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In the flesh: the representation of burlesque theatre in American art and visual culture

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In the flesh: the representation of burlesque theatre in American art and visual culture

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Content IN THE FLESH: THE REPRESENTATION OF BURLESQUE THEATRE IN
AMERICAN ART AND VISUAL CULTURE

by

Jennifer Munro Miller

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

December 2010

Copyright 2010 Jennifer Munro Miller

ii

Acknowledgements

There are many people without whom this dissertation would not be possible.
The collections of a number of archives and libraries across the country were invaluable
to my research. I would particularly like to thank the librarians and staffs of the Prints
and Photographs Division and the Motion Picture and Television Division of the Library
of Congress, the Archives of American Art, the Archives Center at the National Museum
of American History, the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Library for the
Performing Arts, the Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of
Photography, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Special
Collections at the University of Southern California, the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex,
Gender, and Reproduction. Their gracious and generous assistance in navigating their
collections made for fruitful and joyful research.
My professors and fellow graduate students in the Art History department at USC
have provided years of support, encouragement, friendship, and intellectual challenge. I
would particularly like to thank the faculty who served on my committee at various
stages, some of whom have moved on to other institutions: Malcolm Baker, Camara
Holloway, Selma Holo, Eunice Howe, Richard Meyer, and Vanessa R. Schwartz. I am
deeply grateful to Richard Meyer and Vanessa Schwartz for shepherding me through this
process. Thank you to the faculty of Art & Art History at the College of William &
Mary, especially Professors Barbara Watkinson and Alan Wallach, for their rigorous
introduction in a field that I love and for imbuing me with a desire for more knowledge.

iii

I am blessed with an amazing family and network of friends who are endlessly
understanding and have never failed to express interest in this project over the years it has
dominated my life. My parents, Richard and Carol Munro, who introduced me to the
world of museums, provided me with unconditional support and love tempered by an
impetus to work hard. My brother, Jeff Munro, who completed his Ph.D. years ago, has
been uncharacteristically politic about how long it has taken me to catch up, for which I
am most appreciative. The practical and emotional support of the Miller family,
especially my parents-in-law, William and Bonnie Miller, has also been a tremendous
help.
My wonderful husband, Ashley Edward Miller, inspired me to continue my
graduate studies and has never faltered as my font of encouragement or as the voice of
reason when panic struck. I cannot thank him enough for his patience, humor and
wisdom through this process. The birth of our beautiful son, Caden Munro Miller,
proved to be the greatest motivation for completing this dissertation.

iv

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Abstract

Introduction

Chapter 1: Women in Tights: Legs and Other Transgressions in
Representations of Late 19
th
Century Burlesque

Chapter 2: The Exotic Dancer and the Transgressive Potential of
Burlesque, 1890-1930

Chapter 3: Salacious Display: Representing and Viewing the Women of
Burelsque in the Era of Striptease, 1925-1945

Chapter 4: The Image of the Burlesque Queen: A Study of
Representations of Gypsy Rose Lee

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix: Archives Consulted

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List of Figures

Figure I.1: Entrance to Exotic World Movers & Shakers Museum and
Striptease Hall of Fame in Helendale, California, April 2005

Figure I.2: Installation of a corner of the Exotic World Movers & Shakers
Museum and Striptease Hall of Fame in Helendale, California,
April 2005

Figure I.3: Lydia Thompson as Robinson Crusoe, c. 1870

Figure I.4: Little Egypt, n.d

Figure I.5: Everett Shinn, Concert Stage, 1905

Figure I.6: Reginald Marsh, "On the Straight and Narrow Path," The Yale
Record, March 1920

Figure I.7: Gypsy Rose Lee, 1931-1957

Figure 1.1: Mary Ann Lee as Fatima in “The Maid of Cashmere,” n.d.

Figure 1.2: Adah Isaacs Menken as Mazeppa, c. 1861-1866

Figure 1.3: The Black Crook Unmasked, c. 1866

Figure 1.4: Jules Chéret, Lydia Thompson as Faust, c. 1896

Figure 1.5: Lydia Thompson, n.d.

Figure 1.6: Lydia Thompson, n.d.

Figure 1.7: C.D. Fredricks & Co., Olive Logan, New York, 1865

Figure 1.8: Gehrig, Lydia Thompson as Prince Fritz, Chicago, n.d.

Figure 1.9: Mathew Brady Studio, Isabella Hinckley, 1861

Figure 1.10: Sarony, Pauline Markham, n.d.

Figure 1.11: Houseworth’s Celebrities of San Francisco, Pauline
Markham, n.d.

Figure 1.12: Eliza Weathersby, c. 1870s

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Figure 1.13: Sarony, Black Crook Co., c. 1892

Figure 1.14: Sarony, Black Crook Co., c. 1892

Figure 1.15: Cuts for Mazeppa, from Specimens of Show Printing in
Miniature Form

Figure 1.16: Cuts for Black Crook, from Specimens of Show Printing in
Miniature Form

Figure 1.17: Cut for Ixion, from Specimens of Show Printing in Miniature
Form

Figure 1.18: Cut for Spectacular, from Specimens of Show Printing in
Miniature Form

Figure 1.19: The Victoria Loftus British Blondes, c. 1878

Figure 1.20: H. C. Miner Lithograph Co., "On the String!" Bon Ton
Burlesquers, c. 1898

Figure 1.21: H. C. Miner Lithograph Co., DeVere's High Rollers
Burlesque Co., c. 1898

Figure 2.1: Courier Litho. Co., The Arabian Nights or Aladdin's
Wonderful Lamp, c. 1888

Figure 2.2: Robert Henri, Salome, 1909, Mead Art Museum

Figure 2.3: Robert Henri, Salome, 1909, John and Mable Ringling
Museum

Figure 2.4: Courier Co., The Great Chariot Race in Bend Her, High
Rollers Extravaganza Co., c. 1900

Figure 2.5: Enquirer Job Printing Co., The Beautiful Indian Maidens,
c. 1899

Figure 2.6: Cover of The National Police Gazette, 31 March 1894

Figure 2.7: Benjamin Falk, Little Egypt, c. 1896

Figure 2.8: Courier Litho. Co., Our Boquet of Beauties, c. 1900

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Figure 2.9: Gustave Moreau, L'Apparition, c. 1876

Figure 2.10: Aubrey Beardsley, The Stomach Dance, illustration for
Wilde’s Salomé, 1894

Figure 2.11: Franz Von Stuck, Salome, 1906

Figure 2.12: Maud Allan as Salomé, c. 1908

Figure 2.13: Maud Allan as Salomé, c. 1908

Figure 2.14: F.C. Bangs, NY, Gertrude Hoffman As Salome, c. 1908

Figure 2.15: F.C. Bangs, NY, Gertrude Hoffman as Salome, c. 1908

Figure 2.16: "All Sorts and Kinds of Salomes," The Theatre, April 1909

Figure 2.17: Robert Henri Papers. Scrapbooks of Clippings

Figure 2.18: Robert Henri, La Reina Mora, 1906

Figure 2.19: Robert Henri, Ruth St. Denis in the Peacock Dance, 1919

Figure 2.20: "A Persian Princess," 1927

Figure 2.21: Covarrubius, "Familiar Figures of Burlesque," Vanity Fair,
January 1926

Figure 2.22: Bubbles Darlene, Cabaret Yearbook 2, c. 1955

Figure 3.1: Reginald Marsh, Burlesk Runway, 1930

Figure 3.2: Birth of the Pearl, 1901

Figure 3.3: Trapeze Disrobing Act, 1901

Figure 3.4: Reginald Marsh, Gaiety Burlesk, 1930

Figure 3.5: Reginald Marsh, Star Burlesque, 1933

Figure 3.6: Mabel Dwight, Houston Street Burlesque, 1928

Figure 3.7: Mabel Dwight, On the Runway in Vanity Fair, 1929

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Figure 3.8: Program cover for Life Begins at 'Minsky's", 1937

Figure 3.9: Thomas Hart Benton, Burlesque, c. 1930

Figure 3.10: Thomas Hart Benton, City Activities with Subway, 1930

Figure 3.11: Thomas Hart Benton, Peggy Reynolds, 1930

Figure 3.12: Remie Lohse, "A Chorus on the Runway" and "A Comedian
in Blackface" in Vanity Fair, June 1933

Figure 3.13: Remie Lohse, "The Living Curtain," "Irving Place and 14th
Street," "A Stripper Does Her Routine," and "Spring à la
Botticelli" in Vanity Fair, June 1933

Figure 3.14: Stuyvesant Van Veen, Proscenium at the Irving Place in
Fortune, February 1935

Figure 3.15: Stuyvesant Van Veen, 1935 Burlesque Queens in Fortune,
February 1935

Figure 3.16: Stuyvesant Van Veen, The Sewing Room in Fortune,
February 1935

Figure 3.17: "Curtain down on burlesque" May 3 1937

Figure 3.18: Berenice Abbott, "Irving Place Theater," from Changing New
York, 1938

Figure 3.19 : New York Post, July 23, 1937

Figure 3.20: Adolf Dehn, The Last Veil, 1941

Figure 3.21: Edward Hopper, Girlie Show, 1941

Figure 3.22: Thomas Hart Benton, Susannah and the Elders, 1938

Figure 3.23: Thomas Hart Benton, Persephone, 1937-1939

Figure 3.24: Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood, 1937

Figure 3.25: Edward Hopper, Painter and Model, c. 1902-04

Figure 3.26: Raphaelle Peale, After the Bath, 1822
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Figure 3.27: Edward Hopper, Jo Painting, 1936

Figure 3.28: Edward Hopper, Study for Girlie Show, 1941

Figure 3.29: Edward Hopper, Study for Girlie Show, 1941

Figure 3.30: Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926

Figure 3.31: Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939

Figure 3.32: Edward Hopper, Two Comedians, 1965

Figure 3.33: Reginald Marsh, Burlesque Dancer, 1944

Figure 3.34: Reginald Marsh, Down at Jimmy Kelly's, 1936

Figure 4.1: Ralph Steiner, Gypsy and Her Girls, 1944

Figure 4.2: Gypsy Rose Lee, 1931

Figure 4.3: Ann Corio, n.d

Figure 4.4: Bruno of Hollywood, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1935

Figure 4.5: Sally Rand, 1936

Figure 4.6: Orpheum Theatre Program, 1936

Figure 4.7: "Disrobing Act a Feature of Burlesque and Cabaret," Chicago
Daily Tribune, January 31, 1937

Figure 4.8: Program for Streets of Paris, New York World's Fair, 1940

Figure 4.9: Reginald Marsh, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1943

Figure 4.10: Alfred Cheney Johnston, Drucilla Strain, c. 1931-1934

Figure 4.11: Screen Capture from Dancing Lady, 1933

Figure 4.12: George Hurrell, Joan Crawford in Dancing Lady, 1933

Figure 4.13: George Hurrell, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1937

Figure 4.14: Arnold Newman, Gypsy Rose Lee, New York City, 1945
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Figure 4.15: Gypsy Rose Lee, Self-Portrait, 1942

Figure 4.16: VVV 1, no. 2-3 (March 1943)

Figure 4.17: Gypsy Rose Lee in Star and Garter from VVV 1 no. 2-3
(March 1943)

Figure 4.18: Max Ernst, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1942

Figure 4.19: Gypsy Rose Lee in Burlesque, c. 1935

Figure 4.20: The Hotel Room c. 1935

Figure 4.21: Dixie Evans, "The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque," Cabaret
Quarterly

Figure 4.22: Cavalcade of Burlesque, May 1952

Figure 4.23: Cavalcade of Burlesque, May 1952

Figure 4.24: Advertisement for Springmaid Fabrics, c. 1950s

Figure C.8: Mitch O'Connell, "Exotic World Weekend 2007," 2007

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Abstract

“In the Flesh: The Representation of Burlesque Theatre in American Art and
Visual Culture” is a study of representations of American burlesque theatre from 1868 to
the mid-twentieth century. Recent interest in burlesque, both scholarly and in the form of
the nostalgic neo-burlesque movement, has centered on its transgressive, camp potential.
While this potential is apparent in images of burlesque, it is diffused. The display of the
female body became the featured draw of American burlesque theatre in 1868, and by the
later decades of the nineteenth century, burlesque was considered a low theatrical form
for a mostly male audience. Representations of burlesque engage issues of high and low,
art and obscenity, as well as spectator and spectacle. Late nineteenth century images of
burlesque and its female performers are characterized by exaggerated female display,
exotic allusions, humor, and a carefully mediated tension between female performer and
her male audience. These elements persisted in burlesque representations even as the
theatrical genre evolved and declined. Diverse images including theatrical
advertisements, popular media illustrations and photographs, and paintings by canonical
artists reflected and helped constitute burlesque performance as sexually suggestive
beyond the boundaries of conventional behavior and taste. In visual depictions, the
parody and caricature that are part of the literary and theatrical tradition of burlesque are
evident in inversions of gender expectations and pointed references to class distinctions.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, American artists interested in urban spectacle
were looking to popular entertainments as subjects for their work. The interest in
burlesque as a subject from artists such as Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward

xii

Hopper, Mabel Dwight, and Stuyvesant Van Veen coincided with the increasingly
salacious display of the female body on stage. As a setting, burlesque afforded an
opportunity to reveal the artificiality of glamour, to observe and depict the viewing of a
female performance of nudity, and to draw attention to the relationship between spectator
and spectacle. The endurance of the burlesque aesthetic that emerged in the later half of
the nineteenth century demonstrates its currency as a means of exploring the display of
the female body at the borders of high and low culture and art and obscenity.

1
Introduction
Described as “the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to preserving
the art and artifacts of the golden age of Burlesque,” the Exotic World Movers & Shakers
Museum and Striptease Hall of Fame was located on what was once a goat farm in
Helendale, California until 2006 (Figure I.1).
1
The “golden age” referenced in the
description of the museum extended from the 1920s through the late 1950s, an era in
burlesque history when the stripteaser reigned. This domination was reflected in the
collection and display at the Exotic World Museum. A former stripteaser named Dixie
Evans, known as the Marilyn Monroe of burlesque, was the curator of the museum when
it was open to the public in Helendale. She described the function of the collection in
nostalgic terms:
So anyway, we have wonderful, wonderful people that have cooperated and have
tried to realize that this is a part of America’s history that has slipped away. It
will never come back. The young new girls are trying very hard and they do, they
put on great shows. But this was an era. I had a professor from one of the
schools in Bakersfield, and he said Dixie, years ago I just loved to go to the
Burlesque show, and when I’m sitting in there I’m looking at History. One of
these days this is going to disappear. And I said I had the same feeling . . . I had a
feeling this is going to go away. … So anyway, time changes, society changes,
morals change, so what we tried to preserve here is a history of America,
Americana they call it a lot of times, of something that was very vital to the
American public at that time. Not only were the working people put down and
ashamed, but no, hey we’ve got something of our own.
2

1
Dixie Evans and Exotic World USA, “Exotic World Burlesque Museum,” 2001-2005, accessed March 28,
2005, http://www.exoticworldusa.org/frame_history.html. The collection is now located in Las Vegas
under the purview of the Burlesque Hall of Fame, but there was no exhibition space at the time this
dissertation was completed.

2
Dixie Evans, interview by author, April 6, 2005.
2
Evans characterized the collection as the remnants of a lost part of American history, a
history she associates with burlesque’s working class audience in the mid-twentieth
century.

Figure I.1: Entrance to Exotic World Movers & Shakers Museum and Striptease Hall of Fame in
Helendale, California, April 2005.

The majority of the objects displayed were related specifically to striptease
performances and performers, mainly photographs, playbills, posters, and costume items.
Former stripteasers or their families donated most of the items.
3
The collection includes
costumes and a trunk belonging to Gypsy Rose Lee and a set of the large fans used by
Sally Rand for the fan dance she made famous at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, but the
majority of the collection is the ephemera of performers whose names are known only to

3
Ibid.
3
burlesque enthusiasts.
4
Sequins and feathers and tassels were the dominant features of
the costumes on display, and the walls were covered in photographs of women in peek-a-
boo clothing often posed with odd props (Figure I.2). The installation captured the
combination of the display of the female body with an excess of glamour that is typical of
representations of burlesque theatre of the first half of the twentieth century and
characterizes how American burlesque theatre is remembered.
Figure I.2: Installation of a corner of the Exotic World Movers & Shakers Museum and Striptease
Hall of Fame in Helendale, California, April 2005.

4
Ibid. The fans were donated by a stripteaser named Linda Doll, who states that Sally Rand gave her the
fans when she noticed that Rand was throwing them out because the feathers were coming loose from the
handles.
4
For a majority of Americans today, the word burlesque immediately brings to
mind striptease performance, an association that is reinforced by the museum just
described and by the neo-burlesque movement. Although striptease is an important
aspect of burlesque history in the United States, it was not a part of burlesque
performance until the twentieth century.
5
Burlesque is defined as “that species of literary
composition, or of dramatic representation, which aims at exciting laughter by caricature
of the manner or spirit of serious works or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.”
6

English burlesque of the seventeenth century parodied well-known literary works. By the
nineteenth century, English burlesque incorporated more double entendre, which, when
combined with women in breeches parts, added to its risqué appeal. Burlesque of this
time had a largely middle class audience who would have been familiar with the operas
and other artistic works that were being mocked in the performance. When Lydia
Thompson and her troupe of British Blondes first appeared on the American stage and
performed Ixion in 1868, burlesque was combined with female spectacle, an association
that persists to this day. This dissertation is a study of representations of American
burlesque theatre that begins with this moment when the display of the female body
became integral to burlesque performance. The objects of this study range from
advertising for the burlesque theatre, to popular media illustrations and photographs, to

5
See Robert C. Allen’s Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1991) for the first scholarly and most comprehensive examination of
burlesque as a cultural phenomenon. Allen discusses the transgressive potential of burlesque beginning in
the late 1860s with the arrival of Lydia Thompson and her troupe in the United States. Allen regards the
growing domination of striptease in the burlesque show in the 1920s and 30s as a force that diffused
burlesque’s power to challenge normative feminine roles and behaviors.

6
Oxford English Dictionary Online, n. “burlesque,” May 26, 2010, http://dictionary.oed.com.
5
paintings by canonical American artists. These diverse images share a common subject,
the display of the female body as popular entertainment.
Theories of camp and kitsch are useful in establishing the value of an analysis of a
popular entertainment subject in both commercial and artistic production. In his
influential essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg defines kitsch as
“popular, commercial art and literature with their chromotypes, magazine covers,
illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing,
Hollywood movies, etc., etc.”
7
For Greenberg, Kitsch is a “debased,” “watered down”
version of the cultural traditions of the past.
8
It is culture for the masses. Representations
of burlesque theatre, including those produced by artists, and burlesque theatre itself may
be described under Greenberg’s rubric as kitsch. My reading of these representations will
treat these representations neither as “debased” nor “watered down” but as revealing and
constitutive cultural objects. Even before burlesque theatre was firmly constituted as
“low,” it was deliberately derivative of other cultural objects. Burlesque and its
representations intentionally reference high culture, and in turn, both high and middle
brow culture represent burlesque. Thus an analysis of the representations of burlesque
presents an opportunity to look at the boundaries of high and low in American visual
culture.

7
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis
Franscina (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985), 51.

8
Ibid., 52.
6
As burlesque was a theatrical form that caricatured other aspects of culture and
engaged in gender parody, camp is an illuminating discourse for this analysis.
9
Camp is
associated with artifice, urbanity, exaggeration and excess. In her frequently cited essay
from 1964, Susan Sontag states that, “Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is
something that seems quite different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual
characteristics and personality mannerisms.”
10
Her essay and the connection she makes
between camp, androgyny, and “the exaggeration of sexual characteristics,” was an
important source for a discourse about camp that has focused on the relationship between
camp and gay culture. Drag performance was frequently a part of burlesque theatre, and
many burlesque performers have been appropriated as stars of gay camp. Pamela
Robertson addresses the limitations of this discourse: “Women, by this logic, are objects
of camp and subject to it but are not camp subjects.”
11
Robertson argues that camp can
be a useful tool for exploring gender parody. Although I want to avoid an ahistorical
interpretation of camp intentions in representations of burlesque, a reading of these works
that is, however, attentive to instances of gender parody reveals some examples in which

9
“Kitsch, on the other hand, is the secondary, derivative, fake product, the (rough) copy of an existing
original art-piece – not a simulacrum, therefore. The transgressiveness of camp relies on its privilege of the
secondary and derivative, among which are Kitsch and pop, of serial reproduction over the original,
showing that the secondary is always already a copy of a copy. An investment in seriality undermines in
fact the original/secondary binarism that bourgeois epistemology posits within sexuality, and that camp, at
least potentially, queers and crosses.” Fabio Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” in Camp: Queer
Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1999), 20.

10
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New
York: Picador, 1964), 279.

11
Pamela Robertson, “What Makes the Feminist Camp?,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing
Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 267.
7
it is the performance of sexual desirability and not just the object of desire that is
depicted.
When female spectacle was introduced to American burlesque, the main attraction
frequently took the form of a revealingly costumed actress in a male role. Though the
British Blondes were generally greeted with positive press for Ixion at Wood’s, their
continued success with new shows soon generated criticism, much of it directed at the
female display. A review of their 1869 show at Niblo’s Garden, The Forty Thieves,
refers to burlesque in terms of disease:
The distinguishing symptom of the epidemic is a singular and easily detected
appearance of masses of light and golden hair on the stage of the afflicted theatre;
after this symptom the spectator is appalled by observing a tendency in the
patients to dispossess themselves of their clothing, and it requires the greatest
exertion to keep anything on them; then follow a series of piercing screams called
comic singing, distorted and incoherent ravings called puns, and finally strong
convulsions denominated breakdowns and walk-arounds.”
12

The New York Clipper published a little poem titled, “Legs and Burlesque,” that chided,
“Tis now the ladies show/That to make a burlesque go/They’ve only to be beautiful and
fair/And for favors they may beg/If they’ve not a splendid leg/And the lightest of light-
dyed hair.”
13
The legs, the golden hair, and the general lack of clothing derided in these
critiques are displayed in a print of Lydia Thompson dressed as the lead in Robinson
Crusoe (Figure I.3). Dressed for a male role in a burlesque, Thompson is portrayed in a
costume that emphasizes her feminine assets, particularly her legs, juxtaposes masculine
and feminine in the form of a parasol in one hand and a rifle in the other, and combines

12
“The Burlesque Madness,” The New York Times, February 5, 1869, 5.

13
Quoted in Kurt Gänzl, Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque (New York and London: Routledge, 2002),
110.
8
an oddly exotic, shockingly short, feathered costume with the bonnet (strange though it
may be) and gloves required for proper ladies’ outdoor dress in the nineteenth century.
Behaviors and props that would be read as male subvert gender norms and are
simultaneously used to emphasize the display of the female body.

Figure I.3: Lydia Thompson as Robinson Crusoe, c. 1870, Harry Ransom Center, Prints Collection.

The cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards representing these performers are imbued
with the sexual suggestiveness of burlesque performance and destabilize conventions of
9
self-representation and representation of the ideal woman of the time.
14
Photographic
portraits could be and were employed as a means of blurring class distinctions, but
images of the female performer in costume indelibly marked her as a working woman,
and even worse, as a working woman who engaged in masquerade.
15
Women of the late
nineteenth century who worked for a living were associated with prostitution, and as the
theatre was a space frequented by prostitutes, the woman on stage could not escape this
connection.
16
Performers of female spectacle were displaying their bodies in exchange
for payment, and thus the very representation of these performers in their professional
roles ran counter to feminine ideals of the time.
Gender inversions, legs, costumes that exaggerate the shape of the female body
and exotic or incongruous details characterize photographs of burlesque performers as

14
Maria Elena Buszek constructs a convincing feminist narrative of the pin-up, a mass-produced image of a
sexualized woman intended for display. Her analysis extends from the origins of the pin-up, which she
locates in the mid-nineteenth century, to the work of contemporary artists who have appropriated the form
in a paradoxical way. In her first chapter, she argues that it was female burlesque performers who “used
photography to invent the pin-up girl and to imbue the genre with the same subversive, expressive sexuality
that period feminists would increasingly view as an essential part of modern women’s emancipation.” Pin-
Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 22.

15
For more on the tradition of theatrical portraiture in Great Britian, see, Robyn Asleson, ed., A Passion for
Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraits (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999); and
Shearer West, “The Theatrical Portrait,” in The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in
the Age of Garrick and Kemble (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991). For an analysis of representations of an
actress who was a contemporary of Lydia Thompson, see Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah
Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (New York: The Jewish Museum; New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2005). For more on the history of the carte-de-visite, see Elizabeth Anne McCauley,
A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1985).

16
See also Karen Levitov, “The Divine Sarah and the Infernal Sally: Bernhardt in the Words of Her
Contemporaries,” in Sarah Bernhardt, 127; Carol Ockman, ”Was She Magnificent? Sarah Bernhardt’s
Reach,” in Sarah Bernhardt, 25; and Claudia D. Johnson, “Enter the Harlot,” in Women in American
Theatre, eds. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
2006), 57-65. For more on the representation of the prostitute, see T.J. Clark’s analysis of the
representation of the prostitute and of class in Edward Manet’s Olympia (1863). T.J. Clark, “Olympia’s
Choice” in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, revised edition
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 79-146.
10
well as posters that promoted burlesque performance. These characteristics of
representations of burlesque theatre violated conventions for the representation of women
and often depicted the violation of social and cultural conventions for both genders.
Ultimately, conventions of representation and behavior are reinforced through humor and
the consumer exchange that drives burlesque theatre and the commercial production of its
representations.
17
These elements described above are continually visible in commercial
representations of burlesque even as the format and audience of the American burlesque
show evolved. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the popularity of
Thompsonian burlesque had waned, and producers adopted a three-part variety structure
derived from the minstrel show. Beginning with the premiere of Tony Pastor’s “clean”
vaudeville (also a variety format) in New York in 1881, vaudeville was positioned as
middle class entertainment attractive to women and children as well as men. Burlesque
was increasingly associated with a “low” male audience and was firmly established as a
site for viewing displays of female flesh and for ribald humor.
Other examples of female spectacle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century constitute a broader view of performing women in commodity culture.
18
At the

17
In what could be described as an “oblique” study of contemporary, “straight” strip shows, Katherine
Liepe-Levinson notes that in many ways, “the straight strip shows simultaneously upheld and broke
conventional female and male sex roles and other related cultural rubrics as an integral part of their
performance,” and notes the most obvious examples “of the strip show’s transgressive dynamic of
upholding and breaking conventional sex roles.” Katherine Liepe-Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of
Gender and Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. Liepe-Levinson contends that her book
“uses the features [of the strip performance] that replay established sex-role norms as a backdrop for the
exploration of those aspects that resist the binary categories and either/or ways of seeing that still drive and
shape so much of contemporary Western culture.” 16.

18
The agency of the female performer and her impact on cultural representation at the turn of the century in
America is the subject of Susan A. Glenn’s book, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern
Feminism (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8. Other works that examine female
11
World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 female spectacle in the form of an
exotic dancer(s) who came to be known as Little Egypt captivated the American audience
(Figure I.4).
19
An image of a woman who performed as Little Egypt depicts the figure in
a ruffled costume that bares her mid-section and in a pose that evokes the suggestive
motion of what is now typically called the belly dance. A collector’s note on the back of
the card reads, “The fascination of umbilical gyrations was made known by ‘Little
Egypt,’ who probably never saw Egypt.”
20
Photographic images of Little Egypt and
other dancers, including Salomé, who took over the American stage in 1907, circulated
widely. These pictures feature women in revealing costumes that are excessive in their
“exotic” detail. The poses suggest the movements of dramatic, sexually suggestive
dance. The craze for exotic dancers suffused American popular culture at the turn of the
century, but this genre of performance found a more lasting home on the burlesque stage.
The penultimate female spectacle of the American stage in first half of the
twentieth century was the Ziegfeld Girl. The Ziegfeld Girl was a glorified ideal of the
chorus girl, who, “as a figure of modernity was split between cutting-edge and retrograde

spectacle and the role of the female performer in changing gender roles include M. Alison Kibler, Rank
Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill and London: The University
of North Carolina Press). Dancer Toni Bentley examines early exotic striptease as performed by Maud
Allen, Mata Hari, Ida Rubenstein and Colette in Sister’s of Salome (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002). In Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Renée M. Sentilles analyzes the life and career of this
nineteenth century celebrity as a woman who constructed and performed a complex public identity. Rachel
Shteir’s most recent publication, Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2009), presents twentieth century burlesque icon, Gypsy Rose Lee, as an example of self-invented
celebrity.

19
Multiple performers claimed to be Little Egypt. The challenges of attributing this title to an originator is
discussed Chapter 2.

20
Harry Ransom Center, Card Photograph Collection, Performing Arts, Series I, Actresses, Box 56.
12
discourses: on the one hand, the new female independence in mixed-sex working and
leisure worlds and, on the other hand, the connotations of the oldest profession in the
world, …”
21
This tension is amplified in the case of the burlesque performer who, in
contrast to the uniform glamour of the Ziegfeld Girl, was both more unruly and more
closely associated with the sex trade. Visual excess in the construction of the glamorous
image of the Ziegfeld Girl informs my analysis of representations of burlesque in which
glamour is revealed as an illusion through exaggeration and decay.

Figure I.4: Little Egypt, n.d., Harry Ransom Center, Card Photograph Collection.

21
Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1999), 187.
13

The popular entertainment figure of the exotic dancer was not only represented in
popular media, but also in the work of American artists. There are examples of dancers in
the work of American Impressionists. John Singer Sargent was fascinated with Spanish
culture and depicted Spanish dancers in Spanish Dancer (c. 1879-1882), El Jaleo (1882),
and La Carmencita (1890). Carmencita was a popular Spanish Gypsy dancer who
performed in Europe and in the United States. In 1890, Sargent arranged for her to
perform in William Merritt Chase’s studio for an audience that included Isabella Stuart
Gardner. Chase also painted her in Carmencita (1890). These examples are part of a
broader trend in the subject matter of American artists.
As consumer culture and spectacle emerged as primary experiences in American
city life, American artists turned to popular urban entertainments as subjects.
22
Early
twentieth century American artists looked to vaudeville and early motion picture houses
as subjects for their works. Popular entertainments were a source for artists who wanted
to convey the experience of early twentieth century America as a culture of display.
23

22
For more on urban spectacle and American art, see: Patricia McDonnell, ed. On the Edge of your Seat:
Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art (New Have and London: Yale
University Press, 2002). Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artist’s Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925 (London and
New York: Detroit Institute of Arts with Merrell Publishers Limited, 2007). H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen
Bolger and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-
1915 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994).

23
The subject of the relationship between American Art and popular entertainment has been addressed
specifically in exhibitions and the accompanying catalogues and in a dissertation. The focus of this
scholarship has been the work of the Ashcan artists. See Patricia McDonnell, ed., On the Edge of Your
Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth Century American Art (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2002). Works by the Ashcan artists as well as Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley are the focus
of this catalogue. Laural Weintraub’s dissertation examines how popular entertainment functions as a
source for American Realism and American Modernism, bridging the divide between pre and post-Armory
show. She looks specifically at vaudeville and cinema. “Fine Art and Popular Entertainment: The
Emerging Dialogue between High and Low in American Art of the Early Twentieth Century,” (Ph.D. diss.,
City University of New York, 1996). The catalogue for the 1995 exhibition, Metropolitan Lives: The
14
Artists associated with the Ashcan school seem to have been particularly aware of the
predominance of spectatorship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in
conjunction with the rise of the metropolis; these artists reveal a concern with urban
spectacle in their choice of subject matter.
24
Everett Shinn’s 1905 painting, Concert
Stage, portrays a female performer on the vaudeville stage and her audience (Figure I.5).

Figure I.5: Everett Shinn, Concert Stage, 1905, Norton Museum of Art.

Ashcan Artists and their New York, examines the work of the six Ashcan School artists who represented
life in New York at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Their work is
situated in the social and historical context of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century and
demonstrates how the Ashcan artists treated popular theater and how their interest coincides with the
development of popular entertainment. Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder and Virginia M. Mecklenburg,
Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and their New York (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of
American Art in association with W.W. Norton & Company, 1995).

24
Deborah Fairman, “The Landscape of Display: The Ashcan School, Spectacle, and the Staging of
Everyday Life,” Her particular focus is the oeuvre of artist John Sloan to which she applies a trope of
display that commodifies the female subject.
15
Shinn’s painting demonstrates an awareness of the relationship between audience and
performer as integral to the experience of modern theatrical spectacles. In this case, the
audience is a mix of male and female patrons who were most likely middle and upper
class. The female performer’s pose, with one leg raised and her skirt hiked up to reveal a
little bit of stocking at the ankle, suggests a performance that was perhaps somewhat
risqué, and may even reference the famously scandalous motion of the cancan.
The display of the female body for a mostly male audience was the featured draw
of early twentieth century burlesque. This display was accompanied by humor that relied
on puns, double entendre, and racial, gender, and ethnic stereotypes. Beginning in the
1920s, the burlesque scene was pictured in prints, drawings and paintings, many of which
appeared in popular publications. These depictions capture the interaction of performers
and audience and incorporate characteristics of burlesque representation well established
in more commercial forms. Reginald Marsh’s first known image of burlesque, a 1920
illustration for The Yale Record titled “On the Straight and Narrow Path” incorporates
burlesque humor in the form of a title that both jokingly references the burlesque runway
and implies an avoidance of morally questionable behaviors, an all male audience, and a
provocatively costumed dancer in an exaggerated pose (Figure I.6). The proliferation of
images of burlesque produced by illustrators and artists coincides with the increasingly
salacious display of the female body on the burlesque stage.
The most sustained art historical analyses of representations of burlesque can be
found in the literature about artists Reginald Marsh and Edward Hopper. Scholarship on
these artists has demonstrated how representations of burlesque by these two artists
16
negotiate the changing roles of women in the public sphere and the anxiety this generated
for the men who dominated this sphere. I emphasize the ambiguities latent in many
images of burlesque in the relationship between the spectators and the spectacle. The
status of these works as high art also invites an analysis of how these images might
destabilize the traditions of the nude in American art and the conventions of popular
media representations of female performers.

Figure I.6: Reginald Marsh, "On the Straight and Narrow Path," The Yale Record, March 1920.
Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Edward Hopper’s Girlie Show (1941) is a somewhat singular work in his oeuvre,
and it was my own interest in this work as an example of a nude in American art that
sparked my inquiry into representations of American burlesque in general. Girlie Show
17
has been discussed in the context of the portrayal of the nude in Hopper’s body of work
and within the historical context of the battle over burlesque in New York.
25
Critical
debate on the naked and the nude ground this study of the revealed/concealed spectacle of
the burlesque performer within an art historical tradition. Kenneth Clark describes the
distinction between “naked” and “nude” in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, in which he
establishes a selection of idealized bodies reformed in the classical tradition.
26
For Clark,
the nude is “confident” and “balanced,” which he contrasts to the idea of the naked body
and an implication of feelings of shame. Another key idea in his work is that viewing the
nude is an erotic experience for the viewer, though that erotic experience should not, in
the case of a work of art, overtake the aesthetic experience. In her evaluation of these
distinctions, Lynda Nead points out that for Clark, the nude body is a body that is
“produced by culture.”
27
Nead’s analysis of the discourse on the naked and the nude in
The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality demonstrates that “meaning is organized
and regulated at the edges or boundaries of categories” and advocates a practice that
highlights how categorical boundaries are maintained such that the “unity and
wholeness” of the category of the female nude “give(s) way to differences and a

25
See Vivien Green Fryd Fryd, Vivien Green. “Edward Hopper’s Girlie Show: Who is the Silent
Partner?,” American Art 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 53-75; and “Shifting Power Dynamics and Sexuality:
Edward Hopper’s Girlie Show and Office Night” in Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and
Georgia O’Keeffe (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2003). Fryd’s analysis revolves around her
reading of Girlie Show as a transformation of the artist’s model, his wife, into a representation of a
burlesque queen. Fryd argues that the painting exemplifies the confusion that was felt at the time about the
changes in women’s behavior as well as the artist’s anxieties about his relationship with his wife. She also
argues that the men in the painting, the spectators, are unable to act beyond looking.

26
Kenneth Clark. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956), 3.

27
Lynda Nead. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. (London and New York: Routledge,
1992), 14-15.
18
recognition that the female body is in a continual process of definition and change.”
28

My engagement with representations of burlesque began with a consideration of the nude
in American art. The artists who depicted the subject of burlesque seemed, in general
terms, to engage in an artistic practice of reframing the female body on display on the
burlesque stage.
Marsh produced a number of prints, paintings and drawings of burlesque
throughout his career, and his work has logically dominated any work by art historians on
the subject of burlesque in art. Examples of work from Marsh’s oeuvre will be included
in my analysis, but as my goal is to present a broader narrative of representations of
burlesque, I analyze his works in this context. Marsh’s preoccupation with women as
spectacle in the public spaces of the city reveals an awareness of the changing role of
women in modern urban life, though he constructed and maintained conventional gender
roles in his works whether he was showing the burlesque queen on stage or the girl on the
street.
29
Marsh’s burlesque works reflect and reinforce cultural anxieties of the time
about high and low culture, gender and sexuality, and consumerism.
30

28
Nead, 33.

29
In her study of the figure of “the Marsh girl,” the shopper in his Fourteenth Street paintings, Ellen Wiley
Todd situates Marsh as a “knowing and ambivalent” observer in American culture between the wars and
argues that these works are “ambiguous and even contradictory because in them the ideology of a revised
new womanhood – ‘what every woman wants’ – intersects with the ideology of consumer culture.” The
“New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993), 223.

30
In her analysis of the relationship between performer, architecture and audience in Marsh’s works,
Michele L. Miller concludes that, “Like the burlesque, Marsh’s images of it are purposely ambiguous, and
therein lies their significance. In addition to facilitating multiple readings by diverse viewers, this
ambiguity serves to unmask several inconsistencies in the broader culture.” “’The Charms of Exposed
Flesh’: Reginald Marsh and the Burlesque Theater” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1997), 156.
19
The subject of the grotesque and the use of humor in Marsh’s works are also
relevant to an analysis of representations of burlesque in general.
31
In Mikhail Bakhtin’s
work on the carnival and the grotesque body in the writing of François Rabelais, the
carnival is characterized by a combination of high culture and the profane that is
ultimately subversive through inversion. The grotesque body is organic in nature; it is
the body dominated by its basic functions like urination, and most applicable in the
context of burlesque, sex. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue that in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elements of the carnivalesque form a kind of
diaspora that erupts in a variety of cultural forms.
32
American burlesque could certainly
be described as part of this diaspora. The work of Marsh has been described as utilizing a
“grotesque iconography” in which the artists “greatly embellished the made-up quality of
their figures, deconstructing any glamour or beauty as a mere façade.”
33
The link
between humor and the sexualized female body present in Marsh’s depictions of the
burlesque ultimately serves to mediate the threat of female sexuality.
34

By the time that Hopper painted Girlie Show and Marsh produced the majority of
his burlesque works, striptease had established its place as burlesque’s most popular and

31
Kathleen Spies 1999 dissertation on humor and the grotesque in the burlesque works of Marsh and
Walter Kuhn as well as her 2004 publication in American Art provide a theoretically convincing analysis of
the grotesque body in these works. “Burlesque Queens and Circus Divas: Images of the Female Grotesque
in The Art of Reginald Marsh and Walt Kuhn, 1915-1945” (Ph.D. Diss., Indiana University, 1999); and
“’Girls and Gags’: Sexual Display and Humor in Reginald Marsh’s Burlesque Images,” American Art 18,
no. 2 (Summer 2004): 32-57.

32
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1986), 180-181.

33
Spies, “Burlesque Queens and Circus,” 15.

34
Spies, “Girls and Gags “.
20
controversial attraction.
35
Unclothed and barely clothed burlesque stripteasers appear in
publicity photographs that playfully expose and conceal and frequently allude to the
stripteaser’s gimmick – the sometimes exotic, sometimes humorous, frequently gaudy
aspect of her performance intended to set it apart from other performances of female
spectacle. In her memoir, Gypsy Rose Lee recalls making her first striptease costume out
of ten yards of lavender cotton net and four bunches of violets, which she pinned
together: “The lavender net was transparent, the violets on my breasts showed through
and I patted them down so I wouldn’t look bunched up in the front.” She goes on to
describe her first striptease performance, and her first gimmick, in which she paraded on
the stage as she had seen others do, lifting the side of her skirt, she then “took the pins
from the side of (her) dress and dropped them into the tuba. They made a plinging sound
as they hit the side of the shiny instrument, and the audience murmured their approval.
Then just as the music came to an end, I dropped the shoulder straps and the lavender net
dress fell to the floor. Wrapping the curtain around me I disappeared into the wings.”
36
A
page in Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir displays publicity photographs of her famous
“intellectual” striptease act that range from the early years of her burlesque career at
Minsky’s in 1931 to a Las Vegas appearance in 1957 (Figure I.7). In hyper-feminized
costumes complete with ladylike hats, Gypsy pulls up her long, full skirt and petticoats to

35
See Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004) for a history of striptease from the first undressisng acts in American theatre through the
disappearance of striptease in the 1960s. Shteir associates striptease with glamour and illusion and glorifies
its antiauthoritarian tendencies and use of parody. Although rich in archival research, Shteir’s account does
not account for the implicit ambiguities of an entertainment form that is based on the commodification of
the female body.

36
Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy: A Memoir (Berkeley, CA: Frog, Ltd., 1999), 228. First printing New York:
Harper, 1957.
21
reveal stocking-clad legs. The photographs exhibit self-conscious display of the female
body, exaggerated femininity, and a humorous homage to the “leg show”, and in these
traits, an affinity to images of Lydia Thompson and other examples of burlesque’s
earliest female stars.
In the wake of the Great Depression and the subsequent closure of more
respectable, more expensive entertainments, burlesque made its way onto Broadway.
The increased visibility of burlesque, the popularity of striptease, and its association with
working classes audiences brought a corresponding pressure from anti-obscenity activists
to censor burlesque despite the producers’ attempts to situate striptease as an American
“art.”
37
The representation of the mostly male audience in many images of burlesque
invites analysis of the interdependence of the spectacle and the viewer. The relationship
between female performers and male viewers is one that is fraught in the history of
burlesque. In New York in 1942, burlesque finally fell victim to a decade long campaign
by anti-obscenity activists. This campaign ultimately linked burlesque to the promotion
of degeneracy in its audience. Thus, it was not just the content of burlesque itself that
presented a danger, but the audience’s reaction to it.
38

37
In 1937, burlesque producer Herbert Minsky (one of the Minsky brothers) famously testified to the
House Immigration Committee that “stripping is definitely an American art, and I believe it should be kept
entirely American” in an attempt to keep “foreign talent” off the burlesque stage. “Minsky Terms Strip-
Tease Art: Burlesque Impresario Testifies at Hearing Before House Group,” Los Angeles Times, February
25, 1937, 3.

38
See Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-
1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 62-94.
22

Figure I.7: Gypsy Rose Lee, 1931-1957, from Gypsy: A Memoir.

The commodification of the body and the meanings attached to images that are
aimed at sexual arousal have been the subject of debate in feminist scholarship. The
value of the representation of the female body in pornography is in its desirability as a
source of erotic pleasure. In striptease performance, the erotic pleasure is in the play
23
between visibility and invisibility.
39
Burlesque theatre featured women in the public
sphere performing as sexualized objects for the masses.
40
Representations of these
performances, whether they are “high art” or “mass forms,” engage the question of how
women are looked at by an audience/viewer. They also raise questions about the
burlesque dancer’s ability to perform as an object of visual pleasure and the degree to
which this activity as performance is made visible, such that some images might be more
accurately described as a representation of the performance of the sexualized female body
as opposed to a representation of the sexualized female body in performance. The
question of looking is central to the analysis of images of the burlesque, and I argue that
some of these images contain moments of “unease” in both the depiction of looking and
in an attention to the concealing and revealing of both the perfections and imperfections
of female form.
41

Burlesque images almost always feature a female performer or performers who
are shown in elaborate costumes (or parts of costumes) that evoke a sense of the exotic
and sometimes the absurd. The artifice of the performer is prominent, and a number of

39
See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

40
In her essay, “What’s Wrong with Images of Women?,” Griselda Pollock argues for historical specificity
and an attentiveness to the connections between mass forms and high art in an analysis of ideology and the
codes of representation in images of women. “What’s Wrong with Images of Women?” in Looking On:
Images of Femininity in Visual Arts and Media, ed. Rosemary Betterton (London: Pandora Press, 1987).

41
In her essay, “Sexuality and the Field of Vision,” Jacqueline Rose argues that a practice that takes into
account the question of looking reveals the unease that has always been present in visual images. She uses
Sigmund Freud’s analysis of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci to argue that Freud’s reading of Leonardo’s
“failure” to clearly represent sexual difference in a drawing of a sexual act demonstrates the pervasive
presence of imperfections in the representation of women as different from men. Rose encourages looking
“obliquely” at our visual history for these imperfections, which are indicative of the persistence of “the
question of sexuality.” “Sexuality in the Field of Vision,” (1986) reprinted in Feminism-Art-Theory: An
Anthology, ed. Hilary Robinson (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 478.
24
illustrators and painters juxtaposed this artifice with the imperfections of the flesh. In
scenes of the burlesque theater, the performer is often depicted in motion or in a pose that
calls attention to the differences between the burlesque queen and the classical ideal. The
spectators who watch the performance are often featured in the scene, thus the
commodification of the body as spectacle and the possibility of “performing” the
sexualized female body for an audience of mostly male viewers is brought to the surface.
The depiction of the spectatorial relationship and the travesty of the female body as
object of sexual desire offer an opening for a broader analysis and critique of burlesque
as a visual culture. Although burlesque is frequently celebrated for its transgressive
aspects, I argue that the female body and its unruly potential is ultimately regulated or
subsumed in the majority of images of burlesque. This is particularly true of the more
broadly distributed representations of burlesque. Some works by twentieth century artists
with an interest in popular entertainments and urban life reveal the disruptive potential of
burlesque by calling attention to the nature of the spectatorial relationship. These works
reveal ambiguities in the traditional spectator (male)/spectacle (female) relationship that
allow for productive questions regarding the traditions of the female nude and the
representation of women in popular media.
Almost as soon as the last of the burlesque theatres had closed their doors,
nostalgic publications presenting burlesque as a uniquely American art began to appear.
Like the Exotic World Museum, these works reveal how burlesque has been inscribed in
cultural memory and more recently, with the emergence of the neo-burlesque movement,
25
how it has been appropriated and reconceived in contemporary culture.
42
A Pictorial
History of Burlesque from A to Z, published in 1964, features a photo spread of a
striptease performer for each letter of the alphabet along with a brief biography and the
performer’s height and measurements.
43
This “history” demonstrates the extent to which
burlesque was associated with striptease in the decade following the gradual
disappearance of burlesque theatres. It is also notable that most of the women featured in
this history performed in the forties and fifties; the visual history of American burlesque
was truncated to a light-hearted presentation of pin-ups. In another 1964 publication,
Martin Collyer presents “a history of burlesque, an American institution,” in which he
embraces burlesque’s aesthetic failings as distinctly “American”:
The chances are that artist Norman Rockwell – he of the Mom’s Apple Pie
syndrome – will never use it as a setting for a Saturday Evening Post cover, yet
burlesque was every bit as American as the corn flake. When it was bad, it was
very, very bad, and even when it was good it was just a little bit horrid. When it
was good it was good because it basically had a sense of humor about its total
absence of sophistication. It never apologized for its artistic failings simply
because it recognized none.
44

42
Bernard Sobel, playwright, theatre critic, and theatrical historian, published the earliest history of
American burlesque. See Bernard Sobel, Burleycue: An Underground History of Burlesque Days (New
York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931) and Bernard Sobel, A Pictorial History of Burlesque (New York: Putnam,
1956). Len Rothe’s The Queens of Burlesque: Vintage Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s (Atglen,
PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1997) is a pictorial essay that is a wonderful resource for burlesque pin-ups.
A. W. Stencell looks specifically at the girl show at the fair, see A. W. Stencell, Girl Show: Into the Canvas
World of Bump and Grind (Toronto, Ontario: ECW Press, 1999). Jessica Glasscock’s Striptease (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003) locates the history of striptease in burlesque, vaudeville, and modern dance.
For more on the neo-burlesque movement, see Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind
(Speck Press, 2004). Jacki Willson presents an argument for new burlesque as subversive and empowering
for women (though she uses the term empowerment grudgingly) in The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and
Politics of the New Burlesque (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008). A recent publication on the
burlesque poster juxtaposes posters and advertisements for pre-1960s burlesque with neo-burlesque images,
though the emphasis is on the neo-burlesque material. Yak El-Droubie and Ian C. Parliament, Burlesque
Poster Design: The Art of Tease (London: Korero Books, 2009).

