Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (Post 2): Book Reviewers Don’t Know That Childhood Trauma Raises the Possibility of Multiple Personality

A major theme of this novel is the lasting effect of childhood trauma. And since one possible lasting effect is multiple personality, anyone reviewing this novel should consider it, especially since there is such a blatant symptom as sexual affairs with amnesia.

To be fair, reviewers are misled by the author, who clouds the issue of these sexual affairs with alcohol and drugs—use of which seems out-of-character for this character—and then quickly changes the subject.

Moreover, it is misleading of the author to have no character or narrator who even considers the possibility of multiple personality—which should be an obvious consideration when you have both childhood trauma and episodes of amnesia.

And then there are the main character’s body-image hallucinations, among the most memorable things in the novel. Most reviewers have nothing much to say about it, which is lazy. They should have researched what such symptoms could indicate.

After all, Morrison, being a serious writer, must be assumed, until proved otherwise, to be following Shakespeare’s advice to “hold the mirror up to nature.” Which means that a reviewer should assume, until proved otherwise, that those body-image hallucinations are real and true psychological phenomena. As I discussed in the last post, they are.