Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents

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Author: Marlene Kadar | Helen M. Buss

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Life Writing Series

Life Writing Series In the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press publishes life writing and new life-writing criticism in order to promote autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters and testimonials written and/or told by women and men whose political, literary or philosophical purposes are central to their lives. Life Writing features the accounts of ordinary people, written in English, or translated into English from French or the languages of the First Nations or from any of the languages of immigration to Canada. Life Writing will also publish original theoretical investigations about life writing, as long as they are not limited to one author or text. Priority is given to manuscripts that provide access to those voices that have not traditionally had access to the publication process. Manuscripts of social, cultural and historical interest that are considered for the series, but are not published, are maintained in the Life Writing Archive of Wilfrid Laurier University Library. Series Editor

Marlene Kadar Humanities Division, York University Manuscripts to be sent to

Brian Henderson, Director Wilfrid Laurier University Press 75 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

Working in Women’s Archives Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar editors

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Wilfrid Laurier University Press

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Working in women’s archives : researching women’s private literature and archival documents (Life writing) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88920-341-5 1. Women authors, Canadian (English) − Biography − History and criticism.* 2. Canadian literature (English) − Women authors − History and criticism − Theory, etc.* 3. Women authors, Canadian (English) − Archives.* I. Buss, Helen M. (Helen Margaret). II. Kadar, Marlene, 1950- . PS8089.5.W6W65 2001 PR9188.W65 2001

C810.9′9287

C99-932232-X

© 2001 Copyright is retained by the authors. Permission to reproduce the journals of Marian Engel granted by Charlotte Engel and William Engel. Cover design by Leslie Macredie. Front cover image based on a crosswritten letter in the hand of Susanna Moodie (NAC, MG29 D81, Ms. Division). Back cover image: Connie Kerr ’s dance card, University of Toronto, 1895. Courtesy of Rosalind Kerr. Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5 ∞ Printed in Canada All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.

Contents

Introduction Helen M. Buss ............................................................................. 1 Locating Female Subjects in the Archives Carole Gerson ............................................................................. 7 Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity Helen M. Buss ........................................................................... 23 Researching Eighteenth-Century Maritime Women Writers: Deborah How Cottnam—A Case Study Gwendolyn Davies .................................................................... 35 ‘‘A Dusting Off’’: An Anecdotal Account of Editing the L. M. Montgomery Journals Mar y Rubio ............................................................................... 51 Reading My Grandmother’s Life from Her Letters: Constance Kerr Sissons from Adolescence to Engagement Rosalind Kerr ............................................................................. 79 Personal Papers: Putting Lives on the Line—Working with the Marian Engel Archive Christl Verduyn .......................................................................... 91 An Epistolary Constellation: Trotsky, Kahlo, Birney Marlene Kadar ......................................................................... 103 Afterword Marlene Kadar ......................................................................... 115 Contributors .................................................................................. 119

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Introduction Helen M. Buss

The essays in this collection are the product of seven women’s research experiments while working in the laboratory of archival collections of women’s writing. Each contributor began by working on her own, with a belief that the discoveries from her research in women’s archives would yield new insight into women’s lives and women’s culture. The articles in this collection reflect diverse starting points, as contributors write of the challenges and opportunities that arise from encounters with female archival subjects. These investigations occurred at the tentative beginnings of what we now see as the fortuitous coming together of feminist theory, the breaking of traditional limitations set by the idea of a literary ‘‘canon’’ of great writers and the increased use of archives to rescue a female tradition in writing. Such efforts help us to theorize motivations, methods and directions for future work in women’s archives. In the Afterword Marlene Kadar offers some preliminary observations on the constitution of the archive as a complex and incomplete site of feminist knowledge. As a way of introducing this collection, I would like to consider the variety of approaches and feminist preoccupations that link the individual contributions. Carole Gerson reminds us that whatever our motivations or goals are when we enter the archive, our methods will be dictated in the first instance by the problems of locating subjects for continuing study—the detective work that uncovers the often hidden, poorly documented and incomplete record of female persons. Archival research is always a painstaking and time-consuming activity, but is made more so in a country like Canada, which has been organized as a national unity for little over a century. The problematic nature of archival research increases when we are dealing with the activities of marginalized people, those not of the traditional white male elite. When we add to this our wish to research private papers in order to map out the daily life experiences of 1

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Working in Women’s Archives

women as well as to find their lost manuscripts, research in women’s archives demands more than the usual patient search. Gerson’s research has uncovered many helpful methodologies to help us, and in ‘‘Locating Female Subjects in the Archives’’ she shares her knowledge gained in such projects as the ‘‘Publishers’ Papers Project’’ at Simon Fraser University and in her continuing work on early Canadian women writers. Gerson asserts that archives are not neutral sites of primary research materials but collections developed from specific social assumptions that dictate what documents are valuable, social assumptions that construct priorities that often exclude women’s documents. Her description of print and electronic sources for finding women’s documents represents an invaluable guide to researchers. My own contribution to this volume, ‘‘Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive,’’ follows from Gerson’s warning that the archive is not a ‘‘neutral’’ site. I find that it is not only not neutral in that society does not value all documents equally, but that it is not ‘‘neutral’’ in terms of the assumptions readers bring to it. I explore the problems I confronted in bringing a balanced reading to the autobiographical documents of a nineteenth-century Métis woman, Marie Rose Smith, by showing how one portion of her memoir, that concerned with her being married off for money, has been differently constructed by her first editors, the publishers of The Canadian Cattlemen (a magazine devoted to a settler view of the West), by her granddaughter (whose Métis identity brings a different reading to her grandmother’s archival materials) and by myself, a white, academic feminist. Comparing the different constructions of Marie Rose Smith leads me to understand my own ability to distort the female subject in the archive and to advocate a more self-conscious and complex exploration of the researcher’s subject position, her assumptions, biases and desires, as part of archival research. Gwen Davies coins the term ‘‘re/deconstructionists’’ to describe the complexity of the multiple goals that women academics in our times bring to archives, as we both deconstruct the traditional views of the female subject and reconstruct female subjects from the anonymity of history. To carry out this double goal, Davies extends the idea of archives as a paper repository of letters, diaries, newspapers and other documents to include paintings and samplers, as well as gravestone and monument inscriptions and designs. Davies also makes clear in ‘‘Researching Eighteenth-Century Maritime Women Writers’’ that research into women’s lives and art lost from the historical record is a work of patience and perseverance. As she observes, ‘‘It has taken twelve years of putting bits and pieces together to be able to say that I now have nine

Buss / Introduction

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Cottnam mother or daughter letters and seven poems of one of our earliest Canadian women writers’’ (Deborah How Cottnam). While researchers such as Davies must spend years seeking relevant material on their little-known subjects, editing the journals of a wellknown writer such as L. M. Montgomery creates another whole set of problems. Mary Rubio’s autobiographical account of her many years of research and editing offers a timely reminder to a new generation of researchers and editors in a seemingly more welcoming atmosphere: that the respectability of working with women’s lives and art has been a long time coming and still presents special challenges. Rubio and her coeditor Elizabeth Waterston faced problems that ranged from SSHRCC juries that, in the early eighties, saw Montgomery as having a ‘‘very limited appeal and challenge’’ for scholarship to a publisher who, while keen for a saleable publication, nevertheless found that, from a male perspective, many of Montgomery’s concerns were ‘‘trivial.’’ After publication the editors faced the anger of female fans who found the complex subjectivity Montgomery’s Journals revealed to be profoundly disturbing to the ideally ‘‘happy’’ Montgomery that popular myth maintains. In ‘‘ ‘A Dusting Off’: An Anecdotal Account of Editing the L. M. Montgomery Journals,’’ Rubio tackles almost every editorial headache that can plague the researcher working with diaries, memoirs and letters, including how to condense a lifetime of entries into several book-length volumes, how to use footnotes productively in order to make an earlier culture alive in the present and how to make a publication that is both rigorous in its standards of scholarship and good reading for the general public. Most importantly, Rubio deals honestly with her own difficulties in making the ethical decisions that involve balancing ‘‘the individual’s ‘right to privacy ’ against the public’s ‘right to information,’ ’’ when the revelations of a sharp-tongued, articulate but often intolerant Montgomery can hurt people still living, people who do not have the privileged access to expression that these Journals represent. Scholars planning editions of a productive writer’s private literature will learn much from these ‘‘anecdotes,’’ including the helpful hints in the seventh of Rubio’s notes, which details the problems of claiming hard-earned payments for arduous editing tasks from the Public Lending Rights Commission. The centrality of the personal anecdote to autobiographical accounts of feminist experiences in archival research is nowhere more dramatic than in Rosalind Kerr ’s ‘‘Reading My Grandmother’s Life from Her Letters,’’ which begins by revealing Kerr ’s intense and ‘‘ambiguous’’ feelings for a grandmother whose ‘‘austere demeanor’’ reflected her careful obedience to patriarchal values. In her effort to find a more ‘‘resistant’’

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ancestor through a feminist reading of Constance Kerr Sissons’s letters, Kerr demonstrates how a passionate intensity of feeling and careful scholarship have allowed her to ‘‘reappropriate’’ her grandmother as precursor of her own feminist rebellion. Such partisan research is discouraged by traditional scholarship, which idealizes an ‘‘objectivity’’ that hides unacknowledged assumptions and biases. Feminist scholarship allows for the special passion we feel for the archives of those close to us, encourages the full revelation of bias and highlights the sophistication of the insightful readings that emotional attachment brings by an attention to theorization. Kerr ’s account of her strategy of ‘‘overreading’’ her grandmother’s letters to uncover the ‘‘cultural scripts’’ allowed by patriarchy—as well as the small but important rebellions woven into those scripts—constructs the ‘‘liberating’’ potential of such materials. Kerr ’s contribution is an excellent demonstration of the coming together of the personal and the political in archival research. This joining of the private and personal with public scholarship does not happen without bringing up profound ethical questions about the abuse of such a powerful act. These questions are explored in Christl Verduyn’s ‘‘Personal Papers: Putting Lives on the Line—Working with the Marian Engel Archive.’’ Since she had to confront Engel’s own warnings about the dangers of ‘‘badly done’’ psychological criticism and the author’s expressed wish that her personal papers and ‘‘cahiers’’ would ‘‘be found uninteresting until I’ve been dead as long as Boswell,’’ Verduyn is very conscious of the possibilities of falling into ‘‘voyeurism.’’ Verduyn’s arguments for the special place of private papers in the literary appreciation of women writers is cogent and compelling, and establishes the ethical grounds for many of the archival projects concerned with women in this century who have established reputations as professional writers. Researchers working in the archives of women who have recently died often hear arguments for the preservation of privacy from fans or family, even from other academics. Such arguments, if heeded, might have the effect of effacing a woman writer’s place in literary history. Verduyn argues that if we do not take into account how unpublished life writing establishes the ‘‘changing notions of the self in response to increased awareness of the importance of factors of gender, class, race, age, sexual preference,’’ and if we do not investigate the importance of personal relationships in the making of women’s art, we will miss important nuances in the literary development of women’s writing. The importance placed on women’s relational sense of self creates a special challenge in working through their archival remains. As Marlene

Buss / Introduction

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Kadar points out in ‘‘An Epistolary Constellation: Trotsky, Kahlo, Birney,’’ finding women’s subversive texts can be a complex intertextual study of the history of the relationships and the resulting correspondence among several individuals, involving archival work in several writers’ collections. The rewards, however, are exponential, as the timeconsuming work of the archive yields ‘‘a secret subaltern culture negotiated by women members’’ of a literary-political community. All of the essays in this collection have one very practical thing in common: they spring from long-term projects that have involved a great deal of arduous work over long periods of time. This work produces ‘‘results’’ that are tentative markings along the way of longer searches, guideposts that are not meant to be conclusive but which will help others who also choose to work in women’s archives. What unites us and this collection is the conviction that we are re/discovering a part of culture that has not been appreciated, a culture in which women have inscribed themselves. In doing so we aim to deconstruct the narrow boundaries in which established culture has bound us and prepare space for others who have been similarly excluded, with the hope that future archival collection is no longer bound by the assumptions of the past.

Locating Female Subjects in the Archives Carole Gerson

At first glance, the task of researching women in archives seems obvious: one simply searches electronic and paper indices for subject-headings pertaining to one’s topic, and for the names of the women who are individually identifiable. But in this post-Foucauldian age, in which no socially constructed entity can be regarded as self-justified or transparent, problematization accompanies the researcher along every step of her path. To begin with, there are the contingencies of value surrounding the very institution of the archive: ‘‘It is wise to consider the institutional politics underlying the development of archival collections. Archivists are primarily interested in collecting documents of an obvious historical and literary value. This attitude results in collections that, in organization and content, mirror traditional academic attitudes toward significant figures and important events’’ (Meese 41-42). Yet literary critics tend to regard the archive as a neutral zone, untouched by the questions of selection, evaluation and subjectivity that they apply to their own more self-conscious interpretative activities. One need only search the online MLA Bibliography (1981-September 1999) to discover that direct consideration of problems in archival research is scarcely a mainstream activity among literature scholars. A subject search combining ‘‘archives’’ and ‘‘women’’ yields fifteen items, of which fewer than half relate to the accessibility and use of archival material in research on women writers. Researchers, frustrated by futile quests for materials that should have been placed in archives but have disappeared, seldom attack the question directly; after all, we can

Notes to this article are on p. 21. 7

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scarcely replace missing papers from the past. Instead, with the patience characteristic of our gender, we silently accommodate ourselves to the incompleteness of the historical record. Ann Ardis, for example, waits until the end of her analysis of New Woman fiction to speculate, almost as an afterthought, why so few of the papers of the women authors in her study can be found in public custodial institutions (Ardis 165-66).

Letter from E. Pauline Johnson to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada. Courtesy of National Archives of Canada, C146360-61.

Gerson / Locating Female Subjects in the Archives

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The researcher who works with personal and literary papers may encounter difficult choices concerning her handling of archival material—issues that Christl Verduyn and Helen Buss discuss in their essays in this collection. However, before the researcher can put her hands on the manuscript pages that invite her to problematize her analysis of published texts, she must first locate her subject’s papers, a procedure that requires her to deal with the ways the archive problematizes itself.

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The Canadian Scene: Some Problems and Examples More often than not, researching women writers in Canadian archives and institutions is a hit-and-miss affair, especially with regard to authors active before 1940, the period I have been investigating. Inventories are neither standardized nor consistent. The few literary collections catalogued at the item level, such as the Lorne Pierce papers at Queen’s University, the W. A. Deacon papers at the University of Toronto and the Newton MacTavish papers at the North York Public Library, serve as enviable models. Most collections relating to Canada’s cultural history are itemized only to the file level; this is especially true of correspondence. Some collections, like the Leslie family papers in the Archives of Ontario, remain virtually unsorted. These boxes contain the few surviving records that relate to Guelph-area author Mary Leslie (1842-1920), whose first novel, The Cromaboo Mail Carrier, achieved considerable local notoriety upon publication in 1878. Processing collections is a labour-intensive, costly endeavour. In this neo-materialist era, archivists continually struggle to fund work whose only immediately demonstrable utility, to those outside the academic community, is the employment of students. Decreasing financial support for Canadian archives means that administrators, always engaged in a juggling act, must necessarily prioritize acquisitions and processing according to institutional guidelines and perceived degrees of significance. Growing interest in the history of Canadian women, inaugurated by the wave of academic feminism that hit Canadian universities in the 1970s, has led to greater attention to their private records, as demonstrated in the surge of published guides to women’s papers in archival institutions that swelled most noticeably from 1974 to 1981.1 Complementing these published resources, it is important to note that on an individual basis, Special Collections librarians and archivists (the majority of them women) tend to respond eagerly to specific inquiries. However, in the larger picture, preservation and editorial attention have been granted to the unpublished writings of very few earlier women writers. We are extremely grateful to now have on our shelves two volumes of the edited letters of Susanna Moodie, the selected letters of Catharine Parr Traill and four volumes of the selected journals of L. M. Montgomery. As well, a Montgomery preliminary bibliography lists archival holdings, as does Susan Bellingham’s bibliography of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay. Each of these publications represents a tremendous commitment on the part of a few dedicated individuals. To date, the finest example of a detailed inventory of the archive of a deceased Cana-


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dian woman writer is The Papers of Dorothy Livesay, issued by the staff of the University of Manitoba Library and Archives. Preparation of the Mackay, Montgomery and Livesay inventories was supported by the now-defunct Canadian Studies Research Tools Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Following the incorporation of research tool projects into SSHRC ’s regular research grants programs in the early 1990s, the publication of such textual resources noticeably diminished. Fortunately, the current ease with which libraries and archives can now mount finding aids on the web is resulting in a remarkable proliferation of electronically accessible inventories, one entry to which is Canadian Archival Resources on the Internet (http://www.usask.ca/archives/menu.html). However, conversion to electronic formats sometimes results in the loss of details contained in earlier card inventories. Therefore in institutions like the National Archives of Canada, the assiduous researcher should check the old card catalogues as well as the handy computer screens.

Nellie McClung, seated at her writing desk. Courtesy of B.C. Archives, Province of British Columbia, E-05182.

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The electronic inventory can only replicate the level of effort that has gone into the hands-on management of the physical collection. A case in point is the Nellie McClung papers in the Provincial Archives in British Columbia. McClung wrote in children’s scribblers, which her own six children sometimes shared with her, and which bear evidence of having sat open on the kitchen table. Whatever her personal system of organization may have been, it has not survived. The institution to which her son delivered many cartons of these notebooks in 1953, two years after his mother’s death, did not attempt to reconstruct it, either chronologically or thematically. Consequently, there are nine large archival boxes containing nearly three hundred scribblers whose order, as inventoried, is utterly random. For example, scribbler 1/1 contains material dated 1936, scribbler 3/31 is dated 1910, and scribbler 4/20 is from 1919. Notebooks identified as including portions of Sowing Seeds in Danny, McClung’s first novel, published in 1908, are located in box 3 (3/18), box 5 (5/36, 5/37, 5/41), box 7 (7/1, 7/23-27, 7/38, 7/39, 7/41) and box 9 (9/7-9). The recent indexing of McClung’s correspondence by a member of the University Women’s Club of Victoria demonstrates a continuing reliance on volunteer efforts to compensate for shortfalls in institutional budgets. One wonders if the cataloguing of the papers of Canadian men whose historical impact has been as great as that of McClung likewise awaits the attention of volunteers. McClung was among the fortunate few whose papers have survived. My own research experience yields some general patterns of preservation. With authors’ professional and personal papers, the archival institution reflects social constructions of cultural value: collections of early writers’ materials find their way into libraries and archives because friends and families have thought them worth keeping and because the institution considers them worth acquiring. Many families, attributing a higher value to printed texts than to notes or correspondence, save only a writer’s books and clippings. A good example is poet Laura E. McCully, a member of a prominent Toronto family whose papers are in the Archives of Ontario. Her early death in 1924, at the age of thirty-eight, prompted the local press to represent her as a tragic figure, but did not inspire her family to keep her manuscripts and letters. The only memorabilia preserved in her family archive are published documents: her two books and a scrapbook of her photographs and poems clipped from magazines. Many of the women who wrote fiction and poetry in Canada before 1940 were childless; for whatever reason, the papers of women without direct heirs seem to have experienced an especially high mortality rate. Agnes Maule Machar, whose father was principal of Queen’s University


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from 1846 to 1854, spent her entire long life of ninety years, and similarly long literary career of nearly seventy years, in one place, the town of Kingston, Ontario. She produced more than a dozen books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, as well as contributing scores of poems, stories and thoughtful articles on current topics to leading Canadian magazines such as The Canadian Monthly and National Review and The Week. Yet her papers in the Queen’s University Archives consist of one slender file under her own name and one letter to William Wilfred (W.W.) Campbell in the Lorne Pierce papers. Efforts to trace her unpublished writing yield the following meagre list of fragments from a lifetime of literary activity: • New York Public Library: four items in the Century Company papers, 1888-96; • National Archives of Canada: letters to Lady Aberdeen, Louis Fréchette, George Monro Grant, Wilfrid Laurier; • McGill University: three letters to W. D. Lighthall, 1888-90; • McMaster University: nine letters in the Macmillan papers, 1909-10; • Metro Toronto Library: typescript of two letters to her from American poet John Greenleaf Whittier in the L. Burpee papers; • University of Waterloo: one letter to Elizabeth Shortt, 1898; and • York University: letters to Louisa Murray, 1880-93. On the other hand, progeny is no guarantee of preservation. The papers of Toronto writer Virna Sheard, who had four sons, were destroyed by her family after her death. An undated letter from Sheard to M. O. Hammond, editor of the Globe during the 1910s and 1920s, states that her husband, a prominent medical doctor and politician, ‘‘has deeply rooted prejudice against . . . my writing on account of the publicity attached to it.’’2 Researchers quickly learn that serendipity plays a major role in locating their subject’s correspondence or manuscripts within collections of other people’s papers. While it may be unreasonable to expect easy access to occasional letters that survive because the recipient or his (more often than her) executors did not toss them, the lack of a central resource in this country has hitherto rendered the quest for women writers’ papers particularly difficult. The Union List of Manuscripts expired nearly two decades ago. Fortunately, an electronic replacement is now under development, with several universities collaborating in the creation of a central, coordinating website, the ‘‘Finding Aids to Literary Papers in Canadian Archival Collections’’ project, housed in the Electronic Texts Centre at the University of New Brunswick (www.hil.unb.ca / Texts/ead /ead.html). This project should assist literary

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scholars, whose training occasionally lacks the rigour that impels historians towards primary sources. Consider, for example, the Canadian volumes (53, 60, 68, 88, 92, 99) of the Dictionar y of Literary Biography. Although standard DLB format includes descriptions of authors’ papers, these are cited inconsistently. To cite a few instances pertaining to women writers, the entry on Sarah Anne Curzon omits her substantial correspondence with William Kirby in the Archives of Ontario. The entry on Pauline Johnson ignores her major collection at McMaster as well as smaller collections at Trent University, the National Archives of Canada and the Archives of Ontario. And the entry on Isabel Ecclestone Mackay overlooks the Mackay papers at the University of Waterloo and the Provincial Archives of British Columbia.

Politics and Procedures By now it should be evident that many of the collections containing unpublished material by women writers are headed by the names of men, such as Wilfrid Laurier, Lorne Pierce, W. A. Deacon, W. D. Lighthall and Newton MacTavish. This situation seems inevitable as these men, who enjoyed public careers, accumulated substantial holdings of papers and correspondence. It is standard archival practice to list a collection under the name of the creator of the group of records (in archival practice, called the ‘‘fonds’’), who, in the case of correspondence, is the recipient of the letters. The authors of the letters will be indexed only if the collection is processed to this level. Thus, in the National Archives of Canada, three significant collections of L. M. Montgomery ’s letters are catalogued not under the name of their author, but under the names of their recipients, men whose most important historical role was to have been Montgomery’s pen pals and to have saved their mail (George MacMillan, Penzie MacNeill, Ephraim Weber). Two contrasting observations arise from this practice. On the one hand, it can be difficult to find the papers of secondary individuals contained within other collections if the latter are unindexed or poorly crossindexed. But on the other, the example of Agnes Maule Machar demonstrates that women’s papers often survive only because they have been preserved in the papers of persons or organizations whose public significance extends value to their correspondents or members. Researchers should also be aware that archival practice requires that items be described according to their appearance. Thus, in an inventory the term ‘‘diary’’ will be used to describe a commercially produced yearbook with the word ‘‘diary’’ stamped on the cover, even though the pages may be blank or contain random impersonal notes.


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Given the traditional historical invisibility of women, the researcher in quest of the personal papers of women writers must often approach her subject obliquely—‘‘slant,’’ to use Emily Dickinson’s word—and enjoy literary detective work.3 For example, the bibliographical guides to Canada’s printed record, as preserved on microfiche through CIHM (Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproduction), may lead to rewarding avenues of research, following clues found in such ephemera as the printed catalogues of educational institutions or the programs of benefit concerts. Whether or not anything is discovered in major sources or institutions under the author’s own name—whose changes due to marriage frequently present complications not encountered in research on men—the following sources and suggestions may enhance the investigator’s research strategy.

