Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: The Female Narrator, Rebecca, and a Male Self are One Person with Three Personalities

The main characters in the novel are Maxim de Winter and his first wife, the deceased Rebecca, and his second wife, the nameless narrator.

Consistent with the previously discussed biographical information about Daphne du Maurier—her having a male alternate personality—both wives in this novel are described as having a male side to their character.

At the end of the novel, the two women are revealed to be the same person when the second wife sees the first wife in the mirror.

As previously discussed in this blog, it is a classic phenomenon of multiple personality for one personality to see an alternate personality in the mirror. (For example, see posts on mirrors and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

Female Narrator’s Male Side

“I was like a little scrubby school-boy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible. ‘There’s a cold wind this morning, and you had better put on my coat,’ [said Maxim]. I remember that, for I was young enough to win happiness in the wearing of his clothes, playing the school-boy again who carries his hero’s sweater…” (1, pp. 216-217).

“Maxim,” I said, “can’t we start all over again?…I’ll be your friend and your companion, a sort of boy” (1, p. 381).

Rebecca’s Male Side

“She had all the courage and the spirit of a boy had my Mrs. de Winter,” [says Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca]. “She ought to have been a boy, I often told her that” (1, p. 365).

“[Rebecca] looked like a boy in her sailing kit, a boy with a face like a Botticelli angel” (1, p. 391).

Female Narrator and Rebecca are One

“It was not I that answered, I was not there at all. I was following a phantom in my mind, whose shadowy form had taken shape at last. Her features were blurred, her coloring indistinct, the setting of her eyes and the texture of her hair still uncertain, still to be revealed” (1, p. 222).

“…in that brief moment, sixty seconds in time perhaps, I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist, had never come to Manderley” (1, p. 334).

[Dreaming,] “I was writing letters in the morning-room…But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square hand-writing at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes…I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own…The face in the glass stared back at me…Rebecca” (1, p. 464).

1. Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca [1938], pp. 193-465, In Four Great Cornish Novels: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, My Cousin Rachel. BCA, 1992.

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: The Nameless Main Character, an Unreliable Narrator, is Rebecca’s Alternate Personality

Why does Rebecca get its title from the name of Maxim de Winter’s allegedly deceased first wife, and not from the main character, who is the narrator? And, in particular, why is the main character, the narrator, nameless? Daphne du Maurier was often asked, but she never gave a plausible answer.

The narrator gives the reader two facts about her undisclosed name: that most people find it difficult to spell, and that when she first meets Maxim, he has no difficulty spelling it. Why does he have no difficulty? Is he a linguist? Or is it, I speculate, because he had found writings, signed with that name, hidden in his wife, Rebecca’s, room?

I am not the first one to think that the narrator and Rebecca are two halves of a split personality:

“[The second] Mrs de Winter [the narrator] dreams vividly twice in the novel, once at the beginning and once at the end: each time, the dream conveys a truth to her that her conscious mind cannot, or will not, accept…The vision she has just had, of Rebecca and herself united, of first and second wives merged…she rejects…”

“This woman, not surprisingly, views Rebecca as a rival; what she refuses to perceive is that Rebecca is also her twin, and ultimately, her alter ego…”

“The themes of Rebecca — identity, doubling, the intimate linkage between love and murder — recur again and again in du Maurier’s work…there had always been duality in her life…”

Sally Beauman. “Rebecca,” pp. 47-60, in Helen Taylor (ed), The Daphne du Maurier Companion. Virago Press, 2007.

In Literary Novels, An Unreliable Narrator Usually Indicates the Character’s and/or the Writer’s Multiple Personality

Lying is a cheap trick. Readers don’t like it. And I don’t believe that most unreliable narration is based on the writer’s wish to be unreliable.

In everyday life, most lies have an obvious motivation, and most liars, if confronted with their lies, are embarrassed. This does not make great literature.

If a liar is not embarrassed, and lies even when it is not necessary, you may have the basis for a literary story. But most people who lie like that have multiple personality, and they are not, in the usual sense, lying, because what is happening is that alternate personalities are each giving their version of the truth as they see it.

