Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: Initial impression of the six alternate personalities, significance of their mutual awareness, and unanswered questions.

(Please search Woolf for prior posts.)

About one third into this novel, two things about the six alternate personalities—Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis—are clear. First, they are all aware of each other. Second, they are not portrayed as being real people, since, for example, Bernard describes himself as having no fixed identity, and Rhoda says that she has no face, and that Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces.

Personalities Aware of Each Other

When you first learn that a person has multiple personality, and start to become acquainted with their alternate personalities, you initially meet a limited number of alternate personalities, who are, more or less, aware of each other. But you soon realize there are things that have gone on in this person’s life that cannot be accounted for by these particular personalities. And in exploring these unaccounted for things, you find a deeper layer of personalities, unknown to the first group. Some persons with multiple personality have two or three layers, some have many.

So the reader of this novel is faced with trying to understand a person when you are only allowed to meet the most superficial layer of who that person is.

Unanswered Questions

Bernard describes himself as being a sort of chameleon, who adapts to people he meets, but does not have much of any existence in private. He says, “Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are…I am made and remade continually…” (1, pp. 133-134). This reminds me of the character in Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life,” who always knew exactly the right thing to say in social gatherings, but literally ceased to exist in private.

So far, then, Bernard seems to be a “host personality” (search it in this blog), but I wonder if there might be more than one personality using the name Bernard, similar to the way that Doris Lessing described herself as having more than one version of her “hostess” personality (search Lessing). It is one of my unanswered questions.

Meanwhile, Rhoda says that she has “no face,” and also mentions that “Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces” (1, p. 122). In contradiction, Neville says, “Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see reflected mistily in the looking-glass opposite…” (1, p. 138). This brings up the subject of mirrors and multiple personality (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

I am interested to see how much of this is clarified in the rest of the novel.

1. Virginia Woolf. The Waves. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 1931.

Contrasting Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Fay Weldon’s Splitting: Implicit, Literary, Multiple Personality vs. Explicit, Commercial, Multiple Personality

In past posts, I cited a number of literary scholars who associated Virginia Woolf with multiple personality. And I quoted Fay Weldon’s essay on her own multiple personality.

Earlier today, I cited literary scholars, and Woolf herself, on the multiple personality implicit in The Waves. Also, I recently read Weldon’s Splitting, a marital farce revolving around the protagonist’s explicit multiple personality.

Conventional wisdom is that multiple personality is a cheap gimmick used in commercial fiction. But I have found that multiple personality is relatively common in literary fiction. However, its presence is not acknowledged in the text, and it is usually unrecognized in reviews and criticism. In literary fiction like The Waves, whether or not you figure out that multiple personality is at issue, you come away with a feeling of psychological, philosophical, and/or spiritual depth: unacknowledged multiple personality is one thing that makes literary fiction seem literary.

Compared to Woolf’s The Waves, Weldon’s Splitting, a commercial novel, is not taken seriously. The multiple personality in Splitting is explicit and the plot is a madcap comedy. But you can understand how the author of the essay “Me and My Shadows” (see previous post), about Weldon’s own multiple personality, would write a novel like Splitting. Weldon knows what she is talking about.

I’m guessing that Woolf did not understand herself as well as Weldon understands herself. Or that Woolf had multiple personality disorder (a mental illness) and Weldon the normal version. Or that Woolf had both multiple personality and bipolar disorder; although, sometimes the former is mistakenly diagnosed as the latter.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (post 3): Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis are alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality.

“In their attempt to come to terms with the strangeness of the narrative of The Waves, many readers have understood the six voices as aspects of a single character, a point of view apparently endorsed by Woolf herself…Woolf wrote in 1931 to Goldie Dickinson that she ‘did mean in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one.’ The idea that the monologues ‘often seem like one pervasive voice with six personalities’ (Naremore) or that the six are aspects of a single being has been common in critical discussions of The Waves from early on. The point is made with slight variations by such differently oriented critics as Aileen Pippett, Dorothy Brewster, Guiguet, Richter, Poresky, Transue, Gorsky, Daniel Ferrer and Thomas Caramagno…” (1, p. 358).

