“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 4): More on Agnes’s alleged alcoholic blackout

Agnes’s self-diagnosed alcohol blackout was questioned in post 3, because of its recovered memory, since memories of full-fledged alcohol blackouts are not recorded in the first place, and so cannot be recovered. It is also questionable for the following reasons:

First, the amount of her drinking had been unclear.

Second, she had expressed reasons for starting the fire, which burnt the curtains and the wallpaper. “I hate this wallpaper. I hate those curtains…” (1, p. 52).

Third, her sense of how old she was seemed to vary, possibly reflecting switching among different-aged alternate personalities. “…for a moment it was like she was not nearly forty, not a married woman with three children. She was Agnes Campbell again, stuck in her bedroom, listening to her parents through the wall” (1, p. 53).

Fourth, as she and her son watched the flames of the fire she had started, she told little Shuggie, “Now be a big boy for your mammy” and “There was a dead calmness in her eyes” (1, p. 55).

Fifth, after her husband had arrived home and put out the fire, she expressed jealousy as to where he had been earlier that evening (1, p. 56).

So it was not a simple situation in which an alcoholic had gotten drunk, accidentally started a fire, and then didn’t (at first) remember what had happened. If her “blackout” was not just faked, it seems more like multiple personality in the way her personality seemed to fluctuate, was motivated, and she was able to recover the memory. 

Now, if she had multiple personality, she would have had a traumatic childhood. Had she? A peculiar event comes as punishment for her drinking and starting the fire. Her father claims he had been too permissive in her childhood, and he proceeds to make up for it by seriously whipping her buttocks with his belt. At first, she protests, “Daddy! I’m thirty-nine!” But then “She didn’t struggle, and no more begging words would come,” as though a personality took over who knew from experience that resistance was futile (1, p. 75).

1. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020.