The reason for this post is that I read a review of a novel with an unreliable narrator, and then looked up unreliable narrators, but multiple personality was hardly mentioned.

I will come back to this issue in the future when discussing a novel with an unreliable narrator.

How Four Novelists Write: The Relationship of Dissociation, Self-Hypnosis, and Multiple Personality

Dissociation

The histories of multiple personality and hypnosis are intertwined. One of the oldest theories of multiple personality is that it is produced by self-hypnosis. One of the oldest theories of hypnosis is that it works by producing two independent, autonomous, consciousnesses; i.e., double consciousness, the regular consciousness and the hypnotic consciousness. 

An umbrella concept for both multiple personality and hypnosis is dissociation. It is a broad concept which can include everything from an altered state of consciousness (in which you don’t feel like your regular self) to distinctly divided or double consciousness. That is why the official psychiatric term for multiple personality disorder is “dissociative identity disorder,” which is classified as a “dissociative disorder.” Of course, in regard to novelists, I’m talking in this blog about the normal version of this, what I call “normal multiple personality.”

Four Novelists

John Barth: “So much of what we do in those hours when we’re actually making sentences, inventing characters and feeling our way through the threads of a plot, is hunch and feel—half unconscious and somewhat autohypnotic. Those rituals of getting ready to write seem to conduce a kind of trance state” (1, p. 44).

Sue Grafton: “All the humor in my books comes from Kinsey [her main character]. Some of the books get very funny because she’s very impish. In the process of writing I swear she’s standing looking over my shoulder going, Do this, do this, nudge nudge wink wink…She takes over and does something waggishly funny. It’s a fun process because she’s so helpful to me, whoever she is. Mostly it is a question of connecting with her inside of me instead of imagining her as a separate creature…In order to get in touch I have to block out ego…Sometimes I do this through meditation. Something as simple as self-hypnosis…” (1, pp. 69-70).

Stephen King: “Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I’m aware that I’m writing. I’m aware of my surroundings…But in the middle, the world is gone and I’m able to see better…I can remember finding that state for the first time and being delighted. It’s a little bit like finding a secret door in a room but not knowing exactly how you got in…And after doing that for a while it was a little bit like having a posthypnotic suggestion” (1, pp. 141-142).

Anne Rice: "Writers vary so much. You have people who probably are intensely conscious of everything they’re writing and you have people like me who are definitely surrendering to a trancelike state in which things make sense without analysis…I don’t sit there conscious of striking keys and making words. I’m just seeing the action” (1, p. 212).

1. Naomi Epel. Writers Dreaming. New York, Carol Southern Books, 1993.

Daphne du Maurier’s Multiple Personality: Using the Pronoun “We” and Switching into Being Her Characters

The Multiple Personality “We”

If a person who is not using the royal or editorial “we” refers to herself as “we,” consider it a clue that she might have multiple personality. Daphne du Maurier’s editor (1943-1981) may or may not have thought of it in terms of multiple personality, per se, but she did realize that it had autobiographical significance.

“The most revealing passage in The Parasites  [1949] comes with the admission of the oldest of the three [siblings]…that she is always ‘being someone else’…This was true of Daphne herself…When she wrote severally about the three siblings, she referred to them in the third person, but when she wrote of them collectively, she used the pronoun ‘we’…It seemed to me so ingenious, as emphasising the autobiographical nature of the story, that I felt it would be a pity to suggest any change. Nor do I know whether the critics noticed it — so far as I am aware, not a single reviewer took up the point” (1, pp. 25-26).

Switching to an Alternate Personality

When children talk with their imaginary companions and novelists talk with their characters, one reason these things may not be recognized as multiple personality is that there is no switching from one personality to another. What people forget is that some children do switch—they become the super hero, princess, or whatever, for a period of time. And, likewise, some novelists become their characters temporarily; for example, see past posts about Charles Dickens, Philip Roth, and Georges Simenon.

Daphne du Maurier’s editor describes this as happening during research for The House on the Strand (1969). “This book has for me a very special insight into the way in which Daphne lived in and through her characters.” Daphne was going to visit the actual terrain where the action of the novel took place in order to get the geography right. And she invited the editor to accompany her on the hike. “It was a fascinating and revelatory experience, and one I shall never forget. Daphne became Dick [the character]; I ceased to exist for her” (1, p. 40).

