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The Indeterminacy of the Body Trope in The Diary of Alice James

The body is a locus of indeterminacy as a literary symbol. Laden with cultural inscriptions it functions as a trope that courses through the text of The Diary of Alice James. According to Wolfgang Iser, among the myriad determinate meanings of a literary object, which he terms “schematized views,” “there is a no-man’s land of indeterminacy.” In attempting to reconcile the multiplicity of connections among the views, the reader finds that “Gaps are bound to open up and offer a free play of interpretation.” It becomes the reader’s function to fill the gaps through “meaning-projection” of our own (Iser “Indeterminacy” 11–12). Nevertheless, as Iser asserts, we need textual gaps because without them “we should not be able to use our imaginations” (Implied 283). Even though James is understandably and usually located in a feminist context, I would argue for the validity of a readerresponse theoretical approach that offers itself to the diary’s spontaneous, erratic flow of content and the subsequent multiple, textual spaces elicited among its sporadically-dated entries. For these particular critics, “The reading process . . . is a temporal experience.” Wolfgang Iser, who is especially concerned with reader-oriented textual meaning, conceives of “the act of interpretation as one of filling in ‘gaps’ in the text” (Kaye 3, 8). Therefore, in exploring the schematized binaries of female/male, sickness/health, and family/nation, it is possible not only to identify and explore the use of the body trope in Alice James’s Diary but also to calculate meaning within each scheme while also attempting imaginatively to resolve the overall resultant indeterminacy among them.