Grandmothers in the Archive: Three Digital Collections of Women's Writing

Abstract

Grandmothers in theArchive: Three Digital Collectionsof Women'sWriting VeronicaAlfano In September 2011, an article appeared in The Chronicle ofHigherEduca tion encouraging academics to embrace innovative and unconventional modes of research, pointing out that the future of humanities publish ing is likely to be digital.1 My essay considers the exciting possibilities that electronic archiving and dissemination of information holds for feminist studies in particular. Critical works, syllabi, and anthologies devoted to female authors often run the risk of becoming tokenized or ghettoized, but databases of women's writing can begin to open up alternative approaches. Here I explore and assess three such data bases: The Orlando Project: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, which includes searchable entries on over a thousand writ ers from the medieval era to the present day; A Celebration of Women Writers, which provides full texts by female authors across many time periods, along with relevant links; and WomenWriters Online, which features transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850.2 1 ask not only what opportunities for research these archives create, but also how such opportunities may shape feminist thought and work by bringing broad and complex female literary communities to light, helping scholars balance formal and historical methodologies, and providing a new perspective on the gendering of genre. Because books and courses focused solely on female authors are the exception rather than the rule, the same names and titles often Feminist Studies38, no. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 363 364 VeronicaAlfano crop up time and again in print resources that are dedicated to the work of women. It is difficult to write about English women poets of the Victorian era, for example, without spending a great deal of time on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti—and without giving pride of place to AuroraLeighand GoblinMarket.In 1845, Barrett Browning herself lamented the absence of a flourishing female poetic tradition that would provide a set of inspirational predeces sors: "I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none." Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would later encode this lament as female "anxiety of authorship."3 Electronic databases of women's writing reveal, not only to aspiring authors but also to literary scholars, the grandmothers that Barrett Browning so desperately sought. By uncov ering a rich canon of talented-but-neglected artists, they permit crit ics to lighten the metonymic burden on often-anthologized writers; establish a more coherent community of female authors; posit new lines of influence and clusters of interrelation among women poets, novelists, and playwrights; and complicate extant theories about the historical effects of gender. The latent continuities among appar ently disparate works become clearer when these works take on virtual form as searchable online texts and when a user can easily investigate hundreds upon hundreds of writers (or poems, or essays) at once. Additionally, by calling attention to the sheer number of women authors who have yet to be studied in depth, such data bases can alter how feminist literary history—and, indeed, literary history more generally—is written and taught. Reading tradition ally overlooked or underdiscussed texts will allow us to revise our assumptions about certain periods or certain genres and thus will enable women writers to shape the field rather than remaining criti cally marginalized. The digital humanities may also help feminist scholars nego tiate and theorize the notoriously treacherous territory of biogra phy. Angela Leighton asks that critics grant subjectivity to female writers before erasing their life stories in the name of deconstruc tion; ideally, our work will account for the circumstances in which women composed. But Yopie Prins calls instead for "the transfer of personhood to rhetorical entities," or what Paul de Man might call the de-anthropomorphization of literature.4 On one side lies the danger of becoming a psychoanalyst or a confessor rather than a VeronicaAlfano 365 scholar. On the other, there is the risk of ignoring historical condi tions that shaped female voices, or of disregarding the social impor tance of gender. But when a detailed and well-organized electronic chronology of cultural contexts can instantly be called up and visu ally interlaced with the life of...