‘Went into raptures’: reading emotion in the ordinary wartime diary, 1941–1946

Abstract

The last two decades have seen the emergence of an 'emotional turn' within social and cultural history. Groundbreaking studies by William Reddy, Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein, building on the pioneering work of Norbert Elias, Lucien Febvre and others in the early decades of the twentieth century, have inspired a substantial body of work which interrogates the argument that emotions are to some degree shaped by culture. 1 As Susan Matt has recently argued, Febvre was right to suggest that 'the study of emotions would bring new energy to the field', citing as examples recent work on political change and religious life. 2 However, despite the emergence of studies attentive to the difference between discourses about emotion and the experience of emotion within women's history, gay history, men's studies and more, 3 social class has been a neglected category. More specifically, those historical sources which enable engagement with a subject's emotional life have been largely produced by middle-class and elite individuals and groups. 4 It remains notoriously difficult to gain access to the interior lives of 'ordinary' people. 5 Scholarly interest in emotions has been one impetus for a new enthusiasm for diaries as historical sources. Recent work has explored the diary not just as a 'chronicle of the everyday' 6 but as 'a template for personal change, a means of means of the tracking of the self in time.' 7 The diary, in the words of James Hinton, is a 'technology of the self... "the room behind the shop", in which the diarist reflects on and prepares his or her performance, mask, persona', enabling the construction of the self over time. 8 Emotions-their concealment, management and expressionare central to this process. Here again, however, despite the extensive recovery work that has been a feature of feminist scholarship over the last thirty years and which has included the re-evaluation of the sgnificance of the feminine, private and domestic spheres, ordinary diaries have been largely ignored. 9 Literary scholars, concerned to expand the canon to admit previously marginalised women writers, have been keen to identify the literary qualities of some previously neglected diaries. When making selections for inclusion in Revelations: Diaries of Women, for example,

Introduction

“…86 Morris's reflections on her daily life and work provide a 'template' for her professional development. 87 They suggest courageousness in her nursing practice, in which she was not afraid to develop skills outside the normal remit of nursing or to take risks for her combatant patients. Unlike some diaries that offer limited discussion of nursing work because of the lack of desire to relive the working day, or because nursing work was self-evident, Morris's diary is forthright in its descriptions of Army nursing, the war and her place in it.…”