According to recent scholarship, Edgar Degas’s pictures of ballet dancers as well as of bathing or nude women are situated between voyeurism and misogyny. It has been observed among art historians that Degas’s ballerinas are not necessarily pretty. An especially good example of Degas’s cruel observation or misogyny is considered the stocky figure in the foreground in “The Dance Class,” 1874. The fact that Degas felt entitled to practice such an unembellished naturalism on ballet dancers thus implies a position of both social and sexual power. My own encounter with the art of Degas, however, has been very different. Right from the beginning, I saw him not as a notorious voyeur or misogynist, but as an artist conscious of the female condition, sensitive to contemporary developments in the arts, and acutely aware of social and political events of the time.
Degas’s increasing discontent with the idealized depiction of women can be seen not only as a manifestation of his misogyny but also as a response to the paintings produced by the preceding and contemporary artists and a desire to create something new in the arts. Indeed, Degas depicted ballerinas as marginalized figures in French society, yet such representations cannot be automatically attributed to his hatred for women. Perceived as the mystified unknown, strange, and insignificant in the French social system, the ballet dancer was associated with the Oriental “Other” and thus often set in the marginal context. It may as well be simply a reflection of the fact that dancers are real people and that we admire their talents, rather than their actual appearance.
Rather than focusing on Degas’s best recognized backstage pictures of ballerinas, for which he has been accused of a “keyhole” aesthetics, I became interested in his performance picture “Dancer on the Stage,” for which the artist is less known I have considered this painting within the perception of ballerinas in French society and within the political influences on Orientalist ideology in nineteenth-century France. “Dancer on the Stage” was painted with reference to several exotic productions at the Paris Opera: Ludwig Minkus and Léo Delibes’s “La Source,” Gaetano Donizetti’s “La Favorite,” Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “L’Africaine,” and Jules Massenet’s “Le Roi de Lahore.” These exotic performances held a special appeal to the French government and public, for the Paris Opera had long been a symbol of France. Preoccupied with a national identity, the Opera in the nineteenth century turned to the Orient as a way to support French colonialist ambitions, to embody the idea of French superiority, and to glorify the French state. On the other hand, perceived as the mystified unknown, strange, and insignificant in the French social system, the ballet dancer was as well associated with the “Other” and thus set in the marginal context.
European Westerners considered the Orient, not only as “a place of romance, exotic beings, hunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences,” but also as “a land of altered existence,” weak and inferior to the West. From Euro-centric perspective, the Orient signified the alluring yet dangerous lands of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria, including the Holy Land, Palestine, and the Lebanon. In European imagination about the Orient, the elements of strangeness, mystery, and eroticism were strongly emphasized by travelers, explorers, writers, and artists who shared the need to claim and construct the Orient as a European Other. For instance, Charles Baudulaire in his book “Les Fleurs du mal,” 1840–1867, emphasized a sense of imaginative detachment from modern life in the East, providing European readers with the experience of exotic fantasy through images of ports and ships, of half-glimpsed tropical foliage, abundant fruit, and warm seas. Victor Hugo noted that the Orient had become, for both the intellect and the imagination, a sort of widespread preoccupation.
Painters like Eugene Fromentin and Jean-Leon Gerome created the “picturesque” images of Oriental experience as erotic, mysterious, and tranquil. In Fromentin’s painting, static quality and a sense of detachment deny the cultural development in Oriental history, suggesting that Europeans were the only forces causing change in the Oriental world. Gerome, emphasized the “insistent, sexually charged mystery,” with a sense of erotic availability, in his paintings like The Almeh (Arab Girl in a Doorway). These evocative literary and artistic images had thus constructed the collective anthropological consciousness and long continued to shape the Western understanding of the Orient.
People who did not travel could consult guide books, travelers’ memoirs, and published collections of photographs or drawings that conveyed images of the region’s villages, beasts of burden, and crumbling ancient monuments. Musicians and music lovers were also able to discover for themselves the richness and complexity of the music of the Middle East, when a Tunisian instrumental ensemble held forth at the Paris International Exhibition of 1878.
Based on contemporary scholarship (Edward Said), the Orient was also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In this respect, the discourse of Orientalism coincides with the definition of colonialism, in which a country, in the pursuit of raw materials and world markets, establishes colonies and maintains an empire through the conquest of other lands. The Orient, as a European invention, was thus positioned in a direct contrast to the West, and its contrasting existence was at the core of French colonial discourse. In 1830, the French army invaded Algeria, and a new colony was established there, as well as more colonies would later be founded in Tunisia, Morocco, Indochina, and Madagascar. Especially, after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, overseas conquests served as a consolation for French humiliation at home.
Apart from their colonial associations, the French also considered Spain as the “Other,” as a result of Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of Spain in the years between 1808 and 1813, yet the idea of superiority over non-Western had shifted here to over non-French. Southern Spain, in particular, where the middle Eastern influence could be seen in the Moorish heritage of Granada, with its Alhambra, was readily demarcated by the French as the exotic Other. Spain was transformed by the French into a contrasting place, for it had become a leaderless nation divested of the Catholic Spanish royal rulers from the beginning of the Napoleonic campaign. Under such political circumstances, Frnace sought to dissociate itself from its less powerful Catholic Latin neighbors. The French public was yet fascinated by the stoic resistance of the Spanish to the great conqueror Bonaparte. During the Revolution (1789-1795), the French public had learned to defend itself without a king and thus had a tremendous sympathy fro the Spanish fighters in the Napoleonic Wars. Espagnolisme, that is, the appropriation of Spanish themes in the literary, musical, and visual arts, served as a powerful ideological force in nineteenth-century France. France thus sought to elevate itself to the status of the international leader by conquering other countries and representing them as insignificant in the cultural-historical context. Paris often turned the news about military conquests into the entertaining and dazzling Oriental spectacle that would be imprinted in the French collective mind. The Parisian boulevards were filled with men in elaborate blue Turkish blouses selling perfumed sweets, while exotic coffee, desserts, and music were enjoyed by a fashionable crowd in Parisian cafes.
How the idea of Oriental spectacle manifested itself in the modern city can be also seen in the international exhibitions held by Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the Paris Exposition of 1889, for example, the Esplanade des Invalides featured military displays of the French War Department and the foreign pavilions reconstructed in authentic architectural style. The Colonial Section, in particular, held a special appeal to the public, for it was representative of many parts of the world, including Moorish palaces, Egyptian streets, and other exotic reproductions. The photograph from the collection of Prince Roland Bonaparte shows the life performance “Concert d'Alger” in the 'Moorish café.' There were also inhabited “villages” of France’s Asian and African colonies, which successfully promoted a feeling of geographical proximity, while the sense of spectacle was calculated to preserve the cultural dissonance. The exhibitions literally captured indigenous peoples who represented “the colonized, potentially dangerous subject” and reproduced them in an accessible and supposedly open environment. The authentic reproductions of colonial villages within Western culture yet suggested the imperialist ambition, because there was a strong sense of voyeurism about these displays and they could only have reinforced a sense of white western superiority.
The new Paris Opera, designed by the French architect Charles Garnier in 1861, was inaugurated on January 5th, 1875. As a symbol of the French nation, the Paris Opera had long been sensitive to political developments and supportive of government policy by producing exotic themes. Orientalist productions at the Opera became extremely popular with the French public, for they were representative of the other parts of the world. With its panoramic tropical setting, Degas’s pastel “Ballet at the Paris Opera,” 1877, reveals that it was the large-scale exoticism that so appealed to Frenchmen. These magnificent Oriental spectacles provided the French audience with an illusion of their own collective journey from one exotic country to another, while reinforcing a sense of cultural supremacy over the rest of the world.
