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Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin
Redrawing established boundaries between genres, Podnieks builds a broad critical and theoretical range on which she maps the diary as an aesthetic work, showing how diaries inscribe the aesthetics of literary modernisms. Drawing on feminist theory, literary history, biography, and personal anecdotes, she argues that the diary is an especially subversive space for women writers. Podnieks details how Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin wrote their diaries under the pretence that they were private, while always intending them to be published. She travelled extensively to examine the original diary manuscripts and offers unique first-hand descriptions of the manuscripts that underscore the artistic intentions of their authors. Daily Modernism contributes to the ongoing feminist revision of literary history and, in its disruption of traditional concepts of "major" and "minor" literary forms, paves the way for a much needed reconsideration of the diary as a valid literary achievement.
424 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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February 6, 2021
It was so refreshing to read something that takes diary-writing itself seriously -- not as simply internal processing, nor as practice or generating material for more formal writing, but as a genre in itself.
Quoting Marlene Kadar: encourages us to view life writing "as a continuum that spreads unevenly and in combined forms from the so-called least fictive narrative to the most fictive" (7)
Of women keeping diaries of their travels on the Continent: diarists were on the lookout for particular things to record in a distinctive manner (18).
p.37 - nice list of resources on how diarists shape their material (even/esp. "non-literary" diarists
Eakin -- the self and language are mutually implicated in a single, interdependent system of symbolic behavior (42)
Rosenwald argues that we can best meet the author of diaries not by their direct self-disclosure but by signs of behavior - the kind of book a diarist buys or makes, its costs, how the volume is presented, what span of time it includes, whether it has formal beginning/end, whether text clean or revised, whether page is a unit oforganization, where dates placed relative to text, non-verbal marks accompnaying words, length of average entry, frequency, which subjects treated and which not, how organized (chron, association), first and second person pronouns, which parts are habitual and which "free"(43)
Women played a critical role in the development of the diary genre, "the idea that oneself, one's feelings, one's spouse and domestic relations were properly and innately worth writing about was essentially a female idea, however tentatively conceived at the time. There is little or no precedent for such a notion, at least in English, in male thinking or practice" (quoting Cynthia Pomerleau, p. 46).
Pepys tore up his wife's diary before her after she read him sections about "the retiredness of her life and how unpleasant it was" (49)
Rich history of working-class journals (Read this Only to Yourself)
I read this book at least a year ago -- possibly actually in the summer of 2019 -- and am amazed t how much I'd forgotten:
This was especially moving: "Smith writes, 'Stealing words from the language, she would know and name herself, appropriating the self-creative power patriarchal culture has historically situated in the pens of man.'. . . The diarist as much as the autobiographer steals the 'pens of man' and affirms, however silently, the value of her presence. Gannett would agree, for she lauds early diarists who 'created texts out of their lives and new lives out of their texts. Texts are marks on the world; they are physical objects, and journals and diaries, while silent, are visible, potentially permanent markers of a life lived.' Blodgett also sees that it is the _act_ of writing a diary which is particularly meaningful to women: 'I suggest that diary keeping has been practised so extensively by women because it has been possible for them and gratifying to them . . . a diary is an act of language that, by speaking of one's self, sustains one's sense of being a self, with an autonomous and significant identity.'" (53).
She further notes the connections between the diary and novel forms, and the way the early history of women novel-writers has been erased in favor of the five men most considered the "fathers" of the novel -- Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne. (52). Frost in May didn't appear until 1932 and then went out of print until Virago revived it.
_Writing Beyond the Ending_, which cites women's stories that can be found by "writing beyond the ending" as "travels of adventure, professional ambition, lesbian love, adulterous passion, and unconventional parenting."
In _Mapping Ourselves: Canadian Womens' Autobiography in English_, Lucy Maud Montgomery turned to her diary when caring for her ill husband prevented her from pursuing her career as a novelist (66).
Cites Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva "and their notion of l'ecriture feminine, which is perceived as being 'potentially subversive of the structures, logic, and syntax of masculine language..' She links this 'feminine' style to women's autobiographical writing, in that both have been described as, for example, unended, fragmented, and fluid -- terms also used to define a modernist aesthetic." Podnieks warns against this kind of reifying description, then says, "Women's diary writing may also be subversive, like l'ecriture feminine, in the way that it blurs traditional divisions between self and others, writer and reader, text and experience, art and life.' Hogan cites Duplessas, who argues that women can create 'something i call an emotional texture, a structural expression of mutuality. Writers know their text as a form of intimacy, of personal contact." (69).
Cites Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, who fled conventional lives and experimented with lesbian, bisexual, asexual, or alternative heterosexual - non-marital, non-monogamous -- relationships in order to be able to write (75).
