Eastlake’s final thought on the relationship between the photographer and the artist links artistic capability, aesthetic independence, and the different paths through the ‘field of delineation’, envisioning the practitioners themselves as female:
Photography is intended to supersede much that art has hitherto done, but only that which it was both a misappropriation and a deterioration of Art to do. The field of delineation, having two distinct spheres, requires two distinct labourers; but though hitherto the freewoman has done the work of the bondwoman, there is no fear that the position should be in future reversed. (p. 466) However, as the work of all the creators in this chapter have shown, women of the era found ways to negotiate between ‘freedom’ and ‘bondage’ in their creative expression, especially in relation to Victorian ideals and ideologies. However, in the false dichotomy which Eastlake draws up between replication and representation, art and photography, her own political aims and values, her own hopes for women’s self-determination, become visible in her choice of metaphor.
Dress was supposedly an apolitical, if emotive, topic of the day, but Eastlake and Merrifield are not alone in perceiving its relevance to the daily experience of women. A letter to the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine would provoke a controversial discussion of corsetry’s merits which lasted for almost a decade, and addresses how women’s confinement in cultural and social terms would become the means by which they could author their own experiences of pleasure, sexuality and power in much the same way that they could tug at their own corset lace.117 In 1867 an Edinburgh women wrote to the letters column ‘The Englishwoman’s Conversazione’118 to entreat the editor to ‘invite correspondence on the important subject’119 of tight-lacing. She fulminates at length at the deployment of the ‘cruel laces’ that have been
‘instrumental in metamorphosing my merry romping girl to a pale fashionable belle’:
117 For the fullest account of the series of letters on this topic – which later devolved into a discussion of corporal punishment – see Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 81–8.
118 Letters to this column were mediated through the editor’s authorial persona, and direct quotation is strongly implied by a change in tone, if not marked out by punctuation. The column as a whole is presented as a vehicle for its readers’ concerns and talents, such as health advice, recipes, and correcting errors in previous numbers. For more in-depth scrutiny of the ‘Conversazione’ format and the tensions of editorship and readership which it exposed, see Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 73–5.
119 ‘Englishwoman’s Conversazione’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, n.s. 2, 3 (1867), 163–67 (p. 163). All subsequent references are to this issue, and are given in the text with the prefix EDM.
the most merciless system of tight-lacing was the rule of the establishment, and […] she and her forty or fifty fellow-pupils had been daily imprisoned in vices of whalebone drawn tight by the muscular arms of sturdy waiting-maids, till the fashionable standard of tenuity was attained.
(EDM p. 164)
Her daughter had written home in protest against this treatment, but her letters had been confiscated, and she was punished for her rebellion. When the author confronted about the severity of the regime, the headmistress protested that ‘no young lady could now go into good society with a coarse, clumsy waist like a rustic’ (EDM p. 164), but admits that she has to employ force with her pupils, ‘owing to the obstinacy of young girls, and the difficulty of making them understand the importance of a good figure’
(EDM p. 164). The ‘good figure’ has weakened the daughter’s muscles, the mother protests, so that she cannot do without her corset:
her muscles have been, so to speak, murdered, and she must submit for life to be encased in a stiff panoply of whalebone and steel; and all this torture and misery for what? merely to attract admiration for her small waist. (EDM p. 164)
The mother’s letter demonstrates how, even in fulminating against the shaping of the body, cultural interaction with the waist allows women space to articulate their relationship to socially prescribed roles, in terms which carve out a space for their own aesthetic and sensual capacities. In protesting a school’s pursuit of fashionable figures on behalf of their pupils, and their repression of personal preferences and narratives of protest, the author may not only protest the physical impact of the visual effect, but also the elision of her daughter’s individual physique and personality. The letter-writer is using the cultural outpost available to her as a community of female correspondents, articulating an alternative narrative to that of the female body’s confinement, which her daughter has been denied by the confiscation of her letters protesting her discomfort. Her condemnation of the pursuit of admiration for the fashionably visible
‘absurdly small dimensions’ (EDM p. 164) at the expense of the pupils’ ‘romping’ vitality reiterates how young women might experience the shaping, by society, of their bodies and their voices for its own ends.120
The silhouette’s development through the 1860s and 1870s adheres to the idea of what seems most fitting to the camera, with its increasing ability to represent perspective, which does seem to entrench the idea of women’s bodies being shaped to fit a template. As seen in the Punch cartoon, the visual weight of the figure is redistributed as the silhouette develops – the skirt tightens even further, the chignon grows at the back of the head while hats tip forward onto the brow – so that the woman seems to be receding
elegantly. The pursuit of a perspectivized female body during the era, as Eastlake and Merrifield
120 Ana Krugovoy Silver stresses that to Victorian culture, the ‘slender body became a sign not simply of the pure body, but of the regulated body’, and in an era which conflated women’s hunger with sexual desire it was of the utmost importance that schoolgirls be taught to regulate every facet of physical intake and expression, from speech and dress to eating. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 10; p.
