Multiple Personality Misdiagnosed as Mental Retardation for 35 Years: A Case Report

ABSTRACT A woman was diagnosed as mentally retarded when she was five years of age and spent the next 35 years so classified. She also was considered schizophrenic. Incongruities in her clinical presentation ultimately led to the suspicion that she suffered multiple personality disorder. It was found that she had retreated into an adaptation consistent with the superficial manifest appearance of mental retardation, and that the intrusion of her dissociative psychopathology was mistaken for schizophrenia. Correctly diagnosed and treated, she has made noteworthy gains. Selected issues relevant to the misdiagnosis of MPD are discussed. 

Gail Atlas, A.C.S.W. Catherine G. Fine, Ph.D. Richard P. Kluft, M.D. Multiple Personality Disorder Misdiagnosed as Mental Retardation: A Case Report. DISSOCIATION 1:1, March 1988. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1335/Diss_1_1_10_OCR_rev.pdf?sequence=5

“Blaze” by Richard Bachman (post 2) (pseudonym of Stephen King) (post 17): Blaze kidnaps a baby, helped by George, his alternate personality

Blaze, the mentally handicapped “dummy,” manages to get into a gated community and kidnap a rich family’s baby. He is now back in his shack with the baby.

“What did he know about kids, anyway? He was just a dummy. He could barely take care of himself…

“George!” he cried [to his deceased friend]. “George, what should I do?”

"He was afraid George had gone away again, but George answered him from the bathroom. 'Feed him. Give him something from one of those jars' [that Blaze had stolen along with the baby] [Blaze does what he is told and the baby likes it]…

“One of Joe’s thumbs crept into his mouth and he began to suck it. At first Blaze thought he might want a bottle (and he hadn’t figured out the Playtex Nurser gadget yet), but for the time being the kid seemed content with his thumb…” [Note the normal use of parenthesis, unlike the oddly indented parentheses previously seen in King’s Carrie.]

"Blaze…turned away…and started for the bedroom.

“Hey dinkleballs,” George said from the bathroom. “Where do you think you are going?"

“To bed.”

“The hell you are. You’re going to figure out that bottle gadget and fix the kid four or five, for when he wakes up.”

“The milk might go sour.”

“Not if you put it in the fridge. You warm it up when you need it.”

“Oh” (1, pp 141-143).

Comment

As noted above, Bachman’s Blaze has had a normal parenthesis, in contrast to the oddly indented parentheses previously seen in King’s Carrie and The Dark Half. This is the most concrete textual marker I’ve noted to support the possibility that Richard Bachman and Stephen King are distinct personalities.

Blaze continues to get advice from the voice of what is, more and more obviously, an alternate personality, patterned after his deceased friend, George.

If this were real life, it is unlikely that Blaze would have gotten multiple personality for the first time as an adult, since this condition starts as a way to deal with a traumatic childhood. And indeed, Blaze has been described as having had a very traumatic childhood. So his multiple personality probably started then.

It is quite common to add additional alternate personalities, as needed, throughout the rest of life, as the person’s way of coping with a crisis. George’s death was one such crisis.

1. Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman). Blaze [1973/2007]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018.

Novelists tend to write things they have, which are usually alternate personalities, not ghosts

“Blaze” (post 1) by Richard Bachman (Stephen King) (post 16): In Chapter 1, Blaze appears to have multiple personality, not merely a bereavement ghost

I wanted to see what a Richard Bachman novel is like. Bachman wrote Blaze at about the same time that King wrote Carrie (1973).

Conventional Misinterpretation

“The story concerns Clayton Blaisdell Jr. (known as "Blaze" for short, thus the title), a mentally handicapped small-time con artist who kidnaps a wealthy gentleman's baby son, in the hopes of fulfilling the dreams of George Thomas Rackley, Blaze's deceased best friend and partner in crime and who continues to help him.” Genre: “Crime novel, ghost story” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaze_(novel)

First Chapter

It’s night, and Blaze can’t see George, who is “somewhere in the dark,” but hears and converses with George, who calls Blaze a “dummy” and advises him on how to go about stealing a car from the parking lot. “Not that one, you dummy, it’s got bumper stickers all over it. Get a Chevy or a Ford. Dark blue or green. Two years old. No more, no less. Nobody remembers them. And no stickers” (1, first page).