1. Sheila Hodges. “Editing Daphne du Maurier,” pp. 25-43, in Helen Taylor (ed), The Daphne du Maurier Companion, Virago Press, 2007.

Henry James’s The Ambassadors (3rd Post): The Plural Title Refers to the Main Character’s Multiple Personality

Mr. Strether is the novel’s only major character. The story is told from his point of view, and he is on every page. All other characters appear from rarely to occasionally.

Many readers may think that the title is plural because a few minor characters make a very brief appearance in Paris (where Strether’s American employer’s prodigal son is living), but their appearance is too brief and minor for them to be [referred to by] the title’s “ambassadors.”

The novel’s central conflict arises out of the fact that when Strether gets to Paris, he does not act like the man his employer thought she had sent. At first, he tells her son what he is supposed to in order to get him to return to America. But then Strether changes sides and tells the son to be loyal to the woman who has kept him in Paris. His employer thinks that Strether is a traitor and has changed—from Jekyll to Hyde (my analogy)—and it is Strether’s two personalities who are the ambassadors, plural.

As I noted in a previous post, James flags the issue of multiple personality when he says in the novel’s second paragraph that Strether has “double consciousness” (a synonym for multiple personality).

Multiple personality is again flagged just three pages before the end of the novel when Strether is saying his final farewell to Miss Gostrey, who has been his occasional confidante. She hopes that he will stay on in Europe with her. But he explains why he cannot. Strether recalls how they had first met, and:

“…the curiosity felt by both of them as to where he would ‘come out’…He was out, in truth, as far as it was possible to be, and must now rather bethink himself of getting in again. He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. They came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side” (1, p. 467).

Let me emphasize that there was absolutely no literary necessity for James to raise the issue of “double consciousness” (multiple personality). Strether was 55-years-old, and James could more easily have attributed his character’s behavior to a mid-life crisis.

Thus, The Ambassadors is one more novel with what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” The only reason multiple personality is in this novel is that it was, evidently, a personal issue for the author.

1. Henry James. The Ambassadors [1903]. Penguin Books, 2008.

Henry James’s The Ambassadors: The Author’s Multiple Personality is Manifest in Multiple Narrators

My post earlier today focussed on the novel’s second paragraph, but I’m only a psychiatrist. A real literary critic would focus on the first, as did Ian Watt in “The First Paragraph of the The Ambassadors: An Explication” (1960) (1, pp. 442-455).

“…The ‘multidimensional’ quality of the narrative, with its continual implication of the community of three minds—Strether’s [protagonist], James’s, and the reader’s—…[is] established tacitly in every detail of diction and structure, and it remains pervasive. One reason for the special demand James’s fictional prose makes on our attention is surely that there are always at least three levels of development—all of them subjective: the characters’ awareness of events; the narrator’s seeing of them; and our own trailing perception of the relation between the two” (1, pp. 444-445).

“…the abstractness and indirection of James’s style are essentially the result of this characteristic multiplicity of his vision. There is, for example, the story reported by Edith Wharton that after his first stroke James told Lady Prothero that in the very act of falling…he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.’ James, apparently, could not but see even his own most fateful personal experience, except as evoked by some other observer’s voice…” (1. p. 447).

“Obviously James’s multiple awareness can go too far; and in the later novels it often poses the special problem that we do not quite know whether the awareness implied in a given passage is the narrator’s or that of his character” (1, p. p.448).

The above analysis reminds me of my post on James’s The Turn of the Screw, whose “ambiguity” I said was really the contradictory opinions of James’s multiple narrators.

1. Henry James. The Ambassadors. A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition. Edited by S. P. Rosenbaum. New York, WW Norton & Company, 1994.

Henry James’s The Ambassadors: The Main Character’s Double Consciousness Implies the Author’s Multiple Personality

The following statement is made on the second page of the novel, in the introduction of the main character:

“…his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.”

Strether’s errand was to act as “ambassador” from a wealthy American woman to her prodigal son in Paris, to get the son to return home.

