Sybil

Schreiber presents the character of Dr. Cornelia Wilbur only in her professional capacity. Dr. Wilbur is a young, ambitious psychiatrist, a female doctor working in a time when there were still very few female doctors–a fact illustrated by Sybil’s surprise when she is first referred to her, and that a doctor could be a woman not much older than herself. From the narrative, it is clear that Dr. Wilbur has an uncommonly close and committed relationship to her patient, treating her even though she is receiving no payment, taking her shopping, and coming over to her house at all hours. Schreiber makes clear that Dr. Wilbur cares for Sybil as a friend: in the Epilogue, she reveals that Dr. Wilbur and Sybil wind up living together once Sybil is well. However, it is also clear that Dr. Wilbur is driven in part by her own professional ambition: when Dr. Wilbur realizes that Sybil’s case is more complex than any other recorded instance of multiple personality, Schreiber writes, “The Dorsett case was taking on the aspect of adventure, a whodunit of the unconscious, and Dr. Wilbur became even more excited when she realized Sybil was the first multiple personality to be psychoanalyzed” (104).

Though Schreiber does not explore Dr. Wilbur’s personal life deeply, she is an hugely important influence on Sybil’s development. She is the mind who conducts the direction of the analysis. She is also an older friend, a mentor who Sybil greatly admires and depends on. For example, when Dr. Wilbur proposes to treat Sybil with sodium pentothal, part of the beneficial effects of the medicine result from the fact that Dr. Wilbur administers it in Sybil’s home, an event Sybil so looks forward to that she begins to take an interest in improving it. When Dr. Wilbur decides to stop using sodium pentothal, part of Sybil’s anger and disappointment stem from the fact that Dr. Wilbur will no longer come over and that her relationship with Dr. Wilbur will lose its personal dimensions.

Hattie Dorsett is the villain of Sybil’s story, a villainy that both Schreiber and Dr. Wilbur realize is a Freudian trope–the overbearing, abusive mother who is the root cause of all trauma.

However, Schreiber uncovers enough evidence to paint a complex, if not forgiving, picture of Hattie Dorsett. At the beginning of the book, Hattie is ominously presented as a too-caring mother, one who insists that Sybil go everywhere with her and who continues to see her daughter as a child even when Sybil is 22. Her controlling and heartless character is abruptly revealed when, on her deathbed, she confesses to Sybil that she had lied about calling Dr. Wilbur on her behalf while she was ill, arbitrarily and without her knowledge cutting off Sybil’s treatment.

As Sybil’s analysis progresses, Schreiber reveals that Hattie was an unimaginably abusive mother. Suffering from schizophrenia, Hattie made her daughter a participant in her vindictive campaigns against the other townspeople and her joyous sexual abuse of her neighbors’ daughters, as well as witness to sex with her Sybil’s father, and with teenage girls from around the town. When Sybil was a baby, she conducted cruel “medical” experiments that were sometimes life threatening.

Yet as the narrative develops, it becomes clear that Hattie’s abuse stems from her own trauma. As a child, Hattie, who was a straight-A student and gifted pianist, was yanked out of school by her father for no reason, abruptly and arbitrarily cutting off at the knees her ambitions to be a concert pianist. This event induces her schizophrenia. As a woman, Hattie is shunted into a life of marriage and childbearing that she doesn’t really want. Schreiber suggests that Hattie’s trauma results from a life continually hemmed in by male domination. Deprived of her own pursuits, married to a man she doesn’t love, perhaps in spite of her homosexuality, Hattie finds that pregnancy renders her formerly-accommodating husband autocratic and controlling. He refuses to let her appear in public while pregnant. He insists on naming their child himself, giving her a name Hattie hates. It is Willard’s obsessive refusal to let Hattie breastfeed even in private, so long as there are people nearby, that exacerbates her post-partum depression and leads her to stop feeding Sybil at all.

In a telling quote in Chapter 15, Hattie explains her abuse of the tiny Sybil by saying that she is doing what men will later do to Sybil, and that Sybil might as well get used to it. Many of Hattie’s abuses are sexual in nature. The narrative Schreiber tells of Hattie ultimately tells a story of a woman who inflicts gendered, sexual trauma on her daughter because gendered, and perhaps sexual, domination was inflicted on her. Hattie is an evil, unfit mother, but Sybil shows that her character is formed by her surroundings and life circumstances, her own mental illness and the repressive society in which she grows up.

Willard Dorsett is a character with many contradictions, born from the contradictions of his parents. His mother, Grandma Dorsett, is a gentle woman who Sybil adores, and his father. Grandpa Dorsett is a bullying, abusive man who adheres to an apocalyptic and strict Christianity. In response to his father’s belligerence, Willard is a passive, quiet man, with an artistic nature that he shares with Sybil. On the other hand, he is rigidly puritanical. He believes it is sinful to betray feeling. Even though he is embarrassed by his father’s bullying, he himself displays dominating impulses, when he forbids Hattie from breastfeeding anywhere in the house when there are people around, and when he insists on naming his daughter alone. He is, for most of Sybil’s life, distant and completely unaffectionate. Nevertheless, Sybil resists feeling anything but adoration for her father, based on their shared aesthetic vision, which Schreiber writes was like “two eyes looking at the same work,” and the few moments of affection in early childhood that Willard did allow (259).

Willard’s primary characteristic with respect to Sybil is passivity, a characteristic that, fittingly enough, he never gathers the energy to swerve from. The trauma he inflicts on Sybil is that against all odds, he does not notice or do anything about Hattie’s abuse: he is determinedly ignorant, even after countless injuries send Sybil to the doctor, even after he finds Sybil locked in the wheat crib. At the end of the book, though he eventually asks Sybil for her forgiveness, it is clear that Willard is equally passive about his role as father, and equally determined to ignore the responsibility he shares for Sybil’s abuse and her current illness: though he promises to take care of her financially in the case of his death, when he dies, Sybil is left penniless.

Grandma Dorsett is the only relief from abuse in Sybil’s young life, until she dies when Sybil is 9. Being allowed to go upstairs and play in Grandma’s room, where Grandma always has the paper and pencils ready and she is allowed to draw whatever she wants, is Sybil’s only experience of freedom as a child. When she finds a carefully-tended picture of herself in Grandma Dorsett’s drawer and realizes Grandma Dorsett really likes her, it is one of the only true experiences of love in Sybil’s young life. As such, she is significant for Sybil in that her death is one of the greatest traumas in Sybil’s childhood because it represents the loss of the last escape, setting off a two-year dissociation in which Peggy Lou takes over. 

Grandma Dorsett’s life has parallels to Hattie’s life, and like Hattie and Sybil, she also suffers abuse: like Hattie, she is an outsider to Willow Corners who marries into the town and marries into a repressive religion that isn’t her own. Her husband, Grandpa Dorsett, is a belligerent bully who cheats on her and parades his infidelity in front of her.

Grandpa Dorsett is a belligerent, bullying man who required unquestioning obedience from his three children, and who rigorously espouses, and forces his family to espouse, an evangelical religion that denounces Catholics and is paranoid in its anticipation of the imminent end of days, because, Schreiber editorializes, it provides him with an outlet for his aggression and hostility. Sybil instinctively dislikes Grandpa Dorsett and is deeply troubled by the religious beliefs she inherits from him.

Teddy Reeves is Sybil’s roommate, one of the only people in Sybil’s life with whom she is open about her multiple personalities. Sybil relies on Teddy to help her keep track of what she does when her other personalities take over. Sybil’s relationship with Teddy starts to collapse when Teddy accuses Dr. Wilbur of using Sybil for her own personal ends.