Sylvia Hickman
11/6/11
Evolutions of Genre within the
Helen Tufts Bailie Journal
When I first decided to research Helen Tufts Bailie’s journal, I assumed I would be
concentrating mainly on the effects of her radical lifestyle and beliefs on her daily life, as well as
the progression of those radical beliefs. While her radicalism is certainly evident in her writing
and some of the daily activities she describes, it turns out not to be the focus of much of the
journal. The most compelling portions of her journal are her personal confessions and
philosophical musings on her life. The thread that tied the journal together is less her radicalism,
and more her presentation of herself. This presentation of self evolves from her childhood
through old age, both as a result of maturity and life experience, as well as changing
circumstances surrounding the creation and purpose of her journal. It can be tracked through
both the content of her entries, and the style in which she wrote them.
Bailie wrote her journal in the common day- at-a- time format. While each entry is
labeled with its date, and entries are chronological, she did not write every day. In her very first
entry, written March 25, 1886, at age twelve, she proclaims: “It has taken me a long time to
decide whether I shall keep a journal, but I am going to try to write in it every day. Papa says it
will be good practice. He wants me to become a writer.” Despite her conviction, she didn’t
write again for another four days, and never really wrote entries every day. This indicates that
journal writing was not a chore for her, a record in which she was obligated to write down what
she did every day. While her lack of daily writing could simply be an indication of her lack of
time or motivation, or simple forgetfulness, it could also suggest that she only wrote down events
and thoughts she found particularly interesting or important to her at the time. Her journal
therefore becomes not a complete record of her life per say, but a record of what was important
to her, arguably a richer subject for analysis. This idea of self-selecting of material becomes
increasingly significant when we look at how she added material to her journal in later years.
The first general stylistic section of her journal was written when she was a child and
young adult, around the end of the 1880s through the 1890s. She wrote much less during this
period then later in her life (a folder of paper in the archives covers nine years of writing, while
later folders of similar size contain only 1-3 years’ worth of writing). The entries in this section
mainly deal with events of her daily life, but demonstrate her already developing analytical mind,
as well as a love for reading, both themes which are seen throughout her journal. On April 2,
1886 she wrote, “I went to the library and got out a book by Hawthorne called the House of the
Seven Gables. I think I shall like it for Mama does. Mama is reading the History of Magellan
and I like that too. I have been out playing hide and coop.” and on April 4 she continued, “I
finished the House of the Seven Gables. Mr. Hawthorne is a masterly writer.” If she hadn’t
mentioned hide and coop, and “Mama,” this entry could just have well been written by an adult,
especially with her use of the decidedly un-childlike “masterly.” Her questioning, analytical
nature is exhibited near the end of her entry on January 9, 1895, when she wrote “Miss
Hennessey and I finished the Parallel Bible a week agp, a tiresome piece of work. I have made a
number of notes on things people believe that aren’t in the Bible.” [sic] Her skepticism of
religion is a subject that she would revisit throughout her life.
As a young girl, Bailie wrote in short, choppy sentences, her thoughts disconnected and
seemingly random at times. On April 1, 1886 she wrote, “I have been fooled two or three times.
I have fooled others, too. My new dress is finished. Everything Mama makes is pretty…” She
occasionally intersperses these fascinatingly random insights, like her comment on being fooled,
with relatively mundane events of her life, like getting a new dress. Her disjointed writing style
and eclectic subject matter suggest a child’s limited attention span, curiosity, and excitement for
a wide variety of subjects. Subjects of a radical nature are addressed in the same matter-of-fact,
disjointed way, like when she wrote on September 29, 1896, “…Helena and I are taking entrance
examination for the Y.W. Gym. Helena is to call Wednesday her ‘night home,’ meaning with us.
I am seriously thinking of becoming a vegetarian. Helena is one.” It seems that during this
period, she wrote in the journal when either she remembers it exists or something noteworthy
happens, and then she simply wrote down what happened, and perhaps a few of her more
emotional thoughts on the matter. This suggests that she was only writing for herself at this
point, using the journal as an occasional record of events and thoughts.
The second stylistic portion of her journal that I looked at was written primarily in the
19teens and 1920s, when Bailie was in her 30s and 40s. By this point she had had two children,
and her care for them is the dominant theme of the journal during this period. Like most mothers
with young children, they kept her very busy, and she spent most of her journal talking about the
joys and tribulations of raising them. She had an especially difficult time with her older
daughter, Helena, writing on February 11th, 1919, “I am failing miserably in my efforts to make
her obey me. She just won’t. Unless she minds me, her adventurous spirit might carry into the
lake at camp some day, and Sonny with her. She thinks her own way best, and uses considerable
ingenuity in making it appear that my way, when she has to submit, is her way.” Bailie often
struggled to manage her daughter, a strong personality like herself. Her new subject matter also
leads to, or coincides with, a shift in the style of the journal.
As Helena wrote about her children in her middle age, her writing became more proselike, and less disjointed. She wrote with more emotion, both pride and uncertainty. On January
23, 1920, she wrote of Helena, “Her young strength leaps within her, and makes her a wild thing
at times. I am wondering how she will get thro the difficult years between 15 and 20. I try to
know my child. but I feel sometimes that the best I can do is to learn what not to do to her. I
feel my way stumblingly.” [sic] Such raw confessions were new additions to the journal, and
suggest feelings, especially fears, that Bailie didn’t share with others. The journal had become
more of an emotional release and confidant for her. This could be due to increasing maturity, her
growing skill as a writer, or the overpowering emotion that came from raising children, and a
lack of other outlets for her. As she grew older, this sense of the journal as a place for personal,
emotional release grew, as did its prose-like character.
