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The Romantic Ballet and the Nineteenth-Century

Poetic Imagination
Amanda Lee
To cite this article: Amanda Lee (2016) The Romantic Ballet and the Nineteenth-Century Poetic
Imagination, Dance Chronicle, 39:1, 32-55, DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2016.1134980
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2016.1134980

Published online: 04 Mar 2016.

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Date: 23 March 2016, At: 18:13

DANCE CHRONICLE
2016, VOL. 39, NO. 1, 3255
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2016.1134980

The Romantic Ballet and the Nineteenth-Century

Poetic Imagination
Amanda Lee

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ABSTRACT

This essay explores how nineteenth-century French poets Th

eophile
Gautier and Charles Baudelaire theorized dance as a poetic
language and attempted to translate danced movement into
written poetry. Using ballet reviews, iconography, and literary texts, I
analyze the discourse surrounding two of the most famous
Romantic ballets, La Sylphide and Giselle. These ballets cast the
ballerina as a dancer-poeta liminal gure who succeeded in
mediating different sign systems to create embodied poetry. I
examine how Baudelaire and Gautier characterized the dancer-poet
as otherworldly and androgynous, and viewed her as an analog to
the queer Romantic poet.

KEYWORDS

Poetry; dance; gender;

sexuality; nineteenth century;
France

Taglioni is one of the greatest poets of our age, declared French poet Th
eophile Gautier in a review of her performance at the Palais de Compiegne.
Gautier not only anoints
Marie Taglioni a poet in her own right, but also calls her a genius, if we understand this
word to mean a faculty pushed to its very limits, equal to Lord Byron or M. de
Lamartine.y He even goes so far as to imply that her danced movements have as much
communicative power as written poetry: She has ronds de jambes and undulations of
the arms that are worth as much as a long poem.z By casting Taglioni as a dancer-poet,
Gautier enters into an aesthetic tradition dating back to Aristotles Poetics and continuing to the present day, in which literary critics and philosophers conceive of dance as a
poetic language charged with expressing the ineffable in verbal language, poetry, and
more recently, critical theory.x
Color versions of one or more of the gures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ldnc.

y
z

Taglioni est un des plus grands poetes de notre
epoque. The review appeared in the newspaper La Presse (October 13,
1836). Marie Taglioni danse au Palais de Compiegne, in Th
eophile Gautier:
Ecrits sur la danse, eds. Ivor Guest and Martine
Kahane (Arles: Actes sud, 1995), 27. All English translations in the text are my own unless otherwise specied.
Cest un g
enie si lon veut entendre par ce mot une facult
e pouss
ee a ses dernieres limites, tout aussi bien que Lord
Byron ou M. de Lamartine. Gautier,
Ecrits, 28.
Elle a des ronds de jambes et des ondulations de bras qui valent de longs poemes. Gautier,
Ecrits, 28. This quote is a
play on the words of Boileau: Un sonnet sans d
efaut vaut seul un long poeme. (A sonnet without fault is worth a
long poem.) Nicolas Boileau-Despr
eaux, LArt po
etique, in uvres completes, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1952), 92.
See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1720. For more information on philosophical debates in France surrounding gesture and dance as alternative sign systems to verbal language, see Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2001). For a discussion of the development of eighteenth-century discourse casting dance as embodied poetry (spurred by
thinkers such as
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Denis Diderot, and Jean Georges Noverre), see Amanda Lee, The Philosophical
Origins of Dance as a Poetic Language, in The Poetics of Dance in Nineteenth-Century France: Transcribing Movement, Gender, and Culture (Ph.D. diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 2014).

2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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Pinpointing the tendency in theoretical writing to treat dance in a poetic rather than
a critical way, as metaphor rather than object for analysis, dance studies scholar Lucia
Ruprecht encourages readers to interrogate the rhetorical use of dance to represent the
inexpressible, arguing that dance as a physical technique is characterized not by limitless transgressions, but by the nitude of bodily experience.1 At rst glance, French
nineteenth-century poets might appear to fall into this theoretical impassefocusing
on the imaginative possibilities of the dancer as metaphor for the ineffable and failing to
analyze the dance itself. Yet it is evident from their dance criticism that Gautier and
Baudelaire were also acutely aware of the physicality or presence of the dancer. I argue
here that Gautier and Baudelaire attempted to capture the physical sensation of movement and embodiment in their poetry using rhythms and sonority in addition to dance
imagery. In other words, these poets attempted to recreate the experience of dance performance, what Ruprecht calls an event for both the performer and the spectator, in
their poetry, entering into a dialectic with the dancer-poet, who existed as a liminal
gure, straddling two critical worlds, sign systems, and ways of communicating.
I explore here how nineteenth-century discourse surrounding two of the most
important Romantic ballets, La Sylphide (1832) and Giselle (1841), exemplies the
notions of ballet as poetry and the ballerina as poet. I propose that, in the literary works
that inspired these libretti, Le Diable amoureux (1772) by Jacques Cazotte, Trilby ou le
lutin dArgail (1822) by Charles Nodier, and a section of De lAllemagne (1835) by Heinrich Heine, the authors associated the physical body and the metaphysical otherworldly with the experience and the communication of sentiment and poetry. How
did the ballets La Sylphide and Giselle actualize these concepts onstage, and how did
poets and critics such as Th
eophile Gautier (18111872), Jules Janin (18041874), and
Charles Baudelaire (18211867) circulate the notions of ballet as poetry and ballerina as
poet in dance reviews, aesthetic treatises, poetry, and ballet libretti?
The notion of ballet
as poetry is also rmly rooted in nineteenth-century dance manuals and treatises by
dance masters such as Carlo Blasis and E. A. Th
eleur. Reading these manuals in conjunction with dance iconography, ballet libretti, and mise-en-scene points to the kinesthetic aspects of the dancer-poet and helps to uncover the dynamics of embodied
poetry, as it was conceived in the Romantic ballet.y
La Sylphide and Giselle premiered nine years apart, signaling respectively the apex of
French Romantic ballet and another high point before its slow decline.2 I am particularly interested in aspects of the Romantic school in French poetry that gured in the

In reading through the surviving correspondence of Marie Taglioni and Carlotta Grisi, held at the New York Public Library and
the Bibliotheque nationale de France, I did not come across a distinct articulation of the means and process of poetic embodiment. Though the dancers both enjoyed poetryTaglioni kept copies of her favorite poems among her papers, and Carlotta
Grisi occasionally wrote poems and sent them to Gautierneither expressed in the letters preserved the kinesthetic process
of dancing poetry (per se), nor did either explicitly formulate a theoretical response to those who perceived them as poets.
This is not to say that Taglioni, Grisi, and other dancers of the nineteenth century did not have profound and important
insights into what it meant to dance poetry. But such an analysis lies beyond the scope of this study.
Produced and premiered largely between the dates of 1830 and 1850, Romantic ballets in France drew from popular
French and international Romantic literary sources. See Sarah Davies Cordova, Romantic Ballet in France: 1830
1850, in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and
Oxford Dictionary of Dance, s.v. Romantic Ballet.

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34

A. LEE

Romantic ballet, namely an emphasis on the ethereal and otherworldly, the exotic, and
the imaginary.
These aspects also happen to be key components of the conte fantastique or fantastic tale (one of Gautiers preferred genres), which dance scholar Joellen A.
Meglin has linked to the Romantic ballet.3 They are of particular importance in the
works of Gautier, where a direct borrowing can be observed between his fantastic tales
and his ballet libretti, in which the translucent female body with its pervasive images
of whiteness (a silky veil connoting the blurry line between good and evil) reveals the
linkage between the rhetorical body and the ballet body in the discourse of the fantastic.y Indeed, if Taglioni imprinted her Sylphide on Gautiers youthful imagination as
he began his career as one of the centurys most prominent Romantic poets, Giselle
(which he subtitled ballet fantastique) was his nostalgic tribute to Romanticisma
phantom reincarnation of the Sylphide, mixing elements of the sublime and the grotesque. Yet, in the decade following the premiere of Giselle (1841), Gautier turned his
attention toward a new aesthetic, joining, with Leconte de Lisle (18181894), the vanguard of what would later be called Parnassianism.
Gautier anticipated the Parnassian doctrine of lart pour lart (art for arts
sake) in the preface to his Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835).4 Parnassians replaced
Romanticisms lyrical expression of the self and relative freedom in verse with an
absence of the poetic self (an attitude often characterized as neutral, impersonal, or
impassive) and a preference for formal perfection.5 Gautier in particular was
drawn to materialist aesthetics. In his writings, he often contemplated antique
sculpture and the plasticity of the human body, as evident in his sonnet LArt
and in his dance reviews, which often described dancers as moving sculptures.6 As
Romanticism declined among certain disillusioned poets, Gautier turned toward
the politically disengaged artistic ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Art made concrete in
his vision of antique sculpture and formal perfection in verse.7
In contrast to Gautiers obsession with the material art object, Baudelaires work
abounds with references to the immaterial. Resisting classication, Baudelaires
aesthetics have inuenced such diverse literary movements as Realism, Symbolism,
and Naturalism.8 Known for his juxtapositions of the grotesque with the sublime,
Baudelaire helped to usher in modernity with his observations of Parisian city life.
He was an admirer of Gautier, to whom he dedicated the rst edition of Les Fleurs
du Mal (1857). Nevertheless, he seems to subtly satirize Gautier in his novella La
Fanfarlo (1847), about a love affair between a dancer and the ctitious poet Samuel
Cramer, whom he describes as one of the last romantics that France possesses.z


y

For an analysis of dance in nineteenth-century French prose, see Sarah Davies Cordova, Paris Dances: Textual Choreographies in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999).
Joellen A. Meglin, Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the Ballet Fantastique in France, 1831
1841. Part Three: Resurrection, Sensuality, and the Palpable Presence of the Past in Th
eophile Gautiers Fantastic,
Dance Chronicle, vol. 28, no. 1 (2005): 120. Meglin argues that Gautiers fantastic tales, including La morte amoureuse and La Cafetiere, contain tropes that recur in his ballets.
lun des derniers romantiques que possede la France. Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo, ed. Y. G. Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard,
1954), 395. Gautier probably never consummated his passion for ballerina Carlotta Grisi; hence Baudelaires novella counterfactually imagines what would have happened if the ctive poet had satised his passion for a no-longer-elusive dancing
muse.

