Stéphane Mallarmé, who watched an astounding amount of ballet and theater despite finding most of it unbearably banal, attended the theater in search of an elusive idée, some invisible divine presence transcending whatever was happening on the stage, something free of representation and shallow spectacle. His poet’s eye, as he describes it in the prose poem “Un spectacle interrompu,” allows the poet to see more than what is visible, prioritizing intellectual or imaginative elements—insight rather than sight. It makes sense, then, that he was more moved by the abstract, theatrically lit dances of Loie Fuller than any romantic story ballet: “Here brought to Ballet is the atmosphere, or nothing,” the “nothing” here being the elusive divine spirit of man, free from representation. Transcendent nothingness may have been Mallarmé’s object of admiration, but in her famous Serpentine Dance, Fuller was likely imitating the hysterics. In her memoir, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life, she describes the takeoff of her career after performing the dance, which was based on a medical parody play, Quack, M.D., noting that “hypnotism at that moment was very much to the fore in New York.” The play features a scene of “hypnotic suggestion” from Dr. Quack: “I endeavoured to make myself as light as possible, in order to give the impression of a fluttering figure obedient to the doctor’s orders. He raised his arms. I raised mine. Under the influence of suggestion, entranced—so, at least, it looked—with my gaze held by his, I followed his every motion.”

In Dance Pathologies, McCarren articulates early modern dances like Fuller’s as a response to the tradition of dance’s resemblance to hysteric poses. She writes, “Mallarmé’s dance texts on Loie Fuller record a shift away from the spectacular and toward the specular as Fuller’s dance offers its spectators not simply sight, but insight.” On Fuller’s subsequent dances, which incorporated the theatrical lighting for which she came to be known, “Mallarmé describes [her] performing persona as facilitated by the ‘absolute gaze’ created by electric light, a gaze that can be identified with what Foucault refers to as the ‘absolute gaze’ of the nineteenth-century physician newly armed with instruments.” The dancer under the absolute gaze is hypnotized, electrified, but the distinction of Fuller, Mallarmé says, is that she is self-hypnotized; her electric lighting is of her own creation. Her “use of the clinical apparatus used to diagnose and treat hysteria,” McCarren says, “functions as a critique of Charcotian psychology, and reveals to what extent technological agency imposes a hierarchy of well and ill.”