ABSTRACT
Although not alone in their career as professional dancers, Irene and Vernon Castle were by far the most popular performers associated with the widespread embrace of ragtime social dance in the five years preceding the entry of the United States into the First World War. Scholars have identified in Irene Castle's public image a reconfiguration of white womanhood, as she modeled a kind of active femininity —'The New Woman' — that would become increasingly apparent in the 1920s. Vernon Castle's male identity was hardly invisible; he too performed white manhood on the social dance floor in ways not lost on social critics and writers of the time. Vernon Castle predeceased his musical collaborator. Vernon Castle's dancerly manhood was not entirely recuperated until his death. Only a hero's death allowed for rewriting his story in which he had given up a lucrative, although potentially suspect, career to serve his country and, thus, make the ultimate male sacrifice.
