“Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee (post 2): Jean Louise’s multiple personality indicated by her dissociative fugue after finding father racist.

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise is shocked, disillusioned, angered, and nauseated—she literally vomits—when she discovers that her idolized father, Atticus, is a racist.

However, in view of the obvious racist hierarchy of their community, and how freely Atticus and her other close relatives acknowledge their racist attitudes, I think that the only way Jean Louise could not have been aware of her family’s racism would have been for her to have compartmentalized awareness of it in an alternate personality. But that is just my opinion.

The main textual evidence for her multiple personality (aside from her duality, described in the previous post), is her dissociative fugue:

She thinks to herself, “Two solid hours and I didn’t know where I was.”

And when her Aunt asks her where she has been, she replies, “I—I don’t know” (pp. 120-121).

Search “fugue” and “dissociative fugue” for previous posts on this common symptom of multiple personality.

I would also interpret the episode at the end of the novel—when her uncle convinces her not to leave town and not to estrange herself from the family—as further evidence of multiple personality, because both his backhand to her mouth (p. 260) and his giving her whiskey appear to have changed her mind not by intimidation or intoxication, but by altering her state of consciousness (pp. 262, 269) and causing a switch to a more pliant personality.

Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York, Harper, 2015.