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.
Symbols & Motifs
Broken Glass
When Sybil encounters broken glass, it recalls two prominent and traumatic memories that provoke Peggy Lou to take over the body. Peggy Lou, the angry personality, is the one who bears the trauma of the memories of broken glass. Broken glass symbolically represents one of the central themes of Hattie’s abuses, a constant attribution of blame, guilt, and fault, as well as Sybil’s repressed and overpowering rage at being falsely accused.
The first memory associated with broken glass takes place in the summer of 1927, when Sybil, enjoying a respite from abuse while the Dorsetts stay with Hattie’s family, is accused of throwing a fancy pickle dish through the French doors that lead to the room where the adults are all sitting. Sybil’s cousin Lulu throws the dish and then blames Sybil. When all the adults rush into the room to see what happened, Hattie accuses Sybil of being at fault.
Sybil is traumatically reminded of this first accusation when, a few years later, her mother finds her at the town pharmacy. Sybil is in the back, and the kind pharmacist is showing her his violin collection, promising that one day he will make one for her. Hattie calls Sybil to stand next to her while she pays for a medication. Hattie’s elbow knocks the glass bottle containing the medicine off the counter, and she accuses Sybil of being the one to break it.
Music
Music is a recurring and troubling motif throughout the narrative. Loss of music is the source of Hattie’s “trouble”: when she is in the 7th grade, her father yanks her out of school and forces her to work in his music store, crushing and in a sense parodying her dreams of becoming a concert pianist by downgrading her to being a simple shopkeeper selling pianos. Later, Hattie will force Sybil to play piano and stand by constantly criticizing her, a torture that figuratively echoes one of Hattie’s earlier ministrations, which involved tying a very young Sybil to the piano leg while Hattie played for hours. Both abuses utilize the “capture-control-imprisonment-torture” that Dr. Wilbur concludes characterizes Hattie’s abuse: it displeases her mother if Sybil does not play, but it displeases her mother when she does.
Laughter
Sybil recalls in analysis that Hattie’s tortures were always accompanied by wild laughter. Wild and inappropriate laughter is the signal of Hattie’s schizophrenia, the sign that she is unwell. Schreiber recounts that when Hattie’s father tells her she won’t be going to school tomorrow, a sudden and crushing upset, she does not argue back. No one, Schreiber writes, argues with Hattie’s father. Instead, she “just started to laugh” (235). For Hattie, laughter is the only reaction available in a world in which she is powerless, subject to the arbitrary domination surrounding her. While laughter is a sign of Hattie’s disjoint with the world, it also represents the cruel nature of the world, and the way the trauma both she and Sybil suffer is partly produced by an unfair, nonsensical world.
