Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910

Vernacular Modernity in France

Rae Beth Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754652434
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351946421
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining the extraordinary influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on French thought from 1875 to 1910, Rae Beth Gordon argues for a reconsideration of modernism both in time and in place that situates its beginnings in the French café-concert aesthetic. Gordon weaves the history of medical science, ethnology, and popular culture into a groundbreaking exploration of the cultural implications of gesture in dance performances at late-nineteenth-century Parisian café-concerts and music halls. While art historians have studied the ties between primitivism and modernism, their convergence in fin-de-siècle popular entertainment has been largely overlooked. Gordon argues that while the impact of Darwinism was unprecedented in science, it was no less present in popular culture through the popular press and popular entertainment, where it constituted a kind of "evolutionist aesthetic" on display in the café-concert, circus, and music-hall as well as in the spectator's reception of the representations on the stage. Modernity in these sites, Gordon contends, was composed by the convergence of contemporary medical theory with representations of the primitive, staged in entertainments that ranged from the can-can, Missing Links, and epileptic singers to the Cake-Walk. Her anthropology of gesture uncovers in these dislocations of the human form an aesthetic of disorder a half century before the eruptions of Dada and Surrealism.

Chapter 1

The Epileptic Singers

A good half of today’s hit songs [in 1893] … belong to the late Dr. Charcot’s home for the agitated. They jerk and tremble. They have gesticulatory hysteria.

Georges Montorgueil, journalist

Scholars have recently investigated the invention of mass culture in the nineteenth century. Peter Bailey, for example, designates the London Music-Hall as the site that captured “the world’s first mass entertainment audiences” (Bailey 141).¹ For Vanessa Schwartz and others, mass culture was invented in France in the Belle Epoque, and at the center of this invention, stood – or rather, jumped and kicked – the cancan dancer. Certainly, I would agree, the cancan dancer comes to be emblematic of Belle-Epoque Paris, and is marketed as such to other European countries as well as to America in the Belle Epoque. But her skirts only partially hide from view the other types of spectacular performance genres at the Moulin-Rouge, the Folies-Bergère, and other music-halls. And it is these genres that take center stage in the present study… even if the cancan dancer makes a cameo appearance.

Like Peter Bailey, I look at the specific determinants of situation and experience that typify this milieu, and that explain its magnetic hold on audiences. In fact, I take this term literally, exploring the contemporary meaning of magnetism as a crucial component of late-nineteenth-century spectatorship. In France, as opposed to Britain, the language and gesture of the performances incorporated the specialized discourses of psychology, neurology, and evolution theory – a fluid “language of knowingness” that ran parallel to official scientific discourse. Bailey is particularly interested in the concept of knowingness in the above-cited article, and his discussion focuses on the winks, gesticulations, and jerks of singers in 1872 London. Simultaneously in France, in 1871, Paulus (Paul Habans) created a new performance genre, the Agitated Singer. Not only did he become the most popular male singer in Paris in the 1870s, but his performance style was taken over by women who were called Epileptic Singers.

Who were the epileptic singers, why were they so wildly popular for over thirty years (from 1875 to 1907), and why have they passed into oblivion? Ask a French person over sixty to hum a few bars of the song “J’ai le bourdon: Java neurasthénique” (“I have the Blues: Neurasthenic Java,” sung by Georgius) or of the song “Je ne suis pas bien portant” (“I’m not Healthy,” sung by Ouvrard fils), both circa 1930, and you will find that songs about illness and nervous pathology have remained in the French cultural memory. This theme in popular song dates from the end of the nineteenth century. However, no one seems to remember “La Parisienne épileptique,” whose lyrics begin with “When I hear the music, I become epileptic,” frenetically performed by Alice de Tender in 1899. She was one of dozens of female stars of popular entertainment who belonged to the genre of “chanteuses épileptiques.” The popularity of performers like Mlle de Tender, Polaire, and Eugénie Fougère was comparable to that of Elvis Presley a little more than a half-century later (and for many of the same reasons), but without the afterlife (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Albert Guillaume, Mlle Duclerc in “La Revue Déshabillée,”Courrier Français 19 August 1894

Dangerous Dances

Dance is to prostitution what recreation is to convent and middle-school life.

