Chapter 2. Political Drama: Imperial Melodrama at the Empire

Sophie Hawkins

French melodrama of the Napoleonic era was a form of total theater with text, music, and gesture inextricably linked in the creation of effect for the post-Revolutionary audience. Theater scholarship in France has long been dominated by textual analysis and, as a result, the interconnections between these elements of melodrama performance have been underexplored, although attempts "to 'sonorize' the study of melodrama" are becoming more widespread. 1 Even the groundbreaking volumes of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt's theater being produced currently perpetuate the subservience of music to text in that the play texts receive full critical apparatus whereas the scores do not. 2 The creative possibilities of practice as research as a way of moving beyond the study of words on the page is well established in the UK but has only recently begun to gather pace in France and this is leading to an important rapprochement between theory and practice with conférences-spectacles, séminaires-ateliers and historically informed performances

The Greek Wa rofIndependence against Ottomandominion (1821-1830), sparked awave of philhellenic sympathy across Europe. In liberalcircles, initiatives in support of the Greek revolution were taken, whereas the European governments stayed out of the conflict and took measures to control the public sentiment in their countries. Dramatic treatments of the Greek struggle becamep opular in manyE uropean theatres. This article examines as election of philhellenic plays performed in Paris and London in the 1820s. My interestlies with investigating how the contemporary Greek warw as transferred onto the stage using the dramatic genres and conventions of the time whilst negotiating the control of national censorship. In the context of political pressure and ademand for dramaturgicalefficiency, I focus on the problems of documentarism in plays about the Greek war. At ageneral level, the philhellenic plays are seen to contribute to the largerprocess of Europeanculturalself-identification along the dividing lines between East andW est, although this agenda is often in tension with the dramatic handling of the subject, which calls for intrigue and characters crossing the border lines. The repertoires of the London and Paris theatres of the 1810s and 20s indicate a clear connection between war, nation, and the theatre. In these turbulent decades , when Napoleon'sc ontinental wars and various national revolts were drawing new borders between European states, news of victories and losses in famous battles wasregular fodder for the press and asource of fascination for the general public. Enormous new stage grounds were established for the purpose of celebrating patriotic victories, such as Astley'sA mphitheatre and Saddler's We lls, in London, and the Cirque Olympique and Salle des Jeux Gymniques, in Paris. Military parades with cavalry and canon were performed, and scenes of

Chapter 2. Political Drama: Imperial Melodrama at the Empire For the British, the great changes of the nineteenth century were in the locale of warfare, its shift from a defensive to an offensive posture, and the transformation of the enemy from Frenchman or Russian to African and Asian. The intellectual climate of the late century—aggressively self-confident, militarist, and racial—served to heighten longstanding trends in popular culture. The backdrop of stirring events was for a period almost exclusively imperial. Royal pageantry, warfare, sport, and even architecture, had all become imperial. The fact was that imperial exploits made good theatre. They not only fitted into, they heightened military, patriotic, spectacular and melodramatic traditions. (MacKenzie 1984, 62/3) The Victorian taste for spectacle was in the theatre largely furnished by melodrama, realism and Orientalism—heightened romances and swashbuckling adventures that were staged with both opulence and fastidious attention to the detail of set and costume, and dramatically enhanced by technological innovations in lighting and stage machinery. But this demand for visual delight is also evidenced by the continued fascination with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century optical devices and displays (e.g. diorama, panorama, cosmorama, stereoscope etc.). Though pantomime, music hall and theatre inhabited different-yet-overlapping spaces, they existed in what may be termed a relationship of interocularity with the optical entertainments of the day (panorama and photography et al). The mutual contextual association of these popular art forms inevitably resulted in the substantive transfer of meanings and symbols from one site (sight) to another. The specific class histories and formal variances of these popular entertainments are beyond the scope of this chapter; the goal here is rather to simply demonstrate how together they constituted a visual culture that engaged and promoted imperial ideology by means of the spectacle (Booth 1981). In melodrama it was possible to depict life as a titanic struggle between good and evil, a fantasy world in which the wildest dreams could be fulfilled. Melodrama was a strongly non-intellectual tradition in which characterisation, subtle emotional nuance, or 1 philosophical problems—as in the modern pulp romances—had no place. Plot, physical sensation, and stereotype were all. [...] If Victorian melodrama revealed a yearning for moral imperatives, spectacular theatre demonstrated the fascination with grandeur. (MacKenzie 1984, 44-45) The luxuriant Orient provided a popular setting for these melodramas, particularly after the Theatre Act of 1843. Not only did this act standardise the project of rational leisure and promote the gentrification of popular culture, but stipulated prohibitions against the representation of domestic political and class unrest. The impact of these two tangents on the theatrical representation and perception of the Orient—and its magic/spectacle—was significant, if not determinative. On the one hand, the circumventing of political satire at home resulted in a more conscious scene-shift to exotic location and characterisation (i.e. the luxuriant East as stand-in); and on the other, the privileging of a formalised theatre of proscenium arch and fourth wall1, wrote into the experience of theatre a distance which afforded a gaze of othering (i.e. stealthy Orientals in need of colonial supervision) and/or voyeurism. As Percy Fitzgerald, the theatre critic wrote, “we go not so much to hear as to look...It is like a gigantic peep-show, and we pay the showman, and put our eyes to the glass and stare.” (cited by Booth 1981, 4). Spectacular melodrama—of horse race, train wreck, avalanche, or archaeological discovery—preceded the imperialist theatre of the late nineteenth century, as did the use of exotic location. For example, W.T. Montcrieff’s 1823 Cataract of the Ganges offered an oriental spectacle of moonlit temples, rajahs’ palaces, throngs of priests and inter-religious battle wherein ‘good Hindus defeat evil Muslims’, belying a lurid fascination with sati and female infanticide The proscenium wall dividing stage and auditorium was one of the conditions (along with the prohibition of liquor, and the insurance of the safety curtain etc.) that were specified in the Suitability Act of 1878, furthering the bowdlerisation of music halls. See Chanan 1980, 158f and also Bailey 1986, xi and 1978, 148ff. 1 2 (Holder 1991 and Booth 1981, 62f). However, as the representation of oriental locale became more common in Victorian and Edwardian theatre, the Indians that populated this (imagined) locale were, particularly after the so-called “mutiny” of 1857, no longer differentiated by character; rather Indians were consistently satirised as effeminate, mawkish or sly, foils to the manly, no-nonsense heroes of Empire. The bathos of these orientalist representations was echoed by the shift in representation of colonial administrators from altruistic keepers of democracy to rationalised, hard-headed imperialists. By the 1880s, MacKenzie argues, “empire had become its own melodrama, and had become inseparably mixed up with the late nineteenth-century craze for orientalism, which so perfectly fitted the taste for spectacle” (1984, 49). This ‘craze’ for the surface splendour of the Orient2, panacea to what Crary has termed the “nineteenth-century bourgeois horror of the void” (1990, 125), was underpinned by ideologies of racial superiority and the supremacy of British justice such that the oriental alternately functioned as a figure of desire (the seductive nautch girl) or despair (the indolent despot). The theatrical Orient then provided not only spectacular setting, but a license to enact both supremacist and erotic fantasies (as Fitzgerald’s comparison to the peep-show alluded to), for the oriental was not only prone to criminality but promiscuity too. That the Orient should have been so consistently represented in the late nineteenth century demonstrates the successful pay-off of the 1843 Act. As domestic political struggles of class conflict had largely been erased from the stage, …imperial subjects offered a perfect opportunity to externalise the villain, who increasingly became the corrupt rajah, the ludicrous Chinese or Japanese nobleman, the barbarous ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ or black, facing a cross-class brotherhood of heroism, British The superficiality of Orientalist representation is most literally exemplified by the world fairs ‘native villages’, where facades of oriental architecture concealed metropolitan cafés etc. (See Mitchell 1992, 291) 2 3 officer and ranker together. Thus imperialism was depicted as a great struggle with dark and evil forces, in which white heroes and heroines could triumph over black barbarism, and the moral stereotyping of melodrama was given a powerful racial twist. (MacKenzie 1984, 45) The inherent conservatism of melodrama, with its incontrovertibly formulaic dichotomies of good and evil, justice and perversion, religion and superstition, excess and restraint, provided a fertile rhetoric for class mobilisation. The impoverishment and inequities of the working classes were fantastically displaced and temporarily sublimated by the compensatory promises of empire (i.e. distant lands of wealth and opportunity), assuaging the threat of critical protest by “a (false) consciousness of national superiority” (Hays 1995, 144). The ironing out of potentially seditious narratives (whether by displacement or suppression) served then to create of the theatre a “bracketed space”3 in which the audience was called upon as one body (us) against inferior others (them). As in carnival, orientalist melodramas were designed to offer a sense of temporary reprieve to the working classes—transferring their subordination onto the racialized other, and thereby creating a legitimate scapegoat for fantasies of violence and retribution.4 Conceptions of cultural or ethnic ‘difference’ were, characteristically, unidirectional in origin and flow, working through symbolic constructs that actually had less to do with the alien or exotic ‘Other’ than with the nationally conjoined ‘we’ against whom they existed in an entrenched pattern of antithetical disparity. [...] Those non-sublimated, shadowy impulses, wishes and desires that could not be openly made manifest or legitimately accommodated in the culture became lodged in the grotesquely ludicrous or sentimentally pathetic figures of minstrelsy. (Pickering 1991, 192 & 195). See Bratton 1991, 5. Whilst late nineteenth century drama was careful not to create of the colonised other a figure of identification for the working class, the relationship between these two marginalised groups is complicated by the employment of working class men as savages for the stage, parade and exhibition. “He [George Sanger 1825-1911, showman and circus owner] asked a detective for some savages and captured them in the slums. The worst-looking was made chief of the tribe. All were transformed by means of a little red ochre for skin tint, long snaky black hair, feathers, skins, beads and “terrible looking weapons” (Disher 1942, 33). 