Gendering bodies/performing art: dance and literature in early-twentieth-century culture 9780472106165

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction (page 1)
Part 1. Women Who Dance (page 13)
1. Moving Violations: Dance in the London Music Hall, 1800-1910 (page 15)
2. The Dancer and Woman's Place: Maud Allan and Isadora Duncan (page 31)
Part 2. Removing the Dancer from the Dance (page 57)
3. The Symbolist Dancer: The Performance Aesthetics of Isadora Duncan, Arthur Symons, and Edward Gordon Craig (page 59)
4. Oscar Wilde's Salomé: Rewriting the Fatal Woman (page 75)
5. Dance and Gender in Yeat's Early Plays for Dancers (page 87)
Part 3. The Rise of the Author (page 101)
6. The Aesthetic of Control: G. B. Shaw and the Performer (page 103)
7. Usurping High Culture: The Russian Ballet, I (page 119)
Part 4. Performing Modernism (page 135)
8. Disappearing Acts: Ideology and the Performer in T. S. Eliot's Early Criticism (page 137)
9. Massine and Modernism: The Russian Ballet, II (page 155)
Notes (page 175)
Works Cited (page 201)
Index (page 215)

Citation preview

Gendering Bodies/Performing Art

Gendering Bodies/ Performing Art Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture

Amy Koritz

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Ann Arbor

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

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Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1995 | All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper

1998 1997 1996 1995 4 3 2 I A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koritz, Amy, 1955-

Gendering bodies/performing art : dance and literature in early twentiethcentury culture / Amy Koritz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-10616-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—z2oth century—History and criticism. 2. Dance in literature. 3. English literature—i1oth century—History and criticism.

4. English literature—Irish authors—History and criticism. 5. Dance— England—History. 6. Symbolism (Literary movement)—England. I. Title. PR478.D35K67 1995

820.9'355—dc20 95-4350 CIP

GL Gi Pt

UM Press

H2696

NES 466 To my parents:

Helen Garman Koritz and

Seymour B. Koritz

Acknowledgments

For her support and guidance at many stages of this project, I offer my deepest thanks to Linda S. Kauffman. I would also like to thank William Harmon and Fredric Jameson for their generous encouragement, and Molly Anne Rothenberg for her careful reading of the manuscript. Of the many people who have offered comments and suggestions on parts of the manuscript, I am particularly grateful to Nina Auerbach, Margaret

Bockting, Barbara Ching, and Maaja Stewart. For financial support while researching and writing this book I gratefully acknowledge Tulane University Provost James F. Kilroy, a Tulane Committee on Research Summer Fellowship, and an ACLS Fellowship for Recent Recipients of the Ph.D. For her patient and persistent shepherding of the manuscript, |

thank my editor, LeAnn Fields. Sandra Haro’s efficient and goodnatured secretarial support has been indispensable. Most importantly, I

have been sustained during the writing of this book by the joy and affection provided daily by Bob Gaston, Benjamin Koritz Gaston, and Danicl Martin Koritz Gaston. Versions of several chapters of this book have been previously published. I gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to include work that originally appcared in their journals: the Johns Hopkins University Press, for “Moving Violations: Dance in the London Music Hall, 1890-1910,” Theatre Journal (Dec. 1990); Ronald Schleifer, editor of Genre, for “Disappearing Acts: T. S. Eliot’s Early Criticism” (winter 1991); and Modern Drama for “Women Dancing: The Structure of Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers” (Sept. 1989). Illustrations of Maud Allan, Isadora Duncan, and Leonide Massine

appear with the permission of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.

Contents

Introduction J Part 1. Women Who Dance 13

1890-1910 15

1. Moving Violations: Dance in the London Music Hall,

Isadora Duncan 31

2. The Dancer and Woman’s Place: Maud Allan and

Part 2. Removing the Dancer from the Dance 57

Craig 59

3. The Symbolist Dancer: The Performance Aesthetics of Isadora Duncan, Arthur Symons, and Edward Gordon

4. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé: Rewriting the Fatal Woman 75

s. Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers 87

Part 3. The Rise of the Author 101

Performer 103

6. The Aesthetics of Control: G. B. Shaw and the

7. Usurping High Culture: The Russian Ballet, | 119

Part 4. Performing Modernism 135 8. Disappearing Acts: Ideology and the Performer in T. S.

_ Ehot’s Early Criticism 137

9. Massine and Modernism: The Russian Ballet, I 155

Notes 175 Works Cited 201 Index 215 X Contents

Introduction

Most readers who are not dance historians are more likely to know something about the literary figures discussed in this book than about the dancers, with the exception of Isadora Duncan. In our cultural history of the arts, literature has been one of the “victors,” dance one of those half-

forgotten realms of human endeavor good for an occasional striking anecdote or dramatic illustration. Moreover, despite a concerted effort in the last two decades to expand and multiply our narratives of cultural history, we are still likely to assume that those artists whose voices are most heard and accomplishments frequently cited are simply the most deserving of that attention. Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” proposes an alternative to these histories of “cul-

tural treasures” that merely reassert a hegemonic hierarchy of value. Benjamin reminds us that our “documents of civilization” are tainted by the barbarism that erased those unheard voices. This barbarism also infects the history that repeats unquestioningly the value of those docu-

ments, while ignoring the conditions that brought these, and not the products of some other artist or some other art, to their privileged status.

Any study of the relationship between dance and literature that takes Benjamin’s insight seriously, as this one attempts to, must consciously refuse the point of view of literary history in order to make visible the role of dance in shaping, reinforcing, and resisting those developments in aesthetic practice and ideology in which both arts participated. By locating the organizing problem of my study in the realm of dance history— while not writing a history of dance—I hope to provide an analysis of the relationship between dance and literature that reconfigures their relative importance to an understanding of this period in British culture. My scholarly training has been in literature, and I currently teach in

an English department. Given this background, my attempt to treat

2 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art dance together with literature risked its immediate absorption into my home discipline. Moreover, dance as a subject of scrious scholarly inquiry is still marginal to academia in the United States, increasing the pressure to give precedence to the more familiar and intellectually more prestigious discipline of literary studies. Although no doubt the inbred assumptions of a literary scholar have at times contaminated my treatment of dance, one of the first imperatives of this book has been to refuse to treat dance as merely a context for literary criticism. My concern to avoid positioning dancc and the dancer as a reflection of or explanation for events in literary history is motivated as well by my sense that the institutional and intellectual marginalization of dancc is due in part to its perceived “femininity.” In Western culture the professional performance of dance has a long and close association with women, and specifically with the erotic display of the female body. It thus seemed important, when I began this project, not to confine my attention to dance in literature, but to examine dance in its own right. Not, that is, to treat dance as raw material for literature, as subservient to the really important innovations in literary form and content occurring during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centurics. I trace a trajectory of dance history in England, from roughly 1890 to the early 1920s, that was shaped by three major tendencies in aesthetic ideology. The first two of these tendencies were particular to the theater arts: (1) the devaluation of the performer combined with a greater acceptance of women on the stage, and (2) the influence of nonperformative art

forms, such as literature and painting, on the creation and reception of performed art. The third, however, had a much broader application: (3) the valorizing of a separation between artists and the supposedly autonomous, self-enclosed work of art.

In the 1890s, the common assumption of respectable socicty was that theatrical dancing was primarily a form of female crotic display performed by women of questionable moral status. By the 1920s, however, at least some dance forms were accepted as cqual in artistic legitimacy to the most clite forms of music, painting, and litcrature. Primary among these newly elite dance forms were the productions of Diaghilev’s Rus-

sian Ballct. The dramatic success of this company overshadowed that achieved by the carly modern dancers. The early modern danccrs best known in England were Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan, although others belonging in this category, including Loic Fuller and Ruth St.

Introduction 3 Denis, also performed in London. These dancers were inevitably female and frequently solo performers. The success of the Russian Ballet was in part duc to its attenuation of the centrality of the female dancer and the increased status of a male-dominated hicrarchy of creators or “authors” of the ballct production. This is not to say that women did not continue to perform successfully, but that the space that opened up for dancc to emerge as an elite art form came to be defined in a way that excluded most women from its most authoritative positions. As dance acquired greater artistic status, the role of the performer in determining that status lessened—at the very time when a carcer as a performer was beginning to be acceptable for middle-class women. Women, while now able to per-

form in public without losing caste, remained (with few exceptions) merely performers, while the aesthetic value of a performance was more and more likely to depend on its authors’ achievement rather than that of

its executors. I argue that while the definition of dance as an elite art required this separation between the performers and the authors of that art, it stymied the carecrs of female early modern dancers in England. This separation of the performer from the artist was consistent with an increasing tendency to import aesthetic theorics developed in relation to other arts to the arts of the theater; these aesthetic theories denied the centrality of the performer. Dance could benefit from this process if it could increase its artistic legitimacy by association, even on a purcly formal level, with such unquestionably clite forms as literature or the visual arts.2 Further, if well-known literary figures recognized their own aesthetic standards and practices in dance performance, dance stood a greater chance of being acceptcd into the club of clite arts. While formal parallels between literature and dance did indeed emerge in the productions of the Russian Ballet, they were not apparent in those of the early modern danccrs. To the extent that the modern dancers failed to create an art that seemed amenable to the application of these aesthetic criteria,

their dance form was at a disadvantage in its attempt to acquire clite status.

My interest in the importance of literary aesthetic standards to the creation of an clite performed art was rcinforced by the attraction of major literary figures during this period to performed art as a way to reach a broader audience. Yeats and Eliot wished to reach an audience not

accustomed to reading poctry, while Shaw sought to make up for the readers deprived him by his failure to find a publisher for his novels. In the cases of Arthur Symons and George Bernard Shaw the interest in

4 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art performed art was not mercly that of the artist in search of an audience; both writers supported themselves at some point by reviewing various genres of performance. Reviewing played a lesser, but still significant, role in the careers of Wilde, Yeats, and Eliot. In the reviews of Symons and Shaw, and in the essays of Wilde, Yeats, and Eliot, aesthetic criteria derived from literature shaped the evaluation of performed art—and finally, literary aesthetics shaped their own contributions to the theater.

There was, in other words, an active engagement on the part of literary figures with performed art. My argument will be not that this interest alone, or even primarily, was responsible for the trajectory dance

followed in British culture, but that the judgments and aspirations of these figures represented, during a crucial period, a powerful position on

elite performed art. This discourse rejected the centrality of the performer and thus was an attack on the nineteenth-century hegemony of the actor-manager in the theater. The desire to displace the actormanager was shared, however, by Edward Gordon Craig, a theater theorist who had little use for playwrights; the director, not the author, ruled

in his theater. In his disdain for the performer, though, Craig can be grouped with Shaw, Yeats, and Eliot, for whom language was the central

element of theater art. Although in the hands of literary figures, an antiperformer bias was often an assertion of the primacy of an author (in

the narrow sense of the word), it did not necessarily entail granting priority to a written text, as Craig’s adherence to the same position suggests. The argument against the primacy of performers denied them the status of artists, reserving that title for authors, composers, directors, and choreographers. Such a position depended upon a conceptual separation of the artist from the work of art. The separation of the artist from the work of art was in turn a central assumption of the autonomy aesthetic that characterized aestheticism, symbolism, and modernism. The power of this impulse to disavow the intimacy between works of art and their authors (often discussed in terms of the exclusion of “personality” from the work of art) was such as to define the direction of literary aesthetics for a good part of the twentieth century. Under such conditions it would have been surprising if a form of dance that did not embody this separation had attained elite status—as did ballet, a form that adhered to this model. Because of the important role played by the symbolist aesthetic in the relationship between dance and literature during this period, some additional comment on my analysis of its function may be helpful. Sym-

Introduction 5 bolism was a subset of those aesthetic positions that devalued the performer, but it did not for this reason have only a negative impact on the

artistic legitimacy of dance and dancers. From the point of view of dancers and reviewers, in fact, this aesthetic provided a useful language of transcendence that enabled the separation of a dance from the aesthetically suspect materiality of the dancer’s body. This language distanced the performer from the work of art, enabling the conceptual separation previously mentioned to serve two functions at once: the marginalization of the performer and the containment of the female body. Thus Maud Allan could be seen not as a woman displaying her body for pay, but as the translator of some spiritual state into visible form. From the point of view of literary figures such as Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats, the symbolist aesthetic elevated the dancer to an ideal image of the unity of the material and the spiritual. Nonetheless, while Duncan can deploy elements of this aesthetic to articulate her theories of dance with the theater theory of Edward Gordon Craig, and Allan and Wilde can use its terms to mitigate the sexual threat of Salomé, the symbolist aesthetic was a dangerous tool. The price of its power to dissolve the physical into the spiritual, thereby separating art from ordinary life, in practice meant that the woman as dancer was figuratively dispersed between the poles of the material and the spiritual in a binary symbolic system that reproduced in art the gender ideology that relegated women at once to nature and the ideal. The treatment of women within symbolism never acknowledged their humanity. Although most of the literary figures whom I discuss were associated with symbolism or its aesthetic heir, modernism, and although the symbolist aesthetic is central to the relationship I trace between dance and

literary aesthetics, one figure, George Bernard Shaw, is an apparent anomaly. Never a symbolist, always a champion of the political uses of art, Shaw seems out of place in a study that emphasizes the importance of an aesthetic that insists on the separation between art and the material world. Shaw, however, was one of the most vocal and persistent critics of the actor-centered theater and one of the most articulate defenders of

the rights of the author, so that in this important respect he was in agreement with such otherwise ill-matched writers as Yeats and Ehot. Shaw’s treatment of the performer in his drama and music criticism allies

him with these writers, even though in other respects he had little in common with them. The importance of including Shaw among the modernist and proto-

6 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art modernist writers that otherwise represent the literary sphere in this book is a direct result of the methodological principle articulated at the beginning of the introduction. Dance, not literature, provided the organizing problem and conceptual rationale for my project. As theorists of literary history and feminist historiography have long understood, the perspective from which one approaches a subject affects how one defines its parameters and the internal structure of events and relationships that seem obviously important.* Because I’ve approached these literary figures from the point of view of events in dance history, those qualities and relationships that have defined their places in conventional literary histories of the period must be reconfigured. In other words, in the context of these dance events, connections among writers become significant that in other contexts would not be important, or even noticed. Once the focusing questions of a study include dance, not just literature, literary history

looks different. Likewise, however, it must be granted that once the literary is presumed to have a significant relationship to dance, the usually accepted trajectory of that art’s history changes as well. Thus, although a limited span of dance history has served to define the parameters of this study, it is not intended as a history of dance. Both dance and literature take new shapes when looked at from outside of their disciplinary confines. Elements of aesthetic ideology were not the only factors influencing the trajectory of the dance events I trace. Ideologies of gender, as already seen in connection with symbolism, and class were inextricable from developments in aesthetics and thus must be considered alongside them. Dancers were always positioned, evaluated, and discursively constructed by themselves and critics through the deployment of available ideologies of gender and class. Although gender ideologies provide my focal point for analyzing this positioning—1in reviews, aesthetic theory, and literary texts—in parts 1 and 2, class ideologies significantly affected the aspira-

tions and perception of women dancers. The working-class status of most dancers in the 1890s indicates the cultural position of their performances as entertainment rather than art, as well as the dancers’ availability as sexual objects for middle- and upper-class male spectators. This

relationship between dance and the female body militated against its aesthetic legitimacy. In contrast, when middle-class women began.to earn their livings as dancers, they rejected the role of erotic display in their performances, thus bringing with them to dance an ideology of woman’s nature and woman’s place that conflicted with the dominant

Introduction 7 view of women on the stage. Middle-class gender ideology became the foundation for conceptualizing dance as a serious art form created and performed by women. Middle-class gender ideology also could serve other purposes. Shaw preferred middle-class actresses because they were more amenable to his attempts to subordinate the performer to the author’s text and less likely to use sex appeal to upstage an author. As will be apparent throughout this book, the same ideology can serve multiple functions and be deployed by different interests for different, even con- | flicting, ends. The attenuation of the erotic component in women’s public performances enabled by a middle-class gender ideology served the needs of

both early modern dancers and of those theater artists who felt their predominance threatened by the power of sexuality on the stage. For literary figures such as Yeats and Eliot, however, the middle class, male or female, threatened to reduce aesthetic taste to the level of mass culture. In the chapters devoted to these writers, then, the relation between dance and class ideology must be reconfigured; the most valued forms of dance become those associated with an aristocracy. Likewise, in the reception of the Russian Ballet, the problem of female sexual display plays a less dominant role than the ability of their performances to fulfill the criteria of a socially as well as aesthetically elite art. By the final two chapters of the book, class overshadows gender as a category of analysis. This shift in emphasis reflects two important changes in the historical situation: the continued growth of mass culture and the demise of the militant suffrage movement. The muting of militant feminism by the latter event lessened the threat posed by “public” women, making “gender-appropriate” behavior a less compelling criterion for judging performances. The increasing ability of mass entertainment—most notably film—to monopolize the time and money of potential audiences mobilized the modernists to resist what they perceived to be a commodification of art. To this end they alternately attempted to appropriate the forms of mass culture for their own ends or rejected them outright in favor of those dictated by “tradition” or an aristocracy of taste. As may be evident by now, the relationship between literature and dance this book attempts to trace is complex and multileveled. The same or analogous ideological structures are deployed from different contexts to serve differing aesthetic and social agendas. Such apparently incom-

patible artists as Shaw and Yeats or Duncan and Symons turn out to inhabit some of the same territory when it comes to their treatment of

8 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art dance and danccrs. At the same time, very scldom do any of the major literary figures I discuss have any direct connection with cqually major figures in the world of dance. The connections between the two spheres can for the most part only be traced on the level of aesthetic, class, or gender ideology. Organizing the material of such a study in a coherent manner has been a challenge. Since the rationale behind several of my structural decisions may not be apparent at first glancc, some comment on this topic may be helpful.

The first part of the book is devoted to the reception of female dancers in British culture prior to the arrival of the Russian Ballet. Besides delineating the institutional restraints on where and for whom these women could dance, this section examines the opportunitics and obstacles various idcological positions prescnted for dance and dancers. Dance, as any other cultural product, functions as a symbolic ficld in which to display, examine, and (symbolically) resolve the tensions, conflicts, and contradictions a socicty confronts in other realms of activity. Of obvious relevance here is the challenge posed to the separate-spheres ideology by the incursion of suffragists into the public space of politics. The disruption of the dominant gendcr idcology by the suffrage movement (and in gencral the incursion of women into the public realm in search of work) motivated representations of women that contained or reversed this challenge to the status quo. At the same timc, however, the challenge of the New Woman and the suffragist opencd a space for the female performer that Allan and Duncan could capitalize on. The reception of Allan and Duncan by the British press delineates the strategies by which their performances could be considered art, or not. The writings of the dancers themselves, however, indicate how they located themselves within the aesthetic discourse of their time. Duncan in particular gave much thought to the philosophical bases of her dance. Thus part 2, while devoted otherwise to the use of dance in the literary texts of Wilde and Ycats, begins with a chapter that positions Duncan’s theoretical writings in relation to two important exponents of symbolism in literature and theater art. The ways in which Duncan could and could not align her theories with those of Arthur Symons and Edward Gordon Craig cxpose the limitations of symbolism for a woman danccr. Even when a case can be madc for symbolism as a useful way of subverting the

sexualization of the female performer, as is arguably truc of Wildc’s Salomé, the power of ideological pressures to the contrary from outside the acsthetic realm makes this strategy in fact ineffectual. The centrality

Introduction 9 of the dancer as an image for and in the symbolist aesthctic docs not imply its usefulness as a vehicle for furthering the aesthetic status of actual dancers. Ycats’s plays for dancers are rather predicated on an abso-

lute subordination of the dancer to the written text—which thus becomes the exclusive focus of the chapter on him—while on the level of gender ideology they reenact women’s elision from the human realm, already mentioned as typical of the symbolist treatment of women.

Part 3 focuses on the enabling conditions for the success of the prewar London seasons of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. Gcorge Bernard Shaw’s commitment to the idea of theater art as a unificd whole governed by its dramatic clement coincided with Fokine’s application of the same principle to ballct. For Shaw, this unity was exemplified by the Wagnerian music-drama that, unlike traditional opera, dissolved the distinction between dramatic (plot-oriented) music and “absolute” or “decorative” music. Likewise Fokine insisted that all the dancing in a ballet have a plot function. Shaw’s music and drama criticism, however, was written more than ten years before the arrival of Diaghilev and Fokine. Its argument for a performed art unificd by its dramatic element served the needs of a playwright in an actor-dominated theater, not the future practice of an unknown ballet choreographer. Nevertheless, Shaw’s treatment of dance in his music criticism consistently called for the application of aesthetic principles to that art that Fokine would later articulate independently. In addition, Shaw’s criticism would have reinforced the Russian Ballet’s rejection of the dominance of the star performer over the work of art as a whole. Shaw, in other words, was in the 1880s and 1890s an articulate voice for aesthetic criteria later applicd to the Russian Ballet. The success of these first seasons, however, did not rest on purely acsthetic factors. Diaghilev’s ability to market his company as elite art, while injecting a heavy dose of sensational exoticism into his programs, enabled him to draw a large audience. These first seasons in fact appealed to the social elite more than to artistic or intellectual circles. It wasn’t until Massine replaced Fokine as the major choreographer of the Russian

Ballet after the war and adoptcd a style that embodied a rejection of narrative predominance in favor of visual complexity that those artists now canonized as modernists began to pay attention to ballet. Whereas part 3 juxtaposes Shaw’s carlier proclamations on performed art and the place of the performer within the whole of the work with a considcration of the actual reception of the prewar Russian Ballct in London, part 4 focuses on the relation between literary modernism

10 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art and ballet. The relation occurred on the level of aesthetic ideology, but it

also emerges in social and political concerns such as the commercial status of art and proper connection between class and art. T. S. Eliot wished to find a way to create a popular poetic drama with which to counteract the ravages of mass culture on public taste and vacillated between music hall and ballet as the best modcl to follow. His attraction to ballet was due to his perception of the impersonality of the performers and their subordination to an aesthetic tradition. In this chapter, as in the chapter on Yeats, the focus is on texts rather than performances, since these writers’ critical positions, not the relation between these positions and actual performances, are at issue.

By the end of the period I cover, it was ballet that defined what constituted dance as an art form for British culture. The final chapter examines how Massine’s ballets fulfilled modernist aesthetic criteria and the implications of these criteria for his ballets’ relation to the audience as well as to the performer. The categorization of Massine’s ballets as modern, if not modernist, was a function of their style, but also of structural qualities that reaffirmed the separation of the work of art from its author and the subordination of the performer to the demands of the work of art as a whole. As in all end points, there is a degree of arbitrariness in this book’s stopping where it does. Why, one might ask, end with Massine, when he was followed by the equally interesting and modernist choreographers

Nijinska and Balanchine? Why, in fact, end with the Russian Ballet, when by the late twenties or carly thirties native British ballet companies were being launched? The obvious answer to such questions is that this project is predicated on a different task, that of tracing the sources and

impact of specific aesthetic values and conceptual frameworks on the reception and production of dance 1n rclation to literature. The development of dance in England after these values and frameworks have had

their effect is, to my mind, a different book. Further, the analysis ] present docs not depend for its usefulness on its being predictive, in any straightforward sense, of what happened beyond thc historical parameters of this study. This is not the same as accepting its irrelevance outside those paramcters. Change happens, and not necessarily predictably, but also not in a vacuum. One final comment on the place of gender in the concluding section of the book is in order, since the predominance given to this category in my title is to a certain extent belied by its treatment as one among othcr

Introduction II equally important factors in these two chapters. The hegemony of an author-centered (perhaps more accurately termed director- or “creator”centered) performance practice and its supporting aesthetic ideology, illustrated by the success of the Russian Ballet, was also, finally, the hegemony of a male-dominated practice. Among other factors, the absence of a strong challenge to the Russian Ballet by women dancers and choreographers outside the classical tradition muted the salience of gender issues in the production and reception of the postwar seasons. The relation between dance and female, or male, sexuality became merely one of a number of intertwined factors that concerned reviewers. This is not to say that women never held positions of authority in the Russian Ballet— the case of Bronistawa Nyinska (the choreographer who replaced Massine) shows otherwise. In general, however, the trajectory of dance in England from the dominance of erotic display in the 1890s, through the | early-twenticth-century productions of middle-class women dancers, to the final predominance of the Russian Ballet in the teens and twenties, 1s

a trajectory that effected the submersion of the question of gender in dance.

The severing of the association between dance and the female body was arguably necessary for dance to be taken at all seriously as an art in

British culture. The effect of this historical circumstance on the final chapters of this book has been the reduction of the centrality of gender as a category of analysis. That reviewers, dancers, and literary figures do not address questions of gender with the regularity found in earlier com-

mentary does not, of course, imply their irrelevance. Discussions of gender ideology werc integrated into a constellation of factors, both aesthetic and otherwise, that defined the terrain on which Eliot’s performance aesthetics and Massine’s ballets were composed and received.

That gender issues at times disappear in the pursuit of other factors shaping the relation between literary modernism and ballet reflects my perception of the relative power of such other issues as the commodification of art and the homogenization of regional cultures in defining the ideology and practice of the artists I examine.

Part 1

Women Who Dance

1

Moving Violations: Dance in the London Music Hall, 1890-1910

Theatrical dancing—public, paid dance performance—underwent a dramatic change in cultural status in the twenticth century. Despite the brief flourishing of Romantic ballet in the first half of the nineteenth century, no form of dance had held the kind of privileged position granted other performed arts—music, opera, drama—in Westcrn culture; however, with the arrival of the Russian Ballet and the development of modern dance, this devaluation of dance as an art form was to end. Before addressing the process that gave rise to this shift in status, it is necessary to understand the conditions governing theatrical dancing just prior to this development, and to map out the cultural space that new, or revalued, forms of dance would have to appropriate, redefine, or reject. The tendency to focus scholarly attention on the most “successful,” visible, or

elite practices of an art form not only turns cultural history into, as Walter Benjamin put it, a history of the victors, but also discounts the role played by a prior set of historical conditions in the emergence of new art forms. My aim in this chapter is dual: first, to recover aspects of dance performance usually discounted or ignored by traditional dance histories; and, second, to lay the groundwork for an understanding of elite forms of dance that acknowledges their participation in the larger arena of dance performance and aesthetic discourse in Western culture.

The focus of this chapter will be the period from 1890 to approximately 1910, immediately prior to the spectacular rise in the cultural status of dancc. It is a period in which, in England at any rate, dance— even classical ballet—was consigned to the music hall and the pantomime. What were the performers who danced in these performances doing? How did the technology of the theater, the format of the programming, the expectations of the audicnce shape the content and cul[5

16 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art tural meaning of dance performance? These are the questions I will ad-

dress directly. But finally, behind and beyond the answers to these questions, it is important to recognize that recovering the history of theatrical dance in our culture is largely to recover a history of women. Theater dance in London during the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century was seldom an autonomous art form. Even the the-

aters that made ballet their main attraction, the Empire and the Alhambra, also included other kinds of performance in their programs. Not only was dance often intermingled with song and dramatic routines, but boundaries between different genres of dancing were often tenuous and frequently transgressed. There were, however, differences in the structure and casting of performances, and in the activities assigned to dancers, that justify distinguishing among types of dancers and dance performances. These distinctions rest on the material and technical conditions governing late-nineteenth-century entertainment, on the one hand, and on the differ-

ing ideological assumptions, commitments, aspirations, and struggles manifested in them, on the other. Since neither technology nor ideology are static or unitary in a culture, neither are the types of performances associated with specific manifestations of them, and my own classification must also be considered fluid and internally diverse. Of the dance performances in London during this period, I focus on

the three most common types of theatrical dancing: (1) the music hall

turn, (2) the semiautonomous ballet, that is, an extended work with thematic or narrative integrity that nonetheless shares the program with other kinds of performance, and (3) the dance element in spectacular productions such as the Christmas pantomimes. A wide range of dance genres might occur in each of these categories—even pieces billed as ballet often included step dancing, hornpipes, and other popular dance forms. For example, when Adeline Genée, the classically trained prima ballerina of the Empire Theatre, went on tour in 1908, she was replaced by Topsy Sinden, trained in step and skirt dancing (Guest, Empire 72). The importance and function of dance within a performance also varied greatly; some music hall turns were entirely devoted to dance, others combined dance and song, while in others dance held a marginal position. Finally, the actual content of the dance could range from vigorous activity (of greater or lesser technical proficiency) to the practically static display typical of pantomime transformation scenes. These three categories indicate different contexts in which dance performances occurred but specify neither their form nor content. Both

Moving Violations 17 form and content were shaped, however, by the conventions and material constraints governing each context. For example, the music hall turn could not use masses of dancers to create the kinds of scenic effects that

would have been expected in a production at the Empire or the Alhambra. Likewise, the kind and degree of movement in such mass productions was constrained by limitations in the training and skill of the corps de ballet (not to mention the weight and elaborateness of their costumes), while in the pantomime productions at Drury Lane, the capacity of stage technology to produce effects was as likely as the performers’ talents to determine a production’s content (Booth, Spectacular Theatre 26). Each category, however, manifests specific functions of dance in performances of this period in a particularly clear manner. My emphasis will be first on the way dance structured and was structured by a given performance, and then on the connections between these structures and the society’s ideologies, especially gender ideologies. ! Here is the 1912 estimate of one spectacularly successful music hall song-and-dance number. This passage introduces the chapter devoted to 1892 in R. H. Gretton’s A Modern History of the English People:

The year in which “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” overran the streets of our towns may well give pause to the observer of English habits. . . . It was such an affront to English respectability as had never yet been administered, not only because it flaunted a vision of a high-kicking dancer on a music-hall stage, but because the very sound of the tune was jeering, as well as ludicrous. The sudden absurd jolt of its high note became a grin at the gait and carriage of a respectable man... . It had no individual interest whatever; it was the voice of the crowd asserting itself. (305)

Lottie Collins made herself a star with a rendition of “Ta-ra-raboom-de-ay” that combined it with what seemed to viewers a wildly energetic and sexually risqué dance—the “absurd jolt” refers to the convergence of the “boom” of the chorus with a sudden high kick. But the placement of the dance in the turn, as well as its character, contributed to its success. Since in the early music halls and their precursors, audience participation was common during the choruses of songs, this place was already marked as a place of licensed transgression of the boundaries, firmly established in most late-nineteenth-century theaters, between the audience and the performer, and thus also a place where the audience

18 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art could move from being passive spectators to being active participants in their entertainment. According to Peter Bailey, “The point in any performance at which the audience asserted its presence came with the chorus singing. Then the songs of the music hall would be reclaimed as common property” (153). This is precisely the element in the popular response to

Lottie Collins that Gretton objects to—“it was the voice of the mass asserting itself.” And the dance she performed along with the nonsense words of the chorus added one further transgressive element to a situation already unstable. In some respects, Collins’s use of the dance was not at all unusual, for its use to punctuate a performance was common; a dance conventionally provided closure, for example, to a song or a scene in burlesque.

Michael Booth traces the practice to the 1840s and 1850s, quoting a performer of the period who claimed that “it was a novel thing at that time to introduce a dance after a song or duet, and this one became the rage. .. . Encore followed encore every night, and from that time till now no singing has been complete in a burlesque without a dance to follow” (Pantomimes 39). These dances often were “breakdowns,” defined by Booth as “a kind of extraordinarily lively shuffle, with vigorous and often grotesque arm and body movements” (39). Thus even in the

tenor of her movements, Lottie Collins was not without precedent. However, in Lottie Collins’s performance dancing did not provide clo-

sure (or not only) but was interspersed with singing as an interlude between the verses and punctuation for the words of the chorus. And the

kinds of movements that made up her dance struck her audiences as unconventional. Several other descriptions make the content of her performance somewhat clearer than Gretton’s. It should be noted that those authors most invested in upholding the status of dance as a high art (a status by no means assured at the time) are most likely to condemn or dismiss Lottie Collins. George Bernard Shaw saw Lottie Collins after having experienced the performance of at least one of her imitators. In comparing the two renditions, he emphasizes Collins’s restraint rather than her abandon, a position diametrically opposed to that insisted on in other descriptions:

I took an opportunity the other night of acquainting myself with Miss Collins’s interpretation of Ta-ra-ra, etc. It is a most instructive example of the value of artistic method in music-hall singing, and may be contrasted by students with Violette’s crude treatment of the

Moving Violations 19 same song. Violette’s forced and screaming self-abandonment is a complete failure: Miss Collins’s perfect self-possession and calculated economy of effort carry her audience away. She takes the song at an exceedingly restrained tempo, and gets her effect of entrain by marking the measure very pointedly and emphatically, and articulating her words with ringing brilliancy and with immense assurance

of manner. The dance refrain, with its three low kicks on “Tara-ra” and its high kick on “Boom” (with grosse caisse ad lib.), is the

simplest thing imaginable, and is taken in even a more deliberate tempo than the preceding verse. (Music 2:95)

Shaw’s emphasis on her restraint was not characteristic. Ernest Short and Arthur Compton-Rickett’s description, although a memoir rather than a contemporary account, shares with other descriptions an emphasis on the violence of her performance. Collins, in their account, “burst suddenly into a frenzied dance, and, assisted by a big drum and a foam of lace petticoat, roused music-hall audiences to an excitement even wilder than that on the other side of the footlights” (199). They continue their description as follows: Lottie began with diffidence, her trembling voice being emphasized by nervous little gestures with her handkerchief. Then she put her hands on her hips, below the waspish waist of the period, and went crazy, along with an intoxicated orchestra, the music mingling, as it were, with the swirl of the maddened petticoats and the nip of that scarlet-clad limb. The furor which “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” created depended upon the conjunction of song and singer. Either was of small value apart; together they were irresistible. (200) The importance critics placed on the inseparability of Collins’s performance from the success of the song is significant and will be addressed later. What I wish to emphasize about the preceding description first, however, is the nonjudgmental enthusiasm of its tone. The authors were

writing a history of entertainment, not of dance, and had none of the investment dance historians display in distinguishing “art” dance from “lower” forms. Thus, dance historians writing in the early part of this century will corroborate their description of her movements, but judge her artistic merit more harshly. Margaret and Troy Kinncy, in a chapter of their dance history called “The Ballet in Its Dark Age,” associate her

20 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art performance with the “morbid contortions” found in the Montmartre dance halls of Paris: Enter Lottie Collins, she of “ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” To high-kicking and contortion, and the Skirt Dance vogue of the moment, she added action so violent that it seemed a menace to life itself. The combination of attractions was irresistible; Europe and America made her rich. Her master stroke was bending back until her body was horizontal, and violently straightening up to emphasise the “boom” of her song. For no less than a dancer she was a singer! The two talents were employed together. And hordes of little plagiarists of her act, as of every other “hit,” brought delight to the many and despair to the few. (230) Finally, J. E. Crawford Flitch provides a less snide, if equally skeptical, account in his 1912 book, Modern Dancers and Dancing:

Lottie Collins burst upon London just as a dull theatrical season was drawing to a close, and for several years she held the audiences at the Gaiety and Palace Theatre in the hollow of her hand. The rendering of the Cancan on an English stage was a notable event, but Lottie Collins had the invaluable instinct of knowing how far to go without ever once overstepping the border-line of propriety. In spite of the storms of protest which it raised in certain quarters, her dance was never even in its wildest moments very shocking. The extraor-

dinary jerks of her body, her sudden and startling high kicks, her frantic pirouettes, were more astonishing than indecorous; while the

spirit in which they were executed and the utter disregard of the sense of rhythm was a revelation to the English Public, which was held spell-bound. (96-97)

These latter two accounts exhibit a disdain for the English public that both suggests, and attempts to dismiss, the genuine enthusiasm of Lottie Collins’s audiences.? Fhat their response was exploited in particularly garish ways, such as a sixty-foot rendition of the famous kick done in fireworks at the Crystal Palace (Short 201-2), nonetheless indicates her ability to provide a meaningful image for her public. But what this image

might have meant is less clear, especially when we consider that the moment of her performance chosen for public representation was the

Moving Violations 21 most violent and sexually immodest, the least “ladylike.” In this image the fin-de-siécle stereotype of the fatal woman, where violence verging on death intermingles with the threat and attraction of female sexuality, also expresses the perceived danger to the bourgeoisie posed by workingclass culture. The association of high kicks with the cancan, with its French and thus decadent connotations, reinforces the sexual message conveyed by her dance, while the chorus, dance, and audience response together come to epitomize the violence and vulgarity of the working class in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. What Gretton interpreted as a lowerclass attack on “respectability” is inextricable from the frightening and powerful attraction middle-class men attributed to working-class female sexuality (Dykstra 357). Speculation on the source of the song suggests an additional reason for the sexual attraction she represented to some—Flitch traces its origin to “an Algerian danse du ventre” (belly-dance) or the “barbaric orgies of Central Africa” (96), and Short and Compton-Rickett call it a “mock coon song” written by a London musician (200). Her dance represented a

foreign and exotic use of the female body that large numbers of her audience found invigorating, exciting, and perhaps finally reassuring. Reassuring because the dance seemed to have its effect in part through the

sharp contrast Collins developed between the verses of the song on the one hand, and the chorus and dance sections on the other. This structure

isolates the strict order, control, and demure delivery of the verses, which were also coherent English words, from the wild, seemingly uncontrolled movements and incoherent nonsense syllables of the chorus. The representation of a barbaric, bestial female—outside of language, reason, and restraint—is here safely recovered for civilization, brought under the control of the song and structure of the performance. In this anxious game of approach-avoidance, the underside of “female nature” is domesticated for mass consumption. If this is an accurate reading, the dance of Lottie Collins was understandably attacked by writers who wished dance to be taken seriously as high art. Failing the boldness and imagination required by Shaw’s appropriation of artistic restraint and control for Lottie Collins—dqualities the champions of the aesthetic value of dance wished to attach more strongly to that art—they condemn her performance for its failure to display these characteristics. To them, her presentation of the female body seemed to represent the dance in its least spiritual form, as the spontaneous motion of unreasoning nature, exacerbated by its explicit opposition to the

22 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art quict and controlled performance of the song’s verses. In the words of drama critic Clement Scott: “Bang gocs the drum and the quiet, simplclooking, nervous figure is changed into a bacchanalian fury” (qtd. in Flitch 97).

The fear of women’s unrestrained and alicn sexuality exorcised in this manncr constitutes only one possible facct of her popularity. At Icast two other elements influenced her reception, both of which illustrate more general characteristics of music hall performances. The first is the importance of the individual performer to the popularity of the material performed. The consensus among commentators on the importance of the specific conjunction of Lottie Collins and “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dc-ay” for the success of the turn defines the performance as an individual, autonomous act, the untransferable posscssion of a single person. Since people

went to the music hall to see their favorites perform, not to hear a particular song or sce a play, Lottic Collins could become a star because she could integrate her person with her performance. The value of the

latter depended on the presence of the former.* The incorporation of skillful or unique dancing into a performance might thus be understood as a strategy for tying that performance more closcly to the individual performer, to the end of increasing job sccurity and wagcs. The second significant characteristic of music hall performancc |] have already touched on briefly; it 1s the rapport bctwcen the audicnce and the performer. Both Bailey and Vicinus link the growth of the music halls to an increased distance between the two, culminating in modern

mass entcrtainment.4 Audiences became less participatory, and performers no longer mingled with them after thcir turns. Changes in the architecture of the halls and the working conditions of the performers helped solidify this distance. The introduction of a formal stage, fixed seating, the removal of refreshments from the housc, and the increased size of the halls helped shape audience bchavior toward a more restrained and passive norm, while the turn system, under which performers played at several halls a night, forced an efficient and disciplined use of time that

made informal interaction with the audicnce impossible. Since Lottic Collins was playing at largc West End music halls such as the Palace and the Gaicty, the rapport she clearly managcd to establish with her audience

was in tension with both the physical attributes of the theater and the pressure of the management to create a docile mass audience and an aura of respectability for the music hall. Lottic Collins’s dance functioned to create both a signature for her

Moving Violations 23 and a space of license—intersecting both class and gender divisions— within the structure of her turn. In the second category of dance performancc, semiautonomous or extended productions billed as ballets, dancing was less likely to fulfill either of these functions consistently, though the ballct also had its star performers, who were singled out, like the music hall stars, for the “personality” they brought to their technical proficiency (Perugini 283; Beerbohm, “Note” 234). In addition, the conventions governing gender in ballet tended to maintain strict divisions between gendcr roles, despite pervasive transvestism, rather than to challenge them. Ballet performance, as opposed to choreography, has traditionally been dominated by women, even after the examples of Mikhail Mordkin (who partnered Pavlova) and Nyinsky helped alter the generally contemptuous English attitude toward male ballet dancers (Flitch 167-68; Perugini 320). In the late-ninetcenth-century ballet, the male counterpart to the prima ballerina was usually played in travesty by another female dancer known as the “principal boy.”> Character parts, on the other hand, were considered appropriate for men. In an 1884 production of Coppelia, for example, Swanilda’s swectheart was played in travesty, while the male dancer who portrayed the old toy-maker Coppelius was praised in the Era precisely for his ability to effectively dissociate his performance from ballet: “For that horrid, painted epicene thing, the male ballet dancer, we entertain nothing but disgust; but there is nothing offensive about Mr. Warde, who, indeed, shows pantomime talent of no mean order” (gtd. in Guest, Empire 17). Adeline Genéc, prima ballerina at the Empire from 1897 to 1907, was seldom partnered by men during this

time. The reason given for this convention by the theatcr’s manager, George Edwardes, was that “every man in the audience is her partner” (Guest, Genée 50).° By casting women in the parts where the male spectator would, in imagination, cast himself, the management insures that no potential competitor will interfere with his fantasy of possession. The

“principal boy,” meanwhile, has become in part an cmpty counter, a token holding the place for the spectator without usurping any of his pleasure; in this respect she gives up her gender without taking on his own. But the costume typical of this role made no attempt to hide the actual sex of the dancer; rather it was emphasized by her tights and corsct, the male gender of her role being indicated mainly by her lack of

skirts. Thus the woman playing this part takes on the double role of nonthreatening substitute for the male spectator and object of crotic

24 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art display in her own right, the combined effect of which 1s to reinforce the cultural position of dance as an eroticized female space catering to malc visual pleasure.’ Meanwhile, the exclusion of malc dancers from the romantic narrative of the ballet was also their exclusion from classical technique. English male performers closely associated with ballet productions, such as Fred Farren, were often not trained in ballet techniquc, and Guest notes that when Farren took over from Katti Lanner as the chorcographer for

the Empire, Genée had to choreograph her own dances—although her uncle reccived credit for them on the program (Genée 72). But the lack of adequate training in classical technique for English dancers was a con-

stant complaint. The prima ballerinas were always forcigners, and although backstage discipline was strict, members of the corps de ballet were not required to attend classes or do pointe work (Guest, Empire 38). This stratification in skill further isolated classical ballet in the structure

of a piecc—not only was it primarily the province of women, but of specifically forcign women. Those moments devoted most purely to ballet dancing were the solos performed by the prima ballcrina, with the corps de ballet forming at best an ornate sctting for her. The isolation of the ballerina as an idealized romantic object for a male spectator is thus reinforced by the structure of the English ballet

performance and company, which is in turn conditioned by the raw materials available on the English market. Mcmbers of the corps de ballet, or ballet girls, were mostly from working-class or theatrical familics, and even when they were apprenticed to the theater as children and offered free lessons, they were not forced to learn much technique. Ballet

girls were semiskilled workers with limited opportunitics for professional advancement, since English dancers did not become prima ballerinas. In Guest’s estimate, their wages varied from twelve to twentyfive pounds per month, depending on skill and looks (Genée 26; Empire 37-38), and Booth gives the wages of a member of the ballet at Drury Lane in 1892 as “between 10s and 35s a weck, with an average of 30s, depending on whether she appeared in the first, second, or third row” (Spectacular Theatre 85). In contrast, when Genéc first danced at the Empire in 1897 she received twenty pounds per week (Genée 27), and a top solo dancer at Drury Lane was paid between thirty and fifty pounds per weck (Booth, Spectacular Theatre 85), figures commensurate with those commandcd by the bettcr music hall stars (Vicinus, Industrial Muse 256).

Moving Violations 25 At one of those rare occasions when Genée was partnered by a male dancer, he received only five pounds per week, making him equal in worth to the better-paid members of the corps (Guest, Empire 61). The economic hierarchy of the company, as would be expected, mirrors the structure of the production—the highest paid member receiving the most prominent position in the performance—with the exception, however, of the male lead, whose salary rather reflects his voluntary feminization, and of course the power of the ideology that defined ballet dancing as an exclusively feminine genre.

Since the corps de ballet was not technically capable of doing much in the way of dancing, their function lay elsewhere, and this was predominately as vehicles for scenic effects—mass groupings and processions, frequently in the service of feminine display. Augustus Harris’s Drury Lane pantomimes might include one hundred dancers

and as many morc extras who were drilled to march in formation (Booth, Spectacular Theatre 80). The sheer mass of female presence on

the stage, in combination with the size of the theater, dissolved the salience of any individual woman for most of the audience, while exhibiting women as a group to be undifferentiated, interchangeable, and well-disciplined female bodies. In his 1912 novel Carnival, Compton Mackenzie describes his heroine’s participation in one such production.

