“Two Girls, Fat and Thin” by Mary Gaitskill: Two women who were sexually abused in childhood now have multiple personality, but it is unacknowledged. 

Dorothy (fat) and Justine (thin) are two young women who had been sexually abused in childhood (1, pp. 26-27). This psychological novel depicts its aftereffects.

Since the association between childhood sexual abuse and multiple personality is well known, the following questions should be in the mind of any reader: Will the characters have signs of multiple personality? If so, will these signs be labelled as such by a narrator or character? Or will these signs be unacknowledged? (Most multiple personality in novels is unacknowledged.)

Dorothy

“The boundaries of my inner world—[when a person’s alternate personalities are not ‘out,’ they are nevertheless conscious, and are living in the person’s ‘inner world’]—did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded, like the force field of clouds and limitless night sky that surrounded the island of Never-Never Land” (1, p. 111). [See posts on J. M. Barrie.]

“Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted, and noticed that the scalloped potatoes were particularly succulent tonight” (1, p. 117).

[Following her father’s sexual abuse the night before, she has had a multiple personality type of memory gap, a dissociative fugue, in which she finds herself somewhere else, without memory of how she got there:] “I became conscious again as I sat in study hall the next day before a pile of books” (1, p. 124).

“She said, ‘Oh, wait, you haven’t told me—what is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you.’ And I said, ‘Dorothy. Dorothy Never’ ” (1, p. 183). [“Dorothy Never,” as in Never-Never Land, is not the character’s real name, but is evidently the name of an alternate personality.]

[Told her duties as a secretary] “I wanted to cry, I can’t do it! I can’t! But fast after this feeling came another, a deep dark surge of ‘Oh yes you can’ that seemed to come from my lower body…It was a proud, stubborn, angry feeling that made me picture a harsh thin-lipped mouth setting itself in determination. My will, usually wandering my body in various pieces…After the first few hours had passed, my frayed perception forked into two—one navigating the landscape of words, phrases, and ideas, the other absorbing the sounds, inflections, and tonal habits of the voices” (1, p. 201).

“It was as if I had divided into two people: one hungrily embracing the dangerous world of emotional contact and power play, enjoying the game of move, counter move, the unpredictable changes of feelings, the other a terrified child unable to bear the carnivorous spirit of this world, weeping with fear at the sight of adults savagely copulating on their beds, on desks, in elevators” (1, p. 268).

“A voice of reason coughed nervously and interjected that perhaps I had misinterpreted the message of her eyes. But I had not!…I felt like there was an animal trapped in my lower body, pacing furiously, wanting to come out and tear the nearest living creature to pieces” (1, p. 287).

“The chattering voices [of various alternate personalities] in my head stopped, confused…The voices lunged forward, all talking at once, knocking each other down and climbing over each other to explain” (1, p. 295).

Justine

“A tough little person [child-aged alternate personality] within her rose and asserted itself” (1, p. 101).

“She remembers a strange thing she said one night at the dinner table, without knowing why she said it. Her mother asked her how school had been that day, and, recalling a study hall conversation, she answered, ‘Sally Hinkel is going to fuck Jim Thorn tonight.’ Her father’s eyes opened in alarm, her mother’s mouth opened in mid-bite…” (1, p. 139). [An alternate personality had spoken up, inappropriately.]

“One part of her stepped forward like a first grader in a starched dress with her hands clasped behind her back…and yet another part of her tried to puzzle out why she was talking to this prick…” (1, p. 193).

“The child Justine [one of her child-aged personalities] pouted flirtatiously as he eyed her” (1, p. 243).

“Even the rampaging child [another child-aged personality] paused, wondering” (1, p. 248).

[Child-aged alternate personalities are the most common kind, since multiple personality starts in childhood, and such personalities are often frozen in time.]

“Justine pressed her face into the floor [as an adult, she is, at her own request, engaging in a sadomasochistic scene], rubbing her cheek against the porous smelly wood, trying to scrape through her drunkenness. Blackness roared around her; she could barely feel the welts rising on her back. Her knees hurt, she thought. He beat her as she squirmed on the floor, caught in the steel trap that had closed on her when she was five years old. The upper strata of her thoughts and feelings had ruptured, and the creature long trapped beneath [an alternate personality] was out and gnawing her with its teeth” (1, p. 270). [This passage connects her adult interest in sadomasochism with her child abuse at age five and its resulting alternate personalities.]

Concluding Comments

Both of the novel’s two main characters had a history of child abuse, and now have manifestations of alternate personalities. However, since there is no narrator or character who labels it as multiple personality, per se, its presence in the novel seems to be unintentional, and may reflect the author’s own psychology.

Most reviewers of this novel completely missed these issues, but they should not have: When a psychological novel’s set-up is two main characters, both with histories of child abuse, reviewers should stop to consider the implications (multiple personality).

1. Mary Gaitskill. Two Girls, Fat and Thin. New York, Poseidon Press, 1991.