We need to support each other in rejecting the limitations of a tradition--a manner of reading, of speaking, of writing, of criticizing--which was never really designed to include us at all. --Adrienne Rich, "Toward a More Feminist Criticism" In the process of working on women writers, I had changed my critical persona, style, function, and stance from "masculine" to "feminine." I had exchanged the authoritative for the tentative, the impositional for the instrumental, and the antagonist for the lover. --Judith Fetterley, Introduction, Provisions In Susan Glaspell's 1916 classic of insight and misprision, Trifles, the paraphernalia of a woman's daily life are read and re-read from different perspectives, with different results. While the County Attorney and Sheriff scour the bedroom and barn for conclusive clues, the important spaces to them, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale piece together the trifles of Mrs. Wright's life--a broken jar of fruit preserves, unbaked bread, an apron, stitches in a quilt, a broken bird cage, and the last piece of the puzzle, a dead bird wrapped in a scrap of silk. From these fragments, from the past and the house itself and their own experiences as women and wives, the two women see the whole tragedy: a domineering and abusive husband, years of repression and silence, an outburst of anger and violence, and at last desperate revenge and murder through hanging. Having read the story correctly in the only really important space, the kitchen, through which the men just sail, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, in a small but important conspiracy of sisterhood, abridge the text by hiding the dead bird. The men never notice. As readers, they could never get past their scripted methods and preconceptions. But the women have learned how to apply their own experience, [End Page 505] learned to watch for the important symbols of one woman's domestic world, learned to read a diary of trifles to discover the truth of Mrs. Wright's life. When I approach manuscript diaries, I find myself cast in the same role as Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. Both of the epigrams from Rich and Fetterley indicate the empathetic nuance we need to cultivate as readers of manuscript diaries. As part of a buried cultural tradition of women's writing, these diaries require us to engage them as friendly explorers, as students who leave behind as much as possible our former preconceptions and prejudices about the value and design of a text in favor of tentative, genuine inquiry. Fetterley cautions us that to learn how to read best, we must not adopt an antagonistic stance or assume that the reading tools we're accustomed to are the appropriate ones. Rather, we must proceed more cautiously, trying out new techniques, learning how to care for the text and its writer. I would like to suggest here that our position as readers of texts which are not part of the historically sanctioned mainstream tradition is a very complex one, which requires us to situate ourselves within the text as much as possible. Yet because we have even more difficulty as readers participating in the textual, historical, and personal design of manuscript diaries than we would, say, of a piece of fiction, we must simultaneously realize our limited position and try to thicken our understanding by engaging the inner and outer worlds of the diary. How we do or don't read manuscript diaries depends on context and situation and the interrelationships among a variety of factors: ourselves as readers, the historical and social position of the diarist, the diary's textual form, how the diary is or isn't written, and the extra-textual material contained in the diary. Learning how to read manuscript diaries is complicated detective work, a labor of frustration and love, which allows us much latitude for interpretation yet often gives us few clues. I first started reading manuscript diaries over nineteen years ago, and since then I...
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