Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs - Softcover

Mavor, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860641164 ISBN 13: 9781860641169

Publisher: Routledge, 1996

Synopsis

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 era: 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"On Carroll's photographs of girls, on Cameron's photographs of madonnas, on the topics of death, sex, and girlhood, Mavor has produced iconoclastic, illuminating, and consistently thoughtful readings."--Henry Abelove, coeditor of "The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader"

Review:

"Pleasures Taken couldn’t have been more aptly titled. A lusciously written study of luscious images, it invokes smell, touch, disequilibrium, the heft of labor and the weight of loss, to show how much more than spectatorial are the wrenching and stirring relations around Victorian photographs."—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Fat Art, Thin Art and Tendencies

"On Carroll’s photographs of girls, on Cameron’s photographs of madonnas, on the topics of death, sex, and girlhood, Mavor has produced iconoclastic, illuminating, and consistently thoughtful readings."—Henry Abelove, coeditor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

"This book is a knock-your-socks-off hummer. Daring, open, and engaging, Pleasures Taken is both brilliant and warmly seductive. The book keeps us off-balance and eager for more tilts, as the author depends partly on the material and partly on her own prose to open up for us a set of stunning ideas about these photographs, about visions of women and girls, about Victorian culture, and about the ideology of our own customary viewing habits."—James R. Kincaid, author of Annoying the Victorians

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1860641164
• ISBN 13: 9781860641169
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204