Domestic Photography and the Minor: Hawarden and the Aesthetics of Morris

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Morris offers extensive commentary on the impact of the massive economic growth of the nineteenth century on the future of art. For further discussion of Morris's response to modern industrialization, see William Morris: Socialist Diary, ed. Florence Boos and Michelee Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity, and the Rhetoric of Dissent. The dismal future of popular art, according to Morris, is also tied to the dominance of the elite arts—a dominance that suffocates the minor arts. Morris insists that “there must be no sharp distinction” between levels of art and artists “if we are to have . . . popular art” (The Unpublished Lectures 47). Peter Stransky notes that Morris was particularly interested in “breaking down barriers in the arts . . . because such barriers could be used as indications of class and ways of making social distinctions” (119). His theory of democratic art called upon artists “to provide art for the ordinary person” (Stransky 265). Domesticity has perhaps received more longstanding critical attention than any topic in the Victorian era. While any attempt to acknowledge the breadth and depth of impressive and important scholarship will fall short, seminal texts include, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Elizabeth Langland's, Nobody's Angels: Middle Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's, Family Fortune: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). One of the more recent and certainly more impressive studies in the field has been Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Lindsay Smith's The Politics of Focus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) considers the etymological relationship of the domestic realm and photography. She also discusses the importance of the home to amateur and professional photographers alike; see especially 16-18. See specifically Daniel Novak's Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Jennifer Tucker's Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), and Lindsay Smith's The Politics of Focus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Novak specifically challenges Nancy Armstrong's influential argument in Fiction in the Age of Photography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) that nineteenth-century visual culture supplied our understanding of realism (3-4). John Tagg's The Discilinary Frame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) is likewise an important attempt to correct hasty readings that have attempted to equate nineteenth-century photography with unquestioned objectivity. Tagg demonstrates how photographic meanings and truths were derived from discursive constructions and deployments of photography. Tucker is perhaps most concise in her explanation of the supposed objectivity of photography in nineteenth-century culture. She concludes: “Although nineteenth-century faith in photography was powerful, the idea that people over a hundred years ago accepted photographs at face value is exaggerated and misleading. Indeed, nineteenth-century viewers frequently asked many of the same questions that are asked about photographs today. Many recognized that photography is mediated at various points during the process” (4). The vast majority of Hawarden's work predates Morris's theories of art and politics, but his reflections in “The Churches of North France: Shadows of Amiens” (1856) allude to the transformative potential of the camera. He specifically considers how the camera and its products affect human vision. He uses photographs to conduct his study of French churches, and he indicates these images enabled him to “[see] them for the second time” (Works I: 349). But he also notes the insufficiencies of the photograph. As he examines architectural details in a photo, he remarks: “I cannot see the Virgin's face at all, it is in the shade so much: St. John's I cannot see very well” (Works I: 359). The photograph, for Morris, generates visions that are both useful and alluring, but they are neither accurate nor objective. His comment reveals the fundamental power of photography: it allows the viewer to see the world again and anew, to revisit and revision sensory impressions that the viewer presumably previously understood as fixed. He does not offer extensive discussions of photography, but he was certainly aware of its growth, made use of it, and knew several of its practitioners. In an August 12, 1869 letter, he claims: “I have never mustered courage enough to get my photograph taken,” but he admits: “I suppose I shall soon; Mrs. Cameron threatened me with the operation, but it has not come off yet, though I suppose I shall not escape long” (Works I: 87). Despite his use and admiration of early photography, Morris openly acknowledges its limitations as a data-recording device—limitations that likewise promote its artistic potential. He explains how “the square camera of the photographer clips some [of the subjects], many others are in shadow; in fact the niches throw heavy shadows on the faces of nearly all” (Works I: 360). The return of such popular art, according to Morris, hinges upon individuals' access to beauty in their everyday lives. He explains that the “essence or soul of popular art is the due and worthy delight of each worker in his own handiwork, a delight which he feels he can communicate to other people” (Unpublished 154). In “The Worker's Share of Art,” he questions: “What, however, is art? Whence does it spring?” And he immediately responds: “Art is man's embodied expression of interest in the life of man; it springs from man's pleasure in his life; pleasure we must call it, taking all human life together, however much it may be broken by the grief and trouble of individuals” (Political Writings 84). Morris imagines art as a consistent feature of human activity rather than an isolated novelty. He explains how “it will be with us wherever we go, in the ancient city full of traditions of past time, in the newly-cleared farm in America or the colonies, where no man has dwelt for traditions to gather round him; in the quiet countryside as in the busy town, no place shall be without it” (Works XXII: 165). Morris envisions the omnipresence of art, and his language emphasizes the active and mobile nature of the aesthetic experience; art accompanies humans through various experiences and helps to define the human experience. Art for Morris is a political exigency that generates political implications. Peter Stransky eloquently explains how “for Morris, art and the state of society were inextricably intertwined.” He continues: “Morris saw art as the road of subversion, as the way to defy and help change the system, and to show an artist's attitudes toward the values of capitalism” (67). Morris upholds art as the means by which individuals can respond to the social and economic forces of the modern world—and possibly transform the ugliness of its efficiency. For an extensive discussion of the emergence of amateur photography throughout the nineteenth century, please see Grace Seireling and Carolyn Bloore's Amateurs, Photography and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For critical treatments of the role of photography in the modern disciplinary state, see specifically John Tagg's The Burden of Representation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) and Alan Sekula's influential article, “The Body and the Archive” October (Winter, 1996): 3-64. The power of the Victorian museum has received significant recent critical attention, specifically in discussions of its role in exhibiting and ordering the nation's domestic and imperial accomplishments. Barbara J. Black's On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000) is an important study of this emergent museum culture in which she demonstrates how nineteenth-century museums served to communicate a narrative of ordered progress and future ambition to the British public. Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of Kafka's work has been repeatedly employed to discuss the literatures and arts of post-Colonial cultures, ethnic minorities, and other subjugated groups. I am following the suggestion of Simon O'Sullivan's eclectic study, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (New York: Palgrave (2008) to consider Deleuzian concepts, including the minor, beyond the scope of the literary. While Deleuze and Gauattari develop this concept in their study of a literary figure, O'Sullivan helps us explore how the minor operates in various systems of communication and meaning and not only in literary language. Hawarden's work has been enigmatic for recent critics because she produced a great amount of photos without providing titles or detailed contexts. I am adopting the descriptive titles established by Virginia Dodier in her Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies From Life, 1857-1864. I am also following Dodier's lead by including the Victoria and Albert Museum museum number. Dodier conducts the most extensive research on Hawarden's familial and professional connections to the nineteenth-century museum culture. See tracks her early friendships with figures such as Sir David Brewster and her later interactions with the South Kensington Museum. See specifically 17-35. Smith, however, concludes that Hawarden's “photographs are different; they avoid the compositional symmetry and distanced theatricality endemic to the tableau vivant” (38). See specifically Dodier 40, Mavor 44, and Groth 206.