Bri Fidelity’s Reviews > Mind of My Own: The Woman Who Was Known As "Eve" Tells the Story of Her Triumph over Multiple Personality Disorder > Status Update

OMG, I adore you.

I'd love to see 'Lizzie' just once, even if they did distill it down to only three personalities and - apparently - turn Aunt Morgen into a comedy drunk (I would actually, perversely, like to see that too, ha). Eleanor Parker seems to have the reviewers on her side, at any rate.

Bri wrote: "I'd love to see 'Lizzie' just once,

Doesn't Demons quote Shirley as saying her psychiatrist source was going to shoot himself over it? Heh.

even if they did distill it down to only three personalities and - apparently - turn Aunt Morgen into a comedy drunk"

WHAAAAAT

NO MESSING WITH AUNT MORGEN

(I am not overprotective of favourite characters, no, why are you looking at me like that?)

(the MUD OMG)

Moira wrote: "Doesn't Demons quote Shirley as saying her psychiatrist source was going to shoot himself over it? Heh".

So it does! I didn't remember that part at all; just the part about Shirley being unnerved at hearing her words emerging from people not in her head:

When the movie "Lizzie" finally opened, in early 1957, Shirley managed to avoid going to New York for the premiere, ostensibly because Barry had chicken pox, more likely because she had no great urge to view it in the middle of a crowd. The distributors arranged a private showing for her at the Bennington movie theatre a few weeks later, at ten in the morning. The kids enjoyed it all thoroughly - Barry (who was five) mainly because of the MGM lion, she said later - but she herself was too unnerved to watch the movie with any critical acuity. Stanley did, however, and pronounced it 'horrible'. She was more amused at the simultaneous release of 'The Three Faces of Eve' than anything else - the college psychologist strongly suspected that case of being a phoney, she told her parents.

[...]

In retrospect, she came to share Stanley's view of the movie. 'They made her into a lunatic, which she can't be, by definition, and the doctor cures her with a very interesting combination of Freudian analysis, pre-Freudian hypnosis, Jungian word-association and Rorschach inkblots. Not one of these systems gets along with any of the others in real life. I should think every analyist in the country would shoot himself, which of course might be a good idea too, except then that all the Bennington students who are being analysed would have to find something else to do,' she wrote tartly.

Moira wrote: "I am not overprotective of favourite characters, no, why are you looking at me like that?"

Well, Ruth Wilson's eyes are the wrong colour.

Moira wrote: "the MUD OMG"

In her coffee! That was so sinister and hilarious. I still haven't decided which one of them did that, or all of them. Beth seemed to harbour a dislike for Morgen before they actually started interacting 'on the outside'; Bess and Betsy are both too obvious; I'm inclined to think Elizabeth just because she's the least obvious candidate and because it tickles me to think of her using her few minutes per day of existence to carefully prepare a sandwich full of mud and get one of her alters into trouble.

....That biography was really so good. A little floridly overwritten in places, and sometimes thin in research, but really quite good. I've reread it a lot.

Well, Ruth Wilson's eyes are the wrong colour.

THEY ARE
THEY ARE

JANE SAYS HER EYES ARE _GREEN_

SHE SAYS

“Jane, you look blooming, and smiling, and pretty,” said he: “truly pretty this morning. Is this my pale, little elf? Is this my mustard-seed? This little sunny-faced girl with the dimpled cheek and rosy lips; the satin-smooth hazel hair, and the radiant hazel eyes?” (I had green eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake: for him they were new-dyed, I suppose.)

SO

SO
SO THERE

WHY IS EVERYONE BACKING SLOWLY AWAY

In her coffee! That was so sinister and hilarious. I still haven't decided which one of them did that, or all of them. Beth seemed to harbour a dislike for Morgen before they actually started interacting 'on the outside'; Bess and Betsy are both too obvious; I'm inclined to think Elizabeth just because she's the least obvious candidate and because it tickles me to think of her using her few minutes per day of existence to carefully prepare a sandwich full of mud and get one of her alters into trouble.

