Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs

by Carol Mavor

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 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.

Genres: Photography, Art, 19th Century, Gender Studies

171 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 1995

About the author

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour; Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.

Reviews

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book on a plane many years ago and I was constantly hiding the cover. I hadn't encountered Barthes or his ideas about the photograph - as performative object, as one that plays with our notions of presence and absence while we look. I admit I was more interested in the relationship between photographer, Lewis Carroll and his subjects, mostly young girls. What I came away with, thanks to Mavor's book, was a greater appreciation of the subject's ability to direct and control what I would be seeing years later, not to mention what Carroll and the other photographers saw. That was a comparatively simple lesson. The book is a dark meditation on visibility and invisibility by way of the photograph. If you are interested in photography, Victorian culture as it mirrors our own, or the just the nature of performances then this is a book that will be helpful.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author uses various post-modern theorists, from Merleau-Ponty to Jacques Lacan, to examine sexuality in the photography of a few notable, though idiosyncratic Victorian photographers. The photographs that are included in the book are themselves exquisite. While I didn't find the analysis profound, the author has an intellectual honesty and acuity that makes the essays insightful and thought provoking.

[Lumsden · Rating 2 out of 5]

The chapter on Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was fantastic. The other three chapters (short book) brought down the quality of the book to two stars.