59 pages • 1-hour read
What She Left Behind: A Haunting and Heartbreaking Story of 1920s Historical Fiction
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, self-harm, graphic violence, death, substance use, addiction, emotional abuse, physical abuse, ableism, gender discrimination, bullying, death by suicide, and child sexual abuse.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Isabelle”
In 1995, high-school senior Isabelle, who goes by Izzy, visits Willard State Asylum with her foster mother, Peg, who has access to the building as a museum curator. Being near an institution for those with mental illnesses reminds Izzy of her birth mother being admitted to Elmira Psychiatric Center. On the grounds, Izzy finds goslings that she thinks are dead but were only pretending to be. Izzy passes by Willard’s cemetery, main building, and patient wards. She is struck by the wire cages around fire escapes.
Peg tells Izzy about Willard’s first patient, Mary Rote, who arrived by boat in 1869. Over time, patients began to be treated poorly: Half of the residents died in the institution. Izzy reflects on how well Peg and her husband, Harry, treat her. She’s worried that her current living situation is “too good to be true” (6). Peg asks if Izzy is hot and offers to buy her short-sleeve shirts. Izzy says she prefers long-sleeved shirts and thinks about the scars from self-harm that the sleeves cover.
Patients from Elmira Psychiatric Center, which is nearby, are out for a walk. Izzy shares that her biological mother was admitted there. Peg apologizes for being unaware of this fact and offers to listen if Izzy ever wants to talk about her mother. However, Izzy doesn’t feel comfortable discussing the fact that her mother killed her father.
Peg and Izzy go to Willard’s workshop and into the attic. There, they find the patients’ abandoned and untouched luggage. Izzy remembers packing a bag for her mother after the latter shot Izzy’s father. Peg explains that the luggage is “just as important as an archeological dig” (10). She is excited to learn about the residents.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Clara”
In 1929, Clara is 18. Clara’s brother, William, died a year and a half ago (by suicide, it is later revealed), and Clara has been dealing with her grief by secretly going dancing at the Cotton Club. She met her boyfriend, Bruno, there. He’s a lower-class immigrant from Italy, and the first song they dance to together is “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
When Clara brings Bruno home to meet her parents, they are very rude to him. Bruno tells Clara’s father, Henry, about his own father, Moretti Salvatore, who is a very successful shoemaker in Italy. Bruno also discusses his job as a longshoreman, but Henry says that he’s not impressed. Clara and Bruno leave dinner early. Three days later, Henry tells Clara that she is going to marry James, the son of Henry’s business partner, and he forbids her to leave the house.
After being imprisoned in her family’s mansion for three weeks, Clara steels herself to talk to her father. She thinks about how she and William would meet with Henry on Fridays about their schoolwork and behavior. Their mother, Ruth, was not involved with their schooling or discipline and developed an alcohol addiction after William’s death.
Clara tries to convince her parents not to make her marry James. She lies and tells them that she wants to go to college, but in truth, she only wants to start a family with Bruno. Clara is already pregnant but hasn’t told her parents. Ruth blames Clara for William’s death, claiming that William left home because of her. Clara retorts that William was upset because Henry fired him. She says Henry is only forcing her to marry James to strengthen his business partnership. Henry grabs Clara, and she says that she knows he beat William. Ruth collapses on a chair and starts crying as Clara continues to talk about Henry treating William poorly, accusing him of leaving William to die on the streets. Henry slaps Clara and then calls the police, telling them to come take his daughter. Clara runs out of the room.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Izzy”
Izzy arrives at her new high school as a senior. Another student runs into her, and she drops her paperwork. A cute boy helps her pick it up but is then pulled away from Izzy by his girlfriend. When Izzy goes to class, other students make fun of her for wearing a backpack. Someone throws a condom at her while she’s talking to the teacher, who throws it in the garbage. Izzy then finds an empty seat. During roll call, she learns that the cute boy is named Ethan and that his girlfriend is named Shannon. Shannon and her friends remind Izzy of girls from her former school, who bullied her about her mother killing her father.
Izzy pulls on her sleeves and thinks about how it’s been a month since she cut herself. Above all else, she fears having a mental illness like her mother. After class, a girl named Alex introduces herself to Izzy and warns her that Shannon is a bully and that Izzy is her next target because Ethan helped with her papers. Alex admits that she used to be friends with Shannon and offers to give Izzy a ride home. Izzy declines, saying it would upset her foster parents. Alex offers to come over and introduce herself to Izzy’s foster parents.
