Mask and Style

Julie Phillips. James Tiptree Jr.: the double life of Alice B. Sheldon.

For a woman, a pseudonym can be a way of getting published at all, or of avoiding public disapproval. "George Eliot," for example, put some distance between the respectable novels and the "fallen woman," Mary Ann Evans, who wrote them. "Currier Bell" put distance between Charlotte Brontë and the words of poet laureate Robert Southey, who told her that writing "cannot be the business of a woman's life." A male name can confer a power and authority, in the eyes of the reader, that a woman might not have as herself.

Consider also the case of Doris Lessing as Jane Somers.

And then consider, the construction of identity generally.

In other words, those experiences which are normally regarded as the special property of an individual, such as one's treasured memories, are here treated in much the same way as they are in Blade Runner, that is, as the very matter from which the individual is actually constituted. [...] Deleuze redefines experience in terms of effects and relations, or better, hecceities, which for Deleuze means that experience is individuating. So what is a hecceity? Simply put, it is a nonpersonal mode of individuation. For our purposes, though, probably the best way to think of it is in terms of style.

Ian Buchanan. "Introduction". A Deleuzian Century?.

And so for day 1065
12.11.2009