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.