![]() ![]() ![]() This essay examines the presence of women’s bodies in their private writing during the physically and psychologically traumatizing atmosphere of the Second World War, focusing on the diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov and Marguerite Duras. During the first half of the twentieth-century, many women writers tried to present themselves as neutral, and therefore desexualized, subjects, which involved turning away from the body and focusing on the gender neutral mind.1 Women’s diaries from this period, however, evidence a different trend. Excised from intellectual spheres for centuries for purportedly being incapable of rising above their reproductive function to form an objective opinion, women writers often avoided writing about their bodies when they finally gained their precarious admittance into the intellectual sphere. Women in general and women writers in particular have a problematic history with embodiment. Often what is repressed in literature is the story of the body. ![]() As a private versus a public form of discourse, diaries often illuminate aspects of life experience that society endeavours to silence and suppress. ![]()
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