“The Mysteries of Udolpho” by Ann Radcliffe: Protagonist’s “scattered thoughts” in this 1794 Gothic classic may imply multiple personality

The novel gets more psychological when the protagonist, Emily, is described, twice, as having “scattered thoughts” (1, pp. 317, 367), because, many years later, Charles Dickens was to use "scattered” in his novels to imply multiple personality. Search “scattered” in this blog.

Was Dickens’s use of “scattered” to imply multiple personality inspired by Radcliffe’s?

I have three hundred more pages to read in this novel, and I don’t know if multiple personality will become an explicit issue. But readers should not ignore the author’s repeated use of the unusual attribute, “scattered,” for her protagonist.

Added July 30: I lost patience with the lack of psychological-mindedness of this novel and didn't finish it.

1. Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794]. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966/1998. 

“Life of Pi” (post 2) by Yann Martel: Author’s Mind has “Part” with Attitude 

"All I pulled in was line. I had lost the whole tackle…This loss did not strike me as a terrible blow. There were other hooks…in the kit, besides a whole other kit.

“Still, a part of my mind—the one that says what we don’t want to hear—rebuked me. ‘Stupidity has a price. You should show more care and wisdom next time.’

“…the same part of my mind that had rebuked me over my fishing fiasco scolded me again. ‘What exactly do you intend to feed that tiger of yours?…Perhaps you’re hoping that he’ll lap up the Pacific and in quenching his thirst allow you to walk to America?’ ” (1, pp. 178-179).

Comment: The above is NOT how the minds of most people work. Most people intuitively think and/or feel this or that. They are NOT addressed by the quotable voice of a "part” of their mind (an alternate personality) that has an attitude. The latter scenario is how the minds of persons with multiple personality work, which is the way the minds of most novelists work, leading them to take it for granted in portraying the minds of their characters.

Added next day: I found nothing further that is relevant here.

1. Yann Martel. Life of Pi (a novel). New York, Harcourt, 2001. 

“Life of Pi” (post 1) by Yann Martel (author of “Self”): After “part” of Pi rescues Richard Parker, a tiger, Pi’s regular personality regrets it

“The ship sank…From the lifeboat I saw something in the water.

“I cried, ‘Richard Parker, is that you?…Yes, it is you!’

“Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you, Richard Parker! Don’t give up, please. Come to the lifeboat…

“Richard Parker, can you believe what has happened to us? Tell me it’s a bad dream…Tell me I’m still in my bunk on the Tsimtsun…and soon I’ll wake up from this nightmare…(1, p. 97).

“Something in me did not want to give up on life, was not willing to let go…Where that part of me got the heart, I don’t know. “Isn’t it ironic, Richard Parker? We’re in hell yet still we’re afraid of immortality…”

“I threw the lifebuoy mightily. It fell in the water right in front of him…

With his last energies he stretched forward and took hold of it. ‘Hold on tight, I’ll pull you in.’

“Wait a second…Have I gone mad?

“I woke up to what I was doing. I yanked on the rope.

" ‘Let go of that lifebuoy, Richard Parker! I don’t want you here…Drown!’

“He was too fast. He reached up and pulled himself aboard.

“ ‘Oh my God!’

“I had a wet, trembling, half-drowned, heaving and coughing three-year-old adult Bengal tiger in my lifeboat" (1, p. 99).

Comment: In persons with undiagnosed multiple personality, the regular personality will often refer to undiagnosed alternate personalities as “parts.” Search “parts" in this blog for previous discussions. 

Multiple personality may also be suggested by Pi’s having joined multiple major religions—“Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu.”

The multiple personality is not explicit, because the author did not intend it. It is probably in this novel only as a reflection of the novelist’s multiple personality trait, which had also been suggested by his previous novel, Self (search it in this blog).

1. Yann Martel. Life of Pi (a novel). New York, Harcourt, 2001. 

“Self” (post 3) by Yann Martel: Voices of Alternate Personalities in Protagonist’s Head Make Identity-Switching Plot Plausible 

This novel did not sell well, because the author had failed to make it plausible. The reader was expected to believe that the protagonist suddenly changes his identity from “he” to “she” in his late teens for no understandable reason. And that later, “she” suddenly switches back to “he” after “she” is raped. But the reader needed some psychological explanation to make those radical identity-switches plausible.

