Donna Tartt (post 6): Author says “Jekyll-Hyde” and “Peter Pan”—two multiple personality stories—make their way into all her books

“At thirteen, she read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which, she says, has made its way into all of her books, as has Peter Pan. ‘There’s something of Peter Pan in every single thing I’ve written. It’s there in everything, very, very deeply. Peter Pan was the first book I loved that I read to myself. It was a drug, an altered state of consciousness. You weren’t at your school. You were really somewhere else.’ ” https://bookstr.com/list/i-heart-donna-tartt-10-facts-about-mysterious-author-of-the-goldfinch/

Does Tartt realize that both of them are multiple personality stories? Many people do realize that Jekyll-Hyde is a multiple personality story, but most people do not realize that Peter Pan is, too.

Peter Pan is the story of a prepubescent boy who never grows up. The only place where such a boy exists is in multiple personality, where child-aged alternate personalities are child-aged, because they originate in the person’s childhood, are frozen in time, remain the same age, and never grow up.

“The Patron Saint of Liars” by Ann Patchett (post 3): The story of protagonist’s dissociative fugue, a symptom of multiple personality

Plot

Rose, a married young woman, is shocked to find she is pregnant. Without informing her husband of her pregnancy or plans, she drives out-of-state to a home for unwed mothers, where she marries the groundskeeper, they raise her daughter, Cecilia, and Rose takes over as chief institutional cook.

About fifteen years later, Rose’s first husband, having finally discovered her whereabouts, arrives to inform Rose that her mother has died. But since he had sent Rose a letter saying that he was coming, she has already driven away to parts unknown (perhaps to start a third life story).

Dissociative Fugue

This psychological symptom is seen in persons with multiple personality. In a typical scenario, an adult who has just had a psychological shock travels to a location where people don’t know her and establishes a new life under a new identity, since she has amnesia for her former identity. 

At first glance, the plot here would seem atypical in that Rose still knows her name is Rose, but if she had seen herself as the very same Rose who was already married, would she have committed bigamy? Apparently, there were two “Rose” personalities, the first Rose, who liked nothing better than to drive her car to various and sundry places, and the second Rose who liked nothing better than to be the head cook at a home for unwed mothers.

Rose has dissociative amnesia, but describes it in her own words:

“I’m not like you,” she said quietly. “I don’t think about things the way you do…You think I’m holding things in, fighting them back. The truth is, I don’t ever think about the past…I’d do just about anything in the world to avoid thinking about it. The past should stay behind you, where it belongs” (1, pp. 328-329).

Comment

Since Rose calls herself a “liar for the rest of my life” (1, p. 13), and the title of the novel highlights “liars,” the author may have thought of her, not as having multiple personality, but as a liar. People with unrecognized multiple personality are often thought of as liars.

For previous discussions, search “lying” and “dissociative fugue.”

1. Ann Patchett. The Patron Saint of Liars [1992]. New York, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

“The Patron Saint of Liars” by Ann Patchett (post 2): Rose reports a memory gap for her first wedding

I have just finished the first 130-page section of this novel, which is narrated by Rose, the married, pregnant young woman, who, in the previous post, was noted to have temporarily forgotten how to drive a car.

Now, at the end of her section of the novel, Rose has another temporary mental disturbance. She wanders out into freezing, snowy weather, inadequately clothed, and is saved from hypothermia and frostbite by the handyman of the home for unwed mothers where she has been staying (still pregnant). She then insists on marrying the handyman later that same day.

Rose’s wandering into freezing weather is regarded as due to temporary insanity, and her insistence on marrying the handyman that same day as amazing impulsiveness. She even admits she doesn’t love the handyman, any more than she loves her husband, to whom she is still legally married.

A rave review of this novel noted its illogic, but called it an endearing fairy tale. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/books/a-sense-of-the-miraculous.html

Actually, there is a way to explain Rose’s behavior, because she has a memory gap, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality. On her way to getting married that evening, she says: “I was getting married. I tried to remember something about my first wedding, but I couldn’t, not even the dress I wore” (1, p. 136).

Later, during the marriage ceremony, she does find that some of the words are familiar—“Dearly beloved. Honor and obey” etc.—but that is all. In short, she has a memory gap for most of a major event in her life—her first wedding—which (like her temporarily forgetting how to drive) suggests the presence of separate memory banks in alternate personalities.

1. Ann Patchett. The Patron Saint of Liars [1992]. New York, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

“The Patron Saint of Liars” by Ann Patchett: Protagonist’s two names, her inconsistent driving skills, and declaration she is a liar

In the first fifty pages of Patchett’s first novel, the first-person narrator and protagonist is introduced as a young woman with two names, who loves to drive a car, and declares she is a liar.

