Performing Queer Modernism

PENNY FARFAN'S NEW BOOK covers specific intersections between new modernist studies, queer sexuality, and performance. Its subjects range from plays long considered too popular to be truly modernist to drama and dance solidly within mainstream definitions of international modernism. The book's emphasis lies on close investigations of one or two texts per chapter, and Farfan works more or less chronologically from the 1890s to the 1930s. Overall, it is a collection of five very interesting, well researched, and sophisticated essays. It is a testament to the strengths of these individual essays that I found that I wanted the book as a whole to attempt a larger investigation into questions of queerness, performance, and modernism.

Chapter One takes up Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a popular 1893 play that shared the West End season with Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance. Like Wilde's play, it features a fallen woman in search of social redemption. Farfan's innovative reading places the relationship between the title character and her new stepdaughter into Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's erotic continuum of the homosocial-homosexual. As Farfan quite adroitly demonstrates with a thorough tour of contemporary reviews, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was a puzzle to its first audience, despite (or because of) its success: while the play clearly explored the limits of heterosexual marriage as a mechanism for a woman's return to "good" society, the title character's apparently unmotivated and almost violent attachment to her new step-daughter seemed inexplicable to most of the play's initial audience. Farfan takes on the issue by moving Mrs. Tanqueray's desire for her husband's daughter from the exclusively familial to the quasi-erotic. Additionally, Farfan addresses both Victorian and recent objections to the play's lack of complete resolution, seeing this also as evidence of the play's "queer power." Pinero's inability to solve, even imaginatively, the social problem that the play addresses testifies to the impossibility of both being and having a good woman (the Lacanian construction is Farfan's); consequently, the play protests the psychic damage inflicted on women who are caught between these desires. Though long considered a Victorian throw-back whose modernity fails when compared to that of his contemporaries, Farfan's recuperation of Pinero constructs him as pushing beyond Ibsen and Shaw, whose social interventions occur through interrogating conventional feminine gender roles. By engaging queer female desire, Pinero in Farfan's view works toward the possibility of opposing heteronormativity in ways Ibsen and Shaw do not.

The following two chapters turn from drama to dance. The second chapter takes up Loie Fuller's choreography, specifically her Fire Dance of 1895, which had begun as a staging of the biblical Salome story. Though earlier scholarship has tried to distance Fuller's from Wilde's version of the narrative, Farfan instead sees Fuller's dance as "ghosted" both by Wilde's Salome and his legal and social infamy. Farfan reads this haunting in terms of Freud's unheimlich/uncanny as the trace of Wilde, however consciously averted by Fuller, continues to ghost her performance. Chapter Three continues with Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun, which Farfan reads as removing male sexuality from both a continuum of virility to effeminacy and from the heteronormative context in which male sexuality can make sense only in relation to reproduction and in juxtaposition to traditional femininity. Farfan's interpretation is particularly apt in its attention to the ways in which Nijinsky's Russian nationality was seen in England and France through an Orientalist lens and in allowing modernist queerness to be distanced from the often overwhelming matter of sexual object choice.

Chapter Four returns to popular drama, this time to Noel Coward's Private Lives (1930). Like the Pinero play taken up in the first chapter, Coward is usually considered to have too broad of an appeal to be truly modernist, but Farfan successfully challenges this orthodoxy by constructing the play as a queering of the...