Yet most discussions of this novel continue to make the mistake of referring to six “characters.” Woolf, herself, contributes to this semantic confusion when she says, “The six characters were supposed to be one.” Six “characters” cannot be one person.

Characters, by definition, are persons in a work of fiction—persons in their own right—not components of a person. Person-like components of a person are personalities, as in multiple personality.

1. Mark Hussey. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers and Common Readers to Her Life, Work and Critical Reception. New York, Facts On File, 1995.

Clues that Presidential Candidates or Anyone Else might have Multiple Personality: Sincere Lies, Puzzling Inconsistency, Fanatical Consistency, Memory Gaps.

Clues that a person might have multiple personality are not the same as definitive evidence that a person has multiple personality.

At present, the only definitive evidence that a person has multiple personality is to meet and converse with the person’s alternate personalities (who honestly believe they are separate, distinct persons) and for at least one of these personalities to be unaware of, and have amnesia for, at least one of the other personalities; or to have the equivalent information from other reliable observers or documents; and for the evidence to be beyond reasonable doubt, since there are no other good medical or psychiatric explanations for it, and it occurred when there were no pending court cases or other reasons to fake.

Clues to multiple personality are important, however, because if you don’t know the clues, you will never look for the evidence, which is usually camouflaged, because the regular, “host” personality may be the one with amnesia for the other personalities, and the other personalities generally prefer to remain incognito, so that nobody will interfere with them.

Sincere lies—when you know the person is lying, but the person (actually, the host personality) believes they are telling the truth—are a clue. These lies happen because one personality claims not to have said or done something, you know the person did say it or do it, but you don’t know it was another personality who said or did it. Since multiple personality starts in childhood, some adults with multiple personality have had a reputation of being liars since childhood.

Puzzling inconsistency may be due to the different behavior, preferences, interests, abilities, etc., of different personalities, coming and going incognito. One euphemism for this is to say that a person compartmentalizes.

Fanatical consistency, the opposite extreme, can also be a clue, because alternate personalities, it must be remembered, are not whole, well-rounded persons. That is why the American Psychiatric Association coined the term “dissociative identity” (which suggests that there is only one pie, and that each personality is only one slice of that pie) to replace “multiple personality” (which suggests that there is more than one pie). Although each alternate personality can superficially come across like a whole person, they are really rather limited to certain emotions, abilities, interests, etc., and if you only know the person under circumstances in which that particular personality is out and in control, it might come across as a fanatical consistency.

Memory gaps (if the person will admit to having them, which is a big if) are a very good clue, because they raise the possibility that one personality has had amnesia for what another personality has said or done. People with multiple personality often have quite excellent memory, generally speaking, so their memory gaps are rather remarkable (if they admit them).

For example, Mark Twain had a reputation for an extraordinarily good memory, but also for remarkable episodes of “absent-mindedness.” Search Mark Twain in this blog to find a number of posts on him, including one on his absent-mindedness.

But, you may ask, isn’t multiple personality too rare to consider? Well, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-5, its prevalence is 1.5%, which would be more than four million Americans. And that is only for the mental illness, multiple personality disorder (also known as dissociative identity disorder).

I argue in this blog that there is a much more common, normal version of multiple personality, which has the alternate personalities and memory gaps, but lacks sufficient distress and dysfunction to make it a mental illness.

For certain purposes, like writing novels, a normal version of multiple personality is a positive advantage. Some alternate personalities have a great imagination, which is very real to them; indeed, as one novelist said, “more real than real.”

And it is an old joke among novelists that they are professional liars.

Fay Weldon—like J.K. Rowling, Iris Murdoch, Charlotte Brontë—has male writer, alternate personality, says Weldon in “Me and My Shadows” (1983 essay)

As discussed in past posts, J. K. Rowling writes books under a male pseudonym (Robert Galbraith); Iris Murdoch wrote books with male, first-person narrators; and Charlotte Brontë used male pseudonyms since childhood. Of course, male writers may have opposite-sex alternate personalities, too: As Gustave Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary c'est moi.”

