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.

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Monday, August 24, 2015

Madame Bovary: A dissociative identity interpretation of Flaubert’s phrases “without conscious awareness” and “like someone waking from a dream”

Since Gustave Flaubert is famous for trying to get le mot juste (the right word), perhaps I may be excused for noticing not only the presence of a particular phrase in Madame Bovary, but its recurrence:

“…and it was without conscious awareness that she made her way toward the church, inclined to any devotion, so long as her soul might be absorbed in it and all of life disappear into it…and [after having tried to ask the priest a question] she looked like someone waking from a dream” (1, pp. 96-99).

“Indeed, [momentarily reviving on her death bed, in reaction to the priest] she looked all around her, slowly, like someone waking from a dream; then, in a distinct voice, she asked for her mirror…” (1, p. 289).

What is meant by “without conscious awareness”? Obviously, she is not asleep or in a coma. She was, clearly, conscious. So the phrase evidently means that her behavior was not under the control of her regular personality, but was being controlled by an alternate personality of which her regular personality was only dimly aware. Then, when her regular personality came back into control, it was, for her regular personality, like waking from a dream.

The deathbed scenario (of the second quote) makes me think of the kind of myth or fairytale in which someone is trapped in the body of a beast, but then magically reverts to their true, human identity. Be that as it may, Emma seems once again to be switching from one personality to another, with the two personalities differing from each other in voice and appearance.

The idea “inclined to any devotion, so long as her soul might be absorbed in it and all of life disappear into it” might mean that she was prone to switching into alternate personalities; that is, she had dissociative identity (multiple personality).

1. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York, Viking, 2010.
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