43
A Pictorial History of Burlesque, from A to Z. Los Angeles, CA: Sherbourne Press, 1964.

44
Martin Collyer, Burlesque: The Baubles . . . Bangles . . . Babes (New York: Lancer Books, 1964).
26
Collyer’s amusing, but facile description fails to capture the complexities of a vernacular
aesthetic that was broadly disseminated in contrast to popular ideals for the representation
of women.
In the four chapters of this dissertation, I trace a history of the representation of
female performer in the American burlesque theatre. This history begins in 1868 and
extends to the decline of the burlesque theatre in the mid twentieth century. My analysis
by no means encompasses all representations of burlesque in this period, but instead I
analyze a set of persistent visual characteristics that appear in commercial and artistic
representations of burlesque. In the first chapter, “Women in Tights: Legs and Other
Transgressions in Late Nineteenth Century Burlesque,” I examine the female burlesque
performer in cartes-de-visite and posters that advertise American burlesque companies
following the 1868 premiere of Lydia Thompson and Her British Blondes in New York.
Mid-nineteenth century examples of prints and photographs of women who performed in
other popular theatrical forms foreground the analysis, as does an overview of the origin
story of the “leg show” in American popular entertainment. These early representations
of women in burlesque establish a combination of female display with characteristics that
I describe as a burlesque aesthetic.
The second chapter, “The Exotic Dancer and the Transgressive Potential of
Burlesque, 1890-1930,” more closely examines the “exotic” in images of female
spectacle. The representation of women as exotics (non-European) has an established
history as an allusion to dangerous, aggressive female sexuality in the history of Western

27
art. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exotic dancers were popular and
controversial figures on American stages both high and low. Photographs of these
performers circulated in newspapers and magazines. The exotic performer was also a
popular subject for American artists at the turn of the century and thus an important
figure for an analysis of the representation of female spectacle in American art.
Burlesque embraced the craze for exotic female spectacle. Exotic dance in the form of
the danse du ventre and Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils are described as precursors
of burlesque striptease. I examine the depiction of the exotic dancer at the turn of the
century as a transgressive figure whose dangerous, yet broad appeal is ultimately
regulated in art and popular media.
Many of the images discussed in the third chapter, “Salacious Display:
Representing and Viewing the Women of Burlesque in the Era of the Striptease, 1925-
1945,” are part of a more traditional rubric of art historical subject matter. As the
striptease was emerging as the featured entertainment on the burlesque stage and issues
of obscenity and burlesque performance were escalating in New York, a number of realist
artists depicted scenes of burlesque in paintings, prints, and commissioned works for
popular magazines with a mainstream audience. These images usually include the female
performer on stage as well as the burlesque audience. These works demonstrate how the
low space of the burlesque theatre, the performance of nudity, and the patrons of
burlesque were represented for upper and middle class audiences. The viewer of the
painting or print is confronted with an image of spectatorship with a nearly nude female
figure performing as the object of the male gaze. The relationship between the spectator
28
and the spectacle in both the tradition of the nude in high art and in the popular
representation of the female performer is brought to the fore in these works.
The final chapter is a case study of images of American burlesque’s most iconic
figure, burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy herself functioned as a representation of
burlesque for a broad public. Images of Gypsy are contrasted to other icons of female
spectacle in American popular culture, the Ziegfeld Girl and the glamorous movie star, to
determine if there is something distinct in representations of the burlesque queen.
Characteristics of burlesque representation discussed in previous chapters are examined
in a close reading of a variety of images that range from publicity photographs to a self-
portrait collage. Images of burlesque’s most famous queen make visible the exaggerated
glamour of female spectacle and the mockery of its artificiality, the play between display
and concealment, and the tension between sexual suggestiveness and containment. This
burlesque aesthetic persisted as a means of exploring the display of the female body at
the boundaries of high and low culture and of art and obscenity.
29
Chapter 1
Women in Tights:
Legs and Other Transgressions in Representations of Late 19
th
Century Burlesque

In her 1869 publication, Apropos of Women and Theatres, actress, writer, and
feminist activist Olive Logan roundly criticizes the scantily clad female burlesque
performers who had recently emerged as a major presence on the American stage:
The nude woman of to-day represents nothing but herself. She runs upon the
stage giggling; trots down to the foot-lights, winks at the audience, rattles off
from her tongue some stupid attempts at wit, . . . and is always peculiarly and
emphatically herself, -- the woman, that is, whose name is on the bills in large
letters, and who considers herself an object of admiration to the spectators.
45

The “nude woman” of Logan’s account was not, in fact, nude on stage. Rather, the
elaborate, if leg-baring, costumes worn by the burlesque performers of the time are
completely dismissed, and these women are derided for presenting themselves self-
consciously as “nude” “object[s]” for the consumption of a spectator whose appreciation
Logan questions by declaring that the “admiration of the spectators” is in the mind of the
performer. Logan’s declaration that the woman in burlesque “represents nothing but
herself,” implies not only that the performer is not an actress and that her performance is
not a performance, but that the self represented is silly, vain, and even “stupid.”
That same year in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells,
American writer and then assistant editor of the aforementioned publication, describes the
female performers in a Boston burlesque production: “[T]hough they were not like men,
[they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex,
parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible

45
Olive Logan, Apropos of Women and Theatres (New York: Carleton, 1869), 135.
30
prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame.”
46

Howell’s assessment reveals an uncomfortable fascination with the travesty of the
man/woman dichotomy that was taking place on the burlesque stage in the costume and
the production of its players.
47
The women of the burlesque stage not only presented
themselves as “nude” but often in “boy” roles playing opposite other females in the
company. With their short trunks, “boy” costumes often revealed more of the female
form than the skirted female costumes. The attention of the audience was thus drawn to
the female form of the boy character.
Both Logan and Howells, among many other writers and journalists of the time,
were critiquing the recent craze for burlesque shows of the variety popularized a year
earlier by Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes, a burlesque dominated by buxom,
tights-clad women.
48
Before the arrival of Thompson and her Blondes, American
burlesque mocked respected and well-known cultural forms in brief comic bits and was
devoid of sexually suggestive display.
49
The emergence of Thompsonian burlesque in
1868 and its popularity on the American stage is considered the benchmark for the
eventual devolution of a female-centric burlesque into the striptease show. Discourses of

46
William Dean Howells, “The New Taste in Theatricals,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1869. It is from this
article that Robert C. Allen takes the title of his historical analysis of burlesque theatre in America. These
two quotes are mentioned in most histories of American burlesque as formative cultural critiques.

47
Travesty is a term that is often applied to burlesque. It is used to define burlesque theatre of the
nineteenth century as a kind of musical parody of high cultural forms like opera and Greek tragedy.
Burlesque of this time parodies social norms as well as the productions of high culture.

48
Lydia Thompson is a British actress who began her career as a teenager and was known for her dancing.
She often performed in pantomime and later as a lead in burlesque. She will be discussed at length later in
the chapter.

49
Faye E. E. Dudden, Women in American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1994), 113.
31
moral decay and cultural decline mushroomed in published commentaries on burlesque,
like those of Olive Logan, and these public dialogues contributed to an evolving
perception of burlesque as debased and unacceptable for respectable audiences. The
unease suggested by Howell’s observation that through parody – a mocking imitation –
the female burlesque performers “seemed creatures of an alien sex” more eloquently
captures the qualities of the newly risen, female dominated burlesque and its
representations, which portray hyper-feminized depictions of cross-dressed women,
blatant tongue-in-cheek references to contemporary culture, and an over-blown aesthetic
that parodies popular tastes.
50

This chapter will provide an analysis of these characteristics in burlesque theatre
posters and photographs of burlesque performers in the decades immediately following
the arrival of Lydia Thompson and her troupe in 1868 in the context of nineteenth
century American theatrical history. Although it was and is frequently described as
shocking, Thompsonian burlesque did not prance onto an American scene that was
unfamiliar with salacious spectacle. Display of the female body was a featured attraction
on the American stage before the arrival of Lydia and her blondes. An examination of
earlier productions that featured “leg shows” and the images associated with these

50
The quotes from Olive Logan and William Dean Howells have been used to foreground the arguments of
many scholars of burlesque theater and performers. See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque
and American Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 122-137;
Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2006), 42-43, 60; and Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show
(Oxford University Press, 2005), 30. Logan’s and Howell’s critiques are used to frame discussions of the
discomfort and subsequent discourse generated by these performances. Logan’s less-nuanced, more
strident criticism of fellow female performers and their clothed nudity is representative of the type of
moralizing that helps to situate burlesque as a “low” form, whereas Howell’s response reveals the
transgressive potential of this type of performance, a potential that is ultimately far more dangerous than
the nude body.
32
performances will set the stage for an analysis of images of late-nineteenth century
burlesque.
51

The explosion of female-centric burlesque as a popular theatrical form in the
United States was paralleled by advances in the reproduction of images that generated a
proliferation of theatrical advertisements and photographs of burlesque stars. The most
recognizable feature of late-nineteenth century cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards of
performers and posters used to advertise burlesque is provocatively (un)dressed women.
These representations propagate the association of burlesque with a transgressive display
of the female body and potentially with an even more dangerous presentation of women
as sexual aggressors. After 1868, representations of American burlesque are
characterized by exotic costume, excessive detail and attention to ornament, a suggestion
of encroaching decay, challenges to conventional gender roles and expectations, and most
importantly, the display of the female body. The images of female burlesque performers
examined in this chapter were commercial images that traded on that display. The
photographs of these women that circulated as cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards

51
“Leg show” is a vernacular term that refers to popular entertainments that feature the display of the
female body – legs in particular. It is a term that is frequently used in both scholarly and popular accounts
of theatre history, although its use in reference to productions of the mid-nineteenth century is likely
anachronistic. In The Language of Theatre, the origins of the term and its possible roots in sexually
suggestive slang are discussed: "A term used for a variety or musical show which strongly featured a
female chorus line or dancers wearing costumes designed to show off their legs: in occasional but rare use
today. The term appears to date from about 1890, succeeding the previously popular leg-drama (1870) and
leg-piece (1880). Theatres which specialized in such shows were known as leg-shops, possibly influenced
by the term leg-business for dancing, which could have evolved from an unflattering pun on an earlier
sense of that phrase meaning 'sexual intercourse'.” Martin Harrison, The Language of Theatre (New York:
Routledge, 1998), 140.

33
functioned as a means for the spectator to possess the performer.
52
These images also
functioned as a challenge to contemporary ideals of womanhood and its representation
through a combination of cross-dressing, flesh-baring, and over-blown exotic elements.
53

These aspects of a burlesque aesthetic simultaneously make gender and sexual
transgression visible and contain that transgression through a paradoxical cohesion to
conventional modes of representation and spectatorship. This has been described as a
visible tension between the grotesque and the classical body, a tension that, I argue,
continues to play out in images of burlesque performers even as the theatrical form
evolves, or as a number of critics and scholars have argued, devolves.
54
The burlesque
aesthetic that I will identify in the nineteenth century images remains the legacy of
burlesque representation through the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.

52
See also Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 65-108. In
her essay on the 400 photographs taken by a professional photographer of the Countess Castiglione, a
woman of celebrated beauty in France who was identified simultaneously as a lady and a whore, Solomon-
Godeau argues that this fetishistic photographic project was a failed attempt at self-representation in which
the photographs of the Countess are a representation of “image and object of desire,” which is disturbing in
that “the countess has so fully assimilated the desire of others that there is no space, language, or means of
representation for any desire that might be termed her own.” 108. Likewise, images of late-nineteenth
century female burlesque performers undoubtedly represent the desire of the paying spectator.

53
For a feminist analysis of cartes-de-visite of burlesque performers as the first pin-ups, see Buszek, Pin-
Up Grrrls. Buszek carefully situates her study of the pin-up genre as a feminist project, acknowledging
that, “The genre is a slippery one: it doesn’t represent sex so much as suggest it, and these politely
suggestive qualities have as a result always lent it to a commercial culture of which feminists have
justifiably been wary for its need to cultivate the kind of desire and dissatisfaction that leads to
consumption.” She argues that because of its nature as a mass-produced commodity “intended for wide
display,” the pin-up genre can be used to measure “responses to women’s sexuality in popular arts since the
Industrial Revolution, as well as feminist responses to the same.” 5. Buszek’s goal is to expose “the pin-
up’s ‘secret’ feminist history” in order to “contribute to the growing pool of feminist scholarship calling for
an embrace of paradox in contemporary feminism by revealing its consistent presence in feminist history.”
21.

54
See Allen, Horrible Prettiness for an analysis of the body of the nineteenth century burlesque performer
as grotesque. Allen describes this body as representative of “the tension between the expansive materiality
of the grotesque and the enclosed and contained classical body.” A tension made manifest in the
presentation of a “hermaphroditic sexuality,” and in “ample hips and busts protruding out of tightly
corseted costumes.” 176.
34
Setting the Stage
The cultural landscape in which female dominated American burlesque emerged
in the late 1860s provides some context for a visual analysis of its representation in prints
and photographs. Theatrical entertainment grew slowly in the early years of the United
States in part due to the tumultuous conditions of the Revolutionary War and the War of
1812 and because of the small number of sizable population centers.
55
This slow growth
may also be attributed to the persistence of Puritan prohibitions against mimicking
another person, especially if that person was of another gender or class, as a deception.
Theatrical spectacle is also counter to Puritan modesty and humility.
Female actresses were particularly problematic as they were engaging in an act of
deceit for monetary gain – they were perceived as selling themselves for money.
56

Working women in general were associated with prostitution, and this association was
compounded for female performers because the nineteenth century theatre was a site for
prostitution. The space of the theatres of this time was arranged into a pit, the boxes, and
the gallery or third tier. The gallery, the least expensive area of the house, was infamous
as the place where prostitutes gathered and were visited by their customers.
57
This

55
For a more detailed summary of theatre in early and Antebellum America as it relates to burlesque, see
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 46-77.

56
“Most of the expressed disapproval of the theatre and actresses could be traced to nineteenth-century
sexual mores and the commonly held belief that all or most actresses led immoral lives both on and
offstage. With the sole exception of prostitution, to which it was often compared, no single profession was
so loudly and frequently condemned.” Claudia D. Johnson, “Enter the Harlot” in Women in American
Theatre, 3
rd
ed., eds. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 2006), 60.

57
“The assignment of prostitutes to one part of the theatrical house had a profound impact on theatre
design, on theatrical economics, and on the extent to which theatre was accepted and supported during the
35
custom was well established by the 1830s and 1840s, and the press and clergy
campaigned to bring it to a stop. Some theatre managers began to end the practice mid-
century, but there were still complaints of prostitutes seeking to attract attention in the
third tier in the 1850s. By the 1880s, the practice of reserving the gallery for prostitutes
and their patrons had ended.
58
Upper and middle class patrons populated the boxes -- the
only place a respectable woman could be seen, and then only if escorted by a male.
Young men, often of working class, dominated the pit. Early in the nineteenth century, a
broad spectrum of social classes mingled in the American theatre, where they were
entertained by a similarly broad variety of entertainments.
59
In the 1820s and 30s,
American theatre evolved as a more prominent public entertainment, and there was
increasing segmentation of the audiences as well as theatrical styles – the upper classes
would favor a particular theatre while the lower classes patronized a theatre regarded as
less fashionable. Due to the lack of established norms of behavior for the audience and
the eruption of class tensions in theatre riots, most notably the Astor Place Theatre riot of
1849, the theater in the 1830s and 40s was a site of unrest.
60

nineteenth century.” Claudia D. Johnson, “The Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century
American Theatres,” American Quarterly 27, no. 5 (December 1975): 575.

58
Johnson, “Guilty Third Tier,” 579.

59
See Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 56-59.

60
The Astor Place Theater opened in 1847 as a home for the upper class tastes for Italian opera in New
York. Allen, 59. On May 10, 1849, a mob of working class supporters of American actor Edwin Forrest
descended on a performance of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House by Forrest’s rival, British actor
William McCready, whose more restrained style was favored by upper class American audiences. Twenty-
two people died when the state militia fired into an out of control crowd.
36
American burlesque, like many other American theatrical forms, is derived from
the British form. In essence a musical comedy with a largely middle class audience, by
the mid-nineteenth century, British burlesque included topical humor, puns, parodies of
songs and elaborate costumes and stage design. The increasing emphasis on the visual
aspects of burlesque is reflective of broader nineteenth century trend in theatre and other
aspects of public life towards visual spectacle. Burlesque in early Victorian England was
a combination of the musical and highly scenic extravaganza and parody of a well-known
story or play. These productions involved a great deal of exaggeration and incongruous
situations. Increasingly more “middle to musically lowbrow,” burlesque relied on puns
and other linguistic tricks.
61
According to a recent biography, by the time Thompson
emerged as a burlesque performer in Britain and took her show on the road to the United
States, British burlesque was even more popular and more excessive in its use of
language, ridiculous situations, and visual excess.
62
In America, burlesque gained
popularity in cheap theatres in the 1840s and often involved the mocking imitation of art,
philosophy, and other theatrical works.
63
It also incorporated more topical travesties as
well as extravaganzas during the 1840s and 50s.
64
Mid-nineteenth century American

61
Kurt Gänzl, Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 86.

62
Ibid.

63
Dudden, Women in American Theatre, 113.

64
“[S]tage burlesque – here used as a collective term for travesties, extravaganzas, and topical farces – was
an enormously popular form of entertainment in the United States.” George Kummer, “The
Americanization of Burlesque, 1840-1860” in Popular Literature in America: A Symposium in Honor of
Lyon N. Richardson, eds. James C. Austin and Donald A. Koch (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green
University Popular Press, 1972), 146.
37
burlesque attracted sizeable and often fashionable audiences.
65
The irreverent humor
was based on “the uneasy tension between high and low, elite and popular cultures then
emerging, and it flourished by dissolving class tensions in laughter.”
66
Thus the social
tensions and distinctions that fueled burlesque were, when checked by humor, also the
foundation of its attraction for both high and low audiences. With the arrival of
Thompson and the British Blondes on the scene, female spectacle and a tradition of
mocking social conventions and culture combined to create a phenomenon that attracted
large audiences and repulsed many cultural critics.
67

Female Spectacle on the American Stage
There were precedents for the display of tights-clad women on the American
stage and in publicity images. An undated lithograph of Mary Ann Lee, (1823-1899), an
American ballet dancer, depicts Lee en pointe in her role as “Fatima” in the Maid of
Cashmere, a ballet of the Romantic era (Figure 1.1). The lithograph likely publicizes or
commemorates the 1837 production of this ballet in London, a production that marked
Lee’s premiere as a dancer. She would go on to become a well-known dancer in the
United States. She was described in a review in The Ladies’ Companion in 1843: “Miss

65
Krummer, “Americanization of Burlesque,” 146. Bernard Sobel also traces the history of American
burlesque to Aristophanes and to the more contemporary British version of parody, puns, and gags.
Bernard Sobel, Burleycue (New York: Farrar & Rinehard, Inc., 1931), 3.

66
Dudden, Women in American Theatre, 113. Dudden further explains that burlesque required the
audience’s familiarity with the source material and offers this as further testement to burlesque’s appeal
across classes. She argues that this popularity in the 1840s and 50s, “testified therefore to a moment in
which theatrical segmentation was still partial and imperfect, when audiences could laugh at both their own
tastes and those of others.” 114.

67
Solomon-Godeau characterizes the nineteenth-century as a period when the “penetration of the
commodity into all spheres of life, experience, and consciousness” corresponds to an emerging culture of
“heightened fetishization of the woman’s body.” “Legs of the Countess,” 68.
38
Mary Ann Lee has established herself as an artist of uncommon power and promise; and
her playing, as well as dancing, in the exquisite “Bayadere” (another title for The Maid of
Cashmere) has been most rapturously received. By many connoisseurs in this delicate
branch of the fine arts, Miss Lee is placed side by side with Celeste, and but little behind

Figure 1.1: Mary Ann Lee as Fatima in “The Maid of Cashmere,” n.d., Courtesy of the Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

the divine Elssler (a famed Austrian ballerina) herself.”
68
In this print, the young ballerina
is shown in a symmetrical pose that highlights her ability to dance on her toes. Her full
skirt is cut just short enough to reveal her en pointe abilities, and the graceful bell of the
skirt emphasizes both her tiny waist and her slender ankles.

68
“Editor’s Table,” The Ladies Companion, a Monthly Magazine; Devoted to Literature and the Fine Arts,
October 1843, 305.
39
The image of the ballet dancer is an important precedent for the burlesque
performer as female spectacle and also serves as a foil. The advent of ballet on the
American stage earlier in the nineteenth century generated moral outrage from some
critics that was similar in tone to the criticism later evoked by burlesque. However,
“[b]allet became morally and socially acceptable (although, at first, only marginally so)
by containing the ballerina within a silent, removed world; within plots that alluded to the
settings of high-art literature and painting; and within a body that promoted rather than
detracted from the illusion that the audience was watching a creature with the same
materiality as a fairy.”
69
The acceptability of the female spectacle in ballet on the
American stage by the mid-nineteenth century is evident in the Ladies’ Companion
review. The image of Mary Ann Lee demonstrates a symmetry of form that is well-
established as an aesthetically pleasing characteristic associated with the ballet performer
as well as the primacy of the display of the physical self. Although carefully contained
by the symmetrical, en pointe pose that lifts the female figure from the earth, the print
does reveal the dancer’s lower legs. The costume in which Mary Ann Lee is pictured in
this image has a close fitting natural waist and a bell skirt, both features of female fashion
beginning in the late 1820’s. The skirt stops short at the dancer’s shins to display a part
of the female body that was, at that time, usually concealed from public view. Female
legs were a hidden and thus eroticized part of the body. Dancers and actresses who

69
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 91.
40
performed in breeches roles displayed their tights covered legs in a public venue, and
their performances also functioned as erotic spectacle.
70

The female form could also be admired in shows that more blatantly appealed to
the male audience. “Model artist” shows capitalized on the tradition of the tableaux
vivant or living picture by featuring women clad only in tights and leotards in motionless
poses and arrangements imitative of classic paintings and statuary. These shows gained
popularity in the late 1840s. The silent, still performances presented an illusion of nudity
for an exclusively male audience.
71
This presentation of the female body in a public
venue was thinly disguised by the pretense of high art.
In 1860, Laura Keene staged The Seven Sisters at Keene’s Varieties Theater,
which was located “along the upscale Broadway strip.”
72
Opened in 1856, Keene’s
Varieties was the second theatre managed by Laura Keene, an actress and manager.
73

Her theatre activity courted the patronage of middle class women, including the virtuous
“true woman”.
74
The ideal of the “true woman” is associated with the cult of true
womanhood or cult or domesticity. According to historian Barbara Welter, “[t]he
attributes of True Womanhood, . . ., can be divided into four cardinal virtues – piety,

70
Solomon-Godeau, “Legs of the Countess,” 74-87. The author points out that the photographs of dancers
and actresses that circulated in France in the second half of the nineteenth century always displayed the leg
covered in tights, sublimating the erotic zone of the leg into an aesthetic form. Solomon-Godeau traces the
eroticization of the leg in the public performances of the nineteenth-century. The leg, she argues, was the
object of the fetishizing male gaze.

71
For more on “model artists” shows see Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 116-118.

72
Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 39. Buszek states that this production may arguably be a burlesque, and notes
that a woman may be credited with the first burlesque production in the United States.

73
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 105.

74
Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 39.
41
purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother,
daughter, sister, wife – woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame,
achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and
power.”
75
Women who worked in the public sphere, which would have included Keene
herself, were counter to this ideal. Keene’s theater did not serve alcohol, and the
actress/manager had a reputation for charitable work and for the production of plays with
sympathetic female lead characters, all factors that helped her attract a middle class
audience that included respectable women. Given her attentiveness to the idealized
figure at the center of the cult of domesticity, it is of special interest that Keene
capitalized on the prurient appeal of female spectacle.
76
Keene’s productions combined a
variety of entertainment forms. The Seven Sisters, a production that opened in the fall of
1860, has been identified by a burlesque historian as the work that helped the most “to
effect the merger of burlesque with spectacle.”
77
The production combined elaborate
stage effects, a plot (or lack of plot) that allowed for extensive revisions and additions,
burlesque comedy, and an almost all female cast clad in revealing costumes that included
a chorus in short petticoats. The Seven Sisters “is frequently credited as the first
production to bring elements of the concert saloon’s feminized spectacles to ‘legitimate’

75
Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer
1966): 151-174.

76
Allen credits Keene for playing “a key role in opening up the burlesque form and in making feminine
spectacle an expected part of it.” Horrible Prettiness, 105.

77
Ibid.
42
American theatrical space.”
78
Legitimate theater or not, the multitude of legs displayed
in flesh-colored tights was a sensation, and other productions capitalized on its success.
79

In the 1860s, female spectacle developed in a variety of theatrical forms and
productions.
80
Most notable are Adah Isaacs Menken in Mazeppa in numerous
productions from 1861 to 1866 and The Black Crook at Niblo’s Theatre in New York in
1866. Menken’s performance in Mazeppa can be classified as “equestrian drama”, and
“ballet spectacle” is the type of performance popularized by The Black Crook. As
vehicles for the display of the female body, images of their stars provide a relevant
context for an analysis of representations of burlesque after 1868. In particular, a number
of spectacular productions in the 1860s capitalized on the allure of flesh-colored tights
over symmetrically formed legs to fill seats for performances of elaborate spectacles.
The growing popularity of female spectacle in the theatre coincided with the proliferation
of images made possible by photomechanical technology.
Publicity photos of Adah Isaacs Menken in her role as Mazeppa show the actress
in a costume that reveals or “unmasks” her female body. The actress’s scantily clad
figure is showcased by her dramatic pose in one of the many photographs of her in this
role (Figure 1.2). Menken presents a frontal view of her extended leg and a profile view

78
Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 39.

79
In a scathing review, The New-York Tribune concludes that The Seven Sisters, “On the whole, for a
burlesque – if such is meant – the piece is bad; if for a ballet, it is bad; if for an extravaganza, it is bad; if
for any recognized order of play, it is bad; but for an incomprehensible, aimless, plotless, accidental
mélange, it has many a good leg to stand upon; . . ., these legs may give it a smart chance of a run.” “Laura
Keene’s Theatre,” New-York Daily Tribune, November 27 , 1960, 5.

35
Allen identifies three categories of performance in which female spectacle developed in the United States
in the 1860s: “equestrian drama,” burlesque, and “the ballet spectacle”.

Horrible Prettiness, 96.
43
of her bent leg as she lunges towards the right of the picture frame. With her arms up,
her elbows out, her hands behind her head, and her head turned to the right to show her
face in three quarter view, the bare (or seemingly bare) flesh of the actress’s legs, arms,
and neck is dramatized. Her costume is strikingly different than the female fashions of
the time, which covered women’s lower bodies with vast, wide skirts that extended to the
floor.

Figure 1.2: Adah Isaacs Menken as Mazeppa, c. 1861-1866.

Menken (1835-1868), an actress with a flare for scandal and self-promotion, took
the title role in Mazeppa in an 1861 production of the play staged in Albany, New York
at the Green Street Theatre that was loosely based on Lord Byron’s poem of the same
44
name.
81
This is a male role in which Cassimer/Mazeppa is “exiled into the wilderness,
stripped naked, and tied to a charging steed”; a stunt Menken did herself dressed in a pink
body stocking and a “brief tunic, which would appear in a blur to the audience as a naked
woman bound to a horse.”
82
Menken’s version of Mazeppa focused more on her physical
posturing, to the extent that much of the dialogue was cut.
83
Much of the attraction of the
performance was in the agility and athleticism Menken brought to the role, which is the
story of an infant found on the battlefield and raised in the court of a Polish count. As a
young page, Cassimer falls in love with a Polish aristocrat who is betrothed to someone
else. Cassimer fights the fiancé for his love and is punished at the hands of the Count
whom he has served. The young man is stripped of his clothing and strapped, face up
with legs splayed, on the back of a horse that then charges up a “mountain” on the stage.
Wandering the wilderness on the back of a horse, Cassimer finds himself embraced in his
homeland by the King of the Tartars who recognizes him as his long last son, Mazeppa.
Redressed as a prince, Mazeppa returns to battle victoriously for his Polish love. Already
a popular play in mid-century America, Menken’s cross-dressed, undressed Mazeppa and
the physicality she brought to the role (most notably in the horse stunt) brought a new
excitement to the story. In previous productions of the play, a dummy would be strapped

81
Lois Adler, “Adah Isaacs Menken in Mazeppa,” in Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins,
Women in American Theatre, edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York: Theater
Publications Group, 2006), 71. Adler identifies Menken’s first perfomance as Mazeppa as taking place in
Albany in 1861. Allen states, “Nearly every history of burlesque includes in its survey of antecedents the
appearance of Adah Isaacs Menken in the title role of Mazeppa at New York’s Broadway Theater on June
13, 1861.” Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 96. This discrepancy in dates and locations is, according to Adler,
characteristic of inaccuracies in Menken history. Adler provides April 30, 1866 as the date of the first New
York City performance.

82
Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 40.

83
Alder, “Adah Isaacs Menken,” 78.
45
to the horse in lieu of the male lead. In this version, the female lead in a male role,
strapped face up on a black horse, rode across the stage herself. Not only did the actress
appear to be naked in the scene, her “nude” body was displayed in motion. Theatre
historian Lois Alder states that, according to Menken, “she was ‘ordered’ never to answer
questions from the press or anyone else as to whether she wore tights or was really nude.
The wardrobe mistress, Emma Hazeltine, was also sworn to secrecy.”
84
The question
regarding the performer’s state of undress fuelled publicity.
Menken toured with this production in the United States and then in Europe. She
finally appeared in the role of Mazeppa in New York City at the Broadway Theater in
1866. Her sensational appearance generated a great deal of press and cemented her status
as a symbol of desire: her presentation of her physical self was the focus of the
performance rather than her talent as a mimic.
85
Menken’s state of undress, her sex, and
her physical daring contributed to the shocking effect. In his history of nudity on the
American stage, Epes W. Sargent states that “audiences gasped and the clergy denounced
when the big scene was reached.”
86
Menkens’ baggy trunks, loose bodice, and flesh
colored tights (if she did in fact wear tights) were part of an illusion of nudity that has
since become a staple of the burlesque aesthetic. Sargent writes that, “Tights were then
relegated chiefly to circus performers. They were also worn by Shakespearian Violas,

84
Adler states that this was Menken’s account, but does not cite a source, nor was I able confirm one.
“Adah Isaacs Menken,” 73.

85
Menken’s biographer, Paul Lewis, quotes Robert Henry Newell (one of Menken’s husbands), “Adah was
a symbol of desire . . . all who saw her, wanted her immediately.” Ibid., 77.

86
Epes W. Sargent, “History of Nudity on Stage from ‘Mazeppa’ to the Minsky Era,” in “Clippings,
Articles, Etc.,” n.d. Burlesque Collection of the Museum of the City of New York 30, 1.
46
Rosalinds and the like, but never with such a barefaced attempt to suggest nudity.”
87

This style of “clothed nudity” becomes a feature of burlesque spectacle.
88

Menken’s titillating performance is part of a long history of cross-dressing on
stage.
89
By the mid-nineteenth century women had successfully performed in dramatic
male roles to critical acclaim in American theatre.
90
Female cross-dressing was also
often employed in the theatre a means of displaying the female body in a revealing
costume.
91
A publicity photograph of Menken as Mazeppa displays the actress posed and
costumed in such a way as to reveal rather than conceal the feminine contours of her
body. The pale, loosely draped fabric of her shorts and tunic do nothing to distract from
the exposed flesh. The somewhat exaggerated drama of the pose, the unusual costume,

87
Ibid.

88
Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 40. Buszek uses the term, “clothed nudity” in her analysis. The author also
argues that that Menken’s manipulation of her public image to create a star persona is another precursor of
burlesque spectacle.

89
For a comprehensive study of cross-dressing in theater and performance see Laurence Senelick, The
Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theater (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), Kindle edition.

90
See Renée M. Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91-114. Sentilles notes Charlotte
Cushman in particular, who was known for her performances as Hamlet and Romeo. 99-100. Sentilles
analyzes Menken’s cross-dressing performance as Cassimer/Mazeppa in the context of Civil War America.
There was an increased fascination with female cross-dressing in the Civil War era that stemmed from the
wartime necessity for women to take on more public, masculine roles. According to Sentilles, the character
of Mazeppa, a romantic hero/soldier, would have a special appeal, and Menken’s performance with its
shifting gender identifications “suggest[ed] a topsy-turvy world that particularly resonated with Civil War
era audiences.” 111. Finally, Sentilles points to an American predilection for “unmasking” and recognizing
a perceptual trick to explain why these cross-dressing acts were received as spectacular and controversial
but not as salacious. “The mental act of unmasking, or uncrossing, was central to the performance itself.
This was yet another version of America’s preoccupation with seeing “behind the veil,” which can be found
in cultural expression throughout the century, particularly in urban fiction and the trompe l’oeil genre in
American art. 112.

91
“However, the centrality of the principal boy increased throughout the Victorian era owing to the fixation
on female legs and bosoms. The fetishism of the female leg resulted from its disappearance beneath
voluminous crinolines and hoop-skirts. The uncommoness of underwear allowed the male imagination to
lead an unimpeded progress up the leg to the pudenda.” Senelick, Changing Room, Location 7618-7633.
47
the play of naked/maybe not naked flesh, and the feminized, cross-dressed body are
visual tropes that are adopted and used in representations of burlesque theater after 1868.
Menken’s collaboration in the production and distribution of such images of herself as an
aspect of self-promotion is a method that was and continues to be employed by
performers of all stamps.
92
Her use of photography to establish and inscribe a celebrity
image capitalized on the growing popularity of the carte-de-visite as a collectible object
in the United States, a development that will be discussed in greater detail later in this
chapter. In the case of Menken and for the female burlesquers that follow her,
promotional images often emphasize the costume as part of an elaborate frame that
highlights the primacy of physical display in the performance (on stage and in the image).
On the heels of Menken and her black horse came the premier of a ballet
spectacle that would prove to be an enduring hit. On September 12, 1866, The Black
Crook premiered at Niblo’s Theatre in New York and ran for over a year. Set in
Germany in 1600, the combination of a melodramatic script based on Faust, spectacular
sets and costumes, songs by a number of composers, and the legs of a European ballet
troupe proved to be a recipe for one of the first successful musicals in the United States.
The success of the first production of The Black Crook generated many touring
productions and 15 Broadway revivals.
93
This production is regarded as a benchmark not
only in the history of musical theatre, but also in the history of the leg show. The Black

92
For a “queer” reading of Menken’s manipulation of her public image and the impact of her scandalous
life on that image, see Noreen Barnes-McLain, “Bohemian on Horseback: Adah Isaacs Menken” in Passing
Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History, eds. Robert A. Schanke
and Kim Marra (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 63-79.

93
Harry Ransom Library, The Black Crook Collection (Preliminary Catalogue).
48
Crook was remarkable in the magnitude of the spectacle and in its popular, long-running
success. The ballet girls were a popular attraction, and the dancers were the first to
perform the Can-Can in the United States. According to popular theatrical histories like
Jack Burton’s 1965, In Memoriam – Oldtime Show Biz, this first production of The Black
Crook, marks “the birth of the leg show.”
94
Although there were certainly earlier
examples of the display of female legs on stages both reputable and questionable, on a
grand scale, this production, “introduced the popular theater for the first time to the
display of the female figure for its own sake, something which had little relationship to
plot, theme, characterization, or any other dramatic element. This became the
fundamental purpose of burlesque.”
95
This early, popular leg show is almost always part
of the origin story for the “female component of burlesque.”
96
Despite this popular
history, The Black Crook was written as spectacular melodrama with plenty of leeway for
adding attractions and scenes. It did not employ burlesque humor or females in cross-
dressed roles (at least in the original production), which possibly helped the original
production remain within the boundaries of social acceptability.
97

An illustration with a caption at the bottom that reads, “’The Black Crook’
Unmasked – Up in the Flies. – Gauzy Nymphs Going up in the Gridiron to Descend to

94
Jack Burton, In Memoriam – Oldtime Show Biz (New York: Vantage Press, 1965), 47. Burton calls his
work, “reminiscences of a pop song and theater buff for almost eighty years and a former newspaper man,
magazine editor and radio producer.” 11.

95
Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Dial Press, 1970),
173.

96
Felicia Hardison Londré and Daniel J. Watermeier, The History of North American Theater (New York:
The Continuum Publishing Company, 1998), 225.

97
This is Robert C. Allen’s assertion. Horrible Prettiness, 117.
49
Earth” (Figure 1.3) provides a behind the curtain view of numerous costumed chorus girls
preparing to drop onto the stage.
98
The low cut bodices of the costumes, both front and
back, reveal the arms and much of the upper torso and back of the chorines. Some of the
figures ascending the wooden staircase behind the curtains wear short, fringed trunks that
are gathered to create an exaggerated contrast between the hip and the waist. The legs of
the trunk-wearing women are revealed from mid-thigh to half-boot. Tiny wings and
protruding head-pieces complete the fairy costumes. A male stagehand in the center of
the composition watches as the voluptuous fairies climb the stairs; his interest serves as a
stand-in for the eager spectators on the other side of the curtain. He is in contrast to the
only other male in the scene, at stagehand in the upper right of the print who assists one
of the chorines with the rigging. This backstage image, with women in outrageous
costumes literally coming out of the woodwork to clamor up a space where the elaborate
rigging of the production is also on display, characterizes a production that was
revolutionary in its excess. The Black Crook was simply more spectacular than any
spectacle that had come before. This excess in the realization of the lavish production is
representative of a transgressive form contained within “the boundaries of bourgeois
culture” in that it was “yoked to a romantic, melodramatic plot,” and the costumes, “the
single most transgressive element”, maintained the show’s ties to the romantic ballet,
which, by the 1860s, was an acceptable cultural form.
99
The figure in the full-skirted
costume at the left of the image is the closest example in this print of the similarities

98
From the Black Crook Collection at the Harry N. Ransom Center. Penciled on the back is, “opening night
of the Black Crook Niblo’s Garden, September 12, 1866.”

99
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 116-117.
50
between costumes in the romantic ballet and those in The Black Crook, although the close
fitting bodice with a fuller bottom half is generally suggestive of the shape of the
romantic ballet costume.

Figure 1.3: The Black Crook Unmasked, c. 1866, Courtesy of Harry N. Ransom Center, Black Crook
Collection
This spectacle was the subject of a great deal of both praise and criticism in the
contemporary press:
It wasn’t the talk, but the tights that gained “Crook’ its fame, and not so much the
tights as the area of exposure. Trunks were cut to what was then regarded as the
minimum, dropping but little below the curve of the hips, and even the ballet
51
dancers shortened their skirts (which were supposed to fall well below the knees),
and also shortened their trunks. New Yorkers shared shocked gasps with the
hinterlanders, but the ‘Crook’ made a pot of money, and paved the way for Lydia
Thompson and her British Blondes.
100

The Black Crook was a leg show. In “The Black Crook Myth,” Julian Mates quotes one
of the men responsible for importing the ballet troupe (Parisian in his account), Jarrett, as
stating, “‘Legs are staple articles that will never go out of fashion while the world lasts . .
.’”
101
The chorus was reported to include more than thirty dancers listed in the program
with fifty auxiliary ladies: “The Tribune of September 17, 1866, referred to the ‘large
number of female legs,’ and reviews mentioned The Black Crook ‘not only as a ‘leg
show’, but as a sink of abomination.’”
102
In a March 3, 1868 column published in Alta
California, Mark Twain provides an extensive description of the even more spectacular
production of The White Fawn at Niblo’s, the successor to The Black Crook, in which he
seems dazzled by the spectacle and the women on display:
… Everybody agrees that it is much more magnificent than the Crook. The fairy
scenes are more wonderfully dazzling and beautiful, and the legs of the young
women reach higher up. … and out of every flower crops a beautiful woman
(apparently naked, for the most part,) and so ingeniously have these rascally

100
Sargent, “History of Nudity on Stage,” 57.

101
Julian Mates, “The Black Crook Myth,” Theater Survey 7, no. 1 (1966): 36-37.

102
Mates includes snippets of additional contemporary critiques: “The Times (September 13, 1966) spoke
of ‘the witching Pas de Demons, in which the Demonese, who wear no clothes to speak of, so gracefully
and prettily disported as to draw forth thunders of applause.’ The Times critic went back to see the show on
the seventeenth and reported ‘ . . . such unembarrassed disporting of human organism has never been
indulged in before.’ The New York World (September 17, 1866) described ‘a regiment of lithe, active
beauties bent on turning old heads by kicking their regiments of young heels high in the air.’ Again,
‘everyone knows how shocking a Parisian ballet must be, from hearsay, and therefore everybody is going
to Niblo’s post-haste to learn from actual observation.’” 36-37.
52
angels been “sized,” to perfect the perspective, that the smaller ones seem
swimming high in air in the midst of a tinted mist in the distance.
103

Despite his seeming enchantment, Twain continues with an indictment of the production
and its predecessor, The Black Crook:
But the “Black Crook” gave birth to a state of things that may well be regarded as
appalling. It debauched many a pure mind itself, and it has bred a species of
infamous pictorial literature that will spread the same effect over a far wider field.
Papers and pictures that would have been regarded as obscene, and shunned like a
pestilence a few years ago, are displayed on every bookstand, now and sell by
tens and hundreds of thousands. Boys and girls can buy them when they please,
and they do buy them, and so prepare to go as straight to the devil as they possibly
can.
104

Twain acknowledges the overwhelming spectacle of productions like The White Fawn
and The Black Crook in a seemingly enraptured description and notes the pleasures of the
costumes, stage dressing, lighting, and choreography as a frame for the display of the
beautiful women. His review turns rapidly to a sharp critique of the societal effects of
such productions and the proliferation of images that accompany their success. The
result of the spread of this “infernal literature,” he suggests, will be an explosion of
prostitution. The leg show, popular fare for lower class concert saloons, had found a
home in a respectable playhouse, even if it did (for critics like Twain) stink up the place.
Widespread circulation of images of leg show performers, furthermore, was attributed
with the power to spread debauchery well beyond the space of the theatre. The
emergence of female spectacle in mid-nineteenth century American theatre and the
corresponding production of images that commemorated and further commercialized the

103
Mark Twain, “The New Sensational Play – A Glimpse of Hartford – Sundry Connecticut Sights –
Charter Oak – ‘Home Again’,” Alta California from a series of letters titled, “Mark Twain on His Travels”
(San Francisco: March 3, 1968).

104
Ibid.
53
public display of the female performer’s body were thus already well-known and
problematic cultural phenomenons when female-centric burlesque took to the stage.
Lydia Thompson and Her British Blondes in American Visual Culture
In 1868, the theater going public had barely recovered from the shock of scantily
clad demons and fairies in The Black Crook and The White Fawn and the apparently nude
figure of actress Adah Isaacs Menken on the back of a horse in Mazeppa. On September
28, 1868 a production titled, Ixion, or the Man at the Wheel, a British send-up “of
classical culture and mythological allusion composed in punning rhymed pentameter,”
performed by Lydia Thompson and her troupe of women debuted at Wood’s Museum
and Metropolitan Theater in New York.
105
This production is regarded as a landmark in
the history of burlesque theatre in the United States, as Thompson’s burlesque and the
productions that quickly followed mark an increased emphasis on the display of the
female body in burlesque performance.
106
Burlesque was not new to United States
theatres, but, as one historian wrote, “we were unfamiliar with the intimate atmosphere,
the verve and vivacity, the frank and coyless display of well formed legs and substantial
curves, the attractive English accent chattering puns to fit current topics of interest, the
fascinating masses of blonde hair, and the wriggling stage dancing that were the visitors

105
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 10. In Greek mythology, Ixion was infamous for his sins. King of the
Lapiths in Thessaly, Ixion has the dubious distinction of being the first man to kill a relative. Ixion kills his
father-in-law, and unable to receive purification, he wanders in exile until Zeus decides to purify him and
bring him to Olympus. Ixion has the bad manners to fall in lust with Hera, and when Zeus hears of this, he
forms a cloud in the shape of Hera. Ixion mates with this cloud, which results in the birth of Centaurus.
Zeus punishes Ixion by binding him to a winged and sometimes flaming wheel that perpetually tumbles
through the air.

106
“From Ixion on, burlesque in America was inextricably tied to the issue of the spectacular female
performer, and from then on burlesque implicitly raised troubling questions about how a woman should be
“allowed” to act on stage, about how femininity should and could be represented, and about the relationship
of women onstage to women in the outside, “real” world.” Ibid., 21.
54
stock in trade.”
107
The addition of female spectacle to burlesque, or the talking
characteristics of burlesque to ballet spectacle, results in a new, and somewhat
disconcerting, popular theatrical form. Outlandish, brief costumes that exoticize the
female performer and function to reveal the body or at least to create an illusion of the
revealed body become a central feature of the visual culture of burlesque after 1868. I
argue that the combination of the travesty of more traditional burlesque and the
increasingly eroticized image of the burlesque performer reveals tensions in the
spectatorial relationship and tests the boundaries of traditional and popular media
representations of performing women.
The widespread production of images that display the performers and productions
of American burlesque is a result of mid-century advancements in mechanical
reproduction, specifically lithography and photography, and the creation of popular
media for popular culture. As Thompson and her troupe appeared on both sides of the
Atlantic, so too, it seems, did publicity materials. A poster in the collection of the New
York Public Library advertising “The Lydia Thompson Troupe” printed by McClure and
MacDonald, “Lithographers, Draftsmen, and Engravers to the Queen” shows the troupe
in a simple arrangement of seven oval frames.
108
Lydia Thompson is featured in the
largest, center oval. All images are busts in three-quarter profile. All feature the players
elaborately dressed, fully covered with hats, hair decorations, elaborate hairdos and
jewelry. They are portrayed as typical Victorian ladies. The oval framing device is

107
H. E. Cooper, “Pink Tights and British Blondes,” The Dance (October 1926): 26.

108
This poster is available for viewing by request in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. However, it had not
been conserved or photographed prior to the completion of this dissertation.
55
simple and the space between each bust is decorated by a creeping vine design. The
demure design of the poster for a burlesque troupe asserts the status of the female
performers as Victorian ladies and serves here as a contrast to the type of theatrical poster
that came to be more commonly used for the purpose of burlesque advertisement in the
United States.
The theatrical poster became a centerpiece of burlesque advertising during the late
nineteenth century. Lithography was the invention of Alois Senefelder (1771-1834), a
Bavarian playwright. Senefelder’s technique was refined in the decades that followed by
a number of artists. William and John Pendleton of Boston introduced lithography to the
United States in 1828.
109
The Pendletons apprenticed Nathaniel Currier in 1828, who
would soon go on to found Currier and Ives with James Merritt Ives in New York.
Currier and Ives went on to become innovators in the production of hand-colored
lithographs for mass production, though it is William Sharp of Boston who is credited
with the introduction of color lithography to the United States in 1839.
110
Louis Prang
(1824-1909), who was concerned with art education and creating an art for the masses, is
regarded as an important contributor to perfecting the process of color printing in the
United States.
Despite these advances, it took a while for theatre advertising to catch up. Mid-
century theatre notices lack illustration. They were likely the work of job printers who
combined innovative mixtures of typefaces and sometimes a decorative border to

109
Clarence P. Hornung and Fridolf Johnson, 200 Years of American Graphic Art: A Retrospective Survey
of the Printing Arts and Advertising since the Colonial Period (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1976),
49.

110
Ibid.
56
advertise the performances and performers. The eventual incorporation of colored-
illustration into theatrical advertising is likely most indebted to the use of color
lithography in the production of posters for traveling circuses. Joseph W. Morse began
creating multi-colored posters in the 1840s. He specialized in the creation of circus
posters for which he used pine, which was less expensive than cuts previously used.
111

Posters for traveling circuses like those produced by Morse “fueled American’s love of
posters.”
112
Colorful American circus posters are said to have influenced a young Jules
Chéret (1836-1932) when he worked as a young man for a lithographer in England.
113

Whether this tidbit is verifiable or not, it is certainly the case that Chéret’s work would
have an impact on the style of American theatrical posters as well as the “poster craze” in
the United States of the 1890s.
An exceptional example of a theatrical poster featuring costumed performers and
dramatic action can be seen in a small format lithograph reproduction of a Jules Chéret
poster for Lydia Thompson as Faust (Figure 1.4). Lydia Thompson is shown in red from
head to toe. As Faust, she dances into the foreground with toes pointed, arms aloft, and
her torso and neck turned in opposing directions to enhance the sense of dramatic
movement. A muscular leg clad in bright red tights, clearly defined from upper thigh to
ankles, straddles the text, “Lydia Thompson” in the bottom foreground of the image. The
hilt of a sword appears from behind the ruffled breeches of her costume. While the

111
Wendy Nelson-Cave, Broadway Theatre Posters (New York: Smithmark, 1993), 22.

112
Frederic R. Brandt, Designed to Sell: Turn-of-the-Century American Posters, (Richmond, VA: Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), 33.

113
Edgar Breitenback, “A Brief History” in The American Poster (New York: American Federation of
Arts, 1968), 7.
57
breeches and the sword mark the character portrayed as a male, the ruffles of the breeches
and the close fitting costume clearly reveal a cross-dressing female. She emerges from a
less distinctly drawn morass of figures. This image is a lithograph dated to
approximately 1896 taken from an 1869 poster.
114
Chéret, a revolutionary French poster
artist of the later nineteenth century, was known to draw directly onto the lithographic
stone and for his creation of a “unique style by relating text to image in an entirely new
way.”
115
This is exemplified in this example in the integration of the central figure and
the text that identifies her and the show in which she was performing. The dramatic
movement of the figure, the emphasis on tights-clad legs and the elaborate costume, and
the readily identifiable female contours of the cross-dressed performer are common
characteristics of representations of Thompsonian burlesque that are adopted and
repeated in burlesque representation in America through the end of the nineteenth century
and into the twentieth century.

114
Posters became a popular collectable medium, and artists and publishers found ways to capitalize on the
popularity of the colorful images.

115
Carlo Arturo Quintavalle, “The Development of Poster Art” in Max Gallo, The Poster in History.
Translated by Alfred and Bruni Mayor (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1974), 299.
Quintavalle describes Faust as an early example of Chéret’s work: “Already in Faust (1869) his baroque
roots are evident, and there are reminiscences of Giambattista, and also, I would say, of Giandomenico,
Tiepolo, and even Watteau. Chéret’s originality was not in his cultural inspiration, which in the civilized
France of Honoré Daumier’s caricatures was hardly novel; but rather in his presentation. In Faust and
others of Chéret’s early posters, the presentation is substantially academic, with strong colors, bold lines,
and foreshortened figures in the foreground, and the background simply sketched in.”
58

Figure 1.4: Jules Chéret, Lydia Thompson as Faust, c. 1896 lithograph of 1869 poster.

