Cynthia Huff

Chronicles of confinement: Reactions to childbirth in British women's diaries

Abstract This article points out that because we have failed to find material in traditional sources about the personal and emotional dimensions of childbirth in nineteenth-century Britain, the fictional mythos of woman as devil or angel has persisted. But the personal accounts in manuscript diaries housed throughout Great Britain undermine this simplistic distortion. Victorian women utilized their diaries to record the details of pregnancy and childbirth, practices which helped establish and maintain bonding among women. They also kept their diaries as a future reference for details of parturition and disease and employed their writings to mold their role in the network of nursing women. Composing a diary also helped women cope with idleness, and consequently the examination of manuscript diaries allows us to reassess womens social contributions and their reactions to the central ritual of motherhood, childbirth, and to reconsider our conception of womens role in the last century.

Towards a Geography of Women's Life Writing and Imagined Communities: An Introductory Essay

Over the course of working on this project the contributors and I have come, quite naturally, to think of this special issue as an imagined community of ideas. As will be clear from the topics and issues the articles present, our imagined community is far-reaching indeed and one that involves crossing borders of geography, time, and thought. Not only do the articles collected here historically span the Middle Ages to the present, they also stimulate our thinking about a wide range of theoretical and cultural issues, since the contributors’ respective stances cover the spectrum of available critical approaches. The focus of the imagined community brought into being within these pages may be women’s life writing, but this community has proven to be even more eclectic, diverse, and capable of pushing the envelope than I had ever thought possible. With this in mind, I encourage our readers to join our imagined community through hearing the voices articulated here, but to do so

After Auto, after Bio: Posthumanism and Life Writing

Critical posthumanism, as distinguished from popular posthumanism (see Simon), troubles virtually every tenet of autobiographical practice and criticism—the autonomous self, the pact between author and reader, the foregrounding of the human—in favor of focusing on the relational, the material, and the umwelt to suggest a radical reconceptionalizing and reconstruction of life narrative, much less life writing. Life and narrative beg reconsideration in a critical posthumanist configuration. Lauding human life has been central to biography and autobiography since their inception, but posthumanism destabilizes human centrality in favor of considering matter, the non-human, and the surround in which beings interact. Likewise, in a posthumanist imaginary, writing would be decentered and destabilized as a technology controlled by humans to gain mastery in favor of a more expansive concept of narrative relating. That concept would deprivilege sight—the sense with which humans most identify and the one they most use—and qualitative cognition by equally favoring touch, taste, smell, and hearing as well as quantitative thinking, all ways of knowing the world that are just as or more important for non-human animal and mechanical relationality. For writers and theorists of life narrative, the challenges involve realizing that transhuman is not posthuman, for critical posthumanism does not envision a world where humans transcend their environment to float free, unmoored from earth; rather, critical posthumanism is firmly located in the material, whether that materiality involves human-animal interaction, human-machine interaction, or most likely both, given our increasingly interactive and interdependent world. That interactivity and interdependency presage a new kind of narrative and a new terminology to critique that new narrative while simultaneously honing a posthumanist lens to consider the representational shortcomings of popular posthumanist life narrative. A prime example of the last is the animalography, in which the human author ventriloquizes the animal’s voice allegedly to tell his story. This common practice in the memoir boom of stories about heroic companion animals achieving bestseller status concerns ethical questions that have long troubled life-writing theorists, namely who has the right to tell a story. Life-writing

Scripting the Materimperium: The Queen's Highland Journals, Colonial Women's Diaries, and the Victorian Imagined Community

This article argues that womens diaries participated in the construction of shared subjectivities and the imagined Victorian community. I posit that any discussion of imagined communities must include an examination of gender, sexual, ethnic, and class values as well as race, and a broad range of media conveying those shared values. The Queens Highland Journals were edited explicitly to promote equanimity among the classes, to establish sympathy and moral judgement as the primary female subjectivity, and to narrate a vision of the British Empire as a diverse but harmonious family. Comparing Victorias diaries with the manuscript journals of three expatriate middle-class Victorian women reveals similar disjunctions. All the diarists inscribe maternal roles, the assimilation of the foreign, and the memorialization of male icons, but the Queens text reflects her ideological mission, while the manuscript diaries inscribe the imperatives of quotidian life.