Lewis Carroll (post #3): The Mysterious, Self-Contradictory Inconsistency of Multiple Personality, including Carroll’s Child-Aged Alternate Personalities

One of the hallmarks of multiple personality is that—when a person has it, but you don’t know it—you can’t get a coherent picture of them, because, unknown to you, their various personalities differ from each other in such things as attitudes, values, age, or even gender.

A good biography of such a person is Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (New York, St. Martins Press, 2010). Woolf’s main conclusion is that she likes Carroll—as she has, since, as a child, she read about Alice’s adventures—but that he is a mystery, because he is “self-contradictory.”

One of the perennial controversies about Carroll is the nature of his relationship with the young girls to whom he liked to tell entertaining stories and of whom he liked to take pictures. The issue is traditionally framed as the peculiar, if not perverted, interest of an adult man in little girls.

But if Carroll had multiple personality, the personality who was interested in little girls may not have been either adult or male. Since, needless to say, I have not had the opportunity to interview Carroll when he was in that frame of mind, I can only go by circumstantial evidence. I quote from The Mystery of Lewis Carroll:

“His niece, Irene Dodgson Jacques, looking back to her childhood, remembered [Carroll] sitting beside her on the carpet happily playing with a marvelous bear that opened and closed its mouth as it spoke.”

“[Carroll] in his toy-strewn college rooms was perfectly recognizable as the youth who had loved creating puppet stories for his little brothers and sisters…”

“There have been many condescending remarks made about this characteristic of his, as though a love of childish things somehow prevented him from being a proper adult. Virginia Woolf thought that childhood had lodged within Carroll ‘whole and entire’…”

Not all the young children Carroll played with were girls. For example, there was “Bert Coote, whom he met when Coote was 10. ‘My sister and I were regular young imps,’ Coote recalled later, ‘and nothing delighted us more than to give imitations…but we never gave imitations of Lewis Carroll…he was one of us, and never a grown up pretending to be a child...’”

So, psychologically speaking, the situation may not have been an adult man interested in little girls. And the inconsistency between his adult and child-aged personalities would have made him seem self-contradictory. Other of his inconsistencies included his attitudes toward sex and religion. Sometimes he was the ultimate prude, but other times he wasn’t. Sometimes he was the unquestioning believer, but other times he was wasn’t. Different personalities differed.

Many people have their moral ambivalence or even hypocrisy, but Carroll was known for his unusually marked degree of sincere, but contradictory attitudes. Which is how people come across when they have multiple personality, but when you haven’t knowingly interviewed the various personalities, and you don’t know that this is what is going on.