Tis the season for blog reflections, it would seem. From Hilaire to Dr. Crazy to New Kid, everyone’s meditating on the nature of blogging.

Jumping on the bandwagon, I’ve been thinking about the anonymity question. This is an issue that has been addressed extensively in the ol’ blogosphere — and I doubt I have any particularly new insights to add to what has already been said … but here goes:

To me, being anonymous is central to my blogging. I break out in a cold sweat at even the possibility of being “outed” by readers who recognize me. Actually, one of my biggest fears is that somehow some of my graduate students will find this blog, figure out that I’m the author, pass the URL around to all the other grad students, and they will sit around reading my meandering posts, and laughing unkindly. How’s that for a nightmare scenario?

But, even though I want to remain anonymous, I’ve also discovered that trying too hard to be anonymous means not actually saying anything about myself. The blogs that I read most often and enjoy the most are the ones in which the authors share some part of their lives. I don’t have the illusion that what I’m reading is the whole picture or even the “true” picture of the blogger’s life — but I have a sense of connection to them. I’ve been making more of an effort to blog more about myself, including what Golden Boy disdainfully describes as “ham sandwich posts” — those posts that describe the absolute triviality of the day, such as what you had for lunch. In doing so, however, I have had the sense that I am treading closer to the edge of anonymity — making the possibility for discovery/revelation more likely.

My most recent post, on the wondrous front steps I helped to build, comes terribly close to self-revelation because basically anyone who comes over to my house will recognize those steps. (They are pretty amazing, aren’t they? Momentary pause to enjoy the fruits of my labor.) Ironically, I am having a couple of colleagues over for dinner this weekend. I don’t have any reason to think they are blog readers or, even more improbably, readers of THIS blog — but I suppose it’s a possibility and, if they have a look of recognition on their faces as they come up the steps, I’ll have to rethink this blog permanently.

Yesterday, I read this quote from the nineteenth-century poet Lucy Larcom: “I could never understand a girl feeling any pleasure in placing herself ‘before the public.’ The privilege of seclusion must be the last one a woman can willingly sacrifice” (from her memoir, A New England Girlhood, 1889).

Larcom is endorsing an old-fashioned sense of feminine deportment, in which women are properly ensconced in the private sphere — but doing so rather ironically, by stating it in her published memoir. I see a truth in her statement: that privacy or, as I’m extrapolating it here, anonymity is a “privilege” that grants the power of self-definition. While privacy has, historically, been a characteristic imposed on women as they were relegated to the domestic and excluded from the public, nevertheless, some were able to locate the seeds of empowerment within the bounded space of the private. It seems to me that anonymous blogging treads a similar terrain — making it possible to play around with identity and voice precisely by adopting the mantle of privacy.

Or, as Dr. Curmugeon so succinctly put its, “I’m anonymous for a reason, sucka.”