3 4 4 Given that orientalist representations were as much about ‘re-securing the legitimacy of dominant conceptions and values within the imperial homeland’ as justifying imperial supremacy without, MacKenzie criticises Said for his failure to examine the intersections of Orientalism with class antagonisms and historical enmities within Europe. MacKenzie’s argument against a totalized reading of Orientalism is both critically and historically astute; however, his consequent rescuing of romantic orientalism is itself problematic. MacKenzie proposes that bohemian artists and collectors of oriental antiquities, for example, assumed a “counter-hegemonic” stance, “viewing the East not as the Other to be despised and conquered, but as illustrating all the characteristics most highly valued in the cultural fashions of the age” (1995, 184). In their privileging of Hindu philosophy and handspun silks, these romantic orientalists are identified by MacKenzie as anti-modernists, seeking to proffer spiritual and aesthetic renewal to an increasingly industrial Britain: [P]erceptions of the East, however artificial and synthetic, produced a genuine revolution, major technical change, and above all an artistic world which was endlessly alluring and fascinating. Through it the audience sought to find a new Self, less grey and inhibited, a constructive merging of the West and the imagined East. Through fabric, colour, design and movement the artists were expressing excitement and admiration, never racial difference and disdain. With the Ballets Russes the Orientalist thesis of Edward Said seems at one level superficially confirmed and at another irretrievably disrupted. (1995, 199) MacKenzie runs the risk of denying any negative political import from “positive” stereotypes. MacKenzie’s romantics’ celebration of eastern culture is all too neatly divorced from the messy politics of colonial racism. As such, any claims to the aesthetic or spiritual superiority of the East did little to unsettle the political machinations of Said’s Orientalism.5 For whilst MacKenzie is See the work of Vijay Prashad (2000) and John Hutnyk for a political analysis of such romanticized readings—their foundations and afterlife—in the context of New Age Orientalism and third world tourism. 5 5 right to challenge the automatic equation of theatrical orientalism and ideological racism, thereby opening up a space in which alternative interpretations and/or histories can be heard and/or validated, it appears that his writing obscures the position of power from which the orientalist stereotypes were built (i.e. regardless of whether the latter are read as realist portraits or not).6 This is a curious omission given that his earlier focus on the intertextuality of popular culture in late nineteenth century Britain. Pickering’s excellent study of minstrelsy describes this interreferentiality not simply in terms of a conscious reinforcing of political and cultural attitudes, but as a mutually associative context in which representations (whether textual, dramatic or visual) ‘effortlessly fall into place’. Pickering argues that imperialist discourse was itself never fixed due to its foundation upon a dialectic of pleasure and fear, desire and threat: “because repulsion cannot escape the danger of sliding laterally into attraction for the Other, the outcome [of the discourse of mastery] is never eternally guaranteed” (1991, 230). However, to recognise imperialist discourse as unstable does not in itself diminish the power structures inherent to the politics of representation; that minstrelsy may have been interpreted differently across the decades is of course an important factor in the history of ideas, but by focusing only on the consumption of these representations the analysis of who is in a position to represent, and what and whom is represented, is elided. What of MacKenzie’s earlier understanding of imperialism’s project of creating “shows out of the peoples they dominate, subjecting them to all the isolation of “Stereotypes, both cultural and erotic, are generated by and through the frozen inventory of gestures constitutive of theatrical meaning. Though the sheer performativity of this inventory can serve to unsettle identity (easily unmasked as “nothing but an act”), the rehearsed cultural referentialism of the performed type, together with its excessive affect, function to create politically strategic points of semantic connectivity among the blurred procedures of acting, outing, being, doing, passing and meaning.” Apter 1995a, 31. 6 6 spectacle” (1986, 11)? Are not the economies of appropriation and representation deeply political (and politicised) matters? Without disregarding the fact that Orientalist imagery and symbology were indeed used as ciphers for social critique7, the very availability, or currency, of such representations is itself indicative of the politics of empire. We simply need to remember who is representing whom. [T]he question remains whether the banality and the melodrama were only part of the act of representing or whether they were in the events represented. We shake ourselves clear. We insist on the distinction between reality and depictions of it. But the disturbing thing is that the reality seeped through the pores of the depiction and by means of such seepage continued what such depictions were meant only to be about. (Taussig 1987, 133) The self-proliferating discourses of Orientalism, no matter how phantasmagorical or romantic, are politically consequential acts. As Nelson Goodman has argued, ‘fiction operates in actual worlds in much the same way as nonfiction’.8 To underline the politicised nature of Orientalist representations neither implies a hegemony of production nor yields complete autonomy to the representation itself. Nor is it to say that the political ideologies of representation are always successful or indeed obvious to the spectator. Rather, cultural agency is here located in the traffic between the real and the imagined—in the act of translation. MacKenzie’s all-too-amicable divorcing of the romantics’ vision from the violence of colonial rule, whilst intended to problematise Orientalism as a monolithic discourse, fails to recognise (unlike Pickering) that Orientalism rests upon a dialectical slide between attraction and repulsion, as much as between fantastic figment and anthropological fact. See for example Apter 1995a on turn-of-the-century aesthetic Orientalism as a device of outing sapphic love. See also Garber 1992, 314 and MacLeod 1998, 65 on the promotion of oriental fashion by female social reformers in nineteenth century America and Britain respectively. 8 Goodman 1978, 104. See also Bhattacharyya 1998. 7 7 It is this oscillation between desire and disgust, fact and fiction, that the late nineteenth-century popularity of illusionism highlights and that the overdetermined histories of nineteenth-century realism tend to ignore. Holder has, for example, argued that fantasy was subsumed by a pedagogical realism in the imperial theatre of the late nineteenth century given that the aggressive expansionist policies of empire precluded a romantic engagement with the exotic. A corollary to the increased exposure to and knowledge of the outposts of empire was a diminished pantomime back home. Narratives of fantastic transformation and fluid identities (both personal, cultural, gendered, or racial) were replaced by an imperial theatre that foregrounded instead agents of the empire who transplanted their own internalised cultural dramas onto foreign soil. Whilst Holder’s work usefully serves to highlight shifts in cultural attitude, it invests too much in a taxonomical classification of melodrama and realism as distinct genres and points to an all too neat conflation of nationalist politics with realist aesthetics. But though undeniably related9, the biographies of nationalism and realism are not twin aspects of a singular political process. Realism, as a “way of world-making”, is context-specific and the modes of its consumption are similarly mercurial.10 Indeed, it is important to remember that realism was not unanimously welcomed in the late nineteenth century: [W]e are become, in all that regards the theatre, a civil, similar and impassive generation. To touch our emotions, we need not the imaginatively true, but the physically real. The visions which our ancestors saw with the mind’s eye, must be embodied for us in palpable forms... all must be made palpable to sight, no less than to feeling; and this lack 9 See Gillen 1993. Indeed the very ascription of the terminology of realism, its variant use and contexts—be it the bourgeois novel, the techniques of monocular perspectivalism, or tableaux vivants—reflect this shifting ground. Realism and naturalism, though differentiated theoretically by their privileging of depth and surface respectively, are moreover frequently conflated in (connotative) use. 10 8 of imagination in the spectators affects equally both those who enact and those who construct the scene. (William Bodham Donne 1885 cited by Booth 1981, 2)11 However, given the spectacular nature of realism in Victorian England, the categorical claims that emotion, fantasy and imagination were ousted from the theatre remain unconvincing. Surely, no matter how pedagogical or ideologically skewed, Victorian realism would have been as conducive to fantasy as baroque excess? As Corner asks in a different context, “cannot ‘realism’ be an acknowledged effect whose separation from (and discernible difference from) ‘reality’ forms part of its appreciation?” (1992, 98). Realism, not to be confused with reality or the real, is as much a rhetorical artifice, as reliant upon codes as conventions, as melodrama is. Though referring specifically to readings of literary (rather than performative) realism, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of Barthes’ pithy assessment: “realism (badly named, at any rate often badly interpreted) consists not in copying the real but in copying a (depicted) copy of the real” (1974, 55). Hence categorising the popular entertainments of the Victorian era (music hall, panorama, magic shows et al.) as either melodramatic or realist relies on a blunt tool, if not a line in the sand. For example, Tom Taylor’s extravagant production of The Overland Route at the Haymarket surely sought to invoke personal memory, empathy and the embodied pleasures of an imagined journey through its staging of the P&O steamer Poonah. Here then the “reality” of realism is perhaps better understood as virtuality, a space rooted in current politics but wherein desire is apparently divested of political consequence. It is here then that the neat ideological equations of aesthetic realism and empiricist rationality on the one hand and theatrical Donne’s critique of the theatre mirrors that of Eugene Maron’s earlier critique of the realist novel: “There is a very dangerous thing in literature, and that is the excess of truth. That excess leads to method of observation without ideals or poetry, which recounts every fact and scrutinizes every feeling indiscriminately, randomly, and without thought to whether they are by nature worthy of study.” See also Matlock 1995 on the consequent desire to censore the realist gaze on grounds of realism’s ‘showing more than one would want to see’. 11 9 melodrama and heightened emotion on the other need to be rethought. Whilst the perspectivalism of realist painting undoubtedly (re)produced a way of seeing that privileged an acquisitive, colonising gaze, the melodrama-infused realism of late Victorian theatre, particularly through its enacting of spectacle, was arguably less hegemonic in its structuring of vision (and meaning), though proffering no less an ideological vision of empire. Late Victorian and Edwardian melodrama did not wager upon the (modernist) opposition of naturalism and theatricalism, whereby only the former was respected as an authentic representation (Pickering 1991). Indeed melodrama arguably functioned as a mediator, or rather merger, of ‘realism’ and ‘theatricalism’ through its co-presenting of historical and archaeological accuracy of representation (verisimilitude) on the one hand, “the paraphernalia of corporeal existence” (Booth 1986: 15), and an iconography of excess or heightened emotional intent on the other.12 Thus the common melodramatic device of tableau vivant promoted both emotional projection and disengaged observation, “a phantom reminding the visitor of the artifice of the scene, even while signifying its verisimilitude” (Garelick 1995b, 313). The conventional antithesis between melodrama and realism is similarly troubled by the emergence in the 1890s of the figure of the usurping Other, the treacherous villain who receives willingly from the master with one hand and yet simultaneously plots his downfall with the other. This native-but-anglicised villain, recognised (surprisingly) by Holder as a “most paranoic of melodramatic fantasies” (1991, 146), threatens the self by his very likeness to the self—i.e. Bhabha’s mimic men (“white-but-not-quite”). Having schooled the other in methods of Just as the paintings of monocular realism demand a certain familiarity with the conventions of perspective, so too emotional realism of melodrama demands a certain currency of stylized formulae, whether gestural action, characterisation, or scenery. 