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The Parisian café-concerts were host to a number of profound innovations in fin de siècle popular dance, as wildly original and disparate performance styles flourished on the stages of venues such as the Folies-Bergère and the Moulin Rouge. Within this milieu, dancers Loie Fuller, la Goulue, and Polaire became mass sensations in fin de siècle popular culture. Popular spectacles though they were, the impact of these dancers' performances endured beyond the sensations they caused. Fundamentally altering the way movement was both perceived and culturally understood, the strategies of these disparate performers arose out of the Belle Époque and persisted to inform emergent Modernist "-isms" as well as early cinema.[i] In tracing these connections, many contemporary scholars have argued for the subversive potential of Fuller's work, suggesting that her dance presented a heterogeneous or unbounded figure that brought something new to the viewer's experience of the female body on the stage. Similarly, Rae Beth Gordon’s comprehensive analysis of the performances of Polaire and la Goulue reveals that their work drew upon the iconographic postures of the female body that comprised the medical discourse of hysteria as it was newly articulated within the fin de siècle.[ii] Extending Gordon’s insights, I argue that la Goulue and Polaire’s mimetic performance of hysteria represented the female body in ways that were innovative of this discourse. In this paper I will look at how, rather than offering straightforwardly mimetic representations of hysteria, la Goulue and Polaire’s work was “unbounded” and exceeded the frame of the discourse which they represented in their performance.

I interpret these three seemingly disparate dancers through a framework that analyzes the subversive content or potential of their performances of corporeal or abject femininity. Further, their performances are productive sites for looking at how dominant fin de siècle discourses around excessive femininity were negotiated in popular dance. Tracing out the connections between their representations and institutional discourses of the period that inscribed specific meanings upon particular feminine bodies, I analyze both the formal elements of their performance and how these were apprehended by spectators. While many scholars argue that Fuller’s performance was radical in its presentation of the female body, my argument hopes to trouble this reading.

Loie Fuller’s dancing career took off through her ingenious manipulation of the play of multicoloured light on moving fabric. Characteristically known for her Serpentine Dance, Fuller used the torque of her spinning body to create voluminous twirls and swirls throughout yards of silk, kept aloft via suspension from rods that she would hold in her hands while spinning with her body. While projecting coloured light onto the undulating drapery, the onstage figure she presented defied all categorization. Reviewers were quite unsure what to make of her technique, as it was difficult to distinguish between the flowing silk and the movements of the dancer’s body itself. Subtle and sublime, ethereal and electric, overnight it seemed Fuller’s figure was everywhere, shining ubiquitous light onto the cultural landscape.

I locate dancers la Goulue and Polaire at the other end of the fin de siècle’s dance cultural spectrum. Representing France’s raucous cabaret culture, connoting the mixing of classes and threat of venereal disease and degeneracy, [iii] a cluster of affective resonances situate their work culturally. However, emphatically the most provocative element distinguishing their dancing from countless other performers in the cabarets was their enactment of the corporeal effects of the neurological disorder “hysteria” –a malady recently popularized by the work of the neurologist J.M. Charcot, working out of the famous Salpêtrière hospital in Paris.

In the last few decades of the 19^th century, neurologist J.M. Charcot enters the infamous mad house that was the Salpêtrière hospital. At this time, the hospital for mad women holds roughly four thousand patients. Arriving on this scene of interned women, Charcot immediately begins to turn what he sees to good account. Charcot’s account of the pain he encounters upon taking his post is that of the affliction “hysteria.” Interpreting the performances of his female patients, Charcot compiles an extensive iconography, a series of images comprising the diagnostic text Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. This collection of images promises a visual system of diagnosis, through which documented visible bodily signifiers such as stiff members, spasms, grimaces, and convulsions stand in direct referential correspondence to a patient’s "internal disorder" (see fig. 1).[iv] Indeed, Freud notes how Charcot could "scrutinize a procession of patients, seizing an essential image of their inner disorder by penetrating observation."[v] Given the contemporary fascination with positivistic science in fin-de-siècle France, one can only imagine the cultural furor that would have accompanied the highly publicized efforts of Charcot. How exciting the progress he was making at the Salpêtrière with this most infernal of feminine disorders. Charcot penetrates, publicizes, and fixes in place through rendering a visual text, an “image-writing” through which stable interpretation of corporeal-femininity-as-disorder is inscribed and disseminated. It is within this burgeoning psychoanalytic rage that, alongside other cabaret performers such as Jane Avril (herself a one-time patient of Charcot), Polaire and la Goulue’s hysterio-epileptic[vi] dancing ensues. Drawing upon this discursive context, specifically the postures and movements described and documented in medical texts, they create a spectacle that catapults them to fame.

