BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Friday, July 17, 2015

Tennessee Williams: The Great American Playwright says He Draws Every Character — e.g., Blanche DuBois — Out of His “Multiple Split Personality”

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (1911–1983) was an American playwright and author of many stage classics. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th century American drama…His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of being among the finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman. —Wikipedia

INTERVIEWER: When Flaubert was asked who was Madame Bovary, he answered that it was himself. Do you feel that way toward any of your heroines?

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: I think I draw every character out of my very multiple split personality. My heroines always express the climate of my interior world at the time in which those characters were created. Now some people are persistently claiming that Blanche DuBois is a transvestite! This is ridiculous…Blanche is pure feminine just as this interior woman, this, what do you call it, Doppelgänger...the other self...There is within me, I seriously believe, a female Doppelgänger and that is why I create female characters. But that Doppelgänger, despite my physical appearance...is soft and beautiful (1).

1. Tennessee Williams. Interview by John Calendo in Interview, April 1973. http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/new-again-tennessee-williams/print/
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