Like Menken and other celebrities that had come before her, Lydia Thompson
took advantage of another popular and reproducible medium, the photograph, to promote
her public image. Performers were often photographed in costume for the roles by which
they might be readily identified by the consumer. They were also photographed in the
fashions of the time. A number of photographic images of Thompson and other members
of her troupe show the actresses in elegant day or evening wear appropriate to a society
lady. These images are similar to the street-dress photographs of performers in other
genres that circulated at approximately the same time. A comparison of images of
Thompson in her street clothes (Figures 1.5 and 1.6) to one of Olive Logan, the actress
59
who spoke out so vociferously against performers of Thompson’s ilk (Figure 1.7), reveals
little variation from standard profile or three quarter portrait poses. But while Logan’s
conservative dress and hairstyle suggest a well-to-do sobriety appropriate for a portrait of
a middle or upper class woman, Thompson’s portraits demonstrate a flashier approach.
In Figure 1.6, Thompson’s face is dramatically framed by an elaborate hat and the rose
that she holds to her chin. The hand-tinted portrait of Thompson in evening clothes
(Figure 1.5) is even more dramatic in the use of color to emphasize the details of her
dress and accessories and to enhance the color of her lips and hair in contrast to her skin.
The photographs of Thompson, which were produced in part to extend her celebrity and
her reputation as an attraction to see, also suggest a playful or even mocking approach to
the solemnity that often characterizes nineteenth century cartes de visite.

Figure 1.5: Lydia Thompson, n.d. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, Card Photograph Collection
Figure 1.6: Lydia Thompson, n.d.
60

Figure 1.7: C.D. Fredricks & Co., Olive Logan, New York, 1865, MSCUA, University of Washington
Libraries
Working with photography studios, late nineteenth century stars profited in
multiple ways from the popular taste for collecting cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards.
The carte-de-visite is a small photograph of approximately 9 x 6 cm that is pasted on a
piece of card.
116
It looks like a visiting card, though it was rarely used for that purpose.
French photographer André Adolphe Eugéne Disdéri (1819-1889) first patented the carte
in 1854. The process involved the use of a camera with multiple lenses to create identical
images on a single negative plate. The format eventually evolved to a standard format of
eight images per plate. This resulted in a process that allowed for the reproduction of
photographic images at a much lower cost than the cost of a single, large image produced
from a full-plate negative. It also allowed for reproduction of a larger number of images

116
John Plunkett, “Celebrity and Community: The Poetics of the Carte-de-visite,” Journal of Victorian
Culture 8, no. 1, 55. For more on the history of the carte-de-visite and its cultural impact in nineteenth
century France, see Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).
61
within a shorter time.
117
The carte-de-visite could be copied via a process of copied
negatives, resulting in simultaneous printing from multiple negatives.
118
Supply could
then meet the demand of a larger market. Though the first daguerreotype portrait studio
opened in London in 1841, there was a fairly high price for a sitting and the
daguerreotype was a unique, non-reproducible image. The carte-de-visite was utilized
early on by royalty and other socially prominent individuals. Their patronage of the
format established it as a socially acceptable form and in combination with its
affordability, led to rapid proliferation and even a mania for collecting in the 1860s. The
cabinet card was introduced in 1866 in England and later that year in the United States.
The cabinet card measures 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches with an image size of 4 x 5 1/2 inches.
This format is almost three times the size of the carte and provides a much more detailed
portrait. This form slowly gained popularity in the American market. It was not until
approximately 1880 that the larger format shared equal popularity with the carte, but by
1890 carte-de-visite production had declined to less than a tenth of the portrait
photograph market.
119

Publishers paid celebrities a flat fee (the amount was dependent on their
prominence) and then sold these images on cartes and later on cabinet cards in mass
quantities. By the late 1860s in the United States there were only about a dozen

117
Plunkett, “Celebrity and Community,” 59.

118
“Copy negatives of high quality could be made easily. A glass positive was produced by contact
printing and this positive was used to print as many negative copies as desired. All quantity printing of
stereographs and cartes de visite was done with multiply copy negatives.” William C. Darrah, Cartes de
Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography (Gettysburg, PA: W.C. Darrah, Publisher, 1981), 18. The ease
with which copy negatives could be produced resulted in a great deal of piracy. The lack of a publishers
imprint is a definite indicator of a pirated image.

119
Ibid.,10.
62
publishers with a large catalogue of celebrity photographs, but there were hundreds of
photographers who published and distributed celebrity cards. Well-known photographers
and studios who photographed American stage personalities included C.D. Fredricks &
Co., Mathew B. Brady, Jeremiah Gurney & Son, Mora, and Napoleon Sarony. In the
1870s and 80s, Napoleon Sarony was the most prominent photographer and publisher of
celebrity photographs, particularly theatrical portraits. He favored the larger cabinet card
mount but also published in the carte-de-visite format. Mora was another well-known
celebrity photographer. He began his career in Sarony’s studio but had established his
own business by 1870.
John Plunkett argues that the emergence and rapid proliferation of the celebrity
carte-de-visite in the 1860s as a media available to a broad public, “helped to provide a
collective experience of well-known individuals,” that was also, “notable for the intimate
relationship it generated between individual consumers and public figures.”
120
Celebrity
is generated by the agency of the consumer. An expanding middle class provided the
demand for images of theatre performers – part of an assertion of modernity.
121
In the
United States, both men and women collected these images. An article from the London
“Once a Week” reprinted in 1862 in The Saturday Evening Post attests to the market for
photographs of public persons: “Thus a new source of income has been opened to first-
rate photographers, besides the profit arising from taking portraits. A wholesale trade has

120
Plunkett, “Celebrity and Community,” 57. According to Plunkett, the photograph in its realism in
contrast to other media of the time, “proffered a more authentic and collective relationship with the
distinguished sitters so depicted.” This realism, combined with the act of collecting, which “was an activity
that was an expression of selfhood,” produced albums that “constituted part of the bricolage of
subjectivity.”

121
Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 33.
63
sprung up with amazing rapidity, and to obtain a good sitter, and his permission to sell his
carte de visite is in itself an annuity to a man.”
122
Although his analysis focuses on the
use of the carte-de-visite photography by the Victorian court in England, Plunkett’s
argument about the democratizing value of the carte as an object that offers a sense of the
ordinary through photographic realism and functions as a means for the ordinary to
generate an image of themselves that utilizes the same visual language as that employed
by a carte image of the nobility, is applicable to an analysis of how the image of the
burlesque performer was fashioned in celebrity photographs. Photographs of burlesque
performers in both street-dress and in costume as their various stage personae circulated
for the consumption of the collecting public. Though the somewhat dramatized images
of Thompson described earlier are recognizably similar in pose and self-presentation to
portraits of women from the period, there are many images of Thompson and her
burlesque contemporaries in costumes for their various roles that are distinctive as
representations of burlesque performers.
Some description and analysis of Thompsonian burlesque on the American stage
is useful for a reading of the burlesque qualities of these publicity photographs. The
British Blondes’ first production was Ixion, described by one burlesque historian as “a
framework for elaborate costumes, songs, dances, local allusions, sarcastic comment,
imitations of swell dandies and German benders.”
123
Lydia Thompson cross-dressed in

122
A. Wynter, “Cartes de Visite” The Saturday Evening Post, March 1, 1862, 3. The author notably
contends that the British market is more for literary, scientific and political figures while, “In Paris, actors
and singers and dancers are in demand, . . .” and that, “A majority of these portraits are, indeed, aimed a
sensual appetites.”

123
Sobel, Burleycue, 5.
64
the lead roll of Ixion, the ex-king of Thessaly. Ada Harland appeared as Jupiter, Pauline
Markham as Venus, Lisa Weber as and Harry Beckett as Minerva. The performance of
Ixion at Wood’s Museum, even with its popular music, risqué dancing, and gender-
bending use of women in male roles met with some positive critical acclaim. The 1869
production of Thompson’s troupe at the renowned Niblo’s Theater of another burlesque,
The Forty Thieves, penned by a British author, on the other hand, met with both large
crowds and what Allen refers to as “a hysterical antiburlesque discourse.”
124
Regardless
of the “hysterical antiburlesque discourse” Thompson’s company was an unqualified
commercial success. Following their initial runs in New York, the company toured the
Eastern United States, and over the next six years toured as far as California with
occasional returns to New York and trips to England for new scripts, performers, and
costumes.
125
By March of 1869, burlesque was such a phenomenon that it was itself the
subject of a burlesque.
126
From 1869 to 1938, there was some variant of Ixion and The
Forty Thieves performed as burlesque in New York Theaters, which is the best testament
to the popularity and enduring legacy of Thompsonian burlesque. Lydia Thompson’s
performances with her troupe tied burlesque to “the spectacular female performer,” and,
“from then on burlesque implicitly raised troubling questions about how a woman should
be ‘allowed’ to act on stage, and how femininity should and could be represented, and

124
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 16.

125
Marlie Moses “Lydia Thompson and the ‘British Blondes’,” in Women in American Theatre, eds. Helen
Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (Theater Publications Group, 2006), 78.

126
Ibid,, 17.
65
about the relationship of women on stage to women in the outside, ‘real’ world.”
127

Thompson’s New York debut certainly marks an association between burlesque and the
display of the female body that persists even today, and I argue that the unique and
provocative combination of travesty and female spectacle presented by the British
Blondes is characterized by visual attributes that challenged conventions of female
spectacle and the representation of the female body.
Lydia Thompson and her company brought from England to America an
established theatrical form that combined well with an established American popular
taste for spectacle. The celebrity of the performers enhanced the furor over these
productions. British burlesque of the 1850s and 60s, “evolved from the more poetic or
fairy extravaganza style of piece favored in earlier decades, mixing the scenic, pictorial
and musical values of such pieces with the kind of broad burlesque of the serious theatre
popular on British stage since . . . the early eighteenth century.”
128
British burlesque as
practiced in London by Lydia and her ilk, “was a kind of entertainment that parodied or
burlesqued the subject and characters of its target tale or play, allowing its writers and its
performers the wildest of extravagances, the vastest of exaggerations, the most over-the-
top incongruities in action, song, and speech, whilst also leaving place for an eye-
catching physical production.”
129

Thompson is now best known for her glamorous and titillating presence on the
American stage, but according to a recent biography (also the first biography of

127
Ibid,, 21.

128
Gänzl, Lydia Thompson, 86.

129
Ibid.
66
Thompson) by Kurt Gänzl she had been a star in the theater since her teens. Born Eliza
Hodges Thompson in London in 1838 (some sources cite 1836 as the year of her birth),
Lydia was already dancing on the professional stage by 1853. She drew early attention
with her interpretation of “Spanish” or “Andalusian” dance and for a number of
pantomime roles.

As a young danseuse she toured the major cities of Europe and
performed on various stages. She made her first appearance on the burlesque stage in
London in Virginus in 1859.
130
Before her triumphant debut on Broadway, Thompson
was a successful lead in a number of British burlesque productions, usually in the role of
principal boy.
For their debut in New York, Lydia and her troupe decided to produce Ixion,
which was an established and successful burlesque in Britian, but was still new to the
American stage. Ixion was a huge success, and before the end of their four month
engagement at Wood’s, Lydia and the Blondes staged Ernani in which she plays the title
role, or “Don John of Arragon.” At the end of the Woods engagement, Thompson and
her troupe moved to Niblo’s, where they staged a new burlesque, The Forty Thieves.
131

Although the show was criticized for not being a classical burlesque, The Forty Thieves
provided numerous opportunities for Lydia and the principal players to showcase their
legs and their talents. The elaborate costumes and production values made up for any
lack in the text. The spectacle included a rousing performance of the cancan by Lydia
and a scene in which forty female thieves simultaneously struck a match on the heel of

130
Ibid., 30.

131
Ada Harland left the troupe rather noisily once the Wood’s contract was up, and formed a short-lived
troupe of her own in Boston.
67
their shoes and lifted the match to light the cigarettes in their mouths. Both of these
elements of the show illustrate how female-centric burlesque of the period challenged
conventional tastes and morals. The cancan, the scandalous dance, was notoriously
popular in France first as a participatory dance and later as a choreographed
entertainment with high kicks that suggested a lack of control and revealed
undergarments and limbs when performed by women. In the nineteenth century,
smoking was an acceptable practice for men, but not for women. Such actions on stage
could only heighten the tension between masculine and the sexualized female body in
Thompsonian burlesque.
Thompson was treated with regard in the Victorian press in Britian, which
contrasts to the increasingly negative responses her troupe generated in the United
States.
132
Press reaction was increasingly negative during the run of The Forty Thieves as
newspapers cast aspersions not only on the quality of the production but also on the
physical attributes and characters of the principals. Their next show at Niblo’s was
Sinbad in which Lydia played the title role. The take at the box office was not quite as
good. The company spent a total of 45 weeks in New York before they went on the road.
They traveled with a core group of eight performers, which they supplemented with local
performers. Thompson and her fellow players eventually returned to New York and to
Niblo’s in spring of 1870 and toured again after the New York season. Lydia Thompson
and her British Blondes continued to do well on repeat tours of the United States with

132
Moses, “Lydia Thompson,” 80.
68
New York as just another stop on the tour. All in all, Thompson made four visits to the
United States, her first lasting three years.
133

Their performances were a financial success and they received a great deal of
press, some of which was generated by scandal.
134
Some press accounts employ a
mocking tone in their review of the British Blondes. In the report of an interview with
Thompson in December of 1869, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune takes the opportunity
to poke fun a Thompson and her version of burlesque:
The very life, soul, and we may say, salvation of a burlesque, is a short petticoat.
Dull would be the wit, dubious the humor, childishly feeble the hits, inexplicable
the allusions, solemn the laughter, impossible the jigs, and deadly dreary the puns,
if the gods, impersonated by the goddesses, suffered their bespangled skirts to fall
so much as two barleycorns below the patella.
135

Employing a humor familiar to patrons of burlesque, the author chides the reliance of
Thompson’s burlesque on the display of legs. His commentary reinforces the emphasis
on this part of the female figure in the performance and also points to another attention

133
Marlie Moses speculates that Thompson’s marginalized position in theatrical history in both the United
States and England is “because of the fact that she so divided her enterprise between the two countries.”
Moses, 80. The author notes that Thompson’s career spans 53 years and a number of theatrical genres.

134
It was during a stop in Chicago that the most written about scandal of Thompson’s career erupted. The
Chicago Times launched a smear campaign against the women in the Thompson troupe, even though other
local newspapers and journals critiqued their campaign. The Thompson troupe fired back by posting their
reply to the editor of the Times all over the city, a reply that maligned the editor’s masculinity. The editor’s
rhetoric escalated in response, and so Pauline Markham and Lydia Thompson went to the offices of the
paper and waited for the editor to emerge. When he did, the two women defended their reputations by
horsewhipping him. The resulting scandal generated even more press for the troupe. They were fined in
court for disruption of the peace and for assault, but the public was supportive of Thompson and
Markham’s dramatic defense against aspersions to their characters and morals. Part of Thompson’s
questionable reputation in the United States may have been due to her uncertain relationship with Alex
Henderson, her manager. Lydia was referred to as “Mrs. Henderson” and there were various reports of a
marriage, although Alex Henderson denied a marriage publicly in 1868. Gänzl argues that the two did
eventually marry. Lydia was the beneficiary of his estate upon his death, although she was buried under
the name of her first husband as Mrs. John Christian Tilbury.

135
“An Interview with Lydia,” New York Tribune, December 6, 1869, 4.
69
grabbing visual characteristic of the show: the “bespangled skirt”. The reporter’s
emphasis on the display of the female body and the visual excesses of costume is echoed
in photographs that depict Thompson and her troupe in costume.
Photographs of Thompson in burlesque costume are distinctive for their almost
caricatural display of her feminine form. A cabinet card with the imprint of a Chicago
studio, Gehrig, shows Lydia Thompson costumed as Prince Fritz (Figure 1.8). Thompson
performed this lead role in the burlesque, Oxygen or Prince Fritz of Virgamen at
Wallack’s Theatre in New York in 1877.
136
Lydia is shown with her body in profile and
her face turned in three quarters view towards the photographer. The backdrop is
indicative of an interior setting with elaborate wallpaper and decorative molding. One
foot rests on a fur rug as she leans into a chair that looks like it was pulled from the stage
setting of an Elizabethan play. She is dressed in dark tights and a short, brocaded trunks
costume with a light covered cape and a small, feathered cap. The legs of the performer
are once again a feature of the image; revealed almost to the hip, Thompson’s legs are
highlighted by the leaning, assymetrical pose. The rest of the elaborate costume – the
puffy trunks, brocaded tunic, jaunty headdress, and cape – is displayed with equal
attention. Nipped in at the waist, the costume highlights the full female figure. The
gender of the burlesque performer is clearly indicated, even celebrated, in the cross-dress
role. The heavily brocaded and trimmed tunic shows an excessive attention to elaborate
detail that is also characteristic of burlesque production and representation after 1868.

136
T. Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage from the First Performance in 1732 to 1901 2 (New
York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903), 290; Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle,
3
rd
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43.
70
The elaborate costume seems to simultaneously mock the prevailing fashions for women
and highlight the absurdity of the display of the female form in burlesque performance.

Figure 1.8: Gehrig, Lydia Thompson as Prince Fritz, Chicago, n.d., Courtesy of Harry Ransom
Center, Card Photograph Collection.

An earlier image of Isabella Hinckley (1840-1862), an American soprano who
sang in Italian operas staged in New York, shows the singer in her role as a page in
Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), which was set in seventeenth century
New England, in 1861 (Figure 1.9).
137
In contrast to the photograph of Thompson in a

137
Hinckley was one of the first critically acclaimed American opera singers. Her career was brief – she
died in childbirth in 1862. The Smithsonian Institution associates the image with this role. The University
of Washington Libraries, who also have this image in their collections, identify the role as a page in “The
Batttle”. I suspect this is a translation error that took place sometime in the life of their carte.
71
burlesque role, Hinckley’s posture and costume reflect the dress of a seventeenth century
male page. That a portion of her legs is revealed by her costume of a breeches role is
incidental. The emphasis of the image is not on the revelation of the body of the female
performer in tights, but on Hinckley’s face and the specificity of her role in Verdi’s
opera.

Figure 1.9: Mathew Brady Studio, Isabella Hinckley, 1861, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution, Frederick Hill Meserve Collection.

Cartes-de-visite of another member of the Thompson Troupe, Pauline Markham
(1847-1919) depict a performer who played up her femininity for the camera. Regarded
as the true beauty among the women in Thompson’s original troupe, Markham eventually
left the British Blondes and went on to star in the first revival production of The Black
72
Crook. Photographs of Markham reveal a similar attention to the body, costume detail,
and absurdity as in images of Thompson in costume. An undated Sarony cabinet card
(Figure 1.10) shows Markham in an interior space with one hand on her hip and the other
raised to fondle a palm frond in an elaborate evening gown. The tiered lace of her pale
gown with ribbons cascading from the neckline and the decorously unbustled and draped
train are marks of a well-dressed society lady, but Markham’s pose, with one hand on her
hip, the other raised to handle the palm, and her slightly tilted head suggest at least a
coquettishness and possibly a degree of sensuality. These characteristics emerge more
fully in cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards that show the actress in a variety of costumes.
An image published by Houseworth’s Celebrities of San Francisco (Figure 1.11) shows
Markham in a very short diaphanous costume with a light cape of similar material and
pale tights gazing at herself in a full-length mirror with her fingers raised to her chin in a
piquant manner. The image provides the viewer with multiple views of Markham’s
scantily-attired and much-admired figure – it allows for a view of the full line of her legs
in pale stockings and a closer look at her well-shaped thighs. The image showcases the
delicate fabric of the brief costume and the elaborate beadwork.
138
The use of the mirror
suggests complicity in Markham’s status as an object to be collected and admired.
139
She

138
Also from the collection of the New York Public Library, this image is identified on the reverse as being
from the Museum of Modern Art collection of carte-de-visite photographs (it is a cabinet card photograph)
and is noted “Black Crook” leader of the Amazons. The NYPL West website identifies the image as one of
Markham in costume for a San Francisco production of Ixion with Thompson and company. But as the site
also provides a tentative date of 1866 and credits Lydia Thompson with productions of The Black Crook,
this identification is not credible. “The Gold Rush, Railroads, and the Theater Boom,” NYPL West
Website, accessed on May 27, 2008, http://www.nypl.org/west/tw_railroad2.shtml.

139
This is a clear example of what Buszek would term “awarishness” in her argument for the agency of the
object the pin-up.
73
is active in the creation of herself as female spectacle. The juxtaposition of the two
images is even more revealing – it exhibits a facility with contemporary modes of
representing the female body and a willingness to playfully subvert those conventions in
a manner that draws attention to the performance of the transgression and not just the
effect. Mark Twain was not alone in his expression of concern about the proliferation of
such images and their corrupting effect. Just such revealing photographs of actresses
were regarded as among the images most offensive to public mores.
140
The images
described above reference and subvert contemporary tastes and conventional expectations
of a gendered display of the body – they are both bound by Victorian taste and
conventions for the representation of women and transgressive in their excess, their
gender play, and in the revelation of the female form as an object to be viewed. These
characteristics continue to appear in burlesque representations even as the theatrical form
itself evolves into the “low” variety show generally associated with the word “burlesque”
in American cultural history.

140
“The advent of photomechanical technology challenged social and spatial control of viewing images.
For example, during the 1880s, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice actively lobbied shop
owners and the police to remove from public gaze ‘immodest paintings and photographs’ displayed in shop
windows or on street billboards that attracted crowds of children and youth. According to the society,
‘Among the most objectionable photographs are those of actresses and ballet dancers. The saloon and the
cigar store are frequently most active propagators of those vices which we seek to suppress.’ It became
increasingly difficult for a family to restrict access to vulgar or suggestive pictures that could be seen in so
many public places.” The author quotes the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, Annual
Report for the Year 1883-84 (Boston: Press of Deland and Barta, 1884), 7-8 and Annual Report for the
Year, 1887-88 (Boston: Press of Deland and Barta, 1888), 7. Katharine Martinez, “Consumers and
Commercial Visual Culture,” Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual
Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 164.
74

Figure 1.10: Sarony, Pauline Markham, n.d., NYPL, Museum of Modern Art collection of carte-de-
visite photographs.
Figure 1.11: Houseworth’s Celebrities of San Francisco, Pauline Markham, n.d., NYPL, Museum of
Modern Art collection of carte-de-visite photographs.

Female-centric Burlesque: Posters and Photographs, 1870s-90s
Theatrical historians have espoused a number of different takes on the
significance of Thompson and her troupe to the history of burlesque and American
theatre more generally. Analysis runs the gamut from derision to celebration. According
to George Kummer, the demise of burlesque as a combination of travesty, parody of other
theatrical forms, and farcical interpretation of current events arrived with the invasion
“by troops of British blonds in tights who drove out travesty and extravaganza.”
141
He is

141
Krummer, “Americanization of Burlesque,” 146.
75
referring to the new focus on the female body in burlesque and specifically to the arrival
of Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes (who were not all British and most likely
were not all blondes) and more generally to the numerous troupes that sprung up in
imitation soon after the initial success of Thompson’s troupe. Robert C. Allen has a very
different opinion of the merits of the tights-clad Thompson and her colleagues. He writes
that after the arrival of Thompson, burlesque was, “initially dominated by women writers
and producers as well as performers, . . . (who) took wicked fun in reversing roles,
shattering public expectations, brazenly challenging notions of the approved ways
women might display their bodies and speak in public.”
142
For Allen, the combination of
the “impertinence and inversiveness of the burlesque form” and the display of the female
body is one of “transgressive power.”
143

In Allen’s analysis, the power of burlesque turns out to be short-lived and
contingent on the active, speaking role of the women on display, a characteristic that was
not a feature of earlier spectacles like Mazeppa and The Black Crook and that rapidly
diminished in burlesque as the nineteenth century came to a close. I argue that ultimately
representations of burlesque still and silence the female performer. “Impertinence and
inversiveness” are instead conveyed through the use of a visual vocabulary that consists
of exotic and incongruous details, excess and exaggeration, and a playful approach to the
display of the female body and to the portrayal of gender and gender roles including the
spectacle/spectator relationship. The use of this visual vocabulary in representations of

142
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, xii.

143
Ibid., 137.
76
women in burlesque far outlasts the popularity of Thompsonian burlesque on the
American stage. The endurance of these traits suggests their lasting usefulness in
mediating the presentation of a sexualized, commodified female body to the consuming
public.
Michael B. Leavitt (1843-1935) is often cited as the originator of the first
American burlesque company when he merged a female minstrel company “with
elements of vaudeville and musical travesty into a production format which he called
burlesque.”
144
This was the Rentz-Santley Novelty and Burlesque Company with Mabel
Santley as the star. The format established by Leavitt’s company formed the basis for
burlesque production in the 1880s and 90s.
145
In his introduction to The Best Burlesque
Sketches, Ralph Allen discusses the evolution of burlesque production once the taste for
Thompsonian burlesque had waned, claiming that Leavitt merged “the atmosphere of the
honky-tonk with the patterns of the minstrel shows,” but, a lá Lydia Thompson, with
women.
146
Robert C. Allen argues that Thompsonian burlesque and the American
minstrel show shared structural similarities, and that, in fact, “the style of singing and
dancing in Thompsonian burlesque was influenced by minstrelsy even before the
former’s American introduction.”
147
Both forms allowed for flexibility and frequent
alterations to the script/performance. Both also “worked upon principles of transgression

144
Londré and Watermeier, The History of North American, 226. Allen complicates this history, noting
that around this time a number of companies were creating a hybrid of the minstrel show and the female-
centric burlesque. Horrible Prettiness, 163-165.

145
Ibid.

146
Ralph Allen, The Best Burlesque Sketches (New York: Applause Books, 2000), xxi.

147
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 168.
77
and inversion” and employed “low-other” characters that challenged easy interpretation
of race/gender.
148
In the wake of Leavitt’s formation of the Rentz-Santley company,
there was a proliferation of burlesque companies – thirty to forty were on tour by the
1890s – which were organized into circuits or “wheels”.
149
In addition to the display of
female bodies, there were variety type acts. Increasingly dominant were the exotic dance
and comedy acts that were usually of a racial, scatological, or sexual stamp. The
elements of classical burlesque that were the backdrop for the display of female flesh in
Thompsonian burlesque gradually gave way to the more immediate pleasures of the flesh.
A November 19, 1908 obituary of Lydia Thompson claims that Thompson herself was
unhappy with the originating position she was given in the history of American
burlesque:
Nothing annoyed Miss Thompson more than the suggestion that she was the
originator of the modern American burlesque. She would point out that the
modern sort bore little relation to the burlesque of her day and denied
emphatically that she had any share in what she termed the discredit of inventing
the modern show.
150

Regardless of Thompson’s opinion of the American burlesque that evolved after the
success of the British Blondes, she and her troupe had tremendous impact on the
development of a female-centric burlesque and its representation in photographic and
print materials.

148
Ibid., 169.

149
Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 173.

150
“Death of Lydia Thompson,” November 19, 1908, Thompson, Lydia clippings file, New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts.
78
Thompson and various castmates continued to perform in American burlesque
through the 1880s. Portrait images of burlesque performers also continued to circulate in
the carte-de-viste and larger cabinet card formats. An image from the 1870s (Figure
1.12), features burlesque star Eliza Weathersby, another British import who came to the
United States with Thompson and her blondes when they returned for a second tour.
Weathersby is dressed as a foreign prince and oddly posed before a piano. The fez style
hat marks the character as exotic, and the short tunic and tights indicate a cross-dressed

Figure 1.12: Eliza Weathersby, c. 1870s, Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, Card Photograph
Collection.
79
role. The elaborate Victorian furnishings diminish the foreignness of the figure, but
enhance the elaborately brocaded tunic and tights. Beyond the clearly feminine form of
the figure showcased by the close-fitting costume, the lace shawl over the tunic and the
flowery pattern of the brocade that decorates even the tights eliminates any confusion a
viewer might have about the actual gender of the figure. The feminized female cross-
dressing on display in the image might subvert conventions for the display of female
beauty, but is done in a playful way that seems to be acknowledged by the saucy tilt of
Weathersby’s head. Highly feminized cross-dressing, the juxtaposition of Victorian
tastes and exotic details, and the play between the display of the female body and an
excess of decoration on the costume are all evident in this portrait. In this portrait, the
contradictions of female spectacle in American popular culture are represented in a
straightforward manner.
A more deliberately humorous or ironic approach is employed in other examples
of images used to promote burlesque and burlesque performers in the late nineteenth
century. A Sarony photograph of the Black Crook Co. from a publicity image dated to
approximately 1892 (Figure 1.13) captures the all female burlesque company in
costumes, posing with champagne glasses and bottles raised in a toast. Rather than
featuring a portrait of a burlesque performer/celebrity, this image promotes a company.
The company in the image is a burlesque troupe that appropriated the name of the famous
spectacular described earlier in this chapter. The eight women in the photo are standing
or are perched against a carved bench, likely a prop, with a pillar to the left. Four of the
figures are dressed in light colored dresses with full skirts that come only to mid-calf and
80
tight fitting bodices; they are dressed as chorus girls. The costumes are elaborately
feminine with bows, ruffles, and flounces. Long black gloves and legs in black tights
offset the dresses. The other four figures are dressed as males in fitted black pantaloons,
white vests and shirts, and cut-away black coats with a bit of a puff at the shoulder. The
male-clad figure lounging against the pillar and curtain at the left of the photo is in an
indolent stance, one hand tucked partially into pants pocket, the other clasping the lapel
of her coat. Her bent left knee emphasizes the shape of her legs with her left foot crossed
behind the right. This self-conscious attitude is echoed by the seated male-clad figure
just to the left of the center of the photo. Perched on the stone prop with an arm draped
across the female clad shoulders of the figure to the left, the cross-dressed female holds a
top hat over her pelvis and looks directly at the viewer/photographer. The five figures to
the right form a loose semi-circle, gazing at each other or their champagne except for the
one posed with her shoulder below and just to the right of the suspiciously placed top hat,
who raises her chin up and cocks her head to give a sidelong look out. A companion
image (Figure 1.14) shows the same company dressed as a lower-class group of men and
women with scowling faces and bad posture. Each figure has at least one arm extended
straight down with the hand perpendicular to the arm and the palm flat; their poses are
clearly intended as part of a parody of behavior. The rag-tag group is shown in the same
setting as the swells, and now the viewer of the image is confronted with the possibility
of masking and mocking class as well as gender. Burlesque humor and engagement with
the viewer is employed to enhance to the shock value of the photograph, but it also serves
to make any critique or transgression of conventions more palatable to an audience.
81
These images are a caricature of male/female interactions (specifically the swells who
patronized burlesque and the chorines they came to view) and notions of class.

Figure 1.13: Sarony, Black Crook Co., c. 1892, Courtesy of Museum of the City of New York.

Figure 1.14: Sarony, Black Crook Co., c. 1892, Courtesy of Museum of the City of New York.
82
Portrait photographs of burlesque performers like those described in this chapter
served the dual purpose of making money for the photographer and furthering the
celebrity of the sitter. Although also a democratic visual media accessible to the broad
spectrum of society, the poster was employed as theatrical advertising. In the final
decades of the nineteenth century, burlesque posters often depicted stock figures or
humorous narratives. In the 1870s and 80s, commercial lithography grew to be a
significant industry. By 1880, most posters were lithographs. Companies such as
Strobridge Lithographing Company of Cincinnati, Ohio were innovators of mass
production.
151
They employed artists, many of whom were first and second generation
Americans, to work anonymously using vivid colors and large letters to attract attention
and to suggest the spectacular nature of the event advertised.
152
Strobridge specialized in
circus and theatrical posters. Burlesque producer Michael B. Leavitt is credited with
bringing European theatrical posters to America in 1872, which influenced their
production in the United States. He later in turn took Strobridge posters to Europe.
153

Prior to the 1870s, theatrical posters in the United States typically relied on combinations
of typefaces to draw the viewers attention rather than illustration.
Although not of the quality of the Strobridge posters, a reprint of a 300 page bound
volume published in Philadelphia by the Ledgers Job Office titled, “Specimens of Show
Printing in Miniature Form” offers a rare glimpse into the production and marketing of

151
Hornung and Johnson, 200 Years of American Graphic Art, 99.

152
Ibid.

153
Nelson-Cave, Broadway Theatre Posters, 23.
83
nineteenth century theatrical posters.
154
The purpose of the volume was distribution to
theater managers of the late1860s and 1870s such that the managers could “order those
they wished to advertise the plays in their repertoire.”
155
The volume contains miniature
facsimiles of the poster cuts, numbered for easy ordering, and promotes the economy of
ordering one of their designs versus an original design. Colorful posters were thus made
more affordable for the theater manager who did not want to invest in an original design.
Included are designs for popular spectaculars like Mazeppa (Figure 1.15) and The Black
Crook (Figure 1.16) and for burlesques like Ixion (Figure 1.17). Other, untitled poster
cuts, might be more generally applicable to the theater manager’s production (Figure
1.18). This system for stock images attests to the demand for colorful posters that could
be used for outdoor advertisement of coming performances. These stock images for
popular female spectacles and burlesques feature a lot of leg revealed by short costumes
with tight bodices and often exotic accessories and details that indicate foreign settings.
A typical example of the posters that advertised burlesque performers in late
nineteenth century America, the poster for “The Victoria Loftus British Blondes”
(c.1878) displays a regal female figure dressed in an exotic, scanty costume and is likely
a stock image (Figure 1.19). Just as the Loftus troupe capitalizes on the success of
Thompson and her Blondes, the elaborate costume, voluptuous figure and bared leg of
the figure in the image would have been recognizable to an 1878 audience as advertising

154
Early American Theatrical Posters: Specimens of Show Printing in Miniature Form. (Hollywood, CA:
Cherokee Books, 1966).

155
Ibid., 1.
84

Figure 1.15: Cuts for Mazeppa, from Specimens of Show Printing in Miniature Form.

Figure 1.16: Cuts for Black Crook, from Specimens of Show Printing in Miniature Form.
85

Figure 1.17: Cut for Ixion, from Specimens of Show Printing in Miniature Form.
Figure 1.18: Cut for Spectacular, from Specimens of Show Printing in Miniature Form.
a burlesque performance that would feature the spectacular display of the female body.
Garbed in a diaphanous skirt that is slit to the hip to reveal a shapely leg wrapped in an
elaborate sandal, the relationship of this costume to acceptable female attire of the time is
slight, although the elaborate coiffure is more in keeping with late nineteenth century
styles. The elaborate armbands, girdle, and breastplate give the costume an exotic and
somewhat outlandish appeal -- the breastplate bares most of the breast rather than
protecting it. The woman steps forward with her right foot and gestures imperiously with
her left hand. The pose shows off the details of the costume and its brightly colored
palette would certainly attract attention if the warm tones of the revealed flesh did not.
The figure looks like royalty from some exotic local, but it is a generalized exoticism and
not a specific one. The white flesh of the figure and the fashionable hairstyle also draw
attention to the spectacular nature of the figure. Likewise, the detail of the costume
86
reveals rather than conceals the fictions of the image. Nipples and hips are almost
revealed, but ultimately masked. The disruptive potential of the exotic, sexualized figure
is subsumed by the obvious glamour of the image.

Figure 1.19: The Victoria Loftus British Blondes, c. 1878, Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division.
Burlesque companies also used posters to advertise the company rather than
particular shows. A poster for Bon Ton Burlesquers (Figure 1.20) from approximately
1898 shows well-dressed, presumably rich men, “On the String!” of a giant soubrette and
serves as an example of a playful inversion of gender roles in burlesque imagery that is
not reliant on cross-dressing. The soubrette leads the gentlemen on a merry dance as they
87
down champagne and gaze up her skirt. A poster for Devere’s High Rollers Burlesque
Co. (Figure 1.21) features another soubrette perched on a table cluttered with bottles
enjoying a smoke. Her tuxedo clad, bald-pated companion is slumped over a chair. The
image is accompanied by the caption, “Dining a High Roller Girl After the Show.” The

Figure 1.20: H. C. Miner Lithograph Co., "On the String!" Bon Ton Burlesquers, c. 1898, Courtesy of
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
“High Roller Girl” has drunk the man almost under the table. The poster alludes to stage
door relationships that link the performing woman of the era to the prostitute. The chorus
girl featured in the poster, while engaged in unladylike behavior, has successfully eluded
her stage door Johnny. In both images, the male spectators are somehow dominated by
the objects of their desire. But though the Bon Ton patrons are tethered to the soubrette,
she continues to dance for their pleasure. Excessively feminine costumes and tights clad
88
legs advertise the continued display of the female body in the burlesque show, but the
caricatures of the relationship between the burlesque performer and her male viewer
make a joke of this display. The potential illicitness of both scenes is derailed by the
humorous role reversal that is reliant on established assumptions about the female
performer.

Figure 1.21: H. C. Miner Lithograph Co., DeVere's High Rollers Burlesque Co., c. 1898, Courtesy of
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
By the turn of the century, there were more than fifty touring burlesque
companies in the United States, and the majority of them attracted male working and
middle-class audiences.
156
The images that were produced to promote burlesque were
intended to appeal to this largely male and uneducated audience and did so mostly

156
Londré and Watermeier, The History of North American Theater, 226.
89
through the liberal display of the female body. Despite changes in burlesque as a
theatrical form leading up to the turn-of-the-century, the characteristics of burlesque
representation that emerged in conjunction with the popularization of Lydia Thompson’s
brand of burlesque performance consistently appeared in images of female burlesque
performers. Exoticism, excess, exaggerated femininity, mocking references to cultural
norms, a humorous approach to gender relations, and even conscious references to the
nature of spectacle combined with the increasingly sexualized (and bare) portrayal of
burlesque performers yields images that challenge or at least unsettle the conventions of
female spectacle and the representation of women.
90
Chapter 2
The Exotic Dancer and the Transgressive Potential of Burlesque, 1890-1930

In 1887, the Imperial Burlesque Company produced The Arabian Nights or
Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp, which appeared first in Chicago. A poster for the production
advertises a fantastic, orientalizing setting with a multitude of performers in exotic costumes
and with the females revealing a great deal of leg (Figure 2.1).
157
On the left of the poster,
two featured performers, one male and one female gesture toward the extravagant, exotic
scene. The blonde, female performer who holds Aladdin’s magical lamp is costumed in a
brightly colored, leg-baring costume with a bold, geometric design. Bands of stripped
material that correspond with the gold bands on her wrists emphasize the shape of her
calves. The short, “tights” costume indicates the burlesque practice of a woman in a
traditionally male role and in a revealing, feminized costume. In this case, the clearly
Caucasian actress is costumed in exotic garb with accoutrements that serve no other purpose
than to draw attention to her legs.
The exotic and erotic spectacle depicted in the poster for The Arabian Nights was
an established aspect of American burlesque at the end of the nineteenth century.
Exoticized, revealing displays of the female body persisted in burlesque performance and
representation even as the format of burlesque shows changed. The previous chapter
establishes the prevalence of outlandish, revealing costumes that exoticize the female
performer as a dominant feature in images of American burlesque after 1868. This chapter
examines images of the “exotic” dancer in American art and visual culture at the beginning

157
The Library of Congress dates the poster to 1888, and it is unclear if the poster was created for the
Chicago production or if it was created for a later production in another city. The show was to go on to
New York and likely appeared in multiple cities.
91

Figure 2.1: Courier Litho. Co., The Arabian Nights or Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp, c. 1888, Buffalo,
NY, Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Collection.
of the twentieth century in the context of the evolution of the “cooch” dance (a quasi-
Oriental dance characterized by erotic hip gyrations and shaking, also known as the
Hoochie-Koochie) and the representation of popular entertainment in American art.
158
The
majority of the images examined in this chapter are not of burlesque performers or
performances. They are photographs, paintings, and prints of “exotic” dance performers and
performances that range from opera to burlesque. The “exotic” dancer was a cultural
phenomenon that swept the American theatrical landscape both high and low at the turn of
the century and had a lasting impact on the business and aesthetic of burlesque.

158
“’Cooch’ is a derivative of ‘hootchy-kootchy’, the accepted euphemism of the times for the dance of
female hips mimicking sexual intercourse.” David A. Scott, Behind the G-String: An Exploration of the
Stripper’s Image, Her Person, and Her Meaning (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers, 1996),
194.
92
This phenomenon reached its peak with the “Salomania” of the early twentieth
century. The proliferation of Salome performances were attended by all strata of society
from the well-heeled attendees of the opera to the “baldheads” and working class men that
comprised the majority of the burlesque audience.
159
The simultaneous proliferation of
Salome and other exotic dancers in both high (painting) and low (publicity photos) mediums
reveals the porous nature of these distinctions at the beginning of the twentieth century as
well as characteristics of representation that can be associated with burlesque.
Paintings of exotic dancers by Robert Henri (1865-1929), in particular the two
versions he did of Salome in 1909, one of which is housed in the Mead Art Museum at
Amherst College (Figure 2.2) and the other in the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art,
the State Art Museum of Florida (Figure 2.3), will serve as a case study of the treatment of
popular female spectacle in American art. As a leading figure in the history of American
realist art and as an influential teacher, Henri is exemplary of a number of American artists
who turned to the subject of popular entertainment in their works. In my history of
burlesque representations, his fascination with exotic dancers in his paintings serves as a
linchpin between popular media images and images of burlesque by paint and print artists
from the nineteen-twenties through the forties, which are the focus of the third chapter of
this dissertation. Henri’s work will be situated in a history of theatrical portraiture and
contrasted to other, better-known representations of Salome in the visual arts. As an
archetype for images of the exotic femme fatale and for the performance of striptease, the
depiction of Salome as a popular entertainment is pivotal in the history of burlesque

159
“Baldhead” is a slang term that referred to the wealthy men who populated the front rows of female
spectacles. The term is suggestive of another body part besides the head on a gentleman’s shoulders.
93
representation in American art and visual culture. This chapter will examine Henri’s image
of the exotic dancer in the context of mass media representations of the time. Henri
challenged the conventions of academic art in America in his choice of what was considered
to be a risqué subject and also in the way he suggested the movement of the dancer and
attended to the details of the exotic costume and the realities of the flesh. His work brings a
sense of the vibrancy and motion of the performance to the static image. Henri’s Salome
also bears a striking resemblance to a large number of photographic representations of
performers costumed as Salome or other exotic types and reveals a complex relationship
between high and low in early twentieth century art and visual culture.
Many of the performers featured in the works in this chapter were seen on the
vaudeville stage or in spectacular revues like the Follies produced by Florenz Ziegfeld. In
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, vaudeville was considered a middle class
entertainment. Its major producers like B.F. Keith worked to establish it as variety
entertainment acceptable and appealing to audiences of all ages and genders from a broad
spectrum of society. The result was a theatrical form that incorporated acts from elite forms
like the opera and low, popular forms like burlesque and the minstrel show. The erotic
display of the female body in vaudeville was often tied to high culture aspirations, at least
superficially, to make it palatable to “respectable” audiences.
160

160
Theatre historian M. Alison Kibler explores issues of gender and high/low in vaudeville theater in Rank
Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 1999).
94

Figure 2.2: Robert Henri, Salome, 1909, Mead Art Museum.
Figure 2.3: Robert Henri, Salome, 1909, John and Mable Ringling Museum.

Burlesque theatre ignored or mocked these artistic, edifying aspirations in the
staging of very similar entertainments. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, female burlesque performers were often represented as exotics in elaborate, yet
skimpy (and often ludicrous) costumes that revealed the flesh of the performer.
Burlesque at the beginning of the twentieth century is aptly described as, “A glitzy
sideshow culled from the back streets of popular entertainment, burlesque was a
95
hodgepodge of diverse elements -- a kind of circus for adults -- that found an uneasy
common ground by virtue of their lack of sophistication or their outlandishness.”
161

Early in the history of burlesque theater in America, the cooch dancer played a small role;
but by the turn of the century, she became the main attraction of the burlesque stage. The
“outlandish” and erotic appeal of the cooch dance is the forerunner of the striptease acts
that dominated the burlesque stage and representations of burlesque by the 1930s. In the
images examined in this chapter, the movement that characterizes the display of female
flesh in “exotic” dance spectacles is captured in the poses of costumed performers and in
an attention to the details of the exotic costumes that enhance the sense of vitality in
representations of Little Egypts, Salomes, and their ilk. Visual references to foreign,
non-Christian cultures alluded to dangerous, uncontrolled female sexuality, and the
combination of nude flesh and moving bodies transgressed traditional mores for the
display of the female body. Along with the gyrating movements of the cooch dance, the
veiled and beaded vamp becomes a staple of burlesque and later striptease performance
and its representations. As a counter to more socially acceptable standards of beauty and
behavior, an analysis of the representation of the “exotic” dancer in art and popular,
commercial media reveals how the potentially transgressive performing woman is
regulated and exploited for the enjoyment of a broad spectrum of viewers.
The “Cooch” Dancer in Turn-of-the-Century Burlesque
By the 1890s, burlesque performance was dominated more and more by the display
of the female body. The burlesque performer was often depicted in popular culture as

161
Scott, Behind the G-String, 192.
96
predatory: either as a femme fatale or a gold digger.
162
There were companies and theatres
that produced “clean” burlesque, which attempted to deemphasize burlesque’s association
with sexualized female bodies, or resorted to “clean” burlesque when under pressure from
the authorities.
163
Most burlesque producers, however, capitalized on sexual display. Two
burlesque posters from the turn of the century exemplify the combination of revealing and
exotic dress and female aggression characteristic of this sexual display: a poster for The
Great Chariot Race in Bend Her presented by The High Rollers Extravaganza Co., c. 1900

Figure 2.4: Courier Co., The Great Chariot Race in Bend Her, High Rollers Extravaganza Co., c.
1900, Buffalo, NY, Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

162
See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness for a brief analysis of the emergence of the figure of the gold
digger in the late nineteenth century. 197-204. He argues that the “threatening power of feminine sexuality
embodied by the burlesquer and her more generic sister, the chorus girl, was kept in check in the working
class discourse on burlesque by displacing that power into the register of class relations.” 204.

163
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 221. Weber and Fields were the biggest names in “clean” burlesque at the
end of the nineteenth century. Their shows were in the vein of Thompsonian burlesque popular a few
decades earlier, and they attracted a broader audience of both men and women.
97

Figure 2.5: Enquirer Job Printing Co., The Beautiful Indian Maidens, c. 1899, Cincinnati, OH,
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

(Figure 2.4) and a poster for The Beautiful Indian Maidens (Figure 2.5), performed at the
New Palace in Boston and at Kernan’s in Washington DC in 1900.
164
In this representation
of a burlesque of Ben Hur (which featured a live chariot race on stage) the prowess of the
female charioteers is made ridiculous by the comedic portrayal of the horses and the ancient
Rome meets chorus girl costumes.
165
In the scene from Bend Her, with its blatantly
sexualized title in red block letters at the bottom of the image, two chariots are driven by
statuesque beauties in filmy, short skirts and fitted bodices with metal cones over their

164
“Indian Maidens at Kernan’s,” Washington Post, April 15, 1900. “Drama and Music,” Boston Globe,
January 14, 1900, 18. The shows likely traveled to multiple venues that were part of a circuit of theatres
known as a “wheel”.

165
Ben-Hur, the stage adaptation of Lew Wallace’s best-selling novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
premiered in 1899 and achieved remarkable success with a run of over twenty years.
98
breasts. With one hand, they hold the reins of the panicked horses, one of which is on roller
skates, and work the whip the other hand. The male viewers are portrayed as unattractive,
leering drunkards. The female protagonists of the Bend Her poster are physically dominant
and exotically costumed, but not quite in control. In The Beautiful Indian Maidens, a bevy
of dark-haired women in feathered headdress, feathered skirts, animal skins, fitted bodices,
colored tights, high heels, and pearls are engaged in hunting and fishing in the wild. One of
the maidens holds a lobster with a man’s head aloft, another dangles a tuxedoed man with a
bird’s head by the throat, and a group of maidens in the background hunt a fleeing stag. The
dress and practices of the American Indian are reduced to symbolically exotic elements like
feathers that are used to mark the dangerous, yet absurd appeal of warrior Indian chorus
girls. Representations of the female burlesque performer by the turn of the century regularly
combined exotically threatening, presumably sexually aggressive images of women with
ludicrous details that simultaneously capitalized on public fascination with female, “exotic”
spectacles and mocked that fascination.
Burlesque was a ripe venue for the sensational cooch dance, which rapidly took
over the stage following its introduction to American audiences on the Midway at the
World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 in the form of Little Egypt’s danse du
ventre, a French colonial term for what we would call a belly-dance.
166
Visitors to the

166
The Midway was the commercially sponsored entertainment area of the fair. The “Street of Cairo” was
located approximately in the middle of the Midway. Farida Mazar Spryopoulos claimed to be the original
Little Egypt of the Chicago Exposition, although a number of women claimed the title in an attempt to
capitalize on the popularity of the exotic dance. In a small press publication, Donna Carlton contends that
there was no performer going by the name of Little Egypt at the Chicago Exposition, which is exemplary of
a history of misinformation that clouds the history of belly-dance in the United States. Donna Carlton,
Looking for Little Egypt (Bloomington, IN: International Dance Discovery Books, 1995). For more on the
World’s Columbian Exposition see Curtis M. Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace: Comodification of the
99
fair witnessed the first public performances of the belly dance in the United States on the
Midway in a small theater built as part of the “Street in Cairo” exhibit. The Midway
consisted of entertainments and vendors organized by Sol Bloom, a theatrical promoter
from New York. The mile long Midway Plaisance offered commercialized
anthropological exhibitions.
167
The “Street in Cairo,” located in the middle of the
Plaisance, was among the largest and most successful of the Midway attractions. Fair
attendees paid an additional fee to see Little Egypt and then often shelled out additional
money for a postcard image of the performer. Although Farida Mazar Spryopoulos is
often cited as the Little Egypt of the Chicago World’s Fair, there were multiple women
who performed a version of the dance. The fair’s danse du ventre attracted publicity,
huge crowds, and numerous imitators. The cover of the March 31, 1894 edition of The
National Police Gazette features a dark-haired woman in ostensibly middle-eastern garb
with her belly and hips thrusting towards an audience of leering men (Figure 2.6). The
National Police Gazette, identified in its logo as “The Leading Illustrated Sporting
Journal in America,” was a frequently lurid publication whose readership was mostly
male and largely working class, just like the burlesque audience. The Police Gazette
often published images of female burlesque and vaudeville performers. In this case, the
danse du ventre is performed in Brooklyn for “a crowd of sports” who paid “a big price
to see Fatima give a fascinating exhibition” according to the caption. The dancer teases

Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1990), 344-365; and Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing, The World’s Columbian
Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

167
The living ethnological exhibitions of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle inspired the Midway in
Chicago.
100
her audience with a shawl she has removed from her person; her exaggerated movements
and exotic costume emphasize her distinctive appearance in a room full of white males in
Western dress whose leering interest is also captured in the illustration.

