Literary “Madness,” a Misnomer: Henry James, The Madwoman in the Attic, and others use words suggesting schizophrenia, but describe multiple personality.

When Henry James’s character speaks of the “madness” of art; when Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar speak of the “madwoman” in the attic; and when an author’s blog post asks if fiction writers are certifiably “insane,” to what condition are they referring?

Henry James’s “madness of art”

As noted in a previous post, the character who uses that phrase refers to himself with the plural pronouns “we” and “our,” inadvertently implying multiple personality. (Also search past posts on James’s “Ambassadors” and “Private Life” for other examples of his unacknowledged descriptions of multiple personality.)

Quoting from James’s short story, “The Middle Years”:

"You're a great success!" said Doctor Hugh, putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage-bell.

Dencombe lay taking this in; then he gathered strength to speak once more. "A second chance—THAT’S the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"If you've doubted, if you've despaired, you've always 'done' it," his visitor subtly argued.

"We've done something or other," Dencombe conceded.

Thus, if you consider the “we” and “our” in the famous part of the passage only, you might think that the novelist is referring to writers in general, but what comes after—“We’ve done something or other”—shows that he is referring to himself only, and that he experiences himself as plural.

The Madwoman in the Attic

If you look in this book’s index under “Madwomen,” it says “See Doubles,” which, of course, is the literary metaphor for multiple personality. As I noted in a past post on The Madwoman in the Attic:

Gilbert & Gubar’s index does not include multiple personality, per se, but it does include Doubles, Duplicity, Fragmentation of personality, Mirrors, and pseudonyms, all of which have prominent roles in this blog. As they say in Part I. Toward a Feminist Poetics:

“We shall see, then, that the mad double is as crucial to the aggressively sane novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot as she is in the more obviously rebellious stories told by Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Both gothic and anti-gothic writers represent themselves as split like Emily Dickinson between the elected nun and damned witch, or like Mary Shelley between the noble, censorious scientist and his enraged, childish monster. In fact, so important is this female schizophrenia [multiple personality] of authorship that, as we hope to show, it links these nineteenth-century writers with such twentieth-century descendants as Virginia Woolf (who projects both ladylike Mrs. Dalloway and crazed Septimus Warren Smith), Doris Lessing (who divides herself between sane Martha Hesse and mad Lynda Coldridge), and Sylvia Plath (who sees herself as both a plaster saint and a dangerous ‘old yellow’ monster).”

"Are fiction writers certifiably insane?"

That is the title of a post from the blog of a fiction writer that I just chanced upon:

https://jennykellerford.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/are-fiction-writers-certifiably-insane/

She is describing aspects of what I call “normal multiple personality” (and not any psychosis like schizophrenia).

Conclusion

Many writers use vague, meaningless terms like “madness” when they don’t realize they are describing one or another form of multiple personality:  either multiple personality disorder (a mental illness, but one that is quite different from schizophrenia) or its normal version, what I call “normal multiple personality,” the subject of this blog.