Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (opening): Ten-year-old Jane—habitually obedient, self-doubting—switches to assertive, intimidating, alternate personality.

Jane Eyre, an orphan—living with cousins who bully and abuse her, and a widowed aunt (from the other side of the family) who doesn’t love or protect her—describes herself as “habitually obedient” (1, p. 8), with a “habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression” (1, p. 13).

However, when she was being taken to be locked in the red-room, her late uncle’s room, for punishment, “I resisted all the way, a new thing for me…The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself as the French would say” (1, p. 9). In this room’s mirror, she sees “a strange little figure there gazing at me” (1, p. 11). (Search “mirror” or “mirrors” in this blog for discussions of how typical it is for persons with multiple personality to occasionally see other people when they look in a mirror.) And after being left alone in this room, “I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene” (1, p. 14). The next thing she remembers, she was back in her own bed in the nursery.

Did she have an epileptic seizure, or was it a multiple personality memory gap (for the time that another personality had been out and in control) (search memory gaps in this blog)? It is more likely the latter, since there is no mention of a history of epilepsy, and when she is acting normally again, she is asked by someone who has met her before, “…your name is Jane, is it not?”(1, p. 18). This suggests that, during the time of her memory gap, she had not responded to her usual name and/or had used a different name, which would be consistent with having been, during that time, an alternate personality who does not call herself “Jane Eyre.”

After that unremembered episode, she does not switch back to her habitually obedient personality, but now manifests a personality who physically defends herself against her older, abusive cousin, and who is so assertive that her aunt is physically intimidated: all of which is seen as being very out-of-character for her.

In short, the opening of Jane Eyre describes Jane as having at least three personalities: first, the regular, habitually obedient, depressed Jane; second, a personality who has evidently created a disturbance, but is not described, because Jane, the narrator, has amnesia for that personality; and third, assertive Jane, a protector personality, who has now decided to come out when obedient, depressed Jane is threatened.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre [1847/8], a Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition, Edited by Richard J. Dunn. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.