Reclaiming the Silences of Dance: Women and Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
French
First Advisor
Samuels, Maurice
Abstract
This dissertation examines how female spectators and dancers watched and experienced ballet onstage at the Paris Opera (1830-1900). Performed by working-class women, ballet staged the silence of female artists and the limits of women’s expression, leading some to describe the dancers as works of art to be looked at rather than sentient subjects. Starting in the 1820s, ballet provides an example of the disciplined and eroticized female body in the European imaginary. Scopophilia at the Paris Opera is widely believed to prefigure voyeurism in film, as first theorized by Laura Mulvey. Analysis of the sexual politics of spectatorship has, however, reinforced the effacement of women’s perspectives from the historical record. While men did ogle in the opera house, the theory of the male gaze has led to the oversight of many different modes of reception—including those of the women in the room. In Reclaiming the Silences of Dance, I interrogate this longstanding historiography of female erasure by recovering women’s perspectives within the very form that supposedly silenced and objectified them. Male critics of the era consistently objectified dancers’ bodies, seeking to elevate their profession only by turning the female dancer into a metaphor for their own thinking. By studying testimonies from female spectators and dancers at the Paris Opera, from ballet’s first wave of popularity in the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, I show that women may have left fewer traces in the archives in comparison to the written accounts from men, but their subjectivities were not entirely eclipsed. By looking toward the historical particularities and material conditions in which women staged and watched dance, I offer an alternative narrative to the dancer as voiceless muse. In the first chapter, “The Parterre, or the Sexual Politics of Ballet,” I concentrate on the male viewers of ballet, which was considered a semi-pornographic art form because of the foregrounding of the female body. Interrogating the political privileges in men’s assumed right to look, I demonstrate how literary works by authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Stéphane Mallarmé depend on what we now call the male gaze. I then draw from women’s periodicals, journals, and letters to argue in the second chapter, “Women’s Fantasies and the Opera Box,” that dance allowed women in the audience to imagine proto-feminist alternatives to their existing lives. In both the bourgeois women’s press and more radical publications, ballets were reviewed by women writers and featured prominently in their literature, memoirs, and letters. These sources open up both a literal and metaphorical space for women’s spectatorship, problematizing the idea of their passivity as onlookers. I argue that dance’s association with the body and the unconscious allowed women to dream of proto-feminist alternatives, as they admired and identified with financially independent female artists operating in the public space. My third chapter, “Studios, Coulisses, and Foyers, or the Work of Dance,” provides a behind-the-scenes account of the way dancers trained and thought about their practice, recuperating the erased labor in performance to show how women actively contributed to the technical and artistic changes within their profession. In the fourth chapter, “The Stage and the Dancer’s Voice,” I interrogate the silence of the dancer to think through how she used her practice as a means of self-expression. The fifth chapter, “Women Choreographing: Writing the Stage,” follows the three female dancers who choreographed full-length ballets at the Paris Opera: Thérèse Elssler, Fanny Cerrito, and Marie Taglioni. Unearthing their lost performances and alternative approaches to the medium, I show how these women were able to criticize the patriarchy in the stories they told onstage, and were identified as doing so in the press. This dissertations seeks to understand what the medium of dance reveals about women’s experiences in nineteenth-century France. Associated with the somatic and the unconscious, dance figured in the societal imaginary as both men’s and women’s fantasies otherwise suppressed. Ballet libretti spoke to the unspeakable nature of female desire. The reception of ballets among women provides an essential case study in understanding what they were longing for and dreaming about. To ask how women of the era looked at dance onstage is to ask how they saw the world and imagined themselves in it. As an icon of women’s potential ambitions and social ascension, the female ballet student was recognized for transforming her body into a vehicle for her artistic career. Through the “voice” available to them with dance, women of the lower classes possessed a means of expression from which they were otherwise deprived. Recovering what remains of their perspective within the framework of ballet enriches our understanding of a population otherwise largely absent from the archives.
Recommended Citation
Mainwaring, Madison, "Reclaiming the Silences of Dance: Women and Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 892.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/892
