“The Life of the Mind” (A Novel) by Christine Smallwood: Narrator May be Alternate Personality of Dorothy, the Protagonist

During the first half of this novel, Dorothy—an adjunct professor of English, meaning poorly paid and ineligible for tenure—is often preoccupied with her recent miscarriage, which, privately, to herself, she sometimes jokes about, as she often does about things that are serious to her.

She currently has two separate psychotherapists, the significance of which in the novel seems mainly to be as a joke about doubling. In a similar vein, “Dorothy read half a page of Rebecca. It was odd that no one in this book had children. Perhaps that was the meaning of the double. By reproducing the individual, the double interfered with the reproduction of a generation” (1, p. 74). Is she is joking about her own doubling’s having caused her miscarriage? In any case, the double is a metaphor for multiple personality (whether or not the author was thinking of it in those terms).

When Dorothy is reading, a book converses with her, like a critical and conceited, alternate personality:

“Look at me! the book said.

“What? said Dorothy…

“I have read all of Stendhal in French, the book informed her nonchalantly…

“That’s not my field, Dorothy started to say, but the book talked over her.

“Greater minds than yours, it said, minds more serious, more synthetic, with better recall, more command of foreign languages…You…are a dilettante, a prosaic clog in the pipes of discourse…Don’t you know anything, you joke of a humanist, you walking fatberg of consumer debt?” (1, pp. 112-113).

But the main doubling, or talkative alternate personality, in the first half of this novel may be the narration. The third-person narrator has had almost nothing to say from the perspective of any other character than Dorothy’s. Indeed, the perspective has been so much Dorothy’s, I have had to keep reminding myself that Dorothy is not a first-person narrator.

Why wasn’t Dorothy made the first-person narrator? My tentative conclusion is that the narrator in this novel is a narrative alternate personality of Dorothy, the protagonist, which would be the first time, that I recall, seeing that in a novel. Does the author, herself, have a narrative alternate personality? I don’t know.

1. Christine Smallwood. The Life of the Mind: A Novel. New York, Hogarth, 2021.

Added March 21: The second half of the novel has nothing of relevance here.

Added March 22: Does the triple exposure of the image of the woman on the novel's cover imply that the publisher thought the novel had something to do with multiple personality?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/books/review-life-of-mind-christine-smallwood.html

Survey of 181 Writers Finds They Have Multiple Personality Trait, But Survey Doesn’t Call It That or Even Mention Multiple Personality

John Foxwell, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough, Angela Woods.

‘I’ve learned to treat my characters as people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices.

Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 79, March 2020.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810019304155

A Novelist on Fiction Writing: “possession,” “trance,” “spell,” “you can’t be entirely sure where it came from” but “You made it up. It’s made of you”

“…the novel-writing process…requires a degree of possession…you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from…And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you…” (1).

1. Jessica Winter. “Our Autofiction Fixation.” New York Times, March 14, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/books/review/autofiction-my-dark-vanessa-american-dirt-the-need-kate-elizabeth-russell-jeanine-cummins-helen-phillips.html

“Stuart Little” by E. B. White: Like “The Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James, this children’s classic has an unresolved ending

After discussing Charlotte’s Web, I obtained the author’s earlier children’s classic, Stuart Little, which I have just read. The title character is born to Mr. and Mrs. Little, human parents, and is accepted as their child (along with their older, normal human son), even though Stuart has the tiny body of a mouse. He thinks and speaks like a normal human.

Stuart befriends a female bird, who is taken into the Little family’s New York City apartment. But when a neighborhood cat threatens to eat her, she flies away. Stuart, driving a gasoline-powered miniature car, sets out on the road to find her. At the end of the novel his quest is unresolved: “As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction” (1, p. 131).

As to an animal alternate personality, if Kafka (search “Kafka”) can have an insect, then E. B. White can have a mouse.

