Sybil

In 1959, several of the selves attempt to take Sybil’s future into their own hands. Mary, expressing a desire for privacy that Sybil has felt throughout her life, since the days of sleeping in her parents’ room as a child, puts a down payment on a house in upstate New York. Sybil discovers Mary’s plan when her bank account is overdrawn. Dr. Wilbur finds Sybil a lawyer to extricate her from Mary’s obligation on the basis of mental incompetence.

Sybil is invited to visit a friend in Denver over the summer, and seriously considers going before finally turning the invitation down. This disappointment enrages Peggy Lou, as she considers it a breach of a contract Dr. Wilbur brokered between Sybil and herself. Peggy Lou had agreed not to go off on unexpected trips on her own if Sybil agreed to sometimes take her places. Though Peggy Lou had always existed solely to carry Sybil’s anger, and had never had any desire to hold onto control of the body once the anger dissipated, this time Peggy Lou decides she is going to take permanent control and make a complete break with Sybil. She makes arrangements to live, disguised, in the South. Her plan is interrupted when she’s found by Dr. Wilbur at Grand Central Station, and she’s soothed into abandoning it.

Meanwhile, Vanessa, thinking about Sybil’s asceticism and feeling badly that she had so little money to indulge even the smallest pleasures, decides that she will be the breadwinner. She gets a job at a laundromat for two months, using the extra money to buy new clothes, theater tickets, before Sybil decides that it interferes too much with the demands of her classes.

Marcia seeks recognition and validation: she writes an original pop song that she sends out to publishers, and an essay on the abuse a loving mother can inflict on children that she sends to Parents magazine. She insists, through Dr. Wilbur, that she be allowed to have her own name on the mailbox at their apartment, in addition to Sybil’s and Teddy’s.

In August 1959, Sybil writes a letter to Dr. Wilbur and tells her that she does not have multiple personalities. She writes:

I do not have any multiple personalities. I don’t even have a ‘double’ to help me out…The dissociations are not the problem because they do not actually exist, but there is something wrong or I would not resort to pretending to be like that (389).

In the letter, Sybil writes that the extreme things she told Dr. Wilbur about her mother were not true, that she was overprotective, and interfered with Sybil’s music and drawing, but that they did so out of lack of understanding. They loved her and she had no reason to complain–growing up “odd” was her own fault.

After writing the letter, Sybil “loses” two days and then writes another letter, admitting that she wrote the letter because she wanted to show Dr. Wilbur that she was composed and cool, that she didn’t need the doctor, and because it would be easier if her multiple personalities were a ruse.

As Sybil continues to struggle with the different demands of the personalities inside her, her relationship with Teddy, who she has relied on to report the actions of the others and mediate between them, begins to fray.

Teddy is disconcerted by Peggy Lou’s assertiveness and Marcia’s depressions, and Sybil begins to feel alienated by her roommate’s discomfort. Their tensions come to a head in the late summer of 1959, when Teddy tells Sybil that Dr. Wilbur is “exploiting [her] to satisfy her own personal needs” (398). Sybil yells that she does not want to hear that, and Teddy snaps that she never wants to hear the truth. Peggy Lou takes over and hides under a large dresser, refusing to come out while “that girl” is still there. A few months later, Teddy moves out.