Figure 2.6: Cover of The National Police Gazette, 31 March 1894. From Looking for Little Egypt.

Benjamin Falk immortalized Ashea Wabe as Little Egypt in a series of well-
known photographs (Figure 2.7). Wabe gained notoriety performing the danse du ventre
for a bachelor party in New York in 1896, which made headlines because of a raid by the
vice squad. The veils and brief sparkling bodice of Wabe’s Little Egypt are but
variations on a theme that plays out in artistic and cultural productions from painting and
101
opera to the midway and burlesque in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries --
a theme that reached its peak in the United States with the Salome craze.

Figure 2.7: Benjamin Falk, Little Egypt, c. 1896, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,
Billy Rose Theatre Collection.

In the Falk photograph of Ashea Wabe as Little Egypt, the performer poses with
her arms outstretched over her head. She holds a gossamer veil and tilts her head over
her left shoulder. Sparkling bands circle her upper arms, and her torso is barely covered
by a loose, sleeveless, fringed bodice. Her stomach is seemingly revealed, but her
bellybutton is obscured, which seems to be common to photographic representations of
102
Little Egypts and other belly-baring dancers.
168
Her loose skirt hangs from her hips; her
garter and upper thigh above a black stocking are revealed by the outward thrust of her
leg. Although her hair and brow are dark, it is her costume and exaggerated posture that
mark her as foreign and exotic. Belly dancing was soon referred to as “cooch” dancing,
“hootch” dancing, or “hootchy-kootchy”.
169
The cooch dancer was firmly situated as
exotic; she was ethnically removed from bourgeois men and women by a recognizable
costume and the distinctive gyrations of her performance. Wabe was one of the many
performers who brought Little Egypt to New York audiences. The process of imitation
and reinvention of a sensationalized performance is a story that repeats in the history of
exotic dance and burlesque. Benjamin Falk’s photographs of Ashea Wabe, an imitator
who became the “Little Egypt” in visual history and claimed originality, reveals the
importance of such images to creating a lasting and influential image of a temporary
sensation.
A Chicago theatre owner and burlesque producer, Sam T. Jack, is credited with
introducing the Middle Eastern dance to burlesque, where the sexual suggestiveness of
the dance as well as its revealing costume were emphasized. Much of burlesque of the
1890s and the early twentieth century distinguished itself from vaudeville by
emphasizing the display of the sexualized female body and the inclusion of off color
(“blue”) humor, further entrenching the theatrical form as working-class and oriented to
the male spectator. A poster from the early twentieth century for the Rose Hill English

168
Body stockings were sometimes part of the costumes. Jewels were also used to conceal the belly button.

169
The specific origin of the term hootchy-kootchy is unknown. Cooch was used most often in reference to
low-brow versions of the dance as in burlesque. Cooch is now used as a slang term for vagina.
103
Folly Company titled Our Boquet of Beauties (Figure 2.8) features an arrangement of
female performers in the center. A grouping of three cooch dancers is featured just to the
left of center of the larger group. All three wear beaded headdresses and bodices, and
their arms are in varied positions that dramatically display their veils. The two that can
be seen in full view, one kneeling and one standing are clad in brief bodices with
brocaded and beaded girdles low on their hips. Filmy veils do little to shroud their tights-
clad legs. Given the absence of belly buttons and the excessive smoothness of their
torsos, they appear to be dressed in flesh-colored body stockings (or these anatomical

Figure 2.8: Courier Litho. Co., Our Boquet of Beauties, c. 1900, The Rose Hill English Folly Co.,
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
104
details were selectively ignored by the poster artist). They are posed amidst the other
elaborately costumed women in tights, but their distinctly orientalizing costumes draw
attention to the performers as an exotic feature of the show. The uniquely costumed
beauties are framed above and below by smaller images of chorus lines in the center and
groups of three leering, tuxedoed gentlemen with grotesquely exaggerated features in
each corner.
The men at the corners of the Rose Hill English Folly poster are dressed in evening
clothes. In the upper left corner, two of the three gentlemen hold instruments to their lips.
They are likely representative of members of the orchestra, but their dress is similar to the
men portrayed in the other three corners, as are their leers and exaggerated features. A
number of these spectators also have bald or balding pates, a clear reference to the
“baldheads” associated with the burlesque audience. Although the attention of the
unattractive male figures in the poster is captured by the spectacle of female beauty
portrayed in the image to the extent that they appear mesmerized or just ridiculous, these
groupings of spectators frame the image. Their enraptured interest in female exotic
spectacle is the raison d’etre for the elaborate display.
As is visible in the leering spectators in this poster promoting a burlesque company,
there was nothing oblique in the sexual suggestiveness of hips gyrating for the pleasure of
a mostly male audience. According to one burlesque historian, the emergence of the cooch
dance in burlesque, “linked the sexual display of the female performer and the scopic
desire of the male patron in a more direct and intimate fashion than any previous feature of
105
burlesque.”
170
The emphasis on the exoticism of the belly dancing costumes does,
however, reinforce some distance between the male patrons and the low, female
performers. Even while evoking notions of a dangerous, foreign female sexuality, the
exoticism of the cooch dancer is ultimately defanged in burlesque representations.
Setting the Stage for the Representation of Salome in American Visual Culture
A successor to the Little Egypt craze in American popular culture, Salome danced
her way onto American stages ranging from opera to burlesque in the early twentieth
century. The story of Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils has a long history in both
literature and visual art, which informs an analysis of the transgressive possibilities of
representations of “exotic” dancers.
171
The origin of the Salome story most often
referenced is the biblical account found in the gospels of Mark and Matthew. In the
gospel of Mark, it is written that Herod married his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias. John,
who in the Christian tradition is the last of the Old Testament prophets and baptized Jesus
Christ, told Herod this was unlawful, angering Herodias. At a banquet for Herod’s
birthday, Herodias’s daughter (who in later writings is identified as Salome) danced
before Herod and the company. Pleased with her performance, Herod promised the
daughter whatever she desired. At the behest of Herodias, the daughter requested the

170
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 231.

171
For a more complete analysis of the literary and visual history of Salome, see Udo Kultermann, “The
Dance of the Seven Veils: Salome and Erotic Culture around 1900, Artibus et Historiae 27, no. 3 (2006):
187-215.

106
head of John the Baptist in a charger. Caught in his promise, Herod presented the head to
the daughter, who gave it to her mother.
172

Various historians and writers enhanced the legend over time, but in the
nineteenth century, the increasing exchange between Europeans and both the Middle East
and Far East led to an explosion of interest in oriental cultures and themes. Salome was a
popular subject in literature and the visual arts, particularly among late nineteenth century
artists whom critics associated with the Decadent movement. Most associated with
Decadence and with the story of Salome is Oscar Wilde. In Wilde’s 1892 play, Salome
performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for her stepfather against the initial objections of
her mother, Herodias.
173
No longer a pawn as she was in the biblical version, Salome is
a femme fatale acting on her own desires. In the Dance of the Seven Veils, Salome
incites the lust of her audience in the sensual movements of an oriental dance and the
gradual revelation of her body in order to gain the object of her own lust, the head of
John the Baptist. Salome kisses the decapitated head, and Herod, finally disgusted, kills
her.
The paintings of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), who represented Salome many
times, are often cited as a possible source of inspiration for Wilde’s vision of Salome.
Moreau painted several versions of the subject. In a watercolor, L’Apparition (Figure
2.9), Salome appears almost naked, her veils having fallen away during her dance. She

172
See Mark 6:21-29 and Matthew 14:1-13.

173
The play was not performed until 1896, when it debuted in Paris at the Théåtre-de-Oeuvre. Wilde’s play
and the associated scandal are the subject of a large body of literature. Much of this literature deals with
Salome as a symbol of homosexual desire in an inversion of gender in which Salome is a man whose desire
for another man culminates in the destruction of both of them.
107
wears metals and gems that drape her torso and encircle her hips. Her full leg is revealed
and her jeweled girdle falls between her legs. Hips and belly thrust out as she extends
one leg toward the front of the picture plane and her opposite arm points upward to the
severed head of John the Baptist floating above and before her surrounded by a glowing
nimbus. She seems to command the direction of the head and simultaneously recoil from
it. Salome and the decapitated head capture the attention of the other occupants of the
large, distinctly foreign architectural space in which she performs.
174
Herod is enthroned
to the left of Salome, and Herodias is seated below him. Moreau’s Salome is a femme
fatale; her seductive power results in death. She is both beautiful and horrible, and in
Moreau’s vision, both the fantastical space and the details of Salome’s (un)dress identify
her as something other than the familiar; she is something that fascinates and evokes fear.
Aubrey Beardsley’s (1872-1898) illustrations for Wilde’s play are the images
most closely associated with the writer’s vision; they are now so well-known that it is
difficult to think of one without the other, though there is much debate in literary
scholarship about whether or not the images are really illustrative of the content of the
play.
175
An interest in design, particularly in the attention given to the details of costume,
dominates the prints. Wilde’s illustrations appeared with the first English translation of

174
In her thesis, art historian Jennifer Mary Wood argues that Moreau “downplays (Salome’s) femininity”
in this work: “Only the slight revelation of breasts and absence of facial hair assist the viewer in
determining her gender.” She uses this reading to argue that Moreau “associated masculinity with control
and domination.” “From Docile Dancer to Femme Fatale: The Evolution of Salome” (master’s thesis,
University of Southern California, 1994), 40. Although I would agree that the figure’s breasts are not
emphasized in L’Apparition, I would argue that this figure is without a doubt feminine. Wood’s reading of
gender inversion brings to the fore issues of Moreau’s own sexuality and readings of the work of Wilde and
Beardsley, artists also associated with the Symbolist movement.

175
In response to some of this criticism, Linda A. Saladin writes, “Rather than standing as a personal
vendetta against Wilde, these illustrations indicate that Beardsley shared a similar goal with Wilde. His
108

Figure 2.9: Gustave Moreau, L'Apparition, c. 1876, Paris, Musée D’Orsay, kept in the Graphic Arts
Department, Musée du Louvre.
Wilde’s play in 1894. In The Stomach Dance (Figure 2.10), the sharp contrasts of black
and white characteristic of his illustrations further dramatize the figure of Salome. She
gazes directly at the viewer with dark eyes beneath a dark slanted brow. Her hips thrust
forward as if moving to the music provided by the demon creature in the lower
foreground, and the curving motion of her body is punctuated by the dark indentation of
her belly button. Flowering designs and the curving lines of other decorative motifs
emphasize the strangeness of the figures of Salome and her accompaniment. Beardsley

illustrations don’t merely accompany, they engage the story and comment on it. In a similar manner, Wilde
refuses to let his text merely retell a familiar story of thwarted desires. His Salome explores the essence of
desire within language and, at its most idealistic level, points the possibility of moving beyond that desire,
pushing textual and sexual limitations.” Linda A. Saladin, Fetishism and Fatal Women: Gender, Power,
and Reflexive Discourse (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 159. For more on this subject see Elliot L. Gilbert,
“Tumult of Images: Wilde, Beardsley and Salome” Victorian Studies 26, no. 2 (Winter, 1983): 133-159;
and Joan Navarre, “The Publishing History of Aubrey Beardsley’s Compositions for Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 1995).
109
challenges Victorian cultural conventions with the blatant eroticism of his image. The
woman he portrays uses her sexuality to seduce the viewer. She is aware, and her sensual
power entices and threatens. In comparison to this illustration, Moreau’s Salome is far
less menacing. Beardsley’s femme fatale is, however, equally distant in her stylized
dress that is more fantastic than foreign. Salome as portrayed by both Moreau and
Beardsley is reflective of late nineteenth century fascination with eastern cultures as well
as concerns about the changing role of women in western culture. The representation of
Salome in Wilde’s play is dangerous because she transgresses conventional behaviors for
women in order to attain her own desires. Though quite different in style, the danger of
Salome is at the forefront in Moreau and Beardsley’s images in the provocative postures
of their Salomes and the otherworldly, menacing details in both versions. That danger is
only partially mitigated by Salome’s portrayal as an exotic, and therefore distant,
creature.

Figure 2.10: Aubrey Beardsley, The Stomach Dance, illustration for Wilde’s Salomé, 1894.
110
The Spectacularization of Salome in America
The scandalous Salome served as the ultimate femme fatale and as a popular
phenomenon on the European cultural landscape when she eventually made her way to
the United States. In January of 1907, Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera, Salomé, a faithful
adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House.
The production was quickly shut down, but it precipitated what came to be known as
“Salomania”, a craze that permeated American popular culture. Critical response to
Strauss’s Salomé in New York reveals how the sexually transgressive figure was situated
in American discourse. An advanced notice of the first appearance of Richard Strauss’s
Salome in New York appeared in the New York Times on January 13 of 1907. In the
article, Richard Aldrich summarizes the biblical story and describes how the story has
changed over time in various representations, ending with a description of Wilde’s
fascination with Salome as a “woman of boundless cruelty of heart.”
176
Although
Madame Fremstad appeared in the title role, Bianca Froelich performed the Dance of the
Seven Veils in the production, which, as an erotic dance involving the removal of the
veils, was regarded as one of the primary sources for much of the outrage and sensation
generated by the performance.
177
The first performance was given on January 22, 1907,
and the production received a rave review for its artistry from the New York Times, which
also highlighted the controversial nature of the opera in loaded terms as “a work that for

176
Richard Aldrich, “Richard Strauss’s ‘Salome,’” New York Times, January 13, 2007, X5. It should be
noted that there was a vast physical disparity between Fremsted, who was about 250 pounds, and Froelich,
who performed the seductive and, for some, outrageous dance.

177
“May Produce ‘Salome’ at Another Theatre,” New York Times, January 29, 1907, 1.
111
more than a year has been the storm centre of the musical world, about which discussion
has raged on many points – about its repugnant features of realism, its alleged
immorality, decadent spirit, artistic perversity, or about its significance in a philosophical
way; . . .”
178
The theater was packed, but a large number of women reportedly turned
away during the dance and some spectators left during the final scene when Mme
Fremstad “began to sing to the head before her,” while others “left their seats to stand so
that they might look down upon the prima donna as she kissed the dead lips of the head
of John the Baptist.”
179
When later performances of Strauss’s Salome were suppressed at
the Metropolitan Opera House after the premiere, there was talk of reopening it in
another venue. In the meantime, vaudeville theaters swiftly began to capitalize the
sensation caused by the production and mounted “Salome” performances of their own.
These performances were typically reduced to interpretations of one of the most titillating
scenes of the opera, the Dance of the Seven Veils.
The sensationalism of Salome performances was enhanced by reports from
Europe of forbidden and censored acts by dancers performing an interpretation of Salome
and by images of those performers. Maud Allan, born Beulah Maud Durrant in Toronto
in 1873, was a performer who cultivated a femme fatale image that was solidified with
the creation of her Vision of Salome dance, a European sensation that was publicized in
the American press well before Allan ever performed it in the United States.
180
She

178
“Strauss’s ‘Salome’ the First Time Here,” New York Times, January 23, 1907, 9.

179
Ibid.

180
Some newspaper reports add an “e” to the end of her first name. I will use this spelling only when
quoting from one of those sources. The Durrant family moved to San Francisco when Allan was a young
112
developed her dance, The Vision of Salome after seeing a production of Oscar Wilde’s
play by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1904.
181
She premiered the performance in Vienna in
December of 1906 on a night when two other dancers of the femme fatale type were
performing in orientalizing costume, Mata Hari, a Dutch woman, and Ruth St. Denis, an
American.
182
Allan danced in black chiffon “veils” that once removed in her frenzy of
perverse desire to kiss the lips of the dead Jokanaan (John the Baptist) revealed a beaded
breastplate.
There are numerous images of Allan as Salome. She was the model for German
artist Franz von Stuck’s (1863-1928) Salome of 1906 (Figure 2.11). Allan posed nude for
the painting, of which there are three versions. In this example, Salome appears joyful
and energized by the presentation of the head of John the Baptist, which is brought to her
by a black servant who appears more animal-like than human. Her body, covered only in
a loose, gauzy skirt and jeweled necklace and armband, is posed mid-dance with her
breasts and belly curving outward and her head turned back and to the side to expose her

girl. In her late teens, Maud taught piano in San Francisco, but by her early twenties she had gone to Berlin
to study. Soon after she left, the Durrant family was enmeshed in a horrific scandal. Maud’s brother, Theo
Durrant was accused, convicted, and hung for the murder of two young women found naked and mutilated
in the family’s local church. For more on the details of the scandal, see Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last
Stand (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997), 65-69. Maud was supposedly very close to her brother and
greatly affected by the events. The horrific nature of the crime was made even more sensational by
sensational allegations of an incestuous relationship between Theo and Maud’s mother, Isabella. After
years in Berlin working to break into theater and absorbing the lessons of a bohemian circle of friends and
lovers, Allan’s breakthrough performance was at the Theatre Hall of the Conservatory of Music in Vienna
on Christmas Eve in 1903 where she danced expressively in white or back drapery in a Grecian style.
While Berlin at this time was considered a city steeped in decadence, Vienna was even more so with its
associations with Expressionist art and Freud. 70.

181
This production was also the inspiration for Richard Strauss’s opera, which was first performed in 1905.
Philip Hoare is careful to point out that Allan’s performance was inspired by the Wilde play, and that she
deliberately associated herself with a controversial figure who was emblematic of a dissolute upper class.
Ibid., 73-74.

182
Ibid., 74.
113
long neck. The artist is attentive to the contours of the performer’s flesh and the details
of costume. The figure’s body glows in contrast to the dark background and the dark
figure of the servant bearing the head, which suggests the threat that permeates the
performance. The prevalence of jewels in this and other representations of Salome is
typical of orientalizing representations of women in Western art. The sumptuous jewelry
heightens the allure of the flesh, and is also a feature of images of Salome in popular
media.

Figure 2.11: Franz Von Stuck, Salome, 1906.

The American public would have been more familiar with photographic portraits
of the performer in her most famous role. Allan, like many actresses before her, used the
medium of photography for self-promotion. She was photographed in costume for
114
Salome in a number of poses both with and without the head of John the Baptist. These
images and others like them were reproduced and distributed as cabinet cards and for the
press. Allan is depicted in the same Salome costume in two different poses. In the first
(Figure 2.12), she is shown on her knees with her head turned in a three quarters view to
the picture plane as she leers at the head of John the Baptist on the floor to the side of her
body, which is shown in full view. She wears a headdress of pearls with a larger
dangling gem over her forehead. Her bodice and girdle are composed entirely of gems
and beads in an elaborate design that covers her breasts with pearls with a dark stone over
the nipple and more pearls that dangle from her stomach to her hips so as to accentuate
the movement of her stomach and hips during the dance of the seven veils. Her thighs
are clearly visible beneath the sheer black material of her skirt. Allan as Salome leans
back from the decapitated head in an exaggerated posture with one arm outstretched
towards it; it looks as though she is recoiling from the head, but the expression on her
face is more lascivious than horrified. This is a powerful woman who manipulates the
desire of the male spectator to attain her own desires. Allan’s pose in much more
restrained in the second example (Figure 2.13). The details of her costume can be seen as
she stands before the camera with her head again turned to the side. Her arms evoke a
danse du ventre and her torso turns slightly to suggest the movement of the dance. Her
expression is composed and distant in comparison to the previous example; she is
contained and confident in the sensual display of her body before an unseen audience.
The exotic and revealing details of Allan’s costume are emphasized in both photographs,
115
and her pose in both images suggests the movements of the dance as if to remind the
viewer of the less contained, dangerous appeal of her performing body.

Figure 2.12: Maud Allan as Salomé, c. 1908, New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance
Division.
Figure 2.13: Maud Allan as Salomé, c. 1908, New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance
Division.

Indicative of the extent to which exotic details of costume were linked to the
scandalous character of the dance is the inclusion of teasing tidbits about her evocative
costume in reports of Allan’s Vision of Salomé. In April of 1907, it was reported to New
York readers that police in Munich “have prohibited further performances of the Salome
dance by Maud Allan, an American.”
183
The very brief article then provides the salacious
detail that the removal of the seven veils in Allan’s dance revealed that, “her corsage

183
“Salome Dance Forbidden,” The New York Times, April 14, 1907, C4.
116
consisted of an elegant but scanty arrangement of pearls.”
184
In Europe, Allan continued
to capitalize on the sensational reputation of her performance, timing the Parisian debut
of her dance “to coincide with a performance of Strauss’s Salome.”
185
She took her
performance to London in 1908 and performed on the music hall circuit to great success.
She was embraced by Edwardian high society despite her state of undress in an already
scandalous production.
186
A report on Allan’s performances in Britain teased the New
York audience with the possibility of upcoming performances in New York and was
coupled with news that her performances in Manchester had been canceled due to
concerns about the nature of the show.
187
A report a month later reminds the readers of
the problems in Manchester after disclosing that Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. had dispatched a
representative to contract Miss Allan for a New York engagement.
188

New York papers kept the American citizenry informed of Salome related
scandals overseas. There were stories of British concern over the effect of Maud Allan’s
performances on public morals, including a recounting of a party hosted by a London
Society woman in which thirty society ladies were invited to attend a “Maud Allan”

184
Ibid.

185
Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand, 75.

186
Philip Hoare points out that Allan capitalized on leaked reports of a private performance she gave for the
king prior to her London premiere as well as a carefully orchestrated performance for select members of the
press. The “classic and biblical references gave her a certain intellectual respectability, and made her art
suitable for the drawing-rooms of the rich.” Ibid., 76-77.

187
“Miss Maud Allan, the barefooted and otherwise scantily clad dancer, in whose favor a very profitable
boom has been worked up in London, and whose manager is anxious to give New Yorkers a chance of
witnessing her Salome and other dances, has been warned off the stage in Manchester, which is the most
important theatrical city in England outside of the capital.” “Dancer Warned Off Stage,” The New York
Times, June 8, 1908, 1.

188
“Maude Allan’s Dance Here,” New York Times, July 8, 1908, 7.
117
dinner dance. The ladies outdid each other in their Salome costumes: “Each of the ladies
proceeded to outvie her sisters in providing herself with a costume matching in all details
the undress effect of Miss Allan’s scanty attire” and culminated in the ladies
demonstrating their own skill with the Salome dance.
189
When Maud Allan finally
performed in New York, she did not perform her Vision of Salome. Her first American
appearance was in a dance inspired by figures in Greek vases in appropriately
“diaphanous” and “filmy” dress.
190
Allan was not a huge success in New York, which
had seen numerous performers in recent years dancing expressively in scanty attire.
191

An August 1908 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune titled, “Women Whom Salome Has
Made Famous,” describes Allan’s performance first and features images of her dance.
192

As this article exemplifies, Allan’s Salome was known largely to the American public
through publicity photographs and the press. The market was already saturated with

189
“when the coffee and cigarette stage had been reached some of the most graceful members of the party
demonstrated that they had not only succeeded in matching Miss Allan’s costume, but had learned some of
her most captivating steps in movements.” “Salome Dinner Dance: Tale of London Society Women
Dining in Maude Allan Undress”. New York Times. August 23, 1908.

190
“Maud Allan in Greek Dances: More Beautiful in Face and Figure Than Some of Her Predecessors,”
New York Times, January 21, 1910, 11.

191
Allan’s family history was also well known in the United States, though she did receive a positive
reception from her San Francisco audience. Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand, 87. Allan’s popularity had
waned by the time she returned to Europe. In 1918, Allan was offered the part of Salome in what was to be
a noncommercial production of Wilde’s play in London, a decision that would lead to her ultimate downfall
in the public eye. In February of 1918, Noel Pemberton-Billing, a member of the British Parliament,
published an article in the Imperialist titled, “The Cult of the Clitoris” intimating that Maud Allan was
leading a group of perverts in the production of Wilde’s play. Pemberton-Billing espoused a theory that
linked degeneracy in the form of the femme fatale, the homosexual, and the lesbian to Germany and the
threat of espionage. Allan promptly filed a libel suit, but Pemberton-Billing used the trial as a stage to
establish Allan’s degeneracy and further his own theories. For more on “The Cult of the Clitoris,” see Toni
Bentley, Sisters of Salome (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 72-84; Philip Hoare, Oscar
Wilde’s Last Stand; and Jodie Medd, “’The Cult of the Clitoris,’ Anatomy of a Scandal,”
Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 1 (2002): 21-49.

192
“Women Whom Salome Has Made Famous,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 16, 1908, F2. The article
compares Allan’s movements to ancient Greek and Egyptian statuary.
118
Salomes by 1909. The dancer Dazie-Daisy Peterkin performed a Salome dance in
Ziegfeld’s The Follies of 1907 at the Jardin de Paris in New York and then capitalized on
her success by opening a school for Salomes, which churned out even more imitators.
Among the most successful of the Salomes on the American stage was Gertrude
Hoffman, who presented a dance blatantly copied from Allan’s. Before Maud Allan
returned to the United States to capitalize on the success of her Salome performances in
Europe, Hoffmann made a name for herself with her own version of the “Salome Dance.”
She first performed her “imitation of Maud Allan’s dance, ‘A Vision of Salome’” the
afternoon of July 13, 1908 at Hammerstein’s.
193
A few months earlier, Hoffman had
traveled to London on behalf of Hammerstein’s in order to watch Maud Allan’s
performance. Hoffmann, a vaudeville mimic, imitated well-known dancers for the
delight of the audience. Historian Susan A. Glenn’s argues that Hoffmann’s “Vision of
Salome” was not a faithful imitation of Allan’s, although it was touted as such:
Her “Vision” sought both to introduce the American public to modern art dance
and to satirize the arty spiritualism of the modern Orientalist dance style itself.
Salome also provides Hoffmann a way to flaunt female naughtiness, to expose
men’s lust for erotic spectacle, and to ridicule the prudishness of America’s self-
appointed moral censors.
194

Glenn describes Hoffmann’s imitation as a burlesque. Hoffman capitalized on the
“naughtiness” of Allan’s Vision of Salomé in such a way as to make a mockery of public
reactions to the spectacle. In the promotion of her performance, Hoffman carefully
negotiated her scandalous display with an insistence on its artistic merits: “’The dance is

193
“A ‘Salome’ Dance By Miss Hoffman,” The New York Times, July 14, 1908, 5.

194
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 105.
119
not bad at all,’ she insists. ‘True, I wear only a gauze skirt and my jewels, but my Vision
of Salome dance is art—real art. I cannot tell you how it hurts me when people call it
shocking. It is no such thing. It is wonderful. I do it wonderfully.’”
195
Hoffman played
on the popular appeal of the scandalous Salome and the figure’s association with high art
and still managed to emphasize her alluring, but sparse, jeweled costume. Her burlesque
imitation of Allan’s performance for the middle class vaudeville audience and the
numerous photographic representations of Hoffman as Salome demonstrate the
appropriation of dangerous, exotic femme fatale in art for the more widespread and
presumably salacious enjoyment of the middle and lower classes.
The New York Times review of the performance links a “suggestion” of brief
costume to “the largest audience that has been seen on Hammerstein’s roof this
summer.”
196
Her costume is described in detail: “Miss Hoffman wore adornments of
jeweled design above the waist and a transparent black skirt, embroidered in gold around
the edges. The skirt disclosed with unmistakable exactness the extent of the rest of her
costume.”
197
Her costume, or lack thereof, was the source of much of the controversy
generated by the performance. One example of the publicity photographs for
Hoffmann’s “Vision of Salome” (Figure 2.14) shows the performer in a pose and
costume remarkably similar to one of Allan’s (Figure 2.12). She is on the floor, on her

195
“Women Whom Salome Has Made Famous,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 16, 1908, F2. For more
on the rhetoric of “clean” and “wholesome” vaudeville as a means for its producers and performers to get
away with acts that were not clean and wholesome, see Andrew L. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals
and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 2004).

196
“A ‘Salome’ Dance by Miss Hoffman.”

197
Ibid.
120
side so that the front of her body is exposed to the camera, and her arm is outstretched in
the direction of her gaze: towards the decapitated head at her feet. The jeweled bra of her
costume with its draping pearls as well as the gauzy black skirt are close to the costume
worn by Allan, but the photograph of Hoffman reveals even more of her legs as the skirt
is caught underneath her hip and her legs are exposed from above the knee to her ankles.
The bare feet that were characteristic of “Oriental” dancers and considered part of their
erotic appeal are hidden behind the head. The pose seems contrived and somewhat self-
conscious and cool in comparison to the photograph of Allan kneeling on the floor.
Hoffman’s figure is displayed in a manner that is most flattering, and the scant covering
she does wear seems precariously close to revealing what is currently concealed. The
combination of Hoffmann’s pose and costume in this image draw the viewer’s attention
to the flesh she unveils.

Figure 2.14: F.C. Bangs, NY, Gertrude Hoffman As Salome, c. 1908, Courtesy of Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division.
121
Audiences met Hoffmann’s “Vision of Salome” with enthusiasm, and she
performed on variety stages across the country. On July 23, 1909, after performing her
dance approximately 400 times, Hoffman was arrested for “offending public decency”
after her performance at Hammerstein’s. According to Hoffmann, a police Captain and
Lieutenant asked her backstage if she was wearing tights in her act. When she assured
him she did, he asked her “’to show them to him,’” and she refused, which resulted in her
arrest.
198
Hoffmann used her arrest to help generate seat-filling controversy.
199

Whether tights were present during the performance or not, they certainly do
nothing to hamper the impression of exposed flesh in the photographs that circulated in
the popular press and as cabinet cards. The full effect of Hoffmann’s costume can be
seen in another photograph from approximately 1908 (Figure 2.15). In this example,
Hoffmann’s body is shown in three quarters view with her face turned to confront the
camera and her neck and head tilted back to follow the curve of her arched spine. Her
arms are held away from her sides and her left leg is outstretched with bare toes pointed.
The full length of her leg is visible beneath the sheer skirt. The heavy embellishments of
the costume serve as an orientalizing, “artistic” veneer that enhances the contrast to the
smooth pliability of the flesh on display.

198
“Arrest Gertrude Hoffman: Hammerstein Dancer Held for Offending Public Decency.” New York
Times, July 24, 1909, 1.

199
Glenn writes that Hoffman “stoked the fires of her costume controversy,” by hiring the former press
secretary of the former Police Commissioner. The press secretary worked with her to engineer Hoffmann’s
arrest. Female Spectacle, 106. The New York Times covered the trial, which resulted in a chaperon being
appointed to monitor Hoffman as she dressed for performances to make sure that she donned tights that
went past her knees. “Censor for Hoffman Dress,” New York Times, July 28, 1909, 6.
122
Salome performances and representations of Salome in visual media continued to
multiply. A clipping from the April 1909 issue of The Theatre titled, “All Sorts and
Kinds of Salomes” (Figure 2.16) gives a brief account of the history of the character and
her appeal to people in the arts.
200
This description is framed by eight photographs of
Salomes, from opera singer Olive Fremstad to the outrageous performer of vaudeville
parody, Eva Tanguay. All are shown in costumes with sheer fabrics and elaborate
embellishments. With the possible exception of the image of Maud Allan at the upper
left, all are shown in dramatic poses as if in the midst of a passionate performance.

Figure 2.15: F.C. Bangs, NY, Gertrude Hoffman as Salome, c. 1908, Courtesy of Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division.
Figure 2.16: "All Sorts and Kinds of Salomes," The Theatre, April 1909, pg. 130.

200
“All Sorts and Kinds of Salomes,” The Theatre (April 1909): 130.
123
In addition to the propagation of photographic representations, Salome became
the prototype for the popular figure of the vamp in early cinema. In 1908, Vitagraph
produced a film titled Salome; Or, The Dance of the Seven Veils consisting of nine
scenes. Salome performs her dance for Herod and receives her reward at the culmination
of the film.
201
Salome continued to be a popular subject in film and the exotic, sexually
aggressive vamp became a recognizable type. The vast number of representations of
Salome that were originally inspired by Wilde’s play served more as a means of
displaying the female body in an exotic state of undress. The biblical references and
even the references to scandalous literature gave way to the appeal of flesh revealed by
gauzy veils and winking jewels.
By the summer of 1908, the craze for these performances had spread to such an
extent that it became the subject of derisive humor among some theatre managers,
performers, and reporters.
202
An article in the September 3, 1908 New York Times, titled
“The Salome Pestilence” bemoans the “Salomania” that erupted following the first
production of Strauss’s opera in New York. The article begins, “We are having a Salome
epidemic. Half-dressed women in all the variety theatres are doing the dance of seven
veils and joyfully receiving a human head (in paper maché) on a platter. . . . The

201
“Salome; Or The Dance of the Seven Veils,” The Moving Picture World 3, no. 9 (August 29, 1908):
163-164.

202
Theatre manager E.H. Sothern is reported to have stated “’I have decided to give ‘Hamlet’ next season
without any ‘Salome’ dance in it. I know that this will be a shock to the public, who have doubtless
counted on one, but I feel sure that Shakespeare would have put in the dance had he believed it necessary.’”
“The Call of Salome,” New York Times, August 16, 1908, SM4. The article goes on to “quote” managers
and unnamed performers with tongue-in-cheek comments about Salome dances, including reports of a
“Salome” club some 50,000 members strong and the impact of the Salome question on the upcoming
Presidential campaign.
124
spectacular, theatrical Salome has invaded our home.”
203
The author argues that the
“shockingly bad taste” and “rampant vulgarity” of the “Salome epidemic” could have
been avoided if Strauss’s “Salome”, which is “art”, “had not been suppressed at the
Metropolitan Opera House two years ago.”
204
The article goes on to rail against
suppression of work like Strauss’s opera, stating that the public would then not have to
deal with the “’sensational’” performances that resulted, most of which were
performances of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Beyond his willful disregard of the
sensationalism of Strauss’s opera itself and the fact that the opera was “suppressed” in
1907 because some of its high-brow audience found it to be in “shockingly bad taste,” the
author’s critique reveals an objection to the appropriation of “art” for popular
entertainment.
Millie DeLeon (c.1873-1922), known popularly as “the girl in blue” and often
referred to in retrospect as the first burlesque queen of the twentieth century, garnered
attention for her Salome dance by making a mockery of such distinctions in the press.
DeLeon was arrested for her performances on a number of occasions throughout her
career, and she utilized the resulting publicity. In court following a 1909 arrest, DeLeon
attempted to show the judge her dance, which, she argued, “’is a pure Salome dance.’”
She compared herself to vaudeville performers Eva Tanguay and Gertrude Hoffman, who
were themselves doing pointed imitations of “artistic” Salome dances.
205
Like her

203
“The Salome Pestilence,” New York Times, September 3,1908, 6.

204
Ibid.

205
“’Indecent,’ Says Court,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1909, Il. Images of Millie DeLeon in costume are
somewhat scarce. The Harry Ransom Center has some cabinet cards that appear to be from earlier in her
125
vaudeville colleagues, DeLeon capitalized on the exotic, sexually suggestive Dance of
the Seven Veils and played up charges of indecency to fill seats.
Salomania came full circle in January of 1909, when Strauss’s opera was finally
performed again in New York. Salomé was given by the Manhattan Opera House. Mary
Garden performed the title role for which she had received recent accolades in Paris.
Well in advance of her first performance as Salome in Paris, Garden spoke of her
costume for the part in a description that highlights the tantalizing display that audience
might expect:
“It is a composite idea taken from three pictures by Gustave Moreau, . . . One of
these pictures was Oscar Wilde’s inspiration. The jeweler will have more to do
with the making of the costume than the dressmaker. The jewels on the body will
all be rubies. My original idea was amethysts, but artist tell me they are mournful
stones.”
206

She goes on to reiterate her promise to perform the Dance of the Seven Veils herself. In
emphasizing the jewels that make up her costume, Garden affirmed a lack of material that
New York audiences of all varieties had become familiar with in the two years prior. Her
emphasis on the jewels that will disguise her nudity – passionate rubies rather than
mournful amethysts – also seems a deliberate advertisement of the alluring, erotic
spectacle she plans to present. Although the Manhattan Opera House was a venue for a
more elite audience, the provocative nature of the title role seems to have dominated
promotion for the production. According to the New York Times, “the audience was

burlesque career. A 1998 article in the Journal of American Culture references an image of DeLeon in a
“Spanish-inspired costume” published in Vanity Fair in 1908, though this cannot be the Condé Nast Vanity
Fair, which was not published until 1913. See Anne Fliotsos, “’Gotta get a gimmick’: The burlesque
career of Millie De Leon,” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 4 (January 1998): 1-8.

206
“Mary Garden Talks of Salome Costume,” New York Times, July 12, 1908, C1.
126
enormous, its expectancy highly keyed, and the impression it received from the
remarkable work was evidently a deep one.”
207
The author continues, remarking that
“”Salome’ is destined for sensation and unrest by its very nature.” In a positive review
for the opera and the “astonishing achievement” of Mary Garden, the author nonetheless
elaborates on the “abhorrent” subject of Wilde’s play and its “unwholesome
atmosphere.”
208
It had been widely promoted that Mary Garden would perform the
scandalous Dance of the Seven Veils herself, and she did:
It is no conventional stage movement and pose that Miss Garden gives in this. It
is truly Oriental, a dramatic dance, pantomimic and frankly suggestive of the
obvious purpose. In it, and in certain other passages in the drama, Miss Garden
goes quite to the limit of the permissible as a result of the successive removals of
bodily covering.
209

The reviewer alludes to the suggestive sexuality of what is ultimately a striptease on the
stage of the Manhattan Opera House. The review concludes with an extensive list of the
society members who attended the performance, which demonstrates the willingness of
society’s tastemakers to view a production firmly established as scandalous and abhorrent
in content. Mary Garden and the Manhattan Opera traded on the salacious reputation and
popularity of Salome dancers in vaudeville and burlesque theaters to promote the 1909
production. The exchange between high and low culture in the performance of Salome
dances in America was not unilateral. This exchange between high and low, “art” and
crass sensationalism, informs my analysis of commercial representations of performing

207
“Strauss’s ‘Salome’ at the Manhattan” New York Times, January 29, 1909, 9.

208
Ibid.

209
Ibid.
127
women and of work by American artists who, at this time, took an interest in popular
entertainments as subjects.
The “All Sorts and Kinds of Salomes” and the proliferation of their images in
mass culture complicate distinctions between high and low, artistic and spectacular,
transgressive and simply titillating. Dance historian Toni Bentley provides a useful
analysis of the erotic impact of the Dance of the Seven Veils:
Salome’s dance is a display involving manipulation of things less visible than
veils. It demonstrates the dual power of a woman to both reveal and conceal. . . .
In her dance, Salome enslaves the world while holding it at bay, the connection
between desire and unavailability made visible.
210

The tension between what is revealed and what is concealed and between a woman’s
desires and her unavailability to the spectator is negotiated in performances and
representations of Salome through the use of poses that are self-consciously dramatic and
costumes that are exaggerated in their reference to foreign, eastern cultures. This figure,
which troubled conventional notions of the sexual agency of women, appealed to
audiences from a broad societal spectrum, but she also generated censorious criticism and
derision. Although the popularized version of the Dance of the Seven Veils reduces the
performance to female spectacle, an allusion to the dangers represented by the figure of
Salome remains in the attention to exotic costume details and exaggerated movements.
The “exotic” is a trope that signals availability and potentially aggressive female
sexuality in representations of women; this trope persists in representations of female
performers in American burlesque theatre, and its currency was enhanced and solidified
in popular media by the Salome phenomenon.

210
Bentley, Sisters of Salome, 31.
128
Robert Henri’s Salome and Popular Theatre as Subject in American Realist Art
American artist Robert Henri’s Salome in many ways encapsulates the dilemmas
of popular representations of Salome. Henri painted his two versions of Salome in May
of 1909. Art historian Marianne Doezema argues that the original title for these
paintings, Salome Dancing, suggests to the viewer a connection with The Dance of the
Seven Veils as it was being performed in popular culture as well as the more traditional
association with the art-historical tradition associated with the character.
211

No matter the title, a contemporary audience could hardly escape the visual
connections to the numerous photographic representations of the subject, and given the
artist’s oeuvre and his interest in representing the world around him, the relationship of
Henri’s Salome to modern urban spectacle is not really in question. Henri and his wife
saw the 1909 production of Strauss’s opera in New York, and the artist was reportedly
impressed with Mary Garden’s portrayal. In a letter dated February 23, 1909 from
Marjorie Henri, Robert Henri’s second wife, to Mrs. Sloan (wife of artist John Sloan),
Mrs. Henri describes seeing Strauss’s Salome in New York: “Last Saturday evening we
went to see “Salome” – second row in the orchestra – and Mary Garden is certainly it,
and the Boss takes back every thing he ever said against her either as an actress or a
singer. She’s a wonder he says.”
212
Henri was also certainly aware of the many popular
images of The Dance of the Seven Veils circulating at the time and himself collected

211
Marianne Doezema, “Representing Women,” in Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with
Leisure, 1895-1925 (New York: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2007), 84.

212
Bernard B. Perlman, ed., Revolutionaries of Realism: The Letters of John Sloan and Robert Henri
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 191.
129
clippings of dancers in his scrapbooks (Figure 2.17).
213
The scrapbook page shows a
clipping of a Salome dancer in a costume and with a dramatic pose characteristic of
publicity images of exotic dancers.

Figure 2.17: Robert Henri Papers. Scrapbooks of Clippings. Reel #887. Arhives of American Art.

Two full-length portraits of Salome feature Mademoiselle Voclezca in costume
for the Dance of the Seven Veils.
214
The first (Figure 2.2) is the version currently in the

213
There is no date for this particular image of a Salome dancer, but it likely postdates Henri’s paintings as
an adjacent image is dated 1914. The name of the performer seems to be identified in handwriting below
the image, but the name is not legible.

214
In My People, Valerie Ann Leeds identifies her as an opera singer, but I have found no confirmation of
this. Leeds corrects and clarifies this identification in her essay, “Pictorial Pleasures: Leisure Themes and
the Henri Circle.” In a footnote to her discussion of Henri’s Salome, she cites Robert Henri’s record book,
Henri Estate, LeClair Family Collection and notes, “Henri noted the name of the model in the record book,
but nothing else about her is known. Where the model may have obtained the costume is unknown, as
130
Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. The model’s face is turned toward the viewer,
her chin slightly lifted, and her eyelids slightly lowered as if gazing seductively at the
viewer. She wears an abbreviated, green bodice with capped sleeves that reveals the
curves of her torso from just below her breasts to well below her navel. A sheer black
skirt is gathered around her hips and the flesh of her legs is visible from the thigh down.
Turned in profile, her right leg extends out to the left of the picture frame. The exotic
costume is ornamented with dangling earrings and a bauble on the forehead that is
suggestive of the more exaggerated headpieces worn by performers like Hoffman and
Allan. Thin bands circle her left arm, and a swath of gossamer white material dangles
from the model’s extended fingers to pool on the ground behind her. The second version
of Salome (Figure 2.3), which is in the collection of the John and Mable Ringling
Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, shows Salome without the white shawl, which
suggests the removal of a veil and a moment slightly later in the dance.
215
Her pose is
more exaggerated with her back curved and stomach pushed outward. Her arm is slightly
behind her and her head is turned to the viewer. Her left leg is extended so that her toes

Henri’s models usually dressed in their own costumes, except for accessories he sometimes supplied. His
intention in depicting such a controversial subject was not explicitly stated, although he ardently supported
artistic freedom in all art forms; so this them may be interpreted as a reaction to the uproar about the opera
and its subsequent ban.” In Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artist’s Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925 (New
York: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2007), 49. Leeds’s speculation that he may have been reacting to the
ban of the opera is somewhat ahistorical, as the 1909 production, which Henri saw with his wife, was not
banned, and New York was saturated with Salome dancers by the time Henri painted this work. Marianne
Doezema also implies that Mademoiselle Voclezca was a known performer of the dance: “When Henri
painted Mademoiselle Voclezca in the revealing costume she wore for the famous dance scene, . . .”
Bellows and Urban America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 120. Again, I have not found
evidence to suggest that she was a known Salome dancer or opera singer, though Henri likely would not
have had a problem finding a Salome dancer among the many to model for this painting.

215
Doezema, “Representing Women,” 84. Doezema suggests that the two paintings evoke sequential
moments in the dance. The more exaggerated pose of the second image and the lack of the white shawl do
suggest a later moment in a performance of the Dance of the Seven Veils.
131
point to the left edge of the picture frame. The skin of her torso is supple compared to the
translucent gleam of the pearls that dangle from her costume and around her neck and
accentuate the shortened bodice covering her breasts. Henri is again attentive to the sheer
black fabric that reveals the performer’s legs.
Henri’s familiarity with the Strauss opera and Mary Garden’s performance as
both opera singer and Salome dancer is established. What tends to be left out of
discussions of this work or at least glossed over is that Henri, like the rest of New York in
1909, was also exposed to “Salomania.” Henri’s Salome is not a portrait of a famous
opera performer. These portraits are representations of a Salome dancer, a popular type,
and although comparisons might certainly be drawn to previous European examples of
this subject in European painting, Henri’s representation corresponds much more clearly
to the numerous reproductions of photographs that circulated at the time. For example,
Henri’s second version of Salome and the photograph of Hoffmann in a standing pose are
strikingly similar in composition and detail. The visual correspondence between Henri’s
academy entry and publicity photographs of any number of performers of the Dance of
the Seven Veils who performed in venues both reputable and not so reputable
demonstrates the degree to which an aesthetic for the “exotic” dancer was established.
Here, specific references to the biblical/literary context for the erotic display of Salome
are absent in the painting; the familiar narrative referenced in the title is secondary to the
representation of the figure and the costume that was so much a part of contemporary
culture. Henri’s Salome is a representation of popular female spectacle; the femme fatale
who both fascinated and repulsed in consumable form.
132
To establish the significance of Henri’s Salome paintings in the history of
American art and to a history of representations of performing women, it is useful to
situate the works in the context of Henri’s career. Born Robert Henry Cozad in Ohio in
1865, Henri is perhaps best remembered for his legacy as a teacher and as a leader of the
New York Realists at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Henri promoted
progressive art and open exhibitions that offered artists an alternative to the juried
annuals of the National Academy of Design and their conservative standards. He and a
number of his contemporaries often depicted subjects of modern life in a manner that
might be described as less refined than their American predecessors, and they later came
to be associated with the term Ashcan school, a moniker applied to artists who depicted
realistic scenes of city life. Henri was on the jury for the National Academy of Design’s
annual exhibition in 1908 when he publicly disagreed with their procedures and set about
organizing an exhibition at the Macbeth galleries in 1908 with a group of artists who
came to be known as “the Eight”: Robert Henri, John Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, William
Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast. The
work of the Eight is not coherent in style, but the artists shared an interest in promoting
independent exhibitions of progressive art and, with the exception of Arthur B. Davies,
an interest in portraying contemporary life. The show was a financial success and was
well-received in the press. Henri entered his first Salome in the 1910 Spring Annual at the
National Academy of Design along with two other portraits. The rejection of Salome
plus another of his entries prompted Henri to work with John Sloan, Walter Kuhn, Stuart
Davies and others to form the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists, where Salome was
133
shown.
216
This exhibition, with over 100 artists and 500 artworks, was much larger than
the 1908 exhibition at the Macbeth galleries, and its premise was open and egalitarian.
Henri continued to promote smaller, unjuried independent exhibitions in the coming
years. He was only tangentially involved in the 1913 Armory Show, and, as art historian
Valerie Ann Leeds points out, in comparison to some of the European works that pushed
the boundaries of art, the Armory Show “left the work of the American realists looking
retrogressive and provincial, and functionally unseated Henri as the leader of the
American avant-garde, while shifting the focus to European modern art.”
217
Henri had a
tremendous impact on American realism; his emphasis on the representation of
contemporary life serves as a signpost for the growing number of American realists who
turned to urban spectacle, and ultimately burlesque, as an appropriate and necessary
subject for art.
It was as a portrait painter that Henri distinguished himself as an artist, and his
oeuvre reveals an interest in people of diverse nationalities and backgrounds.
218
In an
article in the February 1915 issue of The Craftsmen, the artist writes, “An artist must first
of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then
he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value

216
Valerie Ann Leeds, The Independents: The Ashcan School & Their Circle from Florida Collections
(Winter Park, FL: Rollins College, 1996), 44. Leeds has written extensively on Henri and his circle.

217
Ibid., 3.

218
Manet and Velázquez are often cited as influences on Henri’s portrait style, particularly in reference to
his portraits in the first decade of the twentieth century, which are characterized by a dark palette and
dramatically lit figures. A fellow American, “Henri’s artistic mentor,” Thomas Eakins was perhaps an
even more important influence on Henri’s development of a realist portrait style. See Valerie Ann Leeds,
“The Portraits of Robert Henri: Context and Influences,” American Art Review 7, no. 2 (April-May 1995):
92 and Leeds, My People.
134
of the subject shining through it.”
219
Henri frequently responded to performers as
subjects. Actors and actresses have long been the subjects of portrait painters.
220

Portraiture is historically a genre of painting for the upper classes and the upwardly
mobile such as successful theatrical performers. In the second half of the nineteenth
century, many European artists such as Manet “were involved in efforts to modernize
portraiture, and actors, actresses, playwrights, and journalists provided some of their most
suitable sitters.”
221
As actors, actresses and other performers themselves function as
representations, images of them are reflexive -- the performer as representation is the
subject. Performers and theatrical themes, however, were not of particular interest to the
American Impressionists. It was not until the early twentieth century that the theatre and
other popular entertainments so increasingly prevalent in modern American life became a
common subject for American artists. It has certainly been argued that the work of Henri
and his fellow realists are imitative of French painting produced three and four decades
earlier, and this influence is visible in any number of examples.
222
However, the realist
artists in early twentieth century America were concerned with capturing contemporary
American life. Leisure and entertainment were burgeoning aspects of urban life as was

219
Robert Henri, “My People,” The Craftsman 27, no. 5 (February 1915): 462.

220
For more on this tradition in British portraiture, see Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and
Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991) and Robyn
Asleson, ed., A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraits (Los Angeles: The J. Paul
Getty Museum, 1999). For a case study on the representation of an actress of the period discussed in this
chapter, see Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: the Art of High Drama (New York:
The Jewish Museum; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).

