| Scope and method of study. This study explores the connection between periodic life writing and the formation of ethnic identity. After surveying key contributions to the critical discussion of women's autobiography, I focused on twenty-one published diaries written by Confederate women. I looked for widespread patterns, and then balanced my overviews with in-depth attention to individual texts. In order to establish the diaries' contemporaneous textual milieu, I examined Confederate sermons and religious tracts, Union and Confederate newspaper accounts, and popular literature.;Findings and conclusions. This study argues that the practice of keeping a diary enabled Confederate women to actively maintain and build power structures which privileged “white” Southerners. Diarists encode their attitudes toward individual slaves and institutionalized slavery through refusing to acknowledge similarities between their own emotions and those of their slaves, through the grammatical elision of the slave presence from their texts, and through the appropriation of the rhetoric of slavery. Examination of diarists' changing attitudes toward Union soldiers indicates that the diarists' reassessment of their own national identity involves envisioning the war as an aggressive act perpetrated by an ethnically distinct, male enemy. By grammatically linking themselves with the battlefield, by recording biting verbal exchanges with Union soldiers, and by figuring their diaries as weapons, diarists employ writing to help form ethnic barriers. Diarists both incorporate and reshape the ethnic biases found in contemporaneous sermons, periodicals, and popular literature, while using their texts to document a particular version of Confederate history where Southern slaveholding women are powerful and literate. Each of these patterns pervades the set of primary texts. Understanding that these diaries represent constructed experience rather than the diarists' unfiltered consciousness requires critical examination of ethnic biases embedded in the diarists' editorial choices, and recognition that ethnic biases of the diaries' editors result from separate, though analogous, creative activity. |