12 10 becoming the self (educational curricula, religious codes of morality, aesthetic and political hierarchies etc), the imperialist quakes at his hybrid progeny. This paranoia in part explains the audience’s cultural preference for the safer pseudo-orientals of the theatre (whether Chung Ling Soo, the Fakir of Ava or blackface performers) than “the real thing”. But reading these figures through the lens of either realist representation or theatrical artifice is itself flawed; their appeal is better located in the excluded middle, that space of fluidity of, and between, the signifiers of authenticity and artifice. Indeed, if we accept that music-hall and variety theatre constituted a space of ludic play, the contrivances of performance were surely not lost on the audience. [W]hat was depicted could be valued as a representation of some aspect of social reality and simultaneously regarded and valued as theatrical artifice. This involved a dialectical movement between involvement with the ‘reality’ of the performance and awareness of its simulation of ‘reality’ outside of its own ambit of representation. (Pickering 1986, 89) Pickering’s insightful assessment of the pleasure afforded by the minstrel’s mask, the fluidity between the real and the contrived, is as relevant to the engaged/engaging duplicity of magic (as it is for the fashion for cultural cross-dressing, see below). Pickering’s focus on embodied pleasure reclaims from the overdetermined histories of nineteenth-century realism the agency of the audience, and their ability to shift between denotative and metaphoric levels of interpretation. The spectacle of realism (here understood as experience rather than as representational code) both relies upon and facilitates this slippage between the real and the fake, the original and the copy. This slippage is skilfully illustrated in Schwartz’s tracing of the Musée Grévin’s visual displays that offered composites of artifice (wax works) and reality (whether topical mise-en-scène or montage of authentic memorabilia)13. Such displays sought to propose a See also Reynolds 1976, 4. The Musée Grévin is significant for, like London’s Egyptian Hall, it housed oriental wonders, curiosities and waxworks alongside its staging of magic. Whilst the exhibits themselves addressed the collapsing of the natural and the manufactured, the Musée Grévin existed in the public 13 11 spatio-temporal contiguity between the viewer and the viewed, a realism in which celebrities and newsworthy events were presently historicised and thereby realised.14 This movement between the real and artifice, “the union between fantasy and certified, even topical, reality” that melodrama furnishes by means of what Meisel (1994) has identified as “scattered chiaroscuro”15, parallels the shift between the gaze of desire and the gaze of surveillance within orientalist representation, wherein fantasy is not so much a denial of reality as a playing with it. Similarly, magic may be seen not so much as a denial of empirical logic, but as an extension of it. Magic’s popularity at the end of the nineteenth century is then better contextualised as a continuation (if not exaggeration) of melodrama’s shifting between the real and the imagined, for the pleasure of magic arises from the perceived incongruity (or elasticity) of seen cause and seen effect, i.e. the lie of the illusion: The magic of the spectacle is both in its extraordinariness (e.g., the monumental, the exotic, the microscopic), in its realism (e.g., the magic is completely realised, made concrete either through realistic representations or the ability to transform material reality itself—including the ability to incorporate the material world into representational forms), and finally in its inexplicability (e.g., the sense that although the audience knows a rational explanation exists—indeed that the spectacle is rationally produced—the explanation is not available to them because it is either secret or technically incomprehensible). (Slater 1995, 228) exhibiting the Orient: technological reproduction imaginary in a dialectical relation with the gruesome attraction of the morgue along with the faits divers of the newspapers, the serial novel, and opera et al. 14 It is through the fragmentation of time into verifiable happenings, through the particularisation of scene and role, and through the absolutisation of external appearance, the so-called facts of reality, that the realism of popular culture seeks to extend reality by offering a spectacle of “the real thing as absolute fake” (Eco 1986). 15 This chiaroscuro is staged though the obvious opposition of light and dark, good and evil, tableaux and motion, focus and panorama, and the apparent resolution thereof. The resolution is apparent for it is largely a sensational (i.e. visual) rather than moral resolution. See Meisel 1994, 73 & 65. 12 Whether as drive to mastery or encounter with the unmasterable, realism is involved in the production of knowledge regimes across the body as an economy of the knowable and the unknowable, each reinforcing the other. (Prendergast 1995, 7) Whilst dramatised narratives undeniably impacted the contextual interpretation of orientalist magic in the nineteenth century, the proscenium arch was not the only frame of reference. The visual technologies of spectacle (stereoscope, panorama, cineorama et cetera) literally defined the mechanics of seeing—i.e. not just imagining—the Other. The appeal of the panoramas’ for example lay largely in their scale and verisimilitude, intended to overwhelm and literally envelope the observer16, and thereby proffered a sense of virtual travel. One of the most successful mid-century panoramas was interestingly The Overland Route to India which in its 1,600 performances was seen by a quarter of a million people. But the subject matter of the panoramas was not limited to travel, but addressed a larger function of reportage: coronations, arctic expeditions, military encounters, public catastrophes, chartings of the Mississippi and the Nile, emigration propaganda et cetera. Indeed, by the 1860s India was represented less as a venue for architectural wonder and Himalayan adventure and more frequently as the location of battle (e.g. the battles of the Anglo-Sikh Wars of 1845-6 and 1848-9, and of the so-called Sepoy Mutiny 1857-8). Thus whilst panoramic landscapes were preferably exotically remote, they were nevertheless required to be identifiably real: ‘the public would not patronize a Pandemonium when there was a Seringapatam’ (Altick 1978, 182). As Bhattacharyya succinctly notes, “the exotic cannot work unless its audience believes that it presents something like truth, in the terms they understand.” (1998, 9) The apparent verisimilitude of the panorama’s content, As McClintock has summarily argued, ‘the erotics of imperial conquest were also an erotics of engulfment’ (1995, 24). Whilst maps were being carefully drawn, defining the rationalised borders of empire, much of imperial fantasy paradoxically spoke of a corollary desire to lose oneself in the Other. 16 13 its conventions of real exotica, together with its sensual engulfment of the viewer (its 360 degree form), lent a weight to the image such that it became the measure by which reality was judged: “In effect, the picture became the substitute actuality, and the true actuality was merely a reminiscent reflection of the picture” (Altick 1978, 193/4). As in magic and melodrama, the fluidity between the registers of actuality and imagination, if not a cultural preference for artifice over ‘the real thing’, was foregrounded. This is not to claim a naiveté for the nineteenth century spectator but rather to highlight the conscious projection of fantasies both of and onto the other (e.g. self identified as other), whilst leaving a prejudicial knowledge in tact (i.e. a colonial superiority of self over other).17 These two strands of nineteenth century popular culture—here identified as theatrical exaggeration (fantasy) and technological distance (knowledge)—find, as content and form, their arguably most complete expression in the spectacular extravagance of the world fairs. Starting with the Great Exhibition of 1851, these fairs consolidated, or rather materialised, the empiricist agenda to record, measure and know the world (of empire) and privileged ability of the colonisers to do so. “The fairs told the story of mankind, the very same narrative that accompanied and legitimised colonial expansion. In this epic, staged by themselves, white, rational, civilised European citizens cast themselves in the role of hero” (Corbey cited by Maxwell 1999, 3). At these fairs technology made manifest the geography of empire such that peripheral colonies were realised and translocated to the imperial centre.18 “The spectacle of the exotic was assumed, as many contemporary accounts testify, to excite the mind in several different ways, permitting simultaneously projection and incorporation.” (Jones 1997: 6) 18 Yet not only were the peripheral colonies reconstructed at the centre, but the centre enveloped the peripheries into itself; the British produced exhibitions in Calcutta (1883-84) and Bombay (1910) where the founding rhetoric was of extending the centre, promoting the national unity of the colonial settlers, whose service to the mother country (i.e. having taken control of the local environment and its resources) was not to go unrecognised. 17 14 Displays of minerals and ores extracted from colonial reserves were literally the stuff of an expanding empire: “In them consumers viewed not a replica of the colonial world, but the colonial world itself, in mass and in the raw.” (Richards 1990, 165). Colonisers need no longer travel to encounter their subordinates for virtual steamships travelled virtual oceans to virtual villages inhabited by real natives. That these villages existed alongside the halls of industry did not so much detract from their “realism”19 so much as foster a colonial gaze by which natives and mass consumer items inhabited the same magically collapsed space of objecthood.20 Here, the native functions in much the same way as animals in the zoo—performing a dual function of transporting the spectator to the colonies whilst also serving to bring the colonies to London. In bringing together tundra, swamps and plains the zoological garden acts to construct a single space for the imperial imagination, demarcating a place which is encompassing and encroaching; and yet, also closely defined [...] This viewing modes necessitates a doubling of the imagined territory of which Said has written, such that the zoological gardens are part of London, and yet contain simultaneously, if only figuratively, the plains of Africa or the sands of the Near East. This is a discursive formation which is both powerful and cyclical: the ‘other’ is incorporated as a claim to power, it is indeed brought home, and yet remains as different, and as difficult as before. (Jones 1997, 8 & 9) The ideological imbrication of ‘technological wizardry’ and ‘colonial expansion’ at the 1900 Exposition Universelle for example allied the cause of Empire in the public imagination with ‘the excitement of modern scientific advancement’ but not at the displacement of ‘the charms of dancing women of color and countless other such Orientalist luxuries’ (Garelick 1995a, 86 and 1995b, 295). By creating of the Orient a range of desirable commodities, The realism of the fairs, here, is understood as a shuttling between narrative immersion and forensic distance; indeed, the slippage between technology and fantasy here is reminiscent of that afforded by the minstrel’s duplicitous identity and the magician’s juggling of supernatural effect and rationalist patter. 20 Barkan’s study of the nineteenth-century travel engravings, photographic souvenirs and artefacts sent ‘home’ from the ‘field’ is relevant here: “Paradoxically, the pastoralism of these representations somehow reinforced the mechanical power of the technology that transmitted them, so that the emerging early twentieth-century “modernist” culture they shaped was inebriated by turns with the “savage” and the high tech, the past and the future.” (1995, 8) 19 15 epitomised by Imre Kiralfy’s Empire of India Exhibition in 1895, a greater public involvement with the project of empire was sought. “[J]ust as bourgeois shoppers were encouraged to recognize their own homes in the domesticized space of the grand magasin, so were fairgoers expected to look upon the re-created foreign worlds as representations of their own (newly extended) country” (Garelick 1995b, 301).21 This folding of geography in the fairs, such that foreign lands were brought home, was mirrored by the re-presentation of history by means of which the messy politics of colonialism were carefully obfuscated, whereby past and present come to be encapsulated in and as souvenirs. “By encapsulating the past in the glossy shell of the present, the Exhibition both commemorated the past and annihilated it.” (Richards 1990, 61). The exhibition promoted global history as a single spectacle to be viewed from a point of privileged invisibility, what McClintock (1995) has termed “panoptical time”, thus divesting the exhibited natives the agency to look back at their viewers, positioned as they were in the “anachronistic space” of prehistory, atavism, and irrationalism that bore no relation to the modern space/time of the European exhibition. Whilst the colonisers complacently wandered ‘between the progressive spaces of modernity and that of exotic antiquity’ (Low 1996, 137), the colonised were framed in panoptical time and anachronistic space by the technological inventions of the colonisers, as actors by the proscenium, commodities by the vitrine. Under glass and the desiring gaze of the public, operating within a matrix of trade, technology and colonial power, these artefacts (whether mineral or human) made of the exhibition a catalogue to See also Mitchell 1992: 299 on the link between the exhibition display case and the vitrine. Moreover, the selling of souvenirs and “jingo kitsch” accentuated this commodification of the Orient: “These contrivances removed Empire from the domain of political struggle by moving it into the home, where, along with the samples from nature that Victorians loved to label and preserve under glass, it became an unthreatening decorative fixture. Paradoxically, as the Empire grew larger by millions of square miles, the space Victorians lived in became cramped with imperial allegories of kitsch.” (Richards 1990, 134) 21 16 be perused at leisure. 