THE IMPOSTOR SYNDROME 85Teddy became familiar with role - playing and imposture. To use Finkel-
stein ’ s (1974) words, ‘ [his] parents not only encouraged him to become
an impostor; they also provided characteristics for him to identify with,
particularly his mother ’ s lying and her interest in superfi cial appearances
and his father ’ s abilities as a glib talker ’ (p. 110). By being an impostor,
a liar, and a pretender, Teddy was in a way behaving and acting exactly
the way his parents wanted.
The creative artist as impostor
Someone in whom the crisis of identity, the power of language, and the
skill of myth - making met and combined with both creative and tragic
results was the eighteenth - century English poet, Thomas Chatterton.
Chatterton was the posthumous son of a Bristol schoolmaster and was
raised by his mother and sister. He was precocious and brilliant, and by
the time he was 16 had already written the poems on which his reputa-
tion rests. However, he passed the poems off as medieval manuscripts
that he had found in an old chest, producing further faked documents
to back up his discovery. When his fraud was exposed, Chatterton fl ed
to London, where, in misery and poverty, he took his own life at the
age of 17. What were Chatterton ’ s poems about?
Chatterton [fabricated] in his writings an imaginatively conceived family
romance, which even included a perfected medieval city of Bristol, chang-
ing it to a radiant 15th - century metropolis whose cultural centre was the
very church in which generations of Chattertons had been the sextons.
Written at what must often have been white heat, in an ostensible Middle
English which was really his own neologistic invention, he idealized and
fi ctionalized an actual 15th - century Bristol merchant and mayor into a
saint - like philanthropist, warrior, and humanitarian, a man of the world
who lived an exemplary religious life and who commissioned a priest - poet,
Rowley, to write the chronicles and to eulogize the city ’ s history. The
evidence suggests that Rowley was a perfected projection of Chatterton
himself, while the saintly merchant, Canynge, was his father. (Olinick,
1988 , `p. 674)Any writer of fi ction can be said to be continually engaging in a form
of harmless imposture, requiring the willing collusion of his readers in
his fabrications. Chatterton pushed this mutual, consenting deception
over the moral boundary between fi ction and fraud to satisfy some aspect
of his own injured narcissism. Deprived of a father - fi gure, perhaps forced
into a role he felt unable to sustain by the expectations of his mother