78 Julia Margaret Cameron. Hurdy-Gurdy Man, Ca. 1863

Julia Margaret Cameron. Hurdy-Gurdy Man , ca. 1863.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 The Silent Partner: Agency and Absence in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Collaborations

JORDAN BEAR

Sketching the rudiments of what would become a surprisingly durable origin story of her photographic production, Julia Margaret Cameron wrote in 1874 of her breakthrough more than a decade earlier, casting herself as a naive, if not accidental, initiate into the medium: I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass. . . . I got my first picture, and this was the one I effaced when holding it triumphantly to dry. 1 The obliteration of the photographic image by the novice technique of this presumably self-taught woman was hardly the most consequen - tial effacement to occur in this particular mythology. Although Cameron cultivated this autodidactic persona throughout her life, her “first success” in 1864, the treasured portrait of local girl Annie Philpot, was not the irruptive revolution Cameron’s account would seem to suggest. What this anecdote wipes from view is the course of training Cameron had undertaken in the preceding year from the phenomenally successful commercial photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, as well as the startling photographs that emerged from this period of instruction and collaboration. The ambivalent tension between the effacement and assertion of her photographic agency is complicated further by the peculiar constellation of identities involved in the collaboration between an amateur woman and a professional man. Cameron’s recollection of her initial triumph deletes this alliance from the historical record, yet it was paradoxically in a series of procedures of effacing herself that Cameron was to negotiate the question of her gender in the production of photographic agency, by seeming to absent herself from the image or to defer to the expertise of her male tutor, only to return in terms that seemed to destabilize the very possibility of such an absence, of a photograph without an author. Gender was, in this unique collaboration, the category through

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 which photographic neutrality was aggressively interrogated and in which the mythologies of femininity and transparency might be consolidated and engaged. Cameron and Rejlander probably first met when the latter traveled to the Isle of Wight to photograph Cameron’s closest neighbor and England’s most beloved poet, Alfred Tennyson, in 1863. 2 The intellectual com - munity on the island was close-knit, and the arrival of one of London’s most discussed photographers might easily have induced Cameron to plan one of her seemingly innumerable salons at her country estate, Dimbola. Whatever the source of their initial encounter, the two were presently to collaborate on a number of photographs that indicate, from the start, the pair’s unconventional, charged interaction. Although Rejlander and Cameron’s relationship has traditionally been character - ized as that of mentor and protégée, more recent scholarship has noted the likelihood that the relationship was in fact one of employer and employee, with the socially superior Cameron engaging the services of the commercial photographer Rejlander. 3 The noted photographer P.H. Emerson published a hagiography of Cameron’s life and work in 1890 in consultation with one of Cameron’s surviving sons. Emerson asserts, Long before that memorable day in 1864, on which little Miss Philpot was conjured as with a magician’s wand upon a glass plate covered with a chemical film. . . . Mrs. Cameron had spent hundreds of pounds in paying the degraders of the art to fix the faces of her friends. Her generous nature did not consider money, photographers were ordered with lavishness to work for her, often under her immediate supervision. The best of this vicari - ous photography was Rejlander’s portrait of Tennyson. 4 If, as this passage suggests, Rejlander was one of those “degraders” whose services Cameron procured, then a reconsideration of the conse - quences of this “vicarious photography” and the account of authorship and agency it implies is imperative. Viewing their relationship in this manner makes a group of collaborative pictures from 1863 much more intriguing. Two photographs of similar composition depict the arrival of tradesmen at the back door to Dimbola: The Butcher’s Visit and Receiving the Post . The interaction between the utopia of the Cameron estate and the outside world is mediated through these exchanges—even par - adise needs its meat and its mail. Yet, the pro - nounced class dimensions of these photographs

