Jane Eyre (post 11): Did Jane have one episode of telepathy, or, as Saul Bellow, hear voices routinely? Bellow and Brontë probably had multiple personality

Professor John Sutherland notes that when Jane Eyre was far away from Rochester, she heard his voice say “Jane! Jane! Jane!” They would seem to have been communicating by telepathy. Sutherland speculates that telepathy might be possible if both people are in a mesmeric (trance, hypnotic) state simultaneously: “It is, as Jane protests, no ‘miracle’, but an accident produced by their fortuitously mesmerizing themselves at the same critical moment” (1, p. 65).

1. John Sutherland. The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

The two paragraphs below from Jane Eyre are easy to gloss over as simply two opposing thoughts, the first optimistic, the second pessimistic. And the first paragraph does end by suggesting that the next paragraph is a “thought” that “struck” out the previous thought. But this may be only a recognition that what was coming next was something that was also from inside her head.

Note that the two paragraphs are clearly from different points of view. In the first paragraph she says “My” and “I”; whereas, the second says “your” and “you,” and is “urged” by “the monitor,” which would seem to have a mind of its own (the essence of an alternate personality).

I follow the quote from Jane Eyre with a quote from an interview with the Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow, who says that he has his own monitor voice, which he calls the “commentator within.” Thus, hearing such voices—which, to the extent that they have minds of their own, are alternate personalties—are to be expected of novelists and their characters.

October 26, 2015

Jane Eyre (post 8): Jane gets suggestions from “the monitor”—Saul Bellow from the “commentator within”—only experienced by people with multiple personality

Near the end of Jane Eyre, Jane distinguishes between her own ideas and the suggestions she gets from “the monitor”:

     “ ‘My journey is closed,’ I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into the ostler’s charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my fair; satisfied the coachman, and was going: the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, ‘The Rochester Arms.’ My heart leapt up: I was already on my master’s very lands. It fell again: the thought struck it:—

     ‘Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you know: and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his presence. You have lost your labour—you had better go no further,’ urged the monitor. ‘Ask information of the people at the inn; they can give you all you seek: they can solve your doubts at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home.’

     The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on it…” (1, p. 360).

In Saul Bellow’s 1966 Paris Review interview, he says:

“I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated. When E. M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter…

“When I say the commentator is primitive, I don't mean that he's crude; God knows he's often fastidious. But he won't talk until the situation's right. And if you prepare the ground for him with too many difficulties underfoot, he won't say anything. I must be terribly given to fraud and deceit because I sometimes have great difficulty preparing a suitable ground. This is why I've had so much trouble with my last two novels. I appealed directly to my prompter. The prompter, however, has to find the occasion perfect—that is to say, truthful, and necessary. If there is any superfluity or inner falsehood in the preparations, he is aware of it…”

No, all people don’t have this. These personified, rational voices are the voices of alternate personalities. Only people with multiple personality may hear the voice of, and get suggestions from, a “monitor” or a “commentator within.”

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.

October 14, 2015

Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë: Brontë describes her creative process; Gaskell describes Brontë’s switch to talkative alternate personality

Alternate Personalities Dictate

“…imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?” (1, p. 255).

“When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them, which becomes their master—which will have its own way—putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully-elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is it not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?” (1, pp. 260-261).

Brontë Switches Personalities

At school in Brussels:

“…Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable. Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and well—on certain subjects; but before her tongue was thus loosened, she had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking” (1, p. 162).

When Switching Personalities:

“…Women will frequently turn their faces away, momentarily shield their faces with their hands, or let their hair fall over their faces during the moment of switching” (2, p. 121).

1. Elizabeth Gaskell. The Life of Charlotte Bronte [1857], Edited by Elisabeth Jay. Penguin Books, 1997.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.