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.

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Monday, October 26, 2015

Jane Eyre (post 9) had to be written by Currer Bell, not Charlotte Brontë, because it would have portrayed the latter as coming from an immoral family

At the time Jane Eyre was written, Charlotte Brontë’s father had been blind (for which she had taken him to have cataract surgery). So for Charlotte Brontë, herself, to have written a novel in which a woman who looked like Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre) married a man old enough to be her father who had become blind (Rochester), would have looked like a novel about incest. Moreover, before the novel’s protagonist marries her “father,” she has to resist intense pressure to marry her “brother.”

I do not know, and am not saying, that there was incest in the Brontë family. Nor am I saying that Charlotte Brontë wrote the novel, but then realized what I said above about how it would look, and so concocted a pseudonym for appearances. What I am saying is that the regular Charlotte Brontë personality would not have written such a self-incriminating story in the first place. Such a story had to have been written by an alternate personality who would not have been embarrassed by it, such as Currer Bell, who was not a member of a family like that in the novel: with a small, plain, young woman, a blind father, a gone mother, and a wayward brother.

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