Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, Great Men and Others

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

Only one photograph of her eldest daughter was included in the exhibition. In it Julia Norman appears simply as herself, eyes downcast, the strong features she shared with her mother raked by a decidedly unethereal, harsh light, the more typically Cameronesque cascade of tangled locks replaced by a nunlike dark coif. Norman died during childbirth at the age of 34, denied both the possibility of a "second career" of her own and the opportunity to see her mother's through to conclusion. In place of this daughter so apparently reluctant to submit to the camera, a host of surrogate daughters proliferated--beautiful and young, slipping easily into the role of a doomed Beatrice Cenci, a dreamy Echo or witchy Christabel.

The implications of this family romance seem most apparent in Cameron's photographic relationship to her niece Julia Jackson, renowned beauty and the mother of Woolf (whose feeling that she never quite measured up to her own mother in looks perhaps tempered her descriptions of Cameron's appearance). Not only did Cameron produce numerous portraits of Jackson as herself, but also as a poetic "Stella" and a personification of "Beauty." She also tried to persuade Jackson to marry her widower son-in-law. Thus we find not a case of Cameron's daughter fantasizing another mother, but Cameron-as-mother seeming to fantasize other daughters, made more expressly for the camera, and so better able to bring Cameron's sense of her own photographic identity into focus. At their most pat, such observations threaten to take on a suspiciously Oprah-like, therapeutic quality. Sarah Boxer, in her exhibition review, cannot help wondering if "Cameron's unquenchable obsession with young female beauty [literally had] something to do with her desire to replace her homely lineage with a prettier one?" [23] There is no denying that Jackson, half in shadow,, half in light, her unbound hair appearing as a delicate tracery of light itself around her face, serves as a fitting frontispiece for the catalog. Her image and Cameron's self-image as a photographer were as inextricably entangled as the strands of Jackson's luminous hair.

It is all too tempting to succumb to the seductions of this mode of maternal narrative. When I attended a lecture given by Wolf during the exhibition's run at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, more than one sympathetic sigh was audible in the audience not only when Cameron's story was told, but when the life histories of her "fair maidens" were recounted around the photographs. For instance, knowing about the sudden loss of her beloved first husband allows us to perceive an extra dash of tragedy in Jackson's attitude of aloof melancholy. The fact that her second marriage entailed the inheritance of a schizophrenic stepdaughter tempers the return of her haunted gaze. In "Julia Margaret Cameron's Women," biography served as a key to the psychologization of the otherworldly effects of Cameron's portraiture, and to the interweaving of life and literature in the gendered economy of the Victorian family. A stalwart Rosalba (1867) is revealed as an orphan adopted into the Cameron household who later ran away with a seaman and died of yellow fever. Lithe and untamed, The Wild Flower (1867) began life as a beggar. Taken into the Cameron circle as a servant, she found fortune when an upper-class gentleman, struck by her photograph in a Cameron exhibition at the Colnaghi Gallery in London, made her his wife.