58 pages • 1 hour read
Ruth WareThe Woman in Cabin 10
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
Nilsson returns to Lo's room at 8am. She is asleep, and wakes with a start at the sound of him knocking on the door. She has a raging headache and feels nauseous–she wonders why she asked for such an early wake-up call. As she stands to let Nilsson in, memories of the night before rush back to her. The boat catches a wave and rolls, and she throws up last night's dinner as Nilsson opens the door against the chain to speak with her.
After a shower, Lo follows Nilsson to the lower decks, where the service staff live, to meet any staff members who might match her description of the woman in Cabin 10. Lo's headache and nausea are hard to manage, and she is more overwhelmed as they descend into the claustrophobic, fluorescent-lit lower decks. She meets a number of women in the mess hall, and then is introduced to the female cooking staff. When Lo enters the kitchen, the head chef extends his hand out to shake with latex gloves on, and Lo flashes back to the burglar who invaded her apartment. Lo manages to recover herself and meet the rest of the staff, ending with Ulla, a beautiful, tall, brown-haired front cabin attendant who shared coffee with her and Nilsson in the ship's dining room. As she drinks coffee with Nilsson and Ulla, Lo fears that Nilsson is right about her paranoia. Lo wonders if she has gone insane.
Chapter 13 Summary
Nilsson and Ulla leave Lo to eat her breakfast alone in the dining room. Lo begins to feel better after a meal of pancakes and coffee, and spends her time gazing out at the ocean. She is startled by the dining room attendant, who stands behind her as she rises to leave–she wonders if he was watching her through a spy hole in a hidden door that is barely visible at the end of the room. She leaves quickly, running into Ben Howard on her way out. Howard asks how she's feeling and tries to apologize again for the night before, but Lo quiets him. She thinks about talking to him about the woman in Cabin 10, but decides against it, cautious about trusting both him and the dining room attendant.
Lo takes a wrong turn out of the dining room. She intended to go back to her cabin but ends up in a small, provincial-looking library decorated in cozy green. Not wanting to retrace her steps and run into Ben again, Lo goes out a door that leads onto the deck. There she sees Tina, who calls her over to chat. She wonders about Tina's reputation–Lo's boss, Rowan, has made claims that Tina has stepped on the backs of young women to get a leg up in the business, and that she is too nervous about her position as a powerful female editor to allow other women in the board room, as they might challenge her authority. But Lo realizes she hasn't gotten that impression from Tina thus far on the trip. Tina offers Lo a freelance contract, which Lo declines because she has a no-compete clause in her present contract. After chatting with Tina, Lo returns to her room to discover what she had already suspected–the mascara that the woman in Cabin 10 had given her the night before is gone.
Chapter 14 Summary
Lo struggles to stay calm at the thought that someone has stolen the mascara to remove the only bit of evidence she had that the woman next door existed. Hearing vacuums in the hallway, Lo leaves her cabin and catches Iwona, the polish maid, cleaning Ben's room with the door open. She interrupts Iwona, and asks if she had seen the mascara when she was cleaning. It takes a few moments for Iwona to understand, but ultimately, she reveals that the mascara was there when she cleaned last night, but was gone this morning. In a fit, and realizing she finally has proof that someone is hiding something, Lo calls Nilsson. He comes to her cabin, where he sits down awkwardly and rubs the bridge of his nose, as if exasperated and tired. He and Lo then have a difficult conversation, in which Nilsson admits that he interviewed Ben about any sounds he may have heard that night. Ben revealed that Lo had recently experienced a burglary and had been struggling to sleep. He also told Nilsson that she had been drinking heavily, and took antidepressants. Lo becomes enraged and screams at Nilsson to leave, shaking with fury at the thought that she’s being written off as hysterical. Finally, Nilsson departs, and Lo falls onto her bed sobbing.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
In these chapters, Ware goes deeper into a theme that has been present for much of the novel–mental illness. In this section, Ware is particularly interested in the intersections of mental health and feminism. Lo specifically uses the word “hysterical,” a loaded word in the history of medicine, which calls back to the standard practice of misdiagnosing women experiencing trauma, or who were defiant, based on the idea that they were ill because of their hormones or their sexual organs. Later, Lo makes it clear that hundreds of thousands of people take the same antidepressants she does–she is not unique in her chemical imbalance, and it does not indicate that she is unreliable or delusional by any stretch. Lo is clearly being written off by the male guests and staff, and her mental health and gender are being used as the scapegoats by which her testimony is discredited.
Other themes are also present in this section–Lo becomes more disturbed by the clearly defined lower and upper decks, which represent the wealth gap between guests and service staff. As someone who otherwise would be unable to afford such a luxurious vacation, Lo aligns herself more closely with the service staff, whose quarters make her feel queasy and claustrophobic. The idea of this wealth discrepancy has come up in prior sections, and particularly in Chapter 9, when Lord Bullmer winks at Lo in a way that indicates that she should feel comfortable speaking with him despite his near-infinite wealth and power. In Chapter 13, Lo unpacks this as she thinks about Tina and her rise to editorial prominence, wondering if she might have been judged too harshly by other women for rising to power and not “taking every other woman in the office with her” (128).
Finally, the idea of powerlessness and privacy, particularly in one's own home or bedroom, is relevant here, as in many previous sections. Lo is particularly disturbed by the fact that it wasn't only the maid, Iwona, who had entered her room–someone else had come in and stolen the mascara. This invasion of privacy, which essentially delegitimizes any claim Lo had about the woman in Cabin 10, reduces Lo's power and credibility aboard the Aurora.
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By Ruth Ware
