SELF AS MALADY IN DIARY BY E. B. B.

Abstract

The diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (first published in 1961), reveals the poetess’s polemical treatment of Self as duty to Other. Spread over less than a year of actual time, the content of the narrative is overwhelming. Diary by E. B. B. is an undisguised autobiographical articulation of the writer’s sense of her physical weakness, her doubts about her own sanity, her worship of God, her fear of redundancy, her disturbing interest in reading, and her fixation on death. This thematic range provides a foundation for a hermeneutic (and varied by feminism) examination of identity as incompletion. A kind of incompletion partially fulfilled through diary narrative as dialogue.