Edmond Heuzé

In 1875, the year that Emilie Bécat created the genre of the Epileptic Singer² at Les Ambassadeurs, an important event took place in another temple of music: the inauguration of l’Opéra Garnier. Despite the differences between the two musically and socially, the outcry directed against Carpeaux’s sculpture La Danse, installed on the façade in 1869, is typical of the scandal of the body in movement that will take on ever-larger proportions in the last three decades of the century. It is clear that other representations of the nude female body in the same period elicited vehement attacks – one immediately thinks of Manet’s Olympia (1863) – but in Carpeaux’s sculpture, it is specifically the nude dancing that produces outrage. The desire to keep the Opera distinct from low-class and indecent musical offerings is explicit in Auguste Renoir’s objections to the sculpture: “The Opera is not a cancan” (in Pingeot 341).³ The living nudes on music-hall stages naturally caused a scandal as well, yet, similarly, when they were frozen in immobile poses, they passed censorship under the category of “the aesthetic nude”; when they moved about to dance rhythms, they become threatening and unacceptable.

It is especially when the vocabulary of pathology attaches itself to these outcries that the dancing body becomes the receptacle for the fears and the fascination aroused by nervous illness. This was true both for the epileptic singers and for the sculpture. Jules Claretie called La Danse “nervous and mad, jerky, shaken, sick and incomparable.” “It is an example of ‘l’épilepsie régnante’ of the second Empire: before the reigning epilepsy, the unleashing of appetites … the search for pleasure and the ardent need for brutal voluptuousness that … produces universal neurosis” (“Salon de 1875” in Pingeot 341; emphasis mine).⁴ Even statues can be epileptic, provided they dance! In a poem entitled “Fête Moderne,” dance and hysteria of the first stanza metamorphose into the oxymoron of an epileptic statue in the third stanza. “To a macabre cadence, hysterical Debauchery dances completely naked, with black stockings … Each of her kisses kills: dying, one embraces cette épileptique statue.”⁵ The same figure of epilepsy or hysteria dancing that Claretie described is used to characterize modernity in the poem. Further, we can draw out of Claretie’s article the idea that in the new aesthetic experience represented by Carpeaux’s sculpture, set apart from anxieties surrounding illness, there is the pleasure produced by the perfection of a new formal achievement. Nonetheless, we must underline the improbable couple that results from joining “sick” to “incomparable” in artistic creation. It is a couple that we will study throughout this book. The popular art form of the music-hall as well as the high art of some of the most interesting painters of the late nineteenth-century owe their originality and modernity to experiments in pathology: they are incomparable because “sick.”

Dr. Paul-Max Simon wrote in 1877 that “one put one’s nervous system in unison with the jiggling and stamping of the music of Offenbach, and one invariably became hysterical and sometimes insane” (Simon 98).⁶ To understand the immense popularity of the chanteuse épileptique⁷ in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and in the first years of the twentieth, one must be aware of the connection believed to exist between music — especially dance — and the onset of nervous diseases. And of the chic associated with some of these nervous conditions: the importation of this theme into popular song lyrics is one indication of how fashionable it was, and fashion in Paris — then as now — has everything to do with stardom. Dancing itself is far from being considered an innocent means of expression, and in the 1870s, doctors insisted on its relationship to hysteria. Dr. Henri Dagonet, for example, noted that “among the numerous singularities of hysterical epidemics, there is a pronounced tendency to dance” (Dagonet 20). In 1865, when the number of cases of hysteria began to rise dramatically, a woman dancing at the Eldorado café-concert was compared by Edmond de Goncourt to the hysterical inmates at the Salpêtrière hospital because of her “heated bestiality, … wild mane, … big mouth and the toothy laugh of a Bacchante” (Goncourt 62). Hysteria in the last third of the nineteenth century was a spectacular disease. The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot divided the major hysterical attack into four stages. The first is epileptoid, because its movements resemble the convulsive movements of epilepsy. Clown-ism (where the body contorts itself into all sorts of acrobatic poses) is the second stage. In the third and fourth stages the hysteric hallucinates and strikes theatrical poses. In fact, these patients exhibited a wide array of visible physical symptoms: contractures of the hands, bending over backward in the arc de cercle, bulging eyeballs, facial asymmetry and convulsive tics, grimaces, violent contortions of the extremities, extravagant poses and chaotic gesticulations.⁸ Although Charcot proposed the name of “grande hystérie” to replace “hystéro-épilepsie,” hysteria and epilepsy nevertheless remained joined in the popular imagination. Epileptics and hysterics remained confined to the same ward of the Salpêtrière Hospital, just as popular superstition and ideas about epilepsy remained part of a larger fascination with hysteria in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In his landmark study, Crime and Madness in 19th-Century France, Robert Nye notes that “the population of insane [interned in] asylums increased dramatically faster than the general population in the last third of the century, moving from 49,589 in 1871 to 100,201 in 1911” (Nye 136). Some forms of epilepsy were categorized as insanity, while the question of a form of hysterical insanity was only discussed at the end of the century. Illnesses that were also associated with music-hall performance style were mania, imbecility, idiocy, and cretinism (see Chapters 2 and 3). One of Charcot’s patients suffered from tarentisme (compelled to continually dance the Tarentella). “She is a démoniaque, a possessed woman [taking] the most frightening poses” (Charcot vol. 1, 323). The nervous disease called “jumping chorea” (as in choreography) which involved continually jumping up and down rhythmically is especially pertinent to café-concert performance style. A patient at the Salpêtrière Hospital with hystero-epilepsy is taken over by a “jumping delirium” (délire saltatoire), described by Drs. Bourneville and Régnard in “Observation IV” of the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Vol. 1 (65-66). Another woman afflicted with chorea and the vibratory form of partial epilepsy stamps, jumps, dances convulsively, gesticulates, grimaces, and sticks out her tongue. “She suffers a fit of manic agitation where she laughs without reason, gesticulates, jumps and dances … [and strikes] bizarre poses that change every instant.” Her case (Joséphine, Observation III) is written up in the 1878 Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. This description could just as easily have served for the epileptic singers of the same period. Another patient suffers from athetosis (athétose), a disease of the nervous system that involves the impossibility of keeping fingers and toes in one position; they are in continual movement: at times the toes stand up at a right angle or simply flex. This patient’s movements are “always exaggerated, and also include the left half of the face as well as the neck working with the chorea-like symptoms, such as stamping her foot at every step.” The athetosis comes on from 15 to 20 days after epileptic convulsions. Her sister and a maternal aunt were afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance (Régnard 1878, Observation of Marguerite-Pauline, 35–38). Another patient with an epileptic brother and uncle has a tic in the right eye and suffers from convulsions and a limp. All three propensities might well have destined her for notoriety in the café-concert. Indeed, “Emma was never able to learn to read, count, and her memory was practically nil; however it appears that she retained melodies very well after having heard them only once.” As was the case with the previous patient, “her lips are rather thick” (Régnard 44; emphasis in the text),” a characteristic that we will see underlined in the medical analogies of hysteria, prostitution, and blackness.

