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 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Willow Corners”
After the trip to Connecticut, Sybil becomes more open with Dr. Wilbur and begins describing some of her earlier memories. Sybil grew up in a small town in Wisconsin called Willow Corners, which was religious, puritanical and class-stratified. People from various churches–Methodists, Congregationalists, and Lutherans–looked askance at each other. They hated Catholics, Jews and African Americans.
Willard Dorsett was born in Willow Corners. Hattie Dorsett, born Henrietta Anderson and raised in Elderville, Illinois, married him in 1910, though she didn’t love him and mistrusted all men, who all had “only one thing on their minds” (127). Willard was willing to put up with Hattie’s eccentricities because he thought her intellectual, refined, and a talented pianist, and the first several years of their marriage were happy.
Sybil was born thirteen years after the Dorsetts were married, after four miscarriages. Willard chose Sybil’s name, a name that Hattie hated, and decided to use only when absolutely necessary. At other times, Hattie decided to call her daughter by the name she liked, Peggy Louisiana.
After Sybil’s birth, Hattie suffered severe post-partum depression. She began to care less and less about pleasing Willard. Willard forbade Hattie from feeding Sybil anywhere except in their bedroom, behind the closed doors, and never when anyone else was in the house. Sybil became underfed, and cried and cried. The crying drove Hattie to rage and frustration.
By the age of 8, Sybil was aware of feeling a lack of something, and of feeling sad. She was closest with her grandmother, who lived upstairs. Her grandmother always had drawing paper ready for her. She let her eat whatever she liked, and let her open any drawers she liked. Unlike Hattie, who was volatile, her grandmother was balanced. If Sybil did something wrong, her grandmother promised never to tell Hattie. Once, finding a baby picture of herself carefully stored in one of her grandmother’s drawers, Sybil realized with surprise that her grandmother really liked her.
However, her mother limited her time upstairs with her grandmother, and whenever Sybil’s grandfather came home, Sybil, who was afraid of him, told her grandmother that she had to leave. Her grandmother seemed to understand this.
When Sybil turned 9, her grandmother fell ill with cervical cancer.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Yesterday Was Never”
When Sybil’s grandmother dies, her parents send her upstairs, telling her they will fetch her when it is time for the funeral. Sybil, hearing voices downstairs, blacks out for a while, until suddenly her father comes up and tells her the service is over. Sybil is furious they broke her promise and treated her like a baby. She vows to never forgive her parents.
At the graveside, Sybil tunes out the talk of religion and thinks about the grandmother she knew instead. As the men lift the casket and begin to lower it into the grave, Sybil thinks, “Love is grandma. Love is being committed to the ground” (136). Everyone around her is crying, but Sybil is unable to cry. Overcome by a sudden impulse, she runs to the grave, about to jump in after the casket, when a hand sharply grabs her arm and drags her back.
Still feeling the pressure on her arm, she turns to see who it is and finds she is sitting at a desk. She looks around and recognizes that the fifth-grade teacher, Miss Henderson, is at the front of the class. Sybil believes she is in third grade, and should be sitting in Miss Thurston’s class. Confused about how she wound up in the wrong class, she is about to apologize to the teacher when she notices the other students around her: they are her classmates, but they’re older, and dressed differently.
When it is time for lunch and the other students run off, Sybil lingers in the classroom, afraid to go home. When she finally arrives, she is alarmed to see that the kitchen, which has always been white, is now green. In the living room, she notices a beautiful, unfamiliar doll. When she asks her father where it came from, he thinks she is playing a game, and she is so embarrassed, she decides not to ask any more questions.
Sybil returns to Miss Henderson’s class, where they are learning multiplication and decimals. Though all the unfamiliar homework on her desk bears her name and is marked with A’s, Sybil cannot do the problems Miss Henderson insists she knew yesterday. Sybil keeps thinking, “there was no yesterday” (147). She does not understand that the people around her don’t know that she doesn’t know. Most of the other children ignore her, and she doesn’t know why.
At the end of the day, she walks home with an old friend, Danny Martin, who is a year older than her. As they walk, Danny mentions the time he went around the neighborhood with Sybil after her grandmother’s funeral to give away the funeral flowers to invalids and shut-ins. Suddenly, Sybil remembers distantly that “a girl whom they called Sybil but who wasn’t Sybil” went around to distribute the flowers. She reflects that she couldn’t be certain whether it was a dream, and that the rest of the time since she nearly leapt into the grave remains a “great, cavernous emptiness” (148).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Thieves of Time”
Sybil can talk to Danny more freely than to anyone else, and she decides to try and ask him obliquely about the things that happened during the time she lost. Danny always answers her, and never asks her why she doesn’t already know the answers.
Sybil wants to ask him why time can be so funny and moves in giant leaps, but is stopped by the shame of a memory of asking her mother the same question. Her mother had simply scoffed, “why can’t you be like other youngsters?” (151).But Sybil is so close to Danny, she sometimes feels that he understands even without her telling him.
Then, on an October day, Danny tells Sybil that he and his family are moving to Waco, Texas. The day Sybil says goodbye to Danny, Vicky emerges as an active personality for the first time, slipping into control as Sybil stares at Danny, who is retreating back in panic.
Walking with Hattie, Hattie tells Sybil, who is now controlled by Vicky, that her father spoke to Danny’s father about separating the two children, because Danny’s family is outside their faith. Vicky reflects scathingly on the Dorsetts’ hypocrisy: Willard married Hattie, who was not originally of his fundamentalist faith. Vicky is glad that she is able to protect Sybil from the knowledge of what her father did.
Unlike Sybil, Vicky remembers everything about the two years that Sybil lost. Vicky remembers that Peggy Lou, who was in control of the body, would sit at her desk and make paper dolls instead of going out to play with the other children. It wasn’t that Peggy Lou didn’t like the other children, Vicky reflects, but that she was angry that they had what she didn’t–a home where there was no reason to be afraid.
Sometimes Vicky lets other selves take over, and Sybil experiences herself floating in and out of blankness. In 1935, a new symptom emerges, brought on by puberty: suddenly half of her face would become numb, and she would grow weak on one side. The town doctor diagnoses Sybil with Sydenham’s chorea, and tells her parents that there is a psychological component of the disease that required a visit to a psychiatrist. Her parents refuse to keep the appointment; instead, her father buys her a guitar.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
As Sybil begins to trust Dr. Wilbur, her analysis circles around the outside, closer and closer to the truth of the most painful, humiliating, unthinkable traumas. These chapters explore two traumas that triggered Peggy Lou and Vicky, respectively, to take over Sybil’s body: the loss of her beloved grandmother, and the departure of her one true friend, Danny Martin. Schreiber once again echoes the narrative approach she employs in Chapter 1, establishing Sybil as the central self and writing with an aim of empathetic identification with her: she first recounts the trauma of Grandma Dorsett’s death from Sybil’s perspective, trying first to recreate for the reader Sybil’s childhood experience of amnesia, confusion and shame. Only later, when she recounts Vicky’s period of control, do we learn what Peggy Lou did during the two years that Sybil “lost.”
There are signals, in these chapters, that the revealed trauma of Grandma Dorsett’s death and the loss of Danny Martin only scratch the surface of Sybil’s trauma, and that they are so traumatic precisely because they represent the loss of the only comforts and protections against deeper trauma. Schreiber’s note that Sybil was surprised to learn her grandmother really liked her is an ominous moment of foreshadowing, suggesting a child who has been pathologically deprived of love.
