Modernism's mythic pose: gender, genre, solo performance 9780199877447, 9780199384587, 9780199766260

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Foreword (page vii)
Acknowledgments (page xi)
List of Figures (page xiii)
Introduction (page 3)
I. Modern, Antimodern, and Mythic Posing (page 3)
II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment (page 11)
III. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual (page 14)
IV. Solo Genres (page 18)
V. Modernist Kinesthetics (page 21)
1. The Solo's Origins: Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues (page 26)
I. Galatea's Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama (page 28)
II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton's Attitude (page 32)
III. Goethe's Proserpina and Later Posers (page 39)
IV. Barrett Browning: Naming "Aeschylus" and "The Virgin Mary..." (page 44)
V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti and Augusta Webster (page 51)
2. Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film (page 58)
I. Delsarte's Aesthetics of the Attitude (page 60)
II. Disseminating Delsarte (page 67)
III. Performing Delsartism: Genevieve Stebbins and the Early Motions of Modern Dance (page 73)
IV. Performing Delsartism (Take Two): Denishawn and Hollywood (page 82)
V. The Russian Delsarte: Kuleshov and Film Montage (page 91)
3. Positioning Genre: The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures of Recitation (page 100)
I. Expression, Recitation, and Literary Interpretation (page 102)
II. Charlotte Mew: The Magdalene in "Madeleine in Church" (page 110)
III. T.S. Eliot's "Magus": Impersonality, Objective Correlative, and Mythical Method (page 117)
IV. Chautauquas, "Sextus Propertius," and Ezra Pound's History (page 125)
V. Amy Lowell's Polyphonic Emma Lyon Hamilton (page 134)
4. The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan's Solo Dance (page 144)
I. The Shock of Solo Expression (page 147)
II. The Proto-Motor: Duncan and Delsartean Posing (page 152)
III. The Joints of Early Modernism: Conjunctures of Materialism and Metaphysics (page 160)
IV. The Multiplied Body of the Motor (page 167)
V. Motorized Propulsion and Modernist Ritual (page 173)
VI. Repetitions of the Motor: Will and Spontaneity (page 177)
VII. The Weight of a Thigh and the "New Woman" of Modernism (page 182)
5. Ritualized Reception: H.D.'s Antimodern Poetics and Cinematics (page 191)
I. Imagism Unstuck: H.D.'s Dissent and Pound's Revision (page 194)
II. Stepping from Stone: Dramatic Monologues of The God (page 198)
III. The Ritual Chorus and a Soloist's Suspicion in Ion and "The Dancer" (page 204)
IV. Types of Participation: H.D.'s Film Essays and Reviews (page 212)
V. H.D.'s Attitudes on Film (page 218)
VI. Montage, a Classical Technology (page 225)
VII. The Soloists of Trilogy (page 231)
Afterword (page 239)
Notes (page 250)
Bibliography (page 319)
Index (page 343)

Citation preview

Modernism's Mythic Pose

MODERNIST LITERATURE & CULTURE Kevin J. H. Dettmar e& Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors

Consuming Traditions Elizabeth Outka Machine-Age Comedy

Michael North The Art of Scandal Sean Latham

The Hypothetical Mandarin Eric Hayot Nations of Nothing But Poetry

Matthew Hart Modernism & Copyright

Edited by Paul Saint-Amour Accented America

Joshua Miller Criminal Ingenuity Ellen Levy Modernism’s Mythic Pose

Carrie J. Preston Pragmatic Modernism Lisi Schoenbach

Modernism’'s Mythic Pose Gender, Genre, Solo Performance

Carrie J. Preston

arian nie

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town DaresSalaam HongKong _ Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei ‘Toronto With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preston, Carrie J. Modernism’s mythic pose : gender, genre, solo performance / Carrie J. Preston. p. cm.—(Modernist literature & culture) ISBN 978-0-19-976626-0 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. American poetry—z2oth century—History and criticism. 2. Dance—United States—History—ioth

century. 3. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 4. Modernism (Art)— United States. 5. American literature—Classical influences. 6. Art, Modern—Classical influences. I. Title. PS310.M57P74 2011

700'.4112—dc22 2011014568

135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Contents Foreword vii Acknowledgments xi List of Figures xiii

Introduction 3 I. Modern, Antimodern, and Mythic Posing 3 II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment 11 III. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual 14 IV. Solo Genres 18 V. Modernist Kinesthetics 21 1. The Solo’s Origins: Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues 26 I. Galatea’s Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama_ 28

II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton’s Attitude 32 III. Goethe’s Proserpina and Later Posers 39 IV. Barrett Browning: Naming “Aeschylus” and “The Virgin Mary...” 44 V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti and Augusta Webster 51

2. Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film 58

I. Delsarte’s Aesthetics of the Attitude 60

II. Disseminating Delsarte 67 III. Performing Delsartism: Genevieve Stebbins and the Early Motions of Modern Dance 73

vi CONTENTS

IV. Performing Delsartism (Take Two): Denishawn and Hollywood 82 V. The Russian Delsarte: Kuleshov and Film Montage 91 3. Positioning Genre: The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures

of Recitation 100 I. Expression, Recitation, and Literary Interpretation 102 II. Charlotte Mew: The Magdalene in “Madeleine in Church” 110 III. T. S. Eliot’s “Magus”: Impersonality, Objective Correlative, and

Mythical Method 117 IV. Chautauquas, “Sextus Propertius,’ and Ezra Pound’s History 125 V. Amy Lowell’s Polyphonic Emma Lyon Hamilton 134 4. The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan’s Solo Dance 144

I. The Shock of Solo Expression 147 II. The Proto-Motor: Duncan and Delsartean Posing 152 III. The Joints of Early Modernism: Conjunctures of Materialism and Metaphysics 160 IV. The Multiplied Body of the Motor 167 V. Motorized Propulsion and Modernist Ritual 173 VI. Repetitions of the Motor: Will and Spontaneity 177 VII. The Weight of a Thigh and the “New Woman” of Modernism 182 5. Ritualized Reception: H.D’s Antimodern Poetics and Cinematics 191 I. Imagism Unstuck: H.D.’s Dissent and Pound’s Revision 194 II. Stepping from Stone: Dramatic Monologues of The God 198 III. The Ritual Chorus and a Soloist’s Suspicion in Jon and

“The Dancer” 204 IV. Types of Participation: H.D.’s Film Essays and Reviews 212 V. H.D-s Attitudes on Film 218

VI. Montage, a Classical Technology 225 VI. The Soloists of Trilogy 231

Afterword 239

Notes 250 Bibliography 319

Index 343

Foreword Recovering the astonishingly influential yet largely forgotten movement called Delsartism for modernist studies, Carrie Preston’s Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance makes modernism new by attending to the ways

in which it was always old. As Preston shrewdly remarks, “Modernism was rarely so ‘new as advertised,” and her book reveals modernism’s debt to a set of interna-

tional movements popular between 1880 and 1920 that were inspired by the French performance theorist Francois Delsarte (1811-1871). Later considered excessively feminine and nostalgic, particularly from the perspective of futurism and other hypermasculine celebrations of modernity, Delsartism emphasized the body’s capacity for expression as key to spiritual health and to that end promoted practices such as posing and poetic recitation. Uncovering a lost genealogy of modernism, Modernism’s Mythic Pose links Delsartism to an overlooked tradition of paratheatrical practice—especially the mythic pose but including Romantic and Victorian monodramas—and then connects both to a revisionist account of the dramatic monologue as a genre deeply concerned with the body. What emerges is a new way of thinking about modernism's relation to the performing body, as well as about relations among modern dance, acting theory, literary recitation, poetry, and film—all of which were influenced by Delsartism. The book builds toward detailed case studies of H.D. and Isadora Duncan, but in the intervening chapters, we encounter a fascinating array of figures and texts that rarely enter into studies of modernism. There is Delsarte himself, of course, whose meticulous study of the “jointed body” and its expressive capacities refers to the elbow as “the thermometer of the soul”; the scandalous Emma Lyon Hamilton, Vil

viii FOREWORD

who draped herself in veils, girdles, turbans, and mantles to pose in aristocratic drawing rooms as Niobe, Mary Magdalene, Medea, Iphigenia; Goethe’s Proserpina

and the monodramas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Augusta Webster; and Vernon Lee, whose psychological aesthetics emphasized the embodied and kinesthetic dimension of aesthetic response. But Preston does not present this rich archive simply for its novelty: moving from Delsarte and Hamilton

through monodramas, and then on to dramatic monologues, modern dance, silent film, and cultures of recitation, she traces a typological pattern of thinking that amounts to a prehistory of the modernist mythmaking typically associated with T. S. Eliot’s famous essay on Ulysses. In this line of thought, the mythic pose, “an imagined rupture in time,’ dramatizes, makes visible, embodies the kind of multiple temporalities enacted more abstractly by Leopold Bloom as he walks forth as Odysseus-Elijah-Shakespeare. Exciting enough in itself, this genealogy also transforms familiar landmarks. Having reconnected the dramatic monologue to the history of solo performance, Preston offers dynamic rereadings of Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” and Ezra

Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” in the context of related poems by Charlotte Mew and Amy Lowell and the performance practices of the Chautauqua movement. Isadora Duncan and modern dance recover their central importance to international modernism here in an authoritative exploration of Duncan’s productively ambivalent relation to technological modernity: Duncan’s Delsartean body, easily dismissed as a nostalgic retreat from modern times in its yearning to materialize the soul, engages, in Preston’s fresh account, in a critical pas de deux with the kinetic energy of modernity. In the last chapter, instead of attempting to shift H.D. into the center of a modernism we already know, Preston rethinks both H.D. and modernism in relation to kinesthesia in a way that makes H.D.’s supposed adherence to Pound’s early version of imagism and her subsequent marginalization in literary history seem all the more skewed. Not only H.D.’s investment in poetic typology but also her interest in film looks different in this light. It is not surprising that Delsartism influenced acting in early film—LD. W. Griffith, in fact,

required his actors to train in Delsartean methods—but it turns out that H.D’s interest in montage, usually associated exclusively with the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, also owes a good deal to Eisenstein’s teacher, Lev Kuleshov, who was steeped in Delsartism’s approach to the expressive body. Some might say (though certainly not Preston, who writes with tact and generosity) that certain theorists of the body wouldn't know one if they tripped over it. Preston takes on major theorists of the discursive or performative body, not to debunk them but to open their thinking to complexities introduced by her history

FOREWORD | ix

of the performing body. Judith Butler and Francois Delsarte, it turns out, have more in common than one might think, and Preston’s comparative analysis of the two throws into sharp relief the problems of agency that motivated Butler’s revisit-

ing of the materialization of the body in Bodies That Matter. Of particular interest is the way Delsartism’s emphasis on the will complicates models of reflexive social construction; roles may be thrust upon us, but we also choose them. Theorists of performance, then, as well as those interested in embodied feminist practice, the fine arts, poetry, and dance, will find much to contemplate in Modernism’s Mythic Pose, and we are delighted to welcome it into the series. MARK WOLLAEGER AND KEVIN J. H. DETTMAR

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Acknowledgments A book is in no way a solo performance, although it does require considerable time alone. In the period of my life that this project occupied, I spent time in many different locations, and I must acknowledge friends and mentors in each. This project began as a dissertation at Rutgers University under the excellent direction of Elin Diamond, Alicia Ostriker, and Carolyn Williams. Their guidance and insights are evident on every page, but their contributions extend well beyond careful readings and lengthy discussions. Each has helped me find the space in the profession where I could live. In Michigan, the location of so many of my first drafts, I must thank my family

for keeping my writing cabin stocked with food from their gardens, pulling me away from the computer with bonfires and horseback rides, even driving cookies to New Jersey to sweeten a dissertation defense. My mother, who has always helped

me get wherever I needed to go, still manages to drive me to archives and conferences. I am grateful to all my parents, Cindy, Chuck, Ian, Ilona, and Leroy, and srandparents, Betty and George. My colleagues at Boston University collectively work to make our department an excellent environment for junior faculty. John Paul Riquelme, Bonnie Costello, Anna Henchman, and Sean Edgecomb read and commented on drafts at crucial junctures. For their guidance and support, I would like to thank Deborah Belle, Larry Breiner, William Carroll, Jack Matthews, Virginia Sapiro, and James Winn. My students in several semesters of Performing Genders have been my teachers as well, and I am particularly grateful to Carrie Chiusano and Alexandra Smith, who assisted with research.

x1

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Peter Paul Career Development Professorship gave me the time and resources

to finish this project and begin international research for another. A few postcards from the travel Peter Paul enabled have been small recompense for his generosity, personal kindness, and commitment to the potential of junior faculty. Librarians and archivists at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Harvard Theatre Collection, and Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University have been tre-

mendously helpful. Lori Belilove and Cherlyn Smith, director and associate director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company, provided expert instruction in Duncan’s technique and repertory, helpful interviews, and cherished opportunities to dance.

I am grateful to the Modernist Literature and Culture series editors; Mark Wollaeger kept this project going with his generous readings and careful stewardship at every stage, and Kevin Dettmar defines for me what it means to be a good human and scholar. The editors at Oxford University Press, Brendan O’Neill and Shannon McLachlan, have patiently answered questions and taught me how to get a manuscript ready for production. The formerly anonymous readers provided by the press offered invaluable suggestions for revision: Michelle Clayton helped pare away unnecessary material, and Martin Harries’s ideas about antimodernism were absolutely crucial to the final framing of the book. I also benefited from the insights of the anonymous reviewer at Theatre Journal and Editor David Salz, who helped

me clarify the significance of the Delsartean tradition. The editors at Theatre Journal and Modernism/modernity have kindly allowed me to reprint material that first appeared in their journals. And to Derek, who has endured this book for as long as our partnership. He has jealously protected my time and my dreams and selflessly helped me pack for conferences, performances, and residencies abroad. He has watched me go to a job across the continent from where he must live and work and accepted far too much solo time. Because of him, I am never quite alone.

List of Figures I1 Isadora Duncan in Marseillaise by Arnold Genthe (1915-1918). 4 I.2 La Marseillatse, detail from the eastern face of the Arc de Triomphe, 1832-35 (stone) by Francois Rude (1784-1855). 5

I.3 H.D. under the wing of Victory, H.D. Scrapbook (undated, c. 1920-1930). 6 1.1. Lady Hamilton as Bacchante by Elizabeth Louise Vigée le Brun (1790). 35 1.2. “Maria Magdalena” by Friedrich Rehberg (1758-1835), plate II from A New Edition Considerably Enlarged of Attitudes Faithfully Copied from

Nature, H. Humphrey, (1807). 36 1.3 ~The Muse of the Dance” by Friedrich Rehberg (1758-1835), plate VI from A New Edition Considerably Enlarged of Attitudes Faithfully Copied

from Nature, H. Humphrey, (1807). 37 1.4 Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante by Joshua Reynolds (1837). 39 2.1. “Medallion of Inflection” by Francois Delsarte in Delsarte System of Oratory (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893). 62 2.2 “Attitude of the Eyeball” in Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement (New York: Dance Horizons, 1954). 63

2.3 Eugen Sandow in “The Dying Gaul” by Benjamin Falk (1894). 67 2.4 “Mine woes afflict this spirit sore” in Anna Morgan, An Hour with Delsarte (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1890). 72 2.5 Genevieve Stebbins, The New York School of Expression (New York: Werner, 1893). 76

X11

xiv LIST OF FIGURES

2.6 “Grief Tableaux” in Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1889). 79

2.7. Irma, Margot, Theresa, Anna, Erica and Lisa Duncan in a pose from Iphigenia at the Hotel des Artistes, by Apeda Studios (New York, 1912). 80 2.8 Ted Shawn in “Death of Adonis,” by Lejaren A. Hiller (1923). 85 2.9 Ted Shawn in Gnossienne, by Witzel (1919). 86 2.10 Louisa Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929). 89 4.1. Isadora Duncan, by Paul Berger (1908). 155 4.2 Primavera (ca.1478, tempera on panel) (detail of 558) by Sandro Botticelli (1444/5-1510). 159 4.3. Margot, Anna, and Lisa Duncan in The Three Graces (1921). 160 4.4 “Isadora Duncan in the Marche Militaire” by John Sloan. From The Masses (May 1915). 186

4.5 Isadora Duncan, 1911, by John Sloan (American, 1871-1951). 188

4.6 Isadora Duncan by Aspell (1898). 189 5.1 H.D.near the time of her marriage; used for the cover of Collected Poems (1983). 192

5.2 Borderline film production still, H.D. (1930). 193 5.3 Asklepios, Hygeia & Nike from Epidaurus,” H.D. Scrapbook (undated, Ca. 1920-30). 220 5.4 “Metope of the Zeus Temple depicting Atlas, Apples of Hesperides,” H.D. Scrapbook (undated, ca. 1920-30). 221 5.5 H.D. with shawl and hands clasped to her face, Borderline (1930). 224 6.1. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6 (1977). 2.41 6.2 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #10 (1978). 2.42

Modernism's Mythic Pose

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Introduction I. Modern, Antimodern, and Mythic Poses One of the wildest of her dances she closed with arms outstretched and head thrown back almost out of sight until she resembled the headless Nike of Samathrace [sic]. —“Miss [Isadora] Duncan’s Vivid Dances,” New York Times (1909)!

Isadora Duncan, whom I often had the pleasure of admiring in her free improvisations among the veils of mother-of-pearl smoke of her atelier, used to dance freely, thoughtlessly. ... But she

never managed to project anything but the most complex feelings of desperate nostalgia, of spasmodic sensuality and cheerfulness, childishly feminine. —F. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” (1917)?

FE. T. Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, reacted uneasily to the “emotional expression” in Isadora Duncan’s “classical dances” (Marinetti 137-138). He dubbed her

“passéist” not only for her femininity and nostalgia but also for choreography that incorporates poses of classical statues such as the Victory of Samothrace or the French Nike in her dance to “Marseillaise” (Rouget de Lisle, 1914; figure I.1, figure

I.2.) For Marinetti, mythological figures did not belong in modernity, and his famous Futurist slogan declared that “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”’ And yet, this book demonstrates that a fascination with mythic posing was far more central to modernism than suggested by Marinetti’s rhetoric. Although primarily known as a poet, H.D. posed like a nude Greek athlete under the wing of Nike in a photomontage (ca. 1927-1928; figure I.3).* In another surprising juxtaposition, H.D. wrote about cinema as the 3

4. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

fulfillment of classical aesthetics while performing in silent films. Modernism posed

an expressive, “emotional” body in relation to classical figures in modern dances, films, poetry readings, and various paratheatrical performances, as well as many of the same music halls where Marinetti delivered manifestos.”

A little-known movement called Delsartism promoted the practices of solo posing and poetic recitation for health and personal development, as well as professional performance. Loosely derived from the French performance theorist Francois Delsarte (1811-1871) and benefiting from assumptions of French cultural

authority, Delsartism designated a varied set of international movements that were particularly popular between 1880 and 1920. Although it influenced acting theory, film, dance, physical culture, and even a university discipline focused on literary recitation, Delsartism is part of a genealogy of modernism that has been overlooked because of assumptions evident in Marinetti’s critique of Duncan: it

Fig [a Isadora Duncan in Marseillaise by Arnold Genthe (1915-1918).

Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

INTRODUCTION 5

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| / ‘| y Rude (1784-1855). Arc de i fae | FR j _ Triomphe, Paris, France/ i ek eee §6Giraudon. Courtesy of the | —— ee §_Bridgeman Art Library. was passéist, nostalgic, and feminine. Delsartism took the antimodern position that modernity had separated the body from the soul and that expressive solo performance could reunite a whole person, but it was not enclosed in an idealistic realm apart from modern technologies. Delsartism posed myth in ambivalent relation to modernity, as a still or pause that could function both as skeptical critique and nostalgic diversion. Mythic posing enabled new subject positions but paradoxically fixed them to timeworn norms; it framed questions and threats to modernity but also served as a sentimental escape. Delsartism incorporated prior traditions of posing by developing aesthetic and religious justifications for popular solo performances, especially nineteenthcentury monodramas and attitudes featuring characters from Christian or classical myth. These solos are overlooked generic antecedents for modern dance, one of the first “new” twentieth-century arts, and the dramatic monologue, an important form in modernist poetics and recitation.® Delsartism developed mythic posing into a central modernist kinesthetic: a philosophy and technique of movement

6 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

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emphasizing a tension between stasis and motion, poses of classical beauty, framed cinematic compositions, and speeding bodies. As Delsartism’s influence on cinema reveals, those working in the “mediated” art of film, as well as the “natural” modern

dancers and popular posers, adapted this kinesthetic for performance techniques that shaped American, British, French, Russian, and German modernisms. A

Delsartean genealogy repositions the expressive performing body as a site combining disparate trajectories in modernism: textual and embodied practices, interests in myth and science, classicism and the machine age.’ If Marinetti deemed mythic posing and Duncan’s dance “passéist,” other modernists deployed ideas from modern dance to develop new aesthetic principles. William Carlos Williams used dance images to theorize the poetic act and a pre-

modern language rooted in gesture that could recover an authenticity words lacked. He perceived this authentic expression in Duncan’s movements at a 1908 concert in New York, which he described in a sonnet addressed to her.* He heard the dancer’s footfall in the poetic foot: “Poetry began with measure, it began with the dance, whose divisions we have all but forgotten but are still known as measures...and we still speak of their minuter elements as feet.”’ His ideal reader was

INTRODUCTION 7

a “listener” transported by rhythm into a duet with the poet, as her “imagination” was “free to mingle in the dance.”'® Dance is a metaphor here, but Williams also suggests that poetic rhythms and emotions invoke bodily experiences; even if the origins of poetry “had not been the dance, the heart when it is stirred has multiple beats, and verse at its most impassioned sets the heart violently beating.”'' For the period’s theorists of poetry, dance, and film, the idea that art could produce kinesthetic experiences was much more than a figure of speech. The British critic and novelist Vernon Lee (1856-1935) considered the role of physical sensation in the perception of beauty as the primary inquiry of modern aesthetic theory.'* Like Williams and other modernists, she believed that texts could move beyond the page, affect bodies, dislodge entrenched reading habits, and produce an experience like poetic recitation, even during silent reading. Duncan, H.D, and the Delsarteans struck mythic poses partially in response to their experience of a “crisis” of modernity. Modernist studies has adopted this crisis as one of the defining features of the field and tends to separate a group of what might be called antimodern-classicists from modernist-materialists. The former retreated from modernity into myth and tradition, the story goes, while modernist-materialists confronted the crisis and celebrated modernization, technology, and revolution.’ Yet, few artists fit neatly into either group, and the purported crisis of modernity has happened consistently since the Enlightenment. Those suspicious of modernity’s assurances that the world is on a course for improvement have been accused of nostalgia, religious piety, or passéism, especially if they invoke classical allusions.'* The antimodern critique is part of a long philosophical tradition that preceded the period designated as modernism and did not necessarily object to modernist art.’’ As T. J. Jackson Lears suggests, antimodern-classicism was “a complex blend of accommodation and protest” that shared commitments with avant-garde movements like Marinetti’s Futurism.’

Both were characterized by a yearning for “authentic experience,’ although Futurists demanded more modernity in an aesthetics of shock, and antimodernclassicists looked to the fragments of past cultures that did not survive modernity.'’ The mythic pose, an imagined rupture in time, has a skeptical as well as nostalgic side that envisions an end of modernity, just as Greek culture fell. Although antimodern and materialist impulses are ancient and overlapping forces for creativity, the binary has a purchase on modernist studies. Early interpreters of modernism placed Duncan and H.D. in a gendered antimodern cate-

gory: Douglas Bush influentially criticized H.D.s poetry in 1937 for a “soft romantic nostalgia, which, however altered and feminized, is that of the Victorian Hellenists...and of Isadora Duncan.’ Later critics inherited the divide, and even

8 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

a great paradigm breaker like Laurence Rainey cites H.D’s reviews of “scholarly

works on ancient Greek sculpture and art” as evidence that she was part of a patronized “coterie” rather than a “public dialogue with peers” (Institutions 156). Rainey writes, “She really does believe in a mix of bland notions from popular

occultism and generalizations that denounce contemporary humanity in the abstract and yet promise everyone that he or she is assured of becoming a god” (Institutions 164). This idea of a godlike or mythic subjectivity interrogated conventional ideas of body and soul and was part of a “public dialogue” engaged by

H.D., Duncan, numerous Delsarteans, and even Futurists. Yet, critics more sympathetic to antimodern-classicism exhibit similar anxieties: Ann Daly, one of the best Duncan scholars, excludes her from modernism because of her “romantic grandiloquence.”!’? Edward Comentale’s reassessment of twentieth-century classi-

cism includes H.D. in a version that avoids the “escapism” of Victorian Hellenism through a bodily or “material tangibility.”*? He acknowledges that romanticism and classicism overlapped in earlier periods but produces two distinct categories and represents them in a chart with nineteen new dualisms: Romantic Modernism is caught in “force/form” while Classical Modernism emphasizes “tension”; “hard/

soft” for the former but “posability” for the latter; “masculine/feminine” for romantics while classicists get “hermaphroditism/intercourse” (Production 20). Comentale offers insight into a new classicism but ignores what it shares with the old and with romanticism.”! The trajectory of modernism I describe is obscured, in part, by the tendency in modernist studies to emphasize or invent novelty. We often follow the examples of our colorful figures like Ezra Pound, whose slogan “MAKE IT NEW” is even more famous than Marinetti’s “roaring car.” Recycled for titles such as Kurt Heinzelman’s collection “Make It New: The Rise of Modernism” (2004), the phrase even seems to echo in “New Modernist Studies,” the interdisciplinary, expansive methodology I claim for this study.” As Heinzelman points out, Pound generated “MAKE IT NEW” in Canto 53 from four layers of (mis)translation of an old (twelfth-century) text he associated with Tching Tang (Ch’éng T’ang, founder of the Shang Dynasty, 1766 to 1122 B.c.E.).”> Modernist artists, like Pound and Marinetti, are famous for deploring contending movements, and critics follow suit, so that histories of modernism often focus on a series of -isms that were named, performed, and doggedly defended.” By foregrounding solos, I direct attention away from clashing factions (Imagism, Futurism, etc.) to their particular events, genres, ideas of subjectivity, and how they both develop from and revise earlier constructions. Modernism was rarely quite so new as advertised, and an antimodern critique is present in many

versions of modernism. I describe a trajectory of antimodern-classicism that

INTRODUCTION 9

exerted international and transgeneric influence but has not been central to modernist studies. The purpose of this book is not to delimit modernism or attempt a resolution to what Susan Stanford Friedman calls the “terminological quagmire” of modern/ modernism/modernity/modernization — with the addition of antimodern.”? I want to point out that confusion about these terms contributes to an overemphasis on the new that marginalizes mythic poses and solos, long histories of performance genres and bodily techniques, the ways modern subject positions use old ones, and other continuities with earlier periods—including a long-standing crisis of modernity and a corresponding antimodern critique.*° It would be wrong to ignore the particularities of two world wars, the atomic bomb, and genocide, among other

historical horrors, but neither modernism nor postmodernism’s sense of modernity’s failure is precisely new. With an ambivalent desire for and dread of modernity’s end, this feeling of crisis may be one of the persistent features of the (post)modern or, perhaps, human condition. In keeping with this book’s commitment to examining what is not new in

modernism, chapter 1 recovers an origin for modernist solos in popular performance forms emerging from romanticism; monodramas and attitudes usually presented a mythic character in an emotionally climactic scene. These nineteenth-century solos already posed a complex version of gendered subjectivity, a protomodernist subject figured as a momentary coherence in different possibilities of movement, speech, and character. Combined with classicism and the ancient Christian hermeneutic of biblical typology or the fourfold method,

monodramas and attitudes contributed to the development of the Victorian dramatic monologue. Poems spoken by mythic types exhibit a tension between

their foundation in classical and Christian ethics and an impulse to revise entrenched narratives. The second chapter, “Posing Modernism,” describes an expressive body taking

positions derived from classical statuary in modernist film and dance. Emerging partially from nineteenth-century performance traditions, posing was encouraged

by Delsartism as a practice fostering physical and spiritual health. Critics of modernist performance overlook mythic posing to concentrate on modernistmaterialist modes, exemplified by the multimedia performances of Futurism and Dadaism. Studies emphasizing machine aesthetics tend to assume a corresponding “prosthetic body” characterized by technological augmentation, dehumanization, or fragmentation.”’ Such models can overlook the long histories of performance genres and training regimens that include bodily techniques that emerged well before the technological developments presented as determinative.” Although

10 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Delsartism has been described as a failed antimodern movement, it also incorporated Delsarte’s theory of a mechanical body, and the movement strategies it taught were evident in “natural” or “classical” modern dances and gestures projected and spliced on film screens.” D. W. Griffith’s silent film stars trained in Delsarte technique, and it influenced the montage theories and acting methods of Lev Kuleshov in Russia. Modernist film and dance reveal Delsartism’s reach as an international performance theory. Delsartism also contributed to reforms in elocutionary training that emphasized poetic recitation as a technique of literary interpretation. Young modernists in the making first encountered poetry within a culture of recitation adapted partially from Victorian parlor performance but bolstered by Delsartean theories of the pedagogical value of the dramatic monologue in voice training. The first book on the dramatic monologue was written in 1908 by Samuel Silas Curry, a Delsarte expert and proponent of a university discipline he called “Expression.” The popular but short-lived discipline taught poems as scripts to be interpreted through performance. My third chapter situates Charlotte Mew, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell in relation to the cultures of recitation that ushered in modernism, including the Chautauqua Circuit and Poetry Bookshop. Central modernist aesthetic principles were responses to popular recitations: Modernist impersonality rejected the Delsartean cultivation of personality but incorporated many of its interpretive techniques. The practice Eliot famously called the mythical method is a modernist revision of typological hermeneutics, yet another mythic pose.” The final two chapters offer case studies of Isadora Duncan and H.D. that demonstrate the new readings enabled by a history of mythic posing. I argue that Duncan combined solo dance, Delsartean poses, live orchestral music, innovative stage decor, and curtain-call speeches in a performance form that constitutes a modernist manifesto and an experiment in hybrid performance. Her movement innovations and ideas of the dancing self are clarified by her phrase the “motor in the soul,” but her soulful rhetoric has contributed to assessments that she is not

sufficiently modernist. Her combination of metaphysical (soul) and materialist (motor) discourses was common in the period, and reconsidering her perfor-

mances in the context of international modernism clarifies her relation to movements such as Futurism, Cambridge Ritualism, the Moscow Art Theatre, Greenwich Village Radicalism, and suffragism. These groups often co-opted Duncan for contradictory purposes: her individualistic and essentialist ideas of “woman” never accommodated suffragism, her exaltation of motherhood coexisted with claims that birthing should be mediated by medical technology, and she represented freedom through a careful choreography of spontaneity. Yet, her

INTRODUCTION 11

solo body, dancing freely, comfortably clothed, and emphatically female shaped images of the new woman of modernism. Chapter 5 demonstrates that H.D. drew from both textual and corporal forms of mythic posing in an effort to invoke an engaged, bodily mode of aesthetic apperception or “ritualized reception.” Frequently invoking images of Duncan and dance, she advanced a theory of embodied creativity that resembled Delsartean concepts of the relation between body, mind, and soul. H.D. initially embraced cinema as the realization of classical ideals and began acting, editing, and reviewing. Her essays about film developed a typological film theory in which the spectator connects the screen actor to classical and Christian types and derives ethical lessons relevant to modernity. This interpretive activity constituted participation in a modernist ritual that, she hoped, would transform the participant. Disappointed by sound film and Hollywood, H.D. returned to poetry, but predominantly to long poems like Trilogy (1944-1946). She incorporated montage and other cinematic techniques with classical and typological allusions to alter a reader’s perceptual habits and produce an experience akin to ritual participation. Delsartism was fading by the time of the Second World War, but later performers

from Cindy Sherman to Anna Deavere Smith inherited techniques from mythic posing. Solo performance provides a flexible rubric for crossing disciplinary and period

bounds and tracing connections between text-based and theatrical genres and the subjectivities they construct. Such continuities are often suppressed by studies that assert a strict divide between antimodern-classicist and modernist-materialist trajectories or assume the rhetoric of breach advanced by many artists. The following introductory sections set the scene for a history of modernist solos: I examine current debates in gender theory, consider the very different ideas of subjectivity evident in Victorian and modernist engagements with biblical typology and classical ritual, use the dramatic monologue to explore problems in genre theory, and establish how a transgeneric interest in kinesthetics repositions modernism.

II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment ...at no other time in the history of feminist theory has identity been at once so vilified and so sanctified.... —Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (1989)°!

In the twenty years since Fuss exposed the persistence of essentialism in theories of

gender as a cultural construct, the problem of identity has not been resolved.

122 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Current theorists prefer the term subjectivity, but self, soul, and personality were the

equally “vilified” and “sanctified” terms of early-twentieth-century debates. Although Delsartism was a prominent influence on these debates, the movement has been absent from histories of subjectivity and accounts of modernism, partially due to its regressive definitions of gender and alignment with the dress reform movement and modes of “feminine” self-fashioning. To position Delsartism in a separate genealogy of women’s modernism would acknowledge these important facets of the movement but ignore its broader appeal and influence on diverse cultural practices.** Fewer men participated in physical movement classes, but they were active in Delsarte-derived schools of “expression” and cultures of poetic recitation, a division that replicated contemporaneous associations of femininity with bodies and masculinity with words. While Delsartean conceptions of selfhood promoted these and other essentialisms, they also anticipated contemporary ideas of gender as a performative construct. Delsartism prefigured recent assertions of the centrality of embodiment, lived reality, and the provisional, historically constructed nature of identity, yet it reveals limitations in the ability of gender performances to alter hegemonic norms. These contradictions persist in poststructuralist theories. Ideas of performative identity formation were common in performance before entering theory. Delsartism taught that an ideal self could be achieved if body, mind, and soul were balanced in exercises involving imitations of sacred types from religion and myth. Repeatedly striking a statue pose and performing a desired identity would gradually achieve that self; “personality” was a malleable project rather than a static destiny. Werner’s Voice Magazine, a publication devoted to Delsartism and oratory, advised readers to study photographs of “ideal figures in marble,” preferably “Venus de Milo or Diana,’ until they “can recall any feature or

line at will’? The practice of “artistic statue-posing,’ as described by the well-known American Delsartean, Genevieve Stebbins, was not just a bodily style but a “spiritual aspiration toward a superior and definite type of beauty in which lives and moves a human soul.’ If the language of spirit and soul seems antimodern, the idea of posing to achieve beauty anticipates Judith Butler’s famous defini-

tion of gender not as an essential identity or a cultural construct but as a “performative accomplishment,” realized through the “stylized repetition of acts” that “constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self’”’*° The centrality of gesture,

bodily deportment, and physical practice in Delsartism points to the lack of emphasis on embodiment in some models of gender performativity; dance theorist Susan Foster claims that Butler emphasizes the linguistic basis of the subject, even in the book meant to redress this oversight, Bodies That Matter (1993).°° Ed Cohen similarly argues that Butler’s linguistic, Derridean, and psychoanalytic frames bracket the historical and contextual specificity of any individual.’’

INTRODUCTION — 13

Whereas Delsartism insists on the power of a will that is realized in repeated enactments, Butler denies “the originating force of a radical will” and emphasizes that gender performance occurs in a “situation of duress” (“Performative” 521). The Delsartean notion of will was a major appeal for many in the movement, but the problem of agency plagues the possibility of subversive gender performance. Butler details the problem in her discussion of Jennie Livingston's controversial documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) and the preoperative transsexual drag queen she features, “Venus Xtravaganza’—who also reveals the continued appeal of mythic posing.*® While Venus’s ball performances and social passing might represent a gender trouble that subverts hegemonic norms, she articulates her longing to be “a spoiled rich white girl” with a husband and suburban home. Partially due to the cultural abjection of poor gay men, Butler claims such desires are not simply “male misogyny,’ but she recognizes the possibility that Venus’s “denaturalization of gender” may actually be a “reworking of the normative framework of heterosexuality” (Bodies 132-133). Isadora Duncan’s Nike pose also denaturalizes certain notions of gender as a representation of power but easily becomes an icon of the

Republican mother sending sons to war, as it did in her performances of “Marseillaise” during World War I (see fig. I.1). Differences in class, race, sexuality,

and period separate Duncan, who became an international star, and Venus, who was murdered by a client, but both reveal challenges attending all theories of gender performance.” The politics of their poses are tangled in the performer’s intentions and desires, the cultural meanings of the myths they invoke, and audience interpretations. Butler argues that Paris Is Burning is “an appropriation of dominant culture...a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance” that can succeed only if spectators are implicated in “the ambivalence of that ‘performance’ as related to our own” (Bodies 137).

Mythic posing is also a “making over” that functions as a critique of gender and modernity only if audiences realize the ambivalence of the pose as an imagined alternative that also fails to escape entrenched gender constructs. Critics frequently point to the problem of agency and an overemphasis on discursive constructions of identity in poststructuralist thought. Paula M. L. Moya argues that “people do not live in an entirely abstract or discursive realm,” and a “politics of discourse” fails when it “does not provide for some sort of bodily or concrete action outside the realm of the academic text.’*” Emphasizing lived realities and longing for a theory of the will that could encourage political action, critics like Moya reinvest in the body as the site of the material dimensions of subjectivity. In fact, at the height of the poststructuralist moment, when identity, sub-

jectivity, and individualism were being productively theorized as discursive constructions (following Michel Foucault), the body seemed to reassert itself.*’ As

14. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

theory progresses through a series of corrected and corrective exaggerations, embodiment is used as imprecisely as discourse, and the problem of essentialism reemerges with the added complication that a focus on the body can enhance the biological fixity of identity categories.

Essentializing categories such as woman and the sacred had a pressing reality

for Isadora Duncan, H.D., and other artists living at the time of the “woman question” and suffrage movement. Feminist historians often overlook how these models energized first wave feminism or fold them into a narrative of development that gives precedence to contemporary ideas of subjectivity. Nancy Cott’s important history of the movement claims that “striking the individual pose supplied an interim solution, or substitution, for a more programmatic or collective way of asserting women’s simultaneous equality and difference from men.” Rather than being abandoned, individualism has always coexisted uneasily with coalition, and debates about the value of the individual are evident at the very origins of the term. Individualism first appeared in 1839 to describe selfishness but was referenced as a virtue later that year; still, negative connotations persisted through the nineteenth century.* The political struggle for suffrage—the right to vote as individuals—was

partially inspired by debates about individualism, a fact implicit in Thomas Carlyle’s claim that the “vote” was a sign of the alienation of the individual as a “depersonalized proxy form.“ A primary trajectory of the early-twentieth-century women’s movement, the one most attracted to Delsartism, evoked spiritual models of selfhood rather than biological, economic, or political categories. Margaret Fuller proposed an influential model in her theory of “self-poise,” which empha-

sized spiritual and bodily development of the individual in preparation for collective work.* Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844) calls on an array of powerful female figures from religion, history, and myth as models for subjectivity,

and in this, she builds on a widespread hermeneutic, biblical typology.

II. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual Abraham spoke prophetically, ver. 8, and his words were verified; God did provide himself with a lamb. Abraham’s offering up his son was a type of GOD’s giving his son, our LORD JESUS CHRIST, as a sacrifice for mankind. —Sarah Trimmer, Help to the Unlearned in the Study of the Holy Scriptures (London, 1806)*°

Biblical typology or the ancient fourfold method of interpretation has, for centuries, positioned the individual in relation to divinely ordained categories of

INTRODUCTION = 15

being. Until recently, the prevalence of biblical typology as a reading strategy and associational thought pattern in the Victorian period has been overlooked because of a tendency to emphasize religious doubt and secularism.” A similar secular bias in modernist studies has obscured the persistence of typological imagery, analytical strategies, and subjectivities, along with Delsartean statue posing as mythic types. Fredric Jameson describes typology as an attempt to solve the interpretive dilemma of the “incommensurability... between the private and the public, the psychological and the social, the poetic and the political.’** He maps the fourfold method onto the “Marxist theory of levels” and other “allegorical master narratives” at work in much contemporary theory (Political 32-34). Although he points

out that such narratives are commonly inscribed in texts and even “reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality,’ Jameson’s work has not prompted other critics to examine the historical function of typology or its resonance in current interpretive strategies (Political 34).”

Typology reads people, images, and institutions in the Old Testament as divinely intended prefigurations of Christian characters. The Pauline epistles established the precedent for typological interpretations, and by the Middle Ages, a fourfold figurative series had developed, with Augustine as its central propo-

nent.’ The type (1) is literal and historical, a prefiguring template usually in the Old Testament; (2) the antitype is the allegorical fulfillment of prophecy in the New Testament; (3) the trope applies the lessons of scripture to any individual, indicating the repetition of typological relations; and (4) the anagoge is the ultimate heavenly fulfillment. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) famously presented the fourfold method to Western literature in his “Letter to Can Grande della Scala”

(ca. 1319), where he extends the figurative series to his Commedia and Ovid's Orpheus, thereby elevating poetry and myth to the level of the sacred.°! The fourfold method was particularly recommended to women in the nineteenth century, as educational opportunities expanded literacy and Victorian gender ideology suggested women were responsible for passing religious values to children.” Conservative applications of the hermeneutic were taught in tracts such as Sarah Trimmer’s Help to the Unlearned [woman] in the Study of the Holy Scriptures, as the

epigraph to this section reveals. Trimmer reads the Akeda as a prophecy of the Incarnation, with Isaac as a type for Jesus and Abraham’s offering as a prefiguration of God’s sacrifice. The anagogical application locates Mount Moriah, the site of the Akeda, as “the place on which the house of the Lord of Jerusalem was afterwards built,” which also alludes to heaven (Reading 186).°? Trimmer explicitly states

the tropological level or moral as the virtue of submission: “We should learn from

16 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Abraham’s example to be ready to submit to GOD’s will in the most severe trials” (Reading 186). Victorian poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning deployed the authority of this pervasive hermeneutic but offered alternative interpretations. Modernist applications were often more subversive, yet Judeo-Christian or classical allusions cannot entirely escape the theological master narratives invoked. When T. S. Eliot famously advocated the mythical method to organize earlytwentieth-century experience, he renamed an ancient and antimodern typological practice. Even in emphasizing classical myth, Eliot was following a precedent established by early theologians who endorsed classical figures as typological prefigurations of Christian ideals.°* Modernist interests in classical ritual activated mythic tropes, and like biblical typology, ritual emphasizes patterns of repetition and reenactment and analogic thought paradigms. Although mythic and biblical narratives had long served as escapist and regressive influences, biblical typology and ritual are based in repetition, and any repetition entails the possibility for revision and difference. Modernist ritualism was inspired by Nietzsche, as is often acknowledged, but it was also popularized by Delsartism’s statue-posing in Greek robes and largely organized by Jane Ellen Harrison. Harrison advanced a womancentered theory of ritual that interested many artists and shaped the Cambridge Ritualists, a group that included Gilbert Murray, Francis Cornford, and Arthur Cook; she has received some recent attention for her influence on theatrical mod-

ernism and anticipation of cultural feminism and performance studies, but work remains to be done.” Both Nietzsche and Harrison elaborate myths of individuation from their analysis of ritual. In Nietzsche's discussion, individuation is the necessary but painful resolution of ritual ecstasy, and both ritual and art seem to be temporary historical phenomena.” The Dionysian chorus experiences an ecstatic state of self-abandon, which passes into lethargy and a longing for annihilation (Tragedy 44-48). The

Apollonian force, the second element in the familiar dyad, provides solace in beautiful forms, a reconciliation for the painful process of individuation (Tragedy 50-51). Harrison, like Nietzsche, identifies the origins of art in the “ritual dance” at Dionysian festivals, but she adds a number of seasonal rites honoring harvest goddesses that ensured the rebirth of spring and abundant crops.’’ Whereas Nietzsche postulates the death of ritual, Harrison emphasizes its cyclical recurrence, persistence in religion, potential for transforming culture, and somewhat debased remnants in modern art. She traces the emergence of drama through revisions of the ritual space and then the development of roles: “There is no division at first between actors and spectators; all are actors, all are doing the thing done, dancing the

dance danced....It is the common act, the common or collective emotion, that

INTRODUCTION 17

ritual starts” (Ritual 126). The orchestra was the original space for the dance around a sacred object, “at first a maypole or the reaped corn, later the figure of a god or his

altar” (Ritual 126). The shift from ritual to art, for Harrison, occurred as religious belief faded, members of the community ceased to take part, and a spectator space was added to the orchestra. The tragic chorus, in keeping with its origins in the “common act,” depicted “public” sentiments and preserved a civic function very different from Nietzsche’s destructive, liberating force (Ritual 49). The figures of the god Dionysus and his bride or “May Queen” became the first soloists. Harrison’s myth of individuation from ritual produces the actor, chorus, and spectators; that is, it produces theater, albeit a theater degraded by its distance

from ritual (“Savage” 24). In a guardedly optimistic version of antimodernclassicism, she claims that the impulse of ritual survives in modernity and its forms

are incorporated in other genres: “The spirit of the rite, the belief in its efficacy, dies, but the rite itself, the actual mould, persists” (Ritual 138). She points to vestiges of ritual form in the Greek tragedy, including the chorus, prologue, circular theater, masked performers, and deus ex machina. She similarly finds ritual structures in the Catholic liturgy: “Tt is at the outset one and the same impulse that sends a man to church and to the theatre” (Ritual 9-10). Harrison suggests that the power of intrinsic ritual forms may be harnessed by contemporary religion and art to create a widespread transformation of “all classes,’ not limited to Nietzsche’s elite man or “genius of humankind” (Tragedy 21). In the late 1870s and the 1880s, she participated in amateur Greek theatricals that included tableaux and attitudes and required her to study statue poses in the British museum, like the Delsartean posers who were then popularizing such pursuits.”* While Harrison was not an avid participant, Delsartism certainly contributed to the sympathetic reception of her ideas and theatrical lecture-demonstrations, and she was undoubtedly aware of the movement.” Harrison also cited the modern dances of Isadora Duncan and her followers as evidence of the need for ritual experiences in contemporary life: “Some of the strenuous, exciting, self-expressive dances of to-day are of the soil and some exotic, but, based as they mostly are on very primitive ritual, they stand as singular evidence of this real recurrent need” (Ritual 207). If Duncan served as evidence of modernity’s need for ritual, Harrison’s work appealed to modernist artists because it argued that invoking ancient ritual would make art more effective at a time when it was being pushed to the periphery by

military and industrial concerns. Nietzsche, Harrison, and contemporary performance theorists Victor Turner and Richard Schechner have been drawn to the idea that ritual refuses to distinguish between performers and audience members, participants and spectators, and therefore offers a communal experience and

18 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

alters community. Turner posits a “liminal stage” that can enable “cultural innova-

tion,’ as well as potent change in each participant.” Duncan and H.D. were drawn

to ideas of transformation but suspicious of ritual’s ability to produce change beyond the individual. Their ambivalence led them to the solo.

IV. Solo Genres [New] Criticism and pedagogy, reacting against the Romantic notion of lyric as expression of intense personal experience, have adopted the model of the dramatic monologue as the way to align poetry with the novel: the lyric is conceived as a fictional imitation of the act of a speaker, and to interpret the lyric is to work out what sort of person is speaking, in what circumstances and with what attitude or, ideally, drama of attitudes. |my emphasis] —Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” (2008)

A century ago, the monologue was more likely to be linked to solo performance than the novel because of its historical function in Delsarte-derived cultures of recitation. In fact, the monologue’s privileged place in early modernist “expressions of personality” was a focus of New Critical attacks and encouraged their construction of a poetic “speaker” distinct from author and any reader. New Critics rejected Delsartean interpretive techniques, which encouraged students to analyze dramatic monologues and other texts by preparing them for recitation and choosing vocal intonations and attitudes to reveal their own personalities. Pointing back to a history of relations between literary forms and nineteenth-century popular

performances and forward to modernist poetics and recitation practices, the dramatic monologue clarifies problems in definitions of genre: presented as a set of formal characteristics or an imitative category, hierarchized according to designations of “worth,” or linked to artist’s intention, genre was one of the classificatory systems that poststructuralist theory troubled, along with gender identity.” Solo performance is a useful transgeneric rubric that allows me to trace connections between genres in modernism and their development from earlier forms. In addition to mediums, genres have histories, pedagogical uses, and assumptions about subjectivity; they are constituted at particular cultural moments in negotiations between artists, audiences, and critics.” This negotiation takes in artistic creation, but also what is done with a text, how it is taught, and ways it is read or performed. Like gender-based categories or typologies of subjectivity, genres reveal historical modes of categorization and interpretation, and in this sense, they might be considered performative accomplishments (“Performative” 520). Just as Butler argues that genders are constituted by “a stylized repetition of

INTRODUCTION — 19

acts through time,” generic categories cohere as repeated productions that share formal features or styles are recognized and named (“Performative,” 520). Artists may flag genres, indicating some aspect of their intention, however unreliable, but that generic marker is meaningful only as a culturally situated audience knows the conventions and uses them to interpret the artwork. The dramatic monologue is useful for demonstrating the ways generic definitions change with interpretive theories because a critical record exists since its “naming” in the second half of the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century, New Critics emphasized formal features of the dramatic monologue: Speaker, Silent Auditor, Occasion, Revelation of character, Dramatic action, and so forth.” Against this formula, Robert Langbaum analyzed the dramatic monologue’s “effect, its way of meaning,” but primarily its effect on a reader.® Sympathy

is generated as readers adopt the speaker’s viewpoint to enter the poem, he argued, regardless of how morally reprehensible they might judge a speaker like the Duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842).°° The limitations

of a focus on readers’ responses are revealed by deconstructive and feminist approaches to genre. Herbert F. Tucker suggests that the “fiction of the speaker” who “owns” a text for New Critics is as untenable as the lyric I or impermeable identity after deconstructive theory.” Tucker claims that texts “invent” speakers as performative effects that emerge for trained readers (“Overhearing” 243). In an approach to genres that suggests they perform cultural tensions about identity, he claims that the monologue dramatizes gaps between speaker and poet to explore the “deconstructive ordeals” of Victorian subjectivity: “Privacy” or “lyric isolation” and “History,” which “threatens to resolve the speaking self into its constituent

influences” (“Overhearing” 230). A feminist perspective might claim that a dichotomy between “Privacy” and “History” fails to account for the challenges to “female selfhood”: their entrance into history was contested, the privacy of elite women was subsumed in domesticity, and public identities, including performing

careers, were equated to prostitution. Feminists have critiqued Langbaum’s reader-centered analysis on the grounds that the “capacity for sympathy is almost always linked to a reader’s cultural, political, and gendered identity.’ While these literary definitions of genre have produced important readings, the rubric of solo performance reveals relationships between performance forms, social

enactments, and literature. A. Dwight Culler demonstrates that Browning and Alfred Tennyson, the writers said to have “invented” the dramatic monologue with

the publication of famous poems in 1842, were more likely to call their poems monodramas or prosopopoeiae, indicating the existence of prior generic rubrics in which the poems could be read.” This generic invention, like many others, marks a

20 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

moment when artists, critics, and audiences agreed to name a critical mass of new works that were actually revisions and combinations of previous forms.”” Generic precedents leave their impress on later developments, and the monodrama contributed to an emphasis on gesture and spectacular effects and the provocative

use of myth in many monologues. Considering the influence of performance forms directs attention away from how a speaker like Browning’s Duke invokes sympathy (Langbaum) or dramatizes the ordeals of Victorian subjectivity (Tucker). Delsartean teachings encouraged readers to choose a vocal tone or gesture to reveal the Duke’s intentions and analyze how poetic lines indicate the body positions and movements of the Duke and emissary beneath the portrait of the dead Duchess. The Duke’s line, “Nay we’ll go / Together down, sir,” implies the

emissary has obsequiously motioned for the Duke to precede him. The gesture enables the Duke to perform a divestment of rank, underscoring the irony that he killed the Duchess for lacking pride in his “two thousand year old name.” The Duke demonstrates his power over others’ bodies, a power to transform a woman

into a work of art; this theme in the poetry and painting of the period also inspired Delsartean statue poses, as the trope migrated between stages, visual art, and pages.”!

The second generic precedent, the classical rhetorical mode of prosopopoeia, is a solo impersonation of an absent person.” Prosopopoeiae containing features

later associated with dramatic monologues were written long before 1842.” Inviting speech in the voice of a historical or mythological person, the prosopopoeia, like the repetitions proposed by biblical typology, has been used for centuries to emphasize what history might teach the present. In school assignments through the beginning of the twentieth century, students would rewrite a famous speech such as Odysseus’s attempt to persuade Achilles to fight in the Trojan War. Quintilian (ca. 35-95 c.E.), in Institutiones Oratoriae, treats impersonation as “deliberative oratory” for public assemblies, stating that prosopopoeia is “of the

greatest use to future poets and historians, while for orators of course it is absolutely necessary.’”* Delsartism and related reforms in elocutionary training

revisited classical rhetoric, and the prosopopoeia was deemed an important pedagogical tool to help students learn the appropriate tone of address for a given audience, recognize differing perspectives, and attend to the skills of rhetor-

ical argument. Paul de Man, treating literary forms as transgeneric tropes, famously describes prosopopoeia as “positing voice or face by means of language”

and “the master trope” of poetry and autobiography “by which one’s name is... made intelligible as a face.’”° It also posits voice, face, and body in speech, atti-

tudes, portraiture, and other solo performances.” Delsartism promoted these

INTRODUCTION 21

forms, using the authority of prosopopoeia to frame the value of rehearsing arguments spoken by historical figures. The practice of reading any text as if it were to be performed encouraged experiments in figuring voice and gesture, but

these strategies were also part of a larger modernist interest in embodied movement.

V. Modernist Kinesthetics kinesthesia—the sense by which we perceive muscular effort, movement, and position in Space.

—Rudolph Laban, Modern Educational Dance (1948)

Early-twentieth-century artists working in a variety of genres explored strategies

designed to invoke a kinesthetic experience, a fact that highlights one of the central motifs of modernism: the desire to make sense of the body, to account for and somehow encompass bodily experiences in art, and to figure movement in

words, sculpture, painting, and other media.” Rudolph Laban (1879-1958), a Hungarian dancer-choreographer influenced by Isadora Duncan, theorized kinesthesia as a sense modality incorporating the entire body and all five senses: “Its organs are not situated in any one particular part of the body, as those of seeing and hearing” (Dance 111). It is more than muscle memory, the term dancers use to describe how rehearsed movement patterns become so familiar that the mental labor of remembering seems to be absent from the performance. Kinesthesia is a holistic means of perceiving the relations between bodies, the energies required to move, and bodily pain and pleasure in oneself and others. Crucial to the creation and interpretation of dance and theater, kinesthesia has applications in other arts as well. Laban argued that choreography “cannot be an intellectual process only,

although the use of words tends to make it so”; the language needed to teach dance represents “a framework which has to be filled out and enlivened by an imagery based on a sensibility for movement” (Dance 110).” A cultivated kinesthetic sensibility promotes the interpretation of motion in “enlivened” words and verbal images, as well as dance.

Artists and theorists contemporaneous with Laban experimented with invoking kinesthetic responses to art, but literary critics have not sufficiently considered the diverse approaches to embodied aesthetic experience in the period.

Contemporary critical theory uses dance as a metaphor for the ambiguity of knowledge and uncertainty of truth or the motion of deconstruction and the leap

22 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

of différence.* Moving beyond metaphor, I examine the relation between dance and other bodily performances and how the gestures, rhythms, and movement

techniques of modern dance shaped many of the central tenets of aesthetic modernism. The study of kinesthetics and the role of physical sensation in the perception of beauty was the central concern of psychological aesthetics, a hybrid field that brought advances in psychology and physiology to aesthetic theory. Vernon Lee was the strongest proponent of psychological aesthetics in literature, as well as the only theorist Walter Pater claimed for a disciple.*’ Lee pursued Pater’s interest in the aesthetic response of the individual perceiver, reflecting the individualist strain in early modernism.” Lee’s innovation was to apply studies of emotion by William James and Carl Lange and other new developments in psychology and physiology to questions of aesthetic apperception.” The still-respected James-Lange theory claims that bodily changes (such as the trembling of fear) are not expressions of emotion; rather, the experience of emotion is produced by physiological responses to external stimuli. For Lee, the theory implied that the pleasure accompanying aesthetic apperception is, like other emotions, due to kinetic and bodily responses. Lee linked the theory

to studies of empathy by the German experimental psychologists Karl Groos (Einleitung in die aesthetik, 1892) and Theodor Lipps (Zur einfiihlung, 1900, 1913).

Groos and Lipps claimed that empathy, the imaginative participation in the subjective experience of another, produces an “inner mimicry” or bodily “imitation” of the other’s experience (Beauty 23). Lee suggested the body also imitates the

forms and motions of art to produce an “aesthetic emotion,” evidenced by such “kinaesthetic accompaniments of aesthetic perception” as changes in pulse rates, breath, eye movements, and muscular tension (Beauty 358). Lee analyzed the somatic responses of her lover Kit Anstruther-Thomson to objects as diverse as paintings and furniture. Lee’s later discussions of “literary psychology” and kinesthetic reading practices predicted the reader-response and formalist criticisms of I. A. Richards, Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Iser, and Roland Barthes (Lee 200). Lee described “muscular adjustments of the inner and auditive apparatus, as well as obvious sensations in the vocal parts when we ourselves produce, and often when we merely think of [sounds].’*° Her suppositions about minute physical movements during silent reading were confirmed almost a century later by “elaborate mechanical and electrographic experiments designed to test the muscular responses (of larynx, pharynx, tongue, palate, lips, etc.).’®” Lee theorized bodily responses to language patterns and rhythms in The Poet’s Eye (1926), published by that vehicle for modernist experiment, Hogarth Press:

INTRODUCTION — 23

... rhythm and in lesser degree every other kind of verbal symmetry, makes

us expect repetition of a given effect and thereby prepare ourselves... expectation and preparation, if repeated, eliciting a degree of imitative activity on our part, we set to marching at that particular pace, and metaphorically, if not literally, dancing that particular step.** For Lee, as for William Carlos Williams and other poets, rhythm, alliteration, and other figurative uses of language work through repetition, which invokes bodily changes. The effect of language on reading bodies is not a direct imitation or mimicry of form, as Lee had posited for visual art. Instead, readers interpret “form according to the facts of our own inner experience....Such projection of ourselves

into external objects...is at the bottom of numberless words and expressions” (Beauty 17-18). Lee’s examples include “hills roll” and “mountains rise”; mountains

do not noticeably move, but our eyes seem to rise or roll over a hilly landscape. Through empathy, readers project themselves into characters like a “great actor” and know how characters move, gesture, and speak “because for that moment and to that extent we are those people.’®? When characters seem “to be posing in tableaux vivants, or at the utmost, moving rhythmically... like figures in a grand ballet,”

Lee suggests that readers empathetically feel the pose (Handling 60). Literary invo-

cations of bodily performance forms, like tableaux and dance, promote kinesthetic experiences that dislodge the seemingly static practice of reading. Lee argued that the projection of human motion into art was “the central discovery of modern aesthetics” (Beauty 17). She used scientific advances to interpret Paterian theories for modernism but was marginalized as a lesbian in the maledominated disciplines of aesthetics and psychology.” Virginia Woolf lists “Vernon Lee’s books on aesthetics” to demonstrate the diversity of women writers in A Room of One’s Own (1929).”' Both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot knew of Lee, for Pound excised from an early draft of The Waste Land a statement about “types” of women including a “can-can salonniére” who was “baptized” in a “soapy sea / Of Symonds—Walter Pater—Vernon Lee.””? Wyndham Lewis declared, “To read [Vernon Lee’s] pages is like watching a person of some intelligence administering electric shocks to herself.” Lee actually discusses a perceiver’s “immediate shock of passive and (as much as smell and taste) bodily pleasure” that may be received from art (The Beautiful 27). Such shocks and pleasures were part of an overlooked trend in modernist aesthetics, applied to music (Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound, 1880), the visual arts (Adolf von Hildebrand’s The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, 1893), and especially early film (Hugo Miinsterberg’s The Photoplay, 1916). The ideas were so widespread that the art historian Bernard

24. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Berenson (Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 1896) accused Lee of plagiarism but later dropped the charge (Lee 156-167).

Contemporaneous with Laban’s theories of a kinesthetic sense modality and Lee’s analysis of kinesthetic responses to art, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics at Geneva (1891-1912) famously displaced the notion of the

word as referential to the sign with an arbitrary relation of sound-image to concept, signifier to signified. Responding to theories of language as a conventional sign system, modernists experimented with antimodern gestures, ideo-

grams, and hieroglyphs, that is, with signs that seemed more mimetic and expressive.”* Many understood gesture as a language of presence and immediacy, and Saussure himself suggested that gesture might be a system of nonarbitrary,

symbolic, analogic signs.” Pound believed that the ideogram demonstrated material similarity to the referent and was particularly interested in Ernest Fenollosa’s idea that Chinese ideograms are “shorthand pictures of actions or processes” emphasizing the legs or means of locomotion, rather than sketches of things.” Whereas western linguists assume words deal with abstractions, Fenollosa claimed that the link between language and movement is evident in the grammar of the basic sentence form: the subject acts (verb) on an object. He criticized the focus on static states, like the copula (I am), and promoted a “strong

reliance upon verbs” to transform “speech into a kind of dramatic poetry” (“Chinese” 367). Zora Neale Hurston similarly claimed that “the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics,” adding “action words” (“chop-axe” and “sitting-chair”) permeated with “drama” to a language (English) “transplanted on his tongue by contact” and slavery.’’ Walter Benjamin used “runes and hieroglyphs” to figure a “nonsensuous similarity” embedded in language but realized only in momentary “flashes” when one is “reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances.””® As Benjamin searched for the dance of “nonsensuous” mimesis while reading, Bertolt Brecht theorized a gestic language that combined bodily gestures with words to mime “the back and forth of historical events and of “coincidences.”

Ideograms, hieroglyphics, runes, and other ancient modes of expression all represent antimodern responses to new language theories. The possibility of inducing a physical response in a stationary reader or audi-

ence member was theorized in modern dance by Rudolph Laban and in psychological aesthetics by Vernon Lee and was of great interest to a variety of modernist writers—but feared by the contemporaneous social purity movement, which wanted to control texts’ effects on readers.'”° All faced a high probability of failure. Kinesthetic literary strategies cannot determine a reading, but neither can many accepted poetic devices. Still, we readily claim that poetic images suggest

INTRODUCTION — 25

visual stimuli, meter and other sound effects (rhyme, alliteration, consonance) create an aural experience, and onomatopoeia describes a word functioning mimetically (in spite of Saussure), sounding like what it signifies.'°' Modernist experiments in literary kinesthetics demand imaginative leaps from texts to bodies,

just as more conventional reading practices have taught leaps from text to image and sound. Modernist kinesthetics encouraged readers to imagine a tongue and mouth moving or to read poetry aloud and watch dance with attention to responsive feelings of movement in their own bodies. Solo performance helps to identify the kinesthetic strategies that modernist artists employ across genres. To demonstrate how poets borrowed from the speech and gestures of performance, I combine analysis of textual strategies with accounts of paratheatrical traditions relying on motion and posing. I step between theatrical and textual performances and social enactments, revealing the narratives and voices behind the bodies and reading for the implied gestures and dance of the foot along the poetic line. Modernist solos reveal new and old movements, mythic poses, and antimodern impulses behind more static readings of modernism.

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1. The Solo’s Origins Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues

Little contented with speech, love disdains it: it has livelier ways of expressing itself. What things she who traced the shadow of her lover with so much pleasure told him! What sounds could she have used to convey this movement of the stick? —J. J. Rousseau, “Origin of Languages” (ca. 1761)!

Long before modernists imagined gesture as an original, expressive language that modernity had eroded from words, Rousseau’s antimodern theories suggested

that love abandons speech and communicates in movement.’ As his gendered lover with her stick suggests, romanticism often linked gesture to women as more

passionate and primitive. Romanticism produced several performance forms, including the monodrama and attitude, which featured the emotive gestures of a single, usually female body in a mythic role. Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762) introduced the monodrama to feature poetic declamation that is abandoned for pantomime and music at heights of emotional expression. Goethe adopted the form for Proserpina (1776, revived 1815), and the monodrama circulated throughout Europe into the mid-nineteenth century. Attitudes or posed imitations of famous classical

or Christian statues developed partially from the monodrama’s pantomimic component. Popularized by Emma Lyon Hamilton early in the nineteenth century, attitudes became an international fad, due in part to the erotic appeal of the emphatically displayed female body. In addition to becoming objects of the “male gaze,” however, the posers experienced unusual opportunities for public 26

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 27

performance and emotional expression. They reinterpreted myth and presented subject positions that challenged nineteenth-century gender norms but were also scripted and constrained by the mythic narratives. Solo genres represent ideas of subjectivity. In the Victorian period, the derivation of the term individualism coincided with the emergence of genres to represent the new individual, including the autobiography and dramatic monologue.’ Just as the autobiography is rooted in Christian confessional narratives, the Victorian monologue inherited subjectivities, textual practices, and gestural codes from romantic solos. A. Dwight Culler argued that the monodrama is a formal precedent for the dramatic monologues of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning in an overlooked essay of 1975, but the genealogy of these forms and their influence on mod-

ernist solos is clarified by examining the work of Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Augusta Webster, all of whom were interested in monodramas, attitudes, and other forms of mythic posing.* The generic fluidity between popular solo performance forms and nineteenth-century poetry encourages readings of how poems construct speakers, position them in dramatic time and situations, and use kinesthetic strategies to figure their bodies and gestures. Barrett Browning, Rossetti, and Webster use biblical typology to relate Judeo-Christian figures and stories to contemporary individuals, expand typological parallels to include classical myth, and interrogate gendered identity through the speech of mythic characters.

As genres of first-person presentation, attitudes, monodramas, dramatic monologues, and other solo performances feature a “feint” that reveals both performer-poet and mythic character and highlights continuity and similarity rather than difference.° The biblical or mythological personae of these solos undermine the notion of an independently constituted subjectivity because the characters and their stories preexist the performance. They speak to the present moment and through a history of other renditions and interpretations. The foregrounding of gestures and bodies in solos encourages recognition of the generic continuities between performance forms like attitudes, monodramas, and other dramatic texts not intended for the stage and literary forms like dramatic monologues that were popular recitation pieces. The prominent representation of bodies in these works also points to the inadequacy of definitions of subjectivity based in language without consideration of embodied being.’ Speech, especially when framed as the extemporaneous speech of a dramatic event, invokes a body to say, as well as another to hear; a second body implicates the capacity of bodies to touch, love, or damage each other. For the soloists of the nineteenth century, gender was a central concern, as the burgeoning women’s movement challenged the categorization and normalization of bodies and the ways biological sex was used to explain and

28 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

enforce gender roles.’ This chapter describes the solo forms, typological hermeneutics, and theories of subjectivity that modernism inherited.

I. Galatea’s Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama Galathée fait quelques pas & touche un marbre.... Elle s éloigne de cet objet. Pygmalion dans des agitations.... Elle le voit, savance vers lui, s'arréte, le considere. II se leve précipitamment, lui tend les bras & la regarde avec extase. Elle approche, elle hésite, elle pose une main sur lu1...1l tressaille, prend cette main & la porte sur son coeur. —Rousseau, Pygmalion (1762)?

Rousseau'’s Pygmalion established the hybrid form of the monodrama, performed his theory of expressive individualism, influenced dance history, and promoted theatrical Hellenism."’ A short operatic piece written in 1762, Pygmalion remained in the repertoire of Paris's Comédie Francaise through the beginning of the nineteenth century (MATV 40). Long pantomimic segments feature bodily expression, as in this description of the awakening of Galatea, the statue loved by its sculptor: She takes a few steps, touches the marble in the studio, and then approaches Pygmalion. He rises quickly and stretches his arms to her, but she hesitates before reaching for him. He takes her hand and draws it to his heart. Rousseau, in a response to Gluck’s opera Alceste, described Pygmalion as an antidote to the problem that music and speech undermine each other in opera recitative, flattening the emotion and preventing “the passions” from being “varied” (CWR 492). The monodramatic solution was “a genre of Drama in which the words and the Music, instead of proceeding together, are made to be heard in succession, and in which the spoken phrase 1s ina way announced

and prepared by the musical phrase’ (CWR 495-497). To achieve “the truthfulness of

the expression,’ Rousseau also deployed gesture (CWR 493, 494). His score for Pygmalion presented the three performance media in separate columns: “Musique, ’ “Scéne” (gesture and motion), and “Durée” (the length of phases). Just as the expressive modes shift in Pygmalion, the passions follow each other in rapid succession. With the statue of Galatea posed on the stage, Pygmalion reveals his love for her, promises the gods he would give up his life if she could live,

expresses disbelief then adoration as the statue steps from her pedestal, and dies in fulfillment of his vow.!! At the emotional extremes, as when Galatea comes to life,

declamation is abandoned for pantomime. In Rousseau’s theories of language, gesture can convey great feeling but “the violence of passion causes speech to be broken into by half-begun and interrupted words”; whereas speech, music, and gesture were once unified tools for human expression, speech degenerated and lost

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS — 29

its “ancient energy’ and “lively and passionate tone” as it was bound by grammatical

rules (CWR 290, 329). Rousseau’s interest in gesture was part of a new classicism that popularized reconstructions of the dance and music of Greek tragedy, shaped the romantic ballet and modern dance, and later influenced modernist Hellenism. Jean Baptiste Dubos’s new classical performance theory encouraged revivals of the

Roman pantomime and the chorus of antique tragedy, which were partially realized in ballet’s jeu muet. This chorus dance featured a choreography of “expressive gestures and attitudes which follow the emotions” rather than the standard ballet steps lacking any connection to ancient dance.'” Rousseau was also influenced by Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Pygmalion (1748), which introduced the “danse pantomime’ to convey narrative solely through gesture (MATV 41). Susan Foster mentions Rousseau’s Pygmalion (although not its monodramatic form) as she traces the development of ballet into an autonomous art, separate from opera, through several eighteenth-century interpretations of the Pygmalion myth.’ Marie Sallé’s 1734 Pygmalion told the story using only movement and rejected the conventional “grand operatic structure” in which dance served “as an elaboration on the narrative that lyrics provided” (“No-body” 131). Her selfdirected, twenty-minute composition foreshadowed Isadora Duncan’s innovations, as Sallé performed uncorseted in a simple tunic and presented a Galatea who was not simply a passive recipient of love and life. Her choreography resembled the poses of Greek statues rather than ballet steps, and she avoided demonstrations of balletic virtuosity in favor of movement appropriate to theme and character." Foster positions Sallé’s “audacious initiative” as both choreographer and performer in the context of a “new notion of the individual, contained within and supported by the physical body”; this individual “provided the foundation for the political ideas of citizenship and the supporting definitions of public and private space and masculine and feminine behavior” (“No-body” 133). Foster demonstrates how histories of subjectivity benefit from considering the contemporaneous meanings attributed to the body as revealed in dance. Given the popularity of Sallé’s Pygmalion, Rousseau may have been aware of

the piece, but his monodrama undoubtedly influenced Louis Milon’s 1799 Pygmalion, the first of many full-length narrative ballets. Foster examines Milon’s production in relation to Rousseau’s social contract theory; the agentive individual,

exemplified by the sculptor or the dancer-choreographer, produces his work within a society of other individuals, all of whom possess their own agency and collectively negotiate their “destiny” with a ruler they place in power (“No-body” 136). As Foster points out, this redistribution of power away from the monarch designates other subjects of domination, including women. The Galatea who had

30 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

danced away from the pedestal in Sallé’s choreography is death to the artist fourteen years later in Rousseau’s monodrama and, by the end of the century, is fixed as an object of desire in Milon’s ballet. Galatea has become, for Rousseau and Milon, an “icon for the feminine and the bodily” and a representation of a femi-

ninity hewn by the male creator-individual to serve him (“No-body” 136). Rousseau’s monodrama warns that the sculptor who gives movement to his female

creation does so at the peril of his life. Any idea of subjectivity based on contract has been contentious for women, as they were prohibited from signing contracts through the nineteenth century." In addition to its position in histories of dance and subjectivity, Pygmalion inspired many works in the monodrama form that continued to emphasize gesture, spectacle, and the expression of passions. The monodrama achieved its greatest popularity in Germany after Goethe saw Rousseau’s Pygmalion in 1773 and restaged the monodrama in 1774 (MATV 46). In the next fifteen years, more than thirty monodramas were performed, including Georg Benda’s Medea (1775), Goethe’s Proserpina (1776), and J. G. G6z’s Lenardo und Blandine (1775) (MATV 52). Many

of the other titles from throughout Europe also name the tragic heroines of classical antiquity, the same characters that appear in dramatic monologues and modern dances; in Germany, Dido, Niobe, and Sophonisba appeared in the 1780s. Perhaps the most famous monodrama was Johann Christian Brandes and Georg Benda’s two-act Ariadne auf Naxos (1775), which played throughout Germany and then toured Europe in 1776. The first act features a monologue by Theseus, lamenting that he must abandon his sleeping lover, Ariadne; she awakes in the second act, and her monologue depicts successive emotions as she gradually realizes he will not return. The piece was designed to highlight the talents of Brandes’s wife, Charlotte, who performed with passionate gestures in a Greek costume. A drawing by J. M. Kraus in the Theater Kalender of 1776 depicts her lunging to

the right with one bare foot extended and both arms raised against a stormy sky (MATV 49). Predicting the spectacular conclusions that would become a convention in melodrama, Ariadne is struck by lightning and thrown into the sea.

As solo performances featuring passion-filled characters who episodically abandon speech to gesture their meaning, these monodramas call attention to the limits of expression. They invoke “present-absent figures” whose lack is belied by their impact on the character.'® Pygmalion pleads with the statue and the gods, Ariadne calls out for the departed Theseus, and many soloists talk to themselves in the absence of the desired other. They frequently shift from this inward focus to the external address of the lyric apostrophe, an address that constructs the characteristics of an ideal spectator. Pygmalion desires a spectator who will admire his art

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 31

and sympathize with his loneliness. The ideal spectator of the monodrama will generally recognize the successive passions displayed by the speaker and enable effective communication. Yet, full recognition appears to be impossible as the soloist abandons speech, employs gesture, and returns to speech because neither is sufficient to the expression. The monodrama tends to explore subjectivities in crisis and scenes of hysteria or madness, featuring a fragmented speaking voice that anticipates modernist performances, especially in the expressionist theater. The real-time audience of the monodrama, overhearing the character’s passionate appeal, often experienced an uncomfortable intimacy with the soloist, as is evident in the audience’s response to Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Captive: A Monodrama or Tragic Scene, performed on March 22, 1803, at Covent Garden." Lewis had traveled to Germany in 1792, where he met Goethe and studied German

monodramas. The Captive also draws from trends set by British monodramatists, especially Robert Southey (1774-1843), in its adoption of modern English scenes and exploration of new concerns with psychology and the treatment of the insane." A young mother is imprisoned in a “private mad-house” by her cruel husband, although she repeatedly insists, “I am not mad” (Captive 226). The horrors of the dungeon, a cruel Gaoler, a raving escaped “Madman,’ and the separation from her

young son push the Captive—with some in the audience—toward insanity. In Lewis’s account, “It proved much too terrible for representation, and two people went into hysterics during the performance & two more after the curtain dropped” (Captive 225). A reviewer suggested that the Captive’s “hysteria” was contagious: “Her character was that of a maniac, and her imbodyment [sic] of the author’s hor-

rible imagings [sic], combined with the scenic effect...threw a portion of the audience—whose nerves were unable to withstand the dreadful truth of the language and the scene—into hysterics...” (“Monodrama’” 37). For this reviewer, the soloist presented the “truthfulness of expression” advocated by Rousseau in “the language and the scene” but also in her bodily and gestural expression. In the closing pantomime, the Captive’s father and siblings arrive and, after attempting to restore her reason, gesture “their despair of her recovery” (Captive 230). Even “the music ceases” before a servant brings the son into the cell, she recognizes the boy, and the monodrama ends in the ideology of sanctified motherhood. In spite of its seemingly conservative finale, audience “hysteria” forced Lewis to withdraw The Captive after one night. He never restaged it, but, in one example of the generic fluidity of monodramas and poetry, he published it in 1812, and it was “a popular recitation piece” through the nineteenth century (Captive 225). Not all monodramas infected the audience with hysteria, but the spectacle of the passionate female performer was a crucial feature of the genre. Monodramatic

32. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

actors could build their reputations as “everybody spoke about Mme. Brandes’ Ariadne and Mme. Seyler’s Medea” (MATV 53). Erotic descriptions of “Miss Hodges” in the role of Rousseau’s Galatea survive in Kearby’s translation, which was inspired by an English performance in 1779 (Pygmalion 1). Kearby dedicates his work to Hodges and indulges in descriptions of “your charming Dignity, the attractive Loveliness of your Figure.” At the opening of the piece, “An azure Curtain

richly wrought with Gold, / Fell all around, in many a waving Fold” and “hid the fascinating Charm” of Galatea on the pedestal (Pygmalion 6). The curtain recalled the cloths sculptors draped over unfinished pieces and encouraged the audience’s association of Galatea and nude classical statuary, especially as Pygmalion generated suspense by repeatedly restraining himself from removing the cloth (Pygmalion

12-13). Although Hodges actually wore a light “Greek” tunic that anticipated Isadora Duncan’s costume, she was figuratively undressed as the classical nude. The audience’s titillation and intimacy with the soloist contributed to the monodrama’s popularity.

They were denounced as scandalous women and presented as dependent on patrons, impresarios, or the men who wrote their parts, yet female soloists entered the public stage as actors with some degree of agency, however constrained and impossible to measure. The opportunity to express extreme passions, the fury of Ariadne, Medea, or Dido, was rarely afforded women, as restraint, silence, and sub-

mission were encouraged by nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity. Yet, gender subversions were displaced in the mythic past, objectified, and punished with a lightning bolt or less spectacular penalty linked to myths so familiar that the end need not be staged. The fainting of audience members suggests that the Captive’s suffering at the hands of a cruel husband exceeded the text’s ability to contain her in the happy ending’s familiar narrative of redeemed motherhood. She performed a critique of marriage and the insane asylum, but the show quickly closed. Performance, especially physically based gestural performance, offered the

actors opportunities to ascribe some of their own meanings to the roles, to act out interpretations that are not neatly contained in published scripts or stage directions. But, there were other strategies of containment—mythic and showstopping.

II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton’s Attitude The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does. In her he has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvidere. —Goethe, Italian Journey (1786-1788)"”

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 33

The attitudes of Emma Lyon Hamilton, mistress and then wife of Sir William Hamilton (“the old knight”), fulfill the Pygmalionesque longing for a statue to melt into a living woman and for a beautiful woman to solidify into a work of art.”°

She entertained visitors to Hamilton’s English embassy in Naples in the 1780s and 1790s, becoming a popular tourist attraction, and then performed in aristocratic

drawing rooms and palaces throughout early-nineteenth-century Europe. Costumed in a long white Greek tunic, usually barefoot, Hamilton draped her body in a cloth; arranged her hair; transformed sashes into veils, girdles, mantles, and turbans; and emerged in the pose of Mary Magdalene, the Muse of Dance, Iphigenia, Medea, Niobe, and more. She held each position and then transitioned into another pose from mythological or biblical art. While her attitudes made her famous and initiated an international interest in statue posing, it is her biography that is better known today. Sensationalized “memoirs,” novels, and films depict her roles as child prostitute in the English slums at Hawarden; living advertisement posed as the goddess Hygeia in Dr. Graham’s popular “Temple of Health”; mistress of Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh and Charles Greville; a pawn, along with several of

her portraits, to ensure Greville’s inheritance from his Uncle Hamilton; Lady Hamilton, ambassadress to Naples; and lover of Admiral Horatio Nelson and mother of their child, Horatia (b. 1801).*! She has received little critical attention, however, and this is the first study to trace her influence on protomodernist genres of solo performance and dance.” Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes abstracted the gestural component of the mono-

drama and developed a form of physical expression punctuated by poses that depended on audience recognition of mythological referents for their effect. Goethe wrote the first lengthy description on March 16, 1787, while he was traveling in Italy

with the painter J. H. W. Tischbein.”’ Goethe claimed that the attitudes were “like nothing you ever saw before in your life,’ in spite of precedents such as Rousseau’s Pygmalion Journey 208).** Goethe’s description is part of a comment on how the culture of Naples encouraged “everyone to do nothing but enjoy himself?”

Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here as English ambassador, has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and

34. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

surprising transformations—standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows

another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress. Journey 208)

While Goethe’s reference to an anonymous “English girl” and description of Sir Hamilton’s costume design seem to minimize Lyon Hamilton’s role, she becomes the active agent when he describes the performance and her expressions. “She knows” how to manipulate a veil, and she realizes what other artists “would have liked to express.” Goethe’s focus is not on the sequence of poses but on the “movements and surprising transformations,” represented by the gerunds, “standing,” “kneeling,” “sitting,” and “turning.”

The tension between motion and stasis, the illusion that she was frozen in motion, but at any moment, the statue might become a living woman again, is a significant element of the attitude’s appeal for audiences. Portraits of Lyon Hamilton frequently depict a dancing body rather than a pose and use her long hair and shawls to encode movement in a static medium. In Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Lady Hamilton as Bacchante (1790), she shakes a tambourine overhead and

glances back over her shoulder as if reluctantly turning away from the viewer (figure 1.1).%° The folds of the tunic and long strands of hair flowing beyond the frame of the picture emphasize the centripetal motion of a body that cannot be contained. Instead of a drawing room, the usual location of Lyon Hamilton’s performances, the Bacchante is placed against an open sky at dusk. She turns toward a smoking volcano, probably Mt. Vesuvius, a reference to Lord Hamilton’s interest in volcanology as well as the socially eruptive aspects of the relationship between a noble and a former prostitute. The German artist Frederick Rehberg claimed more accuracy and less embellishment in his series of drawings of Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, twelve of which were engraved by T. Piroli and published in Rome as Drawings Faithfully copied from Nature at Naples (1794) (MATV 122-125). The image titled Maria Magdalena depicts a barefoot woman stepping down a flight of stairs, and a long cloak trails along the steps, emphasizing her forward progress (figure 1.2). Motion is even more evident in Rehberg’s Muse der Tanzkunst (“Muse of the Dance,” figure 1.3). The Muse balances on the arch of the right foot with left leg lifted, and the body is shifted off-center so that she seems to be moving through the position rather than posing. She has kicked up the bottom of her tunic, and her hair and long scarf billow behind. As she assumed such an attitude under the cloth, the signs of motion

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 35

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Fig 1.1

Lady Hamilton as Bacchante by Elizabeth Louise Vigée le Brun (1790). © National Museums Liverpool.

evident in the fabric’s undulations may have increased the audience’s anticipation. Hamilton chose light fabric so that when she let her curtain fall, the motion of the cloth, her long hair, and tunic contrasted with the stillness of her body, contributing to the illusion that she was pausing in a motion that would resume again. Lyon Hamilton occasionally used supporting characters to involve the audience in her performances. Comtesse Adéle de Boigne’s memoirs of a 1792 childhood visit to Naples describe how Hamilton positioned her beneath the cloth curtain kneeling at an urn in an attitude of prayer (MATV 113-114, Mistress 143). Hamilton grasped the young de Boigne by her hair with one hand and raised a knife with the other, and when she let the cloth fall, the audience cried, “Bravo la Medea!””’ Without using the shawl as entr’acte to conceal the transition, Hamilton held the child to her body, and the audience applauded, “Viva la Niobe!” The sequence encouraged audiences to recognize the thematic continuity of the myths of Medea and Niobe, as it provoked fears of proud women and infanticide. Another feature of the attitudes that encouraged the audience’s engagement in the performance is clarified by their recognition of the mythic mothers. The audience’s outcry, “Bravo la Medea” or “Viva la Niobe,” signaled their participation and their familiarity with the referent of the attitude.