22 “At the 1900 exposition the sensual pleasures of consumption clearly triumphed over the abstract intellectual enjoyment of contemplating the progress of knowledge.” (Williams 1982, 59/60). As the fairs increasingly exhibited science and racial otherness as spectacles (rather than specimens), the didacticism of the mid-nineteenth century yielded to a commercial marketing of pleasure and entertainment. The 1889 fair in Paris—most famous for its Eiffel Power—was the first to incorporate a fun fair alongside the exhibition halls. Theories of racial hierarchy themselves became objects of wonder, particularly when translated into the “missing-links” exhibits of popular culture.23 This interplay of triumphalism, an intellectual quasi-scientific discourse concerned with constructing a hierarchical ethnology, and the perennial attractions of the pseudo-educational spectacle, can be observed in numberless variations throughout the period. Its theatricality is important, in that while one formal requirement of such displays is that they claim authenticity, the unmediated presentation of reality, they always determine what is seen through other formal means and structures which make the display conform to the demands of the discourse. No black person (or Scot or Irish person, for that matter) appeared in a public show without being re-produced by that presentation. (Bratton 1991: 3/4) The commodification of the native’s body, as with animals ‘strange to our clime’, served to reify imperial desire into a series of objects that were simultaneously specific of, and generic to, exotic otherness. This slippage between the authentic and the copied (and the values ascribed thereto) is See Young 1995 on capitalism’s centrality to colonialism as a form of writing geography. See Maxwell 1999, 55. See also Altick 1978, 268ff on the earlier Hottentot Venus or “heavy-arsed heathen”. See also Lant 1997 on the transitional aura of Egyptianate material, which, like the missing-links exhibitions, provided a staging post between the self (the future present) and the absolute other (the past perfect). The corollary to the fascination with evolutionary ancestors (or mediators) was the fascination with contemporary “hybrids”, wherein the theory of racial purity is marked by the desire, or fetishization, of racial miscegenation, which Young appositely describes as the “soft underbelly” of the power relation of coloniser and colonised. “The ideology of race, a semiotic system in the guise of ethnology, ‘the science of the races’, from the 1840s onwards necessarily worked according to a doubled logic, according to which it both enforced and policed the differences between the whites and non-whites, but at the same time focussed fetishistically upon the product of the contacts between them.” (1995, 180). 22 23 17 best illustrated by an exhibition of La Rue du Caire at the 1899 Exposition Universelle. For though the curators of the fair deemed it necessary to import fifty Egyptian donkeys to wander this oriental street, the human traders of the bazaar were largely Frenchmen in costume. The conflation here of the representational order with the politics of control is made explicit. However, this is not to obscure the appeal of “real niggers, lascars, and ayahs” (Bancroft, cited by Booth 1996, 15) in popular entertainments of the day.24 Dioramas, stereoramas, panoramas were enlivened with real native bodies but these remained out of reach no matter their proximity—exactly like the objects in the window display of fancy department stories. Representation was privileged over contact, distance over immediacy. To establish the objectness of the Orient, as a picture-reality containing no sign of the increasingly pervasive European presence, required that the presence itself, ideally, become invisible. [...] Yet this was where the paradox began. At the same time as the European wished to elide himself in order to constitute the world as something not-himself, something other and objectlike, he also wanted to experience it as though it were the real thing. (Mitchell 1992: 307) Moreover, the nexus of capitalism and colonialism fostered by the fairs’ framing artefacts-as-fetishes aided a substitution of embodied sensory engagement (touch and interaction) with a disembodied gaze of internalised distance. This investment in the border, the conditional segregation of viewer and viewed by means of a regulation against physical interaction, ultimately divested both of real political agency. This was clear to Walter Benjamin in the late 1930s: World exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish. […] World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value becomes secondary. They are a school in which the masses, forcibly excluded from consumption, are imbued with the exchange value of commodities to the Dirks has argued that the body and colony were metonymically cited by the colonial powers: “Marking land and marking bodies were related activities; not only did land seem to determine much of a putatively biological nature, bodies themselves became markers of foreign lands” (1992, 6). 24 18 point of identifying with it: “Do not touch the items on display.” World exhibitions thus provide access to a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. Within these divertissements, to which the individual abandons himself in the framework of the entertainment industry, he remains always an element of a compact mass. (Benjamin 1999: 18) Hence, the natives, b(r)ought in to authenticate exhibits and performances, to lend the status of the possible if not the real, were themselves de-realised by these displays. This is not to argue that their contextualisation in a manufactured or simulated environment resulted in their sacrificing of ‘cultural authenticity’; but rather to emphasise how the colonial gaze itself eroded the physical reality of their presence whilst simultaneously depending on it. 25 “In an economy of desire where racial and cultural difference was reduced to spectacle, the people who participated in the anthropological displays could never hope to be anything more than phantasmagoria.” (Maxwell 1999: 24) Even when the natives/animals who were shipped in or dressed up to perform an aura of the ‘real’ may have at times destabilised the boundaries of spectacle and spectator26, the fairgoers themselves came to embody the dialectic of viewing subject and commodified object. These exhibitions wrote an imperial fiction that depended on its enactment (i.e. realisation) by colonisers and colonised alike27: “it is not merely a matter of entering into the The “etherealisation” of native bodies is not mere theoretical conjecture, as many of these bodies never returned home and literally became ghosts. See for example Marlon E. Fuentes' 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy. 26 This conscious playing on the roles of observer and observed is made explicit by the 1867 Parisian Exposition Universelle’s housing of the visiting Khedive of Egypt in a simulated medieval Egyptian palace. The Khedive became, during his visit to Paris, part of the exhibition, receiving visitors with ‘medieval hospitality’. (See Mitchell 1992, 293 and Garelick 1995b, 310ff). Interestingly, Altick mentions a similar strategy employed by Madame Tussaud in that she positioned waxwork spectators alongside the more infamous waxwork celebrities. (1978: 335). Moreover the contemporary popularity of both waxwork and tableaux vivants suggests a certain generic fluidity between acting and spectating. 27 That the fair operated as a ground upon which the identity of viewer as well as that of the viewed was actively formed, where through the act of viewing both viewer and viewed are inscribed in the social politics of colonial desire, supports Young’s reading of colonialism as a “desiring machine” (Deleuze and Guattari) where “the ‘subject’, instead of being at the centre, is ‘produced as a mere residuum’ of the processes of the desiring machines, the nomadic offshoot of striated mental spaces and of the body defined as longitude and latitude.” (Young 1995, 168) 25 19 playfully deceptive modalities of representational space, not merely a matter of going along with the pleasures of the eye, for what is at stake in the final analysis is the constitution, fabrication and enfranchisement of the viewer.” (de Bolla 1995, 290) This double movement, between the fetishisation of the native extra and the disembodiment of the viewer-as-voyeur, is most clearly charted through the figure of the Oriental dancer.28 Native women imported to inhabit the colonial villages within these exhibitions, expected to continue their daily routines and relations, and as such were not figures of seduction but objects to be surveyed. The sexualised nature of the gaze however was not in itself diminished by this move, but it was less dependent upon the viewing of an erotic invitation (i.e. the woman as performing agent) and more on the interiorised desires of power (i.e. where the object of the gaze is sublimated by the one who gazes). The women dematerialize under the imperial gaze, inside the framing narratives of the World’s Fair. They become simulacra of themselves, glimpsed through and between obstructions or barriers [...] Despite the “realistic” settings, the fair’s technologizing gaze transforms them into filmic ghosts of themselves, less real women than cinematic shadows, and resembling nothing so much as the stereoscope show, in which, for two centimes, customers could briefly ogle erotic pictures of women. Just as the distinction between audience and spectacle was dismantled, so was the distinction between the technologized body and the “natural” body blurred. (Garelick 1995b, 312) As a figure of both staged desire and exotic curiosity, Garelick argues that these women at once ‘revealed and occulted the scientific effort at stake in their presentation’ (Garelick 1995b, 295 ). Their dances made literal the strategic feminization of the Orient (her body) as a mode of colonial conquest (the stage, the native village). But it was not merely the technical mechanisms of her framing that were both revealed and occulted, but also her symbolic capital as fetish of Here the oriental dancing woman may be understood as a precursor to the figure of the magician’s assistant. The thesis of the dephysicalisation of the body is expanded in Chapter 3 in relation to magic, automata and spiritualism. 28 20 and for the colonial gaze: “her graceful swaying movements, her languid attitudes and smiling gestures rouse in her audience that innate sympathy with Oriental views of women, the gentle, soulless creature of the East, which lies dormant in the heart of every man” (Le Roux 1890, 71/72). Whilst the oriental woman figures largely as a voyeuristic attraction of these fairs, an object of inconsequential and/or suppressed desire, unchartered and inviting in her languid passivity, it was as much her purdah as the sensual theatre of the belly dance that captivated the coloniser’s gaze—for the corollary of colonial erotic desire was the cover of invisibility and secrecy. The veil, the latticed window—the keyhole even—offer a frame in which desire was divorced of its viscerality whilst simultaneously creating a phantasmatic space (Apter 1995b, 164) in which the visual fantasy of sensual touch is legitimated. The frame here operates in much the same way as the stereoscope: “The desired effect of the stereoscope was not simply likeness, but immediate, apparent tangibility. But it is a tangibility that has been transformed into a purely visual experience.” (Crary 1990: 124) The Savage South Africa exhibition (incorporated within the Greater Britain Exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1899, but which later toured Blackpool, Liverpool et al) offers a discursive counterpart to the viewing of the oriental belly dancer, highlighting the gender-discriminate nature of the colonial gaze. The public response to exhibits of muscular black men was largely one of fear, not so much of their strength but of their erotic appeal for lily-skinned British women. Whereas the supine, domestic, oriental woman was seen as a befitting representation of and for the colonial project, the dangerously seductive appeal of an oiled martial body on home turf was lambasted for its potential undermining of colonial patriarchal power. English people having female relatives in South Africa might well feel some anxiety for the women who live in close proximity to natives who are worse than brutes when their passions are aroused. Colonists know how to keep these passions in subjection by a 21 wholesale dread of the white man’s powers and that dread is being dissipated daily by familiar intercourses at Earls Court. (Daily Mail 1899 cited by Shephard 1986, 