It is purely coincidental that Stuart Little has an unresolved ending, like the novel I had just finished, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. The main difference is that E. B. White knew what he was doing.

1. E. B. White. Stuart Little. Pictures by Garth Williams. New York, HarperTrophy, 1945. 

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 10) by Henry James: Two Characters, Besides the Protagonist, with Multiple Personality; and the Abrupt Ending

Ralph’s Other Person

“He had caught a violent cold, which fixed itself on his lung and threw him into dire confusion. He had to give up work and apply, to the letter, the sorry injunction to take care of himself. At first he slighted the task; it appeared to him it was not himself in the least he was taking care of, but an uninteresting and uninterested person with whom he had nothing in common. This person, however, improved on acquaintance, and Ralph grew at last to have a certain grudging tolerance, even an undemonstrative respect, for him” (1, p. 52).

Madame Merle, Confidence Woman

Madame Merle is a completely trusted friend and mentor of the protagonist. And she is a welcome guest in the homes of many reputable people.

But it is she who facilitates Isabel’s meeting and marrying the sinister, two-faced, Mr. Osmond.

And near the end of the novel, it is revealed that Madame Merle and Osmond had conspired to arrange the marriage in order to get Isabel’s large inheritance. Moreover, Merle is revealed to be the mother of Osmond’s teenage daughter.

Is Madame Merle a confidence woman or a split personality? Search “confidence man,” especially the novels by Herman Melville and Thomas Mann, to understand that the best confidence people are the ones with multiple personality.

Abrupt Ending

James wrote in his notebook: “The obvious criticism of course will be that it is not finished—that I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation…This is both true and false. The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together. What I have done has that unity…It is complete in itself—and the rest may be taken up or not, later” (1, pp. xxv-xxvi).

However, the problem with the ending is not its irresolution, but the narrative inconsistency (see post 2). And, unlike most of the novel, the writing doesn’t flow, it has become awkward, for no apparent reason. 

I suspect that the personalities of Henry James who did his literary criticism were not the same as the ones who wrote his novels, and that the ones who wrote the beginning and middle of this novel were not the ones who wrote the abrupt ending.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 9) by Henry James: Isabel hears the rational voice of an alternate personality, who advises her that Madame Merle is a villain

“More clearly than ever before Isabel heard a cold, mocking voice proceed from she knew not where, in the dim void that surrounded her, and declare that this bright, strong, definite, worldly woman [Madame Merle], this incarnation of the practical, the personal, the immediate, was a powerful agent in her destiny” (1, p. 508).

Since this voice is mentioned by the narrator only in passing, and since the author does not intend to imply that his protagonist has multiple personality, this is a symptom of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality” (search it), which is in the novel only as a reflection of the psychology of the author.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 8) by Henry James: Famous Chapter 42, Isabel’s “meditative vigil,” called novel’s “best thing” in author’s Preface

Based on James’s writing process, which he describes in his Preface, you would not expect him to have any deep understanding of his characters. He says he (his host personality) doesn’t create them or invent what happens to them. They arrive in his mind as visions and apparitions, and then he watches to see what happens:

“It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken, and all in response to my primary question: ‘Well, what will she [Isabel, who had arrived as a vision] do? Their answer seemed to be that if I would trust them they would show me; on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it at least as interesting as they could, I trusted them” (1, p. 13).

What Isabel meditates about in Chapter 42 is that she is miserable in her marriage. She had misjudged the man she married. He hates her because she is not his puppet.

“She knew of no wrong she had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel: She simply believed he hated her” (1, p. 421). “The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his…Nothing was a pleasure to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life?” (1, pp. 427-429).

Isabel’s interpretation of the failure of her marriage, based on the information then available to her, is valid. But the psychological explanation that James gives her for not having married the two men who had previously proposed to her is weak. He did not have a good explanation, because he didn’t understand where she was coming from.

James didn’t understand Isabel, because he (his host personality) didn’t create her. She had come to him as a vision or apparition. Who gave James his apparition? There are various speculations as to his outside inspirations. But outside sources did not give him a vision or apparition.

