Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, bodies, family, marriage, motherhood, reproduction, sexuality
Abstract
An upper-class, turn-of-the-century Bostonian, Marian Lawrence Peabody kept a diary for most of her long life (1876-1963). Among many other goings on, she consistently documented the state of her body -- whether her love of vigorous movement, compliments or critiques of her appearance or most significantly, the ever-present vagaries of health and illness. While her youthful ailments were minor, once married she faced physically painful and psychologically devastating infertility as well as what she termed her husband's, impotence. Using her diary as well as her published memoir as a lens through which to understand how upper-class women understood and manipulated information about their health (or lack there-of) within the context of newly emerging ideas about modern female subjectivity, this paper argues that Peabody enacted a sophisticated set of actions and decisions in an effort to both win private battles and control public perception. Traversing an intricate private/public split, Peabody made a range of decisions about what to disclose, when, with whom and in what form: personal diary writings, conversation or published memoir. In turn, drawing on the history of the body, gender, medicine, modernity and textual studies, this paper highlights several complex sets of interpretive dilemmas including issues of privacy and the particular challenges of working with extant life writings.
Keywords
diary, health, impotence, body
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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'How Very Wrong They Are, They Little Know:' Diary-keeping, Private Anguish, Public Bodies and Modern Female Subjectivity
An upper-class, turn-of-the-century Bostonian, Marian Lawrence Peabody kept a diary for most of her long life (1876-1963). Among many other goings on, she consistently documented the state of her body -- whether her love of vigorous movement, compliments or critiques of her appearance or most significantly, the ever-present vagaries of health and illness. While her youthful ailments were minor, once married she faced physically painful and psychologically devastating infertility as well as what she termed her husband's, impotence. Using her diary as well as her published memoir as a lens through which to understand how upper-class women understood and manipulated information about their health (or lack there-of) within the context of newly emerging ideas about modern female subjectivity, this paper argues that Peabody enacted a sophisticated set of actions and decisions in an effort to both win private battles and control public perception. Traversing an intricate private/public split, Peabody made a range of decisions about what to disclose, when, with whom and in what form: personal diary writings, conversation or published memoir. In turn, drawing on the history of the body, gender, medicine, modernity and textual studies, this paper highlights several complex sets of interpretive dilemmas including issues of privacy and the particular challenges of working with extant life writings.