51 pages • 1 hour read
Walter TevisThe Queen's Gambit
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1983A 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 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Beth Harmon’s mother dies in a car crash when Beth is eight, leaving her an orphan. Beth is then sent to Methuen Home in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, where the children are given green pills twice a day. These pills are tranquilizers, and Beth finds that they make it easier for her to sleep by easing her anxiety. At Methuen, Beth makes friends with Jolene, a Black girl of 10. A teacher tasks Beth with clapping the chalk out of erasers in the basement. When she goes down there, she sees the janitor, Mr. Shaibel, playing a game on a board with plastic pieces.
The girls play volleyball in gym class, and Beth struggles to play until Jolene, the best player, instructs Beth on how to better hit the ball. One day, Beth works up the courage to ask Mr. Shaibel what game he is playing when she goes to clean the erasers. He tells her that the game is chess. She watches him sit, thinking over moves. Beth begins hoarding her tranquilizers, experimenting with taking two at night to help her sleep. Finally, during church one day, Beth sneaks down to Mr. Shaibel and asks him to teach her to play chess. When he refuses, saying that girls do not play, Beth picks up a piece and explains how it moves.
Beth continues experimenting with taking more pills each night. Meanwhile, Mr. Shaibel agrees to teach her to play and challenges her to a game. Mr. Shaibel beats Beth in four moves. That night, as she lies in bed, Beth visualizes the chess board and pieces on the ceiling. She angrily plays through her game with Mr. Shaibel, finding a way to block his move, the Scholar’s Mate. At their next game, Mr. Shaibel traps Beth’s queen in 14 moves. When she tries to play on, he stops her, telling Beth that a player always resigns in this situation. She argues with him, and he will not play with her for a week. When they do play again, Beth beats him for the first time. She loves the feeling of victory, watching him resign his king.
Mr. Shaibel begins teaching Beth strategic openings, like the Sicilian Defense and the Queen’s Gambit. They play every Sunday, and Beth begins playing chess on the ceiling every night before falling asleep, taking more pills to do so. One night, Beth wakes to Jolene in her bed. Jolene touches Beth under her pants and takes Beth’s hand to do the same on her. Beth stays limp and follows Jolene’s directions until Beth finally says no, prompting a light to turn on in the hallway, scaring Jolene away. In the days afterward, Jolene bullies Beth.
Mr. Shaibel gifts Beth a copy of Modern Chess Openings for her to study, and she reads it at every opportunity. One day, when Jolene yells at Beth, Beth yells a racial slur back at Jolene. This breaks the tension between them, and they become friends again. The next Sunday, Beth beats Mr. Shaibel five times and realizes that he cannot beat her now. The following Sunday, a friend of Mr. Shaibel’s is there. His name is Mr. Ganz, and he runs the chess club at a local high school. She beats him twice and he gives her a doll as a gift. As Beth leaves, she throws the doll in the trash. The following Sunday, Mr. Ganz returns, and both he and Mr. Shaibel play Beth. She beats them easily, calling out the moves without even looking at the board.
Chapter 2 Summary
On a Saturday afternoon, Beth is called into the office by the superintendent, Mrs. Deardorff. Mr. Ganz is there and offers Beth the opportunity to take a trip to play against his high school club. Beth accepts. A few days before her trip, the orphanage stops giving the children the green pills. Beth struggles to sleep and begins feeling ill in the days to come. When Jolene tells Beth that she knows about the trip, Beth asks Jolene if she has any pills. Jolene tells Beth she does not, but right before Beth leaves, Jolene gives her three pills. As Mr. Ganz drives Beth to the school, Beth begs to stop to use the bathroom, and at a gas station, she swallows the pills.
At the high school, Beth plays the entire chess club at the same time and beats each of them easily. Back at Methuen, the effects of the pills wear off and Beth tries to get more from Jolene. She begs Jolene for more, but Jolene has nothing to offer. Finally, Beth begins planning to steal the remaining pills, left in a large glass jar in the Pharmacy. She realizes that she just needs to pry the screws out of the door to be able to open the window and climb through. That Saturday, during the community movie, she sneaks away and uses a screwdriver to remove the screws.
Beth pulls open the window of the door and climbs through, ripping her dress as she does. Once inside, she takes a handful of pills and swallows them before filling her pockets. She then fills four paper cups to take as well. The door is locked from the inside, however, and Beth realizes she must climb back out through the window. Beth sees that her theft will be apparent in the noticeably emptier glass jar and decides to take the jar with her. As she climbs through the window, the effect of the pills hits her with full force. She is startled to hear someone yell her name and drops the jar, which shatters. The entire orphanage, behind Mrs. Deardorff, watches her faint. Beth goes to the hospital, where they pump her stomach, before returning to Methuen.
As punishment, Beth is forbidden from playing chess with Mr. Shaibel and must now stay in church for the entire sermon on Sundays and write a summary of each for Mrs. Deardorff. Beth struggles with this change in her routine, but she keeps analyzing Modern Chess Openings and playing chess in her head to cope. When the holidays come around, neither she nor Jolene are adopted, but Beth is assigned a better bed in the dormitory.
Chapter 3 Summary
Two months before her 13th birthday, Beth is adopted by Alma Wheatley and her disinterested husband, Allston. As she packs, Beth cannot find Modern Chess Openings and asks Jolene if she knows where it is. Jolene denies knowing its location, and Beth feels sorry for her, unsure if she will ever be adopted. When she drives away with the Wheatleys, Beth turns around and sees Mr. Shaibel. She waves, but he doesn’t wave back.
At the Wheatleys’ house, Mrs. Wheatley tells Beth that Allston is to be away on business in Colorado for a while. Mrs. Wheatley shows Beth to her room—the first real, private bedroom Beth has ever had. As she sits in bed that night, Beth wishes Jolene could be there to see the room. Beth enters seventh grade at the local school. She asks another girl if they have a chess club, but the girl admits she does not know and instead suggests Beth try out for cheerleading. When the orphanage comes to check up on Beth, Mrs. Wheatley cleans the house obsessively and even lies to them about how interested and present Allston is in caring for Beth.
A few days later, Mrs. Wheatley takes Beth shopping for new clothes. As they walk through the department store, Beth sees chess sets and asks Mrs. Wheatley if they can get one. Mrs. Wheatley says they will on the way out, but after picking out cheap clothes, they leave without a set. One morning, during midterm exams, Beth walks to the store before her first exam and asks if the store has Modern Chess Openings. They do not, and they send her to Morris’s bookshop two blocks away. She finds the book there but cannot afford to buy it. Instead, she spends the hour before she needs to leave for school memorizing games.
At Beth’s school, there are many social clubs, including the exclusive Apple Pi Club, in which members wear colorful sweaters to their invite-only meetings. Beth begins comparing herself to these girls, growing insecure over her appearance. The girls do not like Beth either. When Beth speaks up in class, one of the girls from the club, Margaret, calls her, “Brain!” One day, when Mrs. Wheatley sends Beth to the pharmacy for cigarettes, Beth notices a copy of the magazine Chess Review. The owner won’t let her read it without buying it, so when he is not looking, she steals it. She finds an advertisement for the Kentucky State Championship in the magazine, but the $5 entrance fee is too much for her. When Mrs. Wheatley refuses to let her get a job, Beth writes to Mr. Shaibel asking for the money, saying she will send back double if she wins any prizes. He sends $5 back with no note.
