"Flowers in the Attic" (post 3) by V. C. Andrews: Characters Hear Voices in Their Head or Speak Using Voices of Alternate Personalities

“Go away, run away, spring was approaching, we had to leave soon, before it was too late. A voice inside, intuitive, kept drumming out this tune” (1, p. 316).

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m surviving.” And then I said good night in a voice that didn’t even sound like me.

“Good night Cathy,” he said, using someone else’s voice, too.” (1, p. 323).

“My instinct was shouting loud: Wake him up!  My suspicions whispered slyly, keep quiet, don’t let him know; he won’t want you…” (1, p. 328).

Comment: Above probably reflected author’s multiple personality trait.

1. V. C. Andrews. Flowers in the Attic. 40th Anniversary Edition. With a Foreword by Gillian Flynn. New York, Gallery Books, 1979/2019.

Ian Hacking: Obituary of Multiple Personality Critic

It highly praises Hacking, as obituaries should, but note the ending: Hacking is quoted as saying he was “a dilettante” (1).

Search “Ian Hacking” in this blog for a discussion of his views on multiple personality.

1. Obituary. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/science/ian-hacking-dead.html

"Flowers in the Attic" (post 2) by V. C. Andrews: Character warns she may switch to, and get stuck in, abusive alternate personality

“I am here to do what I can to make my father like me again, and forgive me for marrying my half-uncle. And in order to do that, I am going to have to play the role of the dutiful, humbled, thoroughly chastised daughter. And sometimes, when you begin to play a role you assume that character, so I want to say now, while I am still fully myself, all you have to hear…” (1, p. 95).

Comment: When actors or authors with multiple personality get into character, they sometimes have difficulty resuming their regular personality. Perhaps V. C. Andrews, having had that kind of experience with her characters, planned to use it in her plot regarding this character. Or perhaps, as some critics have said (see post 1), this novel is merely nonsensical and “deranged.”

1. V. C. Andrews. Flowers in the Attic. 40th Anniversary Edition. With a Foreword by Gillian Flynn. New York, Gallery Books, 1979/2019. 

New York Times Ignorance on Multiple Personality

1. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/books/sybil-50th-anniversary.html

Comment: Search "Sybil" and read the rest of this blog

“Flowers in the Attic” (post 1) by V. C. Andrews: Novelist Gillian Flynn says she likes this novel because she’s addicted to wicked women, but there may be an additional reason

“Twice adapted into films in 1987 and 2014, the book was extremely popular, selling over forty million copies world-wide…A review in The Washington Post when the book was originally released described the book as “deranged swill” that “may well be the worst book I have ever read.” The retrospective in The Guardian agreed that it is deranged but called it "utterly compelling” (1).

Novelist Gillian Flynn—author of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects—says in her Foreword to Flowers in the Attic that she’s loved this book, because of her “addiction to wicked women” (2), but see Comments below for an additional reason.

Early in Flowers in the Attic , the narrator says, “Before I died, I was going to live in a thousand rooms or more, “a little voice whispered in my ear” (2, p. 34).

Comments: That her narrator hears such a voice suggests that V. C. Andrews my have had multiple personality trait. And I recall that Gillian Flynn’s novels suggested that she had multiple personality trait, too. Search “Gillian Flynn” in this blog to see what I mean.

1. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_in_the_Attic

2. V. C. Andrews. Flowers in the Attic. 40th Anniversary Edition. With a Foreword by Gillian Flynn. New York, Gallery Books, 1979/2019. 

“The Women’s Room” (post 7) by Marilyn French: Narrator ends the novel as she began it, asking the reader to decide her sanity

Beginning

“Well, I said I was going to try to avoid fairy-tale fantasies, but I seem to be incorrigible…I leave it to you to decide on Mira’s sanity” (1, p. 5).

Conclusion

“So, you see, the story has no ending…

“And that’s all, I guess, except for Mira…”(1, p. 462).

“Some days I feel dead, I feel like a robot, treading out time. Some days I feel alive, terribly alive…Other times I think I have gone over the line…An elderly man stopped me the other day as I walked along the beach, a white-haired man with a nasty face, but he smiled and said, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ And I glared and snapped at him, ‘Of course you have to say that, it’s the only day you have!’

“He considered that, nodded, and moved on.

“Maybe I need a keeper…

“I have opened all the doors in my head…” (1, pp. 464-465).

