75 pages • 2-hour read
Sybil
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Chapters 17-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Willard”
All of the accumulated information Dr. Wilbur has received about the traumas being perpetrated in the Dorsett household came from one source: Sybil, and her alternate selves. In April 1957, Dr. Wilbur decides that she needs to substantiate the truth of the findings and brings Willard into the case. Sybil asks him to come to New York.
The doctor and Sybil know that Willard is unlikely to come willingly. Though Willard initially agreed to support Sybil’s analysis, he has since made it clear that he thinks she is too old to be supported by him. Sybil persistently feels that whatever her father has done for her has been out of duty, not because he cares for her. Over the years, Willard has sold Sybil’s furniture, piano, and some of her paintings without consulting her, keeping the money for himself. He has also demanded that she pay half of her mother’s funeral expenses. In his letters, he is careful to always mention his reliance on his social security checks, even though Sybil knows he earned a good income, his wife earned a good income, and they owned several properties.
Willard Dorsett was the product of an unhappy marriage between Aubrey and Mary Dorsett. His father, Aubrey, was the child of homesteaders who settled Willow Corners, a belligerent and bullying man who believed vehemently that the end of days was coming. Mary Dorsett, Sybil’s beloved grandmother and a Canadian outsider to the town, was Aubrey’s primary punching bag. In response to his father’s belligerence, Willard was a passive, quiet man, with an artistic nature. He did housework and had an eye for interior decoration, as well as architecture and construction. He was rigidly puritanical, and believed it was sinful to betray feeling. After Hattie’s death, Willard was remarried to a widow named Frieda, a much younger woman who simultaneously resents Sybil’s dependence on her father, telling Willard that he should put himself first, and insists that if Sybil would just get close to her, she could fix her up and find her a man.
Sybil is agonized as she waits for her father to reply to her letter. Though she often feels rejected by him, her relationship with her father is mixed. Dr. Wilbur believes Sybil is sexually stimulated by her father.
As a child, her father had always been proud of her artwork, and they share a mutual appreciation of art: “When father and daughter looked at a painting together,” Schreiber writes, “it was like two eyes looking at the same work” (259). Because she could not identify with her mother, Sybil identified with her father, even though he failed, in his passivity, to rescue her from her mother: on a conscious level, Sybil always “protected her father’s image” (259).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Confrontation and Verification”
When Willard presents himself in Dr. Wilbur’s office on May 4, 1957, he is “an assured, complacent, well-defended, passive, and unreachable figure who [takes] his responsibilities lightly” (264). Though as an analyst Dr. Wilbur tries not to pass judgment on the past, as Sybil’s friend she is determined to provoke Willard into assuming a belated parental responsibility, in the form of financial support.
Dr. Wilbur allows her questions, therefore, to become accusatory. Why, she asks, did he entrust the full care and upbringing of his daughter to Hattie? Hadn’t he been aware that Hattie’s behavior was peculiar? In fact, wasn’t her behavior more than odd? Didn’t he remember the burns on his daughter’s hands, her black eyes? Sybil had accidents like any child, Willard responds. What about the incident in the wheat crib? Dr. Wilbur asks.
Eventually Willard’s defensiveness crumbles, and he is forced to recognize that Hattie abused Sybil. Memories begin to surface as evidence: he remembers how terrified Sybil was of the buttonhook he used to pull on her Sunday shoes, how she cried and cried whenever he brought it near her. He admits to Dr. Wilbur that he didn’t know about the abuses at the time, but knowing Hattie, he understands she was capable of them. He tells Dr. Wilbur that he once took Hattie to see a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist who diagnosed Hattie as a schizophrenic.
Dr. Wilbur is pleased to hear her own diagnosis confirmed, and considers the admission damning: Willard allowed his daughter to be raised by someone he knew to be schizophrenic. She tells Willard that he had reacted to Sybil’s abuse as if he had not wanted to know. He had always asked Sybil about her injuries when Hattie could overhear them, never when they were alone. When Sybil behaved oddly and expressed a sense of unreality, he laughed it off. When Sybil’s childhood doctor recommended a psychiatrist, he gave her a guitar instead. To this list of accusations, and many others, Willard replies again and again, “I tried to be a good father” (278).
