Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance

By Cecily Devereux

Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance situates the 1908 dance craze, which The New York Times called “Salomania,” as a crucial event and a turning point in the history of the modern business of erotic dance. Framing Salomania with reference to imperial ideologies of motherhood and race, it works toward better understanding the increasing value of the display of the undressed female body in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This study turns critical attention to cultures of maternity in the late 19th century, primarily with reference to the ways in which women are defined in relation to their genitals as patriarchal property and space and are valued according to reproduction as their primary labour. Erotic dance as it takes shape in the modern representation of Salome insists both that the mother is and is not visible in the body of the dancer, a contradiction this study characterizes as reproductive fetishism.

Looking at a range of media, the study traces the modern figure of Salome through visual art, writing, early psychoanalysis and dance, from "hootchie kootch" to the performances dancer Maud Allan called “mimeo-dramatic” to mid-20th-century North American films such as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Charles Lamont's Salome, Where She Danced to the 21st-century HBO series The Sopranos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771125888

Cecily Devereux

Cecily Devereux is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her publications include Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (2005).

Book preview

The cover page of 'Salomania and the representation pf race and gender in modern Erotic Dance' by Cecily Devereux.

The cover image shows Maud Allan featuring a belly dancer attire during her role as Salome. She places the tips of both her hands on the top of her head. The Benetech Global Accessible Certified logo is at the bottom left of the cover.

Salomania

and the

Representation

of Race and Gender

in Modern

Erotic Dance

Salomania

and the

Representation

of Race and Gender

in Modern

Erotic Dance

Cecily Devereux

Logo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.A costumed woman with dark hair stands with bare arms raised, hands touching the top of her head. She is looking to her left and wearing two pearl ropes wound around her head and dangling over her ears; a translucent skirt; and a bra made of pearls.Logo: Laurier. Inspiring Lives.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Funding provided by the Government of Ontario and the Ontario Arts Council. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Logo: Government of Canada. Logo: Canada Council for the Arts. Logo: Government of Ontario. Logo: Ontario Arts Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Salomania and the representation of race and gender in modern erotic dance / Cecily Devereux.

Names: Devereux, Cecily Margaret, author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022039069X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220390800 | ISBN 9781771125871 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781771125888 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771125895 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Sex in dance—Europe—History—19th century. | LCSH: Dance—Europe—History—19th century. | LCSH: Women dancers—Europe—History—19th century. | LCSH: Salome (Biblical figure)—Art. | LCSH: Salome (Biblical figure)—In literature.

Classification: LCC GV1643 .D48 2023 | DDC 792.809409/034—dc23

Cover and interior design by Michel Vrana. Front cover image features Maud Allan in the role of Salome. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

© 2023 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

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Wilfrid Laurier University Press is located on the Haldimand Tract, part of the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe, and Neutral Peoples. This land is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe Peoples and symbolizes the agreement to share, to protect our resources, and not to engage in conflict. We are grateful to the Indigenous Peoples who continue to care for and remain interconnected with this land. Through the work we publish in partnership with our authors, we seek to honour our local and larger community relationships, and to engage with the diversity of collective knowledge integral to responsible scholarly and cultural exchange.

To Mike, with love

Contents

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: Maud Allan and the Salome dance in 1908

CHAPTER 1: Erotic dance and the culture of imperial motherhood

CHAPTER 2: Salomé, c’est moi: male artists and the image of the dancer

CHAPTER 3: Enter Herodias: the phallic mother and the reproductive fetish

CHAPTER 4: On not seeing Salome in Sunset Boulevard

CHAPTER 5: The fetish and the reproduction of whiteness from the Salome corpus to Salome, Where She Danced

CHAPTER 6: Pathmakers for Salome: the danse du ventre, the hootchie kootch, and Little Egypt

