The mask is powerful. You can, in a mask, be anybody. Or more correctly, you can be nobody. A mask removes identity and frees the wearer from everything. We are liberated from our past. In a mask, we have no history, nor regret. We can dispose, if briefly, of our inhibitions, our morals, and our values along with our identities. In a mask, we have no future. We cannot be caught. We cannot be found out. We cannot feel guilt. And a person, a non-person that is, one removed from past and future, is left only to live in the present where there is only experience. Nothing is so powerful, so useful as anonymity.

But the power of anonymity, at least to me, seems mostly a male preoccupation. Boys dream of power and strength and virility and secret identities. Batman, Spiderman, Superman, yes, even the Scarlet Pimpernel were all, when they joined society, overlooked and underestimated geeks, fops, and nerds. The secret identity, the alter ego, was integral to the fantasy of power and brute strength. The penis hides, humble, waiting to be liberated, waiting to perform, to act, to champion, and be seen and be, if briefly, heroic. This notion seriously alters my concept of the Batcave.

Meanwhile, what do women have? Yes, there is Wonder Woman, it’s true. But Wonder Woman was a male-conceived notion created, yes, for the empowerment of women, but fashioned exactly after the male archetype. She was created by an educational consultant and an inventor — he invented the polygraph or lie detector —, William Moulton Marston. I don’t think girls are particularly interested in the power of the mask, the alter ego, the secret identity.

There are perhaps two notable exceptions, besides Wonder Woman, to the feminine mask: makeup and the wedding veil. On makeup, Shakespeare says: “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another” (Hamlet, 3.1.150). Women’s makeup, women’s camouflage is a ubiquitous mask, a ubiquitous alter ego for women. Odd that men should have alter ego fantasies while women, some women, should daily fashion new faces for themselves. Of course, it’s not my place to say whether they should or they shouldn’t; I am merely relieved that I am not required or expected to pursue this industry. Who has that kind of time?

The wedding veil, also, is a kind of mask that has a long tradition. The tradition is usually traced far into history where, in Far Eastern cultures, people believed wicked spirits were especially attracted to women. To protect themselves from these nasty spirits, women wore veils. I continue to think that it’s odd that on the occasion where you are expressing your naked and undying and honest love to your partner that you should wear a veil. I understand that lifting the veil during the ceremony might be a symbol of revealing your honest intentions. In which case it remains a curiosity that the woman should still take that symbol of trust and honesty upon herself when there is no male equivalent, at least that I can think of. Of course it’s no secret that I loathe weddings. Usually they are stuffy things with outdated, outmoded rituals and entirely too much Jesus for my liking. Jesus has as much to do with weddings, as far as I’m concerned, as fish have to do with the manufacture of bicycle parts.

In Italian’s long tradition of Commedia Dell’arte there were many masks and many characters. The witty childlike amorous Harlequin. The evil incompetent and distressingly phallic-beaked doctor, or doctor of the plague, or Il dottore. The beastly bauta who carries away naughty children. The cruel, dwarfish, humpbacked Pulcinella. What’s curious, in this masked theatre, the lovers, Inamorato and Inamorata, had no mask. The lovers were revealed to each other, and for their love, they were revealed to society. The lover, the Inamorato, had either not the need or the place to hide.

But until I am that lover, until I have either no place to hide, or no need to hide, I shall keep, I think, my mask of the Harlequin.

SS