She had no truck with the idea that women couldn’t do it. “Never let a man now say that a woman is a dependent being. For she is not,” she wrote. “She has fought her own battle. She has gained her own victory. She has declared her own independence. She is free!”11 And she appealed directly to women, too, urging her readers to rise up and assert themselves: “Dare to do it!”12
As the book continued to come together, McFarland came to her room to see how she was getting along. To Elizabeth’s surprise, he allowed her to write exactly what she wished—even about himself. “He trusts me,” she thought. “He seems as unconcerned about what I write, as if his character didn’t depend upon the opinions of one of his patients.”13 She took his position as an incredible act of faith in her.
It inspired a faith in him in return. She’d already been encouraged by the improvements she’d seen at the asylum that summer, with the abuse reduced on Eighth Ward and Miss Smith banished. The doctor’s recommendation of her release had softened her suspicion of him still further. Elizabeth’s game plan from the very beginning had been to persuade McFarland to release her, and this was now a course of action he fully supported. With his permission to write her book in complete freedom granted as well, Elizabeth felt forgiveness flooding through her. All her life, her “great want”14 had been to be permitted spiritual liberty—to have no one fettering her mind or pen—and McFarland had just gifted her with what she’d always wished for. “No man on this continent,” she wrote in wonder, “had ever allowed me [that] but himself.”15
So despite everything that had passed between them, once again she began to conceive of McFarland as a “noble protector,”16 sent to her by God in her time of need. Earlier that year, she had hoped to fan his embryo goodness into a flame: now, she warmed her hands on his fire, convinced by his actions she could trust him.
With the doctor forgiven, she welcomed his visits to her writing room, the sound of his footsteps in the corridor outside now causing her heart to “bound with joy.”17 It was “the inauguration of a new and delightful era of my prison life.”18 She would write and write, he would read and read, and together they would discuss the book. He would bring “such a tranquilizing influence with him,” she remembered, “and leave me in such a state of elevation and kind of spiritual illumination, that he seemed, as it were, to father the book… I could appropriate his thoughts and assimilate them so easily with my own deductions, that the two forces of a male and female mind formed one perfect mental union.”19
It was a sensual experience Elizabeth recognized as such. “This I do say,” she wrote frankly, “that if there is such a thing as the male and female intellect being mated, it seemed as if I had found my intellectual mate in Dr. McFarland.”20 Their “magnetisms mingled and blended in this book,”21 yet it was an entirely intellectual endeavor, and “not one word of sentimental love ever passed between us.”22
It wasn’t about love. Not love like that at least. This was about Elizabeth’s love for expression, for her own mind, her own views. To be allowed to think and speak and write for herself was such a novel position that she was almost like a virgin, exploring for the very first time her own intellectual prowess—and having her own mind blown by the power she possessed inside herself. That McFarland had facilitated it made her cast him in the same light she felt shining out from inside her, but the light was hers alone. Nevertheless, she said, “He is the first and only man I had then ever met, to whom my whole soul could pay the homage of my womanly nature. I not only could, but I did love and reverence him… I simply loved him because I could not help it.”23 As Elizabeth could not separate the man from the muse, the doctor and her divine inspiration became as one in her mind.
She didn’t seem to see the irony that had he not treated her as he had in the past, she would have had no need to write her book at all. McFarland was both captor and liberator, but Elizabeth was seemingly dazzled by the dual roles. “As he had had almost omnipotent power to crush,” she wrote, “so he now had this same power to raise and defend me. The power of the husband, the power of the Trustees, the power of the State, had all been delegated to him. As to the power of protection, he was all in all to me now; and the spiritual freedom granted to me by this power was almost God-like.”24
She worshipped at his altar, faith filling her.