This paper draws upon the work of the hystero-epileptic dancers in order to set up the frame through which I read Fuller’s “unbounded body” in performance. To this end, firstly I draw on the main elements of Kristeva’s theory of signification and subjectivity that she delineates in Revolution in Poetic Language and Powers of Horror. Engaging this framework, I argue that la Goulue and Polaire's dance discursively exceeded the iconography they represented in their dance--namely the medical discourse of hysteria. This excessive performance, or repetition with a difference, stands in contrast to Fuller’s “unbounded body” in performance, which I suggest was both bound and framed through her use of the tropes of art nouveau. Finally, I argue that Fuller's representations of “fluidity” and "indeterminacy" were constrained within a representational frame that withheld their subversive potentials. Questions undergirding this analysis are: what made Fuller's "unbounded body" so totally celebrated by mainstream fin de siècle culture? In a period where women were not allowed to be geniuses, why was Fuller, who many consider to be innovative in her representation of the "unbounded" feminine, so congenial to dominant visual ideologies at the forefront of reactionary gender politics–such as art nouveau—within the period? On the other hand, why were these other dancers withheld the status of "artist"? What made their representations so threatening, when they seem to be simply mimetic of a misogynist institutional discourse?

Dancing, Discursive Boundaries, and the Female Form: A Framework

My sense of these dancers pivots upon their performance as an embodied iteration of what Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic modality of subjectivity. Fundamentally, Kristeva argues that the subject is comprised of both semiotic and symbolic modalities. In terms of the development of the subject, the first of these designates subjectivity prior to acquisition of language, and is both prior to and in excess of the symbolic order. The symbolic, on the other hand, is defined as a system of signification that includes all meaning-making –but particularly refers to representational discourse, order, and law. Even after the subject is constituted as a speaking-subject within the symbolic (through the acquisition of language) the semiotic persists within the subject as an inarticulable and irreducible heterogeniety with the symbolic. This is to say that it is a force that destabilizes meaning, or the syntactic division between self and other. Kristeva writes "an irruption of the semiotic chora...prevents the 'other' from being posited as an identifiable syntactic term...the Other has become heterogeneous and will not remain fixed in place."[vii] This relates to my analysis in that the semiotic, located in excess of, and yet always to some extent traversing the symbolic order, introduces marginality, subversion and dissidence into the system. Kristeva understands the marginal and repressed aspects of language as a potentially revolutionary force.

While the symbolic is "order superimposed on the semiotic, the semiotic overflows its boundaries . . . [particularly within] madness, holiness and poetry."[viii] For Kristeva, all signification is, to some extent, traversed by the semiotic. The more that this is the case, the more the meaning of the signification is altered through the affective charge of the semiotic. I argue that la Goulue and Polaire's performances productively filtered the semiotic into the symbolic, bringing the abject into signification and thereby changing the discourse of hysteria --a discourse centered, of course, in the visual representation of female bodies. That is, they performed abject bodies in such a way that this “abject” femininity was reintroduced into visual signification, so that it was no longer wholly abject or radically outside of the symbolic order. Thereby they introduced the possibility of seeing these bodies differently than they were seen or conceived of before. Fuller’s performance, on the contrary, did not exceed the signifying system that it engaged.

As noted above, I read fin de siècle responses to la Goulue and Polaire's dance, along with scholarly interpretations of Fuller's body in performance, as intimately related to these dancers' performance of abject bodies. Kristeva's category of the abject pertains directly to the way that feminine subjectivity was configured as in excess of dominant fin-de-siècle signifying systems. As Kristeva writes, abjection is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders or rules. It is the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”[ix] Here, feminine subjectivity, which is not represented within the dominant symbolic of fin-de-siècle France, upsets the system of meaning in which the speaking-subject exists. Therefore the symbolic is imposed onto the abject as an attempt to contain and fix it as a stable object. This relationship undergirds the iconographic signifying systems of both hysteria and art nouveau. Further, concepts of "the in-between, the ambiguous, [and] the composite" are taken up repeatedly in responses to these dancers' works.

