Victorian Visual Culture

Posted by: Juliette C | November 15, 2025

Photography as Surveillance

When photography was first introduced in the 1800s people couldn’t have imagined how it would develop over the next few centuries. If a small Victorian child saw how much we are being surveilled in our day-to-day lives, they would go into a coma. Early photography looked so different from anything we have today that it can be hard for us to wrap our minds around it. Before photography, there was almost no way for someone to see what someone else looked like before meeting them. Anyone could walk around London and be completely anonymous if they don’t encounter someone they know. They could go to a party with people they have never met, and this would be the first time they would ever see them.

Now it’s almost disgraceful not to stalk someone’s Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. before meeting them. When you start dating someone, it is customary to show your friends their picture. In early photography, this is the joy that Victorian people were discovering. You could give your photograph to the person you are courting or to the person courting you. You could send your photograph to your friends and family who don’t live near you. This was all very exciting and something that we as a society now take for granted. This can be incredibly joyful for people who have relatives who are far away. In the days of early photography, it was a lot of effort to get your photograph taken, write a letter, and send both the letter and the photograph to someone. Now I can see a picture of my baby cousin everyday. My grandmother canFaceTime with her granddaughter and great-grandchildren every day as they grow up. This could never have happened in the Victorian era and is something that we often take for granted.

There is a dark side to photography, however. This comes in the form of surveillance, and this is something that we don’t think about enough in our society. Surveillance is all around us. It’s in the cameras at stores, it’s in the internet, it’s in speed cameras on highways, it’s on people’s Ring cameras on their front doors, and even in EZPass. There is no way to get from one place to another without being on camera, no matter how hard someone tries. This can be viewed in multiple ways; some might say that it’s good. That it doesn’t matter unless you’ve committed a crime, and therefore you deserve to be surveilled. For most people, being constantly surveilled doesn’t affect them; there is no reason to be aware of this fact since there isn’t anyone who is actually checking those cameras, and certainly not for you specifically.

It is a state of constant panopticism in which we are always being surveilled, but we don’t actually know if we are being surveilled or not. A panopticon is a prison system where there is a tower surrounded by cells in a circle. The prisoners in their cells can see the tower but can’t see inside the cells. This makes them behave since there is no way of knowing whether someone is watching them or not. This is how our society functions with our constant state of surveillance. Something that the Victorian people could never have imagined at the time of early photography.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: camera, photographer, photography, social media, surveillance, victorian

Posted by: genevieve.zahner19 | November 12, 2025

Consumed by Beauty: the White Woman’s Disease

As someone with a weird fascination with disease and illness, reading and discussing “Romance of a Shop” by Amy Levy was a perfect way in to talk about consumption, or as it is now known, tuberculosis. The character Phyllis dies of consumption, and it is an interesting choice by Levy to kill the most beautiful, seemingly perfect character. Not interesting as in unexpected, because as we discussed this is a common trope when there are four women, one must die. The March sisters or the Lorimer sisters, it doesn’t matter. The choice to kill Phyllis with consumption caught my attention because at this time in Victorian London, consumption was actually considered a gift. Women were seen as more beautiful if they had consumption because of how it paled their skin, flushed their cheeks, and thinned out their faces and bodies. In the chapters surrounding Phyllis’ death, she is surrounded by “pale” objects, like flowers (pale violets) and clothing (her white dress), both considered objects of beauty, drawing deeper connections between whiteness, consumption, and beauty. As it was considered a disease of white women, I would argue that consumption actually perpetuated themes of empire.

Once society realized that consumption affected people in the working class and people of color, it stopped being a gift, and started being considered an actual affliction, and medical advancements started to ramp up. Not to help the working class or the non-white, but to cure the white, upper class women who developed this disease, so they would not be afflicted with the same disease as someone working class or non-white. Tuberculosis hospitals were started to shunt off patients and hide them from view, and the problem of consumption in other countries under the British empire like India or Africa was largely ignored by England. With the mentions of Africa and India in the novel, it’s hard for a person like me who is intensely interested in diseases not to have one million bells going off in my brain. In the novel, the sisters are distraught when the British army is reported to have been attacked in Africa and they are unsure of if Frank is alive or not. It is never disclosed what the British army was doing there in the first place. Additionally, the sisters have no problem with racializing their labor using slurs, while never acknowledging the labor of black people. The sisters are aware of the army in Africa, aware of enslavement, and aware of consumption, yet none of these things connect in their minds, when in actuality they are entirely connected.

