3 - Carnal knowledges

Summary

MARTHA KNOWS

Of all the men and women in my sample of honeymooning couples, I feel that I know Martha Rolls Macready the best. Part of this feeling comes from what I can express only in the idiom of ownership; unlike many of the other honeymooners about whom I have substantial information – Effie Ruskin, say, or Flu Arnold, or even Emily Birchall – Martha (as I find myself unable not to call her) is my discovery. And this, in turn, has something to do with how, and in what form, I “discovered” her. Although Martha's diary does not have the generic markers of Juliana Fuller's – no blue ribbon, no locks of hair or photographs – it speaks the genre of the honeymoon diary in other ways: its careful daily entries, its meticulous attention to and vocabulary for emotional life, and, most of all, its foregrounding of the vocabulary of the conjugal. Its topics and its language are inflected throughout by the lexicon of privacy, affect, and, finally, of secrecy. Of all the honeymoon diaries I have read, Martha's is the most novelistic, the most like a Victorian novel, both because of its linked interest in quotidian detail and interior life and because of what we might think of as its narrative structure.

Martha's is also one of the least touristic of the diaries. She writes from the small seaside resort of Littlehampton, where she has gone, it seems, in part for her health.