Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (review)
- Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
At the end of chapter 15 of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Gilbert Markham, “panting with eagerness,” rushes upstairs to devour the manuscript journal lent him by a trembling and blushing Helen Huntingdon. This is perhaps the most vivid example of diary consumption within a larger narrative, a favourite device of nineteenth-century novelists. Though much criticised by reviewers as an awkward way of telling a story, it persists until the end of the century, accompanied by all the familiar excuses about the need to tell all to the one secret friend, the journal. Clumsy and [End Page 680] clunky as it was, Victorian novelists, as this study demonstrates, endlessly exploited the fictional journal’s possibilities, especially its crucial positioning between the private and public, the manuscript and the printed form. As Catherine Delafield argues, a diary is essentially a self-dramatization, of dubious authority, performed to strangers, which—for a nineteenth-century woman—is also a transgressive act needing to be edited, policed, positioned, and censored. A diary may give the illusion of freedom, veracity, and intimacy, and its origins may lie in the ladylike superintendence of a household, but its trustworthiness is always questionable: hence its rich potential for sensation novelists especially, but also for readers with an appetite for domestic detail buoyed up in a medium of continuous, low-grade suspense.
According to Delafield, the key moment in the evolution of the fictional narrative diary was the publication of Fanny Burney’s journals from 1842 to 1846, edited by her niece. Addressed to “Nobody” in an artificial quasi-fictional framework, Burney’s journals hearken back to the days of Samuel Richardson, while prefiguring the style of many Victorian novels. Delafield’s approach differs from those of earlier commentators on fictional diaries in that she sees the Burney journals as a significant force in the development of the fictional diary; the editorial framework, the limited retrospection of the journal entry, and the diarist’s role as self-appointed documenter of events happening in a household were all influential. Having discussed a number of real-life diaries published after Burney’s, Delafield then focuses on key fictional examples, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Armadale (1866), and Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Life for a Life (1859), which are revisited through the book in different contexts, including the epistolary form, the serial narrative, and sensation fiction. Assumed throughout is the anomalous nature of the private female diary as a public display, “the ideological clash between the feminine form and a public document” (174): often, as it happens, the writing of a socially superior woman edited by an awkwardly placed and gawky young man (such as Gilbert Markham or Walter Hartright), very much her inferior both in terms of worldly knowledge and experience.
There is much here to stimulate fresh readings of these novels. One strength of the book is its epigrammatic observations, such as the suggestion that the “role of the fictional female diarist both echoes and subverts that of her non-fictional counter-part” (48), or that the fictional diary “only comes into existence as a means of telling a story that cannot otherwise be spoken” (56). As it is, these diarists lack the language to describe the abuse they suffer, which means that this most intimate of forms frustrates the reader at the very moment when salacious detail is most demanded. The structure of Delafield’s argument, however, while it highlights the parallels between the chosen texts, encourages repetition; the argument is reiterated too often, as are the regular reminders about the influence of Burney’s diaries. Then, rich as they are, the focal texts began to pall when repeatedly worked to provide further variations on the central argument. Though new texts are introduced at intervals, the old favourites keep returning, in support of a case that has been more than proven.
While the subject...
