Alice Munro, 1931-2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/books/alice-munro-dead.html

2019

Alice Munro: Retraction of hypothesis that Nobel Prize short-story writer’s inability to write novels is due to her not having multiple personality

I have just read two of Alice Munro’s favorite short stories, and they both feature unlabeled, unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality.

“Royal Beatings”

The main characters are a family of four: the father (nameless), Flo (stepmother), Rose (adolescent daughter from father’s first marriage), and Brian (half brother).

In many past posts, I have discussed the association between namelessness and multiple personality (search “nameless” and “namelessness”). That association is confirmed in this story by the following passing remark about the father: “The person who spoke those words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space” (1, p. 4).

Moreover, after her father gives Rose a “royal beating” at the instigation of her mean stepmother, the family can soon sit down together in peace, almost as if nothing had happened. Rose grows up in a multiple personality family.

“The Beggar Maid”

Rose (now a college student) suggests that her boyfriend, Patrick, might have been the unidentified person who had grabbed her leg in the library: “He did not think it would be funny. He was horrified that she would think such a thing. She said she was only joking…‘You know [Rose says], if Hitchcock made a movie out of something like that, you could be a wild insatiable leg-grabber with one half of your personality, and the other half could be a timid scholar’ ” (1, p. 38). When a character makes a multiple personality joke, the issue has been on the author’s mind.

At another time, Rose hears voices: “Some outrageous and cruel things were being shouted inside her. She had to do something to keep them from getting out. She started tickling and teasing him [Patrick]” (1, p. 42). Nonpsychotic people who hear voices probably have multiple personality. Rose is probably hearing the voice of an alternate personality.

Soon Rose is sexually aggressive, in both words and behavior, in ways that her host personality finds out-of-character: “She had never said anything like this before, never come near to behaving like this” (1, p. 43). An alternate personality had temporarily taken control of her overt behavior.

The couple gets married, divorced, temporarily reconciled, and estranged in the years that follow. When she sees him at the airport many years later, he is unalterably against a reconciliation, but she could go either way.

In short, I see Rose as having multiple personality trait, which originated in childhood to cope with the inconsistency and beatings from her nameless, multiple personality father.

In conclusion, I can’t attribute Alice Munro’s self-claimed inability to write novels to her not having multiple personality trait, since two of her favorite short stories suggest that it is an issue.

1. Alice Munro. Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories. New York, Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1977/2006.