Hi John,
A question that has been with me for a while is this: in light of Rowling’s position on transgender issues, what do we make of her use of a male-sounding pseudonym (JK Rowling) and an obviously male pseudonym (Robert Galbraith, with uber-masculine military backstory and all)? I mean, couldn’t this be considered gender appropriation? identifying as male?
Women writers have used male pseudonyms for a while to juice sales to male readers. Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and Emily Bronte (Ellis Bell) are just two examples.
For one as stridently feminist as Rowling, why the male persona? Of course, in 1990s her initial editor likely advised her to use the initials to attract boy readers, thereby increasing sales, and she, as a writer new to the publishing industry, naively took the advice. But 15+ years later, the wildly successful author/millionaire commander of her empire, with 7+ books, multiple films, one or two theme parks, and philanthropic organizations behind her, was surely much more confident in her abilities, ideas, and beliefs, yet still chose a male persona to check on her popularity aside from the JKR reputation.
Anyway, I’m sure she’s a complex person, so the answer won’t be simple.
Am I just being a smart aleck or is there something to this?
I think it’s a great question; thank you for asking!
I want to take this in three different directions, any one of which three ideas could be the subject of its own post. The first is to dismiss pre-emptively the rot Rowling offers about her name choices as well as the suggestion that the words ‘gender appropriation’ inspire today, the second is the alchemical resolution of contraries into an hermaphroditic ‘Rebis,’ and the third is the Shakespearean psychomachia and mythic backdrop of the Strike-Ellacott series. Join me after the jump for my introductions to reasons why Rowling-Galbraith-Murray has chosen the pseudonyms that she has.
Clear the Table: Let’s start by noting that Joanne Rowling, as a woman born in an Anglo-Norman culture, has always been wearing a surname that she has through her relationship to a man. ‘Rowling,’ of course, is her father Peter’s surname and, given the difficulties of that relationship, that The Presence has several times said she would prefer to use ‘Murray’ is as much about her wish to disassociate herself from the Bad Dad as it is to escape a name that a remarkable number of people pronounce with a short rather than a long ‘o.’ As you point out, Bloomsbury and Christopher Little encouraged her to adopt an Inkling-esque set of initials a la ‘C. S. Lewis’ or ‘J. R. R. Tolkien’ in the hope of giving the new author a masculine persona to prime the sales pump.
Her first masculine names, then, were patronymically derived and, if you will, a function of patriarchal marketing. Neither was really a function of her choice and I think her decision to stick with ‘Rowling’ rather than adopting ‘Murray’ was less strident feminism (as in my experience it usually is and not without consequences in the marriage) than, again, simply a matter of branding. She does use Jo Murray on various legal and financial documents at times so there doesn’t seem to be latent hostility to the predominant and meaningful custom of a woman taking a man’s surname at her marriage.
Names are not a small thing to Rowling as anyone who has spent time decoding her cratylic names or cryptonyms will testify. Though Rowling recently teased that she was running out of clever names and may have to resort to a name generator (!), this was a rare inside joke with Potter Pundits and Serious Strikers who are too aware that her fictional character names are anything but random. I believe that she has reflected on the meaning of her given name, as well as her mother’s and father’s, whence the good guy quality of ‘John’ (‘Joanne’ is probably a combination name of Peter John and Anne, her parents but the name derives from the Greek ‘Johannes’ or ‘John’) and the bad guy quality of Peter or Simon. ‘Rowling’ is fun because it is pronounced as the word ‘rolling,’ movement in a circle, which is both an apt description of transformation through the cycle of elements and the ring structure of her work.
The issue at hand here, again as you point out in your question, is the intentional and free choice to write beneath the pseudonym persona of ‘Robert Galbraith.’ Rowling has explained this choice in three ways; ‘Robert’ supposedly is a tribute to her hero RFK and ‘Galbraith’ was just a name she has “always liked,” she has insisted that she chose to disguise her identity from potential publishers because she wanted affirmation that they were buying the Strike series because of its quality not just because it was from the pen of the Harry Potter creator, and, last, that she was channeling her “inner bloke.”
The first explanation of why she chose those names tells us nothing about why she chose to do so as a man rather than a woman, which, as your question implies, is a queer choice for a 21st century feminist in a genre that was dominated by women until very recently. The “insecurity” explanation or “testing her quality” argument, too, is a fail with respect to her choosing to identify as a man, as you say, an Uber mensch veteran of foreign wars to boot.
