“Middlemarch” (post 2) by George Eliot (post 12): Narrator inadvertently, gratuitously, implies Fred has alternate personality, double consciousness

Fred, an unambitious spendthrift, lives on handouts from his uncle, who has just given Fred another hundred pounds. Now that he has gotten the money, Fred is eager to leave the scene as quickly as possible, but he hesitates. Why? Which of the following is the narrator’s explanation?

1. He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little ashamed to run away immediately after pocketing the money.

2. He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little ashamed in front of his uncle to run away immediately after pocketing the money.

3. He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little ashamed before his inner self, as well as before his uncle, to run away immediately after pocketing the money.

4. He longed to get out of the room, but his conscience made him hesitate to run away immediately after pocketing the money.

The answer is not 4, because taking the money did not violate Fred’s conscience. Fred felt that he was entitled to the money. Indeed, he probably felt that it was shameful for his uncle to give him only 100 pounds, when he needed more to pay his debts and expenses, and his uncle could well have afforded it.

The correct answer is: “He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little ashamed before his inner self, as well as before his uncle, to run away immediately after pocketing the money” (1, p. 127).

Note that the way the sentence is structured, “his inner self” is treated the same as “his uncle”; that is, as a discrete psychological entity in its own right, before which Fred is ashamed to run away immediately.

But since “inner self” uses the same body as Fred’s regular self, it is not another person: it is an alternate personality. And why would George Eliot’s narrator casually assume that a normal character would have an alternate personality, unless a normal person, like the author, had one, too? Although, George Eliot would have thought of it as “double consciousness.”

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.