Lynda Nead

STRIP: Moving bodies in the 1890s

Early films created new representations of the sexualised body and provided new opportunities for erotic viewing. Focussing on the 1896 film, A Victorian Lady in her Boudoir, this articles analyses...Early films created new representations of the sexualised body and provided new opportunities for erotic viewing. Focussing on the 1896 film, A Victorian Lady in her Boudoir, this articles analyses this genre of ‘strip’ films in relation to perceptions of audience response and historical definitions of obscenity and taste. The film is described in the article as the culmination of historical developments concerning technology, movement and the body and as a demonstration of the erotic power of the new moving image medium.

The Layering of Pleasure: Women, Fashionable Dress and Visual Culture in the mid-Nineteenth Century

In March 1863, on the occasion of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, the Penny Illustrated Paper described the behaviour of the crowds who were packed on to the streets of London to take part in the celebrations. In certain areas, they reported, the crowds were so dense that a number of women devised a highly practical solution; they slipped off their crinolines and abandoned them in the streets. When the crowds dispersed, the voluminous petticoats were found littering the pavements and, the newspaper continued, if their original owners came forward, certain gentlemen were now offering to restore the discarded crinolines free of charge. This apparently unimportant newspaper report presents a tantalising image of Victorian city life. It evokes an image of humour and flirtation and of a relaxed informality between strangers on the streets and in the newspapers. It shows a lack of inhibition and self-consciousness about women’s dress, which is defined at once as attractive, impractical and erotic. In the Museum of London, there is a small archive of unpublished letters, written from around 1840 to 1858. The pages are folded and re-folded into tiny squares and are frequently cross-written; the neat handwriting traversing the pages first horizontally, then vertically, weaving a fabric of news and gossip, a warp and weft of the everyday that transforms text into textile (Figure 1). The letters are written by a young woman called Amelia Roper, to her close friend, Martha Busher. Roper lived in Walthamstow, a residential suburb to the north-east of London; her friend lived south of London and then, later, in Warwickshire. I have worked with these letters, on and off, for a number of years and they continue to fascinate me. Some are transcribed by the Museum, others are not, and a number are barely legible. Taken together, they offer compelling snatches of ordinary lives in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The letters are a fascinating blend of Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2013 Vol. 35, No. 5, 489–509, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.854978

The Secret of England's Greatness

The Secret of Englands Greatness is a portrait by Thomas Jones Barker of Queen Victoria meeting an African envoy and presenting him with a copy of the Bible. Painted around 1863, it has become an icon of British imperialism in this period and of the justification of colonial expansion in terms of the transmission of the values of the Bible. As such, the portrait appears confident and unambiguous: the secret of Englands greatness is unravelled and the truth is exposed. This article seeks to disturb the apparent absence of mystery in this painted encounter and to examine what remains concealed in the meeting between the white sovereign and the black emissary. Moving from Barkers painting to William Mulreadys The Toyseller, which was completed in the same years and depicts a black pedlar trying to sell a wooden toy to a white mother and child, the article uncovers, within the language of painting and its surrounding discourses, a different kind of disturbing and exhilarating secret, concerned with racial...

Response: The art of making faces

In July 1885 a curious story was reported in the Amateur Photographer concerning a young woman who had become obsessed with taking her own photograph. The 1880s were years of extraordinary innovation within photographic and camera technologies. New photographic plates were developed that were easier and faster to handle; exposure times were shorter and cameras became smaller and lighter and could be held in the hands rather than needing to be supported on a tripod. Instantaneous photography enabled more people than ever before to take photographs of subjects that had not been possible with the old technology. The cameras were light, sleek, and clean and were perfectly adapted, so the advertisements claimed, to the needs of female photographers. The story concerned a young woman, an amateur photographer, who had never been satisfied with the way she looked in images taken by professional portrait photographers. The correspondent reported: ‘She felt sure that her sweetest expression had not been caught by the camera, as she often saw it in the mirror’. So she had bought an instantaneous camera and was now spending all her leisure hours in making photographs of her own face; searching for the evasive expression she desired and knew to be there. Moreover, the article suggested, this excessive behaviour was not simply a consequence of individual derangement but was a wider social phenomenon amongst ‘freaks of girls’. It continued: ‘with no spectator to hinder or make afraid, she transfers her smiles or frowns to the [photographic] plates . . . She has thus far made one hundred and sixty-seven different pictures of herself’. Her fantasy was that technology would be the instrument of her ideal self and that the speed of the camera film would capture the perfect but elusive expression that she had glimpsed in the mirror and that had satisfied rather than disappointed her. This agonising story of a girl’s grim, interminable search for her perfect expression says much about the ambiguities involved in the visual representation of facial expression: of the tensions between the idea of expression as a register of individuality or as a type of general form; as guarantor of deep identity or as a surface of artifice; as the essence of truth and authenticity or Textual Practice 22(1), 2008, 133–143

