Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance by Ellen Gruber Garvey (review)

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...