Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance

372 Pages·2011·3.63 MB·English

by  Carrie J. Preston

Modernism’s Mythic Pose
Modernist Literature & Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions
Elizabeth Outka
Machine-Age Comedy
Michael North
The Art of Scandal
Sean Latham
The Hypothetical Mandarin
Eric Hayot
Nations of Nothing But Poetry
Matthew Hart
Modernism & Copyright
Edited by Paul Saint-Amour
Accented America
Joshua Miller
Criminal Ingenuity
Ellen Levy
Modernism’s Mythic Pose
Carrie J. Preston
Pragmatic Modernism
Lisi Schoenbach
Modernism’s
Mythic Pose
Gender, Genre, Solo Performance
C arrie J. P reston
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Preston, Carrie J.
Modernism’s mythic pose : gender, genre, solo performance / Carrie J. Preston.
p. cm.—(Modernist literature & culture)
ISBN978-0-19-976626-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th
century—History and criticism. 2. Dance—United States—History—19th
century. 3. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 4. Modernism (Art)—
United States. 5. American literature—Classical infl uences. 6. Art,
Modern—Classical infl uences. I. Title.
PS310.M57P742011
700'.4112—dc22 2011014568
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xi
List of Figures xiii
Introduction 3
I. Modern, Antimodern, and Mythic Posing 3
II. Gendered Identity and Embodiment 11
III. Biblical Typology and Classical Ritual 1 4
IV. Solo Genres 1 8
V. Modernist Kinesthetics 2 1
1. The Solo’s Origins: Monodramas, Attitudes, Dramatic Monologues 26
I. Galatea’s Reach: Gestures of the Monodrama 2 8
II. Veiled Motions: Emma Lyon Hamilton’s Attitude 3 2
III. Goethe’s Proserpina and Later Posers 3 9
IV. Barrett Browning: Naming “Aeschylus” and “The Virgin Mary . . . ” 44
V. Types and Housewives in Christina Rossetti and Augusta Webster 5 1
2. Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film 58
I. Delsarte’s Aesthetics of the Attitude 60
II. Disseminating Delsarte 67
III. Performing Delsartism: Genevieve Stebbins and the Early
Motions of Modern Dance 7 3
vi CONTENTS
IV. Performing Delsartism (Take Two): Denishawn and Hollywood 82
V. The Russian Delsarte: Kuleshov and Film Montage 9 1
3. Positioning Genre: The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures
of Recitation 100
I. Expression, Recitation, and Literary Interpretation 1 02
II. Charlotte Mew: The Magdalene in “Madeleine in Church” 1 10
III. T. S. Eliot’s “Magus”: Impersonality, Objective Correlative, and
Mythical Method 117
IV. Chautauquas, “Sextus Propertius,” and Ezra Pound’s History 125
V. Amy Lowell’s Polyphonic Emma Lyon Hamilton 134
4. The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan’s Solo Dance 144
I. The Shock of Solo Expression 147
II. The Proto-Motor: Duncan and Delsartean Posing 152
III. The Joints of Early Modernism: Conjunctures of Materialism and
Metaphysics 1 60
IV. The Multiplied Body of the Motor 167
V. Motorized Propulsion and Modernist Ritual 173
VI. Repetitions of the Motor: Will and Spontaneity 177
VII. The Weight of a Thigh and the “New Woman” of Modernism 182
5. Ritualized Reception: H.D.’s Antimodern Poetics and Cinematics 1 91
I. Imagism Unstuck: H.D.’s Dissent and Pound’s Revision 1 94
II. Stepping from Stone: Dramatic Monologues of The God 198
III. The Ritual Chorus and a Soloist’s Suspicion in I on and
“The Dancer” 2 04
IV. Types of Participation: H.D.’s Film Essays and Reviews 212
V. H.D.’s Attitudes on Film 218
VI. Montage, a Classical Technology 225
VII. The Soloists of Trilogy 231
Afterword 239
Notes 250
Bibliography 319
Index 343
Foreword
Recovering the astonishingly infl uential yet largely forgotten movement called
Delsartism for modernist studies, Carrie Preston’s M odernism’s Mythic Pose:
Gender, Genre, Solo Performance makes modernism new by attending to the ways
in which it was always old. As Preston shrewdly remarks, “Modernism was rarely
so ‘new’ as advertised,” and her book reveals modernism’s debt to a set of interna-
tional movements popular between 1880 and 1920 that were inspired by the
French performance theorist François Delsarte (1811–1871). Later considered
excessively feminine and nostalgic, particularly from the perspective of futurism
and other hypermasculine celebrations of modernity, Delsartism emphasized the
body’s capacity for expression as key to spiritual health and to that end promoted
practices such as posing and poetic recitation.
Uncovering a lost genealogy of modernism, Modernism’s Mythic Pose links
Delsartism to an overlooked tradition of paratheatrical practice—especially the
