Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle (review)

Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle. Rhonda K. Garelick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. ix + 231. $32.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

The term "dandy" typically calls to mind a quaint if elegant figure whose association with other eras and worlds is reinforced by his elitism. Rhonda Garelick revises this association by bringing the dandy as close to us as (M)TV; in her view the European dandy is the ancestor of the celebrity personality as fostered by the contemporary American media--in short, of the star. Her study argues that the progressive dismantling of the dandy and his transformation into latter-day star are brought about by his confrontation with the popular female performer at the turn of the century.

Transcending the chronological bounds announced by its title, Garelick's book discusses key "treatises" on the dandy by Honoré de Balzac, Jules Barbey, Charles Baudelaire, and Jean Lorrain before homing in on the fin de siècle. Garelick does not merely recapitulate the texts but highlights differences among them in order to demonstrate the progression she is illuminating. Especially perceptive and compelling are her analyses of the turn-of-the-century works at the heart of her argument, Stéphane Mallarmé's La Dernière mode, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future, and Oscar Wilde's Salomé, as well as her reading of the dance performances of Loie Fuller.

This selection was determined by Garelick's focus on the relationship of the dandy to the female performer. Whereas other studies of the dandy emphasize his androgyny and homoeroticism, they tend to neglect his dealings with women. By contrast, Garelick treats fictional and actual relationships between female performers and writers who are dandies as well as their literary creations to demonstrate the extent to which the dandy and the female performer are linked by the element of staged spectacle. At the turn of the century, when the rise of mass culture facilitated both the commodification of the female as performer before a crowd and the large-scale reproduction of her image through new technologies such as lithography, photography, and cinema, the woman of the popular stage represents more a refraction than a reflection of the hermetic dandy. Hence his encounter with her transforms him forever. The link Garelick establishes between the dandy and the female performer gives new significance and cohesion to the decadent association of woman with artifice, popular from Baudelaire on. This is only one example of her book's contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century French culture in general.

In the course of her study Garelick brings to light some suggestive paradoxes associated with the dandy. First, the dandy has a fervent desire for originality, but dandies generate further dandies, and dandyist texts inspire imitation of their style. Second, based on a critique of commodity culture, the dandy is dissociated from the sphere of money, trade, work, and production, yet his personality tends to be commodified. Third, beginning with Baudelaire, the dandy is both an indifferent onlooker and a part of the crowd. Fourth, the dandy is fascinated by the artifice and constructedness of the female body, yet by virtue of these qualities she rivals him. The last of these paradoxes is particularly applicable to Loie Fuller, who is the subject of one of the most engrossing parts of this book. In Garelick's view, Fuller "most provocatively combined the dandy's fin-de-siècle aesthetic with a commodity-based, mechanized spectacle" (99). For Garelick, Fuller effects the transition from dandyism to camp and, concomitantly, from the hermetic, elite, fin-de-siècle dandy to the modern media personality. Anticipating the contemporary star, her private life became as important as her public performances.

Garelick illustrates this and other parallels between nineteenth-century dandies and icons of popular culture today by spotlighting Prince...