An inspector for the London County Council visiting in 1893 the Palace Theatre of Varieties, an opera house that had been converted into a music hall two years before, duly noted that entertainment at the Palace featured “skirt dancers . . . ballet, etc., which involved the usual display of limbs encased in tights.”1 However, prominent among that evening’s exhibitions at the Palace were “Living Pictures,” re-creations on the music-hall stage of paintings by Royal Academy artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Lord Leighton. Edward Kilyani’s Living Pictures allowed for the prominent display of simulated nudity, as models draped in muslin performed as still lifes in classical poses. On this occasion the inspector’s report for the council demonstrated, as Susan Pennybacker observes, “a remarkable preference for aesthetic concerns over suppression of vice.”2 He found the pictures, or, as they were often called, “tableaux vivants,” to be “skillful and artistic living representations of well-known paintings and sculptures.”
The inspector used the occasion to consider whether “the nude” could ever be cordoned off into an autonomous realm of the aesthetic: “Some people . . . would simply object to such public and complete display of the female form. It is a matter of difficulty to fix the exact point where propriety ends and impropriety begins. The borderline which divides the legitimate from the objectionable is not well-defined. I have endeavoured to report the facts as impartially as I can, and it is not for me, but for the Committee, to approve or condemn.”3 The inspector’s deference to municipal authority sidesteps the vexed question of where legitimate artistic endeavor ends and illicit entertainment begins. Here, the problem of separating legitimate entertainment from spurious pleasures is largely avoided by recourse to what is simply seen: the inspector need only report on what he witnessed.
The controversy elicited by tableaux vivants, a frequent staple of the fin-de-siècle halls, was not to be settled by appeals to the self-evident. Tableaux vivants, or, as they were often called earlier in the century, “poses plastiques,” had long been a risqué theatrical attraction. However, the Living Pictures became a special focus of controversy nearly a year after the initial appearance of Edward Kilyani’s traveling troupe at the Palace Theatre in late 1893. In August 1894, Lady Henry Somerset, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, entered a formal protest against the tableaux before the London County Council. She was joined in her protest by W. A. Coote, a leading official in the social purity movement in the National Vigilance Association; his organization supported Somerset in challenging the renewal of the Palace’s liquor license.
The Palace controversy involved many of the same citizens initially galvanized by the Maiden Tribute controversy and the effort to repeal the Contagious Diseases Amendment.4 Unlike the similar protest of purity workers over the presence of prostitutes in the Empire music hall in 1894, the dispute over the Palace did not necessarily draw special attention to the authority of women philanthropists or purity workers; nor did it stop the Living Pictures at the Palace.5 Throughout the decade, controversy over tableaux vivants was often simply deferred, as if no one quite knew how to handle the entertainment. Protests could be quelled through compromise, since managers quickly moved to appease troubled authorities. Although the Palace liquor license was never denied, a member of Parliament wrote to the Theatres and Music Halls Committee the month of Lady Somerset’s public protest, warning, “[I]f you wish to conciliate public opinion, which I believe is becoming increasingly hostile to these representations, then prompt action on your part is desirable.”6 In response to these pressures, Palace manager Charles Morton quickly dropped what he considered the more risqué tableaux.7
Morton’s actions illustrate how controversy over the Living Pictures at the Palace could promptly shift from public scandal to uneasy, secret compromises. However, for a brief time in 1894, the debate over tableaux vivants, as John Stokes put it, “reinvigorated the old topic of the ‘naked’ and the ‘nude.’”8 The dispute over the Living Pictures created a crisis in accepted notions of aesthetic value by addressing feminine spectacle. The purity workers’ attack on tableaux vivants placed these entertainments under scrutiny at a moment when variety theater was becoming increasingly supported by middle-class constituencies. The ensuing controversy over tableaux vivants instigated an intriguing exchange, expressed and contested in the public sphere, about women, mass entertainment, and the nature of the aesthetic. The debate over Living Pictures at the Palace illustrates the importance of intellectuals—various experts in culture and taste—in determining the proper boundaries of “entertainment.” Defining the borders of the permissible is among the acts “of those experts in culture, who patrol the ever shifting borders of popular and legitimate taste”;9 certainly the controversy over the Living Pictures empowered “experts” to clarify the boundaries the inspector found difficult to determine. What he suggested was a delicate matter to arbitrate was what other authorities were emboldened to define.
This chapter, focusing on tableaux vivants of the period, reexamines how certain images of women become privileged, commodified, and, ultimately, consumed. There is, however, something incongruous about linking the efforts of intellectuals to elaborate common sense with a volatile, potentially libidinal entertainment such as the Living Pictures. Theories of the male gaze have typically argued that visual pleasure turns spectators into passive voyeurs.
In Laura Mulvey’s classic discussion of the pleasures of looking in Hollywood film, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the display of women in cinema places them in essentially passive roles beside the activity of male protagonists, whose desire to see without being seen determines the very apparatus of film. Mulvey emphasizes the determinations mass entertainment exerts on spectator response; she stresses how “cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.”10 The voyeurism and wish fulfillment that Mulvey finds privileged in mainstream cinema are, as we will see, prefigured in the production of the tableaux vivants at the Palace Theatre of Varieties.
However, the female nude was not linked simply to scopic pleasure for late-Victorian London spectators; audiences participated in a complex production of meaning when they encountered the female body in settings that encouraged aesthetic evaluation. Experiencing the Living Pictures at the Palace meant encountering feminine display in a highly mediated fashion; new stage technologies including lighting techniques and elaborate stage backdrops encouraged audiences to situate the nude in narrative contexts that might assuage any unease caused by display of the female form.11 Mulvey argues the presence of women in Hollywood film “tends to work against the development of a story line,” tugging against the constraints of diegesis and inciting desultory fantasies in male spectators.12 The reception of the Living Pictures indicates that the exhibition provided careful contexts that situated erotic spectacle. Further, entertainment at the Palace was not simply consumed but also critiqued; the dispute over the Palace’s Living Pictures, instigated by Lady Somerset, was an intervention in the production of a mass entertainment. The controversy elicited a public dialogue over the women who performed in the tableaux vivants and their status as workers. This public mediation of events contrasts with the emphasis most theorists of the gaze set on the construction of individual subjects through scopic pleasure.
What the controversy over the pictures suggests is that consumer decision, as Simon Frith and Howard Horne emphasize, is “the subject . . . of moral and political assessment and choice.”13 In its assumption of a passive spectator prone to voyeurism and fantasies, Laura Mulvey’s description of spectatorship belongs to a tradition of modernist pessimism about the very act of consumption. While Mulvey recounts how classic Hollywood narrative privileges male observers, her account genders viewers as classically “feminine”: passive and prone to nostalgia, daydreams, and furtive desire. These spectators are languid consumers, compliant subjects who willingly yield to the “masculine” apparatus of cinema that informs them of their erotic longings. In this respect Mulvey’s analysis corresponds to many accounts of consumers that equate consumption with passivity and focus on easily manipulated audiences.
Although tableaux vivants in the fin-de-siècle music hall staged the female body as spectacle, I do not treat the exhibitions as another example of the “monolith of misogyny”;14 this chapter explores the ways such spectacular entertainment raised questions of class. My focus on the response to the Living Pictures gestures toward something inadequately registered in Mulvey’s analysis of cinematic convention: the continuous pressure of class-based tastes on any consumer choice. The history of tableaux vivants and of their response is inseparable from class-bound codes of taste and disgust; an account of these exhibitions does much to illuminate how codes of inclusion, self-regulation, and exclusion function historically.
Fin-de-siècle music halls and the spectacles they displayed cannot be isolated from questions of class. The halls were in many ways a summit in late-Victorian consumer culture. The London music hall provides a case study in how a private, upper-class amusement became a commodity. Music hall was transformed by a series of changes, starting in the 1860s and continuing through their heyday, the 1890s. Such changes, including the routinizing of entertainments, the professionalization of labor, the increasing regulation of audience interaction with performers, the fixing of audience position, and the growth of management, are well documented.15 For this reason, Guy Debord’s suggestions about the expansion of the market into everyday life—into forms of leisure, personal expression, and private desire—illuminate the topic of this chapter. Debord’s theory about the “society of the spectacle,” dating from the mid-1960s, is primarily concerned with how electronic media have “colonized” everyday life through television, cinema, and advertising in an age of late capital. However, the “spectacle” is not simply about electronic media; in Debord’s qualification, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”16 Spectators at the Palace were a target audience for the leisure industry, part of an attempt to incite patrons who would come and watch. Attending the Palace Theatre meant a spectator entered a space designed for mass consumption; in that respect, the experience prefigured the proliferation of the commodity in other areas of social life.
Despite Guy Debord’s tendency to read consumer culture as a monolith and his own later quietism, his analysis decidedly emphasizes the social effects of spectacle: how spectacle functions as part of a complex network of social relations, and how spectatorship works as a social practice.17 Certainly the fad for posing that swept the halls in the 1890s announces a society organized increasingly around spectacle, with images of high art eliciting new needs and desires, if only for more images to consume.
Still, while tableaux helped link the halls to a spectacular consumerism, these pictures also participated in a community of signs and images, an entire set of conventions that spoke powerfully to the dominant order. Further, as Martha Banta suggests of the posing craze that swept turn-of-the-century America, tableaux suggested a tremendous “talent for pleasure” uniting spectators across class boundaries.18 It seems futile to deny the pleasure of the pose: for many working-class women, posing not only provided economic support but, as we will see, amounted to something like a strategy for the appropriation of cultural capital. The luster of artistic tradition allowed performing women to accrue such symbolic gain while it furthered the distribution of this capital.
This chapter links the triumph of tableaux in the halls during the 1890s to the logic of “spectacle.” Still, Debord’s critique of spectacle does not fully translate to earlier instances of public posing in the late-Victorian era. Spectacle did not ensure the passive gaze or the full objectification of women workers. For the Victorians, spectacular entertainment did not simply produce the passive regime of looking that Debord anatomizes. Indeed, this chapter suggests that the dominant culture had but tenuous control over the origins and practice of tableaux vivants, as well as over the new subject of leisure that music-hall entertainment appears to have produced.19
Tableaux vivants originated as aristocratic diversion, linked to state ceremony; it was not until late in the eighteenth century that they were linked to sexualized display. In 1787, Goethe attended the new, more exclusive tableaux vivants: an upper-class entertainment staged in Sir William Hamilton’s Naples residence, where his mistress Emma Hart posed in colored costume within a frame that simulated classical painting. The presentation included theatrical elements such as lighting, costuming, and a makeshift stage.20 Goethe hailed Hamilton as a genuine impresario, and the tableau as a logical culmination of the aesthetic project. Hamilton privately saw, Goethe declares, “what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations.”21 Genteel private entertainments such as Hamilton’s depended on a select audience’s acquaintance with classical art; although there were no attempts to reproduce specific paintings, as later tableaux did, classical literacy—and the requisite cultural capital associated with humane learning—was required for spectators to respond properly to the display.
