“Middlemarch” (post 6) by George Eliot (post 17): On the stage of Dorothea’s mind, “Anger” and “Shadowy Monitor” are two actors or personalities

“She was in the reaction of a rebellious anger stronger than any she had felt since her marriage. Instead of tears there came [quotable] words:—

“ ‘What have I done—what am I—that he should treat me so? He never knows what is in my mind—he never cares. What is the use of anything I do? He wishes he had never married me.’

“She [another part of herself] began to hear [the angry part of] herself, and was checked into stillness…

“Her anger said, as anger is apt to say…

“Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle [personified “parts” arguing with each other is typical of multiple personality]…That thought with which Dorothea had gone out to meet her husband—her conviction that he had been asking [Dr. Lydgate] about the possible arrest of all his work [by death from heart disease], and that the answer must have wrung his heart, could not be long without rising beside the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking at her anger with sad remonstrance” (1, pp. 399-400).

Comment

Readers and literary critics, who assume that the above personifications are nothing but literary metaphor, neglect the fact that the author was a person with self-acknowledged “double consciousness” (see prior posts).

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.