“The Many Meanings of Meilan” by Andrea Wang: Mentally well Chinese American girl “contains multitudes,” meaning she has multiple personality trait

In this book review, the protagonist is described as containing multitudes and as “fracturing her identity into Mist, who knows how to be invisible; Basket, the carrier of her parents’ dreams; and Blue, who acknowledges her true thoughts and emotions” (1).

But it appears that neither the Times, the author, nor the reviewer saw this as having anything to do with multiple personality, possibly because the girl was not mentally ill, and they were not aware that multiple personality has a mentally well version, multiple personality trait.

1. Jean Kwok. “A Chinese American Girl Learns That Her Name Contains Multitudes.” The New York Times, August 6, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/books/review/andrea-wang-the-many-meanings-of-meilan.html

“Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (post 3): A romantic comedy cliché that suggests Aurora has multiple personality

The Second Book of this novel is notable here for its romantic cliché—at least as old as the novels of Jane Austen—that a person may not realize she loves someone.

“For although I blushed indeed, as if I loved the man…I think I loved him not…” (1, p. 58).

Apparently, there is a difference of opinion between one of Aurora’s personalities who loves the man and another of her personalities who does not. This would be a symptom multiple personality.

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

Added Aug. 6: If Aurora were merely ambivalent, she would have said that she didn’t want to limit her life to the subordinate position and parental responsibilities of a wife, but instead wanted to be completely free to pursue her writing and poetry; however, she would have added, especially in view of her blush, she knew that she was, to some extent, aroused and attracted, and she had to admit, at least to herself, that she had mixed feelings.

In contrast, Aurora dismisses her blush as though it were some kind of meaningless reflex, and says that she has no feelings for him, period. Meanwhile, I suspect, she had an alternate personality who had blushed, because of feeling attracted. And this interpretation does not forget the context of what was discussed in prior posts.

“Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (post 2): Aurora’s alternate personalities—a skeptic, her “pipers,” and a strong one who sees her in the mirror

This first-person verse novel is composed of nine chapters or “books.” I will conclude First Book with the following quotes:

Skeptic interrupts Aurora's first-person narration:

                              “What’s this, Aurora Leigh,

You write so of the poets, and not laugh?

Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,

Exaggerators of the sun and moon,

And soothsayers in a tea-cup?

                                                 I write so

Of the only truth-tellers now left to God,

The only speakers of essential truth,

Opposed to relative, comparative,

And temporal truths…” (1, p. 30).

Aurora’s “own best poets,” poets inside her, her “pipers”:

“My own best poets, am I one with you,

That thus I love you, - or but one through love?

                             …do you play on me

My pipers, - and if, sooth, you did not blow,

Would no sound come?” (1, pp. 30-31).

Mirrors in Multiple Personality

                            “…I clenched my brows across

My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,

And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong” (1, p. 36).

Search “mirrors” for past posts on this recurring issue in multiple personality.

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

“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.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion (post 7): Italics used for a comment by an alternate personality

Chapter 14 of this first-person memoir concludes with one sentence in italics:

“…I was not actually holding myself responsible. I was holding John [her late husband] and Quintana [her daughter] responsible, a significant difference but not one that took me anywhere I needed to be. For once in your life just let it go” (1, p. 174).

She does not write the last sentence in her own voice, which would have been: “For once in my life, I needed to just let it go”; or simply, “I needed to let it go.”

Instead, she abandons first-person and writes it as though another person were telling her what her attitude should be. And this other person speaks in italics.

I have cited the same thing in many past posts regarding the novels of many writers. It typically occurs in a dialogue or argument between a character and a voice in the character’s head.

Indeed, I have seen this so often, with so many different writers, that I consider it a literary convention: Novelists often use italics to indicate when one of a character’s alternate personalities is talking (although the novelist is probably not thinking of it in terms of multiple personality, per se).

1. Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking [2005]. New York, Vintage International, 2007. 

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion (post 6): Magical thinking may have been multiple personality

It is surprisingly common for a person to have comforting hallucinations of a deceased, beloved spouse, which is one reason that many people believe in ghosts. For example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2017/07/17/ghosted-im-a-new-widow-living-in-denial-that-my-husband-is-gone/

But what Joan Didion describes in her memoir of the year following the death of her husband is different:

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant” (1, p. 35).

Didion had been there when her husband collapsed. She called the ambulance, went to the hospital, and consented to the autopsy, cremation, and obituaries. Her regular personality was in no doubt about her husband’s death and its permanence.

However, she deduced from various of her other attitudes and actions that she also had a child-like part of her mind—“covert” and “hidden even from me”—who didn’t understand death as being permanent.