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 are difficult to overlook, the butcher and postman dressed in their work clothes and negotiating with the staff at the servant’s entrance. Another photograph executed in a similar vein, The Hurdy-Gurdy Man , depicts the itinerant entertainer playing his music box for the benefit of the four women encircling him. However, this installment in the series differs crucially from the previous two, because the man in question is Rejlander himself, cranking away to the delight of the maidens. The association between the tradesmen, bringing to Dimbola the necessities of the outside world, and Rejlander, who comes to pro - vide pleasure through the performance of a mechanical device, indi - cates that the stakes of this “vicarious photography” were far more problematic than the romanticized teacher and student dynamic often attributed to these two figures. That Rejlander would appear in front of the camera manipulating one mechanical tool while Cameron stood behind it, employing another, proposes a complex account of the agency of the photographer that would be articulated in the most con - tested product of this uneasy association. This sojourn was likely when Rejlander produced a photograph of Kate Dore, a local peasant girl, depicting her in a bust-length portrait in profile. 5 This image reemerges in a photograph that is perhaps the most emblematic of the complexities of the Rejlander-Cameron collabo - rations: the image provisionally entitled Kate Dore with Frame of Plant Opposite: Julia Margaret Forms is a most curious kind of dual effort. The object is in fact a pho - Cameron. Receiving the Post , togram, a cameraless picture, which Cameron produced by encasing ca. 1863. Rejlander’s earlier portrait within a frame of ferns placed directly onto Below: Julia Margaret the photographic paper and exposed to light. This use of the photogram Cameron, possibly with O.G. Rejlander. The Butcher’s Visit , technique does not recur in Cameron’s corpus, and its deployment here ca. 1863. suggests that it held a particularly attractive set of associations for Cameron. Initially, the photogram seems to be a deferential production because it reproduces Rejlander’s photograph without overt revision of the portrait itself. Cameron’s contribution seems relegated to one of embellishment because she has added only a decorative frame to the original image. Moreover, the embellishment is one that has appeared through a technique that seems to obviate the presence of an author, in which the natural flora appears as if by organic growth, hav - ing physically touched the photosensitive paper. Yet, this deferral or absence is strategically feigned, shot through with an acute awareness of the peculiarities of being a woman and a photog - rapher in the first decades of the medium, and of the specific history of that ambivalent identity.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Photography Sub Rosa If Cameron’s aim was deference in the execution of a merely repro - ductive and decorative reiteration of Rejlander’s original work, it was enacted in a way that is strikingly marked by the conjunction of the questions of gender and objectivity that attended early photography. The presence of the ferns in Cameron’s photogram was, by the early 1860s, readily associated with a particularly female kind of contribu - tion to the flowering of the medium. The celebrated cyanotypes of Anna Atkins created over an eleven-year period in the 1840s and 1850s had culminated in two albums dedicated not to the algae with which she has since been associated but to Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853). Atkins’s work was, as Carol Armstrong argues, a project in which the limitations of Atkins’s gender in producing a work of positivist taxonomy that might be widely accepted by ortho - dox science empowered her to reexamine the more fundamental ques - tions of the photograph’s suitability to this enterprise. Atkins “wandered into a photographic and scientific cul-de-sac, and liking it Below: O.G. Rejlander. there, stayed to entertain herself by problematizing the system of Kate Dore , ca. 1862. Library of positivist classification and the apparatus of the illustration,” an Congress. undertaking “possible only at the outer limits of the patriarchal con - Opposite, top: Anna Atkins. Cyanotypes of British and 6 duct of normal science.” The title page of this volume, itself a cyan - Foreign Ferns , ca. 1853. otype, shows Atkins’s hand lettering enframed by the very ferns that Title page. are to be the subject of her study. The script of the title rhymes visu - Opposite, bottom: ally with the structure of the ferns, eliding Atkins’s subjective pres - O.G. Rejlander and Julia ence with the ostensibly objective, natural appearance of the flora. Margaret Cameron. Kate Dore with Frame of Ferns , ca. 1862. That these two registers would be visually conflated rather than con - Victoria and Albert Museum. trasted suggests that the naturalization of the female photographer, of an agency that vanishes into the organicism of the fern, is wedded to the equally problematic natural - ization of photographic neutrality itself. The presence of the woman photographer was paradoxically indicated by precisely that visual trope that seemed to obviate the necessity of her existence: the autogenetic flowering of nature. The complexity of asserting artistic agency for women was a torturous route on which photography constituted only one stop, but it was the medium that brought the problem into particular relief because the photo - graph’s reproductive, and possibly author - less, copying of nature itself replicates a variety of stereotypes of women’s creativity

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 that had solidified in the later eighteenth century. Yet the one genre that did seem, even from the eighteenth century, to offer a certain degree of autonomy to the woman artist was the marginal practice of flower painting. Because this was already seen as a thoroughly femi - nized and subsidiary pursuit, it was not policed with the same vigor as those genres in which the demarcation between masculine and feminine, professional and amateur, was essential. Ann Bermingham illuminates what she calls “the language of flowers,” a process through which subtle codes could be displayed by women in the sub-rosa idiom of flora, articulating messages about their romantic status and intentions. This language “offered women an opportunity to bide their time, to express a possible romantic interest without having to own it, to observe a lover without having to commit to him, and to tantalize him with the possibility of intimacy and affection without having to actually give them.” 7 Under the guise of the nat - ural, comparatively bold statements were articulated, attesting to an agency that would have been utterly incon - ceivable in the context of polite society. Cameron turned to this well-established camouflage in her creation of the photogram portrait of Kate Dore. The ferns of that photogram are thus implicated in Cameron’s labyrinthine presence. The photographer used a topos of naturalness to absent herself from the work, yet that very topos is reso - nant of one of the few genuinely emancipatory possibili - ties for the woman artist; it was a space outside the slavish copying mandated by the traditional dynamic of drawing master and lady amateur, perhaps the only space in which the trope of woman-as-copyist might be exploded. And yet, Cameron’s photogram was in a real sense precisely that: a copy of Rejlander’s work, embell - ished and decorated by the hands of a woman. This paradoxical assertion of Cameron’s hand, at once absent and present, original and derivative, is a crucial locus not only of the troubled, gendered nature of photographic collab - oration but of the fluid demands of authorial agency in the medium at large. In the nineteenth century the most visible form of collaboration between men and women was that of marriage.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 An endless parade of commentators on the nature of this relationship indicates the conventional apportionment of agency. One representa - tive text, The Women of England , by Mrs. Ellis, describes the arrange - ment: “Women, considered in their distinct and abstract nature, as isolated beings, must lose more than half their worth. They are, in fact, from their own constitution, and from the station they occupy in the world, strictly speaking, relative creatures.” 8 Another writer, attentive to this problematic tradition, summarizes the predominant account: We underestimate the character of woman, and keep her in a state of forced submission to man: who, in all his transactions with her, treats her as an inferior. She has no legal rights. She is not supposed to exist as a citizen. Her personality is merged in that of man. She is always a minor, never reaching majority. 9 This rhetoric, of a minority or subsumed status of the woman to her husband, was a dominant strain of domestic ideology in Victorian Britain. Yet, it needs to be read against the availability of a new and more complex model of male-female collaboration, one that was invested with the most momentous political and representational stakes for the nation and would furnish a template for a much more fluid set of gender roles and the agency concomitantly accorded to them.

