Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 12): “We don’t deserve…the clueless telling us they know who we are,” but her own memoir and novel are not clueless
Professor of English and New York Times contributing opinion writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, who has previously written of her male-to-female surgery, describes “The Moment I Became My Real Self” (title of the print version of her essay):
In it she says, “Individuals who arrive at such profound and difficult moments don’t deserve to be interrogated…we don’t deserve clever think pieces…We don’t deserve…the clueless telling us they know who we are better than we do.” They deserve a hug.
But she is of interest here, not because she is transgender, but because she is a professor of English and a novelist. And here are my past posts, which begin with her curious failure to mention multiple personality in regard to “Harvey,” and then go on to discuss possible clues to multiple personality in her own memoir and novel.
December 13, 2017
Literature professor says “Harvey,” based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, is a great holiday movie, but she fails to recognize multiple personality.
Jennifer Finney Boylan in New York Times on “Harvey" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/opinion/christmas-holidays-movies.html?_r=0
Search “Mary Chase” for my brief past post on this play.
Search “McConnachie” for posts related to J. M. Barrie’s real-life version of Harvey (in the sense of having a co-conscious, companionable, alternate personality), except that McConnachie is not an animal. For another literary example of an animal alternate personality, search “Kafka.”
People with multiple personality sometimes see and interact with their alternate personalities—like children do with their imaginary companions and fiction writers sometimes do with their characters—either when they look in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors”) or as a free-standing visual hallucination (not psychotic, because they know very well that it is not objectively true and that other people cannot see it).
I think that professors of literature should know about these things, so that they know what they are reading.
They can still enjoy “Harvey,” just as people can still enjoy Peter Pan even if they know about J. M. Barrie’s “McConnachie.”
Indeed, knowing that “Harvey” is a case of multiple personality, and that multiple personality is not a psychosis, might even reinforce their enjoyment of “Harvey.”
And as I emphasize in this blog, if a person’s multiple personality does not cause significant distress or dysfunction, it is not a mental illness, and may even be an asset.
June 23, 2018
“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan: Asks why person with gender dysphoria, a condition without visual hallucinations, would see “ghosts”
Professor Boylan (1, 2) had already published a memoir about the resolution of gender dysphoria by sex reassignment surgery, so her next memoir, I’m Looking Through You, Growing Up Haunted (3), was meant to raise a separate issue: why she had seen “ghosts” (4).
“I do not believe in ghosts, although I have seen them with my own eyes…Maybe someday researchers will tell us more about what makes people see things that are not there…In the meantime, when it comes to ghosts…we’re all pretty much on our own” (3, p. 107).
Two ghosts she had seen, while he was growing up (prior to sex reassignment surgery), were a young girl standing before him, and an older woman when he looked in the mirror.
If visual hallucinations cannot be accounted for by a neurological condition, medical condition, or psychosis, then the cause may be multiple personality, especially if the person is a novelist, playwright, or poet.
Search visual hallucinations, ghost, ghosts, mirror, and mirrors.
[Note added Oct. 11, 2020: The "ghost" of a recently deceased loved one is a relatively common, normal experience, and is not the kind of ghost that she is talking about.]
3. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.
June 24, 2018
“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 3): Had the alternate personality in the mirror gotten the body remade in her own image?
I see two defendable interpretations, a skeptical one and multiple personality.
Skeptical
Since standard medical practice would include an evaluation for multiple personality before going ahead with sex reassignment surgery, the author has already been evaluated for multiple personality and found not to have it. (Of course, the validity of that finding would depend on what questions they asked her and how truthfully she answered them.)
Multiple Personality
The following passage, from near the end of the memoir, could be interpreted to mean that the alternate personality, previously seen in the mirror, and now seen once again, had succeeded in getting the body remade in her own image:
“I looked up, and there she was, just as in days long past. Floating in the mirror was the translucent old woman in the white clothes. I hadn’t seen her reflected there for years and years, but there she was once more, looking at me with that surprised expression I remembered from my childhood. Why, Jenny Boylan. What are you doing here?
“Except that, as I stared at her, I realized that it was no ghost. After all this time, I was only looking at my own reflection.
“Against all odds, I had become solid.
“Was it possible, I thought, as I looked at the woman in the mirror, that it was some future version of myself I’d seen here when I was a child? From the very beginning, had I only been haunting myself?” (1, p. 249).
Conclusion
Although I’m inclined to interpret “ghosts” and strange reflections in the mirror as alternate personalities, I can’t make a definitive diagnosis here.
1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.
June 25, 2018
“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 4): Some people have transsexualism, others have multiple personality, but some may have both
Three Possibilities
People seeking sex reassignment surgery are screened for multiple personality, because there have been cases in which multiple personality was the actual problem.
It is generally thought that a person has either one condition or the other. And I have no reason to doubt that some people have transsexualism with no multiple personality, and that other people have multiple personality with no transsexualism.
But if you are born with transsexualism, and have it during childhood, the social difficulties could be traumatic, and since some children cope with trauma by developing multiple personality, there would probably be some fraction of the transsexual population who have developed multiple personality, secondarily.
I’m Looking Through You
The memoir’s full title is I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted. Perhaps the title alludes to the Lennon/McCartney lyric, which begins:
I'm looking through you, where did you go?
I thought I knew you, what did I know?
You don't look different, but you have changed
I'm looking through you, you're not the same
But since Boylan does look different, I don’t see how that song would apply. Except that the woman Boylan sees in the mirror is translucent, and the title could be the host personality’s view through the translucent alternate personality.
Another possibility is that “I’m looking through you” is the perspective of an alternate personality, who is inside, looking out through the eyes of the host personality.
