Warren’s post discussed the purpose of Dorothy Wordworth’s journals, and I agree it is certainly a interesting question. One entry I found especially relevant to this topic was that of Tuesday, the 24th. On page 41, Dorothy writes,
“In speaking of our walk on Sunday Evening the 22nd November I forgot to notice one most impressive sight—it was the moon & the moonlight seen through hurrying diving clouds immediately behind the Stone man upon the top of the hill on the Forest side…It was a sight that I could call to mind at any time it was so distinct.”
I found Dorothy’s use of “notice” quite key to this passage. Generally I associate noticing with merely seeing something and keeping it in memory, but it seems that for Dorothy, this process also requires an actual journaling of the thing. She clearly remembers it, since she can call the sight to mind “at any time”. But she specifically feels the necessity to put the image into her journal, despite the fact that the time in which she saw it has passed.
Perhaps then, this is an underlying purpose for her journal—to notice things. For Dorothy, the process of noticing or giving attention to it seems to be sealed in by the action of actually putting it in writing—thus, her journal serves to solidify the things she has noticed, and becomes a method of sharing them with those around her.
I agree that Dorothy appears use her journal in part for "noticing," but sometimes it seems like these instances make up only a small portion of her entries and that they are overshadowed by a great deal of cataloguing the events of her day. Dorothy mentions these serially and without much detail, yet when she discusses the more notable interesting or beautiful aspects of the landscape her language becomes much more descriptive and poetic. At first I thought it was odd that she didn't go into more detail about her inner thoughts or feelings (besides mentioning that she expressed them during the day) but then I noticed how the landscapes she describes seemed to be infused with her own emotion as we discussed in class. Instead of writing extensively about her emotions in an explicit way, it appears that "noticing" is the way in which she gives them dimension. Because she knows her brother and her friends will be reading her journal, perhaps she feels this is a more private way of elaborating about her emotions. As we have seen, Wordsworth uses some of the events that she catalogues in her journal as inspiration for his poems, maybe this is why they are more devoid of poetic description - so that Wordsworth may supply his own.
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