A Family on the Throne In February of 1840, as news of Daguerre’s and Talbot’s “inventions” spread, the newly crowned Queen Victoria wed her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The anomaly of a married female monarch problematized the gender roles of typical matrimony as the ostensibly incompatible hierarchies of the royal and the domestic met on an increasingly visible, and visual, stage. A pair of images produced by the photogra - pher John Mayall highlights the representational challenge posed by this novel arrangement. Reproduced as cartes de visite , Mayall’s pho - tographs were decidedly not for the private consumption of the royal household but were part of a vast and sophisticated campaign of image management and were widely dissemi - nated through this cheap and wildly popular format. In both photographs, Albert is seated with a book in his lap, Victoria leaning over him in consultation. As Margaret Homans describes, the two pictures, for all their similarity, differ

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 in the attitude assumed by the prince consort. 10 In the first of these, he boldly looks up at Victoria while she sheepishly stares at the floor. In the second photograph, Albert is less direct in his manner, and Victoria seems to guide the direction of the interaction. This pair of representations does not permit a conclusive assessment of the rela - tive powers of the two but rather indicates an equilibrium in flux, as though the regnant and the deferential could both be available to the couple’s presentation of themselves. The ambiguity of agency offered by the second photograph is striking. When reproduced in subsequent texts, it was given a caption, “The Prince verifies a reference.” 11 This textual addition thus deliberately obscures the vector of the task: On the one hand, his verifying a reference makes him the authority to whom Victoria defers, and that is what her stance conveys here and in the other [photographs] from this session; on the other hand, if he is verifying a reference, his eyes defer - ential toward her act of reading, we are reminded for whom he works: Victoria Regina. Does the caption disguise her servility as her mastery, or does the pose disguise her real mastery as feigned servility? 12 That this ambiguity is heightened by the act of scholarship, of gaining and transmitting knowledge, is especially significant. Whatever project the royals are engaged in, it requires consulting an authority. Opposite: John Jabez But who directs and who defers is hard to know. This dual thrust Edwin Mayall. Victoria and engendered the couple’s creation of themselves as a couple, as a way Prince Albert , 1860. of negotiating the unprecedented representational minefield to which Below: John Jabez Edwin their collaboration gave rise. Mayall. Victoria and Prince Albert , 1860. The historiography of this enterprise has itself struggled with the apportionment of appropriate agency to the royal couple. For instance, Homans sug - gests “Victoria’s own contemporaries saw her both as producer of ‘the royal image’” and as subjected to its construction. 13 However, the art historian Winslow Ames lauds Prince Albert: “his great creations were his wife as an admirable monarch; the modern sort of art museum; and the notion that art and sci - ence could both be applied to products of industry.” 14 Nancy Armstrong, by contrast, finds that while Albert was keenly aware of the “special problem this semiotic of visibil - ity posed for the Queen,” his “well-meaning attempts to carry out that form of service were consistently ignored or rejected.” 15 The

