Benjamin Franklin, Trickster

[R. Fiero]

'Representing the Eighteenth-Century World: Benjamin Franklin, Trickster'
by William Pencak, Professor of History,  Penn State University
http://www.trinity.edu/org/tricksters/TrixWay/current/Vol%203/Vol3_1/Pencak2.htm

"At the age of sixteen, he made his entry on the public stage 
as an elderly woman, criticizing the pretensions and hypocrisy 
of Massachusetts' lapsed puritanical elite.  At eighty-four, he 
took his final bow as a North African Muslim, fallaciously 
arguing for the enslavement of Christians using the arguments 
offered by pro-slavery advocates in the United States to keep 
Africans in bondage.  In between, he appeared as a "poor" 
writer of almanacs, a pregnant unmarried woman, a "plain man," 
the King of Prussia, and in many more guises, including an 
enigmatic character in his autobiography known as "I."  He is 
the only person in history simultaneously ranked among the 
finest authors, serious scientists, practical inventors, and 
political figures of his age.  He so effectively hid whatever 
true self he possessed that over two centuries after his death, 
scholars have built careers arguing whether he was a capitalist 
or a communitarian, a shameless self-promoter or a selfless 
public servant, a deist or a child of the Puritans, a patriot 
or (as one serious scholar makes a plausible case) an enemy spy. . .