Anna’s “Doubling” in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (post 2): Is it “moral quandary,” the literary “double,” evil “spirit” possession, or multiple personality?

“The reality of the doubling is first suggested by Vronsky’s sense that as soon as Anna begins to speak about her unresolved situation with Karenin, it as if ‘she, the real Anna, withdrew somewhere into herself and another woman stepped forward, strange and alien to him, whom he did not love but feared, and who rebuffed him’…

“…the reality of Anna’s doubling—in the sense that it defines her in her world—is confirmed by how it progresses in her mind. She goes from the repeated feeling of psychological doubling during moments of heightened stress to the sense during her illness that she has actually split in two; she tells Karenin, ‘I’m the same…But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her…The one who is not me…’ Because this reads as an aggravation of the condition that beset Anna before her illness, it would be implausible to discount it as merely febrile raving”…

“If this is a psychological state…it appears to be a reification of her moral quandary…The context makes it clear that she is tormented by the competing demands of passion and morality, and the image of doubling in her soul implies the irreconcilability of these demands”…

“…a repeated motif in Anna Karenina about an evil ‘spirit’ that seems to take possession of Anna lends itself to a ‘Gothic’ interpretation that is in keeping with, if not identical to, aspects of the long and influential tradition of doubles in literature” (1, pp. 198-199).

Has anyone interpreted Anna’s doubling as multiple personality?

1. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of Anna Karenina. Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.