36 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

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While watching Lyon Hamilton pose, the audience was uncertain of when the motion would stop or begin because the pose did not conclude at any exterior crite-

rion like the end of a musical phrase. The completion and success of each attitude was determined, then, by audience recognition of the character, statue, or painting represented.”* Posing in relation to familiar myths, Hamilton could invoke an entire narrative and transform herself into the living embodiment of a type. Lyon Hamilton’s audiences, primarily artists and aristocratic visitors to the British embassy, also marked their class and cultural literacy as they called out “Viva la Niobe.” Her performances offered the charadelike pleasures of recognition repeated with each pose, as well as the feeling of inclusion in a community-of-the-knowing encouraged by all mythic posing. The elite of the early nineteenth century received an education that emphasized the classics, and they had recently seen collections from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Tourists frequently came to Italy to be immersed in a classical atmosphere, and Lyon Hamilton suggested the possibility that each could embody ancient ideals. Among the fashionable collectors of ancient artifacts, William Hamilton was one of the preeminent authorities on Greek and Roman art. As Goethe reveals, Hamilton’s expertise (“many years of devotion to the arts and the study of

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 37

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narrations or introductions to her performances (“Goethean” 7). Her “beautiful face” and “perfect figure” were also primary attractions, as was the sensation of her

rise from mistress to famous performer and then lady VJourney 208). An erotic description by the Comte d’Espinchal reveals that her performance at a January 28, 1790, dinner given by M. le Baron de Salis also included dance, particularly the tarantella, an Italian folk dance.”? D’Espinchal claims, “This Mme Hart, who is one of the most beautiful creatures I have seen, is of obscure origin. Nobody knows from

what state the chevalier Hamilton has plucked her” (Emma 129-130). Following the

euphemism “plucked,” he records his appreciation for the poses invoking nude sculptures; if he were “the chevalier Hamilton,” he would “see often Hebe and Venus

and the Graces, sometimes Juno, very rarely Minerva” (Emma 130). The Roman virgin goddess is usually depicted clothed or in armor, while the other types of love and beauty allowed him to imagine a figure less emphatically clad. If audiences sexualized Lyon Hamilton more readily because of her checkered past, her quick transformations from one character and emotional state to another were emblematic of her class mobility. She threatened social boundaries and the

38 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

strictures of “decency” with her advantageous marriage and also as a celebrated performer in her own right. Writers such as Juliane von Krtidener and Germaine de Staél claimed Lyon Hamilton as the model for heroines in their novels, Valérie (1803) and Corinne (1807), respectively. Attitudes in these works are symbols of the

soloist’s independence and rejection of modern hypocrisy for a classical ethical code. Lyon Hamilton became a famous example of a protest against standard morality and class hierarchies, and her performance in a light tunic associated with Greek statuary contrasted with women’s constrictive dress and circumscribed movements. The attitude presents emotional states as transient phases, the ingredients of an individual that can be taken up like a veil, wrapped differently, or discarded, with control over each motion and emotion. As the passions are displayed physically, the body and mind appear to be unified, and even representations of violent emotions, as in the Medea attitudes, are static, balanced poses. This bodily control was an illusion that both exaggerated agency and limited the performer's potential cultural intervention. The attitude was a temporary pose rather than a lasting challenge to social values. Goethe’s catalogue, “sad, playful, ecstatic,”

celebrates the “variety” of emotions. A fascination with emotional representation was the impetus behind the attitude and monodrama but also a widespread fascination, evident in Samuel Foote’s Treatise on the Passions (1747), Aaron Hill’s The Actor (1750), and studies of physiognomy more generally. All seek to exteriorize interior experience, but in attitudes, the turning outward is enclosed by classical and religious myth. The attitude assumes the preexistence of inner qualities in a type (Bacchante), and the emotion (ecstasy) corresponds to a pose. The aristocratic ladies of the court refused to visit Hamilton’s embassy, perhaps because they disapproved of Lyon Hamilton’s transgressions or because propriety required that they appear to guard their virtue against indecency. She was variously admired and rebuffed, invited to perform in the most illustrious drawing rooms, and banned from the English court. She served as the model for interesting examples of eighteenth-century portraiture by G. Romney and Sir J. Reynolds (figure 1.4), which contributed to the popularity of portraits that, like attitudes and prosopopoeia, invoked mythic figures. Reynolds celebrated the “variety which portraits and modern dresses, mixed with allegorical figures, produce.”’? Lyon Hamilton was also the subject of parodies like James Gillray’s 1801 cartoon of a heavy “Dido in Despair” after her lover returned to the English fleet: “He’s [Nelson] gone to fight y Frenchman, t’loose t other Arm & eye, And left me with the old Antique [Hamilton] to lay me down & Cry.’*! Critics have continued this pattern of fascination and ridicule. Introducing Goethe's Italian Journey, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer treat attitudes (and modern dance) with contempt, even as they

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 39

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overstate Lyon Hamilton’s little-acknowledged significance in dance history; they

describe “the future Lady Hamilton, who seems—God forgive her!—to have invented the Modern Dance” (Journey 8).

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III. Goethe’s Proserpina and Later Posers Hopeless the fate of the departed, And among them all I err about, Goddess! Queen! Myself the slave of destiny! —J. W. Goethe, Proserpina (1776)°*

Goethe’s Proserpina poses as a goddess, queen of the underworld, slave, lost child, and nymph, shifting between each with the deft manipulation of veils. Citing Lyon

40 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Hamilton’s example, Goethe incorporated attitudes and the related group pose or tableau vivant into the spectacular conclusion of Proserpina. He popularized the monodrama, attitude, and tableau, all of which appeared in music halls, variety shows, melodramas, and private theatricals and influenced acting techniques, more generally. Excellent studies have discussed posing in the nineteenth-century theater, but they do not usually connect melodramatic tableaux to paratheatrical mythic posing in attitudes, monodramas, drawing room entertainments, dance, and physical culture regimens.” These popular performance forms and movement practices established posing as a prevalent “technique of the body” or “habitus,” terms coined by Marcel Mauss during the modernist period’s interest in kinesthetics (1935). According to Mauss, such corporal practices are not just determined by “individuals and their imitations” or “the soul and its repetitive faculties,’ but they reflect cultural desires as they “vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestige.”** The habitus of posing influenced the bodily techniques deployed in modernist performances, and a history of posing provides a genealogy for the modernist suspicion that bodies might never make meaningful gestures but remain inscrutable and partial, refusing to clarify identities. The living, aging, potentially sick, and dying body, however technically proficient, will ultimately fail to hold the pose or achieve full recognition. This failure was not the intent of Lyon Hamilton and the posers I examine here; they hoped their attitudes would be met with the cheer, “Viva la Niobe.” Still, the practice of composing the body into the appearance of universal beauty and the exposure of an eventual failure are the foundations for later conceptions of bodies as problematic sites. This section traces Lyon Hamilton’s successors, including Goethe’s Proserpina and later monodramas and tableaux, which contributed to the fad for mythic posing that lasted well into the twentieth century. In spite of George Romney’s twenty-four portraits of Lyon Hamilton, many other pictorial depictions of her attitudes, and accounts of her performances by the eminent artists, aristocrats, and politicians of the period, the legacy of her pose through the nineteenth century and into Delsartism has not been recognized.” Goethe not only included Lyon Hamilton’s version of attitudes in Proserpina but also used posing to develop a training method for the acting style he sought in his theater. He began work on Proserpina in 1776, two years after he had staged Rousseau’s Pygmalion. The first performance was given at the Liebhaber Theater in 1779 with music by Siegmund von Seckendorf (Proserpina 287). Goethe was dissatisfied with the production but continued to be interested in the monodrama and attitude and revived Proserpina in 1815, with new music by Karl Eberwein. In the intervening years, he restaged Pygmalion, giving the sculptor’s role to A. W.

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 41

Iffland, an actor he compared with Lyon Hamilton, suggesting that an artist should

draw his poses as Rehberg had captured her attitudes (“Hamiltons” 125). Iffland’s

success may have encouraged Goethe’s interest in the gestural components of monodrama. Before the 1815 Prosperpina, he spent a year training Amalie Wolf (in

true Pygmalionesque style) to play the title role, teaching her the techniques of pantomime, emotional expression, costume manipulation, and attitudes—the skills he admired in Lyon Hamilton. Goethe’s Proserpina must represent an array of emotional states in quick succession after being abducted by Pluto to be Queen of Hades. The transitions are marked by episodes of pantomime; musical interludes; shifts of address to present-absent figures such as her parents, Ceres and Jupiter; and the manipulation of mantles and veils like those used by Lyon Hamilton. As Proserpina remem-

bers the beauty of her life in the world, for example, she addresses her nymph playmates and drops her mantles to reveal a flowered nymph costume (MATV 105). Goethe provides detailed instructions for how Proserpina, abandoning hope, takes up her mantles and veils again to transform them into the costume of death (MATV 107). The spectacular tableau finale of the monodrama is most revealing of the physical demands of the role and the influence of Lyon Hamilton on Goethe's staging. After eating the pomegranate seeds that prevent her departure, Proserpina releases her hold on life and stiffens into a pose representing death. The stage set then opens to disclose a scene of Hades and Pluto seated center on a throne, with Tantalus, Sisyphos, and the damned figures on one side and a throng of blessed souls on the other. Proserpina’s pose is revealed to be the attitude of the queen of Hades as she is drawn into the tableau and the curtain falls (MATV 108).

Proserpina documents the merging of attitude and tableau with the monodrama’s hybrid of declamation, music, and gesture. Goethe recognized Lyon Hamilton as the source for this posed spectacle in a letter to K. F. Zelter (May 7, 1815), where

he refers to the novel element in Proserpina as “Hamiltonisch-Handelische Gebarden” (“Hamiltons” 128). Although he credited Lyon Hamilton’s inspiration in

the private letter and he initially described her in Italian Journey as the “acme of... delights,” his opinion of posing is confused by a second dismissive account of her attitudes, supposedly dated May 27, 1787 UJourney 208). There, he presents her as a “dull creature” and one of the “soulless beauties,’ but he may have added this entry when he was editing Italian Journey in 1816 due to the jealousy of a new lover (Journey 316).°° In this second passage, he identifies the origins of attitudes and tableaux in the Neapolitan Christmas cribs or presepe, scenes of Christ’s birth arranged

in churches and on rooftops. According to Goethe, living people sometimes posed among plastic figures in the presepe, and this practice also gave rise to the

42. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

representation of “profane scenes from history or poetry” in private theatricals, which became “one of the great diversions of noble and wealthy families” (Journey 316).°’ In Elective Affinities (1809), Goethe presents posing as a frivolous practice, but the novel, Proserpina, and Italian Journey all popularized the pastime.

The other poser Goethe mentions in his reference to Proserpina’s tableau curtain call as “Hamiltonisch-Handelische Geberden” is Henrietta Handel-Schiitz

(1770-1849). During her childhood in Gotha, Handel-Schitz had trained in ballet and received music lessons from the monodramatist Georg Benda; in fact, she gave her debut performance as one of the doomed sons in Benda’s monodrama, Medea. She began studying attitudes in 1794, when she met the painter Franz Pforr and he gave her Rehberg’s drawings of Lyon Hamilton (MATV 184). Her costume, like Hamilton’s, was a simple classical tunic with long shawls and bare feet, but Handel-

Schutz attempted to reproduce different styles and periods from the history of art rather than represent particular works (MATV 200). A series of twenty-four attitudes drawn by J. N. Peroux (1809) depicts figures from classical mythology, first in a Grecian and then the more angular Egyptian style (Plates 3 and 4, MATV

193-198). She performed a cycle of poses of the Virgin from Annunciation to Ascension in both the Italian and German styles (Plates 7—23).*°

By the 1850s, entire companies of posers performed revolving repertoires of attitudes and tableaux or “living pictures.’ These companies were the rage of popular entertainment as attractions on a multiple bill or featured events in U.S. and European variety shows, burlesques, and music halls.°’ Some developed a costume of body tights covered with flour or paint to present the illusion of plaster and enhance their verisimilitude to statues. Others, following the example of the classical nude, abandoned costumes altogether. Laws governing decency actually encouraged posing and rendered it more lucrative; in both Britain and the United States, the censor deemed only the naked moving body pornographic (Stripping 85). Static poses in the nude were, like the classical art they referenced, thought to offer aesthetic contemplation.”® In Britain, the law was in place through the 1940s, when the Windmill Theatre in Piccadilly headlined “revuedeville,” a combination of the musical revue and vaudeville that featured nude models through the Second World War (Stripping 87).*' Another set of laws governing the London theater contributed to posing in the melodrama: the Licensing Acts of 1737 and 1752 designated

two “legitimate” patent theaters, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, while other venues could offer mixed forms of entertainment that incorporated music and dance.” The privilege of the patent theaters in England was effectively a “monopoly of the word,’ and other theaters developed performance forms with less dependence

on speech and text (Melodramatic 63). Prominent among these mixed forms was

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 43

the melodrama, which usually included large casts of characters, song and dance numbers, plots of fantasy or mystery, and an emphasis on visual spectacle and posing.“ The laws created an “illegitimate” and hybrid sphere of bodily performance

that was exempt from censorship and could present controversial subjects, prostitutes, criminal heroes, transvestism, interracial lovers, and rape (Illegitimate 18).* The most spectacular of melodramatic conventions was the “realization” or “living picture,” a form of posing similar to Goethe’s Hades tableau at the conclusion of Proserpina. The action of the melodrama was periodically suspended by what Martin Meisel calls a “realization tableau,” a pose that reproduced a recognizable image, usually an illustration in the popular novels from which many melodramas were derived.” J. B. Buckstone’s Jack Sheppard (1839), for example, was freely adapted from a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, but it meticulously imitated George Cruikshank’s illustrations, which the stage directions reference at least fourteen times (Realization 247).*” Audiences expected the melodrama’s stage design and costuming to adhere to the novel’s illustrations and were even more delighted when the action paused in a realization, commonly indicated by the direction “Vide Picture or Illustration.” They recognized an accurate stage realization by clapping.* Opportunities for recognition, similar to those evident in the “Bravo la Medea” cry for Lyon Hamilton, also generated the applause for realizations and transformed audiences into communities-of-the-knowing before a pose. The intersection of nineteenth-century theatrical practices, pictorial art, and

the novel produced the realization tableau in melodrama, but the tradition of monodramas and attitudes is overlooked at the juncture. Posing was used to express codified emotions in nineteenth-century acting techniques. The various “passions” had been linked to particular poses in the Augustan theater, and David Garrick’s “An Essay on Acting” of 1744 rejected those conventional gestures in favor of more original and character-specific techniques. Yet, he demonstrated his ability to “put on” the various human passions using attitudes detached from character or narrative.” By the mid-nineteenth century, Garrick’s demonstrations of the passions were codified, once again, into the melodramatic actor’s stock gestures.” These gestures punctuated the drama with syncopated units of posing, held for the purpose of visibility to large audiences (Melodramatic 76). The term attitude commonly appears in nineteenth-century acting manuals to indicate a posture of the body assumed for the purpose of implying a mental state:°' “You turn round quick and stand in an attitude of terror, [and] even after your father comes on, remain for a moment or two fixed, as a statue representing horror.”*’ Actors capitalized on their training in the bodily techniques of posing and performed attitudes in variety shows as well. George Wieland Frimbly played William in the popular melodrama

44. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Black Ey‘d Susan at the Bowery Theater, New York, in 1831 and simultaneously exhibited as a “Living Statue, or Model of Antiques”: [Frimbly] used to dress himself neatly in skin tight cotton fleshings, which

he then plastered all over with flour, until at the distance of stage from

audience, he really looked very like a statue in plaster-of-paris, by Garbeille.... Frimbly was a good artist and studied his attitudes carefully. (Living Pictures 12-13)

Production styles also reflected the goal of realizing ancient statues; Charles Kean’s

famous staging of Lord Byron’s Sardanapalus at the Princess Theatre (1853) was inspired by the angular images of recently recovered Assyrian art. Kean attempted

to match “his own attitudes and those of others to the action of the disinterred frescoes,’ yet another mythic pose (Realizations 43).

Nineteenth-century performances continued to feature the bodily techniques evident in Goethe’s Proserpina, with its gestural acting style, musical and pantomimic interludes, attitudes, and closing tableau. Yet, just as Holmstrém claims that there were no successors for Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, she suggests that the monodrama was a short-lived theatrical fashion that “left no traces of importance in discussions on the theatre” (MATV 46).” The generic designation “monodrama” was used less frequently after the mid-nineteenth century, but it still occasionally appears

in discussions of both theater* and opera.*? Monologue-based forms of solo performance continued to appeal to artists interrogating notions of selfhood, character, and especially gendered subjectivity. Maggie B. Gale examines several leading nineteenth-century actresses, including Fanny Kelly (1790-1882), who turned to the monologue as a form that allowed them to reinvent themselves as independent creators.” Many challenged contemporaneous assumptions about femininity as they staged material they wrote and directed themselves. As the struggle for the vote intensified on both sides of the Atlantic, critics associated these solo performances with the “women’s movement,’ regardless of their stance on suffrage (“Going solo” 294).°’ Yet another legacy of the nineteenth-century monodrama must be traced off the stage as it influenced literary genres, particularly the dramatic monologue.

IV. Barrett Browning: Naming “Aeschylus” and “The Virgin Mary...” A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate, A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love, A still Medusa with mild milky brows

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 45 All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or anon Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords.... —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)°®

Barrett Browning was more widely read in her own time than her husband, Robert Browning, who was later celebrated as a protomodernist poet, largely for his innovative dramatic monologues. Her poetry was deemed sentimental and autobiographical and fell into obscurity, but as feminist critics began recovering her work in the 1970s, Aurora Leigh became a “heroine-text.””? Often described as a versenovel, it can be read as a dramatic monologue spoken by Aurora, whose name refers to the goddess of dawn, just as titles of monologues frequently name their mythic speakers. A succession of the classical and biblical types featured in statue poses appears in Aurora's visions before a postmortem portrait of her mother in the passage quoted. Critics have interpreted these mythic figures as examples of

the conventional feminine roles in Western literature and the impoverished, “motherless” tradition of female poets. For Aurora, they represent the “incoherencies” of life and how types are “mixed and merged,” rather than static, bounded categories of being; the lessons of her mother’s portrait were more vivid than the “book education” on “the ignorance of men” provided by her father (Aurora I. 171-173). The sequence of poses imagined by Aurora recalls Lyon Hamilton, who

was introduced to Barrett Browning by Madame de Staél’s popular novel Corinne (1807).°' The passage also indicates the power of attitude performances for their nineteenth-century audiences: as a single performer occupies different mythic categories, she reveals overlooked features through juxtaposition.” The diversity of mythic poses does not produce entirely new modes of being, but it destabilizes common types as they are “mixed and merged” in a soloist.® The poses and gestures that punctuate Barrett Browning’s poetry are consistent with her interest in monodramas; in a letter to Robert Browning (February 27, 1845), she wrote, “I have in my head to associate with the version [of Prometheus

Bound] a monodram [sic] of my own—not a long poem,...but a monologue of Aeschylus as he sate [sic] a blind exile on the flats of Sicily and recounted the past to his own soul, just before the eagle cracked his great massy skull with a stone.”™ The textual history of Barrett Browning’s “Aeschylus” illustrates how readings are

influenced by intersections of gender and genre and shifts in historical understandings of both. Frederick Kenyon first published R. Browning’s “Unfinished Draft of a Poem Which May Be Entitled ‘Aeschylus’ Soliloquy” in 1913, but Martha

Hale Shackford, citing evidence in the correspondence, questioned the authorship of the poem as early as 1942.° The discovery of a manuscript of the poem written

46 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

by Barrett Browning definitively resolved the question of authorship. Margaret

Reynolds and Barbara Rosenbaum point to critics who disparaged Barrett Browning’s work as “merely sentimental” but celebrated “Aeschylus” as a monologue featuring R. Browning’s irony.®° The presumed gender of the author influenced its classification as the “new” form of dramatic poetry rather than sentimental verse. Reynolds and Rosenbaum retain the title, “Aeschylus’ Soliloquy,” for their

transcription, but Barrett Browning referred to “Aeschylus’ monologue” or “monodram[a],” suggesting that monologue and monodrama were roughly synonymous. Soliloquies generally feature speech to oneself, monologues tend to include auditors, and monodramas address multiple present-absent figures, but definitive

distinctions did not operate in the period.” If the monodrama was the generic formation operating in a poet’s mind (Tennyson designated Maud, A Monodrama in 1875), it was sometimes retroactively replaced by the dramatic monologue (he dropped the subtitle). Critics might not comply with authors’ designations and read poems as sentimental verse, soliloquies, monologues, or monodramas.™ In “Aeschylus,” Barrett Browning chose a speaker from ancient Greece, a staple for both monodramas and dramatic monologues, and the legend that Aeschylus left Athens for self-imposed exile in Sicily after Sophocles defeated him in the annual dramatic contest.” The 162 extant blank verse lines are spoken by Aeschylus, with the exception of the first stanza, which establishes the location, a technique recalling the description of the “Scene” in drama. Aeschylus sits in “the middle of a plain” in Sicily, where, with only the sky above him, he hopes to thwart the oracle that said he would be killed by a falling house (1. 4).’” According to myth, the oracle was fulfilled when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a boulder that would crack the shell. Readers familiar with the story realize that while Aeschylus views himself as a failed dramatist who is clever enough to elude fate, history will crown him a dramatic genius and the oracle speaks true. As in many mythic dramatic monologues, the disparity between the speaker’s understanding of agency and history’s judgment creates dramatic irony. Aeschylus ironically describes the failure of his play in the language of the prophecy; he refers to the scorn of the audience (“the house” of the theater) as “the crushing of a house” (1. 72). While the irony resembles dramatic monologues, Aeschylus addresses not a silent auditor but a sequence of inanimate objects, gods, former audiences, and himself in monodramatic apostrophes. He repeatedly reminds himself, “I am an old & solitary man” (1. 7). Elsewhere, he rails against the gods and then piously implores, “...let my thoughts in white/Keep chorus round thy glory” (Il. 94-95). An image of self-division, choric thought will serve in the absence of his whiterobed chorus dancing around the “thymele,” the altar to Dionysus.

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 47

Just as assumptions about the gender of the author shaped critical analyses of “Aeschylus,” the generic designation monodrama may also influence readings by encouraging interpretive conventions associated with texts for performance. These include attending to how a text attempts to inscribe a speaking voice and bodily positions as in the kinesthetic reading strategies outlined by Vernon Lee and other proponents of embodied aesthetic response at the turn of the twentieth century.” “Aeschylus” creates the illusion of extemporaneous speech through the turns of address and tendency to question his previous statements. Frequent dashes indicate self-interruption and the inadequacy of language: “The outside of my being— I myself / ah ha—these flats are wide!” (Il. 45-46). The exclamations “ah ha,” “ay,” and “Oh” are idiosyncrasies of speech with acoustic and emotional functions but minimal semantic content. Aeschylus calls attention to his voice when he compares it to the “shrill lipped people” of the audience: ... when the people’s scorn Was Hissed against the sun as if to darken it Over my head, because I spoke my Greek Too deep down in my soul to suit their ears (Il. 52-55)

As opposed to the long vowel rhymes associated with his own voice (“Greek / Too deep”), the “people’s” voices are described with the alliteration of s sounds, “people’s

scorn, “Was Hissed,” and “sun as.” The hissing sounds underscore Aeschylus’s claim that his play failed because of a lack of audience sophistication.” “Hissed” is an example of lexical onomatopoeia, the term literary criticism uses to refer to “what appears to be language functioning unproblematically as direct imitation of the real world,’ as Derek Attridge argues.” This imitation of sound actually requires an interpretive jump from “black marks on the page” to voicing, which relies on the reader’s knowledge of the conventions of the “graphological system” of written language and “the phonological system” of spoken language, as well as the conventions that the sounding of a word resembles a category of other sounds in the world—that is, the recognition of onomatopoeia requires many layers of convention. Still, a reader’s ability to “hear” onomatopoeia, the speaker’s “voice, and the “sounds” of poetic language continue to be common assumptions in poetic analyses. The capacity to “feel” literary language was another assumption

of the reading techniques promoted by Vernon Lee. Just as readers interpret printed words like hiss as a mimesis of sound, they might use the conventions of graphological and phonological language to recognize a relationship between the

meaning of a word and how the mouth and tongue feel when saying it. The

48 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

combination of alveolar consonants (/) and bilabial plosives (p) in “shrill lipped people” would force the lips and tongue to move a good deal if read aloud.” Of course, silent readers might fail to feel the effort required to say these words, just as they might fail to hear the presumed onomatopoeia of hissed, but the illusion that a text is extemporaneous speech in a performance genre encourages attention to the aural properties of language. Barrett Browning’s attempts to inscribe a speaking voice and body in her monodrama anticipates the ideology, common among modernist poets, that verse must be read aloud. Barrett Browning’s “The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus” (1838) further demonstrates the generic continuity between the monodrama and dramatic monologue, as it includes speech, song, and gesture. The snatches of lullaby function like

the musical interludes of the monodrama to shift the emotional tenor of the lines.” In the opening lines, “Sleep, sleep, mine Holy One!” the Virgin attempts to sing a mundane lullaby, but the faltering second line indicates the incongruity between the song and the name “Holy One”: “My flesh, my Lord!—what name?”” The Virgin asks what to call a god born of mortal, supposedly impure, flesh: “So, seeing my corruption, can I see / This Incorruptible now born of me” (“Virgin” 331). She rejects the Augustinian doctrine of original sin which claimed that sexual reproduction transmits Adam and Eve’s sin to each individual, and sexual desire

confirms humanity’s corruption.” Barrett Browning inserts the erotic into the “Immaculate Conception” by rewriting the scene as a passionate encounter in the “midnight hills of Galilee” that resembles the ravaging of maidens by classical gods: “so soft yet strong, so fain to press / Upon my heart as heaven did on the height.” The Virgin claims of her tears, “God heard them falling after, with His dew,” an image of semen as well as natural rejuvenation (“Virgin” 331). Setting the scene in nature, she subverts the dominant Christian iconography that places the conception and annunciation in domestic space, in accordance with the ideology of gendered separate spheres. The Virgin asks if she should “feel the blindness, stain, corruption more” after giving birth to “Innocence,” but her passionate language and interrogative tone suggests real doubt that she is “defiled.’” She proudly addresses the angels as silent auditors, “My spirit...may well contain your glory,” but quickly repeats, “I am not proud” and then interrupts her brazenness with a monodramatic lullaby (“Virgin” 331). Among Barrett Browning’s textual strategies indicating how the poem might be performed are dramatic stage directions, set off in brackets: “[She pauses]” (“Virgin” 332). As in “Aeschylus,” dashes, incomplete thoughts, or ideas broken at the end of the line suggest extemporaneous speech. Fluctuating meter and rhyme schemes distinguish spoken and sung language, as in the three beats of iambic

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 49

trimeter that mark the lullaby phrases: “Each empyreal star / Sits in a sphere afar /...Sleep, sleep, my crownless one!” (“Virgin” 332). These short lines, simple end rhymes, assonance (brow, crowned, crownless), repetition (sleep, sleep), and other sound effects contrast with the irregular rhythms of the spoken sections and reinforce the Virgin’s double nature as young woman and mother of a god. The language also inscribes gestures and bodily positions, most prominently at the end of

the poem, when her tear wakes the baby. The penultimate stanza begins as a rhymed and rhythmic lullaby, but she then sings a tortured prophecy that erodes the meter: a Creator, rent asunder From his first glory and cast away On His own world, for me alone

To hold in hands created, crying—Son! (“Virgin” 332)

The vision of the crucifixion turns Mary into a prophet and produces a tear that falls on the child, thereby indicating her position over the cradle. Jesus wakes, and the sleeping present-absent auditor becomes fully present as the scene ends. In poetry of the sentimental tradition, excesses of emotion frequently result in physical symptoms such as weeping, heaving bosoms, and trembling hands.” But the poem does not follow conventional descriptions of the Virgin crying; the tear falls in the real time of the poem, has material affects on the characters, and signifies common human responses in an uncommon mother-child relationship. Although she does not reject the sentimental tradition in which her poems were read, Barrett Browning uses its symbols and symptoms to reperform the scene and challenge assumptions about the Virgin, including notions of her humility, lack of sexuality, and unquestioning acceptance of Christian doctrines. The tear emphasizes Mary's status as a woman whose baby, however godly, depends on her body for survival. By humanizing the Virgin as an erotic, assertive, lullaby-forgetting mother, Barrett Browning makes her speak to the gendered concerns of the nineteenth century. While she underscores assumptions of sanctified motherhood, she challenges elements of Victorian femininity by celebrating sensuous pleasure, engaging theological questions, and claiming her own “glory” (“Virgin” 331). Just as Barrett Browning revises without rejecting the poetics of sentiment, she

adopts but modifies the dominant Victorian model of exegesis, biblical typology. Her Virgin uses typology to describe her pain at the crucifixion: “the dread sense of things which shall be done, / Doth smite me inly, like a sword: a sword? / That ‘smites the Shepherd’” (“Virgin” 332). The quote is from Zechariah 13:7: “Awake,

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O sword, against my shepherd...saith the Lorp of hosts: smite the shepherd.” It was repeated by Jesus the night before the crucifixion (Matthew 26:31). The Old

Testament sword is a type for the sword of the crucifixion, a symbol of Mary’s anguish in Luke 2:35: “(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Mary serves as an example that encourages later Christians to reveal their thoughts or confess (the tropological level), and this piercing of the soul leads to salvation (the anagogical). Barrett Browning was familiar with biblical typology through her extensive study of the Christian Fathers and the typological poetics of Dante and Milton.” In Aurora Leigh, she explicitly theorizes a revision of typology that emphasizes the value of the “artist,” who

Holds firmly by the natural, to reach The spiritual beyond it,—fixes still The type with mortal vision, to pierce through, With eyes immortal, to the antetype Some call the ideal,—better called the real (Aurora 7:780-784)*!

The “genuine artists” (7.838) must teach less observant individuals to recognize “the spiritual significance” through “the hieroglyphic of material shows,” that is, to become typological readers (Aurora 7:860—861). The “type” she mentions is associated with the “mortal” or historical, as in standard typology, but the “antetype” is both “spiritual” and “real.” She then includes the contemporary individual in her moral or tropological level: Look long enough On any peasant’s face here, coarse and lined, Youll catch Antinous somewhere in that clay, As perfect featured as he yearns at Rome From marble pale with beauty; then persist, And, if your apprehension’s competent, You'll find some fairer angel at his back (Aurora, 7.785-791)

Antinous (110-1302), the beautiful boy-lover of Roman emperor Hadrian who was

deified in the pantheon of gods after his death, serves as a type for any individual, any “peasant.” After recognizing the resemblance, the artist will see beyond the marble Antinous and the peasant, to a heavenly anagoge, the “fairer angel at his back.” The “angel” has Christian resonances, and the tropological or moral lesson

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is that all individuals, from peasants to pagans, can realize a divinity within.® Barrett Browning does not address Antinous’s homosexuality but celebrates his beauty, and her typological revision includes Christian and pagan figures, defies class boundaries, and privileges the work of the woman artist.

V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti and Augusta Webster ...accessories in this Inspired Book seem in great measure emblematical rather than actual; I can at least infer thence that every such figure must have an original, every type an antitype. Only a substance can cast a shadow....Let us sit down amid Divinely cast shadows with great

delight... —Christina Rossetti, The Face of the Deep (1892)**

Rossetti justifies her analysis of Revelations in The Face of the Deep by claiming that

imaginative endeavor is valuable for Christians because the Bible requires interpretation of its figurative, symbolic, and typological language. The Bible, however “Inspired,” is indeterminate, and readers must “infer” the “original” of the “figure,” the type’s relationship to the antitype. Rossetti, a member of one of London’s active Anglican parishes, Christ Church of Albany Street, describes interpretation of scripture as a “great delight,” but it was threatening to Tractarians such as John Keble and Isaac Williams, who argued for the exegetical privilege of the clergy.® Women’s roles in the church were contested during the Victorian period as New Anglican sisterhoods aroused anxiety, the Evangelical and Tractarian Movements competed for followers, and challenges emerged from secular spheres. In response, sermons by Edward B. Pusey and others emphasized Eve’s corruption and called upon Pauline doctrine: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach” (1 Timothy 2:12-13).°° While they were excluded from

teaching and preaching, the ideology of separate spheres also presented women as the last bastions of religion, responsible for passing values to subsequent generations. Devotional writing was one of the few available venues for women to pub-

lish interpretations of scripture. With the subtitle A Devotional Commentary, Rossetti placed The Face of the Deep at the boundary of feminine devotion and masculine exegesis.*’ In ostensibly devotional monologues, Rossetti and Augusta Webster became both readers and rewriters of sacred texts challenging women’s injunction to silence, without adopting a preacherly tone. Like Barrett Browning, Rossetti and Webster articulate typological aesthetic theories, which they apply to both classical and Christian myth.

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Typological figures and symbols are rife in Victorian monologues, but George Landow claims they primarily provide dramatic irony by forcing “the speaker to state more than at first appears” and “unknowingly convict himself of some flaw” (Types 133). This irony is evident in the monologues of Browning and Tennyson that feature religious extremists and hypocrites but not all typological monologues of the period. R. Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (1845) presents a dying bishop who wants a lavish tomb to win a grudge against a dead rival for a mistress. His demand for a “tabernacle” with “nine columns’” is a typological allusion to the design of the tabernacle that Moses built in Exodus, and in calling for it, he fails to follow Moses’ example (Il. 26-27). Tennyson’s

“St. Simeon Stylites” (1842) poses as a saint on a column hoping to be the “Example,

pattern,” for the “foolish people” (Il. 219-220). His cries for “the crown!” recall Christ’s crown of thorns, a typological symbol for Christian martyrs, but emphasize his lack of humility. Rather than the bishops, aspiring saints, or other secondary religious figures chosen by Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Webster often adopted the voices of biblical figures themselves. Christina Rossetti’s devotional writing, poetry, fiction, and posed performances anticipate the interdisciplinary achievements of H.D.** Rossetti’s interest

in popular posing is evident in the novella Commonplace (1870), where she describes attitudes and tableaux at a semiprivate theatrical in Kensington for “about two hundred guests assembled to hear Stella declaim and see Jane attitudinize.”*®’ The highlight of the evening was the tableau vivant of Paris award-

ing the apple to Beauty, featuring Jane in a statue pose of Venus.” Rossetti herself took mythic poses as an artist’s model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an experience that informed poems such as “In an Artist’s Studio” (1890); the Galatealike model becomes “A saint, an angel,” but the vampiric artist “feeds upon her face” and “every canvas means / The same one meaning” (PP 52).”' Rossetti was the first type of feminine beauty for the Pre-Raphaelites, and William Michael Rossetti lists forty-five works based on her image, including her poses as Mary in John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and The Annunciation.” Typological symbolism is a prominent feature of Pre-Raphaelite art, where the practice has been described as “innovative and subversive” in contrast to the “conventional” and “derivative” typology of Rossetti’s poems.”’ Her poetry featuring the voices of Eve and Mary often appears to support conservative positions that are belied by unusual uses of typological imagery and the emotional-erotic registers of her language, both of which seem at odds with her pose as an artist’s model and social pose as religious recluse and devotional poetess.”*

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 53

“Good Friday” (1864) at first seems to be spoken by one of the Marys gathered

at the foot of the cross and then by a later woman who imagines herself there.” Jesus serves as the monologue’s first silent auditor: “Am I a stone and not a sheep /

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross.... And yet not weep?” (PP, Il. 1-4). The speaker shifts to past tense in the second and third stanzas and compares herself with the women who wept below the cross, the thief who repented, and Peter. The present tense returns in the fourth stanza, and this flexible temporality suggests the concept of time underpinning typology’s patterns of repetition. As Landow points out, “Good Friday” transforms the “stone” from the first line of the poem into a common typological symbol, the “smitten rock” derived primarily from the rock at Horeb that Moses struck for water (Exodus 17:6).”° Landow does not recognize that the poem demonstrates the ambiguity of the symbol, in part because he assumes that the speaker is Rossetti herself and that the poem figures her own confession and certainty of forgiveness (Types 88). Yet, the experiments with multiple speakers and shifting temporality trouble the idea that Rossetti is the speaker, and the “problem” is not easily resolved in a message of Christian redemption. Rossetti’s association of the smitten rock with the crucifixion is a conventional typological interpretation; less common but not original, she also suggests that the rock prefigures the women mourning below the cross and any later believer who weeps in repentance. Recalling Peter’s status in Catholic theology as “the rock” upon which the church was established after his denial of Christ, “fallen Peter” serves as a type for Christian repentance (Matthew 16:18). Yet another Mosaic rock enters the typological sequence when Rossetti invokes Meribah-Kadesh, where

Moses was instructed to pray for water but struck the rock instead (Numbers 20:1-13). As punishment, he was refused entrance into the Promised Land and per-

mitted only a glimpse from Mount Pisgah (Deuteronomy 32:51). Rossetti recalls the “Pisgah sight” in the final lines of the poem when she asks Jesus to “look” at her and offer another chance at repentance: “Greater than Moses, turn and look once more, / And smite a rock.””’ Christ is “Greater” in his figural fulfillment of the leader, but Moses’ harsh punishment, juxtaposed to Peter’s reward, complicates the reading of “Good Friday” as a testament of faith in Christian salvation. Rossetti’s

multiple antitypes for the smitten rock suggests that the flowing of tears is not a guarantee of forgiveness. Rossetti uses the gaps between the four layers of typology

with variable temporalities and indeterminate speakers to present complex theological questions. Augusta Webster’s challenges to late Victorian society in her dramatic monologues contribute to her relative obscurity, as does the fact that her poetry, theories

of selfhood, and participation in the burgeoning women’s movement predict

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modernist interests but do not fit the model of the Victorian “poetess.””* Critics reconsidering Webster in the last two decades often attempt to distinguish her from male writers to such an extent that they misrepresent her work in the dramatic monologue, although she builds on the same traditions of solo performance.” The influence of the monodrama is evident in “Medea in Athens” (1870), a monologue based on Euripides’ version of the myth and set in Athens on the evening Medea learns of the death of Jason, the father of two sons she killed to punish him for his unfaithfulness. She responds to the news with a monodramatic variety of

emotions, and rather than the monologue’s conventional silent auditor, she addresses present-absent figures such as Hecate (3), her dead sons (12), Jason, and even herself: “Medea: / What, is it thou?” (7).'°° Webster reflects on the poetic illusion of unmediated speech and the ways preformulated fictions compose identity, when Medea describes her response to Jason’s death as “the prompt trick of words, like a pat phrase / from some one other’s song, found on the lips” (Portraits 2). Medea confesses every crime the myths mention but argues that others, especially Jason, made her into the villain they partially desired of her as a foreign sorceress. Her primary critique is of the ideal that women dedicate their lives to others; the Victorian cult of domesticity encouraged a woman’s total devotion to a husband, which conflicted with the simultaneous demand of her total devotion to children. Medea weighs this conflict when she asks Jason, “what is thy childlessness to mine?”

(Portraits 11). She longs for the role of “mother dear,’ and when she claims to have

“forgotten” Jason, it is clear that she has not forgotten any of her relationships or their incompatibility (Portraits 13). Webster’s “Medea in Athens” is among the Portraits found in a collection that offers many other solo speakers, from myth (“Circe”), religion (“The Manuscript of Saint Alexius”), and Victorian social types (the fallen woman of “A Castaway’). In her book of critical essays, A Housewife’s Opinions (1879), Webster poses as another social type, the housewife, and delivers cultural critique in a self-effacing and satirical tone. Like Barrett Browning and Rossetti, she revises typology and theories of correspondence to describe an artistic and imaginative process: The difference between minds of this [scientific] order and those possessed of imaginative genius appears to lie mainly in their seizing with less facility the hidden resemblances of dissimilar things, and thus failing in that power of vision which shows to the poet link upon link joining earth to heaven, high meanings to humble things.’"!

The skill of the poet (not the scientist) reveals relations between the material and spiritual, low and high, or typical, antitypical, and anagogical. Rather than a

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 55

hermeneutic that attempts to map God’s divine plan, Webster uses typology as a thought pattern or analogical habit that reveals similarities. Poets, in this model, become “spiritual pastors” (Housewife’s 76).

Webster’s version of biblical typology is evident in Anno Domini 33 (1867), a series of four long poems spoken by biblical figures in the year of Christ’s death.'** Offering very different perspectives from the Gospel accounts of Christ’s life and death, the sequence features the voices of Bartimaeus, a blind beggar whom Jesus heals in Jericho (Mark 10:46—52); Judas; Pilate and his wife, Procla; and two disciples on the walk to Emmaus. Judas’s monologue traces his trajectory to suicide from the moment he attempted to return the “thirty pieces of silver” that the “chief priests and elders” paid for his betrayal of Jesus (Matthew 27:3-6). He reasons like a Victorian empiricist: Jesus could not die a mortal death if he were the son of God; if Jesus lied, “his dupes should be unduped,” but if he were the Messiah, his “glory would burst forth and dazzle earth” (43). Judas is a type for the empiricist in a crisis of faith, and his disillusionment with Jesus’ message is due to virtues, like a frugality opposed to wasting spikenard (Sold 49). In Webster’s unorthodox typology, Judas is a figure caught in the gap of a cultural transition to Christian values. Swift changes in emotional register are present throughout the poem as Judas, like monodramatic speakers, attempts to recount his life to himself and the present-absent Christ with other apostrophes to the priests, his fellow apostles, Baal (the devil), and God. He attempts a prayer that Jesus taught but repeatedly abandons the verse; these lyric breaks in the monologue function, like the lullaby sung by Barrett Browning’s Virgin, as the musical interludes in monodrama. The prayers, lullabies, and “other’s song[s]” that interrupt monologues indicate emotions expressed at the limits of speech as language dissolves into formula and repetition. Webster recalls another typical villain and the story of Pilate’s unnamed wife, her dream, and her letter attempting to persuade her husband of Christ’s inno-

cence, which has fascinated women writers for centuries (Matthew 27:19). Imagining a moment after the crucifixion, Webster gives monologues and names to both Pilate and Procla. Pilate is a sympathetic leader who presents a utilitarian argument that if he had prevented the crucifixion, he would have been accountable for many lives lost in a religious war between Jews and followers of Jesus. He uses typological imagery, including the Old Testament’s first type, the bruised serpent, to describe a war in which the Jews would have been “trodden out / Like reptiles underneath the heel” (Sold 55).'°° He claims, “a man, a ruler as Iam,...must allay / Justice with prudence” (54). In contrast to Pilate’s authoritative speech, Procla refuses his style of argumentation, asking:

56 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

And does that mean A woman thinks a judge is to be just, And a man thinks a judge is to resolve What policy were spoiled if he were just? (Sold 54)

Procla becomes a type for Christian women, as she foresees the outcome of the crucifixion and suggests that Pilate perform a sacrifice like he would offer if he had “vexed Apollo,” but to do so according to Christ’s teaching that a “sacrifice to him / Was sorrow for ill-doing” (Sold 57). But Pilate infantilizes Procla, calling her “my

baby” and “pretty simpleton” and characterizing all women as “bird-minded” (58-61). Webster presents common dynamics of Victorian marriage but defamillarizes them in a Roman pagan couple, thereby making them available for critique. Pilate also voices anti-Semitic views: “I loathe / The murderous Jews” (58). Procla has read “those wondrous Jewish writings” and understood their messages of hope (60). Yet, she does not condemn Pilate, as he condemns Christ, suggesting that in some situations the right action may be to refuse judgment. Webster’s speakers in Anno Domint 33 serve as types for late Victorians posing different perspectives on modern crises of faith, marriage, and governance.

Nineteenth century monodramas, attitudes, and dramatic monologues, as well as the poems, modern dances, films, and hybrid performances I consider in modernism, are all genres of first-person presentation; they feature a subject attempting to express a self, usually at an emotional crisis, to an audience or readers who would ideally recognize the emotion expressed. The solo performer presents a version of subjectivity, and the positions taken in the nineteenth century are varied and complex. The desires of Rousseau’s Pygmalion are granted,

but only the dead experience true fulfillment in love; Goethe’s Proserpina is trapped in a role determined by gods and fathers. Barrett Browning’s “Aeschylus” is subject to a deadly misrecognition, and even her “Virgin Mary,” perhaps the most recognizable woman of Christian myth, cannot present herself as mother, corruptible woman, or goddess. Rossetti’s speakers may be biblical women, con-

temporary worshippers, or both simultaneously, and Webster warns against assumptions of a “substantive self.”'°* The suspicion of transparent selfhood, rooted in nineteenth-century performances, continues to mark genres of solo performance in modernism. For writers from Barrett Browning to Oscar Wilde, who used Lyon Hamilton as a model for Dorian Gray’s mother, to Amy Lowell, who wrote a long “polyphonic” poem featuring Lyon Hamilton’s poses, the solo

THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 57

performers in monodramas and attitudes provided evidence of earlier protests against conventional gender roles and images of women’s power founded in the classical past.'° The nineteenth-century resurgence in typology, both as a biblical hermeneutic and as a theory of subjectivity, also persisted in modernism. Typological thought

patterns were adapted for the modernist mythical method of composition and used to interpret novels, dramatic monologues, and new media, including modern dance and film. Typology suggests the primacy of individual experiences of the sacred in its emphasis on a biblical character and the fulfillment of typological patterns when reperformed in the lives of any individual. The interpretive system works through structures of repetition and reenactment, and while these struc-

tures are locked in the past and can produce nothing precisely “new,” both performance theory and deconstruction have suggested that the gap between any iteration may produce difference. Herbert Blau suggests, “we are seeing what we saw before’ but “it’s never quite the same” because “there is something mortifying” in the fact that lives are being lived (and slowly lost) in performance; it “may transform the one performing.’!° An investment in the possibility of transformation

that led Victorians to take up characters and reperform foundational cultural myths survives in the iterations of deconstruction, for all its skepticism. Nineteenth-

century mythic solos, in spite of their nostalgia, reveal an antimodern suspicion that modernity had not learned from history and progressed, that identity was insubstantial, or that the pose would fail to hold.

2. Posing Modernism Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film

Consumption has been held to be incurable, but there are innumerable cases on record where a permanent cure has been effected by the judicious exercise of the vocal organs with accompanying gymnastic exercise, Delsarte and gesture. —Charles Walter Brown, The American Star Speaker and Model Elocutionist (1902)!

Consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) threatened nineteenth-century heroines from Victor Hugo’s Fantine to Louisa May Alcott’s Beth, from Dumas’s Marguerite

to Puccini’s Mimi, as well as many real-life women, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’ The disease had a gendered etiology in popular and medical discourses; women’s idleness and conspicuous consumption produced consumptive women.’ Charles Walter Brown, a professor at the University of Missouri, suggested that “vocal and physical culture, elocution and Delsarte” would cure consumption and indicated the power invested in the theories of Francois Delsarte early in the twentieth century. Delsarte theorized the aesthetic and moral value of nineteenthcentury solo performances, especially the attitude, and reframed them as training regimens for performers and healthy individuals. Delsartism (c. 1880-1920) was a varied set of international movements that influenced modernist art and culture, appealing to performers, physical culturists, and reformers. This chapter focuses on Delsartean theories of the body, and the next describes the institutionalization of another trajectory of the movement in university literature curriculums and recitation practices. Delsartism established a widespread kinesthetic, a technique 58

POSING MODERNISM 59

and ideal of bodily movement emphasizing the tension between stasis and motion, mythic poses and technologies of speed. Delsartism was the first international performance theory of modernism, enthusiastically adapted by modern dancers,

silent filmmakers, and a variety of popular posers. Not simply an antimodern rejection of the machine age, Delsartism proposed a body that is both whole and fragmented at its joints, natural and part of modern technologies, available for modern dance choreography and projection on film screens. A common genealogy for the movements of modern dance and silent film in Delsartism and solo performance intervenes in several critical conversations. Although tremendously influential during the rise of modernism, Delsartism was feminized and trivialized as an affected regimen of self-improvement practiced by upper-class women or a short-lived histrionic acting method, and it is virtually absent from discussions of modernism.* Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter’s foundational research describes how Delsarte’s followers in America linked his theories to progressive movements, including suffrage and dress reform, but does not trace the movement into modernism, claiming that by the 1890s its “creative energy was spent and it became as mechanical and dogmatic as any rigid tradition.”° Julia

Walker, in an important corrective to narratives of American (but not international) dramatic modernism, argues that expressionist playwrights cynically appropriated the “expressive culture movement” derived from Delsartism.° Yet, she describes the movement as a “failed idea” and a form of “anti-modernism” that

claimed “new technologies alienated human beings from their natural condition” (Expressionism 5). This description does not reflect Delsartism’s influence on film performance and (supposedly alienating) cinematic technologies like montage or the legacies Walker herself traces in American expressionism and New Critical formalism.’ Delsartism was not simply a retrograde response to the “crisis” of a human body attacked by twentieth-century technologies; its roots in romanticism and the performance forms it most successfully popularized, statue posing and poetry recitation, have long histories preceding a modernist “crisis.”* Delsartism incorporated and fostered technological innovations, even as it deployed antimodern rhetoric to advertise practices of personal and spiritual development, practices that persist in current therapeutics. I also trouble descriptions of modern dance by both dancers and critics as the most “natural,” “live,’ and “classical” presentation of the human by linking this body to the mediated, projected, and spliced bodies of the cinema. The antimodern tenor of modern dance may explain why the insights of Felicia McCarren, Julia Foulkes, and Penny Farfan, among others, have not been fully incorporated into the so-called new modernist studies.’ In contrast, film has been presented by critics

60 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

such as Miriam Hansen as “the single most expansive discursive horizon in which

the effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or denied, transmuted or negotiated.”'® Descriptions of bodily motion on film often focus on mechanical

styles of movement; Michael North examines “the traces of mechanical reproduction written into the performance styles of comedians like Chaplin” or how “Keaton reinvents himself as machine part.”'' The Delsartean body undermines characterizations of modernist performance as either technophilic stagings of the machine age (film and Futurism) or nostalgic throwbacks to classicism (dance and ritualism).'* The Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded in Los Angeles in 1915 (the year of D. W. Griffith’s controversial Birth of a

Nation), trained Griffith’s actors in Delsartean techniques. The Russian film director Lev Kuleshov also used Delsarte’s theories in his actor-training methods and montage experiments.'’ The genealogy I propose demonstrates that dance and film not only emerged at the same time but also adapted Delsartean semiologies of gesture, a way of using posed bodies to make meaning."

I. Delsarte’s Aesthetics of the Attitude Gesture is the direct agent of the heart.... Gesture is founded on...three sciences, namely: The “static,” the “dynamic” and the “semeiotic.”. .. The semeiotic is its mind; the dynamic is its soul;

the static is founded on the mutual equilibrium or equipoise of the agents....The semeiotic... reveals the meaning of the types which form the object of the system. —Francois Delsarte, Literary Remains (ca. 1871)'”

Delsarte’s theories were influenced by challenges to the definition of selfhood that occurred as ideals of a unique, expressive self, inherited from romanticism, competed with notions of secular democratic subjectivity. He developed a performance theory based on the codification of gestures seen in attitudes, classical sculpture, and melodramatic acting styles.'° Each gesture or pose correlated to a specific meaning or emotion in Delsarte’s “system,” which he also called “semeiotics” or “the science of the organic signs” (Remains 460). Delsarte’s use of the term semetotics, now associated with a critical discourse that developed well after his last Cours d’Esthétique Appliqué in July 1870, indicates his attempt to analyze gestural

communication in a manner similar to structural linguistics.'’ The first use of semiology as a “branch of science concerned with the study of linguistic signs and symbols” is attributed to FE. de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale in 1916.'* Delsarte’s system predicted later versions of semiology in that he attempted to

POSING MODERNISM 61

read bodily gestures and positions as meaningful signs. In contrast to Saussure’s theory of an arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, Delsarte postulated a natural-spiritual-physical correspondence between gesture and meaning. He established a conventional sign system, a language of gesture studied by international artists and audiences, and a semiotics for modernist performance. Delsarte’s influence on performances from theater to modern dance and film has been overlooked in modernist studies in part because of modernists’ tendencies to exaggerate their rejection of the past and of any figure sounding as thoroughly metaphysical as Delsarte. Definitive information about Delsarte’s theories is also difficult to find because the writings of his students, primarily Abbé Delaumosne, Angélique Arnaud, and his daughter, Marie Géraldy, not to mention later interpreters, are often inconsistent. Delsarte died before publishing his long-awaited book, although his Literary Remains were translated in 1893 by Edger S. Werner, proprietor of a publishing house that made its business almost solely in Delsartean publications. The biographical information about Delsarte included in Werner’s books is derived from the first publication to introduce him to the United States, Francis A. Durivage’s article in the Atlantic Monthly in May 1871.” Durivage describes Delsarte’s religious and artistic conversion after being orphaned in Paris and hearing a strain of music at the graves of his mother and

brother (ca. 1821). His musical talents earned him admission to the Paris Conservatoire, where he was an unsuccessful student on account of his unique physical performance style and refusal to imitate professors, or so he claimed. From 1829 to 1834, Delsarte performed at the Opéra Comique but retired when his voice, strained at the conservatory, could no longer meet the demands of the stage. He then began conducting research in morgues, playgrounds, and art museums for the “laws of nature” and “phenomena of instinct” that determine human expression (Remains 392).”° He gave solo concerts, lectured on his theories, and coached actors and singers, including Steele MacKaye, Jenny Lind, Henrietta Sontag, William Charles Macready, and Rachel.’! Delsarte’s “Address before the Philotechnic Society of Paris,” delivered in 1865,

is his most thorough explanation of both his theory and his expressive system.” He claims to have found “aesthetics” in a state of “conjecture” and a “chaos of oratoric fantasies” but studied its rules and “modes of evolution” until aesthetics could be “constituted under the severe forms of a positive science” (“Address” 23, 57). With no sense of conflict between Auguste Comte’s positivism and religion, he offers the art “of which the beginning and the end are in God” (“Address” 22).”* His

theories emphasize the wholeness, divinity, individuality, and expressiveness of the body, combining ideas from Catholicism, Swedenborgian correspondence,

62 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

the work of the physiognomists and phrenologists, and the construction of taxonomies of expression by actors such as David Garrick and Samuel Foote. His system divided the body into distinct zones, required the analysis of each part, and imagined a soul in every joint. Delsarte’s religiophilosophical ideas and claims to “positive science” appear contradictory for those accustomed to separating notions of bodily or physical reality from the soul and materialist from metaphysical ideas. His diagrams of attitudes, “Chart of Man” and“Mediallion of Inflection” (figure 2.1), demonstrate the form but not the content of science (Remains 503, 498). A synthesis of scientific, technological, and metaphysical discourse appears throughout Delsarte’s writing and in phrases such as “Thermometer of the Will,” a designation for the elbow. Delsarte’s theory was based on a series of trinities: three human “states” (mind,

life, and soul), “three organic apparatuses” (thinking, loving, feeling), and three “languages” (speech as language of the mind, song as the language of love and life, and gesture as the language of the soul) (“Address” 65-67). He analyzed the body into parts that can be positioned in three “attitudes,” excentric, normal, and concentric, each of which corresponds to one of three bodily zones, limbs, torso, and head, and an emotion (although students disagree about which). The three central attitudes combined with lateral movements or orientations give nine positions. Charts detailing poses and the associated emotional expressions were printed for each body part, from “Attitudes of the Legs” to “Attitudes of the Eyeball” (figure 2.2).”4

\\f|| /\ by / “Medallion of Inflection” Francois Delsarte in \N | ffo™N Delsarte System of Oratory Lf (New York: Edgar S. i A Werner, 1893). Courtesy of a the Library of Congress.

POSING MODERNISM 63

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Attitude Ex-ex Attitude NOR-ex Attitude Con-ex Head raised and Head raised but Head raised but turned away from not turned in turned towards object or person. either direction. object or person.

Pride or Exaltation Abandon or Revulsion Ecstasy Vulgar Familiarity

Attitude EX-nor. Attitude NOR-nor. Attitude CON-nor. Head turned away Head facing the Head turned toward

from object or object or person. person or object. person:

Adverse criticism Normal Favorable criticism or a sensual examination. State or tenderness Attitude EX-con. Attitude NOR-con. Attitude CON-con

Head lowered Head lowered Head lowered but

or person object. Suspicion Reflection Veneration or

away from object but facing front. towards person or Meditation maternal tenderness.

Fig 2.2 “Attitude of the Eyeball” in Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement (New York:

Dance Horizons, 1954). Courtesy of the Princeton Book Company and the Library of Congress.

64 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

The chart for eyeballs illustrates the excentric position, with the eyes raised away from a given object of contemplation, a pose associated with adverse critique. In the normal state, the eyes face the object in spiritual contemplation, and in the concentric, they move toward the object in a tender or favorable regard. With the eyes lowered in the concentric attitude, they can move toward (con-con) and away (con-ex) from an object placed to the side of the body. The emotions associated with the pose, such as critique and tenderness, indicate that the Delsartean attitude is based on the relation between the body and an object or interlocutor.” For Delsarte, posing the body would produce the emotion in the performer, an idea of the primacy of physiological response that would be the basis of the James-Lange theory of emotion in the 1880s.” The gestures Delsarte performed and taught his students were bodily poses, based on mythological and religious types, that would help them embody the ideal

type by altering their emotional state, spiritual life, and overall health. Earlytwentieth-century manuals repeatedly quoted Delsarte’s “law of correspondence”: “To each spiritual function responds a function of the body. To each grand function of the body corresponds a spiritual act” (“Address” 67). Ideas of the correspondence

between body and spirit have a long history in Western philosophy, including Plato’s concept of a world of visible forms and a higher reality of immutable ideas.

Delsarte focused on the individual, “the concurrence of these two powers in the same person, rather than the world, and his correspondence was between an inner “soul” and its tangible manifestations in the body of the individual (“Address” 67). Delsarte’s theories resemble those of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a figure who also influenced Victorian engagements with typological thought, and the connection reveals the overlooked role of performance in ideas of correspondence.’’ Using theatrical metaphors, Swedenborg names the world “a theater of uses”; humans are actors through whom “God might accomplish primary uses.’”® Delsarte also claimed that human performances reveal God’s extension in the world. Rather than creation, he developed a performative aesthetics of revelation, which is evident in his choice of genres: musical, oratorical, and gestural performances, which do not create lasting art objects. Instead, they are ephemeral illustrations of human capacities to make beauty out of faculties that, for Delsarte, are a priori and God-given. Delsartean correspondence connected the many trinities of the human being, the states, bodily zones, and languages (speech, music, and gesture). Of the three, gesture is the most significant as “the language of the soul,’ and Delsarte believed it made correspondence visible, revealing the relation between the physical life and inner being, as the desire or will to move is translated into bodily motion: The

POSING MODERNISM 65

“outward gesture” is an “echo of the inward gesture which gave birth to it” (Remains

466-468). He sought to “redeem” the body from its nineteenth-century associations

with corruption by transforming it from what he called a “hideousness” that “disfigures and dishonors” into a “magnificent veil thrown over your soul” (“Address” 29).’? Although he emphasized the primacy of gesture, he read the posed end points of the gesture rather than the motion made in space. Delsarte’s nearly static yet expressive body was consistent with his idea of humanity as a hypostatic being whose tripartite identity is held in equilibrium, a state he diagrammed as a triangle (Remains 457-458). For Delsarte, art reveals God’s presence in the individual, so his aesthetics celebrated the stasis of being rather than the motion of becoming. These aesthetic and religious commitments led him to posing.

While statue posing was undeniably a component of most trajectories of Delsartism, some students and critics suggest that it was a perversion of Delsarte’s theories, claiming that he only posed as a pedagogical tool to help students learn the semiotics of gesture.” But posing was consistent with Delsarte’s aesthetics of revelation and his belief in God’s presence in the world and in humanity, a presence that art reveals but need not create. His aesthetic and religious theories intervene in a history of posing that dates back to Emma Lyon Hamilton; she popularized attitudes, but Delsarte’s theories made them respectable by associating them with Christianity, self-improvement, refinement, and health. Delsarte himself performed attitudes, even in the last year of his life. Durivage’s account of the last session of Delsarte’s Cours in 1870 describes his solo performance of a sequence of emotive poses:

[Delsarte] depicted the various passions and emotions of the human soul, by means of expression and gesture only, without uttering a single syllable; moving the spectators to tears, exciting them to enthusiasm, or thrilling them with terror at his will; in a word, completely magnetizing them.... It was a triumphant demonstration. (Oratory 576-577)

Durivage’s fascination with the emotional range of wordless expression recalls descriptions of Lyon Hamilton’s attitude performances. Following Delsarte’s posing, the performance continued with the attitudes of his most famous American student and proponent, Steele MacKaye. Durivage claims that the similarity of MacKaye’s body work to that of the French actress, Rachel, proved that Delsarte instructed both: “Those rapidly changing expressions of the features, those statuesque attitudes melting into each other, which we all remember in Rachel, indicated a common origin” (Oratory 576). Such “statuesque attitudes” were also practiced and taught by Delsarte’s children, Gustave and Marie (Géraldy), as

66 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

revealed by Gustave’s student, William R. Alger (1822-1905), an American minister.

Alger claims that Gustave demonstrated both attitudes of emotions and Hamiltonesque statue poses: [Gustave] trained his pupils in the gentle, slow, precise expansion, contraction, and modulation of all the expressive agents through their nine forms of attitude with their interchanging play. He also exemplified the poses of the famous classic statues, with a musical melting out of one into another, without any break in the passage....*!

The tension between motion and stasis, characteristic of the Delsartean kinesthetic, is evident in Alger and Durivage’s emphasis on the “melting” between poses,

a quality that emerges not from continuous movement but a change from static to more fluid bodily efforts. Delsarte’s daughter, Marie Géraldy, “learned while very young to reproduce with marvelous skill what were called the attitudes and the physiognomic changes,” according to Angélique Arnaud (1799-1884), another Delsarte student and women’s rights activist (Oratory 298). Here, “the attitudes” most likely refers to statue posing, while “physiognomic changes” are poses of emotional states. Marie Géraldy lectured and performed in the United States in 1892, but she was compared unfavorably to American soloists in Delsarte-inspired performances. A review in Werner’s Magazine (1900) suggests that Géraldy’s poses were meticulous but uninteresting, limited to making “mechanically eighty-one expressions of the eyes, one after another.”** In turn, Géraldy criticized “American “Delsarte gymnastics” for a focus on entertainment divorced from philosophical or religious significance (Oratory 536-537). Géraldy

claimed that American Delsarteans misunderstood statue posing as performance art, when it was taught by her father as a means to an expressive and sacred end.

As Delsartism circulated throughout Europe and North America at the turn of the century, his religiophilosophical aesthetic theory may have eroded, but it had already changed the moral tenor of stage posing. The companies of model artists that had been touring and posing, sometimes in the nude, were effectively banned in New York by 1870. When Delsartism reached the United States, it encouraged attitudes and tableaux in the semiprivate sphere of amateur theatricals, physical culture classes, and university syllabi and rendered them highly respectable. The pose then returned to the stage in various forms, including the sculpted figure of the bodybuilder and poser “Sandow, the strong man.”*’ In 1893, the American impresario Florenz Ziegfield discovered Prussian-born Eugen Sandow (1867-1925) and produced “Sandow’s Trocadero Vaudvilles,” which toured throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia. Sandow performed acrobatics and feats of

POSING MODERNISM 67

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Fig 2.6 “Grief Tableaux” in Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1889). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

80 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

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| | i 2)

Fig 2.7 Irma, Margot, Theresa, Anna, Erica and Lisa Duncan in a pose from Iphigenia at the Hotel des Artistes, by Apeda Studios (New York, 1912). Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

drills mixed militaristic movement with the conventionally feminine poses of sentiment. “The Roman Drill—The Amazon” presents women warriors posed in the

actions of combat: holding a spear, running, drawing a bow, charging, and other movement sequences similar to those in Isadora Duncan’s dance The Amazons (1906). “The Athenian Drill—The Victory” and “Energizing Dramatic Drill” also feature a series of battle poses with choreographed transitions. “The Victory” includes an attitude of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the statue that inspired poses by Duncan and H.D. and the ridicule of Marinetti. The vigorous motions of these drills provided an unusual physical experience for upper-class women. Other drills resemble the exotic and primitivist images common to the foundational modern dancers: Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. Stebbins’s “The Greek Drill—The Nymphs” anticipates the Greek imagery of Duncan’s choreography, just as techniques from “Eastern Temple Drill” resemble St. Denis’s The Temple. Shawn’s solo “Jonas Tango,” part of a Spanish Suite, recalls Stebbins’s earlier “The Spanish Drill—The Carmen.’®

POSING MODERNISM 81

Stebbins refused to characterize herself as a dancer on account of her critique of meaningless, “purely gymnastic exercise, the worst forms of which is the so-called

French ballet-dancing” (Delsarte Expression 469). Yet, Stebbins treated religious, ethnic, and social dances very differently, claiming that “pantomimic folk-dance cannot be overrated” and that Greek dancing and Bacchic festivals were the origins of drama, a belief she shared with Jane Ellen Harrison, Isadora Duncan, and other ritualists (Delsarte Expression 464). She performed “authentic” examples of these dances in a lecture-demonstration form; in 1893, a Boston Globe critic describes

Stebbins’s illustration of the movements of Egyptian priestesses, Greek dancing, and then Spanish and gypsy folk dances in a lecture comparing the styles of different cultures (Cultivation 125). A July 1894 performance in Chautauqua, New York, presented “the evolution of dancing, showing its place in physical culture,’ and incorporated “an old English country dance, a gypsy dance, the Scotch Highlander’s dance, an Alpine rustic dance, a French and a Spanish minuet” (Cultivation 125).°° Choreographic representations of religious practices and dances of Eastern and/or “primitive” cultures, with varying degrees of cultural naiveté and racism, were among the first steps of modern dance, as is well recognized, but the impulse was already present in the international Delsarte movements. Reviews also reveal that Stebbins danced without the academic lecture but

interspersed statue posing, choreography, and music in presentations that she preferred to call “pantomimes” or “musical, dramatic and pantomimic monologues.” The terms distinguished her performance from ballet but also align the mixed form with attitudes, monodramas, and dramatic monologues. Her dances, like her statue poses, present female types from Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian myth: “Miriam, the Prophetess,” “Jephtha’s Daughter,’ “Esther at Shushan,’ “The Myth of Isis,” “Ariadne,” “Psyche,” “Ceres,” and “The Descent of Ishtar” (Cultivation 125). Stebbins performed “Miriam” at the Berkeley Lyceum in New York on January 25,

1894, and a detailed review, written by Elsie M. Wilbor for Werner’s Magazine, describes five scenes: The calling of Miriam by Jehovah, Miriam’s consecration, her

delivery of Jehovah’s message to Pharaoh, her grief over the plagues, and the triumph of the Israelites (Cultivation 125). In Stebbins’s dance midrash of the Exodus

story, Miriam features as a prophetess, taking over the visionary role usually ascribed to Moses. The power of this role would have been enhanced by the fact that the soloist implied all other characters. In the culminating scene of Miriam’s celebration by the Red Sea, “Her dance with the cymbals is one of the utmost abandon of joy. Then falling to her knees, she chants a portion of the fifteenth chapter of Exodus, after which she resumes her dance, and the curtain falls for the last time” (Cultivation 126). Combining different expressive media, Stebbins

82 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

included biblical recitation in a dance-drama that emphasized women’s sacred roles in biblical events and positioned Miriam as a type for later individuals. Stebbins, Chilton, Hovey, and others were careful to frame their feminist reinterpretations of biblical stories with assurances from religious authorities, and even

Miriam’s dance was acceptable to turn-of-the-century religious organizations. The Church Union of November 1892 advertised Stebbins’s benefit for the “National Christian League for the Promotion of Social Purity” (NY School 29). The Social Purity movement would have been an uneasy alliance for women’s performance, especially dance, but it was one carefully cultivated and managed by Delsartism. The Church Union forestalls objections to Stebbins’s representations of Jephtha’s daughter and Miriam in dance-worship by insisting that there was “no semblance of anything sensuous” or anything that might “encourage an unholy reflection in a pure or impure mind” (NY School 29-30). The article recommends the performance to “every Presbyterian elder...as well as wives, mothers and maidens” as “a marvelous exhibition of Infinite power in creating such a wonderful creature in the form of woman to personate the chastity and purity of the Hebrew maidens in their approved and accepted forms of worship” (NY School 29-30). Stebbins is often associated with low forms of physical culture rather than dance, but her performances defy easy categorization. She used Delsartism to link diverse trajectories in turn-of-the-century culture: woman-centered reinterpretations of biblical material with Christian Leagues, solo performances with social purity.

IV. Performing Delsartism (Take Two): Denishawn and Hollywood Antedating Isadora Duncan by many years, Genevieve Stebbens [sic] must have had the same feeling for the dance that Isadora had....She moved in a series of plastiques which were based upon her understanding of the laws of motion discovered by Delsarte. Her poses were derived from Greek statuary and encompassed everything from the tragedy of Niobe to the joyousness of Terpsichore. Later she did a dance called The Dance of Day. At the opening of the scene she was lying on the floor asleep, and then, awakened by the morning sun, she rose with a lovely childlike movement to her knees and bathed herself in its rays.... —Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life (1939)

Ruth St. Denis encountered Stebbins’s version of Delsartism at the Madison Square Theatre on November 25, 1892, the same performance representing “the purity of the Hebrew maidens” recommended by The Church Union. St. Denis’s autobiography compares Stebbins and Duncan, discusses statue poses, reveals a

POSING MODERNISM 83

familiarity with Delsarte’s “laws of motion,” and applauds a solo dance piece that closed the performance, Dance of Day. St. Denis had previously studied Delsarte

gestures under the tutelage of her mother, who had “met a Madame Poté...a seventh attenuation of a pupil of Francois Delsarte,’ in New Haven, Connecticut (Unfinished 7). St. Denis recalls, “Mother could not do the exercises herself, but she instantly saw their value for me in correcting some of the deficiencies of my fast-growing body. I vaguely remember a little book with some sketches in it of

extremely chaste ladies and gentlemen standing straight and nude in poses of Delsarte relaxation and posture” (Unfinished 8). The book was probably one of the many manuals published by Werner, and the aspiring dancer described the Delsartean poses as “the actual beginning of all my dancing” (8); she practiced so much that the family’s summer boarders, well aware of the origins of the gestures, nicknamed her “Delsarte” (Unfinished 7). If St. Denis provides evidence of a direct connection between Stebbins’s statue posing and modern dance, her partner, Ted Shawn, was even more steeped in both the techniques and philosophies of Delsartism. Shawn originally studied with a student of Henrietta Hovey (ca. 1880), Mary Perry King, and her lover and collaborator, the poet Bliss Carman (Cultivation 66).°° Shawn had written to Carman after reading his and King’s Delsarte-inspired book, The Making of Personality (1908), which, in response to the popular “feminization” of Delsartism, adapted Delsartean principles to masculinity. Shawn claimed that the book “said about dance all of the things I had been feeling and thinking, but which I had never been able to express so articulately” (Every Movement 12). In 1914, Shawn and his first dance partner, Norma Gould, studied for a month at the “Unitrinian School of Personal Harmonizing and Self-Development” run by Carman and King in the Catskill Mountains of New York.” The school’s Delsarte-derived methods were focused on training the expressive use of the voice and body for “the education of

personality,’ and the philosophy emphasized numerous trinities, as is clear in Carman’s address to the first graduating class in 1911:

Unitrinianism has truly its religious note, as well as its philosophic and artistic. It appeals to the moral or emotional side of human nature, quite as much as to the intellectual and physical, for its sanction.... Your particular field of teaching is the training of the growing body into harmony with the erowing mind and spirit.... In this, your making of personality, you will use chiefly the three great rhythmic arts of music, poetry and dancing.”

Carman, like many other artists influenced by Delsarte, hoped to use solo performance to unify body, mind, and spirit into a unique, malleable “personality,”

84 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

and it was this message that appealed to the first modern dancers attempting to define dance art. Carman and King referred Shawn to Henrietta Hovey, who had begun giving classes on Delsartism in Hollywood in 1909. In Shawn’s book on Delsartism and dance expression, Every Little Movement (1954), he claims to have

taken private lessons with Hovey for years and credits her with teaching him the “true science of Francois Delsarte” and providing “the basis for all my performing, teaching and lecturing career ever since” (12). Shawn claims that Delsarte initiated the birth of American modern dance, what he calls a “Renaissance of the Dance”: “Delsarte’s laws of gesture, above all his insistence that every movement must have meaning, were the foundations of the dance developed by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis” (Every Movement 10-11). Hovey’s interest in self-cultivation influenced Shawn’s concern with individualism, and he claims that “each individual, grasping and understanding the principles of Delsarte, will use them to express individual, unique qualities peculiar to himself!” (Every Movement 86). Shawn appears to dismiss Delsartean pos-

ing in his book, protesting against “the distorted and already outmoded falsifications—‘statue posing, in which amateur entertainers, costumed in bulky, graceless, ‘Greek’ robes, whitened skin, and white wigs, took “poses’ supposedly expressive of grief, joy, shyness, anger...” (Every Movement 11). Shawn’s rejection of “amateur” posing emphasizes his own aesthetic standards; however, he adopted attitudes as a way of projecting emotions and invoking mythic narratives in his choreography. Photographs of Shawn’s Death of Adonis Plastique (1923) reveal that he actually performed with “whitened skin” and a crucially placed fig leaf, resembling Sandow’s “Dying Gaul” (figure 2.8, see figure 2.3). Both choreographed

figures dying into poses, using the bodily technique of statue posing as a visual indication of death and death’s failure to conquer human heroism. Shawn also used attitudes to teach strength, balance, and Delsartean expression in classroom exercises such as “Floor Plastique.””

Shawn's Gnossienne: A Priest of Knossos (Satie, 1919) is a two-minute solo that incorporates Delsartean poses alluding to frescoes at Knossos of an ancient Cretan cupbearer worshipping the Snake Goddess (figure 2.9). The parallel, open position of Shawn’s hips and shoulders suggest the two-dimensional quality of bodies in the frescoes. Shawn emphasizes the horizontal plane by posing with the torso facing the audience rather than at an angle to the front, as in the croisé or crossed position common in ballet. The poses can also be read according to the Delsartean charts analyzing the body into expressive parts, which Shawn prints in Every Little Movement. Shawn’s choreography features bent elbows and knees, both of which he describes as Delsartean “thermometers of the will,’ although

POSING MODERNISM _ 85

i -=+| SS « ’ ae Fig 2.8 Ted Shawn in “Death of Adonis,” by Lejaren A. Hiller (1923). Denishawn Collection. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Stebbins and others claim that Delsarte gave that designation only to the elbow. Shawn writes that the elbow “moves outward, away from the body to express pride, arrogance, assertion of the will,’ and the elbows of his cupbearer are positioned at sharp angles (Every Movement 41). For Shawn, the knee is “strong and straight in ageression... but bent in submission...wherein one gives up self-will for Divine Will” (Every Movement 41-42). Shawn’s left knee in the figure is “bent in submission, yet the right knee appears to be pulling the leg and body up and forward. Following Shawn’s code, the pose of the cupbearer suggests contradictory impulses between submission to divine power and willful pride. Shawn described the thumb as an indication of “degrees of vitality,” with more life represented by a thumb extended away from rather than folded toward the palm (Every Movement 44).

As Elizabeth Drake-Boyt points out, the thumb in Gnossienne is in a neutral position “closed against the side of the hand,” suggesting “his ‘vitality’ and energy

is capable but restricted, severely under (ritualistic) control.”” She interprets the dance asa “sly parody” of the exoticism in women’s solos, but it also uses Delsartean

taxonomies of the body to establish an ambivalent wavering between the desire to reject and submit to religion and ritual.

86 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

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oy Fig 2.9

, Ted Shawn in Gnossienne, a by Witzel (1919). | ! Denishawn Collection.

Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Shawn originally choreographed Gnossienne around 1917 as a classroom exercise, like “Floor Plastique,’ for strengthening students’ bodies and teaching balance and control. He tells the story of its evolution into a solo dance:

“Gnossienne” was a dance in flat, two-dimensional style movement that didn’t come off when the class tried to do it for Ruth [St. Denis] who

dropped by the practice studio. I jumped in and did the exercise, solo.... When I finished I turned to the class and then to Ruth, saying, “There. That’s the way it’s supposed to look.” And that’s the way it was done

by me for the next thirty years.”

Following Shawn’s years of performance, Gnossienne continued to influence his students: Barton Mumaw and Jack Clark preserved the choreography and continued to perform versions of the piece, and Martha Graham created her own Gnossienne in 1926, also to Eric Satie’s music (“Project” 153-155). Shawn and St. Denis trained these and other important figures in American dance at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts in Los Angeles. Denishawn taught

POSING MODERNISM _ 87

diverse styles of dance, including modern dance, ballet, and folk, as well as Delsartean expression and the related system of Dalcrozian eurhythmics. St. Denis

records in her autobiography that after they established the school,

One of our first callers was Mrs. Richard Hovey, whom Ted bore triumphantly home. She was a remarkable woman of seventy-five, who had studied with Francois Delsarte and was his only living American disciple—a wonderful witness to his system of teaching—the other two, Steele MacKaye and Genevieve Stebbins, having passed on.... We arranged for her to come to give a series of lectures on Delsarte, from which, I think, we profited as much as the students.” (Unfinished 179-180)

Delsartean theories of the body, even the self-cultivation Hovey emphasized in lectures, along with “Plastiques” and other Delsarte-derived poses, were staple aspects of Denishawn teachings and choreography.”° While dance history records that Denishawn molded a generation of modern dancers, studies of film overlook the impact of Denishawn, Delsartism, and the many theatrical sources for poses on the kinesthetics of early film.” Shawn was interested in film as early as 1913, when he made a movie about the

history of dance called The Dance of the Ages, with Norma Gould for the Thomas Alva Edison Company (Sun 22-23). The Denishawn School nurtured a mutually beneficial relationship with filmmaker D. W. Griffith of Biograph Studios and trained the first generation of film stars in Delsartean bodily techniques, gestural expression, and posing. Griffith asked film stars, including Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Alden, and Blanche Sweet, to take classes at Denishawn twice a week.” Denishawn listed these and other stars in Photoplay Magazine advertisements, promising to teach aspiring actors, in Delsartean terminology, “the science of the human body as an expressive instrument” (Where 142). Film actors trained to perform Delsarte’s excentric, concentric, and normal movements through exercises in posing or “plastique,” and Delsartean gestures permeate Griffith’s films.” In return, Denishawn dancers frequently performed in films ($5 for group dances, $10 for solos), and the entire company is featured in the Babylonian segment of Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance (Where 143-145).°° The choreography set on the Babylonian steps creates images of “Eastern” or “exotic” ritual motion by combining poses from ancient statuary, art history books, travelogues, and popular “Oriental” or Salome numbers. Griffith’s film frequently cuts between the dance and other celebrations, between close-ups on a soloist (rumored to be St. Denis) and longer shots revealing visual patterns created by the ensemble. The Babylon scene was the spectacle to

88 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

which initial reviewers responded most positively. “Intolerance Impressive,’ claimed the New York Times (September 6, 1916):

It is the Babylonian portion of the film that will commend it to the great public. These pictures of the wals [sic] of Babylon...of the great gates thronged with picturesque caravans, of the palace of Belshazzar with its myriad slaves and dancing girls, and of the siege and fall of the city are indeed masterpieces of the cine. Influenced by Denishawn, popular Delsartean performance, and his own research in classical and Christian art, Griffith uses posed compositions throughout the film. The repeated image of Lillian Gish as the woman who rocks the cradle, dressed in Greek-style robes with a veil, might have been taken from one of the Delsarte manuals featuring such pantomime-recitations as L. Blinn’s “Rizpah” with poses by A. M. Morgenroth; the biblical mother of Samuel 21 protects her sons’ bodies from “beasts” and “dies crooning to and rocking an imaginary child.”*' These popular pieces could be purchased with eight photographs of the poses for 25 cents. One of Shawn’s most successful students, Louise Brooks, best known for her role as Lulu in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), used poses to build careers in both modern dance and film. Brooks began performing in 1922 as a dancer in the Denishawn Company, and her autobiography recalls Shawn’s classroom demonstrations of statue posing.” On the 1922-1923 company tour, she performed in St. Denis’s Ishtar of the Seven Gates and Doris Humphrey’s Sonata Tragica, and she was featured as the Bride in Shawn’s Feather of the Dawn (1923). In 1925, she became

a “specialty dancer” in the Ziegfeld Follies, the vaudeville program that also featured the poses of “Sandow the Strongman,” and although she intended to continue her dance career, she was enticed into film after taking a part in Townsend Martin’s The American Venus (1926). When Pabst cast Brooks as Lulu, she claims he was unaware of her dance training: “That I was a dancer and Pabst essentially a choreographer in his direction came as a wonderful surprise to both of us on the first day of shooting Pandora’s Box” (Lulu 101).°? Pabst had asked for some improvised steps for an early scene in which Lulu dances for Schigolch and was delighted to find that Brooks, like her character, was familiar with the female dancer’s double

status as an adored star and “higher-priced trollop” (Lulu 97).** The Denishawn influence on the dance is evident in the waltz with long reaches from the center of the body, which Lulu performs before a painting of herself as Pierrot, the naive commedia dell’arte clown. In the next scene, she poses in a mirror tableau vivant of the Peirrot painting for her lover, Sch6n, who is positioned as spectator to both woman posed as art and artwork of the woman.

POSING MODERNISM _ 89

Brooks became famous for the restrained, posed gestural style evident throughout Pandora’s Box (figure 2.10). These poses establish a crucial trope of the film as they are metatheatrically highlighted by interpolated performances, such as

the variety show (which probably included attitudes and tableaux) organized by Schon’s son, Alwa, to feature Lulu. A sketch of her posing in the variety costume is passed from son to father. Lulu manipulates veils in a manner recalling Lyon

Hamilton’s attitudes during her trial for the murder of Schén. The lawyer’s comparison of Lulu to Pandora casts her in a mythic pose, and the court photographer captures the attitude for newspaper reproduction. Later, Casti-Piani’s rec-

ognition of the woman in the pose enables him to blackmail Alwa, and then Casti-Piani uses photographs of Lulu to sell her to the “Arab.” These poses and their reproductions transform the desirable woman into an art object available to be traded and sold. Yet as statue poses, performance forms that recall a history of bodily techniques and creativity often associated with women, they trouble claims that Lulu is “totally devoid of thought, a blank surface.”® Read through poses, the film explores femininity not only as a desired image but also as self-conscious posed performance.

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—~ Department Collection.

