“What Philip Roth Didn’t Know About Women Could Fill a Book” by Dara Horn: Shouldn’t she blame Roth’s alter egos for the misogyny of his stories?

After Roth’s recent death, this is the best essay I’ve read about the notorious misogyny of his stories, since Dara Horn, a novelist herself, is from the actual locations in which Roth’s misogynistic stories are set, and she knows for a fact that the women there are admirable.

I am in no position to debate the misogyny of Roth’s stories, since I have read Roth only to the extent I needed to discuss his multiple personality. So for the sake of argument, I accept her premise that many of his writings are rife with misogyny.

But who is to blame for the misogyny in his stories? Who wrote them? Does Dara Horn deny that Roth wrote from the points of view of one or another of various alter egos? Does she know whether all of Roth’s other personalities endorsed the misogyny? Perhaps some were as critical of it as she is.

At book signings, when authors are asked if their novel is autobiographical, they are often quick to say it isn’t, that it does not necessarily represent their own traits, actions, and beliefs.

Dara Horn. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/opinion/sunday/philip-roth-jewish-women-new-jersey.html

Multiple Personality: Medication, Alcohol, and Substances have effects by changing the balance of power among the various alternate personalities

There is no medication that causes or cures multiple personality. Yet some patients who have multiple personality, often undiagnosed multiple personality, may improve when medication is prescribed. Why is that?

One possibility is that the medication is treating a comorbid condition, such as depression. It is common for people to have both multiple personality and depression. And if the depression is truly a separate condition, then the person may benefit from continuing antidepressant medication even after the multiple personality is cured by merger of all the personalities (which is possible if the multiple personality is no longer serving any useful function in the person’s life and all the alternate personalities agree to it).

Another possibility is that the medication is altering the balance of power among the alternate personalities. Any substance (medication, alcohol, drugs, whatever) may effect different personalities differently. And if, let’s say, the substance sedates a disruptive or anxious personality, or energizes a helpful personality, the patient’s behavior will improve, and the doctor will think the diagnosis that goes with that medication is confirmed, or the person will think that the substance they used is just what they need.

A large minority of people with clinical multiple personality use substances, such as alcohol, to alter the balance of power among their alternate personalities. In the short run, they may benefit from alcohol if it sedates anxious personalities or empowers drinking personalities who know or do useful things, but alcohol’s toxicity to the brain, etc., will often outweigh any benefit. Some writers have fallen into this trap.

Most successful writers do not abuse substances, because their alternate personalities have achieved a good balance of power and have learned to cooperate with each other.

Philip Roth (post 8): Obituaries and appreciations show no awareness that Roth virtually ridiculed readers who did not recognize his multiple personality

As my previous seven posts on Philip Roth indicate, his multiple personality was fairly obvious, but literary critics, who have always spoken of Roth’s “alter egos,” have never seemed to know, beyond its euphemistic usage as a literary term, what that meant.

“An alter ego (Latin, "the other I") is a second self, which is believed to be distinct from a person's normal or true original personality. A person who has an alter ego is said to lead a double life. The term appeared in common usage in the early 19th century when dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality disorder] was first described by psychologists. Cicero coined the term as part of his philosophical construct in 1st century Rome, but he described it as "a second self, a trusted friend”…

“The existence of "another self" was first recognized in the 1730s. Anton Mesmer used hypnosis to separate the alter ego. These experiments showed a behavior pattern that was distinct from the personality of the individual when he was in the waking state compared with when he was under hypnosis. Another character had developed in the altered state of consciousness but in the same body…

“Related concepts include avatar, doppelgänger, impersonator, and dissociative identity disorder (DID)” (1).

The multiple personality in some of Roth’s books is so blatant that he seemed to be ridiculing readers who did not recognize it.

Of course, I cannot be sure that Roth ever thought of himself as having multiple personality in precisely those terms. He spoke of his switches to alternate personalities as “impersonations.” But it amounted to the same thing.

And, no doubt, I am not the only one who realizes this about Roth and many other novelists. But since there is as yet no general recognition of what I call Multiple Personality Trait—as opposed to Multiple Personality Disorder (a mental illness)—most people feel that to mention a novelist’s multiple personality is to say they are mentally ill.

