Here, in Hoffman, (as, to some extent, in all her work), she is taking issue with ‘ideational femaleness’, the ways in which she perceives women to be the particular victims of social or gender or power fantasies, reduced to ‘benign automata’, ‘sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute’, wearing masks of ‘hideous’ resignation – none of which resemble in any way the brilliant, flashing unpindownability of Albertina herself.
