The Alice Williamson Diary :: Diaries Journals Literature Civil War Essays

The Alice Williamson Diary To read the civic War diary of Alice Williamson, a 16 year old girl, is to hoist through the individualised, cultural and political experience of both the author and ones self. Her constitution feels like a bullet ricocheted through war, time, death, literary form, femininity, youth, state, freedom and obligation. This probe attempts to do the same to touch on the many issues that arise in the mind of the reader when becoming part of the schoolbook through the tour of yarn. This paper will lay no definitive claims to the absolute importation of the diary, for it has many possible interpretations, for the journey is the ultimate answer. I seek to screw the fluidity of thought when reading, a fluidity which incorporates individual(prenominal) experience with the essence of Williamsons journal. I read the journal personally- as a woman, a friction match in age to Alice Williamson, a surrogate experiencialist, a writer, an academic and approximate ly of all, a modern reader unaccustomed to the personal experience of war. I read the text within a context- as a researcher versed on the period, genre, aesthetics, and to some degree the writer herself. The molding of the personal and contextual create a rich personalized textual sum . I keep my journal hidden the script, the drawings, the color, the weight of the paper, contents I hope never to be experienced by another. My journal is intensely personal, temporal and exposed. When opening the leather bound formality of Alice Williamsons journal a framework of meaning is presupposed by the readers own feelings concerning the medium. Reading someone elses diary can be, and is for myself, an voyeuristic invasion of space. The act of reading makes the private and personal into public. Yet, for Alice Williamson and many other female journalists of the Civil War period, the journal was creating a public memory of the hardship that would be sustained when read by others. The knowledge of the outside reader reading of your life was as essential as the exercise of recording for ones self creating a sense of bathos connecting people through emotions. (Arnold)The activity of understanding Alice Williamsons diary begins prior to reading the first word. The reader begins to identify part of the reading experience ground upon their feelings on diaries themselves in the moments of suspension between knowledge of type of text and the reading of the first entry.