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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Wednesday, September 13, 2023

“FOXFIRE: Girl Gang” (post 3) by Joyce Carol Oates: Intuitive Diagnosis of Multiple Personality in the Girl Gang’s Leader by Another Character


The girl gang’s leader is known by two names, Margaret Sadovsky and “Legs” Sadovsky. It is never explicitly stated that Legs/Margaret has multiple personality.


However, the diagnosis of multiple personality is inadvertently, implicitly made when another character is startled, almost beyond comprehension, by a sudden alteration in Leg’s/Margaret’s demeanor and attitude:


“So abrupt and so complete was the change in her [Margaret Sadovsky], Marianne Kellogg [the other character] could barely comprehend it, let alone respond” (1, p. 270).


Comment: As far as I know, Joyce Carol Oates has never explicitly acknowledged multiple personality in any character of her many novels. Search “Oates” in this blog for past posts on this issue.

 

1. Joyce Carol Oates. FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang. Plume/Penguin, 1994. 

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