Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Catherine Delafield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317201335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First published in 2009, this book investigates the cultural significance of nineteenth-century women's writing and reading practices. Beginning with an examination of non-fictional diaries and the practice of diary writing, it assesses the interaction between the fictional diary and other forms of literary production such as epistolary narrative, the periodical, the factual document and sensation fiction. The discrepancies between the private diary and its use as a narrative device are explored through the writings of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker. It also considers women as writers, readers and subjects and demonstrates ways in which women could become performers of their own story through a narrative method which was authorized by their femininity and at the same time allowed them to challenge the myth of domestic womanhood.

This book will be of interest to those studying 19th century literature and women in literature.

PART 1
The Diary Model

Chapter 1
The Diary in the Nineteenth Century

The fictional diary in the nineteenth-century novel is based on the model of the non-fictional diary. This chapter considers the diary-writing traditions that existed in the nineteenth century and the ways in which women's diaries accommodated these traditions. It assesses the diary as life writing for women and concludes by briefly examining the published diary in the nineteenth-century and the fictional diary discussed by twentieth-century critics.

Four identifiable traditions for diary writing have emerged by the early nineteenth century. These are the accounts of a household or business; the spiritual improvement or book of reflections; the family record or chronicle; and the travel diary.¹ In the nineteenth century, diaries were being kept or composed as economic records and domestic memoirs, and as both spiritual and secular autobiography.

In the financial accounting sense of the daily journal, records of economic dealings took place within literate households. These practical records might be seen as the most basic form of daily recording on a factual basis. They were public in the sense that they were available for consultation and review but rarely publish-worthy. Over time these records acquired personal commentary and fuller descriptions of events and personalities and from these initially pragmatic and circumscribed processes of entering information emerged a second tradition, the family history or domestic memoir. This was more consciously a record of achievement and an account of stewardship and position. A family history or shared journal of this kind represented an assessment of worth in terms not merely monetary. Such a history would have value in public as an acknowledgement of a life and of a circulating heredity; the original document on which it was based would usually remain private.

In parallel, the growth of Non-Conformism stimulated the development of the spiritual diary as a vehicle for the assessment of one's life against a pattern of moral management, accounting for one's soul to God. The daily record of actions measuring progress against a moral standard would be reread and shared to offer guidance to others. The idea of setting up a model approach was also a stimulus to publication so that the most worthy or most improved members of the community could share that model with a wider range of beneficiaries. One of many popular examples was that of The Memoirs of Miss Hannah Ball ... Extracted from her diary of thirty years experience: in which the devices of Satan are laid open, the gracious dealings of God with her soul, and all his sufficient grace, are exemplified in her useful life and happy death.² Robert Fothergill outlines the self-improvement model of diary keeping which emerges, 'intensifying the writer's surveillance over the conduct of his life and the condition of his soul'.³ Miss Matty's diary in Cranford appears to be a form of spiritual accounting. The novel was published in 1853, but Miss Matty is looking back from the 1830s to her own childhood in the 1790s. She tells Mary Smith about the two-column format proposed by her authoritarian father: 'we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course and events of the coming day, and at night we were to put down on the other side what really happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives.'⁴

A fourth strand, the travel diary, operated in a composite tradition reflecting a number of the other functions of diary-writing. Travel, exploration and migration stimulated a need to record. By keeping basic records but also recording events with both public and private aims, the resultant diary of a journey could act both as a reminder for later memoirs and as the basis for more immediate letters and family news.⁵

The diary in its received nineteenth-century guise is discussed in a well-known and much reprinted text, Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. In his discursive essay, 'Diaries Moral, Historical and Critical', D'Israeli draws an important distinction regarding the intended audience of a diary: 'We converse with the absent by letters, and with ourselves by diaries'.⁶ He distinguishes the diary from the letter as 'the honester pages of a volume reserved only for solitary contemplation; or to be a future relic of ourselves, when we shall no more hear of ourselves'.⁷ This is an equivocal statement which suggests that although it is possible to be more honest in private, these pages will nonetheless be 'contemplated' and reread to contribute to the shaping of entries made at later dates. The idea of a 'future relic' also suggests collection and collation for more public view and D'Israeli proposes that, at the very least, a reread diary might act as consolation for the family of a public man out of favour.

D'Israeli describes diaries within a spiritual-economic tradition as 'books of account' which 'render to a man an account of himself to himself'. He regards them as better than history, 'a substitute to every thinking man for our newspapers, magazines, and annual register' although never a substitute for action.⁸ Writing at a time ofburgeoning interest in the past and in the publication of memoirs, he observes: '[W]e their posterity are still reaping the benefit of their lonely hours and diurnal records'.⁹ He accepts the concept of the diarist as an isolated figure at the time of writing even though his examples all appear to have been men of action, and the 'reaping' of benefit again assumes an audience although clearly in the spiritual improvement tradition.

