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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Saturday, June 3, 2023

“The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver: Character with twin has read the Jekyll-Hyde multiple personality classic many times

“ ‘It was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.’  So feel I. Living in the Congo shakes open the prison house of my disposition and lets all the wicked hoodoo Adahs run forth…The quote is from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I [Adah] have read many times…” (1, p. 55).


Comment: This character represents multiple personality in two ways: Twins are a metaphor for multiple personality and so is Jekyll-Hyde.


But why is such a character in this novel? Will multiple personality be integral to the plot? Does this character reflect the novelist’s multiple personality trait? Or both?


Same day: Skimming ahead, I do not find Adah seriously discussed, psychologically. Thus, I have insufficient evidence that this author has multiple personality trait. I have previously estimated that only ninety percent of novelists do.

Later Same day: Many novelists do serious research, but Kingsolver’s 28-source bibliography at the end of this novel suggests her process differs from most novelists.


1. Barbara Kingsolver. The Poisonwood Bible. New York, HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 1998.

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