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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Friday, May 26, 2023

“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.

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