Period reviews suggest the discursive indeterminacy of Polaire and la Goulue’s representations in terms of the ambiguous threat their performance of hysteria posed to the spectator’s subjectivity.[x] In the context of their performance, the supposedly fixed iconic signifiers of hysteria are leaky, referentially loosened from their embodied site. As regards Fuller, nearly all accounts of her dance attend to the indeterminacy of form created by her swirling silk and the play of light upon it. One could not tell where her body ended and the silks began –outside and inside may appear to merge. Fuller recalls her audience’s reactions to her skirt dancing as her movements confounded their efforts at identifying what indeed it was that they were viewing. She describes her audience shouting at intervals, "It is a butterfly! It is an orchid!”[xi] Clearly her work represented a female figure –while at once suggesting a disorienting mixture of elements seamlessly merging into each other. Without question, Fuller represents an indeterminate, fluid, merging of materials –heterogeneous as opposed to fixed in terms of its iconic visual meaning.

Thus, these dancers’ performances take up the abject feminine in ways that would seem to trouble the fixed boundaries of the symbolic which holds the abject in place. Through the discursive instability of their performances, it may be possible to locate the expressive and affective semiotic. Both kinds of dance taken up in this discussion represent the female body in a way that suggests discursive instability. However, if each of these expressive modalities presents the spectator with the unbounded feminine, then the question of reception arises—how to account for the disparity in cultural response?

To begin unpacking this disparity, I analyze la Goulue and Polaire's reception through Kristeva's theory of the semiotic. Through this psychoanalytic lens, the reception of their “hystero-epileptic” dance is so anxiously ambivalent because their performances simultaneously engage and disrupt the iconographic system of hysteria. This analysis takes place through the gap that I identify in scholarship that has thus far connected Charcot's institutional discourse of hysteria and these dancers' performances. While Gordon’s analysis traces connections between Charcot's hysteria and dance, the question remains to be answered: what was it about these performances that made them different from the discourse they mimetically represented?

            Since the iconographies of hysteria and art nouveau, upon which these performances were based, were imposed or inscribed upon the female body, one way to engage my questions is through the female body as signifier in fin-de-siècle art and culture. Lynda Nead's work on the female nude offers some strong insights here. For Nead, the female nude symbolizes the transformation of the base matter of nature into the elevated forms of culture and the spirit.[xii] This outlook can be observed in fin-de- siècle art and culture through a myriad of representational strategies related to abject bodies, for example, in the discourse of primitivism or in representations of nature and women in Symbolism or Art Nouveau. Along these lines, fin de siècle visual art representing the feminine can be understood as a means of containment. If the female body has been regarded as unformed, undifferentiated matter, then the procedures and conventions of high art are one way of "controlling this unruly body and placing it within the securing boundaries of aesthetic discourse."[xiii] In contrast to the discursively boundaried nude, the obscene body is the body without borders or containment; obscenity moves and arouses the viewer rather than bringing about stillness and wholeness. Much like Kristeva's semiotic, the obscene is libidinal, feeling-oriented, and destabilizes subjectivity. Here art is defined, similarly to language, as "the containing of form within limits.” [xiv] Thus any representation of the female body that is not coherently framed within the visual symbolic of fin de siècle culture emphasizes the semiotic modality of subjectivity and can alter this system of meaning. This framework can be productively applied to the systems of representation in which la Goulue, Polaire, and Fuller's "unbounded bodies" arise.