Here the opportunity for displaying women’s bodics seemed relinquished in favor of spectacular costuming and lighting “designed not to display individual figures, but to achieve broad effects of colour and ingenuity,” with the consequence of subordinating the female body to technology and decor. Straight lines were esteemed above dancing, straight lines of French-

men or Spaniards in the Procession of Nations, straight lines of Lowestoft or Dresden in the Procession of Porcelain, straight lines of Tortoise-shell Butterflies or Crimson-underwing Moths in the Pro-

cession of Insects. Jenny’s gay deep eyes were obscured by tricoloured flags or the spout of a teapot or the disproportionate anten-

nae of a butterfly. There was no individual grace of movement in swinging down the stage in the middle of a long line of undistinguished girls. If the audience applauded, they applauded a shaft of vivid colour, no more enthusiastically than they would of clapped an elaborate arrangement of limelight. (121)

26 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art But the fascination with scenic effect was not necessarily incompatible with feminine display, as is evidenced by Arnold Bennett’s description of the prima ballerina of Alaska (1898): Swaying incorporeal, as it were within a fluent dazzling envelope of

endless drapery, she revealed to them new and more disturbing visions of beauty in the union of colour and motion. She hid herself in a labyrinth of curves which was also a tremor of strange tints, a

tantalizing veil, a mist of iridescent light. Gradually her form emerged from the riddlc, triumphant, provocative, and for an instant she rested like an incredible living jewcl in the decp gloom of the stage. (Qtd. in Gucst, Empire 53) Here the dancer is both the vehicle for an abstract beauty to which her physical form is irrelevant, and the enticing scxualized woman made safe for the male spectator by her altcrnating submersion in and transformation into art. What such spectacular productions do with the female body amounts to a manipulation of its form, to achieve which requires its subordination to various technical clements. Booth’s observation that advances in lighting technology allowing illumination of the morc distant parts of the stage

“enabled managers to employ large groups of attractive young women attired . . . as extensions of the scenery” reinforces this view (Spectacular Theatre 25). The kind of display represented by the dance in these produc-

tions was twofold, then, both feminine and formal—female body and a “dazzling envelope of endless drapery,” a mass of women in tights and straight lines. The work of feminist film criticism on the relation between narrative flow and feminine display provides some insight into the cultural significance of the structure of these productions, especially the relative unimportancc of plot. As Laura Mulvcy has pointed out, erotic contemplation works against narrative continuity; in mainstream narrative cinema the visual presence of a woman “tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (19). The less emphasis placed on plot, the more opportunities for crotic contemplation. The exclusion of narrative, however, was itsclf determined by licensing regulations that denicd music halls the right to present narrative theater. In this way a sct of historical conditions, with their own legal and cconomic rationales, shaped a perfor-

Moving Violations 27 mance structure that in turn reinforced a particular ideological message about the relationship between dance and feminine display.? Onc further consequence of this privileging of display over narrative was to permit

the exhibition of female bodies without reference to any particular woman, that is, without injecting into the pleasure of contemplation any concern for the subjectivity implicd by presenting a woman as a charac-

ter. But the extreme subordination of the individual woman to scenic spectacle in the corps de ballet also depended on the physical control and structuring of her body by technology. In its most extreme form this technological manipulation of female

bodies required their absolute passivity, and at this point dance disappeared from the performance. The pantomime transformation scene exemplificd this extreme. The transformation scene, a stock element in pantomime productions from about the 1830s, consisted of the gradual revelation of an idcal otherworld inhabited by fairies, nymphs, and angels, arranged in an appropriately glittcring setting. The following description from a late-nineteenth-century memoir provides the audience's perspective on the event: All will recall in some elaborate transformation scene how quietly and gradually it evolved. First the “gauzes” lift slowly one behind the other. . . giving glimpses of “the Realms of Bliss,” seen beyond in a tantalising fashion. Then is revealed a kind of half-glorified

country, clouds and banks, evidently concealing much. ... Now some of the banks begin to part slowly, showing realms of light, with a few divine beings—fairies—rising slowly here and there. More breaks beyond and fairies rising, with a pyramid of these ladies

beginning to mount slowly in the centre. . . . In some of the more daring efforts, the “femmes suspendues” scem to float in the air or rest on the frail support of sprays or branches of trees. While, finally,

perhaps, at the back of all, the most glorious paradise of all will open, revealing the pure empyrean itself, and some fair spirit aloft in a cloud among the stars, the apex of all. (Qtd. in Booth, Spectacular Theatre 80-81) Accounts of the expericnce of the fairics and “femmes suspenducs,”

however, provide a sobering picture of these ethercal beings. The 1mmense distance between the material conditions under which these women workcd and the effect of transcendent spirituality they were paid

28 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art to evoke presents only the most extreme manifestation of that conjunction of the spectator’s pleasure with stage technology to structure the female body in ballct. As the following descriptions from the latter half of the nineteenth century illustrate, from the point of view of the spectacle the individual woman must be suppressed and shaped by the demands of an effect:

The transformation-scene—an ingenious picce of cruelty introduced some ten or fifteen years ago—a pleasure to the audicnce, but death

to the ballet. The poor, pale girl is swung up to terrific heights, imprisoned in and upon iron wires, dazzled by rows of hot flaming gas close to her eyes, and choked by the smoke of coloured fires... . Even the young ladies who glitter and look so happy as they float in the air in the transformation scenes could not be roasted alive, provided they are released in time from the iron rods to which they are bound. These ineffably exquisite nymphs, however, suffer

more or less from the trials they have to undergo for our amusement. Seldom a night passes without one or two of them fainting. (Qtd. in Booth, Pantomimes 509-10)

No discussion of the dance in nineteenth- and twenticth-century Western culture can avoid the conjunctions of aesthetic, gender, and class

ideologies as they converge on the body of the female performer. To trace the complicity of dance performances with these ideologies is to understand the control and shaping of dancers’ bodics and movements by the available contexts for theatrical dancing, and by the assumptions and expectations an audience brings to those contexts. It is also to understand the power of the vision on the stage to mask or cffacc the human beings creating it. Whether it be the “femmes suspenducs” of the pantomime or

contemporary ballcrinas, anorexic and obsessed with a culturally imposed myth of bodily perfection, female dancers often pay dearly for fulfilling their audience’s dreams of femininity. There is, however, also a more optimistic ending to this story. For the female dancer, the assumptions that devalued dance as an art in the late nineteenth century by associating it with naturc, woman, the primitive, and the exotic—those conventions cxemplified in Lottic Collins’s turn—also opened a space for innovation. Just as, in Martha Vicinus’s analysis, the militant suffragettes could use the supposcd moral superiority of women as a weapon in their fight for the vote (“Male Spacc”),

Moving Violations 29 Isadora Duncan would deploy women’s privileged relation to nature to valorize her art. But a foothold in ideology was not the only requirement for the emergence of modern dance, the first clite art form created by women. A structural place in the accepted varictics of performed art would also be necessary. The form most adaptable to the needs of the

new modern dancers would prove to be that of the music hall turn, becausc this form permitted an independence and diversity to individual performers not available elsewhere. !°

2

The Dancer and Woman’s Place: Maud Allan and Isadora Duncan

Maud Allan: Salomé and Woman’s Place The possibility of using the music hall to launch a dancer who sought artistic legitimacy for her performances was tested in 1908 by Maud Allan. Allan’s middle-class status, Continental education, and elite spon-

sorship distinguished her from the typical music hall performer. The context in which she danced, however, combined with some of the strategies used to publicize her, boosted her popular success while undermining her claim to be performing art. In her short, though spectacular, British career, Allan’s partial success in adapting a performance context

associated with entertainment to the demands of art depended on her ability to appeal to both a social elite and a popular audience. This appeal in turn depended on the positioning of Allan’s dances in a conservative ideological space that reinforced dominant ideologies of gender and race, although at the same time she violated the tacit rule that barred “respectable” women from the public stage. Although Allan has not achieved the same historical stature accorded

to her contemporaries—Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis—these dancers never approached Allan’s popular appeal in England. St. Denis, whose “Eastern” dances might have tapped the same audience attracted to Allan’s best-known piece, The Vision of Salomé, was perceived as overly ascetic and scholarly (Flitch 194). Even though St. Denis, unlike Duncan, was willing to appear in a music hall program, she could not

reach the English popular audience (Shelton 83). While itis important to acknowledge that Allan’s dancing was shaped by existing dance practices and conventions, her historical significance in that dance-specific context is much different from that suggested by the context I address. A dance 31

yi 32 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art

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history written from the point of view of the English public would not

sive the same status to St. Denis, or to Duncan for that matter, as either is commonly accorded in the United States. Maud Allan was born in Canada in 1873, raised in California, and had been studying music in Germany when she decided to devote herself instead to dance.! She had no formal training and relied on the improvisational methods of “barefoot” or “classical” dancing, which were at the

The Dancer and Woman's Place 33 Hp a

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time only vaguely defined. Like Isadora Duncan, Allan came from a middle-class family not sufficiently well-off to free her from earning her

own livelihood if, as was to be the case, she did not marry. She had artistic ambitions, and since Duncan’s German performances just prior to Allan’s emergence as a dancer had been well received, she may have seen in Duncan's dancing a likely career for herself.* Allan's Salome dance, The Vision of Salomé, was controversial from the start, perhaps inten-

34 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art tionally so, her biographer, Felix Cherniavsky suggests, in order to revive a flagging career and to separate herself from Duncan (“Allan, II” 198). She used music composed by Marcel Remy (though reviewers frequently mistook it for authentic Oriental music) and dressed herself in

a daringly scanty costume of gauze and beads. .

Maud Allan’s break came in 1907 when she was invited to perform this dance for King Edward VII at Marienbad. From the start, Allan’s success relied heavily on the patronage of London’s social elite. As a result of her performance for the king, Alfred Butt, manager of a major music hall, the Palace Theatre, arranged for her appearance as a turn in a program of typical acts: jugglers, trained animals, comedians, and “The Bioscope” (short films of current events). Allan would provide twenty minutes of “classical” dancing every evening. Since her European performances had taken the form of concerts (where the entire evening was devoted to her dance) rather than turns (where she shared the stage with a number of acts of varying aesthetic merit), Allan’s London career lost a degree of artistic status. Nevertheless, the financial and social rewards of performing in this context, despite the threat of its defining her as an entertainer rather than an artist, were great. Allan’s personal ambitions for celebrity and wealth overrode any hesitations she may have had about the vehicle used to obtain them. Her public debut occurred on Monday, 8 March 1908. Prior to this

Butt had carefully prepared the press and the public by presenting a private performance the previous Friday for a select audience of critics and members of London’s social, political, and cultural elite. The Saturday papers thus carried reviews, and Butt excerpted these to provide the text for an advertisement in the Monday papers. Besides the benefit of advance publicity, Allan gained from this performance the immediate social legitimacy an elite audience could confer by their simple presence.

Butt, however, did not rely on snob appeal alone; he published and distributed a pamphlet describing the charms of her dancing in lurid, quasi-pornographic language. Although no copies seem to have survived (Cherniavsky, “Allan, HI” 121), sufficient passages exist embedded in reviews to indicate the nature of the appeal. A writer in Truth, for example, quotes the following description, presumably of the Salomé dance: Her naked feet, slender and arched, beat a sensual measure. The pink

pearls slip amorously about her throat and bosom as she moves, while the long strands of jewels that float from the belt about her

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 35 waist float languorously apart from the sheen of her smooth hips. ... The desire that flames from her eyes and bursts in hot gusts from her scarlet mouth infect [sic] the very air with the madness of passion. Swaying like a white witch, with yearning arms and hands that plead, Maud Allan is such a delicious embodiment of lust that she might win forgiveness for the sins of such wonderful flesh. As Herod catches fire, so Salomé dances even as a Bacchante, twisting her body like a silver snake eager for its prey, panting with hot passion, the fire of her eyes scorching like a living furnace. (“Maud Allan” 702)

At the same time the pamphlet attempts (half-heartedly) to retain for _ Allan the privileged place reserved for “good” women. Another excerpt presents an image of Allan as the embodiment of a stereotypically idealized, spiritualized womanhood. Even here, however, sexuality is pervasive, for her attraction seems to owe as much to her “shapely, naked feet” as to her “refined thought”:

Maud Allan has attracted poets, musicians, and the millions, of France, Germany, Spain by her grace and beauty, but the student

and the artist worship at her shapely, naked feet as being the breath- | ing impersonation of refined thought and deified womanhood. (“Maud Allan” 702)

Butt’s publicity strategy presents the press, and through it the public, with conflicting messages about Allan’s dancing. He does this first of all by introducing her to a select and exclusive audience, while intending that she appeal to the masses; and secondly by positioning her, through his publicity pamphlet, at both extremes—sexual and spiritual—of the stereotypical conceptions of female nature. The intrusion of Allan’s sexu-

alized feet in the previous quotation points to both the difficulty of presenting a female dancer as anything other than erotic and to the nature of the discourse about women in which the pamphlet participates. Even the spiritualized woman is chained to her biology.3 Nevertheless, Allan was marketed as both elite and popular, both refined and sexual. On the

one hand, her dancing was patronized by the highest of high society, both male and female, and thus had an implicit moral seal of approval; on the other, it was risqué, a titillating and dangerous pleasure. This strategy worked perfectly, making Allan very quickly into an

36 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art established celebrity in the midst of an unprecedented run of over two hundred and fifty performances at the Palace. Her critical reception was favorable at first; the reviews written in March were generally positive, though not as glowing about the Salomé dance as some of her other picces. After the public had responded so enthusiastically, however, particularly to The Vision of Salomé, critics began writing negative evaluations. These more negative revicws, including one by Max Beerbohm in the Saturday Review, oftcn suggest that Allan’s success owed morc to the

astute manipulation of the media than her own talent or originality.4 They also take exception to the Salomé dancc—somcetimes on the grounds of its immorality, somctimcs on the grounds of its triviality. Commenting on this dance, Beerbohm draws attention to the discrepancy between the description given in Butt’s publicity pamphlet and his experience of the actuality—not, as the sympathctic reviewers do, in

order to assure the audicnce of the dance’s decorum, but to criticize Allan’s failure to embody the tragedy of its subject: Here the thing to be interpreted is no mere interplay of moods, but a grim and definite tragedy, a terrible character, a terrible deed. It is

said of Miss Allan’s Salomé by an ardent pamphletccr that “the desire that flames from her cyes and bursts in hot gusts from her scarlet mouth infects the very air with the madness of passion.” For my own part, J cannot imagine a morc lady-like performance. (“Palacc’)

Becrbohm’s reaction to The Vision of Salomé is in sharp contrast to

those who, like the Manchester Watch Committce, found it morally offensive. While Beerbohm is left cold by the dance, other viewers, such as Walter Higgins of the Labour Leader, seem to have had somcthing close

to the experience described in Butt’s pamphlct. “Miss Maud Allan’s presentation is,” he writes, “beyond doubt, diabolic. The horror of it has been with me for days, now numbing the sense, now making the blood leap in the veins” (qtd. in Cherniavsky, “Allan, I” 127). The reception of The Vision of Salomé was further influenced by the memory of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Thus, when the editor of the Spectator concurs with the moral objections to the dance raised by a reader, he adds that “[t]he taste of the Salomé writhings and contortions is... deplorable” and alludes to Wilde’s play as Allan’s source: “Unless we are greatly mistaken the notion [of Salomé’s love for the Baptist] had its origin in the depraved

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 37 imagination of one whosc literary gift was in essence flashy and mechanical, and who cannot rightly be called a poct and a man of Icttcrs, unless the notoricty of impudence, scandal and abcrration is held to confer that title” (“Salomé” 628). Wilde’s “depravity” is also used as a stick to beat Maud Allan by Higgins, who wrote that The Vision of Salomé was “the incarnation of the bestial in Oscar Wilde and Aubrcy Beardsley” (qtd. in

Cherniavsky, “Allan, III” 128).° The moral outrage provoked by the implicit mingling, in The Vision of Salomé, of scxual love and religion, exacerbated by her scanty costume and the memory of Wilde’s sexual transgressions, led to Allan’s condem-

nation. It did not, however, diminish her popularity. Beyond W. R. Titterton’s explanation for this popularity, who wrotc, in a revicw titled “The Maud Allan Myth,” that the English public loves “to be tickled with anticipation of extreme wickedness and to be horribly disappointed” (171), the reviews, read in conjunction with aspects of the historical context, suggest a decper appcal. Both female sexuality and Orientalism were arcas subject to intense idcological manipulation and contestation during this period—the former because of the growing militancy of the suffrage movement, the latter because of the importance of imperialism in defining a national identity.° In 1907 the suffrage socictics had organized their first mass demonstrations in ordcr to prove to the Liberal prime minister, Asquith, that

women did indeed want the vote. The spectacle of three thousand women, in the “Mud March” of 9 February 1907, of ten to fifteen thousand in the demonstration held in June of the following ycar, and of twice that number marching to Hyde Park, to join a crowd estimated at more than a quarter of a million, two wecks later, challenged the dominant scparatce-sphercs idcology. Women, many of them middle class and apparently otherwise “respectable,” faced the ordeal of public display in order to assert a political position. In a socicty deeply committed to the idea that the proper sphere for women was the private, domestic realm of home and family, such a display questioned the basis of social organization.’ According to Susan Kingslcy Kent, the scxual threats, insults, and physical abuse to which the militant suffragettes were increasingly subjected “stemmed logically from the ideology of scparate spheres.” This idcology “equated women in public with prostitutes” (200). In such a climate the public representation of an aggressivcly sexual figure such as Salomé would have a high idcological charge. The nature of this charge is not casily scparable from the fact that

38 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art Allan was depicting an Eastern woman. The Oriental woman had long been a fantasy object for Western men, a locus for projecting their dreams

of sexual license and power. V. G. Kiernan, in his study of European attitudes toward their colonial subjects, notes that “[t]he harem image appealed to an instinct of possession and domination as well as of mere

pleasure” (135). And Linda Nochlin sees the role of the Orient in nineteenth-century French painting as in part “a project of the imagination, a fantasy space or screen onto which strong desires—erotic, sadistic

or both—could be projected with impunity” (123). But beyond this definition of the Orient as an uncontested realm of absolute male dominance, it served as well as an Other against which to consolidate British national identity. Said’s classic study of Orientalism demonstrates the

importance of European constructions of the Orient to its own selfdefinition. Eric Hobsbawm points out the usefulness of this construction to the European elites for sidetracking other ways in which their populations might have defined themselves—especially those based on class.

Appeals to the racial and national superiority of the imperial powers made discontented voters feel good about themselves and “identify themselves with the imperial state and nation. . . . In short, empire made good ideological cement” (70). Maud Allan’s performance was thus serving multiple ideological

functions for its audience. First of all, it enacted the containment of female self-assertion: on the one hand, it raised the specter of the sexual woman; on the other, it located her in a foreign time and place. It invited

both the worst fears and greatest fantasies of freely expressed sexual desire, while solidifying the audience’s distance from both extreme power and extreme victimization. Secondly, locating the moral disorder represented by female sexuality in the East reaffirmed the Englishman’s claims to racial superiority. The discourse of imperialism had already linked the superiority of the national character to Britain’s success at empire building. To the degree that individuals identified with that char-

acter, each member of Allan’s audience had a stake in the successful domination of the world she was representing. This “superior” character

was explicitly masculine, defined by its love of action, combat, and independence, as well as its kindness to women and children (Field 99). Allan’s dancing posed no threat to mainstream British ideologies and was never meant to. Her Salomé dance was easily recruited to reaffirm the superiority of the West and the inadvisability of conferring the franchise on women.

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 39 Many of the positive reviews of Maud Allan’s The Vision of Salomé focused on the relation between her dance and the “authentic” dances of the East. Since the subject of the dance required critics to pass judgment on the propriety of Maud Allan’s dress and actions, they pay a good deal of attention to the similarities and differences between what she did and “Eastern” dance, with its questionable moral status. A favorable review in the Academy identified Allan’s dance as Eastern by placing it in the genre of “posture-dancing,” which, according to the writer, evolved in the East from “the mere provocative posturing of the body.” But, while he praises her for educating the British public in a form of beauty that “racial instinct, island prejudice, and national conceit” had hitherto led them to condemn, he simultaneously assures the reader that Allan, being

a great artist, does not “slip back into the old and gross appeal” from which this dance arose (“Miss Maud Allan’s Salomé Dance”). Allan improves upon her presumed original, demonstrating once again the Orient’s need for the West in order to progress. With even less subtlety, the Times’ critic likewise both raises the specter of Eastern sexual license and distances Allan’s dance from it: It is of the essence, of course, of Eastern dancing to show rhythmic movements of the body round itself, so to speak, as a pivot, which means, of course, that it may become, as in the notorious case of the danse du ventre, something lascivious and repulsively ugly. Now it is obvious that this dancer could make no movement or posture that is not beautiful, and, in fact, her dancing as Salomé, though Eastern in spirit through and through, is absolutely without the slightest suggestion of the vulgarities so familiar to the tourist in Cairo or Tangier. (“The Drama: The New Dancer”)

Eastern dance is supposedly meant to call attention to the highly sexualized body of a woman, which makes it ugly, but Maud Allan’s Salomé is both Eastern and beautiful—it both alludes to the sexual and evades it. The Salomé dance expresses the East without its sensual physicality, in effect translating it into a “spirit” or “essence”—thus rendering the imagined aggressive sexuality of the Eastern woman safe for Western consumption. The dancer’s body is thus mediating between an ideologi-

cal threat and its redefinition or recuperation on the level of idealized abstraction. Both gender and imperialist ideologies play a role in this process. The prevalent belief in (middle-class) woman’s inherently spiri-

40 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art tual nature was undcr attack by the suffragettes’ public militancy and thus required reinforcement; Salomé was just such an aggressive woman, but Maud Allan’s version turns out in the end to be beautiful, and thus true to “woman’s nature.” Salomé, however, being an Eastern woman, also represents an alien subject of the British Empire. If, as one historian writcs, “the dchumanization of alicn peoples . . . was arguably crucial to making impcrialism work” (Ficld 112), Allan’s representation of Salomé was contributing to this project on the home front.® She created the opportunity to define the

East 1n opposition to her representation, thus reinforcing stcreotypes of | barbarism and vulgarity attached to it. In addition, and in seeming con-

tradiction to this, her dance embodied for its viewers a sccond East, equally alien, of essential qualities, “the spirit of the East.” The contradiction may be better characterized as a dispersal that locates its object at the two poles of primitive nature and disembodicd ideal—effectively denying it a place within the realm of the human. In this strategy of dispersal the treatment of the East resembles the treatment of female nature found in Butt’s pamphlet. There he offered readers simultancously two opposing images of Allan: Allan as a hypersexual, purcly carnal creaturc, rather more like a “white witch,” “silver snake,” and “living furnace” than a human being; and, Allan as “refined thought and deified womanhood.” In their treatment of the relationship between the body of the dancer and the dance itself, the critics depend on an analogous strategy to defuse the physical presence of a female body that they could not, because of Allan’s claims to aesthetic and social legitimacy, dismiss as simply sexual. Thus, reviewers frequently treat the dancer’s body as a mediator betwecn two nonhuman terms, with music and cmotion on onc side of the equation, and movement on the other. Many reviewers comment on Maud Allan’s ability (or failure) to make music visible, to translate music into movement, or, alternately, to translate emotion into movement. The most striking of these treat the

dancer’s body as an instrument, as, for example, when onc reviewer explains that Salomé’s reaction to John the Baptist’s head was conveyed

“by the transformation of the whole body into a musical instrument striking that one note,” and when, in the same review, he describes the dance’s “marvelously beautiful sinuous movements in which the danccr’s

will and emotions play upon the lovely instrument of her body to produce what music she will” (“Miss Maud Allan’s Salomé Dance”). The Times’ critic was particularly taken with this image, though not explicitly in relation to the Salomé dance. In one review he declared that in Allan’s

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 4I dancing, “[t]he music speaks through a new and lovely instrument; there

appear to be no rules, no science to come between the music and its expression in movement and gesture” (“Palace,” 23 July 1908). And the following year, he reiterates her ability to translate music into its visible cquivalent, imagining “the stage as a vast keyboard from which the notes should be actually called forth by skillful feet” (“Palace,” 13 Feb. 1909). The reviewer for Truth was impressed with her expression of emotion, praising The Vision of Salomé for “the extraordinary way in which the dancer can express emotion with every movement” (“Maud Allan” 702). Negative reviews likewise assume the importance of this ability to translate from one mode to another. Christopher St. John criticizes Allan

precisely for her failure at “translating beautiful sound into beautiful form” (736). Beerbohm complains that her movements are pretty but meaningless, in other words, that the translation has not been successful, and Titterton objects to The Vision of Salomé because its movements do not seem to convey authentic emotion: “I cannot imagine anything more immoral and less artistic than. . . this intoxication hammered out cold” (172). Although the translation of music and the translation of emotion

into bodily movement are two different tasks, they share the goal of making something nonmaterial and invisible into something material and visible. The audicnce thus can experience the former on a level it does not by nature inhabit. The importance of this process for the reception of dance was that it allowed the display of the female body to be recategorized. Without a way of perceiving this display that removed its explicitly sexual message (that women in public are “public women”) Allan’s performance could not have been interpreted as aesthetically legitimate. The price paid for this new interpretation of the dancing female body, however, was its depersonalization. The dancer’s movements make visible the music or cmotion that it is the business of the dance to communicate, without intruding her personality, her idiosyncrasies, her sexuality. In a successful performance, the dancer’s body should not call unduc attention to itself but should function like a transparent signifier, an innocent instrument of a greater power, a ficld on which the unity of the incommensurate might be imagincd—where music becomes visible, the intangible, definite. Although it 1s the purely physical presence of the dancer’s body that mediates this unity, its successful accomplishment depends on the crasure of that presence at the moment it fulfills its function. That body 1s, insofar as 1t draws attention to itself, an intrusion, an alien presence in the dance. Both the essentializing of the East and the erasure of the mediating

42 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art body reinforce the positioning of the dance as a transcendent expression of some higher, because less material, realm. This proccss of abstraction is, as Lukacs wrote of the use of the exotic in nincteenth-century litera-

turc, “a negation of the present” (Historical Novel 232). That is, The Vision of Salomé evades, and thus negates, both the historically specific

reality of the Orient in which it is supposedly sct and the body of the woman who performs it. In the hands of most critics, and in the words of Maud Allan herself, this dance becomes instead an occasion for reinforcing representations of the Oriental and of woman’s nature that dchumanize and dchistoricize them. But in doing so, these representations per-

form the valuable ideological work of reaffirming both the Western construction of itself in relation to the Orient and the mainstrcam, though increasingly cmbattled, ideology of woman’s nature. Such an ideology of women’s nature is clearly evident in Allan’s discussions of women’s suffrage and the Salomé dance in her 1908 autobiography, My Life and Dancing, written to commemorate her 250th performance at the Palace. In this text Allan’s own commitments become clear, and

with them the fundamentally conservative intentions informing her dances.

“Woman,” Maud Allan wrote in her autobiography, “should be the refining, the inspiring, the idcalising element of humanity” (118). Her role is to elevate the men and children in her life through beauty, and “with woman swaying man to nobler and lofticr ideals, the world will move to higher things, and humanity progress nearer divinity” (119). Allan expresses these convictions in a chapter devoted to explaining and justifying her opposition to women’s suffrage. The presence of this chap-

ter is noteworthy in a book othcrwise devoted, as the title suggests, to Allan’s life and dancing. It suggests that she felt some pressure to clar-

ify her position, as an unmarricd, sclf-supporting, and unquestionably public woman, on women’s proper role. In doing so she walks a thin linc, supporting greater educational and employment opportunitics for women, whilc asserting that “the rightful destiny of every woman 1s to

be the wife and mother, to make that inner sanctuary known by the swect name of ‘Home’” (114). Such double messages indicate the increasing inadequacy of the separate-spheres idcology to account for the reality of even middle-class women’s lives, while lending credence to arguments such as Fox-Genovesce’s that socictics where “women’s competition for men’s placcs was becoming a real possibility . . . raised the doctrine of separate sphercs to a new idcological prominence” (542). In

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 43 other words, an idcology becomes visible to the extent that 1t can no longer be taken for granted—as “nature” or “common sense” —but must be explicitly propounded. In her argument against women’s suffrage, Allan asserts that women

arc by nature or training unsuited to political life and action; they are overly cmotional, indifferent to principles, easily swayed by personalities. “Careful weighing of evidence,” she argues, “exhaustive analysis free from emotional bias, is antagonistic to our instincts” (116). Her statement of faith in this compendium of antisuffrage assumptions about woman’s nature and proper sphere (sce Harrison 79-83) was perhaps essential to Maud Allan’s success in society, if not in art. She was accepted into important political and social circles, most significantly that of the Asquiths, whosc patronage added considerably to her wealth and whose sympathies were not with the suffragcttes.? In counseling patience, assuring her female reader that “the ballot [will] be given her when she 1s ready to receive it” (112), Allan explicitly affirms her subor-

dination to men, and understandably so, since men controlled her career. 19

Allan’s chapter on Salomé, which follows the discussion of suffrage,

seems to treat the character as a naturally spiritual and innocent child, sharing those qualities Allan had used to characterize truc womanhood. But the ambivalent, or perhaps disingenuous, nature of Allan’s own description of the dance highlights the way in which female spirituality is embedded in female sexuality. Her description exposes the complicity between the dance’s sexual connotations and the supposed spirituality of the character performing it.

Allan presents Salomé as a young girl, fourteen years old, whose secluded life has kept her innocent of the world. She knows only Oriental

luxury and her duty to obcy her parents. Thus when word comes from Herod that she is to dance, she does so—“blind to the circle of inflamed eyes that devour her youthful beauty” (123). She makes her request for the head of John the Baptist out of obedience to her mother but is then terrificd by her prize and runs away panic-stricken to her room. It is at this point in the narrative that Allan added a second dance, the dance for which the whole of her performance is named The Vision of Salomé. Compeclled by a mixture of remorse, fear, longing, and some unnamed but irresistible force, Salomé recnacts the events leading up to John the Baptist’s death and secks out his head. She dances with the head, and the spiritual power it represents “makes of little Salomé a woman”:

44 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art Now, instead of wanting to conquer, she wants to be conquered, craving the spiritual guidance of the man whose wraith is before her; but it remains silent! No word of comfort, not even a sign! Crazed by the rigid stillness, Salomé, seeking an understanding, and knowing not how to obtain it, presses her warm, vibrating lips to the cold lifeless ones of the Baptist! In this instant the curtain of darkness that had enveloped her soul falls, the strange grandeur of a power higher than Salomé has ever dreamed of beholding becomes visible to her and her anguish becomes vibrant. (127) The coexistence of Salomé’s putative innocence and purely spiritual hunger with a use of language that sexualizes her spiritual submission and awakening codes the spiritual as a version of female sexuality. Like the naked, shapely feet of deified womanhood in the publicity pamphlet, Salomé’s vibrating lips give away the game: the choice for women is not between carnality and spirituality, but between two versions of carnality. But Allan either did not see, or refused to acknowledge, the sexual content of her narrative, claiming again in 1918 that Salomé’s attraction to the head of John the Baptist was purely spiritual (Kettle 70).1! In fact her construction of the dance, and the narrative it expressed, shifted the traditional emphasis of the dance of Salomé from being a provocation of desire to being its expression. Instead of being a dance for Herod, to be used by Salomé or her mother for ulterior ends, Allan’s dance becomes

the expression of the personal desire of Salomé for John the Baptist, whether spiritual or not. The sexuality of Salomé is inescapable, making inevitable the persis-

tent denial or condemnation of that sexuality by both artists and audiences. Maud Allan’s allegory of aggressive female sexual desire as a spiritual awakening (whether or not it was consciously conceived as such) embodies the inherent contradiction of an ideology that divided female sexuality in two, containing one extreme by spiritualizing it, and relegating its opposite to the bestial nature of an Oriental (or workingclass, or demonic) Other. The Vision of Salomé was extraordinary in its ability to represent both of these sexualities at once, while not threatening their polarity. It represented the masochistic self-denial that allows Salomé to become the subject of a higher power, as Allan herself became, in the eyes of critics, a self-effacing instrument for translating music into movement. And it represented the sadistic sexuality of the fatal woman, the Oriental princess whose desire means death. The threat of this latter

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 45 representation is in turn neutralized by its absorption into an imperialist ideology that dehumanizes the Oriental and distinguishes Maud Allan’s dance from that alien sexuality, in order, once again, to evade the body of the dancer—translating it this time into the “essence” of the East.

Isadora Duncan: The Artist and Woman’s Place Reviews of Maud Allan in the Academy, Saturday Review, Sunday Times, and New Age compare her dancing to Isadora Duncan’s. Max Beerbohm

and Christopher St. John were aware of Duncan’s recitals at the New Gallery in London in 1900, although it is not clear whether either attended them. The other reviewers were familiar with Duncan’s Continental career, which was at its height from 1903 until Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet overwhelmed Paris in 1909. Each acknowledges that Duncan, not Allan, was the originator of the style of dance Allan performed, and only Grein, in the Sunday Times, thinks that Allan improved on Duncan’s art, because, in his opinion, Allan “conveys feeling and emotion” while Dun-

can provides only a technically expert “simulation” (“Palace”). Other reviewers, however, would interpret this sense of distance between Duncan the woman and her material as a sign of her classicism and artistic

seriousness. Titterton, in the New Age, like Beerbohm and St. John, castigates the British public for their ignorance of Duncan and moreover devotes almost half of his review of Allan to a description of a Duncan

concert he attended in Berlin. Duncan, he argues, is simply the more serious artist of the two, a judgment he supports by observing that while Duncan dresses in Greek-style robes even outside the theater, Allan al-

} ways dresses fashionably, in “a picture hat, a Paris gown, and a parasol.” “This,” he continues, “is not irrelevant, for it marks the distinction between a religion and a trade” (172).

Allan’s seriousness as an artist, as opposed to Duncan’s, was in question on two counts. First, there was doubt, among those familiar with the Continental art-scene, that she was really creative (a doubt reinforced by a lack of variety in her program); secondly, the media hype attending her debut and her subsequent association with the fashionable world had the look of opportunism rather than genuine artistic commitment. Thus Beerbohm 1s reminded of the fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” on finally going to see Allan dance after listening to rapturous accounts of her performance, and St. John not only compares the British public to sheep in the title of her review, but opens it with the denigrat-

46 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art ing proclamation that Allan is mercly “the craze of the hour and the idol of fashion” (735). Duncan, in contrast, positioned herself outside fashion, aiming not for commercial success (although she at times made a great deal of money) but for recognition as a practitioner of high art. When Duncan arrived in London to open her own season in July 1908, critics had additional reason to compare the two dancers. In particular, the kind of femininity embodied by each became an issue. Titterton’s earlier characterization of Allan as the more girlish of the two was now seconded by the IIlustrated London News. In contrast to Allan’s “girlishness,” Duncan was described as “classical,” with all the implications of artistic seriousness carried by that term. Thus, the Illustrated London News

reported that “Miss Allan’s style is more lithe, more unconventional, more full of romantic feeling and girlishness and temperament than that of Miss Duncan: the latter belongs to the classical school, and possesses the restraint, the resourcefulness, the poetic grace of that school” (“Miss Isadora Duncan’s Dances”). While Allan’s “girlishness” could be read,.as Grein did, as “youth and intuition,” and Duncan’s lack of “temperament” as her overly intellectual reliance on technique (“Duke of York’s”), the same qualities could receive a much different reading by a critic more sympathetic to Duncan than Grein. An anonymous reviewer for the Academy, who claimed to be

a “very warm admirer of Maud Allan,” found that what makes Allan “remarkable” is also what excludes her dancing from being taken as seriously as Duncan’s:

Isadora Duncan is without that radiant, palpitating flesh, that “flavour” so desirable in art, so remarkable in Maud Allan. In fact, we value the latter’s art more for what the artist is; the former’s art more for what the art is. Isadora Duncan’s art, so closely modeled on the best Greek sculpture . . . is essentially classical—that is, more pure,

more cold, as we say, more chaste, and therefore more enduring. (“Isadora Duncan” 43) The implication of this passage is that Allan’s dancing, unlike Duncan’s, is perhaps not chaste, having, as Titterton phrased a similar observation, “a hint of the sexually provocative” that Duncan avoided. More importantly, Duncan’s artistic seriousness is inseparable from the “chas-

tity” of her art, so that sexuality—its presence or absence—remains central to the evaluation of both dancers. In seeming to emphasize the

The Dancer and Woman’s Place AT art, not the artist, Duncan’s public performance can be repositioned by this critic so that, while her art may be public, she is not. For both dancers artistic seriousness required a self-presentation that distanced them from the expectation that women appearing on a public stage were by definition morally suspect. Allan walked a thin line in choosing a sexually charged subject, Salomé, for her major dance, but in doing so she also helped assure herself a mass audience. Duncan made no such compromises. Her performances in London, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, were presented as full-length dance concerts, not music hall turns, and the subject matter of the piece most discussed in the reviews was the classical Greek story of Iphigenia.!2 In fact, the critic for the Observer found her rather too serious, complaining that “she disdains all attempt to ‘get over the footlights.’ She is sternly—too sternly I think— epicene. There seems a lack of soul, blood, fire, humanness at times about her dancing. She is absolutely unsensuous. Possibly she is somewhat too much the “artist?” (qtd. in Macdonald, “Isadora” 79-80). Like Grein, he interprets her personal distance from the audience as coldness

but, more explicitly than Grein, expresses the gendered meaning he perceives in this mode of self-presentation by a female performer: a woman who does not enact the expected performance of her gender is not therefore enacting a universal humanity but trying to be something she cannot be, an artist. !3 Duncan’s tenure at the Duke of York’s Theatre was considerably shorter than Allan’s at the Palace (she began a tour of the United States in August). Although she was apparently well received by her audiences, '* that Duncan did not return to London for another formal season until 1921 suggests that she was not overwhelmed by her reception.!° Duncan’s own disdain for Allan’s Salomé dance (and those of other dancers) should come as no surprise.'© Duncan’s definition of herself

as an artist depended upon her ability to distinguish her dance from forms of theatrical dancing such as Allan’s and the institutional contexts of their performance then current. This meant declining lucrative offers

to perform in music halls and finding managers who understood that “my art was not of the nature of a theatrical venture” (My Life 64, 156). Allan’s capitulation to the temptations of the variety stage distinguished her from Duncan’s uncompromising commitment to the elite concert stage, and her willingness to flirt with the erotic from Duncan's

unrelenting “chastity.” The two dancers’ stated theories of their art, however, had important elements in common. Allan, like Duncan, claimed

48 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art to have found her inspiration from nature and from the great art of the Western tradition, notably Botticelli’s Primavera (Allan 62). Allan, like Duncan, emphasized the spiritual quality of her dance. Grein had noticed right away that Duncan and Allan shared a common precursor in the work of Francois Delsarte, whose system of gestures correlated parts

of the body to mental, emotional, or spiritual qualitics (“Duke of York’s”).17 Both dancers also attacked ballet for distorting the true nature of dance. The Times reports Allan asserting, in a paper she delivered in 1909, that “dancing was the spontancous expression of the spiritual state, and the modern ballet has distorted, sprained [sic], and disorganized dancing” (“Miss Maud Allan on Dancing”). Such sentiments had been articu-

lated by Duncan in her 1903 lecture, “The Dance of the Future,” but whether or not Allan was consciously parroting Duncan’s ideas, both dancers are engaged in developing a discourse about dance that, first of all, distanced their performances from ballet—and thus from the connotations of moral laxity and artistic decadence attached to ballet and “ballet girls” —

and secondly, that associated their performances with the territory granted to middle-class women by the separate-spheres ideology—the spiritual. The distance between “ballet girls” and “classical dancers” was precisely the difference between theater as a trade for working-class women and theater as a respectable profession for the middle class. It was this difference, moreover, that the “classical” dancers bore the burden of establishing.

Without question Duncan wrote more, and out of a more fully developed vision of the place and value of dance, than did Allan. Duncan also achieved an appearance of consistency between her theory and her practice that Allan’s popular success, and the dance responsible for it,

threw into question. Allan succumbed more easily than Duncan to the contradiction between the place of the female performer and that assigned middle-class women in her culture. Duncan developed a theory that attempted to resolve the tensions between these two roles, while Allan attempted to fulfill both her audience’s desire for erotic display and her patrons’ ideology of middle-class womanhood. Although Duncan did not write a systematic treatment of the dance, she was a persistent propagandist for her art, not hesitating to lecture her audience from the stage if she was in need of moncy for her schools or if she felt they needed instruction about her dancing. Unlike Maud Allan,

she did not attempt to parlay her popularity into social prestige but remained committed to an idea of herself as an artist, above and outside

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 49 of other measures of status. In addition to the short essays written from 1902 to 1927, and collected after her death in The Art of the Dance and Isadora Speaks, Duncan wrote an autobiography, My Life (1927), which contains frequent digressions devoted to such subjects as education, marriage, and motherhood, as well as dance. These writings demonstrate

that Duncan considered dance to be not merely an art, but an entire philosophy of life. Typical of her articulation of this conviction is the following: “For me the dance is not only the art that gives expression to the human soul through movement, but also the foundation of a complete conception of life, more free, more harmonious, more natural” (Art 101). Clearly such a definition of her performances forces them outside of the usual definition of entertainment, but further, Duncan’s conception of dance, and of herself as a dancer, made it difficult for her even to think of herself as a performer. Duncan frequently defined herself as a teacher or a spiritual seeker

rather than as a performer. She took pains to explain that her schools were not meant to train children for the stage, but to convey to them the beauty and “spiritual message” of great art (Art 88-89). Occasionally she disavowed the label of “dancer” altogether, as when, late in her life, she proclaimed, Iam not a dancer. I never danced a step in my life. I hate all dancing. All I see in what people call dancing is merely a useless agitation of

the arms and legs. I don’t like to look at stage dancing. . . . lam not a dancer. What I am interested in doing is finding and expressing a new form of life. (Isadora Speaks 118)

In her autobiography, she responds to the experience of dancing with a

superior orchestra by commenting on the inadequacy of the term to describe what she does: “Often I thought to myself, what a mistake to call me a dancer—I am the magnetic centre to convey the emotional expression of the orchestra” (My Life 162). As Susan Foster notes, Duncan created a new paradigm for dance performance, “one in which self-expression superseded self-presentation” in the service not of the individual ego, but of a “universal” human spirit (145). Although one might argue that self-expression is always also selfpresentation, Duncan’s insistence on the authenticity of her dancing attempted to close the gap between her “self” and her performance. Thus she complains that those who imitate her think that her dancing consists

50 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art of “certain stercotyped gestures,” when rather “it has its virtuc in certain soul-states which arc, in a sense, incommunicable” (Isadora Speaks 47). Her refusal to countenance a separation between her sclf and her performance, however, points out the antithcatrical implications of Duncan’s goals for dance, and thus the problematic place of the performer for her.

Duncan attempted to convey a spiritual state, making her stage presence, or “personality,” at best a medium rather than an end in itself,

and idcally something to be forgotten altogether at the height of the acsthetic expericnce.!® Although the power of her personality was obvious to some viewers, !° she was at least successful in achieving a type of

distance between herself and the audience that undercut an croticized appropriation of her performance. The London critics indicate as much, though their perception of her as austere or classical might not coincide with an understanding of her message. Her attempt to avoid the modes of feminine display expected of stage dancers might indeed be interpreted

as a willful or elitist refusal to respond to the expectations of her audience, as implied by the critic who accused her of “disdain[ing] all attempt

to ‘get over the footlights’” (qtd. in Macdonald, “Isadora” 79). Duncan did not in fact avoid, or seek to avoid, being judged as a woman. While she would occasionally comment on the appropriateness of her instruction for boys as well as girls, her theories of dance were developed on the assumption that the dancer was female. Likewise, her defenders would make the nature of her femininity an issue. Titterton calls her “a child with a serene woman’s face” (171), and J. E. Crawford Flitch, in his survey of theatrical dancing in England, explains that “[h]er dancing is so deeply rooted in the soul that it ignores the superficial and often coquettish graces of the popular dancer. And yet she is feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple calm, womanly grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles” (109).2° The “complete conception of life” that Duncan pursued through dance might more accurately be called a reconceptualization of women’s nature and potential, such that their femininity could no longer be used to exclude them from being considered serious artists. Throughout her career, Duncan was forced to come to terms with cultural pressures that valued women for beauty, motherhood, and submission, not independence and the aggressive pursuit of an artistic vision. Finally, despite bearing two children out of wedlock, Duncan did not fundamentally challenge the dominant idcology that valued women for their physical qualitics—beauty and childbearing—while assigning

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 51 them a natural spirituality that effectively denied them a voice in the public sphere. Nevertheless, the use she made of that ideology enabled her to justify the aesthetic legitimacy of an art form created by a woman with her own body. She was able to neutralize the pervasive association of public dancing by women for pay with sexual display first by refusing to dance in music halls, second by drawing on the highly valued tradition of the visual arts, particularly Greck sculpturc,?! to assert the aesthetic legitimacy of displaying the female body, and third by deploying aspects of the dominant gender ideology to assert a woman’s access to the aesthetic through her body. The discussion that follows focuses on this last strategy, since it best reveals the difficulty of reconceptualizing the female performer in order to legitimate Duncan’s art.?? Duncan developed a style of performance that was never sexually provocative, no matter how much flesh was revealed. This lack of eroticism was a mixcd blessing, as the review cited earlier from the Observer makes evident. For many viewers, it seems, a female performer ought to display “femininity,” a quality that in this (as in our own) historical and cultural context is not separable from sexuality. André Levinson, a Russian dance critic and champion of classical ballet, expresses an ambivalence toward Duncan’s performance that underlines the entanglement of

femininity with the erotic. He writes that in her dancing “[t]here is neither tragedy nor eroticism. There is, finally, no real femininity. In her,

unpremeditated grace mingles with strength, the merriment of youth, any youth” (“Art and Meaning” 32). Titterton addresses the expectation that her performance would be erotic when he recounts seeing Duncan dance in Berlin while “[t]wo pigs sat beside me and speculated with watery chops on how much of her onc would see.” She disappointed them, not because her body was particularly well concealed, but because of the calm innocence and dignity of her stage presence (171). Duncan quite consciously dissociated the female body from sexuality. After a notorious incident in Boston where Duncan inadvertently revealed more of her body than the audience could countenance, she defended her nudity on the grounds that it was not provocative: “To expose one’s body is art; concealment is vulgar. When I dance, my object is to inspire reverence, not to suggest anything vulgar. I do not appeal to the lower instincts of mankind as your half-clad chorus girls do” (Isadora Speaks 48; sce also Blair 325-27). For similar reasons, toward the end of

her career she made several strident attacks on jazz and the dances it

52 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art inspired. For example, when writing of the dance of America, she proclaims it “monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.” Further,

she describes the Charleston as “tottering, ape-like convulsions” and insists that American dance “will have nothing in it of the inane coquetry of the ballet, or the sensual convulsion of the negro. It will be clean” (My Life 244).23 Duncan’s tirade reveals a racial subtext to gender ideology that reinforced the necessity of her rejection of sexuality in dance. This

distance from the sexual aligned her with the dominant ideology that ascribed to women (read: middle-class, white women) a natural indifference, if not repugnance, to sex.?4+ At the same time, it was only white women who were thought to be “above” sex. There was no difficulty in finding unrestrained sexuality to be a trait of women (as well as men) of other races, along with the rest of the qualities assigned them in contemporary racist ideologies. 7° In seeking to align her art with the dominant Western tradition that traced its pedigree from the Greeks and Romans through the European Renaissance, Duncan restricted herself to a very. narrow conception of artistic beauty. At the same time, the importance of physical beauty in assigning status and value to women presented Duncan with a territory,

already ceded to the feminine, that she might potentially occupy and redefine for her own purposes. Duncan collapsed physical and artistic beauty into the latter, defining both as highly idealized attributes best couched in the platonic language of “Beauty as the highest Idea.” She then tried to appropriate this kind of beauty for women: One might well be led to believe that women are incapable of know-

ing beauty as an Idea, but I think this only seems so, not because they are incapable of perceiving but only because they are at present

blind to the chief means in their power of understanding True Beauty. Through the eyes beauty most readily finds a way to the soul, but there is another way for women—perhaps an easicr way— that is through the knowledge of their own bodies. (Art 66-67) In this passage Duncan has both ceded the ground of the intellect to men and attempted to recuperate for women that to which the intellect gives men access. She deploys the very position granted women, that of the body, as the means to possessing privileged access to a kind of knowledge valued by men. In other words, Duncan claims women’s status as

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 53 objects of the gaze as the means to their full participation in a Western philosophical tradition.2© This strategy bears resemblance to that of her contemporaries, the militant suffragettes, when they claimed political

rights based on the greater moral sense attributed to women by the separate-spheres ideology (see Vicinus, “Male Space’), and to that which Margaret Drewal attributes to the theosophist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky when she placed “the Other—ancients, Asians, and indirectly herself and women in general at the evolutionary pinnacle” (185). But Duncan, unlike the suffragettes and Blavatsky, does not seem to be claiming supe-

riority for women, only equal access, but equal access from woman’s place, not by virtue of women becoming more like men. Duncan argues that the source of all ideas of beauty is the human body, and that a woman’s knowledge of this beauty will not come from contemplating her own form, or even other beautiful objects, but that “she must live this beauty, and her body must be the living exponent of it” (Art 67). If men can see, and thus know, beauty, women can do them one better and be it. For Duncan, dance liberates women from pure object status by first reducing them to the most valued quality of that object—its beauty—and then raising to almost godlike the status of the object bearing that quality: “My body is the temple of my art. I expose it as a shrine for the worship of beauty” (Isadora Speaks 48). She must, in other words, empower women and herself to embody and enact this idealized beauty through their bodies, while maintaining its platonic ideality. Thus Duncan’s desire to claim the cultural territory of beauty for the dance, while stripping it of any vulgar sexual implications, leads her to the simultaneous evasion and celebration of the dancing body. Just as she redeployed the cultural value placed on female beauty to argue for women’s potential to participate in high art, Duncan appropri-

ated motherhood, that which was held to be the highest aspiration for women, to further the quite different goal of valorizing herself as an artist and her dance as an art. Writing about the height of her career, she exults, “TI had created an Art, a School, a Baby” (My Life 156). And she pro-

claims in “The Dance of the Future” that the importance of her new dance is not only aesthetic, but “also a question of the development of perfect mothers” (Art 61). In equating aesthetic with biological creation, and in suggesting that her dance had an eugenic as well as an aesthetic value, she introduces nonaesthetic considerations into the realm of art.

Levinson, in fact, claims that Duncan parts company with “the realm of purely aesthetic thought,” by introducing ethical elements into her

54 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art dance (“Art and Meaning” 27). He cites her interest in Hellenism as primarily an ethical one and places her, not in an aesthetic tradition, but in the context of contemporary physical culture and dress reform movements. Duncan’s insistence on dance’s being the key to a whole philosophy of life, that is, her refusal or inability to separate the aesthetic realm from other spheres of thought and action, went against the grain of a major trend in Western art during this period. While Duncan’s deployment of motherhood rests on its ability to unify different realms of action and existence—art and life, creator and creation—the trend in European aesthetics was toward the autonomy of the work of art. Aestheticism and symbolism, with their insistence on the separation of art from the world, and its irrelevance to ethical concerns, would define the path of high art. Although Duncan’s aesthetic did contain elements consistent with symbolism, which will be addressed in the following chapter, a conceptualization of the relationship between art and womanhood in the concrete terms required by a woman whose art was made with her own body did not easily admit of the kind of separation between the human and the aesthetic that symbolism entailed.

