Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship by Linda M. Morra

Reviewed by: Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship by Linda M. Morra Andrea Beverley Linda M. Morra. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 244pp. $29.95. Linda Morra opens the first case study of Unarrested Archives by describing an enticing archival lead that suddenly went cold: the material in question was simply missing from the fonds. This anecdote epitomizes Morra’s own approach to the cultural politics of archives. That is, she doesn’t shy away from the gaps and peculiarities of the record but instead highlights the circumstances that affect the formation and reformation of particular archives over time, especially as women writers have negotiated their presence in public and for posterity. Morra situates her contribution in terms of archive theory generally (including engagement with Foucault and Derrida) and scholarship on Canadian women writers’ archives more specifically, to which she has already made an important contribution (Morra, Rule). As the book’s title indicates, she develops terminology around arrest/unarrest that provides a conceptual framework for her [End Page 140] analyses. Beginning with Derrida’s discussion of the etymology of “archive,” which evokes documents that would have been under “house arrest” in a magistrate’s home, Morra plays with the varied definitions of “arrested” to situate different archives and their resonances. The “unarrested” archive is non-institutionalized—but archived material might also be “unarrested” as it is mobilized by researchers. As she deploys these terms, arrest/unarrest is not a staid binary; rather, it provides vocabulary for addressing the creation and uses of archives in very different circumstances. In other words, this terminology is productive because Morra exploits its slipperiness. It provides a continuity to the volume, as do the recurring themes of feminist self-agency, the national imaginary, institutional frameworks, and archival formation. Organized chronologically, the five case studies that make up the monograph draw on archival material that spans more than a century. The first case study uses Diane Taylor’s concept of “scenario” to offer a “critical repositioning” of Pauline Johnson’s public performances, particularly “A Cry from an Indian Wife.” The chapter is a wonderful combination of historical contextualization and innovative close reading that explores gaps in Johnson’s “arrested” archive, as well as her on-stage transgressions of gender, race, and class norms. The second chapter draws on Judith Butler’s notion of kinship to discuss how Emily Carr navigated her reliance on Ira Dilworth to legitimate her writings in the public sphere. In its discussion of Carr’s Klee Wyck and Growing Pains, the chapter reflects on the masculinist underpinnings of the genre of autobiography and the extent to which Carr’s narratives subvert those assumptions. The following chapter also traces a writer’s recourse to male authority to manage her writings: this time, Sheila Watson’s interactions with Fred Flahiff. Here, Morra suggests the especial collaborative nature of research in this particular archive: Watson deposits fonds with gaps (or “imminence”) that lend themselves to future “unarresting” by researchers. Morra’s longest chapter synthesizes extensive archival material on Jane Rule’s interactions with her literary agents over the course of her career. The main focus is on Rule safeguarding her “literary integrity” by resisting censorship, maintaining final authority over her publications, and conserving (“arresting”—in a positive sense) her archives for posterity. The chapter is bookended by accounts of Canadian state seizure (“arrest” in the negative) of some of Rule’s written material in two instances: when authorities targeted the gay liberation periodical The Body Politic in 1977 and when they seized books destined for the Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium in 1986. Morra’s final case study invokes a similar sense of the [End Page 141] fraught relationship between a writer and the nation-state. It focuses on Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and particularly the aftermath from the 1995 radio broadcast in which Michael Coren made reprehensible comments about NourbeSe Philip. NourbeSe Philip authorized Morra to peruse five of her own boxes of records. Although Morra characterizes this archive as strategically “unarrested” because NourbeSe Philip has refused to lodge it with an institution...

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