57 pages • 1 hour read
Madwoman
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Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation, and mental illness.
Madwoman begins as a first-person letter, addressed from a daughter to her mother. She tells her mother about her children, seven-year-old Nova and three-year-old Lark, and sorts through her memories of her mother, which include her mother’s obsession with buying plastic bottles of water. The daughter claims to understand this, saying that “it was easier to fixate on small externals than address the fact that [they] did not know if [they] would live to see the next day” (4).
She also considers a memory of her father during a time when he was on pain pills following an injury to his finger. When they brought her father to the store, he intuited her mother’s obsession with bottled water, and the narrator says that her father “was slowed down, but not as much as [her mother had] estimated” because he threw the water out of the cart and snarled abuse at the narrator’s mother (4). The next day, the narrator’s mother discovered a bottle of water by her bedside, which she took as proof that her abusive husband loved her.
The narrator claims that she’ll carry the burden of what happened between her, her mother, and her father on the island she grew up on for the rest of her life. She’s also promised to never speak of it aloud. The narrator has kept to that until she receives a letter from her mother.
Chapter 2 Summary
The day her mother’s letter arrives is the first day of summer vacation for Nova and the day that Lark begins to wean. As the narrator gets her kids dressed, flashes of memories of her mother come into her mind, particularly the morning vodka and Coke that her mother used to drink. The narrator takes her children to the grocery store for some breakfast, and as they eat, she ponders her childhood and desire for a sibling, to which her mother responded that “it was lucky [she] never got pregnant again” (8).
The narrator thinks it’s shocking that she loves her children, considering her childhood. She lives in fear of one day snapping in anger and treating them the way her father treated her. In her worst moments, the narrator envisions being led out into the night to her father’s car, where he hands her a box “with something inside [she] need[s] to see” (10).
The narrator also has bad spending habits, particularly concerning clothing and health supplements. She now has $8,000 of debt that she’s hidden from her husband by shuffling it around from credit card to credit card. She’s worried that if she confesses the debt to her husband, he’ll lose trust in her and start to dig into the other lies she’s told, which the narrator cannot have happen.
She takes her children to the post office so that she can retrieve her latest purchase. On the way, she tells Nova not to relate anything that happened to her father because the PO box contains Christmas gifts—the latest lie she’s employed to keep her spending habits a secret. At the post office, Nova and Lark are difficult and fussy; Lark yanks at his mother’s breast, and Nova paws through her purse. Nova also discovers a letter addressed to the narrator that says, “I know you don’t want to be found. But I found you…Because you’re my child” (16). Momentarily losing herself, the narrator snatches the letter back from Nova, causing her to start crying. The letter is from the narrator’s mother, and the narrator feels protective of it.
A teenage boy approaches the family and asks to borrow a pen to write an address. Angry that the teenager would want to take the pen from Lark, who was playing with it, the narrator berates him, asking whether his mother is present in a loud voice. As the boy skulks off, the narrator realizes that, in her anger, she’s begun to use the same language as her abusive father.
The narrator reveals that she had also lied to her husband about her parents, telling him that they’d died in a car crash when she was 17 years old. In reality, the narrator’s mother murdered her father and is now imprisoned in the Central California Women’s Facility. The narrator chose her husband because of his perceived stability and lack of curiosity about the world, as she doesn’t want him to become too curious about her past.
On their first date, the narrator’s future husband ordered a beer, which caused her to almost leave the restaurant, as the narrator has a strong association between the smell of alcohol and the threat of future violence. However, she decided to stay when he told her that he wouldn’t drink with her. After speaking to her future husband further, the narrator decided that he was safe and trustworthy. She was also attracted to him due to his loving family and home life, which projected stability. Memories of her mother also plagued the narrator. Her mother hadn’t lied to her father about her past; her father used the truths she confessed to him as excuses for his abuse. As a result, the narrator learned to lie easily and believably, as it was necessary for survival.
The novel returns to the present moment. The narrator is driving her children home, feeling distracted and flustered due to her difficult day and the letter from her mother. Suddenly, she crashes into the car in front of her. Her children are uninjured, and the narrator exits the car to speak to the other driver. The woman doesn’t blame her. Instead, she places the blame on the truck in front of her that caused her to slam on the brakes. As the woman fusses over the narrator’s children, the narrator is continually reminded of her mother by the similarities and differences between her and this woman. During the conversation, the narrator reveals her name: Celine, though everyone in her life calls her Clove.