But novelists like Philip Roth are not mentally ill. They have a normal version of a mental illness, just as many people may experience anxiety or depressed mood, but do not have an anxiety or mood disorder. And just as it may be an advantage to have some anxiety and depressed mood, it may be an advantage to have multiple personality trait; for example, in writing novels.

Search “Roth” in this blog for my previous seven posts.

1. Wikipedia. “Alter ego.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter_ego

“The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath” by Leslie Jamison: Author repeatedly mentions her memory gaps, her allegedly alcohol-induced blackouts

The Recovering is a “deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage” (front flap). “Blackouts,” listed in the index (1, p. 524), are mentioned on nineteen scattered pages. 

Jamison considers her blackouts to be a notable phenomenon, sometimes a memorable experience, but something so ordinary for alcoholics to have that she mentions them mostly in passing, for example:

“If I had to say where my drinking began, which first time began it, I might say it started with my first blackout, or maybe the first time I sought blackout, the first time I wanted nothing more than to be absent from my own life. Maybe it started the first time I threw up from drinking, the first time I dreamed about drinking, the first time I lied about drinking, the first time I dreamed about lying about drinking…” (1, p. 6).

What she does not say on any of those nineteen scattered pages is whether she has ever had a blackout for a period of time when she had not been intoxicated.

Some drinkers occasionally do have what they assume to be alcoholic blackouts for periods of time that they had not been intoxicated. But they usually do not mention such “dry blackouts” unless you specifically ask if they’ve ever had them, because their dry blackouts may be relatively short and less dramatic, and may be rationalized as delayed aftereffects of past intoxication.

But memory gaps for any period of time that the person had not been intoxicated are not alcoholic blackouts. What else could they be?

Memory gaps, even if they occur for a period of time when the person had been drinking, may be a symptom of multiple personality. Indeed, a person’s biggest memory gaps may occur for periods of time that an alternate personality who drinks had taken over. But since people with multiple personality almost always have more than two personalities, there will also be other, often shorter and less conspicuous, memory gaps for periods of time that a non-drinking alternate personality had taken over.

So whenever an alcoholic has memory gaps for periods of time that they had been intoxicated, consider whether or not they have also had memory gaps for periods of time that they had not been intoxicated. The latter, as far as I can tell from the index, is not considered in Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering.

Search “blackouts” and “memory gaps” in this blog for the many past posts that discuss these issues, with examples in the work of various novelists.

Leslie Jamison is a novelist. I plan to read her novel, The Gin Closet (2010), in the future.

1. Leslie Jamison. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. New York, Little Brown, 2018.

“The Good Person of Szechwan” by Bertolt Brecht (post 2): Why did Brecht write this as a multiple personality play, when its theme did not require it?

This philosophical comedy decries the necessity to be a ruthless businessman before you can afford to be good and charitable.

As the play begins, three gods arrive in Szechwan searching for good people. The only good person they find is Shen Teh, an impoverished young prostitute. They reward her goodness with a financial windfall, which she uses to start a business.

But she is too good, and when her charitable ways threaten to bankrupt the business, she must do something she hates to do: switch to her male alternate personality, who is a ruthless businessman. Shen Teh tells everyone that she has sent for her male cousin, Shui Ta, to help her run the business. And although the other characters think they are two persons, who never happen to be present at the same time, the audience sees her put on a mask and man’s clothes each time she switches to her male alternate personality.

Shen Teh and Shui Ta maintain their contradictory personalities consistently. That they are really only one person who has multiple personality is revealed to most other characters only at the end of the play when Shui Ta (the male businessman) switches back to his female personality in front of the surprised gods, who suddenly realize it is not a man with a paunch, but a pregnant woman.

However, this play could have made the same philosophical points without multiple personality. Indeed, as one critic said, the play might have been dramatically stronger if Shen Teh and Shui Ta had been two persons who were able to argue with each other. But as Brecht wrote it, these two alternate personalities could never argue the issues, because they could never be on stage at the same time.

Why, then, did Brecht write this as a multiple personality play? I can think of three reasons.

First, Brecht, himself, may have had multiple personality (the normal trait, not the clinical disorder), like many other successful fiction writers.

Second, if he did have multiple personality, he may have assumed that most other people had it, too, and would applaud a play that featured it.

Third, other playwrights had been richly rewarded for multiple personality plays. The Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to Luigi Pirandello in 1934 and Eugene O’Neill in 1936. (Search them in this blog.)

