Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-Formation in Victorian England (Picturing History)

Rating:
Summary: Lovely and repulsive.
Review: 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. ****