Why did Gabriela Mistral adopt a pseudonym instead of using her real name?

Question

I just learned that Gabriela Mistral's real name was Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. Wikipedia says approximately when she started to use the pseudonym but not why:

Since June 1908, Mistral had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral for most of her writing. After winning the Juegos Florales, she rarely used her given name, Lucila Godoy, for her publications.

Unlike some female writers of the past, she didn't need to use a male pseudonym to get recognised. Why did she adopt a pseudonym at all, instead of using her real name?

(Note that I'm not asking why she adopted that particular pseudonym, which could be a separate question.)

Answer 1

It may not be possible to completely disentangle all of the factors which lead to the young Lucila Godoy Alcayaga to use a pseudonym. Probably there were several different influences at work.

She is often described as being a very shy woman, and in her early teens when she started publishing, it would be natural for her to try and conceal her identity. The first pseudonyms that she tried - "Soledad" ("loneliness"), "Alma" ("soul"), "Alguien" ("somebody") - indeed seem quite characteristic of teenage angst. These attempts were dropped quite quickly, in favour of her final choice "Gabriela Mistral" which differs in that it could plausibly function as a first name and a surname.

As detailed in another answer, the translator Langston Hughes wrote in 1957 that "She did not sign her poetry with her own name, Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, because as a young teacher she feared, if it became known that she wrote such emotionally outspoken verses, she might lose her job." This is indeed a plausible explanation. She had already encountered trouble because of her outspokenness. She had left school at 14, and had not been admitted to the Escuela Normal because “a chaplain-professor demanded that they rescind her admission, because she could become a "caudillo" [a ringleader, CDS] of the female students.” As a result she had to begin teaching without having a high-school diploma. Mistral wrote later that “The loss does not hurt me today, but all the teachers and professors who would deny me salt and water during the twenty years I was teaching in Chile - and I've made a note of them - know very well how much it cost me to undertake a teaching career without that piece of paper, the diploma, and that signature."

In the mid 1980s a considerable quantity of documents, correspondence, and personal notebooks, some 120 boxes, were brought from where they had been stored in the Library of Congress in Washington to Chile. Elizabeth Horan, a noted Mistral-scholar, has worked with this freshly available material, and in 2023 published the biography Mistral: A life, the first in a proposed three volume set. I have not been able to get hold of a copy unfortunately, but I did manage to contact her, and her opinion is that Mistral wrote under a pseudonym simply to follow the fashion of the time:

Women writers in Chile at that time quite commonly used pseudonyms... The conventions for women using pseudonyms were standard for that time. The idea is or was that women would do well to protect their reputation, their families, reputation, and not appear, especially ambitious or striving.

It was not just women writers who wrote under pseudonyms, of course. Pablo Neruda, a close contemporary of Mistral, is the pseudonym of Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto.

Finally, a fascinating clue is present in Mistral's final book of poetry Poema de Chile. In the poem entitled “Animales”, the ghost (named in another poem as Gabriela) is asked if she has more than one name. She replies:

Si, el que me dieron
y el que me di de mañosa
y el nuevo me mató el viejo.

Yes, the one that they gave me
and the one that I cunningly gave myself
and the new one has killed the old.

This could be read as referring to herself. It is certainly the case that her pseudonym "killed the old" - there are Gabriela Mistral schools, foundations, and prizes, but the old name "Lucila Godoy Alcayaga" is largely forgotten.

Answer 2

Isn't this answered by Wikipedia?

To protect her job as a teacher, she used a pen name, fearing the consequences of revealing her true identity. [5]

Here [5] is the reference: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on art, race, politics, and world affairs. Langston Hughes translated some of her poems, so it makes sense that he would know this fact.

Langston's exact words (from the introduction to his book of translations of Mistral's poems: Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, 1957) were:

She did not sign her poetry with her own name, Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, because as a young teacher she feared, if it became known that she wrote such emotionally outspoken verses, she might lose her job.

