In her latest book, Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship, Linda M. Morra digs into the archives of five Canadian women authors. Studying the treatment of the papers of E. Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr, Sheila Watson, Jane Rule, and M. NourbeSe Philip, she showcases the ways in which female writers in Canada have represented themselves and their careers.
Here, in an excerpt from her article in a recent issue of ESC: English Studies in Canada, Morra considers what it means to “get dirty” in authors’ archives.
Morra, Linda M. “I’m a Dirty Girl.” ESC 40.2-3 (June-September 2014): 5-8.
I’m a dirty girl—sometimes literally, if not literally at this moment. I spend hours upon hours in archives, not exclusively in formal collections housed in official institutions, but also in informal ones, including people’s basements. The dust and sometimes-literal dirt that accrues in those spaces means that, when I immerse myself therein, I do get dirty—literally.
That dirt, however, also carries symbolic registers. I work both inside and outside authorized, institutional spaces to track the material traces that Canadian women authors leave behind and that were also sometimes willfully omitted from “sanitized” or official archives. As ecocritic Anthony Lioi observes, I want to “give dirt its due” by breaking down the assumptions that undergird socio-cultural networks by which women were at one point “cleansed” from the historical record and that threw their very legibility as citizens and their status as authors into question, when it did not entail their disappearance altogether (17). In short, I want to locate the detritus left behind by Canadian women writers and render it visible to others.
I therefore don’t only “get down and dirty” because of the literal spaces to which I travel; I also do so because of the socio-political material I am looking for and sometimes encounter. I get the dirt on the lives of various Canadian women authors and their associations with publishers, agents, family, and friends, and then engage in ethical decisions that determine how much I will dish in my publications and presentations. My archival research demonstrates that the dirt I am looking for extends beyond questions of gender and carries valences that encompass questions of race, sexuality, class, and economy. In making those ethical decisions, I must acknowledge, even so, that women were already regarded as “embodiments of shame” and that “the female socialization process can be viewed as a prolonged immersion in shame” (Bouson 2). In each encounter with the archive, therefore, I must stage my work carefully, to avoid further perpetuating this process of immersion and consider how my own acts might be characterized in this process. […]
But what does this mean for me, the researcher who digs up and uncovers this kind of dirt? “Moi, j’ai les mains sales, aussi,” as Jean-Paul Sartre would say. Does restaging or revealing such material mean that I have cleansed or righted the record? Not necessarily, since there is no means by which to guarantee what the effects will be of such a restaging, nor that the record with which I am grappling can be “righted”: it is subject to perspective, socio-political contexts, and cultural expectations. I too am implicated in the process, and understand that the moral terms by which I work will shift from one context to another; however, I am aware that being so implicated is inevitable. As Heather Sullivan notes, “we want … a conscious and concrete embrace of dirt, which cannot be avoided since we live and breathe it daily” (517). Finding dirt, it seems, is part of the research process, and feeling dirty, if not actually being so, is implicit in being a researcher in archives.
