47 pages • 1 hour read
Robert BlochPsycho
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1959A 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 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This guide describes and analyzes the source text’s treatment of trauma, abuse, and mental health. The novel contains stigmatizing depictions of cross-dressing and an individual with a mental health condition, which relies on outdated and offensive tropes that connect mental health conditions with violence.
Norman Bates sits in the office of the Bates Motel, reading The Realm of the Incas as it begins to rain. Engrossed by the book’s description of a grotesque ritual, he hears his mother, Norma, enter the room. Norma asks why he has not opened the motel for guests. Norman bitterly reminds her that it is her fault they did not sell the property when they first heard the main highway would be moved. Now, they hardly have any customers. He works himself into a tirade, until his mother cuts him off, accusing him of having no gumption. Norman knows she is right. He could have taken control of his life, but he never did. Norma shames her son for his pathetic life and the books he reads about topics like psychology and the occult. She knows Norman wants to kill her but does not have the gumption. Norman tries to calm down, reminding himself that his mother is just an old lady. A guest arrives before he can lash out again.
Chapter 2 Summary
After driving for 18 hours, Mary Crane turns off the road near Fairvale in the pouring rain, after stealing $40,000 from her boss, Mr. Lowry, who had entrusted her with the money to deposit at the bank. At age 27, Mary feels she has wasted her life. Her father died 10 years ago, and Mary took care of her ailing mother for three years, insisting that her younger sister, Lila, go to college though Mary could not. After their mother’s death and the sale of her estate, Mary and Lila became roommates. Lila encouraged Mary to take a long vacation cruise, where Mary met Sam Loomis. The two quickly fell in love and wanted to get married, but Sam had inherited $20,000 in debt from his father. Sam won the cruise in a contest and lives in the back of his hardware store as he pays down his father’s debts to maintain his standing in Fairvale. He refuses to marry until he pays off the debt, which will take a few years.
Over a year later, Mary’s impatience pushes her to steal Mr. Lowry’s money to pay off the rest of Sam’s debt. She justifies the theft with her distaste of Mr. Lowry and the real estate investors he does business with. After stealing the money, she sells her car in Dallas to cover her tracks and buys a used one, which she also exchanges closer to Fairvale. During the long drive, her confidence diminishes, and she decides to turn off the highway to find a motel. She sees the Bates Motel sign and decides to inquire about a room. She feels horribly alone.
Chapter 3 Summary
Mary makes up her mind to take a room when she sees Norman Bates’s nonthreatening appearance. She signs the guest list as Jane Wilson from San Antonio, Texas. Norman shows her to her room and offers her some dinner; the closest restaurants are 17 miles away in Fairvale. Norman’s obvious embarrassment at talking to a woman puts Mary at ease. Norman leaves so Mary can change clothes.
Mary knocks on the front door of the old house behind the Bates Motel, but there is no answer. Looking inside, she sees a parlor that looks like it belongs in the 1890s. She hears low voices coming from a lighted room upstairs and knocks again. Norman comes downstairs to let her in, apologizing and explaining that he was putting his mother, who can be difficult sometimes, to bed. They eat in the antiquated kitchen. Norman reveals that he has never been married and does not smoke or drink because of his mother’s disapproval. His biggest hobbies are reading and taxidermy.
Mary asks how long Norman plans to go on acting like a little boy, letting his mother dictate his life. When she suggests that Norman take his mother to a psychiatric hospital, Norman flies into a rage. He maintains that his mother is sane and blames himself for her condition. She worked hard for him his whole life, but he stopped her from remarrying. He got over it, but Norma never did. Mary, stunned by his outburst, apologizes. Norman apologizes too, but Mary excuses herself. Norman walks her to her room, intending to close the motel’s office for the night.
In her room, determines to head back in the morning and deposit the money in the bank to relieve her conscience. More at ease than she has felt since taking the money, Mary takes a shower. Someone enters the bathroom, but she can’t hear them over the shower. A figure with a knife opens the shower curtains, revealing a frightening old woman. The intruder kills Mary, then slices her head off.
