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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

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Saturday, July 29, 2023

“The Mysteries of Udolpho” by Ann Radcliffe: Protagonist’s “scattered thoughts” in this 1794 Gothic classic may imply multiple personality


The novel gets more psychological when the protagonist, Emily, is described, twice, as having “scattered thoughts” (1, pp. 317, 367), because, many years later, Charles Dickens was to use "scattered” in his novels to imply multiple personality. Search “scattered” in this blog.


Was Dickens’s use of “scattered” to imply multiple personality inspired by Radcliffe’s?


I have three hundred more pages to read in this novel, and I don’t know if multiple personality will become an explicit issue. But readers should not ignore the author’s repeated use of the unusual attribute, “scattered,” for her protagonist.


Added July 30: I lost patience with the lack of psychological-mindedness of this novel and didn't finish it.


1. Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794]. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966/1998. 

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