“…our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.” Discuss.
I’ve been delving into Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust and I read that phrase on page 23. It made me pause, partly because I’ve definitely heard it quoted before, but also because it made me ask myself…”Is it, really?” However, Proust doesn’t leave you hanging after that phrase. He goes on to describe in more detail what he means by it. How people in different social situations, with various groups of people, can be perceived quite differently. If you don’t notice the “social” in front of “personality” right away, it’s hard to make sense of the phrase, but thanks to my new mantra: reread, reread, reread, on my second pass I became aware of the word “social” and it started to gel. At that point I started to understand his explanation.
If you look at your own life, how many social personas might you have? I’m not aware that I change my personality between groups, but I wonder whether, if you took a poll of my circle of friends and acquaintances, you’d find some aspects of me that are unrecognizable to the others. I’m finding myself thinking about this quite a lot since I read that phrase. I imagine that my level of confidence in one group over another; let’s say, between the OSM and my book club, or my knitting group, would change the way I interact with others, and therefore create a different impression of who I am. Other contributing factors might be how happy I am to be a part of a certain group, whether I enjoy the people involved, how much I respect the others, etc.
Of course, a social personality is not the same as your true self, and in fact, you probably let out bits and pieces of your personality to people as you grow more comfortable with them. Eventually those friends, acquaintances, or colleagues gather enough information about you to create a conviction in themselves about who you are. Is it complete? Absolutely not. Is it enough to go on? In most cases yes. People gather enough information after one or several encounters, to decide whether they want to spend more time with you, whether there’s a possibility of true friendship between you, or whether they will avoid you like the plague. Yet, they are still working with a puzzle that’s missing many key pieces. The more private and discrete you are, the more incomplete the puzzle.
When I think of my great-aunts, the sisters of my maternal grandmother, I have an idea of who they were, which is coloured by the time since they’ve been gone, how much time I spent with each of them, and how they interacted with me. With the little information I have to go on, my impression of them is probably an inaccurate picture of their actual personalities, and I wish I had more to go on. What I have is an impression of one of their social personalities.. I chose my aunts as an example because, considering how little I saw them (the eldest died when I was less than 10, the youngest died around when Erica was born, so I was about 25), they made a strong impression on me that has lasted and created a comforting background to my childhood. I was especially fond of my Aunt Adgie (which was a nickname for her real name, Alison), I thought she was hilarious, and I especially loved her smoker’s gravelly voice and laugh. She lived in Winnipeg and had a gorgeous black fur coat that I loved to snuggle up to. I think all the ladies I knew of from that era had similar fur coats. Perhaps it was the only way to survive the Winnipeg winter. She and my grandmother were very close in age and were close as sisters, too, but Adgie was (again, this is my impression) much more laid back than my grandmother and I can picture her giving my grandmother a look that said, “Take it easy, Eunice!)
Well, that was a tangent a la Proust!
Later:
I’m hoping and expecting to find many more little gems like this as I slowly make my way through this epic journey. I have a dedicated notebook and I’m trying to remember to use it. I just reread the “madeleine” scene, where the protagonist eats a madeleine dunked in tea, served by his mother in adulthood and it brings him back (not without some effort on his part) to a happy ritual from his childhood that he had completely forgotten about. It’s impressive how he spins these explanations and descriptions for several pages, when the actual scene probably took no more than a few minutes to live through. This is how he plays with time, skipping here and there as one thought leads him to another. It’s challenging to follow his lead, but it’s worth the effort!
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