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Baudelaire was equally attracted to traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet,
and to the innovative form of the prose poem. La Chambre double (The Double
Chamber) from his prose poem collection Le Spleen de Paris (1869), not only
names the gure of a Sylphide, but also likens ideal art to an ineffable reverie.9
As a result of both their temporal placement and the inuence they held over prominent poets, La Sylphide and Giselle are useful artworks through which to understand the
arc of Romanticism in poetry and ballet.
Meanwhile, for modern audiences, La Sylphide and Giselle have come to embody the genre of the ballet blanc, in which corps de
ballet and principal dancers perform in white tulle tutus (usually during a climactic second act); it is a genre that is rmly associated with the ethereal, supernatural, or
otherworldly aspect of the Romantic aesthetic.y

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The literary origins of the sylph

While the sylph, or air spirit, originated in European occultism and popular oral
tradition,z Cazottes 1776 novella Le Diable amoureux, considered a precursor of
fantastic ction, propelled the sylph into the nineteenth century. In Le Diable
amoureux, a young Spanish ofcer named Alvare arrogantly conjures up the Devil,
who transforms at will from a male page named Biondetto into a beautiful young
woman named Biondetta, and back again. Both personae are powerfully seductive
for Alvare. When asked about her origins, Biondetta explains, I am a Sylphide by
origin, and I was the most admirable one of them all.x For the modern reader, this
gender ambiguity and blurring of the boundaries between human and supernatural
inspires a whole host of questions related to gender, sexuality, and performance
questions also spurred by representations of the mythical gure of the sylph, and



provoked by the conte fantastique as a genre. Linking the conte fantastique to

The inuence of La Sylphide and Giselle, and of their starring ballerinas Marie Taglioni and Carlotta Grisi, stretched far
beyond the world of dance, pouring into literature, fashion, music, and visual art. Jean Hippolyte Cartier de Villemessant, founder of La Sylphide (published 18391873), a fashion magazine with a literary bent, placed an image of
Taglioni as the Sylphide on the cover of the inaugural issue.
y
Dance historian Lisa C. Arkin and musicologist Marian Smith note that the modern distinction between the nineteenth-century ballet blanc and ballets of the same period featuring national or ethnic character dances is exaggerated. In fact, national dances often appeared in tandem with otherworldly dances. For example, the fantastic ball
scene of Giselle originally included Wilis who performed snippets of dances from their homelands. Lisa C. Arkin and
Marian Smith, National Dance in the Romantic Ballet, in Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. Lynn Garafola (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 4554.
z
See lAbb
e de Villars, Le Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur les sciences secretes (Londres: Chez les freres Vaillant,
1670), 30. For information on eighteenth-century ballets and plays incorporating sylphs, see Th
eodore de Lajarte,
Bibliotheque musicale du Th
e^atre de lOp
era (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), 18081, 2012; and
Michel Delon, Sylphes et sylphides (Paris: Desjonqueres, 1999), 29.
x
Je suis Sylphide dorigine, et une des plus consid
erables dentre elles. Jacques Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux, in
uvres choisies (Paris: Paulin, 1847), 51.



Much has been written about the eroticization of Biondetto/Biondetta in Le Diable amoureux, and the larger implications of the Devils ability to change gender throughout the novel. See Joseph Andriano, Our Ladies of Darkness (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Dorothea E. von Mucke, The Seduction of the Occult and the
Rise of the Fantastic Tale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Tili Boon Cuill
e, The Devil in Drag, in
Paroles gel
ees, vol. 17, no. 2 (1999): 3042; and Amy J. Ransom, The Feminine as Fantastic in the Conte fantastique:
Visions of the Other (New York: P. Lang, 1995). For a discussion of the role of music and seduction in Cazottes text,
see Tili Boon Cuill
e, Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2006), 5689.

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A. LEE

Romantic ballets such as La Sylphide, Meglin posits that the blurred boundary
between reality and fantasy in Le Diable amoureux, the intrusion of darkness and
evil into daily life, and the infusion of dreams into the narrative are precisely the
narrative devices to which La Sylphide gave theatrical and kinesthetic expression.10 During the nineteenth century, the gure of the sylph symbolized diabolical seduction behind airy lightness in such scenes as act 1, scene 2 of Nodiers
drama Faust (1828) and act 1, scene 12 of the ballet Le Diable boiteux (1836), both
choreographed by Jean Coralli.11 In the opera Robert le diable (1831), the third-act
Ballet of the Nuns featured ghosts instead of sylphs, yet evoked a similar sensation in the provocative scene in which nuns damned to hell for their sins emerged
from their graves to dance in white habits.
In the preface to Trilby, ou le lutin dArgail (1822), the work that most directly
inuenced La Sylphide, Nodier acknowledges his debt to Sir Walter Scott and
Cazotte. Amid exquisite descriptions of the Scottish countryside, the narrator
recounts a young married womans forbidden love of a lutin, or house-sprite, in
a poor shing village. Trilby, the mythical air spirit, visits Jeannie in her dreams.
When her husband and a local priest attempt to exorcise him, Jeannie, in despair,
commits suicide. In Trilby, an important aspect of the sylph comes to the fore: in
the imps presence, human capacity for poetic experience is unbounded. Everything blurred together into an indenable nuance without name that astonished
the mind with a sensation so new that one could imagine one had just acquired a
sense.
Cazotte hints at this aspect of the sylph, when Biondetta causes Alvare to
realize, I dream more extraordinarily than other people.y
In his Avertissement to Trilby, Nodier contrasts the dire state of poetry in
advanced societies with that of less advanced nations, such as Scotland, capable
of producing highly imaginative stories and expressing human sentiment because
they remain closer to nature. Such a prelude suggests that Nodier was offering
Trilby as a solution, to save French poetry from a lack of folkloric imagination full
of natures mysteries and human sentiment. The tales adaptation to the medium
of dance in La Sylphide, I believe, served the same purpose.

Blurring the lines between text and performance

In October 1831, almost ten years after Nodiers tale was published, the tenor Adolphe Nourrit read a ballet scenario he had devised to the choreographer Filippo
Taglioni. Taglioni agreed to choreograph the ballet, giving his daughter Marie the
starring role in its production at the Paris Opera. In the illustrated book Les beaut
es
de lOp
era (1845), featuring critics descriptions of operas and ballets, accompanied
by full-page prints of ten starring beauties, Jules Janin states that Trilby inspired

Tout se confondait dans une nuance ind
enissable et sans nom qui
etonnait lesprit dune sensation si nouvelle
quon aurait pu simaginer quon venait dacqu
erir un sens. Charles Nodier, Trilby, ou le lutin dArgail, nouvelle

ecossaise (Paris: LAdvocat, 1822), 122.
Je r^eve plus extraordinairement quun autre. Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux, 53.

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Nourrit: Trilby and La Sylphide, they are the same ballad; who says one, says the
other. Trilby is the poets song; La Sylphide is the paintings frame; Mademoiselle
Taglioni is the poetry, the image, the ideal.
La Sylphide offers the same fantastic
disruption of reality as the novels that inspired it. However, in the ballet scenario,
the gender roles of the sprite/sylph and the possessed/obsessed are reversed. James, a
young Scot, is irresistibly drawn to the mysterious Sylphide (Marie Taglioni). Ultimately, he leaves his anc
ee, Efe, at the altar in order to pursue the Sylphide into
the forest, where he discovers her dancing with her companion spirits. Afraid that
she will forever elude his grasp, he eagerly takes a scarf offered to him by the evil
witch Madge, who tells him that if he places it around the Sylphides shoulders, her
wings will fall off. To Jamess horror, when he follows Madges advice, the Sylphide
not only loses her wings, but also her life force, leaving him to mourn her death.
When Marie Taglioni premiered in the role of the Sylphide on March 12, 1832,
to a full house, she enjoyed an enthusiastic response. In the Revue de Paris, a critic
cited Taglionis performance as evidence that poetry was not dead: To those who
complain of having lost all illusions, to those who repeat that politics has transformed everything into materialism, destroyed all prestige, killed all poetry, give
them this response: Does not the Opera remain? the Opera where Taglioni
reigns. I believe today in sylphides, because I saw one walking, running, ying.
She resembled Psyche a little, Diane of Endymion, Alcine, Armide, and the Devil
in Love by Cazotte, Trilby.y Such a linkage between poetry and dance continued
for years. When, in 1844, Taglioni again performed La Sylphide, Gautier drew connections between Taglionis dancing and the act of writing poetry, calling her a
poetic personication.z Indeed, for Gautier, Mlle Taglioni was not a dancer, she
was dance itself.x Nor was he the only critic to see the ballerina in this light. In Les
beaut
es de lop
era, Janin wrote, Charles Nodier himself, that charming and mocking writer, is hardly a poet next to Mademoiselle Taglioni; he has nothing left to do



but admire and applaud. In an era when most renowned poets were male, critics
viewed Taglioni as a female poet of movement, superior to her male counterpart
and capable of reducing him to passive spectatorship.