Once Blaze has gotten a stolen car ready to drive away, he decides he couldn’t leave without George. However, a different voice says (italics): “But George is dead. That was bullshit [Blaze thought]. George was just there. He went inside for a beer. He’s dead [the voice reaffirms]. ‘Oh, George,’ Blaze moaned. He was hunched over the wheel. ‘Oh, George, don’t be dead.” And the narrator confirms that George has been dead for three months. (1, p. 12).

Now, if the late George “continues to help him,” not only to steal a car, but to commit a kidnapping, as Wikipedia says he will, then George is not just a ghostly presence during bereavement, but an alternate personality with complex interactions. And as to being “mentally handicapped,” Blaze, as a person, cannot be less intelligent than his most intelligent alternate personality.

Moreover, there is a third, nameless personality: the one who says, “But George is dead.”

If literary criticism fails to recognize psychological, multiple personality stories, it may mistakenly lump them with supernatural, ghost stories.

1. Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman). Blaze [1973/2007]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018. 

“The Dark Half” (post 6) by Stephen King (post 15): Why is this story’s protagonist a novelist?

In the end, the good guy, Thad Beaumont, a novelist, defeats his evil, incarnated pseudonym, George Stark. At Thad’s prompting, thousands of birds kill George. “It’s like something out that Daphne du Maurier story" (1, p. 465), which also inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “The Birds.”

Stephen King could have written this kind of story with a protagonist who was not a novelist. It is not only novelists who might have a dark side. So why did he make Thad a novelist? He wanted to say that novelists are more likely to have another side that seems to be autonomous; that is, an alternate personality.

King was right (2, 3).

1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018.

2. Marjorie Taylor PhD, et al. The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own? Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

3. John Foxwell, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough, Angela Woods. ‘I’ve learned to treat my characters as people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices. Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 79, March 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810019304155 

“The Dark Half” (post 5) by Stephen King (post 14): Thad’s inner “part” is a nameless alternate personality, but the novel fails to recognize it as such

“Parts” (nameless personalities)

Thad, a novelist, seems not to know or think certain things, but a “part” of him apparently does.

Naming by Function

When an alternate personality is nameless, you need some way to refer to it. The usual way is by its most prominent attribute. That is what happens with Thad’s “part,” “the one who knows,” in the following puzzling passage:

“If the sparrows had guided George back from

(the land of the dead)

wherever he had been, how come George himself knew nothing about them?…

Question: Are the birds mine? [Thad asks.]

Answer: Yes.

Question: Who wrote about the sparrows?

Answer: The one who knows…I am the knower. I am the owner…

Question: Who brought George Stark back to life?

Answer: The owner. The knower.

“I didn’t mean to! [Thad] cried.

But was that true? Was that really? Hadn’t there always been a part of him in love with George Stark’s simple, violent nature?…

“Yes, but he’s a BASTARD!  Thad screamed…

Perhaps he, Thad Beaumont, had not really created George…but was it not possible that some longing part of him had allowed Stark to be recreated?…some Stark-loving part of him…that didn’t want George to die.

I am the knower, I am the owner. I am the bringer…” (1, pp. 392-393).

The sparrows—who fail to make the distinction between Thad’s regular, host personality and his alternate personality “part”—oversimplify when they tell Thad (host personality) that he, himself, is “the owner…the bringer…the knower,” but Thad (host personality) denies it, replying, “I don’t know jack shit” (1, p. 398).

