Dr. Manette in “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens: Does your high school teacher or college professor understand this novel’s key character?

In A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, the phrase “recalled to life” refers to the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his eighteen-year imprisonment in the Bastille. And since Dickens had originally wanted to call the entire novel “Recalled to Life” (1), it is fair to say that Dr. Manette is a key character.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities

July 19, 2016

Dickens’ (post 6) “Tale of Two Cities” (post 4): Eminent neurologist in British Medical Journal says Dr. Manette is accurate portrayal of multiple personality disorder.

From what I see in Wikipedia and online, many people may be reading and teaching A Tale of Two Cities without realizing that Dr. Manette has multiple personality (the mental illness, inadequately treated, not the normal version). So when I say that Dr. Manette has multiple personality, you might want a second opinion, which follows:

Dickensian Diagnoses

by Sir RUSSELL BRAIN, Bt., D.M., LL.D.

D.C.L., P.R.C.P.

Physician to the London Hospital and the Maida Vale

Hospital for Nervous Diseases

Br Med J. 1955 Dec 24; 2(4955): 1553–1556.

[The following is a direct quote from pages 1555-1556.]

Multiple Personality

Perhaps the most remarkable example of Dickens's psychiatric

insight is the case of Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two

Cities. It is remarkable for the accuracy of his account

of a case of multiple personality and loss of memory,

because it is the most comprehensive of his studies of

psychological abnormality, and because it includes an anticipation

of psychotherapy. Dr. Manette had been imprisoned

for many years without trial in the Bastille during the French

Revolution. As a prisoner he had been a shoemaker, and

after his release he lived in a garret in Paris and spent his

time working at a low bench making shoes. Subsequently

he went to London, but had lost his memory for a long

period of his life. He said: "My mind is a blank, from

some time-I cannot even say what time-when I employed

myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the time when

I found myself living in London with my dear daughter

here. She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God

restored my faculties; but, I am quite unable even to say

how she had become familiar. I have no remembrance of

the process." Dr. Manette had long given up his shoemaking

and was practising in London when his daughter's

marriage brought about a relapse. No sooner had she gone

away with her husband than the doctor was found back at

his shoemaking and unable to recognize his friends. He

remained in this state for ten days, and then he was found

one morning with the shoemaker's bench and tools put aside

in his usual morning dress. "He at first supposed that his

daughter's marriage had taken place yesterday. An incidental

allusion purposely thrown out, to the day of the

week, and the day of the month, set him thinking and counting,

and evidently made him uneasy.”

His friend Mr. Lorry now embarked upon the psychotherapy.

He thought it best to present Dr. Manette's case

to himself as though it was that of a patient. He described

to Dr. Manette someone who had had a great mental shock

and who had suffered from a relapse. He led him gradually

to the recognition that the case was his own and then asked

him " 'to what would you refer this attack?' 'You have

no idea,' said Dr. Manette, 'how such an apprehension

weighs on the sufferer's mind, and how difficult-how almost

impossible-it is, for him to force himself to utter a word

upon the topic that depresses him.' ' Would he,' asked

Mr. Lorry, ' be sensibly relieved if he could prevail upon

himself to impart that secret brooding to anyone, when it

is on him?' 'I think so. But it is, as I have told you,

next to impossible. I even believe it-in some cases-to be

quite impossible.'" But by degrees the resistance is overcome,

Dr. Manette's analysis proceeds, and he is led to

regard his shoemaker's bench as a symbol both of the past

and of his neurosis, and to agree to its destruction. "Very

strange," says Dickens, "to see what a struggle there was

within him." But although Dr. Manette was relieved he

was not cured, and he relapsed again when he failed to

rescue Darnay from the guillotine at the trial in Paris. He

disappeared, wandered about, and when he came back

demanded his shoemaker's bench. He was back in the past.

"Time presses: I must finish those shoes." This time the

relapse was permanent, and the last we see of Dr. Manette

is as a "helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old

man.”