Argues that the devaluation of women's diaries has as much to do with the construction of male-written novels as the standards of value. As those standards are shown to be ephemeral, diaries could become prized as "monuments to female creativity and selfhood" (78)
Argues that "the diarist was central and not marginal to modernist expressions and enterprises." because in Woolf's words, they focused on the material appropriate to the novel -- "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day." In Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, "the lives of the protagonists -- like the lives of diarists -- unfold within a single day. Further, [in Ulysses], "Joyce offers us intimate accounts of their bodily functions, what food they eat, even what Bloom has in his pockets." (81).
"The diary may be considered the quintessential text of modernist fragmentation, for the perpetual starting and stopping of entries, their varying lengths, the differences in time passed between each one, and the mingling of retrospect and anticipation in each one highlight the real fragmentation of lived experience which modernism sought to emulate" (91).
On diary books: Woolf "bought diaries that were physically appealing, and she further made them, or transformed them, into aesthetic caches . . . . " She sometimes covered purchased diary books with her own papers, or made her own by punching two holes and stringing them together, or buying a ring binder and covering it with her own decorative paper. "Woolf had a penchant for writing in different colours of ink, often changing colours within a single volume. Her preferred shades were black, peacock blue, and bright purple. For me, this combination made reading the diaries a visually playful and engaging activity, and it draws attention to her fascination with pens, a topic she constantly mentioned within the diaries" (105) -- Jan saying to me, you're a writer, pens are your tools.
Woolf thought of her future literary reputation, mentioning Carlyle's birthday and "the curious superstition, haunting literary people, of the value of being remembered by posterity -- but I had better reign myself in). Perhaps Woolf had to "reign" herself in because she was getting too close to her own desire to be remembered, which she may have considered shameful arrogance. On the other hand, she did write 'reign' rather than 'rein,' and if her mistake was an intentional pun . . . perhaps she wanted to set herself up as a literary sovereign in her own right, enjoying all the power and prestige traditionally granted to male rulers of the cultural realm." (112).
Blodgett contends that women often justify diary writing in practical terms, but are not being fully honest with themselves, "because such interest in self runs counter to expected female behaviour, so "diaristic ego usually retreats behind justifications that are entirely self-acceptable : utility and need -- a memoir for posterity, a record for my children, a self-improving discipline to make me more acceptable to others" (113).
Lacking formal education, or even access to it, these writers set up for themselves "extensive reading programs [of study] which they conscientously followed" (352). All of them sought publication for portions of their diaries when they had published only none or one other thing, seeing them as central to "their sense of self as public writers" (353).
Quoting Marlene Kadar: encourages us to view life writing "as a continuum that spreads unevenly and in combined forms from the so-called least fictive narrative to the most fictive" (7)
Of women keeping diaries of their travels on the Continent: diarists were on the lookout for particular things to record in a distinctive manner (18).
p.37 - nice list of resources on how diarists shape their material (even/esp. "non-literary" diarists
Eakin -- the self and language are mutually implicated in a single, interdependent system of symbolic behavior (42)
Rosenwald argues that we can best meet the author of diaries not by their direct self-disclosure but by signs of behavior - the kind of book a diarist buys or makes, its costs, how the volume is presented, what span of time it includes, whether it has formal beginning/end, whether text clean or revised, whether page is a unit oforganization, where dates placed relative to text, non-verbal marks accompnaying words, length of average entry, frequency, which subjects treated and which not, how organized (chron, association), first and second person pronouns, which parts are habitual and which "free"(43)
Women played a critical role in the development of the diary genre, "the idea that oneself, one's feelings, one's spouse and domestic relations were properly and innately worth writing about was essentially a female idea, however tentatively conceived at the time. There is little or no precedent for such a notion, at least in English, in male thinking or practice" (quoting Cynthia Pomerleau, p. 46).
Pepys tore up his wife's diary before her after she read him sections about "the retiredness of her life and how unpleasant it was" (49)
Rich history of working-class journals (Read this Only to Yourself)
I read this book at least a year ago -- possibly actually in the summer of 2019 -- and am amazed t how much I'd forgotten:
This was especially moving: "Smith writes, 'Stealing words from the language, she would know and name herself, appropriating the self-creative power patriarchal culture has historically situated in the pens of man.'. . . The diarist as much as the autobiographer steals the 'pens of man' and affirms, however silently, the value of her presence. Gannett would agree, for she lauds early diarists who 'created texts out of their lives and new lives out of their texts. Texts are marks on the world; they are physical objects, and journals and diaries, while silent, are visible, potentially permanent markers of a life lived.' Blodgett also sees that it is the _act_ of writing a diary which is particularly meaningful to women: 'I suggest that diary keeping has been practised so extensively by women because it has been possible for them and gratifying to them . . . a diary is an act of language that, by speaking of one's self, sustains one's sense of being a self, with an autonomous and significant identity.'" (53).