In a contemporary lens, Big Pharma withholds certain medications that can cure tuberculosis, especially drug resistant tuberculosis from countries such as Sierra Leone in Africa, who’s colonial history with England is largely defined by the British and other foreign mining companies exporting what they mined, which is a large opportunity for revenue for Sierra Leone. The prices for the medications are higher than the government and the hospitals can afford due to this history. These lingering effects of British imperialism and empire show that the grip of colonialism is still killing populations in indirect ways.

Though a small plot point, Phyllis’ consumption is an additional subtle theme of empire that Levy puts into her novel. She killed the beautiful, perfect, sister to draw sympathy and emotion from the readers at this unfair disease, yet kept her beauty even in death by killing her with consumption, the white woman’s disease.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: amy-levy, health, tuberculosis

Posted by: Stella Rennard | October 19, 2025

Owning a Portrait of Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one…

The infamous story goes like this: Lizzie Borden, 32, took an axe and murdered her step-mother, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, and her father, Andrew Borden. It was 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie Borden was unmarried, and since rumored to have been queer. Without a husband, Borden was destined to spend the rest of her life in her father’s house.

Abby was murdered first– she was found face down in the guest room, the back of her skull destroyed. Then Andrew, attacked while taking a nap on the couch.

The museum has stuffed dummies where those bodies once were: we sat on the couch next to Andrew and snapped a picture. The tiny Victorian rooms couldn’t contain our tour group. We pushed past each other to get a closer look at the crime-scene photos, the autopsy portraits.

At the end of the night, the Abby and Andrew Borden mannequins are moved so guests can stay inside the house. The spectacle of it all is quite shocking. Any sympathy for the victims has long faded to nothing but morbid interest, of which I am guilty, too.

I was gifted a postcard at the end of the tour. The portrait of Lizzie Borden printed on its face is large; high-res, prominent. She sits before a gray background. Her dress is beautifully made: lace wraps around her shoulders, graces her collar bones. The bodice is pleated, and a white flower rests under her chin. Her head is turned to the left, obscuring half her face in shadow. This is the most widely used image of Lizzie Borden: she is young, beautiful. (She never had a mug shot taken.) Under the museum’s logo is an illustration of an axe.

I truly don’t know what to do with the postcard. I don’t plan on sending it to anyone (I can’t think of a single person who would want it). Taping it to my wall feels weird. Despite being acquitted by a jury of men due to lack of evidence [she didn’t have a spot of blood on her; it is speculated that Lizzie committed the crime while naked] I don’t want to gaze upon her portrait and remember what she was accused of.

We spoke in class about the portrait as a piece of commodity. An image of someone notable sold as a souvenir, to be displayed in the homes of millions of strangers. Like Lady Dedlock’s portrait taped among many to Mr. Jobling’s wall in Bleak House. Like the posters of Taylor Swift hanging in every dorm building on campus. Everything in the Lizzie Borden house has her face on it. A couple things have the crime scene photos of the Borden parents’ bodies. We are still selling photos of people. The advancement of photographic technology has only made this practice easier.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: books, fiction, history, lizzie-borden, writing

Posted by: Abigail McKeon | October 14, 2025

Roman Influence in the Victorian Era

As someone who has wrung out a lot of brain cells by studying the Roman Empire, I cannot help but draw comparisons between Roman society and whatever else my thoughts are currently occupied by. These comparisons cover everything from politics to art to what I ate for lunch — and, apparently, even the Victorian era.

The Victorians, too, could not seem to stop thinking about the Roman Empire. As a whole, Victorian society was hugely influenced by the past and the cultivation of history — especially the aspects of history to which it could relate. Thus, it is quite fitting that a powerful empire run by men beholden to tradition, religion, and duty would appeal to these history-loving Brits. The Romans consequently had a noticeable influence on the values and culture of the Victorian era.

The Victorians tended to view history as the sum of past societies’ achievements that contemporary society could learn from. According to Quentin Broughall’s “Assuming the purple: the rehabilitation of ancient Rome in Victorian culture, 1837-1901,” they also tended to see historical figures as “distant contemporaries” who had confronted and often mastered the same issues that they were facing. Because classical civilizations and languages were such a large part of the education of Britain’s elites during the nineteenth century, it makes sense that the Victorians were drawn to emulate the same values that the Romans held.

