ABSTRACT
This chapter demands a genealogy, rather than a comprehensive history, of the female dancer from the Romantic ballet of the July Monarchy (1830—1848) to the music-hall performances of the fin de siecle. The danseuse in Modernist media takes the nineteenth-century focus on male spectatorship and problematizes it by multiplying the possible narrative positions. The chapter begins with Louis Énault's quotation from 1856 that identified dance as 'the sport of women', and suggests that fantasizing about dancers was the sport of men. It examines four specific instances of Modernist representations of dancers. Because of the prevalence of dancers in nineteenth-century artistic production, the highly gendered Modernist representations of dancers can be read as a response to earlier manifestations. The danseuse maintains her privileged position in a variety of media, but it becomes ever more difficult to figure her as merely a vehicle for commentary on masculine desire.
