A prisoner of Victorian conventions, Clementina Hawarden sought her expression in photography. The results, as Charles Darwentdiscovers, were both frightening and quite possibly fatal
Tennyson's is probably not the first name you associate with photographic exhibitions, but you can hardly keep his verse out of your head as you walk around the V&A's show of the work of Clementina Hawarden. Specifically, the images in the museum's Canon Galleries conjure up visions of the Lady of Shalott. Tennyson's Lady, you will recall, was imprisoned in a tower from which she could look at life only indirectly, through a mirror. Rather than experiencing the actual world, she was reduced to making tapestries of its inverted image. Even this indirect gaze was to prove fatal to the Lady when, in the course of her work, she unwittingly glimpsed the reflection of a reflection - that is to say, a true picture of life itself - in her mirror, and died as a result.
And so with Lady Hawarden. Well born but poor, she spent her youth in Rome before being married off to Cornwallis Maude, a convenient peer, in 1845. As was the way with Victorian women of her caste, Hawarden's subsequent career was as a baby-maker: she produced ten children in the next 17 years, scarcely leaving the family house in South Kensington for most of them. At some point, though, she did find time to take up photography, exhibiting work in two shows of the Photographic Society of London and selling pictures to, among others, Lewis Carroll. For perhaps five years, Lady Hawarden, imprisoned in her Victorian tower of gender and class, took pictures in - and, more yearningly, through the windows of - a single front drawing-room at 5 Princes Gardens. Like Tennyson's Lady, the process of creating images of an outer life from which she was excluded may have killed her. Hawarden died in 1865 at the age of 42 of pneumonia, which seems likely to have been brought on by exposure to the toxic chemicals used in her studio.
As you might expect, it is this same studio that is the hero - or, more properly, the villain - of almost all of Hawarden's pictures. The insidious thing about it is its seeming fragility. The boundaries of Lady Hawarden's prison are set not in stone but in the expensive glass of picture windows and the luxurious muslin of curtains. Where stone is included in the composition - in the form of a balustrade running around the terrace outside - it is carved into semi-transparency. The tenuous feel of the enclosure in Hawarden's images makes its presence more material, more animate. Brilliantly aware of this, Hawarden becomes the mistress of photographic chiaroscuro. Her light exists as a negative thing, a medium through which to examine the contrasting shadows: of fenestration bars, balustrades, muslin, the fragile darkness of enclosure, exclusion, entrapment. The banal vistas of Albertopolis, seen through her studio window, are made extraordinary only by the palpable sense of their being beyond Hawarden's reach. Like the Lady of Shalott, hers is an imprisonment of the mind.
Like the Lady's, too, there is claustrophobic madness in Hawarden's world. If her work is formally about containment, its subject is always one of escape. Her daughters (but not her sons), pressed into photographic service, are photographed play-acting a reality from which they are barred, recreating the world - just visible through the studio window - out of a dressing-up box: the air crackles with repressed sexuality. When they are not in costume, the Maude girls are photographed asleep, escaping into the world of the unconscious, or gazing into mirrors. Always, though, they are ladylike, never returning the camera's vulgar stare, always striking the poses that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had ordained as proper for the portrayal of Victorian womanhood. Just as the transparency of glass and muslin makes Hawarden's imprisonment the crueller, so it is the order of her world that makes it the madder. These are extraordinary photographs, if frightening ones.
"Lady Hawarden: studies from life" is showing at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7, until 30 August (0171-938 8500)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
