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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Thursday, July 6, 2017

“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 5): Should you boycott this historical novel, because of its slavery and racism? Perspective and history.

Perspective
Do you also boycott the one dollar bill, the quarter dollar coin, and anything named after George Washington, because he owned slaves during his presidency? Do you also boycott the Hebrew Bible and The New Testament, because neither Moses nor Jesus prohibited the institution of slavery?

History
How had the South originally gotten its slaves? Most slaves had been bought by white slavetraders from black African slaveowners (1).

There had been black slaveowners in South Carolina (2). 

There had been slaves in New York City and business deals between Northerners and slaveowners in the South (3).

1. Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” New York Times, April 23, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html
2. Larry Koger. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. University of South Carolina Press, 1985.
3. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris (Editors). Slavery in New York. Published in Conjunction With the New-York Historical Society. New York, The New Press, 2005.
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