Elizabeth had laughed, at first, at his outlandish threat. “Can [a woman] not even think her own thoughts, and speak her own words, unless her thoughts and expressions harmonize with those of her husband?”60 she asked archly. And did she not live in free America? It was written in the Constitution that freedom of religion was sacrosanct. Elizabeth saw no reason she should be any less entitled to that right—even if she was a woman.
But by the morning of June 18, there was no more humor. The more she’d spoken up for herself, the more her husband had undermined her. In the Bible class, he dismissed her ideas as “the result of a diseased brain.”61 He told their neighbors she was sadly suffering from an “attack of derangement.”62 His evidence was that she now acted “so different from her former conduct,” his obedient wife having been transfigured into this harridan. Her unwillingness to adopt his viewpoint and insistence on her own made for “strange and unreasonable doings, in her verbal and written sayings.” And then there was the killer proof: “her lack of interest in her husband.” What could be madder than a woman who wanted to be more than just a wife?
Elizabeth had confronted him. “Why do you try to injure and destroy my character rather than my opinions?”63 She thought it nothing short of cowardly, the way he avoided debating her directly.
But he’d had to take action because Elizabeth had not been cowed by his threat. In fact, in May 1860, she’d only grown bolder. She took the courageous decision formally to leave his church. “To…be false to my honest convictions,” she said, “I could not be made to do.”64
But the pastor feared others might follow in her footsteps. He had to ensure that no one else, whether wives or worshippers, replicated her revolutionary stance.
That morning of June 18, Elizabeth’s eyes were drawn again to the green shutters in her bedroom. There was a reason they no longer let in light.
Theophilus had boarded them shut.
He also locked her in her room, supposedly for her health. He felt it best she be “withdrawn from conversation and excitement.”65 Though Elizabeth knew the truth—that she was being “kept from observers…[because] my sane conduct might betray his falsehoods”66—she’d been powerless to stop him.
But she was not entirely powerless now; she still had her powerful brain.
She used it.
After Theophilus’s behavior the night before, Elizabeth’s former forebodings shifted, sliding from suspicion into certainty. Thanks to her husband’s warning, she could even color in the future he had sketched. A hulking, gray insane asylum loomed on her horizon.
Elizabeth knew the plan. She knew the perpetrator. The only question left was: when would he make his move?
At that moment, footsteps suddenly sounded outside her door.
CHAPTER 2
Was it a friend or foe…？
There was every likelihood it was the latter. To Elizabeth’s consternation, when Theophilus had declared that she was mad, his parishioners had taken him at his word. They’d begun to weigh her behavior, looking for evidence to support his claim. Her “every motion; every look; every tone of the voice [became] an object of the severest espionage.”1
“As soon as [the allegation of insanity] has been whispered abroad, its subject finds himself…viewed with distrust,”2 explained a leading nineteenth-century psychiatrist. “There still lingers something of the same mysterious dread which, in early times, gave him the attributes of the supernatural.”3
It was not so many years since the whisper would not have been “insane” but “witch”…
Elizabeth found the “crushing scrutiny”4 oppressive. “Whatever I say or do,” she wrote in dismay, “[they] weave into capital to carry on [the] persecution.”5 Though Elizabeth felt “an instinctive aversion”6 to being called insane, she could not narrow her eyes and speak sharply to those who whispered it of her or her unfeminine annoyance would be perceived as mad. If someone observed her snapping at her husband, perhaps because he had not cleaned the yard, the mere fact Elizabeth was “angry…and showed ill-will”7 became evidence of her unbalanced brain. There were those who thought her “dislike to her husband”8 was proof of her “derangement of mind.”9
Because in the nineteenth century—and beyond—women were supposed to be calm, compliant angels. They were even encouraged, for their health, to endeavor “to feel indifferent to every sensation.”10 Those women, like Elizabeth, who displayed “ungovernable”11 personalities or “more than usual force and decision of character,”12 or who had “strong resolution…plenty of what is termed nerve,”13 were literally textbook examples of mental instability.