Sybil

Hearing the story of Hattie’s catatonia at the farm and of her other odd behaviors, Dr. Wilbur becomes convinced that Hattie is at the center of Sybil’s trauma, and that it would be impossible to treat her without having a better understanding of the mother.

In one significant memory of the Willow Corners mother, the mother who returned with the family’s return to the farm, Sybil is in the town pharmacy. She rushes through the front, the smell of which reminds her of the medicines her mother used to force her to take, to a balcony above, where the pharmacist, Dr. Taylor, keeps violins that he makes himself. The pharmacist notices her and kindly invites her up. He plays for her, and promises her one day she will play, and he will make a violin for her.

Sybil then hears her mother’s voice calling her from below. She goes to stand next to her mother as the clerk wraps her medicine, leaning her elbow on the counter and her head on the elbow. She accidently knocks the bottle over, and it crashes to the floor. Hattie tells her: “You broke it” (206).

After the pharmacy, Hattie walks over to the wagons the farmers brought to town. She helps herself to peas and corn, which Sybil knows other people do as well. But Sybil is embarrassed because her father says it’s stealing. Her mother orders her to take some peas and corn too, but Sybil refuses, this time and every other time.

Hattie does other things that fill Sybil with both embarrassment and shame. During the nighttime walks on which Sybil is forced to accompany Hattie, Hattie stops to defecate on the lawns of the most important people in town, people whose status Hattie feels threaten her own high status as the wife of one of the richest men in town and the daughter of the mayor of Elderville. On Sundays, Hattie volunteers to babysit a group of little girls while their parents are at church. Telling them they are going to play horsey, Hattie orders them to lean over, and when they crawl on their hands and knees, Hattie stuck her fingers into their vaginas as she said “giddyap, giddyap” (210). In the summer, Hattie takes Sybil and a group of teenage girls that she calls “lower crust” down to the river. Sybil, left alone for a long time, looks behind the bushes, and sees her mother and the teenage girls pleasuring each other.

In 1957, analysis with Dr. Wilbur finally reveals the heart of the trauma: a secret ritual of cruelty and punishments inflicted by Hattie on Sybil, which Dr. Wilbur characterizes as a “complicated capture-control-imprisonment-torture” theme (212). Sybil’s other selves represented the flight of a child with no escape, no way out.

Hattie’s “special brand of maternal ministration” is always accompanied by wild laughter (214). In one procedure, she would separate Sybil’s legs with a wooden spoon, and suspend her from the ceiling, filling her baby daughter with an adult-sized enema. Then she would insist that Sybil walk around the room holding in the water. In another procedure, she forced objects into Sybil’s vagina, saying “You might as well get used to it[…]That’s what men will do to you when you grow up[…]So I might as well prepare you” (216).

During these ministrations, Hattie tied towels around Sybil’s mouth to muffle her crying, or she beat her when she cried, so that by age 3½, Sybil no longer cried at all.

As an infant, Sybil tried to fight back. When she had learned to crawl, she waited until her mother left the house to go to the store, and scattered her sheet music all over the sunroom. When her mother tripped her as she was learning to walk, Sybil refused to learn until she was 2½.

As a baby, her grandmother and a kindly maid were Sybil’s allies. As she got older, and her mother took over the primary parenting role, Sybil learned not to fight back, that she would only be punished if she did. Instead, she found an outlet in creativity, one that also provoked her mother’s fury. In one instance, Sybil crafted a Christmas ornament that she was especially proud of. Hattie dismissed it and scolded Sybil that she didn’t have time to look at the ornament on the tree. Then, a minute later, when Hattie went into the living room, she screamed that surely Sybil hadn’t dared to put the ornament on the tree after she’d said not to. She told Sybil to take the ornament off the tree. Sybil felt trapped: if she went to take the ornament off the tree, where Hattie was waiting, Hattie would beat her; if she ran away, Hattie would beat her for disobeying.

Sybil was too afraid to tell anyone what her mother was doing, and no one intervened. Sybil repressed rage at them all. When her grandmother saw Hattie punishing Sybil, or saw Hattie trip Sybil as she went down the stairs, she did not intervene. When her father found her shut up dangerously in the wheat crib, where she’d been trapped for hours by her mother, he believed Hattie’s story that another child did it. He did not seem to find anything odd about Sybil’s many injuries: black eyes, a dislocated shoulder, a fractured larynx, a bead in the nose, and swollen lips. Though the doctor treated these injuries and her teachers asked about them, none of them intervened, either.

Sybil did not blame her mother, who told Sybil that she was the only one in the world who loved her. Instead, Sybil blamed the enema tip, the wheat crib, the instruments of torture themselves. 

Based on the stories Sybil presents in analysis, Dr. Wilbur becomes convinced that Hattie Dorsett suffered from schizophrenia, and that the treatment of Sybil could not proceed without a better understanding of the mother’s illness.

Hattie Dorsett was raised Hattie Anderson in a home with 13 children, in which none of them got very much attention. As a child, Hattie was a straight-A student who was so talented with the piano that her teachers supported her dream of studying at a conservatory and becoming a concert pianist. When Hattie was 12, however, her father announced one night that Hattie was not going back to school the next day: she would quit 7th grade to work as a clerk in his music store, a mandate that was not required by the family’s finances. Hattie knew no one argued back to her father, so she just began to laugh.

This incident marked, Dr. Wilbur believed, the onset of the odd behaviors that characterized Hattie’s schizophrenia. She began to play vindictive practical jokes on her family. As an adult, Hattie would sometimes sit for hours in the living room, fondling her father’s old smoking jacket.

Paradoxically, though, visiting Hattie’s family in Elderville was a respite for Sybil as a child. Her aunts and uncles hugged and kissed her. Hattie’s ministrations had to pause. Sybil was especially attached to her Aunt Fay, whom she loved so much she once asked, “will you keep me?” (240). For that reason Sybil was especially traumatized when, in the summer of 1927, her cousin Lulu flung a fancy pickle dish through the French doors that led to the room where the adults had retired. Lulu and Sybil had been helping Aunt Fay wash the dishes, and Lulu, who saw Aunt Fay year-round, was jealous of the attention she was paying to Sybil. All of the aunts and uncles flung open the broken door. Lulu blamed Sybil, and Hattie said to Sybil, “You broke it” (241). Fay cautioned Hattie that Sybil was just a girl, and she didn’t mean any harm. When Hattie denounced Sybil in front of Aunt Fay as a malicious little girl, Sybil flew into a rage, becoming Peggy Lou.