Yet here at the inception of the nineteenth-century craze for posing, we can detect how this brand of spectacle was open to appropriative possibilities. As Martha Banta remarks, Goethe was quick to point out that he regarded Emma Hart herself as a “vulgar and rather boring woman,” while, in Banta’s words, “the woman he watched in performance was the personification of grace.”22 When Emma strikes a pose, she becomes magically transformed into a type. Goethe is fascinated by Hart’s ability to leave behind the accidents of an individual life—and sidestep male prejudice—to become an exceptional form. As Banta suggests, Emma’s history as artist’s model and fallen woman disappears when she aspires to model the ideal.
Goethe’s description of tableaux vivants in Elective Affinities (1809) stimulated a vogue for the entertainments. The newspaper Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in 1810 heralded Goethe’s presentation of tableaux vivants in his novel as a signal event in the history of aesthetic discourse: “The fashionable world is also indebted to Herr Goethe for the new kind of pastime which he has invented. After exhausting everything which nature and art can provide in the ordinary way, he has hit upon the idea of getting living people to imitate paintings.”23 Goethe’s use of the pictures not only suggested a “fashionable” aesthetic innovation, a new, refined entertainment: it also connected the tableaux to culpable feminine spectacle. In Elective Affinities, Luciane and Ottilie’s engagement in tableaux vivants confirms a link between spectacle and essential “feminine” character. When Ottilie takes part in a Christmas tableau, “the humility, wonder and happiness in Ottilie’s performance are truths of the self,” as Martin Meisel observes.24 Luciane’s performance, however, in the staging of Gerard Terborch’s Paternal Admonition, reveals Luciane, an ambitious and forceful personality, as a character in need of correction. Goethe assumes an intimate connection between mimesis and the truths of feminine character in his presentation of the novel’s tableaux; a woman is what she represents. The power of Emma Hart, which so moved Goethe, is exempt from his moral reproof, attesting to the symbolic liberty woman gained from the patriarchy by assuming a pose.
The vogue for tableaux vivants opened them up for use beyond exclusive salons or drawing rooms: no longer limited to private audiences of refinement, they became a staple of mainstream French theater, in which they were dubbed poses plastiques. Tableaux vivants were featured alongside melodrama at Drury Lane, which always maintained a loyal working-class audience. They entailed the arrangement of human figures, often against a staged backdrop, and required that these figures remain still until the curtain was drawn. In theatrical performance, the models would often rearrange in a series of displays; music or spoken commentary often accompanied the visual presentation.
Tracy Davis observes that tableaux vivants followed “a circuitous and sordid route to the British stage”: part of the disgust the presentations elicited was constructed by class bias. Perhaps it was inevitable that when displays of the body moved from safe, domestic spaces into public arenas with heterogeneous audiences it would raise fears of contamination. If, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue, the “very highness of high culture” is constructed through “the obsessive banishment of the low,” tableaux vivants initially must have constituted a defense against the threatening presence of lower-class bodies.25 The “classical body”—“a refined, orifice-less laminated surface”26—embodies certain values that counter the danger posed by grotesque bodies, the bodies that those who lack culture are imagined to possess.27 When this “classical body” encountered the charged, public space of English stage melodrama, the results could only be volatile. The conflation of feminine display with the norms of classical culture could not be transferred to “vulgar” spaces. Once it left privileged spectators who could read the codes of classical literacy, the private pose embodying aesthetic beauty became degraded display. The contentious history of the entertainment on the nineteenth-century English stage suggests the difficulty of eliciting a proper response to such performances from a heterogeneous crowd. Although advertisements for tableaux vivants often reasserted their claims to artistic value and “classical” status, the display of nude bodies in front of diverse audiences could result only in an unruly spectacle.28
For these reasons, tableaux vivants often appeared to have a “grotesque” character—and appeal—to the late Victorians. When Edward Kilyani’s “Living Pictures” came to the Palace Theatre in 1893, both Kilyani and the theater manager, Charles Morton, endeavored to present a spectacle that was properly managed and compatible with bourgeois tastes. To do so, Kilyani entered into an immense struggle against the entire previous history of these exhibitions. An entertainment often contaminated through association with a popular audience, tableaux vivants, in their actual practice throughout the century, subjected the “classical body” to a lower-class travesty.
Tableaux took their place among a dazzling panorama of quite disparate display at Leicester Square’s Suffolk Home club, where they were only one segment in a dizzying, carnivalesque exhibition of amusements. Bohemian journalist George Augustus Sala recalls the poses plastiques at the Suffolk Home29 as a part of a bewildering collection of commodities that often included “[s]erpents both of land and sea; panoramas of all the rivers of the known world; jugglers, ventriloquists; imitators of the noises of animals; dioramas of the North Pole, and the gold-diggers of California; somnambulists (very lucid); ladies who have cheerfully submitted to have their heads cut off nightly at sixpence per head admission; giants; dwarfs; sheep with six legs; calves born inside out.”30 Such displays echo the parade of commodities triumphantly exhibited in the Great Exhibition (1852).31 For Sala, tableaux proved to be a commodity that was difficult to standardize as it was exhibited: his attitude toward the tableaux evidences clear class condescension. He describes them as “clumsy caricatures of good pictures and good statues, enacted on a turn-table by brazen men and women.”
Sala’s account illustrates the ease with which the cultural capital of classical heritage could become debased currency. For Sala, the foreign actors assuming roles sullied the aspiration of the form to the status of genteel culture. The line between performing in low entertainment and overt criminality is easily crossed, as this account suggests:
I, your servant, assisted once at a representation . . . where the subject was Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Adam by Herr Something, Eve by Madame Somebody, and the serpent by a real serpent, a bloated old snake quite sluggish and dozy . . . The most amusing part of the entertainment was the middle thereof, at which point two warriors arrayed in the uniform of Her Majesty appeared on the turn-table, and claimed Adam as a deserter from the Third Buffs; which indeed he was, and so was summarily marched off with a great-coat over his fleshlings, and neat pair of handcuffs on his wrists.32
Sala recalls a tableau at another theater that presented “the most magnificent parable in the New Testament parodied into a gee-gaw spectacle—a convention between the property-man, the scene painter, and the corps de ballet”: the fear that such performance debased rather than transmitted cultural tradition prompted the otherwise tolerant Sala to call for state intervention. He complains sarcastically about “the charming efficiency of the Lord Chamberlain and his licencers, who can strike a harmless joke out of a pantomime, and cannot touch such fellows as these, going vagabondizing about with nothing to cover them.”33 In Sala’s description of the tableaux nudity is of less importance than the productions’ deflation of cultural objects. The poses plastiques are unable to embody value; they simply refer spectators back to lower-class citizens who impersonate classical bodies. The failure of poses plastiques to represent the cultural heritage endangered the values of traditional aesthetic display.
When tableaux vivants moved from public, heterosocial spaces to predominantly male enclaves, the cultured pretensions of tableaux vivants were exposed to open parody and ridicule. Poses plastiques were added to the salacious entertainments at Renton “Judge” Nicholson’s Coal Hole in 1858 and quickly became part of Nicholson’s ritualized male license. Dubbed by theater historian Harold Scott “a convenient resort for journalists and men of letters,” the Coal Hole catered to an audience of “Bohemians and intellectuals, considerably removed from . . . lower middle-class patrons.”34 The famous journalist/social explorer James Greenwood complained that the Coal Hole corrupted young men from the provinces who visited London during the Cattle Show season in search of urbane entertainment.35 Entertainment at the Coal Hole promoted gender and class solidarity among men; the bohemians who attended the Coal Hole were, to their mind, different from the affluent bourgeois above and working-class audiences below; their rituals of leisure demarcated a special realm of their own.
Under Nicholson’s managerial control, the Coal Hole offered patrons alcohol, parodic images of transgressive women, and the opportunity to intervene or participate in the evening’s entertainment. The Coal Hole had no raised stage dividing audience and performer. The Judge and Jury Society, presided over by Nicholson, staged public “trials” concerned with seduction, divorce, and sexual scandal, recounted with studied coarseness and double entendres. “Witnesses,” many of them male performers in drag, were cross-examined before the audience was permitted to join in the banter. Drag performance at the Coal Hole did not circumvent masculine roles: rather it affirmed masculine order. The comic trials routinely burlesqued “dangerous” women—prostitutes, divorced women—normally excluded from the bourgeois symbolic order.
Nicholson’s club celebrated impertinent behavior and attacked sacrosanct values. James Greenwood, in an account of a visit to the Coal Hole, describes a “disgusting wretch in woman’s attire,” who played a prostitute on trial, “and who was supposed to be a native of Germany, importing filthy blunders into his broken English.”36 The sketch that Greenwood relates included this female impersonator, a convict, and a policeman with “his belly stuffed out with hay in a highly humourous manner.”37 Greenwood experiences a visceral disgust at the spectacle: “Assisted by the judge and counsel, the man in the bonnet and petticoats would now and then utter a something that came at one as a rotten egg might, causing a shudder and a sensation of sickness at the stomach.”38 In fact the trial comes to a comic halt midperformance when the “German prostitute” throws his wig in the counsel’s face. It is clear from Greenwood’s inflammatory rhetoric that in the Judge and Jury sketch, “drag” constitutes not an avowal of gender ambiguity but a travesty of “womanhood,” just as the codes of foreignness threaten Greenwood’s own sense of Englishness.
Nicholson’s introduction of poses plastiques into his Judge and Jury Society performances brought tableaux vivants into a volatile space. Poses plastiques were performed to illustrate a lecture given by Nicholson on poetry and the arts. Women sang out of sight until the curtains were drawn back in a dramatic moment of exposure. The posed women were attired in flesh-colored costumes, simulating nudity. The spectacle was staged after the Judge and Jury performances and broke the homosocial ambience of the Coal Hole; women were invited to attend the performance. As late as the 1870s, Greenwood observed that audiences still noticeably increased during tableaux performances.
From the outset, Nicholson’s control over the display of women at the Coal Hole was evident; through lectures, stage apparatus, and the promise of a cultured entertainment, Nicholson worked to control the effects of feminine spectacle. This was a role with which he was familiar; in his edition of The Swell’s Night Guide through the Metropolis (1841) Nicholson wrote as cultured guide to “temples of voluptuousness.” The book advised young swells on where to see French women “in every possible state, from complete nudity to the half-dressed, go through the most voluptuous exhibitions—imitate the classic models—and perform the most spirit-stirring dances.”39 It is difficult to resist finding Nicholson’s role as Coal Hole lecturer and as procurer of clients for masculine nightlife in The Swell’s Night Guide essentially homologous; both activities illustrate entrepreneurial control of feminine display. As tour guide and “host,” Nicholson monitors such spectacle and offers it for consumption.
Journalist James Greenwood’s description of poses plastiques at the Coal Hole relies on a common misogyny to convey his distaste with the proceedings. Greenwood is unimpressed with the technology behind the display; he describes the first tableau in a disenchanted fashion as “four ordinary and elderly females attired in fleshlings and kilts, hand in hand, and revolving on a pedestal, as though the machinery that moved them were a roasting-jack.”40 Greenwood notes that the tableau of “The Three Graces” produced no effect but a “slight tittering”; otherwise the audience was “unmoved.” And “No wonder,” Greenwood adds: “Fancy a trio of bold-faced women, with noses snub, Roman, and shrewish, with wide mouths and eyes coarse-footed, having the impudence to represent the graces!”