102) Moreover, where the belly dancer was sanctified (as malleable product), the “savage” was deemed a threat—not only to colonial masculinity but also of an emancipated femininity. Here the female gaze was differentiated as being intimately bound to touch, as embodied, in contradistinction to the rarefied, surveying gaze of the colonial male. The modern woman—superior as she is—affects to adore the highest in man, not the lowest. Yet here is a specimen of her sex most eager to tie herself to a savage. We should like to regard her as an exception but why do so many women take pleasure in touching and patting and even stroking these black persons? These blacks do not represent the highest, but the lowest in man. If the Earl’s Court savages were a collection of astronomers or physiologists, if they were in any way noted for their brain power they would create no interest at all among women of this kind. (Vanity Fair 1899 cited by Shephard 1986, 102) This distrust of the sensuality of the female gaze, its political subversion of the gentrified gaze of surveillance/suppressed desire, is deliberately countered by the fair’s aesthetic promotion of a technologised body. Most iconic, though not always the most popular, in this regard was Loie Fuller’s performance at the Exposition Universelle. Self-taught and independent, Fuller (1862-1928) is heralded as one of the founders of modern dance. Working with light, reflection, colour, and fabric to extend the movements of her body, her dances were stunning visual spectacles, inspiring (and hence documented by) Art Nouveau painters, Symbolist poets, early filmmakers et al. Following a scandalous divorce from a bigamous husband, Fuller left America for Paris in 1892. She would come to be known across Europe as “the electric Salome”, epitomising both a fascination with new technological innovation (phosphorescence, mirrors, optics) on the one hand and a fetishization of cultural difference29 on the other. By 1900, Fuller Unlike other dancers who milked the erotic associations of Orientalism, Fuller claimed the Orient as aesthetic inspiration (e.g. she claimed Japanese calligraphy to be a sustained choreographic influence). 29 22 danced as a named artist, in a pavilion of her own, thereby writing into the Exposition’s very ordering of space the politics of empire—in stark contrast to the anonymous and totemic presence of oriental women and natives. However, Fuller’s dance existed in a dialectical though hierarchical relation with the bayadères in that she siphoned off the exotic associations of the oriental belly dance (where the veil functioned as the icon of the Orient), whilst simultaneously privileging an imperial modern vision. While the Fair’s colonial exhibitions employed the most advanced technology available to create the impression that visitors had been transported to another world, Fuller used her own technology to do the reverse: with her mirrors and lighting tricks, she transported herself to another place.[...] Instead of the spectator’s relying upon technology in order to espy the primitive eroticism of an Oriental danseuse, the dancing woman in this case manifestly appropriates technology to render herself spectacle. While Fuller narcissistically dancing before her own reflection recalls the languid poses of those Oriental girls dancing in supposed ignorance of the spectator’s voyeurism, it does so very self-consciously. [...] Without scenery, or conventional costumes, and with technology employed in acknowledgment rather than an obfuscation of theatrical artifice, her performances laid bare the trappings of colonial spectacles. (Garelick 1995a, 96) The abolition of the scenic contextualisation of viewer and object, the rejection of perspectival depth and the promotion of unmediated access, renders Fuller an object in circulation, a floating signifier. The significance of Fuller’s dance, as intimated by Garelick, rested then less with a mimetic appropriation of oriental forms or the spectacular eclipsing of her natural body, and more with the directness of the gaze—her own and her audience’s. Fuller’s conscious use of mirrors and glass (as opposed to the externally imposed display case of the oriental exhibit), “literalized and played with the scientific voyeurism of the other spectacles of But this is the mature artist speaking. Less formally, Fuller claimed that her working with light was down to happenstance: performing in a play, Quack MD, in “an old Hindoo costume” which she hitched up so as not to trip. Stage lights shimmered against the fabric, producing enchanting results. Other biographers are less generous—referring to Fuller’s performances as a poor version of nautch girls’ dances. But as with many of her contemporaries, the Orient offered Fuller something America could not--a space of sexual discovery (gender ambiguity, lesbianism). 23 veiled dancers” (Garelick 1995a, 94) as the audience watched Fuller watching herself. Whereas the oriental woman was to be spied through a window as an object of imperial surveillance, exemplifying the Enlightenment characterisation of knowledge as penetration, Loie Fuller was seen as reflecting her own subjectivity, and by extension the audience’s individuated self-consciousness/ self-surveillance (cf McClintock 1995, 32). Fuller’s performance then brings into focus “the catoptric glint of the enclosure of visuality […] which forces the registration of the social and cultural manifestations of self-identity as much as it causes embarrassment at the threat of auto-voyeurism” (de Bolla 1995: 286). In this regard, then, the nineteenth century fairs may be said to continue the eighteenth century pleasure garden’s foregrounding of identity through visibility. In his paper on Vauxhall Gardens and the visibility of visuality, De Bolla argues that entry into a delineated scopic regime became as definitive of identity (ways of seeing and being seen) as the co-inscribed social discourses of gender and class. The imperial subject of Victorian popular culture then may be seen as constituted by and simultaneously enacting a network of political positionings and representations; and the gaze of empire is here then understood not as the singular focus of perspectivalism, but as an amalgam of viewing practices that nevertheless sought to maintain a certain hegemony of visuality. In the context of viewing at the nineteenth-century world fairs, then, we may argue that the construction of identity relied for its ‘visibility’ both on the imperial propaganda of displaced artefact and on conspicuous commodity consumption: imperial subjects consuming imperial subjects. oriental masquerade and magical selves 24 [T]here was something infinitely seducing in the character of a magician, doctor, and fakir... [E]ven respectable natives, after witnessing a performance of ‘Madal’ and the Magic mirror opined that the stranger was a holy man, gifted with supernatural powers, and knowing everything. One old person sent to offer me his daughter in marriage; he said nothing about the dowry,—but I thought it proper to decline the honour. (Burton 1893 cited by Low 1996, 211) This chapter has so far explored the cultural currency of “the Orient” in nineteenth century popular culture in Britain, and briefly explored ways in which orientalist iconography was staged, transl(oc)ated, and consumed in the theatre and at world expositions. What has as yet been unexplored is the appropriation of orientalist iconography in a staging (strategy) of identity by white European performers. Drawing upon the theatrical play with the real and the fantastic (music hall), and the exhibitionary objectification of the body (world fair), this chapter sites the popular late Victorian and Edwardian “oriental magician” at the intersection of these two trajectories. This intersection is arguably made most visible in late nineteenth century magicians’ “cross-dressing”, whereby performers sought to construct (through both mimicry and mockery) an orientalized identity. The point here though is not to claim cultural cross-dressing as the preserve of late nineteenth century magician, but to argue that the assumption of oriental costume by magicians makes public (i.e. publishes) the very ambivalence of colonial desire. Indeed, the magicians’ self-orientalization plainly diverges from that of the adventurer, the anthropologist, the military strategist et al for the intention is less cultural immersion (camouflage) and more a flaunting, or revealing, of exotica—whereby what is revealed is less the undressed body but the costume itself, the very constructedness of cultural identity. However, the wider social fashion for cultural cross-dressing, what Garber has called ‘the transvestic impulse of the turn of the century’ (1992, 336), needs to be briefly delineated in order to trace the confluence of colonialism (and its practices of collecting and exhibiting), and romanticism (the exoticisation of 25 the Other) upon the destabilisation of the imperialist self/other dichotomy. For as Low has succinctly argued, the imperial divisions of self and other were never complete: “Colonial subjectivities produced by the powerful divisions of self and Other seem paradoxically to be dogged by a relentless nostalgia and desire for the excluded Other.” (1996, 3) It is this paradoxical desire for the carefully excluded Other, ‘the fantasy of otherness as an achievable goal within the self’ (Garber 1992, 335 ), that this chapter explores—both as a position of social critique and as a stage of mimicry. As Garber (1992), MacLeod (1998) and others have argued the appeal of the “chic of Araby” lay in the perception of the greater freedom (particularly sexual) of the colonised Others. As such the fashion for wearing Oriental dress, particularly of items perceived as unisex (‘arabic robes’ and ‘turkish pants’ for example), became a means to extend or radically dilute colonial politics, whilst proffering a space of sexual ambiguity in an otherwise strictly codified society. In flirting with cultural otherness, the cross-cultural dresser (figures as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Richard Burton, Isabelle Eberhardt, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Pierre Loti et al) was, if only temporarily, freed from prescriptive Victorian gendered identities. However, to only interpret sexual ambiguity in cultural transvestism is to tell half the story. The wearing of oriental dress not only allowed a play (and display) of gender fluidity, nor simply reinforced the feminisation/sexualisation of the East common to Orientalist discourse, but expressed on a sartorial level the interior workings of a colonial ambivalence. As oriental dress served for some to express a loosening of the bonds of Victorian sexual mores, so too did it function—potentially and intentionally—as liberation from the demands (and violence) of colonial power. To culturally cross-dress was, in one small way, a disruption of the colonial culture’s paranoid 26 persistence in ‘demarcation, naming, and segregation’; to appear as the Other was to embody (parody?) the fear of contagion30, to bring to light the underground or surrogate self. The appeal of the disguise, white taken for native, is framed by an erotics of cultural penetration; not then a matter of walking in another’s shoes but being in another’s body. Important here to recognise is that the pleasure of transgression was predicated in part by the promise of revelation (i.e. unveiling). This thrill is not dissimilar to the pleasure afforded by the magician’s trick—that middle space between knowing and fooling/being fooled. This movement between the skilful penetration of the mysterious (where self is captivated in becoming the other) and the subsequent revealing of pretence (where the self swiftly resumes superiority over the other) mirrors the gendered epistemology of colonial rule: All too often, Enlightenment metaphysics presented knowledge as a relation of power between two gendered spaces, articulated by a journey and a technology of conversion: the male penetration and exposure of a veiled, female interior; and the aggressive conversion of its “secrets” into a visible, male science of the surface. (McClintock 1995, 23) Of course, cross-dressing’s destabilising of identities did not necessarily result in their subversion, and moreover cultural crossing in the nineteenth-century was largely restricted to one way traffic: only the privileged whites of the colonial culture (however critical of that power they may have been) could afford to play with ethnic identity.31 Isabelle Eberhardt’s adoption of a “Central to the idea of [evolutionary] degeneration was the idea of contagion (the communication of disease, by touching, from body to body), and central to the idea of contagion was the peculiarly Victorian paranoia about boundary order […]. The poetics of contagion justified a politics of exclusion and gave social sanction to the middle class fixation with boundary sanitation, in particular the sanitation of sexual boundaries.” (McClintock 1995, 47) 31 Though ethnic costuming was largely indicative of an imperial hierarchy of race, cultural passing was also (albeit far less commonly) employed as a strategy of assimilation by non-western