Haah, I totally hadn't thought of that! Hmm, I think Beth is too wimpy, Bess is too fastidious and Betsy would seem the obvious choice except it's a little mean-spirited for her -- she's not that malicious -- and she acts like she doesn't know at the table, and she's not that good an actress. Hmmm. It totally could be Elizabeth. She's the one who rereads the 'mad fond letters' to herself in such a creepy way, heh.

Moira wrote: "WHY IS EVERYONE BACKING SLOWLY AWAY"

TO

ER

GET A RUN-UP FOR THE BIG HUG

Moira wrote: "Bess is too fastidious"

I dunno; she trashes Betsy's hotel room when she's angry. And chokes Betsy unconscious (now that would look ridiculous in a film, wouldn't it?). And tackles Aunt Morgen at the end (she's secretly afraid during this, Betsy says, but the text also notes her surprise at finding Morgen such a frail adversary after all - she might've been throwing mud around the place because she didn't dare do worse). Bess is as dangerous as Betsy, when roused.

Moira wrote: "she acts like she doesn't know at the table, and she's not that good an actress."

Ah, but she imitated Beth so well that time.

Moira wrote: "It totally could be Elizabeth. She's the one who rereads the 'mad fond letters' to herself in such a creepy way, heh."

And she has that exchange with Morgen about never getting to eat any of the foods she likes, which leads me to wonder.

Of course, once one of them started doing it, all of the others could've gotten in on it, too.

I dunno; she trashes Betsy's hotel room when she's angry. And chokes Betsy unconscious (now that would look ridiculous in a film, wouldn't it?). And tackles Aunt Morgen at the end (she's secretly afraid during this, Betsy says, but the text also notes her surprise at finding Morgen such a frail adversary after all - she might've been throwing mud around the place because she didn't dare do worse). Bess is as dangerous as Betsy, when roused.

Oh good points! I just meant she probably wouldn't want to get her hands actually dirty, heh.

I dunno, Beth would be pretty easy to imitate, you'd just have to simper (yeah, I like Betsy. Integrated Elizabeth at the end was satisfyingly Betsy-like for me).

Moira wrote: "I just meant she probably wouldn't want to get her hands actually dirty, heh."

That was my circuitous way of saying 'I think when sufficiently angry no level of daintiness would put Bess off for very long'; I just missed the punchline. Also, I think it would appeal to Bess more than any of the others to gaslight Morgen, since she so dreaded Morgen's locking her away in a facility and spending all her money. (There really are motives for all of them - like the anecdote for the first story Shirley ever wrote that turned up in Ordinary Day, only instead of pulling the killer's name out of a hat, she just made everyone plausible suspects and left it there. She does the same thing in The Sundial.)

Besides, you just know Bess would have some godawful leopard-print kitchen gloves with jewels on secreted somewhere about the place. And a little silver trowel looted from the fireplace set, to sell later.

Moira wrote: "I like Betsy. Integrated Elizabeth at the end was satisfyingly Betsy-like for me"

Betsy's my favourite, too. Neither her sweet moments nor her psychotic moments seem, somehow, out of character. And we get more into her head than into any of the other alters, even Elizabeth: the whole Betsy's-eye-view segment is amazing.

I never got much of a sense of Integrated Elizabeth as a person, but I don't think I was meant to. Certainly she had lots of the Betsy mannerisms down. (And since I've read this book, I'm wondering if the Elizabeth at the end was perhaps the long-buried 'real' Elizabeth, since Doctor Wright mentions her having eaten her four sisters. I feel like a 'Doctor Who' fan trying to make the dated science make sense, ha.)

(There really are motives for all of them - like the anecdote for the first story Shirley ever wrote that turned up in Ordinary Day, only instead of pulling the killer's name out of a hat, she just made everyone plausible suspects and left it there. She does the same thing in The Sundial.)

YES. I love that -- it's like nobody's innocent. Very Shirley.

And a little silver trowel looted from the fireplace set, to sell later.

