75 pages • 2 hours read
Flora Rheta SchreiberSybil
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: “Ramon”
Sybil has feelings for Ramon that she has never felt before. She wonders if it is love, and if her ability to feel so intensely means she is well. Though she has always been afraid to get too close to anyone, for fear that they will discover her “lapses,” or her other personalities will take over, or they will hurt her, she dates Ramon continuously for eight weeks. She does not dissociate at all during this time, and Ramon knows nothing about Sybil’s condition.
Ramon, who is Colombian, is in the process of adopting his niece and two nephews in the wake of their parents’ death in an automobile crash. When he’s over for dinner, Ramon shows Sybil a letter from his niece, and remarks that Sybil would make a great mother. Sybil realizes that she could love Ramon’s niece and nephews, and that being with him could fulfill her desire to be a mother, as she’s likely incapable of being pregnant. Listening to the radio, Ramon remarks offhandedly that people with real troubles don’t need a shrink, that Latinos and Europeans don’t indulge in such silly luxuries. At the end of the dinner, Ramon tries to make love to Sybil. Sybil acknowledges that she wants him, but she’s too afraid.
On a date in Central Park the next morning, Ramon proposes to Sybil. They will marry at once, he says, and go to Bogotá to collect the children and bring them back to the United States. Sybil is silent. She wants the children, and imagines she can undo all that was done to her by being good to them. Finally, Sybil tells Ramon that she loves him, that she wants to marry him, but she can’t. She is afraid to tell him why: afraid that he would mock her for her mental illness, that it would be irresponsible to raise children alongside all her personalities, that Ramon wouldn’t want such an ill person to raise his children. She begs him for more time. He tells her the children can’t wait. He says if she can’t tell him what’s holding her back, he will leave, and she will never see him again. Sybil stays resolute, and goes back into her house alone.
Sybil is stricken by grief, but she manages to stay herself, and feels a continued sense of solidity. She does not succumb to the feelings of guilt Ramon tries to awake in her, and continues to feel her decision to insist for herself on the space and time to get well is a sound one.
Chapter 32 Summary: “One”
As Sybil gets closer and closer to getting well, the other personalities cease coming to analysis. They can only be summoned in hypnosis; some, such as Peggy Lou, cannot be summoned at all. The increasingly-integrated Sybil, the “new Sybil,” is not yet a whole person, but neither is she the depleted self she was when so much of her original personality was siphoned off into others. She begins to take on some of the other personalities’ characteristics. Sybil draws in black and white the way Peggy Lou used to do; she now remembers how to do the multiplication that was unavailable to her because it was within the experience of Peggy Lou.
One night during this time of recovery, Sybil experiences a troubling seizure: her fingers go numb, her limbs move involuntarily, she crashes into the wall. Flora, the author, finds her on the floor of her apartment, black and blue. Suddenly Sybil stands up and, in a lilting voice, declares that she is “the girl Sybil would like to be” (457). In analysis, this girl tells Dr. Wilbur she and Vicky belong together, because they were not born out of fear or anger or sadness but out of Sybil’s wish. This blonde girl declares that she has arrived to help usher Sybil into the world. Vicky comes forward and tells Dr. Wilbur that the blonde girl is Sybil’s adolescence.
Sybil declares that she is sure, now, after this last episode that she will never dissociate again. Dr. Wilbur tests this by affirming in hypnosis that none of the remaining selves have any memories that Sybil herself does not.
Sybil makes plans to move to Philadelphia and become an occupational therapist. For her last two weeks in New York, she stays with Flora, the author, in the apartment she shares with her mother. Arriving there, she says, “I’ve been here before–yet I haven’t” (463). Flora asks her who the “I” is. Sybil replies that “I” is “the one who can feel,” and that she now has “new feelings, real feelings. It’s not the way it used to be” (463). The new Sybil’s frame of reference is still the “waking self,” who can compare the way it is now with the way it used to be, but a waking self who is more than just a waking self, a self with the maturity of memory and deep, fully experienced feelings.
Chapters 30-31 Analysis
These chapters represent Sybil’s achievement of wellness, and in doing so, they point to a new kind of fulfilled, adult life for a woman in 1973, the year of the book’s publication.
Chapter 30 makes it clear that though the end of Sybil’s relationship with Ramon fills her with grief, it is a sign of triumph, not tragedy. Schreiber repeatedly emphasizes that Ramon does not represent heartbreak, or Sybil’s ultimate failure to triumph over her illness and have a normal life; instead, Ramon represents Sybil’s finally-achieved ability to feel desire and love in the first place, feelings that were so long stunted and withheld from her by her parents’ abuse. Instead of representing Sybil’s failure to get what she wants–children, motherhood–Ramon also represents Sybil’s ability to finally value and trust herself.
She makes the decision not to accept his offer of marriage because she knows she needs space and time to get well: she thinks her “very salvation depended on her commitment to her dawning health” (451).Hattie’s abuse always worked by inflicting an erroneous sense of blame, the sense for Sybil that she had been a bad girl, even when no action had produced such an accusation. Sybil’s rejection of Ramon represents her ability to reject such guilty feelings: “she realized she had no reason to feel guilty for her actions. Ramon’s efforts to inflict guilt feelings on her had not succeeded. That realization gave her strength” (450).
The two markers Schreiber chooses to represent the resolution and health are the rejection of an offer of marriage and Sybil’s happy settling into her own house with a fulfilling career. In doing so, she writes against the literary tradition of female protagonists: historically, literature that represented the development of female protagonists either resolved with the heroine finding resolution in marriage, or, if the heroine’s arc turned away from marriage, resolved with the heroine’s untimely death.
