Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: The Multiple Personality Mostly Missed by Twenty-Five Years of Literary Criticism

The three main characters of Hemingway’s posthumous novel are David and Catherine Bourne, newlyweds, and Marita, whom they meet on their honeymoon, and who makes it a threesome.

David is a struggling, young novelist. Catherine is a beautiful, rich, 21-year-old, whose money lets them live better than David could otherwise. Marita is another beautiful, young heiress.

Both David and Catherine have multiple personality, but whereas his is constructively utilized and camouflaged by his work as a writer, hers is disruptive and makes her appear, at times, crazy. Indeed, hers creates most of the novel’s drama, while his could easily be overlooked, except for the fact that he acknowledges it:

“He had not known just how greatly he had been divided and separated because once he started to work he wrote from an inner core which could not be split nor even marked nor scratched. He knew about this and it was his strength since all the rest of him could be riven” (1, p. 183).

The only time we see his multiplicity become overt is when Catherine urges him to be the female, while she is the male, in some of their sexual relations. The text of these encounters does not make clear whether his switch to a female personality under those circumstances is anything more than erotic role-playing.

However, much later in the novel, David’s quoted thoughts (see above) clarify the nature of the sex-play encounters in retrospect. It had, indeed, been more than role-play. He had, in fact, subjectively experienced a switch to an alternate, female identity. Not to mention that there was a part of him, he-man though he was, that liked getting his hair done in an unmanly style (1, p. 84).

Toward the end of the novel, when David condemns Catherine for her devilish gender games, he says, “It was all crazy anyway. I’m sick of crazy things. You’re not the only one gets broken up” (1, p. 196). It’s hard to interpret the latter so that everyone would agree, but I take David to mean that Catherine is not the only one whose personality gets split. His does, too.

Later on that same page, Catherine says, “I’m everybody,” which could be taken for the raving of a lunatic. But I think Hemingway is expressing the thesis that Catherine’s multiple personality is just making manifest what is going on secretly with many people.

What is manifest in Catherine is made explicit on page 17 (1), when she says, “I’m Peter,” by which she declares that she has switched to a male alternate personality by that name. At first, the reader thinks that she is just role-playing, but she repeats so often, throughout the novel, that she “changes” from one identity to another, that she must be taken seriously as to her actual subjective experience. It is why both she, herself, and David often refer to her as being “crazy.”

I won’t try to specify how many personalities Catherine has. The text suggests at least three: one male, one “good girl,” and one “wild girl.” Is it one of these or some other one who says, “I’m the destructive type. And I’m going to destroy you” (1, p. 5)? I don’t know. All I can say is that Catherine’s attitudes are too diverse to be accounted for by just two personalities.

Before reading the novel, I read twenty-five years worth of literary criticism (2). Since the novel is mostly about what I discuss above (multiple personality), it is astounding to me how little the issue has been discussed: hardly at all. And when it is mentioned, the view taken is that gender-role games or androgyny can cause craziness such as a multiple personality: “Hemingway implies that, far from restoring an archetypal Edenic wholeness, androgyny carries with it the danger of a split personality” (2, p. 181).

However, multiple personality starts in childhood. Neither David nor Catherine got it from playing gender role games on their honeymoon. David says (see quote above) that he gets readily split, but that his work as a novelist holds him together. Catherine has no such thing to hold her together, but I am not as convinced as David and Marita that Catherine is that disturbed. She is young and has just learned the unfortunate, but practical lesson that most people with multiple personality learn: Keep it secret. Keep it to yourself. Things get complicated when you don’t.

1. Hemingway, Ernest. The Garden of Eden. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986.

2. Suzanne del Gizzo, Frederic J. Svoboda (Eds.). Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Twenty-five Years of Criticism. Kent Ohio, The Kent State University Press, 2012.