Abstract
This essay analyzes a constellation of vestimentary and bodily practices in the setting of the music-hall which heralded the fashion for the savage. The image of the savage was frequently emphasized in descriptions of can-can dancers, semi-nude chorus girls, and the genre of singers discussed in this essay, and was in fact the predominant figure of the sexually desirable woman in the last quarter of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th. The illustrations that accompany the text demonstrate that is also made up part of the image of the fashionable Parisienne. Nothing was more modern, more fashionable between 1880 and 1900 than nervous pathology, whose jerky rhythms and movements defined popular song and performance style in the period. Songs like “Nervous”, “I'm a Neurasthenic”, and “La Parisienne épileptique” were sung by a new genre of performer called Epileptic singers. These performers modelled their performance style on the tics, grimaces, contortions, and convulsive movements and gestures of epileptics and hysterics. Thanks to phenomenal media attention on hysteria, the great majority of spectators recognized this source. The journalist Georges Montorgueil wrote: “A good half of today's hit songs… belong to the late Dr Charcot's home for the agitated. They jerk and tremble. They have gesticulatory hysteria”. In its restructuring of the body, hysteria became a cultural phenomenon and created a new form of expression in the arts. At the same time, a truly obsessional fascination with exoticism and all things African is easily noted in France between 1877 ad 1910. Labelled “animalistically aggressive” like Africans, both in dress and in song lyrics the chanteuse épileptique flaunts the assimilation with courtesans, cocottes and prostitutes. Gordon argues that the rhythms, hyper-sexuality, and aura of danger attributed to black women were co-opted by white stars. This influence is particularly noticeable in Polairc, the wasp-waisted brunette who formed a threesome with Colette and her husband Willy. Journalists wrote that her face was that of “a delicate and perverse little animal” – an animal that could not be more modern, since it “is profiled on the most modern of Parisian horizons”. The paradoxical mixture of an aura of the primitive, of hysteria, and of Parisian chic became in fact the key to success in the Music Hall.
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