Text: Albert Elmer Hancock, “The Dual Personality in Literature and Life,” Booklover's Magazine (Philadelphia, PA), vol. II, no. 4, October 1903, pp. 355-368

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“Homoduplex! Homoduplex!” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first time I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘ He is dead! He is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry; how fine it would be at the theatre.’”

The dualism of man's nature from time immemorial has been at the basis of religion. Ormuzd and Ahriman in the ancient Persian, God and the devil in the theology of the medieval schoolmen, conscience and the natural instincts of self-preservation in modern evolution — philosophical synonyms — have been the inimical actors in that drama which is unceasingly played within the curtained chamber of the human mind. The lives of saints and sinners are filled with records of indwelling monitors and tempters. Socrates had his demon; Augustine, the profligate Carthaginian, was tormented into sainthood by [page 356:] the inexorable voice within his soul; and John Bunyan, whose morbid consciousness was such a picturesque battle-ground of the spirit, was driven by his puritanic fears from the most innocent diversions; first, from the pleasure of tolling the church bell, next from the sound of the ringing, and finally from the sight of the belfry steeple.

Fiction has not failed to make use of such vital elements in human psychology. One of our earliest English poems is a Discourse between the Soul and the Body. Everyone will remember, in the Merchant of Venice, the soliloquy of Launcelot Gobbo, in which, with the fiend at his elbow for counsellor, the servant absolves himself of loyalty to the Jew. Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory, objectified in the external world, of Christian's spiritual battle with the underlings of the prince of darkness, striving to capture his soul. And Goethe's Faust, most important of all, is the biography of the natural, knowledge-loving, sense-craving man, accompanied by the outward personification of evil.

It is singular that Poe, one of the greatest of our analysts of psychological states, did not give more attention to this subject, which would have been such a fertile field to a genius like his. There are haunting suggestions of it, indeed, in much of his work. The Raven, in its real import, has a close bearing on the theme, for the lover, mourning at night over the lost Lenore, represents the higher nature of man putting the eternal query concerning the life beyond the grave, while the bird is the blind spirit of negation mocking his question with answers as puzzling as the silence of the Sphinx. The Tell-Tale Heart might come under the classification by a stretch; but apart from these, William Wilson stands practically alone among his tales as a [page 357:] patent treatment of the dual personality. This story, however, in its subtlety of detail, its theatric succession of crises, and its suspense of ultimate meaning, is to be ranked among the most artistic conceptions of his imagination.

The great weakness of Poe's technique, considered in cold critical mood, is the impossibility of his situations. The close of The House of Usher, possibly his greatest narrative, is an illustration that is typical. Berenice, Ligeia, the Descent into the Maelström, are other examples. But Poe, like Coleridge in The Ancient Mariner, had the power to take the impossible situation, and, by investing it with human interest and absorbing vividness, to heat the imagination, and to suspend thereby, temporarily at least, the reader's incredulity. His art has the spell of superstition on the sensitive temperament.

In the narrative of William Wilson one does not feel the effect of this so much until the close. The conception of a man and his double is a well-worn convention of fiction; the sudden, mysterious, ghost-like appearances of the double at critical moments are also artificial devices such as readers of romance and spectators at the theatre must accept as dramatic necessities for the sake of the story. If Poe's art went no further than this mechanical stock-in-trade, one would be justified in calling it cheap melodrama, and in passing it on to the devotees of the penny dreadful or the shilling shocker.

But Poe does go further; before he is through with you he has pointed his moral and adorned his tale with an imaginative flash of suggestion that binds all the discordant improbabilities into unity. You haven’t been reading something absurdly artificial; you have been reading an allegory of the dual personality. William Wilson's double, who resembled him [page 358:] so accurately in physical lineaments, in everything except the hidden traits of character, who always spoke in a whisper, and who always made his presence known in a moral crisis — was the sinner's conscience. The protagonist of the story, to be sure, sees shim as a distinct personality. That, however, is a trait natural to Poe's male creations; they all see phantoms, and mistake mind-made images for reality. Analyzed in cold blood, as already admitted, the conception shows the artifice; but read under the spell of the artist's mood, one thinks less of the artifice and more of the fundamental significance of the motive. The burden of it is profoundly true in philosophy. The man who stifles his higher self in the poisonous atmosphere of vice is doomed ultimately to extinction. The man who kills his conscience is no longer a man. He is dead for this life and for the life to come.

