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These imitations were not always socially benign. By her gesture, Lady Constance highlighted the antisemitic components of Salomania that otherwise remained subdued in pre-war Britain. A careful selection of the letters was republished in her newspaper column. I tried to move my arms like yours, but they seemed to have much fewer joints. I dance always as a lady. I am sure you will say at once what an extraordinary thing for a man to do; but, believe me, I am not effeminate. Allan was a magnet for men who used the standing room in the back of the theater as a cruising ground to pick up other men.
These activities, unremarked on in the public media but noted in the London County Council records or in later memoirs, would surface with a vengeance during the libel trial. This strategy clearly paid off. In a program cover from , ladies and gentlemen in evening clothes pass a portrait of a scantily clad Maud Allan in the lobby; in a second cover, a man and a woman in the audience watch a stage where the figure of the female performer is barely visible.
This image highlights the public intimacy and vital expressiveness of the couple.
Dancing schools that offered classes in social and theatrical dancing opened in unprecedented numbers and expanded to meet the female demand inspired by Allan and Pavlova. The elite female constituency that adored Allan and Pavlova also embraced a new form of social dancing, when the tango craze spread from Paris to London in First performed on stage in as a dance number in The Sunshine Girls, the tango was then refined, polished, and presented in a sophisticated form appropriate for social dancing, under the supervision of professional dance instructors.
Modern dancing, both as a performance and as a form of social dancing, contributed to a new kind of nightlife for women as well as men. In pre-war years, it sent elite women to the tea dances and dinner dances at the Grand Hotels, where they danced publicly amid tables of seated diners and even hired male partners employed by the establishment. This is a significant shift. Already the pre-war center for after-theater suppers in foreign restaurants, Soho burgeoned into the staging ground for hundreds of clandestine nightclubs that opened during the war to escape the drinking curfews and to feed a new appetite for late-night dancing.
Meanwhile, the English style of dancing established the criteria for dance competitions and sophisticated social dancing throughout Europe and the empire. They were part of a cultural revolution in all the arts, associated with cosmopolitan imports performed in elite spaces but also communicated to a broad reading public through the photo-illustrated press. In a public interview, Mme. In reviewing the play, the press emphasized the illicit status of the production.
To advertise feminism, the Edwardian suffrage movement had appropriated the technologies of spectacular theater, involving the massing of bodies and sumptuous set designs and costuming. Allan, avowedly no suffragist, aligned herself with the rebellious cultural modernism of Margot Asquith and her set, who celebrated a mobile, expressive individualism but disparaged the aims and methods of political feminism.
The feminist production of Salome in unsettled these divisions. An international traffic in rumors started on the Continent even before her visit to London in These early rumors linked her professional role as femme fatale to her personal life, a media strategy that had developed concurrently with the rise of the international star system. The rumors emphasized the homoerotic overtones of her female following in London.
In the pre-war period, these rumors seemed to have been largely contained, at least in the public media, on one side of the Atlantic. This courtroom drama at the Old Bailey occupied the attention of the press for six days in June after the initial proceedings at Bow Street Police Court. Neither Allan nor her counsel was prepared for the interrogation that followed. In the end, she ultimately fell back on an orientalist defense: Billing clearly benefited from a growing public distrust of wartime censorship and propaganda; the strict control of information fed the flames of gossip and made spy stories, including this one, thinkable as did the execution of Mata Hari as a German spy in France in Ironically, Allan was punished for seeming to possess too much knowledge, particularly knowledge of a dangerous cosmopolitan variety.
Billing and his expert witnesses pointed, first of all, to the Wildean legacy of symbolism she seemed to embrace. At this time of national scandal, Justice Darling, the sitting judge, rather surprisingly invoked British feminism as the antidote to dangerous cosmopolitanism. Previous critics have seen the trial as a simple repudiation of cosmopolitanism, but the picture is more complex.
The Blueberry Cookbook - Recipes. The Slow Cooker Cookbook - Recipes. As amateur theatrics, it would lead to developments from which early modern dance would emerge by the end of the century. Sometimes, the tableaux vivants would take their inspiration from genre and history paintings, but the most notorious ones were based on ancient Greek statuary, mythological subjects, or recent orientalist representations of the nude. In the s, Andre Levinson offered a similar critique of Allan. In London, where she returned in , it was still not public knowledge, nor did it shadow her on her tour of Asia in and Queen Victoria - Her Life and Reign.
This version of cosmopolitanism not only pushed her outside the boundaries of the nation, it even alienated her from her North American roots. The trial limited the dynamic effects of her dance to a private, elite cult, whereas her performance had promoted a new body idiom to a diverse metropolitan audience. The mass illustrated press was complicit in this blurring.