Printed resources Many institutions and women’s history projects have published inventories, some of which are listed in the section on ‘‘Archives’’ in Diana L. Pedersen, Changing Women, Changing History: A Bibliography of the Histor y of Women in Canada, 2nd ed. (1996). As well, the researcher should check inventories of publishers’ archives, like the Macmillan archive at McMaster University, and institutional guides, such as those published by Special Collections at the University of Calgary Library. Some helpful places to start: • From the Women in Canadian History Project at OISE: Beth Light, Sources in Women’s History at the Public Archives of Ontario (1977). • From the National Archives of Canada: Literar y Archives Guide (1988) and Joanna Dean and David Fraser, Women’s Archives Guide (1991). • From the National Library of Canada: Linda Hoad, Literar y Manuscripts at the National Library of Canada (1990), updated April 1998. • From McMaster University: Bruce Whiteman, The Archive of the Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd. Par t I, 1905-1965 (1984). • From CIHM: Klay Dyer, Sue Martin and Lucy Sussex, Canadian Women’s History Bibliography (1997). • From the University of Calgary: Mapping the Territory: A Guide to the Archival Holdings, Special Collections, University of Calgary Librar y (1994). This library also issues published inventories of their individual collections of authors’ papers, including Constance BeresfordHowe, Joanna Glass, Miriam Mandel, Alice Munro, Gwen Pharis Ringwood and Aritha van Herk.

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Individual projects may also prove very helpful, such as Kathryn Carter ’s Diaries in English by Women in Canada, 1753-1995: An Annotated Bibliography (Ottawa: CRIAW 1997), most of whose citations are unpublished archival documents, often filed under husbands’ names.

Internet resources Many institutions are no longer updating their published guides, in favour of developing electronic sites. For example, the Canadian Literature Research Service of the National Library of Canada provides links from its webpage to many sources on Canadian authors, and the National Archives of Canada is in the process of facilitating electronic access to its holdings. Some important current websites: • Canadian Archival Resources on the Internet: www.usask.ca /archives / menu.html • Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproduction (CIHM): www.nlc-bnc.ca /cihm • Canadian Literature Research Service (National Library of Canada): www.nlc-bnc.ca /services /eclrs.htm • Canadian Publishers’ Records Database: www.harbour.sfu.ca /ccsp /cprd • Early Canadiana Online: www.canadiana.org • Finding Aids to Literary Papers in Canadian Archival Collections: www.hil.unb.ca / Texts /ead /ead.html • National Archives of Canada: www.archives.ca • University of Calgary, Special Collections: www.ucalgary.ca / library / SpecColl / index.html Questions sent to mail-lists maintained by scholars, archivists, librarians, bibliographers and specialized interest groups, with requests to forward, may be far more effective than general name searches on the web. For example, my inquiry about archival material pertaining to the relationship between Pauline Johnson and her mother’s famous cousin, American novelist W. D. Howells, found its way to the Howells discussion list. It then reached Polly Howells, great-granddaughter of W.D., who confirmed that no unpublished material survives concerning the Howells family’s interactions with their ‘‘Indian cousins.’’

Consult the experts Whenever possible, befriend archivists and Special Collections librarians. Custodians of primary materials, who are now readily accessible by email, can be extremely helpful in facilitating connections between researchers, and in providing updates about new acquisitions. My recent


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work on Marie Joussaye received invaluable assistance from staff at the Yukon Archives, while my projects on Pauline Johnson4 have been aided by a host of archivists and librarians, in particular those at the Research Collections of the McMaster University Library.

When searching archives for records of women, seek the following: • Personal and professional records of male relatives, especially fathers (if the subject’s birth name is known) and husbands. For example, personal papers of Vancouver poet Nelda MacKinnon Sage are included with the papers of her husband, Walter Sage, at the University of British Columbia, where he was a history professor. • Records of literary associations such as the Canadian Authors Association, Canadian Women’s Press Club and the Canadian Writers’ Foundation; these often lack detailed indexes. • Records of relevant schools, social clubs and benevolent associations. • Records of friends, anthology editors and other associates. Worth first-hand attention are collections containing unitemized correspondence such as the papers of W. D. Lighthall (McGill) and Abbie Lyon Sharman (NAC); the latter, for example, include unindexed letters from Florence Randal Livesay. • Surviving family, who may be eager or reluctant to assist researchers. They may sometimes be found by searching family names on the web, or through www.Canada411.com. • Municipal and county institutions such as libraries, museums and archives in regions where the author resided, especially if her work featured local subjects or settings. The smaller the institution, the more helpful its staff may be. Local sources are more likely to possess scrapbooks and clippings than primary papers, but these can often provide valuable leads such as names of relatives. Even if there is a collection of the author’s papers in a national institution, it is worthwhile to check locally. For example, while most of Madge Macbeth’s papers are in the National Archives of Canada, her later papers are in the Ottawa City Archives. • Records pertaining to magazines and newspapers such as the papers of two editors of The Canadian Magazine, Newton MacTavish and John A. Cooper, both at the North York Public Library. Such collections may contain significant correspondence with authors whose work never appeared in their pages. • Records of publishers. For Canadian publishers, check the Canadian Publishers’ Records Database at Simon Fraser University: www. harbour.sfu.ca/ccsp/cprd.

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• Records of prominent men of letters like W. A. Deacon (University of Toronto), J. D. Logan (Acadia), Lorne Pierce (Queen’s) and Archibald MacMechan (Dalhousie).

Letter from Marie Joussaye to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada. Courtesy of National Archives of Canada, C146362-63.


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Discoveries and Puzzles You never know what waits in archives. My own forays into various Canadian custodial institutions offer three examples that provide insights into the historical workings of the Canadian literary institution by illustrating the position of minor women writers vis-à-vis powerful male figures. Archival material can reveal how the published texts of early women authors were shaped not only by the hand that held the pen but also by literary markets, cultural conventions and the interventions of

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editors and publishers. In many cases the unpublished text not only forms the subtext of the published work but is the more interesting document. My first example concerns the discovery of an otherwise undocumented practice in the editorial offices of one of Canada’s major literary publishers. While examining the files of women writers in the Macmillan archive at McMaster University, I came across several letters that indicate that during the 1930s, E. J. Pratt, as a paid reader for Macmillan, wielded considerable backstage power in determining what kind of poetry Macmillan published and by whom. This detail of our cultural history bears further investigation, especially by scholars reconsidering the construction of modernism in Canada.5 My other examples introduce the dimension of social class into the construction of Canadian literary culture. The Laurier papers in the National Archives of Canada contain three letters from Marie Joussaye (1897, n.d.) and the MacMechan papers at Dalhousie include one letter from Jennie Nelson Smith (1925). In their correspondence, both women present themselves as working-class poets determined to enter the cultural mainstream. While they seek approval from men of stature, they are in no way acquiescent; Smith’s letter announces to MacMechan that despite his advice not to publish her poems, she has gone ahead and done so at her own expense.6 In her Preface to the book in question, Moor-Mists (Halifax: Royal Print, 1925), Smith asserts her right to literary expression despite her lack of education, a stance taken earlier by Marie Joussaye when she requested Laurier to present her poems to Queen Victoria during his 1897 visit to Britain.7 Such letters challenge and considerably broaden our received notions about both the conception of literature and the history of literary activity in this country. Just as you never know what is awaiting discovery in archives, you also cannot anticipate the directions in which your archival research might send you. Such is the case with the Canadian Publishers’ Records Database, produced by the Publishers’ Papers Project at the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, with funding from SSHRC. This project began with an innocent inquiry regarding the location of Canadian publishers’ papers in order to retrieve the correspondence of women writers with their editors and publishers. It has subsequently ballooned into a national database that includes more than 1,400 records relating to secular English-language book publishing in what is now Canada, from the beginnings to 1995. New technologies create new horizons and fresh possibilities for researchers seeking archival records. Electronic research tools also create new problematics due to their dependence upon the exigencies and pri-


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orities affecting resources and institutions, including granting agencies, universities, libraries and archives. At their best, they enhance access to the unpublished past, enabling us to deepen our understanding of the construction of culture and cultural value in Canada.

Notes 1 See Diana Pedersen, Changing Women, Changing History: A Bibliography of the History of Women in Canada, 2nd ed. (Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1996) 93-94. The thirty-three items listed under ‘‘Archives’’ include twenty-six regional or institutional guides. Of these, seventeen were published between 1974 and 1981 (peak years being 1977 and 1978); the remaining nine trickle through 1985-94. 2 Matthew Sheard to Carole Gerson, 2 July 1990 and 25 September 1990, Hammond papers, Archives of Ontario, MU 3385, 10-D. 3 A fine example of the possible rewards of persistent research appears in the work done by W. H. New on Winifred Bambrick, whose novel, Continental Review, won the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 1946. See his essay, ‘‘Looking for Winifred Bambrick,’’ in Glen Carruthers and Gordana Lazarevich, eds., A Celebration of Canada’s Arts, 1930-1970 (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ P, 1996) 29-35. 4 See Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson, Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000). 5 See Carole Gerson, ‘‘The Canon between the Wars: Field-Notes of a Feminist Literary Archeologist,’’ Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed. Robert Lecker (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991) especially 53-54. 6 Smith to MacMechan, 1 October 1925, MacMechan papers, item 874, Special Collections, Dalhousie University Library. 7 See Carole Gerson, ‘‘Only A Working Girl: The Story of Marie Joussaye Fotheringham,’’ Nor thern Review 19 (Winter 1998): 141-60.

Works Cited Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990. Bellingham, Susan. Isabel Ecclestone Mackay Bibliography. Waterloo: University of Waterloo Library, 1987. Carter, Kathryn. Diaries in English by Women in Canada, 1753-1995: An Annotated Bibliography. Ottawa: CRIAW, 1997. Dean, Joanna, and David Fraser. Women’s Archives Guide: Manuscript Sources for the History of Women. Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1991. Department of Archives and Special Collections, University of Manitoba Libraries. The Papers of Dorothy Livesay. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1986. Dyer, Klay, Sue Martin and Lucy Sussex, comps. Canadian Women’s History Bibliography. Ottawa: CIHM, 1997.

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Carole Gerson. ‘‘The Canon between the Wars: Field-Notes of a Feminist Literary Archeologist.’’ Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Ed. Robert Lecker. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. 46-56. . ‘‘Only A Working Girl: The Story of Marie Joussaye Fotheringham.’’ Nor thern Review 19 (Winter 1998): 141-60. Hoad, Linda. Literar y Manuscripts at the National Library of Canada. 2nd ed. Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1990; updated April 1998. Light, Beth. Sources in Women’s History at the Public Archives of Ontario. Toronto: OISE, 1977. Meese, Elizabeth A. ‘‘Archival Materials: The Problem of Literary Reputation.’’ Oppor tunities for Women’s Studies Research in Language and Literature. Vol. 1 of Women in Print. Ed. Joan E. Hartman and Ellen MesserDavidow. New York: MLA, 1982. 37-46. Montgomery, L. M. Selected Journals. Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. 4 vols. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1985-98. Moodie, Susanna. Letters of a Lifetime. Ed. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins and Michael Peterman. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985. . Letters of Love and Duty: The Correspondence of John and Susanna Moodie. Ed. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins and Michael Peterman. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Moore, Jean M. Mapping the Territory: A Guide to the Archival Holdings, Special Collections, University of Calgary Librar y. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1994. National Archives of Canada. Literar y Archives Guide. Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1988. Pedersen, Diana L. Changing Women, Changing History: A Bibliography of the Histor y of Women in Canada. 2nd ed. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1996. Russell, Ruth Weber, D. W. Russell and Rea Wilmshurst. Lucy Maud Montgomer y: A Preliminar y Bibliography. Waterloo: University of Waterloo Library, 1986. Strong-Boag, Veronica, and Carole Gerson. Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Traill, Catharine Parr. I Bless You in My Heart: Selected Correspondence. Ed. Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins and Michael Peterman. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Whiteman, Bruce. The Archive of the Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd. Par t I, 1905-1965. McMaster University, Archives and Research Collections, 1984.

Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity Helen M. Buss

Part of what Domna Stanton has called ‘‘the global and essentially therapeutic’’ task of constituting ‘‘the female subject’’1 is archival research into the autobiographical writings of women in the past. This kind of research brings with it special reading problems and special reading responsibilities which I would like to address by the exploration of accounts in archival collections through theoretical insights concerning subjectivity offered by Michel Foucault, Philippe Lejeune and Teresa de Lauretis. In ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ Foucault questions the traditional assumptions we make about the subjectivity of the writing consciousness of a given document, advocating that we abandon the traditional authorial ‘‘privileges of the subject’’ and reconsider it ‘‘to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its systems of dependencies.’’2 When undertaking this ideological reconstitution of what subjectivity was for an actual subject in a given historical moment—a subject whose written archival remains may or may not have been meant as a public representation of that subject’s ‘‘self’’—ethical issues arise which, as Philippe Lejeune points out, bring up questions of the abuse of materials and the distortion of the subject position caused by the past silence of nonliterary classes, the imposition of identity by the ruling classes and ‘‘the dissociation of those who collect the life stories and those who, eventu-

Notes to this article are on p. 34. 23

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ally, will use them.’’3 In order to avoid what Lejeune calls being ‘‘studied from above’’ in a mediation act which becomes appropriation rather than explication (202), the archival researcher needs to establish research methodologies that are ethical as well as scholarly. For those concerned with women’s personal narratives, this task is especially inflected by the fact that, as de Lauretis points out (quoting Joan Kelly): ‘‘[in] any historical forms that patriarchal society takes (feudal, capitalist, socialist, etc.), a sex-gender system . . . operate[s] . . . to reproduce the socio-economic and male-dominant structures of that patriarchal social order’’ and, therefore, ‘‘the construction of gender is the product and process of both representation and selfrepresentation.’’4 For me, this implies that the researcher in the archive must be sensitive to the fact that while the woman writing her autobiographical account may be, as a matter of course, representing the sexgender system of her society, she may also be an agent—because of the very nature of her life experience—in constructing a self-representation away from those restrictions. In order to illustrate the three cautionary statements by the theorists I have summarized, cautions involving the complexity of locating subjectivity, acknowledging class issues in historical context and accounting for the construction of gender, I would like to point to differences made in the construction of one part of a woman’s personal narrative by the fact that it comes to us in three different forms. There are three versions of the courtship and marriage of Marie Rose Smith, a Métis woman born in 1861 in what was to become Manitoba. These are contained in larger narratives that relate a life story which spans the height of the Métis dominance of the plains, the ranching culture in Alberta (she and her white husband settled at Pincher Creek) and the changes of the modern world where, as a widow, Marie Rose faced war, depression and the loss of the settler culture. She died in Edmonton in 1960. I will be dealing with only a small part of her personal narrative in this discussion, the account of her courtship and marriage that she wrote as chapter 1 of ‘‘The Adventure of the Wild West 1870.’’ I use a typewritten transcript which is a virtual reproduction of her handwritten account completed some time in the 1930s and/or 1940s and kept in the Glenbow Archives, Calgary. An edited serial version of the first account then appeared under the title ‘‘Eighty Years on the Plains’’ in the Canadian Cattlemen magazine in 1948-49; the fourth instalment of this serial contains the story of her courtship and marriage. A third version of Marie Rose’s courtship and marriage is narrated in chapter 4 of Smith’s granddaughter Jock Carpenter’s novelistic biography, Fifty Dollar Bride: Marie Rose

Buss / Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive

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Smith—A Chronicle of Métis Life in the 19th Century.5 I would like to consider some of the different constructions of Marie Rose Smith’s subjectivity as revealed by these three sources using the three theoretical positions as guidelines for my inquiry. The narration of a woman’s entrance into matrimony is certainly a likely place to study how she functions as a human subject, what her system of dependencies are and how, as a human subject, she intervenes in the accepted discourse of marriage tales. The archival account tells an ambiguous story, considering the expected cheerful construction of this part of life. Marie Rose speaks with respect and love of her mother and yet indicates that it was her mother who sold her into marriage to an older man, a man who has, because of the language difference between them, mistaken her fear for consent: ‘‘After a long talk [with her mother and stepfather] he asked my mother for me to marry him. Mother was rather surprised, but he told her that he had asked me yesterday and I had said yes. That word ‘yes’ was misunderstood. It was alright for Charley Smith, but not for me. So it was arranged that I was to marry and Charley Smith gave a present of fifty dollars to my mother, I being an orphan girl’’ (her biological father is dead) (10). The interesting aspect of this account of the courtship is that Smith allows the ambiguities of her situation to exist in the text without resolution: Charley’s story, an almost heroic tale of strength and intelligence in getting on in the new world, is told as part of the marriage tale. He is not characterized as a wrongdoer, only as a man in need of a wife. Neither mother nor stepfather is characterized as coercive; both merely figure as negotiating the best possible future for their daughter and appear aware of the contractual implications of saying ‘‘yes’’ to a man, even if you misunderstood the question. At the same time, Smith does not hide her own very real objections to the marriage: ‘‘I cried real loud and said ‘no, no, mother, I never did. He got hold of me, I said yes for him to let me go, not knowing what he was saying. Mother, I don’t want to get married’ ’’ (10). As archival reader, I can best understand the unresolved construction of this account by locating Smith’s ‘‘system of dependencies’’ as a human subject. As a woman writing from a complex subject position, as the long-time wife of Charley who is deceased at the time of writing, as mother of his many children, as grandmother of a large extended family, she gives him his fair place in the story. As the living representative in the twentieth century of a very different nineteenth-century world, she accepts the ways of her parents. However, as an individual human female she allows her own oppositional story to inform these other aspects of her subjectivity.

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It is interesting to see how the account changes under the editorial guidance of Canadian Cattlemen, a magazine published for the benefit of the settler culture that grew out of the cultural mosaic inhabited by Charley Smith and his bride. It is here we can see not only the importance of understanding the class issues that Lejeune alerts us to but of locating the different racial/cultural issues that are foregrounded or backgrounded by the Cattlemen’s account. Although in many ways a copy of the archival document, this version offers a more consistent and detailed story, one in which a young girl is definitely married off against her will. This is achieved in a number of ways—for example, by adding this editorial paragraph: ‘‘So I, a little girl of sixteen years, was forced into a marriage with a man twenty years my senior, and of whom I knew nothing.’’ We are guided as readers to give greater attention to Marie Rose’s personal dilemma. As well, the emphasis on Charley Smith’s life and accomplishments increases, once more constructing the individual at centre stage. We learn that when she resisted consummation of the marriage, Smith is advised by friends to ‘‘beat her into submission . . . but Charley was patient and determined to win me through love’’ (220). The story has more literary drama and sensation than the factual narration of the archival account. Marie Rose’s resistance is also more detailed in this account: ‘‘when night came and I was alone with my stranger husband, alone in a camp of our own, such fear seized me, that I bound my clothes about me with raw hide ropes’’ (220). In the first account Smith excludes this detail, and ends the narrative of her courtship and marriage after acknowledging that Charley was ‘‘patient’’ in this way: Our honeymoon was not all honey, it was more like sour grapes to me. The summer I put in, I will never forget. I would wander away alone and cry to my heart’s content. As the years rolled by I commenced to realize that I had to obey, it was a hard task for me. One consolation my parents travelled with us all summer, through the day I would forget my troubles playing around with my sisters and brother but towards evening my heart would commence to throb. What a feeling, no one knows but myself. Young girls take my advice and never marry too young like I did, otherwise you’ll stand the consequences. (11)

Although the Cattlemen’s account includes some of this material, it is not privileged as Smith’s final statement on the marriage. Rather, the account of the marriage ends with a description of her later place as wife and mother at their ranch in Pincher Creek (Smith’s first account follows her ‘‘advice’’ to young girls with an account of her adopted Sioux brother before the introduction of the Pincher Creek material).


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Marie Rose Smith with husband Charles and daughter Mary Ann. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives, Calgary, NA-2539-1.

The difference in construction of class, race and historical moment in the two accounts is not a simple one. At first glance, and given our current postcolonial habit of locating aboriginal peoples as victim and all whites as exploiters, it would be easy to read the Cattlemen’s account as the oppressor’s history that works to exclude the existence of aboriginal peoples and glorify white settlement. Generally speaking, however, the account includes as much of Smith’s encyclopedic memory of the Indian, Métis and white cultures of the nineteenth-century prairie culture as does her earlier account. Indeed, someone obviously worked hard to get her to enlarge and explain some points. The difference is more subtle, and comes not so much from what is told and what is not, but from narrative ordering and placement of events, observations, etc. In short, I find that by attempting to construct a more linear, consequential and

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consistent narrative, one centred on individual situations, an acceptably historical narrative for the fact-oriented readers of their journals—readers who seem interested in both the price of beef and the idiosyncratic figures of their own ‘‘pioneer’’ heritage—the Cattlemen’s editors have constructed a twentieth-century, middle-class difference in Smith’s nineteenth-century world. The second version loses the integrated communal sense that Smith had of her marriage, where the facts of her suffering are equal in value to her parents’ practicality, Charley ’s patience and her Sioux brother’s misfortunes.

Métis camp near Fort Ellice, ca. 1882. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives, Calgary, NA-1041-11.

The second account is a more individualistic view of the world. The conditions of individuals are foregrounded to the detriment of their communities. Ironically, in making Marie Rose’s predicament more dramatic, more that of the victim, the second account tends to eliminate the even-voiced, authoritative narrator of the first account, a human agent able to access the various positions of the actors in her story and give them credit where they deserve it, while being fair to herself as actor in her own life. This difference is a little more subtle than just a class one


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or, indeed, one attuned to the different racial values of white society and aboriginal society. It is a difference of historical moment, whereby the liberal humanist individualism of the early twentieth century plays differently with the autobiographical text than does its nineteenth-centuryraised author who, not only because of her Métis communal origins but also because of her historical location and her gender, exhibits a much more complex human subjectivity than the Cattlemen’s editors can account for in their earnest retelling of her story.

Interior of a Métis house, 1874. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives, Calgary, NA-47-10.

As granddaughter of Marie Rose Smith, Jock Carpenter would be expected to have more complex and compelling reasons for writing her ancestress’s life than do the editors of Canadian Cattlemen. She does. The account shows a genuine and well-researched effort to include the detail of Métis culture which Smith often leaves unexplicated in her own account and which is often backgrounded in the Cattlemen’s account by more sensational details of the hard and violent life of the early plains. This is the only one of the three accounts that names Marie Rose and her family as ‘‘Métis,’’ and in doing so claims that heritage for the author ’s generation. Thus, Marie Rose’s subjectivity becomes contextualized in her community in a way that present-day readers may even miss in the original account (Smith herself taking community so much for granted that she hardly sees the need to explain its effect on herself).