Duncan’s use of motherhood as both a reason for encouraging women to dance and as a metaphor for the creation of a dance indicates the doubleness of the position she attempted to occupy. On the one hand, the relationship of a mother to her child provided a useful metaphor for thinking about her purpose and her art, and she often used maternal and childbirth metaphors: her school is her second child (My Life 163); dance is born of music (Art 106); true dance can be distinguished from false by

the fertility of its movements, each of which “contains the quality of fecundity, possesses the power to give birth to another movement” (Art

91); and the origin of the dance is an act of conception between the “divine unconscious” and the soul: “My soul should become one with it,

and the dance born from that embrace” (Art 107). On the other hand, literal motherhood is precisely what presumably keeps women from the highest mental and artistic achievement, since the energy necessary for artistic creation would be spent on bearing and raising children. Thus, as Susan Stanford Friedman has argued, the childbirth metaphor applied to artistic creation means something very different for women than it does for men. While men have used this metaphor in a context that reaffirms

the division between the body and the mind, women often use it to “challenge fundamental binary oppositions of patriarchal ideology be-

The Dancer and Woman’s Place 55 tween word and flesh, creativity and procreativity, mind and body” (51). The imperative Duncan felt to unify the literal and metaphorical meanings of motherhood is evident in her devotion to her schools, where the literal development of children was pursued concurrently with the development of the art of dance. Duncan lived and worked inside an ideology that celebrated women as mothers and as beautiful objects for male contemplation, that praised women for service and sacrifice to family and society. Perhaps because of a background that enabled her to acquire the cultural tastes and values of a class that her childhood poverty placed her outside of, Duncan was able to reinterpret for her own ends the most constraining aspects of middleclass gender ideology. In terms of its aesthetic and philosophical appropriations, her aesthetic bears the marks of her struggle to rejoin an elite class. This aesthetic also reveals Duncan’s attempt, not to disregard the

ideology of middle-class womanhood, but to shape its terms to serve needs that ideology never envisioned its subjects having.

Duncan’s virulent rejection of dance forms that freely expressed sexuality is the legacy of her commitment to the separate-spheres ideology. It was not, after all, the Western aesthetic tradition that denied the legitimacy of representations of female sexuality—as long as they were controlled by male artists. Rather it was the limitations placed on representations of sexuality by “respectable” women that pushed Duncan toward the asexual (which is not the same as ungendered) quality of her theory and performance style. In adopting, or adapting, elements of an ideology that identified women’s value with her physical attributes— beauty and motherhood—Duncan chiseled out a place within the dominant ideology that enabled her to stand both within and beyond conventional definitions of woman’s place.

Part 2 :

Removing the Dancer from the Dance

Fo The Symbolist Dancer: The Performance Aesthetics of Isadora Duncan, Arthur Symons, and Edward Gordon Craig

In her attempt to negotiate middle-class conceptions of women’s place, Duncan developed a theory of dance that vacillated between asserting its spirituality and insisting on its continuity with nature. In adopting the former position, Duncan allied herself not only with that ideology which presumed the spirituality of female nature but, more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, with versions of the symbolist aesthetic articu-

lated by Arthur Symons and Edward Gordon Craig. Both Symons, whose book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) introduced the French representatives of this aesthetic to a British audience, and Craig,

whose attempts to overhaul theater art led him to reject naturalism in favor of stylized, quasi-religious performance, shared with symbolist poets an attraction to nondiscursive, nonillusionistic art. Their aesthetic ideals represent a break with nineteenth-century realism and a further step on the path toward the definition of art as a distinct, autonomous sphere of experience, isolated from any obvious social function.! Duncan maintained an uncomfortable alliance with this aesthetic. The depth of

her belief in a connection between her art and nature, as well as the ideological pressure on a female performer to defend her morality, led her away from an autonomy aesthetic. Symons, along with his friend W. B. Yeats, had attended and praised productions designed and directed by Edward Gordon Craig in London in 1901. Craig would later allow Yeats to use his system of screens at the Abbey Theatre and would continue to cite and reprint Symons’s work in his periodical, the Mask.2 Craig met Duncan in Germany in 1904, and 59

60 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art they became lovers. While their affair ended in 1906, their impact on each other was deep and lasting. Although neither Duncan nor Symons shows

any sign of having read or seen the work of the other, Craig provides a personal and intellectual bridge between the two.? Craig’s position in the lives and thought of Symons and Duncan provides the historical rationale for focusing, in this chapter, on the three together. On the level of their theoretical concerns, however, and especially their shared concern with the relationship between art and nature, such a rationale, while satisfying to the positivistic urge, may not be particularly important. The ideas and attitudes they shared cannot be attributed to direct influence with any certainty and, thus, may owe as much to larger cultural forces as to individual relationships. On the other hand, Duncan almost certainly responds specifically to Craig’s misogyny when she denigrates women’s ability to create art in her correspondence with him. Where the personal and the theoretical conjoin, then, is on the level of gender ideology. Thus, for Symons and Craig the maintenance of a separation between art and nature, particularly in relation to the dancer’s or the performer’s body, depends upon a gendered power structure. For Duncan, that power structure is only periodically present and may be one source of her ambivalence toward the symbolist aesthetic. Duncan’s early relationship with Craig was anything but theoretical. The intellectual influence they may have had on each other was filtered through a passionate, often difficult romantic involvement in which Duncan, despite (or because of) her greater fame and wealth, was frequently on the defensive. Craig insisted on the inferiority of women to men in the arts and incorporated his misogyny into his theoretical stance. + Duncan thus found herself having to suppress her creative agency in order to fulfill his expectations of her as a woman—while at the same time Craig became increasingly demanding of her financial support for his projects.

In her letters to Craig, Duncan accepts her imprisonment in the feminine as the reason for her difficulties in the work of creation. In 1905,

at the height of their affair, she writes to him,

O you you you—I am slipping away from myself and becoming nothing but a longing and reflection, and I tried to tell you the other day my work was the principal thing. Work—lI haven’t a thought or feeling left for it—that’s the truth—its [sic] this Infernal feminine Coming out at all placcs. And yet—how far Iam from wishing to be a Man!—but O how

The Symbolist Dancer 61 happy must the woman be who doesn’t know what this tearing to pieces element means. (Qtd. in Steegmuller 79-80) Craig’s ideas about the relation between gender and art exacerbated the already difficult ideological and emotional position of Duncan. This was a man, after all, who was to write in his most famous essay, “The Actor and the Uber-Marionette,” that the historical defeat of the art of the theater was duc to the vanity of women. Further, this essay may have

been one of two that Craig sent Duncan to read in March of 1907;° Duncan’s response to these essays echoes the self-castigation and denigration of the feminine found in the 1905 letter. This time, however, perhaps

because as the relationship fell apart she felt a stronger need to appease him, she makes her acceptance of his definition of the feminine even more explicit: “The feminine spirit has a special aversion to entering that land of abstract idea where work is—Indeed only a few in History have succeeded in doing it alone—®& then only through suffering, & I object to suffer” (qtd. in Steegmuller 212).

The letter continues with a description of Duncan’s experience of creative work as “a wrench, an awful suffering, a feeling of battering for ages against an impassable barrier, & then suddenly & sharply a glow, a light, a connection with the idea like entering into a God.” Duncan immediately refers this final success in creation back to the masculine, unwilling to claim the truly creative as a female space. She concludes that

the process entails so much suffering for her because she is a woman: “That there is so much pain connected with so simple an effort I put down to my sex. Now a man works easily—ait flows from him naturally more like a God” (qtd. in Steegmuller 212). Duncan is thus in the position of having to justify an “unnatural” commitment to creative work. If she is to continue taking herself seriously as an artist, Duncan must act like a man; at the same time her identification with the dominant gender ideology demands that she act like a woman. Craig reinforced this contradiction between her roles as artist and woman. In a draft of a letter written to Duncan in October of 1907 (but perhaps not sent) Craig calls “Woman... the most material packet of goods in this earth” and claims that she wishes “to kill the Desire for an Ideal” in men. She wants this, according to Craig, so that a man will cease “his worship of king—monarchy—stars and gods” and worship her instead. To this goal he attributes women’s interest in “Peace Congresses” and “Socialism” (gtd. in Steegmuller 266). The political allu-

62 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art sions have less to do with Craig’s politics than with his need to assert the power and authority of the artist. The opposition Craig apparently saw

between socialism and art is evident in his tendency to represent the artist-director as a king or other authoritarian figure. He argued that only

absolute obedience to the director can assure the creation of art in the theater and frequently used analogies to traditional authoritarian structures to describe the ideal relationship between the director and his subordinates. For example, in “The Art of the Theatre” Craig praises Wagner for taking care to “possess himself of his theater, and become a sort of

feudal baron in his castle” (Art 175). Likewise, the director is seen as analogous to a ship’s captain, making disobedience equivalent to mutiny and treason.® Such analogies also reinforce the purely masculine nature of the artistic enterprise. Just as a ship, an army, or a government did not

permit women’s participation, no women would be permitted in the theater company he imagines leading or the school he proposes for developing the art of the theater (Art 240; E. A. Craig, Gordon Craig 198). Craig’s attacks on women were from his perspective defensive ma-

neuvers, even desperate ones, aimed at counteracting the threat he believed they presented to the art of the theater (and, incidently, to his own primacy in that art).”? His use of political and military rhetoric to reinforce a gendered division of power is similar to a common strategy of politicians, who have frequently resorted to gendered rhetoric to reinforce the legitimacy of their authority. In both cases the effect is to consolidate power around the “masculine” pole. “Attention to gender,” as Joan Scott notes, “is... a crucial part of the organization of equality or inequality. Hierarchical structures rely on generalized understandings of the so-called natural relationships between male and female” (48). The intersection of the political and the aesthetic on the level of gender ideology in Craig’s theories indicates the depth of the problem Duncan faced. Positions of power in any sphere of public accomplishment were identified with the masculine; she was a female artist. Although considerably less vociferous in voicing his opinions than

Craig, Arthur Symons believed that women should not exceed the boundaries their class and gender determined for them. Thus he chased ballet girls relentlessly in the 1890s and celebrated female performers repeatedly in his criticism, but when a woman of his own class told him of her desire to go on the stage, he wrote to her that although she might succeed on the lyric stage,

The Symbolist Dancer 63 I don’t quite like the idea of seeing you on it. . . . In considering a matter of this kind, there is no use in ignoring facts; and the fact certainly is, that the greater part of actresses on every stage are without even pretensions to virtue. . . . I used to think at one time that it was merely a Puritan prejudice to look on actors and actresses

as specially immoral people. But now that I have so many opportunities of seeing for myself, I find that it is only the truth. They are, as a class, more uniformly immoral than any other class of people. (Selected Letters 90-91)

Symons’s apparent enthusiasm for dance and dancers cannot be taken as any indication of his desire to change the conventional attitudes

toward women on the stage. Nor was he interested in empowering women to transcend traditional social roles. Although like Craig Symons usually showed little interest in politics, he was not blind to the intersec-

tion between politics and gender ideology. The transgression of that ideology by the suffrage movement so disturbed him that he wrote a play

attacking feminism. In it, the women who had taken over the government of England are threatened by the Germans and French. However, their female instincts having overpowered the demands of practical necessity, they are unable to respond because they have spent all the money in the Treasury on frivolous ornaments (Beckson, Symons 251). Despite

the absence of a personal investment in subordinating women within the institution of the theater, Symons maintains the gender divisions that underwrote Craig’s refusal to take women seriously as artists. For Symons, as a spectator rather than a participant in performances, the investment in maintaining the subordinate place of women in the theater came less out of aesthetic principle than the pleasure he received from their display and availability. Even in those essays where aesthetic principles seem to govern his treatment of the dancer, these very principles join forces with his gender ideology. It has been frequently observed that the development of symbolism and

its aesthetic heir, modernism, were in part responses to the growth of mass culture and an attempt to preserve the spiritual realm from dissolution in the face of scientific discourse.® In addition, the emphasis in that aesthetic on the distance between life, nature, or ordinary experience and art, and the correlative emphasis on the proximity of art to religion and

64 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art the occult, can be seen as attempts to preserve an uncommodifiable value for art under capitalism. Thus the least “matcrial” of the arts was the one most commonly cited as an aesthetic ideal—the nondiscursive, disembodied art of music. For Symons, however, the attraction of dance as an image for art was precisely in its ambivalent position betwcen the physical and the spiritual. The dancer can display an apparent unity between the body and the soul. The dancer in Symons’s criticism was the site of

just such a unity, but one that, at the same time, did not threaten the distance of art from the ordinary world. For Symons, dance scemed to represent both control over the physical realm and transcendence of that realm.

At its most extreme, however, treatment of dance in the symbolist aesthetic does away with the physical dancer altogether. In Mallarmé’s essay, “Ballets,” he assimilates the dancer completely to language: she is not a girl, but rather a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental aspect of earthly form . . . she does not dance but rather, with miraculous lunges and abbreviations, writing with her body, she suggests things which the written work could express only in several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose. Her poem is written without the writer’s tools. (112) The danccer’s agency has at best a precarious place in this formulation, since she is text, writing implement and meaning all at once, while at the

same time not being a subject who could write—‘“she is not a girl.” Symons, for whom Mallarmé was the seer who pointed literature toward its goal of “spiritualising the word” (Symbolist 75), did not go quite as far

as Mallarmé in “spiritualising” the dancer. In fact, his treatments of dancers are split between a highly abstract appreciation of them as art and

an equally strong sensuous appreciation of them as female bodies. As John Stokes notes, “It was with his own divided self in mind that he posed a dichotomy between those whose involvement [with dance] was ‘concrete’ (an interest in dancers) and those for whom it was ‘abstract’ (an

interest in dancing)” (81-82).? Importantly, Symons’s attempt to unify these two sides of the dancer in his essay “The World as Ballet” (1898) did

not finally threaten their opposition. In this essay, the dancer constituted an artistic ideal because of her ability to combine the “intellectual as well as sensuous appeal of the living symbol” (Studies 391). Dance is the art closest to nature, closest to

The Symbolist Dancer 65 the instinctual life of the body and its passions, but, Symons proclaims, dance “idealises these mere acts” of the body, so that it simultaneously

reflects and expresses them, imitates and embodies them (388). The dancer both is life and is art; she is the body, and she is that which transcends the body, her gestures being “all pure symbol” (391). This paradox of the dancer as a “living symbol” makes her what Frank Kermode identifies as the Romantic image, an image that resolves the alienation or “disunity” between body and soul. Symons’s use of the dancer, as does Yeats’s, insists on the unity of nature and art in that figure. But this apparent unity occurs at a level of abstraction that effaces the mediating

term, the woman who dances, on which that unity is enacted. In other words, the unity of nature and art can be achieved by the dancer only because both aspects of her performance have been made sufficiently abstract to locate them within the same register. This abstract unity, in turn, depends upon the erasure of the concrete substratum that underwrites it. In “Myth Today,” Barthes posits that “[b]ourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types” (155), and that it therefore seeks to efface the historical specificity of its objects: “It is a kind of ideal servant: it prepares all things, brings them, lays them out, the master arrives, it silently disappears: all that is left to do is enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from” (151). Symons’s myth of the dancer as “living symbol” functions in an analogous way to naturalize the estrangement of women from a male-dominated world by

asserting their dispersal between a primitive world of instincts and a transcendent realm of symbols. The female dancer 1s, in other words, relegated to the realm of the Other. This process, in Symons’s case, involves the elision of the human being whose performance provides the basis of this dispersal and gives it the appearance of being instead a unity. When Symons was not using dancers to resolve, yet maintain, the

alienation of art from nature, he was reveling in their concrete materiality. Symons’s exploits with ballet girls and actresses in the 1890s suggest the basis for his conviction of their “immorality,” but more to the point, indicate the extremely personal nature of his experience of dancers in the theater. The abstract beauty of ballet (Plays 201) is counter-

acted by Symons’s repeated narratives of seduction between performer and spectator. Not only does his own involvement with the dancer Lydia and the actress Rachel Kahn begin by a meeting of their eyes across the footlights (Memoirs 76, 160), but he describes the romance between Duse

66 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art and D’Annunzio in the same terms: “He had free access to the theatre; they gazed on one another across the footlights; she attracted him immensely, he was wild and wanton and light-hearted” (Memoirs 229). ‘The recurrence of this narrative supports John Stokes’s appraisal of Symons’s fascination with music halls; his fantasy was that “a girl is continuing to display her illumined body for his sole benefit” (79-81). If a dancer is engaged in the seduction of individual members of the

audience, she is not the impersonal performer of the symbolist ideal.!° Symons’s ambivalence to this ideal is evident in his unwillingness to relinquish the pleasure of the erotic gaze in watching a performance. This tension between Symons’s celebration of dance as art and his interest in the dancer as flesh comes to the surface periodically. In “The World as Ballet” he asserts both versions of the dancer at once in his description of her as “so human, so remote, so desirable, so evasive” (Studies 389). In

“An Apology for Puppets,” he seems willing to give up the flesh in exchange for a purer experience of art. Arguing that the spectator’s experience should remain an intellectual one, he concedes that this means that in watching marionettes, “[t]here is not indeed the appeal to the senses of the first row of the stalls at a ballet of living dancers” (Plays 5). A few lines later, however, Symons is reintroducing the pleasures of the flesh by

suggesting that, for those spectators who wish that kind of pleasure, if they sit far enough away from the stage they will “find it quite easy to fall in love with a marionette” (Plays 5). Edward Gordon Craig did not share Symons’s reluctance to give up the seductiveness of the performer.!! In fact, Craig wanted to strengthen

the power of the British Censor to suppress performers’ erotic appeal: “We know that perfect dancing is possible without display of naked or semi-naked limbs. . . . All these liberties taken upon the stage are ruining the stage. Let the Censor act twice as stringently as before” (Movement and Dance 76). Likewise he interprets the antitheatrical legislation of

the Puritans as an attempt to remove, not drama, but the human body from the stage (Movement and Dance 66). In “The Actor and the UberMarionette,” Craig attacked performers as flawed material whose lack of control over their emotions and refusal to obey their directors threatened the very existence of theater as a legitimate art form. The two men were familiar with each other’s work, however, and generally supportive of it. Craig used a quotation from Symons’s essay on Eleanora Duse as the epigraph for “The Actor and the Uber-Marionette” and included Symons

among those artists he surveyed on “Realism and the Actor” for his

The Symbolist Dancer 67 journal, the Mask.12 Symons wrote positive reviews of Craig’s produc-

tions for the Purcell Society, as well as of his essay “The Art of the Theatre” (1905). He praised Craig for his attempt to “take us beyond reality” in his productions and explicitly connected Craig’s method with that of symbolism, remarking that “he replaces the pattern of the thing itself by the pattern which that thing evokes in his mind, the symbol of the thing” (Studies 352). Craig wanted to replace the performer’s body with an impersonal instrument that would not interfere with the director’s unified conception of a production. Although on one level a response to the power of the nineteenth-century actor-manager (John 256), Craig’s bias against the performer has larger implications. Repeatedly Craig objects to actors

because they are imperfect instruments, and the same holds true for dancers and “all those who use their own person as instrument. Alas, the human body refuses to be an instrument, even to the mind which lodges in that body” (Movement and Dance 34). The problem with the body as an instrument for art is precisely its unpredictability, its refusal to be dominated. The body, like nature, represents freedom from human control, and thus the promise of freedom from complete rationalization. Craig develops this argument in “The Actor and the Uber-Marionette”:

The whole nature of man tends towards freedom; he therefore carries the proof in his own person, that as material for the theatre he is useless. In the modern theatre, owing to the use of the bodies of men and women as their material, all which is presented there is of an accidental nature. (Movement and Dance 38; see Lyons 69)

Craig, then, like Symons, is of two minds about the value of the performer’s body. Both men vacillate between attitudes toward the body that attempt to deny it—either by abstraction or outright rejection—or

that celebrate it as the site of untrammeled sensuality or irrepressible freedom. As exemplified by Craig and Symons, the symbolist treatment of the performer functions to project “nature” away from the artist or critic and on to an Other who 1s alternately celebrated and condemned for his or her contamination by nature. In either case the superiority of the uncontaminated artist or critic is assumed, since the identification of

nature in the Other/performer forms the basis for her subordination. Nature, as Adorno and Horkheimer realized, is that from which men alienate themselves in order to dominate it (39). Craig recognized the

68 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art importance of that distance from nature to successful domination and therefore wished to exclude it altogether from his art. Symons, the more Romantic of the two, dreamed of a unity between art and nature that mystifies the process of exclusion and objectification that governed his positioning of the dancing body. Craig’s response to Duncan’s performances indicates the importance

for him of defining the relationship between the dancer and art. Craig wrote to his friend Martin Shaw that, whether or not Duncan could be called an artist, she was extraordinary:

My dear lad, artist or not—this is a marvelous being—beauty— nature & brain. | don’t like brainy women but brains intelligence is a rare and lovely thing. If you could see one dance you would understand how wonderful it is. Beauty & Poetry is art when it is created no matter how by a living being. I have seldom been so moved by

anything. It’s a great, a rare, rare gift brought to perfection by 18 years of persistent labour—& we may all agree to worship such things. (Qtd. in Steegmuller 63) Throughout his life Craig was to continue responding to Duncan. Although he tended to devalue her as an artist (a role presumably only Craig and perhaps a few other men could fill), he consistently praised her as a powerful personality and defended her place in the history of dance against all comers, from the Russian Ballet to Ruth St. Denis (Rood x1x-

xx). Her value, in other words, was ambivalent. On the one hand, she was a “personality” rather than an artist; on the other, she was more truly creative and innovative than any other contemporary dancer. Duncan was dangerous to Craig. She had apparently reached some of the same conclusions that he had about the proper direction for theater

art and, moreover, was acting on them more effectively than he was. Further, she seemed to have caused a real breakthrough in his own creative vision. According to his son, Craig’s response to seeing her dance for the first time was one of admiration and resentment, “admiration for what had been to him the greatest artistic experience of his life, resent-

ment that this revelation should come from a woman” (E. A. Craig, Gordon Craig 191-92). Craig’s solution to this dilemma was to cast Duncan in the acceptably feminine role of muse: “Was it art? No, it was not. It was something which inspires those men who labour in the narrower fields of the arts, harder but more lasting. It released the minds of hun-

The Symbolist Dancer 69 dreds of such men: one had but to see her dance for one’s thoughts to wing their way, as it were, with the fresh air” (qtd. in Steegmuller 362). Finally, Craig categorized Duncan’s as a “divine accident,” thus by definition not art, since for him art “can’admut of no accidents” (Art 58). At the root of Craig’s rejection of Duncan as an artist was not only his misogyny, but his conviction that art must be opposed to nature. In “The Artists of the Theatre of the Future” Craig wrote that the natural has nothing to do with art: “We must understand that the two things are divided, and we must keep each thing in its place” (Movement and Dance 27). This was part of a larger tendency in Craig’s thought toward isolat-

ing his own territory, the art of the theater, from any other activity or art.!3 The two tendencies together, the artist’s rejection of nature and the isolation of art within its own unique space, speak to the increased alienation of artists from their societies. Craig practically became a parody of the alienated artist, sabotaging most attempts by other theater artists to work with him. He attempted to force the most collaborative of the arts

into the model of creation that seemed to provide the only hope for individual artistic freedom—that of the artist creating in isolation from all external forces—both interpersonal and market. Craig’s conception of the artist of the theater thus takes to its logical conclusion the goal of symbolism as stated by Symons in his introduction to The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Symbolism was to liberate literature by leading its “revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition” (5). Kermode notes a connection between the attempt to unify body and

soul through the Romantic image and the increasing isolation of the artist. The importance of images of unity often lies in their ability to reconcile on an abstract level deeply embedded oppositions—the alienation of the individual from society, or from nature. That this unity occurs

only on an abstract level may equally suggest a strong investment in maintaining the separation. This, I would argue, is true of the separation of art from nature in the symbolist aesthetic, because this separation 1s seen as a sign of progress, not alienation. It is something to be guarded rather than overcome; the significance of images unifying body with soul Or matter with spirit within an aesthetic committed to the “spiritualisation” of art cannot be taken at face value. The identification of progress

with separation informs the antirealist tradition in the arts, since the future of art is seen to reside precisely in the refusal of art to imitate nature. That this ideology of progress as separation lay at the heart of the

70 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art campaign against women’s suffrage as well suggests the presence of a deep connection between gender ideology and aesthetics. In the antisuffrage version of the ideology, the progress of the race was seen to lie in

increased specialization and division of labor, which was supposed to lead to greater efficiency. Thus the attempts of women to do what men did (vote, for example) was a regressive move (Harrison $9). From such a perspective, a female dancer was transgressive in any number of ways. She used her body to perform art, and since the female body was considered closer to nature than the man’s to begin with, she dangerously blurred the difference between nature and art. Women, in any case, were supposed to do the work of reproduction, not creation (Craig blamed Duncan’s inadequate mothering for their daughter’s death). One function, then, of the insistence on separating nature from art was to reinforce a gender ideology under pressure from the efforts of middle-class women to increase their economic, political, and social independence from men. The antifeminist positions of Symons and Craig are from this perspective perfectly consonant with their aesthetics. Although Duncan seldom repeats the implication that artistic creation is an unnatural activity for women outside of her letters to Craig, !4+ she had a recurrent need to address the relationship between her body and the ideal realm of art. When she does so, her purpose is either to subordinate

the body to a spiritual goal, or, more interestingly, to unify body and soul so that the body itself becomes spiritualized. This latter strategy differs from Symons’s transformation of the dancing body into a living symbol in that Duncan does not attempt, as Symons does, to maintain an opposition between nature and art while unifying them at the same time. Rather, the whole point of Duncan’s strategy is to overcome this dichot-

omy. She does not, however, consistently do so; instead, Duncan frequently adopts the terms of the symbolist dichotomy, particularly as it was expressed by Craig. The body becomes a problem to be overcome on the path to Art. At such moments Duncan often uses language similar to that found in a number of the reviews of Maud Allan, as well as in Craig’s treatment of the actor. Her body becomes an instrument, something to be used in order to make art, but itself foreign to the aesthetic product. In an essay probably first published in 1914, Duncan distinguishes the dancer from the gymnast precisely in terms of each one’s relation to the body: for the dancer, unlike the gymnast, exercise is only a means, not an end in itself.

The Symbolist Dancer 71 For the dancer, “[T]he body itself must be forgotten, for it is only a harmonious and well adapted instrument whose movements express not only the movements of the body, as in gymnastics, but also the thoughts and feelings of a soul” (Art 83).1!5 In a letter to Craig she suggests the

importance of this forgetting of the body to her sense of herself as an artist. Here Duncan describes a successful performance after a day of unsatisfying rehearsal: “After rehearsing orchestra all day—& great agony of spirit—suddenly felt myself dancing like a miracle. Art or whatever you may choose to call it—every little movement came in its old place.

I was hardly conscious of my body at all” (qtd. in Steegmuller 165). The discontinuity between the body and art implied by these examples, however, must be set against those passages that attempt to assert an essential continuity between the body and the soul.!® In one of her earliest essays, “The Dance of the Future,” Duncan defined the dancer of the future as “one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body” (Art 62). Rather than suggesting a translation of the spiritual into bodily movement, this passage suggests that the ability of

the body to express the soul is due not to its effacement, but to the mutual merging of two terms that for the symbolists formed a dichotomy. Likewise Duncan was able to conceptualize a relation between body and soul that granted equal power to each in its ability to affect the other. The body shapes the soul, just as the soul shapes the body: the attitude we assume affects our soul; a simple turning backward of the head, made with passion, sends a Bacchic frenzy running through us, of joy or heroism or desire. All gestures thus give rise to an inner response, and similarly they have the power to express directly every possible state of the feelings or thought. (Art 103) If the movements of the body shape the soul, there is a profound continu-

ity between one’s gestures and spiritual state. The kinds of gestures chosen then become quite important, and the need to establish some basis for making this selection imperative. This need motivates Duncan’s reliance on nature as the foundation for dance. This theoretical stance and the performance practice that went along

with it distinguish Duncan from the symbolist performer. As Frank Kermode notes, Loie Fuller, not Duncan, was the ideal symbolist dancer;

unlike Fuller, “Duncan certainly did not submerge her personality in

72 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art strange disguiscs and unnatural lights” (“Poct and Danccr” 73). While symbolist art attempted to cfface the presence of the artist, Duncan’s presence defined her art. Dance, howcver, could only follow Mallarmé’s dictum that “[t]he pure work . . . implics the clocutionary disappearance of the poet” (qtd. in Symons, Symbolist 73) if it followed the example of Loie Fullcr in hiding the human body of the dancer, or the suggestion of Craig in doing away with human dancers altogether.

The dancer’s movements, according to Duncan, must “become godlike.” But what this means to her is not that they will be complctely divorced from life, but that they will reflect naturc, “mirroring in themselves the waves, the winds, the movements of growing things, the flight

of birds, the passing of clouds, and finally the thought of man in his rclation to the universe” (Art 63). Walter Sorcll sct Duncan in opposition to Oscar Wilde in his cultural history of dance because of her refusal to separate art from nature, observing that “much too little has been made of the rediscovery of nature by Isadora Duncan” (322). In fact the aes-

thetic basis of her dance is its relation to nature. And this relation to nature constitutes at the same time its moral basis, thc answer to those critics who question its propriety. The spiritual value of dance resides in the harmonious relationship it establishes between the human and the natural. Ballct’s violation of this harmony justifics its rejection (Art $5). But while Duncan consistently maintained the foundational role of nature in art, she also maintained the symbolist insistence that art transcend life. She argued that whilc nature was the source of art, and dance must remain in harmony with natural forces, “the dancer’s movement will always be scparate from any movement in nature” (Art 79). Finally, the essential difference between her acsthetic and one like Symons’s that claims to sce in dance the unity of nature and art or body and soul rests as

much in the cultural position of the speaker as in the details of the language used to describe dance. The shifting, clusive quality of Duncan’s writings on the relation between dance and nature or the body and the soul indicates the difficulty of finding a vocabulary within cxisting high-cultural discourse for both accurately describing, and valorizing, what it was she thought she was doing. As a woman, a danccr, and an artist, Duncan could not comfortably adopt the distance between art and

the performer that Craig required, nor the kind of abstract unity— combined with crotic comc-on—that Symons preferred. Even if allowing her to be celebrated within the terms of cach man’s aesthetic, to adopt

The Symbolist Dancer 73 either position would have denied Duncan’s personal presence in her dances and devalued her as a human being. Finally, the implications of Duncan’s theory of performed art as opposed to those of both Symons and Craig become most evident in the assumed relationship between performed art and its audience. To the extent that Duncan saw a continuity between art and life, she also saw one between herself as an individual and her audiences. In believing that her dancing could improve the lives of her pupils and audiences, she relinquished its claim to autonomy. Her willingness to defend it on moral as well as aesthetic grounds is a product of this stance. As André Levin-

son noted, hers was not a “pure” art, but one with a strong ethical component. But rather than being a considered and self-conscious resis-

tance to the separation of art from life, Duncan’s position was more likely a reaction to the realities facing a female performer in her time. Because audiences did not separate the personal morality of the female performer from her performance (as evidenced by Symons’s letter to his middle-class friend), Duncan had no choice but to proclaim the moral content of her aesthetic product. While the logic of Craig’s insistence on aesthetic autonomy led him to greater and greater isolation—he soon stopped working in theaters altogether—the logic of Duncan’s insistence on the connection between art and life led her to Soviet Russia, where in the 1920s she opened a school for workers’ children and gave free concerts for the masses.

4

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé: Rewriting the Fatal Woman

In contrast to Maud Allan, who in her depiction of Salomé was able to inhabit both a sexualized and a spiritualized femininity—without threatening this polarity—Oscar Wilde failed to convince the British public, or the Censor, that his Salomé was anything other than the bestial, oversexed stereotype of the fatal woman. Both Wilde and Strauss, whose Salomé was performed in London in 1910, attempted unsuccessfully to transcend that stereotype. Critics tended to see Salomé’s dance as the

most highly sexualized point in the narrative, the point at which the character descends completely into the physical. That Arthur Symons thought the weakness of Wilde’s play lay in the fact that Herod’s oath came before the dance, rather than in response to it, “that is, under the impression of her dance” (Selected Letters 178), indicates his assumption that the dance represents the climax of Salomé’s sexual power. It would thereby also become the most important point at which to challenge the

fatal-woman stereotype. The presumptive identification of Salomé’s dance with sexuality, however, undercut any attempt to develop an interpretation of it as an aesthetic, let alone spiritual, event. Although Wilde’s Salomé can be read as attempting to conceptualize the unity of the spiritual and the physical, this approach is seldom taken. In both recent and early commentary on Oscar Wilde’s drama, critics have emphasized the sexuality of Salomé, generally containing her within the stereotype of the fatal woman. Wilde, in contrast, attempted repeatedly to suggest a highly aestheticized, symbolic reading of her character and the

play as a whole. His failure to persuade his readers of this symbolist reading of the play can be explained by their, and their culture’s, needs both to evade and to confirm the power and the threat of the exotic

75 |

woman. Strauss faced the same problem in relation to his operatic version

76 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art of Wilde’s text. Readings of these Salomés that ignore their relation to the spiritual as well as the sexual pole ofa dualistic conception of female nature neglect the complexity of the cultural maneuvering that went on around this figure. My analysis of Salomé and her dance seeks to elicit both the possibilitics for transcending the dichotomy between the physical and the

spiritual in the representation of Salomé and the cultural importance of maintaining it. Wilde’s Salomé has persistently provoked critics to meditations on the perverse. From its publication in the original French, in 1893, the play inspired responses such as that of the Times’ critic, who called it “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred” (gtd. in Beckson, Wilde 133). Even reviewers sympathetic to the play and opposed to the Censor’s prohibition of its performance agreed, as Lord Alfred Douglas put it, that “the play is unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome, and unEnglish” (qtd. in Beckson, Wilde 139). And the wisdom of hindsight has had little effect on this critical attitude, other than to throw the weight of the play’s perversity away from its scriptural content, focusing the critical eye on the sexuality of Salomé— that cruel beauty whose desire meant death. ! According to Mario Praz, “It was Wilde who finally fixed the legend of Salomé’s horrible passion.” While Flaubert’s Salomé had been the

innocent tool of her mother’s hatred of John the Baptist, in Wilde’s version she denies her mother’s influence in her desire for his head. “And,” Praz comments, “having obtained the head, she fastens her lips upon it in her vampire passion” (312-13). Too frequently more recent critics have likewise kept Salomé encased in the character of the fatal

| woman. Thus, in 1964, Epifanio San Juan, Jr., wrote that “Salomé’s poisonous malice and her careless crucl passion lie at the heart of Wilde’s conception of her character” (121). Christopher Nassar in 1974 declared that “the thrust of the play is to strip veil after veil from Salome until she emerges as a deathly pale terror feeding on the blood-soaked head of a dead person” (82). And Bram Dykstra, in his impressive feminist study published in 1986, Idols of Perversity, only adds more sophisticated psychoanalytic and matcrialist dimensions—as well as a good deal of irony —to a reading of her character that remains essentially unchanged:

The spectacle of Salome’s bestial passion makes Herod shiver... . But the outrages of feminine desire continuc. In a passage in which

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé T7 Wilde directly equates semen and the blood which feeds man’s brain, Salome, woman, the vampire hungry for blood, tastes the bitter seed of man, deprcdates the spirit of holy manhood. (398) Even those readings of the play that emphasize its symbolic structurc or intellectual basis, such as those of Ellmann and Joost and Court, do not go far enough in challenging the simple enclosure of Salomé in the realm of the flesh. The traditional critical stance that sees Salomé first and foremost as the fatal woman also constructs the reader as a participant in a conception of sexuality that in its obsessive repetition perpetuates rather than questions a misogynist tradition. It seems therefore imperative to open up the character of Salomé to alternative constructions. When Mario Praz delineated the relationship of the fatal woman to the exotic, he in fact laid the groundwork for one such alternative. Those figures that best fit his stereotype are also those “more highly penetrated with aestheticism and exoticism” (210), such as, inevitably, the Oriental princess Salomé. Further, for Praz exoticism is so closely tied to the erotic that “a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire” (207). This intertwining of the exotic and the erotic, or in Edward Said’s terms, of the Orient and sexuality, constitutes a persistent element in the Western discourse of Orientalism (188, 207). But the Orientalist conception of the East also, according to Said, “tends to be static, frozen, fixed eternally” (208).+ It 1s this static conception of the Orient that gives rise to such clichés as “the wisdom of the East.” In noting that both pervasive sexuality and static eternality characterize

Western stereotypes of the Orient and the Oriental, Said points to a tension that surfaces in Praz as well. Praz names these two sides of the Orient the exotic, which is sensual and erotic, and the mystic, which is transcendental and eternal. Wilde’s Salomé, we shall see, fits either, or rather fits both, of these categories. Because the fatal-woman figure seems to rest so securely in the exotic, and Salomé so securely in the fatal woman, Wilde’s character has also been assumed to belong here—but she is, in fact, as much a mystic as an exotic. According to Praz, both the exoticist and the mystic start “from the same sensual basis” and “transter the fulfillment of their desires to an ideal.” But while the mystic “projects himself outside the visible world into a transcendental atmosphere where he unites himself with the Divinity; the [exoticist] transports himself in imagination outside the actualitics of time and space, and thinks he sees in whatever is

78 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art past and remote from him the ideal atmosphere for the contentment of his senses” (210). In Wilde’s play, it is Salomé’s mission to accomplish both ideals—explaining why Wilde himself called Salomé “a mystic, the sister of Salammbd, a Sainte Therésé who worships the moon” (Ricketts, Recollections 51—§2).

Wilde’s Salomé stymies Praz, for it seems to him to be a childish “parody of the whole of the material used by the Decadents” (312), and he can account for its popularity only by positing a massive, if predictable, lapse in taste: “as generally happens with specious second-hand works,” he writes, “it was precisely Wilde’s Salome which became popular” (316). Although to condemn the public for their failure to corroborate a critic’s aesthetic intuitions is to appeal to authority alone, the weakness of Praz’s reading is not to be found so much in its elitism as in the way he delineates his interpretive categories. Yet Praz is less reductive in his use of these categories than many other critics, for he recognized how problematic the relationship was between Wilde’s Salomé and the fatal-woman stereotype; thus he read her as a failed or parody exotic— while scholars such as those already cited place her uncritically within the stereotype. Wilde himself can be quoted both for and against the fatal-woman

reading of Salomé,° which should by itself open to question the easy characterization of Salomé as an evil, castrating vampire, or, to give the same figure its feminist twist, either an antipatriarchal sexual terrorist or

a victim of a compensatory ideology that gives women sexual power while refusing them economic and political power. The foregrounding of female sexuality required by readings of the play that emphasize Salomé

as a stereotypical fatal woman, even if they emphasize the subversive potential of that figure, reduce the range of desires and challenges attributable to her, in effect containing her within the relatively safe confines of her biology. After briefly summarizing the action of the play, I will offer an alternative to these readings. The opening scene presents the observations and desires of secondary, characters—soldiers, a young Syrien, and the page of Herodias. We learn that the Syrien is infatuated with Salomé, while the page languishes

for him. The first appearance of a major character—a purely verbal representation—occurs through the Syrien’s description of Salomé. The first speech by a major character comes from “The Voice of Iokanaan,” who, like Salomé, would also have no physical presence at this point in a performance of the play. Unlike Salomé, who is seen before she is heard,

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé 79 Jokanaan is first heard. After Salomé leaves Herod’s banquet, she hears Iokanaan’s voice, which intrigues her, stimulating her desire to see him.

She convinces the Syrien to release him from the cistern where he is imprisoned. The attempted seduction of Ilokanaan by Salomé leads to the first death of the play—the suicide of the Syrien. Next Herod enters in search of his stepdaughter, followed by his guests. Over the objections of Herodias, he asks her to dance for him. She refuses. He repeats his wish, finally promising to give her anything she wishes in return. Salomé then

agrees to dance, disobeying her mother, and Wilde’s stage direction states that “Salomé danse la danse des sept voiles” (66). In exchange for

the dance she will accept nothing but the head of Iokanaan; so, after fruitless attempts to negotiate, Herod is forced to permit his execution— the second death of the play. Salomé’s speech to the head of IJokanaan motivates Herod to leave the scene, and he orders that Salomé be left in complete darkness. From this darkness she claims to have kissed Iokanaan. A moonbeam falls on her. Herod turns, sees Salomé, and orders her death. The soldiers crush her with their shields—the third death and final action of the play. Salomé’s invisible kiss of Iokanaan’s severed head has attracted fan-

tastic extensions of the play’s text in the minds of readers. Images of Salomé sucking the blood-soaked lips of the Baptist, like images of the “frenzy of Salomé’s dance” (San Juan 128), imported into Wilde’s laconic stage direction, derive from the cultural and conceptual presuppositions readers bring to the play.

The play’s action is carefully patterned around an opposition between the visible and the audible. As I have noted, Salomé is seen before being heard, while Iokanaan is heard before being seen. Salomé is visible to one or another character throughout the play—making her invisibility at the moment of the presumed kiss all the more striking—while Iokanaan often speaks without being visible. This pattern expresses the opposition between the Word, that audible manifestation of the spirit, and the Body, that visible manifestation of the material, the sexual, and the “natural.” The importance of this opposition is emphasized by the fact that two of the three deaths in the play directly respond to perceived threats to it. The Syrien’s suicide is clearly an act of division, an attempt to halt the incursion of the body into the place of the spirit. He begs Salomé not to look at Iokanaan, but also, he supplicates: “Ne lui dis pas de telles choses. Je ne peux pas le souffrir . . . Princesse, princesse, ne dit pas ces choses.”

80 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art And Salomé responds: “Je baiscrai ta bouche, lokanaan.” Immediately thereafter, the Syricn kills himself, and Wilde provides the following stage direction: “Il sc tuc ct tombe entre Salomé ct Iokanaan” (31). Although one might dismiss this scene as a simple case of sexual jcalousy, attention to the pattern of oppositions under discussion suggests that Salomé’s behavior poses a more profound threat: the female body, idcally

a mute object of the male gaze and male desire, attempts to usurp the male prerogative of the voice and usc it from her own position (that of the body) for her own ends. The real dangers Salomé represents for the men in this play arc not those consequent on desiring a fatal woman (a desire indicated in the play by their gaze), but rather those posed by threatening the invidious distinction between the object of the gaze and the disembodied voicc.® The exotic princess Salomé 1s no longer only the

object of sexual desirc; she has demanded the possession of the mouthpicce of God. She sccks, like the mystic, a unity with divinity. Salomé’s own death follows a second attempted transgression of the separation between body and spirit. Her final speech occurs in complete darkness, and the prefix Wilde gives it parallcls those given to Jokanaan’s speeches from the cistern: “The Voice of Salomé.” From the silent physi-

cality in which she entered the play, Salomé has moved to the opposite pole, that of Jokanaan’s invisible voice. She has, at this moment, moved figuratively outside the physical world, but her speech paradoxically concerns a woman’s physical possession of a man: “Ah! j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, j’ai baisé ta bouche” (81). Physical desire speaks from the place of the spirit. Salomé the exotic has here usurped the position of the mystic—she has colonized the spiritual realm for sensual ends. But this alone does not cause her death. Only after her return to visibility—a moonbcam reveals her once more to Herod’s gaze—does he order her death. Salomé must dic not because she has spoken from the place of the spirit, but because she has done so without relinquishing (as if she had the choice) the place of the body. While the threat posed by Salomé 1s most frequently understood in

} terms of female desirc and sexuality, her challenge is in fact not simply sexual. Her actions rcoricnt the relationship between the material and the spiritual. That is, the head of Jokanaan, rather than being a poor substitutc for his penis, is a poor substitute for his voicc—and for the authority and spirituality it represents. Her possession of his head seems to imply that the voice can be subsumcd by the body, thus making it somcthing to be looked at rather than listened to, which, in terms of the gender schema established by the play, also makes Iokanaan into something feminine—

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé SI the object rather than the bearer of the gaze. The challenge presented by this reversal has far greater implications than the fatal woman’s threat to male virility and self-csteem, for it also challenges the foundations of that sclf-estcem: the greater prestige and powcr of male speech, associated with divinity, over the female body, associated with biology, is shaken by the female body’s insistent desire to possess that speech. The silent sexuality of Salomé and the invisible voice of Salomé mark the extremes of her movement between the exotic and the mystic, the sexual and the spiritual, just as her death marks the final consequenccs of her attempt to unite them, to disrupt an order founded on thcir scparation.

The attempt to possess a voice by acquiring the head it emerged from is at best a quixotic gesture toward an implicitly unattainable idcal. A woman, least of all a sexually desirable woman, cannot be a prophet as well. She cannot so casily escape her own identity as object of the male

desiring gaze. Nor can she create a mysticism that will share her own physicality—that will speak the spirit from the place of the body. Praz’s uncxamined assumption that these categories arc mutually exclusive expresses preciscly the dilemma, the tragedy and the challenge of Salomé. A woman imprisoned by our culture’s stereotypes of the Orient and the fatal woman truly lacks the power to speak as a prophet of God. In his criticism, Wilde plays out this dilemma on the philosophical level of the split between the objective and the subjective: “I had taken the Drama, the most objective form known to art, and madc it as personal a

mode of expression as the Lyric or the Sonnct, while enriching the characterization of the stage, and cnlarging—at any rate in Salome—its artistic horizon” (Letters 589). In 1897 Wilde thus expressed the need for art to establish continuity between the individual psyche and the least individualized mode of artistic representation, to bridge, in other words, the distance between subjective isolation and the commonality of objective forms. Earlicr in the same Ictter hc had reminded Lord Alfred Douglas that “[o]ne can really, as I say in Intentions, be far more subjective in an objective form than in any other way.” The pertinent passage in Intentions

scems to be from the sccond part of Wilde’s dialogue, “The Artist as Critic,” where Gilbert explains that “the real artist 1s he who procccds, not from fecling to form, but from form to thought and passion” (Artist as Critic 398), for in art, though not only in art, “the body is the soul” (399). Thus, although his readers cannot sce Salomé as anything except body, Wilde could imagine her equally as soul. But, as I have suggested, Salomé’s desire for the head of Iokanaan 1s

82 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art on one level the story of her failure to attain this relation between body and soul. To the extent that Salomé does not achieve unity with Iokanaan, she remains trapped in the physical. This is not completely so, however, for if the severed head of Iokanaan is the image of Salomé’s failure to unify body and soul, her dance is the image of her success.’ The dance, in Wilde’s text, might be thought of as purely objective —1it is physical, silent, an object of the gaze—the opposite of lokanaan’s prophetic voice or Herod’s oath. This positioning of the dance, however, assumes a relation of opposition between the dance and these uses of the voice. In fact, the oath and the dance are as much equivalent as opposite. Salomé dances in exchange for the word of Herod that he will give her whatever she wishes. The dance and the word form a transactional unity; they become commodities through which the relationship between Herod and Salomé is mediated. Insofar as the dance and the word become equivalents, the binary opposition that kept them apart is undermined. It is further weakened by Wilde’s refusal to provide any description of the dance in his text; any concrete sense of its form, length, or style 1s elided in the one-sentence stage direction, “Salomé danse la danse des sept voiles.” That this exclusion was deliberate is clear from Wilde’s inscription of a copy of the play to Aubrey Beardsley, “for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance” (Letters 348). Wilde again undercuts the polarization

of the body and the soul, for the textual absence of the dance in effect spiritualizes the most purely physical moment of the play, just as the moment of the kiss is spiritualized by its invisibility. In performance, of course, this would not necessarily be the case,® and the question of whether Wilde wrote the play to be performed has been controversial. Robert Ross and Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that performance was not intended. Ross is vehement on the subject and singles out performances of the dance as particularly abusive of Wilde’s intentions: “Salomé was not written for Madame Sarah Bernhardt. It was

not written with any idea of stage representation. ... In no scene of Wilde’s play does Salomé dance around the head of the Baptist, as she is represented in music-hall turns” (vii—vii). Wilde did not appear adverse

to its performance, however, particularly with Sarah Bernhardt as Salomé (Letters 335-36), although he also insisted that “the actable value of

a play has nothing whatsoever to do with its value as a work of art” (Letters 310).?

The difficulty of performing an invisible dance is no reason to re-

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé 83 ject the importance of its conceptual implications. In fact, Wilde’s aesthetic goal of unifying subjective expression and objective form applies uniquely to dance. The most physical or objective of the arts, dance may also be considered the most individual and subjective, since it 1s inseparable from, and in the case of Salomé is the creation of, its performer. In dance, then, the realization of an aesthetic ideal of unity of being in which the body is the soul becomes possible. As Frank Kermode has argued, this aspiration to unity defines the poetic image as it emerges in symbolist and modernist writing, and its figurative expression often takes the form of the dance and the dancer. In terms of this aesthetic, the dance of Salomé becomes the utopian moment of the play, representing a unification of a physical, objective form with pure subjectivity. But an inability to imagine Salomé’s spiritualized dance characterizes its representation and reception and indicates the difficulty of abstracting this figure from her historical and cultural meaning as a sexually aggressive woman. The elements of sexual provocation in the dance, along with religious and sexual transgression in the narrative, make her a magnet attracting cultural anxieties over the place and nature of women

in the face of feminist challenges. There are thus good reasons why Wilde’s characterization of his play as a “beautiful coloured, musical thing” (Letters 492) would not persuade. Linda Dowling delineates one manifestation of this anxiety in the tendency of late Victorian critics to identify the New Woman with the decadent, and to see in both a threat to culture, state, and the survival of the race, for “in a cultural context of radical anxiety, the decadent and the New Woman were twin apostles of social apocalypse” (447).19 The power of such concerns is further evidenced by the ineffectuality of institutional forces in suppressing its representations, as is clear from the history of the first British production of Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé, which used a condensed version of Wilde’s text (in German) for its libretto.

