CLAIMING AND DISCLAIMING THE BODY IN THE EARLY DIARIES OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, ANAÏS NIN AND AINO KALLAS LEENA KURVET-KÄOSAAR University of Tartu (Estonia) Autobiographical practices, as realized and conceptualized in the 20th century have, to a great extent, ignored the issues pertaining to the body. Shirley Neumann sees as one of the main reasons for this «the Platonic tradition that opposes the spiritual to the corporeal, and then identifies ‘self’ with the spiritual»1. In later considerations of autobiography that have been influenced by the postmodernist paradigm, the rationalist ‘self’ is replaced by the notion of the subject that views linguistic constructions of the self, or, in other words, textual markers of the subject as part of historic, social and cultural factors. According to Sidonie Smith, «subjectivity is not an out-of-body experience»2; rather it can be viewed as «the elaborate residue of the border politics of the body since bodies locate us topographically, temporally, socio-culturally as well as linguistically in a series of transcodings along multiple axes of meanings»3. By declaring that «the body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit»4, Adrienne Rich voices an experience familiar to women belonging to various cultures, classes, ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds. The Cartesian mind/body split placing women on the latter side of the divide has historically resulted in a textual neutralization or writing off the body in women’s autobiographical texts. Several feminist autobiography scholars have argued that despite its problematic nature, the body is not 1. NEUMAN, Shirley: «’An appearance walking in a forest the sexes burn’: Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body», in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (eds.): Autobiography & Postmodernism, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, p. 293. 2. SMITH, Sidonie: «Identity’s Body», in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (eds.), Autobiography & Postmodernism, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, p. 266. 3. SMITH, Sidonie: Op. cit., p. 267. 4. RICH, Adrienne: Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York, W.W. Norton, 1976, p. 40. Feminismo/s, 4, diciembre 2004, pp. 69-84 69 Leena Kurvet-Käosaar entirely absent from women’s autobiographical writings. As Smith further argues, «the women autobiographer always remained self-consciously in her body even as she erased the body from her text»5. The word ‘erasure’ here does not denote a mere absence but rather a presence that has been removed, or even more importantly, a presence that is continuously in the process of coming into being and being removed. Even with no visible readable presence, «(in autobiography) the body of the text, the body of the narrator, the body of the narrated I, the cultural body and the body politic must all merge in skins and skeins of meaning»6. Keeping a diary, especially for women, has been a practice of considerable continuity in the Western Culture. In an insightful attempt to conceptualize the diary, Felicity Nussbaum claims; «it is possible that women began the idea of private and later public, articulation of quotidian experience»7. The diary, looked upon as a textual practice both formally and thematically corresponding to women’s pattern of life and way of thinking, has frequently been considered to be the ‘feminine mode of writing’ by feminist critics of autobiography8. While an exposure of the ways in which diaristic writings have been feminized and rejected in the classical theoretical and critical works on autobiography, it can certainly be considered a noteworthy contribution to autobiography criticism, the construction of the textual space of the diary as a safe secluded haven for the female pen runs, at some point, the risk of furthering the feminization and marginalization of the diary rather than expanding the autobiographical canon. An understanding of the diary format as a mode of writing that has been accessible and gratifying for women across centuries9, however, makes it possible to view women’s diaries as important sources providing access to the representation of the development of female subjectivity. In many cases, women’s diaries start with adolescence or girlhood. A renowned French scholar of autobiography, Philippe Lejeune, who has studied the diaries of French girls from the 17th century onwards, sees as the most difficult task in reading young girls diaries «in learning how to decipher the code or thematic framework within which the diary articulates itself»10. Lejeune mentions as one of the characteristic features of girlhood diaries the high degree of self-censorship,11 everything pertaining to the body falling into the category 5. SMITH, Sidonie: Op. cit., p. 272. 6. Ibid., p. 267. 7. NUSSBAUM, Felicity: «Toward Conceptualizing the Diary», in James Olney (ed.): Studies in Autobiography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 134. 