A Nautch Girl to Teach Us Delsarte

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-222
Author(s):  
Anya P. Foxen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
White Women ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Spiritual Authority

Chapter 5 grapples with the dynamics of Orientalism, specifically as enacted by white women with regard to India and its two central personas: the yogi and the dancing girl. It first addresses how the ambiguous gendering of yogis as Oriental men allowed white women to inhabit this persona as a specific way of legitimating their spiritual authority. As a complement to this masculine model, St. Denis’s popularity represents the rise of the “nautch girl” as the symbol of a specifically feminine Orientalism. The appropriated image of the nautch girl reflects broader trends not only within the dance world but within popular culture, as Oriental imagery increasingly becomes co-opted by white women at the turn of the century to express their lingering fantasies and their newfound freedoms. Women’s physical culture quickly begins to mirror this trend as “Oriental dance” exercises are increasingly diffused through the preexisting practice of light calisthenics.

Turning Up the Volume of Inner Speech

2018 ◽  
pp. 94-113
Author(s):  
Angela Frattarola
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Inner Speech ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Acoustic Space

Chapter 4 questions how the common turn-of-the-century practice of listening to the telephone, phonograph, and radio through headphones may have aided modernists in turning up the volume and recording interior monologue—one’s “inner speech” that sounds out within the auditory imagination. Using Jonathan Sterne’s historical study of how headphones created a “private acoustic space,” this chapter postulates that listening to voices and music through headphones created a new sense of a personal and aesthetically objectified space within one’s head. Just as headphones brought unfamiliar sounds and voices into one’s private headspace, James Joyce represents the stream of consciousness as a collage of voices and sounds from literature, religion, popular culture, and the soundscape. In Ulysses (1922), Joyce creates an auditory cosmopolitanism, by allowing the languages and sounds of the surrounding world to penetrate and influence the interior monologues of his characters.

Antediluvian pictorial fun: E.T. Reed and the prehistoric peeps

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Horrall
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Local History ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Racial Threat ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Conservative View ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

This chapter is centred on the ‘prehistoric peeps’ cartoons that E.T. Reed began publishing in Punch magazine in 1893. These immensely influential images, which appeared for years and were reproduced throughout the English-speaking world, marked the point at which the cave man character entered popular culture. Reed’s scruffy human cave men were not related to gorillas or missing links and so they posed no existential racial threat. They inhabited a completely fanciful world that is also easily recognisable as an archaic version of late-Victorian Britain. Reed poked gentle fun at contemporary institutions, ideas and events. It was a conservative view of the ancient past that endorsed late-Victorian ideas about gender, class and national identity. Reed’s images were especially popular in the colonies, where they were used to promote a British identity and erase indigenous peoples from local history. Reed’s impact on contemporaries is explored, especially American cartoonists whose imitative images finally popularised cave men in that country. Reed’s cartoons were also recreated on stage by professional and amateur performers in Britain and throughout the empire. Writers explored prehistory in literature. By the turn of the century, Reed’s unthreatening, middle class vision of prehistory predominated.

scholarly journals The performative Katherine Mansfield

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nicola Saker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Personal Performance

<p>This thesis looks at the role of performance in Katherine Mansfield’s life and its influence on her writing technique. It argues that there is a consistent thread of active engagement with performance throughout Mansfield’s life which profoundly influenced the content, construction and technique of her writing.   It is divided into three chapters. The first examines Mansfield’s early years and the cultural context of colonial, Victorian Wellington and its performance culture as well as the familial and educational influences that surrounded her.  The second chapter explores her later cultural context in London in the first decade after the turn of the century. The importance of popular culture such as music hall is examined, and Mansfield’s professional and personal performance experience is defined.  The third chapter involves a close reading and analysis of Mansfield’s dramatic techniques through the examination of the stories as well as her use of theatrical imagery, motifs, allusions and plot details.</p>

The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960

1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 718-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Perkins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
African American Female ◽  
American Women ◽  
University Archives ◽  
Successful Women

The Seven Sister colleges are well known for producing some of the nation's most successful women. At the turn of the century, they were recognized as the leading institutions for elite White women. In this article, Linda Perkins outlines the historical experiences of African American women attending the Seven Sister colleges from the institutions' founding to the civil rights era of the 1960s, a period during which approximately five hundred Black women graduated from these institutions. Through an exploration of university archives, alumni bulletins, and oral interviews with alumnae, Perkins shows that the Seven Sister colleges were not a monolithic entity: some admitted African American women as far back as the turn of the century, while others grudgingly, and only under great pressure, admitted them decades later. Perkins illustrates how the Seven Sister colleges mirrored the views of the larger society concerning race, and how issues of discrimination in admissions, housing, and financial aid in these institutions were influenced by, and had an influence on, the overall African American struggle for full participatory citizenship.

Race and Reform

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Urban
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Domestic Service ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Hired Labor ◽  
European Immigration

Stymied by the refusal of “new” immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe to pursue work as domestic laborers, at the turn of the century middle-class employers reevaluated the fundamental utility of hired labor to the production of domesticity. Chapter 6 brings the book’s different narrative arcs together by engaging public and expert debates about whether domestic service could best be reformed and made modern through changes to labor relations in the home or whether Chinese and black workers’ alleged predisposition to servitude meant that looking for racialized sources of labor continued to be the best solution for “fixing” the occupation. Examining the start of the Great Migration, the 1917 Immigration Act, and the eventual passage of numerical restrictions on European immigration that the 1924 Immigration Act instituted, this chapter argues that the various exceptions built into immigration laws, which had exempted domestic servants from restrictions since the passage of the 1885 Foran Act, finally gave way to the conclusion that white women could no longer be counted on to do this work.

