The Masquerade of Fiction

Zorro the Mask

Name your favorite masked character and win a free kindle book.

The winner is - Diane Scicluna! Please send me your email address  (to enchantmentATkimfalconerDOTcom) and I'll send you your copy of Tatsania's gift, or Vampires Gone Wild, if you prefer. Congratulations! 

Since the beginning of time, masks have had a powerful influence on human evolution. From preliterate societies to the ancient Greeks and on to present times, the mask represents a part of our multiplicity, the many ‘selves’ that reside within.

Greek Masks of Comedy and Tragedy

In the Greek amphitheater, masks were performance props that helped bring out a ‘persona,’ a word that originally meant ‘to sound through’. The mask actually amplified the voice of the actor on stage, a wonderful metaphor for the expression of character.

Joseph Campbell explores this deeply in The Masks of God, delving into philosophical views of supreme beings in preliterate, Eastern, and Western cultures. He shows how, through story and ritual, we meet the divine, and sometimes demonic (dynamic), within - via our masks.

Batman the Game

In modern times, the mask (metaphorical or real) can be a way of allowing a particular aspect of our personality its day in the sun. We put on the mask and become something  else, something more than . . .
  
This ‘primitive’ practice of donning a mask to express a repressed aspect of the Self is common. We do it all the time when we:

Put on our happy face.

Find our serious look.

Give others our kick-ass stare.

Go all gooey or seductive . . .

Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz in The Mask

We still use masks in fiction to embellish (hide, punish, trick, curse, bless, amplify) a character. It may seem like the mask makes them more archetypal, as in the evil of Darth Vader, the trickster Stanley Ipkiss in The Mask, or Batman and Zorro’s dark hero, but the story always reveals its deeper meaning when the characters finally take off the mask. Then we see what lies beneath.


William Butler Yeats suggests we sometimes prefer the masks stay on!


The Mask

"PUT off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes."
"O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold."
"I would but find what's there to find,
Love or deceit."
"It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what's behind."
"But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.”
"O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?"

What’s your favorite mask in film or literature? Lord Vader? Scream? Dread Pirate Roberts? Zorro? Predator? Stanley Ipkiss? Stanley Ipkiss’s dog? I’d love to hear.

Name your favorite, most scary/awesome/sexy mask in the comments and receive a Kindle copy of Tatsania’s Gift, a YA dystopia novella, lead in to the Quantum Encryption series.

Kim Falconer is a Supernatural Underground author writing paranormal romance, urban fantasy, YA and epic science fantasy novels.

You can find out more about Kim at kimfalconer.com or on the 11th House Blog, and on FaceBook and Twitter. She posts here at the Supernatural Underground on the 16th of every month. Her latest release is"Blood and Water" in Supernatural Underground: Vampires Gone Wild.