Besides narrowing the set of meanings that Allan helped promote, the trial also repositioned feminism in the field of body politics. Billing and his cohorts usurped the role played by liberal feminist campaigners in attacking vicious foreign entertainments; his right-wing journal, The Vigilante renamed from The Imperialist even pirated its title from the National Vigilance Association.
Also passing unnoticed by Darling was the feminist performance of Salome, signaling the emergence of a radical feminism devoted to individualist sexual expression and to disrupting the categories of virtue and vice that sustained Victorian womanhood. Justice Darling may have anathematized Allan as representative of an elite group of idle, disloyal, pleasure-seeking women, but he simultaneously endorsed a law that disenfranchised ordinary, young women—the female munitions workers central to the war effort—as giddy, unthinking devotees of unseemly dancing.
To a considerable degree, before and after the war, the story of dance in London is the story of domestication, of the incorporation of transnational cultural forms into a national culture. This incorporation helped transform the metropolitan consumer economy. However, dancing never lost its negative edge. When the new dancing culture came under wartime siege, some of it relocated from the public venues along the thoroughfares to more circumscribed and clandestine arenas, to new social spaces outside the law.
By the end of the period I have discussed, these social spaces took the form of private clubs—nightclubs, cabarets, theater clubs—most of them housed in liminal, cosmopolitan Soho. In , the flapper, with her new body image of youthful, sexual ambivalence, signaled both this domestication and its cosmopolitan subversion. However domesticated the female dancer had become, she remained a disorderly manifestation of sexual modernism, of cultural hybridity, and of disloyalty to the disciplined body politic. This article was completed while the author was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.
I am grateful for the financial support provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Grant no. Thanks to the editors and anonymous readers of the American Historical Review for their suggestions. Thanks also to the following individuals for their careful reading of the text: Walkowitz, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and writing has focused on the history of political culture, social and cultural contests over sexuality, and on urban space.
She is the author of Prostitution and Victorian Society: This article is part of a book-length project on the cultural geography of Central London, —, which focuses on a particular built environment—Soho and its surrounding thoroughfares—and explores the diverse cultures of modernity and modernism that it helped stage.
On the complex mapping of Anglo-Saxonism, metropole, and empire, see Judith R. Maud Allan in Performance electronic pub. Toronto, ; Cherniavsky, The Salome Dancer: Society and Space 16 Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Women, Representation, and the City Ithaca, N. Essays on Performance and the Stage Cambridge, , 61— Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis, 2 vols.
Isadora Duncan in America Bloomington, Ind. The Alhambra and the Empire, — London, Two early histories of turn-of-the-century dance include J. Its Place in Art and Life ; rpt. Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment Princeton, N. On philosophical debates about affiliations that establish corporate attachments beyond the nation, see Pheng Cheah, et al.
Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation Minneapolis, On the reconfiguration of London as the center of empire and international capital, see Jonathan Schneer, London Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Delusions of Grandeur London, ; J. Priestley, The Edwardians London, ; P. Michie, The City of London: Continuity and Change, — London, ; Anthony D. Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London London, According to Cherniavsky p. On the coverage by the Times, see Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, n. Macqueen-Pope, Carriages at Eleven: Historians acknowledge that the Right was able to exert great influence over governmental policy during the war, particularly toward immigration policy and the treatment of resident aliens, with long-term effects.
They argue, however, that British fascists were unable to sustain popular support in the postwar era. Portrait of a Generation London, A Present for Mr. Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. London, ; Rupert Hart Davis, ed. They insist on the further evolution of modernism, not its dispersal.
For the French case, see Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: Male memoirists also voiced strong resentment against the flappers and suffragist members of the Order of the White Feather, who offered white feathers as a symbol of cowardice to young men in mufti. Gullace and others also link this backlash to widespread concern over deviant and failed masculinities shirkers, conscientious objectors, victims of shell shock, homosexuals.
On failed masculinities, see, for instance, Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Giles, this local disruption was exceptional. By adhering to an established highway, construction of this thoroughfare and Shaftesbury Avenue managed to open up the old, proletarian district of Soho, rather than destroy it. The Parish of St. Survey of London, The West End clubs were renowned for their ostentatiousness, spectatorship, and smoking room attitudes.
On the clubs, see Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: On tableaux vivants as amateur theatrics, from which early modern dance would emerge, see Jowett, Time, See Daly, Done into Dance, , The artistic posturing of tableaux vivants also had its analogue in visual pornography: Smith, Victorian Nude, chap.
As a number of critics have observed, the licensing of music halls did not simply prohibit indecent or controversial acts, it had productive consequences. See Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance, , chap. For other critical reviews, see Koritz, Gendering Bodies, In the s, Andre Levinson offered a similar critique of Allan. For critical praise of Allan, see J. This, coupled with the natural balance of head, arm, and torso, produces the spiral line from every point of view.
They also were used for experimental theater. They were overwhelmingly patronized by women.
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