We are glad to hear you are getting better; hope you will soon get well.21
But Libby knew she was not sick.
Elizabeth felt tears pricking at her eyes. She’d had a fear of this, tucked away deep inside. How could she not, when Theophilus had taken pains to tell the children even before she’d left that she was mad? He’d wanted nothing more than to remove them from her influence, both spiritual and political. But then, she’d always been there to counteract his lies: to strike a funny face to make her children smile, to speak reasonably of how she saw God, or simply to show them that she was the same kind, loving mother they’d always had. For that reason, only twelve-year-old Samuel—her “most troublesome”22 child—had ever wavered in his support.
But far from home, Elizabeth could do nothing now to stop the corrosive power of his claims. They licked like a hungry tide at a sandcastle built of her children’s trust.
As she read and reread that short, sad, singular note, its fifteen words seemed to solidify before her, cementing the fears in her heart. Theophilus had her exactly where he wanted her. And now that end was accomplished, he had “naught to do but to teach [the] children to despise their mother, and treat her name and memory, with contempt.”23 Was he already doing it? Was it already working? The thought was small and scrabbly in her chest, like the wild rabbits in the fields beyond. Like them, it could not be tamed. She feared that Libby could now be “coming under the influence of this delusion.”24
Elizabeth prayed that her daughter would stay true. And she thought again, more urgently now, of her release from the asylum. Though she did not know what had happened to the Blessings, she was starting to fear their plans had come to naught. Yet how else could she make it home? After all, as she realized bleakly, “Being sane, I can’t be cured.”25
But at this juncture, her friend McFarland stepped into the breach, calling upon her, as was his custom, “with the most polite attentions and marked respect.”26 Once more, he promised her liberty—and he meant it wholeheartedly. She could well be ready to go home now, he said.
There was just one condition.
She would have to return to Theophilus—as his obedient wife.
All she had to do to secure her freedom was submit.
CHAPTER 10
Elizabeth had almost been expecting it. One couldn’t hear the tales of the other women on Seventh Ward and not know that an asylum was not so much a place to treat the sick as a pseudo factory for social control. McFarland himself even hinted at it. His hospital, he said, had a “subsidiary use as a social necessity.”1
In truth, superintendents in the nineteenth century acted not only as doctors but as society’s paternal police, ever ready to step in to dissuade people—both male and female—from deviating from the social standards they themselves had set （which largely meant those observed by white, Protestant, middle-class men）。 Thus male patients were committed for seemingly feminine behavior or intemperance, with immigrants in particular committed in large numbers. Masturbation （which occurred “more frequently…amongst those engaged in sedentary occupations,”2 being “very common among shoemakers”3 in particular） was described as the leading cause of male insanity. Meanwhile, women who were assertive or ambitious were also sent to asylums, often with the added warning that if they didn’t desist from their unladylike behavior, they’d risk becoming infertile too. A superintendent summed it up by saying, “A lunatic asylum is a grand receptacle for all who are troublesome.”4 That even included children: Jacksonville had admitted three patients under fifteen in the past two years, one as young as nine.
Psychiatrists—who had no formal training yet yearned to give their new careers the veneer of professional authority—quickly came up with a medical diagnosis to encompass this broad range of social ills. They called it, quite simply, moral insanity.
The term was first coined by the Englishman James Cowles Prichard in 1835, though much earlier, Philippe Pinel in Paris described something similar. According to Prichard, any person who demonstrated “eccentricity of conduct”5—or who showed “perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper [or] habits”6—could be diagnosed as morally insane. Crucially, the diagnosis could be given even if the person was not delusional or suffering any mental impairment. Moral insanity affected the emotions. Its sufferers were the irrational angry woman or overwrought, expressive man. In all other ways, patients could appear perfectly sane. （Often, they actually were.）