Then, Shannon comes over and asks Alex if she’s going to a party that night. Before Alex can answer, Shannon invites Izzy to the party, tells Alex to bring tequila, and walks off. Alex says Shannon is trying to make her look bad in front of Izzy, as Shannon knows Alex dislikes her. Izzy goes to her next class.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Clara”
Clara packs a bag but doesn’t finish before the police arrive. Three law enforcement officers and a doctor surround Clara. Henry claims that Clara is hallucinating and accusing him of killing William. The officers and doctor take Clara to the Long Island Home for Nervous Invalids. There, she is interviewed by a doctor named Thorn. She says that she does not have a mental illness and that her father is committing her to convince her to marry James. Thorn acts like Clara is paranoid. He explains that she can’t escape: The grounds are huge. Their next appointment will be the following week. A nurse named Yott asks Clara to walk outside after her meeting with Thorn, and Clara reluctantly agrees. However, they are stopped by a nurse named McCarn, who says that Clara is to be taken directly to her room.
Ten weeks later, on New Year’s Day, 1930, Clara is still in the Long Island Home for Nervous Invalids. Clara has been writing letters to Bruno to keep him updated. She also gets a letter from Henry saying that he can’t afford to keep her there but that she still needs help: Dr. Thorn will explain what will happen next, and she should do what he says.
Thorn, McCarn, and an unfamiliar man named Mr. Glen come into Clara’s room. McCarn is holding a syringe. Thorn explains that Clara is being transferred to Willard. Clara objects and collapses on the bed. She then updates her journal, saying that she is being sent to Willard against her will. Yott comes to Clara’s room and helps her pack. Clara vomits in her wastebasket and confesses that she’s pregnant. When Yott admits that the hospital hasn’t been sending Clara’s letters to Bruno, Clara writes another letter and begs Yott to send it from her house. Yott reluctantly agrees, hiding the letter in her bra.
McCarn brings Clara dinner and berates Yott for the incomplete packing. Yott says that she’ll stay until it’s done and Clara has eaten. After McCarn leaves, Yott also leaves, returning with Clara’s letters to Bruno, which she hopes that Clara will be able to send from Willard.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Izzy”
Shannon’s friend, Crystal, tells Izzy that the plumbing in the girls’ locker room is broken and that they have to use the boys’ locker room. However, Izzy freezes when she realizes the locker room is not empty, as Crystall claimed. Shannon, Crystal, and another friend of theirs then push Izzy into the boys’ locker room and toward the showers. Ethan is there and keeps Izzy from falling. Izzy storms out while insulting the penises of the boys laughing at her. She tells the principal what happened but leaves out the girls’ names. He says that he will hold an assembly about bullying.
A couple of days later, Shannon and Crystal glue menstrual products to Izzy’s locker. She sees Ethan helping them add ketchup to simulate blood. Izzy isn’t sure what to do because she’s seen that when parents get involved, it often makes the bullying worse. She struggles with impulses to self-harm but resists the urge.
On Saturday, Izzy goes with Peg to the warehouse. Peter, Ethan’s father, is one of the photographers for the project. Ethan accompanies his father, and Izzy is self-conscious about her outfit. While Harry and two other people work on one side of the warehouse, Peg, Izzy, Peter, and Ethan work on the other. They open a suitcase belonging to a woman named Madeline and spread out its contents, which Izzy logs and Peter photographs. Izzy is surprised that there are baby booties and caps in the suitcase. Peg says that these can help them figure out who Madeline was and that the suitcases will reveal more about all the residents. Peg is also seeking permission to get the medical records of some residents from the Office of Mental Health.
Izzy fears that the objects owned by someone with a mental illness can infect someone susceptible to mental illness, like her. However, her attraction to Ethan distracts her from her anxiety. They are only able to get through 15 suitcases before noon, and Izzy realizes that she might be working with Ethan for multiple days. Peg brings a large picnic lunch for everyone. Ethan flirtatiously teases Izzy when she passes him a sandwich.
Speaking aside to one another, Peg says that Ethan is handsome, but Izzy says that he’s a “jerk.” Ethan overhears, and Peg defends Izzy. However, Izzy tells Peg not to bother and cuts herself with a knife as she is putting it away. Ethan helps her wrap her finger in a paper towel while Peg gets a first aid kit. While Peg is away, Izzy confronts Ethan about the menstrual products on her locker. He claims that he didn’t know whose locker it was, but Izzy says he shouldn’t have done it to anyone. Ethan wants to explain why Shannon is a bully, but Peg returns before he can, handing the kit over to Ethan. He bandages Izzy’s finger and says that his parents want him to be a doctor. He wants to be an EMT. Izzy once wanted to be a veterinarian but couldn’t stand to see animals in pain. Ethan talks about his grief over losing his dog and says that animals are better than people. They go back to work, and Ethan helps Izzy put on her glove over her injured finger.
