“Woman is too volatile and spiritual a being to be kept down by mere brute force,” she wrote. “You can cage a bird and thus keep her down on a level with her serpent-mate, but just give her the use of her powers, its freedom, and she will rise.”30
From within the darkness of the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, a new moon rose.
And her name was Elizabeth Packard.
PART THREE
MY PEN SHALL RAGE
A word after a word after a word is power.
—Margaret Atwood, 19811
When I was in the asylum they locked me up…but what did I care for that as long as they had no key that would fit my mouth?
—Phebe B. Davis, 18552
CHAPTER 22
April 3, 1862
Dr. McFarland’s office
Illinois State Hospital for the Insane
Jacksonville, Illinois
Dr. Andrew McFarland, aged forty-four, light shining off his clean bald head, dipped his pen into his inkstand and began to write a letter to Theophilus Packard. It was that time again: time to share an update on his wife Elizabeth.
“In the matter of her domestic affections and relations,” the doctor wrote, perhaps giving a sigh laced with now annoyingly familiar, thwarted frustration, “she is as unyielding as ever.”1
Elizabeth certainly was. One year and ten months on from her initial commitment to the asylum, she was as determined as she’d ever been to follow her own path. More so, in fact. “By my experiences,” she wrote, “it would seem that my Father intended to so capacitate me, that I should be daunted and discouraged by nothing.”2 Iron will, after all, was “smelted by the furnace of affliction”3 and Elizabeth’s, by now, was almost indestructible.
Yet that didn’t mean it had been easy. One year and ten months was not merely measured in time but in missed birthdays, fading bruises, and a relentless cycle of unwashed bodies that swam before her, even as she gritted her teeth and held her breath and soaped them yet again. There had been many times during the past sixteen months on Eighth Ward when she had struggled to stay strong, even to keep her “thinking machine in order.”4 “I never needed my strength so much as I do here,”5 she wrote. Being locked in the asylum, subject to all its rules and regulations, a daily witness to oppression, felt like a “hurricane-blast…sweeping over my unsheltered heart.”6 After all she had seen and continued to record in her secret journal, for her the asylum was now merely a “humanity-crushing institution”7 and all its inmates, herself included, subject to “a feeling of annihilation.”8 There had been times when she’d felt that crushing weight above her and had barely had the strength to lift it from her brain.
Perhaps the very hardest thing of all to bear was that her term of imprisonment was unknown. Unlike convicts, who could count down toward the end of their jail sentence, Elizabeth and her friends were indefinitely detained at the superintendent’s pleasure. And Elizabeth knew from those around her that sometimes those terms could last for years. At least thirty-six patients with her in the asylum in 1862 had been there for five years or more; one woman, committed for displaying “extreme jealousy,”9 had been there ever since the asylum had first opened in 1851—the first patient entered in its register. “If the prisoner could but know for how long a time he must suffer this incarceration,” one of Elizabeth’s friends wrote, “it would be a wonderful relief. Then the Superintendent could not perpetuate it at his own option, as he now can and does.”10
That doctor dipped his pen in his inkstand, thinking of Mrs. Packard’s prognosis. What to write to her husband? In McFarland’s view, one year and ten months was not so very long for him to have been providing what Elizabeth called his “subduing treatment.”11 It was his belief that “the patient who affords any prospect of recovery should not be removed from the Asylum…till every delusion has been banished from the mind.”12
By this criteria, Elizabeth’s continued, unnatural hatred of her husband made her release impossible. The doctor sighed. As much as he might wish it differently, her prognosis was no different from the year before, when he’d written to Mr. Packard on February 2, 1861: “I have in vain looked to time to make a change in the character of Mrs. Packard’s case. In the place of the usual emotions, that exist in the bosom of a wife…there appears only an unmitigated hate, as obdurate as adamant.”13 Such a position, in McFarland’s professional view, debarred “the possibility of any continuance of the natural relations of wife and mother, and…require[s]…her residence in an asylum for the insane.”14