CHAPTER 7: Oscar Wilde, Loie Fuller, and Maud Allan

CHAPTER 8: Salomania and the memetic moment

EPILOGUE: Salomania’s legacies

Notes

Works Cited

Copyright Acknowledgements

Index

Acknowledgements

I WOULD LIKE TO GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE SUPPORT OF the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta and the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program. This book would not have been possible without that support. It would also not have been possible without the advice and suggestions of many people. Thanks are due to the librarians and archivists who have done so much to help with the research for this book. I am very grateful indeed to many people at the British Columbia Provincial Archives at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia; the British Library; the British Film Institute; the California Historical Society in San Francisco; the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles; the National Library of Australia in Canberra; the New York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; Ohio State University Library; the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum; the San Francisco Public Library; the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia; the University of Arizona Library in Tucson, where the American Vaudeville Museum Collection is housed; Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA; and Special Collections and Archives at UCSD. Special thanks to Amy Bowring at Dance Collection Danse in Toronto; Nena Couch at the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, where the Charles H. McCaghy Collection of Exotic Dance from Burlesque to Clubs is housed; and to Justin Seidler at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives in Cleveland. Thanks to Nick Beauchesne and Marcelle Kosman for research assistance. Thanks to Neale Barnholden and Leigh Dyrda for making Sunset Boulevard central to the study; to Susan Hamilton, who as Chair of the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta invited me to present a series of three lectures based on this project; to Susanne Luhmann, for inspiring parts of the study in its early stages when we were carving out time to write around administrative and teaching responsibilities; to Stephen Slemon for asking great questions; to Mark Simpson for his suggestions when he edited an earlier version of the section on Flaubert, Hérodiade, and reproductive fetishism; to Heather Zwicker and Mo Engel for countless inspirational suggestions (and really great dancer gifts); and to many, many other colleagues, students, and friends who responded to papers and presentations over the years it took to write this book. I am very grateful to the two readers of the manuscript, whose careful reading and astute recommendations have been invaluable. I am always and endlessly grateful to my daughters Lucy and Susan, my mother Joan, my sister Joanna, my brothers Jeremy and Benet, and my aunt Anne Moynihan for their support and for reminding me always that my writing about motherhood and maternal ideologies is grounded in my own relationships as a parent and a child. Finally, the biggest thanks here go to my partner, Michael O’Driscoll, whose support of my research and writing as it seeped into our professional and domestic spaces was unfailingly generous and whose astute reading of and listening to huge chunks of this book made so much of it so much better. This book is dedicated to him, with love and gratitude.

INTRODUCTION

Maud Allan and the Salome dance in 1908

ON MARCH 6, 1908, DANCER MAUD ALLAN PERFORMED AT London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties for an invited audience, the first in England to see a dancer who had been generating considerable interest in Europe since her debut in Vienna on December 29, 1906.¹ Her first performance for the English public took place at the same theatre three days later. As Allan’s biographer Felix Cherniavsky has observed, she was an overnight sensation.² There can be little doubt, the Observer’s reviewer wrote on March 8, that Miss Maud Allan, the Canadian dancer who will make her first appearance at the Palace Theatre tomorrow, will take London by storm, just as she took Paris and Berlin and every other centre where she was seen.³ The Times review of March 10 began with a similar flourish: There is little doubt, it proclaimed, that Miss Maud Allan, the dancer who appeared for the first time last night, will make a great success, further suggesting that Allan would be the first to rouse London to enthusiasm with a kind of dancing to which [the city] ha[d] never yet taken very kindly—that is, the dancing of gesticulation and posture.⁴ That kind of dancing, which had emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century and was frequently associated with Allan’s contemporary, Isadora Duncan, is sometimes referred to as classical dancing and was characterized by Allan herself as mimeo-dramatic for its incorporation of poses copied from static images in classical sculpture and painting.⁵ Allan’s performance at the Palace, the Times review concluded, stood as the best exhibition—indeed, the only finished exhibition—of this kind of dancing that has been seen here for a good many years [and] a thing of such interest and beauty that it may even drive high kicking off the stage.⁶

This last observation is compelling, not only in its affirmation of the positive response to Allan’s performance in London in 1908 and of its success in a new field of modern dance, but also in its pointed alignment of her performance with a form of erotic dance. While differentiating the two forms—high kicking and classical dance—the review brings the two together as versions of a kind of performance in which the display of skin was salient. Shorthand for the chorus line or leg show dancing that had become popular in the last three decades of the nineteenth century in Britain and continental Europe, as well as in settler colonial North America and Australasia, high kicking operates on the hint or promise of genital display: thus the scandal of the cancan when it first began to appear in Europe around the 1840s. German writer Heinrich Heine, for example, writing for the daily newspaper the Allgemeine Zeitung in 1842, described the cancan as a dance which is never danced in respectable society, but in common dance-houses, where he or she who dances it is promptly seized by a policeman and led out of doors.⁷