Thomas Beecham, who produced the British premiere (8 Dec. 1910), had sought the intervention of Asquith, then prime minister, to circumvent the otherwise inevitable banning of the opera by the Lord Chamberlain. In order to make its performance possible, Beecham col-

laborated with the Censor to excise from the script those elements thought offensive to British morals and required the singers to learn this new version of the opera. Beecham reports that, among other changes, the text now omitted the name of John the Baptist and “[t]he mundane and commonplace passion of the precocious princess was refined into a

84 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art desire on her part for spiritual guidance” (169). Of course the head of the prophet could not appear on stage, and Salomé sang her finale to a clothcovered platter. The cast had dutifully learned the new script but, half an hour into its performance, began to slip back “into the viciousness of the lawful text,” and Beecham, who was conducting, was powerless to stop them (171). To his amazement, however, the Lord Chamberlain congrat-

ulated him after the performance “for the complete way in which you have met and fulfilled all our wishes” (172). The reception of this bungled attempt to purify Salomé was popularly spectacular and critically mixed. The house was sold out less than one and one-half hours after tickets went on sale, and when Beecham added two additional performances to the two originally planned (Jefferson 46, 49), these sold out as well (Beecham 172). It is doubtful that even a successful rendition of the laundered text would have made much difference to its reception, since the story Wilde told was so well known,

and the decadent connotations of Salomé so strong. The Times’ critic assumed Salomé’s “abnormality” and preferred the “solemn utterances of the Prophet” to her “hysterical confessions of fleshly desire and the would-be licentious ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’” (“Music: Strauss and Salomé”). The Spectator, in an extremely negative review, criticizes the Censor for allowing this “glorification of the erotomania” to take place at all (““Music: Salomé” 1136). This critic specifically abhors the heroine’s

crimes against “womanliness,” comparing Strauss’s choice of subject unfavorably with Beethoven’s, “who ultimately fixed upon a story of pure and unconquerable womanly devotion for his subject” (1135).!! Ina more positive review, Ernest Newman, in the Nation, ignored the morality of the subject and concentrated on Strauss’s music and the singers’ performances (Jefferson 48). Strauss was first attracted to the subject by Reinhardt’s Berlin production of Wilde’s play, at least in part because of its inherent musicality. He wrote in his memoirs that “the dance and especially the whole final scene 1s steeped in music” (150), and this quality of Wilde’s text has been

remarked on as well by modern critics.!2 In “De profundis,” Wilde himself drew attention to the “recurring motifs [that] make Salome so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad” (Letters 475). To emphasize the musicality of a literary work is also to indicate the importance of formal structuring to its aesthetic purpose and to lessen the significance of narrative and discursive content. In such a context the dance 1s less of

an interruption in the action than in a more narrowly dramatic context, and Strauss, in fact, saw it as “the heart of the plot” in Salomé (154).

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé 85 Strauss’s dance has struck commentators, however, more like an afterthought: Newman called it “an obvious ‘inset’ in the score” (5), and Del Mar, who argues that Strauss composed this music last, wrote that it “is a super-potpourri of the main themes of the opera” (270). Strauss’s emphasis on the musicality of the play was no more suc-

cessful than Wilde’s in distracting performers and viewers from their | insistence on its sexual and decadent connotations. He had great difficulty, for example, obtaining the kind of dance he wished to see performed, and the critics inevitably appraised the dance in terms of its “lasciviousness.” Strauss insisted that the capers cut in later performances by exotic variety stars indulging in snakelike movements and waving Jochanaan’s head about in the air went beyond all bounds of decency and good taste. Anyone who

has been in the east and has observed the decorum with which women there behave, will appreciate that Salomé, being a chaste virgin and oriental princess, must be played with the simplest and most restrained of gestures. (151)

Such a characterization sounds very close to Sarah Bernhardt’s, who according to Charles Ricketts intended to play Salomé without rapid movements and with stylized gestures. He blames the Germans for “the music-hall tigress and blood lust” of subsequent Salomés (Recollections 53). There appeared to be such a strong expectation that Salomé would represent the darkest, most fearful side of “female nature,” that even the most rigorously decorous intentions could not hold their own against the cultural mythology of the Salomé figure. This mythology constantly reinforced the depiction of Salomé as a fatal woman, overwhelming the “beautiful, coloured musical thing” that Wilde claimed he was writing. Wilde’s own conviction for sexual transgressions further weakened the case for an aestheticized reading of Salomé. A striking photograph, reproduced in Ellmann’s biography, shows Wilde dressed as Salomé, kneeling and gesturing gently toward a platter on which rests the head of Iokanaan. No aesthetic formalism, no carefully patterned interpenetration of body and spirit, of exotic and mystic, can overcome the play’s concrete attack on his society’s gender norms implied by that photograph. Likewise the constant representation of Salomé’s dance as a music hall striptease, the repeated reduction of Salomé to her sexuality, reflects this figure’s cultural place in the escalating battle Over woman’s nature and her proper sphere.

5 Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers

The cultural anxiety over female sexuality and self-assertion evoked by representations of Salomé is present as well in the critical and literary texts of W. B. Yeats. His work is particularly revealing in this context, since not only does the fatal woman appear with some regularity, but he often makes explicit connections between female sexual power and dance. This is most evident in a group of poetic dramas Yeats called plays

for dancers, and these texts will be the central focus of much of this chapter. As in the characterizations of Salomé discussed in the previous chapter, Yeats’s dancers are often closely linked to female sexuality, especially an illicit sexuality that poses some danger to a male hero. Yeats’s dancers, however, should not be approached simply as manifestations of male anxiety. Dance, and the dancer, played a role in a much broader aesthetic and cultural agenda that addressed questions of class and national identity as well as gender—and did so within a largely symbolist conceptual framework.

In order to clarify the place of dance in this broader agenda, my concern here will not be with actual performances, but with the ways in which Yeats’s beliefs and assumptions about performance, gender, and the role of art in culture affect his textual representations of dance and dancers. This approach will allow me to explore in some detail how the connections between aesthetic theory and textual practice work to situate dance in a purcly literary context. Such an analysis of the aesthetic context and ideological implications of Yeats’s use of dance secks to maintain the cultural and aesthetic specificity of his work as literary, while further developing the case for significant connections between literature and dance on the level of aesthetic ideology. If, therefore, it seems that dance has been displaced by literature here, the perception is accurate. The usc 87

88 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art of dance by a poct would understandably be in the service of a literary aesthetic—what is of interest is precisely how that literary aesthetic appropriates to its own ends a genre of performance as removed from the literary as dance.

Yeats’s plays for dancers were, in part, a response to the failure of his version of national literature to establish, conceptually as well as practically, a popular context for his work. He wrote, in 1919, that the Abbey was not the kind of theater he had wished to create, “and its success has

been to me a discouragement and a defeat” (Explorations 250). In “A People’s Theatre,” Yeats gives up the earlier ideal of an elite art that is also “the Art of the people” (Essays 168) and accepts the necessity for two theaters, the popular theater and his own, “unpopular theatre” meant for

a small audience 1n a small room. For this latter theater, Yeats wrote, “there are my Four Plays for Dancers as a beginning” (Explorations 255).! Yeats’s adaptation of No drama, his decision to call plays based on that

form “plays for dancers,” the placing of a dance, “instead of the disordered passion of nature” (Essays 230), at the climax of the play—these came at a time of retreat from a public theater after the failure of his conception of the relationship between politics and art to set the agenda for the theater in Ireland. This retreat received further impetus from Ycats’s long-standing commitment to antirealistic drama and staging, which in turn supported his belief in the usefulness of dance to dramatic form. As a poet, Yeats had tried to develop a style of acting and speaking that would provide the best possible setting for poctic drama. He realized that poetry, being highly conventionalized, nonrealistic language, would seem incongruous against representational scenery and “naturalistic” acting, and what he was after was a unified, harmonious effect. Thus he praised Craig’s production of Dido and Aeneas at the Purcell Society in 1900 for its creation of an “ideal country where everything was possible, even speaking 1n verse, or speaking to music, or the expression of the whole of life in dance” (Essays 100-101). Being a poct, Yeats wished to set his own art in the most advantageous manner among the visual arts of the stage. Therefore it is not surprising when in 1902, thinking that too often the actors’ movements got in the way of a play’s language, he praised one of Sarah Bernhardt’s productions because of the performers’ tendency to stand still, commenting that he “once counted twenty-seven quite slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved” (Explorations 87). In

Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers 89 the same essay Yeats recalls that he “once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds free to think of speech for a while” (86). If the body is to be subordinated in the service of speech, however, scenery must still take

second place to the body: “I have been the advocate of the poetry as against the actor, but J] am the advocate of the actor as against the scenery” (Explorations 177). Yeats is here attacking both realistic scene paint-

ing that attempts two-dimensional representation in a context made three-dimensional by the presence of an actor, and that must therefore always fail to sustain its illusion, and Craig’s tendency to allow scenery and lighting to overwhelm his actors (Letters 399, Explorations 179). Yeats rejects the technology of the theater altogether in his introduction to Ezra Pound’s edition of No plays, “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” (1916). Drama should now take place in an ordinary room, under ordinary lighting, with no attempt made at representational scenery. It was under these conditions that a Japanese dancer “was able, as he rose from the floor, where he had been sitting cross-legged, or as he threw out an arm, to recede from us into some more powerful life.” “Because,” Yeats

continues, “that separation was achieved by human means alone, he receded but to inhabit as it were the deeps of the mind” (Essays 224). The aesthetic effect is clearly to be sought in those “deeps of the mind,” those

collective, presumably archetypal experiences that give art a quasireligious function and authority; but only through the mediation of human agency—more specifically, through the body—does art properly elicit those experiences. Yeats explains that “[a]s a deep of the mind can

only be approached through what is most human, most delicate, we should distrust bodily distance, mechanism, and loud noise” (Essays 225),

and further, that “[w]e only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body” (Essays 235). These statements value a kind of intimacy in art that Yeats also associated with peasant art and experience. He objects, in this essay, that the ordinary theatrical production destroys intimacy, whereas the arts he loves “can still remind me of their origin among the common pcople” (Essays 223). This connection between intimate art and the peasant experience is further supported by a letter to his father in 1909 wherein Yeats defines intimacy explicitly in opposition to gencralization, a quality that “creates rhetoric, wins immediate popularity, organizes the mass, gives political success.” And to illustrate his point, Yeats draws a comparison between the Irish country life and that of the town: “When you go from

90 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art an Irish country district, where there are good manners, old songs, old stories and good talk, the folk mind, to an Irish country town, generalization meets one in music-hall songs with their mechanical rhythm, or in thoughts taken from the newspapers” (Letters 534). At the same time, Yeats’s new dramatic form is explicitly an “aristocratic” one, not meant to appeal to a large segment of the population. Thus Yeats associates the performer’s body with the peasant experience, though in relation to an art form neither indigenous to the peasantry nor, in this case, even intended for its use. And, as a side effect of allying his art with both the peasant and the aristocratic classes, Yeats dismisses the middle class entirely. 2

These plays may perhaps be interpreted as Yeats’s attempt to create an elite art of the people, although the people are in practice excluded from them. But more importantly, Yeats’s association of peasant experience with his aesthetic agenda for an elite art takes a form that makes it specifically relevant to Yeats’s attitude toward the performer’s body and thus toward dance. In his treatment of the performer’s body, Yeats also grounds a kind of experience he deems aesthetically valuable in the experience or behavior of a group excluded, in some important way, from the art. For the bodily gesture that seems to ensure “human agency” (and

intimacy) in art at the same time effects a separation, a distance that “must be firmly held against a pushing world” (Essays 224). That is, the performer grounds the play in a concrete “human agency” by the physicality of his or her gestures, while the aesthetic effect of the play requires the erasure of human agency—understood as the willed act of a specific individual—in a communal “deep of the mind.” An individual’s gesture becomes the abstract human agency needed to connect the deep of the mind to the world of men and women, and Yeats, while seeming to give his art a basis in an individual’s bodily gesture, abstracts that basis from any actual person’s body.? This perspective changes the significance of Yeats’s placing a dance at the climax of his No-influenced plays. His insistence on masks, on stylized movement and nonillusionistic conventions, suggests that while this drama is dependent on dance, and thus on the body, for its effect— “the music, the beauty of form and voice all come to climax in pantomimic dance” (Essays 221)—it rejects the individuality of the bodies it uses. Yeats remarks that “deep feeling is expressed by a movement of the whole body,” as opposed to mere facial expressions. Thus dance seems to lessen the need for individualized bodies, that is, bodies with faces,

Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers QI while maintaining a human basis for deep feeling. Masks likewise ease Yeats’s evasion of individualized bodies, for they let him bring the audience close enough to the actor for them to hear the subtleties of his or her speech, without inflicting on them “the face of some commonplace player” (Essays 226).4 Yeats’s attraction to the dance, to stylized bodily movement in an intimate setting, seems to be an attraction to a performance that uses the body to effect a strict separation between art and the world. That is, Yeats perceived the dancing body as a vehicle for an effect, and this enabled him to say, for example, of the Japanese players he saw, “The interest is not in the human form but in the rhythm to which it moves” (Essays 231). The place assigned to peasant experience, with its implicit rejection of the middle class, along with the place assigned to the body, provides the conceptual background for the treatment of gender implicit in Yeats’s

use of the dancing body in these plays. And the question of gender is central to understanding Yeats’s use of dance, since in the context of the narrative structure of the plays and the characterization of the figures who dance, it is the containment and exclusion of a specifically female presence that Yeats repeatedly enacts.

Beginning with At the Hawk’s Well, written in the winter and spring of 1915-16 and first performed that March, Yeats was developing a Noinfluenced dramatic form, the results of which he would call plays for dancers. Letters to Lady Gregory indicate that by March of 1916 Yeats was already working on his next dance play, The Only Jealous of Emer (Letters 612) and that by June of 1917 he had almost completed a third, The Dreaming of the Bones (Letters 626). In February 1918, Yeats wrote to

John Quinn, “I have written four plays in the style of the ‘Noh,’ including The Hawk’s Well, and have the plan of the fifth” (Letters 645). Besides the three already named, this group would have included The Cat and the

Moon, which, Liam Miller notes, was written in 1917, though not published until 1924 (201). Of this play Yeats wrote that he had intended to include it in Four Plays for Dancers (1921) “but did not do so as it was in a different mood” (Variorum 805). The fifth play Yeats refers to seems to

have been Calvary, which was published along with the first three in 1921. A letter to Lady Gregory in January of 1918 gives a plot summary vaguely similar to the final version, and Miller suggests this as the genesis of the play (252). From late in 1915 to about 1920, then, Yeats was engaged with these

92 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art plays, and because he had not started any new plays since about 1910 (though he had revised several) and after 1920 his production of dramatic

works was to drop off again, they form a coherent group representing Yeats’s first attempts to integrate dance in a structurally significant way into the poetic drama.5 In theory, the dance was to form the climax of these plays, and clearly by calling them plays for dancers, Yeats was indicating the centrality of the dance to his conception of both their form and content. The specific significance of the dance in each of these plays, however, depends on its structural and conceptual positioning within the

play, on the interaction of gender and dance, and on the implied or explicit gendering of elements related to the dance in the plays. Since male figures also dance in some of thesc plays, and two of them—Calvary and The Cat and the Moon—have only male characters, a broader consideration of the relations among dance, gender, and Yeats’s personal mythology will also be necessary. The narrative function of the dance in At the Hawk’s Well is to seduce the hero, Cuchulain, away from the well of immortality so that he cannot

drink its waters.© Of all these dance plays, in this one the figure who dances is most clearly set apart from all other characters, neither speaking like, nor meant to represent, a being in the same ontological category as

the two speaking figures, least of all while she is dancing. Her only sounds are those of a hawk, and these, according to the Old Man, are not produced through her own agency but by the spirit that has possessed her (Variorum 408). To meet the gaze of this spirit/hawk is to become cursed in one’s relations with women; the man who dares to do so risks never being able to keep the love of a women, or “always to mix hatred in the love,” or to lose his children, the fruits of love (Variorum 407).’ Thus the threat and the power that the guardian of the well has taken on with this possession give her a gaze of such force that the Old Man must cover his head from it. The young man, Cuchulain, on the other hand, responds to this gaze as a challenge and blusters at her, “Why do you fix those eyes of

a hawk upon me? / I am not afraid of you, bird, woman, or witch” (Variorum 409). There are two interconnected points to be raised about this speech: the link between sexual power and the control of the gaze, and the association between*women and animals, particularly in a sexualized context. Because of the male ability to act sexually on a woman, giving rise to the possibility of rape, the sexual gaze has been a male prerogative. As Patricia Mann observes, “[A] mere look of sexual interest was enough to

Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers 93 convey this possibility to a woman, and to constitute an act of intimidation” (22).8 Thus Cuchulain’s response to the hawk-woman’s usurpation of the gaze treats it as a challenge to his sexual dominance and an opportunity for a sexual conquest; he boasts to her:

Run where you will, Grey bird, you shall be perched upon my wrist. Some were called queens and yet have been perched there. (Variorum 410).

But by taking up the “male” position as possessor of the gaze rather than the “female” position of object of the look, the hawk-woman has threatened her status as a woman. She has, as it were, unwomaned herself. At

the same time, her association with nature, on the one hand, and the Sidhe, on the other, has doubly dissociated her from the human. This dual identification with nature and the supernatural implies that the exer-

cise of sexual power is not consistent with human womanhood. From the audience’s perspective, this allows her power to be neutralized by her lack of relevance to (i.e., humanity for) ordinary men. At the same time,

Cuchulain’s uncertainty about exactly what the guardian is simply reflects her position in a conceptual framework where seductive women can reasonably be thought to be indistinguishable, not only from witches, but also from various kinds of animals.? The guardian is hawklike, which associates her with the bird that attacks Cuchulain on his way to the well; this bird, the Old Man tells him, is the “Woman of the Sidhe herself” (407). The Sidhe are referred to as dancers in the play, but Yeats had also, early in his career, established a connection between the Sidhe and beings, like birds, who travel through

the air. In his note to “The Hosting of the Sidhe” (1899), he wrote that “the Sidhe have much to do with the wind. They journey in whirling wind, the winds that were called the dance of the daughters of Herodias

in the Middle Ages, Herodias doubtless taking the place of some old goddess” (Poems 590). The association between birds, dancers, those supernatural beings called the Sidhe, and the seductive dance of the fatal woman make for a powerful configuration of integrated images, and one

that Yeats seems to draw on consistently (though not necessarily selfconsciously) in most of these early dance plays. Most obviously drawing on the motif of the fatal woman as dancer is the dance of Fand, the Woman of the Sidhe, in The Only Jealousy of

94 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art Emer; her dance around the ghost of Cuchulain is meant to seduce him away from his world to her own. But Fand is not only a fatal-woman figure; Yeats explicitly places her within his system associating personality and physical types with phases of the moon. In his note for the play, in Four Plays for Dancers, Yeats wrote that “I have filled “The Only Jealousy of Emer’ with those little known convictions about the nature and history of a woman’s beauty, which Robartcs found in the Speculum of Gyraldus and in Arabia Deserta among the Judwalis.” In this system the most objective nature is symbolized by the first phase of the moon, when it is wholly dark, and the most subjective nature by the fifteenth phase, the light of the moon. The most purely subjective nature is also the most physically beautiful, although since in its purest state such beauty 1s invisible, the fourteenth and sixtecnth phases represent the greatest possible visible beauty (Variorum 566). Thus when the ghost of Cuchulain sees Fand, he compares her to the moon in its fifteenth phase, to which Fand responds, “Because I long I am not complete”; that is, she has not yct reached pure subjectivity, which would be pure self-sufficiency without desire. Despite her vulnerability to desire, Fand, like the guardian of the well, isa nonhuman creature. Ycats’s stage directions makc it clear that even though Fand, unlike the guardian, uscs human language, she is more goddess than woman: “Her mask and clothes must suggest gold or bronze or brass or silver, so that she seems more an idol than a human being. This suggestion may be repeated in her movements” (Variorum 551). These two dances of seduction, dances meant to clicit a powerful cnough desire in a male for a female figure to ensure that he acts not in his own best interest but in the service of an alien interest, link the function of the dance securcly to both a specifically female sexual power and the power of an alicn being to usurp the will of a mortal man. The power and the threat of the guardian is expressed by the dance but is dependent on her possession by an alicn spirit—the Woman of the Sidhe. This intertwining of scxual power and alien presence, both assigned a feminine gender (no matter whether the actual dancer is male or female), represents a definition of female power that is both sexual, that is, a quality of

her body, and nonhuman—as hawk, Iess than human, as_ idol-like Woman of the Sidhc, more than human. But this gender idcology is part of a base on which Yeats’s own sclfconscious system 1s overlaid. In fact, by identifying the woman-as-nature

with the woman-as-goddess, as he docs when the ghost of Cuchulain identifics Fand as the guardian of the well, and then containing both

Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers 95 within a larger system of his own devising, Yeats is making much the same conceptual move as that which allowed him to associate peasant expcricnce with the art of a cultural clite or to ground in the body an aesthetic ideal that effaces it. That is, he focuses attention on the two extremcs of a cultural or conceptual spectrum, using the “lower” to ground the “higher”; this is actually a displacement of the “lower” by the “higher,” cffectively neutralizing its participation, while at the same time dismissing what lics between them. In the case of the middle class, for cxample, although Ellmann interprets Yeats’s attack on it as an expression of his own fear of uncertainty, which makes all middle grounds look weak (Yeats 288-89), what is at issue is not some kind of compromise,

but the acknowledgment of an entire group of human beings. Yeats’s conceptual framework makes the middle class seem an impure pollutant of two pure cxtremes—pceasant and aristocrat. This framework is analogous to the one that makes the crasure of ordinary women the inevitable

consequence of assigning sexual power to two poles of the feminine: woman as nature and woman as goddess. One might argue, however, that in The Only Jealousy of Emer, “ordi-

nary” women are not “erased”; in fact they hold their own successfully against Fand—for Fand fails in her attempt at seduction. The guardian of At the Hawk’s Well, on the other hand, who had no competition from other women, succeeds. One explanation for this might be that the two figures differ in their relation to desire: Fand both expresses and wishes to

clicit desire, while the guardian only elicits it. (This difference has salience also for the dancers in The Dreaming of the Bones.) But Fand’s defeat

retells an old story. A man is tempted by the more-than-human beauty of a woman offering illicit sexual favors and can be saved only by a good woman. In Yeats’s version the story line is complicated by the presence of Bricriu, a male god of discord, and Eithne Inguba, Cuchulain’s current mistress. Because of Bricriu’s intervention, Emer learns that she can save her husband from Fand only by renouncing his love forever, thus handing him over to Eithne Inguba. Eithne Inguba, unlike Fand, is aware

of the shamcfulncss of her position and the greater status, moral and social, of Emer. She is, no doubt, from the wife’s position, the lesser of two cvils. Without Bricriu, meanwhile, Emer would be defenseless against Fand. Thus the male god cffects the reestablishment of the status

quo ante: a faithful wife silently sacrificing herself for an adulterous husband, a loving mistress properly conscious of her second-class and unstable position, and a male hero around whose fate revolves all the

96 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art action—and all the women. Finally, the narrative presents the dominance of a male over a female deity. The ideology underlying the role of woman as dancer in this play

would thus seem to be in contradiction with the ideology of devoted womanhood offered by its plot. But this is not completely so. The dancer does indeed represent female sexuality in that unrestrained, uncompromising, and assertive form most threatening to men and their domestic arrangements (including dependent women). It is this female sexuality that must be erased from the lives and experience of ordinary women and thus from which the ordinary woman must be in turn erased. In The Dreaming of the Bones, published along with The Only Jealousy of Emer in Two Plays for Dancers (1919), the dance is an expression of the

two spirit-lovers’ desire for one another. Although, as in the case of the other dances, this desire will not be satisfied, in this play it is shared by both the male and the female partner, and both dance. The plot presents a young Irish patriot fleeing from Dublin after having taken part in the

Easter Rising. He meets the spirit-lovers Diarmuid (or Dermot) and Dervorgilla, who ask his forgiveness for having brought foreigners onto Irish soil. Although almost yielding, he refuses to forgive them. This is the first of the dance plays where a male figure dances, and the only one where a man’s dance also expresses sexual desire. Since in none of the

plays does a male figure dance in order to elicit sexual desire from a female figure, Yeats implies that although a man may dance with a woman as part of a mutual exchange of desire, he does not dance for a woman in order to elicit her desire for him. The dance remains strongly linked to the female body. Yeats’s willingness to sacrifice the speech of

his female character in this play, even though he did not much care whether her part was taken by a man or a woman, underscores the assumption that women are closer to the body, further from speech, than men: “Dervorgilla’s few lines can be given, if need be, to Dermot, and

Dervorgilla’s part taken by a dancer who has the training of a dancer alone; nor need that masked dancer be a woman” (Variorum 777).'° But dance is not only identified with sexual desire and the female body, it is set against loyalty to husband, king, and country. Dervorgilla,

married to another man, ran off with Diarmuid, who subsequently brought the Normans into Ireland. “This act of private lust,” writes Liam Miller, “which led to public treachery, determined the whole course of Irish history” (237). The dance is again the expression of an

Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers 97 illicit and basically feminine sexual desire, so that the values endorsed by

the play seem to set feminine surrender to personal emotion against masculine strength in the face of temptation. The young man’s refusal to forgive the transgression that sexual passion instigated is patriotic—an

assertion of public over private values—while the weakness of Diarmuid’s moral fiber is expressed by his being condemned to the feminine

space of the dance. Although he had been tempted—“I had almost yielded and forgiven it all” (Variorum 775)—the young man remains loyal

to Ireland and the good woman and rejects the unpatriotic (i.e., illicit) sexuality of the spirit-lovers. 1!

The other two plays for dancers written during this period differ significantly in their use of dance, although presumably it remains, in Yeats’s intention, the climax of the play. In both The Cat and the Moon and Calvary, only men dance. In fact, there are no female characters in either play. The conceptual framework Yeats established for Calvary relied heavily on his personal mythology, particularly on the opposition between objective and subjective character types. There, birds are symbols of subjectivity that Yeats used “to increase the objective loneliness of Christ by contrasting it with a loneliness, opposite in kind, that unlike

His can be, whether joyous or sorrowful, sufficient to itself.” Birds, along with all the figures surrounding Christ—Lazarus, Judas, and the Roman soldiers—represent “those He cannot save” (Variorum 790). The play consists of a series of conversations between Christ on the cross and Lazarus, Judas, and then finally, the Roman soldiers. It is the Roman soldiers who dance. But first they explain their indifference to

Christ. It 1s because they are gamblers that the soldiers need nothing from Christ, and if they worship any god, it is not Christ but the God of dice—chance, not choice: “Whatever happens is the best, we say, / So that it’s unexpected” (Variorum 786). Their dance is the “dance of the dice-throwers”:

In the dance We quarrel for awhile, but settle it By throwing dice, and after that, being friends,

Join hand to hand and wheel about the cross. , (Vartorum 787).

Because the dance expresses their autonomy, their independence from Christ, it embodies the tragedy of Christ’s sacrifice. Christ has died in

98 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art vain for the dancers. But clearly the circling around the cross brings the soldiers into some kind of unity with Christ—the visual image undercuts their claim to independence. That unity, whatever it is, transcends and includes Christ, rather than being represented by him. The dance in this play, then, fulfills two conflicting functions. From the point of view of the dancers (and perhaps of Christ) it proclaims their autonomy, while

from the point of view of the audience it illustrates the overarching interdependence and unity even of those opposite or indifferent to each other. 2 In The Cat and the Moon, finally, the dance also has a dual function, but here Yeats provides two separate dances. A blind beggar carries on

his back a lame beggar, and they are traveling together to the well of Saint Colman, where, they have heard, they can be cured of their defor-

mities. Upon arriving, the saint asks each whether they prefer to be cured or to be blessed. The blind beggar asks to be cured, and the lame beggar to be blessed. In his 1934 note to the play, Yeats wrote that the “blind man was the body, the lame man was the soul.” But the title of the play, where he thought of “the cat as the normal man and of the moon as the opposite he seeks perpetually,” and its connection to the final scene, where, “when the lame man takes the saint upon his back, the normal man has become one with that opposite” (Variorum 807), suggest that the unity of body and soul was not the highest or the most desirable form of unity. The dance of the “body,” the blind beggar, is a stylized beating of the lame beggar for having stolen his sheep, so one might speculate that insofar as this dance represents a materialistic, grasping violence of possession, the blind beggar shares in qualities Yeats associated with much of the middle class.!3 The lame beggar is, in fact, well rid of his companion,

for he was not the true opposite of the soul, but more like an impurity intruding between the two poles to be joined. The unity Yeats was after was that between the soul and some other spirituality, manifested here as the disembodied voice of the saint, for “when the Saint mounts upon the back of the Lame Beggar he personifies a certain great, spiritual event” (Variorum 805).

That this spiritual event should be bodied forth in a dance seems to elevate the body dancing above the dangerous, sexualized manifestations it has in those plays where women dance, making it symbolic of a pro-

found movement of the human soul.!4 Given the failure of any such union to occur between characters of opposite sexes, and given, in fact, the isolation of all the women dancers, as well as the one couple, from

Dance and Gender in Yeats’s Early Plays for Dancers 99 any possibility of heterosexual (spiritual or not) union, the homosexual-

ity of those moments when a dance does coincide with an image or message of unity achieved becomes striking. From Lévi-Strauss’s theory that culture rests on the exchange of women between men, to Irigaray’s use of that theory to claim that “the passage from nature to culture thus amounts to the institution of the reign of ho(m)mo-sexuality” (171), one might find support for arguing Yeats’s inextricable complicity in a homosexual symbolic structure. My focus, however, will be on what has become of women in these five plays for dancers.

Women who dance have either been excluded from the achievement of unity, or they have been the embodiment of a sexuality of questionable value. Fand and Dervorgilla are left with their unsatiated and unsatiable desire, stymied on the one hand by a conspiracy of traditional female roles working out their destiny and the meddling of a male deity, and on the other by the young man, who chose Ireland over sexual love. If the dance is the climax of these plays, and the same might be said of At the Hawk’s Well, it is a climax that negates its meaning in its performance. The dance, in other words, when performed by a female character, is in each of these plays a dance of seduction, a dance expressing sexuality, and

its narrative significance is in each case primarily in the refusal of con-

summation. The guardian’s dance is pure tease, Diarmuid and Dervorgilla’s the same, only this time as punishment for consummation, and Fand’s dance of seduction sets the stage for Emer’s rescue of Cuchulain from her clutches. The purpose of the dance seems to be to demonstrate the danger and undesirability, for any self-respecting hero or patriot, of its very substance and significance. Yeats wrote the plays for dancers as an elite art form, intentionally inaccessible to a popular audience, yet he believed them to be grounded in universal values and meanings. He also insisted on an intimate art, dependent not on technology, but on the human voice and body for its effect. But when that body danced it became reified as animal or idol, instructed to move like a puppet, wear a mask—in every way to distance itself from individualized human experience. The conceptual structure underlying these tensions in Yeats’s thinking informs not only his development of the plays for dancers but is manifest as well, in conjunction with Yeats’s gender ideology, in the places assigned women as dancers: they are dispersed between the poles of spirit and nature, defined above all by a sexuality dangerous to men and to “ordinary” women, to whom,

100 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art therefore, such a sexuality cannot belong. If the dance is indeed the climax of the plays for dancers, the gender-specific associations with and

narrative positioning of those dances performed by female characters give the plays a disturbing cast. The place of the woman as dancer in those plays where she appears, and her absence from those where she does not, reflects the misogyny underlying Yeats’s practice of his aesthetic theories. Her body inscribes what the plot is structured to evade, deny, and displace from human women to goddesses, hawks, and spirits. Her dancing signifies the transgressive, destructive, uncontrollable aspect

of female sexuality that Yeats, in the plots of these plays, enacts the containment of—seeming bent on reassuring himself that real women, human women, are not like women who dance.

Part 3

The Rise of the Author

6

The Aesthetics of Control: G. B. Shaw and the Performer

Although generally positioned in opposition to symbolist and symbolistinspired artists because of his interest in politics and his rejection of “art for art’s sake,” Shaw shared with Yeats and Craig an insistence on the subordination of the performer to the dramatist or director. He shared, in other words, their rejection of the domination of performed art by the performer. While opposing Craig’s emphasis on the visual qualities of dramatic production at the expense of the text, Shaw would have agreed with Yeats on the importance of diction—that is, the predominance of language—in a successful performance.! Shaw’s critical criteria for the evaluation of a performance speak to his own theatrical ambitions and

desires. But insofar as these ambitions necessitate replacing the performer’s dominance with that of the author or director, Shaw partakes in a larger assault on the actor-centered theater in the name of elite art.?

In his commentary on both acting and dance, Shaw attacks performers whom he feels rely primarily on personal charisma or sex appeal. Female performers, needless to say, are particularly vulnerable to the latter flaw, and dancers, even more than actresses, were commonly believed to traffic in sexual titillation rather than art. When Shaw argued

for the aesthetic merit of dance, he explicitly addressed the place of sexuality in both its performance and reception. His discussions of actresses likewise attend carefully to their possession and use of sex appeal. To the extent that Shaw rejected sexuality in performances, however, he was in fact rejecting its use as a substitute for art. He had no objections to performers who harnessed their ability to convey sexual emotion to the demands of a dance or a dramatic context as a whole. Indeed, since his theory of acting was based on self-expression (or rather on a particular kind of self-expression), the sexual element of the performer’s self would 103

104 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art be a necessary resource if he or she were called upon to play a love scene. This use of the self in the service of a dramatic end is quite different from the use of the self in the service of the performer’s personal celebrity. Underlying his attacks on some performers and his praise of others is a theory of drama, and a theory of acting appropriate to it, that calls for

the subordination of parts of a performance to the end of presenting a seamless, unified whole. In terms of dramatic form, this ideal was one of organic unity; a play, Shaw wrote, should not have a plot imposed on it,

“because, if it has any natural life in it, it will construct itself, like a flowering plant” (“William Archer” 22). For dance, Shaw’s most important model was the Wagnerian music-drama, which he thought solved

the problem of the disjunction between “decorative” and “dramatic” music in opera by subordinating the whole work to its dramatic element. “Wagner,” he wrote, “produced no music independently of his poems,” making him “the literary musician par excellence” (“Perfect Wagnerite” 296, 294). For both drama and dance, Shaw’s aesthetic of organic unity

provides the subtext and rationale for his commentary on performers. Beginning with his treatment of actors and actresses and ending with his treatment of dance and dancers, this chapter will examine the implications of this aesthetic for both his view of the performer and the critical criteria Shaw developed to evaluate dance. A central element in Shaw’s discussions of acting is an attempt to change

the focus of the theater from the star and the spectacle to the author’s words. He knew that the author must write what can be performed and that actors’ training in the old stock companies seriously limited his options. Since the stock company system classified actors by character types, it muilitated against both versatility in its actors and innovation in the creation of character by authors. “Under such circumstances,” Shaw wrote in 1929, “serious character study was impossible” (Ellen Terry

xvi). In addition, the mainstream London theaters, with their huge houses and overwhelming scenic effects, were ill equipped to accommo-

date the psychological and intellectual nuance demanded by a writer interested in “serious character study” (see Fromm 167). Finally, the star

system encouraged a style of acting, of which Sarah Bernhardt and Henry Irving are Shaw’s best-known exemplars, that placed personal self-display above an actor’s commitment to the author’s words. In his preface to William Archer’s The Theatrical “World” of 1894, Shaw observes that the audiences and economics of the London theater

The Aesthetics of Control 105 require that plays revolve around the actor-manager and his leading lady, since “[t]he strongest fascination at a theatre 1s the fascination of the actor or actress, not of the author. More people go to the Lyceum Theatre to see Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry than to see Shakespear’s plays” (45). The success of an actor such as Irving was due not to the quality of the plays he produced but to his own presence and style, to which he subordinated all other elements of the production. Irving, Shaw complained, had no interest in Shakespeare, for “he had no power of adapting himself to an author’s conception: his creations were all his own; and they were all Irvings” (“Henry Irving” 163). Shaw, the author, objected to this lack of interest in the author’s conception. In fact a number of otherwise disparate elements of Shaw’s dramatic criticism work together to place artistic control of the theater as much as possible into the hands of the author. Besides consistently attacking the centrality of Irving’s personality to his performances (which made his acting “creative” rather than “interpretive”), Shaw objected to any actors who acted “between” rather than “on” the author’s lines (Meisel 101). He complained of actors who used innuendo, double entendre, intonation, and gesture to give a meaning to a scene or speech not evident from the

script.2 In addition, Shaw’s sustained attack on the censorship of the theater—a position not popular with actors, and especially with managers, who wanted the moral seal of approval the Censor’s license granted them—recognized that the control of the Censor was control over the script, not the production or the acting, and thus was a substantial barrier to the writer. In order to alter the relation between the actor and the author, Shaw attempted to redefine the terms by which acting was to be evaluated. This is his project in a lecture of 1889, “Acting, by One Who Does Not Believe in It.” Comparing two well-known actors, Coquelin and Salvini, Shaw distinguishes between acting that impersonates the character being performed and acting that uses the character as a vehicle for the display of the actor’s own personality. Coquelin is an inferior actor to Salvini, Shaw argues, because he is “a personality, a man pre-eminently himself, im-

possible to disguise, the very last man who could under any circumstances be an actor. ... We go to see him because we know he will always be Coquelin, because every new part he plays will be some new side of Coquelin or some new light on a familiar side of him” (16). The difference between Coquelin and Salvini is not so much that of personal as opposed to impersonal acting, but that of an actor who uses his per-

106 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art sonality in the service of a dramatic character, and one whose expression of his personality occurs purely in service of itself. Salvini acknowledges

that an actor must “intimately experience whatever befits the diverse characters and passions you represent” (14), but personal experience is in his case subordinated to the demands of character and dramatic context. In other words, for both Coquelin and Salvini acting is a form of self-

expression, not simply a technique or craft, but the goal of that selfexpression is fundamentally different for each. When Shaw turns to a comparison of actresses, to whom, as Harold Fromm has noted, most of his instructions on acting were directed (168), the nature of this self-expression received detailed analysis. Shaw’s ideal actress was Elenora Duse, and he delineated the reasons for his preference

in theater reviews written in the 1890s while a critic for the Saturday Review.* The sources of Duse’s superiority, simply stated, are that she is plain and intellectual rather than pretty and charming. “[I]n Duse,” unlike Ellen Terry or Janet Achurch, “you necessarily get the great school in its perfect integrity, because Duse without her genius would be a plain little woman of no use to any manager” (Our Theatres 1:154). The lack of beauty correlates with a greater degree of artistic quality for Shaw because a woman’s physical beauty is not art but nature. “[T]he fortunate sternness of Nature” in Duse’s case has thus saved her from relying on that “extra and cheaper string to her bow” with which nature had provided Miss Achurch (1:153). Likewise, Duse has avoided the pitfall of personal charm that plagues Bernhardt’s acting, for while the latter “has

nothing but her own charm . . . Duse’s own private charm has not yet been given to the public.” In fact, what Duse conveys so much belongs to the particular character she is portraying that the spectator is “enthralled by its reality and delighted by the magical skill of the artist without for a moment feeling any complicity either on your own part or hers in the passion represented” (155).

Duse the woman, in other words, plays no obvious part in her performance, and the audience response to her is not to her body or to her personality but to the character she portrays. If, as his most recent biographer writes, Shaw’s strategy for dealing with women who attracted him was “to envelop their bodies with his words, and then fall in love with his own verbal creation” (Holroyd 313), then his theory of the relation between the actress and her character may have served a personal

need as well as a professional one. The threat posed to Shaw by the actress as a sexual being is dissipated by his insistence that she become a

The Aesthetics of Control 107 tabula rasa for the text of the author.® In fact, any quality that might draw

attention to her in her own right is in this view a danger and a temptation. Acting as self-expression has become practically indistinguishable from acting as self-immolation. In order to understand the greatness of Duse’s art, Shaw wrote, one must understand “the process by which an actress is built up” (Our Theatres 1:154). This is a four-stage process, beginning with the neophyte

who must learn to keep still in between her “points.” And indeed most actresses do no more than repeat, with increasing skill, the same “well worn and tried old points.” At the lowest level, skill in acting is a matter of staying out of the way of the play, for “[w]hen they have learnt to make these points smoothly and to keep quiet between whiles. . . they are finished actresses.” Their performance is made up of disconnected pieces of acting not determined by the demands of a particular play or character. The better actress refuses to stop inventing new points, however, until “she is always making points, and making them well.” Finally, the greatest actress will achieve “an integration of the points into a continuous whole, at which stage the actress appears to make no points at all, and to proceed in the most unstudied and ‘natural’ way” (1:154).°® This development of the actress toward an ideal of integrated unity replicates on the level of performance the structure Shaw elsewhere claimed to be the ideal for a play as a whole. The structure of the play, like the building up of a character by an actress, should be an integrated, continuous whole. Shaw traces the development of dramatic performance toward this ideal in the appendix to The Quintessence of Ibsenism. From the low form it takes in the “small separate doses or ‘turns’” of the

music hall, through various forms of drama in which the “sequence becom[es] more and more organic,” dramatic form progresses until it arrives at the “highest type of play [which] is completely homogeneous, often consisting of a single very complex incident” (7). On the level of the work, the highest form of drama 1s an organic whole, and on the level of the individual performance, the most accomplished actors manifest

the same quality. When the highest forms of these two levels occur together—the best acting in the most perfect drama—the actresses’ per-

formances are inseparable from the play itself. | As in the development of drama from the disconnected music hall turn to the “single very complex action,” the art of acting develops from

the repetition of disconnected points to their “integration ... into a continuous whole.” In support of Duse’s attainment to this highest level

108 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art of her art, Shaw refers to her portrayal of the character Marguerite Gauthier. His analysis reads his theory into that performance:

[A] highly trained observer of such things . . . will bring to light how its apparently simple strokes are combinations of a whole series of strokes, separately conceived originally, and added one by one to the part, until finally, after many years of evolution, they have integrated into one single highly complex stroke. (Our Theatres 1:155) A great acting performance is in structure exactly the same as the highest dramatic form. Shaw even carries his analysis down to the level of Duse’s individual gestures. As with her creation of a character, her development of a gesture has the structure of a complex, organic unity:

Take, as a very simple illustration, the business of Camille’s tieing up the flowers in the third act. It seems the most natural thing in the

world; but it is really the final development of a highly evolved dance with the arms—even, when you watch it consciously, a rather prolonged and elaborate one. The strokes of character have grown up in just the same way. (Our Theatres 1:155) The performance of Shaw’s great actress is a perfectly integrated whole in

its own right, but it is compelled in form and content by its relation to the play, which is equally conceived of as a whole. That from an actor’s standpoint this relationship may well be reversed is acknowledged by Shaw, for example, in the preface to Plays Unpleasant, where he argues that plays must be read as well as performed, since “[t]he very originality and genius of the performers conflicts with the originality and genius of the author” (96). Shaw’s aesthetic is in effect an argument for a hierarchical relation between character and play that subordinates character (read:

actor) to play. The nature of this relationship was indeed what was at stake in Shaw’s struggle for authorial control in the late-nineteenthcentury theater. ' Shaw is working with a conception of the relation between a performer and a play that structures the ideal performance so as to make it an expression of the structure of an ideal play. At the same time, however, Shaw insists that an actor’s relation to his or her character is one of self-

expression. An actor is not, for Shaw, someone “who successfully pretends to be someone else,” but rather “one who has cultivated and inten-

The Aesthetics of Control 109 sified himself to such a degree that he can persuade audiences to pretend that they see other people embodied in him” (Agitations 58). How can a performance be at the same time an expression of the structure of a play and an expression of the actor’s self? Either that self is in fact structured like the play, or Shaw’s analysis mystifies the actual nature of the relationship between the actor and the play. What I would argue is at the root of this problem is a contradiction that Shaw cannot recognize, because to do so would challenge his right to authorial dominance. This contradiction is the classic one of bourgeois ideology—that the individual is at the same time both an autonomous free agent and subjected to social, economic, and other constraints over which he or she has no control. On the one hand, the actor’s subjectivity, :

labor, and product (the performance) are conceptually united by the definition of acting as self-expression. As such the actor exemplifies the autonomous, unified subject of bourgeois ideology, self-sufficient and self-determining, independent of social and economic relations. At the same time, however, the actor is (ideally) a subordinate and inextricable

element in a larger dramatic whole. The kind of subject assumed by Shaw’s definition of acting is incompatible with the place defined for that subject within the dramatic whole of which she 1s a part. The implication of his position is that the freedom and equality of the subject (as actor) are

superficial, for at a deeper level she is compelled by the relations (the demands of the dramatic whole) that constitute the context in which she is embedded. A subject cannot be at once autonomous and dictated to by a larger context. Because Shaw rejects definitions of acting (such as that he attributes to Irving) that would threaten the specific hierarchy he wants to establish between the actor and the play, he can avoid this problem. Clearly, if a play is ideally “a single very complex incident,” it cannot also be, as Shaw writes that it was to Irving, “a length of stuff necessary for his appearance

on the stage, but so entirely subordinate to that consummation that it could be cut to his measure like a roll of cloth” (Ellen Terry xxi). To support his dramatic ideal, Shaw argues for a type of actor who both embodies and serves the aesthetic of organic form. This does not, however, resolve the contradiction between the actor’s autonomy and his or her subordination to the author’s text but instead masks it by deflecting attention away from the relationship between acting and dramatic form. The structures of a gesture, of a character, of a play are all the same and are all, in content, determined by the play. The body of the actress

IIo Gendering Bodies/Performing Art becomes the vehicle for and translator of the dramatic text that embodies

this structure. And that structure becomes the frame onto which her body is strapped. Self-expression is in fact self-immolation. Finding actresses who would define themselves not as objects of display for the pleasure of spectators but as transmitters of an author’s ideas would be a precondition for making this the dominant mode of conceptualizing the relationship of acting to a play. Hence (in part) Shaw’s desire for middleclass, educated actresses (“Appendix” 4). Such women would also be those whose ideologies of the self (as an autonomous and unified sub-

ject), of art (as expression rather than imitation), and of their gender (morally superior and duty bound to raise others to their level), would be most consonant with Shaw’s concept of the drama.” They would, finally, be the class of women least likely to find public attention to their bodies acceptable, let alone flattering.

Although Shaw never had the professional stake in diffusing the power of dancers that he had in the case of actresses, his dance criticism consistently applied quite similar aesthetic values. The next section examines Shaw’s treatment of dance and dancers and the consequences of his aesthetic ideology for that art and its practitioners.

Before midcentury, the ballet had been the preferred art form of the theatergoing elite. The Romantic ballet was the major attraction in opera productions, featuring such dancers of legendary fame as Fanny Elssler, Maria Taglioni, Carolotta Grisi, Lucille Grahn, and Fanny Cerrito. After the debut of Jenny Lind in 1845, however, the importance of the ballet in opera declined, and by 1856 a writer for the Times could comment that “dancing has become a mere supplement to the vocal part of an operatic performance” (gtd. in Guest, Romantic 141). But as dance historian Ivor Guest points out, the ballet did not die from this neglect; it simply moved

from the opera house to the music hall (Romantic 142). And George Bernard Shaw followed it there, writing in 1892, “I should probably not know what a music-hall is like, if it were not for the transfer of the ballet in London from the Opera to the Alhambra” (Music 2:65). When Shaw reviewed dance of any kind, it was almost always as

part of a music hall program. He usually wrote about shows at the Empire or the Alhambra, the two halls best known for their ballets. The presence of ballet in the London music halls alongside popular and exotic forms of dancing reflected its downward mobility; it now inhabited the same cultural plane as step dancing, skirt dancing, and Spanish dancing.