//chokes on tea

Betsy's my favourite, too.

//waves Betsy flag She seems a lot like Merricat, or how Shirley's daughter Sally was supposed to be. Vibrantly naughty.

Neither her sweet moments nor her psychotic moments seem, somehow, out of character. And we get more into her head than into any of the other alters, even Elizabeth: the whole Betsy's-eye-view segment is amazing.

YES, it has that wonderful fluid dreamlike narrative drive she has in so many of her short stories, like "The Tooth" -- where everything is totally strange but somehow right and you're just along for the ride and it takes your breath away. I envy that a lot.

(And since I've read this book, I'm wondering if the Elizabeth at the end was perhaps the long-buried 'real' Elizabeth, since Doctor Wright mentions her having eaten her four sisters

Ha, I hadn't thought of that! -- Yeah, I guess the pop-psychology view of MPD is that the integrated 'whole' is more than the sum of its parts? Well, Sybil seemed to be about that anyway, but the outside perspective forced this continuity of Sybil-as-person through the whole thing, even tho she saw so little. So Betsy + Bess + Beth + Elizabeth' = Real Elizabeth?

What I love about that book is that it's so much about the riddle of personality, not just pathology -- that moment when they ask her "Now who put the mud in the refrigerator?" and she says "I did," and remembers it -- it's almost a chilling moment.

Moira wrote: "Well, Sybil seemed to be about that anyway, but the outside perspective forced this continuity of Sybil-as-person through the whole thing, even tho she saw so little."

Yes, but it was always obvious to me reading it that Sybil was the core personality from whom the others peeled away - there was no question of Sybil just being another alter; she was unquestionably 'real' and all the others were just there to help or hinder her. Almost all the DID cases I've read about (mostly in summary, I have to say) are like that, which is why I initially scoffed at the 'they can't all be alters!' approach taken by Shirley in The Bird's Nest (or, rather, by Dr Wright). 'Personalities don't really break up like that!' I thought.

But Chris Costner Sizemore apparently buried herself somewhere in her own subconscious at age two in response to all her various frights and neuroses, and let a succession of artificial personalities try their hand at running her life for decades; it's really astounding. I left the first autobiography with the impression that Chris's mind really had just disintegrated - just like Elizabeth Richmond's is supposed to have done - with no, er, philosophical continuity (? you know what I mean) whatsoever for her: just a shared pool of memories. So now I'm wondering if the Elizabeths' case isn't something like that: if the crisis that got the girls to disappear in the first place was the slow reemergence of the core Elizabeth, to whom they then stuck like glue. (For obvious reasons I prefer it when personalities are distinctly real or generated, ha. I don't like to think that I might just unravel some day while the real Brian throws out all my books and wonders what he was thinking when he bought that T-shirt.)

I'm going to get around to reading Prince's Dissociation of a Personality soon, probably, too. And what was the other text Wright name-checked? I can't remember.

"What I love about that book is that it's so much about the riddle of personality, not just pathology -- that moment when they ask her "Now who put the mud in the refrigerator?" and she says "I did," and remembers it -- it's almost a chilling moment."

Also inaccurate, I think. Chris came eventually to consider, for example, the 'Jane' memories as her own memories starring herself, but for years she thought of them as 'Jane's memories'; and Sybil ended the novel thinking of her new memories as other people's bequeathed reminisces, too. But maybe Dr Wright is just that good.

Moira wrote: "She seems a lot like Merricat, or how Shirley's daughter Sally was supposed to be. Vibrantly naughty."

And in between Merricat and Betsy there's Fancy Halloran in The Sundial, the missing link: she talks like Betsy, and acts like Merricat. (That's an odd novel, for prototypes. Essex is obviously a proto-Luke, and old Richard Halloran obviously a proto-Uncle Julian; the Halloran house is even a prefiguring of Hill House. I wonder if Shirley decided that The Sundial 'didn't count', somehow, and felt free to loot it for stories in which she had more personal investment.)