Most readers of the novel will be unfamiliar with the term “double consciousness” (see my last post on the synonyms of “multiple personality”), and will mistakenly think that the character is being described as simply indecisive and ambivalent. But James highlights the fact that he is saying something extraordinary about the character when he emphasizes “the oddity of a double consciousness” and that it must be “confessed.”

Self-Contradiction, Not Ambivalence

James explains what he means by “double consciousness” when he says, “There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.” That is, the character was self-contradictory, not just ambivalent. Let me illustrate the difference between self-contradiction and ambivalence.

Suppose you offer ice cream to Person A on two occasions. On one occasion he accepts it gladly, explaining, “I love ice cream.” But on another occasion, he declines it, explaining, “I do love ice cream, but today I can’t afford the calories.” Person A is ambivalent about ice cream, since he loves it, but doesn’t want to get fat.

In contrast, you offer ice cream to Person B on two occasions. On one occasion he accepts it gladly, explaining, “I love ice cream.” But on another occasion, he declines it, explaining, “I hate ice cream and always have.” Person B has been self-contradictory. He evidently has one consciousness (personality) who loves ice cream and another one who hates it.

Gratuitous Multiple Personality

Thus, Henry James, when he says that Strether has double consciousness, is implying that the character has multiple personality. But what, then, should the reader think if multiple personality, per se, never becomes an issue in the novel? In fact, it never does become an issue in The Ambassadors. So when James raises the issue of multiple personality by describing his main character as having double consciousness, it is an example of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.”

As I have said in previous posts, gratuitous multiple personality in a novel suggests that multiple personality was a personal issue of the author. When “it had better be confessed” that someone has multiple personality, it was James’s confession about himself.

Henry James. The Ambassadors [1903]. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Adrian Poole. Penguin Books, 2008.

Synonyms of Multiple Personality: Dissociative Identity, Split Personality, Multiple Identity, Dual or Double Personality, Dual or Double Consciousness

Multiple personality means that a person has more than one autonomous (a mind of its own), person-like (with a sense of its own personal identity) consciousness (it is aware of what is going on). The simplest case would be two personalities, each with its own consciousness and memory bank.

Each personality or identity is often referred to as an “alternate personality”—“alter,” for short—because only one of them is usually “out” at a time. The one who is out has the most control over current behavior. But one or more other alters are probably conscious and monitoring things from behind the scenes. So “alternate personality” is partially misleading: The identities may alternate in controlling behavior, but they may be simultaneous in their consciousness.

The only one of the above synonyms that might confuse the contemporary reader is “double consciousness,” because its most common current usage is for the African-American experience, as originally coined by W. E. B. du Bois. For the history of this term, see Dickson D. Bruce Jr’s “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness”: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/souls/brucepg.html

Charles Dickens used the concept of double consciousness to refer to multiple personality in Chapter 3 of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, when he described Miss Twinkleton as having “two states of consciousness which never clash…”

NOTE: The terms schizoid, schizophrenia, and bipolar have nothing to do with multiple personality.

The Imaginary Companion, Playmate, Alter Ego: Multiple Personality is Common and Normal

Most psychiatrists are not interested in imaginary companions, because imaginary companions are normal.

Why are they considered normal?

Because they commonly occur in children who are not mentally ill; that is, in children who do not have a mental condition causing them distress or dysfunction, and who are no more likely than children who do not have imaginary companions to become mentally ill.

Imaginary companions are not, in any fundamental way, different from multiple personality. They are essentially the same.

Two superficial differences between imaginary companions and multiple personality are amnesia and switching. In multiple personality, one personality may have amnesia, a memory gap, for the time that another personality is out. Also, in multiple personality, the person switches from one personality to another.

In regard to the latter, switching happens in children, too; for example, when they become a super hero or a princess for extended periods of time. In this case, it might be more descriptive to call it an alter ego rather than a companion.

As to amnesia, we know that many older children and adults forget (have amnesia for the fact) that they used to have imaginary companions, and we know that they had them only by asking their parents. Whether there are memory gaps during the time that the child has the imaginary companions, I’m not sure children have been carefully asked.

