“Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation” by Rachel Cusk (post 3): She again cites her multiple personality as though it had just popped up from nowhere.

“I remember, when my own children were born, when I first held them and fed them and talked to them, feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: what I could do — this women’s work — had so much form of its own, yet I didn’t know where my knowledge of it had come from. In some ways I wanted to claim the knowledge as mine, as innate, but to do that seemed to involve a strange kind of dishonesty, a pretending…I felt inhabited by a second self, a twin whose jest it was — in the way of twins — to appear to be me while doing things that were alien to my own character…

“And so I did two things: I reverted to my old male-inflected identity; and I conscripted my husband into care of the children. He was to take the part of that twin, femininity…My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female…He gave up his law job, and I gave up the exclusivity of my primitive maternal right over the children” (1, pp. 18-19).

Comment

Cusk’s regular self — or, at least, her writer personality — is male or masculine. Recall Cusk post 1, in which I quoted her referring to basic female experiences as alien and disgusting: “…Is it disgusting to be a woman? Menstruation, lactation, childbirth, the sexualisation of the female body…In becoming female she must cease to be universal, and relinquish the masculine in herself that permitted her as a child to find the idea of these things disgusting indeed…”

Now she says that her alien, female personality seemed to know about maternal things, “yet I didn’t know where my knowledge of it had come from.” Evidently, her female personality had been present and gathering such information all along, probably since childhood, but her male personality had not been aware of it.

Multiple personality starts in childhood, but the regular personality is usually not aware of it until and unless there is a life change or crisis that brings the alternate personality to the regular personality’s attention. After the crisis, the alternate personality may go back to its life behind-the-scenes, and the regular personality may assume that the alternate personality was just a temporary disturbance.

My first Cusk post had been prompted by reading a review of her recent novel, in which issues of identity and narrative structure had been prominent. Unlike the reviewer, who may have thought that such issues are present in novels because writers seek to be experimental, I suspected it reflected the author’s own psychology (which in no way detracts from the quality of the novel). Search “experimental” for past posts in regard to other writers.

1. Rachel Cusk. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012/2013.