Trilby et La Sylphide, cest la m^eme ballade; qui dit lun, dit lautre. Trilby, cest le chant du poete; La Sylphide, cest le
cadre du tableau; Mademoiselle Taglioni, cest la po
esie, cest limage, cest lid
eal. Jules Janin, Notice sur la Sylphide, in Jules Janin, Th
eophile Gautier, and Philarete Chasles, Les beaut
es de lop
era, ou, Chefs-duvre lyriques
(Paris: Souli
e, 1845), 4. Although I have not found a direct reference to Trilby in Nourrits correspondence that might
illustrate the provenance of the work, many reviews at the time made the connection between the ballet and Trilby.
See Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), 11216.
y
A ceux qui se plaignent de navoir plus dillusions, a ceux qui vous r
epetent que la politique a tout mat
erialis
e,
d
etruit tous les prestiges, tu
e toute po
esie, dites pour toute r
eponse: Ne nous reste-t-il pas lOp
era, . . . lOp
era ou
regne Taglioni. . . . Je crois aujourdhui aux sylphides, car jen ai vu une marcher, courir, voler. Elle ressemble un peu
a Psych
e, a la Diane dEndymion, a Alcine, a Armide, au Diable amoureux de Cazotte, a Trilby. La Sylphide, Revue
de Paris, vol. 36 (1832): 194.
z
une personnication po
etique. Gautier,
Ecrits, 154. This review appeared in the periodical La Presse on June 3,
1844.
x
Mlle Taglioni, ce n
etait pas une danseuse, c
etait la danse m^eme. Gautier,
Ecrits, 153.



Charles Nodier lui-m^eme, l
ecrivain charmant et railleur, nest plus rien, comme poete, a c^ot
e de mademoiselle
Taglioni; il na plus qua admirer, a applaudir. Janin, Notice sur La Sylphide, 7.

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A. LEE

Gautier and Janin echoed ideas presented in important dance manuals of the
period that characterized dance as a poetic language. Although one cannot assume
that either of them read Carlo Blasiss The Code of Terpsichore: The Art of Dancing
(1830) or E. A. Th
eleurs Letters on Dancing (1831), nonetheless, they formulated
the analogy between dance and poetry in a manner similar to how dance masters
and choreographers had done.
In The Code of Terpsichore, Blasis asserts that the
qualities of a good Ballet have a near relation to those of a good poem. According
to Plutarch, the poet Simonides required that dancing should be mute poetry, and
that poetry should be a speaking dance.12 Although dance and poetry have much
in common, the presence of a visual-kinesthetic component created by moving
bodies in ballet and opera makes the difference: What the epic poet presents to
the imagination only, the lyric poet in France undertakes to exhibit to the eyes;
and the same thing must be affected by the Ballet-master in compositions of the
elevated and heroic class. As the marvelous made visible is the very soul of French
opera, so is it the essence of the mythological, fairy, and allegorical Ballet. On a
practical level, Blasis recommends that dancers and choreographers make poetry
visible using sculptural models from antiquity: Dancers should learn from those
chaste pieces of sculpture and painting, the real mode of displaying themselves
with taste and gracefulness. They are a fount of beauty, whereto all who aspire to
distinction must resort for purity and correctness of design.
Similarly, in his Letters on Dancing, Th
eleur approaches dance as the articulation of a specic movement vocabulary that, when correctly expressed, can take
the place of verbal language:
The articulation of every station, movement, &c., (in dancing) ought to be distinctly visible, avoiding all confusion; nothing should be introduced which is likely to displease or
annoy the beholder; every motion, etc. should, as the words in a language, be correctly
pronounced, without any apparent or studied effort on the part of the performer; this is
(if I may be allowed the expression) the uency of the dancer, and will gain on the minds
of the spectators in the same manner as an address would do from an eloquent speaker.13

Th
eleur and Blasis demonstrate the point of view that ballet technique, when
practiced according to the instructions outlined in their respective manuals, may
communicate as effectively as verbal language by drawing on the visual vocabulary
found in sculpture and painting to convey meaning, sentiment, and poetry. Performance studies theorist Gabriele Brandstetter argues that such dance manuals
helped to construct the gure of the nineteenth-century virtuoso in dance (exemplied by Taglioni and Carlotta Grisi) by transforming dance technique into a science of movement and demanding that choreographers and dancers master both
its mechanics and poetics. The pirouette, Brandstetter explains, is an example of
this new virtuosity in dance resonant with the poetics of movement, for it requires

Th
eleurs and Blasiss treatises were among the rst sources to describe pointe technique, an important choreographic component of La Sylphide. See Judith Chazin-Bennahum, The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780
1830 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 18789.

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precise control of centrifugal force, the center of gravity, and dynamics, through all
phases of the turn. This intersection of poetry and mechanics leads to a fascination with the technical, with the phantasm of the human-machine, [which] clings
to the virtuosos image, lending him a demonic aspect. In the end, media hype
and the media machine create and propagate the virtuosos image.14
Taglioni certainly sparked media hype when she played the principal role in La Sylphide, leaving a rich iconography in her wake.
The iconography, music score, and ballet libretto of La Sylphide offer clues as to what the material components of danced
poetry might be for the nineteenth-century spectator. A popular print by Alfred
Edward Chalon and Richard James Lane depicts Taglioni against a backdrop of the
Scottish countryside, etched in light and dark tones with wispy clouds that evaporate
into the horizon (see Figure 1). As she perches en pointe in arabesque, the light, airy
tulle of her white tutu oats above her suspended leg, creating the illusion of suspension
in the air. The gentle curve in her raised arm adds to the impression of weightlessness.
Her costume is strewn with owers, and small wingsthe symbol of the sylph or air
spiritattach to her shoulders. Dance historian Lisa Arkin uses the term movement
markers to designate stylized gestures, attitudes, and steps that nineteenth-century
choreographers used to signal specic national dances (Polish, Spanish, English, etc.) to
their audiences.y One could posit that specic movement markers designate, as well,
the supernatural, otherworldly, and ethereal aspects of Romantic ballet aesthetics,
which Romantic poet-critics associated with the poetic. One of these markers was the
oating arabesque: Taglioni sustained this curving arabesque pose while a machine
gently lifted her upward into the sets trees or lowered her onto the stage.z Such a
moment occurs in scene 5 of the second act: The Sylphide reappears, sees a birds nest
in a tree, and runs to get ita moment that another Chalon lithograph captures
(see Figure 2).x

For more information on the iconography of the dancer in the nineteenth century, and in particular the aura surrounding the pointe shoe in nineteenth-century popular culture, see Judith Chazin-Bennahum, Women of Faint
Heart and Steel Toes, in Garafola, Rethinking the Sylph, 129. For more information on Marie Taglioni and her international legacy, see Jennifer Homans, Apollos Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 13565;
Mindy Aloff, Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006); and Andr
e Levinson, Marie Taglioni (London: Dance Books, 1977).
Nineteenth-century choreographers utilized a repertory of movement markers that gave a transcript or a vibrant picture of a
particular nation. These markers were distilled to an emblematic set of steps, gestures, attitudes and stylization that were
understood by nineteenth-century audiences as uniquely Polish, or Spanish, or English, etc. Lisa C. Arkin, The Mazurka
and the Krakovia: Two Polish National Dances in Michel St. Leons Dance Notebooks, 18291830, in Reecting our Past, Reecting on our Future: Proceedings Society of Dance History Scholars (Riverside, CA: Society of Dance History Scholars, 1997), 134.
In his simplied choreographic script comparing the Bournonville version of the ballet to the Filippo Taglioni one,
Alexander Bennett argues that her ight is carried out in both versions by simple machinery (she places her foot on
a see-saw levered platform and oats gently up the tree) to Schneitzhoeffers music for pas de deux Gavotte. Alexander Bennett, Simplied Choreographic Script, in La Sylphide: Paris 1832 and Beyond, ed. Marian Smith (Alton, UK:
Dance Books Ltd., 2012), 254.
La sylphide repara^t. Elle voit un nid sur un arbre et cours sen emparer. These sentences appear in the Bartholomin
R
ep
etiteur (1835) score of La Sylphide, a violin rehearsal score from the collection of Alexander Bennett, likely
exported to the Th
e^atre de la Monnaie in Brussels by the Paris Opera to aid in the remounting of the production.
For a comparison of the score with the Paris Op
era R
ep
etiteur (1832) and the Paris Op
era Full Score (1832), see
Appendix 6: Comparison of Three Manuscript Scores for Schneitzhoeffers La Sylphide (1832), in Smith, La Sylphide,
33747.