221
H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism:
The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 215.

222
Ibid., 217.
135
the increasing visibility of women in public space. The frequency of theatrical and other
leisure subjects in American art coincided with these developments. As the story of
Salomania in America demonstrates, theatre, in its various guises, provides a heightened
view of the public woman and of class hierarchy and mobility.
223

Henri’s engagement with the representation of theatre can be seen mainly in his
fascination with dancers. Henri’s interest in painting dancers and other performers in
exotic costumes did not begin and end with Salome. The artist used dancers as models
throughout his career. His interest was in capturing the gesture and character of the
subject. He typically depicted his dancers against a dark background, divorced from the
specificity of a theatrical space and other indicators of public performance and instead
relied on pose, the suggestion of movement, and the details of costume to convey the
identity of his subject as dancer. Henri was fascinated with Spain, and in summer of
1906 while in Madrid, he painted La Reina Mora (the Moorish Queen), an image of
dancer Milagros Moreno (Figure 2.18).
224
In Henri’s full-length portrait, the dancer
gazes directly at the viewer with her hands on her hips and one slender ankle and foot
extended toward the bottom edge of the picture frame. She is a bright figure against a
dark background with gray and green tones. A flower that matches the bright print of her
bodice sets off her dark hair. Attention is drawn to the olive-toned flesh of her upper

223
The authors of the catalog for the 1994 exhibition, American Impressionism and Realism: the Painting
of Modern Life, 1885-1915, argue that, “In general, artistic and theatrical circles reveal in microcosm the
fluid nature of status in American life.” 217.

224
Michael Andrew Marlais, “Robert Henri: La Reina Mora,” American Art Review 5, no. 5 (Fall 1993):
84-85, 159. Henri had seen Moreno, an Andulasian dancer, “perform at ‘Actualidades,’ a center for
traditional dance in Madrid.” He arranged to meet her and wrote to John Sloan and his family about the
experience.
136
chest by two gold pendants suspended on gold chains round her neck. Her hips and legs
are swathed in a gauzy white skirt that reveals the lower curve of a leg clad in white
stockings. Although less dramatic than Salome, the direct gaze of the subject, the exotic
details of costume, and the full-length pose that suggests the movements of dance are
typical of Henri’s images of dancers, which are also similar in composition to a number
of the publicity photographs discussed in this chapter.

Figure 2.18: Robert Henri, La Reina Mora, 1906. Colby College Museum of Art.
After the 1913 Armory Show, Henri’s influence on the forefront of American art
waned, but he continued to produce portraits. An expanded and even daring palette
137
characterizes his later work. In 1919, he painted Ruth St. Denis in the Peacock Dance
(Figure 2.19), a life-sized portrait featuring the renowned dancer in an elaborate, scanty
costume.
225
In a letter to his mother dated February 15, 1919, Henri writes that he has
had three sittings with the “great dancer,” was to have three more in the next week, and
describes the subject, “She is in her dance of the ‘Peacock.’ The story is Egyptian
princess very proud, etc. whose spirit is confined in a peacock. It is a very wonderful
dance and she is very beautiful in it. Costume is naturally in the character and colors of
peacock.”
226
In a letter dated January 2, 1927 in response to a request for comment on
Ruth St. Denis, Henri provides some insight into his fascination with dancers: “Gesture is
the oldest art and the most natural, capable of spreading into the habit of every individual,
capable of being understood by all peoples. . . . I personally like any kind of dancing,
even gymnast dancing, in fact there is much of anything I do not like. But the
possibilities of dancer, of gesture, are so great!”
227
Henri’s words reveal an attraction to
expressive movement and an egalitarian attitude in regards to his taste in performance
that is reflected in his choice and treatment of a Salome dancer as subject.
Henri skirted scandal with his choice to depict a Salome divorced from the
biblical context. In reference to the rejection of Henri’s Salome (Figure 2.2) by the
National Academy of Design, art historian Marianne Doezema argues that, “Henri had

225
Valerie Ann Leeds refers to this as “the masterpiece of his late career.” “The Portraits of Robert Henri,”
96.

226
Robert Henri Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

227
Ibid.
138

Figure 2.19: Robert Henri, Ruth St. Denis in the Peacock Dance, 1919. Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts.
certainly intended to jolt the jury with his Salome, a highly recognizable reference to the
Richard Strauss opera, which had a colorful history in New York City.”
228
I argue that
the painting is a “highly recognizable” reference to Salomania in general, not just the
Strauss opera. This is particularly noticeable in the similarities of exotic costume and
what Henri would have called gesture between the standing image of Gertrude Hoffman
(Figure 2.15) described in this chapter and Henri’s first version of Salome (Figure 2.2).
Doezema continues her analysis and argues that Henri,
. . . knowingly toyed with sensationalism. His Salome was ‘half nude,’ a
condition usually thought more suggestive than complete undress. Firmly
grounded in Manet, however, Henri’s painting was stylistically reputable, and on
the imposing scale of 77 by 37 inches, Salome might have been a gallery
centerpiece at the Academy, a salon machine. But an overly sensitive, or perhaps

228
Marianne Doezema, Bellows and Urban America, 120.
139
vindictive, jury intervened. When it finally did go on display, . . ., the painting
provoked a few raised eyebrows but no scandal.”
229

Whether or not the National Academy of Design rejected Salome because of the
suggestive nature of the painting or because of the artist’s contentious relationship with
the Academy is secondary to the notion of Henri’s “recognizable reference” to a popular
sensation in what might otherwise have been a salon machine. Henri’s painting, like
Mary Garden’s promotion of her performance of the Dance of the Seven Veils in
Strauss’s opera, exemplifies how the appeal of female spectacle was recruited or perhaps
simply absorbed in “high” art practice. This reflects a willingness to utilize (and/or
capitalize on) the popular to challenge artistic conventions or societal expectations of the
representation of performing women.
Stripping the Exotic Dancer of Her Aspirations
How, then, might images of Salome and her exotic dancing sisters be read and
understood by audiences that ranged from the burlesque “baldheads” to the well-heeled
opera attendee? Was she the threatening femme fatale or merely an intriguing vehicle for
the representation of a mostly undressed woman? The changing role of women in an
increasingly public culture was a central issue of this era.
230
A vision of Salome as
popular female spectacle for the enjoyment of the masses, particularly the male masses,
diminished the predatory threat of the sexualized woman. The employment of the
iconography of the foreign, exotic woman helped to distance the actively erotic

229
Ibid., 120-121.

230
At the conclusion of his analysis of literary and visual representations of Salome at the turn of the
century, Udo Kultermann writes, “The position of women in this culture was one of the central topics for
change and Salome with her Dance of the Seven Veils one of the most attractive forms in which it was
manifested.” “’The Dance of the Seven Veils’,” 213.
140
representation of the performing woman from the woman who was increasingly present
in the public sphere.
231
The commodification of that woman as a popular entertainment
and as a readily consumable image further diminished her threat.
232
The transgressive
potential of representations of the exotic, performing woman is diminished both by the
distinctions that characterize her as something distinct from the norm and by the
reproduction/commodification of her representation.
The exotic, frightening femme fatale of Moreau and Beardsley is readily adapted
to a medium with only slight pretensions of artistry in a series of stereograph images of
an exotic performance from the 1920s. Numerous stereograph images that feature a
woman in the garb of the exotic or cooch dancer serve as an example of how the
dangerous and threatening beauty of Wilde’s Salome may be rendered innocuous by the
proliferation of cooch dancers on stage and in popular visual representations. A
Stereograph card is made up of “two nearly identical photographs or photomechanical
prints, paired to produce the illusion of a single three-dimensional image, usually when

231
See also Allen’s analysis of the predatory burlesque performer: “She (the burlesque performer) is
certainly a predator, but he (the spectator) is not the victim. Whatever extraclass sexual threat the
burlesque performer might represent to the spectator is further defused by her construction as an exotic
other. She is both the most desirable of women and so different from other women that she seems to
belong to a separate species or to inhabit a separate world.” Horrible Prettiness, 219.

232
Linda A. Saladin, a scholar of literature, uses psychoanalytic terms to discuss sexuality in the realm of
the artist: “In psychoanalytical terms, the feminine serves as a fetish, which suggests its use value for the
artists responding to cultural restraints such as those experienced by the Romantics, Victorians, and the
Decadents. In the sense used here, the fetish is a displacement of threatening elements which gives the
illusion of control since, in psychological terms, a fetish substitutes for something feared lost or non-
existent. Distancing and objectifying the threatening act of textual production onto sexualized images of
femininity reinforces the fetish process or rather necessitates it. Why not commodify, debase, and diminish
that element which seemed so threatening and yet had in the past proven such an easy target?” Thus, in
Saladin’s analysis, the reproduction of the femme fatale on the vaudeville and burlesque stage and in
representations of the burlesque performer as a commodity for the male viewer “diminish(s)” the threat of a
woman who is agent rather than object. Fetishism and Fatal Women: Gender, Power, and Reflexive
Discourse (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 19-20.
141
viewed through a stereoscope.”
233
Although the erotic, partially nude photos are not
always “of” burlesque; they are often representations of cooch acts that could have been
seen on the burlesque stage in the 1920s. In the collection of the Library of Congress,
there are series of images with the same title, model, and theme. Viewing the cards
sequentially provides the viewer with an experience that mimics a live performance.
Many refer to popular stage productions, for example, “The Folies Bergere Girl” or “A
New Revue”. There are also some that depict the fantasy of a backstage, dressing room
scene. Some depict the ingénue, some the vamp. Others employ a graphic or “modern”
aesthetic with strategically placed dark cloth over white skin. And still others just show
women draped in diaphanous material. Many are exoticizing and allude to the danse du
ventre or the Dance of the Seven Veils.
The stereograph series, “A Persian Princess” from 1927 features a single model.
In the first image from the series, she is seated on a bench with embroidered upholstery
with her head resting on her raised knee (Figure 2.20). She looks flirtatiously out at the
viewer. In the eighth image of the series, she is standing in a haughty pose. She teases
the audience with her beaded shawl in the fifteenth image of the series. She has dark
hair, and her eyes are made up dark. Many pearls decorate the costume, which seems to
otherwise consist of a nude body stocking, a diadem, a bra, a girdle with larger beads
around the waist, and an elaborate drape or veil of pearls that extends from an armband
just above each elbow. The title identifies the object to be viewed as foreign, an exotic

233
“About the Stereograph Cards,” The Library of Congress online, Prints and Photographs Division
accessed August 1, 2010, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/stereo/. The Library of Congress
collection is made up of images dated from the 1850s to the 1940s, although the majority of the collection
dates from 1870 to 1920. There are approximately 52,000 cards in the collection, which gives some idea of
how prevalent these images were.
142
creature distinct from the presumed viewer, while the costume composed primarily of
jewels and the model’s bare feet are in the familiar tradition of the cooch and Salome
dancer. The costume does little to conceal the display of the model’s figure, and the
exaggerated poses and beguiling jewels do everything to enhance the display of assets.
While allusions to the menace of aggressive female sexuality remain, the exotic dancer in
stereographs is an erotic object whose motions are controlled by the viewer who places
the image in the stereoscope.
While images like “A Persian Princess” may dilute the potential of
representations of exoticized female performers to challenge social conventions regarding
the role of women, they provide some insight into how such popular representations
might trouble cultural hierarchies.
234
In the case of Salome as a popular phenomenon,
the exotic dancer in burlesque, and the representation of these performances for a mass
public, the cooch or “low” version of the exotic or oriental dancer revels in the
spectacular display of female flesh and makes a mockery of the artistic aspirations and
claims of uniqueness of many performers. At the very least, such performances and
images reveal that artistry may not be the appeal of the productions of high culture.

234
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White offer an examination of the relationship between high and low
cultures in which they argue that the low, “troubles the high”: “We have tried to see how high discourses,
with their lofty style, exalted aims and sublime ends, are structured in relation to the debasements and
degradations of low discourse.” The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1986) 3. Stallybrass and White argue that while the bourgeois identify themselves in
opposition to what is designated as low, the low is as a result internalized through its negation and
imprinted as desire. 191.
143

Figure 2.20: "A Persian Princess," 1927. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division.

Burlesque is a site of low, mass culture and desire. It is also a site where high
culture is mimicked and satirized for the enjoyment of a low audience, further troubling
144
the relationship between high and low through inversion of the hierarchy.
235
On the
burlesque stage, Salome is a cooch dancer for the mostly male audience. The
orientalizing costumes and the exaggerated movements seen in the paintings and
photographs examined earlier in this chapter are perpetuated through continued use by
cooch dancers and later by stripteasers as part of the burlesque aesthetic. Salome and her
sisters are readily appropriated by burlesque as barefaced erotic display. It is on the
burlesque stage that the Dance of the Seven Veils becomes a precursor to the type of
performance most associated with burlesque, the striptease. On the burlesque stage and
in mass produced images, the exotic dance was performed multiple times a day, and the
threatening sexuality of the empowered woman was sold as a scopic pleasure. But it is
also in this context that the conventions of the representation and viewing of the female
body in “high” art forms are presented as pretensions.
A famous performance by Fanny Brice demonstrates how burlesque might be
read as troubling the cultural distinctions between the “high” and “low” representation of
the female body. In 1909, a seventeen year-old Fanny Brice (1891-1951) first performed
“Sadie Salome, Go Home” in a burlesque show at the Arverne Theatre in Long Island.
236

Fanny’s performance of the song by Irving Berlin in a Yiddish accent was a hit and
provided the actress with a niche that was pivotal in her rise to fame as a comedienne and

235
Lawrence W. Levine argues that hierarchical cultural distinctions do not emerge in the United States
until the nineteenth-century, and that the emergence of these distinctions is characteristic of a condition of
the modern: “the emerging distinction between high and low culture was based in part on an evaluation of
the difference between unique and mass-produced objects.” The relationship between the unique and the
mass-produced is a fundamental concern in the study of modern cultures, including the study of burlesque.
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 164.

236
Herbert G. Goldman, Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 34-37.
145
singer.
237
She accompanied her singing with exaggerated hand gestures and squirming
that mocked the craze for the “Dance of the Seven Veils” that erupted in the United
States after the New York premiere of Richard Strauss’s opera, Salome, in 1907.
238
The
song is a burlesque of the “Salomania” of the early twentieth century in which a young
Jewish girl takes to the stage as a Salome dancer only to have her suitor implore her to
cease her performance. In the song, Sadie, “. . . soon became the rage/As the only real
Salomy baby.” When Moses, her sweetheart, sees her on stage, he (the chorus) sings,
“Where is your clothes?/You better go and get your dresses/Ev’ryon’s got the op’ra
glasses/Oy! such a sad disgrace/No one looks in your face.”
239
The lyrics to “Sadie
Salome, Go Home”, Brice’s mockery of an exotic dance, and the overt “Jewishness” of
her Yiddish accent on stage in a burlesque house simultaneously encapsulate the potential
of burlesque to trouble conventional and popular mores and the regulation of
transgression in the use of ethnic stereotypes that distance the audience from the
spectacle. The lyrics draw ironic attention to the rapidly multiplying Salomes in the
early twentieth century whose exotic appearance with its biblical allusions on stages both

237
This song actually elevated Brice out of burlesque and onto the more upscale Ziegfeld stage. Fanny
Brice’s story is probably best known to more contemporary audiences through the 1964 film Funny Girl.

238
Goldman, Fanny Brice, 36-37.

239
[1st verse:]Sadie Cohen left her happy home/To become an actress lady/On the stage she soon became
the rage/As the only real Salomy baby/When she came to town, her sweetheart Mose/Brought for her
around a pretty rose/But he got an awful fright/When his Sadie came to sight/He stood up and yelled with
all his might: [chorus:]Don't do that dance, I tell you Sadie/That's not a bus'ness for a lady!/'Most
ev'rybody knows/That I'm your loving Mose/Oy, Oy, Oy, Oy/Where is your clothes?/You better go and get
your dresses/Ev'ryone's got the op'ra glasses/Oy! such a sad disgrace/No one looks in your face/Sadie
Salome, go home [2nd verse:]From the crowd Moses yelled out loud,/"Who put in your head such
notions?/You look sweet but jiggle with your feet/Who put in your back such funny motions?/As a singer
you was always fine!/Sing to me, 'Because the world is mine!'"/Then the crowd began to roar/Sadie did a
new encore/Mose got mad and yelled at her once more”
146
high and low was really just an excuse for a striptease. The chorus, in the role of Moses,
the suitor, lampoons the nudity on display as the focus of the audience’s attention.
Brice’s song and dance demonstrate the capacity of burlesque for self-ridicule as well as
for mocking other cultural productions. At the same time, the over-the-top “Jewishness”
of the performance reinscribes Salome and the exotic performer as an immigrant “Other”
and provides a critical distance for the audience despite their complicity in the display.
240

Brice’s performance indicates an awareness of herself as an “exotic” display object and
makes a mockery of that display. This awareness challenges notions of cultural
distinction through exaggeration and ridicule, and is sometimes legible in representations
of the exoticized female performer of the burlesque stage.
In the January 1926 issue of Vanity Fair, is an illustrated feature titled, “Familiar
Figures of Burlesque” drawn by Covarrubias at the National Winter Garden Burlesque.
José Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) was a Mexican artist who moved to New York
City in 1924. His work as a caricaturist was often featured in Vanity Fair. “Familiar
Figures of Burlesque” begins with a pithy definition of burlesque:
Burlesque, a thriving institution in America, stands midway between the revue
form of entertainment and vaudeville. Its essence is exaggeration, slap-stick, an
utter lack of aesthetic sensibility and its glorification of the risqué jest. It is the

240
Although Fanny Brice, born Fania Borach, was of Hungarian Jewish decent, she supposedly did not
actually speak Yiddish. She used a Yiddish accent to appeal to the popular taste for ethnic humor. It was
particularly suited to a send up of the superficially exotic Salome dance as Yiddish signaled cultural
difference but was not associated with the dangerous, mysterious appeal of the East. The term “Other” has
a number of meanings in a discussion of representation. In a very basic sense, “other” implies the marking
of difference. In linguistic terms, meaning is found in binary oppositions, although these binary
oppositions are reductive and, as Derrida argued, usually not neutral; one side of the binary dominates the
other. In psychoanalytic terms, the existence of the “Other” is essential to a sense of self and one’s sexual
identity. In anthropology, the marking of difference is necessary in the formation of a system of
classification or culture. A very condensed discussion of the “Other” in visual representation can be found
in Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices, ed. by Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications, Inc., 1997), 225-277.
147
expression of the obvious in song, dance, pantomime, and the short “sketch” with
a suggestive fillip at the end. Scores of burlesque shows travel from town to town
in America on a regular booking circuit. Above is the only figure in burlesque
that is not burlesqued at all. He is known and referred to as the “straightman.”
241

The figure illustrated as “the expression of the obvious” in dance is identified as
“Danse du Ventre” (Figure 2.21), and her image is accompanied by the caption, “La
Belle Cleo, of the voluptuous curves, is the hoochie-coochie expert of the world. She is
noted from coast to coast for her single accomplishment of emptying a glass of water into
another by rotating them in juxtaposition violently on her person.”
242
The caption is
empty of any hint of threat or danger that might exude from this “familiar figure” who is
instead mocked for the exaggerated, violent movement of her dance. Covarrubias’s
cooch dancer is easily recognizable as a Salome dancer from her costume composed of
pearls to the curving torso and exaggerated movement of her arms. The mask she wears
adds an element of the mysterious to the now familiar dance. Representations of cooch
dancers in burlesque employ the orientalizing, exotic aesthetic of Wilde’s play, Strauss’s
opera, and any number of painters’ visions of Salome as an “expression of the obvious’:
this exotic Other is an object to viewed, her aggressive movements are rendered as
amusing and even ridiculous rather than threatening to the audience. Like Brice,
Covarrubius represents the exotic dancer as a caricature. He exaggerates the movements
of her dance with the unlikely position of her arms and hands, the details of her costume
with the armor-like profusion of pearls, and her (not so) mysterious allure with the mask

241
“Familiar Figures of Burlesque: Some Shining Lights of the Star and Garter Palaces,” Vanity Fair,
January 1926, 44.

242
Ibid., 45.
148
concealing her face. Covarrubius’s exaggerated exotic figure derides not only burlesque,
but also the exotic dancer’s status as an object of forbidden desire.

Figure 2.21: Covarrubius, "Familiar Figures of Burlesque," Vanity Fair, January 1926, 45.

149
After the advent of striptease in American burlesque theater, the exotic aesthetic
of the cooch dancer persisted in burlesque performance and representation.
243

Exoticizing (and removable) costumes were a common gimmick for performers who
adapted the danse du ventre, the hula, and other ostensibly unfamiliar or foreign dances
for the burlesque stage. Burlesque performances recorded on 16 mm film in the Richard
Koldoff Collection at the Library of Congress include dances with titles like Persian
Market and Egyptian Fire Dance that feature women in elaborate headdresses, gauzy
skirts and elaborately sequined bras who strip down to tiny sequined skirts and girdles
and finally to sequined pasties and sheer g-strings as the lights dim. A men’s magazine
published in the mid 1950s titled, Cabaret Yearbook, featured pin-up images of burlesque
performers. The second volume of the publication includes an image of a naked
Minsky’s star known as “Bubbles Darlene” (Figure 2.22). The blond Bubbles is shown
wearing only a necklace, enormous round earrings, and a bejeweled and feathered
headdress complete with horns. To her side she holds a platter from which the severed,
dark, bearded head of John the Baptist gazes sightlessly upward. The potential danger
she represents is now a joke, but the joke also pokes fun at the absurdity of the visual
cues that mark the exotic dancer as distinct from her Western audience and allude to the
Salome of high art.
When female-centric burlesque emerged on the American stage, the performers
often appeared and were represented in skimpy, exoticized costumes that ostensibly

243
In A Pictorial History of the Striptease: 100 Years of Undressing to Music, Richard Wortley writes,
“The Salome story, with its Biblical origins, underlines the ancient past of striptease. The trade remains
touchingly loyal to such old and favoured themes: all over the world kitsch versions of Salome’s dance are
commonplace in below-stairs clubs, . . .” (Seacaus, NJ: Chartwell Books, Inc., 1976), 11.
150
suited burlesques of stories like Sinbad and Arabian Nights. The craze for Little Egypts
and Salome dancers swept American popular entertainment from the 1890s, and the
cooch dancer with her orientalizing garb and rotating hips became a staple of a burlesque
characterized by shorter bits. The use of orientalizing details and references to the artistic
tradition of the femme fatale in representations of the exotic dancer in American popular
culture are fixed as a part of the burlesque aesthetic. In representations of burlesque and
other popular versions of the cooch dance, the erotic allure of flesh barely covered in
elaborate, bejeweled (or sequined) costumes on the moving female body is emphasized
for the pleasurable consumption of the male viewer; the dangers of the sexualized,
aggressive woman are mitigated and often exposed as a mere guise for the delectation of
female spectacle.

Figure 2.22: Bubbles Darlene, Cabaret Yearbook 2, c. 1955.
151
Chapter 3
Salacious Display: Representing and Viewing the Women of Burlesque in the Era of the
Striptease, 1925-1945

The female performer on stage, often in motion, with members of the audience
frequently included in the image is a typical composition for painters and print artists
who depict the burlesque theatre of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The etching Burlesk Runway
(Figure 3.1) is an early example of the treatment of this subject in the oeuvre of Reginald
Marsh, the American artist most associated with the representation of burlesque.
244
The
image is dominated by the bodies of two members of a burlesque chorus moving down
the runway – one figure is shown in a frontal view taking a dancing step with most of her
head cut off by the upper edge of the print, and the other is in profile, her head tilted
down as if to watch her step. The naked arm and palm of a third chorine is visible at the
left edge of the image. The performers wear nothing but heels, briefs, and brassieres, and
Marsh’s heavy modeling emphasizes the contours of their assets. Behind the runway,
some members of the mostly male audience gaze directly at said assets, while others have
returned their gazes to the main stage. In the foreground, more male audience members
turn their heads up to watch the passing show. Only the musician in the right bottom
corner of the image is intent on something besides the spectacle of bare flesh and jiggling
bodies. As a setting for the depiction of the female body, the burlesque theatre offered
the artist exposed feminine flesh, bodies in motion, and an audience whose own interest
in the “study” of the female body was integral to the scene.

244
There is one known earlier image of burlesque by Marsh, a cartoon titled, On the Straight and Narrow
Path, which appeared in the Yale Record while Marsh was a student at Yale.
152

Figure 3.1: Reginald Marsh, Burlesk Runway, 1930.

With the emphasis on the display of the female body (as opposed to specific
portraits of female performers) and the attentiveness to the relationship between
performer and audience, Marsh’s Burlesk Runway is characteristic of many of the works
by American artists who treat the subject of burlesque between 1925 and 1945. The
burlesque theatre was an alluring subject for a number of American artists of the early to
mid twentieth century whose interest in the traditional subject of the nude coexisted with
an interest in portraying urban life and contemporary culture. Burlesque in America at
this time was increasingly reliant on the display of the undressed female as spectacle, and
issues of obscenity and the commodification of the female body played out on its stage
and in its representations. This chapter analyzes how the unclothed or barely clothed
body of the burlesque performer is depicted during the period in the history of the
American burlesque that striptease takes center stage.
153
By the 1920s, a burlesque show was a sequence of bits – familiar comedy skits,
chorus acts, songs – without narrative continuity. Low humor and the promise of mostly
bare female bodies moving across the stage were its draw. In the late 1920s, about the
same time that American artists began to take interest in burlesque as a subject for their
works, striptease performance offered a new means for burlesque to distinguish itself as
the most provocative purveyor of sexual suggestiveness. The aspect of burlesque that is
most inscribed in our cultural memory, the striptease, did not gain dominance until the
1930s. The seductive removal of veils in the Dance of the Seven Veils so popular at the
beginning of the century was a precursor to what would become known as burlesque
striptease. Striptease is considered the great invention of the burlesque theater, and the
source of its downfall. Contemporary journalists were speculating that burlesque was
dead at the same moment that striptease was becoming the featured performance. The
stripteaser would enter the stage alone, sing a suggestive song, exit behind the curtain,
wait for audience response, then return and remove an article of clothing. She would exit
the stage and return to remove another item of clothing until she was down to her G-
String: “Burlesque shows’ defining attribute was not exhibitionism per se but sexual
suggestiveness. . . . The key to a striptease’s success, for example, was not how much a
woman revealed but how much the people in the audience thought she revealed.”
245
As
the strip developed, performers began to remove their costumes on stage. Audience
response prompted the gradual revelation of the body. Performers used deceptive
undergarments, body paint, and lighting to create an illusion of nudity that allowed them

245
Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 67.
154
to obey the law and satisfy the desires of the customers.
246
Pasties with tassels, for
example, made it clear that the girl was indeed wearing pasties. The most successful
burlesque performers had a gimmick that set them apart from other performers and often
lent to the humorous tone of the show.
247
Sexual suggestiveness, the illusion of nudity,
gimmicks or some other element expressive of humor, and the audience’s reactions are
common to representations of burlesque during this era.
Because of his preoccupation with the subject, Reginald Marsh’s images of the
burlesque theatre have been the most extensively examined by art historians.
248
The
work that has been done on Marsh serves as a point of departure.
249
Examples of work
from Marsh’s oeuvre will be included in my analysis, but I present a broader narrative of

246
Although laws varied from city to city, still, tableau performances often allowed for the display of more
nudity while restrictions were more stringent for moving bodies.

247
For example, Sally Rand, who is credited with the fan dance though some argue that she stole the act,
gained world renown for her performance at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. An innovative gimmick
increased the value of the performance because it gave it the quality of an “original,” although copying
(often with satirical intent) was a burlesque tradition.

248
Marsh depicted burlesque in numerous Chinese ink drawings, etchings and engravings, and paintings.

249
Marsh’s burlesque images have been the subject of detailed analysis in two dissertation projects that are
important resources. Kathleen Spies 1999 dissertation on humor and the grotesque in the burlesque works
of Marsh and Walter Kuhn as well as her 2004 publication in American Art are theoretically rich
engagements with the subject. Spies argues that the link between humor and the sexualized female body
present in Marsh’s depictions of the burlesque ultimately serves to mediate the threat of female sexuality.
Kathleen Spies, “Burlesque Queens and Circus Divas: Images of the Female Grotesque in The Art of
Reginald Marsh and Walt Kuhn, 1915-1945” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1999). Kathleen Spies,
“Girls and Gags: Sexual Display and Humor in Reginald Marsh’s Burlesque Images,” American Art
(Summer 2004): 33-57. In a 1997 dissertation, Michele Miller analyzes the relationship between
performer, architecture, and audience in Marsh’s works, exploring how they reflect and reify cultural
anxieties of the time about high and low culture, gender and sexuality, and consumerism. Michele L.
Miller, “’The Charms of Exposed Flesh’: Reginald Marsh and the Burlesque Theater” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Pennsylvania, 1997). Both Spies and Miller situate Marsh’s work in the context of other
images of the burlesque produced by other artists and produced commercially. Ellen Wiley Todd’s The
“New Woman” Revised includes a chapter on Reginald Marsh in which she demonstrates how the artist
constructed and maintained conventional gender roles in his works. Ellen Wiley Todd, The “New Woman”
Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1993).
155
burlesque as subject and as descriptor. In addition to Marsh’s well-known prints and
paintings, many other examples of prints, paintings, and photographs of burlesque by
lesser-known artists circulated in popular magazines and newspapers. The sampling of
images from different decades in different media examined in this chapter is exemplary
of the pervasiveness of the representation of the female body, exposed flesh, and the
dynamics of the performers and the audience. Other twentieth century American painters
whose names are familiar, like Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper, also turned to
the subject of burlesque in their work. I examine select examples in detail, in particular
Girlie Show by Edward Hopper, as a means to more closely examine how the politics of
the commodified female body intersect with the artistic tradition of the nude and how
those politics play out in the visual culture of burlesque.
In American art, representation of the nude was complicated by controversy about
the morality of the nude as a subject and its appropriateness in conveying the ideals of a
new nation. In the early twentieth century in America, the female nude was still a subject
that evoked the specter of obscenity, especially when American artists, like European
modernists before them, began depicting the nude in poses and contexts outside of the
classicizing, academic mode. Since the display of the female body emerged as the major
draw of burlesque performance in America during the second half of the nineteenth
century, burlesque has been perceived and critiqued by some as obscene. I argue that
burlesque is a cultural form that often consciously explored the boundaries between the
traditions of the nude and the obscene by teasing its audience with the display of real
156
(usually not ideal) bodies and the layers of ornament and deceit that disguised these
bodies.
Integral to the representation of the spectacle of the female body in burlesque is
the audience, whose motives were often suspect in the discourse of the time. Paint and
print artists are particularly attentive to this relationship, and their works point to a
broader complicity in the observation of modern spectacle. In representations of the
burlesque, the commodification of the body as spectacle and the possibility of
“performing” the sexualized female body for an audience of mostly male viewers is
brought to the surface through an attention to the spectatorial relationship and the
excesses of the performance. These works reveal potential failures in the performance
and construction of the female body as an object of desire rather than sustaining the
spectacle of the female body as a commodity. An attention to these moments of
ambiguity demonstrates how the image of the burlesque performer can serve to reveal
productive tensions in the spectator (male)/spectacle (female) binary and evoke questions
about the boundaries of the traditional nude and popular media representations of
performing women. The gradual decline of burlesque as a theatrical form corresponds
with the concurrent emergence of representations of burlesque that more successfully
cross the boundaries of the frame of the nude by disrupting the spectator/spectacle
relationship or by highlighting the undesirability of a commodified body.
Undressing for an Audience: The Origins of Striptease and its Representation
The history of striptease and its evolution in the American burlesque theater
reveal a number of themes that are central to the analysis of representations of burlesque
157
performance and performers. The history of striptease and its depiction in images does
not begin or end in the American burlesque theatre. In paintings, the depiction of
striptease can be linked to works that present women in stages of undress at their toilettes
or backstage in which the viewer is given a peep at a seemingly unaware female figure as
she performs the ostensibly private or semi-private act of dressing/undressing.
Photographers created series of images of women staged in similar scenarios for the
enjoyment of the viewer who could watch these private moments of unveiling in
sequence. Undressing acts were also the subject of early films. One such example of a
type of performance best categorized as an undressing act is the 1901 film Birth of the
Pearl (Figure 3.2). In less than a minute, two scantily dressed women in the brief
costumes of a showgirl at the turn of the century pull open a curtain. The opened curtain
reveals a large, closed shell. The top of the shell lifts and reveals a woman curled on her
side. She slowly stands up with her hair draping her body and looks around. She appears
to be nude, but the lack of visible nipples or pubic hair indicates that she wears a body
stocking of some kind. The curtain closes after a brief moment. In the Birth of the
Pearl, it is an allusion to high art representations of Venus rather than the illusion of the
private space of a boudoir that serves as the context for the display of a nude female
body. The audience for this performance is not seen, though the staging suggests a
theatrical space.
Another 1901 film, Trapeze Disrobing Act (Figure 3.3), features a female trapeze
artist of dubious talents removing her street clothes down to her corset, petticoat and
stockings while performing her routine on a trapeze. Set in a theatrical space, the
158

Figure 3.2: Birth of the Pearl, 1901, Courtesy of Library of Congress.
performer removes her clothes in a series of complicated, if inelegant, maneuvers to the
excited delight of two disreputable looking male audience members in a theatre box on
the left of the screen. Trapeze Disrobing Act is shot to appear as an act in vaudeville or
burlesque. Although the trapeze artist actually reveals little bare skin, the trapeze serves
as a gimmick for a sexually suggestive performance. With its depiction of the audience,
the humorous gimmick, motion, and the gradual revelation of the body, this early film
has much in common with the striptease performances that would later take over the
burlesque stage and with the paintings and prints that are the focus of this chapter.
Burlesque striptease brings voyeuristic pleasures into the more public space of the
theatre.
159

Figure 3.3: Trapeze Disrobing Act, 1901, Courtesy of Library of Congress.
The history of striptease as a public performance is important to understanding
how it is depicted in popular media like Trapeze Disrobing Act and the work of various
artists.
250
Burlesque is so often conflated with striptease because burlesque histories are
the only theatre histories that will claim the striptease.
251
Earlier histories of vaudeville
and burlesque by authors like Joe Laurie Jr. (Vaudeville: From Honky-tonks to the
Palace, 1953) and Bernard Sobel (A Pictorial History of Burlesque, 1956) attempt to
legitimate vaudeville and burlesque as forms of theatre worthy of study by disassociating

250
This history is the subject of two recent publications, theatre historian Rachel Shteir’s Striptease: The
Untold History of the Girlie Show and visual culture scholar Jessica Glasscock’s Striptease. Rachel
Shteir’s work offers a more rigorous approach to the subject, although both are invested in striptease as
both a popular art and a vehicle for self-expression. Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the
Girlie Show (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Jessica Glasscock’s book is the only work that
deals specifically with burlesque as visual culture. She describes her work as, “a story of undercurrents,
underclasses, and underwear.” Jessica Glasscock, Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight (New York, Harry
N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2003), 8.

251
Burlesque historian Robert C. Allen would invert Glasscock’s statement (following) to emphasize that
burlesque is more that just a striptease performance. “The striptease is more than just a burlesque
performance, and a closer examination reveals that its origins lie in other forms of American theatre as
well. Elements of the striptease were drawn from modern dance, vaudeville, variety shows, and Broadway
revues. This is a fact that has been obscured by most histories of these forms, however, as historians of
vaudeville and even burlesque have minimized the connection between those forms and the striptease;
while chroniclers of modern dance and Broadway revues have ignored it almost completely.” Glasscock,
Striptease, 12.
160
them from the striptease.
252
Recent scholarship has catalogued a number of examples to
demonstrate that, “striptease has roots in all of the nineteenth-century popular theatrical
forms.”
253
Vaudeville, often described as the “clean” version of a burlesque or variety
type show that was appropriate for children and ladies, also incorporated dances and
sketches that capitalized on the female form. The danse du ventre (discussed in the
previous chapter), which was wildly popular in both Europe and America in numerous
venues, merged exotic dance with the undressing act of removing veils to gradually
reveal the dancer’s body. Other examples of female spectacle like the ballet and tableaux
vivants are part of the origin story of striptease. In burlesque, the tableau vivant was
reduced to a nude woman against a black backdrop. However, the figure remained still
and retained an artistic veneer. Ballet emerged in America in the nineteenth century as a
popular art, maintaining its status through careful control of the suggestive costumes and
the eroticism of the movements. However, ballet and the tableau vivant established
“female nudity and erotic vitality” as theatrical motifs. Burlesque adopted these motifs
and combined them, appealing to a lower class audience unconcerned with the pretense
of art.
254
With striptease, the allusion to high art practice (the nude goddess) in a tableau
vivant is transgressed through the animation of the image.

252
Ibid., 14.

253
“The woman in breeches, cancaneuses, and bathing beauties proved the drawing power of the sexually
provocative woman in all forms of popular entertainment, even in the supposedly repressive nineteenth
century.” Ibid., 41.

254
Stripteasers were dancers who “set the chaste nude of the tableau vivant into sudden motion.” Glasscock,
Striptease, 108. In a slightly earlier history of striptease, Behind the G-String, David A. Scott situates the
cooch dance and later the striptease in the context of high art tradition. Scott places the cooch dancer, or the
stripper, within the context of the history of the nude goddess in art and performance: “The history of
burlesque is the story of how the nude goddess image came alive and began to dance . . .. The origins of the
161
The popularization of the female spectacle, object of the gaze of the flâneur, in
modern theatre is not a uniquely American occurrence. The Bal des Quatz Arts on
February 9, 1893 in Paris is often cited as the first striptease. The performance resulted
from an impromptu beauty contest during which two dancers jumped onto a float being
paraded through the streets and began removing their clothes.
255
Undressing acts
flourished in late nineteenth-century Paris in theatrical brothels, and in late nineteenth-
century New York, undressing acts were also performed for audiences in brothels. Given
the historical association of the female performer with the prostitute, the origins of
undressing acts in a house of prostitution was probably not lost on many in the audience.
In The Natural History of the Chorus Girl, Derek and Julia Parker trace the development
of the chorus girl on the stages of France, England, and the United States. Charles
Castle’s 1985 history of the Folies Bergère identifies it as “the first music-hall in the
world to present a naked woman on the stage.”
256
However, the Parkers note that the
nudity in the 1918 production was an illusion -- patches of fabric were attached to the
pubic area and the nipples.
257
This was a practice that would also become common to

cooch dancer may be traced to the static nudity of the tableau vivant and the suggestive Élan of the
ballerina.” David A. Scott, Behind the G-String: An Exploration of the Stripper’s Image, Her Person and
Her Meaning (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1996), 196-197. The tableau vivant was
included in burlesque shows from the time its popularity waned as a main event at the end of the nineteenth
century until the 1930s.

255
Shteir, Striptease, 35-36. Castle also accounts for the origin of the striptease in France at the Bal des
Quat’z Arts in February of 1893, but the story is a bit different. He describes the striptease a scene in
which two girls stood on top of the table to have their physiques judged and debated by their admirers,
body part by body part. Charles Castle, The Folies Bergère (New York: Franklin Watts, 1985).

256
Castle, The Folies Bergère, 94.

257
Derek and Julia Parker, The Natural History of the Chorus Girl (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 44.
162
American striptease. Striptease caught-on in a number of Paris theatres, but at the Folies-
Bergère the nude body was framed by allusions to high art and bourgeois taste.
In the United States, the display of the female body in the elevated Ziegfeld
Follies was part of the evolution of striptease performance.
258
The Ziegfeld Follies was
essentially upscale vaudeville with elaborate production values. Although Ziegfeld
would find many of his star comedians as well as his basic format in the burlesque
houses, he did not use the “lower class, immigrant women who dominated the variety and
burlesque stages.”
259
The Ziegfeld Follies was basically a restaged Follies-Bergère show
for a New York audience.
260
In 1914, Ziegfeld introduced the Midnight Frolic, which
took place at the roof garden of the theatre where his stage production of the Follies was
preformed. One of the features of the 1915 Midnight Frolic was girls costumed in short-
skirted frocks with balloons at the hem. The cigarettes of the audience members could
pop the balloons.
261
The audience was thus involved in the revelation of the performers’
bodies in the elaborate female spectacle. A great deal was actually revealed by the
Follies costumes and often it was only carefully arranged hair that disguised nudity.
262

Ziegfeld’s expensive costuming “became the basis for a showgirl uniform of feathers,

258
See also Glasscock, Striptease and Shteir, Striptease. Glasscock argues that Ziegfeld’s relationship with
the performer Anna Held allowed him to “create a stage iconography that would rule striptease
performance into the 1950s, while vehemently denying ever being involved with striptease at all.” 79.

259
Ibid., 82. Fanny Brice would be a notable exception.

260
Ibid., 73.

261
Ibid., 86.

262
Ibid.
163
rhinestones, and flesh-toned netting still being used by performers today.”
263
However,
the Ziegfeld costume and the striptease costume owe much to Western interpretations of
oriental exoticism.
264
Although female spectacle was prominent in many forms of
American theatre, until the late 1920s on the American stage, the women featured in
disrobing acts remained covered in flesh-colored tights that simulated the naked body but
actually concealed it.
265
American burlesque put these strategically (un)adorned bodies
in motion, often calling humorous attention to their sexual suggestiveness, for a less
respectable audience.
There are a number of stories of various first striptease acts in American
burlesque, and often these stories tell of a striptease act that was a happy accident. Stock
burlesque impresario Morton Minsky claims that the Minsky’s National Winter Garden
Theatre introduced the striptease to burlesque by accident in 1917 when a dancer named
Mae Dix removed her collar as she walked off stage at the end of her act. The audience
demanded an encore, so she came back on stage and removed her cuffs at the end of the
encore. Following the second encore, she unbuttoned the bodice of her costume as she
walked off the stage.
266

Carrie Finnell is sometimes cited as the first burlesque teaser. A Cleveland
performer, Finnell’s performances combined humor and sexual display. She invented

263
Caption to Figure 4. Ibid., 88.

264
See the second chapter of this dissertation. A comparison of the Ziegfeld Girl and the burlesque queen
can be found in the fourth chapter of this dissertation.

265
Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,
1991), 244.

266
Morton Minsky and Milt Machlin, Minsky’s Burlesque (New York: Arbor House, 1986), 32-35.
164
what is probably the best-known striptease gimmick, tassel twirling.
267
The gimmick
became an important element of striptease in burlesque. A gimmick could distinguish the
stripteasers’ acts and often added an irreverent, self-aware tone to the revelation of the
dancing female body.
268
In burlesque, striptease involved the play between the illusion of
nudity, the audience’s active reading of the performance as sexually suggestive, and the
need to adhere to municipal codes. Stripteaser Margie Hart, for example, was reputed to
abstain from the use of a G-string beneath the paneled skirt she wore in her performance.
Her reputation for flashing the audience with a forbidden glimpse of her pubis was likely
based on a falsehood; Hart probably wore a G-string adorned with artificial pubic hair in
order to obey the letter of the law.
269

The striptease gained dominance on the burlesque stage in the 1930s. Although
striptease has a history that both precedes its emergence as a feature of burlesque and
outlives the burlesque theatre, from the mid-1920s through the 1930s and 40s, striptease
became synonymous with American burlesque.
270
Cinema Studies scholar Anna
McCarthy has argued that, “From a visual perspective, striptease eroticizes censorship; a

267
With tassels attached to her nipples with spirit gum, Finnell used her pectoral muscles to move the
tassels in time to music. Shteir, Striptease, 97.

268
The copycatting of another stripteasers' “shtick” was “taboo.” Glasscock, Striptease, 114-115.

269
Andrea Friedman, “The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts,” Journal for the History of Sexuality, no. 2
(1996): 209.

270
For burlesque historian Robert C. Allen, “the true strip was burlesque’s last-ditch and ultimately
unsuccessful strategy to stay alive. It represents not the symbol of burlesque’s golden age – although it is
remembered as such – but rather its ultimate failure to sustain a performance medium sufficiently distinct
in its appeals from other forms to draw an audience.” Allen goes on to call striptease “twentieth-century
burlesque’s only trump card.” Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 244. For Shteir, the period in burlesque history
associated with striptease is a golden age, the “golden age” of striptease, which she defines as the years
between the Jazz Age and the Sexual Revolution. Shteir, Striptease, 4. The Jazz Age allowed women a
“bolder medium of self expression” than other theatrical forms according to Shteir. 6.
165
strip act is, after all, a censorious performance. Its goal is to act out the process of
making something visible (stripping) but also to censor this process at the very last
moment (teasing).”
271
The illusion of nudity and the tension between the seen and the
unseen are characteristic of both the drama and the humor of burlesque striptease. The
inclusion of strip acts to the burlesque format distinguished it from other variety theatres
and became its most salable element and an obvious target for censorship. Regulations
put in place to censor striptease performance in burlesque were, McCarthy points out,
themselves eroticized. Both the g-string and pasties are a good example of how
burlesque performers enhanced the costume elements necessitated by municipal codes in
many locales to draw attention to the parts of the body they barely concealed. The
censorship imposed on burlesque and the censorship endemic to burlesque striptease
performance are also important elements of its representations.
A brief analysis of two works by Reginald Marsh, Gaiety Burlesk (Figure 3.4), a
1930 etching, and Star Burlesque (Figure 3.5), a 1933 tempera painting, demonstrates
how the characteristics that emerged in the development of burlesque striptease are
captured and made manifest in representations of burlesque. In Gaiety Burlesk, an
attractive young woman steps forward on a runway with a swath of material held in front
of her chest. She looks away from the audience to the left of the runway and seems to
gaze coyly at the audience to her right and out at the viewer of the image. Thus the
spectator of the print is equated with the spectator represented in the burlesque scene; a

271
Anna McCarthy, “The Invisible Burlesque Body of La Guardia’s New York,” Hop on Pop: The Politics
and Pleasures of Popular Culture, eds. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, & Jane Shattuc (Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 2002), 419.
166
spectator who, as I will show later in this chapter, was often associated with less than
noble intentions. The G-string resting on the hips of the figure in Gaiety Burlesk
emphasizes the full curve of her bare buttocks, a mockery of the requirements that dictate

Figure 3.4: Reginald Marsh, Gaiety Burlesk, 1930.
a certain amount of concealment for the sake of decency. Similarly, in Star Burlesque,
the performer who dominates the left side of the painting is mostly revealed from neck to
knee; the elaborate ruffles that conceal her shoulders and her calves accentuate her
exposure. The play between dressed and undressed is portrayed as ridiculous in the
excesses of costume that does nothing to conceal what the majority would consider the
most interesting parts of the performer’s anatomy. The stripteaser in both works seems
much larger than the figures of the males that make up the sea of her audience, but in
Gaiety Burlesk, she is dwarfed by the soaring and ornate architecture of the theatre. The
female figure is the focus of attention, but she is also bound by that attention and the
167
physical space that predicates her status as the spectacle to be consumed by the paying
spectator; she is all show. In Gaiety Burlesk, the motion across the stage that is
characteristic of burlesque striptease performance and transgresses the tradition of the
nude tableau is suggested by the female figure’s pose and the delineation of the muscles
in her legs as she works her way down the runway. This motion is, however, arrested or
even censored by the very nature of the medium in which it is depicted. The stripteaser
in Gaiety Burlesk holds the attention of her audience as she loosely holds the draped
fabric concealing her breasts. Her nudity is censored by her performance and Marsh
highlights that censorship and perhaps conducts a tease of his own by depicting the
seemingly precarious moment. Arrested motion, teases of nudity, attentiveness to
spectatorship, and expressions of humor or mockery continue to coalesce in images of
burlesque theatre as it becomes increasingly associated with striptease performance.

Figure 3.5: Reginald Marsh, Star Burlesque, 1933.

168
Negotiating the Threatening Appeal of American Burlesque
Today, the term burlesque conjures images of a series of striptease acts that run
the gamut of exotic, dangerous appeal to the ridiculous punctuated by base, often-ribald
humor and double entendre.
272
This is the burlesque that evolved in the twentieth century
and has more recently been celebrated in burlesque revivals. This is also the burlesque
that was represented in works for middle and upper class audiences including any number
of Hollywood films, illustrations in popular magazines with a significant circulation, and
paintings by recognized American artists. Burlesque, always the lowest form of
American theatre, grew increasingly salacious in the face of competition from vaudeville,
revues, and films. As the striptease gained dominance, runways were installed which
took the performer into the audience. The Minsky brothers are credited with bringing the
runway to burlesque. In 1913, the two eldest Minsky brothers, Billy and Abe, were given
the National Winter Garden Theatre on the Lower East Side, which had been acquired by
their father, to run.
273
They constructed a runway to facilitate the viewing of the cooch
dancers in 1917.
274
With the inclusion of the runway in burlesque theatres, dancers and
chorines started performing with bare legs. The Minskys were innovators of stock
burlesque, and they made their theatres profitable. They advertised themselves as the
American Folies Bergère and the poor man’s Ziegfeld, capitalizing on those productions’
reputations for upscale female spectacle and mocking them at the same time. Their

272
For an analysis of humor in burlesque of this period, see Jill Dolan, “’What, no beans?’ Images of
women and sexuality in burlesque comedy,” Journal of Popular Culture 18, no.3 (Winter 1984): 37-47.

273
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 248.

