ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 144
Bạn đang xem bản rút gọn của tài liệu. Xem và tải ngay bản đầy đủ của tài liệu tại đây (32.33 KB, 1 trang )
ACTRESSES AND THE MISE EN SCÈNE
heavily weighted by the erotic lexicography of male culture. The
clothing inextricably associated with a ‘guilty’ body part became the
indexical sign of the sexual part; in other words, it was fetishized. In
the opinion of Anthony Storr, a sexologist, women use fetishized
objects to attract men, so ‘a fetish may, as it were, be a flag hung out by
the woman to proclaim her sexual availability.’23 But if this is so, how
can one flag be distinguished from another in the Victorian theatre?
Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist, summarizes the problem:
Since there is virtually no bodily part or piece of apparel or
substance that is not fetishized by some men somewhere, it
would be hard indeed for a woman not to hang out a flag without
going naked, which would be construed as definitely hanging
out a flag. From underwear to rubber boots and raincoats to
leather belts to long hair to all varieties of shoes to feet in and of
themselves: all these and more are fodder for male fetishists.24
The repetition of certain motifs must be accepted as a clue to identifying
fetishes and correctly locating them in the historical past. Given the
particularly strong stigma against ballet girls, it is not surprising that
their line of business comes up again and again in erotic allusions or
that their costumes were widely borrowed for other lines of business.
As a type of woman performer they are not a fetish in and of
themselves, but certain articles of clothing associated with dancers
contributed to their fascination—particularly when combined with
sexually inscribed movements.
GESTURE: ‘EVERY LITTLE MOVEMENT HAS A
MEANING OF ITS OWN’
Theatrical costume could and did inspire outrage when combined
with genuine innovations in gesture. The cancan scandalized
audiences that had become immune, by 1870, to the sight of ethereal
danseuses, swaggering principal boys, female gymnasts, and ‘nude’
Mazeppas. William Green observed that economic crises in the
precursors of the American strip show were successively avoided ‘by
tearing away another veil, inventing another gyration to woo new
audiences’,25 but in the case of the cancan it was not the dance alone
that was so scandalously appealing, and no disrobing occurred in the
literal sense of the word. The first English performance of the cancan,
at the Princess’s in 1866, was by four men. They attracted little notice.
115