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 ambivalence of these royal photographs is not merely the product of a lack of sufficient historical analysis but is the effect of a collaboration precisely devised to make the authorship of the royals-as-representa - tion malleable and mobile. What was paradoxical—and, later, proto - typical—about Victoria’s presence in her authorship of her own image was that it seemed to assert her agency not through the grand and domineering gesture of the despots of old but by way of a calculated deferral. Dorothy Thompson argues that a domestic monarchy was insulated from the accusations of aloofness and excess regularly proffered by political modernizers, quoting Walter Bagehot’s pithy observation that “a family on the throne is an interesting idea” because it “brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.” 16 As Victoria and Albert began to fashion themselves as the nation’s bourgeois couple- in-chief, the task required making a domestic wife and mother out of the queen, an act that would be possible only by ceding some of her putative monarchic power. Yet, by aligning herself with the ascendant bourgeoisie, whose commercial and industrial proficiency were underwriting the successful Britain over which she presided, Victoria was able to increase her power by sacrificing her overt agency. That is, by presenting herself in visual representations as akin to a middle- class, domestic woman, she was able to expand her authority among her subjects by sacrificing the trappings of power to the prerogatives of her married partnership. Her very ability to portray herself as ordi - nary and domestic derives from tremendous unordinary qualities; in short, from the power to make a bourgeois matriarch out of a queen. As Homans proposes, “she was unique, a woman whose life was related to ordinary female domesticity only by analogy and masterful tricks of representation, with powers that included her having—if any individual could be said to have it—individual agency.” 17 Agency secured by absence, by a feigned deferral to the demands of a mas - culinist hierarchy of the home, permitted Victoria to solidify her power and secure the loyalty of the new ruling class by seeming to abrogate that very agency. This supposed self-abnegation—and its def - erence to bourgeois gender roles—was a strategy that developed in concert with the rise of photographic representation and, crucially, served as a kind of conceptual template for women to assert their agency while still comporting with the deference required in a collab - orative enterprise with a man. The idea that the appearance of self- denial might be a potentially emancipatory tactic was nurtured by the royal example and would become entangled in the ideology of the photograph itself, a medium whose very definition was invested in the fluctuating presence and absence of this authorial agency.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Tracing and Cutting With a few dramatic exceptions, such as the prolific painter Angelika Kauffman, the woman artist in this period was an amateur of social standing, often acting under the watchful eye of a hired drawing master. Her work often consisted almost exclusively of tracing and copying. As Ann Bermingham’s study argues, “the amateur’s own style is nec - essarily and properly effaced through the reproduction of work done elsewhere. The woman amateur is not fully present in her work; in fact the signs of such presence—a prominent brushstroke or a stray line—could be construed as faulty technique.” 18 This model of male- female collaboration in the visual arts announced the impossible bind in which the woman was placed: either she was a mere reproducer, aping the work of her male tutor and suppressing her agency in the process; or, if she managed to deviate from this mechanical process and assert her authorship, those indices of agency were inevitably marked as failures to conform to the pattern to which she was inescapably tethered. The coding of the assertion of agency by women photographers as a technical failing was resurrected as recently as Helmut Gernsheim’s study of Cameron’s work. 19 What is striking is that this inaptitude is rendered within the context of another of Cameron’s collaborations, her longtime intellectual exchange with John Herschel. Gernsheim writes, Mrs. Cameron was so obsessed by the spiritual quality of her pictures that she paid too little attention to whether the image was sharp or not, whether the sitter had moved, or whether the plate was covered in blemishes. Lacking training, she had a com - plete disregard for technical perfection. Exactly one year after taking up photography she asked Sir John Herschel in a letter, “What is focus—and who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” 20 Cameron’s query was a rhetorical musing, not a reverent solicitation for Herschel to furnish her with an actual definition of focus . Yet, this account underscores the apparent impossibility of a woman photog - rapher expressing her generative agency without being denigrated for insufficient attention to technical—that is, deferentially reproduc - tive—features of the art. The iconography of this deferential and mechanical copying was embedded in the origin story of visual representation itself. 21 The tale of the Corinthian Maid, expressed most definitively by Pliny the Elder, recounts the efforts of a young woman to fix the likeness of her lover before he departs:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 She was in love with a youth, and when he was leaving the coun - try she traced the outline of the shadow which his face cast on the wall by lamplight. Her father filled in the outline with clay and made a model; this he dried and baked with the rest of his pottery. 22 This association was reinscribed into the more specific history of pho - tography itself when, in 1857, Rejlander produced a work entitled The First Negative , which depicts the traditional scene of the maid tracing her lover’s silhouette. This particular neoclassical trope was forlorn by the 1850s, and Rejlander’s recourse to it indicates that the new medium had revitalized the gendered implications of the originary account of visual reproduction. 23 If this photograph represents one extreme of feminine production—the simple tracing of a shadow—the image I consider to be its pendant, produced by Rejlander in the same year, engages the alternative but equally immoderate account of the agency of women in producing photographs. The pair of images con - veys a sense of the polarized and ultimately marginal possibilities that the new medium furnished for women: as the derided copyist or the vilified usurper of masculine prerogatives. The dichotomy was embodied in the two unappealing personages of the perfunctory, pas - sive Corinthian Maid and the menacing, transgressive, biblical Judith. In producing his remarkable Judith and Holofernes (1857), Rejlander turned to another saga from the deep recesses of Western culture. The heroine of this narrative had come to epitomize, along with Salome, the feminine threat to civilization, the fundamental antagonism between a woman’s autonomous action and the ordering forces of masculinist culture. In Judith and Holofernes the nature of this threat is articulated in specif - ically representational, indeed photographic, terms. While The First Negative seems merely to graft the new medium’s reproductive fea - tures onto a readily available if moribund iconography, Judith and Holofernes elides the danger of its female protagonist’s corporeal transgression with an artistic one. After Judith seduces the invading Babylonian general with the lure of her sexuality and an appropriate vol - ume of drink, she slices the brute’s head from his body and parades it victoriously around the city she has saved. Rejlander’s photograph is a composite, Holofernes’s head and the scene of the triumphant Judith joined through the process of manipulation for which the photographer was to become infamous. Judith, with her sword,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 becomes the proxy for Rejlander’s own photographic editing, chop - ping away at the putative integrity of Holofernes’s body much as Rejlander would have to have done to create the picture itself. This woman is hardly the passive copyist of The First Negative ; she is a woman whose agency is manifested in a way that makes explicit the photographic nature of her action. Judith is no meager tracer but a composer whose cuts come at the point of a sword. That the only woman to whom Rejlander would attribute this kind of autonomy was one who, by virtue of her very assertiveness, seemed to many of the period’s more reactionary writers the incarnation of feminine agency run amok is not mere happenstance. The threat of women’s represen - tation, of a representation that deviated from the inert mechanics of the tracing of a male lover’s head to its brutal severing, indicates the distinctly gendered stakes of photographic representation. The woman’s agency in making—or, executing—a photograph that is something beyond the simple tracing of reality is thematized as a necessarily hostile assault on masculine integrity, a precedent that would have marked repercussions for the ambivalence with which Cameron sought to announce her own presence in the photographs she began to produce several years later. The trophy head of Holofernes, grasped brutally by its left ear, indi - cates the conjunction raised by Judith’s transgressive status as a vio - lator of the sanctity of both photographic and corporeal integrity. The image of the decapitated head, a familiar one since the Renaissance, Opposite: O.G. Rejlander. The First Negative , 1857. is a motif that indicates the divided nature of representational practice; in particular, a practice that takes the problem of its own Below: O.G. Rejlander. Judith and Holofernes , 1857. making directly into account. As Michael Fried writes of Caravaggio’s remarkable David with the Head of Goliath (1605–1606), The head of Goliath bears Caravaggio’s features. . . . Caravaggio’s self-portraits often find ways to suggest the immer - sive and specular “moments” in the process by which they were brought into the world . . . thematizing the divided nature of his practice even as it inevitably stresses the “specular” moment as such, a “moment” I have characterized as one of separation, dis - tancing, and discontinuity. 24 For Fried, this kind of self-decapitation manifests a fundamental division that characterizes Caravaggio’s production,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 mediating the shift from an immersive to a specular relationship with his own work, from viewing the picture as its maker to observing it as a viewer. This is the paradox of Caravaggio’s painting: that a particular kind of exteriority to the representation produced can be achieved only by disembodiment (really, disembowelment), and that only through such physical acts of self-violence can the artist pry himself away from an interested immersion in the picture and move toward something like a spectatorial distance from it. In the nineteenth century, such a possibility was licensed by phys - iological studies of decapitated heads, including Edward Rigby’s report in the London Medical Gazette in 1836, in which he collects “anecdotes of blinking and moving eyes, of wrinkled noses, of lips moving up to two minutes after the cut had been made.” 25 That these movements could be readily observed suggested to contemporary observers that consciousness might survive what Ludmilla Jordanova has called “drastic bodily mutilation.” 26 This divided self, consisting of an ambivalence toward authorial presence so intense that it might require corporeal destruction to achieve a desired exteriority, is a burden that a woman—encumbered by the limited exemplars of the Corinthian Maid and Judith—had to negotiate in ways that the special objectivity claims of the photograph made even more formi - dable. Decapitation was perhaps the most extreme form of self-anni - hilation, but it focuses attention on the degree to which the oscillating presence of the photographer’s agency was an enormously conse - quential enterprise.

