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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Lake, Taylor S. "American Delsartism and the Bodily Discourse of Respectable Womanliness," University of Iowa, May 2002.
This dissertation argues that American Delsartism offered women a language of interiority for experiencing and “performing” a respectable, womanly identity. American Delsartism was a combination of performance techniques, acting theories, exercises, and scientific models of embodiment; it was imported into the United States by theatrical impresario Steele MacKaye after he studied with Francios Delsarte in Paris. During the 1880s MacKaye’s student Genevieve Stebbins incorporated the physical culture, New thought, and elocution movements into a Delsartean self-improvement program for women that centered on aesthetic gymnastics and statue-posing. By the early 1890s, thousands of self-proclaimed Delsartists were exercising and posing the “Delsarte way” in order to improve the womanly “self” at a time when industrialized, urbanized American culture made such a self a question and a goal to be realized. The acting techniques at the heart of Delsartean statue-posing and aesthetic gymnastics, the attitude and gesture, and their significations of a respectable middle class identity were translated into the social performance of womanliness through the trope of the classical body. The combination of Greek costume and controlled poses and movements constructed woman as the contradictory site of erotic desire and the source of moral purity. But Delsartists’ emphasis on the performance techniques of the attitude and gesture, the fixed pose in statue-posing and the controlled movements of the aesthetic gymnastics, equally offered a theory and a practice for expanding women’s freedom over their bodies and, at the same time, inculcated techniques of control over that body. American Delsartism marks an early phase in the development of a bodily discourse of womanliness in which gendered identity became a performance-based assumption that an interior self could and must be “expressed” and “experienced” through the surface of the body by means of a visual code of womanly poses and movements.
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