She didn’t think of this covert, hidden part of her mind in terms of multiple personality, but it was probably a child-aged alternate personality, who pulled strings from behind-the-scenes.

1. Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking [2005]. New York, Vintage International, 2007.

“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (post 5): Ending does not give any other reason for Maria's memory gap and mirror symptoms of multiple personality 

“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (post 4): Maria sees someone else in the mirror, a symptom of multiple personality

Some reviewers liked this novel (1), others didn’t (2), but none realized that the protagonist has symptoms of multiple personality. In addition to the symptoms discussed in previous posts, there is this:

“She looked again into the hand mirror and again saw her mother” (3, p. 64).

Readers may think that the above is purely metaphorical, if they don’t know it is a symptom of multiple personality (4). The text does not say that a family resemblance reminded her of her mother, but that she “saw her mother.” She saw an alternate personality that originated as an identification with her mother.

Assuming that the author did not intend to imply that the protagonist has multiple personality, I infer that the presence of such symptoms in this novel—what I call “gratuitous multiple personality”—may be a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. John Leonard. “The Cities of the Desert, The Desert of the Mind.” The New York Times of July 21, 1970. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/21/archives/books-of-the-times-the-cities-of-the-desert-the-desert-of-the-mind.html

2. Lore Segal. “Maria knew what ‘nothing’ means.” The New York Times of August 9, 1970. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/08/09/archives/maria-knew-what-nothing-means-play-it-as-it-lays-play-it.html

3. Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays [1970]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005.

4. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989, p. 62.

“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (part 3): Maria is estranged from husband Carter and visits daughter Kate, but Maria appears to have memory gaps

“She looked at Carter sitting in the living room…

“ ‘You going to stay here?’ she said…

“ ‘All my things are here, aren’t they?…

“ ‘I mean I thought we were kind of separated…

“ ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

“ ‘It wasn’t me. I mean was it me?’

“ ‘Never, Maria. Never you.’

“There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant…

“ ‘I was going out to see Kate,’ she said finally.

“ ‘How many times you been out there lately?…

“ ‘Hardly at all,’ she said, and then: ‘In the past few weeks, maybe a couple of times.’

“ ‘You’ve been there four times since Sunday…They called me,’ Carter said… ‘They called me to point out that unscheduled parental appearances tend to disturb the child’s adjustment…We’ve been through this, Maria. We’ve done this number about fifty times’” (1, pp. 40-42).

Comment

Maria is not sure what has been going on in her marital relationship or how often she has been visiting her daughter. “Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant…”

Carter doesn’t know if his wife is devious, scatterbrained, or mentally ill. All he knows is that she continually acts this way: “We’ve done this number about fifty times.”

Maria appears to have a cardinal symptom of multiple personality: memory gaps.

1. Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays [1970]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005.

“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (post 2): Possible indications of multiple personality in the previously quoted interview and the opening of this novel

from interview in post 1:

“DIDION: Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself…”

People with only one personality can be quite ambivalent and may entertain several points of view. But when people have the subjective experience of hearing themselves or of  “writing to myself” (not for myself) or being aggressive with themselves or being hostile to themselves, they may be describing the interaction of two personalities. (Of course, since the writer is not psychotic, she knows that her reader, objectively, “is me.”)

Psychiatric Opening

Maria Wyeth, the protagonist, is psychiatrically hospitalized for unstated reasons. She mentions that she has migraine headaches (1, p. 5), which doesn’t prove anything. But it is a fact that bad headaches are the most common physical symptom of people with multiple personality. (Some multiples get a bad headache whenever they switch personalities.)

However, what Maria may have that would be more specific to multiple personality are memory gaps. She repeatedly says, “I have trouble with as it was” (1, pp. 7, 9). She also says, “I never in my life had any plans, none of it makes any sense, none of it adds up” (1, p. 7). At this point, I cannot be sure what she means, but memory gaps are a reasonable hypothesis: to be, or not to be, confirmed by the rest of this novel.

1. Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays [1970]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005.

“Sweet Desserts” by Lucy Ellmann: Author’s first novel does not have symptoms of multiple personality, but does have jokes

“Goldberg’s a private in the army. His mother dies, and his superior officers don’t know how to break the news to him. His sergeant volunteers to do it. He calls the whole platoon out, makes them all stand at attention, and then says,

     ‘All those with mothers still living, step forward!’

     They all step forward.

     ‘Not so fast, Goldberg!’ ” (1, p. 117).