individuals in London. One such example is Miss Olive Malvery, an Anglo-Indian woman whose investigative photojournalism was widely praised in Edwardian London. Malvery, in line with the “slumming expeditions” noted by Low (1996, 218) lived as a Cockney woman in the East End. “In representing her travels among the poor, Malvery presents herself as an imperial outsider who can pass as a metropolitan 30 27 male Sufi persona, for example, demonstrates how “the Orient” may act as a space of potential subversion, yet her honourable male status also suggest the reinscription of a position of privilege rather than cultural integration per se; opportunities are given to her as to no Arab woman precisely because of her culturally empowered difference—her residual whiteness and femininity. It is thus that nineteenth-century cultural cross-dressing both constituted and was constituted by a ‘complex fantasy of surveillance and transgression’ (Low 1996, 6) where cultural disguise or camouflage operated both as a rejection of Victorian ideals and an apparent divestment of power, and as an imperialist game of superseding the other in his/her otherness (Low 1996, 192). As such, cultural cross-dressing involved not only the seemingly innocent desire to be the other, but a way to consume the other through cultural appropriation (hooks 1992). Here Low’s analysis of the costume as an extension of the physical body, where costume is a marker of not only cultural but physiological otherness, is apposite. Following the nineteenth-century medical theories that mapped human diversity to different climatic zones, Low demonstrates that the theory of acclimatisation (the production of different bodies) was in part traced by sartorial codes as the privileged sites of racial difference. Conversely, racial difference was not infrequently reduced, through projects like Watson and Kaye’s The People of India, to costume. Whilst Low’s analysis rests on fictional cross-dressers—largely Kipling’s characters of Kim and Strickland, her insights (following Bhabha’s lead) extend beyond the domain of literary insider: an anglicized Indian whose knowledge of the metropolis, particularly of the “London poor”, has been gained by direct knowledge and by expert command over the linguistic and sartorial signifiers of social difference.” (Walkowitz 1998, 12) Walkowitz’s excellent paper traces the highly politicised nature of Malvery’s theatrical identification with various ethnic identities, including her re-configuration of her Indian identity to suit Edwardian taste. Malvery’s self-promotion as “Daughter of the Empire” cleverly worked to sublimate her racial difference within a frame of serving national interests. See also Cohn 1997, 118f on the politics of uniform in British India. 28 imagination into the lived politics of colonial ambivalence. The play between the costume’s magic (fulfilling ‘a fantasy of wholeness that can make good colonial alienation and lack’) and the real body beneath (the persistent truth of an unchangeable whiteness), mirrors the ambivalence broached by the nexus of power and pleasure in colonial discourse. “The lesson is that while on the one hand visible difference constitutes racial difference, on another level, that difference must be disavowed.” (1996, 215) In this vacillation between the exoticisation of difference and its disavowal, cross-dressing here serves the same contradictory demands that were met by the world exhibition: ‘the need to separate oneself from the world and render it up as an object of representation, and the desire to lose oneself within this object-world and experience it directly’ (Mitchell 1992, 307). This contradictory approach to the Orient, between its representation and its realisation, is arguably what underpinned magicians’ assumption of oriental costume, their fantastic narratives, and their active search for the “real thing”—travelling East to see and learn for themselves the ancient art of Oriental magic (see Chapter 5). For the magician this journey from ‘representation’ to ‘reality’ was especially significant, for it writ large (i.e. on a geographical scale) the conceptual shifts that were required of an audience of stage magic—i.e. an epistemic flexibility that allows for movement between the real as contrived and the real as essence. It is thus that both the cross-dresser and the magician, through their publicising of a blurred zone between desire and threat, identity and difference, and through the (conscious) slippage between registers of objecthood and subjectivity in their dealings with the Orient, literalise in visual terms a colonial ambivalence. In this light, Garber’s analysis of transvestism may be extended to apply equally to magic, but particularly to oriental(ist) magic, and further still to the cultural anxiety 29 that was marked by the birth of the uncanny, whether figured by colonial other, automaton, the medium’s spirit, the photographic transparency, or the unconscious mind: “This fear of blurring the line, of not being able to distinguish “reality” from “theater,” this susceptibility to fantasy—to cultural as well as to intra-psychic fantasy—is, precisely, the stage (stage in both senses, both the process and the playing space) of the transvestite.” (Garber 1992, 339) Both transvestite and magician may be seen then as liminal figures that lurked on the borders (national, sexual, racial, epistemological etc.) that were such a preoccupation (and source of paranoia) to the architects of Victorian cultural identity. Indeed, their social function may have been to ward off the very “boundary confusion” felt by those colonials who travelled between home and away (McClintock 1995, 33). By presenting themselves as the Other, they assuaged the threat of difference but thereby ultimately reinscribed the hegemony of the self. In the ultimate act of disavowal, then, cultural cross-dressing employs ambiguity not to subvert colonial authority but to enhance it. As such, the coloniser’s disguise is the inverse of the colonised’s flawed mimicry: for where the latter appears “almost the same but not white” (Bhabha 1994, 89) the former’s whiteness facilitates not only cultural passing but cultural mastery. Whereas the colonised mimic men are forced to ‘inhabit an uninhabitable zone of ambivalence that grants them neither identity nor difference’, the colonising mimic men are afforded a position of both identity and difference (identity as difference and difference as identity).32 It is thus that Garber’s This fantasy of an empowered cultural mobility is perhaps best illustrated by The Sheikh (1921). Though obviously inspired by the heroic adventures and romantic iconology of historical figures such as Richard Burton and Lawrence of Arabia, Rudolph Valentino’s enacting of Ahmed Ben Hassan explicitly sexualises the play with cultural identity. Here the Arab is less the representative of a feminized Orient, and more the personification of an Arab masculinity that is in turn identified as brute sexuality. Both the potential threat of violation of a white women, and Hassan’s role as the twentieth century incarnation of the “noble savage” however are ultimately mediated by the unveiling of Hassan’s true identity as a Scottish earl. Valentino’s sheikh is both the sexually powerful Arab (foil to the threat of the increasing 32 30 succinct analysis that ‘the condition of cross-dressing itself [is] that [it] makes both/and possible—and desirable’(1992, 318) needs to be qualified according to the political context of display and reception. The nexus of colonial exhibition, orientalist iconography and magic is nowhere more evident than in the ‘biography’ of the Egyptian Hall of Piccadilly. Having originally opened in 1812 to house and display William Bullock’s collection of curiosities, the Egyptian Hall began its career as one of the most successful commercial exhibition venues of the nineteenth century (comparative to the Coliseum and Adelaide Gallery etc). Bullock’s vision was something of the wonder cabinet writ large, though the transient gaze promoted by this “Egyptian eclectic” was partially modified by Bullock’s prescient though tentative attempt to categorise his exhibits (Altick 1978, 237). Alongside displays of specimens of the natural world and exotic artefacts, Bullock managed tours of historical artefacts—for example Napoleon’s battlefield carriage and the extremely popular Burmese State Coach. Bullock also started hosting auctions in 1819 to ensure commercial viability, but in 1821 Bullock curated an exhibition of the accumulated treasures of Giovanni Battista Belzoni that was to prove immensely popular. Heralded as one of the most successful egyptologists/looters of the Victorian era, Belzoni’s renown was linked to his previous employment as professional strongman, conjurer and showman of optical illusions—alternatively “The Roman Hercules” or “Patagonian Strongman” who was able to lift seven adult men at once. Belzoni’s career change is largely described as ‘one of the curious turns of fate’ so common to Victorian hagiography. 33 Following further catholic exhibits (most notable sexual emancipation of women at home) and the noble British gentleman—sexual domination and moral superiority are entwined in a fantastical collapsing of identity and difference. 33 “Here, a strong body, special-effects skills, and a profane ontology work directly to extend the global economy. They also work to place Europe at the center of world history; possessing and exhibiting 31 after Belzoni’s Egyptian “finds” was an exhibition of Mexican artefacts in 1823 and Turner’s watercolours), Bullock sold the Egyptian Hall to George Lackington prior to emigrating to the United States in 1827. Lackington rented rooms to any impresario or self-managed attraction, a move that marked the collapse of Bullock’s regional taxonomy of artefacts. Several exhibitions ran simultaneously, providing ‘a motley potpourri of late Regency and early Victorian entertainments for every taste and every social class’ (Altick 1978, 250). Exhibits ranged from bearded women, nautch girls, pianists, Samsons, clairvoyants, and bushmen alongside baboons, automata etc. Most lasting in the collective memory were the “original” Siamese twins, Eng and Chang, who were exhibited in 1829, and P.T. Barnum’s 1844 exhibition of Mr and Mrs Charles S. Stratton, alias Tom Thumb and wife Lavinia. By 1847, the display of human oddities had become so identified with the Egyptian Hall that Punch had described the venue as specialising in “deformito-mania” (Altick 1978, 254). But besides the freakish, the Egyptian Hall was also home to some of the most acclaimed panoramas—acclaimed both for their instructive value and artistic merit; these included in the late 1840s the three mile long panorama of the Mississippi, and the previously mentioned Overland Route to India. But by the 1860s, the Egyptian Hall’s association had once again been reconfigured, ‘increasingly given over to musical and mimetic entertainments’ though largely dominated—in line with the hall’s architectural facade and earlier history—by performances of Oriental magic and spiritualism. For instance, Colonel Stodare was billed in 1865, a self-proclaimed disciple of Indian fakirs from whom he learnt the secrets of the instantaneous Egyptian monuments in London signalled British appropriation of a world historical past. (During 1997, 831) Belzoni’s employment by the British consul to traffic Egyptian antiquities into the safe hands of the British Museum can be read as a precursor to later magicians’ service to the nation (see Chapter 5). 32 growth of plants, the Indian basket trick, and (somewhat confusingly) the Sphinx illusion. In 1867 Maskelyne introduced “The Mystic Freaks of Gynges or the Enchanted Gorilla Den”; and by the early 1870s Dr Lynn and the Fakir of Oolu (alias Alfred Sylvester and Hadji Mahoumed Salib) were common names alongside those of Maskelyne and Cooke, who were to take over management of the Hall as “England’s Home of Mystery” until 1905.34 The Egyptian Hall, perhaps more than any individual character, demonstrates the intersections of Orientalist ideology, popular culture and colonial economy in the nineteenth century—as summed up by its alternative moniker as “Mecca for lovers of Mystery”. Like the Egyptianate façade of the theatre on Piccadilly, many Victorian magicians managed successful careers under assumed oriental identities35. Crucial to the popularisation of these oriental magicians was Ching Ling Foo’s tour of the West in the 1900s, though he was by no means the first Asian conjurer/juggler to perform in London 36. Foo’s act inspired a host of After Cooke’s death in 1904, J.N. Maskelyne partnered with David Devant at St George’s Hall for a ten year span. On splitting with Devant in 1915, Nevil Maskelyne joined his father until the latter’s death in 1917. 