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As well, we see an attention to the gendered response of the human subject that is interestingly different from both the previous accounts. By the use of the techniques of the novel, Carpenter is able to represent the conditions of the forced marriage and its effect on female gendering as in this representation of the wedding night: ‘‘A pile of robes heaped on one side was to be her marriage bed she guessed. Sinking down on the pile she could feel her stomach knotting and cold fingers clutching her bowels. She felt a band constricting her breathing which was coming in short painful gasps. Now she knew the feeling of a wild animal caught in a trap’’ (56). The sensory details allow for a manifestation of the physical effect of the threat of rape and accurately call our attention to the enormity of its effect on female subjectivity by the comparison with the trapped animal. Indeed, reading Carpenter’s novelized account intertextually with Smith’s subdued reference to her honeymoon being ‘‘not all honey’’ certainly increased the impact of both accounts. Throughout this chapter, as the book’s title indicates, Carpenter foregrounds gender and the effects of being ‘‘a fifty dollar bride.’’ However, since as Smith’s biographer Carpenter is also writing her own grandfather’s story, she has a double imperative impacting on those who name themselves Métis: the task of being fair to one’s aboriginal and European ancestry at the same time. Therefore, her gendered response to her grandmother’s female predicament is mediated and made complex by her cultural agendas. Thus, with the novelistic ability to enter into the feelings of her biographical subjects, Carpenter constructs this version of the wedding: ‘‘No two people could have had more diverse feelings than the pair who stood at the altar that day. Resignation folded over Marie Rose like a leaden blanket. The bride’s feelings were those of depression, despair, and forlornness while the groom was elated. Drawing on her youth he became younger; he was assured, confident’’ (55). I find here an interesting depiction of the way in which, as the agency of the female child fades to the passivity of the bride, the male becomes a more effective human agent by appropriating his bride’s youth. At this moment, my reader should become alert to what Lejeune calls being ‘‘studied from above’’ since as a white, academic feminist my construction of Carpenter’s construction of Smith’s life is not measured by a need to construct Métis cultural response. My ideological agenda regarding the sex-gender system, both of Smith’s time and my own and Carpenter ’s present moment, is very different from Carpenter’s. Although she wishes to foreground the seriousness of the forced mar-


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riage, Carpenter’s overriding aim is to rescue a Métis heritage that honours both her ancestors. Thus, she is careful to characterize her grandfather ’s motives in more detail than the ‘‘patience’’ of the other accounts: ‘‘Charley good naturedly took the sly jibes of the men about his wedding night. Saying nothing, he watched his new wife carefully, seeing the drawn face, the hurt in the dark eyes and the dignity which kept her feelings under control. He loved her, wanted her, but he would not—could not—hurt her’’ (56). As well, in being fair to her grandfather, she indicates that Marie Rose’s eventual yielding is an act of deliberate choice: ‘‘Marie Rose made her decision, and the pile of ropes stayed in the corner’’ (57). This decision is motivated by Marie Rose discovering that her husband has been injured by a Sioux warrior’s attack. The scar has become infected; Marie Rose treats it and they become lovers. Smith’s characterization of her yielding in the first account is as follows: ‘‘As the years rolled by I commenced to realize that I had to obey, it was a hard task for me’’ (11). While Smith’s account ends with her ‘‘advice’’ to young girls about standing the ‘‘consequences,’’ Carpenter ’s chapter ends with the bride and groom, marriage now consummated, sharing tea at dawn: Marie Rose passed by her youth, slipping gently from the very young girl into the woman who stood beside her tall husband today. She realized that in spite of her fright, there were sweeter things and greater joys beckoning beyond the open door through which she had stepped. The prairies abounded with the pledge of immortality. The swelling bud and thrusting leaf responded to the wind’s warm breath and she too opened her heart to his new spring. From now on her thoughts would take another path and with changed senses she smelled the fragrance of the plains, and heard the children’s happy laughter, and the music of the trees. She heard the bird’s Te Deum on the wind as if for the first time. Looking back on her troubled days, Marie Rose knew God had answered her prayers; she had been relieved of her heavy load and given the strength with which to take the upward road. (58)

For the white, academic feminist seeking the exposure of the sexgender system through the sympathetic granddaughter’s account, the romantic closure is disturbing. There are several other disturbing presences in Carpenter’s account as well—for example, the patriarchal configuration of the mother’s part in the marriage. The mother is characterized as not just honouring what she assumes is a promise given, but seems more out for the money since Carpenter characterizes her as having ‘‘no intention of returning the fifty dollars now tucked away deep in her bosom’’ (52). In the original account, the destiny of the

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money, whether it will be used for the support of the family, for trade or even for Marie Rose’s future, is not supplied, and neither is this subtle suggestion that the mother trades her daughter for selfish reasons. To be fair to Carpenter, the romantic chapter 4 is not the ending of the book as in traditional novels but the beginning of a difficult life in which many more possibilities are opened for the female subject. The fact that the book is more biography than novel undermines the ending of chapter 4, but also points to its romantic gloss so out of keeping with some of the other chapters. From my own position as a long-time reader of novels and a student of the form, I find that it is the form as internalized by its female readers that mandates the romantic closure of Carpenter’s chapter 4. As Anne Cranny-Francis explains it, [the] novelistic antecedent of the contemporary romance is Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Pamela: or Vir tue Rewarded (1740), which deals with the constant battle of the servant girl heroine, Pamela Andrews, to protect her virginity from the assault by her ‘‘master.’’ Her success results in her marriage to this same man; that is, he does eventually deflower Pamela, but at a price. The tension of the novel arises from the fact that Pamela is constantly under threat of rape from the man who will become her husband and this rape fantasy remains a motivating force in romantic fiction.6

Cranny-Francis then outlines the tradition of the domestic romance and its ties to bourgeois class ideology, concluding that ‘‘these are not love stories so much as economic stories displaced into love story terms’’ (183). Indeed, what the novelistic closure and resolution of Carpenter’s chapter 4 does is normalize, in terms of a love story plot, an economic reality: white men could offer Métis families fifty dollars for their daughters in the 1870s on the prairies and the daughter would be considered lucky to be marrying up the economic scale, the parents having won a victory by insisting on a Catholic marriage in the bride’s language. It is important to remember that this ideological spin is mine and Cranny-Francis’s as feminists. A number of years ago, I might well have chosen the normalization through romance that occurs in Carpenter’s account, having been raised (as I assume Carpenter was and as all women who read or watch television are) in the romance tradition. The important thing to remember is that neither my reading or Carpenter’s reading of Marie Rose’s subjectivity is embedded in the original account. Smith’s subjectivity was informed by neither romance nor contemporary feminism. To each of her readers, the Cattlemen’s editors, her grand-


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daughter and her feminist reader, Smith is a fragmentation of identities to be bound up by whatever narratives we have internalized. That fragmentation contains many conflictual elements: child of the history of the plains, Métis, Catholic, French, child bride of a white man, pioneer mother of the settler culture, twentieth-century woman engaged in a small business and protester against wars that takes a mother’s sons, matriarch and woman suffering from the economic place of women. I could go on.

Marie Rose Smith (standing, right) with local residents of Pincher Creek. Mrs. Kootenai Brown, seated. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives, Calgary, NA-2539-10.

I could go on, but this is the place my research into my own reading assumptions has reached at this point in time. As a twentieth-century feminist, I have realized that in rescuing the female subject from the oblivion of the unread archive, I am as capable of malformation as any.

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Thus, my inquiry into the three theoretical positions is a problemization: can I locate the female subject, her system of dependencies, her intervention in discourse, while being careful not to deform the account by reading from above, from a class position as an academic that appropriates rather than explicates, and still be conscious of the feminist imperatives regarding the exposure of the sex-gender system that motivates my research from the beginning? At times the triple mandate seems impossible. However, even this brief exploration of one small section of Marie Rose Smith’s three stories teaches me some of the assumptions that I and others make as readers of her subjectivity. Further intertextual reading of the three accounts will aid me in breaking down the current ideological tendency of the academy to locate historical subjects in victor /victim duality. Because she has a foot in more than one camp, and the camps keep shifting throughout her life, Smith’s life in its three versions offers me an opportunity to observe how the working out of a female subjectivity over the history of the prairies over one hundred years can offer a reading of that history that does not seek either the dichotomy of victor/victim nor the hegemonic narratives of traditional historical or literary representations of that history. It may, indeed, make me a very good reader, one who can hold many possibilities of subjectivity without resorting to narrative closure as a release from the demands of multiplicity.

Notes 1 Domna C. Stanton, ‘‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?,’’ The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1987) 14. 2 Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?,’’ Language, Counter-Memor y, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 137. 3 Philippe Lejeune, ‘‘Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write,’’ On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1989) 206. 4 Teresa de Lauretis, The Technology of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987) 8-9. 5 Jock Carpenter, Fifty Dollar Bride: Marie Rose Smith—A Chronicle of Métis Life in the 19th Century (Hanna, AB: Gorman & Gorman, 1977). 6 Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1990) 178.

Researching Eighteenth-Century Maritime Women Writers: Deborah How Cottnam— A Case Study Gwendolyn Davies

Although the impact of theory in the 1980s and 1990s has altered approaches to the writing of literary history, the initial challenge of retrieving and researching primary material can still resonate with all the excitement associated with traditional detective work. Confronted by what Richard Altick has called ‘‘a vast and tangled puzzle—the contradictions, which the passage of time leaves behind in the form of history,’’ the scholar-sleuth may turn to resources as varied as railway timetables, muster rolls, literary manuscripts, diaries, letters, deeds or affidavits in order to reconstruct a sense of both text and author.1 However, when at the core of that puzzle lie the silences surrounding eighteenth-century women’s lives, the literary historian is challenged to re-create with sensitivity and diligence the profile and the spirit of the hitherto forgotten female writer. Such is the case of Deborah How Cottnam, who is probably Canada’s first anglophone woman writer. Born in 1728 and raised on Grassy Island off Canso, Nova Scotia, she died in Windsor, Nova Scotia, on 31 December 1806.2 I first found a reference to her when I was browsing through a scrapbook of newspaper columns by ‘‘Occasional,’’ a contributor to the Halifax Acadian Recorder in the post-World War I period. Writing on Saturday, 15 March 1919, he spoke of a ‘‘Mrs. Cotnam, the

Notes to this article are on pp. 48-50. 35

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widow of an officer of the British army,’’ a ‘‘writer of verse . . . in the style of Pope and his school.’’ A poem on ‘‘Recollection’’ was reprinted, including such representative stanzas of her ‘‘strong poetic feeling’’ and ‘‘genuine ability’’ as: What Recollection is—oh! Wouldn’t thou know? ’Tis the soul’s highest privilege below; A kind indulgence, by our Maker given— The mind’s perfection, and the stamp of heaven; In this alone, the strength of reason lies— It makes us happy, and it makes us wise.3

A reconstruction of Deborah How Cottnam’s childhood home on Grassy Island, 1730s-1740s, drawn from evidence gained in the archaeological dig. Drawing courtesy of Rob Ferguson, Archaeology Section, Parks Canada, Historic Properties, Halifax, NS.

No card indexes, conventional research sources or subsequent computer searches rendered any information about ‘‘Mrs. Cottnam,’’ but, by consulting war office records and the Amherst papers in the Public Record Office at Kew, I began to learn more about the movements of two Irish-born military officers, Samuel and George Cottnam, who served in the 40th Regiment of Foot in colonial Nova Scotia.4 This research was greatly abetted by the discovery at the Beaton Institute,

Davies / Deborah How Cottnam—A Case Study

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University College of Cape Breton, and at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia of detailed geneological and land grant work on the Cottnams done by Windsor, Nova Scotia, local historian Leslie Loomer. Although Mr. Loomer ’s work on the Cottnams did not illuminate ‘‘Mrs. Cottman’s’’ role as a poet, it did identify her as the daughter of a prosperous Irish-born merchant, investor and administrative official, Edward How, and as the wife of Captain Samuel Cottnam of the 40th Regiment of Foot.5 The careers of both men converged on Grassy Island, Canso, Nova Scotia, in the 1730s and 1740s, when Cottnam was stationed there at Fort William Augustus and when How used the island as the base for his entrepreneurial and political endeavours. Although subsequent research revealed that Deborah How was baptized, if not born, in Marblehead in 1728,6 there seems every evidence that between 1732 and 1744 she lived on Grassy Island, first with her parents and then as the young bride of Samuel Cottnam. At this point in my research, I was extremely fortunate to receive the assistance of Lois Yorke of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia (who did the Dictionar y of Canadian Biography entry on Cottnam)7 and of Judith Tulloch and Rob Ferguson of Parks Canada. Ms. Tulloch directed me to the grave of Deborah How’s mother, Deborah (Cawley) How, in the burial ground of King’s Chapel, Boston.8 This interested me in the records of the Cawley family in Marblehead and confirmed that, in marrying Deborah Cawley, Edward How had allied himself with one of Marblehead’s finest ‘‘fishocracy’’ families. It also suggested why, in the years following the destruction of Canso (Grassy Island) in 1744, Deborah How Cottnam and her husband chose to move to the SalemMarblehead area as their place of residence. On a more immediate level, Rob Ferguson, project archaeologist for the excavation and interpretation of several eighteenth-century buildings on Grassy Island, gave me insight into the material lifestyle of Deborah How Cottnam during her girlhood and teenage years there. Although one would have expected Grassy Island to have been a crude outpost of the New England frontier in the 1730s and 1740s, archaeological evidence from Edward How’s two-storey residence and his various outbuildings revealed ‘‘that the Hows dressed and drank in the comfortable manners of their class.’’9 Mr. Ferguson directed my attention to a 1742 plan of How’s property lodged in the Public Record Office, London; he also provided me with Parks Canada’s conjectural drawings of Deborah How Cottnam’s childhood home and showed me archaelogical evidence of glass, pottery and personal objects that revealed the sophistication of the Hows’ lifestyle ‘‘in the midst of an insular fishing village on the colonial frontier.’’10

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Wine glasses of English leaded crystal, tumblers of Bohemian glass, teacups of Chinese export porcelain and bowls of Turkish ware attested to the international worldview and cultural taste of the family. Surviving brass shoe buckles, an ornate silver neck buckle, glass cufflinks, wooden and brass buttons, watch keys and wig curlers all provided insight into standards of personal decoration and grooming. Material history, then, has done much to reveal to me the early lifestyle of the woman behind the poetry. So too has Parks Canada’s recent interpretation at the Grassy Island site of the view-planes and the physical surroundings that Deborah How Cottnam would have experienced.

Grave of Deborah Cawley How, mother of Deborah How Cottnam, King’s Chapel, Boston, MA. Grave is the stone in the foreground. Photograph courtesy of Gwendolyn Davies.

Parks Canada’s insights into the Grassy Island years has been reinforced by an 1828 letter by Cottnam’s daughter, Martha Cottnam Tonge, found in the Edward How Papers at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. Alerted to the existence of this letter by Leslie Loomer’s work and by Lois Yorke’s Dictionar y of Canadian Biography entry on Deborah How Cottnam, I found it invaluable in confirming that Deborah’s mother had died of illness in Boston in 1743; that Deborah was partly educated by


39

the Irish gentleman-officer, Captain Samuel Cottnam, stationed with the 40th Regiment on Grassy Island; that at sixteen she was both the wife of Cottnam and the mother of Martha; and that after 24 May 1744, she and the eleven-day-old Martha were both civilian prisoners of war in Louisbourg after the fall of Canso in a French raid.11 Monographs such as A. J. B. Johnson’s The Summer of 1744: A Por trait of Life in 18thCentur y Louisbourg helped to flesh out a sense of the property loss left behind on Grassy Island12 and confirmed Martha’s observation in her 1828 letter that ‘‘as they sailed out of the harbour they saw their Houses, Stores, Vessels and Boats all blazing bonfires.’’ Johnson’s monograph also revealed that, after coping with the unexpected provisioning and accommodation of over one hundred English prisoners of war, Louisbourg arranged, in July 1744, for civilian captives such as Deborah How Cottnam and her child to be sent to Boston. An item on 5 July 1744 in The Boston Weekly News-Letter attested to the fact that both military and civilian prisoners from Louisbourg had arrived in the city.13

German and English tankards, Chinese tea bowl and saucer, Turkish tea bowl, excavated from the How property, Grassy Island Historic Site, Parks Canada (Ref. 128-1436-T). Photograph courtesy of Parks Canada.

Research at the Essex Institute in Salem and in the Boston-Salem newspapers of the 1745-75 period showed that Deborah How Cottnam and her ‘‘half-pay ’’ officer husband eventually took up residence in Salem near her mother’s Marblehead connections and opened a store.14 St. Peter ’s Anglican Church records in Salem indicated that they held the

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French destruction of Canso, 1744, Grassy Island National Historic Site, Parks Canada. Reproduction of painting courtesy of the artist, Bruce Rickett, and Parks Canada.

third-most-expensive pew there and gave some insight into their uppermiddle-class social circle.15 With that information, I checked the indices to papers of leading Salem-Boston families at the Essex Institute, New England Historic Genealogical Association, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, and discovered three letters written by or about Deborah Cottnam in the 1771-92 period.16 Browsing through years of a Salem newspaper revealed that, after her husband had moved to Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1773, in anticipation of the American Revolution,17 she and her daughter Griselda had returned to Massachusetts to operate a school for young women in their well-situated home in Salem. They also had offered to take in ‘‘genteel’’ male boarders (probably British officers stationed in Salem serving under General Gage).18 However, as histories of Salem during the American Revolution indicate, the town was abuzz with patriot activity early in the War of Independence. Salem’s Tory sympathizers had hot coals piled against their front doors and were threatened with tarring and feathering. On 29 April 1775, a prudent Deborah Cottnam escaped with her daughter and the George DeBlois


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family, leaving everything behind.19 Ads in the Salem newspaper for the sale of the Cottnam home attested to their departure.20 Deborah Cottnam first joined her husband, Samuel, in Windsor, Nova Scotia, where their daughter Martha had settled after her 1762 marriage to gentlemanlandowner, Winckworth Tonge.21 By 1777, however, she had opened a school in Halifax, where Captain Samuel Cottnam died in 1780.22 It is at this juncture in the detective story of Deborah How Cottnam that I became interested in the Byles Family correspondence of Boston, Halifax and Saint John, housed in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, the National Archives of Canada, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Houghton Library at Harvard and the New England Historic Genealogical Association. As the young Byles refugees wrote to their aunts in Boston about their Loyalist-family nucleus in Halifax, the names of ‘‘Mrs. Cottnam’’ and her daughter, Griselda, began to emerge—having tea, renting parts of the Legislative Building for a Halifax girls’ school, acquiring a house in downtown Halifax and eventually moving in 1786 to Saint John to open another academy for young women.23 Newspaper ads for ‘‘Mrs. Cottnam’s’’ school reinforced the news of her movements and described a curriculum of French, mathematics, language and writing skills that would prepare students for a society demanding ‘‘propriety,’’ ‘‘correctness’’ and ‘‘rules of practice.’’24 It is a revelation of the calibre of Deborah Cottnam’s students that Rebecca Byles spent the summer of 1779 ‘‘translating a very long Sermon for Doctor Breynton, from French into English,’’ ‘‘in reading Pamela and Terence’s plays in French’’ and ‘‘in hearing Pope’s Homer.’’25 Another Cottnam student, Amelia Desbarres, produced a pleasing botanical watercolour in 1785, revealing in the detail of the roots and the blending of blues and greens an aesthetic as well as an educated eye.26 While it is not documented that Cottnam’s school included watercolour training in addition to its teaching of needlework, it would have been consistent with the curricula of other schools of the period had it done so. As Francina Irwin has pointed out, in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century women were increasingly working in watercolours because of their portability, their fast-drying qualities and their flexibility as a beginner’s medium. They were perceived as being more ‘‘lady-like’’ than were oils because of their absence of odour (‘‘just as real ladies did not eat strong cheeses’’), and they complemented the increasing focus on botanical, bird, shell and insect subject matter found in instructive drawing manuals as the century came to an end.27 Amelia Desbarres’s watercolour conformed to the educational conventions of its period and, with its menacing caterpillar wending its way toward the most suc-

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culent part of the plant, reflected the metaphysical values central to women’s curricula at the time. As Deborah Cottnam was to warn her students in a poem that she wrote for their samplers, ‘‘Observe in time, ye growing Fair! / How transient youth, & Beauty are.’’ Whether worked into worsted, into sampler art or into occasional verse, selfconscious morality was very much part of late-eighteenth-century women’s sensibility. Thus, it was incumbent upon young women, as Cottnam noted further in her ‘‘A Piece for a Sampler,’’ to Expand your Genius in its prime, Your mind inform, improve your time; New pleasures, each, new days shall give, And Virtue’s bloom, shall time out-live.28

Botanical watercolour by Amelia Desbarres, 1785. Reproduction courtesy of William Inglis Morse Collection, Vaughan Memorial Library, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS.

The discovery of Deborah Cottnam’s sampler poem came after a search through the family papers of prominent New Brunswick Loyalists for evidence of those who might have sent their daughters to her school established in Saint John in 1786. Writing to her uncle on 23 September 1786, Griselda Cottnam had indicated to him that the efforts of a number of New Brunswick families had been the impetus for her mother’s


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Deborah How Cottnam’s poem ‘‘A Piece for a Sampler,’’ from the copybook of Maria Ann Smart. Reproduction courtesy of The New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, NB.

removing her educational premises from Halifax to Saint John,29 although the Cottnams had at first entertained the possibility of opening a school in Boston. Thus, the Wolhaupter and Chipman Papers, found in the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick and the New Brunswick Museum respectively, revealed a letter and a poem (the latter signed with Cottnam’s pseudonym ‘‘Portia’’).30 Further poems, including the sampler verse, were found in a 1793 extract book belonging to Cottnam’s student, Maria Ann Smart, and gave evidence to the fact that Deborah Cottnam probably taught both penmanship and prosody by having her students copy her poems and those of others into their notebooks.31 Other poems emerged as Cottnam’s genealogical line was pursued, for her great-granddaughter, Griselda Tonge, was something of a literary celebrity in Nova Scotia before she died in 1825. Her poem, ‘‘To

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My Dear Grandmother,’’ begins with a tribute to ‘‘Portia’s hallow’d lyre.’’ In 1845 this recognition of her great-grandmother was reprinted in Joseph Howe’s newspaper, The Novascotian, with some of Deborah Cottnam’s poems. At this time Joseph Howe commended Cottnam for an earlier collection of her verse that he had seen.32 It has taken years of putting together bits and pieces to be able to say that I now have a body of Cottnam mother or daughter letters and a number of poems by one of our earliest Canadian woman writers. These documents reveal a skilled practitioner of the art of poesy. They also bring to life a sensitive intelligent woman, who, in 1794, wrote to one of her students: ‘‘My morning of Life was happy; but Fortune smiled deceitful; many have been the chances and changes of my pilgrimage, various the vicissitudes, poignant the afflictions.’’33 Yet the resilience with which Deborah How Cottnam met those vicissitudes has revealed much about the subculture of women’s educational, family and social influence in the eighteenth century—from the inspirational place she held in the eyes of her great granddaughter, the poet Griselda Tonge, to the role that she played in the lives of students such as Amelia Desbarres and Rebecca Byles. In the surviving correspondence of the Byles sisters, in particular, there is much to reinforce the insight into women’s lives that Cottnam’s poems and letters also provide. Clearly, after completing her education at Cottnam’s school in 1779, Rebecca Byles experienced a shifting sense of self as she moved from young womanhood to marriage. At age twenty-two, she was lively and liberated in her demeanour. She noted in a letter to her Boston aunts in March 1784 that ‘‘our Boys are all intended for the Army or Navy, or some post under Government where neither knowledge or Honesty are required. Indeed they retard a person’s advancement; to Dance; make a genteel Bow, fill up a printed message card, and sign a receipt for their pay compleat their education and they step forth accomplished Gentlemen.’’ With women, she noted, it was a different matter. Under the guidance of what was presumably her old teacher and friend, Deborah Cottnam, ‘‘they have the best Education the place affords and the accomplishment of their minds is attended to as well as the adorning of their persons.’’ With this education behind them, Rebecca Byles noted, she fully expected ‘‘in a few years . . . to see women fill the most important offices in Church and State.34 Yet only a year later, in June 1785, Rebecca Byles sounded much less enlightened about the role of women in her society. Already being wooed by the Loyalist doctor William Almon, she indicated to her aunts in Boston that she found the authorial role played by historian Catherine Macauley, then visiting New England, threatening to the ‘‘traits of


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Dr. William Almon, drawn by Anna Byles. Almon Scrapbook MG1, Vol. 14, p. 9. Reproduction courtesy of Public Archives of Nova Scotia.

