Marital Abuse: Why doesn’t she just leave him?

In the past, when I read the above, cliché question, I often wondered if the abused wife had multiple personality: Maybe she had memory gaps for the episodes of abuse. Maybe she had an alternate personality that was originally, defensively, designed in childhood to appease abusers.

But since reading the novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover (1), I realize that it may be the husband who has multiple personality: He may know that he abuses his wife, if he sees her injuries, but he may not actually remember assaulting her if he has multiple personality’s memory gaps. Meanwhile, the wife may never think in terms of multiple personality, per se, because she sees her husband’s regular, loving personality as her true husband, whom she married, but his assaultive, alternate personality as only a temporary aberration triggered by alcohol or stress.

In the novel (1), the husband has multiple personality’s memory gaps, but does not get a correct diagnosis, because, apparently, the author did not know the diagnosis, and was not intentionally writing about multiple personality, per se. Search “Colleen Hoover” to see my posts on several of her novels.

Comment: Many works discussed in this blog—including classics and those written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature—have unintended or unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality, probably reflecting the multiple personality trait of most fiction writers.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.