1. Bertolt Brecht. The Good Person of Szechwan [1943]. Translated by John Willett. New York, Penguin Books, 2008.

“Brecht’s Split Characters and His Sense of the Tragic” by Walter H. Sokel: What does it mean when split personality is pervasive in a writer’s work?

“The theme of the split personality is a striking phenomenon in Brecht’s dramatic work. It occurs in A Man’s a Man. The ballet The Seven Deadly Sins and the two major plays The Good Woman of Setzuan [aka The Good Person of Szechwan] and Puntila are built around this theme. Indirectly…an essential aspect of Mother Courage and an important one in Galileo. The theme of the split personality is one of Brecht’s major devices for expressing one of his basic concerns. A proper understanding of it will shed light on his deep-seated though oft-denied sense of the tragic and on the relationship between that and his political utopianism…

“Shen Te, the good woman of Setzuan, invents the person of her cousin Shui Ta, a hard-hearted, level-headed businessman…even as the civilized Dr. Jekyll turns into the monstrous Mr. Hyde” (1, p. 127).

Having read the introductions of the Penguin Classics edition of The Good Person of Szechwan (2)—also Wikipedia and browsed online—I have not found anyone wondering whether a fiction writer’s frequent use of split personality might reflect a split personality of his own.

1. Walter H. Sokel. “Brecht’s Split Characters and His Sense of the Tragic,’’ pages 127-137, in Brecht: A Collection of Critical Essays, Edited by Peter Demetz. Englewood Cliffs N.J., Spectrum/Prentice-Hall, 1962.

2. Bertolt Brecht. The Good Person of Szechwan [1943]. Forward by Carl Weber. New Introduction by Norman Roessler. Edited with an Introduction by John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Translated by John Willett. New York, Penguin Books, 2008.

“The Resurrection of Joan Ashby” by Cherise Wolas (post 5): Resolution of writer’s block (“resurrection”) by mutual accommodation of two alternate personalities

The front flap of the novel, which is quoted on the author’s website (meaning the author agrees with it), says that the novel is about a successful fiction writer, Joan Ashby, who marries a man who, at her request, promises that they will have no children, so she can dedicate herself to writing; but that when she accidentally gets pregnant, he betrays their pact, and she makes a selfless decision to embrace motherhood, which prevents her from writing for many years (until her true, writer self is resurrected).

But in the novel, Joan Ashby admits that she was “complicit” in the decision to have children: “And what she thinks next surprises her: she never tested Martin’s love, never learned how he would have reacted if she had said all those years ago, ‘We agreed on no children,’ and held him to his vow. They were equally complicit…” (1, p. 488). What caused her to be complicit? Why was she both for and against having children?

I interpret The Resurrection of Joan Ashby as the story of a woman with writer’s block caused by two personalities—a writer personality (Ashby) and a maternal personality (Joan? Mom?)—who had never negotiated a way for both of them to have their needs met contemporaneously. 

As noted in a previous post, she was peculiarly picky about how she was addressed, asking to be called “Ashby,” not “Joan.” This may have been because alternate personalities often have very definite ideas about their own names.

How could these personalities have resolved their differences? One way would have been for the writer personality and the maternal personality to agree that if the writer were allowed to write, then the maternal personality could have her needs met by the presence of maternal relationships in the novel. (This could have satisfied the maternal personality, because, as I have quoted more than one novelist as saying, the worlds of their novels are often experienced as “more real than real.”)

And in the novel that Ashby is writing at the end of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, the protagonist, a never-married, very successful woman sculptor, seeks out two much younger men, with whom she intends to have maternal relationships, which would accommodate the maternal personality.

Thus, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is about the resolution of writer’s block by the mutual accommodation of two alternate personalities. (I can only speculate that publication of the novel she had written previously had been blocked by the maternal personality because that previous novel did not make that accommodation.)

1. Cherise Wolas. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. New York, Flatiron Books, 2017.

“The Resurrection of Joan Ashby” by Cherise Wolas (post 4): In Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” Dr. Manette, who has multiple personality, is resurrected

In my first post on The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, I commented on the title, and how the concept of resurrection made me think of multiple personality, because people with multiple personality may think of personalities who are being prevented from coming out as “dead,” but if the obstacles to their coming out are removed, they are found to have not really been dead in the ordinary, permanent sense of the word.

