There have been several aspects of ASTU 100 that have allowed me to develop new ideas, opinions, and perspectives on certain topics. The main focus of our year was autobiography, and I found that working with archives was very interesting for me because it allowed me to see what limits autobiographical representation in history.

For the archives group project, my group chose to discuss the letters Gilean Douglas, a woman who pursued a life as a writer in the wilderness, received from the fans of her writings. It was amazing to see how immensely gratuitous both men and women were to her works for allowing them to identify with the unconventional aspects of her life and character (Gilean Douglas Fonds). Although this was the case, these men and women addressed Grant Madison in their letters, which is the pseudonym that Douglas used to publish her work (Gilean Douglas Fonds).  In contemporary times, women writing under the pseudonym of male names continues to occur. For example, Joanne Kathleen Rowling, who used the initials J.K. Rowling to publish her Harry Potter series, also using the pseudonym Robert Galbraith to publish her detective series. I enjoyed reading the Harry Potter series as a child, and when I learned that Robert Galbraith was a pseudonym Rowling had employed for her more recent work, I wondered to what extent Rowling’s work beneath a male guise versus a female guise managed to secure more sales.

Before I was registered in ASTU, I believed that this choice was representative of the limited agency of the female writer.  Referring specifically to Gilean Douglas, I was at first disheartened by her compulsion, driven by the need to acquire a wider readership, to represent her books through a male identity. Working with the Gilean Douglas fond, however, I realized that Rodney Carter’s work on silences within archives could be integral to understanding the power of self-representation in autobiographical histories.  The fact that Douglas chose to adopt a pseudonym is essentially representative of the inequality experienced by women in literature. Douglas identifies a silent epidemic— the epidemic present within the professional market that restricts the careers of women— and successfully “nam[es]…the silence, subverts it, draws attention to it” (Carter 222). Reading Douglas’ fan letters within her fond, I found that I could see a value in her fan letters highlighting the contrast between her actual identity and her chosen identity.  Ultimately, Douglas’ use of a pseudonym as a form of self-representation established her feminist autobiographical history.

I had never before considered that silence could play a powerful role in interactions between the state and civil society. In general, ASTU has compelled me to read narratives more critically and ask how they are being framed within a public context, allowing me to garner more about what they represent.

Works Cited:

Carter, Rodney G.S. “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence.” Archivaria 61, 2006, pp. 215-33, http://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12541. Accessed 25 February 2017.

“Gilean Douglas Fonds.” UBC Library, http://rbscarchives.library.ubc.ca/index.php/gilean-douglas-fonds. Accessed 16 March 2017.