1. Lucy Ellmann. Sweet Desserts [1998]. London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

“Invisible Guests” by Mary Watkins: Falsely says good, normal “imaginal dialogue” is not multiple personality (misunderstood as “sequential monologue”)

Note: Search "Mary Watkins" for a good past post from 2016. Other than her multiple personality misunderstanding (which many people have), her book is worthy of attention.

Misunderstood Multiple Personality

“Whereas psychoanalytic and developmental theories advocate a developmental unification of the various imaginal personae over time, a perspective which valued dramatic thought would struggle to maintain a multiplicity. Contrary to fearful expectation, this multiplicity of characters in an individual’s experience would not resemble a pathological state of ‘multiple personality.’ In the latter there is no imaginal dialogue, only sequential monologue. The person identifies with or is taken over by various characters in a sequential fashion. The ego is most often unaware of the other voices. It is paradoxical that the illness multiple personality is problematic precisely because of its singleness of voice at any one moment, not because of its multiplicity” (1, pp. 104-105).

Actual Multiple Personality

While it is true that therapy of multiple personality aims to increase dialogue between the host personality (which is least in the know) and the alternate personalities, there is already dialogue before treatment. The host personality may hear voices of, and get into arguments with, alternate personalities. And alternate personalities are often in dialogue with each other. It is the job of protector personalities to be aware of what is going on with the personality that it is protecting. And since persons with multiple personality rarely have only two personalities, often have a dozen, and sometimes many more, there is a lot of co-consciousness and interaction going on, though most of it is behind-the-scenes. Personalities alternate only in regard to which one is most overt. Multiple personality should be understood as involving multiple simultaneous consciousness.

1. Mary Watkins. Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. Hillsdale New Jersey, The Analytic Press/Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.

“The Pessoa Syndrome” by Katia Mitova: Pessoa’s “Multiple Personality Order” (not Disorder), a theory of literary genius by a professor and poet

You can see the whole text of her 2013 book chapter by searching title and author on Google Scholar. I have cited it previously, but here are excerpts:

“Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the national modernist poet of Portugal, is famous for creating numerous authorial personae, which he called ‘heteronyms.’ These heteronyms wrote poetry, poetic prose, philosophical essays, literary theory and criticism, and even crossword puzzles. While indulging in this creative state of constant switching between one heteronym and another, Pessoa sometimes felt he had reached the bottom of depression. He believed that his ‘tendency toward depersonalisation…’ was caused by ‘a deep-seated form of hysteria, [or] pretended communication with diverse spirits,’ but that his ‘insanity [was] made sane by dilution…like a poison converted into a medicine by mixture.’…Pessoa cultivated a positive attitude toward his own multiplicity, nobodiness, and betweenness, which comprise the creative condition that we term Pessoa Syndrome…

“Writers’ nobodiness, manifested as a contradictory, fluid, or missing self, is not limited to the duration of the writing process. Depending on the vehemence of their engagement in that process, writers may remain in a state of nobodiness for longer periods of time outside the writing process. For incessant writers like Fernando Pessoa, nobodiness may become the primary mode of existence…

“Pessoa first experienced deep loneliness at the age of five when his father and brother died within less than a year of each other. He coped with the trauma by inventing an epistolary friend: ‘I can remember what I believe was my first heteronym, or rather, my first nonexistent acquaintance—a certain Chevalier de Pas— through whom I wrote letters to myself when I was six years old’…

“ ‘This tendency to create around me another world . . . began in me as a young adult, when a witty remark that was completely out of keeping with who I am or think I am would sometimes and for some unknown reason occur to me, and I would immediately, spontaneously say it as if it came from some friend of mine whose name I would invent, along with biographical details, and whose figure—physiognomy, stature, dress and gestures—I would immediately see before me’…

“Pessoa...became an individual with multiple personalities through his heteronymic writing. Therefore, a suitable name for Pessoa’s condition would be Multiple Personality Order…

“Pessoa seems to have been thrilled by this existence on the edge of madness, smoothened by the joys of creativity—and of wine, which eventually led him to cirrhosis and death…

“Pessoa’s specific form of Multiple Personality Order could thus be defined as an interactive arrangement of multiple creative personalities…

“Undoubtedly, there is a price to be paid for containing multitudes—mental breakdown, depression, and suicide mark the lives of numerous artists. But the magnificent achievements resulting from artists’ ability to depersonalise and impersonate—an ability most of us had in childhood and blocked later in order to grow up—should make us reconsider the understanding of mental wellness as a clear-cut self-identity…

“Acknowledging the Pessoa Syndrome in the works of visionary artists such as Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Melville, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges, and Philip Roth may lead to more adequate readings of their multidimensional texts” (1).

