The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 52
However, my contention is that this research focuses too closely on Munby
and Hannah’s relationship as the source for the photographs and does not
consider the photographs themselves as a specific communicative system.
This approach seems valid because, as Stanley (1984) and Atkinson (2003)
note, many of the erotic or sexualised practices ‘reproduced’ in the earliest photographs were already part of their relationship. For example, Hannah
records in her diary of 1855 how she blacked herself up for Munby using lead and oil (Atkinson 2003: 39), an act that is photographed in 1862. However, by Untitled-2 337
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drawing from the poststructuralist theoretical developments I have outlined I aim to undertake a more complex reading of these photographs.
On close inspection there are three different ‘types’ of photographs of
Hannah in the archive. Firstly, there are the images of Hannah in different guises: as a lady, as a man, as a rural worker. Secondly, there are photographs of Hannah posed in a manner which replicate her cleaning activities as a maid of all work: cleaning Munby’s shoes, sweeping, serving, outside cleaning the dirty steps, and finally, almost straightforward photographic ‘portraits’ of Hannah taken in her dirty working clothes.
In the first group it is the photographs’ iconic signs system of dress, pose, photographic studio, cleanliness, gloved hands in accordance with the related discourses of the period that signify a working–class man10 – or a middle-class lady. In these photographs the ‘pleasure’ of visually investigating transgressive boundaries is not actually operating within the iconic message of the photograph itself. It can only work because when Munby gazes at these photographs he knows that the woman depicted in the photographs is in ‘reality’ a working-class woman. In this context Munby is consciously playing with the discursive field of the photograph to facilitate his voyeuristic desire to investigate class and gender differences. However, this manipulation of the iconic structure
creates problems for Munby in terms of photographic veracity because he is
aware of the ability of camera to ‘lie’, and I will return to this observation. The next type are the very few photographs which relate to Munby’s training, in which the iconic codes have been controlled to replicate these activities. An example would be the image of Hannah cleaning Munby’s shoes or others that
are referenced, but now missing.
However, for my purpose, it is the photographs of Hannah in her dirty
working clothes (which begin in 1856) that are the most revealing in terms
of my investigation of the photographic sign system. As already noted these have two ‘styles’: one follows the rising conventions of portraiture, where Hannah is photographed in her dirty dress and apron, with messy hair and
her large biceps and hands on display. In this her class position is sometimes accentuated by the inclusion of a prop such as boots or a duster. In the others Munby has staged Hannah in a kind of tableau of ‘cleaning’ activity, on
her knees scrubbing the floor, cleaning the steps outside a house, carrying slop buckets, washing plates or serving. If we interrogate these photographs within the poststructuralist framework I have outlined it is possible to reveal the unconscious processes that are informing Munby’s use of the new invention of photography.
Metz’s (1990) proposal that the photograph is a fetish is evidenced
in Munby’s use. He seeks a small image which he can posses in order to
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repeatedly gaze at it and in the process interrogate the ‘difference’ of class and gender. However, in order for these photographs to function as a fetish Munby needs to be certain that he is looking at a ‘real’ working-class woman.
Munby is fascinated by the technology of photography which allows for
the indexical trace; however, he is, as already noted, aware of the possibility of deception through the iconic function of the photographic sign system.
In this context, I would suggest, Munby is forced to develop strategies to
alleviate or disavow this fear; strategies that, I would suggest, offer clues on how the myth of photographic veracity was first negotiated.
The portrait-style photographs were mostly taken without Munby in
attendance. These mimic the appearance of early photographic ‘likenesses’
taken of the working class. The photographers’ studios are cheap, signifying the woman’s class position. Hannah is instructed by Munby to go in her
dirty clothes after work to have her photograph taken. For instance in 1867, while working in Margate, Hannah was photographed in her dirt for Munby.
