‘Dear Diary, Dear Body’: Reading Embodied and Narrated Selves

Introduction: where is the body?

Diaries, of course, are about bodies. They are about daily activities such as writing (the diary!), eating, working, and sleeping. They are about illness and death, growing up and growing old, about intimate relationships and sexuality, family and motherhood, physical pastimes, and travel and war. Some diaries, however, are much less explicit in their reflection on bodily issues than others. Analogously to diary writing, life writing studies and diary scholarship have shown an uneven attention to corporeal issues. This cursory focus reflects the irregular attention the body has also received in more traditional academic disciplines such as history.

One could say that, for a long time, the body did not even have a history. According to medievalist Le Goff (2012, 1) historians had written the histories of men (and to a lesser extent, women) ‘without bodies’, that is histories of disembodied people’s thoughts and ideas (Ruberg 2020, 1). This changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when the history of the body as a separate field was shaped. This new attention to the body has been variously referred to as the corporeal, bodily, or somatic turn (ibid). In an overview of the new history of the body, historian Roy Porter explained the neglect of the history of the body as a result of both the classical and the Judeo-Christian traditions which advanced a fundamentally dualistic vision of man, privileging mind (or soul) over body (Porter 1991, 206).

Since the 1990s body history has expanded, in several ways. The generic term ‘history of the body’ obscures the coexistence of different – at times even contradictory – perspectives and methodologies (Stolberg and Unglaub 2011, 4). A fundamental theoretical discussion sprung from the question to what extent historians can investigate the way people in the past experienced their bodies. Can historical experiences of the body be reconstructed or is it only possible to approach the representation of the body as a discursive construction? (Ruberg 2020, 2–3). This last view, based on the influential works of Michel Foucault, leads to a ‘strangely disembodied “body history”’, according to medical historian Michael Stolberg (2011, 6). It leaves little room for individual agency and lived experiences of the material body. These first-person experiences can, of course, be found in self-narratives, such as diaries. However, self-narratives are never mere translations of individual experiences into text, but embedded in societal discourses. The complex relationship between subjective experiences and discourses in diaries is shown in several ways in the contributions in this cluster.

In the disciplinary subfield of feminist history, women’s bodies and, perhaps less so, men’s bodies have for quite some time been the explicit focus of attention. One possible (Foucauldian) approach studies these bodies as symbolic or discursive bodies, focusing on the relevance of the body as a signifier to, for instance, nation formation, state power, social discipline, and the welfare state. Another approach examines bodies as sites of lived experience, corporeality, memory, subjectivity, resistance and agency. Referring to the first approach, and in line with Stolberg, historian Kathleen Canning has argued that the symbolic/discursive body has remained ‘immaterial/dematerialised’ (1999, 83). Notwithstanding, it is in particular within the second approach that, in Canning’s view, the body ‘remains a largely unexplicated and undertheorised historical concept’ (81) – ‘often overly concrete, undertheorised or cast too simply in terms of resistance/subjection’ (84). For, as Canning explains in her brief overview of the study of the body ‘in the gradual shift from women’s to gender history’ (82), the body was replaced by gender for fear of being associated to and stigmatised with ‘biological reductionism’/‘essentialism’/‘biologism’ (83). In her view, this would explain ‘in part the apprehension many feminist historians have shown towards a more explicit theoretical or methodological engagement with the body as a historical concept’ (83). According to her, often ‘bodies are not made visible at all’ in historical investigation (86).¹

The body in diary scholarship

This visibility of bodies, requested by historian Canning, is little by little being realised in historical and other research in the field of diary scholarship. When pressed to look for academic studies of the body in diaries one certainly comes across significant, albeit stand-alone case studies from a variety of disciplines. In 1993, the Dutch historian Berteke Waaldijk (1993) published a groundbreaking article in Women’s Studies International Forum, ‘Reading Anne Frank as a Woman’. This had a substantial impact on academic discussions of Frank’s diaries and women’s diaries in general. The Estonian cultural theorist Leena Kurvet-Käosaar published an influential essay in the Spanish journal Feminismo/s that offers a transnational study of the representations of bodies in early diaries by literary writers: ‘Claiming and Disclaiming the Body in the Early Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin and Aino Kallas’ (2004).²

In 2010, the Australian literary critic Sonia Wilson published her noteworthy study Personal Effects: Reading the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff in which she examines the ways in which the Russian artist in her diary engages with the feminine art of self-display (86). In her essay ‘Private Body: What Do Self-Narratives Bring to the History of the Body’? (2015) the German historian and museologist Gudrun Piller presented her insightful analysis of the diary written by the eighteenth-century Johann Rudolf Huber of Basel. Piller takes up this case study to discuss more at length ‘the various uses self-narratives can have for the history of the body’, and she wishes to establish the positioning of a self-narrative-based history of the body in the debate about experience versus discourse history (77). The analysis of Huber’s diary reveals the complex interplay between subjective experience and discourse through the example of masturbation.