1. Katia Mitova. “The Pessoa Syndrome” in Davies, F., & Gonzalez, L. (eds.) Madness, Women and the Power of Art. Oxford, England: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013, pp. 153-179.

Paris Review Interview of Joan Didion (post 1): Her writing self imposes on her reading self; characters speak to her; narrative seems mysterious, arbitrary

The Paris Review is an American literary journal famous for its interviews of writers on the art of fiction. In the following excerpts from the interview of Joan Didion, she portrays herself as being divided into parts that have minds of their own; in effect, as having multiple personality trait. 

She says that her writing personality imposes her literary vision on her reading personality. She learns about her characters when they tell her surprising things about themselves. She says that her narrative strategy often seems mysterious and arbitrary to her (because she has limited awareness of what her alternate personalities are contributing).

INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

DIDION: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way…

INTERVIEWER: Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION: Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself…

DIDION: …I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don’t want to leave them ever.

INTERVIEWER: Do your characters talk to you?

DODION: After a while. In a way…And suddenly Charlotte says, “He runs guns. I wish they had caviar.” Well, when I heard Charlotte say this, I had a very clear fix on who she was. I went back and rewrote some early stuff…

DIDION: …I usually don’t know what’s on my mind. On the whole, I don’t want to think too much about why I write what I write…

INTERVIEWER: A narrative strategy.

DIDION: Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative strategy is very mysterious. It’s a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don’t do it would ever believe…

1. Linda Kuehl (interviewer, 1978). Joan Didion, pp. 407-424, in Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Edited by George Plimpton. Introduction by Margaret Atwood. New York, The Modern Library, 1998.

“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 3): Arguing, Speculation, Comment

In the rest of the novel, the five-year-old narrator-protagonist has one more typical symptom of multiple personality: She hears “arguing” in her head (1, p. 165). Arguing entails two or more personalities with minds of their own.

As to explaining the two “impossibilities” noted in post 2 (the child’s never being addressed by name, and her narrating the novel with adult language), I can speculate: 

Speculation

Throughout the novel, the 5-year-old makes up stories to amuse people. The reader is usually not told what the stories are about, but only that the child is a known storyteller. So this “child” may be an alternate personality with no name whom I can refer to only by her function, storyteller. And as an alternate personality who has no name, and has never been knowingly met by the mother and older sister, naturally she could not have been addressed by them by name.

Who, then, is narrating the story using adult language? It would be an adult alternate personality, who is either the child storyteller personality grown up and telling the story of the novel retrospectively, or another adult storyteller personality, using the child storyteller as a medium of expression.

Comment

I do not put much stock in the details of my speculation. In my clinical experience with multiple personality, I would typically start with a person’s memory gap, ask to speak with the one who was in control at that time, and then see the person switch to the relevant alternate personality, who would tell me what had gone on during that time, which was often verifiable.

But what the alternate personality would tell me, almost always surprised me. It was rarely what I had guessed or speculated. So my above speculation may be right about its having something to do with the author’s alternate personalities, but the details are probably incorrect.

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 2): Why does five-year-old, nameless, first-person narrator have vocabulary and sentences of eloquent adult?

I don’t understand how Esther Freud could have intended to write a novel with the following two impossibilities: a 5-year-old child whose mother and older sister never address her by name, and the 5-year-old child narrates the novel using the language of an often eloquent adult.

I still have 30% of the novel left to read, and maybe I’ll figure it out.

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 1): Nameless narrator-protagonist hears herself  “as if it were someone else’s voice,” which is multiple consciousness

In the first third of this novel, the five-year-old narrator-protagonist has come from England with her mother and older sister to live in Morocco. Her mother and sister have not addressed her by name. And when I listened to the author interviewed (online), she was asked about her protagonist’s namelessness. She said the character was herself (Esther Freud), but not exactly; she knew it was ridiculous for the mother and sister to never address the girl by name; and she had found the naming issue confusing.

Search “namelessness” and “nameless narrator” for past posts on this recurring subject.

At one point in the story, there is a disturbance—a conflict with neighbors—and the narrator-protagonist says: “ ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I could hear myself screaming as if it were someone else’s voice” (1, p. 62). This implies two personalities, the one hearing and the one screaming, which is dual or multiple consciousness.

Since the symptoms of multiple personality—namelessness and multiple consciousness—are not integral to the author’s intentions for plot and character development, this is another example of gratuitous multiple personality, meaning that the symptoms of multiple personality are probably in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology (multiple personality trait).

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.