Comment

The novelist-protagonist, Thad, has a violent, evil pseudonym, George, who refuses to have his novels discontinued; that is, George refuses to die. And there seems to be some kind of force at work to bring George back to life. The sparrows have an unclear role, since neither George nor Thad are sure who controls them. And when Thad asks who controls the sparrows and who brought George back to life, he gets a cryptic answer: the one who knows, owns, brings. For convenience, let’s call this knowing “part” of Thad The Knower.

The Knower is a part of Thad; however, it is a part of which Thad is not—or, at best, only vaguely—aware. It is a nameless alternate personality with which Thad is not co-conscious. It is all so puzzling, because the novel has not recognized the issue of multiple personality, per se.

Coincidentally, the above passage begins with one more example of Stephen King’s peculiarly indented parenthetical remarks, which I now tentatively attribute to The Knower, one of King’s nameless, knowing, alternate personalities.

1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018. 

“The Dark Half” (post 4) by Stephen King (post 13): “Who are you when you write, Thad? Who are you then?” And who whispered that question?

“…he was a writer, an imaginer. He had never met one—including himself—who had more than the vaguest idea of why he or she did anything. He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity…Inside him a voice whispered for the first time: Who are you when you write, Thad? Who are you then?” (1, p. 138).

And which alternate personality whispered that question? Was it Richard Bachman or another one?

1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018.

“The Importance of Being Bachman” by Stephen King (post 12): Essay on his pseudonym, an alternate personality

“Probably the most important thing I can say about Richard Bachman is that he became real. Not entirely, of course (he said with a nervous smile); I am not writing this in a delusive state. Except… well… maybe I am” (1).

1. Stephen King (1996). The Importance of Being Bachman. https://harveystanbrough.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Importance-of-Being-Bachman.pdf

“The Dark Half” (post 3) by Stephen King (post 11): Is the Author’s Note merely a joke? Or are S. K. and Stephen King different personalities?

In post 1 on The Dark Half, I quoted its Author’s Note, which immediately follows the title and dedication pages, but precedes the Prologue and the rest of the novel. The Author’s Note has its own page, and here it is in its entirety:

“AUTHOR’S NOTE

I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This novel could not have been written without him.

S. K.” (1)

“Richard Bachman” was the pseudonym used by Stephen King for a series of novels (2). Did the “late” Richard Bachman die after helping to write this novel, or are reports of his death greatly exaggerated?

Most readers assume that the author’s note, quoted above, is a joke. And since “Richard Bachman,” objectively speaking, was not a real person, it is a joke. But if Richard Bachman was one of Stephen King’s alternate personalities, it is not merely a joke.

And why is the author’s note signed? The book’s dedication is not signed. Both the unsigned dedication and the author’s note immediately follow the title page, which clearly gives the author’s name, "Stephen King." Don’t the words “author’s note” entail the author, as already given on the title page? Perhaps it is signed for some other reason.

And why is the “author’s note” signed with initials only? Most readers presume that “Stephen King” and “S. K.” mean the same thing. But any reader familiar with multiple personality knows that different personalities may be named with seemingly trivial variations of the person’s name (3, p. 116). These seemingly trivial differences in names help alternate personalities to appear in public, but pass as the regular, host personality, and remain incognito.

1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018.

2. Wikipedia. Richard Bachman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

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

“The Dark Half” (post 2) by Stephen King (post 10): Unknown narrator, using oddly indented parenthesis, implies “George Stark” had actually been buried

Chapter 3 takes place in the cemetery where People magazine had set up an imitation grave site to take a picture for their article on the “death” of the protagonist’s literary pseudonym. The inscription on the imitation headstone had been: GEORGE STARK, 1975-1988, Not a Very Nice Guy.

The cemetery’s gravedigger finds a hole at that site, where no grave had ever been dug and nobody had ever been buried. Even more puzzling, it looks like someone has dug his way out of that hole, and there are large footprints leading away from it; moreover, the gravedigger is told that a murder has been reported less than a mile away.

