Reviewed by Lizzy Walker
Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian
Cartoonist is the
first, and much-needed, critical survey of Marie Duval's body of work. Duval is
one of a few pseudonyms used by Isabella Émilie de Tessier, who was an actress
on the London stage and also a prolific cartoonist, with a wealth of comics and
cartoons published between 1860 and 1885. The authors examined various primary
sources to analyze Duval's major themes, vision, and processes in relation to
historic contexts. They provide a brief biography of Marie Duval, stitched
together from public records, newspaper articles, and her body of work. They also
discuss their website The Marie Duval
Archive https://www.marieduval.org/
created in 2016 as a key resource
that provides online information about Duval and seeks out her unknown work.
The
book is divided into two main parts: Part I, Work, and Part II: Depicting and
Performing. There are also two appendices on attribution and terminology. Part
I is comprised of five chapters which "examines Duval within her own
context, presenting an overview of the publishing industry and her place and
influence in it" (p. 6). Part II, Depicting and Performing, consists of
four chapters where her accomplishments are highlighted, along with the
significance of her cartoons and characters (p. 6).
Part I
opens with a chapter on Duval's role working in Judy, a magazine where Duval was employed from 1869 through 1885. Sabin
asserts that Judy was not merely a
"low-level Punch clone" but
was "innovative and often pioneering" (p. 11) and argues that Duval, as
a cartoonist, was essential to the publication's development. After all, a
woman was a key contributor in a time when most society held they were supposed
to be relegated to more domestic roles and pursuits. He explains a serio-comic magazine
is a publication that covers serious topics, such as politics and daily news,
as well as more leisurely topics, such as fashion, humorous stories, cartoons
and comic strips. Sabin also discusses the importance of the periodical itself,
including the topics, the layout of the contents, and other producers of Judy, such as cartoonist William
Boucher, editor Charles Henry Ross, owner and publisher William Spencer
Johnson, and others.
This
brings us to Marie Duval herself. Considering her brief history, including her
time as an actor and that she contributed art to other publications, Sabin
states that it "is important to mention these other endeavors because they
indicate that Duval, like her fellow practitioners, was part of the Victorian
swirl of hustling and entrepreneurship. If you had a skill, you used it"
(p. 21). Sabin discusses Duval's most prolific work on Ally Sloper; her unique
style; influences such as Doré and Cruikshank; and content and subject matter
of her strips (not shying away from mentioning racist and anti-Semitic content),
as well as her theater work and how she was able to "bring the stage to
the page" (p. 27). Sabin concludes the chapter with further discussion of The Marie Duval Archive in that as an
online resource of her work, it effectively removes the context of the
Victorian period. The need for this book is clear from this statement alone. By
providing context into the publishing cycle in the Victorian era with an
analysis of Duval's work with Judy as
a whole, readers get a better idea of her influence on publishing and comics in
that era.
In the
second chapter, Grennan considers how women "undertook work, performed
work and visualised work" (p. 40). The author provides an overview of
women's employment in the Victorian period and asserts that employment
"was thought to make women masculine because employment was considered to
be masculine. As a result, employment for women challenged conceptions of the
significance of domestic life, upon which the highest personal premium was
placed, for women rather than men" (p. 40). Grennan, referring to the
women's household management roles, says "work in one's own house was not
work, because it was not employment" (p. 39). One could ask if this notion
has changed much in the following 150 years. Sabin noted that Duval and other
women who opted to enter the workforce outside the domestic realm, which
included domestic work, were considered to be masculinized, despite the fact
they are acting as caregivers (e.g. the employment of governesses). Grennan
then juxtaposes Margaret Beetham's assertion, that with the rise of mid-to-late
century periodical journal publishing, there came "new visualisations of
femininity," especially with regard to advertisements directed at women
readers, with Duval's rendering of women in her comics (p. 46). Another
juxtaposition Grennan mentions regarding Beetham and Duval is the benchmarks of
gender, as well as providing a great example of how Duval contradicted an ad
page in Ally Sloper's Comic Kalendar for
1878 (p. 49). Grennan examines the fictional woman employee in The Girl of the Period Miscellany and
fictional editor Miss Echo, comparing them to Duval's own work. The author
closes the chapter with the concept of anonymity and the adoption of
pseudonyms, which undoubtedly opened up the employment field in publications
more widely to women than by writing under their own names and posits reasons
for Duval's adopting more than one pseudonym, as these allowed her to explore
different styles of illustration (p. 59).
In Chapter
3, Waite maps Duval's time on the stage to her cartoons published in Judy. The author looks at Duval's time
as an actress, from early appearances, her performances in Charles Ross' lost
play Clam, as well as Silence, and The Beggar's Uproar, her time on tour, and in other plays. While
she was on tour, she was constantly drawing and publishing, but her comics do
not reveal personal details about Duval (p. 75). Waite examines Duval's late
acting career and, with a chronology of her life and works, its influences on
her cartoons and comics (p. 93). A section is devoted to Duval's involvement in
the Such and Such divorce case in 1873 (p. 90). The chapter ends with the
notion that there "are no known portraits of Marie Duval" in
existence (p. 96). Despite the small amounts of evidence available, Waite provides
a good analysis of how Duval's experiences with acting affected her work for Judy.
