Agatha Christie’s Absent in the Spring: Contrasts Novelist’s Double Consciousness (Multiple Personality) with Ordinary Imagination

Absent in the Spring is another of Agatha Christie’s novels written under her pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. But in this one, the wife (Joan), not the husband (Rodney), is at fault. Joan realizes that she had never understood her husband, their three children, or herself.

This novel is of interest here, because it illustrates the distinctly different kinds of imagination in people with, and people without, multiple personality.

Joan illustrates the kind of imagination in persons with multiple personality (not that multiple personality is intended to be an issue in this novel. It isn’t.):

“Really, some inner voice in her exclaimed, you are talking like a hospital nurse. What do you think you are, Joan Scudamore? an invalid? a mental case? And why do you feel so proud of yourself and yet so tired? Is there anything extraordinary in having passed a pleasant, normal morning?” (1, pp. 124-125).

“She mustn’t think of Joan Scudamore. But that’s myself! No, it isn’t. Yes it is…Odd the feeling that there was someone walking with her. Someone she knew quite well. If she turned her head…well, she had turned her head but there was no one. No one at all. Yet the feeling that there was someone persisted. It frightened her” (1, p. 128). (No wonder the theme of the double is sometimes presented as a ghost story.)

The above describes dual or double consciousness, which is the simplest case of multiple personality. There is a voice of a second consciousness. The voice has a mind of its own. Also, Joan senses another person walking with her. Sometimes the personalities alternate—either one is present or the other—but at other times they are both present, talking and walking with each other.

In contrast, husband Rodney—who had had a platonic relationship with a now deceased woman, Leslie—has imagined Leslie during the six weeks that Joan has been away:

“…And Leslie’s face. He couldn’t remember her face clearly…And yet for the last six weeks she had sat there [for parts of] every day and talked to him. Just fantasy, of course. He had invented a pseudo Leslie, and put her in the chair, and put words into her mouth. He had made her say what he wanted her to say…It had been, he thought, a very happy six weeks” (1, p. 179).

Two things to note: First, Rodney couldn’t vividly visualize Leslie the way novelists can sometimes visualize their characters and the way people with multiple personality can sometimes visualize their alternate personalities. Second, Rodney was in full control of the fantasy. He put the words in her mouth. In contrast, a novelist’s characters or a person’s alternate personalities have minds of their own.

1. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Absent in the Spring [1944]. Bantam Books, 1992.