Diaries

The diary is a literary genre that reports and chronicles the experiences and events of a particular day in the life of one individual. The account is usually written in the form of a first-person narrative and provides subjective reflections covering a wide range of topics. The diary, which can be distinguished from the genre of autobiography, usually refers to a given period in the diarist's life. The account can be highly subjective and is often written in direct response to events that highlight some of the conflicts of living public and private lives. In relation to gender and society, the diary is an important genre, and although men have been central to its construction and history, women have been significant contributors in the shaping and evolution of diary writing.

It is useful to situate the diary genre in relation to notions of history, on the one hand, and literary form, on the other. If official, dominant versions of social and economic history have traditionally been written by men, then diaries, as unofficial histories, provide a way of interpreting the past in terms of femininity as well as a dialogic perspective built around, and in response to, gender construction. If official history serves as a grand narrative, often written from a male viewpoint, then the diary functions as a micro narrative, emphasizing its complementary status as a form in which women have been able to situate their sense of subjectivity. Genealogies of the kind represented by the diary constitute a version of the past written from the point of view of the marginal other, particularly women, gay men, and people of color. Illustrations of this genealogical response begin with those written by Japanese women. More recently, women's diary writing reflects the diverse situations in which women have found themselves in the last 150 years. Diaries written by figures such as Marie Bashkirtseff, Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, Alice Walker, and Virginia Woolf highlight ways in which the diary form can be manipulated according to social and cultural context.

The important links between diaries and gender can be traced back to those written by Japanese women in the 10th century. The diaries recount everyday changes in women's relations with each other as well as with men. Additionally, these diaries document the transitions, anxieties, and desires of women whose accounts might otherwise have been ignored by the wider society and its official history. These insights into the history of Japanese culture might otherwise have gone unnoticed had it not been for the memoirs that the diaries contain. More contemporary examples illustrate women's relationships to struggles faced in the public sphere. From age 13, for example, the journal written by Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, / Am the Most Interesting Book of All, chronicled the personal struggles faced by women, and women painters in particular, in pre-revolutionary Russia. In contrast, The Diary of Virginia Woolf allows later readers to understand something of the dimensions of Woolf's psychological pain, which is partly constructed around the cultural requirement to perform gender identity in one way rather than not another.

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