Chapter 3 Summary
At home, Clove makes her children lunch. As they eat, Clove centers herself, opens her mother’s letter, and begins to read. A self-described feminist lawyer has taken Clove’s mother’s case, during which she told her that Clove was still alive. The letter ends with a request for Clove to support her mother in a clemency hearing, defending the murder of her father due to his abuse of her mother.
Feeling angry and disturbed by the letter, Clove walks to her husband’s home office and watches him work. She wonders what it would have been like to find a partner for any reason besides believing that he’s incapable of abuse. Clove feels as if once “[her mother] and this feminist lawyer reveal[] all [her] lies” (39), her husband will have no choice but to leave her. Clove heads back to her children and loses herself in all the tasks she needs to do for them.
That night, once her children are in bed, Clove considers who might have revealed her existence and location to this lawyer. The next morning, Clove tells her husband that she’s preparing for a “spiritual metamorphosis” but becomes annoyed when he doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. Her husband claims that he didn’t bother since he knows she’d become distant and silent if he did.
Clove’s children beg for attention, treats, and television time, and Clove gives in more than she usually would, desiring some moments of quiet to figure out her situation. She goes outside to meditate, but her children kicking a ball around interrupt her. The ball hits Lark in the face. It breaks the skin and causes him to cry. Clove’s husband comes outside to take care of him and asks whether Clove wants to get a nanny so that she has more time to herself. Fearful of a stranger watching her children, Clove says no. Secretly, she feels jealous of her husband’s work, as he isn’t as responsible for childcare as her; she wants him to take more responsibility at home. However, when she says this, her husband claims that he’s too busy. Considering her situation, Clove gives in and tells her husband that she’ll find a nanny for the children.
Chapter 4 Summary
Clove’s husband sends her several links to online profiles of potential nannies, each of which Clove rejects for a variety of reasons. All rejections stem from her anxiety over letting a stranger watch her children. Clove cannot get the thought of her mother out of her head and feels distracted from her day-to-day life. She keeps thinking about her mother’s letter to her. She notices that her mother had never even asked how Clove was doing in it; the letter was purely focused on herself and her situation.
Unable to resist the temptation, Clove reads online articles about her mother’s murder of her father. She finds that the perspectives of the articles are typically sympathetic to her father, calling his death a tragedy and a cold-blooded killing.
Chapter 5 Summary
The articles also report the details of the case. When the family lived in Hawaii, Clove’s mother had shoved her father over the railing of the balcony of their high-rise apartment, plunging him 33 stories to his death. Clove remembers that her father had used the height of the high-rise against her and her mother, often threatening to jump off the balcony as a method of manipulation.
The articles also mention the most mysterious aspect of the case: the disappearance of the couple’s teenage daughter on the night of the incident. Most of the speculation centers around the possibility that Clove’s mother killed her at the same time that she killed her father and hid the body afterward. Clove feels relief that she’s been presumed dead since the incident, as it means that nobody is actively looking for her.
Clove remembers the story her mother had told her about her birth. Her father hadn’t believed that she’d gone into labor, forcing Clove’s mother to ask a neighbor to drive her to the hospital. Clove’s father had arrived late and drunk and abusively berated her mother when allowed to see her. Clove’s mother had lied to the nurse when the nurse asked if she was being abused because she was convinced that there was no way she could leave Clove’s father. Over the following years, Clove’s father continued to abuse her mother, isolating her from her career, friends, and family and regularly covering her with bruises. Her father also frequently threatened that he would end his life by suicide to manipulate Clove’s mother into staying.
When Clove was 10, her father moved the family to Hawaii. When they arrived, Clove and her mother both felt hopeful that they could have some more independence on the island and believed that the change of scenery would make her father calm down. When her father went to work, Clove, who, at this time, went by the name Calla, and her mother tried to meet the neighbors in their high-rise. Clove’s mother made friends with a woman named Christina. Christina had an immunocompromised daughter named Celine, who became Clove’s best friend.
Chapter 6 Summary
In the present narrative, Clove heads to the midwife who helped deliver her children to get guidance about her new psychological difficulties, which include insomnia, intrusive thoughts, and irrational anxiety over her children becoming poisoned or injured. Clove becomes frustrated during the conversation, feeling as if the midwife isn’t being helpful. The midwife pushes Clove to tell her more about her childhood, which she says could be the source of the post-weaning feelings she’s been experiencing.
