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

Modernism’s Mythic Pose
Modernist Literature & Culture

Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions
Elizabeth Outka
Machine-Age Comedy
Michael North
The Art of Scandal

Sean Latham
The Hypothetical Mandarin
Eric Hayot
Nations of Nothing But Poetry

Matthew Hart
Modernism & Copyright

Edited by Paul Saint-Amour
Accented America
Joshua Miller
Criminal Ingenuity
Ellen Levy
Carrie J. Preston
Pragmatic Modernism
Lisi Schoenbach
Modernism’s
Mythic Pose
Gender, Genre, Solo Performance
Carrie J. Preston
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Preston, Carrie J.
Modernism’s mythic pose : gender, genre, solo performance / Carrie J. Preston.
p. cm.—(Modernist literature & culture)
ISBN 978-0-19-976626-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th
century—History and criticism. 2. Dance—United States—History—19th
century. 3. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 4. Modernism (Art)—
United States. 5. American literature—Classical influences. 6. Art,
Modern—Classical influences. I. Title.
PS310.M57P74 2011
700'.4112—dc22 2011014568
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xi
List of Figures xiii
Introduction 3
I. Modern, Antimodern, and Mythic Posing 3
II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment 11
III. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual 14
IV. Solo Genres 18
V. Modernist Kinesthetics 21
1. The Solo’s Origins: Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues 26

I. Galatea’s Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama 28
II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton’s Attitude 32
III. Goethe’s Proserpina and Later Posers 39
IV. Barrett Browning: Naming “Aeschylus” and “The Virgin Mary . . .” 44
V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti and Augusta Webster 51
2. Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film 58

I. Delsarte’s Aesthetics of the Attitude 60
II. Disseminating Delsarte 67
III. Performing Delsartism: Genevieve Stebbins and the Early
Motions of Modern Dance 73
vi C ONT ENTS
IV. Performing Delsartism (Take Two): Denishawn and Hollywood 82

V. The Russian Delsarte: Kuleshov and Film Montage 91
3. Positioning Genre: The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures

of Recitation 100
I. Expression, Recitation, and Literary Interpretation 102
II. Charlotte Mew: The Magdalene in “Madeleine in Church” 110
III. T. S. Eliot’s “Magus”: Impersonality, Objective Correlative, and
Mythical Method 117
IV. Chautauquas, “Sextus Propertius,” and Ezra Pound’s History 125
V. Amy Lowell’s Polyphonic Emma Lyon Hamilton 134
4. The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan’s Solo Dance 144

I. The Shock of Solo Expression 147
II. The Proto-Motor: Duncan and Delsartean Posing 152
III. The Joints of Early Modernism: Conjunctures of Materialism and
Metaphysics 160
IV. The Multiplied Body of the Motor 167
V. Motorized Propulsion and Modernist Ritual 173
VI. Repetitions of the Motor: Will and Spontaneity 177
VII. The Weight of a Thigh and the “New Woman” of Modernism 182
5. Ritualized Reception: H.D.’s Antimodern Poetics and Cinematics 191

I. Imagism Unstuck: H.D.’s Dissent and Pound’s Revision 194
II. Stepping from Stone: Dramatic Monologues of The God 198
III. The Ritual Chorus and a Soloist’s Suspicion in Ion and
“The Dancer” 204
IV. Types of Participation: H.D.’s Film Essays and Reviews 212
V. H.D.’s Attitudes on Film 218
VI. Montage, a Classical Technology 225
VII. The Soloists of Trilogy 231
Afterword 239
Notes 250
Bibliography 319
Index 343
Foreword
Recovering the astonishingly influential yet largely forgotten movement called

Delsartism for modernist studies, Carrie Preston’s Modernism’s Mythic Pose:
Gender, Genre, Solo Performance makes modernism new by attending to the ways
in which it was always old. As Preston shrewdly remarks, “Modernism was rarely
so ‘new’ as advertised,” and her book reveals modernism’s debt to a set of interna-
tional movements popular between 1880 and 1920 that were inspired by the
French performance theorist François Delsarte (1811–1871). Later considered
excessively feminine and nostalgic, particularly from the perspective of futurism
and other hypermasculine celebrations of modernity, Delsartism emphasized the
body’s capacity for expression as key to spiritual health and to that end promoted
practices such as posing and poetic recitation.
Uncovering a lost genealogy of modernism, Modernism’s Mythic Pose links
Delsartism to an overlooked tradition of paratheatrical practice—especially the
mythic pose but including Romantic and Victorian monodramas—and then con-
nects both to a revisionist account of the dramatic monologue as a genre deeply
concerned with the body. What emerges is a new way of thinking about modern-
ism’s relation to the performing body, as well as about relations among modern
dance, acting theory, literary recitation, poetry, and film—all of which were influ-
enced by Delsartism.
The book builds toward detailed case studies of H.D. and Isadora Duncan, but
in the intervening chapters, we encounter a fascinating array of figures and texts
that rarely enter into studies of modernism. There is Delsarte himself, of course,
whose meticulous study of the “jointed body” and its expressive capacities refers to
the elbow as “the thermometer of the soul”; the scandalous Emma Lyon Hamilton,
vii
viii FOR EWO R D
who draped herself in veils, girdles, turbans, and mantles to pose in aristocratic
drawing rooms as Niobe, Mary Magdalene, Medea, Iphigenia; Goethe’s Proserpina
and the monodramas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and
Augusta Webster; and Vernon Lee, whose psychological aesthetics emphasized the
embodied and kinesthetic dimension of aesthetic response. But Preston does not
present this rich archive simply for its novelty: moving from Delsarte and Hamilton
through monodramas, and then on to dramatic monologues, modern dance, silent
film, and cultures of recitation, she traces a typological pattern of thinking that
amounts to a prehistory of the modernist mythmaking typically associated with
T. S. Eliot’s famous essay on Ulysses. In this line of thought, the mythic pose, “an
imagined rupture in time,” dramatizes, makes visible, embodies the kind of mul-
tiple temporalities enacted more abstractly by Leopold Bloom as he walks forth as
Odysseus-Elijah-Shakespeare.
Exciting enough in itself, this genealogy also transforms familiar landmarks.
Having reconnected the dramatic monologue to the history of solo performance,
Preston offers dynamic rereadings of Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” and Ezra
Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” in the context of related poems by
Charlotte Mew and Amy Lowell and the performance practices of the Chautauqua
movement. Isadora Duncan and modern dance recover their central importance
to international modernism here in an authoritative exploration of Duncan’s pro-
ductively ambivalent relation to technological modernity: Duncan’s Delsartean
body, easily dismissed as a nostalgic retreat from modern times in its yearning to
materialize the soul, engages, in Preston’s fresh account, in a critical pas de deux
with the kinetic energy of modernity. In the last chapter, instead of attempting to
shift H.D. into the center of a modernism we already know, Preston rethinks both
H.D. and modernism in relation to kinesthesia in a way that makes H.D.’s sup-
posed adherence to Pound’s early version of imagism and her subsequent margin-
alization in literary history seem all the more skewed. Not only H.D.’s investment
in poetic typology but also her interest in film looks different in this light. It is not
surprising that Delsartism influenced acting in early film—D. W. Griffith, in fact,
required his actors to train in Delsartean methods—but it turns out that H.D.’s
interest in montage, usually associated exclusively with the theories of Sergei
Eisenstein, also owes a good deal to Eisenstein’s teacher, Lev Kuleshov, who was
steeped in Delsartism’s approach to the expressive body.
Some might say (though certainly not Preston, who writes with tact and gen-
erosity) that certain theorists of the body wouldn’t know one if they tripped over
it. Preston takes on major theorists of the discursive or performative body, not to
debunk them but to open their thinking to complexities introduced by her history
FOREWORD ix
of the performing body. Judith Butler and François Delsarte, it turns out, have
more in common than one might think, and Preston’s comparative analysis of the
two throws into sharp relief the problems of agency that motivated Butler’s revisit-
ing of the materialization of the body in Bodies That Matter. Of particular interest
is the way Delsartism’s emphasis on the will complicates models of reflexive social
construction; roles may be thrust upon us, but we also choose them. Theorists of
performance, then, as well as those interested in embodied feminist practice, the
fine arts, poetry, and dance, will find much to contemplate in Modernism’s Mythic
Pose, and we are delighted to welcome it into the series.
Mark Wollaeger and Kevin J. H. Dettmar

This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
A book is in no way a solo performance, although it does require considerable

time alone. In the period of my life that this project occupied, I spent time in many
different locations, and I must acknowledge friends and mentors in each.
This project began as a dissertation at Rutgers University under the excellent
direction of Elin Diamond, Alicia Ostriker, and Carolyn Williams. Their guidance
and insights are evident on every page, but their contributions extend well beyond
careful readings and lengthy discussions. Each has helped me find the space in the
profession where I could live.
In Michigan, the location of so many of my first drafts, I must thank my family
for keeping my writing cabin stocked with food from their gardens, pulling me
away from the computer with bonfires and horseback rides, even driving cookies
to New Jersey to sweeten a dissertation defense. My mother, who has always helped
me get wherever I needed to go, still manages to drive me to archives and confer-
ences. I am grateful to all my parents, Cindy, Chuck, Ian, Ilona, and Leroy, and
grandparents, Betty and George.
My colleagues at Boston University collectively work to make our department
an excellent environment for junior faculty. John Paul Riquelme, Bonnie Costello,
Anna Henchman, and Sean Edgecomb read and commented on drafts at crucial
junctures. For their guidance and support, I would like to thank Deborah Belle,
Larry Breiner, William Carroll, Jack Matthews, Virginia Sapiro, and James Winn.
My students in several semesters of Performing Genders have been my teachers as
well, and I am particularly grateful to Carrie Chiusano and Alexandra Smith, who
assisted with research.
xi
xii ACKNOWLED G MENTS
A Peter Paul Career Development Professorship gave me the time and resources
to finish this project and begin international research for another. A few postcards
from the travel Peter Paul enabled have been small recompense for his generosity,
personal kindness, and commitment to the potential of junior faculty. Librarians
and archivists at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Harvard Theatre Collection,
and Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University have been tre-
mendously helpful. Lori Belilove and Cherlyn Smith, director and associate
director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company, provided expert instruction in
Duncan’s technique and repertory, helpful interviews, and cherished opportu-
nities to dance.
I am grateful to the Modernist Literature and Culture series editors; Mark
Wollaeger kept this project going with his generous readings and careful steward-
ship at every stage, and Kevin Dettmar defines for me what it means to be a good
human and scholar. The editors at Oxford University Press, Brendan O’Neill and
Shannon McLachlan, have patiently answered questions and taught me how to get
a manuscript ready for production. The formerly anonymous readers provided by
the press offered invaluable suggestions for revision: Michelle Clayton helped pare
away unnecessary material, and Martin Harries’s ideas about antimodernism were
absolutely crucial to the final framing of the book. I also benefited from the insights
of the anonymous reviewer at Theatre Journal and Editor David Salz, who helped
me clarify the significance of the Delsartean tradition. The editors at Theatre
Journal and Modernism/modernity have kindly allowed me to reprint material that
first appeared in their journals.
And to Derek, who has endured this book for as long as our partnership. He
has jealously protected my time and my dreams and selflessly helped me pack for
conferences, performances, and residencies abroad. He has watched me go to a job
across the continent from where he must live and work and accepted far too much
solo time. Because of him, I am never quite alone.
List of Figures
I.1 Isadora Duncan in Marseillaise by Arnold Genthe (1915–1918). 4

I.2 La Marseillaise, detail from the eastern face of the Arc de Triomphe,
1832–35 (stone) by François Rude (1784–1855). 5
I.3 H.D. under the wing of Victory, H.D. Scrapbook
(undated, c. 1920–1930). 6
1.1 Lady Hamilton as Bacchante by Elizabeth Louise Vigée le Brun
(1790). 35
1.2 “Maria Magdalena” by Friedrich Rehberg (1758–1835), plate II from
A New Edition Considerably Enlarged of Attitudes Faithfully Copied from
Nature, H. Humphrey, (1807). 36
1.3 “The Muse of the Dance” by Friedrich Rehberg (1758–1835), plate VI
from A New Edition Considerably Enlarged of Attitudes Faithfully Copied
from Nature, H. Humphrey, (1807). 37
1.4 Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante by Joshua Reynolds (1837). 39
2.1 “Medallion of Inflection” by François Delsarte in Delsarte System of
Oratory (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893). 62
2.2 “Attitude of the Eyeball” in Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement
(New York: Dance Horizons, 1954). 63
2.3 Eugen Sandow in “The Dying Gaul” by Benjamin Falk (1894). 67
2.4 “Mine woes afflict this spirit sore” in Anna Morgan, An Hour with
Delsarte (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1890). 72
2.5 Genevieve Stebbins, The New York School of Expression (New York:
Werner, 1893). 76
xiii
xiv L IS T OF F IG UR ES
2.6 “Grief Tableaux” in Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book

(New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1889). 79
2.7 Irma, Margot, Theresa, Anna, Erica and Lisa Duncan in a pose from
Iphigenia at the Hotel des Artistes, by Apeda Studios (New York,
1912). 80
2.8 Ted Shawn in “Death of Adonis,” by Lejaren A. Hiller (1923). 85
2.9 Ted Shawn in Gnossienne, by Witzel (1919). 86
2.10 Louisa Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929). 89
4.1 Isadora Duncan, by Paul Berger (1908). 155
4.2 Primavera (ca.1478, tempera on panel) (detail of 558) by Sandro
Botticelli (1444/5–1510). 159
4.3 Margot, Anna, and Lisa Duncan in The Three Graces (1921). 160
4.4 “Isadora Duncan in the Marche Militaire” by John Sloan. From
The Masses (May 1915). 186
4.5 Isadora Duncan, 1911, by John Sloan (American, 1871–1951). 188
4.6 Isadora Duncan by Aspell (1898). 189
5.1 H.D. near the time of her marriage; used for the cover of Collected
Poems (1983). 192
5.2 Borderline film production still, H.D. (1930). 193
5.3 “Asklepios, Hygeia & Nike from Epidaurus,” H.D. Scrapbook (undated,
ca. 1920–30). 220
5.4 “Metope of the Zeus Temple depicting Atlas, Apples of Hesperides,”
H.D. Scrapbook (undated, ca. 1920–30). 221
5.5 H.D. with shawl and hands clasped to her face, Borderline (1930). 224
6.1 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6 (1977). 241
6.2 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #10 (1978). 242
Introduction
I. Modern, Antimodern, and Mythic Poses
One of the wildest of her dances she closed with arms outstretched and head thrown back
almost out of sight until she resembled the headless Nike of Samathrace [sic].
—“Miss [Isadora] Duncan’s Vivid Dances,” New York Times (1909)1
Isadora Duncan, whom I often had the pleasure of admiring in her free improvisations among
the veils of mother-of-pearl smoke of her atelier, used to dance freely, thoughtlessly. . . . But she
never managed to project anything but the most complex feelings of desperate nostalgia, of
spasmodic sensuality and cheerfulness, childishly feminine.
—F. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” (1917)2
F. T. Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, reacted uneasily to the “emotional expres-

sion” in Isadora Duncan’s “classical dances” (Marinetti 137–138). He dubbed her
“passéist” not only for her femininity and nostalgia but also for choreography that
incorporates poses of classical statues such as the Victory of Samothrace or the
French Nike in her dance to “Marseillaise” (Rouget de Lisle, 1914; figure I.1, figure
I.2.) For Marinetti, mythological figures did not belong in modernity, and his
famous Futurist slogan declared that “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot
is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”3 And yet, this book demonstrates
that a fascination with mythic posing was far more central to modernism than sug-
gested by Marinetti’s rhetoric. Although primarily known as a poet, H.D. posed like
a nude Greek athlete under the wing of Nike in a photomontage (ca. 1927–1928;
figure I.3).4 In another surprising juxtaposition, H.D. wrote about cinema as the
3
4 MODERNISM’S MYTHIC POSE
fulfillment of classical aesthetics while performing in silent films. Modernism posed

an expressive, “emotional” body in relation to classical figures in modern dances,
films, poetry readings, and various paratheatrical performances, as well as many of
the same music halls where Marinetti delivered manifestos.5
A little-known movement called Delsartism promoted the practices of solo
posing and poetic recitation for health and personal development, as well as
professional performance. Loosely derived from the French performance theorist
François Delsarte (1811–1871) and benefiting from assumptions of French cultural
authority, Delsartism designated a varied set of international movements that
were particularly popular between 1880 and 1920. Although it influenced acting
theory, film, dance, physical culture, and even a university discipline focused on
literary recitation, Delsartism is part of a genealogy of modernism that has been
overlooked because of assumptions evident in Marinetti’s critique of Duncan: it
Fig I.1
Isadora Duncan in
Marseillaise by Arnold
Genthe (1915–1918).
Courtesy of the Jerome
Robbins Dance Division,
The New York Public
Library for the Performing
Arts, Astor, Lenox, and
Tilden Foundations.
INTRODUCTION 5
Fig I.2
La Marseillaise, detail from
the eastern face of the Arc
de Triomphe, 1832–1835
(stone) by François
Rude (1784–1855). Arc de
Triomphe, Paris, France/
Giraudon. Courtesy of the
Bridgeman Art Library.
was passéist, nostalgic, and feminine. Delsartism took the antimodern position
that modernity had separated the body from the soul and that expressive solo
performance could reunite a whole person, but it was not enclosed in an idealistic
realm apart from modern technologies. Delsartism posed myth in ambivalent
relation to modernity, as a still or pause that could function both as skeptical cri-
tique and nostalgic diversion. Mythic posing enabled new subject positions but
paradoxically fixed them to timeworn norms; it framed questions and threats to
modernity but also served as a sentimental escape.
Delsartism incorporated prior traditions of posing by developing aesthetic
and religious justifications for popular solo performances, especially nineteenth-
century monodramas and attitudes featuring characters from Christian or classical
myth. These solos are overlooked generic antecedents for modern dance, one of
the first “new” twentieth-century arts, and the dramatic monologue, an important
form in modernist poetics and recitation.6 Delsartism developed mythic posing
into a central modernist kinesthetic: a philosophy and technique of movement
Fig I.3 H.D. under the wing of Victory, H.D. Scrapbook (undated, c. 1920–1930). Courtesy
of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
emphasizing a tension between stasis and motion, poses of classical beauty, framed
cinematic compositions, and speeding bodies. As Delsartism’s influence on cinema
reveals, those working in the “mediated” art of film, as well as the “natural” modern
dancers and popular posers, adapted this kinesthetic for performance techniques
that shaped American, British, French, Russian, and German modernisms. A
Delsartean genealogy repositions the expressive performing body as a site
combining disparate trajectories in modernism: textual and embodied practices,
interests in myth and science, classicism and the machine age.7
If Marinetti deemed mythic posing and Duncan’s dance “passéist,” other mod-
ernists deployed ideas from modern dance to develop new aesthetic principles.
William Carlos Williams used dance images to theorize the poetic act and a pre-
modern language rooted in gesture that could recover an authenticity words
lacked. He perceived this authentic expression in Duncan’s movements at a 1908
concert in New York, which he described in a sonnet addressed to her.8 He heard
the dancer’s footfall in the poetic foot: “Poetry began with measure, it began with
the dance, whose divisions we have all but forgotten but are still known as mea-
sures . . . and we still speak of their minuter elements as feet.”9 His ideal reader was
INTRODUCTION 7
a “listener” transported by rhythm into a duet with the poet, as her “imagination”
was “free to mingle in the dance.”10 Dance is a metaphor here, but Williams also
suggests that poetic rhythms and emotions invoke bodily experiences; even if the
origins of poetry “had not been the dance, the heart when it is stirred has multiple
beats, and verse at its most impassioned sets the heart violently beating.”11 For the
period’s theorists of poetry, dance, and film, the idea that art could produce kines-
thetic experiences was much more than a figure of speech. The British critic and
novelist Vernon Lee (1856–1935) considered the role of physical sensation in the
perception of beauty as the primary inquiry of modern aesthetic theory.12 Like
Williams and other modernists, she believed that texts could move beyond the
page, affect bodies, dislodge entrenched reading habits, and produce an experience
like poetic recitation, even during silent reading.
Duncan, H.D, and the Delsarteans struck mythic poses partially in response to
their experience of a “crisis” of modernity. Modernist studies has adopted this
crisis as one of the defining features of the field and tends to separate a group of
what might be called antimodern-classicists from modernist-materialists. The
former retreated from modernity into myth and tradition, the story goes, while
modernist-materialists confronted the crisis and celebrated modernization, tech-
nology, and revolution.13 Yet, few artists fit neatly into either group, and the pur-
ported crisis of modernity has happened consistently since the Enlightenment.
Those suspicious of modernity’s assurances that the world is on a course for
improvement have been accused of nostalgia, religious piety, or passéism, espe-
cially if they invoke classical allusions.14 The antimodern critique is part of a long
philosophical tradition that preceded the period designated as modernism and
did not necessarily object to modernist art.15 As T. J. Jackson Lears suggests, anti-
modern-classicism was “a complex blend of accommodation and protest” that
shared commitments with avant-garde movements like Marinetti’s Futurism.16
Both were characterized by a yearning for “authentic experience,” although
Futurists demanded more modernity in an aesthetics of shock, and antimodern-
classicists looked to the fragments of past cultures that did not survive moder-
nity.17 The mythic pose, an imagined rupture in time, has a skeptical as well as
nostalgic side that envisions an end of modernity, just as Greek culture fell.
Although antimodern and materialist impulses are ancient and overlapping
forces for creativity, the binary has a purchase on modernist studies. Early inter-
preters of modernism placed Duncan and H.D. in a gendered antimodern cate-
gory: Douglas Bush influentially criticized H.D.’s poetry in 1937 for a “soft
romantic nostalgia, which, however altered and feminized, is that of the Victorian
Hellenists . . . and of Isadora Duncan.”18 Later critics inherited the divide, and even
a great paradigm breaker like Laurence Rainey cites H.D.’s reviews of “scholarly
works on ancient Greek sculpture and art” as evidence that she was part of a
patronized “coterie” rather than a “public dialogue with peers” (Institutions 156).
Rainey writes, “She really does believe in a mix of bland notions from popular
occultism and generalizations that denounce contemporary humanity in the
abstract and yet promise everyone that he or she is assured of becoming a god”
(Institutions 164). This idea of a godlike or mythic subjectivity interrogated con-
ventional ideas of body and soul and was part of a “public dialogue” engaged by
H.D., Duncan, numerous Delsarteans, and even Futurists. Yet, critics more
sympathetic to antimodern-classicism exhibit similar anxieties: Ann Daly, one of
the best Duncan scholars, excludes her from modernism because of her “romantic
grandiloquence.”19 Edward Comentale’s reassessment of twentieth-century classi-
cism includes H.D. in a version that avoids the “escapism” of Victorian Hellenism
through a bodily or “material tangibility.”20 He acknowledges that romanticism
and classicism overlapped in earlier periods but produces two distinct categories
and represents them in a chart with nineteen new dualisms: Romantic Modernism
is caught in “force/form” while Classical Modernism emphasizes “tension”; “hard/
soft” for the former but “posability” for the latter; “masculine/feminine” for
romantics while classicists get “hermaphroditism/intercourse” (Production 20).
Comentale offers insight into a new classicism but ignores what it shares with the
old and with romanticism.21
The trajectory of modernism I describe is obscured, in part, by the tendency in
modernist studies to emphasize or invent novelty. We often follow the examples of
our colorful figures like Ezra Pound, whose slogan “MAKE IT NEW” is even more
famous than Marinetti’s “roaring car.” Recycled for titles such as Kurt Heinzelman’s
collection “Make It New: The Rise of Modernism” (2004), the phrase even seems
to echo in “New Modernist Studies,” the interdisciplinary, expansive methodology
I claim for this study.22 As Heinzelman points out, Pound generated “MAKE IT
NEW” in Canto 53 from four layers of (mis)translation of an old (twelfth-century)
text he associated with Tching Tang (Ch’êng T’ang, founder of the Shang Dynasty,
1766 to 1122 b.c.e.).23 Modernist artists, like Pound and Marinetti, are famous for
deploring contending movements, and critics follow suit, so that histories of mod-
ernism often focus on a series of -isms that were named, performed, and doggedly
defended.24 By foregrounding solos, I direct attention away from clashing factions
(Imagism, Futurism, etc.) to their particular events, genres, ideas of subjectivity,
and how they both develop from and revise earlier constructions. Modernism was
rarely quite so new as advertised, and an antimodern critique is present in many
versions of modernism. I describe a trajectory of antimodern-classicism that
INTRODUCTION 9
exerted international and transgeneric influence but has not been central to mod-
ernist studies.
The purpose of this book is not to delimit modernism or attempt a resolution
to what Susan Stanford Friedman calls the “terminological quagmire” of modern/
modernism/modernity/modernization – with the addition of antimodern.25 I want
to point out that confusion about these terms contributes to an overemphasis on
the new that marginalizes mythic poses and solos, long histories of performance
genres and bodily techniques, the ways modern subject positions use old ones, and
other continuities with earlier periods—including a long-standing crisis of moder-
nity and a corresponding antimodern critique.26 It would be wrong to ignore the
particularities of two world wars, the atomic bomb, and genocide, among other
historical horrors, but neither modernism nor postmodernism’s sense of
modernity’s failure is precisely new. With an ambivalent desire for and dread of
modernity’s end, this feeling of crisis may be one of the persistent features of the
(post)modern or, perhaps, human condition.
In keeping with this book’s commitment to examining what is not new in
modernism, chapter 1 recovers an origin for modernist solos in popular
performance forms emerging from romanticism; monodramas and attitudes
usually presented a mythic character in an emotionally climactic scene. These
nineteenth-century solos already posed a complex version of gendered subjec-
tivity, a protomodernist subject figured as a momentary coherence in different
possibilities of movement, speech, and character. Combined with classicism and
the ancient Christian hermeneutic of biblical typology or the fourfold method,
monodramas and attitudes contributed to the development of the Victorian
dramatic monologue. Poems spoken by mythic types exhibit a tension between
their foundation in classical and Christian ethics and an impulse to revise
entrenched narratives.
The second chapter, “Posing Modernism,” describes an expressive body taking
positions derived from classical statuary in modernist film and dance. Emerging
partially from nineteenth-century performance traditions, posing was encouraged
by Delsartism as a practice fostering physical and spiritual health. Critics of
modernist performance overlook mythic posing to concentrate on modernist-
materialist modes, exemplified by the multimedia performances of Futurism and
Dadaism. Studies emphasizing machine aesthetics tend to assume a corresponding
“prosthetic body” characterized by technological augmentation, dehumanization,
or fragmentation.27 Such models can overlook the long histories of performance
genres and training regimens that include bodily techniques that emerged well
before the technological developments presented as determinative.28 Although
Delsartism has been described as a failed antimodern movement, it also incorpo-

rated Delsarte’s theory of a mechanical body, and the movement strategies it
taught were evident in “natural” or “classical” modern dances and gestures pro-
jected and spliced on film screens.29 D. W. Griffith’s silent film stars trained in
Delsarte technique, and it influenced the montage theories and acting methods of
Lev Kuleshov in Russia. Modernist film and dance reveal Delsartism’s reach as an
international performance theory.
Delsartism also contributed to reforms in elocutionary training that empha-
sized poetic recitation as a technique of literary interpretation. Young modernists in
the making first encountered poetry within a culture of recitation adapted partially
from Victorian parlor performance but bolstered by Delsartean theories of the ped-
agogical value of the dramatic monologue in voice training. The first book on the
dramatic monologue was written in 1908 by Samuel Silas Curry, a Delsarte expert
and proponent of a university discipline he called “Expression.” The popular but
short-lived discipline taught poems as scripts to be interpreted through perfor-
mance. My third chapter situates Charlotte Mew, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Amy
Lowell in relation to the cultures of recitation that ushered in modernism, including
the Chautauqua Circuit and Poetry Bookshop. Central modernist aesthetic princi-
ples were responses to popular recitations: Modernist impersonality rejected the
Delsartean cultivation of personality but incorporated many of its interpretive
techniques. The practice Eliot famously called the mythical method is a modernist
revision of typological hermeneutics, yet another mythic pose.30
The final two chapters offer case studies of Isadora Duncan and H.D. that
demonstrate the new readings enabled by a history of mythic posing. I argue that
Duncan combined solo dance, Delsartean poses, live orchestral music, innovative
stage decor, and curtain-call speeches in a performance form that constitutes a
modernist manifesto and an experiment in hybrid performance. Her movement
innovations and ideas of the dancing self are clarified by her phrase the “motor in
the soul,” but her soulful rhetoric has contributed to assessments that she is not
sufficiently modernist. Her combination of metaphysical (soul) and materialist
(motor) discourses was common in the period, and reconsidering her perfor-
mances in the context of international modernism clarifies her relation to
movements such as Futurism, Cambridge Ritualism, the Moscow Art Theatre,
Greenwich Village Radicalism, and suffragism. These groups often co-opted
Duncan for contradictory purposes: her individualistic and essentialist ideas of
“woman” never accommodated suffragism, her exaltation of motherhood coex-
isted with claims that birthing should be mediated by medical technology, and she
represented freedom through a careful choreography of spontaneity. Yet, her
INTRODUCTION 11
solo body, dancing freely, comfortably clothed, and emphatically female shaped
images of the new woman of modernism.
Chapter 5 demonstrates that H.D. drew from both textual and corporal forms
of mythic posing in an effort to invoke an engaged, bodily mode of aesthetic
apperception or “ritualized reception.” Frequently invoking images of Duncan and
dance, she advanced a theory of embodied creativity that resembled Delsartean
concepts of the relation between body, mind, and soul. H.D. initially embraced
cinema as the realization of classical ideals and began acting, editing, and review-
ing. Her essays about film developed a typological film theory in which the spec-
tator connects the screen actor to classical and Christian types and derives ethical
lessons relevant to modernity. This interpretive activity constituted participation
in a modernist ritual that, she hoped, would transform the participant. Disappoin-
ted by sound film and Hollywood, H.D. returned to poetry, but predominantly to
long poems like Trilogy (1944–1946). She incorporated montage and other cine-
matic techniques with classical and typological allusions to alter a reader’s percep-
tual habits and produce an experience akin to ritual participation.
Delsartism was fading by the time of the Second World War, but later performers
from Cindy Sherman to Anna Deavere Smith inherited techniques from mythic pos-
ing. Solo performance provides a flexible rubric for crossing disciplinary and period
bounds and tracing connections between text-based and theatrical genres and the
subjectivities they construct. Such continuities are often suppressed by studies that
assert a strict divide between antimodern-classicist and modernist-materialist tra-
jectories or assume the rhetoric of breach advanced by many artists. The following
introductory sections set the scene for a history of modernist solos: I examine current
debates in gender theory, consider the very different ideas of subjectivity evident in
Victorian and modernist engagements with biblical typology and classical ritual, use
the dramatic monologue to explore problems in genre theory, and establish how a
transgeneric interest in kinesthetics repositions modernism.
II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment
. . . at no other time in the history of feminist theory has identity been at once so vilified and so
sanctified. . . .
—Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (1989)31
In the twenty years since Fuss exposed the persistence of essentialism in theories of
gender as a cultural construct, the problem of identity has not been resolved.
Current theorists prefer the term subjectivity, but self, soul, and personality were the
equally “vilified” and “sanctified” terms of early-twentieth-century debates.
Although Delsartism was a prominent influence on these debates, the movement
has been absent from histories of subjectivity and accounts of modernism, partially
due to its regressive definitions of gender and alignment with the dress reform
movement and modes of “feminine” self-fashioning. To position Delsartism in a
separate genealogy of women’s modernism would acknowledge these important
facets of the movement but ignore its broader appeal and influence on diverse
cultural practices.32 Fewer men participated in physical movement classes, but they
were active in Delsarte-derived schools of “expression” and cultures of poetic reci-
tation, a division that replicated contemporaneous associations of femininity with
bodies and masculinity with words. While Delsartean conceptions of selfhood pro-
moted these and other essentialisms, they also anticipated contemporary ideas of
gender as a performative construct. Delsartism prefigured recent assertions of the
centrality of embodiment, lived reality, and the provisional, historically constructed
nature of identity, yet it reveals limitations in the ability of gender performances to
alter hegemonic norms. These contradictions persist in poststructuralist theories.
Ideas of performative identity formation were common in performance before
entering theory. Delsartism taught that an ideal self could be achieved if body,
mind, and soul were balanced in exercises involving imitations of sacred types
from religion and myth. Repeatedly striking a statue pose and performing a desired
identity would gradually achieve that self; “personality” was a malleable project
rather than a static destiny. Werner’s Voice Magazine, a publication devoted to
Delsartism and oratory, advised readers to study photographs of “ideal figures in
marble,” preferably “Venus de Milo or Diana,” until they “can recall any feature or
line at will.”33 The practice of “artistic statue-posing,” as described by the
well-known American Delsartean, Genevieve Stebbins, was not just a bodily style
but a “spiritual aspiration toward a superior and definite type of beauty in which
lives and moves a human soul.”34 If the language of spirit and soul seems antimod-
ern, the idea of posing to achieve beauty anticipates Judith Butler’s famous defini-
tion of gender not as an essential identity or a cultural construct but as a
“performative accomplishment,” realized through the “stylized repetition of acts”
that “constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”35 The centrality of gesture,
bodily deportment, and physical practice in Delsartism points to the lack of
emphasis on embodiment in some models of gender performativity; dance theo-
rist Susan Foster claims that Butler emphasizes the linguistic basis of the subject,
even in the book meant to redress this oversight, Bodies That Matter (1993).36 Ed
Cohen similarly argues that Butler’s linguistic, Derridean, and psychoanalytic
frames bracket the historical and contextual specificity of any individual.37
INTRODUCTION 13
Whereas Delsartism insists on the power of a will that is realized in repeated

enactments, Butler denies “the originating force of a radical will” and emphasizes
that gender performance occurs in a “situation of duress” (“Performative” 521).
The Delsartean notion of will was a major appeal for many in the movement, but
the problem of agency plagues the possibility of subversive gender performance.
Butler details the problem in her discussion of Jennie Livingston’s controversial
documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) and the preoperative transsexual drag queen
she features, “Venus Xtravaganza”—who also reveals the continued appeal of
mythic posing.38 While Venus’s ball performances and social passing might repre-
sent a gender trouble that subverts hegemonic norms, she articulates her longing to
be “a spoiled rich white girl” with a husband and suburban home. Partially due to
the cultural abjection of poor gay men, Butler claims such desires are not simply
“male misogyny,” but she recognizes the possibility that Venus’s “denaturalization
of gender” may actually be a “reworking of the normative framework of heterosex-
uality” (Bodies 132–133). Isadora Duncan’s Nike pose also denaturalizes certain
notions of gender as a representation of power but easily becomes an icon of the
Republican mother sending sons to war, as it did in her performances of
“Marseillaise” during World War I (see fig. I.1). Differences in class, race, sexuality,
and period separate Duncan, who became an international star, and Venus, who
was murdered by a client, but both reveal challenges attending all theories of
gender performance.39 The politics of their poses are tangled in the performer’s
intentions and desires, the cultural meanings of the myths they invoke, and audi-
ence interpretations. Butler argues that Paris Is Burning is “an appropriation of
dominant culture . . . a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and
as discourse, in and as performance” that can succeed only if spectators are impli-
cated in “the ambivalence of that ‘performance’ as related to our own” (Bodies 137).
Mythic posing is also a “making over” that functions as a critique of gender and
modernity only if audiences realize the ambivalence of the pose as an imagined
alternative that also fails to escape entrenched gender constructs.
Critics frequently point to the problem of agency and an overemphasis on dis-
cursive constructions of identity in poststructuralist thought. Paula M. L. Moya
argues that “people do not live in an entirely abstract or discursive realm,” and a
“politics of discourse” fails when it “does not provide for some sort of bodily or
concrete action outside the realm of the academic text.”40 Emphasizing lived real-
ities and longing for a theory of the will that could encourage political action,
critics like Moya reinvest in the body as the site of the material dimensions of sub-
jectivity. In fact, at the height of the poststructuralist moment, when identity, sub-
jectivity, and individualism were being productively theorized as discursive
constructions (following Michel Foucault), the body seemed to reassert itself.41 As
theory progresses through a series of corrected and corrective exaggerations,

embodiment is used as imprecisely as discourse, and the problem of essentialism
reemerges with the added complication that a focus on the body can enhance the
biological fixity of identity categories.
Essentializing categories such as woman and the sacred had a pressing reality
for Isadora Duncan, H.D., and other artists living at the time of the “woman
question” and suffrage movement. Feminist historians often overlook how these
models energized first wave feminism or fold them into a narrative of development
that gives precedence to contemporary ideas of subjectivity. Nancy Cott’s impor-
tant history of the movement claims that “striking the individual pose supplied an
interim solution, or substitution, for a more programmatic or collective way of
asserting women’s simultaneous equality and difference from men.”42 Rather than
being abandoned, individualism has always coexisted uneasily with coalition, and
debates about the value of the individual are evident at the very origins of the term.
Individualism first appeared in 1839 to describe selfishness but was referenced as a
virtue later that year; still, negative connotations persisted through the nineteenth
century.43 The political struggle for suffrage—the right to vote as individuals—was
partially inspired by debates about individualism, a fact implicit in Thomas
Carlyle’s claim that the “vote” was a sign of the alienation of the individual as a
“depersonalized proxy form.”44 A primary trajectory of the early-twentieth-century
women’s movement, the one most attracted to Delsartism, evoked spiritual models
of selfhood rather than biological, economic, or political categories. Margaret
Fuller proposed an influential model in her theory of “self-poise,” which empha-
sized spiritual and bodily development of the individual in preparation for
collective work.45 Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844) calls on an array of
powerful female figures from religion, history, and myth as models for subjectivity,
and in this, she builds on a widespread hermeneutic, biblical typology.
III. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual
Abraham spoke prophetically, ver. 8, and his words were verified; God did provide himself
with a lamb. Abraham’s offering up his son was a type of GOD’s giving his son, our LORD
JESUS CHRIST, as a sacrifice for mankind.
—Sarah Trimmer, Help to the Unlearned in the Study of the Holy Scriptures (London, 1806)46
Biblical typology or the ancient fourfold method of interpretation has, for cen-
turies, positioned the individual in relation to divinely ordained categories of
INTRODUCTION 15
being. Until recently, the prevalence of biblical typology as a reading strategy and
associational thought pattern in the Victorian period has been overlooked because
of a tendency to emphasize religious doubt and secularism.47 A similar secular bias
in modernist studies has obscured the persistence of typological imagery, analyt-
ical strategies, and subjectivities, along with Delsartean statue posing as mythic
types. Fredric Jameson describes typology as an attempt to solve the interpretive
dilemma of the “incommensurability . . . between the private and the public, the
psychological and the social, the poetic and the political.”48 He maps the fourfold
method onto the “Marxist theory of levels” and other “allegorical master narra-
tives” at work in much contemporary theory (Political 32–34). Although he points
out that such narratives are commonly inscribed in texts and even “reflect a
fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies
about history and reality,” Jameson’s work has not prompted other critics to
examine the historical function of typology or its resonance in current interpre-
tive strategies (Political 34).49
Typology reads people, images, and institutions in the Old Testament as
divinely intended prefigurations of Christian characters. The Pauline epistles
established the precedent for typological interpretations, and by the Middle Ages,
a fourfold figurative series had developed, with Augustine as its central propo-
nent.50 The type (1) is literal and historical, a prefiguring template usually in
the Old Testament; (2) the antitype is the allegorical fulfillment of prophecy in the
New Testament; (3) the trope applies the lessons of scripture to any individual,
indicating the repetition of typological relations; and (4) the anagoge is the ulti-
mate heavenly fulfillment. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) famously presented the
fourfold method to Western literature in his “Letter to Can Grande della Scala”
(ca. 1319), where he extends the figurative series to his Commedia and Ovid’s
Orpheus, thereby elevating poetry and myth to the level of the sacred.51 The four-
fold method was particularly recommended to women in the nineteenth century,
as educational opportunities expanded literacy and Victorian gender ideology
suggested women were responsible for passing religious values to children.52
Conservative applications of the hermeneutic were taught in tracts such as Sarah
Trimmer’s Help to the Unlearned [woman] in the Study of the Holy Scriptures, as the
epigraph to this section reveals. Trimmer reads the Akeda as a prophecy of the
Incarnation, with Isaac as a type for Jesus and Abraham’s offering as a prefigura-
tion of God’s sacrifice. The anagogical application locates Mount Moriah, the site
of the Akeda, as “the place on which the house of the Lord of Jerusalem was after-
wards built,” which also alludes to heaven (Reading 186).53 Trimmer explicitly states
the tropological level or moral as the virtue of submission: “We should learn from
Abraham’s example to be ready to submit to GOD’s will in the most severe trials”
(Reading 186). Victorian poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning deployed the
authority of this pervasive hermeneutic but offered alternative interpretations.
Modernist applications were often more subversive, yet Judeo-Christian or classical
allusions cannot entirely escape the theological master narratives invoked.
When T. S. Eliot famously advocated the mythical method to organize early-
twentieth-century experience, he renamed an ancient and antimodern typological
practice. Even in emphasizing classical myth, Eliot was following a precedent
established by early theologians who endorsed classical figures as typological pre-
figurations of Christian ideals.54 Modernist interests in classical ritual activated
mythic tropes, and like biblical typology, ritual emphasizes patterns of repetition
and reenactment and analogic thought paradigms. Although mythic and biblical
narratives had long served as escapist and regressive influences, biblical typology
and ritual are based in repetition, and any repetition entails the possibility for revi-
sion and difference. Modernist ritualism was inspired by Nietzsche, as is often
acknowledged, but it was also popularized by Delsartism’s statue-posing in Greek
robes and largely organized by Jane Ellen Harrison. Harrison advanced a woman-
centered theory of ritual that interested many artists and shaped the Cambridge
Ritualists, a group that included Gilbert Murray, Francis Cornford, and Arthur
Cook; she has received some recent attention for her influence on theatrical mod-
ernism and anticipation of cultural feminism and performance studies, but work
remains to be done.55
Both Nietzsche and Harrison elaborate myths of individuation from their anal-
ysis of ritual. In Nietzsche’s discussion, individuation is the necessary but painful
resolution of ritual ecstasy, and both ritual and art seem to be temporary historical
phenomena.56 The Dionysian chorus experiences an ecstatic state of self-abandon,
which passes into lethargy and a longing for annihilation (Tragedy 44–48). The
Apollonian force, the second element in the familiar dyad, provides solace in
beautiful forms, a reconciliation for the painful process of individuation (Tragedy
50–51). Harrison, like Nietzsche, identifies the origins of art in the “ritual dance” at
Dionysian festivals, but she adds a number of seasonal rites honoring harvest god-
desses that ensured the rebirth of spring and abundant crops.57 Whereas Nietzsche
postulates the death of ritual, Harrison emphasizes its cyclical recurrence, persis-
tence in religion, potential for transforming culture, and somewhat debased rem-
nants in modern art. She traces the emergence of drama through revisions of the
ritual space and then the development of roles: “There is no division at first bet-
ween actors and spectators; all are actors, all are doing the thing done, dancing the
dance danced. . . . It is the common act, the common or collective emotion, that
INTRODUCTION 17
ritual starts” (Ritual 126). The orchestra was the original space for the dance around
a sacred object, “at first a maypole or the reaped corn, later the figure of a god or his
altar” (Ritual 126). The shift from ritual to art, for Harrison, occurred as religious
belief faded, members of the community ceased to take part, and a spectator space
was added to the orchestra. The tragic chorus, in keeping with its origins in the
“common act,” depicted “public” sentiments and preserved a civic function very
different from Nietzsche’s destructive, liberating force (Ritual 49). The figures of
the god Dionysus and his bride or “May Queen” became the first soloists.
Harrison’s myth of individuation from ritual produces the actor, chorus, and
spectators; that is, it produces theater, albeit a theater degraded by its distance
from ritual (“Savage” 24). In a guardedly optimistic version of antimodern-
classicism, she claims that the impulse of ritual survives in modernity and its forms
are incorporated in other genres: “The spirit of the rite, the belief in its efficacy,
dies, but the rite itself, the actual mould, persists” (Ritual 138). She points to ves-
tiges of ritual form in the Greek tragedy, including the chorus, prologue, circular
theater, masked performers, and deus ex machina. She similarly finds ritual struc-
tures in the Catholic liturgy: “It is at the outset one and the same impulse that
sends a man to church and to the theatre” (Ritual 9–10). Harrison suggests that the
power of intrinsic ritual forms may be harnessed by contemporary religion and
art to create a widespread transformation of “all classes,” not limited to Nietzsche’s
elite man or “genius of humankind” (Tragedy 21). In the late 1870s and the 1880s,
she participated in amateur Greek theatricals that included tableaux and attitudes
and required her to study statue poses in the British museum, like the Delsartean
posers who were then popularizing such pursuits.58 While Harrison was not an
avid participant, Delsartism certainly contributed to the sympathetic reception of
her ideas and theatrical lecture-demonstrations, and she was undoubtedly aware
of the movement.59 Harrison also cited the modern dances of Isadora Duncan and
her followers as evidence of the need for ritual experiences in contemporary life:
“Some of the strenuous, exciting, self-expressive dances of to-day are of the soil
and some exotic, but, based as they mostly are on very primitive ritual, they stand
as singular evidence of this real recurrent need” (Ritual 207).
If Duncan served as evidence of modernity’s need for ritual, Harrison’s work
appealed to modernist artists because it argued that invoking ancient ritual would
make art more effective at a time when it was being pushed to the periphery by
military and industrial concerns. Nietzsche, Harrison, and contemporary
performance theorists Victor Turner and Richard Schechner have been drawn to
the idea that ritual refuses to distinguish between performers and audience mem-
bers, participants and spectators, and therefore offers a communal experience and
alters community. Turner posits a “liminal stage” that can enable “cultural innova-
tion,” as well as potent change in each participant.60 Duncan and H.D. were drawn
to ideas of transformation but suspicious of ritual’s ability to produce change
beyond the individual. Their ambivalence led them to the solo.
IV. Solo Genres
[New] Criticism and pedagogy, reacting against the Romantic notion of lyric as expression of
intense personal experience, have adopted the model of the dramatic monologue as the way to
align poetry with the novel: the lyric is conceived as a fictional imitation of the act of a speaker,
and to interpret the lyric is to work out what sort of person is speaking, in what circumstances
and with what attitude or, ideally, drama of attitudes. [my emphasis]
—Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” (2008)61
A century ago, the monologue was more likely to be linked to solo performance
than the novel because of its historical function in Delsarte-derived cultures of
recitation. In fact, the monologue’s privileged place in early modernist “expres-
sions of personality” was a focus of New Critical attacks and encouraged their
construction of a poetic “speaker” distinct from author and any reader. New Critics
rejected Delsartean interpretive techniques, which encouraged students to analyze
dramatic monologues and other texts by preparing them for recitation and choos-
ing vocal intonations and attitudes to reveal their own personalities. Pointing back
to a history of relations between literary forms and nineteenth-century popular
performances and forward to modernist poetics and recitation practices, the
dramatic monologue clarifies problems in definitions of genre: presented as a set
of formal characteristics or an imitative category, hierarchized according to desig-
nations of “worth,” or linked to artist’s intention, genre was one of the classifica-
tory systems that poststructuralist theory troubled, along with gender identity.62
Solo performance is a useful transgeneric rubric that allows me to trace connec-
tions between genres in modernism and their development from earlier forms.
In addition to mediums, genres have histories, pedagogical uses, and assump-
tions about subjectivity; they are constituted at particular cultural moments in
negotiations between artists, audiences, and critics.63 This negotiation takes in
artistic creation, but also what is done with a text, how it is taught, and ways it is
read or performed. Like gender-based categories or typologies of subjectivity,
genres reveal historical modes of categorization and interpretation, and in this
sense, they might be considered performative accomplishments (“Performative”
520). Just as Butler argues that genders are constituted by “a stylized repetition of
INTRODUCTION 19
acts through time,” generic categories cohere as repeated productions that share
formal features or styles are recognized and named (“Performative,” 520). Artists
may flag genres, indicating some aspect of their intention, however unreliable, but
that generic marker is meaningful only as a culturally situated audience knows the
conventions and uses them to interpret the artwork.
The dramatic monologue is useful for demonstrating the ways generic defini-
tions change with interpretive theories because a critical record exists since its
“naming” in the second half of the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth
century, New Critics emphasized formal features of the dramatic monologue:
Speaker, Silent Auditor, Occasion, Revelation of character, Dramatic action, and
so forth.64 Against this formula, Robert Langbaum analyzed the dramatic mono-
logue’s “effect, its way of meaning,” but primarily its effect on a reader.65 Sympathy
is generated as readers adopt the speaker’s viewpoint to enter the poem, he
argued, regardless of how morally reprehensible they might judge a speaker
like the Duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842).66 The limitations
of a focus on readers’ responses are revealed by deconstructive and feminist
approaches to genre. Herbert F. Tucker suggests that the “fiction of the speaker”
who “owns” a text for New Critics is as untenable as the lyric I or impermeable
identity after deconstructive theory.67 Tucker claims that texts “invent” speakers as
performative effects that emerge for trained readers (“Overhearing” 243). In an
approach to genres that suggests they perform cultural tensions about identity, he
claims that the monologue dramatizes gaps between speaker and poet to explore
the “deconstructive ordeals” of Victorian subjectivity: “Privacy” or “lyric isolation”
and “History,” which “threatens to resolve the speaking self into its constituent
influences” (“Overhearing” 230). A feminist perspective might claim that a
dichotomy between “Privacy” and “History” fails to account for the challenges to
“female selfhood”: their entrance into history was contested, the privacy of elite
women was subsumed in domesticity, and public identities, including performing
careers, were equated to prostitution. Feminists have critiqued Langbaum’s
reader-centered analysis on the grounds that the “capacity for sympathy is almost
always linked to a reader’s cultural, political, and gendered identity.”68
While these literary definitions of genre have produced important readings, the
rubric of solo performance reveals relationships between performance forms, social
enactments, and literature. A. Dwight Culler demonstrates that Browning and
Alfred Tennyson, the writers said to have “invented” the dramatic monologue with
the publication of famous poems in 1842, were more likely to call their poems
monodramas or prosopopoeiae, indicating the existence of prior generic rubrics in
which the poems could be read.69 This generic invention, like many others, marks a
moment when artists, critics, and audiences agreed to name a critical mass of new
works that were actually revisions and combinations of previous forms.70 Generic
precedents leave their impress on later developments, and the monodrama con-
tributed to an emphasis on gesture and spectacular effects and the provocative
use of myth in many monologues. Considering the influence of performance
forms directs attention away from how a speaker like Browning’s Duke invokes
sympathy (Langbaum) or dramatizes the ordeals of Victorian subjectivity
(Tucker). Delsartean teachings encouraged readers to choose a vocal tone or
gesture to reveal the Duke’s intentions and analyze how poetic lines indicate the
body positions and movements of the Duke and emissary beneath the portrait of
the dead Duchess. The Duke’s line, “Nay we’ll go / Together down, sir,” implies the
emissary has obsequiously motioned for the Duke to precede him. The gesture
enables the Duke to perform a divestment of rank, underscoring the irony that he
killed the Duchess for lacking pride in his “two thousand year old name.” The
Duke demonstrates his power over others’ bodies, a power to transform a woman
into a work of art; this theme in the poetry and painting of the period also
inspired Delsartean statue poses, as the trope migrated between stages, visual art,
and pages.71
The second generic precedent, the classical rhetorical mode of prosopopoeia,
is a solo impersonation of an absent person.72 Prosopopoeiae containing features
later associated with dramatic monologues were written long before 1842.73
Inviting speech in the voice of a historical or mythological person, the prosopo-
poeia, like the repetitions proposed by biblical typology, has been used for cen-
turies to emphasize what history might teach the present. In school assignments
through the beginning of the twentieth century, students would rewrite a famous
speech such as Odysseus’s attempt to persuade Achilles to fight in the Trojan War.
Quintilian (ca. 35–95 c.e.), in Institutiones Oratoriae, treats impersonation as
“deliberative oratory” for public assemblies, stating that prosopopoeia is “of the
greatest use to future poets and historians, while for orators of course it is
absolutely necessary.”74 Delsartism and related reforms in elocutionary training
revisited classical rhetoric, and the prosopopoeia was deemed an important
pedagogical tool to help students learn the appropriate tone of address for a
given audience, recognize differing perspectives, and attend to the skills of rhetor-
ical argument. Paul de Man, treating literary forms as transgeneric tropes,
famously describes prosopopoeia as “positing voice or face by means of language”
and “the master trope” of poetry and autobiography “by which one’s name
is . . . made intelligible as a face.”75 It also posits voice, face, and body in speech, atti-
tudes, portraiture, and other solo performances.76 Delsartism promoted these
INTRODUCTION 21
forms, using the authority of prosopopoeia to frame the value of rehearsing

arguments spoken by historical figures. The practice of reading any text as if it
were to be performed encouraged experiments in figuring voice and gesture, but
these strategies were also part of a larger modernist interest in embodied
movement.
V. Modernist Kinesthetics
kinesthesia—the sense by which we perceive muscular effort, movement, and position in

space.
—Rudolph Laban, Modern Educational Dance (1948)77
Early-twentieth-century artists working in a variety of genres explored strategies

designed to invoke a kinesthetic experience, a fact that highlights one of the
central motifs of modernism: the desire to make sense of the body, to account for
and somehow encompass bodily experiences in art, and to figure movement in
words, sculpture, painting, and other media.78 Rudolph Laban (1879–1958), a
Hungarian dancer-choreographer influenced by Isadora Duncan, theorized kin-
esthesia as a sense modality incorporating the entire body and all five senses: “Its
organs are not situated in any one particular part of the body, as those of seeing
and hearing” (Dance 111). It is more than muscle memory, the term dancers use to
describe how rehearsed movement patterns become so familiar that the mental
labor of remembering seems to be absent from the performance. Kinesthesia is a
holistic means of perceiving the relations between bodies, the energies required to
move, and bodily pain and pleasure in oneself and others. Crucial to the creation
and interpretation of dance and theater, kinesthesia has applications in other arts
as well. Laban argued that choreography “cannot be an intellectual process only,
although the use of words tends to make it so”; the language needed to teach
dance represents “a framework which has to be filled out and enlivened by an
imagery based on a sensibility for movement” (Dance 110).79 A cultivated kines-
thetic sensibility promotes the interpretation of motion in “enlivened” words and
verbal images, as well as dance.
Artists and theorists contemporaneous with Laban experimented with
invoking kinesthetic responses to art, but literary critics have not sufficiently con-
sidered the diverse approaches to embodied aesthetic experience in the period.
Contemporary critical theory uses dance as a metaphor for the ambiguity of
knowledge and uncertainty of truth or the motion of deconstruction and the leap
of différence.80 Moving beyond metaphor, I examine the relation between dance

and other bodily performances and how the gestures, rhythms, and movement
techniques of modern dance shaped many of the central tenets of aesthetic
modernism. The study of kinesthetics and the role of physical sensation in the per-
ception of beauty was the central concern of psychological aesthetics, a hybrid field
that brought advances in psychology and physiology to aesthetic theory. Vernon
Lee was the strongest proponent of psychological aesthetics in literature, as well as
the only theorist Walter Pater claimed for a disciple.81 Lee pursued Pater’s interest
in the aesthetic response of the individual perceiver, reflecting the individualist
strain in early modernism.82
Lee’s innovation was to apply studies of emotion by William James and Carl
Lange and other new developments in psychology and physiology to questions of
aesthetic apperception.83 The still-respected James-Lange theory claims that bodily
changes (such as the trembling of fear) are not expressions of emotion; rather, the
experience of emotion is produced by physiological responses to external stimuli.
For Lee, the theory implied that the pleasure accompanying aesthetic apperception
is, like other emotions, due to kinetic and bodily responses. Lee linked the theory
to studies of empathy by the German experimental psychologists Karl Groos
(Einleitung in die aesthetik, 1892) and Theodor Lipps (Zur einfühlung, 1900, 1913).
Groos and Lipps claimed that empathy, the imaginative participation in the
subjective experience of another, produces an “inner mimicry” or bodily “imita-
tion” of the other’s experience (Beauty 23). Lee suggested the body also imitates the
forms and motions of art to produce an “aesthetic emotion,” evidenced by such
“kinaesthetic accompaniments of aesthetic perception” as changes in pulse rates,
breath, eye movements, and muscular tension (Beauty 358). Lee analyzed the
somatic responses of her lover Kit Anstruther-Thomson to objects as diverse as
paintings and furniture.84
Lee’s later discussions of “literary psychology” and kinesthetic reading prac-
tices predicted the reader-response and formalist criticisms of I. A. Richards,
Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Iser, and Roland Barthes (Lee 200).85 Lee described
“muscular adjustments of the inner and auditive apparatus, as well as obvious sen-
sations in the vocal parts when we ourselves produce, and often when we merely
think of [sounds].”86 Her suppositions about minute physical movements during
silent reading were confirmed almost a century later by “elaborate mechanical and
electrographic experiments designed to test the muscular responses (of larynx,
pharynx, tongue, palate, lips, etc.).”87 Lee theorized bodily responses to language
patterns and rhythms in The Poet’s Eye (1926), published by that vehicle for mod-
ernist experiment, Hogarth Press:
INTRODUCTION 23
. . . rhythm and in lesser degree every other kind of verbal symmetry, makes
us expect repetition of a given effect and thereby prepare ourselves . . .
expectation and preparation, if repeated, eliciting a degree of imitative
activity on our part, we set to marching at that particular pace, and meta-
phorically, if not literally, dancing that particular step.88
For Lee, as for William Carlos Williams and other poets, rhythm, alliteration, and
other figurative uses of language work through repetition, which invokes bodily
changes. The effect of language on reading bodies is not a direct imitation or mim-
icry of form, as Lee had posited for visual art. Instead, readers interpret “form
according to the facts of our own inner experience. . . . Such projection of ourselves
into external objects . . . is at the bottom of numberless words and expressions”
(Beauty 17–18). Lee’s examples include “hills roll” and “mountains rise”; mountains
do not noticeably move, but our eyes seem to rise or roll over a hilly landscape.
Through empathy, readers project themselves into characters like a “great actor”
and know how characters move, gesture, and speak “because for that moment and
to that extent we are those people.”89 When characters seem “to be posing in tab-
leaux vivants, or at the utmost, moving rhythmically . . . like figures in a grand ballet,”
Lee suggests that readers empathetically feel the pose (Handling 60). Literary invo-
cations of bodily performance forms, like tableaux and dance, promote kinesthetic
experiences that dislodge the seemingly static practice of reading.
Lee argued that the projection of human motion into art was “the central dis-
covery of modern aesthetics” (Beauty 17). She used scientific advances to interpret
Paterian theories for modernism but was marginalized as a lesbian in the male-
dominated disciplines of aesthetics and psychology.90 Virginia Woolf lists “Vernon
Lee’s books on aesthetics” to demonstrate the diversity of women writers in A
Room of One’s Own (1929).91 Both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot knew of Lee, for
Pound excised from an early draft of The Waste Land a statement about “types” of
women including a “can-can salonnière” who was “baptized” in a “soapy sea / Of
Symonds—Walter Pater—Vernon Lee.”92 Wyndham Lewis declared, “To read
[Vernon Lee’s] pages is like watching a person of some intelligence administering
electric shocks to herself.”93 Lee actually discusses a perceiver’s “immediate shock
of passive and (as much as smell and taste) bodily pleasure” that may be received
from art (The Beautiful 27). Such shocks and pleasures were part of an overlooked
trend in modernist aesthetics, applied to music (Edmund Gurney’s The Power of
Sound, 1880), the visual arts (Adolf von Hildebrand’s The Problem of Form in
Painting and Sculpture, 1893), and especially early film (Hugo Münsterberg’s The
Photoplay, 1916). The ideas were so widespread that the art historian Bernard
Berenson (Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 1896) accused Lee of plagiarism

but later dropped the charge (Lee 156–167).
Contemporaneous with Laban’s theories of a kinesthetic sense modality and
Lee’s analysis of kinesthetic responses to art, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in
General Linguistics at Geneva (1891–1912) famously displaced the notion of the
word as referential to the sign with an arbitrary relation of sound-image to
concept, signifier to signified. Responding to theories of language as a conven-
tional sign system, modernists experimented with antimodern gestures, ideo-
grams, and hieroglyphs, that is, with signs that seemed more mimetic and
expressive.94 Many understood gesture as a language of presence and immediacy,
and Saussure himself suggested that gesture might be a system of nonarbitrary,
symbolic, analogic signs.95 Pound believed that the ideogram demonstrated
material similarity to the referent and was particularly interested in Ernest
Fenollosa’s idea that Chinese ideograms are “shorthand pictures of actions or
processes” emphasizing the legs or means of locomotion, rather than sketches
of things.96 Whereas western linguists assume words deal with abstractions,
Fenollosa claimed that the link between language and movement is evident in the
grammar of the basic sentence form: the subject acts (verb) on an object. He crit-
icized the focus on static states, like the copula (I am), and promoted a “strong
reliance upon verbs” to transform “speech into a kind of dramatic poetry”
(“Chinese” 367). Zora Neale Hurston similarly claimed that “the Negro thinks in
hieroglyphics,” adding “action words” (“chop-axe” and “sitting-chair”) perme-
ated with “drama” to a language (English) “transplanted on his tongue by contact”
and slavery.97 Walter Benjamin used “runes and hieroglyphs” to figure a “nonsen-
suous similarity” embedded in language but realized only in momentary “flashes”
when one is “reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances.”98
As Benjamin searched for the dance of “nonsensuous” mimesis while reading,
Bertolt Brecht theorized a gestic language that combined bodily gestures with
words to mime “the back and forth of historical events and of ‘coincidences.’”99
Ideograms, hieroglyphics, runes, and other ancient modes of expression all rep-
resent antimodern responses to new language theories.
The possibility of inducing a physical response in a stationary reader or audi-
ence member was theorized in modern dance by Rudolph Laban and in
psychological aesthetics by Vernon Lee and was of great interest to a variety of
modernist writers—but feared by the contemporaneous social purity movement,
which wanted to control texts’ effects on readers.100 All faced a high probability of
failure. Kinesthetic literary strategies cannot determine a reading, but neither can
many accepted poetic devices. Still, we readily claim that poetic images suggest
INTRODUCTION 25
visual stimuli, meter and other sound effects (rhyme, alliteration, consonance)
create an aural experience, and onomatopoeia describes a word functioning
mimetically (in spite of Saussure), sounding like what it signifies.101 Modernist
experiments in literary kinesthetics demand imaginative leaps from texts to bodies,
just as more conventional reading practices have taught leaps from text to image
and sound. Modernist kinesthetics encouraged readers to imagine a tongue and
mouth moving or to read poetry aloud and watch dance with attention to respon-
sive feelings of movement in their own bodies.
Solo performance helps to identify the kinesthetic strategies that modernist
artists employ across genres. To demonstrate how poets borrowed from the speech
and gestures of performance, I combine analysis of textual strategies with accounts
of paratheatrical traditions relying on motion and posing. I step between theatrical
and textual performances and social enactments, revealing the narratives and
voices behind the bodies and reading for the implied gestures and dance of the
foot along the poetic line. Modernist solos reveal new and old movements, mythic
poses, and antimodern impulses behind more static readings of modernism.
1. The Solo’s Origins
Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues
Little contented with speech, love disdains it: it has livelier ways of expressing itself. What
things she who traced the shadow of her lover with so much pleasure told him! What sounds
could she have used to convey this movement of the stick?
—J. J. Rousseau, “Origin of Languages” (ca. 1761)1
Long before modernists imagined gesture as an original, expressive language that

modernity had eroded from words, Rousseau’s antimodern theories suggested
that love abandons speech and communicates in movement.2 As his gendered
lover with her stick suggests, romanticism often linked gesture to women as more
passionate and primitive. Romanticism produced several performance forms,
including the monodrama and attitude, which featured the emotive gestures of a
single, usually female body in a mythic role. Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762) intro-
duced the monodrama to feature poetic declamation that is abandoned for panto-
mime and music at heights of emotional expression. Goethe adopted the form for
Proserpina (1776, revived 1815), and the monodrama circulated throughout Europe
into the mid-nineteenth century. Attitudes or posed imitations of famous classical
or Christian statues developed partially from the monodrama’s pantomimic
component. Popularized by Emma Lyon Hamilton early in the nineteenth
century, attitudes became an international fad, due in part to the erotic appeal
of the emphatically displayed female body. In addition to becoming objects of
the “male gaze,” however, the posers experienced unusual opportunities for public
26
THE SOLO’S ORIGINS 27
performance and emotional expression. They reinterpreted myth and presented

subject positions that challenged nineteenth-century gender norms but were also
scripted and constrained by the mythic narratives.
Solo genres represent ideas of subjectivity. In the Victorian period, the deriva-
tion of the term individualism coincided with the emergence of genres to represent
the new individual, including the autobiography and dramatic monologue.3 Just as
the autobiography is rooted in Christian confessional narratives, the Victorian
monologue inherited subjectivities, textual practices, and gestural codes from
romantic solos. A. Dwight Culler argued that the monodrama is a formal precedent
for the dramatic monologues of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning in an over-
looked essay of 1975, but the genealogy of these forms and their influence on mod-
ernist solos is clarified by examining the work of Barrett Browning, Christina
Rossetti, and Augusta Webster, all of whom were interested in monodramas, atti-
tudes, and other forms of mythic posing.4 The generic fluidity between popular
solo performance forms and nineteenth-century poetry encourages readings of
how poems construct speakers, position them in dramatic time and situations, and
use kinesthetic strategies to figure their bodies and gestures. Barrett Browning,
Rossetti, and Webster use biblical typology to relate Judeo-Christian figures and
stories to contemporary individuals, expand typological parallels to include classical
myth, and interrogate gendered identity through the speech of mythic characters.
As genres of first-person presentation, attitudes, monodramas, dramatic
monologues, and other solo performances feature a “feint”5 that reveals both per-
former-poet and mythic character and highlights continuity and similarity rather
than difference.6 The biblical or mythological personae of these solos undermine
the notion of an independently constituted subjectivity because the characters
and their stories preexist the performance. They speak to the present moment and
through a history of other renditions and interpretations. The foregrounding of
gestures and bodies in solos encourages recognition of the generic continuities
between performance forms like attitudes, monodramas, and other dramatic texts
not intended for the stage and literary forms like dramatic monologues that were
popular recitation pieces. The prominent representation of bodies in these works
also points to the inadequacy of definitions of subjectivity based in language
without consideration of embodied being.7 Speech, especially when framed as the
extemporaneous speech of a dramatic event, invokes a body to say, as well as
another to hear; a second body implicates the capacity of bodies to touch, love, or
damage each other. For the soloists of the nineteenth century, gender was a central
concern, as the burgeoning women’s movement challenged the categorization and
normalization of bodies and the ways biological sex was used to explain and
enforce gender roles.8 This chapter describes the solo forms, typological herme-
neutics, and theories of subjectivity that modernism inherited.
I. Galatea’s Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama
Galathée fait quelques pas & touche un marbre. . . . Elle s’éloigne de cet objet. Pygmalion dans des
agitations. . . . Elle le voit, s’avance vers lui, s’arrête, le considere. Il se lève précipitamment, lui tend
les bras & la regarde avec extase. Elle approche, elle hésite, elle pose une main sur lui...il tressaille,
prend cette main & la porte sur son coeur.
—Rousseau, Pygmalion (1762)9
Rousseau’s Pygmalion established the hybrid form of the monodrama, performed

his theory of expressive individualism, influenced dance history, and promoted
theatrical Hellenism.10 A short operatic piece written in 1762, Pygmalion remained in
the repertoire of Paris’s Comédie Française through the beginning of the nineteenth
century (MATV 40). Long pantomimic segments feature bodily expression, as in this
description of the awakening of Galatea, the statue loved by its sculptor: She takes a
few steps, touches the marble in the studio, and then approaches Pygmalion. He rises
quickly and stretches his arms to her, but she hesitates before reaching for him. He
takes her hand and draws it to his heart. Rousseau, in a response to Gluck’s opera
Alceste, described Pygmalion as an antidote to the problem that music and speech
undermine each other in opera recitative, flattening the emotion and preventing
“the passions” from being “varied” (CWR 492). The monodramatic solution was
“a genre of Drama in which the words and the Music, instead of proceeding together,
are made to be heard in succession, and in which the spoken phrase is in a way announced
and prepared by the musical phrase” (CWR 495–497). To achieve “the truthfulness of
the expression,” Rousseau also deployed gesture (CWR 493, 494). His score for
Pygmalion presented the three performance media in separate columns: “Musique,”
“Scène” (gesture and motion), and “Durée” (the length of phases).
Just as the expressive modes shift in Pygmalion, the passions follow each other
in rapid succession. With the statue of Galatea posed on the stage, Pygmalion
reveals his love for her, promises the gods he would give up his life if she could live,
expresses disbelief then adoration as the statue steps from her pedestal, and dies in
fulfillment of his vow.11 At the emotional extremes, as when Galatea comes to life,
declamation is abandoned for pantomime. In Rousseau’s theories of language,
gesture can convey great feeling but “the violence of passion causes speech to be
broken into by half-begun and interrupted words”; whereas speech, music, and
gesture were once unified tools for human expression, speech degenerated and lost
its “ancient energy” and “lively and passionate tone” as it was bound by grammatical
rules (CWR 290, 329). Rousseau’s interest in gesture was part of a new classicism
that popularized reconstructions of the dance and music of Greek tragedy, shaped
the romantic ballet and modern dance, and later influenced modernist Hellenism.
Jean Baptiste Dubos’s new classical performance theory encouraged revivals of the
Roman pantomime and the chorus of antique tragedy, which were partially real-
ized in ballet’s jeu muet. This chorus dance featured a choreography of “expressive
gestures and attitudes which follow the emotions” rather than the standard ballet
steps lacking any connection to ancient dance.12 Rousseau was also influenced by
Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Pygmalion (1748), which introduced the “danse
pantomime” to convey narrative solely through gesture (MATV 41).
Susan Foster mentions Rousseau’s Pygmalion (although not its monodramatic
form) as she traces the development of ballet into an autonomous art, separate
from opera, through several eighteenth-century interpretations of the Pygmalion
myth.13 Marie Sallé’s 1734 Pygmalion told the story using only movement and
rejected the conventional “grand operatic structure” in which dance served “as an
elaboration on the narrative that lyrics provided” (“No-body” 131). Her self-
directed, twenty-minute composition foreshadowed Isadora Duncan’s innova-
tions, as Sallé performed uncorseted in a simple tunic and presented a Galatea who
was not simply a passive recipient of love and life. Her choreography resembled the
poses of Greek statues rather than ballet steps, and she avoided demonstrations of
balletic virtuosity in favor of movement appropriate to theme and character.14
Foster positions Sallé’s “audacious initiative” as both choreographer and per-
former in the context of a “new notion of the individual, contained within and
supported by the physical body”; this individual “provided the foundation for the
political ideas of citizenship and the supporting definitions of public and private
space and masculine and feminine behavior” (“No-body” 133). Foster demon-
strates how histories of subjectivity benefit from considering the contempora-
neous meanings attributed to the body as revealed in dance.
Given the popularity of Sallé’s Pygmalion, Rousseau may have been aware of
the piece, but his monodrama undoubtedly influenced Louis Milon’s 1799
Pygmalion, the first of many full-length narrative ballets. Foster examines Milon’s
production in relation to Rousseau’s social contract theory; the agentive individual,
exemplified by the sculptor or the dancer-choreographer, produces his work
within a society of other individuals, all of whom possess their own agency and
collectively negotiate their “destiny” with a ruler they place in power (“No-body”
136). As Foster points out, this redistribution of power away from the monarch
designates other subjects of domination, including women. The Galatea who had
danced away from the pedestal in Sallé’s choreography is death to the artist four-
teen years later in Rousseau’s monodrama and, by the end of the century, is fixed
as an object of desire in Milon’s ballet. Galatea has become, for Rousseau and
Milon, an “icon for the feminine and the bodily” and a representation of a femi-
ninity hewn by the male creator-individual to serve him (“No-body” 136).
Rousseau’s monodrama warns that the sculptor who gives movement to his female
creation does so at the peril of his life. Any idea of subjectivity based on contract
has been contentious for women, as they were prohibited from signing contracts
through the nineteenth century.15
In addition to its position in histories of dance and subjectivity, Pygmalion
inspired many works in the monodrama form that continued to emphasize gesture,
spectacle, and the expression of passions. The monodrama achieved its greatest
popularity in Germany after Goethe saw Rousseau’s Pygmalion in 1773 and restaged
the monodrama in 1774 (MATV 46). In the next fifteen years, more than thirty
monodramas were performed, including Georg Benda’s Medea (1775), Goethe’s
Proserpina (1776), and J. G. Göz’s Lenardo und Blandine (1775) (MATV 52). Many
of the other titles from throughout Europe also name the tragic heroines of
classical antiquity, the same characters that appear in dramatic monologues and
modern dances; in Germany, Dido, Niobe, and Sophonisba appeared in the 1780s.
Perhaps the most famous monodrama was Johann Christian Brandes and Georg
Benda’s two-act Ariadne auf Naxos (1775), which played throughout Germany
and then toured Europe in 1776. The first act features a monologue by Theseus,
lamenting that he must abandon his sleeping lover, Ariadne; she awakes in the
second act, and her monologue depicts successive emotions as she gradually real-
izes he will not return. The piece was designed to highlight the talents of Brandes’s
wife, Charlotte, who performed with passionate gestures in a Greek costume.
A drawing by J. M. Kraus in the Theater Kalender of 1776 depicts her lunging to
the right with one bare foot extended and both arms raised against a stormy
sky (MATV 49). Predicting the spectacular conclusions that would become a
convention in melodrama, Ariadne is struck by lightning and thrown into the sea.
As solo performances featuring passion-filled characters who episodically
abandon speech to gesture their meaning, these monodramas call attention to the
limits of expression. They invoke “present-absent figures” whose lack is belied by
their impact on the character.16 Pygmalion pleads with the statue and the gods,
Ariadne calls out for the departed Theseus, and many soloists talk to themselves in
the absence of the desired other. They frequently shift from this inward focus to
the external address of the lyric apostrophe, an address that constructs the charac-
teristics of an ideal spectator. Pygmalion desires a spectator who will admire his art
and sympathize with his loneliness. The ideal spectator of the monodrama will
generally recognize the successive passions displayed by the speaker and enable
effective communication. Yet, full recognition appears to be impossible as the
soloist abandons speech, employs gesture, and returns to speech because neither is
sufficient to the expression. The monodrama tends to explore subjectivities in
crisis and scenes of hysteria or madness, featuring a fragmented speaking voice
that anticipates modernist performances, especially in the expressionist theater.
The real-time audience of the monodrama, overhearing the character’s pas-
sionate appeal, often experienced an uncomfortable intimacy with the soloist, as is
evident in the audience’s response to Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Captive: A
Monodrama or Tragic Scene, performed on March 22, 1803, at Covent Garden.17
Lewis had traveled to Germany in 1792, where he met Goethe and studied German
monodramas. The Captive also draws from trends set by British monodramatists,
especially Robert Southey (1774–1843), in its adoption of modern English scenes
and exploration of new concerns with psychology and the treatment of the insane.18
A young mother is imprisoned in a “private mad-house” by her cruel husband,
although she repeatedly insists, “I am not mad” (Captive 226). The horrors of the
dungeon, a cruel Gaoler, a raving escaped “Madman,” and the separation from her
young son push the Captive—with some in the audience—toward insanity. In
Lewis’s account, “It proved much too terrible for representation, and two people
went into hysterics during the performance & two more after the curtain dropped”
(Captive 225). A reviewer suggested that the Captive’s “hysteria” was contagious:
“Her character was that of a maniac, and her imbodyment [sic] of the author’s hor-
rible imagings [sic], combined with the scenic effect . . . threw a portion of the
audience—whose nerves were unable to withstand the dreadful truth of the lan-
guage and the scene—into hysterics . . .” (“Monodrama” 37). For this reviewer, the
soloist presented the “truthfulness of expression” advocated by Rousseau in “the
language and the scene” but also in her bodily and gestural expression. In the clos-
ing pantomime, the Captive’s father and siblings arrive and, after attempting to
restore her reason, gesture “their despair of her recovery” (Captive 230). Even “the
music ceases” before a servant brings the son into the cell, she recognizes the boy,
and the monodrama ends in the ideology of sanctified motherhood. In spite of its
seemingly conservative finale, audience “hysteria” forced Lewis to withdraw The
Captive after one night. He never restaged it, but, in one example of the generic flu-
idity of monodramas and poetry, he published it in 1812, and it was “a popular rec-
itation piece” through the nineteenth century (Captive 225).
Not all monodramas infected the audience with hysteria, but the spectacle of
the passionate female performer was a crucial feature of the genre. Monodramatic
actors could build their reputations as “everybody spoke about Mme. Brandes’
Ariadne and Mme. Seyler’s Medea” (MATV 53). Erotic descriptions of “Miss
Hodges” in the role of Rousseau’s Galatea survive in Kearby’s translation, which
was inspired by an English performance in 1779 (Pygmalion 1). Kearby dedicates
his work to Hodges and indulges in descriptions of “your charming Dignity, the
attractive Loveliness of your Figure.” At the opening of the piece, “An azure Curtain
richly wrought with Gold, / Fell all around, in many a waving Fold” and “hid the
fascinating Charm” of Galatea on the pedestal (Pygmalion 6). The curtain recalled
the cloths sculptors draped over unfinished pieces and encouraged the audience’s
association of Galatea and nude classical statuary, especially as Pygmalion gener-
ated suspense by repeatedly restraining himself from removing the cloth (Pygmalion
12–13). Although Hodges actually wore a light “Greek” tunic that anticipated
Isadora Duncan’s costume, she was figuratively undressed as the classical nude.
The audience’s titillation and intimacy with the soloist contributed to the mono-
drama’s popularity.
They were denounced as scandalous women and presented as dependent on
patrons, impresarios, or the men who wrote their parts, yet female soloists entered
the public stage as actors with some degree of agency, however constrained and
impossible to measure. The opportunity to express extreme passions, the fury of
Ariadne, Medea, or Dido, was rarely afforded women, as restraint, silence, and sub-
mission were encouraged by nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity. Yet,
gender subversions were displaced in the mythic past, objectified, and punished
with a lightning bolt or less spectacular penalty linked to myths so familiar that
the end need not be staged. The fainting of audience members suggests that the
Captive’s suffering at the hands of a cruel husband exceeded the text’s ability to
contain her in the happy ending’s familiar narrative of redeemed motherhood. She
performed a critique of marriage and the insane asylum, but the show quickly
closed. Performance, especially physically based gestural performance, offered the
actors opportunities to ascribe some of their own meanings to the roles, to act out
interpretations that are not neatly contained in published scripts or stage direc-
tions. But, there were other strategies of containment—mythic and showstopping.
II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton’s Attitude
The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does. In her he has found
all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvidere.
—Goethe, Italian Journey (1786–1788)19
The attitudes of Emma Lyon Hamilton, mistress and then wife of Sir William
Hamilton (“the old knight”), fulfill the Pygmalionesque longing for a statue to
melt into a living woman and for a beautiful woman to solidify into a work of art.20
She entertained visitors to Hamilton’s English embassy in Naples in the 1780s and
1790s, becoming a popular tourist attraction, and then performed in aristocratic
drawing rooms and palaces throughout early-nineteenth-century Europe.
Costumed in a long white Greek tunic, usually barefoot, Hamilton draped her
body in a cloth; arranged her hair; transformed sashes into veils, girdles, mantles,
and turbans; and emerged in the pose of Mary Magdalene, the Muse of Dance,
Iphigenia, Medea, Niobe, and more. She held each position and then transitioned
into another pose from mythological or biblical art. While her attitudes made her
famous and initiated an international interest in statue posing, it is her biography
that is better known today. Sensationalized “memoirs,” novels, and films depict her
roles as child prostitute in the English slums at Hawarden; living advertisement
posed as the goddess Hygeia in Dr. Graham’s popular “Temple of Health”; mistress
of Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh and Charles Greville; a pawn, along with several of
her portraits, to ensure Greville’s inheritance from his Uncle Hamilton; Lady
Hamilton, ambassadress to Naples; and lover of Admiral Horatio Nelson and
mother of their child, Horatia (b. 1801).21 She has received little critical attention,
however, and this is the first study to trace her influence on protomodernist genres
of solo performance and dance.22
Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes abstracted the gestural component of the mono-
drama and developed a form of physical expression punctuated by poses that
depended on audience recognition of mythological referents for their effect. Goethe
wrote the first lengthy description on March 16, 1787, while he was traveling in Italy
with the painter J. H. W. Tischbein.23 Goethe claimed that the attitudes were “like
nothing you ever saw before in your life,” in spite of precedents such as Rousseau’s
Pygmalion (Journey 208).24 Goethe’s description is part of a comment on how the
culture of Naples encouraged “everyone to do nothing but enjoy himself.”25
Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here as English ambassador, has
now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found
the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a
beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her
which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, she lets down her hair and,
with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions,
etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of
artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and
surprising transformations—standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious,

sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows
another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to
match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress.
(Journey 208)
While Goethe’s reference to an anonymous “English girl” and description of Sir

Hamilton’s costume design seem to minimize Lyon Hamilton’s role, she becomes
the active agent when he describes the performance and her expressions. “She
knows” how to manipulate a veil, and she realizes what other artists “would have
liked to express.” Goethe’s focus is not on the sequence of poses but on the “move-
ments and surprising transformations,” represented by the gerunds, “standing,”
“kneeling,” “sitting,” and “turning.”
The tension between motion and stasis, the illusion that she was frozen in
motion, but at any moment, the statue might become a living woman again, is a
significant element of the attitude’s appeal for audiences. Portraits of Lyon
Hamilton frequently depict a dancing body rather than a pose and use her long
hair and shawls to encode movement in a static medium. In Elizabeth Vigée Le
Brun’s Lady Hamilton as Bacchante (1790), she shakes a tambourine overhead and
glances back over her shoulder as if reluctantly turning away from the viewer
(figure 1.1).26 The folds of the tunic and long strands of hair flowing beyond the
frame of the picture emphasize the centripetal motion of a body that cannot be
contained. Instead of a drawing room, the usual location of Lyon Hamilton’s per-
formances, the Bacchante is placed against an open sky at dusk. She turns toward
a smoking volcano, probably Mt. Vesuvius, a reference to Lord Hamilton’s interest
in volcanology as well as the socially eruptive aspects of the relationship between
a noble and a former prostitute.
The German artist Frederick Rehberg claimed more accuracy and less embel-
lishment in his series of drawings of Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, twelve of which
were engraved by T. Piroli and published in Rome as Drawings Faithfully copied
from Nature at Naples (1794) (MATV 122–125). The image titled Maria Magdalena
depicts a barefoot woman stepping down a flight of stairs, and a long cloak trails
along the steps, emphasizing her forward progress (figure 1.2). Motion is even
more evident in Rehberg’s Muse der Tanzkunst (“Muse of the Dance,” figure 1.3).
The Muse balances on the arch of the right foot with left leg lifted, and the body is
shifted off-center so that she seems to be moving through the position rather than
posing. She has kicked up the bottom of her tunic, and her hair and long scarf bil-
low behind. As she assumed such an attitude under the cloth, the signs of motion
Fig 1.1
Lady Hamilton as
Bacchante by Elizabeth
Louise Vigée le Brun
(1790). © National
Museums Liverpool.
evident in the fabric’s undulations may have increased the audience’s anticipation.
Hamilton chose light fabric so that when she let her curtain fall, the motion of the
cloth, her long hair, and tunic contrasted with the stillness of her body, contrib-
uting to the illusion that she was pausing in a motion that would resume again.
Lyon Hamilton occasionally used supporting characters to involve the audience
in her performances. Comtesse Adèle de Boigne’s memoirs of a 1792 childhood visit
to Naples describe how Hamilton positioned her beneath the cloth curtain kneeling
at an urn in an attitude of prayer (MATV 113–114, Mistress 143). Hamilton grasped
the young de Boigne by her hair with one hand and raised a knife with the other, and
when she let the cloth fall, the audience cried, “Bravo la Medea!”27 Without using the
shawl as entr’acte to conceal the transition, Hamilton held the child to her body, and
the audience applauded, “Viva la Niobe!” The sequence encouraged audiences to
recognize the thematic continuity of the myths of Medea and Niobe, as it provoked
fears of proud women and infanticide. Another feature of the attitudes that encour-
aged the audience’s engagement in the performance is clarified by their recognition
of the mythic mothers. The audience’s outcry, “Bravo la Medea” or “Viva la Niobe,”
signaled their participation and their familiarity with the referent of the attitude.
Fig 1.2
“Maria Magdalena” by
Friedrich Rehberg
(1758–1835), plate II from
A New Edition
Considerably Enlarged
of Attitudes Faithfully
Copied from Nature,
H. Humphrey, (1807),
hand colored etching,
Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Collection.
While watching Lyon Hamilton pose, the audience was uncertain of when the
motion would stop or begin because the pose did not conclude at any exterior crite-
rion like the end of a musical phrase. The completion and success of each attitude
was determined, then, by audience recognition of the character, statue, or painting
represented.28 Posing in relation to familiar myths, Hamilton could invoke an entire
narrative and transform herself into the living embodiment of a type.
Lyon Hamilton’s audiences, primarily artists and aristocratic visitors to the
British embassy, also marked their class and cultural literacy as they called out “Viva
la Niobe.” Her performances offered the charadelike pleasures of recognition repeated
with each pose, as well as the feeling of inclusion in a community-of-the-knowing
encouraged by all mythic posing. The elite of the early nineteenth century received
an education that emphasized the classics, and they had recently seen collections
from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Tourists frequently came to Italy to be immersed in
a classical atmosphere, and Lyon Hamilton suggested the possibility that each could
embody ancient ideals. Among the fashionable collectors of ancient artifacts, William
Hamilton was one of the preeminent authorities on Greek and Roman art. As Goethe
reveals, Hamilton’s expertise (“many years of devotion to the arts and the study of
Fig 1.3
“The Muse of the Dance”
by Friedrich Rehberg
(1758–1835), plate VI from
A New Edition
Considerably Enlarged
of Attitudes Faithfully
Copied from Nature,
H. Humphrey, (1807),
hand colored etching,
Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Collection.
nature”) lent authenticity to Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, and he occasionally provided

narrations or introductions to her performances (“Goethean” 7). Her “beautiful
face” and “perfect figure” were also primary attractions, as was the sensation of her
rise from mistress to famous performer and then lady (Journey 208). An erotic
description by the Comte d’Espinchal reveals that her performance at a January 28,
1790, dinner given by M. le Baron de Salis also included dance, particularly the
tarantella, an Italian folk dance.29 D’Espinchal claims, “This Mme Hart, who is one
of the most beautiful creatures I have seen, is of obscure origin. Nobody knows from
what state the chevalier Hamilton has plucked her” (Emma 129–130). Following the
euphemism “plucked,” he records his appreciation for the poses invoking nude
sculptures; if he were “the chevalier Hamilton,” he would “see often Hebe and Venus
and the Graces, sometimes Juno, very rarely Minerva” (Emma 130). The Roman
virgin goddess is usually depicted clothed or in armor, while the other types of love
and beauty allowed him to imagine a figure less emphatically clad.
If audiences sexualized Lyon Hamilton more readily because of her checkered
past, her quick transformations from one character and emotional state to another
were emblematic of her class mobility. She threatened social boundaries and the
strictures of “decency” with her advantageous marriage and also as a celebrated

performer in her own right. Writers such as Juliane von Krüdener and Germaine
de Staël claimed Lyon Hamilton as the model for heroines in their novels, Valérie
(1803) and Corinne (1807), respectively. Attitudes in these works are symbols of the
soloist’s independence and rejection of modern hypocrisy for a classical ethical
code. Lyon Hamilton became a famous example of a protest against standard
morality and class hierarchies, and her performance in a light tunic associated
with Greek statuary contrasted with women’s constrictive dress and circumscribed
movements. The attitude presents emotional states as transient phases, the ingre-
dients of an individual that can be taken up like a veil, wrapped differently, or
discarded, with control over each motion and emotion. As the passions are dis-
played physically, the body and mind appear to be unified, and even representa-
tions of violent emotions, as in the Medea attitudes, are static, balanced poses. This
bodily control was an illusion that both exaggerated agency and limited the per-
former’s potential cultural intervention. The attitude was a temporary pose rather
than a lasting challenge to social values. Goethe’s catalogue, “sad, playful, ecstatic,”
celebrates the “variety” of emotions. A fascination with emotional representation
was the impetus behind the attitude and monodrama but also a widespread fasci-
nation, evident in Samuel Foote’s Treatise on the Passions (1747), Aaron Hill’s The
Actor (1750), and studies of physiognomy more generally. All seek to exteriorize
interior experience, but in attitudes, the turning outward is enclosed by classical
and religious myth. The attitude assumes the preexistence of inner qualities in a
type (Bacchante), and the emotion (ecstasy) corresponds to a pose.
The aristocratic ladies of the court refused to visit Hamilton’s embassy, per-
haps because they disapproved of Lyon Hamilton’s transgressions or because pro-
priety required that they appear to guard their virtue against indecency. She was
variously admired and rebuffed, invited to perform in the most illustrious drawing
rooms, and banned from the English court. She served as the model for interesting
examples of eighteenth-century portraiture by G. Romney and Sir J. Reynolds
(figure 1.4), which contributed to the popularity of portraits that, like attitudes
and prosopopoeia, invoked mythic figures. Reynolds celebrated the “variety which
portraits and modern dresses, mixed with allegorical figures, produce.”30 Lyon
Hamilton was also the subject of parodies like James Gillray’s 1801 cartoon of a
heavy “Dido in Despair” after her lover returned to the English fleet: “He’s [Nelson]
gone to fight y Frenchman, t’loose t’other Arm & eye, And left me with the old
Antique [Hamilton] to lay me down & Cry.”31 Critics have continued this pattern
of fascination and ridicule. Introducing Goethe’s Italian Journey, W. H. Auden and
Elizabeth Mayer treat attitudes (and modern dance) with contempt, even as they
Fig 1.4
Lady Hamilton as a
Bacchante by Joshua
Reynolds (1837).
© National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich
London.
overstate Lyon Hamilton’s little-acknowledged significance in dance history; they

describe “the future Lady Hamilton, who seems—God forgive her!—to have
invented the Modern Dance” (Journey 8).
III. Goethe’s Proserpina and Later Posers
Hopeless the fate of the departed,

................
And among them all I err about,
Goddess! Queen!
Myself the slave of destiny!
—J. W. Goethe, Proserpina (1776)32
Goethe’s Proserpina poses as a goddess, queen of the underworld, slave, lost child,
and nymph, shifting between each with the deft manipulation of veils. Citing Lyon
Hamilton’s example, Goethe incorporated attitudes and the related group pose or
tableau vivant into the spectacular conclusion of Proserpina. He popularized the
monodrama, attitude, and tableau, all of which appeared in music halls, variety
shows, melodramas, and private theatricals and influenced acting techniques,
more generally. Excellent studies have discussed posing in the nineteenth-century
theater, but they do not usually connect melodramatic tableaux to paratheatrical
mythic posing in attitudes, monodramas, drawing room entertainments, dance,
and physical culture regimens.33 These popular performance forms and movement
practices established posing as a prevalent “technique of the body” or “habitus,”
terms coined by Marcel Mauss during the modernist period’s interest in kines-
thetics (1935). According to Mauss, such corporal practices are not just determined
by “individuals and their imitations” or “the soul and its repetitive faculties,” but
they reflect cultural desires as they “vary especially between societies, educations,
proprieties and fashions, prestige.”34 The habitus of posing influenced the bodily
techniques deployed in modernist performances, and a history of posing provides
a genealogy for the modernist suspicion that bodies might never make meaningful
gestures but remain inscrutable and partial, refusing to clarify identities. The
living, aging, potentially sick, and dying body, however technically proficient, will
ultimately fail to hold the pose or achieve full recognition. This failure was not the
intent of Lyon Hamilton and the posers I examine here; they hoped their attitudes
would be met with the cheer, “Viva la Niobe.” Still, the practice of composing the
body into the appearance of universal beauty and the exposure of an eventual
failure are the foundations for later conceptions of bodies as problematic sites.
This section traces Lyon Hamilton’s successors, including Goethe’s Proserpina and
later monodramas and tableaux, which contributed to the fad for mythic posing
that lasted well into the twentieth century.
In spite of George Romney’s twenty-four portraits of Lyon Hamilton, many
other pictorial depictions of her attitudes, and accounts of her performances by
the eminent artists, aristocrats, and politicians of the period, the legacy of her pose
through the nineteenth century and into Delsartism has not been recognized.35
Goethe not only included Lyon Hamilton’s version of attitudes in Proserpina but
also used posing to develop a training method for the acting style he sought in his
theater. He began work on Proserpina in 1776, two years after he had staged
Rousseau’s Pygmalion. The first performance was given at the Liebhaber Theater
in 1779 with music by Siegmund von Seckendorf (Proserpina 287). Goethe was dis-
satisfied with the production but continued to be interested in the monodrama
and attitude and revived Proserpina in 1815, with new music by Karl Eberwein.
In the intervening years, he restaged Pygmalion, giving the sculptor’s role to A. W.
Iffland, an actor he compared with Lyon Hamilton, suggesting that an artist should
draw his poses as Rehberg had captured her attitudes (“Hamiltons” 125). Iffland’s
success may have encouraged Goethe’s interest in the gestural components of
monodrama. Before the 1815 Prosperpina, he spent a year training Amalie Wolf (in
true Pygmalionesque style) to play the title role, teaching her the techniques of
pantomime, emotional expression, costume manipulation, and attitudes—the
skills he admired in Lyon Hamilton.
Goethe’s Proserpina must represent an array of emotional states in quick
succession after being abducted by Pluto to be Queen of Hades. The transitions
are marked by episodes of pantomime; musical interludes; shifts of address to
present-absent figures such as her parents, Ceres and Jupiter; and the manipula-
tion of mantles and veils like those used by Lyon Hamilton. As Proserpina remem-
bers the beauty of her life in the world, for example, she addresses her nymph
playmates and drops her mantles to reveal a flowered nymph costume (MATV
105). Goethe provides detailed instructions for how Proserpina, abandoning hope,
takes up her mantles and veils again to transform them into the costume of death
(MATV 107). The spectacular tableau finale of the monodrama is most revealing
of the physical demands of the role and the influence of Lyon Hamilton on Goethe’s
staging. After eating the pomegranate seeds that prevent her departure, Proserpina
releases her hold on life and stiffens into a pose representing death. The stage set
then opens to disclose a scene of Hades and Pluto seated center on a throne, with
Tantalus, Sisyphos, and the damned figures on one side and a throng of blessed
souls on the other. Proserpina’s pose is revealed to be the attitude of the queen of
Hades as she is drawn into the tableau and the curtain falls (MATV 108).
Proserpina documents the merging of attitude and tableau with the monodra-
ma’s hybrid of declamation, music, and gesture. Goethe recognized Lyon Hamilton
as the source for this posed spectacle in a letter to K. F. Zelter (May 7, 1815), where
he refers to the novel element in Proserpina as “Hamiltonisch-Händelische
Gebärden” (“Hamiltons” 128). Although he credited Lyon Hamilton’s inspiration in
the private letter and he initially described her in Italian Journey as the “acme
of . . . delights,” his opinion of posing is confused by a second dismissive account of
her attitudes, supposedly dated May 27, 1787 (Journey 208). There, he presents her
as a “dull creature” and one of the “soulless beauties,” but he may have added this
entry when he was editing Italian Journey in 1816 due to the jealousy of a new lover
(Journey 316).36 In this second passage, he identifies the origins of attitudes and tab-
leaux in the Neapolitan Christmas cribs or presepe, scenes of Christ’s birth arranged
in churches and on rooftops. According to Goethe, living people sometimes
posed among plastic figures in the presepe, and this practice also gave rise to the
representation of “profane scenes from history or poetry” in private theatricals,

which became “one of the great diversions of noble and wealthy families” (Journey
316).37 In Elective Affinities (1809), Goethe presents posing as a frivolous practice,
but the novel, Proserpina, and Italian Journey all popularized the pastime.
The other poser Goethe mentions in his reference to Proserpina’s tableau cur-
tain call as “Hamiltonisch-Händelische Geberden” is Henrietta Händel-Schütz
(1770–1849). During her childhood in Gotha, Händel-Schütz had trained in ballet
and received music lessons from the monodramatist Georg Benda; in fact, she gave
her debut performance as one of the doomed sons in Benda’s monodrama, Medea.
She began studying attitudes in 1794, when she met the painter Franz Pforr and he
gave her Rehberg’s drawings of Lyon Hamilton (MATV 184). Her costume, like
Hamilton’s, was a simple classical tunic with long shawls and bare feet, but Händel-
Schütz attempted to reproduce different styles and periods from the history of art
rather than represent particular works (MATV 200). A series of twenty-four atti-
tudes drawn by J. N. Peroux (1809) depicts figures from classical mythology, first
in a Grecian and then the more angular Egyptian style (Plates 3 and 4, MATV
193–198). She performed a cycle of poses of the Virgin from Annunciation to
Ascension in both the Italian and German styles (Plates 7–23).38
By the 1850s, entire companies of posers performed revolving repertoires of
attitudes and tableaux or “living pictures.” These companies were the rage of
popular entertainment as attractions on a multiple bill or featured events in U.S.
and European variety shows, burlesques, and music halls.39 Some developed a
costume of body tights covered with flour or paint to present the illusion of plaster
and enhance their verisimilitude to statues. Others, following the example of the
classical nude, abandoned costumes altogether. Laws governing decency actually
encouraged posing and rendered it more lucrative; in both Britain and the United
States, the censor deemed only the naked moving body pornographic (Stripping
85). Static poses in the nude were, like the classical art they referenced, thought to
offer aesthetic contemplation.40 In Britain, the law was in place through the 1940s,
when the Windmill Theatre in Piccadilly headlined “revuedeville,” a combination
of the musical revue and vaudeville that featured nude models through the Second
World War (Stripping 87).41 Another set of laws governing the London theater con-
tributed to posing in the melodrama: the Licensing Acts of 1737 and 1752 designated
two “legitimate” patent theaters, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, while other
venues could offer mixed forms of entertainment that incorporated music and
dance.42 The privilege of the patent theaters in England was effectively a “monopoly
of the word,” and other theaters developed performance forms with less dependence
on speech and text (Melodramatic 63).43 Prominent among these mixed forms was
the melodrama, which usually included large casts of characters, song and dance
numbers, plots of fantasy or mystery, and an emphasis on visual spectacle and
posing.44 The laws created an “illegitimate” and hybrid sphere of bodily performance
that was exempt from censorship and could present controversial subjects, prosti-
tutes, criminal heroes, transvestism, interracial lovers, and rape (Illegitimate 18).45
The most spectacular of melodramatic conventions was the “realization” or
“living picture,” a form of posing similar to Goethe’s Hades tableau at the conclusion
of Proserpina. The action of the melodrama was periodically suspended by what
Martin Meisel calls a “realization tableau,” a pose that reproduced a recognizable
image, usually an illustration in the popular novels from which many melodramas
were derived.46 J. B. Buckstone’s Jack Sheppard (1839), for example, was freely
adapted from a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, but it meticulously imitated
George Cruikshank’s illustrations, which the stage directions reference at least four-
teen times (Realization 247).47 Audiences expected the melodrama’s stage design
and costuming to adhere to the novel’s illustrations and were even more delighted
when the action paused in a realization, commonly indicated by the direction “Vide
Picture or Illustration.” They recognized an accurate stage realization by clapping.48
Opportunities for recognition, similar to those evident in the “Bravo la Medea” cry
for Lyon Hamilton, also generated the applause for realizations and transformed
audiences into communities-of-the-knowing before a pose.
The intersection of nineteenth-century theatrical practices, pictorial art, and
the novel produced the realization tableau in melodrama, but the tradition of
monodramas and attitudes is overlooked at the juncture. Posing was used to
express codified emotions in nineteenth-century acting techniques. The various
“passions” had been linked to particular poses in the Augustan theater, and David
Garrick’s “An Essay on Acting” of 1744 rejected those conventional gestures in favor
of more original and character-specific techniques. Yet, he demonstrated his ability
to “put on” the various human passions using attitudes detached from character or
narrative.49 By the mid-nineteenth century, Garrick’s demonstrations of the pas-
sions were codified, once again, into the melodramatic actor’s stock gestures.50
These gestures punctuated the drama with syncopated units of posing, held for the
purpose of visibility to large audiences (Melodramatic 76). The term attitude com-
monly appears in nineteenth-century acting manuals to indicate a posture of the
body assumed for the purpose of implying a mental state:51 “You turn round quick
and stand in an attitude of terror, [and] even after your father comes on, remain
for a moment or two fixed, as a statue representing horror.”52 Actors capitalized on
their training in the bodily techniques of posing and performed attitudes in variety
shows as well. George Wieland Frimbly played William in the popular melodrama
Black Ey’d Susan at the Bowery Theater, New York, in 1831 and simultaneously
exhibited as a “Living Statue, or Model of Antiques”:
[Frimbly] used to dress himself neatly in skin tight cotton fleshings, which
he then plastered all over with flour, until at the distance of stage from
audience, he really looked very like a statue in plaster-of-paris, by
Garbeille. . . . Frimbly was a good artist and studied his attitudes carefully.
(Living Pictures 12–13)
Production styles also reflected the goal of realizing ancient statues; Charles Kean’s
famous staging of Lord Byron’s Sardanapalus at the Princess Theatre (1853) was
inspired by the angular images of recently recovered Assyrian art. Kean attempted
to match “his own attitudes and those of others to the action of the disinterred
frescoes,” yet another mythic pose (Realizations 43).
Nineteenth-century performances continued to feature the bodily techniques
evident in Goethe’s Proserpina, with its gestural acting style, musical and panto-
mimic interludes, attitudes, and closing tableau. Yet, just as Holmström claims that
there were no successors for Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, she suggests that the mono-
drama was a short-lived theatrical fashion that “left no traces of importance in dis-
cussions on the theatre” (MATV 46).53 The generic designation “monodrama” was
used less frequently after the mid-nineteenth century, but it still occasionally appears
in discussions of both theater54 and opera.55 Monologue-based forms of solo
performance continued to appeal to artists interrogating notions of selfhood,
character, and especially gendered subjectivity. Maggie B. Gale examines several
leading nineteenth-century actresses, including Fanny Kelly (1790–1882), who turned
to the monologue as a form that allowed them to reinvent themselves as independent
creators.56 Many challenged contemporaneous assumptions about femininity as
they staged material they wrote and directed themselves. As the struggle for the vote
intensified on both sides of the Atlantic, critics associated these solo performances
with the “women’s movement,” regardless of their stance on suffrage (“Going solo”
294).57 Yet another legacy of the nineteenth-century monodrama must be traced off
the stage as it influenced literary genres, particularly the dramatic monologue.
IV. Barrett Browning: Naming “Aeschylus”

and “The Virgin Mary . . .”
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,