Just as some of these patients went on to become performers, such as Jane Avril at the Moulin-Rouge, there were also patients at the hospital who were ex-café-concert singers. Pierre Janet’s patient Rose sings and takes a little bow after her attack of chorea: “She was a café-concert singer [before her confinement at the hospital] and she probably thinks that she is on stage, for she sings funny little songs for us,” then smiles and salutes the public with her hands. (Janet, L’Automatisme 49–50).

Figure 1.2 Le Bal des Folles et des Hystériques at the Salpêtrière, Courrier Français 11 April 1886

Saint-Vitus’ dance dates from the Middle Ages: it is the best-known among the principal dance manias, which were St.-John’s dance in 1374, St.-Vitus’ dance in 1418, and Tarantism in 1470. The phenomenon was “propagated by the sight of the sufferers, like a demoniacal epidemic” (Beecher 246). In the late nineteenth century, it is one of the symptoms associated with hysteria. What is more, very recent research in neurology looks back at dances infused with religious fervor or superstition that “may have led to epidemics of mass hysteria. Neurologists today surmise that the epidemics were outbreaks of hysterical chorea, the disorder described above by Charcot and his colleagues. These movements came to be called St. Vitus’ Dance,” dances that offer an example of the close link between “emotion, behavior, and the movement systems in the brain” (Krack 2169).⁹ (See discussion of the James-Lange theory below.) St. Vitus’ dance was the symptom given for which Jane Avril was admitted to the Salpêtrière at the age of 14 in 1882. She spent one and a half years in the ward for epileptics and hysterics, and it was at the Ball given there annually that she discovered her calling. Le Bal des Folles et des Hystériques was quite an event (Figure 1.2). Georges Montorgueil writes of it in his book, Paris Da...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: An anthropology of gesture: the place and gesture of movement in evolution theory; The impact of evolution theory and psychopathology on spectators; Ethnological spectacle and hybrid performance style
• 1 The Epileptic Singers
• 2 Darwinism and Degeneration Theory in Popular Culture
• 3 What Is Ugly?
• 4 Natural Rhythm: Africans and Black Americans in Paris
• 5 Epileptic Singers and the Mysteries of the Dark Continent
• 6 Darwin Meets Père Ubu
• Epilogue: Darwin’s Avant-Garde: Ubu’s Progeny
• Bibliography
• Index