The Threat of Instability: Spectatorship, Subjectivity and Performance

Numerous period reviews of the dance of Polaire and la Goulue register a threat to subjectivity posed by their performance. Gordon identifies la Goulue and Polaire specifically representing disordered subjectivity in their dance; they were referred to as "hystero-epileptic dancers"[xv] and this made them both thrilling and threatening to spectators. Along these lines, it should be noted that performing hysterical female subjectivity -the aporia of inner-most femininity visually rendered by the surface of the female body- would be a performance of an abject body. However, since these performances were only apprehensible through a symbolic iconography, it seems strange that they would provoke anxieties around abjection and its threat to boundaried subjectivity. Critics wrote ambivalently about la Goulue and Polaire’s performances—the public found them sensational precisely because of fears around hysteria as a force of visual contagion. Spectating hysteria could engender autocorporeal mimetic effects,[xvi] through which the boundaries of the viewer's subjectivity would be breached. In other words, it was possible to "catch" hysterical subjectivity through apprehension of its corporeal enactment. Period writings, then, expressed the anxiety that these dancers produced in terms of the syntactic division between self and other. Fears about visual contagion around the work of la Goulue and Polaire emphasize the unsettling of this division. Further, Kristeva's claim that the semiotic "overflows its boundaries in madness, holiness and poetry"[xvii] certainly calls to mind the libidinal excesses associated with hysteria and feminine madness in particular. However, the visual iconography of hysteria, imposed on culturally unruly or excessive feminine subjectivity, was a means of symbolic containment. If these dancers mimetically represented a discourse that abjected feminine subjectivity and corporeal embodiment, why would anyone have found them threatening? More precisely, why were their performances different from those of hysterics locked up in the Salpêtrière hospital, particularly since corporeal mimesis was one of the most noted elements of manifest hysteria?[xviii]

The concept of symbolic containment can be applied to the signifying system of hysteria that la Goulue and Polaire’s "unbounded bodies” engaged. For the purposes of this analysis, the most important aspect of Charcot's medical theory and practice is that the diagnosis of hysteria was primarily enacted visually, through the application of his iconographic system. Didi-Huberman remarks, "Charcot seems to have been the great director of symptoms that, in return, spoke to him of their own accord."[xix] A remark such as this suggests that Charcot was in fact imposing a coherent model of an illness that he coined upon the actions or performances of the women under his care. This supposition is likely, however, not only given his foundational role in developing neurology as a discipline but, perhaps more saliently, because of the incredible uniformity with which Charcot was able to document his patients’ heretofore aporetic symptoms. To quote Charcot:

            treating illnesses that all authors see as the classic example of the unstable,       irregular, fantastic, unforeseeable, ungoverned by any law or rule, not linked                   together by any serious theory: the task disgusted me more than any other. I set            down to work. [xx]

 

One can readily see the connections between the abject in Kristeva, and Charcot’s hysterical women. To return to Kristeva for a moment, the abject may be understood as “the place where meaning collapses.”[xxi] As feminine madness in particular is associated with “disgusting” aporia “ungoverned by any law or rule,” these women can be understood as culturally abject –abject bodies that do not conform to representational discourse that structure and governs sociality and subjectivity. For Kristeva “the abject is closely bound up with questions of identity, boundary crossing, exile and displacement.”[xxii] Thus the abject body is situated in social and political discourse as that which is expelled. Mad women do not conform to representational discourse: they become objects of loathing and provoke an abjecting response through which they are situated as external to society. Further, hysteria was (perhaps most) often connected with disordered female sexuality. In this sense the hysterical body is coded as obscene –the abject as monstrous feminine.[xxiii]

Here, Charcot’s method can be seen to impose the symbolic onto the abject. By delineating a coherent set of exact symptoms that were to be read visibly through the body and affect of his patients, he made them legible. Charcot’s visual iconography of hysteria “revealed” the patient’s hysterical subjectivity, premised upon a one-to-one relationship between signifier (hysterical symptom) and signified (subjective disturbance). The fact that these “symptoms spoke to him of their own accord," suggests that Charcot interpreted these symptoms as libidinal, unconscious forces. However, it must be noted that suggestiveness, or a propensity towards mimesis, was hysteria's number one symptom.[xxiv] In a photograph from Leçons Cliniques sur les Principaux Phénomènes de l'Hypnotisme dans leurs Rapports avec la Pathologie Mentale, entitled "Group Catalepsy Using a Lark Mirror,” numerous unidentified female hysterics in the foreground are shown mimicking the hand movements of their (all male) doctors in the background. While this photograph and numerous others like it were employed by Charcot to show the hysteric's propensity to suggestion, what is actually revealed by this image is one of the fundamental problems with Charcot`s positivist system of diagnosis and evidence. That is, if the hysteric were to act upon Charcot's suggestions to them, they were indeed embodying hysteria. Contemporary scholars agree that this fact should singlehandedly destroy the association of hysteria with women’s libidinal interiority, but of course, within the period, it does not. Didi-Huberman remarks, "What the hysterics of the Salpêtrière could exhibit with their bodies betokens an extraordinary complicity between patients and doctors, a relationship of desires, gazes, and knowledge."[xxv] This relationship, at the crux of Charcot's hysteria, is precisely the dynamic that I propose is frustrated in la Goulue and Polaire's performances.