Associated with both male and female dancers in the 1840s, by the 1890s the cancan had become a dance primarily associated with women, a gendering that is made evident both in the predominance of images of women such as Louise Weber, star dancer at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s, and in the characterization in Britain at that moment of a similar performance as skirt dancing, the high kicking the Times review notes was dominating London stages.⁸ The centrality of genital spectacle to high kicking by women and to its growing popularity in the 1890s can be seen, Mary Weaver Chapin has suggested, in an 1891 painting produced for the Parisian cabaret the Moulin Rouge by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (fig. 1).⁹ The painting depicts Weber, who was also known as La Goulue or The Glutton,¹⁰ posed with her leg raised in a froth of undergarments while a male figure stands in the foreground and frames the dancer against a background of silhouetted spectators with his two hands. Today, Chapin suggests, the image [of the high-kicking dancer] might seem a bit banal—we’ve seen it on coffee cups, mouse pads, tea cozies—but at the time people understood it for what it was, this very dirty joke advertising the Moulin Rouge. If you notice . . . that shadowy figure in the foreground, notice where his thumbs are placed. We’ve got one thumb pointed directly between La Goulue’s legs and the other thumb is positioned rather ‘erectally’ near his groin.¹¹

A poster shows the rear view of dancer Louise Weber on a dance hall floor with silhouetted figures of a crowd in the background, a man in a top hat in foreground, and yellow globe lights at the top. Weber is hoisting her skirt and kicking her leg to the side to reveal a froth of petticoats.

Figure 1. Moulin Rouge: La Goulue. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1891. Lithograph, 190 × 116.5 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932.

The association of Maud Allan’s performance in the Times review with not only classical but with a kind of dancing that had genital display at its centre would not have been altogether surprising to London theatre-goers in 1908, since both the Palace theatre and Allan herself were already known for their association with erotic performance. As Judith R. Walkowitz has pointed out, in the late 1890s the Palace had been transformed from opera house into a variety theater, becoming a site of gentleman’s entertainment.¹² Palace programs included not only high kicking in a leg show by the house troupe the Palace Girls,¹³ but, until their ban in London in 1907, tableaux vivants or living pictures, static performances with often seemingly undressed performers posing in classical or allegorical scenes.¹⁴ Allan, for her part, had been attracting attention in European media for more than a year for her candour concerning the human form, and her dancing had already been banned in at least one European city.¹⁵ In fact, Walkowitz suggests, theatre manager Alfred Butt had been cast[ing] around for an act that would have the appeal of the tableaux vivants whose profits the theatre had lost when their ban was implemented in London, and he found it in Maud Allan.

As the Times, the Observer, and Alfred Butt had all predicted, Allan did make a great success, remaining at the Palace as a star attraction for an extraordinary eighteen months, and breaking, it has been suggested, all box-office records.¹⁶ Her performance so appealed to her audiences, one reviewer observed in the Times Literary Supplement on March 26, 1908, that many people c[ould] not keep away from it and return[ed] . . . to see it night after night—or, at any rate, to see one particular part of it.¹⁷ Allan’s performance at the Palace was built around a small repertoire of dances. According to reviews and to surviving playbills, she typically began by dancing to some combination of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, Rubinstein’s Valse Caprice, Chopin’s Valse in A Minor, and music from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. These dances were classical in their disposition and their costumes, both of which were noted in reviews as reminding audiences of Isadora Duncan. However, while the classical dances formed the basis for Duncan’s popularity, Allan’s enormous appeal was situated in her final dance on the program when, wearing an Orientalizing costume which, as figure 2 shows, displayed her white skin, revealed her bare legs through a translucent skirt, and traced her breasts and genitals with paste jewels (fig. 2), she performed the dance she called The Vision of Salome.¹⁸ As had been the case in Europe where Allan had begun to perform around 1906, it was The Vision that accounted for her success as well as her notoriety in London in 1908. It was to this dance that Amy Koritz notes manager Alfred Butt had given particular advance notice in a reportedly salacious promotional pamphlet.¹⁹ As is suggested by the image of Allan in her Salome costume that was featured on the cover of the 1908 autobiographical volume, My Life and Dancing, issued later in the year as a souvenir to mark her 250th performance at the Palace, it was The Vision that was her defining dance. This dance was at the centre of what Walkowitz characterizes as the Maud Allan boom, a moment when Allan was in prominent view as a celebrity moving through London social spaces, her activities reported in the newspapers and in at least one case a Gaumont newsreel, and her image in both costume and everyday dress appearing on postcards, whose survival and continued circulation suggests their extraordinary volume of production in 1908.²⁰ Two novels were published in London in 1909 with fictionalized versions of an evocatively Allan-esque Salome dancer.²¹ Allan figured in multiple paintings in the first decade of the twentieth century, as well, Felix Cherniavsky points out, as in a range of popular objects, almost always in her Salome costume. In the wake of the success of The Vision of Salome in London in 1908, numerous imitations, parodies, and spin-offs by performers doing their own Salome dances began to appear on British stages, and they were joined by women in everyday spaces adopting Allan’s Salome costume and dance for social events. In the summer of 1908, American vaudevillian and accomplished mimic Gertrude Hoffmann was sent by the house of Hammerstein to London to copy Allan’s Vision and bring it back to New York.²² As shown in figure 3, Hoffmann’s costume evoked Allan’s in its pearl breastplates and strands and its dark translucent skirt, and the dance itself was presented as a copy of Allan’s, something I will consider in more detail later in the book. In the wake of Hoffmann’s highly publicized copy, many more dancers in North America began to perform their own versions of and variations on Allan’s Salome, sparking in the summer of 1908 an extraordinary imitation craze which the New York Times named Salomania.²³