In addition to the individual case studies, of which we only mentioned a few here, journals in the interdisciplinary field of life writing have published some, but not many, special issues that examine corporeal matters in diaries. In 2016, the journal Life Writing had a special issue on one aspect of writing about the body, namely illness and disability—thus connecting interdisciplinary academic approaches such as medical humanities, disability studies, and literary studies. The contributions are introduced in an extensive editorial written by the American anglicist G. Thomas Couser, presenting an overview of scholarly work on illness narratives since the 1990s, and effectively defining notions such as illness and disability. He discusses ‘the “work” of autosomatography—not the mere expression of experiences of illness and disability but the active reclaiming of them from medicalisation’ (2016, 7). Despite their individual relevance, in terms of absolute numbers, these special issues represent a surprisingly small contribution given the significance and prevalence of bodily thematics in diaries.

The same holds for book-length studies of life-writing texts, although some of them do contain definite gems: Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (1980), edited by Estelle Jelinek, includes a precious chapter on Anaïs Nin’s diary, which refers to the topic of the body. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (1992), edited by Leigh Gilmore, comprises a close-reading of autobiographical writings by medieval women mystics and their obsession ‘with the body as metaphor, as material, and as the intimate ground of ecstacy, healing, and suffering’ (134). Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (1993), edited by Sidonie Smith, introduces the essays by stating that ‘the autobiographical subject carries a history of the body with her as she negotiates the autobiographical “I”, for autobiographical practice is one of those cultural occasions when the history of the body intersects the deployments of subjectivity’ (22–23). Many of the issues that are discussed in this collection are related to such corporeal topics: the abject, bodily discipline, dress, desire, space, and health.³

Authoritative handbooks and encyclopedias on (auto)biography and life writing have, in the past two decades, shown a somewhat more conspicuous but still scattered attention to issues of the body. In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001) editors Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson include a section on embodiment, which they summarise as follows: ‘the body has always been there in life writing as the source and site of autobiographical utterance, and critical readings can tease out the encoded forms in which it is presented’ (54). They also explain that life writers

negotiate cultural norms determining the proper use of bodies. They engage, contest, and revise laws and norms determining the relationship of bodies to specific sites, behaviors, and destinies, exposing, and sometimes queering, as they do so, the workings of compulsory heterosexuality and […] compulsory heteroimperial masculinity. (54)⁴

The three-volume Handbook of Autobiography – Autofiction (2019) edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf fails to include an individual theoretical entry on the body or embodiment, but does incorporate discussions of embodiment in other entries. One example of that is Mita Banerjee’s ‘Life Writing’, with a section on ‘Writing the Body’ (338). Banerjee states:

Because it understands the body in both a material and a metaphorical sense, life writing research has created points of departure for critical dialogues between the humanities and the life sciences. […] The materiality of human life and its recording through autobiographical narratives holds particular significance for a different yet related field of research: disability studies. (338)

Another example where attention for the body/embodiment is cursory is Margaretta Jolly’s 2001 Encyclopedia of Life Writing : Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, which presents just a few short lemmas on the body and its role in (auto)biography.

Studies that are specifically focused on the diary as a genre also pay fragmented attention to corporeal topics. In Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff’s Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (1996) we find two short discussions on the body: Jeanne Braham’s ‘A Lens of Empathy’ and Cynthia A. Huff’s ‘Textual Boundaries: Space in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Diaries’. Recent publications on the diary include Desirée Henderson’s How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretative Strategies for twenty-first^t-Century Readers (2019) which incorporates brief discussions on the use of diary codes for the topics of sexual experiences, menstrual cycles, birth control, pregnancies and menopause. Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos, in their voluminous collection The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life (2020), include several chapters that (indirectly) discuss the issue of embodiment. For instance, in her contribution ‘The Diary among Other Forms of Life Writing’, Julie Rak (64) refers to the materiality within diary writing, and states: ‘The act of writing a diary itself has the potential of leaving a trace of the body in handwriting, or in the inclusion of sketches in a travel diary […]’. Leena Kurvet-Käosaar in ‘Estonian Women’s Deportation Diaries’ examines the representation of physical as well as mental effects of deportation to Siberia in the early 1940s.