the female character’’ and upsetting for ‘‘the balance of the sexes.’’35 Instead, as an irreverent sketch of Dr. Almon by Rebecca’s younger sister, Anna, suggests, Rebecca Byles’s world had narrowed to that of courtship and love. Modern readers rarely have an opportunity to see into the dynamics of the eighteenth-century family, but, in Anna’s playful caricature of Almon’s protruding chin and non-athletic body, there lies a world of conjecture, sibling teasing and even social commentary. Rebecca’s marriage to Dr. William Almon on 3 August 1785 was a love match, but it was also a marriage to a professional man of her class who was eight years her senior. Almon’s hairstyle, hat and riding crop in the sketch suggest his gentlemanly status in Nova Scotian society in the 1780s, an environment that expected Rebecca Byles to abandon her youthful exuberance and educational vision to conform to established matronly patterns. How quickly she adapted to those standards of social expectation is illustrated by a letter that she wrote in April 1786 to her friend Eliza Belcher of Boston, indicating that, after eight months of marriage, she proceeded ‘‘into company with reluctance’’ and returned ‘‘to our dear little parlour with heighten’d pleasure.’’ ‘‘Happy in the full

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possession of all my Heart holds dear,’’ noted Rebecca Byles Almon, ‘‘I feel my wishes bounded, my ideas contracted.’’ To ‘‘deserve a continuance of my Almon’s affection to make him Happy, and to show every little attention in my Power ’’36 was now the sole focus of her existence. When informed in 1821 that her Boston relative Hannah (Mather) Crocker had become an outspoken feminist, she dismissed this perceived erosion of female identity with the comment, ‘‘Poor woman. She is certainly crackt.’’37 As with the case study of Deborah How Cottnam, material history throws new light on the social context in which Rebecca Byles Almon functioned. Cynthia Huff has pointed out that picture postcards, pressed flowers, locks of hair and lace handkerchiefs can be as much signifiers of a subject’s life as can diaries.38 Similarly, the ‘‘extended’’ archives of wine goblets, wig curlers and samplers may explain much about the class pressures on a Deborah How Cottnam or a Rebecca Byles. Thus, when the Reverend Mather Byles II composed lines for the samplers of his daughters, Eliza and Anna, in 1778, his sentiments for Eliza’s sampler reflected her political status not only as a Loyalist refugee but also as a middle-class conciliatory female and a daughter: I a young Exile from my native Shore Start at the Flash of Arms and dread the Roar; My softer soul, not form’d for Scenes like these Flies to the Arts of Innocence, and Peace; My Heart exults while to the attentive eye The curious Needle spreads the enamel’d Dye While varying Shades the pleasing Task beguile My Friends approve me, and my parents smile.39

Eliza’s sampler vividly captures the emotional trauma of a small girl uprooted from her home and catapulted into a foreign environment. To paraphrase a popular Tory song of the Revolution, her world has been ‘‘turned upside down.’’ Her sampler verse indicates this when it begins: ‘‘I a young Exile from my native Shore / Start at the Flash of Arms and dread the Roar.’’ The succeeding lines of Eliza’s sampler poem are more conventional in the way in which they inscribe her place as dutiful daughter, congenial friend and diligent needlewoman. However, in their portrayal of Tory Loyalists turning to the arts as an escape from the horrors of revolution, they are consistent with other verses by the Loyalist community in the Maritimes in the 1770s and 1780s. Although Eliza’s sampler has not survived, references in family letters suggest the happy collaboration between Mather Byles and his daughters in the creation of their sampler verses. Nonetheless, the girls could


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hardly have been aware of the degree to which their father’s verses defined their place in the social hierarchy. Certainly, the 1781 sampler stanza written by Byles for his ten-year-old daughter, Sarah, encodes even more so than does Eliza’s poem the perceived separate spheres of men and women in the eighteenth century. Using the needle of the compass as the defining point for man, Byles fixes men in the public world of eighteenth-century science and exploration: ‘‘Man points his needle to the distant Pole / Vast are his views and boundless is his Soul.’’ Sustaining the word ‘‘compass’’ as his metaphor, Byles then develops the narrower sphere or ‘‘compass’’ of women’s lives, measuring their femininity by the aesthetic attractiveness of what their needles create: Various has nature form’d the female mind, Our hands are delicate, our skill refin’d. In narrower Compass but with equal Art Touches from us mysterious pow’rs impart And man acknowledges in all his Pride Needles attract when our fair fingers guide.40

While the verse encodes women’s status, it also gives them the moral high ground by targeting male pride, a sentiment not inconsistent with Byles’s position as a clergyman and with the gendered roles of the sexes in eighteenth-century society. As a teacher, Deborah Cottnam obviously recognized the role that ‘‘plain work,’’ ‘‘fine work’’ and samplers played in providing students with aesthetic enjoyment and in preparing them for the future demands of domestic and teaching life. As a poet, Cottnam also identified the function of the sampler as an alternative text for women’s literary and artistic expression. Whereas in her own life she circulated her poetry in manuscript form, in public readings and in the commonplace books of her students, in her classroom she gave to her pupils a socially acceptable tool with which to express their artistic vision. As Deborah How Cottnam emerges from the shadows of time, she is still an indistinct literary figure. But she is no longer ‘‘Mrs. Cottnam,’’ a mere name in an old newspaper. Her voice now speaks through the influence of her teaching, through the accomplishments of her students, through the surviving letters of her family and friends and through her own poetry and correspondence. The process of recovery is not over, but for me, as for her daughter, Griselda, in 1809, Deborah How Cottnam now seems to be an ‘‘animated mother . . . a bright sun always cheerful.’’41

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Notes 1 Richard D. Altick, The Scholar Adventurers (New York: The Free Press, 1966) 2-3. 2 Headstone: ‘‘Sacred to the Honoured Memory of Mrs. Deborah Cottnam, Widow of S. Cottnam, Esq. Long an officer in his Majesty’s Service. She died 31 Dec 1806 Aged 78 years.’’ Old Parish Burying Ground, Windsor, Nova Scotia. See also New Brunswick Royal Gazette 21 Jan. 1807: 49. 3 ‘‘Occasional’s Letter,’’ Acadian Recorder 15 Mar. 1919: 171. 4 For example, see The Amherst Papers, vol. 90, Miscellaneous Papers and Letters to the Commander-in-Chief, 1762 (Jan.-June), W.O. 34/90, Public Record Office, Kew; The Amherst Papers, vol. 82, Miscellaneous Papers and Letters to the Commander-in-Chief, 1760 (Jan.-Aug.), W.O. 34/82, Public Record Office, Kew; S. Cottnam, Index of Names in Army Lists, 1717-52, 328j, W.O. 65, 11/13/14: 56; and Index to Closed Estate Papers, RG 48, vol. 381, 1750-1841, c 52, Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 5 See Leslie Loomer to Gwendolyn Shand, 29 Nov. 1979, MG1, vol. 2384, #7, PANS; L. S. Loomer to Rob Ferguson, Esq., 11 May 1981; ‘‘Notes for the Beaton Institute of the College of Cape Breton Compiled by L. S. Loomer, Windsor, Nova Scotia, November, 1981,’’ Beaton Institute; and L. S. Loomer to Robert Ferguson, 9 Nov. 1981. 6 ‘‘How, Deborah,’’ Bir ths, vol. 1 of Vital Records of Marblehead, Massachusetts to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem: Essex Institute, 1903) 278. 7 I am deeply indebted to Lois K. Yorke, Head, Manuscripts Division, Public Archives of Nova Scotia, for the leads that she gave me while we both worked on Deborah Cottnam. Her entry on Cottnam appeared in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983) 429-30. 8 Deborah Cawley How’s headstone in the old burial ground of King’s Chapel, Boston, reads: ‘‘Here Lyes The Body of Mrs. Deborah How / The Wife of Edward How, Esq. / Aged 38 years / Died Jan. 16, 1743/44.’’ 9 Anita Campbell, ‘‘The How Household,’’ Canadian Collector Mar.-Apr. 1985: 57. 10 Campbell 57. 11 Martha Tonge to Lieut. R. U. Howe, 1 Dec. 1828, Appendix C, Repor t of the Board of Trustees of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia (Halifax, NS: Queen’s Printer, 1962) 21-27. 12 A. J. B. Johnston, The Summer of 1744: A Por trait of Life in 18th-Century Louisbourg (Ottawa: National Historic Parks and Sites Branch, Parks Canada, 1983) 31. 13 The Boston Weekly News-Letter, #2101, 5 July 1744: 2. 14 The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal 30 July 1764: 3. 15 Harriet Silvester Tapley, St. Peter ’s Church in Salem, Massachusetts, Before the Revolution (Salem: Essex Institute, 1944) 42. 16 See Deborah Cottnam to Mrs. Barnes, Salem, 26 July 1774, J. M. Robbins Papers, 1774-77, 013.10, Massachusetts Historical Society; Thomas Aston Coffin to Mrs. Coffin, New York, 29 Aug. 1782, Thomas Aston Coffin Papers—I: 1769-1782, Massachusetts Historical Society; and Thomas Aston Coffin to Mrs. Coffin, Halifax, 20 Apr. 1784, Thomas Aston Coffin Papers, 1783-87, Massachusetts Historical Society.


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17 ‘‘Memorial, Mrs. Cottnam for Council,’’ 24 July 1784, RG 20 ‘‘A,’’ Reel 6, vol. 11-12A, 1785, Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 18 ‘‘Boarding for Young Ladies,’’ Essex Gazette 19 July 1774. 19 Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton, The History of King’s County (1910; Belleville: Mika Studio, 1972) 624-25. 20 Essex Gazette, vol. 3, #353, 25 Apr.-2 May 1775: 3. 21 Marriages, vol. 3 of Vital Records of Salem, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem: Essex Institute, 1924) 247. 22 Rebecca Byles to her aunts, Halifax, Nov. 1777, Byles Letters, MG 23, Public Archives of Canada. 23 See representative letters on 1 Oct. 1778, 16 Aug. 1780, 18 Sept. 1780, 3 Oct. 1781, 8 Sept. 1786 and 19 Jan. 1790, ms. N-38, Byles Family Papers, 1757-83, Box 1 of 3, Massachusetts Historical Society. 24 ‘‘Education for Young Ladies: Mrs. Cottnam,’’ The Nova Scotia Gazette and the Weekly Chronicle 6 Jan. 1789. 25 R. Byles to ‘‘My Ever Dear Aunt,’’ 6 Jan. 1779, Byles Collection, MG1, vol. 163, Folder 3, Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 26 Watercolour by Amelia Desbarres, 21 Oct. 1785, Sydney, William Inglis Morse Collection, Vaughan Memorial Library, Acadia University. Amelia Desbarres was the daughter of J. F. W. Desbarres, the hydrographer whose charting of the coastline of North America was published in the Atlantic Neptune in 1777. He was Governor of Cape Breton from 1784 to 1786, the period in which Amelia executed her watercolour. 27 Francina Irwin, ‘‘Amusement or Instruction? Watercolour Manuals and the Woman Amateur,’’ Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1995) 149-51. 28 ‘‘A Piece for a Sampler,’’ Canadian Poetr y from the Beginnings through the First World War, ed. Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1994) 34. 29 G. Eliza Cottnam to Alexander Burgoyne Howe, St. John, New Brunswick, 23 Sept. 1786, Edward How Papers, MG1, vol. 474, doc. 240, Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 30 ‘‘Birth-day-address,’’ 2 June 1783, Ward Chipman Papers, Microfilm M-153, Public Archives of Canada. See also D. Cottnam to Nancy, Halifax, 16 March 1794, Wolhaupter Papers, MC 30/18/2, Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. 31 Maria Ann Smart’s Extract Book, St. John, NB, 6 Aug. 1793, The New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, NB. 32 ‘‘The Fount,’’ Acadian Recorder 5 Mar. 1825. See also ‘‘Nights with the Muses,’’ The Novascotian 16 June 1845. 33 D. Cottnam to Nancy, Halifax, 16 Mar. 1794, Wolhaupter Papers, MG 300/18/2, Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. 34 Rebecca Byles to ‘‘Aunt,’’ 24 Mar. 1784, Byles Letters, MG 23, D6, Public Archives of Canada. 35 R. Byles to Aunt Kitty, 1 June 1785, vol. 3, Byles Letters, MG 23, D6, Public Archives of Canada. 36 Rebecca Almon to Eliza Belcher, Halifax, 3 Apr. 1786, Belcher-JennisonWeiss Papers, 1730-1905, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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37 Rebecca Almon to Aunts, Halifax, 18 Sept. 1821, Byles Letters, MG1, vol. 5.18, Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 38 Cynthia Huff, ‘‘That Profoundly Female and Feminist Genre: The Diary as Feminist Practice.’’ Women’s Studies Quarterly 17.3-4 (Fall / Winter 1989): 8. 39 ‘‘Wrought in Miss E. Byles Sampler,’’ Eliza Byles to Miss Polly Byles, 29 Sept. 1778, Byles Papers, 1757-83, Box 1, File folder 1771-1779, ms. N-38, Massachusetts Historical Society. 40 Sarah Byles Sampler, #41, ‘‘A Record for Time,’’ 28 Feb.-28 Apr. 1985, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. 41 J. Eliza Cottnam to Lieut. Alexander Howe, R.N., Windsor, 5 Mar. 1809, Edward How Papers, MG1, vol. 474, Envelope 121, Public Archives of Nova Scotia.

‘‘A Dusting Off’’: An Anecdotal Account of Editing the L. M. Montgomery Journals Mary Rubio

When I was a graduate student in the United States, I turned a fascinated eye on the eminent professors at my institution who were textual editors working on variorum editions of dead male authors. I saw them as musty old gentlemen who looked permanently bent, permanently out of touch with the passions of real life and imperceptibly covered with a fine gray dust. They dealt in footnotes. A scant twenty-two, I wondered how they endured such boredom. Thirty-odd years later, I, too, edit scholarly books. But life is hardly boring. Like many women scholars working in women’s texts, I have found that editorial work is full of endlessly interesting challenges.1 When Dr. E. Stuart Macdonald, L. M. Montgomery’s son, asked me to edit his mother’s diaries, he told me that it would be a difficult task. He was not thinking that the editing itself might present problems; he merely thought that the public would be shocked at his mother’s diaries. He had been her literary executor for forty years. He knew her fans were legion, worldwide and exceedingly devoted to her memory. Since his mother’s diaries presented a side of her quite different from the implied author of her works, upset devotees would be rather inclined to ‘‘shoot the messenger,’’ he warned, adding, ‘‘there will be some nasty letters and phone calls.’’ I thought he was overstating the case, for he, like his mother, had a heightened sense of the dramatic. Time has


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proved him right, although my challenges certainly began before the published journals2 met the public eye. Normally, difficulties in editing start with getting access to materials.3 Fortunately, I had no problems, since the University of Guelph had purchased copyright ownership when it purchased the Montgomery diaries from her son, Dr. Macdonald. The contract of sale designated me as ‘‘licensee,’’ with permission to publish and develop the materials however I judged suitable. I expected the project would fall easily into place from this point. Problems began when I started looking for financial assistance to edit the diaries. The L. M. Montgomery diaries consisted of some five thousand legal-size pages of hard-to-read handwriting, and they first had to be transcribed. Word-processing computers were just coming into use in the humanities at this time, but they were very, very expensive. Funding was essential. Money was available from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council—for any good project. I expected the ‘‘Montgomery Project’’ to find ready acceptance. In 1980, the revision of the canon was underway: women’s writing was gaining respectability. I expected Canadian academics to be eager to place Montgomery on the worldwide stage of influential women writers. After all, she had maintained a readership that had kept almost all of her novels continuously in print since 1908, when she had published her first best-seller, Anne of Green Gables. In addition, her books had been touchstones for scores of emerging women writers ever since. I thought that all that stood between me and funds was writing up a good grant proposal for SSHRC. My first application to SSHRC in 1980-81 was turned down. Several assessors were hostile to spending any money whatsoever on Montgomery. They simply did not consider her worthy of scholarly attention. After all, they noted, she had lived most of her life in a rural community, never near ‘‘a center of culture.’’ She wrote popular books, and these were only read by females and children. (This idea was wrong, of course. Montgomery’s books were originally written for a general audience of men, women and older adolescents, and men read her books as much as women did. For instance, the prime minister of England, Stanley Baldwin, made a point of seeking her out during a 1927 Canadian tour because he loved her books so much.) One of these SSHRC assessors put his opinion bluntly: ‘‘For, to be brutal, Montgomery has a very limited appeal and challenge.’’4 Then, lest someone think he didn’t know that females went quite sentimental over her books, this assessor

Ru b i o / Editing the L. M. Montgomery Journals

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added, ‘‘I mean that in the literary-critical sense, of course.’’ The implication was clear that the females lacked discrimination. Thus, the project seemed doomed by Montgomery’s female audience, her sheer popularity and her location outside the canon.

Anne of Green Gables, 1st edition, published April 1908, superimposed on a journal page, dated 20 June 1908. Photograph courtesy of Ted Carter, University of Guelph Archives.

Despite the assessors’ opinions, however, the SSHRC officials themselves suggested that I reapply in a subsequent year, and they gave some funds to sustain the project. By this time, Dr. Macdonald had died, and my colleague, Professor Elizabeth Waterston, a highly respected senior scholar in Canadian and Scottish literature, had agreed to work with me.5 However, to my disappointment, in 1983 the same kind of comments damned the project again: ‘‘The significance . . . [of the Mont-

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gomery diaries] is limited. Montgomery was an able third-rate (by world standards) writer with a powerful and lasting appeal to leisure readers. She did not, as far as I know, have much special access to great historical events or history-makers. Her . . . emotional reactions to the passing scene . . . [might] have some interest.’’

Photograph of a young girl from an American magazine which Montgomery used as her model for ‘‘Anne of Green Gables.’’ Photograph courtesy of University of Guelph Archives.

But by this time the winds of international scholarship had started blowing through the Canadian academy. Although women were still regarded as ‘‘emotional’’ rather than ‘‘rational’’ or ‘‘intellectual,’’ the material and psychological conditions of their lives were gathering increasing attention; as well, women’s diaries and other texts were being recovered by feminist scholars. Of course, it goes without saying that


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those submitting grant applications have to argue their cases convincingly to win over sceptical assessors. And this could be difficult when assessors were usually prestigious older scholars—mostly males at that time—who were resistant to change. The SSHRC application was redone and it went in once again. Fortunately, the third application in 1984 was successful. One assessor—a younger male, it turned out—took the earlier assessors to task for being old-fashioned.6 This professor, who had an established scholarly reputation despite his relatively young age, vigorously asserted the still somewhat controversial idea that both popular books and women’s writing were important, even if they were outside the ‘‘canon.’’ His assessment helped turn the tide—the project was finally funded. After Dr. Macdonald had first asked me to edit the diaries, we had together consulted several publishers, most of whom expressed interest in the publishing project. All had been adamant that only selections from the original diaries could be published. The sheer bulk of Montgomery’s ‘‘life-books’’—ten volumes of five hundred pages each—daunted them all. I had selected Oxford University Press as the publisher for two reasons. First, William Toye, their editorial director, was an editor of stellar reputation who had shown a deep commitment to supporting the Canadian literary establishment through his publication of Canadian writers, his development of reference books like The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and his commissioning of landmark studies like Sheila Egoff’s The Republic of Childhood. I was sure that his knowledge, experience and advice would be invaluable, and it was. Second, I wanted Montgomery ’s journals to come out under the imprint of a prestigious, world-known university press; I believed this would gain Montgomery more respectability within the academy. To think of condensing the diaries was a daunting prospect, for Montgomery had written them in a narrative style that did not lend itself to condensation. She repeated motifs in ways that showed her sophisticated grasp of the oral storyteller’s art; she gave seemingly inconsequential lead-ins to entries to provide atmosphere for the narrative which followed; and, like the murder mystery writer, she cunningly implanted all the advance evidence that allowed the reader to understand people and events which entered the narrative later on. Her diaries, carefully copied into large financial ledgers after she had become world famous, with pictures pasted in to give a visual dimension to the text, were almost seamless in their art. No wonder, for Montgomery had spent a good part of her life, at the height of her powers, constructing

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her ‘‘life-books’’ for posterity. And now these volumes had to be reduced to fit the skimpy finances of the 1980s publishing scene. Oxford’s overriding concern was that we create a text that would appeal to the average reader as well as to the scholar. Times were already getting difficult for publishers, and they needed books that sold. Elizabeth Waterston, William Toye and I began consulting on ways to present the material in book form. First there was the matter of physical format. We surveyed many other USA and UK publications of a similar nature, noting the advantages and disadvantages of each layout. Montgomery ’s diaries had the potential of reaching both an academic and popular market, and Oxford intended to calibrate everything from the dustjacket to the editorial apparatus so as to maintain scholarly standards without looking so scholarly that the public would be scared off. Mr. Toye, who was an accomplished book designer as well as a scholar and editor, worked out the final format for the entire book. He also made initial suggestions about materials which he thought might be cut. Elizabeth’s and my first passes through the material had produced minimal cuts: we could not bear to remove anything. But we knew we had to cut, or the diaries would not be published at all. Having Mr. Toye’s opinion was very helpful, but we soon discovered that gender certainly dictated different interests. For instance, we thought Montgomery’s accounts of women’s experiences—emotions felt about childbirth, raising children, coping with aggravating husbands and opinionated men—were central to a woman’s experience. We found Montgomery ’s entanglement in the webs of small community gossip endlessly fascinating. Mr. Toye saw much of this as trivial. And many of her philosophical speculations struck him as naive from the viewpoint of a highly educated man living in the 1980s. Mr. Toye’s selections showed a subtle masculine bias, ours a feminine bias for we judged what was central to a woman’s life from our own female experience. To his credit, Mr. Toye acknowledged that the book was ours, and he simply gave us a fixed number of pages for the written text of the entire first volume. Then he left the selection up to us. We dug in. His only requirement was that we make our volume a ‘‘readable book,’’ with its own internal shape, and yet reduce Montgomery’s narrative by about 50 percent, ending up with around 350 pages of text. We soon learned how hard it was to do all of this. When we started to prune the text itself, there were various problems to confront. Should we tamper with Montgomery’s own entries (which had their own internal integrity), or should we delete only complete entries (which had a kind of rhythm between them because she tried to


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alternate moods and introduce comic relief)? In either case, we would destroy some of her artistry. Should we insert narrative bridges when we deleted text? How much detail should the footnotes contain? And should we introduce our own speculations on Montgomery’s text or merely produce factual footnotes? These were all questions that required discussion, and our decisions sometimes did not work well in practice. For instance, we initially decided to delete only complete entries, but we had to abandon this practice for complex reasons.

Mary Rubio, in the University of Guelph Archives, with Lucy Maud Montgomery ’s china dogs, Gog and Magog. Photograph courtesy of Judy McVittie, University of Guelph Archives.