A woman with dark hair stands with bare arms raised, hands touching the top of her head. She is looking to her left and wearing two pearl ropes wound around her head and dangling in loops over her ears; a dark translucent skirt; and a bra made of pearls with a red stone at each centre.

Figure 2. Postcard showing Maud Allan standing in her Salome costume. Jean Reutlinger, photograph on postcard, undated, c. 1908–10. Original photograph in Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection Reutlinger, Maud Allan Album, View 43. Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse, Toronto.

The enormous popularity of Allan’s Salome dance in continental Europe, Britain, and the US in 1908 and after raises important questions about its meaning and operation in what was at that time, in the context of intense national engagement in acts of territorial expansion, occupation, and settlement, always imperial space. What accounts for the appeal of The Vision of Salome in Europe and North America when, as Allan’s tour through South Asia and Oceania in 1913–15 made so clear, non-European audiences often reacted to the dance with distaste or disinterest?²⁴ How and why did the figure of Salome come to such prominence in the Euro-imperial context, including the settler nations of North America, where, in late 1908 and early 1909, Salomania dominated theatrical performance by white women in New York and elsewhere? How, moreover, do we understand the performance of gender and race in this massively popular dance as it relates to the complicatedly and always saliently maternal ideologies of femininity in the context of imperial space in the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth?

Black-and-white photograph of a woman wearing an ornate headpiece, a bra made of circlets of pearls connecting to a diaphanous, ankle-length skirt with a flora pattern. Her head is tilted backward and she is smiling with mouth slightly open. Her left foot points forward as she leans back slightly, arms held away from hips.

Figure 3. Gertrude Hoffman as Salome. Undated. Glass negative, 5 × 7 in. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B2-449-13. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014682020/

This is a study of the performance and circulation of the figure of Salome in imperial Europe and settler colonial North America during the late years of the long period of expansion and territorial occupation at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It begins with Maud Allan’s Salome dance of the first decade of the twentieth century, situating The Vision of Salome as a crucial event and a turning point in the context of the expansion of Euro-imperial territorial occupation across three interrelated cultural registers: the movement of women in imperial centres into a range of categories of labour; the performance of white femininity with reference to the imperial ideologies of motherhood that are central to the construction of white femininity in the expansionist period; and the history of the industry of erotic dance that had first begun to take shape in the Euro-imperial context in the middle of the nineteenth century and that erupted into everyday space in the moment of Salomania. This latter register, this study suggests, is a vector and a site for the symbolic convergence of the first two. Partly a consideration of a foundational event in what is the very recent history of the business of erotic dance, this study also works toward better understanding the increasing value of the display of the undressed female body in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-imperial spaces and how ideologies of race, gender and empire come into play in the shaping of erotic dance in that period as a category of quotidian commerce and labour.

