Performing Queer Modernism by Penny Farfan (review)

Contemporary modernist studies is less about tracing the creation and trajectory of aesthetic revolt and more about the numerous ways those contestatory efforts, and authoring subjects, were engendered by modernity and modernization. As such, the oppositional nature of modernism is rendered as complex, varied, and politically and contextually specific. Likewise, modernist texts are no longer regarded as hermetic but deeply implicated in the context of production and, as well, instrumental in the invention of modernity and the modern world.

One site of inquiry that has benefited from this contextualized accounting of modernism is the performance and representation of gender and sexuality. In Performing Queer Modernism, Penny Farfan builds on studies within that broadly defined area, exploring particularly the intersection of modernism and the advent of queerness. The result is a theoretically savvy and yet accessible account of how five late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century artists engaged with modernism and queerness by way of performance. Though some worked in legitimate arenas and others illegitimate, Farfan asserts that all “bodied forth the dissonances and resistances of both queerness and modernism” (4).

Following her introduction, wherein Farfan offers a useful overview of both traditional and emerging views of modernism and the queer and feminist methodology guiding her work, chapter 1, “‘This Feverish, Jealous Attachment of Paula’s for Ellean’: Homosocial Desire and the Production of Queer Modernism,” addresses Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1893 play, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Dating back to Shaw but also including contemporary scholars who have excluded it from the history of modernism, critics have faulted the work for its perceived convention and conservatism. Farfan counters these readings, which emphasize the trope of the reintegration of the fallen woman into respectable society, by instead highlighting the “interplay of the homosocial and homoerotic,” as manifest in the relationship between the titular character, Paula, and her new stepdaughter, Ellean (12). Thus, for Farfan, the plight of the conventional “fallen woman” character is disrupted when focus is instead placed on the queer dynamic and desires that exist between the two women. More broadly, Farfan situates Pinero’s play as exemplative of “works that do not obviously comply with traditional definitions of modernism” but “nonetheless participated in its political and aesthetic subversions” (26).

The subversion of content and form is taken up again in chapter 2, “‘Fairy of Light’: Performative Ghosting and the Queer Uncanny.” Here, Farfan argues that Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance, a revision and expansion of a piece originally conceived as part of her staging of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, “may be understood as an intensification of [. . .] queer ghosting” (28). Farfan first neatly explicates the particulars of Fuller’s rendering of Salome, staged in 1895, just as Wilde was being tried and convicted for “gross indecency.” In turn, she argues, Fire Dance “retained a ghostly trace of its earlier life” even as it evolved over the course of the next twenty years (31). Drawing on the complimentary notions of the uncanny, understood as an unsettling indeterminacy, and Marvin Carlson’s concept of the body of the performer as haunted by past roles, Farfan offers an account of Fuller’s composition of Fire Dance. Fuller’s composition drew upon the physical similarities she shared with Wilde. Staged with shadowy lighting and voluminous amounts of fabric, Fuller’s version represented the performer’s body in unorthodox ways. The coalescing of these features, Farfan suggests, evoked the image of a queer, ghostly martyr, Wilde, being burned at the stake, as performatively embodied by a queer, uncanny dancer.

While the two subsequent chapters—“‘Without the Assistance of any Girls’: Queer Sex and the Shock of the New” and “‘I Think Very Few People Are Completely Normal Really Down Deep in Their Private Lives’: Popular Plato, Queer Heterosexuality, and Comic Form”—address entirely different performance traditions (i.e., ballet and drawing room comedy), Farfan’s analyses of both attend to the subversion of received norms. In the former, Farfan explicates Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 Afternoon of a Faun, arguing that ballet...