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April 24, 2008
The Future is Now
While attending an interesting Victorian Studies conference honoring Eliza M. Moser Distinguished University Professor Martha Vicinus last weekend I ran into an interesting example of how scholarly research is changing and how the young may end up overtaking the old, although they usually do anyway don't they?
One of the conference presenters, Melanie Hawthorne of Texas A & M talked about Natalie Clifford Barney, a most interesting woman, know as the amazon who strove to be Oscar Wilde's successor. According to Professor Hawthorne she was married twice but the second time was illegal in a number of ways, 1.) she wrote and signed the marriage contract when she was already married and 2.) the marriage contract she signed was with her female lover Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre. Since same-sex marriages were not legally recognized in France in 1918 this marriage was doubly illegal.
Well, back to library research. One of the Victorian Studies scholars attending the conference mentioned he had never heard of the marriage contract between Barney and the Duchess before to which the presenter answered this was a relatively new discovery.
The next day on a whim I decided to perform a Google search on Natalie Clifford Barney and the word “contract” to try and get a sense of if and how well this bit of information has migrated into general knowledge. The first link on the list of results was for a Wikipedia article on Barney which mentioned this same contract and gave a correct citation to a 2005 article in South Central Review by Francesco Rapazzini. I am not necessarily condoning students use Wikipedia for their research but I couldn’t help but consider that a possible expert in the field of Victorian Studies didn’t have this information while, likely an undergraduate English student might easily trip on it, using a resource many scholars and librarians consider inappropriate.
Having LibX installed in FireFox I was able to link directly to the full text of the article cited in Wikipedia and confirm the finding of the marriage contract between these two remarkable women.
Research has come a long way, baby!
Posted by swortman at April 24, 2008 05:17 PM