Hannah Cullwick Research Articles

Beyond The Brontë Myth: Jane Eyre, Hannah Cullwick and Subjectivity in Servitude

Close analysis of the trope of servitude, central to the imaginative world of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and working-class diarist Hannah Cullwick, reveals the challenge as well as the promise of reading these two figures in tandem. Uncoupling the link between will and servitude as one which resulted necessarily in a state either of oppression or emancipation, this essay traces a literary subjectivity largely unaccounted for by The Brontë Myth. Both Cullwick’s diaries and Jane Eyre’s narrative autobiography acknowledge and actively construct servitude as a complex performance of the desire for recognition between master and servant. This desire is deeply rooted in the texts, as well as in the narrating subjects themselves.

The Life Writing of Hannah Cullwick

The Life Writing of Hannah Cullwick

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

Writing in Her Dirt: Authorship, Authority, and the Domestic Diaries of Hannah Cullwick

Writing in Her Dirt: Authorship, Authority, and the Domestic Diaries of Hannah Cullwick

Love and Dirt: the Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick

Love and Dirt: the Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick

BOOK REVIEW: Barry Reay.WATCHING HANNAH: SEXUALITY, HORROR AND BODILY DE-FORMATION IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. London: Reaktion Books, 2002, �22.00, and Diane Atkinson.LOVE & DIRT: THE MARRIAGE OF ARTHUR MUNBY & HANNAH CULLWICK. London: Macmillan, 2003.

Reviewed by: Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England, and: Love & Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby & Hannah Cullwick Martha Vicinus (bio) Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England, by Barry Reay; pp. 200. London: Reaktion Books, 2002, £22.00, $35.00. Love & Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby & Hannah Cullwick, by Diane Atkinson; pp. xviii + 365. London: Macmillan, 2003, £15.99, $35.00. There can be few readers of VS who have not heard of the minor poet and bureaucrat Arthur Munby and his lifelong enthusiasm for women who worked in such physically demanding jobs as coal sorting, milk delivery, fish-bait collection, and acrobatics. His extraordinary love affair with the highly intelligent maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick has been told many times, focusing on the sadomasochistic love games they enjoyed. Their letters and diaries, as well as Munby's large collection of photographs of working women, opened in 1950, comprise an incomparable archive. What more, then, can be said about a couple who compulsively pursued and recorded their erotic interests? The two books under review do not significantly alter our perceptions of Hannah and Munby, but they differ in their intentions. Diane Atkinson simply wants readers to know the details of their extraordinary relationship. Barry Reay has chosen a series of visual case studies, focusing on Munby's cross-class voyeurism. Atkinson's exclusive focus on their courtship and marriage, rather than either Hannah's working life or Munby's explorations, is a welcome change. For Atkinson, the young Munby was an obtuse and demanding lover who forced Hannah into further feats of exhausting labor, and then made her write about them. But the author's sympathies shift when the married Hannah betrays a serious drinking problem, leaving Munby, she implies, with no choice but to send his wife away, surrounded as they were by intrusive neighbors. Munby's class power and Hannah's depression deserve fuller analysis, but Atkinson eschews any psychological probing. For example, after describing how Munby reluctantly permitted Hannah to lick his boots after he had forbidden her to do so, she writes, "we can imagine Arthur indulging her to keep the peace" (317). [End Page 366] Especially valuable is Atkinson's fresh information about their lives after Munby forced Hannah to live in Shropshire with her family and friends, rather than continuing as his servant at Fig Tree Court in London. This period, from 1877 to 1909, when Hannah died, has been largely ignored by previous writers. Drawing upon both Hannah's letters to Munby and Munby's diaries, Atkinson shows how the rural clergy enforced social mores. One refused to believe that Hannah was actually married to the gentleman who regularly visited her; another accused her of having an affair with a widower, while living with his family. The widower badly needed her rent money and general help, but his mother spread rumors about Munby and turned the children against Hannah, adding to the clergyman's suspicions. The intrusive clergyman freely entered the small home and berated her for immorality. Hannah did not feel strong enough to live alone, though she longed for greater privacy. In addition, Munby had hired her sister Ellen as general servant at Fig Tree Court, giving her the position Hannah so dearly wanted. No wonder she turned to drink! Although her book is aimed at the general reader, Atkinson could have provided a fuller assessment of the costs of Hannah's lifelong desire to be Munby's slave. She documents Hannah's youthful attraction to Byron's tragedy Sardanapalus (1821), about a king who passionately loves the slave Myrrha. Certainly the impressionable Hannah was fascinated with Myrrha's strength and Sardanapalus's weakness, but this hardly suffices to explain her extraordinary efforts to retain Munby's interest and love. Atkinson also traces Munby's infatuation from 1865 to 1867 with Sarah Carter, the daughter of a genteel tenant farmer. She describes his erotic response to watching "she who sings Mendelssohn with me" clean his boots, but then concludes that "on the brink of a relationship of more or less equal terms...his lack of experience and confused feelings...

Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture

Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837 coincided with the birth of a now notorious gender stereotype-the Angel in the House. Comparing the position of real women-from the Queen of England to middle-class housewives-with their status as household angels, Elizabeth Langland explores a complex image of femininity in Victorian culture. Langland offers provocative readings of nineteenth-century fiction as well as a rare glimpse into etiquette guides, home management manuals, and cookbooks. She traces the implications of a profound contradiction: although the home was popularly depicted as a private moral haven, running the middle-class household-which included at least one servant-was in fact an exercise in class management. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Benjamin, and Bourdieu, and of recent feminist theorists, Langland considers novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Oliphant. and Eliot, as well as the memoirs of Hannah Cullwick, a former domestic servant who married a middle-class man. Langland discovers that the middle-class wife assumed a more complex and important function than has previously been recognized. With her substantial power veiled in myth, the Victorian angel mastered skills that enabled her to support a rigid class system; at the same time, however, her achievements unobtrusively set the stage for a feminist revolution. Nobody's Angels reconstructs a disturbing picture of social change that depended as much on protecting class inequity as on promoting gender equality.

Eccentric subject, impossible object: A 1 poststructural reading of Hannah Cullwick

The paper explores poststructural figures of identity via a reading of a collection of texts by and about a Victorian maidservant, Hannah Cullwick. Drawing on Donna Haraway's figure of the trickster or shape changer and on the theorizing of the ''subaltern'' subject in postcolonial writing, the paper challenges readings of Hannah and her life that offer her up as an exemplary figure of suffering or heroic womanhood. Instead, it is proposed that Hannah can be seen as an ambivalent and transgressive figure of difference and in - between - ness . The paper gestures towards some implications for the handling of first-person narratives in qualitative research. The ''Hannah Cullwick'' texts include her diaries and those of her secret lover and, later, husband, an eminent barrister, together with the commentaries of their respective editors. Reference is also made to a photographic essay and to contemporary scholarly works about Hannah and her life.

Pleasures taken: performances of sexuality and loss in Victorian photographs

An intimate look into three Victorian photo-settings, Pleasures Taken considers questions of loss and sexuality as they are raised by some of the most compelling and often misrepresented photographs of the era: Lewis Carroll's photographs of young girls; Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs of Madonnas; and the photographs of Hannah Cullwick, a maid of all work, who had herself pictured in a range of masquerades, from a blackened chimney sweep to a bare-chested Magdalene. Reading these settings performatively, Carol Mavor shifts the focus toward the subjectivity of these girls and women, and toward herself as a writer.Mavor's original approach to these photographs emphatically sees sexuality where it has been previously rendered invisible. She insists that the sexuality of the girls in Carroll's pictures is not only present, but deserves recognition, respect, and scrutiny. Similarly, she sees in Cameron's photographs of sensual Madonnas surprising visions of motherhood that outstrip both Victorian and contemporary understandings of the maternal as untouchable and inviolate, without sexuality. Finally she shows how Hannah Cullwick, posing in various masquerades for her secret paramour, emerges as a subject with desires rather than simply a victim of her upper-class partner. Even when confronting the darker areas of these photographs, Mavor perseveres in her insistence on the pleasures taken--by the viewer, the photographer, and often by the model herself--in the act of imagining these sexualities. Inspired by Roland Barthes, and drawing on other theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Mavor creates a text that is at once interdisciplinary, personal, and profoundly pleasurable.

In the Humble Service of Her Emancipation: Hannah Cullwick's Maid-of-All-Work Diaries

In the Humble Service of Her Emancipation: Hannah Cullwick's Maid-of-All-Work Diaries

Domestic service. what's in it for Anthropology?

