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.