Gordon suggests that the artistic representation and popular spectacle of the body as a collection of symptoms implying medical pathology began in the cabaret, as cabaret performance was very much influenced by the medical discourse surrounding hysteria and by popularized depictions of nervous disorders in newspapers and magazines. [xxvi] This representational style conforms closely to the initial stages of Charcot’s hysterical attack. The second stage, termed “clownism,” was performed through the enactment of convulsions and distorting of the body. The dance “moves” of Polaire and La Goulue conformed closely to the hysterical attack. Jean Lorrain remarks: "Polaire! The agitating and agitated Polaire.... hops around, trembles, quivers ... mimes all forms of shocks and shaking, twists, leans over backward in the form of an arc."[xxvii] In a photograph by Renard, entitled Catalepsy (see fig.4) a patient is shown in an iconic hysterical position, arc-de-cercle, in which the body arches backwards in muscular contraction. This stance was a distinct and widely recognized element of the visual iconography of hysteria; it was also a repeatedly noted movement in Polaire's performances.

Not surprisingly, reviewers of these dancers often allude to obscene female sexuality. Georges Montorgueil writes, "The real Mad Ball is at the Moulin Rouge, when the quadrille led by Rayon d'or or la Goulue unleashes that hysteroepilepsy that female clowns translate into the indecent skirt-raising [of the can-can]."[xxviii] A poster advertising La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge by Toulouse-Lautrec represents la Goulue "doing" the can-can. I note that, consistent with Montorgueil's description, Lautrec delineates her body as an incoherent figure that is most certainly ‘unbounded’: her foot is facing the wrong way, and her other foot is seamlessly intracorporeal with the spectator’s face. I suggest that this image renders the threat to the spectator posed by this kind of performance, reflecting the belief in the threat of contagion posed by this performance for the spectator. It is worth noting here that this “threat” to spectators was not felt within the institutional confines of the Salpêtrière, neither by the (male) specialists who worked there, nor by the esteemed men who came to watch at Charcot’s Tuesday afternoon sessions.[xxix] Given that this paradigm of contagion applies to dance spectators in the café-concerts, it is important to note that this is precisely how Kristeva delineates apprehension of the semiotic in representation. One cannot recognize it the way that one would recognize the meaning of a signifier: it is felt. The encoding of unspecified or distorted affective charge is communicated in numerous representations of la Goulue’s body in particular, and according to Kristeva’s paradigm, these strongly suggest the subversive or revolutionary qualities of the semiotic.

In another image of La Goulue by Lautrec, La Goulue Valse pour Piano (see fig.3), the distortion of her body is again evident. While the image does not represent her 'hysterico-epileptic' dancing, her body seems to swerve left, distorting her figure. I would argue this representation indicates that hers is not a discursively stable female form. As mentioned above, Lynda Nead links this instability with obscenity. This visual representation of la Goulue can be closely linked to her representation of the hysteric. Further, the hysteric is motivated by the automatic and instinctual drives –what the then-burgeoning discourse of psychoanalysis would refer to as the unconscious. The unconscious, or libidinal drive energies of the subject once again suggests Kristeva’s semiotic, which is affect-oriented and traverses language without remaining unrepresentable through any kind of mimetic signification.