90 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Brooks’s posed acting style, promoted by Pabst, may have contributed to the controversial work of Pabst’s friend and fellow filmmaker, Leni Reifenstahl, who

used grand tableau for Nazi propaganda films.*® The German physical culture movement undoubtedly influenced Reifenstahl; Stebbins’s Delsartean poses were taught by Hade Kallmeyer under the title of “the American Stebbins-Kallmeyer System” at her school of “harmonic gymnastics” in Berlin (Cultivation 69). Another

German theorist of movement education, Dorothee Giinther, also combined Delsartism with ideas from Dalcroze and Rudolf Laban and adapted them for modernist performance.®’ She opened a school in Munich in 1924 and then in Berlin in 1933 to teach an innovative curriculum combining posing, movement, and music. Her most famous piece was the massive Deutsche Reigen (German Round Dance) at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 (“Aristocratic” 159-161). Giinther, like Reifenstahl, aligned physical culture with Nazi aesthetics and racial purity and health, yet she also sponsored a feminist politics and “homoerotic aura” in an atmosphere that presented men as “absent and unnecessary” (“Aristocratic” 179). As Karl Toepfer claims, Giinther reveals “the astonishing adaptability of Delsartean philosophy,” but he attributes this flexibility to the “detachment of movement forms from any physical or narrative context” (“Aristocratic” 180). Gunther’s pedagogy aside, the larger field of Delsartean practices linked movement to mythic narratives and encouraged a variety of solo performances said to promote personality and health, two remarkably adaptable and transnational constructs. From posing to dance, recitation to silent film, in French, American, German, and Russian venues, Delsartism exhibited a remarkable generic and geographic adaptability. As silent film developed cinematic acting styles, it borrowed from many trends in physical culture and theater, especially the vaudeville circuit, which included statue posing, tableaux, and dance. A vaudeville program in the first decades of the twentieth century might have listed Shawn’s Gnossienne or other Denishawn pieces, skirt dances, tableaux by model artists, Sandowesque statue

posing, and early film shorts. Even actors who did not study at schools like Denishawn were exposed to these performance techniques; Charlie Chaplin originally developed his loosely jointed movement style in British music halls, where he would have seen varieties of posing and dance. Chaplin’s silent film Sunnyside (1919) parodies the many women who, inspired by Delsartism and Isadora Duncan, donned tunics and cavorted barefoot. After hitting his head, Chaplin dreams of a bevy of dancing nymphs with flower garlands. He skips along with them until a misstep plunges him into a cactus and, holding his rear, he leaps away in a motion that is humorously similar to his earlier dancing. Descriptions of Chaplin’s movements often focus on the “traces of mechanical reproduction” in his style and his

POSING MODERNISM 91

comic “robotic routines,” but these descriptions ignore the classical and antimodern body that, for Chaplin, was also funny (Machine 3, 5). The techniques of posing as statues or “windup toys” out of wind preceded the “hand-cranked cameras” that seem to have “created” as well as “recorded” Chaplin’s movements (Machine 3-4).*®

The precinematic, Pygmalionesque trope of a doll coming to life and dancing also

influenced Chaplin’s bodily techniques.*’ While this trope has many sources, Delsartism influenced both American and Russian film, offering a set of gestures correlated to emotions in a manner recognized by audiences familiar with posing in dance, theater, and vaudeville—a semiotics (to borrow Delsarte’s term) of gestural performance.

V. The Russian Delsarte: Kuleshov and Film Montage Delsarte’s system is ideal for training cinematic models in bodily expression. —Lev Kuleshov, “The Banner of Cinematography” (1920)”

The trajectory of Delsartism into Russian film demonstrates the prevalence of the modernist kinesthetic of posing as it troubles critical tendencies to oppose bodily

expression and technological mediation. Critics have largely discounted the numerous references to Delsarte in Lev Kuleshov’s extensive writing as insignificant

anachronisms. Evgeni Gromov’s introduction to a recent and useful collection of Kuleshov’s essays acknowledges, but quickly dismisses, his interest in Delsartism:

Captivated by the theory of the nineteenth century Frenchman Francois Delsarte, Kuleshov came up with an oversimplified view of the relationship

between action and thought, deed and feeling.... He sought to systematize

such movements, proceeding from the rather pretentious book The Expressive Man by Sergei Volkonsky.”!

If oversimplified, the Delsartean link between gesture and feeling offered Kuleshov

a semiology of gesture and a movement technique that shaped his acting method and montage theory. Most critics, like Gromov, subordinate Kuleshov’s ideas of cinematic acting styles to his innovative montage theory, yet the two components of his work were interrelated. Kuleshov’s ideas of montage emerged from his Delsartean method of analyzing the actor’s body into parts and poses. Mikhail Yampolsky reveals that Delsartism reached Russia by 1903, when Yuri Erastovich Ozarovsky lectured on Delsarte and mime.” Ozarovsky developed his

92 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

own theory of “stage speech” and edited the Russian Delsartean journal, Voice and Speech, in 1912.”° Sergei Volkonsky, director of the Imperial Theatres from 1899 to

1901, popularized Delsarte’s ideas in lectures and articles beginning in 1910 and published two Delsartean books in 1913, The Expressive Word and The Expressive Person (“Volkonsky” 101-102). The numerous illustrations in these volumes feature classical statues and frescoes by Raphael and Michelangelo as examples for

taxonomies of gesture, indicating that just as Russia was undergoing radical political and aesthetic changes, Volkonsky advocated classical ideals and modernist art. Volkonsky combined enthusiasms for Delsartism and modernist

performance experiments and supported the innovations of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Sergei Diaghilev, a gesture that contributed to his loss of the directorship of the Imperial Theatres (“Volkonsky” 101-103). Following the revolution in 1917, Stanislavsky asked Volkonsky to teach vocal and rhythmic exercises

at the Bolshoi Opera and Moscow Art Theatre studios, and Vladimir Gardin, director of the First State Cinema School (VGIK), invited him to teach Delsartean performance technique (“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 50, “Volkonsky” 103). At the new school, Gardin, Kuleshov, Vasili lyin, and Valentin Turkin, all early innovators in Russian cinema, designed experiments to explore Delsartean taxonomies of expressive gesture and apply them to silent film. Kuleshov recognized, particularly in Intolerance (1916), the Delsartean gestures Griffith’s actors had studied at Denishawn: “The ‘psychological work’ of joints in films was pioneered by D. W. Griffith who made tremendous progress,

having undoubtedly used the studies of Delsarte...as a starting point.” “Griffithian acting,” according to Kuleshov, involves “joint work” and “complex movements of their [the actors’] whole bodies” rather than the exaggerated ges-

tures and “elementary grimaces” frequenting early film. He produced a cinematic adaptation of Delsartean taxonomies and theories of the body at the Kuleshov Workshop, founded in 1920: “The basic purpose of classifying all the bodily movements as normal, excentric, and concentric, and the combination of these, must be learned by the film actor.’” All workshop members, from editors to directors, practiced Kuleshov’s method for training film actors, or “models,” as he called them, adopting a word that had been applied to generations of posers. Models first broke down the “task” into specific “body-attitudes” that demonstrated physical economy and expressed emotion (Kuleshov 102). Kuleshov

taught them to consult Delsarte’s charts of nine poses corresponding to specific emotional expressions and map “the movement of each joint” along Delsarte’s “three fundamental axes” of the body (Kuleshov 111). The “spatial, metric web”

they created helped the actor perform these precise attitudes according to “a

POSING MODERNISM 93

fundamental metrical rhythm” that Kuleshov often set by a metronome (Kuleshov

104). Delsarte had defined rhythm as “the form of movement” and a primary source for the emotional code of a gesture, just as Stebbins taught statue posers to establish “rhythm of movement in harmony with character of statue or emotion depicted” (Delsarte Expression 261, 459-460). A feature of the transitions between poses and the emotional pulse of the statue/character type, rhythm was also prominent in the syncopation of stillness and movement characteristic of statue posing. Kuleshov’s vision of the performing human body builds on

Delsarte’s idea that every body part, every joint, has an expressive and psychological function. Contrary to the critical commonplace that Kuleshov’s montage theory was

unrelated to his actor training method, montage is surprisingly rooted in his conception of the jointed, posed, expressive Delsartean body.”” The VGIK experiments with the division of the human body into emotive parts gave rise to the idea of montage as film technology’s method for cutting, isolating, combining, and organizing the actor’s movements, as Gardin, Kuleshov’s mentor, reveals in his memoirs from 1912 to 1921: “That is how my first thoughts

arose on the possibilities of montage combinations and on the conversion of acting to the expressive movement of the parts of the actor’s body and to the condition of objects symbolizing the actions of man” (“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 52). Gardin presents montage as the cinematic way of transforming “acting,” or the performance of mimetic actions copying life, into the “expressive movement” of body “parts,” just as Delsartean charts carved the body into emotive organs

in nine positions (see figure 2.2). The technique of cutting and recombining filmstrips was initially a strategy for avoiding untenable acting styles, particularly those of “theatrical “sufferers,” which were, according to Kuleshov, “poor material for celluloid” (Kuleshov 100). He hoped montage would transform the body into the condition of a still object, like any other prop on the screen, but one that symbolizes human actions without the large emoting Kuleshov found in Stanislavsky’s style. Due to the “sufferers” that people Delsartean manuals (see figure 2.4), it might seem that Kuleshov would reject all Delsartean teachings, but the seemingly scientific charts of body parts that appealed to Kuleshov

always coexisted uneasily with emotive posers in the varied Delsartean tradition. Kuleshov extended the early work of the VGIK in his own montage experiments, yet his first published statement on montage resembles Gardin’s memoirs and reveals the influence of Delsarte and mythic posing on his ideas of cinematic composition:

94. MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

The ideal shots are those that look like the flat and primitive paintings on antique vases.... Each sphere of creative endeavour has a major vehicle for getting its message across. Very few film-makers (apart from the Americans)

realize that the artistic vehicle of the cinema is the rhythmic succession of motionless shots or short sequences conveying motion, 1.e., the technique known as montage.”

Kuleshov’s emphasis on montage as the syntactic structure of film, the “shotsign’ that supersedes the content or action, became famous. Kuleshov’s “ideal” shot is nearly motionless, like “the flat and primitive paintings on antique vases, the Delsartean statue poses of such figures, or the modern dance choreography derived from the flat rather than croisé representations of the body in classical art. Kuleshov’s claim that too much action or movement is alien to film’s “artistic vehicle” references the fact that film technology projects a series of still, posed images in succession so that viewers experience the illusion of a moving figure.” In fact, Delsartean posing imagined a “rhythmic succession of

motionless shots,” predicting the tension between the perception of motion and the stillness of each constitutive frame, before it could be realized in cinematic technology. Delsartean performance technique appealed to Kuleshov in

that it trained film actors to imagine their performance as a sequence of rhythmic poses that could be matched, through the metronome, to the rhythm of the cuts.

The experiments conducted at the Kuleshov Workshop demonstrate the importance of a still, posed Delsartean body to avoid interference with montage. Yampolsky lists six of these experiments, taken from Kuleshov’s application to the “Photographic and Cinematographic Section of the Artistic Sector of the Moscow Regional Political Education Committee”: 1. adance, filmed from one place—io metres 2. adance, filmed using montage—1o metres 3. the dependence of the model actor’s experience on the causes of that experience... 4. the arbitrary combination of various scenes of action into a single composition—13 metres [the “created geography” experiment] 5. the arbitrary combination of the parts of different people’s bodies and the creation through montage of the desired model actor... [the “created man” experiment] 6. the uniform movement of the eyes of a model actor—2 metres (“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 58)

POSING MODERNISM 95

As Yampolsky points out, “The history of the cinema has preserved the memory

of only two of these experiments”: “created man” and “created geography” (“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 59). All are related to Delsartism. Kuleshov described

the experiment known as the “created man” (no. 5) as consisting of splicing together images of different women’s body parts to “depict a girl who did not exist in nature.’'"? The experiment was derived from the divisible, jointed Delsartean body, and through it, Kuleshov demonstrated that montage functions as the ligaments of the film, supersedes any theatrical notion of character, and makes cinematic movement and meaning possible. The “created geography” experiment (no. 4) similarly spliced images from different locations to create “an arbitrary earthly terrain” (Art 137). The dance studies (nos. 1 and 2) reinforce the relationship between early film and dance, directing and choreography, and although forgotten by film history, Kuleshov’s theoretical writings reference them repeatedly. He detailed the results of these experiments in another early description of montage: “Let us try and split the dance in the shooting process, now filming the dancer’s legs, now her head, eyes, arms and so on, and edit the pieces to create a certain rhythm: then we shall get the desired screen impression” (“Banner” 42). Truly cinematic dance could never simply be a film recording of a performance (no. 1) but must create a new performance through montage (no. 2). The last experiment on the proposal (no. 6) adopted the exercises in eye movement that Delsarte himself exhibited from 1850 to 1870, a sequence of excentric, normal, and concentric movements charted in numerous Delsarte manuals (see figure 2.2). The third experiment produced the famous “Kuleshov effect”; he intercut the same shot of Ivan Mosjoukin’s still face with images of a bowl of soup, a dead woman, and a child at play. Audience assumptions that the actor had a different expression appropriate to the countershot, as if he were looking at the soup, woman, and child, demonstrated the predominance of montage as a source of filmic meaning, as many critics have noted. But the “Kuleshov effect” also confirmed the success of his Delartean acting method in which the performer’s body, dead or alive, becomes a posed object among bowls of soup, with montage working like cinematic joints. Through the Kuleshov Workshop, Delsarte-inspired acting and montage theories influenced the next generation of filmmakers and performers, including Sergei Eisenstein. Preserving many aspects of Kuleshov’s teachings, Eisenstein rejected what he called “European acting,” based on the emotional transformations of a face, and claimed that the cinema requires “cut acting” and “disinteerated acting.’'*' Both incorporate attitudes and Kuleshov’s Delsartean divisions

of the body for montage representation. Of “cut acting,” Eisenstein claims,

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“Replacing one changing face with a whole scale of facial types of varying moods affords a far more acutely expressive result than does the changing surface, too receptive and devoid of organic resistance, of any single professional actor’s face” (“Ideogram” 42). Eisenstein presents the posed face as a type and an object and suggests that montage cuts, rather than facial expressions, represent emotion. He describes “disintegrated acting” in a death scene: “The whole process of the death agony was disintegrated into the solo performance of each member playing its own role: the role of the leg...arms... head” (“Ideogram” 43). Eisenstein’s ideal performance builds on the Delsartean analysis of the body into parts and imagines the solo of each organ. Distinguishing his own montage theory from that of his teacher, Eisenstein argued that Kuleshov misunderstood montage as “linkage” rather than “collision” (“Ideogram” 36). Eisenstein’s “dialectical,” “intellectual,” and “overtonal” montage stressed an opposition of two shots or a conflict between the frame of the shot and

the object within it. Whereas Kuleshov emphasized creative combination, Eisenstein focused on the creative collision of body parts and landscapes. These modes are not mutually exclusive, especially given the interpretive freedom of the film viewer, and Eisenstein’s work reveals Kuleshov’s influence even in his last film,

Ivan the Terrible Part II (1946). The story of the cruel sixteenth-century Muscovite

tsar culminates in a song-and-dance scene filmed according to Kuleshov’s prescripts for cinematic dance. The Oprichnina, Ivan’s secret police force, dance raucously at a banquet, led by Fyodor Basmanov wearing a mask and crown. Fast cutting, montage effects, and bodies rushing through the frame enhance the energy

of the dance. Eisenstein filmed the stamping footwork of Russian folk dances with close-ups on the feet, while low-angle shots emphasize the height of leaps and the power of the Oprichnina. Basmanov is especially enlarged in the frame, and the mask work emphasizes his unstable identity. He removes and addresses the mask in song, and the comedy in the conversation between man and object is enhanced when the mask peeks off screen. At the end of the carnivalesque dance, the tsar’s traitorous cousin is bestowed with royal garments and mistakenly killed in the assassination that was to have put him on the throne. Modernist studies often cite film montage and its reorganization of temporal and visual experience as a central figure for modernity.'” From poetry’s imagist juxtapositions to narrative styles depicting a camera-like subject splicing auditory and visual stimuli in a city (as in Ulysses, a text that interested Eisenstein), literary techniques have been associated with cinematic montage, often in vague ways. Montage has been used as an analogy for the cutting, splicing, and fragmentation

of the modernist body and for discontinuous jump-cut or machine-like move-

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ments. That Kuleshov’s celebrated montage theory emerged from the same Delsartean source as his “anachronism” of an actor-training method should encourage film theorists and modernists more generally to reevaluate designations of the modern and outmoded, new and classical. Kuleshov’s interest in the posed Delsartean body places him at the center of international modernism’s con-

cerns with bodily expression, evident in film, dance, theater, and popular performance. Delsartean bodies represent classical ideals but are analyzed into organs, gestures, and poses using the language of science, if not always the methods.

This conception of the jointed, mobile human body influenced innovations from the folding theater seat to cinematic montage and shaped a prominent kinesthetic of modernism. In the New York of Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), fashionable society arranged

semiprivate attitude performances with women posing to “expensive music.” [Lily’s] vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food than dressmaking and upholstery, found eager expression in the disposal of draperies,

the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights and shadows. Her dramatic interest was roused by the choice of subjects.... But the keenest of all was the exhilaration of displaying her own beauty under new aspect: of showing

that her loveliness was no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms of grace.'® Among the tableaux at the entertainment was Lily Bart’s solo pose as Sir Joshua Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd.” Reynolds had painted the famous portrait Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante, and the echoes of Lyon Hamilton’s art are present in Lily’s “disposal

of draperies” and “study of attitudes” (see figure 1.4). Wharton’s description of Lily

“shaping all emotions to fresh forms of grace” could quote a Delsartean manual. Just as the pose of Goethe’s Proserpina represents her fixity in hell, Lily’s solo begins

her own descent toward death and her final attitude, “with motionless hands and calm unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart” (Mirth 345). Wharton uses the fad to reveal a shallow, frivolous society that attempts to achieve “the effect of a closing tableau” or “one of those ‘costume-plays’ in which the protagonists walk through the passions without displacing a drapery” (Mirth 202). Wharton’s allusions to tableaux demonstrate the popularity of the form in modernism, even as she presented the pose as deadly. Discussions of modernist bodies often emphasize Wharton’s critique of the elitist pose, Marinetti’s “roaring cars,” Chaplin’s “robotic” walk, or other images

of mechanical movement. Also overstated is the less popular rival view that

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modernism imagines a “whole” body in opposition to the machine age. Hillel Schwartz identifies “torque” as the “kinaesthetic” of the twentieth century; a “model of motion as a spiral at whose radiant center was a mystical solar plexus” or a “spiraling outward from a soulful center.”'!* He argues against the idea that

modern industrialized life, with its “assembly lines, time clocks...silent films,

ragtime music and Cubism,” fostered experiences of isolated, punctuated moments and fragmentation (“Torque” 105). Instead, he describes a kinesthetic that insists on the correspondence between “the bodiliness of the inner core and the outer expressions of the physical self” (“Torque” 104). This core, center, or “solar plexus,” imagined by Delsarte, Stebbins, and Isadora Duncan, had assumed

a politico-anatomical place as “centre of action and sympathy” early in the nineteenth century, a centrality strengthened by the neurophysiological experiments of David Ferrier (1876). Schwartz suggests that torsion characterized “most if not all of the central movement experiences” of the twentieth century, citing

the zipper, handwriting, finger painting, and even the paragraph as evidence (“Torque” 108). While Schwartz is correct that Delsartism proposed an expressive body, this body expressed not only a “soulful center” but also the bodily techniques and technologies of modernity. Rather than spirals or machines, the modernist kinesthetic is best represented

by statue posing, the shift between stasis and motion that can encompass both torque and robot, as well as a sequence of still film frames that offer the illusion of motion. The statue pose imagines a method for ordering human experiences that does not fully separate nature from technology, wholeness from fragmentation, or body from soul. Delsartean bodies gestured toward classicism but were not entirely removed from modernity into a realm of nature or idealism, as is evident in terms such as “thermometer of the will.” Delsartean analyses of the body into its joints, organs, and gestures was part of the appeal for early innovators in montage theory, and the influence of Delsartean theories of expression on film further troubles the usual dichotomies between the natural, live dancer and the mediated cinematic body. The “modernist focus on the isolated moment” in cinema is also captured in bodily poses within film frames or on dance stages.'” A long genealogy of posing clarifies modernist performance theory and emphasizes the centrality of the bodies that build, experience, and drive Marinetti’s car and other machines of modernity. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the fascination with a Delsartean display of “the passions” was fading, but attitudes continued to influence gestural expression in dance and silent film. Even the earlier, more simplified varieties of Delsartean self-cultivation indicate ideas of bodily motion, mental experience,

and subjectivity that modernism would more thoroughly engage. Delsartism

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imagined a malleable selfhood, which, after serious practice of statue posing, would assume the poses “unconsciously” (Hour 101), as “second nature,” a phrase that predicts Stanislavsky’s method acting (Hour 11-12). Genevieve Stebbins insists that “what we [Delsarteans] are aiming for is unconscious cerebration, not conscious’ (Delsarte Expression 91). Bolstered by modern psychology and psychoanal-

ysis, terms such as unconscious, second nature, and inner technique appear in Delsartean literature, acting theory, and the writings of modern dancers and filmmakers. Studies of Russian silent film and montage theory are generally thought to constitute a distinct field from research on American modern dance, which is separate from the physical culture movement and popular entertainment. Only by foregrounding overlooked continuities between aesthetic forms does a common Delsartean genealogy emerge for performances in dance, film, and popular entertainment. Yet another sphere of Delsartean influence is evident in the poetic reci-

tations and monodramatic mixed forms presented at the Delsarte Matinees. Delsartism encouraged the culture of solo recitation that was already an important pedagogical tool and domestic entertainment in the nineteenth century, for which monodramas and dramatic monologues were the genres of choice. Modernist writers coming of age at the height of the Delsarte movement, like Wharton, responded not only to the ways popular performance posed ideas of gendered subjectivity but also to the uses Delsartism made of literature, especially the framing of literary texts as scripts for solo performance.

3. Positioning Genre The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures of Recitation

... only its verbal shell can be printed.... Vocal modulations, motions, and attitudes, the movements of living men and women, are all implied in the conception of a drama.... The same is true of the monologue. —Samuel Silas Curry, Browning and the Dramatic Monologue (1908)!

Samuel Silas Curry was dean of the Boston School of Expression, teaching a cur-

riculum influenced by Francois Delsarte’s theories, when he wrote the first full-length book on the dramatic monologue. He argues that the text is only a “verbal shell” that implies a voice, “attitudes,” and “movements,” which must be

interpreted for oral presentation using Delsartean techniques. Providing further evidence for the monodrama as a formal precedent, Curry points out that the term dramatic monologue “occurs rarely,’ and Edward Dowden’s “recent life of Browning” used “the short monodrama” (BDM u, 110).’ Poetic recitations were among the solo performances included with statue posing, tableaux, and drills in Delsarte Matinees and often got top billing because of the respectability of the form. Delsartism and a related elocutionary reform movement reinvigorated practices of recitation that had been common during nineteenth-century experiments with the dramatic monologue. The family entertainment of parlor poetry moved from the drawing room to the Delsartean stage, and poetic recitation became a pedagogical tool for improving the “self,” as well as perfecting elocutionary skills.

To recite well was an indication of character, class, and above all, personality, in a 100

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culture of recitation that shaped the institutionalization of English studies, techniques of literary interpretation, and modernist preoccupations with the expression and sources of emotion in art. If Delsartism’s influence on the solos of modern dance is often misunderstood and its presence in silent film rarely recognized, scholars of modernist literature are mostly unaware of the movement. Yet, Delsartean literary recitations and interpretive strategies were codified in university curriculums at many institutions,

including Curry’s Boston School of Expression and Genevieve Stebbins’s New York School of Expression, both of which specifically advertised their Departments of Literature.’ “Expression” designated a short-lived discipline that incorporated Delsartism and emerged as the twentieth-century university was redistributing responsibilities for teaching rhetoric, elocution, and literature. The academic discipline fostered a popular “expressive culture movement,’ perhaps

most visible in the Chautauqua lecture circuits inspired by the Chautauqua Summer School of Expression held in New York from 1894 to 1928. The British “verse-recitation movement” was less directly influenced by Delsartism, but it

both absorbed and influenced many aspects of American expressive culture.’ Britain’s liberal educational reforms reinvigorated elocutionary training and produced institutions such as Elsie Fogerty’s Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art (1906) and the Poetry Recital Society (1909). Future modernists in

both countries were introduced to literature within cultures of recitation that sponsored performances in classrooms, parlors, bookshops, and lecture circuits. Reading practices and methods of literary analysis based on interpretation for performance were codified by schools of expression and disseminated through cultures of recitation. Curry’s classes, like his book on the dramatic monologue, taught students to approach a poem by determining the vocal tones, gestures, and bodily placement that would best reveal their own interpretation to an audience. Even if they were not giving an oral performance, students considered how a poem indicated a speaking voice and body; that is, they learned techniques of kinesthetic analysis like those advocated by Vernon Lee’s psychological aesthetics. Dramatic monologues, preferred by Curry for their representation of characters as actually speaking, occupied an important position within the reading and recitation practices that accompanied the rise of modernism. Although the form’s influence on modernist poets has long been recognized, this is the first study to position the

dramatic monologue in relation to Delsarte-derived cultures of recitation. A common critical stance describes the monologue as an apprenticeship for young poets that was discarded at maturity, but it is based primarily on the careers of

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and does not accurately represent their continued

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interest in the form or the monologue experiments of poets such as Charlotte Mew, Amy Lowell, and H.D.° This chapter considers performances of dramatic monologues in classrooms, bookshops, and various modernist venues and their influence on other forms of poetry. Dramatic monologues are imagined solo performances, but they also enabled poets to star in readings of their own work. The cultural uses of genre can change; as Delsartean practices of recitation faded, the dramatic monologue’s function as solo performance shifted, even as New Critics, partially in response to the interpretive techniques of expression, began to read every poem as a dramatic monologue. Mew, Eliot, Pound, and Lowell engaged transatlantic cultures of recitation in a variety of ways: performing their own poetry, organizing readings and lecture tours, or bemoaning the Chautauqua Circuits and Poetry Recital Societies.° All

used dramatic monologues in antimodern explorations of myth to experiment with new ways of notating voice on the page and develop strategies for guiding a reading and hearing of a poem. As I demonstrate the continued influence of the monodrama and other solo performances on modernist monologues, I argue that many of the basic tenets of modernist poetics were responses to cultures of recitation. That they are not recognized as such is due both to the current obscurity of Delsartism and its former popularity; references to “expression,” “personality,” and “vocal culture” would have been understood in relation to Delsartism and the dis-

cipline of expression in the modernist period without additional explanation, but later critics miss the significance of such terms. Modernist doctrines of impersonality were partial rejections of the Delsartean emphasis on fashioning personality

through recitation. Other central modernist principles expanded ideas from expression: the objective correlative drew from the mask of the dramatic monologue; the mythical method reframed and updated typological hermeneutics; and polyphonic prose owes much to Delsarte-influenced elocutionary reforms.

I. Expression, Recitation, and Literary Interpretation At yesterday morning’s session of the Elocutionists’ Convention... Mrs. Elizabeth Mansfield Irving of Toledo read Mrs. Browning’s “Mother and Poet” [a dramatic monologue spoken by Laura Savio, an Italian poet and patriot] most acceptably. In the afternoon came an unusual crowd to hear what would be said for and against that mysterious thing, the Delsarte system.... After the smoke of the Delsartean battle had cleared a little, Mrs. Nella Brown Pond of Boston recited a dramatic poem by T. B. Aldrich and was loudly applauded. —“Elocutionists and Delsarte,’ New York Times, July 1, 1892

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Although elocution is no longer central to studies of literature, it had been a vital aspect of the classical education of elite men for centuries and was part of the

pedagogical milieu that trained modernist poets. In England, the so-called Elocution Movement of the eighteenth century attempted to elevate the English vernacular, establish a standard pronunciation, and explore the relationship between language and society.’ Elocution was linked in the United States to the idea

that democratic citizens would debate the problems of the nation and must develop their “powers of expression” and “individual character” to do so; Curry claimed, “Freedom and oratory have ever gone hand in hand.”* In the twentieth century, new disciplinary divisions dispersed skills once considered part of elocution to other fields, including the new English departments teaching composition, literature, and rhetoric (the study of persuasion) (Expressionism 60-61). For

professors of elocution forced to argue for their field’s specificity and rigor, Delsartism provided claims to a positive science with supporting charts and moral and religious underpinnings. Combining elocutionary reforms with Delsartism’s focus on expression of the passions, the discipline of expression promoted oratory as literary interpretation. Departments of expression do not survive in the contemporary university, but the cultures of recitation and interpretive techniques they promoted were an important context for modernist poetry. The academic study of expression originated in Boston shortly after Steele Mackaye gave his first lecture on Delsarte there in 1871. Boston University became the first American institution to open a separate School of Oratory (1873) promoting a “higher estimate of the value of oratorical training,” and its new dean, Lewis B. Monroe, had been among the signatories to Mackaye’s lecture invitation.” Monroe was most impressed by Mackaye’s concern with the communication of ideas between speaker and audience, rather than the prescriptive exercises

focused on pitch, tone, and speed in previous models of elocutionary training (Expressionism 63). Monroe invited Mackaye to join the oratory faculty, a diverse

group that included Samuel Silas Curry, the Shakespearean scholar Henry N. Hudson, and Alexander Graham Bell, who lectured on “Defects of Public Speakers” and invented the telephone in 1875 in a Boston University laboratory." The oratory curriculum overlapped with current English departments, featuring lectures on Charles Dickens by Moses True Brown, Shakespeare by Robert R.

Raymond, and “Eloquence and Oratory” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Monroe taught classes on “Expressive Reading” and “Gesture and Oratorical Action,’ and the final examinations were public performances. The Boston Evening Transcript (May 16, 1879) describes: “Tremont Temple was completely filled yesterday after-

noon, the occasion being the closing exercises for the year of the Boston

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University School of Oratory.”'' The program resembled a Delsarte Matinee, with “songs,” a speech entitled “Elocution as a Means of Culture,” “aesthetic gymnastics and gesture” including statue posing, and literary recitations from such works as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells,” and Dion Boucicault’s melodrama London Assurance.

When Monroe died in 1879, the Boston University School of Oratory was already a renowned center for the study of “vocal culture,” a term suggesting the broad social impact of oratorical training.’ Many graduates had built successful careers, and Monroe’s most famous students, Henrietta Hovey and Genevieve Stebbins, popularized Delsartism through performances, lecture demonstrations, and studio classes, primarily for women. The trustees of Boston University determined to dissolve the School of Oratory after Monroe’s death, most likely because it had become too popular among those interested in “personal culture” or selfcultivation rather than aspiring professors of oratory. Boston University’s president, William F. Warren, claimed the school was an “immense” success, but it was not

meeting its original aim of training students for “professorships of elocution and oratory in colleges, professional schools, and other institutions of learning.”!’ He offered the School of Oratory name to Monroe’s “first assistant,’ Anna Baright, but she opened the Boston School of Elocution and Expression in October 1879, a title that reflects the discipline’s shift toward expression.” In 1882, Baright married Samuel Silas Curry, another former student of Monroe and Stebbins, who had been teaching elocution in Boston University’s School of All Sciences (Transformations 70).'° In 1885, Curry took his students to Baright’s school and assumed leadership of the merged program under a new name, Boston School of Expression.'® He believed, like Monroe, that elocution and oratory had been debased by formulaic voice training methods, but Curry’s preferred term, expression, came to dominate the new discipline. Curry’s fourteen books on expression were published by its designated press, Boston’s Expression Company. Like Delsarte, Curry identified three “languages,” but rather than speech, song, and gesture, Curry’s categories were vocality, written verbal language, and gesture.'’ In a seeming paraphrase of Delsarte’s “law of correspondence,’ which Curry connected to Swedenborg, he summarized his own method: “All expression obeys the same law; it comes FROM WITHIN OUTWARD,

from the centre to the surface, from a hidden source to outward manifestation.... Every action of face or hand, every modulation of voice, is simply an outward effect of an inward condition.”'* Curry maintained Delsarte’s individualism, criticizing the prescriptive oratorical training of the “Imitative School” for failing to

“develop a man’s instincts, character, and personality” or recognize that “the

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energies of the soul must be aroused as the direct cause of all the actions of the body” (Province 308). A chapter of Curry’s Province of Expression (1891) details Delsartism and acknowledges that Delsarte “widened the field of investigation; that he led men to study the whole man in expression” (359). Yet Curry contradicts this

praise when he distinguishes his work from what he calls Delsarte’s “Speculative School” because it postulates “artificial divisions of man’s mind and body and their languages” (Province xiv). Curry presents Delsarte’s gestural training as the most useful element of the system as it “showed that in any part of the body all motion was meaningless unless it came from and ended in an attitude” (Province 357). Curry’s anxiety about the popularity of Delsartism among women partially explains his conflicted response; he insisted the training was never the “attitudinizing and posé positions,” a “perversion of some of the exercises mixed with the common callisthenic movements” practiced by “young lady pupils” (Province 355-356). Curry included Delsartism in the school’s course of instruction, which listed exercises in “Physical Training,’ “Artistic Respiration,” “Aesthetic Gymnastics (Flexibility of Muscle. Rhythm of Motion. Opposition of Organs.),” “Gesture,” and “Philosophy of Expression—Delsarte’s.””’ To distinguish expression from the posing practiced by “young lady pupils,’ however, Curry focused on “vocal expression’ and linked his work to literary classics, as two of his book titles indicate: Lessons in Vocal Expression (1895) and Classic Selections from the Best Authors (1888).

The goal of the latter is “to furnish the greatest variety of examples for the illustra-

tion of the various steps in vocal expression” and “to secure selections from the greatest number of the best authors.”*” These are primarily nineteenth-century authors, with Robert Browning as the most widely represented, and poetry predominates, especially dramatic monologues. In 1891, very early in the history of criticism on the form, Curry celebrates the “Monologue and Public Reading” as

better attuned to “the higher artistic requirements of the age” than the drama (Province xv). In his antitheatricality, he describes the actor as merely a “personator,’ whereas the “reader or dramatic speaker” can “suggest more points of view

than the most difficult part in any drama.”’! In Browning and the Dramatic Monologue (1908), he further emphasizes the intellectualism of expression in con-

trast to a theater that had been “corrupted into a spectacular show, into something for the eye rather than the mind” (BDM 260). He defines the dramatic monologue as a “new literary form” but a “new and parallel aspect of dramatic art” that could replace the theater (BDM 11).

Curry’s particular interest in the dramatic monologue and his approach to literary analysis are clarified by the pedagogical second part of his book on Browning: “Dramatic Rendering of the Monologue.” He describes all texts as

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records of speech: “The word, then, in all cases, implies the living voice...the better the writing, the greater the suggestion of the modulations of voice and body, gesture and ‘natural action” (BDM 135-136). The dramatic monologue is the ideal genre, Curry claims: “As the expression of a living character, it necessarily requires the natural signs of feeling, the modulations of the voice, and the actions of the body” (BDM 133). In a statement that anticipates later critics’ emphasis on dramatic irony, Curry states that the form “portrays and interprets an individual unconsciously revealing himself” (BDM 261). Curry taught students to read this revelation of the individual speaker through their own personal, subjective responses. They were to imagine the vocal and gestural expressions of the speaker just as if they were preparing the text for recitation. Focusing on figurative language, meter, and line length, they considered the “impression” the text evoked in them and how they might best communicate their personal experience to an audience through their voice and body (BDM 148). They avoided discussions of the author’s biography or intention, which would distract from their unique interpretation.” Although Curry emphasized vocal expression and textual analysis throughout his career, his discussion of the dramatic monologue in 1908 details the “attitudes” the reader should perform and even suggests the primacy of bodily expression and reception.” Curry states that “gesture,” which he associates with “natural action,” “appeals directly to the eye and precedes all speech” (BDM 135-136). As in Saussure’s

structural linguistics, he defines words as “conventional symbols” but claims “modulations of the voice are natural signs” (BDM 147).% Whereas words are “verbal shells” or conventional records of speaking bodies, he suggests that both gestures and vocal intonations express meaning naturally. Readers also respond bodily to language, an idea shared by Vernon Lee and others in the field of psychological aesthetics: “The impression received from each successive idea must

be so vivid as to dominate the rhythm of breathing, and the expansion of other actions of the body” (BDM 148). Just as Lee emphasizes the effects of meter on bodies, Curry claims that readers misunderstand meter as “too much a matter of print. Few recognize the fact that metre is necessarily a part of vocal rather than verbal expression, and can only be suggested in print” (BDM 196). For Curry, as for

Lee, written language must be translated into a voice, and literature must be read for its “suggestion” of a body behind the word and its effects on the reading body. That Curry is not among Lee’s circle promoting psychological aesthetics is further evidence that kinesthetic readings attuned to the role of the body in aesthetic response were prevalent in the first decades of the twentieth century. Boston was recognized as the center of the study of expression, but schools

combining classical rhetoric with Curry’s approach to literary analysis and

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emphasizing recitation opened all over the United States at the turn of the century. In addition to Stebbins’s New York School of Expression (1893), the Columbia School

of Oratory opened in Chicago in 1890 and was renamed the Columbia School of Expression in 1904. Steele Mackaye was associated with the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and Emerson College in Boston was once the Emerson College of Oratory. The Chautauqua Summer School of Expression (1894-1928) attracted

thousands seeking personal development and vocal culture and inspired the “Chautauqua Lecture Circuit” as a “traveling roadshow” (Expressionism 73).”° Picking

up on Curry’s claims that “self-activity must be awakened if vocal expression is to be

improved, *° Delsartean self-cultivation began to emphasize recitation, among its other solo performance forms, as a way to improve speech, health, and personality. As Julia Walker claims, “Encompassing poetry and drama, music and dance, the expressive culture movement purported that, through these forms of artistic self-expression, one could...experience one’s body as an agent of meaning-making once again” (Expressionism 70-71). The popular interest in recitation was rampant, but even the fashionable Chautauquas were bolstered by institutional authority; shortly after becoming the director of Chautauqua, Solomon Henry Clark was invited to assume the leadership of the Department of Public Speaking at the University of Chicago (Expressionism 73). Institutions more conventional than “schools of expression” were also interested in hiring teachers to train students to read and analyze literature as a script to be interpreted for performance, with modulations of voice and gesture chosen to express the meaning of the text. A parallel culture of recitation and elocutionary reform emerged in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. The British movement was less directly prompted by Delsartism, but as chapter 2 details, Henrietta Hovey’s lectures and performances had been positively received in London from 1886 until 1889. She taught Delsartism to performers from Drury Lane and Covent Garden, vocal expression to London’s clergy, and “personal culture” to society elites.’’” The departure of Edmund Russell, Hovey’s partner, from the “salons of Belgravia” in 1889 warranted a notice in the New York Times (March 24, 1889) that claimed he achieved “extraordinary success” and “numbers among his pupils some prominent people in English

society.’ Articles on Delsartism were published in the London Times, London Homeopathic World, and London Journal of Education, among others. Performers

who had trained in Delsartean techniques at schools of expression, such as Mrs. William Calvin Chilton (the monodramatist), performed on both sides of the Atlantic, and British performers also toured the United States. The culmination of the work of actress Florence Farr and poet W. B. Yeats to develop a method of verse recitation was Farr’s 1907 American tour with five engagements in Boston,

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the capital of expression.*® Farr and Yeats began their collaboration in 1899 and appeared together throughout the 1900s, with Farr accompanying her recitation on a psaltery, a stringed instrument built by Arnold Dolmetsch (“Music” 57).”? She describes her method as “song in speech” in The Music of Speech (1909), a widely discussed book that influenced Eliot, Pound, and Lowell.*° The British elocutionary reforms, like those of the United States, discarded the

mechanical rules and rote exercises common in oratorical training, as Mark Morrisson reveals. The professor of elocution and clergyman Canon James Fleming claimed, in The Art of Reading and Speaking (1896) that the goal must be “to make none artificial or stilted, but to help all to be natural and real” (“Pure Voice” 28). Similarly, a series of Education Department circulars from 1896 deplored elementary schools for failing to teach proper speech, recitation, and expressive reading: “There

are too few signs in reading aloud of the individuality of expression which we call ‘intelligence’” (“Pure Voice” 30). In advice columns such as “How to Practise Reading Aloud,” recitation is recommended as a precaution against “falling a victim to consumption,” a disease Delsartism was said to cure.*' Concerns with individualism, expression, intelligence, health, and the interpretation of literature characterize transatlantic cultures of recitation. Morrisson focuses his discussion of British elocutionary reform on the class-based fears provoked by the late Victorian expan-

sion of the British school system. With increasing numbers of working-class children attending schools, anxieties about social mobility were expressed in fears that the dialects, pronunciation, and diction of the lower classes would destroy “pure English.”’* The remedy was to teach expressive reading and classic British literature, according to the English Association, a prominent organization of professors, poli-

ticlans, and “men-of-letters” (“Pure Voice” 29). One member of the English Association warned in 1909 that the “debased dialect of the Cockney” was “spreading, and “in ten years’ time the English language will not be worth speaking”

(“Pure Voice” 30). The English Association was partially responsible for Henry Newbolt’s famous report, The Teaching of English in England (1921), which claimed

that social class is distinguished by “a marked difference in modes of speech,” suggested that all teacher training colleges require oral examinations, and linked “pride in the national language” and literature to national security (“Pure Voice” 29-30).

The concern for elocution and “pure” English in Britain resulted in the Poetry Recital Society, founded in 1909 and later called the Poetry Society, just as American enthusiasm for expression was giving rise to Chautauquas, Delsarte Matinees, and other venues for recitation. Newbolt was a vice president of the society, as well as an education reformer, literary critic, and occasional performer (“Pure Voice” 29-31). The qualities of recitation recommended by the Poetry Society resemble

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Curry’s rules for correct expression, as is clear in Lady Margaret Sackville’s inaugural address to the members: “There should be no striving from outside to produce a definite effect—the soul of the interpreter should be so possessed by the poem that it follows it instinctively in every modulation and inflection as easily as water flows between winding banks” (“Pure Voice” 32).°° Statements such as these begin from a focus on the soul and inner impression but were easily aligned with modernist doctrines of impersonality. Just as Curry presented the dramatic monologue as an alternative to the theater, Sackville’s own antitheatricality is evident in her claim, “The speaking of verse is not acting” (“Pure Voice” 32). Partially because of the bias against popular melodrama and a desire to ensure that verse recitation

was respectable, she argued against the gestural expression emphasized in the American movement: “I believe as little gesture should be used as possible, and that, as a rule, the voice alone, provided it is flexible enough, is sufficiently effective” (“Pure Voice” 32). Poetry Society chapters and Junior Orders were established throughout Britain to organize recitations for their elite membership. A system to credential members was instituted, with an examination that included recitation

and a test of “general knowledge and appreciation of poetry,’ primarily of consecrated Victorians like Browning and Tennyson (“Pure Voice” 33-34). Results of the examinations were published in the society’s journal, the Poetical Gazette.

Although the Poetry Society was “a culturally conservative foe of emerging modernist poets,’ Morrisson argues that it “helped them bring their work to the public, extend their readership, and encouraged their interest in the speaking voice” (“Pure Voice” 32). The seemingly incongruous pairing of the society with avant-garde

modernism is, for Morrisson, embodied in Harold Monro, a society member (beginning in 1910) who also assisted the rise of modernist poetry, always empha-

sizing the relation between poetry and living speech. Although he was ambivalent about the society’s elitism and conservative aesthetics, Monro supported its desire to promote and disseminate poetry among the public.** When asked to assume editorship of the Poetical Gazette in 1912, he suggested a separate magazine but compromised on a joint issue under the title “The Poetry Review (in which 1s incorporated the ‘Poetical Gazette’).’ The arrangement lasted only a year, but the Review discussed

the work of modernists and was followed in 1913 by Monro’s independent Poetry and Drama, a title reflecting his belief in the intersection of the genres. Also in 1913, Monro founded the Poetry Bookshop as a center for verse recitation in Bloomsbury, claiming in Poetry and Drama (December 1913):

We make a regular practice of reading poetry aloud, and any one who wishes to stroll in and listen may do so.... We are absolutely certain that the

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proper values of poetry can only be conveyed through its vocal interpreta-

tion by a sympathetic and qualified reader. Indeed so obvious does this appear that we regard the books on sale in the shop merely as printed scores

for the convenience of refreshing the memory in hours of study or indolence.... We hope that Poetry Bookshops will eventually be established in all the principal towns of England. (“Pure Voice” 38)

The opportunity for a listener to “stroll in” for biweekly readings at the affordable price of three pence diverges from the Poetry Society’s elitism. As Morrisson points out, the bookshop’s readers ranged from the young modernists Ezra Pound and EF. T. Marinetti, to established giants, W. B. Yeats and Walter de la Mare, and even Henry Newbolt. Not limited to poets, other performers could practice and become a “sympathetic and qualified reader.”

Monro, like Curry, advocates poetic analysis through recitation when he defines books as “printed scores” and suggests that the “proper values” of a poem are “conveyed through its vocal interpretation.” Both the practice of recitation and the method of literary interpretation it promoted significantly influenced modernist poetry. Morrisson’s important project for situating modernist poetics within British verse recitation focuses on Eliot and Pound, especially their notions of the pure English, impersonality, and formal experimentation. The context must be expanded through a consideration of Delsartism (already popular in the United States before the poets moved to London), the discipline of expression, and the dramatic monologue as its preferred literary form. The dramatic monologue was not one of the experimental forms Morrisson suggests Eliot and Pound derived from Monro’s impersonal practice of juxtaposing quotes from new poetry rather than presenting his own critical opinion.” Yet, the monologue was a staple for expressive readers and an important vehicle through which the poets Charlotte Mew and Amy Lowell, in addition to Eliot and Pound, worked to embody voices and living speech.

II. Charlotte Mew: The Magdalene in “Madeleine in Church” Many years ago, buying, as was my custom, a copy of The Nation one Saturday morning, I opened it eagerly to see if there might be a poem, and was electrified to find printed there “The Farmer’s Bride” [by Charlotte Mew]. This poem I immediately committed to memory, and a year or two later repeated it with enthusiasm to Harold Monro, who had recently opened

POSITIONING GENRE 111 the Poetry Bookshop, with the avowed intention of publishing the work of young poets and presenting them to a large audience. —Alida Klementaski Monro, “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir” (1954)°*°

Alida Klementaski Monro, Harold Monro’s partner, organized the program of readings at the Poetry Bookshop and regularly promoted the work of women including Charlotte Mew, H.D., Amy Lowell, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.*’ Klementaski Monro recited Mew’s poems at the bookshop and later convinced Monro to publish her book, The Farmer’s Bride (1916). This publication is intertwined with cultures of recitation, both the bookshop’s public readings and the private women’s salons where Mew performed her own poetry. Mew, like Curry and the Monros, believed that poetry is understood only when spoken aloud, and her monologues experiment with rhythm and other sound effects in an attempt to invoke an aural experience.** Mew was marginalized due partially to her poverty and lesbianism, but her dramatic monologues were important at a moment when women’s positions in relation to modernism were being established.” Her poems, praised by H.D., May Sinclair, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf, adopt monodramatic features, including emotional apostrophes and typological parallels that demonstrate continuities with nineteenth-century poetics. Yet, her monologues and her performances of them, as well as the responses

of major organizers of modernism such as Pound, reveal how modernist poetics were shaped by cultures of recitation. Alida Klementaski was an actor and suffragist before she began organizing the readings at the Poetry Bookshop. As Diana Collecott suggests, her skills as a performer made her a popular reader, while her experience in activism influenced her support of women writers and collaborative approach to publishing their writing

(“Another Bloomsbury” 65-66). Cultures of recitation literally introduced Klementaski and Monro; they met on March 14, 1913, when she was reading at a “poets club dinner at the Café Monico.””? After reciting “The Farmer’s Bride” to Monro, she wrote to Mew asking for additional poems in hopes that the bookshop

might publish a volume. Klementaski Monro’s memoir relates that Mew selfdeprecatingly claimed that “no one would want to read them if they were published” but sent “The Changeling” (“Memoir” vii). Klementaski Monro performed “The Farmer’s Bride” and “The Changeling” at the Poetry Bookshop on Tuesday, November 23, 1915, in a program that included the works of Harold Monro, John Masefield, James Joyce, Eleanor Farjeon, and D. H. Lawrence (Friends 149). Mew attended and was pleased with Klementaski Monro’s reading, especially her voice, which she praised in a letter to Sydney Cockrell (Friends 151).

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The voice was crucial to Mew, who claimed, “All verse gains by being spoken,

and mine particularly—I suppose because it’s rough—though my ideal is beauty” (Friends 123).*' The roughness may be a reference to the metrical variety of her lines or the monodramatic range of emotions; in another letter (January 4, 1917), Mew defines poems as “witnesses” to feeling: “The quality of emotion” is the “first requirement of poetry....One has not only the cry but the gesture and the accent” (Friends 104). She suggests that poetry must contain the three modes of expression

identified by Delsarte and replicated in Curry’s teachings: speech (the “cry”), gesture or bodily expression, and vocality (“accent”). Corresponding to the modernist ideology that poetry must be read aloud, Mew’s poems emphasize voice both thematically and through the use of dialects and aurally evocative syntax. “The Farmer’s Bride,” the first poem performed by Klemantaski Monro, adopts an accent often associated with Thomas Hardy’s Wessex dialects.** The speaker describes his wife, “too young maybe,” who was repulsed by “men-folk” and ran

away after they were married.* They caught her and “turned the key,’ but she speaks only to her animals and rejects human language along with marriage. The Farmer sympathetically states that she sleeps in the attic, “Alone, poor maid,” but this tone belies his intense desire, which emerges near the end of the poem: “’Tis but a stair / Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down, / The soft young down of her” (Mew 18).

The other poem recited at the Poetry Bookshop, “The Changeling,” features the voice of another young outsider, very like the “frightened fay” described by the Farmer, but not explicitly gendered in the poem. Addressed to an absent “dear Father, dear Mother,’ “The Changeling” claims to have been “but half your child,” and of his or her own refusal to speak, the child explains: Because in the long, still dusks of Spring You can hear the whole world whispering: The shy green grasses making love, The feathers grow on the dear, grey dove,

Everything there is to hear In the heart of hidden things, But not in the midst of the nursery riot. (Mew 20)

The catalogue is an explanation for silence within a pastoral description that invokes romanticism’s fairy poems but subverts their escapism, partially through metrical variation. The first two lines pull the Changeling from the nursery with

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an irregular meter and syllabically lopsided rhyme, “Spring” / “whispering.” As the

Changeling describes the sounds of the forest, the lines assume a regular four-beat

ballad meter and simple rhymes that seem to be at odds with the unpleasant images of the fairy world. The child will spend the “Black and chill” nights of eter-

nity either “twining twigs” or “whining” with the fairies.“ Both “The Farmer’s Bride” and “The Changeling” expose the inadequacy of marriage and escapism in voices that are incongruous to the critique. The poems also undermine gender dichotomies, including the lesbian-heterosexual binary, in a manner that anticipates poststructuralist critiques of a stable, coherent identity. Severin suggestively claims that the Bride and the Changeling are figures for the lack of a language in which to express lesbian being and embodiments of Mew’s “strategy of negation” and “refusal of cultural re-presentation” (Poetry off 26). While the characters are certainly outsiders in a heteronormative culture and strongly linked to figures of silence, each occupies a different position in relation to speech. The silent Bride is an object of deeply suppressed desire for the sympathetic male speaker, and although the Farmer has been read as a surrogate for lesbian desire, this interpretation is based on Mew’s biography and cannot be substantiated in the text itself. The Changeling is a child speaker, and Mew’s decision not to gender the child is a provocative choice, part of a “wildness” that indicates an ambivalence about alternatives to the nuclear family.” Just as the relationship between a poet’s sexuality and speaker is always more fluid than a dichotomy between impersonation/ identification and critique allows, Mew’s poems trouble the standard categories of gender and sexuality. Mew’s appearance at Klementaski Monro’s reading of her work was also a com-

plex social performance. Although it is tempting to read her presence in the audience rather than on stage as an indication of lesbian marginalization, Mew does not indicate that she either hoped or refused to read.*” Klementaski Monro describes her dressed in drag, her general attire and hardly a costume of invisibility:

She always wore a long double-breasted top-coat of tweed with a velvet collar inset...and she always wore a little hard felt pork-pie hat put on very straight.... When she came into the shop she was asked: “Are you Charlotte Mew?” and her reply, delivered characteristically with a slight smile of amusement, was: “I am sorry to say I am.” (“Memoir” viii)

The topcoat and porkpie hat, clothing usually gendered male, are assertions of identity that contradict her self-deprecatory statement. Although Mew did not read at the bookshop, she was an accomplished performer of her own work in the

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semiprivate setting of Catherine Dawson Scott’s salon in Southall. Dawson Scott described the “marked day” in 1914 when she first persuaded Mew to read her poems in “her wonderful way.’** She reports that Kathie Giles, a painter, said, “I will go to

the ends of the earth any time to hear your Charlotte tell her poems—she is a modern piper, and I will follow her piping” (Sappho 57). May Sinclair frequently celebrated Mew’s performances and, in a letter dated June 1, 1915, begs, “finish your

Courtesan...but even as you read the last poem I could see how great it was. I shouldn't say “even, for you read furiously well: I never knew anyone who could get out the passion of a thing as you can.” A passionate reading was the ideal in this salon context, as it was in the Delsartean readings and attitude displays. Sinclair refers to “Madeleine in Church” (1916), one of Mew’s favorite recita-

tion pieces and a monologue that brought aspects of the nineteenth-century solo performance tradition into debates about the “new” modernist poetry. Spoken by Madeleine, a sensual divorcée and twentieth-century version of the fallen woman, the poem continues from sympathetic portrayals of women betrayed by men they love in monodramas such as “Monk” Lewis’s The Captive (1803) and monologues such as Augusta Webster’s “The Castaway” (1887) and Amy Levy’s “Magdalen” (1896). Mew’s Madeleine sits in a minor chapel of a Catholic church, intentionally removed from the main apse where Christ hangs “too divine” (Mew 42). Finding more comfort in a minor saint represented in tangible “plaster,’ Mew’s speaker would “rather pray / To something more like my own clay” (Mew 42). She quickly abandons her attempt at prayer, and although she implies she had extramarital affairs with men (Monty, Stuart, Redge, and Jim), she also defers the expected confessional form by not relating any particular sin or regret. One of the central tropes of the poem is the search for an acceptable form, genre, or material manifestation in which to represent experience and emotion. Madeleine eschews the church’s standard prayers and confessions, just as she rejects the form available for the expression of passion, marriage. “Madeleine” resembles the nineteenth-century monodrama, as apostrophes and abrupt turns of address shift the emotional tenor of the speech. Apostrophes to the “plaster saint,’ Christ, Madeleine’s mother, and her men frame them as present-absent figures. Madeleine’s phrases of prayer, a particular form of apostrophe, quotes from the Bible (“Thy will be done?”), and “the parsons’ tags” she recites ironically (“Find rest in Him”) function like the musical interludes of the monodrama to mark changes in tone and rhythm (Mew 44, 46). May Sinclair misunderstood the variation in rhyme and meter as a “lack of metrical technique” but

admitted that the poem “sounded perfectly right” when Mew read it aloud (Biography 301). The metrical complexity, with the fact that “parsons’ tags” and

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sermons are spoken forms, encourages a reading that attends to the sounds of spoken language. Madeleine’s first apostrophe to Christ is written in singsong four-beat iambs with simple end rhymes that suggest the inadequacy of prayer to convey pain: “Oh! quiet Christ who never knew / The poisonous fangs that bite us through” (Mew 43). The meter and rhyme fade into long prose lines when she abandons the prayer to consider her sensitivity to beauty. She describes the “joy and pain” she can “hardly bear” when she sees the chiaroscuro of “black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun” (Mew 43). She asks why God would demand a rejection of the beauty He himself created: Who shall teach us To thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhaps in death, When the race is run And it is forced from us with our last breath “Thy will be done”?

If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things, (44)

The second line, “To thrust...,” with its three clauses and predominance of t and th sounds, would be difficult to pronounce if read aloud and reinforces the long struggle (until “death”) implied in the command, especially in contrast with the brevity of the “race” of life described in the following short line. The variation of line lengths continues with the familiar phrase from “The Lord’s Prayer,” the last clause of a long question about the nature of “Thy will.” Perhaps because Mew believed her line lengths could influence oral readings and interpretations, she refused to allow them to run over to the next line, forcing the printers of The Farmer’s Bride (1916) to use a “rather ugly quarto page” (Memoir xvi). Mew responded to the size of the page but did not realize the necessity of printers’ margins in a letter to Monro on February 9, 1916: “I

agree with you that specimen A would make too large a book so that as something must be sacrificed to the abnormal lines of ‘Madeleine’ (which I am sure should not turn over) it looks as if it must be the margin” (Memoir xvi). Although Klementaski Monro thought Mew’s concern was with “the appear-

ance of her poems on a page’ (Memoir xvi), Monro realized that the line lengths created the effect of what he called “ordinary speech” and claimed that “the best poetry is the least poetical...the poetry of Charlotte Mew is above the average of our day” (History 76). The appearance of the lines, Mew and Monro agreed, would help the reader experience the metrical variation, voice, and accent and imagine a monodramatic performance.” Mew was interested in the performance of poetry and claimed to have written certain poems for

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musical accompaniment. In a letter to Sydney Cockerel (1919), she stated that “Song” was “written for music” and “perhaps I shall one day put an air to it” (Mew 118).

“Madeleine in Church” shares generic features with the monodrama and Victorian monologue, but the poem also invokes these genres, as well as religious forms, to challenge the social conventions with which they are associated. Unlike most Victorian fallen women poems, Mew’s “Madeleine” will not confess, pray, convert, or blame men for her downfall. The suffering caused by marriage is represented by Madeleine’s “sapless” mother who was faithfully “yoked” to her father with the promise of “some serene eternity” that Madeleine “cannot see,’ a significant lack given her interest in visual pleasure (Mew 43). She also alludes to the different standards of fidelity for women and men, which allow the man to leave divorce proceedings “Crowing like twenty cocks” (Mew 42).°! But Madeleine’s central critique is of a religion that cannot accommodate the pleasures of the body. Paralleling the concerns of Delsartism, she claims, “I think my body was my soul” and suggests that the human body would not have been “made” to experience such pleasures if they were sinful (Mew 44). As evidence, she provides a typological reading of the story of Mary Magdalene at the close of the poem. Madeleine’s association with the Magdalene is suggested immediately by the phonetic similarity of their names and her promiscuity, but Madeleine overtly reinterprets Mary Magdalene as a type of love that required the body, touch, kiss, and smell of Jesus. Like many readers of the Bible, Madeleine combines the unnamed sinful woman who kissed Jesus’ feet and anointed them with her tears in Luke 7:36—50 with Mary from Magdala, who had been cured of seven demons in Luke 8:2. Madeleine claims that Mary saw Jesus and

recognized a new “passion” by her physical response, that is, her tears. When she kissed him and touched him with her hair, Madeleine believes Jesus recognized that her love was different than “the rest.” She taught him “That You can change the things for which we care, / But even You, unless You kill us, not the way” (Mew 48). Madeleine and Mary Magdalene’s way of worship must involve their bodies. A reader versed in Victorian typology (and the Victorian fallen woman mono-

logue) would expect Madeleine to fulfill the tropological level of the fourfold method, follow Mary Magdalene’s pattern, and learn to devote her passion to God.

But Mew’s Madeleine will not fulfill that expectation. She insists that Mary could not have loved Jesus if she had not touched him: “She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first, the touch” (Mew 49). Absent that touch, without

some sensory experience, Madeleine cannot convert. In the last stanza, she turns to the Crucifix once more and articulates her Pygmalionesque desire: “if, for once, He would only speak” (Mew 49). Mew presents a familiar typological situation

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but frustrates the usual assumptions about how the typological series should be fulfilled. Her Madeleine is a type for sensuous, even erotic worship that undermines Christian strictures against women’s sexuality. Mew’s “Madeleine in Church” and the dramatic monologue form were invoked

as poets jostled for control over definitions of modernist poetry. H.D. wrote an admiring review of The Farmer’s Bride for the Egoist in September 1916:””

When one reads of “the white geraniums in the dusk” one feels that Madeleine has wandered in that same garden...and the “portrait of my mother at nineteen” brings to one’s oversophisticated imagination the Duchess with her unappreciated, wan smile and her branch of cherries.” The “same garden” suggests Eden or H.D.’s own Sea Garden, also published in 1916.

Madeleine reads the portrait of her mother as an allegory of “Youth, or simply Spring” that would then be destroyed by a loveless marriage (Mew 45). H.D. connects that image, as if in typological relation, to Browning’s portrait of “My Last Duchess,” and it also recalls Barrett Browning’s portrait of Aurora Leigh’s dead mother imaginatively taking up different statue poses. H.D. was interested in the dramatic monologue, not as a Victorian throwback, but as a formal challenge; she wrote that Mew “alone of our generation, with the exception of Mr. Hueffer and Mr. Frost, has succeeded in this form” (FB 135). Pound responded by reclaiming the dramatic monologue for T. S. Eliot: “Mr. Eliot has made an advance on Mr. Browning. He hasalso made his dramatis personae contemporary and convincing.”

Pound may have been discounting both Mew and H.D. as “unconvincing” but not the dramatic monologue, which was still a viable “contemporary” genre even in 1917, after many of his pronouncements on Imagism and Vorticism.” Pound had earlier supported Mew (as well as H.D.), publishing her “Féte” in the Egotst (1914) beside an installment of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Friends 127). Mew undoubtedly influenced Eliot’s poems, yet interpreters of modernism following Pound have not sufficiently recovered Mew or the place of the dramatic monologue in debates on poetic form and gendered subjectivity.”

III. T. S. Eliot’s “Magus”: Impersonality, Objective Correlative, and Mythical Method It would not be to my present purpose to inveigh against the ubiquity of standardized or “B.B.C.” English. If we all came to talk alike there would no longer be any point in our not writing alike...it is the poet’s business to use the speech which he finds about him, that with

118 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE which he is most familiar. I shall always remember the impression of W. B. Yeats reading poetry

aloud. To hear him read his own works was to be made to recognize how much the Irish way of speech is needed to bring out the beauties of Irish poetry.... —T. S. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry” (1942)°”

Eliot’s ambivalent response to cultures of recitation and the discipline of expression

before he left for England in 1914, where he encountered the verse-recitation movement, is evident throughout his criticism. In “The Music of Poetry,” Eliot describes the relation between human speech and poetry through a description of Yeats’s readings, several of which were sponsored by the Poetry Bookshop. Yet, he rejects the “standardized or “B.B.C. English” promoted by the Poetry Society. Eliot’s

criticism frequently takes up concerns that were debated by proponents of cultures of recitation in England and the United States, and some recent criticism has begun the work of determining their influence. Julia Walker suggests that Eliot rejected the emphasis on personality and self-expression in American expressive culture, while Mark Morrisson claims that he promoted the main tenets of the British movement, including the importance of the “pure voice.”** Partially because these critics do not consider the transatlantic aspects of cultures of recitation and modernist poetics more generally, they oversimplify Eliot’s response as either rejection or endorsement. His criticism conducts an ambivalent conversation with both cultures of recitation, which influenced such famous principles as impersonality and the voices of

poetry. The dramatic monologue, the form promoted by Curry for recitation and celebrated by Pound as Eliot’s “convincing” contribution to poetry, also influenced his theories of the objective correlative and mythical method.

Eliot’s introduction to poetry, like that of most American children at the turn of the twentieth century, was shaped by elocution and its emphasis on verse mem-

orization and recitation: “At school, I enjoyed very much reciting Homer or Virgil—in my own fashion. Perhaps I had some instinctive suspicion that nobody really knew how Greek ought to be pronounced...” (Eliot Selected 108). Responding to the formulaic rules of pronunciation and diction that Curry rejected, Eliot suggests he was drawn to classical verse partially because he could recite it with more freedom. Morrisson describes Eliot’s continuing interest in the relation of poetry to speech, with reference to Dante’s influence and lines from Four Quartets: “our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe.””’ For Morrisson, these lines indicate that Eliot was among those modernists who “used the cultural legitimacy of the pure voice,’ advocated by British elocutionary reformers and the Poetry Society, “to produce the value and cultural meaning of

aesthetic experiments” (“Pure Voice” 26-27). While Eliot was undoubtedly

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concerned with speech, the lines are presented in a monologue spoken by a ghostly

“dead master” (perhaps Yeats or Dante), whose theories the student has forgotten once and will probably forget again. This context indicates a degree of irony in the desire to “purify the dialect.” In his 1942 lecture on Yeats, Eliot claimed that a poet should “use the speech which he finds about him,’ a speech the arbiters of “pure” English would have rejected if the poet were from Ireland or London’s East End.

His ideas about “common” speech and poetry have more in common with the American emphasis on individuality in recitation. Expressive culture was a formative influence on Eliot in the United States, but

he rejected some doctrines, especially the Delsartean worship of personality. Curry’s claim that “Expression and Personality are intimately related” was reiterated in books published between 1891 and 1913:

The peculiar character of the man affects his modes of utterance. As all forms of art unconsciously reveal the characteristics of the artist, so delivery

being more intimately related to the man is more essentially revelatory than any form of art. Hence development of expression must be more or less dependent on the development of the experience and the soul of the man. (Province x1)

Curry suggests that all art is related to the character of the artist, but the art of “delivery” or recitation is most “revelatory” of the “soul”; this soul must be “developed” before recitation can improve. As Walker points out, Curry even suggests that expressive reading requires “superior skill” to writing (Expressionism 78). Eliot’s dis-

satisfaction with the idea of art as self-expression is evident in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), where he famously demands that the poet “surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable...a continual extinction of personality” (Eliot Selected 40).°' He further challenges the Delsartean concept of a mystical relationship between the soul, self, gesture, and word when he claims, “The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium” (Eliot Selected 42). It is not the Christian notion of soul that Eliot contests, even in this period before his conversion to Anglicanism, but the idea that this soul unifies all aspects of the personality, determines the artwork, and is expressed therein. Discussions of personality in the British verse-recitation movement were more concerned that a self-indulgent performer might overwhelm the poetry than with the relation between the soul and art. Monro criticized Nora Clarke, who made “herself” the center of a reading, but celebrated Florence Farr, whose “restraint and

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self-surrender” allowed her to “submit” herself “to the cadence and rhythms” of the

poems and to become “a sensitive medium for their conveyance to the audience” (“Pure Voice” 40). Morrisson suggests that Monro’s guidelines for recitation are a source for Eliot’s claim: “The interest of a performer is almost certain to be centered in himself.... The performer is interested not in form but in opportunities for virtuosity or in the communication of his “personality” (“Pure Voice” 41). Both British and American cultures of recitation criticized the artifice of the theater and promoted recitation as an alternative to the stage. Eliot’s critique of the performer’s

display of “personality” is distinct from his rejection of the idea that poetry represents the writer’s personality; the immediate target of the latter is American expression’s claims that good art is self-expression, and recitation the highest form. Like R. Browning, Augusta Webster, and many others, Eliot insists that poetry is not autobiography and begins the practice, followed by the New Critics, of reading all poems as dramatic monologues.” Still, he did not reject poetic emotion, and his statement that the “material” of art is “passion” in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” reminds us that the Delsartean presentation of emotions as the material for poses actually extracts them from a particular self (Eliot Selected 41). Gail McDonald observes of Eliot’s syllabi for courses at the Oxford extension program in Ilkley, Yorkshire, “Given his famous aversion to “personality, it is interesting to see the frequency with which the words ‘personality and ‘temperament’ appear in the syllabuses for Modern English literature.’*’ McDonald does not mention the discipline of expression that was prevalent in Boston when Eliot was at Harvard, but both expression and verse recitation influenced his pedagogy. The work of George Santayana, one of Eliot’s Harvard professors, reveals the link between expression and Eliot’s influential concept of the objective correlative. Walker demonstrates that Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), which coined the phrase correlative objects, was partially a response to the theories of expression taught across the Charles River at Boston University and the Boston School of Expression (Expressionism 75): Expression is a misleading term which suggests that something previously known is rendered or imitated; whereas the expression is itself an original fact, the values of which are then referred to the thing expressed....So the charm which a poet, by his art of combining images and shades of emotion, casts Over a scene or an action, is attached to the principal actor in it, who gets the benefit of the setting furnished him by a well-stocked mind.”

Santayana, like Eliot, objects to Curry’s practice of locating the “expression” in poetic characters and scenes or in the “emotion” imitated by poets rather than

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their intellectual work. He would certainly reject Curry’s claim that the readerperformer’s “expression” is a “superior skill” to that of the writer. Yet, both agree that emotion is the substance of poetry, or as Santayana writes: The passions are the chief basis of all interests, even the most ideal, and the passions are seldom brought into play except by the contact of man with man. The various forms of love and hate are only possible in society, and to imagine occasions in which these feelings may manifest all their inward vitality is the poet’s function... the glorious emotions with which he bubbles over must at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects. (“Elements” 276—277)

Santayana sounds almost Delsartean in his emphasis on the passions shared in human relations, but he insists that the poet’s work is to “manifest” emotion in “objects,” such as poetic images or dramatic scenarios, that correlate to the emotion.

Santayana rejects the notion that feeling may be represented by the vocal tones Curry emphasized or that a passion may be brought into being by striking a bodily attitude, as suggested by Delsarte. Walker, like other scholars, presents Santayana’s “correlative object” as a likely source for Eliot’s objective correlative.® Eliot’s first use

of the phrase in “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) resembles Santayana’s: “The

only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall

be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which

must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (Eliot Selected 48).°° Eliot, Santayana, Curry, and Delsarte all coincide in

their emphasis on an art that evokes emotion but disagree on its sources and the relationship between the artist, artwork, reader or performer, and passion. Another possible influence on the objective correlative, one that Walker does not mention, is Robert Browning’s description of “objective” poetry in his “Essay on Shelley” (1852): “The work speaks for itself, as we say: and the biography of the worker is not more necessary to an understanding or enjoyment of it, than is a model or anatomy of some tropical tree, to the right tasting of the fruit.”°’ Browning used the terms objective and dramatic to claim the nonidentity of poet and speaker, and a prominent, although oversimplified, explanation for the so-called invention of the dramatic monologue is that Browning and Tennyson had been criticized for their confessional style in early poems. The dramatic monologue enabled both Browning and Eliot to produce a situation or chain of events separate from the poet’s personal experience to serve as the objective correlative for an emotion. The form fulfills Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality in the sense that a personality, not

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the poet’s, can be presented in an objective form for analysis. Pound had recognized Browning’s influence and Eliot’s successful work with the dramatic monologue in his review of Prufrock and Other Observations.” Subsequent critics mention Eliot’s early engagement with the form, but, as Patrick Deane notes, studies of modernism have been more interested in the experimental “fragment” than the monologue.” Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” published in August 1927, after The Waste Land and other “fragment” poems, demonstrates Eliot’s consistent

interest in the dramatic monologue, as well as the persistence of typological thought in modernist mythmaking. “The Journey of the Magi” (1927) is spoken by one of the wise men or priests of Matthew (2:1-12), many years after he journeyed to Bethlehem to worship at the birth of Christ.” The Magus describes the difficult journey and its more painful aftermath, when he returns to his kingdom but can neither understand his experience nor live comfortably in the “old dispensation” of paganism (“Magi” 41). In spite of the persona and Eliot’s theories of impersonality, the poem is often read as an account of Eliot’s own difficult journey prior to his conversion and confirmation in the Anglican-Catholic church in 1927.” Conventional ideas of Christian conversion and redemption are complicated by the monologue’s competing typological and mythological symbols and unlinear temporality. The first five lines of the poem confront the reader with an unattributed quotation and unidentified speaker. Not until the parenthetical insertion in line thirty-one, “(you may say),” and the Magus’s insistent, “but set down / This set down / This,” does the rhetorical situation become clear: a scribe, the silent auditor, records the Magus’s story, an account that differs from the Gospels and thereby challenges the authority of scripture (31, 34). The opening quote indicates that the scribe reads the Magus’s words back to him, but the lines are actually adapted from a 1622 Nativity sermon by the English cleric Sir Lancelot Andrewes. The language is colloquial but antiquated (“A cold coming we had of it”), with adjectives following the nouns: “The ways deep and the weather sharp” (4). This unusual syntax establishes the Magus’s distinct voice, yet the voice is derived from a later cleric to create the parallel identities and temporalities common in typological poetry. The first half of the poem indicates the conceit of the Magus as he criticizes others, especially the “camel men... wanting their liquor and women” (“Magi” 12). When the Magus describes entering the “temperate valley” at “dawn,” typological symbols proliferate. The valley “smelling of vegetation” in the morning implies the coming of the new Christian era and the rebirth of springtime. The “three trees on the low sky” prefigure the crosses on Golgotha and insert the Crucifixion into the birth journey (24). The “Six hands...dicing for pieces of silver” predict Judas’s

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reward for betraying Jesus and the Roman soldiers who cast lots under the cross

(Matthew 27:1-35). These typological prefigurations appear to reinforce the Christian view of history as the revelation of a divine, preordained plan. Yet, Eliot’s

Magus does not appear to realize the significance of these symbols in his language or use them to understand his experience, even in retrospect. He asks, “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” (35-36). The line invokes the Christian mystery of death as the path to rebirth, but the Magus dwells on his own suffering at the death of the pagan world. Symbols of paganism are mixed with Christian types in the Magus’s description; the “vegetation,” “tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,” and “wine-skins” invoke Dionysus, Greek god of wine, spring, and resurrection. Dionysus is presented in modernist classicism as a type for Christ, and Jane Ellen Harrison describes rituals associated with the Greek resurrection god that were

grafted onto early Christianity to make the new religion more acceptable to pagans—whom the Magus describes as “alien people clutching their gods” (42).” He also clutches those gods in his imagery. Although the Magus insists, “I would do it again,’ he concludes, “I should be glad of another death” (“Magi” 33, 43). The ambiguous statement might mean that he would prefer a different death than the one he experienced as a loss of the “old

dispensation” or that he will be glad for the death that would allow him to be reborn in Christ. But given the Magus’s uncertainty about his journey and his seeming ignorance of the typological figures that permeate his speech, it is not clear if he is a convert to Christianity. The poem creates a gap between the familiar

Christmas story of the three wise men and the Magus’s version, which he hopes to preserve through the scribe. The Magus’s desire for the written record locates Eliot, as poet, in the position of the scribe as much as the position of the speaker with whom he is usually associated. Eliot presents a wise man who is not wise, a familiar story with an unfamiliar emotional valence, and classical types that do not fulfill their fourfold analogies; the Magus will not easily serve as a moral guide or type

for later individuals seeking Christian redemption. Readers must interpret the typological implications of the monologue, performing the work that the Magus overlooks, to understand how it troubles conversion narratives.

Eliot’s familiarity with typological exegesis is indisputable, given his immersion in Dante’s typological poetics and interest in Anglicanism. Yet, critics

rarely comment on Eliot’s typology; Harriet Davidson’s study of Eliot and hermeneutics suggests the fourfold exegetical method lasted only “until the nineteenth century” and does not acknowledge its longer influence.” Eliot’s essay “Dante” (1929) indicates that he was particularly interested in his predeces-

sors application of biblical typology to literature. Eliot argues that the

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widespread understanding of the interpretive method among Dante’s readers enabled his celebrated “simplicity”:

He not only thought in a way in which every man of his culture in the whole of Europe then thought, but he employed a method which was

common and commonly understood throughout Europe....What is important for my purpose is the fact that the allegorical method was a definite method not confined to Italy; and the fact, apparently paradoxical, that the allegorical method makes for simplicity and intelligibility. (Eliot Selected 209)

In Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande,” the allegorical or antitypical level is the second

fold of the method (the antitype fulfills the meaning prefigured by the type). Eliot chooses allegorical, a term as widely associated with literary critical thought as with Christian hermeneutics, to designate the whole of Dante’s method. But Eliot does not ignore the third and fourth levels, the tropological (by which typological patterns are replicated in living individuals) or the anagogical-eschatological (the higher spiritual significance of these patterns):

The Ulysses episode may strike us first as a kind of excursion, an irrelevance, a self-indulgence on the part of Dante taking a holiday from his Christian scheme. But when we know the whole poem, we recognize how cunningly and convincingly Dante has made to fit in real men, his contemporaries, friends, and enemies, recent historical personages, legendary and Biblical figures, and figures of ancient fiction. (Eliot Selected 214)

Eliot insists that these historical, mythological, and fictional figures are “types of sin, suffering, fault, and merit” (Eliot Selected 214). Linked by typological relationships, they reinforce the patterns in Dante’s Christian journey to be followed or avoided by readers. The juxtaposed passages about Dante’s “method” and the “Ulysses episode” inevitably point to Eliot’s famous mythical method, coined in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923).”° Arguing against Richard Aldington’s critique that James Joyce’s

Ulysses (1922) is an “invitation to chaos,” Eliot describes Joyce’s method of connecting Bloom’s journey through Dublin to the Odyssey: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him” (Eliot Selected 177). This mythical method evolves from Dante’s fourfold method as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the

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immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot Selected 177). It adapts a version of the hermeneutic used by Christian exegetes to order and control the contradictory biblical texts that compose Christian history, and it has Victorian precedents in the mythological types presented in dramatic monologues and other solo performances. Although Eliot describes the mythical method as Joyce’s discovery, he later acknowledges that Yeats had anticipated Joyce, as had projects like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1922) (Eliot Selected 177). He might have cited Jane Ellen Harrison’s studies of comparative myth and religion, which pre-

ceded Frazer's, or many other earlier engagements with myth. Typology enjoyed a resurgence in the Victorian period, was a common source for the imagery of PreRaphaelites, and was interpolated in the metaphysical rhetoric of the Delsarteans and other statue posers. Biblical typology may have begun to fade in the twentieth century,

but Eliot, longing for a “definite” and “commonly understood” hermeneutic, gave it a secular and Hellenistic dress as the mythical method, and the analogical or associative

habit of mind that typology encourages permeates modernism.

Eliot, like Mew and other modernists, participated in cultures of recitation by performing his poetry at the Poetry Bookshop, lecturing widely, and reading at several high-profile events during World War II. Eliot’s aesthetic theories have had an enduring impact on modernist studies; his discussions of impersonality, the objective correlative, and the mythical method have come to define modernist poetics more generally, but their sources are not fully understood. All are connected to the American and British cultures of recitation, and all encourage his use of the dramatic monologue, which had a prominent place in those cultures. Even as he

rejected certain ideologies of expression and verse recitation, the movements provided impetus, resources, and departure points for his creative and critical practice. Cultures of recitation have been overlooked in the vast literature on Eliot, and in modernism more generally, because they were shaped by popular Delsartism,

riddled with elements that seem antimodern, and so prominent that Eliot could respond to them without identifying them by name. Positioning Eliot within cultures of recitation clarifies his own strategies of mythic posing.

IV. Chautauquas, “Sextus Propertius,’ and Ezra Pound’s History Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddys, Dr. Dowies, Comstocks, societies for the prevention of all human activities are impossible in the wake of Laforgue. —Ezra Pound, “Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire,’ Poetry Magazine (November 1917)”

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In spite of Pound and Jules Laforgue, Christian Science and social hygiene movements were possible, and the Chautauqua lecture circuits continued to be the most visible platform for American expressive culture until 1928.” Like Eliot, Pound responded in complex ways to cultures of recitation and was just as influenced by Dante’s typological poetics, modernist mythmaking, and the pedagogies of expression. Pound appeared to enjoy the construction of a controversial public persona more than Eliot, certainly more than Mew, and he read at the Poetry Bookshop,

lectured widely, and delivered contentious manifestos.” Best known for organizing the Imagist movement to promote crisp poems like his famous “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), Pound was persistently interested in the dramatic monologue while his attraction to other forms shifted. He even arranged his entire body of early (pre-Cantos) poems into a collection called Personae (1926), a title that pays tribute to Robert Browning’s famous Dramatis Personae (1864). After positioning Pound in relation to cultures of recitation, Delsartism, and the history of American poetry, I examine “Homage to Sextus Propertius” (1917) as a monologue experiment that indicates how the form would continue to affect Pound’s Cantos.

In addition to a familiarity with Chautauqua, Pound’s comments on the history of American poetry reveal suggestive connections with cultures of recitation and Delsartism in particular.*® Among the few American poets he mentions with Walt Whitman as positive influences are Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, largely forgotten poets who collaboratively published the Vagabondia volumes in 1894, 1896, and 1900. Research by Leon Surette reveals that Pound read these volumes and wrote in an unpublished essay of 1909, “I see him [Walt Whitman] as America’s

poet. The only Poet before the artists of the Carman-Hovey period, or better, the only one of the conventionally recognized ‘American Poets’ who is worth reading.”®

Both Hovey and Carman were active participants in trajectories of Delsartism: Hovey met the celebrated Deslartean performer and teacher Henrietta Russell [Hovey] in 1889; they had a child and then married after her divorce. Carman fell in love with Henrietta’s student, Mary Perry King, and lived with or near King and

her husband from 1904 until Carman’s death in 1929.** He and King collaborated on several projects, including The Making of Personality (1908), the book that adapted Delsartean principles for “masculine” personalities and converted modern

dancer Ted Shawn to Delsartism. Shawn later attended Carman and King’s “Unitrinian School of Personal Harmonizing and Self-Development.” Carman’s address to the first graduating class of the Unitrinian School in 1911 reveals the influence of Delsarte on the school’s philosophy of trinities and peda-

gogical practices. Rather than an antimodern relic of the nineteenth century Carman understood Delsartism as a contemporary realization of humanity:

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I see that the Modern Spirit, which dissects all doctrines and holds fast only that which can prove itself true and desirable and comely,— which is forever questing, forever accomplishing, forever growing,— has here enunciated its latest revelation. Rousseau’s plea for freedom... Delsarte’s profound and clarifying discovery, here begin to find their complete fulfillment and

utility. Carman positioned poetry as foremost among “the three great rhythmic arts,” which included music and dance (Moonshine 21). He aligned these arts with “mind,” “spirit,” and “body,” respectively but suggested that the practice of all would enable “harmony” of the three to “influence personality and mould character” (Moonshine 20). As editor of the Independent, Carman published Richard Hovey’s essay “The Technic of Poetry” (1892), which presents a theory of

poetic composition derived from three of Delsarte’s laws of bodily movement: parallelism (likeness), opposition (difference), and succession (which “affirms likeness and unlikeness at once, variety in unity, change not as of a broken line but

as a curve, in obedience to an unchanging law”).** Fearing the predominance of “schoolgirls and dilettanti” in Delsartism, Carman and Hovey hoped to reframe

and legitimize the movement through theories of robust masculinity and an emphasis on poetry rather than posing.*° Hovey’s “Comrades,” the last poem in Songs from Vagabondia (1894), celebrates masculine health and homosocial fellowship: Comrades, watch the tides to-night, For the sailing is with dawn! Oh, to face the spray together, With the tempest coming on! Greet the sea With a shout of glee, When strong men roam together!*°

Pound encountered this popular style in Vagabondia and elsewhere, adopts it for his “Ballad of the Goodly Fere” (1908-1911), and even presents Christ as a type for the “Comrade.” He associates the story of Jesus calming the waters of the Sea of Galilee (Lake Gennesaret, Luke 8:22—25) with the valor of sailors in seafaring ballads: Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret Wi twey words spoke’ suddently.