A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes

Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or anon
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords. . . .
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)58
Barrett Browning was more widely read in her own time than her husband, Robert
Browning, who was later celebrated as a protomodernist poet, largely for his inno-
vative dramatic monologues. Her poetry was deemed sentimental and autobio-
graphical and fell into obscurity, but as feminist critics began recovering her work
in the 1970s, Aurora Leigh became a “heroine-text.”59 Often described as a verse-
novel, it can be read as a dramatic monologue spoken by Aurora, whose name
refers to the goddess of dawn, just as titles of monologues frequently name their
mythic speakers. A succession of the classical and biblical types featured in statue
poses appears in Aurora’s visions before a postmortem portrait of her mother in
the passage quoted. Critics have interpreted these mythic figures as examples of
the conventional feminine roles in Western literature and the impoverished,
“motherless” tradition of female poets.60 For Aurora, they represent the “incoher-
encies” of life and how types are “mixed and merged,” rather than static, bounded
categories of being; the lessons of her mother’s portrait were more vivid than
the “book education” on “the ignorance of men” provided by her father (Aurora
I. 171–173). The sequence of poses imagined by Aurora recalls Lyon Hamilton, who
was introduced to Barrett Browning by Madame de Staël’s popular novel Corinne
(1807).61 The passage also indicates the power of attitude performances for their
nineteenth-century audiences: as a single performer occupies different mythic cat-
egories, she reveals overlooked features through juxtaposition.62 The diversity of
mythic poses does not produce entirely new modes of being, but it destabilizes
common types as they are “mixed and merged” in a soloist.63
The poses and gestures that punctuate Barrett Browning’s poetry are consis-
tent with her interest in monodramas; in a letter to Robert Browning (February 27,
1845), she wrote, “I have in my head to associate with the version [of Prometheus
Bound] a monodram [sic] of my own—not a long poem, . . . but a monologue of
Aeschylus as he sate [sic] a blind exile on the flats of Sicily and recounted the past
to his own soul, just before the eagle cracked his great massy skull with a stone.”64
The textual history of Barrett Browning’s “Aeschylus” illustrates how readings are
influenced by intersections of gender and genre and shifts in historical under-
standings of both. Frederick Kenyon first published R. Browning’s “Unfinished
Draft of a Poem Which May Be Entitled ‘Aeschylus’ Soliloquy” in 1913, but Martha
Hale Shackford, citing evidence in the correspondence, questioned the authorship
of the poem as early as 1942.65 The discovery of a manuscript of the poem written
by Barrett Browning definitively resolved the question of authorship. Margaret

Reynolds and Barbara Rosenbaum point to critics who disparaged Barrett
Browning’s work as “merely sentimental” but celebrated “Aeschylus” as a mono-
logue featuring R. Browning’s irony.66 The presumed gender of the author influ-
enced its classification as the “new” form of dramatic poetry rather than sentimental
verse. Reynolds and Rosenbaum retain the title, “Aeschylus’ Soliloquy,” for their
transcription, but Barrett Browning referred to “Aeschylus’ monologue” or
“monodram[a],” suggesting that monologue and monodrama were roughly synon-
ymous. Soliloquies generally feature speech to oneself, monologues tend to include
auditors, and monodramas address multiple present-absent figures, but definitive
distinctions did not operate in the period.67 If the monodrama was the generic
formation operating in a poet’s mind (Tennyson designated Maud, A Monodrama
in 1875), it was sometimes retroactively replaced by the dramatic monologue (he
dropped the subtitle). Critics might not comply with authors’ designations and
read poems as sentimental verse, soliloquies, monologues, or monodramas.68
In “Aeschylus,” Barrett Browning chose a speaker from ancient Greece, a staple
for both monodramas and dramatic monologues, and the legend that Aeschylus
left Athens for self-imposed exile in Sicily after Sophocles defeated him in the
annual dramatic contest.69 The 162 extant blank verse lines are spoken by Aeschylus,
with the exception of the first stanza, which establishes the location, a technique
recalling the description of the “Scene” in drama. Aeschylus sits in “the middle of
a plain” in Sicily, where, with only the sky above him, he hopes to thwart the oracle
that said he would be killed by a falling house (l. 4).70 According to myth, the oracle
was fulfilled when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a
boulder that would crack the shell. Readers familiar with the story realize that
while Aeschylus views himself as a failed dramatist who is clever enough to elude
fate, history will crown him a dramatic genius and the oracle speaks true. As in
many mythic dramatic monologues, the disparity between the speaker’s under-
standing of agency and history’s judgment creates dramatic irony. Aeschylus iron-
ically describes the failure of his play in the language of the prophecy; he refers to
the scorn of the audience (“the house” of the theater) as “the crushing of a house”
(l. 72). While the irony resembles dramatic monologues, Aeschylus addresses not a
silent auditor but a sequence of inanimate objects, gods, former audiences, and
himself in monodramatic apostrophes. He repeatedly reminds himself, “I am an
old & solitary man” (l. 7). Elsewhere, he rails against the gods and then piously
implores, “. . . let my thoughts in white/Keep chorus round thy glory” (ll. 94–95).
An image of self-division, choric thought will serve in the absence of his white-
robed chorus dancing around the “thymele,” the altar to Dionysus.
Just as assumptions about the gender of the author shaped critical analyses of
“Aeschylus,” the generic designation monodrama may also influence readings by
encouraging interpretive conventions associated with texts for performance. These
include attending to how a text attempts to inscribe a speaking voice and bodily
positions as in the kinesthetic reading strategies outlined by Vernon Lee and other
proponents of embodied aesthetic response at the turn of the twentieth century.71
“Aeschylus” creates the illusion of extemporaneous speech through the turns of
address and tendency to question his previous statements. Frequent dashes indi-
cate self-interruption and the inadequacy of language: “The outside of my being—
I myself / ah ha—these flats are wide!” (ll. 45–46). The exclamations “ah ha,” “ay,”
and “Oh” are idiosyncrasies of speech with acoustic and emotional functions but
minimal semantic content. Aeschylus calls attention to his voice when he com-
pares it to the “shrill lipped people” of the audience:
. . . when the people’s scorn

Was Hissed against the sun as if to darken it
Over my head, because I spoke my Greek
Too deep down in my soul to suit their ears
(ll. 52–55)
As opposed to the long vowel rhymes associated with his own voice (“Greek / Too
deep”), the “people’s” voices are described with the alliteration of s sounds, “people’s
scorn,” “Was Hissed,” and “sun as.” The hissing sounds underscore Aeschylus’s
claim that his play failed because of a lack of audience sophistication.72
“Hissed” is an example of lexical onomatopoeia, the term literary criticism uses
to refer to “what appears to be language functioning unproblematically as direct
imitation of the real world,” as Derek Attridge argues.73 This imitation of sound
actually requires an interpretive jump from “black marks on the page” to voicing,
which relies on the reader’s knowledge of the conventions of the “graphological
system” of written language and “the phonological system” of spoken language, as
well as the conventions that the sounding of a word resembles a category of other
sounds in the world—that is, the recognition of onomatopoeia requires many
layers of convention. Still, a reader’s ability to “hear” onomatopoeia, the speaker’s
“voice,” and the “sounds” of poetic language continue to be common assumptions
in poetic analyses. The capacity to “feel” literary language was another assumption
of the reading techniques promoted by Vernon Lee. Just as readers interpret
printed words like hiss as a mimesis of sound, they might use the conventions of
graphological and phonological language to recognize a relationship between the
meaning of a word and how the mouth and tongue feel when saying it. The
combination of alveolar consonants (l) and bilabial plosives (p) in “shrill lipped
people” would force the lips and tongue to move a good deal if read aloud.74 Of
course, silent readers might fail to feel the effort required to say these words, just
as they might fail to hear the presumed onomatopoeia of hissed, but the illusion
that a text is extemporaneous speech in a performance genre encourages attention
to the aural properties of language. Barrett Browning’s attempts to inscribe a
speaking voice and body in her monodrama anticipates the ideology, common
among modernist poets, that verse must be read aloud.
Barrett Browning’s “The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus” (1838) further dem-
onstrates the generic continuity between the monodrama and dramatic mono-
logue, as it includes speech, song, and gesture. The snatches of lullaby function like
the musical interludes of the monodrama to shift the emotional tenor of the
lines.75 In the opening lines, “Sleep, sleep, mine Holy One!” the Virgin attempts to
sing a mundane lullaby, but the faltering second line indicates the incongruity bet-
ween the song and the name “Holy One”: “My flesh, my Lord!—what name?”76
The Virgin asks what to call a god born of mortal, supposedly impure, flesh: “So,
seeing my corruption, can I see / This Incorruptible now born of me” (“Virgin”
331). She rejects the Augustinian doctrine of original sin which claimed that sexual
reproduction transmits Adam and Eve’s sin to each individual, and sexual desire
confirms humanity’s corruption.77 Barrett Browning inserts the erotic into the
“Immaculate Conception” by rewriting the scene as a passionate encounter in the
“midnight hills of Galilee” that resembles the ravaging of maidens by classical
gods: “so soft yet strong, so fain to press / Upon my heart as heaven did on the
height.” The Virgin claims of her tears, “God heard them falling after, with His
dew,” an image of semen as well as natural rejuvenation (“Virgin” 331). Setting the
scene in nature, she subverts the dominant Christian iconography that places the
conception and annunciation in domestic space, in accordance with the ideology
of gendered separate spheres. The Virgin asks if she should “feel the blindness,
stain, corruption more” after giving birth to “Innocence,” but her passionate lan-
guage and interrogative tone suggests real doubt that she is “defiled.”78 She proudly
addresses the angels as silent auditors, “My spirit . . . may well contain your glory,”
but quickly repeats, “I am not proud” and then interrupts her brazenness with a
monodramatic lullaby (“Virgin” 331).
Among Barrett Browning’s textual strategies indicating how the poem might
be performed are dramatic stage directions, set off in brackets: “[She pauses]”
(“Virgin” 332). As in “Aeschylus,” dashes, incomplete thoughts, or ideas broken at
the end of the line suggest extemporaneous speech. Fluctuating meter and rhyme
schemes distinguish spoken and sung language, as in the three beats of iambic
trimeter that mark the lullaby phrases: “Each empyreal star / Sits in a sphere afar
/ . . . Sleep, sleep, my crownless one!” (“Virgin” 332). These short lines, simple end
rhymes, assonance (brow, crowned, crownless), repetition (sleep, sleep), and other
sound effects contrast with the irregular rhythms of the spoken sections and rein-
force the Virgin’s double nature as young woman and mother of a god. The lan-
guage also inscribes gestures and bodily positions, most prominently at the end of
the poem, when her tear wakes the baby. The penultimate stanza begins as a
rhymed and rhythmic lullaby, but she then sings a tortured prophecy that erodes
the meter:
a Creator, rent asunder

From his first glory and cast away
On His own world, for me alone
To hold in hands created, crying—Son!
(“Virgin” 332)
The vision of the crucifixion turns Mary into a prophet and produces a tear that
falls on the child, thereby indicating her position over the cradle. Jesus wakes, and
the sleeping present-absent auditor becomes fully present as the scene ends.
In poetry of the sentimental tradition, excesses of emotion frequently result in
physical symptoms such as weeping, heaving bosoms, and trembling hands.79 But
the poem does not follow conventional descriptions of the Virgin crying; the tear
falls in the real time of the poem, has material affects on the characters, and sig-
nifies common human responses in an uncommon mother-child relationship.
Although she does not reject the sentimental tradition in which her poems were
read, Barrett Browning uses its symbols and symptoms to reperform the scene and
challenge assumptions about the Virgin, including notions of her humility, lack of
sexuality, and unquestioning acceptance of Christian doctrines. The tear empha-
sizes Mary’s status as a woman whose baby, however godly, depends on her body
for survival. By humanizing the Virgin as an erotic, assertive, lullaby-forgetting
mother, Barrett Browning makes her speak to the gendered concerns of the
nineteenth century. While she underscores assumptions of sanctified motherhood,
she challenges elements of Victorian femininity by celebrating sensuous pleasure,
engaging theological questions, and claiming her own “glory” (“Virgin” 331).
Just as Barrett Browning revises without rejecting the poetics of sentiment, she
adopts but modifies the dominant Victorian model of exegesis, biblical typology.
Her Virgin uses typology to describe her pain at the crucifixion: “the dread sense
of things which shall be done, / Doth smite me inly, like a sword: a sword? / That
‘smites the Shepherd’ ” (“Virgin” 332). The quote is from Zechariah 13:7: “Awake,
O sword, against my shepherd . . . saith the Lord of hosts: smite the shepherd.”
It was repeated by Jesus the night before the crucifixion (Matthew 26:31). The Old
Testament sword is a type for the sword of the crucifixion, a symbol of Mary’s
anguish in Luke 2:35: “(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also) that
the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Mary serves as an example that
encourages later Christians to reveal their thoughts or confess (the tropological
level), and this piercing of the soul leads to salvation (the anagogical). Barrett
Browning was familiar with biblical typology through her extensive study of the
Christian Fathers and the typological poetics of Dante and Milton.80 In Aurora
Leigh, she explicitly theorizes a revision of typology that emphasizes the value of
the “artist,” who
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach

The spiritual beyond it,—fixes still
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through,
With eyes immortal, to the antetype
Some call the ideal,—better called the real
(Aurora 7:780–784)81
The “genuine artists” (7.838) must teach less observant individuals to recognize
“the spiritual significance” through “the hieroglyphic of material shows,” that is, to
become typological readers (Aurora 7:860–861).82 The “type” she mentions is asso-
ciated with the “mortal” or historical, as in standard typology, but the “antetype”
is both “spiritual” and “real.” She then includes the contemporary individual in her
moral or tropological level:
Look long enough

On any peasant’s face here, coarse and lined,
You’ll catch Antinous somewhere in that clay,
As perfect featured as he yearns at Rome
From marble pale with beauty; then persist,
And, if your apprehension’s competent,
You’ll find some fairer angel at his back
(Aurora, 7.785–791)
Antinous (110–130?), the beautiful boy-lover of Roman emperor Hadrian who was
deified in the pantheon of gods after his death, serves as a type for any individual,
any “peasant.” After recognizing the resemblance, the artist will see beyond the
marble Antinous and the peasant, to a heavenly anagoge, the “fairer angel at his
back.” The “angel” has Christian resonances, and the tropological or moral lesson
is that all individuals, from peasants to pagans, can realize a divinity within.83
Barrett Browning does not address Antinous’s homosexuality but celebrates his
beauty, and her typological revision includes Christian and pagan figures, defies
class boundaries, and privileges the work of the woman artist.
V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti

and Augusta Webster
. . . accessories in this Inspired Book seem in great measure emblematical rather than actual;
I can at least infer thence that every such figure must have an original, every type an antitype.
Only a substance can cast a shadow. . . . Let us sit down amid Divinely cast shadows with great
delight. . . .
—Christina Rossetti, The Face of the Deep (1892)84
Rossetti justifies her analysis of Revelations in The Face of the Deep by claiming that
imaginative endeavor is valuable for Christians because the Bible requires inter-
pretation of its figurative, symbolic, and typological language. The Bible, however
“Inspired,” is indeterminate, and readers must “infer” the “original” of the “figure,”
the type’s relationship to the antitype. Rossetti, a member of one of London’s
active Anglican parishes, Christ Church of Albany Street, describes interpretation
of scripture as a “great delight,” but it was threatening to Tractarians such as John
Keble and Isaac Williams, who argued for the exegetical privilege of the clergy.85
Women’s roles in the church were contested during the Victorian period as New
Anglican sisterhoods aroused anxiety, the Evangelical and Tractarian Movements
competed for followers, and challenges emerged from secular spheres. In response,
sermons by Edward B. Pusey and others emphasized Eve’s corruption and called
upon Pauline doctrine: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I
suffer not a woman to teach” (1 Timothy 2:12–13).86 While they were excluded from
teaching and preaching, the ideology of separate spheres also presented women as
the last bastions of religion, responsible for passing values to subsequent genera-
tions. Devotional writing was one of the few available venues for women to pub-
lish interpretations of scripture. With the subtitle A Devotional Commentary,
Rossetti placed The Face of the Deep at the boundary of feminine devotion and
masculine exegesis.87 In ostensibly devotional monologues, Rossetti and Augusta
Webster became both readers and rewriters of sacred texts challenging women’s
injunction to silence, without adopting a preacherly tone. Like Barrett Browning,
Rossetti and Webster articulate typological aesthetic theories, which they apply to
both classical and Christian myth.
Typological figures and symbols are rife in Victorian monologues, but George
Landow claims they primarily provide dramatic irony by forcing “the speaker to
state more than at first appears” and “unknowingly convict himself of some flaw”
(Types 133). This irony is evident in the monologues of Browning and Tennyson
that feature religious extremists and hypocrites but not all typological monologues
of the period. R. Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s
Church” (1845) presents a dying bishop who wants a lavish tomb to win a grudge
against a dead rival for a mistress. His demand for a “tabernacle” with “nine col-
umns” is a typological allusion to the design of the tabernacle that Moses built in
Exodus, and in calling for it, he fails to follow Moses’ example (ll. 26–27). Tennyson’s
“St. Simeon Stylites” (1842) poses as a saint on a column hoping to be the “Example,
pattern,” for the “foolish people” (ll. 219–220). His cries for “the crown!” recall
Christ’s crown of thorns, a typological symbol for Christian martyrs, but empha-
size his lack of humility. Rather than the bishops, aspiring saints, or other secondary
religious figures chosen by Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Webster often
adopted the voices of biblical figures themselves.
Christina Rossetti’s devotional writing, poetry, fiction, and posed perfor-
mances anticipate the interdisciplinary achievements of H.D.88 Rossetti’s interest
in popular posing is evident in the novella Commonplace (1870), where she
describes attitudes and tableaux at a semiprivate theatrical in Kensington for
“about two hundred guests assembled to hear Stella declaim and see Jane
attitudinize.”89 The highlight of the evening was the tableau vivant of Paris award-
ing the apple to Beauty, featuring Jane in a statue pose of Venus.90 Rossetti herself
took mythic poses as an artist’s model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an
experience that informed poems such as “In an Artist’s Studio” (1890); the Galatea-
like model becomes “A saint, an angel,” but the vampiric artist “feeds upon her
face” and “every canvas means / The same one meaning” (PP 52).91 Rossetti was the
first type of feminine beauty for the Pre-Raphaelites, and William Michael Rossetti
lists forty-five works based on her image, including her poses as Mary in John
Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin and The Annunciation.92 Typological symbolism is a
prominent feature of Pre-Raphaelite art, where the practice has been described as
“innovative and subversive” in contrast to the “conventional” and “derivative”
typology of Rossetti’s poems.93 Her poetry featuring the voices of Eve and Mary
often appears to support conservative positions that are belied by unusual uses of
typological imagery and the emotional-erotic registers of her language, both of
which seem at odds with her pose as an artist’s model and social pose as religious
recluse and devotional poetess.94
“Good Friday” (1864) at first seems to be spoken by one of the Marys gathered
at the foot of the cross and then by a later woman who imagines herself there.95
Jesus serves as the monologue’s first silent auditor: “Am I a stone and not a sheep /
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross. . . . And yet not weep?” (PP, ll. 1–4).
The speaker shifts to past tense in the second and third stanzas and compares her-
self with the women who wept below the cross, the thief who repented, and Peter.
The present tense returns in the fourth stanza, and this flexible temporality suggests
the concept of time underpinning typology’s patterns of repetition. As Landow
points out, “Good Friday” transforms the “stone” from the first line of the poem
into a common typological symbol, the “smitten rock” derived primarily from the
rock at Horeb that Moses struck for water (Exodus 17:6).96 Landow does not recog-
nize that the poem demonstrates the ambiguity of the symbol, in part because he
assumes that the speaker is Rossetti herself and that the poem figures her own con-
fession and certainty of forgiveness (Types 88). Yet, the experiments with multiple
speakers and shifting temporality trouble the idea that Rossetti is the speaker, and
the “problem” is not easily resolved in a message of Christian redemption.
Rossetti’s association of the smitten rock with the crucifixion is a conventional
typological interpretation; less common but not original, she also suggests that the
rock prefigures the women mourning below the cross and any later believer who
weeps in repentance. Recalling Peter’s status in Catholic theology as “the rock”
upon which the church was established after his denial of Christ, “fallen Peter”
serves as a type for Christian repentance (Matthew 16:18). Yet another Mosaic rock
enters the typological sequence when Rossetti invokes Meribah-Kadesh, where
Moses was instructed to pray for water but struck the rock instead (Numbers
20:1–13). As punishment, he was refused entrance into the Promised Land and per-
mitted only a glimpse from Mount Pisgah (Deuteronomy 32:51). Rossetti recalls
the “Pisgah sight” in the final lines of the poem when she asks Jesus to “look” at her
and offer another chance at repentance: “Greater than Moses, turn and look once
more, / And smite a rock.”97 Christ is “Greater” in his figural fulfillment of the
leader, but Moses’ harsh punishment, juxtaposed to Peter’s reward, complicates
the reading of “Good Friday” as a testament of faith in Christian salvation. Rossetti’s
multiple antitypes for the smitten rock suggests that the flowing of tears is not a
guarantee of forgiveness. Rossetti uses the gaps between the four layers of typology
with variable temporalities and indeterminate speakers to present complex
theological questions.
Augusta Webster’s challenges to late Victorian society in her dramatic mono-
logues contribute to her relative obscurity, as does the fact that her poetry, theories
of selfhood, and participation in the burgeoning women’s movement predict
modernist interests but do not fit the model of the Victorian “poetess.”98 Critics
reconsidering Webster in the last two decades often attempt to distinguish her
from male writers to such an extent that they misrepresent her work in the dramatic
monologue, although she builds on the same traditions of solo performance.99
The influence of the monodrama is evident in “Medea in Athens” (1870), a mono-
logue based on Euripides’ version of the myth and set in Athens on the evening
Medea learns of the death of Jason, the father of two sons she killed to punish him
for his unfaithfulness. She responds to the news with a monodramatic variety of
emotions, and rather than the monologue’s conventional silent auditor, she
addresses present-absent figures such as Hecate (3), her dead sons (12), Jason, and
even herself: “Medea: / What, is it thou?” (7).100 Webster reflects on the poetic
illusion of unmediated speech and the ways preformulated fictions compose iden-
tity, when Medea describes her response to Jason’s death as “the prompt trick of
words, like a pat phrase / from some one other’s song, found on the lips” (Portraits 2).
Medea confesses every crime the myths mention but argues that others, especially
Jason, made her into the villain they partially desired of her as a foreign sorceress.
Her primary critique is of the ideal that women dedicate their lives to others; the
Victorian cult of domesticity encouraged a woman’s total devotion to a husband,
which conflicted with the simultaneous demand of her total devotion to children.
Medea weighs this conflict when she asks Jason, “what is thy childlessness to mine?”
(Portraits 11). She longs for the role of “mother dear,” and when she claims to have
“forgotten” Jason, it is clear that she has not forgotten any of her relationships or
their incompatibility (Portraits 13).
Webster’s “Medea in Athens” is among the Portraits found in a collection that
offers many other solo speakers, from myth (“Circe”), religion (“The Manuscript
of Saint Alexius”), and Victorian social types (the fallen woman of “A Castaway”).
In her book of critical essays, A Housewife’s Opinions (1879), Webster poses as
another social type, the housewife, and delivers cultural critique in a self-effacing
and satirical tone. Like Barrett Browning and Rossetti, she revises typology and
theories of correspondence to describe an artistic and imaginative process:
The difference between minds of this [scientific] order and those possessed
of imaginative genius appears to lie mainly in their seizing with less facility
the hidden resemblances of dissimilar things, and thus failing in that power
of vision which shows to the poet link upon link joining earth to heaven,
high meanings to humble things.101
The skill of the poet (not the scientist) reveals relations between the material
and spiritual, low and high, or typical, antitypical, and anagogical. Rather than a
hermeneutic that attempts to map God’s divine plan, Webster uses typology as a
thought pattern or analogical habit that reveals similarities. Poets, in this model,
become “spiritual pastors” (Housewife’s 76).
Webster’s version of biblical typology is evident in Anno Domini 33 (1867),
a series of four long poems spoken by biblical figures in the year of Christ’s
death.102 Offering very different perspectives from the Gospel accounts of Christ’s
life and death, the sequence features the voices of Bartimaeus, a blind beggar
whom Jesus heals in Jericho (Mark 10:46–52); Judas; Pilate and his wife, Procla;
and two disciples on the walk to Emmaus. Judas’s monologue traces his trajectory
to suicide from the moment he attempted to return the “thirty pieces of silver”
that the “chief priests and elders” paid for his betrayal of Jesus (Matthew 27:3–6).
He reasons like a Victorian empiricist: Jesus could not die a mortal death if he
were the son of God; if Jesus lied, “his dupes should be unduped,” but if he were
the Messiah, his “glory would burst forth and dazzle earth” (43). Judas is a type for
the empiricist in a crisis of faith, and his disillusionment with Jesus’ message is
due to virtues, like a frugality opposed to wasting spikenard (Sold 49). In Webster’s
unorthodox typology, Judas is a figure caught in the gap of a cultural transition
to Christian values. Swift changes in emotional register are present throughout
the poem as Judas, like monodramatic speakers, attempts to recount his life to
himself and the present-absent Christ with other apostrophes to the priests, his
fellow apostles, Baal (the devil), and God. He attempts a prayer that Jesus taught
but repeatedly abandons the verse; these lyric breaks in the monologue function,
like the lullaby sung by Barrett Browning’s Virgin, as the musical interludes in
monodrama. The prayers, lullabies, and “other’s song[s]” that interrupt mono-
logues indicate emotions expressed at the limits of speech as language dissolves
into formula and repetition.
Webster recalls another typical villain and the story of Pilate’s unnamed wife,
her dream, and her letter attempting to persuade her husband of Christ’s inno-
cence, which has fascinated women writers for centuries (Matthew 27:19).
Imagining a moment after the crucifixion, Webster gives monologues and names
to both Pilate and Procla. Pilate is a sympathetic leader who presents a utilitarian
argument that if he had prevented the crucifixion, he would have been account-
able for many lives lost in a religious war between Jews and followers of Jesus.
He uses typological imagery, including the Old Testament’s first type, the bruised
serpent, to describe a war in which the Jews would have been “trodden out / Like
reptiles underneath the heel” (Sold 55).103 He claims, “a man, a ruler as I am, . . . must
allay / Justice with prudence” (54). In contrast to Pilate’s authoritative speech,
Procla refuses his style of argumentation, asking:
And does that mean

A woman thinks a judge is to be just,
And a man thinks a judge is to resolve
What policy were spoiled if he were just?
(Sold 54)
Procla becomes a type for Christian women, as she foresees the outcome of the
crucifixion and suggests that Pilate perform a sacrifice like he would offer if he had
“vexed Apollo,” but to do so according to Christ’s teaching that a “sacrifice to him
/ Was sorrow for ill-doing” (Sold 57). But Pilate infantilizes Procla, calling her “my
baby” and “pretty simpleton” and characterizing all women as “bird-minded”
(58–61). Webster presents common dynamics of Victorian marriage but defamil-
iarizes them in a Roman pagan couple, thereby making them available for critique.
Pilate also voices anti-Semitic views: “I loathe / The murderous Jews” (58). Procla
has read “those wondrous Jewish writings” and understood their messages of hope
(60). Yet, she does not condemn Pilate, as he condemns Christ, suggesting that in
some situations the right action may be to refuse judgment. Webster’s speakers in
Anno Domini 33 serve as types for late Victorians posing different perspectives on
modern crises of faith, marriage, and governance.
Nineteenth century monodramas, attitudes, and dramatic monologues, as

well as the poems, modern dances, films, and hybrid performances I consider in
modernism, are all genres of first-person presentation; they feature a subject
attempting to express a self, usually at an emotional crisis, to an audience or
readers who would ideally recognize the emotion expressed. The solo performer
presents a version of subjectivity, and the positions taken in the nineteenth
century are varied and complex. The desires of Rousseau’s Pygmalion are granted,
but only the dead experience true fulfillment in love; Goethe’s Proserpina is
trapped in a role determined by gods and fathers. Barrett Browning’s “Aeschylus”
is subject to a deadly misrecognition, and even her “Virgin Mary,” perhaps the
most recognizable woman of Christian myth, cannot present herself as mother,
corruptible woman, or goddess. Rossetti’s speakers may be biblical women, con-
temporary worshippers, or both simultaneously, and Webster warns against
assumptions of a “substantive self.”104 The suspicion of transparent selfhood,
rooted in nineteenth-century performances, continues to mark genres of solo
performance in modernism. For writers from Barrett Browning to Oscar Wilde,
who used Lyon Hamilton as a model for Dorian Gray’s mother, to Amy Lowell,
who wrote a long “polyphonic” poem featuring Lyon Hamilton’s poses, the solo
performers in monodramas and attitudes provided evidence of earlier protests

against conventional gender roles and images of women’s power founded in the
classical past.105
The nineteenth-century resurgence in typology, both as a biblical hermeneutic
and as a theory of subjectivity, also persisted in modernism. Typological thought
patterns were adapted for the modernist mythical method of composition and
used to interpret novels, dramatic monologues, and new media, including modern
dance and film. Typology suggests the primacy of individual experiences of the
sacred in its emphasis on a biblical character and the fulfillment of typological
patterns when reperformed in the lives of any individual. The interpretive system
works through structures of repetition and reenactment, and while these struc-
tures are locked in the past and can produce nothing precisely “new,” both
performance theory and deconstruction have suggested that the gap between any
iteration may produce difference. Herbert Blau suggests, “we are seeing what we
saw before” but “it’s never quite the same” because “there is something mortifying”
in the fact that lives are being lived (and slowly lost) in performance; it “may trans-
form the one performing.”106 An investment in the possibility of transformation
that led Victorians to take up characters and reperform foundational cultural
myths survives in the iterations of deconstruction, for all its skepticism. Nineteenth-
century mythic solos, in spite of their nostalgia, reveal an antimodern suspicion
that modernity had not learned from history and progressed, that identity was
insubstantial, or that the pose would fail to hold.
2. Posing Modernism
Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film
Consumption has been held to be incurable, but there are innumerable cases on record where
a permanent cure has been effected by the judicious exercise of the vocal organs with accom-
panying gymnastic exercise, Delsarte and gesture.
—Charles Walter Brown, The American Star Speaker and Model Elocutionist (1902)1
Consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) threatened nineteenth-century heroines

from Victor Hugo’s Fantine to Louisa May Alcott’s Beth, from Dumas’s Marguerite
to Puccini’s Mimì, as well as many real-life women, including Elizabeth Barrett
Browning.2 The disease had a gendered etiology in popular and medical discourses;
women’s idleness and conspicuous consumption produced consumptive women.3
Charles Walter Brown, a professor at the University of Missouri, suggested that
“vocal and physical culture, elocution and Delsarte” would cure consumption and
indicated the power invested in the theories of François Delsarte early in the twen-
tieth century. Delsarte theorized the aesthetic and moral value of nineteenth-
century solo performances, especially the attitude, and reframed them as training
regimens for performers and healthy individuals. Delsartism (c. 1880–1920) was a
varied set of international movements that influenced modernist art and culture,
appealing to performers, physical culturists, and reformers. This chapter focuses
on Delsartean theories of the body, and the next describes the institutionalization
of another trajectory of the movement in university literature curriculums and
recitation practices. Delsartism established a widespread kinesthetic, a technique
58
POSING MODERNISM 59
and ideal of bodily movement emphasizing the tension between stasis and motion,
mythic poses and technologies of speed. Delsartism was the first international
performance theory of modernism, enthusiastically adapted by modern dancers,
silent filmmakers, and a variety of popular posers. Not simply an antimodern
rejection of the machine age, Delsartism proposed a body that is both whole and
fragmented at its joints, natural and part of modern technologies, available for
modern dance choreography and projection on film screens.
A common genealogy for the movements of modern dance and silent film in
Delsartism and solo performance intervenes in several critical conversations.
Although tremendously influential during the rise of modernism, Delsartism was
feminized and trivialized as an affected regimen of self-improvement practiced by
upper-class women or a short-lived histrionic acting method, and it is virtually
absent from discussions of modernism.4 Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter’s foundational
research describes how Delsarte’s followers in America linked his theories to pro-
gressive movements, including suffrage and dress reform, but does not trace the
movement into modernism, claiming that by the 1890s its “creative energy was
spent and it became as mechanical and dogmatic as any rigid tradition.”5 Julia
Walker, in an important corrective to narratives of American (but not interna-
tional) dramatic modernism, argues that expressionist playwrights cynically
appropriated the “expressive culture movement” derived from Delsartism.6 Yet,
she describes the movement as a “failed idea” and a form of “anti-modernism” that
claimed “new technologies alienated human beings from their natural condition”
(Expressionism 5). This description does not reflect Delsartism’s influence on film
performance and (supposedly alienating) cinematic technologies like montage or
the legacies Walker herself traces in American expressionism and New Critical
formalism.7 Delsartism was not simply a retrograde response to the “crisis” of a
human body attacked by twentieth-century technologies; its roots in romanticism
and the performance forms it most successfully popularized, statue posing and
poetry recitation, have long histories preceding a modernist “crisis.”8 Delsartism
incorporated and fostered technological innovations, even as it deployed anti-
modern rhetoric to advertise practices of personal and spiritual development,
practices that persist in current therapeutics.
I also trouble descriptions of modern dance by both dancers and critics as the
most “natural,” “live,” and “classical” presentation of the human by linking this
body to the mediated, projected, and spliced bodies of the cinema. The antimod-
ern tenor of modern dance may explain why the insights of Felicia McCarren, Julia
Foulkes, and Penny Farfan, among others, have not been fully incorporated into
the so-called new modernist studies.9 In contrast, film has been presented by critics
such as Miriam Hansen as “the single most expansive discursive horizon in which
the effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or denied, transmuted or
negotiated.”10 Descriptions of bodily motion on film often focus on mechanical
styles of movement; Michael North examines “the traces of mechanical
reproduction written into the performance styles of comedians like Chaplin” or
how “Keaton reinvents himself as machine part.”11 The Delsartean body under-
mines characterizations of modernist performance as either technophilic stagings
of the machine age (film and Futurism) or nostalgic throwbacks to classicism
(dance and ritualism).12 The Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts,
founded in Los Angeles in 1915 (the year of D. W. Griffith’s controversial Birth of a
Nation), trained Griffith’s actors in Delsartean techniques. The Russian film
director Lev Kuleshov also used Delsarte’s theories in his actor-training methods
and montage experiments.13 The genealogy I propose demonstrates that dance
and film not only emerged at the same time but also adapted Delsartean semiol-
ogies of gesture, a way of using posed bodies to make meaning.14
I. Delsarte’s Aesthetics of the Attitude
Gesture is the direct agent of the heart. . . . Gesture is founded on . . . three sciences, namely: The
“static,” the “dynamic” and the “semeiotic.”. . . The semeiotic is its mind; the dynamic is its soul;
the static is founded on the mutual equilibrium or equipoise of the agents. . . . The semei-
otic . . . reveals the meaning of the types which form the object of the system.
—François Delsarte, Literary Remains (ca. 1871)15
Delsarte’s theories were influenced by challenges to the definition of selfhood that

occurred as ideals of a unique, expressive self, inherited from romanticism, com-
peted with notions of secular democratic subjectivity. He developed a performance
theory based on the codification of gestures seen in attitudes, classical sculpture,
and melodramatic acting styles.16 Each gesture or pose correlated to a specific
meaning or emotion in Delsarte’s “system,” which he also called “semeiotics” or
“the science of the organic signs” (Remains 460). Delsarte’s use of the term semei-
otics, now associated with a critical discourse that developed well after his last
Cours d’Esthétique Appliqué in July 1870, indicates his attempt to analyze gestural
communication in a manner similar to structural linguistics.17 The first use of
semiology as a “branch of science concerned with the study of linguistic signs and
symbols” is attributed to F. de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale in 1916.18
Delsarte’s system predicted later versions of semiology in that he attempted to
POSING MODERNISM 61
read bodily gestures and positions as meaningful signs. In contrast to Saussure’s

theory of an arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, Delsarte postulated
a natural-spiritual-physical correspondence between gesture and meaning. He
established a conventional sign system, a language of gesture studied by interna-
tional artists and audiences, and a semiotics for modernist performance.
Delsarte’s influence on performances from theater to modern dance and film
has been overlooked in modernist studies in part because of modernists’ ten-
dencies to exaggerate their rejection of the past and of any figure sounding as
thoroughly metaphysical as Delsarte. Definitive information about Delsarte’s
theories is also difficult to find because the writings of his students, primarily
Abbé Delaumosne, Angélique Arnaud, and his daughter, Marie Géraldy, not to
mention later interpreters, are often inconsistent. Delsarte died before publishing
his long-awaited book, although his Literary Remains were translated in 1893 by
Edger S. Werner, proprietor of a publishing house that made its business almost
solely in Delsartean publications. The biographical information about Delsarte
included in Werner’s books is derived from the first publication to introduce him
to the United States, Francis A. Durivage’s article in the Atlantic Monthly in May
1871.19 Durivage describes Delsarte’s religious and artistic conversion after being
orphaned in Paris and hearing a strain of music at the graves of his mother and
brother (ca. 1821). His musical talents earned him admission to the Paris
Conservatoire, where he was an unsuccessful student on account of his unique
physical performance style and refusal to imitate professors, or so he claimed.
From 1829 to 1834, Delsarte performed at the Opéra Comique but retired when
his voice, strained at the conservatory, could no longer meet the demands of the
stage. He then began conducting research in morgues, playgrounds, and art
museums for the “laws of nature” and “phenomena of instinct” that determine
human expression (Remains 392).20 He gave solo concerts, lectured on his the-
ories, and coached actors and singers, including Steele MacKaye, Jenny Lind,
Henrietta Sontag, William Charles Macready, and Rachel.21
Delsarte’s “Address before the Philotechnic Society of Paris,” delivered in 1865,
is his most thorough explanation of both his theory and his expressive system.22
He claims to have found “aesthetics” in a state of “conjecture” and a “chaos of ora-
toric fantasies” but studied its rules and “modes of evolution” until aesthetics could
be “constituted under the severe forms of a positive science” (“Address” 23, 57).
With no sense of conflict between Auguste Comte’s positivism and religion, he
offers the art “of which the beginning and the end are in God” (“Address” 22).23 His
theories emphasize the wholeness, divinity, individuality, and expressiveness of
the body, combining ideas from Catholicism, Swedenborgian correspondence,
the work of the physiognomists and phrenologists, and the construction of

taxonomies of expression by actors such as David Garrick and Samuel Foote. His
system divided the body into distinct zones, required the analysis of each part, and
imagined a soul in every joint. Delsarte’s religiophilosophical ideas and claims to
“positive science” appear contradictory for those accustomed to separating notions
of bodily or physical reality from the soul and materialist from metaphysical ideas.
His diagrams of attitudes, “Chart of Man” and “Medallion of Inflection” (figure 2.1),
demonstrate the form but not the content of science (Remains 503, 498). A syn-
thesis of scientific, technological, and metaphysical discourse appears throughout
Delsarte’s writing and in phrases such as “Thermometer of the Will,” a designation
for the elbow.
Delsarte’s theory was based on a series of trinities: three human “states” (mind,
life, and soul), “three organic apparatuses” (thinking, loving, feeling), and three
“languages” (speech as language of the mind, song as the language of love and life,
and gesture as the language of the soul) (“Address” 65–67). He analyzed the body
into parts that can be positioned in three “attitudes,” excentric, normal, and concen-
tric, each of which corresponds to one of three bodily zones, limbs, torso, and head,
and an emotion (although students disagree about which). The three central atti-
tudes combined with lateral movements or orientations give nine positions. Charts
detailing poses and the associated emotional expressions were printed for each
body part, from “Attitudes of the Legs” to “Attitudes of the Eyeball” (figure 2.2).24
3 4
8 7
Fig 2.1
“Medallion of Inflection”
by François Delsarte in
Delsarte System of Oratory
(New York: Edgar S.
Werner, 1893). Courtesy of
6 the Library of Congress.
POSING MODERNISM 63
Fig 2.2 “Attitude of the Eyeball” in Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement (New York:
Dance Horizons, 1954). Courtesy of the Princeton Book Company and the Library
of Congress.
The chart for eyeballs illustrates the excentric position, with the eyes raised away
from a given object of contemplation, a pose associated with adverse critique. In
the normal state, the eyes face the object in spiritual contemplation, and in the
concentric, they move toward the object in a tender or favorable regard. With the
eyes lowered in the concentric attitude, they can move toward (con-con) and away
(con-ex) from an object placed to the side of the body. The emotions associated
with the pose, such as critique and tenderness, indicate that the Delsartean atti-
tude is based on the relation between the body and an object or interlocutor.25 For
Delsarte, posing the body would produce the emotion in the performer, an idea of
the primacy of physiological response that would be the basis of the James-Lange
theory of emotion in the 1880s.26
The gestures Delsarte performed and taught his students were bodily poses,
based on mythological and religious types, that would help them embody the ideal
type by altering their emotional state, spiritual life, and overall health. Early-
twentieth-century manuals repeatedly quoted Delsarte’s “law of correspondence”:
“To each spiritual function responds a function of the body. To each grand function
of the body corresponds a spiritual act” (“Address” 67). Ideas of the correspondence
between body and spirit have a long history in Western philosophy, including
Plato’s concept of a world of visible forms and a higher reality of immutable ideas.
Delsarte focused on the individual, “the concurrence of these two powers in the
same person,” rather than the world, and his correspondence was between an inner
“soul” and its tangible manifestations in the body of the individual (“Address” 67).
Delsarte’s theories resemble those of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a figure
who also influenced Victorian engagements with typological thought, and the
connection reveals the overlooked role of performance in ideas of correspon-
dence.27 Using theatrical metaphors, Swedenborg names the world “a theater of
uses”; humans are actors through whom “God might accomplish primary uses.”28
Delsarte also claimed that human performances reveal God’s extension in the
world. Rather than creation, he developed a performative aesthetics of revelation,
which is evident in his choice of genres: musical, oratorical, and gestural perfor-
mances, which do not create lasting art objects. Instead, they are ephemeral illus-
trations of human capacities to make beauty out of faculties that, for Delsarte, are
a priori and God-given.
Delsartean correspondence connected the many trinities of the human being,
the states, bodily zones, and languages (speech, music, and gesture). Of the three,
gesture is the most significant as “the language of the soul,” and Delsarte believed it
made correspondence visible, revealing the relation between the physical life and
inner being, as the desire or will to move is translated into bodily motion: The
POSING MODERNISM 65
“outward gesture” is an “echo of the inward gesture which gave birth to it” (Remains
466–468). He sought to “redeem” the body from its nineteenth-century associations
with corruption by transforming it from what he called a “hideousness” that “dis-
figures and dishonors” into a “magnificent veil thrown over your soul” (“Address”
29).29 Although he emphasized the primacy of gesture, he read the posed end points
of the gesture rather than the motion made in space. Delsarte’s nearly static yet
expressive body was consistent with his idea of humanity as a hypostatic being
whose tripartite identity is held in equilibrium, a state he diagrammed as a triangle
(Remains 457–458). For Delsarte, art reveals God’s presence in the individual, so his
aesthetics celebrated the stasis of being rather than the motion of becoming. These
aesthetic and religious commitments led him to posing.
While statue posing was undeniably a component of most trajectories of
Delsartism, some students and critics suggest that it was a perversion of Delsarte’s
theories, claiming that he only posed as a pedagogical tool to help students learn the
semiotics of gesture.30 But posing was consistent with Delsarte’s aesthetics of revela-
tion and his belief in God’s presence in the world and in humanity, a presence that
art reveals but need not create. His aesthetic and religious theories intervene in a his-
tory of posing that dates back to Emma Lyon Hamilton; she popularized attitudes,
but Delsarte’s theories made them respectable by associating them with Christianity,
self-improvement, refinement, and health. Delsarte himself performed attitudes,
even in the last year of his life. Durivage’s account of the last session of Delsarte’s
Cours in 1870 describes his solo performance of a sequence of emotive poses:
[Delsarte] depicted the various passions and emotions of the human soul,
by means of expression and gesture only, without uttering a single syllable;
moving the spectators to tears, exciting them to enthusiasm, or thrilling
them with terror at his will; in a word, completely magnetizing them. . . . It
was a triumphant demonstration.
(Oratory 576–577)
Durivage’s fascination with the emotional range of wordless expression recalls

descriptions of Lyon Hamilton’s attitude performances. Following Delsarte’s pos-
ing, the performance continued with the attitudes of his most famous American
student and proponent, Steele MacKaye. Durivage claims that the similarity of
MacKaye’s body work to that of the French actress, Rachel, proved that Delsarte
instructed both: “Those rapidly changing expressions of the features, those statu-
esque attitudes melting into each other, which we all remember in Rachel, indi-
cated a common origin” (Oratory 576). Such “statuesque attitudes” were also
practiced and taught by Delsarte’s children, Gustave and Marie (Géraldy), as
revealed by Gustave’s student, William R. Alger (1822–1905), an American minister.

Alger claims that Gustave demonstrated both attitudes of emotions and
Hamiltonesque statue poses:
[Gustave] trained his pupils in the gentle, slow, precise expansion, contrac-
tion, and modulation of all the expressive agents through their nine forms
of attitude with their interchanging play. He also exemplified the poses of
the famous classic statues, with a musical melting out of one into another,
without any break in the passage. . . .31
The tension between motion and stasis, characteristic of the Delsartean kines-
thetic, is evident in Alger and Durivage’s emphasis on the “melting” between poses,
a quality that emerges not from continuous movement but a change from static to
more fluid bodily efforts.
Delsarte’s daughter, Marie Géraldy, “learned while very young to reproduce with
marvelous skill what were called the attitudes and the physiognomic changes,”
according to Angélique Arnaud (1799–1884), another Delsarte student and women’s
rights activist (Oratory 298). Here, “the attitudes” most likely refers to statue posing,
while “physiognomic changes” are poses of emotional states. Marie Géraldy lectured
and performed in the United States in 1892, but she was compared unfavorably to
American soloists in Delsarte-inspired performances. A review in Werner’s Magazine
(1900) suggests that Géraldy’s poses were meticulous but uninteresting, limited to
making “mechanically eighty-one expressions of the eyes, one after another.”32 In
turn, Géraldy criticized “American ‘Delsarte gymnastics’ ” for a focus on entertain-
ment divorced from philosophical or religious significance (Oratory 536–537). Géraldy
claimed that American Delsarteans misunderstood statue posing as performance art,
when it was taught by her father as a means to an expressive and sacred end.
As Delsartism circulated throughout Europe and North America at the turn of
the century, his religiophilosophical aesthetic theory may have eroded, but it had
already changed the moral tenor of stage posing. The companies of model artists
that had been touring and posing, sometimes in the nude, were effectively banned
in New York by 1870. When Delsartism reached the United States, it encouraged
attitudes and tableaux in the semiprivate sphere of amateur theatricals, physical
culture classes, and university syllabi and rendered them highly respectable. The
pose then returned to the stage in various forms, including the sculpted figure of
the bodybuilder and poser “Sandow, the strong man.”33 In 1893, the American
impresario Florenz Ziegfield discovered Prussian-born Eugen Sandow (1867–1925)
and produced “Sandow’s Trocadero Vaudvilles,” which toured throughout the
United States, Europe, and Australia. Sandow performed acrobatics and feats of
POSING MODERNISM 67
Fig 2.3 Eugen Sandow in “The Dying Gaul” by Benjamin Falk (1894). Courtesy of
the Library of Congress.
strength, as well as statue poses representing “The Dying Gaul” (figure 2.3) or “a
mythological episode in the life of Hercules” on a pedestal bearing his name and
completely nude except for the essential Grecian fig leaf (Living Pictures 126–127).
The popularity of Sandow and the “system” for bodybuilding he designed is clear
when James Joyce’s Bloom in Ulysses (1922) thinks he “must begin again those
Sandow’s exercises” in “Calypso” (ll. 220–234) and “Circe” (l. 200).34 When Bloom
arranges Sandow’s famous book, Strength and How to Obtain It, next to “Shakespeare’s
Works” in “Ithaca,” he juxtaposes “low” popular performance and “high” drama
(l. 1397). In just a decade, Delsartism transformed a censored performance form
into Sandow’s pose of health, and the international dissemination of this pose is a
crucial juncture of modernist performance and social practice.
II. Disseminating Delsarte
Knowing how thorough a proficient you are in the science and art of dramatic expression as
developed by François Delsarte—acknowledged to be in this department the greatest master
who has ever lived, we join in asking you to favor us with an illustrative lecture on this subject
showing especially the connection of the laws of dramatic expression in the system of Delsarte,
with character, morality and religion.
—Lecture invitation sent to MacKaye by Boston Mayor William Gaston (1871)35
Steele MacKaye, after studying with Delsarte in 1869 and 1870, introduced
Delsartism to the United States in a lecture on March 21, 1871, in Boston. Dignitaries
including Mayor Gaston and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow signed an invitation
revealing the interest generated by Delsarte’s ideas on “dramatic expression” and
“character, morality, and religion.” MacKaye subsequently lectured at Harvard and
then throughout the United States with an enthusiasm that garnered him the
name “Delsarte Mackay” [sic] (“Percy” 100). MacKaye’s lectures were a powerful
means of popularizing Delsartism, and print material also contributed to the bur-
geoning movement; Werner’s Magazine was almost entirely devoted to the con-
cerns of Delsartism from 1879 to 1902.36 Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine,
London Homeopathic World, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Russian periodicals Apollon
Kino fot and Sovetskii Ekran all published articles related to the Delsarte
phenomenon. This variety reveals the international appeal of Delsartism and the
seriousness with which the movement was regarded as an intellectual concern.
Although MacKaye was the founder of American Delsartism, he is better
remembered today as an actor, playwright, and designer. Among his inventions are
the folding theater seat, elevator and “gyratory” stages, and the first theater to be
fully lit by electricity, the Lyceum in 1885. Rather than producing an antipathy to
technology, Delsartism’s kinesthetic of posing and attention to the effects of differ-
ent bodily orientations contributed to MacKaye’s interest in moving seats and
stages that adjusted to the bodies of their users and enabled new movement.37
MacKaye shifted the emphasis of American Delsartism toward bodily performance
and physical culture by teaching a specific sequence of bodily gestures and poses
that he called Psychologic Gymnastics, a name that underscores the correlation of
mind and body that was also a feature of Vernon Lee’s psychological aesthetics.
MacKaye originally credited Delsarte with creating the gymnastics but later
claimed that he designed the exercises himself with his teacher’s approval to help
students attain the fluidity of Delsartean gestures (Every Movement 10). His
lecture-demonstrations, as reviewed in the Boston Transcript and Boston Advertiser
from March 1871, included posing in attitudes of emotions with “transitions from
repose to jollity, silliness and prostration, to utter drunkenness” (Cultivation 20).
The most popular facet of the movement in the United States, Delsartean
“self-cultivation,” linked the body work of Psychologic Gymnastics to the contem-
poraneous physical culture, dress reform, and women’s movements. Delsartean
self-cultivation promoted a model of gendered subjectivity in which a unique self
is perfected through stylized bodily presentation. Although easily dismissed by
later commentators, this version of selfhood was tremendously appealing, partic-
ularly to women at the turn of the twentieth century.38 They practiced Delsartean
POSING MODERNISM 69
exercises including statue poses and tableaux in studios, drawing rooms, amateur
demonstrations, and other semiprivate venues where women could perform
without the stigma attached to professional actresses. Delsartism intervened in a
culture in which the physical activity of women was restricted at puberty to pre-
serve energy for reproduction, as dictated by the medical establishment’s “energy
theory” (Cultivation xvi). Enforced physical inactivity, coupled with the restrictive
clothing of the period, including the corset, had detrimental effects on the health
of middle- and upper-class women, who became the main participants in
Delsartean self-cultivation. Desarte’s insistence on a correspondence between
body and soul were easily aligned with projects advocating exercise and comfort-
able clothing for women, and posing provided a regimen of bodily movement.
The best-known American advocate of self-cultivation, Henrietta Hovey, lec-
tured for the women’s dress reform movement before beginning her studies with
Steele MacKaye in 1872 and then with Delsarte’s son, Gustave, in 1878 in Paris.39
She presented Delsartism as a method for discovering a “real self ” that “may
struggle in vain for expression through the one body [man’s], which labor has nar-
rowed down to a machine only speaking of labor; or the other [woman’s], which
respectability has stiffened up, till it can only express ‘respectability.’ ”40 Reflecting
antimodern fears of the human automaton and replicating the ideology of sepa-
rate spheres, Hovey promised antidotes to the damage of repetitive labor on men
and the comparable stiffening effects of traditional femininity on women’s bodies.
She also offered to eradicate the “evil passions” and other personality flaws that
“dwarf and deform” the individual (Scrapbook 14). For Hovey, the “real self ” was
equivalent to self-presentation; the “self at its best” was an entity to be achieved
through the study of “expression,” including “manner, speech, [and] tone of voice”
(Scrapbook 56). The goal of Hovey’s Delsartean “personal analysis” was to help an
individual “recognize and understand her ‘type,’” which was based on “the whole
physique, the build of the body, mind, manner, will, [and] nerve” (Scrapbook 120).41
Once she knew her type, she would be guided in the choice of “her bonnets, her
jewels, her house, her dinners” (Scrapbook 120). Hovey applied Delsartism to
“Health, Natural Expression, Grace,” “Dress and Personality,” “House Decoration,”
“Artistic Dinner-Tables,” and even “Artistic Lovemaking.” Hovey’s version of typi-
fication, unlike Delsarte’s, is based on social types rather than Judeo-Christian
figures, but it demonstrates similar impulses toward human classification.
If Hovey’s emphasis on self-presentation as the path to a desired selfhood seems
to contradict Delsarte’s spiritual teachings, he also encouraged the application of
his theories of expression to all elements of life, as well as professional training in
drama and oratory. Delsarte’s law of correspondence suggested that improving the
appearance and beauty of a gesture advances the inner person and beauty of the
soul. Emphasizing individuality, he argued that through art “you re-find yourself ”
and even hinted at the idea of a personal God: “Never has an artist denied his God”
(“Address” 24, 33, my emphasis). Such claims would have sounded familiar to those
steeped in nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. Delsartism also antic-
ipated an idea of performance in everyday life now associated with Baudelaire’s
“The Dandy” and the self-fashioning of Oscar Wilde, who was invoked in reviews
of Hovey’s London performances.42 Hovey appeared in England from 1886 until
1889 with her second husband and fellow Delsartean, Edmund Russell. The British
interest in Delsarte has not received even the insufficient attention afforded the
American movement, but articles and reviews list among the enthusiasts the painter
Felix Moscheles (42, 46, 220), Robert Browning (46, 107, 220, 225), Oscar Wilde
(220), prominent London clergymen, and performers from Drury Lane, Covent
Garden, and the Carl Rosa Opera Company (Scrapbook 46–47).
An account of Hovey’s first London lecture at Moscheles’s studio in late June
1886 praises her attitudes, poses, and her “extraordinary gracefulness as she showed
how different feelings and emotions were expressed on the Delsartean principle”
(Cultivation 35).43 The following month (July 31, 1886), Hovey and Russell pre-
sented “The Harmony and Expression of Motion” at the Drury Lane Theatre, and
the reviewer again praises Hovey’s “physical expression.” Placing the performance
in the context of early modernist aestheticism, the review claims that Russell, as a
“species of a propriety padding,” presents no challenge to the better known poser,
“Mr. Oscar Wilde” (Cultivation 35).44 Russell primarily contributed recitation and
oratory to the programs; a description of “A Hindoo Soirée in London,” given by
Matthius Mull, reports that Russell recited “that grandly dramatic poem, ‘Mother
Egypt,’ by Joaquin Miller” and “the ‘Lilith’ of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (Scrapbook
235).45 These recitations were followed by “a very eloquent and witty address on
their [Indian] national art in dress versus our conventional English fashions. He
spoke of dress in its relation to the human body, dwelling on the deplorable fact
that our English styles literally murder expression” (Scrapbook 235). An exoticized
twist on the dress reform lecture that appeared to praise the “style” of Indian colo-
nial subjects, the “Hindoo Soirée” provoked nascent anxieties about the British
Empire’s failings so as to encourage audiences to quell their fears with new clothes.
Once the “Hindoo” style was achieved, it would have appeared as yet another
imperial appropriation among other primitivist and orientalist displays that influ-
enced modernist performance.
After returning from England and separating from Russell in 1889 or 1890,
Hovey lectured independently and gave lessons, primarily to upper-class women
POSING MODERNISM 71
from families such as the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and Astors, often in their summer
homes at Newport, Rhode Island (Cultivation 39). She was also recognized as a
political activist and invited to lecture at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representa-
tive Women, associated with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago
(Cultivation 41). As the popularity of Delsartism grew, self-cultivation became
available to women less privileged than the Vanderbilts, partially through studio
classes and Delsartean manuals, such as Anna Morgan’s An Hour with Delsarte
(1889).46 Morgan taught Delsarte in a Chicago studio, and her book is dedicated to
her “pupils,” who posed for the illustrations. Morgan credits Delsarte with a “per-
fect method by which we may not only obtain freedom and elasticity of action, but
one which adds force and meaning to our every movement” (Hour 8). She notes
the “scoffing” enemies of Delsarte, but she distinguishes her teaching from the
“unskillful exponents” who present “a group of expressionless girls languidly wav-
ing their arms” (Hour 17). Morgan taught attitudes of emotions and even dance in
her “plan of self-cultivation,” and the illustrations portray young women dressed
in the usual Greek robes, alone or occasionally in pairs, posed in attitudes that
recall drawings of Emma Lyon Hamilton.47 The frontispiece depicts a woman in a
pose of supplication, one hand pressed to her heart and the other reaching for-
ward, with the caption, “Let my sorrow plead for me.” In another illustration, a
woman with eyes closed presses a hand to her forehead and thrusts the other
behind her body: “Mine woes afflict this spirit sore” (Hour 90; figure 2.4). Such
representations of distress seem to contradict Morgan’s opening dictate, “It is
every one’s duty to look as well as possible” (Hour 7). But women’s creativity often
took the form of pathos at the turn of the century, and looking “well” included
emphasizing traditional modes of “feminine” vulnerability.48
Delsartean self-cultivation became a fad, even a superficial craze that was still
familiar enough to be parodied as late as Meredith Willson’s The Music Man (1957).
Racketeer Harold Hill wins over the mayor’s wife by urging her to accept the chair-
manship of “the Ladies Auxiliary for the Classic Dance” with the praise: “Your
every move bespeaks Delsarte. . . . What expression of line and movement.”49
Decked out in Greek robes at the ice cream social, the aging women give a “Delsarte
display” in which they pose as “One Grecian Urn” and a “Fountain.” Although
easily ridiculed for its sentimentality and antimodern invocations of classical
Greece, Delsartism also allowed the women who primarily organized the move-
ment to build professional identities and take leadership roles in the public
sphere.50 Delsartism was undoubtedly elitist, but it also held value for Thomas J.
Morgan, a representative of the Trades and Labor Assembly, who gave a speech to
a meeting of Chicago Socialists on March 12, 1893, claiming, “Young working men
Fig 2.4
“Mine woes afflict this
spirit sore” in Anna
Morgan, An Hour with
Delsarte (Boston: Lee and
Shepard, 1890). Courtesy
of the Library of Congress.
are equal to any man . . . and must consider yourselves so. Your children are just as
much entitled to study music, delsarte, physical culture, and have a knowledge of
form and shape as the children of Philip Armour, Allerton, and countless other
autocrats. . . .”51 Hovey’s own political activism grew after she gained recognition as
a Delsartean, and she became increasingly active in the suffrage movement and
helped to found the Progressive Stage Society in 1904. This theater collective with
socialist leanings produced experimental and political plays by international
authors such as Maeterlinck, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Max Nordau, and Ibsen, as
well as lectures on “Symbolism” and “Irish Drama.”52 Recalling her “Hindoo
Soirée,” Hovey and the society also launched a production based on the Indian
myth Sakuntala (1905), with a cast that included Ruth St. Denis. Just beginning her
performing career when she worked with the Progressive Stage Society, St. Denis’s
famous choreography Rhadha (1906) was partially inspired by Sakuntala.53 Hovey,
POSING MODERNISM 73
Morgan, and other Delsartean self-cultivation teachers influenced modernist the-

ater and dance, adapting Delsarte’s original teachings but retaining his assertions
that bodily poses will transform the inner being. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, Delsartism’s promise of transformation moved from the upper-class
drawing room and studio onto a variety of stages.
III. Performing Delsartism: Genevieve Stebbins

and the Early Motions of Modern Dance
We must cast off from our souls the Chaldean incubus of original sin and from our bodies the
hideous dogma of human depravity.
—Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression (1885) (Delsarte Expression 455)
Genevieve Stebbins (1857–1933?) was the most influential American Delsartean

because of her widespread lecture tours and performances, position as founding
principal of the New York School of Expression, and numerous publications ana-
lyzing and disseminating Delsarte’s theories.54 Stebbins attempted to distinguish
herself from the self-cultivation of Hovey and Morgan by emphasizing aesthetic,
religious, and educational themes, although the “self” remained at the center of
her teachings. Coming to Delsartism from the theater, Stebbins began studying
with MacKaye around 1876 in Boston, and in 1877 and 1878, she taught “Delsarte
Expression” at the Boston University School of Oratory, probably taking over
Mackaye’s classes when he began managing the Madison Square Theatre.55 She went
to Paris in 1881 to study with Delsarte’s French student Abbeé Delaumosne and the
Paris Conservatory’s François Joseph Regnier, and she claimed that Delsarte’s widow
gave her his surviving manuscripts, on which she based her book Delsarte System of
Expression (NY School 24–25). She was active in the dress reform and suffrage move-
ments, organized the public programs of Delsarte Matinees at New York’s Madison
Square Theatre from about 1880 until 1893, and founded the New York School of
Expression at Carnegie Music Hall in 1893. Although most dance historians recog-
nize that early modern dancers were drawn to Stebbins’s theories of an expressive
body, few recognize that Delsarte Matinees and Stebbins’s own solo performances
taught the bodily techniques, including posing, that were later deployed by modern
dancers. From them, audiences learned to interpret codes of gestural meaning.56
The respect afforded Stebbins in her time is due, in part, to the sophistication
of her writing, and the circulation of her books took Delsartism to Europe,
especially Germany and Russia.57 Compared to other Delsartean manuals, her
work provided a more scholarly analysis and critique of Delsarte’s system as it
located his theories within a history of ideas that includes Plato, Swedenborg, St.
Paul, and Descartes. She positions his analysis of human trinities in relation to
Christianity but also the “Druidical triad,” “Chinese triangle,” “trinities of the
Hindoos,” and the “tripartite” structure of the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and
Persian religions (Delsarte Expression 109–115). For Stebbins, Delsarte was one of
several important nineteenth-century system makers: “This is an age of formula-
tion. What Comte has done for exact science, Buckle and Mill for history, Spencer
for culture, and Ruskin for painting, Delsarte has tried to do for action, for expres-
sion” (Delsarte Expression 75). Demonstrating her own secular bias, Stebbins con-
cludes that his philosophy was “an esoteric Christianity: a compound of cabalistic
lore and Platonism . . . which, so far as real practical work in the art of vocal or
physical expression is concerned, is of small value” (Delsarte Expression 386).
While Hovey and Morgan present Delsarte as a reified origin, Stebbins more
accurately claims, “Practical Delsartism is . . . an evolution of his system in accor-
dance with American ideas and requirements,” and she credits MacKaye with
designing what he called “Psychological Gymnastics” and she termed “Delsarte
esthetic gymnastics” (Delsarte Expression 398, 400).
At the foundation of Stebbins’s performances and theories was her “artistic
statue-posing,” which combined MacKaye’s gymnastics with Delsarte’s emo-
tional attitudes, her own principles of embodied movement, and widespread
interest in classical statuary. Both MacKaye and Delsarte had posed, but
Stebbins’s attitudes of Greek goddesses including Diana, Ceres, Ariadne, and
Venus indicate her immersion in a tradition that included Lyon Hamilton.58
Prefixing the word artistic to the popular practice of posing, she distinguished
“ordinary statue-impersonation” from her “classical ideals” (Delsarte Expression
444, 370–380). Artistic statue posing, according to Stebbins, is the motion from
the self as “centre” or “still point” into the pose of classical antiquity as a
“spiritual aspiration toward a superior and definite type of beauty in which
lives and moves a human soul” (Delsarte Expression 461). She similarly empha-
sized the “soul” and “type” in her definition of performance as “the tendency of
the fallen soul toward its primitive purity, or its final splendor; in one word, it
is the search for the eternal type” (Delsarte Expression 65). Stebbins’s types are
the characters of classical and Judeo-Christian myth that also served as speakers
in monodramas and dramatic monologues, and she insisted that by posing as
these “eternal types,” the performer would bring the ideals of the type into her
own soul. In this model, artistic statue posing enacts the self-transformation of
the tropological level of biblical typology; the poser embodies typological pat-
terns as she aspires to a “final splendor.”
POSING MODERNISM 75
Stebbins differentiates her notion of subjectivity from Hovey’s self-cultivation

in the study of “types” that enable idiosyncratic expressions of personality in bon-
nets and artistic dinners. Stebbins does not entirely abandon the language of
self-cultivation as she points to the effectiveness of posing in “training the human
body in grace, deportment, and gesture” (Delsarte Expression 447). In artistic statue
posing, however, the particular self must be abandoned in favor of the “eternal
type,” and markers of “individuality” like facial expressions must be “studiously
avoided” to achieve the “absolute calm and repose of an immortal soul” (Delsarte
Expression 444). Stebbins cites her year-long study in the museums of Europe,
including “the exquisite forms of gods and heroes in the great museum of the
Louvre,” as proof that anything but a placid facial expression would interrupt the
“moral poise” evident in the “lines” of the figure (Delsarte Expression 94). Stebbins’s
statue posing featured the pleasures of recognition that attend all attitudes, and
she hoped recognition would lead to the audience’s emotional identification: “The
actor’s art is to express in well-known symbols what an individual man may be
supposed to feel; and we, as spectators, recognizing these expressions, are drawn to
sympathy” (Delsarte Expression 429). Her interest in sympathy parallels Vernon
Lee’s contemporaneous theories of “empathy,” “inner mimicry,” and bodily “imita-
tion” in aesthetic perception.59 Stebbins’s choice of classical figures helped her ele-
vate statue posing but also provided familiar gestures that encouraged the
audience’s recognition and participation.
A photograph of Stebbins in a solo pose (1892), widely published in manuals,
advertisements, and promotional materials for the New York School of Expression,
depicts her in a long white sleeveless gown resembling a Greek tunic or chiton
(figure 2.5). She holds greenery suggestive of an olive branch in one hand, her
robes with the other, and her serene stance resembles the Farnese Flora, one of the
thirty-two photographs she published as examples for statue poses in Delsarte
System of Expression (203). Reviews of her attitudes were generally positive; the
New York World (February 13, 1889) describes how “with no scenic accessories in
keeping with her Grecian pose to aid the illusion, she succeeded, simply by the
exercise of exquisite grace, in framing, to music, for her delighted spectators life-
like images of Melpomene, Diana, Ceres, Ariadne, Atalanta, Hebe and Venus” (NY
School 28). The New York Sun (1893) similarly describes the simplicity of the solo,
focusing on the “rhythm” created by movements punctuated with stillness that
flow gracefully onward from the simple to the complex. They are a natural
evolution of beauty produced by the changing curve of the spiral line from
head to toe, commencing with a simple attitude, and continuing with a
slow, rhythmic motion of every portion of the body, until it stands before
you as the most perfect representation of art.
(Cultivation 117)
This connection between posing and the increasingly popular scientific trope
of “evolution” echoes Stebbins’s own description of her attitudes in “Hints” to
students:
(a) There must be simultaneous movement of all parts of body, from

head to toe; (b) the motion must be magnetic, i.e., slow, rhythmic, and as
Fig 2.5
Genevieve Stebbins, The
New York School of
Expression (New York:
Werner, 1893). Courtesy of
the Library of Congress.
POSING MODERNISM 77
unaffected as the subtle evolution of a serpent; (c) every movement must be

made in conformity with the principles of evolution, i.e., the movements
must unfold from within to without as naturally as the growth and expan-
sion of a flower; (d) there must be no sudden seeking for opposition, no
spasmodic attempt for sequence.
(Delsarte Expression 459)
References to “principles of evolution” and “simultaneous,” “magnetic” movement

associate artistic statue posing with scientific theories and principles. Like Delsarte,
Stebbins taught her students “laws” of movement: The “law of sequence” states,
“Expression of face precedes gesture, and gesture precedes speech”; the “law of
evolution” defines the way a gesture travels from the center of the body outward as
a “gradual unrolling or evolution of vital force through the various articulations”
(Delsarte Expression 260–263). Stebbins transformed Delsarte’s concentric, excen-
tric, and normal attitudes into motions focused around the self as center: Concentric
movement or contraction represents “subjective states of mind” and “motion to a
centre”; “objective,” “expansive,” or excentric motion flows away from the self;
normal or “balanced” motion is “between these two extremes” (Delsarte Expression
113). Stebbins attempted to relocate posing from the field of self-cultivation to aes-
thetics and science without losing the focus on selfhood, a strategy that was repli-
cated by early innovators in modern dance.
Although solo posing was Stebbins’s primary genre, her Delsarte Matinees and
other performances also included recitations, tableaux, and drills, as recorded in the
1889 Delsarte Recitation Book.60 Emphasizing the respectable and familiar form of
literary recitation in its title, the volume features Stebbins’s “Suggestive Analyses” of
poetry and short prose pieces, which draw from Delsartean attitudes, elocution
training, and literary analysis. Her analysis of “Bread,” a piece protesting poverty
and one of Delsarte’s own favorite recitations, indicates that the “vocal coloring” of
passages should variously be “a tone of menace and agony,” an “orotund tone,” or
“concentration, rapidity, and excitement” (Recitation 218). Stebbins details the bodily
poses that should accompany the performance; certain lines were to be “followed by
an attitude of passionate appeal,” while the appearance of “Famine” would be “per-
sonified by a crouching and advancing attitude” (Recitation 218). Rather than a real-
istic acting style in which the performer becomes a character, her body represents
the allegorical figure of Famine while her voice protests the hunger of the body.
Stebbins reads “Bread” and other literature as scripts for performances with textual
indications of “ordinary oratorical gestures” and “dramatic action.” Delsartean reci-
tations were part of a cultural practice that encouraged the oral performance of
literature, especially poetry, in classrooms, lecture circuits, and benefit concerts.

These recitations featured many of the same pieces included in the category of “par-
lour poetry,” the popular verse performed as family entertainment in the middle-
and upper-class nineteenth-century parlor.61 Featuring recitation helped to render
the Delsarte Matinees respectable venues of women’s performance.
One of Stebbins’s more successful students at the New York School of
Expression, Mrs. William Calvin Chilton, combined literary, biblical, and dramatic
interpretation in a performance form she called “the mono-dramatic recital.” A
brochure titled Mrs. William Calvin Chilton, Monodramatist advertises more than
six programs in her repertoire for the 1905–1906 season; she recited regional liter-
ature in “An Evening in Dixie-Land, or Southern Stories from Southern Writers,”
performed impersonations of figures such as Thomas Nelson Page and Ruth
McEnery Stuart, and read the Book of Esther from the Bible, a performance adver-
tised as “appropriate for Y.M.C.A. and Endeavour Sunday afternoon services”—
demonstrating the intersection of Delsartean performance and religious
instruction.62 Chilton’s most popular programs were arrangements of plays for
solo performance, including Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which she
played nine characters in five scenes; Sheakespeare’s Twelfth Night (thirteen char-
acters); and even George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. Her success was recognized by
invitations to perform at the National Association of Elocutionists and the first
annual Shakespearean Symposium at Stratford-on-Avon, England, in 1898. The
brochure prints the testimony of Shakespearean scholar H. Snowden Ward, author
of Shakespeare’s Town and Times (1896), who recalls, “Her delivery of one of
Shakespeare’s most dramatic scenes was full of power and pathos, a piece of very
able work.” Chilton adapted the monodrama for Delsartism and reveals the persis-
tent popularity of solo performance.
Another prominent form among Delsartean performances, the tableaux,
transfers the bodily techniques of the melodrama, semipornographic living pic-
tures, and nude model artists (still playing at Revuedeville) into the respectable
sphere of artistic statue posing. Photographs of tableaux feature women in the
familiar long white “Greek” gowns posing in attitudes representing emotional
states (Recitation 392). A “Grief Tableaux” arranges four women around a “dead”
girl in various postures: one kneels with hands clasped in prayer, another buries
her face in the shroud, a third stands above covering her face with a hand, and the
fourth lifts her hands as if to prevent the recognition of death (figure 2.6). The
sentimental composition suggests that each poser represents different phases in
the experience of grief: hope, despair, sorrow, and denial. The pathos of the tableau
establishes a tension between the lack of emotional composure represented and
POSING MODERNISM 79
the bodily composure of the pose. The group tableaux would be incorporated into
modern dance choreography, as revealed in a 1917 photograph of the Isadora
Duncan Dancers.63 Depicting a scene from Duncan’s Iphigenia en Aulide (Gluck,
ca. 1914–1915), the dancers wear lighter drapery, but the bodies are posed at various
levels from prone to standing with arm positions resembling those of “Grief ”
(figure 2.7). The emotions are more contained in Iphigenia, perhaps because they
are linked to a narrative, but the tableau creates a similar compositional balance.
Delsartean drills, a final form included in the Matinees, combined recitation,
movement, and music in a manner that predicted modern dance dramas.
Presenting images of female strength and mimicking traditionally masculine
movements, “The Sword Drill” by Anna B. Webb features sixteen young girls
dressed in navy blue costumes with white vests holding tinsel swords. Diagrams
indicate how the girls, divided into two “companies,” march in formation while
one gives orders such as “Present Arms” and “Shoulder Arms.” The soloist then
recites Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” one of the most popular
“Parlour Poems,” while the group pantomimes such gestures as “left hand prone”
and “both hands supine” (Recitation 257). Similar choreographies published in
The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training (1898) reveal that Delsartean
Fig 2.6 “Grief Tableaux” in Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book (New York: Edgar
S. Werner, 1889). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Fig 2.7 Irma, Margot, Theresa, Anna, Erica and Lisa Duncan in a pose from Iphigenia at
the Hotel des Artistes, by Apeda Studios (New York, 1912). Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins
Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.
drills mixed militaristic movement with the conventionally feminine poses of sen-
timent. “The Roman Drill—The Amazon” presents women warriors posed in the
actions of combat: holding a spear, running, drawing a bow, charging, and other
movement sequences similar to those in Isadora Duncan’s dance The Amazons
(1906). “The Athenian Drill—The Victory” and “Energizing Dramatic Drill” also
feature a series of battle poses with choreographed transitions. “The Victory”
includes an attitude of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the statue that inspired
poses by Duncan and H.D. and the ridicule of Marinetti. The vigorous motions of
these drills provided an unusual physical experience for upper-class women. Other
drills resemble the exotic and primitivist images common to the foundational
modern dancers: Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. Stebbins’s “The Greek
Drill—The Nymphs” anticipates the Greek imagery of Duncan’s choreography,
just as techniques from “Eastern Temple Drill” resemble St. Denis’s The Temple.64
Shawn’s solo “Jonas Tango,” part of a Spanish Suite, recalls Stebbins’s earlier “The
Spanish Drill—The Carmen.”65
POSING MODERNISM 81
Stebbins refused to characterize herself as a dancer on account of her critique of

meaningless, “purely gymnastic exercise, the worst forms of which is the so-called
French ballet-dancing” (Delsarte Expression 469). Yet, Stebbins treated religious,
ethnic, and social dances very differently, claiming that “pantomimic folk-dance
cannot be overrated” and that Greek dancing and Bacchic festivals were the origins
of drama, a belief she shared with Jane Ellen Harrison, Isadora Duncan, and other
ritualists (Delsarte Expression 464). She performed “authentic” examples of these
dances in a lecture-demonstration form; in 1893, a Boston Globe critic describes
Stebbins’s illustration of the movements of Egyptian priestesses, Greek dancing,
and then Spanish and gypsy folk dances in a lecture comparing the styles of differ-
ent cultures (Cultivation 125). A July 1894 performance in Chautauqua, New York,
presented “the evolution of dancing, showing its place in physical culture,” and
incorporated “an old English country dance, a gypsy dance, the Scotch Highlander’s
dance, an Alpine rustic dance, a French and a Spanish minuet” (Cultivation 125).66
Choreographic representations of religious practices and dances of Eastern and/or
“primitive” cultures, with varying degrees of cultural naïveté and racism, were
among the first steps of modern dance, as is well recognized, but the impulse was
already present in the international Delsarte movements.
Reviews also reveal that Stebbins danced without the academic lecture but
interspersed statue posing, choreography, and music in presentations that she
preferred to call “pantomimes” or “musical, dramatic and pantomimic mono-
logues.” The terms distinguished her performance from ballet but also align the
mixed form with attitudes, monodramas, and dramatic monologues. Her dances,
like her statue poses, present female types from Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian myth:
“Miriam, the Prophetess,” “Jephtha’s Daughter,” “Esther at Shushan,” “The Myth of
Isis,” “Ariadne,” “Psyche,” “Ceres,” and “The Descent of Ishtar” (Cultivation 125).
Stebbins performed “Miriam” at the Berkeley Lyceum in New York on January 25,
1894, and a detailed review, written by Elsie M. Wilbor for Werner’s Magazine,
describes five scenes: The calling of Miriam by Jehovah, Miriam’s consecration, her
delivery of Jehovah’s message to Pharaoh, her grief over the plagues, and the tri-
umph of the Israelites (Cultivation 125). In Stebbins’s dance midrash of the Exodus
story, Miriam features as a prophetess, taking over the visionary role usually
ascribed to Moses. The power of this role would have been enhanced by the fact
that the soloist implied all other characters. In the culminating scene of Miriam’s
celebration by the Red Sea, “Her dance with the cymbals is one of the utmost
abandon of joy. Then falling to her knees, she chants a portion of the fifteenth
chapter of Exodus, after which she resumes her dance, and the curtain falls for
the last time” (Cultivation 126). Combining different expressive media, Stebbins
included biblical recitation in a dance-drama that emphasized women’s sacred

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

and Hollywood
Antedating Isadora Duncan by many years, Genevieve Stebbens [sic] must have had the same
feeling for the dance that Isadora had. . . . She moved in a series of plastiques which were based
upon her understanding of the laws of motion discovered by Delsarte. Her poses were derived
from Greek statuary and encompassed everything from the tragedy of Niobe to the joyousness
of Terpsichore. Later she did a dance called The Dance of Day. At the opening of the scene she
was lying on the floor asleep, and then, awakened by the morning sun, she rose with a lovely
childlike movement to her knees and bathed herself in its rays. . . .
—Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life (1939)67
Ruth St. Denis encountered Stebbins’s version of Delsartism at the Madison

Square Theatre on November 25, 1892, the same performance representing “the
purity of the Hebrew maidens” recommended by The Church Union. St. Denis’s
autobiography compares Stebbins and Duncan, discusses statue poses, reveals a
POSING MODERNISM 83
familiarity with Delsarte’s “laws of motion,” and applauds a solo dance piece that
closed the performance, Dance of Day. St. Denis had previously studied Delsarte
gestures under the tutelage of her mother, who had “met a Madame Poté . . . a
seventh attenuation of a pupil of François Delsarte,” in New Haven, Connecticut
(Unfinished 7). St. Denis recalls, “Mother could not do the exercises herself, but
she instantly saw their value for me in correcting some of the deficiencies of my
fast-growing body. I vaguely remember a little book with some sketches in it of
extremely chaste ladies and gentlemen standing straight and nude in poses
of Delsarte relaxation and posture” (Unfinished 8). The book was probably one
of the many manuals published by Werner, and the aspiring dancer described the
Delsartean poses as “the actual beginning of all my dancing” (8); she practiced so
much that the family’s summer boarders, well aware of the origins of the gestures,
nicknamed her “Delsarte” (Unfinished 7).
If St. Denis provides evidence of a direct connection between Stebbins’s statue
posing and modern dance, her partner, Ted Shawn, was even more steeped in both
the techniques and philosophies of Delsartism. Shawn originally studied with a
student of Henrietta Hovey (ca. 1880), Mary Perry King, and her lover and collab-
orator, the poet Bliss Carman (Cultivation 66).68 Shawn had written to Carman
after reading his and King’s Delsarte-inspired book, The Making of Personality
(1908), which, in response to the popular “feminization” of Delsartism, adapted
Delsartean principles to masculinity. Shawn claimed that the book “said about
dance all of the things I had been feeling and thinking, but which I had never been
able to express so articulately” (Every Movement 12).69 In 1914, Shawn and his first
dance partner, Norma Gould, studied for a month at the “Unitrinian School of
Personal Harmonizing and Self-Development” run by Carman and King in the
Catskill Mountains of New York.70 The school’s Delsarte-derived methods were
focused on training the expressive use of the voice and body for “the education of
personality,” and the philosophy emphasized numerous trinities, as is clear in
Carman’s address to the first graduating class in 1911:
Unitrinianism has truly its religious note, as well as its philosophic and
artistic. It appeals to the moral or emotional side of human nature, quite as
much as to the intellectual and physical, for its sanction. . . . Your particular
field of teaching is the training of the growing body into harmony with the
growing mind and spirit. . . . In this, your making of personality, you will use
chiefly the three great rhythmic arts of music, poetry and dancing.71
Carman, like many other artists influenced by Delsarte, hoped to use solo
performance to unify body, mind, and spirit into a unique, malleable “personality,”
and it was this message that appealed to the first modern dancers attempting to
define dance art. Carman and King referred Shawn to Henrietta Hovey, who had
begun giving classes on Delsartism in Hollywood in 1909. In Shawn’s book on
Delsartism and dance expression, Every Little Movement (1954), he claims to have
taken private lessons with Hovey for years and credits her with teaching him the
“true science of François Delsarte” and providing “the basis for all my performing,
teaching and lecturing career ever since” (12).
Shawn claims that Delsarte initiated the birth of American modern dance,
what he calls a “Renaissance of the Dance”: “Delsarte’s laws of gesture, above all
his insistence that every movement must have meaning, were the foundations of
the dance developed by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis” (Every Movement
10–11). Hovey’s interest in self-cultivation influenced Shawn’s concern with indi-
vidualism, and he claims that “each individual, grasping and understanding the
principles of Delsarte, will use them to express individual, unique qualities pecu-
liar to himself!” (Every Movement 86). Shawn appears to dismiss Delsartean pos-
ing in his book, protesting against “the distorted and already outmoded
falsifications—‘statue posing,’ in which amateur entertainers, costumed in bulky,
graceless, ‘Greek’ robes, whitened skin, and white wigs, took ‘poses’ supposedly
expressive of grief, joy, shyness, anger . . .” (Every Movement 11). Shawn’s rejection
of “amateur” posing emphasizes his own aesthetic standards; however, he adopted
attitudes as a way of projecting emotions and invoking mythic narratives in his
choreography. Photographs of Shawn’s Death of Adonis Plastique (1923) reveal
that he actually performed with “whitened skin” and a crucially placed fig leaf,
resembling Sandow’s “Dying Gaul” (figure 2.8, see figure 2.3). Both choreographed
figures dying into poses, using the bodily technique of statue posing as a visual
indication of death and death’s failure to conquer human heroism. Shawn also
used attitudes to teach strength, balance, and Delsartean expression in classroom
exercises such as “Floor Plastique.”72
Shawn’s Gnossienne: A Priest of Knossos (Satie, 1919) is a two-minute solo
that incorporates Delsartean poses alluding to frescoes at Knossos of an ancient
Cretan cupbearer worshipping the Snake Goddess (figure 2.9). The parallel, open
position of Shawn’s hips and shoulders suggest the two-dimensional quality of
bodies in the frescoes. Shawn emphasizes the horizontal plane by posing with the
torso facing the audience rather than at an angle to the front, as in the croisé or
crossed position common in ballet. The poses can also be read according to the
Delsartean charts analyzing the body into expressive parts, which Shawn prints in
Every Little Movement. Shawn’s choreography features bent elbows and knees,
both of which he describes as Delsartean “thermometers of the will,” although
POSING MODERNISM 85
Fig 2.8 Ted Shawn in “Death of Adonis,” by Lejaren A. Hiller (1923). Denishawn
Collection. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library
for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Stebbins and others claim that Delsarte gave that designation only to the elbow.
Shawn writes that the elbow “moves outward, away from the body to express pride,
arrogance, assertion of the will,” and the elbows of his cupbearer are positioned at
sharp angles (Every Movement 41). For Shawn, the knee is “strong and straight in
aggression . . . but bent in submission . . . wherein one gives up self-will for Divine
Will” (Every Movement 41–42). Shawn’s left knee in the figure is “bent in submis-
sion,” yet the right knee appears to be pulling the leg and body up and forward.
Following Shawn’s code, the pose of the cupbearer suggests contradictory impulses
between submission to divine power and willful pride. Shawn described the thumb
as an indication of “degrees of vitality,” with more life represented by a thumb
extended away from rather than folded toward the palm (Every Movement 44).
As Elizabeth Drake-Boyt points out, the thumb in Gnossienne is in a neutral
position “closed against the side of the hand,” suggesting “his ‘vitality’ and energy
is capable but restricted, severely under (ritualistic) control.”73 She interprets the
dance as a “sly parody” of the exoticism in women’s solos, but it also uses Delsartean
taxonomies of the body to establish an ambivalent wavering between the desire to
reject and submit to religion and ritual.
Fig 2.9
Ted Shawn in Gnossienne,
by Witzel (1919).
Denishawn Collection.
The New York Public
Arts, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.
Shawn originally choreographed Gnossienne around 1917 as a classroom

exercise, like “Floor Plastique,” for strengthening students’ bodies and teaching
balance and control. He tells the story of its evolution into a solo dance:
“Gnossienne” was a dance in flat, two-dimensional style movement that

didn’t come off when the class tried to do it for Ruth [St. Denis] who
dropped by the practice studio. I jumped in and did the exercise,
solo. . . . When I finished I turned to the class and then to Ruth, saying,
“There. That’s the way it’s supposed to look.” And that’s the way it was done
by me for the next thirty years.74
Following Shawn’s years of performance, Gnossienne continued to influence

his students: Barton Mumaw and Jack Clark preserved the choreography and
continued to perform versions of the piece, and Martha Graham created her own
Gnossienne in 1926, also to Eric Satie’s music (“Project” 153–155). Shawn and
St. Denis trained these and other important figures in American dance at the
Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts in Los Angeles. Denishawn taught
POSING MODERNISM 87
diverse styles of dance, including modern dance, ballet, and folk, as well as
Delsartean expression and the related system of Dalcrozian eurhythmics. St. Denis
records in her autobiography that after they established the school,
One of our first callers was Mrs. Richard Hovey, whom Ted bore
triumphantly home. She was a remarkable woman of seventy-five, who had
studied with François Delsarte and was his only living American disciple—a
wonderful witness to his system of teaching—the other two, Steele MacKaye
and Genevieve Stebbins, having passed on. . . . We arranged for her to come
to give a series of lectures on Delsarte, from which, I think, we profited as
much as the students.75
(Unfinished 179–180)
Delsartean theories of the body, even the self-cultivation Hovey emphasized in

lectures, along with “Plastiques” and other Delsarte-derived poses, were staple
aspects of Denishawn teachings and choreography.76 While dance history records
that Denishawn molded a generation of modern dancers, studies of film overlook
the impact of Denishawn, Delsartism, and the many theatrical sources for poses
on the kinesthetics of early film.77
Shawn was interested in film as early as 1913, when he made a movie about the
history of dance called The Dance of the Ages, with Norma Gould for the Thomas
Alva Edison Company (Sun 22–23). The Denishawn School nurtured a mutually
beneficial relationship with filmmaker D. W. Griffith of Biograph Studios and
trained the first generation of film stars in Delsartean bodily techniques, gestural
expression, and posing. Griffith asked film stars, including Lillian and Dorothy
Gish, Mary Alden, and Blanche Sweet, to take classes at Denishawn twice a week.78
Denishawn listed these and other stars in Photoplay Magazine advertisements,
promising to teach aspiring actors, in Delsartean terminology, “the science of the
human body as an expressive instrument” (Where 142). Film actors trained to per-
form Delsarte’s excentric, concentric, and normal movements through exercises in
posing or “plastique,” and Delsartean gestures permeate Griffith’s films.79 In return,
Denishawn dancers frequently performed in films ($5 for group dances, $10 for
solos), and the entire company is featured in the Babylonian segment of Griffith’s
1916 Intolerance (Where 143–145).80 The choreography set on the Babylonian steps
creates images of “Eastern” or “exotic” ritual motion by combining poses from
ancient statuary, art history books, travelogues, and popular “Oriental” or Salome
numbers. Griffith’s film frequently cuts between the dance and other celebrations,
between close-ups on a soloist (rumored to be St. Denis) and longer shots revealing
visual patterns created by the ensemble. The Babylon scene was the spectacle to
which initial reviewers responded most positively. “Intolerance Impressive,” claimed

the New York Times (September 6, 1916):
It is the Babylonian portion of the film that will commend it to the great
public. These pictures of the wals [sic] of Babylon . . . of the great gates
thronged with picturesque caravans, of the palace of Belshazzar with its
myriad slaves and dancing girls, and of the siege and fall of the city are
indeed masterpieces of the cine.
Influenced by Denishawn, popular Delsartean performance, and his own research

in classical and Christian art, Griffith uses posed compositions throughout the film.
The repeated image of Lillian Gish as the woman who rocks the cradle, dressed in
Greek-style robes with a veil, might have been taken from one of the Delsarte man-
uals featuring such pantomime-recitations as L. Blinn’s “Rizpah” with poses by
A. M. Morgenroth; the biblical mother of Samuel 21 protects her sons’ bodies from
“beasts” and “dies crooning to and rocking an imaginary child.”81 These popular
pieces could be purchased with eight photographs of the poses for 25 cents.
One of Shawn’s most successful students, Louise Brooks, best known for her
role as Lulu in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), used poses to build careers in
both modern dance and film. Brooks began performing in 1922 as a dancer in the
Denishawn Company, and her autobiography recalls Shawn’s classroom demon-
strations of statue posing.82 On the 1922–1923 company tour, she performed in St.
Denis’s Ishtar of the Seven Gates and Doris Humphrey’s Sonata Tragica, and she
was featured as the Bride in Shawn’s Feather of the Dawn (1923). In 1925, she became
a “specialty dancer” in the Ziegfeld Follies, the vaudeville program that also fea-
tured the poses of “Sandow the Strongman,” and although she intended to con-
tinue her dance career, she was enticed into film after taking a part in Townsend
Martin’s The American Venus (1926). When Pabst cast Brooks as Lulu, she claims
he was unaware of her dance training: “That I was a dancer and Pabst essentially a
choreographer in his direction came as a wonderful surprise to both of us on the
first day of shooting Pandora’s Box” (Lulu 101).83 Pabst had asked for some impro-
vised steps for an early scene in which Lulu dances for Schigolch and was delighted
to find that Brooks, like her character, was familiar with the female dancer’s double
status as an adored star and “higher-priced trollop” (Lulu 97).84 The Denishawn
influence on the dance is evident in the waltz with long reaches from the center of
the body, which Lulu performs before a painting of herself as Pierrot, the naive
commedia dell’arte clown. In the next scene, she poses in a mirror tableau vivant
of the Peirrot painting for her lover, Schön, who is positioned as spectator to both
woman posed as art and artwork of the woman.
POSING MODERNISM 89
Brooks became famous for the restrained, posed gestural style evident
throughout Pandora’s Box (figure 2.10). These poses establish a crucial trope of the
film as they are metatheatrically highlighted by interpolated performances, such as
the variety show (which probably included attitudes and tableaux) organized by
Schön’s son, Alwa, to feature Lulu. A sketch of her posing in the variety costume is
passed from son to father. Lulu manipulates veils in a manner recalling Lyon
Hamilton’s attitudes during her trial for the murder of Schön. The lawyer’s
comparison of Lulu to Pandora casts her in a mythic pose, and the court photog-
rapher captures the attitude for newspaper reproduction. Later, Casti-Piani’s rec-
ognition of the woman in the pose enables him to blackmail Alwa, and then
Casti-Piani uses photographs of Lulu to sell her to the “Arab.” These poses and
their reproductions transform the desirable woman into an art object available to
be traded and sold. Yet as statue poses, performance forms that recall a history of
bodily techniques and creativity often associated with women, they trouble claims
that Lulu is “totally devoid of thought, a blank surface.”85 Read through poses, the
film explores femininity not only as a desired image but also as self-conscious
posed performance.
Fig 2.10
Louisa Brooks in Pandora’s
Box (1929). Courtesy
George Eastman House
Motion Picture
Department Collection.
Brooks’s posed acting style, promoted by Pabst, may have contributed to the
controversial work of Pabst’s friend and fellow filmmaker, Leni Reifenstahl, who
used grand tableau for Nazi propaganda films.86 The German physical culture
movement undoubtedly influenced Reifenstahl; Stebbins’s Delsartean poses were
taught by Hade Kallmeyer under the title of “the American Stebbins-Kallmeyer
System” at her school of “harmonic gymnastics” in Berlin (Cultivation 69). Another
German theorist of movement education, Dorothee Günther, also combined
Delsartism with ideas from Dalcroze and Rudolf Laban and adapted them for
modernist performance.87 She opened a school in Munich in 1924 and then in
Berlin in 1933 to teach an innovative curriculum combining posing, movement,
and music. Her most famous piece was the massive Deutsche Reigen (German
Round Dance) at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 (“Aristocratic” 159–161). Günther,
like Reifenstahl, aligned physical culture with Nazi aesthetics and racial purity and
health, yet she also sponsored a feminist politics and “homoerotic aura” in an
atmosphere that presented men as “absent and unnecessary” (“Aristocratic” 179).
As Karl Toepfer claims, Günther reveals “the astonishing adaptability of Delsartean
philosophy,” but he attributes this flexibility to the “detachment of movement
forms from any physical or narrative context” (“Aristocratic” 180). Günther’s ped-
agogy aside, the larger field of Delsartean practices linked movement to mythic
narratives and encouraged a variety of solo performances said to promote person-
ality and health, two remarkably adaptable and transnational constructs.
From posing to dance, recitation to silent film, in French, American, German,
and Russian venues, Delsartism exhibited a remarkable generic and geographic
adaptability. As silent film developed cinematic acting styles, it borrowed from
many trends in physical culture and theater, especially the vaudeville circuit, which
included statue posing, tableaux, and dance. A vaudeville program in the first
decades of the twentieth century might have listed Shawn’s Gnossienne or other
Denishawn pieces, skirt dances, tableaux by model artists, Sandowesque statue
posing, and early film shorts. Even actors who did not study at schools like
Denishawn were exposed to these performance techniques; Charlie Chaplin orig-
inally developed his loosely jointed movement style in British music halls, where
he would have seen varieties of posing and dance. Chaplin’s silent film Sunnyside
(1919) parodies the many women who, inspired by Delsartism and Isadora Duncan,
donned tunics and cavorted barefoot. After hitting his head, Chaplin dreams of a
bevy of dancing nymphs with flower garlands. He skips along with them until a
misstep plunges him into a cactus and, holding his rear, he leaps away in a motion
that is humorously similar to his earlier dancing. Descriptions of Chaplin’s move-
ments often focus on the “traces of mechanical reproduction” in his style and his
POSING MODERNISM 91
comic “robotic routines,” but these descriptions ignore the classical and antimod-
ern body that, for Chaplin, was also funny (Machine 3, 5). The techniques of posing
as statues or “windup toys” out of wind preceded the “hand-cranked cameras” that
seem to have “created” as well as “recorded” Chaplin’s movements (Machine 3–4).88
The precinematic, Pygmalionesque trope of a doll coming to life and dancing also
influenced Chaplin’s bodily techniques.89 While this trope has many sources,
Delsartism influenced both American and Russian film, offering a set of gestures
correlated to emotions in a manner recognized by audiences familiar with posing
in dance, theater, and vaudeville—a semiotics (to borrow Delsarte’s term) of ges-
tural performance.
V. The Russian Delsarte: Kuleshov and Film Montage
Delsarte’s system is ideal for training cinematic models in bodily expression.

