“Faithful friend”: Nineteenth-century Midwestern American women's unpublished diaries

Abstract

My purpose in this article is to explore theoretical and methodological questions in regard to the study of nineteenth-century Midwestern American women's unpublished diaries. Such questions include the following: Why did these women write diaries? How can present-day readers benefit from studying them? What is the nature of the interaction among writer, reader, and text? In what ways is the reader constructing the life of the diarist whose texts she studies? What are the reader's ethical responsibilities: both to the diarists and to the present-day readers who will learn about the diaries and their writers based on the reader's interpretation? My article is based on my study, over the past four years, of scores of unpublished diary manuscripts housed in state, county, and local historical society archives in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. My objective in studying these manuscripts has been to examine the ways in which these writings documented the experiences of and functioned as forms of autobiography for their writers, who were not well-known writers nor significant historical figures but ordinary women whose daily lives passed unnoticed and whose diaries now stand, for the most part, as the only extant records of their lives.