Bell’s Laureates I 19consumption, therefore, shows how she was able to adopt the strate-
gies of the network she wants to join. I have organized this study
around the two publishers who represent the two principal networks
in which Robinson participated as a contributor of newspaper verse.
She affiliated herself first with Bell and then later with Stuart, mak-
ing herself their laureate in order to facilitate her professional career
but also her pursuit of poetic fame. Her participation, then, in each of
these networks is chief ly a professional literary collaboration. In this
respect, Robinson’s creation of a repertoire of pseudonyms, which
I call avatars, and the deployment of those avatars within the shift-
ing contexts of her networks, is just as important as the performative
nature of her poetic self. In other words, Robinson’s adoption of a
poetic persona is performative insofar as it disembodies herself from
her public history, and insofar as it as it re- appropriates her self from
celebrity, from her place of public spectacle, for a career in words and
tex t s. We shou ld read t he po et ic per for ma nce s of R obi n son’s avat a r s —
indeed, their performativity—then, not only as acting in a theatrical
sense but in a formal sense as per- forming or (en)acting through form.
In ot her words, a lt hough it may inform her poet ic avata rs, Robinson’s
background as an actress need not overdetermine the way we read her
pseudonyms. As a working poet who contributed to several news-
papers and who sought professional recognition, Robinson follows
a long tradition of pseudonymous periodical publication by which
many emerging writers establish themselves. Robinson, however, is
always re- emerging and re- establishing herself.
Despite the fact that she was an actress, Robinson’s use of pseud-
onyms is not necessarily any more theatrical than, say, Jonathan Swift,
Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele sharing the “Isaac Bickerstaff”
pseudonym or Benjamin Franklin writing to the New England
Courant as the female “Silence Dogood” in the 1740s. Pascoe offers
many different explanations for Robinson’s practice—from “theatrical
impulse” to “legerdemain” to “disguises” to “a fragmented self ” to
“performance on demand” (175–80). While any one of these expla-
nations is at least partly true in some instances, I have come to the
conclusion that Robinson’s use of pseudonyms cannot be explained
by any one coherent theory that seeks the constitution of Robinson’s
biographical or authorial self. It is also tempting to invoke Foucault’s
“What Is an Author?” as Pascoe does (176). I f ind Robert J. Griff in’s
elaboration of Foucault to be pertinent to my understanding of what
Robinson is doing: Grif f in expla ins t hat Foucault “t heorized t hat one
aspect of the author- function was the way, in the act of writing, it
produced multiple selves; his example is the distinction of voices in9780230100251_03_ch01.indd 199780230100251_03_ch01.indd 19 12/31/2010 4:20:08 PM12/31/2010 4:20:08 PM
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