The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

20 The Poetry of Mary Robinson

a text and their relation to the person writing” (890). Of course,

Griffin’s point—and Foucault’s—more directly applies to the autho-

rial concept that is “Mrs. Mary Robinson,” an identity which ulti-

mately assimilates (or attempts to) the various signatures. Robinson’s

avatars, in a sense, allegorize the “aspect of the author- function”

Griffin describes. Furthermore, the nature of the avatar is to evade

any attempt to render a coherent writerly subjectivity; the avatar is

protean, a refraction of identity, one potentially of many.

Robinson deploys a range of avatars depending on text, context,

or whim. Robinson’s signatures, I contend, are formal features of the

poems to which they are attached. I read them as incidental attributes

of the literary text; so, as such, they resound in paratextual, contex-

tual, and intertextual voices and echoes. We may read the pseudony-

mous signature attached to a poem just as we read its title, epigraph,

or footnote. I tend to resist, therefore, imagining a fictional authorial

persona or character that Robinson is performing—except when it is

clear she is doing that. But even then, as we shall see, attempting to

understand the signature as a coherent character can be exasperating.

Even trying to slot Robinson’s pseudonymity into a taxonomy such

as the useful one Paula R. Feldman suggests for Romantic- period

women poets is problematic (“Women” 286–7). The only reliable

way to read Robinson’s pseudonymous signature is to understand its

textual presence as a formal choice the poet has made, like choosing to

write a sonnet instead of an ode. Robinson’s pseudonyms are unique

because of their multiplicity in the context of the newspapers with

which she was affiliated and also because of the way each instance

of a pseudonym attached to a poem involves its particular textual

circumstance and does not necessarily involve other instances of the

same pseudonym. As I will show in what follows, Robinson’s Oberon

avatar is rich with allusion but is not a character that informs the

group of poems that carry the “Oberon” signature. Each signature

contributes to a Venn diagram of multiple referents for its specific

instance. Building on Pascoe’s and Feldman’s explanations, I want to

demonstrate how f luid and amorphous Robinson’s pseudonyms are;

they sometimes mean this, they sometimes mean that, but ultimately

they mean “Mary Robinson”—whatever that is.

Robinson’s avatars allow for a kind of fantastic ludic play while

also representing the propagation of her poetic self for professional

aggrandizement and for literary fame. She learned this from Della

Crusca. I use the term avatar because I want to distinguish the Della

Cruscan use of pen names from the trope of pseudonym- as- costume,

9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 209780230100251_03_ch01.indd 20 12/31/2010 4:20:08 PM12/31/2010 4:20:08 PM

10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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