Victorian Visual Culture

We waffled around whether it’s fair to assign the term “pornography” to the diaries and images that make up the idiosyncratic legacy of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. Certainly, they wrote, drew, and photographed for at least partly for erotic purposes, but their works’ aestheticism and lack of sexual explicitness strays from the OED’s definition of pornography: “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” And then there’s the uncomfortable issue we returned to again and again: Cullwick and Munby created for themselves alone and never intended their works for public consumption (and certainly not for the scrutiny of postmodern academia).

Some (who aren’t too well-versed in Victorian sexual culture) might protest that we can’t assign modern definitions of pornography to the Victorian era. They couldn’t look at piano legs without putting a skirt on them – surely anything vaguely scintillating was tantamount to pornography for the Victorians. Consider the comments on Youtube postings of Victorian moving pictures – women on bicycles, a couple sharing a tame kiss – “This was pornography to them,” the populace insists.

The populace might be surprised to learn that many of the acts portrayed in the most widely-distributed Victorian pornography are not only shocking but abhorrent and illegal to the 21st-century audience. Take The Pearl, the Victorian pornographic magazine which was received the most scholarly attention (thanks in part to its public-domain status allowing publishers to issue several extensively illustrated versions since the 1960s). Among the hundred-odd stories the magazine published over its two-year run, a very sparse handful don’t contain some combination of the following: incest, group sex, questionable consent, pedophilia, flogging (mostly unwanted), homosexuality, and cross-class or cross-race relations. The authors describe every act with the same patently purple prose and a dizzying array of euphemisms, several thousand without counting repeats (Potter 91). A random sampling: “mossy grotto,” “Mr. Priapus,” “curly parsley bed”, “milk of human kindness” (Lazenby).

Pornography, as “obscene material,” was in fact illegal in 19th-century England, and The Pearl was eventually shut down by the police (leading the publisher to create two spin-off series, The Oyster and The Boudoir) (Potter 90). The inherent depravity of pornography to Victorian mores may have been what led Victorian pornography to be so unrelentingly deviant; “If you’re going to sin—and if that sin will lead to sickness, debility, and madness—you may as well go all out, right?” (Gagnon 1)

I think there’s something similar going on in the works of Cullwick and Munby. Their cross-class relationship was sexual deviance in itself, so there was no reason not to “go all out”.

Potter, Rachel. “Obscene Modernism and the Trade in Salacious Books.” Modernism/modernity 16.1 (2009): 87-104.

Gagnon, Jilly. “The Pearl: Victorian Porn at Its Finest.” The Toast 10 Apr. 2014.

Lazenby, William. The Pearl, A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading. Grove Publishers.

In class last week, we touched upon the concept of sexual tourism in relation to Doré’s image of the young, flower girl—

Doré’s picture of the flower girl, likely influenced by the Parisian stereotype of “loose women”, is a brief snapshot into the sex trade market that existed in Victorian London and continues to exist within Europe today. The flower girl is young and beautiful, balancing both a child and a seemingly impossibly full basket of flowers. She wears heavy, dark clothing but is situated in a lighter background and holds a basket of white flowers. It is interesting to us today that Doré depicts her as a tourist sight in “Doré’s London” however, during the Victorian period it was not uncommon to engage with prostitutes and other types of sex workers. It was often thought to be a societal valve in preserving the sanctity of marriage. In an article by Lee Bryant on “Crime and the Sex Trade,” she writes, “Prostitution certainly flourished during the Victorian period of rigid sexual morality. Victorian prostitution was connected with a double standard of morality, which was much more permissive for men than for women.”

Working women were often seen as both a threat to good, middle class men and a safety measure in preserving marriage, or rather, an outlet for their sexual frustrations.

I would like to briefly link the idea of the “working woman” and prostitution to a contemporary media portrayal of sex & the working woman as a marketing tool, whether in regards to tourism, the film industry, or consumer culture.

“Pretty Woman” (1990) Julia Roberts

citation: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/10/27/article-2223998-15B69DF3000005DC-913_634x830.jpg
“Striptease” (1996) Demi Moore

citation: http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjAyNTcyNzY1OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDM2MjAyMQ@@._V1_SX640_SY720_.jpg

Heroes (2006) TV Series, Ali Larter

citation: http://www.eonline.com/eol_images/Articles/20061010/285.heroes.larter.101006.jpg

The Wrestler (2008) Marisa Tomei

citation: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/puUUn1N-rJw/hqdefault.jpg

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/crime_sex_trade.htm –> “Crime and Sex Trade” Bryant Lee

As I was looking at John Thomson’s photographs of Victorian street life, I couldn’t help connecting these photographs with the ones I had seen numerous times on a photoblog popularized by its Facebook page that always seemed to be popping up on my news feed. The page is called Humans of New York and I’m sure most people have heard of it in some way since it started back in 2010. That, or they’ve heard of one of its many spin-offs. I’m pretty sure there’s even a Humans of Mount Holyoke page on Facebook now.

Brandon Stanton is the guy who started the blog. In his senior year of college at the University of Georgia, a $3,000 bet that Barack Obama would win the presidential election in 2008 led to a job trading bonds on the Chicago Board of Trade. When things started to go wrong and he lost his job, he decided to move to New York City and take pictures of strangers on the street. What originally began as a project cataloging the inhabitants of New York City turned into something much more when he started to interview the people he photographed.

What made me make the connection between John Thomson’s photographs and Brandon Stanton’s blog was not just the fact that both of them took photographs of people on the city streets. It was more that they both had stories to go along with the photographs that they took. Instead of just looking at a photograph and wondering who the people are, we are given further insight into their lives and what happened before the photograph was taken.

While the Humans of New York stories and interviews may not directly relate to the person being photographed, they usually make you stop and really think about what the person has to say or what they’re going through. Most of the time the captions are vague, just a sneak peek into a stranger’s life. But oftentimes these snippets reveal a lot about the person’s character and guides you further in trying to explain what is happening within the photograph. They give you enough information to be intriguing, yet leave much of the story to your imagination which is what I think really makes them popular. It is really fascinating to me that even spanning centuries and countries, there are still similarities in these two photographer’s works despite how different they truly are.

Here are a few interesting Humans of New York photographs that I found while browsing the website.

“So do you do a different color every day?”
“No, I used to go through different stages. But then I found that I was happiest when I was green, so I’ve been green for 15 years.”

“After this I go to work at a pizza shop. My wife and I were college professors in Bangladesh. I taught accounting. But one dollar in America becomes eighty dollars when we send it back home.”

“If everyone in the room believes the same thing, I get worried.”

And my personal favorite:

“Put me on the internet! Even on The Google!”

Sources:

All information and photographs found here: http://www.humansofnewyork.com/