35 For example, these include Ching Lau Lauro (c.1839); Phillipe, alias Jacques Talon (c.1840s); Wiljalba Frikell (c.1850s); D’Alvini, alias William Peppercorn (c.1865); Colonel Stodare, alias Jack English/Alfred Inglis (c.1865); Isaiah Harris Hughes, “The Fakir of Ava” (c.1860s); Alfred Silvester, “The Fakir of Oolu” (c.1870s); Dr Lynn (c.1875); Samri Baldwin as “The White Mahatma” (1880s); Prester John (c.1880s); Frank Hewes, “The White Yogi” (c.1896); P.T. Selbit as Joad Heteb (c1900s); Harry Kellar (1904); Fergus Greenwood, “The great Indian Fakir” (c.1910); Albert Marchinsky, “Rameses” (c. 1910); Okito, alias Theodore Bamberg (c. 1910); Ionia, “Goddess of Mystery” (c.1911); Kar-mi, alias Joseph Hallworth (1914); Arthur Dowling as “Prince Jovedah de Rajah, East Indian Psychic” (c1920); Leroy, Talma & Bosco and their “Mystery of Lhasa” (1920); The Great Nicola (1920); A. W. Hartropp as “Ben Said, the Algerian Funjurer” (c.1922); Blackstone’s Arabian (sometimes Oriental) Nights, including an item on the “Sepoy Rebellion” (c.1920); David Bamberg as Fu Manchu (c.1920s); Howard Thurston and his “Mysteries of India” show of 1930; Bela Lugosi as Chandu (1934); Helmut Schreiber as Kalanag (1950s) et al. This list is by no means extensive, and many of the great names of Victorian magic are absent for the simple reason that their performances were so varied that to include them would detract from the centrality of Oriental iconography in the performances of the above. For further biographical information on some of the above see Lamont 2004. 36 Of these, Ramo Samee is the most well known, having travelled to London in 1810. Kia Khan Khruse is also frequently cited as an early Indian performer (1815), though it is speculated that he was in fact a 34 33 aspiring orientalists: Ching Ling Hee, Ching Ling & Soo, Ching Ling Foy, Ching Yuen Lee, Choy Ling Hee etc. Most infamous among these however was Chung Ling Soo, born William Ellsworth Robinson in 1861 in New York. Robinson had already experimented with other oriental identities—Achmed Ben Ali, Nana Sahib, Hop Ling Soo—demonstrating a totalisation of the Orient through a shared exoticism of its regional identities.37 The particular histories of these namesake identities were rarely acknowledged, and were arbitrarily selected (or indeed conflated) according to the demands of spectacle. For example, Theodore Bamberg cast his Oriental identity of Okito (phonetic anagram of Kyoto and Tokyo both) as Chinese, owing to the pragmatics of costume design (Chinese robes were roomier than Japanese), without feeling any compunction to change the Japanese-inspired name.38 Indeed, it was perhaps only through the fraught relationship between Ching Ling Foo, who was performing at the Empire at the same time that Chung Ling Soo was billed at the Hippodrome, that Robinson’s Chinese identity was professionally forged (cf Christopher 1962, 125). Robinson assumed his Chinese identity as Soo both on and off the stage, pretending ignorance of the English language, and relying on similarly faux-oriental interpreters to Portugese man in costume. See Christopher 1962, 121f and Lamont 2004, 28f for more detailed accounts of touring jugglers/magicians from Japan, China and India. 37 This totalising of the Other, the casting of a homogeneity of black races, whereby Orientalism subsumes the Orient, was to be in part unravelled by the science of anthropology began to underwrite (even fetishize) cultural difference. But still in 1905 this binary division of them and us had changed little: “The people’s notion of black man is very limited and even the limited very vague. A good many Britons believe that all Africans and even Indians in Britain are from the same country, that they speak the same language and are known to each other...” (A.B.C. Merriman Labor cited by Shephard 1986: 105). Given the rhetoric of the world fairs (e.g. “the universe in a garden” where “a Lap and a Moroccan, a Malgache and a Peruvian go to bed in the same sleeping car” (see Talmeyr in Williams 1982: 61ff)) which arguably constituted the public discourse of race in the mid to late nineteenth century, such universalisation of otherness is neither wholly surprising nor unconditionally culpable. 38 See Albo 1973. David Bamberg, continuing his father’s Orientalist magic and riding on the popularity of Sax Rohmer’s novel, performed as Fu Manchu on tours and but as Fu Chan in America in order to avoid copyright infringement. David continued his Orientalist magic well into the mid-twentieth century. 34 communicate to the public. Indeed, the debate between authenticity and artifice, reality and illusion, was no longer restricted to the magic show alone but had spilled out into public space (mirroring events in the fractious showdowns between magicians and spiritualists). The apocryphal story is that Ching, nose out of joint, issued a challenge to Chung (“Did Foo Fool Soo?”, “Can Soo sue Foo?”) to perform a number of appointed tricks to prove his provenance, though in all likelihood this challenge was a publicity stunt staged by Chung himself. In a blatant inversion of ‘fact’, and a no less subtle appropriation of identity, Chung ultimately won the praise of the British public, and was authenticated thereby as ‘the real Chinaman’. It was soon obvious that the act presented by the man who was masquerading as a Chinaman was much more to the liking of the general public than the act which was genuine Chinese.... He acted the part perfectly. His slow, deliberate walk, the equally slow movement of his hands, the expression of his eyes, his bland little smile when he sprang a surprise on the audience, and his habit of shaking hands with himself when he was taking a curtain—all these things impressed audiences and served to convince them that Soo was really a Chinaman... Perhaps part of his success was due to the fact that he had a good deal of a Chinaman’s cunning in his own nature; he could be amusingly “deep” when it served his purpose to be so. (Goldston 1933, 23) 39 Is disguise or assumed identity then a consequence of a desire to seem what they are not, or a desire to deny what they are not? Chung Ling Soo’s whole charade clearly pivoted upon denying the ‘real’ Chinese magician’s claim to cultural authenticity. The Other’s very identity was to be stripped, parodied and elided—only to be reassembled by the (colonially) empowered Self—whereby the stereotype (rather than lived experience) comes to be seen as the marker of authenticity. As Pickering has argued, “the racial stereotype designates, places and tries to pin down the object that evinces otherness so that the other-who-cannot-be-known becomes utterly known, utterly visible, in a stripped-down, undifferentiated form, as inferior, disorderly, low.” 39 See also Evans 1902, 74 35 (1991, 196) It is significant then that as colonialists in India increasingly rejected Indian dress for a formal(ised) British uniform, stage magicians began to parody the mystery of the Orient that they had earlier sought to inherit through association.40 Magicians’ success at appropriating cultural otherness is not however to be read as a collapsing of the real and the imagined, whereby the naiveté of the nineteenth-century viewing public is assumed and made culpable for its lack of discernment; rather the success of Chung Ling Soo lies with the very ambiguousness of his identity. The “is he/ isn’t he?” conundrum pulled the audience in as active participant in the mystery of magic by not only fuelling the fascination with the exotic other but also by simultaneously promising the possible unmasking of this self-same other. The pretence of the costume here functions in much the same way as the exhibiting of the native at the world exposition and the minstrel in the variety theatre in that what is being presented is the dialectic movement between actuality and stage, between identity and mask, between presence and absence. Yet the magicians’ participation in this falsification of cultural otherness, given the context of the stretched reality of the conjuror’s illusions (i.e. the seeming elasticity of cause and effect, the insubstantiality of the material etc.), explicitly sought to confuse essential reality with appearance, self-revelation with self-masquerade. As Garber argues, ‘the very real power of transvestism [is] not as a carnivalized stage elsewhere, an exotic other, but rather as a reminder of the repressed that always returns’ (1992, 321).41 In this regard the staples of the magician’s repertoire—the illusions of dismemberment and visceral splicing “Far fewer Victorians wore Indian garb, took Indian wives, or engaged in Indian pastimes than did their Georgian forbearers.... “Going native” was a paramount fear and signalled a precipitate fall from civilized grace.” Cook 1996, 124 41 See also Low 1996, 130 40 36 (particularly of young, scantily-clad women)—project and re-appropriate through sublimation the barbarity, mysticism and sexual licence stereotypically attributed to the oriental Other. Coda: “Smoking Sleeping Standing, or My Realism Can be Your Magic” July 3rd, 2017. Mayank Austen Soofi, otherwise known as “The Delhi Walla”, street-life archivist, blogger and photojournalist, posted his daily apparently random42 collection of photos to his Instagram account. One, perhaps taken near the Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi, stood out. An autorickshaw is parked for the night; in the background, a blue tarpaulin, that may or may not be providing shelter for the night, reflects the orange glow of the street lights. Standing to the right, somehow diminutive aside the auto, is a fakir in charcoal grey shalwar kameez. He is thin, his head drooped forward, his weight supported by a staff which he holds with his left hand, his right arm resting upon his crossed left. Across his left shoulder is a woven strap to which a white plastic bag is tied at his right side. He has a cigarette between his lips. And yet he sleeps. It was the caption that I recognised: “Smoking Sleeping Standing, or My Realism Can be Your Magic”. With enviable brevity, Soofi playfully troubles the conventions we use to map both our world and the worlds of others: the fakir’s mundane is our extraordinary. It was to a similar troubling of categories that nineteenth-century magic both answered and contributed to. What this chapter sought to do, scattered though it is, was plot the cultural niche in which magic, particularly orientalist magic, both sprouted and flourished. The mid-nineteenth century was, after all, the dawn of the Golden Age of Magic as it was of aggressive imperial expansion, accelerated technological innovation, and socio-economic Many photos are part of open-ended series (e.g. Jobs that pay the bills; literary favourites, including Proust, Arundhati Roy, Derek Walcott and Jane Austen) 42 37 transformation. It is then a chapter of crossings—and crossing outs. But it is in these interstitial spaces, whether real or imagined, domestic or oriental, exhibition ground, theatre or carnival, moving between humans and animals (artists, natives, ghosts, donkeys), between cultural costumes (white tie, kimono, kaftan), between aesthetic genres (realism and melodrama), between industry and leisure, between gender and class, that modern magic took root—like a seed between flagstones. Indeed, the nineteenth century magic show is crowded with “tricks” that speak directly of these crossings: metamorphoses of human, animal and thing; projected phantasmagoria; splicing of the female/Oriental body; transformations of men into women and vice versa; the shared repertoire between aristocratic professors and mysterious-yet-flamboyant mahatmas; the disappearance of labour whether by means of spectacular apparatus-based illusions and minimalist mentalist readings. The cultural anxiety about borders (epistemic, gender, class, racial, technological et al) that magic both illustrated and responded to was of course not only the preserve of magicians—in this chapter, transvestite and oriental (i.e. “native”) bodies were foregrounded for their similar evidencing of shifting taxonomies in late nineteenth century popular culture. They provide both precedent and accomplice for the magician, and at times his fall guy. It is through tracing these transgressions that we are able to see how the magic assemblage occluded a series of double takes: the orient as product, realism as a contrivance, native authenticity as colonial artifice, labouring bodies as performing ghosts, copies as originals. “What opens up beneath the place where we wrongly thought a solid floor lay is an abyss, endlessly regressive, of convention on convention, code on code, reading of reading of reading.” (McCarthy 2014, 21) 38 The Orient both functioned as an index of power and a symbol of desire, as both physical reality and malleable fantasy. As such, native bodies were both necessitated at the fairs for proof and yet fetishized as one commodity among many. Real orientals were eviscerated, whether by theatrical narrative or by surveillance, thus allowing for white entrepreneurs (or romantics) to step into their hollowed-out identities. This is precisely what William Robinson engineered in his expropriation of Chineseness from Zhu Liankui (Ching Ling Foo)—“alleviating the uncomfortable Otherness of the foreign body by making it into something that could be bought, sold or consumed” and indeed performed.43 Reproduction here results less in a loss of aura than in its transference. Ching Ling Foo clearly lost his ranking on the Western tour circuit, but the auratic appeal of Chinese magic was simply transferred onto the copy rather than lost per se. Though Chung Ling Soo has been identified by many as a simulacrum (i.e. more real than that which it is a copy of), it is important to stress (as does Stahl 2008) that Soo’s on and off-stage identity depended upon a redaction of ideas of Chineseness taken from the culture at large (i.e. montage) rather than a mimetic copy of Foo per se. “Like magic, Foo could be from China without being Chinese, and Soo could be Chinese without coming from China—Orientalism, not Soo’s pantomimical charade […] was the secret to the great illusion.” (Goto-Jones 2014, 23). This move—by which cultural difference is both expropriated from Asian performers and appropriated by Westerner performers—was contemporaneous with the cultural shifts in the world fairs. Following the Great Exhibition’s halls of industrial production, world fairs began to incorporate a time-line of European progress, using both dinosaur skeletons and dioramas of Stahl 2008: 154. Beyond Stahl’s excellent chapter, scholarly interest in Chung Ling Soo has increased exponentially. Readers are directed to Jim Steinmeyer’s thorough yet immensely accessible 2006 biography, The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the Marvelous Chinese Conjurer, and more recently to the work of Christopher Goto Jones (2016, 2014). 