A. LEE

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40

Figure 1. Marie Taglioni: R^ole de la Sylphide (Paris: Chez Rittner et Goupil). Reproduced by permission of the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the
rightsholder.

The oating arabesque also occurs in act 2, scene 2, The Forest Scene, in
which the Sylphide enters leading James by the hand: she glides over the
tops of the rocks; her feet no longer seem to touch the ground. Where
are you leading me? To the place where I live. This is my kingdom; [it
is] here that I want to hide you from all eyes and to make you forget your

41

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DANCE CHRONICLE

Figure 2. La Sylphide; Souvenir dadieu de Marie Taglioni, lithograph by A. E. Chalon. Reproduced by

permission of Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Permission to reuse must be obtained from the rightsholder.

earthly home.15 As she takes James beyond earthly concerns, the Sylphide
achieves a gliding effect, thanks to the mechanical ramp on which she poses
in arabesque pench
ee.16 Alfred de Musset responded strongly to such
images, writing about the ballerina, She is a soul that oats. She is a ame
that ickers. She doesnt traverse the air at the end of a wire, like her companions, and yet, while barely leaving the ground, she ies much higher

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A. LEE

than they in the sky.
This language resembles other reviews of Taglionis
performances in which her dancing expressed something ineffable, spiritual,
and deeply connected with poetry, whether or not explicitly stated.
The cultural discourse of dance in the form of dance manuals and treatises,
visual iconography, ballet libretti, and dance reviews informed the perspective of a
generation of poets in Paris. Although Gautier and Janin did not practice ballet
technique, they believed its physical vocabulary efciently transmitted ideas that
they, too, struggled to express in written poetrya point of view that Baudelaire
also expressed. In 1847, Baudelaire published La Fanfarlo, his sardonic novella in
which Cramer, a poet-critic, falls passionately in love with a famous ballerina, the
Fanfarlo.
In order to attract her attention, the protagonist writes a series of
scathing reviews about her in the papers. Intrigued by the existence of a critic
immune to her charms, Fanfarlo invites the critic to meet her, igniting an instantaneous passion between them. In the end, Cramer and the Fanfarlos torrid
romance turns into a fairly domestic existence when she becomes pregnant with
twins, and he decides to direct a socialist review.
The Fanfarlo not only satirizes the relationship between ballet critic and ballerina, it also provides valuable insights into its authors conception of dance as a
form of poetry and its potential in the process of poetic creation. Baudelaire initially describes Cramer as a failed poet, lacking the inspiration needed to write
truly great works: a sickly and fantastical creature, whose poetry emanated far
more from his person than his works.y This image of Cramers creative impotence
is contrasted with the immense creative potential of the Fanfarlo: La Fanfarlo was
turn by turn decent, fairylike, mad, playful; she was sublime in her art, as much an
actress with her legs as a dancer with her eyes.z The Fanfarlos performance leads
Cramer to articulate an important connection between dance and poetry: Dance
is poetry with arms and legs, it is gracious and terrible material animated and
embellished by movement.x Here Baudelaire echoes Gautier (an admired friend
and role model), proposing that the dynamic movement patterns of dance lend a
visual expression to ineffable poetic elements.
Similarly, in his book-length essay Th
eophile Gautier (1859), Baudelaire
observes that movement is an essential component of poetic creation, or poesis, in

y
z
x

Cest une ^ame qui otte. Cest une amme qui voltige. On ne lui fait pas, comme a ses compagnes, traverser lair au
bout dun l, et cependant, sans presque quitter la terre, elle plane bien plus haut quelles dans le ciel. Alfred de
Musset, Chronique de la quinzaine, Revue des deux-mondes, August 30, 1832, 641.
According to Suzanne F. Braswell, the name Fanfarlo may refer to the Paris Opera star Fanny Elssler, famous for her
sultry presence onstage. See Suzanne F. Braswell, An Aesthetics of Movement: Baudelaire, Poetic Renewal, and the
Invitation of Dance, French Forum, vol. 31, no. 3 (October 1, 2006): 41 n. 10. Graham Robb has proposed that the
Fanfarlo was dancer Lola Montes. See Graham Robb, Lola Montes et La Fanfarlo, in
Etudes baudelairiennes (Neuch^atel: A la Baconniere, 1987).
cr
eature maladive et fantastique, dont la po
esie brille bien plus dans sa personne que dans ses uvres. Baudelaire,
La Fanfarlo, 377.
La Fanfarlo fut tour a tour d
ecente, f
eerique, folle, enjou
ee ; elle fut sublime dans son art, autant com
edienne par
les jambes que danseuse par les yeux. Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo, 397.
La danse, cest la po
esie avec des bras et des jambes, cest la matiere, gracieuse et terrible, anim
ee, embellie par le
mouvement (my emphasis). Ibid.

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Gautiers work. Baudelaire describes Gautiers poetic muse in metaphorical terms,

recalling the gure of the dancer in Gautiers criticism: Th
eophile Gautiers muse
lives in a more ethereal world. She borrows from the poem, not the meter and
the rhyme, but the pomp and concise energy of its language.
The younger poet
then links the elders poetic style directly to the act of courtly and majestic walking
and to owing, resilient movement: His poetry, at once majestic and precious,
walks like courtiers in elegant attire. It is indeed in the character of true poetry to
have a regular ow, like the great rivers that approach the sea, their death and their
innity, and to avoid precipitation and irregularity. Lyric poetry moves forward,
but always in an elastic and undulating movement.y
Literature and dance scholar Susan F. Braswell has uncovered similarities
between Baudelaires aesthetics and those of nineteenth-century movement theorist Franc ois Delsarte (18111871). Parisians attended Delsartes public lectures, or
Cours desth
etique, in droves from the 1840s through the 1860s.z Delsarte believed
that every human emotion corresponded to a certain movement, an authentic and
harmonious gesture. He proposed that spectators immediately understand and
empathize with an actor executing such a movement. While scholars have yet to
discover whether or not Baudelaire attended any of Delsartes lectures in Paris, the
two men shared common beliefs in the dynamism of the mind and the harmony
of thought and expression. Braswell points out that, Not unlike Baudelaires
notion of a nervous shock in the cerebellum accompanying sublime thought,
leading to poesis, Delsarte advocated a system by which sensation led to introspection, and then to external expression.17 Thus, both Baudelaire and Delsarte considered the act of movement (whether a mental start or a physical gesture) as
instrumental to poetic creation and the expression of that creation.
How then might Baudelaire have achieved the quality of movement that he so
prized, in his own poetic work? Braswell argues that he sought to create a sensation
of embodiment in his reader (premised on the unication of body and mind)
through the use of several distinct tools.18 These tools include dance imagery (metaphorical and literal descriptions of dancers or dance) and rhythms, achieved
through the means of meter and sonority in individual verses of poems, and
through such means as accents and alliteration in prose poems. Inserting rhythms

La muse de Th
eophile Gautier habite un monde plus
eth
er
e. . . . Elle emprunte au poeme, non pas le metre et la
rime, mais la pompe ou l
energie concise de son langage. Charles Baudelaire, Th
eophile Gautier (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1859), 49.
Sa po
esie, a la fois majestueuse et pr
ecieuse, marche magniquement, comme les personnes de cour en grande toilette. Cest, du reste, le caractere de la vraie po
esie davoir le ot r
egulier, comme les grands euves qui sapprochent
de la mer, leur mort et leur inni, et d
eviter la pr
ecipitation et la saccade. La po
esie lyrique s
elance, mais toujours
dun mouvement
elastique et ondul
e. Baudelaire, Th
eophile Gautier, 61.
Braswell, An Aesthetics of Movement, 28. For a helpful outline of the tenets of Delsartes movement theory, see
Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, The Delsarte Heritage, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, vol.
14, no. 1 (1996): 6274. Delsartes teachings inspired pioneers of modern dance in the United States and Europe.
Genevieve Stebbins documented Delsartes work in her book Delsarte System of Expression (1889), and passed this
knowledge on to her disciple Isadora Duncan. Ted Shawn also wrote about Delsarte in Every Little Movement (1954).
For more information about Delsartes inuence on modern dance, see Paul Bourcier, La danse moderne Made in
the USA, in Histoire de la danse en Occident (Paris: Seuil, 1994).

