ABSTRACT
The conventions of the female nude in the history of art, the animality of women in medicine and popular beliefs, are all part of a complex web of social history that Auerbach’s powerful celebration spins over, and it is predicated by her constant slippage between the Alice and the Evelyn Hatch. The discourse of the law, which supposedly sought to prevent harm to young girls but actually sought to control female sexuality, is aptly illustrated in the Offenses Against the Person Act. The photograph became, for Carroll, the contradictory medium to hold the little girl forever young in the looking glass. People can see the photograph as temporal in the sense that it records a specific moment, a split second in the young sitter’s life, yet also as “eternal” in that it is everlasting and not subject to change. But the split between temporality and eternity is not the only contradiction within the photograph.
