“The Blazing World” (post 1) by Siri Hustvedt (post 4): Editor’s Introduction to Mystery of Harriet Burden, an Artist with Feminist Fury and Multiple Personality.  

This novel is the psychological postmortem of Harriet Burden, an artist who had perpetrated a hoax. She had arranged to have her art presented to the public as being the work of three male artists, to prove that a woman’s art would be praised if it were thought to be the work of men.

The “editor” explains that he or she learned of the hoax from a letter to the editor by a Richard Brickman, which had been published in a journal that the editor read. Brickman claimed that his information came from a sixty-page letter from Harriet Burden, called “Missive from the Realm of Fictional Being.” But, the editor discovered, Brickman didn’t exist, and was only a pseudonym for Burden, herself.

Harriet Burden’s daughter told the editor that her mother left twenty-four private journals, which might hold clues to “the secrets of my mother’s personality.”

Indeed, the editor found that Burden had kept multiple journals concurrently, that her handwriting varied markedly, and that “Some passages are written as arguments between two versions of herself. One voice makes a statement. Another disputes it…conflicted anger and divided intellect…do battle on the page.”

Writing in multiple journals concurrently, in different handwritings, from contradictory perspectives, all suggest that Harriet Burden had multiple personality.

The reason that Burden’s “divided intellect” intrigued the “editor,” was that the editor was working on a book, Plural Voices and Multiple Visions, which discussed real-life philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (who published under various autonomous pseudonyms) and M. M. Bakhtin (who discussed Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic,” autonomous characters).

Thus, the novel looks like it will have two themes: feminist fury and multiple personality.

[Note added 2 pm: I used the word "fury" because Hustvedt used that word in an interview to describe Burden's emotion. Hustvedt said that she enjoyed feeling that character's fury while she wrote the novel.]

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Blazing World. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2014.