Sherwood Anderson’s The Man Who Became a Woman: He sees female alternate personality in mirror and becomes her for a while

Occasionally, people with multiple personality see one of their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror. On questionnaires to assess people for dissociative experiences—multiple personality, also known as dissociative identity disorder, is a dissociative disorder—one question is whether the person has ever looked in a mirror and it didn’t look like them.

In this 1923 short story, a man says that when he was young, he had had an “experience…that I am forced, by some feeling inside myself, to tell…It will be kind of like confession is…What I mean is, this story has been on my chest…even after I married…and was happy. Sometimes I even screamed out at night and so I said to myself, ‘I’ll write the dang story,’ and here goes…

“…And then I looked up and saw my own face in the old cracked looking-glass…It—I mean my own face—was white and pasty-looking, and for some reason, I can’t tell exactly why, it wasn’t my own face at all…I’ve thought about it a lot since and I can’t make it out…

“The point is that the face I saw in the looking-glass…wasn’t my own face at all but the face of a woman. It was a girl’s face, that’s what I mean. That’s what it was. It was a girl’s face, and a lonesome and scared girl too. She was just a kid at that…

“It was a puzzler! All my life, you see…I had been dreaming and thinking about women…So I had invented a kind of princess…And now I was that woman, or something like her, myself…

“I couldn’t, to save my life, scream or make any sound. Just why I couldn’t I don’t know. Could it be because at the time I was a woman, while at the same time I wasn’t a woman? It may be that I was too ashamed of having turned into a girl…I don’t know about that. It’s over my head…

“I screamed at last and the spell that was on me was broken…then I stood on my own feet again and I wasn’t a woman, or a young girl any more but a man and my own self…”

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Sherwood Anderson. “The Man Who Became a Woman,” from Horses and Men (1923). This short story is available online:

http://www.doczonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/enl.pdf