She further notes the connections between the diary and novel forms, and the way the early history of women novel-writers has been erased in favor of the five men most considered the "fathers" of the novel -- Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne. (52). Frost in May didn't appear until 1932 and then went out of print until Virago revived it.
_Writing Beyond the Ending_, which cites women's stories that can be found by "writing beyond the ending" as "travels of adventure, professional ambition, lesbian love, adulterous passion, and unconventional parenting."
In _Mapping Ourselves: Canadian Womens' Autobiography in English_, Lucy Maud Montgomery turned to her diary when caring for her ill husband prevented her from pursuing her career as a novelist (66).
Cites Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva "and their notion of l'ecriture feminine, which is perceived as being 'potentially subversive of the structures, logic, and syntax of masculine language..' She links this 'feminine' style to women's autobiographical writing, in that both have been described as, for example, unended, fragmented, and fluid -- terms also used to define a modernist aesthetic." Podnieks warns against this kind of reifying description, then says, "Women's diary writing may also be subversive, like l'ecriture feminine, in the way that it blurs traditional divisions between self and others, writer and reader, text and experience, art and life.' Hogan cites Duplessas, who argues that women can create 'something i call an emotional texture, a structural expression of mutuality. Writers know their text as a form of intimacy, of personal contact." (69).
Cites Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, who fled conventional lives and experimented with lesbian, bisexual, asexual, or alternative heterosexual - non-marital, non-monogamous -- relationships in order to be able to write (75).
Argues that the devaluation of women's diaries has as much to do with the construction of male-written novels as the standards of value. As those standards are shown to be ephemeral, diaries could become prized as "monuments to female creativity and selfhood" (78)
Argues that "the diarist was central and not marginal to modernist expressions and enterprises." because in Woolf's words, they focused on the material appropriate to the novel -- "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day." In Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, "the lives of the protagonists -- like the lives of diarists -- unfold within a single day. Further, [in Ulysses], "Joyce offers us intimate accounts of their bodily functions, what food they eat, even what Bloom has in his pockets." (81).
"The diary may be considered the quintessential text of modernist fragmentation, for the perpetual starting and stopping of entries, their varying lengths, the differences in time passed between each one, and the mingling of retrospect and anticipation in each one highlight the real fragmentation of lived experience which modernism sought to emulate" (91).
On diary books: Woolf "bought diaries that were physically appealing, and she further made them, or transformed them, into aesthetic caches . . . . " She sometimes covered purchased diary books with her own papers, or made her own by punching two holes and stringing them together, or buying a ring binder and covering it with her own decorative paper. "Woolf had a penchant for writing in different colours of ink, often changing colours within a single volume. Her preferred shades were black, peacock blue, and bright purple. For me, this combination made reading the diaries a visually playful and engaging activity, and it draws attention to her fascination with pens, a topic she constantly mentioned within the diaries" (105) -- Jan saying to me, you're a writer, pens are your tools.
Woolf thought of her future literary reputation, mentioning Carlyle's birthday and "the curious superstition, haunting literary people, of the value of being remembered by posterity -- but I had better reign myself in). Perhaps Woolf had to "reign" herself in because she was getting too close to her own desire to be remembered, which she may have considered shameful arrogance. On the other hand, she did write 'reign' rather than 'rein,' and if her mistake was an intentional pun . . . perhaps she wanted to set herself up as a literary sovereign in her own right, enjoying all the power and prestige traditionally granted to male rulers of the cultural realm." (112).
Blodgett contends that women often justify diary writing in practical terms, but are not being fully honest with themselves, "because such interest in self runs counter to expected female behaviour, so "diaristic ego usually retreats behind justifications that are entirely self-acceptable : utility and need -- a memoir for posterity, a record for my children, a self-improving discipline to make me more acceptable to others" (113).
Lacking formal education, or even access to it, these writers set up for themselves "extensive reading programs [of study] which they conscientously followed" (352). All of them sought publication for portions of their diaries when they had published only none or one other thing, seeing them as central to "their sense of self as public writers" (353).
November 22, 2010
Research for Anais Nin fashion conference paper, this had some compelling essays on how diary writing-- differentiated from masculine (and more "serious," respected journal writing) is a modern phenomenon of female expression. Lines between pure fiction and edited, re-written non-fiction are blurred, as in Anais Nin's Diaries.
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