“Naked in Death” and “Seduction in Death” by J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts) (post 4): Eve Dallas’s Dissociative Fugue and Probable Multiple Personality.

Police lieutenant Eve Dallas, who, in the first of this series of over forty novels (1) is thirty years old, had been found abandoned at age eight in the city of Dallas, with no memory of her own name or of anything else about her first eight years. She was given the name Eve Dallas, placed in foster care, and eventually, at about age twenty, joined the New York City police department.

Remarkably, whenever this background is discussed (and it is repeatedly) even Dr. Mira, the highly regarded police psychiatrist (1, p. 133), does not call it what it was: a dissociative fugue, which is when, after psychologically traumatic experience, people wander or travel away from where they are known, and have amnesia for who they are and what their life had been. [Search “dissociative fugue” for prior posts.]

Dissociative fugue is one of a group of psychological conditions called dissociative disorders, which includes dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality). So if someone has had a dissociative fugue, there is a good chance that they have multiple personality, especially if they’ve had extensive psychological trauma in childhood, which was the case for Eve Dallas (1, p. 133).

In short, the protagonist of this series of novels has been given a backstory suggestive of multiple personality, but the author (as represented by the narrator and characters) does not know it, and so there is no effort to provide the reader with relevant information, such as whether Eve Dallas has identity changes and memory gaps (the narrator would have to say so or another character would have to ask her). 

Nevertheless, inadvertently, there are some indications suggestive of multiple personality. For example, at one point Eve says, “My father raped me.” And the narrator adds: “She heard herself say it. The shock of it, hearing her own voice say the words, mirrored in her eyes.” Now, there are two ways to interpret this; 1. that she had often thought of it, but was surprised at her impulsivity to say it out loud to other people, or 2. that she had had dreams and flashes of memory about this, but had not known there was a part of herself (an alternate personality) who had a clear memory of it. It is a clinically known fact that people with multiple personality sometimes have a subjective sense that they say or do things that does not feel like them saying or doing it (alternate personalities can sometimes pull strings from behind the scenes). This is why multiple personality used to be confused with being possessed.

The other main character, Roarke, thinks Eve Dallas has two distinct personalities, as, for example, when he says, “Lieutenant Dallas wouldn’t be afraid of me, even if Eve might” (1, p. 153).

Like many people with multiple personality, Eve Dallas sometimes hears the voices of alternate personalities in her head. One is a personality based on her deceased father, so she must have had this alternate personality from before she was eight years old. As she is in the process of arresting a criminal: “So what? a voice whispered in her ear. Her father’s voice. Another’s coming. Another always is” (2, p. 304).

In multiple personality, it is not uncommon to have some opposite-sex alternate personalities. The alternate personality related to her father was probably not the only one. For example, Eve Dallas and Roarke were having a playful physical fight, and at one point she says, “Just be careful who you call a female, ace” (2, p. 179). Indeed, J. D. Robb’s decision to have police subordinates address their superiors, like Lieutenant Dallas, as “Sir” makes me wonder whether J. D. Robb thinks of Eve Dallas’s police personality as male (as opposed to her off-duty and romantic personalities, which are clearly female). But I don’t think most readers would like that interpretation.

1. J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts). Naked in Death. New York, Berkley Books, 1995.

2. J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts). Seduction in Death. New York, Berkley Books, 2001.