July 28, 2018
Character with three personalities in “Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 5): Quentin has internal dialogue, then speaks as Judith
Quentin, man of many voices—a talent for imitating the voices of other people—has just proposed marriage to the woman who had been his girlfriend years ago. She rejects his proposal. After he drives away and is alone, he has this dialogue with an inner voice:
[VOICE] Well, what were you expecting? That she would drop everything after all these years and leap into your arms?
QUENTIN Yeah, something like that.
[VOICE] And you expected this reception because?
QUENTIN Because she loves me.
[VOICE] Quentin, my friend. She doesn’t have the slightest idea who you are. Anything she was ever in love with was only what you let her see.
QUENTIN And that makes me different from other humans how, exactly?
[VOICE] In every way. The souls that other women come to love bear some resemblance to the men those souls actually belong to. Unlike some people we could mention.
QUENTIN So this is the price of being in love? Having to share your darkest self with someone before they wrap their arms around you? I don’t think most men approach the question that way exactly. Or women, for that matter.
[VOICE] Okay. So what now then?
QUENTIN We’re not going back to Continental Bank, I can tell you that.
[VOICE] So where then? Twenty-nine seems kind of old to be starting your life over again from scratch.
QUENTIN Starting it over? I don’t think we ever had one in the first place.
[VOICE] And whose fault is that exactly?
QUENTIN I know what you want me to do. But I’m not doing that.
[VOICE] Because your plan is clearly working out so well. When’s the wedding again?
QUENTIN Just because I know what we have to do doesn’t mean that I can actually do it. I’ll die if I have to do it.
[VOICE] Hey, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
QUENTIN Yeah, I know that people always say that. But what they never add is, whatever actually does kill you, kills you totally fucking dead (1, pp. 34-35).
At the end of the chapter, the outwardly male Quentin says that his true personality is the female Judith, who speaks for herself:
“I’d always liked the sound of the name Judith; it was the name I’d used in private since childhood, since my first recollection of being alive. I said it out loud…I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next” (1, p. 40).
1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. Long Black Veil. New York, Crown, 2017.
“Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 6): Perhaps the title of this novel comes from a song, “The Long Black Veil”
Note (added July 29): The song is cited on page 144 of the novel.
“Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 7): Another character has an internal dialogue with an alternate personality that has a mind of its own
Rachel, the woman to whom Quentin had proposed, is a college professor who teaches a class on the Italian Renaissance. At a museum, she sees Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist, on loan from the Louvre, where she had seen it six times previously. Rachel feels that “the androgynous young man…looked directly into her soul”…making her feel…“lightheaded, transfixed” (1, p. 63).
For nine pages, Rachel engages in an internal dialogue with St. John the Baptist, who, among other things, says, “I just want you to become yourself” (1, p. 66).
So Quentin/Judith is not the only character in this novel who holds internal dialogues with alternate personalities—they appear to have minds of their own—who help them with relationships and identity.
1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. Long Black Veil. New York, Crown, 2017.
“Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 8): Judith (Quentin/Judith) and her husband have a dog named “Gollum,” a multiple personality allusion
Judith and her husband Jake have a dog named “Gollum” (1, p. 72).
Sméagol/Gollum is the character with two names in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (search “Tolkien”). He often speaks of himself in the third person or as “we,” and clearly has a split personality (2).
1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. Long Black Veil. New York, Crown, 2017.
2. Wikipedia. “Gollum.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gollum
“Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 9): Judith says that before sex-reassignment surgery, she had been “like a ghost or sentient mist”
According to the conventional view, the transsexual woman, prior to sex-reassignment surgery, already has a solid female consciousness.
But Judith says that prior to sex-reassignment surgery, she “had been more like a ghost, or some kind of sentient mist”:
“It occurred to me that after a while, the present trumps the past—that I had been a woman almost exactly as long as I had been a man, that I had been a mother for all but two of my son’s seventeen years, that whatever I had been, I had been something else for far longer. Plus, I had been solid, unlike my younger self, who had been more like a ghost, or some kind of sentient mist” (1, p. 147).
Is the conventional view wrong, or is Judith unconventional?
1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. Long Black Veil. New York, Crown, 2017.
“Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 10): Mention of Mr. Frodo, from same novel as Gollum, the character with multiple personality
“But I don’t think there will be a return journey, Mr. Frodo” (1, p. 177) (2).
The above sentence confirms the author’s knowledge that Gollum, Judith’s dog, is named after the character from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings who is well known as having multiple personality.
Can Boylan be using the name “Gollum,” and then, by mentioning Frodo, remind the reader to what “Gollum” alludes, without meaning to raise the issue of multiple personality? It remains a possibility, as long as no narrator or character in Long Black Veil actually mentions multiple personality.
1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. Long Black Veil. New York, Crown, 2017.
2. Wikipedia. “Frodo Baggins.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Baggins
“Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 11): Protagonist identifies with split personality Gollum and feels that the boy she was still lives inside her
“I’m a relic, though. That’s what I realize now. The world has become a safer place for trans people, for some of us anyhow…I set out to save the shire…and it has been saved. But not for me. ‘Gollum,’ I said, ‘Gollum’ ” (1, p. 230).
Her talk of saving the shire is a reference to the plot of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Her saying “Gollum, Gollum” is to quote Gollum, the multiple personality character from that novel with whom she apparently identifies, although she may not think of him in terms of diagnosis.
“But most of the time I think that the boy that I was still lives inside me, in spite of the woman’s life that came after. I hear his voice when I tell a joke, or raise my voice to sing some song…” (1, p. 287).
1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. Long Black Veil. New York, Crown, 2017.
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