Up until that point, it had been working perfectly.
Even after her discovery that the doctor had deceived her, Elizabeth found it very hard to shake off those reins he’d so skillfully wrapped around her. She still saw McFarland as an authority figure whose respect she not only valued but outright sought. So when one afternoon, probably in September, another patient accused her of acting indiscreetly—she’d allowed a male inmate to push her on a swing—it was to McFarland Elizabeth rushed, worried the incident might reflect badly on her.
McFarland listened to her concerns with sympathy. As she chattered, he shifted closer to her, a tiny adjustment of his body that caused her no alarm. The two of them had been physically close many times before, and not only through the doctor’s “laying on of hands”17 in her private room. Elizabeth had also danced with him at the asylum’s regular balls.
These were entertainments at which “large numbers of the insane, of both sexes…join for a few hours in temperate festivities.”18 Female patients were permitted to dance with male staff and vice versa, but patients could not dance with one another.
If not for the bars on the windows of the hall they used, Elizabeth could imagine she was at any other party from the outside world at those balls. There would often be live music, and many patients made special efforts with their appearance, the women crafting handmade paper flowers for their hair. But best of all was the dancing. Elizabeth had only ever danced at the asylum; in a way, her incarceration had incongruously widened her world. She’d always been taught before that dancing was a sin, but after she’d watched the other patients—their faces lit not only by the gas lamps but from the joy within—she’d abruptly changed her mind. “Is such ease and grace of figure and motion a sin?” she wrote. “Then the sailing of the fish is sin; the soaring of the bird.”19 She vowed “that I should never be again found among the class who condemned dancing.”20
Enthusiastically, she’d thrown herself into the action, even taking private lessons from a twenty-one-year-old attendant, Celia Coe. The patients and staff usually danced cotillions, a formal dance for sets of couples in which they all swapped partners until the whole room felt like a friend.
Yet when Elizabeth had danced with McFarland, they’d performed their own duet. Elizabeth remembered that they’d shunned the formal dancing and instead found a “dark corner”21 in which they’d kept step “all by ourselves.”22
That September afternoon in his office, McFarland took the lead once more, his body morphing close to her in movements intended to impart moral treatment.
“I will see that you are protected,”23 he told her reassuringly.
And as he made this remark, he kissed Elizabeth on the forehead, where her dark-brown hair met her pale pink skin.
She felt his lips on her. “Dr. McFarland didn’t force me, nor I didn’t resist him.”24
Yet her thoughts reeled. Later, she recalled his kiss as “a mere impulsive act, dictated by no corrupt motives.”25 But given the era, it was shockingly indiscreet—especially for a man in his position.
“Dr. McFarland,” Elizabeth said disapprovingly once she’d recovered her stolen breath. “Men do not send their wives, nor fathers their daughters here, expecting that you will manifest your regard for them in this manner.”26
For the doctor, the kiss was no doubt all just part of the therapy. For Elizabeth, however, it was a watershed. She began to worry the kiss might be a “stepping-stone to insults.”27 Whether she meant further sexual contact from the doctor or slurs against her virtue is unclear. Either way, she felt an “imperative necessity of devising some self-defensive armor with which to shield my virtue and self-respect from insult.”28
And Elizabeth had only ever had one means of self-defense worth anything: her way with words. She decided she would write to the doctor, but not just about the kiss. All the events of recent months had built up behind her: a wall of water and wonderings she had to let run free.
Her efforts to date to improve conditions by appealing to the attendants had come to nothing. In fact, when she appealed to them to be kinder, they often replied, “The Doctor orders us to treat them as we do.”29 Whether that was true, Elizabeth did not know, but she thought, “If the doctor lets his attendants abuse his patients, and don’t try to stop it, when he knows it is practised, I say, it comes pretty near being Dr. McFarland’s abuse of the patient.”30
Her own situation was also at the forefront of her mind. McFarland had by that point had “all reasonable time”31 to appreciate her sanity. If he held her any longer, he would have “intelligently and knowingly broken [his] solemn ‘oath of office,’ by retaining a sane person as a patient.”32