So we’re left, having cleared the table of much of Rowling’s smoke and mirrors to her “inner bloke” comment that she made to Val McDermid at the Harrosgate Festival in 2014. McDermid is a giant among detective fiction writers today; Rowling whispered to her during the conversation that she preferred McDermid’s books to the pantheon greats in the genre. McDermid is also a lesbian and what used to be called “butch,” meaning she chose to present herself in the conventional dress, haircut, and speech of a man without disavowing her sex. Rowling’s talking about her “inner bloke” with McDermid while wearing a man’s suit on stage, a rarity for her, was no doubt meaningful.
I have two ideas about this “inner bloke” comment that point to Rowling’s Shed artistry as well as her Lake issues that generate stories for her.
Solve et Coagula:
Rowling takes her literary alchemy and transformational psychology seriously. The only tattoo we know that she has is on the wrist of writing hand and is the words solve et coagula, “dissolve and recongeal,” in her personal script. You can read about the meaning of those words here and a Hogwarts Professor parlor theory here that the explosion of her public persona consequent to her tweets in late 2019 about a Gender Critical woman losing her job consequent to stating the fact that sex is immutable was a deliberate act on Rowling’s part of self-destruction and re-invention.
What could this have to do with her choosing a masculine pseudonym for her Strike-Ellacott books?
Metallurgical alchemy is largely about the creation of a Philosopher’s Stone, which has the properties of transforming base metals to gold and producing the Elixir of Life which will put off mortality indefinitely. The Stone is created by a seven step process each of which has three stages, the nigredo, albedo, and rubedo, or black, white, and red stages. Another name for the Stone is ‘Rebis,’ a two-fold thing, the alchemical hermaphrodite.
From Lyndey Abraham’s Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery:
In the production of the Stone the alchemist must join sulphur, the hot, dry, active male aspect of the prima materia, to the cold, moist, receptive female aspect, argent vive or mercury. The union of these two metallic seeds is presented as the copulation of two lovers, and later, at a higher level of union, the chemical wedding of Sol and Luna, sun and moon, king and queen. This complete undivided unity, known as the rebis or hermaphrodite, is the perfect integration of male and female energies. (98)
This merits a much longer exploration but, for tonight, let’s leave it as a possibility or hypothesis that Rowling chose a masculine persona, Robert Galbraith, to mark her pursuit of the “perfect integration of male and female energies.”
(And, yes, Rubeus Hagrid, with his knitting, apron, and love of animals, is Rowling’s playful representation of the Rebis, sometimes depicted in alchemical manuscripts as a giant astride a winged sphere very suggestive of a Golden Snitch.)
Shakespearean Psychomachia:
The Perennialist interpretation of Shakespeare turns on the conviction that he was primarily a Medievalist writing dramas that, in addition to soul triptychs, included plays which exteriorized the perfection of the soul and spirit in tandem for a cathartic and transformative effect on the Globe audience. From a draft of my PhD thesis exploring this psychomachian strain in Shakespeare according to Martin Lings:
The other significant variant of Shakespeare’s Everyman dramas are those plays in which, under the benevolent eye of sovereign rule, soul and Spirit are couples that have each serve as the other to the partner. The Prince in Romeo and Juliet is master of the two warring factions in Verona, an alchemist who with these families’ leaders raises in the tragedy’s epilogue the contraries of Capulet and Montague as golden statues of their children, married in death. The young lovers Romeo and Juliet are each Sun to the other’s Moon, in hermetic language, complementary seeking soul and perfecting Spirit. The Tempest’s Ferdinand and Isabella meet a less tragic end beneath Prospero’s more attentive guidance, both seeing their beloved as a god. Antony and Cleopatra‘s epynonomous couple each struggle to free themselves from their attachments to the world as military leaders and rulers in their frenetic love for the other. Lings described Anthony’s “Purgatory” as:
the perfecting of his devotion to Cleopatra. For this love to become whole-hearted he needs to extricate his soul from worldly ties and to purge it from the dross of “Roman thoughts.” Apart from this his spiritual path cannot be traced by an psychic development but simply by his gradual spiritual ruin.
