Distance from the author lets the work be read without a second subject

The argument

A second version of this explanation turns on what a book is taken to be about. Proponents argue that when a woman publishes under her own name the work tends to acquire a second subject alongside its first, namely the author. Reviews describe the book and then describe what it reveals about the person who wrote it, novels are read as disguised autobiography, and material that would be treated as invention in another writer is treated as confession. The effect is that the writer cannot put something into a book without being understood to be reporting it. On this account the cost of that second subject is a loss of range. A writer who knows that a cruel character will be read as self portrait, or that a wrong opinion voiced by a narrator will be attributed to her, is constrained in a way that has nothing to do with her skill. She can write only what she is willing to be thought to be. Proponents hold that this is a serious limitation on fiction in particular, which depends on the writer being able to inhabit people she is not and to argue positions she rejects. A name that detaches the book from the person dissolves the second subject. Nothing can be inferred back, because there is nobody to infer back to, and the work is left to be read as a made thing rather than as evidence about a life. Proponents conclude that this is the freedom at issue: not permission to write more, but relief from the expectation that whatever is written will be read as testimony. The relief lasts only as long as the name holds, which is why the arrangement is better understood as a condition of work than as a permanent concealment.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that the reading of fiction as autobiography is a general vice of criticism rather than one reserved for women, and that writers of every description complain of it. They also question the mechanism, noting that a name does not actually prevent inference, since readers speculate about the person behind any name and the speculation attaches to whoever is imagined. A stronger objection is that the argument describes a reason to publish anonymously rather than a reason to publish as a man, and the question asks specifically about the second. Unless the autobiographical reading is applied differently to men, the account explains the pen name and not the choice of a male one.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Opponents hold that reading fiction as autobiography is a general habit of criticism rather than one applied to women in particular. [Rejecting P2] Readers speculate about the person behind any name, so the constraint is reduced rather than removed. [Rejecting P3] Writers routinely inhabit characters they are not and argue positions they reject under their own names, so the claimed dependence is overstated. [Rejecting C] The argument supports anonymity rather than a male name specifically, which is what the position needs to establish.