In
Chapter 4, Sabin considers Duval's children's book, Queens & Kings and Other Things, written under the pseudonym S.
A. the Princess Hesse Schwartzbourg. Sabin argues that her "naïve drawing
style she had developed at Judy made
her a natural choice for a children's book" (p. 101). He also mentions
while her name was not included in the creation of the work, her readers could
easily recognize her distinct style and would purchase the book. The author
discusses the creation and rise of the children's book, as well as the gift
book (p. 104). Sabin compares Duval and Edward Lear in terms of their work and
how both children and adults appreciated them, the latter's influence on
Duval's work, and where the similarities stopped and Duval diverged from Lear,
in terms of verse, tone, and art style (p. 109). Sabin then moves on to discuss
the content of Queens & Kings and
Other Things, Duval's rich illustrations of medieval fashion and royalty,
of which could be attributed to her stage work, and how the book was received
by the public -- sadly not a roaring success.
Concluding
the section on work, Grennan looks at women and gender in the printing
business. He presents a framework for "considering the material
conditions, social expectations, opportunities, prohibitions and
representations of the type of work in the production of periodical
publications" (p. 123). In so doing, Grennan explains that what modern readers
may know as the process of creating a comic book involving a penciller, an
inker, a colorist and so on, has nothing to do with Duval, who apparently drew
directly on the engraving woodblock. Most cartoonists draw on paper, and then
the engraver would transfer the illustration, sometimes by gluing the paper to
the woodblock and carving through it. He describes general woodblock processes
and further discussion of women's employment in printing, including Duval's own
work.
Part
II: Depicting and performing opens with the sixth chapter, Grennan's "The
significance of Duval's drawing style." In this, he examines the
"surviving public, non-academic commentary on Marie Duval's work from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries" and that it is "brief and easy to
summarize" (p. 137). Basically, her art was judged by critics as
elementary or downright terrible, and humorless, which Grennan asserts was a
result of Victorian sexism and prejudice. The author also examines her parodies
of various artworks displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions of 1880
and 1876, and concludes the chapter declaring that Duval "made a living
recklessly, by drawing attention to the contradictions of a working life that
she shared with her readers, so as to provoke laughter and, in doing so, to
sell the next publication, bring on the next comics register and create a new
visual culture" (p. 159).
In Chapter
7, Waite looks at "nineteenth-century theories of acting in relation to
visual aspects of the craft" to determine whether there is evidence that
Duval's role as an actor influenced her work as a cartoonist (p. 160). Waite
analyses resources including unpublished manuscripts and diaries of
contemporary performers to Duval and published acting manuals that she and
others in the theater either had access to or had knowledge of. He also takes a
closer look at her Ally Sloper cartoons as a means to show her own performance
as an "imperfect artist" (p. 182-183).
In Chapter
8, "Waite continues from Chapter 3 his analysis of the theater,
specifically "Victorian spectacle" such as pantomime and special
theatrical effects that "involved the manipulation of bodies in a way
entirely unrecorded in the usual drawing tropes of the nineteenth century,
arising as they did from classical training and fine art models", as an
influence on Duval's illustrations (p. 187). There is extensive analysis of
transformations scenes and characters in pantomime performances, as well as
what the author terms as "flying bodies" and physical performance,
such as the extreme physical work of the Hanlon-Lee Brothers and circus and
music hall acts, and Duval's incorporating certain elements into her artwork. Waite
concludes that, because of Duval's potential access to circus and music hall
acts, and participation in acting herself, she may have put her observations to
use in her cartoons and "allowed
her to depict the actions and presence of bodies in space through a unique
gestural, graphic style that communicates movement" rather than simply
relying on the theater manuals and other works available (p. 214).
In the
closing chapter, Sabin examines Duval's comics and cartoons attempting to
answer whether she is "a 'women's cartoonist' (p. 216) and looks at other
women in the cartooning business and women's magazines as an emerging genre.
Sabin notes that because of the lack of primary resources with such
information, that "the historical record relating to women is sparse to
the point of near invisibility" which he assigns to prejudice. The author
discusses the content of Judy, such
as fashion, politics, and advertising, and how Duval "fit in" with
the publication (p. 222), presenting perhaps why she chose Duval as a penname,
her subject matter, and her comedy.
Authors
Simon Grennan (Leading Research Fellow at the University of Chester), Roger
Sabin (Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London), and
Julian Waite (independent scholar and
former Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Programme Leader MA Drama at the
University of Chester) provide valuable analyses of Marie Duval's works, both as
a cartoonist and as an actor on the London stage. They place her firmly in the
important tradition of British magazine cartooning. Alongside the text, the
authors include a rich selection of Duval's art, as well as of other
contemporaries. In creating this volume, Grennan, Sabin, and Waite have created
a multidisciplinary text that would be good for comics studies, gender studies,
art or theater history, and more. It is also a good resource for those interested
in digital humanities and archives, as libraries and special collections are
increasingly making such materials accessible by digitizing resources. This
text is an excellent example of what scholars can do with digitized
collections. The authors mention that comprehensive mapping work has not yet been
developed between her stage work and artistic efforts that might provide even
more information on this important cartoonist. This book is the first step in
mapping Duval's two career paths.
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