- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Reaktion Books; illustrated edition edition (27 Feb 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1861891199
- ISBN-13: 978-1861891198
- Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 16.3 x 1.9 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 602,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Times Literary Supplement, 03/05/02
'a detailed and sensitive survey ... [Reay] offers us a persuasive account of why we should be interested in this disturbing story.'
Product Description
Arthur Munby (1828-1910) was a Victorian gentleman from a respected family of Yorkshire lawyers. He left behind diaries that record his life-long obsession with working-class Victorian women, whom he interviewed, photographed and wrote about. This osbession led to his relationship with, and eventual secret marriage to, his maidservant Hannah Cullwick. Working women fascinated Munby because they disrupted his Victorian ideal of femininity: their bodies were alterd by physical exertion and dirt, and they were also often deformed by disease. Drawing not only on the diaries but also on vast, untapped archive of documents, photographs, poems and sketches, "Watching Hannah" is an account of a compulsive observer of working women and a fetishist of hard-working female hands. The text analyzes Munby's obsessions in relation to changing definitions of gender, sexual identity and class to reveal wider male preoccupations with femininity, the body, deformity, masculinity and - most of all - sexuality, at a pivotol point in European history.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
not that scary,
By
This review is from: Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (Picturing History) (Hardcover)
This book is not as off putting or frightening as the title sounds. It is essentially an ethnographic study of lower class Victorian women through the eyes of a fetishistic voyeur. Reay draws on much historical documentation to produce a well rounded analysis of a little looked at world. It is not for everyone, but if you are interested in the Victorian underworld you will find this book enlightening.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely and repulsive.,
By Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (Picturing History) (Hardcover)
Barry Reay, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror, and Bodily De-Formation in Victorian England (Reaktion, 2002)
This is an entry in Reaktion's Picturing History series. If the other books in the series are as well-written as this one, I will be buying a large number of imports from Reaktion Books this year. (They can be had in America, usually for outrageous prices, unless you find them used.) Arthur Munby, pre-Raphaelite, gentleman, member of the idle rich, and friend and compatriot to any number of influential figures in many different schools of thought, was also a sexual fetishist par excellence. His particular fetish, to be overly simplistic about it, was dirt; specifically, that dirt which accrued on the bodies of the "working women" of the time (coal diggers, milkmaids, farm girls, etc.). Combined with the usual sexual fetishes to be found in the art, literature, and philosophy of the late eighteen hundreds in England, and you have quite the heady stew. Barry Reay offers another piece of Munby scholarship, but this one aimed at examining Munby's life through his various fetishes. The picture that emerges is uniformly darker than those of books previously written about Munby (both contemporary and modern), and is utterly fascinating. Through Munby's life, Reay takes the reader on a tour through Victorian sexual mores that sheds very different lights on some of what we thought was common knowledge about the people and their time. While the book does not spend quite as much time on the subject of Munby and his wife/slave Hannah Cullwick as one might expect given the title, the tangents into which Reay veers to illuminate other parts of Munby's psyche are just as fascinating (and in some cases even more repulsive, for example the chapter on Munby's fascination with noseless women). It kept me rapt the whole time I was reading it. One of the best pieces of nonfiction to come across my desk, on the readability scale, in some time, and one of the most fascinating in subject matter. Definitely a keeper. **** 0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
http://www.Watching Hannah: Sex, Horror and Bodily De-Formation in Victamazon.com/gp/product/1861891199/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_title,
By M.M.G. "Art and history lover" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (Picturing History) (Hardcover)
Excellent book on the condition of women in victorian times.The title is a bit off putting but the book is actually very interesting.The pictures are also a real insight to the times.
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