“Fair Creature of an Hour”: Romantic Ballet and Its Affects of Disfigurement
Open Access
- Author:
- Boyer, Katy
- Graduate Program:
- English (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 15, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Claire Colebrook, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Elizabeth Kadetsky, Major Field Member
Janet Lyon, Major Field Member
Sabine Doran, Outside Unit & Field Member
Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- Romanticism
British Romanticism
European Romanticism
ballet
Romantic ballet
second-generation Romantics
second-generation British Romantics
2nd-generation British Romantics
2nd-generation Romantics
Gautier
Lord Byron
Byron
Marie Taglioni
Fanny Elssler
Fanny Cerrito
Emma Livry
ballerina
ballerino
Romantic poetry
sublime
embodiment
affect
affect theory
Paul de Man
de Man
deconstruction
French deconstruction
affect studies
visual studies
visual culture
disfigurement
inscription
mourning
death
loss
Sara Ahmed
disfiguration
Clara Webster
Livry
Cerrito
Elssler
Taglioni
spectatorship
empathy
speculative
imaginative
The Rhetoric of Romanticism
rhetoric
anatomy
body
bodies - Abstract:
- In 1903, modernist dancer Isadora Duncan wrote, “To those who … enjoy the movements [of ballet], … to those I answer: They see no farther than the skirts and tricots. But look—under the skirts, under the tricots are dancing deformed muscles. Look still farther—underneath the muscles are deformed bones. A deformed skeleton is dancing before you.” Duncan’s speech alludes to the way the dancing of ballet (particularly pointework) disfigures the ballerina’s skeleton over time, even as the regime of ballet simultaneously heightens her incredible lightness, beauty, and power. Many scholars of Romanticism have noted that second-generation British Romantic poetry exudes a similar aesthetics of death, entropy, sublimity, and deformation that turns one’s gaze ceaselessly towards the body. The works of authors such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley propose that life itself is somehow toxic or disabling; meanwhile, British Romanticism’s catacomb of wrecked bodies prefigures Romantic ballet’s many lost étoiles, undone by their own pursuit of artistry. Despite the aesthetic affinities between these two artistic discourses, little work has been done that places them side by side in a critical capacity. As such, this dissertation makes extensive use of nineteenth-century poetry, ballet, and the biographical archive, listening for their strange and deathly harmonies. My research generates an interdisciplinary method of reading the Romantic body by blending affect theory with Paul de Man’s concept of inscription, as a means of ‘catch a glimpse’ of the body as it becomes inscribed by life and dies. The goal of this dissertation is not to reify the popular myth of the Romantic ballerina as the beauty constantly vanishing around the corner, but instead to restore ballet’s translucent specters and sylphides back into the overworked and shuddering bodies lurking beneath the soft lines of the Romantic tutu, bodies “half in love with easeful Death,” even as they perform stunning feats of athleticism. This practice can help scholars of aesthetics and visual culture to place the body (and its pains and labors) at the center of their works rather than at the margins, giving rise to a more conscious and ethical reading and writing practice—a crucial process of speculative empathy that asks one to imagine more tangibly, to understand art in the light of the artist’s flesh and bone.