“Saving Agnes” by Rachel Cusk (post 4): Gratuitous multiple personality—identity changes, secret selves, pseudonyms, voices, self-persecution—in first novel.

Rachel Cusk’s award-winning first novel, Saving Agnes, has symptoms of multiple personality in its first half, but none in its second half. Why?

After finding a similar thing in the work of a number of novelists, I previously coined the term “gratuitous multiple personality” (search “gratuitous”).

Think about why an author would have gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality in a novel, as you read the following:

“Agnes Day was her real name” but “As a child Agnes had been imaginative—a word often used to explain the character of a compulsive liar—and had enjoyed frequent changes of identity…

“ ‘Bathsheba, could you please pass the salt?’ her father would politely inquire…(1, p. 13).

“As Agnes approached puberty her identity crisis…grew…she chose her own middle name, Grace…Grace was an honored guest in their house…Only her brother…Tom missed Agnes and had little time for her double…(1, pp. 14-15).

“…she sometimes wondered why the proliferation of selves she would have liked to be and lives she would have liked to live remained locked inside her, prisoners of utmost secrecy…” (1, p. 16).

“As a child she had often been mistaken for a boy…” (1, p. 19).

“Agnes had lived most of her life in constant fear and loathing of her own sex. The convent school where she had grown up had been red in tooth and claw with female cruelty” (1, p. 54)…Agnes’s wistful longings for sisterly love had been if anything intensified by her years in the convent…Agnes’s imaginary sister [Grace], who looked something like Doris Day…just smiled and sang as she lay beside Agnes in the dark…” (1, p. 61).

“She examined her fellow passengers…Women in saris…West Indian women…Could they not get together and solve each other’s problems? Agnes seemed to hear, as if from around her, dissenting voices…Condescending! they cried. Racist!…It was so hard sometimes, having to think for oneself…She got off the bus and walked” (1, p. 66).

“Agnes…recalled [that at the age of thirteen] things had…ceased to be real for her…She had, at the moment in question, been neither happy nor particularly unhappy…In any case, what she did remember was that…she had suddenly felt her mind disengage and float away…It was most unexpected…something irrevocable had taken place…‘I don’t feel as if I’m here,’ she had said to Christine Poole [her school friend]; and she remembered very clearly what had happened next. First of all, she realised her voice sounded distant, as if she were listening instead of speaking. Secondly, Christine had looked at her as if she were mad. These two events now seemed to have characterised much of her later life” (1, pp. 88-89).

(Self-) Persecutor Personality

Agnes’s supposed friends, including Christine Poole, subsequently betray Agnes by reading passages from Agnes’s personal diary to school officials. Moreover, “Her friends’ terror campaign was a Mafia-style affair…when, for example, precious objects would disappear from other girls’ rooms, to be discovered hoarded beneath Agnes’s bed…[and when Agnes’s] expensive winter coat, while hanging in her wardrobe, had come to grief…involving…time-consuming application of sharp scissors to heavy cloth” (1, pp. 94-95). 

        Note: In the context of what had been described about Agnes, psychologically, earlier in the novel, this stealing, hoarding, and cutting at school could conceivably have been the work of a self-persecutory, alternate personality, with Agnes having a memory gap (amnesia) for having done it herself. (Search “memory gap” and “persecutor personality,” a common kind of alternate personality.)

        As if purposely designed to support this multiple personality interpretation, what follows on pages 101-102 is that Agnes and her two roommates go for a walk in the park, and Agnes, strangely, gets separated from them. The narrator gives this multiple personality explanation: “[Agnes] had heard them calling for her, [but] had had a strange sense then of being someone else: a lone jogger…who had heard two friends calling to a girl lost in the woods. She had pitied that poor girl and wondered if she would read about it the papers tomorrow” (1, p. 102).

Gratuitous Multiple Personality

There are no more symptoms of multiple personality in the whole second half of the novel. Evidently, the symptoms of multiple personality in the first half of the novel had not been integral to either character development or the plot. The multiple personality had been gratuitous. Why was it in the novel? Because, as seen in the previous three posts, it reflected the author’s own normal psychology.

1. Rachel Cusk. Saving Agnes. New York, Picador USA, 1993/2000.