Comment: “Multiple Personality Trait” (see past posts) is sane.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009.

“The Women’s Room” (post 6) by Marilyn French: Three of Mira’s alternate personalities are heard from after Mira and Ben make love

“After a time, he leaned back and lay on his side close to her. They lighted cigarettes and sipped their drinks. He asked her about her girlhood: what kind of child had she been? She was surprised. Women ask such things, sometimes, but not men. She was delighted. She lay back and threw herself into it, talking as if it were happening there and then. Her voice changed and curled around its subject: she was five, she was twelve, she was fourteen…” (1, p. 307).

Comment: Mira was not an actress. And she had not been asked to change her voice and act as though she were three specific younger ages. But Ben’s question had evidently been heard and answered by three of Mira’s younger alternate personalities, who had been listening behind the scenes, as alternate personalities often do.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009. 

Martin Amis: Three Perspectives on Recently Deceased, Celebrated Author

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/books/best-martin-amis-books.html

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/books/review/martin-amis.html

3. Search “Martin Amis" in this blog.

“The Women’s Room” (post 5) by Marilyn French: Voice, an alternate personality, who is usually inside Mira’s head, comes out, incognito, to converse

“Are you saying,” Mira began carefully, “that you’d never get married again?”

“I can’t imagine why I would,” Val answered…“Why, would you?”

“I’ve thought so…Most divorced people do, don’t they?” her voice asked a little anxiously (1, p. 239).

Comment: Why isn’t it MIRA or SHE who asked a little anxiously? Evidently, a voice (alternate personality) that is usually inside Mira’s head (see post 4) has come out, incognito, to participate in this conversation.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009.

“The Women’s Room” (post 4) by Marilyn French: Author assumes some mentally well people have opinionated “Parts” and “Voices” in their head

“…But it was the same old story. Mira was tired of it. Women and men. They played by different rules because the rules applied to them were different. It was very simple. It was the women who got pregnant and the women who ended up with the kids. All the rest stemmed from that. So women had to learn to protect themselves, had to be wary and careful. The way the rules had been set up, everything was against them. Martha was courageous and honest and loving, but she was also a damned fool.

“Mira told herself this, sitting in the dark with her brandy. She felt mean and small, foreseeing tragedy for Martha. And tragedy it would be if David failed her. Her emotion for him was too intense and engulfing for it to be anything else. Maybe it won’t happen, her other voice suggested. Maybe he’s telling her the truth—after all, she believes him and she has a built-in shit detector. Maybe it will all work out and they’ll live happily ever after. David had applied for a job in a college in Boston. It was better paying than the one he had, and if he got it, he and Martha would get married and move up there and he could still provide for his wife. That’s what he said. Perhaps it was true. But the other part of Mira’s mind nagged and picked. Why did he force Martha into something he wasn’t ready for?

“But both voices came together when she thought about herself” (1, pp. 200-201).

Comment: Such opinionated “parts” and “voices” are alternate personalities, and they indicate that the author had multiple personality trait.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009. 

“The Women’s Room” (post 3) by Marilyn French: When an adult character suddenly sounds Childlike, the author wants a psychological explanation

When one of Mira’s women friends, Natalie, is acutely upset, she says she hates her husband and children. But what is most striking about the author’s description of Natalie’s behavior is that “Her voice changed: it went higher and thinner, it sounded like a child’s voice” (1, p 111), which is what may happen to the voice of an adult when she switches to a child-aged alternate personality.

Natalie’s behavior is so worrisome to Mira (the author’s main character) that Mira finished reading “the Jones biography of Freud and several Freud monographs” (1, p. 113). The author apparently wanted her characters to be understood psychologically.

Unfortunately, Freud was not the best one to consult about multiple personality, because the main psychological defense in classic Freudian theory was “repression,” while the main psychological defense in multiple personality is “dissociation,” which is why “multiple personality disorder” was renamed “dissociative identity disorder” in DSM-5, the current diagnostic manual of The American Psychiatric Association.

Search “Freud” in this blog for further discussion of why Sigmund Freud mostly missed multiple personality.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009. 

“The Women’s Room” (post 2) by Marilyn French: The author’s relationship with her characters may be based on her multiple personality trait

In post 1, the author’s main character had been the woman, Mira, who eventually married the man, Norm. Another female character who has been mentioned is Val.

