Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Two Voices” in “The Poet’s Mind” by Gregory Tate: Poem demonstrates “double consciousness,” which means multiple personality

Professor Tate says that Tennyson’s “view of the embodied mind in his early writing, epitomized in ‘The Two Voices’, is of a fragmented and fluctuating compound of mental states whose operations often defy conscious control; a view that was also partly formed through personal experience…

"‘The Two Voices’ comprises a dialogue between a depressed speaker and an insidious inner voice that urges suicide” (1, p. 45).

The poem refers to states of consciousness that differ in what they remember, so that the relation of the poem to the psychological concept of “double consciousness…is evident in the emphasis that both place on the separation of the two states of consciousness through the fragmentation of memory” (1, p. 48).

Double Consciousness

Tate credits the concept of double consciousness to the work of 19th century doctor Henry Holland, who defined it as a condition in which “the mind passes by alternation from one state to another, each having the perception of external impressions and appropriate trains of thought, but not linked together by…mutual memory” (1, p. 48).

Here is another history of “double consciousness”:

“…the term "double consciousness" was applied to cases of split personality; by the late nineteenth century, it had come into quite general use not only in professional publications but also in discussions of psychological research published for general audiences as well…

“In 1817, in a New York professional journal called the Medical Repository, an account headed ‘A Double Consciousness, or a Duality of Person in the same Individual’ made use of the term in a way that remained fairly constant for psychology through the nineteenth century. The account was of a young woman—later identified as Mary Reynolds—who at about age nineteen fell into a deep sleep from which she awoke with no memory of who she was and with a wholly different personality. A few months later, after again falling into a deep sleep, she awoke as her old self. At the time of the 1817 account, she had periodically alternated selves for a period of about four years. As it turned out, this was to continue for about fifteen or sixteen years in total, until in her mid-thirties she permanently entered the second state. Her two lives were entirely separate; while in one, she had no knowledge or memory of the other. Such utter distinctiveness of the two selves was what made the editors of the Medical Repository refer to hers as a case of ‘double consciousness.’

“As a result of the Mary Reynolds case, the term ‘double consciousness’ entered into fairly extensive use. For example, Francis Wayland's influential mid-nineteenth-century textbook Elements of Intellectual Philosophy treated the concept of double consciousness as part of a general discussion of consciousness as such and recounted the Mary Reynolds case along with a few others by way of illustration. An 1860 article in Harper's also focused on the Reynolds case and on double consciousness as a medical and philosophical issue. As a medical term, then, it was hardly confined to the use of medical professionals.

“During the time Du Bois was formulating his ideas of African American distinctiveness, there had been renewed interest in double consciousness as a medical and theoretical issue. Most important for Du Bois was the role of his Harvard mentor William James. James stimulated this interest, not only in his Principles—in describing what he called ‘alternating selves’ or ‘primary and secondary consciousness,’ he drew on a body of contemporary French work which had been widely publicized in the United States as well—but also as a result of his own experience about 1890 with a notable American case of double consciousness, that of Ansel Bourne. James's work with Bourne (whose discoverer, Richard Hodgson, did use ‘double consciousness’ to label the case), as well as the American publication of the French studies on which James drew, occurred at the same time Du Bois's relationship with James was at its closest. Whether James and Du Bois talked about it at the time is impossible to say, but based on Du Bois's use of ‘double consciousness’ in his Atlantic essay he certainly seems to have known the term's psychological background, because he used it in ways quite consistent with that background” (2).

“The Two Voices” (3).

1. Gregory Tate. The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

2. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG03/souls/brucepg.html

3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “The Two Voices.” http://www.philaletheians.co.uk/study-notes/constitution-of-man/the-two-voices-of-lord-tennyson.pdf