Since Oxford had defined our task as that of creating a book that people would like to read (and hence buy in copious quantities), not a book that was a ‘‘downer,’’ we felt under some pressure to edit out Montgomery ’s most repetitive and dejected moments. Yet, we knew that we must not edit her personality into another shape. If we removed repetitious accounts of feeling blue and depressed, we should also balance this by removing repeated effusions on her pleasures in landscape. Yet, the cumulative effect of even this would be to flatten her volatile personality. As the pruning process advanced, we discovered that we had to work both directions in her text. Invariably, seemingly inconsequential entries paved the way for later ones in either factual detail or in mood. As Montgomery ’s themes expanded and her characters proliferated, and as

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we became too familiar with her text, it was very hard to keep track of all the narrative threads we had already pulled out and then reinserted, sometimes several times. Leaping backwards and forwards in her text was taxing; although her diaries may appear to have chronological organization because of their sequentially dated entries, there is in fact an enormous amount of flashback and ‘‘free association’’ material in them which is not tied to sequential ‘‘real’’ time. Thus, we often found ourselves searching back through some one hundred pages to see if we had made the final decision to include or exclude some offhand remark Montgomery made which turned out to present crucial forecasts for later materials. (The early volumes were done when computer technology was only beginning to be used in the humanities. For instance, global searches were not possible in Volume I and were still not entirely reliable in Volume II.7) In addition, we puzzled over the effect of dropping passages that were strained and artificial: they were a part of her overall profile. Some of her writing on nature, for instance, imitated the American Transcendentalists, as well as the fuzzy romanticism of nineteenth-century texts like Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni: this seemed tiresome to us, and we were sure that reviewers would lambast it, yet it showed much about influences on her style. We decided to leave only enough to give an example of the variety of her experiments and affectations. Generally speaking, our goal in editing was to speed up the movement of her narrative: 1980s readers had much less time for leisure reading than did readers of her era, and the book had to march along at a brisk pace. Elizabeth’s and my exceedingly different individual temperaments came much into play as we each subsequently argued for passages reflecting different extremes of Montgomery’s personality. We agreed that we should not alter Montgomery’s personality by weighting either extreme of her mood swings, but then we also saw that no such thing as a ‘‘true personality’’ could ever emerge from these diaries. Even Montgomery said her diaries were ‘‘grumble’’ books serving a specific function: expressing the unhappiness that she was conditioned as a woman to suppress. Furthermore, my interviews with people who had known her suggested that the personality in the diaries was not in fact the personality whom people in her circle had known. Yet, it was impossible to separate the living woman who purported to write the diaries and the literary persona she created in them; and what could anyone make of the conjecture that she herself came to believe that her literary construct was in fact the ‘‘real Maud’’? There seemed to be endless variables to balance. Among these was the very large problem of whether to end our


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versions of her diaries on an elegiac or a happy note. If Elizabeth and I had not already had a long-established working relationship through Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse (CCL / LCJ), the selection process might have ended a friendship. We had to make each Oxford volume end at a place that gave a sense of closure. Since the readers were going to have to wait several years for each subsequent volume, we could not leave them hanging in the middle of Montgomery’s unresolved problems. But choosing a place to end the volume involved more discussions. After her first volume, Montgomery had started giving her diaries an artificial shape when she started to recopy them into uniform five-hundred-page financial ledgers in 1919. She was very much aware of the physical end of each volume, and she addressed the journal, telling it ‘‘Goodbye.’’ One would have expected either the events in her own life or historical events (like the Great War) to give organic form to her life story. Instead, she seemed as much affected by the number of pages in her ledger. She was creating her own multi-volume ‘‘life-book.’’ Therefore, we saw her own endings as rather artificial, and not necessarily worth preserving in the Oxford volumes, given Oxford’s page limits and the many entries that clamoured for inclusion. Furthermore, as she reached the end of her five-hundred-page volumes, she tended to become elegiac in tone. Of course, it is not unusual for people writing an autobiographical document to stress the difficulties they have faced in order to underline the significance of their achievement. By 1919, when Montgomery began recopying her journals into financial ledgers, she was world famous and interested in detailing her earlier and present problems. Because Montgomery had disposed of the original diaries from which she prepared her final handwritten diaries/journals, we could not compare the contents of these two versions of her life story. She tells us that she changed nothing in the recopying, but we came to regard this statement with some scepticism, for she clearly did sometimes editorialize when she started nearing the end of her ledger. If she tinkered with her endings, could we be sure she did not tinker elsewhere? Could a writer recopying her diaries for posterity resist improving the telling of a tale? We plunged ahead, finally producing a text of about 350 pages. We tried to keep all major events in her life and remove nothing that was essential to the understanding of her personality. Because of space limitations, we did with great regret cut out much that we thought interesting, including many of Montgomery’s comments about minor books she read which are now totally forgotten. Mr. Toye’s directive that the volume had to be ‘‘readable’’ meant that these musings had to go.8 We plan

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to publish them in a separate document. Finally, we set our text aside for a period of time so we could read it again with fresh eyes. The footnotes had their own challenges. There were two reasons for footnotes. First, the need to footnote came first from the fact that we had to condense Montgomery’s text. It is evident that she was conscious of writing for a future audience from the very beginning, for she always introduced all of her supporting characters within her text, just as she would have done in a novel. A casual mention of a name in an aside usually meant that this person would reappear later as a major character. Thus, we frequently had to replace information that we had dropped when we cut out these less important entries—which sometimes existed primarily so that Montgomery could tuck in a new character’s name. Secondly, we used footnotes to give more than the minimal information that Montgomery herself gave in her text. For instance, we wanted to create a wider historical context for her words so that readers could experience the published volume not just as one person’s diary but as a cultural document. However, we decided to put the footnotes at the end of the book so that Montgomery’s own story would dominate the page and so that the format would appear less scholarly. Given the finite length of the Oxford volume, we thought that people would prefer to have Montgomery’s text to our footnotes. Mr. Toye devised a format that used different typographical features in such a way as to condense an enormous amount of footnote-text onto one page. We had reason to regret this later on for other reasons, but it made a very satisfactory way of handling the material in an easily usable way in the Oxford volume.9 Elizabeth and I had agreed that the footnotes and index would be her primary responsibility, and the introduction and final accuracy of the text on computer disk would be mine. Mr. Toye asked for an introduction that would be readily accessible by the non-specialist reader and the general public. He wanted it to be factual and informative—and totally free of the specialized theoretical language of our discipline. He observed, quite rightly, that theoretical commentary could be fed into scholarly articles later on. His editorial pencil pounced on relatively innocuous jargon that crept into the first draft of the introduction. My comment about ‘‘silenced women’’ finding ‘‘their voice’’ disappeared, for instance: what, he asked, would the general public make of the statement that women did not have ‘‘a voice’’? The public knew, he semijoked, that women ‘‘talked all the time.’’ And a phrase calling Montgomery an ‘‘artless’’ writer mysteriously appeared in his professionally edited copy of my introduction. I


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objected, but ‘‘artless’’ stayed. I felt that this phrase was the voice of patriarchy assuring male scholars that Montgomery might be published by Oxford, but that this did not mean that she was to be taken as seriously as a ‘‘real’’ author. Calling her writing ‘‘artless’’ smacked to me of the ‘‘accident’’ theory of Montgomery’s success, which appeared as a subtext in earlier critical references to her work. For instance, an entry in the Reader ’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (Methuen, 1963) states that Montgomery was ‘‘a schoolteacher and the wife of a Presbyterian minister . . . [who] became by accident a popular writer . . .’’ (italics inserted).10 Confused by Montgomery’s undeniable success, male critics had for decades placed her in the tradition of the naive and ‘‘artless’’ practitioner who merely lucked into print and literary fame. They found it hard to see her as a consummate ‘‘storyteller’’ who was able to integrate into her written texts the techniques of the oral raconteur. Mr. Toye had yet another reason for not wanting scholarly jargon or theoretical discussion in the introduction. He said that introductions were first and foremost for reviewers. In fact, experience had taught him that when reviewers were pressed for time they took shortcuts: for instance, they pulled catch phrases from the introduction to describe the book and then quibbled with something in the introduction to flesh out the review. In fact, this could relieve them of the necessity of reading the book itself. An academic introduction would not itself bother an ordinary reader—such a reader would simply skip it—but a reviewer could use the introduction in a way that produced a review that would keep ordinary people from buying the book. Thus, he argued, introductions could be extremely important to a book’s subsequent image in the public mind. We were very lucky when Volume I appeared in 1985. Reviewers liked it. If we had any complaints at all about reviewers, it was that they talked only about Montgomery’s life, not about the editing. We were of course aware that silence about the editing meant that there were no glaring problems with it. The reviews of Volume I delighted SSHRC. The book’s success, both with the public and with scholars, meant that the second volume was funded without a problem, and likewise the third. Later, assessors wrote that ‘‘with the publication of the first volume, Montgomery was suddenly and permanently recognized as a serious writer whose situation and responses merited academic reevaluation and scrutiny’’; that the publication of Montgomery’s journals had advanced ‘‘our knowledge about Canadian literary social and cultural history of the early 20th century’’; and that the publication of primary texts like her journals provided the ‘‘grounding for feminist scholarship.’’ Since that time there have been quite a number of doctoral

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and M.A. theses on her work, many of these abroad, and feminist scholars have turned a sharp eye to her work. As we moved into editing Volume II there were new problems. Dr. Macdonald had been dead since 1982, but his shadow fell across our pages in this second volume. He had given no firm directives about what to include or exclude when he placed the project in my hands. However, in private conversations with me before he died, he had expressed enormous concern over his mother’s sharp statements. He added that some of these comments were quite unfair and that they reflected her distressed state of mind at the time of her writing. He noted that his mother was such a good writer, such a convincing teller of her own story, that her account of things would stand over other people’s versions. He worried somewhat about how people on the Island would react to things she said about their dead ancestors in the early part of the journals. But he worried even more about people mentioned unfavourably in the later journals—people who were still living and able to read his mother’s unfair comments about them. Elizabeth and I had many discussions about the problem of hurting people’s feelings. We decided that the journals would perhaps never be published if the world had to wait until all descendants, and then descendants of descendants, were dead. And we thought people would recognize that Montgomery was a very opinionated person. Surely, they would see that her views were biased by her notions of ‘‘race,’’ and class, and by other standards of judgement that no longer prevailed. It was regrettably inevitable that some relatives would be hurt by things said about their ancestors, but we knew that all the descendants whom we had met were strong, admirable people in their own right. On the positive side, Montgomery’s story would engender much discussion about forces that imprisoned women. Because the recovery of women’s lives was just beginning, we felt it urgent to get Montgomery’s story of her life into ongoing discourse on how femininity had been constructed under patriarchy. We felt also that greater understanding of the prejudices and cultural mores of her time would have a beneficial effect on everyone who read the journals. In addition, the publication of the Montgomery journals would enhance the reputation of a much undervalued female Canadian writer. We decided that we simply could not delete certain sections that made negative comments about the ancestors of living people, for Montgomery’s judgemental stance towards people was an essential part of her personality and character. We thought that in the final analysis her critical remarks about others said more about her than about them.


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We knew that after Volume I had been published, many Islanders had been understandably disturbed about criticisms of their dead relatives. In addition, many community and family memories were quite different from Montgomery’s account. For instance, the people of Lower Bedeque were offended at her portrayal of Herman Leard’s family as boorish and beneath her, for the Leards had in fact been relatively prosperous and much respected in their community. Montgomery ’s notions of ‘‘class’’ were derived from her Anglo-Scottish ancestry, and her notion of ‘‘superiors’’ and ‘‘inferiors’’ owed much to the Presbyterian dogma she had been taught.11 Her snobbishness certainly rankled the descendants of those who were snubbed; it also drew attention to how egalitarian and ‘‘politically correct’’ our society has become by comparison today. By Volume II, when Montgomery was mistress of a manse in Ontario, we started catching up with living people. Dr. Macdonald had been particularly worried about the cutting comments his mother made about people peripheral to her own story, people who were neither part of her immediate family nor of her extended clan, but whose lives became intertwined with hers because of working for her or because they were in her husband’s congregation. If people were actually related to her, they could at least bask in reflected glory in compensation for enduring insults to their ancestors, but people who weren’t related didn’t have this benefit. Dr. Macdonald was adamant that she was unfair to many of the people he had known. It was clear that much of his mother’s identity was bound up in her clan, and it was her nature to praise and condemn people in it. But she also had strong feelings about living people who were not related by blood or marriage. How much of this could be removed without her journals losing their integrity, as well as their savour and substance? Predictably, after Volume II was published, many of the remaining people in the Leaskdale-Zephyr area were disappointed to learn that Montgomery had found some of her endless responsibilities as minister’s wife quite tedious. A gracious, generous, indefatigable community worker in life, she seemed to some to have turned into a monster in death. Dr. Stuart Macdonald had himself been somewhat surprised after his mother died and he dipped into her journals. He was surprised at her inner life on several counts. He hadn’t known the depth of her unhappiness in later life, nor had he ever known the carefree girl of the early journals. In fact, he said that he hadn’t really read the early journals carefully until I began going over them paragraph by paragraph with him. He said, not long before his own death, that reading those early

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L. M. Montgomery as ‘‘Mistress of Leaskdale Manse,’’ with her beloved cousin Frede Campbell, who died in 1919, and the Rev. Ewan Macdonald, holding baby Chester. Photograph courtesy of University of Guelph Archives.

The Leaskdale Manse today. Photograph courtesy of Mary Rubio.


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sections with me had introduced him to a happy mother he had never known, and he was grateful to have met this part of his mother. This illustrates the perplexities of our trying to ascertain and maintain the quixotic personality of our subject during the editing process. If her own son admitted to not knowing her, how could we? And how could the people in the communities where she lived have known her?

The Reverend Ewan Macdonald and his wife, L. M. Montgomery, in a happy pose in front of a friend’s house. Taken during their retirement years in Toronto, 1935-42. Photograph courtesy of University of Guelph Archives.

It is worth observing that the Mrs. Macdonald/L. M. Montgomery who affected people’s lives was the person they thought her to be. For instance, if a young woman in the community admired L. M. Montgomery / Mrs. Ewan Macdonald and modeled her behaviour on this refined and kindly minister’s wife, how can we say that this gracious

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role model was not the real Maud, at least in how she affected people, for most of the time? Yet, the tortured Maud who wrote the journals was clearly the real Maud another part of the time. I once asked Leonard Grove, the son of the writer Frederick Philip Grove, how his attitude towards his father was affected by the discovery that his father had concealed a secret and unsavoury prior life in Germany. Leonard simply replied: ‘‘My father was the man I knew.’’ By the same token, was Montgomery not also the person people actually knew? Elizabeth and I took a break before moving on to Volume III. I continued tracking down people Montgomery had known who were still alive for I wanted, where possible, to hear their stories about her. If she talked in a negative manner about them, I also wanted to give them the chance to record their version of events. For there certainly were alternative versions. Most of Montgomery’s maids were still alive. They had been a special concern of Dr. Macdonald. He accepted that because his mother was a famous public figure painful details of her immediate family’s life were bound to become public property; he also had accepted that close family members would invariably lose their privacy. But he felt that maids were in a different category: he said that they had worked very hard, for modest wages, and that they all had been vulnerable young women whose occasional failure to live up to his mother’s high standards should not be thrown in their faces late in life. Many had come from very poor families where they had been given little training in matters considered important by his mother, whose family had been an old and prominent one, full of ‘‘traditions.’’ He worried about exposing the maid’s youthful indiscretions, as seen and told by his mother during overstressed periods of her life. In fact, he thought she had overreacted and exaggerated their misdemeanours in the first place. We both knew that she liked to dramatize as she wrote up her journals. This comes with the territory of ‘‘storytelling art.’’ He also pointed out that the maids didn’t have the gift of language his mother had, so they would not be able to defend themselves, even if they were still alive. Against this, however, Montgomery ’s description of her relationship with these young women was very important, for it revealed very clearly his mother’s personality and state of mind. Thus, decisions became more complicated as we progressed. We simply had to leave in some few things that we would rather have omitted for reasons of taste and sensitivity, for these remarks told so much about Montgomery herself. Locating and interviewing people was becoming a mixed pleasure for me, for by this time several people were quite angry about the Montgomery publishing project. They blamed Montgomery


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less for writing what she did than they blamed us for publishing it. Elizabeth and I were seen as the ones who were telling tales beyond the grave. I also discovered that the anecdotes read in the earlier journals were now recirculating, often embellished, as bona fide community and family memories. People who had no memories of her whatsoever when I first talked to them now had many stories to tell which in fact originated from the published journals. Some of these ‘‘new memories’’ were as unflattering to Montgomery as hers about people in the community had been. In some cases, people whom Montgomery had avoided in life (because they bored her, or because she heartily disliked them) now presented themselves as people who had been very close to her. From the published journals they drew details enough to sound convincing. It was fascinating to observe the ongoing ‘‘production’’ of oral legend. I had begun interviewing the maids talked about in the later diaries before the very first journal was published, so these women had not been aware of the fact that their early employment in Montgomery’s home could later become a matter of public scrutiny. I was received courteously, and I enjoyed all of my contacts—a livelier, more spritely group of elderly women could not have been found. I learned much about Montgomery and much about these women’s own lives. I came to my own judgement that whatever foolishness and irresponsibility they might have shown in their youth, they were almost without exception exceedingly fine women in their old age. Dr. Macdonald had been right about this. I could see why he had kept his mother’s diaries under wraps all his lifetime, for to have published her damning comments about a great number of people when they were in early or midlife would have created an enormous amount of consternation. And I could see why he had been so glad to turn the responsibility of editing these diaries over to someone else. Elizabeth and I were constantly balancing the individual’s ‘‘right to privacy’’ against the public’s ‘‘right to information’’ about the life of one of Canada’s most influential authors. As I got on with my interviews, there was one maid I had not been able to meet. I had been told that this former maid refused to discuss her relationship with Montgomery with anyone, and that there was not much point in trying to contact her. By this time the first two volumes were published. So it was with some trepidation that I called her, asking for an interview. I started by telling her my name and asking to come for a visit to discuss Montgomery. My call took her unawares, I think, and being a courteous person, she couldn’t think of a good reason to say ‘‘no’’ on the spot. We set a time a few days hence.

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When I arrived, she met me graciously and gamely at the door. I introduced myself again, and she invited me in. I explained that I was doing scholarly research on Montgomery in preparation for bringing out a book on her, and that I was trying to talk to everyone who had known Montgomery so that I could hear their stories and memories about her. She interrupted me to say that one book on Montgomery had already come out which was quite ‘‘shameful’’ and ‘‘awful.’’ It was full of all kinds of wrong information and so on. I assumed that she was thinking of Mollie Gillen’s 1975 biography which had angered many people in Leaskdale and Norval. It was Gillen who had first suggested that Montgomery had found some of her husband’s parishioners boring, boorish and unlovable. I was quite curious to find out precisely which book Mrs. X thought so wrongheaded, since she had actually lived in the MontgomeryMacdonald household for a long period of time. Seeing my eagerness to know the title, and forgetting it for the moment, she decided to fetch the offensive book itself. I could hear her rummaging around upstairs looking for it. Finally, she reappeared triumphantly. She thrust the book into my outstretched hands. It was The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Volume II, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. My heart skipped some of the proverbial beats as I stared at my own name on the jacket. I realized that when I had told her my name over the phone and again at the door, either she hadn’t caught it or hadn’t connected it with the name on the book. I thought that she would surely make the belated connection as I sat there. If so, there were several possible reactions. First, and most likely, she would be embarrassed at what she had said about the book. Or, alternatively, she might be very angry with me, thinking I should have made it clearer who I was before crossing her threshold. If this were the case, she might dismiss me before I had a chance to find out why she felt as she did, and I did want a chance to explain to her how the book had come to be and that it wasn’t a pack of lies. In either case, I thought it best not to direct specific attention to the fact that my name was on the front of the book. This would only create a hopelessly embarrassing situation for us both. I scrambled desperately for ideas about what to do as she seated herself again. She looked at me grimly. She said something to the effect that some people in ‘‘Guelph University ’’ had taken a bunch of scraps of paper that Mrs. Macdonald had written and had written this book ‘‘themselves.’’ She told me that she thought much of the material in this volume was simply ‘‘made up.’’ On this she expanded at some length, and with some vehemence.


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I knew Montgomery’s composition process—jotting down materials for her diaries on handy scraps of paper and assembling these to write up later. I realized that Mrs. X’s construction of the situation was based on the fact that she knew this, too. In fact, I knew that she had read some of these dated notes which she found in kitchen cubbyholes—what curious and bright young maid would not have? Unfortunately, Maud had later overheard her discussing them with her current boyfriend, a young man whom Montgomery loathed. Montgomery’s reaction was rather like Queen Elizabeth’s would have been upon discovering a servant was snitching to the press. I knew that Mrs. X had been brusquely dismissed from her position as maid in the Montgomery-Macdonald household. I had always assumed that she had known why, but wasn’t telling. However, now I suddenly suspected that the elderly Mrs. X had never known the real source of Montgomery’s anger at her. It had been a painful, embarrassing and unresolved falling out for both. Montgomery had grieved over the loss of a maid she had truly liked, one whose perkiness had always cheered her up. On the other hand, the young woman had suffered over a hurtful, sudden rejection from someone she really admired and felt affection for. I was paralyzed by growing embarrassment as I pieced together the scenario of that painful situation some sixty years earlier, and the painful fallout in my lap some sixty years later. How dreadful for Mrs. X to have been in the dark about a sudden and devastating rejection all these years. I took some heart from the prospect of bringing peace to a kindly elderly woman who had carried a sore place in her heart for a long time. No wonder she had refused to talk to people about her relationship with Montgomery: she did not understand what had happened herself. It was also clear that Mrs. X did not know that Maud had written up these paper scraps into formal journals. That gave me an entrance. ‘‘Oh, I do know all about this book,’’ I broke in, pointing bravely at my lap. ‘‘Let me tell you how it came about. . . .’’ I explained that Montgomery had indeed kept scraps of paper, but that she had then copied these herself into big handwritten ledgers, pasting pictures in as she went; I said that this book in my lap was an exact transcription of Montgomery’s handwritten journals, although it was somewhat shortened. Mrs. X listened carefully, showing great interest in the process which I explained at length. In fact, she became quite fascinated with this glimpse into what university people actually did with their time. ‘‘Are there any more of these diaries?’’ she finally asked. I then knew that she was wondering how she was dealt with if there were more. I

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told her that Montgomery did, indeed, talk about her, and I would go back to Guelph, read these sections again, and write her a summary of what was said about her. I hadn’t read these passages for a while, and I wanted to review what was said, and think about how to convey it in a non-hurtful but accurate manner. There had been much venomous sting in Montgomery’s own account because she had felt ‘‘betrayed.’’ Montgomery had expected total loyalty from everyone who worked for her, and her nerves had been raw over other matters when she wrote her final account of her young maid, now the elderly Mrs. X. Mrs. X and I talked for the rest of the afternoon—about her deceased husband, her children, her grandchildren, her friends, her pleasure in life, the ways she had managed to negotiate a life with problems which were as bad if not worse, I thought, than Montgomery’s own problems. She had a quickness of wit, an earthy and comical way of phrasing things, and a vitality that had not lessened with age. I could certainly see why Montgomery had liked her so much. I went home rather on edge—glad I had survived a situation that might have been a disaster for both of us, glad that I could finally put a mind at ease. I worked through my letter very carefully, and I sent it off with trepidation. I wondered what would happen when she saw my signature and would then recall what she had said to me. I was quite sure she would remember, for she was a very smart woman, with an excellent memory. I didn’t hear from her for about two months. Then a letter came. In it and later over the phone, she thanked me for taking the time to explain things to her, and she invited me back to visit. There was no allusion to the awkwardness of the other situation, but she made it clear that she did believe me that we ‘‘at Guelph’’ hadn’t written the journals ourselves.12 Are there things we would do differently in the editing process if we were to start over? I would argue now for longer introductions, which could provide more social history to contextualize Montgomery’s attitudes. Many readers do not understand how social attitudes have changed, and they judge Montgomery by today’s standards. Also, I would explain more about the separate spheres of men and women in the nineteenth century, and the ways in which female friendships sustained women, causing them to bond together as a reaction to the many effects of patriarchy. Lacking this historical understanding, some people have taken Montgomery’s accounts of her affection for her cousin Frede Campbell as lesbianism, for instance. I also wonder if I should have said more about the advisability of reading the journals with a sceptical eye, pointing out the obvious that there are two sides to every story and that a person writing an ‘‘autobiography’’ in the form of recopied journals is


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essentially creating a ‘‘constructed’’ character. But perhaps this is not a good idea: I think that it might have undercut the authenticity of the journals with many unsophisticated readers. If so, this would have been a pity, for I think that the journals do represent Montgomery’s experience as she felt it—though not necessarily as an unbiased observer would have reported it. And perhaps Mr. Toye was right about how reviewers can fasten onto a handle in a way that distorts a book. (His main point was that an introduction should hand reviewers the ideas that they should repeat in a review.) But most of all, I wish that Elizabeth and I had insisted on more generous selections, which is not to say that our insisting would necessarily have changed Oxford’s opinion. Oxford simply could not believe us when we told them the size of the Montgomery popular audience, and the importance these journals would hold to feminist scholars of popular literature and women’s life writing. For instance, they expected to move into a paperback edition of the journals six months after bringing out the first volume. The first cloth binding sold out in a month, leaving them unable to deliver orders for the three weeks before Christmas 1985. The journals sold well enough that a paperback edition of the first volume did not appear until 1999, fourteen years later. These matters aside, I now return to Dr. Stuart Macdonald’s forecast that editing his mother’s journals would be a difficult task for several reasons. He was right about difficulties although he did not anticipate the nature of the first challenge to the project—getting past scholarly resistance to popular women writers. He had been sensitive to the problem of hurting innocent people by publishing his mother’s negative comments about them. Second, he had foreseen the problem of destroying people’s illusions about his mother—people’s varying impressions of who the author was behind the books they loved. He knew that his mother ’s fans had an incredibly passionate attachment to her. To shatter her fans’ sense of who she was would engender a sense of loss in them. To discover that her appealing side—the woman with humour, vitality and compassion—had its shadow—the woman who was embittered, defeated and judgemental—would cause many fans a kind of bereavement. It would be like loving and admiring your father all your life, only to discover in his wallet after his death a set of shameful and embarrassing photographs. After the publication of each volume, letters poured in to Elizabeth and me from Montgomery fans all over the world, thanking us for our editing which, to my surprise, most actually saw as a great deal of work. But among these were occasional notes of anger, as well as angry phone

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calls from people who would not identify themselves (this being before call display and tracing technology had been developed). I began to envy those dusty, bent male scholars from my graduate days who safely worked on dead male authors whose texts carried less emotional impact. Dullness began to seem a virtue to me. Women’s lives, and women’s words, were a bit too heady. Too long silenced, too long angry, women like Montgomery broke forth like an explosive. A living text like Montgomery ’s journals had too much power to disturb people.

