ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that nineteenth-century discourses on fetishism and Victorian representations of hair had several key properties in common. Like the images of overflowing hair in numerous poems and paintings, talk of fetishism was ‘rampant’, ‘disorderly’ and ‘excessive’, defeating the best Victorian minds which tried to control and contain it.3 Scientific discussion informed by evolutionary thought relegated both superfluous hair and ‘primitive fetishism’ to the distinctly ‘low’ stages of human development, indeed casting both as markers of the ‘polar opposite of the telos of the civilizing process’.4 Like many Victorian representations of female sexuality through the medium of women’s hair, fetishism was ‘repeatedly and consistently characterized as inchoate, erratic, and unprincipled’.5 Like hair, fetishism was conceptualized by the Victorians as strongly attached to ‘the base materiality’ of the object-world.6 And, as I will show, Victorian representations of women’s hair ultimately took part in its fetishization through science, fashion, material culture and painting.