The Aesthetics of Control III Shaw did not question this leveling of dance genres and applied the same

criteria to judging them all. Although some forms of dance seemed inherently more capable of meeting these criteria than others, classical ballet received no special privileges. Rather, Shaw anticipates the reforms of Fokine (examined in the following chapter) in his complaints about the inappropriate costuming and lack of dramatic unity in ballet. While on the one hand Shaw objected strenuously to aspects of ballet that he considered vacuous and mechanical, on the other he defended all

forms of theatrical dancing against attacks on their morality and legitimacy as art. His earliest treatment of this latter issue 1s found in his first novel, Immaturity (written 1878-79). Central to his protagonist’s difficulties in appreciating ballet as an art is his erotic attraction to the ballerina, Erminia Pertoldi. Pertoldi was a principal dancer at the Alhambra from 1874 to 1884 (Guest, “Alhambra” 20), and according to the editor of his diaries, Shaw “doted on Erminia Pertoldi’s dancing at the Alhambra so much as a younger man that he put her transparently into his semiautobiographical first novel” (Weintraub, in Shaw, Diaries 339). In this novel, Shaw traces the progressively more educated responses of a naive young clerk named Smith to dance and dancers. This education primarily consists of Smith’s transcendence of his sexual response to the dancer—apparently as a precondition to appreciating dance as an art. During Smith’s first visit to a music hall, he sees a ballet titled The Golden Harvest. In it, Pertoldi dances the part of “the spirit of the harvest

field,” who attempts to seduce the male lead into forsaking his new bride. In his description of her dancing, Shaw implies her fulfillment of the same critical tenets he would later apply to acting. He depicts her movements as if they had grown organically from inherent qualities of the character she portrays: “Her impetuosity was supernatural fire; her limbs were instinct with music to the very wrists; that walking on the

points of the toes, which had given him a pain in the ankle to look at before, now seemed a natural outcome of elfin fancy and ethereality” (74).

But Smith’s appreciation of Pertoldi is colored by erotic attraction and contemporary prejudice. Miss Russell, the dressmaker with whom he keeps company, expresses the still common belief that dancing is not something for a girl “to get her living by, or to do before a crowd of people without being decently dressed. I’m sure no woman who respected herself would do such a thing” (82). The injunction against public display that underlies Miss Russell’s position, like the attitude of Philistines who suffer under the misapprehension “that a ballet-dancer is.

112 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art a daughter of Satan who wears short skirts in order that she may cut lewd capers” (Music 1:49), signals a definition of female respectability that was loosening as the theater gained in status in the second half of the century (C. Kent 95). But the association of the ballet girl (or any woman working in the theater) with the prostitute was not unusual.” Smith shares in this attitude enough to attempt to dissuade himself from what he considers an irrational infatuation and an unflattering (to himself) addiction to a “sensuous attraction” (79). Even though he acquires, by repeated observation and self-education, the ability to judge dance performances, this critical distance does not enable him to overcome his erotic attraction to the dancer. Smith looks for a way to contain, repress, or displace the sexual aspect of his response; finally he accomplishes this goal by displacing the pleasure he experiences 1n watching Pertoldi from the erotic to the intellectual realm. Smith, unable “to argue and to bully the dancer into an object of indifference . . . began to crave for a female friend who would encourage him to persevere in the struggle for truth and human perfection” (83). Erotic pleasure becomes the desire “for truth and human perfection,” and the motivating cause of this desire—a display of the female body in motion—becomes the encour-

agement of a female friend. No longer is the woman at the center of Smith’s field of attention, and with his shift in focus from a dancing body to an abstract concept, the woman moves from her place as a silent object of sight to an encouraging voice or invisible moral presence by his side. 1° As the narrator earlier explained, the dancer had become a catalyst for Smith’s own development who “instead of occupying his imagination to the exclusion of everything else, became a centre of mental activity” (78). Smith is deeply suspicious of female sexuality on the stage, just as Shaw was in his dramatic criticism. From the author’s point of view, if an actress is in her own right an object for erotic contemplation, she is to that extent a less efficient authorial tool, and from the point of view of a spectator the same analysis holds. Instead, however, of interfering with an author’s meaning, the sexualized body of the dancer interferes with the spectator’s pursuit of moral and intellectual abstractions. Shaw’s frequent comparisons between the church and the theater, religion and art, the vulgar appeal of low art forms and the moral potential of high art (sec Fromm, chap. 2), suggest that, for Shaw, Smith’s proper experience of

art was being lessened by his erotic attraction to the dancer.!! Thus Smith’s abstraction of his experience away from the body of the female performer, while retaining its presence as catalyst (that is, as muse), is a

The Aesthetics of Control 113 necessary condition for the proper exchange to take place between art and its consumer. When Luce Irigaray gives a reading of Marx’s concept of the commodity from the point of view of women under patriarchy, this abstraction from the body surfaces as a direct consequence of their function as commodities exchanged between men. According to Irigaray, “Womenas-commodities are thus subject to a schism that divides them into the catego-

ries of usefulness and exchange value; into matter-body and an envelope

that is precious but impenetrable, ungraspable, and not susceptible to appropriation by women themselves; into private use and social use” (176). A woman shares with other commodities a dual nature: while being a material substance with concrete uses, she is simultaneously an exchange value. Exchange value is not immanent in a substance, but an expression of social needs and relations; it is an abstraction by means of which commodities can be placed in a relation of equivalence with one another. Although exchange value expresses a social relation between men, it appears instead to express a relation between things (Marx, Capi-

tal 165). Further, this relation between things is not between concrete (and thus incommensurable) substances, but between their values as mediated by money (the measure through which equivalence is established). Pertoldi, as matter-body, is in fact so irrelevant to the psychological and aesthetic transaction that occurs between Smith and her performance that her value changes independently of her. She has, as Irigaray observes, no control over her own worth.

The change in Smith’s transaction with Pertoldi’s performance amounts to an intervention in the definition of this envelope of value insofar as it encloses women on the stage. In other words, Shaw (through his character’s development) transforms the value of a woman’s performance from a certain abstract pleasure of erotic contemplation to an even more abstract pleasure of intellectual development. This is also a more internal pleasure, for rather than imagining himself meeting the dancer at

the stage door or rescuing her from fires (76), that is, in an immediate social relationship with her, he now imagines himself in pursuit of “truth and human perfection.” From a (to some extent) individuated object of

erotic fantasy, Pertoldi dissolves into a generic and abstract “female friend,” while Smith’s conception of his own activity becomes wholly internalized.!2 To say this much is not to imply that his previous mode of experience is better, or the reverse. Both construct narratives in which the woman plays a subordinate and passive role. It is rather to note that

114 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art the effect of a woman’s dance is in each case different, and that this difference refers to a larger aesthetic agenda on Shaw’s part. The effect Shaw seems to prefer no less splits the value envelope of the woman from her matter-body.

As a critic, Shaw subjects the female dancer to a different set of abstractions than those he attributes to the lay spectator. Rather than setting the erotic against the intellectual, Shaw’s dance criticism focuses on the same two levels found in his acting criticism—the form of the work as a whole and the structure of the individual performance. In both cases Shaw’s pronouncements on dance rest on aesthetic values and principles practically the same as those on which he based his analyses of acting.

Most ballets were in Shaw’s view “dramatically weak.” Repeatedly he writes that only by strengthening the dramatic element, by creating “a whole drama in dance” on the model of the Wagnerian music-drama, will the ballet be reinvigorated (Music 1:48).!3 He attacks the ballet solo and divertissement, complaining of the “the repeated stoppages of dra-

matic action in order that one of the principal dancers may execute a ‘solo’ or ‘variation’” (Music 2:68). Unlike opera, which had reformed itself “by a gradual reduction of the independence and consequent incongruity of the soloist’s showpiece until it became an integral part of the

act,” solos in ballet “are still often ... absurdly out of place” (Music 1:48). Ballet, in other words, needs reform because it does not adhere to Shaw’s principle of dramatically motivated organic unity. The nondramatic element of the ballet is also its most abstract element: “I have already said that classical dancing is the most abstract of the arts; and it is just for that reason that it has been so little cared for as an art, and so dependent for its vogue on the display of natural beauty which its exercise involves” (Music 2:67). Shaw makes an explicit connection

between the absence of dramatic structure and content and the foregrounding of female sexuality. Since physical beauty far its own sake, in dancers as in actresses, interferes with art, it must be subordinated to a dramatic structure. Both nondramatic abstraction and the eroticized female body are interdependent causes of the dance’s artistic failure, and both imply the inadequacy of its dramatic element. Unlike the spectator’s internal abstraction that transformed Pertoldi from an erotic obsession to an intellectual catalyst, the nondramatic abstraction of a performance gives rise to the possibility of erotic contemplation. Shaw’s views on ballet would

The Aesthetics of Control 115 seem to agree with Mulvey’s analysis of women in film: their “visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative” (19). Shaw, however, seemed to believe that a sufficiently strong narrative structure (combined with properly trained performers) could dispel the Opportunities for erotic contemplation. Although Shaw condemns spectators who confuse the pleasure of erotic contemplation with aesthetic worth, he does not absolutely reject the erotic in dance. Of Letty Lind, for example, Shaw writes, “She is no mere skirt-dancer: if she were invisible from the waist downwards the motion of her head and wrists would still persuade me to give her anybody’s head on a charger—and this is the test of the perfect dancer as distinguished from the mere step-dancer” (Music 3:102). Erotic provoca-

tion clearly has a place in Shaw’s critical framework. As in his acting criticism, Shaw’s judgment is based not on the presence or absence of the

erotic, but on the manner of its presentation. What he objects to is the exploitation of beauty as a substitute for skill, not to any dance that solicits erotic desire. The parallel treatment of beauty in acting makes it clear that Shaw applied the same criteria to female dancers as to actresses, as exemplified by his assertion of the “plain” Duse’s superiority to Bernhardt in “the art of being beautiful” (Our Theatres 1:159). In effect, Shaw consistently demanded that the evaluation of the performer be separated

from her physical qualities. It is always the performance rather than the performer that carries value. Female sexuality is as fair a commodity as any other in this economy, as long as it is not the “natural” sexuality of the woman performing, but its skilled construction in the service of the work as a whole. The privileged position of Shaw’s conception of dramatic structure 1s evident in his treatment of individual dance performances as well. In this context, it emerges as a preference for dancers who use the whole body—replicating in their movements the organic unity that defined Shaw’s dramatic ideal. In his review of the musical farce A Man about Town, Shaw specifies the “formula for criticizing a dancer” (Our Theatres 3:13): “In the higher, or classical division the dancer dances with her (or his) whole body. In the lower, or step-dancing division, all that is necessary 1s very rapid and neat bravura with the feet alone” (3:11). By “classical” Shaw sometimes meant ballet, but here he is referring to the qualities that characterize his ideal dancer,

116 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art along whose limbs the rhythmic stream flows unbroken to the very tips of the fingers and roots of the hair, whose head moves beautifully, whose nape and wrists make the music visible, who can fix the spine at each vertebra more certainly than an ordinary person can flex his finger at each joint, and who is the personification of skill, grace, strength, and health. (3:13) In his insistence on the unified movement of the total body in the dance, Shaw repeats on the level of the individual performance his demand for the integration of solos into the work as a whole. The criteria he would apply to acting here emerge in terms appropriate to dance. Rather than

the integration of points into a continuous whole, the aim of dancing should be the integration of parts of the body. Likewise, in locating the origin of the dancer’s performance Shaw applies the same criteria to dancers and actresses; the dancer ideally expresses an internal state, for

the “mere external imitation of good dancers” creates dancers who “work from the extremities instead of from the centre” (Our Theatres 3:13).

Finally, as for the actress, so for the dancer, the determining context

of a performance must be the work as a whole. While the individual performer creates herself from the inside out, she is (or should be) all the time being created from the outside in. Dance and acting are pressed into the same mold, with the same attendant contradiction between the pre-

sumed freedom of the performer—symbolized by naming her or his performance “self-expression” —and the actual subordination of the per-

former to a larger structure over which her only control is her more or less obedient submission to it. The role played by the organic unity of the

dramatic structure in a play is in ballet played by the ideal of “dance drama.” As the music drama on which it is modeled did for opera, dance drama unifies the disparate elements of late-nineteenth-century ballet, most importantly narrative and “absolute” or nonnarrative dancing, by making the dramatic element its ruling attribute. The aesthetic implications of this domination of performance by its

dramatic element are twofold. In the first place, it was supposed to decrease the likelihood of erotic contemplation on the part of the spectator by integrating those “abstract” moments of pure dance into a narra-

tive framework. The task of transcending the erotic response to the dancing body on the part of such naive viewers as Shaw’s character, Smith, is thus made easier and the development of an audience that

The Aesthetics of Control 117 prefers intellectual to erotic stimulation in the theater more likely. Secondly, the insistence on a performance being an organic unity in which all parts are subordinated to its dramatic element provided an aesthetic rationale for authorial control. Clearly, whoever controls the dramatic element controls the entire production, and the most obvious source for this element is, of course, a dramatist. Shaw’s adherence to a theory of acting as self-expression works to mystify the actual consequences of his aesthetic by seeming to grant a degree of self-determination to the performer that his actual aesthetic priorities would deny. Likewise Shaw’s tendency to replicate his ideal of dramatic structure in his analysis of individual performances works to saturate those performances with the aesthetic criteria that will, finally, justify their subordination. Shaw’s application of these performance aesthetics to dance articulated, long before Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet, a desire for the subordination of the performer that the Russian company would fulfill. Theoretically such an aesthetic would apply to male as well as female performers, but its impact on each gender would be different—

its appropriation of creative control for the author would weaken the male performer’s claim to traditionally masculine attributes, while reinforcing in female performers traditionally feminine habits of obedience and self-sacrifice. In practice, however, the hegemony of this aesthetic permitted an increase in the status of some male dancers and did not turn all female dancers into anonymous instruments. Nevertheless, Shaw was apparently correct in his assumption that in order for dance to become an elite art in England the domination of a ballet by the principal dancer would have to be replaced by an author-centered model of dance creation and performance.

7

Usurping High Culture: The Russian Ballet, I

The Shavian ideal of dramatic dance, of a dance form that subordinated

the performer to a larger unity founded on narrative, was admirably fulfilled by the ballets choreographed by Michel Fokine for Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. In fact, the Russian Ballet was able to embody elements from a number of diverse and sometimes conflicting cultural sources— from Wagnerian and symbolist aesthetics to the popular appeal of exotic romance and erotic sensationalism. In addition, the experience of these productions, with their combined resources of large numbers of welltrained dancers, talented composers, designers, and choreographers, set criteria for art dance that the early modern dancers could not fulfill. Early modern dance was primarily a solo art form.! In practice, this meant that the success of Maud Allan and Isadora Duncan was, like that of Lottie Collins, closely tied to their individual stage presence, that they could not draw on an audience accustomed to and attracted by lavish spectacle, and that their ability to create dramatic dance was severely limited. Finally, and, partially in consequence of this last quality, they had more difficulty sustaining a full evening’s program. Maud Allan’s solution was to exploit a context already suited for solo performance—the music hall—while at the same time claiming an aesthetic legitimacy ordinarily not granted music hall performances. Duncan was more ambitious. Her popularity in England, however, never matched the reception she received on the Con-

tinent, and with the arrival of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet the cultural elite—whom she depended upon for her audience—were absorbed with a very different kind of dance performance. Essential to this difference was the place of the performer. While Duncan felt the need to evade the connotations evoked by female performers by demanding that she be considered an artist—occasionally 119

120 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art rejecting the role of the performer altogether—this was not an important issue for the ballet choreographer. Fokine, the major choreographer for the Russian Ballet’s first London seasons, could easily maintain a separation between his roles as choreographer and dancer, whereas Duncan could not. Duncan’s aesthetic of self-expression could not underwrite the separation between the work of art and its creator that helped propel the Russian Ballet to its elite status. In addition, by insisting on the value of self-expression, Duncan was forced to dismiss the legitimacy of an externally imposed discipline arising from an artistic tradition—that 1s, of classical ballet. In consequence, she could elicit for herself neither the respect for tradition and submission to a discipline nor the ideal of an impersonal art that formed a common ground between elements of the ballet audience and an emerging modernist aesthetic. At the same time, the appeal of the Russians to established aesthetic values, especially those in the Wagnerian tradition, in combination with their ability to satisfy popular taste, left little room for alternative dance forms to develop. Because Diaghilev was able to insert his company into the most elite theatrical context available, the opera at Covent Garden, he created unusually favorable conditions for a dance performance in London. However, to be accepted not only as a prestigious performance but as a good one requires more than the upper-class social context provided by Covent Garden. Social stature alone does not explain the genuine enthusi-

asm his company inspired. What the Russian Ballet presented, I will argue, was recognizable to the audiences it appealed to from their own experience or ideals of good performance. In other words, the dramatic rise of dance as an art form exemplified by the reception of the Russian Ballet does not signal a radical break or discontinuity in aesthetic values, but rather ballet’s successful appropriation of elements of existing modes of reception and presentation. This does not mean that all those who liked what they saw at the ballet saw the same thing. The popularity of the Russian Ballet rested on its ability to offer performances that harmonized simultaneously with differing aesthetic criteria. What Fokine was trying to make of ballet can thus be compared not only with how his dances were received, but also with aesthetic agendas that by intersecting, either immediately or indirectly, with his own created points of overlap between the Russian Ballet and other aesthetics. Finally, the interaction of gender and the place of the performer in the Russian Ballet constitutes perhaps the most important difference be-

Usurping High Culture 121 tween it and the dance of Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan. That the Russian Ballet presented England with the first male dancer whose seriousness was as unquestioned as his popularity, is, I think, inextricably linked to its artistic success. Diaghilev (impresario), Fokine (choreographer), Bakst and Benois (designers), Niinsky (dancer and later choreographer), and Stravinsky (composer) together presented ballet as substantially a male-dominated art form. This was in sharp contrast to the ballet then common in British theaters (mostly in music halls) and to the innovations by Duncan, Allan, and other female dancers that would eventually emerge as modern dance. Diaghilev maintained a close association between his ballet and the opera,

which, in England, would be synonymous with maintaining a close association with the social elite. The first appearance of his company in London was at Covent Garden, in a season shared with the opera, and they performed at the Coronation Gala on 26 June 1911, in a program that otherwise would have been devoted purely to opera (Buckle 202). Nor was it unusual for a Russian Ballet program of the prewar period to include a short opera or an excerpt from a full-length work. Since opera had an established position with a long tradition of aristocratic patronage, as well as a long tradition of integrating ballet into its performances (see Guest, Romantic), by launching his ballet from the opera, Diaghilev insured both that it acquired a certain degree of social prestige and that it would be received as art rather than as mere entertainment. The social success of the Russian Ballet in England was as important as its artistic success. When Thomas Beecham produced his first Russian Opera season (alternating opera and ballet) at Drury Lane, in the summer of 1913, he commented that “it was only when it began to be known that the stalls

and boxes were filled nightly with an audience of persons famous in politics, society and art that the man in the street also came to applaud and to approve” (195). Cyril Beaumont notes in his memoirs, “To visit the Ballets Russes was to be at the height of fashion” (122), and the Lady revicwed the opening of the 1911 fall season in both its society and music sections (Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed 48).

But the broad appeal of their performances cannot be attributed purely to the popular audience’s emulation of their social superiors. The Russian Ballet’s potential to cross over between elite and popular culture was immediately evident in the success of its dancers in the music halls. Their prima ballerina, Karsavina, danced at the Coliseum in 1909, and

122 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art Pavlova, who appeared sporadically in Diaghilev’s productions, made her debut at the Palace Theatre (replacing Maud Allan) in 1910. According to dance historian Richard Buckle, “[I]n June 1911 there was a Russian ballerina at every one of the big music-halls near Leicester Square,” with the exception of the Coliseum (204). The fees offered these dancers were substantial in comparison with the salary they received in Russia. Of the soloists, only Niyinsky seems to have resisted on principle the temptation to perform in a music hall (Beaumont 148; Flitch 157), and he was probably following the lead of Diaghilev. After the success of his first Paris season in 1909, Diaghilev had received an offer from one of these halls, to which he reportedly responded: “The Russian Ballet sandwiched between performing dogs and a fat lady playing a silver-plated trombone! Never! Never!” (Buckle 151). Benois as well was anxious to protect the aesthetic purity of ballet and even feared that Fokine’s use of a shortened one-act form for his ballets was influenced by the conventions of performances in music halls (Fokine, Memoirs 109). The potential danger to the artistic prestige of the ballet presented by

too close an association with the music hall was a real one, for many of the ballets staged at Covent Garden had elements of sensationalism, exhibitionist dancing, and erotic appeal that might have threatened their status if the audience felt they were taken too far. When Cyril Beaumont expressed his dissatisfaction with Le Dieu bleu, one of his complaints was that “the demons and reptiles were too reminiscent of a Christmas panto-

mime” (125). Likewise, dancing that was considered an exhibition of technique, rather than expressive of a character or situation, was condemned in the Daily Mail in 1911 as the “acrobatic music-hall type” (qtd. in Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed 58). Even in the music halls, however, the Russian dancers were taken seriously from the first. In the Times’ only review of the ballet carried in the theater column (the rest appeared as music criticism), the reviewer praises Pavlova as “the most artistically important and most stimulating

thing in the past theatrical season” (“Theatres”). This 1s after he pans Galsworthy, Granville Barker, and Shaw for their overly intellectual approach to theater, arguing that “there are other qualities in art than the merely ‘literary,’ and the intellectual appeal is not always the most artistic

appeal.” At the same time, he is careful to distinguish the pleasure he experiences watching Pavlova from the erotic pleasure commonly associated with female dancing. In fact, he assures the reader that “the dancing of M. Mordkin [her male partner] is almost as pleasure-giving as that of

Usurping High Culture 123 Mille. Pavlova.” Setting aside for the moment the question of the male ballet dancer, the necessity this critic feels to separate dance as art from dance as eroticized feininine display requires emphasis. This is a symptom of the influence performance context has on the reception of the female dancer. The same distinction was a major theme of the reviews written of Maud Allan’s music hall appearances two years earlier and indicates the presumption that music hall dancing is primarily a vehicle for eroticized exhibitionism. In contrast, when Diaghilev’s full company appeared at Covent Garden, the Times’ reviews never made sexual display an issue. On the other hand, the first analytic article the Times ran on the Russian Ballet carefully contrasted what was happening at Covent Garden with what Pavlova had been offering the masses at the Palace. Thus, the writer concludes that “how the work of a ballet-master suffers from being given piecemeal may be seen by comparing the effect of detached

‘turns’ of Pavlova and her company at the Palace Theatre before an irrelevant, purely ‘decorative’ backcloth, with the effect of Carnaval in its entirety at Covent Garden” (“Music: The Russian Ballet,” 24 June 1911). This concern for the integrity of the ballet master (choreographer) suggests one of the ways in which the Russian Ballet could be separated from the performances of equally gifted dancers in the music halls. If the ballet

master, like the playwright or the composer, could be called upon to validate the conceptual and aesthetic integrity of a ballet, criteria of unity

and wholeness might be transposed from already established elite art forms to the ballet. This procedure entails a separation of the performer from the creator, the real artist, analogous to that common to music and drama, where the composer and the playwright are thought to have greater claims to the status of creative artists than musicians or actors. Foucault’s analysis of the author function can be called into play here. Clearly the ability to assign an author to a dance potentially aligns it

with a “‘literary’ discourse [that] was acceptable only if it carried an author’s name” (126). When the maker of a dance becomes an author, and conversely, when a dance acquires an author, both enter into a complex of relations that alter the social meaning of both the individual and the product. My point is that the ballet choreographer was better able to take on an author function than modern-dance choreographers, and thus

to enter into artistic discourses that depended on such a function to legitimate their contents. To argue, however, that the ballet choreographer could be conceptualized in terms analogous to a literary author is

124 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art not simply to identify the one with the other. The inadequacy of a strictly literary definition of authorship to the process of creating and producing a ballet cannot be forgotten. Ballet, like most performed art, is a collaboration among a variety of artists in a way that most literary works are not. Nevertheless, the possibility of thinking about a choreographer as

one thought about a writer, composer, or painter, rather than as one thought about a performer, enabled the status of the choreographer to move upward in the prevailing cultural hierarchy. In addition, however, Pavlova’s performance was considered incom-

plete without the “relevant” scenery—like the performance of a play without costumes or set. Once critics had seen full productions of ballets

such as Carnaval, with their integration of scenic design with serious music, a coherent scenario, and choreography adapted in detail to a dramatic purpose, the brilliance of Pavlova’s dancing was no longer enough. At this point there existed a conceptual separation between theatrical dancing and the ballet. A ballet had become an artwork. No longer a haphazard mixture of narrative, spectacle, music, and movement—

assumed to be an excuse for displaying women’s bodies—a ballet had now proved itself neither a mongrel nor a whore, but a single, unified entity serving no master but art. As explained in Flitch’s 1912 survey of contemporary dance, unlike the old ballet, in which the dances were “unrelated to any central inward idea,” the point of the new Russian Ballet “is the strict subjection of the ballet to an artistic idea” (131). While the Russian Ballet benefited from this promotion to strict subjection, the

consequences for ballet dancers were more ambiguous. If ballets were now to be held up to critical criteria that required full productions, they could only be presented by those with the necessary resources, rather than by independent dancers using the available theatrical contexts, as Pavlova had.

To return to the Times’ article, however, the fragmentation of a ballet to fit the performance conventions of the music hall was only one of the differences between ballet there and the art form introduced by Diaghilev. Since full-length ballets were performed regularly at the Empire and Alhambra Theatres, the Times’ critic also establishes the superiority of the Russian Ballet to its native counterpart. The central difference, it turns out, is that the English ballet is a democratic art, while that

of the Russians is aristocratic. As a democratic art, it is an “essential principle” of English ballet, “as in all democratic arts, not to divert any of the spectators’ imaginative cnergy to the central, inward idca, but to save

Usurping High Culture 125 it all for the enjoyment of the expression,” that is, for the spectacle. In Russia, however, the ballet has not had to please the masses because it is an aristocratic institution, and this patronage has given it the freedom to develop ideas. According to this analysis, “It is, in fact, not in the technical skill of the dancing, but in the variety and imaginative quality of those ideas which the dancing succeeds in expressing that the true differentia of the Russian Ballet is to be found” (“Music,” 24 June 1911). The devaluing of technique (though still praised as a handmaiden to art) is, like the disdain for acrobatics, a devaluing of the body “for its own

sake.” A strict hierarchy is maintained, placing the spiritual (the idea) above the physical, and the “artistic idea” above individual performance. This move away from the body, and particularly the gendered body, of

the performer is common to the positive reviews of Maud Allan and Isadora Duncan as well and seems to have been a necessary condition for the reemergence of dance as a serious art form. The audience’s ability to separate physical display from spiritual expression (without the help of language, such as a play would have provided), however, also helped to mask the part played by the Russian Ballet’s real sensual allure in their response. In contrast to the Times’ critics, and the crowds who descended on Covent Garden, Edward Gordon Craig suspected the Russian Ballet of trying to pawn off spectacle as art.> Using his journal, the Mask, as his forum, Craig delivered a series of attacks on the company, largely aimed at decrying the conjunction of sensational spectacle and claims to artistic merit. In an article that actually provoked a response in one of the Times’ reviews (“Le sacre”), Craig attempts to quell the storm of acclamation

for the Russian Ballet, arguing that however talented and charismatic Fokine and Nijinsky may be, they are not creating art: “The Russian Ballet is essentially the ‘Art’ which is created by the Body. Its perfection is physical. Its appeal is to our senses, not through them.” In this kind of “art” the only purpose is to arouse the senses: “It makes no further effort. It is a sensuous art and not spiritual” (Movement and Dance 96). No doubt Craig has a case: enjoying lurid stories of lust and violence in the name of art, like buying National Geographic for its pictures of half-naked women, simply puts a respectable face on a suspect pleasure. Despite general acceptance of the artistic legitimacy of the Russian Ballet, a legitimacy that disallowed any purely sensuous appeal, exotic ballets, heavily erotic in theme, made up a significant part of their repertory. According to Macdonald, these were so popular with English audi-

126 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art ences that “Diaghilev had found it important to give one of his exotic ballets in each programme” (61). Among the works given having Oriental settings and more or less lurid scenarios were Cléopdtre and Schéhérazade (1911), Thamar (1912), Le Dieu bleu and La tragédie de Salomé (1913). Cléopatre, Thamar, and La tragédie de Salomé are fatal-woman stories: the

sexual desire of or for the title character leads to the death of a man. Schéhérazade, one of their most popular ballets in England, reverses the scenario; there the sexual desire of women leads to their own death.® Schéhérazade told the story of a shah betrayed by his harem and of his

revenge. Briefly, the shah and his brother pretend to go out hunting, intending to return unexpectedly in order to test the fidelity of the shah’s wives. Once the men are gone, the women convince the chief eunuch to open two doors, admitting a crowd of negro slaves, while the favorite,

Zobeida, insists that he open a third door to allow her own lover, the Golden Slave, to enter. The orgy begins. The shah arrives when these proceedings are at their height and promptly orders his soldiers to kill the

women and the slaves. Zobeida stabs herself. This exotic fantasy of female sexual appetite and its necessary punishment received one enthusiastic review after another from the Times’ critic, who praised its “gorgeous savagery” (“Music: Royal Opera”), called it “in design and colour,

action, and music, the most red-hot of all the vivid Oriental pictures which the Ballet gave us” (“Russian Ballet: Opening”), and conveyed a sense of the power it had to excite audiences: “This wonderful work has created a profound impression here, and the frequency with which it has been given lately shows that 1t appeals intensely to the popular imagination, as well as being a masterpiece of choreographic art” (“Music: The Russian Ballet,” 25 Oct. 1911). This combination of popular appeal and certified artistic legitimacy made for consistently large and consistently enthusiastic audiences.’ To understand the artistic success of this subject matter, it is helpful to keep in mind that the Russians themselves were thought to come from the East, where they “have all the unfathomable reserves of barbaric life to draw upon,” and whose closeness to old traditions makes “dancing ...anatural act” (Flitch 123). This supposed privileged access to a more primitive existence underwrites Arthur Symons'’s praise of the “primitive and myth-making imagination” the Russians share with the savage. For him the Russians are in an ideal position, poised between savagery and

civilization: “Other races, too long civilized, have accustomed themselves to the soul, to mystery. Russia, with centuries of savagery behind

Usurping High Culture 127 it, still feels the earth about its roots, and the thirst in it of the primitive animal. It has lost none of its instincts, and it has just discovered the soul” (“Russian Ballets” 287). The Russians, in other words, both express the

primitive and domesticate or discipline it by means of the soul. The theme of passion restrained by discipline turns up in reviews as well; for example, the Times’ critic praises, in Schéhérazade, “the superb abandon combined with rigid self-constraint that characterize all M. Diaghilev’s troupe” (“Royal Opera: The Ballet”).8 In its relation to the primitive, the barbaric, the sensual, the Russian Ballet embodied and resolved the opposition between sexual passion and the discipline of civilization, between spirit and the brute matter of the earth. The sense that the exotic and the primitive were the natural territory of the Russians was on the one hand confirmed by their Oriental ballets, while, on the other, the technical expertise of these dancers reassured viewers of its containment and control. This was not a celebration of the primitive, not an embracing of the Other, but the appropriation

and transmutation of the Other to serve that guarantor of civilization, art. Another stance toward the primitive is expressed in the response of John Gould Fletcher, an American expatriate poet associated with the imagists, to Diaghilev’s company. He attributes a major advance in his poetry to his exposure to “the barbaric color, the rhythmic splendor, of the Russian ballet” (64). For him, however, it was Niinsky’s Le sacre du printemps that had the most profound effect on his sense of himself as an artist. He drew a direct connection between the hostility of the public to that work (he saw it in Paris, where it provoked a near riot), the place of the artist in modern culture, and the relation between art and the primitive. To be a modern artist, he realized, meant isolation and contempt. In embracing this identity, “[A]rtists everywhere were turning back to the primitively ugly, knowing that in primitiveness alone lay strength” (68). In Le sacre du printemps, Fletcher saw the primitive as power to be embraced, not domesticated by the civilizing influence of technique or soul. While the fact that the ballet enacted the ritual sacrifice of a virgin made it no less a fantasy of male dominance than Schéhérazade, there was a significant difference between the two in the representation of gender.

In rejecting the beauty and splendor of a romanticized and decorative Orient, Le sacre du printemps thoroughly exiled this stereotype of the feminine from art.? This version of the primitive seemed to offer the artist a source of strength with which to engage a hostile public, in the

128 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art form of an uncompromisingly “ugly”—that is, “masculine’—subjcct. This ballet would secm to Fletcher, thereforc, evidence of a new artistic identity—once that he could embrace wholchcartedly. A’ representative of

an older gencration of artists, Charles Ricketts, in contrast, felt no need to identify with the cmbattled artist as primitive and wrotc of Le sacre du printemps only that “the music... made me want to howl like a dog” (Self-Portrait 183). The difference between the representation of the primitive in Schéhérazade and Le sacre du printemps marks a shift that might be aligned with equally dramatic shifts in other arts, but that is not representative of the Russian Ballct as the English first saw it.!°

For its audience, the innovations of the Russian Ballct that established its reputation were, in comparison to Le sacre du printemps, reasonable reactions to a tradition steeped in unquestioned and stultifying con-

ventions. The structure of the ballet had become formulaic, with many elements serving purely decorative functions, and the usc of gesture and decor lacked any historical reference to the subject and locale of the ballet. This was the tradition rejected by Isadora Duncan. To Fokine, however, her “natural dancing” was too limited and limiting; he wished rather to alter the form of a ballet to fit “naturally” with a large range of possible subjects. In a Ictter to the Times (6 July 1914) in which he stated his theory of the dance, Fokine wrote: Every form of dancing is good in so far as it expresses the content or subject with which the dance deals. . . . It would be equally unnatural to represent a Greek Bacchic dance with ballet-steps on the point of the tocs, or to represent a characteristic Spanish national dance by running and jumping in a Greck tunic. (“Letter” 258) Thus Fokine, unlike Duncan, did not reject classical ballet but relegated it to those subjects for which it seemed appropriate, modifying or replacing its conventions for dances sct in ancient Greece or the Far East.

Buckle notes that in the 1912 Paris scason pointe work was the exception rather than the rule: “Greck ballets were performed in sandals

or barefoot, Russian or Oriental ballets in various kinds of boots and shoes” (221). He, however, attributes this innovation in footwear dircctly to Duncan’s influence. Fokine had seen Duncan dance in St. Petersburg in 1904, but the extent of her influence is a matter of dcbatc; according to one dance scholar, “He did not so much gasp at the newness of it as sec in her the corroboration of his own ideas” (Goldman 35). Certainly by 1914

Usurping High Culture 129 his “five principles” of the dance articulate an aesthetic that diverges from

more than it overlaps with Duncan’s. These principles emphasized the dramatic unity of movements and the expression of a specific dramatic purpose or its emotional correlate, not, like Duncan’s dance theory, the expression of “self,” “nature,” or a universal ideal. Fokine’s principles of ballet place him in an intellectual tradition stemming from Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk as set forth in “The Art-Work of the Future.”!! According to Wagner, dance contains within itself the conditions for all other arts:

Its artistic “stuff” is the actual living Man; and in troth no single

portion of him, but the whole man from heel to crown... . It therefore includes within itself the conditions for the enunciation of all remaining arts: the singing and speaking man must necessarily be

a bodily man; through his outer form, through the posture of his limbs, the inner, singing and speaking man comes forth to view. (100)

Dance, therefore, will serve as the basis for a fusion of the arts but will not itself determine the final shape of an artwork. This is accomplished rather by the dramatic action, in which “the Necessity of the artwork displays itself” (197). Fokine’s program for the ballet required that dance always be subservient to dramatic action. The implications, however, of his insistence that “dancing and mimetic gesture have no meaning in a ballet unless they serve as an expression of its dramatic action” must be understood in the context of the traditional relationship between dance and narrative. For example, in theater contexts other than those devoted only to dance, when dance occurs it is at the expense of narrative flow. Dramatic action halts for the duration of the dance, as illustrated by dance numbers in musical comedy and pantomime, as well as in opera. The attempt to

embody dramatic action in dance had in the past created an internal division in ballet—between dance and pantomime, that is, between

“pure” dance numbers and pas d’action. , An anonymous letter to the Times in 1913 astutely analyzed the consequences of this separation between dance and narrative for the subject matter of the ballet. Arguing for the importance of Nijinsky’s ballet

Jeux, the writer notes, “In all previous ballets the inventor has been concerned to account for the circumstance that his dramatis personae

130 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art dance,” and this need to create a narrative that provides “natural” opportunities for dance to occur—court festivals, harems, fairy-haunted forests —

severely limits the subject matter available to the chorcographer (“Dancing as an Absolute Medium”).!2 Fokine did not relinquish traditional subject matter; his dances were set in exotic contexts, remote in time and place, or in the fantasy worlds of carnivals, dreams, and fairy tales. But he did attempt to apply canons of dramatic unity and realism to the ballet that would integrate narrative and dance to a much greater extent. The value of an all-encompassing integration of the parts into a total work of art that Wagner articulated was shared by George Bernard Shaw as well as Fokine and led to the insistence of both that the dancer use his or her whole body. In Fokine’s words, “Man can and should be expressive from head to foot” (“Lettcr” 260). Fokine, like Shaw, extended this

principle to the entire work, building up level by level an integrated whole governed in the last instance by the “scheme of the whole ballet” (“Letter” 260). Fokine was successful enough in creating dance dramas

that embodied these principles of dramatic and expressive unity that Shaw immediately recognized his own ideals when he saw the Russian Ballet in 1913. He wrote to Mrs. Patrick Campbell in 1913, after secing a program including Petrouchka, Spectre de la rose, Schéhérazade, and Prince Igor, exclaiming, “That is how we should dance” (Collected Letters 191).

Dramatic unity cannot, however, be achieved in ballet without the cooperation of music and the visual arts, and Fokine, like Wagner, insisted that the different branches of art must unite on cqual terms: “The new ballet, refusing to be the slave either of music or of scenic decoration, and recognizing the alliance of the arts only on the condition of complete equality, allows perfect freedom both to the scenic artist and to the musician” (“Lettcr” 260). The relationship between the dancing and the music was of major interest to the Times’ critic. He was concerned that the ballet demonstrate respect for the composer’s intentions and praised Carnaval for having “never a moment when onc felt that the music had been treated with anything but complete sympathy and undcrstanding.” The score had not been altered to fit the necds of the dance, nor had the work of other composers been interpolated: “all was Schumann. . . there was hardly a repeat that is not in the pianoforte composition” (“Royal Opera: The Russian Ballet”). In fact the high quality of the music used by the Russian Ballet was to the Daily News’ critic a signal that they were to be taken scriously:

Usurping High Culture 13] When the orchestra began the prelude ... people looked at one another in surprise. They had evidently come expecting the jingling tunes associated with the ballct in this country, and found they werc listening to a wonderful picce of orchestration, restless, passionate, at times almost poignant, which might have been the prelude to a serious opcra. It was the first indication that the ballet, as developed in Russia, is a serious form of art, and not mercly a frivolous excuse for showing pretty girls and dresses behind the footlights. (Qtd. in Macdonald 32)

In this review, the music not only establishes an association with opera and thus functions to raise the status of the ballet, but it leads to the

immediate exclusion of the feminine display then thought endemic to theatrical dancing. In those ballets where the narrative required highly sexualized female figures, their display was sufficiently justificd by its subordination to the demands of the dramatic action to seem an artistic necessity. The increased integration of dance and drama initiated by Fokine did not do away with the eroticized female dancer but contextualized her. He thereby achieved a major victory in the battle to subdue dance to drama, for, as indicated in the review just quoted, frequently the real motivation for inserting dance into narrative in the first place would be to provide an occasion for feminine display. The power of the female

performer to halt the narrative would have to be diminished if Fokine was successfully to assert the primacy of the dramatic action. This he accomplishes, and the opposition between narrative and feminine display

is resolved by the contextualizing of sexual display within, and in the service of, the narrative. Concurrently with the revamping of ballet from an occasion for “showing pretty girls” to art, there occurred the acceptance of male ballet

dancers. In contrast to the contempt previously conferred on them, reviews of the Russian dancers never question the appropriateness of male dancers’ chosen profession. Rather, “[T]he performances of Mordkin, together with those of Nijinsky, have brought about a reversal of the somewhat contemptuous popular judgment upon male dancing” (Flitch 167). That this shift occurred despite the homosexual orientation of the Diaghilev circle, and after the Wilde trials increased the danger of public exposure for homoscxuals, makes it ali the more extraordinary. The increased value assigned to male danccrs is casily accounted for

132 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art in the case of Mordkin, whose physique inspired comparisons with Greek statues and whose dancing was praised for its virility (Flitch 156;

Beaumont 82; “Royal Opera: The Russian Ballet”). Niyinsky, on the other hand, was often described in language similar to that applied to the ballerinas, and occasionally his masculinity was blatantly denied, as in Beaumont’s preface to a collection of drawings of the dancer: “For Nijinsky is not a man in the true, robust sense of the word. . . . An examination of his roles will show that none are allied with the physical strength and beauty of manhood” (134). Nyinsky seemed to give viewers the same

impression of weightlessness they valued in the dancing of women— although not because he danced on pointe, but because of his tremendous leaping ability. Charles Ricketts, describing a 1912 performance, wrote that “Nijinsky never once touched the ground, but laughed at our sorrows and passions in mid air” (Self-Portrait 174—75). Ricketts, in fact, preferred Niyinsky to his female counterpart Karsavina, for he “outclasses in passion, beauty, and magnetism all that Karsavina can do” (Self-Portrait 177). Occasionally, as Ricketts illustrates, the same descriptive language, and, by implication, the same critical criteria, will be applied to both Nyinsky and the female dancer. The Times’ critic can use exactly the same words

for both Nyinsky and Pavlova: “these two dancers, with their swift, elastic leaps and fluttering butterfly movements, were so incredibly light and vivacious as to seem hardly human” (“Russian Ballet,” 2 Nov. 1911). The emergence of the male dancer in conjunction with the ascendancy of ballet to high art in England may illustrate the necessity that a prestigious art be defined as a masculine one, but this would ignore the degree to which the dancer remained feminized. The popularity of Ni-

jinsky should not be separated from the clearly feminine (or at best boyish, not quite masculine) attributes assigned him. Now, however, the public was willing to accept without ridicule “fluttering butterfly movements” from a male dancer. Even more important than this feminization

of Nyinsky, however, was the broader shift in the focus of the ballet from the dancer to the work as a whole. Niinsky’s greatness, in an aesthetic that valued the subordination of the parts of a work to a governing idea, would depend on a “feminine” willingness to serve, rather than a “masculine” assertion of individuality. In a 1913 celebration of Nijinsky by an Englishman, it is this attribute that defines his genius:

That the whole is greater than the part is a hard precept for mime or dancer who happens to be blessed with personality. The temptation

Usurping High Culture 133 to dominate is strong. But he who will accept and act upon this principle is sure of his reward; for so he will participate in a greatness

that is greater even than his own—the supreme greatness of an impersonal work of art. (Whitworth 7-8) The English public, I am suggesting, had not so much changed its mind about the virility of male ballet dancers, as it had reframed the question of their worth. On the one hand, the increased status of ballet—its association with elite theaters and privileged art forms—yustified male participation, while, on the other, the increased visibility of male participation in the Russian Ballet, as opposed to that typical of English companies, helped assure its higher aesthetic status. At the same time, however, the

separation of the work of artistic creation from that of the performer diminished the importance of the performer in defining the aesthetic status of a performance. Just as the shift from feminine display to the dramatic action as the center of the ballet signals the increased importance of the choreographer, of whom the ballerina can now be considered

an instrument, so does the lack of anxiety about the manliness of Nijinsky’s performances signal the relative unimportance of his masculinity in the face of the end he serves. The assimilation of ballet to an aesthetic that could locate creative power and initiative in the choreographer rather than the dancer to some extent desexualizes the male performer. But this only occurs in tandem with a reinforced separation between the roles of performer and of artist. This separation allowed the choreographer to be assigned the “masculine” role of creator and reinforced the “feminine” position of performers in an aesthetic that celebrated their submission— to the end of becoming more perfect instruments of the choreographer. The place of performers in the Russian Ballet would remain impor-

tant. They provided the public with stars and Diaghilev with the audience loyalty that went along with them. They contributed, to a greater or lesser extent, to the choreography and presentation of their own roles. But what made ballet into art was now understood to be the work of Fokine, Stravinsky, Bakst, and, later, Nyinsky as a choreographer—not the dancers themselves. Regardless of their actual participation in creating the dances they danced, the dancers could be seen as simply the necessary condition, the disciplined raw material of a collective art created on and around them by the composers, designers, and choreographers brought together by Diaghilev. That choreographers sometimes danced as well did not threaten their higher status, for their chorcogra-

134 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art phy was easily separable (in theory) from their performance in it. In this respect the Russian Ballet differed significantly from the practice of Isadora Duncan or Maud Allan. It shared this separation between performer and creator, however, with drama. Fokine’s focus of reform was the aesthetic unity of a ballet;

thus he takes the stance of an artist shaping external material into a coherent whole rather than that of a performer drawing art out of his or her own body. His approach, that is, is distanced from his material—the dancer—in a way that Duncan’s was not, but in a way shared by Craig, Yeats, and Shaw. The performer becomes less an individual and more the exquisitcly gifted instrument of a mediation between genius and audience as the performing arts, theater as well as ballet, reemerge in twentiethcentury clite art.

Part 4

Performing Modernism

8

Disappearing Acts: Ideology and the Performer in T. S. Eliot’s Early Criticism

While the practical circumstances of production and consumption differ dramatically between literature and dance, on the more abstract level of aesthetic values there are striking similarities during this period. These similarities cannot be attributed to a direct causal impact of one art on the other but must be understood as highly mediated manifestations of interests, problems, and ideals that cut across the particularities of a specific art form. Just as Shaw’s goals for drama become integrated in his treatment of dance, and Yeats’s concerns about the relation between poetry and society enter into his conception of an ideal theater, so too do T. S. Eliot’s specifically literary aesthetic ideals inform his evaluations of performers. Some of these ideals, particularly those defining the relationship between the performer and the work of art, are easily found in critical responses to the Russian Ballet and in the aesthetic principles and practice characteristic of some participants in that company. This, let me emphasize, should not be taken as a claim that Eliot’s criticism directly influenced dance aesthetics—if any influence occurred, the stronger case can be made for it moving in the opposite direction. On the other hand, the cultural status of literature, as opposed to dance, made serious attention to ballet by important literary figures a definite asset to Diaghilev’s company.

In order to understand the nature and implications of the kind of attention Eliot gave to ballet, one must address the broader question of the place of performance and the performer in his aesthetics. This chapter therefore is less concerned with an analysis of actual performances than

with a conceptual framework developed to locate and evaluate performances within a larger aesthetic (and social) context. Major tenets of 137

138 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art literary modernism, as expressed in Eliot’s criticism of the late teens and

early twenties, are cut from the same conceptual cloth as many of the aesthetic values informing the dance modernism of the Russian Ballet during the same period. Understanding these interrelations, however, requires a close examination of Eliot’s criticism, attending particularly to the ideological positioning of the performer. Only then will it be possible

to address, in the final chapter, the relationship between a modernist literary aesthetic, such as Eliot’s, and that embodied in contemporaneous productions of the Russian Ballet.

“Those who succumb to the ideology are precisely those who cover up the contradiction instead of taking it into the consciousness of their own

production” (Adorno and Horkheimer 157). In Adorno’s use of the word, contradiction names the very structure of a cultural artifact, because it names the structure of the world of its producer. For Adorno, the

failure of art in the face of the culture industry is its failure to inhabit the contradictory place assigned it by ideology as both a commodity on the market and a renunciation of the market. T. S. Eliot was also concerned about the relationship between art and an increasingly commodified mass culture, but, as I will argue, was engaged in a complex evasion of and desire for a marketable art that makes Adorno’s characterization of contradiction and its relation to ideology a useful model. More specifi-

cally, Eliot desired the creation of a popular high art, and in his early writings on performance and drama, he attempts to articulate the theoretical and practical requirements of such an art. In these writings—reviews, essays, editorial commentary, and letters

—Eliot represses potentially contradictory elements of his ideological fabric, encompassing attitudes toward class, gender, and the individual. This process is especially evident in the instability of his treatment of the performer. For example, on the one hand, the subordination of the performer to the text, and the value given to male performers, marks Eliot’s commitment to a text-based and male-centered aristocracy of high art. On the other hand, Eliot’s praise of a female music hall performer signals his simultaneous need to appropriate the vitality of that performer for his own art, as well as a desire to block the absorption of her working-class audience into the middle class. Such conflicting commitments and desires emerge even more clearly in several other aspects of Eliot’s commentary on performed art: He treats popular performed art as both the basis for

and the opposite of elite art; the performer’s body becomes both the

Disappearing Acts 139 ground of and an intrusion into the work of art; the artist is both organic to his or her class and transcends the class structure altogether. Finally, these contradictory claims are not so much evidence of the inadequacy of Eliot’s aesthetic theories—he is not and should not be treated as a systematic philosopher—as symptoms of ideological commitments that are not, and perhaps cannot be, reconciled with each other. ! Although a study of the ideological positions informing the early criticism on performance may well have consequences for future interpretations of Eliot’s drama and poetry, hasty generalizations from such a study to Eliot’s literary corpus should be avoided. Eliot’s own drama was mostly written much later than the material I address and informed by a desire to communicate the spiritual message of his new religious faith. This biographical fact implies a complexity in the relation between his early criticism and his drama that deserves independent consideration. In the case of the poetry, the double generic shift required between nondramatic poetic texts and critical writings on performed art raises a different set of problems. Although both congruencies and disjunctions are

evident between the ideological positions of the criticism and Eliot’s poetic practice of the same period, a responsible treatment of this connection likewise requires its own analysis.