L. M. Montgomery when dreams lay ahead of her. Photograph courtesy of University of Guelph Archives.

A long and bitter letter sent to me after Volume III read: I wonder if you are trying to totally destroy . . . [everyone’s] liking for Maud. . . . I read Maud’s books as a child. She brought joy into my childhood. Your journals bring only hurt, despair, and unhappiness. . . . I wish


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now I had never read or purchased the journals. I would rather not have known this stuff, then I could have gone on . . . loving Maud’s books and her spirit. You have taken that away from me and I highly resent it.

The letter continued in this vein.

L. M. Montgomery in later years. Photograph courtesy of University of Guelph Archives.

I know that such letters are written out of a deep sense of grief, for losing one’s illusions is always a painful experience. Montgomery’s novels have been so politically empowering and her journals are so personally disturbing because they explore this very terrain of dream and illusion. For instance, Matthew Cuthbert tells Anne not to give up all her dreams; Emily writes a book called A Seller of Dreams; Montgomery writes Anne’s House of Dreams; and Montgomery herself, in her journals, endlessly confronts the moments of pain in her own life by moving into a world of dreams, ‘‘For I dream still—I must or die—dream back

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into the past and live life as I might have lived it—had Fate been kinder,’’ she wrote in a bleak period when she began to accept the fact that she was married to a man whose periodical disappearance into mental illness would erode her own ability to enjoy life. Her journals record the reality behind the illusion she nurtured in life that she was always a happy woman. It is hard for people to face the shattered image she gives them. Thus, while our challenges have been varied, two of them aren’t that different. For instance, the first male professors who told SSHRC that a woman’s journals were not worth editing and the subsequent female readers whose models of womanhood are disturbed by reading them are in a similar position: they both need to confront the patriarchal ideology that has constructed women in totalizing ways—variously as frail creatures who think only simple-minded thoughts about unimportant matters, or as angels of light whose mission in life is to be always cheerful and happy. Both these groups need to ask why so many gifted women in a patriarchal society were forced to retreat into the world of romance, of dreams, even of physical illness—and to keep secret journals lest the smoke from their own natures poison their lives. Getting to know Montgomery has changed my understanding of her era, and her journals—with all their anger intact—have gone forth into the world to ‘‘do their duty’’ of revealing a sample of what repressed, intelligent and silenced women suffered.

Notes 1 This paper was delivered at York University on 8 May 1992 at a Women’s Archival Research Group meeting convened by Marlene Kadar and Helen Buss. 2 I usually refer to the ten unpublished manuscripts as ‘‘diaries’’ and to the published Oxford volumes as ‘‘journals,’’ although I am not always consistent. Montgomery called them ‘‘diaries,’’ but they are more properly called ‘‘journals’’ since they are not a day-by-day unedited account of her life. 3 Normally, a scholar who wants to edit an unpublished document starts with obtaining access to the material and finding out who owns copyright. The ownership of the physical document and the ownership of copyright are two totally different matters. Only rarely does an archive obtain copyright when it obtains archival materials. And an unpublished document is protected by copyright in perpetuity, so the heirs must be found, if there are any. An author ’s heirs may be many and scattered, few and unlocatable, or readily available and highly contentious. In any case, one of the first costs in any major editing project can be a hefty legal bill. In 1985, Canadian copyright lawyers in a large firm cost several hundred dollars an hour, and researching copyright like Montgomery’s could take weeks or months. (Copyright laws are now under revision and unpublished materials are no longer under perpetual copyright.)


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4 Montgomery, of course, had an international following, but I had not yet collected enough evidence to prove this. 5 Elizabeth and I had worked together for many years since a group of us founded Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse (CCL / LCJ) in 1975. Elizabeth had already written about Montgomery and it was she who had first alerted me to the existence of the journals when I was seeking a subject for a doctoral dissertation in 1976. McMaster University approved Montgomery as a thesis subject, but, as it turned out, Dr. E. Stuart Macdonald, Montgomery’s son, was not ready to release his mother’s journals at that time, so I had to find another topic. I wrote instead on Frederick Philip Grove, a writer whom Montgomery had encouraged a great deal in the 1920s. 6 Normally, one does not find out who SSHRC assessors have been, but in this case I did. 7 I remember so well the reaction of Dr. Stuart Macdonald, Montgomery’s son, when he came to the University of Guelph to see the project being input on that first miraculous ‘‘Superbrain’’ computer, which I bought with my first grant money. He was astonished, and mused on how, in the days before xeroxes, when he was in medical school, you had to copy everything in books (or classmates’ notes if you missed a day) totally by hand. In the early 1980s, when I bought the first computer in our Arts College, everyone, including Dr. Macdonald, was amazed at the miraculous things it could do. (Today, this computer would be a curiosity for its primitive antiquity.) We upgraded both hardware and software as more sophisticated technology developed. The project thus began on the cusp of computer usage in the humanities, and it has spanned the amazing and breathless development of technology that could not have been imagined at its start. This project has likewise spanned the astonishing development of bookprinting technology. The first volume was unique in that it was delivered on several computer disks, rather than only as a paper text. Typesetting technology—at least at Oxford University Press—had not developed enough to wrap text around pictures, so these pictures are clumped in sections rather than being integrated into the text, as they were in later volumes. (I had handed in the text for Volume I with visual placement marked in the text, and with the measurements given for their size, but the first time a picture came at the bottom of a page the typesetter did not know what to do. Thus, Oxford decided that wrapping text around pictures was too cumbersome a process, and grouped them in sections.) Computer and typesetting programs now handle these problems without a hitch. 8 By the time we reached the third and fourth volumes, the books were selling so well that Oxford allowed us to keep a much greater proportion of the original text. 9 The compressed format of the footnotes nearly cost Elizabeth and me our public lending right payments. Other editors may be interested in how one qualifies for these subtitles, so I will recount my experiences. My correspondence with the Public Lending Right Commission (PLRC) sheds light on the problems faced by the administrators of this program; it also reveals the somewhat dogged persistence and exactitude that is likely to characterize an editor.

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Working in Women’s Archives The PLRC was established in 1986 to administer a program of payment to Canadian authors for their books held in libraries. At the time of my writing this paper, editors qualify on certain conditions: (1) if no more than two editors’ names appear on the title page; (2) the contributors are one-third Canadian; (3) if the editors’ combined written contribution comprises at least 10 percent of the book’s text or ten pages, whichever is greater. (Editors get 20 percent of the potential PLRC payment, and if there are two, they divide this.) Elizabeth and I wanted to qualify strictly for tax reasons. We each maintained home offices, and our writing income allowed us to deduct some of these expenses. Even with the SSHRC grant, we were much out-of-pocket, and being able to write off some expenses would be a real help. But getting covered by the PLRC payments was not easy. First, we did not qualify because the PLRC officials said our written contribution was not 10 percent of the volume. They did not count things like the index. I argued that making indexes requires thought, money, time and research, and scholarly books were useless without them. So they reversed that rule. In 1994 the PLRC reversed this decision and decided not to include indexes as part of an editor’s contribution. However, we still did not qualify to claim anything except the first volume because they had decided that Volume II was merely an extension of Volume I, and not a separate book. I wrote them: ‘‘Please reconsider! This decision bewilders me: LMM wrote 10 separate volumes of her journals; we are going to make four volumes out of these, each with its separate integrity as an artistic unity. Each volume takes two of us editors at least two years to prepare. At the end of 4 volumes (8 years of work), we will still be remunerated on the basis of having produced one book. This does not seem right. Take Jean Little’s autobiographical series, for comparison. The first volume, Little by Little, came out in 1987; the second instalment, Stars Come Out Within, came out in 1990. Do you consider these one title for PLRC purposes? Like our LMM journals, they are the continuing story of one person, but each book has a carefully shaped integrity. . . . Clearly, in each of these cases, each book is a separate book . . . [artistically], and each book has required a separate commitment of time and development costs.’’ Human beings sit on the PLRC, and they answered my letter very quickly, saying that it raised a question they had been wrestling with for some time and they had now decided to count multiple-volume works as individual works if they had separate titles or subtitles. So we were in, again. But good news was followed by bad. Their count of the pages in Volume II did not put our contribution at 10 percent. I wrote back, ‘‘Editors of journals like the LMM ones make far more than a written contribution in the form of introduction and notes. In each of the 373 pages of text, our editorial hand is present, pruning and shaping. No publisher would touch the complete, uncut journals: we tried and they refused. . . . The shaping was a massive job, as we had to keep track of all the narrative lines which LMM threaded through the journals, and not cut an early reference that would be developed later. We had to cut with an eye to maintaining the narrative flow and LMM’s rhythms in storytelling. This took weeks and weeks. Without this editorial pruning, the LMM journals would not have been published, nor


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would they have been so readable. Our situation is very different from the editor who puts together a collection of somebody’s stories or poems. I think your guidelines were set up to handle the standard academic anthology and they ignore the type of editing we did, shaping the actual text we were working with which was unpublishable until we did this.’’ I continued in a subsequent paragraph, ‘‘Secondly, we laid LMM’s own pages out with lots of white space and pictures. Our own pages we crammed, particularly in the notes section, running the commentary together by careful use of typographical features. The index is set in reduced point size to squeeze it down. If page count is the sole criterion, this really puts us at a disadvantage.’’ Again, I had a courteous, thoughtful letter back. They acknowledged that much more goes into editing a book than just the editor’s written contribution. But they explained that they simply could not take on the labourintensive and subjective job of deciding the degree of ‘‘pruning and cutting.’’ So the 10 percent solution. And the same point applied to the matter of copy-heaviness or point size within the text. Fair enough. But they had decided to accept our estimate of the pages of our contributions, and the book squeezed in. We were admitted, and undoubtedly these officials hoped that was the end of my inquiries. Then, when I was asked to give this talk, I wrote them with another question, born of my own hassles over the 10 percent requirement: ‘‘. . . if the editor puts her footnotes at the bottom of the page, instead of squeezing them in a mass at the end of the book as we did, does the PLRC consider these pages as ones on which the editor has made a contribution?’’ A very patient letter came back from Cate Kempton, Program Officer: ‘‘Allow me to begin by thanking you for spreading the word about the PLRC, and for being so thorough as to check your facts ahead of time. Would that all publishers were so thoughtful about giving advice to writers about PLRC! Yes, footnotes printed at the bottom of the page count as an editor ’s original contribution under PLRC. They do not, of course, count as an entire page; we ask editors to estimate the number of pages their footnotes would come to if they were printed together at the end of the book.’’ If the PLRC continues in operation, editors will now know to arrange their pages in a way that does not minimize their contributions. They will urge their publishers not to put the footnotes in reduced point size. This is, indeed, a small footnote in the production of a big project, but it points indirectly to yet another small way in which economic factors can affect book production. A final practical comment I should make is that anyone undertaking an editing project such as ours should make sure to register copyright correctly. If the editor prunes the original text as we have, giving it a different shape from the original, and creates a different emphasis, then copyright should be registered to read that the editors hold the copyright to the ‘‘selection,’’ as well as to the ‘‘introduction, notes, compilation, illustrations . . . ,’’ etc. The ‘‘selection’’ is a different text from the complete ‘‘original text.’’ 10 Note that we learn about Montgomery’s marital status before we learn that she lucked into authorship. For a thorough rundown of critical reception to

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Montgomery ’s work, including wry commentary on the ‘‘accident theory’’ of Montgomery’s success, see page 8 of Gabriella Ahmansson’s A Life and Its Mirrors: A Feminist Reading of L. M. Montgomery’s Fiction (Sweden: University of Uppsala, 1991). 11 See, for example, ‘‘The Larger Catechism’’ (questions 124ff.) in the Presbyterian Confession of Faith. 12 This was not the first time I had been accused of making the journals up myself. One resource person, whom Elizabeth and I consulted extensively, told us that several people in the community believed we had written the journals ourselves. They had known Montgomery and the author of those journals did not sound like her. Hence, they reasoned, she could not have been the author. It followed that we were the authors!

Reading My Grandmother’s Life from Her Letters: Constance Kerr Sissons from Adolescence to Engagement Rosalind Kerr

My strongest visual memory of my grandmother is of her erect back turned to me as she knelt on each step of our long Victorian staircase in order to whisk up the dust. Her virtually silent presence in our house on Tuesdays and Thursdays was very disturbing. Since she was never idle, it was difficult to communicate with her. Her austere demeanour, compounded by her deafness, kept me at a distance, and as I concurred with her perceived disapproval of my uselessness, our relationship was tacit at best. While our house might have needed to be cleaned to maintain our increasingly tenuous hold on middle-class respectability, her compulsive enactment of female servitude only compounded my already pervasive sense of dis-ease. In retrospect, I recognize a certain subversive quality behind her behaviour—it dramatized, while hiding, her rage against a male world that had failed to live up to its privileged patriarchal position. Needless to say, I am haunted by this ambiguous memory, because Constance Kerr Sissons was a brilliant, cultured woman who came from an upper-middle-class family with several serious scholars and social activists on both sides. Unfortunately, she never shared that ‘‘self’’ with me. Nor did her one major publication, John Kerr, a biography of one of her paternal uncles, speak on her behalf. Although it sat on our bookcase, it is only now that I am able to appreciate its modestly revisionist treatment of one white man’s share in the rape of the West. Since it is 79

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published, and hence outside the scope of this paper, I will refer to it only as my grandmother’s overt and somewhat subversive sop to the androcentric discourse in which she found herself unhappily inscribed. Writing in a purportedly accurate, unemotional style, which can be excruciatingly dull, my grandmother, perhaps unconsciously, disrupts the myth of male subjectivity that she pretends to be fostering as her ‘‘favourite uncle’s’’ scribe.

Constance Kerr, 1898. Photograph courtesy of Rosalind Kerr.

In general, the ‘‘private’’ archival material she left behind—the small remnant of letters painfully selected from the thousands which she and other family members had exchanged, and the large collection of journals, spared because they were already self-censored—bear the telltale marks of her overt submission to the restrictions placed on ‘‘women’s writing.’’ Fortunately, I have found ways to read her obscure messages by applying the critical practices suggested by Marlene Kadar in her

Ke r r / Reading My Grandmother’s Life from Her Letters

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article ‘‘Coming to Terms: Life Writing—From Genre to Critical Practice.’’ Following Kadar’s suggestions, I have been able to ‘‘emancipate’’ my grandmother’s ‘‘overdetermined’’ subject positions and find the places where she resisted. Furthermore, I have been able to identify the ‘‘self-in-the-writing’’ that make her letters and journals part of the ‘‘original genre’’ (Kadar 12) from which she created her transgressive novel ‘‘Law in a Lean-to or Pioneer Life on the Rainy’’ (1900-1908). The rejection slips that condemned it for containing too much personal philosophy and not enough adventure are a testimony to its subversiveness. Although any of her unpublished works could have been selected for this paper, I chose to limit it to a reading of three important letters from the collection, written between 1890 and 1896. Pinpointing certain key events in her relationships with her father, suitor and then fiancé, these letters permit me to reconstruct ‘‘her’’ once again. Their intensely private nature offers a glimpse into the subject positions occupied not only by my grandmother, but also by her male readers, since they, being known (to me), could in turn be held accountable. My grandmother, as a dutiful Victorian daughter, was no doubt trained in the art of amateur letter writing, a well-established activity that was not considered threatening to more ‘‘serious’’ male-dominated art forms. But since these letters were never supposed to enter the public domain, it was not strictly necessary to obliterate any remarks that might possibly reflect unfavourably on revered male family members. I suspect that she had some such ulterior motive in preserving these particular letters, although I’m not sure how conscious she was of it. Her earliest extant letter, sent from 526 Sherbourne St., Toronto, on 18 July 1890 is one that she wrote to her absentee father a year before his early death. Perhaps the reason it was preserved is that it was never sent, since her discreet inquiry about his precise address reveals that he had neglected to inform his wife and children of his exact whereabouts. At this point, I will intervene to demystify her revered papa, with whom the fourteen-year-old Connie could not remonstrate about his patent cruelty in disappearing on them. My rereading posits her subconscious awareness that his wilfully destructive behaviour towards the economic and emotional well-being of his wife and two remaining daughters might possibly be the result of his unresolved mourning for the deaths of three of his children. His grief-stricken womenfolk maintained their grim silence concerning his failure to protect them so well that even a hundred years later, I, on inheriting the few lobby decora-

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tions from the hotels he had bought and lost, was told in tones as much hissed as hushed, that he had been ‘‘too Irish’’ in his economic dealings. In truth, as the privileged eldest, brilliant son of a large family—winner of the gold medal in Classics at the University of Toronto, barrister with a large estate in Brantford—he seems to have abused his position to the point of bankrupting not only himself but also his father. The letter picks up this obscured narrative at the point where her silenced mother, having already accepted her devaluation as a wife who had failed in her child-rearing duties, enlists her younger, virginal daughter to plead on her behalf. Written in the perfect round of a schoolgirl, it politely inquires about the nature of his precarious health and modestly beseeches him to tell them how to address their letters since ‘‘St. Leon Springs’’ appears to be only ‘‘a post-office.’’ In A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, Sidonie Smith examines the effect patriarchal language uses have on female writing whereby the writer must create ‘‘several competing stories about or versions of herself as her subjectivity is displaced by one or multiple representations’’ (47). My grandmother, in an effort to find a patriarchally approved ‘‘cultural script,’’ as Smith would put it, bravely contests her mother’s ‘‘sweet’’ designation of her as ‘‘our little daughter,’’ and renames herself as ‘‘our big daughter’’ or, ‘‘better still,’’ ‘‘our big-for-her-age daughter.’’ Here I am struck by the poignant, if unconscious references to the two dead sisters for whom she must fill in. At times, ‘‘she’’ uses the mature voice of the polite stranger, chitchatting with him about the unpleasantness of his travelling arrangements, diverting him with casual information about the vagaries of the weather and only occasionally inserting bits of information about the deterioration of life at home: the loss of her private lessons, the replacement of another servant. She even assumes the role of his spiritual adviser when she attempts to reassure him that life is still going on, reporting that his new granddaughter cries when the banana-man passes outside. Unable to create herself as the perfect child who can fulfil both her mother ’s and father’s expectations, she sometimes slips into another less-idealized persona, the shy, ex-rich girl forced to move into the bustling city from her country mansion, an adolescent who is trying to hide her terror at an outside world where she cannot even afford a dish of ice cream. This ingenuous ‘‘I’’ who slips out from her constructed identity will soon discover that her shame at their reduced economic circumstances will not be relieved by her confessions to her superior, silent father.


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Thus the preservation by my grandmother of this single letter to her father has allowed me a rereading of it which is historically conditioned by my late-twentieth-century materialist feminism. I have also been able to revise my belief in my grandmother’s professed perfect love for my grandfather after reading the second letter in the collection. It was sent by an eighteen-year-old Connie, then studying pedagogy, from her modest family dwelling at 435 Manning Avenue, Toronto, on 6 March 1895, to her lovestruck admirer, Harry Sissons, in response to his request for a description of two major social occasions that he could not attend. References in her letter indicate that he was somewhat desperate to remain a part of the social world he had to leave behind when he took up a teaching position in the Maritimes. If her first letter was demure and modest as befitted the young lady writing to the non-reclaimable paternal authority figure, this second letter is as extravagantly coquettish as a giddy young woman, sure of her captive male audience, could make it. Empowered in the ‘‘cultural script,’’ as Smith would name it, by youth, beauty and charm, her ‘‘word’’ was temporarily held in great esteem, her cultural pronouncements considered of tremendous importance. The slightly grandiose rhetorical position that she adopts at the beginning of the letter is of one who is pressed for time but who will nevertheless oblige his rather onerous demand: ‘‘So you want to know all about the Pedagogy At Home and Varsity Conversat, do you? That means a good deal of work on my part, do you know? However, I was always remarkable for my industry so you shall have as full an account as you like—perhaps a little fuller than you like.’’ In this case she writes as if she relishes knowing that she is risking public exposure before male ‘‘representative[s] of the dominant order, the arbiters of the ideology of gender and its stories of selfhood’’ (Smith 49). Her narrative shamelessly ventures to assert her right as an eyewitness authority to re-evaluate past events as inferior to present ones when she speaks of the Promenades held at the Pedagogy At Home: ‘‘They were splendid and I enjoyed them very much, in fact the whole affair was ten thousand times nicer than the last Social Evening, do you remember it?’’ One of her most striking devices is her ability to narrate these events through the multiple speaking postures which ‘‘mark the autobiographical process as rhetorical artifact and the authorial signature as mythography ’’ (Smith 47). Domna C. Stanton in ‘‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’’ asserts the necessity of continuing to valorize the female signature precisely because its very weaknesses of ‘‘discontinuity and frag-

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mentation constitute particularly fitting means for inscribing the split subject, even for creating the rhetorical impression of spontaneity and truth’’ (13).

Connie Kerr ’s dance card from a University of Toronto ‘‘Conversat.’’ Photographs courtesy of Rosalind Kerr.

Thus Connie’s attempt at rhetorical control over Harry requires her to move in and out of her own objectified body. For example, when she teases him about one of her escorts who offered to fill the role of her unavailable cousin, she describes their appearance together: ‘‘you have no idea how nicely Mr. Squires can play ‘cousin,’ I am sure a casual observer would have guessed there was that relationship between us. It was great fun.’’ Even her individual body parts take up a life of their own, as she cannot resist describing how ‘‘her obliging relative’’ used an old ruse to make physical contact with her by offering to help her clap more loudly: ‘‘he told me to hold out my hand and then gave it a slap.’’ In truth, most of the closely spaced ten-page letter is taken up with her interpretation of the looks and attentions which her many admirers shower on her not only at these events but on the street and in class. For example, she ‘‘notices’’ that even such an exalted a personage as their teacher, Dr. McLellan, who is sitting behind her, ‘‘almost winked at her.’’


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Since she is speaking directly to Harry about her process of constructing the events, her position as narrator acquires a heightened self-consciousness from which she attempts to torment him under the guise of giving him information. She takes obvious relish in asking him whether he happens to know any of the numerous young men who are paying attention to her. Often her questions are merely rhetorical, intended to position her as an insider ‘‘in the know.’’ At the Conversat she boasts that ‘‘there were hosts and hosts of people I knew and I got lots of extras [dances] though everybody did not bother writing down their names.’’ She then goes on to ask him a question he could not know the answer to: ‘‘Do you know that there were only six pedagogues there?’’ Her guile becomes transparently thin at this point when she reveals that they were, of course, all men. Again, when one of her roses is taken by an impetuous swain, she addresses Harry—‘‘well, you know I promised not to give any away but he had been so nice,’’ indicating that she and Harry had made a prior agreement about how she would behave. She also includes another aside to him when she describes a little tent for two set up as part of the decorations, insists that she ‘‘did not go inside’’ and then adds, as if her own ‘‘words’’ are not to be believed, ‘‘(That’s true).’’

