Window of Diagnosability in “Bleak House” (post 7) by Charles Dickens: Esther is acutely distressed when several of her personalities clash during a personal crisis

Multiple personalities are usually hidden even from the person herself, which is one reason that the diagnosis is usually missed except during a “window of diagnosability,” such as a personal crisis. Esther’s crisis is smallpox. Her personalities as a child, an older girl, and as a woman clash.

“While I was very ill, the way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another, distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them. I suppose that few who have not been in such a condition can quite understand what I mean, or what painful unrest arose from this source” (1, p. 555).

1. Charles Dickens. Bleak House [1853]. London, Penguin Books, 2003.