—Lev Kuleshov, “The Banner of Cinematography” (1920)90
The trajectory of Delsartism into Russian film demonstrates the prevalence of the
modernist kinesthetic of posing as it troubles critical tendencies to oppose bodily
expression and technological mediation. Critics have largely discounted the
numerous references to Delsarte in Lev Kuleshov’s extensive writing as insignificant
anachronisms. Evgeni Gromov’s introduction to a recent and useful collection of
Kuleshov’s essays acknowledges, but quickly dismisses, his interest in Delsartism:
Captivated by the theory of the nineteenth century Frenchman François

Delsarte, Kuleshov came up with an oversimplified view of the relationship
between action and thought, deed and feeling. . . . He sought to systematize
such movements, proceeding from the rather pretentious book The
Expressive Man by Sergei Volkonsky.91
If oversimplified, the Delsartean link between gesture and feeling offered Kuleshov
a semiology of gesture and a movement technique that shaped his acting method
and montage theory. Most critics, like Gromov, subordinate Kuleshov’s ideas of
cinematic acting styles to his innovative montage theory, yet the two components
of his work were interrelated. Kuleshov’s ideas of montage emerged from his
Delsartean method of analyzing the actor’s body into parts and poses.
Mikhail Yampolsky reveals that Delsartism reached Russia by 1903, when Yuri
Erastovich Ozarovsky lectured on Delsarte and mime.92 Ozarovsky developed his
own theory of “stage speech” and edited the Russian Delsartean journal, Voice and
Speech, in 1912.93 Sergei Volkonsky, director of the Imperial Theatres from 1899 to
1901, popularized Delsarte’s ideas in lectures and articles beginning in 1910 and
published two Delsartean books in 1913, The Expressive Word and The Expressive
Person (“Volkonsky” 101–102). The numerous illustrations in these volumes fea-
ture classical statues and frescoes by Raphael and Michelangelo as examples for
taxonomies of gesture, indicating that just as Russia was undergoing radical
political and aesthetic changes, Volkonsky advocated classical ideals and mod-
ernist art. Volkonsky combined enthusiasms for Delsartism and modernist
performance experiments and supported the innovations of Konstantin
Stanislavsky and Sergei Diaghilev, a gesture that contributed to his loss of the
directorship of the Imperial Theatres (“Volkonsky” 101–103). Following the revo-
lution in 1917, Stanislavsky asked Volkonsky to teach vocal and rhythmic exercises
at the Bolshoi Opera and Moscow Art Theatre studios, and Vladimir Gardin,
director of the First State Cinema School (VGIK), invited him to teach Delsartean
performance technique (“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 50, “Volkonsky” 103).94 At the
new school, Gardin, Kuleshov, Vasili Ilyin, and Valentin Turkin, all early innova-
tors in Russian cinema, designed experiments to explore Delsartean taxonomies of
expressive gesture and apply them to silent film.
Kuleshov recognized, particularly in Intolerance (1916), the Delsartean ges-
tures Griffith’s actors had studied at Denishawn: “The ‘psychological work’ of
joints in films was pioneered by D. W. Griffith who made tremendous progress,
having undoubtedly used the studies of Delsarte . . . as a starting point.”95
“Griffithian acting,” according to Kuleshov, involves “joint work” and “complex
movements of their [the actors’] whole bodies” rather than the exaggerated ges-
tures and “elementary grimaces” frequenting early film. He produced a cine-
matic adaptation of Delsartean taxonomies and theories of the body at the
Kuleshov Workshop, founded in 1920: “The basic purpose of classifying all the
bodily movements as normal, excentric, and concentric, and the combination of
these, must be learned by the film actor.”96 All workshop members, from editors
to directors, practiced Kuleshov’s method for training film actors, or “models,”
as he called them, adopting a word that had been applied to generations of
posers. Models first broke down the “task” into specific “body-attitudes” that
demonstrated physical economy and expressed emotion (Kuleshov 102). Kuleshov
taught them to consult Delsarte’s charts of nine poses corresponding to specific
emotional expressions and map “the movement of each joint” along Delsarte’s
“three fundamental axes” of the body (Kuleshov 111). The “spatial, metric web”
they created helped the actor perform these precise attitudes according to “a
POSING MODERNISM 93
fundamental metrical rhythm” that Kuleshov often set by a metronome (Kuleshov

104). Delsarte had defined rhythm as “the form of movement” and a primary
source for the emotional code of a gesture, just as Stebbins taught statue posers
to establish “rhythm of movement in harmony with character of statue or emo-
tion depicted” (Delsarte Expression 261, 459–460). A feature of the transitions
between poses and the emotional pulse of the statue/character type, rhythm was
also prominent in the syncopation of stillness and movement characteristic of
statue posing. Kuleshov’s vision of the performing human body builds on
Delsarte’s idea that every body part, every joint, has an expressive and
psychological function.
Contrary to the critical commonplace that Kuleshov’s montage theory was
unrelated to his actor training method, montage is surprisingly rooted in his
conception of the jointed, posed, expressive Delsartean body.97 The VGIK
experiments with the division of the human body into emotive parts gave rise
to the idea of montage as film technology’s method for cutting, isolating,
combining, and organizing the actor’s movements, as Gardin, Kuleshov’s men-
tor, reveals in his memoirs from 1912 to 1921: “That is how my first thoughts
arose on the possibilities of montage combinations and on the conversion of
acting to the expressive movement of the parts of the actor’s body and to the
condition of objects symbolizing the actions of man” (“Kuleshov’s Experiments”
52). Gardin presents montage as the cinematic way of transforming “acting,” or
the performance of mimetic actions copying life, into the “expressive movement”
of body “parts,” just as Delsartean charts carved the body into emotive organs
in nine positions (see figure 2.2). The technique of cutting and recombining
filmstrips was initially a strategy for avoiding untenable acting styles, particu-
larly those of “theatrical ‘sufferers,’” which were, according to Kuleshov, “poor
material for celluloid” (Kuleshov 100). He hoped montage would transform the
body into the condition of a still object, like any other prop on the screen, but
one that symbolizes human actions without the large emoting Kuleshov found
in Stanislavsky’s style. Due to the “sufferers” that people Delsartean manuals
(see figure 2.4), it might seem that Kuleshov would reject all Delsartean teach-
ings, but the seemingly scientific charts of body parts that appealed to Kuleshov
always coexisted uneasily with emotive posers in the varied Delsartean
tradition.
Kuleshov extended the early work of the VGIK in his own montage experi-
ments, yet his first published statement on montage resembles Gardin’s memoirs
and reveals the influence of Delsarte and mythic posing on his ideas of cinematic
composition:
The ideal shots are those that look like the flat and primitive paintings on
antique vases. . . . Each sphere of creative endeavour has a major vehicle for
getting its message across. Very few film-makers (apart from the Americans)
realize that the artistic vehicle of the cinema is the rhythmic succession of
motionless shots or short sequences conveying motion, i.e., the technique
known as montage.98
Kuleshov’s emphasis on montage as the syntactic structure of film, the “shot-

sign” that supersedes the content or action, became famous. Kuleshov’s “ideal”
shot is nearly motionless, like “the flat and primitive paintings on antique
vases,” the Delsartean statue poses of such figures, or the modern dance chore-
ography derived from the flat rather than croisé representations of the body in
classical art. Kuleshov’s claim that too much action or movement is alien to
film’s “artistic vehicle” references the fact that film technology projects a series
of still, posed images in succession so that viewers experience the illusion of a
moving figure.99 In fact, Delsartean posing imagined a “rhythmic succession of
motionless shots,” predicting the tension between the perception of motion
and the stillness of each constitutive frame, before it could be realized in cine-
matic technology. Delsartean performance technique appealed to Kuleshov in
that it trained film actors to imagine their performance as a sequence of
rhythmic poses that could be matched, through the metronome, to the rhythm
of the cuts.
The experiments conducted at the Kuleshov Workshop demonstrate the
importance of a still, posed Delsartean body to avoid interference with montage.
Yampolsky lists six of these experiments, taken from Kuleshov’s application to the
“Photographic and Cinematographic Section of the Artistic Sector of the Moscow
Regional Political Education Committee”:
1. a dance, filmed from one place—10 metres

2. a dance, filmed using montage—10 metres
3. the dependence of the model actor’s experience on the causes of that
experience . . .
4. the arbitrary combination of various scenes of action into a single
composition—13 metres [the “created geography” experiment]
5. the arbitrary combination of the parts of different people’s bodies
and the creation through montage of the desired model actor . . .
[the “created man” experiment]
6. the uniform movement of the eyes of a model actor—2 metres
(“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 58)
POSING MODERNISM 95
As Yampolsky points out, “The history of the cinema has preserved the memory
of only two of these experiments”: “created man” and “created geography”
(“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 59). All are related to Delsartism. Kuleshov described
the experiment known as the “created man” (no. 5) as consisting of splicing
together images of different women’s body parts to “depict a girl who did not
exist in nature.”100 The experiment was derived from the divisible, jointed
Delsartean body, and through it, Kuleshov demonstrated that montage functions
as the ligaments of the film, supersedes any theatrical notion of character, and
makes cinematic movement and meaning possible. The “created geography”
experiment (no. 4) similarly spliced images from different locations to create “an
arbitrary earthly terrain” (Art 137).
The dance studies (nos. 1 and 2) reinforce the relationship between early film
and dance, directing and choreography, and although forgotten by film history,
Kuleshov’s theoretical writings reference them repeatedly. He detailed the results
of these experiments in another early description of montage: “Let us try and split
the dance in the shooting process, now filming the dancer’s legs, now her head,
eyes, arms and so on, and edit the pieces to create a certain rhythm: then we shall
get the desired screen impression” (“Banner” 42). Truly cinematic dance could
never simply be a film recording of a performance (no. 1) but must create a new
performance through montage (no. 2). The last experiment on the proposal (no. 6)
adopted the exercises in eye movement that Delsarte himself exhibited from 1850
to 1870, a sequence of excentric, normal, and concentric movements charted in
numerous Delsarte manuals (see figure 2.2). The third experiment produced the
famous “Kuleshov effect”; he intercut the same shot of Ivan Mosjoukin’s still
face with images of a bowl of soup, a dead woman, and a child at play. Audience
assumptions that the actor had a different expression appropriate to the counter-
shot, as if he were looking at the soup, woman, and child, demonstrated the pre-
dominance of montage as a source of filmic meaning, as many critics have noted.
But the “Kuleshov effect” also confirmed the success of his Delartean acting
method in which the performer’s body, dead or alive, becomes a posed object
among bowls of soup, with montage working like cinematic joints.
Through the Kuleshov Workshop, Delsarte-inspired acting and montage the-
ories influenced the next generation of filmmakers and performers, including
Sergei Eisenstein. Preserving many aspects of Kuleshov’s teachings, Eisenstein
rejected what he called “European acting,” based on the emotional transforma-
tions of a face, and claimed that the cinema requires “cut acting” and “disinte-
grated acting.”101 Both incorporate attitudes and Kuleshov’s Delsartean divisions
of the body for montage representation. Of “cut acting,” Eisenstein claims,
“Replacing one changing face with a whole scale of facial types of varying moods
affords a far more acutely expressive result than does the changing surface, too
receptive and devoid of organic resistance, of any single professional actor’s face”
(“Ideogram” 42). Eisenstein presents the posed face as a type and an object and
suggests that montage cuts, rather than facial expressions, represent emotion. He
describes “disintegrated acting” in a death scene: “The whole process of the death
agony was disintegrated into the solo performance of each member playing its
own role: the role of the leg . . . arms . . . head” (“Ideogram” 43). Eisenstein’s ideal
performance builds on the Delsartean analysis of the body into parts and imagines
the solo of each organ.
Distinguishing his own montage theory from that of his teacher, Eisenstein
argued that Kuleshov misunderstood montage as “linkage” rather than “collision”
(“Ideogram” 36). Eisenstein’s “dialectical,” “intellectual,” and “overtonal” montage
stressed an opposition of two shots or a conflict between the frame of the shot and
the object within it. Whereas Kuleshov emphasized creative combination,
Eisenstein focused on the creative collision of body parts and landscapes. These
modes are not mutually exclusive, especially given the interpretive freedom of the
film viewer, and Eisenstein’s work reveals Kuleshov’s influence even in his last film,
Ivan the Terrible Part II (1946). The story of the cruel sixteenth-century Muscovite
tsar culminates in a song-and-dance scene filmed according to Kuleshov’s pre-
scripts for cinematic dance. The Oprichnina, Ivan’s secret police force, dance rau-
cously at a banquet, led by Fyodor Basmanov wearing a mask and crown. Fast
cutting, montage effects, and bodies rushing through the frame enhance the energy
of the dance. Eisenstein filmed the stamping footwork of Russian folk dances with
close-ups on the feet, while low-angle shots emphasize the height of leaps and the
power of the Oprichnina. Basmanov is especially enlarged in the frame, and the
mask work emphasizes his unstable identity. He removes and addresses the mask
in song, and the comedy in the conversation between man and object is enhanced
when the mask peeks off screen. At the end of the carnivalesque dance, the tsar’s
traitorous cousin is bestowed with royal garments and mistakenly killed in the
assassination that was to have put him on the throne.
Modernist studies often cite film montage and its reorganization of temporal
and visual experience as a central figure for modernity.102 From poetry’s imagist
juxtapositions to narrative styles depicting a camera-like subject splicing auditory
and visual stimuli in a city (as in Ulysses, a text that interested Eisenstein), literary
techniques have been associated with cinematic montage, often in vague ways.
Montage has been used as an analogy for the cutting, splicing, and fragmentation
of the modernist body and for discontinuous jump-cut or machine-like move-
POSING MODERNISM 97
ments. That Kuleshov’s celebrated montage theory emerged from the same
Delsartean source as his “anachronism” of an actor-training method should
encourage film theorists and modernists more generally to reevaluate designa-
tions of the modern and outmoded, new and classical. Kuleshov’s interest in the
posed Delsartean body places him at the center of international modernism’s con-
cerns with bodily expression, evident in film, dance, theater, and popular
performance. Delsartean bodies represent classical ideals but are analyzed into
organs, gestures, and poses using the language of science, if not always the methods.
This conception of the jointed, mobile human body influenced innovations from
the folding theater seat to cinematic montage and shaped a prominent kinesthetic
of modernism.
In the New York of Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), fashionable society arranged
semiprivate attitude performances with women posing to “expensive music.”
[Lily’s] vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food than dress-
making and upholstery, found eager expression in the disposal of draperies,
the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights and shadows. Her dramatic
interest was roused by the choice of subjects. . . . But the keenest of all was
the exhilaration of displaying her own beauty under new aspect: of showing
that her loveliness was no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all
emotions to fresh forms of grace.103
Among the tableaux at the entertainment was Lily Bart’s solo pose as Sir Joshua
Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd.” Reynolds had painted the famous portrait Lady Hamilton
as a Bacchante, and the echoes of Lyon Hamilton’s art are present in Lily’s “disposal
of draperies” and “study of attitudes” (see figure 1.4). Wharton’s description of Lily
“shaping all emotions to fresh forms of grace” could quote a Delsartean manual.
Just as the pose of Goethe’s Proserpina represents her fixity in hell, Lily’s solo begins
her own descent toward death and her final attitude, “with motionless hands and
calm unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart” (Mirth 345). Wharton uses
the fad to reveal a shallow, frivolous society that attempts to achieve “the effect of
a closing tableau” or “one of those ‘costume-plays’ in which the protagonists walk
through the passions without displacing a drapery” (Mirth 202). Wharton’s allu-
sions to tableaux demonstrate the popularity of the form in modernism, even as
she presented the pose as deadly.
Discussions of modernist bodies often emphasize Wharton’s critique of the
elitist pose, Marinetti’s “roaring cars,” Chaplin’s “robotic” walk, or other images
of mechanical movement. Also overstated is the less popular rival view that
modernism imagines a “whole” body in opposition to the machine age. Hillel

Schwartz identifies “torque” as the “kinaesthetic” of the twentieth century; a
“model of motion as a spiral at whose radiant center was a mystical solar plexus”
or a “spiraling outward from a soulful center.”104 He argues against the idea that
modern industrialized life, with its “assembly lines, time clocks . . . silent films,
ragtime music and Cubism,” fostered experiences of isolated, punctuated
moments and fragmentation (“Torque” 105). Instead, he describes a kinesthetic
that insists on the correspondence between “the bodiliness of the inner core and
the outer expressions of the physical self ” (“Torque” 104). This core, center, or
“solar plexus,” imagined by Delsarte, Stebbins, and Isadora Duncan, had assumed
a politico-anatomical place as “centre of action and sympathy” early in the
nineteenth century, a centrality strengthened by the neurophysiological experi-
ments of David Ferrier (1876). Schwartz suggests that torsion characterized “most
if not all of the central movement experiences” of the twentieth century, citing
the zipper, handwriting, finger painting, and even the paragraph as evidence
(“Torque” 108). While Schwartz is correct that Delsartism proposed an expressive
body, this body expressed not only a “soulful center” but also the bodily tech-
niques and technologies of modernity.
Rather than spirals or machines, the modernist kinesthetic is best represented
by statue posing, the shift between stasis and motion that can encompass both
torque and robot, as well as a sequence of still film frames that offer the illusion of
motion. The statue pose imagines a method for ordering human experiences that
does not fully separate nature from technology, wholeness from fragmentation, or
body from soul. Delsartean bodies gestured toward classicism but were not entirely
removed from modernity into a realm of nature or idealism, as is evident in terms
such as “thermometer of the will.” Delsartean analyses of the body into its joints,
organs, and gestures was part of the appeal for early innovators in montage theory,
and the influence of Delsartean theories of expression on film further troubles the
usual dichotomies between the natural, live dancer and the mediated cinematic
body. The “modernist focus on the isolated moment” in cinema is also captured in
bodily poses within film frames or on dance stages.105 A long genealogy of posing
clarifies modernist performance theory and emphasizes the centrality of the bodies
that build, experience, and drive Marinetti’s car and other machines of modernity.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, the fascination with a Delsartean
display of “the passions” was fading, but attitudes continued to influence gestural
expression in dance and silent film. Even the earlier, more simplified varieties of
Delsartean self-cultivation indicate ideas of bodily motion, mental experience,
and subjectivity that modernism would more thoroughly engage. Delsartism
POSING MODERNISM 99
imagined a malleable selfhood, which, after serious practice of statue posing,

would assume the poses “unconsciously” (Hour 101), as “second nature,” a phrase
that predicts Stanislavsky’s method acting (Hour 11–12). Genevieve Stebbins insists
that “what we [Delsarteans] are aiming for is unconscious cerebration, not con-
scious” (Delsarte Expression 91). Bolstered by modern psychology and psychoanal-
ysis, terms such as unconscious, second nature, and inner technique appear in
Delsartean literature, acting theory, and the writings of modern dancers and film-
makers. Studies of Russian silent film and montage theory are generally thought to
constitute a distinct field from research on American modern dance, which is sep-
arate from the physical culture movement and popular entertainment. Only by
foregrounding overlooked continuities between aesthetic forms does a common
Delsartean genealogy emerge for performances in dance, film, and popular enter-
tainment. Yet another sphere of Delsartean influence is evident in the poetic reci-
tations and monodramatic mixed forms presented at the Delsarte Matinees.
Delsartism encouraged the culture of solo recitation that was already an impor-
tant pedagogical tool and domestic entertainment in the nineteenth century, for
which monodramas and dramatic monologues were the genres of choice.
Modernist writers coming of age at the height of the Delsarte movement, like
Wharton, responded not only to the ways popular performance posed ideas of
gendered subjectivity but also to the uses Delsartism made of literature, especially
the framing of literary texts as scripts for solo performance.
3. Positioning Genre
The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures of Recitation
. . . only its verbal shell can be printed . . . . Vocal modulations, motions, and attitudes, the move-
ments of living men and women, are all implied in the conception of a drama. . . . The same is
true of the monologue.
—Samuel Silas Curry, Browning and the Dramatic Monologue (1908)1
Samuel Silas Curry was dean of the Boston School of Expression, teaching a cur-
riculum influenced by François Delsarte’s theories, when he wrote the first
full-length book on the dramatic monologue. He argues that the text is only a
“verbal shell” that implies a voice, “attitudes,” and “movements,” which must be
interpreted for oral presentation using Delsartean techniques. Providing further
evidence for the monodrama as a formal precedent, Curry points out that the
term dramatic monologue “occurs rarely,” and Edward Dowden’s “recent life of
Browning” used “the short monodrama” (BDM 11, 110).2 Poetic recitations were
among the solo performances included with statue posing, tableaux, and drills in
Delsarte Matinees and often got top billing because of the respectability of the
form. Delsartism and a related elocutionary reform movement reinvigorated prac-
tices of recitation that had been common during nineteenth-century experiments
with the dramatic monologue. The family entertainment of parlor poetry moved
from the drawing room to the Delsartean stage, and poetic recitation became a
pedagogical tool for improving the “self,” as well as perfecting elocutionary skills.
To recite well was an indication of character, class, and above all, personality, in a
100
POSITIONING GENRE 101
culture of recitation that shaped the institutionalization of English studies, tech-

niques of literary interpretation, and modernist preoccupations with the expres-
sion and sources of emotion in art.
If Delsartism’s influence on the solos of modern dance is often misunderstood
and its presence in silent film rarely recognized, scholars of modernist literature
are mostly unaware of the movement. Yet, Delsartean literary recitations and inter-
pretive strategies were codified in university curriculums at many institutions,
including Curry’s Boston School of Expression and Genevieve Stebbins’s
New York School of Expression, both of which specifically advertised their
Departments of Literature.3 “Expression” designated a short-lived discipline that
incorporated Delsartism and emerged as the twentieth-century university was
redistributing responsibilities for teaching rhetoric, elocution, and literature. The
academic discipline fostered a popular “expressive culture movement,” perhaps
most visible in the Chautauqua lecture circuits inspired by the Chautauqua
Summer School of Expression held in New York from 1894 to 1928. The British
“verse-recitation movement” was less directly influenced by Delsartism, but it
both absorbed and influenced many aspects of American expressive culture.4
Britain’s liberal educational reforms reinvigorated elocutionary training and pro-
duced institutions such as Elsie Fogerty’s Central School of Speech Training and
Dramatic Art (1906) and the Poetry Recital Society (1909). Future modernists in
both countries were introduced to literature within cultures of recitation that
sponsored performances in classrooms, parlors, bookshops, and lecture circuits.
Reading practices and methods of literary analysis based on interpretation for
performance were codified by schools of expression and disseminated through
cultures of recitation. Curry’s classes, like his book on the dramatic monologue,
taught students to approach a poem by determining the vocal tones, gestures, and
bodily placement that would best reveal their own interpretation to an audience.
Even if they were not giving an oral performance, students considered how a poem
indicated a speaking voice and body; that is, they learned techniques of kinesthetic
analysis like those advocated by Vernon Lee’s psychological aesthetics. Dramatic
monologues, preferred by Curry for their representation of characters as actually
speaking, occupied an important position within the reading and recitation prac-
tices that accompanied the rise of modernism. Although the form’s influence on
modernist poets has long been recognized, this is the first study to position the
dramatic monologue in relation to Delsarte-derived cultures of recitation.
A common critical stance describes the monologue as an apprenticeship for young
poets that was discarded at maturity, but it is based primarily on the careers of
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and does not accurately represent their continued
interest in the form or the monologue experiments of poets such as Charlotte

Mew, Amy Lowell, and H.D.5 This chapter considers performances of dramatic
monologues in classrooms, bookshops, and various modernist venues and their
influence on other forms of poetry. Dramatic monologues are imagined solo per-
formances, but they also enabled poets to star in readings of their own work. The
cultural uses of genre can change; as Delsartean practices of recitation faded, the
dramatic monologue’s function as solo performance shifted, even as New Critics,
partially in response to the interpretive techniques of expression, began to read
every poem as a dramatic monologue.
Mew, Eliot, Pound, and Lowell engaged transatlantic cultures of recitation in a
variety of ways: performing their own poetry, organizing readings and lecture
tours, or bemoaning the Chautauqua Circuits and Poetry Recital Societies.6 All
used dramatic monologues in antimodern explorations of myth to experiment
with new ways of notating voice on the page and develop strategies for guiding a
reading and hearing of a poem. As I demonstrate the continued influence of the
monodrama and other solo performances on modernist monologues, I argue that
many of the basic tenets of modernist poetics were responses to cultures of recita-
tion. That they are not recognized as such is due both to the current obscurity of
Delsartism and its former popularity; references to “expression,” “personality,” and
“vocal culture” would have been understood in relation to Delsartism and the dis-
cipline of expression in the modernist period without additional explanation, but
later critics miss the significance of such terms. Modernist doctrines of imperson-
ality were partial rejections of the Delsartean emphasis on fashioning personality
through recitation. Other central modernist principles expanded ideas from
expression: the objective correlative drew from the mask of the dramatic mono-
logue; the mythical method reframed and updated typological hermeneutics; and
polyphonic prose owes much to Delsarte-influenced elocutionary reforms.
I. Expression, Recitation, and Literary Interpretation
At yesterday morning’s session of the Elocutionists’ Convention . . . Mrs. Elizabeth Mansfield

Irving of Toledo read Mrs. Browning’s “Mother and Poet” [a dramatic monologue spoken by
Laura Savio, an Italian poet and patriot] most acceptably.
In the afternoon came an unusual crowd to hear what would be said for and against that mys-
terious thing, the Delsarte system. . . . After the smoke of the Delsartean battle had cleared a
little, Mrs. Nella Brown Pond of Boston recited a dramatic poem by T. B. Aldrich and was
loudly applauded.
—“Elocutionists and Delsarte,” New York Times, July 1, 1892
Although elocution is no longer central to studies of literature, it had been a vital

aspect of the classical education of elite men for centuries and was part of the
pedagogical milieu that trained modernist poets. In England, the so-called
Elocution Movement of the eighteenth century attempted to elevate the English
vernacular, establish a standard pronunciation, and explore the relationship bet-
ween language and society.7 Elocution was linked in the United States to the idea
that democratic citizens would debate the problems of the nation and must
develop their “powers of expression” and “individual character” to do so; Curry
claimed, “Freedom and oratory have ever gone hand in hand.”8 In the twentieth
century, new disciplinary divisions dispersed skills once considered part of elocu-
tion to other fields, including the new English departments teaching composi-
tion, literature, and rhetoric (the study of persuasion) (Expressionism 60–61). For
professors of elocution forced to argue for their field’s specificity and rigor,
Delsartism provided claims to a positive science with supporting charts and
moral and religious underpinnings. Combining elocutionary reforms with
Delsartism’s focus on expression of the passions, the discipline of expression pro-
moted oratory as literary interpretation. Departments of expression do not sur-
vive in the contemporary university, but the cultures of recitation and interpretive
techniques they promoted were an important context for modernist poetry.
The academic study of expression originated in Boston shortly after Steele
Mackaye gave his first lecture on Delsarte there in 1871. Boston University became
the first American institution to open a separate School of Oratory (1873) pro-
moting a “higher estimate of the value of oratorical training,” and its new dean,
Lewis B. Monroe, had been among the signatories to Mackaye’s lecture invita-
tion.9 Monroe was most impressed by Mackaye’s concern with the communica-
tion of ideas between speaker and audience, rather than the prescriptive exercises
focused on pitch, tone, and speed in previous models of elocutionary training
(Expressionism 63). Monroe invited Mackaye to join the oratory faculty, a diverse
group that included Samuel Silas Curry, the Shakespearean scholar Henry N.
Hudson, and Alexander Graham Bell, who lectured on “Defects of Public
Speakers” and invented the telephone in 1875 in a Boston University laboratory.10
The oratory curriculum overlapped with current English departments, featuring
lectures on Charles Dickens by Moses True Brown, Shakespeare by Robert R.
Raymond, and “Eloquence and Oratory” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Monroe
taught classes on “Expressive Reading” and “Gesture and Oratorical Action,” and
the final examinations were public performances. The Boston Evening Transcript
(May 16, 1879) describes: “Tremont Temple was completely filled yesterday after-
noon, the occasion being the closing exercises for the year of the Boston
University School of Oratory.”11 The program resembled a Delsarte Matinee,

with “songs,” a speech entitled “Elocution as a Means of Culture,” “aesthetic
gymnastics and gesture” including statue posing, and literary recitations from
such works as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells,” and
Dion Boucicault’s melodrama London Assurance.
When Monroe died in 1879, the Boston University School of Oratory was
already a renowned center for the study of “vocal culture,” a term suggesting the
broad social impact of oratorical training.12 Many graduates had built successful
careers, and Monroe’s most famous students, Henrietta Hovey and Genevieve
Stebbins, popularized Delsartism through performances, lecture demonstrations,
and studio classes, primarily for women. The trustees of Boston University deter-
mined to dissolve the School of Oratory after Monroe’s death, most likely because
it had become too popular among those interested in “personal culture” or self-
cultivation rather than aspiring professors of oratory. Boston University’s president,
William F. Warren, claimed the school was an “immense” success, but it was not
meeting its original aim of training students for “professorships of elocution and
oratory in colleges, professional schools, and other institutions of learning.”13 He
offered the School of Oratory name to Monroe’s “first assistant,” Anna Baright, but
she opened the Boston School of Elocution and Expression in October 1879, a title
that reflects the discipline’s shift toward expression.14 In 1882, Baright married
Samuel Silas Curry, another former student of Monroe and Stebbins, who had been
teaching elocution in Boston University’s School of All Sciences (Transformations
70).15 In 1885, Curry took his students to Baright’s school and assumed leadership
of the merged program under a new name, Boston School of Expression.16 He
believed, like Monroe, that elocution and oratory had been debased by formulaic
voice training methods, but Curry’s preferred term, expression, came to dominate
the new discipline.
Curry’s fourteen books on expression were published by its designated press,
Boston’s Expression Company. Like Delsarte, Curry identified three “languages,”
but rather than speech, song, and gesture, Curry’s categories were vocality, written
verbal language, and gesture.17 In a seeming paraphrase of Delsarte’s “law of
correspondence,” which Curry connected to Swedenborg, he summarized his own
method: “All expression obeys the same law; it comes FROM WITHIN OUTWARD,
from the centre to the surface, from a hidden source to outward manifesta-
tion. . . . Every action of face or hand, every modulation of voice, is simply an out-
ward effect of an inward condition.”18 Curry maintained Delsarte’s individualism,
criticizing the prescriptive oratorical training of the “Imitative School” for failing to
“develop a man’s instincts, character, and personality” or recognize that “the
energies of the soul must be aroused as the direct cause of all the actions of the
body” (Province 308). A chapter of Curry’s Province of Expression (1891) details
Delsartism and acknowledges that Delsarte “widened the field of investigation; that
he led men to study the whole man in expression” (359). Yet Curry contradicts this
praise when he distinguishes his work from what he calls Delsarte’s “Speculative
School” because it postulates “artificial divisions of man’s mind and body and their
languages” (Province xiv). Curry presents Delsarte’s gestural training as the most
useful element of the system as it “showed that in any part of the body all motion
was meaningless unless it came from and ended in an attitude” (Province 357).
Curry’s anxiety about the popularity of Delsartism among women partially explains
his conflicted response; he insisted the training was never the “attitudinizing and
posé positions,” a “perversion of some of the exercises mixed with the common cal-
listhenic movements” practiced by “young lady pupils” (Province 355–356).
Curry included Delsartism in the school’s course of instruction, which listed
exercises in “Physical Training,” “Artistic Respiration,” “Aesthetic Gymnastics
(Flexibility of Muscle. Rhythm of Motion. Opposition of Organs.),” “Gesture,” and
“Philosophy of Expression—Delsarte’s.”19 To distinguish expression from the pos-
ing practiced by “young lady pupils,” however, Curry focused on “vocal expres-
sion” and linked his work to literary classics, as two of his book titles indicate:
Lessons in Vocal Expression (1895) and Classic Selections from the Best Authors (1888).
The goal of the latter is “to furnish the greatest variety of examples for the illustra-
tion of the various steps in vocal expression” and “to secure selections from the
greatest number of the best authors.”20 These are primarily nineteenth-century
authors, with Robert Browning as the most widely represented, and poetry pre-
dominates, especially dramatic monologues. In 1891, very early in the history of
criticism on the form, Curry celebrates the “Monologue and Public Reading” as
better attuned to “the higher artistic requirements of the age” than the drama
(Province xv). In his antitheatricality, he describes the actor as merely a “person-
ator,” whereas the “reader or dramatic speaker” can “suggest more points of view
than the most difficult part in any drama.”21 In Browning and the Dramatic
Monologue (1908), he further emphasizes the intellectualism of expression in con-
trast to a theater that had been “corrupted into a spectacular show, into something
for the eye rather than the mind” (BDM 260). He defines the dramatic monologue
as a “new literary form” but a “new and parallel aspect of dramatic art” that could
replace the theater (BDM 11).
Curry’s particular interest in the dramatic monologue and his approach to
literary analysis are clarified by the pedagogical second part of his book on
Browning: “Dramatic Rendering of the Monologue.” He describes all texts as
records of speech: “The word, then, in all cases, implies the living voice . . . the
better the writing, the greater the suggestion of the modulations of voice and body,
gesture and ‘natural action’ ” (BDM 135–136). The dramatic monologue is the ideal
genre, Curry claims: “As the expression of a living character, it necessarily requires
the natural signs of feeling, the modulations of the voice, and the actions of the
body” (BDM 133). In a statement that anticipates later critics’ emphasis on dramatic
irony, Curry states that the form “portrays and interprets an individual uncon-
sciously revealing himself ” (BDM 261). Curry taught students to read this revela-
tion of the individual speaker through their own personal, subjective responses.
They were to imagine the vocal and gestural expressions of the speaker just as if
they were preparing the text for recitation. Focusing on figurative language, meter,
and line length, they considered the “impression” the text evoked in them and how
they might best communicate their personal experience to an audience through
their voice and body (BDM 148). They avoided discussions of the author’s biog-
raphy or intention, which would distract from their unique interpretation.22
Although Curry emphasized vocal expression and textual analysis throughout
his career, his discussion of the dramatic monologue in 1908 details the “attitudes”
the reader should perform and even suggests the primacy of bodily expression and
reception.23 Curry states that “gesture,” which he associates with “natural action,”
“appeals directly to the eye and precedes all speech” (BDM 135–136). As in Saussure’s
structural linguistics, he defines words as “conventional symbols” but claims
“modulations of the voice are natural signs” (BDM 147).24 Whereas words are
“verbal shells” or conventional records of speaking bodies, he suggests that both
gestures and vocal intonations express meaning naturally. Readers also respond
bodily to language, an idea shared by Vernon Lee and others in the field of
psychological aesthetics: “The impression received from each successive idea must
be so vivid as to dominate the rhythm of breathing, and the expansion of other
actions of the body” (BDM 148). Just as Lee emphasizes the effects of meter on
bodies, Curry claims that readers misunderstand meter as “too much a matter of
print. Few recognize the fact that metre is necessarily a part of vocal rather than
verbal expression, and can only be suggested in print” (BDM 196). For Curry, as for
Lee, written language must be translated into a voice, and literature must be read
for its “suggestion” of a body behind the word and its effects on the reading body.
That Curry is not among Lee’s circle promoting psychological aesthetics is further
evidence that kinesthetic readings attuned to the role of the body in aesthetic
response were prevalent in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Boston was recognized as the center of the study of expression, but schools
combining classical rhetoric with Curry’s approach to literary analysis and
emphasizing recitation opened all over the United States at the turn of the century.
In addition to Stebbins’s New York School of Expression (1893), the Columbia School
of Oratory opened in Chicago in 1890 and was renamed the Columbia School of
Expression in 1904. Steele Mackaye was associated with the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts, and Emerson College in Boston was once the Emerson College
of Oratory. The Chautauqua Summer School of Expression (1894–1928) attracted
thousands seeking personal development and vocal culture and inspired the
“Chautauqua Lecture Circuit” as a “traveling roadshow” (Expressionism 73).25 Picking
up on Curry’s claims that “self-activity must be awakened if vocal expression is to be
improved,”26 Delsartean self-cultivation began to emphasize recitation, among its
other solo performance forms, as a way to improve speech, health, and personality.
As Julia Walker claims, “Encompassing poetry and drama, music and dance, the
expressive culture movement purported that, through these forms of artistic self-ex-
pression, one could . . . experience one’s body as an agent of meaning-making once
again” (Expressionism 70–71). The popular interest in recitation was rampant, but
even the fashionable Chautauquas were bolstered by institutional authority; shortly
after becoming the director of Chautauqua, Solomon Henry Clark was invited to
assume the leadership of the Department of Public Speaking at the University of
Chicago (Expressionism 73). Institutions more conventional than “schools of expres-
sion” were also interested in hiring teachers to train students to read and analyze
literature as a script to be interpreted for performance, with modulations of voice
and gesture chosen to express the meaning of the text.
A parallel culture of recitation and elocutionary reform emerged in Britain at
the turn of the twentieth century. The British movement was less directly prompted
by Delsartism, but as chapter 2 details, Henrietta Hovey’s lectures and perfor-
mances had been positively received in London from 1886 until 1889. She taught
Delsartism to performers from Drury Lane and Covent Garden, vocal expression
to London’s clergy, and “personal culture” to society elites.27 The departure of
Edmund Russell, Hovey’s partner, from the “salons of Belgravia” in 1889 warranted
a notice in the New York Times (March 24, 1889) that claimed he achieved “extraor-
dinary success” and “numbers among his pupils some prominent people in English
society.” Articles on Delsartism were published in the London Times, London
Homeopathic World, and London Journal of Education, among others. Performers
who had trained in Delsartean techniques at schools of expression, such as
Mrs. William Calvin Chilton (the monodramatist), performed on both sides of
the Atlantic, and British performers also toured the United States. The culmina-
tion of the work of actress Florence Farr and poet W. B. Yeats to develop a method
of verse recitation was Farr’s 1907 American tour with five engagements in Boston,
the capital of expression.28 Farr and Yeats began their collaboration in 1899 and
appeared together throughout the 1900s, with Farr accompanying her recitation
on a psaltery, a stringed instrument built by Arnold Dolmetsch (“Music” 57).29 She
describes her method as “song in speech” in The Music of Speech (1909), a widely
discussed book that influenced Eliot, Pound, and Lowell.30
The British elocutionary reforms, like those of the United States, discarded the
mechanical rules and rote exercises common in oratorical training, as Mark
Morrisson reveals. The professor of elocution and clergyman Canon James Fleming
claimed, in The Art of Reading and Speaking (1896) that the goal must be “to make
none artificial or stilted, but to help all to be natural and real” (“Pure Voice” 28).
Similarly, a series of Education Department circulars from 1896 deplored elementary
schools for failing to teach proper speech, recitation, and expressive reading: “There
are too few signs in reading aloud of the individuality of expression which we call
‘intelligence’ ” (“Pure Voice” 30). In advice columns such as “How to Practise
Reading Aloud,” recitation is recommended as a precaution against “falling a victim
to consumption,” a disease Delsartism was said to cure.31 Concerns with individu-
alism, expression, intelligence, health, and the interpretation of literature charac-
terize transatlantic cultures of recitation. Morrisson focuses his discussion of British
elocutionary reform on the class-based fears provoked by the late Victorian expan-
sion of the British school system. With increasing numbers of working-class chil-
dren attending schools, anxieties about social mobility were expressed in fears that
the dialects, pronunciation, and diction of the lower classes would destroy “pure
English.”32 The remedy was to teach expressive reading and classic British literature,
according to the English Association, a prominent organization of professors, poli-
ticians, and “men-of-letters” (“Pure Voice” 29). One member of the English
Association warned in 1909 that the “debased dialect of the Cockney” was
“spreading,” and “in ten years’ time the English language will not be worth speaking”
(“Pure Voice” 30). The English Association was partially responsible for Henry
Newbolt’s famous report, The Teaching of English in England (1921), which claimed
that social class is distinguished by “a marked difference in modes of speech,” sug-
gested that all teacher training colleges require oral examinations, and linked “pride
in the national language” and literature to national security (“Pure Voice” 29–30).
The concern for elocution and “pure” English in Britain resulted in the Poetry
Recital Society, founded in 1909 and later called the Poetry Society, just as American
enthusiasm for expression was giving rise to Chautauquas, Delsarte Matinees, and
other venues for recitation. Newbolt was a vice president of the society, as well as
an education reformer, literary critic, and occasional performer (“Pure Voice”
29–31). The qualities of recitation recommended by the Poetry Society resemble
Curry’s rules for correct expression, as is clear in Lady Margaret Sackville’s inau-
gural address to the members: “There should be no striving from outside to pro-
duce a definite effect—the soul of the interpreter should be so possessed by the
poem that it follows it instinctively in every modulation and inflection as easily as
water flows between winding banks” (“Pure Voice” 32).33 Statements such as these
begin from a focus on the soul and inner impression but were easily aligned with
modernist doctrines of impersonality. Just as Curry presented the dramatic mono-
logue as an alternative to the theater, Sackville’s own antitheatricality is evident in
her claim, “The speaking of verse is not acting” (“Pure Voice” 32). Partially because
of the bias against popular melodrama and a desire to ensure that verse recitation
was respectable, she argued against the gestural expression emphasized in the
American movement: “I believe as little gesture should be used as possible, and
that, as a rule, the voice alone, provided it is flexible enough, is sufficiently effec-
tive” (“Pure Voice” 32). Poetry Society chapters and Junior Orders were established
throughout Britain to organize recitations for their elite membership. A system to
credential members was instituted, with an examination that included recitation
and a test of “general knowledge and appreciation of poetry,” primarily of
consecrated Victorians like Browning and Tennyson (“Pure Voice” 33–34). Results
of the examinations were published in the society’s journal, the Poetical Gazette.
Although the Poetry Society was “a culturally conservative foe of emerging
modernist poets,” Morrisson argues that it “helped them bring their work to the
public, extend their readership, and encouraged their interest in the speaking voice”
(“Pure Voice” 32). The seemingly incongruous pairing of the society with avant-garde
modernism is, for Morrisson, embodied in Harold Monro, a society member
(beginning in 1910) who also assisted the rise of modernist poetry, always empha-
sizing the relation between poetry and living speech. Although he was ambivalent
about the society’s elitism and conservative aesthetics, Monro supported its desire
to promote and disseminate poetry among the public.34 When asked to assume edi-
torship of the Poetical Gazette in 1912, he suggested a separate magazine but com-
promised on a joint issue under the title “The Poetry Review (in which is incorporated
the ‘Poetical Gazette’).” The arrangement lasted only a year, but the Review discussed
the work of modernists and was followed in 1913 by Monro’s independent Poetry
and Drama, a title reflecting his belief in the intersection of the genres. Also in 1913,
Monro founded the Poetry Bookshop as a center for verse recitation in Bloomsbury,
claiming in Poetry and Drama (December 1913):
We make a regular practice of reading poetry aloud, and any one who
wishes to stroll in and listen may do so. . . . We are absolutely certain that the
proper values of poetry can only be conveyed through its vocal interpreta-
tion by a sympathetic and qualified reader. Indeed so obvious does this
appear that we regard the books on sale in the shop merely as printed scores
for the convenience of refreshing the memory in hours of study or indo-
lence. . . . We hope that Poetry Bookshops will eventually be established in
all the principal towns of England.
(“Pure Voice” 38)
The opportunity for a listener to “stroll in” for biweekly readings at the affordable
price of three pence diverges from the Poetry Society’s elitism. As Morrisson points
out, the bookshop’s readers ranged from the young modernists Ezra Pound and
F. T. Marinetti, to established giants, W. B. Yeats and Walter de la Mare, and even
Henry Newbolt. Not limited to poets, other performers could practice and become
a “sympathetic and qualified reader.”
Monro, like Curry, advocates poetic analysis through recitation when he
defines books as “printed scores” and suggests that the “proper values” of a poem
are “conveyed through its vocal interpretation.” Both the practice of recitation and
the method of literary interpretation it promoted significantly influenced mod-
ernist poetry. Morrisson’s important project for situating modernist poetics within
British verse recitation focuses on Eliot and Pound, especially their notions of the
pure English, impersonality, and formal experimentation. The context must be
expanded through a consideration of Delsartism (already popular in the United
States before the poets moved to London), the discipline of expression, and the
dramatic monologue as its preferred literary form. The dramatic monologue was
not one of the experimental forms Morrisson suggests Eliot and Pound derived
from Monro’s impersonal practice of juxtaposing quotes from new poetry rather
than presenting his own critical opinion.35 Yet, the monologue was a staple for
expressive readers and an important vehicle through which the poets Charlotte
Mew and Amy Lowell, in addition to Eliot and Pound, worked to embody voices
and living speech.
II. Charlotte Mew: The Magdalene in “Madeleine

in Church”
Many years ago, buying, as was my custom, a copy of The Nation one Saturday morning,
I opened it eagerly to see if there might be a poem, and was electrified to find printed there
“The Farmer’s Bride” [by Charlotte Mew]. This poem I immediately committed to memory,
and a year or two later repeated it with enthusiasm to Harold Monro, who had recently opened
the Poetry Bookshop, with the avowed intention of publishing the work of young poets and
presenting them to a large audience.
—Alida Klementaski Monro, “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir” (1954)36
Alida Klementaski Monro, Harold Monro’s partner, organized the program of

readings at the Poetry Bookshop and regularly promoted the work of women
including Charlotte Mew, H.D., Amy Lowell, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning.37 Klementaski Monro recited Mew’s poems at the bookshop
and later convinced Monro to publish her book, The Farmer’s Bride (1916). This
publication is intertwined with cultures of recitation, both the bookshop’s public
readings and the private women’s salons where Mew performed her own poetry.
Mew, like Curry and the Monros, believed that poetry is understood only when
spoken aloud, and her monologues experiment with rhythm and other sound
effects in an attempt to invoke an aural experience.38 Mew was marginalized due
partially to her poverty and lesbianism, but her dramatic monologues were impor-
tant at a moment when women’s positions in relation to modernism were being
established.39 Her poems, praised by H.D., May Sinclair, Thomas Hardy, and
Virginia Woolf, adopt monodramatic features, including emotional apostrophes
and typological parallels that demonstrate continuities with nineteenth-century
poetics. Yet, her monologues and her performances of them, as well as the responses
of major organizers of modernism such as Pound, reveal how modernist poetics
were shaped by cultures of recitation.
Alida Klementaski was an actor and suffragist before she began organizing the
readings at the Poetry Bookshop. As Diana Collecott suggests, her skills as a per-
former made her a popular reader, while her experience in activism influenced her
support of women writers and collaborative approach to publishing their writing
(“Another Bloomsbury” 65–66). Cultures of recitation literally introduced
Klementaski and Monro; they met on March 14, 1913, when she was reading at a
“poets’ club dinner at the Café Monico.”40 After reciting “The Farmer’s Bride” to
Monro, she wrote to Mew asking for additional poems in hopes that the bookshop
might publish a volume. Klementaski Monro’s memoir relates that Mew self-
deprecatingly claimed that “no one would want to read them if they were pub-
lished” but sent “The Changeling” (“Memoir” vii). Klementaski Monro performed
“The Farmer’s Bride” and “The Changeling” at the Poetry Bookshop on Tuesday,
November 23, 1915, in a program that included the works of Harold Monro, John
Masefield, James Joyce, Eleanor Farjeon, and D. H. Lawrence (Friends 149). Mew
attended and was pleased with Klementaski Monro’s reading, especially her voice,
which she praised in a letter to Sydney Cockrell (Friends 151).
The voice was crucial to Mew, who claimed, “All verse gains by being spoken,
and mine particularly—I suppose because it’s rough—though my ideal is beauty”
(Friends 123).41 The roughness may be a reference to the metrical variety of her
lines or the monodramatic range of emotions; in another letter (January 4, 1917),
Mew defines poems as “witnesses” to feeling: “The quality of emotion” is the “first
requirement of poetry. . . . One has not only the cry but the gesture and the accent”
(Friends 104). She suggests that poetry must contain the three modes of expression
identified by Delsarte and replicated in Curry’s teachings: speech (the “cry”),
gesture or bodily expression, and vocality (“accent”). Corresponding to the mod-
ernist ideology that poetry must be read aloud, Mew’s poems emphasize voice
both thematically and through the use of dialects and aurally evocative syntax.
“The Farmer’s Bride,” the first poem performed by Klemantaski Monro, adopts an
accent often associated with Thomas Hardy’s Wessex dialects.42 The speaker
describes his wife, “too young maybe,” who was repulsed by “men-folk” and ran
away after they were married.43 They caught her and “turned the key,” but she
speaks only to her animals and rejects human language along with marriage. The
Farmer sympathetically states that she sleeps in the attic, “Alone, poor maid,” but
this tone belies his intense desire, which emerges near the end of the poem: “’Tis
but a stair / Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down, / The soft young down of her”
(Mew 18).
The other poem recited at the Poetry Bookshop, “The Changeling,” features
the voice of another young outsider, very like the “frightened fay” described by the
Farmer, but not explicitly gendered in the poem. Addressed to an absent “dear
Father, dear Mother,” “The Changeling” claims to have been “but half your child,”
and of his or her own refusal to speak, the child explains:
Because in the long, still dusks of Spring

You can hear the whole world whispering:
The shy green grasses making love,
The feathers grow on the dear, grey dove,
.......................
Everything there is to hear
In the heart of hidden things,
But not in the midst of the nursery riot.
(Mew 20)
The catalogue is an explanation for silence within a pastoral description that

invokes romanticism’s fairy poems but subverts their escapism, partially through
metrical variation. The first two lines pull the Changeling from the nursery with
an irregular meter and syllabically lopsided rhyme, “Spring” / “whispering.” As the

Changeling describes the sounds of the forest, the lines assume a regular four-beat
ballad meter and simple rhymes that seem to be at odds with the unpleasant
images of the fairy world. The child will spend the “Black and chill” nights of eter-
nity either “twining twigs” or “whining” with the fairies.44 Both “The Farmer’s
Bride” and “The Changeling” expose the inadequacy of marriage and escapism in
voices that are incongruous to the critique. The poems also undermine gender
dichotomies, including the lesbian-heterosexual binary, in a manner that antici-
pates poststructuralist critiques of a stable, coherent identity. Severin suggestively
claims that the Bride and the Changeling are figures for the lack of a language in
which to express lesbian being and embodiments of Mew’s “strategy of negation”
and “refusal of cultural re-presentation” (Poetry off 26). While the characters are
certainly outsiders in a heteronormative culture and strongly linked to figures of
silence, each occupies a different position in relation to speech. The silent Bride is
an object of deeply suppressed desire for the sympathetic male speaker, and
although the Farmer has been read as a surrogate for lesbian desire, this interpre-
tation is based on Mew’s biography and cannot be substantiated in the text itself.45
The Changeling is a child speaker, and Mew’s decision not to gender the child is a
provocative choice, part of a “wildness” that indicates an ambivalence about alter-
natives to the nuclear family.46 Just as the relationship between a poet’s sexuality
and speaker is always more fluid than a dichotomy between impersonation/
identification and critique allows, Mew’s poems trouble the standard categories of
gender and sexuality.
Mew’s appearance at Klementaski Monro’s reading of her work was also a com-
plex social performance. Although it is tempting to read her presence in the audi-
ence rather than on stage as an indication of lesbian marginalization, Mew does not
indicate that she either hoped or refused to read.47 Klementaski Monro describes
her dressed in drag, her general attire and hardly a costume of invisibility:
She always wore a long double-breasted top-coat of tweed with a velvet

collar inset . . . and she always wore a little hard felt pork-pie hat put on very
straight. . . . When she came into the shop she was asked: “Are you Charlotte
Mew?” and her reply, delivered characteristically with a slight smile of
amusement, was: “I am sorry to say I am.”
(“Memoir” viii)
The topcoat and porkpie hat, clothing usually gendered male, are assertions of
identity that contradict her self-deprecatory statement. Although Mew did not read
at the bookshop, she was an accomplished performer of her own work in the
semiprivate setting of Catherine Dawson Scott’s salon in Southall. Dawson Scott

described the “marked day” in 1914 when she first persuaded Mew to read her poems
in “her wonderful way.”48 She reports that Kathie Giles, a painter, said, “I will go to
the ends of the earth any time to hear your Charlotte tell her poems—she is a
modern piper, and I will follow her piping” (Sappho 57). May Sinclair frequently
celebrated Mew’s performances and, in a letter dated June 1, 1915, begs, “finish your
Courtesan . . . but even as you read the last poem I could see how great it was.
I shouldn’t say ‘even,’ for you read furiously well: I never knew anyone who could
get out the passion of a thing as you can.”49 A passionate reading was the ideal in this
salon context, as it was in the Delsartean readings and attitude displays.
Sinclair refers to “Madeleine in Church” (1916), one of Mew’s favorite recita-
tion pieces and a monologue that brought aspects of the nineteenth-century solo
performance tradition into debates about the “new” modernist poetry. Spoken by
Madeleine, a sensual divorcée and twentieth-century version of the fallen woman,
the poem continues from sympathetic portrayals of women betrayed by men they
love in monodramas such as “Monk” Lewis’s The Captive (1803) and monologues
such as Augusta Webster’s “The Castaway” (1887) and Amy Levy’s “Magdalen”
(1896). Mew’s Madeleine sits in a minor chapel of a Catholic church, intentionally
removed from the main apse where Christ hangs “too divine” (Mew 42). Finding
more comfort in a minor saint represented in tangible “plaster,” Mew’s speaker
would “rather pray / To something more like my own clay” (Mew 42). She quickly
abandons her attempt at prayer, and although she implies she had extramarital
affairs with men (Monty, Stuart, Redge, and Jim), she also defers the expected con-
fessional form by not relating any particular sin or regret. One of the central tropes
of the poem is the search for an acceptable form, genre, or material manifestation
in which to represent experience and emotion. Madeleine eschews the church’s
standard prayers and confessions, just as she rejects the form available for the
expression of passion, marriage.
“Madeleine” resembles the nineteenth-century monodrama, as apostrophes
and abrupt turns of address shift the emotional tenor of the speech. Apostrophes
to the “plaster saint,” Christ, Madeleine’s mother, and her men frame them as
present-absent figures. Madeleine’s phrases of prayer, a particular form of apos-
trophe, quotes from the Bible (“Thy will be done?”), and “the parsons’ tags” she
recites ironically (“Find rest in Him”) function like the musical interludes of the
monodrama to mark changes in tone and rhythm (Mew 44, 46). May Sinclair mis-
understood the variation in rhyme and meter as a “lack of metrical technique” but
admitted that the poem “sounded perfectly right” when Mew read it aloud
(Biography 301). The metrical complexity, with the fact that “parsons’ tags” and
sermons are spoken forms, encourages a reading that attends to the sounds of
spoken language. Madeleine’s first apostrophe to Christ is written in singsong
four-beat iambs with simple end rhymes that suggest the inadequacy of prayer to
convey pain: “Oh! quiet Christ who never knew / The poisonous fangs that bite us
through” (Mew 43). The meter and rhyme fade into long prose lines when she
abandons the prayer to consider her sensitivity to beauty. She describes the “joy
and pain” she can “hardly bear” when she sees the chiaroscuro of “black shadows
on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun” (Mew 43). She asks why
God would demand a rejection of the beauty He himself created:
Who shall teach us

To thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhaps in death,
When the race is run
And it is forced from us with our last breath
“Thy will be done”?
If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things, (44)
The second line, “To thrust . . . ,” with its three clauses and predominance of t and
th sounds, would be difficult to pronounce if read aloud and reinforces the long
struggle (until “death”) implied in the command, especially in contrast with the
brevity of the “race” of life described in the following short line. The variation of
line lengths continues with the familiar phrase from “The Lord’s Prayer,” the last
clause of a long question about the nature of “Thy will.”
Perhaps because Mew believed her line lengths could influence oral read-
ings and interpretations, she refused to allow them to run over to the next line,
forcing the printers of The Farmer’s Bride (1916) to use a “rather ugly quarto
page” (Memoir xvi). Mew responded to the size of the page but did not realize
the necessity of printers’ margins in a letter to Monro on February 9, 1916: “I
agree with you that specimen A would make too large a book so that as
something must be sacrificed to the abnormal lines of ‘Madeleine’ (which I am
sure should not turn over) it looks as if it must be the margin” (Memoir xvi).
Although Klementaski Monro thought Mew’s concern was with “the appear-
ance of her poems on a page” (Memoir xvi), Monro realized that the line
lengths created the effect of what he called “ordinary speech” and claimed that
“the best poetry is the least poetical . . . the poetry of Charlotte Mew is above
the average of our day” (History 76). The appearance of the lines, Mew and
Monro agreed, would help the reader experience the metrical variation, voice,
and accent and imagine a monodramatic performance. 50 Mew was interested
in the performance of poetry and claimed to have written certain poems for
musical accompaniment. In a letter to Sydney Cockerel (1919), she stated that

“Song” was “written for music” and “perhaps I shall one day put an air to it”
(Mew 118).
“Madeleine in Church” shares generic features with the monodrama and
Victorian monologue, but the poem also invokes these genres, as well as religious
forms, to challenge the social conventions with which they are associated. Unlike
most Victorian fallen women poems, Mew’s “Madeleine” will not confess, pray,
convert, or blame men for her downfall. The suffering caused by marriage is repre-
sented by Madeleine’s “sapless” mother who was faithfully “yoked” to her father
with the promise of “some serene eternity” that Madeleine “cannot see,” a significant
lack given her interest in visual pleasure (Mew 43). She also alludes to the different
standards of fidelity for women and men, which allow the man to leave divorce pro-
ceedings “Crowing like twenty cocks” (Mew 42).51 But Madeleine’s central critique
is of a religion that cannot accommodate the pleasures of the body. Paralleling the
concerns of Delsartism, she claims, “I think my body was my soul” and suggests that
the human body would not have been “made” to experience such pleasures if they
were sinful (Mew 44). As evidence, she provides a typological reading of the story
of Mary Magdalene at the close of the poem. Madeleine’s association with the
Magdalene is suggested immediately by the phonetic similarity of their names and
her promiscuity, but Madeleine overtly reinterprets Mary Magdalene as a type of
love that required the body, touch, kiss, and smell of Jesus. Like many readers of the
Bible, Madeleine combines the unnamed sinful woman who kissed Jesus’ feet and
anointed them with her tears in Luke 7:36–50 with Mary from Magdala, who had
been cured of seven demons in Luke 8:2. Madeleine claims that Mary saw Jesus and
recognized a new “passion” by her physical response, that is, her tears. When she
kissed him and touched him with her hair, Madeleine believes Jesus recognized that
her love was different than “the rest.” She taught him “That You can change the
things for which we care, / But even You, unless You kill us, not the way” (Mew 48).
Madeleine and Mary Magdalene’s way of worship must involve their bodies.
A reader versed in Victorian typology (and the Victorian fallen woman mono-
logue) would expect Madeleine to fulfill the tropological level of the fourfold
method, follow Mary Magdalene’s pattern, and learn to devote her passion to God.
But Mew’s Madeleine will not fulfill that expectation. She insists that Mary could
not have loved Jesus if she had not touched him: “She was a sinner, we are what we
are: the spirit afterwards, but first, the touch” (Mew 49). Absent that touch, without
some sensory experience, Madeleine cannot convert. In the last stanza, she turns
to the Crucifix once more and articulates her Pygmalionesque desire: “if, for once,
He would only speak” (Mew 49). Mew presents a familiar typological situation
but frustrates the usual assumptions about how the typological series should be
fulfilled. Her Madeleine is a type for sensuous, even erotic worship that under-
mines Christian strictures against women’s sexuality.
Mew’s “Madeleine in Church” and the dramatic monologue form were invoked
as poets jostled for control over definitions of modernist poetry. H.D. wrote an
admiring review of The Farmer’s Bride for the Egoist in September 1916:52
When one reads of “the white geraniums in the dusk” one feels that
Madeleine has wandered in that same garden . . . and the “portrait of my
mother at nineteen” brings to one’s oversophisticated imagination the
Duchess with her unappreciated, wan smile and her branch of cherries.53
The “same garden” suggests Eden or H.D.’s own Sea Garden, also published in 1916.
Madeleine reads the portrait of her mother as an allegory of “Youth, or simply
Spring” that would then be destroyed by a loveless marriage (Mew 45). H.D. con-
nects that image, as if in typological relation, to Browning’s portrait of “My Last
Duchess,” and it also recalls Barrett Browning’s portrait of Aurora Leigh’s dead
mother imaginatively taking up different statue poses. H.D. was interested in the
dramatic monologue, not as a Victorian throwback, but as a formal challenge; she
wrote that Mew “alone of our generation, with the exception of Mr. Hueffer and
Mr. Frost, has succeeded in this form” (FB 135). Pound responded by reclaiming
the dramatic monologue for T. S. Eliot: “Mr. Eliot has made an advance on Mr.
Browning. He has also made his dramatis personae contemporary and convincing.”54
Pound may have been discounting both Mew and H.D. as “unconvincing” but not
the dramatic monologue, which was still a viable “contemporary” genre even in
1917, after many of his pronouncements on Imagism and Vorticism.55 Pound had
earlier supported Mew (as well as H.D.), publishing her “Fête” in the Egoist (1914)
beside an installment of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Friends 127).
Mew undoubtedly influenced Eliot’s poems, yet interpreters of modernism fol-
lowing Pound have not sufficiently recovered Mew or the place of the dramatic
monologue in debates on poetic form and gendered subjectivity.56
III. T. S. Eliot’s “Magus”: Impersonality, Objective

Correlative, and Mythical Method
It would not be to my present purpose to inveigh against the ubiquity of standardized or

“B.B.C.” English. If we all came to talk alike there would no longer be any point in our not
writing alike . . . it is the poet’s business to use the speech which he finds about him, that with
which he is most familiar. I shall always remember the impression of W. B. Yeats reading poetry
aloud. To hear him read his own works was to be made to recognize how much the Irish way
of speech is needed to bring out the beauties of Irish poetry. . . .
—T. S. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry” (1942)57
Eliot’s ambivalent response to cultures of recitation and the discipline of expression

before he left for England in 1914, where he encountered the verse-recitation
movement, is evident throughout his criticism. In “The Music of Poetry,” Eliot
describes the relation between human speech and poetry through a description of
Yeats’s readings, several of which were sponsored by the Poetry Bookshop. Yet, he
rejects the “standardized or ‘B.B.C.’ English” promoted by the Poetry Society. Eliot’s
criticism frequently takes up concerns that were debated by proponents of cultures
of recitation in England and the United States, and some recent criticism has begun
the work of determining their influence. Julia Walker suggests that Eliot rejected the
emphasis on personality and self-expression in American expressive culture, while
Mark Morrisson claims that he promoted the main tenets of the British movement,
including the importance of the “pure voice.”58 Partially because these critics do not
consider the transatlantic aspects of cultures of recitation and modernist poetics
more generally, they oversimplify Eliot’s response as either rejection or endorse-
ment. His criticism conducts an ambivalent conversation with both cultures of rec-
itation, which influenced such famous principles as impersonality and the voices of
poetry. The dramatic monologue, the form promoted by Curry for recitation and
celebrated by Pound as Eliot’s “convincing” contribution to poetry, also influenced
his theories of the objective correlative and mythical method.
Eliot’s introduction to poetry, like that of most American children at the turn
of the twentieth century, was shaped by elocution and its emphasis on verse mem-
orization and recitation: “At school, I enjoyed very much reciting Homer or
Virgil—in my own fashion. Perhaps I had some instinctive suspicion that nobody
really knew how Greek ought to be pronounced . . .” (Eliot Selected 108). Responding
to the formulaic rules of pronunciation and diction that Curry rejected, Eliot sug-
gests he was drawn to classical verse partially because he could recite it with more
freedom. Morrisson describes Eliot’s continuing interest in the relation of poetry
to speech, with reference to Dante’s influence and lines from Four Quartets: “our
concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe.”59
For Morrisson, these lines indicate that Eliot was among those modernists who
“used the cultural legitimacy of the pure voice,” advocated by British elocutionary
reformers and the Poetry Society, “to produce the value and cultural meaning of
aesthetic experiments” (“Pure Voice” 26–27). While Eliot was undoubtedly
concerned with speech, the lines are presented in a monologue spoken by a ghostly
“dead master” (perhaps Yeats or Dante), whose theories the student has forgotten
once and will probably forget again. This context indicates a degree of irony in the
desire to “purify the dialect.” In his 1942 lecture on Yeats, Eliot claimed that a poet
should “use the speech which he finds about him,” a speech the arbiters of “pure”
English would have rejected if the poet were from Ireland or London’s East End.
His ideas about “common” speech and poetry have more in common with the
American emphasis on individuality in recitation.
Expressive culture was a formative influence on Eliot in the United States, but
he rejected some doctrines, especially the Delsartean worship of personality.60
Curry’s claim that “Expression and Personality are intimately related” was reiter-
ated in books published between 1891 and 1913:
The peculiar character of the man affects his modes of utterance. As all
forms of art unconsciously reveal the characteristics of the artist, so delivery
being more intimately related to the man is more essentially revelatory than
any form of art. Hence development of expression must be more or less
dependent on the development of the experience and the soul of the man.
(Province xi)
Curry suggests that all art is related to the character of the artist, but the art of
“delivery” or recitation is most “revelatory” of the “soul”; this soul must be “devel-
oped” before recitation can improve. As Walker points out, Curry even suggests that
expressive reading requires “superior skill” to writing (Expressionism 78). Eliot’s dis-
satisfaction with the idea of art as self-expression is evident in “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” (1919), where he famously demands that the poet “surrender of
himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable . . . a continual
extinction of personality” (Eliot Selected 40).61 He further challenges the Delsartean
concept of a mystical relationship between the soul, self, gesture, and word when he
claims, “The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the
metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the
poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium” (Eliot Selected 42).
It is not the Christian notion of soul that Eliot contests, even in this period before
his conversion to Anglicanism, but the idea that this soul unifies all aspects of the
personality, determines the artwork, and is expressed therein.
Discussions of personality in the British verse-recitation movement were more
concerned that a self-indulgent performer might overwhelm the poetry than with
the relation between the soul and art. Monro criticized Nora Clarke, who made
“herself ” the center of a reading, but celebrated Florence Farr, whose “restraint and
self-surrender” allowed her to “submit” herself “to the cadence and rhythms” of the
poems and to become “a sensitive medium for their conveyance to the audience”
(“Pure Voice” 40). Morrisson suggests that Monro’s guidelines for recitation are a
source for Eliot’s claim: “The interest of a performer is almost certain to be cen-
tered in himself. . . . The performer is interested not in form but in opportunities
for virtuosity or in the communication of his ‘personality’” (“Pure Voice” 41). Both
British and American cultures of recitation criticized the artifice of the theater and
promoted recitation as an alternative to the stage. Eliot’s critique of the performer’s
display of “personality” is distinct from his rejection of the idea that poetry repre-
sents the writer’s personality; the immediate target of the latter is American expres-
sion’s claims that good art is self-expression, and recitation the highest form. Like
R. Browning, Augusta Webster, and many others, Eliot insists that poetry is not
autobiography and begins the practice, followed by the New Critics, of reading all
poems as dramatic monologues.62 Still, he did not reject poetic emotion, and his
statement that the “material” of art is “passion” in “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” reminds us that the Delsartean presentation of emotions as the material for
poses actually extracts them from a particular self (Eliot Selected 41). Gail McDonald
observes of Eliot’s syllabi for courses at the Oxford extension program in Ilkley,
Yorkshire, “Given his famous aversion to ‘personality,’ it is interesting to see the
frequency with which the words ‘personality’ and ‘temperament’ appear in the syl-
labuses for Modern English literature.”63 McDonald does not mention the disci-
pline of expression that was prevalent in Boston when Eliot was at Harvard, but
both expression and verse recitation influenced his pedagogy.
The work of George Santayana, one of Eliot’s Harvard professors, reveals the
link between expression and Eliot’s influential concept of the objective correlative.
Walker demonstrates that Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900),
which coined the phrase correlative objects, was partially a response to the theories
of expression taught across the Charles River at Boston University and the Boston
School of Expression (Expressionism 75):
Expression is a misleading term which suggests that something previously

known is rendered or imitated; whereas the expression is itself an original
fact, the values of which are then referred to the thing expressed. . . . So the
charm which a poet, by his art of combining images and shades of emotion,
casts over a scene or an action, is attached to the principal actor in it, who
gets the benefit of the setting furnished him by a well-stocked mind.64
Santayana, like Eliot, objects to Curry’s practice of locating the “expression” in

poetic characters and scenes or in the “emotion” imitated by poets rather than
their intellectual work. He would certainly reject Curry’s claim that the reader-
performer’s “expression” is a “superior skill” to that of the writer. Yet, both agree
that emotion is the substance of poetry, or as Santayana writes:
The passions are the chief basis of all interests, even the most ideal, and the
passions are seldom brought into play except by the contact of man with
man. The various forms of love and hate are only possible in society, and to
imagine occasions in which these feelings may manifest all their inward
vitality is the poet’s function . . . the glorious emotions with which he bub-
bles over must at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects.
(“Elements” 276–277)
Santayana sounds almost Delsartean in his emphasis on the passions shared in

human relations, but he insists that the poet’s work is to “manifest” emotion in
“objects,” such as poetic images or dramatic scenarios, that correlate to the emotion.
Santayana rejects the notion that feeling may be represented by the vocal tones
Curry emphasized or that a passion may be brought into being by striking a bodily
attitude, as suggested by Delsarte. Walker, like other scholars, presents Santayana’s
“correlative object” as a likely source for Eliot’s objective correlative.65 Eliot’s first use
of the phrase in “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) resembles Santayana’s: “The
only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective
correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall
be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked” (Eliot Selected 48).66 Eliot, Santayana, Curry, and Delsarte all coincide in
their emphasis on an art that evokes emotion but disagree on its sources and the
relationship between the artist, artwork, reader or performer, and passion.
Another possible influence on the objective correlative, one that Walker does
not mention, is Robert Browning’s description of “objective” poetry in his “Essay
on Shelley” (1852): “The work speaks for itself, as we say: and the biography of the
worker is not more necessary to an understanding or enjoyment of it, than is a
model or anatomy of some tropical tree, to the right tasting of the fruit.”67 Browning
used the terms objective and dramatic to claim the nonidentity of poet and speaker,
and a prominent, although oversimplified, explanation for the so-called invention
of the dramatic monologue is that Browning and Tennyson had been criticized for
their confessional style in early poems.68 The dramatic monologue enabled both
Browning and Eliot to produce a situation or chain of events separate from the
poet’s personal experience to serve as the objective correlative for an emotion. The
form fulfills Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality in the sense that a personality, not
the poet’s, can be presented in an objective form for analysis.69 Pound had recog-
nized Browning’s influence and Eliot’s successful work with the dramatic mono-
logue in his review of Prufrock and Other Observations.70 Subsequent critics
mention Eliot’s early engagement with the form, but, as Patrick Deane notes,
studies of modernism have been more interested in the experimental “fragment”
than the monologue.71 Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” published in August 1927,
after The Waste Land and other “fragment” poems, demonstrates Eliot’s consistent
interest in the dramatic monologue, as well as the persistence of typological
thought in modernist mythmaking.
“The Journey of the Magi” (1927) is spoken by one of the wise men or priests
of Matthew (2:1–12), many years after he journeyed to Bethlehem to worship at the
birth of Christ.72 The Magus describes the difficult journey and its more painful
aftermath, when he returns to his kingdom but can neither understand his experi-
ence nor live comfortably in the “old dispensation” of paganism (“Magi” 41). In
spite of the persona and Eliot’s theories of impersonality, the poem is often read as
an account of Eliot’s own difficult journey prior to his conversion and confirma-
tion in the Anglican-Catholic church in 1927.73 Conventional ideas of Christian
conversion and redemption are complicated by the monologue’s competing typo-
logical and mythological symbols and unlinear temporality. The first five lines of
the poem confront the reader with an unattributed quotation and unidentified
speaker. Not until the parenthetical insertion in line thirty-one, “(you may say),”
and the Magus’s insistent, “but set down / This set down / This,” does the rhetorical
situation become clear: a scribe, the silent auditor, records the Magus’s story, an
account that differs from the Gospels and thereby challenges the authority of
scripture (31, 34). The opening quote indicates that the scribe reads the Magus’s
words back to him, but the lines are actually adapted from a 1622 Nativity sermon
by the English cleric Sir Lancelot Andrewes. The language is colloquial but anti-
quated (“A cold coming we had of it”), with adjectives following the nouns: “The
ways deep and the weather sharp” (4). This unusual syntax establishes the Magus’s
distinct voice, yet the voice is derived from a later cleric to create the parallel iden-
tities and temporalities common in typological poetry.
The first half of the poem indicates the conceit of the Magus as he criticizes
others, especially the “camel men . . . wanting their liquor and women” (“Magi” 12).
When the Magus describes entering the “temperate valley” at “dawn,” typological
symbols proliferate. The valley “smelling of vegetation” in the morning implies the
coming of the new Christian era and the rebirth of springtime. The “three trees on
the low sky” prefigure the crosses on Golgotha and insert the Crucifixion into the
birth journey (24). The “Six hands . . . dicing for pieces of silver” predict Judas’s
reward for betraying Jesus and the Roman soldiers who cast lots under the cross
(Matthew 27:1–35). These typological prefigurations appear to reinforce the
Christian view of history as the revelation of a divine, preordained plan. Yet, Eliot’s
Magus does not appear to realize the significance of these symbols in his language
or use them to understand his experience, even in retrospect. He asks, “were we led
all that way for / Birth or Death?” (35–36). The line invokes the Christian mystery
of death as the path to rebirth, but the Magus dwells on his own suffering at the
death of the pagan world. Symbols of paganism are mixed with Christian types in
the Magus’s description; the “vegetation,” “tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,”
and “wine-skins” invoke Dionysus, Greek god of wine, spring, and resurrection.
Dionysus is presented in modernist classicism as a type for Christ, and Jane Ellen
Harrison describes rituals associated with the Greek resurrection god that were
grafted onto early Christianity to make the new religion more acceptable to
pagans—whom the Magus describes as “alien people clutching their gods” (42).74
He also clutches those gods in his imagery.
Although the Magus insists, “I would do it again,” he concludes, “I should be
glad of another death” (“Magi” 33, 43). The ambiguous statement might mean that
he would prefer a different death than the one he experienced as a loss of the “old
dispensation” or that he will be glad for the death that would allow him to be
reborn in Christ. But given the Magus’s uncertainty about his journey and his
seeming ignorance of the typological figures that permeate his speech, it is not
clear if he is a convert to Christianity. The poem creates a gap between the familiar
Christmas story of the three wise men and the Magus’s version, which he hopes to
preserve through the scribe. The Magus’s desire for the written record locates Eliot,
as poet, in the position of the scribe as much as the position of the speaker with
whom he is usually associated. Eliot presents a wise man who is not wise, a familiar
story with an unfamiliar emotional valence, and classical types that do not fulfill
their fourfold analogies; the Magus will not easily serve as a moral guide or type
for later individuals seeking Christian redemption. Readers must interpret the
typological implications of the monologue, performing the work that the Magus
overlooks, to understand how it troubles conversion narratives.
Eliot’s familiarity with typological exegesis is indisputable, given his
immersion in Dante’s typological poetics and interest in Anglicanism. Yet, critics
rarely comment on Eliot’s typology; Harriet Davidson’s study of Eliot and
hermeneutics suggests the fourfold exegetical method lasted only “until the
nineteenth century” and does not acknowledge its longer influence.75 Eliot’s
essay “Dante” (1929) indicates that he was particularly interested in his predeces-
sor’s application of biblical typology to literature. Eliot argues that the
widespread understanding of the interpretive method among Dante’s readers

enabled his celebrated “simplicity”:
He not only thought in a way in which every man of his culture in the
whole of Europe then thought, but he employed a method which was
common and commonly understood throughout Europe. . . . What is
important for my purpose is the fact that the allegorical method was a
definite method not confined to Italy; and the fact, apparently paradoxical,
that the allegorical method makes for simplicity and intelligibility.
(Eliot Selected 209)
In Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande,” the allegorical or antitypical level is the second
fold of the method (the antitype fulfills the meaning prefigured by the type). Eliot
chooses allegorical, a term as widely associated with literary critical thought as
with Christian hermeneutics, to designate the whole of Dante’s method. But Eliot
does not ignore the third and fourth levels, the tropological (by which typological
patterns are replicated in living individuals) or the anagogical-eschatological (the
higher spiritual significance of these patterns):
The Ulysses episode may strike us first as a kind of excursion, an irrele-

vance, a self-indulgence on the part of Dante taking a holiday from his
Christian scheme. But when we know the whole poem, we recognize how
cunningly and convincingly Dante has made to fit in real men, his contem-
poraries, friends, and enemies, recent historical personages, legendary and
Biblical figures, and figures of ancient fiction.
(Eliot Selected 214)
Eliot insists that these historical, mythological, and fictional figures are “types of
sin, suffering, fault, and merit” (Eliot Selected 214). Linked by typological relation-
ships, they reinforce the patterns in Dante’s Christian journey to be followed or
avoided by readers.
The juxtaposed passages about Dante’s “method” and the “Ulysses episode”
inevitably point to Eliot’s famous mythical method, coined in “Ulysses, Order, and
Myth” (1923).76 Arguing against Richard Aldington’s critique that James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922) is an “invitation to chaos,” Eliot describes Joyce’s method
of connecting Bloom’s journey through Dublin to the Odyssey: “In using the
myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him”
(Eliot Selected 177). This mythical method evolves from Dante’s fourfold method
as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot

Selected 177). It adapts a version of the hermeneutic used by Christian exegetes to
order and control the contradictory biblical texts that compose Christian history, and
it has Victorian precedents in the mythological types presented in dramatic mono-
logues and other solo performances. Although Eliot describes the mythical method
as Joyce’s discovery, he later acknowledges that Yeats had anticipated Joyce, as had
projects like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1922) (Eliot Selected 177). He might
have cited Jane Ellen Harrison’s studies of comparative myth and religion, which pre-
ceded Frazer’s, or many other earlier engagements with myth. Typology enjoyed a
resurgence in the Victorian period, was a common source for the imagery of Pre-
Raphaelites, and was interpolated in the metaphysical rhetoric of the Delsarteans and
other statue posers. Biblical typology may have begun to fade in the twentieth century,
but Eliot, longing for a “definite” and “commonly understood” hermeneutic, gave it a
secular and Hellenistic dress as the mythical method, and the analogical or associative
habit of mind that typology encourages permeates modernism.
Eliot, like Mew and other modernists, participated in cultures of recitation by
performing his poetry at the Poetry Bookshop, lecturing widely, and reading at
several high-profile events during World War II. Eliot’s aesthetic theories have had
an enduring impact on modernist studies; his discussions of impersonality, the
objective correlative, and the mythical method have come to define modernist
poetics more generally, but their sources are not fully understood. All are connected
to the American and British cultures of recitation, and all encourage his use of the
dramatic monologue, which had a prominent place in those cultures. Even as he
rejected certain ideologies of expression and verse recitation, the movements
provided impetus, resources, and departure points for his creative and critical
practice. Cultures of recitation have been overlooked in the vast literature on Eliot,
and in modernism more generally, because they were shaped by popular Delsartism,
riddled with elements that seem antimodern, and so prominent that Eliot could
respond to them without identifying them by name. Positioning Eliot within cul-
tures of recitation clarifies his own strategies of mythic posing.
IV. Chautauquas, “Sextus Propertius,” and Ezra

Pound’s History
Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddys, Dr. Dowies, Comstocks, societies for the prevention of all human
activities are impossible in the wake of Laforgue.
—Ezra Pound, “Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire,” Poetry Magazine (November 1917)77
In spite of Pound and Jules Laforgue, Christian Science and social hygiene move-
ments were possible, and the Chautauqua lecture circuits continued to be the most
visible platform for American expressive culture until 1928.78 Like Eliot, Pound
responded in complex ways to cultures of recitation and was just as influenced by
Dante’s typological poetics, modernist mythmaking, and the pedagogies of expres-
sion. Pound appeared to enjoy the construction of a controversial public persona
more than Eliot, certainly more than Mew, and he read at the Poetry Bookshop,
lectured widely, and delivered contentious manifestos.79 Best known for orga-
nizing the Imagist movement to promote crisp poems like his famous “In a Station
of the Metro” (1913), Pound was persistently interested in the dramatic monologue
while his attraction to other forms shifted. He even arranged his entire body of
early (pre-Cantos) poems into a collection called Personae (1926), a title that pays
tribute to Robert Browning’s famous Dramatis Personae (1864). After positioning
Pound in relation to cultures of recitation, Delsartism, and the history of American
poetry, I examine “Homage to Sextus Propertius” (1917) as a monologue experiment
that indicates how the form would continue to affect Pound’s Cantos.
In addition to a familiarity with Chautauqua, Pound’s comments on the his-
tory of American poetry reveal suggestive connections with cultures of recitation
and Delsartism in particular.80 Among the few American poets he mentions with
Walt Whitman as positive influences are Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, largely
forgotten poets who collaboratively published the Vagabondia volumes in 1894,
1896, and 1900. Research by Leon Surette reveals that Pound read these volumes
and wrote in an unpublished essay of 1909, “I see him [Walt Whitman] as America’s
poet. The only Poet before the artists of the Carman-Hovey period, or better, the
only one of the conventionally recognized ‘American Poets’ who is worth reading.”81
Both Hovey and Carman were active participants in trajectories of Delsartism:
Hovey met the celebrated Deslartean performer and teacher Henrietta Russell
[Hovey] in 1889; they had a child and then married after her divorce. Carman fell
in love with Henrietta’s student, Mary Perry King, and lived with or near King and
her husband from 1904 until Carman’s death in 1929.82 He and King collaborated
on several projects, including The Making of Personality (1908), the book that
adapted Delsartean principles for “masculine” personalities and converted modern
dancer Ted Shawn to Delsartism. Shawn later attended Carman and King’s
“Unitrinian School of Personal Harmonizing and Self-Development.”
Carman’s address to the first graduating class of the Unitrinian School in 1911
reveals the influence of Delsarte on the school’s philosophy of trinities and peda-
gogical practices. Rather than an antimodern relic of the nineteenth century
Carman understood Delsartism as a contemporary realization of humanity:
I see that the Modern Spirit, which dissects all doctrines and holds fast only
that which can prove itself true and desirable and comely,— which is for-
ever questing, forever accomplishing, forever growing,— has here enunci-
ated its latest revelation. Rousseau’s plea for freedom . . . Delsarte’s profound
and clarifying discovery, here begin to find their complete fulfillment and
utility.83
Carman positioned poetry as foremost among “the three great rhythmic arts,”
which included music and dance (Moonshine 21). He aligned these arts with
“mind,” “spirit,” and “body,” respectively but suggested that the practice of all
would enable “harmony” of the three to “influence personality and mould
character” (Moonshine 20). As editor of the Independent, Carman published
Richard Hovey’s essay “The Technic of Poetry” (1892), which presents a theory of
poetic composition derived from three of Delsarte’s laws of bodily movement:
parallelism (likeness), opposition (difference), and succession (which “affirms
likeness and unlikeness at once, variety in unity, change not as of a broken line but
as a curve, in obedience to an unchanging law”).84 Fearing the predominance of
“schoolgirls and dilettanti” in Delsartism, Carman and Hovey hoped to reframe
and legitimize the movement through theories of robust masculinity and an
emphasis on poetry rather than posing.85
Hovey’s “Comrades,” the last poem in Songs from Vagabondia (1894), celebrates
masculine health and homosocial fellowship:
Comrades, watch the tides to-night,

For the sailing is with dawn!
Oh, to face the spray together,
With the tempest coming on!
Greet the sea
With a shout of glee,
When strong men roam together!86
Pound encountered this popular style in Vagabondia and elsewhere, adopts it for
his “Ballad of the Goodly Fere” (1908–1911), and even presents Christ as a type for
the “Comrade.” He associates the story of Jesus calming the waters of the Sea of
Galilee (Lake Gennesaret, Luke 8:22–25) with the valor of sailors in seafaring
ballads:
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret

Wi’ twey words spoke’ suddently.
A master of men was the Goodly Fere,

A mate of the wind and sea,87
In an explanatory note, “Simon Zelotes speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion,”

Pound positions the poem as a dramatic monologue in the voice of one of the
apostles. Pound would later repudiate the ballad style, but he allowed Harriet
Monroe to republish “Goodly Fere” in her 1917 anthology The New Poetry and
included the poem in Personae (1926).88 Even later, Pound was still thinking of
Hovey (and Santayana) in The Cantos:
the texts of his early stuff are probably lost

with the loss of fly-by-night periodicals
and our knowledge of Hovey,
Stickney, Loring,
the lost legion or as Santayana has said:
They just died They died because they
just couldn’t stand it89
Surette points out that many of the Delsarte-derived theories advanced by

Carman and Hovey resemble those of Pound and Ernest Fenollosa; the latter was,
like Carman, a student of Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard. Pound himself sounds
Delsartean in soulful statements such as, “I am interested in art and ecstasy,
ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the
expression and sole means of transmuting, of passing on that ecstasy to others”
(my emphasis).90 Surette acknowledges that Pound may have read the Delsarte-
derived theories of Hovey and Carman in addition to their Vagabondia volumes
but concludes that all “were imbued with the American correlate of Pre-
Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and Symbolisme,” and I would add, an even heavier
dose of American Delsartism, which also influenced the Pre-Raphaelites and
Aesthetes.91 Surette makes no strong claims for poetic influence but argues that
Pound’s persistent admiration for Hovey and Carman undermines the gulf bet-
ween nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, advertised by Pound
and institutionalized by New Critics.
Cultures of recitation also spanned the transition to modernism, and Pound’s
engagement with cultures of recitation, like Eliot’s, spanned the Atlantic to include
the Poetry Bookshop and other avant-garde experiments in Anglo-European
modernism. Reflecting on his own performance at the bookshop and offering to
provide another “programme,” Pound wrote to Monro that public reading taught
him how to revise and cut “superfluous matter,” even as he called the bookshop
audience a “Drinkwaterian-Abercrombogibsonian stodge” for appreciating

Georgian poets (“Pure Voice” 43).92 In a 1914 essay, Pound reveals the influence of
both Yeats and Dante (and occludes that of Florence Farr and Christina Rossetti)
on his ideas about the “music” of poetry.93 He reiterates Dante’s definition of a
poem “as a composition of words set to music” but suggests that “ ‘music’ and
‘poetry’ have drifted apart, and we have a third thing which is called ‘word music.’
I mean we have poems which are read or even, in a fashion, intoned, and are
‘musical’ in some sort of complete or inclusive sense that makes it impossible or
inadvisable to ‘set them to music.’ I mean . . . many of Mr. Yeats’ lyrics” (Pound
Essays 276). For Pound, the “complete” music of the poem is best revealed when
the poem is “intoned,” but he suggests, as does Eliot, that the musical quality of a
poem is crucial to its meaning, that both “sound” and “sense” are interrelated
abstractions, so sound must be interpreted by the reader in the absence of any
performance.94 Pound actually did set the verse of fifteenth-century Parisian trou-
badour François Villon to music in Le testament (1921), a collaboration with Agnes
Bedford, Walter Rummel, and George Antheil.95 Pound composed some of the
music himself, and his notes for the performance of the piece reveal his unique
approach to both poetry and music:
The “orchestration” in the first part of the opera is not in the usual sense
“musical.” It is simply an emphasis on the consonantal & vowel sounds of
the words. I doubt if the instrumentalist will get much help from “counting
the measures.” Let him learn the words & make his noises when the singer
reaches the syllable the instrument is to emphasize. . . .
(Untwisting 159)96
Pound’s score forced attention to consonants and vowels, the sounds that compose
words, and the muscular actions of the speech organs. The relationships between
syllables and the physical experience of pronunciation were both to be considered
when interpreting the interconnected “sound” and “sense” of a poem.
Pound’s poetic translations of troubadours such as Villon and the ballad form
he employed for “Goodly Fere” are attempts to deploy familiar musical frame-
works to ensure that the rhythms and sounds of the poem will be “read.” Pound’s
interest in Hovey and Carman is partially due to their own use of ballad forms and
focus on the sounds of poetry, but his persistent admiration seems even more
exceptional in the context of his tendency to rail against the British Georgian poets
who tainted audiences at the Poetry Bookshop. Pound was vocal in his celebration
of “Master Bob Browning,” whom he addressed in a tribute poem “Mesmerism”
(Personae 13). In his review of Eliot’s Prufrock, Pound called Browning’s dramatic
monologues “the most interesting poems in Victorian English” written in the most
“vital form” (Pound Essays 420). Pound considers his early work and his struggles
to define “self ” with reference to Browning and the dramatic monologue:
In the “search for oneself,” in the search for “sincere self-expression,” one
gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says “I am” this, that, or the
other, and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing.
I began this search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off, as
it were complete masks of the self in each poem. I continued in long series
of translations, which were but more elaborate masks.97
Pound reflects on “self-expression,” that mainstay of American expressive culture,

much more seriously than his dismissals of “Chautauquas” would suggest. He
abstracts “myself ” as the “search for oneself,” with scare quotes that suggest he
refers to much-discussed ideas. Largely influenced by Yeats, Pound realizes what
the Delsarteans suppressed when they advocated solo performance as the path to
a “real” self or personality; in the process of performance, utterance, or pose, a
mask is created. The mask may be “elaborate” and “complete,” but for Pound, it is
the only self that can be expressed. He also suggests that his “translations” are per-
sonae, “masks of the self,” or dramatic monologues rather than nostalgic yearnings
for the past.
Reading “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” the poem that closes Personae, as a
dramatic monologue could reframe long-standing debates about Pound’s approach
to the Roman poet who wrote under Augustus Caesar at the end of the last century
b.c.e. The assumed genre of translation was a problem for classical scholars who
evaluated Pound’s accuracy in rendering the surviving four books of Propertius’s
elegies. Harriet Monroe of Poetry Magazine sent Pound’s “translation” to
W. G. Hale, Professor of Latin at the University of Chicago who declared Pound
“incredibly ignorant of Latin.”98 The debate drew in other critics and classical
scholars for decades, initiated Pound’s break with Monroe, and may have precipi-
tated his departure from London.99 Although Eliot defended Pound’s “Propertius”
as “a paraphrase, or still more truly . . . a persona,” he did not include it in his
Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (1928) (Pound Poet 354). Pound treats the Roman
elegies as source material for a modernist dramatic monologue spoken by
Propertius and focused on the difficulties of genre as they relate to gender. He dis-
cards the rules of literary translation with flamboyant anachronisms such as
“frigidaire patent” (Personae 206). His title invokes the homage, a form that would
mimic the style of the celebrated artist to recognize a debt, yet he often treats his
speaker with sarcasm. Pound’s Propertius repeatedly questions which genre he
should use: elegy, lyric, or epic. He wants to write what he calls “love-lyrics” for his
mistress Cynthia, but he lives in an empire that does not honor love and values
poetry only as it would commemorate and support the imperial and masculine
goal of expansion through war. He suggests that he will eventually be resigned to
composing for the martial machine, but he hopes to hold out: “And I also will sing
war when this matter of a girl is exhausted” (Personae 212). But Propertius cannot
sustain his love-lyric and instead resorts to parodies of genres that reveal their
enmeshment in a cultural moment.
Section I opens with lyric invocation, but rather than calling on the Muses for
assistance in his enterprise, Propertius turns to previous human poets: “Shades of
Callimachus . . . it is in your grove I would walk” (Personae 205). Propertius defends
the lyric he has begun against “Martian generalities” that “expound the distentions
of Empire,” but in this defense, he has already departed from the lyric mode
(Personae 205). He cannot write a few “unsullied” pages or “something to read in
normal circumstances” when unending war is the norm (Personae 205). At that
moment in history and “regardless of quality,” he claims that poetry is attached to
death, to the dead heroes, the women for whom it serves as “a fine tomb-stone over
their beauty,” or the poet appreciated only by “young women doing homage to [his]
palaver” (Personae 206). Here and throughout the poem, the author winks through
his speaker for he, like the young women, is “doing homage” to his predecessor.
Section II includes some of Propertius’s wittiest parodies of the rhetoric of
empire, all “yawned out on my lyre—with such industry”: “ ‘Of ’ the victorious
delay of Fabius . . . ‘Of ’ lares fleeing the ‘Roman Seat’ . . .” (Personae 207). The sec-
tion also interpolates a dramatic monologue spoken by Phoebus and dismissing
Propertius’s poetry as “pamphlets” that will be “thrown often into a chair / Where
a girl waits alone for her lover” (Personae 208). The lines fear the emasculation of
a poet who exalts love over war and will not be read by the male “Comrades” imag-
ined in the earlier ballads of Hovey and Pound. Calliope’s monologue follows and
continues the ridicule and association of lyric and “ladies,” characterizing
Propertius’s verse as “the sorcerizing of shut-in ladies” before splashing him in the
“backwash” of the lyric poet “Philetas the Coan” (Personae 208–209). These mono-
logues, imagined by Propertius, not only disrupt his lyric strivings but also indi-
cate that he cannot reconcile himself to a genre he presumes to be feminine. The
following sections even undermine his claims to be a great lover. Section III pres-
ents a dramatic scene in which Propertius receives a letter from Cynthia asking
him to come to her with stereotyped erotic imagery: “Anienan spring water falls
into flat-spread pools” (Personae 209). The poet who boasts, “And if she plays with
me with her shirt off / We shall construct many Illiads” is actually too afraid of
being attacked in the dark to go to his mistress (Personae 213). In Section IV,
Propertius asks a silent auditor, his slave Lygdamus, to describe Cynthia’s devasta-
tion at his failure to come to her. If Lygdamus complies, we get only Propertius’s
side of the conversation: “Thus? She wept into uncombed hair, / And you saw it”
(Personae 211). The poem suggests that Lygdamus was so invested in saying what
his master wanted to hear, it would make little difference if he spoke or Propertius
spoke for him. The scene is a vivid parody in which Propertius’s short phrases,
dashes, and repetitive questions (“And you saw it . . . You, you Lygdamus”) reveal
his doubt in Cynthia’s disappointment.
The drama of Section V is precipitated by the request for an imperial poem,
and he performs an attempt at a “large-mouthed product”: “And ‘It is, I think,
India which now gives necks to your triumphs’ ” (Personae 212). India was a
prominent concern for the British Empire prior to 1919 when the poem was pub-
lished, but that year saw the passage of the Government of India Act, which granted
some self-determination, along with the coercive Rowlatt Acts that led to the
Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in April. Pound’s reference to India clarifies a major
goal in rehabilitating the voice of the Roman poet: Propertius discusses what
Pound called the “infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire” to reflect
on “the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire” of his period (Pound
Poet 350). The pressure of this historical fold is flagged in the text by the faltering
phrases of “It is, I think . . . ,” and Propertius abandons his imperial poem. His cri-
tique of the culture of death continues in Section VI, as he reflects on how “Caesar
plots against India” and how “victor and conquered” will be “one tangle of shadows”
in Hades (Personae 214). Propertius would turn from these shadows to Cynthia as
“Light, light of my eyes,” and his most sustained attempts at passionate lyric appear
in the next section. He even manages a few rhymes: “Struggles when the lights
were taken away; / Now with bared breasts she wrestled against me, / Tunic spread
in delay” (Personae 215). But images of combat and his tendency to fall asleep dur-
ing the tryst (“Sluggard!” she says) betray the failure.
Sections VIII and IX catalogue mythological love stories with horrible out-
comes: Io turned into a heifer by Juno, Callisto turned into a bear, Persephone and
all the other beautiful “women in hell”: “Death has his tooth in the lot” (Personae
219). Even in his final dejected line, the rhetoric of battle impinges in “taking his
stand.” As for his own mythic pose, Propertius plays Menelaus opposite his friend
Lynceus, who (as Paris) sleeps with Cynthia and passes “on a swig of poison” in the
form of a venereal disease (Personae 223). Along with this mythical method of
ordering his experience, he compares himself in the final stanza to a list of dead
elegists, Varro, Calvus, and Gallus, whose passionate love lyrics have been lost: “And
now Propertius of Cynthia, taking his stand among these” (Personae 224). Pound’s
use of a mythical method five years before Eliot coined the term is not any more of
a “scientific discovery” than was James Joyce’s in Ulysses (Eliot Selected 177). Dramatic
monologues with mythological speakers and typological associations had been
written for centuries. Unlike Joyce’s rough association of the contemporary figure
(Bloom) with the Greek hero (Odysseus), Pound’s method begins with the histor-
ical individual, Propertius, who also comments on the modern British Empire and
poetic genres. Propertius interprets his own life through a variety of myths and his-
torical stories, suggesting the layers of association in the fourfold method. If
Propertius cannot know that his reflections on the sack of Troy at the end of the
poem presage the fall of Rome, Pound presents both as a warning to London. This
alignment of past and present, speaker and author, is a common effect in dramatic
monologues, but also in prosopopoeia, which reminded schoolchildren to learn
from history. Pound suggests we never do learn. Setting his satirical monologue in
the time of the great Roman orators who inspired prosopopoeia assignments, he
undermines the value of oratory as the “Caesarial ore rotundos” (Personae 213). He
might be parodying Quintilian, along with any twentieth-century elocutionary text
or vocal expression manual, when he declares, “One must have resonance, reso-
nance and sonority . . . like a goose” (Personae 224).
Pound’s complaint about “Chautauquas, Mrs. Eddys,” and the like was pub-
lished just before he began writing “Homage to Sextus Propertius”; after its publi-
cation, he was still associating the Chautauqua circuits with everything detestable
in American culture and Amy Lowell. He wrote to Margaret Anderson of Little
Review on April 22, 1921: “Do you honestly think that a serious writer OUGHT to
be reminded of the United States?? . . . ought one to be asked to address that
perpetual mother’s meeting, that chaste Chitaqua [sic]; that cradle of on-coming
Amys???”100 Yet, Pound never rejected his own history so adamantly, as his lifelong
respect for the Delsartean poets Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman reveals. History
provided Pound with the voices of Propertius, Simon Zelotes, Piere Vidal, or the
troubadours and with a method of association, like typology, that he would con-
tinue to use in his “poem including history,” The Cantos. Even of that long poem,
seemingly so different from the early monologues, Pound claimed, “ALL typo-
graphic disposition, placings of words on the page, is intended to facilitate the
reader’s intonation, whether he be reading silently to self or aloud to friends.”101
His belief in the poetic text as a script for intonation recalls Curry’s approach to
literary interpretation; Carman’s definition of poetry, music, and dance as
“rhythmic arts”; Monro’s view of books as “printed scores”; and Amy Lowell’s
theory of poetry as “spoken art.”
V. Amy Lowell’s Polyphonic Emma Lyon Hamilton
Only read it aloud, Gentle Reader, I beg, and you will see what you will see.
—Amy Lowell, Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916)102
Amy Lowell, living near the center of expression and Delsartism in Boston, recited
her poetry and delivered lectures directly responding to expressive culture. Lowell’s
public persona as a cigar-smoking woman in a masculine suit and her effectiveness
at promoting her poetry and that of her friends, including Pound, may be the
source of his association of “Chitaqua [sic]” and “on-coming Amy’s.”103 Her per-
formances resemble events promoted by expression and were part of her marketing
strategies, but they were also extensions of her poetic theories. She describes
“Poetry as a Spoken Art” in an essay of 1916, arguing like Pound, Eliot, and Mew
that poetic interpretation requires attention to the aural qualities of a poem best
experienced through recitation.104 Asking her ideal readers to “read it aloud,” she
guided an auditory experience using both traditional poetic sound effects (meter,
alliteration, rhyme) and techniques from oratory and elocution, disciplines being
interrogated and revised by expression. Audiences at her events, especially in
Boston, may have considered her in relation to performers trained in the vocal
techniques designed by Curry. Lowell’s cigar would certainly have distinguished
her from Delsartean readers and statue posers, but her long poem in oratorical or
polyphonic prose about Emma Lyon Hamilton, “Sea-Blue and Blood-Red” (1918),
demonstrates her interest in mythic posing and the history of solo performance.
Lowell’s recitations and lectures have not received significant attention,
although some of her performances rank among avant-garde performance exper-
iments and certainly depart from the usual Chautauqua reading.105 In an early
performance (December 1914), she collaborated with the composer Carl Engel,
who produced drum sounds while she read “The Bombardment” before a crowd
of four hundred in Boston.106 A verbal enactment of a firebombing in London, the
poem is one of her first experiments in prose poetry with oratorical sound effects.107
The combination of experimental music and chanted verse should be understood
in the context of Yeats and Florence Farr’s recitations with the psaltery, and Lowell
may have been aware of Farr when she appeared in Boston in 1907 or read her
ideas in The Music of Speech.108 Lowell bemoaned the style of recitation at the
Poetry Bookshop, which tended to be less experimental and collaborative, partially
due to the antitheatrical prejudice of the British verse-recitation movement. In “A
Letter from London,” published the same year as her “Bombardment” performance,
Lowell records her impression of a visit to the bookshop:
A month ago I toiled up the narrow stairs of a little outhouse behind the
Poetry Bookshop, and in an atmosphere of overwhelming sentimentality,
listened to Mr. Rupert Brooke whispering his poems. To himself, it seemed,
as nobody else could hear him. It was all artificial and precious. One longed
to shout, to chuck up one’s hat in the street when one got outside.109
Lowell objected to Brooke’s whispering in part because she believed poetry should
communicate to an audience, that it should be expressive rather than self-indul-
gent. In public lectures, she defined poetry as “the expression of the heart” that
“reveals the soul of humanity.”110 Using the weighted term expression, already the
name of an academic discipline, along with invocations of “heart” and “soul”
common among Delsarteans, Lowell appears to be advancing definitions of art
popularized by the expressive culture movement. References to the soulful expres-
sion of art are evident in every modernist discussed in this book and cannot
immediately be attached to either an antimodern backlash or Delsartism, but in
“Poetry as a Spoken Art,” Lowell comments directly on the discipline of expres-
sion: “The few people who attempt to read it [poetry] aloud are handicapped by
the realization of the unusual quality of their task, and lose their sense of proportion
and simplicity in the welter of artistic theories of expression which have gradually
come into being. Let us examine a few of these theories” (“Spoken” 15). While she
does not name particular theorists in the essay, Curry was among the most
renowned at this time, and Lowell shared his sense of a poem as a “verbal shell” to
be filled in by the voice and his critique of mechanical, unnatural training methods.
Like Curry, she criticizes those elocution teachers who misunderstand the “laws of
English prosody” and attempt to “heighten the poetical effect” by mispronouncing
words (“Spoken” 18). She would have disputed Curry’s theory that readers express
their personality through recitation. In an argument familiar from Monro and
Eliot’s critiques of distracting performers, Lowell claims that the audience must
forget the reader: “The dramatic quality of the piece must be given just in so far as
it stimulates imagination, but never so far as to call attention to the reader as an
actual personality” (“Spoken” 17). Although her own performances must have
called attention to her “personality,” she claims that the major “pitfall of all
elocution-taught readers” is their failure to realize “one is all alone, and one must
not act” (“Spoken” 16). Lowell emphasizes recitation as a solo, and the challenge of
solos is that performers are tempted to overact their personalities.111
Lowell understood recitation as the most contemporary pursuit of poetry: “If
the modern movement in poetry could be defined in a sentence, the truest thing
which could be said of it . . . would be that it is a movement to restore the audible
quality to poetry, to insist upon it as a spoken art” (“Spoken” 23). The “modern”
cannot be so easily defined and many earlier poets had worked with the “audible
quality” of poetry, but this was the major interest of cultures of recitation. Lowell
compares poetry as an organization of language comparable to a musical score, in
which the art coheres not in the notation on a page, but in a performance. Few can
read a score and “hear” music, and just as trained musicians must interpret a
musical score for an audience, she claims, “Poetry will come into its Paradise when
carefully trained speakers make a business of interpreting it to the world” (“Spoken”
13). Lowell describes a faculty she calls the “imaginative, mental ear,” which is sim-
ilar to the “visual imagination” and should enable readers to hear the sound pat-
terns of a poem just as they see a poetic image constructed by the text (“Spoken”
10). Most readers fail to perceive the musical patterns of words in a silent reading on
account of their insufficiently developed auditory imagination.112 Contemporary
theories of language as an arbitrary sign system separate the graphic mark of the
word from its sounding, but literary critics have long granted a mimetic connection
between text and sound for onomatopoetic words like the “Boom” Lowell deployed
in “The Bombardment.”113 Lowell imagined that every poetic text could be ono-
matopoetic, that the sounds of poetry could always be mimetic of their meanings.
Lowell was not the first modernist to wish that written language could convey
its sounding or to dream of a troupe of trained performers to recite her poetry (or
students of expression who can control the soloist’s tendency to overact). Lacking
such perfect performers, she attempted to encourage readers to develop their
auditory imaginations. Lowell’s Men, Women and Ghosts (1916) deploys a variety
of strategies, including the onomatopoetic “Boom” and the voices of fire-bombed
victims in the sound collage of her performance piece “The Bombardment.” Just
as her “Painter on Silk” “heard the bugles and drums / And wished he could paint
the roses, / Bursting into song,” a major goal of the book is to make printed words
burst from ink into sound (Men 244). To stimulate a reader’s auditory imagina-
tion, she often includes familiar songs such as the nursery rhymes of children
playing in “A Roxbury Garden” or an eighteenth-century sailor shanty in “The
Hammer.” Lowell uses onomatopoetic language to “transcribe the various move-
ments” of avant-garde music in “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces, ‘Grotesques’ for String
Quartets” (Men ix). She also figures the “movement” of music using kinesthetic
techniques that link images of dancing bodies to rhythms and sound effects:
Banging,
And wooden shoes beating the round grey stones
Of the marketplace.
Whee-e-e!
Sabots slapping the worn old stones,
And a shaking and cracking of dancing bones;
(Men 342–343)
The active gerunds (banging, slapping, cracking) are conventional onomatopoetic

words, and their trochaic rhythm suggests a stamping downbeat in the first line.
The repeated anapests of the last line mimic the three-beat waltz pattern common
to social dances like the one Lowell locates in the marketplace.
Men, Women and Ghosts also features dramatic monologues, a form that may
have appealed to Lowell for many of the same reasons it interested Curry; he believed
that vocal tones, as well as words, were needed to reveal the “heart” of the mono-
logue’s speaker and that the monologue “elevates the study of the spoken word”
more than other poetic forms (BDM 256).114 “Patterns,” the first poem of the book
and Lowell’s most famous monologue, is often oversimplified as an emotional out-
burst linked to her lesbianism and the class restrictions imposed by her wealthy
family. The speaker is a young aristocratic woman of the eighteenth century who
walks in her garden after receiving a letter that her fiancé, Lord Hartwell, was killed
in battle for “the Duke in Flanders.” The “patterns” represented in the poem include
the “garden-paths,” the “stiff, brocaded gown” she wears, her own rhythmic walking,
and the “pattern called a war” (Men 3–9). The speaker suggests that her marriage to
Hartwell “would have broke the pattern” (8) and imagines a passionate chase scene
in the garden, yet she presents the marriage in the most banal and static language of
the poem: “He for me, and I for him / He as Colonel, I as lady . . .” (Men 8). The
dramatic irony that there was little chance of marital fulfillment, in spite of her erotic
dream of a chase, is not recognized by those who read the poem as a revelation of
“Amy Lowell’s inner conflict” and “outer rebellion against world values.”115
Even as the speaker dreams of her lover embracing her naked body, she cannot
imagine him without a “sword-hilt” and other paraphernalia of war: “the buttons
of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me” (Men 5–6). The poem’s rhythm
and meter, the patterns used to construct the speaker’s voice, also reinforce the
irony. Lowell describes walking along garden paths, an image of circumscribed
movement, with repeated short rhyming phrases: “I shall go / up and down / in my
gown” (Men 8). When she imagines the passionate chase through the garden, how-
ever, her rhymes and rhythms are more complex, and the long lines stretch out on
the page to reinforce the deferral of pleasure:
I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,