274
Ibid.
169
shows also brought increased scrutiny from the police and reform-minded groups. In
response to the scrutiny of the police, the Minskys added another innovation to their
theatres, the backstage warning light that let performers know when a policeman was in
the audience. The performers would then do the clean, or “Boston” version of the show.
The Minskys were the target of one of the first obscenity trials against burlesque
performers and managers. The National Winter Garden Theatre was famously raided on
April 20, 1925. Billy Minsky and eight other individuals involved in the production were
charged with “presenting a performance likely to corrupt the morals of youth and
others.”
275
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated the raid. A
seven-week trial followed, but the authorities ultimately found in favor of the defendants
as the acts in the burlesque performance were found to be no more revealing than acts
performed in revues for higher class establishments.
276
In a 1927 review of the summer
show at the Olympic Theatre on Fourteenth Street, J. Brooks Atkinson praises the show
in which “no superfluous flourishes lure these slapstickers from the major business of
entertainment.”
277
He goes on to describe the comedic skits as well as the female
spectacle of “well-designed young ladies” who are not overly attentive to individuals in

275
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 248. This raid was fictionalized in Roland Barber’s novel, The Night They
Raided Minsky’s, which was published in 1967 and adapted as a musical comedy feature film in 1968. In
the story, a young Amish girl who performs religious dances comes to New York and innocently winds up
in burlesque. The Minsky’s advertise her as Mademoiselle Fifi (the moniker of the performer whose act
was part of the raid/trial in 1925), and through a series of accidents involving both an irate father and suitor
during her first performance, the innocent young girl brings striptease to the burlesque stage.

276
See Friedman, “The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts,” for more on the contemporary rhetoric about the
burlesque audience.

277
J. Brooks Atkinson, “Summer Antics,” New York Times, June 26, 1927, X1.
170
the audience.
278
The entertainment, he argues, is “low,” but “not so blatant as most
people suppose.”
279
His emphasis on the comedic elements of the show suggests that
despite the increasingly salacious displays of the female form, the low humor for which
burlesque had long been known remained a key ingredient in the production. Atkinson’s
critique also highlights that the relationship between performer and audience was not
overly familiar.
Mabel Dwight’s (1876-1955) playfully rendered lithographs depicting the
burlesque theater are exemplary of many of the representations from the period during
which burlesque becomes associated with the striptease, and her light-hearted approach
echoes Atkinson’s emphasis on humor.
280
Dwight’s first foray in the representation of
burlesque was Houston Street Burlesque (Figure 3.6), produced in 1928, one year after
Reginald Marsh produced Burlesk Runway (Figure 3.1).
281
The work derives its title
from the location of Minsky’s National Winter Garden. A glaring spotlight cuts a
diagonal swath across the picture plane and contrasts to the exaggerated curve of the arms

278
Ibid.

279
Ibid.

280
Susan Barnes Robinson and John Pirog, Mabel Dwight: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Lithographs
(Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Mabel Dwight, born Mabel Jacque
Williamson, did not make her first lithographs until 1927 when she was fifty-two years old. She adopted
the name Dwight on resuming her artistic career in the early 1920s. Her public emergence as an artist so
late in life corresponded with a revival in the lithographic medium. In New York, Dwight worked with
master printer George Miller. She was interested in the spectacle of modern American life and was known
to try to draw unobserved to keep her subjects unaware of her observation. She made quick sketches at
Minsky’s with her sketchbook hidden behind a big handbag. By the end of 1928, her work was garnering
the acknowledgement of fellow artists: “Dwight’s lithographs began to be reproduced in periodicals, such
as the popular, stylish monthly Vanity Fair. Recognizing the illustrational appeal of the artist’s work,
Vanity Fair featured her lithographs and drawings in full-page spreads, adding their own humorous
captions.” 21.

281
Ibid., 18.
171
of the female performer moving down the burlesque runway to the relaxed delight of the
corpulent males in the audience that encase the runway in the foreground and
background. The curves of her figure are echoed in the exaggerated roundness of the
protruding balconies that loom behind the head of the performer, whose proportions seem
larger than life in contrast to the space.

Figure 3.6: Mabel Dwight, Houston Street Burlesque, 1928.

The images commissioned for a 1929 article in Vanity Fair by Kenneth
MacGowan, a theatre critic who was not a fan of the burlesque of the moment, show a
scene in which both performers and audience are complicit in a performance that is both
risqué and lacking in harmony (Figure 3.7). Dwight’s illustration features a number of
minimally dressed female performers as they walk and pose on a runway that extends
around the pit and into an audience of male heads. The performers’ movements and
poses are exaggerated. Few wear more than their high heels and the equivalent of
172
women’s swimwear today. Exotic remnants of costume in the form of a boa, a leopard
print corset, and a short grass skirt drape some of the performers. Dwight’s illustration
includes characteristics that were found in earlier images of burlesque and performers of
exotic dance (e.g. Salome): the display of the female body, details of costume, and
reference to the relationship between spectacle and spectator.

Figure 3.7: Mabel Dwight, On the Runway in Vanity Fair, 1929.
The Vanity Fair images reveal even more flesh as well as a greater attention to the
spatial relationship between performer, stage, and audience than the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century promotional images, photographs, and paintings depicting
burlesque performers and performances discussed in previous chapters. Dwight’s
illustrations of burlesque for a mass publication show characteristics of an established
visual vocabulary for representing burlesque and convey a sense of the reality of the
theatrical space and performance. The rounded figures of Dwight’s performers, their odd
bits of costume, and the exaggerated femininity of their movements and poses form an
image of female spectacle that is far from ideal. Yet, they are the focus of the attention of
the male heads that surround the runway. Dwight’s illustration positions some of these
173
heads below the high heals of women on the runway – the commodified female body
visually dominates the spectator, but that body is simultaneously contained by the limits
of the stage and the artist’s playful characterization of the scene. A 1934 review of
Dwight’s work in the New York Times points to the quality of humor in her prints, a
quality particularly suited to the subject of burlesque: “Mabel Dwight, continuously
surprising you with the variety and virility of her humor.”
282
Dwight’s approach invites
the Vanity Fair reader to enjoy the joke in manner not unlike that of the late nineteenth
century posters that made a joke of the male spectators susceptibility to the charms of the
chorus girl.
Despite Atkinson’s somewhat benign review of burlesque in the late 1920s, a
review that seems in keeping with Dwight’s lithographic illustrations, the revived
burlesque proved to be a target for reformers concerned with the effects on an audience
that included the lower classes. In a 1928 article in the New York Times, an official of a
Baltimore burlesque company is cited as discussing a decline in burlesque due to the cost
of production and the continuous shows of motion pictures and vaudeville in competing
theatres.
283
The author notes that other forms of show business have also suffered and
have adapted and argues that, “Perhaps burlesque is not passing, but simply preparing to
take on the tricks and manners of some other line of showmanship.”
284

282
Elisabeth Luther Cary, “Recent Lithography: Some Artists of Quality,” New York Times, December 23,
1934, X9.

283
“Topics of the Times: The Passing of Burlesque,” New York Times, January 6, 1928, F22.

284
Ibid.
174
Burlesque did adopt new lines of showmanship. In the late 1920s, stock
burlesque became more prevalent and the striptease took over the stage and the interest of
the audience. A September 1930 New York Times article profiles the success of stock
burlesque producers the Minsky brothers (Abraham, Billy, Herbert and Morton) and
notes that their advertising at the National Winter Garden declares “that what the Folies
Bergère is to Paris the Minsky shows are to a lucky New York.”
285
The Minskys brought
needed innovation to burlesque, including bringing less robust female figures to the stage
and more sophisticated comedy.
286
In 1931, Billy Minsky installed the Minsky brand of
burlesque at the Republic on Forty-second Street. The theatre was outfitted with the
trappings of luxury, and the stripteasers were advertised as the draw. The Minskys are
often credited with revitalizing burlesque and bringing it back to Broadway, though they
acknowledged that their theatres were often a training ground for performers looking to
move up to more legitimate theatre. While stock houses like the Minsky theatres
managed at least marginal success, the burlesque wheels had all folded by 1931.
Of their audience for their downtown Houston Street theatre in 1930, the Minskys
“estimate(d) that 85 per cent . . . now come from outside the immediate vicinage, and of
that proportion 50 per cent are highbrow.”
287
The Minsky theatres, with their more plush
trappings, probably drew more of the slumming audience than many other burlesque
theatres, but large portions of the audience were lower class. The lower-class audience

285
“Burlesque with a Ph.D,” New York Times, September 7, 1930, X2.

286
“For instance, all the girls did not have to weight 170 pounds; and while a red-nosed comedian is always
to be esteemed, a touch of Broadway speed and smartness was discovered to be valuable in discreet
applications.” Ibid.

287
Ibid.
175
was the espoused concern of reform rhetoric. According to Anna McCarthy’s recent
analysis, which deals with the reception of burlesque, “From the perspective of reformers
(and of “slumming” middle-class audience members), the interest of the burlesque-goer
could only be prurient.”
288
Thus the content of the burlesque performance was not the
sole concern of critics and reformers; the lustful desires of a lowbrow audience were also
perceived as dangerous.
A 1937 program cover for “Life Begins at ‘Minsky’s’” presented at Minsky’s
Columbia Theatre makes a mockery of distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow
audiences (Figure 3.8). The cover features an image of a man and woman who are
marked as upper class – their noses are in the air, the gentleman smokes a pipe and leans
on a cane, and the lady is adorned in pearls and a headdress. Both figures wear simple
black masks. The two look as if they should be dressed in evening wear. Instead, their
genital areas are covered by enormous masks – the head of a curly haired, bearded man
for the gentleman and a woman with fair curls for the lady. The two masks exchange
looks and open smiles as opposed to the nose up self-absorption of their wearers. The
bizarreness of the image is furthered by the use of a black mask to conceal the female
figure’s breasts, fitted such that the eyes slits reveal just her nipples. Perhaps a comment
on slumming, highbrow customers, the lewd image suggests that for all their airs, the two
figures are lowbrow at their libidinal cores. Their nudity is concealed in a manner that is
more suggestive than if they were shown fully disrobed as the eye is drawn first to the

288
McCarthy, “The Invisible Burlesque Body,” 416. The bulk of McCarthy’s analysis is concerned with
the sounds of burlesque, e.g. the music, the stripper’s voice, audience vocalizations, and their part in
determining the erotics of striptease performance.
176
large face masks at crotch level and the exchange of looks between the two masks. This
cover for a Minsky’s program suggests an awareness of issues of class distinction and
perhaps that the burlesque audience dispense with the façade of hoity-toity attitudes and
enjoy the licentious appeal of the show.

Figure 3.8: Program cover for Life Begins at 'Minsky's", 1937.

The use of the runway in the burlesque theatre, an element featured in Dwight’s
Houston Street Burlesque and images in Vanity Fair and in Marsh’s Burlesk Runway and
Gaiety Burlesque, allowed the entertainer to interact with the audience and hinted at the
potential of the performance to extend beyond the sexually suggestive to the sexually
explicit.
289
McCarthy argues that the addition of the runway into the traditional space of

289
McCarthy, “The Invisible Burlesque Body,” 416. McCarthy argues that the runway potentially “blurred
the boundary between performed sex acts and sex acts performed on others.” This suggests that the runway
introduces the tension or even threat of actual sexual interaction between performer and audience.
McCarthy relies heavily on the account of burlesque in David Dressler’s 1937 dissertation. It is important
to note that sex acts were not performed on stage. The sexual display in burlesque was a combination of
the woman’s revealed body and her movements, which evolved from the cooch dance and usually involved
177
the audience in burlesque theatres “violated the visual relations of classical theatre by
perforating the invisible ‘fourth wall’ separating the imaginary world onstage and the
‘real’ world of the audience.”
290
This argument is useful to a consideration of
representations of burlesque at this time. The piercing of this fourth wall and the tension
it might evoke is suggested in Thomas Hart Benton’s (1889-1975) Burlesque (c. 1930)
(Figure 3.9). The curving lines of the performer’s body, the heads of the audience
members, and an architecturally segmented space dominate the composition. Benton is
probably best known for his mural projects, in which he depicted a “people’s” history of
America as well as the contemporary scene.
291
Burlesque is dated to approximately the
same time as the America Today (1930) murals for the New School for Social Research,
Benton’s first commissioned work. Benton’s City Activities with Subway is a part of his
America Today (1930) mural scheme, in which he showed a cross-section of American
life. City Activities with Subway (Figure 3.10) juxtaposes a subway scene with depictions
of Americans at leisure, including a burlesque performance. In his autobiography,
Benton describes his representation of the theme as “necessitat(ing) the amalgamation of
many subjects having little or no relationship to one another, certainly no pictorial

the “bump” (a sharp thrust of the hips) and “grind” (a pronounced rotation of the hips). Dressler’s account
incorporated interviews with male burlesque goers who attested to having masturbated while in the
audience. The behavior of the audience thus became part of the sexual display that might be seen at a
burlesque show. “Burlesque as a Cultural Phenomenon” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1937).

290
McCarthy, “The Invisible Burlesque Body,” 416.

291
Although he allied himself with the Regionalist movement in the 1930s, Benton worked in a range of
modernist styles. Henry Adams argues that for the artist, “the mastery of such abstract organization was
simply a way station on the road to mastery of representational painting. While he never abandoned his use
of abstract principles, his paintings after 1930 contain such powerful and controversial subject matter that
their control of formal organization has been largely overlooked.” Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An
American Original (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 110.
178

Figure 3.9: Thomas Hart Benton, Burlesque, c. 1930.

Figure 3.10: Thomas Hart Benton, City Activities with Subway, 1930.

relationship.”
292
He solved this problem by “composing each subject unit so that some
parts on the periphery of its design were left open.”
293
While Burlesque is not often
discussed specifically in Benton scholarship, the choice of subject matter combined with
a dynamic composition of curving lines are exemplary of the artist’s interest in formal
experiments in abstract organization in his compositions and in portraying contemporary

292
Thomas Hart Benton, An American in Art (Kansas City: University Press of Kansas, 1968), 63.

293
Ibid.
179
life.
294
Burlesque may have been used as a study for the City Activities panel as there are
similarities in the performing figures.
295
In Burlesque, the repetition of the rounded
forms of the architectural elements of the burlesque theatre, the balding heads of the
audience, and the body of the performer exemplify Benton’s use of abstract form to
portray a scene from popular culture. The upper left corner of City Activities with
Subway shows a burlesque performance with two scantily clad women dancing on stage.
In her frenzied dance, one of the women has her back to the audience and her skirt is
flipped up to reveal naked buttocks thrusting toward what would presumably be the
audience, but the composition gives way to another element of the pastiche right where
the buttocks leave off; the stripper’s bottom appears dangerously close to the back of an
evangelist at a pulpit. The sexual display of the contemporary theatre is shown in uneasy
proximity to the proselytizing moralist. Another stripper appears at the far right of the
image. A woman in a sleeveless, knee-length dress and a red cloche hat holds onto the
subway strap. The fabric of her dress molds a protruding rear end that echoes the
dancing figure in the burlesque scene. Identified as stripper Peggy Reynolds, Benton

294
Although he allied himself with the Regionalist movement in the 1930s, Benton worked in a range of
modernist styles. Henry Adams argues that for the artist, “the mastery of such abstract organization was
simply a way station on the road to mastery of representational painting. While he never abandoned his use
of abstract principles, his paintings after 1930 contain such powerful and controversial subject matter that
their control of formal organization has been largely overlooked.” Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, 110.

295
In his autobiography, Benton states that at the time he received the New School commission, his
“explorations of American life were providing the subjects for all (his) easel paintings,” so he decided to
“make a survey of contemporary America for the New School mural.” Benton, An American in Art, 63.

180
sketched her along with many of the figures and scenes that make up the New School
murals, before he began the commission (Figure 3.11).
296
She stands in front of Max

Figure 3.11: Thomas Hart Benton, Peggy Reynolds, 1930.
Eastman, Benton’s friend and editor of The Masses, who is seated on the subway.
297
The
ogling appreciation of the female figure by the male spectator is thus not limited to the
space of the burlesque theatre or to the uneducated working classes, but is depicted by
Benton as an activity that permeates multiple aspects of contemporary urban life. Erika
Doss argues that “regionalist art was Benton’s twentieth-century version of
republicanism: an integration of contemporary art and popular culture which addressed
physical and spiritual regeneration in the modern world.”
298
This is a fitting reading of
Benton’s vigorous approach to the representation of an amalgamation of contemporary
American life in which seemingly disparate aspects of this life coexist in a state of

296
“Art: Benton,” Time Magazine, January 5, 1931. Peggy Reynolds as well as Max Eastman and Alvin
Saunders Johnson are identified as among the “recognizable heads” in Benton’s murals.

297
Eastman is described as a “notorious womanizer.” Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, 166.

298
Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract
Expressionism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 56.
181
suspended tension. Both City Activities with Subway and Burlesque depict burlesque as a
vital aspect of this “regeneration.” The burlesque performer’s physicality in these works
evokes a sense of the motion that was characteristic of the transgression of the
conventions of female display in a theatrical space as well as the conventions of the nude
in burlesque performance.
299

Benton believed that realistic content was important, despite his experiments in
abstract form. He writes that after completion of the New School murals, what he wanted
“was to see clearly the nature of American life as it unrolled before me and to paint it
without my vision being distorted by any generalities of social theory.”
300
Burlesque is
one aspect of Benton’s American scene, and his work brings to the fore questions of the
“Americanness” of the subject and the way it is portrayed in American visual culture.
For Benton, the scenes he depicted were “American,” and he sought to depict them as
such. Thus, in an analysis of his images of the American burlesque, his formal treatment
may be presumed to reveal what Benton perceived as the aesthetic characteristics of this
facet of the American scene. In a 1931 article in Time Magazine, Benton is quoted, “’To
the critical objections to my murals that they are too loud and too disturbing to be in good
taste,’ . . . ‘there is only the answer that they represent the U.S. which is also loud and not

299
In an analysis of the drawings Benton incorporated in his compositions for the America Today murals,
Karal Ann Marling writes of the artist’s drawings in burlesque houses: “When Benton sat in the gallery at
the Eighth Avenue Burlesque, yelling and hooting and drawing almost-nude figures from life, the distance
between the tinny, modern world and the rich traditions of the artistic past vanished.” This reading
corresponds with Doss’s description of Benton’s republicanism. Karal Ann Marling, Tom Benton and His
Drawings: A Biographical Essay and a Collection of His Sketches, Studies, and Mural Cartoons
(Columbia, Missouri, University of Missouri Press, 1985), 105.

300
Benton, An American in Art, 67.
182
in ‘good taste.’”
301
For Benton, burlesque, an aspect of American life, seems to be
defined by an abundance of curving lines and flesh (both in the body of the performer and
the bald heads of the male viewers), an exaggeration of posture, and an audience that is
fascinated by the female spectacle they have paid to see. The enjoyment of the spectacle
is complicated by the way that some audience members seem to lean back in their seats
when the backwards thrust of the performer’s hips threaten to break the plane of the stage
– the fourth wall. The tension that Benton conveys in this depiction of one facet of
American visual culture conveys the pervasive threat of burlesque to the boundaries of
traditional codes of viewing the revealed female body in which the male
spectator/consumer safely enjoys the contained, static object.
A series of photographs by Remie Lohse (1893-1947) in the June 1933 edition of
Vanity Fair titled, “Burlesque: 1933 version,” showcases the acts that feature the display
of the female body, including a chorus on a runway (Figure 3.12), a striptease, and two
tableaux of posed, mostly nude women (Figure 3.13) taken during a performance at a
theatre at Irving Place and 14
th
Street.
302
The caption to the photographic spread notes
that the images reveal “the current trend toward nudity” in burlesque and calls strippers,
“the new pièces de résistance around which burlesk revolves today: they take the place of
the erstwhile cooch dancers and may be found nowhere except in burlesque.”
303
The
images are accompanied by brief captions, “A Chorus on the Runway,” “Comedian in
Blackface,” “The Living Curtain,” “Irving Place and 14
th
Street,” “A Stripper Does Her

301
“Art: Benton”.

302
“Burlesque: 1933 version,” Vanity Fair, June 1933, 42-43.

303
Ibid., 43.
183
Routine” (this is a series of four smaller photographs), and “Spring Tableau à la
Botticelli.” In “A Chorus on the Runway,” the runway extends well into the space of an
audience that is barely visible in the shadow of the wall of chorus girls. Although more
contained in their movements than Benton’s performers, the row of partially dressed
women loom over the heads in the audience; the chorus seems Amazonian in relation to
the spectator with their almost lock-step, bare legs cutting across the picture plane and
beyond the edge of the frame. As female spectacle in burlesque became increasingly
salacious in order to attract an audience, the danger represented by the revealed body put
in motion is suggested in images in which the stage can barely contain the performance.

Figure 3.12: Remie Lohse, "A Chorus on the Runway" and "A Comedian in Blackface" in Vanity
Fair, June 1933.
184

Figure 3.13: Remie Lohse, "The Living Curtain," "Irving Place and 14th Street," "A Stripper Does
Her Routine," and "Spring à la Botticelli" in Vanity Fair, June 1933.
The Fall of American Burlesque

As the “most sexually suggestive and sexually explicit of all of New York’s
media,” burlesque had been at the receiving end of much adverse publicity generated by
185
the New York Society for Suppression of Vice throughout the late 1900s.
304
New York
judges did not interpret obscenity law in such a way as to convict burlesque of obscenity.
Despite this interpretation of the law, the question of obscenity and burlesque were linked
in public debate. Catholic lay organizations as well as the Society for the Suppression of
Vice and other local and religious organizations were vocal in their protests against
burlesque and the striptease act in particular. The Forty-second Street Property Owners
and Merchants’ Association objected to the burlesque houses that took over theatres in
Times Square that were among, “’all the unethical and disreputable businesses that are
bringing the greatest crosstown artery of the city into disrepute.’”
305
A case brought
against two burlesque houses for having performances on Sundays was ruled in favor of
the burlesque houses. It was the magistrate’s decision that the acts “were the same as are
performed in all other vaudeville houses.”
306
Beginning in 1932, there were attempts to
circumvent criminal law to regulate burlesque through the licensing process. The Forty-
second Street Property Owners and Merchants’ Associations led a fight to prevent the
Minskys’ Republic Theatre and the Eltinge from getting renewed licenses.
307
The
hearing came before License Commissioner James F. Geraghty. In May of 1933,
Geraghty warned six burlesque houses that they had to clean up their acts or have their
licenses revoked.

304
Friedman, Prurient Interests, 63.

305
“Burlesque Shows on Sunday Upheld,” New York Times, January 27, 1932, 19.

306
Ibid.

307
“Old Actress Backs Burlesque Shows,” New York Times, April 27, 1932, 19. A number of witnesses
were called to testify to their opposition to the renewal of the theatres licenses. Two witnesses, a former
burlesque actress and wardrobe mistress and a reporter, spoke in defense of burlesque, arguing that the skits
are no more objectionable than what can be viewed in Broadway revues.
186
When Paul Moss became license commissioner, the campaign against burlesque
escalated. Moss was disdainful of burlesque, and his agenda coincided with depression-era
Mayor La Guardia’s desire for a clean and moral New York.
308
After a much-publicized raid
in 1934, runways were abolished in New York theatres.
309
The lighted runways that allowed
performers closer proximity to the audience and vice versa, were removed because,
according to Moss, “they were ‘distinct fire hazards.’”
310
Burlesque theatres in New York
had the offending feature removed, and the theatrical space was again dominated by the
framing device of the proscenium, which also served to contain the performers to the
traditional space of the stage. The president of the National Burlesque Association
described the removal of the runways as part of an overhaul of burlesque on the part of
producers who “are instituting a higher form of the burlesque art.”
311
Despite these (self)
imposed changes, burlesque continued to prosper during the Depression as popular
entertainment. In 1937, seven major Broadway theatres were burlesque houses.
The February 1935 issue of Fortune featured the article, “The Business of
Burlesque, A.D. 1935,” which is accompanied by photographs by Charles F. Jacobs Jr. and
full color reproductions of paintings by Stuyvesant Van Veen (1910-1988).
312
Three of Van

308
Friedman, Prurient Interests, 82.

309
Irving Zeidman, The American Burlesque Show (New York: Hawthorne Books, Inc., 1967), 143.

310
“Burlesque Shows Adopt New Deal,” New York Times, March 28, 1934, 26.

311
Ibid.

312
Stuyvesant Van Veen is best known as a muralist. His work is best categorized as of the social-realist
style. A New Yorker, Van Veen studied at a number of art schools and worked with Thomas Hart Benton
while at the Art Students League. Van Veen taught at City College of New York from 1949 to 1975.
“Stuyvesant Van Veen, Muralist, Is Dead at 77,” New York Times, June 3, 1988. His interest in burlesque
extended beyond the paintings commissioned for the 1935 Fortune article. In a 1949 interview, he
187
Veen’s paintings are included: Proscenium at the Irving Place (Figure 3.14), 1935
Burlesque Queens (Figure 3.15), and the Sewing Room (Figure 3.16). In 1935, the Irving
Place Theatre was the only burlesque theatre in New York still doing full-length,

Figure 3.14: Stuyvesant Van Veen, Proscenium at the Irving Place in Fortune, February 1935.

Figure 3.15: Stuyvesant Van Veen, 1935 Burlesque Queens in Fortune, February 1935.

expressed his desire to do a book on burlesque, “an evaluation of the transcontinental concept of burlesque
– which I hope will be enjoyable as well as informative.” Albert J. Elias, “Professor Strips Burlesque of
Myth,” The Daily Compass 4 (August 1949): 18. According to this interview and images in the Stuyvesant
Van Veen papers in the collection of the Archives of American Art, Van Veen produced many images of
burlesque over the course of his career. The College of the City of New York Mercury magazine did an
issue devoted to burlesque in 1950 with Van Veen serving as faculty advisor.
188

Figure 3.16: Stuyvesant Van Veen, The Sewing Room in Fortune, February 1935.
two-act burlesque. The Irving Place was owned by the Wilner Chain, a rival to the Minsky
theatres in New York. The article numbers the existing burlesque theatres across America at
approximately 50 and numbers their clientele at 50,000 a night.
313
It is noted that it cost an
average of less than 50 cents to attend a show, less than what it cost to see burlesque at the
turn of the century, and links this declining ticket price to “the artistic degradation” of
burlesque.
314
The strip acts were the focus of the production, and an average show is
described as featuring three or more stripteasers, a chorus of dancers, a chorus of showgirls,
a singer, two comedians and their straightmen, and a “talking woman” to assist the
comedians.
315
The better stock houses often sold out the first ten to twelve rows in
advance.
316

313
“The Business of Burlesque, A.D. 1935,” Fortune, February 1935, 67

314
Ibid.

315
Ibid. The article details the pattern of production as well as approximate salaries of the employees,
approximate grosses, and expenses.

316
Ibid., 144.
189
Van Veen’s series of images depicts the theatre before or between shows.
Proscenium at the Irving Place shows a traditional, though shabby, theatrical space. The
mostly male audience is engaged in napping, reading newspapers, or looking toward the
barker. They are set back from the raised stage at the front, which is defined by a gilded
proscenium arch – a heavy, ornate frame for the upcoming performance. The burlesque
audience is depicted without the accompanying female spectacle. Instead, the readers of
Fortune magazine are situated as voyeurs to a female spectacle populated by the unwitting
objects of our gaze. The burlesque women are not shown performing, but preparing for
performance with rolled down stockings, unflattering postures, and a lot of bared flesh.
Though a familiar trope in painting, the dressing room scene paired with the image of an
empty stage and a disengaged audience draws attention to the performative nature of the
sexuality on display once the unguarded women backstage appear onstage. The presumably
middle and upper class reader of Fortune is given a more intimate view of the burlesquers’
bodies than the ticket holders in the theatre seats, which begs the question to what extent do
the trappings of fine art contain or perhaps just mask the lascivious pleasures of viewing.
Despite the relative success of many burlesque houses at this time, the visible
presence of morally questionable performance generated fear, and on May 2, 1937, New
York City revoked the licenses of all the burlesque theatres in New York.
317
Two major
factors contributed to the revocation of licenses at this time: a sex crime panic that
erupted across the city made burlesque a scapegoat, and as a result, the only people who

317
Scott, Behind the G-String, 211. See also “Theater: Moss vs. Lice,” Time Magazine, May 10, 1937.
“Last week, after three patient years, Commissioner Moss made theatrical history when, with one fell
swoop, he darkened 14 burlesque house, threw 2,000 theatrical workers out of work, and at least
temporarily ended what is professionally known as ‘louse opera’ in the city where it was born and has
flourished rankest.”
190
would testify on behalf of burlesque were the people who made their living by it; second,
in 1937 two performers from the New Gotham Theatre were convicted for offering an
obscene performance.
318
Anti-burlesque activists employed a rhetoric that suggested that
the potential power of a burlesque show to corrupt a low audience to act on perverse
desires posed a threat to women and children.
319
In his 1937 dissertation on the subject
of burlesque, sociologist David Dressler devotes a chapter to the burlesque patron. He
describes the motley audience:
Enter any burlesque theatre. There, a stuffy, smelly odor greets the nostrils.
Smoke curls up here and there from lighted cigarettes. Bad ventilation causes
body odors to assail the senses. In the orchestra section one sees a motley
aggregation: there are tough-looking, roughly dressed individuals in shirt sleeves;
there are neat, white-collar patrons. Some are old, some middle-aged, and a few
perhaps in their ‘teens. Here and there we find a woman, perhaps with a child.
Each patron is oblivious of his neighbor. He has eyes and ideas only for the stage.
He stares, he follows the moving figures by slowly twisting his head from East to
West. …
In the balcony and the gallery one sees the same picture, expect that here
are very few white-collar people. This audience has more younger men, some in
their ‘teens. Here, too, are the derelicts, the transients with little money, a few
negroes. Here the atmosphere is even stuffier, and the attention to the stage just
as acute.
320

Dressler goes on to describe the audience as a “man’s world” in which the “abnormality
of the burlesque business” can be found in frequent incidents in which men in the
audience masturbate and in the “stealthy advances” of a homosexual “to a likely
neighbor.”
321
On the question of the corrupting effects of burlesque and its potential

318
Friedman, Prurient Interests, 83-85.

319
Ibid., 62-64.

320
Dressler, “Burlesque as a Cultural Phenomenon,” 159.

321
Ibid., 150-151.
191
threat to society, Dressler is able to draw no conclusions.
322
Regardless, the notion that a
readily corrupted low audience was dangerous to the community played a role in
burlesque’s eventual demise.
An Associated Press photograph dated May 3, 1937 titled “Curtain Down on
Burlesque” (Figure 3.17) shows an exterior shot of Minky’s Burlesque theatre the day after

Figure 3.17: "Curtain down on burlesque" May 3 1937. Courtesy of Library of Congress, New York
World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection.
licenses were revoked. Four men stand near the ticket booth. Below and behind the
marquee, there are images of burlesque girls in provocative poses, often with legs exposed.
The round case on the wall to the left of the ticket booth features an arrangement of seven
photographs of women, likely the current headliners. The two on top appear to be
headshots, but the other images feature a more complete view, some more clothed than
others, of the visual stimulation one might have enjoyed inside the theater.
Several theatres were allowed to reopen, but under a strict code of conduct. Mayor
La Guardia banned the performance of the striptease and the use of the word “burlesque” in

322
Ibid., 181-185.
192
advertising.
323
The license commissioner had to approve the entertainment of these “variety
revue theatres.” Burlesque houses were allowed to reopen with revamped shows with
ninety-day permits under the supervision of a board of citizens who were to monitor the
performances. Commissioner Moss seemed to target the Minskys in particular, stating that,
“’The Minsky brothers have been in burlesque business for a number of years, during which
time the name Minsky has become associated in the public mind with indecent burlesque
shows.’”
324
As the theatres could not use the term burlesque, they reopened as “follies.”
325

Figure 3.18 is a 1938 photograph of the Irving Place Theatre by Berenice Abbott.
326
The
Moorish style theatre bears the term, “Glorified Follies,” indicating the performance of the
reformed burlesque as well as information about the twice daily two and a half hour shows.
However, Yiddish posters appear underneath the marquee – the burlesque house had folded
by the time of this photograph, and the space was set to reopen as a Yiddish Theatre.

323
“Burlesque Show Closed By Minskys,” New York Times, November 26, 1937, 26.

324
“’High-Class’ Show of Minskys Barred,” New York Times, June 5, 1937, 20.

325
“Burlesque Show Closed By Minskys,” 26.

326
This image is among the 307 photographs from Abbott’s 1935-1939 project for the WPA, “Changing
New York.” The photograph is dated September 8, 1938. The address is cited as 118-120 East 15
th
Street.
193

Figure 3.18: Berenice Abbott, "Irving Place Theater," from Changing New York, 1938.

Much of the burlesque audience was lost once the prospect of nudity was restricted,
although displays of nudity gradually returned to the stage in the remaining theatres in
performances reminiscent of pre-striptease burlesque.
327
Just as the “purified” burlesque
theatres were reopening in New York, the New York Post ran a twelve article series in July
of 1937 by sociologist David Dressler, which he based on his dissertation on the subject.
328

The editor points out that Dressler’s study was based on his attendance at 1,000 burlesque
shows and that Dr. Dressler “has merely surveyed a sociological phenomenon and stated his
facts clearly.”
329
Dressler opens his series by claiming that, “modern burlesque” is

327
In a tongue-in-cheek review, Brooks Atkinson, a fan of burlesque but not striptease, praises the new
burlesque and describes the presentation of the female form on the reformed stage, “But the new art of
burlesque is still adapted to the special needs of students of anatomy. Like all soundly motivated art, it has
form. In the lavish production numbers with their exotic dances and tropical music, glum girls dutifully
stand up stage in artistic and unhampered poses. Fortunately, the strip-tease has been entirely eliminated.”
Brooks Atkinson, “No More Burlesque,” New York Times, August 22, 1937, p. X1.

328
“Science Looks at Burlesque,” New York Post, July, 15 1937, 16.

329
Ibid.
194
“completely sex-centered” of which the “piece de resistance is the girl who disrobes.”
330

Despite claims of scientific impartiality, Dressler’s description is peppered with terms like
“low,” “dirtied,” “cheap,” and “tawdry” and images of performers bare legs are splashed
with headlines like, “Classic ‘Burlesque’ a Flagrant Misnomer for the Modern Plotless
Parade of Smut” (Figure 3.19).
331

Figure 3.19 : New York Post, July 23, 1937, Striptease Vertical File, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library.

In a 1941 lithograph titled The Last Veil (Figure 3.20), Adolf Dehn (1895-1968)
turned his satirical eye to this “Modern Plotless Parade of Smut.” Dehn was a well-known
graphic artist whose lithographs can be found in major museum collections.
332
The Last Veil

330
David Dressler, “Article I – Burlesque is Sex,” New York Post, July 15, 1937, 16.

331
“Science Looks at Burlesque.”

332
In the mid 1930s he began to work in watercolor as well. For more on Dehn see Richard Cox, “Adolf
Dehn: Satirist of the Jazz Age,” Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1978): 11-18; and Adolf Dehn:
195
is included in a published article titled, “O Woman! O Frailty!” in which Dehn explains to
the reader “how the five lithographs included in these pages were conceived and put
together” in order to answer the question, “why I occupy myself with what seem to be
unpleasant and tawdry subjects.”
333
One of those seemingly “tawdry” subjects was
burlesque. Dehn describes his image of burlesque: “A burlesque number! For men only!
For men who get tired of being noble, upright, and lonely. A couple hours of sublimation
before going home to a dull or empty bed. In this picture, I tried to make the garish setting,
the vulgar attempt to stimulate the audience, and the awkward patter of the dancers a part of
the design.”
334
The exaggerated proportions of the dancers, their ridiculous bits of costume

Figure 3.20: Adolf Dehn, The Last Veil, 1941.
including the clown like hats worn by the front row of the chorus, and the simplified, kewpie

Retrospective Exhibition of the Lithographs, 1920-1963 (New York: Far Gallery March 9-29, 1964). Adolf
Dehn Papers. [Reel 287]. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

333
Adolf Dehn, “O Woman! O Frailty!: Five lithographs and a personal commentary,” 133. Adolf Dehn
Papers. [Reel 287]. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. I have not been able to identify
the publication in which this commentary was originally published.

334
Dehn, “O Woman! O Frailty!,” 133.
196
doll faces of the figures are a burlesque of burlesque. Stripped of artistic pretensions, Dehn
represents the excesses of potentially libidinous display in burlesque as a joke.
335
Whether
burlesque is the object or the source of the joke, humor and female spectacle are linked. The
lewd humor of burlesque insures that the sexuality of the female spectacle is emphasized
and simultaneously mitigates its threat.
Although Dehn’s derisive representation of burlesque highlights vulgarity, the
exaggerated excesses of the scene suggest some delight in the tasteless display rather than
portraying burlesque as a threat to the decent society of New York. Premier burlesque
producers and theatre owners, the Minsky brothers, were driven into bankruptcy in the early
1940s. By the first few years of the 1940s, Commissioner Moss and Mayor La Guardia had
closed most of the burlesque theatres in New York.
336
On January 31, 1942, License
Commissioner Paul Moss closed the Republic Theatre and the Eltinge Theatre on Forty-
second Street. Moss stated, “’Applications were denied today for the renewal of license for
each theatre. They were denied renewal of licenses for the simple reason that the producers
have not lived up to the requirements of decency in accordance with the policy of Mayor La
Guardia and the License Department.’”
337
The statement continues, noting that the theatres
had been warned repeatedly. In March of 1942, despite the urgings of numerous theatrical
and labor organizations, License Commissioner Paul Moss decided not to renew the licenses

335
Dehn’s central figure appears suspended as she pulls a last thin veil away from her body. The image
evokes the moment of the “Flash,” another burlesque innovation that was necessitated by censorship.
During the chorus parade, the showgirls pause for a moment and reveal both breasts. The “Flash” was born
of the rule that breasts might only be exposed “in posed tableaux,” thus, the pause on stage before breasts
are revealed. “The Business of Burlesque, A.D. 1935,” 67.

336
John Houchin. Censorship of the American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
158.

337
“Moss Denies licenses to 2 ‘Follies’ Houses,” New York Times, February 1, 1942, 45.
197
of the remaining burlesque theatres, which New York Times theatre critic Atkinson declared
“is in effect arbitrary one-man censorship.”
338
The Authors League of America criticized
the “high-handed methods” of Commissioner Moss and Mayor LaGuardia.
339
Atkinson
argued that, “If the morals of burlesque theatres are objectionable, the performers and the
public have a right to a hearing.”
340
In September of 1942, the same writer questions why
theatergoers can no longer view a striptease for 35 cents in New York due to the demise of
burlesque theatre in the city, but audiences can spend $4.40 to see stripping in the show Star
and Garter.
341
Star and Garter, which featured Gypsy Rose Lee and Georgia Sothern, had a
successful run on Broadway. Atkinson asked, “Does $4.40 legitimize a form of
entertainment that is branded with the bar sinister at 35 cents?”
342

In his 1967 book, The American Burlesque Show, Irving Zeidman offered the first
text to historicize burlesque. The author criticizes burlesque for being primarily a sex
show.
343
Zeidman states that it is the cooch dance that sustained burlesque, and that

338
On the license renewal for the Minskys’ Gaiety Theatre at Broadway and Forty-seventh, “One hundred
telegrams and letters from theatrical and labor organizations and other groups urging renewal of the license
were read into the record.” “Moss Defers Ruling on Gaiety License,” New York Times, February 22, 1942,
29. Brooks Atkinson’s declaration appeared in his article, “Rumpus in City Hall,” New York Times, March
22, 1942, X1.

339
“Mayor is Criticized for Burlesque Ban.” New York Times, March 4, 1942, 4.

340
He also commented on the speculation that Mayor LaGuardia was behind Moss’s action. Atkinson,
“Rumpus in City Hall,” X1.

341
Brooks Atkinson, “High Cost of Respectability,” New York Times, September 13, 1942, X1. This show
will be discussed further in the fourth chapter of this dissertation in the context of an analysis of
representations of Gypsy Rose Lee.

342
Ibid.

343
“Despite some original identification with travesty and vaudeville, and occasional timid divagations into
the fields of talent, the American burlesque show has primarily been a commercialized sex show.”
Zeidman, The American Burlesque Show, 11. Zeidman offers a history of burlesque from the establishment
198
burlesque should not be understood as anything but a venue for the cooch dance:
“Burlesque, unfortunately, has never been any of the fancy or sentimental things ascribed to
it – neither now nor then. It has never been a lusty form of folk expression or a national
forum for satire or a showplace for knockabout hilarious slapstick. If burlesque ever became
too talented, it ceased to be burlesque.”
344
Zeidman emphasizes the importance of
commercialized sexuality – the more blatant the better – to the development of burlesque.
But he fails to recognize what critic Brooks Atkinson was suggesting – this commercialized
sexuality seems to be deemed acceptable when it is more expensive. Historian David A.
Scott describes burlesque theatre as “A glitzy sideshow culled from the back streets of
popular entertainment, burlesque was a hodgepodge of diverse elements -- a kind of circus
for adults -- that found an uneasy common ground by virtue of their lack of sophistication or
their outlandishness.”
345
In contrast to Zeidman, Scott emphasizes the importance of parody
and travesty to classic or legitimate burlesque and argues that, “burlesque became a
burlesque of itself” when the female body became its focus:
A genre whose métier was the unmasking of convention, propriety, and refinement
with ridicule sooner or later had to lift the cultural lid on the libido (. . .). But by so

of the big wheels to the rise of individual theatres. He offers details of the producers and performers. He
points out repeatedly that burlesque thrived when striptease was its centerpiece. Attempts at “clean”
burlesque or “glorified” burlesque were ridiculed for being failures of refinement. Zeidman forms his
argument based on contemporary reviews from Variety, The Billboard, and New York Clipper that the
comedy of burlesque is memorable and successful “only in nostalgia.” 246.

344
Ibid., 21.

345
Scott, Behind the G-String, 192. Scott offers a social and cultural analysis of the stripper with an
emphasis on the social status of the stripper and the image of the stripper. Scott’s introduction offers a
synopsis of his purpose: “On some level, we are aware of the stripper’s complexity, in spite of supreme
mental efforts to keep her framed in simple, controllable terms (like goddess and slut). The fact that there is
a real person beneath the mesmerizing display of naked sensuality whispers to the mind of hidden depths, of
things unrevealed, that something is working beneath and around and behind, and that deals are being
brokered between subconscious minds. Her modern rendition of an age-old motif stirs up linkages between
signals and metaphors, arabesques and ancient memories.” 6.
199
doing, it fell. As the erotic component of the show increased, its artistic pretension
shrank in proportion. The transition of legitimate burlesque to its eroticized
derivative represented a shift away from a thing of the mind toward one of the
body. It moved beyond the pale of moral standards and found itself more firmly in
the camp of the lower-class audience.
346

Although he also points out the significance of the girl show aspect of burlesque in its
evolution, Scott offers a useful analysis that draws attention to a relationship between the
social status of the audience, “low” humor, and an emphasis on the body as the essential
element of burlesque performance, including the comedic.
There were the occasional attempts to produce burlesque on the New York stage,
but those attempts were met with little success and, as noted in a December 31, 1956 New
York Times article on a show closure, the show was prohibited to “use striptease, bumps or
grinds.
347
Burlesque in cities other than New York faced attempts to bar striptease with
mixed success. In the first few years after World War II, one could still attend a burlesque
performance in every major American city except New York. A 1954 issue of Newsweek
reveals that burlesque had declined in other major cities, although not as dramatically as in
New York. Minsky’s Rialto, the last burlesque house in Chicago, a city that once had a

346
Scott further explains that by the turn of the century, burlesque could be associated more definitively
with travesty – the audience was the low, so the humor was directed at the high. Ibid., 200.

347
Sam Zolotow, “’Welcome Exile’ Out in the Cold,” New York Times, December 31, 1936, 9. The 35
th

Annual Report of the American Civil Liberties Union cites another attempt to open a burlesque theatre in
New York in May of 1955. The License Commissioner refused a license for the Orpheum to produce
burlesque. The New York Civil Liberties Union argued that this violated both the First and the Fourteenth
Amendments. The judge ruled against the license commissioner’s refusal, which was based on burlesque’s
association with indecency. “35
th
Annual Report of the American Civil Liberties Union,” Clearing the
Main Channels (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1955), 13-14.

200

dozen burlesque theatres, closed in January of 1954. The two remaining burlesque theatres
in Boston were refused licenses at about the same time.
348

Representing the Nude on Stage
As evidenced in some of the examples described earlier in the chapter, from the
late 1920s and into the 30s and 40s, a number of American artists address the subject of
burlesque in their work. The interest in this subject coincides with the preponderance of
striptease in burlesque and the well-publicized accusations of obscenity in burlesque
performance. While American realist artists turned to the representation of contemporary
urban spectacle from the beginning of the twentieth century, the advent of striptease in
burlesque provided a uniquely self-referential performance of the female body on display.
The combination of the humor of burlesque and the action of the striptease invites
questions about the revealed body as spectacle or, at the very least, provided an
opportunity to observe that body in a public performance space. Images of the undressed
body in a public setting reveal how American realist artists like Hopper, Benton and
Marsh approached the tradition of the nude in their works, a tradition with a contentious
history in the United States.
349
A close reading of Hopper’s single painting of burlesque,
Girlie Show, an image which reveals more of the female body than most of the images of

348
“Theatre: Stripper’s Retreat,” Newsweek, January 11, 1954, 72.

349
William H. Gerdts states that the period between the wars in America was “a second golden age for the
depiction of the nude . . . . Certainly, the nude by its very nature, whatever its sensual overtones, offered a
traditional theme that necessarily involved structural concerns.” The Great American Nude (New York:
Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1974), 174.
201
discussed in this chapter, provides an opportunity to analyze the representation of a
burlesque performance in the context in the nude.
Kenneth Clark’s distinction between “naked” and “nude” in The Nude: A Study in
Ideal Form provides a useful framework for an analysis of the (nearly) nude figures in
representations of burlesque in an art historical tradition:
To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the
embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude,” on the other
hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it
projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced,
prosperous, and confident body.
350

In her evaluation of this passage, Lynda Nead states that for Clark, “the nude is the body
re-formed rather than deformed,” and that, “The nude is precisely the body in
representation, the body produced by culture.”
351
Clark’s ideal form is defined in
opposition to the real, the naked. Although the female nude should illicit erotic pleasure,
according to Clark, its value is located in the artist’s refinement of the real, naked form.
Nead argues that it is possible to question the ideals of wholeness and contained form in
the tradition of the female nude by examining how the category is maintained and
regulated at its boundaries. She uses Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural and social
distinction to analyze the distinctions made between high art representation of the nude
and representation that is deemed obscene and argues that these distinctions are not fixed
but constantly policed and transgressed. As a subject, the display of the female body in
burlesque was linked to obscenity. Artists who chose this subject often depicted a female

350
Kenneth Clark. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956), 3.

351
Lynda Nead. Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 14-15.
202
figure that was far from the ideal, classical nude and at times bordered on caricature.
Representation of the (nearly) nude in the context of burlesque also involves a public
setting and a performance of nudity. The subject demands some engagement with the
boundaries of the artistic tradition of the nude and the obscene.
In his 1941 painting, Girlie Show (Figure 3.21), Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
presents the viewer with a female nude who displays her body not only for the eyes of the
audience in a burlesque theatre, but also for the artist and an unseen spectator – the
painting’s viewer. Girlie Show features a female performer spotlighted against a deep
grey curtain. The vivid figure strides across the stage dressed only in blue high heels and
a G-string that serve to adorn her nudity. The blue swath of fabric that billows from her
artfully posed hands accentuates the white of her body. Her arms extend such that her

Figure 3.21: Edward Hopper, Girlie Show, 1941.
352

352
This image of Girlie Show is quite a bit darker than the painting.
203
torso, at the center of the composition, curves toward the viewer and displays red nipples.
This red is echoed in the color of the woman’s lips, cheeks, and hair. The woman gazes
beyond the picture plane, over the male spectators whose heads frame the bottom edge of
the painting -- a part of the dimly lit interior of the theatre. Only one male face is visible
to the viewer of the painting, that of the drummer providing the music for the
performance. His gaze is fixed on the music in front of him, away from the spectacle of
the nude woman.
Girlie Show merges two subjects common in Hopper’s oeuvre, the theatre and the
female nude. The combination of these two subjects deviates from the visible patterns
present in his other representations of both the theatre and the nude. Hopper’s paintings of
the theatre tend to focus not on the main attraction -- as in Girlie Show -- but on the
spectators who are isolated from each other as they engage in an activity of modern life.
Girlie Show differs from Hopper’s typical female nudes in that this nude has been removed
from the privacy of a domestic interior and been put on stage in a public space. Although
these differences make Girlie Show unique within the body of his work, it is in the context
of Hopper’s other representations of the theatre and the nude that the meaning of this
painting should be explored. In his choice of the “low” setting of a burlesque theatre for
an easel painting in oil, the traditional medium of “high art” representations of the nude,
Hopper raises questions about the status of this work as a nude and the status of the nude in
art.
A sustained examination of Girlie Show will reveal that it not only belongs to the
category of the nude as defined by Clark, it serves as a treatise -- whether conscious or
204
unconscious -- on the female nude as spectacle. Hopper positions the viewer in this
painting such that she or he is observing the female nude being looked at by anonymous
spectators -- the act of looking at the nude female body becomes the subject of the painting
through the presence of the male viewers within the picture frame. By framing the male
gaze as well as the female nude, Hopper demonstrates that looking at the female nude in
the eroticized, or even obscene, space of the burlesque theatre contains the spectacle of the
female body and divorces it from the sex act.
353
The stripper, for all her coarseness, is
never naked. Girlie Show represents nudity, “the body re-formed.”
In Girlie Show, the performance is the centerpiece. The spectators are engaged by
the performance of the striptease on stage. The viewer of the painting is invited to
question why Hopper chose to represent both spectacle and spectator in a theatre, which,
unlike the other theatres he represents, is not part of respectable middle class life. There is
a preponderance of images of theatre in Hopper’s oeuvre and his arrangement of figures in
the theatrical space is meticulous.
354
The stripper in the burlesque theatre was one of the
types observed by many during this time. Art historian Gail Levin suggests the idea of the
theatre as a “metaphor for life” in Hopper’s work.
355
Perhaps Hopper saw in the space of
the burlesque theatre -- in which the viewer is confronted with the act of looking at a nude

353
Nead continues her reading of Clark with a discussion of this idea of containment: “The female body has
become art by containing and controlling the limits of the form – precisely by framing it. And by giving a
frame to the female body, the female nude symbolizes the transforming effects of art generally.” Art,
Obscenity and Sexuality, 19.

