Abstract
In contrast to the now-standard critical and popular account of the diary as a feminine genre, I have argued that, until the late nineteenth century, manuscript diaries undermined conventional gender dichotomies, while published diaries generated persistent anxieties about gender compliance. Even as the diary became increasingly associated with the feminine, in practice both male and female diarists continued to write and publish many different kinds of diaries. In this chapter, I turn to the final textual arena in which the relationship between gender and the diary played out in nineteenth-century Britain. In fiction, we find a broad spectrum of diarists and diary practices, along with a persistent valorization of female diarists and the Romantic, embodied, interior, secret diary coded as feminine. This fictional valorization significantly influenced both the diary’s status in the cultural imagination and actual diary practices. At the same time, however, fictional representations of diverse diaries and diarists trouble gender and class binarisms, reflecting the complexity of the diary’s cultural presence and revealing how it functioned to monitor and produce gender identities, rather than simply to represent them. This chapter thus frames the relationship between the literary and the cultural as at once mimetic and transformative. While the spectrum of fictional diaries reproduced actual diary practices, fiction’s insistent focus on feminine diaries helped transform those practices.
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Notes
In making this argument, I echo Nancy Armstrong who, in Desire and Domestic Fiction (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 55–61.
For discussions of strategies of verisimilitude in eighteenth-century British fiction, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York and London: Norton, 1990).
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 32.
Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 18, 19.
Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1982).
Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986).
and Joe Bray, The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (London; New York: Routledge, 2003).
Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 208–16.
Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50.
See also Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 173–83.
Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 197–213.
Beth Newman, “Telling Situations: The Frame Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction,” (Cornell University, 1987).
Catherine Delafield, Womens Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 100.
Hannah Rathbone, So much of the DIARY of LADY WILLOUGHBY as relates to her Domestic History, & to the Eventful Period of the Reign of CHARLES the First (London: Longman, 1844).
George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (1892; Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Samuel Warren, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (Edinburgh: Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1832).
Charlotte Campbell Bury, Journal of the Heart (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830).
Holme Lee’s The Wortlebank Diary, and Some Old Stories from Kathie Branded Portfolio (London: Smith Elder, 1860).
Emma Marshall’s Mrs. Mainwarings Journal, those copies alone come from five different editions over the course of seven years: New York: Dutton, 1874.
Elizabeth Charles Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family (1862; New York: M. W. Dodd, 1864).
Elizabeth Charles The Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevylyan (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1864)
Elizabeth Charles The Diary of Brother Bartholomew (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1865).
See John Wilson Crawford, Jonathan Oldaker; or Leaves from the Diary of a Commercial Traveller (London, 1856).
John Wilson Crawford Diary of an Ex-Detective, ed. Charles Martel (London: Ward and Lock, 1860).
Edward Carpenter, The Diary of a Pawnbroker (London: David Bryce, 1865).
William Russell, Leaves from the Diary of a Law Clerk (London: J&C Brown, 1857).
Edmund D. Wickham, The Anglo-Indian Family; or Aunt Lucy’s Journal (Croydon: J. S. Wright, 1853), ix.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; New York: Norton, 1990), 16.
Email communication, Sarah Carr, Collections Assistant, Brontë Parsonage Museum, June 11, 2004.
Christine Alexander, A Bibliography of the Manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë (Keighley, West Yorkshire: The Brontë Society, 1982), 21, 23, 41, 50, 51, 171.
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 146.
Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 567.
Robert C. McKibben, “The Image of the Book in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15.2 (1960): 159–69.
J. Hillis Miller, “Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the *Uncanny,’” in The Brontës, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 169–92.
Carol Jacobs, “Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation,” Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature 7:3 (1979): 49–71.
Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Womens Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 72–73.
Patricia Yaeger, “Violence in the Sitting Room: Wuthering Heights and the Woman’s Novel,” Genre 11.2 (1988): 203–29.
Regina Barreca, “The Power of Excommunication: Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering Heights,” in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 227–40.
Jan B. Gordon, Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo’s Economies (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 97–154.
George Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street (London: Chatto & Windus 1930), 257.
Winifred Gérin, “Introduction,” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 14–15.
Lori Paige, “Helen’s Diary Freshly Considered,” Brontë Society Transactions 20.4 (1991): 225.
Elizabeth Langland, “The Voicing of Feminine Desire in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, ed. Anthony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 113.
Catherine MacGregor, ‘I Cannot Trust Your Oaths and Promises: I Must Have A Written Agreement’: Talk and Text in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Dionysos 4.2 (Fall 1992): 31.
Rachel K. Carnell, Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Nineteenth-Century Literature 53.1 (June 1998): 1.
Garrett Stewart, “Narrative Economies in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë, ed. Julie Nash and Barbara A. Suess (Aldershot; Burlington; Singapore; Sydney: Ashgate, 2001), 77–78.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 260; Homans, Bearing the Word, 69–73.
Beth Newman, “The Situation of the Looker-On”: Gender, Narration, and the Gaze in Wuthering Heights, PMLA 105.5 (October 1990): 1034.
G. H. Lewes, “Currer Bell’s Shirley,” Edinburgh Review 91 (April 1850): 153–73.
Jacob Korg, “The Problem of Unity in Shirley,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12.2 (1957): 125.
Andrew and Judith Hook, “Introduction,” Shirley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 10.
Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 156.
Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 58.
Gisela Argyle, “Gender and Generic Mixing in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley,” Studies in English Literature 35.4 (Autumn 1995): 741–56.
F. A. C. Wilson, “The Primrose Wreath: The Heroes of the Brontë Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29.1 (1974): 47–48.
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 58.
Wilkie Collins, Basil (1852; Oxford: Oxford University Press-World’s Classics, 1990), 2.
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 422, 371, 420, 428.
Lillian Nayder, Wilkie Collins (New York: Twayne, 1997), ix.
Sue Lonoff combines reader response criticism with an historical perspective in Wilkie Collins and the Victorian Reader (New York: AMS, 1982).
Margaret Oliphant, “Sensation Novels,” Blackwood’s Magazine 91 (May 1862) 112.
See Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Patrick Brantlinger, “What Is Sensational About the Sensation Novel?” Nineteenth-Century Literature 37 (June 1982): 1–28.
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (1875; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 372.
See D. A. Miller, “Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988), 146–91.
Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel, in Three Supernatural Novels of the Victorian Period, ed. E. F. Bleiler (1878; New York: Dover, 1975), 38.
Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain (1889; Dover, New Hampshier: Sutton, 1993), 310.
Collins, Miss or Mrs., in After Dark and Other Stories (1871; New York: Harpers, 1873), 306.
Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch (1872; Oxford: World’s Classics-Oxford University Press, 1995), 328–29.
Wilkie Collins, Armadale (1866; Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press), 514.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895; Oxford: World’s Classics-Oxford University Press, 1995), 282.
George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (1892; Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.
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© 2011 Rebecca Steinitz
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Steinitz, R. (2011). Fiction and the Feminization of the Diary. In: Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339606_6
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