Comment: In my series of past posts on A Tale of Two Cities (search it), I criticized Dickens’s case history of Dr. Manette’s multiple personality disorder for its presumption that it could have had its original onset in adulthood. Multiple personality begins in childhood. However, as a practical matter, clinical multiple personality is usually not diagnosed by most psychiatrists until some major stress in an adult patient causes one or more alternate personalities to blow their cover.

One other thing wrong with Dickens's case presentation—and, in real life, one probable reason for therapeutic failure—was the assumption that Dr. Manette had only two personalities, which would be very unlikely. But in this novel, more than two personalities would have been unwieldy.

“Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson (post 3): Characters as alternate personalities; Housekeeping as metaphor for managing multiple personality

None of the main characters—Ruth, Lucille, Sylvie—is a whole person.

Ruth, the first-person narrator, has a reportorial function, but has no friends, tastes, interests, goals, etc. She has a function, as most alternate personalities do, but is not a full-fledged person in her own right. The closest she comes to explicitly stating this is when she says, “Sylvie and I (I think that night we were almost a single person)…” (1, p. 209).

Sylvie is a transient, a prototypical lifestyle for alternate personalities, who, by definition, come and go: are here today, gone tomorrow. Moreover, she can facilitate the transience of other personalities like Ruth (at the end of the novel they are in transit together). Sylvie is also described as being able to communicate with an unnamed personality inside: “She could speak to…someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation…” (1, p. 195).

Lucille, as noted in a previous post, has named alternate personalities: Rosette Browne and Rosette Browne’s mother, her “familiars.” Since Lucille turns out to be the personality who is leading the most ordinary, overt, public life, she would be termed the “host personality.” At the end of the novel, Lucille is described as having Ruth and Sylvie in the back roads of her mind (1, pp. 218-219).

Housekeeping Metaphor

People who know they have multiple personality often visualize it as a house or apartment building, with a different personality in each room or apartment. Thus, housekeeping is a good metaphor for managing multiple personality.

1. Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980.

Lucille’s “Familiar” in “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson (post 2, cont.): In using this term, was the author erudite, sneaky, or truthful?

Erudite

Many educated people are familiar with the term “familiar” as it is used in Housekeeping and Jane Eyre. It is so well known that it has its own entry in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familiar_spirit

Sneaky

But the term’s most common use is in stories about witches. And when something is out of its usual context, it is often ignored; for example, few readers notice its use in Jane Eyre.

So Marilynne Robinson may have assumed, correctly, that few if any readers of Housekeeping would know what was meant by Lucille’s having a “familiar.”

Truthful

Marilynne Robinson would probably say that her characters are the way they are, and that in saying Lucille had a familiar, Ruth was simply telling the truth.

“Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson (post 2): “Lucille had a familiar” as did Bertha Mason in “Jane Eyre,” meaning they had alternate personalities

Halfway through this novel, the three main characters are Aunt Sylvie and her two adolescent nieces, Ruth, the first-person narrator, and her younger sister Lucille. Sylvie is increasingly portrayed as being mentally ill; Ruth is relatively tolerant of Sylvie’s odd behavior; but Lucille insists on conventional behavior.

Most readers misunderstand the following:

“Lucille had a familiar, Rosette Browne, whom she feared and admired, and through whose eyes she continually imagined she saw” (1, p. 103). And it is described in the next four pages how “Rosette Browne” and “Rosette Brown’s mother” disapprove of Sylvie’s odd behavior.

Most readers, not knowing what “a familiar” is, think that Lucille is referring to a real mother and daughter. So let me reprint a past post that discussed “a familiar” in Jane Eyre:

October 24, 2015

Jane Eyre (post 7): Bertha Mason misbehaves because she is “prompted by her familiar”—the alternate personality of her multiple personality disorder.

Rochester says that his wife, Bertha Mason, “is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night [himself], to stab them, to bite their flesh [her brother]…” (1, p. 257).