8. See, for example, MOFFAT, Mary Jane, and PAINTER, Charlotte: Revelations: Diaries of Women, New York, Vintage, 1974, p. 5. HOGAN, Rebecca: «Diarists on Diaries», a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2.2 (1986), p. 100. 9. BLODGETT, Harriet: Centuries of Female Days. Englishwomen’s Private Diaries, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1988, p. 5. 10. LEJEUNE, Philippe: «The ‘Journal de Jeune Fille’ in Nineteenth-Century France», in Bunkers, Suzanne L. and Cynthia A. Huff, Inscribing the Daily. Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, p. 111. 11. LEJEUNE, Philippe: Op. cit., p. 111. 70 Claiming and Disclaiming the Body in the Early Diaries of Virginia Woolf.... of topics to be left out of the diary. «A girl could keep a diary», claims Lejeune, «without any interruption, between the ages of eight and seventeen, without mentioning at all any transformations brought about by puberty»12. The diaries of girlhood, adolescence and young womanhood offer extremely valuable insights into the textual negotiational practices through which women have attempted to locate themselves in their surroundings and contexts as well as their bodies. Nussbaum identifies the need for keeping a diary with the point when «the subject begins to believe that it cannot be intelligible to itself without written representation and articulation»13. Considering both the intellectual and ideological ways of male-dominated Western culture that submits women to multiple objectifying practices from quite an early age, it is not difficult to see why a written articulation and representation of experience has been of such crucial value for young women across various cultural contexts and time frames. According to Bunkers and Huff, «women’s daily experience» that has been articulated in the diary, «has been denigrated by mainstream Western epistemology in favor of universality is commonly related to the bodily and separated from the universality [of the mind in favor of the latter]»14. The binary opposition of mind and body, although commonly associated with Descartes, can be traced back to Plato, who views the body as a «tomb, or as a grave or a prison for the soul»15. Claiming that women live more through their bodies than men, Plato views the body as an enormous obstacle in seeing beauty, achieving knowledge and the highest forms of love16. Women’s lives are seen as more related to the body than those of men and the diary has been viewed as a textual practice that, more than any other autobiographical discourse, as if bears trace of the operation of binary thought. On the one hand, the diary is positioned in the canon of autobiography as a textual practice pertaining more to the body (characterized by qualities such as immanence, the daily, and being of local relevance) than to the mind (characterized by qualities such as universality and transcendence). On the other hand, as a rather loosely conceptualized and flexible genre the diary offers more varied and richer possibilities for writing the body. Diaries can be also viewed as having a positive relation to the body, as offering a home to the textual & textured body of the author’s subjectivity. When keeping a diary, she calls into being a text that continually expands in time and space, the author 12. Ibid., p. 111. 13. NUSSBAUM, Felicity: Op. cit., p. 132. 14. BUNKERS, Suzanne and HUFF, Cynthia: «Issues in Studying Women’s Diaries: A Theoretical and Critical Introduction», in Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff (eds.): Inscribing the Daily; Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, p. 5. 15. SPELMAN, Elizabeth V.: «Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views», Feminist Studies, 8-1 (spring 1982), p. 136. 16. SPELMAN, Elizabeth V.: Op. cit., pp. 36, 37. 71 Leena Kurvet-Käosaar gradually claims a textual body, she possesses a text and is simultaneously contained by it. As the diary is «experienced as writing without an end» 17, it lacks a pressure for closure, the need to declare itself finished, it acquires over time a more intimate and more immediate, or one may say more bodily, relation with its author. This is a feature that is characteristic of all diary texts that cover long periods of their authors’ lives. It is clear for the reader that the diary is for its author a familiar and reliable writing situation or context, to which she is related via the dynamic patterns of previous entries. This, however, does not imply an obligation of the author to continue reproducing the style, length, mode and referential framework of previous entries. On the contrary, the familiarity of the context can be traced in the freedom of the author to vary and modify format and structure of the diary according to his/her needs. Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin and Aino Kallas kept a diary more or less regularly for long periods of their lives.