The View from Where? Self-abnegation was increasingly seen in Victorian culture as a pre - requisite to the kind of objectivity that a desire for knowledge about the world seemed to mandate. The safest route to knowledge, in which nature might speak for itself, was to deny all of the interested distor - tions that being a human being with a body seemed to entail. This sensibility was especially pronounced in scientific enterprises, because, as Peter Galison insists, “in the nineteenth century . . . the desired character of the natural philosopher inverted to one of self- abnegation . . . more saint-like in self-denial than powerful in genial interpretation.” 27 As Lorraine Daston and others discuss, the case of the midcentury study of the physiology and perception of color pro - vides an especially rich instance of how the problem of visual objec - tivity was mutating in significant ways. The signal shift came around 1850 when the unreliability of the perceiver became newly pro - nounced: “whereas [chemist Michel Eugene] Chevreul and his prede - cessors had assumed that an investigation of visual phenomena would yield . . . generalizations, Helmholtz and his colleagues worried about

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 the incorrigible inter-individual variability that was part and parcel of the subjective.” 28 This development, whose origins have themselves been the subject of important scholarly attention since the 1994 cen - tennial of Helmholtz’s death, nurtured the flowering of a regime of scientific training that “required the scientist to progress through a series of ever more demanding exercises in self-observation, until complete visual passivity was attained.” 29 For women, the liberating potential of this self-denial was magni - fied by the fact that it was their supposedly marked vulnerability to all of those interfering characteristics of temperament, desire, and emotion that made them so unsuited to the gathering of knowledge. If, in the self-abnegation exemplified by death, by the transcendence of the limitations of human corporeality, one might find a privileged access to the world, this was an especially promising state for a woman, because it seemed to offer something life could not. Harriet Martineau, the polymathic feminist, found in these kinds of scientific pursuits, unencumbered by her female body and its limitations, a free - dom unavailable elsewhere. Her recollection in her Autobiography crucially fashions this liberation in familiar terms: “I had got out of the prison of my self, wherein I had formerly sat trying to interpret life and the world—much as a captive might undertake to paint the aspect of Nature from the gleams and shadows and faint color reflected on his dungeon walls.” 30 The specter of the Corinthian Maid looms large here, as though the prison of the female self is a kind of spatial adjunct to the imprisonment of the woman in representation, bound as she was to mere “gleams and shadows,” deprived of a more panoramic vista by virtue of her female embodiment. George Levine’s provoca - tive recent study posits the centrality of this ethos in nineteenth-cen - tury literature and its embodiment in a particularly extreme metaphorical structure. In Dying to Know , Levine seeks to describe the rise of “a passion for knowing so intense that one would risk one’s life to achieve it . . . a willingness to repress the aspiring, desiring, emo - tion-ridden self and everything merely personal, contingent, histori - cal, material that might get in the way of acquiring knowledge.” 31 For Levine, only in death can such a complete purification of episte - mological processes be achieved, because the cessation of life places one in A kind of liminal position, at the edge of nonbeing, and it implies a persistent tragedy: only in death can one understand what it has meant to be alive. The continuing aspiration to get it straight, to understand what it means, to transcend the limits imposed by the limiting self, depends upon the elimination of the self. 32