William Wilson is the forerunner, perhaps the literary parent, of a story which stands supreme, in modern fiction, as a treatment of the dual personality. Intrinsically an illustration of the same theme, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in technique, style, and narrative tactics, is widely different. Here a doctor, a respected member of the community, discovers a drug which divorces the good and evil in his nature, and which transforms his physical body into a depraved human animal — a libertine of selfishness and crime. Passing from one to the other, he lives at will two antipathetic existences, indulging without restraint the nobler and the baser instincts. Stevenson has surpassed Poe as a story-teller in unfolding his plot. Until the very end there is nothing to tax the reader's credulity. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde apparently are two persons, pursuing different careers, and occupying the stage [page 359:] at different moments only. The engrossing mystery is held in suspense until the tale is told, and then it is cleared up in an epilogue. If Stevenson, on the one hand, is more skillful in the main thread, Poe, on the other, is more convincing at the untying of the knot. The motive of the drug and the two physical beings is ingenious, but it does violence to natural law; Poe's use of the phantom conscience is far more subtle; it is universally typical of the workings [page 360:] of law in man's spiritual nature. Both agree in the moral, however. When Wilson repeatedly crushed his monitor, and Jekyll repeatedly indulged himself in the disguise of Hyde, through sin they both lost the power of regaining themselves.

In these two instances of the dual personality in fiction — and they may fairly stand as representatives — the opposition is confined to the domain of morals. The line is drawn sharply between good and evil; and in general it may be said that fiction has followed the theoretical traditions of religion and speculative philosophy, and has observed their distinctions of man's duality.

This theoretical idea of the dual personality as a strict alignment of good and evil forces is disappearing before the revelations of modern psychology, and the dualism in fiction is quite different from its manifestations in actual experience. The Society for Psychical Research, although its work is yet fragmentary, has shown that the distinction of the schoolmen is not warranted by the facts. The opposition is not confined to the realm of morals. In a far broader way two personalities may co-exist in the same body, one dormant while the other is active, and two or more trains of memory, of feeling, and of will may proceed from one brain. Shakespeare rather vaguely phrased the matter in those lines which are at once poetically and scientifically true:

Two very striking instances of the modern view are found in the cases of Ansel Bourne and Mlle. Héléne Smith.

Ansel Bourne, a preacher, aged sixty-one years, living in Rhode Island, went to Providence one morning and drew a large sum of [page 361:] money from the bank. He then suddenly disappeared, and for a long time his friends and relatives, aided by the police, could obtain no trace of his existence. In the meanwhile a man calling himself A.J. Brown arrived in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and opened a store for the vending of small wares. He lived in the rear room of his shop a life of abstemious habits, was highly respected by his neighbors, and participated actively in the work of a local church. After a residence of six weeks this stranger woke up one morning and discovered himself to be in an unknown place. Upon asking for an explanation, a neighbor told him he was A. J. Brown, who had come there six weeks previously and had started in business. The man declared he had no recollection of such a person; he said he was Ansel Bourne, a resident of Rhode Island, and gave the address of his relatives. Letters, in the course of a few days, confirmed his statements, and shortly afterwards he was restored to his friends. Since that time he has resumed his normal life. As Ansel Bourne he has no memory of any details of the career of A. J. Brown. Professor James of Harvard, by the use of hypnotism, has restored the consciousness of Brown, and in the hypnotic trance the man has described his journey from Providence, through New York and Philadelphia to Norristown, giving in addition, an account of the storekeeper's transactions. Awakened from the trance, however, he immediately lost all knowledge of Brown.

The case of Mile. Héléne Smith, studied for years by Professor Flournoy of the University of Geneva, is one of greater complexity, far more so than a short sketch can indicate. Mlle. Smith, since the age of fifteen, has been employed in a commercial house of her native city. Sheisa young woman of the middle class, fairly [page 362:] well educated, and of unusual business ability. At frequent intervals she loses her normal personality and enters capriciously into one of several others.

In the first she is the re-incarnation of the daughter of an Arab sheik, who, about the year 1400, was given in marriage to a Hindu prince named Sivrouka, and upon his death she sacrificed herself in the suttee. This prince, an obscure ruler, is mentioned in only one history of India, and that, too, is a forgotten volume found after long search. In this role Mlle. Smith shows an intimate knowledge of Hindu customs, converses with some of her dead countrymen, and speaks a language which, although not altogether recognized by oriental scholars, contains unmistakable traces of Sanskrit.

In another personality her mind travels to the planet Mars, where she discourses with several of its inhabitants, one of whom, named Esenale, is a transmigrated French boy; and another, called Astané, is a sort of prophet. She reproduces little sketches of Martian objects — weird distortions of earthly reminiscences — carriages without horses, houses with fountains on the roofs, men and women in the same style of costume, and landscapes with buildings resembling Chinese pagodas. In this condition she speaks a Martian language; it sounds to the uninitiated like gibberish, but it is perfectly consistent and has been analyzed into a phonetic structure similar to French.