As the reviews in 1908 in the Times and the Observer cited above suggest, for as long as critics have been discussing Maud Allan’s dance, they have been divided on the question of whether she is an erotic or a legitimate dancer and thus on the question of whether she belongs in dance history or the history of erotic dance. These two categories remain by and large separate and distinct in performance, perception, and scholarly analysis. This study of the representation and performance of Salome in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries begins from the perception of Maud Allan as an erotic dancer. It is not situated in dance history per se, but in the cultural history of the business of erotic dance in an early moment of its emergence. Its emphasis is on representation and on the intermedial development and circulation of the image of the dancer as an icon of visibly white femininity in the context of imperial ideologies of race, gender, and power. It aims, by assembling an archive of interlinked cultural events and objects not only of the moment of Salomania in 1908 but preceding and following it, to explain how and why Maud Allan’s dance sparked what Marlis Schweitzer and others have characterized as an epidemic of white women doing Salome dances across Euro-imperial space,²⁵ and in this way to better understand erotic dance not as a marginal element of dance but as a vital index of the performance of gender and race in modern patriarchy.

In its analysis of the making, the moment, and the enduring cultural legacies of Salomania, this study builds on a great deal of work done by other scholars on the Salome dance, Maud Allan, and erotic dance history more broadly. Although Allan has long been—and remains—largely absent from the big picture of twentieth-century dance history,²⁶ she and her Salome dance have been the focus of considerable critical and historical attention across other registers. Many researchers have noted an increased scholarly interest in Salomania,²⁷ itself part of a well-established recent attention to erotic dance history and culture, in the study of which Allan has come to be recognized as a central figure.²⁸ Lucinda Jarrett’s Stripping in Time: A History of Erotic Dancing, published in 1997, is one of the first studies to address the culture of skin-baring performance that begins to take shape in the mid-nineteenth century: her book devotes a chapter to Allan’s Salome dance.²⁹ Rachel Shteir, in Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, suggests that the Salome fad marked a crucial turning point in the history of undressing.³⁰ Dancer and writer Toni Bentley’s 2002 Sisters of Salome, which focuses on the performances of four women—Maud Allan, Mata Hari (b. Margarethe Zelle), Ida Rubinstein, and Colette (b. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)—makes a case for understanding their work as erotic dance.³¹

Central to studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century erotic dance history, Allan has also been given considerable scholarly attention as an erotic dancer in many recent critical studies of Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Salomé.³² There are significant connections between her Vision and Wilde’s play, this study suggests, not only in the initial conception of the dance but also at the time of her first official planned performance of the role of Salome in Wilde’s play a decade after the eruption of Salomania. That unrealized performance was infamously displaced by Allan’s role in the 1918 criminal libel trial she initiated when British MP Noel Pemberton-Billing seized on the event of her imminent performance to intimate in print that she was a lesbian.³³ This trial is the focus of two books: Michael Kettle’s 1977 Salome’s Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century³⁴ and Philip Hoare’s 1997 Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century.³⁵ Regenia Gagnier’s 1986 Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public also includes a discussion of the trial.³⁶ Wilde’s play has been the subject of Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome, a recent collection of essays edited by Michael Y. Bennett,³⁷ as well as Petra Dierkes-Thrun’s volume Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression,³⁸ and numerous other books, articles, and chapters by scholars across a range of disciplines. A comprehensive study of the play’s history appeared in 1996, edited by William Tydeman and Steven Price.³⁹

While comprehensible in the first instance as part of what Susan A. Glenn characterizes as an "entire sub-industry of literary criticism . . . devoted to analyzing Wilde’s Salome and the faithful adaptation of the text in Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera," in their attention to the play, these critical works are also part of a growing interest noted by so many scholars in the cultural history and work of the Salome dance as it took shape in the period after the publication of Wilde’s play in 1893.⁴⁰ In its inclusion of what Wilde named the dance of the seven veils, the play was in principle the first site for the staging of Salome’s dance by a female performer in modern Europe. Dierkes-Thrun takes up Maud Allan, her dance, and the Pemberton-Billing trial in Salome’s Modernity.⁴¹ Glenn considers The Americanization of Salome in Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism.⁴² Mary Simonson likewise focuses on the US Salome craze in Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.⁴³ Jayna Brown discusses African American women’s performances of Salome in the US in Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern.⁴⁴ Marlis Schweitzer looks at The Salome Epidemic in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater.⁴⁵ While many of these studies are saliently concerned with the reconsideration of modernism with reference to the ways in which the production of artists outside of the frame of white men can be seen to shape the category of the modern, they are themselves also part of a much wider field of inquiry touching on many disciplines, including, as well as recent dance studies, studies in theatre and performance, bodies and embodiment and opera; English and cultural studies, media studies, gender and sexuality studies; histories of feminism; and studies in race, nationalism, imperialism, Orientalism, cosmopolitanism, and mobility. Dozens of articles and chapters on Salome dances and dancers, including Maud Allan, have appeared over the past three decades.

