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2. Reckless Debutantes and the Spectacle of “Coming Out”
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51 Reckless Debutantes and the Spectacle of “Coming Out” Let your eyes be blind to all external attractions, your ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse.—These are nothing—and worse than nothing—snares and wiles of the tempter, to lure the thoughtless to their own destruction. —Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Not choose to dance the polka! It was absurd, it was ridiculous, it was like nobody else, it was prudish, it was censorious. —Charlotte Yonge, The Castlebuilders Although the disciplinary apparatus upholding the eighteenthcentury ballroom was flexible enough for Jane Austen to do something new—model a new, more active kind of close-reading practice— it continued to be represented in fiction as a joyous social space where families could come together and perpetuate communal unity and pleasure . The Victorian ballroom, in contrast, is rarely celebrated for its gaiety but rather is cast as a site rife with danger and temptation. An activity that in the Austen canon provided a learning opportunity for women to read the complexity of human character came to operate in the Victorian era as a test, with the stakes being nothing less than social banishment and disgrace . The associations of “spirit” also changed in the nineteenth century. In the Austen canon, we find “spirit” coded as a feminine characteristic that 52 ChaPter two provides a cover for facilitating the reading act for women; in Victorian fiction, however, a spirited woman is understood euphemistically as sexual and potentially dangerous and, as such, the matter of spectacle for the voyeuristic man and reader. This chapter investigates one of the many cultural and ideological oddities of nineteenth-century dance practices: one of the most exciting and presumably dangerous social locations in the popular imagination was also the setting in which daughters of the wealthy were expected to “come out” and assume their positions as available marriage partners and members of the institution of Society. While we associate the term today with homosexuality and the closet, “coming out” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century marked the advent of a woman’s readiness for marriage; she emerged from the cloistered schoolroom much like a butterfly from the chrysalis, transformed, accomplished, and ready for adult life. The rituals attached to the “coming out” moment originated during the eighteenth century as part of the quasi-kinship structure used to place newcomers in the social landscape of Society. Society comprised about three hundred to four hundred families whose “wealth, influence and style of living distinguished them from the inferior ranks of landed society and enabled them to support a great house and employ it as a center of social and political influence.”1 Of course, the most prominent house of all was Buckingham Palace, with presentations to the king understood as annual family visits during which both men and women registered changes in their family circumstances—marriage, births, and inheritance—into the royal books.2 During the mid-nineteenth century, however, court presentations were less about keeping up with “family relations ” than about getting into the family; the ritual of bowing to the queen became exclusively the realm of unmarried, upper-class women, with acceptance into the fold dependent on one’s endorsement by someone of superior rank, usually a mother. If there was no mother, a relative or family friend would do. By the 1850s, there was an actual Certificate of Presentation given to the woman to serve symbolically as her “passport to Society.” As one nineteenth-century etiquette book put it, “Prior to this important function, [a girl] is a ‘juvenile,’ but after making her profound curtsey to Royalty she leaves the magic presence a ‘grown up!’”3 But “coming out” involved more than the ritualized bow before monarchy marking the moment of transformation from juvenile to adult; it was also understood as an exhibition of all of the skills a woman was to master before her induction into Society. The challenges involving such preparation were so high that in some cases families opted out of the ritual altogether by marrying their daughters early on and leaving the arduous work of preparing for entrance into Society to husbands. It was her newness, her virginal [3.235.251.99] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:01 GMT) Reckless Debutantes and the Spectacle of “Coming Out” 53 aura, and the temporary freedom in which she was allowed to move about in social space that made the social neophyte a site of interest, speculation, and, for...