Victoria's Sovereign Obedience
Portraits of the Queen as Wife and Mother

Margaret Homans

[Acknowledging] one important truth [will make a successful marriage]—it is the superiority of your husband as a man. It is quite possible that you may have more talent, with higher attainments . . . but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.
Sarah Ellis, The Wives of England, 1843

Since the Queen did for herself for a husband "propose,"
The ladies will all do the same, I suppose;
Their days of subserviency now will be past,
For all will "speak first" as they always did last!
Since the Queen has no equal, "obey" none she need,
So of course at the altar from such vow she's freed;
And the women will all follow suit, so they say—
"Love, honour," they'll promise, but never—"obey."
1841 London street ballad

What made it possible, at a time when women were meant to "obey," for a woman to occupy the throne of England for sixty-three years and to leave the monarchy's domestic and international prestige, if not its political authority, enhanced? Despite notable exceptions, women were never meant to be Britain's monarchs. The throne is patrilineal. Dorothy Thompson indicates how peculiar it is "that in a century in which male dominion and the separation of spheres into sharply defined male and female areas became entrenched in the ideology of all classes, a female in the highest office in the nation seems to have been almost universally accepted."^[1] Adrienne Auslander Munich points out in particular that the idea of "maternal monarchy seems absurd," an outrageous mingling of separate spheres that created a "gap in representability" to be filled by one paradox after another.^[2] And yet

it is also arguable, by analogy with Nancy Armstrong's contention "that the modern individual was first and foremost a woman,"^[3] that—quite apart from the historical accident of Queen Victoria's reigning from 1837 to 1901—the modern British monarch was first and foremost a woman: to be specific, a middle-class wife.

The characteristics required of the monarch of a nineteenth-century parliamentary democracy were those also required of middle-class wives, and if a married woman had not occupied the throne for most of the century, the monarchy would have needed some other way of associating itself with wifeliness. Just like a middle-class wife, the monarch was obliged (beginning in the seventeenth century, but increasingly so) not to intervene in politics. Like a middle-class wife spending her husband's income, she was expected to spend the wealth of her nation in a manner that displayed both its economic strength and her dependency.^[4] She had to serve as public, highly visual symbol of national identity and of her nation's values, just as a middle-class wife might be expected to display her husband's status. She had to be available for idealization and, by the same token, to be manifestly willing to relinquish active agency in political affairs, so that others could perform remarkable deeds in her name, as when, for example, in 1871 Disraeli presented the crown of empire to his Fairy Queen. As the nation's wife, Britain's nineteenth-century monarch had to be a married woman.

To look at the matter from another angle, female monarchy posed numerous representational problems, as Munich argues, but those problems and others could be resolved if the queen was a wife. Britain, finding itself under female rule, capitalized on the desire to limit female power by making that the alibi for limiting (but not eliminating) the monarchy's powers and entitlements. By presenting herself as a wife, Queen Victoria offered the perfect solution to Britain's fears of both female rule and excessive monarchic power. At the same time, as if in compensation, the monarchy acquired what is granted to middle-class wives in exchange for their loss of economic and social autonomy: that ambiguous resource early Victorian ideologues call influence.^[5] Through Victoria, the monarchy embraced the limitation of its powers to symbolic ones, and flourished as a result.

Historians generally agree that the Victorian monarchy succeeded—that is, survived into the twentieth century when other European monarchies disappeared—despite Victoria's unpopularity from the death of Prince Albert to the first Jubilee, thanks to its popular representation as middle-class, domestic, and patriotic, in contrast to the profligate and foreign royalty of the previous generation (see Thompson, 87). In this

essay I explore some specific ways in which Victoria's gender and marital status enabled such representations during the early part of her reign, simultaneously creating the appearance of limited female and monarchic power and expanding the monarchy's symbolic power and ideological influence. The monarchy succeeded because of its transformation into a popular spectacle during the nineteenth century; during that time the association of royal spectacle and middle-class practices and values came to seem the permanent hallmark of the royal family.^[6] This spectacle depended for its effectiveness on Victoria's gender. A woman is perhaps more readily transformed into spectacle at any historical period; the Victorians, in the period I examine, were treated, specifically and paradoxically, to the spectacle of royal domestic privacy, a privacy that centered on the ever-plumper figure of their queen as wife and mother.

Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert both enabled and complicated her impersonation of the woman her nation needed. Just as Victoria both functioned publicly as the nation's wife and was herself, in private, a wife, she both publically impersonated a domestic woman and really was one. But these public roles are inversely, or at any rate not causally, related to the private versions of them. On the one hand, to pursue the analogy to Nancy Armstrong's argument that the modern individual was a woman, Victoria could be said to have had no larger share of power than that of the average woman Armstrong has in mind, a conduit for the sort of power a Foucauldian reading attributes to all—great, perhaps, but unrelated to individual empowerment or agency. On the other hand, she was unique, a woman whose life was related to ordinary female domesticity only by analogy and masterful tricks of representation, with powers that included her having—if any individual could be said to have it—individual agency. If it was not because she was a domestic woman that she appeared to be one, it was still because she was an ordinary woman in another sense: her representational powers could not exceed those of any other citizen. She could only manipulate her image to the extent that her culture made it possible for her to do so.

Queen Victoria's resemblance to a middle-class wife made her seem ordinary, but the meaning and effectiveness of that resemblance depended on the contrast with her extraordinariness. As she acknowledges in a letter, her ordinariness is at once genuine and deliberate, that of a unique individual empowered to be exemplary: "they say no Sovereign was more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say), and that , from our happy domestic home —which gives such a good example.^[7] She represents palatial Balmoral Castle and Osborne House—purchased and renovated at great expense to the nation—as homes and herself as an ordi-

nary woman who adored her husband and took an uncommon interest in raising her children. For state occasions she preferred wearing a bonnet to wearing a crown, and she preferred her wedding lace and veil to the robes of state.^[8] For her Jubilee procession in 1887 she horrified her family by refusing to wear anything more glamorous than her black widow's dress. But the rituals for which she chose such costumes were no less costly for her dowdy tastes, and a queen in a bonnet cuts a very different figure from a commoner in a bonnet; in Victoria's case, the crown is visible by its absence.

Whether Victoria's own agency constructed this imposture or it was constructed for her by social forces operating independent of her can never be established. Her choosing to seem ordinary may have been both the act of a remarkably shrewd and inventive monarch, accurately discerning the only route available to effective monarchical power, and the role given her by the culture that produced her. The most that can be said is that she performed certain gestures of self-representation in concert with other representations of her in the media, gestures that were legible and efficacious only because they coincided with representations already in place.

Sarah Ellis's writing on the newly crowned Victoria suggests that for her contemporaries Victoria both produced "the royal image" and was subjected to the Victorian construction of her as of all women. Ellis sees Victoria at once as the epitome of the "influence" that serves as the alibi for containing women within the domestic sphere, not differentiating between Victoria's powers and those of her female subjects, and as unique authorizing agent of that containment. The women of England must "prove to their youthful sovereign, that whatever plan she may think it right to sanction for the moral advancement of her subjects . . . will be . . . faithfully supported in every British home by the female influence prevailing there."^[9] Victoria is at once an exemplary construct of Victorian ideology and its fantasized author.

Queen Victoria appears to have shared with her subjects a collective fantasy about her own powers and her agency that is to be identified neither with a specific state or royal authority nor with the cultural power all subjects have. Whatever individual agency monarchs have takes the form, by the time of Victoria, of influencing ideological shifts. For Victoria this power lay in manipulating the spectacle of royalty, as well as in being manipulated by it. Serious-minded middle-class domesticity was becoming the behavioral norm for her nation, and in acting for the public like members of the middle class, Victoria and Albert could be said to have "encourage[d] trends which were already devel-

oping" (Thompson, 87–88). She helped her nation to become powerful and prosperous by helping it see itself as a middle-class nation, just as she smoothed the transition to a wholly symbolic monarchy that would have taken place with or without her in the nineteenth century.