And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his
shoes.
(Men 6)
The imaginative descriptions of what she “would be” and “should see” contrast
with his stumbling bewilderment described in shorter, rhymed lines. The meter
and rhyme underscore the idea that the fulfillment she imagined would have con-
stituted a pattern of disappointment.
Lowell connects her dramatic monologues to her experiments with polyphonic
prose, which she defines as a “purely dramatic form” that, especially when read
aloud, gives to “characters the vivid, real effect they have in a play” (Men x). Andrew
Thacker points out that the term polyphonic had previously been used to describe
a musical composition with several melodies or, in philology, a symbol with more
than one phonetic value (“Unrelated” 106). If she gleaned the term from her
interest in experimental music, Lowell’s major work in polyphonic prose, Can
Grande’s Castle (1918), introduces the form in relation to oratory at a moment
when the discipline was undergoing significant reforms due to expressive culture:
Putting aside one rhythm of English prosody after another, I finally decided
to base my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The
variations permitted to this cadence enable the poet to change the more
readily into those of vers libre, or even to take the regular beat of metre,
should such a marked time seem advisable. It is, of course, important that
such changes should appear as not only adequate but necessary when the
poem is read aloud.116
In Lowell’s era, the “cadence of oratorical prose” was often traced back to Roman
rhetoricians who discussed alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme; the juxta-
position of phrases; and the strategic use of sonorous words in speeches. The prose
style they elaborated was thought to have entered English through the liturgy and
translations of the Bible, according to Bliss Perry’s A Study of Poetry (1920), a book
that responds to cultures of recitation as it emphasizes the influence of oratory on
poetics.117 Perry mentions Lowell’s work in polyphonic prose as evidence of the
continued presence of the cadence in modern verse. Lowell suggests the rhythms
of oratorical prose are natural, not due to tradition or training, when she claims
that “men under stress of emotion tend to talk in rhythmed speech.”118 For her, the
“‘beat’ of poetry, its musical quality . . . bears in it the stress of emotion,” and the
“great orators of all time” have known how to infuse their speech with rhythms to
carry the feeling (“Spoken” 10). Correspondingly, Lowell’s primary rule for
polyphonic prose is that the meter should be “necessary” to, even mimetic of, the
emotional content of the passage; she insists on “the absolute adequacy of the
manner of a passage to the thought it embodies,” and the sound of the line is a
crucial part of the “manner” (Can Grande xi).
Can Grande’s Castle fluidly shifts between voices and rhythms in four long
poems connected by the theme of war. The first poem, “Sea-Blue and Blood-Red”
retells the life of Emma Lyon Hamilton and demonstrates that the solo statue
poser continued to be a model of creativity for modernist women:
And a new camlet shawl, all sea-blue and blood-red, in an intricate pattern
given by Sir William to help you do your marvelous “Attitudes.” Incomparable
actress! No theatre built is big enough to compass you. It takes a world; and
centuries shall elbow each other aside to watch you act your part. Art, Emma,
or heart? . . . She dances the tarantella, and poses before a screen with the red-
blue shawl. It is the frescoes of Pompeii unfrozen; it is the fine-cut profiles of
Sicilian coins; it is Apollo Belvedere himself—Goethe has said it. She wears a
Turkish dress, and her face is sweet and lively as rippled water.
(Can Grande 7–8)
The repetition of phrases attempting to describe the attitudes, “It is . . . ; it is . . . ; it

is . . . said it,” suggests extemporaneous speech continuously refining the descrip-
tion of Lyon Hamilton’s mythic posing. In those rhythmic phrases, words with
phonetic similarity to “pose” punctuate the flow, similar to the syncopated rhythm
of the statue posing itself: “poses,” “frescoes,” “Pompei,” “unfrozen,” “profiles,” and
“Apollo.” Exclamations and shifting voices indicate Lyon Hamilton’s fame and
controversy and the difficulty of describing her. A first-person address invokes her
presence as “you,” before the narrative shifts to a third-person description and
then implied dialogue, “Have you seen her—the Ambassadress? Ah, Bellissima
Creatura! ‘Una Donna Rara’! She is fairer than the Blessed Virgin; and good! Never
was such a soul in such a body!” (Can Grande 5). Lowell includes voices that do not
associate Lyon Hamilton with the Virgin, but even after her affair with Nelson, the
birth of their child, and his death in the sea battle of Trafalgar, she is presented
sympathetically as an artist who rejected conventional gender and class identities.
In spite of her title and Nelson’s dying wish that she and their child should be
protected, she died in poverty. In the last scene of Lowell’s narrative poem, an “old
guide to Calais” points her auditor to an unmarked grave.
Lowell’s interest in Lyon Hamilton may be due to her desire to trace a tradition
of women’s creativity, a desire she also pursued in “Sisters,” her poem discussing
Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson. Lowell’s speaker in

“Sea-Blue and Blood-Red” refers to the authority of Goethe to claim the title
“actress” for Lyon Hamilton and emphasizes her diverse talents as dancer and
poser. Yet, she also foregrounds, with rapid internal rhymes, the question so often
applied to the performances: “Art, Emma, or heart?” Is she an artist or just a
beautiful woman loved by powerful men; does she possess genius or only natural
charm? Lowell’s suggestion that the “centuries shall elbow each other aside to
watch you act your part” has proven to be true, as nineteenth- and twentieth-
century authors record her performances. For Lowell, Hamilton not only brings to
life classical frescoes and statues of figures of both genders, from Apollo to the
Virgin, but also relives the ancient theme that war, in this case the Napoleonic War,
destroys love. The attitudes reembodying the Virgin and other myths might be a
figure for Lowell’s strategy of invoking mythic themes, tropes, and images
throughout Can Grande’s Castle. With a suggestive invocation of Dante’s patron,
Can Grande, Lowell adopts the analogic mode characteristic of typological thought
and the mythical method.
Lowell’s typological organization in Can Grande’s Castle is clearest in the final
poem, “The Bronze Horses.”119 Lowell represents history as recurrence through
another classical sculpture, the chariot drawn by four horses now located above
the portal of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. Opening in the period of the quadri-
ga’s creation, Caesar’s legions march “Back to Rome with a victor’s spoils, with a
victor’s wreath on every head, and Judah broken is dead, dead! ‘Io triumphe!’ ”
(Can Grande 133). With a leap to the fall of Rome, the poem features another victor
invoking a god’s favor in Byzantium-Constantinople, where the horses were placed
outside the Hippodrome prior to the sack of that city in 1204 (“Unrelated” 114):
These vessels are the chalices of God’s wrath. The spirit of Christ walking
upon the waters. Or is it anti-Christ? This is the true Church. Have we not
the stone on which Jacob slept, the rod which Moses turned into a serpent,
a portion of the bread of the Last Supper? We are the Virgin’s chosen abid-
ing place. . . . We have pulled the sun’s rays from the statue of Constantine
and put up the Cross instead.
(Can Grande 156)
Lowell invokes common typological symbols, Moses’ rod and the bread and wine
of the Last Supper, but she also suggests that these symbols continue previous pat-
terns of destruction and reconstruction. The sun’s rays, an invocation of Apollo,
are connected to the new God of “Let there be light” in the mythical method. The
fall of Constantinople invokes the “tarantella” of Lyon Hamilton as a “death dance,”
and the poem leaps to Venice in May 1915 as that city is attacked. Thacker suggests
that the “poems look back to previous times of war in order to try to make sense
of the present” and the “horses symbolize an art that might endure the travails of
war” (“Unrelated” 115). They escape the firebombing only when Lowell imagines
the quadriga as a statue pose awakening and galloping along the canals “like a con-
stellation” (Can Grande 232). If there is hope at the end of the book, it is not in the
survival of art but the transformative power of the imagination, creating bombs
and quadrigae, constellations and poetry.
Lowell’s fluid polyphonic prose accommodates the figures of reenactment and
return that, introduced through Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, organize the entirety
of Can Grande’s Castle. Her presentation of historical repetitions suggests that war
will recur, along with less destructive, more beautiful human activities. This ver-
sion of history also demonstrates the associative thought paradigm characteristic
of typology and the mythical method common to the modernists examined here.
Lowell’s formal experimentation was celebrated in John Gould Fletcher’s 1915
Poetry Magazine article, “Miss Lowell’s Discovery: Polyphonic Prose,” but partially
due to her negative reception by Pound and others, she has been framed as a
derivative Imagist (“Amygist”). Lowell herself claimed, “There is nothing new
under the sun . . . and of this the Imagists were well aware.”120 Her “nothing new”
slogan could be applied to the many manifestations of antimodern-classicism in
modernism, including her own work in the “old” form of the dramatic mono-
logues, the polyphonic prose she associated with classical oratory, and her unusual
performances contributing to cultures of recitation.
In an early Canto of 1917, Pound comments on his Personae or the dramatic mono-
logue form more generally, asking if giving “life” to other figures is an “evasion”:
Is’t worth the evasion, what were the use

Of setting figures up and breathing life upon them,
Were’t not our life, your life, my life, extended?
I walk Verona. (I am here in England).
I see Can Grande. (Can see whom you will.)121
Rather than abandoning the feint and the form he adopted so consistently, Pound
uses the imaginative power and dramatic participation enabled by the monologue
to describe walking in Verona past Dante’s patron, Can Grande, who had a sur-
prising presence in modernism. Later interpreters of modernist poetics have read
dramatic monologues as if they were evasions concealing Mew and Lowell’s lesbi-
anism or Eliot’s conversion. There is a tendency to interpret poets’ careers as a
continual progress to so-called experimental forms like cantos, fragments, and

multivocal poetics. As Rita Felski points out in the context of gendered discussions
of modernism, writers “are often singled out for attention by feminist critics
because of their defiance of linguistic and social conventions and their transgres-
sive questioning of femininity. . . . Yet it also often perpetuates an unfortunate
dichotomy of literary and political value which identifies formal experimentation
as the most authentically resistive practice.”122 This tendency to applaud the “new”
experiment also obscures significant continuities and contexts for modernism,
including cultures of recitation with their roots in popular movements like
Delsartism and conservative institutions like the Poetry Society.
Mew’s career was launched by the verse-recitation movement centered around
the Poetry Bookshop, and she read her dramatic monologues in private women’s
salons, alternative sites for the performances of poetry and gender. Both T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound, as expatriate poets, responded to transatlantic cultures of recita-
tion. Eliot rejected expression’s emphasis on personality but incorporated ele-
ments of Curry’s theories of expression and ideas from the British verse-recitation
movement in principles that came to define modernist poetics, including the
objective correlative and mythical method. Pound adamantly rejected such American
manifestations of expressive culture as the Chautauqua readings yet celebrated the
Delsartean poets, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, and wrote dramatic mono-
logues influenced by their theories and versions of masculinity. Lowell most
directly engaged American expressive culture and attacked boring readings at the
bookshop. More research is needed to situate modernist poetics in relation to cul-
tures of recitation, with attention to Louise Bogan (“Medusa” and “Cassandra”),
Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1915), or Anna Wickham, who per-
formed nine times at the Poetry Bookshop.123 I might have discussed Edith Sitwell’s
avant-garde performances of Façade (beginning in 1923) or the readings she con-
ducted during World War II costumed as an ironic queen.124 These included an
April 14, 1943, war benefit billed as “Reading of Famous Poets at London’s Aeolian
Hall,” featuring Sitwell’s “Anne Boleyn’s Song,” H.D.’s “Ancient Wisdom Speaks to
the Mountain,” and T. S. Eliot’s “What the Thunder Said” from The Waste Land.
H.D. reported to May Sarton that “the [real] Queen came with the two little
Princesses.”125 Her partner, Bryher, claimed, “Hilda [H.D.] read magnificently like
the inspired muse she was” and described how “Edith [Sitwell] stepped forward as
if from some great tapestry” to deliver the Boleyn monologue.126
Influenced by the solo forms of the monodrama and ancient prosopopoeia,
the dramatic monologue is an imagined solo that attempts to notate a voice and
a gesturing speaker, as well as words, all three modes of expression outlined by
Curry and Delsarte. It became a solo performance in poetry readings and recita-
tions conducted by both poets and other performers in Delsartean matinees,
Chautauqua circuits, Schools of Expression, the Poetry Bookshop, Poetry Society
events, or school assignments as children practiced elocution. Many perfor-
mances of monologues passed without the billing “Reading of Famous Poets” or
with frustration and the desire to, as Lowell put it, “chuck up one’s hat in the
street.” Yet, cultures of recitation required young modernists to memorize a poem
and stand before classrooms to deliver a recitation, and this old but not entirely
rejected pedagogical model provides an important context for modernist poetics.
Never quite so “new” as publicized, modernism inherited genres, pedagogies, bib-
lical typology and its mythic relative, and a strain of antimodern-classicism
that was skeptical of historical progress from the sack of Troy to the fall of
Constantinople to World Wars I and II.
4. The Motor in the Soul
Isadora Duncan’s Solo Dance
Before I go out on the stage, I must place a motor in my soul . . . if I do not get time to put that
motor in my soul, I cannot dance.
—Isadora Duncan, My Life (1927)1
Duncan describes being propelled to dance by a motor in her soul, an image sug-
gesting her complex relationship to technology and her choreography joining
motorized movement practices to soulful expression. Duncan’s attempt to make
dance “new” by turning back to a mythical past brought Delsartean statue posing
into a hybrid performance form: a combination of solo dance, live orchestral
music (usually romantic), nonnaturalistic stage decor, and inflammatory curtain-
call speeches. This hybrid form constituted a modernist manifesto and enabled
Duncan to promote an ambivalent antimodern politics and subjectivity. Drawing
on popular nineteenth-century conceptions of the self, body, and soul, especially
those of Walt Whitman, Ernst Haeckel, and Friedrich Nietzsche, she redefined
spirituality through that icon of modern technology, the motor. Her presentation
of a self that is embodied but spiritual, carefully choreographed but seemingly
free, and adamantly female influenced an important trajectory of feminism and
spheres of modernism as diverse as Futurism, Cambridge Ritualism, the Moscow
Art Theatre, and Greenwich Village Radicalism. The impact of Duncan, who was
already an international star by 1908, indicates that modern dance was an early
transnational modernist movement. Widely and vaguely recognized as the “Muse
144
THE MOTOR IN THE SOUL 145
of Modernism,” to borrow the title of a 1998 exhibition of art featuring Duncan,

her own achievements are submerged in the figure of the muse who inspires but
does not create.2 I position Duncan as an instigator of modernism by reading her
choreography, movement techniques, and the political manifestos she danced.3
Excellent studies of Duncan have appeared recently, but this is the first to dem-
onstrate that her aesthetic practice reinterpreted established traditions of solo
performance for international modernism.4 Her performances adapted Delsartean
movement principles and ideas of the body and soul for the concert halls of what
she called “high religious art.”5 A significant modernist experiment in hybrid
performance, Duncan’s form has not been recognized as such because aspects, like
the solo, became common practice in modern dance, while other features have
been overlooked. Although soloists in “Greek” dresses had occupied music halls
and Delsartean platforms for decades, Duncan’s body, costumed in a light tunic
and dancing alone in legitimate theaters was unprecedented.6 Classical romantic
music (Chopin, Beethoven) became a staple accompaniment for dance, but
Duncan’s use of “high music” was controversial, even deemed a “sacrilege.”7 The
simple curtains she hung on her stage may have inspired Gordon Craig’s similar
designs, as she claimed in her autobiography, but they certainly promoted a style
of spare decor deployed by Craig and others.8 Her curtain-call speeches combined
the Delsartean lecture-demonstration with the modernist manifesto’s “bad-
mannered” speech and “hostility toward the audience.”9 Duncan used her speeches
to present aesthetic theories, attack the conservatism of her audience, ostracize
imitators, raise money for schools, and point to the political significance of her
dance. She often published these speeches as essays and then incorporated many
of them into her autobiography, thereby extending her manifesto performance
into print. The difficulty of treating the interdisciplinarity of her performance
form tends to foster a divide between studies of her dances and analyses of her
published aesthetic theories. Yet Duncan’s choreographic practice and theories of
dance are inseparable in her version of the dance manifesto.
Duncan’s biography is far better known than her choreography or aesthetics,
due in part to her assertions that her solos were the dance of her “soul,” but also to
her undeniably dramatic life.10 Films, plays, biographies, and even criticism
describe in sensationalized detail her departure from the United States on a live-
stock ship in 1899 to begin her career abroad,11 the deaths of her two children in
April 1913 when their car plunged into the Seine,12 the loss of her citizenship and
deportation due to accusations of communism,13 and her own highly publicized
strangulation in 1927, when her scarf caught in the wheel of a car. The accidents of
the biography even shape interpretations of her belief system so that the deaths of
Duncan and her children in automobiles are read as lessons on the deadly invasion
of the motor—in spite of her references to motors in souls.14 Penny Farfan describes
the popular and critical “co-optation of Duncan into a tragic historiographic nar-
rative” that transforms her life into art and negates her dance.15 Farfan quotes
Harriet Monroe’s statement in Poetry Magazine (31, no. 4 [1928]): “The death of
Isadora Duncan—so swift, so beautiful, a mere twist of the dancer’s scarf ” (WMP
109). Even the feminist critic Susan Gubar claimed Duncan’s “costumes and affairs
and death express her creed as well as her autobiography does” (WMP 109). Farfan
points out that her death, unlike her costumes and autobiography, was accidental
and “intentionally expressive of nothing” but does not discuss Duncan’s choreog-
raphy as she examines the gendered functions of historiography (WMP 109).
Dance critics have not positioned Duncan in the context of international mod-
ernism partially because of the metaphysical rhetoric in her published discussions
of spirit and selfhood.16 Ann Daly’s detailed account of Duncan’s dance practice
claims that she “never completed the leap” from Victorianism to modernism,
assuming that her “romantic ideas about morality and spirituality” could not
accommodate “the secular interests of modern art” (Done 209–220). Duncan’s
blend of metaphysical, materialist, and antimodern thought is actually a dominant
feature of modernism that was promoted by popular Delsartism but evident from
Soviet silent film theory to discussions of verse recitation at the Poetry Bookshop.
Duncan grounded ideas of the soul in moving bodies and twentieth-century tech-
nologies, dissolving without resolving assumed antagonisms between spiritualism
and modernist materialism. She manipulated the dominant discourses of her time
to elevate dance as a privileged means of cultivating and expressing what she called
“inner self,” “soul,” or “spirit.”17 These include Walt Whitman’s model of a multitu-
dinous self; the evolutionary scientist Ernst Haeckel’s “monistic religion”; Friedrich
Nietzsche, the “dancing philosopher”; and Jane Ellen Harrison’s ideas about dance
in ancient ritual.18 Duncan’s innovative use of these discourses was her ability to
transmute them into choreography, to make them the basis of a dance technique.
In the second half of the chapter, I turn to Duncan’s three central movement
innovations, all of which she associated with the motor in the soul: The motor’s
ability to move several objects simultaneously offers an image of a “multiplied
body,” an interest that was shared by F. T. Marinetti (who was also cheering,
“Hurrah for motors”) and influenced Futurist dance.19 The power of motorized
propulsion to channel forces and move a foreign object offered the ideal of dance
movements that appear to be executed effortlessly in a self-abandonment that
Duncan associated with classical ritual.20 Finally, the motor’s endless repetition
inspired Duncan’s desire to simulate spontaneity in her dances. Her deliberate
choreography of spontaneity might be emblematic of the tensions in antimodern

performances more generally: a soloist attempts to assert agency and freedom but
through a preformulated mythic construct that inevitably confines. Duncan hoped
to dance a manifesto, but it was often the weight of myth that transformed her into
a model for the “new woman” of modernism.
I. The Shock of Solo Expression
Imagine then a dancer who, after long study, prayer and inspiration, has attained such a degree
of understanding that his body is simply the luminous manifestation of his soul; whose body
dances in accordance with a music heard inwardly, in an expression of something out of
another, a profounder world. This is the truly creative dancer, natural but not imitative,
speaking in movement out of himself and out of something greater than all selves.
—Duncan, “The Philosopher’s Stone of Dancing” (1920)21
Dance history tends to describe the first generation of modern dancers not as
creative artists but as idiosyncratic individuals, partially due to the form’s origins
in solo performance. Mark Franko summarizes the received history: After the
“expressivist individuals typified by Isadora Duncan,” later dancers expunged the
self to produce a technique of modernist innovation.22 This “modern dance master
narrative” is derived from prevailing narratives of literary modernism, which often
cite such claims as T. S. Eliot’s “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice,
a continual extinction of personality” (Eliot Selected 40).23 As discussed in the last
chapter, Eliot’s ideas about selfhood and personality were part of his ambivalent
response to the Delsarte-inspired craze for expression, a formative movement for
modern dance, as well as cultures of recitation. The master narrative that domi-
nates dance studies overlooks this context to suggest that modernism happened
later in dance than other aesthetic modes; only after a “progress from expression
as spontaneity [Duncan] to expression as semiological system [Martha Graham]”
was dance modernist; postmodern dance further required “the marginalizing of
expressive intent [Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham]” (Dancing Modernism ix).
I argue that Duncan’s dance aesthetic attempted to create the illusion of spontaneous
self-expression, and she was very successful. Marinetti misunderstood her dances
as “free improvisations,” and even the “master narrative” of dance history ignores
the actual existence of her choreography and technique.24
Duncan’s writing about self-expression, as the epigraph to this section reveals,
dissolves the usual dialectic between self and other. She describes dance as both
an expression of the self and a movement “greater than all selves,” that is, not
reducible to any division of humanity into distinct selves. Movement renders the
self-soul present, but “truly creative” dancing expresses both “selfhood” and a tran-
scendent world accessible through art. Her model of self-soul resembles the Judeo-
Christian typological individual in that it is both historical and related to other
categories of being and a “profounder world” that she struggles to describe
(“something . . . something greater”). One of Duncan’s strategies for undermining
the self-other dichotomy was to present selfhood through mythic types, a strategy
common to Delsartism and modernist mythical methods, as well as biblical
typology. This is not to say that Duncan rejects self-expression or autobiograph-
ical dance altogether, but she understands the danced self in relationship to other,
usually mythic, characters. To deplore “mere self-expression” is to ignore the fact
that in Duncan’s period, the public expression of a female self on any stage outside
the private sphere was a controversial act.25 A body, especially a solo body, commu-
nicating from a stage, invokes assumptions about the meanings of bodies and
identities. Even the so-called depersonal postmodern dancers explore versions of
subjectivity; Yvonne Rainer’s variations on everyday movement practices, building
on pedestrian steps already present in Duncan’s choreography, present an illusion
of the subject as “normal,” that is, as “not performing.”26 Reframing Duncan’s
practice as solo- rather than self-expression better accounts for her ideas of subjec-
tivity, range of themes, and sources of inspiration, including personal experience,
movements in nature, works of art, political struggles, and myth.
The effect of Duncan’s apparently spontaneous solo expression, with simple
choreography derived from running, skipping, and other common movements,
was shocking for audiences accustomed to very different styles of dance and
performance. When she first took the stage in the 1890s, Loïe Fuller (1862–1928)
had initiated an enthusiasm for skirt dancing with her innovative lighting tech-
niques, stunning stage effects, and an elaborate costume apparatus that allowed
her to manipulate yards of fabric enfolding her body.27 The ballerinas of the period,
such as Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), had appeared in solos as a part of longer narra-
tive ballets but not as a full-length dance concert.28 Pavlova and Duncan, touring
simultaneously, were often compared in the media; a male partner accompanied
Pavlova, and she performed dances from romantic ballets using the virtuosic tech-
nique established in the first decades of the nineteenth century.29 Salomé dances,
initiated by Maud Allan in 1908, were standard solo acts in variety shows and
vaudeville venues, but the seductive pieces were interspersed among diverse genres
of entertainment and did not constitute an entire evening of dance on the stage of
“high art.” Duncan defined her dance against each of these styles: she criticized the
chorus girls and Salomé dancers for their erotic displays; she condemned the ballet
as unnatural with its codified technique and painful physical discipline; she argued
against any skirt or apparatus that concealed, embellished, or controlled the
body.
Duncan achieved international fame in Europe after 1900, as is well docu-
mented, but previous attempts to explain her powerful effect on audiences have
overlooked the prevalence of references to her solo body. Duncan later choreo-
graphed ensemble pieces and revised solos for her students, but her initial inter-
vention was as a soloist. Reviewers frequently emphasized the simplicity,
spontaneity, and novelty of a dancer who, alone and simply dressed, could com-
pete with technologically enhanced spectacles like skirt dances. The French dra-
matist Henri Lavedan describes Duncan’s stage decor and costume in her early
Paris performances (1900–1902):
On an empty stage, faintly lighted, unfurnished, simply and severely draped

at back and sides with a soft, blue fabric, a young woman, vital, beautiful,
has been able without the aid of any artifice and without uttering a word, to
hold an audience for two hours, in one of the largest theaters of Paris. She
was alone, draped rather than dressed. . . .
(“Artists” 45)
The blue curtains became Duncan’s signature stage property, with lighting
designed to glimmer on this draped cloth and on her diaphanous tunics. Duncan’s
conductor for her 1906 tour of Europe, Martin Shaw, also describes her “unaided”
solos:
The theatre was crowded and the audience in a state of ecstatic delight
throughout. Isadora provided the whole programme. This in itself is
remarkable. I doubt whether any other dancer has ever been able to carry
through a whole evening’s entertainment unaided. All the time I conducted
for her she was the sole performer on the stage.30
Both Lavedan and Shaw remark on Duncan’s ability to “hold an audience” or

“carry” an entire evening without another performer or the diverse acts of variety
shows.
Duncan’s international fame and controversy were partially due to her solos,
and as her reputation abroad grew, some Americans initially attempted to debunk
the lauded European taste. A review in the St. Louis Sunday Gazette (December 26,
1902) refers to Duncan’s success in Germany as a “fad.” The reviewer was astonished
that European audiences would pay to see Duncan’s “unaided” and misleadingly
modest solo dances: “Meantime, the demure little maiden is quietly raking in the
shekels, getting higher prices for her unaided performances than are commanded
by a Wagner opera” (Sensational 100).31 During Duncan’s 1908 American tour, her
first after achieving star status, reviewers continued to suggest that audiences
clapped because they thought they must appear to take “real delight” in a performer
who had been a success in Europe: “Isadora Duncan’s attempt to monopolize a
whole audience—and a $2 audience at that—for an entire evening, has very much
the complexion of Paul McAllister’s untoward experiment as a condensed ‘Hamlet’
in vaudeville.”32 The Variety reviewer opines that solo dance belongs on a vaudeville
stage, where female soloists were the rage. Hamlet is to be presented for “$2” at New
York’s Criterion Theater, and the two should never be confused.
For the artists and intellectuals at Duncan’s 1908 concerts, her solos embodied
a particularly American version of individualism and innovation.33 The poet
William Carlos Williams attended one of the August 1908 performances at the
Criterion Theater deplored in Variety and described Duncan in a letter to his
brother, Edgar (Bo):
Last night I went to see Isadora Duncan in her classical dances, really Bo it
was the most chaste, most perfect, most absolutely inspiring exhibition
I have ever seen. It fairly made my hair stand on end Bo and best of all she
is an American. . . . I could see all our future before us in her dancing and
I came away alive as I have rarely been to the exquisite beauty of simple per-
fect truth.34
Like many Duncan enthusiasts, Williams emphasized the chasteness of the

performance, a trend indicating how frequently dance was associated with the
erotic. He framed Duncan’s “classical dances” as the “future” of American art. His
surprisingly antimodern vision of the future is even more evident in the sonnet he
addressed to Duncan and enclosed in the letter:
. . . Heat thirsty Sythians [sic] craving wrack,

Lithe Bacchanals or flushed, in roseate track,
Athenian girls completing vict’ry’s law.
I breathed their olden virgin purity
................
I saw, dear country-maid, how soon shall spring
From this our native land great loveliness.
The hard rhymes and occasionally strained iambic pentameter bear little resem-
blance to Williams’s later experiments, but the sonnet demonstrates his interest in
the classical imagery common to modernist poetry and modern dance. Of the
“Greek poems” of his friends, H.D., Pound, and other expatriate poets, Williams
claimed, “Hellenism, especially the modern sort, is too staid, too chilly, too little
fecundative to impregnate my world.”35 He insisted on poetry featuring the American
language, “western dialect,” and “a local assertion” (Imaginations 175, 138). Yet, refer-
ences to warring Scythians, festive Bacchanals, and other mythic types featured in
Duncan’s dances suggest that early in his career, Williams saw the possibility of
American art through a return to ancient Greece, even a mythical method.36
Duncan’s use of material from classical myth contributed to Shaemas O’Sheel’s
1910 description of her as a “great priestess” who revealed to her audience its
“secret” self: “This solitary figure on the lonely stage suddenly confronts each of us
with the secret of a primal desire invincibly inhering in the fibre of each, a secret
we had securely hidden beneath our conventional behaviors, and we yearn for a
new and liberated order in which we may indeed dance.”37 For O’Sheel, the solo
evoked a desire to dance with the woman who was courageous enough to move
against “convention” (“Priestess” 481). O’Sheel recorded an erotic gaze at “that
solitary figure, gloriously a woman, voluptuous yet slender and agile and full of
youth, barefooted, with draperies fluttering away from strenuous legs and perfect
shoulders” (“Priestess” 481). Yet, he diverted attention from Duncan’s body and
any physical response it might generate in the audience by describing her “utter
beauty” as “intoxicating to souls” rather than eyes (“Priestess” 481–482). She
defeated the vices of “Fashion and Prudery, in the abuse and suppression of the
body” and instituted a “renaissance of reverence for the body” (“Priestess” 480).
O’Sheel attempted to sacralize dance by subverting her sexuality, framing her as a
“priestess,” and using the metaphysical terms common in Duncan’s rhetoric:
“soul,” “beauty,” “freedom,” and “life.”
Duncan’s audiences focused on the novelty of her solo performances, “unaided”
dance, singular body, the emptiness or size of the stage, and her perceived loneli-
ness. They called her a priestess, virgin, prostitute, “country-maid,” swindler, or
kitten. The image of a playful kitten featured in an account John Butler Yeats sent
to John Quinn on November 1, 1908, accompanied by a sketch of himself walking
with Duncan. In spite of the sensationalized reviews he had read, Yeats reported
that Duncan’s performance was surprisingly “demure”: “I saw her dancing on the
biggest stage in New York—a figure dancing all alone on this immense
stage. . . . Several people said: Is it not like watching a kitten playing for itself? We
watched her as if we were each of us hidden in ambush.”38 For Yeats, as for O’Sheel,
the soloist seeming to dance for her own pleasure rather than theatrical display
had the paradoxical effect of drawing the audience into the performance. The
audience in ambush may be a sinister image, but many reviewers demonstrated
contradictory impulses to attack, celebrate, and join the solo. Duncan was an
international star by the second decade of the century, and through solo expres-
sion, she established herself as a type for the independent, creative, “new woman”
of modernism.
II. The Proto-Motor: Duncan and Delsartean Posing
Delsarte, the master of all principles of flexibility and lightness of body, should receive universal
thanks for the bonds he has removed from our constrained members. His teachings, faithfully
given, combined with the usual instruction necessary to learning dance, will give a result
exceptionally graceful and charming.
—Duncan, “Emotional Expression,” The Director (1898)39
While Duncan’s solo body and simple tunic were shocking to audiences at high art
theaters in New York, London, Paris, and Moscow, her costume and movements
would have been more familiar in a Delsarte matinee or lecture-demonstration.
When she returned to the United States in 1908, her success abroad had bolstered
the Delsarte-inspired enthusiasm for statue posing in “Greek” costumes at semi-
private performances, studio classes, and schools of expression. The publicity for
Duncan’s first American tour, organized by the Broadway producer Charles
Frohman, contrasted the mixed forms of Delsartean performance with her solo
dance as “a feat of endurance never previously seen outside of Europe. . . . She will
be the first example of a single artist devoting a whole evening to dancing, unre-
lieved by song, skit, or recitation” (Sensational 232). The impresario strategically
positioned her in relation to, but at a remove from, the respectable Delsartean
combination of recitation, music, and dramatic scenes rather than the racier
hybrid of the variety show. Duncan took the “principles of flexibility and light-
ness” she attributed to Delsarte out of the drawing room and onto the professional
stage, emphasizing Delsartism’s promise that bodily discipline could produce a
desired self. Yet, long after she celebrated Delsarte in The Director, Duncan denied
her old “master” to claim originality, genius, and individuality. Even in this gesture,
she was following a strain of antitraditionalism already present in Delsarte’s pro-
test “against the tyranny of its influence.”40 Critics often take her at her word, so the
extent of Delsartism’s influence on her choreography and movement techniques,
as well as her theories of dance, is not fully recognized.41
The evidence for Duncan’s interest in Delsartism dates to the 1890s, when she,
with her sister, Elizabeth, began to teach in Oakland, California, to supplement the
family income. Duncan reported to the journalist Walter Shaw that her professional
cards advertised her as “Professor of Delsarte” but claimed that she had not under-
stood her studies of his technique (Portrait 18–20). Her lover, Gordon Craig,
reported that she carried a Delsarte manual with her on tours, and her childhood
friend Florence Treadwell Boynton remembers watching her practice Delsartean
gestures (Sensational 30, Portrait 17).42 In a program note of 1905, Duncan writes
that at the age of eleven, she began to teach “a new system of body culture and
dancing,” and she describes how her students “danced and mimed small scenes—of
mimodramas accompanied by Poems” (Sensational 25). The vocabulary of system
and body culture resembles Delsartean rhetoric, and performances of choreo-
graphed poetry or “mimodramas” recall the monodrama form and the recitations
promoted by the expressive culture movement. Duncan’s early performances for
elite patrons in Newport, Rhode Island, were a blend of recitation and dance that
resembled Delsarte matinees; reviews of “An Idyl from Theocritus and Other
Scenes” performed on September 15, 1898, indicate that Duncan danced to recita-
tions by her sister Elizabeth.43 Duncan continued to include poetry recited by her
brother Augustin in 1915 when H. T. Parker’s review in the Boston Evening Transcript
(February 4, 1915) objected to the event as “a most disheartening and amateurish
mixture of music and recited literature” (Sensational 330). Parker may have associ-
ated Duncan’s “mixture” with the “amateur” performances in Delsarte matinees.
In addition to shaping Duncan’s performance form, Delsartism inspired her
interest in the poses of classical antiquity and her Greek costumes. A 1908 photo-
graph of Duncan, posing as if adjusting the shoulder pins or fibulae of a long
Greek chiton, resembles the widely circulated image of Genevieve Stebbins posing
as Farnese Flora (figure 4.1, see figure 2.5). Duncan’s chiton is a heavier drapery
than the transparent tunics she wore for dance concerts, suggesting that she may
have practiced Delsartean statue poses distinct from her other performances.
Regardless, well into the first decade of the twentieth century, she presented herself
in the image of the Delsarteans. Even later, photographs of her students, the
Isadora Duncan Dancers, show bodily compositions similar to Delsartean tab-
leaux (see figures 2.6 and 2.7). Ann Daly dismisses Delsartism as a “popular
craze . . . pushed nearly to the brink of parody,” although popularity may bolster
rather than discount its influence.44 She claims that Duncan abandoned any
interest she had in Delsarte after seeing Ellen Terry and Eleonora Duse perform
and realizing “the distinction between imitating emotion and summoning it”
(Done 131). This distinction, contested at least since Diderot’s “Le paradoxe sur le
comedien” (1773), is not upheld by Duncan’s ideas of emotional expression.45
Duncan’s essay about Duse focuses on a single moment when “Duse stood quite
still, alone on the stage.”46 She was “transmuted” into a “divine presence,” and this
“supreme gesture,” although completely still, made her “part of the movement of
the spheres” (AD 121–122). Her achievement had nothing to do with the character
for, according to Duncan, A. W. Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1899) was
“two acts of utter vulgarity and banality” (AD 121).47 Duse was neither “imitating”
human emotion in a mimetic character study nor “summoning” it—if that means
drawing from personal experiences. Duse was posing, and Duncan claims, “when
I can come on the stage and stand as still as Eleonora Duse did tonight, and, at the
same time, create that tremendous force of dynamic movement, then I shall be the
greatest dancer in the world” (ADL 121).
Duncan’s theories built on Delsarte’s laws of correspondence between body
and soul. As detailed in chapter 2, Delsarte associated his nine attitudes of each
body part with spiritual expression in a theory of correspondence that can be
traced through Emanuel Swedenborg, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
and Duncan’s account of her “discovery” of dance:
I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance which might
be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the
body’s movement. For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded
between my breasts, covering the solar plexus. . . . I was seeking, and finally
discovered, the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power,
the unity from which all diversions of movements are born.
(ML 58)48
Duncan gives “spirit” and “soul” a physiological location in an interior “crater” of

the individual, which she calls the “solar plexus” or “the temporal home of the
soul” (ML 244). Both Duncan and Delsarte revise notions of an immanent spirit
by insisting on the soul’s materiality and suggesting that an “expression” of the
soul requires bodily motion. Duncan defines dance as motion attuned to the soul,
a physical response to a “central spring” that provides a visible sign of inner spiri-
tuality. For both, the person is a fusion of body and spirit, but the relation between
Duncan’s moving body and soul is a direct causation rather than a Delsartean
correspondence. She suggests the soul actually comes into existence through
dance; the moving body is the material in which spirit coheres in the world.
The solar plexus, as the soul’s organ and the motor propelling dance, was also
a crucial aspect of the dance technique and choreography Duncan created. If
movement begins from the area above the abdomen and between the breasts, the
entire body will necessarily travel through space (or fall), and this locomotion was
crucial to Duncan’s definition of dance. She contrasted her movements to the
ballet dancer who gestures from the spinal axis: “The ballet school taught the
Fig 4.1 Isadora Duncan, by Paul Berger (1908). Irma Duncan Collection. Courtesy of the
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
pupils that this spring [of motor power] was found in the centre of the back at the
base of the spine. From this axis says the ballet master, arms, legs, and trunk must
move freely, giving the result of an articulated puppet. This method produces
artificial mechanical movement not worthy of the soul” (ML 58). Certainly, ballet
often involves explosive locomotor movements, but Duncan is correct that ballet
trains dancers to avoid moving the solar plexus area when lifting the leg (grand
battement) or arms (port-de-bras). To correctly perform a reaching gesture with
the arm in Duncan technique, a prior “inner” motion or desire to move is indi-
cated by the dancer’s facial expression as she looks in the direction of the reach.
Then, the solar plexus initiates a vector by shifting the torso in that direction, the
upper arm continues the motion as if the force were traveling progressively from
shoulder to hand, and the fingertips finish the gesture by pointing to the shape it
would make in the air. Duncan’s gesture adapts two Delsartean movement princi-
ples as taught by Stebbins: The “law of sequence” requires that the “expression of
face” precedes the gesture, and the “law of evolution” defines the way a reaching
motion passes from the shoulder to the elbow and then to the wrist and thumb
(Delsarte Expression 260–263). Stebbins had also anticipated Duncan’s solar plexus
in her own description of movement from what she calls a “bodily centre” located
in the torso or “the soft place below the breastbone” (Delsarte Expression 317).
Stebbins applied Delsartean laws to the transitions between statue poses, while
similar principles were adapted by Richard Hovey for a Delsartean theory of
poetics in “The Technic of Poetry” (1892), and expressive culture had connected
them to nearly every aspect of social life.
Duncan obviously shifted Delsartean bodily techniques toward the full
movement of dance, as might be expected, but she also incorporated attitudes
directly into her choreography. Her dances are punctuated with poses referencing
classical statuary and famous paintings invoking mythic narratives and associated
emotions. She used the same process of meaning making through recognition of a
bodily shape that operated in Emma Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes and Stebbins’s
artistic statue poses. This is Duncan’s version of a modernist mythical method or
danced typology. Duncan, like Lyon Hamilton, Delsarte, Stebbins, and later H.D.,
studied ancient vases and bas-reliefs to inspire her poses. Beginning her research
in the British Museum after arriving in London in 1899, Duncan wrote detailed
observations of the statues, searching for “the feelings that their gestures symbol-
ized” and then attempting to “express them to whatever music seemed to me to be
in harmony with the rhythms of the feet and Dionysiac set of the head” (ML 44).49
The “Dionysian” became a distinctive step in her choreography; the movement
begins with a lift of one leg and both arms and a contraction of the upper torso.
The dancer steps forward with a downward thrust of the arms as the second leg
lifts behind the body (attitude derrière) and the back arches. Duncan claims of the
movement:
This figure is the best example I could give of an emotion taking entire pos-
session of the body. The head is turned backward—but the movement of
the head is not calculated; it is the result of the overwhelming feeling of
Dionysiac ecstasy which is portrayed in the entire body.50
Duncan associates the Dionysian step with ritual ecstasy, just as Delsarte’s gestures
were correlated to specific emotions.
Duncan’s early piece, Tanagra Figures, is based on a British Museum collection
that included several of the famous fourth- to third-century b.c.e. terra cotta fig-
ures unearthed at Tanagra, Greece, in 1873 and 1874. The popular collection
appealed to Duncan, in part because the statuettes predominantly represented
women dancing or participating in funerary rites.51 Perhaps the most widely
known piece from the Duncan repertory today, the choreography is a series of
statue poses, performed on each foot, with fluid transitions.52 As the dancer shifts
her weight between poses, she maintains a parallel line in her hips and torso, fully
open to the audience as opposed to the crossed position called croisé in ballet ter-
minology. Duncan derives this placement from the flat two-dimensional quality
of figures in ancient frescoes, and the position also emphasizes the S-curve in
Greek sculptures of the body.53 Among other poses, the dancer holds a lunge and
glances behind as if she is being pursued, she lifts a foot to adjust a sandal strap,
both hands move to her shoulder as if she is pinning her tunic, and she bends to
the ground to take a handful of dirt. Used to teach correct body placement and
spatial orientation, including the open angle of the hips and chest that were fea-
tures of Duncan’s technique, Tanagra Figures also demonstrates the foundational
influence of statue posing on her choreography.
Duncan continued her study of classical statuary after 1900 at the Louvre in
Paris, where she met the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He befriended and sketched
Duncan, recognizing a similarity in their aesthetic pursuits. Describing his
attempts to represent the moving, living body in his sculptures, he claimed: “the
nostrils breathe, the heart beats, the lungs inhale, the being thinks and feels, has
pains and joys, ambitions, passions, and emotions. These I must express.”54
Rodin’s desire to convey living movement and emotion in static form contributed
to his interest in contemporaneous dance, and he claimed that Duncan “achieved
in sculpture feeling without effort.”55 Duncan studied at the Rodin Pavillon with
the painter Charles Hallé, and she incorporated gestures from Rodin’s Gates of
Hell into her Furies (Gluck, Orfeo, 1911). Unlike the sequenced posing of Tanagra
Figures, Furies quickly strikes postures from the Gates of Hell and invents
movement for figures in the sculpture. Belying caricatures of her dance as mono-
lithically lighthearted, Furies explores weightedness, bodily contortions, floor-
work, and falls—movement innovations that dance history often attributes to
Duncan’s successor, Martha Graham.56
Teaching Furies as an “abstract representation” of Hades, the renowned
second-generation Duncan dancer Julia Levien insisted that the dancer must per-
form variously as the tortured, the imprisoned, and the avengers of sins.57 Changes
in the bodily efforts demanded by the dance suggest these roles and representa-
tions, but they are reinforced by choreographic allusions to such figures from
Rodin’s Gates as the “Paola and Francesca” detail on the lower left inner panel.
Other allusions help convey the shift from movement sequences portraying the
twisted limbs and knotted bodies of the damned to those representing the avenger.
In the sphinx position, the dancer lies on her stomach, with torso lifted, legs
extended behind, forearms resting on the ground, and clawed hands, while the
eyes dart from side to side for a victim. Later, a series of leg extensions with the
torso thrust forward transforms the dancer’s legs into spears. The hands twist
as the leg extends, invoking the movement of the serpents entwined about the
arms of the avenging goddesses. Another position represents the punishment of
Atlas bearing the world on his back; the dancer’s torso contracts forward while her
arms stretch wide over her shoulders, sculpting a globe. In Furies, the dancer
embodies different characters, objects, and emotions, from guilt to vengeance and
pain, by evoking poses from art. Passion filled but not self-expressive, these feel-
ings are associated with characters contained in a sculpture of hell.
Duncan also imagined movement for the still figures in paintings like Sandro
Botticelli’s Primavera (1477–1478), an immensely popular reproduction and sign of
cultural literacy that hung in Duncan’s childhood home (AD 128; figure 4.2). In The
Three Graces (Schubert, ca. 1917), Duncan invents a waltz for the three entwined fig-
ures in the foreground of the painting, and the conceit of the piece is that the Graces
are sneaking out of the picture.58 The opening pose is a tableau vivant of Botticelli’s
painting, as evidenced by a photograph of three of Duncan’s most famous students
(figure 4.3). The three dancers begin to waltz forward with small, delicate steps, and
sly glances at one another. The energy grows as they join hands and rotate in a circle
with quick leaps, but they abruptly stop and pose again, as if to avoid being caught
outside the painting—before tiptoeing away for another waltz.
Duncan used both tableaux and statue posing in her choreography as a way of
making meaning through bodily poses, taking a technique common in Delsartism
Fig 4.2
Primavera (ca.1478,
tempera on panel)
(detail of 558) by Sandro
Botticelli (1444/5–1510).
Galleria degli Uffizi,
Florence, Italy. The
Bridgeman Art Library.
and other popular performances and recasting it on the legitimate stage of high
art. From American Delsarteans like Henrietta Hovey and Genevieve Stebbins,
she also learned to use classical aesthetics to elevate her performances, and she
developed their invocations of mythic types into her own mythical method of
choreography. Attitudes and theatrical posing, including the living pictures and
tableaux that had been popular since the nineteenth century, have not been con-
sidered important techniques in modern dance. In part, this is because Duncan,
like the modernist avant-garde, announced a clean break with the past, refusing
to acknowledge the influence of other forms. Just as she denied her Delsarte
training, Duncan turned her ballet classes into an anecdote of originality. At the
age of ten, she refused to stand on her toes in ballet class because, as she informed
the teacher, “it was ugly and against nature.” She (inaccurately) claimed to have
left after the third lesson and never returned: “The stiff and commonplace gym-
nastics which he called dancing only disturbed my dream. I dreamed of a differ-
ent dance” (ML 22).59
Fig 4.3
Margot, Anna, and Lisa
Duncan in The Three
Graces (1921). Irma
Duncan Collection.
The New York Public
Tilden Foundations.
III. The Joints of Early Modernism: Conjunctures

of Materialism and Metaphysics
Dear Master . . .
—Isadora Duncan, letter to Ernst Haeckel (1904)60
Instead of ballet teachers, Duncan cited a number of eminent male intellectuals as

her “only dance masters,” most prominently Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), Walt
Whitman (1819–1892), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) (ML 62). Rereading
these pivotal figures through the lens of Duncan’s dance demonstrates their
common interest in the moving body, an interest that shaped modernism’s many
engagements with their work. The joints of Duncan’s practice, the joining of body
and spirit, the material and spiritual, evident in her phrase “a motor in my soul,”
also characterizes the work of Haeckel, Whitman, and Nietzsche and invites their
reintroduction to modernism. Her references to these masters in curtain-call
speeches and essays adopt a variety of elitist, national, scientific, religious,
philosophical, and popular discourses to legitimize dance.61 She also developed
movement principles and choreography from the theories of Haeckel, Whitman,
and Nietzsche, and often, her danced interpretations complicate her elitist com-
mentary. This section examines Duncan’s written engagement with her “dance
masters”; the next discusses how she choreographed their ideas into dances.
Duncan’s conjuncture of materialist and metaphysical thought influenced her
personal and intellectual relationship with Ernst Haeckel, a German evolutionary
theorist and popular intellectual. Although he is now best known for his advocacy
of the discredited theory that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” Haeckel’s related
ideas of the position of an individual spirit in relation to universal scientific and
evolutionary forces appealed to Duncan.62 Likewise, Haeckel used the physical
culture movement and the interest Duncan generated in movement and dance to
justify his application of evolutionary theories to notions of spirit and soul. His
goal was to replace religion with science by shattering the “false structures of super-
stitious dogma” and erecting “a new abode for human emotion.”63 Haeckel’s “reli-
gion of monism” rejected a Cartesian dualistic perspective that divides the universe
into two substances, the visible, material world and the immaterial world of God,
the soul, and the mind. Instead, monism “recognizes one sole substance in the uni-
verse” composing God and nature, spirit and body (Riddle 20). Monism faults both
a materialism that denies spirit and a “theoretical spiritualism” that considers the
world to be only a “specially arranged group of ‘energies’ ” (20). Monism combines
materialist and spiritualist thought in the manner of the motor in the soul and
provided Duncan with evolutionary language to sacralize the body.
Haeckel popularized his evolution-inspired religion in The Riddle of the
Universe (1900), a book Duncan read in translation and always kept beside her
bed, along with works by Whitman and Nietzsche (Sensational 123). She met
Haeckel in Bayreuth in August 1904, and claims, “I was greatly impressed by his
lucid and clear expression of the different phenomena of the Universe. I wrote him
a letter expressing my gratitude” (ML 112). Heinrich Schmidt, director of the Ernst
Haeckel Archives, reports that this initial letter addressed to “Dear Master” arrived
with “thousands” of notes for Haeckel’s seventieth birthday on February 16, 1904.
He answered Duncan “in a very hearty manner,” and she responded on April 7:
“How much I would like to dance for you!” (IDDCNY). They could not meet in
Berlin as he had been banished by the Kaiser for “free speaking,” so she invited him
to Bayreuth, where she was dancing in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (ML 112). He arrived
on August 2, 1904, and she held a party and performed in his honor: “Haeckel
commented on my dance, likening it to all the universal truths of nature, and said
that it was an expression of monism, in that it came from one source and had one
direction of evolution” (ML 112–113).
Haeckel’s interest in Duncan’s dance as an illustration of monism is appro-
priate to the centrality of movement in his theory. Of eight corollaries to his “law
of substance,” six deal with the “uninterrupted movement and transformation” of
matter (Riddle 242). For Haeckel, the human capacity to move is “the direct con-
nection of cerebral functions with other physiological functions,” the link bet-
ween mind and body (Riddle 127). The prevailing “cerebral functions” or sensations
are “like and dislike,” and they correspond to “desire and aversion” or “ ‘attraction’
and ‘repulsion’ ” in the “category of movement”: “ ‘Attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ seem
to be the sources of will, that momentous element of the soul which determines
the character of the individual” (Riddle 127). In Haeckel’s writing, human motion
provides evidence of an individual’s will and soul, and it is this emphasis that
distinguished his monism from more traditional versions of evolution theory.
The general understanding of evolution at the turn of the century was that the
individual of the species perpetuates itself by passing inheritable traits to off-
spring.64 Haeckel’s monism describes each individual’s continued participation
in the universe’s constant movement and exchanges of matter and energy, which
he associates with dance: “In this ‘perpetual motion’ the infinite substance of the
universe, the sum total of its matter and energy, remains eternally unchanged,
and we have an eternal repetition in infinite time of the periodic dance of the
worlds” (Riddle 373). While dance is a metaphor here, Haeckel consistently
emphasizes how bodily motion reveals the willing participation of the individual
in cosmic processes.
In the final chapters of The Riddle of the Universe, Haeckel deplores Christianity’s
contempt for the body, posits a new trinity of the “three goddesses of the monist—
truth, beauty, and virtue,” and discusses the “school of the future,” which, among
other reforms, will teach comparative religion as mythology and include more
physical exercise, particularly dance (Riddle 353–364). Duncan adopted Haeckel’s
language to describe her own frustrations with organized religion and ideas for the
education of her “dancer of the future.”65 She connected individualism and self-
hood to religion and spirituality but deplored dogmatic and churched versions of
the self. From Haeckel, Duncan learned how popularized theories of evolution
could be used to join her ideas about science and spirituality, body and soul, in the
evolutionary individual. In “The Dance of the Future,” the essay in which Duncan
refers to her “most revered teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel,”
she defines dance using Haeckel’s terms: “The dance should simply be, then, the
natural gravitation of this will of the individual, which in the end is no more nor
less than a human translation of the gravitation of the universe” (AD 54–55). In a
scientifically inflected idea of correspondence, Duncan claims that each dance
motion is an instance of the universal force of propulsion, gravity.
Duncan’s definitions of the dancing, evolutionary individual are ambiguous,
partially because she was as uninterested in a systematic philosophy as in prior
systems of dance, such as ballet or gymnastics.66 From Whitman, Duncan gathered
additional antisystem language to explain art and individuality, quoting from
Leaves of Grass: “Very well then . . . I contradict myself . . . I contain multitudes.”67
She invoked Whitman as justification for a new dance of America and used his
poetics to frame her art as formless, spontaneous, and natural. Referring to herself
as the “spiritual daughter” of Whitman, she answered the poet’s call for an
American artist who “incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and
lakes” (Leaves 7). Duncan’s 1927 essay, “I See America Dancing,” inspired by
Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” uses the poet as evidence of her Americanness,
a strategy she adopted frequently in curtain-call speeches after she established her
Moscow school in 1921 and was accused of communist sympathies.68 The essay is a
nostalgic glance at her native country with the desire of establishing the origins of
dance in America’s landscape. Her vision inspired by the “mighty song that Walt
heard” transforms the geography of the country into the body of a mythic dancer:
“I see America dancing, beautiful, strong, with one foot poised on the highest
point of the Rockies, her two hands stretched out from the Atlantic to the Pacific”
(AD 49). Duncan imagines a geographical influence on American bodies, using
the expanse of the continent to explain the “tall finely made woman,” the “real
American type,” whose “legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too
free” for ballet (AD 49).
Duncan’s ideal of “natural dance” may have been inspired by Whitman’s dis-
cussions of the “free growth” of poetic form. In a 1903 speech, Duncan claims,
“How beautiful these movements are that we see in animals, plants, waves and
winds. All things in nature have forms of motion corresponding to their inner-
most being” (Speaks 33).69 Duncan’s insistence that dance corresponds to both the
physical and inner “being,” which she describes as a “unity of form and movement,”
resembles Whitman’s interest in the relation between poetic form and content:70
The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of met-
rical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on
a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges
and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form.
(Leaves 11)
Whitman imagines a poem growing organically from the earth and describes per-
fect form as a scent, a natural and intangible “perfume.” Whitman avoided poetic
“ornaments,” just as Duncan refused “servile coquetry” (Leaves 11, AD 49). Duncan’s
dance was frequently associated with Whitman by both enthusiasts and detractors.
In an essay printed in Duncan’s Dionysian program, Robert Henri associates
Whitman with her “deep philosophy of freedom, and of dignity, and of simplicity,
and of order” (Dionysian).
Lincoln Kirstein, an important figure in twentieth-century American dance,
deplored both Duncan and Whitman for replacing “technique” with “narcissistic
self-exposure” and the “fetters of self.”71 “Free form dance” and, he implies, free
verse can be “psychotherapy,” “physical hygiene,” “recreation,” and “life-
enhancement” but, according to Kirstein, not “serious craft.” He suggests that
self-expression is a crutch for those incapable of classical (ballet) technique or tra-
ditional form. Duncan and Whitman were so successful in their goal of producing
the illusion of natural, unmediated expression that they convinced audiences their
work was, in Kirstein’s formulation, “the exposure of a private personage’s unique
sensibility” (IDDCNY). Their definitions of the natural do not preclude poetic
technique or choreographic “design”; Duncan claims, “ ‘Natural’ dancing should
mean only that the dance never goes against nature, not that anything is left to
chance.”72 Kirstein rejected self-expression and personality as prescribed in the
master narratives of modernism, but he also coupled aesthetic “technique” with
traditional forms, such as the sonnet and the ballet pas de deux. Critics tend to
oversimplify links between modernist antitraditionalism, representations of a
fragmented selfhood, and rejections of self-expression as an aspect of bourgeois
individualism. Duncan and Whitman reveal that the desire to represent a whole
embodied individual also led them to abandon traditional, codified forms. Michael
Levenson claims we read the modernists as opposing individualism because the
movement revised its trajectory, but “modernism was individualist before it was
anti-individualist, anti-traditional before it was traditional.”73 While Duncan and
Whitman’s emphasis on selfhood resembled romantic individualism, as many
commentators have suggested, they did not ignore the body or consider it the
weighted container that spirit must transcend. Duncan and Whitman emphasized
the material, embodied components of spirit in a complex influenced by motors
and labor, a combination that was of interest to many later modernists.
Of the late-nineteenth-century dance masters, Friedrich Nietzsche was most

frequently referenced by Duncan to support her ideas of the primacy of the
individual, the sanctity of the human body, and the value of dance for physical and
spiritual fulfillment (Nietzsche’s Dancers 108). “Nietzsche was the first dancing phi-
losopher,” Duncan claimed, and her interest indicates that the moving body and
dance more particularly are crucial and overlooked components of his philoso-
phy.74 Duncan began to study Nietzsche in Munich in 1903 with the German writer,
Karl Federn, and thereafter, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883–1885) joined the books she kept at her bedside (ML 104).75 Duncan chose as
the frontispiece to her autobiography a quotation from Zarathustra’s “Yes and
Amen Song,” which read, in her translation: “If my virtue be a dancer’s virtue, and
if I have often sprung with both feet into golden-emerald rapture, and if it be my
Alpha and Omega that every thing heavy shall become light, every body a dancer
and every spirit a bird; verily, that is my Alpha and Omega” (Nietzsche’s Dancers
108). Duncan opened the story of her life with a quote that combines virtue,
rapture, body, and spirit in a self-conscious tautology. Quotes from Nietzsche
appear throughout her autobiography: “Zarathustra the dancer. . . . Let that day be
called lost on which I have not danced.” Duncan interpreted Zarathustra as a
philosophical statement “filled with phrases about man in his dancing being” (ML
215–216). Although critics usually read Nietzsche’s ubiquitous dance imagery as
metaphorical or rhetorical, Duncan’s interest prompts another interpretation, one
that recognizes dance as a crucial practice in his vision of human transformation
(Nietzsche’s Dancers ix).
Nietzsche and Duncan, like Delsarteans, argued that Christian morality is
damaging in its insistence on the corruption of the body and corporal mortifica-
tion. The act of dancing encourages a very different relationship to bodily being.
Duncan claimed that Nietzsche did not believe in a god that cannot dance “the
exaltation of life in movement” because dancing is “self-creating”; the dancer uses
the body, the material manifestation of the self, to create new ways of moving,
feeling, and being (AD 123, 77). To those “despisers of the body,” Zarathustra says,
“Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown
sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body.”76 In opposition to the
“herdsmen” who follow traditional values, Nietzsche identifies the “creating one,”
“overman,” or “the pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome
is the self-enjoying soul” (Zarathustra XVII.39; LIV.2.132). Christianity’s universal
values or laws of the herd are displaced, and the dancer/overman adheres only to
“my good and evil” (Zarathustra LV.2.135).77 Zarathustra’s complaints about the
herdsmen gave further credence to Duncan’s emphasis on solo expression and
complicated her desire to found a school that could train the modern Dionysian
chorus.78 The disindividuation of the choric dancer might seem to contradict
Duncan’s commitment to individualism. The tension is evident when Duncan
describes how “a Dionysian emotion possesses” her students and then cautions,
“But even when they are dancing together, each one, while forming part of a
whole, under group inspiration, will preserve a creative individuality.”79 Reviews
of her students in performance suggest that her attempts to teach them to dance
as Nietzschean individuals were successful. The New York Tribune reviewer for a
Carnegie Hall performance describes the “personal idiosyncrasies” of each
Duncan dancer, particularly Anna’s “controlled harmony,” Theresa’s “rhythms,”
and Lisa’s “ecstatic leaps.”80 Another review claims that while they dance “like
Isadora Duncan in gesture and motion . . . each one was distinctly and beautifully
individual, each one expressed a love of music and motion absolutely personal.”81
Duncan’s individualistic teachings, encouraged by her masters, contributed to
her critique of ballet’s uniformity of costume, expression, style, and technique.
Only dance that preserves a “creative individuality,” even in group performance,
will teach the dancer new relations to her body. Duncan closes her essay on
Nietzsche with an invocation in his own style: “Oh, she is coming, the dancer of
the future: the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new woman . . . the highest
intelligence in the freest body” (AD 62). The phrase “dancer of the future” echoes
Nietzsche’s “philosophers of the future,” whom he describes as “free, very free
spirits” (Beyond 40, 44).
Duncan’s late-nineteenth-century sources for theories of the dancing self all
share a belief in a fusion of body and soul. Haeckel argued that the soul and the
body are the same substance, the single substance of the “religion of monism.”
Whitman suggested that by discovering the soul’s truth, the body will become
poetry: “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dis-
miss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and
have the richest fluency . . . in every motion and joint of your body” (Leaves 11).
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra claims, “Body am I entirely, soul is the name for something
in the body” (IV.19). While they hailed from biology, literature, and philosophy
and sometimes engaged the mind-body problem and its correlative question of
the self with different language, their persistent engagement with these issues and
popularity among both contemporaries and subsequent modernists reveals a late-
nineteenth-century pattern of thought that bears little resemblance to what is
sometimes described as Victorian spiritualism. Duncan’s use of their rhetoric is
often misread as a glorification and mystification of dance. Instead, she exhibits a
serious intellectual engagement with the ideas of her time, and as she dances at the
conjuncture of discourses, periods, and cultural practices, she reveals continuities

as well as conflicts. Locating Duncan’s practice in the context of debates in science,
art, and philosophy demonstrates how she used these ideas to develop her central
movement principles, each of which she positions at the juncture of soulful expres-
sion and motorized motion: the motor’s ability to govern multiple levers moving
at different speeds simultaneously, the motor as an external force of propulsion,
and the motor’s capacity for tireless repetition.
IV. The Multiplied Body of the Motor
I have never once danced a solo.

—Duncan, “The Dance of the Greeks” (1928)82
Duncan’s claim not to have performed solos contradicts the choreography passed
down through four generations yet resonates with contemporary Duncan danc-
ers.83 Drawn to Whitman’s line “I contain multitudes” (Leaves 64), Duncan
described a standard of “multiple oneness” while dancing as, for example, the
maids of Tauris in Iphigenia (ML 100):
I so ardently hoped to create an orchestra of dancers that, in my imagina-

tion, they already existed, and in the golden lights of the stage I saw the
white supple forms of my companions: sinewy arms, tossing heads, vibrant
bodies, swift limbs environed me. . . . I felt their willing hands in mine; the
pull and swing of their little bodies.
(ML 103)
Duncan’s statement records a mystical vision on the stage, but she actually devel-
oped choreographic techniques and practices to achieve “multiple oneness”; she
represented different characters, emotions, and energies simultaneously in a
motion analogous to a motor’s ability to power several moving objects. Duncan
surprisingly anticipated Marinetti’s claim in “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance”
(1917): “One must go beyond muscular possibilities and aim in the dance for the
ideal multiplied body of the motor. . . . One must imitate the movement of
machines . . . steering wheels, ordinary wheels, pistons” (Marinetti 138). Duncan
would never have endorsed Marinetti’s demands for the imitation of machines,
and he claims to have “admired” her “free dance” but not her “nostalgia”—which,
like many other critics of antimodern thought, he called “childishly feminine”
(Marinetti 137).84 Still, her techniques to invoke bodily multiplicity, as if harnessed
by a motor, indicate the shared influence of automotive technology; as I describe

at the end of this section, Futurist dancers Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953)
and Giannina Censi (1913–1995) inherited these techniques.
Duncan’s dance of the maids of Tauris suggests that one of her strategies for
choreographing a soloist who contains a chorus was the presentation of different
characters within a single piece. In Furies, the soloist represents both avenging
goddesses and groups of the damned by shifting between thrusting and slashing
efforts and restrained or reactive movements. She also attained “multiple oneness”
by filling her stage with nymphs, ghosts, babies, blessed spirits, and other present-
absent figures. The solo Mother (Scriabin’s Piano Etude op. 2, no. 1, 1924) is a duet
with a dead, lost, or absent child, the equivalent of the poetic apostrophe. As per-
formed by Lori Belilove, the dance develops a movement vocabulary from moth-
ering gestures, including cradling and breast-feeding.85 The dance travels a diagonal
line ending downstage left, and as the dancer progresses along this path, her move-
ments indicate that the child is aging. Initially, the soloist performs rocking ges-
tures, then she bends low and motions with her arms as if ushering a young child
before her. The passage of time is revealed by the posture of the dancer, so that her
gradual rise to full height indicates the growth of the child. As the diagonal floor
pattern approaches the end of the stage, the mother figure kneels and clutches her-
self in a pose of loneliness, suggesting that her child has grown and left her. She
struggles to her feet in the last moments of the piece to wave a vigorous farewell as
if she wants a backward glance to show her in a position of strength.
The soloist in Mother invokes a child only through gesture, and the absence of
a second dancer performing the child’s role reinforces the theme that mothering is
an experience of loss. The final wave of the arm is directed both at an imagined
child and the real-time audience. Seeing a person waving farewell produces the
impulse to wave back, and through such choreographic techniques, Duncan situ-
ates the audience in relation to the dance and invites kinesthetic participation. The
technique corresponds to Nietzsche’s idea in Human All Too Human of the “imita-
tion of gesture” or the “instinctual kinetic response” of a person who sees the
movement of another, a visceral response that is “older than language” (Nietzsche’s
Dancers 35). Duncan’s choreographic strategy for invoking a kinesthetic response
in her audience helps to explain Shaemas O’Sheel’s comment that Duncan’s
“solitary figure” makes audiences “yearn” to dance (“Priestess” 481). Audience
members are beckoned to the stage to join the Mother who has, through her move-
ments, cast them as children or other present-absent figures. The idea that an
audience may be offered a kinesthetic, bodily experience was discussed outside the
field of dance by those, like Vernon Lee, working in psychological aesthetics,
Curry and other theorists of expression, and Nietzsche, as well as many modernist
writers and performers.
In addition to waving invisible presences onto her stage, Duncan’s choreog-
raphy divides the body into a collection of organs similar to Whitman’s long cata-
logues of body parts in section nine of “I Sing the Body Electric.” Naming organs
“parts and poems of the body” and “the soul,” Whitman invokes a body in which
every organ, from “thumb” to “finger-nail,” is “sacred” (Leaves 256–258). Whitman’s
idea of embodiment resembles Delsarte’s jointed, soulful body, and Duncan’s
technique recalls Delsarte’s analysis of the body into zones representing specific
emotions. Delsartean performances tended to represent emotions sequentially, as
in a series of statue poses, whereas Duncan divided the body in her dance so that
zones express different emotions or energies simultaneously, usually following
separate strains in the accompanying music. Third-generation Duncan dancer
Julia Levien described this difficult element of Duncan technique as “the many
voices of the body.”86 Duncan’s early Schubert waltz Water Study (1900) uses dif-
ferent bodily zones to represents the crashing of waves, the spiral motion of an
eddy, and the drawing current. An opposition between the legs and arms is
established, as the feet follow a standard three-beat waltz rhythm that recalls the
repetitive breaking of waves against the beach; the pliant arms and torso express
the contrasting lyrical melody, as if tracking the flow of a single wave.87 The dancer
also variously represents the character of a person playing in the water and a sea-
gull skimming its surface. To show the dancer being pulled off-balance as if she has
been struck by a wave, the ribs and torso shift away from the hips and shoulders in
another bodily opposition. The feet follow the shift to catch the fall, the dynamic
of fall and recovery adds more undulations to those of the torso, and the dance
explores many possible movements produced by or related to water.
The isolation of one body part or the opposition between zones of the body, as
in Water Study’s shifted torso, is deployed for political positions in Duncan’s later
choreography. Reviewer Carl Van Vechten focuses on the isolated movements of
parts of Duncan’s body in his description of a 1916 performance of Marseillaise
(Rouget de Lisle, 1914), a piece danced to the French National Anthem and intended
to garner sympathy for the French during World War I. Van Vechten applauds
Duncan’s ability to invoke “the hideous din of a hundred raucous voices” and enu-
merates the interactions of various body parts as if they produced the sounds of a
crowd: “At times, legs, arms, a leg or an arm, the throat, or the exposed breast
assume an importance above that of the rest of the mass, suggesting the unfinished
sculpture of Michael Angelo [sic]” (“New” 31). Not a Michelangelo, but François
Rude’s sculpture of Victory as Marianne, the French goddess of war, on the Arc de
Triomphe inspired Duncan’s statue poses (see figures I.1 and I.2). Van Vechten rec-
ognizes, “. . . finally we see the superb calm, the majestic flowing strength of the
Victory of Samothrace” (“New” 31).
Duncan probably became interested in Victory and Marianne as figures of
female strength while living in Paris, but she may have been exposed to the image
through her Delsartean training. Elsie M. Wilbor’s Delsarte Recitation Book
includes a photograph of a sculpture for a statue pose titled “France Protecting
Her Alsatian Soldier,” in which the Marianne figure guards a wounded man (328).
Rather than citing Delsarte, Duncan, as Van Vechten points out, “called her art the
renaissance of the Greek ideal”; but he identified “something modern” in this “new
art” of “abstract emotion” and “moving sculpture” (“New” 28–32). He buries her
“exposed breast” in his catalogue of body parts, but Duncan’s famous, controversial
final pose, right arm thrust forward and breast bared, was a tableau vivant of
Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). An American audience would
have been reminded of the Statue of Liberty and historical alliances between
France and the United States. As the ending pose of her solo, the partially realized
living picture of Liberty invites the audience to fill in the other figures from the
painting, the mass of soldiers following Marianne. The “new” use of Delsartean
tableau literally recruited. Van Vechten wrote to Gertrude Stein after a 1917 New
York concert that Duncan concluded with one of her manifesto speeches for the
Allied cause: “I tell you she drives ’em mad; the recruiting stations are full of her
converts” (Sensational 365). Duncan used the Delsartean practice of alluding to
other works of art in statue poses to fill her stage with present-absent figures and
choreograph political messages.
The performance techniques Duncan developed in pieces such as Marseillaise
and her militant curtain call demonstrate the intersection of antimodern mythic
posing with the Futurist exaltation of war.88 Marinetti claimed to have found
Duncan’s performances provocative, but he preferred her predecessor and one-
time stagemate, Loïe Fuller, because her dances produced machinelike motions,
and her innovative lighting techniques and mechanical manipulation of yards of
cloth skirting extended, multiplied, and even prostheticized the body (Machines
58). Although Duncan emphasized the possibilities of the body containing rather
than imitating the power of the machine (the motor in the soul), she influenced
Valentine de Saint-Point’s Futurist “métachorie” (performed 1913–1917). A narra-
tor recited Saint-Point’s poems while she performed abstract, geometrical dances
often framed as a rejection of Duncan’s “childishly feminine” movements. Yet,
Duncan’s celebration of the female warrior in The Amazons (1906) and battle man-
ifesto in Marseillaise (1914) satisfy Saint-Point’s claims in Manifesto of the Futurist
Woman (1912): “Women are Erinyes, Amazons, Semiramis . . . warriors who fight
more ferociously than men, lovers who incite, destroyers who contribute towards
natural selection by breaking those who are fragile.”89 Saint-Point combined
mythic poses with evolution theory and feminist politics, and she adopted
Marinetti’s own rhetoric of violence to oppose his “contempt for women.”90
Marinetti probably drafted his “Manifesto of Futurist Dance” after her 1917
performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in an attempt to exert
control over the new dance (“Cyborg” n. 14).
Giannina Censi’s performances of aerial dances in the 1930s were advertised as
the realization of the Futurist dance and expression of the motor’s “multiplied
body” in the movement of machines, particularly airplanes (“Cyborg” 397).
Photographs of Censi on a poster for Teatro Garibaldi (1932–1933) demonstrate
the influence of Duncan’s technique, particularly in the pliant chest and back,
upward lift of the torso, parallel positions, and leg extensions with bent knees. In
images from her Aerofuturist Dance (1931), Censi kneels on the floor with solar
plexus lifted and arms in an open line parallel to the audience, as in Duncan’s
two-dimensional fresco-derived body. The pose recalls Duncan’s floor work and
Dionysian position in which “the head is turned backward” to denote “ritual
ecstasy.”91 Censi used these motions to interpret the myth of the machine rather
than the diverse mythic and natural scenes and human dramas of Duncan, but
Censi’s comments on her dances add the language of soulful expression to the
Futurist “multiplied body of the motor”: “everything that the plane did had to be
expressed in my body. It flew and, moreover, it gave the impressions of these wings
that trembled, of the apparatus that trembled. . . . And the face had to express what
the pilot felt” (“Cyborg” 400). The multiplied body of the Futurist dancer did not
simply imitate machines or the motor’s autonomous moving parts; Censi repre-
sented the pilot in the machine and the plane’s movements as it encountered other
forces. As Anja Klöck states, such performances “blur the boundaries between
woman and machine, materiality and spirituality, mind and body, signifier and
signified” (“Cyborg” 408). This blurring is similar to Duncan’s shifting roles bet-
ween the tormenter, the damned, and the hellish scenes in Furies or her successive
representation of the waves, currents, seabirds, and humans playing in Water
Study. Censi applied the techniques of Duncan’s multiplied body more directly to
the modernist machine but retained her predecessor’s interest in the soul.
Censi’s dances, and Futurist performance more generally, exhibited an antag-
onistic orientation to audiences (Censi was sometimes assailed with fruit), but in
this, too, Futurist aesthetics follow Duncan. Her controversial curtain-call speeches
were a crucial and overlooked component of her form. These manifestos educated
or insulted her audience as they explained and defended her choreography, the-
ories of education, and political positions. Declaring her curtain-call statements
central to her performance during her final American visit of October 1922,
Duncan stated, “My manager tells me that if I make more speeches the tour is
dead. Very well, the tour is dead!” (Speaks 138). In spite of the protests of Sol Hurok,
the impresario for the troubled tour, Duncan continued to give speeches that
mixed metaphysical (soul) and materialist (motor) concepts and have therefore
been dismissed as incoherent or hysterical. Yet, the brief polemical statements can
be better understood in the context of the modernist manifesto, a genre employed
by contending avant-garde groups. Attempting to transform political argumenta-
tion into a performative form, manifestos were published in a layout designed to
shout in print and, after 1910, increasingly delivered publicly by Marinetti and oth-
ers.92 Surprisingly, the verse-recitation movement encouraged some manifesto
performances; Harold Monro, after sponsoring a Marinetti reading at a larger
venue than the Poetry Bookshop, described “Futurist Poetry” in Poetry and Drama
(September 1913) as being written “for immediate and wide circulation and decla-
mation in large assemblies. . . . It is verse rather for the ear than for any close and
studious scrutiny by the eye” (“Pure Voice” 37). Duncan’s practice of giving
curtain-call speeches predates Marinetti’s London manifesto performances but
not the Delsartean genres that influenced the verse-recitation movement, and she
became more confrontational as the manifesto fever took hold. While Duncan’s
1903 address to the Berlin Press Club signals a rupture with traditional forms of
dance, her speech at the Century Opera House following a performance in April
1915 more aggressively insults the “rich people of America” as “criminally unintel-
ligent” (Speaks 39–40).
The performed manifesto was a crucial component of early modernism’s jos-
tling for social, literary, and danced positions. The modernist factions, including
Futurism and antimodern-classicism, actually shared a hostility for “tradition,”
although they defined their enemy differently. Duncan railed against traditional
forms of dance, most notably ballet, viewing Greek and mythic dancing as a break
from tradition. Marinetti asks, “Why poison ourselves? Why rot?” by touring the
museums where Duncan gathered many of her mythic poses.93 Duncan’s and
Marinetti’s manifestos both establish a relation of provocation to the audience, a
stance at odds with images of Duncan as “childishly feminine” or nostalgic. In one
speech she railed, “Thank God the Boston critics don’t like me. If they did I should
feel I was hopeless” (Speaks 53). Futurist manifestos are better known for their cel-
ebration of technological achievements, like the motor, yet they, like Duncan, draw
on metaphysical expressions such as the “rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs”
(Marinetti 134). The Aerial Futurists of the 1920s claim, “We intend to use the
plane . . . to express the ‘spirit of the epoch.’ These pictures therefore break the circle
of reality to indicate the mystery of a new spirituality” (“Cyborg” 403). The fusion
of technology and spirit in Duncan’s phrase, the motor in the soul, is evident even
among the technophilic Futurists.
V. Motorized Propulsion and Modernist Ritual
Emotion works like a motor. It must be warmed up to run well . . . [the dancer] opens the way
to his soul and his “genius,” and he lets himself be swayed by them as the trees abandon them-
selves to the winds. . . . We do not know how to get down to the depths, to lose ourselves in an
inner self. . . .
—Duncan, “Depth” (1928)94
The second quality of motorized movement evident in Duncan’s aesthetic is the

illusion that the work of an exterior force propels the body into dance the way a
motor propels a vehicle. In the epigraph, Duncan connects motorized force with
the winds that move trees and the “emotion” or “soul” that sways a dancer. This
propulsion, loss of inhibition, and abandonment to an emotion were all experi-
ences Duncan associated with ancient Greek ritual and the possibility of a trans-
formation of both dancer and audience. Her ideas of ecstatic performance and
ritual possession are primarily associated with Nietzsche’s famous description of a
“magic transformation” achieved through the dance of the dithyrambic chorus in
Birth of Tragedy.95 Her study of Nietzsche beginning in 1903 encouraged these
interests; she adopted his classification of Dionysian and Apollonian spirits of art
and hoped to fulfill his demand: “we need a new world of symbols; and the entire
symbolism of the body is called into play . . . the whole pantomime of dancing”
(Tragedy 2). Before claiming Nietzsche as her dance master, however, she collabo-
rated with Jane Ellen Harrison in a hybrid performance at the New Gallery in 1900.
Their joint recital occurred early in the careers of both, just after Duncan arrived
in London and while Harrison was writing Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion (1903). A review in the London Times (March 17, 1900) claims that Duncan
danced as Harrison read passages of Greek poetry: “Miss Duncan’s exceptional
beauty of face and figure fits her for her . . . task of illustrating in dance . . . pas-
sages . . . chosen from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Idylls of Theocritus;
these were read . . . by Miss Jane Harrison.”96 Attended by artists including Henry
James and William Holman Hunt, the event included poetry interpreted by gesture
and classical themes, similar to Delsartean demonstrations. Harrison provided
theories for Duncan’s aesthetic practice, while Duncan’s “strenuous, exciting,

self-expressive dances” served as evidence for Harrison’s claim of the “real recur-
rent need” of ritual (Ritual 207).
Duncan was most drawn to Harrison’s emphasis on goddess worship, a
departure from Nietzsche’s focus on the all-male Greek tragedy. Duncan was also
inspired by Harrison’s claim that there is no distinction between participant and
spectator in ritual, and she developed choreographic strategies to encourage audi-
ence participation in her dance. One strategy is evident in the farewell wave of
Duncan’s Mother, a gesture designed to invoke a response. She also hoped to revise
the topography of the theater by removing the spectator space that, according to
Harrison, was added when belief in the ritual faded. Duncan claims:
I have always deplored the fact that I was forced to dance in a theatre where
people paid for their seats. . . . I had always hoped that the day would come
when we could have such a temple where the public, participating in differ-
ent ways with me in my dance, would arrive at a much fuller enjoyment
than they ever will experience by simply sitting as spectators.
(AD 123)
Duncan viewed the convention of clapping as a step toward this ideal participa-
tion but hoped for “a more complete dance expression on the part of the audience”
in which they might “arise and, by different gestures of dance, participate in my
invocation” (AD 123). In a more confrontational mode, Duncan’s manifesto-like
speeches also minimized the distance between dancer and spectator as she broke
the fourth wall of the stage and turned on the audience. Another strategy was
thematic; she used mythological and religious themes in her choreography to con-
nect her performances to sacred stories that would be familiar for audience mem-
bers yet require their thoughtful engagement to fill in elements of the narrative not
represented in the solo. Such pieces include her Orpheus sequence (ca. 1911),
Euripides’ drama of Iphigenia (ca. 1914–1915), The Amazons (1906), and Christian
pieces such as Ave Maria (1914), her depiction of the Passion of Christ (Bach 1916),
and her dance to Berlioz’s Enfance du Christ (1920).
Ultimately, Duncan hoped to combine dance with song and dramatic speech
in a “fusion of three arts,” as she stated in an interview with a Russian writer-critic
in 1913:
I came to the conclusion that the dance itself, the pure dance for dance’s
sake, can no longer offer a full artistic satisfaction either to the connoisseur
or to the artist . . . the dance separated from poetry is not worth much. In the
time of the Ancient Greeks, dances did not exist separately, but at the
beginning were tightly fused with music and poetry.”97
Duncan’s desire to break down the boundaries between the arts and re-create the
ritual experience using the Delsartean/Unitrinian “three great rhythmic arts”98 led
to a 1911 project to build a theater designed by the architect Louis Sue near the
Champs-Elysées in Paris.99 The London Daily Mail reported, “Miss Duncan intends
to stage Greek tragedies in a vivid and artistic manner. The pupils of her school will
form the chorus for the pieces, and the venture will be supported by well-known
poets, musicians, actors, and actresses. No effort will be spared to make the theatre
a real temple of art” (Sensational 283). In addition to inviting artists to participate,
Duncan wrote a letter dated September 4, 1911, asking Gilbert Murray, Jane
Harrison’s close collaborator among the Cambridge Ritualists, to help her gather a
group of experts to re-create an authentic Greek ritual drama.100 The project was
abandoned after the deaths of Duncan’s children, but Murray, like Harrison, used
Duncan’s dance as evidence for modern ritual performance in his correspondence.
Duncan’s claims to have always “been the Chorus dancing the Pyrrhic Dance,
or the Bacchic” relate both to her choreography of “multiple oneness” and her
attempts to draw the audience into her performance (AD 96). Among her refer-
ences to Nietzsche, she claims that the Dionysian movement possesses the audi-
ence as well as the performer: “If you had before you a dancer inspired with this
feeling, it would be contagious. You would forget the dancer himself. You would
only feel, as he feels, the chord of Dionysiac ecstasy” (AD 131). The Dionysian spirit
that transforms performers into a chorus might similarly possess the spectators,
produce a receptive state, and alter their consciousness and sense of community.
Duncan choreographed dances for both Apollo and Dionysus that used movement
to represent the principles Nietzsche ascribes to the two forces. Her Scherzo
(Schubert C Major Symphony, date unknown) and Bacchanale (Gluck-Mottle
Suite, date unknown) both represent Bacchantes worshipping the god with dance
and song. Bacchanale begins with a celebratory grape gathering, depicts the
growing frenzy through the stamping of the grapes and drinking of the wine, and
concludes with a fall to the stage. Duncan also danced the Bacchanale from
Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1904) and was criticized in a 1911 review by H. T. Parker for
her opening “lascivious rout of fauns and satyrs.” By the end of the piece, however,
Parker claims that she achieved “a clear, soft beauty of sensuous rapture, a still
ecstasy,” that suggested the waning Dionysian trance.101
Duncan claimed that Dionysian dancing involves “throw[ing] oneself into the
spirit of the dance,” whereas Apollonian dancing encourages the performer to
“contemplate the spirit of the dance—and dance as one who relates a story”
(AD 140). Duncan’s Andante, a rite for Apollo, uses slower, more deliberate
movements.102 Duncan choreographed the ensemble piece for her students, and
the dancers create geometrical floor patterns, primarily circles, appropriate to the
Apollonian qualities of symmetry and balance. The dancers enter the stage in pro-
cessional groups, miming the lifting of laurel branches to the sky, and the prevail-
ing direction of the piece is upward. The rhythms are regular and controlled,
unlike the writhing beats and ecstatic movements of the Dionysian pieces.
Although Duncan associated narrative with Apollonian dance, she rarely attempted
to choreograph a structured plot or to become a particular character. Another
Parker review of a performance on November 28, 1908, claims that she did not
“translate into motion and miming the legend of Iphigenia” or “try to individu-
alize herself as Iphigenia” (Motion 58). Instead, she presented groups of characters
at particular episodes in the story:
From the shore the Greek maidens see the approaching fleet; the joy of the
sight wells in them and quickens their spirit. Then [sic] natural impulse is
to dance. Miss Duncan is seemingly one of them. Her joy speaks in every
motion of her body, in the play of her arms, in the carriage of her head, in
the responsive flow and swirls of her draperies.
(Motion 59)
Parker’s lengthy comparison of Duncan’s art to sculpture in a review from Duncan’s

final American tour (October 21, 1922) leads him to a tentative definition of abstract
dance. Rather than trying to visualize the music or the story of Wagner’s Tannhäuser
(ca. 1904–1925), she danced in counterpart. When the music was “ringing with
motion,” she stood “statically” posing in “sculptural beauty”: “Such beauty as she
gained was altogether abstract—sculpture upon herself, quite apart from a music
that in itself visualizes . . . an abstract beauty of its own” (Motion 70). For Parker,
abstract dance is “independent” in that it does not attempt to visualize the music
or tell a story. With the orchestra playing Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, a piece that
“mourns and exalts the dead Siegfried,” Duncan’s body “flows from pose to pose”
and achieves the effect of “mourning translated into sculptural beauty, of deep
grief transmuted into line, plane and mass” (Motion 69–70). In addition to recall-
ing statue posing, Parker suggests that abstract dance expresses emotions in the
manner of sculpture rather than narrative, that is, through bodily positions. In
standard histories of modern dance, abstraction is presented as the antithesis of
self-expression and associated with the later choreography of Martha Graham.103
Duncan’s work to represent Apollonian dancing, however, seems to have led her to
an earlier version of abstraction. If Duncan, rather than Graham, is credited with

experiments in abstraction, then abstract dance is contemporaneous with innova-
tions in other arts rather than lagging behind.104
Duncan and the aesthetics of abstraction are an uneasy alliance, but the pair-
ing exposes tensions in ideas of abstract dance and the modernist celebration of
abstraction more generally. Abstraction in painting is anticonventional in that it
emphasizes color and shape rather than resemblance to nature, representation of
an accurate human figure, or mimesis, more generally. Duncan insisted that her
movements were anticonventional (unlike ballet) but natural in that they were
movements often found in nature or that a body makes so naturally it seems to be
propelled by an exterior force, like a motor. Abstraction in dance is troubled by the
fact that the vehicle of the art form is the human body, and it is difficult for a body
not to represent a body on the stage. The abstraction of Censi’s Aerofuturist dance,
as we have seen, referenced both the pilot and aircraft but could not avoid repre-
sentation. Duncan’s dances may be most abstract when they vacillate between
human and nonhuman motion, as in Water Study. The dancer both moves through
the water and is the water; she appears to be splashing and playing, but her body is
a wave and her arms are swirling eddies. For a moment, she leaps out of the water
like a fish, a counterpoint that demonstrates how weighted the body is when it
returns to the water. Abstract and natural, the willful exertion against weight and
ritualistic abandon—these movement qualities seem irreconcilable but are
partially clarified by Duncan’s ideas of the motor in the soul and in the will.
VI. Repetitions of the Motor: Will and Spontaneity
When that [motor in my soul] begins to work my legs and arms and my whole body will move
independently of my will.
—Duncan, My Life, 1927 (ML 123)
After the agentive act of placing the motor in the soul, Duncan suggests that her
dance no longer requires her “will.” While this statement corresponds to her idea
of abandonment to the forces of ritual or an inner self, it seems to contradict her
advocacy of the willful individual. She critiques ballet for “striving against . . . the
natural will of the individual” and celebrates the power of her will to establish
“The Dance of the Future” (AD 55–59). Duncan’s concept of the will encourages
two very different, even contradictory, qualities in her dance: choreographed
spontaneity and a deliberate display of the labor to move. These tensions reveal
contradictions in the modernist idea of the will, contradictions Nietzsche outlined

in his description of the opposing muscular experiences of the willing subject.
Duncan’s choreography of the Nietzschean will inspired later dancers to develop
the weighted contractions and falls that became central to modern dance, but she
also had an impact on other spheres of modernist performance, especially
Stanislavsky’s method acting.
Nietzsche describes the contradictions of the will using the language of
movement, suggesting that in “every act of willing” there is a muscular sensation,
even if we do not move, due to “a sort of habit.”105 This sensation includes the
“feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the state towards which,” a
“commandeering thought,” and the “affect of the command” (Beyond 18, 19).
Bodily movement serves as his prototype for how the process of willing creates a
duality, whereby the individual is both “the one who commands and the one who
obeys,” the one who demands that her leg lift and the one who submits to the
order. The experience simultaneously produces the sensations of the commander’s
power and freedom and the subordinate’s compulsion, force, and resistance.
Nietzsche relates this compound will to the soul by defining the body as “a society
constructed out of many souls,” a phrase resembling the motor’s multiplied body
(Beyond 19). Duncan developed this idea of the will’s two muscular manifestations
(power and submission) into movement techniques; in pieces such as Marseillaise
and Revolutionary (Scriabin, ca. 1924) she emphasizes the “resistance” of the
Nietzschean will battling against injustice. These choreographies represent the
confinement of oppression, for she claimed that human beings are like “free ani-
mals” who, when placed “under false restrictions,” soon “lose the power of moving
in harmony with nature, and adopt a movement expressive of the restrictions
placed upon them” (AD 54–55). The opening of Revolutionary reveals a worker
kneeling with bound hands while the chest and neck strain upward.106 The soloist
eventually rises to her feet and wrenches her hands free, but they are stiff and
clawed from years of confinement. To depict an individual obeying her own
command to move against oppression, the choreography emphasizes labor and
weight, with the dancer lagging slightly behind the music.
A similar choreographic strategy helped Duncan represent the power of the
dancer who moves with natural forces. To avoid the appearance of dancing cho-
reographed steps and to create the illusion of spontaneity, Duncan’s technique
requires that the execution of movements be a fraction of a beat behind the accom-
paniment, and the dance appears to be a response to the music rather than a set
choreography.107 As reactions from Marinetti and Lincoln Kirstein reveal, Duncan
convinced many in her audience that she was dancing “free improvisations”
(Marinetti 137). Even a century later, her strategies for simulating spontaneity are
misunderstood; one reviewer claimed in 1997 that Duncan was a “solo artist who
gave little thought to choreography as such,”108 and other critics emphasize
spontaneous emotional self-expression109 or music visualization.110 In her variety
of political, natural, Dionysian, or Apollonian pieces, she never wanted to signal
that she was dancing predetermined steps, as that would interfere with the dramatic
immediacy of her performance. In addition to moving slightly behind the music,
Duncan, like most dancers, rehearsed frequently to render the movements so
familiar that they need not think about separate motions (dancers call this “muscle
memory”). Duncan further stipulates that a thought or intention must motivate
every movement, describing her teaching philosophy: “We do not allow the child
to make a single movement unless it knows why it makes it.”111 Prior to every
gesture, the dancer must convey a desire to make the motion so that she appears to
be moving in response to an instantaneous impulse rather than following prede-
termined choreography. The technique requires the dancer to look in the direction
of a gesture or change the focus and expression before executing the movement.
The seemingly spontaneous performance Duncan choreographed is not
thoughtless, although it seems not to have been thought prior to the performance,
just as Stanislavsky’s method actor does not appear to have previously chosen a
response. In fact, Duncan’s illusion of spontaneity, as if being moved by an inner
motor, influenced Stanislavsky’s acting theory. Duncan’s description of the motor
in the soul in My Life quotes from Stanislavsky’s chapter devoted to Duncan and
Gordon Craig in his own autobiography, My Life in Art (1924).112 Stanislavsky
remembers the first time he saw Duncan dance in 1905 and the friendship they
developed when she returned to Moscow in 1908, and he discusses her influence
on his ideas of performance with reference to the motor in the soul:
At the time I was in search of that very creative motor, which the actor must
learn to put in his soul before he comes out on stage. . . . I watched her dur-
ing her performances and her rehearsals, when her developing emotion
would first change the expression of her face, and with shining eyes she
would pass to the display of what was born in her soul.
(Art 506–507; ML 123)
Stanislavsky hoped to replicate Duncan’s effect of motorized movement, the

