Jane Austen’s Emma: Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes, in this week’s New York Times Book Review, miss the fact that Emma has multiple personality.

“This week, Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes discuss what Austen’s work says now, 200 years after ‘Emma’ was published.” Here is what they missed.

My post of June 24, 2015, reprinted below, addresses the key psychological issue of the novel: How could Emma not have known that she had loved Mr. Knightly all along?

Jane Austen’s Emma: She had loved Mr. Knightley all along, but did not know it, because her love was conscious only to her alternate personality

In an article published by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor of English Bruce Stovel makes the case that “Emma Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides,” that she has a “split self,” and that she “often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that are in her mind…Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr. Knightley from long before the novel starts.” Indeed, “Emma’s unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot does in Persuasion” (1).

Emma’s two selves are acknowledged in this dialogue, in which Mr. Knightley says to Emma:

“I shall not scold you. I leave you to your own reflections.”

“Can you trust me with such flatterers?—Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?”

“Not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.—If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it.”

However, Emma, Knightley, and Professor Stovel never explicitly say whether they think that Emma has an ambivalent mixture of vanity and seriousness or a dissociation between a vain personality and a serious personality. In a mixture, there would be no issue of one part’s being unaware of what the other part thinks or feels. In a mixture, she would always have been aware that she loved Knightley, but would have been ambivalent about it. In contrast, in dissociation, one self may really not know what the other self thinks and feels. Multiple personality is also known as dissociative identity, because it entails such dissociation.

This romantic comedy scenario of lovers’ not realizing they are in love is interpreted differently depending on whether the reader has multiple personality. A reader who does not have it will think the scenario is a joke: how can people not know they are in love? A reader who does have multiple personality will consider the scenario to be ordinary psychology: of course things go on inside of which a person is not aware.

Emma’s love for Knightley had not been “unconscious,” except from the perspective of the host personality who was not co-conscious with the personality who loved him. The personality who had always loved him always knew it. That is why, once circumstances changed the balance of power among the personalities, allowing the personality who loved Knightley to come out and predominate, the change to loving him was quick. Emma was not finally learning to love him: behind the scenes, one of her personalities always had.

Writers write such multiple personality characters, because most writers are that way themselves. When writers comment that they will know what they think and feel when they see what they write, they are referring to the way that the thinking and feelings of their own alternate personalities come out from behind the scenes through their writing.

1. Bruce Stovel. “The New Emma in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line: V. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2007).
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm