Dancing Dead Girls: Monstrous Spectacle in 19th Century Ballet

Shades, sylphs, and wilis - ghosts of young women - adorn nineteenth-century ballet. La Sylphide (1832/6) saw Marie Taglioni dancing en pointe for aesthetic effect as a sylph. Her physicality embodied the liminal being who dies in her lover’s arms. In Giselle (1841) and La Bayadere (1877) the female leads die of broken hearts but return to haunt their lovers. Female dancers perform deaths and undeaths, haunting the stage as uncanny returns made flesh. In ‘Gothic, Ballet, Dance: The Aesthetics and Kinaesthetics of Death’ (2019), Steven Bruhm argues Giselle and other undead ballerinas ‘helped to establish the tradition of the monstrous female figure that still anchors so much of the Gothic.’ The ballet blanc tradition of dancing women in white enticing unfaithful lovers to their death was delightful and disturbing. Moreover, it reflected concerns around the inherent monstrosity of women and the figure of the femme fatale in Gothic texts such as ‘Christabel’ (1797-1800) and Carmilla (1872) and Dracula (1897). This intrigue at the dancing dead girl was reiterated off stage: the prima ballerinas who performed these roles were often depicted, in photographs or prints, in full costume holding a pose. Their identity elided with the characters they performed. Indeed, much like a shade herself, Taglioni’s immortal appeal continued after her death: her grave becoming a site of pilgrimage where local dancers leave their worn point shoes as homage to her skill. This article will explore how the undead ballerina performs a subliminal monstrosity that reveals the tensions between the Gothic, spectacle and gender in the 1800s.