Bloom Private Diaries

Bloom. “Private Diaries as Public Documents.” Shares Blodgett's point of view that “private” signifies not “domestic, but rather personal.” Questions circumscription--that Blodgett considered some diaries less candid because of the lurking audience, usually a husband, as in the case of Percy Shelley, who continued Mary's diary during her time in childbed. (24) “I will argue here that the presence of an audience, whether near or remote, requires accommodation through the same textual features that in all cases transform private diaries into public documents. I also assert that for a professional writer there are no private writings.” (24) Features of truly private diaries: form “bare-bones works written primarily to keep records of receipts and expenditures, the weather” visits and events. (25) Doesn't change much over the course of centuries. Chronological structure. Contextualization: “It lacks sufficient development and detail to make it self-coherent.” (26) Characters, central and subordinate. “In such truly private diaries the diarist does not shape the evidence to reinforce a preconceived and therefore self-controlled authorial persona.” “The subordinate characters who populate these diaries are more faintly limned, readers must search the entries in quest of such fugitive entities . . . “ not “analyzed or described in depth.”(27) Contemporary value: “lack the depth and dimension of biography or autobiography” (27) Features of private as public. Form: “Because diaries as public documents are broader in scope and more fully developed than their truly private counterparts, they admit of far greater variation in form and technique, even within their day-by-day format.” Structure and literary techniques: “diary's natural time line reinforces its overall narrative structure. . . “ (29) Revision and looking forward Contextualization: “coherent, free-standing texts that are more or less self-explanatory if the entries are read in toto.” (30) Characters: “the author creates and presents a central character, herself, as seen through a central consciousness, also herself.” (31) Textual transformations. Revision changes form & genre “to make sense of one's life for an external audience.” (32-33) Contemporary value: “transcend the realm of the family legacies and historical records where truly private diaries live “(35) Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein (Toklas), Anne Frank, Martha Ballard, Mary Chesnut, Agnes Newton Keith, Margaret Sams, Natalie Crouter