Navel-Gazing and the Performance of Gratitude: Accounting for Character in Ralph Josselin's Diary (1641–1683)

Abstract

abstract:Repetitive, pious, and often mired in the less appetizing details of seventeenth-century life, Ralph Josselin's diary is inhospitable to any modern reader looking for titillating confession or exciting narrative development. Drawing on the widespread seventeenth-century analogy that likened spiritual self-examination to financial accounting, this essay argues that the diary is not meant to be confessional by revealing the self as it is; rather, it is aspirational, a performance of the self the diarist hopes to become. Josselin provides a model of character in which the manipulation of lived experience and the performance of gratitude are earnest and sincere endeavors. The raw materials of seventeenth-century existence are, in Josselin's diary, parts of God's inscrutable plan to be accreted, recorded, reviewed, and (possibly) understood. Meticulous repetition and performance—in the sense of both physically acting and consciously pretending—aim to ensure that the recognition of God's mercies and the resulting posture of gratitude become, quite literally, habits of thought. The diary is an exercise, and its purpose, over time, is not to reveal, but to create, the self.