As Snug as a Bug in a Rug

This article examines the layers of meaning and value attached to the image of the open coal fi res ide in the years immediately fol lowing the end of the Second World War. Although the open fi re has a much longer economic, socia l and cultural history, i t i s argued here that after 1945 i t took on new, emergent meanings that tapped into press ing contemporary debates concerning the nature of the modern Bri tish nation, the home and the fami ly. Whi lst wri ters often evoked the experience of the open fi re as a timeless comfort, address ing bas ic human needs, the fi res ide of post-war Bri tish journal ism and i l lustration was a very modern thing indeed, able to express speci fic debates aris ing from the requirements of reconstruction and modernisation. The almost folkloric associations of the open fi re made i t harder in the 1950s to legis late against domestic smoke than i t was to regulate industria l pol lution. Vested interests drew on the powerful rhetoric of the coal fi re to combat the smoke pol lution reports of the early 1950s and the growing inevitabi l i ty of legis lation. The coal fi re was part of a post-war chain of being that started with the domestic hearth and progressed to the nuclear fami ly, the sel f-contained home, the nation, and ultimately to the Commonwealth. Compone nt DOI: http://dx.doi .org/10.15180/180902/001

The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island

“knowing the other” (xii)? Is it even ethical at all? For those developing the first full-blown theories at the fin de siècle, empathy was primarily psychological and physiological, not ethical, an evolutionarily-developed habit of feeling our way into the forms—trees and mountains, columns and vases—of the surrounding world. Neither knowing what others feel nor acting ethically on that knowledge is the point of an empathy seeking to explain our association of moods with certain colors (as it did for Vernon Lee) or that asks why and how we feel “in the mind’s muscles” such abstract concepts as gravity, as it did for the psychologist Edward B. Titchener. Mitchell is using another model, and that’s fine. But which is it? We “want to think that through hard work, we may reach a state of identification leading to sympathy or, better yet, empathy,” she writes (x). Mitchell believes that this is flawed. But why empathy should be “better” than sympathy, or what, exactly, distinguishes one from the other, is unexplained.

The Cutman: Boxing, the Male Body and the Wound

‘A cutman kneels beside the fighter … [he] works quickly… He knows the fighter wants to be anywhere but here, seen like this. It’s more than blood pouring onto the canvas. It’s pride, ego, hope. The cutman’s job is to keep these things out of the puddle forming between them’ (Jones 2008). Boxing is arguably one of the most visually arresting of sports, its history punctuated with intense, expressive images. This paper examines one category of boxing picture, the photograph of the wounded boxer with a cut, open and bleeding, above his eye. As in the classical legend of the warrior Achilles, the cut above the eye is the boxer’s deadly weakness, the single point of vulnerability in the otherwise ideal, hardened masculine body. The cut, with its spongy tissue and flowing blood, opens up the otherwise contained and contoured body, it represents a soft, feminised man, rather than the male body as metal tool. These themes recall Klaus Theweleit’s ‘Male Fantasies’ (1987), a psychoanalytic account of the violence of the German Freikorps as they fought the revolutionary German working class. Using diaries and letters written by the troops, Theweleit examines their language and imagery and sets out their hatred of women’s sexual bodies, their dread of loss of self and fixed boundaries and of being engulfed and annihilated by the formlessness of the red masses. Drawing on these arguments and the aesthetics of the ideal male body, it is possible to argue that the fascination of the image of the bleeding cut above the boxer’s eye, is as a sign of the beginning of the unravelling of the male warrior body ego and its dissolution into soft, formless matter. Analysing the photographic image of the boxer’s cut face and the aesthetic and bodily traditions on which it draws, this paper concludes that an interdisciplinary methodology, based on art history and the philosophy of sport, can tell us much about the cultural meanings of the athletic male body.

The Artist’s Studio: The Affair of Art and Film

Jonson’s list of ingredients evokes the weird and marvelous world of the alchemist: the magician who could take these macabre and banal materials and through his knowledge and power turn them into gold. The enduring image of the alchemist’s laboratory, where this transmutation takes place, has become a metaphor for other forms of mysterious creativity and is, one suspects, behind prevailing myths of artistic creativity and our ongoing fascination with the artist’s studio as the alchemic site of artistic transformation. Alchemy was a heady mixture of philosophy, art, and science, the precursor of modern chemistry, and the stuff of the creative imagination. It dealt with illusions, with things not being what they seemed, and with sight’s fallibility in comprehending the true nature of objects. The ultimate goal of the alchemist was the transmutation of matter, of base materials, to gold, and it was this process of transformation and its questioning of the physical universe through formal experimentation that made alchemy an art as much as a science.

The History in Pictures

ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between the picture as historical document and as aesthetic experience. Pictures, it is suggested, are more than passive conveyors of visual evidence; they do not reflect other forms of historical experience and representation but actively work on and may alter those structures. The pleasures of the image should be recognized as a fundamental quality of this particular form of historical evidence.

Frederic Leighton's The Fisherman and the Syren

...................................................................................................................................................................................... Women: a cultural review Vol. 13. No. 1. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09574040210122986 This piece is reprinted from the winter 2001 issue of Tate Magazine. Frederic Leighton’s The Fisherman and the Syren