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  • Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque by Lela F. Kerley
  • Chris Brickell
Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque. By Lela F. Kerley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Pp. 278. $48.00 (cloth).

The body—especially the nude female body—is something of a barometer of social change: this is the key proposition of Lela F. Kerley’s Uncovering Paris. This is a fascinating treatment of the relationships between bodies, popular entertainment, and notions of gendered representation in France during the Belle Époque, the period between 1871 and 1914.

Kerley deftly paints the broad strokes of Parisian social change: the new freedoms and liberties engendered by shifts in French politics after 1879, the massification of culture exemplified by the music halls, women’s increasing access to public space, and the ebbs and flows of bourgeois notions of propriety. This big picture is the structure within which the “nude woman question”—Kerley’s play on the popular late nineteenth-century formulation the “New Woman question”—is subject to detailed scrutiny. Kerley tells of an important shift in the context of the nude female body. It was, at first, sequestered in the relative privacy of the artist’s studio: the “artistic nude” was not seen in the flesh but was rerendered for a public—and generally middle-class—audience. The represented body was not, in a sense, the real thing. The “modern nude,” however, signified a new public engagement with the body itself. Women posed in a state of partial or substantial dishabille, at first in café concerts and then in other settings. Soon there were concours de beauté plastique, the first beauty parades, although only the legs were revealed in the earliest examples.

All this signified a new engagement with mass culture, as well as loosening ideas about respectability. In the music halls, in particular, lines between high and low forms of entertainment began to blur, and performances became more risqué: the striptease became popular, along with the burlesque opera and nude dancing. The restrained object of artistic beauty was now the hypersexualized figure of public entertainment. Audiences witnessed the revealing of “nude torso and breasts,” scenes of drunkenness, and even lesbian passion; the mutual caresses of female performers excited spectators (165).

Technology played a role too. The rise of photography helped capture the new body cultures for posterity, but it did more than that: photographs transmitted these new cultures and the values that accompanied them. The sitters’ bodies and associated props told of gendered notions of sexuality: bare breasts and animal skins hinted at their—and perhaps also their admirers’—bestial sexuality. Photography and the rise of the fashion press went hand in hand, for the popular new periodicals spread this imagery far and wide.

As sites of both regulation and liberation, the female body sat at the center of redefinitions of women’s respectability. It should come as no surprise that the upholders of bourgeois morality contested the new developments. Attempts to police public decency focused on the theaters, and [End Page 307] Parisian moralists pushed back against the increasingly influential idea that late nineteenth-century rights to liberty included a right to “license and enjoyment” (102). They worried about the corruption of youth and tried to enforce a common morality. Kerley suggests that the naked female body was “a real and symbolic site for the articulation of social anxieties” and, more broadly, the “creation of modern subjectivities between 1899 and 1914” (8). Even so, she adds, the bodies of naked women were increasingly seen as natural over the period between the 1890s and the First World War. The New Woman, a figure who had purchase far beyond France, was intent on rediscovering her corporeal self as a source of “identity, self-pleasure, and empowerment” (172). Many of those who engaged in nude performances in public balls and music halls embraced a new combination of sexual freedom and self-expression. These shifts constituted an important stepping stone in the development of a “new body culture” of the early twentieth century, one in which the fit and attractive body was both enhanced and widely celebrated.

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