“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 3): Arguing, Speculation, Comment

In the rest of the novel, the five-year-old narrator-protagonist has one more typical symptom of multiple personality: She hears “arguing” in her head (1, p. 165). Arguing entails two or more personalities with minds of their own.

As to explaining the two “impossibilities” noted in post 2 (the child’s never being addressed by name, and her narrating the novel with adult language), I can speculate: 

Speculation

Throughout the novel, the 5-year-old makes up stories to amuse people. The reader is usually not told what the stories are about, but only that the child is a known storyteller. So this “child” may be an alternate personality with no name whom I can refer to only by her function, storyteller. And as an alternate personality who has no name, and has never been knowingly met by the mother and older sister, naturally she could not have been addressed by them by name.

Who, then, is narrating the story using adult language? It would be an adult alternate personality, who is either the child storyteller personality grown up and telling the story of the novel retrospectively, or another adult storyteller personality, using the child storyteller as a medium of expression.

Comment

I do not put much stock in the details of my speculation. In my clinical experience with multiple personality, I would typically start with a person’s memory gap, ask to speak with the one who was in control at that time, and then see the person switch to the relevant alternate personality, who would tell me what had gone on during that time, which was often verifiable.

But what the alternate personality would tell me, almost always surprised me. It was rarely what I had guessed or speculated. So my above speculation may be right about its having something to do with the author’s alternate personalities, but the details are probably incorrect.

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.