“Me and My Shadows” by Fay Weldon: Essay, anthologized the same year she was chair of judges for the Booker Prize, declares she has multiple personality

Fay Weldon CBE FRSL is an English author, essayist, feminist, playwright, and professor of creative writing, who has published over forty books through 2017. She was chair of judges for the 1983 Booker Prize. —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Weldon

Here are two interesting past posts:

March 25, 2016

Fay Weldon—like J.K. Rowling, Iris Murdoch, Charlotte Brontë—has male writer, alternate personality, says Weldon in “Me and My Shadows” (1983 essay)

As discussed in past posts, J. K. Rowling writes books under a male pseudonym (Robert Galbraith); Iris Murdoch wrote books with male, first-person narrators; and Charlotte Brontë used male pseudonyms since childhood. Of course, male writers may have opposite-sex alternate personalities, too: As Gustave Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary c'est moi.”

Before quoting from Weldon’s more explicit essay, let me cite her memoir, which covers her first thirty-two years (1931-1963), for what it indicates about her dissociative (split personality) tendencies.

Auto da Fey (Memoir)

Weldon describes her split sense of self during her first sexual intercourse: “…before I knew it spirit had split from body, I had in some way de-materialized, and was hovering in the top left-hand corner of the room looking down…” (1, p. 201).

Throughout this memoir, Weldon uses the first person, except for thirty-one pages: “It is around this juncture that the first person begins to seem inappropriate to the tale and changes into the third. An ‘I’ for Davies/Bateman is not possible to incorporate into the current Weldon at all. Franklin Birkinshaw [her birth name] can be osmosed, Fay Franklin Davies acknowledged, but [Mrs] Fay Bateman is more than the current ‘I’ can bear” (1, p. 283).

“Mrs Bateman, previously Davies, née Birkinshaw, found herself able to resume the first person again. She was Fay Bateman, not Mrs Bateman any more. She could put her adventures as a married woman behind her and pick up where she left off” (1, p. 314).

If you think that this change from first person to third person and back to first person is just a feminist statement about her marriage, and not indicative of multiple personalities, read what she says next, in her essay.

“Me and My Shadows” (1983 essay)

“…How else other than in terms of split personality am I to explain…at the end of a week in which I cannot remember having written at all, typescript is neatly stacked waiting for delivery — neatly, when I am neat in nothing else? Or that when I read for the first time what I have written it comes to me as something new?…

“[Personality] A lives a kind of parody of an NW lady writer’s life. Telephones ringing, washing machine overflowing, children coming and going, and so on. B does the writing. B is very stern, male (I think), hard working, puritanical, obsessive and unsmiling. C is depressive, and will sit for days staring into space, inactive, eating too much bread and butter, called into action only by the needs of children. A knows about C but very little about B. B knows about A and C and in fact controls them, sending them out into the world to gather information but otherwise despising them. C is ignorant of A and B — and although A and B leave her notes, advising her at least to tidy the drawers or sort the files so as not to waste too much of the lifespan, C has not the heart or spirit to act on them…the writing of fiction, for me, is the splitting of the self into myriad parts. It’s being author, characters, readers, everyone…” (2, p. 162).

In short, Fay Weldon is another successful writer with her own, normal version of multiple personality.

1. Fay Weldon. Auto da Fay. New York, Grove Press, 2002.

2. Fay Weldon. “Me and My Shadows,” pp. 160-165, in On Gender and Writing, Edited by Michelene Wandor. London, Pandora Press, 1983.

March 30, 2016

Contrasting Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Fay Weldon’s Splitting: Implicit, Literary, Multiple Personality vs. Explicit, Commercial, Multiple Personality

In past posts, I cited a number of literary scholars who associated Virginia Woolf with multiple personality. And I quoted Fay Weldon’s essay on her own multiple personality.

Earlier today, I cited literary scholars, and Woolf herself, on the multiple personality implicit in The Waves. Also, I recently read Weldon’s Splitting, a marital farce revolving around the protagonist’s explicit multiple personality.

Conventional wisdom is that multiple personality is a cheap gimmick used in commercial fiction. But I have found that multiple personality is relatively common in literary fiction. However, its presence is not acknowledged in the text, and it is usually unrecognized in reviews and criticism. In literary fiction like The Waves, whether or not you figure out that multiple personality is at issue, you come away with a feeling of psychological, philosophical, and/or spiritual depth: unacknowledged multiple personality is one thing that makes literary fiction seem literary.

Compared to Woolf’s The Waves, Weldon’s Splitting, a commercial novel, is not taken seriously. The multiple personality in Splitting is explicit and the plot is a madcap comedy. But you can understand how the author of the essay “Me and My Shadows” (see previous post), about Weldon’s own multiple personality, would write a novel like Splitting. Weldon knows what she is talking about.

I’m guessing that Woolf did not understand herself as well as Weldon understands herself. Or that Woolf had multiple personality disorder (a mental illness) and Weldon the normal version. Or that Woolf had both multiple personality and bipolar disorder; although, sometimes the former is mistakenly diagnosed as the latter.