What inside source could there have been? An alternate personality, who may have been influenced by outside sources, presented James with a vision of Isabel. And then the narrators and characters, who were also alternate personalities (since they seemed to have minds of their own) carried on.

If you have a better way to explain the creative process that Henry James describes in his Preface, please submit your comments.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 7) by Henry James: Isabel’s mind has a “capacity for ignorance” and her consciousness has “different parts”

The basic mental mechanism of multiple personality is dissociation (division of consciousness). If an alternate personality knows about something, but the host (regular) personality does not know about it, that is multiple personality’s capacity for ignorance.

“With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking in unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with the finest capacity for ignorance” (1, p. 205).

In dissociation, disturbing knowledge is not repressed into “the unconscious,” but is dissociated (split off, segregated) into an alternate consciousness. In other words, consciousness has different parts. And since these different parts, these alternate personalities, seem to have minds of their own, they can lead in different directions.

“Her consciousness was so mixed that she scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her…” (1, p. 289).

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 6) by Henry James: Is the protagonist irrational and the narrator a liar?

A new character, Madame Merle, is said by the narrator to have a rare attribute and a good purpose: “She knew how to think—an accomplishment rare in women; and she had thought to very good purpose” (1, p. 195).

Since the narrator has not said that the protagonist, Isabel Archer, is also a rare woman who knew how to think, it is possible that Isabel is irrational.

And if Madame Merle turns out to be a villain, then the narrator’s description of her as having a good purpose will have been a lie.

Will my discussion of the novel be affected if, in the novelist’s conception, the protagonist is irrational and the narrator is a liar?

The novelist’s conception may not matter, because symptoms of multiple personality in novels are usually not the novelist’s intention.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 5) by Henry James: Isabel hears a voice, suddenly switches attitude, unintentional symptoms of multiple personality

Isabel has just rejected a marriage proposal by Lord Warburton, who is rich, attractive, and accommodating. The best guess as to why she has done this is that she fears a loss of independence.

But the novel has pointedly provided the example of her aunt, who is married to a rich man, but spends most of the year in a different country and lives quite independently. So both Isabel and the reader find her behavior puzzling.

Meanwhile, there have been two more clues that Isabel might have multiple personality. There is no indication that the author has done this intentionally; they are mentioned inadvertently, in passing.

Isabel hears a voice

“A certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist—murmured to her that virtually she had a system and an orbit of her own. It told her things besides—things which both contradicted and confirmed each other” (1, p. 114).

Instincts don’t speak. Alternate personalities do. Isabel is hearing from something that is personified and speaking to her: It is “not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist…murmured…told her things.” 

Isabel switches personalities

Puzzled by her own rejection of the marriage proposal, she says, “ ‘I don’t care if I don’t meet anyone else. I like Lord Warburton quite well enough.’ She fell into that appearance of a sudden change of point of view with which she sometimes startled…her interlocutors” (1, p. 124).

When a person with undiagnosed multiple personality suddenly switches personalities—which typically remain incognito—all that may be noted is that the person has a startling change in attitude. And it is implied that this was not Isabel’s only episode.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 4) by Henry James: Editor-personality’s failure to control narrator-personality results in very long paragraphs

Chapter VI begins with a 1,000-word, two-and-a-half-page paragraph, the gist of which is as follows:

“Isabel Archer was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active…among her contemporaries she passed for a young woman of extraordinary profundity…she…had a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior…Meanwhile her errors and delusions were frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving the dignity of his subject must shrink from specifying…the danger of a high spirit was the danger of inconsistency…she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant” (1, pp. 62-64).

Henry James’s overly-long sentences and paragraphs have been discussed for generations, and I want to add my two cents. What comes to mind is a comment by Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Toni Morrison, who had been an editor before she became a writer. She said that she could always tell when a character had gotten away from a writer. She saw characters as having minds of their own, and said it was the author’s responsibility to control them, to remind them who was boss, and whose novel it was.