Still puzzling to me, this chapter again contains one of the author’s oddly indented parentheses, previously seen in Carrie (see Carrie posts):

“The fragments of footprints petered out less than twelve feet from the

    (grave)

    hole in the ground” (1, p. 51).

It appears that what the regular narrator refers to as a “hole,” some other narrator is calling a “grave,” implying that George Stark (the discontinued pseudonym) had actually been buried there.

In short, the pseudonymous alternate personality has gotten a literary incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection. And I’m still not sure who is communicating to the reader via the oddly indented parenthesis.

1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018. 

“The Dark Half” (post 1) by Stephen King (post 9): Novelist’s Pseudonym as Evil Twin (persecutor Alternate Personality)

In Chapter 1, Thad Beaumont, a tenured English professor, and his wife Liz are reading an article in People magazine about his discontinuing the use of his literary pseudonym, or, as the article puts it:

GEORGE STARK

1975-1988

Not a Very Nice Guy

Fifteen years after Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, he has stopped using oddly indented parentheses (see post 8) and is now using italics to indicate a character’s thoughts, but with this distinction: When it is the character’s own thoughts, it explicitly says “he thought” or “she thought.” But when the thoughts are from an alternate personality, they address the character as “you.” For example:

“You’re afraid of a goddam article in People magazine? Is that what you’re thinking? Dumb. Afraid of being embarrassed, of having your colleagues in the English Department look at those pictures and think you’ve lost the poor cracked handful of marbles you had?…Stop it, his mind ordered in the dry, stern tone that had a way of causing even the most obstreperous of his undergrad English students to fall pale and silent. Stop this foolishness right now” (1, p. 22).

This novel’s multiple personality foundation is more obvious than it was in Carrie. But in a Prologue to The Dark Half, it is explained away this way: Thad had had brain surgery at age eleven to remove the residual tissue of Thad’s twin, who had not been born. I expect that Thad’s pseudonym is really Thad’s twin, who had not been successfully eliminated by the brain surgery, who still refuses to be done away with, and is not a very nice guy.

Before the novel’s Prologue, there is an Author’s Note by Stephen King: “I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This novel could not have been written without him.” Richard Bachman was Stephen King’s pseudonym for a series of novels (2).

1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018.

2. Wikipedia. “Richard Bachman” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman 

Schizophrenia in “The Man Who Lived Underground” according to “Memories of My Grandmother” (author’s essay) by Richard Wright (post 5)

In my previous four posts on Richard Wright’s classic African-American novel, Native Son (1) (search “native son”), I found that the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, has unacknowledged multiple personality (a dissociative disorder, not a psychosis like schizophrenia).

In contrast, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s novel, The Man Who Lived Underground (2), has schizophrenia (a psychosis), according to the author:

“I’d like to go into detail on this point, for in the writing of The Man Who Lived Underground, this kinship of insanity and religion intrigued me more, perhaps, than anything else. As I wrote page after page I was reminded of many psychiatric case histories of schizophrenic personalities. More and more, as the story progressed, I felt the writing to be a good emotional description of schizophrenia…First, I noticed that Fred Daniels was withdrawn from the world; second, that he suffered a loss of contact with reality in a hard and sharp sense; third, that there was a gradual disintegration of his personality. Yet, while noticing this, I also noticed that this whole idea of a man withdrawing from the world had a striking similarity to the life of my grandmother, who, in her religious life, was certainly withdrawn from the world as much as anybody has ever been withdrawn from it…[Although] my grandmother was surely a sane woman…that is, she was adjusted to her environment…[she] heard voices; she imagined things, too. I imagine that the reason no one ever called her crazy was that everyone who lived around her was acting more or less the same way. When I, in my childhood, told my grandmother that I could not see things or hear voices, I was branded the crazy one in the environment” (2, pp. 201-204).

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

2. Richard Wright. The Man Who Lived Underground [written 1942] and Memories of My Grandmother [written 1942]. New York, Library of America, 2021.

