In extreme instances, however, certain people so persistently and continuously act the role they have chosen to assume before the world that we begin to wonder whether there is a real human being inside the mask or not. Such a person has become identical with his persona; the ''good hostess'' who greets everyone with a gracious smile, even those she heartily dislikes, or the minister who utters pious sentiments onall occasions though he may have his moments of bitterness and irritation like most other men, furnish outstanding examples. In a relationship with such people no reality, in the psychological meaning of the word, is possible. For they only accept their conventional mask and do not recognize their own disagreeable feelings and reactions. The search for consciousness does not of course mean that a woman must cease being polite to people whom she does not like. A persona is as necessary to a conscious woman as to an unconscious one-only instead of being a mask of conventional design which is mechanically worn, it must be developed as a living function relating the human being in a purposive way to the outer world.
— Esther Harding
Harding is not arguing against social grace — she is making a finer distinction than that, one worth staying with. The persona that has calcified into identity is not merely a lie told to others; it is a lie told to the self, one maintained so consistently that the disagreeable feelings underneath — the bitterness, the dislike, the irritation — lose their claim to exist at all. When that happens, something more than dishonesty is in play. The inner life has been evacuated to maintain an image of acceptability, and what the world encounters is a surface with nothing pressing against it from within.
What Harding calls a "living function" is the difference between wearing a face and inhabiting one. The conscious persona is not a performance of who you are not; it is a genuine mediation between what you feel and what the situation requires — and that mediation only works if the feeling beneath it is acknowledged rather than cancelled. Politeness that springs from recognized dislike is not the same as politeness that has replaced it. The first is an act of will; the second is an absence. What gets foreclosed in the collapse into persona is not social comportment but the capacity for any contact that carries actual pressure — because pressure requires two surfaces, and one of them has gone missing.
Esther Harding·the way of all women·1970