What psychological explanation is supported by the facts of the story?

Multiple personality, which usually starts in childhood, and often entails both male and female alternate personalities, is indicated by the voices (of alternate personalities) heard by the protagonist since childhood: One of the protagonist’s earliest childhood memories had been “a voice inside my head” (1, p. 2).

As an adult, multiple personality is indicated by the italicized voice in the protagonist’s head: “He’s a man. This is homosexuality. I’m a homosexual” (1, p. 201).

Comment: Did the author understand that his identity-switching plot was plausible only on the basis of multiple personality? Probably not, since the author never mentions it. But I’d guess the author had heard his own voices due to multiple personality trait.

Search “voices” and “italicized voices” in this blog for past posts.

1. Yann Martel. Self (a novel). Toronto, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996.

“Self” (post 2) by Yann Martel: Protagonist’s switch to female alternate personality, including the mirror symptom of multiple personality

Before starting college in Canada, after his parents had recently died in a plane crash, when he was visiting Portugal by himself:

“I awoke suddenly…confused. I couldn’t remember anything—my name, my age, where I was—complete amnesia. I knew that I was thinking in English, that much I knew right away. My identity was tied to the English language. And I knew that I was a woman, that also. English-speaking and a woman. That was the core of my being. The rest, the ornaments of identity, came several seconds later, after some mental groping. What I remember most clearly of this confusion is the feeling that came upon me afterwards, the feeling that everything was all right. I looked about the dark room. A deep sense of peace sifted through me, so deep that it felt like a dissolution. I was falling asleep again. I lay on my side, brought the sheet up to my neck and returned, smiling to the realm of Morpheus. Everything was all right.

“This happened on a special night. I got up in the morning, stood naked in front of the mirror looking at myself and thought, ‘I’m a Canadian, a woman —and a voter.’

“It was my birthday. I was now eighteen years old. Full citizen” (1, pp. 107-108).

Comment: The above is best explained by his switching to an English-speaking, female, alternate personality, with amnesia for his regular male, English and French-speaking personality. He has the mirror symptom of multiple personality that I have discussed in various past posts: He looks in a mirror and sees, instead of his regular self, the image of an alternate personality. Search “mirror” and/or “mirrors” in this blog for related past posts.

I will read on to see whether the author probably based the above on his own, similar, understanding, or on his own personal experience.

1. Yann Martel. Self (a novel). Toronto, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996. 

“Self” (1) by Yann Martel, who later wrote “Life of Pi” (2), features a sex change scenario that might occur to a writer with multiple personality trait

Wikipedia: “Self is a novel by Yann Martel. It tells the story of a traveling writer who wakes up one morning to discover that he has become a woman” (1).

Comment: In real life, it could seem that way to a male writer who had switched to his female alternate personality.

Since I haven’t quite finished Self, and I haven’t read Life of Pi yet, I reserve further comment.

1. Wikipedia. Self (novel). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(novel)

2. Wikipedia. Life of Pi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_Pi 

“Cutting for Stone” (post 2) by Abraham Verghese:

Thomas Stone’s Multiple-Personality Memory Gaps

“His curse is this (and he weeps…at the recollection, he beats his head with his hand): when he wakes from his Missing Period, he senses only a perturbation in space, a gap in time, a deep embarrassment and shame, the reason for which he cannot recall, but which he can only heal by throwing himself into his work anew. He has blocked out what came before…

“But it is too late to say all this to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Even his memory of her, beautiful and erotic, cannot arouse him or fill him with joy. Instead, when he sees her nakedness, his engorgement, the miscibility of their parts, what he feels is a violent jealousy, as if another person occupies his naked body and straddles the woman he loves…—That is me, but it is not me (1, pp. 556-557).

Comment: Thomas Stone, a central character at the beginning of the novel, is then absent for hundreds of pages, but returns toward the end, to help save the narrator’s life. Some readers may have felt that the sequence was scatterbrained, but since the novel was a bestseller, most readers must have felt it was brilliant.

Thomas Stone’s recurring memory gaps, cardinal symptoms of multiple personality, are never recognized as such, suggesting that the author did not understand their significance, and may, himself, have had multiple personality trait, a creative asset.