Before quoting from Weldon’s more explicit essay, let me cite her memoir, which covers her first thirty-two years (1931-1963), for what it indicates about her dissociative (split personality) tendencies.

Auto da Fey (Memoir)

Weldon describes her split sense of self during her first sexual intercourse: “…before I knew it spirit had split from body, I had in some way de-materialized, and was hovering in the top left-hand corner of the room looking down…” (1, p. 201).

Throughout this memoir, Weldon uses the first person, except for thirty-one pages: “It is around this juncture that the first person begins to seem inappropriate to the tale and changes into the third. An ‘I’ for Davies/Bateman is not possible to incorporate into the current Weldon at all. Franklin Birkinshaw [her birth name] can be osmosed, Fay Franklin Davies acknowledged, but [Mrs] Fay Bateman is more than the current ‘I’ can bear” (1, p. 283).

“Mrs Bateman, previously Davies, née Birkinshaw, found herself able to resume the first person again. She was Fay Bateman, not Mrs Bateman any more. She could put her adventures as a married woman behind her and pick up where she left off” (1, p. 314).

If you think that this change from first person to third person and back to first person is just a feminist statement about her marriage, and not indicative of multiple personalities, read what she says next, in her essay.

“Me and My Shadows” (1983 essay)

“…How else other than in terms of split personality am I to explain…at the end of a week in which I cannot remember having written at all, typescript is neatly stacked waiting for delivery — neatly, when I am neat in nothing else? Or that when I read for the first time what I have written it comes to me as something new?…

“[Personality] A lives a kind of parody of an NW lady writer’s life. Telephones ringing, washing machine overflowing, children coming and going, and so on. B does the writing. B is very stern, male (I think), hard working, puritanical, obsessive and unsmiling. C is depressive, and will sit for days staring into space, inactive, eating too much bread and butter, called into action only by the needs of children. A knows about C but very little about B. B knows about A and C and in fact controls them, sending them out into the world to gather information but otherwise despising them. C is ignorant of A and B — and although A and B leave her notes, advising her at least to tidy the drawers or sort the files so as not to waste too much of the lifespan, C has not the heart or spirit to act on them…the writing of fiction, for me, is the splitting of the self into myriad parts. It’s being author, characters, readers, everyone…” (2, p. 162).

In short, Fay Weldon is another successful writer with her own, normal version of multiple personality.

1. Fay Weldon. Auto da Fay. New York, Grove Press, 2002.

2. Fay Weldon. “Me and My Shadows,” pp. 160-165, in On Gender and Writing, Edited by Michelene Wandor. London, Pandora Press, 1983.

Snow White: Since the magic mirror indicates that the Queen has multiple personality, the seven dwarfs may be Snow White’s alternate personalities.

The Queen could not have been more familiar with how Snow White looked—Snow White was the Queen’s stepdaughter—so any ordinary mirror would have told the Queen who was more beautiful.

Why, then, did the Queen need a magic mirror?

Perhaps the Queen was in denial, and needed someone to tell her the truth. But since it is not hard to imagine a magical person who could have served that purpose, why was a magical mirror used instead?

Well, people with multiple personality sometimes see strangers in the mirror; that is, their alternate personalities. (Search “mirror” and “mirrors” to find past posts.) Thus, the use of a magic mirror raises the issue of multiple personality. And since there was no necessity to raise that issue, I call it “gratuitous multiple personality,” which is multiple personality found in stories for no other reason than that it reflects the author’s own psychology (many fiction writers have a normal version of multiple personality).

Now, it might be argued that the Queen’s multiple personality is not gratuitous, that it is intentional, since the seven dwarfs, found by Snow White in the forest, could be interpreted as her own alternate personalities. And if the author did have the intention of writing a multiple personality story, but did not wish to say so explicitly, then instead of calling it “gratuitous,” I would call it “unacknowledged” multiple personality.

