And so, in the past week or so, Elizabeth had hit a brick wall when it came to her feelings about Theophilus. In her private writings, she now confessed, “I hate him…and I can’t help it and I don’t want to, neither. He deserves to be hated.”20 She continued, “He has by his own actions annihilated every particle of respect I have ever felt.”21 She now considered him “the most inhuman, cold-blooded, calculating tyrant the world ever witnessed”22 and recoiled from him with “loathing and disgust.”23
She did not share these feelings in her defense.
She did worse.
She told McFarland plainly that her husband was “a perverted and unnatural man”24 and that since October 14, 1860, “David’s prayer for his persecutors has become my prayer for mine.”25
He remembered not to show mercy… As he clothed himself with cursing like as with a garment, so let it come into his bowels like water… Let his net that he hath hid, catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall.26
It was so angry, so unforgiving…so very unladylike. “Her hatred of her husband had something diabolical about it,”27 McFarland later said, almost in abhorrent wonder.
And although the intellectual impairment he’d sought was still absent, this was at least evidence of madness. It always had been. In ancient Greek mythology, Argo’s virgins, who “refused to honor the phallus,”28 were deemed insane, pronounced cured only once a doctor persuaded them “to join carnally with young and strong men,”29 after which they “recovered their wits.”30 In McFarland’s own era, his peers believed female insanity occurred when “their love is changed into hate.”31
“They excite the most stormy domestic scenes,” one doctor explained, “using gross and even obscene language to their husbands…to resume afterwards, in public, their pretences of reserve.”32
Some might simply have seen a domestic tiff in this account: a woman driven to her wits’ end by an impossible husband…but of course that was the point. She was at her wits’ end.
Otherwise, she never would have dared speak back.
But Elizabeth felt no need to conceal her feelings anymore. She felt her sane conduct should be enough to free her. “I fear nothing,” she wrote bravely in her defense. “The dungeon, or the rack, or the stake, I defy… I am determined fearlessly and boldly to advocate the truth, as it respects my husband.”33
Then she wrapped everything up with a big finish:
Dr. McFarland, I beg and entreat you to have pity upon me… You, sir, now have a fair opportunity to judge for yourself [whether I am insane]. If you can conscientiously say that I have given you proof, from my own words and actions, of being insane, I wish you to say so, and take upon yourself the entire responsibility of this decision… Dr. McFarland, my duty is done. Yours remains to be done. Choose for yourself whom you will serve. Choose evil or good…God’s blessing or his curse, and God will accept the act as a testimony of your real character.34
She signed it, “Your sane patient, E. P. W. Packard.”35
Back on the ward, Elizabeth awaited the doctor’s reaction. The women waited with her, all anxiously anticipating his response.
First one day passed, then another. Elizabeth rose each morning, took her sponge bath in her private room, combed her hair, breakfasted in the dining hall, ever expecting her daily routine to be disrupted.
But it was not. Nothing changed. The doctor expressed no anger at her audacity, but neither did he offer her freedom.
It seemed he had decided to keep things exactly as they were. Elizabeth was a woman of Seventh Ward now—and there she was destined to stay.
She felt McFarland’s betrayal keenly. She felt his fall from grace with even greater anger. Because this proved that his decision to keep her at the asylum was not based on her behavior. He truly was her husband’s abettor—and not only hers, for that matter. Elizabeth had been admitted to the asylum in 1860, six years after McFarland had first been appointed. How many other sane women, she wondered, might have been committed on his say-so in that time?
“He can see insanity in anyone where it will be for his interest to see it,”36 she realized with creeping horror. Another friend was even more blunt: “I have no confidence in that man’s honesty.”37 Yet another declared McFarland a doctor “who always finds the suspicion [of insanity in a woman] well founded.”38
Elizabeth felt a strong calling to take action against this injustice. So she dug out her reproof. It lay in her hands like a pearl-handled pistol.