Dancing out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture

Preface

xi PrefaCe Dancing as a metaphor for life and death has a strongly felt presence in the humanities. “Life is a dance,” writes philosopher Alan Watts, as does Ram Dass in The Only Dance There Is. Women, Annette Kolodny tells us, must “dance through the minefield” of patriarchy to establish a subject location, while Norman Mailer claims in his book title that “tough guys don’t dance.” Ballerina Gelsey Kirkland describes her cocaine addiction and eating disorders while she was a principal dancer for New York City Ballet as “dancing on [her] grave,” while for Martha Graham, “dancers are the messengers of the gods.” Dancing out of Line, however, should be understood not as a metaphor but as a true representation of the book’s contents : a study of actual people, both historical and fictional, really dancing and using (sometimes abusing) the rules and properties of the dance—the lines—to know themselves and feel incorporated as mobile bodies. One of my assumptions in writing this book is that scholars have taken for granted the Victorians’ enthusiasm for dancing, in part because dance scenes figure so prominently in our collective imagination of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regardless of genre or geography, things of import happen in dance scenes, and we have come to expect them: Cinderella meets the prince at a ball, Eliza Doolittle passes as royalty, Scarlett dances in her mourning weeds with Rhett, and Nancy sings “oom pah pah” as she dances on the bar tables so that Oliver can escape Bill Sikes. Dancing out of Line seeks to fill a gap in Victorian studies by looking critically at dance scenes in narrative fiction and the ways in which these scenes stir and are stirred by social debates circulating simultaneously about the body and its pleasures and pathologies. Making the dance central in a study of Victorian fiction and culture guarantees unexpected results, in part because dancing is a movement: a perpetual movement at that, and one that is always contingent on timing, tempo, context, and dancer. With such a (de) centering force at its core, Dancing out of Line offers new readings of the novel and the novelist and complicates the paradigms we use for studying Victorian social patterns and sensibilities. Luckily for us, the Victorians not only danced but also wrote about the dance with a frenzy—Dancing out of Line investigates what they had to say. ...