“The Invisible Circus” by Jennifer Egan (post 4): Two characters in author’s first novel have unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality

Phoebe O’Connor, eighteen, is not mentally ill, but she hasn’t been able to get over her older sister Faith’s suicide. Can Faith, who had been traveling in Europe, really have jumped off a cliff? Phoebe goes to Europe to find out.

Luckily, she finds Faith’s old boyfriend, Sebastian (nicknamed Wolf), who knows the truth. Wolf is not mentally ill either. In fact, he is about ten years older than Phoebe and somewhat more mature.

I emphasize that neither Phoebe nor Wolf is mentally ill, because I’m about to quote passages in which Wolf has visual and auditory hallucinations, while Phoebe has memory gaps, mirror hallucinations, and alterations in her personality.

These symptoms—which, in nonpsychotic persons, are suggestive of multiple personality—are mentioned in the novel only in passing. The author evidently saw these symptoms as interesting ordinary psychology. 

Sebastian (“Wolf”)

“Faith [Phoebe’s deceased sister] seemed to come to him, so clear, nothing to do with that body bent on the rocks [at the bottom of the cliff]. She was smiling, saying, Wolf, go on, are you nuts? Get on the train! Don’t you see? she said. We’re free, both of us” (1, p. 312).

“But meeting Phoebe that morning weeks ago on the stairs, Wolf had heard a voice that said, You knew it was coming; well, here it is” (1, p. 314).

Phoebe

“Only when she found herself outside in the hallway, her mother’s white door shut behind her, was she conscious of having left the room” (1, p. 98).

“It was only then that Phoebe realized she’d been crying, her face wet” (1, p. 145).

“As a child she’d played a game of staring in her bedroom mirror and tempting herself not to recognize the girl who looked back, a delicious fear seeping through her stomach as her own image became another girl’s, a stranger whose presence made her shy” (1, p. 153).

“The nervous, solitary girl of these past weeks was someone she wondered at, even pitied. But not herself” (1, p. 182).

“Phoebe listened intently, overcome by a familiar sense that she herself was slipping from the scene as if literally fading, becoming physically less solid” (1, p. 220).

“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was disembodied, as if she’d ceased to be anyone at all” (1, p. 224).

[In a sexual encounter] “She felt like a spectator, observing her physical self in baffled amazement as if it were a violent, stricken creature she were nursing through a fit…That wasn’t me, she would think” (1, p. 264).

“…she was two people, one despairing, the other greedy…” (1, p. 275).

Comment

The symptoms of multiple personality contribute to the novel’s literary, psychological depth.

Search “Jennifer Egan,” “memory gaps,” “mirrors,” “voices,” and “hallucinations” for previous discussions.

1. Jennifer Egan. The Invisible Circus. New York, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995.