Since hysteria was linked to the lower orders, it only makes sense that it would also be linked to the discourses of primitivism and evolution.[xxx] Indeed, critics linked can-can dancers with racist discourse against colonial subjects. Gordon argues that the commercial attraction of obscenity was central to these performers’ fame and to the popularity of the can-can, and that it was also central to the appeal of African women in the media of the period. She writes “the chanteuse epileptique successfully embodies and capitalizes on Otherness: loss of control in epilepsy and hysteria, the behavior and language of a prostitute. Like African women, they were labeled "animalistically aggressive."[xxxi] As noted by Gordon, the connection between hysteria and primitivism can also bee seen in representations of Polaire that caricature her both through the visual iconography of the hysterical body and racialized signifiers. A Caucasian woman (see fig.4), Polaire was caricatured as African in numerous visual representations (see fig.5). In a poster of Polaire by Cappiello in 1903 (see fig.6), she is coded as racially other in the artist’s depiction of her huge mouth and frizzy black hair.[xxxii] Additionally, Cappiello represents her body comprised with the visual iconographic signifiers of hysteria, most obviously clenched fists and taut members. Her back is also somewhat arched backwards –her “thrown back” head is the strongest indicator of this stance. I note that these primitivist links can be seen in Degas' representations of café-concert performers generally, which pictorially link these performers to savages and prostitutes, or in other words to the obscene body. Particularly in Degas, one can readily see the conflation of primitive, degenerate, de-evolving bodies with café-concerts performers,[xxxiii] who he depicts with receding foreheads and protruding jaws --not to mention the corpse-like ill health that he suggests through the ghastly color of his performers’ skin. It is worth noting in this regard that the primary signifier for the abject in Kristeva is indeed the corpse itself, gendered feminine. Judging by the period criticism and art, it is evident that these women were visually coded in such a way that popular representations conflated them with Africans (not to mention disease, degeneration, and perhaps death) en masse. It seems to me that the proliferation of images here, of multiple subjects represented in the very same way, is crucial for an understanding of these dancers as they were received in their period. In comparison with Loie Fuller, who was regarded as an individual artist, these hysterio-epileptic dancers are discussed and represented broadly as a mass of bodies or a group who all engage in the same representational strategy. Again, they are interpreted and represented for the most part en masse, instead of as singular artists.

This primitivist understanding of these dancers as one and the same is similar to the West’s perspective on “primitive” art, a perspective that "empties its referent of historical contingency or cultural specificity"[xxxiv] and takes the work produced by one individual as representative of the entire group to which she belongs. This is a feminizing concept, and contrasts to the Western male artist as masculine singularity. Loie Fuller was culturally situated in terms of this latter orientation, and I suggest this is an important element of contrast between Fuller and la Goulue and Polaire. The written descriptions of Polaire and la Goulue in the media, and depictions of them by their contemporaries, suggest to me that they are performing abject or obscene female bodies in such a way that these performances destabilize the experience of the spectator's subjectivity. This is most evident in the written anxieties of reviewers, and the unstable and "othering" visual representations of their performances.

Given that the repetition of hysteria in café-concert performance was so threatening to viewers, while "hysteria" proper was not, these dancers' enactments of Charcot's iconography must be seen as repetition with a difference. This difference is a structural one, frustrating the seamless apprehension of meaning for the viewer --creating an apprehension not fully structured by the symbolic, but that is instead primarily affective. la Goulue and Polaire, performing hysteria outside the patient-doctor feedback loop within the walls of the Salpêtrière, broke apart Charcot’s visual iconography of hysteria precisely in terms of the one to one relationship between signifier and referent. By creating representations of hysteria with their bodies self-reflexively, their performances frustrated the stability of the symbolic order of their culture, in which the subject requires a clearly demarcated other in order to maintain a coherent self. In this way, they frustrated the self-other dichotomy upon which coherent subjectivity rests (as in Lautrec’s image of the obscene body melding seamlessly with the mind of the spectator), emphasizing the semiotic modality of communication and opening up discourse to new meaning-making possibilities. It is precisely this element of hysteria as a cultural discourse that later Modernists, such as the Surrealists and Dada, found so valuable. It is also this instability in representation that rendered these performances obscene. Given that these representations were coded as obscene femininity, they were not taken up as art by art critics within their period. I suggest that it is for this reason that they have been largely ignored historically, in spite of their pivotal role in shifting paradigms about signification and the body that would be taken up so intensively by later modernists. This is a historical "forgetting" that is not shared by the other dancer in my study, Loie Fuller.

