The Waltzing Body in Victorian Literature

The Waltzing Body in Victorian Literature traces the evolution of the waltz from subversive to traditional across the 19th century, focusing on the Victorian authors who wrote about the waltz, exploring ideas around sexual desire, female empowerment, shifting masculinity, queer erasure, and the fear of being left behind in a modernizing world.

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The Waltzing Body in Victorian Literature: Narratives of Sexuality and Power traces the evolution of the waltz from a taboo dance in the early nineteenth century to a gracefully nostalgic practice that must be preserved by the century's end. While Sabrina Gilchrist Hadyk references eighteenth-century authors to frame the waltz's initial reception in England, the study focuses primarily on Victorian authors who shaped how and why this dance was paradoxically viewed as elegant, effeminate, and sterile. Hadyk explores female sexuality and the concept of choice in the ballroom; a shifting and sometimes contradictory understanding of masculinity through male performance; the erasure of and reclamation of queer desire in heterosexual courting spaces; and the rhetoric of new technologies that attempted to contain, shape, and memorialize a temporal art form. A brief epilogue considers how late-Victorian (and heavily sanitized and romanticized) depictions of the waltz reverberate today in popular films and reality TV, which perpetuate Victorian assumptions about class, gender, sexuality, and more. By understanding the history of the waltz, the reader is invited to examine the dizzying discomfort that many Victorians expressed about forging ahead into a modern (and modernizing) world, particularly at the turn of the century. With comparatively little scholarship around understanding dance scenes and dance semiotics in literature, this book articulates a new interpretive path for familiar and unfamiliar nineteenth-century narratives, offering new ways of understanding and engaging with the role and culture of dance.