In any case, it is possible that memory gaps only represent a conflict between personalities, and that it is only the degree of such conflicts that distinguishes normal multiple personality from multiple personality disorder. So my guess is that amnesia is present when a child has imaginary companions (normal multiple personality), but that it is more subtle than in multiple personality disorder.

The myth that multiple personality is rare or weird is based on a lack of appreciation for the fact that it is common and normal in childhood. Psychiatrists tend to ignore imaginary companions, because imaginary companions are normal. Psychologists who are experts regarding imaginary companions may be less knowledgeable about multiple personality, and so hesitate to make the connection. And parents just want to be reassured that imaginary companions are nothing to worry about.

I recommend Marjorie Taylor’s Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999). It’s an eye-opening discussion of what’s normal.

Daphne du Maurier: The National Book Award Winner’s Male and Female Alternate Personalities

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), Lady Browning, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was a novelist, wife, and mother. Her novel, Rebecca, won the National Book Award for 1938. Alfred Hitchcock’s first American movie, “Rebecca,” based on the book, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. Indeed, a number of her stories and novels were made into movies. In short, she was a very successful, well-functioning person.

At the same time, beginning in childhood, she had at least two personalities, one male and one female. She referred to the male personality by different names at different times in her life: “alter ego Eric Avon,” “boy-in-the-box,” narrator, or “personality No. 2.”

“There were no psychological depths to Eric Avon. He just shone at everything…There was a cricket match, and prize-giving, with Eric Avon receiving four prizes, but for what subjects my diary does not state…But it was a sad moment for the captain of cricket. I realized that Eric must now be nearly eighteen, and that this would be his final day at school…I often wonder how he got on at Cambridge, and what became of him. How did he fare in later life?…Yet why did I pick on Eric Avon as an alter ego and not an imaginary Peggy Avon…?…Whatever the reason, he remained in my unconscious, to emerge in later years—though in quite a different guise—as the narrator of the five novels I was to write, at long intervals, in the first person singular, masculine gender, I’ll Never Be Young Again, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, The Flight of the Falcon, The House on the Strand. None of these characters resembled the popular schoolboy hero, Eric Avon; instead, their personalities can be said to be undeveloped, inadequate, sharing a characteristic that had never been Eric’s, who had dominated…For each of my five narrators depended, for reassurance, on a male friend older than himself…The female narrators—and these have been three in number—depended upon no one but themselves…The only timid one of the trio was the nameless heroine in Rebecca, and she found strength of purpose when she discovered that her husband Maxim truly loved her, and had never cared for this first wife Rebecca” (1, pp. 55-58).

“Her alter ego, ‘Eric Avon’, in whom she believed implicitly, went to Rugby and was bold and fearless and did all the things she would have done if she had been a boy…It was all rather charming and nobody was disturbed, nobody realized quite how much Daphne genuinely hated being a girl. What her family also did not realize, and this was much more serious, was that Daphne actually convinced herself she was a boy” (2, p. 14).

“The boy could sometimes be shut up in the box inside her, it seemed, without causing any strain” (2, p. 39).

“What puzzled [Clara, Daphne’s friend] were the two sides to [Daphne]: on the one hand the genuine love, after all, of the simple life, but on the other the contradiction, to Clara, of a rucksack full of ‘cosmetics, vanishing creams…lotions…and also scents’. Daphne’s clothes fascinated her too: ‘a white jockey cap, socks, mountaineer’s boots with yellow laces, linen blouse and a zip linen skirt on top of white cotton shorts, then in villages she zipped it back up—‘she was feminine…[then] on the yonder side up rolled the skirt and she strode forward like a boy’” (2, pp. 263-264).

“[Daphne] wrote…she had always been able to feel within herself two quite separate personalities—‘When I get madly boyish No. 2 is in charge, and then, after a bit, the situation is reversed.’ The point was that…one had to make friends with No. 2 and say ‘now don’t get carried away…No. 2 can come to the surface and be helpful’. She explained that when she was writing she felt all No. 2—‘he certainly has a lot to do with my writing’—but when she was not, No. 2 caused trouble…But sometimes her No.2 came into its own and she felt ‘a power thing’…Daphne was trying hard to explain the tremendous contradictions she knew existed in her own personality…the problem of aligning her No. 1 and No. 2 as something to do with her writing self being different from her real-life self…’The people I write about in books are more real to me than the people I meet’…in order to function at all she had to suppress her No. 2” (2, pp. 276-279).

