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"To those accustomed to the detached tone of the academic monograph, Carol Mavor's stance in Becoming will seem daring. From the effusive acknowledgements onwards, the author thrusts herself to the front, so that her particular appreciation of what she studies becomes both subject and critical method."--Lindsay Duguid, TLS, October 15, 1999 "The author's perspectives on Victorian and contemporary issues of intimacy, up new perspectives for the reader, who thus feels inspired to stop and dream for a while, hoping to do so as acutely and as inventively as Mavor does." -Joseph Litvak, author of Strange Gourmets: Theory, Sophistication, and the Novel
Product Description
Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1822-1865) produced over eight hundred photographs during her all-too-brief life. Most of these were portraits of her adolescent daughters. By whisking away the furniture and bric-a-brac common in scenes of upper-class homes of the Victorian period, Lady Hawarden transformed the sitting room of her London residence into a photographic studio - a private space for taking surprising photos of her daughters in fancy dress. In Carol Mavor's hands, these pictures become windows into Victorian culture, eroticism, mother-daughter relationships, and intimacy. With drama, wit, and verve, Lady Hawarden's girls, becoming women, entwine each other, their mirrored reflections and select feminine objects (an Indian travelling cabinet, a Gothic-style desk, a shell-covered box) as homoerotic partners. The resulting mise-en-scene is secretive, private, delicious, and arguably queer-a girltopia ripe with maternality and adolescent flirtation, as touching as it is erotic. Luxuriating in the photographs' interpretive possibilities, Mavor makes illuminating connections between Hawarden and other artists and writers, including Vermeer, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and twentieth-century photographers Sally Mann and Francesca Woodman. Weaving psychoanalytic theory and other photographic analyses into her work, Mavor contemplates the experience of the photograph and considers the relationship of Hawarden's works to the concept of the female fetish, to voyeurism, mirrors and lenses, and twins and doubling. Under the spell of Roland Barthes, Mavor's voice unveils the peculiarities of the erotic in Lady Hawarden's images through a writerly approach that remembers and rewrites adolescence as sustained desire. In turn autobiographical, theoretical, historical, and analytical, Mavor's study caresses these mysteriously ripped and scissored images into fables of sapphic love and the real magic of photography.
"To those accustomed to the detached tone of the academic monograph, Carol Mavor's stance in Becoming will seem daring. From the effusive acknowledgements onwards, the author thrusts herself to the front, so that her particular appreciation of what she studies becomes both subject and critical method."--Lindsay Duguid, TLS, October 15, 1999 "The author's perspectives on Victorian and contemporary issues of intimacy, up new perspectives for the reader, who thus feels inspired to stop and dream for a while, hoping to do so as acutely and as inventively as Mavor does." -Joseph Litvak, author of Strange Gourmets: Theory, Sophistication, and the Novel
Product Description
Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1822-1865) produced over eight hundred photographs during her all-too-brief life. Most of these were portraits of her adolescent daughters. By whisking away the furniture and bric-a-brac common in scenes of upper-class homes of the Victorian period, Lady Hawarden transformed the sitting room of her London residence into a photographic studio - a private space for taking surprising photos of her daughters in fancy dress. In Carol Mavor's hands, these pictures become windows into Victorian culture, eroticism, mother-daughter relationships, and intimacy. With drama, wit, and verve, Lady Hawarden's girls, becoming women, entwine each other, their mirrored reflections and select feminine objects (an Indian travelling cabinet, a Gothic-style desk, a shell-covered box) as homoerotic partners. The resulting mise-en-scene is secretive, private, delicious, and arguably queer-a girltopia ripe with maternality and adolescent flirtation, as touching as it is erotic. Luxuriating in the photographs' interpretive possibilities, Mavor makes illuminating connections between Hawarden and other artists and writers, including Vermeer, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and twentieth-century photographers Sally Mann and Francesca Woodman. Weaving psychoanalytic theory and other photographic analyses into her work, Mavor contemplates the experience of the photograph and considers the relationship of Hawarden's works to the concept of the female fetish, to voyeurism, mirrors and lenses, and twins and doubling. Under the spell of Roland Barthes, Mavor's voice unveils the peculiarities of the erotic in Lady Hawarden's images through a writerly approach that remembers and rewrites adolescence as sustained desire. In turn autobiographical, theoretical, historical, and analytical, Mavor's study caresses these mysteriously ripped and scissored images into fables of sapphic love and the real magic of photography.
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First Sentence
The professor of art and her prize student were looking at lovely and sensual slides of Hawarden's photographs of her daughters. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The professor of art and her prize student were looking at lovely and sensual slides of Hawarden's photographs of her daughters. Read the first page
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Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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65% buy the item featured on this page: Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden£16.14 |
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35% buy Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott£18.99 |
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