Victorian Visual Culture

Ghost mother photographs are some of the most interesting photographs from the Victorian era, and that’s saying something. There is something so disturbing and uncanny about each and every one of these photographs. These kids are not old enough to be in pictures by themselves; most of these babies aren’t old enough to sit up by themselves. This is not the biggest uncanny feeling in these photos; it is, in fact, the mother and how she is always slightly out of frame. Whether she is crouching behind furniture or her face is burned from the picture, she is looming in the background, never fully seen, but always present. This changes the photos completely; it is no longer a nice picture of some children, it has turned into a very clear example of the erasure of feminine labor in Victorian England. The erasure of female labor in the Victorian era is very fitting for that time period. Women were commodifications, not real people. They were seen as the means to the end, that end being reproduction and domestic labor. For society at the time, once a woman had reproduced, she no longer mattered; all that did was the children. They are the ones who are front and center in these photographs. 

Although these photos are distinct from the time, there are echoes of them throughout history. At the beginning of the semester, when we looked at the portrait of Lady Betty Delme and her children, we noted how the son is front and center and that Lady Delme looks as though she is fading into the scenery. Her hair is blending into the tree, and her skirts almost look like a piece of furniture. This is a less extreme version of the ghost mother photos. In the ghost mother photographs, the mothers are often shrouded in a sheet of some sort. This makes them look like they are the sofa or chair that the child is sitting on. Even the photos where the mother’s face has been taken out of the picture, her body often ends up being obscured in the same way Lady Delme’s is obscured. This goes along with the more modern tradition of having the mom take all the photos of her kids without actually being in them. There are a lot of families where the mom is barely in any of the photos. Neither  of these examples is the same as the ghost mother photographs because the harm in the ghost mother photos is incomparable to everything else. 

The harm of taking these mothers out of the photographs is unquestionable when looking at these photos. Not only the ones where the faces of these women are being scratched, burned, or cut out, but all of the photos. It is harmful to erase all of the labor that these women are doing and have done for their families. By shrouding and erasing the faces of these women, the photographer and society at large are keeping the labor hidden from the world. Society didn’t want to recognize reproductive labor as real labor, so that women would keep doing it for free. The fewer people who see, the less they care about women and their feelings on the matter. There are so many photos where the mom is hunched over a piece of furniture. The cloth covering her is also draped over the couch. It looks like she is the couch that her children are sitting on. She is nothing more than an ornament to the scene of this picture, a tool.