Meg Jensen

The Writer's Diary as Borderland: The Public and Private Selves of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott

‘It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here; and Mrs D and shall invent my next book here …’ So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1924. In this essay I extend Woolfs idea of a writers journal as a practice ground to that of a borderland mediating the public and private identities of the three women whose diaries I examine here: Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott. In the major fictions of all three writers, moreover, we encounter multiple images of both mirrors and windows, open and closed. Emily Dalgarno has argued that for Woolf, this motif is linked to a childhood trauma that Woolf recounted in ‘A Sketch of the Past’. In ‘Sketch’, Woolf writes of the ‘small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House’ and the ‘looking glass-shame’ she continued to feel as an adult, and connects this shame to being molested as a ‘very small’ child by her much older stepbrother in front of that hallway mirror. Dalgarno posits that this event constitutes the primal source for mirror tropes in Woolfs fiction. In this essay, I suggest that by exploring the diaries that all three writers kept throughout their lives, we may likewise find a context for understanding their repetitive use of these key images of self-perception, subjectivity and familial identity. The diaries of Woolf, Mansfield and Alcott, I argue, functioned both as the mirrors that reflected, and the windows that framed, or offered escape from, the split-voiced selves of the writers that composed them, and thus offer readers a unique glimpse of creativity in action.

How Art Constitutes the Human: Aesthetics, Empathy and the Interesting in Autofiction

James Dawes asks ‘How does art constitute the human, and what implications does this have for human rights?’ Examining works by Rachel Cusk, Louise Erdrich, Vladimir Nabokov and Elfriede Jelinek among others, Jensen argues that the unique genre tensions of autofiction provide a space for responding to Dawes’s question, detailing the rhetorical strategies enabling such works to generate empathy. Drawing upon Sianne Ngai’s definition of the ‘interesting’ as both an aesthetic evaluation and an emotional one, Jensen shows how the hybridity of autofictions challenge both dominant societal narratives and traditional artistic conventions, giving voice to a distinctive kind of interrogative aesthetic subject. In a world challenged by so-called ‘compassion fatigue’, Jensen claims, the intersubjectivity of autofiction generates the intimacy that enables empathetic and rights-advancing humanity.

Surviving the Wreck: Post-traumatic Writers, Bodies in Transition and the Point of Autobiographical Fiction

ABSTRACT In autobiographical fiction, the repetition of specific ‘unprocessed’ tropes wherein contextual meaning remains unclear can be likened to the symptomatic ‘flashbacks’ endured by victims of trauma. Virginia Woolfs compulsive use of images of sea, mirrors, and unspoken shame, Jack Kerouacs brothers and angels, J. G. Ballards empty swimming pools, Melvilles tropes of Narcissus and madness and my own return to images of blood and wounding in my work, are part of each writers attempt to construct a new post-trauma narrative identity. Writing fiction enabled these writers to shake off the fixed subject position dictated by their pasts and construct new and more multifaceted identity narratives as survivor-writers. As Maggie Schauers work demonstrates, through narrativisation a new ‘sense of perceived identity may emerge: ‘who I am now’ and ‘who I was’ when trauma struck. These narratives comprise the past as a story written post-traumatically, and a new identity (as a survivor/writer) they have narrated for themselves. Autobiographical fiction, therefore, may be central to understanding the function of self-narrative in the construction of post-trauma identities. This essay considers what such texts can tell us about trauma and the body, trauma narratives and autobiographical fictions, and writing and post-traumatic identity.