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A master of men was the Goodly Fere, A mate of the wind and sea,*” In anexplanatory note, “Simon Zelotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion,’

Pound positions the poem as a dramatic monologue in the voice of one of the apostles. Pound would later repudiate the ballad style, but he allowed Harriet Monroe to republish “Goodly Fere” in her 1917 anthology The New Poetry and included the poem in Personae (1926).** Even later, Pound was still thinking of Hovey (and Santayana) in The Cantos:

the texts of his early stuff are probably lost with the loss of fly-by-night periodicals and our knowledge of Hovey, Stickney, Loring, the lost legion or as Santayana has said: They just died They died because they just couldn't stand it®

Surette points out that many of the Delsarte-derived theories advanced by Carman and Hovey resemble those of Pound and Ernest Fenollosa; the latter was, like Carman, a student of Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard. Pound himself sounds

Delsartean in soulful statements such as, “I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means of transmuting, of passing on that ecstasy to others” (my emphasis).”° Surette acknowledges that Pound may have read the Delsartederived theories of Hovey and Carman in addition to their Vagabondia volumes

but concludes that all “were imbued with the American correlate of PreRaphaelitism, Aestheticism and Symbolisme,’ and I would add, an even heavier dose of American Delsartism, which also influenced the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes.”! Surette makes no strong claims for poetic influence but argues that Pound’s persistent admiration for Hovey and Carman undermines the gulf between nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, advertised by Pound and institutionalized by New Critics. Cultures of recitation also spanned the transition to modernism, and Pound’s engagement with cultures of recitation, like Eliot’s, spanned the Atlantic to include

the Poetry Bookshop and other avant-garde experiments in Anglo-European modernism. Reflecting on his own performance at the bookshop and offering to provide another “programme,” Pound wrote to Monro that public reading taught him how to revise and cut “superfluous matter,” even as he called the bookshop

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audience a “Drinkwaterian-Abercrombogibsonian stodge” for appreciating Georgian poets (“Pure Voice” 43).”* In a 1914 essay, Pound reveals the influence of

both Yeats and Dante (and occludes that of Florence Farr and Christina Rossetti)

on his ideas about the “music” of poetry.” He reiterates Dante’s definition of a poem “as a composition of words set to music” but suggests that ““music’ and ‘poetry’ have drifted apart, and we have a third thing which is called “word music.

I mean we have poems which are read or even, in a fashion, intoned, and are ‘musical’ in some sort of complete or inclusive sense that makes it impossible or inadvisable to ‘set them to music. I mean...many of Mr. Yeats’ lyrics” (Pound Essays 276). For Pound, the “complete” music of the poem is best revealed when the poem is “intoned,’ but he suggests, as does Eliot, that the musical quality of a

poem is crucial to its meaning, that both “sound” and “sense” are interrelated abstractions, so sound must be interpreted by the reader in the absence of any performance.” Pound actually did set the verse of fifteenth-century Parisian troubadour Francois Villon to music in Le testament (1921), a collaboration with Agnes Bedford, Walter Rummel, and George Antheil.”” Pound composed some of the music himself, and his notes for the performance of the piece reveal his unique approach to both poetry and music:

The “orchestration” in the first part of the opera is not in the usual sense “musical.” It is simply an emphasis on the consonantal & vowel sounds of the words. I doubt if the instrumentalist will get much help from “counting the measures.” Let him learn the words & make his noises when the singer reaches the syllable the instrument is to emphasize.... (Untwisting 159)”°

Pound’s score forced attention to consonants and vowels, the sounds that compose words, and the muscular actions of the speech organs. The relationships between syllables and the physical experience of pronunciation were both to be considered when interpreting the interconnected “sound” and “sense” of a poem. Pound’s poetic translations of troubadours such as Villon and the ballad form he employed for “Goodly Fere” are attempts to deploy familiar musical frameworks to ensure that the rhythms and sounds of the poem will be “read.” Pound’s interest in Hovey and Carman is partially due to their own use of ballad forms and

focus on the sounds of poetry, but his persistent admiration seems even more exceptional in the context of his tendency to rail against the British Georgian poets

who tainted audiences at the Poetry Bookshop. Pound was vocal in his celebration of “Master Bob Browning,” whom he addressed in a tribute poem “Mesmerism” (Personae 13). In his review of Eliot’s Prufrock, Pound called Browning’s dramatic

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monologues “the most interesting poems in Victorian English” written in the most “vital form” (Pound Essays 420). Pound considers his early work and his struggles to define “self” with reference to Browning and the dramatic monologue: In the “search for oneself,” in the search for “sincere self-expression,” one gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says “I am” this, that, or the other, and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing. I began this search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off, as it were complete masks of the self in each poem. I continued in long series of translations, which were but more elaborate masks.”” Pound reflects on “self-expression,” that mainstay of American expressive culture,

much more seriously than his dismissals of “Chautauquas” would suggest. He abstracts “myself” as the “search for oneself,’ with scare quotes that suggest he refers to much-discussed ideas. Largely influenced by Yeats, Pound realizes what the Delsarteans suppressed when they advocated solo performance as the path to a “real” self or personality; in the process of performance, utterance, or pose, a mask is created. The mask may be “elaborate” and “complete,” but for Pound, it is the only self that can be expressed. He also suggests that his “translations” are per-

sonae, masks of the self,” or dramatic monologues rather than nostalgic yearnings for the past. Reading “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” the poem that closes Personae, as a dramatic monologue could reframe long-standing debates about Pound’s approach to the Roman poet who wrote under Augustus Caesar at the end of the last century B.C.E. The assumed genre of translation was a problem for classical scholars who evaluated Pound’s accuracy in rendering the surviving four books of Propertius’s

elegies. Harriet Monroe of Poetry Magazine sent Pound’s “translation” to W. G. Hale, Professor of Latin at the University of Chicago who declared Pound “incredibly ignorant of Latin.” The debate drew in other critics and classical scholars for decades, initiated Pound’s break with Monroe, and may have precipitated his departure from London.” Although Eliot defended Pound’s “Propertius”

as “a paraphrase, or still more truly...a persona,’ he did not include it in his Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (1928) (Pound Poet 354). Pound treats the Roman

elegies as source material for a modernist dramatic monologue spoken by Propertius and focused on the difficulties of genre as they relate to gender. He dis-

cards the rules of literary translation with flamboyant anachronisms such as “frigidaire patent” (Personae 206). His title invokes the homage, a form that would

mimic the style of the celebrated artist to recognize a debt, yet he often treats his speaker with sarcasm. Pound’s Propertius repeatedly questions which genre he

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should use: elegy, lyric, or epic. He wants to write what he calls “love-lyrics” for his

mistress Cynthia, but he lives in an empire that does not honor love and values poetry only as it would commemorate and support the imperial and masculine goal of expansion through war. He suggests that he will eventually be resigned to composing for the martial machine, but he hopes to hold out: “And I also will sing war when this matter of a girl is exhausted” (Personae 212). But Propertius cannot sustain his love-lyric and instead resorts to parodies of genres that reveal their enmeshment in a cultural moment. Section I opens with lyric invocation, but rather than calling on the Muses for assistance in his enterprise, Propertius turns to previous human poets: “Shades of Callimachus...it is in your grove I would walk” (Personae 205). Propertius defends the lyric he has begun against “Martian generalities” that “expound the distentions

of Empire,’ but in this defense, he has already departed from the lyric mode (Personae 205). He cannot write a few “unsullied” pages or “something to read in normal circumstances” when unending war is the norm (Personae 205). At that moment in history and “regardless of quality,” he claims that poetry is attached to death, to the dead heroes, the women for whom it serves as “a fine tomb-stone over their beauty,” or the poet appreciated only by “young women doing homage to [his]

palaver” (Personae 206). Here and throughout the poem, the author winks through his speaker for he, like the young women, is “doing homage” to his predecessor. Section II includes some of Propertius’s wittiest parodies of the rhetoric of empire, all “yawned out on my lyre—with such industry”: “‘Of’ the victorious delay of Fabius...‘Of’ lares fleeing the “Roman Seat’...” (Personae 207). The section also interpolates a dramatic monologue spoken by Phoebus and dismissing Propertius’s poetry as “pamphlets” that will be “thrown often into a chair / Where a girl waits alone for her lover” (Personae 208). The lines fear the emasculation of a poet who exalts love over war and will not be read by the male “Comrades” imagined in the earlier ballads of Hovey and Pound. Calliope’s monologue follows and

continues the ridicule and association of lyric and “ladies,” characterizing Propertius’s verse as “the sorcerizing of shut-in ladies” before splashing him in the “backwash” of the lyric poet “Philetas the Coan” (Personae 208-209). These mono-

logues, imagined by Propertius, not only disrupt his lyric strivings but also indicate that he cannot reconcile himself to a genre he presumes to be feminine. The following sections even undermine his claims to be a great lover. Section III presents a dramatic scene in which Propertius receives a letter from Cynthia asking him to come to her with stereotyped erotic imagery: “Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools” (Personae 209). The poet who boasts, “And if she plays with me with her shirt off / We shall construct many Illiads” is actually too afraid of

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being attacked in the dark to go to his mistress (Personae 213). In Section IV, Propertius asks a silent auditor, his slave Lygdamus, to describe Cynthia’s devasta-

tion at his failure to come to her. If Lygdamus complies, we get only Propertius’s side of the conversation: “Thus? She wept into uncombed hair, / And you saw it” (Personae 211). The poem suggests that Lygdamus was so invested in saying what his master wanted to hear, it would make little difference if he spoke or Propertius spoke for him. The scene is a vivid parody in which Propertius’s short phrases, dashes, and repetitive questions (“And you saw it... You, you Lygdamus”) reveal his doubt in Cynthia’s disappointment. The drama of Section V is precipitated by the request for an imperial poem, and he performs an attempt at a “large-mouthed product”: “And ‘Tt is, I think,

India which now gives necks to your triumphs” (Personae 212). India was a prominent concern for the British Empire prior to 1919 when the poem was published, but that year saw the passage of the Government of India Act, which granted some self-determination, along with the coercive Rowlatt Acts that led to the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in April. Pound’s reference to India clarifies a major goal in rehabilitating the voice of the Roman poet: Propertius discusses what Pound called the “infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire’ to reflect on “the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire” of his period (Pound Poet 350). The pressure of this historical fold is flagged in the text by the faltering phrases of “It is, I think...,” and Propertius abandons his imperial poem. His critique of the culture of death continues in Section VI, as he reflects on how “Caesar plots against India” and how “victor and conquered” will be “one tangle of shadows”

in Hades (Personae 214). Propertius would turn from these shadows to Cynthia as “Light, light of my eyes,’ and his most sustained attempts at passionate lyric appear in the next section. He even manages a few rhymes: “Struggles when the lights were taken away; / Now with bared breasts she wrestled against me, / Tunic spread in delay” (Personae 215). But images of combat and his tendency to fall asleep during the tryst (“Sluggard!” she says) betray the failure. Sections VIII and IX catalogue mythological love stories with horrible outcomes: Io turned into a heifer by Juno, Callisto turned into a bear, Persephone and all the other beautiful “women in hell”: “Death has his tooth in the lot” (Personae 219). Even in his final dejected line, the rhetoric of battle impinges in “taking his stand.” As for his own mythic pose, Propertius plays Menelaus opposite his friend Lynceus, who (as Paris) sleeps with Cynthia and passes “on a swig of poison” in the form of a venereal disease (Personae 223). Along with this mythical method of ordering his experience, he compares himself in the final stanza to a list of dead elegists, Varro, Calvus, and Gallus, whose passionate love lyrics have been lost: “And

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now Propertius of Cynthia, taking his stand among these” (Personae 224). Pound’s use of a mythical method five years before Eliot coined the term is not any more of a “scientific discovery” than was James Joyce’s in Ulysses (Eliot Selected 177). Dramatic

monologues with mythological speakers and typological associations had been written for centuries. Unlike Joyce’s rough association of the contemporary figure (Bloom) with the Greek hero (Odysseus), Pound’s method begins with the historical individual, Propertius, who also comments on the modern British Empire and poetic genres. Propertius interprets his own life through a variety of myths and his-

torical stories, suggesting the layers of association in the fourfold method. If Propertius cannot know that his reflections on the sack of Troy at the end of the poem presage the fall of Rome, Pound presents both as a warning to London. This alignment of past and present, speaker and author, is a common effect in dramatic monologues, but also in prosopopoeia, which reminded schoolchildren to learn from history. Pound suggests we never do learn. Setting his satirical monologue in the time of the great Roman orators who inspired prosopopoeia assignments, he undermines the value of oratory as the “Caesarial ore rotundos” (Personae 213). He might be parodying Quintilian, along with any twentieth-century elocutionary text or vocal expression manual, when he declares, “One must have resonance, resonance and sonority...like a goose” (Personae 224). Pound’s complaint about “Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddys,” and the like was published just before he began writing “Homage to Sextus Propertius”; after its publication, he was still associating the Chautauqua circuits with everything detestable in American culture and Amy Lowell. He wrote to Margaret Anderson of Little Review on April 22, 1921: “Do you honestly think that a serious writer OUGHT to

be reminded of the United States??...ought one to be asked to address that perpetual mother’s meeting, that chaste Chitaqua [sic]; that cradle of on-coming Amys???”!° Yet, Pound never rejected his own history so adamantly, as his lifelong respect for the Delsartean poets Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman reveals. History provided Pound with the voices of Propertius, Simon Zelotes, Piere Vidal, or the troubadours and with a method of association, like typology, that he would continue to use in his “poem including history,” The Cantos. Even of that long poem, seemingly so different from the early monologues, Pound claimed, “ALL typographic disposition, placings of words on the page, is intended to facilitate the reader's intonation, whether he be reading silently to self or aloud to friends.”'"! His belief in the poetic text as a script for intonation recalls Curry’s approach to

literary interpretation; Carman’s definition of poetry, music, and dance as “rhythmic arts”; Monro’s view of books as “printed scores”; and Amy Lowell’s theory of poetry as “spoken art.”

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V. Amy Lowell’s Polyphonic Emma Lyon Hamilton Only read it aloud, Gentle Reader, I beg, and you will see what you will see. —Amy Lowell, Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916)!

Amy Lowell, living near the center of expression and Delsartism in Boston, recited her poetry and delivered lectures directly responding to expressive culture. Lowell’s public persona as a cigar-smoking woman in a masculine suit and her effectiveness

at promoting her poetry and that of her friends, including Pound, may be the source of his association of “Chitaqua [sic]” and “on-coming Amy’s.”'”’ Her performances resemble events promoted by expression and were part of her marketing

strategies, but they were also extensions of her poetic theories. She describes “Poetry as a Spoken Art” in an essay of 1916, arguing like Pound, Eliot, and Mew that poetic interpretation requires attention to the aural qualities of a poem best experienced through recitation.'” Asking her ideal readers to “read it aloud,’ she guided an auditory experience using both traditional poetic sound effects (meter, alliteration, rhyme) and techniques from oratory and elocution, disciplines being

interrogated and revised by expression. Audiences at her events, especially in Boston, may have considered her in relation to performers trained in the vocal techniques designed by Curry. Lowell’s cigar would certainly have distinguished her from Delsartean readers and statue posers, but her long poem in oratorical or polyphonic prose about Emma Lyon Hamilton, “Sea-Blue and Blood-Red” (1918), demonstrates her interest in mythic posing and the history of solo performance.

Lowell’s recitations and lectures have not received significant attention, although some of her performances rank among avant-garde performance experiments and certainly depart from the usual Chautauqua reading.'” In an early performance (December 1914), she collaborated with the composer Carl Engel, who produced drum sounds while she read “The Bombardment” before a crowd of four hundred in Boston.'” A verbal enactment of a firebombing in London, the poem is one of her first experiments in prose poetry with oratorical sound effects. '°”

The combination of experimental music and chanted verse should be understood in the context of Yeats and Florence Farr’s recitations with the psaltery, and Lowell may have been aware of Farr when she appeared in Boston in 1907 or read her ideas in The Music of Speech.'’ Lowell bemoaned the style of recitation at the Poetry Bookshop, which tended to be less experimental and collaborative, partially due to the antitheatrical prejudice of the British verse-recitation movement. In “A Letter from London,” published the same year as her “Bombardment” performance, Lowell records her impression of a visit to the bookshop:

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A month ago I toiled up the narrow stairs of a little outhouse behind the Poetry Bookshop, and in an atmosphere of overwhelming sentimentality, listened to Mr. Rupert Brooke whispering his poems. To himself, it seemed, as nobody else could hear him. It was all artificial and precious. One longed

to shout, to chuck up one’s hat in the street when one got outside.'” Lowell objected to Brooke’s whispering in part because she believed poetry should communicate to an audience, that it should be expressive rather than self-indul-

gent. In public lectures, she defined poetry as “the expression of the heart” that “reveals the soul of humanity.’!’? Using the weighted term expression, already the name of an academic discipline, along with invocations of “heart” and “soul” common among Delsarteans, Lowell appears to be advancing definitions of art popularized by the expressive culture movement. References to the soulful expres-

sion of art are evident in every modernist discussed in this book and cannot immediately be attached to either an antimodern backlash or Delsartism, but in “Poetry as a Spoken Art,’ Lowell comments directly on the discipline of expression: “The few people who attempt to read it [poetry] aloud are handicapped by the realization of the unusual quality of their task, and lose their sense of proportion and simplicity in the welter of artistic theories of expression which have gradually come into being. Let us examine a few of these theories” (“Spoken” 15). While she

does not name particular theorists in the essay, Curry was among the most renowned at this time, and Lowell shared his sense of a poem as a “verbal shell” to be filled in by the voice and his critique of mechanical, unnatural training methods.

Like Curry, she criticizes those elocution teachers who misunderstand the “laws of English prosody” and attempt to “heighten the poetical effect” by mispronouncing words (“Spoken” 18). She would have disputed Curry’s theory that readers express

their personality through recitation. In an argument familiar from Monro and Eliot’s critiques of distracting performers, Lowell claims that the audience must forget the reader: “The dramatic quality of the piece must be given just in so far as it stimulates imagination, but never so far as to call attention to the reader as an actual personality” (“Spoken” 17). Although her own performances must have

called attention to her “personality,” she claims that the major “pitfall of all elocution-taught readers” is their failure to realize “one is all alone, and one must not act” (“Spoken” 16). Lowell emphasizes recitation as a solo, and the challenge of solos is that performers are tempted to overact their personalities.'"! Lowell understood recitation as the most contemporary pursuit of poetry: “If the modern movement in poetry could be defined in a sentence, the truest thing which could be said of it... would be that it is a movement to restore the audible

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quality to poetry, to insist upon it as a spoken art” (“Spoken” 23). The “modern” cannot be so easily defined and many earlier poets had worked with the “audible quality” of poetry, but this was the major interest of cultures of recitation. Lowell compares poetry as an organization of language comparable to a musical score, in which the art coheres not in the notation on a page, but in a performance. Few can read a score and “hear” music, and just as trained musicians must interpret a musical score for an audience, she claims, “Poetry will come into its Paradise when carefully trained speakers make a business of interpreting it to the world” (“Spoken” 13). Lowell describes a faculty she calls the “imaginative, mental ear,’ which is sim-

ilar to the “visual imagination” and should enable readers to hear the sound patterns of a poem just as they see a poetic image constructed by the text (“Spoken” 10). Most readers fail to perceive the musical patterns of words in a silent reading on

account of their insufficiently developed auditory imagination.''*” Contemporary theories of language as an arbitrary sign system separate the graphic mark of the word from its sounding, but literary critics have long granted a mimetic connection between text and sound for onomatopoetic words like the “Boom” Lowell deployed in “The Bombardment.”!'? Lowell imagined that every poetic text could be onomatopoetic, that the sounds of poetry could always be mimetic of their meanings. Lowell was not the first modernist to wish that written language could convey its sounding or to dream of a troupe of trained performers to recite her poetry (or students of expression who can control the soloist’s tendency to overact). Lacking

such perfect performers, she attempted to encourage readers to develop their auditory imaginations. Lowell’s Men, Women and Ghosts (1916) deploys a variety

of strategies, including the onomatopoetic “Boom” and the voices of fire-bombed victims in the sound collage of her performance piece “The Bombardment.’ Just as her “Painter on Silk” “heard the bugles and drums / And wished he could paint the roses, / Bursting into song,” a major goal of the book is to make printed words burst from ink into sound (Men 244). To stimulate a reader’s auditory imagina-

tion, she often includes familiar songs such as the nursery rhymes of children playing in “A Roxbury Garden” or an eighteenth-century sailor shanty in “The Hammer.” Lowell uses onomatopoetic language to “transcribe the various movements” of avant-garde music in “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces, “Grotesques’ for String Quartets” (Men ix). She also figures the “movement” of music using kinesthetic techniques that link images of dancing bodies to rhythms and sound effects: Banging,

And wooden shoes beating the round grey stones Of the marketplace.

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Whee-e-e!

Sabots slapping the worn old stones, And a shaking and cracking of dancing bones; (Men 342-343)

The active gerunds (banging, slapping, cracking) are conventional onomatopoetic words, and their trochaic rhythm suggests a stamping downbeat in the first line. The repeated anapests of the last line mimic the three-beat waltz pattern common to social dances like the one Lowell locates in the marketplace. Men, Women and Ghosts also features dramatic monologues, a form that may have appealed to Lowell for many of the same reasons it interested Curry; he believed that vocal tones, as well as words, were needed to reveal the “heart” of the mono-

logue’s speaker and that the monologue “elevates the study of the spoken word” more than other poetic forms (BDM 256).''* “Patterns,” the first poem of the book and Lowell’s most famous monologue, is often oversimplified as an emotional outburst linked to her lesbianism and the class restrictions imposed by her wealthy family. The speaker is a young aristocratic woman of the eighteenth century who walks in her garden after receiving a letter that her fiancé, Lord Hartwell, was killed in battle for “the Duke in Flanders.’ The “patterns” represented in the poem include the “garden-paths,” the “stiff, brocaded gown” she wears, her own rhythmic walking,

and the “pattern called a war” (Men 3-9). The speaker suggests that her marriage to Hartwell “would have broke the pattern” (8) and imagines a passionate chase scene in the garden, yet she presents the marriage in the most banal and static language of

the poem: “He for me, and I for him / He as Colonel, I as lady...” (Men 8). The dramatic irony that there was little chance of marital fulfillment, in spite of her erotic

dream of a chase, is not recognized by those who read the poem as a revelation of “Amy Lowell’s inner conflict” and “outer rebellion against world values.”'” Even as the speaker dreams of her lover embracing her naked body, she cannot imagine him without a “sword-hilt” and other paraphernalia of war: “the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me” (Men 5-6). The poem’s rhythm and meter, the patterns used to construct the speaker’s voice, also reinforce the irony. Lowell describes walking along garden paths, an image of circumscribed movement, with repeated short rhyming phrases: “I shall go / up and down / in my gown’ (Men 8). When she imagines the passionate chase through the garden, however, her rhymes and rhythms are more complex, and the long lines stretch out on the page to reinforce the deferral of pleasure: I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths, And he would stumble after,

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Bewildered by my laughter.

I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes. (Men 6)

The imaginative descriptions of what she “would be” and “should see” contrast with his stumbling bewilderment described in shorter, rhymed lines. The meter and rhyme underscore the idea that the fulfillment she imagined would have constituted a pattern of disappointment. Lowell connects her dramatic monologues to her experiments with polyphonic prose, which she defines as a “purely dramatic form” that, especially when read aloud, gives to “characters the vivid, real effect they have in a play” (Men x). Andrew

Thacker points out that the term polyphonic had previously been used to describe a musical composition with several melodies or, in philology, a symbol with more

than one phonetic value (“Unrelated” 106). If she gleaned the term from her interest in experimental music, Lowell’s major work in polyphonic prose, Can Grande’s Castle (1918), introduces the form in relation to oratory at a moment when the discipline was undergoing significant reforms due to expressive culture: Putting aside one rhythm of English prosody after another, I finally decided to base my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The

variations permitted to this cadence enable the poet to change the more readily into those of vers libre, or even to take the regular beat of metre, should such a marked time seem advisable. It is, of course, important that such changes should appear as not only adequate but necessary when the poem is read aloud.'"®

In Lowell’s era, the “cadence of oratorical prose” was often traced back to Roman

rhetoricians who discussed alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme; the juxtaposition of phrases; and the strategic use of sonorous words in speeches. The prose style they elaborated was thought to have entered English through the liturgy and translations of the Bible, according to Bliss Perry’s A Study of Poetry (1920), a book

that responds to cultures of recitation as it emphasizes the influence of oratory on poetics.''” Perry mentions Lowell’s work in polyphonic prose as evidence of the continued presence of the cadence in modern verse. Lowell suggests the rhythms of oratorical prose are natural, not due to tradition or training, when she claims that “men under stress of emotion tend to talk in rhythmed speech.’'!® For her, the ““beat’ of poetry, its musical quality... bears in it the stress of emotion,” and the “great orators of all time” have known how to infuse their speech with rhythms to

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carry the feeling (“Spoken” 10). Correspondingly, Lowell’s primary rule for polyphonic prose is that the meter should be “necessary” to, even mimetic of, the

emotional content of the passage; she insists on “the absolute adequacy of the manner of a passage to the thought it embodies,” and the sound of the line is a crucial part of the “manner” (Can Grande xi).

Can Grande’s Castle fluidly shifts between voices and rhythms in four long poems connected by the theme of war. The first poem, “Sea-Blue and Blood-Red” retells the life of Emma Lyon Hamilton and demonstrates that the solo statue poser continued to be a model of creativity for modernist women: And a new camlet shawl, all sea-blue and blood-red, in an intricate pattern given by Sir William to help you do your marvelous “Attitudes.” Incomparable

actress! No theatre built is big enough to compass you. It takes a world; and centuries shall elbow each other aside to watch you act your part. Art, Emma,

or heart?...She dances the tarantella, and poses before a screen with the redblue shawl. It is the frescoes of Pompeii unfrozen; it is the fine-cut profiles of Sicilian coins; it is Apollo Belvedere himself—Goethe has said it. She wears a Turkish dress, and her face is sweet and lively as rippled water. (Can Grande 7-8)

The repetition of phrases attempting to describe the attitudes, “It is...; it is...5 it is...Said it,’ suggests extemporaneous speech continuously refining the description of Lyon Hamilton’s mythic posing. In those rhythmic phrases, words with phonetic similarity to “pose” punctuate the flow, similar to the syncopated rhythm of the statue posing itself: “poses,” “frescoes,” “Pompei, “unfrozen,” “profiles,” and

“Apollo.” Exclamations and shifting voices indicate Lyon Hamilton’s fame and controversy and the difficulty of describing her. A first-person address invokes her presence as “you,” before the narrative shifts to a third-person description and then implied dialogue, “Have you seen her—the Ambassadress? Ah, Bellissima Creatura! ‘Una Donna Rara’! She is fairer than the Blessed Virgin; and good! Never was such a soul in such a body!” (Can Grande 5). Lowell includes voices that do not associate Lyon Hamilton with the Virgin, but even after her affair with Nelson, the birth of their child, and his death in the sea battle of Trafalgar, she is presented sympathetically as an artist who rejected conventional gender and class identities. In spite of her title and Nelson’s dying wish that she and their child should be protected, she died in poverty. In the last scene of Lowell’s narrative poem, an “old guide to Calais” points her auditor to an unmarked grave. Lowell’s interest in Lyon Hamilton may be due to her desire to trace a tradition of women’s creativity, a desire she also pursued in “Sisters,” her poem discussing

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Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson. Lowell’s speaker in “Sea-Blue and Blood-Red” refers to the authority of Goethe to claim the title “actress” for Lyon Hamilton and emphasizes her diverse talents as dancer and poser. Yet, she also foregrounds, with rapid internal rhymes, the question so often applied to the performances: “Art, Emma, or heart?” Is she an artist or just a beautiful woman loved by powerful men; does she possess genius or only natural charm? Lowell’s suggestion that the “centuries shall elbow each other aside to watch you act your part” has proven to be true, as nineteenth- and twentiethcentury authors record her performances. For Lowell, Hamilton not only brings to life classical frescoes and statues of figures of both genders, from Apollo to the Virgin, but also relives the ancient theme that war, in this case the Napoleonic War, destroys love. The attitudes reembodying the Virgin and other myths might be a

figure for Lowell’s strategy of invoking mythic themes, tropes, and images throughout Can Grande’s Castle. With a suggestive invocation of Dante’s patron, Can Grande, Lowell adopts the analogic mode characteristic of typological thought and the mythical method. Lowell’s typological organization in Can Grande’s Castle is clearest in the final poem, “The Bronze Horses.”''? Lowell represents history as recurrence through another classical sculpture, the chariot drawn by four horses now located above the portal of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. Opening in the period of the quadriga’s creation, Caesar’s legions march “Back to Rome with a victor’s spoils, with a victor’s wreath on every head, and Judah broken is dead, dead! ‘Io triumphe!’” (Can Grande 133). With a leap to the fall of Rome, the poem features another victor invoking a god’s favor in Byzantium-Constantinople, where the horses were placed outside the Hippodrome prior to the sack of that city in 1204 (“Unrelated” 114): These vessels are the chalices of God’s wrath. The spirit of Christ walking upon the waters. Or is it anti-Christ? This is the true Church. Have we not the stone on which Jacob slept, the rod which Moses turned into a serpent, a portion of the bread of the Last Supper? We are the Virgin’s chosen abiding place....We have pulled the sun’s rays from the statue of Constantine and put up the Cross instead. (Can Grande 156)

Lowell invokes common typological symbols, Moses’ rod and the bread and wine of the Last Supper, but she also suggests that these symbols continue previous patterns of destruction and reconstruction. The sun’s rays, an invocation of Apollo, are connected to the new God of “Let there be light” in the mythical method. The fall of Constantinople invokes the “tarantella” of Lyon Hamilton as a “death dance,”

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and the poem leaps to Venice in May 1915 as that city is attacked. Thacker suggests

that the “poems look back to previous times of war in order to try to make sense of the present” and the “horses symbolize an art that might endure the travails of war” (“Unrelated” 115). They escape the firebombing only when Lowell imagines the quadriga as a statue pose awakening and galloping along the canals “like a constellation” (Can Grande 232). If there is hope at the end of the book, it is not in the survival of art but the transformative power of the imagination, creating bombs and quadrigae, constellations and poetry. Lowell’s fluid polyphonic prose accommodates the figures of reenactment and return that, introduced through Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, organize the entirety of Can Grande’s Castle. Her presentation of historical repetitions suggests that war will recur, along with less destructive, more beautiful human activities. This version of history also demonstrates the associative thought paradigm characteristic of typology and the mythical method common to the modernists examined here. Lowell’s formal experimentation was celebrated in John Gould Fletcher’s 1915 Poetry Magazine article, “Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose,” but partially

due to her negative reception by Pound and others, she has been framed as a derivative Imagist (“Amygist”). Lowell herself claimed, “There is nothing new under the sun...and of this the Imagists were well aware.”!”° Her “nothing new” slogan could be applied to the many manifestations of antimodern-classicism in modernism, including her own work in the “old” form of the dramatic monologues, the polyphonic prose she associated with classical oratory, and her unusual performances contributing to cultures of recitation. In an early Canto of 1917, Pound comments on his Personae or the dramatic monologue form more generally, asking if giving “life” to other figures is an “evasion”:

Ist worth the evasion, what were the use Of setting figures up and breathing life upon them, Were’t not our life, your life, my life, extended? I walk Verona. (J am here in England). I see Can Grande. (Can see whom you will.)!”’

Rather than abandoning the feint and the form he adopted so consistently, Pound uses the imaginative power and dramatic participation enabled by the monologue to describe walking in Verona past Dante’s patron, Can Grande, who had a surprising presence in modernism. Later interpreters of modernist poetics have read dramatic monologues as if they were evasions concealing Mew and Lowell’s lesbianism or Eliot’s conversion. There is a tendency to interpret poets’ careers as a

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continual progress to so-called experimental forms like cantos, fragments, and multivocal poetics. As Rita Felski points out in the context of gendered discussions

of modernism, writers “are often singled out for attention by feminist critics because of their defiance of linguistic and social conventions and their transgres-

sive questioning of femininity.... Yet it also often perpetuates an unfortunate dichotomy of literary and political value which identifies formal experimentation as the most authentically resistive practice.”!’* This tendency to applaud the “new” experiment also obscures significant continuities and contexts for modernism,

including cultures of recitation with their roots in popular movements like Delsartism and conservative institutions like the Poetry Society. Mew’s career was launched by the verse-recitation movement centered around the Poetry Bookshop, and she read her dramatic monologues in private women’s salons, alternative sites for the performances of poetry and gender. Both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as expatriate poets, responded to transatlantic cultures of recitation. Eliot rejected expression’s emphasis on personality but incorporated elements of Curry’s theories of expression and ideas from the British verse-recitation

movement in principles that came to define modernist poetics, including the objective correlative and mythical method. Pound adamantly rejected such American

manifestations of expressive culture as the Chautauqua readings yet celebrated the Delsartean poets, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, and wrote dramatic mono-

logues influenced by their theories and versions of masculinity. Lowell most directly engaged American expressive culture and attacked boring readings at the bookshop. More research is needed to situate modernist poetics in relation to cultures of recitation, with attention to Louise Bogan (“Medusa” and “Cassandra”), Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1915), or Anna Wickham, who performed nine times at the Poetry Bookshop.'”’ I might have discussed Edith Sitwell’s avant-garde performances of Facade (beginning in 1923) or the readings she conducted during World War II costumed as an ironic queen.'** These included an April 14, 1943, war benefit billed as “Reading of Famous Poets at London’s Aeolian Hall,” featuring Sitwell’s “Anne Boleyn’s Song,” H.D.’s “Ancient Wisdom Speaks to the Mountain,” and T. S. Eliot’s “What the Thunder Said” from The Waste Land.

H.D. reported to May Sarton that “the [real] Queen came with the two little Princesses.”!*° Her partner, Bryher, claimed, “Hilda [H.D.] read magnificently like

the inspired muse she was’ and described how “Edith [Sitwell] stepped forward as if from some great tapestry” to deliver the Boleyn monologue.’ Influenced by the solo forms of the monodrama and ancient prosopopoeia, the dramatic monologue is an imagined solo that attempts to notate a voice and a gesturing speaker, as well as words, all three modes of expression outlined by

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Curry and Delsarte. It became a solo performance in poetry readings and recita-

tions conducted by both poets and other performers in Delsartean matinees, Chautauqua circuits, Schools of Expression, the Poetry Bookshop, Poetry Society

events, or school assignments as children practiced elocution. Many performances of monologues passed without the billing “Reading of Famous Poets” or with frustration and the desire to, as Lowell put it, “chuck up one’s hat in the street.” Yet, cultures of recitation required young modernists to memorize a poem and stand before classrooms to deliver a recitation, and this old but not entirely rejected pedagogical model provides an important context for modernist poetics. Never quite so “new” as publicized, modernism inherited genres, pedagogies, bib-

lical typology and its mythic relative, and a strain of antimodern-classicism that was skeptical of historical progress from the sack of Troy to the fall of Constantinople to World Wars I and II.

4. The Motor in the Soul Isadora Duncan's Solo Dance

Before I go out on the stage, I must place a motor in my soul...if I do not get time to put that motor in my soul, I cannot dance. —Isadora Duncan, My Life (1927)!

Duncan describes being propelled to dance by a motor in her soul, an image sug-

gesting her complex relationship to technology and her choreography joining motorized movement practices to soulful expression. Duncan’s attempt to make dance “new” by turning back to a mythical past brought Delsartean statue posing

into a hybrid performance form: a combination of solo dance, live orchestral music (usually romantic), nonnaturalistic stage decor, and inflammatory curtaincall speeches. This hybrid form constituted a modernist manifesto and enabled Duncan to promote an ambivalent antimodern politics and subjectivity. Drawing on popular nineteenth-century conceptions of the self, body, and soul, especially those of Walt Whitman, Ernst Haeckel, and Friedrich Nietzsche, she redefined spirituality through that icon of modern technology, the motor. Her presentation of a self that is embodied but spiritual, carefully choreographed but seemingly free, and adamantly female influenced an important trajectory of feminism and spheres of modernism as diverse as Futurism, Cambridge Ritualism, the Moscow Art Theatre, and Greenwich Village Radicalism. The impact of Duncan, who was already an international star by 1908, indicates that modern dance was an early transnational modernist movement. Widely and vaguely recognized as the “Muse 144

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of Modernism,” to borrow the title of a 1998 exhibition of art featuring Duncan, her own achievements are submerged in the figure of the muse who inspires but does not create.” I position Duncan as an instigator of modernism by reading her choreography, movement techniques, and the political manifestos she danced.’ Excellent studies of Duncan have appeared recently, but this is the first to demonstrate that her aesthetic practice reinterpreted established traditions of solo performance for international modernism.* Her performances adapted Delsartean movement principles and ideas of the body and soul for the concert halls of what she called “high religious art.’? A significant modernist experiment in hybrid performance, Duncan’s form has not been recognized as such because aspects, like the solo, became common practice in modern dance, while other features have been overlooked. Although soloists in “Greek” dresses had occupied music halls and Delsartean platforms for decades, Duncan’s body, costumed in a light tunic and dancing alone in legitimate theaters was unprecedented.° Classical romantic

music (Chopin, Beethoven) became a staple accompaniment for dance, but Duncan’s use of “high music” was controversial, even deemed a “sacrilege.”’ The simple curtains she hung on her stage may have inspired Gordon Craig’s similar designs, as she claimed in her autobiography, but they certainly promoted a style of spare decor deployed by Craig and others.® Her curtain-call speeches combined

the Delsartean lecture-demonstration with the modernist manifesto’s “badmannered” speech and “hostility toward the audience.’ Duncan used her speeches to present aesthetic theories, attack the conservatism of her audience, ostracize imitators, raise money for schools, and point to the political significance of her dance. She often published these speeches as essays and then incorporated many of them into her autobiography, thereby extending her manifesto performance

into print. The difficulty of treating the interdisciplinarity of her performance form tends to foster a divide between studies of her dances and analyses of her published aesthetic theories. Yet Duncan’s choreographic practice and theories of dance are inseparable in her version of the dance manifesto. Duncan’s biography is far better known than her choreography or aesthetics, due in part to her assertions that her solos were the dance of her “soul,” but also to

her undeniably dramatic life.'° Films, plays, biographies, and even criticism describe in sensationalized detail her departure from the United States on a livestock ship in 1899 to begin her career abroad,"' the deaths of her two children in April 1913 when their car plunged into the Seine," the loss of her citizenship and deportation due to accusations of communism,'’ and her own highly publicized strangulation in 1927, when her scarf caught in the wheel of a car. The accidents of the biography even shape interpretations of her belief system so that the deaths of

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Duncan and her children in automobiles are read as lessons on the deadly invasion of the motor—ain spite of her references to motors in souls.'* Penny Farfan describes the popular and critical “co-optation of Duncan into a tragic historiographic nar-

rative” that transforms her life into art and negates her dance.’ Farfan quotes Harriet Monroe’s statement in Poetry Magazine (31, no. 4 [1928]): “The death of Isadora Duncan—so swift, so beautiful, a mere twist of the dancer’s scarf” (WMP 109). Even the feminist critic Susan Gubar claimed Duncan’s “costumes and affairs and death express her creed as well as her autobiography does” (WMP 109). Farfan

points out that her death, unlike her costumes and autobiography, was accidental and “intentionally expressive of nothing” but does not discuss Duncan’s choreography as she examines the gendered functions of historiography (WMP 109). Dance critics have not positioned Duncan in the context of international modernism partially because of the metaphysical rhetoric in her published discussions of spirit and selfhood.'® Ann Daly’s detailed account of Duncan’s dance practice claims that she “never completed the leap” from Victorianism to modernism,

assuming that her “romantic ideas about morality and spirituality” could not accommodate “the secular interests of modern art” (Done 209-220). Duncan’s blend of metaphysical, materialist, and antimodern thought is actually a dominant feature of modernism that was promoted by popular Delsartism but evident from Soviet silent film theory to discussions of verse recitation at the Poetry Bookshop. Duncan grounded ideas of the soul in moving bodies and twentieth-century technologies, dissolving without resolving assumed antagonisms between spiritualism and modernist materialism. She manipulated the dominant discourses of her time to elevate dance as a privileged means of cultivating and expressing what she called “inner self,’ “soul,” or “spirit.”'” These include Walt Whitman’s model of a multitudinous self; the evolutionary scientist Ernst Haeckel’s “monistic religion”; Friedrich Nietzsche, the “dancing philosopher”; and Jane Ellen Harrison’s ideas about dance in ancient ritual.'* Duncan’s innovative use of these discourses was her ability to transmute them into choreography, to make them the basis of a dance technique. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to Duncan’s three central movement innovations, all of which she associated with the motor in the soul: The motor’s

ability to move several objects simultaneously offers an image of a “multiplied body,” an interest that was shared by F. T. Marinetti (who was also cheering, “Hurrah for motors”) and influenced Futurist dance.'? The power of motorized propulsion to channel forces and move a foreign object offered the ideal of dance movements that appear to be executed effortlessly in a self-abandonment that Duncan associated with classical ritual.”® Finally, the motor’s endless repetition inspired Duncan’s desire to simulate spontaneity in her dances. Her deliberate

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choreography of spontaneity might be emblematic of the tensions in antimodern performances more generally: a soloist attempts to assert agency and freedom but through a preformulated mythic construct that inevitably confines. Duncan hoped to dance a manifesto, but it was often the weight of myth that transformed her into a model for the “new woman” of modernism.

I. The Shock of Solo Expression Imagine then a dancer who, after long study, prayer and inspiration, has attained such a degree of understanding that his body is simply the luminous manifestation of his soul; whose body

dances in accordance with a music heard inwardly, in an expression of something out of another, a profounder world. This is the truly creative dancer, natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of himself and out of something greater than all selves. —Duncan, “The Philosopher’s Stone of Dancing” (1920)?!

Dance history tends to describe the first generation of modern dancers not as creative artists but as idiosyncratic individuals, partially due to the form’s origins

in solo performance. Mark Franko summarizes the received history: After the “expressivist individuals typified by Isadora Duncan,’ later dancers expunged the self to produce a technique of modernist innovation.” This “modern dance master narrative” is derived from prevailing narratives of literary modernism, which often cite such claims as T. S. Eliot’s “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (Eliot Selected 40).”” As discussed in the last chapter, Eliot’s ideas about selfhood and personality were part of his ambivalent response to the Delsarte-inspired craze for expression, a formative movement for modern dance, as well as cultures of recitation. The master narrative that domi-

nates dance studies overlooks this context to suggest that modernism happened later in dance than other aesthetic modes; only after a “progress from expression as spontaneity [Duncan] to expression as semiological system [Martha Graham ]” was dance modernist; postmodern dance further required “the marginalizing of expressive intent [Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham]” (Dancing Modernism ix). I argue that Duncan’s dance aesthetic attempted to create the illusion of spontaneous

self-expression, and she was very successful. Marinetti misunderstood her dances as “free improvisations,’ and even the “master narrative” of dance history ignores the actual existence of her choreography and technique." Duncan’s writing about self-expression, as the epigraph to this section reveals, dissolves the usual dialectic between self and other. She describes dance as both

an expression of the self and a movement “greater than all selves,’ that is, not

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reducible to any division of humanity into distinct selves. Movement renders the self-soul present, but “truly creative” dancing expresses both “selfhood” and a transcendent world accessible through art. Her model of self-soul resembles the JudeoChristian typological individual in that it is both historical and related to other

categories of being and a “profounder world” that she struggles to describe (“something...something greater”). One of Duncan’s strategies for undermining the self-other dichotomy was to present selfhood through mythic types, a strategy

common to Delsartism and modernist mythical methods, as well as biblical typology. This is not to say that Duncan rejects self-expression or autobiographical dance altogether, but she understands the danced self in relationship to other, usually mythic, characters. To deplore “mere self-expression” is to ignore the fact that in Duncan’s period, the public expression of a female self on any stage outside the private sphere was a controversial act.” A body, especially a solo body, communicating from a stage, invokes assumptions about the meanings of bodies and identities. Even the so-called depersonal postmodern dancers explore versions of subjectivity; Yvonne Rainer’s variations on everyday movement practices, building on pedestrian steps already present in Duncan’s choreography, present an illusion of the subject as “normal,” that is, as “not performing.’”* Reframing Duncan’s practice as solo- rather than self-expression better accounts for her ideas of subjectivity, range of themes, and sources of inspiration, including personal experience, movements in nature, works of art, political struggles, and myth. The effect of Duncan’s apparently spontaneous solo expression, with simple choreography derived from running, skipping, and other common movements, was shocking for audiences accustomed to very different styles of dance and performance. When she first took the stage in the 1890s, Loie Fuller (1862-1928) had initiated an enthusiasm for skirt dancing with her innovative lighting techniques, stunning stage effects, and an elaborate costume apparatus that allowed her to manipulate yards of fabric enfolding her body.’’ The ballerinas of the period, such as Anna Pavlova (1881-1931), had appeared in solos as a part of longer narrative ballets but not as a full-length dance concert.** Pavlova and Duncan, touring simultaneously, were often compared in the media; a male partner accompanied Pavlova, and she performed dances from romantic ballets using the virtuosic technique established in the first decades of the nineteenth century.”” Salomé dances, initiated by Maud Allan in 1908, were standard solo acts in variety shows and vaudeville venues, but the seductive pieces were interspersed among diverse genres of entertainment and did not constitute an entire evening of dance on the stage of “high art.” Duncan defined her dance against each of these styles: she criticized the chorus girls and Salomé dancers for their erotic displays; she condemned the ballet

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as unnatural with its codified technique and painful physical discipline; she argued

against any skirt or apparatus that concealed, embellished, or controlled the body.

Duncan achieved international fame in Europe after 1900, as is well documented, but previous attempts to explain her powerful effect on audiences have overlooked the prevalence of references to her solo body. Duncan later choreographed ensemble pieces and revised solos for her students, but her initial inter-

vention was as a soloist. Reviewers frequently emphasized the simplicity, spontaneity, and novelty of a dancer who, alone and simply dressed, could compete with technologically enhanced spectacles like skirt dances. The French dramatist Henri Lavedan describes Duncan’s stage decor and costume in her early Paris performances (1900-1902): On an empty stage, faintly lighted, unfurnished, simply and severely draped

at back and sides with a soft, blue fabric, a young woman, vital, beautiful, has been able without the aid of any artifice and without uttering a word, to hold an audience for two hours, in one of the largest theaters of Paris. She was alone, draped rather than dressed.... (“Artists” 45)

The blue curtains became Duncan's signature stage property, with lighting designed to glimmer on this draped cloth and on her diaphanous tunics. Duncan’s conductor for her 1906 tour of Europe, Martin Shaw, also describes her “unaided” solos:

The theatre was crowded and the audience in a state of ecstatic delight throughout. Isadora provided the whole programme. This in itself is remarkable. I doubt whether any other dancer has ever been able to carry through a whole evening’s entertainment unaided. All the time I conducted for her she was the sole performer on the stage.*°

Both Lavedan and Shaw remark on Duncan’s ability to “hold an audience” or “carry an entire evening without another performer or the diverse acts of variety shows.

Duncan’s international fame and controversy were partially due to her solos, and as her reputation abroad grew, some Americans initially attempted to debunk the lauded European taste. A review in the St. Louis Sunday Gazette (December 26, 1902) refers to Duncan’s success in Germany as a “fad.” The reviewer was astonished

that European audiences would pay to see Duncan’s “unaided” and misleadingly modest solo dances: “Meantime, the demure little maiden is quietly raking in the

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shekels, getting higher prices for her unaided performances than are commanded by a Wagner opera” (Sensational 100).°' During Duncan’s 1908 American tour, her first after achieving star status, reviewers continued to suggest that audiences clapped because they thought they must appear to take “real delight” in a performer who had been a success in Europe: “Isadora Duncan’s attempt to monopolize a whole audience—and a $2 audience at that—for an entire evening, has very much the complexion of Paul McAllister’s untoward experiment as a condensed ‘Hamlet’ in vaudeville.”’* The Variety reviewer opines that solo dance belongs on a vaudeville stage, where female soloists were the rage. Hamlet is to be presented for “$2” at New York’s Criterion Theater, and the two should never be confused.

For the artists and intellectuals at Duncan’s 1908 concerts, her solos embodied

a particularly American version of individualism and innovation.’ The poet William Carlos Williams attended one of the August 1908 performances at the Criterion Theater deplored in Variety and described Duncan in a letter to his brother, Edgar (Bo): Last night I went to see Isadora Duncan in her classical dances, really Bo it

was the most chaste, most perfect, most absolutely inspiring exhibition I have ever seen. It fairly made my hair stand on end Bo and best of all she is an American....1 could see all our future before us in her dancing and I came away alive as I have rarely been to the exquisite beauty of simple per-

fect truth. Like many Duncan enthusiasts, Williams emphasized the chasteness of the performance, a trend indicating how frequently dance was associated with the erotic. He framed Duncan’s “classical dances” as the “future” of American art. His

surprisingly antimodern vision of the future is even more evident in the sonnet he addressed to Duncan and enclosed in the letter: ... Heat thirsty Sythians [sic] craving wrack, Lithe Bacchanals or flushed, in roseate track, Athenian girls completing vict’ry’s law.

I breathed their olden virgin purity I saw, dear country-maid, how soon shall spring From this our native land great loveliness.

The hard rhymes and occasionally strained iambic pentameter bear little resemblance to Williams's later experiments, but the sonnet demonstrates his interest in the classical imagery common to modernist poetry and modern dance. Of the

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“Greek poems” of his friends, H.D., Pound, and other expatriate poets, Williams claimed, “Hellenism, especially the modern sort, is too staid, too chilly, too little fecundative to impregnate my world.” He insisted on poetry featuring the American language, “western dialect,” and “a local assertion” (Imaginations 175, 138). Yet, refer-

ences to warring Scythians, festive Bacchanals, and other mythic types featured in Duncan's dances suggest that early in his career, Williams saw the possibility of American art through a return to ancient Greece, even a mythical method.”*° Duncan’s use of material from classical myth contributed to Shaemas O’Sheel’s 1910 description of her as a “great priestess” who revealed to her audience its “secret” self: “This solitary figure on the lonely stage suddenly confronts each of us with the secret of a primal desire invincibly inhering in the fibre of each, a secret we had securely hidden beneath our conventional behaviors, and we yearn for a new and liberated order in which we may indeed dance.”’’ For O’Sheel, the solo evoked a desire to dance with the woman who was courageous enough to move against “convention” (“Priestess” 481). O’Sheel recorded an erotic gaze at “that solitary figure, gloriously a woman, voluptuous yet slender and agile and full of youth, barefooted, with draperies fluttering away from strenuous legs and perfect shoulders” (“Priestess” 481). Yet, he diverted attention from Duncan’s body and any physical response it might generate in the audience by describing her “utter

beauty” as “intoxicating to souls” rather than eyes (“Priestess” 481-482). She defeated the vices of “Fashion and Prudery, in the abuse and suppression of the body” and instituted a “renaissance of reverence for the body” (“Priestess” 480). O’Sheel attempted to sacralize dance by subverting her sexuality, framing her as a

“priestess, and using the metaphysical terms common in Duncan’s rhetoric: “soul,” “beauty,” “freedom,” and “life.”

Duncan’s audiences focused on the novelty of her solo performances, “unaided”

dance, singular body, the emptiness or size of the stage, and her perceived loneliness. They called her a priestess, virgin, prostitute, “country-maid,” swindler, or kitten. The image of a playful kitten featured in an account John Butler Yeats sent to John Quinn on November 1, 1908, accompanied by a sketch of himself walking with Duncan. In spite of the sensationalized reviews he had read, Yeats reported that Duncan’s performance was surprisingly “demure”: “I saw her dancing on the

biggest stage in New York—a figure dancing all alone on this immense stage.... Several people said: Is it not like watching a kitten playing for itself? We watched her as if we were each of us hidden in ambush.’* For Yeats, as for O’Sheel,

the soloist seeming to dance for her own pleasure rather than theatrical display had the paradoxical effect of drawing the audience into the performance. The audience in ambush may be a sinister image, but many reviewers demonstrated

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contradictory impulses to attack, celebrate, and join the solo. Duncan was an international star by the second decade of the century, and through solo expression, she established herself as a type for the independent, creative, “new woman” of modernism.

II. The Proto-Motor: Duncan and Delsartean Posing Delsarte, the master of all principles of flexibility and lightness of body, should receive universal

thanks for the bonds he has removed from our constrained members. His teachings, faithfully

given, combined with the usual instruction necessary to learning dance, will give a result exceptionally graceful and charming. —Duncan, “Emotional Expression,’ The Director (1898)°°

While Duncan’s solo body and simple tunic were shocking to audiences at high art theaters in New York, London, Paris, and Moscow, her costume and movements

would have been more familiar in a Delsarte matinee or lecture-demonstration. When she returned to the United States in 1908, her success abroad had bolstered

the Delsarte-inspired enthusiasm for statue posing in “Greek” costumes at semiprivate performances, studio classes, and schools of expression. The publicity for

Duncan’s first American tour, organized by the Broadway producer Charles Frohman, contrasted the mixed forms of Delsartean performance with her solo dance as “a feat of endurance never previously seen outside of Europe....She will be the first example of a single artist devoting a whole evening to dancing, unrelieved by song, skit, or recitation” (Sensational 232). The impresario strategically

positioned her in relation to, but at a remove from, the respectable Delsartean combination of recitation, music, and dramatic scenes rather than the racier hybrid of the variety show. Duncan took the “principles of flexibility and lightness” she attributed to Delsarte out of the drawing room and onto the professional stage, emphasizing Delsartism’s promise that bodily discipline could produce a desired self. Yet, long after she celebrated Delsarte in The Director, Duncan denied her old “master” to claim originality, genius, and individuality. Even in this gesture, she was following a strain of antitraditionalism already present in Delsarte’s protest “against the tyranny of its influence.””° Critics often take her at her word, so the extent of Delsartism’s influence on her choreography and movement techniques, as well as her theories of dance, is not fully recognized."! The evidence for Duncan’s interest in Delsartism dates to the 1890s, when she, with her sister, Elizabeth, began to teach in Oakland, California, to supplement the family income. Duncan reported to the journalist Walter Shaw that her professional

THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL © 153

cards advertised her as “Professor of Delsarte” but claimed that she had not under-

stood her studies of his technique (Portrait 18-20). Her lover, Gordon Craig, reported that she carried a Delsarte manual with her on tours, and her childhood friend Florence Treadwell Boynton remembers watching her practice Delsartean gestures (Sensational 30, Portrait 17).” In a program note of 1905, Duncan writes that at the age of eleven, she began to teach “a new system of body culture and dancing,’ and she describes how her students “danced and mimed small scenes—of mimodramas accompanied by Poems” (Sensational 25). The vocabulary of system and body culture resembles Delsartean rhetoric, and performances of choreographed poetry or “mimodramas” recall the monodrama form and the recitations promoted by the expressive culture movement. Duncan’s early performances for elite patrons in Newport, Rhode Island, were a blend of recitation and dance that resembled Delsarte matinees; reviews of “An Idyl from Theocritus and Other Scenes” performed on September 15, 1898, indicate that Duncan danced to recitations by her sister Elizabeth.* Duncan continued to include poetry recited by her brother Augustin in 1915 when H. T. Parker’s review in the Boston Evening Transcript

(February 4, 1915) objected to the event as “a most disheartening and amateurish mixture of music and recited literature” (Sensational 330). Parker may have associated Duncan’s “mixture” with the “amateur” performances in Delsarte matinees. In addition to shaping Duncan’s performance form, Delsartism inspired her interest in the poses of classical antiquity and her Greek costumes. A 1908 photo-

graph of Duncan, posing as if adjusting the shoulder pins or fibulae of a long Greek chiton, resembles the widely circulated image of Genevieve Stebbins posing

as Farnese Flora (figure 4.1, see figure 2.5). Duncan’s chiton is a heavier drapery than the transparent tunics she wore for dance concerts, suggesting that she may

have practiced Delsartean statue poses distinct from her other performances. Regardless, well into the first decade of the twentieth century, she presented herself

in the image of the Delsarteans. Even later, photographs of her students, the Isadora Duncan Dancers, show bodily compositions similar to Delsartean tableaux (see figures 2.6 and 2.7). Ann Daly dismisses Delsartism as a “popular craze... pushed nearly to the brink of parody,’ although popularity may bolster rather than discount its influence. She claims that Duncan abandoned any interest she had in Delsarte after seeing Ellen Terry and Eleonora Duse perform

and realizing “the distinction between imitating emotion and summoning it” (Done 131). This distinction, contested at least since Diderot’s “Le paradoxe sur le

comedien” (1773), is not upheld by Duncan’s ideas of emotional expression.” Duncanr’s essay about Duse focuses on a single moment when “Duse stood quite still, alone on the stage.’*° She was “transmuted” into a “divine presence,” and this

154 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

“supreme gesture, although completely still, made her “part of the movement of the spheres” (AD 121-122). Her achievement had nothing to do with the character for, according to Duncan, A. W. Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1899) was “two acts of utter vulgarity and banality” (AD 121).*” Duse was neither “imitating” human emotion in a mimetic character study nor “summoning” it—if that means drawing from personal experiences. Duse was posing, and Duncan claims, “when I can come on the stage and stand as still as Eleonora Duse did tonight, and, at the same time, create that tremendous force of dynamic movement, then I shall be the greatest dancer in the world” (ADL 121).

Duncanr’s theories built on Delsarte’s laws of correspondence between body and soul. As detailed in chapter 2, Delsarte associated his nine attitudes of each body part with spiritual expression in a theory of correspondence that can be traced through Emanuel Swedenborg, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Duncan’s account of her “discovery” of dance: I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement. For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus....I was seeking, and finally discovered, the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversions of movements are born. (ML 58)" Duncan gives “spirit” and “soul” a physiological location in an interior “crater” of the individual, which she calls the “solar plexus” or “the temporal home of the soul” (ML 244). Both Duncan and Delsarte revise notions of an immanent spirit by insisting on the soul’s materiality and suggesting that an “expression” of the soul requires bodily motion. Duncan defines dance as motion attuned to the soul, a physical response to a “central spring” that provides a visible sign of inner spirituality. For both, the person is a fusion of body and spirit, but the relation between

Duncan’s moving body and soul is a direct causation rather than a Delsartean correspondence. She suggests the soul actually comes into existence through dance; the moving body is the material in which spirit coheres in the world. The solar plexus, as the soul’s organ and the motor propelling dance, was also

a crucial aspect of the dance technique and choreography Duncan created. If movement begins from the area above the abdomen and between the breasts, the entire body will necessarily travel through space (or fall), and this locomotion was

crucial to Duncan's definition of dance. She contrasted her movements to the ballet dancer who gestures from the spinal axis: “The ballet school taught the

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156 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

pupils that this spring [of motor power] was found in the centre of the back at the base of the spine. From this axis says the ballet master, arms, legs, and trunk must

move freely, giving the result of an articulated puppet. This method produces artificial mechanical movement not worthy of the soul” (ML 58). Certainly, ballet often involves explosive locomotor movements, but Duncan is correct that ballet trains dancers to avoid moving the solar plexus area when lifting the leg (grand battement) or arms (port-de-bras). To correctly perform a reaching gesture with the arm in Duncan technique, a prior “inner” motion or desire to move is indicated by the dancer’s facial expression as she looks in the direction of the reach. Then, the solar plexus initiates a vector by shifting the torso in that direction, the upper arm continues the motion as if the force were traveling progressively from shoulder to hand, and the fingertips finish the gesture by pointing to the shape it would make in the air. Duncan’s gesture adapts two Delsartean movement principles as taught by Stebbins: The “law of sequence” requires that the “expression of face” precedes the gesture, and the “law of evolution” defines the way a reaching motion passes from the shoulder to the elbow and then to the wrist and thumb (Delsarte Expression 260-263). Stebbins had also anticipated Duncan’s solar plexus in her own description of movement from what she calls a “bodily centre” located in the torso or “the soft place below the breastbone” (Delsarte Expression 317). Stebbins applied Delsartean laws to the transitions between statue poses, while

similar principles were adapted by Richard Hovey for a Delsartean theory of poetics in “The Technic of Poetry” (1892), and expressive culture had connected them to nearly every aspect of social life.

Duncan obviously shifted Delsartean bodily techniques toward the full movement of dance, as might be expected, but she also incorporated attitudes directly into her choreography. Her dances are punctuated with poses referencing classical statuary and famous paintings invoking mythic narratives and associated emotions. She used the same process of meaning making through recognition of a bodily shape that operated in Emma Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes and Stebbins’s artistic statue poses. This is Duncan’s version of a modernist mythical method or danced typology. Duncan, like Lyon Hamilton, Delsarte, Stebbins, and later H.D., studied ancient vases and bas-reliefs to inspire her poses. Beginning her research in the British Museum after arriving in London in 1899, Duncan wrote detailed observations of the statues, searching for “the feelings that their gestures symbolized” and then attempting to “express them to whatever music seemed to me to be in harmony with the rhythms of the feet and Dionysiac set of the head” (ML 44).” The “Dionysian” became a distinctive step in her choreography; the movement begins with a lift of one leg and both arms and a contraction of the upper torso.

THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL 157

The dancer steps forward with a downward thrust of the arms as the second leg lifts behind the body (attitude derriére) and the back arches. Duncan claims of the movement: This figure is the best example I could give of an emotion taking entire pos-

session of the body. The head is turned backward—but the movement of the head is not calculated; it is the result of the overwhelming feeling of Dionysiac ecstasy which is portrayed in the entire body.” Duncan associates the Dionysian step with ritual ecstasy, just as Delsarte’s gestures were correlated to specific emotions. Duncan’s early piece, Tanagra Figures, is based on a British Museum collection

that included several of the famous fourth- to third-century B.c.k. terra cotta figures unearthed at Tanagra, Greece, in 1873 and 1874. The popular collection appealed to Duncan, in part because the statuettes predominantly represented

women dancing or participating in funerary rites.’ Perhaps the most widely known piece from the Duncan repertory today, the choreography is a series of statue poses, performed on each foot, with fluid transitions.” As the dancer shifts her weight between poses, she maintains a parallel line in her hips and torso, fully open to the audience as opposed to the crossed position called croisé in ballet terminology. Duncan derives this placement from the flat two-dimensional quality

of figures in ancient frescoes, and the position also emphasizes the S-curve in Greek sculptures of the body.” Among other poses, the dancer holds a lunge and glances behind as if she is being pursued, she lifts a foot to adjust a sandal strap, both hands move to her shoulder as if she is pinning her tunic, and she bends to the ground to take a handful of dirt. Used to teach correct body placement and spatial orientation, including the open angle of the hips and chest that were features of Duncan’s technique, Tanagra Figures also demonstrates the foundational influence of statue posing on her choreography. Duncan continued her study of classical statuary after 1900 at the Louvre in Paris, where she met the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He befriended and sketched

Duncan, recognizing a similarity in their aesthetic pursuits. Describing his attempts to represent the moving, living body in his sculptures, he claimed: “the nostrils breathe, the heart beats, the lungs inhale, the being thinks and feels, has pains and joys, ambitions, passions, and emotions. These I must express.””* Rodin’s desire to convey living movement and emotion in static form contributed to his interest in contemporaneous dance, and he claimed that Duncan “achieved in sculpture feeling without effort.”*> Duncan studied at the Rodin Pavillon with the painter Charles Hallé, and she incorporated gestures from Rodin’s Gates of

158 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Hell into her Furies (Gluck, Orfeo, 1911). Unlike the sequenced posing of Tanagra

Figures, Furies quickly strikes postures from the Gates of Hell and invents movement for figures in the sculpture. Belying caricatures of her dance as monolithically lighthearted, Furies explores weightedness, bodily contortions, floorwork, and fallsk—movement innovations that dance history often attributes to Duncan’s successor, Martha Graham.”

Teaching Furies as an “abstract representation” of Hades, the renowned second-generation Duncan dancer Julia Levien insisted that the dancer must perform variously as the tortured, the imprisoned, and the avengers of sins.°’ Changes in the bodily efforts demanded by the dance suggest these roles and representations, but they are reinforced by choreographic allusions to such figures from Rodin’s Gates as the “Paola and Francesca” detail on the lower left inner panel. Other allusions help convey the shift from movement sequences portraying the twisted limbs and knotted bodies of the damned to those representing the avenger.

In the sphinx position, the dancer lies on her stomach, with torso lifted, legs extended behind, forearms resting on the ground, and clawed hands, while the eyes dart from side to side for a victim. Later, a series of leg extensions with the torso thrust forward transforms the dancer’s legs into spears. The hands twist as the leg extends, invoking the movement of the serpents entwined about the arms of the avenging goddesses. Another position represents the punishment of Atlas bearing the world on his back; the dancer’s torso contracts forward while her arms stretch wide over her shoulders, sculpting a globe. In Furies, the dancer embodies different characters, objects, and emotions, from guilt to vengeance and pain, by evoking poses from art. Passion filled but not self-expressive, these feelings are associated with characters contained in a sculpture of hell. Duncan also imagined movement for the still figures in paintings like Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1477-1478), an immensely popular reproduction and sign of cultural literacy that hung in Duncan’s childhood home (AD 128; figure 4.2). In The Three Graces (Schubert, ca. 1917), Duncan invents a waltz for the three entwined fig-

ures in the foreground of the painting, and the conceit of the piece is that the Graces are sneaking out of the picture.** The opening pose is a tableau vivant of Botticelli’s

painting, as evidenced by a photograph of three of Duncan’s most famous students (figure 4.3). The three dancers begin to waltz forward with small, delicate steps, and sly glances at one another. The energy grows as they join hands and rotate in a circle

with quick leaps, but they abruptly stop and pose again, as if to avoid being caught outside the painting—before tiptoeing away for another waltz. Duncan used both tableaux and statue posing in her choreography as a way of making meaning through bodily poses, taking a technique common in Delsartism

THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL 159

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and other popular performances and recasting it on the legitimate stage of high art. From American Delsarteans like Henrietta Hovey and Genevieve Stebbins, she also learned to use classical aesthetics to elevate her performances, and she developed their invocations of mythic types into her own mythical method of choreography. Attitudes and theatrical posing, including the living pictures and tableaux that had been popular since the nineteenth century, have not been considered important techniques in modern dance. In part, this is because Duncan, like the modernist avant-garde, announced a clean break with the past, refusing to acknowledge the influence of other forms. Just as she denied her Delsarte training, Duncan turned her ballet classes into an anecdote of originality. At the age of ten, she refused to stand on her toes in ballet class because, as she informed the teacher, “it was ugly and against nature.” She (inaccurately) claimed to have left after the third lesson and never returned: “The stiff and commonplace gymnastics which he called dancing only disturbed my dream. I dreamed of a different dance” (ML 22).”

160 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

|

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Tilden Foundations.

III. The Joints of Early Modernism: Conjunctures of Materialism and Metaphysics Dear Master... —TIsadora Duncan, letter to Ernst Haeckel (1904)”

Instead of ballet teachers, Duncan cited a number of eminent male intellectuals as

her “only dance masters,” most prominently Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) (ML 62). Rereading these pivotal figures through the lens of Duncan’s dance demonstrates their common interest in the moving body, an interest that shaped modernism’s many engagements with their work. The joints of Duncan’s practice, the joining of body

THE MOTOR IN THESOUL 161

and spirit, the material and spiritual, evident in her phrase “a motor in my soul,” also characterizes the work of Haeckel, Whitman, and Nietzsche and invites their

reintroduction to modernism. Her references to these masters in curtain-call speeches and essays adopt a variety of elitist, national, scientific, religious, philosophical, and popular discourses to legitimize dance.°' She also developed movement principles and choreography from the theories of Haeckel, Whitman, and Nietzsche, and often, her danced interpretations complicate her elitist commentary. This section examines Duncan’s written engagement with her “dance masters”; the next discusses how she choreographed their ideas into dances. Duncan’s conjuncture of materialist and metaphysical thought influenced her personal and intellectual relationship with Ernst Haeckel, a German evolutionary theorist and popular intellectual. Although he is now best known for his advocacy of the discredited theory that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ Haeckel’s related ideas of the position of an individual spirit in relation to universal scientific and evolutionary forces appealed to Duncan.” Likewise, Haeckel used the physical culture movement and the interest Duncan generated in movement and dance to justify his application of evolutionary theories to notions of spirit and soul. His goal was to replace religion with science by shattering the “false structures of super-

stitious dogma” and erecting “a new abode for human emotion.”® Haeckel’s “religion of monism” rejected a Cartesian dualistic perspective that divides the universe into two substances, the visible, material world and the immaterial world of God,

the soul, and the mind. Instead, monism “recognizes one sole substance in the universe’ composing God and nature, spirit and body (Riddle 20). Monism faults both a materialism that denies spirit and a “theoretical spiritualism” that considers the world to be only a “specially arranged group of ‘energies’” (20). Monism combines

materialist and spiritualist thought in the manner of the motor in the soul and provided Duncan with evolutionary language to sacralize the body.

Haeckel popularized his evolution-inspired religion in The Riddle of the Universe (1900), a book Duncan read in translation and always kept beside her bed, along with works by Whitman and Nietzsche (Sensational 123). She met Haeckel in Bayreuth in August 1904, and claims, “I was greatly impressed by his lucid and clear expression of the different phenomena of the Universe. I wrote him a letter expressing my gratitude” (ML 112). Heinrich Schmidt, director of the Ernst Haeckel Archives, reports that this initial letter addressed to “Dear Master” arrived with “thousands” of notes for Haeckel’s seventieth birthday on February 16, 1904. He answered Duncan “in a very hearty manner,’ and she responded on April 7: “How much I would like to dance for you!” (IDDCNY). They could not meet in Berlin as he had been banished by the Kaiser for “free speaking,’ so she invited him

162 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

to Bayreuth, where she was dancing in Wagner’s Tannhduser (ML 112). He arrived

on August 2, 1904, and she held a party and performed in his honor: “Haeckel commented on my dance, likening it to all the universal truths of nature, and said that it was an expression of monism, in that it came from one source and had one direction of evolution” (ML 112-113).

Haeckel’s interest in Duncan’s dance as an illustration of monism is appropriate to the centrality of movement in his theory. Of eight corollaries to his “law of substance,” six deal with the “uninterrupted movement and transformation” of matter (Riddle 242). For Haeckel, the human capacity to move is “the direct connection of cerebral functions with other physiological functions,” the link between mind and body (Riddle127). The prevailing “cerebral functions” or sensations are “like and dislike,’ and they correspond to “desire and aversion” or “ ‘attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ ” in the “category of movement”: “ ‘Attractior and ‘repulsion’ seem to be the sources of will, that momentous element of the soul which determines

the character of the individual” (Riddle 127). In Haeckel’s writing, human motion

provides evidence of an individual’s will and soul, and it is this emphasis that distinguished his monism from more traditional versions of evolution theory. The general understanding of evolution at the turn of the century was that the individual of the species perpetuates itself by passing inheritable traits to offspring.” Haeckel’s monism describes each individual’s continued participation in the universe’s constant movement and exchanges of matter and energy, which he associates with dance: “In this ‘perpetual motion’ the infinite substance of the universe, the sum total of its matter and energy, remains eternally unchanged, and we have an eternal repetition in infinite time of the periodic dance of the worlds” (Riddle 373). While dance is a metaphor here, Haeckel consistently emphasizes how bodily motion reveals the willing participation of the individual in cOsmic processes. In the final chapters of The Riddle of the Universe, Haeckel deplores Christianity’s

contempt for the body, posits a new trinity of the “three goddesses of the monist—

truth, beauty, and virtue,” and discusses the “school of the future,” which, among other reforms, will teach comparative religion as mythology and include more physical exercise, particularly dance (Riddle 353-364). Duncan adopted Haeckel’s language to describe her own frustrations with organized religion and ideas for the education of her “dancer of the future.” She connected individualism and self-

hood to religion and spirituality but deplored dogmatic and churched versions of the self. From Haeckel, Duncan learned how popularized theories of evolution could be used to join her ideas about science and spirituality, body and soul, in the evolutionary individual. In “The Dance of the Future,” the essay in which Duncan

THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL 163

refers to her “most revered teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel,”

she defines dance using Haeckel’s terms: “The dance should simply be, then, the natural gravitation of this will of the individual, which in the end is no more nor less than a human translation of the gravitation of the universe” (AD 54-55). In a scientifically inflected idea of correspondence, Duncan claims that each dance motion is an instance of the universal force of propulsion, gravity. Duncan’s definitions of the dancing, evolutionary individual are ambiguous, partially because she was as uninterested in a systematic philosophy as in prior systems of dance, such as ballet or gymnastics. From Whitman, Duncan gathered additional antisystem language to explain art and individuality, quoting from Leaves of Grass: “Very well then...I contradict myself...I contain multitudes.’®’ She invoked Whitman as justification for a new dance of America and used his poetics to frame her art as formless, spontaneous, and natural. Referring to herself

as the “spiritual daughter” of Whitman, she answered the poet’s call for an American artist who “incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes” (Leaves 7). Duncan’s 1927 essay, “I See America Dancing,” inspired by Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,’ uses the poet as evidence of her Americanness,

a strategy she adopted frequently in curtain-call speeches after she established her Moscow school in 1921 and was accused of communist sympathies.® The essay is a nostalgic glance at her native country with the desire of establishing the origins of dance in America’s landscape. Her vision inspired by the “mighty song that Walt heard” transforms the geography of the country into the body of a mythic dancer: “IT see America dancing, beautiful, strong, with one foot poised on the highest point of the Rockies, her two hands stretched out from the Atlantic to the Pacific” (AD 49). Duncan imagines a geographical influence on American bodies, using the expanse of the continent to explain the “tall finely made woman,” the “real American type,’ whose “legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free” for ballet (AD 49). Duncan’s ideal of “natural dance” may have been inspired by Whitman’s discussions of the “free growth” of poetic form. In a 1903 speech, Duncan claims, “How beautiful these movements are that we see in animals, plants, waves and winds. All things in nature have forms of motion corresponding to their innermost being” (Speaks 33). Duncan’s insistence that dance corresponds to both the physical and inner “being, which she describes as a “unity of form and movement,” resembles Whitman’s interest in the relation between poetic form and content:”

The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on

164 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. (Leaves 11)

Whitman imagines a poem growing organically from the earth and describes perfect form as a scent, a natural and intangible “perfume.” Whitman avoided poetic “ornaments, just as Duncan refused “servile coquetry” (Leaves 11, AD 49). Duncan’s dance was frequently associated with Whitman by both enthusiasts and detractors.

In an essay printed in Duncan’s Dionysian program, Robert Henri associates Whitman with her “deep philosophy of freedom, and of dignity, and of simplicity, and of order” (Dionysian). Lincoln Kirstein, an important figure in twentieth-century American dance, deplored both Duncan and Whitman for replacing “technique” with “narcissistic self-exposure” and the “fetters of self.””’ “Free form dance” and, he implies, free

verse can be “psychotherapy,” “physical hygiene,” “recreation,” and “lifeenhancement” but, according to Kirstein, not “serious craft.” He suggests that self-expression is a crutch for those incapable of classical (ballet) technique or tra-

ditional form. Duncan and Whitman were so successful in their goal of producing the illusion of natural, unmediated expression that they convinced audiences their work was, in Kirstein’s formulation, “the exposure of a private personage’s unique sensibility’ (IDDCNY). Their definitions of the natural do not preclude poetic technique or choreographic “design”; Duncan claims, ““Natural’ dancing should mean only that the dance never goes against nature, not that anything is left to chance.’” Kirstein rejected self-expression and personality as prescribed in the master narratives of modernism, but he also coupled aesthetic “technique” with traditional forms, such as the sonnet and the ballet pas de deux. Critics tend to

oversimplify links between modernist antitraditionalism, representations of a fragmented selfhood, and rejections of self-expression as an aspect of bourgeois individualism. Duncan and Whitman reveal that the desire to represent a whole embodied individual also led them to abandon traditional, codified forms. Michael

Levenson claims we read the modernists as opposing individualism because the movement revised its trajectory, but “modernism was individualist before it was anti-individualist, anti-traditional before it was traditional.’’> While Duncan and

Whitman’s emphasis on selfhood resembled romantic individualism, as many commentators have suggested, they did not ignore the body or consider it the weighted container that spirit must transcend. Duncan and Whitman emphasized the material, embodied components of spirit in a complex influenced by motors and labor, a combination that was of interest to many later modernists.

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Of the late-nineteenth-century dance masters, Friedrich Nietzsche was most

frequently referenced by Duncan to support her ideas of the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of the human body, and the value of dance for physical and spiritual fulfillment (Nietzsche’s Dancers 108). “Nietzsche was the first dancing phi-

losopher,’ Duncan claimed, and her interest indicates that the moving body and dance more particularly are crucial and overlooked components of his philosophy.’* Duncan began to study Nietzsche in Munich in 1903 with the German writer, Karl Federn, and thereafter, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

(1883-1885) joined the books she kept at her bedside (ML 104).” Duncan chose as

the frontispiece to her autobiography a quotation from Zarathustra’s “Yes and Amen Song,’ which read, in her translation: “If my virtue be a dancer’s virtue, and if I have often sprung with both feet into golden-emerald rapture, and if it be my Alpha and Omega that every thing heavy shall become light, every body a dancer and every spirit a bird; verily, that is my Alpha and Omega” (Nietzsche’s Dancers 108). Duncan opened the story of her life with a quote that combines virtue, rapture, body, and spirit in a self-conscious tautology. Quotes from Nietzsche appear throughout her autobiography: “Zarathustra the dancer.... Let that day be called lost on which I have not danced.’ Duncan interpreted Zarathustra as a philosophical statement “filled with phrases about man in his dancing being” (ML 215-216). Although critics usually read Nietzsche’s ubiquitous dance imagery as metaphorical or rhetorical, Duncan’s interest prompts another interpretation, one that recognizes dance as a crucial practice in his vision of human transformation (Nietzsche’s Dancers 1x).

Nietzsche and Duncan, like Delsarteans, argued that Christian morality is damaging in its insistence on the corruption of the body and corporal mortification. The act of dancing encourages a very different relationship to bodily being. Duncan claimed that Nietzsche did not believe in a god that cannot dance “the exaltation of life in movement” because dancing is “self-creating”; the dancer uses

the body, the material manifestation of the self, to create new ways of moving, feeling, and being (AD 123, 77). To those “despisers of the body,” Zarathustra says, “Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.’” In opposition to the “herdsmen” who follow traditional values, Nietzsche identifies the “creating one,”

“overman, or “the pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying soul” (Zarathustra XVII.39; LIV.2.132). Christianity’s universal values or laws of the herd are displaced, and the dancer/overman adheres only to “my good and evil” (Zarathustra LV.2.135).’” Zarathustra’s complaints about the herdsmen gave further credence to Duncan’s emphasis on solo expression and

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complicated her desire to found a school that could train the modern Dionysian chorus.” The disindividuation of the choric dancer might seem to contradict Duncan’s commitment to individualism. The tension is evident when Duncan describes how “a Dionysian emotion possesses” her students and then cautions, “But even when they are dancing together, each one, while forming part of a whole, under group inspiration, will preserve a creative individuality.”” Reviews of her students in performance suggest that her attempts to teach them to dance as Nietzschean individuals were successful. The New York Tribune reviewer for a

Carnegie Hall performance describes the “personal idiosyncrasies” of each Duncan dancer, particularly Anna’s “controlled harmony,’ Theresa’s “rhythms,” and Lisa’s “ecstatic leaps.”*° Another review claims that while they dance “like Isadora Duncan in gesture and motion...each one was distinctly and beautifully individual, each one expressed a love of music and motion absolutely personal.”®! Duncan’s individualistic teachings, encouraged by her masters, contributed to her critique of ballet’s uniformity of costume, expression, style, and technique. Only dance that preserves a “creative individuality,” even in group performance,

will teach the dancer new relations to her body. Duncan closes her essay on Nietzsche with an invocation in his own style: “Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new woman...the highest intelligence in the freest body” (AD 62). The phrase “dancer of the future” echoes Nietzsche’s “philosophers of the future,’ whom he describes as “free, very free spirits” (Beyond 40, 44). Duncan’s late-nineteenth-century sources for theories of the dancing self all share a belief in a fusion of body and soul. Haeckel argued that the soul and the body are the same substance, the single substance of the “religion of monism.” Whitman suggested that by discovering the soul’s truth, the body will become poetry: “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency...in every motion and joint of your body” (Leaves 11). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra claims, “Body am I entirely, soul is the name for something in the body” (IV.19). While they hailed from biology, literature, and philosophy and sometimes engaged the mind-body problem and its correlative question of the self with different language, their persistent engagement with these issues and popularity among both contemporaries and subsequent modernists reveals a latenineteenth-century pattern of thought that bears little resemblance to what is sometimes described as Victorian spiritualism. Duncan’s use of their rhetoric is often misread as a glorification and mystification of dance. Instead, she exhibits a serious intellectual engagement with the ideas of her time, and as she dances at the

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conjuncture of discourses, periods, and cultural practices, she reveals continuities as well as conflicts. Locating Duncan’s practice in the context of debates in science, art, and philosophy demonstrates how she used these ideas to develop her central movement principles, each of which she positions at the juncture of soulful expression and motorized motion: the motor’s ability to govern multiple levers moving at different speeds simultaneously, the motor as an external force of propulsion, and the motor’s capacity for tireless repetition.