For Victoria's monarchy to become and remain popular, the potential disadvantage of a woman on the throne—specifically, the fears of female rule that a queen regnant would inspire—had to turn into an advantage for the monarchy's middle-class imposture. This, Victoria's early marriage made possible (while, as we shall see, it also perpetuated those fears in other, though less potent, forms). It was possible for her subjects to read her marriage as no different from any other, as a form of privatization through which women were defined as the complements and subordinates of men. Her marriage subdued anxieties about female rule and at the same time made her a model for the middle class because gender hierarchy was becoming a hallmark specifically of the middle-class family. When Sarah Ellis writes that a wife must recognize "the superiority of [her] husband as a man," in the passage quoted as the first epigraph of this essay, she directly addresses, and simultaneously constructs, the category of middle-class wives. Ellis's interest, like Victoria's, was explicitly in shaping the emerging middle class, and gender hierarchy in Victoria and Albert's "happy domestic home" would have helped establish the middle-class nature of that home.

Popular representations of Victoria at the time of her coronation betray enormous and sometimes self-contradictory anxieties about female rule. Such apprehensions and the urgent need to see Victoria controlled by a husband are complexly dramatized in a pair of broadsheets from this time. In one, titled "Petticoats for Ever" and headed by the image of an enormously fat, menacing-looking woman (Fig. 56), two characters, Kitty and Joan, hold a conversation about the "wonders" the new queen will do "all in favour of the women." There will be a Parliament of women (with names like "Mother Mouthalmighty") and an act passed providing "that all women, married or single, are to have a roving commission, to go where they like, do as they like, and work when they like . . . and [that they] shall have . . . a gallon of cream of the valley each to drink health to the Queen." The fear is specifically of female bodily excess as well as of political misrule, although the threat posed by female rule is here defused by comic exaggeration.

Another, and opposite, popular strategy for relieving anxieties about Victoria's accession was in effect to deny that a female monarch would rule at all. A second broadsheet, "The Coronation" (Fig. 57), represents the sentimental possibilities of seeing the queen as a simple woman.

Celebrating her sincerely on her coronation day, this doggerel inserts Victoria firmly into the female sphere as dutiful daughter ("Tho' Victoria does the sceptre sway, / Her parent may she still obey") and into her female role as genetic link between generations of men: "E'er she resigns all earthly things, / Be mother to a line of Kings." The broadsheet closes with the image of a coronation, but it is, oddly, of a king, not a queen. The queen is merely a consort (it seems) sitting uncrowned next to him as he receives the crown, as if to suggest the role England would prefer for Victoria, whose portrait at the top of the page represents her as young, sweet, and unthreatening. But even this soothing image may betray an attendant fear: if the queen acts only as consort, as the closing image seems to hope, then the same image presents the danger that an actual consort may act as king. Taken together, the two broadsheets suggest that female rule is inescapably disadvantageous: being queen may give her powers improper to a woman, or a proper woman may be too weak a monarch.