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(such as the triplet often associated with the waltz) into a larger verse structure,
or interspersing different rhythms with one another, also achieves the sensation of
movement. Applying Braswells framework to Baudelaires prose poem La
Chambre double, can illuminate how Baudelaire connected poetry to balletic
movement.
La Chambre double resembles a paradisiac, opium-induced reverie that turns
dramatically sour as the effects of the drug wear off for the narrator. The double
chamber at rst welcomes the reader: A chamber that resembled a dream, a truly
spiritual chamber, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted rose and blue.
The soul bathes in laziness there, in the aromas of regret and desire.It is something dusky, bluish and pinkish, a voluptuous dream during an eclipse.
The
word chambre is repeated twice (recalling the double chamber of the title),
each time as part of a thirteen-syllable sentence fragment. The words rose and
bleu echo in bleu^atre and ros^atre in the third phrase, although switching
positions. The sufx -^atre adds a pejorative connotation, rendering the colors
faded and slightly sullieda typical baudelairien pairing of pleasant with unpleasant, beauty with the grotesque. Yet the noun -^atre also means hearth, a place to
center the swirling colors, just as it is the center of the home.y The consonant r
weaves its way throughout the paragraph, in ressemble, r^everie, rose,
regret, ros^atre and r^eve, tying together the two word couples (blue/pink, bluish/pinkish), and creating a sense of movement or alternation. The description of a
dreamlike atmosphere at dusk, tinted in pink and blue, recalls the scenic backdrop
for La Sylphide, a ballet itself perfumed by regret and desire, as evidenced by the
iconographies discussed above.z
The text continues with a description of the details of the room. The elongated,
prostrated forms of the pieces of furniture, endowed with some sort of somnambulist life spirit, recall the elongated lines of the corps de ballet.19 Meanwhile, the
upholstery speaks a langue muette, the same silent language that infuses danced
movement. The curtains and bed sheets are made of muslin that spreads out in
snowy cascades, evoking the white muslin and tulle commonly used to construct
romantic tutus in the nineteenth century.20 On the bed, the idol, the queen of
dreams is sleeping.x

y
z
x

Une chambre qui ressemble a une r^everie, une chambre v
eritablement spirituelle, ou latmosphere stagnante est
l
egerement teint
ee de rose et de bleu. L^ame y prend un bain de paresse, aromatis
e par le regret et le d
esir.Cest
quelque chose de cr
epusculaire, de bleu^atre et de ros^atre; un r^eve de volupt
e pendant une
eclipse. Charles Baudelaire, La Chambre double, in Le Spleen de Paris (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 2003), 68.
Incidentally, in the ballet the rst time the Sylphide comes to James, he is sleeping by his hearth.
aromatis
e par le regret et le d
esir. Baudelaire, Chambre double, 68.
La mousseline pleut abondamment devant les fen^etres et devant le lit; elle s
epanche en cascades neigeuses. Sur ce
lit est couch
ee lIdole, la souveraine des r^eves. Mais comment est-elle ici? Qui la amen
ee? Quel pouvoir magique la
install
ee sur ce tr^one de r^everie et de volupt
e? (Muslin rained abundantly in front of the windows and the bed; it
spread out in snowy cascades. On the bed the Idol, the queen of dreams is sleeping. But how did she get here? Who
brought her? What magic power placed her on this throne of dreams and pleasure?) Baudelaire, Chambre double,
68.

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45

In a dichotomy typical of Baudelaires work, the creature emits a sinister

quality. Her dark eyes radiate malice, betraying her capacity to subjugate and
devour her victims.21 Much like Biondetta, Trilby, and several heroines of the
Romantic ballet, la souveraine des r^eves projects the double quality of
dreamlike inspiration and dangerous seduction tied to impending doom.
Upon awaking to realitys disappointment, the poet regrets bitterly the paradisiacal chamber, the idol, the queen of dreams, the Sylphide, as the great
Ren
e called her, all this magic disappeared with the brutal knock of the Specter.
Baudelaire links the idol in his bed to the Sylphide referenced by
Franc ois-Ren
e de Chateaubriand in his M
emoires doutre-tombe, even as she is
displaced by the imposing masculine Spectre (who resembles a bailiff come
to make the poet pay his debts).y
Baudelaire equates his Sylphide/Spectre with the expansion of poetic imagination. He combines the beautiful and the grotesque, embodying both the
ideal and the splenic aspects of poetic creation, in order to provoke the reader
out of aesthetic complacency. Similarly, the Sylphide/Spectre inevitably evokes
the dancers body striving to achieve the pinnacle of beauty in rareed motion
and technical precision, along with the gruesome specter of death haunting
the winged creature and the sordid details of the life of the lle dOp
era.
As the poet in the Chambre double comes down from his laudanum-induced
reverie and returns to a brutal reality, measured by time, the prose poem once
again picks up rhythm. The phrases become shorter, interrupted by commas and
exclamation points: Horror! I remember! I remember! Yes! creating the sensation of leaps in the air when cried aloud.z The absence of the Sylphide also means
an absence of poetic inspirationmarked by incomplete manuscripts on the table,
and dates written in the almanac contrast with the furnitures earlier parole
muette (silent speech).
The prose poems pace accelerates, as the poet rattles off a list of his personal demons, using capitals to personify them, as though they comprised a
cast for a nightmarish entracte at the theater: Oh! Yes! Time has reappeared;
Time reigns as sovereign now; and with the hideous old man has returned his
demonic cortege of Memories, Regrets, Spasms, Fears, Anguish, Nightmares,
Anger and Neuroses.x Each second sounds a well-timed accent, causing the
pendulum of the clock to cry forth: I am Life, insupportable, implacable,

La chambre paradisiaque, lidole, la souveraine des r^eves, la Sylphide, comme disait le grand Ren
e, toute cette
magie a disparu au coup brutal frapp
e par le Spectre. Baudelaire, Chambre double, 70.
y
Il me semble que je vois sortir des ancs du Saint Gothard ma sylphide des bois de Combourg. Me viens-tu retrouver, charmant fant^ome de ma jeunesse? Franc ois-Ren
e de Chateaubriand, M
emoires doutre-tombe in uvres
completes de Chateaubriand, vol. 17 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1828), 558. See also pages 197 and 535
in the same volume.
z
Horreur! je me souviens! je me souviens! Oui! Baudelaire, Chambre double, 70.
x
Oh! oui! Le Temps a reparu; Le Temps regne en souverain maintenant; et avec le hideux vieillard est revenu tout son
d
emoniaque cortege de Souvenirs, de Regrets, de Spasmes, de Peurs, dAngoisses, de Cauchemars, de Coleres et de
N
evroses. Ibid.



Je suis la Vie, linsupportable, limplacable Vie! Ibid, 60.

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A. LEE

Life! Time, a brutal dictator, pushes the poet forward comme un buf
(like a cow), crying out in three identically syncopated phrases (after the initial fragment of Et), in which the rst, second, and fourth syllables are
stressed:

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^ /
/
^ /
/
/
^ /
/
/
^ /
Et [hue donc! bourrique!] [Sue donc, esclave!] [Vis donc, damn
e!]
And [bray then! donkey!] [Sweat then, slave!] [Live, cursed one!]22

The poem creates a sensation of movement in the reader, as the dynamic passage of
each second marks the rhythmic exclamations of Life, pushing the poet to walk forward
in double time. The reader identies somatically, in mind-body, with the sensation of
moving forward through time and space to a precise rhythm, always reminded of an
alter ego interrupting their dreamlike self-projections into space, whether it is a
demonic inversion of themselves, a twin, or for that matter, a dance partner.
Furthermore, Baudelaires pairing of poet and Sylphide reects Nourrits coupling in
La Sylphide. In both instances, the pursuit of impossible communion between a human
and an elemental spirit engenders a positive poetic reverie, followed by negative guiltridden aftereffects. In La Sylphide, James rejects societal norms to pursue the Sylphide,
seeking a partner outside of his community. This pursuit ends in the Sylphides death,
while James sees in the distance, with despair, his jilted anc
ee Efe joyfully marrying
her fellow Scot, Gurn. As scholars Sally Banes and Noel Carroll observe, On the one
hand, La Sylphide operates, in a broad sense, like a cautionary tale, warning that
romance and sexual passion outside ones social circle risks destruction and death. But
on the other hand, La Sylphide indulges forbidden wishes, allowing James to gambol
with the woodland sylphs for the best part of the second act before he is killed.23 Similarly, in Baudelaires Chambre double, although the Sylphide spreads out on the
poets bed enticingly, inspiring dreams of union and unearthly poetic delights, in the
end, the Spector takes her place, transforming the poet into the damned of the earth,
reective of Baudelaires own social marginalization and captured by the expression
poete maudit.

Baudelaire successfully infuses his prose poem with imagined corporal movement and ballet imagery, calling to mind the gure of the danced Sylphidea
source of poetic inspiration both inside and outside of the poem. In a sense, Baudelaire achieved his ideal for the prose poem: Who among us has not, in his days of
ambition, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and

The expression poete maudit, literally meaning an accursed poet, refers to a brilliant but self-destructive writer misunderstood by an indifferent society. The name for this Romantic type comes from the title of Paul Verlaines collection of essays on St
ephane Mallarm
e, Arthur Rimbaud, and others. Paul Verlaine, Les Poetes maudits (Paris: L
eon
Vanier, 1884); The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, s.v. poete maudit.
Quel est celui de nous qui na pas, dans ses jours dambition, r^ev
e le miracle dune prose po
etique, musicale sans
rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurt
ee pour sadapter aux mouvements lyriques de l^ame, aux ondulations de la r^everie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? Charles Baudelaire, Lettre-D
edicace aux Petits poemes en
prose, in uvres completes, ed. Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 146.