One day, Mrs. Wheatley sends Beth to the pharmacy with a prescription from her doctor. The medicine turns out to be the same tranquilizers Beth had at the orphanage. Beth takes half of the bottle for herself. At school, Beth steals $10 from Margaret’s purse while she showers after gym. She enters the tournament and begins using the green pills again, taking the prescription to buy herself refills.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Beth’s talent for chess becomes apparent very quickly while she plays with Mr. Shaibel. When he invites a friend, Mr. Ganz, to see if she can play against his high school chess team, Beth must face The Constraints of Gender Norms for the first time. While Mr. Shaibel treats her with respect, appreciating Beth’s passion for chess and working to foster her knowledge of the game, Mr. Ganz takes a different approach to her. He gifts her a doll—a choice that has more to do with stereotypical expectations of young girls than with any understanding of who Beth is as an individual. Beth’s reaction to this gift demonstrates the attitude with which she will dismiss sexist assumptions throughout her life:
She lifted it out and pulled away the loosely wrapped paper. It was a pink doll in a blue print dress, with blond hair and a puckered-up mouth [...] There was a big oilcan used for trash at the end of the hallway. As she passed it [...] she dropped the doll into it (20).
Beth throws the doll away immediately, not wanting it and seeing no purpose for it in her life. She realizes that Mr. Ganz gives her the doll because he thinks that all girls must love dolls as if it is the standard toy for their gender. Beth cares only for chess and does not want to conform to other’s expectations of her. She throws the doll away with no guilt, feeling no pressure to accept a gift from a stranger who knows nothing about her other than her gender.
At Methuen, Beth becomes addicted to the green tranquilizer pills that the orphanage gives to the children to keep them easy to manage. From the first night, Beth forms a dependence on them, marking the beginning of what will become a central pattern in her life: Addiction as a Response to Anxiety. Traumatized by the recent death of her mother and feeling isolated in the orphanage, Beth deals with constant anxiety, and the pills quiet her anxious thoughts and allow her to sleep. She soon learns to save them up so she can take more than one at a time when her anxiety is worse than usual. When the school stops distributing the pills, Beth breaks into the school’s infirmary to take them. She goes to great and even painful lengths to achieve her goal: “There was a slightly sharp edge along the window sill, and it felt as though it were cutting her. She ignored it and kept on wriggling, doing it methodically, inching forward. She both felt and heard her blouse ripping. She ignored it” (32). Beth’s perseverance here is both a mark of her addiction and a character trait: Once she decides what she wants, she pursues it with absolute determination. This applies to chess as well as to the pills, and indeed chess itself becomes something of an addiction for her. When she wins against Mr. Shaibel, she feels a sense of calm similar to the feeling she gets from the pills. She discovers these two forms of relief at the same time, and she thinks of them as closely related:
Something in her life was solved: she knew about the chess pieces and how they moved and captured, and she knew how to make herself feel good in the stomach and in the tense joints of her arms and legs, with the pills the orphanage gave her (8).
From this formative moment, Beth’s life will revolve around the twin poles of substance misuse and chess, and her substance misuse will both fuel her success in chess and threaten to destroy it.
Beth’s loneliness and anxiety at Metheun stem in part from feelings of self-doubt, and her coming-of-age process is in part a movement From Self-Doubt to Self-Reliance. Both at the orphanage and at her new school after being adopted, these feelings mostly manifest in criticisms of her physical appearance. Beth often analyzes her face, disliking her hair and freckles because they set her apart from others. Beth is particularly sensitive to this around the age of puberty, as she watches other girls older than her, like Jolene, or her age, like the girls at her new school, begin to grow into adulthood: “Beth could see Margaret’s sizeable breasts, like solid cones. Beth’s chest was still like a boy’s and her pubic hair had just started coming in” (58). Beth is conscious of how her body compares to that of Margaret, a popular girl from the Apple Pi Club who largely ignores Beth. At this stage, Beth cannot help but compare herself to others and analyze herself until she finds perceived failings and flaws. This tendency often drives her to pursue vain pathways, looking to wear better clothes and fit in with more popular kids at school. When she wins in chess, she feels a sense of fulfillment in victory, and this feeling helps her to become more confident in herself and her abilities. It is through chess that Beth can eventually stop comparing herself to her peers, instead taking pride in her own unique achievements. As she faces better opponents, however, she begins to compare herself to them, beginning the cycle of self-doubt anew.
