Nude Bodies: The Controversial Aesthetics of Exposure

Abstract

Nude Bodies:The Controversial Aesthetics of Exposure Chris Kent (bio) Nude was a relative term for Victorians, and perhaps all the more thrilling for that. It generally applied to the female body, for both in art and in fact, male nudity was in low demand. Men's fashion saw the triumph of the tubular suit, that egalitarian outfit that, if anything, privileged the physique of men with thin legs and shoulders like coat hangers. Combined with high collars, spats, gloves, and the newly fashionable beard, it meant that about ninety-nine per cent of the properly dressed male body was concealed in public. The general fashion rule for the male body was the less of it showing, the better. Women's fashion, by contrast, featured strategic nudity. If the female body from the waist down was taboo territory, the bust, arms, shoulders, and neck were very much in play. Queen Victoria, who was proud of her shoulders (Munich 64), required décolleté dresses for ladies appearing in court, strictly enforcing that rule until she was almost seventy, when she made known that she would give permission to those, such as infirm or older ladies, who applied through the Lord Chamberlain to wear a "high dress." "No lady who has a good neck and shoulders will wear a high dress," a fashionable dressmaker confidently predicted ("The Queen and Court Dresses" 7). On the stage, "nudity is 'the only wear,'" reported a London newspaper in 1869, noting the scanty costume worn by Nelly Powers as Robinson Crusoe in the Christmas pantomime of that name at Covent Garden ("The Pantomimes" 11). Attractive women played almost all the parts, male and female, in the pantomimes, burlesques, and extravaganzas that were generally the most profitable productions in the Victorian theatre. The few men on these stages were reduced to playing comic roles, including old women. Transvestism ruled because the female body put bums on seats. Male dress enabled the female body, and above all the female leg, which Victorian women's fashion conspired to mystify and conceal, to be openly displayed. The ballet, simultaneously vulgarized and incorporated into spectacles, saw the triumph of the flaring tutu, knee-length and higher, and the reduction of male dancers to lifting devices. Women were increasingly popular in music hall and circus acts. The diarist Arthur Munby, a close observer of the female body, thought "it [was] not well to see a nude man fling a nude girl about … or to see her grip his body in mid-air between her seemingly bare thighs" (qtd. in Smith 54). The first "human cannonball," the beautiful and sensational young "Lulu"—protege of the notable Canadian acrobat William Hunt, who styled himself "the Great Farini"—was actually a boy in drag (Peacock 198). So incensed was the American actress Olive Logan that in "The Nude Woman Question," she denounced the "nude drama" and the "leg business" that were driving respectable, legitimate actresses like herself off the stage (193). [End Page 1] Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic patron of the nude in art. She and Prince Albert frequently gave each other nude paintings and statues as birthday presents. She evidently subscribed to the view of William Etty, a prominent painter of the nude, that "God's most glorious work [was] WOMAN, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her" (qtd. in Lambourne 282). Reconciling the female nude and Christian morals entailed certain artistic conventions intended to discharge the nude's eroticism. The most familiar was to distance the nude subject in space, time, and culture by situating it in pre-Christian Greece or Rome, or in the harems and slave markets of the Islamic Middle East. However, the medieval English setting of Edwin Landseer's Lady Godiva's Prayer (c. 1865) was too close for some critics' comfort (Smith 55). The model Eliza Crowe, who claimed to have sat for early sketches of Landseer's controversial painting, also modelled for Etty. Much better known by her professional name, Madame Warton, she conducted a tableau vivant troupe that was the best known of its era. Tableaux vivants were perhaps the most controversial manifestations of Victorian nudity. These productions went under several names...