In “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” by Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello, protagonist sees stranger in mirror, symptom of multiple personality.

“…the moment Pirandello looks at the individual, he sees him in double, in triple, in multiple forms…there is no fixed personality. An Individual is only one of the indefinite personalities, which has for the moment the upper hand over all the others…” (1, pp. 40-41).

“Most readers of the general public who started to read Uno Nessuno e Centomila soon gave up in despair, because the book had all the appearance of being a pedantic treatise on psychology. The story of Vitangelo Moscarda is hidden away in a chaotic medley of psychological dialogues between various personalities of the author” (1, p. 111).

Moscarda’s Stranger in the Mirror

“…I happened to catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in a mirror…I did not recognize myself at first…Was it really my own, that image glimpsed in a flash?…I still believed…that the stranger in question was a single individual…But my atrocious drama speedily grew more complicated, with the discovery of the hundred-thousand Moscardas that I was, not only to others, but even to myself…” (2, pp. 28-29).

“…a cursed voice from within kept telling me that he was there, too, the stranger, there in front of me, in the mirror” (2, p. 34).

“…my visage suddenly essayed in the mirror an unprepossessing smile. ‘Be serious, you imbecile!’ I shouted at it then. ‘There’s nothing to laugh about!’… ‘Moscarda,’ I murmured, after a long silence. It did not move, but stood gazing at me in astonishment. It might be that it had another name” (2, pp. 36-37).

“I glanced at myself in the clothespress mirror with an irresistible self-confidence; I even winked an eye by way of signifying to that Moscarda there that we two understood each other, all the while, marvelously well. And it is but the truth I am telling you, when I say that he winked back, by way of confirming that understanding.

“(You, I know, will inform me that this was due to the fact that the Moscarda in the mirror there was I; and by so doing, you will be proving to me yet one more time that you know nothing whatever about it. It was not I, I can assure you of that. This is evidenced by the fact that when, a moment later, before going out of the room, I turned my head a trifle to have a look at him in the mirror, he was already another person, even to me, with a satanic smile in his keen and brightly gleaming eyes. You would have been terrified by it, but not I; for the reason that I knew him; and I gave him a wave of the hand. He waved back at me in turn)” (2, pp. 206-207).

Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog to read past posts on mirrors in multiple personality.

1. Walter Starkie. Luigi Pirandello 1867-1936. Third Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1926/1967.

2. Luigi Pirandello. One, None and a Hundred-Thousand [1926]. Translated from the Italian by Samuel Putnam. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1933.

Madness and Misdiagnosis: Literary critics and psychiatrists confuse Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality) with Schizophrenia.

In novels and literary theory, the term “madness” often confuses multiple personality (not a psychosis) with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia. The same diagnostic mistake is made by most psychiatrists. Search “literary madness” and “mental status exam” in this blog.

If you are interested in reading a psychiatric article on how some of the symptoms of multiple personality and schizophrenia are superficially, misleadingly similar, click the following link and download the article:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-008-0036-z 

New York Times and Wall Street Journal review Charlotte Brontë biography, but for fresh ideas on Brontë and Jane Eyre, visit this cutting-edge literary blog.

According to the Times and Journal reviews, biographer Claire Harman says that Brontë was feisty.

If you want to read something new, search “Jane Eyre,” “Charlotte Bronte,” and “Bronte” in this blog.

Tolstoy, Goethe, Lessing, Poe, Wharton, Hemingway, Woolfe: Depression, suicide, memory gaps, magical thinking in characters and people with multiple personality.

Among the writers discussed in this blog who raise these issues, the following readily come to mind: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen,” Poe’s “William Wilson,” and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolfe in real life.