Drawing out the body

In this cluster of articles, we build on the diffuse approaches to the body in the scholarship described above, and seek to introduce an additional perspective by explicitly drawing out the body in a series of case studies. As we examine our selection of diaries, we ask ourselves at every turn: where is the body? This question permits us to unravel the extent to which corporeality is intrinsically enmeshed in the lived experience diary-writers articulate in their autobiographical narratives, and to disentangle the theoretical threads and the common themes that run through the findings.

In our case studies, we cover a range of diary genres, located in different national backgrounds and historical contexts. Meritxell Simon-Martin examines the epistolary travel diary that English artist, feminist and philanthropist Barbara Bodichon (1827–1891) wrote during her honeymoon in the United States and Canada (1857–1858). Her paper teases out the extent to which Bodichon’s bodily encounters with alterity stirred up emotions that resulted in an ambiguous narrative agency: a feminist epistolary self-(re-)fashioning as a British citizen, wife, traveller, artist, and philanthropist that concomitantly reified racial difference. Babs Boter focuses on the different diaries kept by Dutch journalist and world traveller Mary Pos (1904–1987). These include private diaries of the 1930s, written in shorthand and manifesting her sexual desire and liaisons, and typed diaries, written during the late 1930s and Second World War establishing her as a physically active, travelling subject, investing in her social network and career. Leonieke Vermeer examines experiences of self-tracking in five Dutch diaries from the long nineteenth century (1780–1940), written by both men and women, including one of the earliest examples of a ‘journal intime’ written by an adolescent. Vermeer analyses two bodily aspects of these diaries: firstly, masturbation in connection with sleeping habits and, secondly, the menstrual cycle and birth control. Finally, Ernestine Hoegen works with a corpus of six diaries written by Allied Prisoners of War (POWs) during their internment in Japan from 1942 to 1945. These are ‘crisis’ or ‘trauma diaries’, written under life threatening circumstances, what Lejeune (2009) calls ‘partial diaries, devoted to a single phase and organised around a particular area of experience’. As the men struggle for survival, enduring starvation, forced labour and severe illness, their diary writing is increasingly devoted to the sufferings of the body and mind. Hoegen examines the relationship between the corporeal experience and the identity the men carved out for themselves in their diaries.

Given the range of diaries in our selection, and the variety in individual corporeal experiences of the diarists, it was exciting to uncover five main themes, or common threads, binding the case studies together. In this editorial, we will briefly touch on each of the themes by drawing on examples taken from the different articles.

The first common thread is that of gender. This theme is paramount in the articles of Simon-Martin and Boter, who both examine the bodily experiences represented in the diaries of female travel writers. Boter, for example, examines the bodily implications of Mary Pos’ public and private roles: those of being a fiancée and lover, secretary and stenographer, world traveller, public speaker and journalist, and volunteer distributing food on her bicycle during the Second World War. Pos’ diaries show her preoccupation with her body image, and how she practiced ‘the feminine art of self-display’ (Wilson 2010, 86). Simon-Martin also examines the body in a female historical subject: Barbara Bodichon. Her paper focuses on unpacking the extent to which, in her epistolary diary, Bodichon managed to transform the ‘entrapping’ female body into a source of curiosity, pleasure, desire and critical thinking that broke with gendered normativity as well as the implications of this exercise of narrative agency in terms of ‘Other’ female bodies.

But gender also features explicitly in the other two papers, which reject the notion of the diary as a feminine genre. The diary is not a feminine genre, but a feminised genre; a process through which the genre became associated with femininity (Henderson 2019, 54–58). Vermeer finds that both men and women engaged in self-tracking practices in their diaries, but there are gendered differences. For example, masturbation remained outside the scope of most female diaries, probably because this solitary sexual act did not accord with the proper, social role of girls, wives, and mothers. Women, there again, tracked their menstrual cycle, which has been used by feminist scholars as one of the arguments to support the statement that diary writing is a female form of writing. Yet some men also tracked the menstrual cycle of their wives as well as sexual encounters, which can be interpreted in terms of the wish for offspring that made use of new techniques of birth planning and control. Finally, Hoegen’s paper is a case-study of diary-writing in an all-male environment, where ‘masculinist assumptions … the Western privileging of mind over body, the tendency to deny the body’s intervention in intellectual and spiritual life’ (Couser 1991, 68 as quoted in Couser 2016, 4) are completely overridden. In the extreme circumstances of the POW camp where these diaries were written, the state of the body was such that it ‘intervened’ at all levels, and became the very essence of identity, both empirically and on paper.

