UC Berkeley

By bringing to light the importance of the body and feminine expressive agency in the writing of Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, this dissertation makes a case for dance as a key locus of modernity in nineteenth century French literary history. Each of these poets was challenged by the question of how to represent the dancer as an embodied being. My study works through the entanglement of images, figures of speech and fantasies centering on dance in these poets’ works, through which each of these writers confronts and responds to changing aspects of the modern world. In particular, I am interested in moments in which the dancer is neither idealized nor denigrated, but rather a powerful symbol of movement, agency and embodiment. How does the autonomy and resistance of the female dancing body inspire the poetics of these writers? In addition, how can a critical emphasis on feminine artistry and agency through the figure of the dancer help us better understand these male authors’ relationship to gender and femininity? I will propose that these authors’ writings were not purely misogynistic and dismissive of the feminine; rather, each was forced to grapple with the dancer’s autonomy and individuality. Finally, this study seeks to reaffirm the importance of each author’s interest in the body and bodily experience, challenging a literary history that has often characterized the poetics of these writers as disembodied and disengaged.