In some real-life cases, a person has both suicidal depression (or manic-depression) and multiple personality, independent of each other; that is, cure one of the two and the other one remains. In other cases, depression and suicidal behavior are secondary to the multiple personality: work with the multiple personality and the depression remits. I have never seen or heard of multiple personality caused by depression, in which curing the depression cured the multiple personality; although, if you get the depression under control, thus abating the crisis, the multiple personality may go back behind the scenes (where it often is when there is no crisis).

There is no medicine that cures multiple personality, but a medicine, or any substance (including alcohol and other drugs) may affect the balance of power among the personalities. That is, a particular drug may make it easier for one personality, and harder for another personality, to take control. I learned this when a patient’s alternate personality told me that she sometimes hid the host personality’s medicine, because it would make it harder for that alternate personality to come out. (The patient’s regular, host personality knew only that sometimes her medicine would get misplaced.)

Whenever people survive a suicide attempt, the evaluation should include asking them if they remember the attempt. You have to distinguish what they know or have inferred about the attempt (from circumstantial evidence: bandages, what people have said or asked them, etc.) from what they, themselves, personally, directly, actually remember.

You need to make this kind of inquiry, because people who have multiple personality will rarely volunteer the information that they don’t really remember. Usually, the host personality doesn’t remember, and doesn’t want to know about, the alternate personality. And the alternate personality doesn’t want to disclose its existence and be interfered with. But the host personality will often admit to having had memory gaps or lost time, if you directly ask.

It was an alternate personality, not God, who killed Anna Karenina. And the alternate personality may have thought that only the host personality would die, because multiple personality starts in childhood, and some alternate personalities have childlike magical thinking.

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy (post 8): Anna asked “Where am I?” for the same reason she hadn't remembered doing her hair or recognized herself in the mirror.

Just before killing herself, Anna wondered, “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” (see post 7). I have been trying to imagine how generations of readers have misinterpreted what she said, and not recognized it as a complete non sequitur, indicative of a switch to another personality, who was not aware of the thoughts and actions that the text had just described.

Perhaps some readers have thought that Anna’s brain was impaired, that she had never fully recovered from the delirium of puerperal fever. But no, since then, Anna has been described as amazing Vronsky with “her knowledge, her memory” to such an extent that he “wanted corroboration,” which she then provided by showing him where she had gotten her facts in the many books she had read (p. 643).

More likely, I think, readers have attributed Anna’s confusion to some sort of madness; what, in past posts, I have called “literary madness,” which usually confuses multiple personality with schizophrenia. Two distinctions are that multiple personality has peculiar problems with memory and mirrors; whereas, schizophrenia does not.

“ ‘…did I do my hair or not?’ [Anna] asked herself. And she could not remember. She felt her head with her hand. ‘Yes, my hair’s been done, but I certainly don’t remember when.’ She did not even believe her hand and went to the pier-glass to see whether her hair had indeed been done or not. It had been, but she could not remember when she had done it. ‘Who is that?’ she thought, looking in the mirror at the inflamed face with strangely shining eyes fearfully looking at her. ‘Ah, it’s me,’ she realized…” (p. 755).

As discussed in past posts (e.g., search Mark Twain), people with multiple personality may have both amazingly good memory (like Anna, see above) and peculiar lapses of memory, the latter due to one personality’s having amnesia for what another personality thinks and does. Also, people with multiple personality sometimes have peculiar problems with recognizing themselves in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin Books, 2000/2002.

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy (post 7): The narrator thinks Anna’s death is God’s vengeance for her sins, but the text describes classic multiple personality.

In a classic multiple personality scenario, Ms. A, an attractive, but reserved, young woman, is enjoying a quiet evening at home, when, suddenly, Ms. B, a sexually adventurous alternate personality, takes over, goes to the bar of a hotel, meets a man, and they go to his room.

After Ms. B is satisfied, she relinquishes control, and Ms. A finds herself in puzzling circumstances. “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” she wonders. The last thing she remembers is being at home, but now she suddenly finds herself in a strange man’s bed.

