Unsuspecting Souls Read online

  Nietzsche loved the dance, the naked, intoxicated dance; and he loved laughter. For him, a true life could be lived only when it had rid itself of all constraints. Only the brave, the heroic, could risk something so magnificent. Wilde imagined precisely the same kind of world; and he saw his own superior self reflected in his double, Miss Sarah Bernhardt. For both Wilde and Bernhardt lived like Übermenschen—supermen—beyond good and evil, beyond the slightest thought of recrimination from those critics who continually took aim at their extravagances. To what end? Wilde and Bernhardt had no shame; they felt no guilt. They experienced no remorse or regret. If ever there were a celebration of the unrestrained, unfettered self onstage—the free expression of individual spirit—Salomé was that play. And Sarah Bernhardt would take the stage as its embodiment, the polar opposite of that other Sarah, the one from South Africa. Wilde gave birth to the entire dramatic undertaking: He was playwright, director, and entrepreneur. He, too, was a star, a person of total self-reliance and total self-absorption. Wilde apologized to no one, and responded to everyone.

  It may seem strange, then, that Wilde barely referred to that crucial and climactic moment of the play, the famous dance, and offered no details and gave no stage directions for its execution. He merely mentioned on one page of the script, in mostly lowercase letters sandwiched between brackets, that “[Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils.]” Wilde confided to friends, however, that he saw the dance as the key to unlocking the central meaning of the play. That he gave no specific directions, however, attested in part to Oscar Wilde’s faith in Sarah Bernhardt’s talent, attraction, and, more important, her keen intellect coupled with her wild spirit. Wilde knew that Bernhardt could turn a simple dance performance into a protracted episode of sheer exotic fantasy. He would, it appeared, allow her to improvise and see how her instincts played out in front of a live audience.

  In 1900, he wrote to a friend about what he saw as Sarah Bernhardt’s truest, deepest nature, an inexplicable quality born of the most mysterious imaginings of the Orient. In the note, Wilde says, “The only person in the world who could act Salomé is Sarah Bernhardt, that ‘serpent of old Nile,’ older than the Pyramids.”17 Wilde doesn’t say she could merely act the part of Salomé. Instead, he says she can “act Salomé.” The word act—Bernhardt’s chosen profession, after all—in its broadest sense refers to a confluence, of sorts, between deep emotion and its expression through the whole body. The word actor is cognate with author: A good actor creates his or her own new, fabricated self on the stage by paying strict attention to narration. The actor dies into the role. And so, in Wilde’s mind, Sarah Bernhardt had surpassed mere acting. She had become something greater, something more, certainly, than a mere character in a play. Playacting was all right for the run-of-the-mill. Sarah Bernhardt had become Salomé. Again, in Wilde’s scheme of things, she had prepared for this moment her entire life.

  Sarah Bernhardt may have felt the exact same way, as we witness in the following two incidents. In the midst of rehearsal one day, some skeptical theater critic asked Bernhardt, then forty-eight years old, whom she would choose to perform the dance in her place. She snapped back, saying that as long as she could manage a single step, she and no one else would dance Salomé. And when another critic asked what she had in mind for the choreography of Salomé’s dance, she yelled in the poor man’s face: “Never you mind.”18

  Wilde was less cryptic. In fact, he spoke rather bluntly, telling a friend that Salomé must end up on the stage no other way but naked. But Wilde had a different take even on the idea of nakedness. He intended a stylized version of nakedness, one that smacked of the exotic: “Yes, totally naked, but draped with heavy and ringing necklaces made of jewels of every colour, warm with the fervour of her amber flesh.”19 Wilde indirectly opened the door to the craze for the Salomé dance, as well as for other versions of so-called Oriental dancing, that marked the last decades of the end of the nineteenth century. If Africa represented nineteenth-century white fantasies of savagery and racial inferiority, the Orient symbolized the exotic, the amorous, the highly charged sexual life. Baartman and Africa, Bernhardt and the Orient: One could not hope to find in this period more extravagantly opposed pairs—of countries, of styles, of Western perceptions of humanity, of stardom and fame, of sexuality, and, finally, of women.