Added same day: Richard Wright was an advocate for mental health services in Harlem (New York) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafargue_Clinic

“Carrie” (post 2) by Stephen King (post 8): Carrie’s “parts” and oddly indented, parenthetical “voices”; and oddly indented, parenthetical chorus 

Carrie’s “Part”

“Part of her was actually convinced that all this was a dream from which she would wake with mixed feelings of loss and relief” (1, p. 193).

Reader, while awake, have you ever had an independent-minded part of you who was “actually convinced” that you were dreaming, even though the rest of your mind had no doubt that you were awake?

Only two different personalities in a person with multiple personality could have such contradictory views of reality.

Carrie’s Oddly Indented “Voice”

“…only the voice had said

(my god that’s blood)

something too awful to be contemplated” (1, p. 216).

The text of this novel has many similar, oddly indented, parenthetical remarks, but they are usually not preceded by an explicit indication of their source, such as being a voice heard by Carrie, as in this case.

When a voice is heard by Carrie, it is probably one of her alternate personalities.

Alternate Personality Chorus

When the source of many of the novel’s oddly indented, parenthetical remarks is not clear, it might be one of Carrie’s alternate personalities, or an alternate personality of another character, or voices of an anonymous, alternate personality chorus.

Comment

Carrie is King’s first published novel. It takes the pseudoscientific position that Carrie has a genetic, inherited ability (of telekinesis). But in later years, as quoted in some of my past posts on the writing process, King expresses a psychological view compatible with the theory here.

As to his oddly indented parentheses in Carrie, it may have been his tentative solution for what other authors have used italics—to indicate the thoughts and voices of alternate personalities—which King sometimes also uses.

1. Stephen King. Carrie [1974]. New York, Anchor Books, 2011. 

“Carrie” (post 1) by Stephen King (post 7): Multiple personality story in which telekinesis is evidently a power of protagonist’s protector personality

The most common reading of this novel is that Carrie, a graduating high school senior, “uses her newly discovered telekinetic powers to exact revenge on those who torment her” (1).

“Telekinesis is the ability to move objects or to cause changes in objects by force of the mind” (2, p. 50). It is a pseudoscientific idea (3).

But Carrie’s telekinetic powers are newly discovered only from the point of view of her regular, host personality, who had had a memory gap for the telekinetic powers, evidently powers of an alternate personality, present since early childhood:

“And now, seemingly unbidden—like the knowledge of menstruation—a score of memories had come, as if some mental dam had been knocked down so that strange waters could gush forth. They were cloudy, distorted little-girl memories, but very real for all that. Making the pictures dance on the walls; turning on the water faucets from across the room; Momma asking her (carrie shut the windows it’s going to rain) to do something and windows suddenly banging down all over the house; giving Miss Macaferty four flat tires all at once by unscrewing the valves in the tires of her Volkswagen…but now there was no denying the memory…and something flexed, not flex but FLEX, something huge and unformed and titanic, a wellspring of power that was not hers…Then she had fainted herself. And after that there were no more memories. Momma did not speak of it. The butcher knife was back in its drawer…” (2, pp. 108-110).

A memory gap is a cardinal symptom of multiple personality (search “memory gaps”). However, in the novel so far, it does not appear that the author intended the story to have anything to do with multiple personality, per se. So why is the memory gap included? It may be another example of gratuitous multiple personality, meaning that it is in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology.

1. Wikipedia. “Carrie (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_(novel)

2. Stephen King. Carrie [1974]. New York, Anchor Books, 2011.

3. Wikipedia. “Psychokinesis.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychokinesis 

“House of Seven Gables” (post 2) by Hawthorne (post 6): At the end, Clifford is quickly recalled to life, like Dr. Manette in Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities”

Clifford’s rather sudden recovery from his puzzlingly inconsistent, childlike imbecility, tends to support my diagnosis of multiple personality. But why would Hawthorne give Clifford this condition?

Although it is possible for persons with multiple personality since childhood to commit crimes and go to prison (1), people do not get multiple personality from being imprisoned as adults.

