Pseudonymity, Passing, and Queer Biography: The Case of Mary Diana Dods

If the normative practice of biography is grounded, as James Clifford puts it, in "the myth of coherent personality," how can a life be written that is based not on identity but the subversion of identity? This is the question posed by the life of Mary Diana Dods, a woman with multiple names and genders. A brilliant but impoverished early nineteenth-century Scottish woman and an illegitimate daughter of George Douglas, the fifteenth Earl of Morton, Dods seems to have had all the advantages of an aristocratic upbringing until the earl married a much younger woman. Apparently uninterested in marriage and supposedly disqualified for it by physical deformity, Dods was then, apart from a small allowance from her father, thrown on her own devices to survive. Having had an excellent classical education, she tried the typical professions available to respectable intellectual women in early-nineteenth-century Britain: giving lessons, running a school for girls, and taking in lodgers. (Her sister Georgiana, who was also illegitimate, attempted the remaining option, being a lady's companion, when she became a young widow but never found a position.) Finding herself unable to live on the combined proceeds from these endeavors and her allowance, Dods began to supplement her income by writing for magazines, both anonymously and under the masculine pseudonym of David Lyndsay. The invention of the Lyndsay persona was a prelude to a more radical transformation under another authorial pseudonym, Walter Sholto Douglas. As Douglas, Dods eventually adopted masculine dress, passed as a man, and moved to France, where, hoping to join the diplomatic service, s/he played the role of husband to Isabella Robinson, a beautiful young woman who needed a father for her illegitimate child. Douglas's diplomatic ambitions remained unfulfilled, and he seems to have died between November 1829 and November 1830, of mental and physical ailments. Until recently, the conservative understanding of subjectivity and narrative in much biographical practice has converged with the social stigma and often severe punishments attached to gender crossing to keep stories like Dods's from being written. In fact, these factors have tended to produce a curious situation where the requirement for coherency in a life story can be strictest precisely in those cases that radically put into question any notion of the subject as a unitary entity, comprehended by a single name and possessing a single life history and gender. This happens, for example, in the prescribed programs of counseling and training developed by the transsexual industry in the twentieth century for gender dysphoric persons who seek sex-reassignment surgery. The professionals who control access to this surgery and prescribe the shape of the entire transformative process define passing as its goal. Consequently, they teach pre-operative transsexuals attempting to live as members of the "opposite" sex to talk about their past histories in ways that conceal their gender change and future sex change. The resulting narratives are even less flexible than the generality of normative biographies, because while in the latter wholeness is conventionally achieved as an end product, in the former it is asserted to exist from the beginning. Yet, the emergence of two new factors has changed this state of affairs significantly. The incursion of poststructuralist theory into biographical studies and the advent of transgender activist movements have recently given an unprecedented visibility to alternative biographical practices which in deliberately fragmentary and discontinuous narrative forms celebrate self-contradictory subjects, including those who change their sex and/or gender. These new generic models are epitomized by a different kind of transsexual narrative, in which the subject rejects the goal of passing and insists instead on being read as transsexual. Kate Bornstein's …