“Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir)” by Hilary Mantel: She is not possessed by the devil, but may have had a male alternate personality

One clue that people may have undiagnosed multiple personality is that they are puzzling even to people who know them well. Another clue, as seen in this memoir, is that they are puzzling even to themselves.

Mantel begins her memoir with puzzlement about whether she sees ghosts (or only has auras related to migraine headaches). “I see a flickering on the staircase…I ‘know’ it is my stepfather’s ghost. I am not perturbed. I am used to ‘seeing’ things that aren’t there…It was in this house that I last saw my stepfather, Jack [when alive], in the early months of 1995…Many times since then I have acknowledged him on the stairs” (1, p. 1).

Comment: As I have previously joked, the English don’t believe in alternate personalities. They believe in ghosts.

Midway through the memoir, Mantel describes an experience that is often quoted in reviews. Since she introduces it as momentous, she cautions readers that it is not what they expect, “some revelation of sexual abuse.” Rather, she feels she has literally had an encounter with the devil:

“I am seven, seven going on eight…I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift in the light…There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift makes my stomach heave. I can sense…the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two…The air stirs around it invisibly…I cannot move…I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body…My first thought is that I have seen the devil…In the days afterward…Wherever I was, home or school, night or day and in bed or abroad, what I’d seen accompanied me…It is part of me…it is a body inside my body…” (1, pp. 93-97).

Later in the memoir, Mantel minimizes this experience, mentioning it only in passing, as “my mauvais quart d’heure” (my bad quarter of an hour) (1, p. 145).

Comment: The above quoted experience lasted much more than a quarter of an hour: “In the days afterward…” it had become a “part of me…it is a body inside my body…” That is, she felt possessed, which is an old way of thinking about multiple personality.

Moreover, the views of that experience given on pages 93-97 vs. page 145 are so inconsistent with each other that they seem to have been written by different narrator personalities.

And after having seen such narrative inconsistencies in works by various writers, I coined the phrase, “split inconsistent narrative” (you can search it).

[Added Sept. 27: Here is another issue, insufficiently raised in most reviews:]
Mantel says, “I am waiting to change into a boy. When I am four this will occur” (1, p. 41)

At age four, she says, “The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me” (1, p. 51).

“As a knight I am used to arranging siege warfare, the investment of major fortresses…” (1, p. 51).

“It is 1957. Davy Crockett is all the go…We sing he killed a bear when he was only three. Somehow I doubt it. Even I didn’t do that…When exactly do I become a boy?” (1, p. 53).

“Years pass…I realize…that I am never going to be a boy now. I don’t know exactly why. I sense that things have slid too far, from some ideal starting point” (1, p. 55).

“I went to school, taking my knights…I was a small pale girl…but I had a head stuffed full of chivalric epigrams, and the self-confidence that comes from a thorough knowledge of horsemanship and swordplay” (1, pp. 56-57).

“I felt my man’s spirit aroused, my ardor clenching inside my chest like a fist within a mailed glove. Saddle my charger: I’ll canter up their street and decapitate him. My sword arm twitched…I was six…” (1, p. 83).

“I am seven, I have reached the age of reason…I had begun practicing as a parish priest at five years old…Girl could change to boy: though this had not happened to me, and I knew now it never would” (1, p. 86).

Comment: The above goes further than a typical tom boy or ordinary imaginative play, but not as far as transsexualism. Mantel does not describe getting into trouble for being too masculine, so she appears to have switched between male and female personalities, as appropriate.

Her male personality wondered why he could not look male, and thought it was just a matter of time. At age seven, Mantel gave up that hope, personally, but still felt that girls and boys could change into each other, since that had been her subjective experience.

Mantel does not say that she gave up hoping to become a boy because she no longer felt like a boy at times. So she evidently continued to have a male personality (in addition to her female personality), which probably has helped her to write male characters.

1. Hilary Mantel. Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir) [2003]. New York, Picador/John Macrae/Henry Holt, 2004.