Two Names

Her first and middle names are “Martha Rose,” but she is always called “Rose.” She explains: “It was my father who wanted to name me Rose…My mother settled on Martha…So I was Martha Rose, Martha until my father died and Rose after that” (1, p. 38). Her father died from injuries in a car accident when she was three years old.

Why does Patchett make an issue of the character’s two names? Do they represent two personalities?

Driving Skill

Rose loved to drive, had to drive, because “I had found a tightness in my chest. Some nights it woke me up, and I would lie there, taking shallow breaths…The only time it seemed to go away was when I was driving” (1, p. 31).

When she found out she was pregnant, but didn’t want to have a child or remain married, she decided not to tell her husband or her mother of her pregnancy or where she was going, but simply planned to drive far away, out of state, to a home for unwed mothers.

The peculiar inconsistence of her driving skills is notable: “After I left the doctor’s office, after he had shaken my hand and said congratulations, I drove the car out onto the freeway and couldn’t remember how to drive. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel…I kept thinking, someone is going to open the passenger side door and tell me what to do…but no one came” (1, pp. 33-34).

In multiple personality, alternate personalities may differ in their skills. One personality may know how to drive, but another personality may not. Did the author know this about multiple personality? Or had she experienced puzzling changes in her own skills?

Liar

This is the protagonist’s first line in the novel: “I was somewhere outside of Ludlow, California, headed due east toward Kentucky, when I realized that I would be a liar for the rest of my life” (1, p. 13). And the title of the novel is The Patron Saint of Liars. I don’t yet know Patchett’s reason for highlighting the issue of lying.

My interest in lying is its relation to multiple personality. Persons with multiple personality may be thought of as liars when their alternate personalities contradict each other, or make up fanciful stories, or when one personality denies doing something that another personality has been seen doing. Search “lying” for past discussions of this recurring topic.

1. Ann Patchett. The Patron Saint of Liars [1992]. New York, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

from August 6, 2015

Nabokov’s "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography" reports memory gaps and dissociative fugues seen in multiple personality

In the summer of 1914, when Nabokov was fifteen, a “numb fury of verse-making first came over me” (1, p. 167). It was when “my first poem began” (1, p. 168).

“…On the physical plane, my intense labors were marked by a number of dim actions or postures, such as walking, sitting, lying…Each of these broke into fragments…for instance, I might be wandering one moment in the depths of the park and the next pacing the rooms of the house. Or, to take the sitting stage, I would suddenly become aware that a plate of something I could not even remember having sampled was being removed and that my mother, her left cheek twitching as it did whenever she worried, was narrowly observing from her place at the top of the long table my moodiness and lack of appetite. I would lift my head to explain — but the table had gone, and I was sitting alone on a roadside stump, the stick of my butterfly net, in metronomic motion, drawing arc after arc on the brownish sand…

“When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die, there came the most trancelike state of all. With hardly a twinge of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather’s study. On that couch I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm dangling, so that my knuckles loosely touched the floral figures of the carpet. When next I came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still there, my arm was still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the edge of a rickety wharf, and the water lilies I touched were real…I relapsed into my private mist, and when I emerged again, the support of my extended body had become a low bench in the park…

“…when the old trance occurs nowadays, I am quite prepared to find myself, when I awaken from it, high up in a certain tree, above the dappled bench of my boyhood, my belly pressed agains a thick, comfortable branch and one arm hanging down among the leaves upon which the shadows of other leaves move” (1, pp. 172-173).

[That first poem] “was indeed a miserable concoction…In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing…’How wonderful, how beautiful,’ [my mother] said, and with the tenderness in her smile still growing she passed me a hand mirror so that I might see the smear of blood on my cheekbone where at some indeterminable time I had crushed a gorged mosquito by the unconscious act of propping my cheek on my fist. But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass” (1, pp. 175-177).

People with multiple personality have memory gaps because one personality has amnesia for the periods of time that another personality was out. For further discussions of that, search memory gap(s) and dissociative fugue in this blog.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited [1947/1967]. Introduction by Brian Boyd. New York, Everyman’s Library, 1999.

Authorial Intent in “Last Things” by Jenny Offill (post 2): Author says she and other writers know next to nothing about their own books

How do I know my interpretations in the previous post are what the author intended? Not only don’t I know, but I assume that my interpretations are not what she intended, because I don’t think most literary novelists actually have clearcut intentions or fully understand the psychological implications of their scenarios.

Authorial intent is debatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent

Jenny Offill, herself, says it is a “trade secret: writers know next to nothing about their own books” https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/a-micro-interview-with-jenny-offill

She may be exaggerating, but she is not lying.

“Last Things” by Jenny Offill: In author’s first novel, the two main characters have unacknowledged multiple personality

The two main characters are Grace, an eight-year-old girl (retrospective first-person narrator) and her thirty-five-year-old mother, who is fluent in several real and invented languages.

