“Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (post 1): Aurora describes how multiple personality may start in childhood with trances and voices

As I have just started this verse novel, I don’t yet know if Aurora, the first-person protagonist, will show symptoms of multiple personality when she grows up. But what she describes at ages four and thirteen could be a poet’s description of multiple personality’s childhood origin.

Aurora is four years old when her mother dies. There is a portrait of her mother, which Aurora stares at for hours at a time. And for a four-year-old to stare at something for hours at a time suggests that she goes into trances, which is a clue that a child may be developing multiple personality. Here are excerpts:

“The painter drew it after she was dead…

                …I, a little child would crouch

For hours upon the floor with knees drawn up,

And gaze across them, half in terror, half

In adoration, at the picture there,…

For hours I sate [sic] and stared…

                …And as I grew

In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,

Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed…

With still that face…

                …All which images,

Concentrated on the picture, glassed themselves

Before my meditative childhood…

…I stared away my childish wits

Upon my mother’s picture, (ah, poor child!)…” (1, pp. 9-10).

At age thirteen, after her father dies, she takes heart when she hears voices:

“Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up

More slowly than I verily write now,

But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide

The window and my soul…

And so…we hide our eyes

And think all ended. - Then, Life calls to us

In some transformed, apocalyptic voice,

Above us, or below us, or around:

Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, Loves’s,…

Still, Life’s voice! - still we make our peace with Life” (1, pp. 24-25).

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh [1856/1859]. Edited by Margaret Reynolds. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton, 1996.