The Opera composers and producers were well aware of the popular taste for Oriental exoticism, so they created and revived the operas with Eastern or tropical themes. “La Favorite” composed by Gaetano Donizetti in 1840 was revived at the Palais Garnier in 1875, with new costumes, settings, and choreography. In “La Favorite,” the story takes place in Spain, in the midst of the Spanish battles with the Moors, who conquered the Iberian Peninsula in AD 714 and dominated Spain for the next 700 years. The title refers to Leonora, the mistress of King Alphonse XI of Castile. Leonora is shown as a victim of the tensions between Spanish royalty and members of the Catholic Church at the Monastery of Santiago di Compostela. The ballet dancers dressed in sumptuous harem-like outfits were set in an elegant Alhambra-like Moorish palace on an island off the coast of Spain.
In “L’Africaine,” the title translates as the “African Maid” and refers to a slave girl brought by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. But, in reality, she is a Hindu queen of Madagascar who falls in love with Vasco. She eventually ends her life because Vasco returns to his fiancée from his native Portugal. The revived 1877 version of “L’Africaine” was replete with temple dancing girls, placed among tropical flora and next to a large palace in a Hindu sanctuary.
Since “La Favorite” and “L’Africaine” had long remained popular with Opera audiences, the French composer Jules Massenet produced in 1877an oriental story Le Roi de Lahore, as a response to the prevailing tastes in modern France. “Le Roi de Lahore” is a melodramatic story brought within the historical context of the Muslim conquests of India in the eleventh century. Here, great emphasis is placed on internal affairs and intrigues. In the end, the priestess of the Indian temple and the King of Lahore fell prey to vicious actions of their rivals.
Orientalist ideology in Degas’s “Dancer on the Stage” can be seen in the painting’s relation to the Garnier Opera and its repertoire. The lush, jungle-like flora in the scene can be found in the stage designs for all the three exotic operas. The colonized female subjects in these Orientalist productions were always represented by alluring dancing girls. It is important to note that in the nineteenth century dance was not considered as an independent form of art but almost exclusively as an accompaniment to opera. The architect Garnier himself perceived the ballet as playing a subsidiary role to great music and great dramatic literature and, in general, less important in the grand Opera scheme. In this regard, ballet performers adjacent to the Palais Garnier, a signifier of the French nation, had no meaning except in relation to the Opera, and thus personified the “Other.” In “Dancer on the Stage,” this is evident in the choice Degas made in the composition by putting the figure far off to the side and thus representing the Opera dancer as marginal. The performer is displayed with her body in profile and her head turned away from the viewer. She averts her eyes from the audience and thus expresses a sense of distance, as if trapped in her own social reality of being favored yet estranged.
With intense blues, greens, yellows, browns, and blacks, overlaid with misty grays, Degas created the mysterious colonized terrain, in which an exotic dancer appears frozen in space. The static representation of the ballerina reflects a mental picture of Oriental existence that is far from European dynamism and modernity. The statuesque ballerina appears herself as a beautiful, refined object and seems to be detached from the realities of modern life. The picture title draws the viewer’s attention to a dancer, but not exactly to her identity. Desired and possessed by the Opera audience, a ballet dancer was yet stripped of her identity in favor of the invisible gaze. Degas presents the persona of the alluring dancer in ways that suggest not only her sexual availability but her relationship to the Opera – a world of spectacle and possession.
Degas responded to events at the Paris Opera, and, as an artist, he was sensitive to the preconceptions imposed by his own culture and time. An exoticized image of the ballerina represents his conscious decision based upon aesthetics, an estimation of the public perception, and the power of the stereotype. What is depicted here may not have happened in a single performance, because despite his loyalty to the Opera’s programs, Degas’s ideas were far from descriptive illustration. Perhaps, the artist was interested not in an accurate record of the Paris Opera images and events, but in the moment, in which the most significant aspects of several exotic spectacles would be juxtaposed in the scene. In this respect, “Dancer on the Stage” reflects an accumulated, multi-layered collective experience of Orientalist productions at the Opera throughout the nineteenth century. In a greater sense, Degas has created the painting, in which the ballet dancer exists as the Oriental Other, thus speaking of her social circumstances and also of political events in modern France.—Diana Guber, “Edgar Degas: Dancer on the Stage,” 2009.