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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Wednesday, December 21, 2022

“Far from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy: Gratuitous Multiple Personality

History of childhood trauma

“…An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me” [Bathsheba] (1, p. 202).


Memory gap 

“Bathsheba” knelt beside the coffin…“she knew not how long she remained engaged thus. She forgot time, life, where she was, what she was doing” (1, p. 291).


Voice like “another woman”

“What have you to say as your reason?” [Bathsheba] asked, her bitter voice being strangely low—quite that of another woman now” ( 1, p. 293).


Women are “rum things”

“But knowing what rum things we women be…” (1, p. 354). Search “Casterbridge” regarding another of Hardy’s novels, in which a man changes personalities whenever he has rum.


Comment: “Gratuitous Multiple Personality” means symptoms or features of multiple personality that do not appear to be in the novel intentionally (to suggest multiple personality for plot or character development) and so may be in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.


1. Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1874/2002.

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