IV. The Multiplied Body of the Motor I have never once danced a solo.

—Duncan, “The Dance of the Greeks” (1928)

Duncanr’s claim not to have performed solos contradicts the choreography passed down through four generations yet resonates with contemporary Duncan danc-

ers.% Drawn to Whitman’s line “I contain multitudes” (Leaves 64), Duncan described a standard of “multiple oneness” while dancing as, for example, the maids of Tauris in Iphigenia (ML 100):

I so ardently hoped to create an orchestra of dancers that, in my imagination, they already existed, and in the golden lights of the stage I saw the white supple forms of my companions: sinewy arms, tossing heads, vibrant bodies, swift limbs environed me....I felt their willing hands in mine; the pull and swing of their little bodies. (ML 103)

Duncan’s statement records a mystical vision on the stage, but she actually developed choreographic techniques and practices to achieve “multiple oneness”; she

represented different characters, emotions, and energies simultaneously in a motion analogous to a motor’s ability to power several moving objects. Duncan surprisingly anticipated Marinetti’s claim in “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” (1917): “One must go beyond muscular possibilities and aim in the dance for the

ideal multiplied body of the motor....One must imitate the movement of machines...steering wheels, ordinary wheels, pistons” (Marinetti 138). Duncan would never have endorsed Marinetti’s demands for the imitation of machines, and he claims to have “admired” her “free dance” but not her “nostalgia”—which, like many other critics of antimodern thought, he called “childishly feminine” (Marinetti 137).** Still, her techniques to invoke bodily multiplicity, as if harnessed

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by a motor, indicate the shared influence of automotive technology; as I describe at the end of this section, Futurist dancers Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953) and Giannina Censi (1913-1995) inherited these techniques. Duncan’s dance of the maids of Tauris suggests that one of her strategies for choreographing a soloist who contains a chorus was the presentation of different characters within a single piece. In Furies, the soloist represents both avenging goddesses and groups of the damned by shifting between thrusting and slashing efforts and restrained or reactive movements. She also attained “multiple oneness” by filling her stage with nymphs, ghosts, babies, blessed spirits, and other presentabsent figures. The solo Mother (Scriabin’s Piano Etude op. 2, no. 1, 1924) is a duet with a dead, lost, or absent child, the equivalent of the poetic apostrophe. As performed by Lori Belilove, the dance develops a movement vocabulary from mothering gestures, including cradling and breast-feeding.* The dance travels a diagonal line ending downstage left, and as the dancer progresses along this path, her movements indicate that the child is aging. Initially, the soloist performs rocking gestures, then she bends low and motions with her arms as if ushering a young child before her. The passage of time is revealed by the posture of the dancer, so that her gradual rise to full height indicates the growth of the child. As the diagonal floor pattern approaches the end of the stage, the mother figure kneels and clutches herself in a pose of loneliness, suggesting that her child has grown and left her. She struggles to her feet in the last moments of the piece to wave a vigorous farewell as if she wants a backward glance to show her in a position of strength. The soloist in Mother invokes a child only through gesture, and the absence of a second dancer performing the child’s role reinforces the theme that mothering is an experience of loss. The final wave of the arm is directed both at an imagined child and the real-time audience. Seeing a person waving farewell produces the impulse to wave back, and through such choreographic techniques, Duncan situates the audience in relation to the dance and invites kinesthetic participation. The technique corresponds to Nietzsche’s idea in Human All Too Human of the “imitation of gesture” or the “instinctual kinetic response” of a person who sees the movement of another, a visceral response that is “older than language” (Nietzsche’s Dancers 35). Duncan’s choreographic strategy for invoking a kinesthetic response in her audience helps to explain Shaemas O’Sheel’s comment that Duncan’s “solitary figure” makes audiences “yearn” to dance (“Priestess” 481). Audience members are beckoned to the stage to join the Mother who has, through her movements, cast them as children or other present-absent figures. The idea that an audience may be offered a kinesthetic, bodily experience was discussed outside the field of dance by those, like Vernon Lee, working in psychological aesthetics,

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Curry and other theorists of expression, and Nietzsche, as well as many modernist writers and performers. In addition to waving invisible presences onto her stage, Duncan’s choreography divides the body into a collection of organs similar to Whitman’s long catalogues of body parts in section nine of “I Sing the Body Electric.” Naming organs “parts and poems of the body” and “the soul,” Whitman invokes a body in which every organ, from “thumb” to “finger-nail,” is “sacred” (Leaves 256-258). Whitman’s idea of embodiment resembles Delsarte’s jointed, soulful body, and Duncan’s technique recalls Delsarte’s analysis of the body into zones representing specific emotions. Delsartean performances tended to represent emotions sequentially, as in a series of statue poses, whereas Duncan divided the body in her dance so that zones express different emotions or energies simultaneously, usually following

separate strains in the accompanying music. Third-generation Duncan dancer Julia Levien described this difficult element of Duncan technique as “the many voices of the body.’** Duncan’s early Schubert waltz Water Study (1900) uses dif-

ferent bodily zones to represents the crashing of waves, the spiral motion of an eddy, and the drawing current. An opposition between the legs and arms is established, as the feet follow a standard three-beat waltz rhythm that recalls the repetitive breaking of waves against the beach; the pliant arms and torso express the contrasting lyrical melody, as if tracking the flow of a single wave.*’ The dancer

also variously represents the character of a person playing in the water and a seagull skimming its surface. To show the dancer being pulled off-balance as if she has been struck by a wave, the ribs and torso shift away from the hips and shoulders in another bodily opposition. The feet follow the shift to catch the fall, the dynamic of fall and recovery adds more undulations to those of the torso, and the dance explores many possible movements produced by or related to water. The isolation of one body part or the opposition between zones of the body, as in Water Study’s shifted torso, is deployed for political positions in Duncanr’s later choreography. Reviewer Carl Van Vechten focuses on the isolated movements of parts of Duncan’s body in his description of a 1916 performance of Marseillaise (Rouget de Lisle, 1914), a piece danced to the French National Anthem and intended to garner sympathy for the French during World War I. Van Vechten applauds Duncan’s ability to invoke “the hideous din of a hundred raucous voices” and enumerates the interactions of various body parts as if they produced the sounds of a crowd: “At times, legs, arms, a leg or an arm, the throat, or the exposed breast assume an importance above that of the rest of the mass, suggesting the unfinished sculpture of Michael Angelo [sic]” (“New” 31). Not a Michelangelo, but Francois Rude’s sculpture of Victory as Marianne, the French goddess of war, on the Arc de

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Triomphe inspired Duncan’s statue poses (see figures I.1 and I.2). Van Vechten rec-

ognizes, “...finally we see the superb calm, the majestic flowing strength of the Victory of Samothrace” (“New” 31).

Duncan probably became interested in Victory and Marianne as figures of female strength while living in Paris, but she may have been exposed to the image

through her Delsartean training. Elsie M. Wilbor’s Delsarte Recitation Book includes a photograph of a sculpture for a statue pose titled “France Protecting Her Alsatian Soldier,’ in which the Marianne figure guards a wounded man (328). Rather than citing Delsarte, Duncan, as Van Vechten points out, “called her art the renaissance of the Greek ideal”; but he identified “something modern” in this “new art” of “abstract emotion” and “moving sculpture” (“New” 28-32). He buries her “exposed breast” in his catalogue of body parts, but Duncan’s famous, controversial

final pose, right arm thrust forward and breast bared, was a tableau vivant of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). An American audience would

have been reminded of the Statue of Liberty and historical alliances between France and the United States. As the ending pose of her solo, the partially realized living picture of Liberty invites the audience to fill in the other figures from the painting, the mass of soldiers following Marianne. The “new” use of Delsartean tableau literally recruited. Van Vechten wrote to Gertrude Stein after a 1917 New York concert that Duncan concluded with one of her manifesto speeches for the Allied cause: “T tell you she drives ’em mad; the recruiting stations are full of her converts” (Sensational 365). Duncan used the Delsartean practice of alluding to other works of art in statue poses to fill her stage with present-absent figures and choreograph political messages. The performance techniques Duncan developed in pieces such as Marseillaise and her militant curtain call demonstrate the intersection of antimodern mythic

posing with the Futurist exaltation of war.** Marinetti claimed to have found Duncan’s performances provocative, but he preferred her predecessor and onetime stagemate, Loie Fuller, because her dances produced machinelike motions, and her innovative lighting techniques and mechanical manipulation of yards of cloth skirting extended, multiplied, and even prostheticized the body (Machines 58). Although Duncan emphasized the possibilities of the body containing rather than imitating the power of the machine (the motor in the soul), she influenced Valentine de Saint-Point’s Futurist “métachorie” (performed 1913-1917). A narrator recited Saint-Point’s poems while she performed abstract, geometrical dances often framed as a rejection of Duncan’s “childishly feminine” movements. Yet, Duncan’s celebration of the female warrior in The Amazons (1906) and battle manifesto in Marseillaise (1914) satisfy Saint-Point’s claims in Manifesto of the Futurist

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Woman (1912): “Women are Erinyes, Amazons, Semiramis...warriors who fight more ferociously than men, lovers who incite, destroyers who contribute towards natural selection by breaking those who are fragile.”*’ Saint-Point combined

mythic poses with evolution theory and feminist politics, and she adopted Marinetti’s own rhetoric of violence to oppose his “contempt for women.” Marinetti probably drafted his “Manifesto of Futurist Dance” after her 1917 performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in an attempt to exert control over the new dance (“Cyborg” n. 14). Giannina Censi’s performances of aerial dances in the 1930s were advertised as

the realization of the Futurist dance and expression of the motor’s “multiplied body’ in the movement of machines, particularly airplanes (“Cyborg” 397). Photographs of Censi on a poster for Teatro Garibaldi (1932-1933) demonstrate the influence of Duncan’s technique, particularly in the pliant chest and back, upward lift of the torso, parallel positions, and leg extensions with bent knees. In images from her Aerofuturist Dance (1931), Censi kneels on the floor with solar plexus lifted and arms in an open line parallel to the audience, as in Duncan’s two-dimensional fresco-derived body. The pose recalls Duncan’s floor work and Dionysian position in which “the head is turned backward” to denote “ritual ecstasy.’’! Censi used these motions to interpret the myth of the machine rather than the diverse mythic and natural scenes and human dramas of Duncan, but Censi’s comments on her dances add the language of soulful expression to the Futurist “multiplied body of the motor”: “everything that the plane did had to be expressed in my body. It flew and, moreover, it gave the impressions of these wings

that trembled, of the apparatus that trembled.... And the face had to express what the pilot felt” (“Cyborg” 400). The multiplied body of the Futurist dancer did not simply imitate machines or the motor’s autonomous moving parts; Censi represented the pilot in the machine and the plane’s movements as it encountered other forces. As Anja Klock states, such performances “blur the boundaries between woman and machine, materiality and spirituality, mind and body, signifier and signified” (“Cyborg” 408). This blurring is similar to Duncanr’s shifting roles between the tormenter, the damned, and the hellish scenes in Furies or her successive

representation of the waves, currents, seabirds, and humans playing in Water Study. Censi applied the techniques of Duncan’s multiplied body more directly to the modernist machine but retained her predecessor’s interest in the soul. Censi’s dances, and Futurist performance more generally, exhibited an antagonistic orientation to audiences (Censi was sometimes assailed with fruit), but in this, too, Futurist aesthetics follow Duncan. Her controversial curtain-call speeches

were a crucial and overlooked component of her form. These manifestos educated

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or insulted her audience as they explained and defended her choreography, theories of education, and political positions. Declaring her curtain-call statements

central to her performance during her final American visit of October 1922, Duncan stated, “My manager tells me that if I make more speeches the tour is dead. Very well, the tour is dead!” (Speaks 138). In spite of the protests of Sol Hurok,

the impresario for the troubled tour, Duncan continued to give speeches that mixed metaphysical (soul) and materialist (motor) concepts and have therefore been dismissed as incoherent or hysterical. Yet, the brief polemical statements can be better understood in the context of the modernist manifesto, a genre employed by contending avant-garde groups. Attempting to transform political argumentation into a performative form, manifestos were published in a layout designed to shout in print and, after 1910, increasingly delivered publicly by Marinetti and others.” Surprisingly, the verse-recitation movement encouraged some manifesto

performances; Harold Monro, after sponsoring a Marinetti reading at a larger venue than the Poetry Bookshop, described “Futurist Poetry” in Poetry and Drama (September 1913) as being written “for immediate and wide circulation and declamation in large assemblies....It is verse rather for the ear than for any close and

studious scrutiny by the eye” (“Pure Voice” 37). Duncan’s practice of giving curtain-call speeches predates Marinetti’s London manifesto performances but not the Delsartean genres that influenced the verse-recitation movement, and she became more confrontational as the manifesto fever took hold. While Duncan’s 1903 address to the Berlin Press Club signals a rupture with traditional forms of dance, her speech at the Century Opera House following a performance in April 1915 more aggressively insults the “rich people of America” as “criminally unintelligent” (Speaks 39-40).

The performed manifesto was a crucial component of early modernism’s jostling for social, literary, and danced positions. The modernist factions, including Futurism and antimodern-classicism, actually shared a hostility for “tradition,” although they defined their enemy differently. Duncan railed against traditional forms of dance, most notably ballet, viewing Greek and mythic dancing as a break from tradition. Marinetti asks, “Why poison ourselves? Why rot?” by touring the

museums where Duncan gathered many of her mythic poses.” Duncan’s and Marinetti’s manifestos both establish a relation of provocation to the audience, a stance at odds with images of Duncan as “childishly feminine” or nostalgic. In one speech she railed, “Thank God the Boston critics don’t like me. If they did I should feel I was hopeless” (Speaks 53). Futurist manifestos are better known for their celebration of technological achievements, like the motor, yet they, like Duncan, draw

on metaphysical expressions such as the “rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs”

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(Marinetti 134). The Aerial Futurists of the 1920s claim, “We intend to use the plane...to express the ‘spirit of the epoch. These pictures therefore break the circle of reality to indicate the mystery of a new spirituality” (“Cyborg” 403). The fusion

of technology and spirit in Duncan’s phrase, the motor in the soul, is evident even among the technophilic Futurists.

V. Motorized Propulsion and Modernist Ritual Emotion works like a motor. It must be warmed up to run well... [the dancer] opens the way to his soul and his “genius,” and he lets himself be swayed by them as the trees abandon themselves to the winds.... We do not know how to get down to the depths, to lose ourselves in an

inner self... —Duncan, “Depth” (1928)”4

The second quality of motorized movement evident in Duncan’s aesthetic is the illusion that the work of an exterior force propels the body into dance the way a motor propels a vehicle. In the epigraph, Duncan connects motorized force with the winds that move trees and the “emotion” or “soul” that sways a dancer. This propulsion, loss of inhibition, and abandonment to an emotion were all experiences Duncan associated with ancient Greek ritual and the possibility of a transformation of both dancer and audience. Her ideas of ecstatic performance and ritual possession are primarily associated with Nietzsche’s famous description of a “magic transformation” achieved through the dance of the dithyrambic chorus in Birth of Tragedy.” Her study of Nietzsche beginning in 1903 encouraged these interests; she adopted his classification of Dionysian and Apollonian spirits of art and hoped to fulfill his demand: “we need a new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play...the whole pantomime of dancing” (Tragedy 2). Before claiming Nietzsche as her dance master, however, she collaborated with Jane Ellen Harrison in a hybrid performance at the New Gallery in 1900. Their joint recital occurred early in the careers of both, just after Duncan arrived in London and while Harrison was writing Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). A review in the London Times (March 17, 1900) claims that Duncan

danced as Harrison read passages of Greek poetry: “Miss Duncan’s exceptional

beauty of face and figure fits her for her...task of illustrating in dance... passages...chosen from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Idylls of Theocritus; these were read... by Miss Jane Harrison.”” Attended by artists including Henry James and William Holman Hunt, the event included poetry interpreted by gesture and classical themes, similar to Delsartean demonstrations. Harrison provided

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theories for Duncan’s aesthetic practice, while Duncan’s “strenuous, exciting, self-expressive dances” served as evidence for Harrison’s claim of the “real recurrent need” of ritual (Ritual 207).

Duncan was most drawn to Harrison’s emphasis on goddess worship, a departure from Nietzsche’s focus on the all-male Greek tragedy. Duncan was also inspired by Harrison’s claim that there is no distinction between participant and spectator in ritual, and she developed choreographic strategies to encourage audience participation in her dance. One strategy is evident in the farewell wave of Duncan’s Mother, a gesture designed to invoke a response. She also hoped to revise the topography of the theater by removing the spectator space that, according to Harrison, was added when belief in the ritual faded. Duncan claims: I have always deplored the fact that I was forced to dance in a theatre where

people paid for their seats....I had always hoped that the day would come when we could have such a temple where the public, participating in different ways with me in my dance, would arrive at a much fuller enjoyment than they ever will experience by simply sitting as spectators. (AD 123)

Duncan viewed the convention of clapping as a step toward this ideal participation but hoped for “a more complete dance expression on the part of the audience” in which they might “arise and, by different gestures of dance, participate in my invocation” (AD 123). In a more confrontational mode, Duncan’s manifesto-like speeches also minimized the distance between dancer and spectator as she broke the fourth wall of the stage and turned on the audience. Another strategy was thematic; she used mythological and religious themes in her choreography to connect her performances to sacred stories that would be familiar for audience members yet require their thoughtful engagement to fill in elements of the narrative not represented in the solo. Such pieces include her Orpheus sequence (ca. 1911), Euripides’ drama of Iphigenia (ca. 1914-1915), The Amazons (1906), and Christian pieces such as Ave Maria (1914), her depiction of the Passion of Christ (Bach 1916),

and her dance to Berlioz’s Enfance du Christ (1920).

Ultimately, Duncan hoped to combine dance with song and dramatic speech in a “fusion of three arts,’ as she stated in an interview with a Russian writer-critic in 1913:

I came to the conclusion that the dance itself, the pure dance for dance’s sake, can no longer offer a full artistic satisfaction either to the connoisseur or to the artist... the dance separated from poetry is not worth much. In the

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time of the Ancient Greeks, dances did not exist separately, but at the beginning were tightly fused with music and poetry.’””

Duncan’s desire to break down the boundaries between the arts and re-create the ritual experience using the Delsartean/Unitrinian “three great rhythmic arts””® led

to a 1911 project to build a theater designed by the architect Louis Sue near the Champs-Elysées in Paris.”” The London Daily Mail reported, “Miss Duncan intends

to stage Greek tragedies in a vivid and artistic manner. The pupils of her school will

form the chorus for the pieces, and the venture will be supported by well-known poets, musicians, actors, and actresses. No effort will be spared to make the theatre a real temple of art” (Sensational 283). In addition to inviting artists to participate, Duncan wrote a letter dated September 4, 1911, asking Gilbert Murray, Jane Harrisons close collaborator among the Cambridge Ritualists, to help her gather a sroup of experts to re-create an authentic Greek ritual drama.'” The project was abandoned after the deaths of Duncan’s children, but Murray, like Harrison, used Duncan’s dance as evidence for modern ritual performance in his correspondence. Duncan’s claims to have always “been the Chorus dancing the Pyrrhic Dance, or the Bacchic” relate both to her choreography of “multiple oneness” and her attempts to draw the audience into her performance (AD 96). Among her references to Nietzsche, she claims that the Dionysian movement possesses the audience as well as the performer: “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” (AD 131). The Dionysian spirit

that transforms performers into a chorus might similarly possess the spectators, produce a receptive state, and alter their consciousness and sense of community. Duncan choreographed dances for both Apollo and Dionysus that used movement to represent the principles Nietzsche ascribes to the two forces. Her Scherzo (Schubert C Major Symphony, date unknown) and Bacchanale (Gluck-Mottle Suite, date unknown) both represent Bacchantes worshipping the god with dance and song. Bacchanale begins with a celebratory grape gathering, depicts the growing frenzy through the stamping of the grapes and drinking of the wine, and concludes with a fall to the stage. Duncan also danced the Bacchanale from Wagner's Tannhduser (1904) and was criticized in a 1911 review by H. T. Parker for

her opening “lascivious rout of fauns and satyrs.” By the end of the piece, however,

Parker claims that she achieved “a clear, soft beauty of sensuous rapture, a still ecstasy, that suggested the waning Dionysian trance.'"! Duncan claimed that Dionysian dancing involves “throw[ing] oneself into the spirit of the dance,’ whereas Apollonian dancing encourages the performer to

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“contemplate the spirit of the dance—and dance as one who relates a story” (AD 140). Duncan’s Andante, a rite for Apollo, uses slower, more deliberate movements.'*’ Duncan choreographed the ensemble piece for her students, and the dancers create geometrical floor patterns, primarily circles, appropriate to the Apollonian qualities of symmetry and balance. The dancers enter the stage in processional groups, miming the lifting of laurel branches to the sky, and the prevail-

ing direction of the piece is upward. The rhythms are regular and controlled, unlike the writhing beats and ecstatic movements of the Dionysian pieces. Although Duncan associated narrative with Apollonian dance, she rarely attempted

to choreograph a structured plot or to become a particular character. Another Parker review of a performance on November 28, 1908, claims that she did not “translate into motion and miming the legend of Iphigenia” or “try to individualize herself as Iphigenia’ (Motion 58). Instead, she presented groups of characters

at particular episodes in the story: From the shore the Greek maidens see the approaching fleet; the joy of the sight wells in them and quickens their spirit. Then [sic] natural impulse is to dance. Miss Duncan is seemingly one of them. Her joy speaks in every motion of her body, in the play of her arms, in the carriage of her head, in the responsive flow and swirls of her draperies. (Motion 59)

Parker’s lengthy comparison of Duncan’s art to sculpture in a review from Duncan’s final American tour (October 21, 1922) leads him to a tentative definition of abstract dance. Rather than trying to visualize the music or the story of Wagner’s Tannhduser

(ca. 1904-1925), she danced in counterpart. When the music was “ringing with motion,’ she stood “statically” posing in “sculptural beauty”: “Such beauty as she gained was altogether abstract—sculpture upon herself, quite apart from a music that in itself visualizes...an abstract beauty of its own” (Motion 70). For Parker, abstract dance is “independent” in that it does not attempt to visualize the music or tell a story. With the orchestra playing Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, a piece that

“mourns and exalts the dead Siegfried,’ Duncan’s body “flows from pose to pose” and achieves the effect of “mourning translated into sculptural beauty, of deep grief transmuted into line, plane and mass” (Motion 69-70). In addition to recalling statue posing, Parker suggests that abstract dance expresses emotions in the

manner of sculpture rather than narrative, that is, through bodily positions. In standard histories of modern dance, abstraction is presented as the antithesis of self-expression and associated with the later choreography of Martha Graham.'” Duncan’s work to represent Apollonian dancing, however, seems to have led her to

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an earlier version of abstraction. If Duncan, rather than Graham, is credited with experiments in abstraction, then abstract dance is contemporaneous with innovations in other arts rather than lagging behind.'” Duncan and the aesthetics of abstraction are an uneasy alliance, but the pairing exposes tensions in ideas of abstract dance and the modernist celebration of abstraction more generally. Abstraction in painting is anticonventional in that it emphasizes color and shape rather than resemblance to nature, representation of an accurate human figure, or mimesis, more generally. Duncan insisted that her movements were anticonventional (unlike ballet) but natural in that they were movements often found in nature or that a body makes so naturally it seems to be propelled by an exterior force, like a motor. Abstraction in dance is troubled by the fact that the vehicle of the art form is the human body, and it is difficult for a body not to represent a body on the stage. The abstraction of Censi’s Aerofuturist dance, as we have seen, referenced both the pilot and aircraft but could not avoid representation. Duncan’s dances may be most abstract when they vacillate between human and nonhuman motion, as in Water Study. The dancer both moves through the water and is the water; she appears to be splashing and playing, but her body is a wave and her arms are swirling eddies. For a moment, she leaps out of the water like a fish, a counterpoint that demonstrates how weighted the body is when it returns to the water. Abstract and natural, the willful exertion against weight and

ritualistic abandon—these movement qualities seem irreconcilable but are partially clarified by Duncan’s ideas of the motor in the soul and in the will.

VI. Repetitions of the Motor: Will and Spontaneity When that [motor in my soul] begins to work my legs and arms and my whole body will move independently of my will. —Duncan, My Life, 1927 (ML 123)

After the agentive act of placing the motor in the soul, Duncan suggests that her dance no longer requires her “will.” While this statement corresponds to her idea of abandonment to the forces of ritual or an inner self, it seems to contradict her advocacy of the willful individual. She critiques ballet for “striving against...the natural will of the individual” and celebrates the power of her will to establish “The Dance of the Future” (AD 55-59). Duncan’s concept of the will encourages two very different, even contradictory, qualities in her dance: choreographed spontaneity and a deliberate display of the labor to move. These tensions reveal

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contradictions in the modernist idea of the will, contradictions Nietzsche outlined

in his description of the opposing muscular experiences of the willing subject. Duncan’s choreography of the Nietzschean will inspired later dancers to develop the weighted contractions and falls that became central to modern dance, but she

also had an impact on other spheres of modernist performance, especially Stanislavsky’s method acting.

Nietzsche describes the contradictions of the will using the language of movement, suggesting that in “every act of willing” there is a muscular sensation, even if we do not move, due to “a sort of habit.”'’” This sensation includes the

“feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the state towards which,’ a “commandeering thought,’ and the “affect of the command” (Beyond 18, 19). Bodily movement serves as his prototype for how the process of willing creates a duality, whereby the individual is both “the one who commands and the one who obeys,” the one who demands that her leg lift and the one who submits to the order. The experience simultaneously produces the sensations of the commander’s

power and freedom and the subordinate’s compulsion, force, and resistance. Nietzsche relates this compound will to the soul by defining the body as “a society constructed out of many souls,” a phrase resembling the motor’s multiplied body (Beyond 19). Duncan developed this idea of the will’s two muscular manifestations (power and submission) into movement techniques; in pieces such as Marseillaise and Revolutionary (Scriabin, ca. 1924) she emphasizes the “resistance” of the Nietzschean will battling against injustice. These choreographies represent the confinement of oppression, for she claimed that human beings are like “free animals” who, when placed “under false restrictions,” soon “lose the power of moving

in harmony with nature, and adopt a movement expressive of the restrictions placed upon them” (AD 54-55). The opening of Revolutionary reveals a worker kneeling with bound hands while the chest and neck strain upward.'” The soloist eventually rises to her feet and wrenches her hands free, but they are stiff and clawed from years of confinement. To depict an individual obeying her own command to move against oppression, the choreography emphasizes labor and weight, with the dancer lagging slightly behind the music. A similar choreographic strategy helped Duncan represent the power of the dancer who moves with natural forces. To avoid the appearance of dancing choreographed steps and to create the illusion of spontaneity, Duncan’s technique requires that the execution of movements be a fraction of a beat behind the accompaniment, and the dance appears to be a response to the music rather than a set choreography.'”’ As reactions from Marinetti and Lincoln Kirstein reveal, Duncan

convinced many in her audience that she was dancing “free improvisations”

THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL 179

(Marinetti 137). Even a century later, her strategies for simulating spontaneity are misunderstood; one reviewer claimed in 1997 that Duncan was a “solo artist who

gave little thought to choreography as such,’'®* and other critics emphasize spontaneous emotional self-expression'”’ or music visualization.''® In her variety of political, natural, Dionysian, or Apollonian pieces, she never wanted to signal that she was dancing predetermined steps, as that would interfere with the dramatic immediacy of her performance. In addition to moving slightly behind the music,

Duncan, like most dancers, rehearsed frequently to render the movements so familiar that they need not think about separate motions (dancers call this “muscle memory ). Duncan further stipulates that a thought or intention must motivate every movement, describing her teaching philosophy: “We do not allow the child

to make a single movement unless it knows why it makes it.”'!’ Prior to every gesture, the dancer must convey a desire to make the motion so that she appears to be moving in response to an instantaneous impulse rather than following predetermined choreography. The technique requires the dancer to look in the direction of a gesture or change the focus and expression before executing the movement.

The seemingly spontaneous performance Duncan choreographed is not thoughtless, although it seems not to have been thought prior to the performance, just as Stanislavsky’s method actor does not appear to have previously chosen a response. In fact, Duncan’s illusion of spontaneity, as if being moved by an inner motor, influenced Stanislavsky’s acting theory. Duncan’s description of the motor in the soul in My Life quotes from Stanislavsky’s chapter devoted to Duncan and Gordon Craig in his own autobiography, My Life in Art (1924).'" Stanislavsky remembers the first time he saw Duncan dance in 1905 and the friendship they developed when she returned to Moscow in 1908, and he discusses her influence on his ideas of performance with reference to the motor in the soul: At the time I was in search of that very creative motor, which the actor must

learn to put in his soul before he comes out on stage....1 watched her during her performances and her rehearsals, when her developing emotion would first change the expression of her face, and with shining eyes she would pass to the display of what was born in her soul. (Art 506-507; ML 123)

Stanislavsky hoped to replicate Duncan's effect of motorized movement, the appearance that an exterior force propelled the performer through an emotional experience that resulted in a “display” of the “soul.” Duncan’s impact on Stanislavsky

has not been recognized in dance and theater history.'!’ Just as Joseph Roach’s excellent discussion of the history of acting theory in relation to science and

180 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

conceptions of the human body fails to mention Delsarte, he leaves Duncan out of the lines of influence from Diderot to Craig and Stanislavsky. Nonetheless, Stanislavsky’s theories and Roach’s discussion of his “System” reveal points of connection with Duncan. Stanislavsky sought to “objectify the phenomenon of spontaneity” by defining spontaneity in performance as “an activity repeated so often that it becomes automatic and therefore free.”''* In Stanislavsky’s rubric, “Habit creates second nature, which is a second reality.” The repetitive rehearsal process fosters habits and a second nature that emerges on the stage as an “unconscious’ or “natural” response, enabling the actor to re-create lived experience on the stage as a “second reality.”'» Stanislavsky mentions Duncan’s rehearsal process in his autobiography, and their shared interest in the motor as an image of repetition clarifies that she also seeks to “objectify” spontaneity through habit formation. In an interview with Mason Redfern (ca. 1917), Duncan insisted, “When I am dancing, the movements succeed one another so rapidly, so spontaneously, it would seem—though every effect is carefully worked out beforehand—that I hardly know what I am doing and my state of mind is akin to clairvoyance.’''® Before each performance, Duncan clearly choreographed movement, “carefully” organized the effect she hoped to produce, and rehearsed until she need not think about each individual step, and the dance became habit. The modernist concept of habit, as Lisi Schoenbach has recently demonstrated, is more significant than has been recognized by critics reading modernism through the lens of avant-garde principles of shock. Defining a “pragmatic modernism” founded on the tradition of American pragmatic philosophy, Schoenbach discusses John Dewey’s view of habit as both a force for “machine-

like repetition” and a necessity for any process of social reorganization. For Dewey,

a society without habit is in chaos, and the dominance of habit can produce blind recurrence, but “with conflict of habits and release of impulse there is conscious search.”!'? Duncan and Stanislavsky translate a similar view of habit to the stage and use the repetition of rehearsal to establish a second nature that will alter the usual consciousness of performance and allow a state of “creative unconscious” or “clairvoyance.” The habits developed for performances will probably conflict with more quotidian habits to release Dewey’s “impulse” for “conscious search.” For Duncan, only a disciplined moving body produced a clairvoyant mind and performance experience, and while Stanislavsky was more interested in spoken habits, his “psychophysical” techniques indicate that bodily movement was an important aspect of his training as well. Stanislavsky claimed that both physical and psychological or “inner” habits are used on stage as the actor develops “creative objectives” that “lure” emotions and desires: “All these necessary objectives are so

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habitual that we execute them mechanically, with our muscles. In our inner realm, too, we find an infinite number of necessary, simply psychological objectives” (Theater 255-256). Stanislavsky discussed the relationship between the performing body and mind/“soul” using the language of twentieth-century psychology but also, like Duncan and Delsarte, the theory of “correspondence”: “The bond between body and soul is indivisible. ...In every physical act there is a psychological element and a physical one in every psychological act” (Theater 205). Interpreters of Stanislavsky’s system and American method acting often outline a purely materialistic and mechanistic performance theory, “a bald equation of organism and machine,” but Stanislavsky himself analyzed “spiritual activity” and “inner aspiration” (Theater 217, 253-254). He hoped, like Duncan, to create a “religion of art” with theater as a temple, audience as worshippers, and actors as initiates at a ritual. As Roach claims, “A mystic and idealist, he tolerated his own mechanization of the art he loved only within definite limits, and such sonorities as the ‘inner life of the human spirit’ rolled off his tongue far more naturally than technical terms like cerebral reflex” (Theater 217). The metaphysical language of Stanislavsky, Duncan, even Futurist manifestos, and Nietzsche’s philosophy reinforces the prevalence of invocations of spirit and soul in diverse spheres of modernism. Duncan’s contributions to a modernist performance technique of spontaneity

have been obscured, in part, because her method became a prevailing style in modern dance. But an early-twentieth-century ballet dancer displayed her virtuosity in the well-known Sylph choreography of the famous La Sylphide (1832), and

the pretense of spontaneity would have undermined her contest with previous Sylphs. A contemporaneous vaudeville skirt dancer performed with the wink of self-presentation, not the illusion of motorized propulsion. Just as Stanislavsky’s method asks audiences to accept the feint that the actor is living, not acting in a well-rehearsed production, Duncan’s state of clairvoyance demanded that audiences forget the fact of her choreography. She was frequently successful, and this act of suspending reality is another method for invoking audience participation. Yet, her state of clairvoyance or Dionysian abandon does not mean that her dance must appear thoughtless or effortless. Her body must record the forces of power and constraint in the Nietzschean will but also the affects of gravity, “the natural

gravitation of this will of the individual” (AD 55). Duncan’s performance of weightedness would be avoided in ballet technique, which, as she complained, uses

“unnatural” toe shoes to float and “create the delusion that the law of gravitation does not exist” (AD 56). Whereas the ballet dancer is taught to conceal the effort of her movements with a pleasant face and rigid torso, every lift of the leg, even in Duncan’s small waltz steps, must acknowledge the effort to move. Duncan rarely

182 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

choreographed ballet’s degagés, kicks with a straight knee that tend to accentuate length and suggest lightness; instead, her leg swings require a bent knee, which most prominently presents the thigh, the heaviest part of the leg, to the audience.

VI. The Weight of a Thigh and the “New Woman” of Modernism Not angelic, materialistic-not superhuman but the greatest human love of life. Her great big thighs, her small head, her full solid loins, belly-clean, all clean—holy—part of God. —John Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene (ca. 1911)""®

The weight of Duncan’s “great big thighs,” as she became a powerful and interna-

tionally recognized symbol for women’s liberation, exerted pressure on what Duncan called the “new woman” or the woman of the “future” (AD 62). Until recently, Duncan’s significance for first-wave feminism has not been fully realized, in part because she was suspicious of mass political movements and her classicism

and individualism complicates her inclusion in the dominant histories of feminism. Duncan dissociated herself from the suffragists and criticized them for being

myopically concerned with the vote while ignoring the inequality of social relationships and women’s inability to satisfy spiritual, creative, and professional needs. Disputing what she identified as one of the myths of motherhood, that giving birth is a universally joyful experience, she declares, “Don’t let me hear of any Woman’s Movement or Suffrage Movement until women have put an end to this, I believe, wholly useless agony” (ML 142). Duncan advocated a more radical and expansive transformation of society than she believed the vote would provide. Lucy Delap’s important revisionary history of feminism mentions Duncan in a category she calls the transatlantic “advanced women,” who departed from suffragism and the “woman movement” to emphasize the creative individual, also a feature of antimodern critiques in the period.'”’ Delap’s study of the avant-garde as a “social imaginary within feminism” and a “textual space, delineated by shared discourses” cannot accommodate the ways Duncan performed feminism (Avantgarde 4). Duncan’s “great big,” “clean,” “holy” body, moving freely, danced the “new woman’ into existence.

Duncan, like other antimodern-classicists in this study, incorporated the consecrated mythic types as she constructed the “dancer of the future”; she attempted to recast these figures to emphasize their variety and relevance, a strategy

related to the modernist mythical method. She represented the diversity of “the

THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL 183

mother” in solos such as the playful Lullaby; Mother, a study in separation and loss; and Niobe, a danced version of the Greek myth of the grieving mother. Her focus on this type indicates one intersection of antimodernist discourses that celebrated a “primitive Great Mother” (Antimodernism 278) and first-wave feminist preoccupations with the mother as “the key feminine social role” (Avant-garde 180).

The “endowment of motherhood controversy” dominated feminist debates about the role of government in reproduction in both the United States and Britain during the first three decades of the twentieth century.'”” In one of Duncan’s most famous dances, choreographed after the accidental deaths of her children in 1913, Duncan danced as the Madonna to Schubert’s Ave Maria (1914). Partially inspired by personal tragedy, the piece was drawn into political debates about motherhood; Duncan was invited to perform Ave Maria at the Bolshoi during the Fifth Congress of the Women’s Section of the Communist Party, November 1923. The event was the

first Oktabrina christening, described by New York Times writer Walter Duranty

as a “weird substitute” for Christian baptism: “Every woman in the audience watched...as though it were a living child that lay under Isadora’s outstretched arms” (Sensational 490).'2! Duncan associated her dance with an antimodern mother goddess, but in the context of the period’s feminist debates, her performance

for the Communist Party would have appeared to support ideas of reproduction as service to the state warranting government oversight. In her autobiography and curtain-call speeches, she declared opposition to any state intervention in marriage and motherhood (ML 19, 136). In another example of the ambiguity in antimodern politics, Duncan’s mythic pose took positions she would not otherwise support. Duncan’s Ave Maria invoked religious as well as political messages, and audiences seem to have interpreted a typological layering of the Christian myth with her own experience of losing her children as she reembodied the Madonna type. The spare choreography of the dance, as performed by Hortense Kooluris, includes a repeated pattern of slow processional walks in a circle followed by a high gesture of offering. Florence Boynton, Duncan’s childhood friend, describes this gesture as “the parting [of her children] and lifting them upward, releasing them to the heavenly sphere”; when she saw Ave Maria in California in 1918, Boynton stated, “This

[gesture] was repeated so incessantly that it was...unendurably pathetic” (Sensational 376). The gesture is actually repeated three times in the choreography, but Boynton’s exaggeration suggests its emotional power. Duncan’s use of Christian

themes might seem to contradict her claim: “From my earliest childhood I have always felt a great antipathy for anything connected with churches or church dogma” (ML 197). While she protested against organized religion, believing that dogma interfered with the individual’s cultivation of her unique soul and spiritual

184 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

needs, she believed, like Jane Ellen Harrison, that the power of pagan ritual, espe-

cially of goddess worship, had passed into the younger religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In her autobiography, she wrote that the hymns of Apollo and the other gods and goddesses “had found their way through transformations into the Greek Church” (ML 96). She reads the classical figures of Botticelli’s Primavera in typological relation to Christian characters in a description of how she developed choreography from the painting: Oh, sweet, half seen pagan life, where Aphrodite gleamed through the form of the gracious but more tender Mother of Christ, where Apollo reached towards the first branches with the likeness of St. Sebastian! I felt all this

enter my bosom with a flood of peaceful joy, and I wished intensely to translate all this to my dance, which I named the Dance of the Future. (ML 8s)

Understanding all religions as expressions of a basic human desire for the sacred, she used Christian figures within her version of the mythical method, as T. S. Eliot would later do in dramatic monologues like “The Journey of the Magi.” The claim that Duncan had a “change of faith” after her children died fails to recognize that, for her, pieces such as Niobe, Narcissus, and the Furies or Blessed Spirits of Orpheus were sacred statements like Ave Maria (Sensational 330).'*? As Madonna, Amazon, Bacchante, or Apollonian devotee within a solo concert, Duncan danced possibilities of sacred subjectivity that defied religious definitions, but the mythic narratives intersected with context (the Bolshoi Oktabrina) to complicate her goals and even reinforce traditional understandings of femininity. Duncan’s manifesto-like curtain-call speeches often attempted to control interpretations of the political statements of her choreography by, for example, positioning the dance in relation to her insistence on women’s sexual freedom and right to bear children outside the institution of marriage. In keeping with her individualist and personal approach to the women’s movement, she often began by referring to herself as an example of bodily liberation through dance, sex, and motherhood. One such lecture occurred after the committee of prominent and ostensibly pro-

gressive Berlin women who supported her school in Grtinewald threatened to rescind their patronage due to Duncan’s “illegitimate pregnancy” in 1906. Outraged,

Duncan spoke “on the dance as an art of liberation, and ended with a talk on the right of woman to love and bear children as she pleased” (ML 135).'?? Without char-

acterizing motherhood as a universal feminine ideal, Duncan presented the capacity to give birth as one aspect of women’s creativity and undermined the idea of mater-

nity as a primary duty or an illness, prominent justifications for confining women

THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL 185

to the domestic sphere in her period.'* Many left the lecture, but Duncan claims that she facilitated an interesting debate with those who stayed “on the rights and wrongs of women, which was considerably in advance of the Women’s Movement of the present day” (ML 136). Duncan was as suspicious of feminism and other mass political movements as she was of any dance technique that prescribed a specific way of moving for every individual, regardless of her unique body and spirit. In another curtain-call speech, she declared, “Place your hands as I do on your heart, listen to your soul, and all of you will know how to dance as well as I or my pupils do. There is the true revolution” (Speaks 54). Locating the “revolution” in

the dancing “self,” she suggests that any movement must begin with the individual. For Duncan as for Delsarte, the dance of “self” is a practice of revolutionary politics;

she does not as cogently address how a politics focused on the self will generate the societal changes she desires, although the same critique plagues many feminist theories oriented around coalition.’”

In spite of the contradictions in Duncan’s political positions, she became the undeniable symbol of avant-garde artistic and social liberation for New York’s Young Intellectuals, a group of artists and revolutionaries centered in Greenwich Village. Their interest was partially due to her ambivalent relation to the contem-

poraneous women’s movement as a radical individualist with a suspicion of group activity and partially due to their own antimodern search for authentic experience.'*° They thronged to Duncan’s Dionysian season at New York’s Century

Theater in the spring of 1915, where her performances were framed by a pamphlet that quoted Nietzsche and Whitman and closed with a biblical passage: “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing” (Psalm 30:11). The season included a Delsartean mixture of recitations, solos, Christian themes, and the Greek tragedies Iphigenia and Oedipus Rex. Duncan’s use of religious and mythic types encouraged audiences to associate her with the idea of the female artist as savior, an ideal that appealed to Greenwich Village Radicals such as Floyd Dell. Dell’s Women as World Builders (1913), an early (and forgotten) summary of various trajectories of feminism, argues that American feminism, following Duncan’s lead, was more concerned with liberating the body than agitating for the vote. He states that “it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta [sic] of femi-

nism” and that Duncan “renovated the modern soul and made us see...the goodness of the whole body.”'”’ He follows Duncan in suggesting that modern life

requires a renovation of relationships between soul and body, not a complete rupture from spiritual modes.

Dell, Max Eastman, and John Sloan were members of the collective editorship of the Masses, a radical publication structured as “a worker-owned

186 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

cooperative with all stock held by the artists and writers.”!’* In addition to its revolutionary politics and advocacy of artistic freedom, the Masses was instrumental in developing the image of the “new woman” in drawings and articles that supported mass social transformation (“Masses” 191). Duncan’s thigh and mature, womanly body, dressed in flowing tunics with free breasts, dancing alone onstage, became a prototype for the self-sufficient, free woman, who might emancipate men as well. Eastman claimed just after Duncan’s death that her influence on moral and social life had been underestimated: “All the bare-

legged girls, and the poised and natural girls with strong muscles and strong free steps wherever they go—the girls that redeem America... they all owe more

to Isadora Duncan than to any other person.”'” Dell and Eastman’s descriptions of Duncan reflect her appearance of moving freely to natural forces and attest to the effectiveness of her illusion of spontaneity. Their interpretations of her dance as “natural,” “strong,” and “free” are also evident in the visual art of the Greenwich Village Radicals. The May 1915 edition of the Masses features a

cover design by Sloan, a leading artist of the Ashcan school, illustrating the preparation for a leg extension in Duncan’s Marche Militaire (figure 4.4).'°° The

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222 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

weight, and her arms extend behind her.” The pose links H.D. to Atlas rather than the other figures, Hercules or Athena, but the placement of her body behind and

below the metope makes her bear all three figures. Her breasts and pubis are partially concealed by the shadow of her upper body, a visual effect that, with the juxtaposition to male nude statuary, contributes to the androgyny of the image and suggests that the sexed body is less weighty than the burden of myth and art.” H.D-s poses in the photomontages, like Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes a century earlier, invoke ancient statuary, use solo performance to reembody prior types, and encourage an audience familiar with mythic references to develop analogies bet-

ween classical and contemporary life. Although the newer technology of the camera could have caught H.D. in motion, her positions are static as the statue posers, albeit without the necessity of holding the pose that contributed to their virtuosity. Deflecting concerns about the public presentation of the gendered body, both posed forms locate that body in the chaste, aestheticized category of the

Greek statue and invoke classical values and themes through juxtaposition. In the second POOL film, Foothills (1929), and again in Borderline (1930), H.D. poses with a long white shawl that resembles the veils used by Lyon Hamilton and other statue posers to conceal physical adjustments as they prepared an attitude. The use of cloth in mythic posing reflects the prominent representation of drapery in classical female figures like those unearthed at Tanagra, Greece, in the 1870s and displayed at the British Museum, where they fascinated H.D., Isadora Duncan, and other modernists. In Foothills, H.D. plays a city dweller who falls into neurotic boredom while visiting the country with a man, presumably her lover, played by Macpherson. The shawl symbolizes her desire for elegance and beauty in a provincial atmosphere, as do her bracelets and other prominent jewelry. Her gestures

with these objects, too intentional to be mindless play, reveal her entrapment. Macpherson’s character also manipulates the fabric of the shawl as if he could release her but refuses. H.D. flips through a magazine titled Venice on Foot, and pictures of ancient art and Venetian architecture contrast sharply with her “country” activities, predominantly drinking tea and staring out the window. Borderline, the third POOL film, is usually associated with expressionist film melodramas.” The plot was summarized in a “libretto” written to accompany the seventy-minute feature: set in a European mountain town, the film marks the confrontation between several dyads occupying the “borderlines” of psychology, sexuality, and race. H.D. describes her character, Astrid, as a “sensitive neurotic,” and a “white-cerebral”; her alcoholic lover, Thorne (Gavin Arthur), is having an affair with a “mulatto woman,” Adah (Eslanda Robeson) (BP 112). Astrid informs Adah’s previous lover, Pete (played by the renowned African American actor and singer Paul

RITUALIZED RECEPTION 223

Robeson), who arrives and is quickly reconciled with Adah. The confrontation con-

tinues in a hotel café, where the Café Manageress (Bryher) is coded lesbian by her short hair and cigar. The pianist, Robert Herring, also appears to be gay, as he frequently admires a photograph of Pete. At the climax of the film, Astrid threatens Thorne with a knife, but he wrenches it away and kills her. The local government acquits Thorne and condemns Pete, Adah blames herself and departs alone, and the Manageress must ask Pete to leave. In one of the film’s few subtitles, “Sorry Pete,’ she

says. What makes it worse is they think they’re doing the right thing. We’re like that.” Her shift from they to we is a sign of acceptance reinforced by her return to business. In a final scene of reconciliation at the train station, Thorne and Pete shake hands.”

Criticism of the film has focused primarily on the complicated racial and gendered politics of this plot, but H.D.s The Borderline Pamphlet directs attention

to the acting style and visual composition of the scenes as the source of these politics.”° H.D. describes the film composition as a “dynamic picture writing” that

reconciles the “high powered vibrations of past static art,” such as the pose or photograph, with “the most modern art of portraiture in movement” (BP 116). Macpherson “‘wrote’ his scenario in a series of some 1,000 pictures” with “captions” that detail the pose or tableau actors are to strike (BP 123): “Interior. Astrid’s Room.

Close up. Fade in. A door is flung open... Astrid’s shadowy face is seen.... Her hand rises across her face, and—Close up. Panning....Close up—at a telephone receiver” (BP 123). H.D’s motions as she touches her face or reaches for the telephone are posed in a manner that combines Delsartean and melodramatic gestures with the acting style of the turn-of-the-century poetic and symbolist theater, both of which offered alternatives to the realist, mimetic mode.” Film’s ability to focus on the face or isolate a gesture enables a subtler performance style than the melodramatic pose, held for visibility from the stage. But H.D/s performance avoids the naturalism of the realist theater, which she associated with sound film in that both destroy cinema’s potential as “the art of dream portrayal” (BP 121). Cinematic gestures should not be mimetic of “real” behavior but signify as a “cryptic symbolism” in which the actor’s bodily form is united to transcendent meaning for the audience to interpret (Close Up 126). In keeping with the aesthetics of the symbolist theater and its incorporation of music and the dancing body, Borderline, with the pianist’s music as accompaniment, is almost danced. H.D-s character, Astrid, is particularly associated with melodramatic conventions, behaviors, and costumes to indicate her entrapment in a misogynistic and racist social context. She is subject to the hysterical fits and rages that plague the melodramatic heroine, and her costume and properties further link her to the past. The symbolist and melodramatic styles merge in Astrid’s floral shawl; like the

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224 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

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Fig 5.5 H.D. with shawl and hands clasped to her face, Borderline (1930). Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

shawl in Foothills, it recalls attitude performances and establishes the manipulation of cloth as a central element of H.D.s acting style (figure 5.5). H.D/s descriptions of her own performance focus on the shawl; she connects it to Renaissance Hellenism in her claim, “It is odd to associate Botticelli with the cinema but the association is inevitable in some of the interior scenes for instance of Astrid and her shawl” (BP 116). Yet, she also defines the shawl as a combination of “concise

modernist abstraction” and “Victorian abstraction of stuffed dead sea-gull,” referencing Astrid’s stuffed bird, a property emphasized in interior scenes. The shawl is one of a number of symbolic objects associated with Astrid who: runs across a room to fall, draped in the most obvious of imported London or Paris embroidered shawls, is a woman of the drama, of the screen, yet

like the Hedda of Ibsen or any of the Hildas or Hedwigs, she achieves through the actual fitness of her materialized setting, furniture, blowing window curtain, stuffed gull and overcrowded mantle-piece, something more obviously out of the world.... (BP 125)

H.D. suggests that Astrid’s shawl and stuffed gull work like the guns of Hedda Gabler and Ibsen’s other symbolic props; clearly, H.D. appreciates the symbolic

RITUALIZED RECEPTION 225

settings in Ibsen’s realism as material objects become symbols of “something” beyond (BP 125).”* This transcendent something is inextricable from the “terribly incarnated” quality of the woman, her confinement in the material conditions of her life.

The shawl that gives Astrid the illusion of having wings is as incapable of offering actual flight as the stuffed seagull on her table. In spite of this confinement, Astrid conveys a powerful strength, and her taut pose, contrasted to the ineffectual, fluttering shawl, transforms her body into a hieroglyph among other symbolic objects that speak for the silent film. H.D. suggests that all of the characters are “posed figures...seething with mental turmoil and psychic discord” (BP 124). Pete is a “bronze portrait” with a head “sculptured, gouged out in planes and focus of light and shadow’; Astrid is “gouged out with white lightning fury...from white marble” (BP 116). Borderline stages an uneasy combination of posed performance techniques borrowed from melodramas and attitudes and symbolist performance styles that would offer new status to everyday objects. H.D. plays the nineteenth-century poser, with associated prejudices and neuroses, and an isolation underscored by her solo scenes. When the solo frame is broken by another actor, as it finally is by Thorne, the duet marks her death.

VI. Montage, a Classical Technology Screen montage or mounting is a difficult thing to talk of.... An effect almost that of superimposition but subtly differing from it, is achieved by the meticulous cutting of three and four and five inch lengths of film and pasting these tiny strips together. —H.D. The Borderline Pamphlet, 119 (1930)

H.D. describes the process of montage construction for Edith’s death scene with the detail of someone who has cut and pasted strips of film, underscoring the fact

that she and Bryher did most of the editing and montage of Borderline after Macpherson developed “a bad throat” (“Approaching” 380).” Editing a film of nearly 1,000 different shots would have been demanding work, and the innovative montage in Borderline required some technical expertise (“Approaching” 380). Yet, Gallagher claims that H.D. exhibits a“profound apprehension about the mechanical aspects of cinema,’ and many critics assume a generalized antimodern suspicion of technology (“Distractions” 419).!°? Although H.D. insisted that sound or the “talkies” would destroy the ritual, she celebrated cinematic technologies for representing motion as being rooted in classical ideals and believed the “Elusinians”

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would have exalted in “a subtle device for portraying the miraculous. ... The screen

is the medium par excellence of movements.... Flowers open by magic and magic spreads cloud forms, all in themselves ‘classic’” (Close Up 112). H.D. delighted in her own ability to use the “subtle device” of the projector and took a more active role in the making of the films than has generally been assumed. She particularly celebrated montage as a technique that, by juxtaposing visual images, performed associations and guided audiences into an ideal analogical or typological thought paradigm. Just as restraint prevented satiety, H.D. believed that montage was a classical technology that encouraged participatory reception. H.D.s montage theories have been associated not with Kulshov, but with his student Eisenstein, in part because Close Up translated Eisenstein’s writings. H.D. cites “Eisenstein’s meticulous innovation” in the film October (1928) as inspiration for Borderline, although she uses the earlier term “Russian montage” rather than Eisenstein’s “overtonal” or “intellectual” montage (BP 119). The first Eisenstein piece about montage appeared in the March 1930 issue, and Kenneth Macpherson writes that when they began work on Borderline, Eisenstein had not published his “now commonly accepted, though little understood, theory of over-tonal montage” (Close Up 236). Macpherson claims to have developed similar but independent strategies to take Borderline “into the minds of the people” (Close Up 238). Both Macpherson and H.D. shared Eisenstein’s goal, as described in an essay translated in the May 1929 issue, of invoking “a transformation of generally accepted notions into the consciousness of the audience... the new cinema must include deep reflective processes” (Close Up 333). Neither are likely to have distinguished the theories of Kuleshov and Eisenstein at this point, for Eisenstein did not publish a break from his teacher until the 1929 essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” which was not translated in Close Up. For H.D., the “reflective processes” encouraged by montage included the mythological and typological associations she models in her film criticism as she associates Kuleshov’s Edith with Athena and Joan of Arc. Montage develops this analogical mode of “consciousness” as it asks audiences to make connections between images from discontinuous narrative segments and as it cuts and isolates Edith’s gesture like a “hieroglyph” against a “sky line” (Close Up 126). H.D/s ideas of montage as a device for framing and cutting bodily gestures were worked out in her analysis of Kuleshov’s Delsarte-derived bodily and rhythmic montage featured in By the Law. She then applied these ideas to her own performance of Astrid’s death and discussion of the scene. Montage creates the “effect” of Astrid’s final scene, but her death also explores

the meaning of cutting bodies in a metacinematic reflection on montage that recalls its origins in Kuleshov’s experiments with the divided, Delsartean body:

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The same sort of jagged lightening [sic] effect is given with Astrid and her dagger. The white woman is here, there, everywhere, the dagger is above, beneath, is all but in her heart or in the heart of her meretricious lover. This effect of immediacy is not achieved by a facile movement of a camera; that would be impossible. It is attained by the cutting and fitting of tiny strips of

film.... (BP 119).

The dagger that slices the woman’s body parallels the cutting of the film strip, and the montage of the scene explores the power relations that determine who holds the knife that severs bodies, flowers, and film. The montage of Astrid’s death begins with shots of her shawl and the stuffed seagull, symbols of her entrapment. Astrid takes up a knife near the gull and slashes at Thorne through a vase of flowers. During approximately ninety-four fleeting cuts, the montage leaps from a piece of the body, to the knife, to symbolic objects in the room, to scenes of flirtation between the barmaid and Pete in the hotel bar downstairs.'"' Thorne wrestles the knife from Astrid and stabs her as they fall to the floor. The montage closes with images of the barmaid

cutting a white rose with a knife, placing it between her lips as she dances, and then tucking it behind Pete’s ear. The next cut reveals Thorne washing the bloody knife.

The juxtaposition of these shots connects each successive image through a visual metaphor.'** The flowers and knives appearing in both the battle and bar scenes imply that they are concurrent and causally related. Rather than indicating relations in space, as would a pan shot, montage asks spectators to consider the meaning of the juncture: how might white desire for the black other and the emasculation of Pete with the rose contribute to Astrid’s death? Thorne (whose emblem-

atic name is clarified by the white rose) is linked to the barmaid by their power over the knife and their attraction to Adah and Pete. But Astrid’s racism is also associated with the erotically expressed exoticism of the barmaid, and Astrid’s death parallels Pete’s banishment. Thorne is acquitted, and the barmaid finds her place beside the manageress in another erotic pairing. In his article on Borderline, Macpherson suggests that such connections operate in the “transferential” film with its “hundreds of layers, inferences and associations” (Close Up 238).'°? These

montage-fostered links expose the complex scaffolding of cultural hierarchies. H.D?’s descriptions of montage in Borderline and By the Law suggest generic relationships between film and solo genres in that they share performance techniques and perceptual paradigms. Film makes a series of still pictures move, and if the speed of the film reel were slowed down enough, the montage cuts and the pose in each frame would be visible. In fact, attitudes, statue poses, and tableaux

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imagine halting movement, as a strip of film is stopped, before the technology became possible. These forms of posing join a list of protocinematic genres that includes magic lantern shows, panoramas, and kinetographs, although Emma Lyon Hamilton tends not to appear alongside Eadweard Muybridge or Thomas Edison.'* The close-up, in its focus on a single body, but especially the close-up still shot as it reveals the immobile body or body part, is another cinematic relative

of the attitude. The technical term for magnification through a lens, close-up also designates the position of a viewer in relation to an object or an analysis of minute particulars. Friedberg claims that H.D. viewed Close Up as “a splendid title” for the journal, as it implies “the conflation of technical specificity with philosophical endeavour’ (Close Up 96, 3). This conflation is also evident in H.D’s theories of montage and its effect on the consciousness of film audiences. The close-up was of interest to diverse early film theorists including Jean Epstein, Béla Balazs, and

Walter Benjamin. Epstein called the close-up “the soul of the cinema,” and Benjamin suggests that the technology “reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject,’ especially as it represents the human face in a perspective never possible before (Close Up 1). The emphasis on soul, subject, and face suggests that the close-up is the cinematic version of prosopopoeia, giving face to a character, and therefore a generic descendant of monodramas and dramatic monologues. Borderline features an obsessive use of the close-up on H.D. as Astrid and Paul Robeson as Pete, demonstrating a visual interrogation of subjectivity organized along sexual and racial lines. The bodies of Astrid and Pete constantly threaten to stiffen into a “stuffed sea-gull” and a red clay sculpture of an “earth god,” respectively (BP 111). Close-up representations of the black man—earth god and white woman-stuffed seagull are the primary sites of the problem of the “borderline” subject. The close-up often becomes uncomfortably close, and the camera dissects Pete into the large hand of a black laborer and Astrid into a trembling hand on a white shawl. The “everlasting black-white Problem with a capital” that H.D. mentions and the problems of gender and sexuality that she does not overtly discuss are represented by the reluctance to picture a whole body on the film or two bodies simultaneously. Instead, a sequence of close-ups on parts of the bodies, arranged in montage sequences, demonstrate the fragmentation of the subject defined by

identity categories. Montage cuts the raced-gendered body, just as borderline bodies are, through stabbing or transportation, cut out of the community. The emphasis on individualism, evident in much of H.D?s poetry, is also prominent in her discussions of film technology. In her 1929 response to a questionnaire published in Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, H.D. celebrates film

as a technology of individualism:

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I myself have learned to use the small projector and spend literally hours alone in my apartment making the mountains and village streets and my

own acquaintances reel past me in the light.... I should like more than anything to have some sort of workable little car...and go off and on, on my own more or less.... I should like to work the Debrie camera which I can't. 1 can do a little work on the small camera and some of it will be incor-

porated in the big film that we are busy on.'°° H.D. expresses pride in her ability to use a projector and in her filmmaking skills, and she indicates that she had even more strenuous aspirations to work the larger camera. H.D. wants a car so that she can travel independently, and she emphasizes

her solitary experience of making and watching personal films as she spends “hours alone.” The automobile, becoming affordable for personal use after Ransome Eli Olds’s 1901 invention of the assembly line, and the camera are both technologies that foster experiences of individualism. If the car transported the free-moving individual of the twentieth century, the film camera became a visual

apparatus of individualism; for H.D., the camera was an “elaborate one-man mechanism” (BP 114). Graeme Turner’s classic work, Film as Social Practice, describes the camera as a function of the theory that the individual eye is the “organizing principle of reality” as it encourages viewers to collapse the distinction between the projector and their visual perspective.'*° H.D. describes viewing films

in the privacy of her apartment, but cinema attendance is also an isolated experience, according to Turner, born at a time when social life was marked by isolation (Film 132). Although we enter a theater with other audience members and there may be some discussion before or after, the darkened house simulates anonymity. H.D.’s belief that the film apparatus and cinematic experience are oriented toward an ethic of individualism might seem to contradict her emphasis on the universal appeal of film and its ritual potential. Yet, a tension between individualism and community is central to early film theory, modernist ritualism, and modernist experience more generally. Film technology offers the capacity for mass production and can therefore reach a large community, but Walter Benjamin famously insists that this capacity destroys the “authenticity,” “aura,” and crucially, the “ritual” or “cult value” of the art. Benjamin directs his objections at the enthusiasm of early film theorists such as Abel Gance and directors like Carl Dreyer.'”” H.D-?s own critique of Dreyer’s too realistic Joan of Arc (1928) resembles the claim

that cinema destroys the aura of the human, but H.D. suggests that a new ritual value may be created by the cult of the human body “resurrected” on film. This is possible if the directors and performers eschew the naturalistic tendencies of film,

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including sound, which for H.D. most effectively degrades aura. Using symbolist and expressionist modes, as in Borderline, the performing body becomes not an exemplary individual, but a collection of roles related to transhistorical mythic types. H.D. initially had high hopes for a cinematic ritual that would heal humanity

following the First World War. Without a language barrier, silent film would project transcultural myths and dissuade active viewer-participants from nationalistic violence. H.D. did not share Marinetti’s ninth thesis in the “Founding Manifesto of Futurism” (1909): “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene.’!®*

Instead, she hoped the camera would replace the gun; the director would replace the soldier with a “divine creative instinct” that “enslaves” the machine. In a Futurist

mode, she described her ideal director as a “machine man” and a “young gunner alone with his machine gun,” and the interpenetration but primacy of the human in relation to the cinematic machine was her version of the motor in the soul (“Borderline” 113-114). Marinetti’s manifestos also share with H.D’s film theory an

emphasis on “intuition,” “rhythm,” and “instinct”; in “The Futurist Cinema,” he admires the “rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs” (Marinetti 91, 134). For H.D., the camera would enable the director’s war against the censor, patriotic sniper, and popular filmmaker’s “present-day gutter-offshoot of the stage,” leaving in the wake not a “no-man’s land” but a cinematic “everyman’s land of such plausible perfection” (“Borderline” 113).

Aesthetic “perfection” through the cinema was H.D.s interwar dream. She offers another version of the “motor in the soul” in her “Projector” poems in Close Up (July—October 1927):

Your souls upon the screen live lives that might have been, live lives that ever are; (evoe

to the car of god-king Dionysus) (CP 358)

Spoken by the sun god Apollo, also the god of projected light, the poem instructs “neophytes” of film that their own souls are projected on the screen. The ritual cry, evoe, celebrates “the car of god-king Dionysus,” presenting yet another combination of classicism and “roaring” automobiles with mixed references to ancient Greece, the soul, and modern technology. Cars transport the audience-participants, and

the projector, a new temple of Apollo shaped like the sacred tripod of Delphi,

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engages their souls. As the camera failed to replace the machine gun and the buildup to World War II became undeniable, H.D. did not retain her enthusiasm for film, but she incorporated its perceptual frames into her later poetry.

VII. The Soloists of Trilogy He uses the direct image...in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of sound. —H.D., “Review of John Gould Fletcher’s Goblins and Pagodas” (1916), 183.

Revisiting H.D_s review of Fletcher’s book in light of her film work suggests that even in 1916, she imagined a poetry that could offer sensory experiences resembling film’s projected light. Her immersion in film was short-lived but productive, and her poetry continued to feature the perceptual frameworks or ways of seeing

taught in the cinema. Her theories of cinematic reception clarify the engaged reading experience she hoped to invoke in her later long poems, especially Trilogy.

H.D. suggested that, as sound and spectacle became more prominent with the dominance of the Hollywood industry, film audiences failed to participate in her cinematic ritual by envisioning, with the help of montage juxtapositions, associations between their moment and Christian and classical myth. She transposed a version of this typological and mythical method into Trilogy, written in London during World War II. Trilogy replays many of the mythic figures she analyzed in her film essays and reviews, but presents them in ambiguous relation to modern speakers. This strategy encourages readers to actively engage the text by tracing its allusions to classical, Egyptian, and Christian myth. H.D-s version of the mythical

method was, unlike T. S. Eliot’s ordering device, a hermeneutic practice that encouraged ritualized reader reception. Trilogy’s three poems, “The Walls Do Not Fall” (1944), “Tribute to the Angels” (1945), and “The Flowering of the Rod” (1946), constitute a prologue, middle, and end in deus ex machina that resembles the dramatic structure of Ion.' Each poem depicts dream-visions through montagelike juxtapositions of ritual traditions and modern events, including alchemy and the London blitz. “The Walls” invokes the sacred caduceus of Hermes, Jon’s “introducer,” and provides a cinematic still shot of a religious ritual featuring a resurrection god named Ra, Osiris, Amon, and then identified with Christ (Trilogy 25). The imagery of “Tribute” becomes increasingly inflected through cinematic techniques, as a dream vision of “the Lady” is superimposed on an alchemical ritual, and she serves as a new symbol of resurrection

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associated with an apple tree blossoming in a London courtyard that was bombed

during the war. Finally, “The Flowering” presents four dramatic scenes: an encounter between the magus Kaspar and Mary Magdalene, the anointing of Christ’s feet by Mary, Kaspar’s ecstatic vision of typologically associated goddesses,

and the Christian Nativity. Mary Magdalene, Kaspar, and the Virgin Mary are repositioned in a series of myths about the birth, death, and resurrection of a god. Many of these figures speak monologues that alternate ambiguously with the voice

of a central dreamer or ritual participant, thereby eroding distinctions between characters and types. H.D. anticipates the frustration of her readers when they first encounter Trilogy’s obscure allusions, writing that although the “search for historical parallels... has been done to death before,” each mind has a “personal approach / to the eternal realities” and must retrace the patterns (Trilogy 51-52). Placing readers on the well-traveled path as “voyagers, discoverers,” Trilogy calls attention to the act of

reading as part of the journey (Trilogy 59). To understand the text, readers must do the intellectual work of connecting the many types in the poem, just as H.D_s ideal

film viewer is engaged in a thought paradigm relating cinematic types and montage images. With far-ranging references to myth comparable with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) but without his explanatory notes, Trilogy demands that readers labor to decipher the allusions; H.D. refuses the authority of the footnote and enables an individualized interpretation as she asks readers to set her work aside and consult their own reference sources.'!° “The Walls” is initially focused on the value of the solitary act of reading in establishing personal relationships with the divine. The poem then opens to include a suspicious auditor who questions the worth of personal religious experience in a dialogue structure that reinforces a tension between the individual and social groupings evident throughout the poem: “T speak of myself individually / but I was surrounded by companions” and “nameless initiates” (Trilogy 20-25).

“The Walls” is “an endeavour to make ready,’ that is, a prologue and guide for how to abandon “sterile logic, trivial reason” in preparation for a more engaged reading (Trilogy 54, 40). The speaker models an analogic paradigm that links resurrection gods with contemporary residents of London who have emerged from the bombed ruins into the promise of a “lily-bud” (Trilogy 7). The ritual or “mystery” of “The Walls” takes place in a “bare meeting-house” that resembles the Moravian services H.D. attended as a child in Pennsylvania. With invocations of Ra, Osiris, and Amon and references to flowers and blossoming trees, the service is transformed into an Egyptian resurrection myth and spring ritual.''! H.D. clarifies parallels in a chantlike pattern of word association that she calls “prayer, spell, /

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litany, incantation” and that operates through the phonological similarity of names: “here am I, Amen-ra / Amen, Aries, the Ram” (Trilogy 30). In addition to

detailing these relations more than she will in later sections, the speaker also teaches readers how to “see” figures through perceptual frameworks that resemble those offered by a moving film camera. A series of cinematic manipulations of the

visual image of the gods reveals their resonance in the contemporary world. Following a close-up on the eyes as “all pupil, dark / yet very clear with amber / shining...,’ the ellipsis suggests a pullback of the gaze, as if organized by a camera, to reveal a stop animation. The pupils then become, following another ellipsis, “,..coals for the world’s burning” and the “eyes / of Velasquez’ crucified [Christ]” (Trilogy 25-28). The vision “explains symbols of the past / in today’s imagery,” so

the eyes are both ancient and more modern gods, coals that fuel the military-industrial complex, “the heart burnt out / dead ember” left by the war’s bombs, and the bud of spring (Trilogy 4). This bud grows into Moses’ “rod of power,’ Hermes’s “Caduceus,” Thoth’s “stylus,” and Jesus’ cross, all typologically related to the sword of war in an imagistic montage. Just as the old walls are intact, these symbols of patriarchal power and violence remain but are defamiliarized by their surprising similarities. The incantatory name association first chanted in “The Walls” is also part of an alchemical process described in “Tribute,” with the poem serving as both a recipe for and the enactment of the ritual. First, the participant must invoke Hermes Trismegistus, “patron of alchemists,’ and “give thanks” to Uriel and other JudeoChristian angels. Then, “polish the crucible / and in the bowI distill / a word most bitter, marah” (Trilogy 63-71). The goal of alchemy was to transform metals into silver and gold, but this transformation is performed through the act of speaking: “marah, mar, mer, mere, mére, mater, Maia, Mary... Mother” (Trilogy 71). The progression begins with the base word, marah, Hebrew for “bitter”; passes the Spanish word for “sea,” mar; French terms for bodies of water and mother; the Greek goddess

Maia; the Christian Mary; and ends with Mother. As in alchemy, the ordinary becomes something of value when the words are spoken by a “we” who “admit the

transubstantiation” (Trilogy 60). The mystery of Communion, in which bread becomes body, is H.D.s model for this word ritual. Using auditory and visual simi-

larity to form a linear progression, the poem asks readers to hear and see the rela-

tion and encourages an oral engagement and kinesthetic reading. Readers are invited to look up the unfamiliar words and determine an associative logic: bitterness, the sea of tears, is the realm of the goddess and any mother or figure of love. The word alchemy is not guaranteed to produce gold, and all readers may not participate in the chant or “admit the transubstantiation.” The speaker reveals that

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a version of wordplay has desecrated another goddess, transforming “Venus” to “venery and “venereous,’ but she counters with her desired alchemical formula: “Venus” —“venerate”—“venerator” (Trilogy 74-75). She is interrupted by the entrance of a “patron,” not a “companion” or fellow participant, but another suspicious auditor who demands a name for the jewel in her alchemical crucible. The speaker’s refusal to “name it” rejects the power of the patron or suggests that the word ritual has not worked (Trilogy 77). But a second figure, “the Lady,” has been called forth by the rite, and the dream-vision describes her as she has appeared from antiquity through modernity (goddess, virgin, or mother of gods) using cinematic visual properties. The luminosity of the Lady becomes brighter and brighter until her image dissolves into the green glow of a bedside clock. The sound of the Lady knocking is actually the ticking of the clock, and her appearance is explained as the cinematic projection of light from the clock’s “phosphorescent face” onto the blank screen of the dreamer’s mind. This explanation does not dim the significance of the vision; the Lady was “there more than ever” after the dreamer wakes. By appearing in the clock’s light, she established the exact hour of her presence and “miraculously / related herself to time here” (Trilogy 90-91). She had graced an hour that would return to the clock face each night as a reassurance that “Every hour, every moment / has its specific attendant Spirit” (Trilogy 88). The clock, merely a “curious mechanical perfection,” relates daily life to “that other” spiritual or eternal life in the model of a typological anagoge (Trilogy 88-89). The speaker begins to describe the Lady using a word association much like the alchemy she interrupted: “Our Lady of the Goldfinch... Our Lady of the Pomegranate .... (Trilogy 93). These names give way to a montage of visual depictions: “or her face

set in profile / with blue hood and stars” (Trilogy 93). The portraits are replaced with small, restrained gestures, just as H.D?s acting theory prescribed, and the Lady strikes a series of poses that, due to their mythic significance, were also in the repertoires of

statue posers from Lyon Hamilton to Delsarteans.

We see her hand in her lap, smoothing the apple-green or the apple-russet silk; we see her hand unknot a Syrian veil or lay down a Venetian shawl (Trilogy 95)

The veil recalls the white shawl that accentuates H.D.’s poses in Foothills, Astrid’s

embroidered shawl in Borderline, and the folds of fabric represented in classical

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and Christian iconography. The Lady’s changing poses demonstrate that no single representation can contain her, just as the single body shifting to pose as various mythological or religious figures in attitudes suggests both the contiguity of these figures and the potential for different representations. Trilogy’s speaker disagrees with the interpretations of another suspicious “you” who attempts to construe the

vision based on traditional depictions of the Virgin in relation to male companions: I grant you her face was innocent and immaculate and her veils like the Lamb’s Bride,

but the Lamb was not with her, either as Bridegroom or Child; (Trilogy 104)

The Lady of “Tribute” is adamantly solo.

The final and most cinematic poem, “The Flowering of the Rod,’ opens with a brief prologue enumerating images of Dionysian ecstasy: “I am full of new wine” (Trilogy 124). “The Flowering” then provides a new Gospel relating how Mary Magdalene obtained an “alabaster jar” of incense for anointing the feet of Jesus.'”” In H.D?s version, the Magdalene is one of a number of “unbalanced, neurotic” women who serve as witnesses to resurrection. Mary boldly introduces herself to Kaspar, one of the three magi, and even more brazenly allows her veil to slip as she ignores his rebuke and refuses to leave. Kaspar considers it “hardly decent of her to stand there, / unveiled, in the house of a stranger” (Trilogy 134). Yet, he replays Mary’s gestures with the cloth again and again in the model of a cinematic flashback: “never / for a moment did he quite forget / the turn of a wrist as it fastened a scarf” (Trilogy 163). Mary’s gestures with the veil function like the curtain falling between four dramatic tableaux. The first scene presents Mary, “unveiled,” speaking directly to Kaspar for the entirety of part 16 in a dramatic monologue, complete with aggressively silent auditor. She introduces herself in typological relation to the several New Testament Marys: “O, there are Marys a-plenty / (though I am Mara, bitter) I shall be Marymyrrh” (Trilogy 135). She invokes versions of the Greek and Sumerian goddess associated with Myrrha, mother of Adonis (related to Attis and Tammuz).''’ Ovid’s Metamorphosis (book X) relates the story of Myrrha’s love for her father, Cinyras, and how with the help of a servant, Myrrha deceives him into believing she is a shy woman of the town. Cinyras discovers the trick and tries to kill her, but the gods

take pity and transform her into a myrrh tree, always weeping fragrant tears.

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Adonis is later born of the tree. Invoking this tale, H.D. draws Greek figures into her Gospel and connects the valuable myrrh to classical myth and the theme of a daughter’s passion for a father.

Following Mary’s monologue, Kaspar repeats his judgment that “it was unseemly that awoman / appear disordered” or that she “appear at all” (Trilogy 137).

When her scarf falls to the ground, however, he sees an image projected on the blank screen of her hair, like “moon-light on a lost river” (Trilogy 136). This vision

flashes forward to another scene, a mime or dance in which Mary lets down “the long, carefully-braided tresses” to anoint and wipe the feet of Christ (Trilogy 141). Kaspar, knowing the “scene was unavoidable,” takes up another alchemical chant, an accompaniment to Mary’s performance: “Isis, Astarte, Cyprus...De-meter, earth-mother ...” (Trilogy 145). After this glimpse into the immediate future, the poem flashes back to the original encounter between Mary and Kaspar, and then forward into a third tableau, a trinity of goddesses: “one head uncrowned and then one with a plain head-band / and then one with a circlet of gems of an inimitable colour” (Trilogy 150). As he bends to retrieve Mary’s scarf, Kaspar sees a “fleck of light” in the “third jewel” of the circlet. She also reaches for the scarf, “his hand just did-not touch her hand,’ and in this combined gesture the “fleck” or “seed” opened like a blossoming flower to reveal “the whole scope and plan” of civilization (Trilogy 152-154). The slipping of the veil, an impropriety, provides Kaspar’s revelation of redemption and Mary’s role in a sacred “plan.” Their gestures with the veil, described in close-up, set the camera panning over “the islands of the Blest,” “Hesperides,” “Atlantis,” the great cities, and “paradise before Eve” (Trilogy 153-155).

With the vision, he hears a chanted soundtrack: Lilith born before Eve

and one born before Lilith, and Eve; we three are forgiven, we are three of the seven daemons cast out of her. (Trilogy 157)

The first women, Lilith and Eve, and a more ancient goddess are three types for Mary, and each is redeemed, as is the speaker who joins the “we” of the chant to merge with the other types. The cinematic flashbacks and cuts, telescoping into what H.D. calls a “point in time,” are explained by another chant: “this has happened before somewhere else /or this will happen again—where? when?” (Trilogy 167). The fourth and final dramatic

scene, a Christmas tableau, is a repeated rite and both “a coronation and a funeral”

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(Trilogy 130). The three magi, mirroring the three goddesses and daemons, each step from the picture to perform their gestures. Balthasar bows low offering spikenard, Melchior gives rings of gold, and Kaspar only inclines his head slightly to show “his part in this ritual / was almost negligible” (Trilogy 171). In H.D’s revision

of the familiar scene, Mary holds not a child but a bundle of myrrh, which she describes as a “most beautiful fragrance, as of all flowering things together” (Trilogy

172). Mary is both the Magdalene who gets the myrrh from Kaspar to wash Christ's

feet and the Virgin who already carries myrrh at the birth. She is also the weeping Myrrha, mother of Adonis, a resurrection God prefiguring Christ. Beloved of God the Father, she, too, may be a “stricken woman, / having borne a son in unhallowed fashion” (Trilogy 135). The usual chronology of the nativity is insignificant in a typological repetition that reveals a divine “scope and plan” (Trilogy 154). A God has been incarnated and resurrected before and will be again. H.D-?s film work, the sensory experiences offered by cinematic technology, and solo performance more generally help to clarify Trilogy as a poetic ritual that seeks to invoke an active reading experience. The “points of time” punctuating H.D.’s retelling of the Gospel function like cinematic jump cuts, as if time were a segment on a reel to be spliced. The ritual performances use montage effects and close-ups on minute details, such as light on a strand of hair or the fold of a veil. A curtain of hair or veil is also a property emphasized in the protocinematic attitudes and statue poses recorded in this study, and the “actors” of Trilogy gesture with the

“restraint” H.D. demanded on film. The postures and small gestures invoking familiar iconography and statue poses also provoke a heightened kinesthetic sensibility or awareness of bodily position and placement within the text. Readers may become aware of their own bodily experiences while reading and “hear” the chants that transform words and relate mythical figures. As readers investigate references and trace the typological relations that structure Trilogy, they are guided

into other modes of participation. To both her poetry and film writing, H.D. brought the same interests in ritual enactment and mythic figures juxtaposed in a typological montage. The closing Christmas tableau of Trilogy provides a curtain call for many of the figures introduced or repositioned in this story of modernism. The tableau or presepe, as Goethe named the Neapolitan tradition of Christmas cribs, recalls the long genealogy of posed performances reaching back to Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes and Goethe’s finale for Proserpina. Trilogy provides another version of T. S. Eliot’s Magus, and Charlotte Mew’s Magdalene/Madeleine is recast with a similar reading of her sensuality and physicality. H.D.s combination of Christian types, the Virgin and Magdalene, with the mythological figure Myrrha also unites allegorical figures

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for the soul and body. A similar desire to reunite a body and soul, thought to have been separated by modernity, is evident in Delsartism; the movement promoted a variety of popular poses and poetic recitations and influenced performance styles in film and dance. Isadora Duncan, reflecting on a popular image for Delsartean tableaux, describes “the ‘Primavera’ of Botticelli in Florence, which I tried afterwards to transform into a dance. Oh, sweet, half seen pagan life, where Aphrodite

gleamed through the form of the gracious but more tender Mother of Christ” (ML 85). Duncan’s choreography used Delsartean poses to connect Mary and Aphrodite in a spring dance. H.D.’s Trilogy similarly suggests new gender relations for the Marys and Kaspar, replaces the god with “a bundle of myrrh,” and reframes

the Christmas story as a spring rite celebrating “all flowering things together” (Trilogy 172).

Afterword Modernism’s Mythic Pose traces an antimodern genealogy from nineteenth-century

attitudes, monodramas, and dramatic monologues into the Delsartean tradition and its presence in modern dance, silent film, and poetic recitation. The trajectory links Isadora Duncan’s solo dance manifestos and the interdisciplinary art of H.D. but also canonical modernists like Ezra Pound and the lesser known poet Charlotte

Mew, Delsartean statue-poser Genevieve Stebbins, and filmmaker Lev Kuleshov,

whose actor-training method was shaped by Stebbins’s books on Delsarte.! Connecting them is a mythic pose: a bodily attitude imitating an ancient statue, a poetic pose that repositions a character from myth, or an interpretive paradigm posing myth in analogical relation to current life. Mythic posing was part of a search for a reunified body and soul that modernity seemed to have severed. Many modernists believed that if they performed their solo search well, they could invoke kinesthetic responses or aural imaginations and inspire audiences. They often failed, judging by the critical neglect of Delsartism and other antimodern move-

ments within modernist studies. Yet, the postmodern theater director, Jerzy Grotowski, names Delsarte’s method of “plastic motion” as among his “most important” influences — as he critiques the idea that ““experimental’ work is ...

toying with some ‘new’ technique.”’ Avoiding the rhetoric of novelty and often nostalgic, the mythic pose was also a break in the march of progress that called attention to what myth might teach history. One lesson is that many so-called new features of modernism, including a crisis in relation to modernity, are quite old. Antimodern skepticism is shared by the historical avant-garde but is also evident in the postmodern desire to break with modernity.’ Postmodernism interprets much art and culture as a pose without substance or an imitation without original, 239

240 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

as reflected in the language of “spectacle,” “gaming,” and “simulation.”* This ironical posing was anticipated in modernist works but takes a more central position in postmodern performance and poetics.° In addition to serving as a metaphor for the spectacularity and commodification of culture, postmodern posing is a performance form that calls attention to those processes. Cindy Sherman turns the camera on herself to repeatedly photograph her own body; in Untitled Film Stills from 1977 to 1980, she adopts poses referencing common cinematic types, particularly stock characters from the film melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s.° Choosing costumes, makeup, and wigs asso-

ciated with the type, she positions her body, and in an adamant solo performance, indicates that she took the picture herself. In photographs such as Untitled Film Still #6 (1978), the shutter cord and her hand on the button are visible, although

they could have easily been hidden among the strewn bedsheets (figure 6.1). Sherman wears a blond wig, she holds a mirror in one hand, and her shirt is open to expose black and white underclothes, the prevailing colors of film melodramas. Her position invokes eroticism, but with one hand in control on the shutter cord

and the other arm folded under her chin like a broken wing, she grounds that erotic pose in the merely conventional. Her almost blank face is turned away from the camera, suggesting that the sexualized pose is devoid of expressive content. Sherman is transformed in Untitled Film Still # 10 (1978) by a dark wig and heavy makeup (figure 6.2). With the shutter line again visible along the bottom of the photograph, she kneels near a bag of groceries that has ripped apart and fallen. She reaches for the eggs, probably broken, but looks back over her left shoulder, pouting at a present-absent character outside the frame. The static pose is the only enactment of Sherman’s character available, but she appears to be paused in a task that will momentarily resume. A dramatic situation is invoked, along with a desire for the nexus of narrative and image offered in film drama, but the frame of the photograph subverts both. Viewers want to know the situation, want the camera to pan over to the person just outside the shot who receives her pout. Sherman’s

still photography defamiliarizes the images of femininity seen repeatedly in popular film, making them available for analysis. Her solo poses, like those of other figures in this study, explore past constructions of gender, acknowledging and troubling their power. And like other posers, Sherman cannot fully control how audiences will gaze upon her exposed body or if they will understand her self-conscious embodiment of a type as a denaturalization of gender. Contemporary performance artist Pia Lindman poses as types of grief in New York Times, a solo piece combining photography, video, statue posing, and sitespecific community art that was performed in New York, Mexico City, Tokyo,

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Helsinki, Vienna, and Berlin between 2003 and 2006. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli describes Lindman’s process of collecting photographs from the New York Times published between September 2002 and September 2003 and depicting international grief, usually caused by terrorism.’ Lindman videotapes herself reenacting the photographs as tableaux and then traces her bodily pose from the video stills (“Grief” 77). A performance “tour” at Battery Park on September 9, 2005, begins with the presentation of these sketches, but not the original photographs, to the

audience.* Lindman abstracts the pose from its political situation, erasing the comforting distance that a foreign context can offer and suggesting that any media representation of grief is similarly abstracted and distanced. Dressed in a pale gray shirt and trousers and leading her audience like a tour guide with gray flag held high, she sets a music stand near a monument such as the East Coast War Memorial

242 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

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or the National Museum of the American Indian. She places the sketch on the stand and then slowly and laboriously assumes the pose. She does not conceal her effort to imitate the pose precisely, reveals pain in her legs as she kneels near the Korean War Memorial, occasionally uses her hands to manipulate her face and produce a particular expression, and sometimes abandons her pose for another look at the picture. Exposing the apparatus of her performance, Lindman encour-

ages audiences to consider the protracted but often invisible mechanisms that publish images of grief: the guides who bring the photographer to sites of tragedy, the institutions of publication and circulation, and the processes that memorialize

certain events with statues and monuments. Lindman writes, “In my opinion monuments are deposits of collective memory and unprocessed trauma. My aim is to set this emotional potential of monuments in process by my temporal and particular gestures, animating what the monument cannot” (“Battery Park”). The juxtaposition of Lindman’s body with statues recalls Emma Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes with veils, particularly when Lindman poses with a long gray cloth, using it to stifle a scream, spreading it before her on the ground like a dead body, or paralleling the shape of a boat hull at the Merchant Mariners Memorial.