“She could tolerate only a few months without writing before being plagued by her discontented No. 2 which had no other outlet” (2, p. 287).

1. Daphne du Maurier. Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer. Garden City NY, Doubleday & Company, 1977.

2. Margaret Forster. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York, Doubleday, 1993.

Suppose 90% of Novelists and 30% of The Public do, in fact, have Multiple Personality: Who cares? And so what?

Remember, we are talking about normal multiple personality, as opposed to multiple personality disorder. Normal multiple personality is normal not because everyone has it—most people, 70%, don’t—but because, by definition, it does not cause the person distress, dysfunction, or disability. Indeed, normal multiple personality may be an asset for creativity.

So if having this kind of multiple personality does not cause any major problem, of what interest is it, and to whom? Would it be of interest to:

Novelists? Aspiring novelists? Agents, editors, publishers, interviewers, or biographers of novelists? Friends or family of novelists? Literature professors? Psychologists? Book reviewers? Readers? Cultural critics? Intellectuals? Ordinary people? Others?

If you fall into any of these groups, I would welcome your comment, which you can make by clicking “comment” at the end of this post (or at the end of any post in this blog).

Anne Rice, Rene Descartes, The Essence of Personhood, a Novelist’s Characters, and Multiple Personality

If you went to a wax museum, where they have statues that look like famous people, you wouldn’t confuse those statues with the real people, because the essence of people is not their physical appearance, but their thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Or think of stories and movies based on the fantasy of two people who exchange bodies. We consider the person to be where their personality is, not where their usual body is.

As Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” Not, I have a body, therefore I am.

My point has to do with the last post in which the novelist Anne Rice explained how she used pseudonyms only as long as she had more than one personality who wanted to publish.

She stopped using her two pseudonyms, she explained, because her thinking, memory, etc., was no longer split into three personalities. Now her Anne Rice self knew things that had previously been known only by her two other selves.

Thus, multiple personality, even though there is only one body, is not just some abstract metaphor. It deals with the practical essence of personhood. The different personalities differ from each other, and from the person’s regular self, in the essence of what makes a person a person: their autonomous and unique thoughts, feelings, and memories.

That is why I have previously said that when novelists experience the autonomy (in thought, feeling, memory) of their characters—that their characters have minds of their own—it is the essence of multiple personality.

The Three Voices of Anne Rice: Multiple Personality as the Reason for Pseudonyms

Anne Rice, famous for her vampire novels, and having already used one pseudonym, A. N. Roquelaure, chose a second pseudonym, Anne Rampling, as her “California voice.” “She was beginning to feel as if she had three distinct personalities…Later she referred to her body of work as ‘the divided self’” (1, p.225).

“When I moved back here [New Orleans], all of that changed. In The Witching Hour it was as if my vocabulary doubled or tripled. My access to memory accelerated one hundred or two hundred percent, and a great explosion of the novel resulted in about five months’ time…The first four or five chapters had taken five years out in California, and then the entire remainder of the book took five months…Well, this was really when Rampling and Roquelaure died, because once I came home, I was able to get in touch with all that as Anne Rice. There was never any need for a pseudonym after that…All at once I was able to have lots of different voices…and so finally all three voices were together for me in that book” (2, pp. 115-116).

In other words, she had had three literary voices—three distinct personalities—each with its own name: Anne Rice and her two pseudonyms. For some reason, moving back home to New Orleans resulted in the integration of these three personalities into one; or, at least, the three personalities were now co-conscious and working together.

Thus, all of the memories and vocabulary that had been divided among three segregated, estranged, individually named personalities were now available to one integrated writer personality, Anne Rice, or to one team of writer personalities all working under the name of Anne Rice.

In multiple personality, can such spontaneous integrations happen? Yes, they can. Especially if the personalities involved were not that far apart to begin with, as suggested in this case by all three names beginning with the letter “R.”

