Elizabeth believed she could convince him. After all, she was a “model wife and mother,”23 her only crime was thinking for herself, and best of all, she possessed an “impregnable, invincible fortress of calm self-composure.”24 She had gotten out of Worcester within six weeks when she was a teenager.
She was sure she could do it again.
Although Elizabeth did not know it, she could not have picked a better doctor for her plan, because McFarland was one of those psychiatrists who’d begun to question moral insanity. Some cases seemed to him “mere emotional impulses”25 that “hardly deserve the name of disease.”26 He subscribed to a theory that moral insanity was impossible without an underlying intellectual delusion.
And it was obvious to McFarland that Elizabeth had no “intellectual impairment at all—certainly nothing that deserved the name.”27 When he wrote to Theophilus on August 11, 1860, to update him, he praised Elizabeth’s “fine mind and brilliant imagination.”28 He found her case a truly “interesting study.”29
By August, Elizabeth felt as fascinated by her doctor as he appeared to be by her. Their one-on-one meetings in her private room led only to deeper confidences. In moral treatment, patients were to be “made comfortable, [her] interest aroused, [her] friendship invited, and discussion of [her] troubles encouraged.”30 McFarland’s sympathetic sessions with Elizabeth soon inspired “feelings of tranquillity, peace, and quietude”31 that “permeated into the very fibers of my existence.”32 She called him “my kind friend”;33 herself, “your faithful Eva.”34 As McFarland drew on his “extraordinary tact and skill,”35 they wove their words into a latticework that lifted Elizabeth’s spirits higher and still higher, binding the two of them together in what McFarland hoped would be an “intimate and effective relationship.”36
Elizabeth’s sole complaint was that the doctor could sometimes be taciturn. McFarland was said to possess “a self-control so perfect that to a stranger he might seem impassable and cold.”37 While Elizabeth poured out her heart, he barely replied, leaving her in the dark as to his real opinions.
But to meet a man who listened was so wonderful she did not give it much thought. Onto the blank canvas he gave her, she painted masterpieces. She explained away the man’s mystery as “one of his God-like traits.”38
For twenty-one years, throughout her marriage, Elizabeth had been lonely. She’d felt damped down, strangled, and silenced. But now a man had given her permission to speak—to speak her mind. It felt like magic. Day by day, McFarland’s conjured claim on her slowly “took possession of my womanly heart.”39
Ordinarily, when a woman in the nineteenth century was in danger—as Elizabeth still felt she was; she “dare[d] not come again within [Theophilus’s] influence”40—she sought safety via her husband, her “manly protector”41 from the society in which she was restricted from maneuvering alone. But to whom could a woman turn when it was her own husband persecuting her?
Elizabeth had few options. Theophilus had told her that her two brothers and her father all supported her commitment. Elizabeth knew they’d only have done so because her husband had told them lies—as she hadn’t seen her father in more than a decade due to geographical distance, he was unable to judge her sanity for himself—but it left her entirely alone, without any male family member to represent her in the world. This was scary; she did not feel safe. Elizabeth wrote, “[I] do so want to be loved by somebody, who can help me to get out from beneath the iron feet of my oppressors.”42 She wondered: Could McFarland be that man? She looked to the doctor for protection and, in his friendship, found “buds of hope and promise.”43
She took strength, too, from the sisterhood on Seventh Ward. McFarland gave Elizabeth permission to hold a prayer circle with her “kindred spirit[s],”44 and these daily social gatherings soon became a source of comfort and support. There were never less than twelve women in attendance, sometimes eighteen or more.
“O,” Elizabeth exclaimed happily, “how I love this new circle of friends!”45
In time, her asylum acquaintances widened further. Out for a pleasant stroll in the grounds one day, she heard her name being shouted. To her surprise, a group of patients from a lower ward were calling to her through their window—the asylum favorite now so notorious all the patients knew her name.
Elizabeth stood beneath their window and squinted upward. She’d never visited these wards, but with a creeping feeling, she realized that some of these women must be those she heard crying and calling out at night.