Greenwood strives to demystify the spectacle of the poses plastiques and take away its glamour, in order to dissuade customers from attending the performances. The Coal Hole is represented as a space filled with cultural rubes and amateur aesthetes, to be avoided by men of culture. The club is figured in the threatening image of a “dragon that has devoured many green men.” It is noteworthy that Greenwood, like Sala, is not as shocked by nudity as at the inappropriateness of using “coarse” women to represent classical forms and normative feminine beauty. The social explorer shares with Sala a distinct distaste for the class transgression manifest in the public display of poses plastiques, in which the classical body became tainted when circulated in spaces outside the controlled area of the aristocratic drawing room.
Greenwood’s essay attempts to bury both the poses plastiques and the Coal Hole, but his efforts to herald the end of such diversions largely indicate his own anxiety that such spectacles may continue to spread. The Saturday Review’s impassioned attack on poses plastiques in 1874, the same year Greenwood’s account was published, does not cast the poses plastiques as an innocuous entertainment losing its audience. On the contrary: the Saturday Review suggests that the exhibition not only was flourishing but still retained a transgressive charge.
Complaining of a “certain class of performers—not actresses, for they cannot act or speak or sing—who may be called, for want of a better name, exposers of their persons,” the journal attacks in particular an unnamed theater manager and her “free and unabashed display of her undraped figure. The exhibition of a big woman who appears to be wholly unclothed except for about a foot and a half round her middle is one which may be commended to the attention of the Censor.” Like Greenwood, the Saturday Review is less disturbed about the impropriety of poses plastiques than about how the display disrupts the spectacle of the classical, orderly body: clearly the epithet “big” carries the weight of opprobrium in this observer’s account. The manager’s exhibition is dangerous because it insolently discloses the gap between real bodies and the classical body of high art.
Worse, the poses plastiques threaten the circulation of proper, tasteful art. “It cannot be doubted,” the Saturday Review continues, “that it is in the interest of genuine art that resolute measures should be used to clear the stage of the models of the studio, and the lay figures of lascivious poses plastiques.” The “lay figures” of tableaux vivants threaten the professionalization of the actress at a historic juncture when social sanction of the theater was broadening.41 “When a taint of this kind breaks out,” the journal concludes, “it has a tendency to spread. It frightens respectable persons away from an honourable profession, it attracts disreputable persons towards it, and it tempts people who have no preference for impropriety in itself to try how far they can go in competition with it.”42
The account likens poses plastiques to the current practice of displaying actresses’ photographs in shop windows. Both provide images of commodified femininity that challenge claims to theatrical professionalism:
Nothing can be more sadly significant than the representation of the theatrical profession which is exhibited in the windows of the photograph shops. Who are the young persons with fantastic hair and very low-bodiced dresses who are there depicted? Are they actresses capable of articulate speech or of the faintest kind of histrionic personation? . . . In many cases they are women who find in this sort of publicity a useful advertisement of another trade.43
The professional features of the actress are played off the physicality of women on display; the comparison to prostitution suggests itself immediately. The editorial clearly establishes a binary of corrupt physical display and commendable rhetorical ability. Although, as Peter Fryer observes, the poses plastiques continued their popularity in London theater throughout the 1870s and 1880s, journalism marked them as a degrading spectacle that threatened the genuine aspirations of theatrical professionals to respectability.44
As these examples suggest, tableaux vivants were largely associated by the end of the century with an unsavory brand of spectacle. The difficulty with the exhibitions lay not only in their simulated nudity but also in the discrepancy between the cultured body and the working-class performer who represented the classical form in front of heterogeneous audiences. The approbation of the classical body meant the purposeful exclusion of what the bourgeois would “[mark] out as low—as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating”; this cultured ideal needed a substantial amount of policing in order to be maintained as a hegemonic standard.45 In poses plastiques, women outside the symbolic economy of bourgeois decorum might represent the classical body. Tableaux vivants often used models employed by professional artists; the new technology, however, permitted the class markers of the body to be erased. The effects were literally unreal.
Edward Kilyani’s troupe of Living Pictures, whose tour visited the Palace Theatre in 1893, performed complicated ideological work in order to secure its acceptance, let alone its success, with a popular audience. Kilyani’s entertainments had to secure public consent for a performance that was largely linked to inappropriate, indecent display. The success of Kilyani’s troupe demonstrates how an entertainment form not only achieved financial success for an economically troubled theater, but also constructed an audience that would steadily support the exhibition.
Kilyani’s success lay in the unprecedented technology he designed for his Living Pictures, which, unlike the poses plastiques of twenty years before, reproduced paintings with realism. Technical advances in lighting led to the marshalling of quite literally spectacular effects: sophisticated lighting could even make models appear as if they were cut from marble.46 Reviewers praised the lighting techniques for securing an unprecedented “softness of tone and absence of shadow” in figures. Special illusionist techniques were used in the display of “Venus de Milo”; as one reviewer observes, “the arms of the woman personating the armless figure were draped in sleeves of the same color and texture as the background.” “The illustration was so perfect,” the reviewer adds, “as well-nigh to defy detection.” Kilyani’s design for a revolving table, divided in sections, with removable backgrounds led to a remarkably rapid change between different tableaux. The degree of attention given to matters of verisimilitude in background and scenery, and to musical accompaniment for the Living Pictures, was considerable.
These advances in illusionist technique allowed for a remarkable control over the nude figure on display; they also offered new possibilities to aestheticize nudity in displaying and controlling the spectacle of the female body. The new technology Kilyani developed for the display of tableaux vivants is best understood as constructing new forms of knowledge about the body, connecting the desire to see and know more about the human figure to the pleasure of visual spectacle. Kilyani’s Living Pictures partakes in what film historian Jean-Louis Comolli has called the “frenzy of the visible” that “dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century.” Comolli draws attention to the proliferation of optical inventions in the late nineteenth century—cameras, magic lanterns, dioramas, biographs—“machines of the visible” that place the body under new, intense scrutiny. Along with the “ever wider distribution of illustrated papers, waves of prints, caricatures,” such machinery ensured the “geographical extension of the field of the visible and the representable” during the Victorian age.47
The simultaneous development of these technologies places Kilyani’s inventions for the Palace tableaux in the proper context. The links between Living Pictures and cinematic apparatus were clear and explicit to contemporaries. Advance notices for Edison’s Vitascope candidly made the connection: “By this invention,” they promised, “veritable living pictures are thrown upon a screen.”48 Kilyani’s exhibitions anticipated the film studies of female subjects that debuted in music halls in the late 1890s; the Living Pictures already linked new technology with female display. The affinity between greater verisimilitude and increased scopic pleasure was made evident in the new Living Pictures.
Kilyani’s exhibition also utilized the erotic potential already culturally encoded in the display of women’s bodies. The cultural imperative to enhance the visual observation of bodies affected the female nude differently than it affected male bodies. Kilyani’s tableaux vivants and the problems the exhibition symbolically resolved are best understood by comparison with other technologies that predated the development of film apparatus. In her analysis of the motion studies included in Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion (1887), Linda Williams draws attention to Muybridge’s difficulty in making photographic studies of women appear unselfconscious. Where men could be filmed with minimal props, Muybridge felt compelled to place his female studies among suggestive mise-en-scènes and mininarratives. In effect, Muybridge invented scenarios to make sense of the women on display. Where two men posing engage in activities such as contact sports for the camera, Muybridge stages subtle mise-en-scènes to justify his exhibition of women. In one scene, a woman pours a bucket of water over another woman seated in a basin; in another scenario, a woman suggestively leans against another woman smoking a cigarette. Williams argues that these exhibitions of the female body in scientific motion studies nevertheless “immediately [elicited] surplus aestheticism.”49 The display of the female body using new technologies required an account or a context, something that could contain the problem of sexual difference posed by the spectacle.
Williams’s comments are helpful in considering tableaux vivants and how they might have functioned for the fin-de-siècle spectator at the halls. Like Muybridge’s motion studies, Kilyani’s Living Pictures combined visual pleasure with the sanction of culturally privileged knowledges. In Muybridge’s case, science underwrote feminine display; in Kilyani’s, the tradition of high art painting. Technological advances in the tableaux vivants helped situate the display of the feminine body; more than previous poses plastiques, Kilyani’s troupe at the Palace erased the distinction between real models displayed and the classical body that signified decorum and rationality. Technology helped eradicate the distaste that James Greenwood or the Saturday Review had expressed concerning poses plastiques, over “coarse women” playing the Graces or “big” women representing Venus.50 In Kilyani’s Living Pictures, technical innovations worked to legitimate prolonged scopic enjoyment of the classical nude.51
For both Muybridge and Kilyani, spectacle called for a narrative or context instead of halting diegesis, as Laura Mulvey has suggested. Kilyani’s tableaux offered visual pleasure through the illusion that these “marble” statues might become kinetic; he frequently introduced moving elements in otherwise static representations. Kilyani’s nude Aphrodite was “made more real by the dripping of water over the form,” a device one reviewer complained threatened to make “the realism . . . a little too strong to be artistic”; a staging of Delaroche’s “Pharaoh’s Daughter” traveled “through imitation bulrushes to a painted Moses.” Lerch’s “Will o’ the Wisp” was lit in a manner that suggested the model was floating. Technology linked pleasure and knowledge in these exhibitions; the “Living Pictures” produced the pleasure that accompanied the exhibition of bodies that a spectator might see without being seen.52 Kilyani’s pictures became a Foucauldian apparatus for sustained observation, “a continuous incitement to discourse” because of their sensational displays.53
Kilyani’s living statuary at the Palace Theatre also activated the link between tableaux vivants and the high culture discourse of Royal Academy painting. Ronald Pearsall observes that, for the Victorians, “in a sea of changing values, [feminine beauty] was something permanent; there was a reverence for the naked female body that was reflected in the large number of nudes that were exhibited each year at the Royal Academy.”54 After Kilyani’s troupe left the Palace for a New York engagement, lighting designer W. P. Dando continued to present tableaux (most likely under Kilyani’s tutelage) with subjects taken almost exclusively from paintings by Royal Academy artists: Luke Fildes, Alfred Glendening, Jean Bougereau, Lord Leighton, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The cult of female form in academic painting was, as Pearsall observes, “a cult bound up with perfection, with the elimination of the particular, the ruthless excision of the grubby inessentials.”55 Following this artistic discourse, the new technology of the Living Pictures promulgated the classical body to a broad, heterogeneous audience.
The Palace Living Pictures were a powerful incitement to aesthetic discourse. The Stage praised Kilyani’s troupe as “perfect in every artistic sense”;56 “to have introduced the famous tableaux to the metropolis is in itself enough to earn the undying gratitude of artistic London,” the Music Hall and Theatre Review asserted.57 W. Macqueen-Pope’s account of the tableaux vivants at the Palace recalls that “Kilyany [sic], a Viennese, had a really artistic touch”;58 similarly, the Music Hall and Theatre Review singled out the performers as “distinctly classical, models of feminine loveliness, . . . graceful and artistic in pose.”59
Aesthetic discourse provided the Living Pictures a mise-en-scène that could contextualize the women on display. The Living Pictures placed models against fully conceived backgrounds with meticulous efforts to represent exact pictorial detail. The technology of tableaux vivants had complex effects on how audiences received the display. The presentation could rely on expectations encoded in the response to artistic objects, on narrative cues that could contain the effects of erotic subjects. The Living Pictures worked both to elicit excitement and reverie and to provide a context that could ease any discomfort such forbidden pleasures might arouse.
