“Marnie” by Winston Graham (post 6): Marnie’s multiple personality never acknowledged. Novel narrated in first person because author was Marnie

Marnie begins to think it futile to keep on “living a solitary life and codding up a make-believe world with a different name and personality every nine months and rustling bank notes stuffed surreptitiously in your handbag” (Marnie, last page).

She thinks she might want to go back to her husband, because he may still love her, and he was the only person she felt who had really tried to hear her.

However, her husband’s brother, who said he was driving her to her home, has instead taken her to meet the owner of one of the businesses she had robbed. She thinks that this may be a facing up to her past, and therefore to the good. But since her husband’s brother hates his brother, he may be delivering her to the enemy. This is how the novel ends, and the reader will never know what happened.

As to Marnie’s multiple personality, neither she nor any other character ever calls it that. Her theory about her behavior is that she may have inherited insanity from her mother.

Marnie does not realize that she has memory gaps (indicative of multiple personality), because she has, to borrow a phrase from the psychiatric literature, “amnesia for her amnesia” (see the example of her memory gaps in post 5).

The author may have gotten the idea for this novel from a news article (1). But he wrote it in the first person, because, ultimately, he, himself, was a “Marnie”: In real life, he had changed his own name and identity from Winston Grime to Winston Graham (2).

The significance of this and many other novels I have discussed is that they involve a character with multiple personality, but multiple personality, per se, is never acknowledged. The author has evidently not set out to use multiple personality, per se, as a literary gimmick. In fact, he seems not to have seen Marnie as having multiple personality, per se, for he has a psychiatrist as a character, but the psychiatrist does not offer any such opinion.

So how did unacknowledged multiple personality get into this and many other novels? It reflects the personal psychology of most fiction writers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marnie

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Graham