Who or what is Bertha’s “familiar”? What is a “familiar”?

According to Wikipedia, familiar spirits, sometimes referred to simply as “familiars,” are supernatural entities. “When they served witches, they were often thought to be malevolent, while when working for cunning-folk they were often thought of as benevolent…The former were often categorized as demons, while the latter were more commonly thought of and described as fairies.”

Some familiars take animal form, such as a witch’s black cat. Other familiars take human form, common in Western Europe. According to one definition, “A familiar spirit (alter ego, doppelgänger, personal demon, personal totem, spirit companion) is the double, the alter-ego, of an individual.”

Accounts of familiars were often striking for their “ordinariness” and “naturalism.” Familiar spirits “were often given down-to-earth, and frequently affectionate, nicknames. One example of this was Tom Reid, who was the familiar of the cunning-woman and accused witch Bessie Dunlop.”

Now, if I were to translate “familiar” to modern, psychiatric terminology, I would say that it refers to alternate personality, as in multiple personality. And since Bertha Mason’s multiple personality causes her distress and dysfunction, it would be multiple personality disorder.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.

Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which “a familiar” (alternate personality) is given to “the mad woman in the attic,” Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping gives “a familiar” (alternate personality; actually two alternate personalities) to the best adjusted character, Lucille. Jane Eyre illustrates clinical, multiple personality disorder, while Housekeeping illustrates the normal version, which is the subject of this blog.

And since Marilynne Robinson does not appear to be intentionally giving Lucille multiple personality, per se, or intentionally using multiple personality in the plot, then Lucille’s multiple personality is gratuitous (search “gratuitous multiple personality”), and is probably just a reflection of the author’s concept of ordinary psychology.

1. Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980.

“Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson: Ruth, first-person narrator, reports her mother had committed suicide and her grandfather had behaved strangely

In Chapter 1, Ruth reports that in her childhood, mother had driven her and her younger sister Lucille to their grandmother’s house, at an hour the mother knew grandmother would be out, and left them there. The mother then drove away and committed suicide: she handed her purse to a stranger and drove the car off a cliff.

As to the girls’ father, Ruth says, parenthetically: “(I have no memory of this man at all. I have seen photographs of him…In one he is looking at my mother…)” (1, p. 14). Was she too young to remember him or does she have posttraumatic amnesia? Ruth does not offer an opinion.

Why did Ruth’s mother commit suicide? Was it related to Ruth’s father? Did it have anything to do with Ruth’s grandfather (who died in a train wreck when Ruth’s mother was fifteen)?

The behavior of Ruth’s grandfather had been strange: “How many times had she [the grandmother] waked in the morning to find him gone? And sometimes for whole days he would walk around singing to himself in a thin voice, and speak to her and his children as a very civil man would speak to strangers” (1, p. 10).

What would make a man, at times, speak to his wife and children as though they were strangers? A switch to an alternate personality who did not see himself as a member of that family.

Why doesn’t Ruth express her own opinion about her mother’s suicide and these other things? Does her character or culture exclude psychological, philosophical, and/or religious explanations? But this is only Chapter 1, and those things may come later.

1. Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980.

“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer (post 3): Nameless first-person narrator knows many things he could not possibly know about the protagonist 

The first-person narrator, who is nameless until the end of the novel, knows innumerable things about what Arthur Less thinks and does that only Arthur Less, himself, could have known. Thus, the narrator is grossly implausible.

It is a mystery, then, why the novel was written this way. The key to the mystery may be the first-person narrator’s namelessness (for most of the novel).

In the author’s creative process, the narrative voice was probably a nameless alternate personality, since multiple personality is where you find both namelessness and imaginative stories. But editorial opinion may have considered a nameless narrator inappropriate for this type of novel. So another character was given the narrative credit, even though it didn’t make sense (because that character had no way of knowing all that he knew).

Why haven’t most readers objected to such an obviously implausible narrator?

They give the novel the benefit of the doubt, because it is otherwise so well written. Plus the character given credit for the narration is part of a happy ending. And love trumps logic.

