SOURCE: Porter, Roger J. “‘A Serpent in the Coils of a Pythoness’: Conflict and Self-Dramatization in Delacroix's Journal.” In Autobiography, Historiography, Rhetoric: A Festschrift in Honor of Frank Paul Bowman, edited by Mary Donaldson-Evans, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, and Gerald Prince, pp. 161-79. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

In the following essay, Porter analyzes the introspective aspects of Delacroix's Journal, evaluating what these deeply personal writings say about the author's artistic aesthetic, the role of conflict in his art, and self-identification.

On September 3, 1822, Eugène Delacroix began the journal which he would keep, punctuated by several long interruptions, for the next forty-one years. At the very outset he declared “je l'écris pour moi seul”,¹ and this disclaimer of a desire to make his inner life available to the public is largely true. Much of the Journal consists of an intensely private meditation on his habits of mind and work, an account of...