It is not only character-personalities who have minds of their own; narrator-personalities do, too. And James’s long paragraphs look like the product of a narrator-personality who tends to go on and on, because it is just doing what it is specialized to do. And James’s editor-personality chooses not to control his narrator-personality, because he thinks that his narrator is not just verbose, but quite impressive. Or his narrator-personality refuses to be edited, and says, take it or leave it.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 3) by Henry James: Isabel’s mind has “a dozen capricious forces,” just as James’s mind had multiple capricious narrators

The narrator has been discussing the title character’s personal attributes. For example, Isabel liked to read. Also, “Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window” (1, p. 45). And “her memory was excellent” (1, p. 47).

“Isabel had in the depths of her nature an…unquenchable desire to please…but the depths of this young lady’s nature were a very out-of-the-way place, between which and the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious forces” (1, p. 47).

In other words, Isabel had a desire to please, but she was impulsive. However, instead of simply saying she was impulsive, the narrator says she had “a dozen capricious forces.” Is the latter just a more literary way of saying the same thing?

No, “impulsive” would have implied just one personality; whereas, “a dozen capricious forces” implies multiple, countable (therefore distinguishable), impulsive personalities. This multiplicity is comparable to what Professor Luckhurst says in his Introduction to this novel (see post 2) about its having multiple capricious narrators.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Introduction to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” (post 2) by Roger Luckhurst: Narrative Inconsistencies

“The novel begins with an overall narrator, setting a scene in the grounds of Gardencourt and slowly zooming in on its figures. A debonair, witty narrative voice directs us in our judgement of these characters, undercutting Isabel’s forthright comments with an ironic voice of experience. The omniscient narration slips in and out of the perspectives of Isabel, Mrs Touchett, Ralph, and others with sinuous ease…Yet somewhere around Chapter XVIII, with the arrival of Madame Merle, the narrative tactics change. Crucial information is withheld from the reader, whilst our knowledge of the jaws of the trap around Isabel grows. Then James make his most audacious structural decision: he leaps forward in time, so that we fail to witness her momentous decision to marry Osmond. This is perverse, after the acres of time given over to her rejection of her competing suitors: we surely need to know her thought-process. As if this weren’t strange enough, we then leap forward again three years into her marriage and for the space of four long chapters we are left outside Isabel’s consciousness…We know she has suffered the death of a baby; we suspect the marriage may not be happy; we are given no clue. When the reader is finally allowed to return to her consciousness, in Chapter XL, it leads up to one of the most sustained subjective reveries in English literature in Chapter XLII…From this point on, the overall narrator virtually falls away, the irony disappears: we regard the world principally from the perspective of Isabel. The novel has shifted in strange leaps from consensual Realism to the single window of Isabel’s extended consciousness. Even so, her very last, critical decision, whether or not to return to her husband in Italy, is left outside our knowledge. We only hear of her decision and are left to imagine the consequences in the space left by her absence. This accounts for the complaints of some contemporary reviewers that for an alleged exhaustive portrait, the novel fell oddly short” (1, pp. xvi-xvii).

Comment

In my past post on “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), I noted the same thing: narrative inconsistencies due to multiple narrators. The questionable reality of the ghosts was not due to an intriguing ambiguity, but due to the inconsistency of multiple narrators who took different sides of the issue.

Judging from the above Introduction to “The Portrait of a Lady” (1881), James’s creative process had employed multiple, inconsistent narrator personalities for many years. Any confusion it caused for the reader was not due to profundity. It was a manifestation of his multiple personality trait.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 

Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady” started with an apparition of Isabel Archer; James watched to see what she’d do; he loved her meditative vigil

In his Preface to the novel, Henry James describes the fiction writing process as starting with a “vision” or “apparition” of a character. (Most great novels do not start with a profound idea.) And what did the author say was “obviously the best thing in the book”?