354
“Hopper, it seems clear, saw the theatre as a metaphor for life, and himself a kind of stage director, setting
up scenes to paint based on the events he saw take place around him, casting his characters from types he
observed.” Gail Levin, “Edward Hopper: The Influence of Theatre and Film,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 2
(October 1980): 125.

355
Ibid.
205
– an opportunity to engage in a critical examination of the traditional view of the nude as a
metaphor for artistic practice. Hopper is consciously staging a nude in a low space and
directing the viewer’s attention to the act of looking at a framed, nude female who is
untouchable and does not return our gaze. Hopper applies a setting unique to his time and
a striking compositional arrangement to this traditional theme.
The work of another American artist who pursued an exploration of the nude on
display helps to demonstrate how Hopper negotiates the figure performing her nudity on
the burlesque stage. Thomas Hart Benton depicted his nude figures in an unconventional
manner. The voyeuristic gaze at the naked female form is represented most vividly in his
interpretations of two classical stories, Susannah and the Elders, 1938 (Figure 3.22) and
Persephone, 1937-39 (Figure 3.23). In both paintings, allusions to classical subjects are
overshadowed by visual references to contemporary rural life. The female figures are
depicted with contemporary hairstyles and their contemporary clothing lies discarded
next to them. There is no artful drapery to suggest the modesty of the figures, and in the
case of Susanna, pubic hair is on display. In both images, fully dressed males observe
the unclothed, unaware females.
356
Benton’s figures are passive, unaware that they are
the objects of a lustful gaze. By conflating the classical nude, references to contemporary
life, and the voyeuristic gaze Benton unsettles the comfortable viewing of the artistic

356
James M. Dennis describes these works in the context of more Courbet’s work and popular media: “In
each of Benton’s efforts, bedroom eyes, vulnerably raised arms, naked torsos, discarded clothes, and “knees
in action” advanced a modern formula of male amusement launched by Courbet in bold defiance of Victorian
decorum. High-heeled shoes and pubic hair added even more shock appeal, as, to the horror of his more
conservative mid western viewers, Benton outstripped calendar art and gas-station pinups.” While certainly
potentially shocking in the display of the naked bodies of what could have been the girl next door, Benton’s
display of the nature of spectatorship is more interesting in the context of my argument. James M. Dennis.
Renegade Regionalists (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 136.
206
nude.

Figure 3.22: Thomas Hart Benton, Susannah and the Elders, 1938.

Figure 3.23: Thomas Hart Benton, Persephone, 1937-1939.

Benton also depicted the nude in a more public space. In 1937, Benton completed a
large composite picture of the movie industry commissioned by Life magazine in which
the female figure demonstrates a similar passivity to Persephone and Susanna despite her
conscious presence in front of an audience. Hollywood (Figure 3.24) contains a number
of compositional elements similar to those in Girlie Show. A nearly nude female stands
on a stage of sorts looking outward and away from both the other occupants of the
207

Figure 3.24: Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood, 1937.
painting and the viewers of the painting. She is framed by an arch, and a male figure
kneels in front of her such that his head lines up with her bare midsection. The camera
and its operator shoot from above. She is the central figure surrounded by the tools and
the predominantly male workers of the movie industry, all of whom are engaged in the
creation of the spectacle. Unlike Hopper’s stripper, Benton’s movie actress appears still,
like an artist’s model posed for the painter who will remake her.
357
Hopper’s figure is
active, emphasizing her physical and mental distance from the viewers and maintaining a
balance between the questions raised by the space of the burlesque theatre and the
containment of the nude female body. The confidence of Hopper’s figure, her active
participation in her nudity, and her removal from the spectators suggest an approach to
the question of the male gaze that differs from Benton’s.
As a resident of New York City, Hopper would have been aware of public debate
over burlesque performance. He chose to represent a striptease in a painting that was

357
See Fred G. See, “Something Reflective,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22, no. 4 (Winter
1995): 165. “It seems to me that Benton’s Hollywood, especially when considered together with the two
paintings that immediately followed, foreshadows this observation that women are represented as icons
conditioned by a deeply ambivalent masculine gaze. Movies are of course the most popular of popular
forms, so this cinematic separation of passive feminine from active masculine signifies a basic uneasy
model that is right at the heart of American culture.”
208
completed after this aspect of the performance was restricted in the New York theatres.
This choice of setting engages the question of obscenity while Hopper’s compositional
choices demonstrate his artistic ability to contain the sexuality of the nude and the male
gaze in this morally questionable space. The function of the drummer in the painting, a
figure who is turned away from the female body, may be illuminated by the description
provided by Ann Corio, a former burlesque stripper from New York. Corio explains in her
memoir that the burlesque producers got rid of the singers who originally accompanied the
striptease and substituted music, “most importantly the drummer. I don’t know what a
stripper would do without a drummer. He controls her movements like a Drill
Sergeant.”
358
In Corio’s account, the drummer plays a controlling role in the striptease. It
is possible to associate Hopper with the drummer who has his own role in the creation of
the spectacle rather than assuming that Hopper’s gaze is associated with that of the
anonymous spectators.
The figure of the drummer allows for Hopper to play upon his dual role as artist
and viewer. An early work by Hopper shows him in a traditional role as painter creating a
nude from a live model: Painter and Model, an oil sketch from c. 1902-1904 (Figure 3.25).
In the work, the artist looks to his task rather than the nude female figure. This early
example demonstrates that Hopper had engaged in a more traditional representation of
nude as metaphor for artistic practice.
359

358
Ann Corio and Joseph DiMona, This Was Burlesque (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968), 76.

359
See also Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003), 93-94.
209

Figure 3.25: Edward Hopper, Painter and Model, c. 1902-04 from Art and the Crisis of Marriage
Another compositional element of the painting that is closely linked to the actual
performance of burlesque is the curtain. The dominant presence of the curtain attains
significance as a key feature in the “tease” of the “striptease.” The curtain serves as more
than a compositional device. The curtain both reveals and conceals. In Girlie Show, the
curtain reveals and frames the figure of the nude it concealed just moments before. In
Raphaelle Peale’s famous After the Bath (1822), the artist tested the conservative
American response to the nude by using a curtain to both conceal and tease the audience
with the nude female body (Figure 3.26). Peale’s successful trompe l’oeil “teased” the
viewer with the possibility of plucking the napkin or handkerchief from the canvas to
reveal a beautiful form beneath. The suggestiveness of the concealed figure provides the
erotic charge. Hopper chose to portray a stripper at the end of her performance when she
has just removed a blue skirt to reveal the G-String, and the element of suggestion is
removed -- the tease is over.
210

Figure 3.26: Raphaelle Peale, After the Bath, 1822.
Though it is this moment of the performance that led to the restrictions placed on burlesque
in New York in 1937, the revelation of nudity at the end of the performance is the least
suggestive moment of the striptease. Hopper’s compositional choices and his decision to
represent the final moments of the stripper’s performance are indicative of an engagement
with traditional ideas about the nude as subject.
Existing scholarship on Girlie Show does not fully examine Hopper’s treatment of
the nude as subject in this painting, although Edward Hopper’s life and art have been dealt
with extensively in art historical scholarship. Girlie Show itself is discussed in surveys of
Hopper’s work and in detail in a more recent publication. However, the emphasis of these
explorations always seems to revert to the relationship between Hopper and his wife, Jo
Nivison Hopper (1883-1968).
360
The evidence for Jo’s role in the creation of Girlie Show

360
Gail Levin is the most widely published scholar of Edward Hopper’s work. Levin emphasizes the role
of Hopper’s wife in her description of Girlie Show: “The eroticism of Girlie Show (1941), a painting of a
burlesque stripper with conical breasts and bright red nipples who teases her audience by waving a blue
211
is found in a frequently referenced diary. From Jo’s diary, we learn that Hopper began
doing studies of burlesque performance years before he began the painting. In her diary
and in a letter sent to Hopper’s sister, Jo records that she posed before a stove in winter for
a painting of a burlesque queen doing a striptease.
361
Hopper was notoriously reserved
when it came to discussing his work. Perhaps because of this, Jo’s diary and her role as
his business manager and model have attained a status of great importance in the
interpretation of Hopper’s work.
In comparison to an actual portrait of Jo, the central figure in Girlie Show is
clearly not a portrait of the artist’s wife. Hopper’s 1936 portrait, Jo Painting (Figure
3.27), represents the profile of the face and shoulders of Jo Hopper as she raises her arm
to her easel. Jo, like the stripper in Girlie Show, is a redhead with a strong jaw line.
Similarities between Jo and the stripper do not go beyond this cursory resemblance. Jo
Painting is a portrait of an artist focused on her work. Her posture is relaxed, her face
devoid of cosmetics, and her muted red hair is pulled back with bangs falling over her
forehead.

garment she has already removed, is both obvious and intentional. The preparatory sketches reveal how
Hopper transformed Jo's petite form and aging features to that of the tall sultry redhead in the painting.
Hopper, who must have identified with the male figures in the audience, shows this woman as desirable but
untouchable, to be observed safely from a distance.” Gail Levin, Edward Hopper (New York: Crown
Publishers, Inc., 1984), 52. This passage is the best example of a sustained description of Girlie Show within
the Levin texts I explored. Her other publications on Hopper contain very similar, but shorter, descriptions.
Just prior to this description, Levin details the artist/model relationship between Hopper and his wife: “In
interpreting Hopper’s figural compositions it is essential to remember that Jo modeled for all the women.
She also joined him in naming and fantasizing about the characters in his paintings. Thus she played a
crucial role in the rich drama of his imagination, assisting him in transforming her image into one of his
fantasy. An actress, Jo enabled Edward to function like the director giving a favorite actress many roles to
play. She also assisted him by shopping for the exact props he wanted to set up his pictures. For example, Jo
could appear young or old, seductive or disinterested.”

361
Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonne 3 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
1995), 282.
212
Two drawings for Girlie Show (Figures 3.28 and 3.29) demonstrate the extent to
which the Jo, as the model for the painting, differs from Hopper’s representation of a
stripper. In Figure 3.28, Jo’s features are recognizable as the artist studies her body in the
striding pose of the stripper. In Figure 3.29, the nude female figure is on stage, and her
facial features no longer identify her as Jo. In the final painting, the stripper’s garish red

Figure 3.27: Edward Hopper, Jo Painting, 1936.

Figure 3.28: Edward Hopper, Study for Girlie Show, 1941.
213

Figure 3.29: Edward Hopper, Study for Girlie Show, 1941.
hair is styled stiffly back from her face with high bangs. The hardened facial features of
the woman are made-up in an indifferent mask. Legs, torso, and arms are lengthened and
firmed and large breasts jut towards the viewer, defying the age the woman’s face betrays
as she strides across stage with her shoulders thrust back. Although Hopper’s use of his
wife as a model is interesting, she was acting as a model, and not as portrait subject. The
emphasis on the identification of Jo within Hopper’s representations of women obscures
the significance of the setting and the presence of the spectators in the painting as well as
evaluation of the work in the context of the nude.
362

362
In an article published in 2000 entitled, “Edward Hopper’s Girlie Show, Who is the Silent Partner?”
Vivien Green Fryd engages in a prolonged analysis of the power relationships demonstrated in the painting
and most specifically what this reveals about the power struggle in the Hoppers’ marriage. Fryd argues that
Girlie Show is a central painting in the Hoppers’ lives in that it demonstrates ”one more battleground within
their troubled marriage.” Fryd contextualizes the power struggle between man and wife through discussions
of burlesque theatre and the concept of the companionship marriage in the 1930s and 40s. Fryd, “Edward
Hopper’s Girlie Show” American Art 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 53. Fryd also develops this argument in a
more recent publication, Art and the Crisis of Marriage; Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003). Fryd uses reports of verbal and physical combat in Jo’s diary, Hopper’s
unexhibited caricatures his wife, and the testimonial of acquaintances in her attempts to characterize the
Hoppers’ marriage as a failed example of the companionship marriage, contemporary society’s solution for a
mutually satisfying lifelong relationship. Fryd argues that the Hoppers appeared to have a modern marriage,
which would have allowed for greater independence of the woman both inside and outside he home as well
as a mutually satisfying sexual relationship. However, she seeks to prove that their marriage was hostile
because of their disparate personalities. Fryd explains that Hopper’s dominance as the artist, the director of
the male gaze, is destabilized by the dominant position of the figure in the painting and by Jo’s participation
214
Exploring this painting in the context of the tradition of the nude in art reveals a
critical approach to this tradition and the role of the viewer. While the painting confronts
the viewer with contemporary sexuality, engaging us in questions of sexual liberation that
arise from the increased presence and power of the woman in the public sphere and the
marketplace, ultimately, the female figure in Girlie Show is contained by the composition
of the painting, the structure of burlesque performance, and her economic dependence on
the male viewers. Though the burlesque theatre is treated by other realist painters of the
time, the singular instance of a nude in a public space in Hopper’s work points to the
interest it held as a space peculiar to modern life.
363

Given what we presume to know from Jo’s diary and Hopper’s artistic practice in
general, it may be assumed that the composition for Girlie Show does not represent a
specific stripper or a specific theatre.
364
The specific identity of the place and the female
performer are less important than Hopper’s choice to portray a nude in the denouement of
an erotic performance when the tease is over and the body is revealed. The significance of

in the creation of the fantasy. According to this argument, Jo enhanced her power in their relationship by
posing as a sexualized woman. Fryd explains how this power struggle plays out in the visual evidence of the
painting by describing both the power of the masculine gaze and the strip teaser’s control through the display
of her body. 70. Ultimately, Fryd argues that Hopper fails to contain his wife’s sexuality in the image,
“Girlie Show does not embody this sense of containment. Instead, it addresses and exploits the complexities
of the cultures’ new open sexuality.” 73.

363
Although Fryd situates her interpretation in the context of the changing sexual dynamics of the day, she
does so with the intent of furthering the biographical reading of the work, which can be seen in the last
paragraph of the article: “Jo may have written her diary as one means to control her husband’s art. In
essence, her diary contains the last word about the painting and their relationship, which Edward cannot
dispute. Thus, he becomes the silenced and silent partner. However, most people who are familiar with the
painting will not have read Jo’s diaries, which makes her the silenced and silent partner.” It is only through
this focus on biography and her reading of Girlie Show as a portrait that Fryd can support an argument that
the sexuality of the stripper is uncontained. Fryd, 73.

364
Art historian Robert Hobbs argues that Hopper regarded his art as personal and subjective, representing
“a condensation of many scenes and impressions.” Edward Hopper (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
Publishers, 1987), 62.
215
this choice lies in the inclusion of the heads of the spectators. By depicting the act of
looking, Hopper invites us to question the nature of the act. The spectators are removed
from the nude female. Any promise of sex suggested by her made-up face and confident
body is negated by the presence of the stage and the solitary, detached performance of the
stripper. The stripper, like the female nude in an academic painting, is an erotic object, but
she is equally removed from the act of sex. The use of a space of “low” art to contain the
female body challenges the viewer with the tenuous status of the nude and spectatorship of
the “high” art nude.
Girlie Show does not fit within the context of Hopper’s other representations of the
nude figure any more readily than it does within the theatre category. The female figure,
particularly the nude female figure, is a theme that Hopper revisits throughout his career.
365

Eleven A.M., 1926 (Figure 3.30) exemplifies Hopper’s usual treatment of the female nude.
A solitary female nude sits in a blue chair turned towards the light streaming from a large
window open to the city. She gazes away from the viewer toward the city visible outside
her window -- we do not see her face. She is unaware of our presence. Her relaxed
posture and fixed interest on the world outside the window make us, the viewers, silent,
invisible spectators who intrude on this figure in a private space.

365
It is interesting to note that the nude is not considered as a “theme” in much of Hopper scholarship.
According to Gail Levin, Hopper began to focus on the solitary female figure in an interior space as early
as 1921. Levin, Edward Hopper, 40.
216

Figure 3.30: Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926.

Hopper returns to this basic formula a number of times, highlighting the
distinctiveness of Girlie Show. This work removes the viewer from the uncomfortable
position of the voyeur. The painting both allies itself with artistic tradition and evokes
questions about the status of the nude in “high” and “low” art.
366
The stripper is aware that
she is being looked at, although her gaze does not acknowledge that of the spectators or the
viewer of the painting. Instead of representing a female who is seemingly unaware of the
viewer, in Girlie Show, Hopper gives us a nude that more readily fits John Berger’s
description of the themes that offered an opportunity to paint the nude: “But in them all
there remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a
spectator.”
367
In representing the act of looking at a traditional female nude contained by

366
In a caption for Girlie Show, Ivo Kranzfelder states: “This picture shows Hopper addressing the theme
of voyeurism in the most direct form. Here the painting has indeed become a stage, and the striptease takes
place expressly for the viewer, challenging him or her to consider the reactions elicited by the
performance.” Edward Hopper, 1882-1967: Visions of Reality. (Germany: Benedikt Taschen Verlag,
1995), 144.

367
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
217
the “low” art space of the burlesque theatre, Hopper invites the viewer to ask why we gaze
at the female nude and examine the parameters under which such a gaze is permissible. In
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Kenneth Clark states:
Thus modern art shows even more explicitly than the art of the past that the nude
does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that
have become part of our imaginative experience.
368

In Girlie Show, Hopper presents the viewer with a nude that simultaneously challenges a
traditional conception of the nude and reaffirms the boundaries of the nude as established
by a male artist and male viewers, relating the nude to the “structure” of burlesque theatre,
a part of contemporary “imaginative experience.” Looking again at Remie Lohse’s 1933
pictorial for Vanity Fair, the striptease performance and the nearly nude tableaux included
in the feature are representations of the body contained by theatrical conventions and
censorship, the space of the stage, and the expectations of an audience.
The Burlesque Audience: Viewing the Nude on Stage
Not only are American artists like Hopper and Marsh depicting the performance of
nudity in the low theatre, their works also directly engage questions of spectatorship.
There is no embarrassment in the self-possessed stride of Hopper’s stripper – she is a
“balanced, prosperous, and confident body,” a “body produced by culture.” An important
aspect of that formative culture is the burlesque audience. Hopper’s treatment of the
theatre in his oeuvre suggests his interest in the gaze. Many scholars have noted that
Hopper’s paintings are like isolated stills in a movie, both in his choice of subjects as well

368
Clark, The Nude, 370.
218
as his style.
369
This quality results in a kind of suspended narrative -- a theatrical moment
for which the viewer must supply the plot.
The theatre is a subject that Hopper returned to a number of times in his work,
reflecting both a life-long interest in the theatre and performativity.
370
The space of the
theatre itself is important in Hopper’s representations of theatre scenes – he typically
focuses the viewer’s attention away from the stage to the realm of the audience, a realm
that he knew well as a life-long fan of the theatre. It is significant that the artist usually
features the spectators of the theatre as the central figures in these works rather than the
spectacle itself. The focal figures in the theatre paintings are isolated in moments during
which they are not engaged in watching a performance as in his 1939 painting, New York
Movie (Figure 3.31). In most of his paintings, “Hopper’s works depend on ellipses, on the
missing parts of a narrative, and on the presence of a viewer who is assumed within the
fictive realm of the painting and made a reality by the actual people who look at the work
of art.”
371
In Two Comedians (1965), Hopper’s farewell painting, there are two figures on
stage, a man and a woman, dressed like two small figures from a pantomime, taking a bow
(Figure 3.32). An audience is not visible. We, the viewers, are the assumed audience of

369
Levin, “Edward Hopper: The Influence of Theatre and Film,” 123. Levin argues that Hopper’s frequent
theatre attendance affected his choice of subject matter and his compositional strategies, stating that he was
“influenced by set design, stage lighting, and cinematic devices such as cropping and unusual angles of
vision.”

370
Much of the Hopper literature points to works by Degas as a source of inspiration for Hopper, especially
because of Degas’ choice of dancers and the theatre as a subject for high art. Such a comparison is
interesting, but Hopper’s lifelong interest in the theatre, his interest in an American art, and his representation
of a view of reality culled from his own memories makes a search for direct sources for Hopper’s work in
Degas less significant in an examination of Girlie Show.

371
Hobbs, Edward Hopper, 20.
219

Figure 3.31: Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939.

Figure 3.32: Edward Hopper, Two Comedians, 1965.
this departure. In Girlie Show Hopper features both the spectacle and the spectator on
canvas. Hopper’s composition for this work demonstrates the way in which burlesque
theatre contains sexuality as well as the continued containment of sexuality through the
artist’s direction of the male gaze: “Hopper becomes the implied viewer of his art, and then
he questions his motives for looking at the scene and his connection to these isolated
fragments of reality.”
372
Given this perspective on Hopper’s position as a viewer, it
follows that those of us who view his work are also expected to question why we look at a
scene, at a painting, at a nude. The female stripper is a body transformed by a performance

372
Ibid., 123.
220
on stage and her performance is conventionalized by the evolving traditions of burlesque --
it is through both transformation and conventionalization that Hopper establishes the
stripper as nude, not naked. Her position as a nude available to the gaze of the spectator, a
stranger (as Berger describes) is mirrored by Hopper’s representation of nudity on
display.
373
Hopper’s treatment of the nude in Girlie Show demands that the viewer
question his or her role as spectator of the nude.
Girlie Show is only one example of the significance of the role of the spectator in
representations of burlesque. As established earlier in this chapter, the burlesque
audience is a subject of interest not only to the artists who represented burlesque, but also
to burlesque’s critics. In the burlesque feature in the February 1935 issue of Fortune, the
burlesque audience is described derisively: “The most repulsive thing about a burlesque
show is its audience. Weed out the regular patrons of long-established house, weed out
slumming socialites, rowdy collegians, and honest seamen ashore, and where once the
bloods of town sat now sit the backwash of a depressed industrial civilization, their eyes
alight and most of their mouths open. It is not a pretty sight.”
374
The “average age of an
audience is forty” and a “smattering” of women can be found among the largely male
audience in most theatres.
375
Sociologist David Dressler argues that there is some
exaggeration in the above statement but argues that regardless of class, the patron “has

373
Berger, Ways of Seeing, 54.

374
“The Business of Burlesque, A.D. 1935,” 141.

375
Ibid.

221
eyes and ideas only for the stage.”
376
He contends that, “the burlesquegoer is titillated
not by nudity alone, but by the salaciousness accompanying it.”
377
Viewing burlesque’s
representation of nudity is explicitly associated with lust in contemporary popular media.
The salacious interest of the audience is even more on the surface in the work of
Reginald Marsh. Marsh’s oeuvre provides us with the most extensive contemporary use
of the burlesque theatre as a subject by an artist and demonstrates his avid, career long
interest in burlesque. In Marsh’s burlesque scenes, the spectacle is an unclothed,
pleasantly curved female and the spectator a rapt male. According to Lloyd Goodrich, a
major theme in the work of Reginald Marsh was the pursuit of pleasure:
Sex as publicly presented was a main theme throughout Marsh’s art, the magnetic
power of the female body. The conventional studio nude, private, decorative, and
languid, was not for him; it had to be the female figure as seen in the real world,
and in public, whether clothed or near-nude, from the shop girl on the street to the
burlesque stripper.
378

Although Marsh’s interest was in the “female figure as seen in the real world,” this figure
was not individualized, she was a “generic female” usually with a particular body type that
was “fully developed and voluptuous, projecting a potent sexual aura.”
379
Marsh, an avid
observer of burlesque theatre, explained its attraction: “’Everything is nice and intimate,
not spread out and remote as in a regular theatre. Here you can get the complete setting, its

376
David Dressler, “Science Looks at Burlesque: Article 10,” New York Post, July 26, 1937.

377
David Dressler, “Science Looks at Burlesque: Article 2” New York Post, July 16, 1937, 16.

378
Lloyd Goodrich. Reginald Marsh. (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., Publishers, 1972), 37. Goodrich
was friends with Marsh from childhood. He organized a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the
Whitney Museum in 1955 (Marsh died in 1954) as well as publishing this monograph.

379
Ibid., 37-38.
222
all compact.’”
380
The “complete setting” – a decorated theatrical space, female spectacle,
and male audience -- are typically all depicted in the artist’s crowded compositions.
381

The female performer and her audience are the spectacle in his works. Marsh was such a
dedicated burlesquegoer that he testified in defense of burlesque in the 1937 hearings in
New York on its indecency of burlesque in 1937. When burlesque could no longer be
enjoyed in New York City, he attended performances in Jersey City.
382
Most of the people
who testified on behalf of burlesque in 1937 in the face of an obscenity conviction, the sex
crime panic and the fear that burlesque had the capacity for instigating deviant behavior
were individuals whose livelihoods were dependent on burlesque staying in business.
Marsh’s testimony is notable in light of the cultural climate and may reflect both his
sustained interest in lower class entertainments and his ambivalence towards the upper
classes.
In her analysis of burlesque’s downfall in New York, Friedman argues that the
presence of burlesque on 42
nd
street, “threatened to destabilize the composition of its
audiences, as burlesque entrepreneurs sought to capture the mixed-gender, middle-class
audience that had previously supported the legitimate theater.”
383
Much of the campaign
against burlesque was predicated on the threat of the presence of the low in what had been
a middle class area. Marsh’s interest in what many would describe as low-life was evident

380
Ibid., 37.

381
Michele Miller argues that the theatrical space with its baroque decoration in Marsh’s work helped him
make his figures “modern analogues of the goddesses and bathers painted by the Old Masters.” “The
Charms of Exposed Flesh,” 22.

382
Ibid.

383
Friedman, “The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts,” 213.
223
to critics even early in his career. In a 1933 review of an exhibition, Henry McBride states
that, “Apparently Mr. Marsh thinks the Boweryites are just as good as the uptown folk and
a whole lot more picturesque” and notes the artist’s ability to depict people like burlesque
goers as “just plain human beings.”
384
He concludes that thanks to Marsh, we can now see
the beauty of such low attractions.
385
In Marsh’s burlesque oeuvre, the audience members
are often respectably dressed men, though their leering expressions and leaning postures
are less respectable. His audiences lend credence to Dressler’s description of the burlesque
patron who “has eyes and ideas only for the stage.” Through representation, burlesque
spectacle and its patrons become acceptable, and possibly even beautiful to Marsh’s
middle and upper class audiences.
Marsh emphasizes the intimacy of burlesque theatre, an intimacy that is absent in
Girlie Show. Two examples of Marsh’s burlesque works demonstrate the differences in
his treatment of the subject. His 1930 etching, Gaiety Burlesk (Figure 3.4) shows a coy
female teasing a large, crowded all male audience whose faces leer from balconies and
seats near the runway as she holds a scrap of fabric in front of her breasts. Marsh’s
stripper looks down toward her audience and the viewer of the painting rather than off
into the distance. All eyes in the packed theater are turned toward the display and the
balcony patrons lean over the railing to get a better look. Performer, spectator, and the
unseen viewer of the painting are all engaged in the exchange of looks.

384
Henry McBride, “Reginald Marsh’s Bowery,” The New York Sun, April 8, 1933, reprinted in The Flow
of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 302-305.

385
In her dissertation, Kathleen Spies presents a much more critical take on Marsh’s attraction to burlesque
performers as a subject: “By painting these performers, the artists (Marsh and Kuhn) distanced and
controlled the potential danger and the lure that these women embodied, and regained a sense of masculine
productivity.” “Burlesque Queens and Circus Divas,” 112.
224
By looking away from her male audience, Hopper’s stripper references the traditional
nude in which the female does not return the gaze of the unseen viewer. Marsh’s 1944
watercolor and ink painting, Burlesque Dancer shows a stripteaser mid bump and grind.
Her right hand extends out to the audience seated next to the stage such that she could
almost be blessing the spectator with whatever article of clothing or prop she holds in her
open hand (Figure 3.33). Despite this intimacy, the space of the performance and the
space of the viewer are clearly articulated, and in this example, the performer does not
make eye contact with the spectator with whom she is in such close proximity. Down at
Jimmy Kelly’s (Figure 3.34) depicts a nude or nearly nude performance in a nightclub
setting. The controlled intimacy of the burlesque stage is gone. The stripper is within

Figure 3.33: Reginald Marsh, Burlesque Dancer, 1944.
225

Figure 3.34: Reginald Marsh, Down at Jimmy Kelly's, 1936.
reach of her audience, separated only by her use of a prop. Despite the proximity of the
tantalizing figure of the woman, the male audience maintains the distance established by
the performance. The figures in Marsh’s work, like the figures in Girlie Show are not
identifiable, and the works are about public view of the female body. The sexuality of
the strippers, the salaciousness of the spectator’s gaze, and the tenuous divide between
the two are much more on the surface than in Hopper’s interpretation. Marsh’s paintings
of burlesque theatres invite the viewer into the raucous entertainment and highlight the
formalized constraint of Hopper’s composition. Marsh’s stripteasers are portrayed with
exaggerated breasts and buttocks and open, if somewhat vacant, expressions. Female
spectacle as commodity is a parody of itself in these images, but the enraptured audience
is beholden to the joke. While exaggeration and humor balance the power of the
performance of nudity and female sexuality in Marsh’s work, the tenuous balance
226
between spectacle and spectator is visible.
386
Marsh’s exaggerated female figures and
seemingly hypnotized audiences, the self-contained ambivalence of Hopper’s stripteaser,
the parades of chorus girls looming over their male audiences in Lohse’s photographs and
in Dwight’s illustration, and the frenetic energy of the burlesque dancers in Benton’s
work as they threaten to exceed the boundary of the stage all suggest the potential danger
of the sexually suggestive female spectacle as well as her appeal. These images were
included in publications like Vanity Fair and Fortune and in the oeuvres of a number of
American artists like Marsh whose prints were sold to middle class patrons. This
dissemination of the “low” performance of nudity and female sexuality for an audience
that extended beyond the marginal space of the burlesque theatre occurred during a
period in which the shows were increasingly salacious and burlesque and its audience
were often criticized in the mainstream press. These representations of burlesque address
the consumption of popular female spectacle but in a manner that is palatable and, in
many cases, enjoyable. The burlesque pictured in the works discussed in this chapter
continued to thrive in representations in Broadway productions and in Hollywood films
that emphasized the exaggerated glamour and class conscious humor even as the
theatrical form began to fade from the American scene.

386
Robert C. Allen describes the power relationship between the performing women of burlesque and their
audience: “. . . , the specter of women’s sexuality and all of the mystery and power it represents continues
to hover over the spectacle of the woman onstage no matter how much the male viewer is made to feel in
control.” Horrible Prettiness, 264-265.
227
Chapter 4
The Image of the Burlesque Queen: A Case Study of Representations of Gypsy Rose Lee

In Ralph Steiner’s (1899-1986) 1944 photograph, Gypsy and Her Girls, famous
burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, “the Literary Stripper,” poses on a rural road in the
Bronx (Figure 4.1). The publicity savvy performer stands in the middle of this
contradictory space, an exotic apparition elaborately dressed in a heavy, sequined

Figure 4.1: Ralph Steiner, Gypsy and Her Girls, 1944.
gown that hugs her figure, and a spiraling, white fur stole that skims the rough surface of
the road. She poses with four of her girls, all clad in nude body stockings strategically
decorated with shimmering, vegetative designs.
387
A Rolls Royce and well-traveled
pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage complete the scene. The incongruous setting and
expensive props draw attention to the elaborate staging of this display of the female form,

387
It is possible that this photo shoot was to promote Gypsy’s carnival tour. Noralee Frankel, Stripping
Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The author identifies the
costumes worn in the photograph as those worn in the carnival tour.
228
which lampoons both glamorous celebrity photographs and the revealing performance of
burlesque striptease. Steiner later writes of this publicity photo shoot that Gypsy, who
was a friend of his, “knew the value of publicity and was willing to invest in it. Since
Gypsy’s acts all kidded sex, I could kid it in my stage setting and direction.”
388
Steiner’s
photograph is a burlesque of a burlesque performer. The symbols of status and wealth
are mocked, and the ridiculous setting and staging draw attention to the absurd costumes
worn by the burlesque performers and their out of place sex appeal.
Gypsy and Her Girls is an example of a representation of burlesque that uses the
mocking humor and sexual display of the theatrical form to destabilize an easy reading of
the photograph as merely scantily clad women in a picture. Images of the burlesque
queen, the sexualized object of burlesque performance, often utilize and transgress visual
formulas made familiar in art and other popular media representations of the female
body. As such, they present interpretive possibilities that are useful in a broader
consideration of the representation of the female body. In this chapter, I use images of
the best-known burlesque queen in American history, Gypsy Rose Lee, as examples to
establish the visual vocabulary of representations of burlesque queens and to examine
how those representations may have been construed. The history of burlesque
performance is intrinsic to my reading of the images as well as to my discussion about
how these representations might have been understood by contemporary viewers. A case
study also affords the opportunity to discuss how the qualities of exoticism, excess, and

388
Ralph Steiner, A Point of View (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 22.
Steiner’s description is in the context of working in public relations photography. He uses the picture as an
example of “how free a photographer can be when doing public relations work.”
229
mocking humor examined in earlier chapters play out in the representation of the woman
who epitomizes burlesque as it is best remembered in American culture.
389
Gypsy’s
career and fame far exceeded the boundaries of the burlesque stage. Her image was
always tied to burlesque, but her performance of burlesque striptease and of her own
status as a burlesque queen was a crossover act that was eventually embraced on
Broadway, in film, and even in literature. When the “American art” of burlesque was
dying as a theatrical form, Gypsy’s version of the burlesque queen was ingrained in
popular culture.
Gypsy’s status as a crossover performer is useful in determining what makes an
image of a burlesque queen different from other images of women in popular
entertainment and also in complicating facile dismissals of these works as kitsch,
nostalgia, or the mere ephemera of a dead theatrical art. Publicity photographs of female
burlesque performers share a number of similarities with publicity images for other
theatrical formats like the popular Ziegfeld Follies and with Hollywood glamour
photography. A comparison of images of Gypsy, who performed in the Follies and in
Hollywood features, to examples of photographs of Ziegfeld girls and Hollywood stars
will reveal whether or not there are boundaries that distinguish representations of
burlesque queens from representations of her contemporaries on uptown stages or the big
screen. I contend that publicity photographs often render the burlesque woman with a
kind of tongue-in-cheek awareness through exaggerated poses, odd props and settings,

389
In earlier chapters I discussed the ways in which burlesque changed since the mid to late nineteenth
century. Whether or not the burlesque of the 1930s, when Gypsy rose to fame, bears any real resemblance
to the subversive theatrical form from which it sprung, and whether or not striptease proved to be the
downfall of burlesque, it is burlesque of the 1930s that has inspired nostalgic and celebratory publications
as well as the neo-Burlesque movement.
230
and sheer excess. Images of burlesque queens often seem just slightly off from the
prescriptive representations of the Ziegfeld and Hollywood types, and it is this quality
that has the potential to produce a sense of unease in the viewer or even that invites him
or her to be in on the joke.
Gypsy, as both performer and image, serves as an example in this analysis, but
she is also an exceptional case. She is attractive as an object of analysis because she was
so well known and because she was an active participant in the creation of her image.
Given her fame and her lengthy affiliation with burlesque in the media, she had an impact
public perception of burlesque queens. Gypsy was known throughout her career as a
burlesque stripteaser even though she was in and out of burlesque, and she eventually
became a household name. She distinguished herself on the burlesque stage with an act
that was self-aware. She engaged in striptease performance even while she made fun of
it. She made blatant use of her identity as a burlesque queen even as she railed against its
strictures. Gypsy utilized representations to promote herself and concocted an elaborate
public image that was part truth and part fiction. In doing so, she seemed to call mocking
attention to the questionable veracity of the performing woman’s image in contemporary
culture.
As an exceptional case, Gypsy’s representation of self is useful as a wedge for
exploring questions of artifice in other representations of female burlesque performers.
The legibility of the potentially fictive nature of the representation of the burlesque queen
as sex object is further complicated by the shadow of pornography that marginalizes the
pinup-like photographs of these queens and their production and reproduction for a
231
largely male viewership. These more marginal images are the flip side of the image of
the burlesque queen adopted by mainstream popular culture.
In his essay on striptease published in Mythologies, Roland Barthes explores the
contradictory nature of Parisian striptease: “Woman is desexualized at the very moment
when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a
spectacle based on fear or rather on the pretense of fear, as if eroticism here went no
further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to
evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.”
390
Barthes describes striptease as a
“mystifying spectacle,” which employs distancing barriers like exoticism, music hall
props (i.e. furs and fans) and the g-string to render the stripping woman as an “object in
disguise.”
391
Barthes goes on to argue that the stripper’s dance is not an erotic element;
the dance is couched in Art and also serves to hide nudity through a series of ritual
gestures.
392
Although Barthes is not talking about striptease in the context of the
American burlesque show, his notion of the “object in disguise” and the “mystifying”
function of the tools of the stripteaser to evoke sexuality and eroticism is applicable to
representations of the burlesque queen and, in particular, to representations of Gypsy. In
Gypsy and Her Girls, the suggestion of sexual availability intimated by barely there
chorus girl costumes and Gypsy’s flashy, tight dress is revealed as a disguise, as fakery,

390
Roland Barthes, “Striptease,” Mythologies translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,
1972), 84.

391
Ibid., 84-85.

392
Ibid., 85-86.
232
by the obvious staging of the scene. Steiner’s photograph demystifies the spectacle and
impishly reveals it as deceitful.
The Burlesque Queen
In a 1931 photograph labeled Minsky’s Burlesque, a young Gypsy Rose Lee
poses with a large urn decorated by an elaborate floral design (Figure 4.2). The floral
motif is continued in the strategically situated leaves that decorate Gypsy’s costume, a
flesh-toned body stocking. The high heels she wears, somewhat ubiquitous in
representations of burlesque performers, highlight the brevity of the costume and
simultaneously lessen the intimacy of the representation. In this early publicity image of
Gypsy as a burlesque performer, she is dressed in a striptease costume that she likely
created herself.
393
This image is published in her 1957 memoir with the caption, “I
stripped it leaf by leaf.” She gazes out at the viewer, her pose flirtatious; a viewer might
imagine that she leans her elbow on his broad shoulder and drapes her arm across his
waist instead of a large ceramic vessel.
By 1931, Gypsy had found her way to Minsky’s burlesque in New York, where
she continued to develop an act that emphasized the tease in striptease. Her coy pose and
body-hugging costume with foliage covering the naughty bits in this photograph is
similar to an early costumed photograph of Ann Corio, who is depicted with bare legs, a
diaphanous cape, a star-spangled tiara, and a brief swimsuit-like costume with spangled
foliage over the nipples and genital area (Figure 4.3). The two images share a number of
qualities characteristic of publicity photographs of burlesque queens in the age of

393
Gypsy often made her own costumes.
233
striptease: a body conscious pose, plenty of bare flesh, a costume that is markedly
theatrical, and a degree of incongruity in the disparate elements of the scene or the
costume (a barely clothed woman hugging a huge vase or an elaborate head ornament
with a miniscule costume) that draws attention to the staginess of the image. Unlike the
image of Gypsy, Corio looks slightly away from the camera. Corio was a rival burlesque
queen whose popularity peaked in the late 1930s. She was known for her coy, sweet
routine in which she undressed just as she would “’do in my own bedroom’” so as not to
be “’offensive.’”
394
Gypsy’s routine was often characterized as coy, but Gypsy’s most
famous gimmick was her dialogue. Gypsy’s coyness was a mockery, and her routine was
imbued with the sense that she was making fun of the whole process, including herself
and her audience.

Figure 4.2: Gypsy Rose Lee, 1931, Gypsy Rose Lee Archive, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York
Public Library.

394
Corio is quoted in Mort Cooper, “What ever became of Ann Corio?” Modern Man, December 1961, 39.
234

Figure 4.3: Ann Corio, n.d, from Modern Man, 39.

Gypsy’s popularity as a burlesque striptease performer took off by the mid 1930s.
She had opportunities in the early thirties in the chorus of the Ziegfeld Follies and other
revues, though she returned to burlesque where she was a marquee performer after her
first turn in a lesser part in Ziegfeld’s Hot-Cha. Gypsy returned to the Follies in 1936
235
with much better billing, and her fame exploded beyond burlesque. A photo dated to
1935 by Bruno of Hollywood shows Gypsy in another studio photograph (Figure 4.4).
395

Bruno of Hollywood was Anthony J. Bruno (1893-1976) who began his career as a still
publicity photographer for Columbia Studios in Hollywood and opened his New York
studio in 1934 in Carnegie Hall.
396
“Bruno of Hollywood” appears on many burlesque
publicity images. In this photograph, a nude Gypsy is perched on a round object with a
geometric design. Her shoulders and breasts as well as her upper thighs and genital area
are concealed by white fur. She poses in three quarters view with an elbow extended and
a hand behind her neck; her head tilts to the side as she glances sideways at the camera
lens. High heels and a sparkling necklace and bracelet are her only adornment. Her hair
is arranged in an updo that she wore with little moderation for the remainder of her
career.
397
Her hairstyle is evocative of the elaborate updos of Charles Dana Gibson’s
turn-of-the-century dark-haired feminine ideal, the Gibson Girl.
398
Overall, Gypsy’s look
is more sophisticated and more polished than the 1931 image. The 30s deco style of the
setting, which was common to Hollywood film set design and publicity images of the

395
Gypsy Rose Lee Archive, Billy Rose Theater Archives, New York Public Library. The hand-colored
copy of this photograph in the archive is in a folder dated 1935 and is identified on the back as being by
Bruno of Hollywood.

396
“Anthony J. Bruno Dead at 82; Photographed Star Performers,” New York Times, February 8, 1976, 47.

397
According to Rachel Shteir, Billy Minsky suggested that Gypsy “straighten her hair to be ‘more
ladylike.’” Gypsy “wore her hair off her face in an elaborate upsweep” for the remainder of her career.
Rachel Shteir, Gypsy: The Art of the Tease (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 32.

398
It is very possible that Gypsy deliberately evoked the well-known image of the Gibson Girl in her choice
of hairstyle. For more on the Gibson Girl as an ideal of American beauty see Lois W. Banner, American
Beauty (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 154-174. Banner concludes her analysis
of the Gibson Girl: “Neither entirely radical nor conservative, reflecting in her image a complete
combination of artistic, literary, and sociological strains, the Gibson girl was popular precisely because of
her ambiguity.” 174.
236
time, evokes a modern up-to-date glamour. However, Gypsy’s oddly shaped,
uncomfortable looking perch draws attention to the staging of the shot. Symbols of
wealth mask Gypsy’s nudity. The white furs are recognizable as the accessories of a
wealthy woman but also suggest tactile pleasures. Markers of glamour and upper class
privilege are used in the service of a blatant come-on of provocatively posed flesh.
A 1936 photograph of Sally Rand, a dancer who frequently performed in
burlesque, depicts the well-known blond against a backdrop of a folding screen decorated
with a diamond pattern (Figure 4.5). Posed as if mid-dance, the lines of Rand’s naked
legs and arm break up the geometric regularity of the screen. Her body is hidden from
shoulder to hip by an outrageously large fan of ostrich feathers. Ostrich feathers were a
luxury item often used to adorn hats prior to the automobile era. Rand’s profuse use of
them to disguise her nudity is characteristic of burlesque excess and the utilization of the
accoutrements of glamour and wealth as a teasing mask of nudity.
A performer of some notoriety, Rand rose to fame when she performed her fan
dance at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
399
Her gimmick, which she employed on
burlesque stages, in fairs and in other venues, was a dance choreographed to tease at, but
not completely reveal, her nude body with the strategic movement of her large fans.
Other performers copied (and perhaps originated) her fan dance, but it is Rand who made

399
She also rode down the midway as Lady Godiva.
237

Figure 4.4: Bruno of Hollywood, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1935. Gypsy Rose Lee Archive, Billy Rose Theatre
Collection, New York Public Library.

Figure 4.5: Sally Rand, 1936. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.
238
it famous. A 1936 advertisement for a Sally Rand performance at the Orpheum Theatre
in San Francisco refers to the dancer as “Her Sexellency” (Figure 4.6). The caption is
accompanied by a drawing of a female figure from the back that emphasizes the curve of
a naked back and legs. Large feathery objects, likely Rand's famous fans, mostly conceal
the figure's buttocks and hips. Few burlesque performers attained the kind of
fame/notoriety in the mainstream public consciousness that Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose
Lee achieved. The photograph and drawing of Rand demonstrate how the gimmick that
thrust her into the spotlight was reproduced as a visual symbol to perpetuate her
popularity. The burlesque quality is located in the pairing of flesh and an outrageous
prop to disguise it with a pose that announces, “performance.”
To more easily read how Gypsy’s burlesque gimmick might be interpreted in her
publicity photographs, it is useful to examine her public image and the interpretation of
her act in the contemporary press. The New York Woman profiled Gypsy in the
September 30, 1936 edition as a star of Minsky’s burlesque and as “the first girl to bring
the strip act uptown.”
400
In September of 1936, Gypsy performed in the Ziegfeld Follies,
“She stripped, at the end of Act I, more completely than she ever had before, appearing
for one tantalizing moment in nothing but two tiny bows, held to each breast by glue, and
a three-inch triangle of turquoise satin on a G-string.”
401
Though Gypsy was performing
in the middle-class Follies, she was doing her burlesque act. The article goes on to

400
Gretta Palmer, “She Undressed Her Way to Fame,” The New York Woman, September 30, 1936.

401
Ibid.
239

Figure 4.6: Orpheum Theatre Program, 1936. From Burlesque Poster Design.
provide a history of Gypsy, this oddity of burlesque who managed to rise in social stature
above any previous burlesque girl.
402
She is described as the possessor of a “strong,
magnificent body,” and “handsome” features, which she gives “greater piquancy with an
absurd Gibson-girl coiffure.”
403
According to the article, “The New York audience was
fascinated by her strip-technique and by her weakness for bald headed men in the
audience, whom she singled out for special attention from the runway.”
404
The author
argues that Gypsy’s engagements uptown garnered her a more sophisticated following
and that good press followed. The feature ends with a note about Gypsy’s interactions
with her audience: “Gypsy doesn’t kiss bald men in the Follies. She takes off her garter

402
Fanny Brice’s beginnings in burlesque are not mentioned, though she and Gypsy performed together in
the Follies and were friends.

403
Palmer, “She Undressed Her Way to Fame.”

404
Ibid.
240
belt and throws it into the audience.”
405
The Bruno of Hollywood photograph described
earlier accompanies the photograph. A similar article is published in Collier’s in the
December 19, 1936 edition. Gypsy is exposed as an intelligent burlesque girl whose
uptown connections helped her get a role in the Follies.
406
In the context of those
uptown connections and the Follies stage, Gypsy’s burlesque striptease is fascinating and
seemingly unproblematic.
A number of mainstream publications profiled Gypsy around this time, and she
began to solidify a history that is important to her public image. She would later inscribe
this history in a memoir first published in 1957, in which Gypsy recounts her early life in
vaudeville and her introduction to burlesque theater up to the beginning of her contract
with Twentieth Century-Fox in 1937.
407
Born Rose Louise Hovick in 1911, Gypsy had
been in show business since childhood. According to her memoir, Gypsy was traveling
with a struggling vaudeville act called “Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes” under
the management of her mother, Rose. Her sister, June, was the star of the vaudeville act.
Gypsy made costumes. Stories of Gypsy’s early life were recounted well before Gypsy
published a memoir. In a 1937 article in The Chicago Tribune, Charles Collins offered

405
Ibid.

406
Kyle Crichton, “Strip to Fame,” Collier’s, December 19, 1936, 13, 47-?.

407
The veracity of Gypsy’s memoir is not a major concern for my purposes in this dissertation. Gypsy’s
public image is far more relevant to a discussion of the visual representations of her than the actual facts of
her life. Gypsy’s account of her history in Gypsy: A Memoir, on which the Broadway musical Gypsy, first
staged in 1959, as well as two film adaptations was loosely based, became entertainment. Another memoir,
Gypsy and Me (1984) republished as My G-String Mother: At Home and Backstage with Gypsy Rose Lee
(2004), presents Gypsy’s later career from the perspective of her son, Erik Lee Preminger. Preminger’s
memoir is currently being adapted as an HBO film with Sigourney Weaver in the role of Gypsy. Two
recent publications, Rachel Schteir’s Gypsy: The Art of the Tease, and Noralee Frankel, Stripping Gypsy:
The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) offer both biography and cultural
analysis.
241
an account of Gypsy’s history.
408
According to Collins’s article, the Hovick act
commanded decent money in vaudeville ($1250 a month) before June ran off to get
married.
409
June’s defection and the demise of vaudeville meant fewer opportunities. As
Gypsy’s story goes, to the dismay of Mother Rose, the troupe was booked into a
burlesque theater in Kansas City, and Louise Hovick was introduced to the art of
striptease by Tessie, the Tassel Twirler, whose talent was a unique aptitude for moving
her breasts. In this tale of how she came to be a burlesque stripteaser, Gypsy establishes
an identity beyond that of burlesque performer. She got her start in vaudeville and went
to burlesque out of necessity. Simultaneously, the rhetoric of much of the early
mainstream publicity about Gypsy suggests that burlesque is not that bad. For example,
Collins’s article makes a distinction between striptease performers in burlesque and
exotic dancers in nightclubs – a distinction based on the amount of time the performer
spends in removing clothing.
410
In the Collier’s article, a glimmer of Gypsy’s
complicated relationship with her image as burlesque queen is revealed. Gypsy often
took opportunities outside of burlesque, even when she was making a lot of money to
work the burlesque stage. Gypsy is quoted stating in support of burlesque, “’Where can
you find any better work?’ she asks. ‘Immoral? Why I’m embarrassed in the Follies. I
never took off as much as that down at the Irving Place. And these night clubs . . . !
They don’t have anything on and they’re so close to the ringside tables that customers

408
Charles Collins, “Disrobing Act a Feature of Burlesque and Cabaret,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January
31, 1937, E12.