Developing in the context of the expansion Stéphanie Wahab and her coauthors note in the late twentieth century of the academic study of popular culture and forms of cultural studies,⁴⁶ this body of critical and historical work as it pertains to Maud Allan is also importantly indebted to Felix Cherniavsky’s 1991 biography, The Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan.⁴⁷ Cherniavsky, whose father and uncles toured with Allan between 1912 and 1915 and whose uncle was executor of Allan’s estate, builds an account of her life and career first through his family’s collection of Allan’s personal papers and objects, since acquired by the Toronto archive Dance Collection Danse. Cited by most researchers on the life and work of Maud Allan since the early 1990s, Cherniavsky’s biography has been instrumental in turning renewed attention to her dancing and the significant part it played in the development of a culture of gender and performance within which erotic dance emerged as a business.

This study continues to explore the history of erotic dance that has been so generatively established in these and other foundational studies. It considers the ways in which Allan’s Salome dance and the Salome craze of the early twentieth century operate with respect not only to the business of erotic dance but to that business as a site for what might be understood as the industrial performance of race and gender and a form of labour which enabled numbers of white women to go to work, perversely by staging the very ideologies of white maternity impeding their ability to work in the public sphere. Beginning here with Maud Allan’s spectacular success in London in 1908, this study of the history and the cultural legacies of the 1908 Salome dance is foundationally concerned with the dynamically intermedial path that led to Salomania as a turning point in the history of erotic dance and with the persistence into this moment of the cultural logic of the nineteenth-century representation of Salome. The principles of whiteness and its reproduction that I suggest are central to the shaping of the image of the dancer and to erotic dance in the nineteenth century would continue to operate through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, something this study traces in its consideration of texts across periods, genres, and media.

The study is organized along lines that are roughly chronological, while following significant connections between earlier and later texts and events that affirm continuities and account for a still-evident representational logic of race, gender, and reproduction in a still-patriarchal culture of Euro-imperial industrial capitalism in the global west. Chapter 1 offers a brief history of the business of erotic dance as it emerged in the nineteenth century in the European and settler colonial context, engaging that history with the culture of imperial motherhood that is pervasive in the work of the period’s Euro-imperial territorial expansion, conquest, and settlement. Chapter 2 turns to the phenomenon of the representation of Salome in mostly European art and literature from around the middle of the nineteenth century, when the figure of the dancer would become for so many male artists and writers an obsessive, self-referential, and profoundly pathologized representational focus. Chapter 3 considers this pathologized representation in relation to the increasingly anxious construction of the maternal in Europe and its settler colonial spaces, turning in particular to the emergence of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century as a site for the articulation and management of the Eurocentric concerns about reproduction and race that I characterize in this study as reproductive fetishism. This chapter aligns Gustave Flaubert’s 1877 novella Herodias, an enormously influential text in the Salome corpus of the nineteenth century, with the theorizing in psychoanalysis of the figures of the phallic mother and the fetish, as well as with later and resonantly Oedipal representations, such, notably, as in the HBO television series The Sopranos, which aired between 1999 and 2007. Chapter 4 considers the persistence of the cultural logic of reproductive fetishism by looking at its central role in Billy Wilder’s 1950 Sunset Boulevard, a film that has been observed to evoke nineteenth-century representations of Salome but has not been considered in relation to histories of the dance itself. Chapter 5 traces the central operation of Euro-imperial ideologies of race in the pathologizing of Salome as a reproductive fetish, focusing on the significant occlusion of dancers of colour in the representation of this figure in the nineteenth century. This chapter foregrounds the emergent industry of erotic dance as what Eva Cherniavsky has characterized for twentieth-century North American film as a technology of empire,⁴⁸ suggesting that film is itself both a site for the reproduction of the fetish in erotic dance and for the intermedial development of erotic dance. Chapter 6 reconsiders the central work of imperial exposition dances in the shaping of erotic dance in the global west, what one reviewer in 1908 described as Pathmakers for Salome.⁴⁹ In doing so this chapter aims for a better understanding of the relationships among the danse du ventre, the hootchie kootch and the cultural circulation of the 1893 Columbian World Exposition dancer known as Little Egypt. In Chapter 7 I turn to Loie Fuller and Maud Allan, two white North American women working in Europe from the 1890s who first began to dance as Salome in the last decade of the nineteenth century.⁵⁰ This chapter considers the complicated gestures of disengagement for both Fuller and Allan from the influence of what have been described as the too many fathers of the nineteenth-century Salome corpus and in particular from Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play Salomé, and situates their work in relation to the developing idioms of Western erotic dance that would find such spectacular footing in Salomania in 1908.⁵¹ In Chapter 8, the study arrives at Salomania, emphasizing its importance in the history of erotic dance. In this chapter, I reconsider this event as one that is grounded in the cultural logic of reproductive fetishism shaped by male artists of the later nineteenth century and that is best understood as a series of interrelated performances in which reproductivity itself is central, what I describe here as a memetic moment.

