It seems the worst of the reign of terror took place in Sophia’s hall, perhaps because that was where Lizzie Bonner worked. Even though Elizabeth did not reside there, her inspirational example had nevertheless left its mark on the patients, as it had throughout the asylum. The hospital authorities had acted too slowly to separate her from those she influenced. Because her star was still glowing, even if she herself currently felt as though her light was all but burnt out.
The patients in Sophia’s hall decided to fight back.
“At every opportunity,” Sophia confided, “we banded together in little secret societies.”11 They planned various strategies, devised a hundred plans that were rejected, reworked, and gone over until they felt ready to proceed. They acted only as a last resort, once all other strategies to secure a kinder environment and a restoration of basic privileges had failed. But they were determined not to endure the reign of terror any longer. They were worth more than that. They deserved more than that. And if the doctors wouldn’t listen, they would make them.
One Sunday—and then for days afterward—the “military activity”12 began. It was an organized patient protest, almost unheard of at that time. And they had but one mission: sabotage of state property.
Sophia did not participate directly, according to her. One wonders if she made this statement because it was transgressive enough already for her to be a female writer, without adding this secondary insurgency to her catalog of unfeminine behavior. But her fellow patients, working as one, caused hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage. Blankets were torn into long narrow strips, skeins of sewing silk and spools of thread “tangled up in inextricable confusion,”13 and glass and crockery were deliberately smashed—cleverly, in time with the blast of the asylum bell or when another patient shrieked in order to avoid detection.
“Looking glasses, goblets and crockery were dashed upon the floor, at different times, on all possible safe occasions,” recalled Sophia. “Tea-spoons, knives and forks were stealthily taken from the table, and thrown out of the window; clothing and curtains torn and mutilated, doors were smashed, cushions opened, the walls were scratched and strange literature in conspicuous places written there!”14 She said she felt “little uneasiness”15 at the widespread destruction, because the emotional devastation wrought by the restrictions was so much worse. These were mere things, after all: far less valuable than hearts and minds.
On one of these defiant days, another patient called her to bear witness to one of their acts of rebellion. As the woman ripped open a collection of pillows, she cast their contents to the air outside.
A winter gale caught them. “The wind was an auxiliary,”16 said Sophia in wonder; it took the women’s side. It “so scattered the feathers, like the flakes of a coarse snowstorm, that no outsider could tell from which of all the numerous windows the rejected feathers were cast out.”17
So they watched with impunity as the wind made those feathers dance: a thousand snow-white birds that were finally flying free. There was something so beautiful about it. They wended where they wanted. As the women watched from behind their barred windows, they only wished they could taste even a touch of the same liberty.
To their delight, the sabotage worked. “Orders were suddenly given,”18 Sophia announced triumphantly, “that walks might again be allowed, company again permitted to visit us, and that in several other particulars more lenity [was] to be shown…a general amnesty ensued…and the mischief at last ceased.”
Sitting despairingly in her own hall, waiting for an end that could only ever be endless, Elizabeth perhaps felt inspired by their courageous example. Like a circle in the sand that had neither head nor tail, she had prompted their passion, but now, in turn, it sparked something inside her. Perhaps a deal could be struck with the doctor, she reasoned, exactly as the patients in Sophia’s hall had done. She felt her only hope now was to publish her book, but without McFarland, she simply could not do it. Toffy had not replied to her letters asking for money, nor had her friends in Manteno. She was entirely in the doctor’s hands. And if she could not persuade him to publish, then “blasted reputation and life-long imprisonment”19 alone awaited her.
With the stakes so high, Elizabeth felt “in a state of desperation.”20 Frantically, she racked her brains for what on earth she could offer McFarland in exchange for his support. She had no money. She had no power. She was already married, which was the only currency a woman in the nineteenth century had.