Outwardly Rome stands for duty, sobriety and morality in general; it also stands for reason….[Egypt in turn] spells neglect of duty, lack of sobriety, lack of moral principles and also the vanity of unreason…. What are the means by which, beneath this most transparent outside, Shakespeare contrives to weight the scales so heavily in favour of Egypt? One of the first thing that comes to mind is the symbolism of East and West which correspond to Heaven and earth; and it is certainly not Rome which stands at the celestial point of the compass. Rome is this world, and nothing but this world (Shakespeare as Sacred Art, 92).
In Shakespeare’s other representations of the ‘pearl of great price,’ the Divine Qualities of the Spirit are symbolized by outstanding human virtues. But in this play the stress is on the Spirit’s incomparability, the lack of any common measure between this world and the next; and as a symbol of the celestial, it is the function of Egypt to convey to us something of the next world’s elusive mysteriousness that passes human comprehension, its infinite riches, its marvellous varieties and its boundless freedom. Everything that Egypt stands for is personified by Cleopatra (89-90).
Caesar gives something of a benediction over the dead Anthony and Cleopatra, both of whom have died at their own hand in expectation of otherworldly marriage to the other at play’s end, the drama’s sorrowful equivalent of the over-seeing Intellect of judgment.
I believe that Rowling is writing a Shakespearean soul-spirit psychomachean drama in her Strike-Ellacott series of novels, in which the woman struggles to resolve the contraries of her biological grounding as a woman with her vocation as a private detective and the man, a wounded soldier, is in a parallel agony of bringing his masculine and feminine qualities, not to mention his relationship with women, into balance. She weaves into both the hermetic pursuit of hermaphroditic perfection and their acting as Spirit to the other’s soul or psychological needs. The mythological backdrop to the series, the tale of Cupid and Psyche, is essential in that regard.
Why did Rowling choose a macho persona for her writing of this series? To exteriorize what the depths of these books is about.
Conclusions: Out of Her ‘Lake’?
The alchemy and psychomachian artistry, of course, are Rowling’s Shed genius. What part of her ‘Lake’ unconscious issues brought her to explore these subjects at such depth?
The seventh of Rowling’s seven life crises, one we only know from common sense conjecture consequent to the publication of Christmas Pig and Rowling’s repeated insistence that much of it reflected stories and objects from her personal life, is her marriage to Neil Murray on Boxing Day, 2001. It wasn’t a smooth ride, I think it is safe to say, especially with respect to Jessica and her Murray siblings and her relationship with her step-father.
An obvious possibility as a point of conflict in this new marriage was the upside-down quality in terms of prevalent conventions with respect to the roles of husband and wife of the Rowling-Murray match. She was the primary wage earner, her vocation was by far the most recognized and accepted as the family’s identity, and this despite the fact that Murray was a medical professional. Perhaps inevitably, he became part of Rowling, Inc., the home-husband of Team Rowling. I doubt that was an easy adjustment.
How did they get through it? Here’s my tentative guess.
Dr Murray’s twitter feed, Dr Slowfinger @slowfinger45, has as its subtitle, “Better to walk alone than with the crowd in the wrong direction. Biology is real. Sex matters, and so does Evidence based Medicine.” I suggest in a secondary hypothesis that Jo and Neil Murray resolved the contraries (and contradiction of conventional roles) in their marriage by creating a synthesis outside those cultural models for men and women in which “Biology is real” and “sex matters” were mantras; ‘Don’t pretend that men and women are interchangeable categories — compensate both the man and the woman in a relationship where the surface ‘jobs’ do not support the realities of life as a man or a woman.
I like that guess because it explains both Rowling’s Shakespearean psychomachian drama in the Strike-Ellacott series as well as her crusade against the eradication of sex distinctions in law and the chemical castration and surgical mutilation of children and adolescents caught up in the “transgenderism” folly of our times. Both her artistry and her advocacy could have a shared point of origin in her primary human relationship and their successful clearing of a very high emotional and psychological set of hurdles.
To answer your question, then, no, I do not think Rowling is guilty of the Woke crime, ‘Gender Appropriation.’ She has a hard won and profound grasp of the biological, psychological, and spiritual realities of sex; her choice of a male persona in her second pseudonym simply served to exteriorize the primary allegorical freight of the Strike-Ellacott series and the reality of her life as the seeming “bloke” of her marriage.
Thank you for a great question and please accept my apologies for this hasty answer, one which needs much more argument and evidence to be more than a working hypothesis. More anon!
I’ll buy that!