Clove can’t stop herself from diving into her memories of Christina and Celine. In Hawaii, the four women settled into a routine together, with Christina regularly berating Clove’s mother for her decision to stay with her father. Clove and her mother told Christina and Celine everything that happened at home as her father got worse and worse.
When the midwife offers to send Clove to another specialist, she reacts with anger and storms out of the woman’s office. Driving home, Clove feels intense, irrational anxiety that Lark might wander into the bathroom and eat ibuprofen pills before she can get back home. Arriving home, Clove begins to throw away all the family’s pills and toys with button batteries, which she’s worried about the children swallowing. Clove’s husband watches her with concern, as her behavior seems extreme.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
One of the most notable aspects of Madwoman is the novel’s thematic exploration of Intergenerational Patterns of Female Survival through its narrative structure, which interweaves the present-day narrative with the protagonist’s memories. Clove’s dual identity—typified by her name, which she invented while trying to cast off her birth name, Calla—reflects the fragmentary nature of selfhood in the aftermath of abuse. This structural choice creates a temporal fluidity that mirrors the way trauma disrupts linear time.
In these opening chapters, water appears as a motif, particularly through Clove’s mother’s obsession with bottled water and her family’s apartment directly on a beach in Hawaii. This introduces the theme of The Commodification of Safety. To Clove’s mother, this fixation served as a metaphor for control and safety in an unstable environment. This motif illustrates how survivors of abuse often displace their fears onto manageable external objects. In Clove’s mother’s case, the water bottles became objects of safety; their presence or absence marked moments of perceived security or threat.
Clove’s relationship to memory and truth telling emerges as a complex aspect of her character in these initial chapters. Clove lies constantly and systematically, most notably hiding her entire past from her family, including her loving and supportive husband and children. Bieker shows this behavior as a remnant of a survival mechanism that Clove used in childhood to placate her violent and unpredictable father. In this context, truth itself becomes malleable in the context of trauma, as Clove’s fabrications serve as a form of self-preservation rather than a malicious deception. This motif of lying extends to the broader narrative structure, where the reliability of memory itself comes into question through the protagonist’s fragmented recollections.
In addition to water and memory, setting and physical spaces are important to the narrative. The high-rise apartment on the coast of Hawaii, for instance, functioned as both a metaphorical and literal cliff. In the metaphorical sense, the apartment’s height and relative isolation transformed it into a functional prison for Clove, confining her high in the sky where few could see how her father treated her and her family. On the other hand, the apartment was also very much a literal precipice, which the author emphasizes by Clove’s father’s eventual headlong plunge over the railing. Throughout Clove’s childhood, her father manipulated her relationship with herself and the space she inhabited by frequently threatening to die by suicide, a manipulative tactic common to abusers. Through doing so, he transformed Clove’s lifelong relationships with the spaces she inhabits. Later in the novel, these feelings manifest within her as an obsession with control over her environment. This provides a constant sense of stress and worry when Clove’s ability to control her situation is not entirely possible.
Along with Clove’s relationship to rooms and physical spaces, the novel explores the cyclical nature of trauma through the use of parallel narratives. The protagonist’s present-day parenting anxieties mirror her childhood experiences, particularly evident in her reactions to perceived threats to her children’s safety. Additionally, her compulsive disposal of household items deemed dangerous reflects this internal need for control, much like her mother’s water-bottle-collecting behavior. Clove is obsessively hypervigilant in protecting her children, constantly fixating on potential perceived harm. This hypervigilance exists in tension with her fear of replicating her father’s abuse, contributing to Clove’s constant sense of anxiety and oncoming disaster. In this way, parenthood can trigger intergenerational trauma. These parallels also underscore the inevitability of confronting one’s past trauma through parenting. This notion manifests extensively throughout the narrative, particularly in the way Clove compartmentalizes her past and her current struggles to present a carefree face to the world, just as her mother did.
Bieker further explores Clove’s fractured and shifting identity through the use of names and naming in the novel, a recurring motif. The protagonist’s multiple names—Calla, Celine, and Clove—represent different aspects of her fragmented identity and serve as protective masks. The one name assigned to her—Calla—is the name that she decided to drop in favor of a stolen name—Celine—and an eventual nickname, Clove. This constant renaming demonstrates the theme of The Struggle for Personal Identity Amid Trauma for Clove; each name has functioned as a new attempt to start over and fully reinvent herself from the ground up. This multiplicity of identities reflects the complexity of trauma survival and how survivors must often compartmentalize their traumatic experiences to move forward.
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