Toni Morrison (post 12): Professor Lynda Koolish describes Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) in characters of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

“The struggle for psychic wholeness is a continuous one in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel situated in slavery and its aftermath. It is a process which requires access to painful memories; the characters in the novel reintegrate, achieve ‘the join’ so desperately wished for in Beloved’s soliloquy chapter, re-fuse, when they no longer refuse the deepest knowledge of the meanings of their individual and historical pasts. But much of the novel explores the extraordinary anguishing interlude of time during which virtually all the protagonists, not just Sethe, exist almost as dream walkers in a state of dissociation…

“Sethe’s consciousness, and the consciousness of Denver, Paul D., and the twenty-year-old Beloved (the spectral and apparently embodied adult presence of her murdered two-year-old daughter) are suffused with a truncated, relentless, disrupted chronology common to persons so severely abused that they suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or dissociative states…

“The…characters in Beloved…have been so devastated by the unspeakable abuse of slavery that they exhibit clinical signs of MPD…

“…each character splits into a ‘core self’ and ‘alters,’ none of whom possess the others’ memories. Within each individual, there is no memory/knowledge that a split has taken place.

“Eventually, in each of these characters, memory returns unbidden. Without choosing consciously to be aware, Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Ella, and even Bodwin, as dissociative persons, become gradually aware of at least one alternate self in the person of Beloved. As evidence of the existence of an alternate self of selves begins piling up, it becomes so compelling that the characters have to acknowledge the existence of these selves…

“In Sethe, Morrison has created a character who reproduces in extraordinary fidelity a clinical pattern of someone experiencing MPD” (1).

1. Lynda Koolish. “To Be Loved and Cry Shame”: A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 4, African American Literature (Winter, 2001), pp. 169-195.

Lynda Koolish, a scholar of African American literature, is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University.