Anna Karenina’s death scene is the same as the above, except that instead of a personality B who is sexually adventurous, Anna’s personality B is vengeful and suicidal:

“And suddenly…[Anna] realized what she must do. With a quick, light step she went down the stairs…to the rails and stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottoms of the carriages…and tried to estimate by eye the midpoint between the front and back wheels and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.

“ ‘There!’ she said to herself…’there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself’…

“And just at the moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she…fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees. And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed her head and dragged over her. ‘Lord, forgive me for everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle’ ” (p. 768).

Since the novel’s epigraph is “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” (says the Lord), the narrator interprets the above, not as multiple personality, but as God’s punishment for Anna’s sins. The narrator does not realize that he has described a multiple personality scenario (especially in view of Anna’s “doubling” issues, cited in prior posts).

How can novelists write characters with multiple personality and not know it? This has happened so often in the novels discussed in this blog that I had to coin a term for it—gratuitous multiple personality—which, in a novel, is multiple personality that is unintentional, and is there only because it reflects the novelist’s own multiple personality, or at least the novelist’s sense that multiple personality is a common feature of ordinary psychology.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin Books, 2000/2002.

“Anna Karenina” by Tolstoy (post 6) and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (post 2): Multiple Personality is revealed in a life crisis.

In post 2 on Tolstoy, I quoted a literary critic as saying that Anna’s declaration of having multiple personality—quoted below—cannot be dismissed as just the raving of a person in a fever, because she has a history of “doubling” earlier in the novel, when she had not been ill.

But that is not the only reason to take what Anna says seriously. The narrator makes it quite clear that Anna is speaking during a lucid period, when her delirium has temporarily abated:

“From the bedroom came Anna’s voice saying something. Her voice was gay, animated, with extremely distinct intonations…She seemed not only healthy and fresh but also in the best of spirits. She spoke quickly, sonorously, and with unusually regular and deep-felt intonations.

“ ‘Because Alexei — I am speaking of Alexei Alexandrovich (such a strange, terrible fate, that they’re both [both her lover and husband] Alexei, isn’t it? — Alexei wouldn’t refuse me…

“…Alexei [her husband], come here. I’m hurrying because I have no time, I haven’t long to live, I’ll be feverish soon and won’t understand anything. Now I do understand, I understand everything, I see everything…

“ ‘Yes,’ she began. ‘Yes, yes, yes. This is what I wanted to say. Don’t be surprised at me. I’m the same. But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her — she fell in love with that man [her lover], and I wanted to hate you and couldn’t forget the other one who was there before. The one who is not me. Now I’m real, I’m whole…No, you can’t forgive me! I know this can’t be forgiven! No, no, go away, you’re too good!’ With one hot hand she held his hand, and with the other she pushed him away.”

                                *

“The doctor and his colleagues said it was puerperal fever, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ends in death. All day there was fever, delirium and unconsciousness. By midnight the sick woman lay without feeling and almost without pulse.

“The end was expected at any moment” (pp. 411-414).

But this is an 817 page novel, and Anna fully recovers.

“Anna Karenina” is the second work I have discussed about a woman who becomes more aware of her multiple personality after giving birth. The first was “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Search “Gilman” in this blog.

Why would multiple personality be more obvious after giving birth? No special reason. It is an example of the general principle that multiple personality becomes more obvious when a person who has multiple personality (since childhood) is undergoing a major change or crisis.

Most of the time, multiple personality is hidden and secretive. The regular self is not aware (or only vaguely aware) of the alternate personalities, and the latter go about their business incognito. That is why most people who have multiple personality are never recognized as having it.

However, during a life crisis of one sort or another, the personalities are more likely to bump into each other and be less discreet. This is when the small minority of multiples who ever do get diagnosed, usually get their diagnosis.

[Added 7:18 pm: Of course, people who have some expertise in diagnosing multiple personality can diagnose it even if there is no current crisis, by asking relevant questions, which most clinicians have never been taught. Search "mental status exam."]

