Gratuitous Multiple Personality in “The Magician” by W. Somerset Maugham (post 2): The magician’s magic works by empowering an alternate personality

Margaret is deeply in love with her fiancé, and they plan to marry in two weeks. The magician casts a spell on Margaret that makes her marry him instead.

But how did the magician’s spell work? Did it modify Margaret’s one and only personality, or did it cause a switch from her regular personality to an alternate personality?

Margaret confirms the latter when she says to her fiancé: “There seem to be two persons in me, and my real self, the old one that you knew and loved, is growing weaker day by day” (1, p. 137).

That is, Margaret’s regular personality still loves her fiancé, but her alternate personality loves the magician. The magician’s magic worked by empowering Margaret’s alternate personality.

Since the plot of this novel does not need Margaret to have multiple personality, and no narrator or character refers to it in those terms, this is another example of unwarranted “gratuitous multiple personality” (search it in this blog for examples in other novels). Gratuitous multiple personality in a novel probably reflects the author’s own psychology.

“Look, the sun is rising”

This novel is criticized as being derivative; for example, of George du Maurier’s Trilby, only with du Maurier’s Svengali replaced by Maugham’s magician.

But the line quoted above, which comes at the end of this novel, after the villain has been vanquished, reminds me of the title of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a later novel. Is Hemingway derivative?

Since Hemingway cites Ecclesiastes as including a phrase close to his title, it is assumed that the Bible was his inspiration. But the Bible’s “The sun rises” is soon followed by “there is nothing new under the sun.” Is that what Hemingway meant by his title? If he meant something more hopeful, he may have been paraphrasing The Magician.

But be that as it may, the reason for this post is to point out yet one more example of a surprisingly common literary phenomenon: gratuitous multiple personality.

1. W. Somerset Maugham. The Magician [1908]. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.