Unfortunately, the Victorian method of processing history involved a lot of trimming and even the blatant overlooking of facts at times. When using the past as a model for the present, Victorians tended to choose “golden ages” of history to concentrate on. They often tailored, suppressed, and domesticated historical facts to suit their contemporary purposes. For example, one certainly would not see the Victorians outwardly accepting homosexuality in the way that the Romans did. By removing these difficult components, the Victorians created a classical world that was unchanging, stable, and perfectly fitted to their own agendas. This tailoring of history effectively creates an apparently ideal model of an era that Victorians could bind to their own. As English culture was imperialized, the Romans’ past successes offered solace and stability while the present day held ambiguity and doubt.

As the Roman Empire slowly turned over from republicanism to imperialism under its first emperor, Augustus, traditional values sprang to the surface of Roman identity. Pietas (a sense of piety and duty to the empire, social hierarchies, the household, and the gods) became an important measure of success. Romans, especially Roman women, were expected to prioritize their familial responsibilities over most else. Additionally, Romans were pressured to adhere to social norms and be faithful to the gods. The Victorians’ conservative society echoed these values, whether or not they were directly drawn from the Roman way of life. British citizens, especially women, needed to prioritize their duties to their households, spouses, and children. Keeping up appearances and carefully following social norms was also seen as essential. We can see these values clearly depicted in Victorian advertisements. These pieces of visual culture emphasize the importance of contributing to the home, pleasing one’s spouse, responsibly raising children, and following social expectations such as dressing, living, and acting in what is deemed to be a decorous manner.

The Augustan-era value of otium is also represented in Victorian society. After Augustus took sole power in Rome and the members of the wealthy ruling class no longer needed to engage in the political sphere to the same extent that they had before, they were instead compelled to fill their days with leisurely self-realization activities such as reading and writing, contemplation, and other artistically valuable and enlightening pursuits. The ability to engage in this self-realization was seen as a privilege denoting elite status. In Victorian society, this belief system was echoed. Progress and status were often demarcated by the reduction of toil, which we can see is lauded in Victorian advertisements for products meant to diminish household labor. Like the Romans, Victorians sought leisure for the twofold purpose of self-betterment and status.

Though, of course, many societies across time have held similar values about leisure, duty, piety, and family, it is evident that the Victorians looked to the Romans as a cultural model in many ways. Like many of us in modern society, the Victorians feared the mysteries of the future and embraced the past as a certain and stable source of knowledge. Historical comparativism served as a useful lens through which Victorians could analyze and classify their own society. As a result, it is no coincidence that both the Roman and British Empire have a strong focus on tradition, honor, order, and status.

Source: Broughall, Quentin J. Assuming the purple: the rehabilitation of ancient Rome in Victorian culture, 1837-1901. 2015. Maynooth U, PhD thesis. mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/6332/1/Assuming%20the%20Purple%20-%20Master.pdf. Accessed 13 Oct. 2025.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: ancient-history, history, literature, roman-empire, rome, victorian advertising, victorian-classicism

Posted by: Aislin McKaelen | October 14, 2025

The “Horror” Movie That Is Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights

Adapting a beloved book into a visual format is also difficult. Even some of the most perfect book adaptations, like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, have their faults. Some adaptors do not even try to faithfully adapt their source material, like David Benioff and D.B. Weiss who gave a horrible adaptation of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, known now as Game of Thrones. Unfortunately it looks as if the new Wuthering Heights movie, directed and written by Emerald Fennell, looks like it will be falling into the ladder category.

Adaptations of Emily Bronte’s famous work have been iffy at best. They are not the best things in the world. Fennel’s take on the classic novel looks horrific. The book follows Heathcliff, an ethnically ambiguous and odd man from boyhood into adulthood and his obsession with his housemate Catherine. The book follows their obsession with each other and how Catherine, after her death, haunts Heathcliff. The duo are played by Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, who are a tad bit old to be playing teenagers/young adults.

Period dramas are infamous for not being aesthetically accurate to the time period they are portraying. Wuthering Heights takes this to a new degree. What we see of the men’s costuming is fairly accurate to the mid Victorian aesthetic. None of Margot Robbie’s costumes as Catherine are not aesthetically correct. Some of the basic silhouettes are there, like an oval neckline for fancy dresses and the general shape of the skirt, but the rest is historical fiction. The neckline is often too low for the period and in several outfits a mid 18th century colonial neckline is used. Some of these outfits are just plain ugly too. The costuming decisions look like they wanted to dress Margot Robbie up as a classic Disney Princess, like Cinderella.