Loie Fuller: Feminine Nature, Discursive Boundaries and the Abject

            Numerous scholars, such as Rhonda Garelick and Anne Cooper Albright, argue that Loïe Fuller presented a “new” version of the feminine figure, one that challenged contemporary figurations of the female form and introduced heterogeneity into the viewer’s experience. Albright foregrounds how Fuller's dancing "put forth visions of nature, and yet was extremely technologically innovative,"[xxxv] casting the relationship between physical expression and visual abstraction in a new light. Felicia McCarren argues that Fuller, "blend[ed] action and release, inside and outside, self and other, nature and artifice and create[d] new viewing possibilities through her technique."[xxxvi] Yvon Novy describes Fuller as "an un-fixable errance."[xxxvii] All of these scholar's suggest the radical potential of her dancing body to disrupt, confront and intervene in representations of women’s bodies as they were sexualized on the stage. Garelick indicates this orientation towards Fuller's work most clearly by stating that she was "more like Thomas Edison than Josephine Baker."[xxxviii]

In what these critics deem to be the indeterminacy of Fuller’s representations, one might imagine a semiotic filtering into the symbolic, an art that is potentially disruptive in its fluid indeterminacy. However, I argue that Fuller's work replicates the conservative strategies of fin-de-siècle art, detailed in Dikstra, Greenhalgh, Antliff and Leighton and others.[xxxix] As opposed to representations that foregrounded “instinctual drives,” Fuller’s work “reflected the state of advanced societies, in which the creative intellect gains ascendancy over the realm of the irrational,”[xl] –in Fuller’s case, the feminized body or abject nature. These orientations are reflected in the critics’ treatment of Fuller as individual genius, as opposed to a mass of obscene bodies of degenerate and racially Other women in the cases of Polaire and La Goulue. Regarding Fuller's singularity as genius, this conception of the artist can be readily observed in Dikstra's characterization of the misogyny of emerging modernist paradigms. He writes, "to be original was to be masculine in the best sense."[xli] One can read the masculinisation of Fuller in the acknowledgement of her as an artist by her contemporaries, particularly in terms of Fuller as innovator. Further, Dikstra opposes this conception of the artist with the portrayal of women by artists, which he characterizes as often delimiting their intimate link with primal nature.[xlii]

Antleiff and Leighton describe this paradigm when they write that the artist “transcends nature through cultural production.”[xliii] Numerous fin de siècle paintings by artists such as Matheiu Morais illustrate this paradigm. Sexualized women and children are depicted surrounded by butterflies, as enticing figures that suggest both sexual availability (for the implicitly male spectator) and a conflation of innocence, sexuality, and nature. Here the male artist creates a work whose value lies in his ability to give cultural shape to the undifferentiated or otherwise meaningless or abject natural world. In a promotional photograph of Fuller from 1899 (see fig.7) she is depicted very similarly, surrounded by the butterflies on her skirts, which were often themselves taken to suggest the natural world. Numerous posters and paintings of Fuller follow this image very closely. Further, Fuller’s performative body as a fan or decorative object in this image is classically aligned with representations of women in art nouveau and its ephemeral women as decorative objects.

Much scholarship indicates that Fuller’s skirt-dances, such as her dance The Lily, were considered 'pure' –and that this “purity” offered a new and alternative perspective on the female cabaret performer. While this may be the case to some extent, I would note Dikstra's discussion of the Lily as signifier within the fin de siècle, as he argues that the lily was a signifier of purity –sexualized in terms of being ripe for the despoiling. Mallarme writes, in his famous essay on Fuller, that “she acquires the virginity of un-dreamt of places.”[xliv] Given the representation of women and children’s purity as sexual desirability and availability in the fin-de-siècle, it ought to be questioned whether Fuller’s body in performance was not a sexualized body. Perhaps, instead, it was a body sexualized in misogynist ways, much like the depictions of purity and innocence in women and children identified by Dikstra in the works of numerous fin de siècle artists.

Emphatically, Fuller’s work should be associated with feminine iconography of art nouveau. Dances such as Fire Dance, The Lily, and The Butterfly depicted a female figure conflated with elements of the natural world. Julia Townsend suggests that, "by constructing herself as Other (insect, serpent, butterfly, etc.), Fuller removed herself from the realm of gender altogether."[xlv] On the contrary, nature itself was indeed gendered in the fin-de-siècle; this conflation between woman and nature in the period has been delineated extensively in scholarship and is particularly salient in terms of the style of art nouveau. Jan Thompson, in her discussion of women in the iconography of art nouveau, identifies the art nouveau woman as “decorative nature” and an object as opposed to subject.[xlvi]