After Victoria's marriage, although it was constructed largely to allay fears of female rule and transform it into a source of middle-class imagery, these twin anxieties—that Victoria would exceed her domestic role and fail to do so—continued to surface, as the doggerel quoted as the second epigraph to this essay suggests. Victoria did, however, promise to obey Albert, contrary to the verse's assertion ("her promise to 'obey' the Prince was heard throughout the Chapel"^[10] ), and its erroneous emphasis on her refusal to obey may stem from either the fear of such a refusal or, indeed, a wish for it. It would not do for Victoria to appear too much a private woman and Albert's subordinate, for fears of Albert's foreign loyalties were just as potent as fears of a woman's rule (see Thompson, 36–41). Another cartoon from the time of the marriage, titled "Trying It On" (Fig. 58), emphasizes the equal and opposite risks of her status as wife. This cartoon, in which Albert poses admiringly before a mirror wearing the crown of England, expresses the anxiety that the suspect foreigner—because (as he puts it in the cartoon's text) "vat is yours is mine, now ve are married"—will take over the monarchy. His threat may be in part defused by the presence of the mirror, which feminizes him by representing his vanity, and by the presence of sports equipment that suggests it is all just play, but Victoria looks on horrified and helpless. Victoria's marriage did on the whole consolidate the image of her as an ordinary and unthreatening woman, but representations of the royal couple had to balance reassurances of Victoria's domestication with those of her sovereignty.

Victoria herself wrote ambivalently about the prospect of marriage in

the abstract, and her feelings in some ways echoed those of her subjects. Anticipating those who feared Albert's taking over the monarchy, Victoria wrote in her diary:

at present my feeling was quite against ever marrying. . . . marrying a subject was making yourself so much their equal. . . . I said I dreaded the thought of marrying; that I was so accustomed to have my own way, that I thought it was 10 to 1 that I shouldn't agree with any body.^[11]

That she soon decided to consider marriage anyway suggests that she understood it as a giving up of personal autonomy that would nonetheless maintain or increase her powers. Most immediately, she wanted to get her dominating mother out of her household, and the only way to do so with propriety was to marry, thus substituting fur her mother's rule another form of subordination, probably a greater one, and gaining one power only by losing another. A larger motive may have been her desire to stabilize her image as queen of a middle-class nation. Here again she enhances her particular form of rule, her power as symbol, only by taking the risk of giving away her power over herself.

Perhaps in response to both popular anxieties and Victoria's own worries, representations of Victoria and Albert once they were married—commissioned portraits, cartoons, and other popular images alike—helped to disseminate a complex picture of royalty's superordinary domesticity, publicizing the monarchy as middle-class and its female identity as unthreateningly subjugated yet somehow reassuringly sovereign. That there was such a congruence between commercial and commissioned works suggests the reciprocal shaping, between the queen and her subjects, that I am arguing for: while the popular press enacts its power to shape her as England's middle-class queen, she too shapes her subjects in her own image. These images also support my argument that Victoria chose to hold her power in the only way open to her, by giving her power away.

These images play on two conventions of hierarchy, one related to Victorian portraiture, the other, to protocol. First, height conveys power, so that portraits with both husband and wife seated or standing "naturally" represent the husband as the more authoritative (recall that Prince Charles had to stand on a step to tower appropriately over Lady Diana in their nuptial portrait). Typically in Victorian marital portraits the husband stands while the wife sits (or occasionally, in a convention that reads in essentially the same way, he sits center stage while she leans deferentially against the back of his chair), to emphasize their difference and perhaps also to suggest her bodily weakness and his strength.

This convention runs counter to the second, however, that the monarch may sit while others stand, while no one may sit in her presence unless invited. Victoria's sitting or standing, in other words, can represent, simultaneously and ambiguously, her power as sovereign and her subordination as wife. Complicating the question is the Victorian revival of chivalric conventions, whereby the woman's elevation may represent not her power but "a tactical inversion of the real relations of power . . . a strategy for reconciling women to the facts of gender relations [in marriage], that they are called goddesses by the men because they are going to have to treat the men as gods."^[12] Placing a woman on a pedestal, as is well known, does not necessarily mean giving her an advantage. Victoria loved an 1843 portrait of Albert in full armor and commissioned double portraits and a statue of the two of them in Anglo-Saxon dress, suggesting her identification with the days of chivalry.^[13] Where her image is elevated, therefore, it is hard to say whether that elevation connotes royal authority or symbolic femininity; indeed, by conflating these two possibilities, such images suggest that feminine idealization is the only form monarchic power can take. Moreover, confusingly, because Albert himself was often represented as feminized by his role as consort (proposed to by Victoria, dependent on her wealth, and described by her as "beautiful," an "Angel," with "a cheek like a rose"), his elevation may mean conventional male supremacy—or it may mean that he is the woman on the pedestal.