One of the most popular tableaux at the Palace (it was later withdrawn after Lady Somerset’s complaints), an adaptation of Jean-Léon Gérome’s “The Moorish Bath,” illustrates how the discourse of Royal Academic art could situate feminine spectacle. A reviewer singled out this tableau, observing that of the night’s exhibitions, “[t]he representation of ‘A Moorish Bath,’ is particularly happy, both in idea and execution, the dusky slave forming a pleasing foil to the voluptuous beauty preparing for her ablutions.”60 The brevity of the comment belies the complicated response the Living Pictures could call forth. Gérome’s painting juxtaposes a white mistress with the ministrations of a black servant. Like the original painting, the tableau drew on images of the exotic other, in this instance a serving girl and the “Oriental” setting of the bath, to highlight the eroticized European female. The painting activates a series of distinct binaries: black and white, energy versus languor, the classical body versus the Eastern exotic body, the latter facing us without answering our gaze. In the case of “The Moorish Bath,” the proper execution of the tableau underscored the secondary position of the “dusky slave” to the “voluptuous beauty”; as the reviewer hints with his comments on the slave as “foil,” the painting even suggests the proper hierarchy in which to situate these women. The women are framed in a manner to suggest a hierarchy and a context in which disturbing sensations can be placed. When a painting such as Gérome’s was properly reconstructed at the Palace, the work of high culture was fostered by other means than in the museum or the academy.
The response to such charged tableaux could be quite various; while the Music Hall and Theatre Review worked to emplot the “Moorish Bath,” “Gossamer,” who reviewed music-hall entertainment for the belles-lettres journal Fun, stressed the more private pleasures the same tableau provided: “The ‘Moorish Bath’ tableau is a perfect dream. In fact, I dreamt about it for several nights. The lady stands there clothed in flesh-coloured tights and her native modesty, and a very charming vision she is, too. During the ‘Moorish Bath,’ the auditorium is also bathed—in darkness, so that your girlfriends cannot see your blushes, or your eagerness in using the opera glasses. This is a distinct advantage.”61 In keeping with an overwhelming popular success, the Living Pictures had it both ways: it was both a “contained” display of aesthetic value, alluding to works of high artistic value, and an incitement to sexual reverie.
Another reviewer’s response to a series of tableaux at the Royal Theatre “somewhat on the lines of the celebrated Palace Production” that reproduced with “striking fidelity some of the best known masterpieces of English and continental artists” provides a sense of how closely aesthetic judgments could be intertwined with scopic pleasure when evaluating living statuary. The reviewer finds the artistic effect of the Royal Theatre’s tableaux vivants to be secure because “the selection of the ladies taking part in the representations [was] particularly happy.”62 The opportunities tableaux vivants allowed for visual pleasure are apparent in the reviewer’s list of the performance’s artistic qualities: “There are four statue sets, ‘Justice,’ ‘Psyche,’ ‘The Toilet of Venus,’ and ‘Poetry,’ in which Miss Travers, a lady with most beautifully molded limbs, is seen to great advantage. . . . Miss Marsden—tall, divinely fair—makes a pretty picture as ‘The Favourite,’ and with Miss Lait, in ‘After the Bath,’ discloses an entrancing vision of female loveliness.” The reviewer praises “The Sirens” on formalist grounds—“faultlessly grouped and perfect in form and figure”—yet his description of the tableau as “both voluptuous and artistic” is telling. The discourse the Living Pictures elicited from reviewers made appeals to artistic value and hedonism in ways that were difficult to untangle. Along with the aesthetic values of formal composition, tableaux vivants utilized the sensational pleasures of bodily display.
Most important for the Palace, the seductive discourse around the Living Pictures attracted customers. The success of Kilyani’s Living Pictures was overwhelming: when the tableaux initially appeared on the Palace bill in October 1893, there were none advertised in London. By the time Kilyani’s troupe left the Palace in February of the next year, a throng of imitators crowded the halls. H. G. Hibbert recalls that the entertainment “became a mania” among “every music hall in town and country”; he also claimed in retrospect the entertainments “marked the turn in the fortunes of the house.”63 Contemporaries said much the same thing: the Music Hall and Theatre Review reminded readers that “[i]t must not, however, be forgotten that the present popularity of the theatre is largely due to the beautiful Tableaux Vivants, a form of entertainment produced here.”64 This financial success cannot be considered in isolation from what the pictures offered spectators. The tableaux made a new technology available that could secure the classical body on the music-hall stage; it linked scopic pleasure with the cultural capital of art in a way that poses plastiques had previously failed to. To many male spectators at the Palace the inherent cultural capital of feminine display became a “natural” fact: a reviewer’s casual description of two comedians following the living statuary at the Palace as “low comedy [following] high art” was typical.65
The Living Pictures succeeded in becoming a “spectacular” entertainment. Spectacle played a crucial role throughout the century in theater and music-hall entertainment; the extent to which popular entertainments were enabled by new technology has been well documented. Novel combinations of lighting, sound, elaborate scene painting, projections, and moving panoramas had become staples of melodrama in the 1830s.66 In many presentations, special effects quickly became the real show: as one theatergoer put it, “We go not so much to hear as to look.”67 It is in reference to this meaning of spectacle that art critic Frederick Wedmore in the Nineteenth Century later distinguishes “the newer and more fashionable” music halls, including the Palace, the Empire, and the Alhambra, from other London halls. The difference, Wedmore observes, lies in the “immense and novel importance . . . assigned to ‘spectacle’ in their programs.” Wedmore specifically invokes the Palace tableaux as heralding this new form of entertainment in the halls: he dubs the living statuary “organized splendours.”68 Wedmore locates the same elements of commodified “splendor” found in the Living Pictures in “the yet greater spectacle of the Dance” at the Empire and the Alhambra, where “the dance [is] organized and performed upon a scale that makes the ballet or the opera a comparatively insignificant thing.”69
Wedmore’s description of “organized” splendors—the search for large-scale effects, overpowering images, and incessant novelty—touches on Guy Debord’s later understanding of spectacle as “capital accumulated until it becomes an image.”70 Debord’s definition of spectacle focuses on how commodity forms influence cultural styles; Thomas Richards has recently suggested that spectacular theater in melodrama functioned as “a kind of experimental theater for industrial capitalism . . . by making the technologies themselves into a form of entertainment.”71 Spectacle worked in accord with a fundamental tenet of market culture: an expansive tendency that led audiences to expect, and compelled theater managers to provide, bigger, more expansive displays. Spectacular entertainment accommodated this logic of excess; at the Palace such entertainment allowed the affluent a vision of what they might be or what they could possess. It offered those with little the aesthetic compensation of watching, of vicarious participation in what the wealthy might experience on a more regular basis.
An important element in the Palace’s success was its ability to “stage” its own commercial success; its patrons were encouraged to imagine themselves part of an exclusive elite. The Era claimed that tableaux vivants brought the Palace a “brilliant audience,” further observing that “the presence of many celebrities in law, literature, and medicine may also be regarded as a proof that a variety entertainment is rapidly winning its way into favour with these classes.”72 W. Macqueen-Pope’s retrospective account of Palace audiences also emphasizes the class position of its patrons. Kilyani and Dando’s exhibits, he writes,
drew many people to the Palace who had never entered a music hall before; leading statesmen came, smart society folks and even Bishops. Royalty often visited the Palace to see the Tableaux. . . . The stalls, boxes and dress circle of the Palace flashed with jewels, gleamed with white shirts and shimmered with silks and satins, no such an audience had ever before graced Music Hall. The Palace became . . . the world’s smartest Theatre of Varieties (it never called itself a Music Hall, that would not have done).73
As Macqueen-Pope suggests, the Palace audience was an aesthetic event itself, another “spectacle” in the hall: this much is given away by his parenthetical. The audience marked the Palace as a site of privileged consumption where, in Macqueen-Pope’s words, “evening dress was the rule and opulence the prevailing note.”74 After the success of the tableaux turned the hall around, Palace manager Charles Morton proudly reported to the shareholders of the Palace Theatre Company, Ltd., that “they could . . . boast of having created a new era in a variety theater, as they had a class of audience unequalled anywhere else. They had in their stalls—not hiding themselves in boxes, as they might do elsewhere—royalty, peers, judges, ambassadors, law officers, and even cabinet ministers, who did not hesitate to bring their wives and daughters [Applause].”75 Certainly the usual differences between pit and gallery maintained class identity at the hall; however, the Palace’s singular success lay in placing its elite audience on display. If, as Guy Debord observes, “The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue,” the Palace promoted the illusion that, for the price of admission, this discourse was also inclusive.76
Conventional thinking about the prestige and cultural capital of high art offered the Living Pictures another means of capitalizing on the utopian desires that spectacle answered: they could advance a high style of representation open to all consumers. As late as the 1907 hearings of the Theatres and Music Halls Committee on tableaux vivants, such exhibitions were defended on the grounds that they allowed a large audience the opportunity to study sculpture and art. This raised the countercharge that, as an LCC member claimed, “the proper place to study sculpture are the museums and the art galleries.”77 Still, the argument that tableaux vivants acculturated as well as entertained was readily at hand in the culture. A review of a tableaux vivants star, La Milo, recorded that art students were “especially conspicuous among the audience” and were “loud in their praise of the beautiful poseuse, whose work they declare to be the most artistic exhibition of the female form divine yet given on the variety stage.”78
As a consumer spectacle, the Living Pictures at the Palace endeavored to create the ideal patron; on this count, the Palace shared similar goals with other London variety theaters dedicated to extravagant display. It was the everyday work of fin-de-siècle music halls like the Palace to place, in Peter Bailey’s words, “the open social mix of the city street in some kind of territorial order.”79 Bailey goes on to observe that class difference in music-hall audiences could “generate a lively drama of individual and collective acts of display and competition, amplified and encouraged.”80 Struggles between class fractions at the halls, however, worked against subtle controls in what was called the “aristocratic” variety theater, which began to flourish during the 1890s. At the Empire music hall, walls were embellished by huge expanses of glass throughout the promenade: John Stokes notes that these mirrors were “so plentiful and so dominating that they could easily reinforce a mood of introspection.”81 The Palace was decorated with an intricate fenestrated screen of brick tiles, in the style of the early Spanish Renaissance.82 These ornate decors provided cues that a particular kind of consumption—more insular, more formalized—was being offered in these spaces. The very surroundings of a hall militated against overly familiar interchange and the experience of direct, physical pleasures.83 In the midst of such opulent surroundings, the ideal consumer of sensational entertainment was encouraged to personal reverie and privatized pleasure.
The cover of the Music Hall and Theatre Review of February 2, 1894, offers a clear example of what we might refer to as the music-hall imaginary, the repertoire of images that variety theaters strove to evoke in their ideal patron (figure 5). The cover, captioned “Seen in the Mirror,” abstracts what such a patron might recall from a performance on stage if the customer remained in the promenade. The Empire’s large mirrors allowed audience members to watch performances without leaving the bar, or even without facing the stage. Dancer Clara Wieland, strangely foreshortened, appears in the foreground with five different “Wielands” occupying the background in a surreal display. Empire doormen flank the exhibition on stage. Masculine order demarcates and contains the phantasmic vision of the spectator, half gleaned from the mirror instead of from a direct view of the stage. At the Empire, feminine display was contained, offered for the quasi-private delectation of patrons.