Alternate personalities who have been “dead” may be “resurrected.”

And it has just occurred to me that a famous literary illustration of the connection between resurrection and multiple personality is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, in which Dr. Manette, who has multiple personality, is “recalled to life.”

Search “A Tale of Two Cities” in this blog for my series of posts on that novel.

“The Resurrection of Joan Ashby” by Cherise Wolas (post 3): Novel with novelist as protagonist fortunately does talk about fiction writing process.

Previously, I mentioned that Joan Ashby had been asking all the other characters to address her as Ashby, not as Joan. I speculated that her wish to be called Ashby may have had masculine implications. And in a novel with a novelist as protagonist, I hoped that there would be something about the fiction-writing process. In the next eighty pages, I found four things.

First, while all the other characters have been consistently addressing Joan Ashby as Ashby, the narrator has continued to consistently refer to her as Joan. Evidently, in writing this novel, the narrator personality and the character personalities had a difference of opinion about this, and they agreed to disagree, which illustrates that novels are written by multiple personalities.

Second, in the novel that Joan Ashby is writing, the protagonist is a female sculptor who is very successful and has never been married or had children. Joan Ashby’s protagonist has lived the kind of life that Joan Ashby had always considered ideal for herself. In other words, the protagonist of a novel may have been based on the author’s previously existing, idealized, alternate personality.

Third, the single and very successful female sculptor is described as having a “manly” laugh (1, p. 475) and “mannish hands” (1, p. 477), which suggest that my speculations about masculinity in the previous post may not have been entirely unwarranted.

Fourth, the other major character in the novel that Joan Ashby is writing is the sculptor’s assistant, Theo, who “is in Joan’s mind all at once, suddenly fully developed, wanting the chance to start to tell his own tale.” With Joan’s “fingers on the laptop keys, she lets Theo take over” (1, p. 467). Characters who have minds of their own and who take over are alternate personalities.

1. Cherise Wolas. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. New York, Flatiron Books, 2017.

Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”: “Timeless Preoccupations and Old-School Virtues” in today’s Wall Street Journal ignores Alcott’s split personality

The Wall Street Journal article gives the conventional view:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/timeless-preoccupations-and-old-school-virtues-1526670348

To read my twelve posts on Alcott and the two, markedly different, types of stories she wrote, search “Alcott” in this blog.

“The Resurrection of Joan Ashby” by Cherise Wolas (post 2): “She feels again the dichotomy that always did split her in two,” the “maternal” and the “writerly”

Early in the novel, the reader is told of the protagonist’s quest: She “needed to reframe her existence, fracture her life, bifurcate Joan Manning, wife and mother, from Joan Ashby, the writer, erect boundaries to prevent any accidental bleeding between the two” (1, p. 82).

Three hundred four pages later, the split in her personality is again stated: “She feels again the dichotomy that always did split her in two,” the “maternal” and the “writerly” (1, p. 386).

To help her writer personality dominate and supplant her wife-mother personality, she has left her husband and older adult son back in the USA, and has gone to India to rediscover and reinforce her true, writerly self.

She also wants to visit her younger adult son, who, unlike her husband and older adult son, has no conflict of interest with, or objection to, her being a writer, and who is already living in India (to find his own true self).

When Joan and her younger adult son meet in India, he senses that she wants him to address her in terms of her writer personality, not her married or maternal personality, and so he asks her if she wishes him to call her Joan or Ashby. “Ashby,” she says (1, p. 396).

Why does she choose Ashby instead of Joan? It is an interesting choice. In the USA, if an adult child does not address his mother as “mother” or “mom” (or some variation), he will address her by her first name. After all, of her two names, Joan is her personal name, while Ashby is probably her father’s family name, and her son would associate it more with his grandfather than with his mother.

What does it mean (if anything) that she wishes her writer personality to be addressed by her father’s family name rather than her own personal name? Is her writer personality male? It is possible, since I have discussed other female writers in this blog who had clear evidence of male narrative personalities. But in this case, based only on her choice to be addressed by her father’s family name, it is little more than idle speculation.

So far, I have read 396 pages of this novel, and except for the narrator’s repeated comment that the protagonist has a split personality—the mother and the writer, who compete for control—very little has been said about the writer’s writing process. I hope something is said in the remaining 135 pages.