Apparently, in the author’s subjective experience, Mira, Norm, and Val were not merely her literary puppets, but, rather, alternate personalities, which I define as such, because they have minds and wills of their own:

“The thing that bothers me—or if truth be told, the thing that bothers Val, since she won’t go away—is that these qualities [of men and women] that appeal to us in each other have nothing to do with reality. Maybe it’s our culture, Val, that posits such a relationship as desirable. Please go away [Val]. Just for a little while…(1, p. 65).

“…I feel as if Val were curling up the edges of the letters even as I type them. If you want to write letters of complaint about my handling of Norm, please address them to her” (1, p. 66). 

Comment: Some literary critics might label the above as a literary technique, metafiction, but I think the author was sincere, because, for example, in the past, when I saw that author Gabriel García Márquez had been described by critics as using the literary technique of “magic realism,” I quoted García Márquez in a past post as denying it. It appears that some critics invent terms to explain away genuine psychological experiences.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009. 

“The Women’s Room” (post 1) by Marilyn French: Front cover of this feminist classic says “TWENTY-ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD”

“My head is full of voices…I feel as if I were a medium and a whole host of departed spirits has descended on me clamoring to be let out…I am going to try to let the voices out” (1, pp. 8-9)

“…she was approaching her twentieth birthday: look, her other self said, what Keats had done by twenty. And finally her whole self would rise up and wipe it all out. Oh don’t bother me with it! I do the best I can! Part of her knew that she was simply surviving in the only way she could” (1, p. 36).

    

Comment: The protagonist says she hears “voices” of “spirits,” and also has an “other self,” and “parts,” which are terms for how she experiences the alternate personalities of her undiagnosed multiple personality trait, which she got from the author.

1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009. 

“Wuthering Heights (post 4) by Emily Brontë: Heathcliff’s Eyebrows

“I was amazed by the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man…His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army. His countenance…looked intelligent…A half-civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows…(1, p. 96).

Comment: Search “eyebrows” in this blog and/or read my journal articles (2, 3) for the significance of lowered or depressed eyebrows, as specified by Emily Brontë.

1. Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights [1847]. UK, Penguin Books 1995/2003. 

2. Nakdimen, K. A. (1978). The Two Faces of Attention: Early Formulations. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 42(2), 97-118.

3. Nakdimen, K. A. (1984). The Physiognomic Basis of Sexual Stereotyping. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 141(4), 499–503.

“Wuthering Heights (post 3) by Emily Brontë: Another Great Novelist with Multiple Personality Trait

Comment: Since the first half of this novel addressed the psychology of Catherine, I was hoping that the second half would do the same for Heathcliff, but it didn’t. So I’m left with the conclusion that Catherine’s multiple-personality symptoms are in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights [1847]. UK, Penguin Books 1995/2003. 

Novelist Hernan Diaz Surprised by Own Taste in Music

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/books/review/hernan-diaz-interview.html 

“Wuthering Heights (post 2) by Emily Brontë: Catherine sees other faces in the mirror, a textbook symptom of multiple personality

“Don’t you see that face?” she enquired, gazing earnestly at the mirror.

“And say what I could, I was incapable of making her comprehend it to be her own…(1, p. 123).

Textbook: “MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror” (2, p. 62).

1. Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights [1847]. UK, Penguin Books 1995/2003.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“Wuthering Heights (post 1) by Emily Brontë: Narrator says Catherine has multiple personality, if readers pay respectful attention to Emily Brontë's words and details

“Catherine had…a double character without exactly intending to deceive anyone” (1, p. 67)…“now and then; besides, she hurt me extremely, so I started up from my knees and screamed out. O, Miss, that’s a nasty trick! You have no right to nip me, and I’m not going to bear it!

“I didn’t touch you, you lying creature! cried she…

“What’s that, then? I retorted; showing a decided purple witness to refute her.

She stamped her foot, wavered a moment, and then irresistibly impelled by the naughty spirit within her, slapped me on the cheek…

“Catherine, love! Catherine! interposed Linton, greatly shocked at the double fault of falsehood, and violence, which his idol had committed…” (1, pp. 67-71). 

Comment: Since Catherine assaults a longterm female servant, who is also the author’s narrator, in front of a witness, I interpret “double character” to mean multiple personality, not merely impulsiveness and hypocrisy.

