Why does Margaret Atwood (post 4), who argues that all fiction writers have multiple personality, never use the term, but only the euphemism of doubles?

“…in Negotiating with the Dead [A Writer on Writing], Atwood returns to her persistent concern with the writer as double, as split personality…” (1, p. 38), says Lorraine York, who teaches Canadian literature (Atwood is Canadian).

The term that Professor York uses, “split personality,” is the informal term for multiple personality, and she is quite right in reading Atwood as arguing that fiction writers have multiple personality. Atwood clearly states that the writer consists of “two entities,” one who exists for activities other than writing, and the other “personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over” to do the writing.

Why, then, doesn't Atwood use either “split personality” or “multiple personality”? The closest she comes is to say that writing “splits the self in two.” She prefers the euphemism of “doubles”: “In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss.”

My guess is that she thinks of multiple personality as always being a mental illness, and that it would be absurd to say that she and all other fiction writers were mentally ill. I agree, which leads me to infer that multiple personality has a normal version.

1. Coral Ann Howells (Editor). The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge University Press, 2006.