  To refer to something called the Orient and something called Africa is, of course, to refer to not very much, if anything at all. Africa is vast, made up of many nations, and the same holds for that highly romanticized abstraction, the Orient. Both terms refer to fantasies, constructions generated by the colonizing, imperial mind and imagination of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Both concepts reduce enormous complexity to a single, easily digestible concept.

  Bernhardt and Wilde tried their whole lives to break out of that kind of colonizing grip. Indeed, they pursued the exact opposite—an uncircumscribed life, free of constraint or definition of any kind. And that is why those in authority worked at putting them into that new, nineteenth-century category where they put homosexuals and thieves and, evidently, some divas, the deviant. Here was a category they could understand and deal with; the category made sense out of loose and undignified behavior. Once they placed Wilde inside that definition, then of course they could refuse Wilde the opportunity to mount his play. And they could further prevent his sultry compatriot Sarah Bernhardt, no matter the role, from stepping foot on the English stage.

  The examiner of plays for the Lord Chamberlain, Mr. Edward Pigott, banned Salomé, he said, because it dealt with a biblical subject. Very few people believed his explanation. And, indeed, in a letter to a friend—kept secret for many years—he made his real reasons for canceling Salomé quite clear, referring to Wilde’s play, among other insulting descriptions, as “a miracle of impudence.”20 Both playwright and actress expressed their disappointment in the local newspapers, Wilde fuming to reporters that he could no longer live in a country like England that would stoop so low as to condemn a biblical play: “I shall leave England and settle in France, where I will take out letters of naturalization. I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness of artistic judgement.”21

  Wilde may have announced his intention to move to France, but he did not immediately flee England; and of course he faced all kinds of indignities, including a protracted trial, imprisonment, and later forced exile for his unapologetic homosexuality. Sarah Bernhardt immediately returned to France. Wilde’s Salomé finally reached the stage in 1896 at Aurélien Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre with Lina Munte as Salomé. Her dance followed closely my own imagined choreography of seven colored veils falling about her as she spun slowly around and around in the muted light.

  While Oscar Wilde may not have actually been the first person to promote disrobing onstage, professional stripping—a most sensual disappearing act—did have its birth in the nineteenth century, and Wilde certainly hurried its evolution along. The famous nightclub the Folies Bergère had opened in 1869, shocking Parisian society with a chorus line of women who, for that time, wore quite revealing costumes. With the opening of that club came a new performance art, perhaps more popular today than in the nineteenth century, the striptease. In time with orchestras playing schmaltzy renditions of Oriental-sounding music, women, in carefully choreographed movements, would slowly remove their lavish costumes onstage.

  At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a young Algerian woman named Ashea Wabe performed what the fair billed as the ultimate Oriental dance, the “hootchy-kootchy.” Part of the allure came from her stage name, Little Egypt. She fanned her own flames by selling her petit provocations to clients on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Arrested one evening at the apartment of the son of one of her backers, the wealthy circus promoter Phineas T. Barnum, she defended herself in court by cooing to the magistrate, “Oh, Monsieur, just a little pose in the altogether, a little Egyptian slave girl, comprenez-vous? . . . I do what is proper
for a-r-r-r-r-t.”22

  Newspaper accounts of Little Egypt’s performance described her shedding her garments one at a time until she stood before the audience in the absolute altogether—that is, totally naked. But the climax of the dance had a hook, and the Salomé dance no doubt reached its finale in the same way. Given the various exotic dancers at the time, like Little Egypt, and dozens of others including the equally famous Maud Allan, we can only assume the same conclusion for all of them. I turn again to the master, Oscar Wilde, to reveal the unusual conclusion to the striptease. In an inscription on a copy of the French edition of Salomé, dated March 1893, addressed to his equally outrageous friend, the artist Aubrey Beardsley, Wilde wrote: “[F]or Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.”23

  Wilde called the dance of the seven veils an invisible one not so much, I believe, because he withheld all stage directions, but because the dancer ended up, in a sense, on the stage unseen and without location. After removing her seventh and final veil, Little Egypt, say, stood motionless for an instant totally naked, but only for an instant. For immediately the lights went out, the house went dark, and the audience at one and the same time saw everything and nothing. The dancer disappeared, vanished. And the audience was left with only an afterimage—a ghostly presence—the entire performance devolving into nothing more than the definition of titillation, of provocation—a living symbol of the ghostly nature of the times. Just as disappearance marked the age itself, so disappearance—of the dancer, of what the dance promised, of the artistic climax—really stood as the theme of Salomé’s remarkable act.