The vibe of the movie is also waaaaaaay off. Like Emerald Fennell’s previous film, Saltburn, this adaptation of Wuthering Heights feels perverted and is used as an excuse to create yet another horny period drama (Can’t we just live with Bridgerton?). There was romantic tension between the main characters, but there were no intense makeout scenes or scenes of sexual bondage (I honestly don’t know what else to call it), as shown by the brief scene featuring Ewan Mitchell and some random woman he is strapping a strange metal device to. It is just too horny, and nothing about Wuthering Heights, the book, is like that.

To also release this movie on Valentines Day, the hallmark holiday of love, when Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship, along with several other relationships within the book, are toxic is wild. Wuthering Heights is not a Hallmark movie story. This book, nor film, should be the example of love in any capacity.

We have only gotten a glimpse of what I firmly believe is a horrid monster. This may be one of the worst book adaptations ever created. Emily Brontë deserves so much better than this. Emily, I am so sorry.

~ A. E. McKaelen

Victorian Lover’s Eye Jewelry

Eye Miniature, early 19th century. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

As a jewelry maker myself, I was fascinated when I heard about Victorian lover’s eye jewelry. I found a helpful article that discusses the origins of this trend written by Alexxa Gotthardt, which contains many photos of lover’s eye jewelry from various museums. This style of jewelry was popularized in Britain around the late 1700s and started with a marriage proposal from Prince George of Wales to a woman named Maria Anne Fitzherbert. George had proposed before, but the courtship was forbidden because of laws around a Catholic widow from becoming a monarch. Fitzherbert opened a letter written by the prince in November of 1785 to reveal a marriage proposal in the form of a letter and a small painting of his eye. The two eventually married, and a locket was crafted for the prince with a small painting of Fitzherbert’s eye within.

Gotthardt analyzes Victorian eye jewelry as an expression of Victorian culture’s focus on visuality, as she points out that “even the subtlest glance could convey lust, love, surveillance, or a heady mix of all three.” Lover’s eye jewelry relied upon a complex depiction of a small part of the body, one that could convey an immense amount of emotion in a single glance. The experience of both looking and being looked on makes these jewelry pieces even more compelling, as they embody a kind of meta-narrative of visuality.

There is also the potential for these accessories to be indicative of surveillance around marital fidelity. One might find themselves less inclined to cheat on their spouse if they knew they had a constant reminder of their lover’s gaze hung around their neck. Wearing a piece of lover’s eye jewelry would also indicate to other people that an individual is romantically involved, and could deter potential suitors.

The gendered dynamics of these pieces are also interesting to consider. It might appear to be an egalitarian exchange of love between a heterosexual couple, as both the man and the woman are essentially giving the other a representation of an intimate part of their bodies. Additionally, in locket form, a person could control who looked upon the eye of their lover. This would prevent uncomfortable incidents of boundary-crossing, such as the scene in the novel Bleak House when Mr. Guppy looks at the portrait of Lady Dedlock, despite Sir Leicester’s wishes that the portrait remain private and Lady Dedlock’s loud silence about whether or not she wants her portrait to be viewed by others. However, it does reduce the body to a commodity, an act that has historically been used to violate the female body. Not only is the body reduced to a commodity, but there is a kind of violence in stripping away the context of the rest of a person’s body to focus on one disembodied part. Women also might not have any say on whether or not their eye is used in this way, as they likely did not have control over their finances to pay an artist to make one.

According to Gotthardt, lover’s eye jewelry faded out from popularity around the early 1800s. Because of the novelty of photography, people seemed to lose interest in miniature portraits once they could have access to a photo of their exact likeness quickly and cheaply. However, Victorian era lover’s eye jewelry experienced a revival on TikTok, with amateur artists painting small portraits of their lover’s eye and attaching them to pieces of jewelry. Making video-form content of an intimate artistic exchange between two romantic partners presents a new kind of ideological struggle being played out visually. Visual indicators provide little context about the rest of the relationship, and the quality of a relationship is often judged by its visual appeal on social media platforms. This resurgence makes sense with our current era’s emphasis on visuality and spectacle which is similar to Victorian-era visual drama.

