Dancing Out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture (review)

With the rise of television programs, such as So You Think You Can Dance? and Dancing With the Stars, dancing, particularly ballroom dancing, is experiencing a Renaissance in American culture. Dancing has always been part of the popular view of nineteenth-century British literature and culture, featuring prominently in films and recreations (the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America always includes a lavish ball, for example). Despite the obvious dance-mania of the Victorians themselves, however, literary and cultural scholarship has been slow to catch up with popular interest in the dance of the period. Recent publications, such as my own Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2009) and Molly Engelhardt's Dancing Out of Line begin to remedy this gap, bringing the dancing bodies of the Victorians to bear on our study of the period.

Focusing on the Victorians' response to dance crazes such as the polka and the Romantic ballet, Dancing Out of Line blends cultural and historical research to "tap into Victorian sensibility via emotionally potent, contextually rich dance scenes that have been overlooked in Victorian, feminist, and dance studies" (5). The scope of Engelhardt's research on Victorian dance and its cultural resonances is truly impressive, and the volume includes a number of wonderful anecdotes, examples, and illustrations from the dance history archives—such as Thomas Rowlandson's grisly images of a skeletal Death waltzing with an unsuspecting debutante from The English Dance of Death (1815-16)—which will interest readers regardless of their familiarity with this field.

Engelhardt's style is refreshing and fun—she weaves in casual references to popular culture, such as the high-school prom, hip hop, and Dirty Dancing (1987)—encouraging readers to see links between our own culture of dance and that of the Victorians with regard to topics such as socialization and courtship. She also allows the voices of the dancers and the writers she studies to come through, blending them seamlessly with her own contexts and analysis. Particularly poignant is her recuperation of the ballet girl, long cast as a prostitute or coquette, but instead, as Engelhardt demonstrates, having more in common with the working-class seamstress than with members of the demimonde.

Dancing Out of Line waltzes through multiple arenas of Victorian dance, including the expected, such as the ballroom and the ballet stage, and the unexpected, such as the sickroom. Engelhardt sweeps us onto the dance floor with the opening description of the performance of the polka at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1844, and from here she introduces the world of Victorian dance, framing her study and offering a metacritical celebration of ambivalence: "ambivalence in the context of dancing is generative, capable of producing new meanings that slip out of and in between the structural lines that partner in their manufacturing" (11). Engelhardt employs this ambivalence in her own writing, choosing to explore multiple perspectives and probe the sometimes messy world of dance history and scholarship—a strategy that prompts readers to question the sanitized ballrooms we regularly encounter in film and elsewhere. For example, Engelhardt explicates a scene from Catherine Gore's novel The Debutante (1846) in which characters seek refuge from the crowded ballroom by sitting near a window: "Followers of sanitation reformer Edwin Chadwick would no doubt have aligned this delicate reference to body odor with the fetid smell they used to locate the seedbeds of disease" (118). Indeed, the chapter on "Dance Manias, Medial Inquiry, and Victorian (Ill) Health" will be, perhaps, most interesting to Victorian scholars in general, as Engelhardt explores "the partnership of disease and dance" (113), concluding with a compelling parallel discussion of diseases of the heart in the Romantic ballet Giselle (1842) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847).

Dancing Out of Line begins with a chapter on Jane Austen, but undercuts expectations by focusing on the bodies of Austen's...