Panel: Class, Gender, Power, and Publication
Copanelists: Eva-Marie-Kr¨oller and Gabriele Linke
The diaries kept by Hannah Cullwick at the command of Arthur Munby speak authoritatively, even though these Victorians’ class and gender gulf, buttressed by constructed racism, preclude this. Reading these through nineteenth-century autobiography studies shows how women’s and working class diaries differed from the res gestae of men’s autobiography, and helps us understand the gendered, class inflected, and racial translations of how autobiography enabled men, women, and classes to “read” each other.
Hannah Cullwick spent her life in service, and her attraction for Munby was Hannah’s antithesis to privileged “ladies” and her muscular physique and life of drudgery. Fascinated by working-class women, Munby convinced Hannah to write down the details of her everyday life and to dress up for him. Photographs show Hannah scrubbing the front steps, drawing water from a pump, and cleaning Munby’s boot, wearing the blackened skin of a “slave.” The power dynamics between them were complex. After Hannah married Munby, she refused to become a lady. Hannah derived control from her work, and since Hannah defined herself as “not a woman,” she seemed unwillingly to renegotiate her subjectivity.
Their relationship lends itself to a gendered analysis, and interrogates power dynamics, for Munby was well aware that he and male members of his class appeared “feminized” in contrast to the more robust Hannah. Their relationship also translates through the lenses of race and class, since Munby manifested his privileged position by commanding Hannah to write for him and to dress as a slave. Their respective social positions show how seemingly intimate and unequal relationships afford working class women power. The Diaries interrogate how life narrative is translated by race, class, and gender. I plan to use the autobiographical theoretical frameworks proposed by Linda Peterson, Reginia Gagnier, and Martin Danahay.
Cynthia Huff, professor of English at Illinois State University, edited Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities (2005), and coedited with Suzanne L. Bunkers Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (1996). She has published in Prose Studies, Victorian Review, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and her article “A Text of Their Own: Life Writing as an Introduction to Undergraduate English Studies” appears in Teaching Life Writing Texts (MLA, 2008). She teaches life writing, women’s literature, Victorian literature, feminist literary theories, pedagogical theory, and archival research.