appearance that an exterior force propelled the performer through an emotional
experience that resulted in a “display” of the “soul.” Duncan’s impact on Stanislavsky
has not been recognized in dance and theater history.113 Just as Joseph Roach’s
excellent discussion of the history of acting theory in relation to science and
conceptions of the human body fails to mention Delsarte, he leaves Duncan out
of the lines of influence from Diderot to Craig and Stanislavsky. Nonetheless,
Stanislavsky’s theories and Roach’s discussion of his “System” reveal points of
connection with Duncan. Stanislavsky sought to “objectify the phenomenon of
spontaneity” by defining spontaneity in performance as “an activity repeated so
often that it becomes automatic and therefore free.”114 In Stanislavsky’s rubric,
“Habit creates second nature, which is a second reality.” The repetitive rehearsal
process fosters habits and a second nature that emerges on the stage as an “uncon-
scious” or “natural” response, enabling the actor to re-create lived experience on
the stage as a “second reality.”115
Stanislavsky mentions Duncan’s rehearsal process in his autobiography, and
their shared interest in the motor as an image of repetition clarifies that she also
seeks to “objectify” spontaneity through habit formation. In an interview with
Mason Redfern (ca. 1917), Duncan insisted, “When I am dancing, the movements
succeed one another so rapidly, so spontaneously, it would seem—though every
effect is carefully worked out beforehand—that I hardly know what I am doing and
my state of mind is akin to clairvoyance.”116 Before each performance, Duncan
clearly choreographed movement, “carefully” organized the effect she hoped to
produce, and rehearsed until she need not think about each individual step, and the
dance became habit. The modernist concept of habit, as Lisi Schoenbach has
recently demonstrated, is more significant than has been recognized by critics
reading modernism through the lens of avant-garde principles of shock. Defining
a “pragmatic modernism” founded on the tradition of American pragmatic philos-
ophy, Schoenbach discusses John Dewey’s view of habit as both a force for “machine-
like repetition” and a necessity for any process of social reorganization. For Dewey,
a society without habit is in chaos, and the dominance of habit can produce blind
recurrence, but “with conflict of habits and release of impulse there is conscious
search.”117 Duncan and Stanislavsky translate a similar view of habit to the stage
and use the repetition of rehearsal to establish a second nature that will alter the
usual consciousness of performance and allow a state of “creative unconscious” or
“clairvoyance.” The habits developed for performances will probably conflict with
more quotidian habits to release Dewey’s “impulse” for “conscious search.”
For Duncan, only a disciplined moving body produced a clairvoyant mind and
performance experience, and while Stanislavsky was more interested in spoken
habits, his “psychophysical” techniques indicate that bodily movement was an
important aspect of his training as well. Stanislavsky claimed that both physical
and psychological or “inner” habits are used on stage as the actor develops “creative
objectives” that “lure” emotions and desires: “All these necessary objectives are so
habitual that we execute them mechanically, with our muscles. In our inner realm,
too, we find an infinite number of necessary, simply psychological objectives”
(Theater 255–256). Stanislavsky discussed the relationship between the performing
body and mind/“soul” using the language of twentieth-century psychology but
also, like Duncan and Delsarte, the theory of “correspondence”: “The bond bet-
ween body and soul is indivisible. . . . In every physical act there is a psychological
element and a physical one in every psychological act” (Theater 205). Interpreters
of Stanislavsky’s system and American method acting often outline a purely mate-
rialistic and mechanistic performance theory, “a bald equation of organism and
machine,” but Stanislavsky himself analyzed “spiritual activity” and “inner aspira-
tion” (Theater 217, 253–254). He hoped, like Duncan, to create a “religion of art”
with theater as a temple, audience as worshippers, and actors as initiates at a ritual.
As Roach claims, “A mystic and idealist, he tolerated his own mechanization of
the art he loved only within definite limits, and such sonorities as the ‘inner life
of the human spirit’ rolled off his tongue far more naturally than technical terms
like cerebral reflex” (Theater 217). The metaphysical language of Stanislavsky,
Duncan, even Futurist manifestos, and Nietzsche’s philosophy reinforces the prev-
alence of invocations of spirit and soul in diverse spheres of modernism.
Duncan’s contributions to a modernist performance technique of spontaneity
have been obscured, in part, because her method became a prevailing style in
modern dance. But an early-twentieth-century ballet dancer displayed her virtu-
osity in the well-known Sylph choreography of the famous La Sylphide (1832), and
the pretense of spontaneity would have undermined her contest with previous
Sylphs. A contemporaneous vaudeville skirt dancer performed with the wink of
self-presentation, not the illusion of motorized propulsion. Just as Stanislavsky’s
method asks audiences to accept the feint that the actor is living, not acting in a
well-rehearsed production, Duncan’s state of clairvoyance demanded that audi-
ences forget the fact of her choreography. She was frequently successful, and this
act of suspending reality is another method for invoking audience participation.
Yet, her state of clairvoyance or Dionysian abandon does not mean that her dance
must appear thoughtless or effortless. Her body must record the forces of power
and constraint in the Nietzschean will but also the affects of gravity, “the natural
gravitation of this will of the individual” (AD 55). Duncan’s performance of
weightedness would be avoided in ballet technique, which, as she complained, uses
“unnatural” toe shoes to float and “create the delusion that the law of gravitation
does not exist” (AD 56). Whereas the ballet dancer is taught to conceal the effort of
her movements with a pleasant face and rigid torso, every lift of the leg, even in
Duncan’s small waltz steps, must acknowledge the effort to move. Duncan rarely
choreographed ballet’s degagés, kicks with a straight knee that tend to accentuate
length and suggest lightness; instead, her leg swings require a bent knee, which
most prominently presents the thigh, the heaviest part of the leg, to the audience.
VII. The Weight of a Thigh and the “New Woman”

of Modernism
Not angelic, materialistic-not superhuman but the greatest human love of life. Her great big
thighs, her small head, her full solid loins, belly-clean, all clean—holy—part of God.
—John Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene (ca. 1911)118
The weight of Duncan’s “great big thighs,” as she became a powerful and interna-
tionally recognized symbol for women’s liberation, exerted pressure on what
Duncan called the “new woman” or the woman of the “future” (AD 62). Until
recently, Duncan’s significance for first-wave feminism has not been fully realized,
in part because she was suspicious of mass political movements and her classicism
and individualism complicates her inclusion in the dominant histories of femi-
nism. Duncan dissociated herself from the suffragists and criticized them for being
myopically concerned with the vote while ignoring the inequality of social rela-
tionships and women’s inability to satisfy spiritual, creative, and professional
needs. Disputing what she identified as one of the myths of motherhood, that
giving birth is a universally joyful experience, she declares, “Don’t let me hear of
any Woman’s Movement or Suffrage Movement until women have put an end to
this, I believe, wholly useless agony” (ML 142). Duncan advocated a more radical
and expansive transformation of society than she believed the vote would provide.
Lucy Delap’s important revisionary history of feminism mentions Duncan in a
category she calls the transatlantic “advanced women,” who departed from suf-
fragism and the “woman movement” to emphasize the creative individual, also a
feature of antimodern critiques in the period.119 Delap’s study of the avant-garde
as a “social imaginary within feminism” and a “textual space, delineated by shared
discourses” cannot accommodate the ways Duncan performed feminism (Avant-
garde 4). Duncan’s “great big,” “clean,” “holy” body, moving freely, danced the “new
woman” into existence.
Duncan, like other antimodern-classicists in this study, incorporated the
consecrated mythic types as she constructed the “dancer of the future”; she
attempted to recast these figures to emphasize their variety and relevance, a strategy
related to the modernist mythical method. She represented the diversity of “the
mother” in solos such as the playful Lullaby; Mother, a study in separation and
loss; and Niobe, a danced version of the Greek myth of the grieving mother. Her
focus on this type indicates one intersection of antimodernist discourses that cele-
brated a “primitive Great Mother” (Antimodernism 278) and first-wave feminist
preoccupations with the mother as “the key feminine social role” (Avant-garde 180).
The “endowment of motherhood controversy” dominated feminist debates about
the role of government in reproduction in both the United States and Britain dur-
ing the first three decades of the twentieth century.120 In one of Duncan’s most
famous dances, choreographed after the accidental deaths of her children in 1913,
Duncan danced as the Madonna to Schubert’s Ave Maria (1914). Partially inspired
by personal tragedy, the piece was drawn into political debates about motherhood;
Duncan was invited to perform Ave Maria at the Bolshoi during the Fifth Congress
of the Women’s Section of the Communist Party, November 1923. The event was the
first Oktabrina christening, described by New York Times writer Walter Duranty
as a “weird substitute” for Christian baptism: “Every woman in the audience
watched . . . as though it were a living child that lay under Isadora’s outstretched
arms” (Sensational 490).121 Duncan associated her dance with an antimodern
mother goddess, but in the context of the period’s feminist debates, her performance
for the Communist Party would have appeared to support ideas of reproduction as
service to the state warranting government oversight. In her autobiography and
curtain-call speeches, she declared opposition to any state intervention in marriage
and motherhood (ML 19, 136). In another example of the ambiguity in antimodern
politics, Duncan’s mythic pose took positions she would not otherwise support.
Duncan’s Ave Maria invoked religious as well as political messages, and audi-
ences seem to have interpreted a typological layering of the Christian myth with
her own experience of losing her children as she reembodied the Madonna type.
The spare choreography of the dance, as performed by Hortense Kooluris, includes
a repeated pattern of slow processional walks in a circle followed by a high gesture
of offering. Florence Boynton, Duncan’s childhood friend, describes this gesture as
“the parting [of her children] and lifting them upward, releasing them to the heav-
enly sphere”; when she saw Ave Maria in California in 1918, Boynton stated, “This
[gesture] was repeated so incessantly that it was . . . unendurably pathetic”
(Sensational 376). The gesture is actually repeated three times in the choreography,
but Boynton’s exaggeration suggests its emotional power. Duncan’s use of Christian
themes might seem to contradict her claim: “From my earliest childhood I have
always felt a great antipathy for anything connected with churches or church
dogma” (ML 197). While she protested against organized religion, believing that
dogma interfered with the individual’s cultivation of her unique soul and spiritual
needs, she believed, like Jane Ellen Harrison, that the power of pagan ritual, espe-
cially of goddess worship, had passed into the younger religions, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. In her autobiography, she wrote that the hymns of Apollo
and the other gods and goddesses “had found their way through transformations
into the Greek Church” (ML 96). She reads the classical figures of Botticelli’s
Primavera in typological relation to Christian characters in a description of how
she developed choreography from the painting:
Oh, sweet, half seen pagan life, where Aphrodite gleamed through the form
of the gracious but more tender Mother of Christ, where Apollo reached
towards the first branches with the likeness of St. Sebastian! I felt all this
enter my bosom with a flood of peaceful joy, and I wished intensely to
translate all this to my dance, which I named the Dance of the Future.
(ML 85)
Understanding all religions as expressions of a basic human desire for the sacred,
she used Christian figures within her version of the mythical method, as T. S. Eliot
would later do in dramatic monologues like “The Journey of the Magi.” The claim
that Duncan had a “change of faith” after her children died fails to recognize that,
for her, pieces such as Niobe, Narcissus, and the Furies or Blessed Spirits of Orpheus
were sacred statements like Ave Maria (Sensational 330).122 As Madonna, Amazon,
Bacchante, or Apollonian devotee within a solo concert, Duncan danced possibil-
ities of sacred subjectivity that defied religious definitions, but the mythic narra-
tives intersected with context (the Bolshoi Oktabrina) to complicate her goals and
even reinforce traditional understandings of femininity.
Duncan’s manifesto-like curtain-call speeches often attempted to control inter-
pretations of the political statements of her choreography by, for example, posi-
tioning the dance in relation to her insistence on women’s sexual freedom and right
to bear children outside the institution of marriage. In keeping with her individu-
alist and personal approach to the women’s movement, she often began by referring
to herself as an example of bodily liberation through dance, sex, and motherhood.
One such lecture occurred after the committee of prominent and ostensibly pro-
gressive Berlin women who supported her school in Grünewald threatened to
rescind their patronage due to Duncan’s “illegitimate pregnancy” in 1906. Outraged,
Duncan spoke “on the dance as an art of liberation, and ended with a talk on the
right of woman to love and bear children as she pleased” (ML 135).123 Without char-
acterizing motherhood as a universal feminine ideal, Duncan presented the capacity
to give birth as one aspect of women’s creativity and undermined the idea of mater-
nity as a primary duty or an illness, prominent justifications for confining women
to the domestic sphere in her period.124 Many left the lecture, but Duncan claims
that she facilitated an interesting debate with those who stayed “on the rights and
wrongs of women, which was considerably in advance of the Women’s Movement
of the present day” (ML 136). Duncan was as suspicious of feminism and other
mass political movements as she was of any dance technique that prescribed a
specific way of moving for every individual, regardless of her unique body and
spirit. In another curtain-call speech, she declared, “Place your hands as I do on
your heart, listen to your soul, and all of you will know how to dance as well as I or
my pupils do. There is the true revolution” (Speaks 54). Locating the “revolution” in
the dancing “self,” she suggests that any movement must begin with the individual.
For Duncan as for Delsarte, the dance of “self” is a practice of revolutionary politics;
she does not as cogently address how a politics focused on the self will generate the
societal changes she desires, although the same critique plagues many feminist the-
ories oriented around coalition.125
In spite of the contradictions in Duncan’s political positions, she became the
undeniable symbol of avant-garde artistic and social liberation for New York’s
Young Intellectuals, a group of artists and revolutionaries centered in Greenwich
Village. Their interest was partially due to her ambivalent relation to the contem-
poraneous women’s movement as a radical individualist with a suspicion of
group activity and partially due to their own antimodern search for authentic
experience.126 They thronged to Duncan’s Dionysian season at New York’s Century
Theater in the spring of 1915, where her performances were framed by a pamphlet
that quoted Nietzsche and Whitman and closed with a biblical passage: “Thou
hast turned for me my mourning into dancing” (Psalm 30:11). The season included
a Delsartean mixture of recitations, solos, Christian themes, and the Greek trag-
edies Iphigenia and Oedipus Rex. Duncan’s use of religious and mythic types
encouraged audiences to associate her with the idea of the female artist as savior,
an ideal that appealed to Greenwich Village Radicals such as Floyd Dell. Dell’s
Women as World Builders (1913), an early (and forgotten) summary of various
trajectories of feminism, argues that American feminism, following Duncan’s
lead, was more concerned with liberating the body than agitating for the vote. He
states that “it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta [sic] of femi-
nism” and that Duncan “renovated the modern soul and made us see . . . the
goodness of the whole body.”127 He follows Duncan in suggesting that modern life
requires a renovation of relationships between soul and body, not a complete
rupture from spiritual modes.
Dell, Max Eastman, and John Sloan were members of the collective
editorship of the Masses, a radical publication structured as “a worker-owned
cooperative with all stock held by the artists and writers.”128 In addition to its
revolutionary politics and advocacy of artistic freedom, the Masses was instru-
mental in developing the image of the “new woman” in drawings and articles
that supported mass social transformation (“Masses” 191). Duncan’s thigh and
mature, womanly body, dressed in flowing tunics with free breasts, dancing
alone onstage, became a prototype for the self-sufficient, free woman, who
might emancipate men as well. Eastman claimed just after Duncan’s death that
her influence on moral and social life had been underestimated: “All the bare-
legged girls, and the poised and natural girls with strong muscles and strong
free steps wherever they go—the girls that redeem America . . . they all owe more
to Isadora Duncan than to any other person.”129 Dell and Eastman’s descrip-
tions of Duncan reflect her appearance of moving freely to natural forces and
attest to the effectiveness of her illusion of spontaneity. Their interpretations of
her dance as “natural,” “strong,” and “free” are also evident in the visual art of
the Greenwich Village Radicals. The May 1915 edition of the Masses features a
cover design by Sloan, a leading artist of the Ashcan school, illustrating the
preparation for a leg extension in Duncan’s Marche Militaire (figure 4.4).130 The
Fig 4.4
“Isadora Duncan in the
Marche Militaire” by John
Sloan. From the Masses
(May 1915). © 2010
Delaware Art Museum/
Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York. Photo
courtesy of the Library of
Congress.
September 1917 edition includes one of the many famous Duncan drawings by
Abraham Walkowitz, and both Walkowitz and Sloan depict a shapely, full-
breasted woman dancing alone without scenery to distract the eye from the
singular body. With thickly shaded lines, they emphasize the weightedness of
the thighs, a trademark of Duncan technique. Sloan’s sketch of Marche Militaire
is particularly suggestive of the lightness of the lower leg falling from the bent
knee in opposition to the heaviness of the thigh. Duncan’s thigh appears to
have been pulled upward toward the chest rather than lifted away from the
body, as ballet technique would prescribe.
Sloan’s description of Duncan as “not angelic, materialistic” and yet a “part of
God” suggests that audiences saw both the political weight of her performance
and the soulful aspect (Sloan 352). His catalogue of her “great big thighs, her small
head, her full solid loins, belly-clean, all clean—holy” might be a list of the qual-
ities he was attempting to capture in his 1911 painting Isadora Duncan (figure 4.5).
Duncan dances alone on a large, empty stage, and the positions of the legs again
emphasize their weight; she stands on one slightly bent leg, lifting the other as if
to present her thigh, the largest part of the leg, to the audience. Sloan’s other
drawings of women use the same thick lines and full thighs, demonstrating the
influence of Duncan’s body and dance technique. The significance of these depic-
tions of the female body lies in their deviation from the image of the sleek and
posed “commercial cover girl” that, to the artists of the Masses, “represented the
forces of capitalism because it used art—and by implication sex—to sell a maga-
zine filled with illustrated advertisements designed to sell goods” (“Masses”
203).131 In response to a letter complaining of “crude” drawings, Eastman writes
that the Masses offers alternatives to the “slippery girls in tights and tinted cupids”
featured in conventional magazines (“Masses” 206). The Masses used Duncan for
political purposes that contradicted her elitism but not her commitment to
altering representations of women’s bodies. Eastman echoes her own chastise-
ment of ballet and vaudeville dancers in “horrid salmon-coloured silk tights”
(ML 115) with their “half-clothed suggestiveness” and “burlesque semi-exposures”
(Speaks 48–49).
The extent to which Duncan changed ideas of the female body is revealed by
a comparison of images from early and late in her career. A series of drawings,
signed “Aspell,” from a New York recital in 1898, depicts Duncan as a slight,
nymphlike figure wearing toe shoes with ribbons (figure 4.6). Aspell presents her
in the genre of nineteenth-century ballet, but a decade later, when Walkowitz and
Sloan began drawing Duncan’s weighty thighs, her body had changed, but
more important, she changed the way the female body could be represented. Her
Fig 4.5
Isadora Duncan, 1911, by
John Sloan (American,
1871–1951). Oil on canvas.
32¼ x 26¼ in. (81.92 x
66.68 cm). Milwaukee Art
Museum, Gift of Mr. and
Mrs. Donald B. Abert
M1969.27. Photo by
P. Richard Eells. © 2010
Delaware Art Museum/
Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
choreography and movement techniques, which she imagined in relation to the

modern motor, had shifted constructions of femininity from entrenched posi-
tions. Yet, dance criticism and modernist studies alike have failed to recognize the
extent of Duncan’s participation in international modernism and influence on
several significant movements in addition to modern dance: Futurism, the
Moscow Art Theatre, Greenwich Village radicalism, feminism, and even silent
film. Although her emphasis on the soul resembles antimodern spiritualism,
Duncan assigned the soul a physiological location and reflected a materialist sus-
picion of its immanence. The word soul functioned as a placeholder for all that
lies outside rational logic in her 1924 speech at the Kamerny Theater: “nobody
believes in the soul any more, so I say they [children] learn from the spirit, or
from intuitions” (Speaks 82). Duncan recognized the changing terminology of
modern life, and if her audience no longer understood “soul,” she found another
word to mark a sphere of experience that was crucial to her dance and much
antimodern thought. In this late speech, Duncan argued against accusations that
she is “mystical” and explained her “natural” dance with images of unfolding
plants but also with the motor: “here in our breast is a motor supplying power for
our most wonderful emotions” (Speaks 82).
Fig 4.6 Isadora Duncan by

Aspell (1898). Isadora
Duncan Archives.
The New York Public
Tilden Foundations.
Duncan employed the language of technology as a dialectic to ways of being

(the motorized machine rather than the mechanical puppet), and her motor in
the soul indicates a reinterpretation of the spirit through images of modern
technology. Duncan’s combination of scientific, evolutionary, and metaphysical
discourses, derived from Delsarte, Haeckel, Whitman, and Nietzsche, was actually
a central modernist trope found among Futurists, philosophers, and feminists.
Her work asks scholars of modernism to reevaluate some of their foundational
categories and their emphasis on “newness.” Just as Duncan refused to establish an

opposition between the soulful human and the mechanized motor or compromise
her feminist individualism within the women’s movement, she danced around
many of modernism’s dualisms without resolving them: spirit-body, sacred-pro-
fane, modern-antimodern. She choreographed her ideas and contradictions into
dances seeming so fluid and continuous that they appear to be the spontaneous
movements of a body propelled by a motor, so weighted that her thighs became
symbols of political struggle.
5. Ritualized Reception
H.D.’s Antimodern Poetics and Cinematics
why did you turn back,

that hell should be reinhabited
of myself …
—H.D., “Eurydice” (1916)1
H.D. (1886–1961) rarely looks back from the covers of her books. The jacket
photographs for works first published in the 1980s as feminist scholars reintro-
duced her to modernist studies show her looking askance the frame (figure 5.1).2
She stares directly at the camera in the silent films Wingbeat (1927), Foothills (1929),
and Borderline (1930), in which she stars opposite Paul Robeson (figure 5.2).3 As
the contrast implies, critics struggle to reconcile H.D.’s work in diverse genres,
even as they refer to her as a model of the interdisciplinary art and criticism that is
central to both modernist and gender studies. Mythic performance is a pliant
rubric that can encompass her dramatic monologues, verse drama, film theory,
acting, and long poems, all of which look back to prior genres and subjectivities so
as to gaze more directly on modernity.4 An antimodern critique unites her work:
the search for a mode of being that unites body and soul and the use of myth to
encourage readers and audiences to participate in a similar search. For H.D., as for
Isadora Duncan, ancient ritual achieved such participation, and Duncan’s “classical
dance” influenced H.D.’s poetic images, experiments with posing, film perfor-
mances, and desire to encourage a ritualized mode of reception in audiences and
191
Fig 5.1 H.D. near the time

of her marriage; used for
the cover of Collected
Poems (1983). Courtesy of
the Yale Collection of
American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library.
readers. She primarily appeared solo, in close-up, and posed on screen, and she
defined cinema as a modern ritual that projects sacred types and encourages audi-
ences to engage in the analogical thought exercise of typology. As her most sub-
stantial aesthetic statements, her film theory provides insight into the kinesthetic
techniques she used to figure the speaking voices and moving bodies of mythic
types in her poetry and to discourage passive readings.
This chapter addresses aspects of H.D.’s long career and varied performances
that have not been a part of the burgeoning interest in her work. The secular and
communal ideals of feminist and queer theory have contributed to a critical neglect
of H.D’s interest in spiritual individualism and ambivalence about collective action—
which frame her emphasis on the solo. Her theories of bodily responses to art and
soulful inspiration fit poorly into the political ironies and antinomian tendencies of
poststructuralism.5 Literary histories tend to emphasize her initial reception as Ezra
Pound’s Galatea-like model for Imagism. Although her early “Imagist” poems con-
tinue to be the most anthologized, even “Oread,” a poem considered a prototype of
Imagism, reveals her disagreement with certain tenets of Pound’s poetics and the
RITUALIZED RECEPTION 193
Fig 5.2 Borderline film production still, H.D. (1930). Courtesy of the Yale Collection
of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
appeal of kinesthetic techniques. Her dissent is even more pronounced in The God,
a sequence that removed several of her better known early poems from Imagist con-
texts and repositioned them with dramatic monologues, which she wrote throughout
her life. H.D.’s monologues build on generic features we have traced from Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, as they foreground the poses, gestures, and voices of mythological
speakers who revise the stories of “Pygmalion,” “Eurydice,” “Thetis,” “Circe,”
“Phaedra,” “Cassandra,” and others. In Notes on Thought and Vision (1919), H.D. the-
orized the monologue as a solo performance that nurtures the poet and reader’s
“strength” in three manifestations of human life: “mind, body, and overmind.”
H.D.’s description of the creative individual as a tripartite nexus of “mind, body,
and overmind” resembles the theories François Delsarte derived from the Catholic
Trinity and passed to Isadora Duncan and other modernists via international
Delsartism. H.D. takes the Eleusinian Mysteries, rather than Catholic rituals, as her
model for embodied creativity, as well as for artworks capable of producing a trans-
formation of the individual. Her understanding of classical ritual, derived from
Nietzsche and Jane Ellen Harrison, informed her translation of Euripides’ Ion into a
new rite with performance notes designed to guide a participatory reading experi-
ence. Yet she was suspicious of the power of ritual to produce vast cultural transfor-
mation and emphasized art’s potential impact on the individual performer or
participant. This suspicion is evident in “The Dancer,” a poem that recalls images of
Isadora Duncan and the interest she initiated in Greek dancing.6 Although I have not
found evidence that she saw Duncan dance, H.D. undoubtedly encountered the many
reviews and images of the dancer in the press.7 H.D. owned a “presentation edition”
(#156) of Duncan’s My Life, and one of the few underlines indicates an interest in the
dancer’s reflection on how to determine the “personality” or type for her autobiog-
raphy: “Is it to be the Chaste Madonna, or the Messalina, or the Magdalen …” (ML 8).
The passage resonates with H.D.’s typological poetics and autobiographical fiction.8
H.D. turned to silent film late in the 1920s as an art of the body, gesture, and
movement, which she believed to be capable of uniting a war-torn world beyond the
divisions of nation, language, or religion. H.D. wrote eleven film reviews and essays
for the journal Close Up, several additional unpublished essays, and The Borderline
Pamphlet to accompany the feature film in which she starred. Her film theory sur-
prisingly fuses cinematic technology, classical rites, and Christian exegetical practic-
es.9 As audience members draw connections between mythic types and interpret
gestures, they become active participants in the cinematic ritual. H.D. enacted these
theories in her own performances, as I reveal through analyses of her acting style in
Wingbeat, Foothills, and Borderline. She also became involved in filmmaking with the
POOL group and was particularly interested in montage theory. If her early dramatic
monologues predicted her enthusiasm for cinema with their movie clip quality,
film’s capacity for altering visual and kinesthetic experience through techniques like
the close-up, pullback, and fade influenced her World War II sequence, Trilogy
(1946).10 At the end of the chapter, I discuss the long poem in relation to the cine-
matic ritual she imagined but never achieved. Trilogy depicts typological relations
through mythic figures using poses that reference sacred iconography and interpo-
lated dramatic monologues to project a speaking, gesturing character.11 H.D. defa-
miliarized expectations of genre and employed kinesthetic strategies to dislodge a
reader’s perceptual habits and encourage a version of ritualized reception.
I. Imagism Unstuck: H.D.’s Dissent and Pound’s Revision
Some sort of rigor mortis. I am frozen in this moment. Perhaps I held it all my life, it is what
they called my “imagery”; even now, they speak of “verse chiseled as to seem lapidary,” and
they say, “She crystallizes—that is the right word.”
H.D., End to Torment (1958)12
In a famous anecdote of a literary instigation, Pound launched H.D.’s career in

1912 when he revised her poems in the tearoom of the British Museum, scrawled
“H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom, and sent them to Harriet Monroe’s new journal,
Poetry.13 Her three poems in the January 1913 issue were published as “Verses,
Translations, and Reflections from ‘The Anthology,’ ” a reference to J. W. Mackail’s
Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1890) that most writers and readers of
Poetry would have immediately recognized for its contribution to the wide-
spread interest in Greek verse.14 “H.D. Imagiste” stuck; she used the genderless
initials for the rest of her life, and the literary movement Pound had written like
a last name fixed interpretations of her work for fifty years. H.D.’s poetry
appeared in Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914) and Amy Lowell’s Some Imagist Poets
(1915, 1916, and 1917), in spite of her ambivalence about the latter title.15 Later
anthologies continued to reprint poems from the period of her association with
Pound, especially “Sea Rose,” “Garden,” and “Oread.” The feminist critics who
reintroduced her work have recognized that Imagiste, as defined by Pound, is an
awkward tag even for those early poems.16 H.D. herself was dissatisfied with
them and frustrated by the labels, particularly “crystalline,” applied by her critics:
“Perhaps my annoyance with them was annoyance with myself. For what is
crystal or any gem but the concentrated essence of the rough matrix, or the
energy, either of over-intense heat or over-intense cold that projects it.”17 Against
being “frozen” in the “rigor mortis” of death, H.D. advocates a kinesthetic
“energy . . . that projects.”
H.D. avoided the doctrinal clashes as her modernist counterparts named,
defended, and abandoned aesthetic movements like Imagism, Vorticism, and
Futurism. After her involvement with Imagism, she wrote Notes on Thought and
Vision (1919) to describe her body-centered, ritualistic aesthetics, but she never
attempted to publish this work.18 Her first printed aesthetic theories were in reviews
of Marianne Moore, Charlotte Mew, and John Gould Fletcher, published while
serving as interim assistant editor of the Egoist in 1916, after her husband, Richard
Aldington, left the post to fight in World War I.19 Pound declared, “H.D. is all right
but shouldn’t write criticism,” and Diana Collecott suggests this was due to her pro-
motion of women poets.20 H.D.’s review of John Gould Fletcher’s Goblins and
Pagodas also interrogates Pound’s concept of the image: “He [Fletcher] uses the
direct image, it is true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer
images—a pebble . . . dropped into a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent
water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of sound.”21 The phrase “direct image” ref-
erences Pound’s famous first tenet of the “Imagiste faith”: “I. Direct treatment of
the ‘thing.’ ”22 Rather than “direct” presentation, H.D. describes a poetry of “sugges-
tion” in which images evoke visual sensory material (“light” and “colour”) but also
aural experience, the “sound” of a poem so crucial to the Delsartean discipline of
expression and the verse-recitation movement. Her review implies some
dissatisfaction with Fletcher’s work; using language that could describe statue pos-
ing, she claims, “the maenad, poised for ever, quietly for all the swirl of draperies
and of loosened head-band, or the satyr for ever lifting his vine-wreathed cup—are
satisfying,” but she prefers “the flicker of the purple wine” rather than the “static”
images (Goblins 183). She wanted concrete things but also waves of motion.
For the younger poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988), the motion of H.D.’s poetry
distinguished it from Pound’s version of Imagism. In 1959 or 1960, a decade before
feminist reinterpretations, Duncan launched his study, “The H.D. Book,” originally
imagined as a small volume for H.D.’s birthday but one that occupied him for the
rest of his life.23 Opening with an account of how a young high school teacher intro-
duced him to Imagism and H.D.’s “Heat” (entitled “Garden” in Collected Poems),
Robert Duncan records that he immediately felt the difference between the image as
illustration or “appearance of things” and her poem of forces that “rend,” “cut apart,”
and “plough”: “The power of subtle, hidden organization, inbinding all elements to
its uses, towards an early conclusion of free movements.”24 These tensions and
motions in H.D.’s poetry were “crucial” to his own poetics and to others of his gen-
eration, including Charles Olson. H.D.’s description of a “rough matrix” and
“energy . . . that projects” anticipates Duncan’s process of Composition by Field and
Olson’s theories of Projective Verse (“Delia” 184). H.D. was ignored by the “university
versifiers,” who, according to Duncan, “despise inspiration or divine fire or the inner
melody of things,” all metaphysical concepts long associated with antimodern cri-
tiques.25 Duncan identifies Randall Jarrell as the representative of a group of “profes-
sor-poets concerned with what poetry should be admitted as part of its official
culture.”26 Jarrell described H.D. in Partisan Review as “queer, sincere, more than a
little silly”; when Tribute to Angels was published in 1945, he claimed, “Imagism was
a reductio ad absurdum upon which it is hard to base a later style” (II.9, 81). Jarrell’s
understanding of Imagism ignores the “later styles” founded on Imagism, including
Robert Duncan’s. While Pound “didn’t give scope” for Duncan’s poetics, both he and
Olson understand Imagism as the beginning of a “continuing phase.”27
Pound’s revision to his own theories of Imagism points to an overlooked
aspect of the movement based in the kinesthetic commitments that appealed to
H.D. In 1913, Pound defined the image as “that which presents an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time.”28 Three years later, in “Vorticism” (1916),
he reiterated the tenets of the “Imagiste faith,” including “direct treatment” (147).
In revising his title from Imagism to Vorticism, Pound did not abandon the image
as “the poet’s pigment” but emphasized the motion, tension, and force that Robert
Duncan found in H.D. Pound famously redefined the image as “a radiant node or
cluster . . . a VORTEX, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are
constantly rushing” (“Vorticism” 152). Two decades later, in a retrospective

assessment of Imagism, ABC of Reading (1934), Pound insisted that “the defect of
earlier imagist propaganda” is that “diluters” only understood the “STATIONARY
image” and overlooked the “moving image.”29 He adopted the new term phanopo-
eia, defining it as the act of “throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the [read-
er’s] visual imagination” (ABC 63). The other ways of infusing a word with meaning
are melopoeia, to “charge it by sound” through the musical effects of language, or
logopoeia, using the intellectual content of “groups of words.” Logopoeia, melo-
poeia, and phanopoeia suggest the interrelation of the Unitrinian “rhythmic arts,”
and Pound claims that poetry will “atrophy” if it departs from “music,” which in
turn will “atrophy” if it departs from “dance” (ABC 14). Robert Duncan’s summary
of these terms emphasized kinesthetic strategies: “The point: just as the ear and eye
have been incorporated in the act of making in language, the locomotor muscular-
nervous system is being called into the adventure.”30
Although Pound declared his interest in music and dance, the poem taught as
the prototype for imagism, “In a Station of the Metro,” is not usually read for the
locomotor or kinesthetic experience it offers. With reference to Pound’s descrip-
tion of the poem as a “form of super-position” and “complex in an instant of time,”
readers tend to link juxtaposed images with a focus on visual features (“Vorticism”
150). Andrew Welsh’s classic study associates the poem with peripeteia, “movement
caught at the still point of the turn.”31 The super-posed “metro,” “crowd,” and
“petals” are all potentials for motion, but the metro is paused at the station, the
petals are stuck to the bough, and the crowd is reduced to particular faces as points
of stasis. If a kinesthetic experience is offered, it is characterized by latent motion
halted in tension, just as the images pose atop each other. H.D.’s “Oread” features
more dynamic locomotive and kinesthetic qualities, and Pound’s celebration of
the poem suggests he was searching for similar motions. Pound printed and
analyzed “Oread” in the first issue of Blast (154), characterizing it with Aldington’s
“In Via Sestina” as “longer poems depending on a similar presentation of matter”
that “express much stronger emotions” than “In a Station of the Metro” (“Vorticism”
150). The emotions of “Oread” are partially due to H.D.’s indication of a mountain
nymph as speaker, in keeping with the dramatic monologue’s convention of using
the speaker’s name as a title.32 Pound’s title specifies location rather than speaker
and figures a disembodied observer, but “Oread” establishes presence in a dramatic
space with its attendant registers of voice, time, character, and setting.
The title not only implies a speaker but also an assertive one, as the command
“O read” hides in “Oread” like a demand for attention to the reading as an event.
In contemporaneous cultures of recitation, the “reader” had a prominent place in
Chautauqua programs where, as in schools of expression, “to read” was actually

“to recite.”33 Poems that are presented as speech, as monologues, were not just cel-
ebrated pieces for recitation; poets like Amy Lowell suggested they encourage the
development of an “imaginative, mental ear” to “hear” the lines (“Spoken” 10). For
Vernon Lee, they prompt the reader to attend to the “muscular adjustments” they
experience even when reading silently.34 All indicate a prevailing modernist desire
that poems could sound and move from the page. If we read for that dream of
aurality, “Oread” implies an increasing pace over the six lines. A hesitant voice is
suggested in the first lines of the poem, as commas and dashes conventionally
indicate pauses and interruptions. The successive plosives in the second and third
lines would also slow the pronunciation. The d of pointed next to the p of pines
would require a momentary pause as the tongue shifts away from the roof of the
mouth and the lips purse for the p sound. These strenuous movements, repeated
in great and pines, emphasize the labor of pronunciation, especially in contrast to
the implied speed of the last three lines, which contain fewer plosives, none succes-
sive. The ease of eliding soft consonants and vowels (“on our,” “green over us,”
“cover us”) in speech would suggest the lines move fast and the Oread’s voice gains
momentum and power as she commands nature.
H.D.’s images also emphasize the motion of the scene, as windblown pines,
from the height of a mountain, resemble the cresting of waves, and the Oread asks
the pines to become fluid like water. The motion of the poem is conveyed by the
five verbs (whirl, whirl, splash, hurl, cover) that begin all but one line in the poem.
“Oread” imagines a swirling, flowing landscape rather than the posed, structured
images of “In a Station of the Metro,” which contains no verbs in spite of Pound’s
interest in Ernest Fenollosa’s celebration of action words.35 Even the implied verb
is (a copula) represents the inactivity that Fenollosa presents as evidence of the
fallen state of language: “The apparition . . . [is like] petals. . . .” Although “In a
Station of the Metro” has been understood as the quintessential Imagist poem,
Pound preferred the “stronger emotions” of “Oread” and emphasized movement
and sound in his redefinition of Imagism.
II. Stepping from Stone: Dramatic Monologues

of The God
I made god upon god

step from the cold rock,
—H.D., “Pygmalion” (1917) (CP 49)
H.D. did not include “Oread” in her first volumes of poetry, Sea Garden (1916) and
Hymen (1921), despite the attention it received from Pound. In her 1925 Collected
Poems, she arranged “Oread” and five other poems of 1914 with several of her more
famous dramatic monologues from 1916–1917, “Pygmalion,” “Eurydice,” and
“Adonis,” under the section title The God. These monologues had been included in
Amy Lowell’s Some Imagist Poets (1917) but not previously collected by H.D., and
The God repositions some of her widely disseminated “crystalline” poems and
encourages readings unstuck from Imagist doctrines.36 Such readings might be
attuned to kinesthetic strategies to notate speaking bodies and gestures and what
Diana Collecott describes as “non-Imagist techniques of vocalization” (Sapphic
154).37 As chapter 3 demonstrated, Pound and Lowell developed similar techniques
in dramatic monologues, although their strategies, like H.D.’s, are often obscured
by static readings of Imagism. H.D.’s interest in the dramatic monologue, which she
called “dramatic lyric” in her celebratory review of Charlotte Mew, was not unique
in modernism, but her prose-poem-essay Notes on Thought and Vision (1919) sug-
gests that the form occupied a privileged place in her theories of embodied crea-
tivity and ritualized reception, which inform my reading of The God series.38
H.D. describes the dramatic monologue as one approach to the “overmind,” a
perceptual state in which the intellectual and bodily being is fully balanced. In a
rubric that resembles Delsartean trinities (body, mind, soul), Notes on Thought
and Vision identifies three “phases” of life: “body, mind, and overmind,” each of
which must be cultivated in a pursuit she associates with initiation processes at
ancient Eleusinian rituals. The first phase requires bodily health and sexual desire;
the second demands intellectual capacity. The final challenge for the “initiate,”
H.D.’s model for any creative individual, is to achieve the “overmind” or “womb
vision,” a phrase appropriate to the emphasis on female eroticism and goddess
worship in the rites at Eleusis. But H.D. avoids the sexual determinism of the
womb in her suggestion of a corresponding creative vision rooted in male geni-
talia. The initiate of any gender must find a personal method for nurturing strength
in body, mind, and overmind for every individual’s “sign-posts” are different; H.D.
hopes, “if I blaze my own trail,” others may follow (Notes 24).
H.D.’s “trail” features the “dramatic poem,” a category that includes her verse
dramas and dramatic monologues. The rewriting and reperformance of mythic
scenes provides access to the overmind’s sphere of “eternal, changeless ideas” and
“dramas already conceived” (Notes 17, 23). H.D.’s overmind resembles the Platonic
realm of ideal forms, the repetitions of biblical typology, and Swedenborgian
correspondence, but the objects, artworks, and dramas of the world, as opposed to
the spiritual sphere, do not exist in fallen states. In fact, she suggests that the
“philosopher” who merely contemplates ideas does not exercise all three phases of
life. Only the “Attic dramatist” balanced the three when he took the overmind’s
dramas and “reproduced them for men of lesser or other gifts,” an idea that recalls
the fulfillment of typological relations when repeated in the life of an individual
(Notes 23).39 A dramatist (Euripides) took myths from the overmind (the story of
Dionysus and Pentheus), provoked the mind’s tendency to relate them to the current
moment (the erosion of faith and democratic principles during the Peloponnesian
War), and used bodies to reenact and reperform those myths (The Bacchae).
The Attic drama served the community as it offered audiences access to the
overmind’s reservoir of eternal ideas and types, but in keeping with the antitheat-
ricalism and classicism of many modernists, H.D. believed that drama had
degraded since the classical period.40 For her, poetic adaptations of myth can
provide the social function of the Attic drama even when not performed. In her
review of Charlotte Mew’s dramatic monologues, she credits Robert Browning
with the invention of the dramatic monologue, “a mould for generations . . . to
follow,” indicating that the fiction of this invention was already deeply entrenched
(FB 135).41 H.D. suggests that Browning provided poets such as Mew with a new
form for accessing the overmind, one that encourages “the poet’s dramatic partic-
ipation in other personalities in other times”; that is, the dramatic monologue
promotes an antimodern imagination.42 H.D. claims that “the poet speaks through”
the character “with his own vibrant superabundance of ecstasy before a miracle.”43
The connection she imagines between poet and personae, more complex than an
autobiographical relation, produces “superabundance” or excess that offers the
experience to readers as well. She does not presume that the “miracle” of this par-
ticipation is certain, but she hopes that her “trail” may serve as an example and
devises textual strategies to foster such an experience (Notes 24).
The dramatic monologues of The God sequence reposition ancient figures,
many from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, forcing them to move from their entrenched
positions and making them more available for participatory engagement.44 The
trope of displacement is established in the repeated image of a statuelike figure who
awakens from a pose, introduced in the first poem as “The God” who might turn
“from his portals of ebony / carved with grapes” (CP 45). This trope reflects on the
generic conventions of the dramatic monologue, as it gives voice, body, and
movement to historical and mythic figures. In “Pygmalion,” all of the mythic sculp-
tor’s statues of gods, not just Galatea, have stepped from stone.45 The departure of
each statue is a figure for the fading of the creative passion that gave light and life to
the artwork for a time. As the statues become his present-absent figures or silent
auditors, Pygmalion imagines their insults, “you are useless, / no marble can bind
me,” and cries out, “what agony can express my grief?” (CP 50).46 The statues con-
demn the artist’s failure to embody the divinity of the gods they represent.
“Eurydice,” one of H.D.’s most famous dramatic monologues, revises the familiar
myth by providing the female character’s perspective, a project common in H.D.’s
mythic monologues.47 “Eurydice” implies that death is the only way for a woman
ensnared in the culture of beauty worship to achieve a voice not dominated by her
body; that is, she must speak from the grave. H.D.’s discussions of the body, spirit, and
sexuality in Notes help to clarify the problem addressed in the monologue: the danger
when “the body of a man’s mistress” serves as an “approach to something else,” for
poet-musician Orpheus, an approach to his art (Notes 45). H.D. warns against sole
dependence on physical beauty and erotic pleasure, for art requires the entire human
being, a balance of body, mind, and overmind. A “neglect” of the body will
“retard” the growth of the spirit, and the overmind requires a compensatory physical
and mental health, or madness will result (Notes 17–20). Mixing metaphors from the
science of electricity with metaphysical concepts, H.D describes the body as the “ground”
that “casts off the spirit” through the reception and transmission of kinesthetic energies;
she compares the bodies of lovers to “receiving stations” capable of conducting the
current but “only to another body or another mind that is in sympathy with it, or
keyed to the same pitch” (Notes 47). The model of electrical transmission that charac-
terizes the ideal physical and mental sympathy of lovers might also figure an ideal
aesthetic reception, as the poem charges the body, mind, and overmind of readers.
H.D. distinguishes between “physical love” and that love in which “the heat of
the physical body is transmuted to this other, this different form, concentrated,
ethereal, which we refer to in common speech as spirit” (Notes 48). H.D.’s Orpheus
and Eurydice are merely physical lovers, and her furious Eurydice retells the story
and accuses him of being a “light” only to himself and his art: “what was it you saw
in my face? . . . the fire of your own presence?” (CP 54). Pointing to his “arrogance”
and “ruthlessness,” Eurydice claims he wanted that “glance” at her body as an
approach to his own ecstasy. The male artist cannot deny himself the gaze at a
beautiful woman even if it results in her death, for Eurydice, a doubly suffered
death. Orpheus “swept” her back to life and then to death again, at least partially
for the sake of his song, to make himself into the famous artist he became after his
journey to the land of the dead. When he attempted his rescue, she had nearly
forgotten him and was herself “almost forgot.” She will never find “peace” and “rest
with the dead” following her second death; she will be remembered as the object
of Orpheus’s desire in later songs and poems. If, as the monologue suggests,
Eurydice suffers with each retelling of the story, H.D.’s revision may not be exempt,
but in it, Eurydice speaks and demands her own “presence.”
H.D. records Eurydice’s voice and the “fervour” she could not have in a world
that celebrated only her physical beauty as she encourages a reader to “listen” dif-
ferently (CP 55). Orpheus, addressed as you, initially appears to be the silent auditor
common in monologues. But Eurydice reveals that she does not expect him to
listen: “if I should tell you, / you would turn from your own fit paths / toward hell”
(CP 54).48 The position of silent auditor is vacant, as in the monodramatic apos-
trophe, and readers may be encouraged to listen better than Orpheus. In these
lines about speech, stretched assonance (should, you, you, would, your) and succes-
sive d-t and t-p plosives (should tell, would turn, fit paths) direct attention to
Eurydice’s voice and the aural qualities of language. Varying line lengths also guide
interpretations of Eurydice’s potential vocalizations due to the convention that
readers pause at line breaks:
flowers,
if I could have taken once my breath of them,
enough of them,
more than earth,
(CP 53)
The long second line would demand more breath if read aloud than the one word,
two-syllable first line. The sounds of the word breath are then repeated in words
dominated by aspirated phonemes: them, them, than earth. Lacking a living breath
as well as an auditor, Eurydice speaks to herself from the grave, much like Goethe’s
monodrama Proserpina, and asks a reader to become a listener. Just as Mew and
Lowell insisted their poems must be read aloud, H.D. created a poetic script that
she hopes will encourage similar participation from a reader, although she seems
to recognize it will be a “miracle” if she succeeds (Ion 14).
After “Pygmalion” and “Eurydice” shift from their pedestals and challenge the
traditional status of the (male) artist in relation to his (female) subject-muse, the
next two monologues of The God sequence establish scenes of ritual. The first line
of “Orion Dead” reveals its contiguity with drama in a parenthetical stage direction:
“(Artemis speaks)” (CP 56). H.D. sets the scene of the goddess’s confrontation
with the hunter she killed, using kinesthetic techniques to construct Artemis as a
speaker who moves over the body of Orion, her silent, dead auditor.49 She
announces her gestures when she says, “I break a staff. / I break the tough branch”
(CP 57). The repeated word break is conventionally onomatopoetic, assumed to
provide the sound of the action described, but if the repetition emphasizes her
action, it also emphasizes her failure. Artemis can break objects, including Orion’s
body, but she cannot make the dead rise, in spite of her apparent regret: “I have lost
heart for this” (CP 57). Originally published as “Incantation” in 1914, the dramatic
monologue is an unsuccessful resurrection ritual and, like “Eurydice” and
“Pygmalion,” it fails to communicate with a silent (dead) auditor.
Incantatory speech becomes a gift or tribute to a god in the fourth monologue of
the sequence, “Hermonax,” an elaboration on a Greek Anthology epigram by Antipater
of Sidon, as translated by Mackail.50 The first stanzas establish a dedicatory prelude as
Hermonax calls, “Gods of the sea . . . hear me,” particularly naming the sea demigods
and figures of metamorphosis, Ino and Palaemon. In the description of Ino’s fall from
mortal woman into the “green, grey-green fastnesses / of the great deeps,” incantatory
qualities are enhanced by the consonance of the g sound and the assonance of ee
(CP 57).51 Hermonax declares a scene of offering and tribute at an “altar front” where
land becomes sea: “I / who can offer no other sacrifice to thee / bring this” (CP 58).
Antipater’s epigram names a “broken fragment of a sea-wandering scolopendra” as the
gift, but H.D.’s Hermonax offers only “this,” an ambiguous referent (Hellenism 170).
Eileen Gregory suggests that the sacrifice is “effectively the verbal gesture itself” and that
the “gift of sea wrack” is a “metonym for the broken, fragmentary, imagist poem”
(Hellenism 170–171). The poem is a dramatic monologue, however, and one that engages
the possibility of personal transformation. “This” might refer to the poem as gift, but
“the sea-gliding creature” in H.D.’s line is also the speaker “Hermonax, / caster of nets,”
who, “plying the sea craft, / came on it” (CP 58). “It” is another ambiguous referent, pos-
sibly indicating the poem as “sea wrack,” or the speaker’s own realizations as he plies the
“craft” of poetry. He twice asserts his presence, “I, Hermonax,” and the name features in
a sequence of close end rhymes (“chance,” “craft,” and “wrack”) that indicate a near
identity of objects for the offering—including Hermonax as a human sacrifice.
H.D. theorizes the dramatic monologue as a minidrama that can provide
access to the overmind’s store of myths featuring Pygmalion, Eurydice, Artemis,
and Ino. In her immersive model of aesthetic response, readers would link mythic
narratives to their own temporal moment and engage in the associative thought
paradigm characteristic of biblical typology and the mythical method. This herme-
neutic is modeled in “The Tribute,” the final poem of the sequence; through
typological association, the poem produces an ancient women’s ritual of venera-
tion at a temple that is also an ineffectual funerary rite for the dead of World War I.52
The women attempt to transform the “youth” sent “to strike at each other’s
strength” into temple devotees ordered to keep beauty “alight” (CP 68):
That the boys of the cities keep

with the gods apart,
for our world was too base
for their youth,

our city too dark,
(CP 65)
The deaths of the “boys” might be tolerable if the women could imagine they make
the world less “base” or that the boys dwell with the gods. But the poem’s layering
of temporalities suggests that the chorus of ancient devotees can offer no more
substantial justifications for war than those given by religious groups during the
first World War. Just as the “boys” of ancient Troy were sacrificed, modern nations
continue to send their youth to devastating battles. H.D.’s antimodern skepticism
indicates that there was no glory in ancient battles, and modern “progress” has not
eradicated futile wars. The rite fails in its attempt to “lure some god to our city”
from a chanted litany of possibilities: “O daemon of grasses . . . O gods of the plants
of the earth” (CP 63). Instead, the poem suggests that, as H.D. wrote elsewhere,
“this has happened before” (Trilogy 167).
III. The Ritual Chorus and a Soloist’s Suspicion in Ion

and “The Dancer”
Certain words and lines of Attic choruses . . . have a definite, hypnotic effect on me. They are
straight, clear entrances, to me, to over-world consciousness.
—H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision (1919) (24)
Emphasizing an individual response with the clause, “to me,” H.D. states that cho-
ruses from ancient ritual drama offer her access to the overmind. Many modernists
understood classical ritual as a model for the power of art to offer alternative states
of being through aesthetic and bodily experiences. Following Nietzsche and Harrison,
ritual was predominantly defined as an ordered, social enactment of worship that
involves role playing or the taking up of provisional identities, dissolves distinctions
between participant and observer, and establishes new communal relations.53 H.D.’s
terminology of the “overmind” and “over-world” echoes Nietzsche, and although
H.D., like Isadora Duncan, avoided discussing the influence of Harrison’s work, she
was undoubtedly aware of Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual because it was reviewed
in the Egoist in 1913.54 H.D. read Gilbert Murray’s publications, which popularized
Harrison’s argument that Greek tragedy and all subsequent art emerges from the
rituals of the Dionysian cult.55 But H.D.’s theories were unique in that they empha-
sized the similarity between ritual drama, Christian typology, and other modernist
mythical methods, as all indicate the artist’s receptivity to the overmind’s sphere of
eternal dramas and her ability to reproduce them for the benefit of others. As “The
Tribute” indicates, however, H.D. was skeptical of the capacity of ritual to produce
vast cultural renovation and focused on the transformation of the individual, soloist,
and reader. Her ambivalent version of ritualized reception is evident in her transla-
tion of Euripides’ Ion (1937) and “The Dancer” (1935).56
H.D. began her translation of Ion in 1916, revised the text in 1919 as she was
writing Notes on Thought and Vision, and took it up again in 1934 after her immersion
in film.57 The play therefore reflects a long period of engagement with ideas of ritual
that encompassed H.D.’s work in closet drama, cinema, and poetry. The unique
form of Ion, with twenty-five pages of “explanatory notes,” attempts to resolve the
tension between her enthusiasm for ritual and ambivalence about its ability to pro-
duce real change in an entire audience. The notes do not function as stage direc-
tions for an actual performance; rather, they guide an imagined readerly reception
of Ion: “If one departs from the strict ritual, entrance, exit, the upraised palms of
prayer, the mystic circle of the dance . . . one’s imagination takes one, perhaps, too
far” (Ion 50). H.D. follows Harrison’s emphasis on the circular dance as one of the
vestiges of ritual. She also follows Harrison’s antitheatricality by suggesting these
vestiges need not be realized in the theater. Instead, they help direct the reader’s
“imagination” as it transforms Ion from a dramatic text into a ritual occurring
through the reading event. For H.D., audiences resembled armies or could be too
easily recruited for them. Ion suggests both formally and thematically that ritual
transformation is a private experience, located in the individual, not the group.
H.D.’s ideas of ritualized reading reception also influenced her choices as a
translator. Like Pound’s “Sextus Propertius,” H.D.’s Ion disregards conventional
notions of accuracy. She omitted large portions of Euripides’ text and admits, “The
broken, exclamatory or evocative vers-libre which I have chosen to translate the
two-line dialogue, throughout the play, is the exact antithesis of the original” (Ion
32). Also like Pound, H.D. was derided by classicists such as F. R. Earp, who
described the form of Ion as “a kind of hysterical shorthand; for the writer con-
denses the trimeters of Euripides into lines of two or three syllables, which he (or
she) believes to be the equivalent.”58 “Vers-libre” was being debated in the little
magazines of modernism, often with reference to Pound, and H.D. chose the con-
troversial form for a particular effect that she believed could no longer be pro-
duced by trimeters.59 She insists that in altering the form and “concentrating,” she
does not “depart from the meaning” (Ion 32). H.D. does adhere to Euripides’ basic
plot: in her youth, Kreousa, now the queen of Athens, was the lover of Apollo; she
secretly abandoned their child, fearing her father’s censure. The orphan, Ion, was
protected by the gods and raised by the Pythian priestess at the Delphic temple.
Kreousa later travels to Delphi with her husband, King Xouthos, to ask for an heir,
and the god gives him Ion. Kreousa mistakenly believes that Ion will render her
royal lineage barren and attempts to have him killed, but the plot is foiled. Ion is
also prevented from matricide by the arrival of one of H.D.’s most revered figures
in the pantheon, Athena Nike, who restores order.
The “appearance of a god” on the classical stage is, according to Harrison,
another remnant of ritual (found “especially if the play be by Euripides”), as is the
long prologue that details the events of the play (Ritual 120–121). H.D. notes that
the prologue spoken by Hermes is intentionally “ponderous,” because it allows the
playgoer or reader to “become accustomed to this melodious rhythm” rather than
being “jerked suddenly” into another state: “Life was to merge with art. But it was
to merge, to be bridged gradually” (Ion 134–135). The similarity with Harrison’s
language is striking: “Thus ritual makes, as it were, a bridge between real life and
art” (Ritual 135). H.D. describes Hermes guiding the reader across the bridge by
chanting the prologue with a “rhythmic, hypnotic effect . . . in the manner of cathe-
dral litany” (Ion 9). The rituals of the cathedral are another anachronism in the
translation, but like Harrison, H.D. suggests that both Christian rituals and the
Attic drama are rooted in ancient temple ceremonies. To help her readers experi-
ence her translation as ritual, she asks them to imagine the Catholic litany and
church choir.
H.D.’s translation of several Euripidean choruses in addition to Ion might sug-
gest she follows Harrison and Nietzsche in believing that the chorus was an anti-
modern model of community and remedy for modern alienation and capitalist
competition.60 Yet her understanding of the chorus does not correspond exactly to
Harrison’s claim that it depicts “public” sentiments “felt and expressed officially”
(Ritual 49). Nor does she fully agree with Nietzsche’s theory of the dissolution of
individuality in the Dionysian chorus, which, unlike Harrison’s productive and
civic chorus, is a destructive and liberating phenomenon.61 H.D.’s notes to Ion
reveal her distrust of groups, even choruses, as she redefines Ion’s chorus as “a
manifestation of its inner mood, expression, as it were, of group-consciousness;
subconscious or superconscious comment on the whole” (Ion 7). The influence of
psychoanalytic thought, evident here, marks a departure from both Nietzsche and
Harrison, for as a manifestation of mood or a “superconscious comment,” the
chorus is a voice from an alternate state of consciousness similar to H.D.’s over-
mind. The chorus is a figure rather than a group of human beings. Whereas most
ritualists celebrated choric, communal experience, H.D., like Isadora Duncan,
worried about the destructive powers of groups, nations, militaries, crowds, con-
gregations, even suffragists.62
H.D.’s suspicion of group dynamics and brotherhoods is clear in the plot of Ion
when, just as he threatens Kreousa and is prepared “to be sworn-in as it were, to a
brotherhood of mastery and battle,” the Pythia intercedes: “you must know why
you strike” (Ion 98). She warns that individual responsibility, self-knowledge, and
control must never be superseded by the code of “battle.” The presence of the cul-
pable individual within the choric community is also evident in the grammar of
H.D.’s translations. The choral voice fluctuates between plural and singular, we
and I, creating phases of inclusion and individuation as reminders of the dangers
of groupthink. Ion’s dancing chorus of the Queen’s waiting women generally
speaks in the universal we, but as H.D. notes, it can also be “curiously ‘human,’
startlingly personal” (Ion 45). After Kreousa’s death sentence, the chorus moans,
“hers / is our death,” but as they begin to describe their own deaths, they speak in
the first-person singular: “they will stone me / to death” (Ion 89). Whereas the
plural “our death” multiplies and generalizes the horror, the shift to the first person
suggests that mass slaughter is effectively understood only in relation to an
individual. H.D.’s image for the tension between the singular and plural is a dance
ensemble: “the choros, so singularly a unit yet breaking occasionally apart, like
dancers, to show individual, human Athenian women of the period, to merge
once more into a closed circle of abstract joy or sorrow” (Ion 112). H.D. emphasizes
the “individual” bodies in her descriptions of her dancing chorus, and when these
bodies “merge,” they become an abstraction of emotion rather than a crowd.
The fluctuation between the first person and the choric first person evident in
Ion also appears in “The Dancer,” published just after a period of extensive revision
of Ion in 1935. “The Dancer” features classical images and notates a ritual dance
using kinesthetic techniques to convey the dancer’s movement. In her typescript at
the Beinecke Library, H.D. arranged “The Dancer” with “The Master” and “The
Poet” under the heading “Three Poems,” although the triad was not published
until 1983.63 The sequence parallels H.D.’s three components of human subjectivity
or “manifestations of life”: body, mind, and overmind. “The Dancer,” recalling
Isadora Duncan, refers to the art most intimately connected to the body.64 “The
Master” references H.D.’s analysis with Sigmund Freud and explores the workings
of the mind. “The Poet,” identified as D. H. Lawrence, invokes poetry and prophecy,
the arts of the overmind, and states of extreme creativity edging to insanity: “(your
nerves are almost gone)” (CP 462). In each of the poems, the speaker wrestles with
the titular figure to develop strength in that manifestation of life without aban-
doning the others. She refuses to fully succumb to the Poet’s madness, and she
struggles against the “wisdom” of the Master “with his talk of the man-strength,”
using images of solo dance to refute his focus on mind:
as her limbs fling wide in dance

ecstatic
Aphrodite,
... ....
for she needs no man,
herself
is that dart and pulse of the male,
hands, feet, thighs,
herself perfect.
(CP 456).
The speaker of “The Dancer” also struggles to maintain the Master’s intellectual
perspective while learning from the dance, and this tension is expressed as a desire
to join in a duet with the dancer fluctuating with a fear of ecstatic Dionysiac
abandon.
H.D.’s dancer is an image of the integration of the material body and meta-
physical spirit, a fusion that also interested symbolist poets such as Stéphane
Mallarmé. Symbolist descriptions tend to erase the artistry of the dancer and the
desires of the spectator, whereas H.D. emphasizes the roles of both as a creative
and erotic partnership.65 In “The Dancer,” the spectator is also the speaker of a
poem with a voice figured as prominently as in many of H.D.’s dramatic mono-
logues; the direct address establishes the dancer as the silent auditor. The first sec-
tion describes the feelings of watching her move through assertions of difference
and similarity: “I came far, / you came far . . . I from the west, / you from the east”
(CP 440). The speaker-spectator’s initial distinction between I and you fades by the
third stanza, when she asks: “which is which? / either is either” (CP 440). The
dancer’s “sorcery” dissolves identities, temporalities, and gender categories: “I am
a priestess, / I am a priest; / You are a priest, / you are a Priestess” (CP 440). In the
following section, the speaker retreats from the dancer into a position of critical
distance in the “city / of thinkers, of wisdom-makers” (CP 441). She insists that she
does not carry a “wine-jar,” distinguishing herself from a bacchante who might
join the dance. She has withdrawn into “mind,” becoming the philosopher who is
“perfectly aware, perfectly cold.” She claims to understand how the amputee has
sensation in the lost arm, but unlike this wounded soldier “back from the last war,”
who feels “healing, electric” where there is no longer physiological cause, the
speaker will not allow the dancer to “betray” her into sensation (CP 441). The next
section contradicts these protests as the frozen critic finds that the dance has a
kind of “electric” power to dislodge her critical distance: “ember / burns in ice”
(CP 442). The war amputee’s phantom pain is a figure for the possibility of a kin-
esthetic response to art; readers and spectators may have sensory experiences even
when the dance and the poem never touch their bodies. These experiences may
include pleasure but also the pain and loss implied by the amputee and the speak-
er’s ambivalent response to the dance.
As the speaker-spectator is increasingly moved by the dance, lines of repeated
monosyllabic words stretch the text along the page like the extension of a limb or
tendu:
Fair,
fair,
fair,
do we deserve beauty?
pure,
pure
fire,
do we dare
follow desire
CP 442)
The tentative question “do we dare” remains, but the poem takes on the rhythm of
chant, bolstered by the rhyme sequence: fair, dare, fire, desire, pure, where. By the
opening of section IV, the I has become the we of communal experience and can
admit the insufficiency of mind to define being without body: “we are more than
we know” (CP 443). This shift in pronouns may suggest a union of dancer and
spectator, but the dancer is still an adamant soloist to be followed; this, along with
the problems of identity raised in these lines, suggests that “do we” and “we are”
address readers and encourage their sense of participation in a communal we.66
The monosyllabic chantlike structure resembles Hermes’s rhythms in Ion, where
chant was a bridge between life and art. The instability of the pronouns, the choric
I and we, also recalls the dual nature of Ion’s chorus of individuals representing
abstract emotions but specific responsibilities.
In section V, the speaker is fully integrated into a choric community; she
describes joining the sacred circle dance and states that she will “claim no prece-
dence among the flute-players” (CP 444). No longer analytical, her speech becomes
more songlike with prayerful appeals: “Give us the strength to follow, / the power
to hallow / beauty” (CP 443). She seeks the strength of the body in this section
(rather than mind or overmind) to celebrate desire and “pleasure such as gods may
feel” (CP 450). The speaker contrasts this sensuous ritual with the remote academic,
the “sullen and silent” poet, and any religion of torture and sacrifice (CP 445). She
now addresses the dancer as “O chaste Aphrodite . . . O my sister . . . O Priestess,”
referencing the roles of goddess, human, and the religious intermediary, among
other provisional identities in ritual. In Harrison’s theory of the development of
drama from ritual, the leader of the choral dance developed into an actor when
members of the community stopped participating in the ritual and became spec-
tators. The solo gave rise to the first god because the drama was, like its ritual ante-
cedents, linked to seasonal changes; the roles, “because they recur, get a sort of
permanent life of their own and become beings apart” (Ritual 72). Harrison sug-
gests that the theater produced gods rather than celebrated them. H.D.’s poem
similarly reenacts the imaginative creation of a goddess from a woman as the
dancer takes on divine attributes: “your feet melt into folded wing” (CP 444).
In section VI, the dancer is a human soloist again, cast in the role of Rhodocleia,
the beloved addressed by Rufinus in the Greek Anthology. The poem incorporates
a monologue spoken by her “Father,” who, as “burning sun-lover” referencing the
“laurel / at Delphi,” is identified with Apollo. Yet, the Egyptian Thoth or Greek
Hermes is also invoked by the symbol of the stylus in his command, “dance . . . you
are my stylus, / you write in the air with this foot” (CP 445). Echoing the Christian
God, the Apollonian voice declares,
I have sent you into the world;

beside you,
men may name
no other;
(CP 445)
The Apostle Peter similarly says of Christ, “there is none other name under heaven
given among men” (Acts 4:12). H.D. connects ancient gods and Christ with lan-
guage that echoes several myths and the typologically related symbols of laurel,
stylus, and cross. H.D. also inserts the dancing daughter into the tradition of male
gods and their sons, and this new type incarnates a spirituality of desire with dance
as an ephemeral scripture written “in the air.”
When the spectator-speaker resumes speech from the Apollo figure, she ini-
tially appears to contradict a religion of desire and demand restraint in a passage
that troubles gender roles:
O let us never meet, my love,

let us never clasp hands
as man and woman,
as woman and man,

as woman and woman,
as man and man;
(CP 446)
The speaker refuses to “meet” as any combination of “women” or “men,” that is,
according to the traditional rules of gender and conventional heterosexual or homo-
sexual relationships. Edward Comentale argues that restraint from sexual consum-
mation is central to H.D.’s ritual poetics, suggesting that when the “minds of the two
lovers merge,” their bodies must not (Production 224).67 But H.D.’s warning applies
specifically to a physical passion that uses only the lover’s body, as in “Eurydice”; H.D.
refuses a dichotomy between mind and body and instead suggests that the energy of
“great lovers” is never dissipated merely in sex but also demands a spiritual and intel-
lectual union, all three manifestations of life (Notes 21). She seeks a consummation
of love that refuses gender binaries, but lacking an alternative language, she can only
repeatedly refute the vocabulary of “man and woman” (CP 446).
In both Ion and “The Dancer,” H.D. invites an engaged, kinesthetic reading
experience by defamiliarizing expectations of dramatic and poetic form, using
stage directions not intended to be staged, and alternating the pronominal address
along with rhythms, voices, and rhyme. Her notes to Ion theorize these variations,
stating that a “receptive mood” may be encouraged if the speaker first stresses the
syllables “like a gong,” then by “chanting” the middle part to create a “rhythmic,
hypnotic effect,” and finally, by nurturing “subtle” and “silver rhythms” (Ion 8–12).
This progression appears in “The Dancer” as well; the initial staccato syllables of
free verse give way to a faster rhythmic chant that uses repetition to produce a cli-
mactic finale. H.D. is well aware that a poem cannot actually require a response
from the reader and that her strategies may fail. In her notes to Ion, she states that
“the audience must be keyed-in to the theme . . . must know roughly the trend of
events, so that they may be sufficiently swayed but not over-excited” (Ion 11). She
hopes that half of her readers might achieve this response:
Roughly speaking, there were two types of theatre-goers in ancient Greece,

as there are to-day. . . . The ardent lover of the drama will doubtless be strung
up to a fine pitch of intensity and discrimination from the first. The presence
of this actor, who impersonates the god Hermes, will actually be that god.
(Ion 8)
The ideal reading response is modeled by the spectator-speaker in “The Dancer” as

she vacillates between desire for inclusion in the dance and assertions of individu-
ality, we and I. H.D. always discourages “sullen and silent” responses to art and
offers typological symbols and mythic connections to entice an active, associative
reading. But “The Dancer” and Ion advocate a temporary suspension of inhibi-
tions to experience ritual without losing individual judgment, which is notated by
a return to first-person speech. These shifting movements toward ritual ecstasy
and back to a position of critical individuality reflect H.D.’s concern that actual
dissolution of the self in a group can produce a “brotherhood of mastery and
battle” as easily as a liberated Dionysian community. Her notes for Ion and textual
strategies in “The Dancer” appear to advocate a ritual without performance, one
that occurs in the individual reading event. Still, H.D. may have come to believe
that ritual experience required an oral performance, if not an actual dance. She
was satisfied that Ion was complete only when it received a BBC radio broadcast in
London in December 1954, thirty-eight years after she began her translation. The
H.D. collection at the Beinecke Library contains a program revealing that the
London Chamber Singers and Chamber Orchestra performed original music by
Anthony Bernard for the event. H.D. added at least thirty-four additional commas
to her copy of Ion, probably when she was preparing the text for oral radio
performance and hoping to guide the readers’ delivery.68 Although Ion is often
associated with H.D.’s early “Greek” poems, her long development of the play
encompasses her period of cinema work, and her notes for Ion clarify the
performance she hoped to achieve on film.
IV. Types of Participation: H.D.’s Film Essays

and Reviews
Art and life walk hand in hand, drama and music, epic song and lyric rhythm, dance and the
matter of science here again, as in some elaborate “allegory” of the Florentines, take hands,
twine in sisterly embrace before their one God, here electrically incarnated, LIGHT.
—H.D., The Borderline Pamphlet (1930)69
H.D.’s film essays and reviews enthusiastically present cinema as a modern ritual,
employing the combined power of all arts, as in classical drama, but including
science and technology.70 H.D. engaged film with an optimistic antimodern-
classicism: “True modernity approaches more and more to classic standards.”71
Her cinematic ritual “electrically incarnated” a God of “LIGHT” to be worshipped
in a “sisterly embrace” rather than the “brotherhood of mastery and battle” that
produced war (Ion 98). H.D.’s association of cinema with the “‘allegory’ of the
Florentines” combines Dante’s allegorical and typological method with early film
theory. The epigraph also reveals that H.D. developed her vocabulary for film
analysis in earlier writing about drama and performance; her description of “hand
in hand” synthesis echoes her notes about the function of the prologue in Ion:
“Religion and art still go hand and hand” (Ion 8). Studies of H.D.’s film work tend
to focus on Borderline without a thorough examination of her essays and reviews.
Those critics who do examine her film theories, most notably Susan McCabe,
position her in relation to Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory and the psychoana-
lytic practices of Freud and Hanns Sachs.72 Eisenstein’s influence on H.D. has
obscured that of his teacher, Lev Kuleshov, yet H.D.’s theories of cinematic
performance and montage are mostly clearly established in “Expiation” (May
1928), a review of Kuleshov’s 1926 silent film, Po Zakanu (usually translated as By
the Law). She fuses Kuleshov’s Delsartean actor-training system and montage
mise-en-scène with her version of the fourfold interpretive method to imagine
practices of audience reception that constitute participation in a cinematic ritual.
From 1927 until 1933, H.D. was part of the POOL film group established by her
lover Kenneth Macpherson and longtime partner, Bryher.73 With a manifesto-like
rhetoric of novelty that was seemingly in tension with H.D.’s antimodern series
“Cinema and the Classics,” POOL ads announced, “It has projects. It will mean
concerning books, new hope . . . concerning cinematography, new beginning. New
always” (Close Up 9).74 POOL launched Close Up in July 1927 as “The Only Magazine
Devoted to Films as an Art: Theory and Analysis . . . No Gossip” (Close Up 8–9).
Modeled after the literary “little magazines” common in the period, it was the first
English-language film journal and began to invent a language for film criticism
that influenced the next generation of critics and producers (Close Up 10).75 Close
Up’s international contributors included writers Dorothy M. Richardson, Gertrude
Stein, and Marianne Moore; psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs; and visual artist Man
Ray. It introduced avant-garde Russian film theory to Europe and the United
States, printing the first translations of Kuleshov and Eisenstein’s writings (Close
Up vii). While editorial positions were frequently revised, the magazine was com-
mitted to the aesthetic possibilities of cinema in spite of commercialization, the
battle against film censorship, and a celebration of international experiments in
film (with special issues devoted to Japanese, Russian, and African American
cinema) (Close Up 10–20). Many of these commitments are evident in H.D.’s eleven
Close Up pieces, a surprisingly substantial critical output, given her reticence to
publish poetic theory. She did not have to battle a coterie of powerful male literary
critics when she wrote about film, and women frequently took up early film criti-
cism because its marginal, “popular” status discouraged male reviewers.76
H.D.’s “Expiation” reviews the celebrated third film of the Kuleshov Collective,
By the Law, which was based on Jack London’s story “The Unexpected” (1906). Set in the
Yukon during the Alaskan gold rush, five prospectors share a cabin: the Swedish
leader Hans Nelson (Sergei Komarov); his English wife, Edith (Alexandra
Khokhlova); the shareholders Dutchy (Porfiri Podobed) and Harky (Pyotr
Galadzhev); and the Irish servant Michael Dennin (Vladimir Fogel). The group
determines to abandon the claim, and they tell Dennin (misnamed Jack by H.D.)
to pack the tools. While pulling up the stakes, Dennin finds gold, and the group
celebrates their good fortune through the winter. With spring approaching, the
others plan to take their wealth to their families and taunt Dennin, who is not enti-
tled to a share. One evening, Dennin shoots Dutchy and Harky and aims his
shotgun at Hans before Edith prevents the attack. She also prevents Hans’s revenge:
“You can’t kill him. Only the law can punish him.” In a tiny shanty, the survivors
wait to take their prisoner to “the law” through violent storms, ice floes, and flood-
ing when, with all three near desperation, Dennin demands, “Kill me.” They con-
duct a trial under a picture of Queen Victoria, and Edith delivers the verdict of
death, mimicking the monarch’s hand positions in a living picture or tableau as if
to embody royal authority. After the hanging, Dennin appears at the door of the
shanty: “It wasn’t meant to be, your rope was rotten, it broke.” He throws the noose
into the cabin “for luck” and leaves. This conclusion departs from London’s story,
in which a group of natives are present at the trial and hanging to wonder at
strange rituals. Both film and story reveal that Dennin wanted a share of the gold
for his mother, but only in the film is he a servant, in keeping with Kuleshov’s con-
cern for class relations.
H.D.’s review finds “some almost Elusinian note of purity” in Kuleshov’s film,
and she figures herself as reviewer in the role of priestess, “like someone before the
high altar explaining to a neophyte” (Close Up 125–126). Her new converts among
the audience must “receive this series of uncanny and almost psychic sensations in
order to transmute them elsewhere; in order to translate them” (Close Up 125).
This “translation” constitutes a cinematic version of audience participation, which
was an essential component of ritual for H.D. The spectator must establish associ-
ations between the characters on the screen, earlier mythic and historical figures,
and the contemporaneous moment. This typological or mythical method directs
attention to how film participates in the structures of repetition that relate scrip-
ture, myth, and history. H.D.’s adaptation of typology for film builds on her interest
in Judeo-Christian history and study of Dante, but she combines the fourfold her-
meneutic with ritual structures to theorize a thought paradigm and interpretive
activity through which audiences participate in a cinematic ritual. H.D. models
this thought paradigm in her review of By the Law; she describes Dennin as “Atlas
with a world of new discovery, new possibility, the new, so to speak Russia . . . the
Irishman, the servant, finds gold” (Close Up 128). As a modern antitype of Atlas,
Dennin shoulders a new society that will reevaluate relations between master and
servant and that H.D. associates with postrevolutionary Russia, suggesting that
she, like Isadora Duncan, was, at least temporarily, in support of the revolution.
The moral (tropological) lesson is that oppressive class structures produce crime.
At the anagogical level, there is a transcendent force of justice, what she calls
“someone, something [who] ‘intended’ ” that Dennin should not be executed
(Close Up 125).
H.D. establishes a similar typological series in her description of Edith as a
“wan and exquisite Persephone” who is, as in her revision of “Eurydice,” “crying to
be buried, dragged in, taken back” (Close Up 126). H.D. further associates Edith
with “Joan of Arc, all the women from Pallas Athene to Charlotte Corday that have
personified some grave principle is in her fanatic gesture, in her set gargoyle pos-
ture, in her lean attenuated determination” (Close Up 126). Edith’s principle of
“the law” connects her to Athena, the Christian martyr Joan of Arc, and Corday,
the French Girondist revolutionary who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat and went to
the guillotine believing she had rescued France from a tyrant. The moral level of
H.D.’s series of parallels from Joan to Corday is that within oppressive social
structures a “fanatic” commitment to a principle, whether law, wisdom, God, or
revolution, will result in death; all judgments based on the code of an unjust
society are fallible. Joan reappears in H.D.’s review of Carl Dreyer’s film Jeanne
d’Arc (1928) as “the flawless type, the Jeanne d’Arc of all peoples, of all nations, the
world’s Jeanne d’Arc (as the world’s Christ)” (Close Up 133). A transnational “type,”
Joan exists in “another series of valuations,” a pattern of relations that extends
beyond the historical individual to other sacrificial icons, namely, Christ
(Close Up 133). H.D. criticizes Dreyer’s film for limiting the typological participa-
tion of his audience with realistic portrayals of torture that leave viewers “numb
and beaten” rather than thoughtful (Close Up 133). By replacing a figure with reality
and destroying allegorical suggestion, Dreyer will “rob us of our own Jeanne,” each
“Joan or Johanna or Juana,” and the opportunity for creative participation (Close
Up 131). H.D. seeks the Joan who “talked openly with angels” in keeping with the
anagogical or spiritual level of the fourfold method, but Dreyer’s realism trans-
forms her into a “brute” without even a “hint of the angelic wing tip, of the winged
sandals . . . or of the distillation of maternal pity of their ‘familiar’ Margaret” (Close
Up 133). She cannot find the angel, god, woman, or space for the typological
thought paradigm and cinematic ritual experience.
H.D.’s combination of mythic, religious, and historical types collapses the

boundaries between art and religion, which she describes in “Expiation” as “febrile
and old-fashioned really. All I can know is that I, personally, am attuned to certain
vibration, that there comes a moment when I can ‘witness’ almost fanatically the
‘truth’ ” (Close Up 127). The physical experience of spectatorship is vibration, a
word that appears frequently in her film writing. It helps her describe typological
“heroism” in her essay on “Russian Films” (September 1928), which she categorizes
as “in spirit Biblical films”:
Heroism is without nationality and should be without prejudice. We should

not think David was a Jew, Leonidas a Greek. These are epic characters, and
as long as we are citizens or subjects of the world, the vibration set up by the
heroism of a David or the beauty and restraint of a Leonidas belongs to
each one of us individually.
(Close Up 136)
The vibrations initiated by performing types may also, as suggested by the moral
or tropological level, move each viewer to relinquish harmful national prejudices
in favor of individual connections. This response is possible only if the audi-
ences can “add” to the film with their own associations and desires, a participa-
tion that sound film prevented, according to H.D. In her essay protesting the
advent of sound, “The Mask and the Movietone,” she declares, “I want to help to
add imagination to a mask, a half finished image, not have everything done for
me. I can’t help this show” (Close Up 115). The welding of voice and face may be
“mechanical perfection,” but such perfection does not produce a mythic type or
“the possibility of something more divine behind the outer symbol of something
shown there” (Close Up 119). The silent film fosters participation because the
actor does not merely “look” the part; “she ‘is’ for the time being what she typ-
ifies” (Close Up 145). In that provisional identity with the character, the actor
remakes herself and provides an example of transformation for the audience to
follow.
The actors’ movements in Kuleshov’s By the Law, especially Khokhlova’s as
Edith, also produce vibrations:
The gestures of this woman are angular, bird-like, claw-like, skeleton-like

and hideous. She has a way of standing against a sky line that makes a hiero-
glyph, that spells almost visibly some message of cryptic symbolism. Her
gestures are magnificent. If this is Russian, then I am Russian. Beauty is too
facile a word to discuss this; this woman is a sort of bleak young sorceress,
vibrant, febrile, neurotic, as I say, almost cataleptic. . . . Her mind, her soul,
her body, her spirit, her being, all vibrate, as I say, almost audibly.
(Close Up 126)
H.D. uses the term hieroglyph to describe a technique in which the static image of
the actor’s body signifies in the manner of language, as gesture unites with primi-
tive or preverbal meaning, and her interest in the antimodern hieroglyph is evi-
dent throughout her film writing, fiction, and poetry. The idea of a gestural
hieroglyph also reflects the posed quality of Khokhlova’s performance as she
stands “almost cataleptic” yet vibrating in a manner that H.D. can almost hear.
Khokhlova’s ability to write a “message” on the screen in gesture reflects her
training at the Kuleshov Workshop, where the actor-training method used
Delsarte-derived axes (excentric, normal, and concentric) to map each bodily atti-
tude and establish a cinematic semiology of gesture, a linkage of bodily pose to
emotional expression.77 Delsartean attitudes and other forms of posing enjoyed
international popularity well into the period of silent film and contributed to cin-
ematic acting styles.
H.D. outlined a film aesthetic of “Restraint” in an essay of that title, an ideal
achieved by Khokhlova’s posed style and a quality that encourages an audience’s
receptivity to the cinematic ritual. Too much movement or inappropriate adorn-
ment renders an audience “sated and lost and tired” (Close Up 111). H.D. experi-
ences “satiety” when she watches the chariots of Ben Hur and suggests that a sated
audience will not be tuned to typological vibrations or engaged in the associa-
tional thought patterns of the fourfold method.78 Echoing her description of
Hermes’s gestures as “direct copy of marble arm and bared limb of pentellic frieze”
in the prologue of Ion (17), H.D. claims that appropriately restrained cinematic
movement is “pure vase-gesture, black-figure vase pre-fifth century gesture,” that
is, gestures resembling classical statue poses (Close Up 110). She calls for “simple
beautiful line, bodies almost naked” and costumes without “exaggerated, uncouth
drapery,” the Greek tunics popularized by Isadora Duncan and Delsartean posers
(Close Up 110–111). In “Restraint,” H.D. also evaluates D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance
(1916), a film in which she would have seen Denishawn-trained Lillian Gish as the
woman rocking a cradle, a common Delsartean pose. Other actors, particularly
Mae Marsh as “the Dear One” and Howard Gaye as “Christ,” convey emotion by
striking Delsartean attitudes.79 H.D. claims that the performers in Intolerance were
not always posed enough, particularly citing the crowd scene in the Babylonian
sequences, which featured Denishawn choreography (Close Up 111). Perhaps
reflecting her suspicion of any crowd that subsumes the individual, H.D advocates
the restraint of the tableau or group pose featured in Delsarte matinees and
popular melodramas. H.D. refers twice to an “exquisite naked silhouette of a
woman, the famous judgement of Paris tableau” in the “German production Force
and Beauty” (Close Up 110, 114).80 In Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927), she
views the “last tableau” of Christ’s “farewell into the roll of motors, the irregular
jag on jag of sky-scrapers” as the “crux and final reason” of the film.81 Set in “the
most modern minute-after-next modernity,” the cityscape tableau pictured Jesus’
tropological claim, “behold I am with you always.” In H.D.’s theory of “Restraint,”
posing maintains the receptivity of audiences so that they may locate Christ as type
with tropes in the contemporary world of skyscrapers.
H.D.’s association of cinematic poses with typological hermeneutics is already
present in Delsarte’s theory that posing as the Virgin Mary or Athena would help
the performer achieve the ideal represented by that type (submission or wisdom).
A similar association works in Kuleshov’s theory of the “model actor [natursh-
chik],” which was based on a version of Christian typology, according to Jay Leyda.82
Kuleshov studied classical statuary, as did Delsarte, to determine the pose associ-
ated with a particular emotion and character type. Both were also influenced by
physiognomy, the “science” claiming that particular faces are naturally expressive
of certain personalities, and Kuleshov divided his “model actors” into three groups:
“the emotional type, the rational-technical type, and the technical type”
(“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 51). Kuleshov’s cinematic typology and the Delsartean
statue poses in his actor-training system were among the silent film theories and
practices that shaped Khokhlova’s performance as Edith into an antitypical repre-
sentation of Athena. H.D. added the idea that the audience’s analogical interpreta-
tion of such types was a practice of ritual participation.
V. H.D.’s Attitudes on Film
So the world beats and pulses in this modest four reel film of Mr Macpherson. But it is a world
of reality, of a simple setting, a lyric setting and to all intents and purposes, no action. The
action, that is the action of subtle “stills,” is an action of thought etched in fine distinguished
line on the fine distinguished features of Mr Macpherson and of H.D.
—H.D. “Wingbeat” (1927)83
In her unpublished essay on Wingbeat, H.D. describes her own acting style and
that of Kenneth Macpherson as a vibrating, restrained, series of “stills.” The pro-
gression of single, static images or poses indicates “thought,” even writes “thought”
upon the performers’ faces, and encourages audiences to explore their own
thought paradigms. The restrained, gesturing body H.D. praised in her essays for
enabling ritualized spectatorship was also evident in her own acting style. Her per-
formances in Wingbeat, Foothills, and Borderline were partially modeled on
Khokhlova’s Delsarte-derived poses and especially her static gaze directly into the
camera in By the Law.84 In the Delsartean charts of attitudes Khokhlova consulted
at the Kuleshov workshop, this direct gaze was associated with “thought” and
“reflection/meditation” (see figure 2.2). H.D. adopted a similar pose to represent
the “action of thought” in Wingbeat and encourage a meditative mood in the audi-
ence. She is usually featured alone on screen, a soloist framed in close-up, and her
movements are punctuated by poses that “vibrate” and “pulse” with energy. H.D.’s
attitudes, often accented by a shawl that recalls the prominent representation of
cloth in the Greek Tanagra figures and Emma Lyon Hamilton’s veils, position her
in a long history of antimodern mythic posing.
H.D.’s earliest known appearance on film is in a fifty-four-second sequence of
poses in Wingbeat (1927); her lone body and the series of stills convey isolation and
confinement.85 She sits against a tree, and then six cuts reveal her in new poses:
kneeling with face forward, sitting with chin on knees, leaning back with right arm
supporting the body, then kneeling and looking down. Finally, the camera moves
to a close-up on her head and face, and she stares directly into the lens for eighteen
seconds. A second series of static poses includes shots of H.D. positioned in an
ornate doorway, a body doubly enclosed in the cinematic frame and doorframe.86
These minimal, contained movements are accurately reflected in the verbs she
uses to describe Wingbeat: pulsing, shivering, and quivering (“Wingbeat” 5–18). Her
poses are also crucial to presenting the film’s “world as lived by the nervous post-
war thinker, artist, intellectual; nerve-wrought, hysterical if your [sic] will but
vibrant, pulsing with life and with rarefied emotion” (“Wingbeat” 5). Posing con-
tributes to her critique of a postwar modernity in which the artist-intellectual, for
all her noble feeling, cannot move. Close Up’s advertisement for Wingbeat includes
stills of Macpherson and H.D. and bills the film as the first “free verse poem” for
the screen, representing the “will shivering and quivering on a frail, too-high, too
inaccessible brink” (Close Up 18). In keeping with Nietzsche and Isadora Duncan’s
ideas that human movement is evidence of the power of the will, the traumatized
modern individual is best depicted as posed forever at the brink of movement.
Contemporaneous with the POOL group’s first film experiments, H.D.
appeared in another genre of mythic posing, a series of photomontages composed
by Macpherson, perhaps with the help of Bryher and H.D., and bound in a brown
leather album known as the H.D. Scrapbook (HDPB).87 Several compositions jux-
tapose nude photographs of H.D., taken by Bryher in 1920 at the Carmel Highlands
Inn near Monterey, California, with images of Greek sculpture or architecture

gleaned from pamphlets and travel brochures or photographed by H.D. and
Bryher during their 1920 journey to Greece (“Images” 158).88 The compositions
replay Pygmalionesque fantasies of a statue becoming a woman or a woman solid-
ifying into rock, a fascination also evident in H.D.’s dramatic monologue
“Pygmalion” and the other poems of The God. More important, they visually rep-
resent the associative thought paradigms and recognition essential to both H.D.’s
cinematic ritual and the aesthetics of statue posing.89
Three of the compositions feature images of Nike or Athena-Nike, H.D.’s deus
ex machina in Ion and figures she associated closely with her identity as a poet. She
kneels in the grass under the wing of the Victory of Samothrace (see figure I.3).
Another version of Nike appears in a photomontage with a caption, most likely in
Bryher’s hand: “Fragment of Base, Asklepios Hygeia & Nike from Epidauros”
(figure 5.3). Sitting on a jagged rock, H.D. might represent a pupil of the healer-god
Asklepios, whose arm is raised as if he is engaged in declamation. Yet, the rotation
of H.D.’s nude body appears to direct her gaze beyond Asklepios to Hygeia and the
Fig 5.3 “Asklepios, Hygeia & Nike from Epidaurus,” H.D. Scrapbook (undated,
ca. 1920–1930). Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library.
partial figure of Nike, suggesting that health may be found in a return to ancient
teachings and mythic female figures.90 H.D. is further linked with Nike as the angle
of her head follows the line of Nike’s wing, which remains in the fragment while the
rest of her body appears to have moved, as if on a film strip, outside the frame. If
H.D. gazes at protocinematic figures, her pose frustrates the gaze of the viewer as
the rotation of her torso conceals facial features and genitals. Her visible back and
right thigh are blank like the rocks where she sits or the headless stone figures she
observes. The secrets sought in Greek art, photography, film, or health lectures will
be partially concealed, ravaged by time, or cut by the frame. The montage is an
ambivalent representation of antimodern longing and modern therapeutics.91
The photomontage captioned “Metope of Zeus Temple Apples of Hesperides”
depicts Hercules’s eleventh labor when he tricked Atlas into taking the world on
his shoulders so that he could give the apples of the Hesperides to Athena
(figure 5.4). The metope is cut jaggedly along the lower right corner and separated
to reveal H.D. standing nude in a rocky pool. The mythic narrative determines the
meanings of her pose; she leans forward, one foot advanced as if bracing under
Fig 5.4 “Metope of the Zeus Temple depicting Atlas, Apples of Hesperides,”
H.D. Scrapbook (undated, ca. 1920–1930). Courtesy of the Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
weight, and her arms extend behind her.92 The pose links H.D. to Atlas rather than
the other figures, Hercules or Athena, but the placement of her body behind and
below the metope makes her bear all three figures. Her breasts and pubis are
partially concealed by the shadow of her upper body, a visual effect that, with the
juxtaposition to male nude statuary, contributes to the androgyny of the image
and suggests that the sexed body is less weighty than the burden of myth and art.93
H.D.’s poses in the photomontages, like Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes a century ear-
lier, invoke ancient statuary, use solo performance to reembody prior types, and
encourage an audience familiar with mythic references to develop analogies bet-
ween classical and contemporary life. Although the newer technology of the
camera could have caught H.D. in motion, her positions are static as the statue
posers, albeit without the necessity of holding the pose that contributed to their
virtuosity. Deflecting concerns about the public presentation of the gendered
body, both posed forms locate that body in the chaste, aestheticized category of the
Greek statue and invoke classical values and themes through juxtaposition.
In the second POOL film, Foothills (1929), and again in Borderline (1930), H.D.
poses with a long white shawl that resembles the veils used by Lyon Hamilton and
other statue posers to conceal physical adjustments as they prepared an attitude.
The use of cloth in mythic posing reflects the prominent representation of drapery
in classical female figures like those unearthed at Tanagra, Greece, in the 1870s and
displayed at the British Museum, where they fascinated H.D., Isadora Duncan, and
other modernists. In Foothills, H.D. plays a city dweller who falls into neurotic
boredom while visiting the country with a man, presumably her lover, played by
Macpherson. The shawl symbolizes her desire for elegance and beauty in a provin-
cial atmosphere, as do her bracelets and other prominent jewelry. Her gestures
with these objects, too intentional to be mindless play, reveal her entrapment.
Macpherson’s character also manipulates the fabric of the shawl as if he could
release her but refuses. H.D. flips through a magazine titled Venice on Foot, and
pictures of ancient art and Venetian architecture contrast sharply with her
“country” activities, predominantly drinking tea and staring out the window.
Borderline, the third POOL film, is usually associated with expressionist film
melodramas.94 The plot was summarized in a “libretto” written to accompany the
seventy-minute feature: set in a European mountain town, the film marks the con-
frontation between several dyads occupying the “borderlines” of psychology, sexu-
ality, and race. H.D. describes her character, Astrid, as a “sensitive neurotic,” and a
“white-cerebral”; her alcoholic lover, Thorne (Gavin Arthur), is having an affair with
a “mulatto woman,” Adah (Eslanda Robeson) (BP 112). Astrid informs Adah’s
previous lover, Pete (played by the renowned African American actor and singer Paul
Robeson), who arrives and is quickly reconciled with Adah. The confrontation con-
tinues in a hotel café, where the Café Manageress (Bryher) is coded lesbian by her
short hair and cigar. The pianist, Robert Herring, also appears to be gay, as he fre-
quently admires a photograph of Pete. At the climax of the film, Astrid threatens
Thorne with a knife, but he wrenches it away and kills her. The local government
acquits Thorne and condemns Pete, Adah blames herself and departs alone, and the
Manageress must ask Pete to leave. In one of the film’s few subtitles, “Sorry Pete,” she
says. “What makes it worse is they think they’re doing the right thing. We’re like that.”
Her shift from they to we is a sign of acceptance reinforced by her return to business.
In a final scene of reconciliation at the train station, Thorne and Pete shake hands.95
Criticism of the film has focused primarily on the complicated racial and
gendered politics of this plot, but H.D.’s The Borderline Pamphlet directs attention
to the acting style and visual composition of the scenes as the source of these
politics.96 H.D. describes the film composition as a “dynamic picture writing” that
reconciles the “high powered vibrations of past static art,” such as the pose or
photograph, with “the most modern art of portraiture in movement” (BP 116).
Macpherson “ ‘wrote’ his scenario in a series of some 1,000 pictures” with “captions”
that detail the pose or tableau actors are to strike (BP 123): “Interior. Astrid’s Room.
Close up. Fade in. A door is flung open . . . Astrid’s shadowy face is seen. . . . Her
hand rises across her face, and—Close up. Panning. . . . Close up—at a telephone
receiver” (BP 123). H.D.’s motions as she touches her face or reaches for the tele-
phone are posed in a manner that combines Delsartean and melodramatic ges-
tures with the acting style of the turn-of-the-century poetic and symbolist theater,
both of which offered alternatives to the realist, mimetic mode.97 Film’s ability to
focus on the face or isolate a gesture enables a subtler performance style than the
melodramatic pose, held for visibility from the stage. But H.D.’s performance
avoids the naturalism of the realist theater, which she associated with sound film
in that both destroy cinema’s potential as “the art of dream portrayal” (BP 121).
Cinematic gestures should not be mimetic of “real” behavior but signify as a
“cryptic symbolism” in which the actor’s bodily form is united to transcendent
meaning for the audience to interpret (Close Up 126). In keeping with the aes-
thetics of the symbolist theater and its incorporation of music and the dancing
body, Borderline, with the pianist’s music as accompaniment, is almost danced.
H.D.’s character, Astrid, is particularly associated with melodramatic conven-
tions, behaviors, and costumes to indicate her entrapment in a misogynistic and
racist social context. She is subject to the hysterical fits and rages that plague
the melodramatic heroine, and her costume and properties further link her to the
past. The symbolist and melodramatic styles merge in Astrid’s floral shawl; like the
Fig 5.5 H.D. with shawl and hands clasped to her face, Borderline (1930). Courtesy of the
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
shawl in Foothills, it recalls attitude performances and establishes the manipula-

tion of cloth as a central element of H.D.’s acting style (figure 5.5). H.D.’s descrip-
tions of her own performance focus on the shawl; she connects it to Renaissance
Hellenism in her claim, “It is odd to associate Botticelli with the cinema but the
association is inevitable in some of the interior scenes for instance of Astrid and
her shawl” (BP 116). Yet, she also defines the shawl as a combination of “concise
modernist abstraction” and “Victorian abstraction of stuffed dead sea-gull,”
referencing Astrid’s stuffed bird, a property emphasized in interior scenes. The
shawl is one of a number of symbolic objects associated with Astrid who:
runs across a room to fall, draped in the most obvious of imported London
or Paris embroidered shawls, is a woman of the drama, of the screen, yet
like the Hedda of Ibsen or any of the Hildas or Hedwigs, she achieves
through the actual fitness of her materialized setting, furniture, blowing
window curtain, stuffed gull and overcrowded mantle-piece, something
more obviously out of the world. . . .
(BP 125)
H.D. suggests that Astrid’s shawl and stuffed gull work like the guns of Hedda
Gabler and Ibsen’s other symbolic props; clearly, H.D. appreciates the symbolic
settings in Ibsen’s realism as material objects become symbols of “something”

