Benjamin Franklin, Trickster

[Richard Fiero]

Representing the Eighteenth-Century World: Benjamin Franklin, Trickster
William Pencak, Professor of History, Penn State University
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.
Of course "he" is Benjamin Franklin.  As preparations are under way to
celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of his birth, what more can
be said about one of the most "biographied" characters in history? 
Franklin's fictional personae are the clue to understanding him as the
embodiment of the classic figure of Trickster.  C. W. Spinks,
Professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, founder of
the on-line journal Trickster's Way, author and editor of numerous
books on the subject, variously defines Trickster as: "the hero who  .
. . is used to satirize the conventions of culture."  But he grows
"from being a buffoon and joker to being a culture hero who will
forward the goals of culture or slay the monsters that threaten the
culture."   Despite his humorous exterior, he "risks all and brings
whatever sacred gifts a people use."  He accomplishes his task not
through the heavy-handed indoctrination of the ideologue, but through
the "generation of marginal signs, either as personifying cultural
change, or dissolution and growth"; he is "the border creature who
plays at the margins of self, symbol, and culture."