58 pages • 1 hour read
Ruth WareThe Woman in Cabin 10
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A 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 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
Lo wakes up trapped inside a tiny cabin in the lower decks of the ship. There is no window, and the door is locked.
Lo describes the experience of being captured by an unknown assailant. She woke with a start to a banging on her door, and realized she had dozed off with the pillow in her hand, keeping watch in her room. The tapping on the door continued, and she finally went and looked out the fish eye to the hall. Standing there, amazingly, was the woman from Cabin 10. She looked at Lo and then sauntered off, completely unharmed, to the lower decks. Lo ran out the door to catch the woman, and caught the code-locked door to the lower decks just before it shut. As Lo walked down the dark stairs, she was attacked from behind, and her assailant smacked her head on the metal door frame. Everything then went black.
Back in the room, Lo realizes that there is no way to jimmy the door open. It is still Tuesday, based on her best guess, and the engine is going. Either they did not stop in Trondheim or they have left the port. Lo fears that the other guests will assume she got off the ship and did not return, and that no one will come looking for her. She feels panicked and claustrophobic as she tries to nurse her aching head.
Chapter 23 Summary
Lo wakes up to the sound of a footstep in the hallway. The door to her cell clicks open, and Lo waits to see who will appear. A hand arrives through the small hole in the door, grabs the plate, and disappears. Lo hears a light switch click and she is trapped in darkness.
Lo reflects on her mental health history, talking about the therapists she saw to treat her panic disorder when she was in her early teens. She realizes that she hasn't taken her antidepressants in nearly two days, possibly longer. She begins to feel panicked, and remembers the sensations of her earlier panic attacks, and the last time she tapered off her medicine, which caused her to nearly lose her job at Velocity.
Lo falls asleep for a while, and has a horrible nightmare that the woman in Cabin 10 comes into her room and does a horrifying striptease, finally pulling out her own hair and teeth and pulling off her skin until she is just a horrifying pink muscle writhing open-mouthed toward Lo’s sleeping body. Lo wakes with a start, and tries to find the light switch. But the switch inside her room doesn't work–the electricity has been cut. Lo returns to her bunk and tries desperately to figure out who was working with the woman in Cabin 10. She realizes that the woman must be in on this scam, and that the incident in the cabin that she had witnessed must have been planned. She realizes that she believes firmly that someone died–not the woman she thought, but someone. But Lo can't figure out who.
Chapter 24 Summary
Lo wakes when the electricity turns back on. Lo jumps up, but misses her chance to see her assailant again. Instead, she finds a tray with a pastry and some porridge on it. She tries to eat, but is too consumed by hatred for the woman in Cabin 10.
Lo makes a new plan. She breaks the plastic dining tray in half, creating two jagged daggers. Then, she waits by the door for someone to come back. To keep herself awake, she plays counting games, shaking herself awake and trying to focus. Finally, a door slams in the hallway and the doorknob turns. Lo jumps out at the woman in Cabin 10, who tries to slam the door shut. But Lo sticks her arm in the door to block it, screaming in pain as it slams on her forearm. She then attacks the woman, but the woman is stronger, and finally backs Lo into the small room and shuts the door behind her. Lo confronts the woman, and demands to be let out. The woman tells her that they warned her to stop digging, but Lo refused. The woman also tells her that some unnamed “he” would never let her release Lo from the cell. Lo asks for her antidepressants, and the woman agrees, in exchange for a promise of good behavior from Lo. As she leaves, Lo is left wondering who the unnamed man could be. She puts the pieces of the puzzle together in her head, and realizes that it must have been Ben, as he was the only one with access to the spa, and also who had an alibi for every instance, none of which truly checked out. Despite this realization, Lo can't imagine what his motive might be.
Chapters 22-24 Analysis
Though entrapment is a common theme in the novel, this particular section capitalizes on the entrapment–Lo's worst fears have come true, and she is locked in a windowless cell, deep below the waterline. This danger is nuanced, particularly in terms of gender; Lo expresses rage at her prison guard, the woman in Cabin 10, when in fact there is a man behind the scenes orchestrating the scene. This connects back to criticism of Tina, who is blamed for patriarchal structures that limit women because she has been given positions of power. Lo is enraged at her jailer, a woman, because she doesn't see the larger, masculine force operating behind the scenes.
The most vivid passage in these sections is Lo's nightmare about the woman in Cabin 10. She dreams the woman shedding her evening gown, and then her hair, teeth, and finally her skin. The woman slithers like a snake, mouth open, toward Lo. This nightmare has a number of symbolic meanings–the most obvious is the idea of sexuality and violence, which came up in earlier chapters when Ben assaults Lo, and when Archer traps the young waitress in the lounge and becomes furious at her rejection. The woman shedding not only her clothes but every aspect of her physical being, even her skin, is indicative of sexual violence, which strips women of their sense of power and identity. In relation to later sections in the novel, the woman's loss of body is representative of her literal loss of identity, as she impersonates Richard's wife in order to carry out his elaborate scheme.
Other images that appear in this section indicate Lo's fear of being trapped. She writes about images of spider webs that haunt her addled brain: “My imagination conjured up horrors from my childhood nightmares: giant spiderwebs across my face, men with clutching arms...” (240). The spiderwebs represent Lo's fear of being trapped or snared, as a fly in a web. The clutching arms of men are similarly representative of a sense of being trapped, though in this instance by a sexual predator. Both of these images indicate Lo's fear of powerlessness and violence.
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By Ruth Ware