Passionate Love-Letters to a Dead Girl: Elizabeth Siddall in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily J. Orlando
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Passionate Love ◽  
Red Hair ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Elizabeth Siddall

While Oscar Wilde's attraction to Pre-Raphaelite art has been well documented, surprisingly little attention has been paid to his career-long fascination with Elizabeth Siddall (1829–62). This essay will demonstrate that Wilde's deep and abiding interest in Siddall reverberates across his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), to an extent that has not been considered. I will specifically argue that the suicide of Dorian Gray's lover Sibyl Vane was inspired by Elizabeth Siddall's untimely overdose. The very name Sibyl echoes Siddall, who is best known as the model for John Everett Millais's Ophelia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix. I want to suggest that Siddall, long dead by the 1890s, may have been coded as Celtic across turn-of-the-century Irish literature in ways not hitherto considered. Although Siddall was not born of Irish parents, she served ‘as a model for “a fair Celt with red hair”’ for the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, perhaps owing to the fact that she was copper-haired, ivory-skinned, Welsh, and working class. As such, Siddall ­– who has not previously been read in a Celtic context – might serve as a signifier of the young, pale, passive, red-haired Irish maiden romanticised across popular culture as a symbol of the Irish nation. Indeed, it is plausible that the Dublin-born Wilde was attracted to Siddall because of her resemblance to the aisling figure derived from the eighteenth-century Gaelic tradition and popular in turn-of-the-century Irish culture. The essay will examine closely the nods to Elizabeth Siddall in The Picture of Dorian Gray and ultimately will propose that the Pre-Raphaelite musings in Wilde – whose engagement with feminism and with his native Ireland have always been complicated – effectively, if not intentionally, silence the figure of the fin-de-siècle New Woman as she appeared across the British and Irish Isles.

Finnish Sleep-Preachers: An Example of Women's Spiritual Power

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsi Stjerna
Keyword(s):  
Women Leaders ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Medieval Mystics ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACT: A remarkable number of women leaders and teachers in the history of Christianity have relied on the ‘‘supernatural,’’ spiritual authority received through extraordinary religious experiences. Among them were the Finnish ‘‘sleep-preachers,’’ laywomen who felt called to preach and prophesy while asleep. This article introduces the most famous of these preachers, Helena Konttinen (1871-1916), and through her story discusses the phenomenon of sleep-preaching in turn-of-the-century Finland. Links are made to similar individuals earlier in Christianity, such as medieval mystics and Victorian Spiritualists, and to evidence from other women-led religions. Special attention is paid to the issues of gender and authority as related to religious experience and empowerment in explaining these pioneering women's rise, emancipation and contributions as lay theologians and unofficial ministers who significantly influenced grassroots religiosity in Finland.

scholarly journals "The Man of these Infinite Possibilities": Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 61-87
Author(s):  
Abigail Susik
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Picture Plane ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Accelerated Motion ◽  
Post War ◽  
Critical Writings ◽  
The Way

On more than one occasion in his critical writings of the 1920’s, surrealist leader André Breton compared Max Ernst’s collages to cinema. In his first essay on the artist in 1921, Breton aligned Ernst’s collages with cinematic special effects such as slow and accelerated motion, and spoke of the illusionistic ‘transformation from within’ that characterized Ernst’s constructed scenes. For Breton, Ernst’s collages employing found commercial, scientific and journalistic images approximated the naturalistic movement of film, and thereby contributed to the radical obsolescence of traditional two-dimensional media such as painting and drawing, which remained frozen in stillness. Thus, Ernst’s images were provocative witnesses to the way in which modern technology fundamentally altered the perspectivally-ordered picture plane. But at the same time that Ernst’s collages rendered painting obsolete, they likewise depended upon fragments of outmoded popular culture themselves. For Breton, Ernst was a magician, “the man of these infinite possibilities,” comparable to cinematic prestidigators like turn-of-the-century filmmaker Georges Méliès. By drawing on the influence of recently outmoded popular culture such as early trick films, Ernst provides a crucial early example of the post-war fixation on counter-temporalities and anti-production. At once technologically advanced and culturally archeological, Ernst’s collages cannily defy strict categorization as “Modernist.”

“To Popularize the Nude in Art”: Comstockery Reconsidered

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Picard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Free Love

Of all the figures in the struggle over turn-of-the-century vice reform, Anthony Comstock is perhaps the last one might expect to encounter immortalized in the nude. He acquired his fame as a censor of nudity, among other offenses: from 1873 to his death in 1915, Assistant United States Postmaster Comstock lent his name and his enthusiasm for law enforcement to the prosecution of the “Comstock Laws,” the eponymous statutes which restricted the dissemination of vicious images and information through the United States mail. In his government post and as the head of New York City's private Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock prosecuted quack physicians, abortionists, lottery runners, purveyors of lewd literature and art, free love advocates and physical culture devotees. By the end of his career, he had arrested more than 3,700 people and burned over fifty tons of obscene books, 3,984,063 obscene pictures, and 16,900 photographic plates.

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