Sexual Longing in Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s American Victorian Diary

Sexual Longing in Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s American Victorian Diary MICHAEL FELLMAN As a genre, diaries are now past their fashion. Literate, but essentially unconscious self-revelation, the hallmark of the diary form, is unlikely in our culture, where we are all psychologically aware at least to the degree that we know every utterance means something, some repression betrayed. In the nineteenth century ladies would faint and would have protracted illnesses of an unspecific nature, and men would openly declare their love for one another. More inwardly sexual fantasies could exist for themselves and be written about unanalytically in the common language of the day. At the same time, rigorous convention demanded that literature for publication preclude all but the most allusive treatment of sexual fantasies. In partial response to this conventional split between the private and the public, many literate people kept diaries as links between the most personal fantasy, and formal literary efforts. Though there was always some sense of audience in diary keeping, it clearly was not a psychoanalyst to whom one was writing. As privately controlled realms, diaries may have maintained, rather than challenged or reoriented tensions between inward desires and outward demands, may have aided people in continuing to live under repressive social conventions by positively reinforcing a compensatory shadow world of day dreams and night dreams. Perhaps this meaning of nineteenth-century diaries can be clarified by reference to a French diary of the early 1930s, that of Anais Nin. Nin felt guilty about what she thought to be the self-indulgence of diary writing, which she believed was almost purely fantasy writing, as opposed to the more social and therefore more disciplined and realistic writing act of the novel. This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream, and indulge in refractions and defractions. I can turn away from reality into the reflections and dreams it projects, and this driving, impelling fever which keeps me tense and wideawake during the day is dissolved in improvisations, in contemplations. I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations the transfigurations which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost.1 THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. III, NO. 2 1 FALL 1.972 This guilt-ridden awareness of living life best in dream-like reliving, this realization of the distance between act and thought, marks the deathknell of the diary form. We have come to disbelieve in the pleasures of this distance; to believe instead in something called the present. Whatever the present may be, a diary is clearly antithetical to it. Otto Rank, Nin's analyst, instructed her to give up her diary, which he saw as a hoarding place into which she retreated from a direct confrontation with life,and with analysis. "The diary is your last defence against analysis," he warned her. "It is like a traffic island you want to stand on. If I am going to help you, I do not want you to have a traffic island from which you will survey the analysis, keep control of it. I do not want you to analyze the analysis. Do you understand?" 2 In those psychologically innocent days before Freud and his students, no external authority could intercede so incisively between an individual and his diary. However an internalized sense of social demands and the proper performance of one's role did serve to edit the musings entered in a diary. In some American Victorian diaries these limits were as implicitly formalized and maintained as any paternal authority might have explicitly demanded. In one obsessively self-censored diary, that of Horace Mann (1796-1859), the writer went so far as to exclude from his diary all reference to his forthcoming re-marriage until the very day of his wedding. The acknowledgment of the event was also the last entry in the diary. Mary Peabody "had long since won my admiration and love. Circumstances have hitherto rendered it improper that I should avow my...