Andrew Sean Greer. Less [2017]. New York, Back Bay Books, 2018.

“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer (post 2): Novelist Arthur Less speaks more truth-in-jest about his alternate personalities and the fiction writing process

“[In] numerous…interviews…Less…keeps to a… persona at all times, refusing to wax philosophical about subjects he chose to write about precisely because he does not understand them” (1, p. 92).

It is often the “host personality” (search) who does interviews. Since the host personality did not do the writing, he cannot give an authoritative interpretation.

“This is the class he will be teaching…He called the course Read Like a Vampire, Write Like a Frankenstein, based on his own notion that writers read other works in order to take their best parts” (1, pp. 102-103).

Other writers have said similar things in their nonfiction writing.

“In the club, as he later recalls, a woman gets onto the dance floor and really lets go…really takes over the floor…Actually, it isn’t a woman; it’s Arthur Less” (1, p. 124).

He is not saying that he pretended to be a woman or that he was expressing effeminacy, but that, in some sense, he was a woman on that occasion. And gay men, per se, do not see themselves as women. So this episode illustrates cross-gender alternate personalities, which are common in multiple personality. He can remember it, because many alternate personalities are aware of each other (but others are not, causing memory gaps).

1. Andrew Sean Greer. Less [2017]. New York, Back Bay Books, 2018.

“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer: First chapter asks who the narrator is; how many selves the protagonist has; whether the author knows how he wrote it

I have just read the first chapter of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The opening line—“From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.”—raises two questions: Who is the narrator? And does the story have a tragic ending?

The narrator seems to know everything that Arthur Less, a novelist, thinks and does, even when Less is alone, and I cannot see how anyone knows these things except Arthur Less, himself.

Then, toward the end of this first chapter, the narrator says he has known Less since he was twelve and Less was twenty-seven (1, pp. 37-39).

Perhaps something happens to Less, making him unable to tell his own story, but he has written his story or told it to an old friend.

Multiple Personality?

In this first chapter, there is one, apparently inadvertent, suggestion of multiple personality, in the discussion of Less’s custom-made blue suit:

“There is no Arthur Less without the suit…Chosen in haste from a wall of fabrics: not an ordinary blue…He loved whatever self had chosen it and after that wore it constantly” (1, p. 25).

Writing Process

“What does one ever ask an author except: ‘How?’ And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: ‘Beats me!’ ” (1, p. 8).

1. Andrew Sean Greer. Less [2017]. New York, Back Bay Books, 2018.

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”: Flaubert’s famous explanation of his writing process refers to his multiple personality (and that of most fictions writers)

Some of the greatest characters in literature are not the same sex as their author. What can explain it? Most men don’t understand women. And most women don’t understand men. So how can fiction writers do it?

I have discussed Flaubert before (search “flaubert”), but may not have previously made clear how common cross-gender personalities are in multiple personality.

“At least half of all MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients have cross-gender personalities. In female MPD patients…male personalities are found in about half of cases. In male MPD patients, female alter personalities appear…in about two-thirds to three-quarters of all cases. These opposite gender personalities…may be responsible for the unisex look adopted by many MPD patients…In both sexes, cross-gender alter personalities may be sexually active with either heterosexual or homosexual orientations… (1, p. 110-111).

“Cross-gender alters may see the body as [consistent with their self-image]. In cases where a cross-gender alter perceives the body’s actual sex, there may be attempts to change it. These may run from crude mutilation of the genitals or breasts to seeking sex-change operations. One female multiple complained to me about the fact that she was getting arm muscles ‘like a man.’ The culprit turned out to be ‘Billy,’ a 17-year-old male alter who liked to lift weights. He kept telling me, ‘I got to get this body back in shape, man!’ ” (1, p. 181).

Of course, the above is from a textbook on clinical, multiple personality disorder. To apply the above to fiction writers, subtract the clinically significant dysfunction. What remains is the presence of cross-gender personalities in up to three-quarters of people with multiple personality. 