Note: It is not crazy to invent languages. J. R. R. Tolkien said he wrote The Lord of the Rings in order to use languages he had invented; see past posts.

One review liked Offill’s novel (1), another didn’t (2), but since neither had the perspective of multiple personality, neither fully understood it.

I will apply that perspective to one passage about each character.

Mother

“My mother knew five languages by heart and could dream in three. Her father had been a linguist and once she had wanted to be one too. Sometimes she spent all night translating what one person in her dream said to another. When she woke up, she was so tired she could barely speak. That was why she slept all day and wandered around the house at night” (3, p. 6).

If she had actually been asleep all night, she wouldn’t have slept all the next day. So she had either been awake all night or in a so-called “waking sleep,” which is a trance state, not true sleep.

If a person with multiple personality speaks several languages, then it is likely that she will have alternate personalities who speak different languages and cannot understand each other. So the mother’s regular personality was acting as translator for her alternate personalities who had things to say to each other.

Girl

“Mrs. Carr [the girl’s school teacher] regretted to inform her [mother] that I was an incorrigible thief. She told how I had stolen the pennies our class had collected for the Ethiopians. Also a ruler, two finger puppets, thirty-four gold stars, and a box of paper clips. Despite repeated explanations, Grace [the girl] seems unable to grasp the concept of private property, Mrs. Carr wrote” (3, p. 76).

It is improbable that an eight-year-old girl of normal intelligence would be unable to grasp the concept of private property or that she would be motivated to steal those things. But a younger alternate personality would have been unable to grasp the concept, might have been interested in taking such things, and might have had a memory gap for what Mrs. Carr had said to Grace’s regular personality.

1. Publishers Weekly. Last Things by Jenny Offill. Starred review March 29, 1999. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-18405-6

2. Bob Wake. Last Things by Jenny Offill. CultureVulture. https://culturevulture.net/books-cds/last-things/

3. Jenny Offill. Last Things. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999.

“Y is for Yesterday” by Sue Grafton (post 7): Why did Kinsey Millhone have memory gaps and hear voices “chatter,” “babbling” in her head?

“My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a female private investigator, aged thirty-nine, living and working in this Southern California town ninety-five miles north of Los Angeles. I’m also single and cranky-minded to hear some people tell it” (1, p. 13).

Kinsey is neither mentally ill nor alcoholic nor abusing substances. She is both well organized and intuitive.

Therefore, the following seem out of character and require explanation:

“I closed my eyes, hoping to quiet the chatter in my head. It’s difficult to tune into that sixth sense with all that babbling that goes on” (1, p. 239).

“What seemed odd to me later was that I couldn’t reconstruct the sequence of events and conversations with any continuity. I remembered most of it, but there were gaps…” (1, p. 271).

Why did Kinsey hear voices conversing in her head and have memory gaps? And what are these things doing in this novel?

Psychiatrists once thought that hearing voices conversing in your head was a so-called “first rank” symptom, highly diagnostic of the psychosis, schizophrenia. But it is now recognized that voices conversing are usually the voices of alternate personalities, and are usually a symptom of the nonpsychotic condition, multiple personality.

Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, caused by the amnesia that one personality has for the period of time that another personality had taken over.

But since Kinsey is not portrayed as having multiple personality, and since the plot has nothing to do with multiple personality, how did conversing voices and memory gaps get into this novel?

As discussed in past posts, the author had multiple personality, which she once started to discuss in a television interview, but the interviewer wasn’t interested.

1. Sue Grafton. Y is for Yesterday. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017.

“Dust Tracks on a Road” (autobiography) by Zora Neale Hurston (post 2): Visions given to host personality by alternate personality while host is asleep

The best-known way for an alternate personality to communicate with the regular, host personality, is to speak as a voice in the host’s head. Another way is for the alter to put images in the host’s mind, either when the host is awake or asleep.

As an alternate personality once said, “I show her [the host personality] images a lot, even while she’s awake, of memories and things I feel and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she’s dreaming” (1, p. 77).

“Visions”

Here is how Zora Neale Hurston distinguished between her regular dreams and her “visions”: “I do not know when the visions began. Certainly I was not more than seven years old…There was no continuity as in an average dream. Just disconnected scene after scene with blank spaces in between…These visions would return at irregular intervals. Sometimes two or three nights running. Sometimes weeks and months apart. I had no warning. I went to bed and they came…I never told anyone around me about these strange things. It was too different. They would laugh me off as a story-teller…Oh, how I cried out to be just like everybody else! But the voice said no” (2, pp. 41-43).

1. Deirdre Barrett. “Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder,” pages 68-81 in Trauma and Dreams, edited by Deirdre Barrett. Harvard University Press, 1996.