1. Abraham Verghese. Cutting for Stone (a novel). New York, Vintage books, 2009.

Milan Kundera (1929-2023): Search Kundera in this literary-psychological blog for additional perspective

OBITUARY: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/world/europe/milan-kundera-dead.html

“Cutting for Stone” (post 1) by Abraham Verghese: Thomas Stone may have had multiple personality, for which twins and “possession” are metaphors

The first-person protagonist, Marion Stone, a twin, says he “was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry…And so I became a surgeon” (1, p. 7).

The twins’ mother, a nurse, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, had been the main operating assistant of a surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone, for seven years. “It was as if she had a bicameral mind, allowing one half to be a scrub nurse, shuttling instruments from the tray to his fingers, while the other side served as Stone’s third arm…(1, p. 34).

“Thomas Stone had a reputation at [the hospital] for being outwardly quiet but intense and even mysterious, though, as Dr. Ghosh [another doctor at the hospital], said, “When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious” (1, p. 35).

“It was a well-kept secret that Stone had on three or four occasions…gone on a drunken binge. For a man who rarely drank, who loved his work , who found sleeping a distraction, who had to be reminded to go to bed, these episodes were mystifying. They came with the suddenness of influenza and the terror of possession…When they went looking for him the first time they found a babbling, disheveled white man, pacing in his quarters. During the episodes he did not sleep or eat…On the last occasion this creature had climbed the tree out its window and perched there for hours, muttering like a cross hen. A fall from that height would have cracked his skull…

“As abruptly as it started, in two days, no more than three, the spell would be over, and after a very long sleep Stone would be back at work as if nothing had happened, never making any reference to how he’d inconvenienced the hospital, the memory of it erased. No one ever brought it up to him because the other Stone, the one who rarely drank, would have been hurt and insulted by such inquiry or accusation. The other Stone was as productive as three full-time surgeons, and so these episodes were a small price to pay” (1, pp. 45-46).

Comment: Judging by Wikipedia (2), reviewers have not recognized that Thomas Stone’s out-of-character behavior, followed by memory gaps, as described at the beginning of this novel, is the classic pattern of multiple personality (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”). Not to mention that twins and “possession” are metaphors for multiple personality.

1. Abraham Verghese. Cutting for Stone (a novel). New York, Vintage books, 2009.

2. Wikipedia. “Cutting for Stone.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_for_Stone

3. Wikipedia. “Abraham Verghese.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Verghese

“Great Expectations” (post 4) by Charles Dickens: Author Cancels Mistakes Re Convict and Estella, and Sneaks in Metaphor for Multiple Personality

Convict Mistake

The convict has repeatedly said he loves Pip and wants to enrich him, because Pip had been such a humanitarian in helping him to escape. But both of them must realize that Pip had helped the convict—who is eventually back in court and sentenced to death—only because Pip had been a frightened child.

Estella Mistake

Pip had been infatuated with Estella, because she had seemed to him to be uniquely pretty, and because he had been, in effect, hypnotically indoctrinated to love her (see post 3). But when they meet at the end, she acknowledges “I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me” (1. p. 483).

Metaphor for Multiple Personality

Joe and Biddy, now married, name their son “Pip” and hope “he might grow a little bit” (1, p. 481) like Pip. But since Pip had always wanted Estella, not Biddy, and had chosen to forsake his apprenticeship with Joe in favor of seeking “great expectations,” it is out-of-character for them to honestly want their son to take after Pip. But for some reason, which Dickens may or may not have understood, he has now chosen to have two characters named “Pip,” which sneaks in this metaphor for multiple personality, in addition to what I’ve cited in posts 1 and 2.

1. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations [1860-61]. London, Penguin Books, 1996.

Added same day: The stories about the convict and Estella are often wrong-headed, because Dickens had chosen a mostly first-person perspective, so there is often no objective third-person perspective to observe that what the characters are saying or thinking is nonsense. 

For example, the very idea that any particular girl or woman is uniquely pretty is silly unless she is on a desert island. And if a character mistakenly thinks that someone is uniquely pretty, his psychology should be discussed by either other characters or a narrator.

If Dickens was not mistaken to do first-person, then, at least, he was lazy. You may disagree.