Chapter 4 Summary
In the office, Norman starts drinking to cope with the events of the evening. When he invited Mary to the house, he told his mother to spite her for belittling him. Norma flew into a rage, exclaiming, “If you bring her here, I’ll kill her! I’ll kill the b*tch!” (44), and Norman locked her in her room. Norman drinks his third whiskey, thinking about his conversation with Mary. He wishes he had dared to ask her to drink with him, but quickly banishes the thought, feeling impotent. He hears her in her room, adjacent to the office. He takes a frame from the wall and watches her through a peephole he drilled there. Mary undresses, but the bathroom is foggy and the bathroom mirror appears wavy. Norman blacks out. When he comes to, Norman has a sinking feeling, remembering that his mother has a key to the motel. Norman goes to Mary’s room, where he finds her body.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
On the surface, Norman Bates is an ordinary man. The quiet 40-year-old fills his days reading; the motel he runs with his mother has little business since the state constructed a new highway. Bloch’s setting is innocuous, a motel like many others just off the highway in the rural United States. However, Norman’s interaction with his mother, Norma, in Chapter 1 shows that something is not right under the surface, introducing The Duality of Human Nature theme early on and suggesting that darkness can lurk in the most innocent of settings.
The novel’s characters reinforce this theme. While Norman Bates is the most obvious example, Mary Crane also demonstrates this theme. Nurturing and self-sacrificing, Mary exemplifies many of the era’s feminine stereotypes, demonstrated by her commitment to caring for her mother and sacrificing her education so Lila could attend. By the time her mother dies, Mary does not even recognize herself; in the rear-view mirror of her car, she sees “The dark hair and regular features were still familiar, but the smile had gone and her full lips were compressed to a taut line” (27). Mary has little sense of this identity; she is a stranger to herself. The money Mary steals is a famous example of a MacGuffin, an object or event that sets the plot in motion but does not add much to the narrative after it serves its purpose. When Norman kills Mary, he has no idea of the wealth hidden in her luggage. The money represents an opportunity to start her life, but the theft sets her on a collision course with Norman Bates, who disposes of it along with her body and the rest of her things.
Norman does not have a healthy relationship with his mother, who infantilizes him: “Forty years old, and she called him ‘boy’: that’s how she treated him, too, which made it worse” (12). Norman’s only refuges from his mother are books and alcohol, though she approves of neither. His hiding and apologizing for these habits to placate her speak to the theme of Shame and Repression, which develops further in later chapters. Much of Psycho’s narrative explores Norman’s psychology, setting up potential explanations for his behavior even before revealing much of it. Thus, Psychoanalyzing Norman Bates is a major theme of the novel. For example, in these early chapters, Bloch suggests that Norman’s interests in psychoanalysis, metaphysics, the occult, and taxidermy are a reaction to Norma’s puritanical worldview and controlling nature, an attempt to claim some agency. Norman himself mentions psychoanalysis in the very first chapter. He defends his interest in psychology, saying, “I was only trying to explain something. It’s what they call the Oedipus situation, and I thought if both of us could just look at the problem reasonably and try to understand it, maybe things would change for the better” (15). Whether this indicates that Norman has a physical relationship with his mother is ambiguous, but this passage suggests that Norman is aware of his abnormal relationship with Norma and studies psychology to better understand it. It is important to note, however, that much of the psychoanalysis depicted in Psycho is long-outdated, along with many of the assumptions about people with mental health conditions.
The setting also reflects the suffocating relationship between mother and son. The Bates’s house symbolizes Norman’s relationship with and guilt regarding his mother, as the novel later reveals that Norman murdered her. To deal with this trauma, Norman preserves his mother’s home, keeping it in the same condition as when she was alive. The house is also a form of refuge from the outside world, which Norma taught Norman to hate and fear: “Here everything was orderly and ordained; It was only there, outside, that the changes took place. And most of those changes held a potential threat” (9).