The upscale variety theater presented visions of high style and excess and, especially with ballet and tableaux vivants, of spectacular feminine display. In retrospect, literary intellectuals made ideal middle-class patrons of such halls; most of the decadent poetry with the music hall for its subject suggests how totally these myths of abundance were absorbed. Literary patrons of the music hall such as Arthur Symons and Theodore Wratislaw responded to the images of women on stage and working women in the promenade by further elaborating on the phantasmic element of sensual luxury that the halls displayed.
Figure 5. “Seen in the Mirror.” From Music Hall and Theatre Review, February 2, 1894. (By permission of the British Library)
Typical of decadent verse in this tradition, Arthur Symons’s “To a Dancer” transforms the public performance of a music-hall dancer into a private fantasy of a sexual encounter:
Intoxicatingly
Her eyes across the footlights gleam,
(The wine of love, the wine of dream)
Her eyes, that gleam for me84
Another of Symons’s music-hall poems, “Behind the Scenes at the ‘Empire’” (1894), first published in the Sketch, was originally accompanied by a prominent illustration of ballet dancers coming from the green room and going down a stairwell toward the stage (figure 6). The poem itself participates in the conspicuous display of ballet dancers (one of the dancers is in putting on leggings) the picture provides. Feminine display is linked to fantasy images that erase traces of working-class association with performing women’s bodies.
The little painted angels flit,
See, down the narrow staircase, where
The pink legs flicker over it!
Blonde, and bewigged, and winged with gold,
The shining creatures of the air
Troop sadly, shivering with cold.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All wigs and paint, they hurry in;
Then, bid their radiant moment be
The footlights’ immortality!85
Although he notes the vulnerability of these performers—“shivering with cold”—Symons’s poem catches the ballet dancers in the process of transformation. They are about to change from working-class women into something more ethereal, if artificial (“All wigs and paint”). Symons’s poem focuses on working-class women who are transfigured into classical bodies in the space of the halls.
In a fashion characteristic of decadent verse meditation on music hall, Theodore Wratislaw’s “At the Empire” (1896) conflates the “calm and brilliant Circes” in the promenade with the spectacular women performers on stage. Every woman the poet encounters in the music hall provokes only additional ennui in an already terminally lethargic spectator:
Ah! what are these, the perfume and the glow,
The ballet that coruscates down below,
Figure 6. The cultured male gaze. “Behind the Scenes at the ‘Empire.’” From Sketch, March 21, 1894, 389. (By permission of the British Library)
The glittering songstress and the comic stars,
Ah! what are these, although we sit withdrawn
Above our sparkling tumblers and cigars,
To us so like to perish with a yawn?86
Here the spectacle of the halls, with strong images of achieved abundance, underwrites the fashionable tedium experienced by the weary aesthete. Wratislaw’s poem indicates how thoroughly literary intellectuals promulgated variety theater spectacle and its commodified vision of ornamental display. His ennui is less aesthetic malady than the complaint of a jaded consumer.
Such verse suggests the debt of decadent poetry to the “spectacular” visions promoted by variety theaters such as the Palace. W. B. Yeats’s account of the fin-de-siècle cult of the halls characterizes the work of poets including Symons, Wratislaw, and Selwyn Image as representative of “the cultivated man” in “a somewhat hectic search for the common pleasures of common men.”87 However, the poetry from the music-hall cult transmits images very far removed from plebeian diversion. In the images of sexual availability they circulate, these poems elaborate on the lessons of conspicuous consumption that performances at the “aristocratic” music hall broadcast. Symons’s and Wratislaw’s poems offer their middle-class readership images of the spectacular consumption exemplified by tableaux vivants and music-hall ballet.
The success of spectacular entertainment in the nineteenth century was remarkable and remarkably sustained; still, other responses to this extravagant spectacle were available to music-hall patrons. Throughout the spring of 1894, the Pall Mall Gazette remained ambivalent about the spread of Living Pictures. However, the complaints reviewers lodged against tableaux vivants partook of the logic of spectacle in their demand for continual novelty. One reviewer protested: “It is always annoying to find managers weakening their companies on the strength of Tableaux Vivants. We cannot help looking at these when they come, but we had much rather they stayed away.”88 Yet, if writers such as Arthur Symons were often content with insisting on the erotic unity of the spectacle, at least for the masculinist spectator, others drew attention to what the ideal vision of spectacle excluded. It is an achievement of the purity movement that its members were capable of moving from the Pall Mall Gazette’s vague boredom or passivity to a realized critique.
The connections that Palace tableaux forged between scopic pleasure and cultural capital were symbolically powerful, yet still open to dispute. Lady Henry Somerset, leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, turned the organization newspaper, the Woman’s Signal, into a platform against the tableaux in general and the Palace in particular. Somerset filed a complaint against the Palace’s liquor license on behalf of the National Vigilance Association largely based on the Living Pictures. Her Woman’s Signal, an appeal “to the women of England,” resisted the links tableaux drew between cultural capital and the bodies of working women. She troubled the entertainment’s claims to be art: “Go to the South Kensington Museum and look at Mr. Watts’ ‘Psyche,’ and then go to the ‘Palace’ and wait for the ‘Moorish Bath.’ The one is a glorification of womanly form; genius and reverence are confessed in every touch. The mind would have to be diseased indeed to which that picture could suggest unruly thoughts. But the other—!”89 Somerset’s own aesthetic shares common ground with the aesthetic extolled by men of rank and prestige, including a professional class of journalists. The “genius” of the individual artist elevates genuine art above the libidinal response to female display evidenced by the untrained observer. Reverence for the female form is a keynote of “genius” in Somerset’s own aesthetic economy—the truly aesthetic is always the fully sublimated.
Somerset, however, differs from the pictures’ defenders in her insistence that the new tableaux vivants fail to transform the forms they evoke: “These ‘tableaux’ violate every artistic canon,” she writes, because what they present “is sham nudity, not spiritualized and made ideal by the hallowed creating hand of genius, but palpably gross and disgusting in its suggestive flesh-coloured tights.” Somerset’s response to the performance suggests that the elaborate technology Kilyani and Dando designed to breach the gulf between the coarse bodies of poses plastiques and the classical body privileged by high artistic taste was not always successful; it could be seen through. For Lady Somerset, the bodies of the Living Pictures could not be worked over aesthetically; models were fated to bear the markings of their class.
Somerset’s colleague W. A. Coote offers a similar objection in a Daily Chronicle interview republished in the Woman’s Signal. When asked how tableaux vivants could prove more indecent than the original paintings they reproduced, Coote elaborated on the “marked difference between the two”: “The great difference is just that which makes the one true art and deprives the others of any semblance of it. In the picture you have the artist’s soul and ideal beautifying the subject, and sometimes making even the nude an inspiration for good. In the other, you have apparently the full personality of the flesh and blood of the individual.”90 In the tableaux vivants, the “full personality” of the performer, tainted by social and economic standing, remains too readily apparent. It is the “full personality” of these lower-class women that suggests to Coote that they require safeguarding.
The style in which Coote and Somerset argue against living statuary serves to draw further attention to the working-class women who labored as models on the music-hall stage. Somerset makes the models the explicit subject in her appeal, directed to other women of England: “It is the performers who call for our intervention; and I make this appeal to the English public as accomplices in the ruin and degradation of these girls. . . . I am speaking . . . of young women whose modesty and purity is of just as much account in the sight of God as the virtue of the highest in the land, whose dishonour is just as much a blot and infamy on the community as would be publicly tolerated insult or outrage on the most royal of princesses.”91 The attack on the spectacle of the tableaux vivants generates, in Somerset’s hands, a counterspectacle: a potential media scandal focused on pure but beleaguered working women. Of course, Somerset’s counterspectacle is indebted to previous media provocations launched by social purity workers, especially the controversial Maiden Tribute dispute. As with W. T. Stead’s popular image of working-class girls threatened by aristocratic rakes, Somerset’s “appeal to the women of England” provokes others to defend against threats to female honor. She represents the Palace as a site where unscrupulous men threaten working-class women unable to defend themselves.
Somerset’s construction of the tableaux vivants models as women in distress created a media sensation; nearly twenty papers are quoted two weeks later in the Woman’s Signal in explicit response to Somerset’s public appeal. Images of victimized performers stirred male and female readers; a correspondent to the Signal expresses horror that
men can sit and gaze at the presentment in the nude of the beautiful form of woman—the form of poetry, beauty, nobleness, and purity and not remember that they are men, the descendants of men who worshipped and carried their veneration for women almost to a religion, and not ask their memories to travel so far back. How can they forget that the form held up to the gaze and mockery of the idle crowd is the form they venerated and loved in their mothers and their sisters and love and worship in their wives?92
Within the social purity imaginary, the sanctity of English women remains tied to the stability and persistence of imperial power. The letter closes with the ominous warning that “the surest sign of a great empire’s ruin is the want of veneration for noble womanhood.” In connecting victimized womanhood with endangered nationhood, this correspondent only elaborated Somerset’s own suggestions in her initial protest against the Palace Living Pictures. In Somerset’s words, “No one who sees but must agree here is the gravest insult and dishonour that has been put upon woman in our time; for at last we have, in letting women make public merchandise of the beauty of their bodies, surpassed even the Oriental standard of female degradation.”93 That tableaux vivants perform for pay links their exhibition with another illicit form of commerce with the female body, prostitution. Somerset’s Orient stands in typical fashion as antithesis to the West, and Oriental spectacle imperils national integrity. Her rhetoric collapses the distinction between English values and Eastern mores.94
In key areas, Somerset’s rhetorical appeal demands respect for its daring. She enlists working-class women within the cause of social purity and takes a clear stand against male hegemony by assailing the Victorian sexual double standard. However, the models that she speaks for can stand beside “the women of England” only if they consent to Somerset’s management; worse, the models must relinquish the ability to define the parameters of their work and assent to the argument that they are simply victimized by their work. Somerset insists that the place of the model within English and feminine protocols is fully conditional.
Annie Holdsworth, coeditor of the Woman’s Signal, followed Somerset’s strategy and cast the Living Pictures models as victims in need of public intervention. Her short story “Footlights: The Story of a Living Picture” suggests the pathos of this strategy and its ability to dramatize oppression; the fiction also demonstrates the limitations that appeals to “save” working-class women placed on feminine agency.
The story begins with Cecil Rhys, a New Woman journalist, entering into a discussion about the Living Pictures at the Progressive Club. Cecil, a devotee of the pictures, declares that it is “the people of narrow views that are the real enemies of purity.”95 Her feminism is at odds with the stated policies of social purity workers: “‘Women are ruining their own cause by all this pother,’ she went on, talking rapidly to cover the confusion. ‘I would not in the least mind being a Living Picture. I see no harm whatever in it. I would just as soon earn my bread that way myself.’”96 Geraldine Staunton, a woman artist and Progressive Club member, informs Cecil that one of her Living Pictures models, Grace Fleming, needs a substitute so she can visit her ailing mother. Geraldine asks Cecil to take Grace’s place and perform that night at the Folly music hall. In a mood of daring, Cecil takes the challenge as a journalistic opportunity: “Why should she not do it? In her profession she had already assumed many nondescript roles. She had been barmaid, milliner, organ-grinder. What she had attempted for journalism might well be done for a dying woman. Besides, it would be good copy, and she would prove her case.” The manager of the Folly meets Cecil; he is eager to take her up on her offer to replace Grace. Holdsworth uses the exchange to dramatize the disposability of models. The reader is privy to the manager’s internal musing regarding Cecil’s benefits over Grace for the job: “Grace had been posing for the Venus Aphrodite, but Grace had gone off lately. She had looked peaked and haggard, and here was a Venus that would make the success of any picture.”
