Modernist fictions of identity and subjectivity are often taken as indexing the newly fluid, indeterminate and performative elements of gender, racial and class identities generated by social phenomena such as metropolitan life, consumerist ideology, celebrity and expatriation. Critics often describe a distinctive modernist sense of identity as being without a fixed and authentic core. Modernist writers develop an interest in masquerade, illegibility, personae, artifice, proliferation of surfaces and perspectives, and so on. Against this, I argue that the historical period of modernism is not one in which identities proliferate, but one in which they become increasingly bureaucratically fixed.

The unfixing of identity itself should not be considered specific to the modernist period, or to modernist literature. The nineteenth-century novel, with which modernism's supposedly new sense of modern identity is often contrasted, abounds with changed names, adoptions, faked deaths, and the discovery of blood relations in strangers. While the point of these fictions may seem to be to return people to their proper places, it is nonetheless significant that the possibility of leaving those places lingers.