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Such a transcendence, however, seems to bring us dangerously close to what Donna Haraway calls the “god trick,” a disembodied vision that, despite its apparent liberty for figures like Martineau, is never - theless wedded to a view from nowhere, accountable to nobody but the patriarchal panopticism that licenses it. 33 Haraway advocates something quite different and in doing so illuminates the peculiarities of many Victorian women’s relationship to objectivity. Not universal - ity but the always ambivalent and contradictory specificity of episte - mology, of “situated knowledges,” might furnish something like a feminist objectivity. The figure in which such an undertaking is embodied is, for Haraway, the split self, an actor whose features seem, in crucial ways, to codify the fluid absence and presence that Cameron uneasily sought to assert for herself. “The split and contra - dictory self,” Haraway emphasizes, “is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemolo - gies of scientific knowledge.” 34 Cameron was sensitive to this splitting in a way that few others in the middle of the nineteenth century were, enamored as many of them were of the freedom apparently offered by a complete transcendence of the self as the most secure route to objec - tivity. In Cameron’s photographs, this is the more fundamental “split” that plays out: on the one hand, an objectivity that could come to women only by repressing emotionality and corporeality and, on the other, the promise of a new, photographic modality of female agency expressible only by negating the possibility of objectivity itself. How was one to be neither the Corinthian Maid nor the eccentric hysteric, both the sober investigator and the agent of creativity? How was one to be absent and present at the same time and in the right proportions, especially when one was burdened with all of the impossible contra - dictions of female agency? An important and recurrent theme of some of the most insightful analyses of Cameron’s representations is the relationship between her overt demonstration of the technical procedures through which her photographs were produced and the gendered agency that this asser - tion would seem to entail. As Carol Armstrong’s study of Cameron’s oeuvre concludes, [In] her insistence on visible process rather than masterfully hidden technique, and her declaration of home-staging, all serving the interests, ultimately, of demonstrating the personal quality of the truth of her fictions, Cameron’s photographs not only pronounce how they are made, but also identify the locus and condition of their making as that of the female domain of the home. 35

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 This is an apt description of much of Cameron’s corpus, but this view seems to represent only one extreme of a more dynamic declaration of agency that the strangely overlapping assumptions of photographic objectivity and feminine subjectivity required. To be only overtly pre - sent would have meant reinforcing the supposed feminine insuffi - ciency of self-possession. What was required was a presence that naturalized its appearance but did so through a process that indicated the savoir faire of an agent familiar with the most penetrating ques - tions about photography itself. The remarkable conceptual move that Cameron demonstrates in her early collaborative photograph with Rejlander of Kate Dore reappears at a later moment in Cameron’s pro - duction, in a suite of images that constitute her most ambitious epis - temological interrogation of the medium and of her relationship to it.

From Death: Sympathy and the Postmortem Photograph In 1872, young Adeline Grace Clogstoun, one of several children adopted into the utopian kingdom of the Cameron household, broke her back while playing with her sister and died soon thereafter. Her adoptive mother took a group of photographs of Adeline lying in repose, all from subtly different points of view and with distinct strategies of positioning objects in the room, including, very probably, the decedent herself. Common to each of the images is the presence of flowers strewn about the corpse and the bed on which she rests. Nearly a decade after the photogram of Kate Dore, Cameron has returned to the motif of a florally embellished portrait of a young girl, although this time the flowers are found “in” the original scene itself, adorning the lifeless body of her beloved child. Yet, in these photos, the flowers are not the products of natural growth exemplified in the Dore portrait but are clearly positioned by a human hand, a memorial gesture that entails a much more attentive presence. In the pho - tographs of Adeline is a subject who has achieved at least the precon - dition for epistemological objectivity, a girl freed from the corporeal cell and its connection to the vagaries of a vision insufficiently insu - lated from emotion and interest. But her mother is unwilling to repli - cate this status, unwilling to swap the sanctity of the intact body for knowledge, a conviction revealed in her refusal, equally strewn with floral metaphors, to permit an autopsy: “It has been like a mysterious dream losing that blossom of my old heart thus and in such a way! . . . I did not after all have my darling opened.” 36 This adamant refusal to make the bargain of female objectivity brought tantalizingly close by the death of her daughter, to reject the primacy of a patriarchal epis - teme that seemed to many other women the only route to emancipa - tion as a knowing subject, indicates how deeply fraught these photographs were for Cameron. Opening her darling was simply too

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 far to go. And yet, something is oddly attractive about the liminality of the postmortem space, which seemed to open up a tentative reso - lution to Cameron’s objectivity problem in a way that the coroner’s scalpel could not. In the last of the images is Cameron’s assertion of her presence in the creation of the photograph: a camera looming above the deathbed. However, this is not the camera that is taking the photograph; it is an additional camera, a prop strategically placed in the scene. This was a way—perhaps the only way—for Cameron to rebut simultaneously the presumption of the inescapable objectivity of the photograph and the irredeemable subjectivity of the woman. In the most emotionally charged scene of her oeuvre, Cameron is as composed as the most imperturbable investigator but can become so only by making her pro - duction itself the subject of the photograph, by showing objectivity to be but one strategy rather than the natural state of affairs. In Adeline was the figure of a substitute, whose death could be like taking away the blossom of one’s own heart, leaving behind a changed, dimin - ished, partial self. Amanda Anderson’s 2001 account describes the cultivation of detachment as a narrative, epistemic, and political strat - egy that was “a prevalent Victorian preoccupation,” one “character - ized by ambivalence and uncertainty about the significance and consequences of such practices.” 37 Anderson indicates one recurring approach to reconciling that ambivalence, which receives its most considered articulation in the writings of John Stuart Mill. The philosopher negotiates the problem of objectivity through “a complex dialectic of detachment and engagement: ethical and epistemological progress is achieved through the flexible agency of sympathetic under - Below: Julia Margaret Cameron. Adeline Grace 38 standing.” Sympathy —that is, sympatheia , to suffer together— Clougston , 1872. implies the metaphysically impossible duality achieved by Cameron Opposite, top: Julia Margaret in these haunting photographs, of a presence split apart by the loss of Cameron. The Lovely Remains the child, managing through that joint suffering to be both transported of My Little Adeline , 1872. to the world of postmortem objectivity and, tragically, to remain teth - Opposite, bottom: ered to the world in which that view was precluded. Julia Margaret Cameron. Adeline Grace Clougston , Cameron annotated hundreds of her photographs in her own hand - 1872.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 writing throughout her career with her signature assurance of verisimilitude: “from life.” On the matte of the first photograph of Adeline, the crucial inversion is inscribed: “From death . . . the sacred and lovely remains of my little adopted child.” The odd phraseology begs the question: Does the photograph come from death, from an absence so deeply felt as to provide a horrifically privileged view from the outside? “To die—without the Dying / And live—without the Life,” Emily Dickinson echoes, “This is the hardest Miracle / Propounded to Belief.” 39 The promise of this liminality was nurtured by the scientific investigation of death itself in the 1870s, a period with a rich lexicon that evokes the new permeability attributed to the two states: trance, coma, syncope, catalepsy, insensibility, suspended