It will not be surprising that Wilde’s play is a recurring element here. While its complicatedly problematic and productive operation for Fuller and Allan are the focus in Chapter 7, the play and its representations are a central consideration across the whole study. Chapter 2 considers the play’s relationship to the works of other later nineteenth-century artists and writers. Chapter 3 touches on its role in the shaping of the logic of reproductive fetishism. Chapter 4 begins with the play’s foundational relation to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Chapter 5 looks closely at the play and whiteness. Chapter 6 notes connections between the play and hootchie kootch dancing. Chapter 8 traces the ways in which many dancers of Salomania turned away from Wilde’s representation.

There are some challenges for researchers in the area of erotic dance history. Records of dance and performance are notoriously ephemeral. Erotic dance, particularly through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is arguably even more so. Research materials in this area are typically scattered and are made harder to find by matters of selective preservation, diverse classification, and, sometimes, ambiguous naming. Although I refer to this category, with its many forms, as erotic dance, many others, in particular when referencing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dance, use the terms exotic or burlesque. My preference is not to use either of these terms, in the case of the former because of its remobilization of a colonialist logic and in that of the latter because of the specific formal and other attributes it has both in the later nineteenth century in leg show and music hall performance and in twentieth-century classic striptease. Library and archive searches using any of these terms do not always produce results; internet searches produce too many. The internet is nonetheless a crucial site for erotic dance research, in part because of links to digitized records and in part because of people’s own personal collections of erotic dance ephemera shared through social media. These materials’ provenance or any details can be hard to trace back to a verifiable resource, but they mark a history much larger and more systemic than the official record indicates.

The study’s archive is an index of both the ephemerality and the intermediality of histories of skin-baring performance. The texts of the later nineteenth-century Decadent and Symbolist artists who so obsessively represented Salome in their work and who gave shape to the image of the dancer as white reproductive fetish are, of course, not ephemeral at all, and are not hard to find. Many of these literary works are still in print; much of this visual representation is on display in permanent collections. Dancers’ records are less likely to have endured. Some dancers wrote about their experiences, and books such as Maud Allan’s My Life and Dancing, published as a souvenir to mark her 250th performance in 1908 at the Palace Theatre of Varieties in London, is one important example. The first modern Salome dancer Loie Fuller’s autobiographical Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life is another.⁵² The work of dancers who began to embody that image is recorded in photographs and across a broad range of news media: dancers are noted in advertisements, some reviews, and, occasionally, articles. Photographs at that moment in the medium’s history were of dancers in studio poses, rather than in dance itself, and were made and circulated as commercial objects (cabinet cards, cigarette cards, postcards). Moving images are rare.

Although they are still relatively few, there are nonetheless important repositories of images and materials associated with the history of erotic dance and burlesque. The Charles H. McCaghy Collection of Exotic Dance from Burlesque to Clubs at the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University holds a substantial range of materials from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Other collections have been similarly vital to the tracing of images and histories of skin-baring performance in this study, including the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, whose extensive records and range of materials are crucial to the history of erotic dance; Dance