“Sybil”: The New York Times' Unprofessional Opinion

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/books/sybil-50th-anniversary.html

Professional Opinion

“Schreiber’s (1974) (1) account is both detailed enough and accurate enough to serve as mandatory clinical reading for students of MPD” (2, p. 35).

1. Schreiber FR (1974) Sybil. New York, Warner Paperbacks.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. NewYork, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Comment: Search “Sybil” in this blog for past discussion. And let me reemphasize that the least reliable aspect in any account of multiple personality is a bizarre history of abuse. It may turn out to be true—sometimes truth is stranger than fiction—but must be corroborated before being completely accepted as historical truth. After all, the thesis of this blog is that multiple personality is an asset for fiction writing.

In conclusion, be very skeptical about opinions on multiple personality from persons who have rarely, if ever, actually seen it, and that appear in publications like The New York Times, which has been a poor source of information on multiple personality. 

Colleen Hoover: New York Times on Bestselling Author

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/opinion/columnists/colleen-hoover.html

Comment: Also, search “Hoover” in his blog to find a link to a better NY Times article on Hoover that was published only last year, and also my posts on a few of Hoover’s bestselling books. 

“Great Expectations” (post 3) by Charles Dickens: Hypnosis in this novel and in author’s real life

“Far into the night, Miss Havisham’s words [to Pip re Estella], 

‘Love her, love her, love her!’ sounded in my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, ‘I love her, I love her, love her!’ hundreds of times’ (1, p. 243).

Comment: In real life, Dickens was a student and practitioner of hypnosis (a.k.a. mesmerism) (2). The above is one example of the power of suggestion (hypnosis) used by characters in this novel.

Clinical Note: Hypnosis may be used in the diagnosis and treatment of multiple personality, because it may temporarily weaken the regular personality’s ability to suppress and hide the alternate personalities, who usually remain hidden behind-the-scenes, but whose coming out and cooperation is needed for successful treatment.

I don’t know if Dickens, when he used hypnosis on other people, ever accidentally came upon cases of multiple personality.

Comment: Intentionally or inadvertently, Dickens probably used self-hypnosis in his own creative writing process. Search “Dickens” in this blog.

Warning: Using intrusive or uncovering hypnosis with someone, without your having expertise in the treatment of multiple personality, may precipitate a crisis. So don’t do this at home.

1. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations [1860-61]. London, Penguin Books, 1996

2. Fred Kaplan. Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975. 

“Great Expectations” (post 2) by Charles Dickens: Pip’s mind is “scattered”

“And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella…Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often, before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all directions by one stray thought, that perhaps Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune…” (1, pp. 132-133).

Comment: The first time I noted Dickens’s use of “scattered” was when he used it for the mind of John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), as a way to foreshadow the later discovery that Jasper had multiple personality.

I suspect that Dickens experienced his own mind as variably “scattered,” as probably do most novelists, for whom a benign form of multiple personality is an asset.

Search “Dickens” in this blog for further discussion.

1. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations [1860-61]. London, Penguin Books, 1996. 

Shirley Jackson: A More Remarkable Writer than just for her human sacrifice short story, “The Lottery”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/books/review/the-lottery-75th-anniversary-shirley-jackson.html

March 9, 2017 (past post)

“In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Shirley Jackson was ranked among America’s most highly regarded fiction writers…an article in 1955 on the strength of contemporary American fiction listed her with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty…In 1968, Macmillan’s Literary Heritage series included her with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Welty, and Ellison in its canonical anthology The American Experience: Fiction…When Joyce Carol Oates’s first novel appeared, her publisher advertised her as ‘already compared to William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Shirley Jackson’…This study argues that Jackson’s reputation should be restored to the lofty position it occupied during her life” (1, pp. 1-2).

“Jackson was…almost, at least at times, a multiple personality. As is well-known, multiple personalities often arise from sexual abuse, and it seems that Jackson might have been so victimized [by her] maternal uncle…”

“More precisely…She was a bit like the multiple personality described in a book by [Morton] Prince…that she used to develop Elizabeth, the protagonist with a multiple personality in The Bird’s Nest…

“Sometimes when Jackson awoke, she found disturbing notes that she had written to herself while sleepwalking” (1, pp. 25-26).

“As Jackson did in her letters…Betsy [one of the alternate personalities in The Bird’s Nest] refers to herself with a lowercase i ” (1, p. 134).