  Peel away the layers of meaning from reality, from any subject, including—or perhaps especially—the unending layers of human sensibility, and you find . . . nothing. Or, a person might for an instant believe that he or she had indeed seen something, but the belief lasted but an instant—once again, leaving the person with only a ghostly image, the specter of evidence. You have it, or you think you do, and then it vanishes. It’s over in the blink of an eye. We have heard this same lament from fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes and from serious authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Scientist after scientist thought he or she had found the philosopher’s stone, the basic, core meaning of human existence—the structure of experience—only to have it, poof, disappear out of hand. The answer turned out to lie somewhere else, to be something else. Another, more appealing theory came along to supplant the earlier one.

  Edmund Gurney is a good case in point. A Cambridge scholar and one of the founders of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, Gurney had the most profound experience of his life, he wrote, while sitting in a dentist’s chair. Under the influence of heavy drafts of nitrous oxide—a gift, you may recall, from Joseph Priestley and Humphry Davy—he saw with utmost clarity the secret to eternal life and could not wait to tell the dentist, and then the entire world. Alas, when he shook off his dreaminess, he could remember no details of that most compelling secret. Nothing remained, he lamented, but the feeling—and even that slowly drifted to nothingness, as well.

  Poor Gurney, left with only the fading memory of the event. And for everyone else, too, nothing remained but performance, the art of looking: the search itself. We can regard the incipient striptease, the dance of Salomé and her magical veils of seven different colors, which had its magical birth in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a dramatic representation of the investigative method titillatingly at work as scientists tried to lift the layers of illusion and peer into reality itself. And maybe that was the lesson in the end, that nothing mattered (and, at the same time, had no matter), really, but the dance itself. Living, itself, is finally all that we have. Perhaps that is the only truth. Which leads to Wilde’s second source for his character of Salomé.

  Wilde found his other, more ancient source for his dance of the seven veils in the goddess Ishtar, who dates from some four thousand years before the birth of Christ, in Babylon. In a journey reminiscent of Orpheus, Ishtar descends to the underworld to retrieve her son (and sometime husband) Tammuz. (Tammuz is also an ancient Hebrew month that follows the summer solstice and marks the retreat of the sun and the shortening of the days. It is a time of mourning, of fasting even—an appropriate moment to begin a descent into the underworld.) Before each of the seven portals to the underworld, Ishtar has to remove some article of clothing or adornment until, in the “land of no return,” she stands absolutely naked, divested of all illusion—the naked truth embodied. (Here, she resembles literature’s other great embodiment of the naked truth, King Lear.) According to Carl Jung,24 Ishtar descends not into some nondescript underworld, but into the unconscious itself. There, she must confront her shadow self, her double—in this case, Tammuz. In Ishtar, Wilde found perhaps a perfect symbol, for he always concerned himself with the deep psychological underpinnings of behavior. In this reading, Salomé engages in the ultimate unveiling. (It is important, in this regard, to keep in mind that Sarah Bernhardt titled her memoir My Double Life.)

  Imagine the entirety of a complicated century devolving into nothing more than a veil, that small and diaphanous piece of material that occludes the object from the gaze of the viewer. The veil is a film, through which one sees objects and events in a most ghostly way. Historians first used the word film for the new technology of photography in the 1840s, giving precise recognition to film as a thin veil on which the camera imprinted a picture of reality. This principal substance, film, came to stand for the art form itself. Moviegoers in the late nineteenth century went to theaters to watch films, a series of ghostlike, evanescent images projected onto a screen. Unlike their visits to brightly lit museums, people got used to seeing more and more of their images in darkness or half darkness, as shadows in the twilight play between light and dark.