And that is what “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” means.

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

Presidents and Multiple Personality: Before Trump’s puzzling changeability (hair color, etc.), Bill Clinton had “Saturday night Bill” and “Sunday morning Bill”

Today’s New York Times column by Maureen Dowd revives the popular joke, smear, or insight that there are two Bill Clintons: “Saturday night Bill” (his Mr. Hyde, responsible for sexual abuses) and “Sunday morning Bill” (his good Dr. Jekyll personality).

Since neither I nor anyone else has interviewed either president with relevant questions, I have no way of knowing whether either of them has multiple personality.

But Trump is not the only president to inspire speculation.

“The Gin Closet” by Leslie Jamison (post 3): Child Abuse, Prostitution, Alcoholism, Suicide, Anorexia Nervosa, Blackouts, Multiple Personality

Tilly, who was sexually abused as a child (1, pp. 146-147), becomes a prostitute, an alcoholic, and commits suicide. Stella has a history of anorexia nervosa and nonalcoholic blackouts.

Child abuse makes it more likely that a person will have prostitution (2), alcoholism (3), and multiple personality (4). Anorexia nervosa and suicide are surprisingly common in people with multiple personality disorder (4). Memory gaps that are not due to intoxication (or other medical condition) are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality (4).

This novel does not develop any of those connections.

1. Leslie Jamison. The Gin Closet. New York, Free Press, 2010.

2. Mimi H. Silbert, Ayala M. Pines. “Sexual child abuse as an antecedent to prostitution,” in Child Abuse & Neglect., Vol. 5, Issue 4, 1981, pp. 407-11.

3. Kathleen T. Brady MD PhD, Sudie E. Back PhD. “Childhood Trauma, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and Alcohol Dependence” in https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arcr344/408-413.htm

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

Blackouts in “The Gin Closet” vs. “The Recovering” by Leslie Jamison (post 2): The novel uses “blackouts” in ways that suggest multiple personality

In my previous post, on Jamison’s nonfiction book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018), I noted its failure to ask whether some alcoholics might also have “dry blackouts”: memory gaps for periods of time when they had not been intoxicated.

An alcoholic who had both wet and dry blackouts would probably have both alcoholism and multiple personality.

So I planned to read Jamison’s novel, The Gin Closet (2010), for comparison.

I am halfway through the novel, which has two main characters, Stella and her aunt, Tilly, who are first-person narrators of alternate chapters. Blackouts have been mentioned by both characters.

Tilly is a severe alcoholic, who has been known to drink gin in a closet, literally. Her blackouts—“One morning I woke up on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten there” (1, p. 81)—are explicitly during times of intoxication.

Stella describes herself as psychologically split into multiple parts: “I was just organized into little sections inside. The sections didn’t touch each other, necessarily. I hadn’t seen some of them for a long time” (1, p. 21).

She, too, has had blackouts, but when she mentions them—“Blackouts took moments of my life and hid them from my sight” (1, p. 121)—it is when telling the story of her history of anorexia nervosa, a story in which she does not mention intoxication.

So Stella has had “dry blackouts”: memory gaps without intoxication, which are the kind that are typical of multiple personality.

Of course, a person with multiple personality can have both kinds of blackouts if they have both drinking and nondrinking personalities.

Tilly’s blackouts, which do occur during intoxication, nevertheless raise the possibility of multiple personality, because her drinking behavior is so peculiar. She drinks in the closet of a place where she lives alone.

What could explain such odd behavior? [I can only speculate:] It might be the behavior of a drinking, alternate personality, who originated in childhood (multiple personality starts in childhood), when Tilly might have started her drinking in a closet, so her mother wouldn’t see it.

