Elizabeth knew none of this—that in standing up to her husband, she was also thwarting the interests of some very powerful men. The church leaders had been aghast when she’d left their church on principle, because who was to say this woman’s independent exit might not inspire others to follow suit? Tellingly, although the deacons signed the petition to commit her on May 22, two days later, they tried another tack, when they and twelve others wrote to Elizabeth to beg her to rejoin their church. In the letter, they appealed to her reason—which suggested they thought she was sane.
Yet they hadn’t been able to resist including a rebuke in the letter for the way she’d “so entirely disregarded the counsels of your husband.”30 Her political views were not the only problem for them in her stand for selfhood. After all, even the women of the church believed that “we all have to be under rule and subjection to our husbands.”31 （Elizabeth called them “my deluded Calvinistic sisters.” She later urged them, “Don’t sneer at the suggestion of our aspiring to an equality with the men!… Because perverted manhood has trodden us so long under foot, shall we choose to lick the dust?”）32
True to form, Elizabeth had roundly rejected the church’s offer. Only after that did the deacons double down on their allegations of insanity. “She would not leave the church,” Deacon Dole insisted, “unless she was insane.”33
With the political tension so taut, it was no wonder Elizabeth had felt the pressure: the wolves’ hot breath on the back of her neck. Ironically, once she was in the asylum, surrounded by women who soon became friends, she actually found she was able to relax, perhaps for the first time in months. The asylum truly was “a covert from the storm.”34
And to her surprise, she found Dr. McFarland was part of that peace too.
The superintendent made daily rounds of his hospital, sometimes visiting Seventh Ward two or three times a day. He was conscious of “how many hopes rest in him”35 and made a determined effort, in keeping with the treatment principles of the era, to know his patients’ “characters, feelings, connections and interests with a good degree of intimacy.”36 His consultations were as soft in tone and manner as the velvet slippers he sometimes wore to attend them, his self-described “fountains of sympathy”37 ever-ready to wash clean the stricken souls he sought to soothe. As he and Elizabeth got to know one another better, she found—as others had before her—that the doctor possessed “a heart of the tenderest sympathies,”38 while McFarland discovered a woman, in his words, of “extraordinary mental capacity and power, great charm of manner, and taste in dress, and good judgment.”39 His work had always been to him “a labor of love.”40 At times, with Elizabeth, that seemed almost literal.
The conversational “feast”41 the pair had enjoyed at their first meeting transpired to be a mere appetizer. Never before had Elizabeth enjoyed such an opportunity to converse freely with an intelligent man. At home, Theophilus had always silenced her opinions with looks like daggers; if she really overstepped the line in public, he’d followed through with “after-claps”42 as soon as they got home. But McFarland never made any such threats. On the contrary, he seemed fascinated by her, later praising “the perfection of her mind.”43 They’d discuss all sorts of things, McFarland expressing interest in the “minutest movements”44 of her world, but perhaps most important to Elizabeth was that he seemed to sympathize. “I felt that he did pity me,” she wrote, “and really wished to be a true friend.”45
It was only days before his visits “were anticipated with the greatest pleasure of any of my early asylum experiences.”46 Though McFarland, by his own admission, “never could sing a quaver,”47 in the gentle music of his ministrations, Elizabeth found perfect harmony. She thought McFarland “a man of honor, of intelligence, and of real worth.”48 Simply from the “affectionate”49 touch of his hand, she felt better, so much so that she did not complain when—as she sometimes thought—that touch of his hand on hers “longer continued than this healing process demanded.”50
“I was then quite a novice in this mode of cure,” she conceded. “I might not have been a proper judge.”51
McFarland’s job, of course, was to judge the sanity of his patients and to determine when they were cured. Notwithstanding those damning certificates in his files, McFarland was a man who made up his own mind. Seeing the way Elizabeth had adapted so quickly to life at the hospital, he felt very pleased with his new patient. That was why, when he called on her one day toward the end of her first week, he had good news to share.