OK I admit it - over the past two days I’ve spent more time that I perhaps should have done reading wild theories about the true whereabouts of Kate Middleton, zooming in on ‘that’ Mother’s Day family portrait to see which bit of the sleeve didn’t match up, and deciding if her face really was superimposed from last year’s photoshoot for Tatler. I know, I know, I should know better, but I just have this insatiable need to play the amateur sleuth that I’m determined to frame as a positive quality even if you don’t. I blame Enid Blyton basically. And the Red Hand Gang.
Also, I do actually care how she is. She’s a mum of three, and although that’s about where our similarities begin and end, I hope she is ok. I am invested, somehow, in her wellbeing.
As I compulsively zoomed in on her family photo, the surrounding controversy about doctored images and absent mothers reminded me of something arguably even more fascinating, a set of images from the Victorian era known as the Hidden Mother photos. Before I explain to you what they are, I will share a few for you to look at.
As bizarre as these images may look to us today, this was apparently a common technique used in an era when photos required long exposure times - longer than a wriggly baby could sit still for. But the need for a firm pair of hands to hold the baby still doesn’t explain why the mother was so clumsily covered up with a pair of old curtains, does it? One theory is that, because infant mortality was so high at the time - and in this era posthumous photos of babies were also popular - parents actually wanted the hidden mother to look obvious, because her presence under the sheet signified that this particular child was still alive and kicking. There’s something quite eerie, though, about the way the mother is not considered worthy of showing her own face in the photograph, but instead becomes passive and faceless; her humanity erased.
These images struck me powerfully when I first saw them some time around 2011, as they did the rounds on what was then the place to be on social media - Facebook. At the time, I was overwhelmed with a toddler and a baby, and without wishing to or intending to, I felt I had somehow completely disappeared from my own life - or at least, from the life and the identity I had known up until that point. Like the women in the portraits, I was still quite obviously ‘there’, but my purpose was functional, utilitarian; a new life of service. In spite of my presence, I was at the same time invisible - in fact no, I wasn’t invisible, but motherhood somehow seemed to act as a signifier to treat me as if I were invisible, to pretend that I was; to truly objectify me, not in the old fashioned, fuckable way I was used to, but by instead treating me as a comfortable and reliable part of the furniture. All of this was voluntary of course: I had willingly placed the cloth over my own head. And as the women in the Hidden Mother portraits must have done, I felt in the dark, lost, and at times, stifled.