Daniel Deronda (post 3) by George Eliot (post 6): Gwendolen has multiple personality’s amnesia—a memory gap—for her behavior when husband drowned.

In a previous post, I discussed indications of Gwendolen’s probable multiple personality found at the beginning of the novel. For hundreds of pages thereafter, the novel makes passing comments suggestive of multiple personality.

Suggestive Passing Comments

Nobody says that she has alternate personalities, but she is said to have “impetuous alternations” (1, p. 589).

She is continually spoken of as being possessed by metaphors for alternate personalities—ghosts, phantoms, and demons—at work inside her, behind-the-scenes:

“Fantasies moved within her like ghosts, making no break in her more acknowledged consciousness and finding no obstruction in it: dark rays doing their work invisibly in the broad light” (1, p. 606).

“In Gwendolen’s consciousness Temptation and Dread met and stared like two pale phantoms…” (1, p. 674).

“Gwendolen…was not afraid of any outward dangers—she was afraid of her own wishes, which were taking shapes possible and impossible, like a cloud of demon-faces” (1, p. 681).

But something more definitive of multiple personality happens when her husband drowns.

Memory Gap: A Cardinal Symptom of Multiple Personality

In multiple personality, if personality A is unaware of personality B, and has amnesia for what B does, then if B jumps in the water to save her drowning husband, A will have a memory gap for having done that, and will feel guilty for letting her husband drown. That is what happens in Book VII, Chapter 56 of the novel. Witnesses had seen Gwendolen jump into the water, but when she tells Deronda what happened, all she remembers is that she failed to throw her drowning husband a rope (1, p. 696).

Describing her past conflicting feelings toward her husband, Gwendolen says, “I was like two creatures” (1, p. 691).

1. George Eliot. Daniel Deronda. London, Penguin Books, 1876/2003.