beyond (BP 125).98 This transcendent something is inextricable from the “terribly
incarnated” quality of the woman, her confinement in the material conditions of
her life.
The shawl that gives Astrid the illusion of having wings is as incapable of
offering actual flight as the stuffed seagull on her table. In spite of this confine-
ment, Astrid conveys a powerful strength, and her taut pose, contrasted to the
ineffectual, fluttering shawl, transforms her body into a hieroglyph among
other symbolic objects that speak for the silent film. H.D. suggests that all of the
characters are “posed figures . . . seething with mental turmoil and psychic dis-
cord” (BP 124). Pete is a “bronze portrait” with a head “sculptured, gouged out
in planes and focus of light and shadow”; Astrid is “gouged out with white
lightning fury . . . from white marble” (BP 116). Borderline stages an uneasy
combination of posed performance techniques borrowed from melodramas
and attitudes and symbolist performance styles that would offer new status to
everyday objects. H.D. plays the nineteenth-century poser, with associated prej-
udices and neuroses, and an isolation underscored by her solo scenes. When the
solo frame is broken by another actor, as it finally is by Thorne, the duet marks
her death.
VI. Montage, a Classical Technology
Screen montage or mounting is a difficult thing to talk of . . . . An effect almost that of super-
imposition but subtly differing from it, is achieved by the meticulous cutting of three and four
and five inch lengths of film and pasting these tiny strips together.
—H.D. The Borderline Pamphlet, 119 (1930)
H.D. describes the process of montage construction for Edith’s death scene with
the detail of someone who has cut and pasted strips of film, underscoring the fact
that she and Bryher did most of the editing and montage of Borderline after
Macpherson developed “a bad throat” (“Approaching” 380).99 Editing a film of
nearly 1,000 different shots would have been demanding work, and the innovative
montage in Borderline required some technical expertise (“Approaching” 380). Yet,
Gallagher claims that H.D. exhibits a “profound apprehension about the mechanical
aspects of cinema,” and many critics assume a generalized antimodern suspicion
of technology (“Distractions” 419).100 Although H.D. insisted that sound or the
“talkies” would destroy the ritual, she celebrated cinematic technologies for repre-
senting motion as being rooted in classical ideals and believed the “Elusinians”
would have exalted in “a subtle device for portraying the miraculous. . . . The screen
is the medium par excellence of movements. . . . Flowers open by magic and magic
spreads cloud forms, all in themselves ‘classic’ ” (Close Up 112). H.D. delighted in
her own ability to use the “subtle device” of the projector and took a more active
role in the making of the films than has generally been assumed. She particularly
celebrated montage as a technique that, by juxtaposing visual images, performed
associations and guided audiences into an ideal analogical or typological thought
paradigm. Just as restraint prevented satiety, H.D. believed that montage was a
classical technology that encouraged participatory reception.
H.D.’s montage theories have been associated not with Kulshov, but with his
student Eisenstein, in part because Close Up translated Eisenstein’s writings. H.D.
cites “Eisenstein’s meticulous innovation” in the film October (1928) as inspiration
for Borderline, although she uses the earlier term “Russian montage” rather than
Eisenstein’s “overtonal” or “intellectual” montage (BP 119). The first Eisenstein
piece about montage appeared in the March 1930 issue, and Kenneth Macpherson
writes that when they began work on Borderline, Eisenstein had not published his
“now commonly accepted, though little understood, theory of over-tonal mon-
tage” (Close Up 236). Macpherson claims to have developed similar but independent
strategies to take Borderline “into the minds of the people” (Close Up 238). Both
Macpherson and H.D. shared Eisenstein’s goal, as described in an essay translated
in the May 1929 issue, of invoking “a transformation of generally accepted notions
into the consciousness of the audience . . . the new cinema must include deep reflec-
tive processes” (Close Up 333). Neither are likely to have distinguished the theories
of Kuleshov and Eisenstein at this point, for Eisenstein did not publish a break
from his teacher until the 1929 essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the
Ideogram,” which was not translated in Close Up. For H.D., the “reflective processes”
encouraged by montage included the mythological and typological associations
she models in her film criticism as she associates Kuleshov’s Edith with Athena and
Joan of Arc. Montage develops this analogical mode of “consciousness” as it asks
audiences to make connections between images from discontinuous narrative seg-
ments and as it cuts and isolates Edith’s gesture like a “hieroglyph” against a “sky
line” (Close Up 126). H.D.’s ideas of montage as a device for framing and cutting
bodily gestures were worked out in her analysis of Kuleshov’s Delsarte-derived
bodily and rhythmic montage featured in By the Law. She then applied these ideas
to her own performance of Astrid’s death and discussion of the scene.
Montage creates the “effect” of Astrid’s final scene, but her death also explores
the meaning of cutting bodies in a metacinematic reflection on montage that
recalls its origins in Kuleshov’s experiments with the divided, Delsartean body:
The same sort of jagged lightening [sic] effect is given with Astrid and her
dagger. The white woman is here, there, everywhere, the dagger is above,
beneath, is all but in her heart or in the heart of her meretricious lover. This
effect of immediacy is not achieved by a facile movement of a camera; that
would be impossible. It is attained by the cutting and fitting of tiny strips of
film. . . .
(BP 119).
The dagger that slices the woman’s body parallels the cutting of the film strip, and
the montage of the scene explores the power relations that determine who holds the
knife that severs bodies, flowers, and film. The montage of Astrid’s death begins with
shots of her shawl and the stuffed seagull, symbols of her entrapment. Astrid takes
up a knife near the gull and slashes at Thorne through a vase of flowers. During
approximately ninety-four fleeting cuts, the montage leaps from a piece of the body,
to the knife, to symbolic objects in the room, to scenes of flirtation between the bar-
maid and Pete in the hotel bar downstairs.101 Thorne wrestles the knife from Astrid
and stabs her as they fall to the floor. The montage closes with images of the barmaid
cutting a white rose with a knife, placing it between her lips as she dances, and then
tucking it behind Pete’s ear. The next cut reveals Thorne washing the bloody knife.
The juxtaposition of these shots connects each successive image through a
visual metaphor.102 The flowers and knives appearing in both the battle and bar
scenes imply that they are concurrent and causally related. Rather than indicating
relations in space, as would a pan shot, montage asks spectators to consider the
meaning of the juncture: how might white desire for the black other and the emas-
culation of Pete with the rose contribute to Astrid’s death? Thorne (whose emblem-
atic name is clarified by the white rose) is linked to the barmaid by their power
over the knife and their attraction to Adah and Pete. But Astrid’s racism is also
associated with the erotically expressed exoticism of the barmaid, and Astrid’s
death parallels Pete’s banishment. Thorne is acquitted, and the barmaid finds her
place beside the manageress in another erotic pairing. In his article on Borderline,
Macpherson suggests that such connections operate in the “transferential” film
with its “hundreds of layers, inferences and associations” (Close Up 238).103 These
montage-fostered links expose the complex scaffolding of cultural hierarchies.
H.D.’s descriptions of montage in Borderline and By the Law suggest generic
relationships between film and solo genres in that they share performance tech-
niques and perceptual paradigms. Film makes a series of still pictures move, and if
the speed of the film reel were slowed down enough, the montage cuts and the
pose in each frame would be visible. In fact, attitudes, statue poses, and tableaux
imagine halting movement, as a strip of film is stopped, before the technology

became possible. These forms of posing join a list of protocinematic genres that
includes magic lantern shows, panoramas, and kinetographs, although Emma
Lyon Hamilton tends not to appear alongside Eadweard Muybridge or Thomas
Edison.104 The close-up, in its focus on a single body, but especially the close-up
still shot as it reveals the immobile body or body part, is another cinematic relative
of the attitude. The technical term for magnification through a lens, close-up also
designates the position of a viewer in relation to an object or an analysis of minute
particulars. Friedberg claims that H.D. viewed Close Up as “a splendid title” for the
journal, as it implies “the conflation of technical specificity with philosophical
endeavour” (Close Up 96, 3). This conflation is also evident in H.D.’s theories of
montage and its effect on the consciousness of film audiences. The close-up was of
interest to diverse early film theorists including Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, and
Walter Benjamin. Epstein called the close-up “the soul of the cinema,” and
Benjamin suggests that the technology “reveals entirely new structural formations
of the subject,” especially as it represents the human face in a perspective never
possible before (Close Up 1). The emphasis on soul, subject, and face suggests that
the close-up is the cinematic version of prosopopoeia, giving face to a character,
and therefore a generic descendant of monodramas and dramatic monologues.
Borderline features an obsessive use of the close-up on H.D. as Astrid and Paul
Robeson as Pete, demonstrating a visual interrogation of subjectivity organized
along sexual and racial lines. The bodies of Astrid and Pete constantly threaten to
stiffen into a “stuffed sea-gull” and a red clay sculpture of an “earth god,” respec-
tively (BP 111). Close-up representations of the black man–earth god and white
woman–stuffed seagull are the primary sites of the problem of the “borderline”
subject. The close-up often becomes uncomfortably close, and the camera dissects
Pete into the large hand of a black laborer and Astrid into a trembling hand on a
white shawl. The “everlasting black-white Problem with a capital” that H.D. men-
tions and the problems of gender and sexuality that she does not overtly discuss
are represented by the reluctance to picture a whole body on the film or two bodies
simultaneously. Instead, a sequence of close-ups on parts of the bodies, arranged
in montage sequences, demonstrate the fragmentation of the subject defined by
identity categories. Montage cuts the raced-gendered body, just as borderline
bodies are, through stabbing or transportation, cut out of the community.
The emphasis on individualism, evident in much of H.D.’s poetry, is also
prominent in her discussions of film technology. In her 1929 response to a ques-
tionnaire published in Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, H.D. celebrates film
as a technology of individualism:
I myself have learned to use the small projector and spend literally hours
alone in my apartment making the mountains and village streets and my
own acquaintances reel past me in the light. . . . I should like more than
anything to have some sort of workable little car . . . and go off and on, on
my own more or less. . . . I should like to work the Debrie camera which I
can’t. I can do a little work on the small camera and some of it will be incor-
porated in the big film that we are busy on.105
H.D. expresses pride in her ability to use a projector and in her filmmaking skills,
and she indicates that she had even more strenuous aspirations to work the larger
camera. H.D. wants a car so that she can travel independently, and she emphasizes
her solitary experience of making and watching personal films as she spends
“hours alone.” The automobile, becoming affordable for personal use after
Ransome Eli Olds’s 1901 invention of the assembly line, and the camera are both
technologies that foster experiences of individualism. If the car transported the
free-moving individual of the twentieth century, the film camera became a visual
apparatus of individualism; for H.D., the camera was an “elaborate one-man
mechanism” (BP 114). Graeme Turner’s classic work, Film as Social Practice,
describes the camera as a function of the theory that the individual eye is the
“organizing principle of reality” as it encourages viewers to collapse the distinction
between the projector and their visual perspective.106 H.D. describes viewing films
in the privacy of her apartment, but cinema attendance is also an isolated experi-
ence, according to Turner, born at a time when social life was marked by isolation
(Film 132). Although we enter a theater with other audience members and there
may be some discussion before or after, the darkened house simulates anonymity.
H.D.’s belief that the film apparatus and cinematic experience are oriented
toward an ethic of individualism might seem to contradict her emphasis on the
universal appeal of film and its ritual potential. Yet, a tension between individu-
alism and community is central to early film theory, modernist ritualism, and
modernist experience more generally. Film technology offers the capacity for mass
production and can therefore reach a large community, but Walter Benjamin
famously insists that this capacity destroys the “authenticity,” “aura,” and crucially,
the “ritual” or “cult value” of the art. Benjamin directs his objections at the enthu-
siasm of early film theorists such as Abel Gance and directors like Carl Dreyer.107
H.D.’s own critique of Dreyer’s too realistic Joan of Arc (1928) resembles the claim
that cinema destroys the aura of the human, but H.D. suggests that a new ritual
value may be created by the cult of the human body “resurrected” on film. This is
possible if the directors and performers eschew the naturalistic tendencies of film,
including sound, which for H.D. most effectively degrades aura. Using symbolist
and expressionist modes, as in Borderline, the performing body becomes not an
exemplary individual, but a collection of roles related to transhistorical mythic
types.
H.D. initially had high hopes for a cinematic ritual that would heal humanity
following the First World War. Without a language barrier, silent film would
project transcultural myths and dissuade active viewer-participants from nation-
alistic violence. H.D. did not share Marinetti’s ninth thesis in the “Founding
Manifesto of Futurism” (1909): “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene.”108
Instead, she hoped the camera would replace the gun; the director would replace
the soldier with a “divine creative instinct” that “enslaves” the machine. In a Futurist
mode, she described her ideal director as a “machine man” and a “young gunner
alone with his machine gun,” and the interpenetration but primacy of the human
in relation to the cinematic machine was her version of the motor in the soul
(“Borderline” 113–114). Marinetti’s manifestos also share with H.D.’s film theory an
emphasis on “intuition,” “rhythm,” and “instinct”; in “The Futurist Cinema,” he
admires the “rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs” (Marinetti 91, 134). For H.D., the
camera would enable the director’s war against the censor, patriotic sniper, and
popular filmmaker’s “present-day gutter-offshoot of the stage,” leaving in the wake
not a “no-man’s land” but a cinematic “everyman’s land of such plausible perfec-
tion” (“Borderline” 113).
Aesthetic “perfection” through the cinema was H.D.’s interwar dream. She
offers another version of the “motor in the soul” in her “Projector” poems in
Close Up (July–October 1927):
Your souls upon the screen

live lives that might have been,
live lives that ever are;
(evoe
to the car
of god-king Dionysus)
(CP 358)
Spoken by the sun god Apollo, also the god of projected light, the poem instructs
“neophytes” of film that their own souls are projected on the screen. The ritual cry,
evoe, celebrates “the car of god-king Dionysus,” presenting yet another combination
of classicism and “roaring” automobiles with mixed references to ancient Greece,
the soul, and modern technology. Cars transport the audience-participants, and
the projector, a new temple of Apollo shaped like the sacred tripod of Delphi,
engages their souls. As the camera failed to replace the machine gun and the
buildup to World War II became undeniable, H.D. did not retain her enthusiasm
for film, but she incorporated its perceptual frames into her later poetry.
VII. The Soloists of Trilogy
He uses the direct image . . . in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of
colour, of sound.
—H.D., “Review of John Gould Fletcher’s Goblins and Pagodas” (1916), 183.
Revisiting H.D.’s review of Fletcher’s book in light of her film work suggests that
even in 1916, she imagined a poetry that could offer sensory experiences resem-
bling film’s projected light. Her immersion in film was short-lived but productive,
and her poetry continued to feature the perceptual frameworks or ways of seeing
taught in the cinema. Her theories of cinematic reception clarify the engaged
reading experience she hoped to invoke in her later long poems, especially Trilogy.
H.D. suggested that, as sound and spectacle became more prominent with the
dominance of the Hollywood industry, film audiences failed to participate in her
cinematic ritual by envisioning, with the help of montage juxtapositions, associa-
tions between their moment and Christian and classical myth. She transposed a
version of this typological and mythical method into Trilogy, written in London
during World War II. Trilogy replays many of the mythic figures she analyzed in
her film essays and reviews, but presents them in ambiguous relation to modern
speakers. This strategy encourages readers to actively engage the text by tracing its
allusions to classical, Egyptian, and Christian myth. H.D.’s version of the mythical
method was, unlike T. S. Eliot’s ordering device, a hermeneutic practice that
encouraged ritualized reader reception.
Trilogy’s three poems, “The Walls Do Not Fall” (1944), “Tribute to the Angels”
(1945), and “The Flowering of the Rod” (1946), constitute a prologue, middle, and
end in deus ex machina that resembles the dramatic structure of Ion.109 Each poem
depicts dream-visions through montagelike juxtapositions of ritual traditions and
modern events, including alchemy and the London blitz. “The Walls” invokes the
sacred caduceus of Hermes, Ion’s “introducer,” and provides a cinematic still shot
of a religious ritual featuring a resurrection god named Ra, Osiris, Amon, and then
identified with Christ (Trilogy 25). The imagery of “Tribute” becomes increasingly
inflected through cinematic techniques, as a dream vision of “the Lady” is super-
imposed on an alchemical ritual, and she serves as a new symbol of resurrection
associated with an apple tree blossoming in a London courtyard that was bombed
during the war. Finally, “The Flowering” presents four dramatic scenes: an
encounter between the magus Kaspar and Mary Magdalene, the anointing of
Christ’s feet by Mary, Kaspar’s ecstatic vision of typologically associated goddesses,
and the Christian Nativity. Mary Magdalene, Kaspar, and the Virgin Mary are
repositioned in a series of myths about the birth, death, and resurrection of a god.
Many of these figures speak monologues that alternate ambiguously with the voice
of a central dreamer or ritual participant, thereby eroding distinctions between
characters and types.
H.D. anticipates the frustration of her readers when they first encounter
Trilogy’s obscure allusions, writing that although the “search for historical paral-
lels . . . has been done to death before,” each mind has a “personal approach / to the
eternal realities” and must retrace the patterns (Trilogy 51–52). Placing readers on
the well-traveled path as “voyagers, discoverers,” Trilogy calls attention to the act of
reading as part of the journey (Trilogy 59). To understand the text, readers must do
the intellectual work of connecting the many types in the poem, just as H.D.’s ideal
film viewer is engaged in a thought paradigm relating cinematic types and mon-
tage images. With far-ranging references to myth comparable with T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land (1922) but without his explanatory notes, Trilogy demands that readers
labor to decipher the allusions; H.D. refuses the authority of the footnote and
enables an individualized interpretation as she asks readers to set her work aside
and consult their own reference sources.110 “The Walls” is initially focused on the
value of the solitary act of reading in establishing personal relationships with
the divine. The poem then opens to include a suspicious auditor who questions the
worth of personal religious experience in a dialogue structure that reinforces a
tension between the individual and social groupings evident throughout the poem:
“I speak of myself individually / but I was surrounded by companions” and “name-
less initiates” (Trilogy 20–25).
“The Walls” is “an endeavour to make ready,” that is, a prologue and guide for
how to abandon “sterile logic, trivial reason” in preparation for a more engaged
reading (Trilogy 54, 40). The speaker models an analogic paradigm that links res-
urrection gods with contemporary residents of London who have emerged from
the bombed ruins into the promise of a “lily-bud” (Trilogy 7). The ritual or “mys-
tery” of “The Walls” takes place in a “bare meeting-house” that resembles the
Moravian services H.D. attended as a child in Pennsylvania. With invocations of
Ra, Osiris, and Amon and references to flowers and blossoming trees, the service is
transformed into an Egyptian resurrection myth and spring ritual.111 H.D. clarifies
parallels in a chantlike pattern of word association that she calls “prayer, spell, /
litany, incantation” and that operates through the phonological similarity of

names: “here am I, Amen-ra / Amen, Aries, the Ram” (Trilogy 30). In addition to
detailing these relations more than she will in later sections, the speaker also
teaches readers how to “see” figures through perceptual frameworks that resemble
those offered by a moving film camera. A series of cinematic manipulations of the
visual image of the gods reveals their resonance in the contemporary world.
Following a close-up on the eyes as “all pupil, dark / yet very clear with amber /
shining . . . ,” the ellipsis suggests a pullback of the gaze, as if organized by a camera,
to reveal a stop animation. The pupils then become, following another ellipsis,
“ . . . coals for the world’s burning” and the “eyes / of Velasquez’ crucified [Christ]”
(Trilogy 25–28). The vision “explains symbols of the past / in today’s imagery,” so
the eyes are both ancient and more modern gods, coals that fuel the
military-industrial complex, “the heart burnt out / dead ember” left by the war’s
bombs, and the bud of spring (Trilogy 4). This bud grows into Moses’ “rod of
power,” Hermes’s “Caduceus,” Thoth’s “stylus,” and Jesus’ cross, all typologically
related to the sword of war in an imagistic montage. Just as the old walls are intact,
these symbols of patriarchal power and violence remain but are defamiliarized by
their surprising similarities.
The incantatory name association first chanted in “The Walls” is also part of an
alchemical process described in “Tribute,” with the poem serving as both a recipe
for and the enactment of the ritual. First, the participant must invoke Hermes
Trismegistus, “patron of alchemists,” and “give thanks” to Uriel and other Judeo-
Christian angels. Then, “polish the crucible / and in the bowl distill / a word most
bitter, marah” (Trilogy 63–71). The goal of alchemy was to transform metals into
silver and gold, but this transformation is performed through the act of speaking:
“marah, mar, mer, mere, mère, mater, Maia, Mary . . . Mother” (Trilogy 71). The pro-
gression begins with the base word, marah, Hebrew for “bitter”; passes the Spanish
word for “sea,” mar; French terms for bodies of water and mother; the Greek goddess
Maia; the Christian Mary; and ends with Mother. As in alchemy, the ordinary
becomes something of value when the words are spoken by a “we” who “admit the
transubstantiation” (Trilogy 60). The mystery of Communion, in which bread
becomes body, is H.D.’s model for this word ritual. Using auditory and visual simi-
larity to form a linear progression, the poem asks readers to hear and see the rela-
tion and encourages an oral engagement and kinesthetic reading. Readers are
invited to look up the unfamiliar words and determine an associative logic: bitter-
ness, the sea of tears, is the realm of the goddess and any mother or figure of love.
The word alchemy is not guaranteed to produce gold, and all readers may not
participate in the chant or “admit the transubstantiation.” The speaker reveals that
a version of wordplay has desecrated another goddess, transforming “Venus” to

“venery” and “venereous,” but she counters with her desired alchemical formula:
“Venus”—“venerate”—“venerator” (Trilogy 74–75). She is interrupted by the
entrance of a “patron,” not a “companion” or fellow participant, but another sus-
picious auditor who demands a name for the jewel in her alchemical crucible. The
speaker’s refusal to “name it” rejects the power of the patron or suggests that the
word ritual has not worked (Trilogy 77). But a second figure, “the Lady,” has been
called forth by the rite, and the dream-vision describes her as she has appeared
from antiquity through modernity (goddess, virgin, or mother of gods) using cin-
ematic visual properties. The luminosity of the Lady becomes brighter and brighter
until her image dissolves into the green glow of a bedside clock. The sound of the
Lady knocking is actually the ticking of the clock, and her appearance is explained
as the cinematic projection of light from the clock’s “phosphorescent face” onto
the blank screen of the dreamer’s mind. This explanation does not dim the signif-
icance of the vision; the Lady was “there more than ever” after the dreamer wakes.
By appearing in the clock’s light, she established the exact hour of her presence and
“miraculously / related herself to time here” (Trilogy 90–91). She had graced an
hour that would return to the clock face each night as a reassurance that “Every
hour, every moment / has its specific attendant Spirit” (Trilogy 88). The clock,
merely a “curious mechanical perfection,” relates daily life to “that other” spiritual
or eternal life in the model of a typological anagoge (Trilogy 88–89).
The speaker begins to describe the Lady using a word association much like the
alchemy she interrupted: “Our Lady of the Goldfinch . . . Our Lady of the Pomegranate
…” (Trilogy 93). These names give way to a montage of visual depictions: “or her face
set in profile / with blue hood and stars” (Trilogy 93). The portraits are replaced with
small, restrained gestures, just as H.D.’s acting theory prescribed, and the Lady strikes
a series of poses that, due to their mythic significance, were also in the repertoires of
statue posers from Lyon Hamilton to Delsarteans.
We see her hand in her lap,

smoothing the apple-green
or the apple-russet silk;
... ... ... ....
we see her hand unknot a Syrian veil
or lay down a Venetian shawl
(Trilogy 95)
The veil recalls the white shawl that accentuates H.D.’s poses in Foothills, Astrid’s
embroidered shawl in Borderline, and the folds of fabric represented in classical
and Christian iconography. The Lady’s changing poses demonstrate that no single
representation can contain her, just as the single body shifting to pose as various
mythological or religious figures in attitudes suggests both the contiguity of these
figures and the potential for different representations. Trilogy’s speaker disagrees
with the interpretations of another suspicious “you” who attempts to construe the
vision based on traditional depictions of the Virgin in relation to male
companions:
I grant you her face was innocent

and immaculate and her veils
like the Lamb’s Bride,
but the Lamb was not with her,
either as Bridegroom or Child;
(Trilogy 104)
The Lady of “Tribute” is adamantly solo.

The final and most cinematic poem, “The Flowering of the Rod,” opens with a
brief prologue enumerating images of Dionysian ecstasy: “I am full of new wine”
(Trilogy 124). “The Flowering” then provides a new Gospel relating how Mary
Magdalene obtained an “alabaster jar” of incense for anointing the feet of Jesus.112
In H.D.’s version, the Magdalene is one of a number of “unbalanced, neurotic”
women who serve as witnesses to resurrection. Mary boldly introduces herself to
Kaspar, one of the three magi, and even more brazenly allows her veil to slip as she
ignores his rebuke and refuses to leave. Kaspar considers it “hardly decent of her to
stand there, / unveiled, in the house of a stranger” (Trilogy 134). Yet, he replays
Mary’s gestures with the cloth again and again in the model of a cinematic flash-
back: “never / for a moment did he quite forget / the turn of a wrist as it fastened
a scarf ” (Trilogy 163). Mary’s gestures with the veil function like the curtain falling
between four dramatic tableaux.
The first scene presents Mary, “unveiled,” speaking directly to Kaspar for the
entirety of part 16 in a dramatic monologue, complete with aggressively silent
auditor. She introduces herself in typological relation to the several New Testament
Marys: “O, there are Marys a-plenty / (though I am Mara, bitter) I shall be Mary-
myrrh” (Trilogy 135). She invokes versions of the Greek and Sumerian goddess
associated with Myrrha, mother of Adonis (related to Attis and Tammuz).113 Ovid’s
Metamorphosis (book X) relates the story of Myrrha’s love for her father, Cinyras,
and how with the help of a servant, Myrrha deceives him into believing she is a shy
woman of the town. Cinyras discovers the trick and tries to kill her, but the gods
take pity and transform her into a myrrh tree, always weeping fragrant tears.
Adonis is later born of the tree. Invoking this tale, H.D. draws Greek figures into
her Gospel and connects the valuable myrrh to classical myth and the theme of a
daughter’s passion for a father.
Following Mary’s monologue, Kaspar repeats his judgment that “it was
unseemly that a woman / appear disordered” or that she “appear at all” (Trilogy 137).
When her scarf falls to the ground, however, he sees an image projected on the
blank screen of her hair, like “moon-light on a lost river” (Trilogy 136). This vision
flashes forward to another scene, a mime or dance in which Mary lets down “the
long, carefully-braided tresses” to anoint and wipe the feet of Christ (Trilogy 141).
Kaspar, knowing the “scene was unavoidable,” takes up another alchemical chant,
an accompaniment to Mary’s performance: “Isis, Astarte, Cyprus . . . De-meter,
earth-mother …” (Trilogy 145). After this glimpse into the immediate future, the
poem flashes back to the original encounter between Mary and Kaspar, and then
forward into a third tableau, a trinity of goddesses: “one head uncrowned and then
one with a plain head-band / and then one with a circlet of gems of an inimitable
colour” (Trilogy 150). As he bends to retrieve Mary’s scarf, Kaspar sees a “fleck of
light” in the “third jewel” of the circlet. She also reaches for the scarf, “his hand just
did-not touch her hand,” and in this combined gesture the “fleck” or “seed” opened
like a blossoming flower to reveal “the whole scope and plan” of civilization
(Trilogy 152–154). The slipping of the veil, an impropriety, provides Kaspar’s reve-
lation of redemption and Mary’s role in a sacred “plan.” Their gestures with the
veil, described in close-up, set the camera panning over “the islands of the Blest,”
“Hesperides,” “Atlantis,” the great cities, and “paradise before Eve” (Trilogy 153–155).
With the vision, he hears a chanted soundtrack:
Lilith born before Eve

and one born before Lilith,
and Eve; we three are forgiven,
we are three of the seven
daemons cast out of her.
(Trilogy 157)
The first women, Lilith and Eve, and a more ancient goddess are three types for
Mary, and each is redeemed, as is the speaker who joins the “we” of the chant to
merge with the other types.
The cinematic flashbacks and cuts, telescoping into what H.D. calls a “point in
time,” are explained by another chant: “this has happened before somewhere else /or
this will happen again—where? when?” (Trilogy 167). The fourth and final dramatic
scene, a Christmas tableau, is a repeated rite and both “a coronation and a funeral”
(Trilogy 130). The three magi, mirroring the three goddesses and daemons, each
step from the picture to perform their gestures. Balthasar bows low offering spike-
nard, Melchior gives rings of gold, and Kaspar only inclines his head slightly to
show “his part in this ritual / was almost negligible” (Trilogy 171). In H.D.’s revision
of the familiar scene, Mary holds not a child but a bundle of myrrh, which she
describes as a “most beautiful fragrance, as of all flowering things together” (Trilogy
172). Mary is both the Magdalene who gets the myrrh from Kaspar to wash Christ’s
feet and the Virgin who already carries myrrh at the birth. She is also the weeping
Myrrha, mother of Adonis, a resurrection God prefiguring Christ. Beloved of God
the Father, she, too, may be a “stricken woman, / having borne a son in unhallowed
fashion” (Trilogy 135). The usual chronology of the nativity is insignificant in a
typological repetition that reveals a divine “scope and plan” (Trilogy 154). A God
has been incarnated and resurrected before and will be again.
H.D.’s film work, the sensory experiences offered by cinematic technology, and
solo performance more generally help to clarify Trilogy as a poetic ritual that seeks
to invoke an active reading experience. The “points of time” punctuating H.D.’s
retelling of the Gospel function like cinematic jump cuts, as if time were a segment
on a reel to be spliced. The ritual performances use montage effects and close-ups
on minute details, such as light on a strand of hair or the fold of a veil. A curtain
of hair or veil is also a property emphasized in the protocinematic attitudes and
statue poses recorded in this study, and the “actors” of Trilogy gesture with the
“restraint” H.D. demanded on film. The postures and small gestures invoking
familiar iconography and statue poses also provoke a heightened kinesthetic sen-
sibility or awareness of bodily position and placement within the text. Readers
may become aware of their own bodily experiences while reading and “hear” the
chants that transform words and relate mythical figures. As readers investigate ref-
erences and trace the typological relations that structure Trilogy, they are guided
into other modes of participation. To both her poetry and film writing, H.D.
brought the same interests in ritual enactment and mythic figures juxtaposed in a
typological montage.
The closing Christmas tableau of Trilogy provides a curtain call for many of
the figures introduced or repositioned in this story of modernism. The tableau or
presepe, as Goethe named the Neapolitan tradition of Christmas cribs, recalls the
long genealogy of posed performances reaching back to Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes
and Goethe’s finale for Proserpina. Trilogy provides another version of T. S. Eliot’s
Magus, and Charlotte Mew’s Magdalene/Madeleine is recast with a similar reading
of her sensuality and physicality. H.D.’s combination of Christian types, the Virgin
and Magdalene, with the mythological figure Myrrha also unites allegorical figures
for the soul and body. A similar desire to reunite a body and soul, thought to have
been separated by modernity, is evident in Delsartism; the movement promoted a
variety of popular poses and poetic recitations and influenced performance styles
in film and dance. Isadora Duncan, reflecting on a popular image for Delsartean
tableaux, describes “the ‘Primavera’ of Botticelli in Florence, which I tried after-
wards to transform into a dance. Oh, sweet, half seen pagan life, where Aphrodite
gleamed through the form of the gracious but more tender Mother of Christ”
(ML 85). Duncan’s choreography used Delsartean poses to connect Mary and
Aphrodite in a spring dance. H.D.’s Trilogy similarly suggests new gender relations
for the Marys and Kaspar, replaces the god with “a bundle of myrrh,” and reframes
the Christmas story as a spring rite celebrating “all flowering things together”
(Trilogy 172).
Afterword
Modernism’s Mythic Pose traces an antimodern genealogy from nineteenth-century
attitudes, monodramas, and dramatic monologues into the Delsartean tradition
and its presence in modern dance, silent film, and poetic recitation. The trajectory
links Isadora Duncan’s solo dance manifestos and the interdisciplinary art of H.D.
but also canonical modernists like Ezra Pound and the lesser known poet Charlotte
Mew, Delsartean statue-poser Genevieve Stebbins, and filmmaker Lev Kuleshov,
whose actor-training method was shaped by Stebbins’s books on Delsarte.1
Connecting them is a mythic pose: a bodily attitude imitating an ancient statue, a
poetic pose that repositions a character from myth, or an interpretive paradigm
posing myth in analogical relation to current life. Mythic posing was part of a
search for a reunified body and soul that modernity seemed to have severed. Many
modernists believed that if they performed their solo search well, they could invoke
kinesthetic responses or aural imaginations and inspire audiences. They often
failed, judging by the critical neglect of Delsartism and other antimodern move-
ments within modernist studies. Yet, the postmodern theater director, Jerzy
Grotowski, names Delsarte’s method of “plastic motion” as among his “most
important” influences – as he critiques the idea that “ ‘experimental’ work is …
toying with some ‘new’ technique.”2 Avoiding the rhetoric of novelty and often
nostalgic, the mythic pose was also a break in the march of progress that called
attention to what myth might teach history. One lesson is that many so-called new
features of modernism, including a crisis in relation to modernity, are quite old.
Antimodern skepticism is shared by the historical avant-garde but is also evident
in the postmodern desire to break with modernity.3 Postmodernism interprets
much art and culture as a pose without substance or an imitation without original,
239
as reflected in the language of “spectacle,” “gaming,” and “simulation.”4 This

ironical posing was anticipated in modernist works but takes a more central posi-
tion in postmodern performance and poetics.5
In addition to serving as a metaphor for the spectacularity and commodifica-
tion of culture, postmodern posing is a performance form that calls attention to
those processes. Cindy Sherman turns the camera on herself to repeatedly photo-
graph her own body; in Untitled Film Stills from 1977 to 1980, she adopts poses
referencing common cinematic types, particularly stock characters from the film
melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s.6 Choosing costumes, makeup, and wigs asso-
ciated with the type, she positions her body, and in an adamant solo performance,
indicates that she took the picture herself. In photographs such as Untitled Film
Still #6 (1978), the shutter cord and her hand on the button are visible, although
they could have easily been hidden among the strewn bedsheets (figure 6.1).
Sherman wears a blond wig, she holds a mirror in one hand, and her shirt is open
to expose black and white underclothes, the prevailing colors of film melodramas.
Her position invokes eroticism, but with one hand in control on the shutter cord
and the other arm folded under her chin like a broken wing, she grounds that
erotic pose in the merely conventional. Her almost blank face is turned away from
the camera, suggesting that the sexualized pose is devoid of expressive content.
Sherman is transformed in Untitled Film Still # 10 (1978) by a dark wig and
heavy makeup (figure 6.2). With the shutter line again visible along the bottom of
the photograph, she kneels near a bag of groceries that has ripped apart and fallen.
She reaches for the eggs, probably broken, but looks back over her left shoulder,
pouting at a present-absent character outside the frame. The static pose is the only
enactment of Sherman’s character available, but she appears to be paused in a task
that will momentarily resume. A dramatic situation is invoked, along with a desire
for the nexus of narrative and image offered in film drama, but the frame of the
photograph subverts both. Viewers want to know the situation, want the camera
to pan over to the person just outside the shot who receives her pout. Sherman’s
still photography defamiliarizes the images of femininity seen repeatedly in
popular film, making them available for analysis. Her solo poses, like those of
other figures in this study, explore past constructions of gender, acknowledging
and troubling their power. And like other posers, Sherman cannot fully control
how audiences will gaze upon her exposed body or if they will understand her
self-conscious embodiment of a type as a denaturalization of gender.
Contemporary performance artist Pia Lindman poses as types of grief in New
York Times, a solo piece combining photography, video, statue posing, and site-
specific community art that was performed in New York, Mexico City, Tokyo,
AFTERWORD 241
Fig 6.1
Cindy Sherman, Untitled
Film Still #6 (1977),
black-and-white
photograph, 10 x 8 inches.
Courtesy of the Artist and
Metro Pictures.
Helsinki, Vienna, and Berlin between 2003 and 2006. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
describes Lindman’s process of collecting photographs from the New York Times
published between September 2002 and September 2003 and depicting interna-
tional grief, usually caused by terrorism.7 Lindman videotapes herself reenacting
the photographs as tableaux and then traces her bodily pose from the video stills
(“Grief ” 77). A performance “tour” at Battery Park on September 9, 2005, begins
with the presentation of these sketches, but not the original photographs, to the
audience.8 Lindman abstracts the pose from its political situation, erasing the
comforting distance that a foreign context can offer and suggesting that any media
representation of grief is similarly abstracted and distanced. Dressed in a pale gray
shirt and trousers and leading her audience like a tour guide with gray flag held
high, she sets a music stand near a monument such as the East Coast War Memorial
Fig 6.2 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #10 (1978), black-and-white photograph,
10 x 8 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures.
or the National Museum of the American Indian. She places the sketch on the
stand and then slowly and laboriously assumes the pose. She does not conceal her
effort to imitate the pose precisely, reveals pain in her legs as she kneels near the
Korean War Memorial, occasionally uses her hands to manipulate her face and
produce a particular expression, and sometimes abandons her pose for another
look at the picture. Exposing the apparatus of her performance, Lindman encour-
ages audiences to consider the protracted but often invisible mechanisms that
publish images of grief: the guides who bring the photographer to sites of tragedy,
the institutions of publication and circulation, and the processes that memorialize
certain events with statues and monuments. Lindman writes, “In my opinion
monuments are deposits of collective memory and unprocessed trauma. My aim
is to set this emotional potential of monuments in process by my temporal and
particular gestures, animating what the monument cannot” (“Battery Park”).
The juxtaposition of Lindman’s body with statues recalls Emma Lyon
Hamilton’s attitudes with veils, particularly when Lindman poses with a long gray
cloth, using it to stifle a scream, spreading it before her on the ground like a dead
body, or paralleling the shape of a boat hull at the Merchant Mariners Memorial.
AFTERWORD 243
Unlike Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, Lindman’s poses often emphasize the difference
between her body, the drawing, and the sculpture, as well as the vast differences
between her white skin and, for example, the Native Americans in a stone
monument. Ravetto-Biagioli claims, “By demonstrating how similar gestures of
grief are used to differentiate victims from victimizers, us from them, or men from
women, she shows how such gestures do not mark actual difference but only
ground and legitimize pre-existing relations of power by repeating them” (“Grief ”
79–81). The similarity and familiarity of the gestures also serve as reminders that
the media and other cultural institutions teach us many of our attitudes of grief,
no less than Delsartean manuals taught emotional attitudes to dancers and silent
film stars a century earlier.9 In one particularly striking confrontation between
likeness and difference, Lindman poses near the Ladies of Liberty, other statue
posers adopting the bodily techniques used in attitudes of Nike, the Victory of
Samothrace, and Marseillaise (upon which the Statue of Liberty was partially
based). If the technique is similar to Lindman’s, the Ladies adopt very different
affects as they wrap tourists in American flags and raise their torches for photos.
The solo form in postmodern stage performance has become so popular that
anthologies of solo texts have been published, although the texts cannot encom-
pass the hybrid modes that make this form one of the most obvious inheritors of
monodramatic expressive impulses.10 In Surviving Virginia (1997), Robbie
McCauley uses speech, dance, and song, all the components of expression J. J.
Rousseau deployed in his development of the monodrama, to explore the history
of racism in her family’s migratory existence. Postmodern performance artists
commonly use autobiographical material to negotiate the intersections of memory,
history, and politics, but the resulting performance is never simply autobiography.
McCauley performs every character in her family, adopting different embodi-
ments and moving between temporally marked stage locations to shift identities
(Extreme 250). The solo form requires this adaptability but also underscores the
fluidity of all identities; in the “Prologue” she dances and chants:
we all do dance
between contradictions
of individual and
ancestor identities.
(Extreme 250)
One of the most successful contemporary soloists, Anna Deavere Smith, has devel-
oped an innovative process that involves conducting interviews with numerous
individuals and then creating a script that interweaves their voices in monologues.
Smith employed this method in Fires in the Mirror (1992), an exploration of the
1991 Crown Heights Riots, which were ignited when a Brooklyn rabbi’s car hit and
killed a black child and a Hasidic student was murdered in retaliation. Twilight: Los
Angeles, 1992 (1994) examined racial violence in the aftermath of the acquittal of
the white police officers who beat Rodney King. Susan Stanford Friedman sees
Smith’s work as crucial for a feminism that reaches “beyond difference” as she
indicates “the very power of fixed identity politics at the same time that her
performance transcends that fixity by encompassing multiple others” (Mappings
81).11 Yet Smith has also been criticized for reducing her subjects to caricatures, a
collection of bodily habits and vocal affectations that parody cultural codes of
expression. Friedman argues that Smith makes “visible the way in which the iden-
tities of difference to which people often cling are performances” (Mappings 80).
Although her virtuosity as a performer would allow her to launch into mimicry of
her subjects, she does not simply imitate them. Like Lindman, she gradually
assumes her pose, puts on an article of clothing, slowly begins to take on vocal
qualities and mannerisms, and always plays others with a self-consciousness of her
own position. Smith’s most recent piece, Let Me Down Easy (2008–2009), con-
siders the differences that seem to reside in the human body and the search for
grace, a word she adopts for its bodily and spiritual connotations.12 Her mono-
logues introduce the voices of those who have sought bodily perfection, dissected
and analyzed the body, experienced extreme physical suffering, or provided insight
into the eventual death of the body. The voices of models, dancers, athletes, doc-
tors, patients, priests, philosophers, and survivors of genocide highlight the diverse
functions and manipulations of the contemporary body, as well as its universal
status as the vulnerable organ through which we experience the world. The piece
is particularly self-conscious that performance is a bodily art.
In poetry, the dramatic monologue has continued to be an important genre, as
Robert Duncan’s response to H.D. revealed. Mythical methods and typological
hermeneutics were incorporated into postmodern poetics particularly by the
Black Mountain poets, a group including Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and
Charles Olson. Olson’s Projective, Open, or Field Verse built on typology in a
well-known (if rarely understood) formula, “tope/type/trope.” Invoking the
Christian trinity and punning on type-print, he writes, “The basic trio wld seem to
be: topos/typos/tropos, 3 in 1. The ‘blow’ hits here, and me, ‘bent’ as born and of sd
one’s own decision for better or worse (allowing clearly, by Jesus Christ, that you
do love or go down).”13 Topos refers to the location or “here” that the event, poem,
or “blow” hits. Typos is “me,” the subject that is brought into being (“born”) and
shaped (“bent”) by the blows of topos. Olson argues, in keeping with the
AFTERWORD 245
tropological level of the fourfold method, that “built in is the connection, in each
of us, to Cosmos” (“Projective” 29). Tropos, from the Greek “to turn,” is the poem’s
pattern of images and sounds, which also replicate the patterns of myth and the
“cosmic” stories of love and death.14 Olson’s long sequence The Maximus Poems,
published in three volumes between 1953 and 1975, develops the formula in its per-
sona, Maximus, who is simultaneously a fourth-century mystic, a fictional modern
Gloucester man, and the poet or “the man who writes.” That is, Maximus is a type,
and as in other versions of typification, he is related to other figures and a sense of
the eternal (the anagogical level) that Olson calls “Cosmos.” Olson redefines
Pound’s “image” as the moving “vector” that “carries the trinity” of tope, type, and
trope, and the usual histories of American poetry follow Olson’s self-identified
lineage from Pound and William Carlos Williams into postmodern poetry.
As Robert Duncan makes clear in his “H.D. Book,” she also serves as a prece-
dent for Olson’s typological and kinesthetic poetics. In the 1940s and 1950s, the
Black Mountain poets were developing what Duncan referred to as a “physiological,”
“muscular,” and “locomotor” poetry and what Olson calls “the kinetics” of verse.15
They began with the central tenets of Imagism but, like Amy Lowell, were pri-
marily concerned with the syllable, breath, laboring mouths, and other compo-
nents of the bodily production of speech.16 Critics suggest that their theories,
especially Olson’s “Projective Verse” (1950), represented a new “experiment” and
the first postmodern poetics, but a foundation for kinesthetic, projective poetics
exists in Vernon Lee’s turn-of-the-century psychological aesthetics and the
dramatic monologues of H.D., Mew, Lowell, and others.17 Olson redefined an ear-
lier tradition of kinesthetic poetics for postmodernism, but he, like S. S. Curry,
imagined all poetry as a written record of speech and any reading as a performance
event in a space and time that is “immediate, contemporary to the acting-on-you
of the poem” (“Projective” 21). The syllables of the line do this work by creating
sound patterns but also by mimetically contributing to the sense as they alter the
time, effort, or breath it would take to speak the line. Olson claims that breath
carries the “speech-force” and the typewriter carries the breath into the poem by
creating a “script to its vocalization” (“Projective” 20–22).18 Comparing the type-
writer to the musical staff, he suggests that it allows the poet to “indicate how he
would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work” (“Projective” 22).
Olson inserts the machine of the typewriter into the modernist dream that poetry
could make readers hear voices or could become notes for a recitation.
The possibility of conveying a speaker’s movement, as well as vocalization, in
the poem is the central concern of another series of notes Olson linked under the
title “Proprioception” (1959–1962).19 Olson’s definition of proprioception as the
“SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN

TISSUES” resembles the understanding of the kinesthetic sense modality advanced
by Rudolph Laban and other modern dancers (“Proprioception” 17). Olson uses
the term kinesthesia to name the goal of poetry: “Today: movement at any cost.
Kinesthesia: beat (nik) the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles, tendons,
joints, and are stimulated by bodily tensions (or relaxations of the same). Violence:
knives/anything, to get the body in” (“Proprioception” 17). Olson defines kines-
thesia as a sense with a physiological basis in bodily tension and relaxation; this
sense may be stimulated by descriptions of bodily experiences, even threats of vio-
lence against the body. For Olson, proprioception helps the body experience
“depth,” but even “the soul is proprioceptive”: “The ‘soul’ then is equally ‘physical.’
Is the self. Is such, ‘corpus’ ” (“Proprioception” 17–18). Olson does not define depth,
but it is a term used by Isadora Duncan to describe the relation between movement
and “emotion,” “impulse,” or “soul,” an accord that can produce “those gestures
that exteriorize his fullness of feeling.”20 If Olson was the first postmodern poet, he
shared concepts of the “soul,” “self,” “body,” and kinesthetic established by modern
dance.21 He even shared Isadora Duncan and H.D.’s interest in ritual; in
“Proprioception,” he cites Jane Ellen Harrison as the source: “how to find out now
about then: MISS JANE HARRISON, Prolegomena, Themis, and her first book,
which is Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens—and is, by god, nothing but
Pausanias on Pausanias!” (“Proprioception” 8).
Contemporary poets continue to imagine a kinesthetic poetics through
speaking types and mythic tropes. Diane Wakoski’s poetry builds on Olson and
the other Black Mountain poets, but like many other women artists, she has been
dismissed as too confessional. Wakoski finds the label problematic even for Sylvia
Plath and Ann Sexton and claims that the idea of confession ignores that every
presentation of self in a poem is the performance of a “personal mythology.”22
Shaped by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung, especially the latter’s
description of the anima and animus as complementary masculine and feminine
elements of a “whole” human, she defines poetry as a deep engagement with “the
archetypes and patterns that shape us”: “In creating a personal mythology, poets
can give themselves to their bigger stories, imbuing them with greater intimacy or
poignance, using the small details of our everyday experiences.”23 Using the myth
of “Medea’s Chariot,” she creates a mythic persona who explores the guilt of giving
children up for adoption through a sorceress escaping in a dragon-drawn chariot
from the scene where she killed her children, who is also any contemporary woman
speeding in a “brown Audi.”24 Wakoski’s excavation of the myth of Medea as it
interacts with contemporary stories and her own “personal mythology” is part of
AFTERWORD 247
her series The Archaeology of Movies and Books.25 In a poetry of alchemical word-
play similar to that of H.D., Wakoski’s mythmaker chants, “Diane, Dianne, Dian,
Dyan, Dyanne, Diane.”26 Her Medea appears to reflect on modernist typologies
and mythical methods when she claims, “… The rules / are about the patterns, the
stories, / completing the cycle or rhythms” (Jason 195)
Lilith, a version of the sorceress from Hebrew myth, rebels against “the rules”
in Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s sequence of dramatic monologues, The Lilith Poems
(1993).27 Lilith was the first woman, created before Eve and of the same earth as
Adam. In Ostriker’s version, Lilith explains to Eve, “No hard feelings, but I don’t
like men / Who try to lay down the law” (Lilith 94). She “jumped the fence” of her
own accord and does not envy Eve’s “tidy house / And garden” (Lilith 92). Ostriker’s
Lilith sequence is dedicated to Enid Dame, whose own Lilith and Her Demons
(1986) presents another, very modern speaker, who now works in New Jersey and
lives with a cabdriver. Lilith left her first husband, Adam, in part because he “car-
ried a god / around in his pocket” that always contradicted her.28 Occasionally, she
misses the safety of that man with his phallic pocket god and patriarchal Eden, but
she could not live with him. As in so many monologues spoken by religious or
mythological personae, these Liliths interrogate the experiences of contemporary
women. Dame’s Lilith gets an abortion and Ostriker’s wears high heels and knows
how analyze scripture with deconstruction.29
Postmodern dance has also emphasized the use of all expressive modes from
movement to speech to technological reproduction of the moving body. Yvonne
Rainer, first recognized for her participation in the Judson Church Movement, has
followed a fascination with the moving body that brought her to the moving image
on film. In “Feelings are Facts,” she describes her realization that the narcissistic
relation between the spectator and the dancer undermined the cultural interven-
tion she sought.30 By incorporating film into pieces like “In the College” (ca. 1972),
she presented forty dancers who were also spectators modeling the kinesthetic
response of the audience. Taking text from G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), star-
ring the Denishawn-trained dancer Louise Brooks, she projected a film of the sub-
titles that the dancers interpreted with tableaux vivants that mimicked the
production stills of the film. By emphasizing the ridiculous and the melodramatic
conventions of the film with her tableaux, she hoped to present plot, character,
and text as images for analysis and encourage the spectator’s ability to engage these
elements critically. After experimenting with tableaux and projected texts, Rainer
turned to filming dance. Her recent project, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,”
with Mikhail Baryshnikov, presents the “shards of her dance career” in a thirty-
minute cinematic choreography. Her title invokes the famous ballet Swan Lake
and the 1939 Aldous Huxley novel, but other intertexts include statements from
postmodern artists Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauchenberg and
numerous quotes from Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
(1980). Her choreography, mediated by the cinematic apparatus, depicts a repeated
falling motion and the tendency of the body to succumb to gravity. With the
quotes moving across the screen like curtains, she connects the fall of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire with the aging of her own body and the decay of the “U.S.
Empire.”
Popular Hollywood film has also engaged U.S. politics by reviving and revising
classical myth, although usually with very different political commitments from
those of Rainer. Given the seeming tension between classicism, often linked to
antimodern thought, and the computer-generated spectacles of Hollywood, it is
not surprising that the feature articles in a recent issue of Film & History explore
the controversy of films set in classical antiquity; according to Rob Prince, “just
mentioning the term ‘classics’” invokes “the best, and worst, of cultural pedagogy”
and “privileges Eurocentric patriarchy.”31 Several of the articles discuss 300, the
2007 remake about the Battle of Thermopylae, when, according to the myth and
movies, three hundred Spartan warriors led by a Sandow the strongmanesque
Leonidas (Gerard Butler) attempted to defend the pass against the invading Persian
Empire.32 Reviewers quipped, “It’s nice to see kids tuning in to the classics,” while
criticizing the film’s obvious racism and mixed homoerotic homophobia as very
white and worked-out Spartans make fun of Athenian “boy-lovers” before con-
tending against the dark hordes of a brown, pierced, decadent, statue-posing
Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), whose mouth is penetrated by Leonidas’s arrow before
he dies.33 The film has the quality of serial posing, an effect that is partially due to
the fact that it was based on yet another tableau-reliant genre, the graphic novel
(Frank Miller’s 300).34 According to Michael Williams, 300 is an uneasy hybrid of
“graphic novel coloring, live action and CGI” (computer-generated imagery) that
also uses the old technique of statue posing with “obsessive” reference to the
“Leonidas Monument” erected in 1955.35 Williams suggests that 300 adapted what
he calls the “contrapposto pose” from MGM’s 1925 Ben-Hur (Fred Niblo), a film
that was reviewed by H.D. Williams does not connect the posed style to the
Delsartean practice of statue posing, but contemporaneous viewers would have, as
is evident in H.D.’s typological description of the “beauty and restraint of a
Leonidas [which] belongs to each one of us individually” (Close Up 136).
In discussions of the antimodern poses of 300, Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004),
and Alexander (2004), Charles-Antoine Courcoux claims that the “resurgence of
the historical epic appears emblematic of a renewed interest by current Hollywood
AFTERWORD 249
production in the contradictory relationship between masculinity and technolog-

ical modernity.”36 These films point to a practice of posing classical antiquity
against contemporary experiences of gender, technology, and politics, which has
been common in literature, performance, and cinema since its silent days. The
1962 film The 300 Spartans subtitled choreography as “Arabic dance” rather than
Persian, while it actually consisted of stereotyped motions from modern dancers
like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis; the film was widely interpreted as a rally-
ing cry for the Cold War to stop “tyranny” at the Hot Gates.37 The new 300, with
lines such as “Freedom isn’t free,” invoked controversy over current military oper-
ations in the Middle East and provoked Iran to call the film an act of war. Myth
poses a threat in the form of Leonidas.
Isadora Duncan’s attitude as Nike and H.D.’s pose under Victory’s wing seem
far removed from Hollywood’s Leonidas. Yet, they share an antimodern critique
and bodily techniques that recall the mythic posing Delsartism popularized in
drawing rooms, theaters, and cinemas. Throughout this study, I have sought con-
nections across genres and periods, often emphasizing not what is new (CGI) but
what is old, the persistence of bodily techniques and expressive genres (Leonidas’s
statue pose). Suppressed continuities also erode the critical tendency to oppose the
gendered categories of antimodern-classicism and modernist-materialism. Many
avowed antimodern artists, like Duncan, shared rhetoric and aesthetic values with
self-proclaimed Futurists like Marinetti. If she placed a soul in Marinetti’s “roaring
car,” his manifestos contain their own references to souls, and H.D.’s bacchantes
anticipate Wakoski’s Medea in an Audi as they cheer for the “car / of god-king
Dionysus” (CP 358).
Notes
Introduction
1. “Miss Duncan’s Vivid Dances,” unattributed review in the New York Times, November
17, 1909. Duncan’s concert at the Metropolitan Opera House was accompanied by the New
York Symphony Orchestra with Walter Damrosch conducting.
2. F. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” [1917] in Marinetti: Selected Writings,
ed. R. W. Flint and trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1972), 137. Henceforth cited in the text as Marinetti.
3. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” [1909] in Marinetti:
Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint and trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 41. The Winged Victory or Nike of Samothrace, attributed
to Pythokritos, marble, ca. 200–190 B.C.E., Louvre, Paris.
4. The photomontage, assembled by the POOL film group, appears in the H.D. Scrapbook
at the Hilda Doolittle Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
H.D. saw Nike of Samothrace in Paris’s Louvre in 1911, and in Writing on the Wall (1946), she
describes a dream vision in which a “man” was “reaching out to draw the image of a woman
(my Nike) into the sun behind him . . . .” See Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions,
1974), 56. Nike also features in H.D.’s novel Asphodel (ca. 1921–1922) (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1992), and she began but destroyed a manuscript entitled Niké in 1924, as
described in Susan Stanford Friedman’s Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and “Dating H.D.’s Writing” in Signets:
Reading H.D., eds. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 46–51. Eileen Gregory demonstrates that very early in
her career, “H.D. puts the goddess Nike near the center of her Greek pantheon” in H.D. and
Hellenism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 174. Henceforth cited in the text as
Hellenism.
5. Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) details Marinetti’s public performances at London’s
Bechstein Hall in 1912 and then in 1914 at the Coliseum Music Hall (27–38).
250
NOTES TO PAGES 5–7 251
6. Duncan returned to tour the United States in 1908, the year Ezra Pound moved to
London, having already gained international celebrity for her new dance in Europe. The
influence of the dramatic monologue extends far beyond the Victorian period; in just one
example, the poet Robert Duncan claims that the “mode of Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and
H.D.” is derived from Robert Browning’s “dramatic poem.” See “Two Chapters from the
H.D. Book,” TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968), 85–86. Glennis Byron’s The Dramatic Monologue
(London: Routledge, 2003) argues that the flourishing of the form in modernism demands
a reevaluation but does not undertake an extensive study of modernist monologues.
7. The pioneering works on Delsartism are Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter’s Reformers and
Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1979) and
The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1999). A special issue of Mime Journal 23 (2004–2005), Essays on François
Delsarte, edited by Ruyter, expands the discussion into actor training and film but does not
focus on international modernism. Histories of dance detail the emergence of “solo art
dance” in the first decade of the twentieth century; see Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm
McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003), 1. Maggie B. Gale treats solo performance from the perspective of acting theory
and the profession of the actress in “Going Solo: An Historical Perspective on the Actress
and the Monologue,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, ed. Maggie B. Gale and
John Stokes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Susan A. Glenn describes how
women performers in the popular theater “contributed to changing ideas about female
identity” as they “reworked older stereotypes” in Female Spectacle, The Theatrical Roots of
Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8. None considers the
wider field of embodied social practices, dances, literary techniques, and films that com-
prise my study of modernism.
8. The sonnet is published in Andrew J. Krivak’s edition of The Letters of William Carlos
Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902–1912 (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2009), 151–152.
9. William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John
T. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1985), 331.
10. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New
Directions, 1970), 59.
11. Quoted in Terri A. Mester’s Movement and Modernism (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1997), 147.
12. Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics
(London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912). Henceforth cited in the text as Beauty.
13. Miriam Hansen offers a helpful discussion of the “classical” and its supposed opposi-
tion to the “modernist-materialist” (65–66) trajectory in “The Mass Production of the
Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999),
59–77.
14. Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of
European High Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 3–6.
15. I will continue to use antimodern (not antimodernism) to describe a suspicion of
modernization that was distinct from opposition to aesthetic modernism; antimodern
impulses were common among modernist artists.
252 NOT ES TO PAG ES 7 –8
16. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of

American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xi–xv. Henceforth
cited in the text as Antimodernism. In focusing on “antimodernism” among “the educated
strata of Northern bourgeoisie,” Lears does not mention Delsartism, although the move-
ment’s popularity directly corresponds to the dates of his study (xvi). Lears’s use of the term
“antimodernism” seems to blur distinctions between a resistance to modernization and a
hostility toward modernism. Perhaps because of confusion about the terminology, only a
few works have taken up Jackson Lears’s insights: Lynda Jessup defines antimodernism as
“often ambivalent and Janus-faced, smacking of accommodation as well as protest,” in
Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda
Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 3. Weldon Thornton’s The
Antimodernism of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1994) presents antimodernism primarily as a rejection of the Cartesian subject-ob-
ject dichotomy. See also Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural
Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1994), and Candida Rifkind, “Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the
Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques,” Journal of Canadian Studies 39, no. 1 (2005), 90–114.
17. Lears claims that antimodernism ambivalently associated this authenticity with
“feminine’ values,” a “mode of unity—a return to childlike dependence on a vitalist mother-
goddess” (Antimodernism 281). Although Lears consistently points to the tension between
exaltation and fear of femininity in men, he does not discuss its influence on women, first-
wave feminism, Delsartism, or the suffrage movement that was active between 1880 and
1920.
18. Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 505–506. Gilbert Seldes’s The Seven Lively Arts [1924]
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001) similarly dismissed “classic dancing”: “Fat women leaping with
chaplets in their hair, in garments of grey gauze, are not the poetry of motion, and Irene
Castle in a black evening dress dancing Irving Berlin’s music is—just as surely as Nijinsky
was. What is more, these two dancers, whom I choose at the extremes of the dance, both
have reference to our contemporary life . . . ” (318). My thanks to Sunny Stalter for the
reference.
19. Ann Daly, Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 136. In her thorough study, H.D. and Hellenism, Eileen Gregory simi-
larly feels the need to offer an “apology” for the “nostalgia” in H.D.’s classicism (Hellenism 6).
20. Edward P. Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18. Henceforth cited in the text as
Production.
21. A similar process of arranging categories and ignoring continuities occurs in Daniel
Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), a fascinating study of multimedia performance experi-
ments. Albright defines modernism as “the testing of the limits of aesthetic construction” and
establishes the limits as expressionism vs. objectivity, hyperrealism vs. abstractionism, neo-
classicism vs. neobarbarism, and futurism vs. the mythic method (29). Albright’s emphasis
on modernism’s aesthetics of extremity leads him to claim that “after certain nineteenth-
century artists had established a remarkably safe, intimate center where the artist and
audience could dwell, the twentieth century reaches out to the freakish circumferences of
art” (Untwisting 30). Victorian art was not nearly so safe, and some of his “freakish” forms
have roots in earlier periods.
22. See Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s much-discussed introduction to the
New Modernist Studies in PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008), 737–748. They call for “expansion” of
the period, interdisciplinary studies of new forms and genres, and transnational reconsid-
erations. My work expands the field of modernism in these directions and others, as their
sizable bibliography does not include works on performance and dance, and even theater is
underrepresented.
23. Kurt Heinzelman, ed., Make It New: The Rise of Modernism (Austin, TX: Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, 2003), 132. See also Hong Sun, “Pound’s Quest
for Confucian Ideals: The Chinese History Cantos,” in Ezra Pound and China, ed.
Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 96–119, and Eric
Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2004).
24. As revisionary studies of modernism by feminist critics such as Bonnie Kime Scott,
Susan Stanford Friedman, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis have pointed out, women modernists
did not participate to the same extent in these doctrinal battles and were often openly
excluded. Diana Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999) describes how Pound discouraged H.D. from engaging in critical
activity and dismissed her editorial work for The Egoist (165–167).
25. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/
Modernity/Modernism,” in Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001), 493–513, 499.
26. Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallbert exaggerate the “new” in their introduc-
tion to the first issue of Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 1 (1994), 1–3. “Modernism was more
than a repertory of artistic styles . . . it initiated an ongoing transformation in the entire set
of relations governing the production, transmission, and reception of the arts. The mod-
ernists themselves seem to have understood this when they urged that changes in the arts be
viewed in conjunction with changes in philosophy, historiography, and social theory, to say
nothing of the scientific shifts that they claimed as part of their moment’s cultural revolu-
tion” (1). Artists from the Victorian and earlier periods also frequently understood the arts
in relation to religion, social theory, and scientific advances, as is evident in George Levine’s
Dying to Know (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
27. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. Classic studies of modernism as a response to techno-
logical modernity include Hugh Kenner’s The Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987) and Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999).
28. Michael North’s fascinating Machine-Age Comedy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009) situates cinematic acting styles in relation to mechanical reproduction, but
many performance techniques on film were shaped by traditions, such as Delsartism, that
anticipated cinematic technology.
29. Julia A. Walker describes Delsartism as a “failed idea” due largely to its “anti-
modernism” in Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6. Walker offers one of the few studies considering
254 NOT ES TO PAG ES 10– 13
Delsartism’s relation to modernism, but her assessment of the movement’s failure does not
reflect its influence in dance, film, and poetic recitation.
30. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” The Dial, 75, no. 5 (November 1923),
480–483.
31. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989), 60. Henceforth cited
in the text as Essentially. Fuss claims that discussions of gender use both essentialism and
(de)construction: essentialism generalizes oppressed classes as the basis for political move-
ments, and deconstruction highlights the cultural processes that produce classes and orga-
nize difference.
32. In Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that to postulate a distinct
“women’s modernism” fosters inaccurate divisions, and the diversity within modernism
demands “gender-oriented analyses of all producers” with discussions of race, sex, class, and
religion (4–7).
33. Helen Potter, “Beauty and Artistic Dress,” Werner’s Voice Magazine 13 (1891), 269–271,
270. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.
34. Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed. (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1902),
461.
35. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Theatre Journal 40,
no. 4 (December 1988), 519. Henceforth cited in the text as “Performative.”
36. Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Gender,” in Performance Studies, ed. Erin
Striff (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 169. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
(New York: Routledge, 1993), Butler claims to augment her idea of the “construction” of
gender with the concept of “materialization,” a process that appears to stabilize over time to
produce the effect of the boundaries and surfaces we understand as matter. Henceforth
cited in the text as Bodies.
37. Ed Cohen provides a summary of Butler’s use of Austin, Derrida, and Lacan in
“Posing the Question: Wilde, Wit, and the Ways of Man,” in Performance and Cultural
Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996), 39. J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things
with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) describes the “performative” as an
utterance in which the saying is part of the doing, a speech-act. Butler’s “Performative Acts”
cites John Searle’s Speech Acts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), which pro-
moted Austin’s ideas. Derrida takes up Austin but limits the agency of the subject through
the concept of “citationality” in “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 306–330.
38. bell hooks critiques the film in Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
(New York: Routledge, 1996), claiming that it transforms “black gay subculture,” espe-
cially Venus, into “spectacle” (224). See also Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston’s
Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Many of the per-
formers featured in the film sought claims against Livingston and Miramax for a share
of the profits, but charges were subsequently dropped. See Jesse Green’s “Paris Has
Burned,” New York Times (April 18, 1993) at The New York Times Archive Online: http://
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE0DF143DF93BA25757C0A965958260&s
ec=&spon=&pagewanted=1.
39. Duncan and H.D., along with Amy Lowell and Charlotte Mew (who predominantly
dressed in male clothing), challenged traditional gender roles in their lives as well as their
art with domestic arrangements that included male and female partners—lifestyles we now
call queer. Duncan does not mention her bisexuality in her autobiography, My Life [1927]
(New York: Liveright, 1995), and her references to Loie Fuller’s “troupe of beautiful but
demented ladies” seem homophobic (73). Critics often replicate her silence. See The Gay
and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy, ed. Billy J. Harbin, Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
40. Paula M. L. Moya, “Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe
Moraga and Chicana Feminism,” in Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Sandra
M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Norton, 1997), 791.
41. See Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, 1980). Also influential were ideas about historical categories of knowledge in
Foucault’s The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970).
42. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1987), 280–281.
43. Koenraad W. Swart, “‘Individualism’ in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the
History of Ideas, 23, no. 1 (January–March 1962), 77–90. Raymond Williams claims the term
individualism has roots in theological doctrine and “the unity of the Trinity” in Keywords: A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 162. In Aspects
of Sociology [1956] (Boston: Beacon, 1972), the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research argued
against the idea that “the sociohistorical unfolding of the individual had its origin in
Christianity” and cited biological, economic, and political categories (40–47). Such models
were problematic with respect to women, as the discrete biological individual was compli-
cated by understandings of the female body as a social resource for reproduction. Paid labor
was not widely available for some classes of women, and wives could not own property until
the second half of the nineteenth century.
44. Isobel Armstrong, “A Music of Thine Own,” in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical
Reader, ed. Angel Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 3.
45. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845], ed. Larry J. Reynolds (New
York: Norton, 1998). Fuller (1810–1850) was a member of the Transcendental Club, a close
friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the editor of Dial from 1840 to 1842. “Self-poise” revised
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” [1841]; both theorized a sacred selfhood, but Fuller
posited an individual that exists as a force for change rather than an exemplary persona.
46. Quoted in Stephen Prickett’s Reading the Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 186.
Henceforth cited in the text as Reading.
47. George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (Boston: Routledge, 1980).
48. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 31. Henceforth cited in the text as Political.
49. Bill Brown discussed Fredric Jameson’s use of typology and the Christian influence
on Marxist hermeneutics more generally in “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space,
Faith, Allegory),” PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005), 734–750. Northrop Frye’s influential Anatomy of
Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) is also rooted in typology.
50. Typology demonstrates the continuity of God’s redemptive plan in I Corinthians
10:6–11, Romans 5:14, Colossians 2:17, and Hebrews 10:1. See Erich Auerbach’s classic study,
“Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1959), and A. C. Charity’s Events and Their Afterlife (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966).
256 N OT ES TO PAG ES 15 –1 7
51. Dante uses Psalm 114:1–2: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a
people of strange language; Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.” The type is
Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt, and the antitype is Christ who offers a later “redemp-
tion.” The moral or tropological meaning is that any believer can experience “the conversion
of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace.” The anagogical significa-
tion, applying to the afterlife, indicates that the “sanctified soul” will be rewarded with
“eternal glory.” Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande della Scala” is reprinted in The Norton
Anthology: Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 251.
52. Landow claims that typology influenced “virtually every major Victorian poet” but
does not discuss the gendered applications of the hermeneutic in “Bruising the Serpent’s
Head: Typological Symbol in Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Newsletter 55 (Spring 1979), 11.
53. Psalm 122 praises Jerusalem: “Let us go to the house of the LORD!” Heaven is figured
as “my Father’s house” in John 14:2.
54. For how patristic writers treat classical myth in typological relation to religion, see
Erich Auerbach’s “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature,” Yale French Studies 9
(1952), 6.
55. Harrison was written out of the history of classical scholarship by classicists not
friendly to her feminist politics; Hugh Lloyd-Jones excluded her from his study of classical
transmission and criticized her knowledge of Greek, although he included Murray, who
popularized her ideas (Hellenism 56). Julie Stone Peters details Harrison’s influence on
(anti)theatrical modernism and positions her in the history of theater anthropology in
“Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archeological Voyages, Ritual Origins,
Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre,” Modern Drama 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 1–41.
Henceforth cited in the text as “Savage.” For the argument that Harrison influenced the
discipline of classics through her “personal convictions” rather than her learning or “the
soundness of her ideas,” see Shanyn Fiske’s “The Daimon Archives: Jane Harrison and the
Afterlife of Dead Languages,” Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 2 (2005), 130–164, 131.
Mary Beard describes the difficulty of determining reliable biographical information
about Harrison in The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000). Annabel Robinson’s recent biography, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen
Harrison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), paints a more coherent picture of
her life. Martha Carpentier’s Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane
Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach,
1998) traces the connection between Harrison’s interpretation of myth and the modernist
mythical method.
56. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 83. Henceforth cited in the text as
Tragedy.
57. Harrison first presented these ideas in 1903 in Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion (New York: Meridian, 1955) and developed them in Ancient Art and Ritual (New
York: Henry Holt, 1913). Henceforth cited in the text as Ritual.
58. Peters describes Harrison’s early “Greek” poses and performances and later antithe-
atricality but does not connect her work with the relevant Delsarte tradition (“Savage”
5–6).
59. Harrison’s lecture on the “Parthenon Marbles” at King’s College London was adver-
tised on the same page as Mrs. Fred Turner’s instruction in “Elocution” and the “Delsarte
System, Including Voice Training and Physical Exercises” in Journal of Education 16 (London:
William Rice, 1894), 537.
60. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York:
Performing Arts, 1982), 85. Schechner suggests that in performance: “The self can act in/as
another,” and this “transindividual” self suggests new subject formations. Richard
Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1985), 36.
61. Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008), 201–206, 201.
62. Michael B. Prince states that “all genres are . . . bad types, impositions of convention
on some fuller possibility,” in “Mauvais Genres,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 (2003), 453.
Henceforth cited in the text as “Mauvais.”
63. I was influenced by Carolyn Williams’s ideas of genres as discursive formations:
“The utility of the concept of genre for cultural study lies in its powerful fusion of historical
and formal assumptions. For period study, it is especially clear that the concept of genre
enables a focus on synchronic relations while also depending upon the diachronic relations
with antecedents of current practice.” See “Genre and ‘Discourse’ in Victorian Cultural
Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), 517–520.
64. Ina Beth Sessions, “The Dramatic Monologue,” in PMLA 62 (1947), 503–516.
65. Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), 77.
66. W. David Shaw, in Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1999), provocatively revises “sympathy” to a relation of “intimacy,” which
produces dramatic irony as readers know more than speakers intend to tell. Shaw claims the
Duke does not mean to reveal that he killed the Duchess, yet many readers have suggested
that the Duke discloses the murder as a warning to his next wife, delivered by proxy and
hidden in talk of art.
67. Herbert F. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric
Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hôsek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 241–242. Henceforth cited in the text as “Overhearing.”
68. Cynthia Scheinberg, “Recasting ‘Sympathy and Judgment’: Amy Levy, Women Poets,
and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue,” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 2 (1997), 176. In Victorian
Poetry (New York: Routledge, 1993), Isobel Armstrong argues that women “invented” the
dramatic monologue to address the challenge that the poetic voice, assumed to be male, was
never their own voice. See also Kate Flint’s “ ‘ . . . As a Rule, I Does Not Mean I’: Personal
Identity and the Victorian Woman Poet,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance
to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 157–160.
69. A. Dwight Culler, “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” in PMLA 90 (1975),
366–385. Henceforth cited in the text as “Monodrama.” “Dramatic monologue” was coined
in 1857, when George W. Thornbury used it to designate a group of poems in his Songs of the
Cavaliers and Roundheads . . . (“Monodrama” 366). It appeared in Athenaeum, March 20,
1869, and in a review of D. G. Rossetti’s Poems in Westminster Review, January 30, 1871.
Tennyson first used the term in his 1886 dedication to “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”
(“Monodrama” 366).
70. Tzvetan Todorov claims that a “new genre” is always a development of earlier ones
in “The Origin of Genres,” trans. Richard M. Berrong, New Literary History 8 (1976–1977),
159–170.
258 N OT ES TO PAG ES 20 – 2 1
71. For a discussion of this convention in both poetry and painting, see Barbara
Onslow’s “Deceiving Images, Revealing Images: The Portrait in Victorian Women’s
Writing,” Victorian Poetry 33, no. 3–34 (1996), 450–475.
72. Culler briefly discusses the use of prosopopoeia in literary education (“Monodrama”
368–367).
73. Aemilia Lanyer’s “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women” (1611) is an early modern
prosopopoeia in verse that predicts the dramatic monologue, challenging its definitions as
a quintessentially Victorian, masculine, and secular form. Lanyer’s prosopopoeia resem-
bles in form and content both Charlotte Brontë’s dramatic monologue, “Pilate’s Wife’s
Dream” (written in the late 1830s, published in 1846), and the wife’s speech attempting to
persuade Pilate of Christ’s innocence in Augusta Webster’s Anno Domini 33 (1867). In the
modernist period, H.D.’s Pilate’s Wife (ca. 1934) might be considered a prosopopoeia in
novella form.
74. Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoriae, trans. John Selby Watson (London: Bohn, 1876),
III. vii. 49.
75. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of
Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 81, 76. As Jonathan Culler claims,
de Man is interested in “the idea of the lyric as utterance, an idea fostered by the New
Criticism, which in effect treated lyrics as dramatic monologues.” See Culler’s “Reading
Lyric,” Yale French Studies (1985), 99, for a discussion of de Man’s occasionally contradictory
use of the term prosopopoeia. Yopie Prins criticizes de Man’s “effacement of gender in his
theoretical account of lyric as a genre” in Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 20.
76. Prince establishes the importance of prosopopoeia in neoclassical genres, where it
“reconciles relative beauty, dictating the lowering of imitation to recognizable human
forms” (“Mauvais” 468). The trope of prosopopoeia helps to explain the popularity of por-
traiture at a time when it was ranked lower in the usual hierarchies of genre.
77. Rudolph Laban, Modern Educational Dance [1948] (Plymouth, England: Northcote
House, 1988), 111. Henceforth cited in the text as Dance.
78. Until recently, dance and other performance forms have been underrepresented
even in revisionary studies of modernism. Bonnie Kime Scott’s important The Gender of
Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) included only Djuna Barnes’s
play To the Dogs and Gertrude Stein’s White Wines. Scott’s more recent anthology, Gender in
Modernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), redresses the lack of drama and
includes a wider field of performance practices; she even reprints selections of Isadora
Duncan’s aesthetic statements, indicating that the influence of modern dance is beginning
to be recognized. Penny Farfan’s Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004) argues that not only has modernist studies marginalized
theater but also “narratives of modern theatre history . . . do not address the efforts of women
artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal
avant garde” (2). She includes a chapter on Isadora Duncan, with interdisciplinary studies
of Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. Penny Farfan and
Katharine Kelly’s special issue, “Staging Modernism” in South Central Review 25, no. 1
(Spring 2008), includes Farfan’s essay on Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet “L’Après-midi d’une Faune”
and Shane Vogel’s analysis of the popular song-and-dance number “Stormy Weather.”
NOTES TO PAGES 2 1–23 259
79. Just as dance has not been treated as often as other arts in interdisciplinary literary
studies, dance scholars have a tendency to ignore both the discursive constructions of the
body that inform dance and the ways dancers such as Laban theorize language and use
words to enhance expressive possibilities.
80. Derrida uses the dance metaphor in “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans.
Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173–285, and with Christie
V. McDonald in “Choreographies,” Diacritics 12, no. 2 (1982), 66–76. See Julie Townsend’s
“Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18,
no. 1 (2005): 126–148, for a discussion of Derrida’s analysis of Stéphane Mallarmé and dance
in Dissemination. Amy Koritz discusses the sexual politics of the Symbolist interest in dance
in Gendering Bodies/Performing Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). See
also Kimerer L. LaMothe’s Nietzsche’s Dancers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) for a
discussion of dance’s presence in critical theory.
81. Vineta Colby describes Lee’s relationships with Pater, John Addington Symonds,
Henry and William James, and Edith Wharton in Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Henceforth cited in the text as Lee.
Colby claims Lee rejected psychological aesthetics after 1915 and “made no major contribu-
tion to psychology or to aesthetics” (167). Yet, Lee continued to use psychological aesthetics,
primarily in literary studies.
82. Pater asked, “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life
or in a book, to me?” See Studies in the History of the Renaissance [1873], in New Library
Edition of the Works of Walter Pater, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1910), viii.
83. See Stefano Evangelista’s “Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism,” in Vernon
Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 91–111.
84. Lee believed Anstruther-Thomson possessed an acute sense of “aesthetic empathy,”
and they produced a jointly authored essay, “Beauty and Ugliness” (1897), which was later
included in Lee’s book of the same title. A passage ridiculed by Colby (Lee 157) devotes four
pages to the perception of a chair: “While seeing this chair, there happen movements of the
two eyes, of the head, and of the thorax, and balancing movements in the back . . . ” (Beauty
163–167).
85. For Lee’s anticipation of reader-response and formalism, see David Seed’s intro-
duction to Lee’s The Handling of Words (Lampeter, England: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992),
i–xxx.
86. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1913), 36. Henceforth cited in the text as The Beautiful.
87. This evidence is summarized by Garrett Stewart in Reading Voices: Literature and the
Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 129.
88. Vernon Lee, The Poet’s Eye (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 11.
89. Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (London:
John Lane The Bodley Heat, 1923), 22–23. Henceforth cited in the text as Handling.
90. Joe Briggs, “Plural Anomalies: Gender and Sexuality in Bio-Critical Readings of
Vernon Lee,” in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia
Pulham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 160–173.
91. Woolf refers to Lee as an example of women who have begun to publish books in
traditionally “masculine” fields in A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1929), 79.
260 NOT ES TO PAG ES 2 3– 2 5
Lee’s nonessentialist gender perspective may have influenced Woolf ’s ideas of creative
androgyny. See Christa Zorn’s Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female
Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003) and Catherine A. Wiley’s review of Zorn’s
treatment of gender in Victorian Periodicals Review 38, no. 1 (2005), 117–118.
92. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed.
Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 27.
93. Catherine Anne Wiley quotes Lewis and positions Lee in relation to modernism in
“ ‘Warming Me Like a Cordial’: The Ethos of the Body in Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics,” in Vernon
Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 58–74.
94. Martin Puchner traces an “aesthetics of gesture” from Richard Wagner’s use of
gesture as the unifying force for music, acting, and poetry, in the Gesamtkunstwerk through
Nietzsche, Mallarmé, and Adorno. He claims that gestures suggest the possibility of unme-
diated expressivity in all representational forms, from opera to text. See “Polyphonous
Gestures: Wagnerian Modernism from Mallarmé to Stravinsky,” Criticism 41, no. 1 (Winter
1999), 25–39.
95. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1976), 68.
96. Pound famously and somewhat erroneously claimed, “The Chinese still use abbre-
viated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, the Chinese ideogram does not try to be the pic-
ture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still a picture of a thing. . . .”
See Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading [1934] (New York: New Directions, 1960), 21. After becoming
Ernest Fenollosa’s literary executor, Pound published Fenollosa’s “An Essay on the Chinese
Written Character,” in Instigations of Ezra Pound (New York: Libraries Press, 1920), 364.
Henceforth cited in the text as “Chinese.”
97. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Negro, [1934], ed. Nancy
Cunard and Hugh Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), 49.
98. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New
York: Schocken, 1978), 333–336.
99. Carrie Asman, “The Return of the Sign to the Body: Benjamin and Gesture in the
Age of Retheatricalization,” Discourse 16, no. 3 (1994). Asman discusses Benjamin, Brecht,
and Franz Kafka’s interest in gestures that “functioned as a means of physically reconnect-
ing word, image, and action; it is a means of bypassing written and spoken signs by linking
expression back to the site of its alienation—the body” (55).
100. Katherine Mullin details the fears of kinesthetic readings in James Joyce, Sexuality
and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): a “kinetic model of
reading was assumed by most social purity campaigners. . . . The theory that young people
were drawn to mimic what they read found constant reiteration” (34–35). See also my
“Joyce’s Reading Bodies and the Kinesthetics of the Modernist Novel,” Twentieth-Century
Literature 55, no. 2 (2009).
101. See Derek Attridge’s brilliant discussion of James Joyce’s onomatopoeia in Peculiar
Language (London: Routledge, 2004). He does not examine Lee or kinesthetic readings, but
he suggests that in spite of literary criticism’s general acceptance, onomatopoeia is actually
a projection of human experience into language, much like Vernon Lee’s example of “hills
rise” (136).
NOTES TO PAGES 26–2 8 261
Chapter 1
1. Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Origin of Languages,” in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7,
trans. John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 290. Henceforth
abbreviated in the text as CWR.
2. Peter Brooks claims that theorists from Rousseau to Derrida view gesture as
“something like the mythical primal language, a language of presence, purity, immediacy,”
in The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 66.
Henceforth cited in the text as Melodramatic.
3. The first book designated an autobiography by its author, The Autobiography of a
Dissenting Minister, was written by W. P. Scargill in 1834, just before the term individu-
alism emerged in 1839 and the 1842 publication of famous dramatic monologues by
Tennyson and Browning. See James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” in
Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton. NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1980), 5–6.
4. A. Dwight Culler, “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” in PMLA 90 (1975):
366–385. Henceforth cited in the text as “Monodrama.” Culler does not discuss women
writers but recognizes that the monodrama and dramatic monologue emerged from “sev-
eral related art forms that focused on a solitary figure, most frequently a woman, who
expressed through speech, music, costume, and gesture the shifting movements of her soul”
(375).
5. Alan Sinfield’s Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977) claims that in spite of
the “feint” by which the monologue presents itself as a speech, letter, or encounter rather
than poem, “we feel the pressure of the poet’s controlling mind” (30).
6. In Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998), Susan Stanford Friedman describes the critical investment
in difference and calls for moving “beyond” gender and difference to help resolve the white,
heterosexist, middle-class, and western biases of feminism (17).
7. In Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971),
Émile Benveniste famously described the social foundations of subjectivity in language:
“I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this
condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person” (224). Like other models of subjectivity
based solely in discourse, Benveniste’s does not encompass the bodily subjectivities, gestural
forms of communication, or layering of the mythic and personal I explored in solo genres
of first-person presentation.
8. In one example, nineteenth-century medicine claimed that women needed a reserve
of vital power to meet the cost of reproduction, a reserve supposedly threatened by activ-
ities in the public sphere. The theory was used to exclude women from higher education
and professional careers. See Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
9. Reprinted from Joseph Kurzböck’s 1906 edition of Pygmalion, Revue musicale de Lyon,
in Kirsten Gram Holmström’s Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants (Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967), 42. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as MATV. Holmström’s
study is a rare source of information on performances of monodramas and attitudes, but
I contest her conclusion that they were short-lived “trends” with little bearing on later
developments in the theater.
262 NOT ES TO PAG ES 2 8 –33
10. Isadora Duncan cited Rousseau as one of her “dance masters,” and her first
professional performance was in a pantomime entitled “Miss Pygmalion” (dir. Augustin
Daly, 1895) and partially inspired by the monodrama. See Peter Kurth, Isadora: A Sensational
Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 39–40. H.D.’s monologue “Pygmalion” (1917) also points
to the popularity of the myth in modernism.
11. This summary is based on an English translation published by J. Kearby, Pygmalion:
A Poem from the French of J. J. Rousseau (London, 1779). Henceforth cited in the text as
Pygmalion.
12. Jean Baptiste Dubos, Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la penture, trans. Thomas
Nugent (London, 1748), 19.
13. Susan Foster, “Pygmalion’s No-Body and the Body of Dance,” in Performance and
Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996). Henceforth cited in the
text as “No-Body.”
14. See Judith Chazin-Bennahum’s description of Pygmalion and Bacchus et Ariane (1734)
in The Lure of Perfection: Fashion and Ballet, 1780–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 44.
15. See Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1988) for a discussion of the historical exclusion of women from contract theory.
16. Gad Kaynar uses the term present-absent figures in his discussion of an “aesthetics of
absence” in contemporary monodramas. See Kaynar, “A Jew in the Dark: The Aesthetics of
Absence—Monodrama as Evocation and Formation of ‘Genetic’ Collective Memory,”
Theatre Research International 25, no. 1(2000): 53–63.
17. Published as “A Scene at a Private Madhouse” in Poems (1812); reprinted as The
Captive in Matthew G. Lewis, Seven Gothic Dramas, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1992), 225. Henceforth cited in the text as Captive.
18. Robert Southey learned of the monodrama from Frank Sayers’s Dramatic Sketches of
Northern Mythology (1792), and between 1793 and 1802 composed Sappho (1797), Lucretia
(1798), The Wife of Fergus (1798), Florinda (1804), and seven other texts subtitled
“A Monodrama.” Sayers had collaborated with William Taylor on a translation of Goethe’s
Proserpina and then wrote his own Pandora (1790), which Taylor reviewed as “not only the
finest poem of the kind in our language, but may be confronted with advantage against the
Pygmalion of Rousseau, or even the Proserpina of Goethe, which last had served in some
degree as a model” (“Monodrama” 376).
19. J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1962), 208. Henceforth
cited in the text as Journey.
20. Emma Lyon was probably born Amy Lyon in 1765 and died in poverty in 1815. The
best biography is Kate Williams’s England’s Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton
(New York: Ballantine, 2006). Henceforth cited in the text as Mistress.
21. The apocryphal Memoirs of Lady Hamilton was published just after her death.
Biographies with various degrees of accuracy include J. C. Jeaffreson’s Lady Hamilton and
Lord Nelson (1888), Walter Sichel’s Emma Lady Hamilton (1905), A. O. Sherrard’s A Life of
Emma Hamilton (1927), Hugh Tours’s The Life and Letters of Emma Hamilton (1963), Norah
Lofts’s Emma Hamilton (1978), and Flora Fraser’s Emma Lady Hamilton (New York: Knopf,
1987). Henceforth cited in the text as Emma. Film treatments include The Divine Lady
(1929), The Nelson Affair (1973), and most famously, Alexander Korda’s 1941 That Hamilton
Woman, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.
22. Volker Schachenmayr examines Lyon Hamilton’s influence on Goethe in “Emma

