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identity
and identity crime in fiction
This page considers the depiction of identity in literature.
It covers -
It
complements the discussion of surveillance fiction elsewhere
on this site.
In literature, as online, things are not always what they
seem and possession - upmarket identity theft - abounds.
Stevenson (Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde).
appropriations
In Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley
(1955) the charming psychopath Tom Ripley character murders
and then takes over the identity of his friend Dickie
Greenleaf, commenting that surely it is better to be a
fake somebody than a real nobody.
That assessment - and the exhilaration of shape changing
- is a preoccupation in major works such as Thomas Mann's
The Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man
(1954), Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade (1857), T C Boyle's Table Talk
(New York: Viking 2006), Gottfried Keller's Kleider
machen Leute (1874) and William Gaddis' The Recognitions
(1955).
Downmarket it is just a blur of costume changes and fast
talking in works such as Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel,
Mark Twain's The Prince & the Pauper: A Tale for
Young People of All Ages (1881), Rafael Sabatini's
The Lost King (1937), Wilkie Collins' Armadale
(1866), Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar, Ian Fleming's
Moonraker (1955), Peter Carey's My Life as
a Fake (2003), Armistead Maupin's The Night Listener
(2000), Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask,
Daphne Du Maurier's Scapegoat, Anthony Hope's
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and Robert Bird's
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (1836).
Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, engages in
a spot of gender-bending by posing as a Doctor of Law,
a fraud (like that of her 'clerk' Nerissa) that is not
punished in Shakespeare's play and that reflects the beginnings
of 'professional society'. Who better to impersonate than
a lawyer?
It harks back to Genesis 27, in which Jacob and his mother
famously deceive Isaac at Esau's expense. Exegetes on
occasion have construed the incident as what would now
be characterised as 'plausible denial', with Isaac being
complicit in the deception and looking for justification
in his future contact with Esau. Some identity theft victims
want to be fooled.
There is a mordant view in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved
One (1947), Peter Lovesey's The False Inspector
Dew (2001), Simon Leys' The Death of Napoleon
(1986), Muriel Spark's splendid Aiding & Abetting
(London: Viking 2000), W.F. Hermans' The Darkroom
of Damocles (London: Harvill Secker 2007) and Charles
Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
Literary treatments of historic impostures include Pushkin's
Boris Godunov (1825), Schiller's Demetrius
(1803), Sumarakov's Dmitry Samozvanets,
'Reinvention' and appropriation appears in works such
as Dana Spiotta's Eat The Document (New York:
Scribner 2006), Ian Fleming's Moonraker (1955)
and Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal
(1971). More recently Geoffrey Wolff gained attention
for his wry memoir The Duke of Deception (New
York: Vintage 1990) about a master of deceit.
For academic perspectives on the conman - and conwoman
- in literature see Gary Lindberg's The Confidence-Man
in American Literature (New York: Oxford Uni Press
1982), Susan Kuhlmann's Knave, Fool, Genius: The Confidence
Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
(Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 1973) and other
works highlighted here.
Identity offences have proved a resource for librettists
- perhaps unsurprisingly given the genre's suspension
of disbelief about fat fifty year-olds portraying waif-like
teens - and accordingly feature in works such as Dvorák's
1882 Dimitrij, Mussorgsky's 1869 Boris Godunov
and Prokofiev's 1936 Boris Godunov (both concerned
with Russia's first False Dimitry), and Weill's 1927 Der
Zar lässt sich photographieren (more trouble
for the Tsar).
disappearances
Fake deaths (discussed later
in this guide) have been an equally fertile field for
authors, with works including Margaret Atwood's Lady
Oracle, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Shakespeare's
Romeo & Juliet, Jean Racine's Mithridate,
Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.
doppelgangers, changelings and dybbuks
For the Doppelganger see Karl Miller's intelligent The
Double: Studies in Literary History (London: Oxford
Uni Press 1985), The Double and the Other: Identity
as Ideology in Post-romantic Fiction (Basingstoke:
Macmillan 1988) by Paul Coates and The Double in 19th-Century
Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1990) by John Herdman.
For folk literature about changelings a starting point
is Katherine Briggs' magisterial four volume A Dictionary
of British Folk Tales (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press
1970).
Works on possession - the lights are on but something
else is home - include The Dybbuk and the Yiddish
Imagination: A Haunted Reader (Syracuse: Syracuse
Uni Press 2000) edited by Joachim Neugroschel, Henry James'
The Turn of the Screw, Isaac Bashevis Singer's
Satan in Goray and Stevenson's Dr Jeckyll &
Mr Hyde.
whodunit
Literary conspiracists have of course detected identity
theft where there was none, perhaps most famously in denying
Shakespeare's authorship. Ignatius Donnelly's zany 1888
The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's cipher in the
so-called Shakespeare plays argued that aristocratic
sponger and thug Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford (1550-1604),
was the author of Montaigne's Essays, Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy and Marlowe's plays. Contemporary
Edward Durning-Lawrence's 1910 Bacon is Shakespeare
went even further, crediting Francis Bacon with the Authorized
Version of the Bible.
Calvin Hoffman's 1930s The Murder of the Man Who Was
'Shakespeare' argued that Shakespeare was Christopher
Marlow. Paul Streitz's Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth
I (2006) claims that Shakespeare was the lovechild
of Elizabeth I and was raised as Earl of Oxford. Others
have announced that Shakespeare was Mary Herbert, Countess
of Pembroke, William Stanley, Earl of Derby or even Elizabeth
I. No one seems to have blamed Philip II or Martin Luther.
Brian Vickers, in reviewing Scott McCrea's The Case
For Shakespeare: The end of the authorship question
(Westport: Praeger 2005), gently comments that
None
of the Baconians was a literary scholar, none of them
felt the need to acquire any knowledge of English literature,
or the English language in the sixteenth century, and
none bothered to read Bacon, although the magnificent
fourteen-volume edition of James Spedding was completed
in 1874. All they needed was the preconceived notion
that Shakespeare could not have written the plays, while
Bacon could.
One
of the more deliciously wacky exposes sighted recently
explains that both Bacon and the Earl of Essex were the
unacknowledged children of Queen Elizabeth I, an individual
who has also been credited with writing Shakespeare's
plays.
Critics of less distinguished writing have had fun with
the mysterious B Traven, author of The Treasure of
the Sierra Madre and Death Ship. His oeuvre
has been variously identified as coming from Hal Croves,
Ret Marut/Otto Feige or Traven Torsvan. Accounts are provided
in Karl Guthke's B.Traven: The Life Behind the Legends
(London: Lawrence Hill 1991) and Tapio Helen's 2000 article
B. Traven's Identity Revisited.
Julie Phillips' James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life
of Alice Sheldon (New York: St Martins Press 2006)
profiles Alice Sheldon (1915–1987), aka science
fiction writer James Tiptree Jr.
ghosting and plagiarism
This site features a more detailed discussion of ghosting,
essay mills and plagiarism
(with a supplementary note on plagiarism incidents).
next page (forensics)
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