Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman (review)

Given the frequent appearance of dance in the pages of English fiction during the nineteenth century, research on its place and function has been sparse. When tackled, writers have tended to focus on descriptive accounts that skim the surface of the actual activity of dancing and the choreographic construction of the dance itself. In an exploration of one of the most fruitful periods of literary constructions of social dance, Cheryl A. Wilson attempts to close the gap between the dance text and literary text. She neatly summarizes her ambition to reveal the “intertextual relationship between social dance and literary renderings of social dance” with a view to exposing the instrumental role of the former not only in the narrative of the latter (21), but also in its broader social context. Dance is not seen, however, as simply a strategy for forwarding the narrative or as a reflection of the social scene, but meanings are ascribed to its own structures and conventions. That is, dance is not just representational but presents itself in the literary text.

Wilson’s premise is that, for the middle and upper classes, “to fully participate in the social and cultural world of the nineteenth century was to dance or, at the very least, to watch others do so” (3). What is refreshing about Wilson’s approach is her acknowledgement that writers produced their accounts from their own experience, thus evoking physicality and performativity rather than simply a static narrative. It was not only the writers who knew their referential frame, for the social customs embodied in the dance would be meaningless without an informed readership, one that recognized not only the conventions of dance and when they were broken, but also their metaphorical status. Cognizant of writers and readers, dancing and dance, narrative and society, Wilson offers an analysis of how dance produced, and reproduced, issues relating to “mobility (both physical and social), nationalism and gender” (12). This premise and Wilson’s aims are articulated in a thoughtful, if slightly repetitive, introduction. From there, the book moves not through chronological time but is structured by the dominant social dance forms in the ballrooms of the period: English country dancing, the French quadrille, and the waltz. This is a clever strategy, for it avoids repetition and reductionism and places the dance as central to the enquiry.

A chapter on “the culture of dance” sets the scene and prefaces the above. This culture is traced primarily, and a little surprisingly, through an analysis of dance manuals that offered advice as much on morals and manners as on movement. Acknowledging the gap between the instructions on the page and the practice in the ballroom, the manual “is in conflict with the cultural phenomenon it represents” (29). Here, as part of her intertextual strategy, Wilson privileges the meanings of the written text rather than the danced activity.

Wilson reminds us that the nomenclature English “country dance” is misleading, for this term is actually a corruption of the French contredanse. Its basic floor pattern of two lines of dancers facing each other, moving through changing lead position, offers an opportunity for a discussion of social rank, mobility, and marriage in close readings of Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot. The quadrille, however, is based not on lines with their limited potential for internal movement, but on “sets” or squares comprising four couples. A disruption of linearity, the quadrille offers Anthony Trollope, among others, an opportunity to expose the relationship between “social sets and individual mobility” (119). As outsiders infiltrate, sets disintegrate or form and reform more tightly. Although less hierarchical than the line dances, these sets are still, essentially, spatially and socially closed.

The line and the set on the ballroom floor were joined by the seemingly spatially anarchic and scandalous dance of the waltz. Imported in the Regency period, it took hold during the Victorian...