2. Zora Neale Hurston. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1942, 2006.

“The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides: Title Character’s Unacknowledged Symptoms of Multiple Personality

Alicia is mute since killing her husband. And she’s sometimes heard a voice with a will of its own that could direct her behavior, making it an alternate personality. Moreover, she has had memory gaps for a huge part of her life:

“Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband” (1, p. 5)…“the years passed—and still Alicia didn’t speak” (1, p. 12)…“But if I’m really paying attention [Alicia writes in her diary, in relation to her creativity as a painter], really aware, I sometimes hear a whispering voice pointing me in the right direction. And if I give in to it, as an act faith, it leads me somewhere unexpected, not where I intended…and the result is independent of me, with a life force of its own” (1, p. 57)…“I don’t remember much of the walk…I don’t want to admit the truth to myself—that a huge part of my life is missing” (1, p. 119).

Alternate personalities and memory gaps are the two cardinal symptoms of multiple personality.

What about her mutism? Is mutism ever seen in multiple personality (aka dissociative identity disorder)? Yes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7649956

1. Alex Michaelides. The Silent Patient. New York, Celadon Books, 2019.

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston: Henry Louis Gates Jr. invokes “double consciousness,” which is multiple personality

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a classic African-American novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a literary critic, historian, and public intellectual who is University Professor and Director of African American Research at Harvard University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_Jr.

“Double Consciousness”

In an Afterword to the novel, Professor Gates invokes the concept of “double consciousness”:

“…she constantly shifts back and forth between her ‘literate’ narrator’s voice and a highly idiomatic black voice found in wonderful passages of free indirect discourse. Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly…to chart Janie’s [the protagonist’s] coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of ‘double consciousness’ for the hyphenated African-American” (1, Afterword, p. 203).

“…the term itself had a long history by the time Du Bois published his essay in 1897…In using the term ‘double consciousness,’ Du Bois drew on two main sources. One of these was European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. The other…was initially medical, carried forward into Du Bois’s time by the emerging field of psychology. Here the term ‘double consciousness’ was applied to cases of split personality; by the late nineteenth century, it had come into quite general use not only in professional publications but also in discussions of psychological research published for general audiences as well…

“In 1817, in a New York professional journal called the Medical Repository, an account headed ‘A Double Consciousness, or a Duality of Person in the same Individual’ made use of the term in a way that remained fairly constant for psychology through the nineteenth century. The account was of a young woman—later identified as Mary Reynolds—who at about age nineteen fell into a deep sleep from which she awoke with no memory of who she was and with a wholly different personality. A few months later, after again falling into a deep sleep, she awoke as her old self. At the time of the 1817 account, she had periodically alternated selves for a period of about four years. As it turned out, this was to continue for about fifteen or sixteen years in total, until in her mid-thirties she permanently entered the second state. Her two lives were entirely separate; while in one, she had no knowledge or memory of the other. Such utter distinctiveness of the two selves was what made the editors of the Medical Repository refer to hers as a case of ‘double consciousness.’

“As a result of the Mary Reynolds case, the term ‘double consciousness’ entered into fairly extensive use. For example, Francis Wayland's influential mid-nineteenth-century textbook Elements of Intellectual Philosophy treated the concept of double consciousness as part of a general discussion of consciousness as such and recounted the Mary Reynolds case along with a few others by way of illustration. An 1860 article in Harper's also focused on the Reynolds case and on double consciousness as a medical and philosophical issue. As a medical term, then, it was hardly confined to the use of medical professionals.

“During the time Du Bois was formulating his ideas of African American distinctiveness, there had been renewed interest in double consciousness as a medical and theoretical issue. Most important for Du Bois was the role of his Harvard mentor William James. James stimulated this interest, not only in his Principles—in describing what he called ‘alternating selves’ or ‘primary and secondary consciousness,’ he drew on a body of contemporary French work which had been widely publicized in the United States as well—but also as a result of his own experience about 1890 with a notable American case of double consciousness, that of Ansel Bourne. James's work with Bourne (whose discoverer, Richard Hodgson, did use ‘double consciousness’ to label the case), as well as the American publication of the French studies on which James drew, occurred at the same time Du Bois's relationship with James was at its closest. Whether James and Du Bois talked about it at the time is impossible to say, but based on Du Bois's use of ‘double consciousness’ in his Atlantic essay he certainly seems to have known the term's psychological background, because he used it in ways quite consistent with that background” (2).

Protagonist’s Duality

“Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody [her husband], while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and clothes…This was the first time it happened, but after a while it got so common she ceased to be surprised” (1, p. 77).

Novel’s Last Line

“She called in her soul to come and see” (1, p. 193).

A subjectively experienced entity that behaves like a person—it could respond to an invitation and can “come and see”—would be an alternate personality.

1. Zora Neale Hurston. Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

2. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/283f/af8d6260742990695f6c0177117fd383e802.pdf