Thumbing through the brittle pages of the scrapbook of Jean Carroll, America’s first Jewish woman to do stand-up comedy, I felt … invasive. My iPhone snapped photos, turning textured collages into weightless digital data. My academic gaze threatened to transform a family heirloom into “research.” At one point, when I unfolded a lengthy clipping that had been doubled over, it crumbled in my hand and I gasped in horror. I imagined Carroll, carefully creasing the newsprint to fit the scrapbook page. I had desecrated the masterpiece she had so carefully prepared for … for whom? The scrapbook felt like Carroll extending her hand out through the onslaught of oblivion that comes with time, but who—or what—was she reaching toward?
The film-and-digital-media scholar Amelie Hastie offers some insight on this question. In her book Cupboards of Curiosity, Hastie examines dozens of scrapbooks by and about women who worked in the silent-film era. According to Hastie, the author of a scrapbook both expects her artifacts to disappear (or she would have no need to preserve them in the first place) and anticipates their re-discovery. So, too, does Carroll’s collection and curation of press clippings suggest that she expected her fame to recede, but also that she hoped it would be recovered. Building this archive, this scrapbook, may have been her way to, as Hastie puts it, “transform memories (or acts of remembering) into histories.”
