Nora Roberts’ (post 5) Eve Dallas in Historical Context: Incest victim, solving a murder about incest, when incest and multiple personality were associated.

Naked in Death, the first of more than forty novels featuring police lieutenant Eve Dallas, was published in 1995. The novel highlights the fact that Eve Dallas had been a victim of incest in childhood. And she solves a murder that had been committed to cover up multigenerational incest: a woman had been blackmailing her grandfather, threatening to expose his crime of incest, so he kills her.

In the 1990s, incest, traditionally a hidden crime, and multiple personality, intrinsically a hidden disorder, had come out of the closet. In fact, discovering incest as the hidden cause of psychological problems had become so popular that some misguided therapists were over-diagnosing it. And since incest had become associated in the popular mind with multiple personality, the backlash against false accusations of incest had become a backlash against multiple personality as well.

In any case, the point is, when Naked in Death, a novel about an incest victim who solves a murder about incest, was published in 1995, incest and multiple personality were associated, not only as a clinical fact, but in the popular mind. And so anyone who reads the story of Eve Dallas without thinking of multiple personality is taking it out of historical context.

The fact that the novel emphasizes and highlights incest, but does not even mention multiple personality as a possibility, is curious, considering the historical context noted above. Perhaps, for the author, multiple personality was too sensitive a subject.