The next suitcase was owned by a man named Lawrence Lawrence. They go through 10 more suitcases and then find personal items that once belonged to a resident named Roberto Torres, who was from the Philippines. There are a variety of objects in the suitcases, like Bibles, pictures, teacups, and ice skates. The largest suitcase belonged to someone named Clara Elizabeth Cartwright. It holds a large collection of clothes and accessories, books, sheet music, and postcards. There are pictures of Clara with her friends and with Bruno, as well as her journal. Izzy wonders about the process of Clara developing a mental illness and about Bruno’s fate, loving a woman with a mental illness.
Next, they find a stack of unopened letters from Clara to Bruno, which reminds Izzy of the letters her mother sent from prison that Izzy has never opened. She fears that she will be infected by her mother’s mental illness if she reads them. Izzy reads the first entry of Clara’s journal, which dates to a time when William was alive and the family was on vacation in Switzerland, and the last entry, in which she writes that her father is sending her to Willard. Izzy cries thinking about Clara and Bruno’s fate but hides her tears.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
What She Left Behind alternates between two time periods and two points of view. Izzy is the protagonist in the 1990s, and Clara is the protagonist in the 1920s. Wiseman uses the third person for both points of view, and this structural parallel helps establish the two young women as foils and mirrors to one another, their paths crossing at Willard State Asylum.
Clara’s experiences establish the theme of the Institutional Control of Women’s Bodies in the 1920s. A motif of imprisonment supports this theme; though Clara is never literally jailed, the metaphor repeatedly surfaces in connection with both domestic and medicalized spaces. For instance, when Clara’s father, Henry, forbids her to leave his house for three weeks, it “[makes] her feel like an inmate being kept in a prison” (11). This is the most comfortable “prison” that Clara inhabits, yet the fact that she feels trapped even in lush surroundings illustrates the basic lack of respect for her freedom and consent. Similarly, the first institution she is placed in has decent care: It is “warm and clean” (42). However, “there [is] no mistaking that she was being kept against her will” (42). Most significant of all is the fact that Clara’s father has her committed because she refuses to marry the man he wants. This reveals the common thread between the various kinds of “imprisonment” Clara undergoes: the policing of her sexuality and reproductive capacity (for economic purposes, in her father’s case).
Though Izzy is not subject to the same level of scrutiny, her experiences in high school reveal that female bodies and sexuality still carry a stigma in the late 20th century. The kind of bullying Izzy experiences at the hands of Shannon, her main antagonist, is centered on bodies. By pushing Izzy into the boys’ locker room, Shannon exposes her to male bodies and mocks her developing desire, while gluing menstrual products to her locker demonizes a natural bodily process. The novel thus draws a throughline between the institutionalized control of Clara’s reproductive abilities and the contemporary social policing of women and girls’ bodies.
A second, related theme that Wiseman introduces in this section is Defining Female Autonomy as Mental Illness. The novel suggests that patriarchal society pathologizes women’s defiance, using the pretext of mental illness as a way of punishing women who resist male authority. When Clara is committed, she feels she is “being punished for standing up for herself” (53). Conversely, her father treats Clara’s insistence on marrying the man she loves and her calling out how Henry treated his late son William as evidence that she is “having some kind of episode” (30). A woman must have a mental illness to want to choose her own path, according to the novel’s rich, powerful men. In the 1990s, Izzy’s fears of mental illness underscore how powerful the label remains.
Wiseman also introduces the motif of water in this section. For many visitors, Seneca Lake is a place for vacationing and relaxing: It symbolizes fun for the people Izzy sees enjoying their time there. However, the lake also has historical connections to Willard: “Willard Asylum’s first patient arrived by steamboat” (5). This foreshadows how the water also takes patients away from Willard: The lake is where Clara’s beloved Bruno dies later in the novel.
There are two sets of unopened letters in What She Left Behind: Clara’s letters to Bruno and the letters from Izzy’s mother, Joyce. Bruno never sees Clara’s letters because the staff at the Long Island Home were instructed not to mail them. These letters represent Clara’s institutional silencing, the result of Henry’s efforts to destroy his daughter’s relationship with a lower-class man. By contrast, Joyce’s letters were sent, but Izzy is afraid to open them. She fears that they are “filled with the insane rambling of a crazy woman. What if her mother’s words influenced her in some way, edging her down the slippery slope toward madness?” (81). Later in the novel, the actual contents of the letters reveal that Joyce killed Izzy’s father because he was molesting her. These letters symbolize Izzy’s repression of sexual trauma and her profound fear of mental illness, which once again serves as a way of delegitimizing women’s resistance to men’s violence.
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