APTERWORD — 243

Unlike Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, Lindman’s poses often emphasize the difference

between her body, the drawing, and the sculpture, as well as the vast differences

between her white skin and, for example, the Native Americans in a stone monument. Ravetto-Biagioli claims, “By demonstrating how similar gestures of erief are used to differentiate victims from victimizers, us from them, or men from women, she shows how such gestures do not mark actual difference but only ground and legitimize pre-existing relations of power by repeating them” (“Grief” 79-81). The similarity and familiarity of the gestures also serve as reminders that the media and other cultural institutions teach us many of our attitudes of grief, no less than Delsartean manuals taught emotional attitudes to dancers and silent film stars a century earlier.’ In one particularly striking confrontation between likeness and difference, Lindman poses near the Ladies of Liberty, other statue posers adopting the bodily techniques used in attitudes of Nike, the Victory of Samothrace, and Marseillaise (upon which the Statue of Liberty was partially based). If the technique is similar to Lindman’s, the Ladies adopt very different affects as they wrap tourists in American flags and raise their torches for photos. The solo form in postmodern stage performance has become so popular that anthologies of solo texts have been published, although the texts cannot encompass the hybrid modes that make this form one of the most obvious inheritors of

monodramatic expressive impulses.'° In Surviving Virginia (1997), Robbie McCauley uses speech, dance, and song, all the components of expression J. J. Rousseau deployed in his development of the monodrama, to explore the history of racism in her family’s migratory existence. Postmodern performance artists commonly use autobiographical material to negotiate the intersections of memory, history, and politics, but the resulting performance is never simply autobiography. McCauley performs every character in her family, adopting different embodiments and moving between temporally marked stage locations to shift identities (Extreme 250). The solo form requires this adaptability but also underscores the fluidity of all identities; in the “Prologue” she dances and chants: we all do dance

between contradictions of individual and ancestor identities. (Extreme 250)

One of the most successful contemporary soloists, Anna Deavere Smith, has devel-

oped an innovative process that involves conducting interviews with numerous individuals and then creating a script that interweaves their voices in monologues.

244 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

Smith employed this method in Fires in the Mirror (1992), an exploration of the 1991 Crown Heights Riots, which were ignited when a Brooklyn rabbi's car hit and killed a black child and a Hasidic student was murdered in retaliation. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994) examined racial violence in the aftermath of the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King. Susan Stanford Friedman sees Smith’s work as crucial for a feminism that reaches “beyond difference” as she

indicates “the very power of fixed identity politics at the same time that her performance transcends that fixity by encompassing multiple others” (Mappings 81).'' Yet Smith has also been criticized for reducing her subjects to caricatures, a collection of bodily habits and vocal affectations that parody cultural codes of expression. Friedman argues that Smith makes “visible the way in which the identities of difference to which people often cling are performances” (Mappings 80). Although her virtuosity as a performer would allow her to launch into mimicry of

her subjects, she does not simply imitate them. Like Lindman, she gradually assumes her pose, puts on an article of clothing, slowly begins to take on vocal qualities and mannerisms, and always plays others with a self-consciousness of her

own position. Smith’s most recent piece, Let Me Down Easy (2008-2009), considers the differences that seem to reside in the human body and the search for grace, a word she adopts for its bodily and spiritual connotations.'* Her monologues introduce the voices of those who have sought bodily perfection, dissected and analyzed the body, experienced extreme physical suffering, or provided insight into the eventual death of the body. The voices of models, dancers, athletes, doctors, patients, priests, philosophers, and survivors of genocide highlight the diverse functions and manipulations of the contemporary body, as well as its universal status as the vulnerable organ through which we experience the world. The piece is particularly self-conscious that performance is a bodily art. In poetry, the dramatic monologue has continued to be an important genre, as Robert Duncan’s response to H.D. revealed. Mythical methods and typological

hermeneutics were incorporated into postmodern poetics particularly by the Black Mountain poets, a group including Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. Olson’s Projective, Open, or Field Verse built on typology in a well-known (if rarely understood) formula, “tope/type/trope.” Invoking the Christian trinity and punning on type-print, he writes, “The basic trio wld seem to be: topos/typos/tropos, 3 in 1. The ‘blow’ hits here, and me, ‘bent’ as born and of sd one’s own decision for better or worse (allowing clearly, by Jesus Christ, that you do love or go down).”!’ Topos refers to the location or “here” that the event, poem, or “blow” hits. Typos is “me,” the subject that is brought into being (“born”) and

shaped (“bent”) by the blows of topos. Olson argues, in keeping with the

AFTERWORD 245

tropological level of the fourfold method, that “built in is the connection, in each of us, to Cosmos” (“Projective” 29). Tropos, from the Greek “to turn,” is the poem’s

pattern of images and sounds, which also replicate the patterns of myth and the “cosmic” stories of love and death.'* Olson’s long sequence The Maximus Poems, published in three volumes between 1953 and 1975, develops the formula in its per-

sona, Maximus, who is simultaneously a fourth-century mystic, a fictional modern Gloucester man, and the poet or “the man who writes.” That is, Maximus is a type, and as in other versions of typification, he is related to other figures and a sense of

the eternal (the anagogical level) that Olson calls “Cosmos.” Olson redefines Pound’s “image” as the moving “vector” that “carries the trinity” of tope, type, and

trope, and the usual histories of American poetry follow Olson’s self-identified lineage from Pound and William Carlos Williams into postmodern poetry. As Robert Duncan makes clear in his “H.D. Book,” she also serves as a precedent for Olson’s typological and kinesthetic poetics. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Mountain poets were developing what Duncan referred to as a “physiological,”

“muscular,” and “locomotor” poetry and what Olson calls “the kinetics” of verse.’ They began with the central tenets of Imagism but, like Amy Lowell, were primarily concerned with the syllable, breath, laboring mouths, and other components of the bodily production of speech.’® Critics suggest that their theories, especially Olson’s “Projective Verse” (1950), represented a new “experiment” and the first postmodern poetics, but a foundation for kinesthetic, projective poetics

exists in Vernon Lee’s turn-of-the-century psychological aesthetics and the dramatic monologues of H.D., Mew, Lowell, and others.'” Olson redefined an earlier tradition of kinesthetic poetics for postmodernism, but he, like S. S. Curry, imagined all poetry as a written record of speech and any reading as a performance event in a space and time that is “immediate, contemporary to the acting-on-you of the poem” (“Projective” 21). The syllables of the line do this work by creating sound patterns but also by mimetically contributing to the sense as they alter the

time, effort, or breath it would take to speak the line. Olson claims that breath carries the “speech-force” and the typewriter carries the breath into the poem by creating a “script to its vocalization” (“Projective” 20—22).'* Comparing the type-

writer to the musical staff, he suggests that it allows the poet to “indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work” (“Projective” 22). Olson inserts the machine of the typewriter into the modernist dream that poetry could make readers hear voices or could become notes for a recitation. The possibility of conveying a speaker’s movement, as well as vocalization, in the poem is the central concern of another series of notes Olson linked under the title “Proprioception” (1959-1962).'? Olson’s definition of proprioception as the

246 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

“SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES” resembles the understanding of the kinesthetic sense modality advanced

by Rudolph Laban and other modern dancers (“Proprioception” 17). Olson uses the term kinesthesia to name the goal of poetry: “Today: movement at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (nik) the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles, tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily tensions (or relaxations of the same). Violence: knives/anything, to get the body in” (“Proprioception” 17). Olson defines kinesthesia as a sense with a physiological basis in bodily tension and relaxation; this sense may be stimulated by descriptions of bodily experiences, even threats of violence against the body. For Olson, proprioception helps the body experience “depth,” but even “the soul is proprioceptive”: “The ‘soul’ then is equally ‘physical. Is the self. Is such, “corpus’” (“Proprioception” 17-18). Olson does not define depth,

but it is a term used by Isadora Duncan to describe the relation between movement

and “emotion, “impulse,” or “soul,” an accord that can produce “those gestures that exteriorize his fullness of feeling.”’° If Olson was the first postmodern poet, he shared concepts of the “soul,” “self? “body,” and kinesthetic established by modern

dance.*! He even shared Isadora Duncan and H.D’s interest in ritual; in “Proprioception,” he cites Jane Ellen Harrison as the source: “how to find out now about then: MISS JANE HARRISON, Prolegomena, Themis, and her first book, which is Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens—and is, by god, nothing but Pausanias on Pausanias!” (“Proprioception” 8).

Contemporary poets continue to imagine a kinesthetic poetics through speaking types and mythic tropes. Diane Wakoski’s poetry builds on Olson and the other Black Mountain poets, but like many other women artists, she has been dismissed as too confessional. Wakoski finds the label problematic even for Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton and claims that the idea of confession ignores that every presentation of self in a poem is the performance of a “personal mythology.’” Shaped by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung, especially the latter’s description of the anima and animus as complementary masculine and feminine elements of a “whole” human, she defines poetry as a deep engagement with “the archetypes and patterns that shape us”: “In creating a personal mythology, poets can give themselves to their bigger stories, imbuing them with greater intimacy or poignance, using the small details of our everyday experiences.’*? Using the myth of “Medea’s Chariot,’ she creates a mythic persona who explores the guilt of giving children up for adoption through a sorceress escaping in a dragon-drawn chariot from the scene where she killed her children, who is also any contemporary woman speeding in a “brown Audi.”** Wakoski’s excavation of the myth of Medea as it interacts with contemporary stories and her own “personal mythology” is part of

AFTERWORD 247

her series The Archaeology of Movies and Books.” In a poetry of alchemical word-

play similar to that of H.D., Wakoski’s mythmaker chants, “Diane, Dianne, Dian, Dyan, Dyanne, Diane.”*° Her Medea appears to reflect on modernist typologies and mythical methods when she claims, “... The rules / are about the patterns, the stories, / completing the cycle or rhythms” (Jason 195) Lilith, a version of the sorceress from Hebrew myth, rebels against “the rules” in Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s sequence of dramatic monologues, The Lilith Poems (1993).”’ Lilith was the first woman, created before Eve and of the same earth as Adam. In Ostriker’s version, Lilith explains to Eve, “No hard feelings, but I don’t like men / Who try to lay down the law” (Lilith 94). She “jumped the fence” of her own accord and does not envy Eve’s “tidy house / And garden” (Lilith 92). Ostriker’s Lilith sequence is dedicated to Enid Dame, whose own Lilith and Her Demons (1986) presents another, very modern speaker, who now works in New Jersey and lives with a cabdriver. Lilith left her first husband, Adam, in part because he “carried a god / around in his pocket” that always contradicted her.”* Occasionally, she

misses the safety of that man with his phallic pocket god and patriarchal Eden, but she could not live with him. As in so many monologues spoken by religious or mythological personae, these Liliths interrogate the experiences of contemporary women. Dame’s Lilith gets an abortion and Ostriker’s wears high heels and knows how analyze scripture with deconstruction.” Postmodern dance has also emphasized the use of all expressive modes from movement to speech to technological reproduction of the moving body. Yvonne Rainer, first recognized for her participation in the Judson Church Movement, has followed a fascination with the moving body that brought her to the moving image on film. In “Feelings are Facts,” she describes her realization that the narcissistic relation between the spectator and the dancer undermined the cultural intervention she sought.” By incorporating film into pieces like “In the College” (ca. 1972), she presented forty dancers who were also spectators modeling the kinesthetic response of the audience. Taking text from G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), starring the Denishawn-trained dancer Louise Brooks, she projected a film of the sub-

titles that the dancers interpreted with tableaux vivants that mimicked the production stills of the film. By emphasizing the ridiculous and the melodramatic conventions of the film with her tableaux, she hoped to present plot, character, and text as images for analysis and encourage the spectator’s ability to engage these elements critically. After experimenting with tableaux and projected texts, Rainer turned to filming dance. Her recent project, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” with Mikhail Baryshnikov, presents the “shards of her dance career” in a thirtyminute cinematic choreography. Her title invokes the famous ballet Swan Lake

248 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE

and the 1939 Aldous Huxley novel, but other intertexts include statements from postmodern artists Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauchenberg and numerous quotes from Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

(1980). Her choreography, mediated by the cinematic apparatus, depicts a repeated

falling motion and the tendency of the body to succumb to gravity. With the quotes moving across the screen like curtains, she connects the fall of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire with the aging of her own body and the decay of the “U.S. Empire.”

Popular Hollywood film has also engaged U.S. politics by reviving and revising

classical myth, although usually with very different political commitments from those of Rainer. Given the seeming tension between classicism, often linked to antimodern thought, and the computer-generated spectacles of Hollywood, it is not surprising that the feature articles in a recent issue of Film e History explore the controversy of films set in classical antiquity; according to Rob Prince, “just mentioning the term ‘classics” invokes “the best, and worst, of cultural pedagogy” and “privileges Eurocentric patriarchy.”*' Several of the articles discuss 300, the 2007 remake about the Battle of Thermopylae, when, according to the myth and movies, three hundred Spartan warriors led by a Sandow the strongmanesque Leonidas (Gerard Butler) attempted to defend the pass against the invading Persian Empire.” Reviewers quipped, “It’s nice to see kids tuning in to the classics,’ while criticizing the film’s obvious racism and mixed homoerotic homophobia as very white and worked-out Spartans make fun of Athenian “boy-lovers” before con-

tending against the dark hordes of a brown, pierced, decadent, statue-posing Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), whose mouth is penetrated by Leonidas’s arrow before he dies.’ The film has the quality of serial posing, an effect that is partially due to the fact that it was based on yet another tableau-reliant genre, the graphic novel (Prank Miller’s 300).** According to Michael Williams, 300 is an uneasy hybrid of “graphic novel coloring, live action and CGI” (computer-generated imagery) that

also uses the old technique of statue posing with “obsessive” reference to the “Leonidas Monument” erected in 1955.°° Williams suggests that 300 adapted what

he calls the “contrapposto pose” from MGM’s 1925 Ben-Hur (Fred Niblo), a film

that was reviewed by H.D. Williams does not connect the posed style to the Delsartean practice of statue posing, but contemporaneous viewers would have, as

is evident in H.D.’s typological description of the “beauty and restraint of a Leonidas [which] belongs to each one of us individually” (Close Up 136).

In discussions of the antimodern poses of 300, Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004), and Alexander (2004), Charles-Antoine Courcoux claims that the “resurgence of the historical epic appears emblematic of a renewed interest by current Hollywood

AFTERWORD 249

production in the contradictory relationship between masculinity and technological modernity.’*° These films point to a practice of posing classical antiquity against contemporary experiences of gender, technology, and politics, which has been common in literature, performance, and cinema since its silent days. The 1962 film The 300 Spartans subtitled choreography as “Arabic dance” rather than Persian, while it actually consisted of stereotyped motions from modern dancers like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis; the film was widely interpreted as a rallying cry for the Cold War to stop “tyranny” at the Hot Gates.’’” The new 300, with lines such as “Freedom isn’t free,” invoked controversy over current military operations in the Middle East and provoked Iran to call the film an act of war. Myth poses a threat in the form of Leonidas. Isadora Duncan’s attitude as Nike and H.D.’s pose under Victory’s wing seem far removed from Hollywood’s Leonidas. Yet, they share an antimodern critique and bodily techniques that recall the mythic posing Delsartism popularized in drawing rooms, theaters, and cinemas. Throughout this study, I have sought connections across genres and periods, often emphasizing not what is new (CGI) but what is old, the persistence of bodily techniques and expressive genres (Leonidas’s statue pose). Suppressed continuities also erode the critical tendency to oppose the gendered categories of antimodern-classicism and modernist-materialism. Many avowed antimodern artists, like Duncan, shared rhetoric and aesthetic values with self-proclaimed Futurists like Marinetti. If she placed a soul in Marinetti’s “roaring car,’ his manifestos contain their own references to souls, and H.D.s bacchantes

anticipate Wakoski’s Medea in an Audi as they cheer for the “car / of god-king Dionysus” (CP 358).

Notes Introduction 1. “Miss Duncan’s Vivid Dances,’ unattributed review in the New York Times, November 17,1909. Duncan's concert at the Metropolitan Opera House was accompanied by the New York Symphony Orchestra with Walter Damrosch conducting. 2. FE. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” [1917] in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint and trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 137. Henceforth cited in the text as Marinettt.

3. FE. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” [1909] in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint and trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 41. The Winged Victory or Nike of Samothrace, attributed to Pythokritos, marble, ca. 200-190 B.C.E., Louvre, Paris. 4. The photomontage, assembled by the POOL film group, appears in the H.D. Scrapbook at the Hilda Doolittle Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. H.D. saw Nike of Samothrace in Paris’s Louvre in 1911, and in Writing on the Wall (1946), she describes a dream vision in which a “man” was “reaching out to draw the image of a woman (my Nike) into the sun behind him....” See Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1974), 56. Nike also features in H.D’s novel Asphodel (ca. 1921-1922) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), and she began but destroyed a manuscript entitled Niké in 1924, as described in Susan Stanford Friedman’s Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and “Dating H.D.s Writing” in Signets:

Reading H.D., eds. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 46-51. Eileen Gregory demonstrates that very early in her career, “H.D. puts the goddess Nike near the center of her Greek pantheon” in H.D. and Hellenism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 174. Henceforth cited in the text as Hellenism. 5. Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) details Marinetti’s public performances at London’s Bechstein Hall in 1912 and then in 1914 at the Coliseum Music Hall (27-38).

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NOTES TO PAGES 5-7 251

6. Duncan returned to tour the United States in 1908, the year Ezra Pound moved to London, having already gained international celebrity for her new dance in Europe. The influence of the dramatic monologue extends far beyond the Victorian period; in just one example, the poet Robert Duncan claims that the “mode of Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and H.D.’ is derived from Robert Browning’s “dramatic poem.” See “Two Chapters from the H.D. Book,” TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968), 85-86. Glennis Byron’s The Dramatic Monologue

(London: Routledge, 2003) argues that the flourishing of the form in modernism demands a reevaluation but does not undertake an extensive study of modernist monologues. 7. The pioneering works on Delsartism are Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter’s Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1979) and

The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999). A special issue of Mime Journal 23 (2004-2005), Essays on Francois Delsarte, edited by Ruyter, expands the discussion into actor training and film but does not

focus on international modernism. Histories of dance detail the emergence of “solo art dance” in the first decade of the twentieth century; see Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1. Maggie B. Gale treats solo performance from the perspective of acting theory and the profession of the actress in “Going Solo: An Historical Perspective on the Actress and the Monologue,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, ed. Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Susan A. Glenn describes how

women performers in the popular theater “contributed to changing ideas about female identity” as they “reworked older stereotypes” in Female Spectacle, The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8. None considers the wider field of embodied social practices, dances, literary techniques, and films that comprise my study of modernism. 8. The sonnet is published in Andrew J. Krivak’s edition of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912 (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 151-152.

9. William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John T. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1985), 331.

10. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 59.

11. Quoted in Terri A. Mester’s Movement and Modernism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 147.

12. Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912). Henceforth cited in the text as Beauty. 13. Miriam Hansen offers a helpful discussion of the “classical” and its supposed opposi-

tion to the “modernist-materialist” (65-66) trajectory in “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,’ Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999), 59-77:

14. Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 3-6.

15. I will continue to use antimodern (not antimodernism) to describe a suspicion of modernization that was distinct from opposition to aesthetic modernism; antimodern impulses were common among modernist artists.

252 NOTES TO PAGES 7-8

16. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xi-xv. Henceforth

cited in the text as Antimodernism. In focusing on “antimodernism” among “the educated strata of Northern bourgeoisie,’ Lears does not mention Delsartism, although the movement’s popularity directly corresponds to the dates of his study (xvi). Lears’s use of the term “antimodernism” seems to blur distinctions between a resistance to modernization and a hostility toward modernism. Perhaps because of confusion about the terminology, only a few works have taken up Jackson Lears’s insights: Lynda Jessup defines antimodernism as “often ambivalent and Janus-faced, smacking of accommodation as well as protest,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda

Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 3. Weldon Thornton’s The Antimodernism of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Syracuse: Syracuse University

Press, 1994) presents antimodernism primarily as a rejection of the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. See also Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), and Candida Rifkind, “Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 39, no. 1 (2005), 90-114. 17. Lears claims that antimodernism ambivalently associated this authenticity with “feminine’ values,’ a “mode of unity—a return to childlike dependence on a vitalist mothergoddess” (Antimodernism 281). Although Lears consistently points to the tension between exaltation and fear of femininity in men, he does not discuss its influence on women, firstwave feminism, Delsartism, or the suffrage movement that was active between 1880 and 1920.

18. Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 505-506. Gilbert Seldes’s The Seven Lively Arts [1924] (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001) similarly dismissed “classic dancing”: “Fat women leaping with

chaplets in their hair, in garments of grey gauze, are not the poetry of motion, and Irene Castle in a black evening dress dancing Irving Berlin’s music is—just as surely as Nijinsky was. What is more, these two dancers, whom I choose at the extremes of the dance, both have reference to our contemporary life...” (318). My thanks to Sunny Stalter for the reference.

19. Ann Daly, Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 136. In her thorough study, H.D. and Hellenism, Eileen Gregory similarly feels the need to offer an “apology” for the “nostalgia” in H.D’s classicism (Hellenism 6).

20. Edward P. Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18. Henceforth cited in the text as Production.

21. A similar process of arranging categories and ignoring continuities occurs in Daniel Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), a fascinating study of multimedia performance experiments. Albright defines modernism as “the testing of the limits of aesthetic construction” and establishes the limits as expressionism vs. objectivity, hyperrealism vs. abstractionism, neoclassicism vs. neobarbarism, and futurism vs. the mythic method (29). Albright’s emphasis on modernism’s aesthetics of extremity leads him to claim that “after certain nineteenth-

century artists had established a remarkably safe, intimate center where the artist and

NOTES TO PAGES 8-10 = 253

audience could dwell, the twentieth century reaches out to the freakish circumferences of art” (Untwisting 30). Victorian art was not nearly so safe, and some of his “freakish” forms have roots in earlier periods. 22. See Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s much-discussed introduction to the New Modernist Studies in PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008), 737-748. They call for “expansion” of

the period, interdisciplinary studies of new forms and genres, and transnational reconsiderations. My work expands the field of modernism in these directions and others, as their sizable bibliography does not include works on performance and dance, and even theater is underrepresented. 23. Kurt Heinzelman, ed., Make It New: The Rise of Modernism (Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 2003), 132. See also Hong Sun, “Pound’s Quest

for Confucian Ideals: The Chinese History Cantos,” in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 96-119, and Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 24. As revisionary studies of modernism by feminist critics such as Bonnie Kime Scott, Susan Stanford Friedman, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis have pointed out, women modernists did not participate to the same extent in these doctrinal battles and were often openly excluded. Diana Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) describes how Pound discouraged H.D. from engaging in critical activity and dismissed her editorial work for The Egotst (165-167).

25. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism,’ in Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001), 493-513, 499. 26. Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallbert exaggerate the “new” in their introduction to the first issue of Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 1 (1994), 1-3. “Modernism was more

than a repertory of artistic styles...it initiated an ongoing transformation in the entire set of relations governing the production, transmission, and reception of the arts. The modernists themselves seem to have understood this when they urged that changes in the arts be viewed in conjunction with changes in philosophy, historiography, and social theory, to say nothing of the scientific shifts that they claimed as part of their moment’s cultural revolution” (1). Artists from the Victorian and earlier periods also frequently understood the arts in relation to religion, social theory, and scientific advances, as is evident in George Levine’s Dying to Know (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 27. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. Classic studies of modernism as a response to technological modernity include Hugh Kenner’s The Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 28. Michael North's fascinating Machine-Age Comedy (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2009) situates cinematic acting styles in relation to mechanical reproduction, but many performance techniques on film were shaped by traditions, such as Delsartism, that anticipated cinematic technology. 29. Julia A. Walker describes Delsartism as a “failed idea” due largely to its “antimodernism” in Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6. Walker offers one of the few studies considering

254 NOTES TO PAGES 10-13

Delsartism’s relation to modernism, but her assessment of the movement’s failure does not reflect its influence in dance, film, and poetic recitation.

30. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,’ The Dial, 75, no. 5 (November 1923), 480-483. 31. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989), 60. Henceforth cited

in the text as Essentially. Fuss claims that discussions of gender use both essentialism and (de)construction: essentialism generalizes oppressed classes as the basis for political movements, and deconstruction highlights the cultural processes that produce classes and organize difference. 32. In Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that to postulate a distinct “women’s modernism” fosters inaccurate divisions, and the diversity within modernism demands “gender-oriented analyses of all producers” with discussions of race, sex, class, and religion (4-7). 33. Helen Potter, “Beauty and Artistic Dress,” Werner’s Voice Magazine 13 (1891), 269-271,

270. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. 34. Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed. (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1902), 461.

35. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,’ Theatre Journal 4o, no. 4 (December 1988), 519. Henceforth cited in the text as “Performative.” 36. Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Gender,” in Performance Studies, ed. Erin Striff (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 169. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), Butler claims to augment her idea of the “construction” of gender with the concept of “materialization,” a process that appears to stabilize over time to

produce the effect of the boundaries and surfaces we understand as matter. Henceforth cited in the text as Bodies.

37. Ed Cohen provides a summary of Butler’s use of Austin, Derrida, and Lacan in “Posing the Question: Wilde, Wit, and the Ways of Man,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996), 39. J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) describes the “performative” as an utterance in which the saying is part of the doing, a speech-act. Butler’s “Performative Acts” cites John Searle’s Speech Acts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), which promoted Austin’s ideas. Derrida takes up Austin but limits the agency of the subject through

the concept of “citationality” in “Signature, Event, Context,’ in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 306-330.

38. bell hooks critiques the film in Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996), claiming that it transforms “black gay subculture,” especially Venus, into “spectacle” (224). See also Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston’s Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Many of the performers featured in the film sought claims against Livingston and Miramax for a share of the profits, but charges were subsequently dropped. See Jesse Green’s “Paris Has Burned,’ New York Times (April 18, 1993) at The New York Times Archive Online: http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9 FoCEo DF143DF93BA25757C0A965958260&s ec=&spon=&pagewanted=1. 39. Duncan and H.D., along with Amy Lowell and Charlotte Mew (who predominantly dressed in male clothing), challenged traditional gender roles in their lives as well as their

NOTES TO PAGES 13-15 2.55

art with domestic arrangements that included male and female partners—lifestyles we now call queer. Duncan does not mention her bisexuality in her autobiography, My Life [1927] (New York: Liveright, 1995), and her references to Loie Fuller’s “troupe of beautiful but demented ladies” seem homophobic (73). Critics often replicate her silence. See The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy, ed. Billy J. Harbin, Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 40. Paula M. L. Moya, “Postmodernism, “Realism, and the Politics of Identity: Cherrie Moraga and Chicana Feminism,’ in Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Norton, 1997), 791. 41. See Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). Also influential were ideas about historical categories of knowledge in Foucault’s The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970). 42. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 280-281.

43. Koenraad W. Swart, ““Individualism’ in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 23, no. 1 (January—March 1962), 77-90. Raymond Williams claims the term individualism has roots in theological doctrine and “the unity of the Trinity” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 162. In Aspects of Sociology [1956] (Boston: Beacon, 1972), the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research argued

against the idea that “the sociohistorical unfolding of the individual had its origin in Christianity” and cited biological, economic, and political categories (40-47). Such models were problematic with respect to women, as the discrete biological individual was complicated by understandings of the female body as a social resource for reproduction. Paid labor was not widely available for some classes of women, and wives could not own property until the second half of the nineteenth century. 44. Isobel Armstrong, “A Music of Thine Own,’ in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angel Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 3. 45. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845], ed. Larry J. Reynolds (New York: Norton, 1998). Fuller (1810-1850) was a member of the Transcendental Club, a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the editor of Dial from 1840 to 1842. “Self-poise” revised Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” [1841]; both theorized a sacred selfhood, but Fuller posited an individual that exists as a force for change rather than an exemplary persona.

46. Quoted in Stephen Prickett’s Reading the Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 186. Henceforth cited in the text as Reading. 47. George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (Boston: Routledge, 1980). 48. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 31. Henceforth cited in the text as Political. 49. Bill Brown discussed Fredric Jameson’s use of typology and the Christian influence on Marxist hermeneutics more generally in “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory),’ PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005), 734-750. Northrop Frye’s influential Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) is also rooted in typology. 50. Typology demonstrates the continuity of God’s redemptive plan in I Corinthians 10:6—11, Romans 5:14, Colossians 2:17, and Hebrews 10:1. See Erich Auerbach’s classic study,

“Figura, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), and A. C. Charity’s Events and Their Afterlife (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).

256 NOTES TO PAGES 15-17

51. Dante uses Psalm 114:1-2: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.” The type is Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt, and the antitype is Christ who offers a later “redemption.” The moral or tropological meaning is that any believer can experience “the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace.” The anagogical signification, applying to the afterlife, indicates that the “sanctified soul” will be rewarded with

“eternal glory.” Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande della Scala” is reprinted in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 251.

52. Landow claims that typology influenced “virtually every major Victorian poet” but does not discuss the gendered applications of the hermeneutic in “Bruising the Serpent’s Head: Typological Symbol in Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Newsletter 55 (Spring 1979), 11. 53. Psalm 122 praises Jerusalem: “Let us go to the house of the LORD!” Heaven is figured as “my Father’s house” in John 14:2.

54. For how patristic writers treat classical myth in typological relation to religion, see Erich Auerbach’s “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature,” Yale French Studies 9 (1952); 6.

55. Harrison was written out of the history of classical scholarship by classicists not friendly to her feminist politics; Hugh Lloyd-Jones excluded her from his study of classical transmission and criticized her knowledge of Greek, although he included Murray, who popularized her ideas (Hellenism 56). Julie Stone Peters details Harrison’s influence on (anti)theatrical modernism and positions her in the history of theater anthropology in

“Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre,’ Modern Drama 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 1-41. Henceforth cited in the text as “Savage.” For the argument that Harrison influenced the discipline of classics through her “personal convictions” rather than her learning or “the soundness of her ideas,” see Shanyn Fiske’s “The Daimon Archives: Jane Harrison and the Afterlife of Dead Languages,’ Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 2 (2005), 130-164, 131. Mary Beard describes the difficulty of determining reliable biographical information about Harrison in The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Annabel Robinson’s recent biography, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), paints a more coherent picture of her life. Martha Carpentier’s Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1998) traces the connection between Harrison's interpretation of myth and the modernist mythical method.

56. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 83. Henceforth cited in the text as Tragedy.

57. Harrison first presented these ideas in 1903 in Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (New York: Meridian, 1955) and developed them in Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Henry Holt, 1913). Henceforth cited in the text as Ritual. 58. Peters describes Harrison’s early “Greek” poses and performances and later antithe-

atricality but does not connect her work with the relevant Delsarte tradition (“Savage” 5-6). 59. Harrison’s lecture on the “Parthenon Marbles” at King’s College London was advertised on the same page as Mrs. Fred Turner’s instruction in “Elocution” and the “Delsarte

NOTES TO PAGES 18-20 257 System, Including Voice Training and Physical Exercises” in Journal of Education 16 (London: William Rice, 1894), 537.

60. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts, 1982), 85. Schechner suggests that in performance: “The self can act in/as

another,’ and this “transindividual” self suggests new subject formations. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36.

61. Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric,’ PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008), 201-206, 201.

62. Michael B. Prince states that “all genres are... bad types, impositions of convention on some fuller possibility,” in “Mauvais Genres,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 (2003), 453. Henceforth cited in the text as “Mauvais.”

63. I was influenced by Carolyn Williams’s ideas of genres as discursive formations: “The utility of the concept of genre for cultural study lies in its powerful fusion of historical and formal assumptions. For period study, it is especially clear that the concept of genre enables a focus on synchronic relations while also depending upon the diachronic relations with antecedents of current practice.’ See “Genre and ‘Discourse’ in Victorian Cultural Studies,’ Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), 517-520. 64. Ina Beth Sessions, “The Dramatic Monologue,” in PMLA 62 (1947), 503-516.

65. Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 77.

66. W. David Shaw, in Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), provocatively revises “sympathy” to a relation of “intimacy,” which produces dramatic irony as readers know more than speakers intend to tell. Shaw claims the Duke does not mean to reveal that he killed the Duchess, yet many readers have suggested that the Duke discloses the murder as a warning to his next wife, delivered by proxy and hidden in talk of art.

67. Herbert F. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hések and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 241-242. Henceforth cited in the text as “Overhearing.” 68. Cynthia Scheinberg, “Recasting ‘Sympathy and Judgment’: Amy Levy, Women Poets, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 2 (1997), 176. In Victorian Poetry (New York: Routledge, 1993), Isobel Armstrong argues that women “invented” the dramatic monologue to address the challenge that the poetic voice, assumed to be male, was never their own voice. See also Kate Flint’s “‘... As a Rule, I Does Not Mean I: Personal Identity and the Victorian Woman Poet,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 157-160.

69. A. Dwight Culler, “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” in PMLA 90 (1975), 366-385. Henceforth cited in the text as “Monodrama.” “Dramatic monologue” was coined in 1857, when George W. Thornbury used it to designate a group of poems in his Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads...(“Monodrama’” 366). It appeared in Athenaeum, March 20, 1869, and in a review of D. G. Rossetti’s Poems in Westminster Review, January 30, 1871. Tennyson first used the term in his 1886 dedication to “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” (“Monodrama’” 366). 70. Tzvetan Todorov claims that a “new genre” is always a development of earlier ones in “The Origin of Genres,’ trans. Richard M. Berrong, New Literary History 8 (1976-1977), 159-170.

258 NOTES TO PAGES 20-21

71. For a discussion of this convention in both poetry and painting, see Barbara Onslow’s “Deceiving Images, Revealing Images: The Portrait in Victorian Women’s Writing,’ Victorian Poetry 33, no. 3-34 (1996), 450-475. 72. Culler briefly discusses the use of prosopopoeia in literary education (“Monodrama” 368-367). 73. Aemilia Lanyer’s “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women” (1611) is an early modern prosopopoeia in verse that predicts the dramatic monologue, challenging its definitions as a quintessentially Victorian, masculine, and secular form. Lanyer’s prosopopoeia resem-

bles in form and content both Charlotte Bronté’s dramatic monologue, “Pilate’s Wife’s Dream” (written in the late 1830s, published in 1846), and the wife’s speech attempting to persuade Pilate of Christ’s innocence in Augusta Webster’s Anno Domini 33 (1867). In the modernist period, H.D.s Pilate’s Wife (ca. 1934) might be considered a prosopopoeia in novella form. 74. Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoriae, trans. John Selby Watson (London: Bohn, 1876), III. vir. 49.

75. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 81, 76. As Jonathan Culler claims,

de Man is interested in “the idea of the lyric as utterance, an idea fostered by the New Criticism, which in effect treated lyrics as dramatic monologues.” See Culler’s “Reading Lyric,” Yale French Studies (1985), 99, for a discussion of de Man’s occasionally contradictory

use of the term prosopopoeia. Yopie Prins criticizes de Man’s “effacement of gender in his

theoretical account of lyric as a genre” in Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 20.

76. Prince establishes the importance of prosopopoeia in neoclassical genres, where it “reconciles relative beauty, dictating the lowering of imitation to recognizable human forms” (“Mauvais” 468). The trope of prosopopoeia helps to explain the popularity of portraiture at a time when it was ranked lower in the usual hierarchies of genre. 77. Rudolph Laban, Modern Educational Dance |1948] (Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1988), 111. Henceforth cited in the text as Dance.

78. Until recently, dance and other performance forms have been underrepresented even in revisionary studies of modernism. Bonnie Kime Scott’s important The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) included only Djuna Barnes’s play To the Dogs and Gertrude Stein’s White Wines. Scott’s more recent anthology, Gender in

Modernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), redresses the lack of drama and includes a wider field of performance practices; she even reprints selections of Isadora Duncan’s aesthetic statements, indicating that the influence of modern dance is beginning to be recognized. Penny Farfan’s Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) argues that not only has modernist studies marginalized theater but also “narratives of modern theatre history...do not address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde” (2). She includes a chapter on Isadora Duncan, with interdisciplinary studies of Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. Penny Farfan and Katharine Kelly’s special issue, “Staging Modernism” in South Central Review 25, no. 1 (Spring 2008), includes Farfan’s essay on Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet “L-Aprés-midi d’une Faune” and Shane Vogel’s analysis of the popular song-and-dance number “Stormy Weather.’

NOTES TO PAGES 21-23 259

79. Just as dance has not been treated as often as other arts in interdisciplinary literary studies, dance scholars have a tendency to ignore both the discursive constructions of the body that inform dance and the ways dancers such as Laban theorize language and use words to enhance expressive possibilities. 80. Derrida uses the dance metaphor in “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173-285, and with Christie V. McDonald in “Choreographies,” Diacritics 12, no. 2 (1982), 66-76. See Julie Townsend’s “Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 1 (2005): 126-148, for a discussion of Derrida’s analysis of Stéphane Mallarmé and dance in Dissemination. Amy Koritz discusses the sexual politics of the Symbolist interest in dance

in Gendering Bodies/Performing Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). See also Kimerer L. LaMothe’s Nietzsche’s Dancers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) for a discussion of dance’s presence in critical theory. 81. Vineta Colby describes Lee’s relationships with Pater, John Addington Symonds,

Henry and William James, and Edith Wharton in Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Henceforth cited in the text as Lee. Colby claims Lee rejected psychological aesthetics after 1915 and “made no major contribution to psychology or to aesthetics” (167). Yet, Lee continued to use psychological aesthetics, primarily in literary studies. 82. Pater asked, “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?” See Studies in the History of the Renaissance [1873], in New Library Edition of the Works of Walter Pater, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1910), viii. 83. See Stefano Evangelista’s “Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism,” in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 91-111. 84. Lee believed Anstruther-Thomson possessed an acute sense of “aesthetic empathy,” and they produced a jointly authored essay, “Beauty and Ugliness” (1897), which was later included in Lee’s book of the same title. A passage ridiculed by Colby (Lee 157) devotes four pages to the perception of a chair: “While seeing this chair, there happen movements of the two eyes, of the head, and of the thorax, and balancing movements in the back...” (Beauty 163-167).

85. For Lee’s anticipation of reader-response and formalism, see David Seed’s introduction to Lee’s The Handling of Words (Lampeter, England: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 1-XXX.

86. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 36. Henceforth cited in the text as The Beautiful. 87. This evidence is summarized by Garrett Stewart in Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 129. 88. Vernon Lee, The Poet’s Eye (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 11. 89. Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (London: John Lane The Bodley Heat, 1923), 22-23. Henceforth cited in the text as Handling.

90. Joe Briggs, “Plural Anomalies: Gender and Sexuality in Bio-Critical Readings of Vernon Lee,’ in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia

Pulham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 160-173. 91. Woolf refers to Lee as an example of women who have begun to publish books in traditionally “masculine” fields in A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1929), 79.

260 NOTES TO PAGES 23-25

Lee’s nonessentialist gender perspective may have influenced Woolf’s ideas of creative androgyny. See Christa Zorn’s Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003) and Catherine A. Wiley’s review of Zorn’s treatment of gender in Victorian Periodicals Review 38, no. 1 (2005), 117-118. 92. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 27. 93. Catherine Anne Wiley quotes Lewis and positions Lee in relation to modernism in “Warming Me Like a Cordial’: The Ethos of the Body in Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics,” in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 58-74.

94. Martin Puchner traces an “aesthetics of gesture” from Richard Wagner’s use of gesture as the unifying force for music, acting, and poetry, in the Gesamtkunstwerk through Nietzsche, Mallarmé, and Adorno. He claims that gestures suggest the possibility of unmediated expressivity in all representational forms, from opera to text. See “Polyphonous Gestures: Wagnerian Modernism from Mallarmé to Stravinsky,” Criticism 41, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 25-39.

95. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 68.

96. Pound famously and somewhat erroneously claimed, “The Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, the Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still a picture of a thing....” See Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading [1934] (New York: New Directions, 1960), 21. After becoming

Ernest Fenollosa’s literary executor, Pound published Fenollosa’s “An Essay on the Chinese Written Character,’ in Instigations of Ezra Pound (New York: Libraries Press, 1920), 364. Henceforth cited in the text as “Chinese.” 97. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,’ Negro, [1934], ed. Nancy Cunard and Hugh Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), 49. 98. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,’ in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 333-336. 99. Carrie Asman, “The Return of the Sign to the Body: Benjamin and Gesture in the Age of Retheatricalization,’ Discourse 16, no. 3 (1994). Asman discusses Benjamin, Brecht, and Franz Kafka’s interest in gestures that “functioned as a means of physically reconnecting word, image, and action; it is a means of bypassing written and spoken signs by linking expression back to the site of its alienation—the body” (55). 100. Katherine Mullin details the fears of kinesthetic readings in James Joyce, Sexuality

and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): a “kinetic model of reading was assumed by most social purity campaigners.... The theory that young people were drawn to mimic what they read found constant reiteration” (34-35). See also my “Joyce’s Reading Bodies and the Kinesthetics of the Modernist Novel,’ Twentieth-Century Literature 55, no. 2 (2009).

101. See Derek Attridge’s brilliant discussion of James Joyce’s onomatopoeia in Peculiar Language (London: Routledge, 2004). He does not examine Lee or kinesthetic readings, but he suggests that in spite of literary criticism’s general acceptance, onomatopoeia is actually a projection of human experience into language, much like Vernon Lee’s example of “hills rise’ (136).

NOTES TO PAGES 26-28 261

Chapter 1 1. Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Origin of Languages,’ in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7, trans. John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 290. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as CWR.

2. Peter Brooks claims that theorists from Rousseau to Derrida view gesture as “something like the mythical primal language, a language of presence, purity, immediacy,’

in The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 66. Henceforth cited in the text as Melodramatic.

3. The first book designated an autobiography by its author, The Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister, was written by W. P. Scargill in 1834, just before the term individualism emerged in 1839 and the 1842 publication of famous dramatic monologues by Tennyson and Browning. See James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 5—6.

4. A. Dwight Culler, “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” in PMLA 90 (1975): 366-385. Henceforth cited in the text as “Monodrama.” Culler does not discuss women writers but recognizes that the monodrama and dramatic monologue emerged from “several related art forms that focused on a solitary figure, most frequently a woman, who expressed through speech, music, costume, and gesture the shifting movements of her soul” (375).

5. Alan Sinfield’s Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977) claims that in spite of the “feint” by which the monologue presents itself as a speech, letter, or encounter rather than poem, “we feel the pressure of the poet’s controlling mind” (30). 6. In Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), Susan Stanford Friedman describes the critical investment in difference and calls for moving “beyond” gender and difference to help resolve the white, heterosexist, middle-class, and western biases of feminism (17). 7. In Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), Emile Benveniste famously described the social foundations of subjectivity in language: “T use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person” (224). Like other models of subjectivity based solely in discourse, Benveniste’s does not encompass the bodily subjectivities, gestural forms of communication, or layering of the mythic and personal I explored in solo genres of first-person presentation. 8. In one example, nineteenth-century medicine claimed that women needed a reserve of vital power to meet the cost of reproduction, a reserve supposedly threatened by activities in the public sphere. The theory was used to exclude women from higher education and professional careers. See Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

9. Reprinted from Joseph Kurzbéck’s 1906 edition of Pygmalion, Revue musicale de Lyon,

in Kirsten Gram Holmstrém’s Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants (Stockholm: Almavist & Wiksell, 1967), 42. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as MATV. Holmstrém’s study is a rare source of information on performances of monodramas and attitudes, but

I contest her conclusion that they were short-lived “trends” with little bearing on later developments in the theater.

262 NOTES TO PAGES 28-33

10. Isadora Duncan cited Rousseau as one of her “dance masters,’ and her first professional performance was in a pantomime entitled “Miss Pygmalion” (dir. Augustin Daly, 1895) and partially inspired by the monodrama. See Peter Kurth, Isadora: A Sensational Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 39-40. H.D.s monologue “Pygmalion” (1917) also points to the popularity of the myth in modernism. u1. This summary is based on an English translation published by J. Kearby, Pygmalion: A Poem from the French of J. J. Rousseau (London, 1779). Henceforth cited in the text as Pygmalion. 12. Jean Baptiste Dubos, Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la penture, trans. Thomas Nugent (London, 1748), 19. 13. Susan Foster, “Pygmalion’s No-Body and the Body of Dance,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996). Henceforth cited in the text as “No-Body.’ 14. See Judith Chazin-Bennahum’s description of Pygmalion and Bacchus et Ariane (1734) in The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780-1830 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 44. 15. See Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988) for a discussion of the historical exclusion of women from contract theory. 16. Gad Kaynar uses the term present-absent figures in his discussion of an “aesthetics of absence” in contemporary monodramas. See Kaynar, “A Jew in the Dark: The Aesthetics of

Absence—Monodrama as Evocation and Formation of ‘Genetic’ Collective Memory,’ Theatre Research International 25, no. 1(2000): 53—63.

17. Published as “A Scene at a Private Madhouse” in Poems (1812); reprinted as The Captive in Matthew G. Lewis, Seven Gothic Dramas, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 225. Henceforth cited in the text as Captive. 18. Robert Southey learned of the monodrama from Frank Sayers’s Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology (1792), and between 1793 and 1802 composed Sappho (1797), Lucretia

(1798), The Wife of Fergus (1798), Florinda (1804), and seven other texts subtitled “A Monodrama.” Sayers had collaborated with William Taylor on a translation of Goethe’s Proserpina and then wrote his own Pandora (1790), which Taylor reviewed as “not only the finest poem of the kind in our language, but may be confronted with advantage against the Pygmalion of Rousseau, or even the Proserpina of Goethe, which last had served in some degree as a model” (“Monodrama’ 376). 19. J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1962), 208. Henceforth cited in the text as Journey. 20. Emma Lyon was probably born Amy Lyon in 1765 and died in poverty in 1815. The best biography is Kate Williams’s England’s Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (New York: Ballantine, 2006). Henceforth cited in the text as Mistress.

21. The apocryphal Memoirs of Lady Hamilton was published just after her death. Biographies with various degrees of accuracy include J. C. Jeaffreson’s Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson (1888), Walter Sichel’s Emma Lady Hamilton (1905), A. O. Sherrard’s A Life of Emma Hamilton (1927), Hugh Tours’s The Life and Letters of Enma Hamilton (1963), Norah Lofts’s Emma Hamilton (1978), and Flora Fraser’s Emma Lady Hamilton (New York: Knopf,

1987). Henceforth cited in the text as Emma. Film treatments include The Divine Lady (1929), The Nelson Affair (1973), and most famously, Alexander Korda’s 1941 That Hamilton Woman, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.

NOTES TO PAGES 33-38 263

22. Volker Schachenmayr examines Lyon Hamilton’s influence on Goethe in “Emma Lyon, the Attitude and Goethean Performance Theory,’ New Theatre Quarterly 49 (1997): 3-17. Henceforth cited in the text as “Goethean.” David Constantine’s “Goethe and the Hamiltons,” Oxford German Studies 26 (1997): 101-131 also offers valuable analyses but con-

centrates on William Hamilton. Henceforth cited in the text as “Hamiltons.” Marcia Pointon’s chapter “Portraiture, Excess, and Mythology” in Strategies for Showing (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997) locates the attitudes in the context of the visual arts. Henceforth abbreviated as Strategies. 23. Tischbein went with Goethe to see Lyon Hamilton perform and painted her portrait the following morning (Journey 208). Tischbein later sketched a scene from Goethe’s “Orest and Iphigenia’ with her as Iphigenia and Goethe as Orest, and he gave the sketch to Frederike Brun, whose daughter, Ida, also became a famous poser (“Hamiltons” 110). 24. Reports circulated of Miss Hodges’s performance in Rousseau’s Pygmalion 1n 1779 in England, where Lyon Hamilton lived until March 1786. Lyon Hamilton’s use of a veil to conceal bodily adjustments resembles the ornate curtain covering Galatea as an unfinished

sculpture. Sir Hamilton’s cousins wrote to him about a statue coming to life in a 1778 performance of Pygmalion, a production probably derived from Rousseau’s monodrama (Emma 107). Culler, Holmstrém, and most other critics credit Sir Hamilton with originating the attitudes, but Kate Williams insists that all evidence indicates she independently conceived of her performances (Mistress 144). 25. Constantine claims that Goethe’s confidence “in a philosophy of wellbeing and happiness” was encouraged by Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes and his travels in Italy (““Hamiltons” 104-105).

26. Hamilton’s most famous pose as dancing Bacchante was depicted in paintings by Thomas Lawrence (Emma 118), George Romney, and J. R. Smith (Strategies 206-207). 27. Pietro Antonio Novelli drew a series of Hamilton’s attitudes with a young girl, and one of the images resembles de Boigne’s description of the Medea pose (Mistress 143).

28. Rather than linking Lyon Hamilton’s completion to audience recognition, Schachenmayr argues that each attitude was complete only after she began to move again: “Retroactively, Lyon accomplishes total embodiment, but no one was aware of this achievement until it had passed” (“Goethean” 12). This transience is an element of every performance where the presentness of the body is apprehended only in its disappearance. See Heidi Gilpin’s “Lifelessness in Movement, or How Do the Dead Move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance,’ in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Foster (New York: Routledge, 1996): “Performance, through its embodiment of absence, in its enactment of disappearance, can only leave traces for us to search between, among, beyond” (106).

29. The international popularity of this dance, encouraged by Lyon Hamilton, is evident in its inclusion in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), a foundational text in dramatic modernism. 30. See Michael B. Prince’s discussion of Reynolds and the trope of prosopopoeia in neoclassical portraiture in “Mauvais Genres,’ New Literary History 34, no. 3 (2003): 471. 31. James Gillray, “Dido in Despair,’ hand-colored etching and stipple engraving, published by Hannah Humphrey, February 6, 1801. In the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D13034.

264 NOTES TO PAGES 39-43

32. J. W. Goethe, Proserpina, in Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and Frank Ryder (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), Il. 51-57. Henceforth cited in the text as Proserpina.

33. David Marshall discusses the tableau and private theatricals in relation to the nineteenth-century novel but does not include the monodrama or Lyon Hamilton in The Figure of the Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs briefly mention Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes and Delsarte’s theories in their interesting Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) but do not consider relationships between posing in theater, film, and dance. 34. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body” [1935] in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. by Nathan Schlanger (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 80. 35. Holmstrém concludes, “Lady Hamilton had no direct successors” (MATV 140). 36. Fraser reports that the lover was “Marianne von Willemer, also of modest origins. To placate her, he tempered his praise” (Emma 108). 37. Goethe also connects Hamilton’s attitudes, the Christmas presepe, and the tableau curtain call of Proserpina in an article for the journal Morgenblatt (“Hamiltons” 129). 38. Many posers, including Ida Brun, contributed to the widespread interest in attitudes initiated by Lyon Hamilton. Brun’s mother, Frederikke, saw Hamilton perform in 1796 and

later instructed her daughter in the art of the attitude. While Brun’s performances were similar to Hamilton’s in their classical style and range of subjects, she brought the form closer to dance by including background music and narratives (MATV 174). Gustav von Seckendorff, Elise Biirger, and Sophie Schréder also performed attitudes throughout the nineteenth century. 39. Jack McCullough’s Living Pictures on the New York Stage (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI,

1981) gives a useful account of posing in the popular theaters of the United States. Henceforth cited in the text as Living Pictures. Lucinda Jarrett’s Stripping in Time (Glasgow,

Scotland: Pandora, 1997) discusses international posing. Henceforth cited in the text as Stripping. 40. The rule did not prevent the occasional police raid, and entire companies of “model artists’ were arrested and marched publicly to jail; the spectacle of semiclad posers on the move undoubtedly garnered its own enthusiastic audience. 41. The 2005 film Mrs. Henderson Presents, directed by Stephen Frears, recounts the story of the Windmill Theater, owned by the rich widow Laura Henderson and directed by impresario Vivian Van Damm. | am grateful to John Paul Riquelme for bringing the film to my attention. 42. See Jane Moody’s Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000) for a detailed analysis of the history of the patent theaters and licensing acts and their influence on hybrid theatrical forms. Henceforth cited in the text as Illegitimate.

43. In “The Text of Muteness,” Brooks argues that the stock “mute character” in the melodrama represents an extreme case of nonverbal meaning making that is also evident in melodramatic gestuality more generally. 44. Rousseau’s essay on Pygmalion and monodramatic performance technique introduced the term mélo-drame as a general designation for musical drama (CWR 497).

NOTES TO PAGES 43-44 = 265

45. See Kathy Fletcher’s “Planché, Vestris, and the Transvestite Role: Sexuality and Gender in Victorian Popular Theatre,” in Nineteenth Century Theatre 15, no. 1 (1987): 8-33. See also Matthew S. Buckley’s careful trace of historical continuities from melodrama to modern drama in Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

46. Martin Meisel, Realizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). Henceforth cited in the text as Realizations. 47. In some cases, illustrations are referenced to ensure the similitude of set or costume design: The direction for 1.1 describes Mrs. Sheppard’s lodgings in the Old Mint: “See the Illustration by Cruikshank.” Jack’s costume is also described with reference to the novel’s illustrations: “Brown coat, long drab waistcoat, black velveteen breeches, carpenter’s apron, black wig, ds picture, three-cornered black hat” (my emphasis). J. B. Buckstone, Jack Sheppard [1839] in Trilby and Other Plays, ed. George Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6. 48. Meisel quotes an unidentified review of a dramatization of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge from 1841 that emphasizes the audience’s audible recognition of the tableaux: “It is scarcely necessary to detail a plot which is so well known and generally admired as Dickens’s last novel, bearing this title, the tale being fully borne out in the drama here presented, in the most perfect and attractive manner, by a series of tableaux vivans, |sic] copied from the illustrations of the tale; these tableaux were the admiration of the audience, who testified their delight by the most enthusiastic applause” (Realizations 251). 49. Denis Diderot used Garrick’s facility in these demonstrations as evidence that acting is a technical, practiced skill that constitutes “passion well imitated” rather than emotions that are actually felt. Diderot states in “Le Paradoxe sur le comedien” (1773), “Can his [Garrick’s] soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face? I don’t believe it.... Actors impress the public not when they are furious,

but when they play fury well...” Diderot, “Le Paradoxe sur le comedien” [1773] trans. W. H. Pollock (London, 1883), ed. Lee Strasberg (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 33.

50. George Taylor, “Francois Delsarte: A Codification of Nineteenth-Century Acting,” Theatre Research International 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 71-81, 72.

51. This was a common meaning in the nineteenth century, but the mental or moral state began to take precedence and “attitude” now generally refers to a stance of the mind rather than body (OED 771). 52. Reprinted in George Taylor, Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1989), 2. 53. Jeffrey N. Cox claims that the monodrama lived on only as a style that influenced characterization in the theater of romanticism in “Melodrama, Monodrama and the Forms

of Romantic Tragic Drama,’ in Within the Dramatic Spectrum, ed. Karelisa V. Hartigan (New York: University Press of America, 1986). He suggests that the monodrama’s represen-

tation of “an entrapment in self-consciousness” is one pole against which the romantic tragic drama struggled; the other was the melodrama’s assertion that a “moral order” can arise out of terror and violence (21, 25). While Cox’s opposing poles are present in some romantic theater, monodramas and melodramas continued to be staged well into the twentieth century and particularly influenced early film. 54. “Monodrama’” designates twentieth-century plays that feature a single actor or productions in which the stage conveys one dominant character’s perception of the world, with

266 NOTES TO PAGES 44-45

other characters as projections of the protagonist’s ego (what might be called “single protagonist monodramas'’ ). For the former, see Gad Kaynar’s analysis of Oren Neeman’s A Jew

in the Dark, which premiered at the Israeli National Theatre Habimah in 1996. See also Julian Meyrick, “The Meaning of Tragedy: Literary Pattern vs. Performance Form,’ Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 16, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 119-131. The single protagonist monodrama became important in Russian modernism as Nikolay Evreinov’s monodramatic staging theories were adapted by Konstantin Stanislavsky and passed to Gordon Craig in a famous collaboration initiated by Isadora Duncan at the Moscow Art Theatre (Hamlet, 1909). See Laurence Senelick, “Moscow and Monodrama: The Meaning of the CraigStanislavsky Hamlet,” Theatre Research International 6, no. 2 (1981): 109-124.

55. Operatic and musical compositions that include spoken text continue to be designated monodramas. The term entered the English vocabulary of music later than the theatrical vocabulary. In 1954, it was included in Grove’s Dictionary of Music with a reference to Hector Berlioz’s Lelio (OED 1016). See Berlioz, Lelio: or the Return to Life Op.14. (New York: Belwin Mills, 1832). Francois Delsarte knew Berlioz in Paris and may have been aware

of his monodrama, which resembles later Delsartean performances. 56. Gale, “Going Solo: An Historical Perspective on the Actress and the Monologue,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, ed. Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2007), 291-313. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as “Going solo.’

57. The tradition of using solo performance to explore subjectivity is strong in the postmodern performance art monologues of Anna Deavere Smith, Laurie Anderson, and others, who combine bodily movement and gesture, music, and speech as in the early monodramas. Jo Bonney prints many texts from this influential genre in Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000). See the conclusion for my discussion of Smith. 58. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (New York: Norton, 1996), I. 155-161. Henceforth cited in the text as Aurora.

59. See Margaret Reynolds’s “Preface” to Aurora Leigh for a summary of Barrett Browning’s reception history. 60. See Isobel Armstrong’s “A Music of Thine Own: Women’s Poetry—An Expressive Tradition” and Joyce Zonana’s “The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics,” both in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). As Zonana claims, a negative response was evident as early as John Nichol’s 1857 description of the passage as a “perfect shoal of mangled and pompous similes” in Westminster Review (60). 61. Barrett Browning described Corinne as “an immortal book” to be read every year. See Sandra M. Gilbert, “From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento,” in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 30. Aurora reenacts Corinne’s crowning in Rome with a pose, and the two characters share

a mixed Italian-British heritage (Aurora II. 60-62). In Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), Angela Leighton finds such poses “silly” and suggests Aurora’s crowning is a “literary in-joke about the Corinne myth” (88). But this view problematically echoes that represented in the text by Aurora’s cousin, Romney, who finds her performance of literary ambition “silly” because he limits her “purpose” to wifely domesticity.

NOTES TO PAGES 45-47 267

62. Yopie Prins’s Victorian Sapphos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) also describes how nineteenth-century women poets used mythic figures to explore the concerns of gender and genre: “...through Sappho we can trace the gendering of lyric as a feminine genre, not because we assume she was the first poet to speak as a woman, but because the assumption of voice in lyric reading produces Sappho as a feminine figure that does not speak” (37). See also Prins’s “‘Lady’s Greek’ (with the Accents): A Metrical Translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson,’ in Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 591-618.

63. Gilles Deleuze claims diversity is not difference in Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), but I argue that the diversity embodied and posed by a soloist represents an opening to otherness.

64. On May 23, 1845, Barrett Browning wrote, “The Prometheus is done—but the monodram [sic] is where it was.’ See Elvan Kintner, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1:73. Culler uses Barrett Browning’s letters to establish that R. Browning was aware of the term monodrama, but does not discuss Barrett Browning or investigate the Aeschylus

monodrama. 65. Margaret Reynolds and Barbara Rosenbaum, “‘Aeschylus’ Soliloquy’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,’ Victorian Poetry 35, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 329-348. Henceforth cited in the text as “Aeschylus.”

66. Reynolds and Rosenbaum write of William Irvine and Park Honan’s The Book, The Ring and The Poet: “In a 1974 biography of Robert Browning, his wife and her poetry are treated with exaggerated scorn. How unfortunate under the circumstances, that the authors should have chosen as an epigraph to their account of Browning’s funeral and final farewell, lines from this particular poem—‘Aeschylus’ Soliloquy’—by Elizabeth Barrett Browning” (“Aeschylus” 334).

67. Culler adopts Tennyson’s description of Maud as the definition of the monodrama: “The peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters” (“Monodrama’” 369). He follows Robert Langbaum’s description of the monologue as a form that produces dramatic irony whereby the reader understands more than the speaker intends to reveal (“Monodrama’” 382). Culler argues that Tennyson wrote monodramas, while only R. Browning wrote “true” dramatic monologues, as if the form were the idiosyncratic style of one poet. 68. As late as 1909, Arthur Sedgwick described Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” “Demeter and Persephone,’ and “Tithonus” as monodramas (“Monodrama’” 369). 69. Her source material was most likely Aeschylus’ Vita, which was found attached to a draft of her Prometheus Bound (“Aeschylus” 343). 70. All references are to line number in the Reynolds and Rosenbaum diplomatic transcription, but I have taken account of the textual corrections to produce a reading text in my quotes. 71. AsI describe in the introduction, Vernon Lee was one of the advocates of a historical reading practice suggesting that any text, not just a performance text, should be interpreted kinesthetically. The relationship between a text and its performance continues to be debated. For a recent discussion of the debates, see Peter Kivy, The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) and Anna Christina Ribeiro’s review of Kivy’s work in Mind (January 2009).

268 NOTES TO PAGES 47-50

72. Reynolds and Rosenbaum note that “in many of her letters Barrett Browning attributes what she saw as the degradation of the nineteenth-century theatre to the incomprehension of the public and the imperative that the dramatist submit to the dictates of popular taste” (“Aeschylus” 344). 73. Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language (London: Routledge, 2004), 136-138.

74. Garrett Stewart theorizes a “phonotext” that negotiates the tension between the graphic and aural properties of language produced by any reading event: “A word is read

with no presumption that a voice either preceded that textual mark or can be elicited from it. Yet a voice is brought fo it, one that often produces an adventitious, potentially submorphemic ‘sound’ even when the written word is over—a voiced though silent sound.” See Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 135.

75. Herbert F. Tucker discusses the fragments of stornelli sung by the monk in R. Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi’ as lyrical outbursts against the “historical monologue” that suggest the “dissolution” of the “individual self” See Tucker’s “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,’ in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hések and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 226-235. I read the interludes of song that are a frequent feature of Victorian monologues as monodramatic remnants rather than lyric outbursts. 76. Barrett Browning, “The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus,” in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Horace E. Scudder (New York: Buccaneer, 1993), 330. Henceforth cited in the text as “Virgin.”

77. In the late fourth century, Augustine argued, “The entire human race that was to pass through woman into offspring was contained in the first man when that married couple received the divine sentence condemning them to punishment and humanity produced what humanity became, not what it was when created, but when, having sinned, it was punished.’ See Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Random, 1988), 108-109.

78. Linda M. Lewis overlooks the subversive interrogations of scripture in “The Virgin” when she reads the poem as an acceptance of Augustinian theories. See Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spiritual Progress (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 161. Henceforth cited in the text as Progress.

79. Margo K. Louis, “Enlarging the Heart: L. E. L’s “The Improvisatrice, Hemans’s ‘Properzia Rossi; and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh,’ in Victorian Literature and Culture (1998), 1-17.

80. Barrett Browning read seven chapters of the Bible daily (Progress 9-10). 81. G. P. Landow quotes this passage in his introduction to Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (Boston: Routledge, 1980) to demonstrate the widespread use of typology in the period, but he does not examine her revisions to the hermeneutic (6). Henceforth cited in the text as Types.

82. Most critics claim that Barrett Browning derived this idea from Emanuel Swedenborg’s theory of correspondence, which claimed that the heavenly can be known by studying the earthly because material objects have spiritual manifestations. Correspondence builds on biblical typology, and Barrett Browning uses the language of both to develop her version of the fourfold method (5.123). See Aurora, Book V (120-124) and Reynolds's discussion of Swedenborg in the notes on pages 237—239 (7.763 and 7.842).

NOTES TO PAGES 51-52 39269

83. Barrett Browning considered classical mythology in typological relation to Christian myth, writing to R. Browning, “And then Christianity is a worthy myth, and poetically acceptable” (March 29, 1845, Letters I.43).

84. Christina Rossetti, The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on The Apocalypse (New York: Young, 1892), 438. Henceforth cited in the text as Face. For a detailed discussion of this work, see Robert M. Kachur, “Repositioning the Female Christian Reader:

Christina Rossetti as Tractarian Hermeneut in The Face of the Deep,’ Victorian Poetry 35, no. 2 (1997): 193-214.

85. See John Keble’s On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Father of the Church, Tract 89, in Tracts for the Times, vol. 6 (1868) for a discussion of nature’s symbolic teachings and

the sacramental universe. Isaac Williams’s On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge, Tract 89 in Tracts for the Times, vol. 6 (1868) argues that the biblical text offers

“hidden wisdom” in “dark and difficult sayings” as it reserves a specific, appropriate knowledge for each individual. Both are discussed in Lynda Palazzo’s Christina Rossetti’ Feminist Theology (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 58-65. Henceforth cited in the text as Theology.

86. Pusey preached, ““When the woman saw the tree was good for food’ (this is the lust of the flesh) ‘and that it was pleasant to the eyes’, (this was the lust of the eye,) ‘and a tree to be desired to make one wise’ (here is the ‘pride of life) she took of the fruit and ‘did eat’ and, ‘as the first fruit of her sin, she spread her sin to whom she could.” (Theology xiii). 87. Her earlier works, Called to Be Saints (1881) and Time Flies (1885), fit more easily into the devotional category than Face and Letter and Spirit (1883). 88. Christina Rossetti’s influence on modernism is evident in Ezra Pound’s “Mr. Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse,” Poetry 4, no. 3 (June 1914), 111-120. Pound takes issue with

Hueffer’s appreciation of Rossetti’s experiments in voicing, claiming that he himself went back to Rossetti’s sources, which he identifies as Arnaut Daniel, Guido, and Dante. 89. Christina Rossetti, Commonplace in Poems and Prose, ed. Jan Marsh (London: Everyman, 1996), 383. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as PP. 90. The performance also included a “processional” of “English-Grecian maidens,” who sang and moved ina manner anticipating Isadora Duncan’s dance performances (Bachanale, Gluck-Mottle Suite, c.1910), and the processionals written by H.D. (“Hymen,” 1921). 91. Although not many women poets were artists’ models, many performed social poses and recitations to frame the reception of their poems. Mary Robinson, a popular actress turned poet, performed improvisational poetry and impersonated Sappho to market her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon (1796). Poets Caroline Norton and Eliza Cook also dressed like Sappho, as described by Margaret Reynolds in “I lived for art, I lived for love’: The Woman Poet Sings Sappho’s Last Song,’ in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 207-306. Letitia Landon, as L. E. L., also performed the “poetess” role and became a “drawing-room attraction” at aristocratic gatherings. She appeared as Corinne after she wrote poems for Madame de Staél’s novel based on Lyon Hamilton. 92. Rossetti’s slight figure, defined features, and serious expression were the ideal until later models such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris epitomized the luxuriant hair and sensuous, erotic expression that has come to be associated with the PRB. See Barbara Garlick’s “Defacing the Self: Christina Rosseti’s The Face of the Deep as Absolution,” in

270 NOTES TO PAGES 52-54 Tradition and the Poetics of Selfin Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 171.

93. Linda H. Peterson, “Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of Christina Rossetti and the PRB,’ Victorian Poetry 32, nos. 3-4 (1994), 214-215. Peterson claims that Rossetti “engages typology and its hermeneutic system in a far more revisionary way” in her “major narrative poems,” but the shorter poems and monologues merely reproduce “religious symbols derived from traditional authorities” (216). 94. Rossetti’s poems invoking Eve’s voice include “Shut Out” (1856) and “Eve” (1865); she also wrote monologues for classical characters such as “Sappho” (1846), “What Sappho

Would Have Said Had Her Leap Cured Instead of Killing Her” (1848), and “Ariadne to Theseus” (1844).

95. John 19:25 lists the women at the cross as Mary, her sister, and Mary Magdalene (see also Mark 15:33). 96. Rossetti’s “Good Friday” is the only poem by a woman that Landow discusses in Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows. For a summary of the prevalence and significance of the “smitten rock” image, see Landow’s article on the Victorian Web, “The Smitten Rock: One of the Most Popular Victorian Uses of Typological Symbolism,” at www.victorianweb.org/ religion/type/moses.html. 97. The prevalence of Victorian invocations of the Pisgah sight contributes to James Joyce’s critique of idealized nationalism at the end of the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986), “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums.” For a detailed

analysis of the parable, see Amardeep Singh’s “A Pisgah Sight of Ireland: Religious Embodiment and Colonialism in Ulysses,” Semeia 88 (1999): 129-147.

98. Christina Rossetti suggested that their contemporary W. E. Gladstone excluded Webster from his “list of poetesses” because of her work for women’s suffrage but claimed that hers is “the one name which I incline to feel as by far the most formidable of those known to me.” See Angela Leighton’s “‘Because Men Made the Laws’: The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet,’ in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 227.

99. Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets argues that Webster’s monologues are more “secular and everyday” than Browning’s: “their speakers are not saints, artists or charlatans, but real men and women, with altogether smaller sins and guilts” (178). While monologues like “A Castaway” might be characterized as “secular, Webster also adopts the voices of types with large “guilts,” including Judas, Pilate, and Pilate’s wife, Procla. Patricia Rigg’s “Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama” in Victorian Review 26, no. 2 (2001), 75-107, is one of the few studies that has taken up Culler’s discussion of the monodrama. Yet, Rigg concludes that Webster does not write dramatic monologues and locates “secular” studies like “A Castaway” but not “Medea in Athens” within the monodramatic tradition, in spite of the precedent of Benda’s Medea monodrama. Christine Sutphin discusses the mythological monologues in “The Representation of Women’s Heterosexual Desire in Augusta Webster’s ‘Circe’ and “Medea in Athens,” Women’s Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 373-392, and the

“fallen woman” in “Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints,” Victorian Poetry 38, no. 4 (2000): 511-531.

100. Webster, Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1870). Henceforth cited in the text as Portraits.

NOTES TO PAGES 54-59 271

101. Webster, A Housewife’s Opinions (London: Macmillan, 1879), 215. Henceforth cited in the text as Housewife’s.

102. Anno Domini is Latin for “the year of the lord,” and thirty-three is the age at which Christ is said to have died. Augusta Webster, A Woman Sold (London: Macmillan, 1867). Henceforth abbreviated in the text as Sold. 103. “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Landow writes that this was the “prophetical type which Victorian commentators take to be simultaneously both the Bible’s first type and its first prophecy” (“Bruising” 11-14). 104. “Suppose the first personal pronoun not artistically vicarious but standing for the writer's substantive self; what an appalling dozens of persons!” (Housewife’s 153). 105. Wilde’s portrayal of Dorian’s beautiful and rebellious mother in The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Norton Critical, 2007) could describe Vigée Le Brun’s “Lady Hamilton as Bacchante” (figure 1.1): “And his mother with her Lady Hamilton face, and her moist wind-dashed lips.... She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress. There were vine leaves in her hair” (121). As I discuss in chapter 3, the first part of Amy Lowell’s Can Grande’s Castle (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1918) retells the story of Lyon Hamilton’s affair with Admiral Horatio Nelson and features her “marvelous ‘Attitudes’” (7). 106. Blau, The Eye of Prey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 173, 185.

Chapter 2 1. Charles Walter Brown, The American Star Speaker (Chicago: M. A. Donohue, 1902), 9.

2. Hugo’s novel Les Misérables (1862) was adapted into the famous English-language musical in 1985; Beth dies in Alcott’s Little Women (1871); Marguerite Gautier is the heroine of Dumas’s novel and play, The Lady of the Camellias (1848), which was later adapted by Giuseppe Verdi as La Traviata (1853) and several films called Camille beginning in 1909 (most famously the 1936 version starring Greta Garbo); Mimi was a character in Puccini's 1896 opera, La Bohéme. 3. See Ann Chisholm, “Incarnations and Practices of Feminine Rectitude: NineteenthCentury Gymnastics for U.S. Women,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 737-763. Chisholm discusses gymnastic systems that trained nineteenth-century women’s bodies for “Republican Motherhood,’ of which the ideal emblem was the Venus de Milo (737).

4. Although several of Delsarte’s students figure prominently, Delsarte is not mentioned in Joseph Roach’s The Player’s Passion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), an influential study of acting style in relation to contemporaneous ideas of the body, the passions, and scientific discoveries. Richard Schechner footnotes Delsarte in “Magnitudes of Performance” but claims that if Delsarte rejected the formalized actor training of his period, his system developed “sclerosis” and his students produced another rigid and mechanical system. See By Means of Performance, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 46-47, n. 12. Taylor S. Lake describes the influence of Delsartism on late-nineteenth-century actresses in “The Delsarte Attitude on the Legitimate Stage: Mary Anderson’s Galatea and the Trope of the Classical Body,” in Essays on Francois Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 113-135.

272 NOTES TO PAGES 59-60

5. Ruyter, Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1979), 27. Henceforth cited in the text as Reformers. Ruyter expands this discussion with a closer analysis of bodily expression and movement techniques, which then influenced modern dancers, especially Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, in “The Delsarte Heritage,’ Dance Research 14, no. 1 (Summer, 1996): 62-74. Henceforth cited in the text as “Heritage.” 6. Julia Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Henceforth cited in the text as Expressionism. 7. Walker’s “‘In the Grip of an Obsession’: Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession,” Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 617-631, examines theories of selfhood related to film performance. Hilary Hart’s “Do You See What I See? The Impact of Delsarte on Silent Film Acting,” in Essays on Francois Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 185-199, helpfully analyzes the use of Delsartean gestures in American silent film, with a focus on the performances of Lillian Gish. Henceforth cited in the text as “See.” Neither Walker nor Hart explores Delsarte’s influence on film technologies and montage.

8. Walker describes a “crisis” when film first appeared and “threatened to displace, replace, or even erase the human body whenever the vehicle of technology was made to substitute for the tenor of the body” (Expressionism 2). 9. Felicia McCarren’s Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) also views dance as a “physiological inspiration” for cinema and complicates the technology-nature dichotomy by describing two stories of dance’s relation to machines: “one recounting the stripping down of gesture and bodies to machine aesthetics and the minimum gesture...the other recounting the fleshing out of machines with bodies, reconnecting technology to its mythic, ritual, or religious functions” (21, 11). McCarren does not discuss Delsartism, although the movement associated bodies with machines and religion, and the statue pose was the protocinematic and protodance form that best articulates this connection. Henceforth cited in the text as Dancing. See also Julia L. Foulkes, Modern Bodies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 10. Miriam B. Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer and Benjamin on Cinema and Modernity,’ in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vannessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California P, 1995), 365. 11. Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2009), 3, 39.

North’s fascinating study of the humor in technological modernity does not assume a simple human-machine divide, as he recognizes: “Some of the aesthetic value of machines, in fact, comes from the way they resemble and thus externalize certain human attributes

and impulses” (198). Yet, he consistently associates bodily movement onscreen with mechanical reproduction and does not consider the very different Delsarte-derived theory of the cinematic body that, as I will show, shaped even Chaplin’s movements. Henceforth cited in the text as Machine. 12. Steve Dixon’s recent Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance,

Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) examines the long history of media in performances from ancient Greek tragedy through Wagner’s gesamtkunstwerk and modernist groups including the Futurists. Interest in postmodern dance and digital media is evident in the special section on “Dance and Media Technologies,” edited

NOTES TO PAGES 60-61 = 273

with an introduction by Johanes Birringer, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 24, no.1 (2002): 84-119. 13. Kuleshov was partially influenced by the Delsarte-derived theories Isadora Duncan promulgated from her Moscow school beginning in 1921, the year Kuleshov established his workshop.

14. Isadora Duncan began performing in 1895, the same year that Edison filmed “Serpentine Dance,” a skirt dance performed by Annabelle Whitford and banned for the peep it afforded of her undergarments (Dancing 50). Whitford’s dance on Edison’s film is available at Internet Archive, www.archive.org/details/dance1895. Skirt dancing was popularized by Loie Fuller, who, influenced by new technologies for projecting light, designed spectacular effects and an apparatus to manipulate long folds of fabric. Her choreography is understood as “protocinematic” by Christophe Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics,’ PMLA 120, no. 1 (2005): 128-147. See also Tom Gunning’s reevaluation of cinematic technology and the “collision” between “the aesthetic and the technological” in “Lote Fuller and the Art of Motion” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003): 75-90, 80.

15. Francois Delsarte, Literary Remains in Delsarte System of Oratory, ed. Abbé Delaumosne (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893), 467. Henceforth cited in the text as Remains.

16. For a discussion of Delsarte’s use of melodramatic gestures without the larger sphere of Delsartean paratheatrical practices, see George Taylor’s “Francois Delsarte: A Codification of Nineteenth-Century Acting,’ Theatre Research International 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 71-81.

17. According to the OED, the word semiotic (or semeiotic) had been used to refer to a language of signs since 1641, and after 1797, it took on the meaning of the adjective symbolic.

Through the nineteenth century, the term was primarily related to medical symptoms (958-959).

18. Walker provocatively suggests that Saussure’s analysis of the signifier-signified relationship was a rejection of Delsartean theories: “It is worth noting that, on the banks of Lac Leman, across the river from the Uni-Bastion where Saussure was delivering his famous lectures, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze was staging civic pageants with performers trained in ‘eurhythmics, his program of physical movement derived from Delsarte’s teachings” (Expressionism 256, n. 6). Walker does not detail the connection between Delsarte and Dalcroze, but Selma Landen Odom describes the relationship in “Delsartean Traces in Dalcroze Eurhythmics,” in Essays on Francois Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 137-152. Henceforth cited in the text as “Traces.”

19. Durivage’s article is reprinted with the writings of Delsarte’s students Abbé Delaumosne and Angelique Arnaud in Delaumosne, Delsarte System of Oratory (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893), 576-577. Henceforth cited in the text as Oratory. 20. The first seven chapters of the book he intended to title My Revelatory Episodes, or the History of an Idea Pursued for Forty Years largely describe this work. 21. The students of Delsarte are listed in Montrose J. Moses, “Percy Mackaye and His Father,’ Book News Monthly (October 1911): 100, clipping in the Papers of Marion and Percy MacKaye, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. Henceforth cited in the text as

274 NOTES TO PAGES 61-66

“Percy. I am grateful to the staff at the Harvard Theatre Collection, particularly Elizabeth A. Falsey.

22. Francois Delsarte, “Address before the Philotechnic Society of Paris,” in Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1902). Henceforth cited in the text as “Address.”

23. Comte’s Systeme de Politique Positive (1851-1854) presents an empirically based “Positivism” as a doctrine that could embrace all of science, philosophy, and psychology, bind men under one “Religion of Humanity,” and establish a utopian “Positive Polity.’ Walker discusses Delsarte’s indebtedness to Lavater, an eighteenth-century moral philosopher whose theory of physiognomy localized three human faculties—vitality, morality, and intelligence—in three regions of body (Expressionism 46). In keeping with her emphasis on technology and the institutionalization of Delsartism in universities, she details the “pseudoscientific theories” to which he ascribed but not his religious aspirations. 24. Delsarte used the term attitude to refer to poses of emotional states rather than Emma Lyon Hamilton’s classical statues, but as I argue later, he performed both posed displays of the passions and statue poses. 25. Some interpretations of the emotional valence of the attitudes differ slightly; whereas Delsarte described the con-con attitude of the head as “tenderness,” his most widely published American student, Genevieve Stebbins, uses the term “veneration” in Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed. (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1902), 221. Henceforth cited in the text as Delsarte Expression.

26. American dancer and Delsarte proponent Ted Shawn writes that Delsarte claimed “motion creates emotion” in Every Little Movement (New York: Dance Horizons, 1954), 57. Henceforth cited in the text as Every Movement. The James-Lange theory that emotions are produced by physiological changes in the body (a blush produces embarrassment rather than vice versa) influenced Vernon Lee’s idea of aesthetic emotion and mimicry, as my introduction discusses. 27. Delsarte does not discuss Swedenborg in Literary Remains, but Stebbins points to similarities in their ideas (Delsarte Expression 109). 28. Originally published in True Christian Religion, The Essential Swedenborg, ed. Sig Synnestvedt (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1970), 144. 29. Ideas of the body’s corruption were bolstered by biblical commands such as “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13).

30. Walker claims that due to the teachings of “less knowledgeable” “enthusiasts,” bodily training techniques, like posing, were “put in the service of something other than learning the intricacies of the Delsarte method,” including “women’s health reform” and “the physical culture movement” (Expressionism 52). While Ruyter is less dismissive of women’s applications of Delsarte, she does not recognize the relevance of posing to Delsarte’s theories.

31. William R. Alger, “The Aesthetic Gymnastics of Delsarte,” Werner’s Magazine (January 1894), 3-4, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. 32. Lucien Odend@’hal, “Delsartiana,”’ Werner’s Magazine 25, no. 5 (July 1900): 509.

33. While Sandow is unknown in performance history, he is famous among bodybuilders; since 1977, a statuette called “The Sandow” has been bestowed upon the annual

NOTES TO PAGES 67-69 = 275

winner of the Mr. Olympia contest for bodybuilding, a competition won by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1980.

