Elizabeth was going nowhere.
As McFarland reflected on her progress over the past year, he found none. Even a visit from Theophilus in 1861 had rendered things only worse, not better. Elizabeth had been set against her husband’s presence from the start, outraged by a recent letter he’d sent in which he’d discussed breaking up the family and—illogically, given her commitment—sought her advice on who should raise Arthur. But Elizabeth had deduced—correctly—that the entire letter was a lie to induce her, for her children’s sake, to plead to go home.
She told McFarland frankly, “He is trying to make me say, ‘O, husband do take me home! If you only will, I will think, speak and act just as you please…and will never venture to think for myself again!’”15
Elizabeth had refused to cooperate, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t worried. Other elements of Theophilus’s letter had rung true. Libby, for example, was described as doing “all the work for the family.”16 In his private diary, Theophilus enthused about his then eleven-year-old, “My daughter did exceedingly well in household duties.”17 Everything that Elizabeth used to do—the cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing, gardening, nursing, and so much more—had fallen on Libby’s slender shoulders. As the only girl, she was simply expected to get on with it.
Elizabeth felt wretched about it, not least because Libby was at that “very important age of budding womanhood”18 when a girl needed her mother. For goodness’ sake, Elizabeth thought, she hadn’t even had time to show Libby how to make piecrust before she’d been kidnapped, but now her little girl was catering for the whole family.
It was yet another reason to hate Theophilus. “How can a father put upon this child of eleven years, the cares of a woman—the care of a babe, in addition to the care of a family, while she needs to attend school!”19 she railed. Libby had been a first-ranked scholar in her studies before Elizabeth had been committed, but it seemed highly unlikely she’d be able to maintain her schooling now that she had to keep house.
Elizabeth tried harder to get out, appealing to anyone who might listen to let her live alone as an independent woman—“Is there not room enough in this wide world for me to live separate from him?”20 she would beg—but every appeal was blocked. This meant the stage was set for a showdown when Theophilus had arrived at the asylum in 1861. “When I visited her,” he said crossly, “she utterly refused to speak to me in the three days I stayed.”21
But Elizabeth was adamant: “I have done no wrong, and he has done nothing but wrong.”22 She insisted that “he is answerable for our family troubles.”23 She would not act the hypocrite by bestowing pleasantries on “a being whom my whole nature abhors,”24 and neither would she be so foolish as to let him have any further power over her. “I can protect myself—thank you,” she announced sharply. “I have a body of my own, and a head of my own, and a heart of my own, and a will of my own, and I do not consent to share this capital with [him] again… I have sense enough to keep out of the fire, and old Packard’s hands, too.”25
It almost amused her to see how shocked Theophilus was at the intensity of her emotion. “Yes, husband,” she wrote with bitter cheer. “You now find that I have hating faculties as well as loving.”26
A woman’s heart was deep inside—and Theophilus was only now discovering that he was completely out of his depth.
Reflecting on the visit, McFarland shook his head sadly and pressed his pen to the paper.
“Everything in her whole nature of that kind is so perfectly callous,” he informed her husband in April 1862, “that it is most painful to witness…she shows rather the malignity of the fiend, than any natural sentiment ever before seen in woman.”27
And nothing McFarland did seemed able to persuade this recalcitrant woman to change. After Theophilus’s visit, the doctor had appealed to her, saying, “Mrs. Packard, do you think it would be considered as natural, for a true woman to meet one who had been a lover and a husband, after one year’s separation, even if he had abused her, without one gush of affection?”28
Yet she’d insisted it was natural to behave as she did; to offer affection “would be an insane act in me.”29
There, they would have to disagree.
Theophilus’s visit had stirred her up, McFarland remembered. That may have been because her husband had remarked to another patient—in a comment that ultimately got back to Elizabeth—“I never saw children so attached to a mother, as Mrs. Packard’s are to her—I cannot by any means wean them from her.”30