While numerous cartoons of Victoria and Albert around the time of their marriage represent them at a standoff—she powerful through sovereignty, he powerful through masculinity—many popular portraits of the royal pair thereafter represent them with their family, surrounded by increasing numbers of rosy-cheeked children. In Figure 59, the frontispiece to a songbook, Victoria is seated, engrossed in the baby she holds in her lap, to identify her with the private female sphere. Albert's arms enclose Victoria as well as the children, and his gaze directly returns that of the viewer, to suggest that he takes in the public as well as the private realm, like any Victorian husband and man of business. Although the words "God Save the Queen" appear prominently, no one wears a crown. A rural scene below the portrait connotes ordinary domestic pleasantness, but it also elevates the royal family to the heavens, to make them an object of veneration, in the manner of a Renaissance Assumption of the Virgin. This is the apotheosis of the royal family as middle-class folks, with the queen imaged as governing, paradoxically, by removing herself absolutely from the sphere of government.

This representation occupies one extreme of the range of contempo-

rary images, which show Victoria domesticated and Albert firmly ensconced in the role of protective and superior Victorian husband. Figure 60, while also domestic, at first suggests a contrast. Victoria's figure is the higher of the two, centered in a throne-like structure, while the far from patriarchal Albert on all fours indulgently plays "horsey" with his children. Victoria makes no intimate visual or bodily contact with her children, in contrast to her absorption in her children in "God Save the Queen." Perhaps, however, Albert's subordination in this scene—he is tugged along by his cravat, decked with flowers, and used as a prop for baby's delight—is all play, thus connoting the reverse of subordination, a reading supported by the light tone of the drawing and by the pose of Victoria's bending, yielding, and smiling figure. But I would suggest that the picture makes even more explicit than "God Save the Queen" how Victoria used her domestic position to reign. Framed by the words "To the Queen's Private Apartments: The Queen and Prince Albert at Home," the picture exemplifies Victoria's apparent desire to have her subjects witness her private life, to perform it as a spectacle and model, as the stage-like setting of the picture suggests. Paradoxically, the more privatized and ordinary her family life appears, the more effective it is as an instrument of ideological rule. The more she appears as a bending, yielding wifely figure, the more her subjects grant her the power to model their lives.

Portraits commissioned by Victoria herself present a similarly ambiguous relationship between Victoria and Albert. In an early Landseer portrait (Fig. 61), which Victoria called "very cheerful and pleasing," Victoria stands while Albert is seated, in body-revealing clothes, surrounded by the paraphernalia of hunting. Dogs gaze up at him adoringly, and the toddler Vicky, their first child, toys with one of several dead birds as she stands at the far end of this animal group, mirroring her mother's position. The dog between Albert's legs especially suggests his phallic dominance of the scene. The signs of female domesticity are here displaced by the signs of masculine prowess, and Victoria's pose mirrors not only that of her tiny daughter but also that of the dogs: she seems to wait attendance upon Albert as they do. The unfeminine authority that might be suggested if she stood above him is countered by these manifold indications that she is like any loving Victorian wife, deferring to her husband's centrality, not towering above him—the elevated symbol of domesticity for whom he performs his chivalric, manly deeds rather than the family decision maker. Moreover, the rule that none may sit in the queen's presence strengthens the suggestion that here she wishes to be seen as wife, not queen. Paradoxically, their posi-

tioning must reverse the usual husband-wife pose for him to be read as husband and her as wife.