34. In “Ithaca,” Sandow’s exercises are described as a “means still remaining to achieve...the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility” (Il. 509-518). The “first drawer” he unlocks in the episode contains “a chart of the measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled before, during, and after 2 months’ consecutive use of Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser, an early weight machine and predecessor of today’s Bow Flex (Il. 1815-1817). References are to line numbers in James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986). 35. “Buffalo Marks Centenary of Steele Mackaye, Actor,” Buffalo Evening News (May 29, 1942): 7. Henceforth cited in the text as “Centenary.” Fred Winslow Adams claims that the lecture took place at the home of Reverend William R. Alger, providing further evidence that Delsarte’s religious teachings were an important aspect of his appeal. “Steele Mackaye’s Literary Work,’ Boston Evening Transcript (1894). Henceforth cited in the text as “Mackaye’s Literary.” Both clippings are in the Papers of Marion and Percy MacKaye, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. 36. Published by Werner in Albany, the magazine was originally titled The Voice, then renamed Werner's Voice Magazine, and finally Werner’s Magazine. 37. Arguing that Delsartism diminished the actor’s interpretive agency, Walker suggests that through MacKaye’s technologies and Delsartean acting style, “the body of the actor was practically reduced to a mere visual symbol” (Expression 42). The new movement technologies and techniques of expressive posing were viewed as enabling by the many Delsartean practitioners. 38. According to Ruyter’s The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), women composed about 85 percent of Delsartean teachers, and most women taught in this area of generalized “self-cultivation”

(58-59). Henceforth cited in the text as Cultivation. In her “Introduction” to Essays on Francots Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 1-7, Ruyter suggests that there were “three phases” of Delsartism in the 1870s and 1880s: one

was “closely associated with the professional training of speakers and actors”; a second “emphasized physical culture for the general public and was particularly popular among women’; and in the third, “Delsartean aesthetic theory was applied to all aspects of life” (3). Such distinct phases cannot be identified if Delsartism is considered in its international

context, and many trajectories of the movement continued well into the twentieth century. 39. Hovey (1849-1918) was born Henrietta Knapp, married Edward B. Crane, and used his name until 1885, when she married Edmund Russell. They separated by 1890, and in 1894, she married the poet Richard Hovey, who was also interested in Delsarte and influenced Ezra Pound (see chapter 3). I will use “Hovey” because her most significant contribu-

tions to Delsartism were made under this name. See Ruyter’s chapter “Henrietta Hovey:

From the Fashionable Salon to the School of Denishawn” for a detailed biography (Cultivation 31-44). 40. “What Is Delsartism,” A Delsartean Scrap-book, ed. Frederic Sanburn (New York: Lovell, 1891), 4. The volume gathers and reprints many pieces on Hovey, and as Number 124 in Lovell’s Literature Series, it is placed in the context of such “desirable works of current

276 NOTES TO PAGES 69-72

and standard literature” as John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and Volume 1 of Emerson’s Essays (11). Henceforth cited in the text as Scrapbook.

41. “Dress and Personality” by Emma Moffett Tyng, originally published in Harper’s Bazar. 42. Baudelaire describes dandies who “have no other calling but to cultivate the idea of beauty in their persons” in The Painter of Modern Life, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 27.

43. Ruyter quotes a review from “Occasional Notes,” June 29, 1886. Moscheles’s studio

and friends (including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, and George Du Maurier) were described in “Felix Moscheles: A Volume Containing Fragments of His Autobiography,’ New York Times, June 3, 1899. 44. The review was originally printed in “Occasional Notes,” August 2, 1886. 45. The piece is attributed to Helen Fagg and originally published in the New York Home Journal. 46. Morgan, An Hour With Delsarte: A Study of Expression (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1889). Henceforth cited in the text as Hour. 47. These drawings also resemble Charcot’s photographs of hysterical women at the Saltpétriére posed in attitudes with subtitles designating emotions such as “amourous supplication,” “ecstasy,” or “eroticism.” These images indicate a common link between women’s hysterical poses, melodramatic acting styles, and Delsartean expression. For Charcot’s images, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 150 and Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysterta: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpétriére (Boston: MIT Press, 2004). 48. The enduring connection between solo posing, women’s bodies, and pathos is evident in Pia Lindman’s site-specific poses reenacting images of grief from the New York Times. See my conclusion and Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli’s “The Visual Grammar of Suffering: Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 84 (2006): 77-92. 49. Meredith Willson, The Music Man, choreographed by Oona White (1957). I am grateful to Anna Henchman for this reference. 50. Joseph Fahey explores the professionalization enabled by the movement in “Quiet

Victory: The Professional Identity American Women Forged through Delsartism” in Essays on Francots Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 43-84. He argues that women’s professionalism was “compromised at best”

and frequently “defined by little else than a defensive response to those who criticized Delsartism,” but he focuses on women’s careers in “theater training” rather than studio

teaching and the variety of paratheatrical solo performance forms promoted by Delsartism (75). 51. Quoted in Patricia M. Amburgy, “Fads, Frills, and Basic Subjects: Special Studies and Social Conflict in Chicago in 1893,” Studies in Art Education 43, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 109-123, 114.

52. “Life and Letters” in Poet Lore: A Quarterly Magazine of Letters 17, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (Boston: Poet Lore, 1906), 135. See also “To Spread Socialism through Drama: The Progressive Stage Society Gives First Series of Plays” (November 28,

NOTES TO PAGES 72-74 277

1904) and “Progressive Stage Society’s Plans” (April 19, 1905), unattributed reviews in the New York Times, Online Archive. Ibsen’s The Master Builder was presented on May 2 and 4, 1905.

53. Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in Modern Dance, 1890-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 1999), 48. 54. Stebbins’s Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression went into six editions and was expanded in 1902. Other related books include Society Gymnastics and Voice Culture (1885), Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics (1893), Genevieve Stebbins Drills (1895), and The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training (1898, 1913). Ruyter claims that Stebbins lived until 1933 but notes that a Dutch dance historian wrote in 1926 that she had died in India, and no obituary has been found (Cultivation 52). Jane Donawerth’s Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) gives Stebbins’s dates as “1857-1914?”

55. Stebbins’s studies with MacKaye and position at the Boston University School of Oratory are described in Norman Astley’s New York School of Expression Prospectus (New York: Werner, 1893), held in the Library of Congress Special Collections. Henceforth cited in the text as NY School. Although the prospectus prints MacKaye’s letter to Stebbins naming her as “the

only one of my pupils now living whom I can conscientiously recommend,’ distance later developed between them, perhaps due to MacKaye’s frustration with the “feminization” of Delsartism or Stebbins’s own assertions of originality and claims to expertise based on studies with Delsarte’s French students. See the biography in Ruyter’s Cultivation (45-54). Both Stebbins and Hovey emphasize their studies in France as a sign of Delsartean authenticity and to exploit the American fascination with European culture (Cultivation 33). 56. The clearest discussion of the transmission of Stebbins’s ideas into dance is in Ruyter’s “Heritage” (68-72). Ruyter expresses surprise at Stebbins’s interest in posing and claims that her training as a professional actor did not include the attitude (Cultivation 116-119. But given the emphasis on posing in late-nineteenth-century acting, she must have been exposed to attitudes in her stage training, as well as in her studies of Delsartism. Deborah Jowitt mentions Stebbins and Delsartism in Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), suggesting that Isadora Duncan was exposed to general Delsartism and that a more specific influence might be present in her theories of the body (79-81).

57. Stebbins’s books are cited by Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Volkonsky of Russia in his 1913 treatise on the Delsarte system. Hade Kallmeyer, a German physical culturist, references

Stebbins in her “system,” and Bess Mensendieck studied with Stebbins before opening training centers in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia (Cultivation 67-69). For the influence of Delsarte on Mensendieck, see Robin Veder, “The Expressive Efficiencies of American Delsarte and Mensendieck Body Culture,” in Modernism/

Modernity 17, no. 4 (2011): 819-838. Selma Landen Odom suggests that Emile JaquesDalcroze may have taken unattributed quotes from Stebbins (“Traces” 143). 58. Ruyter distinguishes Stebbins’s statue posing from the attitudes common in the nineteenth century by her fluid transitions and her practice of posing as a series of 10 or 20 statues in a performance (Cultivation 116-119). As I established in the first chapter, descriptions of Lyon Hamilton also focus on her transitions through a series of attitudes, occasionally even a thematically related sequence.

278 NOTES TO PAGES 75-83

59. Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1912), 23.

60. Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1889). Henceforth cited in the text as Recitation. 61. See Michael R. Turner’s Victorian Parlour Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (New York: Dover, 1967) for a description of this related practice. Authors common to both Delsartean and parlor recitations include James Whitcomb Riley, Bret Harte, Adelaide Anne Proctor, Eugene Field, and Robert Browning. This culture of recitation continues beyond the nineteenth-century parlor and Delsarte Matinees and well into modernism, as I discuss in the next chapter. 62. Mrs. William Calvin Chilton, Monodramatist (Chicago: Hollister Bros., 1908) is in the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, Redpath Chautauqua Collection.

63. The group was composed of Duncan’s six most successful students from her first Griinewald school; all took Duncan’s last name, and they were affectionately called “the Isadorables” in tours as a distinct group and with their teacher. Apeda’s photograph was reprinted in a program for the Isadora Duncan Dancers at the Auditorium Opera House, Oakland, California, December 1, 1919.

64. The dance is described in the New York Times review of November 17, 1909, “New Dances Here”: “This was in two scenes, the first showing the temple gates guarded by a yellow-clad Yogi.... To the waving of lights and the presentation of offerings Rhada came to life. In the dance which followed was shown the renunciation of the five senses.” 65. The Pittsburg Daily Headlight of February 4, 1924 (p. 3, cols. 1-3) describes the audience’s “applause of appreciation” for Shawn’s Jonas Tango, which he encored. Clipping in

Louise Brooks and the Denishawn Dancers Collection at the Leonard H. Axe Library, Pittsburg State University, Kansas. 66. Review in Werner’s Magazine (September 16, 1894), 334. 67. St. Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1939), 16-17. Henceforth cited in the text as Unfinished. 68. Bliss Carman was one of the few American poets from the previous generation that Ezra Pound admired, as I discuss in the next chapter.

69. The intellectual status Delsartism held for the period is evident in the New York Times announcement of The Making of Personality (Boston: L. C. Paige, 1908) as a “serious” study of the “invariable triplicity of effect, physical, mental, and spiritual, from all action

and all influence.” See “New Books from Boston Presses: Bliss Carman’s ‘Making of Personality’ Nearly Ready,” New York Times (February 14, 1908), Online Archive.

70. Naima Prevots’s Dancing in the Sun: Hollywood Choreographers, 1915-1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987) discusses the relationship between Shawn and Norma Gould, who would later develop dance programs demonstrating Delsartean influences at the University of California, Southern Branch (now UCLA), beginning in 1919 and the University of Southern California in 1920 (32). Henceforth cited in the text as Sun. 71. Bliss Carman, Address at Moonshine (New York: Tabard Press, 1911), 18-21. Carman’s

address to the graduating class MCMXI of the Unitrinian School of Personal Harmonizing founded by Mary Perry King at Moonshine, Twilight Park, in the Catskills was delivered in September 1911.

NOTES TO PAGES 84-87 279

72. The New York Times review of a concert of Denishawn choreography, “Tribute to Early Modern and Beauty,’ by Jack Anderson (March 31, 1988; Online Archive) claims, “The

concert’s tone was set at the start with ‘Floor Plastique, classroom exercises devised by Shawn to strengthen the muscles. But the way the dancers assumed statuesque poses suggested that he wished students to seek beauty as well as fitness.” 73. Elizabeth Drake-Boyt, Dance as a Project of the Early Modern Avant-garde, Dissertation, Florida State University, 2005: 141. Henceforth cited in the text as Project. The dissertation has been published as Dance as a Project of the Early Modern Avant-garde: An Analysis of Three Western Expressive Dance Works Created between 1900 and 1920 and Their Cultural Implications (Saarbriicken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2008).

74. Ted Shawn and Gray Pool, One Thousand and One Night Stands (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 70.

75. Hovey probably did not study with Delsarte, but St. Denis speaks to her perceived authority. 76. Even after Denishawn disbanded, Shawn’s students at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts studied Delsarte and read Shawn’s Every Little Movement as late as 1967 (“Project” 239).

77. One of the few books to recognize the significance of late-nineteenth-century theatrical traditions for early film is Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’s Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Although

they do not focus on dance or discuss Delsarte’s influence on Russian film and montage technology, they mention Delsartism: “Delsarte’s acting system, which was based on the teaching of poses, was still being taught by Gustave Garcia at the London Academy of Music in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the evidence from films...shows that these traditions were still alive a decade later throughout Europe” (81-82). Elizabeth Kendall’s Where She Danced (New York: Knopf, 1979) provides a general overview of the influence of dance on film but does not discuss Delsartism. Henceforth cited in the text as Where. Hilary Hart only briefly mentions Denishawn in “Do You See What I See? The Impact of Delsarte on Silent Film Acting” (“See” 189). 78. New York’s Dramatic Mirror (May 13, 1916) claims Griffith sent seven female actors

to Denishawn (Where 142). Other film stars who studied at Denishawn include Roszila Dolly, Leonire Ullrich, Ruth Chatterton, Ina Claire, Mabel Normand, Louise Glaum, Margaret Loomis, and Carol Dempster (“Project” 239). 79. Roberta E. Pearson’s Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) equates Delsartism with the “histrionic code” of acting and argues that it was supplanted by a “verisimilar” or realistic style of movement. She acknowledges Delsarte’s influence on early films but claims “the interesting parallels between Biograph and Delsarte style lie not in specific poses but in the overall principles of histrionically coded acting shared by the two” (23). She does not mention Denishawn’s function in disseminating this code. 80. Ruth St. Denis also performed in The Lily and the Rose, a film produced and written by Griffith and directed by Paul Powell. Ted Shawn performed as Faun in Cecil B. DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919). Kendall claims that dancers from the Denishawn school performed in Sex and The Lily and the Rose (1915), The Victoria Cross (1916), A Little Princess, Conscience, The Legion of Death, Joan the Woman, Cleopatra (1917), Hidden Pearls, Wild Youth, Bound in Morocco (1918), Pettigrew’s Girls, and Backstage (1919) (Where 144).

280 NOTES TO PAGES 88-91 81. Howell L. Piner, Werner's Readings and Recitations No. 23 (New York: Werner, 1899), 180.

82. Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 1974), 8. Henceforth cited in the text as Lulu.

83. Correspondence between H.D. and Kenneth Macpherson, a fellow member of the POOL film group, suggests that H.D. may have been considered for the part of Lulu. While visiting Pabst from October 21 to 25, 1927, Macpherson sent a letter to H.D. claiming that Pabst “loved the Kitten” (H.D.’s nickname): “And wht he reeeeeeally liked about the

fillum was that YOU showed up the utter futility of the Hollywood tradition, and that beauty was something quite different. And I m wondering if he still wants Louisa Brooks for Lulu, or whether he is writing the Kitten tonight to book her!!!!!!...“But she is ver’ good, ver’ strong, she makes a deep mark. ‘She impresses the whole idea of the film. O, she is strong. Look out Lulu! [sic]” Letter in the H.D. Archives at the Beinecke Library, Box 12, Folder 415. 84. Brooks claims that she knew wealthy men who “much like Schén in the film, backed shows to keep themselves well supplied with Lulus” (Lulu 97). 85. Mary Ann Doane, “The Erotic Barter: Pandora’s Box,’ in The Films of G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 70. Doane’s classic study discusses the many representations of Lulu in an account of how “her image circulates and is exchanged as a form of currency” (69). 86. For an analysis of Reifenstahl’s political posing, see Brigitte Peucker’s “The Fascist Choreography: Riefenstahl’s Tableaux,’ Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 2 (2004): 279-297. Peucker does not mention Delsarte in her discussion. 87. Karl Toepfer, “The Aristocratic City: The Dance Aesthetic of Dorothee Giinther and the Political Legacy of Francois Delsarte,’ in Essays on Francois Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 153-183. 88. This is not to undermine Michael North’s argument in Machine-Age Comedy that comedians like Chaplin exploit the technologies of modernity and that mechanization is funny, but North’s work demonstrates the prevailing interest in a modernist machine-body at the expense of other prominent kinesthetic ideals. 89. As I describe in the first chapter, the trope appears in J. J. Rousseau’s monodrama Pygmalion (1762) and several famous Pygmalion ballets (1734-1799). Inanimate figures also dance in Coppelia (Léo Delibes, 1870), The Nutcracker (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1892), and Petrushka (Igor Stravinsky, 1911). 90. Lev Kuleshov, “The Banner of Cinematography” (1920) in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 48. Henceforth cited in the text as “Banner.”

91. Evgeni Gromov, “Introduction,” in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 19. The book to which Gromov refers is Sergei Volkonsky’s The Expressive Person: A Stage Training in Gesture According to Delsarte (St. Petersburg: Apollon, 1913).

92. Mikhail Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor,’ in Inside the Film Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge, 1991), 46. Yampolsky recognizes the integral relationship between Delsartean performance and Kuleshov’s theories of montage, but not having studied Delsarte’s manuscripts or the

writings of his French and American students, he misunderstands the teachings as

NOTES TO PAGES 92-96 281

“physiognomy” and does not grasp the full extent of the influence. Henceforth cited in the text as “Kuleshov’s Experiments.” 93. See George Taylor and Rose Whyman’s “Francois Delsarte, Prince Sergei Volkonsky and Mikhail Checkhov,’ in Essays on Francois Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 97-111, 102. Henceforth cited in the text as “Volkonsky.”

Taylor and Whyman focus on the similarities between Delsarte’s theories and the principles of physical acting developed by Chekhov, particularly his idea of the “psychological gesture,’ but they also detail the Russian transmission of Delsartism and mention its influence on the theater practitioners Konstantin Stanislavsky, Rudolf Steiner, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and even the physiologists Ivan Pavlov and Ivan M. Sechenov. 94. Yampolsky claims that the Volkonsky and Kuleshov were interested in Delsarte’s

theories and the eurhythmics of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze due to their opposition to Stanislavsky’s “method” at the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky opposed gestural taxonomies, but he also worked with Volkonsky, and later critics have exaggerated the “opposi-

tion.’ Although Kuleshov consistently referenced Delsarte in his writings, Yampolsky suggests that he was equally indebted to Dalcroze, who, in any case, derived many ideas from Delsarte. Dalcroze had copies of the writings of Delsarte’s students in his library (“Traces” 137-152).

95. Lev Kuleshov, “Hands and Arms” (1926), in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 64-65. 96. Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film, ed. and trans. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 107. Henceforth cited in the text as Kuleshov. 97. Yampolsky argues that the intersection of montage and Delsartean performance was present at the very beginning of the VGIK’s film theory, but his insights have not been incorporated into film studies (“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 56). 98. Lev Kuleshov, “The Art of Creating with Light: Foundations of Thought,” in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 36. First published in Kinogazeta 12 (March 1918): 12. 99. Michael North, following Benjamin, claims that Chaplin embodied this syncopated aspect of film technology in machinelike movements, but Kuleshov associated the cinematic still with Delsartean expressive posing. 100. Lev Kuleshov, The Art of the Cinema, in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 138. Henceforth cited in the text as Art.

101. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” (1929) in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949). Henceforth

cited in the text as “Ideogram.” 102. Susan McCabe’s Cinematic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) is one of the excellent recent works that both recognizes and furthers the interest in montage. She argues that the relationship between modernist art and film may be characterized by a tension between a poetics of “corporeal subjectivity” and “cinematic bodies,” which “haunt, permeate, fragment and are fragmented by representation” (6—7). Delsartism, which she does not discuss, demonstrates a commitment to whole corporeal subjectivity yet produces the “cinematic bodies” she describes. See also P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) and Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (April 2006), a special issue on film.

282 NOTES TO PAGES 97-103

103. Wharton, Edith, House of Mirth (New York: Penguin, 1966), 150. Henceforth cited in the text as Mirth.

104. Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Urazone, 1992), 75, 108. Henceforth cited in the text as “Torque.” 105. The phrase is used in Laura Marcus’s “‘A New Form of True Beauty’: Aesthetics and Early Film Criticism” in Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (April 2006): 269-282. Marcus’s discussion of the aesthetics of early film does not mention Delsartism, although she does

recognize, “Action Picture romance comes when each hurdle is a tableau, when there is indeed an art-gallery-beauty in each of these swift glimpses” (276).

Chapter 3 1. Samuel Silas Curry, Browning and the Dramatic Monologue [1908] (New York: Haskell, 1965), 133-134. Henceforth abbreviated as BDM.

2. Edward Dowden was a professor at the University of Dublin when he wrote Robert Browning (London: J. M. Dent, 1904). 3. Norman Astley’s New York School of Expression Prospectus (New York: Werner, 1893)

describes the Literature course: “This is not confined, as in so many schools of Oratory and Expression, to the study of one or two great authors, as Shakespeare and Browning; but it consists of practical work, teaching how to ‘cut’ any novel or other work so as to present the style, plot and general ideas conveyed by a writer, in a brief class-talk of half an hour or so” (12). Henceforth cited in the text as NY School. 4. Julia Walker’s Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) considers the American expressive culture movement, and Mark Morrisson discusses the British verse-recitation movement in “Performing the

Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London,’ Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 3 (1996): 25-50. Henceforth cited in the text as Expressionism and “Pure Voice.” Neither Walker nor Morrisson considers the transatlantic aspects of recitation experienced firsthand by poets such as H.D., Eliot, and Pound, and Morrisson does not mention Delsartism as an influence on poetic recitation. I use the term cultures of recitation to recognize the many manifestations of the movements, including the prominent Delsartean trajectories. 5. Susan Howe’s The Dramatic Monologue (New York: Twayne, 1996) treats the dramatic monologue as a Victorian invention but discusses the monologues of T. S. Eliot and Pound as an essential but passing phase in their development. Carol T. Christ argues that Eliot was influenced by Tennyson’s lyric dramatic monologues and Pound followed

Browning’s model in “Self-Concealment and Self-Expression in Eliot’s and Pound’s Dramatic Monologues,’ Victorian Poetry 22, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 217-226, and Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

6. My sketches of these writers are necessarily brief, and each warrants an entire chapter, but this treatment establishes the scene of poetic solo performance in modernism that enables a detailed case study of H.D. 7. Brenda Gabioud Brown, “Elocution,’ in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Theresa Enos (New York: Garland, 1996), 212. 8. Samuel Silas Curry, The Province of Expression (Boston: Expression, 1891), viil. Henceforth cited in the text as Province.

NOTES TO PAGES 103-106 = 283

9. A Department of Elocution and Oratory was previously housed within the College of Liberal Arts at Boston University. By giving the school its own faculty, the university claimed, the real value of oratory “would be disseminated throughout the country, and thus a valuable service rendered to the cause of higher education at large.” Sixth Annual Report of the President of Boston University, 1878-1879. Boston University School of Oratory Records, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Henceforth cited in the text as Gotlieb. Walker names 1872 as the founding date, but the archives indicate that the action of trustees was taken on June 17, 1873, and the school opened the following October at 18 Beacon Street, Boston. 10. “Fourth Annual Report of the President of Boston University” 1876-1877 (Gotlieb). Bell’s father and grandfather had also been teachers of elocution. uu. “The School of Oratory,’ Boston Evening Transcript (May 16, 1879) (Gotlieb). 12. Monroe was serving as the “superintendent of “vocal culture” for the Boston area school system. “The Late Professor Monroe,” Boston Evening Transcript (July 24, 1879) (Gotlieb). 13. The “Sixth Annual Report of the President of Boston University” indicates that of the 77 students in 1876-1877, there were 27 teachers, 13 clergymen, 7 teachers of the deaf, 6 public readers/actors, 4 lawyers, 2 lecturers, and 18 studying “personal culture” (Gotlieb). 14. Kathleen Kilgore, Transformations: A History of Boston University (Boston: Trustees of BU, 1991), 70. Henceforth cited in the text as Transformations. According to Kilgore, Baright had previously established a Boston University Summer School of Oratory on Martha’s Vineyard, a program that probably emphasized self-cultivation. Walker does not mention Baright’s role as Monroe’s assistant or the dissolution of the School of Oratory but

claims that Curry assumed Monroe’s duties and merged Baright’s school with his (Expressionism 66). The archives indicate that she was the founder and first “principal” of the Boston School of Elocution and Expression. 15. The New York School of Expression Prospectus lists both Baright and Curry as among Stebbins’s renowned students (NY School 27). 16. In 1943, the institution was renamed Curry College and still operates in Milton, Massachusetts. A brief history of Baright and Curry is published on the Curry College Web site, but Delsarte is not mentioned. See www.curry.edu/About+ Us/Currys+Legacy/. 17. Delsarte defined speech as the language of mind, song as the language of love and life, and gesture as the language of the soul in his “Address before the Philotechnic Society of Paris”; see Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1902), 65—67.

18. Curry, Foundations of Expression (Boston: Expression, 1920), xiv, 10. Henceforth cited in the text as Foundations. 19. “The School of Elocution and Expression” clipping in Gotlieb. 20. Curry, Classic Selections from the Best Authors (Boston: Expression, 1888), V. 21. Curry, Imagination and Dramatic Instinct (Boston: Expression, 1896), 255-256. 22. As Julia Walker points out, this aspect of Curry’s approach to literary analysis anticipates the New Critics, although New Critical approaches were not attuned to subjective impressions or recitations (Expressionism 68). Walker does not discuss the significance of the dramatic monologue to Curry’s thought. 23. Basing her analysis primarily on Curry’s The Province of Expression (1891), Walker suggests that he differed from those interpreters of Delsarte who claimed that gesture was

284. NOTES TO PAGES 106-110

more important than speech. Curry generally insists that all three languages are necessary for expression, but his later book on the dramatic monologue focuses more on gesture. Walker also claims that Curry is “mostly secular” while Delsarte is “mystical,” a surprising distinction, given that Curry was a Methodist minister and taught for seminaries including Harvard's (Expressionism 69). 24. The publication of Curry’s book in 1908 preceded the publication of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1910-1911), reconstructed by his students. Of course, Saussure’s theories

were circulating earlier, and regardless of whether Curry had access to them, his discussion of language as a symbolic system suggests that there was fertile ground for such ideas among critics interested in recitation and performance-oriented approaches to literature. 25. Foradetailed discussion of the Chautauqua phenomenon, see Charlotte M. Canning’s

The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (lowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005). 26. Curry, Spoken English (Boston: Expression, 1913), 7. 27. A Delsartean Scrap-book (New York: Lovell, 1891) collects reviews and articles from

Hovey’s London years and claims that she was admired by Felix Moscheles and Robert Browning, among others. 28. Josephine Johnson, “The Music of Speech: Florence Farr and W. B. Yeats,” Text and Performance Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1981): 56-65. Henceforth cited in the text as “Music.” 29. Yeats discussed their experiments in his “Speaking to the Psaltery” (1907), first pub-

lished in the Monthly Review and reprinted in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961). Yeats is an important precedent for transnational cultures of recitation, but I do not discuss his work in detail here, choosing to focus on poets whose interest in recitation has been overlooked and who entered the modernist scene of poetry at the height of Delsartean cultures of recitation. 30. Florence Farr, The Music of Speech (London: Elkin Mathews, 1909). 31. “How to Practise Reading Aloud,” unattributed column in The Phonetic Journal in Pitman’s Journal of Commercial Education 56 by Sir Isaac Pitman (London: Pitman & Sons, 1897), 129.

32. Similar class anxieties are evident in Samuel Silas Curry’s link between speech and character in Spoken English: “To improve spoken English the teacher must, therefore, awaken the student to think and to feel” (6). 33. Lady Margaret Sackville, “The Art of Speaking Verse,” published in the Poetical Gazette (September 1912): 454. 34. Morrisson emphasizes the progressive and modernist Monro who used the Poetry Society to advance his own goals, but Monro also marginalized some women modernists, as Diana Collecott reveals in “‘Another Bloomsbury’: Women’s Networks in Literary London during World War I,” in Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links, Europe-America, 1890— 1939, ed. Marina Camboni (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 59-78. Henceforth cited in the text as “Another Bloomsbury.” I view Monro as a figure with both conservative and progressive tendencies, gender biases, and a capacity to enthusiastically support male and female modernists.

35. Morrisson writes, “Monro’s critical practice of ‘massing...quotations’ was an extension of verse-performance commonplaces, but it will also look somewhat familiar to readers of The Waste Land, or Pound’s Cantos. The Cantos are impersonal in that there is no consistent single lyric voice at the center of each poem” (“Pure Voice” 42).

NOTES TO PAGES 111-113-285

36. Alida Klementaski Monro, “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir,” in Collected Poems of Charlotte Mew (London: Duckworth, 1953), vii—viii. Henceforth cited in the text as “Memotr.’

37. Morrisson does not mention Klementaski Monro’s role in organizing the book-

shop’s readings and other events. Collecott claims that she “was vital to a cultural development which coincided with a dynamic shift from Victorian rules of elocution to the modern art of verse speaking, then being encouraged by the newly-founded Poetry Society and brought into the curriculum by London University and the Royal Schools of Speech and Drama” (“Another Bloomsbury” 67). 38. Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), claims that Mew’s and H.D.’s “concern with the performative aspect of language as a basis for poetry carries forward the Swinburne/Wilde/Yeats tradition and contrasts strongly with the formalism of some male modernists for whom, as for Derrida, the written text prevails over the spoken word” (166). Collecott contrasts Mew’s dramatic monologues with the “artifice of Pound’s or Eliot’s personae,’ but this distinction overlooks the fact that all present speakers who interrogate artifice, and all are interested in cultures of recitation, which Collecott does not detail. 39. Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle’s important A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) introduces the dramatic monologues of Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Anna Wickham but does not position

these writers within cultures of recitation. Dowson and Entwistle adhere to many of the generic assumptions I trouble, such as ideas that the dramatic monologue invokes “the reader’s sympathy and judgment,” is “not linguistically avant-garde,” and should be read biographically to determine which elements of the poem are “a cathartic evasion of the poet's condition” and which “can be directly construed with biographical details” (71). Henceforth cited in the text as History. Laura Severin’s Poetry off the Page: Twentieth-Century British Women Poets in Performance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004) describes the significance of performance to women poets, but in examining the long twentieth century, she does not consider modernist cultures of recitation. Henceforth cited in the text as Poetry off. 40. Monro and Alida Klementaski were married in 1920, although biographies suggest that they lived separately due to Monro’s homosexuality. See Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (London: Addison-Wesley, 1984), 147. Henceforth cited in the text as Friends.

41. Ina letter to Catherine Dawson Scott (June 26, 1913). 42. Hardy admired Mew’s work, and the two became friends. See Jeredith Merrin, “The Ballad of Charlotte Mew,” Modern Philology (1997), 208. 43. Charlotte Mew: Complete Poems, ed. John Newton (London: Penguin, 2000), 17. Henceforth cited in the text as Mew.

44. Laura Severin’s provocative reading suggests that these activities are “a parody of middle-class women’s pointless domestic arts like embroidery” (Poetry off 25). Yet, it is the fairies and not the women that “twine twigs,’ and the domestic arts (which are certainly not all pointless) are not the focus of the poem’s complex gender critique.

45. Severin claims, “The desire for women briefly flickers in the last lines of “The Farmer’s Bride, where it is a woman poet impersonating a man who claims, ‘Oh! My God!...’ But such love sputters out since it can only be figured in terms of heterosexual

286 NOTES TO PAGES 113-117

desire” (Poetry off 25). Severin claims that Mew generally critiques the Farmer’s attempt to possess a woman but then impersonates him for a few lines to illustrate queer silencing. Severin does not think Mew impersonates the aroused seventeen-year-old boy in “Féte” but instead “used a male speaker’s limited perception...to expose a woman’s unacknowledged complexity” (Poetry off 18). This inconsistent coupling of Mew and her speakers demonstrates a pitfall of biographical readings of dramatic monologues present since the Victorian period. 46. Reading the Changeling as a figure for lesbian desire, Severin claims that the child is a “girl” because he or she exhibits a concern for physical appearance and “badness” characteristic of the typical “Victorian girl” (“Poetry off” 25). Yet, the Changeling is not typical in any other way. 47. Severin claims that Mew declined to read at the Poetry Bookshop as “an extremely elegant form of non-performance” that symbolized lesbian silencing (Poetry off 10, 22-23). There is no evidence for this in Klementaski Monro’s memoir or the letters, and the other writers included on the program for November 23 (such as James Joyce) were not all reading or even present. 48. Marjorie Watts, Mrs Sappho: The Life of C. A. Dawson Scott (London: Duckworth, 1987), 56. Henceforth cited in the text as Sappho.

49. Quoted in Mary Celine Davidow’s “Charlotte Mew: Biography and Criticism,” unpublished dissertation, Brown University (1960), 310. Henceforth cited in the text as “Biography.”

50. Attesting to Mew’s interest in dramatic genres, she also wrote a play in Cornish dialect, The China Bowl, which was later adapted for radio performance. 51. British husbands and wives did not have equal rights to divorce until the 1923 Matrimonial Causes Act. Mew’s poem would have been considered in relation to contemporaneous debates on divorce, although she provides distance with a French-sounding name and references to Catholicism and Aix. 52. Dora Marsden’s feminist publication The New Freewoman: An Individualist Review (1913) was renamed The Egoist in 1914 at Ezra Pound's instigation. The anecdote indicates a convergence of feminist and individualist ideals, as well as the possibility that individualism could eclipse feminist projects. See Bruce Clarke, “Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound: The New Freewoman and “The Serious Artist,” Contemporary Literature 31 (1992): 91-112. 53. H.D., “Review of The Farmer’s Bride” in Egoist 3, no. 9 (September 1916): 135. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as FB. Robert Duncan, revealing his own interest in the dramatic monologue, discusses H.D.’s review of The Farmer’s Bride in his “Two Chapters from H.D,” TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968): 86.

54. Ezra Pound, “Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot” (Review of Prufrock and Other Observations), Egoist 4, no. 5 (1917): 72-74, 73.

55. Collecott claims that Pound’s review “reasserted the male line” (“Another Bloomsbury” 65), but H.D. had included Huefer and Frost in her list of poets who had written successful dramatic monologues. She also reviewed John Gould Fletcher, as well as Mew and Marianne Moore in the Egoist, although Collecott only mentions reviews of women writers. 56. See Newton’s introduction to Charlotte Mew: Selected Poems for lists of lines Eliot may have derived from Mew.

NOTES TO PAGES 118-122 287

57. Eliot delivered “The Music of Poetry” (1942) as the W. P. Ker Lecture for the University of Glasgow Press. In Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 112. Henceforth cited in the text as Eliot Selected.

58. Morrisson states, “Much of Eliot’s first collection of criticism, The Sacred Wood, reads like a synthesis of the interests and ideals of the verse-recitation movement” (“Pure Voice” 41).

59. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, in Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 204. 60. Popular manifestations of the pursuit of “personality” included Henrietta Hovey’s

“Delsartean personal analysis,’ intended to clarify the relationship between “Dress and Personality” to wealthy patrons (Scrapbook 120). “Dress and Personality” by Emma Moffett Tyng, originally published in Harper's Bazaar. 61. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in the Egozst (1919). 62. See my discussion in the introduction and Jonathan Culler’s recent critique of the practice in “Why Lyric,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 201-206. Herbert FE. Tucker presents a more

detailed analysis of the New Critical practice of reading any poem as a monologue in “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hések and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985): 226-243.

63. Eliot served as an extension lecturer for Oxford and the University of London from 1916 to 1919. See Gail McDonald, Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56-57.

64. George Santayana, “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner, 1900), 263. Henceforth cited in the text as “Elements.” Walker quotes the passage and contextualizes the term Expression with which it begins: “Indeed, the movement was so popular, its influence so pervasive, its precepts so widely accepted that it could be referenced with barely a mention of its name” (Expressionism 76,72). 65. Walker also notes that critics have pointed to Nietzsche, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(“framework of objectivity”), and Washington Allston’s influence on the idea and term (Expressionism 77).

66. First published as “Hamlet and His Problems” in Athenaeum (September 26, 1919). 67. Robert Browning, “Essay on Shelley,” in Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), 572. 68. Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 79.

69. In The Cambridge Intro to T: S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), John Xiros Cooper recognizes that the dramatic monologue “can illuminate his [Eliot’s] literary critical interest in the poetry of impersonality,’ but Cooper defines the form as a “mask” for the poet and follows Langbaum’s formula of a “tension between sympathy and moral judgment”: “The need to invent personas and masks is tempered by the horror of how others might see us or might see past our facades, whether in judgment or sympathy, and, for Eliot, sympathy was the greater horror, even more than that of being judged” (50).

70. Ezra Pound, “T.S. Eliot,’ in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1954). Henceforth cited in the text as Pound Essays.

288 NOTES TO PAGES 122-126

71. Patrick Deane, “David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and the Modernist Unfinished,’ Renascence 47, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 75-88. See also Vincent Sherry, “David Jones and Literary Modernism:

The Use of the Dramatic Monologue,” in Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett, ed. H. B. de Groot and A. Leggatt (Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 241-250; and Antony Easthope “‘The Waste Land’ as a Dramatic Monologue,’ English Studies 4 (1983): 330-344.

72. References are to line number in T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi,’ in The Waste Land and Other Poems, ed. Helen Vendler (New York: Signet, 1998), 77-79. Henceforth cited in the text as “Magi.” 73. Melissa A. Eiles, “The Infirm Glory of the Positive Hour: Re-Conversion in AshWednesday, in T: S. Eliot: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. Tapan Kumar Basu (Delhi, India: Pencraft, 1993), 118-131. In T: S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1984), Ronald Bush reads the poem as an account of the time Eliot’s “old ways of thinking and feeling seemed irrevocably alien and his new life as a Christian existed more in intention than fact” (127). He includes typology among “three realms of reference—the fictional frame, the correspondences of Christian typology, and his own deepest and most troublesome feelings” (128). 74. Jane Ellen Harrison discusses connections between Christian and classical myth and theater in Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Henry Holt, 1913).

75. Harriet Davidson, T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 40. Dominic Manganiello’s T: S. Eliot and Dante (London: Macmillan,

1989) does not deal centrally with the fourfold hermeneutic Dante described in his Letter to Can Grande.

76. Eliot’s “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” was first published in Dial (November 1923). Although the review preceded his essay on Dante, Eliot had been engaged with The Divine Comedy for years. 77. Many of Pound’s contributions to literary magazines, including “Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire” in Poetry 11, no. 2 (November 1917), 98, are accessible through the Modernist Journals Project. See www.modjourn.org. This essay is reprinted in Pound Essays, 283. 78. Mary Baker Eddy was the founder of the Christian Science movement, and Dr. John Alexander Dowie, another Christian Scientist, established the city of Zion in 1900 near Chicago. Anthony Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. 79. After leaving London, Pound continued to share his voice in the infamous Rome Radio Broadcasts. Daniel Tiffany’s Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) presents them as a “culmination of

the radiology of the Image, a discourse of radio pictures” that counteracts the critical emphasis on the visual in Imagism (25).

80. Julia Walker suggests that Pound rejected expression, citing his critique of “the cosmic poet” and demand for the “exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word” in the Introductions to the Imagist anthologies (1913 and 1915), but neither

statement definitely references expression. Concluding her brief reflections on Eliot and Pound, she writes that “a whole new generation of poets developed their craft in response” to debates in expressive culture (Expressionism 260, n. 28). I absolutely agree, but this response was complex and ambivalent, and claims about entire generations must consider other poets in addition to Eliot and Pound.

NOTES TO PAGES 126-129 289

81. Quoted by Leon Surette in “Ezra Pound, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey,” Canadian Poetry 43 (Fall-Winter 1998): 44-69. Henceforth cited in the text as “Carman, Hovey.’ 82. For a detailed biography and study of Carman’s work, see Gerald Lynch, ed., Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal (Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990). 83. Bliss Carman, Address at Moonshine (New York: Tabard Press, 1911), 16-17. Henceforth cited in the text as Moonshine.

84. Delsarte’s “laws” differed according to the teacher, but Hovey’s articulation is similar

to Genevieve Stebbins’s “law of sequence” and “law of evolution” (Delsarte Expression 260-263).

85. Surette recognizes that Carman and Hovey were influenced by Delsartism, but, deriving his understanding of the movement primarily from their writings, he mischaracterizes Hovey’s comments on Vagabandia in 1897 as a“Delsartean mode”: “Poetry is thought

to have something to say to strong men in the midst of the battle of life and not to be an elegant amusement for schoolgirls and dilettanti. More stress is laid on the masculine element in thought and life, and the effort is to be downright and masculine.” Hovey’s dismissive comment about “schoolgirls” is part of his effort to insist on the masculine applications of Delsartism in spite of its appeal to women. 86. Richard Hovey, Songs from Vagabondia (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1894), 54.

87. Ezra Pound, Personae, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 32-33. Henceforth cited in the text as Personae. 88. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, eds., The New Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1917). 89. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1993), 495. 90. Compare Genevieve Stebbins’s definition of statue posing as the “spiritual aspiration toward a superior and definite type of beauty in which lives and moves a human soul” in Delsarte System of Expression (New York: Werner, 1902), 461. Pound’s similar statement is cited in Surette from Pound’s 1907 letter to Viola Jordan. 91. The British press compared famous aesthete Oscar Wilde to the Delsartean Edmund Russell, Henrietta Hovey’s husband prior to Richard Hovey. 92. Morrisson quotes a letter from Ezra Pound to Monro, November 26, 1920, Harold

Monro Papers, UCLA. Pound’s epithet refers to the Georgian poets John Drinkwater, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Wilfred Gibson. 93. Pound’s “Mr. Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse,” first published in Poetry 4. no. 3 (June 1914): 111-120. Hueffer credited Christina Rossetti’s ideas about music, prose, and verse, but with characteristic misogyny, Pound criticizes “Christina” for a “certain limpidity” and claims that she “found” her ideas in Arnaut Daniel, Guido, and Dante (Pound Essays 272). Pound met Farr through Yeats, and she contributed to his interest in trouba-

dours and provided the inspiration for “Portrait D’Une Femme” and Canto XXVIII (“Music” 63). 94. Eliot similarly suggests that “a “musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern

of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one. And if you object that it is only the pure sound, apart from the sense, to which the adjective ‘musical’ can be rightly applied, I can only reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an abstraction from the poem as is the sense.’ (Eliot Selected 113).

290 NOTES TO PAGES 129-134

95. See Daniel Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) for a fascinating discussion of Le testament (141-167). Henceforth cited in the text as Untwisting. 96. The opera received a BBC performance in 1931 (Untwisting 142). 97. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970), 85. 98. In The Classics in Paraphrase (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988), Daniel M. Hooley provides an excellent account of debates about the status of “Propertius” as a translation or an original poem and concludes that the poem must be understood as “a remarkably (and remarkable) free translation” (29). Reading Pound’s responses to his critics and interpreting his work with the Latin text, he claims that Pound’s “theory” of translation “is phrased in personal terms and based in cooperation, even collaboration” (31). 99. A. David Moody’s Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 353. Henceforth cited in the text as Pound Poet. Still attacking Pound in Horizon (January 1961), Gilbert Highet claims, “His Homage to Sextus Propertius is an insult both to poetry and to scholarship, and to common sense.... The misinterpretation of Propertius’ words is disgusting but explicable and even, from some points of view, amusing. What is

more disgusting is that Pound, himself a poet, should have so degraded the sensitive thoughts of another poet.... This is not a mistake in language. It is a fundamental failure of taste.” Quoted by J. P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), viii—ix.

100. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, “Introduction,” in Amy Lowell, American Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), xiv. 101. Pound, Selected Letters 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 322.

102. Amy Lowell, Men, Women, and Ghosts (New York: Macmillan, 1916), x. Henceforth cited in the text as Men.

103. Pound called Lowell a “hippopoetess,” and Eliot referred to her as a “demon saleswoman’ of poetry. This and many other gender-oriented battles are described in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 66.

104. Amy Lowell, “Poetry as a Spoken Art” [1916], in On Poetry and Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930). Henceforth cited in the text as “Spoken.” 105. Simone Knewitz discusses Lowell in relation to expressive culture in “Spoken Art: Amy Lowell’s Dramatic Poetry and Early Twentieth-Century Expressive Culture,” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies 9 (2008). http://www-copas.uni-regensburg. de/articles/issue_o9/09_06_text_knewitz.php Knewitz suggestively claims that Lowell “operates between different, opposing camps of modern(ist) culture—‘high modernism’

on the one hand, and the so-called ‘expressive culture movement.” References to “opposing camps” in modernism tend to exaggerate oppositions; Knewitz defines high modernism by Eliot’s theory of impersonality and links “expressive culture” to the idea that “meaning cannot be reduced to verbal discourse.” As I have shown, Eliot, as well as Pound and Mew, agreed with Lowell and expression that sound contributes to the meanings of a poem. 106. S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 280. 107. Dismissing the poem as a “melodramatic failure” but attesting to the power of her performance, Richard Benvenuto claims that “it made for good theatrics when Lowell read it aloud.” See Amy Lowell (Boston: Twayne, 1985).

NOTES TO PAGES 134-140 291

108. Andrew Thacker suggests that Farr’s tours may have influenced Lowell’s innovations in polyphonic prose, but he does not discuss Lowell’s own performances. Although there is no definitive evidence that Lowell knew of Farr’s work, she was probably aware of Farr’s experiments with Yeats, given her several visits to London and correspondence with British modernists. See Thacker, “Unrelated Beauty: Amy Lowell, Polyphonic Prose, and the Imagist City,” in Amy Lowell, American Modern, ed. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 106-107. Henceforth abbreviated as “Unrelated.” 109. Lowell’s “A Letter from London” was first published in the Little Review (October 1914), 6-9. Reprinted in Complete Poetical Works and Selected Writings, ed. Naoki Onishi (Kyoto, Japan: Eureka, 2007). 110. Lowell’s Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1917), vii, was based on lectures she gave at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in December 1917.

111. Lowell does not comment on gesture, so crucial to Curry, and she may have thought gesture would lead to (over) acting.

112. The visual and auditory imaginations Lowell discusses were also elements of Vernon Lee’s theory of a kinesthetic faculty enabling bodies to respond to art. 113. See Derek Attridge’s Peculiar Language (London: Routledge, 2004). 114. Lowell’s “The Overgrown Pasture” includes monologues in rural New England

dialect and a dialogue between two impoverished and hopeless young lovers in “The Grocery’ outside Boston (Men 275). Munich and Bradshaw's Amy Lowell, American Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), provides important new criticism of Lowell, yet as they recognize, “Some of her most popular poems were dramatic monologues

and long narrative poems, genres not touched on in this collection or included in our volume, The Selected Poems of Amy Lowell.’ (2003), xv. They justify the omission of her monologues by claiming they are too difficult for “readers unfamiliar with the New England accent of almost a century ago” (xv). Yet, dialect was crucial to her aesthetic project, particularly her attempts to notate speaking voices. 115. For an example of biographical readings, see Jean Gould, Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement (New York: Dodd, 1975), 81. 116. Amy Lowell, Can Grande’s Castle (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1918), xii—xiii. Henceforth cited in the text as Can Grande. 117. Bliss Perry’s A Study of Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920) provides insight into assumptions about “ornamental prose” in the period (99-100). 118. Amy Lowell, “Why We Should Read Poetry,’ in On Poetry and Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 7. 119. The second poem, “Guns as Keys: And the Great Gate Swings,” records Commodore

Perry’s so-called opening of Japan and represents the clash of cultures by juxtaposing “American” polyphonic prose with free verse and orientalist imagery to describe “old Japan.” For a discussion of Lowell’s engagements with Japan, see Mari Yoshihara’s “Putting on the Voice of the Orient: Gender and Sexuality in Amy Lowell’s ‘Asian’ Poetry,” in Amy Lowell, American Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 120-135. Thacker describes the third poem, “Hedge Island,’ as “a faintly bizarre poem, ironically praising the British postal system while seeming to criticize England for being ‘trussed and knotted’ in tradition and antiquity” (“Unrelated” 114).

292 NOTES TO PAGES 141-145

120. Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 240.

121. The three early cantos were published in Poetry (June-August, 1917). Reprinted in Personae (230).

122. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 28.

123. Interesting feminist monologues were published by British poets including Stella

Gibbons (“Artemis Married”), Ada Jackson (“The Farmer’s Mother”), and Sylvia Townsend Warner (“The Rival”). Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle discuss some of these

women writers of dramatic monologues in A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry. Yet, their conclusions about the form demonstrate assumptions about literary “high modernism” and its gendering that this chapter questions: “They [dramatic monologues] fracture the authority of the masculine Romantic unitary lyric ‘TP while

maintaining the self as a literary source; although not yielding to the antireferential impersonality demanded by high modernism, the monologues allow for self-concealment for the poet” (History 84). 124. See Laura Severin’s “Acting ‘Out’” in Poetry off the Page for a discussion of Sitwell’s performances during World War II. Severin argues that Mew, Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell,

Stevie Smith, Liz Lochhead, and Jackie Kay constitute an alternative radical tradition of performance poetry. The book innovatively approaches formal flexibility and interdisciplinary cultural productions, yet its claims for a distinct tradition ignore the specificities of period, like modernist cultures of recitation, which influenced the poetry of both men and women. 125. The letter from April 21, 1943, is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. See Diana Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 235-236, for a description of the reading. 126. Bryher, Days of Mars: A Memoir 1940-1946 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 81, 88. Bryher was the pseudonym of Annie Winifred Ellerman, the British writer and financier of modernism. John Lehmann described Eliot as “wearily benign and noble” next to Sitwell, “dominating as a Roman emperor’ (Poetry off 50).

chapter 4 1. Isadora Duncan, My Life [1927] (New York: Liveright, 1995), 123. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as ML.

2. “Muse of Modernism” was the title of a 1998 exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, and the web advertisement (home.earthlink.net/~cultureom/Isadora.htm) quotes the sculptor Laredo Taft describing Duncan as “Poetry personified. She is not the Tenth Muse but all nine Muses in one—and painting and sculpture as well.” Similarly, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle describes Duncan’s influence on his design of the bas-relief on the facade of Paris’s Theatre des Champs-Elysees: “All my muses in the theater are movements seized during Isadora’s flight; she was my principal source.” Duncan’s image appeared in artworks by John Butler Yeats, Abraham Walkowitz, John Sloan, José Clara, Auguste Rodin, and Gordon Craig, among others. See Allan Ross Macdougall’s “Isadora Duncan and the Artists,” in Isadora Duncan, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Hold, 1947), 35-63. Henceforth cited in the text as “Artists.”

NOTES TO PAGE 145 = 293

3. I studied Duncan’s technique and repertory with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation (IDDF) based in New York City. IDDF and its resident Isadora Duncan Dance Company, directed by Lori Belilove with Associate Director Cherlyn Smith, establish Duncan lineage predominantly through Hortense Kooluris and Julia Levien, who studied with Irma Duncan, one of Duncan’s original students from the Griinewald School.

4. Ann Daly’s richly documented Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) locates Duncan in an American context, discusses accounts of contemporaneous critics, and analyzes the ideological implications of her art but does not consider her in the context of international modernism. Henceforth cited in the text as Done. Kimerer L. LaMothe’s Nietzsche's Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation of Christian Values (New York: Palgrave, 2006) provides a useful close reading of Duncan's discussion of aesthetics and spirituality in relation to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity; she does not analyze Duncan’s dances or how she choreographed his philosophical principles. Henceforth cited in the text as Nietzsche’s Dancers. 5. Isadora Duncan, “The Dance of the Future” [1909], in Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1969), 62. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as AD.

6. Duncan identifies features of her innovative form in her autobiography: “How strange it must have been to those dilettantes of the gorgeous ballet with its lavish decorations and scenery, to watch a young girl, clothed in a tunic of cobweb, appear and dance before a simple blue curtain to the music of Chopin” (ML 119). 7. On November 10, 1909, Carl Van Vechten, reviewer for the New York Times, deemed Duncan’s use of “music never designed for dancing” a “sacrilege,” and a week later, he protested Duncan’s “perverted use of the Seventh Symphony” of Beethoven. By July 1917, however, Van Vechten applauded Duncan’s new experiments: “More than the dance this new art partakes of the fluid and unending quality of music. Like any other new art it is not to be understood at first and I confess in the beginning it said nothing to me.’ See Van Vechten, “The New Isadora” [1914] in Isadora Duncan, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Holt, 1947), 19, 32. Henceforth cited in the text as “New.” 8. Ina BBC radio talk of May 31, 1952, Craig described Duncan’s curtains the first time he saw her dance in 1904: “She came through some small curtains which were not much taller than herself.... She was speaking in her own language, not echoing any ballet master, and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before.’ Printed in Mindy Aloft, Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern

Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 22. In Edward Gordon Craig: A Vision of

Theatre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1998), Christopher Innes claims that Craig admired the curtains but then “replaced her modest gray curtains, which were only fiveand-a-half feet high and hung on rods from a row of short wooden pilasters to form an enclosed dancing area, with great blue drapes the height of the stage” (115-116). 9. See Martin Puchner’s “The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-

Guard of Modernism,’ in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 56. Franklin Rosemont has conveniently collected many of the speeches in Isadora Speaks (Chicago: Kerr, 1994). Henceforth cited in the text as Speaks.

10. Duncan’s biography has been the subject of films such as Ken Russell’s Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1966) and Karel Reisz’s The Loves of Isadora (1968),

2904 NOTES TO PAGES 145-147

starring Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave reprised her representation of Duncan in Martin Sheman’s When She Danced (New York: Samuel French, 1990), a play that depicts an aging, overweight dancer with an addiction to expensive champagne. 11. She had previously performed several unsatisfying roles in Augustin Daly’s productions of Midsummer Night's Dream and Miss Pygmalion. The latter was undoubtedly influenced by J. J. Rousseau’s monodrama Pygmalion. The best source for Duncan’s biography is Peter Kurth’s diligently documented Isadora: A Sensational Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001). Henceforth cited in the text as Sensational. 12. Deirdre was born to Duncan and Gordon Craig, and Paris Singer, of the Singer sewing machine family, was the father of Patrick. 13. The New York Times article “Isadora Duncan and Poet Husband Detained on Liner” (p.1, col. 5), published October 2, 1922, reports that Duncan and Sergei Esenin, whom she

married in 1922, were detained and questioned by the U.S. State Department about her “Soviet Proclivities,’ along with such details that Esenin “powders his hair.” 14. A respondent at an Isadora Duncan Dance Company performance commented, “She hated modernity, and it destroyed her.” Morrocco’s Studio, New York City, June 19, 2005.

15. Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as WMP.

16. Deborah Jowitt’s groundbreaking study of modern dance, Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), claims, “Before the onslaught of the modernists, Duncanism without Duncan, asa theater art, retreated into the backwater.” (94). Henceforth cited in the text as Time. 17. Isadora Duncan, “The Dance of the Future” [1909], in Art of the Dance (AD 62). 18. Isadora Duncan, “I See America Dancing” [1927], in Art of the Dance (AD 48). 19. F. T. Marinetti and C. R. W. Nevinson’s “A Futurist Manifesto: Vital English Art” was first published in the Observer (June 7, 1914). They later performed the manifesto as a part of their lectures on “Vital English Art” at the Doré Gallery, London (June 12, 1914). Reprinted in C. R. W. Nevinson’s Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 79. 20. Felicia McCarren’s excellent study Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) also examines the “motor” as an analogy for dance that embodies “the natural force that technology harnesses” (2): “The “dancing machine’ elaborated in the first decades of the twentieth century engages two very different kinds of energy, or styles of dance: the first, dancing that looks mechanical, like machines; and the second, dancing that works like a machine, producing the image of a force of nature, a superhuman functioning” (3). McCarren points to Duncan’s interest in the

motor, but she argues that “Isadora’s dance embodies a nineteenth-century view of the machine, the human motor” and “passed like the dream of another time” (67-68). While I appreciate McCarren’s emphasis on continuities, I argue that Duncan’s view of the “motor” was far more central to modernism than she implies, and the antimodern “dream of another time” was very much of the modernist moment. Henceforth cited in the text as Machines. 21. Isadora Duncan, “The Philosopher’s Stone of Dancing” [1920], in Art of the Dance (AD 52).

22. Mark Franko questions this narrative in Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), ix. Henceforth cited in the text as Dancing Modernism.

NOTES TO PAGES 147-150 = 295

23. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in the Egoist (1919).

24. E T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” [1917], in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 137. Henceforth cited in the text as Marinettti.

25. Ann Daly appears to reject the self when she claims that Duncan’s dance was not “mere self-expression,’ but Duncan combines selfhood with universal categories (Done 136). Daly reveals a common prejudice emerging from the modern dance master narrative’s assumption that self-expression must be abandoned to achieve more innovative, depersonalized choreographies.

26. Rainer’s 1963 piece, We Shall Run, choreographed with the Judson Church Movement in New York, was composed entirely of basic running motions. Rainer recalls joking with Steve Paxton that she “invented running,’ while he “invented walking” with his contemporaneous choreography of A Satisfying Lover, featuring the random entrances and exits of forty-two dancer-walkers. Yvonne Rainer, “Feelings Are Facts,’ a lecture for the Contemporary Artists Series at the University of California at San Diego (May 19, 2005). 27. See Julie Townsend’s excellent work on Fuller in The Choreography of Modernism in France: La Danseuse 1830-1930 (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). 28. Dance historians usually designate the first ballet as the Ballet Comique de la Reine, produced by Henry III of France in 1581. Jean Georges Noverre initiated widespread reforms in the second half of the eighteenth century with his promotion of ballet @action, but the technique, system of instruction, and generalized form of the narrative ballet were codified with European Romanticism during what is often called “The Golden Age of Ballet” (1815— 1870). See Richard Kraus, Sarah Chapman Hilsendager, and Brenda Dixon, History of the Dance in Art and Education, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991). Henceforth cited in the text as History. 29. Pavlova expressed admiration for Duncan, but in an interview in Musical America she insisted on the superiority of her ballet form: “You see, she never has to get up and dance on her toes as I do” (Done 75). 30. Shaw, Up to Now (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 59. Shaw and Gordon Craig collaborated on a production of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas in 1900. Craig invited Shaw to conduct for Duncan’s tour, which featured music by Gluck, Schubert, Rameau, and Couperin (58). Among the interesting anecdotes from the tour in Shaw’s autobiography was that August Strindberg, who invited Shaw and Craig to dine with him, was too “afraid” of Duncan to meet her (76). He also claims that Duncan’s great success in Europe was not matched in London because “there was no sex appeal in Isadora’s dancing. That in itself is new and strange, and the English public does not like anything new and strange” (72). 31. The reviewer's association with Wagner is interesting, given that Duncan performed at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth during the summer of 1904 and she shared Wagner’s aspirations for a “total work of art.” For an innovative interpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the influence of the concept on modernist theater and postmodern culture, see Matthew W. Smith’s Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007). 32. Anonymous Variety review (August 2, 1908), quoted in Done 107. 33. McCarren provides an analysis of Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Duncan in “Orta or One Dancing,’ of which she provocatively claims “like... Phydias’s frieze on the Elgin marbles that Isadora took as her inspiration, Isadora becomes, in Stein’s portrait, a figure in

2906 NOTES TO PAGES 150-153

motion who moves out, extends into the space of affirmation and existence” (Machines 87). In spite of this reference to Phydias’s friezes, McCarren claims that Duncan’s dance “abandoned stillness and pose for ‘diversities of movement” (Machine 70). The juxtaposition of stillness and posing in her choreography revealed the diversity of her movements. 34. The letter of August 22, 1908, and the sonnet are published in Andrew J. Krivak’s edition of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 151-152.

35. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 12. Henceforth cited in the text as Imaginations.

36. The 1908 tour featured several dance styles, but best remembered are the playful nymphs of Water Study (Schubert waltz, 1900) and Narcissus (Chopin Op. 64 No. 2, 1900). She also deployed narratives as indicated in the New York Times review, “Isadora Duncan in Grecian Dances”: “Miss Duncan chose as the medium of her American debut the dances and choruses from Gluck’s opera, ‘Iphigenie en Aulide’ (1774), which follows the story of the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra after the manner of Euripides’ play” (August 19, 1908, 7).

37. Shaemas O’Sheel, “Isadora Duncan, Priestess,’ Poet Lore 21 (1910): 481. Henceforth cited in the text as “Priestess.”

38. In Marc Pachter, ed., Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation 1776-1914 (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1976), 267.

39. Duncan, “Emotional Expression,’ The Director, March 1898, 109. The passage is quoted in Fredrika Blair’s Isadora: Portrait of the Artist as a Woman (New York: McGrawHill, 1986), 17. Henceforth cited in the text as Portrait. On Duncan’s debt to Delsarte, see also Kurth, Sensational (30) and Shawn, Every Movement (80). 40. Francois Delsarte’s “Address before the Philotechnic Society of Paris,” published in Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression (New York: Werner, 1902), 63.

41. Ann Daly and Elizabeth Kendall understand American Delsartism as a trivial popular movement against which Duncan rebelled. Nancy Chalfa Ruyter’s scholarship, as described in my second chapter, reintroduced Delsartism to dance history but circumscribed its period to the 1890s. Her article “The Delsarte Heritage,’ Dance Research 14, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 62-74, provides the most detailed account of the Delsartean ideas modern dance inherited. Deborah Jowitt’s Time and the Dancing Image suggests, “It would have been hard for a bright, serious young person with theatrical aspirations growing up in America in the 1880’s and 1890’s not to have been influenced by Delsarte” (Time 78-79). Like

Ruyter, Jowitt does not discuss Delsartism’s influences on Duncan’s choreography and dance technique. 42. Boynton’s memories of Duncan are published in Millicent Dillon, After Egypt: Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt (New York: Dutton, 1990). 43. “Society News of Newport,” New York Times (November 16, 1898). Online Archive: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A05EED8103CE433A25755C1A96F9 C94699ED7CF.

44. Daly carefully analyzes many American cultural movements but claims that Delsartean proponents of the “pose and gesture school,’ such as Genevieve Stebbins and Henrietta Hovey, taught “a series of rote exercises or a series of discrete poses: an updated substitution for Victorian strictures” (Done 123-130).

NOTES TO PAGES 153-158 297

45. See Joseph Roach’s The Player’s Passion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1993) for an excellent summary of Diderot and acting theory in relation to theories of physiological and emotional processes. Henceforth cited in the text as Player’s. 46. Isadora Duncan, “Dancing in Relation to Religion and Love” [1927], in Art of the Dance (AD 121).

47. H.D. mentions Duse in her film writing when she critiques the tendency of productions to make a leading lady “vulgar” or “commonplace” by forcing the “Bernhardts and the Duses of the period to appear in crinoline when playing Phaedra.” See Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 113. 48. Franko describes this quote from Duncan’s autobiography as the “foundational narrative of modern dance, its myth of origin” (Dancing Modernism 1). 49. A notebook from 1900-1903 survives in the Isadora Duncan Dance Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Other indications of Duncan’s study habits are revealed by the transcription of a quote from Descartes (7) and letters to “my [indecipherable word] most revered teachers Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel” (59). Henceforth cited in the text as IDDCNY. 50. This entry from the IDDCNY Notebook, 1900-1903, is reprinted in Art of the Dance (AD 131).

51. Sara Immerwahr, “Death and Tanagra Larnakes, in The Ages of Homer, ed. Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 109-115.

52. Frequently taught in IDDF classes, Tanagra Figures is illustrated in Irma Duncan’s The Technique of Isadora Duncan (New York: Dance Horizons, 1970).

53. Ted Shawn adopted this body position and technique in his choreography for Gnossienne (Satie, 1919), another piece heavily influenced by statue posing (see figure 2.9).

54. Quoted at the Hirshborn Museum’s Rodin exhibit, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.

55. Rodin’s statement is printed in a performance brochure titled Dionysian, which Duncan distributed during her “Dionysian Season” at New York’s Century Theater in the spring of 1915, the season H. T. Parker described as “amateurish” due to its inclusion of recitations (IDDCNY). The brochure includes testimony from Rodin and other artists; quotes Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, and the Bible; and prints some of Duncan’s own statements on art. Henceforth cited in the text as Dionysian.

56. In a summary of Graham’s discoveries, Kraus, Hilsendager, and Dixon include “spasm and resistance...she made the floor a part of gesture; invented many beautiful falls and recoveries from the ground; she discovered a whole technique of balancing on bent knees” (History 124). While Graham used these forms of movement more consistently in her dance, Duncan employed them twenty years earlier in pieces like Furies and Revolutionary. 57. Julia Levien, repertory class, IDDF, New York (June 11, 2003). 58. Ina personal communication, Lori Belilove stated that Duncan originally performed The Three Graces and many other group pieces as solos but later revised them for her students (October 12, 2003). In her autobiography, Duncan claims she responded to a 1904 invitation to dance Wagner’s Tannhduser saying, “But, alone, what can I do? Nevertheless, I will come, and I will try to give at least an indication of the lovely, soft, voluptuous movements which I already see for the Three Graces” (ML 105).

298 NOTES TO PAGES 159-163

59. She returned to ballet class, most notably, under the instruction of the Italian prima ballerina Marie Bonfanti of “Black Crook” fame (Done 69). 60. Heinrich Schmidt, unpublished analysis of the Duncan-Haeckel correspondence, “The Riddle of the Universe and the Dancer,’ Folder 34, IDDCNY. 61. Daly discusses Duncan’s practice of defining her art against the “cheap” by identifying with the upper class and Greeks, against the “profane” by using racist rhetoric to contrast her performances with African dancing, against the “mindless” by referencing great thinkers, and against the “feminine” by choosing powerful male mentors (Done 17). These patterns are evident but complicated in Duncan’s writing: her elitism (though not her racism) is troubled by her socialist ideals and schools for underprivileged children; she celebrates her version of the “feminine,” although it is not always the version most desired by feminist critics.

62. Recapitulation theory suggests that the development of the individual embryo (ontogeny) progresses through earlier evolutionary forms of adult species (phylogeny), and for Haeckel, it also indicates the importance of individual spiritual development. Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977) details the history and significance of the theory of recapitulation and suggests that neoteny supports aspects of the theory. 63. Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe [1900], trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper, 1902), 336. Henceforth cited in the text as Riddle. 64. Evolutionary biologists now often suggest that natural selection works at the level of the gene, rather than the individual organism, but individualism was a feature of early evolution theory and the late Victorian period more generally. 65. Whereas Haeckel highlighted the conflict between science and Christianity as evidence for his religion of “monism,” Darwin claims, “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone...it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of selfdevelopment into other and needful forms.” Darwin also invokes a version of the will in his reference to “self-development,” indicting the prevalence of such concepts in early evolution theory. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 477.

66. According to Duncan, systems lack “all inspiration, all life. So, too, do those systems of dancing that are only arranged gymnastics, only too logically understood (Dalcroze, etc.)” (AD 53). For Emile Jaques-Dalcroze’s system of music visualization through body movement or “plastique animée,” see Selma Landen Odom’s “Delsartean Traces in Dalcroze Eurhythmics,’ in Essays on Francois Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 137-152; and Tamara Levitz’s “In the Footsteps of Eurydice: Jaques-Dalcroze’s Staging of Gluck’s Orpheus und Eurydice in Hellerau Germany, 1912,’ Echo 3, no. 2 (Fall 2001) and www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume3-issue2/levitz/levitzi.html. 67. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [1855-1892] (New York: Vintage/Library of America, 1992), 87. Henceforth cited in the text as Leaves. 68. After they were detained by immigration officials at Ellis Island, October 1-2, 1922, on suspicion of being Bolsheviks, Duncan gave a speech in which she claimed of her poet husband Esenin, “Serge is the Walt Whitman of Russia” (Speaks 104). Duncan lost her U.S. citizenship on March 10, 1923 (Sensational 472).

NOTES TO PAGES 163-167 299

69. Duncan’s statements also resemble Stebbins’s claim that “movements must unfold from within to without as naturally as the growth and expansion of a flower” (Delsarte Expression 459).

70. Isadora Duncan, “The Great Source,” in Art of the Dance (AD 102).

71. Lincoln Kirstein, “The Curse of Isadora,’ New York Times, November 23, 1986. Clipping file IDDCNY. 72. Isadora Duncan, “Movement Is Life” [ca. 1909], in Art of the Dance (AD 79). 73. Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 79.

74. Kimerer LaMothe details Duncan’s written engagement with Nietzsche, especially his influence on her discussions of religion. She does not discuss Duncan’s performances of religious figures as an essential part of her “revaluation of Christian values.” 75. In My Life, Duncan describes Federn reading and states, “The seduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy ravished my being” (104). Federn also designed the academic program for her students at the Griinewald school. 76. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1883-1885], trans. Thomas Common (New York: Dover, 1999), IV.19. Henceforth cited in the text as Zarathustra. 77. See also Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil [1886], ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): “All these morals directed at the individual person to promote what people call his ‘happiness’—are they anything other than recommendations for constraint.... They are all baroque in form and unreasonable (because they are directed at “everyone, because they generalize what should not be generalized)” (85, 198). Henceforth cited in the text as Beyond. 78. LaMothe does not discuss this component of Nietzsche’s influence on Duncan and, in fact, is dismissive of Duncan’s professional aspirations. She suggests that Duncan performed only to support her dance schools: “That her successes in touring paved the way for the advent of a highly professional art form, then, cannot be held against her” (Nietzsche's Dancers 128). Duncan’s professionalism and international reputation did not conflict with her spiritual aspirations, as she believed that dance must be “revalued” in public performance. 79. Isadora Duncan, “Beauty and Exercise,” in Art of the Dance (AD 82). Nietzsche him-

self became more skeptical of Dionysian choric participation and its potential to inspire

cultural innovation by the time of Thus Spake Zarathustra. For a summary of this development in Nietzsche’s thought, see Robert Gooding-Williams’s Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6—7. 80. “Isadora Duncan Dancers,’ undated, unattributed clipping in IDDCNY.

81. “Modern Dancing as an Inspiration for Mural,” undated, unattributed article, IDDCNY.

82. Isadora Duncan, “The Dance of the Greeks” [1928], in Art of the Dance (AD 96). 83. Both Lori Belilove and Cherlyn Smith referred to Duncan’s claim never to have per-

formed solos, in IDDF classes and interviews with the author. Annabelle Gramson, a prominent third-generation Duncan dancer, also emphasized the challenge of Duncan’s solo form: “The solo dance presents problems different from group dances.... The soloist must learn to draw more from the inside than from externals...the solo dance can live or die depending upon the dancer.” See Barry Laine, “In Her Footsteps: Annabelle Gramson Talks to Barry Laine,” Ballet News 3, no. 8 (February 1982): 24.

300 NOTES TO PAGES 167-175

84. T. J. Jackson Lears, in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), explores an ambivalence between elevating and fearing femininity in what he calls “antimodernism”: “the association of femininity with the unconscious suggested not only mythopoeic insp1-

ration but also uncontrolled, amoral impulse” (278). Henceforth cited in the text as Antimodernism. | use the term antimodern to designate a suspicion of technological modernity and modernization rather than “antimodernism,” which seems to imply and opposition to aesthetic modernism. 85. Isadora... No Apologies at the Duke Theater, New York, February 1, 2003, and Salon Performance at IDDF, June 6, 2003. Belilove described the experience of dancing Duncan pieces like Mother: “Whether you are alone or in a group you are unto yourself, but, even in a solo, you are dancing with others. There are other forces—invisible, imagined. That is why she [Duncan] said, ‘I never once danced solo’ ” (personal interview with the author). 86. Julia Levien, technique class, IDDE, New York (June 11, 2003). 87. Cherlyn Smith, repertory class, IDDF, New York (October 12, 2003). 88. McCarren discusses Futurist dance through Marinetti’s manifestos but does not discuss Giannina Censi and Valentine de Saint-Point (Machines 99-103). 89. Anna B. Webb’s Delsarte “Sword Drill” in Recitation anticipates these dances of female strength and militarism. 90. The phrase appears in Marinetti’s Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). Anja Klock describes how women’s shaping of Futurism, as well as participation in the movement, was contested by Marinetti and others and overlooked by critics in “Of Cyborg Technologies and Fascistized Mermaids,” Theatre Journal 51, no. 4 (1999): 397. Henceforth cited in the text as “Cyborg.”

91. Images of Censi’s dance and the Teatro Garibaldi poster are available at http:// architettura.supereva.com/censi/. 92. Marinetti performed his manifestos in England in 1910 and 1912 and was even booked to appear at the most lavish music hall in London, the Coliseum, twice daily for a week in 1914. See Lawrence Rainey’s account of Marinetti’s London activities in “Creation of the Avant-Garde,” in Institutions of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

93. See Marjorie Perloff, “Violence and Precision,” in The Futurist Moment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 2003), 88.

94. Isadora Duncan, “Depth” [1928], in Art of the Dance (AD 99-100). 95. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Henceforth cited in the text as Tragedy.

96. The review is unsigned but attributed to J. Fuller-Maitland, who sponsored the performance, along with classical scholar, historian, and poet Andrew Lang. See Blair, Portrait, 34. Jowitt also describes three New Gallery recitals and lists Sir Lawrence AlmaTadema, Walter Crane, and Hubert Parry among the sponsors (Time 83). 97. V. Svetlov, “An Evening with Isadora Duncan” [1913] in Dance News 31, no. 3 (November 1957), 7. 98. Bliss Carman, Address at Moonshine (New York: Tabard Press, 1911), 21. 99. Paris Singer, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortunes and the father of Duncan’s second child, was the funder.

NOTES TO PAGES 175-179 301

100. The letter and Murray’s discussions of the ritual nature of Duncan’s art are in the Gilbert Murray papers at the Bodleian Library, Carton 100. See Harry C. Payne, “Modernizing the Ancients: The Reconstruction of Ritual Drama 1870-1920,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122, no. 3 (June 1978): 191.

101. H. T. Parker, Motion Arrested: Dance Reviews of H. T: Parker, ed. Olive Holmes (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 65. Henceforth cited in the text as Motion. 102. As taught by IDDE, June 10-12, 2003.

103. McCarren suggests that “modern dance has often served as the image of abstraction,’ but her discussion does not describe abstraction in dance; instead, she explains how poets such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein use dance to frame their work in abstract poetics (Machines 83). 104. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon launched the abstract painting of Cubism in 1907, while Graham’s first original dance concert was not held until 1926. 105. Nietzsche introduces his concept of the will in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) but explores it more thoroughly in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). 106. Performed by Lori Belilove, IDDF Salon Performance, June 10, 2005. Belilove introduced the piece as Duncan’s “vision of what she wanted the [1917] Russian revolution to be.’ 107. Cherlyn Smith, Technique class, IDDF, New York (October 12, 2003).

108. Marion Sawyer, “Celebrating Isadora” (June 9, 1997), clipping file, Duncan Centennial Dance Company, IDDCNY. 109. We have seen that reviewers, like Lincoln Kirstein, designate Duncan’s dance as self-expressive. Even her influential student, Irma Duncan, describes Duncan’s dance as a

“personal expression” and “individual manifestation that cannot be duplicated” in The Technique of Isadora Duncan (New York: Dance Horizons, 1970), xi.

io. Ann Daly claims, “Duncan’s dancing was not the spontaneous expression of her own personal emotions. Neither was it the description of music.... Rather, music served as

her starting point suggesting to Duncan visual/emotional imagery” (Done 137-139). Duncan’s choreographic process was more diverse than Daly suggests; she occasionally created dances without musical accompaniment, such as Death and the Maiden (1903), or choreographed to poetry. 11. Duncan, “A Child Dancing,’ in Art of the Dance (AD 75). 112. Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art [1924] trans. J.J. Robbins (New York: Theatre Arts, 1948). Henceforth cited in the text as Art. In another illustration of how Duncan was at the center of international modernist performance, Duncan introduced Stanislavsky to Craig and initiated their collaboration on the Moscow Art Theatre’s famous monodramatic production of Hamlet in 1912. See Laurence Senelick’s Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet (London: Greenwood, 1982). 113. In “Isadora Duncan...Actress: And Her Influence on the Theater,” Dance Magazine (February 1960), David Weiss minimizes Duncan’s contributions to Stanislavsky’s thought,

describing her as among the “pioneers in theatrical self-expression” (40-43). Natalie Roslavleva’s Stantslavski and the Ballet (New York: Dance Perspectives 23, 1965) uses the motor in the soul quote to differentiate Duncan’s practice from Stanislavsky’s interest in the development of character: “Duncan started that motor within herself for the purpose of self-expression.... She expressed emotions of a general kind, never showing any interest in

302 NOTES TO PAGES 180-185

characterization, never being anyone but herself” (145-16). Duncan mined the possibilities in the spectrum of relationships between self and character in performance. 114. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 197. Henceforth cited in the text as Passion. 115. Stanislavsky, “Inner Impulses and Inner Action” and “Creative Objectives” (19161920) in Twentieth Century Theater, ed. Richard Drain (New York: Routledge, 1995), 253-257. Henceforth cited in the text as Theater.

116. The interview took place before Duncan’s performance of her Chopin repertory at

the Columbia Theater with Harold Bauer conducting. The typescript in IDDCNY is undated, but based on the program, the interview most likely took place in 1917. 117. Lisi Schoenbach, “‘Peaceful and Exciting’: Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein’s Pragmatic Modernism,’ Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 2 (2004): 242. 118. John Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, ed. Bruce S. John (New York: Harper, 1965), 352. Henceforth cited in the text as Sloan.

119. Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39. Henceforth cited in the text as Avant-Garde.

120. See Delap’s chapter on “the endowment of motherhood controversy,’ as many suffragists “waxed lyrical about the transformative power of the ‘mother spirit’” and others protested state intervention in reproduction and childcare (Avant-Garde 181). 121. Although Duranty’s comment demonstrates Duncan’s ability to invoke presentabsent figures on her stage, his tone is scornful: “With sublime incongruity, of which the spectators seemed unconscious, the proceedings closed with a ceremonial christening dance by Isadora Duncan and her pupils, to the sacred strains of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’” (Sensational 490). The “incongruity” he assesses is probably a reference to Duncan’s two children born outside of marriage. 122. Allan Ross Macdougall wrote of Duncan’s “allegory of the birth of Christ” danced to “Air on the G String” by Bach (Christmas Eve 1916): “What a moment to have lived! Not all the sermons preached in every church in Christendom could equal in spiritual eloquence that dance” (Sensational 387). 123. Duncan opened a 1922 curtain-call speech with a similar declaration that her art “is symbolic of the freedom of woman and her emancipation from the hidebound conventions” (Speaks 48). 124. See Susan Kingsley Kent’s Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). The “women’s sphere” was limited to domestic concerns, and one argument against women’s public employment and higher education, bolstered by medicine and science, insisted that they must reserve their strength to meet the costs of reproduction and nurturing children (34-43). 125. bell hooks provides a recent example of feminist critiques of poststructuralism, which would also highlight Duncan’s ethnocentrism and the racism in antimodern-classicist thought more generally. hooks’s work often incorporates individualist ideas and genres as she performs her analysis of the elitism of academic theory by writing in a personal voice, using modes of memoir, and celebrating myth and love. See, for example, Communion: The Female Search for Love (New York: Morrow, 2002) and hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2006).

NOTES TO PAGES 185-194 303

126. Never mentioning Duncan, Lears includes Greenwich Village radicalism in his list of those movements that have repeated the “mistakes” of what he calls “antimodernism”: “Throughout the twentieth century, Americans have heard the same demands for “personal growth as a remedy for all psychic and cultural ills. The Greenwich Village intellectuals of the pre-World War I era, the expatriate artists of the twenties, the therapeutic ideologues of the thirties and forties—none have realized the hidden affinities between their liberationist ideology and the dominant culture of consumer capitalism” (Antimodernism 306). 127. Floyd Dell, Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism [1913], (New York: Hyperion, 1976), 45-49.

128. Rebecca Zurier, “The Masses and Modernism,’ in 1915, the Cultural Moment, ed. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 197. Henceforth cited in the text as “Masses.” 129. Max Eastman, “Isadora Duncan Is Dead” [1928], in Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1969), 38.

130. The artists known as the Ashcan school all worked on newspapers and developed an art “based on the life of New York’s streets” (“Masses” 201). 131. See Sloan’s illustration in the May 1915 issue, “Putting the Best Foot Forward,’ which

presents an ostentatious woman posing with slender leg outstretched beside a crippled man with a wooden leg.

Chapter 5 1. H.D., Collected Poems, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), 51. Henceforth abbreviated CP. 2. This photograph is used on the cover of H.D.’s Collected Poems (1983). See also the cover designs for her novel HERmuione (New York: New Directions, 1981) and Selected Poems, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1988).

3. Foothills and the fragments of Wingbeat are at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Borderline was released by Criterion in 2007 on a four-DVD set, Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist, and its availability promises to bring the film more attention. See the informative review by James Donald, “Borderline and Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist” in Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 3 (September 2008): 594-598. In “H.D.’s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire,’ Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 3 (2002): 407-408, Jean Gallagher uses this still and H.D.’s prose to suggest that images of a “sustained, fixed stare” construct a model of lesbian spectatorship and desire. Henceforth cited in the text as “Distractions.” 4. Several excellent works have detailed H.D.’s Hellenism but have not focused on her in relation to antimodern performance or mythic posing. Eileen Gregory details H.D.’s classical contexts, including her engagement with Jane Ellen Harrison, in H.D. and Hellenism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 170. Henceforth cited in the text as Hellenism. Diana Collecott’s, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) focuses on the “sapphic,” woman-centered aspects of H.D’s classicism. Henceforth cited in the text as Sapphic. 5. Timothy Clark points out the “embarrassment” of inspiration in his discussion of H.D. in The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997). 6. In his preface to H.D.’s Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1988), Louis L. Martz claims, ““The Dancer, perhaps in part evoking memories of Isadora Duncan’s

304. NOTES TO PAGES 194-195

Greek and erotic modes of dancing, is her supreme assertion of woman’s integrity as artist and sexual force (the two are for H.D., as for Lawrence and Duncan, inseparable)” (xiii). Dagny Boebel associates “The Dancer” with Duncan in “The Sun Born in a Woman: H.D_?s Transformation of a Masculinist Icon in “The Dancer,” in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings, ed. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).

7. The London Daily Mail reported on October 29, 1912, after one of Duncan’s London performances, “Miss Duncan intends to stage Greek tragedies in a vivid and artistic manner” (Sensational 283). Such a review would have interested H.D. 8. H.D. also underlined Duncan’s claim, “No woman has ever told the whole truth of

her life”? (ML 8). H.D’s copy of My Life is in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

9. This fusion of technology, classicism, and religious practice has been evident throughout this study, and Miriam Hansen’s reassessment of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer indicates that some similar preoccupations have been overlooked in their thought, partially due to a failure to historicize early film theory. Both were interested in allegory, suspicious of crowds and masses, and critical of modernity as the detritus of tragedy, and, in different ways, both positioned film in relation to apocalypse. See Hansen’s “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 437-469; “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 3-45; and “Benjamin’s Aura,’ Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 336-374.

10. H.D., Trilogy (New York: New Directions, 1998). Henceforth cited in the text as Trilogy.

ul. Helen in Egypt (1961) is a series of monologues spoken by Helen, Achilles, Paris, and a chorus of ghosts with commentary helping to clarify the narrative. 12. H.D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1979), 3. Henceforth cited in the text as End. 13. Rachel Blau DuPlessis claims that “Oread” was the poem Pound revised, in H.D. The Career of That Struggle (Sussex, England: Harvester, 1986), 6-7. In her memoir, H.D. recalls Pound insisting, “Hermes of the Ways’ is a good title” (End 18). The three poems published in the January 1913 issue of Poetry Magazine (vol. 1, no. 4) were “Hermes of the Ways,’ “Priapus: Keeper-of-Orchards” (later titled “Orchard”) and “Epigram (After the Greek)” (118-122). Issues of Poetry are digitalized by the invaluable “The Modernist Journals Project” of Brown University and the University of Tulsa at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/. 14. J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (London: Longmans, Green, 1890). Henceforth cited in the text as The Anthology. Gregory points out that H.D. references twenty distinct epigrams from The Anthology in her poetry, twelve of which “may loosely be called translations” (Hellenism 167). 15. H.D. wrote to Lowell that “in no event can we now appear under the direct title of ‘Tmagiste.’” H.D., “Letters,” in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 134-138. Henceforth cited in the text as Gender. 16. For the recovery of H.D.’s work, see Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Who Buried H.D.?” College English 36, no. 7 (March 1975): 801-814. In Writing Like a Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), Alicia Ostriker claims, “But I find to read H.D. I must forget whatever I have learned about Imagism” (7).