After the appointment in New York, Willard sends Sybil money every month, like clockwork.
Chapter 19 Summary: “The Boys”
The evening of Willard Dorsett’s appointment with Dr. Wilbur, Sybil walks into her home and finds that someone has built a partition in the apartment where she lives with her roommate. Sybil had been sleeping in the living room of the one-bedroom apartment they shared; now, her sleeping quarters are shielded from view.
In analysis that day, a new personality enters Dr. Wilbur’s office and announces that he was the one who built the partition. The new personality is Sid, and he introduces Mike. Sid’s name comes from the initials for Sybil Isabel Dorsett. He has light skin, dark hair, blue eyes. Mike is the name Sybil’s father used to call her whenever she was dressed in overalls. The boys emerge to help Sybil with woodcarving, sculpture, and repairs. They miss the sports they used to play in Willow Corners, and are resentful that Willard never took them to a ballgame. Like both Aubrey and Willard Dorset, Mike and Sid like to build things. Dr. Wilbur hypothesizes that Sid is Sybil’s identification with her father, and that Mike is her identification with her grandfather.
Mike and Sid want to know why they are different, why they are boys when the others are girls. The boys are still boys, Dr. Wilbur hypothesizes, because growing up presents the impossible physical challenge for them of becoming men. Dr. Wilbur’s analysis of the boys centers on convincing them that they are living in a woman’s body, something they refuse to acknowledge. When they proclaim that they’re as big and strong as Willard, or that they can pound nails like Aubrey, Dr. Wilbur points out that they’re not built like their father or their grandfather. The boys insist that they have arms and legs, just like their father. When Dr. Wilbur counters that the boys do not have penises, they insist that when they grow up, they will be able to push them out. They insist that when they grow up they will be able to give a girl a baby.
Dr. Wilbur discovers that Mike and Sid are the emotional offspring of Peggy Lou, born of Peggy Lou’s anger about sex, her anger that her mother never told her the “facts of life.” Dr. Wilbur discovers through Mike and Sid that subsidiary personalities do not lose access to the emotions they bequeath to subsequent personalities. Sybil cannot remember what happens when Peggy Lou takes over, but Peggy Lou is aware of what Sid and Mike do.
The emergence of Mike and Sid makes Sybil’s case even more ground-breakingly complicated: it is the first recorded case of cross-gendered personalities.
Chapters 17-19 Analysis
Chapters 17-19 deal with the trauma imparted to Sybil by her relationship with her father. Though Dr. Wilbur comes to realize that Hattie’s abuse is at the center of Sybil’s trauma, she is insistent, over and above Sybil’s illusions that she has a loving relationship with her father, that Willard’s willful ignorance of Hattie’s abuse and not-so-benign neglect are also important causes of her condition.
As its title “Confrontation and Verification” suggests, Chapter 18 is an important one for Schreiber’s and for Dr. Wilbur’s claims that the book is nonfiction, and that it is an account of a history-making medical case, not just an interesting third-person memoir, or a good novel. Willard is invited into analysis because he is the only person besides Sybil who would be able to remember and corroborate the events Sybil has recounted of Hattie’s abuse. Thus, Chapters 17 and 18 describe Willard’s meeting with Dr. Wilbur in technical, evidentiary terms: Willard is described as “giving testimony,” as a “witness,” and his words as “substantiating the truth” of Dr. Wilbur’s findings (244). Chapter 18 is written to emphasize that Dr. Wilbur conducts a kind of cross-examination of Willard, one in which she victoriously proves that he was culpable for the abuse Hattie committed, and thus also that abuse was committed and Sybil is telling the truth.
Willard’s reticence in the analyst’s office also suggests to the reader that his passivity in the past wasn’t simply absent-minded or incompetent parenting, but willful and blameworthy. He is unwilling to admit that Hattie’s behavior could have been construed as odd, or that he might have been advised to act differently in the past. This evidences his self-motivated thinking and the ways in which he likely willfully ignored all the signs of abuse during Sybil’s childhood.
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