Maza, Sarah C. Servants and Masters in Eighteenth‐Century France. The Uses of Loyalty. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983. xiv + 368 pp. including illustrations, appendices, chapter references, sources and bibliography, and index. $32.50 cloth. Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women. Household Service in Nineteenth‐Century America. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. viii + 344 pp. including chapter references and index. $19.95 cloth. Rollins, Judith. Between Women. Domestics and Their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985. viii + 261 pp. including chapter references and index. $24.95 cloth. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Issei, Nisei, War Bride. Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple Uni‐verity Press, 1986. xviii + 290 pp. including appendices, chapter references, and index. $29.95 cloth. Stanley, Liz, ed. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick. Victorian Maidservant London: Virago Press, 1984. vii + 327 pp. including illustrations, appendices, and notes. £5.95 paper ($25 available through Rutgers University Press). Gordon, Suzanne. A Talent for Tomorrow. Life Stories of South African Servants. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985. xxvii + 294 pp., including glossary, bibliography, index, and photographs by Ingrid Hudson. $16.95 paper (available through Ohio University Press).

Recovering women in history from feminist deconstructionism

Recent feminist deconstructionist ideas, which argue that invocations of the category women lead to an impasse in feminist politics, are discussed through a detailed look at contributions to this debate. These ideas contain much insightful thinking which needs to be taken on board in feminist academic work across all disciplines. They also contain assumptions and silences that need to be challenged. One is the failure to see heterosexuality as a metanarrative binding the category women to the category men. Another is the tacit denial of aged, black, lesbian, disabled, and working-class women's struggles to name themselves such. Also women, not just feminists, theorise their own lives and experiences in actually complex deconstructionist terms which recognise multiple fractures within the category women. This is argued in relation to the theory and practice concerning such fractures contained in Hannah Cullwick's diaries, written between 1854 and 1873 and edited by the present author.

Biography as microscope or kaleidoscope? The case of ‘power’ in Hannah Cullwick's relationship with Arthur Munby

The conventional model of biography is a linear ‘jigsaw’ one: the more information about the subject you collect, the closer to ‘the truth’—the ‘whole picture’—about them you get. In my own biographic practice in relation to Hannah Cullwick this model has been totally inappropriate and would entail missing out from ‘the biography’ many of the salient factors which help us to understand this complex woman and her equally complex relationship with Arthur Munby. This model also denies the often uncomfortable but always interesting fact that ‘biography’ and ‘autobiography’ are inseparable dimensions of basically the same experience. I may be ‘the biographer’ of Hannah Cullwick, but this biography has necessarily become a part of my autobiography. Effectively, in order to ‘write biography’ I have had to deal in the currency of ‘intellectual autobiography.’ A more appropriate metaphor to describe my biographic practice is to see biography as a kaleidoscope: each time you look you see something rather different; perhaps composed of the same elements but in a new configuration. I use the idea of ‘intellectual autobiography’ as the means of describing this still happening process of looking again and seeing differently. Effectively, then, I describe an existing and living relationship between me, Hannah, and Munby: I am a part of the (historical?) process I am concerned with; and its relationships encompass and engage me probably as much as either of the other two participants in them.

Book reviews

The Model Company Town: Urban Design Through Private Enterprise in Nineteenth‐Century New England. By John S. Garner Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. xv, 280 pp. $22.50. The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts. By Jonathan Prude. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xvii, 364 pp. $34.50. Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age. By Susan Levine. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. xxii, 191 pp. $24.95. Polish Detroit and the Kolasínski Affair. By Lawrence D. Orton. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981. 299 pp. $19.95. American Widow. By Ketty W. Johnson. Sausalito, CA: Lingonberry Press, 1983. 290 pp. $10.95. Anthracite People: Families, Unions, and Work, 1900–1940. By John Bodnar. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1983. 100 pp. $3.50 paper. First Person America. By Ann Banks. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. xxv, 287 pp. $5.95 paper. Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong. By Norm Cohen. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1981. xx, 710 pp. $17.50 paper. The Municipal Grievance Process. By Steven Briggs. Los Angeles: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California at Los Angeles, 1984. 184 pp. $9.00. Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations, 1717–1800. By C.R. Dobson. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. 212 pp. $24.75. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. By Gareth Stedman Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 viii, 260 pp. $39.50. Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 1838–1918. By David Englander. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. xviii, 342 pp. $19.50. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick “Victorian Maidservant.”; Edited with an introduction by Liz Stanley. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984, 328 pp. $25.00 hardcover, $10.95 paperback. All Our Working Lives. By Peter Pagnamenta and Richard Overy. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1984, 288 pp. £10.75. Foreign Workers in Western Europe: an emerging political force. By Mark J. Miller. New York: Praeger, 1981. x, 229 pp. $15.95.

Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick

Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick