Rosamond Smith’s Double Delight: The protagonist has multiple personality—his mistress may, too—but do the novelist and literary critics know it?

Protagonist’s Multiple Personality

The protagonist is described at one point as shopping for a big, expensive bird cage for his mistress, which he later may not remember buying. And during the shopping, he is seen and recognized by one of his daughters, but the personality shopping for his mistress does not recognize who his daughter is. This kind of absentmindedness is a well-known symptom of multiple personality.

Another sign of the protagonist’s multiple personality is that, at first, he is not sure if he has has killed a young man whom he had told to stay away from his daughter, but whom he saw, one night, leaving his house. He is not sure if the murder and disposal of the body (carried away in a rug) were real or a dream. To find out, he checks to see if the rug is still where it had been before the murder, and he finds that it is gone. Moreover, the young man, from a well-to-do family in the area, has, in fact, gone missing since that very night, and is probably never found.

I should note that it is common for people with multiple personality to sometimes have difficulty distinguishing their dream and waking lives, because their waking imagination can be so involving and vivid (“more real than real,” as Toni Morrison said). I have quoted novelists in this blog referring to their “waking dreams.” And that very phrase is used a number of times in this novel.

In addition to the above, the protagonist is frequently described as acting out of character, in everything from what he drinks to committing other murders. Also, the text is frequently interrupted by commentary written in italics, which may be a chorus of his (or the novelist’s) alternate personalities.

Mistress is “Twins”?

Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist, Terence, is visited by a woman who claims to be his mistress’s identical twin:

Terence stared at the young woman, astonished.

“I’m Ava-Grace Renfrew, her sister. I’m not surprised, she told you nothing about me…”

“You are—Ava-Rose’s sister?”

“Her twin.”

“Her twin—!” Terence stared, appalled.

“Don’t look so shocked, this is us, I am us, and she is…something else” (1, p. 294).

Now, what is the reader to make of “I am us”? It is never explained. But it is worth knowing that people with multiple personality occasionally, usually inadvertently, blow their cover, and speak of themselves in the plural.

Discussion

Most dictionaries of literary terms do not have any entry for “the Double” or the “theme of the double.” And those few dictionaries that do may mention the doppelgänger, mirror image, alter ego, secret sharer, divided self, or being divided into two distinct, usually antithetical, personalities, and may even add that critics are increasingly aware that the “self” may be a composite of many “selves” (2, pp. 66-67). However, amazingly, the psychological condition that has these things—multiple personality—is never mentioned.

Does Rosamond Smith know that Terence, and probably Ava-Rose, have multiple personality? Since most novelists, themselves, have multiple personality, and since two personalities can hold contrary opinions, my guess is that Rosamond Smith both knows and doesn’t know that her characters have multiple personality.

1. Rosamond Smith. Double Delight. New York, William Abrahams/Dutton, 1997.

2. Karl Beckson, Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. Third Edition. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.