Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: The main character has the body-image, mirror hallucinations and fugue, amnesia episodes of multiple personality

Lula Ann Bridewell—a.k.a. little Lula Ann (pre-age 8), big Lula Ann (age 16), Ann Bride (after high school), and Bride (beautiful career-woman)—has two textbook symptoms of multiple personality: 1. going places and doing things that she can’t remember, and 2. body-image hallucinations.

The first symptom is reported on pages 51-53 (1), when Bride says that she has been “sleeping with men…and not remembering any of it.” In other words, an alternate personality has been going places (fugue) and doing things that her host personality (Bride) doesn’t remember (amnesia). This is a classic symptom of multiple personality.

In the aftermath of one of these episodes, she looks in a mirror and sees that her earlobes do not appear to be pierced (which they have been since she was eight) and she has “not a single hair in my armpit” (p. 52). At various other times in the novel, she sees that her adult breasts have disappeared. “So this is what insanity is,” she says (p. 52).

But no, body-image hallucinations are not insanity. They are a textbook symptom of multiple personality:

“The visual hallucinations reported in MPD [multiple personality disorder] are a curious blend of hallucination and illusion and frequently include changes in the patient’s perceived body image. MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror. They may see themselves as having hair, eyes, or skin of a different color, or as being of the opposite sex. In some instances, these alterations of perception of self are so disturbing that the individuals may phobically avoid mirrors. They may describe seeing themselves sequentially change into several different people while looking in a mirror. MPD patients may also hallucinate their alter personalities as separate people existing outside of their bodies” (2, p. 62).

What multiples are hallucinating in mirrors (and even without mirrors) are their various alternate personalities. So when Bride saw unpierced earlobes, etc., she was seeing her little, prepubescent, Lula Ann alternate personality. But since Bride did not know about multiple personality, she worried that she was insane. (She need not have worried, because multiple personality is not a psychosis.)

Does Toni Morrison know that Bride, as portrayed in this novel, has multiple personality? I don’t know. All I can say is that there is no character or narrator in this novel who knows it. And multiple personality, per se, plays no part in the plot.

This situation has happened with so many novelists discussed in this blog that I have given it a name, “gratuitous multiple personality.” Search it in the blog for previous discussions.

1.Toni Morrison. God Help the Child. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

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