1. Leslie Jamison. The Gin Closet. New York, Free Press, 2010.

“The Kraus Project” by Jonathan Franzen (post 8): Franzen’s dramatic episode of writer’s block is due to conflict between alternate personalities

“At this point I went literally crazy for about fifteen minutes. Tried to pull my face off with my fingers, tried to rip up the bedsheets with my teeth, ran downstairs and tried to leave the building to call W, but I couldn’t unlock the street door, no matter how hard I yanked on it. Some shadow thing in me, some thing that my conscious self could never see clearly but that was no less me than my conscious self was, had momentarily got the upper hand.

“The thing in control of me made me give the street door a despairing kick, and…the lock freed up. Out on the street…I became halfway sane. I met W for a drink and a proper farewell (she was leaving for Spain the next morning), and she told me it sounded as if I was spending too much time alone. The next day, alone, I described to V [another woman] what had happened while I was typing:

“…I’ll tell you what my impulses were: to smash the typewriter, to throw it out the window, to smash the mirror with it, smash the window…to pound the typewriter with the ashtray, to throw the ashtray through the window, to cut my face with a knife, to throw myself out the window, to bloody my fingers trying to rip the typewriter to pieces.

“…But then the thought, the feeling, of wanting to describe what was happening—this became what was happening. The impulse of wanting to control (through writing) this lack of control turned out to be the real source of the lack of control. So that every time I thought of ceasing to be crazy and going back to the typewriter, I became more crazy and more furious with the typewriter…So I gave up the idea of describing this…what was happening, the…fight between the side of me that kept wanting to narrate and the side that refused to be narrated anymore…” (1, pp. 230-231).

1. Jonathan Franzen (translation and personal footnotes). The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus [2013]. Toronto, Harper Perennial, 2015.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote (post 5): Author’s uncertainty about his own name is reflected in naming of Holly, Narrator, and Cat

Holly has fled to South America or Africa. When leaving New York, she had abandoned her unnamed cat on the streets of Spanish Harlem. And the very last scene of the story is when the unnamed narrator finds the unnamed cat:

“I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms—flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, were not him. But one day, one cold sunshiny Sunday winter afternoon, it was. Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too” (1, pp. 104-105, the end).

At the end, everyone has a name (Holly/Lulamae has at least two) except the narrator.

Did the author have naming issues? He did. Truman Garcia Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons. He was renamed when he was adopted by his mother’s second husband. He expressed his own sense of what his real name was in a 1964 interview:

“I was born in New Orleans in 1924. (By the way, my name isn’t Capote at all—I’ll explain that later.) My father’s name is Persons, and he was a salesman” (2, p. 38).

He doesn’t say that Capote was not his original name. He says “my name isn’t Capote at all.” Which makes me wonder if he had a Capote personality and a Persons personality, and it was Persons speaking.

1. Truman Capote. Breakfast at Tiffany’s [1958]. New York, The Modern Library, 1994.

2. M. Thomas Inge (Editor). Truman Capote Conversations. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

“The Unconscious”: This week’s visitors to March 31, 2017 post should search “the unconscious” and “double consciousness” for related posts

I notice that the post with most visitors in the last week is not a post from this week, but the one from last year noted above on “the unconscious,” a post which points out that Freud did not discover it and that it is a misnomer.

If you search “the unconscious” in this blog, you will find some other posts that repeat the same things, but other posts that add to the discussion.

Posts found by searching “double consciousness,” an old synonym for multiple personality, will also add to the same discussion.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote (post 4): Holly is also Lulamae, a frightened, child-aged, alternate personality, which explains “the mean reds”

In Capote’s novella, here is how Holly first defines “the mean reds”: She says the blues mean “You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is” (1, p. 38).

Here is the movie version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jsUIgchHXU

Note: “You’re afraid…but you don’t know what you’re afraid of…something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

As Holly, she has episodes of fear, but she does not know what the fear is related to.

Later in the story, it is revealed that until age fourteen, her name was Lulamae, not Holly. She says, “I’m not fourteen any more, and I’m not Lulamae. But the terrible part is…I am. I’m still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it the mean reds” (1, pp. 69-70).