When Cecil replaces Grace as a “nude” Venus, Holdsworth’s story demonstrates how, in Cecil’s own words, “a world of difference lay between the picture before the footlights and the picture behind them.” The narrative emphasizes the degrading labor behind the spectacle of living statuary. As Cecil begins to lose her nerve, a model tells her what keeps the Living Pictures models at work: “Take a drop of brandy before you go on. We all have to the first time, just to keep us up. Bless you, not one of us would go through it if Collins didn’t make us half-drunk first! But that’s only the first few nights!—you soon get hardened.”97 When Cecil goes onstage, the conversation among the men in the audience suggests that the boundaries that separate working as a picture and prostitution are all too permeable:
“My! ain’t she a stunner?”
“She won’t stay here long. She’ll soon be down at the other shop.”
“Carriage and pair, you bet.”
Cecil doesn’t register this conversation: all she can register is “the speech of the eyes looking at her. She felt as if she had stepped into a bath of pollution. Would she ever be clean again as long as she lived?”
Cecil’s performance as Venus ends abruptly when she hears the voice of her boyfriend, a self-professed “aesthete,” in the Folly audience: her hands reach up to cover her face before the curtain falls. Upon seeing Cecil in distress, Clarke, the boyfriend, renounces his aestheticism in an impassioned speech to his companion Rawson, who had passively enjoyed the diversion: “You brute! Suppose it was your sister standing there! It’s a vile shame to allow it!” In an interesting reversal of the male gaze, Clarke becomes humiliated by Cecil’s eyes, which “[meet] his in a despairing appeal for Pity” as the curtain rises again: “It was his turn then to grow pale, his turn to cover his face with his hands. But he could not shut out the sight of the humiliation of the girl he loved. He was powerless to silence the coarse remarks that pointed the ringing applause of the audience.” Holdsworth represents the effects of public display on women performers as irrevocable. The performance ruins Cecil’s relationship with Clarke: at the close of the performance she realizes that “the footlights, like a flaming wall, would stand between them for ever.”
Holdsworth’s story supplements Somerset’s own account of Living Pictures model psychology: passive, maltreated women, prone to abuse by rogue male audiences and unscrupulous managers. The strength of such rhetoric to elicit media reaction had a clear precedent; the Maiden Tribute controversy had demonstrated that such rhetorical appeals might challenge the natural status of male sexual prerogative. However, the essentialist notions of femininity that Holdsworth relies on—the denial of sexual agency to working-class women, the presentation of performance as an agent of contamination—would be interrogated as the controversy over the Living Pictures raged on. The dispute over the Living Pictures was primarily fought on the discursive terrain of legitimate female performance.
For some, the dispute over the pictures needed to be engaged on the same terms as the struggle against Chant’s simultaneous suit against the Empire. Journalists protested against the unqualified “amateur” who meddled in matters of decorum over which gentlemen could peacefully disagree. The St. James Gazette refused to take seriously Lady Somerset’s argument that Living Pictures models were contaminated by public performance: “Is it really true that they degrade themselves more than Gaiety chorus girls, or serpentine skirt-dancers?” The Gazette suggests instead that all such disputes were, finally, matters of taste: “If Lady Henry Somerset had attacked the tableaux because they are stupid and ugly, we could understand her better.”98 The Gazette speaks here for the collective cultured subject, the imperial “we” who passes over those hapless enough to confuse disagreements about taste with ethical problems. Fun, a journal chronicling the political scene and theatrical entertainment, attacked Lady Henry Somerset’s defense of the “Newer Drama” in what it described as her “new womanly journal,” the Woman’s Signal, even more pointedly than her protest against tableaux vivants. Somerset’s defense of the “problem play” (1894 was also the year of Sydney Grundy’s The New Woman, H. A. Jones’s controversial The Case of Rebellious Susan, and Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in London) drew this disdainful response: “No, my dear Lady Henry, return to your attacks on the publicans—it amuses you and it doesn’t hurt them. But for Heaven’s sake, leave the theatres alone. You know nothing about them, and it is silly to display your ignorance.”99 Such disputes over taste suggested it was important to settle who possessed the proper credentials to arbitrate aesthetic questions. The diatribes of Fun and the St. James Gazette against Lady Somerset’s comments on theater and music-hall performance suggest that a proper resolution of aesthetic disputes was a matter of moment in the fin-de-siècle public sphere.
George Bernard Shaw’s defense of tableaux vivants in response to W. A. Coote’s complaint against the Palace, filed on behalf of the National Vigilance Association (NVA), demonstrates a similar optimistic progressivism. Coote’s testimony on behalf of Lady Somerset and the NVA receives a sharp rebuke from Shaw, focusing on the matter of Coote’s credentials to settle artistic disputes: “As a critic, I at once perceived that Mr. Coote had placed before the public an issue of considerable moment: namely, whether Mr. Coote’s opinion is worth anything or not. For Mr. Coote is a person of real importance, active, useful, convinced, thoroughly respectable, able to point to achievements which we must all admit honourable to him. . . . But all this is quite compatible with Mr. Coote being in artistic matters a most intensely stupid man.”100 Shaw’s review stages the struggle over the Palace as a drama of competing authorities, a clash between activism and journalism, which Shaw declares he wishes to fight fairly: “I do not want to take an unfair advantage of the fact that in writing about art I am a trained expert and Mr. Coote a novice.”101
Shaw’s defense of the Palace Living Pictures favors the transfiguring effects of spectacle; he believes in the transformation of the model in the pictures, at least with the right technology. He also lauds the hygienic qualities of the display, qualities he hopes might have a direct effect on the audience for the exhibition: “It was only too obvious to a practiced art critic’s eye that what was presented as flesh was really spun silk. But the illusion produced on the ordinary music-hall frequenter was that of the undraped human figure, exquisitely clean, graceful, and, in striking contrast to many of the completely and elaborately dressed ladies who were looking at them, completely modest.” The special effect that witnessing “clean, graceful” bodies might exert on working-class women in attendance is the crucial point in Shaw’s favoring the pictures: “Many of the younger and poorer girls in the audience must have gone away with a greater respect for their own persons, a greater regard for the virtues of the bath, and a quickened sense of the repulsiveness of that personal slovenliness and gluttony which are the real indecencies of popular life.” Shaw’s concern with the response that the pictures might elicit in spectators is evident. The performance, he suggests, might indoctrinate “classical” decorum in women with working-class manners—“slovenliness,” “gluttony.” For this reason Shaw extols the pictures as “not only works of art” but “excellent practical sermons,” and he can “urge every father of a family who cannot afford to send his daughters the round of the picture galleries in the Haymarket and Bond Street, to take them all (with their brothers) to the Palace Theatre.”102 Despite the hyperbole, Shaw’s aims in this review are clear: the tableaux vivants are necessary since they circulate classical culture by other means, and at other sites than the public art gallery.
Since Shaw bases his claims for the artistic merit of the pictures on their ability to promote social hygiene, he confidently proceeds to refute Coote’s claim, similar to Lady Somerset’s own argument, that there remains a “marked difference between the canvas or marble and the living picture, much to the disadvantage of the latter.” In contrast with the purity reformers, Shaw insists on the power of the technology of the pictures to transform bodies. The models hired to play Living Pictures become artistic entities through detailed work of stage design and lighting, controlled by skilled impresarios. Shaw also defends the rights of artistic experts against amateur “critics” like Coote:
Let Mr. Morton, the manager of the Palace, request Mr. Dando, the arranger of the pictures to stand aside and entrust his functions for one night . . . to Mr. William Alexander Coote. Let the entire resources of the establishment be placed absolutely under his direction; and let us then see whether he can take advantage of their being “no art in it” to produce a single tableau that will not be ludicrously and outrageously deficient in the artistic qualities without which Mr. Dando’s compositions would be hooted off the stage.
Like other managerial intellectuals, Shaw has faith that change can emanate from a central source of authority, through the progressive use of technology. Shaw also implies that all managerial types are equal; however, Coote’s inability to produce correct aesthetic judgment compels Shaw to distinguish his own reformist vision from Coote’s. The Shavian expert is aligned with the interests of the people, who, like Shaw, know art when they see it and who can learn more about proper aesthetic protocols from the entertainment. Working-class audiences are believed capable of recognizing and esteeming the classical form in a manner that Coote, the mere bourgeois, cannot. In Shaw’s estimation, Coote represents a particularly intransigent portion of the untrained public.
Frederick Wedmore defended the tableaux against purity workers on similar grounds, relying on the public’s ability to discern that the “nude in a tableau vivant” was obviously not an unclothed model:
Before the interventions of the Puritan became necessary, the public itself would have interfered. But in the matter of the tableau vivant, the public rightly recognized what the Puritan ignored—that the nude in a tableau vivant, with its accessories, with all its associations, is no longer an undressed woman, but the nude in art—the nude to be seen, therefore, with something, at least, of artistic appreciation of refined colour and of ordered and intricate line.103
Like Shaw, Wedmore regards it as self-evident that the tableau vivant represents civilized values because it represents the classic human form. This argument in favor of the intuitive artistic sense of popular audiences centers around the transformed Living Pictures models as much as it relies on the public’s aesthetic sense. Even when the models in the pictures were evaluated in Wedmore’s formalist terms of “refined colour” and “ordered” lines, the controversy over the pictures rarely moved too far from the real women who performed in the entertainment.
The heightened interest in the models in the pictures sometimes allowed explicit class concerns to be aired. The public protest of Reverend Wilson Carlile against the Palace, stirred by Lady Henry Somerset’s complaints, elicited this response from Palace manager Charles Morton:
Mr. Carlile had a short conversation with Mr. Morton as to the dangers incurred by the young woman who plays “The Polar Star,” and is exposed for several seconds every night to the unfeeling public’s gaze. Mr. Morton assured him that the young woman was in no danger of being contaminated on his stage, and he thought that their [sic] chances of remaining an ornament to her sex while she was receiving 5 pounds a week were far greater than they would be if she was receiving smaller enumeration for the more arduous task she might be obliged to perform had she a less exquisite shape.104
The exchange between Carlile and Morton suggests that Carlile shared Annie Holdsworth’s fears that performers might be contaminated by means of the audience’s gaze. It is hard to imagine how Morton’s defense of the pictures as better than minimum wage labor pacified Carlile, since Morton assumes the proximity between models and prostitutes that alarmed purity workers.105 The encounter between minister and manager, with its acknowledgment of labor and class determinants, is an exception in media coverage of the pictures. More typical were human interest stories such as the one the Standard ran on tableaux vivants, in which a young woman is portrayed in a series of pictures being “transformed” from a model artist into a “classical” Living Picture. Picture number six of the story bears a caption noting that the complete transformation of the model must be postponed. The manager is shown informing the model that “he will have omit her ‘turn’ this evening, as Lady Henry Somerset’s watchers are in the theatre.”106 In this photo exposé, Lady Somerset’s “watchers” impede the magic technology of the Living Pictures and the possibilities they offer to refigure the female body.
