Girl, Interrupted: Chapter 34 Summary & Analysis

Susanna’s first encounter with a famous Vermeer painting is fleeting, but not quite poignant or memorable. Though Susanna felt that there was something the painting was trying to tell her, she disregarded it, and went on with her life. Susanna became ill and was, of course, eventually institutionalized, but the painting and its warning faded from her memory almost completely over the years. There is the faint suggestion that the warning that the painting’s subject may have been trying to offer was in fact Susanna’s subconscious mind trying to warn her of the affair with her teacher, though this is never discussed as a cause for Susanna’s mental break.

Susanna is back at the Frick, and is again visiting with a man who seems in no way prepared to meet her emotional needs. It seems as if Susanna has made great attempts to divorce herself form her past, to the point of blocking out her prior visit to the museum, but as the visit approaches her memories begin to bleed through.

Susanna remembers having “loved” the painting of the girl and her music teacher, though in reality she had initially fled from it. Just as her memory of the paining has changed, Susanna feels that the painting itself has changed, too—or perhaps it is just Susanna herself who has changed so very much since her last visit.

Susanna sees her own journey—and her own violent interruption—reflected in the painting and the girl’s sad, lonely expression. Both Susanna and the girl have been interrupted at a crucial moment, and both are processing the consequences of that interruption quietly and painfully.

Though Susanna’s careless boyfriend thinks she is overreacting to the painting, he does not know the intense emotional and intellectual realization Susanna is having, and belittles her for exhibiting emotion.

The light that characterizes the Vermeer painting allows certain things to be glimpsed only “imperfectly and seldom,” and in this way mirrors reality. Not everything can be seen or understood at first glance, and indeed, not everything should be. The “fitful, overcast” lighting in the painting mirrors the fitful and overcast “lighting” of Susanna’s adolescence—the simultaneous mania and gloom of McLean, the fits and starts of adulthood, and the changeable, prismatic quality of Susanna’s passage into womanhood.

Susanna earlier wondered what it means to “recover” from something like a “character disorder,” and the book leaves the answer open-ended. The recurring motif of the inserted case files calls into question the veracity of the forms, despite their official nature—yet another facet of the theme of perception versus reality. The documents appear to be the ultimate authority when it comes to Susanna’s health, but Kaysen slyly calls this into question, prompting the reader to wonder whether the professionals treating Susanna could know more about her than she knows about herself. The complicated questions Kaysen has raised throughout her memoir linger in the air, like the filtering, hazy light in the painting from which the book derives its title.