“The fractured self in Charlotte Brontë’s early manuscripts” by Professor Christine Alexander: Tracing multiple personality trait to childhood

Multiple personality begins in childhood. It perpetuates aspects of childhood cognition and imagination.

One approach to recognizing multiple personality in the childhood of fiction writers is to read their childhood writing, their juvenilia, when available. I will quote from a study by Professor of English, Christine Alexander.

“In the case of Charlotte Brontë…the narrative ‘I’ is splintered into multiple male voices…” (1, p. 154).

“…Using such tactics, Lord Charles [a character] plays with his Glass Town audience, he plays with us, the readers, and he plays with his own insubstantial identity, both as a narrator and as a player in the saga. There is no closure, no logical plot, no single narrative authority: the Brontë juvenilia can be seen as a precursor of the postmodern tendency to problematize time and the identity of self. There is…no unified writing self. Instead there is a fragmented narrative ‘I’ that manifests itself in a series of layers ranging from an assumed autobiographical ‘I’ through the mask of Chief Genii, to various narrative voices…” (1, p. 160).

“…From such examples, I would like to suggest that Charlotte Brontë had a very early conception of herself as necessarily a Fiction; a construct of fragmented voices that would vie for supremacy of her public persona in the real world throughout her life” (1, p. 161).

“The question of ‘Who am I?’ is finally one of existence, but it is also one of consciousness. What am I doing when I record the ‘airy phantoms’ of my imagination? What am I doing when I divide the self? Which part of me is real? The physical self or the imaginative self (or selves)? How can I reconcile the competing demands of each? Such questions reach back to Charlotte Brontë’s earliest juvenilia, large ontological questions that are not usually associated with children. Certainly the modernist fascination with the fragmentation of the experiencing subject (the narrative ‘I’) is anticipated by the young Brontës in their juvenilia. Perhaps children know these things instinctively and it is adults who forget them in their search for a coherent identity” (1, p. 169).

The only thing I would add to what the professor says is that Charlotte Brontë evidently had multiple personality trait since childhood.

Search “Bronte” and “Jane Eyre” for past posts.

1. Christine Alexander. “Autobiography and juvenilia: the fractured self in Charlotte Brontë’s early manuscripts.” Pages 154-172 in The Child Writer From Austen to Woolf. Edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (digitally printed version 2009).