1. Cherise Wolas. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. New York, Flatiron Books, 2017.

“Miriam” by Truman Capote: “…it is not always possible to show others ‘the whys and wherefores’ of something that one has experienced in the mind”

In today’s New York Times, there is an article about an exchange of letters between Truman Capote and a reader of his short story “Miriam,” in which a 61-year-old widow, Mrs. Miller, whose first name is “Miriam,” meets a strange young girl with the same first name (1,2,3,4).

The story’s surprise ending—in 1946 it earned an O. Henry Award in the category Best First-Published Story—is that nobody else can see the girl, who will apparently continue to be Mrs. Miller’s imaginary companion.

The play Harvey (about an adult’s imaginary companion) had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 (5), but Capote says that “Miriam” came from his own mental experience.

In Capote’s letter to the reader, he says: “Of course there are clinical terms for what is actually mentally wrong with Mrs. M.: Sleeping Personality, Schizophrenia, etc. But my story is an imaginary document, and it is not always possible to show others ‘the whys and wherefores’ of something that one has experienced in the mind” (1).

In adults, imaginary companions are called alternate personalities.

And writers may not always be able to explain their stories.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/nyregion/truman-capote-rare-letter-recently-discovered-explains-miriam-story.html

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_(short_story)

3. https://literaryfictions.com/fiction-1/miriam-by-truman-capote/

4. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/13422/14505

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(play)

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell (post 8): Did Orwell really believe that the basis of his novel was totalitarianism and not multiple personality?

In a recent post, I questioned how well authors understand their characters, because their process of creating characters is partially a mystery to them.

But it is not just characters. Authors may not understand the basis of their whole novel. For example, George Orwell promoted a political/sociological interpretation of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. And most critics have accepted totalitarianism as what the novel is obviously about.

Yet if you search “Orwell” in this blog and read my posts, you will see that the novel is about multiple personality. Was Orwell unaware of this? I don’t know.

For example, was he unaware that his “Doublethink” is just a repackaged version of “double consciousness,” which had been a common synonym for multiple personality? Search “doublethink” and “double consciousness” in this blog.

“The Resurrection of Joan Ashby” by Cherise Wolas: The metaphor of reversible death suggests that the protagonist has multiple personality

I have just started this 531-page novel, which is the story of how marriage and motherhood suspend the career of a promising fiction writer.

My first question is about the title metaphor, “resurrection.” When I think of resurrection, I think of Jesus Christ. But since I doubt that either the author or the character has a God complex, the resurrection metaphor must imply something else. Why do I think it implies multiple personality?

Because the narrator says that the protagonist’s writing career is the function of a particular Joan Ashby, who is not the same as the Joan Ashby who marries and has children.

“It was the first Joan Ashby, the realest Joan Ashby, the one who was neither wife nor mother, that she was in immediate danger of losing” (1, p. 82).

The concept of reversible “death” is often seen in people with multiple personality. Alternate personalities who have been rendered unable to come out and perform their characteristic function are often thought of, and referred to, as “dead.” But they are not dead in the ordinary, permanent sense, because they are capable of being resurrected if the forces or circumstances preventing them from coming out are neutralized.

1. Cherise Wolas. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. New York, Flatiron Books, 2017.

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 7): Novelists’ understanding of their characters is limited, because character creation is partially a mystery to them

In my last post, I said Franzen had provided his biographer a key to understanding that the character, Andreas Wolf, had multiple personality, but that his biographer had failed to use the key. I may have been unfair to the biographer, because Franzen himself probably did not understand the character in terms of multiple personality. 

How could a writer provide his character with the symptoms of multiple personality, but not understand that the character has multiple personality? Aside from whether or not the author knows the symptoms of multiple personality, the answer has to do with how characters are created.

Generally speaking, fiction writers do not mechanically construct their major characters. Characters may either come from the author’s repertory company of alternate personalities, or may be newly minted, starting with aspects of real people, a mood, an image, or a story situation. In any case, most major characters are created by the same psychological process that creates imaginary companions and alternate personalities, which is a process that most fiction writers can employ, because most fiction writers have a normal version of multiple personality.