NOTES TO PAGES 195-197 = 305

17, H.D. “H.D. by Delia Alton,” Iowa Review 16 (Fall 1987): 184. One of H.D’s experi-

mental autobiographical prose pieces, the essay is presented as if written by the fictional figure “Delia Alton.” Henceforth cited in the text as “Delia.” 18. H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, intro. Albert Gelpi (San Francisco: City Lights, 1982), 24. Henceforth cited in the text as Notes. Her reticence to publish may have been due to Havelock Ellis’s indifference to the manuscript; H.D. became friends with the famous sexologist after World War I (Gender 87). 19. H.D., “Marianne Moore,” Egoist 3, no. 8 (August 1916): 118; “Review of Charlotte Mew’s The Farmer’s Bride,’ Egoist 3, no. 9 (September 1916): 135; “John Gould Fletcher’s Goblins and Pagodas,’ Egoist 3, no. 12 (1916): 183. Henceforth cited in the text as Goblins. For

a detailed analysis of H.D.s work as an editor, see Jayne E. Marek’s Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 109-115.

20. Collecott quotes Pound’s dismissal and claims that Aldington himself acknowledged that Pound and T. S. Eliot disagreed with H.D_s inclusive editorial policies and “pushed her aside ruthlessly” (Sapphic 165-167). 21. Adelaide Morris quotes from this review to describe different modes of projection in H.D.’s work; see “The Concept of Projection: H.D’s Visionary Powers,’ Contemporary Literature 25, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 417. 22. Ezra Pound, “Vorticism” [1916], in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 147. Henceforth cited in the text as “Vorticism.” Pound’s other rules were: “II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute

to the presentation. III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase.”

23. Robert Duncan met for “sessions” with the older poet when she was visiting the United States. He continued to work on “The H.D. Book” until his death in 1988, publishing chapters in literary magazines. The University of California Press will finally publish the collected volume in 2011. I cite the original publication information. 24. Robert Duncan, “Beginnings: Ch. 1 of the H.D. Book Part 1,” Coyote’s Journal 5-6 (1966): 14-15.

25. Robert Duncan, “The H.D. Book, Part II: Nights and Days, Ch. 7,” Credences 1, no. 2 (1975): 60.

26. Robert Duncan, “The H.D. Book, Part II: Nights and Days, Ch. 9,” Chicago Review 30, no. 3 (Winter 1979): 81. Henceforth cited in the text as II.9. 27. Robert Duncan, Part 1, Ch. 5, “From the H.D. Book, Occult Matters,” Stony Brook 1-2 (Fall 1968): 4-19.

28. “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste” [1913], in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 143-145. Henceforth cited in the text as “Don'ts.” 29. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading [1934] (New York: New Directions, 1960), 52. Henceforth cited in the text as ABC.

30. Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” in Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985), 71.

31. Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 82. 32. Susan Stanford Friedman suggests, “The center of “Oread, as the title indicates, is not the sea; it is instead the perceptions and emotions of an oread,’ in Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 56.

306 NOTES TO PAGES 198-200

33. See chapter 3 and John E. Tapia’s Circuit Chautauqua: From Rural Education to Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth Century America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997).

34. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 36.

35. Fenollosa claims that the verb is the mediator between subject and object in sentence syntax: the subject acts on an object. See my introduction for more on Fenollosa’s theories of words and movement in “An Essay on the Chinese Written Character,” in Instigations of Ezra Pound (New York: Libraries Press, 1920).

36. Margaret Bruzelius’s “H.D. and Eurydice,” Twentieth Century Literature 44. no. 4 (Winter 1998), 447-463, discusses how “Eurydice” is often anachronistically positioned in relation to H.D.’s later mythic work such as Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1961), in spite of its inclusion in The God (448). Henceforth cited in the text as “Eurydice.” 37. Collecott claims that The God sequence establishes “a quasi-dramatic structure” that resembles classical tragedy and ancient ritual (Sapphic 144-145). 38. H.D., “Review of The Farmer’s Bride,” Egoist 3, no. 9 (September 1916): 135. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as FB. 39. H.D. also builds on Nietzsche’s theories of the social transformation enabled by the Attic drama. 40. Martin Puchner’s Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) describes modernist antitheatricality but not its link

to antimodern theories. His section on the closet drama examines Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, describing their innovations in a form that, he claims, derives from Tennyson. Their version of the closet drama, “rather than using the genre’s minimal theatricality as a background for the presentation of more or less self-sufficient speeches,” is a form that is “bound up with its setting and characters, as well as with movement, gesture, mimicry, and costume” (60). Puchner does not consider the similar efforts of H.D.

41. Collecott claims that the monologues of Pound and Eliot followed Tennyson and R. Browning’s, but “H.D. had an earlier model in Sappho” (Sapphic 154). H.D., Pound, and Eliot all understood their work in a lineage that included ancient and Victorian poets, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning may also have influenced H.D.’s association of the dramatic monologue with a typological “overmind.” In the postscript of a letter to Richard Aldington dated October 18, 1953, she writes: “I always carried the E.B.B. sonnets with me at one time, as a school-girl, knew many of them by heart....” Box 17.566, HDPB. 42. Robert Duncan, “Two Chapters from H.D,’ I.4 in TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968): 86-87. 43. H.D., Ion (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan, 1986), 14. Henceforth cited in the text as Ion. 44. Bruzelius argues that H.D.’s The God rewrites the Orpheus stories in Ovid’s Book X (“Eurydice” 449). Other intertexts include the myths of Orion and Artemis and the epigram of Antipater from The Anthology, which she “translated” as “Hermonax.” 45. The popularity of the Ovidian myth continued after J. J. Rousseau’s monodrama and the ballets discussed in chapter 1; derivatives include Augustin Daly’s Miss Pygmalion

(1895), in which Isadora Duncan performed (Done 72). Daly’s production launched numerous amateur versions of Pygmalion; in fact, H.D’s novel Hermione reveals that Her

NOTES TO PAGES 201-205 307

fell in love with Fayne Rabb when she was playing Pygmalion in such a production circa 1910.

46. Bruzelius reads Pygmalion as an arrogant artist insisting on the superiority of his gaze, but his confusion and uncertainty contradict this characterization. The poem consists of eighteen questions and less than half as many statements (“Eurydice” 453-455). 47. In Ovid’s popular version, Eurydice dies from snakebite on the day of her wedding

to the poet-musician, Orpheus. The bridegroom woos even Hell with his song, and Eurydice is permitted to follow him to the land of the living as long as he does not look back at her. He does not obey and looks behind, only to see her drawn back to death. Isadora Duncan choreographed several scenes from the story to the music of Gluck’s “Orfeo” (ca. 1911).

48. Eurydice may allude to Ovid’s story of Orpheus’s gruesome death at the hands of enraged Maenads. 49. Not an Ovidian story, H.D.’s source is the myth that Artemis killed Orion, one of her best huntsmen, in jealousy. 50. Eileen Gregory reprints Mackail’s translation of Antipater (Hellenism 170). 51. Neptune transformed Ino into the goddess Leucothea, and the son she clutched as she leapt became the god Palaemon. See Ovid, The Metamorphosis IV, “Ino and Athamas.” 52. Gregory characterizes “The Tribute” as one of H.D.s “epinician poems praising victors and heroes,” but the association with World War I undermines any tone of praise (Hellenism 147).

53. This definition of ritual was advanced by other Cambridge Ritualists in addition to Harrison, and it anticipates theories presented by Jacques Ranciére and, of particular significance to performance theory, Victor Turner. See Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts, 1982).

54. Robert Duncan asked if H.D. had met Harrison in a letter of October 28, 1960, and she responded: “No, I never met Jane Harrison—your questions always intrigue me” (November 6, 1960, HDPB). Duncan insists that none of the modernist arts can be “separated from the reawakened sense of the meaning and reality of the gods in contemporary studies of the mystery cults—Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena (1903) and Themis (1912). “Two Chapters from H.D? in TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968): 81. Gregory suggests that Harrison was dismissed by modernists due to a sexist bias in the field of classicism and points to a

review in the Egoist that derided her “female enthusiasm, lack of intellectual rigor, ‘Specialised Unintelligence, and “brain fuddle’” (Hellenism 109). Julie Stone Peters describes the ambivalent antitheatricality in Harrison’s later view of theater as a fallen and degraded derivative of the Dionysian ritual, in “Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre,’ Modern Drama 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1-41. 55. H.D-s annotated copy of Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion; Studies Based on a Course of Lectures Delivered in April 1912 at Columbia University (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925)

is in HDPB. Gregory details Harrison’s influence on Murray’s Euripides and His Age (London: Williams, 1913), which H.D also read (Hellenism 272-273). 56. Gregory discusses the “ritual intent” of H.D’s first book, Sea Garden, in “Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.s Sea Garden,’ Contemporary Literature 27, no. 4 (1986): 538, but does not discuss Ion or “The Dancer.”

308 NOTES TO PAGES 205-208

57. See Susan Stanford Friedman’s helpful “Chronology: Dating H.D’s Writing,” in Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 360-366. 58. E.R. Earp, “Review: Versions of Euripides,” Classical Review 51, no. 5 (November 1937): 171-172.

59. See T. S. Eliot’s defense of Pound in “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” (1917): “Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in English.... The term is a loose one—any verse is called ‘free’ by people whose ears are not accustomed to it—in the second place, Pound’s use of this medium has shown the temperance of the artist, and his belief in it as a vehicle is not that of the fanatic” (Selected 150). See also Eliot’s “Reflection on Vers Libre,” first published in the New Statesman, March 3, 1917 (Selected 31).

60. These include “Chorus of the Women of Chalkis” (CP 71), “Chorus of Troizenian Women” (CP 85), “Choros Translations from The Bacchae,’ (CP 223), “Choros Sequence from Morpheus” (CP 253), and “Songs for Cyprus” (CP 277). Robert Duncan suggests that H.D. used these translations to escape the constraints of “imagisme” and develop the poetic style that would allow her to produce the major poems of her late career, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. See “From the H.D. Book, Part 2 Ch. 5,” Sagetrieb 4, nos. 2-3 (Fall-Winter 1985): 66. Gregory echoes this argument and describes H.D.’s “choros” as an “image-theatre of phano-

poeta” (Hellenism 140). Neither focuses on the unique ritualized reading experience she was attempting to construct. 61. H.D., like Isadora Duncan, was interested in Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits of art, but her translations of Euripides signal her disagreement with Nietzsche's assessment that Euripides killed the Greek drama. For more on H.D-’s views of Nietzsche see Hellenism 117-122.

62. Edward P. Comentale’s “Thesmophoria: Suffragettes, Sympathetic Magic, H.D.’s Ritual Poetics,’ Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001) explores the influence of Harrison’s theories of ritual but does not recognize the limit to H.D-'s desire for community. He claims, “Her ritualized poetry does not avoid political responsibility; rather, it raises possibilities for a community that always already incorporates the marginal, the feminine, and the poetic” (484). His association of H.D.’s ritual practice with suffragism is useful, but she was skeptical of the possibility of an already inclusive community. Henceforth cited in the text as Thesmaphoria. 63. “The Dancer” and “The Poet” were published together in Life and Letters Today 13 (September 1935), and “The Master” first appeared in Feminist Studies 7 (Fall 1981) with an essay by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Stanford Friedman. See Martz’s “Preface” to Selected Poems, xxvii.

64. Elizabeth Anderson discusses “The Dancer” and H.D. and Duncan’s shared interest in ritual, but Anderson claims that H.D.’s theories of erotic embodiment distinguish her from Duncan’s chaster ideals in “Dancing Modernism: Ritual, Ecstasy, and the Female Body,’ Literature and Theology 22, no. 3 (September 2008): 354-367. Although Duncan adamantly rejected attempts to censor her dance as pornographic, both she and H.D. understand erotic passion as a crucial component of ritual and art. 65. Mallarmé brackets his own spectatorship in “Ballets,” where he describes the dancer as “not a girl, but a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental aspect of earthly form... she

does not dance but rather, with miraculous lunges and abbreviations, writing with her

NOTES TO PAGES 209-213 309

body, she suggests. ... Her poem is written without the writer’s tools.” See Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 64. The passive tense erodes the dancer’s agency or creativity and even her

particular body. See Mary Fleischer’s Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright-Dancer Collaborations (New York: Rodopi, 2007).

66. Gregory argues, “H.D’s early lyrics demand from the reader a distinct, dramatic form of attention and participation” (Hellenism 123). Yet, she does not detail H.D.’s poetic strategies for garnering this form of attention, which are most developed in her dramatic monologues and translations rather than in lyrics. 67. Comentale cites a passage in H.D’s Notes, “The love-region is excited by the appearance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind...” (Notes 22). 68. H.D. wrote on a proof of the first printing, “Jon: 1935—-Assembled Vaud, Switzerland from rough notes begun in England 1915-1917 and Greece 1920 & 1932” (HDPB). On the inside front cover of her copy, she indicated that she reread the play in Ktisnacht in May 1954 and that the radio play, produced by Raymond Raikes, was broadcast in London on December 19, 1954 at 3 P.M. and 21 Dec. at 9 P.M. See HDPB Box 31 Folder 813 for page proofs. 69. H.D., The Borderline Pamphlet, in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 121. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as BP.

70. Adelaide Morris describes H.D.’s persistent engagement with science but claims she

increasingly desired “to temper modern mechanical science with hermetic wisdom” in “Science and the Mythopoeic Mind: The Case of H.D.,” in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 201. I suggest H.D.'s antimodern critique of science coexisted uneasily with her enthusiasm for technology, as her film work most clearly illustrates, but hermeticism also accommodated scientific images in her later long poems. 71. Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 112. Henceforth cited in the text as Close Up.

72. McCabe builds on work by Anne Friedberg, who identified overtonal montage and psychoanalysis as H.D.’s major theoretical interests in“Approaching Borderline,’ Millennium Film Journal 7. no. 9 (1980-1981): 130-139. Henceforth cited in the text as “Approaching.” McCabe’s chapter on H.D. in Cinematic Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) examines the fertile intersection of film, modernist poetry, and psychoanalytic studies of embodiment and mind. She discusses the early poems of Sea Garden (1916) as “precursors” to H.D.’s film work but does not examine her later poetics, her typological hermeneutics, or the influence of Lev Kuleshov’s acting and montage theories. Henceforth cited in the text as Cinematic. Susan Stanford Friedman also considers Eisenstein and Borderline but focuses on the complex racial politics as the film avoids Paul Robeson’s standard shirtless presence on screen yet adopts other modes of “racial primitivism” and a “homoerotic and misogynist eye.” See “Border Forms, Border Identities in Borderline:

Contemporary Cultural Theory and Cinematic Modernity,’ in Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links, Europe-America, 1890-1939, ed. Marina Camboni (Rome: Edizioni

310 NOTES TO PAGES 213-219

di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 125-134. See also Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing

about Cinema in the Modernist Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Henceforth cited in the text as Muse.

73. H.D. met Macpherson in 1926; in 1927, Bryher married him and gave him a film camera, and all three lived and worked together in Territet. 74. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus’s Close Up is a useful compilation of articles, stills, and advertisements that document the POOL projects, which included three films directed by Kenneth Macpherson and starring H.D.: Wingbeat (1927), Foothills (1929), and Borderline (1930). Appendix 2 of Close Up provides biographies of all contributors. Appendix 3 lists POOL'’s publishing projects: two novels by Macpherson, a memoir by Bryher, and several books on film including Oswell Blakeston’s Through a Yellow Glass (1928), a guide to the cinema studio, Eric Elliott’s Anatomy of a Motion Picture Art (1928), and Bryher’s Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929).

75. French journals such as Le Film (1914) preceded Close Up and established a continental “tradition of literary respect for the cinema” that was not as prominent in England and America (Close Up 12). 76. Marsha McCreadie, Women on Film: The Critical Eye (New York: Praeger, 1983), xi. See also Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, ed. Antonia Lant with Ingrid Periz (London: Verso, 2006). 77. Laura Marcus’s useful “Introduction” to “The Contribution of H.D.” in Close Up connects H.D.’s hieroglyph to Swedenborg, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Herring, and Eisenstein’s

intellectual montage but not Kuleshov’s Delsarte-derived system of gestural expression (Close Up 99-102). 78. H.D. refers to Fred Niblo’s 1925 film Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which advertised 150,000 in the cast.

79. See Hilary Hart’s analysis of Lillian Gish’s Denishawn-trained Delsartean technique in “Do You See What I See? The Impact of Delsarte on Silent Film Acting,” in Essays on Francois Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal, ed. by Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004— 2005): 185-199.

80. The film was Wege zu Kraft und Schénheit: Ein Film iiber moderne K6rperkultur (1925), or Ways to Strength and Beauty: A Film of Modern Physical Culture, directed by Nicholaus Kaufmann and Wilhelm Prager, and it further demonstrates the international appeal of the physical culture movement in which Delsartism figured prominently. 81. H.D.s review of “King of Kings” appeared in Close Up, 2, no. 2 (February 1928), but is not reprinted in Donald et al., Close Up. Manuscript in HDPB. 82. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 8. Eisenstein, like his teacher, subscribes to this idea of the model actor but calls his version “typage.”

83. Probably intended for Close Up, the typescript of “Wingbeat” is in HDPB, Box 43.1102, 5. Henceforth cited in the text as “Wingbeat.”

84. Critics who have discussed H.D.’s acting style have not recognized the connection between her theories of cinematic ritual and her performance style or their link to older Delsartean theories. Gallagher’s “H.D’s Distractions,” recognizes that Khokhlova influ-

enced H.D/s intense stare but does not mention Khokhlova’s Delsartean training (“Distractions” 416). Judith Brown, displacing the focus on Freud in readings of Borderline,

NOTES TO PAGES 219-222 311

uses Bertrand Russell’s theories of sensation and the unconscious to produce a fascinating reading of close-ups on hands and what she provocatively calls the film’s “machinery of expression” (704). She does not associate this hand language with Delsartean theories of

gesture or the taxonomies of hands produced in Delsarte manuals. See “Borderline, Sensation, and the Machinery of Expression,’ in Modernism/Modernity 14, no. .4 (2007): 687-705.

85. Anne Friedberg reconstructed the fragments of Wingbeat and Foothills in 1979.

86. The decorative door also recalls the gilded picture frame in which Emma Lyon Hamilton occasionally posed.

87. Diana Collecott points out that although Bryher attributed the montagecomposition to Macpherson, she and H.D. both commonly credited Macpherson for their collaborative work (158). See Collecott’s thorough discussion of the H.D. Scrapbook in “Images at the Crossroads: H.D.’s “Scrapbook,” in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 155— 181. Henceforth cited in the text as “Images.” See also Lara Vetter’s excellent study of the Scrapbook in relation to H.D-’s experimental, autobiographical prose, “Representing ‘A Sort of Composite Person’: Autobiography, Sexuality, and Collaborative Authorship in H. Ds Prose and Scrapbook,” Genre 36, nos. 1-2 (2003): 107-130. 88. Photomontage was becoming popular with practitioners as diverse as Dadaists, advertisers, and film publicists; the most famous “monteur,’ John Heartfield, turned Dadaist montage into a tool of political protest against the German Nazi party (“Images” 157). Although the POOL montages do not share Heartfield’s political fervor, both work by inviting viewers to develop associations between images. 89. H.D/s fiction, although not the focus here, also models this thought pattern; in HERmiuone (New York: New Directions, 1981), Her reads Fayne’s performance as Pygmalion

like a photomontage, describing how she “saw Pygmalion, saw a stretch of sea coast, saw a boy in a tunic...” and other visions present only by association (138). 90. Reading the image biographically, Collecott understands Asklepios as Freud, the “blameless physician,’ and H.D. as the disciple who has “placed her head on his knee” (“Images” 172). She provocatively suggests that the seated figure of H.D. “might equally well be ‘at the pictures” and associates Nike with H.D_s final vision of the winged goddess at Corfu, described as “writing on the wall” in H.D.’s Tribute to Freud (“Images” 172-173). 91. The montage predicts one of T. J. Jackson Lears’s provocative claims in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981): “What begins in discontent with a vapid modern culture ends as another quest for self-fulfillment—the dominant ideal of our sleeker, therapeutic modern culture. The effort to re-create a coherent sense of selfhood seems fated to frustration” (306). 92. Isadora Duncan uses a similar position to invoke the burden of Atlas in a section of

her Furies (Gluck, 1911) when she portrays the punishments of the condemned in her body.

93. Collecott argues that there are “teasing allusions to the peepshow,” another early cinematic form, as the fragments of the metope become a parted curtain (“Images” 171). 94. Anne Friedberg describes Borderline as “hopelessly obscure” (“Approaching” 380), but it was shown more often and to more critical acclaim than she acknowledges, according

312 NOTES TO PAGES 223-227

to Annette Debo’s “Interracial Modernism in Avant-Garde Film: Paul Robeson and H.D. in the 1930 Borderline,’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 4 (2001): 371-383. Henceforth

cited in the text as “Interracial.” A review in Manchester Guardian 14 (October 1930) corroborates: “In a large majority of films the accent is always on the excitement of story, on the interest of character, and it comes as something of a shock to find a director seeing subject and person so entirely through the eyes of a painter, to find the centre of attention fixed on light, line, form, and colour rather than on situation (in the theatrical sense of the word) or on the appeal of individuality in the actor” (HDPB, Box 50.1249).

95. Jean Walton reads the handshake as homoerotic in its juxtaposition with the pianist: “Immediately following this scene, as though to remind us that it has been ‘accompanied’ and inscribed all along by the gay pianist’s overt homoerotic desire, we see a brief close-up of his hand gliding in a flourish across the piano keys.” See “White Neurotics, Black Primitives, and the Queer Matrix of Borderline,’ in Out Takes, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 264. Henceforth cited in the text as “White.” 96. For the racial and gendered politics, see Debo’s “Interracial Modernism” and Susan McCabe’s “Borderline Modernism: Paul Robeson and the Femme Fatale,’ Callaloo 25, no. 2 (2002): 639-653.

97. Laura Marcus, in The Tenth Muse, compellingly analyzes H.D.’s concept of silent

film as it was shaped by Gordon Craig and the “aesthetics of the ritualized, nonrepresentational and poetic theatre, including the mime-theatre, of the 1910’s” (43). She does not acknowledge that the mime theater in particular was shaped by Delsartean gestures. 98. W.B. Yeats famously defines the symbol similarly in “The Symbolism of Poetry,’ published in the Dome (April 1900) and reprinted in Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, ed.

James Pethica (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000): “It is indeed only those things which seem useless or very feeble that have any power...” (273). As in T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative,’ Yeats suggests emotions are perceptible only when expressed through “outer things.” 99. H.D.’s The Borderline Pamphlet describes Macpherson as the sole genius responsible for the film and minimizes Bryher’s and her own contributions to locate film creativity in the individualistic model of a single director or auteur. 100. H.D?s concern with technology’s link to war is evident in an unpublished review of Yeats’s Responsibilities, probably intended for the Egotst; she identifies “the enemy” not as

the “middle-classes” or “Philistines” but the “mechanical daemon” whose “hideous offspring’ is the war (Gender 128). In contrast, Wyndham Lewis's Blast [1914] (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 2002) declares a desire to destroy the middle class that exceeds any national allegiance: “We fight first on one side, then on the other.... Mercenaries were always the best troops” (30). 101. I counted the ninety-four narrow strips of film by winding the film at the Museum of Modern Art by hand; I am grateful for the assistance of Charles Silver, Associate Curator at MOMA.

102. H.D?s description of the technique also recalls Ezra Pound’s imagist definition of the “one image poem” as “a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another” that requires a mental connection (“Vorticism” 150). 103. As Macpherson’s references to transference and layers of consciousness suggest,

psychoanalytic theory influenced early film and the POOL group. The psychoanalytic

NOTES TO PAGES 228-235 313

preoccupations of Borderline are well documented in Friedberg’s “Approaching Borderline.” See also part 6 of Close Up, “Cinema and Psychoanalysis.” 104. See Charles Musser’s The Emergence of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) for a description of protocinematic technologies. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs offer a comprehensive discussion of how theatrical acting techniques influenced early film in Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a relevant history of perception, see Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

105. Quoted in Anne Friedberg, “On H.D., Woman, History, Recognition,’ Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1982): 26-31. Here, she suggests that H.D. was never actually involved in “filmmaking,” but she revises that position four years later in “Approaching Borderline” (1986).

106. Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3d ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 133. Henceforth cited in the text as Film. 107. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968). Benjamin quotes Gance as evidence of an enthusiasm for the ritual potential of film (shared by H.D.): “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films...all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions...await their exposed resurrection and the heroes crowd each other at the gate” (1108).

108. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,’ in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), 50. Henceforth cited in the text as Marinettt.

109. The poems were originally published separately by Oxford University Press in London and New York, and they were not brought together as Trilogy until Norman Holmes Pearson republished them in 1973. While there is justification for reading the poems sepa-

rately, they each have forty-three sections and share symbols, allusions, and features of form. In my focus on cinematic scenes of dream-vision and ritual enactment, I necessarily leave many fascinating moments out of my discussion. 110. Endnotes like Eliot’s require a different engagement with his mythical method, as readers flip between the text and the presumably authoritative notes at the back of the book. 11. The recurrence of seasonal celebrations is of “paramount importance” to Harrison’s theory of ritual (Ritual 49). 112. The four Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus’ feet and his defense of her when the disciples complain about the expense of the ointment. They do not feature a “jar,” a womblike object choice, but a costly alabaster box is described in Matthew 26:7, Mark 14:3, and Luke 7:37, and a “pound of ointment of spikenard” appears in John 12:3. Although

John indicates that it was Mary of Bethany who performed the anointing, the woman is designated a “sinner” in Luke 7:37 and often identified with Mary Magdalene, from whom Jesus casts seven devils in both Mark and Luke. H.D. freely takes elements from all accounts; she even attributes the Pharisee’s accusation from Luke 39 to Simon, “this man if he were a prophet, would have known / who and what manner of woman this 1s” (Trilogy 143). 1143. Myrrha isa crucial figure in H.D.’s revision of Mary Magdalene, but she is not mentioned in critical studies or in Aliki Barnstone’s footnotes to the lines.

314. NOTES TO PAGES 239-241

Afterword 1. I have left out many figures who might be included in this history: in modern dance, Maud Allen and Martha Graham both performed solos rooted in religion and myth and attempted to stage modernist rituals. H.D., as poet, performer, and filmmaker combines central forms of mythic posing, but I might have examined the dancer and filmmaker Maya Deren or the poet and artist Mina Loy, who was working on a biography of Duncan at the time of her death. 2. Jerzy Grotowski, The Grotowski Sourcebook, ed. Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner (London: Routledge, 1997), 81, 28. Grotowski also writes, “I was very interested in Delsarte’s

thesis that there are introverted and extroverted reactions in human contact. At the same time, I found his thesis very stereotyped; it was really very funny as actor training, but there was something to it, so I studied it” (45). 3. See Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 4. For classic works, see Guy Debord, Société Du Spectacle [Society of the Spectacle} (New York: Zone, 1995); Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Au Juste [Just Gaming] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation [Simulacra and Simulation] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

5. The significance of myth to postmodern critical theory is evident in Ihab Hassan’s influential The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) and Hélene Cixous’s “Le Rire de la Méduse” [“The Laugh of the Medusa” in L’Arc (1975): 39-54. As discussed in the introduction, biblical typology is an important part of Frederic Jameson’s analysis in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 31. For one

articulation of the postmodern interest in posing, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday, 1980). 6. Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

7. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “The Visual Grammar of Suffering: Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief,’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 84 (2006): 77-92, 77. Henceforth cited in the text as “Grief.” Ravetto-Biagioli argues, “Lindman’s performances offer us a way

of rethinking how we ground discourses about Others on notions of difference. By focusing

on repetition rather than difference, Lindman’s performances do not allow any subject position to form.... More than simply reminding us about the manipulation of images and gestures into representations, her work makes us think about the way we consume images, make gestures, interpret events, and even how we can make political and feminist art” (90). While I believe it is impossible to prevent subject positions from forming in a performance where poser, audience, and random passersby interact, Lindman reveals the processes by which we assume and interpret subject positions, and this lends power to her interrogation of difference.

8. Commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the performance was part of the international summit “What Comes After, Cities, Art + Recovery,” referencing the events of September 11, 2001, and other terrorist attacks. My description is based on a selec-

tion of the performance filmed by Manuel Acevedo and edited by Johann Torkkola,

NOTES TO PAGES 243-245 = 315

available at http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/lindmanaspect/videos/4781-new-york-timesperformance-tour-in-battery-park-nyc. Henceforth cited in the text as “Battery Park.” 9. For how bodily practices are learned, see Marcel Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body” [1935], in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York: Berghahn, 2006): 77-95. 10. See Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jo Bonney (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000). Henceforth cited in the text as Extreme. The special issue “Solo Performance” in Canadian Theatre Review (Fall 1997) discusses performances by Shawna Dempsey, Rhonda Trodd, Jeffrey Oullette, and others. Editors Ric Knowles and Harry Lane explain, “This issue began from a sense not only that the number of theatre productions with only one performer has grown rapidly in the 1980’s and 90’s, but also that some of our most provocative theatre experiences have resulted from the encounter between the audience and the solo actor” (3). They do not discuss monodrama in the issue. uu. In Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), Friedman calls for moving “Beyond Gender” and difference to help resolve the white, heterosexist, middle-class, and Western biases of feminism (17). 12. See Charles Isherwood’s review, “The Body of Her Work: Hearing Questions of Life and Death,’ in the New York Times (January 22, 2008). I saw Smith’s Let me Down Easy at American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA, on September 23, 2008. 13. Charles Olson, “Projective Verse and Letter to Elaine Feinstein,’ in Selected Writings of Charles Olson, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1950), 29. Henceforth cited in the text as “Projective.” 14. Thomas F. Merrill, in The Poetry of Charles Olson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), reads this trinity as a formula for how “to recover the roots of nouns so that their cosmic connections may be tapped.” While he does not recognize its affinity with biblical typology, the central thrust of typological hermeneutics is to uncover the connections between figures, events, and institutions (all nouns) in relation to each other and an idea of cosmos or heaven (98). 15. Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,’ in Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985), 71. Henceforth cited in the text as “Notes.” 16. Olson’s doctrine of “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” has three principles, two of which are familiar from Pound’s definition of imagism: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” and “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (“Projective” 16-17). The third principle is “kinetics.” 17. John Palatella claims that Olson actually coined the term postmodern in his 1952 essay “The Present Is Prologue.” Palatella accepts the label of Olson as the first “postmodern” poet in his discussion of Olson’s Collected Prose in Boston Review (February—March 1998). 18. Olson also claims that to record speech, poetry must dismantle the syntactical conventions that logic has forced on written language. Quoting Ernest Fenollosa’s influential advice to modernism, Olson suggests that the English language must return to the active, forceful property of “the VERB, between two nouns” (“Projective” 21).

19. Charles Olson, “Proprioception,’ in Additional Prose, ed. George F. Butterick (Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons, 1974). Henceforth cited in the text as “Proprioception.”

316 NOTES TO PAGES 246-248

20. Relevant to Olson’s call for violence, Isadora Duncan concludes “Depth”: “Even vio-

lence is the greater when it is restrained: one gesture that has grown slowly out of that reserve is worth many thousands that struggle and cut each other off.” See “Depth,” in Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1969), 100. 21. Robert Creeley similarly insists, “How to dance sitting down...is my own preoccupation as I try to write these words—not at all metaphorically, because it is an absolutely physical event for me.” See his Was That a Real Poem and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons, 1964), 129. 22. Wakoski states of the term confession, “It was coined by an academic critic who had to come to terms with the fact that these [ Plath, Sexton, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman] were extremely successful, powerful poets who had all been in mental institutions. Three of them were suicides.” See Carrie Preston, “Interview with Diane Wakoski,” Red Cedar Review 35, no. 1 (1999): 14-28.

23. See Wakoski’s recent essay “Creating a Personal Mythology,” in The Diamond Dog (Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga, 2010), xi—xiv.

24. Diane Wakoski, Jason the Sailor (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1993), 194. Henceforth cited in the text as Jason. 25. The series includes Medea the Sorceress (1991), Jason the Sailor (1993), The Emerald City of Las Vegas (1995), and Argonaut Rose (1998). 26. Diane Wakoski, Medea the Sorceress (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1991), 114.

27. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Lilith Poems, in Feminist Revision and the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 94. Henceforth cited in the text as Lilith. 28. Enid Dame, Lilith and Her Demons (Merrick, NY: Cross-Cultural Communications, 1989); 4.

29. Ostriker provides a list of what she calls “myth-poems” by women in Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 284-286. She does not deal with these poems as dramatic monologues, although they are often written in that form. She describes the mythical impulse in women’s writing: “These poems generically assume the high literary status that myth confers and that women writers have often been denied because they write ‘personally’ or ‘confessionally’ But in them the old stories are changed, changed utterly, by female knowledge of female experience, so that they can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy or as the pillars sustaining phallocentric ‘high’ culture” (215). While women’s adoption of the mythic pose is influenced by the historical marginalization of their writing, my research points to continuities between men’s and women’s use of dramatic monologues and poetic theories more generally.

30. Rainer presented her lecture “Feelings Are Facts” and her dance film commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” in the Contemporary Artist Series, University of California at San Diego, May 19, 2005. 31. Rob Prince, “Feature Editor’s Introduction to The Classical Era,’ Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 27—28, 27. 32. Directed by Zack Snyder and released by Warner Brothers (2007). 33. Alex Beam, “Meanwhile: Hot Times at the “Hot Gates,” New York Times, March 8, 2007. New York Times Online at www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/opinion/o8iht-edbeam .4844292.html. For a discussion of the reception of the film by U.S. Marines, see Evan

NOTES TO PAGES 248-249 317

Thomas’s “The Few, the Proud, the Movie,’ Newsweek Web Exclusive at www snewsweek.com/id/36146. 34. Frank Miller, 300 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1998).

35. Michael Williams, “The Idol Body: Stars, Statuary and the Classical Epic,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 39-48, 44.

36. Charles-Antoine Courcoux, “From Here to Antiquity: Mythical Settings and Modern Sufferings in Contemporary Hollywood’s Historical Epics,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 29-38, 34.

37. See Beam’s “Hot Times” and Seong-Kon Kim, “Orientalism in the “300’ Spartans,’

Korea Herald (March 24, 2010) at www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_ dir/2010/03/24/201003240040.asp.

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Index abstraction, 24, 129, 158, 170, 176-7, 207, H.D. and, 191, 200, 204, 212-3, 217, 219,

224, 241, 252n21, 301nNN103—4 221, 225 acting technique, 10, 40-44, 59-60, 77, and language, 24-26, 217 90-96, 99, 178-81, 194, 217-25, 25107, and ritual, 16-17 253N28, 265N49, 27104, 272N7, 275n37, antitheatricality, 16-17, 105, 109, 134, 200,

276nN47, 279nN77-79, 281nn93—-94, 205, 268nN72, 306N40, 307N54

310n84 attitude (statue posing), 4,9

aesthetic emotion, 22-23, 75, 259n84 aesthetics of, 58, 60-67, 274nn24—-25 agency, 13-14, 29, 32, 34, 38, 46, 107, 147, 177, Goethe’s popularization of, 40-42,

254N37, 275N37, 308n65 264nn37—38 Albright, Daniel, 252n20 Hamilton, Emma Lyon, invention Aldington, Richard, 124, 195, 197, of, 32-39, 139, 141, 239, 242-3, 263n22,

305n20 263n26, 263N28, 271N105

allegory, 15, 38, 77, 117, 124, 212-5, 237-8, in modern dance, 82-84, 88, 144, 152-6,

302N122, 304n9 156-9, 169-70, 234, 249, 265N51, 279n72, antimodern-classicism, 7—8, 11, 17, 102, 141, 297N53

143, 172, 182, 219, 248-9, 302125 in nineteenth century, 9, 26-29, 42-45,

authenticity, 7, 185 52, 56-57, 239, 261N9, 276n47 critique of modernity, 7-9, 57, 69, 125-6, in poetic recitation, 100, 104—6, 114, 121,

135, 182, 191, 196, 221, 219, 225, 239, 134, 140-1

251N15, 252n16, 309n70 in Delsartism, 5, 16-17, 20, 59, 63-71, Duncan and, 144, 146-7, 150, 170, 183, 74-81, 84-87, 92—93, 98, 127, 218, 234-5,

188, 190, 294n20 274N30, 277NN56—58

303N126 248-9

as gendered, 5, 7, 167, 183, 300N84, in contemporary performance, 240-3,

343

344 INDEX

attitude (continued ) Brooks, Louise, 88—90, 247, 280nn in semiprivate/amateur theatricals, 40, 82-84

52, 69, 97 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 44-51, 58, 111, in silent film, 87—95, 98, 220, 217-9, 220, 140, 193

222, 224-5, 227-8, 235, 237 Aurora Leigh, 44-45, 117, 266nn59-61 and subjectivity, 12, 15, 99, 125, 139, 239, and monodrama, 45—48

289n90 “monologue of Aeschylus,” 45-48, 56, and theatrical laws, 42-43, 264nn 267nn64—66, 268n72

39-42 and typology, 16, 27, 45, 49-51, 54-55, Attridge, Derek, 47—48, 260n101 154, 269n83, 306N41 auditory (aural) imagination, 25, 48, 111-2, “The Virgin Mary to the Child 134—6, 195, 198, 202, 233, 239, 268n74, Jesus,” 48-50, 56

291N112 Browning, Robert, 19-20, 27, 45-46, 52, 70, Augustinian doctrines, 15, 48, 268nn77—78 100, 105—9, 117, 120—2, 126, 129-30, 200,

autobiography, 20, 27, 82, 87-88, 120, 145-6, 251n6, 261n3, 267N64, 267nnN66-67, 148, 165, 179-80, 183—4, 194, 200, 243, 268nN75, 270N99, 278nN61, 282n3, 282n5, 254n39, 261N3, 293n6, 297N48, 305nN17, 284n27

311n87 “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” 52

Bacchantes, 34-35, 38—39, 97, 175, 184, 208, “My Last Duchess,” 19-20, 117

249, 263N26, 279N105 Bruzelius, Margaret, 306n36, 306n44, ballet, 23, 29-30, 42, 81, 84, 87, 148, 154-66, 307N46 172, 177, 181—2, 187, 247, 258n78, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 142, 280n89, 293n6, 293n8, 295nn28—-29, 213, 219, 220, 223, 225, 292n126,

298n59 310nn73—74, 311n87, 312n99 Baright, Anna, 104, 283nn14—16 Buckstone, J. B., 43, 265n47

Baudelaire, Charles, 70, 276n42 Bush, Douglas, 7 Belilove, Lori, 168, 293n3, 297n58, 299n83, Butler, Judith, 12-13, 18, 254nn36—37 300nN85, 301N106

Benda, Georg’s Medea, 30, 42, 270n99 Cambridge Ritualism, 10, 16, 144, 175,

Benda and Johann Christian Brandes’s 307nN53—55 Ariadne auf Naxos, 30-32 Can Grande della Scala, 15, 124, 138—40, Benjamin, Walter, 24, 228-9, 260nn98—99, 256n51

281N99, 304n9, 313N107 Carman, Bliss, 83-84, 126—9, 133, 142,

Blau, Herbert, 57 278nn68—69, 278n71, 289n85 Boston University School of Oratory (later | Censi, Giannina, 168, 171, 177, 300n91

Boston School of Expression), 73, Chaplin, Charlie, 60, 90-91, 97, 272n11,

100-7, 120, 277N55, 283nn9—-14 280n88, 281n99 Botticelli, Sandro, 158—9, 184, 224, 238 Chautauqua, 10, 81, 101-8, 125-34, 142-3,

Brecht, Bertolt, 24, 260n99 198

INDEX 345

chorus (ancient Greek), 16-18, 29, 46, 166, Dalcroze, Emile Jaques, 90, 273n18, 277n57,

168, 173, 175, 204-10, 299N79, 304N11, 281n94, 298n66

308n60 Daly, Ann, 8, 146, 153, 293n4, 295n25, class (socioeconomic), 13, 17,19, 36-38, 51, 296nN44, 298N61, 301N110 59, 67-71, 73, 80, 97, 100, 103, 107-10, Dante, Alighieri, 15, 50, 118-9, 123-4, 126,

137, 139, 145, 148—53, 159, 161, 187, 129, 140-1, 213—4, 256n51 214-15, 254nnN31—32, 255n43, 261n6, deconstruction, 12, 19, 21, 57, 247,

284n32, 285n44, 298n61, 302n125, 254n31

312N100, 315N11 Delap, Lucy, 182-3, 302n120 classic/classical dancing, 3, 10, 71, 150, 194, Dell, Floyd, 185-6

252n18 Delsarte, Francois: biography, 4, 60-66 classicism, 3-12, 29-30, 36, 60, 74, 98, 123, laws of movement, 61—64, 127, 156

141, 182, 200, 212, 230, 248, 252nn Delsarte Matinees, 73, 77-80, 99-100, 108, 19—21, 303n4, 304n9, 307n54. See also 143, 153, 218, 278n61

antimodern-classicism Delsartism, 58-109 Close Up, 194, 213-9, 226, 228, 230, as antimodern, 5—6, 9-10, 59, 69, 71,

310nn74-75 25329

Cohen, Ed, 12, 254n37 and the body, 12, 58-70, 104-5 Collecott, Diana, 111, 195, 199, 253n24, and attitudes (posing), 4, 9, 63-70, 284n34, 285nn37—38, 28655, 30304, 74-79, 84-87, 92-93, 127, 218, 234-5, 305N20, 306nN37, 306N41, 311n87, 311N90, 274N30, 277N56

311n93 emotional expression in, 4, 61-77, 84, 87, Comentale, Edward, 8, 211, 308n62, 92

309n67 and film, 9-10, 87-97, 217-9, 223—4, 226, Comte, Auguste, 61, 74, 274n23 253n28, 279nN77, 310n80,

Courcoux, Charles-Antoine, 248—9 312n97 Craig, Gordon, 145, 153, 179, 180, 266n54, and gender, 12-13, 58-59, 69-72, 78-83, 292n2, 293n8, 294n12, 295n30, 301N112, 104-5, 126-7

312N97 as international movement, 4, 10, 58-59, Creeley, Robert, 244, 316n21 67-70, 73-74, 81, 90-97, 107, 193, 217, crisis of modernity, 7, 9, 55, 59, 239, 272n8 251N7, 264N39, 275n38, 310n80 Culler, A. Dwight, 19, 27, 258n72, 261n4, and modernism, 4—6, 12-13, 58—61,

263n24, 267n64, 267n67, 270n99 253n29 Culler, Jonathan, 18, 258n75 and modern dance, 10, 79-80, 81-87, cultures of recitation (international), 10, 144, 152-60, 169-70, 173-4, 296n41 18, 100-35, 147, 197-8, 282n4, 284n29, promotion of recitation, 4, 10, 12, 20,

285nn38—39, 292n124 58-59, 70, 77-79, 82, 88, 90, 100-9, Curry, Samuel Silas, 10, 100-12, 118-21, 195 133-7, 142-3, 169, 245, 283nn14—23, religious aspects of, 64-70, 73-74, 78,

284n24 81-82, 274N23, 274N29, 275N35

346 INDEX

Delsartism (continued ) and Pound, Ezra, 101, 117—8, 122, 126, 128, trinities, 11-12, 60—64, 69, 74, 83-84, 105, 130-1, 133, 141, 199, 251n6, 282n5,

126, 161—2, 166, 181, 199, 217 285N38, 306N41 and technology, 58-60, 68, 93, 274n23, recitation of, 10, 100—9, 142-3

27537, 279N77, 281n99 and typology, 53, 56-57, 74, 116-7 and women’s movement, 59, 66, 68—69, Victorian, 9, 18-20, 27, 44-57, 100, 115—6,

71-72, 104, 27430, 275n38 239 de Man, Paul, 20, 258n75 and Webster, Augusta 54-56 Denishawn School and Company, 60, dress reform, 12, 59, 68-70, 73 82-92, 217, 247, 278n65, 279nnN72-76 Dreyer, Carl, 215, 229 Derrida, 12, 254n37, 259n81, 261n2, 285n38 Duncan, Isadora, 144-90

de Staél, Germaine, 38, 45, 269n91 Americanness, 150—1, 163—4, 293n4

Diaghilev, Sergei, 92 antimodern, 6-7, 144-7, 150-1, 170, Diderot, Denis, 153, 180, 265n49, 297N45 183—4, 188, 190, 294n20 Dionysus/Dionysian, 16-17, 46, 123, 156-7, autobiography, 145-6, 148, 165, 179-80, 164, 166, 171, 173, 175—6, 179, 181, 185, 183—4, 293n6, 297n48

200, 204, 206, 208, 212, 230, 235, 249, biography, 145-6, 251n6, 293n10, 294n11

297N55, 299N79, 307N54, 308n61 choreographic practice, 3,10, 79, 144-8,

dramatic monologue: 153—9, 164-70, 174-84, 188, 238, 295n25, and Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 44-51, 295N33, 301N110

102 costume, 32, 90, 145, 149, 152-3, 157, 186, biographical readings of, 113, 119-22, 130, 217, 293n6 137, 141-2, 246, 285n39, 286n45, 29115, curtain-call speeches (manifestos), 10,

316n22, 316n29 144—5, 147, 161, 163, 167—72, 174, 183-5, and Curry, Samuel Silas, 105-10, 239, 302N123

284n23 decor, 10, 144-5, 149, 293n6

in Delsartism, 81, 99-109 and Delsartism, 10, 79-80, 144, 152-60, and Eliot, T. S., 117-25, 287n69, 288n73 169-70, 173—4, 296n41 generic theories, 18—20, 27, 30, 102, eroticism, 149-51, 170, 187, 303n6, 257nn66—69, 258nN73, 258N75, 292N123, 308n64 261nn4—5, 267N67, 270N99, 282n5 and feminism, 142, 144, 146, 171, 182—90 and H.D., 117, 191, 193—4, 197-203, 220, as international artist, 10, 13, 144-6, 149,

228, 235-6, 306N41 152, 182, 188, 251n6, 293n4, 295n30, and Lowell, Amy, 137-42, 291n14 299n78, 301N112 and Mew, Charlotte, 110-7, influence on modernism, 10, 21, 144-6,

285nn38-39, 286n45 170-81, 184—8, 292n2, 301nn112—3 and modernism 5, 101—2, 111-3, 117-8, and myth, 148, 151-3, 156-7, 159, 170,

130-1, 137—42, 251n6 173—6, 182-5 postmodern and contemporary, 244-7, natural dance, 6,10, 147, 163-4, 171,

316n29 177-81, 186, 188, 193, 294n20, 299n69

INDEX 347

reviews, 1, 149-53, 166, 169, 173-6, 179, Eastman, Max, 185-7 250N1, 293N7, 295nn31—32, 296n36, Egotst, 117,195, 204, 253n24, 286nn52-56,

297N55, 300N96, 301N109 305N19, 307N54, 312n11 science, 144, 146, 161-3, 167, 179-80, 189 Eisenstein, Sergei, 95-96, 213, 226,

self/soul, 10,14, 144-8, 151-6, 161-6, 309n72 171—3, 179—81, 185—8, 293nN4, 300N85 Eliot, T. S., 10, 16, 23, 101—2, 108, 110,

as soloist, 10, 144-52, 165-8, 179, 185-8, 117—26, 128-30, 133—5, 141—2, 147, 184,

297n58, 299n83 231-2, 237, 282nn4—5, 284n35, 285n38, spontaneity, 10, 144-8, 163—4, 177-81, 186 287nN63, 287nN69, 288n73, 288n8o,

students and schools, 79, 149, 153, 158, 289n94, 290N103, 290N105, 292n126, 165—6, 176, 184, 278n63, 293n3, 299N75 305n20, 306N41, 313n110

and technology, 10, 144—6, 166-8, 170-3, “Journey of the Magi, The” 122-4, 184,

177, 189, 294n20 237

on women, 7, 10-11, 14, 163, 168, 171, Waste Land, The, 23, 122, 142, 232, 284n35

182—90, 298n61, 300n84 elocution, 10, 20, 58, 77-78, 100—4, 107, 109,

Duncan, Isadora choreography: 118, 133-5, 143, 283n9, 285n37 Amazons, The, 80,170, 174 emotional expression, 3, 26—27, 41, 62, 75,

Andante, 176 152-3, 173, 179, 217, 301NN109-10, Ave Marta, 174, 183—4, 302n12 301N113

Bacchanale, 175 empire, 70, 131-3, 248 Blessed Spirits, 184 essentialism, 10, 11-14, 254n31, 259n91 Furies, The, 158, 168, 171, 184, 297n56, evolution, 75—77, 146, 156, 161-3, 171, 189,

311n92 298nn62-—64

Iphigenia, 79-80, 167, 174, 176, 185 expression:

Lullaby, 183 academic discipline of, 10, 12, 78, 100-10, Marseillaise, 3-5, 13, 169-70, 178 118, 120, 125, 134—6, 142-3, 147, 152, 169,

Mother, 168, 174, 183-4, 300n85 195, 198, 282n3, 284n23, 288n80

Narcissus, 184, 296n36 ancient modes of, 24, 28-29, 133

Niobe, 183-4 Delsartean, 61-77, 84, 87, 92, 98, 105, 112, Revolutionary, 178, 297n56 152, 276N47 Scherzo, 175 emotional, 22, 26—31, 41, 62, 106, 114, 153, Tanagra Figures, 157-8, 297n52 179, 217, 243-4 Tannhduser, 162, 175-6, 297n58 physical, 6, 28, 31-34, 84, 91, 95-98, Three Graces, The 158-60, 297n58 106, 109, 147, 154, 156, 162, 174, 242,

Water Study, 169, 171, 177, 296n36 260n99 Duncan, Robert, 196—7, 244—5, 251n6, of self/soul, 18, 108, 118—21, 128, 130, 144,

286n53, 305N23, 307N54, 308n60 147-8, 154, 164, 171, 176, 179, 295n25, Duplessis, Rachel Blau, 250n4, 253n24, 301NN109—10, 301N113 254N32, 304N13, 308N63, 311N87 solo, 147-8, 165

Duse, Eleonora, 153-4, 297N47 expressionism, 59, 222, 230, 252n21

348 INDEX

expressive culture (American), 59, 101-8, Fuller, Loie, 148, 170, 255n39, 273n14 118—19, 126, 130, 134—8, 142, 153, 156, Fuller, Margaret, 14, 154, 255n45

282n4, 288n80, 290N105 Fuss, Diana, 11-12, 254n31 Futurism, 5, 7-10, 60, 144, 172, 188, 195, 230,

fallen woman, 54, 114-7, 270nn98—99 252n21, 300n90 Farfan, Penny, 59, 146, 258n78

Farr, Florence, 107—8, 119-20, 129, 134, Gale, Maggie B., 44, 251n7

289n93, 291n108 Gallagher, Jean, 225, 303n3, 310n84 femininity, 3—8, 12, 29-32, 44-45, 49, 51-52, Galatea, 28-32, 52, 192, 200, 263n24 59, 69, 71, 80, 89, 167, 170, 172, 184, 188, Gardin, Vladimir, 92-93

240, 246, 252N17, 267N62, 298n61, Garrick, David, 43, 62, 264n49

300N84, 308n62 gender:

feminism, 11, 14, 16, 19, 45, 82, 90, 142, 144, and Delsartism, 12-13, 58-59, 69-72, 146, 171, 182—92, 195—6, 244, 253n24, 78-83, 104—5, 126-7

256nN55, 261n6, 286n52, 292n123, diversity, 13-14, 23, 90, 111-3, 228, 248,

298n61, 302N125, 314N7 309N72, 254nn38-9, 285N40, 285N45, Fenollosa, Ernest, 24, 128, 198, 260n96, 286nn46—47, 312n95

film: 261n8

306n35, 315n18 ideologies of, 15, 31-32, 51, 69, 112, 116,

and dance, 9, 58—60, 87-96, 279n77 in the nineteenth century, 15, 26—28, and Delsartism, 9—10, 87—97, 217-9, 31-32, 69, 261n8 223-4, 226, 253n28, 279N77, 310n80, and modern dance, 7, 10—11, 14, 163, 168,

312N97 171, 182—90, 298n61, 300n84 and H.D., 3, 11, 191, 194, 212-31, 304n9, bias in modernist poetics, 110-3, 117,

308n72, 31074, 310nn77-84 133-4, 142, 195-6, 247, 25324, silent film, 82-99, 212-31 285n37, 285nn38—-39, 290N103, technology, 6, 9, 58-60, 90-98, 225-6, 307N54, 316n29 228-9, 249, 253n28, 281n99, 304n9, as performative, 12-13, 18, 240, 254n37

309N70, 312N100 theory, 11-14 contemporary, 240-2, 248-9 genre: Fletcher, John Gould, 141, 195-6, 231, histories of, 9, 18-19, 26-57, 100—9

286N55 hybrids, 10, 17, 25, 28, 41, 43, 56, 144-5, Foster, Susan, 12, 30, 254n36 152, 173, 243, 191, 194, 306n40

Foucault, Michel, 13 and gender, 19, 45-47, 51, 130-1, 142, 148, Franko, Mark, 147-8, 294n22, 297n48 267N62, 285nn38—-39 Friedberg, Anne, 228, 309n72, 310n74, solo genres, 8—9, 11, 18-21, 25, 27-31,

311n85, 311N94, 3130105 44-45, 56-57; 99-134, 143, 191, 227-8, Friedman, Susan Stanford, 9, 244, 250n4, 261N7, 266nn56—57 253nNn24—25, 261N6, 304n16, 305n32, theory, 18—21, 257nn62—62, 257n70,

308N57, 309N72, 311N87, 315Nn11 258nn75—76, 263n30

INDEX 349

gesture: 262—3nN20—29, 264n33, 264nn35—38, cinematic, 10, 87-98, 194, 215—7, 222-7, 269nN91, 271N105, 274n24, 277n58,

272N7, 311N84, 312N97 311n86 in dance, 22, 153-6, 166, 168, 173—4, 179, Hamilton, Sir William, 32-33, 36, 139,

183, 272n9, 273n16, 297N56, 316n20 263N22, 263n24

Delsartean, 58-70, 75-79, 83-84, Handel-Schiitz, Henrietta, 42 104—5,153, 157, 217, 283N17, 283n23, Hansen, Miriam, 60, 251n13, 304n9

296n44 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 16-18, 81, 123, 125, 146, language of, 6-7, 12, 24-43, 217, 242-3, 173-4, 184, 193, 246, 256nn 260nN94, 260N99, 261N2, 266N57, 314N97 55-59, 307NN53—-55

in poetry, 20-21, 27, 45, 48-49, 193, H.D., 191-238

199—203, 234-7, 246 acting style, 194, 218-25, 310n84 in recitation, 112, 119, 173, 291n111 as antimodern, 7, 191, 196, 200, 204, and schools of expression, 103-7, 283n23 212-3, 217, 219, 221, 225, 309N70 Gish, Lillian, 87—88, 217, 272n7, 310n79 cinematic techniques in poetry, 11, 231-8

Glenn, Susan A., 251n7 and dance, 191, 194, 197, 205, 207—12, 236, Goethe, J. W., 26, 30-34, 36, 38-44, 56, 97, 303n6, 308nn64—65 139—40, 202, 237, 262n18, 263nn dramatic monologues, 117, 191, 193-4,

22-25, 264N37 197—203, 208, 210, 220, 228, 232, 235-6, Italian Journey, 32, 37-39, 41-42 306N41 Proserpina, 26, 30, 39-44, 56, 97, 202, 237, embodied creativity, 11, 193, 198-201, 207

262n18 eroticism, 199-201, 208, 210-1, 222-3, Gregory, Eileen, 203, 250n4, 252n19, 303n4, 227, 237, 308n64, 309nN67 304n14, 307N52, 307NnN54—56, 308n60, film work, 3, 11, 191, 194, 212-31, 304n9,

309n66 308nN72, 310N74, 310nn77—84 Greek tragedy, 16-17, 29, 82, 165, 173-4, 183, and feminism, 191—2, 194, 195—6, 201,

204, 256, 272N12, 304nn6-7, 306n37 308n62 Greenwich Village Radicalism, 10, 144, and gender, 7, 14, 117, 191, 199-202,

185—6, 188, 303N126 207-8, 210—1, 222-3, 228, 233-8 Griffith, D. W., 10, 60, 87-88, 92, 217, and Imagism, 192-9, 203, 304nn15—16,

279nn78—80 308n60, 312n102

Intolerance, 87-88, 92, 217 and individualism, 192, 199-200, 204-7,

Grotowski, Jerzy, 239, 314 211-2, 228-9, 232, 312n99 Giinther, Dorothee, 90 and kinesthetics, 192-8, 202, 207-9, 211, 213, 233, 237

Haeckel, Ernst, 144, 146, 160-3, 166, 189, and myth, 192, 198-205, 212, 214-6,

298nn62—65 221—2, 230-8, 306N36, 313nn112—3 Hamilton, Emma Lyon, 26, 32-45, 56, participatory (ritualized) reception, 191, 65—66, 71, 74, 89, 97, 134, 139-41, 194, 197—8, 200, 202—9, 211—9, 226,

156, 219, 222, 228, 234, 237, 242-3, 231—3, 237, 309N66, 313N110

350 INDEX

H.D., (continued ) “Pygmalion,” 198-201 photomontage, 3, 219-22, 250n4, “Restraint,” 217-9

311nn88—89 “Tribute, The” 203-4

queerness, 192, 208, 211, 213, 222-3, Trilogy, 11, 194, 204, 231-38, 308n60,

25439, 3033, 306N45, 313NN109—-113

312n95 Wingbeat, 191, 194, 218—9, 303n3 reviewing, 11, 194-5, 199, 200, 212-8, 231, Hellenism, 8, 28—29, 151, 224, 303n4 See also

2.48, 286nn53—55, 305N19, 305n21, classicism 305n38, 310N81, 312N100 “high” art, 67, 97, 103-5, 120, 145-50, 152, and ritual, 11, 192-3, 195, 199-210, 212-15, 159, 290N105, 292n123, 298n61

218, 225, 229-38, 306n37, 306n39, hieroglyph, 24, 50, 217, 225-6, 310n77

307n56, 308n62 Holmstrém, Kirsten Gram, 44, 261n9, and the sacred, 14, 191-2, 196, 206, 236, 263N24, 264N35

303N107 hooks, bell, 254n38, 302n125 and soul/self, 191-2, 198—201, 228, 230, Hovey, Henrietta, 69-75, 82-87, 104, 107, 159,

311n91 275nn39—40, 279N75, 287N60, 296n44 and technology, 194, 212, 222, 225-31, Hovey, Richard, 126-9, 133, 142, 156, 275n39,

234, 237, 304n9, 309N70, 312N100 289nn8&4—-85 and typological theories, 11, 192, 194, Hurston, Zora Neale, 24 199-200, 203, 210—8, 226, 231—8, 306N41

H.D. works: Ibsen, Henrik, 72, 224-5, 263n29, 227n52 Borderline, 191, 193—4, 213, 219, 222-30, Iffland, A. W., 40-41 234, 303N3, 309N72, 310N84, 311n94, Imagism, 8, 117, 126, 141, 192-9, 203, 245,

312N95 288nn79-—80, 304nnN15—16, 308n60, “Dancer, The,” 194, 204-5, 207—12, 303n6, 312102, 315N16

308n63—64 impersonality (modernist), 10, 109-10, End to Torment, 194 117—8, 121—2, 125, 287n69, 290N105, “Eurydice,’ 191, 193, 199, 201-3, 211, 215, 292N123

306n36, 307nnN47—48 individualism, 10, 13-14, 16-18, 22, 27-28,

“Explation,” 213-17 61, 70, 104, 108, 119, 152, 162—6, 182, 185, Foothills, 191, 194, 219, 222, 224, 234, 190, 192, 206, 212, 228-9, 255n43,

303n3 255N45, 286N52, 298n64, 302n125, God, The, 198-204 312n94, 312n99 “Hermonax, 203 Iphigenia, 33, 79-80, 167, 174, 176, 185, Ion, 193, 205—9, 211-3, 217, 220, 231, 309n68 263N23

“Jeanne d’Arc,” 215 irony, 20, 46, 52, 106, 125-6, 137, 257nn66—67, Notes on Thought and Vision, 193, 195, 267n67

199, 204-5 Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation “Oread,” 192, 195, 197—9, 304N13, 305N32 (IDDF), 293n3, 297n52, 299n83,

“Orion Dead,” 202-3 300nN85, 301N102, 301NN106—107

INDEX 351

Jack Sheppard, 43, 265n47 Lewis, Monk (Matthew)’s The Captive, 31,

James-Lange theory of emotion, 22, 114

274n26 Lindman, Pia, 240-4, 314nn7-8

Jameson, Frederic, 255nn48—49 living picture (realization tableau), 42-44, Joyce, James, 67, 111, 117, 124-5, 133, 159, 170, 214, 264n39 260nn100-1, 270nN97, 286nN47, 306nN40 Livingston, Jennie (Paris is Burning), 13, 254n38

Khokhlova, Alexandra, 214-9, 310n84 Lowell, Amy, 10, 56, 102, 108, 110-1, 133-43,

kinesthetics: 195, 198-9, 202, 245, 254N39, 271N105, in poetic techniques, 27, 47, 101, 106, 136, 290nn103-7, 291nn108—9

192-9, 201-2, 207, 211, 233, 245-6, Can Grande’s Castle, 138-41

260n100 “Patterns, 137-8

modernist, 5, 11, 21-25, 58, 87, 97-98, 239, lyric, 18-19, 30, 55, 131-2, 199, 258n75,

280n8&8& 267N62, 268N75, 292n123, 309n66 in psychological aesthetics, 22-24,

260N101, 267N71 Mackail, J. W., Greek Anthology, 195, 203,

of posing, 6, 68, 91 210, 304n14

as sense modality, 21-22, 168, 194, 237, MacKaye, Steele, 61, 65-69, 73-74, 87, 103,

246-7, 291n112 107, 27537, 277N55 King, Mary Perry, 83-84, 126 Macpherson, Kenneth, 213, 218-9, 222-3, Kirstein, Lincoln, 164, 178, 301n109 225-7, 280n83, 310nn73—74, 311n87, Klementaski Monro, Alida, 110-5, 285n37, 312N99, 312N103

285n40, 286n47 “make it new,” 8, 253n23, 253n26 Kuleshov, Lev, 10, 60, 91-97, 213-9, 226, 239, manifesto, 3—4, 10, 126, 144-5, 147, 167,

273N13, 280N92, 281N94, 309n72 170—4, 181, 184, 213, 230, 239, 249, 293n9, 300n92

Laban, Rudolph, 21, 24, 90, 246, 259n79 Marcus, Laura, 282n105, 310n74, 310N77,

LaMothe, Kimerer L., 259n80, 293n4, 312n97

299n74, 299n78 Marinetti, E. T., 3-8, 80, 97-98, 110, 146-7, Landow, George, 52-53, 256n52, 268n81, 167, 170—3, 178—9, 230, 249, 250N5,

270nN96, 271N103 300nn8&8—92 Langbaum, Robert, 19-20, 267n67, 287n69 marriage, critiques of, 32, 56, 112-7, 137, Lears, T. J. Jackson, 7, 252nn16—-17, 300n84, 183—4, 286n51, 302N121

303N126 Mary Magdalene, 33-36, 110-7, 232-7, lecture-demonstration, 17, 68, 81, 145, 152 270nN95, 313N112 Lee, Vernon, 7, 22-24, 47, 68, 75, 101, 106, Mary, the Virgin, 42, 48-49, 52, 55-56, 168, 198, 245, 259nn81—-93, 267N71 139—40, 174, 183—4, 218, 232-7, 302N121

lesbianism, 23, 111-3, 134, 137, 223, 28545, materialism, 160-1. See also modernist-

286nn46—47, 303N3, 255N39, 312N95 materialism

Levien, Julia, 158, 169, 293n3 Mauss, Marcel, 40

352 INDEX

McCabe, Susan, 213, 281n102, 309n72 monodrama, 5, 9, 19-20, 26—48, 54-57, McCarren, Felicia, 59, 272n9, 294n20, 74, 78, 81, 99, 100—2, 111-6, 142, 153,

295N33, 300N88, 301N103 202, 228, 239, 243, 261N4, 262n16,

McCauley, Robbie, 243 262n18, 265nn53—4, 266nN55, 267n64, Medea, 30, 32-33, 35, 38, 42-43, 54, 246-7, 267nn67—68, 270N99, 301N112

249, 263N27, 270n99 Monroe, Harriet, 128, 130, 146, 195 Meisel, Martin, 43, 265n48 Monroe, Lewis B., 103-104, 283n12, 283n14 melodrama, 30, 40—43, 60, 78, 104, 109, 218, | Monro, Harold, 109-12, 115, 119-20, 128, 133,

222-5, 240, 264N43, 265N45, 265n53, 135, 172, 284nn34—35, 285n37, 285n40

273n16, 276n47 montage (cinematic), 10-11, 59-60, 91-99, Mew, Charlotte, 10, 102, 110-7, 125—6, 134, 194, 213, 225-34, 237, 279N77, 280n92,

141-2, 195, 199-202, 237, 239, 245, 281n97, 281n102, 309N72, 310N77 254nN39, 285nn36—-39, 285n45, Morgan, Anna, 71-74 286nn46—51, 286n55, 290N105, 292n124 ~=Morrisson, Mark, 108—10, 118, 120, 282n4,

“Changeling, The,” 111-3, 286n46 284nn34—35, 285n37, 287n58, 289n92 “Farmer’s Bride, The,” 110-5, 117, 285n45 motherhood:

“Madeleine in Church,” 114-7, 237 Duncan, Isadora and, 10, 13, 168, 182—4

modern dance: mythic mothers, 35, 45, 54, 56, 70, 88, and Delsartism, 10, 79-87, 144, 147, 102, 117, 183—4, 230, 233-8 152—60, 169-70, 173—4, 296N41 Republican mother, 13, 271n3, 302n120 and film, 9, 58—60, 87-96, 279n77 sanctity of, 31-32, 49, 82, 88, 182—4, 252n17 and gender, 7, 10-11, 13-14, 163, 168, 142, Moya, Paula M.L., 13 144, 146, 171, 182—90, 298n61, 300n84 music hall, 4, 40, 42-43, 73, 89-90, 145,

and kinesthetic theories, 21-23 148—9, 152, 250n5, 300n92 and modernism, 5, 10, 59—60, 144-7, mythical method, 10, 16, 57, 102, 117-8, 122-5,

160-1, 251n6, 292n2 132—3, 140—2, 148, 151, 156, 159, 182, 184, as natural, 6,10, 59—60, 77, 98, 147, 160—4, 203-4, 214, 231, 244, 247, 313N110 177-9, 181, 186, 188, 294n20, 299n69

and ritual, 17, 84-87, 144, 146, 156-7, New Criticism, 18-19, 22, 59, 102, 118-21,

173-7, 208-11, 272nN9, 301N100 128, 258N75, 283n22, 287n62 as solo art, 10, 144-52, 165-8, 179, 185-8, Newbolt, Henry, 108-10

251N7, 297N58, 299n83 “new woman, 11, 147, 152, 166, 182, 186 as transnational, 10, 13, 144-6, 149, 152, New York School of Expression, 73, 75-76, 182, 188, 251n6, 293n4, 295n30, 299n78, 78, 101, 107, 120, 277N55, 282n3

301N112 Nietzsche, Friedrich:

modernist-materialism, 7, 11, 146, 249, and Duncan, Isadora, 144, 146, 160-85,

251N13 189, 293n4, 299nNn74-79

modernist studies, 7—9, 15, 59, 61, 96, 125, and H.D., 193, 204-6, 219, 306n39,

188, 191, 239, 253N22, 258n78 308n61 monism, 161—2, 166, 298n65 theories of ritual, 16-27, 144, 146

INDEX 353

Nike (goddess), 3, 13, 206, 220-1, 243, 249, Poetry Society, 101-2, 109-10, 118,

230nN4, 311N90 142-3 North, Michael, 60, 253n28, 272n11, 280n88, polyphonic prose, 56, 102, 134, 138-141, 281n99 291n108, 291N119 nostalgia, 3, 5, 7,57, 60, 130, 167, 172, 239, POOL film group, 194, 213, 219, 222, 250n4,

252n19 280n83, 310N74, 311N88, 312N103 novelty, 8-9, 149-51, 213, 239 postmodernism, 9, 147-8, 239-40, 243-8, 272N12, 295N31, 3145, 315N17

objective correlative, 102, 117-25, 142, poststructuralism, 12-13, 18, 113, 192,

312n98 302N125

Olson, Charles, 196, 244-6, 315nn14—18, Pound, Ezra

316n20 The Cantos, 126, 128, 133, 141, 284n35, onomatopoeia, 25, 47—48, 136-7, 202, 292nN121

260nN101 and Chautauqua, 125-6, 130, 133-4, 142 oratory, 12, 20, 64, 69-70, 73, 77, 103-8, and Delsartism, 126—30, 133, 275n39

133-8, 141, 282n3, 283n9 and dramatic monologue, 101, 117-8, 122, Ostriker, Alicia Suskin, 247, 304n16, 316n29 126, 128, 130-1, 133, 141, 199, 251n6,

O’Sheel, Shaemas, 151, 168 282n5, 285n38, 306nN41 Ovid, 15, 200, 235, 306nn44—45, 307nn and expression, 130, 288n80, 290n105

47—A9Q “Homage to Sextus Propertius” 126, Ozarovsky, Yuri, Erastovich, 91-92 130-3, 290nng1—-92 “In a Station of the Metro,” 126, 197-8

Pabst, G. W., 88-90, 247, 280n83 and Imagism, 117, 126, 141, 192-9, 245, pantomime, 26, 28-31, 41, 79, 81, 88, 173, 288nn79—80, 312N102, 315n16

262n10 and kinesthetics, 23-24, 151, 194-8,

paratheatrical performance, 4, 17, 25, 260nN96, 301N103 32—40, 60—84, 97—99, 102-14, 134, 152-3, and modernist novelty, 8, 308n59

273N16, 276N50, 297N55, 306N45 and mythical method, 132-3 Parker, H. T., 153, 175-6, 297n55 and recitation, 10, 102, 108, 110-1, 125-9,

Pater, Walter, 22-23, 259nn81—82 133, 289n93

Perry, Bliss, 138, 291n117 and typology, 127-8, 133 personality, 10, 12, 18, 69, 75, 83-84, 100, Pre-Raphaelitism, 52, 128 102-7, 118-22, 125-7, 130, 135, 142, 147, present-absent figures, 30, 41, 46, 49, 54-55,

164, 194, 218, 287nN60 114, 168, 170, 200, 240, 262n16 physical culture, 4, 12, 40, 58, 66-72, 81-82, primitivism, 16-18, 24, 26, 29, 70, 81-85, 87,

310n80 309n72

90, 99, 161, 274N30, 27538, 27757, 94, 146, 173, 183, 191, 199, 204, 227,

Poetry Bookshop, 10, 101, 109-13, 118, Prince, Michael B., 257n62 125—6, 128-9, 134-5, 142-3, 146, 172, Prins, Yopie, 258n75, 267n62

286n47 Projective Verse, 196, 244-5, 315nn16—18

354. INDEX

prosopopoelia, 19—21, 38, 133, 142, 228, Reynolds, Margaret, 46, 266n59, 267n66,

259nn72-76 267N70, 268nN72, 269n9g1 psychoanalytic theory, 12, 99, 206, 213, ritual:

309N72, 312N103 individuation, 16-18, 193 psychological aesthetics, 22-25, 68, 101, 106, and film, 192, 194, 212-20, 225, 229-31,

168-9, 245, 259n81 310N84, 312N97 Puchner, Martin, 260n94, 293n9, 306n40 and modern dance, 84—87, 146, 156-7, Pygmalion, 26, 28-33, 40-41, 56, 91, 116, 193, 173-7, 208-11, 272nN9, 301N100 198—200, 202-3, 220, 262nn10—11, and modernism, 16—18, 61, 81, 123, 181,

263n24, 264n44, 280n89, 294N11, 184, 195, 202-9, 211, 231—4, 237, 246, 306n45, 307nnN45—46, 311n89. See also 306N37, 307NN53—56, 308nn60—64,

Rousseau 312N97, 313N107, 313N109, 314N1 participation, 11, 16-17, 174-5, 191, 194,

queerness, 13-14, 23, 90, 111-3, 222-3, 248, 199, 204-5, 212, 219 309N72, 254n38—9, 285n40, 285n45, and performance studies, 16-18, 257n60,

286nn46—47, 312N95 307N53 seasonal rites, 16, 123, 210, 232, 238, 313N111

race, 13, 43, 81, 90, 222-3, 227-8, 243-4, 248, Roach, Joseph, 179-81, 271n4

254N32, 298n61, 302N125, 309N72, Robeson, Paul, 191, 222-3, 228, 303n3,

312nn95—96 309n72

Rainer, Yvonne, 147-8, 247-8, 295n26, Rodin, Auguste, 157-8, 292n2, 297nn54—55

316N30 romanticism, 8—9, 18, 26—27, 29, 59-60, 112, Rainey, Lawrence, 8, 250n5, 253n26, 300n92 265N53, 295n28 Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss, 241-3, 314n7 Romney, George, 38, 40, 263n26 realism, 215, 223, 225, 229, 252n21, 279n79 Rosenbaum, Barbara, 46, 266n59, 267n66,

recitation: 267N70, 268n72

in Delsartism, 4—5, 10, 12, 18, 20, 58-59, Rossetti, Christina, 27, 51-53, 56, 111, 129,

70, 77-79, 82, 88, 90, 100—9, 195 269nn87—92, 270nnNg3—98, 289n9g3 of dramatic monologue, 10, 18, 27, 99-111 “Good Friday,” 53

and modernism, 5, 100—2, 109-10, “In an Artist’s Studio,” 52 118—28, 134—43, 146-7, 152-3, 172-3, Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 26, 28-32, 40, 56,

197-8, 282n4, 284n24 127, 243, 261nNn1—2, 262n10, 263n24, nineteenth-century practices of, 18, 264nN44, 280n89, 294nN11, 306n55

269n91, 278n61 Pygmalion, 26, 28-31 recognition of mythic referent, 31, 33-36, Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa, 59, 251n7, 272ns, 40, 43, 75) 122-3, 156, 158, 169-70, 174, 274N30, 275nNn38-39, 277NN5 4-58,

203, 220, 263n28, 265n48 296n41 Rehberg, Frederick, 34-37

Reifenstahl, Leni, 90, 280n86 Saint-Point, Valentine de, 168, 170-1

Reynolds, Joshua, 38-39, 97 Sallé, Marie, 29-30

INDEX 355

salons (women’s), 111—4, 142 and gendered subjectivity, 27, 44, 82, 130, Sandow, Eugen, 66-67, 84, 88, 90, 248, 185, 225, 266n57, 276n48

274N33, 275n34 recitation as, 100-7, 114, 134—6, 142-3 Santayana, George, 120-1, 128, 287n64 as trans-generic rubric, 9—11, 18—21, 25, Saussure, Ferdinand de, 24—25, 60-61, 106, 59, 77-78, 90, 99, 125, 192, 227-8, 237,

273N18, 284n24 240

Schechner, Richard, 17-18, 257n60, 271n4 soul:

Schwartz, Hillel, 98—99 and body, 5, 8, 10-12, 40, 62-65, 69-70, science, 6, 23, 54, 60-62, 67, 74, 75-77, 84, 75, 98, 105, 116, 139, 144-8, 151, 154-5, 87, 93, 97-98, 103, 133, 146, 161—3, 167, 161—2, 165—6, 169-70, 177-8, 181, 185,

179-80, 189, 201, 212, 218, 253n26, 188—91, 199, 230, 238—9, 246 271n4, 274Nn23, 298n65, 302n124, 309n70 in Delsartism, 11-12, 60, 62, 64—65,

Scott, Bonnie Kime, 253n24, 258n78 69-70, 73-75, 78, 116, 283n17, 289n90 secularism, 14-15, 17, 74, 125, 146, 192, and Duncan, 8,10, 144-51, 154, 172-3,

258N73, 270N99, 283n23 177, 185, 187—90, 249 self-cultivation, 68—75, 77, 84, 87, 98, 107, and film, 228

275n38, 283n14 and Haeckel, Ernst, 161—2, 166 sentimental art, 45—46, 49, 71, 78, 135 and H.D., 11, 191—2, 199, 217, 230-1, 238,

sexualization of performers, 26, 32, 34, 37; 249 42-43, 88, 148-51, 201, 221, 240, 264n40, and individualism, 12, 40, 105, 109

276n47, 280n85, 308n64, 309n72 and Nietzsche, Friedrich, 178 Shawn, Ted, 80, 82-91, 126, 272n5, 274n26, and Olson, Charles, 246 278n65, 279N72, 279Nn76, 279n80, and Pound, Ezra, 128

297N53 recitation as expression of, 104-5, 109, 119 Gnossienne, 84-87, 90, 297N53 and Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 179-81

Sherman, Cindy, 11, 240-2 and Whitman, Walt, 166, 169 silent auditor, 19, 46—48, 53-54, 122, 132, speaker (poetic), 18-20, 27, 31, 45, 52-56, 74,

200-3, 208, 235 105—6, 112—4, 121-3, 130—3, 137—42, 193, Sinclair, May, 111, 114 197, 202-11, 231—6, 245, 257N66, 267n67, Sloan, John, 182, 185-8, 303n131 285n38, 285n45 Smith, Anna Deavere, 11, 243—4, 266n57 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 92-93, 99, 178-81,

social contract theory, 29-30, 262n15 266n54, 281nn93—-94, 301NN112—13 socialism/communism, 71-72, 145, 163,183, statue posing. See attitude

276n52, 298n61 St. Denis, Ruth, 72-73, 80, 82-91, 2.49, solar plexus, 98, 154-6, 171 272N5, 279N75, 279n80 soliloquy, 45-46 Stebbins, Genevieve, 12, 73-83, 85, 87, 90, 93, solo performance: 4—6, 25, 27-57, 240-4, 98—99, 101, 104, 107, 239, 277nN54—58,

251N7, 315n10 289n84, 289n90

dance as, 73, 82-83, 144-52, 179, 183-5, and Duncan, Isadora, 153, 156, 159,

299n83, 300N85, 314n1 299n69

356 INDEX

subjectivity: trinity (body, mind, soul), 11-12, 60-64, 69, and embodiment, 12-13, 27, 29-30, 148, 74, 83-84, 105, 126, 161—2, 166, 181, 199,

207, 261N7, 281n102 217 gendered, 11-14, 18, 29-30, 44, 68,99,117, ‘Tucker, Herbert FR, 19-20, 268n75,

144, 222—4, 228, 266N57 287n62 mythic/typological, 8, 27,57, 75, 184 tunic (Greek), 29, 32-38, 42, 75, 90, 132, 145,

Victorian, 19-20, 28, 56, 60, 98 149, 152-3, 157, 186, 217, 293n6, 311n89 suffrage, 10, 14, 44, 59, 72-73, 111, 182, 206, Turner, Graeme, 229 252N17, 270N98, 302n124, 308n62 Turner, Victor, 17-18, 307n53

Surette, Leon, 126-128, 289n85 typology (fourfold method), 9-11, 14-16, Swedenborg, Emanuel, 61, 64, 74, 104, 154, 27-8, 25550 199, 268n82, 274nn27—28, 310N77 and gender, 14-16, 256n52 symbolism, 72, 128, 173, 208, 223-5, 230, and contemporary criticism, 15, 244-5,

259n80, 308N65, 312n98 247, 255N49, 315n14 in dance, 148, 151, 156, 159, 182, 184

tableaux vivants, 17, 23, 40—4, 52, 66, 69, and Delsartism, 64, 74-75 77-79, 88-90, 97, 100, 158-9, 170, 214, and film, 192, 212-8, 226 218, 223, 227, 235-8, 241, 247-8, 264n33, and modernist poetry, 111, 116-26, 132-3,

264n37, 265N48, 282N105 140-3, 194, 199—200, 203—4, 210, 231—7 technology, 6, 9, 10, 58-60, 68, 90-98, and the mythical method, 16, 102, 117-8, 144—6, 166—8, 170-3, 177, 189, 194, 212, 122—5, 132—3, 140-2, 148, 156, 183—4,

225-31, 234, 237, 249, 253n28, 203-4, 256n4 272nn8—9, 274n23, 275N37, 279N77, in nineteenth-century poetry, 49-57, 281N99 294N20, 304nN9, 309N70, 125, 268nn81—82, 270Nn93, 270n96 312n100

Tennyson, Alfred, 19, 27, 46, 52, 79, 109, Unitrinianism / Unitrinian School, 83-84, 121, 257N69, 261n3, 267nN67—68, 126-7, 175, 197, 278n71 306nn40—41

Maud, 46, 276n67 Van Vechten, Carl, 169-70, 293n7 “St. Simeon Stylites,” 51 vaudeville, 42, 88—91, 148, 150, 181, 187 Tractarian movement, 51, 269nn85—86 verse-recitation movement (British), 100-1, translation, 8, 129-30, 193, 195, 205-7, 212-3, 118—9, 134, 142, 172, 195, 282n4, 287n58

262n18, 290nn9g8—99, 304nN14, VGIK (First State Cinema School), 92-93,

308nn60—61, 309n66 281n97 transnationalism, 4, 10, 13, 58-59, 67-70, Victory (Nike) of Samothrace, 3, 80, 73-74, 81, 90—97, 107, 144-6, 149, 152, 182, 169-70, 220, 243, 250n4 188, 193, 215, 217, 251nn6-7, 253n22, vocal culture, 58,102, 104, 107, 283n12 264N39, 275N38, 284N29, 293N4, 295n30, Volkonsky, Sergei, 91-92, 277n57, 280n91,

299n78, 301N112, 310n80 281nn93—-94

INDEX 357

Wagner, Richard, 150, 162, 175-6, 260n94, and Duncan, Isadora, 162-3, 167,

272N12, 295n31, 297N58 177-182, 298n65 Wakoski, Diane, 246-7, 249, 316n22 and H.D., 219 Walker, Julia A., 59, 107, 118—21, 253n29, Williams, Carolyn, 257n63 272nn7-8, 273n18, 274N23, 274Nn30, Williams, Michael, 248 275N37, 282n4, 283n14, 283nn22—23, Williams, William Carlos, 6-7, 23, 150-1,

288n80 245

Webster, Augusta, 27, 51-56, 114, 120, Windmill Theatre, 42, 264n41

258n73, 270nn98—99 Wolf, Amalie, 41 Anno Domint1 33, 55-56 Woolf, Virginia, 23, 111, 258n78,

A Housewife’s Opinions, 54-55 259n9g1 “Medea in Athens,’ 54 World War I, 9, 13, 139—43, 169, 195, 203-4, Werner, Edger S. publishing, 12, 61, 66, 68, 219, 230, 303N126, 307N52

81, 83, 275n36 World War II, 9, 11, 42, 125, 142-3, 194, 231,

Wharton, Edith, 97-99, 259n81 233, 292n124 Whitman, Walt, 126, 144, 146, 160-9, 185,

189, 297N55 Yampolsky, Mikhail, 91-95, 280n92, Wilde, Oscar, 56, 70, 271105, 285n38, 281n94, 281n97

289n91 Yeats, W. B., 107-8, 110, 118-9, 125, 129-30,

will: 134, 284n29, 285n38, 289n93, 291N108, Delsartean, 13-14, 62, 64, 69, 84-85, 98 312N98, 312N100