56.
recognise, might come at the expense of the individuality of young women, who must learn to submit their ‘obstinacy’ and individuality to the ‘stiff panoply’ of contemporary visual mores.121
But the concept of shaping the expression of the self might also offer them a scope for self-determination in their participation in culture, whether in domestic albums, photography exhibitions, or journalism. Di Bello comes to consider women’s magazines, like their albums, as providing their contemporary reader with a tool ‘to produce herself as a genteel woman’,122 yet allowing her to maintain a degree of individual choice.123 Within such a context the magazine publishing women’s correspondence about dress alongside the periodical criticism of Eastlake, Merrifield and their peers, and Hawarden’s photographs, are part of a wider participation in culture within prescribed bounds, but which nonetheless allow for a measure of self-determination in cultural narratives.
The Edinburgh mother preferred to remain anonymous but enclosed her card as her authority to the magazine. Just over a week after that letter’s publication an illustration of Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake, graced the cover of The Lady’s Own Newspaper at the age of fifty-seven, as part of a profile which named her as the author of many of her anonymous pieces, including the Quarterly Review articles on dress and
photography.124 Prior to this Eastlake could be said to have been working to tacitly feminise the periodical press, as befitted an author who, despite her capabilities and the male persona of her articles for the Quarterly Review, was manipulating it to serve her own ends, just as women were used to do in the daily business of dressing. While elements of her practice appear to be shoring up the ideology of separate spheres, her voice – and her scholarship – jostled for space amongst her critical peers.125 Eastlake herself, through her writing, had contributed to the tensions which had been situated between the interpretative eye and the observing eye, and which had been applied to the sensitised spots of the clothed
mid-Victorian female body. Nevertheless, she was prepared to risk being subject to them in claiming her life’s work.
The fraught attitude to the Victorian visual would prove a spur particularly to the project of realist fiction in the late 1860s and early 1870s, in which the literary eye might be construed as similarly vulnerable to
121 The lines of the 1870s silhouette lengthened and straightened, which required even tighter control through corsetry, and over a larger surface area. The ‘cuirasse’, or spoon busk extended over the length of the torso and abdomen, forming the longest and most restrictive form of corset thus far. It is possible to speculate that such a shift was influenced by photography’s development, with technological advances in capturing the fashionable visual
‘froth’, while still capturing the lean silhouette and small waist beneath. Vincent, p. 41.
122 di Bello, p. 124.
123 Sharon Marcus notes that letters to the Conversazione column on the topic of whipping, which were a direct result of the tight-lacing correspondence, were printed verbatim as part of a pornographic compendium called ‘The Birchen Bouquet’. This might be considered the ultimate example of textual malleability, where women’s narratives of taking pleasure in pain intended for a genteel general audience of their peers can be re-purposed for erotic ends.
Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 147.
124 ‘Lady Eastlake’, Lady’s Own Paper, 1 (1867), 1.
125Her writing is often symptomatic of an author who championed her own career, while being tacitly aware of the gender norms which had hampered her work. Even a decade after her husband’s death, Eastlake wrote to a friend ‘I feel that I shd have been his best successor in the direction of the Nat: Gallery […] tho’ the world wd be astonished at such an idea.’ Letter to Hannah Brightwen, 14 October 1875, quoted in Sheldon, p. 407. Emphasis original.
the human organism, in the substitution of an image and the camera’s ‘way of seeing’126 for individual and subjective sight is sought-after. Eastlake’s acute consciousness of how the struggle between ideals as they played out in the mind’s eye, in culture, and on the body of mid-Victorian woman must particularly have informed her when she wrote, wryly:
Of course, to the inward eye of the imagination the mere name of woman presents a vision clothed in perpetual youth and loveliness, or floating in a region too far above us to know precisely how she is clothed at all. But to the outward eye of the senses, which acts as a man of business to the inward eye of the mind, bothering it with particulars it never wants to know, it is not to be denied that there are some of these visions which appear not beautiful, and many by no means young. (MAD, pp. 85-6)
Her own work had warned of the dangers of exposing the female body to what the conduct books called
‘the vulgar stare of the public eye’,127 warning women not to make themselves conspicuous, while acknowledging that dress was one of the most powerful means at their disposal for communicating. But her work also bore its consciousness of how evading the ‘particulars’ of women’s bodies could constitute sensitised areas in which culture’s ideas and ideals about women could about find expression. It also could be said to participate in some of the rhetoric which fed into the Contagious Diseases acts
implemented throughout the 1860s, when anxieties over women’s public visibility and the interpretation of their bodies could be said to have had their utmost social impact across Britain.
Representations of the female body, and measured interpretation of its outer appearance, had never been so imbued with significance, and even the most solemn forms of culture which followed this period would negotiate the sexualised frisson of display wherever a female body, and its sensuous capacity, was under prolonged scrutiny. If we can reconsider the means by which the female body was atomised, it’s possible to see within women’s efforts a reflection on the forces within culture which created such sensitised spots. In turn, we can then read their contributions to culture as a re-positioning of the
representation of the female body, while still operating in relation to patriarchal norms and narratives, as a construct which cannot be voided of its own sexual significances in relation to itself.
126 Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, p. 77.
127 Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen, Or, The Principles of True Politeness: To Which Is Added, Hints on the Flower Garden, p.
75.