Is it only the author’s host personality who may not understand that a character has multiple personality? What about the author’s alternate personalities, including muse and narrator personalities? Surely, you might think, alternate personalities must recognize the presence of multiple personality, since alternate personalities, per se, are an integral part of multiple personality. But it is in the nature of alternate personalities to see themselves as other people, not as alternate personalities (which is why, clinically, they often deny the diagnosis).

As a practical matter, when I see that a character in a novel has symptoms of multiple personality, but no narrator or other character acknowledges that fact, I infer that the author did not understand the character in those terms. And that is the case with Andreas Wolf in Purity.

Novelists know many things about their novels better than anyone else, but there are aspects that are a mystery to them.

“Jonathan Franzen” (post 6) by Philip Weinstein: Franzen provides key, “I have multiple selves,” but biographer does not use it in his interpretations

Philip Weinstein, Professor of English at Franzen’s alma mater, discusses the author and his work, through and including Purity (2015), the novel I discuss in five previous posts (search “Franzen”).

In Chapter 1, “Becoming Jonathan Franzen,” Weinstein quotes Franzen as saying:

“That we do things that we’re not aware of doing…that we so often unaccountably sabotage ourselves…A human personality is best understood as a collection of selves in conflict…I am a divided person. I have multiple selves” (1, p. 34).

Weinstein fails to apply the above to his interpretation of Andreas Wolf, one of the main characters in Purity. As I have previously discussed, this character had a dissociative fugue (during which he did things, including murder, that he was not aware of doing), had a named alternate personality (Killer), and sabotaged himself in the most extreme way (suicide).

When a novelist provides a key to his work (multiple personality), use it.

1. Philip Weinstein. Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

James Tiptree Jr., Raccoona Sheldon, & Alex are alternate personalities of Alice B. Sheldon (post 5), who dies in murder-suicide: But who is the killer?

Alternate personalities—e.g., James Tiptree Jr. and Raccoona Sheldon—are not puppets. Alternate personalities, by definition, and in practice, have minds of their own.

Another male alternate personality, Alex, is mentioned in Allie’s journal (1, p. 344), but since most people with multiple personality have more than three alters, there were, almost certainly, more alters behind the scenes.

For example, “Part of her whispered that suicide was the only logical response to her condition. Another part shouted, ‘Something inside me is trying to kill me. Help!’ ” (1, p. 342).

These “parts” were two additional alternate personalities, and one of them may have committed the double murder, the apparent murder-suicide, of Allie and her husband.

Whether such parts are seen as metaphors or alternate personalities may be a matter of life and death.

1. Julie Phillips. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2006.

Nobel Prize in Literature, Etc.: In accepting literary awards, have any novelists, playwrights, or poets shared credit with their alternate personalities?

Comments are welcome.

James Tiptree, Jr., and Raccoona Sheldon, pseudonyms of Alice B. Sheldon (post 4): Allie wants to write as a woman, but hasn’t a story in her head.

In 1972, Allie wanted to do some science fiction writing as a woman, but wrote in her journal that “I” (which she puts in quotation marks) “am not a writer” and “haven’t a story in my head—all that went to J. T. Jr.”

“In the spring and summer of 1972, [a] female friend [of Tiptree] began to write stories and was given a name: Raccoona Sheldon.”

Allie “bought Raccoona a typewriter, an Olivetti with sans-serif letters and a black ribbon instead of Tip’s trademark blue. She invented a signature, a small cramped one that was very different from Tiptree’s flowing, confident hand.”

“Raccoona would go on to write two of Alli’s best stories, including the coolly gruesome tale, ‘The Screwfly Solution.’ But at first she seems compelled to sympathize with the world’s victims, of whom she is one.”

“Alli came to feel that Raccoona wasn’t taken seriously because she was a woman, and it’s possible this was true. Yet Raccoona was not the many-sided woman that Allie Sheldon was, either in her fiction or in her correspondence, nor was she as appealing as Tiptree” (1, pp. 283-286).

Thus, by 1972, there are three identified personalities: Alice “Allie” Sheldon, the host personality; James “Tip” Tiptree Jr., a male alternate personality; and Raccoona Sheldon, a female alternate personality.

The biographer has not mentioned multiple personality, per se. She calls Tip and Raccoona “personas,” not alternate personalities, but often refers to Allie, Tip, and Raccoona as though they were three people.

1. Julie Phillips. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2006.

Multiple Personality Trait: Fiction writers acknowledge “the madness of art,” a normal version of multiple personality. But the situation is like Darwin and evolution.

