Commonplaces - Then and Now

As I read Kenneth Lockridge’s essay, I thought back on my own private commonplaces in girlhood.  I thought of my journal, of lines of songs or poems I would write in or on spiral notebooks, and of family gatherings.  Specifically, with my family, I remember the way that the young girls would gather in one area, with our mothers and aunts would gather separate from the men.  It was within these commonplaces that I know I practiced being the person I was and am in public, similar to Lockridge’s discussion.  A commonplace, a place where a person privately defines and understands their thoughts and desires seems imperative to growth. 

However, considering modern commonplaces (although families and friends still gather) I can’t stay away from spaces such as Facebook and Twitter.  Although immediately public, there are private strands that people seem to follow, speaking of their own beliefs and thought processes.  Because we are able to post on these sites, even more elaborately on Facebook than Twitter, we can share our interests on a grand and technologically advanced scale. 

The blog space also appears to be a place in which the “public self is rehearsed in this intensely private arena provided by literacy” (Lockridge, 338).  As many know from journaling, it is during times that we engage in our own literacy that we are led to discovery.  The blog is a space where private thoughts and beliefs can be shared for the public, but about any topic that comes from the private interest.

So, looking back on girlhood, I would have to say that writing for the middle school paper, writing in yearbooks, writing notes, and keeping a journal would have been literary commonplaces I engaged with.  Those practices, however, are what keep me journaling and enjoying the commonplaces that friends share in blogs and scrapbooks.  I do see, as Lockridge touches on, that commonplaces do have class divisions, even today.