[ begin by juxtaposing what is perhaps the best known of Eliot’s critical essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” with a lesserknown piece on the music hall star Marie Lloyd. These essays, published respectively in 1919 and 1923, specify the place of the artist in contradic-

tory terms. This discussion will expand, in the second section, to an analysis of the role of the middle class in Eliot’s treatment of music hall, the relationship between his attitudes toward popular performers and his ideal for performers of poetic drama, and the conceptual grounding he offers for his performance aesthetics. The final section will then map out the ideological implications of Eliot’s valuations of forms of performance and kinds of performers. When T. S. Eliot eulogized Marie Lloyd, he praised in particular her skill in “giving expression to the life of [her] audience, in raising it to a kind of art” (Selected Essays 406). The terms of this praise define Lloyd’s relationship to her audience as that of a Gramscian “organic intellectual.” Her art is defined by its relation to the life of a specifically working-class

audience. This connection between the artist and her audience is not, according to Eliot, present in any other class (407). Further, this connection seems dependent on the personal relation established between the

140 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art individual performer and the audience, one that, in the case of Marie Lloyd, elicited a strong and sustained “hold on popular affection” (405). In one of the “London Letters” Eliot wrote for the Dial between 1921 and 1922, he remarked that in music hall performance “success depends upon

the relation established by a comedian of strong personality with an audience quick to respond with approval or contempt”; this sort of personality in performance leads to an intimate rapport between performer and audience that for Eliot is definitive of music hall (June 1921, 688).

Although the meaning of and value granted to personality in Eliot’s critical vocabulary varies, he uses the term consistently in relation to performers to indicate the basis of a personal rapport that the performer establishes with her audience. It is only music hall performers, however, that Eliot praises straightforwardly for the infusion of personality into a performance.+ Besides the organic intellectuals, like Marie Lloyd, whose thought and production remain explicitly tied to their own class, Gramsci posits another type of intellectual. These are the traditional intellectuals, those usually thought of as doing the intellectual work of a culture— ecclesiastics, teachers, artists. Although this group generally serves the function of ensuring the social hegemony of the dominant class, it does not (necessarily) recognize itself as doing so: “Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience. . . their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group”

(7). In Gramsci’s formulation, then, it is not the case that traditional intellectuals are in fact independent of any social class, but rather that they frequently do not recognize their class position. Eliot’s insistence on defining himself in terms of a literary tradition places him in this second group.

More specifically, Eliot the poet in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” does not recognize himself as a member of any particular social class, while he is at pains to establish his place in the “uninterrupted historical continuity” of the literary tradition. But if poets’ participation in this tradition effaces their class positions, it no less effaces their individual personalities. In fact this, not the relation between poetry and social class, is the point of the essay. The “surrender,” “self sacrifice,” “extinction” of the artist’s personality define the proper relation between the poet and poetry.* This is not to say that a poet should not have any personality. In a 1920 letter to the editor of the Athenaeum clarifying his

Disappearing Acts I4I claim that Massinger had too little personality, Eliot emphasized the need for personality as a sort of raw material for art. The expression of personality has for him little to do with art, but, as he reminds the reader: “I said in my article ‘transformation,’ not expression. Transformation is what |

meant: the creation of a work of art is ... a painful and unpleasant business; it 1s a sacrifice of the man to the work, it is a kind of death” (Letters 387). The presence of personality is, in other words, necessary to its sacrifice—a point Eliot makes as well in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” But what defines the poet is the “sacrifice” of personality to the medium of poetry (“the work”) and to the literary tradition.> This is in

contrast to the definitive characteristics of the music hall performer, who, if she can be said to “sacrifice” her personality, it is not in service to “the work” or “the tradition,” but to her class—in “giving expression to the life of [her] audience” (Selected Essays 406). The foregrounding of the poet’s participation in a literary tradition, combined with the sacrifice of personality to this realm of art, establishes Eliot’s sense of himself as a

poet in terms inconsistent with, if not directly in opposition to, those assigned to Marie Lloyd. This implicit connection between the music hall artist as organic intellectual and the role of her personality in the success of her art suggests that in Eliot’s criticism the valuation of “personality” masks a class ideology. It also, less directly, masks a gender ideology. Although Marie

Lloyd was obviously a female performer, Eliot does not discuss her performance in gendered terms. This repression, I would argue, marks the power of gender rather than its irrelevance. Similarly, Eliot’s failure to mention the erotic qualities of her material or her stage presence does not indicate their absence, or even their lack of importance. Rather, her success in the music hall cannot be separated from her representation of working-class sexuality—from the innocent cockney girl of her early songs to the drunken old woman of her late numbers—especially since Lloyd was often attacked for the “rudeness” of her songs (Cheshire 73). The force of her physical presence, even at the end of her career, is clear in Virginia Woolf’s 1921 description of her as “a mass of corruption— long front teeth—a crapulous way of saying ‘desire,’ & yet a born artist —scarcely able to walk, waddling, aged, unblushing” (107). The absence of any reference to the specifically female physical presence of this per-

former in Eliot’s essay is common to his other critical treatments of performers and performances as well. Unlike his poetry of the teens and

twenties, which repeatedly constructs a female Other against which a

142 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art male speaking voice reacts, the body of criticism addressed here seldom

acknowledges the presence of gender, let alone the erotic, as of any significance to a performance. A case can be made, however, for a connection between the fem1-

nine and personality in Eliot’s thought—particularly when he felt the

relation of personality to the work made it too personal. Except in working-class contexts, both the feminine and the personal imply an aesthetic or intellectual weakness. Thus, Eliot writes to his father that “I distrust the Feminine in literature” (Letters 204), and to Pound the same

year (1917) that a gathering he attended had “I thought too many women—it lowers the tone” (Letters 198).© Most revealing, however, 1s Eliot’s assessment of the philosopher Santayana, for here the connection between a devaluation of the feminine and of the personal becomes explicit: “I have never liked Santayana myself, because I have always felt that his attitude was essentially feminine, and that his philosophy was a dressing up of himself rather than an interest in things” (Letters 395). The

feminine interest in self, as opposed to the objective (i.e., masculine) interest in things, puts Santayana in precisely the wrong relationship to his work, according to the criteria laid out in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Further associations between the feminine and the personal occur when Eliot identifies the psychoanalytic novel as a form “practiced rather by women” (“London Letter,” Sept. 1922, 330) and when art concerned with “feeling” rather than “object” is defined as “a more feminine type” (“London Letter,” Aug. 1921, 216). This denigration of the feminine and personal is most apparent when Eliot comments on members of his own class (or fellow aspirants to the role of traditional intellectual). Eliot can therefore celebrate the personal and female stage presence of Marie Lloyd more easily because she is working class. But in addition he can do so because he has a more important object to attack in that essay.

Eliot’s praise of Marie Lloyd was also an attack on the middle class. Unlike performers for the middle class, Eliot felt that Marie Lloyd engaged her audience “in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art” (Selected Essays 407). At the music hall, Eliot observed what seemed to him to be a

nearly ideal relation between art and audience, one that in his opinion

| middle-class performances neither provided nor encouraged. Middleclass forms of performance (for Eliot, cinema and revue) rather encouraged in the audience passivity and “listless apathy” (Selected Essays 407).’

Disappearing Acts 143 By the time Eliot began holding music hall up as a form to be emulated, however, it was moribund. This was in part because the structure of revue permitted a consolidation of resources with which music hall could not compete. While music hall entertainment consisted of a series of short turns or performances by individual artists or groups with no narrative or thematic connection to each other, revue attempted to

unite its segments by means of loose thematic continuities. This was accomplished by placing all segments of the revue under a single management, which also allowed a more efficient use of technology and performers. The consequences were considerably more complex and spectacular productions than possible in any single music hall turn. But Eliot does not address the structural relations between music hall and revue. Rather, his condemnation of the latter rests on its supposed failure to establish an organic relationship with a class-specific audience. Eliot insisted that revue, along with cinema, failed to serve the kind of expressive function that he believed Marie Lloyd’s performances fulfilled for her class: “I have called her the expressive figure of the lower classes. There is no such expressive figure for any other class” (Selected Essays 407). Thus, although revue and cinema are in some sense middle-class forms, they

do not for Eliot fulfill the cultural function proper to performed art: “In England, at any rate, the revue expresses almost nothing” (Selected Essays 407).

The picture Eliot paints of the class structure in England reflects the sense of cultural degeneration found in much of his early poetry. The authentic working-class art is under siege from middle-class mass culture in the form of revue and cinema, which threaten to reduce a vulnerable

working-class audience to “the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie” (Selected Essays 407). The failure of the middle class to produce

its Own genuinely expressive art seems in part due to the fact that the middle class is “morally dependent” on a diseased and dying aristocracy that it is in the process of absorbing. But, in addition, Eliot deplores the lack of any figures comparable to Marie Lloyd capable of expressing middle-class culture. The absence of powerful individual figures in a class-specific art form is a symptom of that class’s corruption—in Eliot’s

words, “The middle classes have no such idol: the middle classes are morally corrupt. That is to say, their own life fails to find a Marie Lloyd to express it” (Selected Essays 407). Thus, the relation between the power of the individual performer or artist and the well-being of the class for

which his or her art is intended is an important one for Eliot.

144 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art Eliot, however, seems to have no aspirations himself to this role; that is, he does not define himself as an organic intellectual in the way he

does define Marie Lloyd. Although he wishes to conceptualize, and if possible produce, a revitalized performed art, he does not connect his project to a specific class. This suppression of class is possible because of how Eliot defined his own ideal of performed art—the poetic drama— and its ideal performer. While the personal power of the performer in the

case of the music hall is appropriate to the context and form of the performance, and perhaps needed in order to subdue its working-class audience,® in poetic drama this power is a substitute for what ought to be holding the audience—the poetry, or what Eliot will elsewhere call the “permanent form.” Personality is only a strength in poetic drama if the poetry is bad; thus Sybil Thorndyke’s “personality triumphed over... Professor Murray’s verse” (which Eliot disliked) in a production of Euripides (Selected Essays 46). In the case of “any play which is a literary art,”

such as The Duchess of Malfi, modern actors, according to Eliot, are inadequate because they are trained to interpret rather than transmit the lines. That is, they insist on intruding themselves into the poetry, whereas “the ideal actor for a poetic drama is the actor with no personal vanity” (“Duchess of Malfi” 38-39). Thus, while he endorses the results of

working-class art and endorses the powerful position of the individual “expressive figure” in achieving these results, Eliot condemns the source of the performer’s success—his or her personality. In his comments on performers (except those in music hall), Eliot’s strategy is to contain and distance the performer’s personality from the performance by valuing a stylized, unnaturalistic presentation. In a 1923 article in the Criterion, Eliot sees a connection between acting styles and the state of dramatic art: “The chaos of the modern stage is a chaos of styles of acting as much as of types of play” (“Dramatis Personae” 304). The occasion for this comment is a Phoenix Society production of ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, in which two actors, lon Swinley and Michael Sherbrooke, epitomize for Eliot two disparate styles of acting, and thus two different kinds of dramatic art—only one of which Eliot endorses. Sherbrooke played his role realistically, a bad sign in Eliot’s critical vocabulary, for the result is that Sherbrooke is not an actor at all, but rather “an illusionist” (305). On the other hand, Eliot writes of Swinlcy that he “is always an actor; he makes himself into a figure, a marionettc; his acting 1s abstract and simplified” (305).? Swinley’s only failing, according to Eliot, is his lack of “training in

Disappearing Acts 145 movement and gesture—the training of ballet” (“Dramatis Personae” 305). Not surprisingly, then, Eliot’s ideal performer is a ballet dancer, Léonide Massine, who had replaced Nijinsky in the Russian Ballet in 1913. Massine seemed to Eliot “the greatest actor whom we have in London,” and the actor who, “the most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract, belongs to the future stage” (“Dramatis Personae” 305). In addition, in “The Beating of a Drum” (1923), Eliot explicitly connects Massine’s kind of performance with rhythm, a concept that, as will become evident, plays a central role in Eliot’s thinking about the sources of drama (and poetry). He declares, “It is the rhythm, so utterly absent from modern drama, either verse or prose, and which interpreters of Shakespeare do their best to suppress, which makes Massine and Charlie Chaplin the great actors that they are” (12). This linkage between Massine and Chaplin speaks to Eliot’s desire

for a popular, yet elite, performed art, but it also makes the power of performers such as Chaplin and Lloyd particularly problematic. In “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” Eliot suggests that “our problem should be to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material” (Sacred Wood 70). Coming at the end of one of Eliot’s most violent attacks on personality in performance, this suggestion is, to say the least, unexpected. In this essay, Eliot had lamented the “triumph of the actor over the play” and traced its cause to “the instability of any art . . . which depends upon the intervention of performers.” He had argued that the necessity of actors gives rise to a conflict between the “creator and the interpreter,” based on the performer’s interest in “opportunities for virtuosity or in the communication of his ‘personality.’” Instead, the actor ought to be interested in form (Sacred Wood 69). It is in the final paragraph that Eliot, after rejecting a series of possible solutions to the problem of actors (including the substitution of “refined automatons,” and disguising them with masks), dismisses the conventionally trained actor altogether, in favor not of the ballet dancer but of the music hall comedian. !°

Given the importance Eliot grants to personality in music hall performance, this proposal can only accommodate his ideal of an impersonal performer given a conceptual separation between the “script” and the performance of a piece—that is, only if the essential elements of a music hall comedian’s turn can be abstracted from the contribution made by her personality. In practice, the first fruits of this strategy would be Sweeney

146 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art Agonistes. But even before this experiment in creating a popular poetic drama, Eliot had incorporated elements of music hall performance, in the

form of quotations from popular songs, in early versions of the The Waste Land.'! In doing so, Eliot subordinates performance to script, shaping materials originally dependent on the performer’s skill for their success into a form dependent instead on authorial skill.!2 Eliot’s proposal, that is, is not that poetic drama take over the performance style of individual music hall stars, but that it extract the form of their perfor-

mance and transmute it into art. Music hall performers and their acts become the raw material with which to build a new poetic drama—a drama that, presumably, would not depend on the personality of the performer, the way music hall admittedly does. This is in fact the strategy Eliot uses to recuperate Charlie Chaplin for elite art, when, in “Dramatis Personae” he attributes Chaplin’s escape

from realism in film to his ability to invent a rhythm (306). Because rhythm is for Eliot a foundational quality of drama, the value of Chaplin

as a performer is dictated not by his personality but by the relation between his performance and the grounds on which Eliot rests his theory of drama. This theory is ultimately not one of the performer, but of the

formal qualities of drama and their basis in human nature. A similar procedure will allow Eliot to appropriate “primitive” art, suggesting that this conceptual strategy may be operative in a number of areas of Eliot’s thought. The formal qualities Eliot sought in drama were best exemplified for

him in ballet. One of his interlocutors in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” comments that the Russian Ballet “seemed to be everything that we wanted in drama, except the poetry. It did not teach any ‘lesson,’ but it had form. It seemed to revive the more formal element in drama for which we craved. . . . If there is a future for drama, and particularly for

poetic drama, will it not be in the direction indicated by the ballet?” (Selected Essays 33-34). What constitutes this “formal element” seems twofold. On the one hand it is a “permanent form” that has been passed down over a long period as “a tradition, a training, an askesis” (34). On the other hand, the “permanent and universal” finds its natural expression in rhythmic art, that is, in verse. In this sense, permanence is not a product of historical process, but the foundation on which the historical phenomena of rhythmic art rest. Eliot locates this kind of permanence ultimately in the body: “The human soul, in intense emotion, strives to

express itself in verse. It is not for me, but for the neurologists, to

Disappearing Acts 147 discover why this is so, and why and how feeling and rhythm are related” (34). Permanent form is not, for Eliot, simply synonymous with long-standing tradition, which is rather a symptom of its presence. That is, the roots of permanent form are not historical, but a consequence of human physiology. Rhythm, because of its basis in human physiology, underwrites the claim to the universality of permanent form, and so an understanding of rhythm can serve as a guide to the development of art.13 But the importance of rhythm to Eliot’s conception of performed art exceeds its usefulness as a physical basis for aesthetic experience—it is also the vehicle for art’s moral or spiritual qualities. In Eliot’s introduction to his mother’s dramatic poem, Savanarola, he specifically identifies form and rhythm as the underlying sources of value in drama, ballet, and religious services: In relaxing its form, the drama has lost its therapeutic value. Hence the popularity of the ballet. The play, like a religious service, should be a stimulant to make life more tolerable and augment our ability to

live; it should stimulate partly by the action of vocal rhythms on what, in our ignorance, we call the nervous system. (xii) Finally, the connection between form and the “therapeutic value” of religion is part of a more complex constellation connecting form, rhythm, religion, and the primitive. Earlier in this essay he asserted that “[d]ramatic form may occur at various points along a line the termini of which are liturgy and realism,” and Eliot’s examples of these extremes make ex-

plicit the source of liturgy in the primitive: “the arrow-dance of the Todas” at one pole, “and at the other Sir Arthur Pinero” (x). It comes as no surprise, then, that in “The Ballet” Eliot begins his instructions for the study of dance by calling for a “close study of dancing among primitive peoples” (441). Dance, in fact, stands at the historical origin of drama, from which it was derived via ritual (“Beating of a Drum” 12). Poetry as

well has its origins in the primitive, in “a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm” (Use of Poetry 148).14 The artist, then, must have access to the primitive, while understanding the limitations of “the savage, the barbarian and the rus-

tic” so that he does not “yield to the weak credulity of crediting the savage with any gifts of mystical insight or artistic feeling that he does not possess himself” (“War-Paint and Feathers”). As he had praised the music hall comedian only to reject her per-

148 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art sonal rapport with her audience as a legitimate contribution to an ideal

performed art, he valorizes the primitive only to deny its privileged "access to “artistic feeling,” that is, to permanent form. Although Eliot is clearly attempting to establish an alliance between popular and primitive art forms and poetic drama, the conceptual usefulness of these art forms cannot be confused with an endorsement of their practice as a substitute for his own. Rather, popular and primitive culture serve other purposes for Eliot; they are raw material for his own art and theory, proof for the concepts that ground his own attempts to assert a universal foundation for art, and a stick with which to beat what he considers inadequate art— that is, middle-class art. Grounding his theory of poetic drama in the primitive, the nervous system, the body rationalizes Eliot’s commitment to this form without acknowledging its concrete differences from popular performances, and without solving the problem of the relationship of the performer to the

poetic text and to the audience. In fact, Eliot is painting himself into a conceptual corner. Poetic drama is in need of revival and can perhaps be invigorated by the vitality of truly popular arts such as music hall. Further, the emergence of mass culture threatens to usurp the music hall audience, making the assertion of commonality between Elhiot’s art and that of the working class a tactical move in an attempt to stymie middleclass hegemony. However, the music hall depends not on great writing,

. but on strong personalities. Eliot’s only way out is a concept of form that, if valid, would rationalize the abstraction of some elements of music

hall performance from their context, and their transplanting, sans performer’s personality, into a poetic drama. Presumably this abstraction and transplanting could occur without any loss in the vitality of the art, which depends not on its intersection with a specific urban working-class

culture, but on a “permanent and universal” form. This staggering capacity to abstract art from its cultural context and assume that its vitality will survive intact is symptomatic of a tendency to impose, with great authority, a universalizing intellectual schema on a historically embedded cultural context. The concurrent effacement of the performer’s personality is likewise symptomatic of the contradictory position the individual artist holds in Eliot’s criticism. Both cases, in turn, express Eliot’s opposing desires for an autonomous aesthetic order and a truly popular art.!°

It has been argued that what Eliot is engaged in, on an ideological level,

at certain moments in his critical thought, 1s a replay of the conflict

Disappearing Acts 149 between the individual and the state inherent in bourgeois individualism.

According to Lawrence Venuti, “Just as liberal political theory asserts that private agents must accept the authority of the state in order to maintain their freedom, Eliot’s critical theory asserts that individual poets must surrender their selves to the authority of the literary tradition in order to achieve self mastery” (185—86).16 In the case of performed art, however, the terms of this dualism change: here the performer is respon-

sible for a surrender of self to the work of art, in effect to the writer, while the writer can in turn disclaim responsibility for this subordination by reference to tradition, permanent form, or some other transcendent authority. Two variations on this conceptual structure are evident in Eliot’s treatment of middle-class mass culture and in the gendered subtext of his evaluations of performers. In his June 1921 “London Letter” Eliot compares music hall with revue and complains that the inadequacy of the revue as a genre made the inadequacy of its performers inevitable. Nevertheless, he provides a description of the revue comedian he considers the best available, Miss Ethel Levey: “She is the most aloof and impersonal of personalities; indifferent, rather than contemptuous, towards the

audience; her appearance and movement are of an extremely modern type of beauty. Hers is not a broad farce, but a fascinating inhuman grotesquerie; she plays for herself rather than for the audience” (688). Much of the language used to praise Massine’s performances returns here

with the negative cast any discussion of revue would carry for Eliot. Impersonality becomes indifference in the context of a middle-class art form. Here, however, is a performance style that Eliot would praise had

it occurred in another context, making the nature of the differences between revue and ballet, on the one hand, and music hall, on the other, of particular interest.

Because each turn is free to perform as it pleases, music hall is a much more individualistic genre than revue. The formal structure of music hall performance reinforces the ability of a strong personality to establish quick and powerful contact with an audience. Revue, in contrast, permits only limited autonomy to those responsible for its different

segments, which must remain, however loosely, integrated with one another. The indifference and alienation from her audience noted of Ethel

Levey may well be the appropriate personality for a performance that neither permits the individual autonomy of the music hall nor subordinates the performer to a permanent form such as ballet. Ballet, finally, in

150 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art Eliot’s view, completely subordinates the personality of the performer to the demands of the art form. The inhuman, impersonal qualities of Massine’s performance do nothing to interfere with the rapport between the audience and the performance, since this 1s not founded on personality at

all, but on a transcendent form. |

In sum, while the music hall encourages an immediate connection between individual performer and audience, revue exemplifies the lack of connection between individuals typical of middle-class figures in Eliot’s poetry—the clerk and the typist in The Waste Land, the narrators in “Portrait of a Lady” and “Prufrock.” Finally, ballet performance, as Eliot interprets it, erases the lack of connection between the individual performer and his or her audience, as well as the subordination of the performer to an external authority in the form of the choreographer and the tradition, by locating the connection between audience and performance in the abstract order of permanent form. In other words, the revue came closer in form to expressing exactly the contradiction between individual autonomy and state authority that, Venuti notes, characterizes the ideology of liberal individualism and the critical stance of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Nevertheless, Eliot rejects this model in favor of an explicitly hierarchical one that emphasizes the subordination of the performer, while remaining nostalgic for the music hall, a dying form based on the performer’s autonomy. The individual performers Eliot selects for praise or blame, particularly those to whom he grants extended descriptions as exemplars of a type, suggest another level of ideological conflict in Eliot’s performance aesthetics. Marie Lloyd, Sybil Thorndyke, and Ethel Levey all represent the highest level of performer in performances that are fundamentally flawed in Eliot’s terms. Massine, Charlie Chaplin, and Ion Swinley all represent the best guides for the future development of performed art. The female artist receives the backhanded praise of being very good at the wrong thing, while the male artists, if not quite successful, are harbingers of the art of the future.

Eliot’s comments on female writers are equally problematic. A glowing review of Marianne Moore’s poetry closes with the “‘magnificent’ compliment” that her poetry is so “‘feminine’” that “one never forgets that it is written by a woman” (“Marianne Moore” $97). The fact that this is a dubious compliment in Eliot’s mind is expressed by his need to qualify it immediately by explaining, in the final phrase of the review,

Disappearing Acts 151 that “one never thinks of this particularity as anything but a positive virtue” (597).17 In another place, Eliot distinguishes between Joyce and

Woolf in specifically gendered terms, again implying that the female artist, as good as she may be at what she does, is not quite doing the right thing. Joyce’s strength is, according to Eliot, his ability to give an objective structure to feeling, to “make [his] feeling into an articulate external world.” A weaker sort of writer—Virginia Woolf is Eliot’s example—

proceeds differently: “[W]hat might be called a more feminine type, when it is also a very sophisticated type, makes its art by feeling and by contemplating the feeling, rather than the object which has excited it or

the object into which the feeling might be made” (“London Letter,” Aug. 1921, 216). The objectivity Eliot values in Joyce and associates with a masculine

art is analogous to the impersonality he values in the performances of Massine, whose embeddedness in the traditional forms of ballet is analogous to the poet’s embeddedness in the literary tradition in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The feminine art of Virginia Woolf, in contrast, is associated with the subjective space of feeling, which would, in turn, be analogous to the personal art of the great music hall performers such as Marie Lloyd. The need Eliot and other male modernists may have felt to establish a culturally valued and therefore male sphere of artistic

accomplishment no doubt drives their denigration of women artists. Women must be excluded from the highest reaches of art if, given the cultural devaluation of the feminine, the male artist was to stand a chance at having his self-esteem reinforced by his society. In Eliot’s performance aesthetics, however, the gendered subtext of his examples is complicated

by an ideology of class. The value of effacing personality in a performance is at times overridden by a need to establish an alliance between working-class and high art, to the end of staving off the encroachment of middle-class mass culture. What Eliot fears is the merging of the lower class with the middle class, and his attempts to appropriate music hall for high art can be read as a rearguard action against this cultural alliance. His distress in “Marie

Lloyd” that the working class may be turned into protoplasm by their exposure to middle-class performances is repeated when, in the course of trashing the Georgian Anthology, he comments that the lower and middle

classes are becoming more and more alike: “In other words, there will soon be only one class, and the second Flood is here” (“London Letter,”

152 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art April 1921, 451). It is, I would suggest, this fear of middle-class power that motivates him to object to a distinction between proletarian and aristocratic art in his review of Marianne Moore’s poctry: So far as a prolctariat art is art at all, it 1s the same thing in essence as

aristocratic art; but in gencral, and at the present time, the middleclass art. . . is much more artificial than anything elsc; it plays with sham ideas, sham cmotions, and even sham sensations. On the other hand a real aristocracy is essentially of the samc blood as the people over whom it rules.” (“Marianne Moore” 594-95) An aesthetic judgment quickly becomes a political agenda that proclaims the willing subordination of the working class to its aristocracy, while excluding the middle class—that harbinger of the second Flood—altogcethcer. The exclusion of the middle class from Eliot’s utopian world of art is the exclusion of that which symbolizes leveling, loss of distinction, loss

of hicrarchy. More importantly, the middle class symbolizes for Ehot loss of individuality. The willingness of pocts and journalists to cater to public taste is, he claims, “a part of the so-called modern democracy which appears to produce fewer and fewer individuals” (“London Letter,” May 1922, 511). What Eliot seemed to have meant by individuality is the potential a person offers to “detach him[sclf] from his classification

and regard him|sclf] for a moment as an unique being” (“Ecldrop and Appleplex I” 8). Unfortunately, as Eliot’s mouthpicce Ecldrop com-

ments, in contemporary socicty a “man is only important as he is classed,” and besides, “The majority . . . arc for the most part unaware of themselves as anything but gencralized men” (9, 10). Thus, it is preciscly in the identification of the individual with a collective category—a class, for example—that Eliot locates the consequences of middle-class hegemony. This, however, was also what defined the value of the relationship between Marie Lloyd and her audicnce—that she expressed the life of these working-class individuals—as a class. The implication of this position is that while the working-class artist 1s valuable and successful preciscly because of how she is “classed,” the poct is instead valuable and

successful to the extent that he or she is free from class. Under the circumstances, Eliot can only recuperate popular art by grounding it ina concept of permanent form that is expressed via a physiologically universal rhythmic sensc; this permits the simultancous appropriation and sub-

Disappearing Acts 153 ordination of class-specific art by a “classless” clite art, while abstracting clite art from its own historical and social specificity.

Performers of clite art, however—ballet or poctic drama—in fact embody the contradiction that the poct represses and Eliot’s appropriation of popular art evades. The reason they must be inhuman, abstract, and impersonal 1s because they must be absolutely subordinate to the text of the poct and the choreographer. The job of the performer of elite art is neither to establish the personal connection with his or her audience that

Eliot idealized in music hall performance—but associated with the feminine—nor to enact the alicnation between the audience and the performer consequent on the latter’s commodification by mass entertain-

ment. Rather, the placement of the clite performer in the conceptual nexus of Eliot’s carly criticism is such that he or she metaphorically enacts the willing subordination of working class to aristocracy, of popu-

lar art to permanent form, of the artist to a transcendent authority. But finally, the performer enacts as well the subordination of individuality to class—though this “class” is not the one Eliot was worried about, but the one he embraced, that of the traditional intellectual, the artist. Since the performer is not an artist (he or she is an “interpreter” rather than a “creator”), this figure is simultaneously the embodiment of a universal aesthetic order and the servant to a set of specific demands made by one category of human beings on another. Like the middle class

he condemned, Eliot suppresses any individuality that would threaten the hegemony of his preferred order.'8 The appeal to this order, meanwhile, masks the real (human) interests at stake. In this respect, Eliot’s ideal performer is analogous to the artist in the cra of the culture industry, simultancously divorced from nonaesthetic outside forces, and completely determined by his or her relation to those forces. The nonaesthetic is here represented, however, not as the market, but as the will of the artist—over which the performer has no more control than artists in fact have over the market in which their works are exchanged.

9

Massine and Modernism: The Russian Ballet, II

If Fredric Jameson is right that high modernism is the result of attempts to resist the commodity form as embodied in mass culture, the implica-

tions of this insight are not only that elite art and mass culture are inseparable aspects of a larger formation, but that the opposition that seems to keep the two apart conceals deeper affinities. Indicative of this closer relation is the ease with which Léonide Massine moved from being choreographer for the most elite dance company in Europe to staging revues. In fact, Eliot’s praise for Massine in “Dramatis Personae” (1923) was written specifically in response to his appearance in a revue, produced by George Robey at Covent Garden, called You’d Be Surprised. Eliot was predictably dismayed by the revue as a whole but found that “[t]he contrast made by Massine, after an hour of the tinned, preserved, and cold-stored humour of a New York revue, is a reminder that there is life, as well as machinery” (306). Eliot’s enthusiasm for Massine’s work in this production was not widely shared, but its existence indicates a desire—for popularity, for social effectiveness—that the aesthetic presuppositions of modernism denied the work of art, and thus the artist. Nonetheless, those characteristics that would disqualify a work from clite status were invariably excluded from or significantly transformed by Massine’s work for Diaghilev. Massine’s practice illustrates the means by which ballet continued its assimilation into a realm of art defined by its autonomy, impcrsonality, and lack of commercial appeal. At the same

time, the tension that remains, at times unbearably, between the demands of the production and distribution of a ballet, and the aesthetic criteria by which it is to be judged, reveal the intimacy of the connection . between high modernism and its presumed opposite. What Terry Eaglcton notes as a central quality of modernism is strikingly obvious in IS5

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Massine and Modernism 157 this tension between economic need and aesthetic value in the productions of the Russian Ballet: Modernism is among other things a strategy whereby the work of art

resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth against those social forces which would degrade it to an exchangeable object. To this extent, modernist works are in contradiction with their own

material status, self-divided phenomena which deny in their discursive forms their own shabby economic reality. (“Capitalism” 67)

To say this much is not to imply that the only alternative to commodified mass culture is a willfully difficult and elitist modernism, that only two, diametrically opposed, forms of art are possible during the period. Rather, mass culture and high modernism are two distinct positions in a network of aesthetic practices. The place any particular work holds in this network is not fixed, but susceptible to manipulation by such factors as the context of its production and the attitude and education of its consumers. The position of Massine’s work vacillated widely from the explicitly commercial to the presumably autonomous. While I focus in what follows primarily on the characteristics of his elite or “autonomous” productions, their relation to and contamination by what they claim to reject will also become evident. Massine dominated the choreography of Diaghilev’s post-World War I seasons up until 1921, when he left the company. But, having been

discovered by Diaghilev while still in his teens, Massine’s tastes and standards were very strongly shaped by the older man. His style was formed by his collaboration with Diaghilev and his circle and did not alter substantively (if verbal descriptions are to be trusted) in his work for popular consumption. The two pieces he choreographed for the George Robey revue, an extended narrative dance that he described in his autobiography as an “Amerindian” ballet, and an “oriental” solo for himself

in a Chinese costume, illustrate as much. For example, two qualities typical of his choreography for Diaghilev, the angularity of his gestures and the raising of ethnic or historical styles to a position equal to if not above classical style, remain in evidence here. Likewise the revue dances manifest a typically modernist concern for formal relations as opposed to narrative content; the Oriental dance, he recalled in his autobiography, used “the upper part of the body to create oriental designs in space” (My Life 157). The significant difference between these dances and those cre-

158 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art ated for Diaghilev is of course the context of their production and consumption: the collaborators, the intended audience, the aesthetic standards thought appropriate to them. On the other hand, one element that did not much change between the two contexts was the dancers Massine had to work with. In postwar England, with -Diaghilev’s company as always in a precarious financial state, and réturn to Russia not an attractive option, ballet dancers took what work they could find. This implies that the aesthetic status of a ballet was not a function of the performers. The immediate difficulty, however, that Massine’s contributions to revues posed to a high modernist aesthetic—commercialization and the consequent aesthetic impurity—is inseparable from the attraction the work held for a modernist such as Eliot—breadth of appeal. For, as Peter Burger has pointed out, the price paid for relative freedom from social pressure acquired by asserting the autonomy of art was its social ineffectuality. The desire to overcome this ineffectuality motivated Eliot’s (not to mention Yeats’s) own interest in the theater. Eliot’s attraction to Massine’s revue dances reflects his own desire to reach a mass audience, and his search for a model allowing him to do so without compromising his aesthetic standards. The attraction to Massine’s choreography was in fact concurrent with (or slightly prior to) Eliot’s own experimentation with dramatic form. Arnold Bennett records a conversation with Eliot in September of 1924 in which Eliot claimed to have given up the kind of writing that produced The Waste Land: “He wanted to write a drama of modern life (furnished flat sort of people) in a rhythmic prose ‘perhaps with certain things in it accentuated by drum-beats’” (786). Sweeney Agonistes eventually came to represent for Eliot an attempt to write a multileveled drama

in which different groups in the audience would respond to different levels of meaning, thus enabling Eliot, in theory at least, to fulfill his goal of writing for “as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible” (Use of Poetry 146). Thus, it 1s likely that Eliot saw in the plot, style, and perfor-

mance context of a work such as Massine’s “Amerindian” ballet, an example of precisely the mixture of quasi-religious ritual, sophisticated technique, and popular format that his theory of the multileveled poetic drama called for. Similarly, Sweeney Agonistes incorporates the popular elements of music hall patter, song and dance numbers, and a strongly rhythmic meter into a sophisticated conceptual framework generally read as a meditation on sin, purgation, and redemption. ! If Eliot saw in Massine’s ballets a model for a multileveled dramatic

Massine and Modernism 159 art, however, it was not in the first place suggested by their presence in revue. Eliot had been familiar with Massine’s work at least from his second London season as choreographer for the Russian Ballet in 1919.2 Along with other members of the London intelligentsia, most notably the Bloomsbury group, Eliot responded enthusiastically to the postwar seasons of the Russian Ballet, an enthusiasm largely missing from their

response to the prewar performances. Osbert Sitwell, who had patronized Diaghilev from the beginning, was in a position to note that “the amateur of the ballet had himself at last changed, for now the leaders of the intellectuals, seven lean years too late, had given the signal O.K..,

and their followers flocked to it, replacing the old kid-glove-and-tiara audience of Covent Garden and Drury Lane” (15).3 The differences between what that earlier audience saw, largely dominated by Fokine’s choreography, and what Diaghilev began introducing after World War I were significant. The postwar ballets featured scenery and costumes designed by the most “advanced” artists—Picasso, Derain, Matisse—and a style of choreography, Massine’s, that deemphasized dramatic action in favor of abstract form. Despite this aggressive presentation of visually difficult material to their London audiences, Diaghilev’s first postwar season took place not in an opera house, legitimate theater, or bohemian alternative space, but in the very heart of mass culture’s own territory, the music hall. Massine’s ballets are a site where the ideology of modernism meets the demands of a commercial theater, at times crossing over completely into that theater, but generally resisting mass culture even while using its products and venues. By examining the aesthetic assumptions and prac-

tices of Massine’s major ballets of the postwar seasons, I will suggest how they maintained this position, and at what cost. Four elements of his practice are particularly important here and will be taken up in turn: first,

how Massine’s innovations in choreographic style shifted the place of narrative in the structure of a ballet; second, the place of the performer in Massine’s (and his elite audience’s) aesthetic; third, the ways in which his

ballets incorporated the past—whether in the form of a historical or classical style; fourth, Massine’s appropriation of popular culture.

The choreographic style Massine developed was grounded in his early

training in both dance and drama and his exposure, with the help of Diaghilev, to the visual arts of western Europe. Massine reports being influenced by (among other things) Byzantine art, Picasso, and the Italian

160 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art futurists (My Life 66-70, 106-7). In addition, his early training in drama, in combination with his own limitations as a classical dancer,* led him

away from the classical style and attracted him to other dancers like himself who were essentially character dancers. The result was a shift in the relation between classic ballet and other dance forms that was fundamental to the choreographic development of Massine, and thus the Russian Ballet. The consequences of this new emphasis on character dancing were evident not only in the type of movement Massine created, but in his attitude toward the dance as a discipline and in the relationship between dance and drama. In its treatment of dramatic action, Massine’s work participated in a rejection of narrative realism also evident in literary modernism. Massine’s retreat from narrative was due to his reconfiguration of the relation between mime and dance in a ballet. Character dancing was

closely associated with the mime sections of traditional ballet, while classical technique dominated the virtuoso performances of the principal

dancers in the “pure” dance sections of the work. One consequence of Massine’s background and talents on the Russian Ballet’s repertoire might, therefore, have been an increase in the importance of the dramatic (narrative) aspect of the ballet. The opposite occurred, because Massine’s

Interest was not in reducing dance to mime but in turning mime into dance. Thus Cyril Beaumont, at first resistant to the speed and “jerky, puppet-like quality of Massine’s choreography,” came to admire not only his ability to integrate movement and music, but his use of mime as well: “the miming too, was unusual in that it was not separated from the

actual dancing, but, so to speak, grafted on it” (202, 203). The music critic Edwin Evans, in an article on Massine published 1n 1919, noted that

his conception of choreography included “the whole art of the actor, except the spoken word. It includes every form of regulated movement. ... As raw material, it includes even the undisciplined movements of daily life.” Tamara Karsavina reinforces the accuracy of these observations when, reminiscing about the dancers of the twenties, she praises Massine for discovering how to resolve the tension between dance

and mime, “the, often so jarring, incompatibility of the balletic and secular elements” (“Dancers” 252). In La boutique fantasque, she recalls,

Massine invented movements that did not simply reproduce ordinary gestures but translated what would have been performed as mime into its own dance vocabulary. This process is evident as well in the dinner scene

from The Good Humoured Ladies, where, rather than having dancers

Massine and Modernism 16] mime the eating of a meal, Massine invented appropriate dance movements. One consequence of Massine’s refusal to distinguish clearly between mime and dance was an attenuation of the importance of plot in favor of

more abstract formal relations. The reviews in both the Times and the Dancing Times (“Sitter Out,” Nov. 1918) comment that the story of The Good Humoured Ladies is extremely hard to follow, despite, as was the practice, the inclusion of a scenario in the program. James Strachey, in the Athenaeum, wrote that this weakening of narrative was a sign of the further development of ballet. Massine, according to Strachey, was reacting against Fokine’s innovations, which had made dramatic action the

controlling force of a ballet. The dominance of the dramatic element carries with it an “anti-dancing implication” that forced Fokine to reject “qlogical dancing,” that is, dancing not given a narrative justification. Massine, however, ignored this constraint, allowing the “scénes mimiques to be scénes rhymiques.” Thereby, Strachey concludes, “Massine has made ‘The Good Humoured Ladies’ not only delightful in itself, but also a

turning point in the history of the ballet” (407). Raymond Mortimer made a similar observation six years later, connecting the weakening of narrative in his ballets explicitly to Massine’s immersion in the visual arts. In Fokine’s ballets (which Mortimer identifies with the designer, Baskt, rather than with their choreographer), “[T]he choreography was above all dramatic.” But “now this literary element—a very valuable

one, I think—is all but gone. The interest, like that of contemporary painting, is almost purely visual” (“Les Matelots”). Thus Massine’s choreography exhibited one of the central tendencies of modernist literary aesthetics, where the temporal organization of realistic narrative is replaced by what Joseph Frank named spatial form. Nevertheless, Massine

never relinquished narrative altogether during this period; the plot, no matter how attenuated, remained the framework on which the ballet was hung.®

Plot in fact may have served an important function. The banality and predictability of most ballet scenarios made them excellent vehicles for innovative formal effects. Less conventional stories than those of love threatened and redeemed in The Three Cornered Hat and La boutique fantas-

que, for example, might have distracted attention from the more experimental levels of structure and meaning that gave the ballets their aesthetic credentials. That these plots were not at all innovative in their treatment of gender roles and relations meant that they provided audiences with a

162 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art familiar, unobtrusive framework for other more challenging elements of the ballets. Rachel Blau DuPlessis makes a similar point in her analysis of how gender functions for male modernist writers: In writings of male modernists, femaleness is as fixed and eternal a category as ever before in Euro-literature. Male modernists do not deeply resist, perhaps cannot make a critique of this place allocated for female figures because their readability depends on such reliable gender narratives. Their radical forms are made relatively accessible —readable—by the familiarity of gender limits, the iconographies they inherit and repropose. (42)

This relationship between formal innovation and “reliable gender narratives” is not, of course, unalterable. The treatment of gender in ballets choreographed by Bronislawa Niinska for Diaghilev in 1923 and 1924 illustrates as much. From her use of pointe in Les noces to subvert

: the romantic ideology of femininity traditionally evoked by that technique, to her strong characterizations of female roles and relations in Les biches, Nijinska was able to combine a high modernist aesthetic idiom with a nontraditional approach to gender roles. Her approach to gender cannot be separated from her unusual position as the only female chore-

ographer in a male-dominated arena, and in most other respects Nijinska’s aesthetic was similar to Massine’s—both underplayed the impor-

tance of plot and the individuality of the performer; both attempted to create a contemporary dance idiom solidly based in ballet technique.’ Niujinska’s distinct contribution to the Russian Ballet and to dance history requires a discussion well beyond the scope of this project. Unlike Mas-

sine’s, her work (with the possible exception of Les noces—first performed in England in 1926), was not enthusiastically received by British modernist artistic and intellectual circles. Massine’s innovations affected not only the place of narrative in a ballet, but the place of the dancers, especially the structural position of

the soloists. Just as the privileged position of classical dancing in the technical repertoire of ballet was lessened when it lost its physical isolation from other forms of dancing, so did the classical soloist lose some of

his or, more frequently, her star status in the structure of Massine’s ballets. Nineteenth-century ballet had isolated the prima ballerina from the corps de ballet, whose function was to provide a decorative setting for the principals and fill up the space between their dances. Massine’s

Massine and Modernism 163 ballets of this period made minimal use of a corps de ballet. This not only meant that a higher proportion of the dancers were soloists, but that the

stature of any one soloist was somewhat diminished. Massine felt

strongly that the star system was detrimental to ballet. “The Sitter Out,” a column written by the editor of the Dancing Times, P. J. S. Richardson, echoed Massine’s sentiments, praising his apparent indifference to how large his own role in a ballet is, as long as the whole is a success (Oct. 1918). And, in an interview in 1977 Massine himself reasserted this position, dismissing Nureyev and Baryshnikov as stars and virtuosi. Art, he asserted, has no stars (Massine, interview 7).

Massine’s insistence on the subordination of the individual performer to the work of art was in effect a demand that the dancer conform to his own stylistic interests and choreographic strengths. This was more amenable to some dancers than to others. Lydia Sokolova felt comfortable with Massine’s choreography, which she attributes to her being in

essence a character dancer. Karsavina, in contrast, was in Sokolova’s opinion a Fokine dancer (143). Karsavina’s own comments on her experience of dancing for Massine confirm Sokolova’s judgment; she felt unable to establish a connection with him: “I had a feeling he was observing

me, but giving no response. ... A similar feeling of being an instrument, rather than an individual artist, haunted me through the rehearsals of Le Tricorne” (“Dancers” 252). Her role as the American girl in Parade, although she enjoyed dancing it, had earlier led her to leave the permanent company out of the fear that she would become “a cog in the wheel of Diaghilev’s new phase” and lose both her individuality and her classical technique in the process (“Dancers” 252). Karsavina’s feeling of alienation originated in Massine’s tendency to

see performers (himself included when in that role) as a means to an aesthetic end. This in turn increased the distance between the performer and spectator, since the emphasis on the ballet as an integrated whole made the performer’s task of establishing a rapport with audience members structurally more difficult. Both the instrumental attitude toward the performer and the lack of a personal relation between the performer and members of his or her audience, however, were integral to a ballet’s being seen as an autonomous work of art. This lack of a personal relationship was in fact what Clive Bell, a central figure in the Bloomsbury

group, considered indicative of ballet’s ascension to art. Massine has succeeded in placing ballet “on a level with literature, music and the graphic arts. His idea of a ballet is an organized whole, detached from

164 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art circumstances and significant in itself” (415). Bell’s essay, published two

months before the first part of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” argues for an inherent connection between Massine’s autonomous, formally complex, and unified ballet, and the impersonality of the performer: “Since, to be a work of art, the ballet must have the detachment of a picture or asymphony, the mimes, it seems, should go through their

motions as in an imaginary box, with an imaginary screen between themselves and the rest of the world” (415). Bell began his argument by contrasting Karsavina with Lopokova (another leading ballerina). Karsavina is demoted from the level of artist to actress because of her propensity to communicate directly with her audience, thereby establishing a relationship with them outside or beyond that demanded by the work

of art. That is, in Bell’s words, “[S]he is apt to express herself, not through the work of art she is interpreting, but immediately, as in conversation” (414). Lopokova, in contrast, is like Mozart or Fra Angelico in that all of them “transmute personality into something more precious.

| The public gets no raw material from them” (415). Rather, all of their personal attributes are devoted not to the public but to the work itself, toward which the artist has an obligation that he or she does not, in Bell’s opinion, have toward the public. As a unified aesthetic object, then, a ballet cannot depend on any individual performer for its success, for to do so would detract from its integrity. There is thus a close relationship between an aesthetic that

posits the work of art as an autonomous, unified object and impersonality as an aesthetic criterion for performers. Impersonality in these works means explicitly the refusal of a privileged place to any participating performer, in order that the whole take precedence. Implicit in this, as in other modernist performance aesthetics, is the invisible hand of the author—or authors, there need not be only one—of this unified object. The linkage between autonomy and impersonality masks a hierarchy that, if made explicit, would undermine the viability of the assertion of

autonomy (since anything that is a product of a human being is in a profound sense not autonomous), which in turn is needed to justify the demand for impersonal! performers. The tendency to exclude women from positions of authority marks the gender-inflected nature of this hierarchy. Although women did occasionally design for Diaghilev, and Nyinska was the company’s choreographer between the tenures of Massine and Balanchine, no woman filled either role during the Massine period. During this important period,

Massine and Modernism 165 when its influence on avant-garde and modernist artists and writers was perhaps strongest, the Russian Ballet was the art of men, a homosocial community that acknowledged the contributions of women only as performers.® Further, even at the level of performance, the Russian Ballet’s perceived masculinity was important to its cultural status. “The Sitter Out” makes an explicit connection between the ballet as a unified work of art and its masculinity. He writes that the three elements necessary to the success of the ballet are “‘thoroughness,’ ‘teamwork,’ and the presence of the ‘male dancer’”:

By “thoroughness” I mean that the music and the decor must be regarded as an integral part of the ballet and not as a mere necessary adjunct to the dancing. By “teamwork” I mean that in our ballets we must abolish the hateful “star” system, in which all sense of proportion is sacrificed in order that the leading lady may shine. The necessity of the “male dancer” is obvious. (Nov. 1918, 30)

The star system in English ballet before Diaghilev did structure the ballet around a female dancer; in fact ballet was commonly seen as an occasion for mildly erotic display. One of the consequences of (or pre-

requisites for) the shift in ballet’s cultural position from the low- or middlebrow to the highbrow was its decreased association with feminine display. The “obvious” need for male dancers emerges concurrently with ballet’s increased status; one need only recall the disgust that male ballet dancers evoked in the 1890s to see this connection. In addition, however, the reduced importance of the female performer is inextricably connected to the increase in the importance of author figures who are conceptually separable from the performance and predominately male.