Holly and Lulamae are alternate personalities. Lulamae had been in control back when she and her brother, Fred, had been orphaned and were living in Texas as vagabonds, surviving by stealing turkey eggs, etc. She was taken in as a child bride by Doc Golightly, a veterinarian, who is portrayed as kindly and protective. But then she left and has lived as Holly.

I can only speculate that, as Lulamae, she had had an alternate personality, Holly (short for Holiday), who had fantasized getting away from her horrible vagabond life (going away on holiday). So when she was a little older and safer, the Holiday personality took over and traveled away (she is a traveler, as her card says), reversing positions with Lulamae, who was no longer in control, but remained inside as a frightened (living in the horrible past) child-aged alternate personality. Holly, usually not aware of Lulamae, would sometimes feel Lulamae’s never-ending fear (Lulamae was frozen in time, the time being when life was actually horrible), which Holly called her “mean reds.”

So if you think of Lulamae as the original personality and Holly as an alternate personality, then Holly’s travels would be Lulamae’s dissociative fugues. But if you think of Holly as the main personality, then traveling is not a dissociative fugue, but just an intrinsic part of her personality: she is a traveler, she goes on holidays, trying to find a truly safe place (like Tiffany’s).

But I can’t think of either of them, Lulamae or Holly, as the “real” person. Lulamae is evidently a frozen-in-the-past child-age alternate personality. But Holly, like most alternate personalities, is not a well-rounded whole person, but is more or less specialized: she is the traveler, who hasn’t furnished her apartment, because she expects to move on. Moreover, Holly is inconsistent—age, gender, etc., as previously discussed, and sometimes she remembers Lulamae, but other times she doesn’t—so “Holly” is probably the cover name for several personalities.

In multiple personality, none of the personalities is the real person. The real person is all the personalities taken as a whole. To function well, the person, instead of “being beside themselves,” has to “get their act together” (common sayings probably deriving from people with multiple personality). In multiple personality trait, as seen in successful novelists, this is accomplished by cooperation among the personalities.

1. Truman Capote. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories [1958]. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.

Fifth Anniversary of blog on Multiple Personality Trait: Normal version of dissociative identity most Fiction Writers have and use in their writing process

If this is your first visit, welcome. If you are one of the many people from over fifty countries who have visited in the past five years, welcome back. There are now 1,300 posts on 200 writers (and associated issues).

Please read past posts: Many great writers have been discussed, and early posts explain basic ideas.

Note: To see everything, you need search. If you don’t see the search box, please visit on a larger device (if available).

I continue to enjoy doing this. My only disappointment is that people have not submitted comments, which you are invited to do, in response to any post, old or new.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote (post 3): Nameless Narrator and Holly Golightly are introduced as people with multiple personality issues

At this story begins, the two main characters are the nameless, male, first-person narrator, who is an aspiring writer, and his New York City neighbor, whose card says, “Miss Holiday Golightly,” and in the corner, “Traveling.”

Holly

She is nineteen, but appears to be “anywhere between sixteen and thirty” (1, p. 12) and is described by a Hollywood actor’s agent, who has followed her to New York, as “nuts” and “a phony.” But, he says, “she’s a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can’t talk her out of it.” He says that someone had “spent maybe thousands sending her to head-shrinkers. Even the famous one”…but “he threw in the towel”…“Mind you, I like the kid, everybody does…” (1, p. 29).

She is also described as having, at least at times, “boyish” hair (1, p. 12) and voice (1, p 16), and handwriting that is “a freakishly awkward, kindergarten hand” (1, p. 26).

Why has she suddenly traveled to New York, just when she had been up for a part in a movie? Why does her apparent age range from kindergarten (handwriting) to sixteen to thirty? Why do her gender attributes vary from boy to girl to woman? Why is she described as truly crazy, but also as very likable and socially engaging?

