Edith Wharton: More on the writing process and her autonomous characters, who came from nowhere, spoke to her with their own voices, but were controlled by her critical attention

“When Wharton talked in old age about her writing methods, she said (as many novelists do) that her characters ‘arrived,’ ‘coming seemingly from nowhere,’ complete with their names. They ‘then began to speak within me with their own voices.’ It sounds from this as though she subscribes to the idea of the writer as a kind of unconscious medium, through which the narrative flows onto the page. But she also says, firmly, that her characters never ‘walk away with the subject’: she knows ‘from the first exactly what is going to happen to every one of them.’ So she describes a double operation (which parallels the mixture of cool analysis and deep emotion in her fiction). The process of writing ‘takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness’ but ‘is always illuminated by the full light of my critical attention’ “ (1, p. 176).

The biographer, Hermione Lee, is, of course, quite right when she says that what Wharton says is the same thing that many novelists say. I have quoted a number of novelists in this blog saying the same thing.

Novelists see and hear their characters just like Hamlet saw and heard his late father in the famous bedroom scene (Act 3, Sc 4), cited in my post of August 1, 2014. This is the way that people with multiple personality sometimes see and hear their alternate personalities.

And neither Wharton nor Shakespeare—who, I am guessing, like Wharton, had had such subjective experiences—were psychotic. They had a normal, creative version of multiple personality.

1. Hermione Lee. Edith Wharton. New York, Vintage Books, 2008.