Reading Journal - Session 3 - 8/11/2016
Sharon Cadman Seelig - Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature, Reading Women’s Lives, 1600-1680
·
women
often preferred to write, not about their own life, but about someone else’s,
mostly their husband’s, and to define their own place in his life
·
many
different reasons for diary keeping:
o
self-preservation
o
record
daily events
o
present
a record of the world
o
justify
oneself
o
place
oneself in the midst of the past and present events and persons
o
place
oneself in a more favorable or dominant or more subordinate role than the one
perhaps occupied
o
to
find or create a pattern, a meaning in life itself
o
to
go beyond the details of life to the trajectory of fiction
·
here
concerned with autobiographical impulse to represent oneself that takes the
form of diary, memoir, autobiography, fantasy
·
similarities
btw the six different women writers examined in this book:
o
construct
the self in written form
o
present
particular images or conceptions of the self, in isolation as well as in
connection with others, intended to share or kept to oneself
o
brief
notation as well as extended narration
o
from
factual and documentary to more fully elaborated and persuasive accounts
o
at
once a discovery, creation and imitation of the self
·
often
questioned how much male and female diaries differ and if this can be
attributed to different places in society
·
autobiography
dependent on conscious self-awareness, in 17th century autobiographer
often claims individual significance by virtue of some specific quality or
accomplishment, or witness to the affairs of the great (Georges Gusdorf)
·
due
to heavy focus and analysis of male diaries, they are the norm, while females
are the exception or aberration
·
men’s
diaries often more unified and linear, while women’s are often fragmented,
irregular and not chronological (maybe reflecting different experiences in life
due to gender differences?)
·
literary
excellency should not be expected of works that were not intended for
publication, but interest in the topic itself should be important, even though
it is impossible to ignore literary expectations, but maybe not assign them the
most value in consideration
·
conversion
narrative: account of one’s spiritual existence that assumes a particular
direction, a plot in which prior experience is seen as the prelude to new
insight and a new way of life (popular in mid-17th-century
·
different
mixtures of literary genres can be found (romance, drama...)
·
Puritan
Lady Margaret Hoby (1599-1605)
o
records
of her spiritual observances
o
independence
and interdependence
·
Lady
Ann Clifford (1603-1676)
o
daily
events in brief notes rather than narrative form, but strong sense of inner
life
o
juxtaposition
btw early and late writing, dramatic entries to describe the pressure to give
up her inheritance and narrative summaries after she takes control of her
possessions
o
attempts
to control textual and material circumstances, writing such a constant part of
her experience, that it shapes our understanding as well as her life itself
·
next
four: more fully developed narratives, longer, more coherent, focused,
endentious
·
royalist
Anne Murry Halkett (1676-78)
o
combines
rage of narrative material and conceptions: from familial and religious to the
romantic and dramatic, she strongly asserts integrity of her actions
·
royalist
Ann Harrison Fanshawe (1676-1678)
·
Lucy
Hutchinson (1674)
o
autobiographical
fragment
o
account
of the life of her husband
o
places
herself in a larger context that justifies her narrative and lends its weight
·
Margaret
Cavendish, True Relation of My Birth,
Breeding and Life (166), The Blazing
World (1666, science fiction fantasy)
o
places
herself in the context or marital and familial relations as well as watching
the world
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