Jane Eyre (post 6): Jane’s metaphors—in which personified forces and voices manipulate and control her behavior—are a literary use of multiple personality.

In a previous post (search: metaphors), I used the phrase “subjectively experienced metaphors” to refer to metaphors that are based on the author’s subjective experience.

When an author uses metaphors of personified forces and voices that manipulate and control the person’s behavior—in the way that alternate personalities pull the strings from behind the scenes in multiple personality—it suggests that the author has multiple personality.

“But what is so headstrong as youth? What is so blind as inexperience? These affirmed that it was pleasure enough to have the privilege of again looking on Mr. Rochester, whether he looked on me or not; and they added—‘Hasten! hasten! be with him while you may: but a few more days or weeks, at most, and you are parted with him for ever!’” (1, pp. 207-208).

“An impulse held me fast,—a force turned me around. I said—or something in me said for me, and in spite of me:—‘Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you, and wherever you are is my home—my only home’” (1, p. 209).

“I stopped my ears against the voice that kept warning me of near separation and coming grief” (1, p. 210).

Rational voices are the voices of alternate personalities.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.