In order for knowledge to be gleaned from archives, significant depositories of knowledge, a certain degree of trust must exist between the author and the audience. This trust gives archives and their creators a great responsibility to portray their work in the most accurate and honest way possible. To those who are not careful, or who have a hidden agenda, archives can serve as a tool to silence or alter specific groups or people’s histories. They can also be molded in highly critical ways that perpetuate a certain desired idea or message. In Henriette and Henriette: The Life of a Woman, I use real information and true sources to shape the reader’s perception of Henriette Alice McCrea-Metcalf, the subject of my work. In creating my archive, I chose to explore the power I hold to use materials in a way that paints the picture I want the audience to see, as well as the silences found in the spaces between my sources. Each item was carefully chosen and intentionally described in a way that would most serve my plan of guiding the audience to a specific conclusion about the work.
When I first stumbled upon Henriette Alice McCrea Metcalf, I knew nothing about her. I began researching her life, and could not find one conclusive source as to the true nature of her identity. My research led me to discover two women with the same name, women who lived very different lives: one was a mother who did little else but lead a household, the other a non-conforming rebel who escaped to Paris to explore art and her sexuality. I found myself preferring one to the other, wishing that the more “interesting one” would be the women I was looking for. I was working like Ricoeur’s “historian”; my “…interrogations [were] guided by the theme chosen to guide [my] inquiries” (Ricoeur 67). When I discovered the two were actually the same woman, I was appalled at my own judgmental mindset. I decided that I wanted my archive to reflect the thought process I went through when assigning value to the two women. To do this, I would have to trick the reader into thinking that two Henriette’s actually existed. Our friends the medieval monks helped me with my task.
This project was designed to make an argument about the pervasiveness of the antiquated view of women’s roles in the minds of my readers, as well as to expose the ease with which an archive can, using truth, create a different if not false reality charged with specific meaning. Very much like for the Dominican monks, in my work “what was written down was carefully selected” (Clancy 147). Not only were my sources precisely chosen and decontextualized with specific intent, they were also used to formulate a desired message. I, like the “monastic writer, aimed to use records to convey to posterity a deliberately created and rigorously selected version of events” (Clancy 147). Though I did not falsify any information, I did take events, images, and texts out of context and placed my own analysis upon them, all for the purpose of leading the audience through the same thought process I went through when doing my original research.
My scheming and re-contextualizing of sources made me question the consequences of my archive. “By using historically unquestioned authority to take Native objects and remains and to define who and what Native Americans are, museums have, in many ways, trapped Native Americans behind their glassed-in cases, rendering vital, contemporary Native voices silent…” (Cobb 488). Instead of trapping the Native Americans, I was worried about boxing in Henriette and silencing her amazing life story. Yet, it is within my right as an archivist to add analysis to my sources. “The editing stage is utilized as an equal forum of mediation and construction, where unanticipated and meaningful juxtapositions can be formed and the structures of the ice can be tweaked into its final intact shape” (Salloum 187). The way in which I organized my archive and its contents serves to expose significant comparisons in the portrayal of women and calls upon the reader to confront their own potential prejudices and stereotypes.
Not only was I experimenting with the power of the archivist to create or re-create history, I was also exploring the idea of silences in the archive. In my work, I am trying to consciously create a difference between the two women I am identifying. “It was only on the basis on mutual comparison… that zones of deviance and respectability could be clearly demarcated “ (Sekula 72). In my establishing difference, I am establishing the norm of female identity. Herein lies a purposefully created silence. By recognizing the normality of one lifestyle over another, I am limiting female identity to very narrow categories. Though I am not completely comfortable with this, I make it clear in the conclusion of my archive the purpose of this classification and simplification of a life; the silences I create eventually serve to make the final self-reflection and reevaluation of the mindset of the reader a more deafening experience.
Henriette and Henriette: The Life of A Woman is meant to be a highly interactive experience, guiding the reader to learn not only about a fantastic woman but also about their own worldview. My archive relies on readers to achieve its purpose, which is more than the mere preservation of materials. “To amass an archive is a leap of faith, not in preservation but in the belief that there will be someone to use it, that the accumulation of these histories will continue to live, that they will have listeners” (Salloum 186). The readers also enter my archive with the understanding that “we are both aware of the medium, the dialogical aspects of the work, of transferring meaning, and the act of translating and editing that is at the core of their expressions and my mediation. The material itself has a sense of ‘living’, a presentness, a relevance, excerpts of life resting on their context of extraction” (Salloum 186). The “context of extraction” is extremely relevant to my archive, as taking events out of context allows me to present the split life of Henriette.
I think my work accomplishes my goals well, allowing for the reader to not only explore the silences created by the gathering of materials, but also experience the power of the archive first hand by having it create believable and seemingly real personages only to have them be torn down. The path function of Scalar provided the necessary flow for this archive so that it could function as a real guide for the audience; without it, my work would not have the chance to set up and subsequently expose my rouse. Creating this archive has been a fascinating experience for me, and hopefully, the story of Henriette will draw the readers in and give them a chance to take a hard look at their own preconceived notions and ideals, as it did for me.
Works Cited
Clanchy, M.T. From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066-1307. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Cobb, Amanda J. "The National Museum of the American Indian as Cultural Sovereignty." American Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 485-506.
Ricoeur, Paul. "Archives, Documents, Traces/1978." The Archive. By Charles Merewether. London: Whitechapel, 2006. 66-9.
Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive/1986." The Archive. By Charles Merewether. London: Whitechapel, 2006. 70-5.
Solloum, Jayce. "sans titre/untitled: The Video Installation as an Active Archive//2006." The Archive. By Charles Merewether. London: Whitechapel, 2006. 185-93.
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