Sisters of Salome (review)

Toni Bentley's book Sisters of Salome raises a number of important questions, but they aren't related to the subject matter of the book. A former professional ballet dancer, performing at the top of her field with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet for a decade, Bentley is clearly a multitalented artist. She writes well. The book is very readable by a nonspecialist audience and well illustrated with photographs that make the descriptions of costumes and physical bodies of its four protagonists—Canadian dancer Maude Allen, Dutch performer and wrongly convicted spy Mata Hari, Russian dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein, and French actress and writer Colette—come alive. But graceful writing and good illustration can't illuminate the larger question raised by this book: Who is its audience, and why? And can such a crossover book really ever work?

The book focuses on the lives onstage and off of four well-known female performers who once dominated the theaters and society salons of Western Europe during the period from the turn of the century to the First World War. A heady political cocktail of the time mixed immigration, radical artistic shifts, and increasing pressure for women's suffrage and related changes in the public status of women. Using the popular image of the time of the femme fatale, the dangerous woman whose sexuality gave her power over men, Bentley unites these four women as exemplars of a wider social phenomenon. Each in her own way, she suggests, was a sister of Salome, the nubile seductress who traded access to her sexuality for revenge and power when she demanded that King Herod kill John the Baptist. The image of his bloody severed head delivered to her on a platter stands as an emblem for what Bentley terms "men's ideas, desires, and fears about the erotic woman . . . an archetype of the castrating woman [that] still thrives today" (19).

Of the four, only Collette did not at some time in her career portray Salome, but even she performed her share of orientalized, slightly clad seductresses and in her life, Bentley argues, used her sexual power and physical beauty to attract and manipulate powerful men—and, at times, as a Sapphic Salome, powerful women. Underlying each life story is Bentley's contention that a feminist or protofeminist urge to claim sovereignty over one's own body, profession, and destiny drove these women to use the power of feminine seduction to gain their wider ends, questioning any sharp division between exhibitionism and power, "prostitution" and political savvy. They all "found stripping in some exotic manner to be a very attractive endeavor." As social rebels who rejected a middle-class model of wife and mother, each gained a public presence, even adulation, and, as Bentley put it, "did not seek liberation by doing the work of men but rather used the very suppression that had imprisoned them to free themselves . . . not by succumbing to men's fear of their sexuality, but by using it" (13).

The book unfolds as an illustration of this thesis, with evidence drawn from the life stories and performance histories of each stage persona. Blow-by-blow accounts trace the trajectories of these women from young to old, chronicling their loves and losses, their intrigues, their interpellation into high society, their always dangerous position as actress/dancer in danger of disrepute, and the political battles over "decency" raised by some of their material (like various versions of Oscar Wilde's Salomé). Those who know Colette as a writer may find interesting material in Bentley's descriptions of her forays onto the stage as an actress in passionate embrace with her female cross-dressing lover. But overall the four main portions of the book, each devoted to one of the performers, read like a catalog of stage premieres and love affairs, scandals and successes, and the merging between all of the above. The narratives are entertaining enough in their retelling and...