Tessa Hadley’s “Late in The Day” reviewed by Rebecca Makkai: Hadley is compared to Virginia Woolf and “The Waves,” a multiple personality novel

“I’m not the first to compare Tessa Hadley to Virginia Woolf, not even in these pages, and ‘Late in the Day’ calls to mind, in particular, Woolf’s ‘The Waves’…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/books/review/tessa-hadley-late-in-the-day.html

Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” is well-known in literary criticism and in Woolf’s own opinion as a multiple personality scenario (see past posts, below). However, since critics and Woolf may speak only in euphemisms and may not actually use the words “multiple personality,” it is not clear that they understood it in those terms.

Did Rebecca Makkai mean that Hadley’s novel is a multiple personality story? I don’t think so. It seems that she missed multiple personality in “The Waves,” as may many readers.

But since both Makkai and a previous reviewer have compared Hadley to Woolf, there may be some similarity, and it may be multiple personality, but neither reviewer has said so.

March 30, 2016

The Waves by Virginia Woolf: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis are alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality.

“In their attempt to come to terms with the strangeness of the narrative of The Waves, many readers have understood the six voices as aspects of a single character, a point of view apparently endorsed by Woolf herself…Woolf wrote in 1931 to Goldie Dickinson that she ‘did mean in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one.’ The idea that the monologues ‘often seem like one pervasive voice with six personalities’ (Naremore) or that the six are aspects of a single being has been common in critical discussions of The Waves from early on. The point is made with slight variations by such differently oriented critics as Aileen Pippett, Dorothy Brewster, Guiguet, Richter, Poresky, Transue, Gorsky, Daniel Ferrer and Thomas Caramagno…” (1, p. 358).

Yet most discussions of this novel continue to make the mistake of referring to six “characters.” Woolf, herself, contributes to this semantic confusion when she says, “The six characters were supposed to be one.” Six “characters” cannot be one person.

Characters, by definition, are persons in a work of fiction—persons in their own right—not components of a person. Person-like components of a person are personalities, as in multiple personality.

1. Mark Hussey. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers and Common Readers to Her Life, Work and Critical Reception. New York, Facts On File, 1995.

March 31, 2016

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: Initial impression of the six alternate personalities, significance of their mutual awareness, and unanswered questions.

About one third into this novel, two things about the six alternate personalities—Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis—are clear. First, they are all aware of each other. Second, they are not portrayed as being real people, since, for example, Bernard describes himself as having no fixed identity, and Rhoda says that she has no face, and that Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces.

Personalities Aware of Each Other

When you first learn that a person has multiple personality, and start to become acquainted with their alternate personalities, you initially meet a limited number of alternate personalities, who are, more or less, aware of each other. But you soon realize there are things that have gone on in this person’s life that cannot be accounted for by these particular personalities. And in exploring these unaccounted for things, you find a deeper layer of personalities, unknown to the first group. Some persons with multiple personality have two or three layers, some have many.

So the reader of this novel is faced with trying to understand a person when you are only allowed to meet the most superficial layer of who that person is.

Unanswered Questions

Bernard describes himself as being a sort of chameleon, who adapts to people he meets, but does not have much of any existence in private. He says, “Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are…I am made and remade continually…” (1, pp. 133-134). This reminds me of the character in Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life,” who always knew exactly the right thing to say in social gatherings, but literally ceased to exist in private.

So far, then, Bernard seems to be a “host personality” (search it in this blog), but I wonder if there might be more than one personality using the name Bernard, similar to the way that Doris Lessing described herself as having more than one version of her “hostess” personality (search Lessing). It is one of my unanswered questions.

Meanwhile, Rhoda says that she has “no face,” and also mentions that “Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces” (1, p. 122). In contradiction, Neville says, “Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see reflected mistily in the looking-glass opposite…” (1, p. 138). This brings up the subject of mirrors and multiple personality (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

I am interested to see how much of this is clarified in the rest of the novel.

1. Virginia Woolf. The Waves. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 1931.

April 1, 2016

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (conclusion): Protagonist has alternate personalities, but literary criticism fails to acknowledge multiple personality.

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life” (p. 238).

“There are many rooms—many Bernards” (p. 260).

“I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs” (p. 276).

“For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another” (p. 281).

“And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know” (p. 288).

Unnamed Personality

As I speculated in a previous post, the six mutually-aware personalities were unlikely to be the person’s only personalities. Bernard mentions another, unnamed personality, who has affected his life for many years.

“I spoke to that self who has been with me in many tremendous adventures; the faithful man who sits over the fire when everybody has gone to bed, stirring the cinders with a poker; the man who has been so mysteriously and with sudden accretions of being built up, in a beech wood, sitting by a willow tree on a bank, leaning over a parapet at Hampton Court; the man who has collected himself in moments of emergency and banged his spoon on the table, saying, ‘I will not consent’ ” (pp. 283-284).

Do Bernard and Others Die? “…he is dead, the man I called ‘Bernard’…” (p. 291).

Who is this speaking in the final seven pages? Is Bernard, psychologically speaking, dead, or does he mean only that he feels depressed, because he seems to have been abandoned by his named and unnamed alternate personalities, and feels empty and at a loss without them? Have those personalities died? Is this narrator, who says Bernard is dead, the unnamed personality mentioned above, or some new narrator, who has taken over?

At the end of this novel, where have all these personalities gone? Have they died? Have they ceased to exist? Not at all. They have simply gone behind the scenes. How do I know? Because it is in the nature of multiple personality that most alternate personalities, most of the time, reside behind the scenes; or, if not behind the scenes, at least incognito.

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality

Although the six “characters” are revealed to be alternate personalities, the text does not call them “personalities” or speak of them in terms of multiple personality. So the author probably knew that she had various selves—which I think she mentions in her diaries—but she probably did not think of them in terms of multiple personality, per se.

Similarly, many literary critics have recognized that this novel features personalities, not characters, but most critics have not made the connection between personalities and multiple personality.

Virginia Woolf. The Waves. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 1931.