The final part of Bailie’s journal is increasingly philosophical, musing, and expressive.
During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, when she was in her seventies, she wrote
substantially longer entries. With no children to take care of any more, she was left with her
husband, William, who was sick and not really present mentally (it is unclear what is wrong with
him, potentially dementia or Alzheimer’s). She wrote in 1948, “I have no one with whom to
share my thoughts. But those who yield to resentment become burdens. None of that for me.”
In that absence of people to confide in, and perhaps substantially more free time in her old age,
Bailie wrote long, winding entries about her personal beliefs. The journal became her only
source in which to confide. She often wrote on the subject of faith, her style increasingly
literary, for example when she started an entry “What is the hold of creed upon mankind?
Christianity began with the dogma of immortality…” While the intense emotion of some of her
passages in this period could have come from her loneliness and isolation, their literary aspect
was more likely a result of the circumstances around which she was writing at the time, namely
the preparing of her journal for posterity in an archival setting.
The personal nature of the final section is complicated by the issue of transcription and
audience. Bailie typed her own journals around this time, and typed them with the knowledge
that they would be going to the Smith College Archives. It was not clear why she was sending
them, and it begs the question, was she asked to send them, or did she offer, believing her story
to be something of note that others would be interested in? Regardless of her intent, the fact that
she knew this journal would be read by others could explain her increasingly literary style. Her
journal became not only a personal release, but a sort of narrative of her life and a summation of
her beliefs for posterity. This can best be seen in an incredible passage in 1954, when she felt
she was done writing in her journal, and she should wrap it up with a final declaration, stating,
“I am close to 81, full time to close my journals. What use have I made of life? what the
philosophy with which I pass out? Tomorrow sees the beginning of a new year. I feel no
urge to make new resolutions, asking only the strength to go on living the philosophy
already won. Is it final? No, it is but a door I keep open for further glimpses of the path I
must travel…Papa and Mama remained throughout life faithful to the spiritual, repelling
creed… We were a really happy family, we four, family love more real to us that the
pressure of poverty. I was through High School before unity shattered. I fell in with
Helena Born, and with her a new world opened to me…radicalism assimilable by me, but
not by the rest of us…What of the philosophy that I claim to have won? It is nothing new,
but it is my own, won by my own exertions. I have broken with the great frauds of
formalized Christianity that bid man look outside himself for salvation …With all my
heart I long for continuation of life after death, to meet my dear ones and earn their
forgiveness for my failures toward them. But finally in my thought is the realization that
whatever is my Sonny’s fate, I am content to share it.” [sic]
This passage last for a couple pages, and seems to be her attempt at consolidating her journal and
her life into a coherent philosophical statement, an explanation of who she is and what she wants
to represent to the rest of the world. The journal became a way to retrospectively find meaning
and closure in her life. She combines grandiose phrases (“I have broken with the great frauds of
formalized Christianity”), romantic notions (“family love more real to us that the pressure of
poverty”), and intensely personal statements (I long…[to] earn their forgiveness for my failures
toward them.”) into a coherent narrative.
Also during this later period, Bailie attempted to turn the earlier parts her journal into a
similarly coherent narrative. When typing her journals for Smith, she added to parts of her
journal, parts with help us understand what she found most significant in her life. In the
beginning of the journal, she wrote a story-like, occasionally romantic sounding account of her
parents’ life and her memories of childhood before she began writing her journal. She added a
few paragraphs the spring she met Helena, mentioning their meeting and her family’s initial
reception of Helena, events she might not have thought important at the time, but in retrospect
were clearly crucial to her development. She also added emotional recollections of the periods in
her life when her friend Helena and her son Sonny died. Initially, there was either no writing in
her journal at these points, or just a quick note of the death, but she added highly expressive,
narrative retellings of her experience living through these dark moments. After Bailie’s daughter
moved out of the house, they had a thriving correspondence, and Bailie typed up many of the
letters Helena [her daughter] sent her. All of these additions seem to be an effort by Bailie to fill
the cracks in the narrative of her life. She might have thought the readers of her journal, be
them family, scholars, etc. would find use in the added emotion and nostalgia of her later
additions. Or perhaps she simply was trying to give the most accurate, full description of her
life, to the best of her memory.
Despite its seeming transformation into a story and document for others, Bailie’s journal
was in essence still a personal document. In 1949 she wrote, “I plod along with the copying of
my journals, and am now with Sonny. To put away what was lost, to hold what was had- it has
been a bitter struggle. But with the journals, my heart swells with love, and I can again look at
his pictures.” The act of copying, while ostensibly for the archives, also served to help her come
to grips with her past, which perhaps led to that final entry of 1954, where all her life’s events,
struggles, and beliefs seemed to finally come together for her.
Although Bailie claimed to be done with her journal in 1954, three years later she began
writing in it again, referring back to her last entry as she wrote “I had by that time arrived at a
philosophy of life that by that time had seemed to me a good round ending. But so long as life
has sway, it has no ending. … I achieved a sort of triumph by affirming to myself that I was
never to be defeated unless I accepted defeat… But I am adrift again, sorely wounded.” Clearly
her journal became more than just a record of events, or a narrative of her life for others. It
became an outlet she increasingly relied upon to ground her when there was nothing and no one
else to turn to.