7 - Women Walking, Women Dancing: Motion, Gender and Eurocentrism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
In early-twentieth-century Europe, the representational trope of ‘walking women’ takes on a specific connotation of gracefully focused, directional energy, predicated on women in the aftermath of first-wave feminism. The trope is widely diffused and for that reason often ambient rather than salient, and liable to escape notice. This chapter focuses on the trope in the context of neo-classicist aestheticism, c. 1900, as exemplified by Wilhelm Jensen's (1837-1911) novella Gradiva (1903) and German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg's (1866-1929) figuration of the nymph as Renaissance dynamism. As such it also becomes a marker of Eurocentrism. As a classicist-European auto-image, the trope becomes more salient when contrasted with its contemporaneous exoticist counterpart: the Orientalist mirage of the ‘dancing woman’, specifically the temple dancer or bayadère.
Keywords: Eurocentrism, Europe, gender, Orientalism, Gradiva, bayadère
[T]he girls whom I had noticed, with that mastery over their limbs which comes from perfect bodily condition and a sincere contempt for the rest of humanity, were advancing straight ahead, without hesitation or stiffness, performing exactly the movements that they wished to perform, each of their members in full independence of all the rest, the greater part of their bodies preserving that immobility which is so noticeable in a good waltzer.
– Marcel Proust, Within a Budding GroveOne of the classic texts of psychoanalytical literary criticism is Sigmund Freud's ‘Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva’ (1907). It addresses, as one might guess, a novella entitled Gradiva (with the subtitle Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück), which was published in 1903 by a German author called Wilhelm Jensen (1837-1911). Both the novella and its author have escaped oblivion largely thanks to Freud's sustained critical tour de force. It is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of the novella's fictional protagonist, the archaeologist Norbert Hanold. He is a withdrawn scholar, who keeps a plaster cast of an antique relief showing a walking woman (he nicknames her with the Latin epithet gradiva: she who strides forth) in his study. Something in her gait has a curious appeal for him:
[T]he young woman […] possessed […] a realistic, simple, maidenly grace. […] This was effected chiefly by the movement represented in the picture.
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- Eurocentrism in European History and Memory , pp. 121 - 140Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019