And since an old interpretation of multiple personality is demon or spirit possession, “naughty spirit within her” also suggests multiple personality.

Furthermore, persons with multiple personality are often called liars, because memory gaps lead them to deny what witnesses have seen them do, as seen in this case.

Since Wikipedia (2) does not mention that Catherine has multiple personality, I’m not expecting it to become more obvious than it already is.

1. Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights [1847]. UK, Penguin Books 1995/2003.

2. Wikipedia. “Catherine Earnshaw.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Earnshaw

“Trust” (post 6) by Hernan Diaz: Quotation of monstrous multiple-personality metaphor; then Comment on puzzling inconsistency

“A diarist is a monster: the writing hand and the reading eye are sourced from different bodies” (1, p. 390).

Comment: The novel’s four parts have puzzling inconsistencies. Writers with multiple personality trait may have puzzling inconsistency. The Pulitzer Prize may reward such creativity. Search “puzzling inconsistency” in this blog for further discussion of the psychology.

Should the author have made a greater effort to reconcile inconsistencies? Not if he assumed that readers of "Trust" would have sufficient trust.

1. Hernan Diaz. Trust. Riverhead Books. 2022. 

“Trust” (pre-post 1) by Hernan Diaz: Before obtaining this novel

May 9, 2023

2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded to Novelist Hernan Diaz, who is also a biographer of Jorge Luis Borges: Please search “Borges” in this blog 

“Trust” (post 5) by Hernan Diaz: Handwriting? Author says he always writes with a fountain pen!

https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/upaiqe/one_of_us_writer_hernan_diaz_gushes_about_his/

“Trust” (post 4) by Hernan Diaz: Page 294 recalls Page 83, which indicated Multiple Personality

“In Bonds, I suddenly remember Vanner describes the journals Helen Rask kept day and night during her breakdown, wondering if her future self would recognize her own writing” (1, p. 294).

Comment: See “Trust” (post 2), in which I discussed the passage on page 83, where what Helen said indicated multiple personality.

Note (at the end of post 2): In my email exchange with Hernan Diaz, he was surprised that what he had written on page 83 was indicative of a real psychiatric condition, since, he said, it came from his own imagination.

1. Hernan Diaz. Trust. Riverhead Books. 2022.

“Trust” (post 3) by Hernan Diaz: Why that title? Imagine “Distrust” 

Connie Chung: Focus on the popularity of her first name (1) ignores the body language of her elevated, stereotypically feminine, eyebrows (2, 3)

Search "eyebrows" in this blog for discussion.

1.Connie Wang. “Generation Connie.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/11/opinion/connie-chung-named-after.html

2. Nakdimen, K. A. (1978). The Two Faces of Attention: Early Formulations. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 42(2), 97-118.

3. Nakdimen, K. A. (1984). The Physiognomic Basis of Sexual Stereotyping. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 141(4), 499–503. 

“Trust” (post 2) by Hernan Diaz: Helen has mental breakdown in which she fears that her “future self” won’t be able to recognize her own handwriting

In 1929, when Helen goes out for a walk in Manhattan, where she and her husband live, she feels people are staring at her, because most people are suffering from the stock market crash, but she and her husband, due to his shrewd investments, have become fantastically wealthy.

Helen gets progressively more withdrawn, at times paranoid, manic, or incoherent. Both she and her husband fear she is getting crazy like her father, who had been psychiatrically hospitalized. Indeed, Helen asks to be hospitalized in Switzerland like her now missing father.

“Because she felt increasingly lost in the new tyrannical architecture of her brain, and because she no longer trusted her thoughts or her memory, she started relying on her journals, which she kept with daily rigor. She hoped her future self, the one reading her diaries, would be able to use those writings as a measure of how far into her delirium she had gone. Would she see herself on the page? She addressed herself constantly in her entries, asking herself to believe that it was, in fact, she who had written those words in the past—even if her future self refused to believe it; even if, as she read, she were unable to recognize her own handwriting” (1, p. 83).

Comment: In multiple personality, different alternate personalities may have different handwritings and refuse to acknowledge each other. Such things are not seen in schizophrenia or anything else.

Added 5:22 p.m.: I emailed Hernan Diaz about the above.

He replied: "I simply imagined that...Amazed to hear it has a correlation in reality."

1. Hernan Diaz. Trust. Riverhead Books. 2022.