Fragments of letters from Connie Kerr to her fiancé, Harry Sissons. Photographs courtesy of Rosalind Kerr.

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The whole letter appears to permit Connie the luxury of selfexposure without tarnishing her public reputation, since she is confessing all to an interested male figure whom she has licence to tease. The narrative climaxes with her most daring transgression—a description of her last dance with the ‘‘hot-tempered’’ Rex King: a waltz which they danced even when the lights mysteriously went out, without any of the couples ‘‘even so much as touching each other on the crowded floor.’’ But her bravado wears a little thin when she discovers that she is being spied on by an unknown friend of Harry’s, who begins to query her about him. This man ‘‘fairly shook’’ when she pretended to know Harry only slightly and tried to force her into admitting that she and Harry had some agreement between them. This somewhat rash behaviour of ‘‘Mr. H.’’ will then cause Connie to blush and reconsider what she and Harry have committed to so far. This part of the letter ends with a thank you to him for providing her with a ticket to attend the Conversat, since he was away teaching in New Brunswick at the time. In closing, she undercuts her own power over the story when she acknowledges her dependence on his time and attention as her reader: ‘‘Have you a lot of time at your disposal? You will need it if you are to going to wade through this letter.’’ Her narrative of dangerous flirtation thus pushes at the margins of an economic privilege which she owes to him. The harsh financial realities that prevented her from going to university put her at his mercy. Sadly, Connie, for all her extravagant gaiety, has never really stepped beyond seeking male approval. But even as I lament her unavoidable ‘‘reconfirmation’’ of ‘‘the very systems and institutions we wish[ed] to undermine,’’ as her resistant modern reader, I agree with Stanton that ‘‘at this symbolic moment’’ promoting her rhetorically defiant ‘‘female signature’’ over the text still has ‘‘liberating rather than constraining effects’’ (18) for me. Inevitably, Connie’s inscription within patriarchy had proceeded further after a three-year engagement to Harry. More radical strategies are required to keep uncovering her now more plaintive voice. In Subject to Change, Nancy K. Miller proposes the need to ‘‘overread’’ (83) such muffled, neglected texts through ‘‘arachnology . . . a critical positioning which reads against the weave of indifferentiation to discover the embodiment of writing of a gendered subjectivity; to recover within representation the emblems of its construction’’ (80). This alternate text is, as Miller puts it, ‘‘hopelessly entangled’’ (77) in the material circumstances affecting Connie’s life in the quasi-pioneer conditions in Canada at the turn of the century.


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As such, it is significant to note that the final letter, sent to her absentee fiancé who had just completed articling, was written from the cramped rented digs where she lived when she taught school—194 Besserer Street in Ottawa—on 12 September 1898. Supporting her mother on a tiny teacher’s salary seems to be a very difficult task. She mentions that ‘‘We think we have a house that will suit us. it is quite near the School and is only $12 a month, taxes, water-rate etc. all paid.’’ The problem seems to be that she had not had room to put Harry up for some time. ‘‘Of course, it is very small, but if you visit us next year we can accommodate you beautifully.’’ She is so desperate that he spend some time with them that she has enlisted her forbidding mother’s support for his coming as well.

Connie and Harry, 1898. Photograph courtesy of Rosalind Kerr.

Culturally inscribed as the virginal bride-to-be who must wait patiently to be claimed, she chooses the third anniversary of their first exchange of love vows to remind the far-off Harry of the event. Struck by the news, which she has only learned inadvertently from his mother,

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that he will be called to the bar on the same date, she cannot resist directly appealing to him to remember a more momentous prior event: ‘‘Harry do you recollect three years ago tonight? It was the 12th Sept, when I had that awful cold and we walked up by Dunlop Conservatories and sat by the hole in the fence and quarrelled, and you had to leave, and we both felt so angry we scarcely knew what to do, and I wrote to you that night. How fresh it all seems to look back upon it now!’’ Connie here tries to rewrite the love narrative, juxtaposing it with the later male career event from which she is excluded. Here she presents her figures to Harry: ‘‘Have you reflected that in the last year we have only enjoyed each other’s society for three weeks. Subtract 3 from 52 and what remains?’’ Time becomes her leitmotif. She protests that she is too busy to write, that she has no time. But almost immediately, her reasons for getting Harry to remember their betrothal begin to surface; she can barely congratulate him on his graduation before begging him to prolong his imminent visit to them: ‘‘Harry you must please stay more than a day, or I shall have just cause to feel aggrieved.’’ She then blurts out her frustration, partly couching it in a stock literary phrase: ‘‘I’ve been too ‘upshot and rig’up’ lately as Samantha Allen [?] says, to be content with only shaking hands to say Goodbye again almost directly. Can’t you stay longer?’’ Although it is only in her letter, she gives vent to her pent-up sexual frustrations, writhing against the social conventions that prohibit her expression of physical desire. She has seen so little of Harry that he now exists more as her literary creation than in the flesh. He was about to arrive for one of his very brief visits: ‘‘You seem to have a faculty for growing abstract and impersonal in my mind very quickly. It is because I think of you so much and you are always absent.’’ My grandmother, who did get to marry Harry after another two long years, never remarried after his tragic drowning seven years later. Although the family mythology stated that Connie and Harry had sworn to love each other unto death, my readings of the two letters from Connie call this unswerving devotion into question. Harry, as she discovered after their wedding, had been availing himself of the ‘‘double standard’’ for some time, carrying on what I have pieced together to be a clandestine affair with a Métis woman in the northern community where she would set her novel. My resistant reading of the novel is informed by the same strategies that I have employed here, ‘‘overreading’’ her letters in order to reappropriate the story by unravelling her ‘‘arachnologies . . . [as I] deploy the interwoven structures of power, gender, and identity inherent in th[is] production of mimetic art’’ (Miller 81).


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Despite culturally embedding herself as the ‘‘constant’’ daughter, lover, bride and, later, widow, she has left enough traces in her writings to permit the uncovering of other resistant, indeed rebellious, subject positions which she moved among, in defiance of the ‘‘always absent’’ male figures. As I tear at my grandmother’s web of writings, I ‘‘discover in the representations of [the] writing itself, the marks of the grossly material, the sometimes brutal traces of the culture of gender; the inscriptions of its political structures’’ (Miller 84).

Works Cited Kadar, Marlene, ed. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. Kerr, C. K. S. John Kerr. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1946. . Letters. Private collection. . Journals. Private collection. . ‘‘Law in a Lean-to: Pioneer Days on the Rainy.’’ Unpublished manuscript. Kerr, Rosalind. ‘‘The Flag in Her Flesh: A White Bride’s Life in Fort Frances, 1901-1908.’’ Tessera 18 (1995): 20-30. . ‘‘Constance Kerr Sissons.’’ The Small Details of a Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996. Ed. Kathryn Carter. Toronto: U of Toronto P, forthcoming. Miller, Nancy K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987. Stanton, Domna C. ‘‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’’ The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Domna C. Stanton. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1984.

Personal Papers: Putting Lives on the Line—Working with the Marian Engel Archive Christl Verduyn

If this is my Golden Notebook I am getting into it a bit late. Better late than never. — Marian Engel, 14/11/741 Artists and thinkers, innovators of any kind, put their inner lives on the line. — Marian Engel, 17/11/842 Lives. I’m putting lives on paper. It’s modern, and very moral. — Marian Engel3

In an article published in November 1984—only weeks before her untimely death on 16 February 1985—Marian Engel made a ‘‘plea’’ to readers and critics.4 This plea was ‘‘to stop turning the knobs on writers’ closets.’’ What did Engel mean by this? The author’s entreaty arose out of her reflections on psychological, literary and artistic criticism.5 Her thoughts extended to the widespread interest in biography, which she herself shared. They were related to the fact that she had recently sold her own papers to McMaster University Archives. ‘‘As a writer who has sold her papers,’’ Engel remarked, ‘‘I hope to be found uninteresting until I’ve been dead as long as Boswell. I’d rather people read my fiction.’’ My reading of Engel’s writing began with her fiction: seven novels, two collections of short stories and two books for children. It continued


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with her non-fiction, which includes numerous essays, articles and columns in reviews, magazines and newspapers, as well as a book on islands in Canada. Then, in carrying out research for a comprehensive literary study of Engel’s writing,6 I also read her papers, and found them interesting. This brought me headlong into the conundrum Engel addressed in her plea. What to do when the interest of a person’s private papers collides with her express wish that any attention directed toward her be placed on her published, public work? The following represents a brief consideration of this question, and some of the matters and issues that arise in relation to archival research involving personal papers (diaries, letters, recorded thoughts, etc.). In searching for possible approaches to this area of inquiry I am not alone. Beyond the undertakings represented in this collection of working papers, I will mention just one recent example within the Canadian literary framework of my own research. This is Joan Coldwell’s work on the autobiographical writings of English-Canadian poet Anne Wilkinson— The Tightrope Walker7— about which more later. And then there is Marian Engel herself, who took up the question in the above-mentioned article. I will begin my considerations with this piece, for Engel’s comments have remained foremost in my mind as I have contemplated the issue. Marian Engel made a serious investment reading ‘‘what psychologists say about fiction and fiction-writers,’’ as she phrased it. ‘‘Part of it appals me,’’ the writer reported, ‘‘and part of it is very good.’’ Engel did not advocate sealing off the path that branches into psychological criticism, biography and archival research, but she did urge readers and critics to proceed with caution. ‘‘Psychological criticism, badly done, is the fundamental argumentum ad hominem,’’ she asserted. ‘‘Psychiatric criticism can explain a good deal about why a work was created and what its themes and forms mean in terms of its maker’s life and attitudes, why it appeals, where material about the author is available. . . . It does not, however, make artistic judgements of a useful kind and it fails on several important scores.’’ Writers and artists, Engel suggested, try to transcend the limits of time, place and personal circumstances to outlast their personal reputations and be rarefied to the pure proposition: ‘‘by their works ye shall know them.’’ ‘‘Think what it must mean,’’ she invited persuasively, ‘‘to be pulled by the kite-string back to earth and told that one is pathological, sexist, neurotic, decadent, bad, sad or mad. Such telling, operating only from anecdote and written document, cannot hope to be accurate.’’ Hence, Engel’s plea that it is simply not possible to know everything about everyone. ‘‘You, too,’’ the author reminded us, ‘‘have silly secrets,

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cravings you have fortunately left unexpressed, obsessions, letters you ought not to have written. You, too, have gone through a batty period after a death or a divorce, made erratic judgements, changed your mind, been unkind. Only fictional characters can satisfy our desire for perfect consistency.’’ Engel made the case for fiction, even as she admitted the appeal of psychological and biographical approaches to literature. ‘‘Psychoanalytical criticism and psychobiography in good hands are fascinating,’’ she acknowledged. Moreover, ‘‘as biography becomes ever more intimate, it becomes more enjoyable.’’ But how intimate is intimate? Or, to paraphrase Nancy K. Miller,8 how personal is personal? Who decides? . . . Is it personal only if it’s embarrassing? If not, is it just a rhetorical ploy? Do I wind up saying that ‘‘bad’’ politics aren’t personal? Or am I saying, if I like it, it’s personal, it caresses me; otherwise, it’s just positional, it aggresses me. Am I being politically correct again? Maybe personal criticism is for women only. Or do women seem better at it because they’ve been awash in the personal for so long? Is it political? Is it theoretical? (19)

Miller ’s musings help to bring out the complex theoretical and political and, yes, ethical and moral nature of the matter before us. Miller is one of several feminist scholars whose (re)considerations of private, personal or life writings,9 autobiography and biography may be of use in the inquiry here. A few examples may serve to illustrate. In her introduction to the autobiographical writings of English Canadian poet Anne Wilkinson, Joan Coldwell puts the question bluntly: ‘‘How can one justify the intrusion?’’ Coldwell finds a first justification in ‘‘the service of literature’’: ‘‘The journals illuminate Anne Wilkinson’s poetry, sometimes by showing the specific thought processes or incident that led to particular poems . . . and more generally by creating an understanding of her mind and its workings’’ (xv). A similar claim can be made of Marian Engel’s personal papers, particularly her notebooks or cahiers, which have been the focus of much of my attention. As I have noted elsewhere,10 Engel had ‘‘a Gallic passion for the cahier, and early on in her career acquired the habit of recording ideas, notes on books read, drafts of letters never sent, plot outlines and many other things in her notebooks.’’ Engel’s cahiers present a fascinating blend of personal introspection and fiction fragments. Shopping lists and recipes sit alongside elegant prose passages and character sketches in a convincing illustration of what scholars have recently described as life writing.11 In this sense, the notebooks are a precious

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resource for the literary researcher. In conducting my study of Engel’s novels and short stories, I found the notebooks often helped elucidate the fiction. Thus, for example, a notebook embargoed until 198812 contains passages related to Engel’s novel Bear, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1976; valuable notes on the character Marshallene, a feisty woman writer who appears in Lunatic Villas and several short stories; entries pertaining to the novel Monodromos (1973); and an early draft of the intriguing ‘‘Bicycle Story.’’ At the same time, the cahier contains ‘‘other things.’’ Among these are the author’s thoughts and comments about her marriage and the elements that ultimately led to its breakdown; notes taken before and after sessions with psychotherapist John Rich; remarks about individuals in Engel’s life, including her husband, mother, twin son and daughter and friends. This notebook material renewed my queries about research on private writings and how, in practical terms, to deal with some of the ‘‘other things’’ found therein. It revived that ‘‘troublesome sense’’ Jane Marcus reports in The Private Self,13 as we retell women’s tales so that they are the told and not the tellers. It posed the possibility of the ‘‘curious form of voyeurism’’ Nancy Walker identifies.14 As these and other feminist scholars show, it is helpful to turn to the growing body of theoretical work in this area. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have been devoted to women’s autobiographical writing. These studies suggest important differences exist between autobiography and journal or notebook writing. In House by the Sea,15 May Sarton describes autobiography as the story of experience summoned from the past: ‘‘what I remember.’’ The journal, diary or notebook has to do with ‘‘what I am now, at this instance.’’ The immediacy of the entry contrasts with the reflective gaze on the past, but if there are differences between autobiographical and journal or notebook writing, there are important similarities as well. A major commonality has to do with changing notions of the self in response to increased awareness of the importance of factors of gender, class, race, age, sexual preference and so on. Engel’s notebooks demonstrate what Domna Stanton in The Female Autograph16 identifies as the fundamental deviance of ‘‘autogynographies,’’ which produces conflict in the divided self. This is the act of writing itself. ‘‘For a symbolic order that equates the idea(l) of the author with a phallic pen transmitted from father to son places the female writer in contradiction to the dominant definition of woman and casts her as the usurper of male prerogatives’’ (13). Stanton elaborates:


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The graphing of the auto was the act of self-assertion that denied and reversed woman’s status. It represented . . . the conquest of identity through writing. Creating the subject, an autograph gave the female ‘‘I’’ substance through the inscription of an interior and an anterior. And yet, the symbolic specificity of woman as the inessential other also helped explain why the female self was textually constructed through the relation to mother and father, mate and child. (14)

This corresponds to Mason’s ‘‘delineation of identity by way of alterity.’’17 Theoretical perspectives such as these may help account for the incisive presence of ‘‘others’’ in Engel’s notebooks—mother, children, husband, friends. They provide the possibility of understanding their presence in terms of the argument that women’s sense of self exists within a context of deep awareness of others—the concept of women’s self as relational. Engel’s comments about her mother might be read with a view to Nancy Chodorow’s psychoanalytical focus on relational gender identity: the importance of mother-child relationships as the factor that leads to the different sense of self in men and women. Such a framework would allow us to argue that Engel’s notebooks, like Anaïs Nin’s diaries, embody the ‘‘dangers of fluidity and relations for women in patriarchy—the destructiveness of autonomy denied.’’18 It appears helpful to approach Engel’s papers within the feminist framework of women’s departure from a vision of self as separate, unitary and autonomous. Added to this is the concern for historical context raised by feminist critics and researchers from Sheila Rowbotham to Joan Coldwell.19 Thus, Coldwell argues that Anne Wilkinson’s journals provide a valuable record of social history. ‘‘Women’s private narratives have not until recently played a prominent part in accounts of social history. Anne Wilkinson’s journals add another piece to the steadily growing patchwork which allows us to see what the realities of life have been for all sorts and conditions of women. Through an intimate awareness of one individual in a particular, never-to-be-repeated time and place, we are able to understand more about ourselves and our own world’’ (xv). As Nancy Walker argues in her essay on the private writings of Emily Dickinson, Alice James and Virginia Woolf, ‘‘the diaries, letters, journals, and memoirs of women are properly of increasing interest to scholars’’ (emphasis added).20 These often are the only kinds of writing women have produced. This is not the case with Marian Engel, who published several novels, but her notebooks, like other women’s private writings, ‘‘illuminate the lives and concerns of women generally in their recording of small as well as large—‘public’—moments.’’21 Thus, as

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From Marian Engel’s Cahiers

MEA, Box 6, File 28, page 1.





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98







99

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Walker argues, ‘‘it is less important to know with whom, if anyone, Emily Dickinson [substitute Marian Engel] was [or was not] in love than to know what relationships with men and women meant to women of her time and place, and how these meanings became transformed into ar t’’ (300; emphasis added). Research into private papers may allow us to better understand art and its creation, or a particular individual’s art and life and the sociohistoric context in which they unfolded. Marian Engel’s private writings may be seen as an illustration of artistic (re)creation and transformation. In their significance to her struggles as a woman writer, these writings acquire significance within the wider picture of women’s writing. It is within this frame that one might approach her reflections on her husband’s perceived attempt to break into her ‘‘treasure box’’ of writing, her criticism of her mother’s attitude in life, her alcohol abuse and so on. It is, thus, both useful and productive to bring feminist literary theory to bear on archival research. This does not answer all the questions that may arise in exploring writers’ personal papers. These questions are many, vary enormously from archive to archive and often cannot be anticipated. Nor does it supersede the material’s ability to ‘‘stand on its own,’’ as fruitful and rewarding reading in itself. This point deserves to be stressed, as I bring these brief considerations to an end. For personal writings, such as those in question here, continue to hold their interest and value while new literary, theoretical and moral perspectives are developed. Thus, Marian Engel’s personal writings, in particular her notebooks, present a fascinating account of being a woman and a writer, which speaks volumes.

Notes 1 Marian Engel Archive, Box 6, File 28, McMaster University Archives. Box 6 contains the majority of the author’s notebooks from the first instalment of papers, catalogued and available in the McMaster University Archives. A second instalment of papers was made in July 1992 and notebooks contained therein are catalogued in Box 34. 2 ‘‘In order to prove their own existence,’’ Engel added (‘‘A Plea to Stop Turning the Knobs on Writers’ Closets,’’ Globe and Mail [Toronto] 17 Nov. 1984: Literary Supplement—Books). 3 Marian Engel, ‘‘Why and How and Why Not and What Is This, about Starting Another Novel . . . ,’’ Canadian Literature, 25th anniversary issue: Canadian Writers in 1984, ed. W. H. New (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1984) 101-102. 4 Engel, ‘‘A Plea to Stop Turning the Knobs on Writers’ Closets.’’ 5 Engel’s terminology, in the article mentioned.


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6 Christl Verduyn, Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writings (Montreal: McGillQueen’s UP, 1995). 7 Joan Coldwell, The Tightrope Walker (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992). 8 Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991). 9 See Marlene Kadar, ed., Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992). 10 Christl Verduyn, ‘‘Between the Lines: Marian Engel’s Cahiers or Notebooks,’’ Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992). In it, here and in Christl Verduyn, ed., Marian Engel’s Notebooks: ‘‘Ah, mon cahier, écoute’’ (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1999), I cite archivist Dr. K. E. Garay, who catalogued Engel’s papers. 11 For more on this fascinating genre, see Kadar, ed., Essays on Life Writing. 12 This was the only embargoed notebook. As Mary Rubio, editor of L. M. Montgomery ’s journals, pointed out during our workshop discussion, this and the fact that the embargo was for only five years would suggest Engel anticipated, possibly even expected, public perusal of her personal writings. 13 Jane Marcus, ‘‘Invincible Mediocrity, The Private Selves of Public Women,’’ The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 114-46. 14 Nancy Walker, ‘‘ ‘Wider than the Sky’: Public Presence and Private Self in Dickinson, James, and Woolf,’’ The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 272-304. 15 May Sarton, House by the Sea (New York: Norton, 1977), quoted by Walker, ‘‘ ‘Wider than the Sky.’ ’’ 16 Domna Stanton, ‘‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’’ The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987). 17 Cited by Stanton 14. 18 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice,’’ The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 34-62. 19 See Stanford Friedman 34-62. 20 Walker 300. 21 Walker 300.