The Standard story also indicates that the purity workers who instigated the controversy quickly lost control of how their protests and the pictures themselves would be represented in the press. If Lady Somerset and other female philanthropists cast the Living Pictures as victims, competing images of the performers in the press worked against the notion of the models as passive quarry for men. Besides the argument for the “transfigured” body in Shaw, Wedmore, and the Standard, the discourse of professionalism complicated public notions regarding the Living Pictures model.
Even before the purity worker attack on the Living Pictures, the rhetoric of professionalism was invoked in order to legitimate the exhibition. The Sketch, for example, praises W. P. Dando’s version of the Living Pictures at the Palace early on as “simply exquisite” with “absolutely nothing about them to offend even the most sensitive or modest temperament”107 Still, the Sketch concedes that “even to the hardened artistic nerve, to find oneself in the midst of a group of beautiful girls attired in the very scantiest of raiment was a position, to say the least of it, of some delicacy.” To allow spectators to overcome this embarrassment, the Sketch provides a symbolic solution: the notion of the Living Pictures model as dance professional. “As, however, most of the ladies taking part in the representations are models well known in the artistic world, they probably felt far less embarrassment than the ordinary onlooker. To them it is part of their ordinary day’s work, whether they are posing before a Palace Theatre public or in the privacy of an artist’s studio, for habit is second nature.” When the New Review published a public forum on the Living Pictures in November 1894, Arthur Symons, fittingly, further elaborated the notion of the models’ professional ethos. Symons suggests that what might normally corrupt other women was not an issue where experts were concerned. He especially finds fault with Lady Somerset’s suggestion that models required others to defend them from vice:
I believe that Lady Henry Somerset grounded her objection on the presumable “moral ruin and degradation” which the wearing of tights and the removal of corsets would cause to a girl who took part in such a performance. If anyone really believes that, I can only say that such a person must be very ingenuous and very ill-informed. A girl who is accustomed to the stage thinks no more about the eyes of the audience and the cut of her costume than you or I, when we are walking along the street, think about the swift, imperceptible criticism of the indistinguishable crowd. Or if she thinks of the matter at all, it is as a friend of mine thought when she said to me, only the other day: “I sometimes wish I had a better figure; I never think about anything else.”108
Symons utilizes his insider knowledge of models to counter what he takes as Lady Somerset’s misreading of the psychology of artistic professionals. He represents the Living Pictures model as aloof, professional, self-obsessed, but not easily victimized.
Lady Somerset conceived the Living Pictures model as a figure too fragile to avoid the dangers associated in the Victorian mind with public display. Her representation of the passive model was actively countered in the press during her speaking engagement in New York at the height of the pictures model controversy. While in New York in August 1894, Somerset voiced concern regarding Kilyani’s Living Pictures in New York, then appearing in the Proctor variety theater. As in London, some public responses countered Lady Somerset’s campaign with defenses of the high standards of the profession. The manager of the Koster and Bial music hall appealed to the “peculiarly modest and respectable” nature of professional models:
It seems to have been imagined by the public that the young woman who could pose in a living picture . . . must be bereft of all modesty, and Lady Somerset and her co-laborers seem to have conceived the idea that they ought to reform these young women, whom they imagine are depraved. Now it is well known among artists and professional people, and fairly understood among intelligent people, that artists’ models are a peculiarly modest and respectable type. Any artist will tell you that the young woman who will pose has a certain confidence in herself . . . while a woman who is at all lacking in self-respect, you understand, cannot be hired to pose for any price.109
The virtues of expert models are represented, predictably, as standing above the lure of mere commerce. The description separates professional virtues from commercial value; the “true” model displays a “natural” confidence that, of course, has little to do with nature and everything to do with culture and social status.
One of the major exhibitors of Living Pictures in New York, music-hall manager Suzie Kirwin, tested Somerset’s rhetoric of besieged womanhood. Kirwin’s public rebuke of Somerset in the New York daily press brought the matter of class to bear on the protest in unexpected ways. In response to Lady Somerset’s comment to the New York Times that “the models pose for dollars, for bread and butter, not to educate the public taste for art,” Kirwin responds:
The “clear cut commercial situation,” so pointedly referred to by Lady Somerset, presents itself to most of us born without titles and estates. No doubt, some of the young women in living pictures would gladly exhibit themselves solely for love of art if worldly circumstances would permit. Young women and matrons of fair repute have freely displayed such charms of feature and form as Heaven has favored them with in the cause of charity. The professional model, whether of the studio or the living picture cabinet, is less fortunate in worldly endowment.110
Kirwin endeavors to claim the Living Pictures controversy as a struggle over access; at issue is the possibility of unskilled labor gaining entrée in the job market: “The honorable avenues of employment open to women are none too many. Lady Somerset, as a philanthropist, must know this. Why seek to close any of them?” Like the manager of the Koster and Bial, Kirwin stresses the professional attributes of the working-class women who model: “I have found them clear headed, modest, well behaved young women—self-reliant and courageous enough to fight the never ceasing battle for support—women who prefer honest toil to vice. They and other women of this type, no matter what vocation in life, in my humble opinion, lend to the glorification, not to the degradation of their sex.”111
The notion of Living Pictures model as hapless victim of commodified sexuality was further complicated when the models themselves contested this image in the New York daily press. In the New York Tribune, the women in Kilyani’s troupe spoke for themselves. Esther Gaab, a renowned German model, takes up Suzie Kirwin’s argument in favor of employment opportunities that the pictures offered women: “Wouldn’t it be better if (Somerset) fed the hungry and clothed the naked (sic), than if she shut off another avenue of honest employment? Surely, there are few enough open to women.”112 Another model in the troupe, Miss Eggert, expresses her belief in the autonomy of art: “On what grounds, . . . does this English lady charge the Living Pictures with immorality? If it is because men come to see us with impure thoughts, are we to blame? When a masterpiece is painted who can object to it? Only those who are not pure in mind. And we are like the beautiful models who rejoice every painter’s heart.” The language of high art, so often used to denigrate the women who portrayed living statuary, here is deployed to legitimate a woman’s professional identity. Eggert goes on to make claims about artistic sovereignty that would fit comfortably alongside the contemporary claims of the aesthete for the autonomy of artistic values: “I do not want blame or pity or condonement for my art. It is art and needs no excusing.” In the same New York Tribune article, an anonymous model cleverly suggests her disregard for the responses the pictures might elicit from audiences: “As for the effect on the young men, I do not know that we are accountable for that. It isn’t half so bad for them to look at the living pictures than at some of the dead ones they have in their rooms.”113
Somerset’s protest over the Living Pictures not only incited literary intellectuals to intervene, but also provoked performing women to speak as authorities on their own work in a manner few contemporaries might have anticipated. Female philanthropists clearly set the terms of the debate, claiming the Living Pictures model as an embodiment of gender inequity. No doubt this appeal for women to act on behalf of “womanhood” resulted in the explicit curiosity about the models themselves that increasingly preoccupied journalistic coverage of these women. Some of the claims maintained by the performers—regarding the autonomy of art, the importance of experts in an increasingly professionalized field—may surprise even contemporary readers. Suzie Kirwin’s argument for the pictures appealed to something that Somerset’s concern with “true womanhood” allowed her to overlook: the material conditions of working women. What Somerset and the NVA failed to anticipate was the popular discontent with their tutelary efforts to speak for other women. The protest over tableaux vivants—perhaps against Somerset’s intention, which appears to have been to speak for women unable to articulate their own concerns—established these women as speaking subjects in a public sphere.114
The women of the tableaux seem to have rejected an old, male-defined discourse that interpreted female display associated with “common” bodies as vulgar and unrefined. They seem to have freed themselves as well from male-defined prejudices against feminine display and the notion of art as exclusively male property. The tableaux vivants workers asserted themselves against a male-based spectator practice and social prejudice that equated nudity with working-class identity or with the abject. They met these objections using more than the alibi of art; they also invoked their vocation and common enterprise, their aesthetic professionalism. The recourse to a notion of dignified labor demystifies the middle-class Victorian spectacle of female nudity fostered by the old penny gaff display or the high-toned Palace Theatre spectacle. The discourse of these women workers even tugs at the ethereal notions of art and artistic autonomy. Yet their media pronouncements do not establish that they imagined their work as a fully collaborative endeavor, or a step beyond standard middle-class notions of self-fashioning or self-promotion. The archive of recorded comments from these workers offers little to suggest the tableaux women believed their labor was a social expression, reflecting common interests or collective practice: although it must be remembered that the racy New York Police Gazette had another ideological agenda for female spectacle, and tended to interpret the work of female performers in a limited ideological fashion.
Still, Lady Somerset’s social critique, subsuming economic factors under moral imperatives, led her to neglect a crucial aspect of the Living Pictures phenomena—the inclusive character of consumer spectacle. She underestimated the dynamic force of market culture, as professionals are wont to do. From the outset, the pictures were nothing if not inclusive, provided one could pay to view. With this proviso, scopic pleasure was not an exclusively male, heterosexual business.115 The success of the Palace tableaux encouraged Eugene Sandow, advertised as “The Modern Hercules and the Perfect Man,” to tour as a tableau vivant (he debuted as a tableau vivant at the Palace Theatre six months before Kilyani’s troupe).116 After the notoriety of Kilyani’s troupe, Sandow’s performances regularly included exhibitions of the strong man in tight silk shorts and laurel crown, covered only by bronze makeup, in classical poses as Apollo or Hercules. During a tour of San Francisco, women especially were encouraged to attend Sandow’s matinee performances. In London, the Music Hall and Theatre Review reprinted a comic squib by a Californian poet on Sandow’s tour. The poem considers what other cultural arbiters repressed: the basis of the entertainment’s commercial success in vulgarity. Of course, a difference between visual pleasure provided for men and that provided for women was that the latter could readily be denigrated as sexualized display, and arguments for its aesthetic integrity were more vulnerable to demystification:
Oh, dear, how the ladies did hustle to see
The perfect man pose at his great matinee; . . .
The ladies from most of our Art Schools were there,
The “old” and “homely,” the young and the fair . . .
For nearly one hour they sat and they gazed
At Sandow’s nude figure and gushingly praised
His form and his muscles, his curls and his face,
His curves and his outlines, his ease and his grace,
And vowed it was, oh! such an artistic sight,
They could linger with pleasure there night after night,
And so when the “horrid old curtain” came down
Each lady declared with a very deep frown
She thought the performances was really too short
They did not see half the “art pictures” they ought.117
The doggerel verse enforces a double standard for scopic pleasure, patronizing women in search of visual enjoyment. However, Sandow’s popularity highlights what Lady Somerset’s protest overlooked in the spectacle of the Living Pictures. The success of Sandow “The Modern Hercules” demonstrates the difficulty purity workers encountered when they claimed that, in a world of commodified entertainment, collective resistance to vulgar pleasure might define womanhood. Somerset’s appeal to the women of England underestimated the appeal of a nascent image of womanhood—as empowered consumer, and as a demographic.118
The controversy over the Palace Living Pictures resulted in few substantial changes in the pictures themselves aside from the withdrawal of “The Moorish Bath.” Despite W. A. Coote’s testimony before the LCC Theatres and Music Halls Committee about the indecencies of tableaux vivants—what another National Vigilance campaigner called the exhibition’s “mere nudities”—the committee decided that spectators had to adjust their own perspective rather than the Palace change its entertainment. If the Palace presented “works of art,” the committee decided, spectators needed to remind themselves that the bodies they watched were, in fact, covered by tights.119 The burden of aesthetic consciousness was thrust back on the spectator/consumer.