Nonetheless, the open door framing the picture at the far right serves as a reminder that this model Victorian domestic privacy is being deliberately exposed and that Victoria's deference in the picture may have other meanings in the context of its display. Indeed, it could also be argued that the composition rises triangularly toward her and that all eyes really are on her, not on Albert. While the domestic femininity of her form is emphasized by her elaborate lacy dress, his body, on display as a masculine body, could nonetheless be said to be feminized, in that bodily display is itself feminizing. The Byronic tights he wears represent the costume of an earlier age and of outmoded aristocratic pleasures. Real men—prime ministers and businessmen, for example—after 1820 wore pants, so that costumes like Albert's here look romantic and effete.^[14] It is unusual for a hunter to be shown indoors, as if his masculinity had been captured and tamed by Victoria's coercive domesticity. Turning the paradigm of chivalry the other way, we could say that Victoria is not diminished here by her symbolic elevation. For a parliamentary queen, symbolic power—a woman's power—is the only possible form of royal authority. Perhaps what is really on display here is not (or not only) Victoria's domestic deference toward Albert, but (or but also) her supremacy over a feminized Albert and an adoring nation.

This ambiguity receives a somewhat different emphasis in perhaps the most famous portrait of the family, painted in 1846 by Winterhalter (Fig. 62), who, along with Landseer, was the chief portraitist to the royal family.^[15] Here both Albert and Victoria are seated, this time in regal attire, on throne-like chairs in a formal, stagy setting. Despite the presence of five active children, the parents' expressions are more business-like than cordial. The painting mingles the genre of conversation piece with that of the formal state portrait, and the setting heightens the ambiguity (as to privacy and publicity) we have also seen in the Landseer painting and in the cartoon To the Queen's Private Apartments . While the children in the right foreground seem to tumble about in a domestic space not unlike that in the Landseer portrait, albeit in their best clothes, the left background framing Victoria and Albert is an idealized and undomestic combination of "fine turquoise-blue skies" (specifically requested by Albert) and formal drapery.^[16] Are Victoria and Albert public or private, indoors or out, onstage or not? Privacy is being publicized here, and public life privatized. This ambiguity is echoed by the painting's locations: it hung in the dining room at Osborne, Victoria and

Albert's most home-like home, but it was also engraved by Samuel Cousins and therefore enjoyed wide public circulation.

The painting's formal ambiguities reinforce those of the figures' poses. Although Albert is seated closer to the picture plane and obstructs part of Victoria's figure with his elegantly clad leg, Victoria wears a crown while he does not, and their relative heights have been misrepresented so as to make Victoria almost as tall (against her chair and also in the picture plane) as Albert, despite the shrinking of perspective. Furthermore, in exact contrast to "God Save the Queen" (Fig. 59), it is now she who gazes unflinchingly out at the spectator, while her husband's gaze is absorbed by his child. Of course, the look shared at some distance between father and eldest son differs greatly from the mutual gaze of mother and infant in "God Save the Queen"; it suggests patrilineage and the passage of power from father to son rather than cozy parental love. Yet Victoria's steely gaze looking out between them reminds the viewer that it is her line, not Albert's, that is importantly continued in their son, and that patrilineage in this case is subordinate to other principles of hierarchy. Her arm around her son thus conveys both domestic maternity and royal lineage, just as the setting conveys both state formality and domestic intimacy.

Although the picture represents her in just about as authoritative and regal a pose as she was willing to occupy in family portraits of this period, and although Victoria was known to have "loved" this picture,^[17] in the sketch she made of it, she revises her own figure in significant ways (Fig. 63). She has made her head bow further and more yieldingly toward her son and perhaps has changed the direction of her gaze from out at the viewer to down toward her son, and she has removed or elided the crown on her head. Appreciating Winterhalter's relatively regal and public vision of her, she nonetheless domesticates it further. Or perhaps she liked the picture because she saw it in the way that she sketched it, as more domestic than it is.