Cultural status is gendered, but that gendering implies something more when an art is also defined by its unity and autonomy. The aesthetic object is above all an authored object under this aesthetic, and its author or authors are generally conceptualized as male, on the model of the Judeo-Christian God. As Joyce expresses this position in A Portrait of

the Artist, “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (215)—never that is, an obvious participant in it, as a performer must be. Such an ideology raises problems for male performers, who remain somehow feminized even while their presence increases the status of the work they perform in. Massine,

166 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art like Fokine and even Niyinsky—a performer of genius—addressed this dilemma (which is not the same as solving it) by becoming an author.

Despite the attenuation of the erotic as a selling point for ballet, which Diaghilev accomplished when he persuaded the English public to classify the Russian Ballet as elite art, he and Massine were never free to create pure art that, existing for its own sake alone, escaped commodification. They had substantial obligations to the consuming public, since

if the audience disliked their productions, they were out of a job. Diaghilev, for one, worked hard to develop his audience, to offer sufficient novelty to keep them interested without getting too far away from what they were accustomed to. He did not, for example, produce Parade in London for two years after its Paris premiere out of fear that 1t was too innovative for the London audiences, and even after introducing it to London in 1919, he did not make it part of the repertoire. Reviewers acknowledged the skill with which Diaghilev judged and shaped his audiences. Raymond Mortimer praised the “educative influence of the Russian Ballet” that had gradually introduced the public to major painters and composers that they would not have otherwise come into contact with. Diaghilev’s strategy, he observes, was to offer new ballets “sandwiched between proved favorites until the public has become familiar with them, and they, in turn, can be used to sponsor still newer experiments” (“The Drama”). Just how successful this technique was may be gathered from the failure of The Sleeping Princess, a full-length classical, narrative ballet that he produced in 1921. Typical of the critical response to this piece was an impatience with its length. Audiences, or at least critics, having learned to appreciate short, rapidly paced ballets, could not readjust. The critic for Vogue, for example, was astonished at finding “M. Diaghilev, the quondam pioneer, sponsoring this elaborate, longwinded, cumbrous, mechanical ballet of action, constructed on the for-

mal mid-Victorian lines which brought ballet into such low esteem among artists until M. Diaghilev himself appeared on the scene” (qtd. in

! Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed 278).9 Not everyone liked Massine’s innovations. Propert, the author of an early history of Diaghilev’s company, believed that, by the time Massine left, “[c]ertain mannerisms were beginning to obsess his choreography, and the curve was becoming subservient to the angle” (Russian Ballet, 19211929 7), while Grigoriev (Diaghilev’s regisseur) found his choreography

Massine and Modernism 167 “complicated, mannered and dry” (118). In defense of Massine’s angular, contorted, rapid movements, critics asserted their accuracy in reflecting

-modern life and experience. Even Karsavina acknowledged that while Massine’s art “leans toward the grotesque. . . this is a grotesque age, and M. Massine when he is grotesque is only expressing life as he sees it with

the perceptive eye of genius” (gtd. in “Music of the Age” 505). The writer citing Karsavina is not reassured: Frankly, Mr. Massine has made us feel extremely uneasy. It 1s one thing to regard the excesses of musicians like Casella, of painters like

Wyndham Lewis, of poets like Ezra Pound, as mere excesses of fashion which have little to do with normal and sensible folk. It 1s quite another thing to regard these manifestations as faithful reflections of ourselves. (“Music of the Age” 505) Although it is not clear that Pound or Lewis would have welcomed being classed with the Russian Ballet, the consistency with which Massine’s ballets were recognized as modern suggests that the cultural place of these artists was similar.!° In contrast to the specifically Russian or exotic quality that drew audiences to the prewar seasons, these ballets were associated with the sophisticated and advanced art of Paris, without, however, being French. With Massine, the Russian Ballet became

cosmopolitan, embracing in its form and style the rapid, fragmented experience of a deracinated urban life that, grotesque as it may be, was familiar to its audience. This is not to suggest that Massine’s subject matter was that of modern urban life. The Good Humoured Ladies was set

in the eighteenth century, La boutique fantasque in the mid-nineteenth century, and The Three Cornered Hat in rural Spain. Only Parade (the ballet in which Massine’s contribution as choreographer is most open to

question) incorporated explicit references to contemporary culture. Rather, it is the use made of historical and regional styles that links the content of these ballets with literary modernism. !! For example, to return briefly to Eliot’s response to Massine, his choreography may have represented for Eliot precisely the relationship

between the past and modernity epitomized, in poetic form, by The Waste Land. In that poem, the literary tradition valorizes and underwrites a specific conception and judgment of the present. To the extent that the density of its allusions to past literary texts reinforces the authority of its

168 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art representation of the present, the use madc of the past in The Waste Land has the effect of asserting the poem’s own privileged modernity. !2 At the same time, the presence of allusions to a valorized literary past proclaims the poem as legitimate heir to that past. In Eliot’s case, he, as a newcomer to an aesthetic discourse, 1s not only establishing his own modernity, but also implying an older pedigree for his preferred practice than that of the currently dominant group. As

Menand has articulated this strategy, “The task of the usurping practitioner is to make his discourse seem not a new, but in fact the traditional discourse” (124). At the same time, that preferred practice is one that appropriates the past as an ingredient, among others, in the creation of a modern work of art. In consequence, the relationship between past and present was one that elided the former into the latter by means of the stasis of their unity.!3 That is to say, the use of the past in the modernist work is not historical, does not acknowledge change or process, but incorporates the past as an acsthetic medium, timeless and abstract, among other ingredients in an autonomous whole. History, or more precisely,

fragments of the past, are integrated into the presumably autonomous work of art, in which they form a static unity with the “present.” That unity is, like the autonomous work of art itself, separable from and theoretically irrelevant to the social realm.!4 This treatment of the past reduces it to an analogue of the aesthetic. The relationship between modern ballet and its tradition is easily assimilated to the conceptual structure that defined the relationship between modern poetry and its tradition. One of the characteristics of ballet that made it attractive to Eliot was its pedigree. The real strength of ballet, he writes in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poctry,” “is in a tradition, a

training, an askesis, which, to be fair, is not of Russian but of Italian origin, and which ascends for several centuries” (Selected Essays 34). And the analogy gocs further, for just as past styles of poctry became available for modernist incorporation into their own poetry, so for the choreographers of the Russian Ballet, “the historical succession of techniques and styles has been transformed into a simultancity of the radically disparate” (Burger 63).!° Massinc in particular dramatically altcred the relationship

between, not only historical styles of dancc, but classical ballet and a range of popular and national dance styles. André Levinson, perhaps the most important dance critic of the period, articulated a perception very close to Burger’s when (in 1924) he analyzed Massine’s usc of classical style in Pulcinella:

Massine and Modernism 169 [Massine] treats the great “temps d’ccole” (like the double turns in the air, the caper or that brilliant ornament the “fouctté”) as so many comic themes, expressing the exubcrance and manncrisms of cava-

liers costumed by Picasso. The “classic” is no longer the grand style—abstract and synthetic. It is used purposcly to create character in the same way that the czardas, the bolero and the jig were used in the classic Coppelia. Only now the rdles are reversed. In Pulcinella the traditional steps are used to stylizc the pantomime. (“Stravinsky and the Dance” 753) In other words, 1n Massine’s hands, ballct is no longer characterized by a single dominant style (the classical), but all styles become available as artistic means (“a simultaneity of the radically disparate”). What Massine did was transmute the characteristic attributes of these regional, histori-

cal, popular dance styles into a structure and vocabulary that marked them not as representations of their original contexts, but as disciplined servants of modern art. In this process he was influenced by the Italian futurists, whose interest in speed, compression, nonnarrative structure, and the use of material from the music hall and circus is especially evident

in Parade. In his autobiography Massine suggests that their art had a sustained effect on his choreography (107). Certainly, like Marinetti in his manifesto, “The Variety Theatre,” Massine and his collaborators were trying, in Parade, to take popular art and “translate it into a totally new form” (My Life 105).!© Massine insisted that their use of “ragtime music, jazz, cinema, billboard advertising, circus and music-hall tech-

niques” was not meant to reflect negatively on those forms. Rather, Parade illustrates a self-conscious appropriation and distillation of popular

forms for a fundamentally clite art that Massine hoped was “new and representative of our own age” (105). But, as Garafola notes, the Russian

Ballet did not become a futurist vehicle (82); their performances remained rooted in classical technique, just as, in this period, they retained their reliance on narrative. Thus, while Diaghilev encouraged innovation, he also retained the morc popular older ballcts in his repertoire. Massine himself spoke of his innovations not in terms of a radical break with or rejection of classical ballet, but its modernization: What we have to do to-day in order to make dancing vital is to learn all we can from the Italo-French school of three hundred ycars ago,

170 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art and transpose it into terms of the best in modern jazz. We have to alter the direction of the ancient school, and, by adapting its conventions, its form, and its steps, create a new spirit representative of the spirit of the age. (Qtd in “Sitter Out,” Aug. 1925, 1139) Likewise, T. S. Eliot, despite his assertion of the importance of primitive ritual, did not advocate a return to “the arrow-dance of the Todas” in the modern theater. In fact he disliked Massine’s choreography for The Rite of Spring because it seemed too primitive: “In everything in the Sacre du

Printemps, except the music, one missed the sense of the present.” Stravinsky’s music, in contrast, seemed “to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the

srind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music” (“London Letter,” Oct. 1921, 453). Although the connection between the “rhythm of the steppes” and modern life is important, the operative language is that of transformation, not authenticity or representation. The past, whether in the form of primitive ritual or “the Italo-French school of three-hundred years ago,”

must be retained, but only under the sign of the modern. The past 1s valuable only insofar as it is an effective ingredient in a distinctly modern work. The past constituted only one of several realms Massine ransacked for dance material. His other most significant resource was the dance of popular culture—in both its urban and regional forms. These appropriations first of all establish an “aesthetic distance” between the dance form and its audience, allowing this dance to be approached via the dominant

model for elite art as an autonomous aesthetic object. Secondly, they effect a homogenization of culture such that not only do all historical styles become available to artists as material, but all regional and classspecific forms of performance do as well. As the story of Felix Fernandez

Garcia will illustrate, for those artists providing the raw material for appropriation this process can be devastating. When Massine began working on The Three Cornered Hat, he was studying Spanish dance forms with a young man he and Diaghilev had discovered dancing in a cafe in Granada. Impressed by the “precision and rhythm of his movements, and by his perfect control,” Diaghilev eventually invited him to join his company, although Felix Fernandez Garcia

Massine and Modernism I7I had no ballet training (My Life 114). Felix was invaluable not only as a teacher, but as a “native” who could insure that Massine and his compan-

ions were accepted by local dancers. While Felix may have seen his association with Massine as a step on the path to fame and glory (Buckle 336), Massine was interested in assimilating as much as Felix had to offer in order to create “a Spanish ballet in which there would be a complete fusion of native folk-dances and classical choreographic techniques” (My Life 118-19). To this end, Massine added “to the style and rhythm which

I had learned from Felix . . . many twisted and broken gestures of my own” (My Life 141). It soon became apparent that Felix could not submit himself to the discipline of classical technique or choreographed performance. Accustomed to an improvisational dance form, he could not be counted on to perform the same steps, in the same length of time, at each performance. He was therefore relegated to progressively less important roles, while Massine himself performed his transformed version of Felix’s regional, and personal, dance.

In an attempt to help him fit into the company Massine had given Felix a metronome, but this, rather than allowing him to discipline what Karsavina described in her autobiography as the “impetuous, half-savage instincts within him” (Theatre Street 302), became a symbol of an incomprehensible external order that he could neither conform to nor ignore. According to Sokolova, “The metronome. . . became an obsession with him: he was even seen walking down Shaftsbury Avenue and making his footsteps coincide with its ticking” (135). Soon afterwards he suffered a

mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum after being found dancing at the altar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in the middle of the night. Felix’s story might serve as a parable for the relationship between popular and elite art in both ballet and literary modernism. As Yeats used Irish folklore, as Eliot used music hall songs, as Massine used Spanish dance, the appropriation is always accompanied by violence to the form appropriated. This may be inevitable in any act of transposition from one

context to another, but it needn’t also be mystified by the language of transformation, fusion, or even celebration of the original that accompanied modernist appropriations. What was never carried over from its popular context, meanwhile, was the rapport and interaction with the audience that was arguably definitive of these forms. Modernist ballet, like the kinds of performance called for by Eliot and Yeats, maintained a distance between performer and audience.!”? This distance was part of

172 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art the price paid for the autonomy of the work of art, and it enacts bodily the lack of human connection and social effectivity that Eliot, for one, looked to Massine’s ballets to redress. The autonomous work of art may seek to attenuate the individuality of the performer and the specificity of history; it may sustain the conservative banality of gender roles while proclaiming its newness. But, one might argue, it not only evades commodification by asserting its irrelevance to economic considerations, it offers an image of unity, integration, and connection badly needed in the fragmented world of the modern city.!8 In fact, possibly the most frequently mentioned quality of the Russian Ballet’s productions was their ability to integrate dance harmoniously with the most “advanced” music and visual art. The ballet for many observers (and participants) constituted a multifaceted unity in which an extraordinarily wide range of elements were successfully incorporated. Further, this was a nonhierarchical unity in that none of the arts—dance, music, or visual art—were perceived to be subservient to the others. Rather, all were necessary parts of a whole, each requiring the completion of the others, but without depending entirely on the others for its value. !%

This representation of harmony in heterogeneity operates on two levels: that of the collaborating authors and that of the formal qualities of the final product. In both cases, it depends on the institution of another kind of hierarchy. This hierarchy is found in the subordination, first, of the performer to the authors’ collective vision; and, second, of the histor-

ical, the regional, and the popular to the homogenizing effect of the modern as defined by these authors. While on one level, the productions

of the Russian Ballet represent a utopian community of artists, each pursuing his own art, but each committed to the success of the whole, this community depends on a cooperative, highly trained workforce capable of and committed to realizing the creations of the authors. Thus,

while on the level of the authors, the collective creation of an autonomous work of art is a utopian image, on the level of the performer it is

business as usual. ,

Likewise the integration of heterogeneous material within a ballet provides an image of the harmonious union of individual visions when approached from the authored art forms alone (music, painting, dance); within each of those forms, however, a different picture emerges. Massine’s choreography depended on the appropriation and “modernization”

Massine and Modernism 173 of source materials from the cancan to Spanish folk dance. These popular, historical, and regional styles exist in his ballets as stylistic flourishes— finally, as versions of the modern. The ideal of the harmonious integration of the arts, like the ideology of bourgeois individuality, forgets that it only

applies to some individuals, only to some arts. It is what an aesthetic excludes, as much as what it embraces, that reveals its ideology.

Unlike other forms of modernist art, such as poetry or painting, ballet depended on a human medium for its realization. Thus in ballet (and probably in performed art generally) the human implications of the modernist aesthetic become apparent, and these end up being not that different from the human implications of a commodified mass culture. In both human beings become vehicles for a product rather than ends in themselves. This is not to say that individual performers could not overcome or disregard the demands of impersonality imposed upon them by a modernist dance aesthetic. Nor is it to argue that the modernist ballets of Massine and others should be treated simply as analogues to nonperforming art forms of the period. As Edward Gordon Craig realized early on, an art that depends on performers cannot embody a philosophically pure version of aesthetic autonomy. Further, Diaghilev was well aware of the importance of providing stars for that segment of his audience that required them and of keeping those stars happy with roles well suited to their talents. The philosophical tenets that characterize the aesthetic of a choreographer such as Massine (and his heir Nyinska), however, explicitly demand the subordination of the performer. It is in this characteristic, as well as in the innovative use of ballet vocabulary, regional and historical dance forms, and plot and structure, that the significant relation between the Russian Ballet and high modernist literary aesthetics resides. The commercial environment in which the Russian Ballet, unlike Eliot’s poetry, existed forced the most problematic aspects of their shared aesthetic values to the fore—but that environment also allowed Ehiot for a brief time to see in Massine’s choreography a solution to the alienation of elite art in an age of mass culture. The available alternatives to an author-driven, impersonal performance structure did not rest solely in the star-driven, mildly eroticized structure of the pre-Diaghilev ballet. The performance practices of Marie Lloyd, Felix Fernandez Garcia, Maud Allan, and Isadora Duncan depended upon establishing a rapport with the audience, one dependent on a lack of distance between the performer and the creator or author of the performance. This kind of rapport was downplayed by a strong current

174 Gendering Bodies/Performing Art in the aesthetics governing the Russian Ballet that favored a more abstract

rapport between the audience and the work of art as an autonomous entity. Such a position was taken up by champions of the company among the intellectual elite in England during Massine’s tenure as chief

choreographer. It posited a utopian community of artists working together to create a complex, unified aesthetic object. I have argued that this ideal amounts to a community of inaccessible creators whose production seems to mediate, but in effect erases, their relationship with their audience. The price paid for the resulting image of unity and harmony is thus the rejection of another kind of community, one that seeks connection rather than autonomy. This was the community unsuccessfully sought by Isadora Duncan in a form of dance that presented not the closed utopia (or dystopia) of the modernist work of art but a plea for social relevance and connection.

Notes

Introduction 1. The application of a term such as author to dance may be problematic. Dances are often more collaborative in their creation and unstable in their reproduction than most arts to which the term is more comfortably applied. Two points are pertinent here: first, the instability of the category of author is now a commonplace of poststructuralism—the status and identity of an author and the text he or she authorizes are arguably functions of cultural context and ideological need rather than simple facts. Second, once the instability, or at least the ideological content of authorship is acknowledged, any use of the concept must be taken as a claim about the way in which a relationship between a product and its producer or producers is understood in a given context, rather than an absolute claim as to the nature of that relationship. This is how I would like my use of the term to be understood throughout this book. 2. While the association of ballet with prestigious visual artists such as Matisse and Picasso helped attract the London intelligentsia (and especially the Bloomsbury group) to Diaghilev’s post-World War I seasons, the visual arts could not provide a model for evaluating dance as easily as art forms that depended on temporal progress. This being said, however, one must keep in mind the growing attraction to “spatial form” on the part of literary figures, as well as the growing interest in nonnarrative (i.e., visual) modes of organizing performances explored by Edward Gordon Craig and Léonide Massine. My use of the term literary in this context should be understood as a necessarily reductive shorthand to describe a shift in the criteria that defined the “Artist of the Theatre” (to use Craig’s name for himself) as an author in the Foucauldian sense of that word (“What Is an Author?”).

3. Perhaps the classic feminist statement of this position and its consequences for historical study is Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In literary studies, Jane Tompkins’s argument for the value of the sentimental novel in Sensational Designs reveals how this insight can contribute to the radical reconceptualization of aesthetic value. Karl Marx’s call for a materialist historiography

in The German Ideology arises from a similar insight. His critique of idealist history is precisely that the perspective from which it approaches its subject leads 175

176 Notes to Pages 17-23 it to ignore the relationship that, for Marx, constitutes the truth of history: that material life is the foundation of consciousness. The “bottom-up” history inspired by Marx and the “woman-centered” history developed by feminists have been the two greatest influences on my methodology. I

1. Peter Bailey and Martha Vicinus (Industrial Muse) have both explored the

relationships between music hall culture and the growth of mass entertainment, and both note the increasingly passive and well-disciplined audiences that emerged as the halls became larger and the entertainment more general in appeal. The relationship between the dance and such large cultural patterns might also be traced in the movement from popular-based step dancing to the precision dancing of groups such as the Palace Girls (precursors to the chorus line). John Tiller trained numbers of these women, also known as Tiller girls, to dance in unison (see Flitch). Finally, Gareth Stedman Jones examines the content and significance

of music hall entertainment in terms of working-class politics, and Penelope Summerfield examines how legal constraints shaped and controlled the content of music hall performance. 2. Holbrook Jackson, in The Eighteen Nineties, provides further evidence of this enthusiasm, explicitly linking it to the sense of transgression that characterized the song for Gretton: “Our new-found freedom seemed to find just the expression it needed in the abandoned nonsense chorus of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! which, lit at the end of the red skirts of Lottie Collins, spread like a dancing flame through the land. . . from 1892 to 1896 it affected the country like an epidemic” (31-32). 3. This inseparability of the performance from its performer has been common in dance (other than ballet), where unlike in the theater, the residue resulting from separating a work of art from its performer was intangible. In the case of songs, however, the path to a separation between the work and its performer is easier, and Bailey notes a movement in this direction among middle-class critics (160).

4. See Vicinus, Industrial Muse 252, and Bailey, chap. 7. Both emphasize how the desire of business interests to create a profitable mass entertainment industry influenced changes in the form and content of music hall performance. Summerfield notes the tendency of licensing agencies to favor larger halls (221). 5. See David Mayer, “The Sexuality of Pantomime.” He traces use of the term principal boy to refer to a woman appearing in a male role in pantomime to the 1870s. The genres of pantomime and ballet clearly overlap in this regard, and in fact ballets were generally incorporated into the late-nineteenth-century panto-

mimes and other forms of spectacular theater. Booth reports Hollingshead’s introduction of “artistic dancing” in burlesque in the 1880s (Pantomimes 42). 6. Edwardes’s comment makes it clear why, although women attended these performances, I refer solely to male spectators. The satisfying of a specifically male visual pleasure shaped these productions. See Tracy C. Davis, “The Actress in Victorian Pornography,” for a discussion of the pervasive croticization of the ballet girl.

Notes to Pages 24-36 177 7. In discussing cross-dressing conventions in pantomime, Mayer notes that costumes from the 1850s “reveal that the principal boy’s shape was considerably assisted by tights with padding graduated in thickness, thicker at the hip, thin at the ankle” (61). He interprets the convention of the principal boy as a response to male anxiety over women’s increased earning power and independence, permitting audiences “to contemplate female power” in an unthreatening context (61). In the late-nineteenth-century ballet, however, it can as easily be read as increasing the isolation of the feminine from the masculine, and thus as a reflection of more strict gender role divisions. See Gareth Stedman Jones’s documentation of the retreat of women into the home in the second half of the century, leading to a “stricter division of roles between man and wife” (485-87). 8. In ballet productions of this period spectacular effects could overwhelm feminine display as, for example, in those described by Perugini in the 1898 ballet

of Beauty and the Beast at the Alhambra, where the dancers were dressed to represent every known kind of rose, “each dancer being almost hidden by gigantic presentments of the flowers . . . a luxurious mass of living blossoms, weaving itself into ever fresh and endless harmonies of colour and enchantment” (265). 9. The legal situation governing English theater in this period barred “stage plays” altogether from music halls (see Cheshire 92—94). This important interaction between the structure of the “gaze apparatus” implied by the positioning of women in a performance, and outside constraints on the form and content of that

performance, suggests the necessity of historicizing Mulvey’s theoretical insights. See E. Ann Kaplan’s important contribution to this project. Patricia Mann

provides another approach to the “male gaze” in her analysis of the relation between social agency and the meaning of the sexual gaze. 10. Only Isadora Duncan, of this first generation of modern dancers, refused to dance in music halls. Even Diaghilev—a cultural snob if ever there was one—permitted his company to perform in music halls after World War I.

The financial resources of the management, and the relative poverty of the dancers, often made this option attractive, while making other performance contexts impracticable. 2

1. Biographical information on Maud Allan comes from Felix Cherniavsky’s

series of articles in Dance Chronicle. He has recently published this work as a book, The Salome Dancer. 2. Allan’s relationship to Isadora Duncan is unclear. Reviewers often treated

her as an imitator or student of Duncan, but Allan consistently denied any influence. Cherniavsky provides evidence to the contrary, as well as reporting Maud Allan’s own attempts to distinguish her dance from Duncan’s (“Allan, I” 200; “Allan, III” 120, 149). 3. Susan Kingsley Kent notes that the ideology of separate spheres that valued in women their moral and spiritual purity and devotion to home and family was in fact dependent on definitions of female sexuality and “was always depicted in those terms” (57). 4. See also “We All Like Sheep,” by Christopher St. John, and Walter Hig-

178 Notes to Pages 37-44 gins’s article in the Labour Leader (26 June 1908; qtd. in Cherniavsky, “Allan, III” 27).

5. Only because the Censor had no jurisdiction over music hall productions could the dance be performed at all. He had consistently refused to permit performances of Wilde’s play or of Strauss’s operatic version of that text. The absence of language in dance performances freed them from censorship in regards to

subject matter, although the type of gesture and costume used might still be grounds for prohibiting a performance. It was because of the costume Maud Allan wore, that is, the amount of uncovered flesh she displayed, that the Manchester Watch Committee refused her permission to perform in their city (Cherniavsky, “Allan, III” 133). 6. For an extended treatment of Maud Allan in the context of English impe-

rialism and Orientalist discourse, see my article, “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan’s The Vision of Salomé.” Jane Desmond has addressed the relationship between cultural imperialism and gender in Ruth St. Denis’s Radha. 7. See Tickner for an account of these marches and the press response to them (73—100). She quotes a number of writers who comment on the difficulty of walking in a public procession for middle- and upper-class women. For example, from the Manchester Guardian: “Nobody can suppose that most of the women who took part. . . can have done so for the sport or pleasure of the thing. . . . It

requires some courage for a woman to step out of her drawing room into the street to take her place in a mixed throng” (75). 8. See also John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, particularly chap. 2 on “The Theatre of Empire.” g. Cherniavsky reports that she received at least two hundred pounds for each private performance (“Allan, III” 140). He also documents the intimacy of her friendship with the Asquiths, the public knowledge of which is evident from the existence of a skit (published in The Referee), “Salomé and the Suffragettes.” According to Cherniavsky, in this skit Allan is kidnapped by the suffragettes from the terrace of the House of Commons, where she is having tea with the prime minister, Lord George, and Winston Churchill. Alfred Butt arrives to declare that the public will riot if Salomé does not perform, and Asquith finally agrees to the suffragettes’, demand that women be given the vote in return for Maud Allan’s release (“Allan, III” 154). 10. Allan’s acceptance of male dominance was the trade-off for the class privileges she was struggling to acquire. As Gerda Lerner cogently explains, oppressed groups willingly accept the hierarchy that subordinates them if they believe that it benefits them by extending to them privileges denied some other group. Thus, while “dominant elite, white, upper-class men benefit from all aspects of their dominance . . . [w]omen of their own class benefit sufficiently from racist and economic privilege so as to mask for them the disadvantages and discrimination they experience because of sexism” (112). 11. Although beyond the scope of this discussion, the circumstances of this declaimer are fascinating. Maud Allan had been engaged by J. T. Grein to play Salomé in a production of Wilde’s play. The Vigilante, a right-wing paper operated by a man named Pemberton-Billing, published a paragraph on this produc-

Notes to Page 47 179 tion titled “The Cult of the Clitoris,” implying Maud Allan’s homosexuality. Allan sued for libel—and lost. Michael Kettle analyzes the political subtext of the trial in Salomé’s Last Veil. See also Gagnier’s appendix on the subject. Allan did

not lose because her homosexuality was established; it wasn’t in fact the real issue, as Kettle shows. According to Cherniavsky, however, she was most likely

a lesbian (see “Allan, V” 206-7).

12. Unlike Allan, Duncan was never so closely associated with a single dance as to make it the subject of repeated and extensive description by reviewers. Consequently, a comparison between the two on the grounds of their perceived treatment of a narrative or character is not possible. Further, the detailed description of Iphigenia offered by Blair indicates that Duncan did not retain a single persona throughout the dance but continually altered the character repre-

sented (191-92). This no doubt contributed to the desire expressed by some reviewers for program notes on the dances. Grein suggests that “a brief explanation of the various dances would have been of value” (“Duke of York’s”). A writer in the Era reports that Duncan’s Iphigenia “had little reference to the old Greek story” and that “it would often have been agreeable to have hada hint.. . from the program as to what was the meaning of some of the dances” (qtd. in Macdonald, “Isadora” 79). This lack of an apparently expected narrative transparency may also help explain some of the differences in the reception of Duncan and Allan. 13. Judith Butler has developed a theory of gender as a form of performance that is particularly suggestive in this context. Her work makes clear both the constructed nature of gender and the use of the body as a “signifying practice” trained to enact its assigned gender (see Gender Trouble, especially 128-41, and “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”). 14. See Macdonald, “Isadora” for a survey of the criticism. The Academy’s review, “Isadora Duncan,” notes the enthusiasm of the audience, as do Grein and the reviewer for the Illustrated London News. Both of the latter, however, indicate ~ that Duncan’s rendition of the “Blue Danube” waltz as an encore received the greatest response. Although Ruth St. Denis reported seeing Duncan dance to a sparse audience in London, other sources contest this (see Blair 179-80). 15. In a letter to Edward Gordon Craig, Duncan comments that “I have had very very nice audiences here—as nice as anyplace” (qtd. in Steegmuller 297).

Her real purpose in going to London, however, was to find funding for her school, and in this she was not successful. She wrote in her autobiography that “London audiences looked upon me and my school as a charming amusement, but I could find no real aid for the foundation of a future school” (My Life 155). 16. In her autobiography, Duncan mitigates her feeling of inadequacy to her ideals with the thought that “at least I was not Salome. I wanted the head of no one: I was never a Vampire, but always an Inspirational” (My Life 157-58), and Victor Seroff recalls a parody of Allan’s dance performed by Duncan for the amusement of friends (126). Perhaps even more telling of what Maud Allan represented to Duncan is a letter to her from her former lover, Edward Gordon Craig. Craig expresses his anger at her by refusing to acknowledge the distinction between Duncan’s dance and Maud Allan’s: “You have removed from yourself

180 Notes to Pages 48-52 the right to deride the Maud Allens [sic] of the variety stage” (qtd. in Steegmuller 303). See Kendall, chapter 4, for an account of the craze for Salomé dances that hit New York prior to Duncan’s arrival there in August of 1908. One of the first of

these Salomé dancers, Mlle. Dazie, even opened a school to teach others her dance, and according to Kendall, “By the summer of 1908 she was sending approximately 150 Salomes every month into the nation’s vaudeville circuits” (75).

17. Kendall argues that in her early recitals in New York, Duncan “was no more than a skilled Delsartean” (64), and Allan cites Delsarte herself in her autobiography. Delsarte’s theories, as Allan realized, provided a rationale for the nonerotic exhibition of the female body, since “[h]is teaching rests on the inseparability of body and spirit” (Allan 65). See also Jowitt (Time 78-81) and Macdougall (31-34) for additional discussions of Delsarte’s influence on Duncan.

18. In a notebook entry describing her reaction to a work of art, Duncan places herself in the role of her audience, making clear the response she desired: “If you had before you a dancer inspired with this feeling, it would be contagious. You would forget the dancer himself. You would only feel, as he feels, the chord of Dionysiac ecstasy” (Art 131). 19. See Flitch, for whom “personality” is a positive trait (105), and Levin-

son, for whom it is not (“Art and Meaning” 32). Edward Gordon Craig was awed by Duncan’s personal magnetism but also devalued her art by attributing it to her “personality” (see Steegmuller 7, 64). In his case this critique stemmed from personal as well as aesthetic sources; these will be addressed in the following chapter. 20. The chapter in which Flitch discusses Duncan is titled “The Revival of Classical Dancing” and includes a discussion of Maud Allan and a third dancer, Magdeleine, who like Trilby, performed under hypnosis. He treats Allan as an

heir to Duncan’s legacy who, unlike Duncan, “added the personal touch that gained the applause of the crowd” (110).

21. See Jowitt, “Impact of Greek Art.” One example of the way Duncan aligned dance with the more highly valued visual arts can be found in “The Dance

and Its Inspiration,” where she proclaims that a woman who dances “shall be sculptor not in clay or marble but in her body, which she shall endeavor to bring to the highest state of plastic beauty; she shall be a painter, but as part of a great

picture. ... In the movement of her body she shall find the secret of right proportion of line and curve and—the art of the dance she wil] hold as a great well-spring of new life for sculpture, painting and architecture” (Isadora Speaks 43).

22. For an excellent, extended treatment of Duncan’s deployment of the body in the context of her American reception see Ann Daly’s dissertation, ““Done Into Dance’: Isadora Duncan and America.” 23. Duncan also rejected the waltz and the mazurka as “sickly sentimental,” and the minuet for being “the expression of unctuous servility” (My Life 244-45).

To some extent these were also rejections of the classes to which the dances belonged—the middle-class waltz, the aristocratic minuet, and the lower-class jazz dance—and thus followed from her attempt to recreate dance as a universal art.

Notes to Pages 52-60 181 24. See Susan Kingsley Kent’s chapter “The Sex” for a discussion of the history and cultural significance of female “passionlessness” in England. 25. This connection is ironic in view of Margaret Drewal’s hypothesis: “It may be that Duncan was so popular in Europe because there she represented the exotic Other” (186). It makes perfect sense for Duncan to deploy a racist ideology in order to maintain or increase her status as a woman, however, if one accepts Gerda Lerner’s analysis of the interconnections among ideologies of domination

(see note 10). In addition, Duncan’s expression of racial intolerance followed from her attempt to overcome sexism by associating herself with the Western male tradition in the arts. 26. In terms of women’s relation to the gaze, this place is described by John Berger in the course of analyzing the differences between the social presence of women and men; he concludes that “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus

she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (47). 3

1. See Peter Burger on the relationship between bourgeois society and the claim of the autonomy of art (especially chaps. 2 and 3). Bourdieu’s examination of the relations between the “pure” aesthetic gaze and contemporary class identities suggests the continued hegemony of the autonomy aesthetic. For a succinct discussion of Symons’s use of the term symbolism see Ellmann’s introduction to The Symbolist Movement in Literature. The most important aspect of symbolism for my purposes is its refusal of naturalistic representation out of a commitment to art defined as distinct from the ordinary experience of life or nature. Craig’s short essay “Symbolism” defines it in opposition to realism and places it at “the very essence of the Theatre” as an art (Art 293). 2. On the collaboration of Yeats and Craig, see Flannery, “W. B. Yeats, Gordon Craig, and the Visual Arts of the Theatre,” and Dorn, “Dialogue into Movement: W. B. Yeats’s Theatre Collaboration with Gordon Craig.” On the mutual influence of Craig and Symons, see Markert (29-34). 3. Symons had, however, seen Maud Allan in 1908. His response was less

than flattering: “Hutton and I went tonight to see Maud Allan and Yvette [Guilbert] (standing at the back of the stalls). Yvette simply wipes Maud out like a sponge” (Selected Letters 195). Symons began reviewing music hall performances in 1892, but his attendance at a performance of Javanese dancers in Paris in 1889 marked the beginning of his fascination with dance (Beckson, Symons 76, 82). Although Loie Fuller, according to Kermode, “remains the dancer of Symbolism, from Mallarmé to Yeats” (“Poet and Dancer” 69), Symons did not seem overly interested in her dance, despite having written a positive review of her London appearance in 1892 (Fletcher 54; Beckson, Symons 83). Fuller, who used yards of flowing material and colored lights to disguise her body and give the

182 Notes to Pages 60-63 effect of various natural phenomena (fire, butterflies, flowers, etc.) was the subject of an essay by Mallarmé. Symons appeared to prefer the typical music hall ballets (such as those described in chapter 1) that revealed rather than disguised the dancer’s body. 4. For example, in his essay “The Artists of the Theatre of the Future” from 1908 Craig wrote that “it seems to me that before the female spirit gives herself up, and with the male goes in quest of this vast treasure, perfect movement will not be discovered” (Movement and Dance 35). At times Craig seems willing to

accept the help of women in the quest for art; at others he wants to exclude women altogether. In any case, women were never to provide the creative energy needed to revitalize the theater. In the same year, Craig published a description of his idea for a school of the theater as an open letter to Andrew Carnegie. Here, under one of his many pseudonyms, “John Semar,” Craig wrote: “It is, I think,

quite obvious that the theatre will regain its vitality through the men and not through the women, although some of the latter can be relied on to a great extent” (Mask 73).

5. See Steegmuller 212; in a footnote he attributes this claim to Arnold Rood. Eynat-Confino reports that the two essays Craig sent to Duncan were

“The Artists of the Theatre of the Future” and “The Actor and the Uber-

Marionette,” but she gives no source for this information.

6. For example, in the first dialogue of “The Art of the Theatre,” Craig develops an analogy between the theater and a ship, finally a military ship, over the course of several pages, in order to argue for the obedience and discipline he required of actors, their “proper and willing subjection to rules and principles” (Art 171). In “The Artists of the Theatre of the Future” he returns to the image of the king to describe the place of the artist in the theater, writing, “I use the word ‘Kingdom’ instinctively in speaking of the land of the Theatre” (Movement and Dance 32). Finally, in a rare defense of Diaghilev, whose Russian Ballet Craig consistently attacked, he castigates Pavlova and Nyinsky for what he believed to be their desertion of Diaghilev. His reason was that “[o]nce a performer or an artist takes service under any Director whatever it is his and her duty to remain faithful to him to the end” (Movement and Dance 137). 7. In her biography of Ellen Terry, Craig’s mother, Nina Auerbach suggests some of the personal and psychological reasons for Craig’s misogyny. He was surrounded by independent and talented women, on whom he was materially dependent. According to Auerbach, Duncan took on Ellen Terry’s role in Craig’s life, making her both especially valuable and especially dangerous to Craig (352-55). 8. See, for example, Levenson: “Symbolist literature represented an attempted overcoming of the materialist spectre” (109); Allon White: “[Obscurity] is manifestly an aesthetic strategy which is taken from Symbolism and Art for Art’s Sake, an ideology of rarity which endeavors to value the art object by placing it beyond the reach of the multitude” (52); Kermode’s chapter on the isolation of the artist in Romantic Image; and Anna Balakian: “What symbolism really did was to close its shutters on the world. In reaction against increased literacy in the civilized world, there emerged a new literacy of poetic conventions, closed to those who could find only literal meaning in language” (122).

Notes to Pages 64-69 183 Another way of approaching this new elitism might be through Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the pure gaze or pure aesthetic, the detachment of which “cannot be dissociated from a general disposition towards the world which is the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities—a life of ease—that tends to induce an active distance from necessity” (5). This is not to imply that all symbolist artists lived a life of ease, but to emphasize their function in upholding an ideological stance only available to an audience habituated to distancing themselves from material necessity. 9. Other critics have also noted the importance of dualistic thinking about women (and the world) in Symons’s life and work. Karl Beckson, in his biography of Symons, traces the centrality to Symons of a binary opposition between the flesh and the spirit to the writer’s Nonconformist background (he was the son of a Wesleyan minister) (53). Chris Snodgrass devotes a long article to demon-

strating the power of dualistic thinking in Symons’s treatment of Beardsley, where “Symons blatantly distorts (or represses) elements in Beardsley’s art that undercut traditional high Victorian and Decadent dualistic presumptions” (63). 10. S. Beynon John argues that the symbolist theater of Maeterlinck, Jarry, Craig, and Yeats requires “the surrender of important aspects of the actor’s personality and technique” (247). Balakian notes that symbolist plays share “a certain effacement of the actor demanded by the poet-dramatist, who .. . is looking for a medium rather than an interpreter” (125). Frantisek Deak sees the problematic place of the actor in symbolist theater as evidence of the “fundamental contradiction between materiality and conceptuality, or between materiality and spirituality” in its aesthetic (24). Symons himself, despite his ambivalence,

takes a position hostile to the actor in “An Apology for Puppets,” where he objects to the actor who forces spectators “to consider this intrusive little personality of his as well as the author’s” (Plays 3). 11. See Gruber’s comparison of Brecht and Craig’s theories of performance for a discussion of the relationship between Craig’s support for the Censor and his antitheatricalism. See also Barish on Craig’s position in an antitheatrical tradition. 12. For a discussion of the mutual influence of Craig and Symons see Mar-

kert (29-34). Although Beckson writes that Symons’s “An Apology for Puppets” was “inspired by Gordon Craig’s experiments” (Symons 229), Markert gives evidence that the influence in this case went in the other direction (32), since

the essay was first published in 1897, before Symons saw Craig’s work in the theater. According to Markert, the two men influenced each other: “Symons senses the embodiment of his artistic ideals in Craig’s productions, and Craig draws upon the theoretical foundation Symons suggests in his various essays for part of his own theories of drama and dramatic presentation” (29). One might argue, for example, that the slogan printed below the title of the journal in the Mask, “After the Practice the Theory,” was derived from Symons’s review of Craig’s 1905 pamphlet, “The Art of the Theatre.” There Symons writes that although “[m]ost people begin with theory” and then attempt to put their theory

into practice, “Mr Gordon Craig has done a better thing” by following the Opposite procedure (Studies 360). 13. This impulse is behind Craig’s rejection of the written text in the theater

184 Notes to Pages 70-77 (one point on which Symons took issue with him (Studies 364)). As Innes explains: “For Craig, theatre is the equal of literature, but a very different form of art that can reach its full potential only if it is no longer subordinated to the written word” (113). Craig took a similar position in regard to all of the elements of theatrical performance—lighting, scene design, costumes—and of course act-

x ing. His ideal director must know about each of these areas, but not practice any of them: “the director of a theatre must be a man apart from any of the crafts” (Art 173).

14. Important exceptions occur in her autobiography, where she notes the battle between her commitment to Craig and to her art (135) and at one point comments that she wondered “if'a woman can ever really be an artist, since Art is a hard taskmaster who demands everything, whereas a woman who loves gives up everything to life” (175). Duncan thus at times accepted both the separation

between “art” and “life” and the ideological location of women in “life” (i.c., reproduction) rather than “art” (1.e., creation). 15. Duncan repeats this sentiment almost verbatim in her autobiography (127).

16. At times these two ways of understanding the relationship between body

and art are so intermingled as to be inextricable, as in the following passage: “When I dance, I use my body as a musician uses his instrument, as a painter uses

his palette and brush, and as a poet uses the images of his mind. It has never dawned on me to swathe myself in hampering garments or to bind my limbs and drape my throat, for am I not striving to fuse soul and body in one unified image of beauty?” (Isadora Speaks 49). 4

1. Wilde wrote Salomé in 1891. In June 1892, the Censor banned a production then under rehearsal with Sarah Bernhardt as Salomé—ostensibly because it portrayed biblical characters (Wilde, Letters 316). Wilde then published the play— in French in 1893 and in English in 1894. For the composition and publishing history of the play see Rupert Hart-Davis’s notes in his edition of Wilde’s letters (305, 326, 344) and Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (339-45, 374-76; on the English translation, 402-4).

2. To this list might be added the insightful analysis of the relation between Wilde’s text and Beardsley’s illustrations by Elliot Gilbert, where he argues that both artists were engaged in an attack on patriarchal culture, “even as they express their horror at the threatening female energy which is the instrument of that attack” (134). Salomé represents this threat by embodying nature, the opposite of culture; thus she remains enclosed in the sexual (where,

one might add, she is finally no threat at all to patriarchal culture). Kerry Powell takes practically the same position. In his interpretation, Salomé is trying to control her own sexuality, and in doing so she “attacks the very foundation of patriarchal culture with murderous female energy” (34). Marjorie Garber’s bricf discussion of Salomé in Vested Interests argues that the character should be considered neither male nor female, but a transvestite. In her view it

Notes to Pages 77-82 185 is “gender undecidability” rather than transgressive gender behavior that constitutes the threat posed by Salomé (342). 3. Joost and Court recognize the importance of reconciling the spirit and the flesh for Wilde and treat Salomé as a victim of this dichotomy. Ellmann, however, despite his reading of the play as an intellectual encounter between the Paterian and Ruskinian sides of Wilde, assumes that Salomé is a “villainous” woman of “perverse sensuality” (“Overtures” 75, 90). Two important exceptions to the kinds of readings I critique are found in Jane Marcus’s article on Salomé as a New Woman, and Regenia Gagnier’s Idylls of the Marketplace. Gagnier regards the

play as an attempt to confront the Victorian public with their own repressed sexuality by portraying, in Salomé, a nonpurposive sexuality—‘“sex for sex’s sake” (165). Gagnier’s discussion is particularly useful in its acknowledgment of how Wilde’s own unproductive (homosexual) sexuality contributes to the play. She also provides an excellent rebuttal to Ellmann’s argument for placing Herod at the center of the play (in “Overtures to Salomé,” and repeated in his biography of Wilde).

4. The ahistorical quality of representations of the Orient is also noted by Linda Nochlin, in the context of French nineteenth-century Orientalist painting. She also analyzes the element of erotic fantasy informing many of these paintings.

5. The best example of this double attitude toward Salomé can be seen in Carrillo’s recollections of Wilde’s conversations about the character—at times, “Her lust must be an abyss, her corruptness, an ocean”; at other times, “[Hl]is Salomé was almost chaste. . . . Her beauty has nothing of this world about it” (qtd. in Mikhail 1:193). 6. In analyzing the position of women in performance, feminist film critics have developed the concept of the male gaze to name a major structuring device in this positioning. E. Ann Kaplan modifies the ahistorical argument first presented by Laura Mulvey to explain the malc-centered manipulation of point of

view in film; for Kaplan, the filmic positioning of women as objects-to-belooked-at represents a culturally specific manifestation of polarized gender roles

in which the male is dominant and the female submissive (319). Particularly relevant to my point is Kaja Silverman’s discussion of the threat posed by a disembodied female voice to a system that identifies the female subject with her body. Although Silverman analyzes this threat in Lacanian terms, and specifically

in relation to narrative cinema, the desire to position the female body “in ways which are accessible to the gaze and. . . [which] attest . . . to dominant values” (135) does not depend on this conceptual system, nor 1s it limited to narrative film. See also Teresa de Lauretis, who in Alice Doesn’t argues for greater “awareness that spectators are historically engendered in social practices” (156). 7. Ed Cohen's location of “male same-sex desire” in the “absent presence” of the picture in The Picture of Dorian Gray might be extended to apply to the dance, also an “absent presence,” in Salomé. Ken Russell’s movie, Salomé’s Last Dance (1988), implies as much by revealing Salomé, at the climax of her dance, to be man. Such an approach, while foregrounding the sexually transgressive qualities of Wilde’s texts, keeps Salomé imprisoned in the sexual (now homosexual rather

186 Notes to Pages 82-88 than heterosexual) and, as a result, provides no way to address the spiritual aspect of her (or his) transgression. It is not clear to me that Garber’s reading of Russcll’s film—focusing on the undecidability of Salomé’s gender—is of any help in this respect. 8. When Robert Wilson staged Strauss’s Salomé in Milan (in 1987), he substituted for this dance, which the reviewer for the New York Times considers “an

embarrassment in most... productions,” a “gradual banishment of the darkness” to represent “Salomé dropping her veils” (Rockwell). yg. Ross seems to be referring specifically to the Salomé dance of Maud Allan

and her imitators. For Douglas’s opinion scc his review from 1893 in the Spirit Lamp, reprinted in Beckson (Wilde). Winwar claimed that Wilde was eager to have it performed (205). Powell develops a case for Wilde’s having indeed written the play for Sarah Bernhardt in his chapter on Salomé. 10. See also Chauncey’s discussion of the relation betwcen the medical discourse on homosexuality and lesbianism at the turn of the century and the increasing pressure being placed on Victorian gender roles. His analysis would support the claim that female sexual aggression such as that depicted in Salomé’s character was felt to be a threat to the entire sex-gender system (i.e., the social order). 11. It should be noted that less than one month prior to this performance militant suffragettes had marched on the House of Commons, on what became known as Black Friday (18 Nov. 1910). Over one hundred women were arrested, and several were seriously injured (two of whom died) (Raeburn 246). Women had for the past five years shown themselves increasingly and violently unwilling to accept the role of “womanly devotion” praised by the Spectator, and its attack on a performance portraying a woman aggressively pursuing her own desires should not be abstracted from the real aggressiveness women were exhib-

iting in pursuit of the vote. In addition, the editor of the Spectator, St. Loe Strachey, was an antisuffragist who “often produced helpful editorials” for the antis (Harrison 118, 153). In medical discourse the threat posed by the assertive behavior of the militant suffragettes was linked to their presumably “abnormal” sexuality (Chauncey 131). The insistence that Salomé was a sexual pervert and moral monster was inextricable from the need of an ideology under stress to reassert its terms clearly and forcibly. 12. See, for example, George Steiner, who calls Salomé “a libretto in search of a composer” (29), and Nassar, who believes that it aspires to the condition of music. As Stciner notes, the tendency “toward an ideal of musical form” is a retreat from language and from the kinds of meaning most successfully conveyed by words. Kermode, in Romantic Image, argucs that such a retreat from discursive meaning was an inevitable consequence of the symbolist aesthetic. Powell argues that the musical quality of the play formed part of Wilde’s (unsuccessful) strategy to gct it past the Censor (38). 5

1. Edward Gordon Craig had reached the same conclusion in his “Plea for Two Theatres” (1915) (Theatre Advancing 3-41), one of which would be “dura-

Notes to Pages go—-93 187 ble,” a ritualistic theater, and the other “perishable” and devoted to the more cphemeral] art of the actor. See Charles R. Lyons, “Gordon Craig’s Concept of the Actor.” As is well known, Yeats admired Craig’s productions and used both mask and scenery designs provided by Craig for some of his own plays. In addition, Yeats had published his essay “The Tragic Theatre” in Craig’s periodical, the Mask, in 1910.

