Jane Austen’s Literary Legacy: Characters whose multiple personality makes it possible to both know and not know whom they have loved all along.

Back in 2007, writing in a publication of the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor Bruce Stovel pointed out that Emma Woodhouse is “a split character, with two very different sides,” and that the same thing is true of Austen characters in several of her novels (http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm).

Taking some of the professor’s observations as my starting point, I discussed Jane Austen’s Emma, and the psychological significance of both knowing and not knowing something, in the following two posts:

June 24, 2015

Jane Austen’s Emma: She had loved Mr. Knightley all along, but did not know it, because her love was conscious only to her alternate personality

In an article published by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor of English Bruce Stovel makes the case that “Emma Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides,” that she has a “split self,” and that she “often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that are in her mind…Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr. Knightley from long before the novel starts.” Indeed, “Emma’s unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot does in Persuasion” (1).

Emma’s two selves are acknowledged in this dialogue, in which Mr. Knightley says to Emma:

“I shall not scold you. I leave you to your own reflections.”

“Can you trust me with such flatterers?—Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?”

“Not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.—If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it.”

However, Emma, Knightley, and Professor Stovel never explicitly say whether they think that Emma has an ambivalent mixture of vanity and seriousness or a dissociation between a vain personality and a serious personality. In a mixture, there would be no issue of one part’s being unaware of what the other part thinks or feels. In a mixture, she would always have been aware that she loved Knightley, but would have been ambivalent about it. In contrast, in dissociation, one self may really not know what the other self thinks and feels. Multiple personality is also known as dissociative identity, because it entails such dissociation.

This romantic comedy scenario of lovers’ not realizing they are in love is interpreted differently depending on whether the reader has multiple personality. A reader who does not have it will think the scenario is a joke: how can people not know they are in love? A reader who does have multiple personality will consider the scenario to be ordinary psychology: of course things go on inside of which a person is not aware.

Emma’s love for Knightley had not been “unconscious,” except from the perspective of the host personality who was not co-conscious with the personality who loved him. The personality who had always loved him always knew it. That is why, once circumstances changed the balance of power among the personalities, allowing the personality who loved Knightley to come out and predominate, the change to loving him was quick. Emma was not finally learning to love him: behind the scenes, one of her personalities always had.

Writers write such multiple personality characters, because most writers are that way themselves. When writers comment that they will know what they think and feel when they see what they write, they are referring to the way that the thinking and feelings of their own alternate personalities come out from behind the scenes through their writing.

1. Bruce Stovel. “The New Emma in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line: V. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2007). http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/stovel-b.htm

June 28, 2015

Jane Austen’s Emma (post 2): Can a person love someone and not know it? How do I know it is possible and is related to multiple personality?

Can you both know something and not know it? It seems logically impossible. Although everyone has a little experience with that when they can’t remember a particular fact, but it comes back to them later, most people don’t have trouble accessing the fact that they love someone.

I learned that both knowing and not knowing is possible when I once asked a patient my usual screening question for multiple personality disorder—“Do you ever have memory gaps?”—and she answered, “No.” So I figured that she probably did not have it and moved on.

However, about six months later, in the course of my getting an update from her on her everyday life, I noted a discrepancy between something she mentioned and what she had told me previously. I was treating her in the psychiatric clinic of a hospital, and I assumed that she was getting all of her general medical care at the medical clinic of that same hospital (which was the hospital closest to where she lived), but now she made reference to attending the medical clinic at another hospital, and this took me by surprise. I asked for some verification, and she said that she kept the papers related to that treatment in a particular dresser drawer at home.

When I made an issue of her attending the other clinic as something she had never told me before, she became flustered [she was switching back to her regular personality], and then [her regular personality] said she knew nothing about going to a medical clinic at another hospital. But I told her to look in a particular dresser drawer when she got home and tell me next time what she found.

At the next appointment, she said that she had been surprised to find papers from another hospital in the drawer I had told her to look. And then I asked her the same question I had asked her six months before, “Do you ever have memory gaps?” But now she said that she did, and that she had been having them since childhood. “Well, why didn’t you tell me that when I asked you six months ago?” And I’ll never forget her answer:

“I knew, but I didn’t know.” She knew it sounded ridiculous, but that was her truth.