| Popis: |
This chapter presents a close reading of a stunning document from the home front in the First World War: the daily journal of a teenage girl in Paris. Through the temporal shifts reflected in Germaine’s writing, we perceive cracks in the protocols of gender and class that related to her earlier life. Increasingly, she entered the diary as a performer in her own right. Banal shopping trips now became excursions that had a purpose in the day-to-day existence of her family, in particular the waiting for news from family members enlisted in the army. As she tracked the movements of her brother, she also commented on the action of producing that chronology, expressing her emotional connection to her family through the material creation of the account of their wellbeing and whereabouts. Through the First World War, the intersection between the organisation of each day as it came, the management of the emotional relations of the family, and the articulation of an ordinary young woman’s personal life mapped against the symbols of national memory, represented a real shift in diary-writing, driven by the way war impacted on the reflections about time and family of those who remained at home. |
