Edith Wharton’s Autobiography: Her multiple personality began in early childhood, when a storytelling personality repeatedly took control

When Edith Wharton was a little girl (before she had learned how to read), she had episodes—highly pleasurable, but against her will—in which her consciousness and behavior were taken over: She “had to obey the furious Muse” (storyteller personality):

“The imagining of tales…had gone on in me since my first conscious moments; I cannot remember the time when I did not want to ‘make up’ stories…I had to have a book in my hand to ‘make up’ with, and from the first it had to be a certain sort of book. The page had to be closely printed, with rather heavy black type, and not much margin…

“…making up was ecstasy. At any moment the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams. The fact that I could not read added to the completeness of the illusion…Parents and nurses, peeping at me through the cracks of doors (I always had to be alone to ‘make up’), noticed that I often held the book upside down, but that I never failed to turn the pages, and that I turned them at about the right pace for a person reading aloud as passionately and precipitately as was my habit.

“There was something almost ritualistic in the performance. The call came regularly and imperiously; and though, when it caught me at inconvenient moments, I would struggle against it conscientiously—for I was beginning to be a very conscientious little girl—the struggle was always a losing one. I had to obey the furious Muse; and there are deplorable tales of my abandoning the ‘nice’ playmates who had been invited to ‘spend the day’, and rushing to my mother with the desperate cry: ‘Mamma, you must go and entertain that little girl for me. I’ve got to make up” (1, pp. 33-35).

Many years later, as a successful novelist, writing her autobiography, Edith Wharton says:

“No picture of myself would be more than a profile if it failed to give some account of the teeming visions which, ever since my small-childhood…have incessantly peopled my inner world…

“What I mean to try for is the observation of that strange moment when the vaguely adumbrated characters whose adventures one is preparing to record are suddenly there, themselves, in the flesh, in possession of one, and in command of one’s voice and hand. It is there that the central mystery lies…

“My impression is that, among English and American novelists, few are greatly interested in these deeper processes of their art…

“…my characters always appear with their names…I often wonder how the novelist whose people arrive without names manages to establish relations with them!…

“…what I want to try to capture is an impression of the elusive moment when these people who haunt my brain actually begin to speak within me with their own voices…as soon as the dialogue begins, I become merely a recording instrument…my hand [has] only to set down what these…people say to each other in a language, and with arguments, that appear to be all their own…

“…the process…takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness…is as real and as tangible as my encounters with my friends and neighbors, often more so, though on an entirely different plane…and my two lives, divided between these equally real yet totally unrelated worlds, have gone on thus, side by side, equally absorbing, but wholly isolated from each other, ever since in my infancy I ‘read stories’ aloud to myself [out of a book] which I generally held upside down” (1, pp. 197-205).

Novelists and other people with normal multiple personality have a different kind of imagination than people who do not have multiple personality. They intellectually recognize it as being subjective, but they experience it as being more real than real, and as involving other people or selves. What they call those other people or selves—muse, alter ego, shadow, character, voice, god, dialogic or polyphonic imagination, unconscious, spirit, guide, etc.—is culturally determined. But whatever they call them, they have the essential features of alternate personalities.

1. Edith Wharton. A Backward Glance [1933]. An Autobiography. New York, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1998.