Marie Duval: The methods and politics of attribution

Abstract

Visual journalist and actress Marie Duval (Isabella Emily Louisa Tessier 1847–90) was one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth-century. Her work focused on the humour, attitudes, urbanity and poverty of the types of people she knew, in a period of diversifying leisure activities for working people. Frequently importing the ethics, habits and practices of the theatre into the periodical press, Duval’s work distributed marginalised ideas (such as a woman employing masculine humour, or feminising employment in the print industries), to a wide, eager and heterogenous readership, increasingly rendering these ideas and types of behaviour unremarkable, habitual and quotidian (Grennan, Sabin and Waite 2020: 1–13). This chapter will outline Duval’s achievement as a visual journalist and the ways in which her work continued to be obscured, stolen and erased, through phases of denial, misuse, exclusion and neglect, since the 1880s (Dalziel and Dalziel 1901: 320, Boswell Jnr 1922: 11, Dalziel 1927: 10, Ray 1976, Barr 1986, King, Easley and Morton 2017, Gale NewsVault 2020, British Library Catalogue 2020). It will describe the specific problems that the mechanisms of this obfuscation and erasure continue to create, for attribution of both signed and unsigned work by Duval, most recently due to a lack of attribution in the metadata of digitised collections. The chapter will then consider the range of methods of attribution that the authors employed and developed, in order to classify items in The Marie Duval Archive (Grennan, Sabin and Waite 2015). Referring to methods in diplomatics, connoisseurship and visual stylistics, the chapter will evaluate the authors’ process of collating empirical evidence, commentary, and stylistic analysis, in attributing work to Duval (Cencetti 1939, Munro 1946, Ventrella 2017, Morelli 1880, Bal 2003, Rose 2012, Munsterberg 2009, Meyer 1987, Forceville, El Refaie and Meesters 2013). Examples of these methods and rationales will be interrogated in a small number of comparative case studies of attribution, including a case of misattribution (Lodge 2019: 212–5). The chapter will propose that attribution and the lack of attribution have significant political dimensions, deriving from the exclusion of information from the development of a canon or from the foundational learning tool provided by any agreed condition of current knowledge. For example, over a century and a half, the invisibility of Duval’s work can be accounted for by the repetition of teaching and learning about a canon to which her work has never belonged (Grennan 2018). Finally, the chapter will argue that his political dimension is often gendered, by default. The achievements, innovations, impact and significance of women’s work is diminished, obscured or lost, again and again, through exclusion from the record by lack of attribution. Its present-time status is diminished or erased and history is recurrently distorted.