Rodney G.S. Carter describes archives as being “filled with voices”, they are an effective way of preserving information that would otherwise be lost or forgotten in order for contemporary societies to understand the past (Carter 216). However, widespread oppression and institutional discrimination has resulted in some experiences being forcibly erased from archives. Carter defines this erasure of experiences as “archival silences” (Carter 217). These silences come in two forms, “natural silences are those that are entered into by choice” and unnatural silences are those in which “the individual or group is silenced, through the use of power” (Carter 217). Many individuals and groups have responded to this erasure by forming independent archives which can be used to resist state-sponsored archives or as ways of augmenting them to add more diversity to the experiences captured.
At the Rare Books and Special Collections library at the University of British Columbia I looked through The Gilean Douglas Collection which contains documents collected by a woman named Gilean Douglas, a Toronto-born writer in 1950s Vancouver. Initially I found myself questioning why this seemingly “normal” life was being preserved. However, I realised that an understanding of larger concepts could be gained from an individual’s experience. Women have been continually silenced and excluded from entering academic discourse. Female writers are only recently being acknowledged and their stories are being used to fill some of the “silences” contained in our understanding of the past. The materials contained in the Gilean Douglas collection provide insight into the experience of a silenced member of society. Thus, her life may seem relatively uneventful, but it contributes to a larger understanding of history.
The document I chose to focus on (pictured below) is a letter addressed to a Mr. Gilean Douglas from a seemingly upset publisher from the Royal Publishing Company. This document provides a great teaching opportunity for students of literary and cultural studies because it showcases the importance of context and setting in research and analysis. Douglas is referred to in the letter as “Mr. Gilean Douglas” which provides a clue about social norms of the time period. The use of male pseudonyms by western female writers in the early 19thto mid-20thcentury was common practice Douglas took on various male pseudonyms and “Mr. Douglas was likely one of them (UBC 4). Therefore, a single detail from this archive is able to provide a real-life example of social norms, emphasizing the importance of context to textual analysis.
The publisher writing the letter, a man named Paul L. Heard, seems very upset by a previous letter sent by Douglas. The word “rot!” has been written in blue pen in the top-left corner of the letter and after doing some research about the meaning and use of the word I discovered that the expression “talk rot” was commonly used at the time and meant nonsense or rubbish (Dictionary). Without this contextual understanding I would not have been able to make the suggestion that Douglas must have felt very annoyed by Heard’s words in which he claimed to be unaffiliated with the loss of her books after a company shutdown. The entire collection contained many letters of this nature with various publishers.
This document is one piece of a much larger story and would be better understood if an analysis of all the documents between Douglas and Heard was done. However, it highlights the importance of diversity in our production of knowledge. Douglas’s life seems to have been relatively normal one but her individual and dynamic experience offers us a more dynamic understanding of a range of experiences. From Douglas’s archival records a range of knowledge can be understood from letter writing practices of the 1950s Canada to some of the successes and challenges of female writers. Additionally, I found this document significant because taught me how to work with primary sources, a skill that I have not practiced often due to the variety of more accessible secondary sources that we often use as students.
Works Cited
Carter, Rodney G.S. “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences and Power in Silence*.” Archivaria1 April 2006: 228.
University of British Columbia. “Finding Aid -Gilean Douglas Fonds (RSBC -ARC-1168).” 10 January 2018. RBSC Archives Library Website.25 January 2019.
Dictionary, The Free. Rot. n.d. 27 January 2019.
The National Archives. “Archive Principles and Practice: an introduction to archives for non-archivists.” 2016: 124.
Douglas, Gilean. Letter from Paul L. Heard to Giilean Douglas. 27 April 1958. Box 2. File 26. Gilean Douglas Fonds. University of British Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections, Vancouver, Canada