Lyon, the Attitude and Goethean Performance Theory,” New Theatre Quarterly 49 (1997):
3–17. Henceforth cited in the text as “Goethean.” David Constantine’s “Goethe and the
Hamiltons,” Oxford German Studies 26 (1997): 101–131 also offers valuable analyses but con-
centrates on William Hamilton. Henceforth cited in the text as “Hamiltons.” Marcia
Pointon’s chapter “Portraiture, Excess, and Mythology” in Strategies for Showing (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997) locates the attitudes in the context of the visual arts.
Henceforth abbreviated as Strategies.
23. Tischbein went with Goethe to see Lyon Hamilton perform and painted her portrait
the following morning (Journey 208). Tischbein later sketched a scene from Goethe’s “Orest
and Iphigenia” with her as Iphigenia and Goethe as Orest, and he gave the sketch to Frederike
Brun, whose daughter, Ida, also became a famous poser (“Hamiltons” 110).
24. Reports circulated of Miss Hodges’s performance in Rousseau’s Pygmalion in 1779 in
England, where Lyon Hamilton lived until March 1786. Lyon Hamilton’s use of a veil to con-
ceal bodily adjustments resembles the ornate curtain covering Galatea as an unfinished
sculpture. Sir Hamilton’s cousins wrote to him about a statue coming to life in a 1778
performance of Pygmalion, a production probably derived from Rousseau’s monodrama
(Emma 107). Culler, Holmström, and most other critics credit Sir Hamilton with origi-
nating the attitudes, but Kate Williams insists that all evidence indicates she independently
conceived of her performances (Mistress 144).
25. Constantine claims that Goethe’s confidence “in a philosophy of wellbeing and hap-
piness” was encouraged by Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes and his travels in Italy (“Hamiltons”
104–105).
26. Hamilton’s most famous pose as dancing Bacchante was depicted in paintings by
Thomas Lawrence (Emma 118), George Romney, and J. R. Smith (Strategies 206–207).
27. Pietro Antonio Novelli drew a series of Hamilton’s attitudes with a young girl, and
one of the images resembles de Boigne’s description of the Medea pose (Mistress 143).
28. Rather than linking Lyon Hamilton’s completion to audience recognition,
Schachenmayr argues that each attitude was complete only after she began to move again:
“Retroactively, Lyon accomplishes total embodiment, but no one was aware of this achieve-
ment until it had passed” (“Goethean” 12). This transience is an element of every performance
where the presentness of the body is apprehended only in its disappearance. See Heidi
Gilpin’s “Lifelessness in Movement, or How Do the Dead Move? Tracing Displacement and
Disappearance,” in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Foster
(New York: Routledge, 1996): “Performance, through its embodiment of absence, in its
enactment of disappearance, can only leave traces for us to search between, among, beyond”
(106).
29. The international popularity of this dance, encouraged by Lyon Hamilton, is evi-
dent in its inclusion in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), a foundational text in dramatic
modernism.
30. See Michael B. Prince’s discussion of Reynolds and the trope of prosopopoeia in
neoclassical portraiture in “Mauvais Genres,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 (2003): 471.
31. James Gillray, “Dido in Despair,” hand-colored etching and stipple engraving, pub-
lished by Hannah Humphrey, February 6, 1801. In the collection of the National Portrait
Gallery, London, NPG D13034.
264 NOT ES TO PAG ES 3 9 –4 3
32. J. W. Goethe, Proserpina, in Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, ed. Cyrus Hamlin
and Frank Ryder (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), ll. 51–57. Henceforth cited in the text as
Proserpina.
33. David Marshall discusses the tableau and private theatricals in relation to the
nineteenth-century novel but does not include the monodrama or Lyon Hamilton in The
Figure of the Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Ben Brewster and Lea
Jacobs briefly mention Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes and Delsarte’s theories in their interesting
Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997) but do not consider relationships between posing in theater, film,
and dance.
34. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body” [1935] in Techniques, Technology and
Civilization, ed. by Nathan Schlanger (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 80.
35. Holmström concludes, “Lady Hamilton had no direct successors” (MATV 140).
36. Fraser reports that the lover was “Marianne von Willemer, also of modest origins. To
placate her, he tempered his praise” (Emma 108).
37. Goethe also connects Hamilton’s attitudes, the Christmas presepe, and the tableau
curtain call of Proserpina in an article for the journal Morgenblatt (“Hamiltons” 129).
38. Many posers, including Ida Brun, contributed to the widespread interest in attitudes
initiated by Lyon Hamilton. Brun’s mother, Frederikke, saw Hamilton perform in 1796 and
later instructed her daughter in the art of the attitude. While Brun’s performances were
similar to Hamilton’s in their classical style and range of subjects, she brought the form
closer to dance by including background music and narratives (MATV 174). Gustav von
Seckendorff, Elise Bürger, and Sophie Schröder also performed attitudes throughout the
nineteenth century.
39. Jack McCullough’s Living Pictures on the New York Stage (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI,
1981) gives a useful account of posing in the popular theaters of the United States.
Henceforth cited in the text as Living Pictures. Lucinda Jarrett’s Stripping in Time (Glasgow,
Scotland: Pandora, 1997) discusses international posing. Henceforth cited in the text as
Stripping.
40. The rule did not prevent the occasional police raid, and entire companies of “model
artists” were arrested and marched publicly to jail; the spectacle of semiclad posers on the
move undoubtedly garnered its own enthusiastic audience.
41. The 2005 film Mrs. Henderson Presents, directed by Stephen Frears, recounts the
story of the Windmill Theater, owned by the rich widow Laura Henderson and directed by
impresario Vivian Van Damm. I am grateful to John Paul Riquelme for bringing the film to
my attention.
42. See Jane Moody’s Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000) for a detailed analysis of the history of the patent theaters and
licensing acts and their influence on hybrid theatrical forms. Henceforth cited in the text as
Illegitimate.
43. In “The Text of Muteness,” Brooks argues that the stock “mute character” in the
melodrama represents an extreme case of nonverbal meaning making that is also evident in
melodramatic gestuality more generally.
44. Rousseau’s essay on Pygmalion and monodramatic performance technique intro-
duced the term mélo-drame as a general designation for musical drama (CWR 497).
45. See Kathy Fletcher’s “Planché, Vestris, and the Transvestite Role: Sexuality and
Gender in Victorian Popular Theatre,” in Nineteenth Century Theatre 15, no. 1 (1987): 8–33.
See also Matthew S. Buckley’s careful trace of historical continuities from melodrama to
modern drama in Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern
Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
46. Martin Meisel, Realizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
Henceforth cited in the text as Realizations.
47. In some cases, illustrations are referenced to ensure the similitude of set or costume
design: The direction for 1.1 describes Mrs. Sheppard’s lodgings in the Old Mint: “See the
Illustration by Cruikshank.” Jack’s costume is also described with reference to the novel’s illus-
trations: “Brown coat, long drab waistcoat, black velveteen breeches, carpenter’s apron, black
wig, as picture, three-cornered black hat” (my emphasis). J. B. Buckstone, Jack Sheppard [1839]
in Trilby and Other Plays, ed. George Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.
48. Meisel quotes an unidentified review of a dramatization of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge
from 1841 that emphasizes the audience’s audible recognition of the tableaux: “It is scarcely
necessary to detail a plot which is so well known and generally admired as Dickens’s last
novel, bearing this title, the tale being fully borne out in the drama here presented, in the
most perfect and attractive manner, by a series of tableaux vivans, [sic] copied from the
illustrations of the tale; these tableaux were the admiration of the audience, who testified
their delight by the most enthusiastic applause” (Realizations 251).
49. Denis Diderot used Garrick’s facility in these demonstrations as evidence that acting
is a technical, practiced skill that constitutes “passion well imitated” rather than emotions
that are actually felt. Diderot states in “Le Paradoxe sur le comedien” (1773), “Can his
[Garrick’s] soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert
with his face? I don’t believe it. . . . Actors impress the public not when they are furious,
but when they play fury well. . . .” Diderot, “Le Paradoxe sur le comedien” [1773] trans.
W. H. Pollock (London, 1883), ed. Lee Strasberg (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 33.
50. George Taylor, “Francois Delsarte: A Codification of Nineteenth-Century Acting,”
Theatre Research International 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 71–81, 72.
51. This was a common meaning in the nineteenth century, but the mental or moral
state began to take precedence and “attitude” now generally refers to a stance of the mind
rather than body (OED 771).
52. Reprinted in George Taylor, Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre
(Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1989), 2.
53. Jeffrey N. Cox claims that the monodrama lived on only as a style that influenced
characterization in the theater of romanticism in “Melodrama, Monodrama and the Forms
of Romantic Tragic Drama,” in Within the Dramatic Spectrum, ed. Karelisa V. Hartigan
(New York: University Press of America, 1986). He suggests that the monodrama’s represen-
tation of “an entrapment in self-consciousness” is one pole against which the romantic
tragic drama struggled; the other was the melodrama’s assertion that a “moral order” can
arise out of terror and violence (21, 25). While Cox’s opposing poles are present in some
romantic theater, monodramas and melodramas continued to be staged well into the twen-
tieth century and particularly influenced early film.
54. “Monodrama” designates twentieth-century plays that feature a single actor or pro-
ductions in which the stage conveys one dominant character’s perception of the world, with
266 NOT ES TO PAG ES 4 4– 4 5
other characters as projections of the protagonist’s ego (what might be called “single pro-
tagonist monodramas”). For the former, see Gad Kaynar’s analysis of Oren Neeman’s A Jew
in the Dark, which premiered at the Israeli National Theatre Habimah in 1996. See also
Julian Meyrick, “The Meaning of Tragedy: Literary Pattern vs. Performance Form,” Journal
of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 16, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 119–131. The single protagonist
monodrama became important in Russian modernism as Nikolay Evreinov’s monodra-
matic staging theories were adapted by Konstantin Stanislavsky and passed to Gordon Craig
in a famous collaboration initiated by Isadora Duncan at the Moscow Art Theatre (Hamlet,
1909). See Laurence Senelick, “Moscow and Monodrama: The Meaning of the Craig-
Stanislavsky Hamlet,” Theatre Research International 6, no. 2 (1981): 109–124.
55. Operatic and musical compositions that include spoken text continue to be
designated monodramas. The term entered the English vocabulary of music later than the
theatrical vocabulary. In 1954, it was included in Grove’s Dictionary of Music with a reference
to Hector Berlioz’s Lelio (OED 1016). See Berlioz, Lelio: or the Return to Life Op.14. (New
York: Belwin Mills, 1832). François Delsarte knew Berlioz in Paris and may have been aware
of his monodrama, which resembles later Delsartean performances.
56. Gale, “Going Solo: An Historical Perspective on the Actress and the Monologue,” in The
Cambridge Companion to the Actress, ed. Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 291–313. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as “Going solo.”
57. The tradition of using solo performance to explore subjectivity is strong in the post-
modern performance art monologues of Anna Deavere Smith, Laurie Anderson, and others,
who combine bodily movement and gesture, music, and speech as in the early monodramas.
Jo Bonney prints many texts from this influential genre in Extreme Exposure: An Anthology
of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century (New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 2000). See the conclusion for my discussion of Smith.
58. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (New York: Norton, 1996), I. 155–161. Henceforth
cited in the text as Aurora.
59. See Margaret Reynolds’s “Preface” to Aurora Leigh for a summary of Barrett
Browning’s reception history.
60. See Isobel Armstrong’s “A Music of Thine Own: Women’s Poetry—An Expressive
Tradition” and Joyce Zonana’s “The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora
Leigh and Feminist Poetics,” both in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela
Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). As Zonana claims, a negative response was evident as
early as John Nichol’s 1857 description of the passage as a “perfect shoal of mangled and
pompous similes” in Westminster Review (60).
61. Barrett Browning described Corinne as “an immortal book” to be read every year.
See Sandra M. Gilbert, “From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento,”
in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996),
30. Aurora reenacts Corinne’s crowning in Rome with a pose, and the two characters share
a mixed Italian-British heritage (Aurora II. 60–62). In Victorian Women Poets: Writing
against the Heart (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), Angela Leighton finds
such poses “silly” and suggests Aurora’s crowning is a “literary in-joke about the Corinne
myth” (88). But this view problematically echoes that represented in the text by Aurora’s
cousin, Romney, who finds her performance of literary ambition “silly” because he limits
her “purpose” to wifely domesticity.
62. Yopie Prins’s Victorian Sapphos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)
also describes how nineteenth-century women poets used mythic figures to explore the
concerns of gender and genre: “ . . . through Sappho we can trace the gendering of lyric as a
feminine genre, not because we assume she was the first poet to speak as a woman, but
because the assumption of voice in lyric reading produces Sappho as a feminine figure that
does not speak” (37). See also Prins’s “‘Lady’s Greek’ (with the Accents): A Metrical
Translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson,” in Victorian Literature and Culture 34
(2006): 591–618.
63. Gilles Deleuze claims diversity is not difference in Difference and Repetition (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), but I argue that the diversity embodied and posed
by a soloist represents an opening to otherness.
64. On May 23, 1845, Barrett Browning wrote, “The Prometheus is done—but the
monodram [sic] is where it was.” See Elvan Kintner, The Letters of Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–1846, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1969), 1:73. Culler uses Barrett Browning’s letters to establish that R. Browning was aware of
the term monodrama, but does not discuss Barrett Browning or investigate the Aeschylus
monodrama.
65. Margaret Reynolds and Barbara Rosenbaum, “‘Aeschylus’ Soliloquy’ by Elizabeth
Barrett Browning,” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 329–348. Henceforth cited in the
text as “Aeschylus.”
66. Reynolds and Rosenbaum write of William Irvine and Park Honan’s The Book, The
Ring and The Poet: “In a 1974 biography of Robert Browning, his wife and her poetry are
treated with exaggerated scorn. How unfortunate under the circumstances, that the authors
should have chosen as an epigraph to their account of Browning’s funeral and final farewell,
lines from this particular poem—‘Aeschylus’ Soliloquy’—by Elizabeth Barrett Browning”
(“Aeschylus” 334).
67. Culler adopts Tennyson’s description of Maud as the definition of the monodrama:
“The peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one person take the place
of different characters” (“Monodrama” 369). He follows Robert Langbaum’s description of
the monologue as a form that produces dramatic irony whereby the reader understands
more than the speaker intends to reveal (“Monodrama” 382). Culler argues that Tennyson
wrote monodramas, while only R. Browning wrote “true” dramatic monologues, as if the
form were the idiosyncratic style of one poet.
68. As late as 1909, Arthur Sedgwick described Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” “Demeter and
Persephone,” and “Tithonus” as monodramas (“Monodrama” 369).
69. Her source material was most likely Aeschylus’ Vita, which was found attached to a
draft of her Prometheus Bound (“Aeschylus” 343).
70. All references are to line number in the Reynolds and Rosenbaum diplomatic tran-
scription, but I have taken account of the textual corrections to produce a reading text in my
quotes.
71. As I describe in the introduction, Vernon Lee was one of the advocates of a historical
reading practice suggesting that any text, not just a performance text, should be interpreted
kinesthetically. The relationship between a text and its performance continues to be debated.
For a recent discussion of the debates, see Peter Kivy, The Performance of Reading: An Essay
in the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) and Anna Christina Ribeiro’s
review of Kivy’s work in Mind (January 2009).
268 NOT ES TO PAG ES 4 7– 50
72. Reynolds and Rosenbaum note that “in many of her letters Barrett Browning attrib-
utes what she saw as the degradation of the nineteenth-century theatre to the incompre-
hension of the public and the imperative that the dramatist submit to the dictates of popular
taste” (“Aeschylus” 344).
73. Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language (London: Routledge, 2004), 136–138.
74. Garrett Stewart theorizes a “phonotext” that negotiates the tension between the
graphic and aural properties of language produced by any reading event: “A word is read
with no presumption that a voice either preceded that textual mark or can be elicited
from it. Yet a voice is brought to it, one that often produces an adventitious, potentially
submorphemic ‘sound’ even when the written word is over—a voiced though silent
sound.” See Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 135.
75. Herbert F. Tucker discusses the fragments of stornelli sung by the monk in
R. Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” as lyrical outbursts against the “historical monologue” that
suggest the “dissolution” of the “individual self.” See Tucker’s “Dramatic Monologue and
the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hôsek and
Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 226–235. I read the interludes of
song that are a frequent feature of Victorian monologues as monodramatic remnants rather
than lyric outbursts.
76. Barrett Browning, “The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus,” in Complete Poetical Works,
ed. Horace E. Scudder (New York: Buccaneer, 1993), 330. Henceforth cited in the text as
“Virgin.”
77. In the late fourth century, Augustine argued, “The entire human race that was to
pass through woman into offspring was contained in the first man when that married
couple received the divine sentence condemning them to punishment and humanity pro-
duced what humanity became, not what it was when created, but when, having sinned, it
was punished.” See Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Random, 1988),
108–109.
78. Linda M. Lewis overlooks the subversive interrogations of scripture in “The Virgin”
when she reads the poem as an acceptance of Augustinian theories. See Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s Spiritual Progress (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 161. Henceforth
cited in the text as Progress.
79. Margo K. Louis, “Enlarging the Heart: L. E. L’s ‘The Improvisatrice,’ Hemans’s
‘Properzia Rossi,’ and Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh,” in Victorian Literature and Culture
(1998), 1–17.
80. Barrett Browning read seven chapters of the Bible daily (Progress 9–10).
81. G. P. Landow quotes this passage in his introduction to Victorian Types, Victorian
Shadows (Boston: Routledge, 1980) to demonstrate the widespread use of typology in the
period, but he does not examine her revisions to the hermeneutic (6). Henceforth cited in
the text as Types.
82. Most critics claim that Barrett Browning derived this idea from Emanuel
Swedenborg’s theory of correspondence, which claimed that the heavenly can be known by
studying the earthly because material objects have spiritual manifestations. Correspondence
builds on biblical typology, and Barrett Browning uses the language of both to develop her
version of the fourfold method (5.123). See Aurora, Book V (120–124) and Reynolds’s
discussion of Swedenborg in the notes on pages 237–239 (7.763 and 7.842).
83. Barrett Browning considered classical mythology in typological relation to Christian

myth, writing to R. Browning, “And then Christianity is a worthy myth, and poetically
acceptable” (March 29, 1845, Letters I.43).
84. Christina Rossetti, The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on The
Apocalypse (New York: Young, 1892), 438. Henceforth cited in the text as Face. For a detailed
discussion of this work, see Robert M. Kachur, “Repositioning the Female Christian Reader:
Christina Rossetti as Tractarian Hermeneut in The Face of the Deep,” Victorian Poetry 35,
no. 2 (1997): 193–214.
85. See John Keble’s On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Father of the Church, Tract
89, in Tracts for the Times, vol. 6 (1868) for a discussion of nature’s symbolic teachings and
the sacramental universe. Isaac Williams’s On Reserve in Communicating Religious
Knowledge, Tract 89 in Tracts for the Times, vol. 6 (1868) argues that the biblical text offers
“hidden wisdom” in “dark and difficult sayings” as it reserves a specific, appropriate
knowledge for each individual. Both are discussed in Lynda Palazzo’s Christina Rossetti’s
Feminist Theology (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 58–65. Henceforth cited in the text as
Theology.
86. Pusey preached, “‘When the woman saw the tree was good for food’ (this is the lust
of the flesh) ‘and that it was pleasant to the eyes’, (this was the lust of the eye,) ‘and a tree to
be desired to make one wise’ (here is the ‘pride of life’,) she took of the fruit and ‘did eat’,
and, ‘as the first fruit of her sin, she spread her sin to whom she could.’ ” (Theology xiii).
87. Her earlier works, Called to Be Saints (1881) and Time Flies (1885), fit more easily into
the devotional category than Face and Letter and Spirit (1883).
88. Christina Rossetti’s influence on modernism is evident in Ezra Pound’s “Mr. Hueffer
and the Prose Tradition in Verse,” Poetry 4, no. 3 (June 1914), 111–120. Pound takes issue with
Hueffer’s appreciation of Rossetti’s experiments in voicing, claiming that he himself went
back to Rossetti’s sources, which he identifies as Arnaut Daniel, Guido, and Dante.
89. Christina Rossetti, Commonplace in Poems and Prose, ed. Jan Marsh (London:
Everyman, 1996), 383. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as PP.
90. The performance also included a “processional” of “English-Grecian maidens,” who
sang and moved in a manner anticipating Isadora Duncan’s dance performances (Bachanale,
Gluck-Mottle Suite, c. 1910), and the processionals written by H.D. (“Hymen,” 1921).
91. Although not many women poets were artists’ models, many performed social poses
and recitations to frame the reception of their poems. Mary Robinson, a popular actress
turned poet, performed improvisational poetry and impersonated Sappho to market her
sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon (1796). Poets Caroline Norton and Eliza Cook also
dressed like Sappho, as described by Margaret Reynolds in “I lived for art, I lived for love’:
The Woman Poet Sings Sappho’s Last Song,” in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader,
ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 207–306. Letitia Landon, as L. E. L., also
performed the “poetess” role and became a “drawing-room attraction” at aristocratic gath-
erings. She appeared as Corinne after she wrote poems for Madame de Staël’s novel based
on Lyon Hamilton.
92. Rossetti’s slight figure, defined features, and serious expression were the ideal until
later models such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris epitomized the luxuriant hair and
sensuous, erotic expression that has come to be associated with the PRB. See Barbara
Garlick’s “Defacing the Self: Christina Rosseti’s The Face of the Deep as Absolution,” in
270 NOT ES TO PAG ES 52 –54
Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2002), 171.
93. Linda H. Peterson, “Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of Christina
Rossetti and the PRB,” Victorian Poetry 32, nos. 3–4 (1994), 214–215. Peterson claims that
Rossetti “engages typology and its hermeneutic system in a far more revisionary way” in her
“major narrative poems,” but the shorter poems and monologues merely reproduce “reli-
gious symbols derived from traditional authorities” (216).
94. Rossetti’s poems invoking Eve’s voice include “Shut Out” (1856) and “Eve”(1865);
she also wrote monologues for classical characters such as “Sappho” (1846), “What Sappho
Would Have Said Had Her Leap Cured Instead of Killing Her” (1848), and “Ariadne to
Theseus” (1844).
95. John 19:25 lists the women at the cross as Mary, her sister, and Mary Magdalene (see
also Mark 15:33).
96. Rossetti’s “Good Friday” is the only poem by a woman that Landow discusses in
Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows. For a summary of the prevalence and significance of the
“smitten rock” image, see Landow’s article on the Victorian Web, “The Smitten Rock: One
of the Most Popular Victorian Uses of Typological Symbolism,” at www.victorianweb.org/
religion/type/moses.html.
97. The prevalence of Victorian invocations of the Pisgah sight contributes to James
Joyce’s critique of idealized nationalism at the end of the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses (New
York: Vintage, 1986), “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums.” For a detailed
analysis of the parable, see Amardeep Singh’s “A Pisgah Sight of Ireland: Religious
Embodiment and Colonialism in Ulysses,” Semeia 88 (1999): 129–147.
98. Christina Rossetti suggested that their contemporary W. E. Gladstone excluded
Webster from his “list of poetesses” because of her work for women’s suffrage but claimed
that hers is “the one name which I incline to feel as by far the most formidable of those
known to me.” See Angela Leighton’s “‘Because Men Made the Laws’: The Fallen Woman
and the Woman Poet,” in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 227.
99. Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets argues that Webster’s monologues are more
“secular and everyday” than Browning’s: “their speakers are not saints, artists or charlatans,
but real men and women, with altogether smaller sins and guilts” (178). While monologues
like “A Castaway” might be characterized as “secular,” Webster also adopts the voices of
types with large “guilts,” including Judas, Pilate, and Pilate’s wife, Procla. Patricia Rigg’s
“Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama” in Victorian Review 26, no. 2 (2001),
75–107, is one of the few studies that has taken up Culler’s discussion of the monodrama.
Yet, Rigg concludes that Webster does not write dramatic monologues and locates “secular”
studies like “A Castaway” but not “Medea in Athens” within the monodramatic tradition, in
spite of the precedent of Benda’s Medea monodrama. Christine Sutphin discusses the myth-
ological monologues in “The Representation of Women’s Heterosexual Desire in Augusta
Webster’s ‘Circe’ and ‘Medea in Athens,” Women’s Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 373–392, and the
“fallen woman” in “Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints,” Victorian
Poetry 38, no. 4 (2000): 511–531.
100. Webster, Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1870). Henceforth cited in the text as
Portraits.
101. Webster, A Housewife’s Opinions (London: Macmillan, 1879), 215. Henceforth cited
in the text as Housewife’s.
102. Anno Domini is Latin for “the year of the lord,” and thirty-three is the age at which
Christ is said to have died. Augusta Webster, A Woman Sold (London: Macmillan, 1867).
Henceforth abbreviated in the text as Sold.
103. “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her
seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Landow writes
that this was the “prophetical type which Victorian commentators take to be simultaneously
both the Bible’s first type and its first prophecy” (“Bruising” 11–14).
104. “Suppose the first personal pronoun not artistically vicarious but standing for the
writer’s substantive self; what an appalling dozens of persons!” (Housewife’s 153).
105. Wilde’s portrayal of Dorian’s beautiful and rebellious mother in The Picture of
Dorian Gray (New York: Norton Critical, 2007) could describe Vigée Le Brun’s “Lady
Hamilton as Bacchante” (figure 1.1): “And his mother with her Lady Hamilton face, and her
moist wind-dashed lips. . . . She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress. There were
vine leaves in her hair” (121). As I discuss in chapter 3, the first part of Amy Lowell’s Can
Grande’s Castle (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1918) retells the story of Lyon Hamilton’s affair
with Admiral Horatio Nelson and features her “marvelous ‘Attitudes’ ” (7).
106. Blau, The Eye of Prey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 173, 185.
Chapter 2
1. Charles Walter Brown, The American Star Speaker (Chicago: M. A. Donohue, 1902), 9.
2. Hugo’s novel Les Misérables (1862) was adapted into the famous English-language
musical in 1985; Beth dies in Alcott’s Little Women (1871); Marguerite Gautier is the heroine
of Dumas’s novel and play, The Lady of the Camellias (1848), which was later adapted by
Giuseppe Verdi as La Traviata (1853) and several films called Camille beginning in 1909
(most famously the 1936 version starring Greta Garbo); Mimì was a character in Puccini’s
1896 opera, La Bohème.
3. See Ann Chisholm, “Incarnations and Practices of Feminine Rectitude: Nineteenth-
Century Gymnastics for U.S. Women,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 3 (Spring 2005):
737–763. Chisholm discusses gymnastic systems that trained nineteenth-century women’s
bodies for “Republican Motherhood,” of which the ideal emblem was the Venus de Milo
(737).
4. Although several of Delsarte’s students figure prominently, Delsarte is not men-
tioned in Joseph Roach’s The Player’s Passion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1993), an influential study of acting style in relation to contemporaneous ideas of the body,
the passions, and scientific discoveries. Richard Schechner footnotes Delsarte in “Magnitudes
of Performance” but claims that if Delsarte rejected the formalized actor training of his
period, his system developed “sclerosis” and his students produced another rigid and
mechanical system. See By Means of Performance, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 46–47, n. 12. Taylor S. Lake describes the
influence of Delsartism on late-nineteenth-century actresses in “The Delsarte Attitude on
the Legitimate Stage: Mary Anderson’s Galatea and the Trope of the Classical Body,” in
Essays on François Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter
(2004/2005): 113–135.
272 N OT ES TO PAG ES 5 9 –60
5. Ruyter, Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (New
York: Dance Horizons, 1979), 27. Henceforth cited in the text as Reformers. Ruyter expands
this discussion with a closer analysis of bodily expression and movement techniques, which
then influenced modern dancers, especially Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, in “The Delsarte
Heritage,” Dance Research 14, no. 1 (Summer, 1996): 62–74. Henceforth cited in the text as
“Heritage.”
6. Julia Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Henceforth cited in the text as Expressionism.
7. Walker’s “ ‘In the Grip of an Obsession’: Delsarte and the Quest for Self-Possession,”
Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 617–631, examines theories of selfhood related to film performance.
Hilary Hart’s “Do You See What I See? The Impact of Delsarte on Silent Film Acting,” in
(2004/2005): 185–199, helpfully analyzes the use of Delsartean gestures in American silent
film, with a focus on the performances of Lillian Gish. Henceforth cited in the text as “See.”
Neither Walker nor Hart explores Delsarte’s influence on film technologies and montage.
8. Walker describes a “crisis” when film first appeared and “threatened to displace,
replace, or even erase the human body whenever the vehicle of technology was made to
substitute for the tenor of the body” (Expressionism 2).
9. Felicia McCarren’s Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) also views dance as a
“physiological inspiration” for cinema and complicates the technology-nature dichotomy
by describing two stories of dance’s relation to machines: “one recounting the stripping
down of gesture and bodies to machine aesthetics and the minimum gesture . . . the other
recounting the fleshing out of machines with bodies, reconnecting technology to its mythic,
ritual, or religious functions” (21, 11). McCarren does not discuss Delsartism, although the
movement associated bodies with machines and religion, and the statue pose was the pro-
tocinematic and protodance form that best articulates this connection. Henceforth cited in
the text as Dancing. See also Julia L. Foulkes, Modern Bodies (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002).
10. Miriam B. Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer and Benjamin on Cinema
and Modernity,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vannessa
R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California P, 1995), 365.
11. Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2009), 3, 39.
North’s fascinating study of the humor in technological modernity does not assume a
simple human-machine divide, as he recognizes: “Some of the aesthetic value of machines,
in fact, comes from the way they resemble and thus externalize certain human attributes
and impulses” (198). Yet, he consistently associates bodily movement onscreen with
mechanical reproduction and does not consider the very different Delsarte-derived theory
of the cinematic body that, as I will show, shaped even Chaplin’s movements. Henceforth
cited in the text as Machine.
12. Steve Dixon’s recent Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance,
Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) examines the long
history of media in performances from ancient Greek tragedy through Wagner’s gesamt-
kunstwerk and modernist groups including the Futurists. Interest in postmodern dance and
digital media is evident in the special section on “Dance and Media Technologies,” edited
with an introduction by Johanes Birringer, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 24, no. 1
(2002): 84–119.
13. Kuleshov was partially influenced by the Delsarte-derived theories Isadora Duncan
promulgated from her Moscow school beginning in 1921, the year Kuleshov established his
workshop.
14. Isadora Duncan began performing in 1895, the same year that Edison filmed
“Serpentine Dance,” a skirt dance performed by Annabelle Whitford and banned for the
peep it afforded of her undergarments (Dancing 50). Whitford’s dance on Edison’s film is
available at Internet Archive, www.archive.org/details/dance1895. Skirt dancing was popu-
larized by Loïe Fuller, who, influenced by new technologies for projecting light, designed
spectacular effects and an apparatus to manipulate long folds of fabric. Her choreography
is understood as “protocinematic” by Christophe Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics,”
PMLA 120, no. 1 (2005): 128–147. See also Tom Gunning’s reevaluation of cinematic tech-
nology and the “collision” between “the aesthetic and the technological” in “Loïe Fuller and
the Art of Motion” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm
Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003): 75–90, 80.
15. François Delsarte, Literary Remains in Delsarte System of Oratory, ed. Abbé
Delaumosne (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893), 467. Henceforth cited in the text as
Remains.
16. For a discussion of Delsarte’s use of melodramatic gestures without the larger
sphere of Delsartean paratheatrical practices, see George Taylor’s “Francois Delsarte: A
Codification of Nineteenth-Century Acting,” Theatre Research International 24, no. 1
(Spring 1999): 71–81.
17. According to the OED, the word semiotic (or semeiotic) had been used to refer to a
language of signs since 1641, and after 1797, it took on the meaning of the adjective symbolic.
Through the nineteenth century, the term was primarily related to medical symptoms
(958–959).
18. Walker provocatively suggests that Saussure’s analysis of the signifier-signified
relationship was a rejection of Delsartean theories: “It is worth noting that, on the banks
of Lac Leman, across the river from the Uni-Bastion where Saussure was delivering his
famous lectures, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was staging civic pageants with performers
trained in ‘eurhythmics,’ his program of physical movement derived from Delsarte’s
teachings” (Expressionism 256, n. 6). Walker does not detail the connection between
Delsarte and Dalcroze, but Selma Landen Odom describes the relationship in “Delsartean
Traces in Dalcroze Eurhythmics,” in Essays on François Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime
Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 137–152. Henceforth cited in the text
as “Traces.”
19. Durivage’s article is reprinted with the writings of Delsarte’s students Abbé
Delaumosne and Angelique Arnaud in Delaumosne, Delsarte System of Oratory (New York:
Edgar S. Werner, 1893), 576–577. Henceforth cited in the text as Oratory.
20. The first seven chapters of the book he intended to title My Revelatory Episodes, or
the History of an Idea Pursued for Forty Years largely describe this work.
21. The students of Delsarte are listed in Montrose J. Moses, “Percy Mackaye and His
Father,” Book News Monthly (October 1911): 100, clipping in the Papers of Marion and Percy
MacKaye, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library. Henceforth cited in the text as
274 N OT ES TO PAG ES 61 – 66
“Percy.” I am grateful to the staff at the Harvard Theatre Collection, particularly Elizabeth
A. Falsey.
22. François Delsarte, “Address before the Philotechnic Society of Paris,” in Genevieve
Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1902). Henceforth
cited in the text as “Address.”
23. Comte’s Système de Politique Positive (1851–1854) presents an empirically based
“Positivism” as a doctrine that could embrace all of science, philosophy, and psychology,
bind men under one “Religion of Humanity,” and establish a utopian “Positive Polity.”
Walker discusses Delsarte’s indebtedness to Lavater, an eighteenth-century moral philoso-
pher whose theory of physiognomy localized three human faculties—vitality, morality, and
intelligence—in three regions of body (Expressionism 46). In keeping with her emphasis on
technology and the institutionalization of Delsartism in universities, she details the “pseudo-
scientific theories” to which he ascribed but not his religious aspirations.
24. Delsarte used the term attitude to refer to poses of emotional states rather than
Emma Lyon Hamilton’s classical statues, but as I argue later, he performed both posed dis-
plays of the passions and statue poses.
25. Some interpretations of the emotional valence of the attitudes differ slightly; whereas
Delsarte described the con-con attitude of the head as “tenderness,” his most widely pub-
lished American student, Genevieve Stebbins, uses the term “veneration” in Delsarte System
of Expression, 6th ed. (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1902), 221. Henceforth cited in the text as
Delsarte Expression.
26. American dancer and Delsarte proponent Ted Shawn writes that Delsarte claimed
“motion creates emotion” in Every Little Movement (New York: Dance Horizons, 1954), 57.
Henceforth cited in the text as Every Movement. The James-Lange theory that emotions are
produced by physiological changes in the body (a blush produces embarrassment rather
than vice versa) influenced Vernon Lee’s idea of aesthetic emotion and mimicry, as my
introduction discusses.
27. Delsarte does not discuss Swedenborg in Literary Remains, but Stebbins points to
similarities in their ideas (Delsarte Expression 109).
28. Originally published in True Christian Religion, The Essential Swedenborg, ed. Sig
Synnestvedt (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1970), 144.
29. Ideas of the body’s corruption were bolstered by biblical commands such as “For if
ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the
body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13).
30. Walker claims that due to the teachings of “less knowledgeable” “enthusiasts,”
bodily training techniques, like posing, were “put in the service of something other than
learning the intricacies of the Delsarte method,” including “women’s health reform” and
“the physical culture movement” (Expressionism 52). While Ruyter is less dismissive of
women’s applications of Delsarte, she does not recognize the relevance of posing to
Delsarte’s theories.
31. William R. Alger, “The Aesthetic Gymnastics of Delsarte,” Werner’s Magazine
(January 1894), 3–4, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.
32. Lucien Odend’hal, “Delsartiana,” Werner’s Magazine 25, no. 5 (July 1900): 509.
33. While Sandow is unknown in performance history, he is famous among body-
builders; since 1977, a statuette called “The Sandow” has been bestowed upon the annual
winner of the Mr. Olympia contest for bodybuilding, a competition won by Arnold
Schwarzenegger in 1980.
34. In “Ithaca,” Sandow’s exercises are described as a “means still remaining to
achieve . . . the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility” (ll. 509–518). The “first
drawer” he unlocks in the episode contains “a chart of the measurements of Leopold Bloom
compiled before, during, and after 2 months’ consecutive use of Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley
exerciser,” an early weight machine and predecessor of today’s Bow Flex (ll. 1815–1817).
References are to line numbers in James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York:
Vintage, 1986).
35. “Buffalo Marks Centenary of Steele Mackaye, Actor,” Buffalo Evening News (May 29,
1942): 7. Henceforth cited in the text as “Centenary.” Fred Winslow Adams claims that the
lecture took place at the home of Reverend William R. Alger, providing further evidence
that Delsarte’s religious teachings were an important aspect of his appeal. “Steele Mackaye’s
Literary Work,” Boston Evening Transcript (1894). Henceforth cited in the text as “Mackaye’s
Literary.” Both clippings are in the Papers of Marion and Percy MacKaye, Harvard Theatre
Collection, Houghton Library.
36. Published by Werner in Albany, the magazine was originally titled The Voice, then
renamed Werner’s Voice Magazine, and finally Werner’s Magazine.
37. Arguing that Delsartism diminished the actor’s interpretive agency, Walker suggests
that through MacKaye’s technologies and Delsartean acting style, “the body of the actor was
practically reduced to a mere visual symbol” (Expression 42). The new movement technol-
ogies and techniques of expressive posing were viewed as enabling by the many Delsartean
practitioners.
38. According to Ruyter’s The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century
American Delsartism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), women composed about 85 percent
of Delsartean teachers, and most women taught in this area of generalized “self-cultivation”
(58–59). Henceforth cited in the text as Cultivation. In her “Introduction” to Essays on
François Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005):
1–7, Ruyter suggests that there were “three phases” of Delsartism in the 1870s and 1880s: one
was “closely associated with the professional training of speakers and actors”; a second
“emphasized physical culture for the general public and was particularly popular among
women”; and in the third, “Delsartean aesthetic theory was applied to all aspects of life” (3).
Such distinct phases cannot be identified if Delsartism is considered in its international
context, and many trajectories of the movement continued well into the twentieth
century.
39. Hovey (1849–1918) was born Henrietta Knapp, married Edward B. Crane, and used
his name until 1885, when she married Edmund Russell. They separated by 1890, and in
1894, she married the poet Richard Hovey, who was also interested in Delsarte and influ-
enced Ezra Pound (see chapter 3). I will use “Hovey” because her most significant contribu-
tions to Delsartism were made under this name. See Ruyter’s chapter “Henrietta Hovey:
From the Fashionable Salon to the School of Denishawn” for a detailed biography
(Cultivation 31–44).
40. “What Is Delsartism,” A Delsartean Scrap-book, ed. Frederic Sanburn (New York:
Lovell, 1891), 4. The volume gathers and reprints many pieces on Hovey, and as Number 124
in Lovell’s Literature Series, it is placed in the context of such “desirable works of current
276 NOT ES TO PAG ES 69– 72
and standard literature” as John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Aurora Leigh, and Volume 1 of Emerson’s Essays (ii). Henceforth cited in the text as
Scrapbook.
41. “Dress and Personality” by Emma Moffett Tyng, originally published in Harper’s
Bazar.
42. Baudelaire describes dandies who “have no other calling but to cultivate the idea of
beauty in their persons” in The Painter of Modern Life, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London:
Phaidon, 1964), 27.
43. Ruyter quotes a review from “Occasional Notes,” June 29, 1886. Moscheles’s studio
and friends (including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Rossetti, James
McNeill Whistler, and George Du Maurier) were described in “Felix Moscheles: A Volume
Containing Fragments of His Autobiography,” New York Times, June 3, 1899.
44. The review was originally printed in “Occasional Notes,” August 2, 1886.
45. The piece is attributed to Helen Fagg and originally published in the New York Home
Journal.
46. Morgan, An Hour With Delsarte: A Study of Expression (Boston: Lee and Shepard,
1889). Henceforth cited in the text as Hour.
47. These drawings also resemble Charcot’s photographs of hysterical women at the
Saltpêtrière posed in attitudes with subtitles designating emotions such as “amourous sup-
plication,” “ecstasy,” or “eroticism.” These images indicate a common link between women’s
hysterical poses, melodramatic acting styles, and Delsartean expression. For Charcot’s
images, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture
(New York: Pantheon, 1985), 150 and Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria:
Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Boston: MIT Press, 2004).
48. The enduring connection between solo posing, women’s bodies, and pathos is evi-
dent in Pia Lindman’s site-specific poses reenacting images of grief from the New York
Times. See my conclusion and Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli’s “The Visual Grammar of Suffering:
Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief ” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 84
(2006): 77–92.
49. Meredith Willson, The Music Man, choreographed by Oona White (1957). I am
grateful to Anna Henchman for this reference.
50. Joseph Fahey explores the professionalization enabled by the movement in “Quiet
Victory: The Professional Identity American Women Forged through Delsartism” in
(2004/2005): 43–84. He argues that women’s professionalism was “compromised at best”
and frequently “defined by little else than a defensive response to those who criticized
Delsartism,” but he focuses on women’s careers in “theater training” rather than studio
teaching and the variety of paratheatrical solo performance forms promoted by
Delsartism (75).
51. Quoted in Patricia M. Amburgy, “Fads, Frills, and Basic Subjects: Special Studies
and Social Conflict in Chicago in 1893,” Studies in Art Education 43, no. 2 (Winter 2002):
109–123, 114.
52. “Life and Letters” in Poet Lore: A Quarterly Magazine of Letters 17, ed. Charlotte
Porter and Helen A. Clarke (Boston: Poet Lore, 1906), 135. See also “To Spread Socialism
through Drama: The Progressive Stage Society Gives First Series of Plays” (November 28,
1904) and “Progressive Stage Society’s Plans” (April 19, 1905), unattributed reviews in the
New York Times, Online Archive. Ibsen’s The Master Builder was presented on May 2 and 4,
1905.
53. Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in Modern
Dance, 1890–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 1999), 48.
54. Stebbins’s Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression went into six editions and was
expanded in 1902. Other related books include Society Gymnastics and Voice Culture (1885),
Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics (1893), Genevieve Stebbins Drills (1895), and
The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training (1898, 1913). Ruyter claims that Stebbins
lived until 1933 but notes that a Dutch dance historian wrote in 1926 that she had died in
India, and no obituary has been found (Cultivation 52). Jane Donawerth’s Rhetorical Theory
by Women before 1900 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) gives Stebbins’s dates as
“1857–1914?”
55. Stebbins’s studies with MacKaye and position at the Boston University School of
Oratory are described in Norman Astley’s New York School of Expression Prospectus (New York:
Werner, 1893), held in the Library of Congress Special Collections. Henceforth cited in the text
as NY School. Although the prospectus prints MacKaye’s letter to Stebbins naming her as “the
only one of my pupils now living whom I can conscientiously recommend,” distance later
developed between them, perhaps due to MacKaye’s frustration with the “feminization” of
Delsartism or Stebbins’s own assertions of originality and claims to expertise based on studies
with Delsarte’s French students. See the biography in Ruyter’s Cultivation (45–54). Both
Stebbins and Hovey emphasize their studies in France as a sign of Delsartean authenticity and
to exploit the American fascination with European culture (Cultivation 33).
56. The clearest discussion of the transmission of Stebbins’s ideas into dance is in
Ruyter’s “Heritage” (68–72). Ruyter expresses surprise at Stebbins’s interest in posing and
claims that her training as a professional actor did not include the attitude (Cultivation
116–119. But given the emphasis on posing in late-nineteenth-century acting, she must have
been exposed to attitudes in her stage training, as well as in her studies of Delsartism.
Deborah Jowitt mentions Stebbins and Delsartism in Time and the Dancing Image (New
York: William Morrow, 1988), suggesting that Isadora Duncan was exposed to general
Delsartism and that a more specific influence might be present in her theories of the body
(79–81).
57. Stebbins’s books are cited by Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Volkonsky of Russia in his
1913 treatise on the Delsarte system. Hade Kallmeyer, a German physical culturist, references
Stebbins in her “system,” and Bess Mensendieck studied with Stebbins before opening
training centers in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia
(Cultivation 67–69). For the influence of Delsarte on Mensendieck, see Robin Veder, “The
Expressive Efficiencies of American Delsarte and Mensendieck Body Culture,” in Modernism/
Modernity 17, no. 4 (2011): 819–838. Selma Landen Odom suggests that Émile Jaques-
Dalcroze may have taken unattributed quotes from Stebbins (“Traces” 143).
58. Ruyter distinguishes Stebbins’s statue posing from the attitudes common in the
nineteenth century by her fluid transitions and her practice of posing as a series of 10 or 20
statues in a performance (Cultivation 116–119). As I established in the first chapter, descrip-
tions of Lyon Hamilton also focus on her transitions through a series of attitudes, occasion-
ally even a thematically related sequence.
278 N OT ES TO PAG ES 7 5 –83
59. Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics
(London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1912), 23.
60. Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1889).
Henceforth cited in the text as Recitation.
61. See Michael R. Turner’s Victorian Parlour Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (New
York: Dover, 1967) for a description of this related practice. Authors common to both
Delsartean and parlor recitations include James Whitcomb Riley, Bret Harte, Adelaide Anne
Proctor, Eugene Field, and Robert Browning. This culture of recitation continues beyond
the nineteenth-century parlor and Delsarte Matinees and well into modernism, as I discuss
in the next chapter.
62. Mrs. William Calvin Chilton, Monodramatist (Chicago: Hollister Bros., 1908) is in
the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, Redpath Chautauqua
Collection.
63. The group was composed of Duncan’s six most successful students from her first
Grünewald school; all took Duncan’s last name, and they were affectionately called “the
Isadorables” in tours as a distinct group and with their teacher. Apeda’s photograph was
reprinted in a program for the Isadora Duncan Dancers at the Auditorium Opera House,
Oakland, California, December 1, 1919.
64. The dance is described in the New York Times review of November 17, 1909, “New
Dances Here”: “This was in two scenes, the first showing the temple gates guarded by a
yellow-clad Yogi. . . . To the waving of lights and the presentation of offerings Rhada came to
life. In the dance which followed was shown the renunciation of the five senses.”
65. The Pittsburg Daily Headlight of February 4, 1924 (p. 3, cols. 1–3) describes the audi-
ence’s “applause of appreciation” for Shawn’s Jonas Tango, which he encored. Clipping in
Louise Brooks and the Denishawn Dancers Collection at the Leonard H. Axe Library,
Pittsburg State University, Kansas.
66. Review in Werner’s Magazine (September 16, 1894), 334.
67. St. Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1939), 16–17.
Henceforth cited in the text as Unfinished.
68. Bliss Carman was one of the few American poets from the previous generation that
Ezra Pound admired, as I discuss in the next chapter.
69. The intellectual status Delsartism held for the period is evident in the New York
Times announcement of The Making of Personality (Boston: L. C. Paige, 1908) as a “serious”
study of the “invariable triplicity of effect, physical, mental, and spiritual, from all action
and all influence.” See “New Books from Boston Presses: Bliss Carman’s ‘Making of
Personality’ Nearly Ready,” New York Times (February 14, 1908), Online Archive.
70. Naima Prevots’s Dancing in the Sun: Hollywood Choreographers, 1915–1937 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987) discusses the relationship between Shawn and
Norma Gould, who would later develop dance programs demonstrating Delsartean influ-
ences at the University of California, Southern Branch (now UCLA), beginning in 1919 and
the University of Southern California in 1920 (32). Henceforth cited in the text as Sun.
71. Bliss Carman, Address at Moonshine (New York: Tabard Press, 1911), 18-21. Carman’s
address to the graduating class MCMXI of the Unitrinian School of Personal Harmonizing
founded by Mary Perry King at Moonshine, Twilight Park, in the Catskills was delivered in
September 1911.
72. The New York Times review of a concert of Denishawn choreography, “Tribute to
Early Modern and Beauty,” by Jack Anderson (March 31, 1988; Online Archive) claims, “The
concert’s tone was set at the start with ‘Floor Plastique,’ classroom exercises devised by
Shawn to strengthen the muscles. But the way the dancers assumed statuesque poses sug-
gested that he wished students to seek beauty as well as fitness.”
73. Elizabeth Drake-Boyt, Dance as a Project of the Early Modern Avant-garde,
Dissertation, Florida State University, 2005: 141. Henceforth cited in the text as Project. The
dissertation has been published as Dance as a Project of the Early Modern Avant-garde: An
Analysis of Three Western Expressive Dance Works Created between 1900 and 1920 and Their
Cultural Implications (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2008).
74. Ted Shawn and Gray Pool, One Thousand and One Night Stands (New York:
Doubleday, 1960), 70.
75. Hovey probably did not study with Delsarte, but St. Denis speaks to her perceived
authority.
76. Even after Denishawn disbanded, Shawn’s students at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts
studied Delsarte and read Shawn’s Every Little Movement as late as 1967 (“Project” 239).
77. One of the few books to recognize the significance of late-nineteenth-century
theatrical traditions for early film is Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’s Theatre to Cinema: Stage
Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Although
they do not focus on dance or discuss Delsarte’s influence on Russian film and montage
technology, they mention Delsartism: “Delsarte’s acting system, which was based on the
teaching of poses, was still being taught by Gustave Garcia at the London Academy of Music
in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the evidence from films . . . shows that these
traditions were still alive a decade later throughout Europe” (81–82). Elizabeth Kendall’s
Where She Danced (New York: Knopf, 1979) provides a general overview of the influence of
dance on film but does not discuss Delsartism. Henceforth cited in the text as Where. Hilary
Hart only briefly mentions Denishawn in “Do You See What I See? The Impact of Delsarte
on Silent Film Acting” (“See” 189).
78. New York’s Dramatic Mirror (May 13, 1916) claims Griffith sent seven female actors
to Denishawn (Where 142). Other film stars who studied at Denishawn include Roszila
Dolly, Leonire Ullrich, Ruth Chatterton, Ina Claire, Mabel Normand, Louise Glaum,
Margaret Loomis, and Carol Dempster (“Project” 239).
79. Roberta E. Pearson’s Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in
the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) equates Delsartism
with the “histrionic code” of acting and argues that it was supplanted by a “verisimilar” or
realistic style of movement. She acknowledges Delsarte’s influence on early films but claims
“the interesting parallels between Biograph and Delsarte style lie not in specific poses but in
the overall principles of histrionically coded acting shared by the two” (23). She does not
mention Denishawn’s function in disseminating this code.
80. Ruth St. Denis also performed in The Lily and the Rose, a film produced and written
by Griffith and directed by Paul Powell. Ted Shawn performed as Faun in Cecil B. DeMille’s
Don’t Change Your Husband (1919). Kendall claims that dancers from the Denishawn school
performed in Sex and The Lily and the Rose (1915), The Victoria Cross (1916), A Little Princess,
Conscience, The Legion of Death, Joan the Woman, Cleopatra (1917), Hidden Pearls, Wild
Youth, Bound in Morocco (1918), Pettigrew’s Girls, and Backstage (1919) (Where 144).
280 NOT ES TO PAG ES 8 8– 91
81. Howell L. Piner, Werner’s Readings and Recitations No. 23 (New York: Werner, 1899), 180.
82. Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 1974), 8. Henceforth cited in
the text as Lulu.
83. Correspondence between H.D. and Kenneth Macpherson, a fellow member of the
POOL film group, suggests that H.D. may have been considered for the part of Lulu.
While visiting Pabst from October 21 to 25, 1927, Macpherson sent a letter to H.D. claiming
that Pabst “loved the Kitten” (H.D.’s nickname): “And wht he reeeeeeally liked about the
fillum was that YOU showed up the utter futility of the Hollywood tradition, and that
beauty was something quite different. And I m wondering if he still wants Louisa Brooks
for Lulu, or whether he is writing the Kitten tonight to book her!!!!!! . . . ‘But she is ver’
good, ver’ strong, she makes a deep mark.’ ‘She impresses the whole idea of the film. O, she
is strong.’ Look out Lulu! [sic]” Letter in the H.D. Archives at the Beinecke Library, Box 12,
Folder 415.
84. Brooks claims that she knew wealthy men who “much like Schön in the film, backed
shows to keep themselves well supplied with Lulus” (Lulu 97).
85. Mary Ann Doane, “The Erotic Barter: Pandora’s Box,” in The Films of G.W. Pabst: An
Extraterritorial Cinema, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1990), 70. Doane’s classic study discusses the many representations of Lulu in an account of
how “her image circulates and is exchanged as a form of currency” (69).
86. For an analysis of Reifenstahl’s political posing, see Brigitte Peucker’s “The Fascist
Choreography: Riefenstahl’s Tableaux,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 2 (2004): 279–297.
Peucker does not mention Delsarte in her discussion.
87. Karl Toepfer, “The Aristocratic City: The Dance Aesthetic of Dorothee Günther and
the Political Legacy of François Delsarte,” in Essays on François Delsarte, Special Issue of
Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 153–183.
88. This is not to undermine Michael North’s argument in Machine-Age Comedy that
comedians like Chaplin exploit the technologies of modernity and that mechanization is
funny, but North’s work demonstrates the prevailing interest in a modernist machine-body
at the expense of other prominent kinesthetic ideals.
89. As I describe in the first chapter, the trope appears in J. J. Rousseau’s monodrama
Pygmalion (1762) and several famous Pygmalion ballets (1734–1799). Inanimate figures also
dance in Coppelia (Léo Delibes, 1870), The Nutcracker (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1892), and
Petrushka (Igor Stravinsky, 1911).
90. Lev Kuleshov, “The Banner of Cinematography” (1920) in Lev Kuleshov: Selected
Works, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 48. Henceforth
cited in the text as “Banner.”
91. Evgeni Gromov, “Introduction,” in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri
Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 19. The book to which Gromov
refers is Sergei Volkonsky’s The Expressive Person: A Stage Training in Gesture According to
Delsarte (St. Petersburg: Apollon, 1913).
92. Mikhail Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the
Actor,” in Inside the Film Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge,
1991), 46. Yampolsky recognizes the integral relationship between Delsartean performance
and Kuleshov’s theories of montage, but not having studied Delsarte’s manuscripts or the
writings of his French and American students, he misunderstands the teachings as
“physiognomy” and does not grasp the full extent of the influence. Henceforth cited in the
text as “Kuleshov’s Experiments.”
93. See George Taylor and Rose Whyman’s “François Delsarte, Prince Sergei Volkonsky
and Mikhail Checkhov,” in Essays on François Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed.
Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 97–111, 102. Henceforth cited in the text as “Volkonsky.”
Taylor and Whyman focus on the similarities between Delsarte’s theories and the principles
of physical acting developed by Chekhov, particularly his idea of the “psychological gesture,”
but they also detail the Russian transmission of Delsartism and mention its influence on the
theater practitioners Konstantin Stanislavsky, Rudolf Steiner, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and
even the physiologists Ivan Pavlov and Ivan M. Sechenov.
94. Yampolsky claims that the Volkonsky and Kuleshov were interested in Delsarte’s
theories and the eurhythmics of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze due to their opposition to
Stanislavsky’s “method” at the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky opposed gestural taxon-
omies, but he also worked with Volkonsky, and later critics have exaggerated the “opposi-
tion.” Although Kuleshov consistently referenced Delsarte in his writings, Yampolsky
suggests that he was equally indebted to Dalcroze, who, in any case, derived many ideas
from Delsarte. Dalcroze had copies of the writings of Delsarte’s students in his library
(“Traces” 137–152).
95. Lev Kuleshov, “Hands and Arms” (1926), in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans.
Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 64–65.
96. Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film, ed. and trans. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974), 107. Henceforth cited in the text as Kuleshov.
97. Yampolsky argues that the intersection of montage and Delsartean performance
was present at the very beginning of the VGIK’s film theory, but his insights have not been
incorporated into film studies (“Kuleshov’s Experiments” 56).
98. Lev Kuleshov, “The Art of Creating with Light: Foundations of Thought,” in Lev
Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga,
1987), 36. First published in Kinogazeta 12 (March 1918): 12.
99. Michael North, following Benjamin, claims that Chaplin embodied this syncopated
aspect of film technology in machinelike movements, but Kuleshov associated the cine-
matic still with Delsartean expressive posing.
100. Lev Kuleshov, The Art of the Cinema, in Lev Kuleshov: Selected Works, trans. Dmitri
Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 138. Henceforth cited in the text as
Art.
101. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” (1929) in
Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949). Henceforth
cited in the text as “Ideogram.”
102. Susan McCabe’s Cinematic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005) is one of the excellent recent works that both recognizes and furthers the interest in
montage. She argues that the relationship between modernist art and film may be charac-
terized by a tension between a poetics of “corporeal subjectivity” and “cinematic bodies,”
which “haunt, permeate, fragment and are fragmented by representation” (6–7). Delsartism,
which she does not discuss, demonstrates a commitment to whole corporeal subjectivity yet
produces the “cinematic bodies” she describes. See also P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) and Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (April
2006), a special issue on film.
282 N OT ES TO PAG ES 97– 1 03
103. Wharton, Edith, House of Mirth (New York: Penguin, 1966), 150. Henceforth cited in
the text as Mirth.
104. Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” in
Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Urazone, 1992), 75, 108.
Henceforth cited in the text as “Torque.”
105. The phrase is used in Laura Marcus’s “‘A New Form of True Beauty’: Aesthetics and
Early Film Criticism” in Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (April 2006): 269–282. Marcus’s
discussion of the aesthetics of early film does not mention Delsartism, although she does
recognize, “Action Picture romance comes when each hurdle is a tableau, when there is
indeed an art-gallery-beauty in each of these swift glimpses” (276).
Chapter 3
1. Samuel Silas Curry, Browning and the Dramatic Monologue [1908] (New York:
Haskell, 1965), 133–134. Henceforth abbreviated as BDM.
2. Edward Dowden was a professor at the University of Dublin when he wrote Robert
Browning (London: J. M. Dent, 1904).
3. Norman Astley’s New York School of Expression Prospectus (New York: Werner, 1893)
describes the Literature course: “This is not confined, as in so many schools of Oratory and
Expression, to the study of one or two great authors, as Shakespeare and Browning; but it
consists of practical work, teaching how to ‘cut’ any novel or other work so as to present the
style, plot and general ideas conveyed by a writer, in a brief class-talk of half an hour or so”
(12). Henceforth cited in the text as NY School.
4. Julia Walker’s Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005) considers the American expressive culture movement,
and Mark Morrisson discusses the British verse-recitation movement in “Performing the
Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London,”
Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 3 (1996): 25–50. Henceforth cited in the text as Expressionism
and “Pure Voice.” Neither Walker nor Morrisson considers the transatlantic aspects of reci-
tation experienced firsthand by poets such as H.D., Eliot, and Pound, and Morrisson does
not mention Delsartism as an influence on poetic recitation. I use the term cultures of reci-
tation to recognize the many manifestations of the movements, including the prominent
Delsartean trajectories.
5. Susan Howe’s The Dramatic Monologue (New York: Twayne, 1996) treats the
dramatic monologue as a Victorian invention but discusses the monologues of T. S. Eliot
and Pound as an essential but passing phase in their development. Carol T. Christ argues
that Eliot was influenced by Tennyson’s lyric dramatic monologues and Pound followed
Browning’s model in “Self-Concealment and Self-Expression in Eliot’s and Pound’s
Dramatic Monologues,” Victorian Poetry 22, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 217–226, and Victorian
and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
6. My sketches of these writers are necessarily brief, and each warrants an entire
chapter, but this treatment establishes the scene of poetic solo performance in modernism
that enables a detailed case study of H.D.
7. Brenda Gabioud Brown, “Elocution,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition,
ed. Theresa Enos (New York: Garland, 1996), 212.
8. Samuel Silas Curry, The Province of Expression (Boston: Expression, 1891), viii.
Henceforth cited in the text as Province.
9. A Department of Elocution and Oratory was previously housed within the College
of Liberal Arts at Boston University. By giving the school its own faculty, the university
claimed, the real value of oratory “would be disseminated throughout the country, and thus
a valuable service rendered to the cause of higher education at large.” Sixth Annual Report
of the President of Boston University, 1878–1879. Boston University School of Oratory
Records, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Henceforth cited
in the text as Gotlieb. Walker names 1872 as the founding date, but the archives indicate that
the action of trustees was taken on June 17, 1873, and the school opened the following
October at 18 Beacon Street, Boston.
10. “Fourth Annual Report of the President of Boston University” 1876–1877 (Gotlieb).
Bell’s father and grandfather had also been teachers of elocution.
11. “The School of Oratory,” Boston Evening Transcript (May 16, 1879) (Gotlieb).
12. Monroe was serving as the “superintendent of ‘vocal culture’” for the Boston area
school system. “The Late Professor Monroe,” Boston Evening Transcript (July 24, 1879)
(Gotlieb).
13. The “Sixth Annual Report of the President of Boston University” indicates that of
the 77 students in 1876–1877, there were 27 teachers, 13 clergymen, 7 teachers of the deaf, 6
public readers/actors, 4 lawyers, 2 lecturers, and 18 studying “personal culture” (Gotlieb).
14. Kathleen Kilgore, Transformations: A History of Boston University (Boston: Trustees
of BU, 1991), 70. Henceforth cited in the text as Transformations. According to Kilgore,
Baright had previously established a Boston University Summer School of Oratory on
Martha’s Vineyard, a program that probably emphasized self-cultivation. Walker does not
mention Baright’s role as Monroe’s assistant or the dissolution of the School of Oratory but
claims that Curry assumed Monroe’s duties and merged Baright’s school with his
(Expressionism 66). The archives indicate that she was the founder and first “principal” of
the Boston School of Elocution and Expression.
15. The New York School of Expression Prospectus lists both Baright and Curry as among
Stebbins’s renowned students (NY School 27).
16. In 1943, the institution was renamed Curry College and still operates in Milton,
Massachusetts. A brief history of Baright and Curry is published on the Curry College Web
site, but Delsarte is not mentioned. See www.curry.edu/About+Us/Currys+Legacy/.
17. Delsarte defined speech as the language of mind, song as the language of love and life,
and gesture as the language of the soul in his “Address before the Philotechnic Society of
Paris”; see Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed (New York: Edgar
S. Werner, 1902), 65–67.
18. Curry, Foundations of Expression (Boston: Expression, 1920), xiv, 10. Henceforth
cited in the text as Foundations.
19. “The School of Elocution and Expression” clipping in Gotlieb.
20. Curry, Classic Selections from the Best Authors (Boston: Expression, 1888), v.
21. Curry, Imagination and Dramatic Instinct (Boston: Expression, 1896), 255–256.
22. As Julia Walker points out, this aspect of Curry’s approach to literary analysis antic-
ipates the New Critics, although New Critical approaches were not attuned to subjective
impressions or recitations (Expressionism 68). Walker does not discuss the significance of
the dramatic monologue to Curry’s thought.
23. Basing her analysis primarily on Curry’s The Province of Expression (1891), Walker
suggests that he differed from those interpreters of Delsarte who claimed that gesture was
284 NOT ES TO PAG ES 106– 1 1 0
more important than speech. Curry generally insists that all three languages are necessary
for expression, but his later book on the dramatic monologue focuses more on gesture.
Walker also claims that Curry is “mostly secular” while Delsarte is “mystical,” a surprising
distinction, given that Curry was a Methodist minister and taught for seminaries including
Harvard’s (Expressionism 69).
24. The publication of Curry’s book in 1908 preceded the publication of Saussure’s Course
in General Linguistics (1910–1911), reconstructed by his students. Of course, Saussure’s theories
were circulating earlier, and regardless of whether Curry had access to them, his discussion of
language as a symbolic system suggests that there was fertile ground for such ideas among
critics interested in recitation and performance-oriented approaches to literature.
25. For a detailed discussion of the Chautauqua phenomenon, see Charlotte M. Canning’s
The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2005).
26. Curry, Spoken English (Boston: Expression, 1913), 7.
27. A Delsartean Scrap-book (New York: Lovell, 1891) collects reviews and articles from
Hovey’s London years and claims that she was admired by Felix Moscheles and Robert
Browning, among others.
28. Josephine Johnson, “The Music of Speech: Florence Farr and W. B. Yeats,” Text and
Performance Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1981): 56–65. Henceforth cited in the text as “Music.”
29. Yeats discussed their experiments in his “Speaking to the Psaltery” (1907), first pub-
lished in the Monthly Review and reprinted in Essays and Introductions (New York:
Macmillan, 1961). Yeats is an important precedent for transnational cultures of recitation,
but I do not discuss his work in detail here, choosing to focus on poets whose interest in
recitation has been overlooked and who entered the modernist scene of poetry at the height
of Delsartean cultures of recitation.
30. Florence Farr, The Music of Speech (London: Elkin Mathews, 1909).
31. “How to Practise Reading Aloud,” unattributed column in The Phonetic Journal in
Pitman’s Journal of Commercial Education 56 by Sir Isaac Pitman (London: Pitman & Sons,
1897), 129.
32. Similar class anxieties are evident in Samuel Silas Curry’s link between speech and
character in Spoken English: “To improve spoken English the teacher must, therefore, awaken
the student to think and to feel” (6).
33. Lady Margaret Sackville, “The Art of Speaking Verse,” published in the Poetical
Gazette (September 1912): 454.
34. Morrisson emphasizes the progressive and modernist Monro who used the Poetry
Society to advance his own goals, but Monro also marginalized some women modernists,
as Diana Collecott reveals in “‘Another Bloomsbury’: Women’s Networks in Literary London
during World War I,” in Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links, Europe-America, 1890–
1939, ed. Marina Camboni (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 59–78. Henceforth
cited in the text as “Another Bloomsbury.” I view Monro as a figure with both conservative
and progressive tendencies, gender biases, and a capacity to enthusiastically support male
and female modernists.
35. Morrisson writes, “Monro’s critical practice of ‘massing . . . quotations’ was an
extension of verse-performance commonplaces, but it will also look somewhat familiar to
readers of The Waste Land, or Pound’s Cantos. The Cantos are impersonal in that there is no
consistent single lyric voice at the center of each poem” (“Pure Voice” 42).
36. Alida Klementaski Monro, “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir,” in Collected Poems of

Charlotte Mew (London: Duckworth, 1953), vii–viii. Henceforth cited in the text as
“Memoir.”
37. Morrisson does not mention Klementaski Monro’s role in organizing the book-
shop’s readings and other events. Collecott claims that she “was vital to a cultural
development which coincided with a dynamic shift from Victorian rules of elocution to the
modern art of verse speaking, then being encouraged by the newly-founded Poetry Society
and brought into the curriculum by London University and the Royal Schools of Speech
and Drama” (“Another Bloomsbury” 67).
38. Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), claims that Mew’s and H.D.’s “concern with the performative aspect of language as a
basis for poetry carries forward the Swinburne/Wilde/Yeats tradition and contrasts strongly
with the formalism of some male modernists for whom, as for Derrida, the written text
prevails over the spoken word” (166). Collecott contrasts Mew’s dramatic monologues with
the “artifice of Pound’s or Eliot’s personae,” but this distinction overlooks the fact that all
present speakers who interrogate artifice, and all are interested in cultures of recitation,
which Collecott does not detail.
39. Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle’s important A History of Twentieth-Century British
Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) introduces the dramatic
monologues of Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Anna Wickham but does not position
these writers within cultures of recitation. Dowson and Entwistle adhere to many of the
generic assumptions I trouble, such as ideas that the dramatic monologue invokes “the read-
er’s sympathy and judgment,” is “not linguistically avant-garde,” and should be read bio-
graphically to determine which elements of the poem are “a cathartic evasion of the poet’s
condition” and which “can be directly construed with biographical details” (71). Henceforth
cited in the text as History. Laura Severin’s Poetry off the Page: Twentieth-Century British
Women Poets in Performance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004) describes the significance of
performance to women poets, but in examining the long twentieth century, she does not
consider modernist cultures of recitation. Henceforth cited in the text as Poetry off.
40. Monro and Alida Klementaski were married in 1920, although biographies suggest
that they lived separately due to Monro’s homosexuality. See Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte
Mew and Her Friends (London: Addison-Wesley, 1984), 147. Henceforth cited in the text as
Friends.
41. In a letter to Catherine Dawson Scott (June 26, 1913).
42. Hardy admired Mew’s work, and the two became friends. See Jeredith Merrin, “The
Ballad of Charlotte Mew,” Modern Philology (1997), 208.
43. Charlotte Mew: Complete Poems, ed. John Newton (London: Penguin, 2000), 17.
Henceforth cited in the text as Mew.
44. Laura Severin’s provocative reading suggests that these activities are “a parody of
middle-class women’s pointless domestic arts like embroidery” (Poetry off 25). Yet, it is the
fairies and not the women that “twine twigs,” and the domestic arts (which are certainly not
all pointless) are not the focus of the poem’s complex gender critique.
45. Severin claims, “The desire for women briefly flickers in the last lines of ‘The
Farmer’s Bride,’ where it is a woman poet impersonating a man who claims, ‘Oh! My
God! . . . ’ But such love sputters out since it can only be figured in terms of heterosexual
286 NOT ES TO PAG ES 113– 1 1 7
desire” (Poetry off 25). Severin claims that Mew generally critiques the Farmer’s attempt to
possess a woman but then impersonates him for a few lines to illustrate queer silencing.
Severin does not think Mew impersonates the aroused seventeen-year-old boy in “Fête” but
instead “used a male speaker’s limited perception . . . to expose a woman’s unacknowledged
complexity” (Poetry off 18). This inconsistent coupling of Mew and her speakers demon-
strates a pitfall of biographical readings of dramatic monologues present since the Victorian
period.
46. Reading the Changeling as a figure for lesbian desire, Severin claims that the child is
a “girl” because he or she exhibits a concern for physical appearance and “badness”
characteristic of the typical “Victorian girl” (“Poetry off ” 25). Yet, the Changeling is not typ-
ical in any other way.
47. Severin claims that Mew declined to read at the Poetry Bookshop as “an extremely
elegant form of non-performance” that symbolized lesbian silencing (Poetry off 10, 22–23).
There is no evidence for this in Klementaski Monro’s memoir or the letters, and the other
writers included on the program for November 23 (such as James Joyce) were not all reading
or even present.
48. Marjorie Watts, Mrs Sappho: The Life of C. A. Dawson Scott (London: Duckworth,
1987), 56. Henceforth cited in the text as Sappho.
49. Quoted in Mary Celine Davidow’s “Charlotte Mew: Biography and Criticism,”
unpublished dissertation, Brown University (1960), 310. Henceforth cited in the text as
“Biography.”
50. Attesting to Mew’s interest in dramatic genres, she also wrote a play in Cornish
dialect, The China Bowl, which was later adapted for radio performance.
51. British husbands and wives did not have equal rights to divorce until the 1923
Matrimonial Causes Act. Mew’s poem would have been considered in relation to contem-
poraneous debates on divorce, although she provides distance with a French-sounding
name and references to Catholicism and Aix.
52. Dora Marsden’s feminist publication The New Freewoman: An Individualist Review
(1913) was renamed The Egoist in 1914 at Ezra Pound’s instigation. The anecdote indicates a
convergence of feminist and individualist ideals, as well as the possibility that individualism
could eclipse feminist projects. See Bruce Clarke, “Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound: The New
Freewoman and ‘The Serious Artist,’” Contemporary Literature 31 (1992): 91–112.
53. H.D., “Review of The Farmer’s Bride” in Egoist 3, no. 9 (September 1916): 135.
Henceforth abbreviated in the text as FB. Robert Duncan, revealing his own interest in the
dramatic monologue, discusses H.D.’s review of The Farmer’s Bride in his “Two Chapters
from H.D,” TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968): 86.
54. Ezra Pound, “Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot” (Review of Prufrock and Other
Observations), Egoist 4, no. 5 (1917): 72–74, 73.
55. Collecott claims that Pound’s review “reasserted the male line” (“Another
Bloomsbury” 65), but H.D. had included Huefer and Frost in her list of poets who had writ-
ten successful dramatic monologues. She also reviewed John Gould Fletcher, as well as Mew
and Marianne Moore in the Egoist, although Collecott only mentions reviews of women
writers.
56. See Newton’s introduction to Charlotte Mew: Selected Poems for lists of lines Eliot
may have derived from Mew.
57. Eliot delivered “The Music of Poetry” (1942) as the W. P. Ker Lecture for the University
of Glasgow Press. In Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 112. Henceforth
cited in the text as Eliot Selected.
58. Morrisson states, “Much of Eliot’s first collection of criticism, The Sacred Wood,
reads like a synthesis of the interests and ideals of the verse-recitation movement” (“Pure
Voice” 41).
59. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1970), 204.
60. Popular manifestations of the pursuit of “personality” included Henrietta Hovey’s
“Delsartean personal analysis,” intended to clarify the relationship between “Dress and
Personality” to wealthy patrons (Scrapbook 120). “Dress and Personality” by Emma Moffett
Tyng, originally published in Harper’s Bazaar.
61. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in the Egoist (1919).
62. See my discussion in the introduction and Jonathan Culler’s recent critique of the
practice in “Why Lyric,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 201–206. Herbert F. Tucker presents a more
detailed analysis of the New Critical practice of reading any poem as a monologue in
“Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New
Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hôsek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1985): 226–243.
63. Eliot served as an extension lecturer for Oxford and the University of London from
1916 to 1919. See Gail McDonald, Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American
University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56–57.
64. George Santayana, “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” in Interpretations of
Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner, 1900), 263. Henceforth cited in the text as
“Elements.” Walker quotes the passage and contextualizes the term Expression with which it
begins: “Indeed, the movement was so popular, its influence so pervasive, its precepts so
widely accepted that it could be referenced with barely a mention of its name” (Expressionism
76, 72).
65. Walker also notes that critics have pointed to Nietzsche, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(“framework of objectivity”), and Washington Allston’s influence on the idea and term
(Expressionism 77).
66. First published as “Hamlet and His Problems” in Athenaeum (September 26, 1919).
67. Robert Browning, “Essay on Shelley,” in Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed.
Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), 572.
68. Robert Langbaum, Poetry of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 79.
69. In The Cambridge Intro to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), John Xiros Cooper recognizes that the dramatic monologue “can illuminate his
[Eliot’s] literary critical interest in the poetry of impersonality,” but Cooper defines the
form as a “mask” for the poet and follows Langbaum’s formula of a “tension between
sympathy and moral judgment”: “The need to invent personas and masks is tempered by
the horror of how others might see us or might see past our facades, whether in judgment
or sympathy, and, for Eliot, sympathy was the greater horror, even more than that of
being judged” (50).
70. Ezra Pound, “T.S. Eliot,” in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, CT: New
Directions, 1954). Henceforth cited in the text as Pound Essays.
288 NOT ES TO PAG ES 12 2– 1 2 6
71. Patrick Deane, “David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and the Modernist Unfinished,” Renascence
47, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 75–88. See also Vincent Sherry, “David Jones and Literary Modernism:
The Use of the Dramatic Monologue,” in Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William
Blissett, ed. H. B. de Groot and A. Leggatt (Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 1990),
241–250; and Antony Easthope “‘The Waste Land’ as a Dramatic Monologue,” English
Studies 4 (1983): 330–344.
72. References are to line number in T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi,” in The Waste
Land and Other Poems, ed. Helen Vendler (New York: Signet, 1998), 77–79. Henceforth cited
in the text as “Magi.”
73. Melissa A. Eiles, “The Infirm Glory of the Positive Hour: Re-Conversion in Ash-
Wednesday,” in T. S. Eliot: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. Tapan Kumar Basu (Delhi,
India: Pencraft, 1993), 118–131. In T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984), Ronald Bush reads the poem as an account of the time
Eliot’s “old ways of thinking and feeling seemed irrevocably alien and his new life as a
Christian existed more in intention than fact” (127). He includes typology among “three
realms of reference—the fictional frame, the correspondences of Christian typology, and
his own deepest and most troublesome feelings” (128).
74. Jane Ellen Harrison discusses connections between Christian and classical myth and
theater in Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Henry Holt, 1913).
75. Harriet Davidson, T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1985), 40. Dominic Manganiello’s T. S. Eliot and Dante (London: Macmillan,
1989) does not deal centrally with the fourfold hermeneutic Dante described in his Letter to
Can Grande.
76. Eliot’s “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” was first published in Dial (November 1923).
Although the review preceded his essay on Dante, Eliot had been engaged with The Divine
Comedy for years.
77. Many of Pound’s contributions to literary magazines, including “Irony, Laforgue, and
Some Satire” in Poetry 11, no. 2 (November 1917), 98, are accessible through the Modernist
Journals Project. See www.modjourn.org. This essay is reprinted in Pound Essays, 283.
78. Mary Baker Eddy was the founder of the Christian Science movement, and Dr. John
Alexander Dowie, another Christian Scientist, established the city of Zion in 1900 near
Chicago. Anthony Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
79. After leaving London, Pound continued to share his voice in the infamous Rome
Radio Broadcasts. Daniel Tiffany’s Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra
Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) presents them as a “culmination of
the radiology of the Image, a discourse of radio pictures” that counteracts the critical
emphasis on the visual in Imagism (25).
80. Julia Walker suggests that Pound rejected expression, citing his critique of “the
cosmic poet” and demand for the “exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely
decorative word” in the Introductions to the Imagist anthologies (1913 and 1915), but neither
statement definitely references expression. Concluding her brief reflections on Eliot and
Pound, she writes that “a whole new generation of poets developed their craft in response”
to debates in expressive culture (Expressionism 260, n. 28). I absolutely agree, but this
response was complex and ambivalent, and claims about entire generations must consider
other poets in addition to Eliot and Pound.
81. Quoted by Leon Surette in “Ezra Pound, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey,” Canadian
Poetry 43 (Fall–Winter 1998): 44–69. Henceforth cited in the text as “Carman, Hovey.”
82. For a detailed biography and study of Carman’s work, see Gerald Lynch, ed., Bliss
Carman: A Reappraisal (Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990).
83. Bliss Carman, Address at Moonshine (New York: Tabard Press, 1911), 16–17. Henceforth
cited in the text as Moonshine.
84. Delsarte’s “laws” differed according to the teacher, but Hovey’s articulation is similar
to Genevieve Stebbins’s “law of sequence” and “law of evolution” (Delsarte Expression
260–263).
85. Surette recognizes that Carman and Hovey were influenced by Delsartism, but,
deriving his understanding of the movement primarily from their writings, he mischarac-
terizes Hovey’s comments on Vagabandia in 1897 as a “Delsartean mode”: “Poetry is thought
to have something to say to strong men in the midst of the battle of life and not to be an
elegant amusement for schoolgirls and dilettanti. More stress is laid on the masculine
element in thought and life, and the effort is to be downright and masculine.” Hovey’s dis-
missive comment about “schoolgirls” is part of his effort to insist on the masculine applica-
tions of Delsartism in spite of its appeal to women.
86. Richard Hovey, Songs from Vagabondia (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1894), 54.
87. Ezra Pound, Personae, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New
Directions, 1990), 32–33. Henceforth cited in the text as Personae.
88. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, eds., The New Poetry: An Anthology
(New York: Macmillan, 1917).
89. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1993), 495.
90. Compare Genevieve Stebbins’s definition of statue posing as the “spiritual aspira-
tion toward a superior and definite type of beauty in which lives and moves a human soul”
in Delsarte System of Expression (New York: Werner, 1902), 461. Pound’s similar statement is
cited in Surette from Pound’s 1907 letter to Viola Jordan.
91. The British press compared famous aesthete Oscar Wilde to the Delsartean Edmund
Russell, Henrietta Hovey’s husband prior to Richard Hovey.
92. Morrisson quotes a letter from Ezra Pound to Monro, November 26, 1920, Harold
Monro Papers, UCLA. Pound’s epithet refers to the Georgian poets John Drinkwater,
Lascelles Abercrombie, and Wilfred Gibson.
93. Pound’s “Mr. Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse,” first published in Poetry 4.
no. 3 (June 1914): 111–120. Hueffer credited Christina Rossetti’s ideas about music, prose,
and verse, but with characteristic misogyny, Pound criticizes “Christina” for a “certain lim-
pidity” and claims that she “found” her ideas in Arnaut Daniel, Guido, and Dante (Pound
Essays 272). Pound met Farr through Yeats, and she contributed to his interest in trouba-
dours and provided the inspiration for “Portrait D’Une Femme” and Canto XXVIII
(“Music” 63).
94. Eliot similarly suggests that “a ‘musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern
of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it,
and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one. And if you object that it is only the
pure sound, apart from the sense, to which the adjective ‘musical’ can be rightly applied,
I can only reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an abstrac-
tion from the poem as is the sense.” (Eliot Selected 113).
290 NOT ES TO PAG ES 129 –13 4
95. See Daniel Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and
Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) for a fascinating discussion of Le
testament (141–167). Henceforth cited in the text as Untwisting.
96. The opera received a BBC performance in 1931 (Untwisting 142).
97. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970), 85.
98. In The Classics in Paraphrase (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988),
Daniel M. Hooley provides an excellent account of debates about the status of “Propertius”
as a translation or an original poem and concludes that the poem must be understood as “a
remarkably (and remarkable) free translation” (29). Reading Pound’s responses to his critics
and interpreting his work with the Latin text, he claims that Pound’s “theory” of translation
“is phrased in personal terms and based in cooperation, even collaboration” (31).
99. A. David Moody’s Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 353. Henceforth cited in the text as Pound Poet. Still attacking Pound in Horizon
(January 1961), Gilbert Highet claims, “His Homage to Sextus Propertius is an insult both to
poetry and to scholarship, and to common sense. . . . The misinterpretation of Propertius’
words is disgusting but explicable and even, from some points of view, amusing. What is
more disgusting is that Pound, himself a poet, should have so degraded the sensitive
thoughts of another poet. . . . This is not a mistake in language. It is a fundamental failure of
taste.” Quoted by J. P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative
Translation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), viii–ix.
100. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, “Introduction,” in Amy Lowell, American
Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), xiv.
101. Pound, Selected Letters 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 322.
102. Amy Lowell, Men, Women, and Ghosts (New York: Macmillan, 1916), x. Henceforth
cited in the text as Men.
103. Pound called Lowell a “hippopoetess,” and Eliot referred to her as a “demon sales-
woman” of poetry. This and many other gender-oriented battles are described in Sandra
M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 66.
104. Amy Lowell, “Poetry as a Spoken Art” [1916], in On Poetry and Poets (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1930). Henceforth cited in the text as “Spoken.”
105. Simone Knewitz discusses Lowell in relation to expressive culture in “Spoken Art:
Amy Lowell’s Dramatic Poetry and Early Twentieth-Century Expressive Culture,” Current
Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies 9 (2008). http://www-copas.uni-regensburg.
de/articles/issue_09/09_06_text_knewitz.php Knewitz suggestively claims that Lowell
“operates between different, opposing camps of modern(ist) culture—‘high modernism’
on the one hand, and the so-called ‘expressive culture movement.’ ” References to
“opposing camps” in modernism tend to exaggerate oppositions; Knewitz defines high
modernism by Eliot’s theory of impersonality and links “expressive culture” to the idea
that “meaning cannot be reduced to verbal discourse.” As I have shown, Eliot, as well as
Pound and Mew, agreed with Lowell and expression that sound contributes to the mean-
ings of a poem.
106. S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 280.
107. Dismissing the poem as a “melodramatic failure” but attesting to the power of her
performance, Richard Benvenuto claims that “it made for good theatrics when Lowell read
it aloud.” See Amy Lowell (Boston: Twayne, 1985).
NOTES TO PAGES 13 4–1 40 291
108. Andrew Thacker suggests that Farr’s tours may have influenced Lowell’s innova-
tions in polyphonic prose, but he does not discuss Lowell’s own performances. Although
there is no definitive evidence that Lowell knew of Farr’s work, she was probably aware of
Farr’s experiments with Yeats, given her several visits to London and correspondence with
British modernists. See Thacker, “Unrelated Beauty: Amy Lowell, Polyphonic Prose, and the
Imagist City,” in Amy Lowell, American Modern, ed. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 106–107. Henceforth abbreviated as
“Unrelated.”
109. Lowell’s “A Letter from London” was first published in the Little Review (October
1914), 6–9. Reprinted in Complete Poetical Works and Selected Writings, ed. Naoki Onishi
(Kyoto, Japan: Eureka, 2007).
110. Lowell’s Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1917), vii, was
based on lectures she gave at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in December 1917.
111. Lowell does not comment on gesture, so crucial to Curry, and she may have thought
gesture would lead to (over)acting.
112. The visual and auditory imaginations Lowell discusses were also elements of
Vernon Lee’s theory of a kinesthetic faculty enabling bodies to respond to art.
113. See Derek Attridge’s Peculiar Language (London: Routledge, 2004).
114. Lowell’s “The Overgrown Pasture” includes monologues in rural New England
dialect and a dialogue between two impoverished and hopeless young lovers in “The
Grocery” outside Boston (Men 275). Munich and Bradshaw’s Amy Lowell, American Modern
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), provides important new criticism of
Lowell, yet as they recognize, “Some of her most popular poems were dramatic monologues
and long narrative poems, genres not touched on in this collection or included in our
volume, The Selected Poems of Amy Lowell.” (2003), xv. They justify the omission of her
monologues by claiming they are too difficult for “readers unfamiliar with the New England
accent of almost a century ago” (xv). Yet, dialect was crucial to her aesthetic project, partic-
ularly her attempts to notate speaking voices.
115. For an example of biographical readings, see Jean Gould, Amy: The World of Amy
Lowell and the Imagist Movement (New York: Dodd, 1975), 81.
116. Amy Lowell, Can Grande’s Castle (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1918), xii–xiii.
Henceforth cited in the text as Can Grande.
117. Bliss Perry’s A Study of Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920) provides insight
into assumptions about “ornamental prose” in the period (99–100).
118. Amy Lowell, “Why We Should Read Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 7.
119. The second poem, “Guns as Keys: And the Great Gate Swings,” records Commodore
Perry’s so-called opening of Japan and represents the clash of cultures by juxtaposing
“American” polyphonic prose with free verse and orientalist imagery to describe “old Japan.”
For a discussion of Lowell’s engagements with Japan, see Mari Yoshihara’s “Putting on the
Voice of the Orient: Gender and Sexuality in Amy Lowell’s ‘Asian’ Poetry,” in Amy Lowell,
American Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 120–135. Thacker
describes the third poem, “Hedge Island,” as “a faintly bizarre poem, ironically praising the
British postal system while seeming to criticize England for being ‘trussed and knotted’ in
tradition and antiquity” (“Unrelated” 114).
292 NOT ES TO PAG ES 1 4 1–1 4 5
120. Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan,
1917), 240.
121. The three early cantos were published in Poetry (June–August, 1917). Reprinted in
Personae (230).
122. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995), 28.
123. Interesting feminist monologues were published by British poets including Stella
Gibbons (“Artemis Married”), Ada Jackson (“The Farmer’s Mother”), and Sylvia
Townsend Warner (“The Rival”). Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle discuss some of these
women writers of dramatic monologues in A History of Twentieth-Century British
Women’s Poetry. Yet, their conclusions about the form demonstrate assumptions about
literary “high modernism” and its gendering that this chapter questions: “They [dramatic
monologues] fracture the authority of the masculine Romantic unitary lyric ‘I’ while
maintaining the self as a literary source; although not yielding to the antireferential
impersonality demanded by high modernism, the monologues allow for self-concealment
for the poet” (History 84).
124. See Laura Severin’s “Acting ‘Out’” in Poetry off the Page for a discussion of Sitwell’s
performances during World War II. Severin argues that Mew, Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell,
Stevie Smith, Liz Lochhead, and Jackie Kay constitute an alternative radical tradition of
performance poetry. The book innovatively approaches formal flexibility and interdisci-
plinary cultural productions, yet its claims for a distinct tradition ignore the specificities of
period, like modernist cultures of recitation, which influenced the poetry of both men and
women.
125. The letter from April 21, 1943, is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public
Library. See Diana Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 235–236, for a description of the reading.
126. Bryher, Days of Mars: A Memoir 1940–1946 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 81, 88.
Bryher was the pseudonym of Annie Winifred Ellerman, the British writer and financier of
modernism. John Lehmann described Eliot as “wearily benign and noble” next to Sitwell,
“dominating as a Roman emperor” (Poetry off 50).
chapter 4
1. Isadora Duncan, My Life [1927] (New York: Liveright, 1995), 123. Henceforth abbre-
viated in the text as ML.
2. “Muse of Modernism” was the title of a 1998 exhibition at the Georgia Museum of
Art, and the web advertisement (home.earthlink.net/~cultureom/Isadora.htm) quotes the
sculptor Laredo Taft describing Duncan as “Poetry personified. She is not the Tenth Muse
but all nine Muses in one—and painting and sculpture as well.” Similarly, Emile-Antoine
Bourdelle describes Duncan’s influence on his design of the bas-relief on the façade of
Paris’s Theatre des Champs-Elysees: “All my muses in the theater are movements seized
during Isadora’s flight; she was my principal source.” Duncan’s image appeared in artworks
by John Butler Yeats, Abraham Walkowitz, John Sloan, José Clará, Auguste Rodin, and
Gordon Craig, among others. See Allan Ross Macdougall’s “Isadora Duncan and the Artists,”
in Isadora Duncan, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Hold, 1947), 35–63. Henceforth cited in the
text as “Artists.”
NOTES TO PAGE 1 45 293
3. I studied Duncan’s technique and repertory with the Isadora Duncan Dance
Foundation (IDDF) based in New York City. IDDF and its resident Isadora Duncan
Dance Company, directed by Lori Belilove with Associate Director Cherlyn Smith, establish
Duncan lineage predominantly through Hortense Kooluris and Julia Levien, who studied
with Irma Duncan, one of Duncan’s original students from the Grünewald School.
4. Ann Daly’s richly documented Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) locates Duncan in an American context, dis-
cusses accounts of contemporaneous critics, and analyzes the ideological implications of her
art but does not consider her in the context of international modernism. Henceforth cited in
the text as Done. Kimerer L. LaMothe’s Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham,
and the Revaluation of Christian Values (New York: Palgrave, 2006) provides a useful close
reading of Duncan’s discussion of aesthetics and spirituality in relation to Nietzsche’s cri-
tique of Christianity; she does not analyze Duncan’s dances or how she choreographed his
philosophical principles. Henceforth cited in the text as Nietzsche’s Dancers.
5. Isadora Duncan, “The Dance of the Future” [1909], in Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon
Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1969), 62. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as AD.
6. Duncan identifies features of her innovative form in her autobiography: “How
strange it must have been to those dilettantes of the gorgeous ballet with its lavish decora-
tions and scenery, to watch a young girl, clothed in a tunic of cobweb, appear and dance
before a simple blue curtain to the music of Chopin” (ML 119).
7. On November 10, 1909, Carl Van Vechten, reviewer for the New York Times, deemed
Duncan’s use of “music never designed for dancing” a “sacrilege,” and a week later, he pro-
tested Duncan’s “perverted use of the Seventh Symphony” of Beethoven. By July 1917, how-
ever, Van Vechten applauded Duncan’s new experiments: “More than the dance this new art
partakes of the fluid and unending quality of music. Like any other new art it is not to be
understood at first and I confess in the beginning it said nothing to me.” See Van Vechten,
“The New Isadora” [1914] in Isadora Duncan, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Holt, 1947), 19, 32.
Henceforth cited in the text as “New.”
8. In a BBC radio talk of May 31, 1952, Craig described Duncan’s curtains the first time
he saw her dance in 1904: “She came through some small curtains which were not much
taller than herself. . . . She was speaking in her own language, not echoing any ballet master,
and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before.” Printed in Mindy
Aloff, Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern
Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 22. In Edward Gordon Craig: A Vision of
Theatre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1998), Christopher Innes claims that Craig
admired the curtains but then “replaced her modest gray curtains, which were only five-
and-a-half feet high and hung on rods from a row of short wooden pilasters to form an
enclosed dancing area, with great blue drapes the height of the stage” (115–116).
9. See Martin Puchner’s “The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-
Guard of Modernism,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 56. Franklin Rosemont has conveniently col-
lected many of the speeches in Isadora Speaks (Chicago: Kerr, 1994). Henceforth cited in the
text as Speaks.
10. Duncan’s biography has been the subject of films such as Ken Russell’s Isadora
Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1966) and Karel Reisz’s The Loves of Isadora (1968),
294 NOT ES TO PAG ES 1 4 5–1 4 7
starring Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave reprised her representation of Duncan in Martin

Sheman’s When She Danced (New York: Samuel French, 1990), a play that depicts an aging,
overweight dancer with an addiction to expensive champagne.
11. She had previously performed several unsatisfying roles in Augustin Daly’s produc-
tions of Midsummer Night’s Dream and Miss Pygmalion. The latter was undoubtedly influ-
enced by J. J. Rousseau’s monodrama Pygmalion. The best source for Duncan’s biography is
Peter Kurth’s diligently documented Isadora: A Sensational Life (Boston: Little, Brown,
2001). Henceforth cited in the text as Sensational.
12. Deirdre was born to Duncan and Gordon Craig, and Paris Singer, of the Singer sew-
ing machine family, was the father of Patrick.
13. The New York Times article “Isadora Duncan and Poet Husband Detained on Liner”
(p. 1, col. 5), published October 2, 1922, reports that Duncan and Sergei Esenin, whom she
married in 1922, were detained and questioned by the U.S. State Department about her
“Soviet Proclivities,” along with such details that Esenin “powders his hair.”
14. A respondent at an Isadora Duncan Dance Company performance commented, “She
hated modernity, and it destroyed her.” Morrocco’s Studio, New York City, June 19, 2005.
15. Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 109. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as WMP.
16. Deborah Jowitt’s groundbreaking study of modern dance, Time and the Dancing
Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), claims, “Before the onslaught of the modernists,
Duncanism without Duncan, as a theater art, retreated into the backwater.” (94). Henceforth
cited in the text as Time.
17. Isadora Duncan, “The Dance of the Future” [1909], in Art of the Dance (AD 62).
18. Isadora Duncan, “I See America Dancing” [1927], in Art of the Dance (AD 48).
19. F. T. Marinetti and C. R. W. Nevinson’s “A Futurist Manifesto: Vital English Art” was
first published in the Observer (June 7, 1914). They later performed the manifesto as a part
of their lectures on “Vital English Art” at the Doré Gallery, London (June 12, 1914). Reprinted
in C. R. W. Nevinson’s Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 79.
20. Felicia McCarren’s excellent study Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) also examines the
“motor” as an analogy for dance that embodies “the natural force that technology harnesses”
(2): “The ‘dancing machine’ elaborated in the first decades of the twentieth century engages
two very different kinds of energy, or styles of dance: the first, dancing that looks mechanical,
like machines; and the second, dancing that works like a machine, producing the image of a
force of nature, a superhuman functioning” (3). McCarren points to Duncan’s interest in the
motor, but she argues that “Isadora’s dance embodies a nineteenth-century view of the
machine, the human motor” and “passed like the dream of another time” (67–68). While
I appreciate McCarren’s emphasis on continuities, I argue that Duncan’s view of the “motor”
was far more central to modernism than she implies, and the antimodern “dream of another
time” was very much of the modernist moment. Henceforth cited in the text as Machines.
21. Isadora Duncan, “The Philosopher’s Stone of Dancing” [1920], in Art of the Dance
(AD 52).
22. Mark Franko questions this narrative in Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), ix. Henceforth cited in the text as Dancing
Modernism.
NOTES TO PAGES 1 4 7–150 295
23. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in the Egoist (1919).
24. F. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” [1917], in Marinetti: Selected
Writings, ed. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1972), 137. Henceforth cited in the text as Marinetti.
25. Ann Daly appears to reject the self when she claims that Duncan’s dance was not
“mere self-expression,” but Duncan combines selfhood with universal categories (Done
136). Daly reveals a common prejudice emerging from the modern dance master narrative’s
assumption that self-expression must be abandoned to achieve more innovative, deperson-
alized choreographies.
26. Rainer’s 1963 piece, We Shall Run, choreographed with the Judson Church
Movement in New York, was composed entirely of basic running motions. Rainer recalls
joking with Steve Paxton that she “invented running,” while he “invented walking” with his
contemporaneous choreography of A Satisfying Lover, featuring the random entrances
and exits of forty-two dancer-walkers. Yvonne Rainer, “Feelings Are Facts,” a lecture for the
Contemporary Artists Series at the University of California at San Diego (May 19, 2005).
27. See Julie Townsend’s excellent work on Fuller in The Choreography of Modernism in
France: La Danseuse 1830–1930 (Oxford: Legenda, 2010).
28. Dance historians usually designate the first ballet as the Ballet Comique de la Reine,
produced by Henry III of France in 1581. Jean Georges Noverre initiated widespread reforms
in the second half of the eighteenth century with his promotion of ballet d’action, but the
technique, system of instruction, and generalized form of the narrative ballet were codified
with European Romanticism during what is often called “The Golden Age of Ballet” (1815–
1870). See Richard Kraus, Sarah Chapman Hilsendager, and Brenda Dixon, History of the
Dance in Art and Education, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991). Henceforth
cited in the text as History.
29. Pavlova expressed admiration for Duncan, but in an interview in Musical America
she insisted on the superiority of her ballet form: “You see, she never has to get up and
dance on her toes as I do” (Done 75).
30. Shaw, Up to Now (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 59. Shaw and Gordon
Craig collaborated on a production of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas in 1900. Craig invited
Shaw to conduct for Duncan’s tour, which featured music by Gluck, Schubert, Rameau, and
Couperin (58). Among the interesting anecdotes from the tour in Shaw’s autobiography was
that August Strindberg, who invited Shaw and Craig to dine with him, was too “afraid” of
Duncan to meet her (76). He also claims that Duncan’s great success in Europe was not
matched in London because “there was no sex appeal in Isadora’s dancing. That in itself is
new and strange, and the English public does not like anything new and strange” (72).
31. The reviewer’s association with Wagner is interesting, given that Duncan performed
at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth during the summer of 1904 and she shared Wagner’s aspi-
rations for a “total work of art.” For an innovative interpretation of the Gesamtkunstwerk
and the influence of the concept on modernist theater and postmodern culture, see Matthew
W. Smith’s Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007).
32. Anonymous Variety review (August 2, 1908), quoted in Done 107.
33. McCarren provides an analysis of Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Duncan in “Orta or
One Dancing,” of which she provocatively claims “like . . . Phydias’s frieze on the Elgin mar-
bles that Isadora took as her inspiration, Isadora becomes, in Stein’s portrait, a figure in
296 NOT ES TO PAG ES 150–1 53
motion who moves out, extends into the space of affirmation and existence” (Machines 87).
In spite of this reference to Phydias’s friezes, McCarren claims that Duncan’s dance “aban-
doned stillness and pose for ‘diversities of movement’” (Machine 70). The juxtaposition of
stillness and posing in her choreography revealed the diversity of her movements.
34. The letter of August 22, 1908, and the sonnet are published in Andrew J. Krivak’s
edition of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902–1912
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 151–152.
35. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New
Directions, 1970), 12. Henceforth cited in the text as Imaginations.
36. The 1908 tour featured several dance styles, but best remembered are the playful
nymphs of Water Study (Schubert waltz, 1900) and Narcissus (Chopin Op. 64 No. 2, 1900).
She also deployed narratives as indicated in the New York Times review, “Isadora Duncan in
Grecian Dances”: “Miss Duncan chose as the medium of her American debut the dances
and choruses from Gluck’s opera, ‘Iphigenie en Aulide’ (1774), which follows the story of the
daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra after the manner of Euripides’ play” (August 19,
1908, 7).
37. Shaemas O’Sheel, “Isadora Duncan, Priestess,” Poet Lore 21 (1910): 481. Henceforth
cited in the text as “Priestess.”
38. In Marc Pachter, ed., Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation 1776–1914
(Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1976), 267.
39. Duncan, “Emotional Expression,” The Director, March 1898, 109. The passage is
quoted in Fredrika Blair’s Isadora: Portrait of the Artist as a Woman (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1986), 17. Henceforth cited in the text as Portrait. On Duncan’s debt to Delsarte, see also
Kurth, Sensational (30) and Shawn, Every Movement (80).
40. François Delsarte’s “Address before the Philotechnic Society of Paris,” published in
Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression (New York: Werner, 1902), 63.
41. Ann Daly and Elizabeth Kendall understand American Delsartism as a trivial
popular movement against which Duncan rebelled. Nancy Chalfa Ruyter’s scholarship, as
described in my second chapter, reintroduced Delsartism to dance history but circum-
scribed its period to the 1890s. Her article “The Delsarte Heritage,” Dance Research 14, no. 1
(Summer 1996): 62–74, provides the most detailed account of the Delsartean ideas modern
dance inherited. Deborah Jowitt’s Time and the Dancing Image suggests, “It would have
been hard for a bright, serious young person with theatrical aspirations growing up in
America in the 1880’s and 1890’s not to have been influenced by Delsarte” (Time 78–79). Like
Ruyter, Jowitt does not discuss Delsartism’s influences on Duncan’s choreography and
dance technique.
42. Boynton’s memories of Duncan are published in Millicent Dillon, After Egypt:
Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt (New York: Dutton, 1990).
43. “Society News of Newport,” New York Times (November 16, 1898). Online Archive:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A05EED8103CE433A25755C1A96F9
C94699ED7CF.
44. Daly carefully analyzes many American cultural movements but claims that
Delsartean proponents of the “pose and gesture school,” such as Genevieve Stebbins and
Henrietta Hovey, taught “a series of rote exercises or a series of discrete poses: an updated
substitution for Victorian strictures” (Done 123–130).
45. See Joseph Roach’s The Player’s Passion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1993) for an excellent summary of Diderot and acting theory in relation to theories of
physiological and emotional processes. Henceforth cited in the text as Player’s.
46. Isadora Duncan, “Dancing in Relation to Religion and Love” [1927], in Art of the
Dance (AD 121).
47. H.D. mentions Duse in her film writing when she critiques the tendency of produc-
tions to make a leading lady “vulgar” or “commonplace” by forcing the “Bernhardts and the
Duses of the period to appear in crinoline when playing Phaedra.” See Close Up: Cinema
and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 113.
48. Franko describes this quote from Duncan’s autobiography as the “foundational nar-
rative of modern dance, its myth of origin” (Dancing Modernism 1).
49. A notebook from 1900–1903 survives in the Isadora Duncan Dance Collection at the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Other indications of Duncan’s study
habits are revealed by the transcription of a quote from Descartes (7) and letters to “my
[indecipherable word] most revered teachers Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel”
(59). Henceforth cited in the text as IDDCNY.
50. This entry from the IDDCNY Notebook, 1900–1903, is reprinted in Art of the Dance
(AD 131).
51. Sara Immerwahr, “Death and Tanagra Larnakes,” in The Ages of Homer, ed. Jane
B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 109–115.
52. Frequently taught in IDDF classes, Tanagra Figures is illustrated in Irma Duncan’s
The Technique of Isadora Duncan (New York: Dance Horizons, 1970).
53. Ted Shawn adopted this body position and technique in his choreography for
Gnossienne (Satie, 1919), another piece heavily influenced by statue posing (see figure 2.9).
54. Quoted at the Hirshborn Museum’s Rodin exhibit, Smithsonian Institute, Wash-
ington, DC.
55. Rodin’s statement is printed in a performance brochure titled Dionysian, which
Duncan distributed during her “Dionysian Season” at New York’s Century Theater in the
spring of 1915, the season H. T. Parker described as “amateurish” due to its inclusion of rec-
itations (IDDCNY). The brochure includes testimony from Rodin and other artists; quotes
Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, and the Bible; and prints some of Duncan’s own statements on
art. Henceforth cited in the text as Dionysian.
56. In a summary of Graham’s discoveries, Kraus, Hilsendager, and Dixon include
“spasm and resistance . . . she made the floor a part of gesture; invented many beautiful falls
and recoveries from the ground; she discovered a whole technique of balancing on bent
knees” (History 124). While Graham used these forms of movement more consistently in her
dance, Duncan employed them twenty years earlier in pieces like Furies and Revolutionary.
57. Julia Levien, repertory class, IDDF, New York (June 11, 2003).
58. In a personal communication, Lori Belilove stated that Duncan originally performed
The Three Graces and many other group pieces as solos but later revised them for her stu-
dents (October 12, 2003). In her autobiography, Duncan claims she responded to a 1904
invitation to dance Wagner’s Tannhäuser saying, “But, alone, what can I do? Nevertheless,
I will come, and I will try to give at least an indication of the lovely, soft, voluptuous move-
ments which I already see for the Three Graces” (ML 105).
298 NOT ES TO PAG ES 15 9 –1 63
59. She returned to ballet class, most notably, under the instruction of the Italian prima
ballerina Marie Bonfanti of “Black Crook” fame (Done 69).
60. Heinrich Schmidt, unpublished analysis of the Duncan-Haeckel correspondence,
“The Riddle of the Universe and the Dancer,” Folder 34, IDDCNY.
61. Daly discusses Duncan’s practice of defining her art against the “cheap” by identi-
fying with the upper class and Greeks, against the “profane” by using racist rhetoric to con-
trast her performances with African dancing, against the “mindless” by referencing great
thinkers, and against the “feminine” by choosing powerful male mentors (Done 17). These
patterns are evident but complicated in Duncan’s writing: her elitism (though not her rac-
ism) is troubled by her socialist ideals and schools for underprivileged children; she cele-
brates her version of the “feminine,” although it is not always the version most desired by
feminist critics.
62. Recapitulation theory suggests that the development of the individual embryo
(ontogeny) progresses through earlier evolutionary forms of adult species (phylogeny), and
for Haeckel, it also indicates the importance of individual spiritual development. Stephen
Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977) details the history
and significance of the theory of recapitulation and suggests that neoteny supports aspects
of the theory.
63. Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe [1900], trans. Joseph McCabe (New York:
Harper, 1902), 336. Henceforth cited in the text as Riddle.
64. Evolutionary biologists now often suggest that natural selection works at the level of
the gene, rather than the individual organism, but individualism was a feature of early evo-
lution theory and the late Victorian period more generally.
65. Whereas Haeckel highlighted the conflict between science and Christianity as evi-
dence for his religion of “monism,” Darwin claims, “I see no good reason why the views
given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone . . . it is just as noble a
conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-
development into other and needful forms.” Darwin also invokes a version of the will in his
reference to “self-development,” indicting the prevalence of such concepts in early evolu-
tion theory. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1964), 477.
66. According to Duncan, systems lack “all inspiration, all life. So, too, do those systems
of dancing that are only arranged gymnastics, only too logically understood (Dalcroze,
etc.)” (AD 53). For Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s system of music visualization through body
movement or “plastique animée,” see Selma Landen Odom’s “Delsartean Traces in Dalcroze
Eurhythmics,” in Essays on François Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal 23, ed. Nancy Lee
Chalfa Ruyter (2004/2005): 137–152; and Tamara Levitz’s “In the Footsteps of Eurydice:
Jaques-Dalcroze’s Staging of Gluck’s Orpheus und Eurydice in Hellerau Germany, 1912,” Echo
3, no. 2 (Fall 2001) and www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume3-issue2/levitz/levitz1.html.
67. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [1855–1892] (New York: Vintage/Library of America,
1992), 87. Henceforth cited in the text as Leaves.
68. After they were detained by immigration officials at Ellis Island, October 1–2, 1922,
on suspicion of being Bolsheviks, Duncan gave a speech in which she claimed of her poet
husband Esenin, “Serge is the Walt Whitman of Russia” (Speaks 104). Duncan lost her U.S.
citizenship on March 10, 1923 (Sensational 472).
69. Duncan’s statements also resemble Stebbins’s claim that “movements must unfold
from within to without as naturally as the growth and expansion of a flower” (Delsarte
Expression 459).
70. Isadora Duncan, “The Great Source,” in Art of the Dance (AD 102).
71. Lincoln Kirstein, “The Curse of Isadora,” New York Times, November 23, 1986.
Clipping file IDDCNY.
72. Isadora Duncan, “Movement Is Life” [ca. 1909], in Art of the Dance (AD 79).
73. Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 79.
74. Kimerer LaMothe details Duncan’s written engagement with Nietzsche, especially
his influence on her discussions of religion. She does not discuss Duncan’s performances of
religious figures as an essential part of her “revaluation of Christian values.”
75. In My Life, Duncan describes Federn reading and states, “The seduction of Nietzsche’s
philosophy ravished my being” (104). Federn also designed the academic program for her
students at the Grünewald school.
76. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1883–1885], trans. Thomas Common
(New York: Dover, 1999), IV.19. Henceforth cited in the text as Zarathustra.
77. See also Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil [1886], ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and
Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): “All these morals directed
at the individual person to promote what people call his ‘happiness’—are they anything
other than recommendations for constraint. . . . They are all baroque in form and unreason-
able (because they are directed at ‘everyone,’ because they generalize what should not be
generalized)” (85, 198). Henceforth cited in the text as Beyond.
78. LaMothe does not discuss this component of Nietzsche’s influence on Duncan and, in
fact, is dismissive of Duncan’s professional aspirations. She suggests that Duncan performed
only to support her dance schools: “That her successes in touring paved the way for the
advent of a highly professional art form, then, cannot be held against her” (Nietzsche’s Dancers
128). Duncan’s professionalism and international reputation did not conflict with her spiritual
aspirations, as she believed that dance must be “revalued” in public performance.
79. Isadora Duncan, “Beauty and Exercise,” in Art of the Dance (AD 82). Nietzsche him-
self became more skeptical of Dionysian choric participation and its potential to inspire
cultural innovation by the time of Thus Spake Zarathustra. For a summary of this
development in Nietzsche’s thought, see Robert Gooding-Williams’s Zarathustra’s Dionysian
Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6–7.
80. “Isadora Duncan Dancers,” undated, unattributed clipping in IDDCNY.
81. “Modern Dancing as an Inspiration for Mural,” undated, unattributed article,
IDDCNY.
82. Isadora Duncan, “The Dance of the Greeks” [1928], in Art of the Dance (AD 96).
83. Both Lori Belilove and Cherlyn Smith referred to Duncan’s claim never to have per-
formed solos, in IDDF classes and interviews with the author. Annabelle Gramson, a
prominent third-generation Duncan dancer, also emphasized the challenge of Duncan’s
solo form: “The solo dance presents problems different from group dances. . . . The soloist
must learn to draw more from the inside than from externals. . . the solo dance can live or
die depending upon the dancer.” See Barry Laine, “In Her Footsteps: Annabelle Gramson
Talks to Barry Laine,” Ballet News 3, no. 8 (February 1982): 24.
300 NOT ES TO PAG ES 167– 1 7 5
84. T. J. Jackson Lears, in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of