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 animation, human hibernation, mesmerism, and anesthesia, all prod - ucts of the Victorian sensibility. 40 The literary device of prosopopoeia, of furnishing an absent person, even a corpse, with a voice, might seem to have no analogue in visual representation, but the tradition of posthumous photography—in particular that of the fragile mortality of Victorian children—is clearly related. 41 The achievement of posthu - mous agency, which seems belatedly to have had the perspective to access some objective truths about the world, is one of the central aspirations with which the photograph has been widely associated. Diana Fuss writes of what she calls the “corpse poem,” pointing out that this particular literary form underlines something about literature and representation more broadly: “[a]ny poem is readable without its author. In a poem, a word exists independently, signifies on its own; words communicate and circulate in the writer’s absence . . . all writ - ing presumes the radical absence of the agent who produced it.” 42 This particular device, then, exemplifies the disembodied, detached qual - ity of all literature. Fuss is here elaborating on Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” which envisions as a central condition of modernism the shift from literature to text, from author to scriptor . Barthes asserts that “the removal of the author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a veritable distancing )” has begun to undermine the fraudulent coher - ence of an authorial voice upon which “positivism, crown and con - clusion of capitalist ideology . . . has granted the greatest importance to the author’s ‘person.’” 43 The refusal to comport with this ideology, the rejection of the charade of a single meaning dictated by the pres - tige of the author, is, for Barthes, a truly revolutionary possibility in the realm of both representation and politics. Barthes does not metaphorize this authorial absence in a haphazard way. The carefully selected vocabulary of his title indicates that death remains a potent mode of altering one’s relationship to an objective account of the world. The now moribund figure of the author is inevitably linked to the inherently masculine bias of modern culture: The author is reputed to be the father and the owner of his work; literary science thus teaches us to respect the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions, and society postulates a legality of the author’s relation to his work. The text, on the other hand, is read without the Father’s inscription. 44 The Father’s inscription is directly supplanted in one of Cameron’s post -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 mortem photographs of Adeline. Just above the child’s reposing head is a framed image of a military scene, a space left blank in one previ - ous image and occupied in another by Cameron’s reflection of her camera. Cameron has provided, directly on top of this portion of the photograph, her own hand-written inscription: “Her father’s charge at Madras for which he won the Victoria Cross.” The father’s fatal action, which ultimately lead to Adeline’s passage into Cameron’s home, is memorialized by a conjunction saturated with apparently deferential female agency: of the photographer who inscribes the scene of her creation and of the monarch whose largesse sanctified the father’s ser - vice. Cameron’s agency is thus asserted, in the form of her handwrit - ten inscription, by apparently deferring to the deceased warrior, by cloaking her intervention in the description of his gallantry. The delib - erate arrangement of the objects significantly looming above Adeline’s head, transitioning from a darkened cavity in an empty wall to the tex - tual dedication to the father to the visual reflection of the maternal photographer, marks the space as the laboratory of Cameron’s expres - sion of gendered presence. The complex displacement of the father is a central strategy of this photograph and of Cameron’s project at large. What seems to be an examination of the problem of female agency in the photograph becomes an even more ambitious interrogation of what that problem can reveal about the notion of objectivity itself. The death of the author can liberate writing from patriarchy yet equally demands the obliteration of agency, female or otherwise. But the par - tial death of the author, the feigned, proxy, split “death” that straddles the intermedial chasm between the objective clarity of the god trick

Opposite: Julia Margaret and the subjective assertiveness of situated knowledge, may preserve Cameron. Adeline Grace both in a flexible dynamic. To the list of hypostases of capitalist and Clougston , 1872. Detail. patriarchal ideology occupied by the male Author, historians have tra - Below: Julia Margaret ditionally added the photograph, a modern invention equally wedded Cameron. The Lovely Remains to the notion of a holistic and true representation of the world. Yet of My Little Adeline , 1872. Detail. to do so is to underestimate the fluidity with which agency—espe - cially the agency of a woman—was negotiated and deployed. If the photograph’s putative objectivity was the guarantor of its persuasiveness and signifi - cance, women were paradoxically situated in this equation, because they were both inside and outside of the objectivity: too slavishly objective in their copying of the master’s work and too emotional to be properly objective. Cameron seized upon this strati - fied position to make herself into an agent who examined the nature of photography and the prob - lematic masculine prerogatives that governed its privileged status.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Cameron’s ambivalence registers most poignantly in the wistful recollection of her supposed “first triumph,” her portrait of young Annie Philpot. Here, the incommensurable accounts of agency are memorably joined in a recollection that evokes the complexity of Cameron’s photographic authorship: I felt as if [Annie] had entirely made the picture. I printed, toned, fixed and framed it, and presented it to her father that same day: size 11 in. by 9 in. Sweet, sunny haired little Annie! No later prize has effaced the memory of this joy, and now that this same Annie is 18, how much I long to meet her and try my master hand upon her. 45