“In her diary as an adolescent, [Jackson] wrote of her writing as something that came not from her but from her pen or her typewriter” (1, p. 22).

“The most important nonfictional work enabling this novel [The Bird’s Nest] is the definitive work of the time on multiples, The Dissociation of a Personality by a doctor named Morton Prince. Jackson studied it assiduously before writing this novel…Prince appears to have helped Jackson understand her own life” (1, pp. 130-131).

1. Darryl Hattenhauer. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003.

2. Wikipedia. “The Bird’s Nest.” By Shirley Jackson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bird's_Nest_(novel)

March 15, 2017

Shirley Jackson on Writing: Notes she writes to herself while awake, and other notes she writes to herself while she is supposedly asleep.

Notes Written Awake

“When I start writing a book, I go around making notes, and I mean that I literally go around making them; I keep pads of paper and pencils all over the house…I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget—no murder before chapter five’…or ‘Shirley, have old man fall downstairs.’ When I am ready to write the book, I go and collect all my little scraps of paper and try to figure out what I was thinking when I wrote them” (1, p. 392).

Why do these notes address “Shirley”? They could not be mistaken for anyone else’s notes. They were obviously written by the only novelist of the house; written by Shirley for herself. Yet the notes are written as if someone else were addressing Shirley to help her write her book.

Notes Written Supposedly Asleep

People with MPD (multiple personality disorder) “frequently have the experience of waking up in the morning and finding evidence that they were busy during the night, although they do not remember anything. They may find drawings, notes, poems, relocated furniture, discarded clothing, or other evidence that they have been up and busy. If this is a common life experience for a patient, there is an excellent chance that he or she has MPD” (2, p. 81).

One Example

“I was talking casually one evening recently to the husband of a friend of mine, and he mentioned his service in the Marines. I said, ‘Oh, yes, your rifle number was 804041,’ and then we kind of stared at each other dumbfounded, since one does not usually just happen to know the rifle numbers of the husbands of friends. We finally remembered that some months before, during a similar conversation after another bridge game, he had mentioned his Marine service, and remarked that one thing he would never forget was his rifle number, 804041…

“I was having a good deal of trouble at the time, working over a new novel that somehow refused to go together right…One night I gave up; I shoved the typewriter away and…went to bed, somehow forgetting to set the alarm clock.

“When I came rushing downstairs the next morning, half an hour late…I did not go at once into the study…it was not until much later in the morning that I went near my desk, but when I did, I got one of the really big shocks of my life. A sheet of paper had been taken…and put directly into the center of the desk, right where it would be most visible. On this sheet of paper was written, in large figures, and in my own writing with my own pencil, 804041.

“Now, I have walked in my sleep frequently, particularly when I am under pressure with a book, and have done odd things in my sleep, but I have rarely taken to writing notes to myself, and particularly not in code…Clearly, I was remembering this number as a clue to something else…”

Then Shirley remembered that the former Marine had told her about a woman member of an anti-Fascist organization who had been taught to “withdraw her mind from her body” so that she would not break under torture.

“When I remembered all of this and went back to my book again, I found that the trained ability to separate mind from body, a deliberate detachment, was the essential characteristic I had been looking for for my heroine, and was what I had been trying to tell myself by [the number]…(1, pp. 378-380).

Another Example

“Two weeks ago, I had written part of the beginning of the book and was having a great deal of trouble making it go together and could not find a suitable name for my secondary female character. One evening…finally I decided to give up…and I stomped furiously up to bed.

“The next morning, when I went to my desk, I found a sheet of typing paper…set right in the middle. On the paper was written, ‘oh no oh no Shirley not dead Theodora Theodora.’ It was written in my own handwriting, but as though it had been written in the dark.

“I have always walked in my sleep, but I don’t think I have ever been so frightened. I began to think that maybe I had better get to work writing this book awake, because otherwise I was going to find myself writing it in my sleep…Since then, the book has been going along nicely, thank you, and my female character is named Theodora and is turning out quite well.

“Now, incidentally, you can see why a writer might be reluctant to explain where ideas for books come from” (1, pp. 392-393).

1. Shirley Jackson. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt. Foreword by Ruth Franklin. New York, Random House, 2015.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.