mythic pose but including Romantic and Victorian monodramas—and then con-
nects both to a revisionist account of the dramatic monologue as a genre deeply
concerned with the body. What emerges is a new way of thinking about modern-
ism’s relation to the performing body, as well as about relations among modern
dance, acting theory, literary recitation, poetry, and fi lm—all of which were infl u-
enced by Delsartism.
The book builds toward detailed case studies of H.D. and Isadora Duncan, but
in the intervening chapters, we encounter a fascinating array of fi gures and texts
that rarely enter into studies of modernism. There is Delsarte himself, of course,
whose meticulous study of the “jointed body” and its expressive capacities refers to
the elbow as “the thermometer of the soul”; the scandalous Emma Lyon Hamilton,
vii
viii FOREWORD
who draped herself in veils, girdles, turbans, and mantles to pose in aristocratic
drawing rooms as Niobe, Mary Magdalene, Medea, Iphigenia; Goethe’s P roserpina
and the monodramas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and
Augusta Webster; and Vernon Lee, whose psychological aesthetics emphasized the
embodied and kinesthetic dimension of aesthetic response. But Preston does not
present this rich archive simply for its novelty: moving from Delsarte and Hamilton
through monodramas, and then on to dramatic monologues, modern dance, silent
fi lm, and cultures of recitation, she traces a typological pattern of thinking that
amounts to a prehistory of the modernist mythmaking typically associated with
T. S. Eliot’s famous essay on Ulysses . In this line of thought, the mythic pose, “an
imagined rupture in time,” dramatizes, makes visible, e mbodies the kind of mul-
tiple temporalities enacted more abstractly by Leopold Bloom as he walks forth as
Odysseus-Elijah-Shakespeare.
Exciting enough in itself, this genealogy also transforms familiar landmarks.
Having reconnected the dramatic monologue to the history of solo performance,
Preston offers dynamic rereadings of Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” and Ezra
Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” in the context of related poems by
Charlotte Mew and Amy Lowell and the performance practices of the Chautauqua
movement. Isadora Duncan and modern dance recover their central importance
to international modernism here in an authoritative exploration of Duncan’s pro-
ductively ambivalent relation to technological modernity: Duncan’s Delsartean
body, easily dismissed as a nostalgic retreat from modern times in its yearning to
materialize the soul, engages, in Preston’s fresh account, in a critical pas de deux
with the kinetic energy of modernity. In the last chapter, instead of attempting to
shift H.D. into the center of a modernism we already know, Preston rethinks both
H.D. and modernism in relation to kinesthesia in a way that makes H.D.’s sup-
posed adherence to Pound’s early version of imagism and her subsequent margin-
alization in literary history seem all the more skewed. Not only H.D.’s investment
in poetic typology but also her interest in fi lm looks different in this light. It is not
surprising that Delsartism infl uenced acting in early fi lm—D. W. Griffi th, in fact,
required his actors to train in Delsartean methods—but it turns out that H.D.’s
interest in montage, usually associated exclusively with the theories of Sergei
Eisenstein, also owes a good deal to Eisenstein’s teacher, Lev Kuleshov, who was
steeped in Delsartism’s approach to the expressive body.
Some might say (though certainly not Preston, who writes with tact and gen-
erosity) that certain theorists of the body wouldn’t know one if they tripped over
it. Preston takes on major theorists of the discursive or performative body, not to
debunk them but to open their thinking to complexities introduced by her history
FOREWORD ix
of the performing body. Judith Butler and François Delsarte, it turns out, have
more in common than one might think, and Preston’s comparative analysis of the
two throws into sharp relief the problems of agency that motivated Butler’s revisit-
ing of the materialization of the body in Bodies That Matter . Of particular interest
is the way Delsartism’s emphasis on the will complicates models of refl exive social
construction; roles may be thrust upon us, but we also choose them. Theorists of
performance, then, as well as those interested in embodied feminist practice, the
fi ne arts, poetry, and dance, will fi nd much to contemplate in M odernism’s Mythic
Pose , and we are delighted to welcome it into the series.
Mark Wollaeger and Kevin J. H. Dettmar