Why in older literature is it common to see names of characters or places represented as something like “Mr. M—”, as if the author were keeping the identity of an actual person anonymous, and is there a name for the practice?
An example from Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”:
“from her he learnt that she had grown up in Petersburg, but had lived in S— since her marraige two years before”
This is a fictional character, not an actual person whose reputation might be harmed etc. - why would he use this construct rather than just putting in a real (or for that matter fictional) place name?
Well, according to Barth in the titular story in his collection Lost in the Funhouse, “Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality.” I don’t know if literary critics have invented a term for it. It’s like a fraudulent roman à clef, though, and used for exactly the reason Barth gives.
This is my understanding as well. I think the common use of the epistolary format in the 18th and 19th centuries was also due to a desire to make fiction seem more “realistic”.
It was used pretty commonly, but not inevitably.
Woody Allen made fun of it in one of his early New Yorker pieces: “Should I marry M______? Not if she won’t tell me the rest of the letters in her name.”
When I was younger, I thought it meant you got to make up your own name. I remember being very frustrated as a 5 year old at how long some of those books are.
