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"From the Ubiquitous to the Ridiculous"

Dr. Melody Davis

Saturday, October 25 - 3:00PM to 3:45PM
Clark Theater

If any form of photography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deserves the term ubiquitous, it is stereography, also known as the stereoview. The stereoview was broadly accessible, and by the 1890s could be found in just about every home, along with stereoscopes. Stereoviewing was a defining feature of parlor life, which in turn defined middle-class culture through the social presentation of the family's values and she who orchestrated them. In Narrative Stereography and American Women, 1870-1910 (The University Press of New Hampshire, forthcoming in 2015), I show that stereoviews were marketed to the domicile and the woman at home as part of a universal vision of married life that spoke for interrelated ideas: the ideology of domesticity and separate gender roles, the rise in middle-class materialism, and the belief that civilization depended on the wife and mother in order to foster morality, social stability, and the cultivation of the individual.

This lecture will present marriage stereoviews from the mid-nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth from both Britain and America. During this time, marriage scenes transform from a sentimental and picturesque ideal (the domestication of the sublime) to what I call the personal narrative style, which tends toward the theatrical and comic. The idea of home ife moves from stability to extreme emotion and ridiculous parody. Within fifty years, the conception of home and marriage had utterly changed, and so had women. The marriage stereoview reflected sentiment, then anxiety and comic relief, as gender roles and home life came to terms with outside demands.

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Melody Davis
Melody Davis

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