Source: Gotthardt, Alexxa. “The Mysterious Lover’s Eye Jewelry of 18th-Century England | Artsy.” Artsy, 4 Jan. 2019, http://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-mysterious-history-lovers-eye-jewelry.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: art, gender, jewelry, material culture, portraiture, victorian-jewelry

Posted by: genevieve.zahner19 | October 10, 2025

After Effects of Gendered Victorian Advertising

Our most recent in class discussion sparked a lot of thoughts for me about gendered advertisements and what that means in the Victorian era as well as in our current contemporary time period. We discussed how in Victorian times women were the primary consumers, doing all the shopping for their households. Therefore, many advertisements at this time were targeted towards women, creating an extremely gendered advertising strategy that has carried through the decades. This gave women at the time the illusion of choice, seeing which advertisements catered to their assumed needs like soap that didn’t require hot water, or that it worked so well you barely needed to do any work scrubbing the clothes. However, they were still spending money that they were able to access through the labor of their husbands, purchasing items dictated by the demands of domesticity and the family, like washing materials or food. Advertisements became extremely gendered in their depictions of the body, like in one soap advertisement we discussed in class showing an endless line of maids with cinched waists, perfectly clean aprons, and porcelain white skin. In advertisements for men, such as a Cadbury’s Cocoa advertisement, the product is portrayed as making men stronger, resilient, one could even say more masculine while depicting them playing sports and in power poses. The very same product advertised to women as being “absolutely pure” and “the perfect food” and showing the drink being fed to a child by her mother almost as if it is an extension of herself, as we discussed in class.

These kinds of gendered advertisements have carried into our modern society, similarly around products concerning cleaning or self care, like deodorant or razors. Men’s deodorant has pictures of the kraken and named buzzwords like “swagger” or “captain”, while women’s is called “powder fresh” and has pink flowers on the container. What makes the difference in deodorant? Products that serve the same purpose such as deodorant are being gendered and arguing different proposed benefits, even though such products don’t inherently need a gender for marketing. To continue on the beat of deodorant, women’s deodorant commercials are oddly sensual, depicting close shots of the body, or show women dancing with their newly deodorized armpits. Men’s deodorant commercials often take place in locker rooms, playing sports or with men wearing only a towel around their waist, showing that men are additionally subject to having the body be used as a tool for marketing.

What started in the Victorian era as something to try and get women to purchase specific brands of soap or cocoa has exploded into a massive gendered marketing campaign for almost every product under the sun, dividing men and women into separate, binary consumer categories. Marketing styles have continued stereotypes and strategies such as dividing the same product into gendered categories that seem to have begun at the beginning of the advertising boom in the Victorian era, making it impossible for consumers to separate their actual needs from old Victorian ideals about gendered responsibility.

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Posted in course business | Tags: gender, history, politics, women

Posted by: Hannah U | December 26, 2023

The Olive Tree Installation, December 2023, Mount Holyoke College

The Fall 2023 semester at Mount Holyoke College was rocked in early October by an open siege on Palestine by Israel, which to the date of this writing has claimed nearly twenty-thousand Palestinian lives. Shock and outrage poured in from the Mount Holyoke community, accompanied—as expected of a liberal arts college—by art. One piece of art that stands out among the influx of posters, protest signs, and graffiti is the installation created by several of my Mount Holyoke peers. Composed of pro-Palestine art arranged in the shape of an olive tree on a giant sheet of fabric, a symbol of Palestine, the mobile art installation was displayed in the Kendade Science Hall, the Talcott Greenhouse, and the Williston Library in December of 2023. The featured art appeared mostly in shades of white, black, green, and red: the colors of the Palestinian flag, recently adopted to represent the movement for a free Palestine and a halt to the genocide being carried out there. The Palestinian flag is central to the piece, with phrases such as “Jews for Palestine” and “no justice on occupied land” surrounding it as if the flag itself were blasting out the words. It’s striking. The harder one looks, the more there is to see, dozens of individual pieces of art coming together to form an impressive and moving cry for Palestinian freedom and lives. It’s also giant, spanning the size of two queen-sized beds and able to hang from a second-story railing without even coming close to touching the floor. The size and boldness of the installation remind the viewer that no matter what else is happening, despite the many thousands of deaths that have occurred, Palestinian liberation is an idea that will never be crushed or forgotten.

