“Throwing Anna Under the Train” by Todd Gitlin in New York Times: In Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (post 9), Anna’s suicide was due to her multiple personality.

Todd Gitlin’s essay seems to be a parody of feminist analysis, prompted by what, I don’t know: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/books/review/throwing-anna-under-the-train.html

In any case, it prompts me to provide my eight posts from earlier this year on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, explaining Anna’s suicide as a complication of her multiple personality:

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Leo Tolstoy, writing Anna Karenina, experienced his characters as autonomous, alternate personalities, who were not under his control.

In what “has often been cited by scholars as Tolstoy’s aesthetic credo…He gave an example: the scene of Vronsky’s suicide…When Tolstoy was revising this chapter, Vronsky, ‘completely unexpectedly’ for him, the author, ‘but quite decidedly, proceeded to shoot himself ’…Tolstoy then leveled his anger at literary critics: ‘And if critics now already understand what I want to say…then I congratulate them and can confidently assure them that they know more than I do.’

“Twentieth-century literary critics tend to read this much-quoted formula as a claim of art’s superiority over other forms of expression, affirming art’s ability—and Tolstoy’s—to produce inexhaustible meaning, perhaps to express the inexpressible. But at precisely the time Tolstoy coined this formula, he was considering retreating from literature and abandoning Anna Karenina. In this context, we may read Tolstoy’s words somewhat differently: as an admission of art’s inherent inability to deliver a clear message and a complaint about the author’s lack of control over his text” (1, pp. 44-45).

1. Irina Paperno. “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy’s Struggles to Narrate the Self. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2014.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Anna’s “Doubling” in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (post 2): Is it “moral quandary,” the literary “double,” evil “spirit” possession, or multiple personality?

“The reality of the doubling is first suggested by Vronsky’s sense that as soon as Anna begins to speak about her unresolved situation with Karenin, it as if ‘she, the real Anna, withdrew somewhere into herself and another woman stepped forward, strange and alien to him, whom he did not love but feared, and who rebuffed him’…

“…the reality of Anna’s doubling—in the sense that it defines her in her world—is confirmed by how it progresses in her mind. She goes from the repeated feeling of psychological doubling during moments of heightened stress to the sense during her illness that she has actually split in two; she tells Karenin, ‘I’m the same…But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her…The one who is not me…’ Because this reads as an aggravation of the condition that beset Anna before her illness, it would be implausible to discount it as merely febrile raving”…

“If this is a psychological state…it appears to be a reification of her moral quandary…The context makes it clear that she is tormented by the competing demands of passion and morality, and the image of doubling in her soul implies the irreconcilability of these demands”…

“…a repeated motif in Anna Karenina about an evil ‘spirit’ that seems to take possession of Anna lends itself to a ‘Gothic’ interpretation that is in keeping with, if not identical to, aspects of the long and influential tradition of doubles in literature” (1, pp. 198-199).

Has anyone interpreted Anna’s doubling as multiple personality?

1. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of Anna Karenina. Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

“Voices” in Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (post 3): Anna’s “inner voice” comes out and speaks of love; a “voice” takes one side of her husband’s inner debate.

In post 2, I quoted a literary scholar, making the conventional interpretation of Anna’s “doubling,” that it is a metaphor for her moral and emotional conflicts. But that interpretation does not explain how “her inner voice” can participate in a conversation with Count Vronsky, saying the word “Love” (as quoted below). Only an “inner voice” that is an alternate personality can take part in a conversation with someone else.

“Anna Arkadyevna [Karenina]…listened with delight to what Vronsky was saying…

“…he said, ‘but you know it’s not friendship I need, for me there is only one possible happiness in life, this word you dislike so…yes, love…..

“ ‘Love…’ she repeated slowly with her inner voice, and suddenly…added: ‘That’s why I don’t like this word, because it means too much for me, far more than you can understand…’ ”

Soon after the above, when her husband is debating with himself what his wife is up to, his own “voice” takes one side in the debate:

“…Alexei Alexandrovich [Karenin] found nothing peculiar or improper in the fact that his wife [Anna Karenina] was sitting at a separate table with Vronsky and having an animated conversation about something; but he noticed that to the others in the drawing room it seemed something peculiar and improper, and therefore he, too, found it improper. He decided that he ought to say so to his wife…

“ ‘But, finally,’ he asked himself…, ‘what has happened? Nothing. She talked with him for a long time. What of it? A woman can talk with all sorts of men in society…but…some voice said to him that this was not so, that if others had noticed it, it meant there was something…” (1, pp. 141-143).

The author appears to think, probably on the basis of his own psychology, that voices are a routine aspect of everyone's psychology. The fact is, most people do not have voices. But people with multiple personality do sometimes hear the rational voices of their alternate personalities. And these alternate personalities sometimes do come out and participate in conversations, typically incognito.

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

Friday, March 4, 2016

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.

Friday, March 4, 2016

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.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

“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.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

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.

March 14, 2016

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.

Comment

How do most readers and literary critics interpret the passages from the novel that I have quoted in the above posts? If you do not realize that those passages are descriptions of symptoms of multiple personality, they will be ignored, glossed over as idiosyncrasies, or thought of as “madness,” a psychiatrically meaningless, nonspecific, literary euphemism.

Are suicide attempts common in multiple personality? Unfortunately, yes. Sometimes it is done by a depressed alternate personality, other times by a persecutor alternate personality, who, because personalities think they are each people in their own right, thinks it can get rid of a weak, regular personality without itself dying.

Of course, suicide attempts and actual suicide are much more of a risk for people with the clinical version, the mental illness, multiple personality disorder, than it is in the normal, high-functioning version, present in many novelists and others.