“Welcome to Hard Times” (post 1) by E. L. Doctorow (post 3): Molly speaks in a different accent, indicating a switch to a different personality

In two previous posts on this award-winning writer, I quoted him from two interviews in which he said that his writing process involved alternate personalities. I accepted his first-hand testimony and did not look in his works for indirect evidence. But I am now halfway through his first novel (1).

In an episode with Molly (who has been living in this small frontier town of the Dakota Territory), she is comforting an ill young boy with a story about when she had been a maid for a wealthy family in New York. The narrator says:

“I will never forget her words. Even after the boy’s eyes were closed she sat holding him around, whispering these remembrances. It was the most she ever said about herself, it was the most I ever learned about her. She was speaking the brogue. I had never heard her use it before, and I wouldn’t again…

“…she saw me looking and ‘Turn away!” she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Don’t you dare look at me, turn away!’ ” (1, p. 97).

Molly’s switch to speaking with a brogue was a manifestation of her switch to another personality, who didn’t want the narrator-protagonist to know about her.

1. E. L. Doctorow. Welcome to Hard Times [1960]. New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007.