When in “The Middle Years,” Henry James’s fiction-writer character speaks of “the madness of art,” most readers think that all he is doing is praising, in a sad, self-deprecating way, the mystery of literary creativity. Most readers don’t notice that later in that passage the writer explains the mystery of literary creativity by making plural self-reference, which implies that the writer has multiple personality. Henry James elaborates his contention that fiction writers have multiple personality in “The Private Life.”

And I have previously quoted other fiction writers—e.g., Margaret Atwood and Stephen King—as saying something similar about literary creativity. So why have I bothered to make the case for multiple personality in over 150 writers? Writers themselves have already made and conceded the point.

First, few people believe writers when they say these things. Second, the example of fiction writers implies that multiple personality has a normal version, which is neither recognized nor studied by modern psychology. In short, the presence of multiple personality trait, in a sizable minority of the general public, is not yet widely accepted.

This blog is analogous to Darwin and evolution: He did not originate the idea of evolution. It was already well known. His own grandfather had written about it. But it was still not generally accepted. So Darwin painstakingly collected data, elaborated the theory, and helped it to become conventional wisdom.

James Tiptree, Jr., pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon (post 3): Allie finds her science fiction-writing personality, and he takes on a life of his own

“Later Alli sometimes wondered if Tiptree hadn’t been in her all along, waiting to be given a name. But he doesn’t seem to have been a deliberate plan…

“In February 1967, she defended her thesis and became Dr. Alice B. Sheldon…Her thesis was published in the prestigious Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology. She was now a research scientist, with formal credentials…

Meanwhile, by November of 1967, “James Tiptree, Jr., wasn’t rich, but with three stories accepted in six weeks he was a selling science fiction writer.

“Alli…gave him a flowing signature that looked very different from Alice Sheldon’s neat, careful one…

“When Tiptree got on a first-name basis [in written correspondence with science fiction magazine editors] he asked them…to call him ‘Tip’…

“Later she wrote, ‘Tiptree kept taking on a stronger and stronger life of his own…This voice would speak up from behind my pancreas somewhere. He insisted on the nickname, he would not be Jim.’ It seemed to Alli, at least in retrospect, that Tiptree was creating himself…

“ ‘The Last Flight of Dr. Ain’ [1968] was Tiptree’s real debut, the moment when he found his own voice and his own material…

“Though ‘Ain’ went through several drafts—as would almost all of Alli’s stories—she later said its writing felt strangely natural. For the first time, she experienced the writer’s sense of an inner voice, as if someone else were telling the story and all she had to do was write it down…” (1, pp. 212-222).

1. Julie Phillips. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2006.

Variations in personal appearance—clothing styles, hair color, grooming, accessories—do not always mean that a person has multiple personality

Persons with only one personality may have variations in their personal appearance. For example, they may dress differently at home and the office, but this does not prove they have different personalities at home and the office, even if their home and office behavior is different, too.

Variations in personal appearance are clues that a person has multiple personality only if they can be correlated with variations in knowledge, memory, name, age, gender, sexual orientation, talents, skills, interests, values, preferences, or beliefs.

So don’t jump to the conclusion that people you know have multiple personality just because they have variations in personal appearance.

James Tiptree, Jr., pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon (post 2): She evaluated her multiple personalities to see who would write fiction and be companionable 

1950

She says: “Somewhere in the back of my mind there is a female wolf who howls, and a gross-bodied workman who moves things and sweats, and a thin rat-jawed person who is afraid and snaps, and a practical woman, and one of those monkeys with big haunted eyes gazing at an equation with love, and Miss Fix-It, and an Anglo-Saxon lady…and—my own favorite—a disastrous comedian who every so often comes roaring out of the wings and collapses the show. Now it seems clear that while one might get one or two of these characters to write for a living, most of them won’t go along…” (1, p. 160).

1955

"For a long time Alli [Alice B. Sheldon] wanted a divorce…Alli insisted she couldn’t live with anyone. 'I’ve learned my lesson, it’s not for me, and there are plenty of women who live alone and I’m one,' she wrote their marriage counselor…'I figure that I have enough sub-personalities so I can build one up to where it is quite companionable, and displays divergent views, the ability to question, argue and hold opinions' ” (1, p. 174).

1. Julie Phillips. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2006.