DANCE CHRONICLE

47

without rhyme, supple and choppy enough to adapt to the lyric movements of the
soul, to the undulations of reverie, and the soubresauts of consciousness?y Indeed,
La Chambre double passes freely between the rhythmless existence of eternity
and the marked steps of time; between impressions of pleasure and misery subject
to the undulations of dreams, and occasional dramatic spurts and shocks of consciousness, much as a dancer executes seemingly effortless undulations and dramatic leaps.

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From sylphs to Wilis: A poetic dance of death

While the sylph inspired numerous poets in the mid-nineteenth century, Gautier
himself created the balletic depiction of the Wili. The Wili rst caught Gautiers
attention when he read Heinrich Heines De lAllemagne (1835), a compilation of
essays published in the periodicals Europe litt
eraire and Revue des Deux Mondes
during his time in Paris.24 Heine alludes to the myth of the Wilis, young maidens
who died the night before their wedding. Unable to rest tranquilly in their tomb
and condemned to dance each night at midnight, they forced any man who crossed
their path to dance to his death. This imagery inspired Gautier to write Giselle, as
he attested in an open letter to Heine published in La Presse.

Giselle is the story of a young peasant girl in love with the handsome Loys, who,
unbeknownst to her, is the Duke Albrecht in disguise, already betrothed to
Bathilde, daughter of the Prince of Courland.y When Giselle uncovers the duplicity
of her lover, she descends into madness and plunges his sword into her breast,
committing suicide. Come midnight, the Wilis raise Giselle from her tomb and initiate her into their band. Then they begin to wreak their revenge on Albrecht, who
has come to visit Giselles tomb in the forest. Yet, Giselles love remains strong,
even after death, and she protects her lover until daybreak, when the Wilis lose
their power. At dawn, Albrecht is forced to bid goodbye to Giselles ghost as she is
drawn irresistibly to her underground tomb. Bathilde arrives to comfort the distraught and grief-stricken Albrecht and gently leads him away.

In his letter, published on July 5, 1841, Gautier states: Mon cher Heinrich Heine, en feuilletant, il y a quelques semaines, votre beau livre De lAllemagne, je tombai sur un endroit charmant ; . . . cest le passage ou vous parlez . . . des
Wilis au teint de neige, a la valse impitoyable ; et de toutes ces d
elicieuses apparitions que vous avez rencontr
ees . . .
dans la brume velout
ee du claire de lune allemand, et je m
ecriai involontairement : Quel joli ballet on ferait avec
cela ! (My dear Heinrich Heine, while leang through, a few weeks ago, your lovely book On Germany, I happened
upon a charming spot; . . . its the passage where you speak about . . . Wilis the color of snow, with their ruthless
waltz; and of all the delicious apparitions that you encountered . . . in the velvet mist of the German moonlight, and
I cried out involuntarily: What a beautiful ballet one could create with that!) Gautier,
Ecrits , 117. Gautier and JulesHenri Vernoy de Saint Georges collaborated on the libretto for Giselle, and were listed as coauthors on the scenario
and the playbills. See Ivor Guest, The Romantic Ballet in Paris (Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2006), 347.
See Th
eophile Gautier, Th
e^atre: mystere, com
edies et ballets (Paris: Charpentier, 1872), 332. In Gautiers original
libretto, Albrecht is called Le Duc Albert de Sil
esie; the name Albrecht became more common in later productions
of the ballet, which also used the terms Duke and Prince interchangeably.
un v
eritable poeme. Th
eophile Gautier, Notice sur Giselle, in Jules Janin, Th
eophile Gautier, and Philarete Chasles,
Les beaut
es de lop
era, ou, Chefs-duvre lyriques (Paris: Souli
e, 1845), 23.

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The choreographer Jean Coralli chose Carlotta Grisi to play Giselle. Grisi was
known for her lyricism, precision, lightness, and joyful ease; she struck a happy
medium between the styles of her famous predecessors Marie Taglioni and Fanny
Elssler.25 Gautier called Grisis choreographic collaboration with her partner
Lucien Petipa in the second act of the ballet a true poem.z This choreographed
poem inspired Gautier to transcribe the storyline of Giselle, act 2, into his own
 la princesse Bathilde, which appeared in the periodical Pandore, on
poem, A
February 15, 1845.

This poem, composed of twenty-four alexandrines, contains three dashes that
mark key moments from the end of the second act of Giselle, resembling moments
of rest in a musical score. The rst eight verses, preceding the rst dash, describe
Giselle dancing her last steps before she disappears back into her tomb, bidding
farewell to Albrecht forever. We see before us a corps de ballet, les p^ales Wilis
(the pale Wilis), who glide offstage surrounded by n
enufars et des belles-de-nuit
(water lilies and mirabilis blossoms). Gautier takes care to mention that the Wilis
glide without noisean important aspect of the technique of a dancer on pointe.
The next eight verses, before the second dash, refer to the entrance of Bathilde
onstage as dawn breaks. In the poem she resembles the mythological huntress
Diana. In contrast to the pale and ethereal Wilis, the living huntress is compared
to durable materialthe marble of Pharos. The poet imagines that in Greece the
people would worship Bathilde on a white alter, and the Graces would welcome
her in their midst.
Following the third dash, the poet juxtaposes la r
ealit
e (reality) and le r^eve
(dream) twice, comparing opposites personied by Bathilde and Giselle. This doubling ts nicely with the structure of the poem, which has an even number of verses
and an even number of syllables in every line, culminating in the nal verse: Quel
r^eve peut valoir votre r
ealit
e? (What dream is worth your reality?). It is a question
that ultimately privileges Bathildes sunny reality over Giselles unfullled dream;
Giselle is but a charming phantom.
When the poem is read in terms of the evolution of nineteenth-century aesthetics,
historical context suggests that Giselle and Bathilde represent two opposing artistic
ideals. Giselle represents the Romantic aesthetic, reecting common psychological
themes of Romanticism, including sentiment turned to madness, self-destruction, and
untimely death. Furthermore, when Giselle transforms into a Wili in the second act of
the ballet, she and her ethereal sisters exemplify tropes of nature and folklore present in
the works of German Romantics, such as Heinrich Heine, and French Romantics, such
as Franc ois Ren
e de Chateaubriand. Embedded in these tropes is the view that nature

 la princesse Bathilde, in Po
esies completes de Th
eophile Gautier, vol. 2 (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1970),
Th
eophile Gautier, A
221. It is interesting that Gautier chose to dedicate his poem to the Princess Bathilde, given the fact that Bathilde is
not technically a Princess in the libretto of Giselle. She is the daughter of the Prince of Courland and Duke Albrechts
anc
ee, but her title is not otherwise specied. See Gautier, Th
e^atre, 332. She is also a secondary character in the
ballet.

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elicits poetic emotions and mimics the sentiments of the individual, but that it is also
dangerous, and at times lethal, to the lonely wanderer.
Bathilde, on the other hand, represents a material aesthetic, one that is quite
compatible with the Parnassian ideal. Just as Gautiers preface to Mademoiselle de
Maupin (1835) is a precursory articulation of the Parnassian doctrine of lart
 la princesse Bathilde anticipates the Parnassian obsespour lart, so the poem A


sion with antiquity and sculptural forms, as evident in Gautiers Emaux
et cam
ees
(1852), Leconte de Lisles Poemes antiques (1852), and Heredias Les Troph
ees
(1893). In his poem LArt (1857), Gautier exclaims about poetry: Sculpte, lime,
cisele; / Que ton r^eve ottant / Se scelle / Dans le bloc r
esistant! (Sculpt, sand,
 la
chisel / So that your oating dream / Is sealed / In a resistant block!)26 In A
princesse Bathilde, Giselles body is the oating dream of poetry, whereas Bathilde is essentially a moving sculpture. The dancers body executes the transition
from one poetic ideal to another, illustrating the ascent of the Parnassian aesthetic
in the wake of Romanticisms untimely deatha death hastened, according to
some, by the Revolution of 1848.27
Socially engaged idealists within the Romantic movement, who placed great
importance, in both their art and their lives, on social reorganization in the name
of increased equality, saw the failure of the 1848 revolution in France as the failure
of the French nation and the larger goals of French Romanticism.
As literary
scholar Richard Terdiman points out, the universalizing ideals that up to 1848
had undergirded all the French Revolutions seemed to have been liquidated along
with the working class protesters.28 Inevitably, such a crushing blow on a sociopolitical scale affected the thinking of artists and poets, including Gautier. Briey
swept up in revolutionary optimism, Gautier refers, in March 1848, to incredible
events, that succeed one another with magical rapidity, and turn life into a waking
dream, only to lament, in April of the same year, the revolutionary torment.y By
1852, Gautier proclaimed his retreat from societal concerns to write a hermetic collection of poems: Without taking notice of the tempest / that beat against my


closed window panes / I created Emaux
et Cam
ees.z
As Gautiers poetic ideals changed, he was able to express this change through a
transcription of his own ballet into a written poem. In his 1890 biography of the

Meanwhile, sociologist and philosopher Michael Lowy argues that Romanticism is essentially a reaction against the
way of life in capitalist societies, and thus that its endpoint cannot be pinpointed at 1848, nor at the end of the
nineteenth century, but rather the aesthetic and social tenets of Romanticism (called by other names) continue to
play a key role in art and literature today, and will do so as long as we live in a capitalist system. See Michael Lowy,
Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1718.
y

ev
enements inous, qui se succedent avec une rapidit
e magique, et font de la vie un r^eve
eveill
e. Th
eophile Gautier, cited in St
ephane Gu
egan, Th
eophile Gautier (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 303. La tourmente r
evolutionnaire. Ibid.,
316.
z
Sans prendre garde a louragan / Qui fouettait mes vitres ferm
ees, / Moi, jai fait
Emaux et Cam
ees. Th
eophile Gautier,
Emaux et cam
ees, ed. J. Pommier (Paris: Droz, 1947), 4.
x
On dirait que cest pour mat
erialiser ses propres r^eves quil a fait des ballets. Maxime Du Camp, cited in Edwin Binney, Les Ballets de Th
eophile Gautier (Paris: Nizet, 1965), 16.