43 39 non-western natives as foils. By 1889, the demand for spectacle (both erotic and technological) had come to define the fairs. “The cultural impact of the ﬁrst Western encounters with erotic dancers of the East is impossible to overestimate. Every fair after 1889 explicitly sought to supercharge the ideological display of free trade and colonial expansion with eroticism, latching consumption to the pornographic gaze, to the frenzy of the visible.” (Luckhurst 2012, 392). What Luckhurst fails to mention is how this eroticism, having initially been legitimated by anthropological (i.e. edifying) displays of native women, had by the turn of the century been redirected away from the oriental body to the more reﬁned aesthetics of the western artist (Loie Fuller, Sarah Bernhardt et al). The shift in representation of the Oriental woman, from enticing to deﬁcient, reﬂected the wider discursive shift in colonial politics that followed the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 (i.e. from ‘trade with’ to ‘rule over’). The tragic irony is that as Oriental women were marginalized, western women assumed their veils and the sexualized associations of their dances in the name of both aesthetic and sexual freedom. The latter’s visibility depended on the former’s invisibility. This trade in visibility—this shuttling between concealment and revelation, of appropriated identities and appropriate desire, of male gaze and female agency—was however shot through with domestic political concerns also. Concurrent with fears of native uprisings were fears of women’s growing demands for political and sexual independence. Orientalist masquerade may have made the body of the Oriental disappear, but in her place stood a new Salome44. Arguably, this sexually-empowered Salome functioned as the inverse of the feminized 44 In 1893 Oscar Wilde gave to Salome two singular gifts: her self-determination and her Dance of the Seven Veils. Both as play and as libretto for Strauss’ opera, Salome was subject to censorship both in England and America. (See Bentley 2002) 40 fakir—both ﬁgures highlighting the intersection of Orientalism, colonialism, sexual politics and “the arts of deception” (Cook 2001) in nineteenth century popular culture. These intersections do not make for simple narratives, and given that the following chapters are largely concerned with how male magicians determined, perpetuated and drove home a patriarchal Orientalism, I here (as a corrective of sorts) want to brieﬂy introduce three women who each appropriated the Orient deceptively, albeit to diﬀerent ends. Jeanne Scrive (1860-1908), a contemporary of Loie Fuller, was born in Paris, and is only slightly better known by her pen name, Jane de la Vaudère. Jeanne/Jane was a prolific author, writing over thirty novels (not to mention plays and poetry) and yet she has barely received mention outside of French academia. Guy Ducrey includes her in the group of “décadents méconnus” (2009), and other scholars have largely focused on two of her novels, Les Demi-Sexes (1898) and Les Androgynes (1900). These both explore themes of sexual freedom (decrying motherhood, advocating bisexuality, masturbation and cross-dressing). But de la Vaudère did not stop at so-called “salacious medical novels” (Mesch 2013); sexual freedom and erotica were also Orientalist affairs. Just in the short period between 1900 and 1904, de la Vaudère published at least six erotic novels that had Oriental settings—Java, Egypt, Japan, Thailand, and India. Courtesans, geishas, dancing girls and harems populate these novels, but it is her “roman magique” that is of specific interest here. Le Mystère de Kama, published in 1901, is set in Benares: a fakir castes his magic over the young, Viamalah, such that she can no longer bear sexual contact with her husband and is magnetically drawn to the fakir. As one tongue-in-cheek reviewer of the time wrote: At all events, lots of fakirs pray in lots of temples, and odd words are uttered and any number of Indian maidens pass to and fro undressed. Never in any French novel, have we come across so much uncovering: every Viamalah might be a model and the fakirs seem 41 to be the painters. But they pray and do not paint, and __. […] The whole book is truly enough a mystery; full, also, of improprieties. The monkeys alone are respectable… (Saturday Review 1901) Hence, Jane de la Vaudère (and indeed her reviewer) makes explicit what Loie Fuller only suggested and Madam Blavatsky only hinted at. An unveiled body/Orient promised both spiritual and sexual liberation, and thereby threatened to expose modernity’s patriarchal and rationalist strictures as evidence of its own barbarism. It is this threat that the magicians arguably co-opted. What was threatening about the Orient and women in the late nineteenth century was pacified, sedated, and tamed. Magicians were after all seen to hypnotize, suspend, and torture women on stage if they did not make them vanish altogether. What Jane de la Vaudère offered in her erotic novels and indeed in her collaboration with the Theatre du Grand Guignol was a portrait of transgressive desires which were clearly not hers alone.45 Arguably, the gentrified magic show gave form to these same potentially disruptive desires, but did so through a strategy of appeasement and containment, if not ridicule. Perhaps Margaretha Zelle (1876-1917) read de la Vaudère’s 1901 “roman javanais”, Trois Fleurs de Volupté, when she returned to Paris. She had spent five years in Java and Sumatra as a colonial officer’s wife (1897-1902) and, like Loie Fuller, came to Paris in 1905 to reinvent herself after an abusive marriage. This she did by becoming one of the most famous, daring and seductive dancers of the Belle Époque. Mata Hari’s first performance, Les Dances Brahmaniques, took place not in a theatre or bawdy music hall but in a private museum of oriental antiquities. The library of the Musée Guimet had been transformed into a Shaivite temple, scented with jasmine and sandalwood, and here Mata Hari (meaning “Eye of the Dawn”) 45 Cf Frappier-Mazur 1988, Coppa 2008, Maguire 2011. 42 presented herself as exponent of Hindu sacred dance. It was here that she shirked off her Dutch identity, and became the orphaned daughter of a devadasi. Her performance was “a delightful blend of mysterious, high-brow art and racy, low-brow sex. […] The irresistible combination of the sacred and the profane satisfied intellectual pretensions while legitimizing the prurient.” (Bentley 2002, 101) Where other dancers had appealed to classical Greece and ancient Egypt, “Mata Hari had a monopoly on the Hindu, the Indian, and the naked.” (Bentley 2002, 102). This monopoly did not last long, however, leaving her in a position much like Chung Ling Soo—protecting her own inauthenticity against future copies. As a famous dancer, courtesan and suspected spy, Margaretha Zelle’s life was both closely scrutinized and tragically determined by a much-politicized discourse of revelation and concealment. Mata Hari veiled her Dutch identity and yet unveiled an Orientalized body; she was both naïve and seductive, yet charged for calculated espionage on the flimsiest of evidence. The well-rehearsed story of Mata Hari’s death by firing squad in 1917 need not be repeated again here, other than to say that it was politically advantageous for both the French and the German officers involved to make her vanish. But if the Orient was a sensational plot device for de la Vaudère, a rarefied aesthetic for Fuller, a smart career move for Zelle, it offered something very different to Woolf. Neither expedient means nor erotic fantasy, nor part of the ongoing Salomania, Woolf’s Orientalist cross-dressing was both simply a lark and a critique of the established order of things. Where it is easy to put Chung Ling Soo’s success down to the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief, it is harder to explain the credulity of the navy officers on the HMS Dreadnought. In 1910, Horace de Vere Cole—Edwardian aristocrat, inveterate prankster—and four friends managed to board the most prized ship of the Royal Navy as members of the Abyssinian royalty. Virginia herself 43 was a keen but last minute recruit, her substitution vouchsafed by her brother, Adrian Stephen. For Virginia the jaunt required dressing both across gender and culture as she was to be a prince among princely regents. Aided by the costumier, Willy Clarkson, the group dressed in exquisite robes (though more generically Oriental than Abyssinian per se), attached beards, turbans and blackface. Preceded by telegrams reputedly sent by the Foreign Office, they travelled from Paddington to Weymouth by train, having obtained a special carriage given their august rank, and were subsequently greeted with due pomp and given the tour of this most powerful of warships. They received formal hospitality and gave their thanks in an impromptu gibberish, a jambalaya of Latin, Greek and nonsense, that was “interpreted” by Cole, in one instance asking for prayer mats.46 The group of five had pulled off a remarkable hoax, fooling disciplined and well-travelled naval officers in daylight and in close quarters. When Cole leaked the story to the newspapers, the public response was mixed: some congratulated the hoaxers for their ballsy prank, others felt it to be a matter of national humiliation. “In an era of rapid technological advance the fast, powerful and sleek Dreadnought became an icon of innovation and progress. The very word ‘dreadnought’ gripped the Edwardian imagination with ideas of efficiency, masculinity, and superiority.” (Jones 2013, 82) The Dreadnought Hoax had not taken place in a darkened theatre, nor in front of an audience who was particularly forgiving of caricatures, but rather the most powerful and disciplined naval force of the world. Moreover, the perpetrators themselves were highly educated, upper class gentlemen, who in the social hierarchies of the day were thought to be the most far removed from their racialized others (white working classes being the intermediaries). For a fuller account of the hoax, its preparations and its consequences, see Downer 2010, Jones 2013, and Johnston 2009. 46 44 How was it that their bungled disguises could have been so convincing? Was it, as Stahl has argued in relation to Chung Ling Soo’s success, that “the Oriental body [was] presumed to lack the Western subject’s complex sense of self and [was] thus reduced to easily understandable cultural or racial characteristics” (2008, 155)? Certainly, media accounts fixated on white Edwardian constructions of blackness—‘wooly’ hair, dark skin, and ‘nigger lips’. The surviving photographs of the hoaxers, whilst not wholly reliable as evidence, nevertheless show only dark skin and beards—no hair, no changes to facial features, no white gloves, no up-turned shoes, and no mounds of rich jewellery as described in various news accounts—suggesting that the newspaper reports constructed a vision of the faux-Africans that had less to do with the actual costumes and more with the racist assumptions of their readers. Perhaps, given Virginia’s pacifism and commitment to the suffrage movement, we would have expected more political point-scoring against the British establishment. However, Virginia only spoke publicly about her involvement in 1940, thirty odd years later, and then in a jocular fashion, reinforcing Cole’s reputation as a trickster rather than activist. What these crossings point to is a series of receding frames. The exhibition, the music hall, the racy novel, the naval ship all offered different codes of belief and/or make believe, each determining what was real and what imposture. But running through all of these, the Orient remains a cipher—that lent safe cover until the code was indeed broken. Indeed, my realism can be your magic, my parody your truth, my author your prince. 45

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