George Eliot: Recollections by Herbert Spencer, who encouraged her to write novels, but she complained of double consciousness

Spencer, "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century” (Wikipedia) and Marian Evans (George Eliot) were friends. He recalls her fondly:

“In presence of so much that is familiar concerning her powers and her character, as displayed in her works and delineated in biographies, it seems scarcely needful for me to say anything. Still, an account of her as she appeared during early days, when she was as yet unaffected by the incidents of her later life, may be of value as contributing to a complete estimate…

“She complained of being troubled by double consciousness—a current of self-criticism being an habitual accompaniment of anything she was saying or doing…Most active minds have, I presume, more or less frequent experiences of double consciousness—one consciousness seeming to take note of what the other is about, and to applaud or blame. Of late years various evidences have made me lean more and more to the belief in what has been called ‘the duality of the mind’…

“An extraordinarily good memory and great quickness of apprehension made acquisition of every kind easy…her constructive imagination, remarkably displayed though it was in the creation of characters and the representation of mental states, did not serve her so well in other directions. She did not devise satisfactory plots…however, her philosophical powers were remarkable…

“It was, I presume, her lack of self-confidence which led her, in those days, to resist my suggestion that she should write novels…She did not believe she had the required powers…

“Of course, as we were frequently seen together, people drew their inferences…There were reports that I was in love with her, and that we were about to be married. But neither of these reports was true” (1, pp. 457-462).

Comment

Herbert Spencer incompletely understood the term “double consciousness” as it was used in psychology throughout the nineteenth century. It was a synonym for multiple personality:

“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”' (2).

Of course, Mary Reynolds had clinical, multiple personality disorder, not multiple personality trait, found in great fiction writers. And what George Eliot initially thought to be a problem, turned out to be an asset.

1. Herbert Spencer. An Autobiography. Volume 1. New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1904.

2. Dickson D. Bruce Jr. “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/souls/brucepg.html