“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