John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award winner): Coverly Wapshot may have multiple personality and so may Moses Wapshot’s wife

In this autobiographical, episodic novel about the Wapshot family—especially brothers Moses and Coverly and their parents—the two episodes of interest to this blog are when Moses marries Melissa and when Coverly discovers that he is bisexual.

Moses and Melissa are very much in love, and very eager to make love, which they frequently do, in spite of Melissa’a rich guardian. And they are soon married. But then, suddenly, Melissa changes drastically, from a beautiful, ardent lover to a chaste spinster who speaks in a “voice that he didn’t recognize at all” (1, p. 307) and who dresses like Cinderella.

However, after the guardian’s mansion is destroyed by fire, Melissa reverts to being Moses’s beautiful, loving wife. And although these sudden switches in personality are not acknowledged in the novel to be multiple personality, that is what it looks like.

Coverly is also recently married, and while his wife is away, his gay male boss makes sexual advances. Coverly is sexually aroused, but he doesn’t act on it, because “the lash of his conscience crashed down with such force that his scrotum seemed injured” (1, p. 290). And “Then the lash crashed down once more, [but] this time at the hands of a lovely woman who scorned him bitterly…and whose eyes told him that he was now shut away forever from a delight in girls” (1, p. 290).

Assuming drugs or brain disease don’t account for it, only a person with multiple personality has such vivid and personified subjective experiences, which is why multiple personality used to be thought of as spirit or demon possession.

1. John Cheever. The Wapshot Chronicle [1957]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003.