Describing the art nouveau woman, Thompson articulates “delicate, flowering forms” stating that “she appears to be wrapped in an other-worldly aura, detached from the mundane world.”[xlvii] Along these lines, women in art nouveau were characterized by undulating movement and masses of hair. The hair of the art nouveau woman was represented as “intertwining tendrils twisting into fantastic shapes almost of their own accord.”[xlviii] Fuller’s yards of silk could be very readily construed as equivalent to these masses of hair, whipping around in delicate boundlessness. As Jiri Mucha states about the iconic art nouveau painter Edward Mucha: “A woman, for him, was not a body, but beauty incorporated in matter and acting through matter. This is why all his female figures, however solid, are not really of this world. They are symbols, unattainable dreams.”[xlix] As in an advertisement for "Job" cigarettes by Mucha (see fig.8), the art nouveau woman is ephemeral, she is like smoke, elemental and dreamlike. Along the bottom border of the advertisement she exceeds the frame. Indeed, as nature and femininity are abject alike, they are slippery in artists' representations, which often gesture towards their excess while at once "pinning them down" with conventional signifiers. In an 1893 print by Jules Cheret of Fuller her diaphanous silk swirls around her –she looks as if she is floating in the air, surrounded by whirling pastel colors which glow like phosphorescence. Indeed Cheret's image suggests Fuller’s performance as nymph-like, the epitome of feminized nature.

Fuller renders an abstract representation of the female form as an otherworldly, flowering embodiment of the feminine as decorative nature. This orientation to the female form is mirrored in Fuller’s own ideas about movement in dance, as she suggested that the unbounded body of her work is premised upon movement that conveys thought through the image, emphasizing, moreover, that it was not her that was being represented -- not a body but an abstract idea.[l] Fuller's work is further associated with nature and the tropes of art nouveau through the names and forms of her dances, such as the Lily Dance, Fire Dance and Butterfly Dance.[li] Thompson suggests a “favourite analogy was created by associating women with flowers, emphasizing shared attributes…resulting in numerous representations of dreamy art nouveau girls invested with nymph-like qualities.”[lii] An ad for "Loie Fuller at the Folies-Bergere" by PAL (see fig.9) suggests petals unfolding out of a stem –a female flower unfolds before the viewer's eyes. Fuller’s performances themselves unquestionably embody these representational strategies. My reading is reinforced by critical responses to her performance of Salome, undertaken in both 1895 and 1907, in which she represents an embodied, sexually desirous femininity. To say that critics lambasted these performances would be an understatement. As Anne Cooper Albright puts it, she is savagely "skewered” for “making a spectacle of herself."[liii] That there is such a powerful difference in the reception of Fuller’s skirt-dancing and her depiction of feminine subjectivity and sexual agency in Salome should indicate the conservatism with which she represented the female body in her earlier works.

Loie Fuller, la Goulue and Polaire each mimetically engaged dominant fin-de-siècle iconographies of the female body. In considering how these three dancers represent “unbounded” female forms, it is necessary to consider the culturally situated discourses that each engaged. Though each seems to present an “unbounded body,” they are not equally engaged in subverting dominant discourses. While La Goulue and Polaire enacted corporeal, incoherent bodies associated with the obscene in Lynda Nead's paradigm, Loie Fuller’s dance more closely resembles Nead’s nude. Fuller’s female form is obviously abstract, mimetically representing Art Nouveau’s woman as a “series of curves” as well as this style’s “abstraction of figurative elements.” Nead argues that, in order for the female body to have been considered “art,” it “must be clothed by a consistent style.” Fuller’s body was indeed clothed by a consistent style, the reactionary style of art nouveau. Rather than performing repetition with a difference, Fuller maintained the coherence of a symbolic that associated femininity with abject nature that can only have value when shaped and abstracted through the reasoned skill of the artist. Her representation of the female form remains solidly within the symbolic order of French fin-de-siècle culture. Keeping this signifying system intact, Fuller does not effectively challenge the abjecting of feminine subjectivity or sexuality in the fin-de-siècle. While the indeterminacy of the hysterical female figure is taken up by la Goulue, threatening institutional paradigms out of which “hysteria” arose, Fuller’s indeterminate body replicates the discursive melding of women and nature that was so central to colonial, psychoanalytic and medical paradigms in the period.

 

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