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

The Alice Williamson Diary To read the Civil War diary of Alice Williamson, a 16 year old girl, is to meander finished the personal, cultural and political experience of both the author and ones self. Her writing feels like a bullet ricocheted through war, time, death, literary form, femininity, youth, state, freedom and obligation. This investigation attempts to do the same(p) to touch on the many issues that arise in the mind of the reader when becoming part of the text through the act of indication. This paper will recumb no definitive claims to the absolute nub of the diary, for it has many possible interpretations, for the journey is the ultimate answer. I seek to acknowledge the fluidity of thought when reading, a fluidity which incorporates personal experience with the content of Williamsons journal. I read the journal personally- as a woman, a peer in age to Alice Williamson, a surrogate experiencialist, a writer, an academic and most 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 meaning . 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, blase 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 voyeuristical 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 harm that would be sustained when read by others. The knowledge of the outside reader reading of your l ife was as important as the exercise of recording for ones self creating a sense of sentimentality 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 based upon their feelings on diaries themselves in the moments of suspension between knowledge of type of text and the reading of the first entry.