ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interplay of the different voices, modes of self understanding and methods of self narration in the diary, and shows how Ives's longing for cogency and coherence is mired by multiplicity and complexity, indicating a deeply conflicted sense of self. George Ives, the early campaigner for homosexual law reform, is reticent about his sex life in his diary for the 1890s and early 1900s. Sex, Margaretta Jolly observes, is 'a classic literary challenge'. 'It is an experience that tests the limits of representation not for its bliss or indeed its trauma, but because it most expresses the gap between the body and language'. Writing and studying were 'duties' Ives associated with the Order of the Chaerona, and the diary helps him to work through and enunciate the philosophical frame of reference for, and commitment to, the 'cause'.