That Anne Rice may have had other personalities besides these three is suggested by “All at once I was able to have lots of different voices.” But regardless of how many personalities she had, if they were all now integrated, or at least communicating and working together, then she no longer needed pseudonyms.

Most novelists probably have the same reason for using pseudonyms, whatever other reasons they also have.

1. Katherine Ramsland. Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. New York, Dutton, 1991.

2. Michael Riley. Conversations with Anne Rice. New York, Ballantine, 1996.

The Relevance of Religion to Multiple Identity Literary Theory: One Indication of the Surprising Prevalence of Normal Multiple Personality

Since this is not a theological blog, why do I occasionally have a post, like the last one, which cites religious experience and the Bible? Because it is relevant to Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

The basic idea of the theory is that most novelists, perhaps 90%, have a nonpathological version of multiple personality, and that they use it in their creative writing. But that raises a question: Where do all these novelists with multiple personality come from?

They come from the approximately 30% of the general public that has normal multiple personality. (Only 1.5% of the general public has the mental illness, multiple personality disorder, aka dissociative identity disorder.)

Why do I estimate that 30% of the public has normal multiple personality? First, there are all the novelists with multiple personality, and they have to come from somewhere. Second, among the most avid readers of novels, there are probably some who have a similar psychology to the people who write the novels. Third, there are other professions—e.g., acting—which may also have a relatively high prevalence of people with multiple personality. Fourth, there is the literary theme of the double, which, though it may often reflect the psychology of the writers, probably also reflects the psychology of people whom the writers have observed. Moreover, there are many readers, who, even if they don’t have multiple personality themselves, find the theme of the double interesting, and it may be because they have seen multiple personality in others, even if they did not think of it in those terms. Fifth, there is religious experience, not a rare thing, which I have discussed as possibly indicative of multiple personality, according to William James.

Does the Bible have the Literary Theme of the Double and does it Debate if God has Multiple Personality?

As noted in previous posts: Jesus treats a case of multiple personality in Mark 5:1-20. And William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, from a psychological perspective, concludes that our experience of the presence of God may really be our perception of an alternate personality. Of course, not everyone would agree with my interpretation of Mark 5:1-20. And William James continued to believe in God, personally.

The present post is about our image of God, since we are made in God’s image, and therefore our image of God may tell us something about our own psychology. The following quotations are from Benjamin D. Sommer’s award-winning book, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (1):

“The bulk of this book is devoted to…demonstrating that in parts of the Hebrew Bible the one God has more than one body (and also, we shall see, more than one personality)…” (1, p. 1).

“God’s body and self have a mysterious fluidity and multiplicity” (1, p. 10).

“Some biblical authors, embracing a theological intuition common throughout the ancient Near East, maintained that…God’s body and self are completely unbounded. For these thinkers, who include the J and E authors of the Pentateuch, God has many bodies, and God’s person finds expression in more than one self, even as the underlying unity of the being called Yhwh endures. Other biblical authors, including those of the priestly and deuteronomic schools, completely rejected this conception. Putting greater emphasis on God’s unity, they insisted that God has only one body and one self” (1, p. 124).

“It is immediately evident that the fluidity traditions from the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East found expression in Christianity. The most obvious example of fluidity in Christian thought is the notion of the trinity” (1, p. 132).

Now, I cannot emphasize too strongly that Professor Sommer makes absolutely no reference to the literary theme of the double or to multiple personality. And, no doubt, he and other theologians would find the idea that God has multiple personality to be silly and offensive. So let me make it clear that I am not making that argument. This post and this blog have no theological agenda.

I just find it interesting that an ancient controversy about the nature of God is the same controversy we have about the nature of people. And I wonder if, besides this blog, any other article or book on the literary theme of the double, etc., has mentioned the Bible.

1. Benjamin D. Sommer. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Nabokov said “Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one…The Double…[is] the best thing he ever wrote…” (from Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature)

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Famous Novel That Most People Have Not Heard is About Multiple Personality

Lolita (1955) is usually spoken of as a novel about a 38-year-old literature professor, Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Delores Haze (Lolita). And that’s true, as far as it goes.