2. James W. Flannery makes precisely this point, although with a quite different emphasis: “In their freedom from the narrow constraints of the materialistic middle class he despised, Yeats also identified the peasantry with an ideal aristocratic way of life” (Yeats 74). On Yeats’s attitudes toward the middle class see Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism, and Graham Good’s review

of that book. 3. George M. Harper’s explication of Ycats’s dramatic theory suggests the importance of symbolism in his aesthetic of the theater, and this influence may explain the case with which Yeats effaces the performer. For, as Harper writes, “liffart is not to copy nature but the idcal model on which nature is patterned, the artist obviously must avoid realism, and if he is consistent he must search for an organic vehicle by means of which he can suggest not this world but the idcal world beyond” (25). 4. See Barish, The Anti- Theatrical Prejudice, for a discussion of the distaste for the actor in the ninetcenth century: “Artists dream of creating something permanent, fixed, and exempt form the ravages of time, well-wrought urns and mosaic

saints. Inert matter they can force to do their bidding; they can impose their shaping wills on it, stamp it with thcir signatures. But how subduc human beings

in the same way, who have wills of their own? How control a medium recalcitrant not with the brute heaviness of inanimate matter but with the wild rebelliousness of flesh and blood?” (343). 5. Yeats’s play The Land of the Heart’s Desire, first performed in 1894, indicates his early association of dance with spiritual or supernatural figures; there the fairy child dances in the course of luring the bride, Mary Bruin, away from her husband and tells her that “I could make you ride upon the winds. . . And dance upon the mountains like a flame” (Variorum 202). But dance docs not here have the structural importance it would acquire in the No-influenced plays.

6. It was first choreographed and performed by a male Japanese dancer named Ito Michio, who, although familiar with traditional Japanese dance forms, was cqually influenced by his training in European genres (Taylor 111-13). Technical loyalty to authentic No dance was not considered necessary. For a reading of the dance in this play in terms of the “rhetoric” of performance, sce Wilham B. Worthen (97). 7. For a sympathetic discussion of Yeats’s symbolic use of an opposition between men and women sce Joseph M. Hassett, Yeats and the Poetics of Hate, chap. 6. 8. The clearest explanation of this dynamic I know of 1s in John Berger's Ways of Seeing (47), while the most influential one for feminist theory has been Laura Mulvcy’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” yg. Yeats implicitly or explicitly devalued the “feminine” side of conceptual dualisms by associating the feminine with nature rather than culture and with

188 Notes to Pages 96-103 inferior art. Art, he believed, should be “masculine and intellectual” (Explorations 109). See also Frank Kermode’s discussion in Romantic Image, where he argues that Yeats associated women with the body: “[B]ooks are good, and men must

write them; but not women; they must think with their bodies” (52). Although in this Yeats is certainly not unusual, such practices pose problems for anyone reading from a feminist position. Gayatri Spivak, comparing Dante and Yeats, articulates the difficulty: “In Dante, as in Yeats, woman is objectified, dispersed, or occluded as a means; it is a reactionary operation that holds the texts together. If, as a woman, I deliberately refuse to be moved by such texts, what should I do with high art?” (18). When Yeats places “woman” in lists along with inanimate or supernatural entities, he reinforces a gender ideology that makes this “dispersal” between the poles of animal and god seem reasonable, meaningful, and even profound. 10. On the relationship between the association of women with nature and

“the universal devaluation of women” documented by anthropologists, see Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” That it is Irish politics that keeps Diarmuid and Dervorgilla apart—the young man, who had taken part in the Easter Rising of 1916, refuses the forgiveness they need for having brought the English into Ireland by their love—invitcs references to Yeats’s long unconsummated desire for Maud Gonne. This psychobiographical reading seems quite plausible on that level. 11. Flannery comments on the tradition of symbolizing Ireland as a woman (Yeats 92-93).

system. .

12. Thus my reading of the soldiers’ dance differs from Nathan’s: “The irony of the soldiers’ concluding dance is that this ritual act, which usually suggests Unity of Being, is given to those who, indifferent to such unity, emble-

mize its opposite” (204). I read this scene not as ironic, but as a conscious

recuperation of those who would claim independence from Yeats’s own unifying

13. Other incidents of fighting in Yeats’s plays also suggest a certain futility in physical violence: Cuchulain’s fighting the waves in On Baile’s Strand, the endless fighting between rival kings in The Herne’s Egg. 14. Note, however, that Yeats conceived of the lame beggar’s movements in much the same terms as Fand’s: “Whatever his movements are they must be artificial and formal, like the movement upon a puppet stage or in a dance” (Variorum 805). 6

1. On Craig and Shaw sce Fisher’s account of their relationship. Shaw showed an appreciation for Craig’s talents and, according to Fishcr, invited him

to design some of his plays. Although Craig did produce some designs for a German production of Caesar and Cleopatra in 1905, he finally backed out of the

project. In a letter to his German translator, Siegfried Trebitsch, Shaw both praises the beauty of Craig’s effects and worries that his attention to the visual will ruin the play: “If Craig makes beautiful mysterious silhouettes of the speakers, all will be lost” (Letters to Trebitsch 90). The importance of language to

Notes to Pages 103-10 189 Shaw’s conception of good acting is evident in his novel, Love among the Artists (1881), where Madge Brailsford’s success on the stage is attributed to her diction lessons. See also Meisel’s chapter on acting. On the relationship between Shaw and writers associated with aestheticism—including Wilde, Symons, and Yeats— and more generally the relation between aestheticism and his conception of the artist and the work of art, see Adams, Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes. 2. John Russell Stephens places Shaw’s campaign on behalf of the author in the context of nineteenth-century theater history. According to Stephens it was Shaw “who most determinedly carried the banner of the playwright’s authority

into the twentieth century” (172). While one might argue that the director quickly overtook the author in importance, the increasing possibility that anyone other than an actor-manager could control a production suggests a weakening of the power of performers. 3. In this way actors could convey sexually or politically risqué messages

that would not have gotten past the Censor if put in the script by the author. Thus controversy in the popular, commercial (as opposed to independent) theaters was in the power and at the discretion of the actors to a much greater extent than the authors. Even when scripts exist for these productions, they are often not a reliable guide to what was actually said onstage (Booth, Spectacular Theatre 86; Meisel 388; Fromm 165). 4. Duse was also a favorite of Arthur Symons and of Craig. Barish attributes

the shared admiration of Duse among writers and theater artists he considers “antitheatrical” to her apparent lack of artifice: “She does not pretend to play such and such a part; she simply inhabits that part, lives the life of the character, thinks the very thoughts of that character, for the duration of her performance” (345). This makes her the perfect actress for those who object to acting, “an antitheatrical actress, an anti-actress” (346). 5. Holroyd comments repeatedly on Shaw’s simultaneous solicitations and evasion of female attention. For example, he concludes that despite Shaw’s out-

spoken claims for the independence of women, he “continued to make them dependent on him, to deprive them of their sexual power over him. He excited interest: then ran” (447). Auerbach classes Shaw with other men of this period who used feminist positions for their own purposes, seeing in women’s emancipation the fulfillment of their own fantasies (290). From a psychobiographical perspective, then, Shaw’s treatment of female performers was rooted in a need to control female sexuality. Jill Davis supports such a view in her analysis of female characters in several of Shaw’s plays; these representations of women, she concludes, are actually “cyphers for a psychic strategy to achieve and protect masculinity” (31). Further, Davis argues that the response of progressive or socialist

men in general to the threat posed to traditional gender rclations by the New Woman follows a similar pattern. 6. Shaw repeats the same analysis in a letter to Ellen Terry (21 Sept. 1896), prefacing his lecture to her on her art with the demand the she read the Saturday Review (for which he wrote theater reviews) so as to “learn all about it” (Eller Terry §2). On Shaw’s relationship with Ellen Terry see Auerbach, especially pp. 288-99. 7. On the movement of middle-class women into the theater see Christo-

190 Notes to Pages 111-12 pher Kent, “Image and Reality,” and, more recently, Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women. Martha Vicinus discusses the use made by middle-class women in the suffrage movement of an ideology of female moral superiority in “Male _ Space and Women’s Bodies.” Her analysis of the relation between this ideology and militant suffragettes’ use of their bodies is especially relevant: “Women were to gain access to the male political arena by the strength of their superior morality. This naturally meant a rigorous sexual purity—strong bodily control—in

order to enter safely male space. . . . The WSPU woman sacrificed her body through numerous and varied militant actions so that her spirit might triumph in the material world” (211). Shaw might well appropriate these attitudes for his own ends (and not at all maliciously), by asserting the high moral worth of acting that reduced the body to a vehicle for (authorial) ideas. 8. See also Shaw’s letter to Stewart Headlam (26 Dec. 1922), where he asks for biographical information about the dancer, commenting in passing on Headlam’s attempts to persuade people of the artistic legitimacy of dance; however, Shaw notes that “until the Russian ballet arrived long after Pertoldi was superannuated and forgotten there were practically no converts” (Collected Letters 802). 9. C. Kent notes that “prostitutes were identified in newspaper court reports as ‘actresses’” and “probably identified themselves that way on official occasions” (288). Tracy Davis contests the frequency of this practice and argues that available evidence does not support the reality of the assumed overlap between performers and prostitutes (78-86). Nevertheless, she acknowledges that the association in the public mind between female performers and sexual immorality of various kinds was pervasive. Shaw comments snidely on the female music hall star’s ability to “enter into the closest relations with the Peerage” (Music 1:46) and in another place observes that prejudice against dancing could not have become as strong as it had “had not too many music-hall performers acquiesced in their own ostracism by taking advantage of it to throw off all respect for themselvés and their art” (Music 2:66). 10. Kaja Silverman argues that the silent female image becomes for the male spectator a “dark continent,” threatening because inaccessible to definitive interpretation (135), but not as threatening as the invisible female voice that usurps that male position. Insofar as the theater, like cinema, positions women as objects of the male gaze, it would reinforce what Ann Kaplan calls the “gaze apparatus”

that helps maintain cultural gender definitions (319). Shaw’s rejection of the female body’s relevance (in an important and sexualized sense) to an actress’s performance might thus subvert the voyeuristic pleasure and dominance of part of his audience, while simultaneously increasing their focus on plot and character development. Since, however, the female performer’s body is still present, although attenuated, out of focus, she would not threaten the gaze apparatus—as an invisible female voice would. 11. On Shaw’s attitude toward sexuality in the theater see his preface to Plays jor Puritans, in which he claims to prefer to see works of art destroyed than to see them “becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness” (xx). Thirteen years later, however, Shaw was to respond to a bishop’s attack on the “suggestiveness” of a performance at the Palace Theatre by claiming that “[t]he

Notes to Pages 113-22 IQ] suggestion, gratification, and education of sexual emotion is one of the main uses and glories of the theatre” (Agitations 154). In the criticism under examination here he remains consistently opposed to performers who substitute (in his opinion) sex appeal for artistic skill and talent—which is a different thing from using skill and talent to portray or arouse sexual emotion. In the latter case sexuality is under control, like the special effects in a horror movie.

12. Thus Smith’s solution to his erotic obsession with Pertoldi parallels Lukacs’s analysis of the bourgeois subject who “confronts a reality ‘made’ by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its ‘laws.’” In such a state of affairs, he is “the object and not the subject of events. The field of his activity thus becomes wholly internalized” (History 135). Pertoldi can be transformed from an alien natural phenomenon confronting Smith into an adjunct to his own freely chosen pursuits by limiting those pursuits to wholly internal, and thus wholly abstract, goals.

13. For example: “[A] development of the dramatic element, not only in extent but in realistic treatment, is inevitable if the ballet is to survive at all” (Music 2:69). “The monotony and limitation of the dancer’s art vanishes when it becomes dramatic” (Music 3:256). “Surely it is clear by this time that if the ballet is to live, it must live through dramatic dancing and pantomime” (Music 3:145). 7

1. Solo dancing was considered definitive of modern dance, and group dancing of ballet. For example, the author of a book on Nyinsky published in 1913 comments that before the Russian Ballet arrived in 1911, although London had seen “considerable evidence of a revival in individual dancing, concerted dancing on a definite theme (which we may take as a practical definition of the ballet) had seldom reached a lower stage of insignificance” (Whitworth 2). Havelock Ellis, in his philosophical work The Dance of Life (1923), distinguishes two major tradi-

tions of dance, the classical and the Romantic (ballet): “The first is, in its pure form, solo dancing . . . and is based on the rhythmic beauty and expressiveness of simple human personality. . . . The second is concerted dancing, mimetic and picturesque, wherein the individual is subordinated to the wider and variegated rhythm of the group” (53). 2. Their first London season ran from 21 June to 31 July 1911, but their successful seasons in Paris in 1909 and 1910 had paved the way for a respectful reception by the English. Macdonald provides a synopsis of each of the London seasons in Diaghilev Observed.

3. See Garafola, chapter 11, for an analysis of the Russian Ballet’s prewar London audience. “Between 1911 and 1914,” she concludes, “the company wore a badge of social and economic privilege” (329). Garafola’s recent study of Diaghilev’s company is by far the best cultural history of the Russian Ballet, both in its depth of research and analytic acuity. 4. This is also the distinction drawn by T. S. Eliot in his review “The Ballet” (1925). He criticizes the author of the book under review for not analyzing “the

192 Notes to Pages 125-27 essential difference between ‘dancing’ and ‘acrobatics’” and explains that “[t]he difference between acrobatics and dancing may be observed in any music-hall” (442). The association of acrobatics with music hall performances rather than art was pervasive. Occasionally, on the other hand, a comparison between the ballet and a popular, spectacular theater form such as pantomime could be positive, as in the Times’ review of 5 February 1913 (“Russian Ballet: Triple Bill”). In this case the ability of both to “enchant” the audience, to please “children of all ages,” suggests that the ballet’s success rested in part on its easy assimilation to pure entertainment as well as to rigorously artistic theatrical precedents. 5. Garafola cites Bloomsbury critics’ references to Craig in explanation of their dislike for the prewar Russian Ballet. Like Craig, Rupert Brooke and Clive Bell attributed the popularity of these performances to their sensationalism, and Garafola agrecs that “sensory thrill, not structure, was the pivot on which the company’s aesthetic turned” (317). 6. Le sacre du printemps (1913) belongs in a different category, although the remote setting and overtones of sexual violence give it much in common with the more straightforwardly sensational pieces. It is with this picce, and to a lesser extent Nijinsky’s other works, L’aprés-midi d’un faune and Jeux, that the link

between the Russian Ballet and modernism began to be strongly felt. In their attempts to make sense of Le sacre du printemps, for example, critics begin drawing comparisons between ballet and postimpressionism and cubism (“Old Ballet and New”; Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed 99). 7. Dykstra discusses the appeal of narratives of male domination as depicted

in late-nineteenth-century paintings of “Oricntal” slavery (111-14), indicating,

for my purposes, the continuous popularity of the subject replayed in Schéhérazade. By the time the Russian Ballet arrived in London, however, the militant

suffrage movement was in full swing, lending additional symbolic weight to a story line that condemned self-assertive women to death. For Western men worricd about the increasing demand from women for freedom, the harsh discipline they saw imposed upon disobedient women in the East had its attractions (Kiernan 137). For suffragists, on the other hand, the prejudice against women’s participation in the public sphere was evidence of England’s backwardness. A writer in the New Age, commenting on the failure of antisuffrage women to make

a public demonstration of their existence, notes that “we cannot always loiter about with the social habits of the veiled East” (gtd. in Tickner 100). As already discussed in relation to Maud Allan’s Salomé, the treatment of women in the East (imagined or otherwise) provided a racially and politically charged symbolic field for addressing anxicties about the place of women in English socicty. 8. As in his ecarlicr essay, “The World as Ballet” (an excerpt from which opens his essay on the Russian Ballet), Symons sees the dance as a powerful, if contradictory, union of the material and the ideal. It thus represents the central contradiction of a symbolist aesthetic, which, as stated in his introduction to The Symbolist Movement, has as its end and purpose the rejection of materialism in order to “disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists... [while] waiting upon every symbol by which the soul of things can be made visible” (5). g. Edward Said offers a brief discussion of the femininity of the Orient in the

Notes to Pages 128-40 193 male discourse of Western Orientalism in Orientalism (206—8). See chapter 8 for a

discussion of the relation between the “feminine” and aesthetic value in the criticism of T. S. Eliot. 10. The primitivism of Le sacre du printemps might be usefully compared to that expressed by Anna in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, where she dances, naked and pregnant, in an act of assertion against her husband, “dancing his nonexistence, dancing herself to the Lord, to exultation” and becoming to her husband “a strange, exulted thing having no relation to himself” (181). The refusal of a relation between dancer and spectator was never an aspect of the “Oriental” ballets; rather they permitted all the vicarious pleasures of romance. On the other hand, the opposition of male and female figured in terms of dancer (primitive) and nondancer draws on a long-standing association of both dance and the primitive with women. 11. On the reception and influence of Wagner in England see Anna Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English, and, on the impact of Wagner's ideas on European culture, David C. Large and William Weber’s collection of essays. 12. Although not as important as Fokine in the prewar reception of the Russian Ballet in England, Nyinsky as a choreographer had a significant impact on aspects of later ballet choreography. His most obvious influence was on his sister, Bronistawa Nijinska, who became Diaghilev’s first, and only, female choreographer in the early 1920s. Jeux, in particular, which revolved around flirtations among thrce tennis players, can be seen as a precursor to Nyinska’s use of sports and acrobatics in Le train bleu (1923). 8

1. Peter Burger articulates this stance in defining what he calls “dialectical criticism”: “For dialectical criticism, the contradictions in the criticized theory are not indications of insufficient intellectual rigor on the part of the author, but an indication of an unsolved problem or one that has remained hidden” (liv). By the same token, they are not simply the chance products of psychological conditions. That is, the sustained presence of certain tensions, along with consistent patterns in attempts to “resolve” them, in Eliot’s performance aesthetics is not adequately explained by the emotional strain he may have been under at the time. 2. I refer throughout to the revised version of “Maric Lloyd” first published in the Criterion 1, no. 2 (Jan. 1923) 192-95, and reprinted in Selected Essays. An

earlier version had appeared in the Dial as a “London Letter” (Dec. 1922) (see Gallop 208). Ronald Bush’s thesis that Ehot’s poetry and criticism underwent a shift from “romantic honesty” to “classical order” in 1922 (72) does not undermine the usefulness of the juxtaposition of “Maric Lloyd” with “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Bush acknowledges that what is at stake is not a radical break but a shift in balance between clements present both earlier and later. If anything, the later essay (“Maric Lloyd”) is arguably more “Romantic” than the earlier one. 3. On the question of “personality” in Eliot’s criticism, see Sanford Schwartz. He argues that “Eliot employs two distinctions between personality and imper-

194 Notes to Pages 140-44 sonality: first, the conventional ‘personality’ (and the pose of the aesthete) versus the ‘impersonality’ of the serious poct; second, the impersonal conventions that organize everyday experience versus the personal sensations and emotions we usually ignore” (70). It is the first of these formulations that Eliot (and this essay) gives priority to. The second emerges at the end of the chapter. 4. The critical corpus on this essay is enormous. Some recent discussions that address specifically the issues of impersonality and the meaning, for Eliot, of tradition include those of Maud Ellmann, James Longenbach, Michael Levenson, and Sanford Schwartz. Louis Menand has written an important account of the relation between Eliot’s deployment of “tradition” and the rise of professionalism in the arts during the modernist period. 5. Similar language is present in “Ben Jonson” (1919): “The creation of a work of art . . . consists in the process of transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense, the life, of the author into the character. This is a very different matter from the orthodox creation in one’s own image” (Sacred Wood 118); and in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927): “Shakespeare, too, was occupied with the struggle—which alone constitutes life for the poet—to transmute

his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal” (Selected Essays 117).

6. Eliot’s sense of being surrounded by demanding women with literary ambitions is best seen in the already quoted letter to his father and a letter to Scofield Thayer (Letters 236). Both concern his editorial work for the Egoist. When engaged in negotiations over the Criterion, he writes to Pound that “there are only half a dozen men of letters (and no women) worth printing” (Letters 593).

7. Eliot’s association of revue and cinema with the middle class should not be taken as a factual account of who attended such performances. Rather this connection seems motivated by a desire to sequester mass culture from the working class, thus opening a space for an alliance between elite culture and workingclass culture (i.e., the music hall). Middle class should be taken throughout this chapter to refer to Eliot’s construction of that group. Andreas Huyssen has argued that mass culture (as opposed to working-class or popular culture) has consistently been gendered feminine, and that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the fear of the masses . . . is always also a fear of women” (52). Although not obvious in Eliot’s writings, such an association could be present in his thought. Fredric Jameson offers an alternate explanation of modernist Opposition to mass culture in his thesis that mass culture and modernism are structurally interrelated responses to the commodity form in late capitalism, with modernism constituting a reactive stance. 8. “The fierce talent of Nellie Wallace . . . holds the most boisterous musichall in complete subjection” (“London Letter,” June 1921, 688). Given Eliot’s claim that interaction between the audience and the performer is desirable, the language of subjection here is confusing. The ambivalence expressed here toward audience participation is an ambivalence found in his treatment of music hall performers as well and points toward the relationship between Eliot’s class ideology and performance aesthetics (as I hope will become clear in the final section of

Notes to Pages 144-51 195 the essay). I am indebted to Molly Rothenberg for bringing this issue to my attention. 9. This language is reminiscent of Edward Gordon Craig’s and Yeats’s theories of the theater, and Eliot aligns himself with them further when he calls for a

return to ritual in drama. See Craig’s essay, “The Actor and the Uber-Marionette,” for the best-known statement of his position. Yeats emphasized the importance of ritual in drama and the need to avoid naturalistic acting, in (among other places) “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” and “The Theatre” (Essays). 10. On the other hand, Eliot concludes another diatribe against poor acting, “The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric” (1919), by pointing to the ballet as the ideal toward which poetic drama must strive: “To obtain, with verse, an effect as immediate and direct as that of the best ballet” (39). Clearly Eliot is vacillating between two models—music hall and ballet. 11. See Valerie Eliot’s edition of the original drafts of this poem, especially the first section of “The Burial of the Dead” (5). As early as 1914 Eliot was playing with popular art forms. In a series of letters to Eleanor Hinkley he sketched out the scenario for his “great ten reel cinema drama EFFIE THE WAIF” (Letters 62, 7off.). His “King Bolo” verses would also be relevant here. The relationship between Eliot’s interest in popular forms and his development as a dramatist deserves further examination. Caro] Smith traces his use, not only of music hall and jazz, but of middle-class forms such as revue and domestic comedy, in his attempts to reach a broad audience (Eliot’s Dramatic Theory). 12. This appropriation of working-class culture on one level reproduces the

class hierarchy of Eliot’s society. On another, it suggests the quandary Eliot found himself in in trying to create a popular elite art, and the extent to which he was resisting any identification with the middle class in order to do so. 13. Thus, when Eliot lists the criteria for a study of dance that will lead to its proper future shape, he ends by instructing the author to “track down the secrets of rhythm in the (still undeveloped) science of neurology” (“The Ballet” 442).

14. The relationship between the primitive, ritual, and Eliot’s critical thought has been discussed in depth by Crawford, Manganaro, and Skaff. 15. Burger describes art in bourgeois society in terms of its “progressive detachment .. . from real life contexts, and the correlative crystallization of a distinctive sphere of experience, i.e., the aesthetic” (23). That is, art in bourgeois society is defined by its autonomy. Eagleton interprets this distancing of art from “real life” as a defensive strategy against commodification (i.e., mass culture), but one that has the side effect of “reproducing that other side of the commodity which is its fetishism” (“Capitalism” 67). Eliot is easily read in terms of this

dilemma: caught between an irrelevant autonomy and an increasingly commodified popular culture, he attempts to avoid the latter without condemning himself to the former. 16. See also Eagleton’s analysis of the ideological implications of Eliot’s criticism (“Rise of English”) and Raymond Williams on the relation between modernism and the ideology of the sovereign individual. 17. See Gilbert and Gubar (148-49) for a brief discussion of the nature of male modernist compliments of female writers. Frank Lentricchia’s discussion of

196 Notes to Pages 153-59 Wallace Stevens’s conflicted gender identity may also be useful for understanding

Eliot’s discomfort with women artists and the “feminine” in art. Lentricchia argues that American culture devalued the aesthetic as a feminine realm, valuing economic activity and success as properly masculine. This made it difficult for male artists to define themselves in a culturally valued way. In the case of Stevens, and the same might be said of Eliot, it led to a bifurcation of the poet’s life, with

an economically viable career taking up his daytime hours, the poetry being relegated to the private sphere of activity, that is, the feminine. 18. The argument is not that performers should act only in the most selfish manner, or that all hierarchies in performed art are oppressive. Rather, at issue are the conceptual connections between Eliot’s treatment of the performer and his

class, gender, and aesthetic ideologies. Some version of this constellation of ideologies is also applicable to some other modernist performance aesthetics (see chap. 5). 9

1. The narrative content of Sweeney Agonistes is also quite misogynistic. The hero, Sweeney, proclaiming in reference to a woman’s death at the hands of her lover that “[a]ny man might do a girl in.” The presence of a violently misogynistic element has been noted in a number of Eliot’s texts— “The Love Song of Saint Sebastian” and The Family Reunion, as well as in Sweeney Agonistes. In the latter,

the sin-purgation-redemption thematic that controls the philosophical level of meaning in the play is embodied by Sweeney’s story of the man who “did a girl in.” According to Carol Smith, “[T]he beloved’s murder represents a brutal cleansing of human desire and an abandonment of the old life of ‘birth and copulation and death’” (“Sweeney and the Jazz Age” 97). David Galef calls Sweeney’s story a “grotesque perversion of the spiritual halfway state” and the Lysol bath that the murderer keeps his victim in “a horrible travesty of baptism” (503). It is unclear why the sin of the man should be purged by cleansing the body of the woman he murdered—unless the sin is in fact hers, not his. The obvious

answer seems to be that this murderer has projected his disgust at his own sexuality onto its object, blaming her for his own “uncleanliness” and killing her in order to escape his own desire. The Lysol bath continues the process: the need to cleanse the female body acts as a displaced confession of his own inability to come to terms with the male body and its functions. 2. See Letters 292. The Russian Ballet had returned to England the previous year, and it is possible that Eliot saw them perform at the Coliseum as part of a music hall program. They performed in this context from early September 1918 till late March 1919. I have not located confirmation of his presence at a performance before the May 1919 letter cited above. From April 10 to July 30, 1919, the

| company was presenting full-evening performances at the Alhambra Theatre. (See Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed, for the dates, places, and repertoires of their

London seasons.) Although Massine choreographed a total of ten ballets for Diaghilev before he left the company in 1921, I discuss only those that seem to have had the greatest impact on the London elite— The Good Humoured Ladies, La

Notes to Pages 159-65 197 boutique fantasque, The Three Cornered Hat, and, to a lesser extent, Parade and his

version of The Rite of Spring. The first three of these ballets were premiered during Diaghilev’s first two postwar seasons and thus set the terms of the critical discourse. Two other Massine ballets premiered in 1918 treated subjects from

Russian folklore and thus had more in common with the prewar seasons than these three. 3. Osbert’s brother, Sacheverell, also noted this change in audience: “It was

amusing ... to see the intelligentsia of Bloomsbury, who had previously affected to despise Diaghilev, rallying to the ballet because of his patronage of Andre Durain and Picasso” (19). Garafola documents the shift in Diaghilev’s London audience in detail (see especially chap. 12). 4. In a 1977 interview with Robert Hardin, Massine comments, “Iam by no means a classical dancer” (68). Sokolova wrote that “Massine had certain physical defects, which prevented him from becoming a classical dancer” (140). 5. Garafola also notes the weakening of dramatic narrative in Diaghilev’s productions, beginning with Parade (1917), as well as the continued presence

of plots, “however flimsy and unrelated to the choreography they might be,” throughout the twenties (136). As she indicates in relation to Parade, the alternative to narrative structure adopted was close in form to that of the music hall and revue—a series of short, barely related sketches (136). In fact, the presence of an overarching theme would ally a ballet more closely to revue than music hall. 6. See Garafola for an extended analysis of Nyinska’s treatment of gender in these two ballets (128-32). The mixed, or in the case of Les noces, largely negative, reaction of the British press to these two ballets is not irrelevant here. The reviews quoted by Macdonald of Les noces repeatedly critique its negative treatment of marriage (Diaghilev Observed 325-37). Nuyinska refused to depict the event as a Joyous occasion, noting that not only would the marriage between two peasants in old Russia have been arranged without their consent, but that most likely the bride would become “nothing more, in her new, rough family, than a useful extra worker” (“Creation of Les noces” 59).

7. In a statement of her aesthetic principles written most probably in the early twenties Niinska criticizes dancers who depend on “individuality,” on their

personal strengths and perceptions, in performing a choreographer’s work: “Such dancers falsely transmit the choreographic score, utterly destroying the particularity of the work. The actual work of the choreographer perishes” (“On Movement” 87). In regard to the role of plot in ballet, Irina Nyinska, Bronistawa’s daughter, has claimed that her mother left Diaghilev’s company in 1925 in part because she wanted to choreograph ballets with no plot, and “Diaghilev was against plotless, abstract ballets” (“Conversation” 44). 8. According to Garafola, the audience for the Russian Ballet shifted away from “artists and writers of the avant-garde” after the early twenties (350). When the company returned to England in 1924, after more than a year’s absence, its offerings appealed to a segment of the London public characterized by their snobbery and francophilia, and by the final phase of the company’s existence, from 1925 to Diaghilev’s death in 1929, “[T]he Ballets Russes became a public embodiment of the values and lifestyle of England’s dandy-aesthetes” (360).

198 Notes to Pages 166-68 Diaghilev’s attitude toward Niinska, despite his admiration for her work, indicates the depth of the masculine bias present in upper reaches of the company’s hierarchy. Buckle attributes the following to Diaghilev: “What a choreographer Bronia would have been if only she were a man!” And he goes on to explain that Diaghilev “admired her and was fond of her, but she was downright, difficult and determined, and he found this unacceptable in one of her sex” (446). Despite the important contributions to ballet by a few women choreographers and teachers, as an institution it has been dominated by men—particularly when contrasted with modern dance—and women have had their most public and pervasive impact as performers.

9. The ballet closed after completing four months of a planned six-month run and cost Diaghilev the scenery and costumes to help offset the debt incurred by the spectacular production. Tellingly, W. A. Propert complained that The Sleeping Princess “was the culminating effort of a school whose only ideal was the glorification of the ballerina” (Russian Ballet, 1921-1929 10). According to Kochno, Diaghilev decided that he had to import dancers from Russia for this production,

since “in dancing Massine’s modern choreography the company had lost the technique and the purity of style of classical ballet” (168). Ina comment pertinent to the development of ballet (and the ballet audience) in England after Diaghilev, Arnold Haskell praised The Sleeping Princess for redressing the balance between dance and the visual and musical elements he felt had overwhelmed other ballets. Haskell maintained that its dependence on classical technique required “a real knowledge of dancing” in order to discuss it intelligently; the production “gave the ballet public rigid standards, and to-day [1935] in England its influence in retrospect is tremendous” (322-23). 10. Pound, although he liked La boutique fantasque, seemed to prefer the earlier, expressly “Russian,” Prince Igor: “The spirit of the music moves this flood

of physical rhythm; the ‘Igor’ has a force.” He finds this ballet “moving, and repeatedly moving,” while The Three Cornered Hat is merely clever (189). Parade was not worth going to, while The Good Humoured Ladies was “a pleasant show to see once” (201). Pound’s dislike of most of Massine’s ballets, however, was

mild compared to Wyndham Lewis’s attack on the Russian Ballet. He accused Diaghilev of “deliberately manufacturing a bastard ‘revolutionary’ article” that would sell. In doing so, “[H]e has used and degraded all the splendid material of artistic invention on which he could lay his hands” (56). He also insists that Diaghilev and his company “reflect . . . that phase of feminism expressed in the gilded Bohemia of the great capitals by the epicene fashion” ($7). 11. In addition, Massine’s own quality of gesture and movement, which, in its jerkiness and rapidity, led critics to compare it to cinema, might be considered typically modernist in its reference to emerging technologies. See Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” where he identifies this emergence of new technologies as one of the key components of the modernist conjuncture (324). 12. As early as 1911 the usefulness of the Russian Ballet’s representation of past periods and styles for a modernist aesthetic agenda was noted by T. E. Hulme. In his biography of Hulme, Alun R. Jones reports a conversation between Hulme and an acquaintance who was surprised to mect him at a perfor-

Notes to Pages 168-72 199 mance of Diaghilev’s company. However, unlike his friend, “Hulme was only impressed by the endeavors being made by Nijinsky and others with Diaghilev’s hearty support to bring the plastique of ballet into line with the non-humanist ideals that inspired Egyptian, archaic Greek and Polynesian art” (92). 13. On modernism and history see also Knapp’s chapter “Modernist Form and the Evasion of History,” Joseph Frank’s well-known essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” and Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. 14. In Writing Degree Zero Barthes outlines the analogous consequences of the autonomy aesthetic for the use of language, where, as in the case of Mallarmé, “[t]he word, dissociated from the husk of habitual clichés, and from the technical reflexes of the writer, is then freed from responsibility in relation to all possible

context; it. . . declares its solitude, and therefore its innocence” (75). 15. Burger sees this quality as definitive of the “historical avante-garde,” which he distinguishes from modernism. For example, he writes that “these movements liquidated the possibility of a period style when they raised to a principle the availability of the artistic means of past periods” (18). It seems obvious, however, that this, or a very similar process, was already occurring in modernist texts such as Ulysses and The Waste Land. 16. Thus, Marinetti proclaims that “FUTURISM WANTS TO TRANSFORM THE VARIETY THEATRE INTO A THEATRE OF AMAZEMENT, RECORD-SETTING, AND BODY-MADNESS” (183). While Massine simply wanted to incorporate popular culture into elite art, Marinetti wants to take over the Variety Theatre altogether. Burger’s distinct claim for the historical avantgarde, as opposed to modernism, can be seen at work here. Futurism, or the avant-garde, unlike the Russian Ballet, “intends the abolition of autonomous art

by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life” (54). Although the specifics of Massine’s contributions to Parade are contested, there is little doubt that he embraced the principles governing its composition and applied similar principles to pieces more clearly authored by himself. 17. This is not to say that members of the audience did not overcome the distance implied by the aesthetic governing the ballet they were watching. As de Certeau has argued, it is one thing to control the production and distribution of a

product; quite another to control the manner of its consumption. Individual performers as well were capable of subverting the demand for “impersonality” made by this aesthetic by their performance style. 18. This would be a version of Marcuse’s theory of art as “affirmative culture.” In his essay, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” Marcuse argues that art represents a completely separate, better, and more valuable world than that of

daily life, one that can be realized by every individual within his or herself without requiring any change in the actual world, since “what occurs in art, occurs with no obligation” (114). Adorno, unwilling to concede that art functions only in support of the status quo, replies that “affirmation in art is not completely wrong. . . . Culture keeps barbarism in check; it is the lesser of two evils” (357). 19. For example: “[A] fair test of the real art of the ballet, as distinct from the

fortuitous conflict of several arts in one performance, is whether one does hear

200 Notes to Page 172 the music” (Pound 191). Roger Fry is appealing to similar standards but expresses concern that the visual arts may not be keeping up with the music and choreography (“M. Larionow” 112). The Times, referring explicitly to Wagner, explains to its readers that Diaghilev’s “new art combines on equal terms music, decorative art, and choreography” (“Russian Ballet: A Triad of Arts”).

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Yeats, William Butler. Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

214 Works Cited ———. Explorations. New York: Macmillan, 1962. ———. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954.

———. The Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1983. ———. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Russcll K. Alspach. London: Macmillan, 1969.

Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 67, 138, 110, 122; performer in, 24, 48,

199n. 18 162-63; Shaw and, I10-I1,

Allan, Maud, 2, 31-45, I19, 173; as IIl4, 116

artist, 45; biography, 32, 34; dance Barthes, Roland, 65, 199n.14 theory of, 47-48; Duncan and, 33, Beecham, Thomas, 83-84, 121 45-46; Eastern dance and, 39; gen- Beerbohm, Max, 36, 41, 45 der ideology and, 5, 40, 42; public- _ Bell, Clive, 163-64 ity for, 34-35; reception of, 8, 36, Benjamin, Walter, 1, 15

40-41, 123, 125; Russian Ballet Bennett, Arnold, 26, 158 and, 121, 134; on Salomé, 42-44; Benois, Alexandre, 121, 122

Wilde and, 75 Bernhardt, Sarah, 82, 88, 104, 106

At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats), 91-93, Biches, Les (Niyinska), 162

95, 99 Boutique fantasque, La (Massine), 160—

Author, II, 175n.1; dance and, 3, 61

117, 123-24, 165; Foucault and, Birger, Peter, 158, 168, 193n.1, 123; performer and, 4, 173-74; in 19§n.1§5, I199n.15

Shaw, 104-5, 107-9 Butt, Alfred, 34-35, 40

Autonomy of art, 2, 4, 164-65, 168; Craig and, 69, 73; Duncan and, 54, Calvary (Yeats), 91-92, 97-98 73; Eliot and, 148; Massine and, Cat and the Moon, The (Yeats), 91-92,

170; modernism and, 10, 172; Rus- 97-98 sian Ballet and, 172, 174; symbol- Chaplin, Charlie, 145-46, 150

ism and, 59; Symons and, 64 Class ideologies, 7, 48; Collins and, 21; Duncan and, §5; Eliot and,

Bakst, Léon, 121, 133 139-40, 142-43, 148-49, ISI-53; Ballet, 119-34, 155—74; Allan and, female performer and, 6, 28; Shaw 48; aS-art, 123, 125, 164; before and, 110; Yeats and, 89—90 Russian Ballet, 16, 23; corps de Collins, Lottie, 17-22, I19, 176n.2 ballet, 25, 27, 163; Duncan and, 48; Craig, Edward Gordon, 4, 59-62,

Eliot and, 137, 145-47, 149-50; 66-73; autonomy of art and, 69, Fokine’s reform of, 129; gender 73; Duncan and, 5, 60-61, 68-70; and, 23-24, 121, 131-33; Massine on performer, 66-67, 173; Russian and, 159-60; music hall and, 15, Ballet and, 125, 134; Shaw and, 215

216 Index Craig, Edward Gordon (continued) 138; performed art and, 3, 10, 146103, 188n.1; Symons and, 60, 66; 48, 153, 171; performer and, 137women and, 61-62, 182n.4; Yeats 38, 144-45, 150

on, 88—89 Erotic display in dance, 2, 6, 24, 39, AI, 111-12; Allan and, 48; ballet

Dance history, 16, 19, 32; literature and, 23-24, 123, 131, 133, 165;

and, 1-2, 6 Duncan and, 50-51; Shaw and,

Dancer’s body, 5—6, I1, 40-41, 45, 114-16; Yeats and, 87 125; Allan and, 39-40; Craig and,

67; Collins and, 21; Duncan and, Fatal Woman, Collins and, 21; Rus$I-$3, 70-71; in pantomime, 25- sian Ballet and, 126; Salomé as, 44,

28; Shaw and, 112, 114-16; 75, 77-78, 81, 85; Yeats and, 87, Symons and, 64; Yeats and, 90-91, 93-94

96, 99 Female performer, 48; Duncan and,

Delsarte, Francois, 48, 180n.17 50, 119; Eliot and, 141; Fokine Diaghilev, Serge, 2, 119-21, 124, and, 131; gender ideology and, 2,

126, I3I, 133, 155, 164-65; ballet 6, 28, 70; Shaw and, 113-15, I17; tradition and, 169; Massine and, Symons and, 65; Yeats and, 94 1§7-59, 170; Nyinska and, 162; Fletcher, John Gould, 127-28 Pavlova and, 122; performer and, Fokine, Michel, 119, 120-21; as au173; success of Russian Ballet and, thor, 133, 166; dance theory of, 9,

9, 137, 166 128-30, 134; Duncan and, 128; feDreaming of the Bones, The (Yeats), male dancer and, 131; Massine and,

OI, 95-96 159, 161; music hall and, 122;

Duncan, Isadora, 2, 31, 45-55, 119; Shaw and, III, 130 Allan and, 33, 45-48; audience Foucault, Michel, 123, 175n.2

and, 73, 173; autonomy of art and, Four Plays for Dancers (Yeats), 88,

$4, 73, 174; body and, $3, 70-71, 91, 94 125; Craig and, 60-61, 68, 70, 73; Fuller, Loie, 71-72, 181—82n. 3 dance theory of, 47, 49-50, 52, $9, 72; Fokine and, 129; gender ideol- Garcia, Felix Fernandez, 170-71, 173

ogy and, 29, 50-SI, $5; on Jazz, Gender ideology, 6, 178n.10; Allan $2; motherhood and, 53-54; recep- and, 35-38, 40, 42-44; art and, 61tion of, 8, 47; Russian Ballet and, 62, 70, 162, 164; Collins and, 21; 120-21, 128, 134; symbolism and, Duncan and, 52, $55; Eliot and,

5, 71-72; Symons and, 70, 73 141-42, 149-51; female body and,

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 162 28, 39, 47; Russian Ballet and, Duse, Elenora, 106-8, 189n.4 120-21, 161-62; Salomé and, 83;

separate spheres, 8, 37, 42; Shaw

Eagleton, Terry, 155-56, 195nn. and, 103, 112; status of dance and,

15, 16 7, 11, 48; Symons and, 63; Yeats

Eliot, T. S., 137-53, 158; ballet and, and, 9I—100

137; class and, 7, 142-43, I$I—5§2; Genée, Adeline, 16, 23-25 gender and, 141-42, 151; history Good Humoured Ladies, The (Massine),

and, 168; Massine and, 155, 159, 160-61, 167 167, 170, 172~—73; modernism and, Gramsci, Antonio, 139-40

Index 217 Hobsbawm, Eric, 38 139-50, 153, 158; Russian Ballet and, 121-24; Shaw and, 107, 110

Immaturity (Shaw), 111-13 My Life and Dancing (Allan), 42-44

Intentions (Wilde), 81 |

Iphigenia (Duncan), 47, 179n.12 Niyinska, Bronislawa, I1, 162, 164,

Irigaray, Luce, 113 173, 197nn. 6, 7

Irving, Henry, 104, 105, 109 Niyinsky, Vaslav, 121, 122, 127, 12930, 131-33, 166

Jameson, Fredric, 155, 194n.7 Noces, Les (Niyinska), 162 Jeux (Nyinsky), 129-30

Joyce, James, 151, 165 Only Jealousy of Emer, The (Yeats), 91, 93-95

Karsavina, Tamara, 121, 132, 164, Orientalism, 37-38, 77 171; Massine and, 160, 163, 167

Kermode, Frank, 65, 69, 71, Pantomime, 16, 25, 27-28, 177n.7

83, 188n.9 Parade (Massine), 163, 166-67, 169 Pavlova, Anna, 122-24, 132

Levinson, André, $51, $3—-54, 73, Performer, 2—5, 164, 173-74; ballet

168—69 and, 133, 159, 162, 172; Eliot and,

Lewis, Wyndam, 167, 198n.10 138-40, 144, 153; Shaw and, 10s, Lloyd, Marie, 139-44, 150-52, 173 107-10; Yeats and, 89—90 Lukacs, Georg, 42, I191n.12 Personality, 4, 50, 105—6, 180n.19; Eliot and, 140, 144-46, 148-50,

Male dancer, 24-25, 117, 165; Rus- 193—94N. 3 sian Ballet and, 121, 123, 131-33; Pertoldi, Erminia, 11I-13, II4

Yeats and, 97-98 Picasso, Pablo, 159, 175n.2

Mallarmé, Stephane, 64, 72 Pound, Ezra, 89, 167, 198n.10 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 169, Praz, Mario, 76-78, 81

199n. 16 Pulcinella (Massine), 168-69

Marx, Karl, 113, 175—76n. 3

Massine, Léonide, 155—74; as author, Revue, 143, 149-50, 155, 157-59

165-66; Eliot and, 145, 149-51, Ricketts, Charles, 85, 128, 132 172; gender and, 164; modernism Rite of Spring, The (Massine), 170 and, 9-10, 157, 159; Nyinska and, Russian Ballet, The, 2-3, 9, 119-34, 162; performer and, 162-63, 173; 1§5—-74; Eliot and, 137-38, 146;

reception of, 167 gender and, 3,7, II, 133, 165;

Modern dance, 3, 29, I9In.I Shaw and, I17

Modernism: autonomy of art in, Io, 174; dance and, II, 157, 159, 165, Sacre du printemps, Le (Nyinsky),

167; literary, 11, 138, 155, 157-58; 127-28

performer and, 171, 173 Said, Edward, 38, 77 Moore, Marianne, 150, 152 St. Denis, Ruth, 31 Mulvey, Laura, 26, 115 Salomé, 5, 40, 87; Allan on, 43-44; Music hall, 31, 119; Allan and, 34; fatal woman and, 77, 85 Collins and, 17—23; dance and, 15- Salomé (Strauss), 84-85 17, 29; Duncan and, 47; Eliot and, Salomé (Wilde), 36-37, 75-85

218 Index Schéhérazade (Fokine), 126-28 gender and, 62-63, 65—66; Russian

Scott, Joan, 62 Ballet and, 126; symbolism and, Separate-spheres ideology, 42, 48, 55, 69; Wilde and, 75 L77N. 3

Shaw, George Bernard, 3, 103-17; “Ta-rara-boom-de-ay” (Collins), 17author and, 104-5; on Collins, 18; 20, 22, 176n.2 Craig and, 103, 188n.1; dance and, Three Cornered Hat, The (Massine),

IIlO-12, 114-16, 119, 137; Fokine I6I, 163, 167, I70—-7I and, 111, 130, 134; gender and, Times (London): on Allan, 39, 40-41; 103, 106, 113-14, 117, 189n.5; per- Fokine in, 128; on Pavlova, 122, former and, 5, 9, 103-4, 106, 108, I24, 132; on Russian Ballet, 123, 110; theory of drama, 104, 107-9, 125-27, 129, 130, 132, 161; on Sa-

117; Yeats and, 103 lomé, 76, 84

Sitwell, Osbert, 159 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Sleeping Princess, The (Nyinska), 166 (Eliot), 140-41, 150

Sokolova, Lydia, 163, 171 Tricorne, Le (Massine). See The Three Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 188n.9 Cornered Hat Strauss, Richard, 75, 83, 85

Stravinsky, Igor, 121, 133, I70 Vision of Salomé, The (Allan), 31, 33, Suffrage movement, 7-8, 37, 40, 42— 36, 39-44 43, 53, 63, 70, 186n.11, 190n.7, Wagner, Richard, 119-20, 129-30 192n.7

Sweeney Agonistes (Eliot), 145-46, Waste Land, The (Eliot), 146, 150,

148, 196n.1 158, 167-68

Symbolism, 5, 59, 63, 66-67, 119, Wilde, Oscar, 5, 8, 75-85; Allan and, 182n.8; Craig and, 69; dance and, 36-37; Strauss and, 84 4, 8, 64, 83, 87; Duncan and, $4, Woolf, Virginia, 141, 151 71-72; Symons and, 69, 18In.1;

Wilde and, 75; Yeats and, 187n.3 Yeats, William Butler, 3, 7, 9, 87Symbolist Movement in Literature, The 100, 171; Craig and, 59, 88-89;

(Symons), 59, 69, 192n.8 Fokine and, 134; gender and, 9, 87, Symons, Arthur, 3-4, 59, 62-66; 91-93, 95-97, 99-100; performer Craig and, 60, 67; dance and, 5, and, 89-90; Shaw and, 103; theater 63-66, 68; Duncan and, 70, 72; and, 88—89, 137, 158