From Author’s Preface

“I have always fondly remembered a remark…from the lips of Ivan Turgenev in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began…almost always with the vision of some person…who hovered before him, soliciting him…If I watch them long enough…I see them…engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty…

“They are…in a manner prescribed and imposed…Thus I had my vivid individual…the apparition…

“The point is…that this single small cornerstone…a certain young woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for…‘The Portrait of a Lady’…By what process…was the slight ‘personality’…to find itself endowed with the high attribute of a Subject?…

“ ‘Place [at] the centre [James said to himself] the young woman’s own consciousness’…

“And I cannot think of a more consistent application of that ideal unless it be…just beyond the middle of the book…my young woman’s extraordinary meditative vigil…It represents…one of the identifications dear to the novelist, and even indispensable to him; but it all goes on without her being approached by another person and without her leaving her chair. It is obviously the best thing in the book…” (1, Preface, pp. 5-16).

Comment

Where does the initial vision or apparition come from? By whom is it “prescribed and imposed”? There must be an intelligent consciousness in the author’s mind—an alternate personality; in antiquity, called “the muse”—of whom his regular personality had not been aware.

1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. 

“The Foundation Trilogy” (post 2) by Isaac Asimov (post 4): Science Fiction Explanation of Writing Process and Multiple Personality

In my first post on Asimov, who was amazingly prolific, I quoted his memoir on his writing process: “I can hear bits of dialogue…or passages of exposition…That’s why I’m always ready to write. Everything is…already written” (1).

Since he experienced his works as “already written,” he must have wondered who had written it, put the words in his mind, and made his typing it so enjoyable. The Foundation Trilogy is Asimov’s science-fiction answer.

Near the end of the third novel of this trilogy, a character wonders: “When can a man know he is not a puppet? How can a man know he is not a puppet?” (2, p. 601). It turns out that the “Second Foundation” is a secret group of scientific psychologists, who, without doing any kind of therapy, can put ideas in any person’s mind and change their personality.

1. Isaac Asimov. I. Asimov: A Memoir. New York, Bantam/Doubleday, 1994.

2. Isaac Asimov. The Foundation Trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation [1942-1953]. Introduction by Michael Dirda. New York, Everyman’s Library, 2010. 

“The Foundation Trilogy” (post 1) by Isaac Asimov (post 3): Villain with special powers, said to be “mutant,” has symptoms of multiple personality

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy won the Hugo Award for best all-time series in science fiction (1). But the 600-page work does not say much about the psychology of its characters until page 400, when the backstory and psychological attributes are given for The Mule, a man who has just conquered the galaxy.

The Mule says, “It was not possible for me to lead a normal childhood. My mother died before she saw me. I do not know my father. I grew up haphazard, wounded and tortured in mind, full of self-pity and hatred of others. I was known then as a queer child. All avoided me; most out of dislike; some out of fear.” Enough happened in his childhood to indicate “that I was a mutant,” but he, himself, never realized it “until I was in my twenties” (2, p. 400).

What he means by being “a mutant” is that he has extraordinary mental powers. He is telepathic to some extent, but his greatest power is to magically manipulate the feelings of other people so that they are either fearful of him or dedicated followers. Moreover, “anyone who did catch me in the act would leave me with a slice gapped out of his memory” (2, pp. 403-404).

Comment

The villain is nameless, which is rare in real life, but common among alternate personalities. He had a traumatic childhood, as have most people with multiple personality, but which would not be necessary in order to have a genetic mutation. His being partially telepathic means having a certain amount of co-consciousness with other personalities. And he can do things to make other personalities fear or like him. Moreover, he can leave other personalities with memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Wikipedia. “Isaac Asimov.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

2. Isaac Asimov. The Foundation Trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation [1942-1953]. Introduction by Michael Dirda. New York, Everyman’s Library, 2010. 

