“Villette” (post 3) by Charlotte Brontë (post 15): Protagonist Lucy Snowe has “two lives,” trance states, and switches back to being Lucy Snowe

“I seemed to hold two lives—the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter” (1, p. 77).

Most people feel like they are one person who has both private fantasies and practical thoughts. Persons with multiple personality may feel they have two (or more) ways of thinking and feeling that are so different it’s like different people.

“Oh, my childhood! I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future—such a future as mine—to be dead. And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature” (1, p. 109).

Her references to a problematic childhood, being suicidal, and trance states are not adequately explained, but such things are more common in persons with multiple personality.

“I never had felt so strange and contradictory an inward tumult as I felt for an hour that evening: soreness and laughter, and fire, and grief, shared my heart between them…However, that turmoil subsided: next day I was again Lucy Snowe” (1, p. 119).

She probably feels “strange and contradictory,” because of switching among conflicting alternate personalities, but by the next day, she has switched back to her regular personality, Lucy Snowe.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008.