Lewis Carroll (post 5), Alice in Wonderland (post 2): her being “two people” in her everyday life indicates Alice’s multiple personality

What was Alice really like? When she was not dreaming of being down a rabbit hole, what kind of person was she? She is revealed to have had multiple personality. But since the revelation is camouflaged with the word “pretend,” many readers may not understand what they are being told.

“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. ‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person’ " (1, p. 18).

If you are unfamiliar with multiple personality, you will be puzzled by what is being described, so when you get to the words “pretending” and “pretend,” you give a sigh of relief, and lump it with her dreamworld fantasy. But what is being described above is not part of Alice’s dream. It is about what she is like in her everyday life.

In her dream fantasy, she has been shrunk in size, but size matters in regard to  the “two people” of her everyday life, because they are regular kinds of people with regular bodies.

One of those two people has, on occasion, scolded the other one so severely as to bring her to tears, which is as hard to do for a person without multiple personality as is trying to tickle yourself.

Similarly, a person without multiple personality does not try “to box her own ears” for having cheated herself in a game of croquet.

So in the above context, what “pretending” and “pretend” mean is that Alice, like most people with multiple personality, knows that her second self is a subjective reality: in the same way that novelists know that their characters—who sometimes seem “more real than real” to them (to quote Toni Morrison)—are not real to everyone else.

Perhaps the easiest way to recognize when a person is talking about alternate personalities is when the selves argue:

“Many host personalities already have some form of communication with the other alters [alternate personalities] when they present for treatment, although they are usually not aware of what is actually happening. The experience of the host personality is that he or she gets into arguments with himself or herself” (2, p. 82).

The clinician learns that the arguments are not just a person talking to himself, but are arguments with other personalities, when the clinician later has conversations with the other personalities and hears their side.

1. Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.