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Notes 1. Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass House” (1874), in Violet Hamilton, Annals of My Glass House: Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 12. 2. April Watson, For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1994), 20. 3. Victoria Olsen, From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 138 –139. 4. P.H. Emerson, “Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron,” in W. Arthur Boord, ed., Sun Artists (London: Kegan Paul, 1891), 35. 5. Joanne Lukitsh suggests this image, now in the Library of Congress, was pro - duced by Rejlander “possibly in collaboration with Julia Margaret Cameron,” dating it to “about 1862.” Joanne Lukitsh, “Before 1864: Julia Cameron’s Early Work in Photography,” in Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs , ed. Julian Cox and Colin Ford (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), 94–105. While this is plausible, it is of secondary import to the nature of the definite collaboration in the later version. 6. Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 187. 7. Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 209. 8. Mrs. Ellis, Education of the Heart: Woman’s Best Work (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1869), 149. 9. “Treatment of Women,” Eliza Cook’s Journal , 9 August 1851, 225. 10. Margaret Homans, “To The Queen’s Private Apartments: Royal Family Portraiture and the Construction of Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience,” Victorian Studies 37, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 1–41. 11. As in G.H.L. LeMay, “Prince Albert and the British Constitution,” History Today 3, no. 6 (June 1953): 411–416. 12. Homans, 29. 13. Homans, 6. 14. Winslow Ames, “Prince Albert’s Taste,” History Today 18, no. 1 (January 1968): 22–29. 15. Nancy Armstrong, “Monarchy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22, no. 4 (2001): 495–536. 16. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Henry King, 1872), 38; quoted in Dorothy Thompson, Q ueen Victoria: The Woman, the Monarchy, and the People (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 139. 17. Homans, 5. 18. Bermingham, 159. 19. Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children, and Nineteenth- Century Photography (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998); and Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (1948), rev. ed. (New York: Aperture, 1975). 20. Gernsheim, 14. 21. The myth of photography’s origins in painterly discoveries has received con - siderable critical attention. See especially the excellent account of the problematic nature of this historiography in Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), which critiques Peter Galassi’s Before

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981). 22. Pliny the Elder, Natural History , trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938–1963), 371. 23. Lori Pauli, “The First Negative,” in Oscar Gustave Rejlander, 1813(?)—1875 (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1998), 27. 24. Michael Fried, “Severed Representations in Caravaggio,” in Pathos, Affekt, Gefühl: Die Emotionen in den Künsten , ed. Klaus Herding and Bernhard Stumpfhaus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 323–324. 25. James Elwick, “The Philosophy of Decapitation: Analysis, Biomedical Reform, and Devolution in London’s Body Politics, 1830–1850,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 174–187. 26. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Medical Mediations: Mind, Body, and the Guillotine,” History Workshop Journal 28 (Autumn 1989): 39–52. 27. Peter Galison, “Judgment against Objectivity,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art , ed. Peter Galison and Caroline Jones (New York: Routledge, 1998), 329. 28. Lorraine Daston, “Can Scientific Objectivity Have a History?” Mitteilungen der Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung 75 (2000): 31–40. 29. Daston, “Can Scientific Objectivity Have a History?” 39. For more on the devel - oping unreliability of the perceiver, see Jutta Schickore, “Misperception, Illusion and Epistemological Optimism: Vision Studies in Early Nineteenth-century Britain and Germany,” The British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 3 (2006): 383–405. Among the many recent contributions to history of vision studies in this period, see Michael Heidelberger, “Innen und außen der Wahrnehmung: Zwei Auffassungen des 19. Jahrhunderts (und was daraus wurde),” in Video ergo sum: Repräsentation nach innen und außen zwischen Kunst- und Neurowissenschaften , ed. Olaf Breidbach and Karl Clausberg (Hamburg: Hans-Bredow-Institut, 1999), 147–157; and Timothy Lenoir, “The Eye as a Mathematician: Clinical Practice, Instrumentation, and Helmholtz’s Construction of an Empiricist Theory of Vision,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science , ed. David Cahan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 109–153. 30. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography , ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Osgood, 1877), 2:29. 31. George Levine, Dying to Know (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2. 32. Levine, 2. 33. I borrow this term—as, I presume, Haraway does—from Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986). 34. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 586. 35. Carol Armstrong, “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,” October 76 (Spring 1996): 131. 36. Julia Margaret Cameron to Anne Thackeray, 17 June 1872, quoted in Cox and Ford, 69–70. 37. Amanda Anderson, Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. 38. Anderson, 17. 39. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1017.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 40. George K. Behlmer, “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death,” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 2 (April 2003): 206–235. 41. See Sara Claire Raymond, “Aftermath: The Trope of the Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2001). 42. Diana Fuss, “Corpse Poem,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Autumn 2003): 1–28. 43. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language , trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 50. 44. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in The Rustle of Language, 61. 45. Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass House,” 180.

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