In deriving these diary-writing criteria, D'Israeli pictures the isolated, private writer engaged in a 'diurnal task'. He describes the practice of using portable daily books or tablets but he cautions against the exhaustiveness of presenting the daily record - 'to write down everything, may end in something like nothing' - which suggests the need to edit or shape material. He presents the diary formed from a literary man's studies as 'the practice [of] ... journalizing the mind'. He also suggests that there is a hierarchy of diary texts, doubting, for instance, the need for a daily record of dreams: 'Works of this nature are not designed for the public eye; they are domestic annals, to be guarded in the little archives of a family'.¹⁰

Two other factors are also vital to an understanding of the context of diary-writing and publication in the early nineteenth century. Firstly, the value of private experience became a relevant concept within the Romantic tradition. The urge towards self-expression and definition was fired by a new sensibility giving both a voice to the concept of 'I' and a link to the subjectivity and authority of private experience. Secondly, at a practical and commercial level, the publication of diaries was linked inevitably with the growth of literacy, the cheapness of the printing process and the availability of material.¹¹

Within this nineteenth-century context, any analysis of t he diary model must also take account of the work of twentieth-century diary critics like Robert Fothergill, William Matthews and Andrew Hassam. The diary as a genre in its own right has been described by Fothergill as a 'serial autobiography'. Observing that no one can record exhaustively, he defines the diary as a 'non-linear book of the self', a record which tends to be valued according to the time of discovery rather than the time o fwritin.¹² He describes the diarist as 'a fugitive and cloistered genius' and identifies a tendency to shape entries and to employ literary forms.¹³ Self projection, and thus performativity, is seen by Fothergill as the key to the genre: 'the diary ... creates its own reader as a projection of the impulse to write'.¹⁴

William Matthews, whose Bibliography of British Diaries published in 1950 was Fothergill's starting point, revisits the diary in a later article. He specifically identifies the absence of an audience and 'a natural disorder and emphasis', the lack of a value system.¹⁵ Although neither Fothergill nor Matthews specifically refers in any detail to female diarists, their observations draw attention to the concepts of creating an internal reader and valuing the daily which are significant for women keeping diaries within the ideological constraints of the nineteenth century.

Andrew Hassam in turn challenges the sense of an audience for the journal using the French critic Rousset's typology of the diary as 'texte sans destinataire', without an addressee. Hassam puts together a spectrum of authorial intention based on the status of the addressee in the text relative to publication and this suggests that the diary comes into existence for a range of performative reasons.¹⁶ Additionally, he identifies a dilemma for the reader or editor arising from the diarist's authorization to read, and this is a useful concept for an analysis of the unauthorized and 'licensed violators' who read fictional diaries within the novels and so become accidental narratees. Hassam comments: 'The position of the researcher reading an unpublished diary would be the same as that of an editor, that of licensed violator of the secrecy clause.'¹⁷ In a later article, Hassam also describes the act of writing a travel diary as being based on the availability of the 'narrative occasion' or 'moment of stasis'¹⁸ which provides an opportunity to write within the dailiness or busyness of travelling. Hassam observes that: 'The diary is self-referential in that the diarist employs language to construct both the space and the occasion in which to write.'¹⁹ It is this concept which confers performative agency on the diarist through her text.

The nineteenth-century female diarist was writing and living within a tradition which valued her as a moral touchstone and domestic object. Kathryn Gleadle observes that language was used to make sense of lives and that 'the discourses of separate spheres contributed to the construction of individual subjectivities'.²⁰ The published discourse of womanhood maintained this ideological position and one of the ways in which domestic space was identified and constructed was through advice manuals which located women's lives in the moral sphere of the home. Elizabeth Langland points out that these books of etiquette for the early nineteenth century were 'aimed specifically at enabling the middle class to consolidate its base of control through strategies of regulation and exclusion'.²¹ Women were defined within these regulated texts by their relational status within the ordered garden of the kingdom where, Sarah Stickney Ellis tells the 'Daughters ofEngland': 'Society has good reason for planting this friendly hedge beside the path of a woman.'²² The dailiness represented by a diary might reflect a woman's duties as defined by writers such as Ellis or Thomas Gisbome. Their manuals codified a woman's life as an alternative to the masculine world of work. The maintenance of the home was a matter of moral and patriotic duty addressed to the 'Wives of England': 'To make [her] husband happy, to raise his character, to give dignity to his house, and to train up his children in the path of wisdom- these are the objects which a true wife will not rest satisfied without endeavouring to attain.'²³

In terms of the diary, of course, the very act of writing by women is a vexed question for the nineteenth-century adviser on etiquette. Like the diarist valorizing the daily, Ellis seeks authority for her own writing when she explains that she is making public the 'apparently insignificant detail of familiar and ordinary life' for instructional and patriotic purposes: 'a nation's moral wealth is in your k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Texts
• Introduction: Performing to Strangers
• Part 1 The Diary Model
• Part 2 The Diary and Literary Production
• Part 3 The Diary as Narrative
• Bibliography
• Index