Oh, when she’d heard this, Elizabeth’s heart had soared. Not forgotten. Still loved. What a precious treasure from her jewels, glimmering with light and love. It had inspired her to try to get a letter back to them. Yet Elizabeth had known too well by then that to write via the usual routes would be useless. McFarland’s censorship still ran as a tight ship, and no watery words could break that solid hull.
No words on paper at least.
Working in the sewing room one day that past June, she’d carefully selected some bleached cotton and begun embroidering some underwaists to send to Libby. Yet the embroidery was merely a deceptive distraction; using her nubby pencil, she wrote a long letter on the underside of the plain cotton. Her plan was that a fellow patient who lived close to Manteno and was soon to be discharged could take the clothing to her child as a gift. No one would be any the wiser until her daughter opened up her underwear and read her mother’s secret words.
But McFarland, suspicious, had discovered the plot, searching the discharged patient and sending the scribbled-upon underwaists for washing, so the message was erased.
McFarland shifted in his seat. His attempts to isolate Elizabeth hadn’t been entirely successful, to his chagrin. The previous summer, she’d kicked up an enormous fuss when she’d somehow gotten a message from her Manteno friends that they’d raised a fund for her legal defense; a “new effort for her removal”31 from the asylum had begun. McFarland consistently received letters from Elizabeth’s friends, such as the Blessings and the Hasletts, and from the husband of her cousin, Angeline Field, which protested her sanity and demanded her release. He firmly shut them all down, writing that “Mrs. Packard”32—whose insanity, it may be remembered, had been recorded as merely “slight”33 when she’d first arrived—“has become a dangerous patient; it will not be safe to have her in any private family!”34 When David Field had respectfully inquired on what evidence this claim was based, McFarland had reportedly replied, “I do not deem it my duty to answer impertinent questions!”35
Happily, at least, the new legal effort had come to nothing, as McFarland had always known it would. Her friends had wanted to obtain a writ of habeas corpus, but that specifically ruled on cases of unlawful confinement. As Theophilus had explained to his wife on the very day he’d brought her to the asylum, the “forms of law”36 were all complied with in her case. No legal remedy could reach her, because everything Theophilus had done was within the law.
Trapped within the iron cage of McFarland’s censorship, Elizabeth did not know the outcome nor even the specifics of her friends’ attempts to free her. By April 1862, however, she’d simply had to accept that she had “no hope of deliverance through this source.”37 The only thing that had changed in the wake of her friends’ efforts was that although McFarland had by then relaxed his rules to allow her to exercise outside, she refused to go. The renewed attempt to gain her freedom had centered her mind painfully upon the fact that she was a prisoner, held against her will. She appreciated now that the beauty of the asylum grounds was mere window dressing, there to make a passerby “think this place is a heaven, instead of a hell.”38 In her view, if she walked out of the hospital to ride or walk in those deceptively pleasant grounds and then walked back in again on her own two legs, she was complicit in her incarceration. Therefore, she’d told the doctor, “I shall never return again a voluntary prisoner to my cell.”39 She’d added, “You, Dr. McFarland, have might to put me there, but no right.”40
Consequently, since the summer of 1861, she had left the ward for no reason: not to pray and not to sew and not to walk. It was the only physical way she felt she could protest her imprisonment. Though it was extremely hard never to leave the ward—never to feel the changing weather on her face or to taste even the false freedom of fresh air—she wrote, “I never regretted taking this step, as…having entered my protest, I was thus exonerated from all responsibility, as in any way a willing accomplice in the conspiracy.”41
No one could accuse her of going along with it or of not fighting back.
Although all legal remedies for Elizabeth’s release were denied her, Dr. McFarland, in private, sometimes wished that were not the case. While most patients retained as long as Elizabeth soon began to show a “slow constitutional deterioration”42—“The cheek loses its fresh tints,”43 McFarland recorded in his notes, “the eye its expression”—he’d noticed that Elizabeth’s eyes seemed only to burn brighter. Other patients wrote of the “sedative influence”44 of an asylum, describing the “power and authority…it would be useless to resist,”45 but Elizabeth just didn’t get those memos. The longer she stayed, the stronger she seemed to become.