Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary

Part two of the novel is narrated by Maud, in her voice, and from her point of view. Chapter 7 opens with Maud's mental image of her birth and her mother's death due to hemorrhage in childbirth. She relates that she spent the first ten years of her life in a madhouse, raised by the nurses who, she believes, loved her. It is here that she says she learned discipline and order, as well as the attitude and actions of insanity. Her expectation, at this young age, is that she will become a nurse when she is grown, and that she will spend her life tending to lunatics.

At the age of eleven, Maud is called to meet a gentleman. She indicates that the gentleman is dressed in black, including black silk gloves; the tip of his tongue, she notes, is black...