The mask, role, or character which society expects individuals to present. Swiss psychologist Jung, Carl used this term, which literally means ‘mask’, to describe the different social roles people are called on to play in everyday life. The complaint made by feminism critics that society demands that women be wives, mothers, mistresses, and so on, all at once, is in effect a statement about both the significance of personae in daily life and the difficulties they present when they come into conflict with one another. What is crucial, though, about this notion of persona is the fact the subject is always conscious of the fact that ‘they’ are never quite ‘that’, they are never quite what they appear to be. This is a potential source of both anxiety and comfort. Obeying the same logic, persona is also used in literary studies to describe the character an author adopts to tell a particular story. This concept is especially useful in the case of first person narratives to distinguish the ‘I’ of the text from the actual author.