BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Tuesday, April 13, 2021

“Middlemarch” (post 8) by George Eliot (post 19): Will Ladislaw is one more character with “double soul” (double consciousness or multiple personality)


Rosamond informs Will Ladislaw that Dorothea’s late husband put it in his will that if she marries him, she will forfeit all her property. Will is shocked and angry.


“ 'Now you are angry with me,’ said Rosamond…

“ ‘So I am,’ said Will, abruptly, speaking with that kind of double soul which belongs to dreamers who answer questions.

“ ‘I expect to hear of the marriage,’ said Rosamond, playfully.

“ ‘Never! You will never hear of the marriage!’

“With those words uttered impetuously, Will rose, put out his hand to Rosamond, still with the air of a somnambulist, and went away” (1, p. 564).


1. George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]. Middlemarch [A Study of Provincial Life] [1872]. Edited with Notes by David Carroll. With an Introduction by David Russell. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019.

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