A third impersonation, the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, in which she acts out the gayer moods of that ill-starred queen, is less interesting and more easily explicable; while a fourth, that of Cagliostro, whom she sometimes objectifies as her guardian spirit, is allied and confused with the other three. It is he who acts as interpreter of the Martian language. Apart from these assumptions of [page 364:] various characters, Mlle. Smith, who is a neurotic, is subject to all kinds of grotesque hallucinations.

She is a spiritualist in her faith, and believes in the verity of these incarnations. Professor Flournoy, a careful, cool-headed man, in his biography, entitled From India to the Planet Mars, sarcastically rejects all such claims and thinks her vagaries, though logically consistent in themselves, are romances of abnormal psychology. Her sub-consciousness, he assumes, retains very tenaciously the impressions of her past life, and her hysterical temperament produces a disassociation of the mental faculties and evolves manifestations of multiple personality.

So much for the cases; the facts are indisputable, and they are attested, moreover, by scores of similar instances. The crux comes with the demand for a satisfactory and comprehensive explanation. The philistine disciples of physical science flout the whole subject as unworthy of attention, and they scorn the students of psychic research as dabblers in the black arts. The investigators, in truth, do not know just exactly where they are; this particular field of science has only recently been opened to explorers. The most plausible theory is that of the subliminal consciousness, advocated by Frederic Myers. “The stream of consciousness in which we habitually live,” he writes, “is not the only consciousness that exists in connection with our organism.” The so-called self is always manifested through the physical body, but there is always some part of self lying latent in the sub-consciousness, just as there are sounds in nature imperceptible to the human ear. And when morbid conditions are produced these hidden phases may rise above the submerged levels to the surface and reveal themselves, when logically consistent, as separate identities. [page 365:]

Below the conscious self, which thinks and reasons, there is an underworld of mental existence, wherein are stored the lost data of experience, wherein are performed the involuntary automatic actions of the physiological functions, and wherein, too, may be received impressions from the external world that the conscious self can never know through the senses, just as the actinic rays of light and other ether vibrations beyond the gamut of the visible spectrum pass into the eye without giving us any sensation. This underworld Mr. Myers calls the subliminal consciousness. In the normal mind it is under the domination and control of the conscious reasoning self, and like an engine under the control of the engineer it keeps on the straight track. But let the guiding influence be dethroned and then the automatic engine of the mind is left without guidance, to the play of its unregulated caprices. The extreme result is insanity. The manifestation of dual personality occurs in the borderland between sanity and madness — when the reasoning self has imperfect control of the submerged data of the mind. It is then that the latent impressions rise like rebels; and when, for some cause or other, there is method in the madness of their confusion, we see the revelation of an apparently alien identity.

Formerly such cases were confined in the asylum to wait for death. Today, from the light which has been thrown upon the whole subject by careful study, it looks as if we might discover means of cure. Hypnotism, in many instances, has been applied with beneficial results. The lunatic who insists that he is Napoleon Bonaparte, or that he is himself and his brother by different mothers, can often be hypnotized out of his delusions. Telepathy, clairvoyance, spiritualism, hitherto involved in the trickery of charlatans, [page 366:] or relegated to the realms of the occult, may turn out to be functions of the subliminal consciousness, and all the “psychic oscillations” of the human mind may be explained on the basis of natural law as acceptable as the atomic theory or the attraction of gravitation. “We are only at the mouth of the river,” says Frederic Myers, “which runs up into the unexplored interior of our being.”

One thing is already certain — our old categories of science have been too dogmatic, too exclusive. The old opposition of the dual nature of man as strictly good and evil will have to go, and we shall have to recognize in the human mind more complex relations of the mental and moral faculties. Who can say that anger, if the new theory be true, is not an incipient form of insanity, “a psychic oscillation,” which temporarily dethrones the moral governor of the mind and leaves the agent irresponsible for the act? It is too early yet, perhaps, to come to any definite conclusions, but when one stops to consider the possibilities of changed opinion which might result from this conception of the dual personality, one must realize that like Columbus we have touched on the shore of a new world.

Fiction has made good use of the old tradition of the schoolmen. It is a question whether the new field will ever offer the same opportunity for art. Art demands a sympathy which implies a continuous identity of character. You cannot make a hero out of a lunatic; Wordsworth tried to do so in The Idiot Boy, but the result as well as the hero was idiotic. Art cannot desert the settled order of reason without compromising its dignity and without becoming grotesque. If you say that Hamlet was mad, then Shakespeare's masterpiece, with its wonderful study of the human will paralyzed by a complication of motives, has [page 368:] no more significance than fragments of wreckage; it would lack that central unity without which the play would merely exhibit the antics of a crazed brain. Disassociated personalities could appeal only to our sense of the grotesque.

Albert E. Hancock