The Palace, throughout its existence as a music hall, until it became a cinema, maintained its reputation as one of London’s primary sources for feminine spectacle.120 The Palace increasingly diversified its exhibits to serve its patrons with greater efficiency. If the primary result of the public debate over Living Pictures was heightened publicity for those who performed in them, spectacular entertainment was able to accommodate this curiosity toward working women. Tableaux vivants soon centered on individual stars and their star images rather than collective troupes overseen by solitary impresarios like Kilyani or Dando.121
The tableaux vivants were defended against moral protest by declarations of their aesthetic merit; living statuary faced the burden of maintaining this justification into the next century. When another London licensing dispute over tableaux vivants flared up in 1906, the Music Hall and Theatre Review defended the exhibitions on the grounds that “there are degrees” of living statuary. Yet the paper went on to complain that the abundance of tableaux on the music-hall stage had started “competition[s] in daring”: “We began with the perfect woman, modestly clad. We proceeded to the partly perfect woman, not so carefully guarded against the weather. We advanced to mis-shapen creatures who had not even beauty or symmetry to excuse their indecency.”122 The editorial expresses the fear that the logic of the marketplace can transform “proper” tableaux into demeaning spectacle; at any moment, the grotesque, “mis-shapen” body so inimical to artistic taste can blight the halls.
One of the most celebrated exceptions to the fears expressed by the Music Hall and Theatre Review was believed to reside in the Living Pictures’ Pansy Montague, an Australian model who performed under the name of “La Milo.” Her career in the Edwardian age represents a culmination of sorts for living statuary performance in the nineteenth century. La Milo’s initial success occurred when she imitated Velasquez’s Rokesby Venus, capitalizing on the acquisition of the painting by the National Portrait Gallery.123 This performance had a long and successful run at the London Pavilion in 1906, during which the Sunday Chronicle asserted, “[H]er chaste and beautiful suggestions of marble statuary, have revived a fashion.”124 However, for a picture performer to maintain success amid the competition it was necessary—if increasingly difficult—to cordon off authentic performance from debased imitation. Advertising was one means of establishing faith in the unique prestige of a tableaux star, but even ad copy faced clear limits. The same ad that boldly asserts in one instance that “there is only one ‘La Milo’” contains the rueful admission that “[t]o be successful is to court imitation.” The advertisement for La Milo appeals to the lay expert to establish the performer’s real singularity: potential customers are advised to “Listen to Critics—not Mugtown reporters!” The excerpts from reviews that follow typically declare La Milo to be a legitimate artistic event; in the words of one paper, “There are half a dozen poseuses competing for popular favour, but none of them, so far, has so rare a distinction as ‘La Milo.’” A review from Entr’Acte claims that La Milo’s work is “in a class by itself,” while the Daily Express, giving the game away, declares, “‘La Milo’ stands for high Art.”
The poseuse’s success signified the greater tolerance, at least in music-hall London, for working-class women who wished to assume the classical form. No less an authority than W. T. Stead, whose Pall Mall Gazette exposés made working-class prostitution a political issue and galvanized reaction against the Contagious Diseases Act with his own brand of media scandal, exempted La Milo from his denigration of music-hall entertainment as “[d]rivel for the dregs.” Stead’s highly publicized first visit to a music hall in 1907 resulted in a celebrated editorial about the “imbecility” of the halls. However, La Milo’s performance stood, in Stead’s estimation, as the sole exception to “the depths of the abyss in which these trousered and petticoated savages of civilisation wallow.” In his words:
Imagine my surprise and delight to find that the exhibition of La Milo was the only redeeming feature in the long monotonous succession of ugliness and vulgarity. There can be no difference of opinion as to the beauty and ideal loveliness of the pictures to which La Milo formed the centre figure. . . . Those who came to gloat over indecency were pretty considerably sold, but the audience, unintelligent and vulgar though it was, seemed to be thrilled for a moment by the beauty of the spectacle.125
In Stead’s praise, the turbulent negotiations between class and taste that involved public displays of the classical nude, from poses plastiques to Living Pictures, nearly stabilize. In the applause of the crusading journalist for the classical body represented by La Milo, we have the “apotheosis” of the music-hall body. The body of the working woman becomes authorized to represent artistic canons of taste.
Stead even suggests that the pedagogic effect of La Milo might prove the sole hope of the “dregs” who attend the halls. Until her performance, he claims, “I had regarded them as something like the fishes in the mammoth cave in America, whose optic nerve had perished from long sojourn in the regions of eternal night. They seem to have lost all consciousness either of morality, or beauty, or intelligence. But . . . It was sufficient to display a picture instinct with a soul of beauty to elicit an immediate, although it might be but a transitory response. In that fact lies a great hope.” As her advertisements claim, La Milo’s value is in her difference from other performers. Stead’s appraisal performs the difficult task of preserving the aura of a distinctive work of art from contamination by “drivel.”
I have suggested that the professional tableaux vivants did not make a comprehensive break with Victorian patriarchy or with Victorian convention; the individual artists often spoke the language of competitive, assertive individualism that we would expect from the mid-Victorian entrepreneur. The spectacular case of La Milo’s horseback ride as Lady Godiva in the 1907 Coventry pageant underscores the failure of the practice to produce new structures of feeling. The tableaux vivants woman worker commanded notoriety rare in the Victorian context. La Milo’s ride may have represented a scandal or travesty, but of the sort that accrues individual gains and, as we will see, offers the kinds of display that media apparatus easily turn to spectacle. The Lady Godiva ride represented the kind of subversion that, as Guy Debord might icily observe, ideology exists to neutralize.
Still, La Milo both participated in and to a degree manipulated her own spectacle. On her own initiative, Pansy Montague, an expert horsewoman, took part in the Coventry city pageant, celebrating Lady Godiva’s ride for municipal charity. There was controversy over La Milo’s attire, particularly fears that she would wear the flesh-colored costume often used in tableaux vivants for the pageant. La Milo’s assurances to the planning committee were conciliatory and well publicized: “Let it be distinctly understood that I have no desire to be seen in a costume, or lack of costume, which would give offenses to the most susceptible.”126
La Milo’s ride, replete with body-length wig, proved a media extravaganza. The Sketch supplement photographed La Milo’s ride through Coventry, flanked by a reproduction of an old Coventry coin remodeled to depict La Milo ringed by the caption Pro Bono Publico. Such public display typified an age of “invented traditions”127 when new state ritual and civic pageantry proliferated. La Milo’s ride carefully made use of civic ritual—and a national symbol—in order to bestow more legitimacy on her profession. Against those who might dub her ride mere prurient display, Montague was vocal in her defenses of the “womanly” reasons she had for riding. She requested, against those who protested, that the celebration be supported by all “liberty-loving men and women . . . [who wish to] help in the triple cause of charity, chastity, and chivalry.”128 For a performer linked to poses plastiques to plausibly represent a national heroine, and to appeal to “charity” and “chastity,” illustrates a new veneration for the music-hall body, so often denied access to high artistic values before the Palace statuary.
It is probably going too far to regard La Milo’s ride in Coventry as resembling contemporary performance art in its desire to have practical, social consequences: yet her performance shares the same impatience with traditional aesthetic criteria. The record of the event that we have figures some of the perceptible limits faced by Montague’s endeavor to escape gender bias. Along with the photographic depiction of the ride in a full two-page supplement, the Sketch ran a small picture of the original “Peeping Tom” as surrounding border. The caption for the photo observes that the picture was “taken specially for us from the King’s Head Hotel” where the original “Peeping Tom” spied on Godiva’s ride. The photo of La Milo’s ride contained by its own Peeping Tom suggests the event retained a sensational aspect despite Montague’s serious public pronouncements. However, Pansy Montague’s attempt to control the reception to her public display anticipates the efforts that experimental dancer Maud Allan exerted to manage audience response to her performance as Salome at the Palace music hall a year later. Allan’s ability to legitimate her physical display and taunt her critics through the same print media used by her detractors seems anticipated by Montague’s example.129
An attempt to intervene in powerful images of traditional femininity for her purposes, La Milo’s ride at Coventry reveals an inchoate politics. Yet her part in the procession is a colorful example of female agency and of how the desire to pose could be put to one’s own purposes. Before the pageant ride, the Era reported with surprise La Milo’s trial run. “Seized with a desire to emulate Lady Godiva,” she rode through Coventry in the same attire in which she performed, only under the gaze of her manager and dresser.130 This solitary ride suggests the ludic appeal of posing, and its potential for empowerment. On a whim, La Milo took the stage to the streets. The Coventry pageant utilized the conservative imagery of national instruction, but it also framed La Milo’s self-display as consumer spectacle. The ride was likely more provocation than politics; yet, having taken place in a culture in which literary intellectuals and journalists largely worked to enforce class-based distinctions in mass culture, La Milo’s ride deserves reconsideration.
The controversy over tableaux vivants had, throughout the 1890s and beyond, uneven results. Initially the dispute over the Palace Living Pictures empowered middle-class women to assume a custodial role over women performers from primarily working-class backgrounds. However, as the controversy over tableaux vivants was played out in the press, performers themselves gained a degree of power as self-proclaimed aesthetic professionals whose work exempted them from the temptations faced by mere stage amateurs. The controversy over the Palace in 1894 suggested that autonomy might be gained through publicity, a possibility that individual performers such as La Milo would attempt to enact during their music-hall careers.
The ability to manipulate one’s self-display was overlooked or condemned out of hand by the female philanthropists who protested the Living Pictures. The class gulf between models and purity workers resulted in an unwillingness to allow performers the opportunity to speak about their work on their terms. The social purity movement, adept at marshaling the media to defend women against rapacious male sexuality, had difficulty in imagining how women performers could be the agents rather than the subjects of their publicity. Performers were instead categorized as inclined to “fall.” In this instance, purity workers, like male professionals in journalism, claimed to speak as authorities, without considering the material conditions of theatrical labor and the gendered division of labor in Victorian society. The dispute over tableaux, however, suggests that, to a degree, aesthetic values might have some collective ownership. Standards for evaluation were the lingua franca for all participants in the debate, and the aesthetic ideal the court of appeals recognized by most of the disputants in the controversy.
In my conclusion, I contend that the potentially exclusive categories of professional culture could nonetheless provide some common ground between amateurs and experts divided by class and gender. The music hall was the premiere nineteenth-century example of a marginal culture practice that conquered the mainstream. In so doing, performance in the halls increasingly catered to the tastes of its growing middle-class audience. The bourgeois takeover of the music hall expanded and thereby transformed the values of the new class that appropriated the entertainment. I suggest that expert discourse on the music hall could destabilize a too-rigid separation between amateurs and professionals.
