Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

Ellen Garvey's Writing with Scissors provides a meticulously researched and provocative glimpse of the ways that men, women, and children used the newspapers they read in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Garvey analyzes a form of activity—making scrapbooks out of newspaper clippings—that was increasingly popular by the 1850s. But “writing with scissors” did not in fact involve “writing” at all— at least not as we tend to think about that form of communication, reflection, record keeping, or creativity. Indeed, as Garvey explains, scrapbook makers rarely included written commentary in their crowded pages of pasted scraps. Yet it is extremely productive to see scrapbooks as a form of writing because scrapbook makers created new meaning for news articles, poems, and stories by lifting them out of their initial frame, often cutting off the name of the author and newspaper, and providing a fresh context for “writing that mattered to them” (14). Thus Garvey's study is as much about reading and response as about writing, and it will be of particular interest to historians and theorists of reception. From this point of view, the title of the book does not do justice to one of its most compelling threads.Reading and response are at the heart of Writing with Scissors. The book deftly engages multiple issues: canon formation, pedagogy, the slippery boundaries of genre, the function of anonymity, the dawning self-awareness of marginalized groups, and changing conceptions of authorship, nation, and region. But for this reader, Writing with Scissors is most important as a meditation on and a historical reconstruction of reading, its multiple uses, and its social implications. Insofar as Writing with Scissors interrogates reading both as a publicly sanctioned interpretive practice and an intimately personal one, the book engages some of the thorniest questions that contemporary historians of reading and reception, as well as literary theorists, continue to struggle with. Garvey addresses the balance of social and individual motivations for reading, the roles of cultural and personal history in shaping the outcome of reading, and the ways that readers who are variously situated with regard to gender, race, class, region, ethnicity, and age respond differently to the same text.As Writing with Scissors repeatedly emphasizes, scrapbooks tell stories. Garvey pieces such stories together, analyzing numerous scrapbooks, some created by well-known figures, many by obscure ones. Garvey's archive includes scrapbooks made during the Civil War by Northern readers with easy access to books and newspapers, but also by Southern readers with few material resources. Grieving parents on both sides clipped accounts of battles as well as poems of death and loss, situating them among other clippings to express turbulent emotions, hopes, and fears. The emerging narrative of the war in any individual scrapbook served the personal needs of its maker while reflecting broader loyalties to family, region, or nation. Garvey also teases out narratives constructed by late nineteenth-century African Americans and by women activists, whose scrapbooks create alternative histories by scissoring negative images of themselves out of a hostile press and repositioning them, using the “language of juxtaposition” to challenge stereotypes of race or gender (103–4). When shared among like-minded members of a group, such scrapbooks helped consolidate a sense of community.Garvey argues that as newspapers proliferated and became increasingly inexpensive, accessible, and disposable, many people felt a desire to impose order on what they experienced as an overwhelming flood of printed matter. To one degree or another, all the scrapbook makers in Writing with Scissors attempted to create a personally meaningful and enduring artifact out of the relentless flow of published ephemera; as a result they often transformed the meaning of the items that they clipped and pasted. In a particularly telling example, Garvey shows how a seemingly anonymous poem titled “Mortally Wounded” (written, in fact, by Mary Woolsey Howland, wife of a clergyman) was repeatedly attributed to a soldier on his deathbed, as if he had left the lines under his pillow to express his resignation to God's will. Frequently reprinted without the author's name, the poem was pasted into both Northern and Southern scrapbooks. Men and women on both sides of the conflict apparently used the poem as consolation for brutal losses in war and as an assertion of communal feeling. Garvey effectively explores the tension between the source of the clipping and its implications in particular scrapbooks. Elsewhere she turns her attention to some of the bound volumes that were appropriated to serve as clipping repositories. Scrapbook makers transformed the function not only of individual newspaper items but, even more thoroughly, of books that had outlived their usefulness: government reports, ledgers, and sermons that were repurposed as scrapbooks. Once their printed pages were pasted over, their initial function was all but obliterated. Yet while such repurposing affirms the agency of the scrapbook maker who destroys one book to make another, the material form of the initial volume imposes limits of its own. The tension between freedom and constraint that informs all reading is richly evident here and throughout Writing with Scissors.Garvey also explores the differential significance that could be attached to the same clipped items, using biographical evidence wherever possible to position the scrapbook maker in historical time and space. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African Americans made scrapbooks, which by their very existence constituted a challenge to racialized claims and judgments that circulated freely in the white press. Pasting insulting articles into their scrapbooks, such readers exposed as well as rejected derogatory images, compiling a record of attitudes and events (such as lynching) that they condemned, while creating an “unwritten history” to be proud of by preserving clippings of African American achievements (136). Nineteenth-century women activists used an analogous strategy, making scrapbooks that recorded their own public appearances in order to refuse the trivialization of their goals and activities as reflected in newspapers. Like African American scrapbook makers, women activists from the 1850s to the 1910s read the press against the grain, with a critical eye, often clipping relevant material in order to contest it. Such scrapbooks made strong statements about women's value; monitoring their own images in the press, activist scrapbook makers forged constructive and politically conscious self-images. They not only created and kept records but circulated them to other women.Reconstructing the meaning of scrapbooks—like all historical reconstructions—involves filling in blanks and making imaginative leaps. Such leaps are indispensable for historicizing reading and reception, but they can be productive only when, as in Writing with Scissors, interpretation is informed by scrupulous attention to historical detail. Salvaging these scrapbooks as scrapbook makers salvaged clippings, Garvey produces a fascinating narrative and a dense cultural history. Both Garvey's archive and her method are instructive for anyone with a historical interest in the way the circulation of texts has created individual meaning and reinforced group solidarity. It will also be useful for anyone with a theoretical interest in the reading process. The scrapbooks that Garvey analyzes took shape when readers paused over texts that were meaningful to them. By pasting newspaper clippings into a book, readers gave material heft to ephemeral items and turned them into sources of significance, comfort, political awareness, and self-assertion. Histories of reading often present literacy as a ground of personal satisfaction and agency, especially for readers with little or no political power. In this spirit, traces of reading, embodied in scrapbooks, imply agency throughout Writing with Scissors; but Garvey is thankfully attentive not only to the triumphs of her subjects but to the obstacles they faced, the limits of their resources, and the multiple factors that made this rich archive a neglected one for so long.

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