But after the crisis passes, and everything reverts to its usual hiddenness and secretiveness, the episode is usually shrugged off as a temporary disturbance.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin, 2000/2002.

Did Tolstoy (post 5) and Nabokov (post 9) intentionally put multiple personality in their novels, having borrowed the idea from Dostoevsky (post 7)?

In my posts on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when I argue that Anna, judging from signs and symptoms in the text, had multiple personality, do I mean that Tolstoy intentionally created Anna with that in mind?

After all, Dostoevsky had started a tradition of multiple personality in Russian literature, beginning with The Double (1846). And this tradition continued in the 20th century with Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels Lolita and Despair were discussed in past posts.

Indeed, Nabokov is an amusing case. He derided Dostoevsky, saying he was an inferior literary talent, but said that Dostoevsky had one good idea, that of The Double. And then Nabokov went on to use that idea in Despair, and to manifest his own multiple personality with the contradictory narrative perspectives of Lolita.

But what about Tolstoy? I doubt that he intentionally constructed Anna to depict multiple personality, because most novelists do not mechanically, intentionally, “create” their major characters, according to Mark Twain and other novelists I have quoted. This is true even in the carefully planned detective and mystery genres, as seen in a number of past posts.

I have not finished Anna Karenina yet, but if it turns out that neither the narrator nor any character explicitly invokes the idea of multiple personality, per se, then my inference will probably be that Tolstoy did not have multiple personality in mind, even if Anna has symptoms.

So how could a character get multiple personality if the author did not intend it? Was Tolstoy influenced by Dostoevsky? Where did Dostoevsky get the idea? Edgar Allan Poe? But both Dostoevsky and Poe, themselves, had multiple personality.

Indeed, most novelists (and perhaps 30% of the general public) have a normal version of multiple personality, and their characters reflect it.

More evidence of multiple personality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (post 4): Anna’s experience of a “double soul” and her post-switch or hair-pulling headache.

Double Soul

Having confessed infidelity to her husband, Anna was beside herself:

“She felt that everything was beginning to go double in her soul” (p. 288).

“And again she felt things beginning to go double in her soul” (p. 290).

“Again she felt that things had begun to go double in her soul” (p. 293).

Post-Switch or Hair-pulling Headache

“ ‘Ah, what am I doing!’ she said to herself, suddenly feeling pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that she was clutching the hair on her temples and squeezing them with both hands” (p. 288).

“…that gesture, which was terrible for her even in remembrance, when she had clutched her hair with both hands…” (p. 302).

“When she came to herself” (switched from an alternate personality back to her regular self), she found her hands clutching her hair, which she didn’t recall doing, and which was a gesture that was uncharacteristic of her (which is why she said, “Ah, what am I doing!”).

Given the ambiguous way that Tolstoy and/or the translators worded the above, I cannot be sure whether the pain in her head was due to pulling the hair—“clutching” and “squeezing” do not necessarily mean painful pulling and pressing—or whether she had a headache so severe that she grabbed at her hair in agony.

In short, Anna had head pain for one of two reasons: First, some people with multiple personality have headaches, sometimes severe, when they switch personalities. Second, an alternate personality may have pulled, or made her pull, her hair, causing the pain. In either case, since Anna knew that pulling her hair like that was something she would never do, it had been very frightening to find herself doing it.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin, 2000/2002.

Times Book Review essay, “Which Writer’s Journals Are Worth Reading?” quotes Proust, but should have quoted The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates.

In a New York Times Book Review essay, Pankaj Mishra quotes Proust, who said that a book “is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.”

Proust is acknowledging that most novelists have multiple personality, but he is not a psychiatrist, so he doesn’t put it those terms. For a discussion of how multiple personality manifests itself in his writing, search Proust in this blog.

The most candid writer’s journal I have found—in regard to multiple personality—is that of Joyce Carol Oates (1). It contains a series of entries that were written by alternate personalities. I quote those entries in my post on Oates: search Oates in this blog.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982. Edited by Greg Johnson. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2007.