Dictionaries of Literary Terms (“the Double”; “Ghost Story”) show Blind Spot for Multiple Personality in Literary Theory

I tried to look up “the Double” in three dictionaries of literary terms, two from England (1,2) and one from the USA (3). The two dictionaries from England had no entry at all for the Double.

The American dictionary defines “Double, the” as “a device whereby a character is self-duplicated (the Doppelganger, ‘mirror image,’ or ‘alter ego’), as in the case of…Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, or divided into two distinct, usually antithetical, personalities, as in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde…” Other works cited include Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dostoevsky’s The Double, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It says that this literary device represents an interest in the “divided self.” But it makes no mention of, or reference to, multiple personality, per se; none whatsoever.

The two UK dictionaries don’t have an entry for the Double, but they do have for “ghost story” (the American dictionary doesn’t). Indeed, the Penguin entry is encyclopedic: eight pages. It defines a ghost story as “a fictional narrative…in which the spirit of a person…, no longer bound by natural laws…‘haunts’…as a kind of ‘presence’.” Two stories by Robert Louis Stevenson are cited, but not the one about Jekyll and Hyde.

Now, having a “divided self” or experiencing a “presence,” does, at the very least, suggest the possibility, and raise the issue, of multiple personality. But professors of literature, as reflected in dictionaries of literary terms, don’t think of this, because it is not encompassed by any of the literary theories with which they are familiar.

1. Baldick, Chris: The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

2. Cuddon JA (revised by Preston CE): The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London, Penguin Books, 1999.

3. Beckson K, Ganz A: Literary Terms: A Dictionary. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.