  They entered the theater, many of them reported, as if into a cave—or, perhaps, like little Alice, into the underworld of imagination and fantasy. Once inside, once underground, anything could happen, and usually did. For the theater offered a brand new, reordered world, one characterized not by logic or reason but by magic, or, more accurately, the strange and shifting logic of dreams. The old rules fell away. It was mythmaking, shape-shifting, elusive and marvelous: the mundane world, heightened and attenuated. The movie theater had its projector, the live theater its phantasmagoria, a machine for creating ghosts that seemed to flutter and glide in midair. Theater images suggested rather than shouted; they insinuated rather than commanded. They moved at a fairly rapid clip. The glimpse replaced the stare. Victorians increasingly viewed the world as through a glass darkly: Meaning moved closer to metaphor, fertile ground for aesthetic movements like impressionism and pointillism, and fertile ground, too, for the desire for entertainment that dominated the end of the period, and which took over in the following centuries.

  Liminality works its power by promising so much and delivering so little; it vibrates with an erotic charge. It titillates. Like impressionistic paintings, veiled and suggestive images leave much to the imagination. The observer has to work, providing many of the fine details and, in the process of interpretation, revealing just a bit of himself or herself. (The words veil and reveal come from the same Middle English root, veile, “a sail.” To reveal literally means “to pull back the curtain,” hence “to disclose,” so that every intellectual revelation resembles a stage entrance—a surprise.) The veil is the translucent shower door through which we catch the barest outlines of a naked, lathered body; or it is the oiled rice paper door in the traditional Japanese house through which family members observe, as a blur, various intimacies.

  But of course the veil also serves as a mask. Muslim women hide a good bit of their faces behind the hijab or purdah. Even in the East, the veil sends mixed messages: Some say it liberates the woman, some say it oppresses. And we also know the veil as another, more pointed kind of religious symbol: To “take the veil” means that a nun has chosen God as her b
ridegroom. Salomé and Little Egypt, along with the other nascent stripteasers, incorporated all the various meanings of the veil and used them in just those ways—Salomé, oh so exotic, so religious, so liberated, and yet so sensual. Or, perhaps dancing in front of the male gaze, Salomé collapses into nothing more than a sexual object. She reveals, she occludes. She gives, and she steals reality back again.

  The veil also characterizes that incredibly popular genre born in the nineteenth century, the detective story, which gains its literary life from the twin themes of concealment and disclosure. (The word detective appears in England in 1843 for the first time, in the phrase “detective policeman,” what today we would call the plainclothes detective.) The heart of those stories, from Poe to Conan Doyle, always moves to an unveiling of the truth. Anyone with a keen mind can pierce through the veil “to discover matters artfully concealed” (per the Oxford English Dictionary). “Beyond the veil” was not just a nineteenth-century stock term for referring to the world of the departed, but for seeing through the profusion of details to the root meaning of reality. And thus Marshall Berman points out that “for Marx, writing in the aftermath of bourgeois revolutions and reactions, and looking forward to a new wave, the symbols of nakedness and unveiling regain the dialectical depth that Shakespeare gave them two centuries before. The bourgeois revolutions, in tearing away veils of ‘religious and political illusion,’ have left naked power and exploitation, cruelty and misery, exposed like open wounds.”25 But the veil also connects Salomé with Sarah Baartman in yet one more way.

  Along with her huge buttocks, Sarah Baartman’s vagina also fascinated scientists. Georges Cuvier had hoped to study the unusually large piece of skin that supposedly covered the vaginas of African bushwomen, what scientists called the sinus pudoris, or “curtain of shame,” or, as others in the period called it, more crudely, the Hottentot apron. Sarah Baartman kept that part of her anatomy hidden during her lifetime, however, even refusing to reveal her genitals when she posed in the nude at the Jardin du Roi. Unlike Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Baartman was not trying to be coy or seductive. She was merely trying to hide her shame. Her anatomical veil was all she had left to hide behind. (Ironically, I find that scientists sometimes mistranslated sinus pudoris—even Linnaeus himself—as “women are without shame.”) Her reluctance explains in part Cuvier’s great delight at being able, finally, not just to observe her private parts, but to dissect them as well. Scientific certainty lay at the end of his scalpel.