The Politics of Gender and the Revival of Ballet in Early Twentieth Century France

Abstract

At the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, the French painter Edgar Degas presented for the first and last time a sculpture entitled “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen.” The statuette caused a furor, generating polemics and divisions among critics. Two-thirds life size and adorned with a horse hair wig, a green satin ribbon, a tattered mid-thigh tulle and gauze tutu, a silk bodice, and pink ballet slippers, it outraged many spectators' sense of propriety. Unlike the dreamy, idealistic representations of romantic ballerinas, it was violently criticized for its excessive realism and for the expression of “bestial boldness” of the ballet girl who was said more to resemble a “girl-monkey” than a sylph. Rendering her body toughened by exercises with tired eyes, chin up, and shoulders back, spectators found her “repulsive”, “frightening … a flower of precocious depravity.”1 One critic remarked, “wishing to present us with a statuette of a dancer, [Degas] has chosen amongst the most odiously ugly; he makes it the standard of horror and bestiality … Yes, certainly, at the very bottom of the barrel of the dance school, there are some poor girls who look like this monster … but what good are they in terms of statuary? Put them in a museum of zoology, of anthropology, of physiology, all right: but in a museum of art, really!”2 In fact, the “realness” of the piece even incited anthropological and anatomical treatises to make reference to the statuette, frequently comparing the statuette to monkeys and rats.3 Joris-Karl Huysmans, a more sympathetic critic, recollected that at the exhibition “… one hear[d] fathers cry: “God forbid my daughter should become a dancer.”4