Answer 3

Even though the question is about why Lucila Godoy Alcayaga adopted a pseudonym at all rather than why she chose that specific pseudonym, those questions seem to be intertwined. The sources I consulted don't cite any statements by the poet herself, so theories about what motivated the adoption of the pseudonym are based on assumptions about its meaning.

According to Peter Mayo and Paolo Vittoria (Critical Education in International Perspective, Bloomsbury, 2021), the pseudonym

derives from the names of two poets she must have greatly admired — Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral.

Note the "must have", which suggest a degree of uncertainty. This seems to be the most widely adopted theory. It is also mentioned in Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, edited by Richard A. Young and Stephen Hart (Taylor and Francis, 2014) and The Women of the Nobel by Massimo di Terlizzi (Sem Edizioni, 2014).

According to Paul Burns and Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres, editors of Mistral's Selected Poems (Oxbow Books, 2006, page 10), Lucila Godoy Alcayaga

began using the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, and this name (made up either of the Archangel Gabriel or the Christian name of Gabriele D'Annunzio plus the surname of Frédéric Mistral) became generally accepted as hers, not just as a nom de plume (and so is now used here).

This introduces an alternative theory for the origin of "Gabriela", which can also be found in other sources. For example, Stephen Smith (An Inkwell of Pan Names, Xlibris US, 2006, page 21) writes,

Some biographers believe that Alcayaga derived her pen name from these two authors [Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral] whose writing she liked. Alcayaga combined the feminine form of Gabriele with the surname Mistral to form the pseudonym, Gabriela Mistral. Other biographers believe that the author formed her pen name from the name of the divine messenger, the Archangel Gabriel, and from the mistral, a cold, dry, northerly wind whose currents move swiftly over southern France.

This introduces a second potential origin for the name "Mistral", but still doesn't explain why the poetess chose a pseudonym. Smith continues,

What is known is that, as a teenager, Lucila Alcayaga, using a variety of pen names, began contributing poetry to Chilean newspapers. She first used Gabriela Mistral as a pseudonym for a poem published in Elegancias, a French magazine.

Martin C. Taylor mentions her earlier pseudonyms (Gabriela Mistral's Struggle with God and Man. McFarland, 2012, page 24–25):

In 1906, she wrote ten selections, in 1907, eight, and in 1908, thirteen, sanctifying herself as "Alma" ("Soul"), and posturing in a materialistic, secular way as "Alguien" ("Somebody"), the pseudonym that marks the book's opening Epigraph/Manifesto. The assertion of "posturing gains greater validity with regard to "Alguien". Pedro Pablo Zegers B. claims this pseudonym is an anagram—a scrambling of letters—to playfully and furtively involved the initials of her full name, i.e. LGA.

Alcayaga first used the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral in 1908 and according to Taylor, there are three categories of opinions about its origin:

One group held that Lucila combined the given name of the Italian novelist of The Triumph of Death, Gabriele D'Annunzio, with the surname of Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914), the Provençal poet of Miréio (1859), and Nobel laureate (1904). Another group held that she combined Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the English Pre-Raphaelite, and Frédéric Mistral to give rise to the name. Lucila finally cleared up the provenance, in 1946, after years of torturous elaborations and hesitations. She declared, in accord with a third group, that the name derived from a "nombre de arcángel con apellido de viento" ("the first [name] from an archangel, the last, a wind"). (…) She re-fashioned herself in sacred and secular symbols, "Gabriela Mistral" fused materialized divine essence (the archangel), with earthly, but invisible, matter (the mistral).

However, even this last quote explains only the origin; the motivation is Taylor's interpretation.

Finally, there is the following motivation for "mistral" by the poetess, quoted on Poetry Foundation:

I have great love of the wind. I take it for one of the most spiritual of the elements—more spiritual than water. I wanted, then, to adopt a name of wind, but not "hurricane" or "breeze"; one day, teaching geography in my school, I was impressed by the description of the wind made by Reclus in his famous work, and I found in it that name: Mistral. I immediately adopted it as my pseudonym, and this is the true explanation of why I use the last name of the singer of Provence.

In sum, biographers don't seem know for certain why Gabriela Mistral decided to use a pseudonym.