“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 5): Shuggie’s Parentification (seen in children of alcoholics) and Agnes’s Two Handwritings (in multiple personality)

Parentification

Shuggie and his mother Agnes often have role reversal. When Agnes’s alcoholism incapacitates her, Shuggie takes care of her as though he were the parent and she were the child. Here is another literary example:

“Charles Dickens' ‘Angel in the house’ characters, particularly Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield, are parentified children. Agnes is forced to be the parent of her alcoholic father…” (1).

Alternate Handwriting

In previous posts, it was seen that Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, an alcoholic, probably had multiple-personality memory gaps, not alcoholic blackouts. Another clue to multiple personality is her having two different handwritings:

“The red leather address book by the phone listed all the people that Agnes knew. She had been religious about keeping it updated, and some of the names in the book had been crossed out in what looked like anger. Next to her neat cursive she had scrawled in another hand, one that looked like another woman’s entirely, a short comment…” (2, p. 309).

Her different handwriting probably reflected an angry alternate personality, and not merely anger, because the text emphasizes that it was written in “another hand, one that looked like another woman’s entirely,” as distinguished from the crossing out, which merely “looked like anger.”

1. Wikipedia. “Parentification.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentification

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