The above is a description of a person with multiple personality, who probably has alternate personalities of different ages and genders. And as I have said in past posts, when someone seems crazy, but in other ways seems not crazy, and is very socially engaging—people with multiple personality may be very socially engaging, but people with a true psychosis are usually not—think of multiple personality. I would guess that her sudden travels are that symptom of multiple personality, dissociative fugue (search in this blog).

Nameless Narrator

Reviews of this novella will mention the narrator’s namelessness, but not have a good reason for it. They let it pass, because other writers have done the same thing and so reviewers are used to it.

But for a first-person narrator, who is one of the two major characters in the story, to never tell people his name, never have another character ask him his name, never be addressed by name, is ridiculous.

In this story, the only reason for his namelessness I can think of is to enable Holly to call him “Fred,” her brother’s name, but that doesn’t work, because you would expect it to prompt the narrator to reply that his name is actually whatever it is, but he doesn’t.

In the world of this story, contemporary New York City, it simply does not make sense for a major character to have no name. Then what was the author’s reason?

Only in the world of multiple personality is namelessness common. Although many alternate personalities have names, many others don’t. And since many fiction writers feel obliged to tell the truth about their characters, if the alternate personality who was narrating this story did not have a name, Truman Capote was not going to lie about it.

Search “nameless” for previous discussions.

1. Truman Capote. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories [1958]. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.

Cover of June 2018 American Journal of Psychiatry is a charcoal drawing by a 19-year-old man with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality)

https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/suppl/10.1176/ajp.2018.175.issue-6/suppl_file/cover.pdf 

https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17121347

Truman Capote (post 2) in “Tiny Terror” by William Todd Schultz: Capote called himself “consistently inconsistent” and felt like more than one person

Prof. William Todd Schultz, an academic psychologist and editor of a book about writing psychobiographies, is not a clinician and has little or no experience with diagnosis. His psychobiography of Truman Capote, Tiny Terror, never mentions multiple personality, but makes a case for it, inadvertently:

“ ‘Consistently inconsistent’ is what Truman Capote liked to call himself” (1, p. 3).

“ ‘She [his mother] was Jekyll and Hyde,’ Capote said” (1, p. 22). Multiple personality is sometimes multigenerational.

“Maybe, as Capote explained, there were always two people inside him—one intelligent, imaginative, mature; the other a fourteen-year-old. In some situations the adult was in control, in others, the adolescent” (1, p. 94). Since multiple personality begins in childhood, child-aged alternate personalities are the most common kind.

“Capote declared: ‘…I have a way of blocking things completely out of my mind and I have had since I was a child, because I’ve had a lot of things to block out of my mind” (1, p. 121). This may refer to his using a dissociative psychological defense, the principal psychological defense used in multiple personality, which, as already mentioned, starts in childhood.

“And what about Capote’s ‘consistent inconsistency,’ his sense, of a sort many people have—for instance the writer Patricia Highsmith [search her in this blog], a friend of Capote’s—that he was not just one, but a handful of persons, more plurality than unity?… [In multiple personality, there are usually more than two personalities, but not all of them are prominent and conspicuous.]

“These were Capote’s most prominent dual personalities: neurotic Capote, fear-filled and injury-prone; and Capote the disagreeable destroyer, emotionally bulletproof. They fluctuated, and they lent his life a quality of dividedness” (1, p. 154).

Puzzling Inconsistency

As discussed in many past posts, the two most common clues to the presence of undiagnosed multiple personality are a puzzling inconsistency and memory gaps (search them in this blog).

People with multiple personality may be consistently inconsistent, because they switch from one alternate personality to another. But you don’t know why the person is inconsistent, because, before diagnosis has blown their cover, alternate personalities usually answer to the person’s regular name and remain incognito.

Truman Capote was aware of his consistent inconsistency, and of its basis in his feeling like more than one person. But since he did not call it “multiple personality,” he may not have thought about it in precisely those terms.

1. William Todd Schultz. Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote ‘Answered Prayers.’  New York, Oxford University Press, 2011.