‘So I went one morning just as I was … I had slipp’d out without asking
leave afore the lodgers’ breakfast, & I was partly black wi’ cleaning boots & grates & that’ (cited in Mavor 1996: 98) (but she had not been dirty enough for Munby’s liking).11 In these photographs the iconic signs of the working-class backdrops, the props and the signs of her dirty labour are stabilised as authentic by linking them to the material connection of coming dirty from
work, confirming the indexical trace as ‘true’.
In the staged tableaux Munby attempts to confirm photographic indexi-
cality by connecting the photographs to something he has encountered in
the real. An example of this is offered in 1860 when he visited the Crystal Palace on Forester’s Day. Munby notes:
passed a tallish young woman, evidently a servant, who was noticeable for
the size of her gloveless hands … She was a maid of all work at Chelsea,
it seemed … I looked at her hands and spoke my opinion of them … Her
right hand lay, a large red lump, upon her light-coloured frock: it was
broad and square and thick … the skin was rough to the touch, and hard
and leathery in the palm … I lifted it too – it was quite a weight, heavy
and inert (21/8/1860).
Less than two weeks later Munby takes Hannah to have ‘several photo-
graphs taken of her in working dress and attitudes. With what meekness she
submitted to be posed, and handled, and discussed to her face; the coarse-
ness of her hands examined and the best mode of showing them displayed’
(1/9/1860). In this example Munby attempts to use photography to recreate
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the ‘excessive’ descriptive detail given in his written encounter through the highly unusual (for the period) use of an extreme close-up of Hannah’s
hands (Figure 4).
Figure 4
The photograph’s authenticity, although staged, is increased through its
relationship to his previous encounter in the real. In 1862, Munby records
meeting prostitutes in Oxford Street:
The prostitutes who as usual accosted me in the streets and won’t be
shaken off, were tonight peculiarly atrocious … She said that for ten years she had been accustomed to appear before men, not only naked, but in the
character of a beast. ‘I’ve practiced going on four legs, till I can do it as well as a dog said the creature; I run about the room like a dog and bark,
and pick up bones and things with my mouth from the floor … and I like
it!’ (16/5/1862)
In August 1862 Munby takes Hannah to Fink to have her photographed
as a ‘dog’ ‘crouching and tugging at the chain’ (cited in Atkinson 2003:
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99–100). The photograph has not survived. If we further examine the inter-
nal codes of some of these ‘staged’ photographs we can witness something
quite extraordinary. In a photograph that appears to have been taken by Fink (Figure 5) Hannah is posed looking away from the camera, busy on her knees
scrubbing the floor. In this photograph the props of class employed in other photographs are put to work in a narrative which implies that she has been
captured unknowingly at her cleaning tasks. Thus this photograph mobilises
iconic signs to signify a type of photograph that was not yet technically possible; the ‘snap shot’. The ‘captured moment’ which, as critics have noted, significantly increased the myth of photographic veracity.
Figure 5
This example is also related to the findings of Kuhn (1985) on pornog-
raphy and confirms how unconscious drives were informing this restaging.
Munby’s desires to examine the ‘signs of difference on display’ (gender and Hannah’s class), which are exhibited for him in the photograph, also recall castration anxieties. Significantly, then, this example of a photograph at the cusp of its popular development has included the protective device of the
averted gaze to facilitate Munby’s voyeurism. This example confirms how
the iconic signs of the averted gaze functioned to not just establish the veracity of the photograph but to also displace the fears held in the split subject, revealing the impossibility of separating historically based discourse studies from poststructuralist appreciations of the unconscious.
