“Some Methodical Person”: Querying Virginia

Transcript:“Some Methodical Person”: Querying Virginia:
“Some Methodical Person”: Querying Virginia Woolf’s Self-Archival Practices in Three Guineas By Cindy L. Taylor Graduate Student Paper Session Archives * Records Ensuring Access Over a decade-long period, Virginia Woolf collected a carefully curated body of press clippings, articles from various sources, appeal letters, photographs, and copious notes into a series of notebooks, which she would later use as a primary resource archive to support her arguments in her feminist/pacifist manifesto, Three Guineas. In doing so, Woolf became that “methodical person” whom she hopes, in one of her own copious endnotes, would document the day-to-day evidence of political and social movements of that disquieting decade leading up to the Second World War. Abstract I will argue that there is a distinction in Woolf’s documentation efforts that justifies the nomenclature “archive”, as opposed to merely an individual “collection of materials” or “personal papers”. I will explore issues including the lack of physical, social, and educational access to mainstream archives and libraries, and collecting biases, that inspired and affected Woolf’s self-made archival approaches. Abstract I will explore ways in which the difficulties Woolf encountered, and her motivations for self-archiving, are paralleled by contemporary writers and activists operating outside of the ideological mainstream today. This will include examining a few current modes of electronic media for the creation, sharing, and use of “Outsider Archives”. Ultimately, I will query whether, and to what extent, professional archivists should be open to seeking out, collecting, and preserving these Outsider Archives, whether they are the work of the notable or the obscure. Abstract Background “…the archive is the first law of what can be said”. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge Unsatisfied with the available archives and libraries of her day, when not literally excluded from them, Virginia Woolf created her own archives, collection practices, and uses of those materials in order to express wholly new ideas in original ways. Background In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf subverts the ostensible topic of “Women and Fiction” by instead detailing the difficulties she has encountered in merely attempting to research that topic in archives and libraries, including: Being physically barred from entry Being disadvantaged by a lack of formal education and training in doing research When she does obtain access to the official record, being confronted by the fact that records of women’s lives are glaringly absent. Background All these missing facts about women’s historical lives must “lie