Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” (post 3): The protagonist fulfills clinical criteria for multiple personality and sees Chinese alternate personality in mirror.

Multiple Personality

The first-person narrator/protagonist has been out on the town (New York City) with her friend Doreen, during which they are picked up by a man, a stranger, to whom the protagonist gives a false name, “Elly Higginbottom,” because “I didn’t want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name” (1, p. 11).

However, when she is back in her hotel room, a woman who works at the hotel and Doreen come knocking at her door, the former saying “Elly, Elly, Elly, let me in”, but the protagonist doesn't respond, because “I didn’t know any Elly.” When the other woman outside her door says, “Miss Greenwood, your friend wants you,” “I knew it was Doreen.” The protagonist comments on the fact that one woman was addressing her as “Elly” and the other woman was addressing her as “Miss Greenwood” “as if I had a split personality or something” (1, pp. 20-21).

The protagonist apparently has amnesia for having consciously used “Elly” as an alias. Indeed, she apparently has amnesia for having previously identified herself as “Elly” to that member of the hotel staff. Moreover, her present personality does not see herself as being, or remember having been, a close friend of Doreen, as she clearly was in earlier pages.

Thus, at the beginning of this novel, the protagonist is portrayed as having more than one personality plus memory gaps (amnesia), fulfilling the clinical diagnostic criteria for multiple personality.

Chinese Personality

“I slid into the self-service elevator and pushed the button for my floor…and I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course, I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I was” (1, p. 18).

The protagonist was apparently looking in a mirror in the elevator. Seeing an alternate personality in the mirror is a known phenomenon in multiple personality (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

In a previous post, I mentioned Sylvia Plath’s poem “In Plaster.” Its first two lines are:

“I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:

This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one” (2).

So Plath is consistent, in both novel and poem, as having a Chinese or yellow alternate personality.

1. Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar [1963/1971]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

2. Sylvia Plath. “In Plaster.” http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1401