Meglin, Behind the Veil of Translucence . . . Resurrection, 84. Meglin explores how the ballet Giselle transcribes
Gautiers ideal of fantastic literature: a paradise of uncensored sensuality, spirituality, and cultural memory (136).

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A. LEE

poet, Maxime Du Camp, Gautiers contemporary and friend, argued, One could
say that it was in order to materialize his own dreams that Gautier created ballets.x
For Gautier, dance transcribed poetic ideas into a sensual and living presence, as
Meglin points out: Like poetry with its rhymes and rhythms, music with its tones
and timbres, and visual art with its lines and colors, ballet in its movement and
stillness yielded a sensuous surface of pure pleasure, what Gautier considered its



essence.
This material artistic ideal bears a stark contrast to Baudelaires conception of
art in La Chambre double, which he delineates in terms of harmony, obscurity,
and vague impressions: When compared to a pure dream, to un-analyzed impressions, denite art, positive art, is blasphemy.
Yet, neither Baudelaire nor Gautier
would have the last word on how to embody poetic and aesthetic ideals. Instead
the dancer continued her dialogue with poets throughout the nineteenth and
onward into the twentieth century, notably shaping the aesthetics of symbolists
St
ephane Mallarm
e and Paul Val
ery.

Queer poetics and the androgynous dancer

Even as Gautier and Baudelaire formulated a poetics of dance, they expressed particular
notions about the dancer-poet, describing her as an androgynous creature and a source
of desire, sexual ambiguity, and poetic creativity. One of Gautiers favorite dancers at
the Paris Opera was Fanny Elssler, whom he likened to the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, the androgyne of antiquity, this ravishing chimera of Greek art.y Her beauty was
superior because of this delicious ambiguity, allowing Mlle Elssler to appeal to everyone, including women who cannot stand any female dancer.z In La Fanfarlo, Baudelaire echoes Gautiers fetishizing description of combined masculine and feminine
qualities.x The protagonist Samuel Cramer eroticizes the dancers calf muscle, dwelling
at length on its hybrid qualities:
This leg was already, for Samuel, the object of an eternal desire. Long, ne, strong, thick
and nervous all at once, it had all of the rectitude of beauty and all the libertine attraction
of prettiness. If sliced perpendicularly at the largest spot, the leg would have provided a
sort of triangle, the point would have been situated at the tibia, and the rounded line of

Relativement au r^eve pur, a limpression non analys
ee, lart d
eni, lart positif est un blaspheme. Baudelaire,
Chambre double, 6869.
y
landrogyne antique, cette ravissante chimere de lart grec. Le Messager, May 4, 1838, in Gautier,
Ecrits, 57.
z
qui ne peuvent souffrir aucune danseuse. Ibid.
x
Fanny Elssler was an international ballet star, most famous for her rendition of the Spanish cachuca. Elssler graced
the stage of the Paris Opera from 1834 to 1840, and then proceeded to tour the world. See Homans, Apollos Angels,
16465.



Cette jambe
etait d
eja, pour Samuel, lobjet dun
eternel d
esir. Longue, ne, forte, grasse et nerveuse a la fois, elle
avait toute la correction du beau et tout lattrait libertin du joli. Tranch
ee perpendiculairement a lendroit le plus
large, cette jambe e^ut donn
e une espece de triangle dont le sommet e^ut
et
e situ
e sur le tibia, et dont la ligne arrondie du mollet e^
ut fourni la base convexe. Une vraie jambe dhomme est trop dure, les jambes de femmes crayonn
ees
par Dev
eria sont trop molles, pour en donner une id
ee. Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo, 396.

DANCE CHRONICLE

51

the calf would have furnished the convex base. A real mans leg is too hard, while the legs



of women drawn by Dev
eria are too soft, to give the proper idea.

According to Cramer, the dancers calfof a unique shape and muscularity

existing outside traditional gender normsinspires both admiration and libertine
desires. French literary scholar Nathanial Wing views the Fanfarlos androgyny as
mirroring the poet Cramers hermaphroditic characteristics, as linking their sexual
passion to artistic creativity and poetic inspiration:

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Baudelaires early novella is strong evidence that he is keenly aware of the disruptive and
productive potential of multiple, uid gender identities as they contribute to new forms
of poetic sensibility and as they facilitate new forms of writing. Gender ambiguities are
linked to the unnished business of Romanticism, understood as a literature of excess, of
innitization, ever in a state of incompletion.29

It is only when the Fanfarlo and Cramer fall into the bourgeois model of heteronormative sexuality leading to reproduction that Cramers writing becomes banal.
Just as Wing ties the aesthetic project of Romanticism to gender ambiguity and
sexual exploration, I would propose that the Romantic ballerina occupied a space
of poetic production free from gendered social constraints. As a poet of dance and
metaphoric vehicle of the androgynous, she expanded the imagination of the poet
of words and stimulated him to achieve his full potential.
It is not surprising that Gautier and Baudelaires texts about dancers, along with
the nineteenth-century ballets La Sylphide and Giselle, drew inspiration from gender ambiguity and androgyny, given their literary sources. In Cazottes Le Diable
amoureux, Biondettos seamless transformation into Biondetta bewilders and titillates the narrator. Much like the future sylphides of the Paris Opera, Biondetto/as
ambiguously gendered body and indeterminate identity stimulate Alvare, inspiring
poetic reections on dream and reality.
Androgyny was also a facet of the ballet world at the time in which Gautier and
Baudelaire were writing. From 1830 through 1850, the star power of the female
dancer overshadowed that of the male dancer in Paris. The number of female
dancers performing travesty roles increased in the corps de ballet and in popular
divertissements, as the number of male dancers decreased.
Lynn Garafola links
this transformation, in part, to the change in the economic structure of the ballet
after 1830, when the Paris Opera lost its royal license. As government funds for

Marian Smith suggests that dance scholarship would benet from further studies of the male dancer in the nineteenth-century ballet. During this time period male dancers had a stronger presence in operas than in ballets. Smith
calls attention to an anti-male strain in ballet historiography, inherited from nineteenth-century dance critics such as
Jules Janin and Th
eophile Gautier and encouraged by the privileged study of ballets blancs over other works that
featured male dancers in more prominent roles. See Marian Smith, The Disappearing Danseur, in Cambridge Opera
Journal, vol. 19, no. 1 (2007): 3357.
As shipboys and sailors, hussars and toreadors, the proletarians of the Op
eras corps de ballet donned breeches and
skin-tight trousers that displayed to advantage the shapely legs, slim corseted waists, and rounded hips, thighs, and
buttocks of the eras ideal gure. Like the prostitutes in fancy dress in Manets Ball at the Opera, the danseuse en
travesti brazenly advertised her sexuality. Lynn Garafola, The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet, Dance
Research Journal, vol. 17, no. 2 and vol.18, no. 1 (19851986): 37.

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the Opera decreased signicantly, its income depended on bourgeois, moneyed

subscribers (largely male), democratizing and diversifying the star system and outmoding the male danseur noble, whose aristocratic restraint audiences no longer
viewed as manly.30 An increased exchange of dancers sexual favors for monetary
recompense accompanied these changes, a practice that ourished as budget cuts
decreased dancers salaries and pensions. The highly fetishized danseuse en travesti
was a popular and inoffensive replacement for the male dancer. Costumers,
Garafola notes, gave her trousers and a corset to show off her gure.y The danseuse
en travesti presents a symbol of the erotic qualities and queer possibilities inherent
in the androgynous dancer.
In A Queer History of the Ballet, Peter Stoneley discusses androgyny and queer
sexuality, focusing on how ballets blancs such as The Ballet of the Nuns from
Robert le diable, La Sylphide, and Giselle put highly sexualized sisterhoods on display for a male heteroscopic audience.31 These sisterhoods, according to Stoneley,
exist in a space between or outside of male and female genders, encouraging deviant sexual fantasies. Such fantasies include same-sex desire and excessive sexuality, or attraction to disembodied fairies or spirits, with which a union can never
successfully be consummated. I would propose that this balletic space between or
beyond genders and conventional sexuality is, in the nineteenth century, also associated with the act of poetic creation itself. For, among poets like Gautier and Baudelaire, poetic creation occurs in the midst of transgression.
In Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine,
Lucia Ruprecht examines dances of the self in German Romantic texts, which, she
argues, subvert neoclassicist balletic ideals through written choreographies of trauma:
Dances of the self involve the body in a signifying activity where physicality even if constantly implied, does not only speak of itself, but of processes of cultural discipline and
codication, their success or their failure, and of the complex psychophysical links.
Through a style of movement, the body tells of the subjection to cultural and historical
norms and ideals, how they shape the individual performance, or how this performance
resists given codes. Dance, especially as recreated in literary text, becomes a performed
narrative of the subject; or in other words, a specic apparatus within the cultural processes that form subjectivity. At the same time, it functions as a metaphor for the fact
that this subjectivity is an inherently repetitive, dynamic activity rather than a given
state.32