An Epistolary Constellation: Trotsky, Kahlo, Birney Marlene Kadar

The Archive(s), The Problem(s) In this article, I want to probe a few general questions about the nature of archival work, using as my primary text a grouping of letters from various archives that form a particular epistolary constellation. Before I recount my concerns, which include problems and questions I have about archival research and its relationship to literary scholarship, let me describe the epistolary constellation to which I refer and explain how it has come to form what I think of as a map of partisan culture in the 1930s. The geography of this culture is not solely Canadian. The Triangle of Influence stretches from Paris across the ocean to Toronto, where Earle Birney was literary editor for The Canadian Forum, 1936-40; to New York, where many of the anti-Stalinist intellectuals lived and worked, some of them as editors or writers for the progressive journal Partisan Review (after 1937); and also south to Mexico City, where Leon Trotsky lived the last few years of his life in exile, and where he died in 1940. What is the grouping and how was it established? This grouping consists of three sets of letters found in three separate collections over the past two decades, each bearing a substantive relationship to the other in some way (although this was not obvious in 1980). These sets of letters are: 1. The Exile Papers, T2 (formerly the ‘‘Closed Section’’) of the Lev Trotsky / Leon Trotsky Archives [bMS Russian 13.1], Houghton


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Library, Harvard University, opened to the public 2 January 1980 (letters to—in carbon—and from); 2. Frida Kahlo’s letters to (only) Ella Wolfe, the widow of Bertram Wolfe, some found in the Bertram D. Wolfe Collection at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University Campus, and others found in Ella Wolfe’s private collection; and 3. Earle Robertson’s [Birney’s] letters to and from Leon Trotsky, found in the Exile Papers above; however, Earle Birney’s letters to Dorothy Livesay, Daphne Marlatt, Robertson Davies, Northrop Frye and others are collected in the Earle Birney Archives of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto. I have used this ‘‘grouping’’ in conjunction with other sets of correspondence to propose an influence study along conventional historical lines, as a way of reclaiming the contribution of anti-Stalinist intellectuals and activists to contemporary debates about the politics of culture. The debates emerged in the aftermath of Leon Trotsky ’s exile from the former USSR in the 1920s, and evolved and developed in the thirties and forties in the West. This study often required the interpretation of ‘‘unofficial’’ texts, both unpublished and so-called non-literary (Hoffman and Culley ), to make the case, often supported, however, by published, literary materials, such as Earle Birney’s novel, Down the Long Table (1955). The grouping thus constitutes the Triangle of Influence, or the geography of partisan culture.1 The primary proposal of my research is that Birney and Kahlo, among many others, came under the influence (or the spell) of Leon Trotsky during the flourish in cultural modernism (for Birney, 1930-38; for Kahlo, 1934-47). One exciting influence within modernism—acknowledged by a few, such as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe and Mary McCarthy—was the development of an antiStalinist cultural left, or as György Lukács called it, though he meant it disparagingly, ‘‘literary Trotskyism.’’ The Triangle of Influence is a map of literary or cultural Trotskyism (see fig. 1 below). It is an account of the relationships that formed on the anti-Stalinist cultural left, the Canadian details of which are documented in Elspeth Cameron’s controversial biography of Earle Birney. The powerlessness of the partisan culture against blackballing (and more serious threats) from both sides (East and West, Stalinist-communist and capitalist) required that its practitioners use language as a communiqué directed toward the thing signified in the real world in order to foster group solidarity or provide a critique of the majority culture (Meese 23, my emphasis). The genres which circulated in the movement represented by the grouping were conspicuously life-writing genres,

Toronto Earle Birney [Rober tson] Maurice Spector John McDonald The Canadian Forum

Los Angeles Kenneth Patchen Har vey Breit [Foka] Edward G. Robinson Pulse

London British Surrealist Group George Bernard Shaw Earle Birney [Rober tson]

NEW YORK CITY

Partisan Review James T. Farrell [Oneal] James Rorty Sidney Hook Earle Birney [Rober tson, David Brownstone] Victor Calver ton [Goer tz] League of American Writers The New International (published by the Four th Inter national)

Leon Trotsky in exile (Dec. 1936 to Aug. 1940) Jean van Heijenoort Diego Rivera MEXICO Frida Kahlo CITY FIARI Manifeste

André Breton Jacqueline Lamba Breton Jean van Heijenoort Benjamin Peret [Peralta] PARIS Nicolas Calas Pierre Naville [Servoix] Jean Malaquais [Malacki] Victor Serge [Maurice] Parajanine [Donzel] Les Humbles FIARI [Patrice] Sherr y Mangan Marcel Martinet Copenhagen Maurice Wullens Wilhelm Reich

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LEGEND [ ] indicates pseudonyms Italics indicate publications FIARI = Fédération Internationale de l’art

Kadar / An Epistolary Constellation: Trotsky, Kahlo, Birney

Figure 1 The Triangle of Influence, or, The Geography of Partisan Culture

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often the letter and the manifesto—both of which were grand at fostering a kind of self-portrait, either of the individual letter writer (in his / her wish for an improved self) or of the collective in its wish for an improved, even an ideal, world. A bias toward canon and literariness explains why these sorts of texts are dismissed as polemical, didactic and non-literary in a traditional or canonical sense. Apart from their lack of generic authority, these non-literary texts also revealed a myriad of illegitimate yearnings and subgenres—self-portraiture itself, doodles or decorations, personal comments, self-criticism, gossip and numerous complaints. But they also provided the evidence needed to support the proposal of a Triangle of Influence, one that had a celebrated public face, and, more importantly for feminists, a secret subaltern culture negotiated by women members of the community. Briefly, behind the scenes, through private letters, this women’s culture carried out very important but unofficial operations: Kahlo and Wolfe, for example, coordinated and monitored the exchange of ideas and political strategies which ostensibly took place between their husbands and among other progressive men who, in public, were leaders of this partisan culture in the thirties. Frida wants to prepare Bert Wolfe for a letter from Diego so that he will agree more readily to writing Diego’s biography. Persuasive communication, then, is ‘‘women’s work.’’ With her goal in mind, Kahlo writes to Ella Wolfe in March of 1936: I read your nice letter to Diego and he wants me to tell you more or less what he’s going to write to Boit [Bertram Wolfe, Ella’s husband; Frida is putting on a Brooklyn accent] in a forthcoming letter. I think it’s a good idea for me to give you his answer in advance because with any luck Boit is going to get tired of waiting for the letter, and it will get to him only when the whole world speaks Esperanto and when Diego imagines that barely a week has gone by since your letter, so that I will tell you more or less what Diego told me to tell you to explain to Bert. About the biography [Diego Rivera: His Life and Times, 1939] there isn’t even anything to discuss since you and everybody else knows that Bert ought to write it.2

Behind the scenes, as well, Kahlo first sold her paintings. Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits were, by and large, neglected in their time. (Kahlo was in failing health and in the last year of her life when, in 1953, her own country Mexico finally organized a retrospective of her work.) Frida Kahlo had had a memorable affair with Trotsky in 1937, during which time Trotsky was visited by one of his correspondents, the American actor, Edward G. Robinson. From the Exile Papers I learned that Robinson saw Kahlo’s work during this visit to Trotsky ’s home in 1937, which is when a film in which he starred, The Last Gangster, was


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released in the United States. Soon after the visit, Robinson sent Trotsky a copy of the film, which Trotsky referred to as ‘‘The Gangster’’ (a film which was, he thought, beneath Robinson’s talents) and became the first American to buy Kahlo’s work, followed in our time by another celebrity, the rock vocalist, Madonna. Robinson paid for his affiliation with Trotsky and other left-wing intellectuals. He was blacklisted by the entertainment industry during the postwar red scare (O’Neill 227-28); thereafter he worked as a character actor ‘‘in cheap B pictures’’), too old to secure leading roles (228).

Frida Kahlo (right) with Ella Wolfe, New York, 1935. Photograph by Ella Parese, with permission of Ella Wolfe.

The Questions and Issues The questions I asked myself began with an inquiry into the genre of life writing and its status in cultural studies, and ended with the question of responsibility when reading and interpreting other people’s private mail. Some of the more pertinent questions are recounted here, and although many are never answered fully, they did form the context of my study. Most important was the question about the authority of my texts. Are the letters that form the grouping legitimate texts in and of themselves, or are they more pertinent as historical or ethnographic accounts? If they are simply texts as any other, what then is the status of a text that is a letter or the text that is a self-portrait? The argument that the distinc-

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tion between literary and non-literary texts should be made less absolute is strengthened by inter-archival research with a self- conscious political, feminist or anti-racist agenda, because in the case of this constellation of correspondents, social and literary links are established as a consequence of reading a variety of texts and accounts. This led me to the next question: is there something in particular revealed about the letter-text in the modern or contemporary period that needs to be historicized? And, along with that question, the researcher must assess the fact that it is not usual for an ‘‘ordinary’’ letter writer to bring her own letters into print. Are archival researchers then really interlopers? If yes, what is the burden of responsibility here? Thus, are the letters which form this grouping better named (as in Kristeva’s usage) intertexts? There is a distinct advantage in using this term over ‘‘text.’’ Kristeva argues that an intertext is interminably linked to other texts because it makes either obvious or covert allusions to other texts; or, it simply refers to the same gallery of literary and linguistic conventions and devices as all other texts; or, utterances within texts intersect and thereby neutralize each other (Kristeva 36). That is, it is not non-literary, sub-literary or extra-literary at all; or, it is irrelevant whether or not the intertext has ‘‘literary potential’’ because the adjective ‘‘literary,’’ has itself multiple meanings. Therefore, the intertext is not a particularly fixed nor stable literary composition. All texts, or intertexts, exhibit narrative strategies that can be overdetermined and compared, as proposed by the field of narratology (see, for example, Beauchamp, Pratt, Rimmon-Kenan). Does this mean therefore that the letter is open to the same kind of literary analysis as the short story? If yes, what are the literary advantages and conventions, and which generic features are privileged? Meese suggests that the same features apply: coherence, chronology, causality, plausibility, point of view, tense, emotional intensity, etc. If archival researchers apply this kind of analysis, does the letter remain special, or do its own generic features become lesser versions of ‘‘real literary’’ narratives? Can we imagine analyzing a single letter-text in a purely structural way, as does Virginia Walcott Beauchamp in ‘‘Letters as Literature,’’ in Women’s Personal Narratives? How is this analysis improved by a theoretical consideration of gender and class? Like Helen Buss, I want to acknowledge the biases and prejudices we may then employ in our literary and political judgements which may be to the detriment of the letter and its specificities. I am most interested in sorting out the different intellectual and moral demands made of a feminist archival researcher—that is, someone


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who reads other people’s mail and has the academic obligation to either present the mail in some orderly fashion or to provide a justification for the larger study which is informed by the mail. There is a pull here between two current schools of thought. The deconstructionist is able to mediate the question of social or political responsibility more than the cultural materialist. This is interesting when one remembers that it was largely through the inauguration of cultural studies that ‘‘subjectivities’’ and ‘‘literariness’’ became an issue, and that ‘‘subjective’’ accounts were heralded for their contribution to either the history of women or women’s voices or as ideological documents of ‘‘subjectivities’’ (i.e., not male-dominated objective thinking) (see Franklin, Lury and Stacey 1-19). Also, the implication in a materialist or cultural studies approach is that the researcher is committed to social change; that popular culture is as legitimate a record of ‘‘our times’’ as high culture; that there is nothing ‘‘natural’’ about human nature; and that there is a relationship worth studying between ‘‘Culture’’ (the arts) and ‘‘culture’’ in the anthropological sense of ‘‘a whole way of life’’ (Raymond Williams’s protest in Culture and Society, 1961). This relationship also unsettles our understanding of identity and class, and how those two categories unsettle each other and our reading habits in the archive and elsewhere, just as both Marxism and Postmodernism encounter and unsettle what has come to be known as Cultural Studies.3 Four years after the publication of The Long Revolution, Williams defined culture as ‘‘the signifying system’’ in which belonged the traditional arts and forms of intellectual production, but also all the ‘‘signifying practices.’’ A letter or a correspondence or a grouping of letters is a signifying practice with an internal life that presumes much on the part of its audience. That is, it assumes certain relationships already made, and also less fixed relationships in the making as the letter is being written. Thus, the signifying practice in this triangle offers the space for more politicized readings of both the literary canon and what has been excluded from it. The signifying practices of the letters also offer the possibility of radical rereadings of traditional subjects in the arts, humanities, etc., and resistance to any number of conventions. For example, Frida’s letters to Ella allow us to present an image of a woman-artist who is not the image-unity of victim that Kahlo’s prime biographer, Hayden Herrera, tends to suggest. Nonetheless, Kahlo is a ‘‘modern’’ letter writer who is sustained by (a) her own exciting and turbulent life, (b) the crazed, and celebrated, life of her husband and patriarch-muralist, Diego Rivera, and (c) her own art, which consists primarily of self-portraiture; indeed, her

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self-portraits are constructions of her various selves (and often about how loved or unloved they are). About letter writing, Eva Meyer proposes that ‘‘an urge to impart oneself [ein Mitteilungsbedurfnis] takes hold, which imagines itself in writing and thereby comes to love’’ (80). One might say that through the self-portrait, and also through her impassioned and decorated letters to Ella Wolfe, Kahlo constructs the love for which she longs. In one letter, ‘‘Mexico. Marzo de 1936’’ (March of 1936), the farewell includes four sets of lipstick marks from lips that have kissed the page (see illustration below). Kahlo declares at the end of this letter that ‘‘soon I’ll write you a tremendous letter full of enough gossip about myself to fill a New York Times [sic]’’ (translated in my Reading Life Writing, 241).

‘‘Mexico. Marzo de 1936,’’ a letter from Frida Kahlo to Ella Wolfe, with four lipstick kisses on paper. From the Bertram Wolfe Papers, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.


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It is possible that all Kahlo writes in her letters to Ella Wolfe is punctuated by her experience of and to her own sexuality, as Foucault would suggest is typical of the Western and the modern: the truth of the subject is to be found in the apprehension of her own sexuality (Histor y of Sexuality). I wonder: how important is Kahlo’s vision of herself as sexual being to the creation of her self? Is it central or subtextual? (Is it any different in Birney’s letters to, for example, a colleague named ‘‘Jake,’’ where the two men belittle a serious letter about creative writing by Daphne Marlatt?) Can we know this from the letters, which anticipate a particular and circumscribed audience? Is this confirmed by Kahlo’s selfportraits? What is the play between the representation of ‘‘desire’’ in the women’s letters and the representation of ‘‘power’’ or ‘‘power-over ’’ in the men’s? I can only conclude that gender and sex can cross letter writing and reading in uneven and unpredictable ways, and that these ways have the potential to steer researchers in the right direction as they formulate guidelines that are appropriate to the primary texts. In this case, the guidelines are feminist in orientation, and attentive to both subjects which are overtly political or political in less obvious or subtle ways. In other words, subaltern new intertexts can be constructed and produce new / other narratives (other than the ones contained within an individual letter or a single archive), because of the combined readings of groupings of letters at different archives in conjunction with readings of published or public documents. In the case of the Trotsky, Kahlo and Birney letters, an epistolary constellation emerges as a new narrative among many in the Triangle, punctuating the official story of the antiStalinist cultural left with feminist intertexts of subterfuge, maybe even resistance. The story of subterfuge, however, does not change the heroic story we already know about the anti-Stalinist movement. It is a narrative of resistance, fighting against the dominant cultures of both the communist left and the capitalist right, and will remain so. However, as we recover more information about women’s lives through their writings in the Dirty Thirties and later, this particular narrative of resistance will continue to be renegotiated by archivists and scholars, both inside the ‘‘archive,’’ writ large and intertextual, and outside it, among various published accounts.

Notes 1 The Triangle of Influence and the details of ‘‘partisan culture’’ are discussed in greater detail in my dissertation and in ‘‘Partisan Culture in the Thirties: Partisan Review, the Surrealists and Leon Trotsky ’’ (see Works Cited). Appendix A

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of the dissertation includes a variety of letters and documents (1935-39) found in the Exile Papers (T2), 184-248. 2 This letter is one of many found in the Bertram Wolfe Collection at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. All are written in Spanish, although they may have English words and phrases included here and there. The letters have been translated by Ellen Anderson and edited by me. This particular letter was discussed with Mrs. Ella Wolfe in December 1986. A complete transcript of the letter was published with her permission in the Fall 1987 issue of MOSAIC: DATA and ACTA: Aspects of Life Writing 20.4: 149-50. 3 See Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, for critiques of the central debates in Cultural Studies, including ‘‘diasporic questions.’’

Works Cited Beauchamp, Virginia Walcott. ‘‘Letters as Literature: The Prestons of Baltimore.’’ Women’s Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy. Ed. Leonore Hoffmann and Margo Culley. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 29-39. Buss, Helen. Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993. Cameron, Elspeth. Earle Birney: A Life. Toronto: Viking, 1994. Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey. ‘‘Introduction 1: Feminism and Cultural Studies: Pasts, Presents, Futures.’’ Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey. London: Harper-Collins, 1991. 1-19. Hall, Stuart. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and KuanHsing Chen. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Herrera, Hayden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Hoffmann, Leonore, and Margo Culley, eds. Women’s Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Howe, Irving. Trotsky. Glasgow: Fontana / Collins, 1978. Kadar, Marlene. ‘‘Cultural Politics in the 1930s: Partisan Review, the Surrealists and Leon Trotsky.’’ Diss. U of Alberta, 1983. . ‘‘Partisan Culture in the Thirties: Partisan Review, the Surrealists and Leon Trotsky. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (September 1986): 375-423. , ed. Reading Life Writing. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1993. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Meese, Elizabeth. ‘‘The Languages of Oral Testimony and Women’s Literature.’’ Women’s Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy. Ed. Leonore Hoffmann and Margo Culley. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 18-26.


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Meyer, Eva. ‘‘Letters or the Autobiography of Writing.’’ Trans. Timothy H. Engstrom and Sabine I. Golz. Discourse 10 (Fall-Winter 1987-88): 78-88. O’Neill, William L. A Better World—The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Phillips, William. A Par tisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life. New York: Stein and Day, 1983. Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literar y Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. . The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of Histor y. 1940. New York: Doubleday, 1953.

Afterword Marlene Kadar

Archive as Fact The assumption of this collection is that researching women’s archival writing yields new insights into the study of women’s lives in significant political, historical and cultural ways. Like a conventional literary text, the archive, too, is a complex site of influences and representations. But it is also an incomplete site, created by this donor or that; by this survivor or by that librarian; in partial translation or in English and Spanish, etc. In other words, part of what makes the archive a complex text is that it is a fragmentary piece of knowledge, or an unfixed and changing piece of knowledge. Archives build: as they grow, as Gwen Davies’s research on the Cottnam women and Helen Buss’s reconstruction of the life of Marie Rose Smith illustrate, the knowledge they produce will alter the way we read archival subjects in general, and gender in particular. Like a conventional literary text, Buss and Davies prove that an archival text is an opportune subject for feminist scrutiny and therefore feminist deconstruction and reclamation. In the act of reclaiming women’s life writing, for example, the instructive lessons of sexual politics come into play. Nowhere is this clearer than in Mary Rubio’s experience editing Montgomery—both Montgomery’s works (the primary texts) and Rubio’s works (the biography) are, at different times, undermined by comments made by both the professoriate and the publishers, comments which continue to hurt women because of their ideological and judgemental character; and comments which also encourage the suppression of women’s experience, partly by trivializing aspects of that experience. Here, the word ‘‘trivial’’ itself must be re-evaluated. Like Verduyn and Kerr, Rubio raises the question of ethics in reclaiming 115

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women’s history. Verduyn and Kerr interrogate the ethics of feminist reclamation; but they have other concerns as well: how close to the subject can the feminist scholar be before the effect of emotional ties or the need for privacy take control? My own essay tackles the problem of authority from another angle. Frida Kahlo’s letters to Ella Wolfe, for example, indicate the control Kahlo and her women friends had over political and cultural concerns in her community, even when the public record tends to remember only her spouse, Diego Rivera, or her lover, Leon Trotsky. It is the question of authority itself that feminist archival research interrogates and reclaims. Women are authors in diverse conditions, including unpublished and uncelebrated conditions, and as Carole Gerson explains, feminist archival research acknowledges this fact.

The Multiple Goals of Recovery and Deconstruction As indicated by the contributors, women’s archival research documents the multiple goals produced by the recovery and deconstruction of archival texts by women. These multiple goals can be summarized in what we will refer to as six operations, recalling that two salient operations in mathematics are addition and multiplication, and these operations have a metaphoric quality when we consider the task of recovering women in the archives. An operation also refers to the way a thing works, often replacing the gerund, ‘‘working.’’ Although not exhaustive, what follows is a summary list of the six operations of the research that distinguishes this particular study of recovering women’s lives in archives. The six operations include: 1. The recovery of heretofore unknown materials, facts, knowledges; 2. The reclamation of women’s lives; 3. The reclamation of women’s ordinary, everyday (or ‘‘trivial’’) experiences as valuable, having their own integrity, both formal and substantive; 4. The reclamation of women’s writing, in a variety of life-writing genres—letters, diaries, memoirs, paintings, samplers, gravestones, cahiers and other kinds of reminiscences; 5. The investigation, as a consequence of the above four operations, of how women’s lives and works change how we think about reading; and 6. The ongoing project of rescuing women’s lives and cultures from the ‘‘anonymity of history’’ (Davies), so that they are understood as part of our history and our present.

Kadar / Afterword

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These operations are evidence that scholars must work in archives in order to study the variety of women’s work and works, and that this work is mandatory if we are to embolden feminist scholarship or, as Carole Gerson indicates, locate female subjects in a non-neutral zone. The consequence of this ‘‘working’’ is the improved representation of women, and the continuing interrogation of ‘‘women’’ as a fixed category of study in the academy. Hence, this working is also a continuing refinement of the archive itself, an attempt to keep the door of the archive always open—as Jacques Derrida has cautioned us to do (2-4).

Work Cited Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995 and 1996.

Contributors Helen M. Buss (aka Margaret Clarke), is a professor in the English Department at the University of Calgary. She is the author of novels, plays and poetry, as well as books and articles on Canadian literature and life writing. In 1983 she won a best-first-novel prize in Manitoba for her book The Cutting Season, and in 1993 she won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for her study of Canadian women’s autobiography, Mapping Our Selves. Her current writing and research centres on the memoir form. In 1999 she published Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood, and has recently completed a book on women’s uses of the memoir form with the working title, Repossessing the World: Reading and Writing Contemporary Women’s Memoirs. Gwendolyn Davies is Dean of Graduate Studies and a member of the English Department at the University of New Brunswick. She has authored or edited various books and articles on Maritime literature and is particularly interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s writing and cultural history in the Atlantic provinces. Carole Gerson, a professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, has done extensive research on Canadian literary history and early Canadian women writers. In addition to many articles, her publications include A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in English in Nineteenth-Century Canada (1989), Canada’s Early Women Writers: Texts in English to 1859 (1994), Canadian Poetr y: From the Beginnings through the First World War (1994), co-edited with Gwendolyn Davies, and Paddling Her Own Canoe: Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionake) (2000), co-authored with Veronica Strong-Boag. She is currently a member of the editorial team working on The History of the Book in Canada / L’histoire du livre et de l’édition au Canada. Marlene Kadar is the Director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University. She teaches in the Humanities Division and in Women’s Studies. Her published works include Essays on 119

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Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992), Reading Life Writing (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1993) and ‘‘ ‘Write Down Everything Just as You Know It’: A Portrait of Ibolya Szalai Grossman,’’ Great Dames, ed. Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997). Her current research investigates Holocaust/ Porramjos life-writing narratives and archival documents in order to examine the categories of ethnicity in the Hungarian-speaking regions of Central Europe. Rosalind Kerr is an assistant professor of Dramatic Theory and Criticism in the Drama Department of the University of Alberta. Her main areas of concentration are modern and contemporary dramatic and performance theory with an emphasis on feminist, gay/lesbian / queer and critical race theory. She is preparing a book on the first Italian actresses in sixteenth-century Commedia dell’Arte. Another very important interest is in women’s auto/biography, focusing primarily on her grandmother Constance Kerr Sissons’s archive of letters, journals and an as-yetunpublished novel. Mary Henley Rubio is a professor of English at the University of Guelph where she has taught since 1967. With Elizabeth Waterston, Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, she has edited The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery (Volumes 1 to 4 with a fifth volume to come [Oxford UP]), co-written Writing a Life: L. M. Montgomery (ECW Press) and co-published many other items on Montgomery. Since its founding in 1975, she has co-edited the academic journal CCL: Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse. Mary Rubio’s most recent publication on Montgomery is ‘‘L. M. Montgomery: ScottishPresbyterian Agency in Canadian Culture,’’ L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, ed. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly (U of Toronto P), and she is working on the official biography of Montgomery. Christl Verduyn teaches and writes about Canadian literature, with special interest in Canadian and Québécois women’s writing and criticism, multiculturalism, life writing and interdisciplinary approaches to literature. Her books include Margaret Laurence: An Appreciation (1988), Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence (1995), Lifelines: Marian Engel’s Writing (1995), Literar y Pluralities (1998) and Marian Engel’s Notebooks (1999). Before joining the faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2000, Christl Verduyn taught at Trent University, where she was founding chair of Women’s Studies (1987-90) and chair of Canadian Studies (1993-99). She is currently president of the national Association for Canadian Studies (2000-2002).

Books in the Life Writing Series Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press Haven’t Any News: Ruby’s Letters from the Fifties Edited by Edna Staebler with an Afterword by Marlene Kadar 1995 / x + 165 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-248-6 ‘‘I Want to Join Your Club’’: Letters from Rural Children, 1900-1920 Edited by Norah L. Lewis with a Preface by Neil Sutherland 1996 / xii + 250 pp. (30 b&w photos) / ISBN 0-88920-260-5 And Peace Never Came Elisabeth M. Raab with Historical Notes by Marlene Kadar 1996 / x + 196 pp. (12 b&w photos, map) / ISBN 0-88920-281-8 Dear Editor and Friends: Letters from Rural Women of the North-West, 1900-1920 Edited by Norah L. Lewis 1998 / xvi + 166 pp. (20 b&w photos) / ISBN 0-88920-287-7 The Surprise of My Life: An Autobiography Claire Drainie Taylor with a Foreword by Marlene Kadar 1998 / ISBN 0-88920-302-4 xii + 268 pp. (+ 8 colour photos and 92 b&w photos) Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke 1998 / xvi + 153 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-350-4 The Life and Letters of Annie Leake Tuttle: Working for the Best Marilyn Färdig Whiteley 1999 / xviii + 150 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-330-X Marian Engel’s Notebooks: ‘‘Ah, mon cahier, écoute’’ Christl Verduyn, editor 1999 / viii + 576 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-333-4 cloth / ISBN 0-88920-349-0 paper Be Good Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie Audrey Andrews 1999 / vi + 276 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-334-2 Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar, editors 2001 / vi + 120 pp. / ISBN 0-88920-341-5

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