However, if you read an extensive review of the novel, like the one in Wikipedia, you will find, if you don’t blink (it is mentioned only in passing):

“Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's William Wilson, a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym. The theme of the doppelgänger also occurs in Nabokov's earlier novel, Despair.”

That is, the character Clare Quilty is Humbert Humbert’s double, his alternate personality.

For a detailed literary analysis, see:

Meyer, Priscilla, “Lolita and the Genre of the Literary Double: Does Quilty Exist?” (2009). Division III Faculty Publications. Paper 305. Wesleyan University:
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div3facpubs/305

[Search "Nabokov" for other posts on Lolita and Despair.]

Georges Simenon (3rd post): “Round characters,” like alters in multiple personality, are not willfully created by the imagination

A well-known distinction in creative writing is between “round” and “flat” characters. Round characters, like real people, can surprise you. They are not completely predictable.

The reason they may not be predictable is that the author (the regular, “host” personality) didn’t create them, and so they are autonomous (as are the alternate personalities, the alters, in multiple personality).

Like alters, round characters live inside the person (except when they come “out,” because the author “impersonates” them). As Simenon said:

“Maigret [Simenon’s famous detective] lived inside me. I saw him as a flesh-and-blood character, I knew his voice, the smell of his worn sweater, down to the tips of his shoes. He was right there smoking his pipe, waiting, as I slaved away. We had faith in each other” (1, p. 95).

Simenon describes his creative process:

“My existence [as an author] is divided into periods of fifteen days. In each period I compose one [relatively short] novel. On the first day I wander alone, at random. I might run, sit for a while, or walk. I watch the people passing by. I make appointments with my characters, introduce them to one another. I watch. Later, when I go home, I have the ‘starting point’ of my story, the ‘site’ where the action takes place, and the ‘atmosphere.’ That’s all I need. I don’t think about it anymore. I go to bed. I sleep. And dream. My characters grow inside me, without my help. Soon they no longer belong to me: they have lives of their own. The next day and in the days that follow all I have to do is act as their historian…” (1, p. 102).

Thus, Simenon agrees with Mark Twain, who said (as discussed in a past post) that real writers don’t “create” their characters. (They may create their “flat” characters, but not their “round” ones.) Characters just materialize (as they do in multiple personality), sometimes for no apparent reason, but often in response to a particular need or circumstance.

And since characters are not created, they are autonomous, unpredictable, and lifelike, as are alters in multiple personality. Indeed, characters are alternate personalities—literary alters—and novelists have multiple personality.

1. Pierre Assouline. Simenon: A Biography [1992]. Translated by Jon Rothschild. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Professional Writers, Worldwide, Have Permission to Publish Books based on “Great Novelists have Multiple Personality,” Both Fiction and Nonfiction

Judging by books on writing by writers, writers don’t completely understand how they do it.

Fiction writers know how they get into the right frame of mind to write, and how they engage their voice(s), muse, and characters. Moreover, they have observed life attentively, studied other writers, and practiced writing for decades.

Yet, I have never found a book by a writer that really explained how their mind works during writing. Is this because they are writers, not philosophers? Perhaps. Or because they fear that self-analysis might undermine their creativity? Perhaps.

But if great novelists have multiple personality: Which one of a novelist’s personalities would know enough about all of their other personalities to have a complete understanding of their writing process?

Now, in theory, it would be possible for all of the writer’s personalities to hold a writer’s conference, so to speak—in the writer’s mind—where they could meet and discuss what everyone has been contributing to the writing process. But most writers haven’t done this.

So the books that have been written by writers on writing have left the reader still wondering how they do it.

Writer’s “Voice” and Writer’s “Muse”: Why is the explanation of Writer’s Genius—but not other kinds of genius—often Personified?

In Greek mythology, there are Muses for all kinds of arts and sciences. And geniuses outside of literature often do talk of the importance of inspiration and imagination.

But do Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and most other non-literary geniuses attribute their creativity to anything as personified as “voice” or “muse”? Most don’t. (Any that do invoke “voice” or “muse” may have the same explanation as literary geniuses.)

So why is literary genius often explained, in part, by something as personified as “voice” or “muse”?

This blog is my answer. What is yours?