Comparing the mad scene in Giselle to Laurences dance in a story by Heine

titled Florentinische Nachte, Ruprecht uncovers similar choreographies of resistance to the neoclassical balletic ideal, including physical manifestations of horror
through mime, movement, and facial expression, and a sudden collapse that
opposes the dominance of the vertical. According to Ruprecht, Heine offered his
readers a new aesthetic of movement through text that did not have a place on
ofcial stages.33 Meanwhile Giselle thwarted codes of ballet technique, gender,
and sexuality during the mad scene onstage. I would argue that, although Giselle
recuperates some of these balletic codes in the second act through her

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transformation into an ethereal and exquisitely graceful Wili, her impossible pairing with Albrecht remains a source of tension until the end of the ballet, when the
stately Bathilde arrives to lead her anc
e home, hence restoring societal order.
The androgynous quality of the dancer-poet who resisted, at least for eeting
moments, neoclassical ideals and societal constraints attracted Baudelaire and
Gautier. The dancer created ephemeral poetry with her moving body, blurring the
boundaries of meaning and representation in dominant linguistic and cultural sign
systems, even while elaborating established balletic codes and challenging them
with her virtuosity. As dancers like Marie Taglioni and Carlotta Grisi created a kinesthetic system of referents for danced poetry onstage with such signiers as the
oating arabesque or the pirouette en pointe, they moved uidly through discursive boundaries of language, gender, and sexuality, and inspired their collaborators and their public to new realms of poetic experience. Baudelaire and Gautier
responded profoundly to the androgynous dancer-poet as she created her embodied poetry, and they attempted to recreate her dance imagery, rhythms, and
somatic experience in their written texts. These nineteenth-century thinkers
thought of writing about danceor writing dance in todays languageas reaching
for the ineffable, analogous to searching for an ever-elusive denition of poetry.
Modern-day critical theorists have shown that pinning down a single denition
or an essence of poetry is difculteven impossible. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton, for example, has dened a poem as a ctional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who
decides where the lines should end, immediately adding, This dreary sounding
denition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do.34 Meanwhile, poetry scholar Harold Schweizer cautions, poetry seeks manifold interdisciplinary connections but complicates all forms of appropriation.35 Unconcerned
with disciplinary boundaries, Baudelaire and Gautier freely used dance as both a
metaphor for poetic language and a sign system to help them unlock poetrys
essence in the written word. Firmly convinced that dance was the key to understanding poetrys embodiment, they continually referred to ballet performances as
translations of a poetic vision or ideal. Exploring dance poetics in the Romantic
imagination not only reveals important intersections between dance studies and
literature, but also provides scholars and artists/researchers with tools to better
understand their own materials of inquiry, whether written choreographies or
danced poems.

Notes
1. Lucia Ruprecht, Towards Discursive Discipline: Dance beyond Metaphor in Critical Writing, in In(ter)discipline: New Languages for Criticism, eds. Gillian Beer, Malcolm Bowie,
and Beate Perrey (London: Legenda, 2007), 205.
2. Jennifer Homans, Apollos Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010),
165.

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A. LEE

3. Joellen A. Meglin, Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the Ballet
Fantastique in France, 18311841. Part Three: Resurrection, Sensuality, and the Palpable
Presence of the Past in Th
eophile Gautiers Fantastic, Dance Chronicle, vol. 28, no. 1
(2005): 110, 120.
4. Th
eophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris: Charpentier, 1883), 136.
5. Peter France, ed., The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), s.v. Parnasse, Le by James Kearns; Catulle Mendes, La L
egende
du Parnasse contemporain (Brussels: Auguste Brancart, 1884); Yann Mortelette, Le Parnasse (Paris: Presses Paris Sorbonne, 2006); Maurice Anatole Souriau, Histoire du Parnasse
(Geneve: Slatkine, 1977); Andr
e Th
erive, Le Parnasse (Paris: Les uvres Repr
esentatives,
1929).
6. David Moulds, The Development of Th
eophile Gautiers Aesthetics (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Oxford, 1984); David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 35, 7677.
7. St
ephane Gu
egan, Th
eophile Gautier (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 268369.
8. Beryl Schlossman, Baudelaires Place in Literary and Cultural History, in The Cambridge
Companion to Baudelaire, ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 175.
9. Charles Baudelaire, La Chambre double, in Le Spleen de Paris (Paris: Le Livre de Poche,
2003), 70.
10. Joellen A. Meglin, Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the Ballet
Fantastique in France, 18311841. Part One: Ancestors of the Sylphide in the Conte Fantastique, Dance Chronicle, vol. 27, no. 1 (2004): 76, 121.
11. Charles Nodier, Faust, drame en 3 actes imit
e de Goethe (Paris: J. N. Barba, 1828), 7; Jean
Coralli and Edmond Burat de Gurgy, Le diable boiteux: ballet-pantomime en trois actes
(Paris: Roullet, 1836).
12. Carlo Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore: The Art of Dancing, trans. R. Barton (London: Bull,
1830), 55, 515, 75.
13. E. A. Th
eleur, Letters on Dancing, in Studies in Dance History, vol. 2, no. 1 (1990): 60.
14. Gabriele Brandstetter, The Virtuosos Stage: A Theatrical Topos, Theatre Research International, vol. 32, no. 2 (2007): 189.
15. Marian Smith, Appendix 2: French libretto of La Sylphide, English translation, in La Sylphide: Paris 1832 and Beyond, ed. Marian Smith (London: Dance Books Ltd., 2012), 316
323, quotation 321.
16. Alexander Bennett, Simplied Choreographic Script of La Sylphide, in Smith, La Sylphide, 251.
17. Suzanne F. Braswell, An Aesthetics of Movement: Baudelaire, Poetic Renewal, and the
Invitation of Dance, French Forum, vol. 31, no. 3 (October 1, 2006): 29.
18. Ibid., 24, 38.
19. Baudelaire, Chambre double, 68.
20. Marion Kant, The Soul of the Shoe, in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion
Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18498.
21. Baudelaire, Chambre double, 69.
22. Ibid., 70.
23. Sally Banes and Noel Carroll, Marriage and the Inhuman: La Sylphides Narratives of
Domesticity and Community, in Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic
Ballet, ed. Lynn Garafola (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 102.
24. William Stigand, The Life, Work, and Opinions of Heinrich Heine (London: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1875), 155.

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25. Th
eophile Gautier, Notice sur Giselle, in Jules Janin, Th
eophile Gautier, and Philarete
Chasles, Les beaut
es de lop
era, ou, Chefs-d'uvre lyriques (Paris: Souli
e, 1845), 4.


26. Th
eophile Gautier, LArt, in Emaux
et cam
ees, ed. J. Pommier (Paris: Droz, 1947), 132.
27. Peter France, ed., Oxford Companion to Literature in French (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), s.v. Romanticism; David Owen Evans, Social Romanticism in France, 1830
1848 (Gloucestershire, UK: Clarendon Press, 1951); Jacob Leib Talmon, Romanticism and
Revolt: Europe, 18151848 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979); Alexander L. Ringer,
The Early Romantic Era: Between Revolutions, 1789 and 1848 (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1991); Michael Broers, Europe after Napoleon: Revolution, Reaction, and
Romanticism, 18141848 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996).
28. Richard Terdiman, 1848: Class Struggles in France, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 707.
29. Nathanial Wing, Between Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 73.
30. Lynn Garafola, The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet, Dance Research Journal, vol. 17, no. 2 and vol. 18, no. 1 (19851986): 3540.
31. Peter Stoneley, A Queer History of the Ballet (New York: Routledge, 2007), 2225.
32. Lucia Ruprecht, Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich
Heine (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), xvi.
33. Ruprecht, Dances of the Self, 10516.
34. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 25.
35. Harold Schweizer, Poetry, in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, eds. Michael
Payne and Jessica Rae Barbera (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 545.
AMANDA LEE is lecturer in French at Washington University in St. Louis, where, in 2014, she
attained her Ph.D. in French (supervised by Professor Tili Boon Cuill
e), with a graduate certicate in women, gender, and sexuality studies. Dr. Lee is currently working on a book manuscript
based on her dissertation. The Poetics of Dance in Nineteenth-Century France: Transcribing
Movement, Gender and Culture examines the theorization of dance as a poetic language by
poets, philosophers, choreographers, and dance critics, from 17501914. In her next booklength project, Perfumed Poetry: Dancing Bodies in French Orientalism, she plans to examine
orientalism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French ballet. Her research interests
include eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century French literature as well as dance
studies, aesthetics, gender, and translation theory.