By 1860 in England, costly and traditional oil portraiture had lost ground to a newer method of representation, for "hand-tinted portrait photographs were being praised as 'truthful beyond the artist's power.'"^[18] Along with its relative cheapness and availability, photography's claim to offer greater realism made it the middle class's favored method of recording itself (the representation of itself as "the real" was part of the middle class's strategy for making its values normative for all classes of British society), and the royal family began to commission photographs too.^[19] And just as photography supplanted oil painting, so

trousers supplanted knee breeches and hose as Albert's habitual portrait costume, while Victoria's dress rarely suggests her rank. These photographs, in their striking difference from the oils of just a decade earlier, may represent the fruition of Victoria's efforts to be portrayed as a middle-class queen; even so, they adjust Victoria and Albert's relationship in similarly ambiguous ways.

Of the many available images, I will discuss three made shortly before Albert's death—two Mayall photographs and one by a Miss Day, in each of which Victoria and Albert are dressed as an ordinary wealthy middle-class couple. Day's photograph was engraved for public circulation, and Mayall's images were made explicitly to be published as cartes de visite.^[20] In the image by Day, taken at Osborne House on 26 July 1859 (Fig. 64), Albert leans rather casually against a wall, looking an exaggerated distance down at Victoria, holding his hat, in a pose that suggests disengagement and even weariness, while she gazes up at him intensely with an expression of agitation and needfulness. She may be seated, but her attitude suggests that it is not with the precedence of a queen but rather with the humility and even bodily weakness of a worshipful, yearning wife. The first of the Mayall photographs, taken at Buckingham Palace on 15 May 1860 (Fig. 65), seems at first glance to reverse this hierarchy: Albert sits and Victoria stands. But he sits confidently with legs crossed, looking up at her while holding a book as if interrupted in reading, while she stands with eyes downcast, her pose apologetic, almost servile, her arm on his shoulder, her figure partly obscured by his. She stands, but her relative height in the picture plane does not convey power or precedence. Another pose from the same session has her seated and him standing, yet he faces the camera with his arm cocked on his hip, while she looks down at the book in her lap, as if to demonstrate that the same marital hierarchy can be read in opposite poses. Because of the recurrence of servility here, it is perhaps surprising to learn that yet a third photo from the same session, posed almost identically to the first (she stands, he sits), was captioned "The Prince verifies a reference" when published by the Picture Post Library. On the one hand, his verifying a reference makes him the authority to whom Victoria defers, and that is what her stance conveys in each of the images from this session; on the other hand, that he is verifying a reference reminds us for whom he works: Victoria Regina. Does the caption disguise servility as mastery; or does the pose disguise mastery as servility?

Finally in the last Mayall photograph, made six months before the prince's death (1 March 1861; Fig. 66), Victoria stands on a step so as to look almost on a level into his eyes. Does the democratizing potential

of photography influence the content of the image? Perhaps, but his top hat and her hatlessness and lowered umbrella (and of course her crownlessness) re-hierarchize the carefully dehierarchized pose, and the ostentatious failure to conceal the machinery by which she is made to appear his height suggests that the very idea is a sort of somber joke. Another photograph from the same session represents them at their different heights: he appears about a foot taller. Seated below, standing over, or standing on a level with him, Victoria in each of these images conveys proper wifely humility and subordination toward her husband—sometimes even abjection—rather than sovereignty. Yet in the context of their dissemination these photographs could be read as we read the two cartoons (Figs. 59, 60) and the Landseer painting, as a display of her female subordination that reinforces her ideological rule. In the pictorial medium of the middle classes, Victoria and Albert assume increasingly the guise of the middle classes, their clothes and, most important, their rigid gender hierarchy; and, paradoxically, the declassing and gender subordination confirm Victoria's highest ambition, to lead by her example a middle-class nation.

