Wright learns swiftly that Elizabeth’s mind is split into four parts. When he persuades her to accept hypnosis, Dr. Wright, a pompous, genteel man who treats her as a child. Exhausted and in pain, Elizabeth visits a psychologist at the behest of her physician.
Strange things are afoot: Aunt Morgen is accusing Elizabeth of leaving the house in the middle of the night, which Elizabeth claims isn’t true Elizabeth is also receiving menacing handwritten notes at work (sample line: “…i hate you dirty lizzie and youll be sorry you ever heard of me because now we both know youre a dirty dirty…”). At night, she suffers from insomnia, migraine, and backaches, none of which are assuaged by her domineering aunt, Morgen, with whom she resides in a family home. But The Bird’s Nest is a monumental work, not just for spurring a renewed interest into the multiple-personality story, but because its inventive storytelling structure gives a powerful look at a young woman trapped within her own body and mind.Īt the center of The Bird’s Nest is Elizabeth Richmond, a meek 23-year-old who spends her days working a menial job in a museum. It did not reach the popularity of her canonical short story “The Lottery,” and it was not the commercial success of her later Gothic novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Cleckley’s The Three Faces of Eve, and Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil, it’s easy to understand why Shirley Jackson’s 1954 novel (her third) might have fallen through the cracks. With popular literary examinations of dissociative identity disorder including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Multiple-personality narratives are well-worn territory, usually introduced as a lame plot device on daytime soap operas.
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