American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), explores an
ambivalence between elevating and fearing femininity in what he calls “antimodernism”:
“the association of femininity with the unconscious suggested not only mythopoeic inspi-
ration but also uncontrolled, amoral impulse” (278). Henceforth cited in the text as
Antimodernism. I use the term antimodern to designate a suspicion of technological moder-
nity and modernization rather than “antimodernism,” which seems to imply and opposi-
tion to aesthetic modernism.
85. Isadora . . . No Apologies at the Duke Theater, New York, February 1, 2003, and Salon
Performance at IDDF, June 6, 2003. Belilove described the experience of dancing Duncan
pieces like Mother: “Whether you are alone or in a group you are unto yourself, but, even in
a solo, you are dancing with others. There are other forces—invisible, imagined. That is why
she [Duncan] said, ‘I never once danced solo’ ” (personal interview with the author).
86. Julia Levien, technique class, IDDF, New York (June 11, 2003).
87. Cherlyn Smith, repertory class, IDDF, New York (October 12, 2003).
88. McCarren discusses Futurist dance through Marinetti’s manifestos but does not dis-
cuss Giannina Censi and Valentine de Saint-Point (Machines 99–103).
89. Anna B. Webb’s Delsarte “Sword Drill” in Recitation anticipates these dances of
female strength and militarism.
90. The phrase appears in Marinetti’s Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). Anja
Klöck describes how women’s shaping of Futurism, as well as participation in the movement,
was contested by Marinetti and others and overlooked by critics in “Of Cyborg Technologies
and Fascistized Mermaids,” Theatre Journal 51, no. 4 (1999): 397. Henceforth cited in the text
as “Cyborg.”
91. Images of Censi’s dance and the Teatro Garibaldi poster are available at http://
architettura.supereva.com/censi/.
92. Marinetti performed his manifestos in England in 1910 and 1912 and was even
booked to appear at the most lavish music hall in London, the Coliseum, twice daily for
a week in 1914. See Lawrence Rainey’s account of Marinetti’s London activities in “Creation
of the Avant-Garde,” in Institutions of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1998).
93. See Marjorie Perloff, “Violence and Precision,” in The Futurist Moment (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985, 2003), 88.
94. Isadora Duncan, “Depth” [1928], in Art of the Dance (AD 99–100).
95. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Henceforth cited in the text as Tragedy.
96. The review is unsigned but attributed to J. Fuller-Maitland, who sponsored the
performance, along with classical scholar, historian, and poet Andrew Lang. See Blair,
Portrait, 34. Jowitt also describes three New Gallery recitals and lists Sir Lawrence Alma-
Tadema, Walter Crane, and Hubert Parry among the sponsors (Time 83).
97. V. Svetlov, “An Evening with Isadora Duncan” [1913] in Dance News 31, no. 3
(November 1957), 7.
98. Bliss Carman, Address at Moonshine (New York: Tabard Press, 1911), 21.
99. Paris Singer, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortunes and the father of Duncan’s
second child, was the funder.
100. The letter and Murray’s discussions of the ritual nature of Duncan’s art are in the
Gilbert Murray papers at the Bodleian Library, Carton 100. See Harry C. Payne, “Modernizing
the Ancients: The Reconstruction of Ritual Drama 1870–1920,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 122, no. 3 (June 1978): 191.
101. H. T. Parker, Motion Arrested: Dance Reviews of H. T. Parker, ed. Olive Holmes
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 65. Henceforth cited in the text as
Motion.
102. As taught by IDDF, June 10–12, 2003.
103. McCarren suggests that “modern dance has often served as the image of abstrac-
tion,” but her discussion does not describe abstraction in dance; instead, she explains how
poets such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein use dance to frame their work in abstract
poetics (Machines 83).
104. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon launched the abstract painting of Cubism in
1907, while Graham’s first original dance concert was not held until 1926.
105. Nietzsche introduces his concept of the will in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885)
but explores it more thoroughly in Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
106. Performed by Lori Belilove, IDDF Salon Performance, June 10, 2005. Belilove intro-
duced the piece as Duncan’s “vision of what she wanted the [1917] Russian revolution to be.”
107. Cherlyn Smith, Technique class, IDDF, New York (October 12, 2003).
108. Marion Sawyer, “Celebrating Isadora” (June 9, 1997), clipping file, Duncan
Centennial Dance Company, IDDCNY.
109. We have seen that reviewers, like Lincoln Kirstein, designate Duncan’s dance as
self-expressive. Even her influential student, Irma Duncan, describes Duncan’s dance as a
“personal expression” and “individual manifestation that cannot be duplicated” in The
Technique of Isadora Duncan (New York: Dance Horizons, 1970), xi.
110. Ann Daly claims, “Duncan’s dancing was not the spontaneous expression of her
own personal emotions. Neither was it the description of music. . . . Rather, music served as
her starting point suggesting to Duncan visual/emotional imagery” (Done 137–139).
Duncan’s choreographic process was more diverse than Daly suggests; she occasionally cre-
ated dances without musical accompaniment, such as Death and the Maiden (1903), or cho-
reographed to poetry.
111. Duncan, “A Child Dancing,” in Art of the Dance (AD 75).
112. Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art [1924] trans. J. J. Robbins (New York: Theatre
Arts, 1948). Henceforth cited in the text as Art. In another illustration of how Duncan was
at the center of international modernist performance, Duncan introduced Stanislavsky to
Craig and initiated their collaboration on the Moscow Art Theatre’s famous monodramatic
production of Hamlet in 1912. See Laurence Senelick’s Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet
(London: Greenwood, 1982).
113. In “Isadora Duncan . . . Actress: And Her Influence on the Theater,” Dance Magazine
(February 1960), David Weiss minimizes Duncan’s contributions to Stanislavsky’s thought,
describing her as among the “pioneers in theatrical self-expression” (40–43). Natalie
Roslavleva’s Stanislavski and the Ballet (New York: Dance Perspectives 23, 1965) uses the
motor in the soul quote to differentiate Duncan’s practice from Stanislavsky’s interest in the
development of character: “Duncan started that motor within herself for the purpose of
self-expression. . . . She expressed emotions of a general kind, never showing any interest in
302 NOT ES TO PAG ES 180 –1 85
characterization, never being anyone but herself ” (15–16). Duncan mined the possibilities in
the spectrum of relationships between self and character in performance.
114. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993),
197. Henceforth cited in the text as Passion.
115. Stanislavsky, “Inner Impulses and Inner Action” and “Creative Objectives” (1916–
1920) in Twentieth Century Theater, ed. Richard Drain (New York: Routledge, 1995), 253–257.
Henceforth cited in the text as Theater.
116. The interview took place before Duncan’s performance of her Chopin repertory at
the Columbia Theater with Harold Bauer conducting. The typescript in IDDCNY is
undated, but based on the program, the interview most likely took place in 1917.
117. Lisi Schoenbach, “‘Peaceful and Exciting’: Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein’s
Pragmatic Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 2 (2004): 242.
118. John Sloan, John Sloan’s New York Scene, ed. Bruce S. John (New York: Harper, 1965),
352. Henceforth cited in the text as Sloan.
119. Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39. Henceforth cited in
the text as Avant-Garde.
120. See Delap’s chapter on “the endowment of motherhood controversy,” as many suf-
fragists “waxed lyrical about the transformative power of the ‘mother spirit’” and others
protested state intervention in reproduction and childcare (Avant-Garde 181).
121. Although Duranty’s comment demonstrates Duncan’s ability to invoke present-
absent figures on her stage, his tone is scornful: “With sublime incongruity, of which the
spectators seemed unconscious, the proceedings closed with a ceremonial christening dance
by Isadora Duncan and her pupils, to the sacred strains of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’” (Sensational
490). The “incongruity” he assesses is probably a reference to Duncan’s two children born
outside of marriage.
122. Allan Ross Macdougall wrote of Duncan’s “allegory of the birth of Christ” danced
to “Air on the G String” by Bach (Christmas Eve 1916): “What a moment to have lived! Not
all the sermons preached in every church in Christendom could equal in spiritual eloquence
that dance” (Sensational 387).
123. Duncan opened a 1922 curtain-call speech with a similar declaration that her art “is
symbolic of the freedom of woman and her emancipation from the hidebound conven-
tions” (Speaks 48).
124. See Susan Kingsley Kent’s Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1987). The “women’s sphere” was limited to domestic concerns,
and one argument against women’s public employment and higher education, bolstered by
medicine and science, insisted that they must reserve their strength to meet the costs of
reproduction and nurturing children (34–43).
125. bell hooks provides a recent example of feminist critiques of poststructuralism,
which would also highlight Duncan’s ethnocentrism and the racism in antimodern-classicist
thought more generally. hooks’s work often incorporates individualist ideas and genres as
she performs her analysis of the elitism of academic theory by writing in a personal voice,
using modes of memoir, and celebrating myth and love. See, for example, Communion: The
Female Search for Love (New York: Morrow, 2002) and hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains,
Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2006).
126. Never mentioning Duncan, Lears includes Greenwich Village radicalism in his list
of those movements that have repeated the “mistakes” of what he calls “antimodernism”:
“Throughout the twentieth century, Americans have heard the same demands for ‘personal
growth’ as a remedy for all psychic and cultural ills. The Greenwich Village intellectuals of
the pre-World War I era, the expatriate artists of the twenties, the therapeutic ideologues of
the thirties and forties—none have realized the hidden affinities between their liberationist
ideology and the dominant culture of consumer capitalism” (Antimodernism 306).
127. Floyd Dell, Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism [1913], (New
York: Hyperion, 1976), 45–49.
128. Rebecca Zurier, “The Masses and Modernism,” in 1915, the Cultural Moment, ed.
Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 197.
Henceforth cited in the text as “Masses.”
129. Max Eastman, “Isadora Duncan Is Dead” [1928], in Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon
Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1969), 38.
130. The artists known as the Ashcan school all worked on newspapers and developed
an art “based on the life of New York’s streets” (“Masses” 201).
131. See Sloan’s illustration in the May 1915 issue, “Putting the Best Foot Forward,” which
presents an ostentatious woman posing with slender leg outstretched beside a crippled man
with a wooden leg.
Chapter 5
1. H.D., Collected Poems, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), 51.
Henceforth abbreviated CP.
2. This photograph is used on the cover of H.D.’s Collected Poems (1983). See also the
cover designs for her novel HERmione (New York: New Directions, 1981) and Selected Poems,
ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1988).
3. Foothills and the fragments of Wingbeat are at New York’s Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA). Borderline was released by Criterion in 2007 on a four-DVD set, Paul Robeson:
Portraits of the Artist, and its availability promises to bring the film more attention. See the
informative review by James Donald, “Borderline and Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist” in
Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 3 (September 2008): 594–598. In “H.D.’s Distractions: Cinematic
Stasis and Lesbian Desire,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 3 (2002): 407–408, Jean Gallagher
uses this still and H.D.’s prose to suggest that images of a “sustained, fixed stare” construct a
model of lesbian spectatorship and desire. Henceforth cited in the text as “Distractions.”
4. Several excellent works have detailed H.D.’s Hellenism but have not focused on her
in relation to antimodern performance or mythic posing. Eileen Gregory details H.D.’s
classical contexts, including her engagement with Jane Ellen Harrison, in H.D. and Hellenism
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 170. Henceforth cited in the text as Hellenism.
Diana Collecott’s, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999) focuses on the “sapphic,” woman-centered aspects of H.D.’s classicism. Henceforth
cited in the text as Sapphic.
5. Timothy Clark points out the “embarrassment” of inspiration in his discussion of
H.D. in The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997).
6. In his preface to H.D.’s Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1988), Louis
L. Martz claims, “‘The Dancer,’ perhaps in part evoking memories of Isadora Duncan’s
304 NOT ES TO PAG ES 19 4 –1 95
Greek and erotic modes of dancing, is her supreme assertion of woman’s integrity as artist
and sexual force (the two are for H.D., as for Lawrence and Duncan, inseparable)” (xiii).
Dagny Boebel associates “The Dancer” with Duncan in “The Sun Born in a Woman: H.D.’s
Transformation of a Masculinist Icon in ‘The Dancer,’” in Unmanning Modernism: Gendered
Re-Readings, ed. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1997).
7. The London Daily Mail reported on October 29, 1912, after one of Duncan’s London
performances, “Miss Duncan intends to stage Greek tragedies in a vivid and artistic manner”
(Sensational 283). Such a review would have interested H.D.
8. H.D. also underlined Duncan’s claim, “No woman has ever told the whole truth of
her life” (ML 8). H.D.’s copy of My Life is in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library.
9. This fusion of technology, classicism, and religious practice has been evident
throughout this study, and Miriam Hansen’s reassessment of Walter Benjamin and
Siegfried Kracauer indicates that some similar preoccupations have been overlooked in
their thought, partially due to a failure to historicize early film theory. Both were inter-
ested in allegory, suspicious of crowds and masses, and critical of modernity as the
detritus of tragedy, and, in different ways, both positioned film in relation to apocalypse.
See Hansen’s “ ‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical
Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 437–469; “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,”
October 109 (Summer 2004): 3–45; and “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter
2008): 336–374.
10. H.D., Trilogy (New York: New Directions, 1998). Henceforth cited in the text as
Trilogy.
11. Helen in Egypt (1961) is a series of monologues spoken by Helen, Achilles, Paris, and
a chorus of ghosts with commentary helping to clarify the narrative.
12. H.D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1979), 3.
Henceforth cited in the text as End.
13. Rachel Blau DuPlessis claims that “Oread” was the poem Pound revised, in H.D. The
Career of That Struggle (Sussex, England: Harvester, 1986), 6–7. In her memoir, H.D. recalls
Pound insisting, “‘Hermes of the Ways’ is a good title” (End 18). The three poems published
in the January 1913 issue of Poetry Magazine (vol. 1, no. 4) were “Hermes of the Ways,”
“Priapus: Keeper-of-Orchards” (later titled “Orchard”) and “Epigram (After the Greek)”
(118–122). Issues of Poetry are digitalized by the invaluable “The Modernist Journals Project”
of Brown University and the University of Tulsa at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/.
14. J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (London: Longmans, Green,
1890). Henceforth cited in the text as The Anthology. Gregory points out that H.D. refer-
ences twenty distinct epigrams from The Anthology in her poetry, twelve of which “may
loosely be called translations” (Hellenism 167).
15. H.D. wrote to Lowell that “in no event can we now appear under the direct title of
‘Imagiste.’ ” H.D., “Letters,” in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1990), 134–138. Henceforth cited in the text as Gender.
16. For the recovery of H.D.’s work, see Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Who Buried H.D.?”
College English 36, no. 7 (March 1975): 801–814. In Writing Like a Woman (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1983), Alicia Ostriker claims, “But I find to read H.D. I must
forget whatever I have learned about Imagism” (7).
17. H.D. “H.D. by Delia Alton,” Iowa Review 16 (Fall 1987): 184. One of H.D.’s experi-
mental autobiographical prose pieces, the essay is presented as if written by the fictional
figure “Delia Alton.” Henceforth cited in the text as “Delia.”
18. H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, intro. Albert Gelpi (San Francisco: City Lights,
1982), 24. Henceforth cited in the text as Notes. Her reticence to publish may have been due
to Havelock Ellis’s indifference to the manuscript; H.D. became friends with the famous
sexologist after World War I (Gender 87).
19. H.D., “Marianne Moore,” Egoist 3, no. 8 (August 1916): 118; “Review of Charlotte
Mew’s The Farmer’s Bride,” Egoist 3, no. 9 (September 1916): 135; “John Gould Fletcher’s
Goblins and Pagodas,” Egoist 3, no. 12 (1916): 183. Henceforth cited in the text as Goblins. For
a detailed analysis of H.D.’s work as an editor, see Jayne E. Marek’s Women Editing
Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1995), 109–115.
20. Collecott quotes Pound’s dismissal and claims that Aldington himself acknowledged
that Pound and T. S. Eliot disagreed with H.D.’s inclusive editorial policies and “pushed her
aside ruthlessly” (Sapphic 165–167).
21. Adelaide Morris quotes from this review to describe different modes of projection
in H.D.’s work; see “The Concept of Projection: H.D.’s Visionary Powers,” Contemporary
Literature 25, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 417.
22. Ezra Pound, “Vorticism” [1916], in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and
Charles Feidelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 147. Henceforth cited in the text
as “Vorticism.” Pound’s other rules were: “II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute
to the presentation. III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase.”
23. Robert Duncan met for “sessions” with the older poet when she was visiting the
United States. He continued to work on “The H.D. Book” until his death in 1988, publishing
chapters in literary magazines. The University of California Press will finally publish the
collected volume in 2011. I cite the original publication information.
24. Robert Duncan, “Beginnings: Ch. 1 of the H.D. Book Part 1,” Coyote’s Journal 5–6
(1966): 14–15.
25. Robert Duncan, “The H.D. Book, Part II: Nights and Days, Ch. 7,” Credences 1, no. 2
(1975): 60.
26. Robert Duncan, “The H.D. Book, Part II: Nights and Days, Ch. 9,” Chicago Review
30, no. 3 (Winter 1979): 81. Henceforth cited in the text as II.9.
27. Robert Duncan, Part 1, Ch. 5, “From the H.D. Book, Occult Matters,” Stony Brook 1–2
(Fall 1968): 4–19.
28. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” [1913], in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann
and Charles Feidelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 143–145. Henceforth cited
in the text as “Don’ts.”
29. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading [1934] (New York: New Directions, 1960), 52. Henceforth
cited in the text as ABC.
30. Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” in Fictive Certainties
(New York: New Directions, 1985), 71.
31. Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 82.
32. Susan Stanford Friedman suggests, “The center of ‘Oread,’ as the title indicates, is
not the sea; it is instead the perceptions and emotions of an oread,” in Psyche Reborn: The
Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 56.
306 NOT ES TO PAG ES 198 – 2 00
33. See chapter 3 and John E. Tapia’s Circuit Chautauqua: From Rural Education to
Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth Century America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
1997).
34. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1913), 36.
35. Fenollosa claims that the verb is the mediator between subject and object in sen-
tence syntax: the subject acts on an object. See my introduction for more on Fenollosa’s
theories of words and movement in “An Essay on the Chinese Written Character,” in
Instigations of Ezra Pound (New York: Libraries Press, 1920).
36. Margaret Bruzelius’s “H.D. and Eurydice,” Twentieth Century Literature 44. no. 4
(Winter 1998), 447–463, discusses how “Eurydice” is often anachronistically positioned in
relation to H.D.’s later mythic work such as Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions,
1961), in spite of its inclusion in The God (448). Henceforth cited in the text as “Eurydice.”
37. Collecott claims that The God sequence establishes “a quasi-dramatic structure” that
resembles classical tragedy and ancient ritual (Sapphic 144–145).
38. H.D., “Review of The Farmer’s Bride,” Egoist 3, no. 9 (September 1916): 135. Hence-
forth abbreviated in the text as FB.
39. H.D. also builds on Nietzsche’s theories of the social transformation enabled by the
Attic drama.
40. Martin Puchner’s Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) describes modernist antitheatricality but not its link
to antimodern theories. His section on the closet drama examines Stéphane Mallarmé,
James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, describing their innovations in a form that, he claims,
derives from Tennyson. Their version of the closet drama, “rather than using the genre’s
minimal theatricality as a background for the presentation of more or less self-sufficient
speeches,” is a form that is “bound up with its setting and characters, as well as with
movement, gesture, mimicry, and costume” (60). Puchner does not consider the similar
efforts of H.D.
41. Collecott claims that the monologues of Pound and Eliot followed Tennyson and
R. Browning’s, but “H.D. had an earlier model in Sappho” (Sapphic 154). H.D., Pound, and
Eliot all understood their work in a lineage that included ancient and Victorian poets, but
Elizabeth Barrett Browning may also have influenced H.D.’s association of the dramatic
monologue with a typological “overmind.” In the postscript of a letter to Richard Aldington
dated October 18, 1953, she writes: “I always carried the E.B.B. sonnets with me at one time,
as a school-girl, knew many of them by heart. . . .” Box 17.566, HDPB.
42. Robert Duncan, “Two Chapters from H.D,” I.4 in TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968):
86–87.
43. H.D., Ion (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan, 1986), 14. Henceforth cited in the text as
Ion.
44. Bruzelius argues that H.D.’s The God rewrites the Orpheus stories in Ovid’s Book X
(“Eurydice” 449). Other intertexts include the myths of Orion and Artemis and the epigram
of Antipater from The Anthology, which she “translated” as “Hermonax.”
45. The popularity of the Ovidian myth continued after J. J. Rousseau’s monodrama
and the ballets discussed in chapter 1; derivatives include Augustin Daly’s Miss Pygmalion
(1895), in which Isadora Duncan performed (Done 72). Daly’s production launched
numerous amateur versions of Pygmalion; in fact, H.D.’s novel Hermione reveals that Her
fell in love with Fayne Rabb when she was playing Pygmalion in such a production circa
1910.
46. Bruzelius reads Pygmalion as an arrogant artist insisting on the superiority of his
gaze, but his confusion and uncertainty contradict this characterization. The poem consists
of eighteen questions and less than half as many statements (“Eurydice” 453–455).
47. In Ovid’s popular version, Eurydice dies from snakebite on the day of her wedding
to the poet-musician, Orpheus. The bridegroom woos even Hell with his song, and
Eurydice is permitted to follow him to the land of the living as long as he does not look
back at her. He does not obey and looks behind, only to see her drawn back to death.
Isadora Duncan choreographed several scenes from the story to the music of Gluck’s
“Orfeo” (ca. 1911).
48. Eurydice may allude to Ovid’s story of Orpheus’s gruesome death at the hands of
enraged Maenads.
49. Not an Ovidian story, H.D.’s source is the myth that Artemis killed Orion, one of her
best huntsmen, in jealousy.
50. Eileen Gregory reprints Mackail’s translation of Antipater (Hellenism 170).
51. Neptune transformed Ino into the goddess Leucothea, and the son she clutched
as she leapt became the god Palaemon. See Ovid, The Metamorphosis IV, “Ino and
Athamas.”
52. Gregory characterizes “The Tribute” as one of H.D.’s “epinician poems praising vic-
tors and heroes,” but the association with World War I undermines any tone of praise
(Hellenism 147).
53. This definition of ritual was advanced by other Cambridge Ritualists in addition to
Harrison, and it anticipates theories presented by Jacques Rancière and, of particular signif-
icance to performance theory, Victor Turner. See Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre: The
Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts, 1982).
54. Robert Duncan asked if H.D. had met Harrison in a letter of October 28, 1960, and
she responded: “No, I never met Jane Harrison—your questions always intrigue me”
(November 6, 1960, HDPB). Duncan insists that none of the modernist arts can be “sepa-
rated from the reawakened sense of the meaning and reality of the gods in contemporary
studies of the mystery cults—Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena (1903) and Themis (1912).” “Two
Chapters from H.D.” in TriQuarterly 12 (Spring 1968): 81. Gregory suggests that Harrison
was dismissed by modernists due to a sexist bias in the field of classicism and points to a
review in the Egoist that derided her “female enthusiasm, lack of intellectual rigor,
‘Specialised Unintelligence,’ and ‘brain fuddle’” (Hellenism 109). Julie Stone Peters describes
the ambivalent antitheatricality in Harrison’s later view of theater as a fallen and degraded
derivative of the Dionysian ritual, in “Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archeological
Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre,” Modern Drama 51, no. 1
(Spring 2008): 1–41.
55. H.D.’s annotated copy of Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion; Studies Based on a
Course of Lectures Delivered in April 1912 at Columbia University (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925)
is in HDPB. Gregory details Harrison’s influence on Murray’s Euripides and His Age
(London: Williams, 1913), which H.D also read (Hellenism 272–273).
56. Gregory discusses the “ritual intent” of H.D.’s first book, Sea Garden, in “Rose Cut in
Rock: Sappho and H.D.’s Sea Garden,” Contemporary Literature 27, no. 4 (1986): 538, but
does not discuss Ion or “The Dancer.”
308 NOT ES TO PAG ES 2 05– 2 08
57. See Susan Stanford Friedman’s helpful “Chronology: Dating H.D.’s Writing,” in
Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 360–366.
58. F. R. Earp, “Review: Versions of Euripides,” Classical Review 51, no. 5 (November
1937): 171–172.
59. See T. S. Eliot’s defense of Pound in “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry” (1917):
“Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in English. . . . The term is a loose one—any
verse is called ‘free’ by people whose ears are not accustomed to it—in the second place,
Pound’s use of this medium has shown the temperance of the artist, and his belief in it as a
vehicle is not that of the fanatic” (Selected 150). See also Eliot’s “Reflection on Vers Libre,”
first published in the New Statesman, March 3, 1917 (Selected 31).
60. These include “Chorus of the Women of Chalkis” (CP 71), “Chorus of Troizenian
Women” (CP 85), “Choros Translations from The Bacchae,” (CP 223), “Choros Sequence
from Morpheus” (CP 253), and “Songs for Cyprus” (CP 277). Robert Duncan suggests that
H.D. used these translations to escape the constraints of “imagisme” and develop the poetic
style that would allow her to produce the major poems of her late career, Trilogy and Helen
in Egypt. See “From the H.D. Book, Part 2 Ch. 5,” Sagetrieb 4, nos. 2–3 (Fall–Winter 1985): 66.
Gregory echoes this argument and describes H.D.’s “choros” as an “image-theatre of phano-
poeia” (Hellenism 140). Neither focuses on the unique ritualized reading experience she was
attempting to construct.
61. H.D., like Isadora Duncan, was interested in Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian
and Apollonian spirits of art, but her translations of Euripides signal her disagreement with
Nietzsche’s assessment that Euripides killed the Greek drama. For more on H.D.’s views of
Nietzsche see Hellenism 117–122.
62. Edward P. Comentale’s “Thesmophoria: Suffragettes, Sympathetic Magic, H.D.’s
Ritual Poetics,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001) explores the influence of Harrison’s
theories of ritual but does not recognize the limit to H.D.’s desire for community. He claims,
“Her ritualized poetry does not avoid political responsibility; rather, it raises possibilities
for a community that always already incorporates the marginal, the feminine, and the
poetic” (484). His association of H.D.’s ritual practice with suffragism is useful, but she was
skeptical of the possibility of an already inclusive community. Henceforth cited in the text
as Thesmaphoria.
63. “The Dancer” and “The Poet” were published together in Life and Letters Today 13
(September 1935), and “The Master” first appeared in Feminist Studies 7 (Fall 1981) with an
essay by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Stanford Friedman. See Martz’s “Preface” to
Selected Poems, xxvii.
64. Elizabeth Anderson discusses “The Dancer” and H.D. and Duncan’s shared interest
in ritual, but Anderson claims that H.D.’s theories of erotic embodiment distinguish her
from Duncan’s chaster ideals in “Dancing Modernism: Ritual, Ecstasy, and the Female
Body,” Literature and Theology 22, no. 3 (September 2008): 354–367. Although Duncan ada-
mantly rejected attempts to censor her dance as pornographic, both she and H.D. under-
stand erotic passion as a crucial component of ritual and art.
65. Mallarmé brackets his own spectatorship in “Ballets,” where he describes the dancer
as “not a girl, but a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental aspect of earthly form . . . she
does not dance but rather, with miraculous lunges and abbreviations, writing with her
body, she suggests. . . . Her poem is written without the writer’s tools.” See Mallarmé: Selected
Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1956), 64. The passive tense erodes the dancer’s agency or creativity and even her
particular body. See Mary Fleischer’s Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright-Dancer
Collaborations (New York: Rodopi, 2007).
66. Gregory argues, “H.D.’s early lyrics demand from the reader a distinct, dramatic
form of attention and participation” (Hellenism 123). Yet, she does not detail H.D.’s poetic
strategies for garnering this form of attention, which are most developed in her dramatic
monologues and translations rather than in lyrics.
67. Comentale cites a passage in H.D.’s Notes, “The love-region is excited by the appear-
ance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its
character of mind . . .” (Notes 22).
68. H.D. wrote on a proof of the first printing, “Ion: 1935—Assembled Vaud, Switzerland
from rough notes begun in England 1915–1917 and Greece 1920 & 1932” (HDPB). On the
inside front cover of her copy, she indicated that she reread the play in Küsnacht in May
1954 and that the radio play, produced by Raymond Raikes, was broadcast in London on
December 19, 1954 at 3 P.M. and 21 Dec. at 9 P.M. See HDPB Box 31 Folder 813 for page
proofs.
69. H.D., The Borderline Pamphlet, in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 121. Henceforth abbreviated in the text as
BP.
70. Adelaide Morris describes H.D.’s persistent engagement with science but claims she
increasingly desired “to temper modern mechanical science with hermetic wisdom” in
“Science and the Mythopoeic Mind: The Case of H.D.,” in Chaos and Order: Complex
Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 201. I suggest H.D.’s antimodern critique of science coexisted uneasily with her
enthusiasm for technology, as her film work most clearly illustrates, but hermeticism also
accommodated scientific images in her later long poems.
71. Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura
Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 112. Henceforth cited in the text as
Close Up.
72. McCabe builds on work by Anne Friedberg, who identified overtonal montage and
psychoanalysis as H.D.’s major theoretical interests in “Approaching Borderline,” Millennium
Film Journal 7. no. 9 (1980–1981): 130–139. Henceforth cited in the text as “Approaching.”
McCabe’s chapter on H.D. in Cinematic Modernism (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005) examines the fertile intersection of film, modernist poetry, and psychoanalytic
studies of embodiment and mind. She discusses the early poems of Sea Garden (1916) as
“precursors” to H.D.’s film work but does not examine her later poetics, her typological
hermeneutics, or the influence of Lev Kuleshov’s acting and montage theories. Henceforth
cited in the text as Cinematic. Susan Stanford Friedman also considers Eisenstein and
Borderline but focuses on the complex racial politics as the film avoids Paul Robeson’s
standard shirtless presence on screen yet adopts other modes of “racial primitivism” and a
“homoerotic and misogynist eye.” See “Border Forms, Border Identities in Borderline:
Contemporary Cultural Theory and Cinematic Modernity,” in Networking Women:
Subjects, Places, Links, Europe-America, 1890–1939, ed. Marina Camboni (Rome: Edizioni
310 NOT ES TO PAG ES 2 13–2 1 9
di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), 125–134. See also Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing
about Cinema in the Modernist Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Henceforth cited in the text as Muse.
73. H.D. met Macpherson in 1926; in 1927, Bryher married him and gave him a film
camera, and all three lived and worked together in Territet.
74. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus’s Close Up is a useful compilation
of articles, stills, and advertisements that document the POOL projects, which included
three films directed by Kenneth Macpherson and starring H.D.: Wingbeat (1927), Foothills
(1929), and Borderline (1930). Appendix 2 of Close Up provides biographies of all contribu-
tors. Appendix 3 lists POOL’s publishing projects: two novels by Macpherson, a memoir by
Bryher, and several books on film including Oswell Blakeston’s Through a Yellow Glass
(1928), a guide to the cinema studio, Eric Elliott’s Anatomy of a Motion Picture Art (1928),
and Bryher’s Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929).
75. French journals such as Le Film (1914) preceded Close Up and established a
continental “tradition of literary respect for the cinema” that was not as prominent in
England and America (Close Up 12).
76. Marsha McCreadie, Women on Film: The Critical Eye (New York: Praeger, 1983), xi.
See also Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, ed. Antonia Lant
with Ingrid Periz (London: Verso, 2006).
77. Laura Marcus’s useful “Introduction” to “The Contribution of H.D.” in Close Up
connects H.D.’s hieroglyph to Swedenborg, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Herring, and Eisenstein’s
intellectual montage but not Kuleshov’s Delsarte-derived system of gestural expression
(Close Up 99–102).
78. H.D. refers to Fred Niblo’s 1925 film Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which advertised
150,000 in the cast.
79. See Hilary Hart’s analysis of Lillian Gish’s Denishawn-trained Delsartean technique
in “Do You See What I See? The Impact of Delsarte on Silent Film Acting,” in Essays on
François Delsarte, Special Issue of Mime Journal, ed. by Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2004–
2005): 185–199.
80. The film was Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit: Ein Film über moderne Körperkultur
(1925), or Ways to Strength and Beauty: A Film of Modern Physical Culture, directed by
Nicholaus Kaufmann and Wilhelm Prager, and it further demonstrates the international
appeal of the physical culture movement in which Delsartism figured prominently.
81. H.D.’s review of “King of Kings” appeared in Close Up, 2, no. 2 (February 1928), but
is not reprinted in Donald et al., Close Up. Manuscript in HDPB.
82. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 8.
Eisenstein, like his teacher, subscribes to this idea of the model actor but calls his version
“typage.”
83. Probably intended for Close Up, the typescript of “Wingbeat” is in HDPB, Box
43.1102, 5. Henceforth cited in the text as “Wingbeat.”
84. Critics who have discussed H.D.’s acting style have not recognized the connection
between her theories of cinematic ritual and her performance style or their link to older
Delsartean theories. Gallagher’s “H.D.’s Distractions,” recognizes that Khokhlova influ-
enced H.D.’s intense stare but does not mention Khokhlova’s Delsartean training
(“Distractions” 416). Judith Brown, displacing the focus on Freud in readings of Borderline,
uses Bertrand Russell’s theories of sensation and the unconscious to produce a fascinating
reading of close-ups on hands and what she provocatively calls the film’s “machinery of
expression” (704). She does not associate this hand language with Delsartean theories of
gesture or the taxonomies of hands produced in Delsarte manuals. See “Borderline,
Sensation, and the Machinery of Expression,” in Modernism/Modernity 14, no. .4 (2007):
687–705.
85. Anne Friedberg reconstructed the fragments of Wingbeat and Foothills in 1979.
86. The decorative door also recalls the gilded picture frame in which Emma Lyon
Hamilton occasionally posed.
87. Diana Collecott points out that although Bryher attributed the montage-
composition to Macpherson, she and H.D. both commonly credited Macpherson for their
collaborative work (158). See Collecott’s thorough discussion of the H.D. Scrapbook in
“Images at the Crossroads: H.D.’s ‘Scrapbook,’” in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford
Friedman and Rachel Blau Duplessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 155–
181. Henceforth cited in the text as “Images.” See also Lara Vetter’s excellent study of the
Scrapbook in relation to H.D.’s experimental, autobiographical prose, “Representing ‘A
Sort of Composite Person’: Autobiography, Sexuality, and Collaborative Authorship in H.
D.’s Prose and Scrapbook,” Genre 36, nos. 1–2 (2003): 107–130.
88. Photomontage was becoming popular with practitioners as diverse as Dadaists,
advertisers, and film publicists; the most famous “monteur,” John Heartfield, turned Dadaist
montage into a tool of political protest against the German Nazi party (“Images” 157).
Although the POOL montages do not share Heartfield’s political fervor, both work by
inviting viewers to develop associations between images.
89. H.D.’s fiction, although not the focus here, also models this thought pattern; in
HERmione (New York: New Directions, 1981), Her reads Fayne’s performance as Pygmalion
like a photomontage, describing how she “saw Pygmalion, saw a stretch of sea coast, saw a
boy in a tunic . . . ” and other visions present only by association (138).
90. Reading the image biographically, Collecott understands Asklepios as Freud, the
“blameless physician,” and H.D. as the disciple who has “placed her head on his knee”
(“Images” 172). She provocatively suggests that the seated figure of H.D. “might equally well
be ‘at the pictures’” and associates Nike with H.D.’s final vision of the winged goddess at
Corfu, described as “writing on the wall” in H.D.’s Tribute to Freud (“Images” 172–173).
91. The montage predicts one of T. J. Jackson Lears’s provocative claims in No Place of
Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981): “What begins in discontent with a vapid modern culture
ends as another quest for self-fulfillment—the dominant ideal of our sleeker, therapeutic
modern culture. The effort to re-create a coherent sense of selfhood seems fated to frustra-
tion” (306).
92. Isadora Duncan uses a similar position to invoke the burden of Atlas in a section of
her Furies (Gluck, 1911) when she portrays the punishments of the condemned in her
body.
93. Collecott argues that there are “teasing allusions to the peepshow,” another early
cinematic form, as the fragments of the metope become a parted curtain (“Images” 171).
94. Anne Friedberg describes Borderline as “hopelessly obscure” (“Approaching” 380),
but it was shown more often and to more critical acclaim than she acknowledges, according
312 NOT ES TO PAG ES 22 3 –2 2 7
to Annette Debo’s “Interracial Modernism in Avant-Garde Film: Paul Robeson and H.D. in
the 1930 Borderline,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 4 (2001): 371–383. Henceforth
cited in the text as “Interracial.” A review in Manchester Guardian 14 (October 1930) corrob-
orates: “In a large majority of films the accent is always on the excitement of story, on the
interest of character, and it comes as something of a shock to find a director seeing subject
and person so entirely through the eyes of a painter, to find the centre of attention fixed on
light, line, form, and colour rather than on situation (in the theatrical sense of the word) or
on the appeal of individuality in the actor” (HDPB, Box 50.1249).
95. Jean Walton reads the handshake as homoerotic in its juxtaposition with the pia-
nist: “Immediately following this scene, as though to remind us that it has been ‘accompa-
nied’ and inscribed all along by the gay pianist’s overt homoerotic desire, we see a brief
close-up of his hand gliding in a flourish across the piano keys.” See “White Neurotics, Black
Primitives, and the Queer Matrix of Borderline,” in Out Takes, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 264. Henceforth cited in the text as “White.”
96. For the racial and gendered politics, see Debo’s “Interracial Modernism” and Susan
McCabe’s “Borderline Modernism: Paul Robeson and the Femme Fatale,” Callaloo 25, no. 2
(2002): 639–653.
97. Laura Marcus, in The Tenth Muse, compellingly analyzes H.D.’s concept of silent
film as it was shaped by Gordon Craig and the “aesthetics of the ritualized, non-
representational and poetic theatre, including the mime-theatre, of the 1910’s” (43). She does
not acknowledge that the mime theater in particular was shaped by Delsartean gestures.
98. W. B. Yeats famously defines the symbol similarly in “The Symbolism of Poetry,”
published in the Dome (April 1900) and reprinted in Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, ed.
James Pethica (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000): “It is indeed only those things which
seem useless or very feeble that have any power . . . ” (273). As in T. S. Eliot’s “objective
correlative,” Yeats suggests emotions are perceptible only when expressed through “outer
things.”
99. H.D.’s The Borderline Pamphlet describes Macpherson as the sole genius responsible
for the film and minimizes Bryher’s and her own contributions to locate film creativity in
the individualistic model of a single director or auteur.
100. H.D.’s concern with technology’s link to war is evident in an unpublished review of
Yeats’s Responsibilities, probably intended for the Egoist; she identifies “the enemy” not as
the “middle-classes” or “Philistines” but the “mechanical daemon” whose “hideous off-
spring” is the war (Gender 128). In contrast, Wyndham Lewis’s Blast [1914] (Santa Rosa, CA:
Black Sparrow, 2002) declares a desire to destroy the middle class that exceeds any national
allegiance: “We fight first on one side, then on the other. . . . Mercenaries were always the best
troops” (30).
101. I counted the ninety-four narrow strips of film by winding the film at the Museum
of Modern Art by hand; I am grateful for the assistance of Charles Silver, Associate Curator
at MOMA.
102. H.D.’s description of the technique also recalls Ezra Pound’s imagist definition of
the “one image poem” as “a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of
another” that requires a mental connection (“Vorticism” 150).
103. As Macpherson’s references to transference and layers of consciousness suggest,
psychoanalytic theory influenced early film and the POOL group. The psychoanalytic
preoccupations of Borderline are well documented in Friedberg’s “Approaching Borderline.”

See also part 6 of Close Up, “Cinema and Psychoanalysis.”
104. See Charles Musser’s The Emergence of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990) for a description of protocinematic technologies. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs
offer a comprehensive discussion of how theatrical acting techniques influenced early film
in Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997). For a relevant history of perception, see Jonathan Crary’s Techniques
of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1995).
105. Quoted in Anne Friedberg, “On H.D., Woman, History, Recognition,” Wide Angle 5,
no. 2 (1982): 26–31. Here, she suggests that H.D. was never actually involved in “filmmaking,”
but she revises that position four years later in “Approaching Borderline” (1986).
106. Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 3d ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 133.
Henceforth cited in the text as Film.
107. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968). Benjamin quotes Gance as evidence of an enthu-
siasm for the ritual potential of film (shared by H.D.): “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven
will make films . . . all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the
very religions . . . await their exposed resurrection and the heroes crowd each other at the
gate” (1108).
108. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed.
R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), 50. Henceforth cited in the text as
Marinetti.
109. The poems were originally published separately by Oxford University Press in
London and New York, and they were not brought together as Trilogy until Norman Holmes
Pearson republished them in 1973. While there is justification for reading the poems sepa-
rately, they each have forty-three sections and share symbols, allusions, and features of
form. In my focus on cinematic scenes of dream-vision and ritual enactment, I necessarily
leave many fascinating moments out of my discussion.
110. Endnotes like Eliot’s require a different engagement with his mythical method, as
readers flip between the text and the presumably authoritative notes at the back of the
book.
111. The recurrence of seasonal celebrations is of “paramount importance” to Harrison’s
theory of ritual (Ritual 49).
112. The four Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus’ feet and his defense of
her when the disciples complain about the expense of the ointment. They do not feature a
“jar,” a womblike object choice, but a costly alabaster box is described in Matthew 26:7, Mark
14:3, and Luke 7:37, and a “pound of ointment of spikenard” appears in John 12:3. Although
John indicates that it was Mary of Bethany who performed the anointing, the woman is
designated a “sinner” in Luke 7:37 and often identified with Mary Magdalene, from whom
Jesus casts seven devils in both Mark and Luke. H.D. freely takes elements from all accounts;
she even attributes the Pharisee’s accusation from Luke 39 to Simon, “this man if he were a
prophet, would have known / who and what manner of woman this is” (Trilogy 143).
113. Myrrha is a crucial figure in H.D.’s revision of Mary Magdalene, but she is not men-
tioned in critical studies or in Aliki Barnstone’s footnotes to the lines.
314 N OT ES TO PAG ES 23 9 –2 4 1
Afterword
1. I have left out many figures who might be included in this history: in modern dance,
Maud Allen and Martha Graham both performed solos rooted in religion and myth and
attempted to stage modernist rituals. H.D., as poet, performer, and filmmaker combines
central forms of mythic posing, but I might have examined the dancer and filmmaker Maya
Deren or the poet and artist Mina Loy, who was working on a biography of Duncan at the
time of her death.
2. Jerzy Grotowski, The Grotowski Sourcebook, ed. Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner
(London: Routledge, 1997), 81, 28. Grotowski also writes, “I was very interested in Delsarte’s
thesis that there are introverted and extroverted reactions in human contact. At the same
time, I found his thesis very stereotyped; it was really very funny as actor training, but there
was something to it, so I studied it” (45).
3. See Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of
European High Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of
Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
4. For classic works, see Guy Debord, Société Du Spectacle [Society of the Spectacle] (New
York: Zone, 1995); Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Au Juste [Just Gaming]
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); and Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et
Simulation [Simulacra and Simulation] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
5. The significance of myth to postmodern critical theory is evident in Ihab Hassan’s
influential The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, 2nd ed.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) and Hélene Cixous’s “Le Rire de la Méduse”
[“The Laugh of the Medusa”] in L’Arc (1975): 39–54. As discussed in the introduction, bib-
lical typology is an important part of Frederic Jameson’s analysis in The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 31. For one
articulation of the postmodern interest in posing, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday, 1980).
6. Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
7. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “The Visual Grammar of Suffering: Pia Lindman and the
Performance of Grief,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 84 (2006): 77–92, 77. Henceforth
cited in the text as “Grief.” Ravetto-Biagioli argues, “Lindman’s performances offer us a way
of rethinking how we ground discourses about Others on notions of difference. By focusing
on repetition rather than difference, Lindman’s performances do not allow any subject
position to form. . . . More than simply reminding us about the manipulation of images and
gestures into representations, her work makes us think about the way we consume images,
make gestures, interpret events, and even how we can make political and feminist art” (90).
While I believe it is impossible to prevent subject positions from forming in a performance
where poser, audience, and random passersby interact, Lindman reveals the processes by
which we assume and interpret subject positions, and this lends power to her interrogation
of difference.
8. Commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the performance was part
of the international summit “What Comes After, Cities, Art + Recovery,” referencing the
events of September 11, 2001, and other terrorist attacks. My description is based on a selec-
tion of the performance filmed by Manuel Acevedo and edited by Johann Torkkola,
NOTES TO PAGES 2 43–2 45 315
available at http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/lindmanaspect/videos/4781-new-york-times-
performance-tour-in-battery-park-nyc. Henceforth cited in the text as “Battery Park.”
9. For how bodily practices are learned, see Marcel Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body”
[1935], in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York:
Berghahn, 2006): 77–95.
10. See Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth
Century, ed. Jo Bonney (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000). Henceforth
cited in the text as Extreme. The special issue “Solo Performance” in Canadian Theatre
Review (Fall 1997) discusses performances by Shawna Dempsey, Rhonda Trodd, Jeffrey
Oullette, and others. Editors Ric Knowles and Harry Lane explain, “This issue began from
a sense not only that the number of theatre productions with only one performer has grown
rapidly in the 1980’s and 90’s, but also that some of our most provocative theatre experi-
ences have resulted from the encounter between the audience and the solo actor” (3). They
do not discuss monodrama in the issue.
11. In Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998), Friedman calls for moving “Beyond Gender” and difference
to help resolve the white, heterosexist, middle-class, and Western biases of feminism (17).
12. See Charles Isherwood’s review, “The Body of Her Work: Hearing Questions of Life
and Death,” in the New York Times (January 22, 2008). I saw Smith’s Let me Down Easy at
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA, on September 23, 2008.
13. Charles Olson, “Projective Verse and Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” in Selected Writings
of Charles Olson, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1950), 29. Henceforth cited
in the text as “Projective.”
14. Thomas F. Merrill, in The Poetry of Charles Olson (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1982), reads this trinity as a formula for how “to recover the roots of nouns so that
their cosmic connections may be tapped.” While he does not recognize its affinity with bib-
lical typology, the central thrust of typological hermeneutics is to uncover the connections
between figures, events, and institutions (all nouns) in relation to each other and an idea of
cosmos or heaven (98).
15. Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” in Fictive Certainties
(New York: New Directions, 1985), 71. Henceforth cited in the text as “Notes.”
16. Olson’s doctrine of “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” has three principles, two of which
are familiar from Pound’s definition of imagism: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN
EXTENSION OF CONTENT” and “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND
DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (“Projective” 16–17). The third prin-
ciple is “kinetics.”
17. John Palatella claims that Olson actually coined the term postmodern in his 1952
essay “The Present Is Prologue.” Palatella accepts the label of Olson as the first “postmodern”
poet in his discussion of Olson’s Collected Prose in Boston Review (February–March 1998).
18. Olson also claims that to record speech, poetry must dismantle the syntactical con-
ventions that logic has forced on written language. Quoting Ernest Fenollosa’s influential
advice to modernism, Olson suggests that the English language must return to the active,
forceful property of “the VERB, between two nouns” (“Projective” 21).
19. Charles Olson, “Proprioception,” in Additional Prose, ed. George F. Butterick
(Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons, 1974). Henceforth cited in the text as “Proprioception.”
316 NOT ES TO PAG ES 2 4 6–2 48
20. Relevant to Olson’s call for violence, Isadora Duncan concludes “Depth”: “Even vio-
lence is the greater when it is restrained: one gesture that has grown slowly out of that
reserve is worth many thousands that struggle and cut each other off.” See “Depth,” in Art of
the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1969), 100.
21. Robert Creeley similarly insists, “How to dance sitting down . . . is my own preoccu-
pation as I try to write these words—not at all metaphorically, because it is an absolutely
physical event for me.” See his Was That a Real Poem and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen
(Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons, 1964), 129.
22. Wakoski states of the term confession, “It was coined by an academic critic who had
to come to terms with the fact that these [Plath, Sexton, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman]
were extremely successful, powerful poets who had all been in mental institutions. Three of
them were suicides.” See Carrie Preston, “Interview with Diane Wakoski,” Red Cedar Review
35, no. 1 (1999): 14–28.
23. See Wakoski’s recent essay “Creating a Personal Mythology,” in The Diamond Dog
(Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga, 2010), xi–xiv.
24. Diane Wakoski, Jason the Sailor (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1993), 194.
Henceforth cited in the text as Jason.
25. The series includes Medea the Sorceress (1991), Jason the Sailor (1993), The Emerald
City of Las Vegas (1995), and Argonaut Rose (1998).
26. Diane Wakoski, Medea the Sorceress (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1991), 114.
27. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Lilith Poems, in Feminist Revision and the Bible
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 94. Henceforth cited in the text as Lilith.
28. Enid Dame, Lilith and Her Demons (Merrick, NY: Cross-Cultural Communications,
1989), 4.
29. Ostriker provides a list of what she calls “myth-poems” by women in Stealing the
Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 284–286.
She does not deal with these poems as dramatic monologues, although they are often writ-
ten in that form. She describes the mythical impulse in women’s writing: “These poems
generically assume the high literary status that myth confers and that women writers have
often been denied because they write ‘personally’ or ‘confessionally.’ But in them the old
stories are changed, changed utterly, by female knowledge of female experience, so that
they can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy or as the pillars sus-
taining phallocentric ‘high’ culture” (215). While women’s adoption of the mythic pose is
influenced by the historical marginalization of their writing, my research points to conti-
nuities between men’s and women’s use of dramatic monologues and poetic theories more
generally.
30. Rainer presented her lecture “Feelings Are Facts” and her dance film commissioned
by Mikhail Baryshnikov, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” in the Contemporary Artist
Series, University of California at San Diego, May 19, 2005.
31. Rob Prince, “Feature Editor’s Introduction to The Classical Era,” Film & History: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 27–28, 27.
32. Directed by Zack Snyder and released by Warner Brothers (2007).
33. Alex Beam, “Meanwhile: Hot Times at the ‘Hot Gates,’” New York Times, March
8, 2007. New York Times Online at www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/opinion/08iht-edbeam
.4844292.html. For a discussion of the reception of the film by U.S. Marines, see Evan
NOTES TO PAGES 2 4 8 – 2 4 9 317
Thomas’s “The Few, the Proud, the Movie,” Newsweek Web Exclusive at www
.newsweek.com/id/36146.
34. Frank Miller, 300 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1998).
35. Michael Williams, “The Idol Body: Stars, Statuary and the Classical Epic,” Film &
History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 39–48,
44.
36. Charles-Antoine Courcoux, “From Here to Antiquity: Mythical Settings and
Modern Sufferings in Contemporary Hollywood’s Historical Epics,” Film & History: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 29–38, 34.
37. See Beam’s “Hot Times” and Seong-Kon Kim, “Orientalism in the ‘300’ Spartans,”
Korea Herald (March 24, 2010) at www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_
dir/2010/03/24/201003240040.asp.
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Index
abstraction, 24, 129, 158, 170, 176–7, 207, H.D. and, 191, 200, 204, 212–3, 217, 219,
224, 241, 252n21, 301nn103–4 221, 225
acting technique, 10, 40–44, 59–60, 77, and language, 24–26, 217
90–96, 99, 178–81, 194, 217–25, 251n7, and ritual, 16–17
253n28, 265n49, 271n4, 272n7, 275n37, antitheatricality, 16–17, 105, 109, 134, 200,
276n47, 279nn77–79, 281nn93–94, 205, 268n72, 306n40, 307n54
310n84 attitude (statue posing), 4, 9
aesthetic emotion, 22–23, 75, 259n84 aesthetics of, 58, 60–67, 274nn24–25
agency, 13–14, 29, 32, 34, 38, 46, 107, 147, 177, Goethe’s popularization of, 40–42,
254n37, 275n37, 308n65 264nn37–38
Albright, Daniel, 252n20 Hamilton, Emma Lyon, invention
Aldington, Richard, 124, 195, 197, of, 32–39, 139, 141, 239, 242–3, 263n22,
305n20 263n26, 263n28, 271n105
allegory, 15, 38, 77, 117, 124, 212–5, 237–8, in modern dance, 82–84, 88, 144, 152–6,
302n122, 304n9 156–9, 169–70, 234, 249, 265n51, 279n72,
antimodern-classicism, 7–8, 11, 17, 102, 141, 297n53
143, 172, 182, 219, 248–9, 302n125 in nineteenth century, 9, 26–29, 42–45,
authenticity, 7, 185 52, 56–57, 239, 261n9, 276n47
critique of modernity, 7–9, 57, 69, 125–6, in poetic recitation, 100, 104–6, 114, 121,
135, 182, 191, 196, 221, 219, 225, 239, 134, 140–1
251n15, 252n16, 309n70 in Delsartism, 5, 16–17, 20, 59, 63–71,
Duncan and, 144, 146–7, 150, 170, 183, 74–81, 84–87, 92–93, 98, 127, 218, 234–5,
188, 190, 294n20 274n30, 277nn56–58
as gendered, 5, 7, 167, 183, 300n84, in contemporary performance, 240–3,
303n126 248–9
343
344 INDEX
attitude (continued ) Brooks, Louise, 88–90, 247, 280nn

in semiprivate/amateur theatricals, 40, 82–84
52, 69, 97 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 44–51, 58, 111,
in silent film, 87–95, 98, 220, 217–9, 220, 140, 193
222, 224–5, 227–8, 235, 237 Aurora Leigh, 44–45, 117, 266nn59–61
and subjectivity, 12, 15, 99, 125, 139, 239, and monodrama, 45–48
289n90 “monologue of Aeschylus,” 45–48, 56,
and theatrical laws, 42–43, 264nn 267nn64–66, 268n72
39–42 and typology, 16, 27, 45, 49–51, 54–55,
Attridge, Derek, 47–48, 260n101 154, 269n83, 306n41
auditory (aural) imagination, 25, 48, 111–2, “The Virgin Mary to the Child
134–6, 195, 198, 202, 233, 239, 268n74, Jesus,” 48–50, 56
291n112 Browning, Robert, 19–20, 27, 45–46, 52, 70,
Augustinian doctrines, 15, 48, 268nn77–78 100, 105–9, 117, 120–2, 126, 129–30, 200,
autobiography, 20, 27, 82, 87–88, 120, 145–6, 251n6, 261n3, 267n64, 267nn66–67,
148, 165, 179–80, 183–4, 194, 200, 243, 268n75, 270n99, 278n61, 282n3, 282n5,
254n39, 261n3, 293n6, 297n48, 305n17, 284n27
311n87 “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint
Praxed’s Church,” 52
Bacchantes, 34–35, 38–39, 97, 175, 184, 208, “My Last Duchess,” 19–20, 117
249, 263n26, 279n105 Bruzelius, Margaret, 306n36, 306n44,
ballet, 23, 29–30, 42, 81, 84, 87, 148, 154–66, 307n46
172, 177, 181–2, 187, 247, 258n78, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 142,
280n89, 293n6, 293n8, 295nn28–29, 213, 219, 220, 223, 225, 292n126,
298n59 310nn73–74, 311n87, 312n99
Baright, Anna, 104, 283nn14–16 Buckstone, J. B., 43, 265n47
Baudelaire, Charles, 70, 276n42 Bush, Douglas, 7
Belilove, Lori, 168, 293n3, 297n58, 299n83, Butler, Judith, 12–13, 18, 254nn36–37
300n85, 301n106
Benda, Georg’s Medea, 30, 42, 270n99 Cambridge Ritualism, 10, 16, 144, 175,
Benda and Johann Christian Brandes’s 307nn53–55
Ariadne auf Naxos, 30–32 Can Grande della Scala, 15, 124, 138–40,
Benjamin, Walter, 24, 228–9, 260nn98–99, 256n51
281n99, 304n9, 313n107 Carman, Bliss, 83–84, 126–9, 133, 142,
Blau, Herbert, 57 278nn68–69, 278n71, 289n85
Boston University School of Oratory (later Censi, Giannina, 168, 171, 177, 300n91
Boston School of Expression), 73, Chaplin, Charlie, 60, 90–91, 97, 272n11,
100–7, 120, 277n55, 283nn9–14 280n88, 281n99
Botticelli, Sandro, 158–9, 184, 224, 238 Chautauqua, 10, 81, 101–8, 125–34, 142–3,
Brecht, Bertolt, 24, 260n99 198
INDEX 345
chorus (ancient Greek), 16–18, 29, 46, 166, Dalcroze, Émile Jaques, 90, 273n18, 277n57,
168, 173, 175, 204–10, 299n79, 304n11, 281n94, 298n66
308n60 Daly, Ann, 8, 146, 153, 293n4, 295n25,
class (socioeconomic), 13, 17, 19, 36–38, 51, 296n44, 298n61, 301n110
59, 67–71, 73, 80, 97, 100, 103, 107–10, Dante, Alighieri, 15, 50, 118–9, 123–4, 126,
137, 139, 145, 148–53, 159, 161, 187, 129, 140–1, 213–4, 256n51
214–15, 254nn31–32, 255n43, 261n6, deconstruction, 12, 19, 21, 57, 247,
284n32, 285n44, 298n61, 302n125, 254n31
312n100, 315n11 Delap, Lucy, 182–3, 302n120
classic/classical dancing, 3, 10, 71, 150, 194, Dell, Floyd, 185–6
252n18 Delsarte, François: biography, 4, 60–66
classicism, 3–12, 29–30, 36, 60, 74, 98, 123, laws of movement, 61–64, 127, 156
141, 182, 200, 212, 230, 248, 252nn Delsarte Matinees, 73, 77–80, 99–100, 108,
19–21, 303n4, 304n9, 307n54. See also 143, 153, 218, 278n61
antimodern-classicism Delsartism, 58–109
Close Up, 194, 213–9, 226, 228, 230, as antimodern, 5–6, 9–10, 59, 69, 71,
310nn74–75 253n29
Cohen, Ed, 12, 254n37 and the body, 12, 58–70, 104–5
Collecott, Diana, 111, 195, 199, 253n24, and attitudes (posing), 4, 9, 63–70,
284n34, 285nn37–38, 286n55, 303n4, 74–79, 84–87, 92–93, 127, 218, 234–5,
305n20, 306n37, 306n41, 311n87, 311n90, 274n30, 277n56
311n93 emotional expression in, 4, 61–77, 84, 87,
Comentale, Edward, 8, 211, 308n62, 92
309n67 and film, 9–10, 87–97, 217–9, 223–4, 226,
Comte, Auguste, 61, 74, 274n23 253n28, 279n77, 310n80,
Courcoux, Charles-Antoine, 248–9 312n97
Craig, Gordon, 145, 153, 179, 180, 266n54, and gender, 12–13, 58–59, 69–72, 78–83,
292n2, 293n8, 294n12, 295n30, 301n112, 104–5, 126–7
312n97 as international movement, 4, 10, 58–59,
Creeley, Robert, 244, 316n21 67–70, 73–74, 81, 90–97, 107, 193, 217,
crisis of modernity, 7, 9, 55, 59, 239, 272n8 251n7, 264n39, 275n38, 310n80
Culler, A. Dwight, 19, 27, 258n72, 261n4, and modernism, 4–6, 12–13, 58–61,
263n24, 267n64, 267n67, 270n99 253n29
Culler, Jonathan, 18, 258n75 and modern dance, 10, 79–80, 81–87,
cultures of recitation (international), 10, 144, 152–60, 169–70, 173–4, 296n41
18, 100–35, 147, 197–8, 282n4, 284n29, promotion of recitation, 4, 10, 12, 20,
285nn38–39, 292n124 58–59, 70, 77–79, 82, 88, 90, 100–9,
Curry, Samuel Silas, 10, 100–12, 118–21, 195
133–7, 142–3, 169, 245, 283nn14–23, religious aspects of, 64–70, 73–74, 78,
284n24 81–82, 274n23, 274n29, 275n35
346 INDEX
Delsartism (continued ) and Pound, Ezra, 101, 117–8, 122, 126, 128,
trinities, 11–12, 60–64, 69, 74, 83–84, 105, 130–1, 133, 141, 199, 251n6, 282n5,
126, 161–2, 166, 181, 199, 217 285n38, 306n41
and technology, 58–60, 68, 93, 274n23, recitation of, 10, 100–9, 142–3
275n37, 279n77, 281n99 and typology, 53, 56–57, 74, 116–7
and women’s movement, 59, 66, 68–69, Victorian, 9, 18–20, 27, 44–57, 100, 115–6,
71–72, 104, 274n30, 275n38 239
de Man, Paul, 20, 258n75 and Webster, Augusta 54–56
Denishawn School and Company, 60, dress reform, 12, 59, 68–70, 73
82–92, 217, 247, 278n65, 279nn72–76 Dreyer, Carl, 215, 229
Derrida, 12, 254n37, 259n81, 261n2, 285n38 Duncan, Isadora, 144–90
de Staël, Germaine, 38, 45, 269n91 Americanness, 150–1, 163–4, 293n4
Diaghilev, Sergei, 92 antimodern, 6–7, 144–7, 150–1, 170,
Diderot, Denis, 153, 180, 265n49, 297n45 183–4, 188, 190, 294n20
Dionysus/Dionysian, 16–17, 46, 123, 156–7, autobiography, 145–6, 148, 165, 179–80,
164, 166, 171, 173, 175–6, 179, 181, 185, 183–4, 293n6, 297n48
200, 204, 206, 208, 212, 230, 235, 249, biography, 145–6, 251n6, 293n10, 294n11
297n55, 299n79, 307n54, 308n61 choreographic practice, 3, 10, 79, 144–8,
dramatic monologue: 153–9, 164–70, 174–84, 188, 238, 295n25,
and Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 44–51, 295n33, 301n110
102 costume, 32, 90, 145, 149, 152–3, 157, 186,
biographical readings of, 113, 119–22, 130, 217, 293n6
137, 141–2, 246, 285n39, 286n45, 291n15, curtain-call speeches (manifestos), 10,
316n22, 316n29 144–5, 147, 161, 163, 167–72, 174, 183–5,
and Curry, Samuel Silas, 105–10, 239, 302n123
284n23 decor, 10, 144–5, 149, 293n6
in Delsartism, 81, 99–109 and Delsartism, 10, 79–80, 144, 152–60,
and Eliot, T. S., 117–25, 287n69, 288n73 169–70, 173–4, 296n41
generic theories, 18–20, 27, 30, 102, eroticism, 149–51, 170, 187, 303n6,
257nn66–69, 258n73, 258n75, 292n123, 308n64
261nn4–5, 267n67, 270n99, 282n5 and feminism, 142, 144, 146, 171, 182–90
and H.D., 117, 191, 193–4, 197–203, 220, as international artist, 10, 13, 144–6, 149,
228, 235–6, 306n41 152, 182, 188, 251n6, 293n4, 295n30,
and Lowell, Amy, 137–42, 291n14 299n78, 301n112
and Mew, Charlotte, 110–7, influence on modernism, 10, 21, 144–6,
285nn38–39, 286n45 170–81, 184–8, 292n2, 301nn112–3
and modernism 5, 101–2, 111–3, 117–8, and myth, 148, 151–3, 156–7, 159, 170,
130–1, 137–42, 251n6 173–6, 182–5
postmodern and contemporary, 244–7, natural dance, 6, 10, 147, 163–4, 171,
316n29 177–81, 186, 188, 193, 294n20, 299n69
INDEX 347
reviews, 1, 149–53, 166, 169, 173–6, 179, Eastman, Max, 185–7

250n1, 293n7, 295nn31–32, 296n36, Egoist, 117, 195, 204, 253n24, 286nn52–56,
297n55, 300n96, 301n109 305n19, 307n54, 312n11
science, 144, 146, 161–3, 167, 179–80, 189 Eisenstein, Sergei, 95–96, 213, 226,
self/soul, 10, 14, 144–8, 151–6, 161–6, 309n72
171–3, 179–81, 185–8, 293n4, 300n85 Eliot, T. S., 10, 16, 23, 101–2, 108, 110,
as soloist, 10, 144–52, 165–8, 179, 185–8, 117–26, 128–30, 133–5, 141–2, 147, 184,
297n58, 299n83 231–2, 237, 282nn4–5, 284n35, 285n38,
spontaneity, 10, 144–8, 163–4, 177–81, 186 287n63, 287n69, 288n73, 288n80,
students and schools, 79, 149, 153, 158, 289n94, 290n103, 290n105, 292n126,
165–6, 176, 184, 278n63, 293n3, 299n75 305n20, 306n41, 313n110
and technology, 10, 144–6, 166–8, 170–3, “Journey of the Magi, The” 122–4, 184,
177, 189, 294n20 237
on women, 7, 10–11, 14, 163, 168, 171, Waste Land, The, 23, 122, 142, 232, 284n35
182–90, 298n61, 300n84 elocution, 10, 20, 58, 77–78, 100–4, 107, 109,
Duncan, Isadora choreography: 118, 133–5, 143, 283n9, 285n37
Amazons, The, 80, 170, 174 emotional expression, 3, 26–27, 41, 62, 75,
Andante, 176 152–3, 173, 179, 217, 301nn109–10,
Ave Maria, 174, 183–4, 302n12 301n113
Bacchanale, 175 empire, 70, 131–3, 248
Blessed Spirits, 184 essentialism, 10, 11–14, 254n31, 259n91
Furies, The, 158, 168, 171, 184, 297n56, evolution, 75–77, 146, 156, 161–3, 171, 189,
311n92 298nn62–64
Iphigenia, 79–80, 167, 174, 176, 185 expression:
Lullaby, 183 academic discipline of, 10, 12, 78, 100–10,
Marseillaise, 3–5, 13, 169–70, 178 118, 120, 125, 134–6, 142–3, 147, 152, 169,
Mother, 168, 174, 183–4, 300n85 195, 198, 282n3, 284n23, 288n80
Narcissus, 184, 296n36 ancient modes of, 24, 28–29, 133
Niobe, 183–4 Delsartean, 61–77, 84, 87, 92, 98, 105, 112,
Revolutionary, 178, 297n56 152, 276n47
Scherzo, 175 emotional, 22, 26–31, 41, 62, 106, 114, 153,
Tanagra Figures, 157–8, 297n52 179, 217, 243–4
Tannhäuser, 162, 175–6, 297n58 physical, 6, 28, 31–34, 84, 91, 95–98,
Three Graces, The 158–60, 297n58 106, 109, 147, 154, 156, 162, 174, 242,
Water Study, 169, 171, 177, 296n36 260n99
Duncan, Robert, 196–7, 244–5, 251n6, of self/soul, 18, 108, 118–21, 128, 130, 144,
286n53, 305n23, 307n54, 308n60 147–8, 154, 164, 171, 176, 179, 295n25,
Duplessis, Rachel Blau, 250n4, 253n24, 301nn109–10, 301n113
254n32, 304n13, 308n63, 311n87 solo, 147–8, 165
Duse, Eleonora, 153–4, 297n47 expressionism, 59, 222, 230, 252n21
348 INDEX
expressive culture (American), 59, 101–8, Fuller, Loïe, 148, 170, 255n39, 273n14
118–19, 126, 130, 134–8, 142, 153, 156, Fuller, Margaret, 14, 154, 255n45
282n4, 288n80, 290n105 Fuss, Diana, 11–12, 254n31
Futurism, 5, 7–10, 60, 144, 172, 188, 195, 230,
fallen woman, 54, 114–7, 270nn98–99 252n21, 300n90
Farfan, Penny, 59, 146, 258n78
Farr, Florence, 107–8, 119–20, 129, 134, Gale, Maggie B., 44, 251n7
289n93, 291n108 Gallagher, Jean, 225, 303n3, 310n84
femininity, 3–8, 12, 29–32, 44–45, 49, 51–52, Galatea, 28–32, 52, 192, 200, 263n24
59, 69, 71, 80, 89, 167, 170, 172, 184, 188, Gardin, Vladimir, 92–93
240, 246, 252n17, 267n62, 298n61, Garrick, David, 43, 62, 264n49
300n84, 308n62 gender:
feminism, 11, 14, 16, 19, 45, 82, 90, 142, 144, and Delsartism, 12–13, 58–59, 69–72,
146, 171, 182–92, 195–6, 244, 253n24, 78–83, 104–5, 126–7
256n55, 261n6, 286n52, 292n123, diversity, 13–14, 23, 90, 111–3, 228, 248,
298n61, 302n125, 314n7 309n72, 254nn38–9, 285n40, 285n45,
Fenollosa, Ernest, 24, 128, 198, 260n96, 286nn46–47, 312n95
306n35, 315n18 ideologies of, 15, 31–32, 51, 69, 112, 116,
film: 261n8
and dance, 9, 58–60, 87–96, 279n77 in the nineteenth century, 15, 26–28,
and Delsartism, 9–10, 87–97, 217–9, 31–32, 69, 261n8
223–4, 226, 253n28, 279n77, 310n80, and modern dance, 7, 10–11, 14, 163, 168,
312n97 171, 182–90, 298n61, 300n84
and H.D., 3, 11, 191, 194, 212–31, 304n9, bias in modernist poetics, 110–3, 117,
308n72, 310n74, 310nn77–84 133–4, 142, 195–6, 247, 253n24,
silent film, 82–99, 212–31 285n37, 285nn38–39, 290n103,
technology, 6, 9, 58–60, 90–98, 225–6, 307n54, 316n29
228–9, 249, 253n28, 281n99, 304n9, as performative, 12–13, 18, 240, 254n37
309n70, 312n100 theory, 11–14
contemporary, 240–2, 248–9 genre:
Fletcher, John Gould, 141, 195–6, 231, histories of, 9, 18–19, 26–57, 100–9
286n55 hybrids, 10, 17, 25, 28, 41, 43, 56, 144–5,
Foster, Susan, 12, 30, 254n36 152, 173, 243, 191, 194, 306n40
Foucault, Michel, 13 and gender, 19, 45–47, 51, 130–1, 142, 148,
Franko, Mark, 147–8, 294n22, 297n48 267n62, 285nn38–39
Friedberg, Anne, 228, 309n72, 310n74, solo genres, 8–9, 11, 18–21, 25, 27–31,
311n85, 311n94, 313n105 44–45, 56–57, 99–134, 143, 191, 227–8,
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 9, 244, 250n4, 261n7, 266nn56–57
253nn24–25, 261n6, 304n16, 305n32, theory, 18–21, 257nn62–62, 257n70,
308n57, 309n72, 311n87, 315n11 258nn75–76, 263n30
INDEX 349
gesture: 262–3nn20–29, 264n33, 264nn35–38,

cinematic, 10, 87–98, 194, 215–7, 222–7, 269n91, 271n105, 274n24, 277n58,
272n7, 311n84, 312n97 311n86
in dance, 22, 153–6, 166, 168, 173–4, 179, Hamilton, Sir William, 32–33, 36, 139,
183, 272n9, 273n16, 297n56, 316n20 263n22, 263n24
Delsartean, 58–70, 75–79, 83–84, Händel-Schütz, Henrietta, 42
104–5,153, 157, 217, 283n17, 283n23, Hansen, Miriam, 60, 251n13, 304n9
296n44 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 16–18, 81, 123, 125, 146,
language of, 6–7, 12, 24–43, 217, 242–3, 173–4, 184, 193, 246, 256nn
260n94, 260n99, 261n2, 266n57, 314n97 55–59, 307nn53–55
in poetry, 20–21, 27, 45, 48–49, 193, H.D., 191–238
199–203, 234–7, 246 acting style, 194, 218–25, 310n84
in recitation, 112, 119, 173, 291n111 as antimodern, 7, 191, 196, 200, 204,
and schools of expression, 103–7, 283n23 212–3, 217, 219, 221, 225, 309n70
Gish, Lillian, 87–88, 217, 272n7, 310n79 cinematic techniques in poetry, 11, 231–8
Glenn, Susan A., 251n7 and dance, 191, 194, 197, 205, 207–12, 236,
Goethe, J. W., 26, 30–34, 36, 38–44, 56, 97, 303n6, 308nn64–65
139–40, 202, 237, 262n18, 263nn dramatic monologues, 117, 191, 193–4,
22–25, 264n37 197–203, 208, 210, 220, 228, 232, 235–6,
Italian Journey, 32, 37–39, 41–42 306n41
Proserpina, 26, 30, 39–44, 56, 97, 202, 237, embodied creativity, 11, 193, 198–201, 207
262n18 eroticism, 199–201, 208, 210–1, 222–3,
Gregory, Eileen, 203, 250n4, 252n19, 303n4, 227, 237, 308n64, 309n67
304n14, 307n52, 307nn54–56, 308n60, film work, 3, 11, 191, 194, 212–31, 304n9,
309n66 308n72, 310n74, 310nn77–84
Greek tragedy, 16–17, 29, 82, 165, 173–4, 183, and feminism, 191–2, 194, 195–6, 201,
204, 256, 272n12, 304nn6–7, 306n37 308n62
Greenwich Village Radicalism, 10, 144, and gender, 7, 14, 117, 191, 199–202,
185–6, 188, 303n126 207–8, 210–1, 222–3, 228, 233–8
Griffith, D. W., 10, 60, 87–88, 92, 217, and Imagism, 192–9, 203, 304nn15–16,
279nn78–80 308n60, 312n102
Intolerance, 87–88, 92, 217 and individualism, 192, 199–200, 204–7,
Grotowski, Jerzy, 239, 314 211–2, 228–9, 232, 312n99
Günther, Dorothee, 90 and kinesthetics, 192–8, 202, 207–9, 211,
213, 233, 237
Haeckel, Ernst, 144, 146, 160–3, 166, 189, and myth, 192, 198–205, 212, 214–6,
298nn62–65 221–2, 230–8, 306n36, 313nn112–3
Hamilton, Emma Lyon, 26, 32–45, 56, participatory (ritualized) reception, 191,
65–66, 71, 74, 89, 97, 134, 139–41, 194, 197–8, 200, 202–9, 211–9, 226,
156, 219, 222, 228, 234, 237, 242–3, 231–3, 237, 309n66, 313n110
350 INDEX
H.D., (continued ) “Pygmalion,” 198–201

photomontage, 3, 219–22, 250n4, “Restraint,” 217–9
311nn88–89 “Tribute, The” 203–4
queerness, 192, 208, 211, 213, 222–3, Trilogy, 11, 194, 204, 231–38, 308n60,
254n39, 303n3, 306n45, 313nn109–113
312n95 Wingbeat, 191, 194, 218–9, 303n3
reviewing, 11, 194–5, 199, 200, 212–8, 231, Hellenism, 8, 28–29, 151, 224, 303n4 See also
248, 286nn53–55, 305n19, 305n21, classicism
305n38, 310n81, 312n100 “high” art, 67, 97, 103–5, 120, 145–50, 152,
and ritual, 11, 192–3, 195, 199–210, 212–15, 159, 290n105, 292n123, 298n61
218, 225, 229–38, 306n37, 306n39, hieroglyph, 24, 50, 217, 225–6, 310n77
307n56, 308n62 Holmström, Kirsten Gram, 44, 261n9,
and the sacred, 14, 191–2, 196, 206, 236, 263n24, 264n35
303n107 hooks, bell, 254n38, 302n125
and soul/self, 191–2, 198–201, 228, 230, Hovey, Henrietta, 69–75, 82–87, 104, 107, 159,
311n91 275nn39–40, 279n75, 287n60, 296n44
and technology, 194, 212, 222, 225–31, Hovey, Richard, 126–9, 133, 142, 156, 275n39,
234, 237, 304n9, 309n70, 312n100 289nn84–85
and typological theories, 11, 192, 194, Hurston, Zora Neale, 24
199–200, 203, 210–8, 226, 231–8, 306n41
H.D. works: Ibsen, Henrik, 72, 224–5, 263n29, 227n52
Borderline, 191, 193–4, 213, 219, 222–30, Iffland, A. W., 40–41
234, 303n3, 309n72, 310n84, 311n94, Imagism, 8, 117, 126, 141, 192–9, 203, 245,
312n95 288nn79–80, 304nn15–16, 308n60,
“Dancer, The,” 194, 204–5, 207–12, 303n6, 312n102, 315n16
308n63–64 impersonality (modernist), 10, 109–10,
End to Torment, 194 117–8, 121–2, 125, 287n69, 290n105,
“Eurydice,” 191, 193, 199, 201–3, 211, 215, 292n123
306n36, 307nn47–48 individualism, 10, 13–14, 16–18, 22, 27–28,
“Expiation,” 213–17 61, 70, 104, 108, 119, 152, 162–6, 182, 185,
Foothills, 191, 194, 219, 222, 224, 234, 190, 192, 206, 212, 228–9, 255n43,
303n3 255n45, 286n52, 298n64, 302n125,
God, The, 198–204 312n94, 312n99
“Hermonax,” 203 Iphigenia, 33, 79–80, 167, 174, 176, 185,
Ion, 193, 205–9, 211–3, 217, 220, 231, 309n68 263n23
“Jeanne d’Arc,” 215 irony, 20, 46, 52, 106, 125–6, 137, 257nn66–67,
Notes on Thought and Vision, 193, 195, 267n67
199, 204–5 Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation
“Oread,” 192, 195, 197–9, 304n13, 305n32 (IDDF), 293n3, 297n52, 299n83,
“Orion Dead,” 202–3 300n85, 301n102, 301nn106–107
INDEX 351
Jack Sheppard, 43, 265n47 Lewis, Monk (Matthew)’s The Captive, 31,
James-Lange theory of emotion, 22, 114
274n26 Lindman, Pia, 240–4, 314nn7–8
Jameson, Frederic, 255nn48–49 living picture (realization tableau), 42–44,
Joyce, James, 67, 111, 117, 124–5, 133, 159, 170, 214, 264n39
260nn100–1, 270n97, 286n47, 306n40 Livingston, Jennie (Paris is Burning), 13,
254n38
Khokhlova, Alexandra, 214–9, 310n84 Lowell, Amy, 10, 56, 102, 108, 110–1, 133–43,
kinesthetics: 195, 198–9, 202, 245, 254n39, 271n105,
in poetic techniques, 27, 47, 101, 106, 136, 290nn103–7, 291nn108–9
192–9, 201–2, 207, 211, 233, 245–6, Can Grande’s Castle, 138–41
260n100 “Patterns,” 137–8
modernist, 5, 11, 21–25, 58, 87, 97–98, 239, lyric, 18–19, 30, 55, 131–2, 199, 258n75,
280n88 267n62, 268n75, 292n123, 309n66
in psychological aesthetics, 22–24,
260n101, 267n71 Mackail, J. W., Greek Anthology, 195, 203,
of posing, 6, 68, 91 210, 304n14
as sense modality, 21–22, 168, 194, 237, MacKaye, Steele, 61, 65–69, 73–74, 87, 103,
246–7, 291n112 107, 275n37, 277n55
King, Mary Perry, 83–84, 126 Macpherson, Kenneth, 213, 218–9, 222–3,
Kirstein, Lincoln, 164, 178, 301n109 225–7, 280n83, 310nn73–74, 311n87,
Klementaski Monro, Alida, 110–5, 285n37, 312n99, 312n103
285n40, 286n47 “make it new,” 8, 253n23, 253n26
Kuleshov, Lev, 10, 60, 91–97, 213–9, 226, 239, manifesto, 3–4, 10, 126, 144–5, 147, 167,
273n13, 280n92, 281n94, 309n72 170–4, 181, 184, 213, 230, 239, 249,
293n9, 300n92
Laban, Rudolph, 21, 24, 90, 246, 259n79 Marcus, Laura, 282n105, 310n74, 310n77,
LaMothe, Kimerer L., 259n80, 293n4, 312n97
299n74, 299n78 Marinetti, F. T., 3–8, 80, 97–98, 110, 146–7,
Landow, George, 52–53, 256n52, 268n81, 167, 170–3, 178–9, 230, 249, 250n5,
270n96, 271n103 300nn88–92
Langbaum, Robert, 19–20, 267n67, 287n69 marriage, critiques of, 32, 56, 112–7, 137,
Lears, T. J. Jackson, 7, 252nn16–17, 300n84, 183–4, 286n51, 302n121
303n126 Mary Magdalene, 33–36, 110–7, 232–7,
lecture-demonstration, 17, 68, 81, 145, 152 270n95, 313n112
Lee, Vernon, 7, 22–24, 47, 68, 75, 101, 106, Mary, the Virgin, 42, 48–49, 52, 55–56,
168, 198, 245, 259nn81–93, 267n71 139–40, 174, 183–4, 218, 232–7, 302n121
lesbianism, 23, 111–3, 134, 137, 223, 285n45, materialism, 160–1. See also modernist-
286nn46–47, 303n3, 255n39, 312n95 materialism
Levien, Julia, 158, 169, 293n3 Mauss, Marcel, 40
352 INDEX
McCabe, Susan, 213, 281n102, 309n72 monodrama, 5, 9, 19–20, 26–48, 54–57,

McCarren, Felicia, 59, 272n9, 294n20, 74, 78, 81, 99, 100–2, 111–6, 142, 153,
295n33, 300n88, 301n103 202, 228, 239, 243, 261n4, 262n16,
McCauley, Robbie, 243 262n18, 265nn53–4, 266n55, 267n64,
Medea, 30, 32–33, 35, 38, 42–43, 54, 246–7, 267nn67–68, 270n99, 301n112
249, 263n27, 270n99 Monroe, Harriet, 128, 130, 146, 195
Meisel, Martin, 43, 265n48 Monroe, Lewis B., 103–104, 283n12, 283n14
melodrama, 30, 40–43, 60, 78, 104, 109, 218, Monro, Harold, 109–12, 115, 119–20, 128, 133,
222–5, 240, 264n43, 265n45, 265n53, 135, 172, 284nn34–35, 285n37, 285n40
273n16, 276n47 montage (cinematic), 10–11, 59–60, 91–99,
Mew, Charlotte, 10, 102, 110–7, 125–6, 134, 194, 213, 225–34, 237, 279n77, 280n92,
141–2, 195, 199–202, 237, 239, 245, 281n97, 281n102, 309n72, 310n77
254n39, 285nn36–39, 285n45, Morgan, Anna, 71–74
286nn46–51, 286n55, 290n105, 292n124 Morrisson, Mark, 108–10, 118, 120, 282n4,
“Changeling, The,” 111–3, 286n46 284nn34–35, 285n37, 287n58, 289n92
“Farmer’s Bride, The,” 110–5, 117, 285n45 motherhood:
“Madeleine in Church,” 114–7, 237 Duncan, Isadora and, 10, 13, 168, 182–4
modern dance: mythic mothers, 35, 45, 54, 56, 70, 88,
and Delsartism, 10, 79–87, 144, 147, 102, 117, 183–4, 230, 233–8
152–60, 169–70, 173–4, 296n41 Republican mother, 13, 271n3, 302n120
and film, 9, 58–60, 87–96, 279n77 sanctity of, 31–32, 49, 82, 88, 182–4, 252n17
and gender, 7, 10–11, 13–14, 163, 168, 142, Moya, Paula M. L., 13
144, 146, 171, 182–90, 298n61, 300n84 music hall, 4, 40, 42–43, 73, 89–90, 145,
and kinesthetic theories, 21–23 148–9, 152, 250n5, 300n92
and modernism, 5, 10, 59–60, 144–7, mythical method, 10, 16, 57, 102, 117–8, 122–5,
160–1, 251n6, 292n2 132–3, 140–2, 148, 151, 156, 159, 182, 184,
as natural, 6, 10, 59–60, 77, 98, 147, 160–4, 203–4, 214, 231, 244, 247, 313n110
177–9, 181, 186, 188, 294n20, 299n69
and ritual, 17, 84–87, 144, 146, 156–7, New Criticism, 18–19, 22, 59, 102, 118–21,
173–7, 208–11, 272n9, 301n100 128, 258n75, 283n22, 287n62
as solo art, 10, 144–52, 165–8, 179, 185–8, Newbolt, Henry, 108–10
251n7, 297n58, 299n83 “new woman,” 11, 147, 152, 166, 182, 186
as transnational, 10, 13, 144–6, 149, 152, New York School of Expression, 73, 75–76,
182, 188, 251n6, 293n4, 295n30, 299n78, 78, 101, 107, 120, 277n55, 282n3
301n112 Nietzsche, Friedrich:
modernist-materialism, 7, 11, 146, 249, and Duncan, Isadora, 144, 146, 160–85,
251n13 189, 293n4, 299nn74–79
modernist studies, 7–9, 15, 59, 61, 96, 125, and H.D., 193, 204–6, 219, 306n39,
188, 191, 239, 253n22, 258n78 308n61
monism, 161–2, 166, 298n65 theories of ritual, 16–27, 144, 146
INDEX 353
Nike (goddess), 3, 13, 206, 220–1, 243, 249, Poetry Society, 101–2, 109–10, 118,
230n4, 311n90 142–3
North, Michael, 60, 253n28, 272n11, 280n88, polyphonic prose, 56, 102, 134, 138–141,
281n99 291n108, 291n119
nostalgia, 3, 5, 7, 57, 60, 130, 167, 172, 239, POOL film group, 194, 213, 219, 222, 250n4,
252n19 280n83, 310n74, 311n88, 312n103
novelty, 8–9, 149–51, 213, 239 postmodernism, 9, 147–8, 239–40, 243–8,
272n12, 295n31, 314n5, 315n17
objective correlative, 102, 117–25, 142, poststructuralism, 12–13, 18, 113, 192,
312n98 302n125
Olson, Charles, 196, 244–6, 315nn14–18, Pound, Ezra
316n20 The Cantos, 126, 128, 133, 141, 284n35,
onomatopoeia, 25, 47–48, 136–7, 202, 292n121
260n101 and Chautauqua, 125–6, 130, 133–4, 142
oratory, 12, 20, 64, 69–70, 73, 77, 103–8, and Delsartism, 126–30, 133, 275n39
133–8, 141, 282n3, 283n9 and dramatic monologue, 101, 117–8, 122,
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin, 247, 304n16, 316n29 126, 128, 130–1, 133, 141, 199, 251n6,
O’Sheel, Shaemas, 151, 168 282n5, 285n38, 306n41
Ovid, 15, 200, 235, 306nn44–45, 307nn and expression, 130, 288n80, 290n105
47–49 “Homage to Sextus Propertius” 126,
Ozarovsky, Yuri, Erastovich, 91–92 130–3, 290nn91–92
“In a Station of the Metro,” 126, 197–8
Pabst, G. W., 88–90, 247, 280n83 and Imagism, 117, 126, 141, 192–9, 245,
pantomime, 26, 28–31, 41, 79, 81, 88, 173, 288nn79–80, 312n102, 315n16
262n10 and kinesthetics, 23–24, 151, 194–8,
paratheatrical performance, 4, 17, 25, 260n96, 301n103
32–40, 60–84, 97–99, 102–14, 134, 152–3, and modernist novelty, 8, 308n59
273n16, 276n50, 297n55, 306n45 and mythical method, 132–3
Parker, H. T., 153, 175–6, 297n55 and recitation, 10, 102, 108, 110–1, 125–9,
Pater, Walter, 22–23, 259nn81–82 133, 289n93
Perry, Bliss, 138, 291n117 and typology, 127–8, 133
personality, 10, 12, 18, 69, 75, 83–84, 100, Pre-Raphaelitism, 52, 128
102–7, 118–22, 125–7, 130, 135, 142, 147, present-absent figures, 30, 41, 46, 49, 54–55,
164, 194, 218, 287n60 114, 168, 170, 200, 240, 262n16
physical culture, 4, 12, 40, 58, 66–72, 81–82, primitivism, 16–18, 24, 26, 29, 70, 81–85, 87,
90, 99, 161, 274n30, 275n38, 277n57, 94, 146, 173, 183, 191, 199, 204, 227,
310n80 309n72
Poetry Bookshop, 10, 101, 109–13, 118, Prince, Michael B., 257n62
125–6, 128–9, 134–5, 142–3, 146, 172, Prins, Yopie, 258n75, 267n62
286n47 Projective Verse, 196, 244–5, 315nn16–18
354 INDEX
prosopopoeia, 19–21, 38, 133, 142, 228, Reynolds, Margaret, 46, 266n59, 267n66,
259nn72–76 267n70, 268n72, 269n91
psychoanalytic theory, 12, 99, 206, 213, ritual:
309n72, 312n103 individuation, 16–18, 193
psychological aesthetics, 22–25, 68, 101, 106, and film, 192, 194, 212–20, 225, 229–31,
168–9, 245, 259n81 310n84, 312n97
Puchner, Martin, 260n94, 293n9, 306n40 and modern dance, 84–87, 146, 156–7,
Pygmalion, 26, 28–33, 40–41, 56, 91, 116, 193, 173–7, 208–11, 272n9, 301n100
198–200, 202–3, 220, 262nn10–11, and modernism, 16–18, 61, 81, 123, 181,
263n24, 264n44, 280n89, 294n11, 184, 195, 202–9, 211, 231–4, 237, 246,
306n45, 307nn45–46, 311n89. See also 306n37, 307nn53–56, 308nn60–64,
Rousseau 312n97, 313n107, 313n109, 314n1
participation, 11, 16–17, 174–5, 191, 194,
queerness, 13–14, 23, 90, 111–3, 222–3, 248, 199, 204–5, 212, 219
309n72, 254n38–9, 285n40, 285n45, and performance studies, 16–18, 257n60,
286nn46–47, 312n95 307n53
seasonal rites, 16, 123, 210, 232, 238, 313n111
race, 13, 43, 81, 90, 222–3, 227–8, 243–4, 248, Roach, Joseph, 179–81, 271n4
254n32, 298n61, 302n125, 309n72, Robeson, Paul, 191, 222–3, 228, 303n3,
312nn95–96 309n72
Rainer, Yvonne, 147–8, 247–8, 295n26, Rodin, Auguste, 157–8, 292n2, 297nn54–55
316n30 romanticism, 8–9, 18, 26–27, 29, 59–60, 112,
Rainey, Lawrence, 8, 250n5, 253n26, 300n92 265n53, 295n28
Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss, 241–3, 314n7 Romney, George, 38, 40, 263n26
realism, 215, 223, 225, 229, 252n21, 279n79 Rosenbaum, Barbara, 46, 266n59, 267n66,
recitation: 267n70, 268n72
in Delsartism, 4–5, 10, 12, 18, 20, 58–59, Rossetti, Christina, 27, 51–53, 56, 111, 129,
70, 77–79, 82, 88, 90, 100–9, 195 269nn87–92, 270nn93–98, 289n93
of dramatic monologue, 10, 18, 27, 99–111 “Good Friday,” 53
and modernism, 5, 100–2, 109–10, “In an Artist’s Studio,” 52
118–28, 134–43, 146–7, 152–3, 172–3, Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 26, 28–32, 40, 56,
197–8, 282n4, 284n24 127, 243, 261nn1–2, 262n10, 263n24,
nineteenth-century practices of, 18, 264n44, 280n89, 294n11, 306n55
269n91, 278n61 Pygmalion, 26, 28–31
recognition of mythic referent, 31, 33–36, Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa, 59, 251n7, 272n5,
40, 43, 75, 122–3, 156, 158, 169–70, 174, 274n30, 275nn38–39, 277nn54–58,
203, 220, 263n28, 265n48 296n41
Rehberg, Frederick, 34–37
Reifenstahl, Leni, 90, 280n86 Saint-Point, Valentine de, 168, 170–1
Reynolds, Joshua, 38–39, 97 Sallé, Marie, 29–30
INDEX 355
salons (women’s), 111–4, 142 and gendered subjectivity, 27, 44, 82, 130,
Sandow, Eugen, 66–67, 84, 88, 90, 248, 185, 225, 266n57, 276n48
274n33, 275n34 recitation as, 100–7, 114, 134–6, 142–3
Santayana, George, 120–1, 128, 287n64 as trans-generic rubric, 9–11, 18–21, 25,
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 24–25, 60–61, 106, 59, 77–78, 90, 99, 125, 192, 227–8, 237,
273n18, 284n24 240
Schechner, Richard, 17–18, 257n60, 271n4 soul:
Schwartz, Hillel, 98–99 and body, 5, 8, 10–12, 40, 62–65, 69–70,
science, 6, 23, 54, 60–62, 67, 74, 75–77, 84, 75, 98, 105, 116, 139, 144–8, 151, 154–5,
87, 93, 97–98, 103, 133, 146, 161–3, 167, 161–2, 165–6, 169–70, 177–8, 181, 185,
179–80, 189, 201, 212, 218, 253n26, 188–91, 199, 230, 238–9, 246
271n4, 274n23, 298n65, 302n124, 309n70 in Delsartism, 11–12, 60, 62, 64–65,
Scott, Bonnie Kime, 253n24, 258n78 69–70, 73–75, 78, 116, 283n17, 289n90
secularism, 14–15, 17, 74, 125, 146, 192, and Duncan, 8, 10, 144–51, 154, 172–3,
258n73, 270n99, 283n23 177, 185, 187–90, 249
self-cultivation, 68–75, 77, 84, 87, 98, 107, and film, 228
275n38, 283n14 and Haeckel, Ernst, 161–2, 166
sentimental art, 45–46, 49, 71, 78, 135 and H.D., 11, 191–2, 199, 217, 230–1, 238,
sexualization of performers, 26, 32, 34, 37, 249
42–43, 88, 148–51, 201, 221, 240, 264n40, and individualism, 12, 40, 105, 109
276n47, 280n85, 308n64, 309n72 and Nietzsche, Friedrich, 178
Shawn, Ted, 80, 82–91, 126, 272n5, 274n26, and Olson, Charles, 246
278n65, 279n72, 279n76, 279n80, and Pound, Ezra, 128
297n53 recitation as expression of, 104–5, 109, 119
Gnossienne, 84–87, 90, 297n53 and Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 179–81
Sherman, Cindy, 11, 240–2 and Whitman, Walt, 166, 169
silent auditor, 19, 46–48, 53–54, 122, 132, speaker (poetic), 18–20, 27, 31, 45, 52–56, 74,
200–3, 208, 235 105–6, 112–4, 121–3, 130–3, 137–42, 193,
Sinclair, May, 111, 114 197, 202–11, 231–6, 245, 257n66, 267n67,
Sloan, John, 182, 185–8, 303n131 285n38, 285n45
Smith, Anna Deavere, 11, 243–4, 266n57 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 92–93, 99, 178–81,
social contract theory, 29–30, 262n15 266n54, 281nn93–94, 301nn112–13
socialism/communism, 71–72, 145, 163, 183, statue posing. See attitude
276n52, 298n61 St. Denis, Ruth, 72–73, 80, 82–91, 249,
solar plexus, 98, 154–6, 171 272n5, 279n75, 279n80
soliloquy, 45–46 Stebbins, Genevieve, 12, 73–83, 85, 87, 90, 93,
solo performance: 4–6, 25, 27–57, 240–4, 98–99, 101, 104, 107, 239, 277nn54–58,
251n7, 315n10 289n84, 289n90
dance as, 73, 82–83, 144–52, 179, 183–5, and Duncan, Isadora, 153, 156, 159,
299n83, 300n85, 314n1 299n69
356 INDEX
subjectivity: trinity (body, mind, soul), 11–12, 60–64, 69,

and embodiment, 12–13, 27, 29–30, 148, 74, 83–84, 105, 126, 161–2, 166, 181, 199,
207, 261n7, 281n102 217
gendered, 11–14, 18, 29–30, 44, 68, 99, 117, Tucker, Herbert F., 19–20, 268n75,
144, 222–4, 228, 266n57 287n62
mythic/typological, 8, 27, 57, 75, 184 tunic (Greek), 29, 32–38, 42, 75, 90, 132, 145,
Victorian, 19–20, 28, 56, 60, 98 149, 152–3, 157, 186, 217, 293n6, 311n89
suffrage, 10, 14, 44, 59, 72–73, 111, 182, 206, Turner, Graeme, 229
252n17, 270n98, 302n124, 308n62 Turner, Victor, 17–18, 307n53
Surette, Leon, 126–128, 289n85 typology (fourfold method), 9–11, 14–16,
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 61, 64, 74, 104, 154, 27–8, 255n50
199, 268n82, 274nn27–28, 310n77 and gender, 14–16, 256n52
symbolism, 72, 128, 173, 208, 223–5, 230, and contemporary criticism, 15, 244–5,
259n80, 308n65, 312n98 247, 255n49, 315n14
in dance, 148, 151, 156, 159, 182, 184
tableaux vivants, 17, 23, 40–4, 52, 66, 69, and Delsartism, 64, 74–75
77–79, 88–90, 97, 100, 158–9, 170, 214, and film, 192, 212–8, 226
218, 223, 227, 235–8, 241, 247–8, 264n33, and modernist poetry, 111, 116–26, 132–3,
264n37, 265n48, 282n105 140–3, 194, 199–200, 203–4, 210, 231–7
technology, 6, 9, 10, 58–60, 68, 90–98, and the mythical method, 16, 102, 117–8,
144–6, 166–8, 170–3, 177, 189, 194, 212, 122–5, 132–3, 140–2, 148, 156, 183–4,
225–31, 234, 237, 249, 253n28, 203–4, 256n4
272nn8–9, 274n23, 275n37, 279n77, in nineteenth-century poetry, 49–57,
281n99 294n20, 304n9, 309n70, 125, 268nn81–82, 270n93, 270n96
312n100
Tennyson, Alfred, 19, 27, 46, 52, 79, 109, Unitrinianism / Unitrinian School, 83–84,
121, 257n69, 261n3, 267nn67–68, 126–7, 175, 197, 278n71
306nn40–41
Maud, 46, 276n67 Van Vechten, Carl, 169–70, 293n7
“St. Simeon Stylites,” 51 vaudeville, 42, 88–91, 148, 150, 181, 187
Tractarian movement, 51, 269nn85–86 verse-recitation movement (British), 100–1,
translation, 8, 129–30, 193, 195, 205–7, 212–3, 118–9, 134, 142, 172, 195, 282n4, 287n58
262n18, 290nn98–99, 304n14, VGIK (First State Cinema School), 92–93,
308nn60–61, 309n66 281n97
transnationalism, 4, 10, 13, 58–59, 67–70, Victory (Nike) of Samothrace, 3, 80,
73–74, 81, 90–97, 107, 144–6, 149, 152, 182, 169–70, 220, 243, 250n4
188, 193, 215, 217, 251nn6–7, 253n22, vocal culture, 58, 102, 104, 107, 283n12
264n39, 275n38, 284n29, 293n4, 295n30, Volkonsky, Sergei, 91–92, 277n57, 280n91,
299n78, 301n112, 310n80 281nn93–94
INDEX 357
Wagner, Richard, 150, 162, 175–6, 260n94, and Duncan, Isadora, 162–3, 167,
272n12, 295n31, 297n58 177–182, 298n65
Wakoski, Diane, 246–7, 249, 316n22 and H.D., 219
Walker, Julia A., 59, 107, 118–21, 253n29, Williams, Carolyn, 257n63
272nn7–8, 273n18, 274n23, 274n30, Williams, Michael, 248
275n37, 282n4, 283n14, 283nn22–23, Williams, William Carlos, 6–7, 23, 150–1,
288n80 245
Webster, Augusta, 27, 51–56, 114, 120, Windmill Theatre, 42, 264n41
258n73, 270nn98–99 Wolf, Amalie, 41
Anno Domini 33, 55–56 Woolf, Virginia, 23, 111, 258n78,
A Housewife’s Opinions, 54–55 259n91
“Medea in Athens,” 54 World War I, 9, 13, 139–43, 169, 195, 203–4,
Werner, Edger S. publishing, 12, 61, 66, 68, 219, 230, 303n126, 307n52
81, 83, 275n36 World War II, 9, 11, 42, 125, 142–3, 194, 231,
Wharton, Edith, 97–99, 259n81 233, 292n124
Whitman, Walt, 126, 144, 146, 160–9, 185,
189, 297n55 Yampolsky, Mikhail, 91–95, 280n92,
Wilde, Oscar, 56, 70, 271n105, 285n38, 281n94, 281n97
289n91 Yeats, W. B., 107–8, 110, 118–9, 125, 129–30,
will: 134, 284n29, 285n38, 289n93, 291n108,
Delsartean, 13–14, 62, 64, 69, 84–85, 98 312n98, 312n100

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

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Modernism’s Mythic Pose

Modernist Literature & Culture

The Art of Scandal

Nations of Nothing But Poetry

Modernism & Copyright

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1. The Solo’s Origins: Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues 26

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

IV. Performing Delsartism (Take Two): Denishawn and Hollywood 82

3. Positioning Genre: The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures

4. The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan’s Solo Dance 144

5. Ritualized Reception: H.D.’s Antimodern Poetics and Cinematics 191

Recovering the astonishingly inﬂuential yet largely forgotten movement called

Mark Wollaeger and Kevin J. H. Dettmar

A book is in no way a solo performance, although it does require considerable

I.1 Isadora Duncan in Marseillaise by Arnold Genthe (1915–1918). 4

2.6 “Grief Tableaux” in Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book

—“Miss [Isadora] Duncan’s Vivid Dances,” New York Times (1909)1

—F. T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” (1917)2

F. T. Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, reacted uneasily to the “emotional expres-

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

Delsartism has been described as a failed antimodern movement, it also incorpo-

II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment

Whereas Delsartism insists on the power of a will that is realized in repeated

theory progresses through a series of corrected and corrective exaggerations,

III. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual

IV. Solo Genres

forms, using the authority of prosopopoeia to frame the value of rehearsing

kinesthesia—the sense by which we perceive muscular effort, movement, and position in

—Rudolph Laban, Modern Educational Dance (1948)77

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

of différence.80 Moving beyond metaphor, I examine the relation between dance

Berenson (Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 1896) accused Lee of plagiarism

Long before modernists imagined gesture as an original, expressive language that

performance and emotional expression. They reinterpreted myth and presented

I. Galatea’s Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama

—Rousseau, Pygmalion (1762)9

Rousseau’s Pygmalion established the hybrid form of the monodrama, performed

II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton’s Attitude

surprising transformations—standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious,

While Goethe’s reference to an anonymous “English girl” and description of Sir

nature”) lent authenticity to Lyon Hamilton’s attitudes, and he occasionally provided

strictures of “decency” with her advantageous marriage and also as a celebrated

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

III. Goethe’s Proserpina and Later Posers

Hopeless the fate of the departed,

representation of “profane scenes from history or poetry” in private theatricals,

IV. Barrett Browning: Naming “Aeschylus”

A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,

All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)58

by Barrett Browning deﬁnitively resolved the question of authorship. Margaret

. . . when the people’s scorn

a Creator, rent asunder

Holds ﬁrmly by the natural, to reach

Look long enough

V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti

—Christina Rossetti, The Face of the Deep (1892)84

And does that mean

Nineteenth century monodramas, attitudes, and dramatic monologues, as