In the years following Albert's death in 1861, Victoria's almost groveling worship of his image became central to royal iconography, and the emphasis in the late photographs on his height and her servility seems simply to continue after his death, in exaggerated form. Figure 67, an 1862 photograph taken by Prince Alfred at Windsor, shows Victoria and Princess Alice with a bust of Albert that rises above and between them, Victoria in heavy mourning in a pose of extravagant, upward-turning devotion. (Similar photographs pose this bust with different groupings of family members, and it is usually above them all, although sometimes at one side of the composition.) This pose is anticipated by that in another photograph (Fig. 68), taken of Albert, Victoria, and Princess Vicky on her wedding day, in which, again, the stolid Albert towers above and between the two women, who seem undifferentiated—both nervous, with downcast eyes, both crowned, both busty, in similar white dresses. Photography may have its democratizing effect, but democracy here means adherence to middle-class norms, and photographic democracy puts Victoria on a level, not with her husband, but with ordinary Victorian wives, who are lower in status and in stature than their husbands—or with her daughters, who became the consorts that some early cartoons (such as "The Coronation," Fig. 57) wished Victoria herself had been. Where the Winterhalter portrait tricks the viewer into seeing Victoria's sovereignty as well as her ordinary wifeliness, photography exposes her ordinariness even more than her sover-

eignty. Or—to turn the photograph of worshiping Albert's statue another way—does placing him on a lofty pedestal mean reducing him, in all the ways chivalry reduces the women who are so placed?

That ambiguity reminds us again that posing as ordinary was Victoria's mode of sovereignty: to put her ordinariness on royal display for popular admiration. Paradoxically, she holds her sovereignty because of the popularity she accrues by appearing as an ordinary wife: she rules in the only way she can, by giving over her authority. If she wanted to promote a worldview in which the middle-class wife's subordination underwrites middle-class supremacy, she became both the agent and the product of her own ideological designs. Her portraits not only testify to her skill and that of popular image makers in manipulating conventions for representing gender difference and class status, but also record the ideological complexity of the problem, for art and for the queen herself, of representing a queen regnant in an era desiring to see the end of female power.

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Fig. 56.
"Petticoats for Ever." Broadsheet, c. 1837. From Louis James, ed.,  English 
Popular Literature, 1819–1851  (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 340.

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Fig. 57.
"The Coronation." Broadsheet, c. 1837. From Louis James, ed.,  English
 Popular Literature, 1819–1851  (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 341.

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Fig. 58.
"Trying It On." Woodcut, c. 1840. From Dorothy Thompson,  Queen Victoria:
 The Woman, the Monarchy, and the People  (New York, Pantheon: 1990), 40.

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Fig. 59.
W. J. Linton, "God Save the Queen." Wood engraving of a picture by H. Warren used
 as illustration for the  Illustrated Book of British Song  (1842). From Dorothy Thompson,
  Queen Victoria: The Woman, the Monarchy, and the People  (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 45.

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Fig. 60.
To the Queen's Private Apartments: The Queen and Prince Albert at Home.
 Lithograph, c. 1844.

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Fig. 61.
Sir Edwin Landseer,  Windsor Castle in Modern Times: Queen Victoria,
 Prince Albert, and Victoria, Princess Royal,  1841–45. Oil on canvas. The Royal Collection, copyright 1993 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 62.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter,  The Royal Family in 1846 . Oil on canvas. 
The Royal Collection, copyright 1993 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 63.
Queen Victoria's sketch of Winterhalter's  Royal Family in 1846 . The 
Royal Collection, copyright 1993 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 64.
Miss Day, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Osborne, 26 July
1859. The Royal Archives, copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 65.
J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Price Albert,
15 May 1860. Copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 66.
J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 
1 March 1861. Copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 67.
Prince Alfred, photograph of Queen Victoria and her second daughter, 
Princess Alice, with a bust of Prince Albert, 1862. Copyright 1994 Her 
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 68.
Williams, photograph of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their 
daughter Victoria, Princess Royal, on her wedding day, 25 January 1858. Copyright 
1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.