The second theme that runs through our case studies is that of the act of writing. In the case of the POWs, in Hoegen’s article, the physical writing process was dictated by a lack of writing materials and the secrecy in which the diaries had to be written. This ‘materiality’ (Rak 2020, 63) shaped the emerging diary texts to the extreme, leading to ever smaller handwriting on scraps of paper, drawings, short poems and lists in the back of coveted notebooks, ‘making it both an art and an act’ (Ben-Amos and Ben-Amos 2020, 3). In Simon-Martin’s article, the act of writing is examined in the light of the workings and implications of Bodichon’s exercise of her narrative agency; the way this is stimulated by a series of body-emotions interactions that opposes traditional approaches in western philosophy that eschew body and emotions for (presumably) being inimical to rational autonomy; and how, in the process of exercising her narrative agency, she ends up essentialising ‘Other’ (female) bodies (e.g. enslaved people, free African Americans). Boter examines how for Pos, writing her diary was about creating a site (Schahadat 2019, 550) where she could establish her persona and agency, a space where she could form her subjectivity as well as manifest her resistance and rebellion. Vermeer’s contribution shows that the act of writing also entails the margins of diaries, as these sometimes reveal crucial information on bodily processes in the form of little symbols.

Our third theme, that of discourse, comes to the fore most pronouncedly in the articles of Boter, Simon-Martin and Vermeer. Boter shows that, in her diaries, Pos chronicles her negotiations with the cultural practices and discourses of femininity and religious decency as they were current in the Netherlands in the 1930s. Bodichon, in Simon-Martin’s study, makes sense of her lived embodied experience in critical dialogue with permeating gender-normative discourses and in doing so produces feminist counter-discourses. At the same time, this resulting feminist outlook is concomitantly connivant with the perpetuation of oppressive discourses on racial difference. Vermeer examines the body in diaries from ‘the long nineteenth century’. This period is of crucial importance for the production of ‘ego-documents’ such as autobiographies and diaries, which increased exponentially after 1780. But the significance of this period also lies in the emerging discourses connected to self-tracking, involving ideas on self-monitoring, self-improvement, time management, ‘ableism’, and diaristic writing as a ‘technology of the self’. This discursive context is essential for understanding the experiences of self-tracking represented in the studied diaries.

This brings us to our fourth theme, that of the Other, or alterity. Vermeer’s contribution on self-tracking is about ableism: ‘a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human’. Disability then is cast as ‘a diminished state of being human’ (Campbell 2009, 5). The examples of self-tracking in diaries show the coming into existence of the neoliberal self who is responsible and able to take care of his or her own health and wellbeing. Are the Others – people who are more or less unable to take care of their own health and wellbeing – thereby, excluded? Exclusion of the Other was certainly the case in the diaries of the POWs examined in Hoegen’s paper. In the semi-autonomous environment of the prison camp, the British, American, Dutch and Indo-European prisoners were united by a common enemy – their Japanese captors – but at the same time sought refuge among their own national factions, jostling with the other groups for the best positions in the camp hierarchy.

This process of strengthening one’s own identity through the Other is also discussed by Simon-Martin: for Bodichon, her encounter with North-American alterity prompts a re-definition of her identity as a British citizen, wife, traveller, artist, and philanthropist. Finally, in the process of writing the self, Pos also sets herself off against Others. Her diaries show her anxieties of becoming an unattractive ‘old-maid’, and she continuously compares herself to other women, and to individuals with illnesses and disabilities. Whereas she invests her time in distributing food in the poorer neighbourhoods of The Hague during the Second World War, she also exhibits in her diary an attitude of condescension and superiority. This echoes her attitude towards those she meets during her travels to former Dutch colonies and other countries in and outside of Europe.

Finally, the fifth common thread touches upon the ethics of reading and analysing diaries. In What Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home (2019) Sonja Boon writes about her archival research on her family’s history. She reports of an anonymous letter she once found, written by a young man who had asked his doctor to destroy it because of its erotic contents:

[…] what did it mean that I could still read his words over two centuries later? And what were my ethical responsibilities to this man’s story and to his request for privacy? The man’s words forced me to pause; they were a reminder that I needed to tread lightly, to be as generous with the dead whose voices I encountered in the documents as I am with the voices of those with whom I live in the present. (45)

It is telling that Boon uses physical metaphors (‘tread’; ‘voices’) to indicate her way of dealing with such confidential archival material. Her use of these metaphors indicates that the intimate, archival experience of reading such personal sources is not only a mental one, but also physical.

Like Sonja Boon, we ask ourselves: what does it mean that we can still read the words of diarists centuries later? And what are our ethical responsibilities to these stories? Most of the diaries in this thematic cluster are private and confidential. Some were meant to be read by others; most of the war diaries in Hoegen’s contribution were written with a particular reader in mind (wives, an elder brother, American Army leaders), but this intended audience did not include the (academic) reader of the twenty-first century. Some of the diaries were never meant to be read by others or, in the case of Mary Pos in Boter’s article, were even meant to be burned after her death. In Bodichon’s case, what is extant today is most probably an edited version of her epistolary diary, which she had the intention to publish but, for unknown reasons, failed to. Are we allowed, then, to study her notebooks which were written in shorthand, containing many references to her sexual desires and experiences, intimate relationships, and more confidential issues? How ethical is it to study intimate details in manuscript diaries, on very private matters such as masturbation and menstruation, in the case of Vermeer’s contribution?

Historian Antoon de Baets has argued, from a legal standpoint, that the dead do not have privacy, but they do possess ‘posthumous dignity’ and therefore deserve respect of the living (Baets 2009, 119). This equals, in a more formal sense, Boon’s approach ‘to tread lightly’ and to be ‘generous with the dead’. As diary scholars we are confronted with balancing the diarists’ ‘posthumous dignity’ with our other, academic responsibility: providing scientific knowledge. In her contribution, Vermeer argues that the diaries, including the little symbols in the margins, enable us to gain insight into a subject for which other source material is rare: bodily and sexual experiences in relation to contemporary discourses, such as the discussion on the supposed dangers of masturbation. The diaries show the impact and the development of these discourses, but also the agency of the diarists to object to or even change these discourses. Simon-Martin suggests that reading, analysing and making public Bodichon’s epistolary diary provides a great opportunity to reflect on the workings and implications of (liberal) feminist discourses and praxis vis-à-vis different profiles of women – with specific standpoints, needs and desires. This is so because Bodichon’s case invites readers to problematise their own location, which might be providing cover for privileged speaking positions.

To conclude

The seeds for this cluster were sown at the 2019 IABA conference in Madrid on ‘Knowing the Self: Auto/Biographical Narratives and the History of Knowledge’. During one of the panel sessions, ‘Dear Diary, Dear Body: Personal Reports on Health and Illness in a Transnational Context’, we presented the preliminary findings of our case studies. Finding common ground in our focus on bringing the body to the fore in diary writing, we decided to develop our individual papers into this cluster. We study bodies because they are omnipresent in diaries, even if sometimes silent or in the margins. As Kathleen Canning summarises, subjects ‘are not simply the imposed results of alien, coercive forces; the body is internally lived, experienced and acted upon by the subject and the social collectivity’ (88). In studying the diary writing of such embodied subjects, we have explored the various ways in which our five recurring themes can be employed and understood. As peer researchers and colleagues we have revisited and embroidered the five common threads, and now present the results of this collaboration. We eagerly invite the reader to join us in exploring how the body is experienced in a selection of diaries.

Notes

1 https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/centre-for-life-writing-research.

2 See also Kurvet-Käosaar’s 2006 PhD-dissertation Embodied Subjectivity in the Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Aino Kallas and Anaïs Nin.

3 See, for instance, Domna Stanton, The Female Autograph (1984); Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (1985); Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the fictions of Self-Representation (1987); Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (1988); Shari Benstock, The Private Self: theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (1988); Bella Brozki and Celeste Schenck, Life/Lines: Theorising Women’s Autobiography (1988); Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (1989); Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1990); Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes (1990); Paul John Eakin (1991); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, De/Colonising the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (1992); Margo Culley, American Women’s Autobiography (1992).

4 In their more recent Life Writing in the Long Run Smith and Watson include a (short) section on Space of Embodiment (2016, 291–292).