The phrases and images used within the art installation as a whole are not foreign to anyone who has been keeping up with the global outrage on Palestine’s behalf. The symbolism of the watermelon, used in the stead of the Palestinian flag when it was banned, stands out. Olive branches encircle the art and form the defining shape of the tree, both as a symbol for peace and a reference to the ancient and historic olive trees destroyed by the siege on Gaza. One of the central pieces of the installation shouts out to the Land Back movement, alongside other pronouncements of solidarity from those whose home countries or ethnic backgrounds were also the victims of imperialism and occupation. The entire work gives off the impression of dozens of protest signs brought together into one unifying image without losing their own messages and choices in the process. Some of the images also support the boycott against companies which support Israel enacting genocide such as Starbucks and McDonald’s. A phrase from a piece towards the base of the tree declares, “liberation for all requires resistance from all.” Those who look upon the art and feel helpless under the weight of it all are reminded that there are ways to help. Starbucks stock has recently tanked as a result of continued boycotts and protests. Even just seeing the art and its many voices calling for Palestinian liberation imbues the viewer with a sense of hope; it’s a powerful piece of art that grabs the viewer’s attention no matter where it hangs. Nearly a month after seeing the installation, I still think of that giant tree and the Palestinian flag at the center when I scroll through Twitter and see reports of the death toll climbing higher and higher. It forms a piece in the unofficial series of art crying out for liberation that stands millions strong—art itself cannot save the world and protect human lives, but it sure can help. With every piece of art that I see that voices support for Palestine, denounces the actions of Israel, and continues to spread the branches of hope to whoever comes across it, the worldwide art installation of support becomes even larger. The Olive Tree Installation presented at Mount Holyoke is a small part of the overall outpouring, but it’s striking and meaningful in that it displays the unequivocal belief that Palestine will be freed from Israel’s occupation and violence.

The Olive Tree Installation has its own Instagram account, theolivetreeinstallation, where updates on its creation and journey around the campus have been posted. The fate of the installation is uncertain—will it continue to be displayed around Mount Holyoke or even further when the spring semester arrives? Was this a temporary display, to be seen only by those who were lucky enough to catch it in the beginning of December? No matter what happens to it when we return for the spring semester, the image of its mighty branches and its calls for liberation will ensure that the Olive Tree Installation will remain in my mind for a long time to come.

The Madonna and the Fallen Woman

Our class’s discussions on the fallen woman stereotype reminded me of the Madonna-whore dichotomy, which originated as a psychological complex but now finds itself a place in media and literature. The Wikipedia page has helpfully informed me that the Madonna-whore dichotomy appeared in Vertigo (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock). What I’m more interested in is how the stereotype played itself out in the depictions of mothers and “fallen women” in the Victorian era. The mother figure was meant to be virtuous and sexually pure, despite having children, and the fallen woman figure was a woman who had fallen from grace and turned to sex work rather than fulfilling her domestic duties. The fallen women is often portrayed as dark or covered in shadow, while the mothers wear white clothes and are bathed in light.

Augustus Egg, Misfortune

Here, the fallen woman has thrown her family into disarray, accompanied by the vibrant but brutal hues of the room and clothing.

In considering the differences between the mothers and the fallen women, one must also remember that mothers frequently faded into the background in portraits taken of them, most memorably with the proliferation of “ghost mother” photographs which literally erase the identity of the mother. While the fallen woman is condemned, she is also the center of attention rather than being forced to be overshadowed.

Washing Away Your Skin Color?

In our discussions of advertising and race, I was struck by how people of color were—and are—often the “before” part of a “before and after.” One only needs to think of Victorian advertisements where someone gets into the bath Black and comes out white. In this case, the whitewashing is literal. Racism was a pervasive issue throughout Victorian advertisements for hygiene, such as these:

As much as we would like to imagine that we live in a world much less tainted by racism, these kinds of whitewashing are still present in ads today. A 2020 haircare ad in South Africa described Black hair as “damaged” and white hair as “normal.”

An offensive haircare advert shows Black South Africans still have to fight apartheid’s race battles

This has made me wonder how many ads I’ve seen that have portrayed the natural features of people of color as undesirable because they’re been pitted against the white beauty standard. What other examples of this have you seen from the Victorian era until now?

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: advertisement, advertising, Beauty, race, racism