Video Author Event 2/26/21: Vivian Conan discusses her memoir, “Losing the Atmosphere,” about life with multiple personality

After a brief introduction, Vivian Conan, a clear-spoken, 78-year-old librarian, discusses her memoir about life with multiple personality disorder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6kopI96Fcs

Although, since childhood, she often functioned fairly well, her private world, which she called “the atmosphere,” had been quite disturbing.

But since finally seeing a therapist who understood multiple personality, it is no longer causing her any problems.

Alternate Personalities: Derided, Discriminated Against, Ignored, Prototypical Victims of Cancel Culture

New York Times essay on rereading “Lolita” and praising Nabokov’s memoir “Speak, Memory” fails to note his symptoms of multiple personality

The essay decries the pedophilia of Lolita. Since I, too, am against pedophilia, I don’t fault the essay on that basis.

What I do object to is yet another discussion of Lolita that fails to note the novel’s puzzling inconsistency. By the end of the novel, Humbert Humbert is still pursuing Lolita when she is no longer a “nymphet”—a pubescent girl aged nine to fourteen—but is now a pregnant, married adult. It is as if the author of end of the book was not the same as the author of the beginning, hadn’t read the beginning, and didn’t know the novel’s premise.

The essayist also mentions Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory. She had been a “huge fan of Nabokov’s — I had bought copies of his memoir, “Speak, Memory,” in bulk to hand out to my friends at college” (1). However, like many other people who have read, or even taught, Nabokov’s memoir, she makes no mention of his blatant dissociative fugues and memory gaps.

Puzzling inconsistency or self-contradiction, dissociative fugues, and memory gaps are symptoms of multiple personality. I have discussed these symptoms in many past posts, including posts on Lolita and Speak, Memory.

1. Emily Mortimer. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/review/lolita-obscenity-cancel-culture-emily-mortimer.html

“Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White (post 4): Fable about fiction writing, in which a spider represents an alternate personality, writing behind the scenes

Wilbur is a pig who is awarded a special medal at the country fair, because a series of words that make reference to him have appeared in a spider web. Since all of the humans (except a girl named Fern) assume there is no such thing as spiders who are writers, they have given Wilbur credit for the writing, by some kind of miracle.

Fern, since she can understand what the animals are saying to each other, knows that the spider, Charlotte, has been writing these words in her web as a way to make Wilbur seem special, so that he won’t be killed for food. But when Fern tries to tell people that Wilbur is not responsible for the writing, that it is Charlotte the spider, working behind the scenes, nobody believes her.

That E. B. White saw Charlotte as representing writing, and how writing is actually done, is seen in how he ends the novel. These are his last words:

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both” (1, p. 184).

1. E. B. White. The Annotated Charlotte’s Web. Introduction and Notes by Peter F. Neumeyer. Pictures by Garth Williams. New York, HarperCollins, 1952/1994. 

E. B. White’s (post 3) first name, Elwyn: Did he feel it was too revealing?

Why did his parents name him “Elwyn”? He is said to have told The New York Times that, because he was the sixth child, his parents had run out of names. And according to the biography by Scott Elledge, “He was named Elwyn because shortly before his birth his mother had met a woman whose pretty little boy bore that Welsh name.”

Be all that as it may, there must have been something about the name that E. B. White didn’t like. As previously noted, from college on, he had people call him “Andy” instead of “Elwyn.” Why didn’t he like “Elwyn”? Did he feel it was too revealing?

I’m going to speculate, based on what the name looks like.

The Winner

If El=the and wyn=win, then Elwyn might suggest The Winner.

Elfin

Elwyn looks similar to Elvin, which suggests elfin; i.e., small, like an elf.

So, did “Elwyn” somehow contribute, psychologically, to a secret self-image as a tiny winner, and the creation of the title character of E. B. White’s “Stuart Little”?

And did he have a winning, elfin (or mouselike), alternate personality?