| Women's literature has painted a universe of female protagonists in seclusion. Some, following Woolf's example, are in search of autonomy; others are held captive by their own men, dispossessed of agency, deprived of basic civil rights. Feminist diary fiction conjures up the image of women sitting behind desks, often near a window and/or a mirror. In the privacy of their own rooms, whose walls secretly shelter them from the intrusive male gaze, the female protagonists of these literary works seek to capture, in their journals, their own perception of reality. The mirror and the window are there to remind them that, in their writings, two different discourses will be interwoven. Mirrors of their souls, their diaries will bear witness to their internal struggles while reflecting, at the same time, (on) the external world, whose socio-political turmoil will be observed, however, from afar. Constantly excluded from History, women have been forced to act as mere spectators to events which have nevertheless shaped their subjugated condition: the window thus remains their assigned place, and it is a window which often contains prison bars, if only at a a symbolic level.; The ideal coexistence of the internal and external world, that of the emotions and that of politics, lies at the core of most feminist fictional diaries, and my analysis of works by Alba de Cespedes, Dacia Maraini, Susanna Tamaro, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Simone de Beauvoir is aimed at exploring its multifaceted, yet constant presence. Such a task will be carried out through the analysis of significant textual passages which most clearly reveal a struggle, occurring on one hand within the psyche of the diarist herself, and on the other, between the woman diarist and the phallogocentric society that resists her access to the written word. |