So why do Hawthorne and Dickens make the same mistake, and imagine that Clifford and Dr. Manette could get multiple personality from being imprisoned as adults?

Because Hawthorne and Dickens were fiction writers, and multiple personality was their thing.

1. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, MD., et al. Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder. American J Psychiatry, Dec 1, 1997. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703

“The House of the Seven Gables” (post 1) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (post 5): Clifford may have unacknowledged multiple personality like Dickens’ Dr. Manette 

A third of the way into this 1851 novel, a character has been introduced who reminds me of Dr. Manette in Dickens’ 1859 A Tale of Two Cities. Both characters are released after many years in prison. Dr. Manette had a clear-cut case of multiple personality disorder (search “manette”).

The Hawthorne character, Clifford Pyncheon, the guest of his sister and cousin in the house of the seven gables, has just been released from a long imprisonment for a murder he did not commit. In his introductory chapter, he has radical, moment-to-moment changes in his personality, which may mean that he is switching from one personality to another.

“Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figure—a substantial emptiness…Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering…It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and was doing its best…to light up intellectual lamps…” (1, p. 105).

“In a little while, the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet untasted coffee. He quaffed it eagerly…a certain fine temper of being was now…betrayed—of which it was the function to deal with all beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness…Such a man would have nothing to do with sorrow…” (1, pp. 107-108).

“But the several moods of feeling…through which he passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had evidently wearied the stranger…He appeared to become grosser; almost cloddish. If aught of interest or beauty…had heretofore been visible in this man, the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own imagination of deluding him…” (1, pp. 111-112).

Comment

At first, you may think Clifford just needed some coffee, which he eagerly drinks. His mood brightens. He appreciates beauty and enjoyable things. But his mood and attitude is soon so changed, you wonder if you had imagined it.

Puzzling inconsistency (search it) may be a clue to undiagnosed, unacknowledged, multiple personality. But I am not expecting Hawthorne to be as clear about Clifford as Dickens is about Dr. Manette.

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The House of the Seven Gables [1851]. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Davitt Bell. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.

“Middlemarch” (post 10) by George Eliot (post 21): Complete quotation of the novel's joke on authorship as being “always done by somebody else”

Why shouldn’t the following passage from the novel’s Finale be taken at face value, as nothing more than a humorous way to report what eventually happened to these two characters?

“All who have cared for Fred Vincy and Mary Garth will like to know that these two made no such failure, but achieved a solid mutual happiness. Fred surprised his neighbors in various ways. He became rather distinguished in his side of the county as a theoretic and practical farmer, and produced a work on the ‘Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding’ which won him congratulations at agricultural meetings. In Middlemarch admiration was more reserved: most persons there were inclined to believe that the merit of Fred’s authorship was due to his wife, since they had never expected Fred Vincy to write on turnips and mangel-wurzel.

“But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called ‘Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch,’ and had it printed and published by Gripp & Co., Middlemarch, every one in the town was willing to give the credit of this work to Fred, observing that he had been to the University, ‘where the ancients were studied,’ and might have been a clergyman if he had chosen.

“In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived, and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else” (1, p. 779).

Comment

First, for fiction writers, authorship and the creative process is one of the most serious things in their life. Second, as documented in past posts, George Eliot acknowledged having “double consciousness,” which means she had the subjective experience of having more than one thinker in her mind. Therefore, the issue as to which of these thinkers should get the praise and credit for her writing, was, to her, an unresolved puzzle and no joking matter.

1. George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]. Middlemarch [A Study of Provincial Life] [1872]. Edited with Notes by David Carroll. With an Introduction by David Russell. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Added April 16: By the time Middlemarch was published, readers felt that they were not to be deceived by the pseudonym, “George Eliot,” and they gave credit for authorship to Mary Ann Evans. But the author may have kept using “George Eliot” on her books, because that was the collective name for her writing personalities, and her Mary Ann Evans personality had relatively little to do with it.