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Finally, as previously noted, Kaplan (1992) suggests that the Industrial
Revolution is a moment when social and cultural change instigates a distur-
bance of the symbolic/discursive order. Elizabeth Wilson explains how, for
men like Munby, the voyeurism of the flâneur represents a ‘shifting projection of angst’ in which ‘the flaneur represents masculinity as unstable, caught up in the violent dislocations that characterized urbanization’ (Wilson 1992:
109). In Kristeva’s terms this discursive disruption causes a rupture of the border separating the symbolic order from that which threatens it. In this
context Munby’s photographs can also be analysed as evidence of a need
to renew contact with the abject. The recurring iconic signs in Munby’s
photographs reveal his fascination with dirt and cleaning, as well as the
‘dirty’ feminine body; there are also glimpses of the lure of bodily wastes (this ‘interest’ in viewing photographs of maids undertaking dirty work was not exclusive to Munby in this period; see Edge 2008). The now defaced
photograph of Hannah cleaning Munby’s boot (Figure 1) holds such a
meaning when related back to Hannah’s diary entry which recalls licking
his boots clean when they were covered in horse shit (cited in Atkinson 2003: 106). These traces of the abject reveal Munby’s desire to use the photographs’ symbolic iconic function to allow a renewed contact with repressed
pre-symbolic desires. However, he also uses photography to replay the very
process of ritual cleansing and this is evident in his most private use of two contrasting photographs held in his travelling case. One captures Hannah
covered in dirt, representing her work when cleaning a chimney (Figure 2);
the other captures Hannah as a lady (Figure 3). I would suggest that in the first the iconic signs recall the jouissance of Kristeva’s maternal authority
‘and the mapping of the self ’s clean and proper body’ (Kristeva 1982: 72)
while in the other the ‘stability’ of paternal law has been restored.
To conclude, this short case study on very early Victorian photography, I
would suggest, confirms the importance of photographic theorists engaging
with poststructuralist theories in order to uncover the complex working of
the photographic sign system. This is because such theories offer the tools to ‘order’ communicative mediums in order to isolate and examine their
specific workings and effects. In the case of the photograph, whether digital or chemical, its uniqueness remains its stillness and its indexicality.
Acknowledgements
Images from the Arthur J. Munby archive reproduced with permission from
Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.
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Notes
1. A key text here would be Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ noted for its influenced on the development of communication theory within the Frankfurt School (Benjamin [1936]
1973).
2. The semiotic is quite different to linguistic theory of semiotics, and refers to a developmental phase close to the infantile pre-Oedipal phase of Freud.
3. Kristeva’s highly theoretical work is relevant to the study of photography because she offers examples on how the unconscious informs cultural production. For example, she suggests that avant-garde modernist poetic practices
‘evade the apparently monolithic control of the symbolic’ through ‘texts which are produced from rhythms and pulses of the semiotic chora – the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal’ (Wolff 1990: 74).
4. Here I would like to draw attention to my own photographic practice which operates within this genre (Edge 1999).
5. A digital photograph of a person still operates within this framework; the difference is that the trace is recorded electronically rather than chemically.
6. Born in 1828 in Clifton, a village on the outskirts of York, Arthur Joseph Munby was a product of industrial England’s emergent upper middle class. His father was a clerk to the York magistrates and although his mother was at home, as was common practice for people of this class, the family employed a nanny, Hannah Carter. Munby trained as a Bar student at Cambridge and graduated with a BA in 1851 and an MA in 1856. In November 1857 he moved into central London,
taking up residence in the first floor of Fig Tree Court, part of the Inner Temple area, at the rent of fifty pounds per year and he remained a tenant there for the rest of his life.
7. Hannah Cullwick’s diaries are held in box 98 of the collection. There are sev-enteen items. They start earlier than Munby’s in 1855 and finish in 1872.
8. Munby first asked Hannah to be photographed in ‘her dirt’ in 1856 when she was posed with her ‘sleeves rolled up in her dirty apron and white cotton cap’
(Atkinson 2003: 49).
9. Phillip Fink was a German high-street photographer, his backdrops and location in Oxford Street indicate that he catered for a middle-class rather than working-class clientele. Munby had a long-term relationship with Fink, who
photographed Hannah and Munby in their different guises over a number of
years.
10. It is these photographs that feminist academics have used to argue that the play with codes of respectability is instigated by Hannah herself.
11. The fact that Stodart the photographer was very pleased with the photograph and displayed it in his shop window for others to see (Atkinson 2003: 161)
indicates a much wider interest in these dirty photographs: see Edge (2008).
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