"Somewhere Along the Line I Lost Myself": Recreating Self in the War Diaries of Natalie Crouter and Elizabeth Vaughan

In October 1943, Natalie Crouter, a U.S. civilian citizen interned in a prison camp in the Philippines by the Japanese army, noted in her diary, "Yesterday I remembered Mao Tse Tung saying, 'Somewhere along the line I lost myself,' and I know now what he means" (226). Crouter's quotation of Mao Tse Tung raises several issues of interest to the study of the diary and to the constructions of self that diarists perform. How are these constructions affected by a crisis, such as war and internment? The idea that Mao has lost his self highlights the instability of self, particularly in times of social upheaval. Mao's new self emerges in response to the new situation, for which his old self is no longer suited. In an internment camp behind enemy lines, Crouter's identification with Mao marks her movement into her new wartime subjectivity. In the context of Mao's lost self, I will look at the war diaries of two women, Natalie Crouter and Elizabeth Vaughan, and examine how this genre enables their creation of new narratives of self and new subjectivities that are, by necessity, provisional.

Crouter's and Vaughan's diaries also raise questions about the social functions of diaries and about their generic and individual purposes. I will explore what the diary does in such an extraordinary situation and what social actions it performs for writers in totally alien circumstances. I suggest that diaries can become a site for the construction of the communities through which we project identity. In the situation of internment, these diaries both stand in for absent communities and create new ones. Using Roz Ivanic's and John Swales's theories of community identification and identity, I will look at these women's diaries and the role that diaries play in constructing communities and identities.

Natalie Crouter and Elizabeth Vaughan were both American civilians living with their husbands and children in the Philippines during the Second World War. Like many Americans in the South Pacific at that time, they took advantage of the high wages available compared to the relatively low cost of living and enjoyed lifestyles much more luxurious than they could afford in the United States. But this privileged life ended with the Japanese invasion in December 1941 and the subsequent internment of citizens from the Allied nations. Natalie Crouter and her family were interned in a five-hundred-member camp in the mountains of Baguio. Elizabeth Vaughan, whose husband enlisted in the U.S. army and died in the notorious Cabanatuan prison, spent the majority of the war with her children in the Santo Tomas site, along with five thousand other internees.

Because these internees were civilians, they were better treated by the Japanese and lived in conditions far more humane than those in military prisoner of war camps. Though food supplies were meager, prisoners did have enough to subsist on, and until 1944 they were able to receive additional food packages from friends and former servants outside the camp. However, when this privilege was suspended and Allied attacks intensified, prisoners (and in some cases, their captors) came to the brink of starvation. Living quarters were tiny, with no more than seven square feet per prisoner, and were segregated by sex. Radios and newspapers were banned, and no mail was sent out or received for over three years. Despite constant hunger, discomfort, isolation, and fear of the unknown, the internees tried to make the camps livable and to retain some vestiges of their pre-war lives. They started schools for children and adults and put on camp-wide activities such as plays, quiz nights, and lectures; in Baguio, the Japanese soldiers attended and even performed in some of these events. The prison camps, then, did become communities for the internees, though none had chosen...