409
Ibid.

410
The implication is that the floor show in a nightclub or cabaret involved a speedier removal of clothing
and that the burlesque stage offers more of a tease. Ibid.
242
can reach out and touch them. Nobody ever yells about that but you’d think burlesque
was awful.”
411

Many accounts of the burlesque theatre take the form of biography and
autobiography. Burlesque queens like Gypsy Rose Lee and Ann Corio who found fame
in burlesque theatre portray burlesque with a sense of nostalgia for a dying art. These
accounts are also works of celebrity in which the star is positioned as a pivotal figure in
the “glorified” version of American burlesque. Gypsy Rose Lee’s romanticized account
of her life growing up on the vaudeville circuit and accidental fall and rise in burlesque
includes her description of her first encounter with a representation of a burlesque
woman:
While we waited the girls and I watched a man adjust an electric fan under the
marquee of the theater. He was aiming the breeze from it down on a larger than
life-sized photograph of a blonde woman who wore nothing but a triangle patch
where she should have worn panties and two smaller patches for a brassiere.
Another man was nailing black silk tassels to the brassiere part of the photograph.
As he stepped aside the breeze from the fan picked up the tassels and made them
spin like windmills.
412

Gypsy, probably the woman most immediately identified with burlesque popular culture,
describes the image of burlesque by which it is best known today – the desirable female
body displayed for the titillation, but more importantly, for the amusement of the viewer.
She also demonstrates an attentiveness to the representation of a burlesque gimmick,
tassel twirling, which becomes a counter image to the one she eventually develops for
herself, that of the intellectual stripper.

411
Crichton, “Strip to Fame,” 47.

412
Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1957), 178.
243
In a 1936 article in the Baltimore Sun, “Strip Queen Sees Art Dying,” Gypsy, “the
girl who made the strip-tease acceptable by introducing it into the Ziegfeld Follies,
acknowledged today the future held little for her art.”
413
The author describes the setting
of Gypsy’s interview, her book filled apartment. The author writes that “unless you knew
you’d never guess she ever was associated with burlesque.”
414
You would never guess
her affiliation with burlesque because of her good voice and “faultless” speech.
415

Gypsy’s status as low female spectacle for a lower class audience masks her upper class
characteristics and vice versa. Even after she moved to Broadway and the Follies, Gypsy
was consistently identified as a burlesque stripteaser in the press, even if this
identification was accompanied by an obligatory “you’d never guess.” This treatment in
the mainstream press demonstrates how Gypsy was situated as both representative of
burlesque and as distinct from it because of her upper class attributes, almost as if she
was slumming on the stage.
A December 6, 1936 article in The Baltimore Sun credits Gypsy with “lifting”
striptease to “a high art,” and points out, in the same sentence, that Gypsy was a
burlesquer “by desperation rather than intent,” as if to excuse her from any culpability in
the morally suspect burlesque theatre.
416
The author of the article claims that Gypsy’s
performance of the striptease “ceased to be burlesque and became big-league
entertainment” by virtue of a change in venue from burlesque theater on Forty-second

413
John Ferris, “Strip Queen Sees Art Dying,” The Baltimore Sun October 18, 1936, T5.

414
Ibid.

415
Ibid.

416
Dale Harrison, “Strip Tease Boosts Burlesque to Favor,” The Baltimore Sun, December 13, 1936, MT4.
244
street to Broadway.
417
Note that it is not by virtue of a change in the actual performance.
The author goes on to credit the Minsky brothers with a trend towards “high-class”
burlesque, perhaps indicating some awareness that the distinctions between burlesque and
variety shows for middle and upper class audiences were somewhat thin. In the press,
Gypsy’s status as a burlesque performer with broad appeal was consistently defined in
terms of high and low, which is both apt and ironic considering that historically burlesque
performance addressed cultural distinctions. According to Charles Collins of the
Chicago Tribune, Gypsy became the queen of the burlesque stage and later the darling of
the Follies because her striptease act was different. Collins describes Gypsy as an
“ironical undresser; she chatters as she unpins and unsnaps her raiment in a vein which
ridicules the business.”
418
She performs a burlesque of striptease. The article, published
in the Chicago Daily Tribune in January of 1937, features a numbered series of images of
Gypsy that depict various poses in her striptease act (Figure 4.7). Gypsy, gowned in a
lady-like full-length dark skirt and a puffed-sleeve blouse adorned with polka dots and a
large bow, stoops to reveal her leg through a slit in the skirt, and proceeds to remove
items of clothing usually reserved for the final moments of undressing.
Recent scholarship credits Gypsy for bringing striptease out of the margins and
into mainstream culture.
419
Given the exposure Gypsy received in the mainstream press,

417
Ibid.

418
Charles Collins, “Disrobing Act a Feature of Burlesque and Cabaret,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January
31, 1937, E12.

419
Rachel Shteir, Gypsy, 9. Shteir gives Gypsy a lot of credit in her analysis: “After Gypsy’s triumph,
striptease became more than a crime or a vice. It was now an ironic diversion for middle-class and wealthy
245
it certainly does seem that she brought striptease into the mainstream. However, Gypsy’s
mainstream image as a stripteaser was articulated as “high-class,” “high art,” and as a
humorous, mocking critique of burlesque – in other terms, a burlesque of burlesque.
Figure 4.7: "Disrobing Act a Feature of Burlesque and Cabaret," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 31,
1937.

women, a sly commentary on the rags-to-riches myth, the sort of hoax that the New Yorker could write
about as a universal ideal.” 1-2.
246
Gypsy: The Exception that Reveals the Rules
Gypsy’s burlesque gimmick relied on the various means she employed to
demonstrate her awareness of her status as sex object and to poke fun at the audience
paying to view her as such. Gypsy describes the last chorus number in her burlesque act,
which “hasn’t varied much with years” and is “one of partial undress”: “Clutching the
velvet curtain in one hand, the last shreds of my costume in the other, I had one line of
dialogue to deliver: ‘Oh, boys, if I take that off, I’ll catch cold!’”
420
In a magazine that
celebrated all things burlesque, the climax of Gypsy’s act is described, “Gypsy Rose Lee
was noted for her ‘parade number,’ but when it came time to untie the string to get to the
‘G’ string, her specialty was having her garment full of straight pins, which she would
throw to the orchestra, and you could hear them rebounding off the brass section.”
421
In
both examples, Gypsy draws attention to the tease of her striptease. The emphasis is not
on the body that is revealed, but on the artifice that hides a presumably naked female.
After an unsuccessful attempt at Hollywood stardom, Gypsy returned to New
York and rebuilt her image as a queen of burlesque striptease. By this time,
Commissioner Moss and Mayor LaGuardia had successfully restricted burlesque theatre
in New York, and it would soon be banned from New York altogether.
422
This did not
mean that burlesque style performances disappeared from the New York scene; a middle
and/or upper class audience that included both men and women seemed to render

420
Gypsy Rose Lee, “My Burlesque Customers,” American Mercury, November 1942, 549. From the
Gypsy Rose Lee Archive, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.

421
“’G-String’ Not For Tying Packages Or . . . Flying A Kite,’” Cavalcade of Burlesque, Fall 1951, 12.

422
See Chapter 3 of this dissertation for more on the downfall of burlesque theatre in New York.
247
striptease a more acceptable entertainment. A 1940 program cover for producer Mike
Todd’s Streets of Paris at the New York World’s Fair announces the title of the show and
depicts Gypsy perched on the edge of a small table wearing a close fitting dark hat with a
dark lace mantilla, dark gloves, bra, garter belt, stockings and, of course, heels (Figure
4.8). Perhaps the black undergarments are meant to suggest Parisian sophistication,
while the headdress, the heels, and Gypsy’s uncomfortable tabletop perch again draw
attention to the artifice of both the pose and the state of undress. Todd presented Hot

Figure 4.8: Program for Streets of Paris, New York World's Fair, 1940. From Stripping Gypsy.
Mikado during the first year of the fair, but decided to put on a production that might
compete with all of the women in bathing suits in Billy Rose’s Aquacade for the fair’s
second year.
423
Todd’s answer was to do something with striptease. Streets of Paris was
a variety production and included Gypsy’s best known striptease, “A Stripteaser’s
Education,” (known later as “The Psychology of a Strip-Tease Dancer”) in which Gypsy

423
Frankel, Stripping Gypsy, 104-107.
248
studiously recounts all of the intellectual things she’s thinking about while she removes
her clothes, but ends with the punch line, “Do you think for one moment that I’m
thinking of sex? . . . Well, I certainly am.”
424

Gypsy continued to work with Todd. A review of Gypsy’s performance of
striptease in Michael Todd’s 1941 floor show at his Theater Café nightclub in Chicago
pays homage to her abilities of as a satirist of her own art:
With her tongue in her cheek about the whole thing, she refuses to let even
the slightest suggestion of pruriency or lewdness color the deft but mechanical
process by which she divests herself of her garments, one by one.
Like a magician giving away his secrets, she shows us how her trick is
done. There is no meaning to this, she seems to say, unless you yourself choose
to put it there. Yet in spite of its cool realism, her act is a good one, for she
performs with the economy of device and the exact projection of a genuine
artist.
425

Cecil Smith’s review for the Chicago Tribune serves as a contemporary reading of
Gypsy’s act as one that reveals the artifice of the tease and the sexual suggestiveness that
drives it as well as hinting that the audience supplies any salaciousness, a regular defense
employed on behalf of the double entendre in burlesque shows.
Another aspect of Gypsy’s metaburlesque that I alluded to earlier in the
discussion of her publicity photographs is class. Gypsy cultivated her own rags to riches
story in the media, but her over the top display of her own wealth in conjunction with her
nudity, or in the case of the photo spread published in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1937,

424
See Frankel, Stripping Gypsy for an extended reading of this performance in which she argues that
Gypsy offers the viewer a psychological striptease. She goes on to contend that the final line of the
performance let the male audience in on the joke, reassuring them that of course, she is thinking about sex.
The final line also lets the female audience, which she would have had at the fair, in on the joke as a
“parody of sexual submission” in which the woman is actually in control. 107-109.

425
Cecil Smith, “Gypsy Rose is a Satirist of Her Own Art,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 2, 1941, 15.
249
her inverted striptease act, in her publicity photos reveals that the indicators of class are
just another mask, an artificial device. Gypsy Rose Lee, a 1943 Chinese ink and
watercolor painting by Reginald Marsh depicts an elaborate production number in Mike
Todd’s Broadway production of Star and Garter starring Gypsy Rose Lee (Figure 4.9).
By 1943, burlesque was banned from the New York stage, but one could spend a lot more
money to see what was essentially burlesque on the Broadway stage. Marsh, whose
interests as an artist were in lower class entertainments, titles this work with the name of
the performer rather than the theatre or the production. An elaborate series of ramps and
curved columns of the set design suggest the expense of the production, as does the sheer
number of chorus girls parading on the stage. All of the figures are costumed in briefs
and brassiere type bodices with wing-like elements flying over the girls’ shoulders. All
wear large picture hats with an exaggerated, rakish tilt. The performers wear gloves, and
high heels and garters emphasize the sea of long legs displayed from leg to hip. The
figures look like caricatures of high society women, except that they forgot their dresses.
One girl on the left in the foreground even carries a muff. Although the painting is titled
Gypsy Rose Lee, none of the figures stand out clearly as the star. Marsh’s women tend to
look alike, and this proves true even in his depiction of the famous stripteaser. One
figure stands slightly apart on the right of the image in the foreground. Her hair is dark
and her features might be construed as Gypsy’s. Although a clear portrait is not evident
in Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy’s burlesque of the artificial distinctions that mark class is
apparent in the image.
250
Figure 4.9: Reginald Marsh, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1943.
Marsh’s depiction of Gypsy, the burlesquer who “lifted” striptease out of
burlesque, is particularly prescient in 1943. Marsh, who was raised comfortably and
attended Yale, demonstrated a persistent interest in the leisure activities of the working
classes in his oeuvre. An unabashed burlesque-goer, Marsh frequently depicted New
York’s burlesque theatres prior to 1942, particularly those in the lower-class
neighborhoods.
426
After burlesque theatres were forced to close, Marsh followed
burlesque out to New Jersey. Like the reviewers of Star and Garter, Marsh could not
have failed to recognize the irony of a show like Star and Garter, which was just
burlesque in fancier clothes with an exclusive ticket price.

426
See Chapter 3 of this dissertation for more on Marsh’s burlesque works.
251
In his review for the Chicago Daily Tribune of Star and Garter, Burns Mantle
provides a brief review of the history of burlesque in New York and its fairly recent
banishment by Mayor La Guardia and the license commissioners. He states that,
a little to everybody’s surprise it proved to be much better than expected. Rough,
yes; tough, in spots; and pretty terrible comedy; burlesque with all the old-time
trimmings, including as many exhibits of the stripping art as there are strippers
present, but staged with a frankness that minimizes the coarser leers, and with
such bold warnings as should protect everybody, including old ladies from
Dubuque.
427

Described as “neither more nor less than a burlesque show with first-rate production and
performers in place of the shoddy elements associated with this form of entertainment in
recent times,” Star and Garter, at $4.40 a seat, was a success.
428
Though it is noted that
the lewdness of burlesque was somewhat toned down for this show, “the dancers (were)
encouraged to toss themselves at the audience with enthusiasm and vigor, and the puritan
who strays into the Music Box by mistake is in for a rough time.”
429
Star and Garter,
which premiered just months after burlesque was banned in New York City, was a
burlesque show for people with fatter wallets.
430
Gypsy, the headliner of the show, was
not the only stripteaser. Georgia Sothern, Leticia, and Carrie Finnell were all well-known
stripteasers who performed their art in the production. Finnell, who is often credited with
having invented the striptease, was “not particularly young, and quite fat” by the time she

427
Burns Mantle, “Mantle Finds Burlesque Best Theater of the Week,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 5,
1942, F5.

428
Donald Kirkley, “Star and Garter,” The Baltimore Sun, September 9, 1942,16.

429
Ibid.

430
In 1943, Michael Todd and Gypsy signed a “lend-lease” agreement for film rights to Star and Garter.
This type of agreement, which allowed the leaser a limited period of time in which to exercise the film
rights, was fairly revolutionary at the time. A film was never made. Burns Mantie, “Gypsy Rose Lee to
Make Super Burlesque Picture,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1943, D10.
252
performed in Star and Garter, but her display of muscle control as she twirled the tassels
on her pasties in multiple directions at varying speeds remained a draw.
In a review of Star and Garter for the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson refers to
the “illustrious Gypsy,” who “looks upon shedding as a joke”:
When she is restlessly pacing the stage in the ancient ritual of stripping you would
never dream that you are gazing at an author. That is a fine way to feel about a
mistress of pure form. Whether or not Miss Lee’s humorous point of view toward
letting things fall is valid is a topic that could reasonably be argued. She gives
you the technique of stripping without the wickedness.
431

Gypsy’s gimmick in Star and Garter remained the same, and an article that she writes
while she is performing in the show demonstrates her awareness of a false distinction
between productions for the working-class burlesque audience and those for the uptown
crowd. She also demonstrates a willingness to recognize the distinction. In an article for
The American Mercury, titled “My Burlesque Customers,” from November 1942, Gypsy
Rose Lee states that to her, “all audiences are alike.”
432
She argues that she does not
perceive a difference in her audiences no matter the venue or the ticket price, nor is she
interested in the difference.
433
“At present, I’m playing in an uptown, top-price house. A
few years ago, I did much the same act downtown in the old Irving Place Theatre, off
Fourteenth Street. Both audiences seem remarkably similar – it may be that my
particular talents draw the same kind of customers regardless of the price of

431
Atkinson is referring to Gypsy’s 1941 publication, G-String Murders. Brooks Atkinson, “High Cost of
Respectability,” New York Times. September 13, 1942, X1. Atkinson goes on to write, “From the long
point of view that may be wrong and possibly should not be sanctioned. Meanwhile, you have the pleasure
of the gifted Gypsy’s magnetic good nature, not to mention the candor and charm of her lines.”

432
Lee, “My Burlesque Customers,” 548. from Gypsy Rose Lee Archives, Box 45, Folder 16, New York
Public Library. Penciled date indicates ca. 1943 publication.

433
Ibid.
253
admission.”
434
Though she makes it a joke in her article, the excess of the accoutrements
of wealth that Gypsy employed in her performances and her representation of self reveal
these objects as mere props. In Marsh’s Gypsy Rose Lee, the high society hats and gloves
that decorate a swarm of mostly naked chorus girls can be read as a gentle satire of the
artifice of class distinctions. The intellectual striptease gimmick that made Gypsy a
famous performer revealed the chicanery of female spectacle and the fallacy of
distinctions between burlesque and other theatrical forms centered on such spectacles.
Glamorous Girls and Burlesque Queens
Though Gypsy effectively channeled her identity as a burlesque performer into
fame and fortune and even managed, to some extent, to glamorize the genre, she tried
unsuccessfully on multiple occasions to build an identity as a performer apart from
burlesque. She did, however, succeed in unveiling something of the nature of burlesque’s
representations of women. A comparison of representations of women in burlesque and
women in other popular culture mediums will expose how images of Gypsy can be
interpreted not only as a burlesque of burlesque, but also as a mocking imitation of more
mainstream pictures of performing women.
As the premier variety show of the early twentieth century, the elevated Ziegfeld
Follies offered middle and upper class theatre-goers their own version of female
spectacle. The Ziegfeld Girl was a carefully constructed ideal. Florenz Ziegfeld (1967-
1932) was the mastermind of the Follies and the glorified girl. After Ziegfeld’s death in

434
Ibid. Gypsy goes on to describe some of her more memorable customers from the Irving Place and
notes that they have all come to see the show at the more upscale Music Box (where Star and Garter
played at $4.40 a ticket).
254
1932, Lee Schubert bought the rights to produce the Follies. A photograph of Ziegfeld
Girl Drucilla Strain by Alfred Cheney Johnston (1885-1971) shows a slender young
woman, mostly nude, seated in a pose designed to accentuate the shape of her legs and
the line of her back and buttocks (Figure 4.10).
435
Johnston, who was mentored by
family friend Charles Dana Gibson, became the Follies official photographer in 1916, and
it was his job to commit the Ziegfeld ideal to film and inscribe it in the public
consciousness.
436
Strain is posed against a rich fabric that features figures in eighteenth
century clothing engaged in pastoral activities of an idealized past. A sheer black shawl
with beaded decoration and high heels are all that covers the performer’s body, the
profile of which is completely revealed. Strain looks over her shoulder and slightly away
from the photographer/viewer. Despite the fact that no less is exposed in this photograph
of a Ziegfeld girl than in the photographs of Gypsy previously examined, the figure’s
elegant pose, rich accessories, and indirect gaze evoke the high art nude.
Some analysis of the Ziegfeld ideal will illuminate the conventions of that ideal
and how some representations of burlesque queens disrupt those conventions. Early
representations of the Ziegfeld Follies in film and in texts reinscribe the discourse of taste
and sophistication Florenz Ziegfeld engaged to distinguish his productions from
burlesque and vaudeville. Ziegfeld’s use of nudity in his shows deliberately alludes to

435
Alfred Cheney Johnston has been described as “the ‘court photographer’ of the Follies.” See Robert
Hudovernik, Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston
(New York: Universe Publishing, 2006), 36. The image is dated by Hudovernik to circa 1931-34, which
likely corresponds to the years that Strain appeared in the Follies.

436
“Gibson, an accomplished and financially successful artist, was a family friend of Johnston’s and
nurtured his artistic creativity, advising him to take classes in drawing and painting at the same schools
Gibson had attended.” Ibid., 60.
255
art.
437
In his 1906 production, The Parisian Model, Ziegfeld staged an artist’s studio:
“Six girls in long cloaks stood before easels; that is, the easels were between them and
the audience. Suddenly the girls threw off their cloaks and the audience saw gleaming

Figure 4.10: Alfred Cheney Johnston, Drucilla Strain, c. 1931-1934. From Jazz Age Beauties.
bare shoulders and curving bare legs.”
438
Behind the easels, the girls were not actually
naked; they were wearing pinned up strapless gowns that the audience could not see.
This was Ziegfeld’s first presentation of “the illusion of nudity on the legitimate

437
In the opening sentence of her 1956 book, The Ziegfeld Follies, Marjorie Farnsworth describes the
artist/businessman/connoisseur of these elaborate productions as one who had “the master touch of
illusion.” This illusion is defined by Ziegfeld’s ability to distinguish “between desire and lust” and
“between good taste and vulgarity” as well as his self-display. Marjorie Farnsworth, The Ziegfeld Follies
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1956), 11.

438
Ibid., 24.

256
stage.”
439
Ziegfeld’s criteria for selecting his girls were recorded in interviews and
established an ideal. Burlesque came to the Follies well before Gypsy’s arrival in the
figure of Fanny Brice, whom Ziegfeld discovered in a burlesque performance in 1910:
“Her classic burlesque and her artistry of satire became as much a part of the Follies as
sensual allure.”
440
Brice served as a contrast to the glorified girl, entrenching Ziegfeld’s
type as an American ideal.
Ziegfeld’s creation has been described as a cultural icon.
441
In her extensive
analysis of this icon, Linda Mizejewski argues that the sexuality of the Ziegfeld Girl is
contained and differentiated from both ethnicity and comedy.
442
This is an important
distinction between the Ziegfeld Girl and the burlesque queen. Mizejewski notes that this
containment is reliant on glamour, which she describes as, “a fairly modern concept
involving public visibility of a desirable object, its management or control, and its
resulting value as class marker or commodity,” that is dependent on, “both visibility and
inaccessibility, producing the tension of desire.”
443
Glamour is related both to a
consumer aesthetic and the production of celebrity prevalent in the twentieth century.

439
Ibid.

440
Ibid., 50.

441
“My premise is that the Ziegfeld Girl in her many images – fashion model, showgirl, Glorified
American Girl – worked as a powerful icon of race, sexuality, class, and consumerist desires early in this
century, with resonances persisting into the present day.” Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1999), 3.

442
Ibid, 9.

443
Mizejewski, 11. In her footnote on page 201, Mizejewski states her indebtedness to an article by Peter
Bailey titled, “Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype,” published in
1990 in Gender and History.
257
The glamour is produced in part by fashion, where consumer desire and the body meet.
444

Glamour’s function as a means of containing the sexually suggestive female body, the
“desirable object,” and promoting the aspirational markers of class are evident in
Johnston’s portrait of a Ziegfeld girl. Although Gypsy performed in the Follies, both her
image and her performance remained tied to burlesque.
In 1933, Joan Crawford starred with Clark Gable and Franchot Tone in Dancing
Lady, a MGM film about a hard working dancer who is rescued from burlesque and given
a chance to perform on Broadway.
445
The film represents the Ziegfeld-like glorification
of a burlesque performer. Released before the Production Code was enforced in 1934, in
the opening sequence of the film, Crawford’s character, Janie Barlow, is performing in
the chorus during a striptease number.
446
As the lead female sings, they note a group of
well-dressed patrons in the audience. As the chorus parades down two parallel runways,
they pause to remove their skirts (Figure 4.11). Just as they parade back and remove their
bodices, there is a police raid. After she is bailed out of jail by one of the slumming
patrons, Tod Newton (Franchot Tone), Janie decides to leave burlesque and pursue
Broadway success. She uses her connection to the rich Tod Newton to gain an audition

444
Ziegfeld positioned his displays as tasteful commodities for the better classes through rich display in his
presentation of self, the space of the theater, the stage sets, and the costumes that helped to “glorify” the
girls. The best materials were used in Ziegfeld productions, and Ziegfeld used established designers like
Lady Duff Gordon to design the costumes. Ziegfeld girls were expected to present themselves in public in
fashionable and tasteful dress, and Mizejewski points out that she is thus positioned as both consumable
object and consumer. Ibid, 89.

445
The film also features Fred Astaire as himself and the antics of the Three Stooges as stagehands.

446
Known as the Hays code when it was first adopted in 1930, an amendment to the Production Code in
1934 established the Production Code Administration, which required films to acquire a seal of certificate
of approval before their release. The Code was a set of censorship guidelines for the U.S. motion picture
industry that remained in effect until 1968.
258
with Broadway director Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable). The film culminates with Janie’s
performance as the lead in Gallagher’s Follies like production. The final scene in the
production, titled “Rhythm of the Day,” includes artful arrangements of chorus girls in
costumes even more revealing than those in the burlesque number represented at the
beginning of the film. The number culminates with Janie on a carousel horse in center
stage dressed in a sheer, beaded gown. Though filled with scantily clad chorus girls, the
production is presented in the film as a fantastical world distanced from the audience.
Though still a spectacle of the female body, its potential prurience is negated by elaborate
costumes and set design that couch the performance as upper class and artistic.

Figure 4.11: Screen Capture from Dancing Lady, 1933, DVD, Warner Brothers Home Video, 2006.

Crawford, like Gypsy, was a performer who worked hard for her stardom and
cannily used publicity to build her career. Crawford was often cast in rags-to-riches
259
stories in which she played characters who find success through hard work. Crawford
was photographed by George Hurrell (1904-1992), then under contract to MGM, to
publicize Dancing Lady. Hurrell was a well-known Hollywood glamour photographer
who worked with the performers and the studio to create star identities.
447
One of
Hurrell’s publicity photographs for the film shows Crawford on stage, dramatically lit
such that the outline of her body is visible through a sheer, sparkling gown (Figure
4.12).
448
Her slender body is shown in profile on a dramatic set of stairs. Her face is
turned to the viewer and two white columns frame her figure, swathed in an elaborately
beaded, loosely draped gown with a long train. The contrasts between light and dark, the
elaborate production design, and the sumptuous length of fabric that reveals Crawford’s
still form create a glamorous and provocative image, but the effect is sculptural and
reminiscent of the artistic pretensions of a tableau vivant rather than the self-aware tease.
Gypsy’s success in burlesque and the Follies attracted the attention of Hollywood,
and in 1937, 20
th
Century-Fox bought out her contract from the Shuberts. Her image as a
burlesque performer soon became a problem for the Hollywood star makers. An April
1937 article in the Los Angeles Times announced Gypsy’s arrival in Los Angeles to begin

447
For more on George Hurrell, see also George Hurrell, Hollywood Glamour Portraits (Munich: Schirmer
Art Books, 1993) and Mark A. Vieira, Hurrell’s Hollywood Portraits: The Chapman Collection (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997). For more on glamour photography see, Hollywood Glamour 1924-
1956 (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin, 1987); John Kobal and Terence Pepper, The Man Who Shot
Garbo: The Hollywood Photographs of Clarence Sinclair Bull (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); and
Liz Willis-Tropea, “Hollywood Glamour: Sex, Power and Photography 1925-1939” (PhD diss., University
of Southern California, 2008). For more on glamour, see Annette Tapert, The Power of Glamour (New
York: Crown Publishers, 1998. For more on the star system, see Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) and Mick LaSalle, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in PreCode Hollywood
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000).

448
Crawford was one of Hurrell’s favorite subjects because of the regularity of her features, and the two
worked together to create numerous photographs. Vieira, Hurrell’s Hollywood Portraits, 143.
260
her film career and the dictate of studio officials that Gypsy could not even show one
knee in her first picture, the aptly titled, You Can't Have Everything.
449
According to the
Washington Post, 20th Century-Fox received “upward of 4,000 letters” from religious
groups who threatened to boycott films featuring Gypsy.
450
The reporter speculated that
a campaign against Gypsy’s appearance in films, even under the name Louise Hovick,
could cause damage to her film career.
451
In an attempt to avoid any moral backlash, the
studio had decided to use a version of Gypsy’s real name to market her as a Hollywood
star. Gypsy was cast in the role of the vamp in her Hollywood films as Louise Hovick,
but the studio attempted to diminish her burlesque fame. George Hurrell photographed
Gypsy in 1937 for 20
th
Century Fox.
452
She is depicted with an elaborate and somewhat
sleeker hairstyle (Figure 4.13). She is shown seated in a full-length metallic halter dress.
While attention is drawn to her long bare arms, there is nothing of the burlesque queen in
this image. Rather than depict the burlesque star, Hurrell produces a glamorous photo of
Gypsy typical of Hollywood publicity stills. Though certainly characterized as a dark-
haired vamp, this image is far from the leaf festooned body stocking in the 1931 photo of
Gypsy (Figure 4.2) or the fur-draped, confident stripteaser in the 1935 photo (Figure 4.3).
As in the image of Crawford, Hurrell’s Hollywood portrait of Gypsy is one in which the
self-contained pose of the subject and the refined, modern setting effectively distances

449
“Gypsy Rose Lee, Striptease Artist, Arrives for Film,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1937, 2.

450
“’Gypsy Rose Lee,’ Stripper of Burlesque, Finds Her Impediments Many,” The Washington Post, May
28, 1937, 25.

451
Ibid.

452
Photographs labeled “Hurrell” and “2oth Century Fox” with the date 1937 are in the Gypsy Rose Lee
Archive, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.
261
her from the viewer. The incongruities that enliven photographs of Gypsy as a burlesque
star and point to the artifice of glamour are absent in the Hurrell images.

Figure 4.12: George Hurrell, Joan Crawford in Dancing Lady, 1933. From Hurrell’s Hollywood
Portraits.

Figure 4.13: George Hurrell, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1937. Gypsy Rose Lee Archive, Billy Rose Theatre
Collection, New York Public Library.
262
In the Steiner and Bruno of Hollywood portraits of Gypsy, the conventions of
glamour are employed as a joke. Mizejewski discusses camp as a potential discourse for
understanding both representations of the Ziegfeld Girl and her persistence in American
culture. She identifies camp sites as, “power sites, . . . spaces where dominant meanings
and values are challenged and “sent up.”
453
Camp, Mizejewski argues, calls into
question the status of the original – the glorified girl – as the authentic image of sexual,
racial, and class identity. She argues that, “camp as a mode of rereading exposes the
contradictions of bourgeois respectability,” and that, “camp readings seize on rigid and
excessive definitions, especially rigid definitions of sexuality and gender, as reversible
and thus ironic and potentially comic.”
454
Representations of Gypsy Rose Lee, in
Mizejewski’s terms, can be interpreted as a “camp reading” of glamour representations of
desirable ideals. Burlesque, a theatrical form with a long-standing tradition of travesty,
provided an “ironic,” “comic” approach with which to challenge (intentionally or
unintentionally) the conventions of glamour images. Gypsy’s ironic performance of
nudity and legibly coy and excessive qualities of her publicity photographs unveils the
conventions of glamour. Her humorous approach directly addresses sexual
suggestiveness, which both sustains the erotic charge of her image and makes it
acceptable.

453
Ibid., 196.

454
Ibid., 196-197.
263
Gypsy and the Art of Burlesque Self-Representation
Gypsy wore many hats over the course of her career: burlesque performer, movie
actress, Follies and Broadway star, author, TV host, and even artist. Her friends,
acquaintances and lovers ran the gamut from mobsters to the cultural elite. Her
endeavors seem always to have been received through the lens of her burlesque
performance. Though this may have been a source of frustration for Gypsy, she never
failed to capitalize on it. Gypsy’s first book was published in 1941 after her World’s Fair
triumph. She wrote this first and most successful book, The G-String Murders, while she
lived for a year at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn with Jane and Paul Bowles, Carson
McCullers, W.H. Auden, and Benjamin Britten.
455
With the guidance of editor George
Davis, she created a detective story in which she is the narrator and main character. The
book was fairly well received and became a bestseller, making sales history among
mysteries.
456
Gypsy established herself as an author and garnered some favorable
reviews, but she did so in such a way as to solidify her image as a burlesque stripteaser.
Gypsy, a wry portrait by photographer Arnold Newman (1918-2006) commissioned by
the subject in 1945, shows a fully clad Gypsy lounging in front of her collection on a

455
For more on this unlikely communal living situation, see Sherill Tippins, February House (Boston and
New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005).

456
“And Gypsy Rose Lee, who can strip from the inside out, as she did at the World’s Fair, is a national
figure in more ways than one, admired for her wit and intelligence as much as her stage hocus-pocus.
Recently she confounded the intelligentsia by writing a lively book of crime fiction. Although the plot was
intricate, the dialogue was original and the characters were drawn like human beings; and Gypsy had as
much right to speak from the steps of the Public Library during the Victory book drive as many other
authors less famous for their pleasing style.” Brooks Atkinson, “Rumpus in City Hall,” New York Times,
March 22, 1942, X1. The film rights were sold to United Artists, and the book was adapted as Lady of
Burlesque, starring Barbara Stanwyk.
264
chaise, her head in profile with her nose tilted slightly upward (Figure 4.14).
457
Cast in
the role of wealthy society lady in a pose reminiscent of antiquity, Gypsy plays the role to
the hilt, mocking herself and the cultural elite even while establishing herself as a serious
collector.
458

Figure 4.14: Arnold Newman, Gypsy Rose Lee, New York City, 1945.

In addition to her role as collector, Gypsy was an exhibited artist. In 1943, a work
by Gypsy Rose Lee was first shown as part of an exhibition of thirty-one women artists in
Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. A jury including Peggy Guggenheim,
André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, James Johnson Sweeney, and Howard

457
Arnold Newman’s Americans , with essays by Alan Fern and Arnold Newman (Boston, Toronto,
London: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in association with Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown
and Company, 1992), 136.

458
Gypsy’s pose is also reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David’s unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier, a
famous beauty who had ascended from fairly common roots to a position of social prominence.

265
Putzel selected the work in the exhibition.
459
Gypsy’s contribution, titled Self-Portrait, is
a collage in a shadow-box frame (Figure 4.15), which she later exhibits in the Newman
photograph – Self-Portrait is the work just to the left of the lamp.
460
In his review of “31
Women” for the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell devotes a full paragraph to
describing Gypsy’s contribution – more ink than is given to any of the other works in the
exhibition.
461
In a later review, Jewell provides an overall assessment of the works in the
exhibition, “Indeed, many of the paintings in the Art of This Century exhibition are very
skillful and imaginative if sometimes hair-raising too, and as I have hinted, generally
clinical in their bid for the instant attention of all up-to-date psychiatrists.”
462
Jewell was
likely referencing a predominance of surrealist imagery. Gypsy’s Self-Portrait is
certainly in this vein.
463

Her work was pictured in the March 1943 issue of the Surrealist journal, VVV:
Poetry, plastic arts, anthropology, sociology, psychology. David Hare served as the

459
Edward Alden Jewell, “31 Women Artists Show Their Work,” The New York Times, January 6, 1943,
23. Frankel states that her work also appeared in Collage in spring of 1943 and in The Women in the
summer of 1945, both at the Art of this Century gallery. Frankel, Stripping Gypsy, 102. In the Gypsy Rose
Lee Archive in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, there is another image of a
collage with the notation that it is a photo of collage by Gypsy for “31 Women” exhibition at the Art of this
Century Gallery in January 1943. It features disembodied lips, an eye, hands, a horse’s head, grapes,
snakes and both men and women in late nineteenth century dress.

460
The current location/continued existence of this work is unknown.

461
Jewell describes Gypsy’s “self-portrait”: “One could not call this a canvas, because it is really a paste-
up, or “collage,” contrived in a deep shadow-box frame. Miss Lee’s face makes several appearances, once
surmounting a form manifestly not her own, dressed in a Victorian bathing suit. Again she has pasted a
nice dog’s head where one would expect to find hers (the form this time is unmistakably authentic, teasing
along toward the strip). And the foreground is marvelously enriched with a three-dimensional mosaic of
seashells.” Ibid.

462
Edward Alden Jewell, “No Priority on the Spice of Life,” The New York Times, January 10, 1943, X9.

463
This reflects Gypsy’s collecting tastes. Ralph Steiner described Gypsy’s living room as “filled with
terrifying surrealistic paintings . . .” Steiner, A Point of View, 22.
266
editor of the journal, with Max Ernst, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp serving as
editorial advisers.
464
A New York publication with content in both English and French,
the first issue was published in June of 1942. Gypsy’s work appears on the third page of
a section of four pages devoted to images (Figure 4.16).
465
There are three images, Self
Portrait 1942 (Figure 4.15), Gypsy Rose Lee, an uncredited photograph of her in a Star
and Garter costume (Figure 4.17), and Portrait of Gypsy Rose Lee, 1942, by Max Ernst
(Figure 4.18). The Gypsy page features Gypsy’s collage self portrait in the upper left.
The photo is in the upper right, and the largest image on the page is the Ernst portrait in
the bottom center.
In Self-Portrait, a variety of seashells fill the bottom of the shadow box, objects
indicative of nostalgia. Collecting seashells and including them in arrangements in
shadow boxes behind glass was popular with women in the Victorian era. A torn banner
form the tabloid, the Police Gazette, which frequently published pictures of burlesque
performers, is featured at the top center of the self-portrait. A pastiche of images forms
the remainder of the composition, including what is presumably Gypsy’s body clad only
in briefs, a barely there bandeau covering her breasts, and a necklace. The figure has one
arm on her hip – a recognizable Gypsy pose. However, in place of Gypsy’s head is the

464
“Although David Hare was the official editor, the project was really conceived and directed by Breton.”
Isabelle Dervaux, Surrealism USA (New York, National Academy Museum and Hatje Cantz Publishers,
2004), 16. Marcel Duchamp was not listed as an editorial adviser for the June 1942 issue. Each issue had a
specially designed artist’s cover.

465
VVV 1, no. 2-3 (March 1943): 83-86. Gypsy’s work is on page 85. Other artists illustrated in these
pages include, Jacqueline Lamba, Leonora Carrington, Louis Binet, Joe Milone, Breton-Duchamp-
Seligmann, and another photograph of Ficelles de Marcel Duchamp.
267
Figure 4.15: Gypsy Rose Lee, Self-Portrait, 1942 from VVV 1, no. 2-3 (March 1943). Getty Research
Institute.

268

Figure 4.16: VVV 1, no. 2-3 (March 1943). Getty Research Institute.
269

Figure 4.17: Gypsy Rose Lee in Star and Garter from VVV 1 no. 2-3 (March 1943). Getty Research
Institute.

Figure 4.18: Max Ernst, Gypsy Rose Lee, 1942 from VVV 1 no. 2-3 (March 1943). Getty Research
Institute.
270
head of a dog shown in profile; the stripper’s recognizable body is paired with the head of
a domestic animal. The dog wears the enormous hat that was part of one of Gypsy’s
most recognizable costumes. Situated in the center of the composition is a larger cut out
image of Gypsy’s head pasted over what appears to be a newspaper with the text, “ter
Winchell” visible beneath the disembodied head. This is likely Walter Winchell, the
syndicated newspaper columnist. Above this is another figure of a woman pasted at an
odd angle. The woman is dressed in a costume that looks like it belongs to turn-of-the-
century burlesque. This cutout speaks to the tradition of representation of women in
burlesque, but the head appears to by Gypsy’s. Some minor characters in the self -
portrait are a policeman, a sailor with a spyglass, and other small male figures as well as
quite a few fish. On the right, a tiny image of Gypsy’s head is positioned atop the
disproportionably large figure of a woman with big hips and shoulders in a Victorian
bathing costume and black stockings. Newspaper articles line the sides of the interior of
the shadow box. In Self-Portrait, Gypsy examines her identity as a product of her press.
She depicts herself as an object to be looked at but then asserts some control in the
spectator/spectacle dynamic by duplicating and creating a pastiche that reveals the
construction of her image and obscures her desirability. She also represents herself as a
woman of the past with references to a bygone era when female spectacle and a more
literate burlesque first took the stage.
The photographic portrait (Figure 4.17) in the right hand corner of the VVV page
shows Gypsy with her body turned to the left of the image and her head turned toward the
viewer. She is wearing patterned fishnets shown off by a raised knee. Her torso and
271
arms are covered in the same stocking material, and she appears to be wearing some sort
of covering on her breasts. That covering is hidden by her arm, which is lifted to touch
the large feather hat perched atop her head. A long train of a pale colored tulle like
material in elaborate ruffles hangs from her backside and trails to the edge of the picture
frame. She appears as if she is giving a jaunty salute and has halted an exaggerated
march mid-stride. The somewhat unnatural looking pose and the exaggerated details of
costume that allude to the upper-classes but are incongruous in their excess and in their
relation the figure’s state of undress are characteristic of publicity images for Gypsy
analyzed in this chapter. The costume pictured here is the same costume pictured in
Gypsy’s collage. The placement of this image with Gypsy’s Self-Portrait seems to point
the stripper’s disassembling and duplication of her own image. Simultaneously, the
publicity photo is imbued with the disjointed quality of the collage.
The third and largest image on the page in VVV is Max Ernst’s portrait of Gypsy
(Figure 4.18). Gypsy collected Ernst’s work. In Ernst’s portrait, Gypsy’s head with her
signature hairstyle is framed by an elaborate lacy, leaf-like frame. Her head is very
slightly turned so that she does not look directly out at the viewer. Her torso is elongated
and the pale skin peaks out behind another, more rounded lacy fan, which reveals and
emphasizes the curve of her hip and thigh. Her torso is twisted such that her hip and
thigh (almost in a seated pose) are shown in profile. Her hips seem exaggerated
compared to her torso and the small head. Costume is replaced by a fantastical mermaid-
like decoration reminiscent of the most elaborate of Ziegfeld’s productions. This
ornamentation binds the figures legs and seems to lift Gypsy’s head away from her body.
272
In this portrait, the leafy fan-like objects serve as both mask and frame, but they are pure
fantasy. Theatre historian Rachel Shteir rightly notes that Ernst’s portrait of Gypsy is
different from all the other images of her, but goes on to extend her reading into a fantasy
of “the Gypsy who might have been” and argues that Ernst “divorces Gypsy from her
burlesque past and striptease . . .”: “More mermaid or ghost than human, Ernst’s Gypsy, a
phantasmagoric creature covered with either feathers or scales, floats through macabre,
mossy landscapes.”
466
In the context of the page in VVV, it is impossible to divorce
Gypsy from “her burlesque past.” Also, Ernst’s portrait so readily evokes images of the
Ziegfeld Girl that this painting remains firmly in the realm of commercial female
spectacle. The fantastical qualities of the image are more usefully read as informative in
their artificiality; the exaggerated fantasy of the image highlights the unreal quality in
popular representations of Gypsy.
A few scholars have discussed Self-Portrait. In her brief analysis of the work in a
recent publication on Gypsy, Shteir writes that the collage, “articulates the failure of
Gypsy’s cobbled-together selves to cohere.”
467
This argument is somewhat specious as it
hangs on an interpretation of Gypsy’s biography in which her dissatisfaction with the
persistence of her identification with burlesque is understood. Regardless of whether or
not Gypsy was dissatisfied with her public/private persona(s), she was highly aware of
the usefulness of visual media in the creation of a public (performative) image. Art
historian Jennifer Blessing’s argument presents a reading that is far more useful to my

466
Shteir, Gypsy, 137-138.

467
Ibid., 136. Noralee Frankel reads Self-Portrait as reflective of Gypsy’s ambivalence towards the display
of her own body. Stripping Gypsy, 102.
273
own. In her essay, “The Art(ifice) of Striptease,” Blessing argues that Gypsy’s, “use of
her own life and her own body as the subject of her performance and her art has
implications for contemporary entertainers and (performance) artists who express
themselves autocorporally, raising questions about the representation of the female body,
the nature of spectatorship, and female agency.”
468
Blessing couches her analysis in
psychoanalytic feminist film theory and Roland Barthes’ brief essay on striptease to
establish the notion of femininity as masquerade and the act of striptease as a
masquerade.
469
For Blessing, Gypsy and her colleagues in the art of striptease are
“female female impersonators,” and she goes on to explain that the striptease performer,
“enacts the image of his (the male spectator’s) desire, which is not to say that her identity
is equivalent with the identity that she constructs on stage.”
470
I would argue that
Blessing’s notion of “female female impersonators” is material when there is an
awareness of the masquerade on the part of the impersonator. The exaggerated
femininity of the striptease performance, often punctuated by humor, is a means for the
performer to “derive a modicum of control of her representation within the spectacle.”
471

Blessing uses Bakhtin’s analysis of Rabelaisian carnivalesque as a model for her

468
Jennifer Blessing, “The Art(ifice) of Striptease: Gypsy Rose Lee and the Masquerade of Nudity,”
Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach, ed. Lisa Rado (New York and London:
Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997), 48. Blessing’s approach is psychoanalytic and dependent on feminist film
theory. She ultimately compares Gypsy’s burlesque performance to contemporary performance art. She
argues that, “In Contemporary performance art, the female artist has the ability to sustain the representation
of a powerful and assertive vision of the female body and female agency,. .” and that in, “erotic
performance,” which is bound by “heterosexual male imperatives,” there are “gaps and ruptures in the
spectacle” that the female performer might address. 58.

469
Ibid., 48-49.

470
Ibid., 50.

471
Ibid.
274
argument that “striptease could pose a challenge through masquerade, parodistic
language, and the apotropaic act of unveiling” to bourgeois behavioral norms as an act
with “symbolic significance”.
472
In my argument about representations of Gypsy, it is
the instances when the masquerade is made visible that challenge viewing norms. I
would also argue that while striptease does potentially challenge bourgeois behavioral
norms, this challenge was typically neutralized by the persistent association of burlesque
with prurient interests of the lower classes.
In her description of Gypsy’s Self-Portrait, Blessing describes the space of the
self-portrait: “A theatrical space is created within the box using a reproduction of the set
from Star and Garter, in which Gypsy was appearing when this piece was made, as a
point of departure.”
473
This interpretation of the space is suggested by the corncob
columns on the left of the image and the arrangement of the two main figures, and it
certainly makes sense given Gypsy’s public identity and the numerous references to her
performances in the image. Continuing with a Freudian reading of Gypsy’s
representation of self, Blessing notes that Gypsy’s self-portraits “seems littered with
rudimentary phallic symbols” – the paddles, the fish, other column-like objects.
474
While
nothing precludes the reading of these objects as phallic, the author ventures down the
psychoanalytic rabbit-hole: “The foregrounding of symbols of castration anxiety in the

472
Ibid., 51-52. Blessing argues that, Gypsy’s incorporation of her “The Psychology of the Stripteaser”
into her undressing act calls attention to Gypsy’s awareness of herself as spectacle; her speech act was an
essential element of her self-representation.” 52-53.

473
Ibid.,, 54.

474
Ibid., 54-55. She discusses Freud’s explanation of “the fetishistic aspect of the symbol,” and argues that
the repetition of the phallic symbols as well as the disembodied heads of audience members that appear in
the image at the feet of the figure in Gypsy’s Star and Garter costume, “obliquely suggest decapitation and
thus castration in a Freudian interpretation.”
275
box suggests the fundamental psychoanalytic dynamic of striptease, which is exaggerated
in a humorous way.”
475
For Blessing, castration anxiety is essential to her reading of the
striptease as masquerade. I read the evidence of masquerade in representations of Gypsy
and in her representation of self in the way that these images seem to delight in the
superficial and in the constant play of symbols of class and sexual suggestiveness. Her
references to female spectacle of the past in her own self-presentation and in her collage
as well as Ernst’s Midnight Follies-esque portrait draw attention to a history of female
spectacle and further a reading of intentionality and gently subversive irony in
representations of Gypsy.
Burlesque Representations and the Specter of Pornography
Even while Gypsy was establishing herself as a burlesque performer for the smart
set and images of her could be seen in mainstream publications and even in the art
gallery, the majority of her fellow burlesque queens were more likely to be featured in
men’s magazines. Gypsy Rose Lee, one of burlesque’s most refined and socially
acceptable queens, did not escape pornographic representation even though she herself
carefully negotiated the line between sexual suggestiveness and obscenity. The
association of burlesque with obscenity has a long history and has been discussed in
previous chapters of this dissertation. Pornography, which is generally defined as
representations produced for no other purpose than to stimulate sexual desire in the
viewer, is relevant to an analysis of burlesque representation. As burlesque performance
was long plagued by accusations of obscenity and its female performers were connected

475
Ibid., 55.
276
to long-standing notions about women in theater and prostitution, it is important to
examine how representations of burlesque, and in particular, female burlesque
performers, may have been understood in relation to pornography. The legal circulation
of pornographic material is fraught with the complicated history of obscenity laws in the
United States. With the invention of halftone printing in 1880, photographs could be
quickly and cheaply reproduced and widely distributed. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, magazines aimed at a male audience with titles like Figure Photography and
Nude Living reproduced images of nude or nearly nude women that circulated legally by
asserting a pretense of artistic value or naturism. Burlesque performers sometimes posed
for these publications, which were considered by some to be pornographic. Of course,
many publicity images of female burlesque performers like those discussed throughout
this dissertation also existed on the boundaries or in the realm of what many crusaders
declared obscene.
In addition to their prominent display at the front of the burlesque theatres
themselves, photographs of burlesque dancers and stripteasers in revealing costumes
were reproduced in trade journals and tabloids. One popular publication that featured
photographs of burlesque dancers and stripteasers was the Police Gazette, a publication
that was popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was similar
to the most lurid of today’s tabloids.
476
These images were also sometimes published in
more respectable mainstream magazines and newspapers, as exemplified by some of the
photographs of Gypsy discussed earlier in this chapter. Beyond these margins and, I

476
The National Police Gazette began publication in 1845. It had significantly declined in popularity by
the Great Depression.
277
would argue, reflective of the unfulfilled sexual suggestion of burlesque performance and
of the pervasive stigma of obscenity associated with burlesque and its representations are
examples of black market pornographic materials that use burlesque and burlesque
performers as their subject.
Gypsy stars as the main character in “Gypsy Rose Lee in Burlesque” (Figure
4.19) and “Hotel Room” (Figure 4.20), both dated to approximately 1935.
477
These are
just two examples of eightpagers (Tijuana Bibles) that use burlesque and/or burlesque
performers to create a brief, sexually explicit, illustrated narrative.
478
In “Gypsy Rose
Lee in Burlesque,” the crudely drawn comic sequence begins when Gypsy leaves the
stage and speaks with a new stagehand. A brief conversation of thinly veiled double
entendres results in the two adjourning to Gypsy’s dressing room for “lunch” – mutual
oral sex and intercourse. In “The Hotel Room,” because no other men are around, Gypsy
puts an old bellhop through his paces after he brings her a drink. The implication is that
the burlesque performer can’t get through a lunch break or an evening without the
services of a man. In both examples, genitals make an appearance by the third frame, and
slang terms are used to describe said genitals. The sex acts discussed in the bubbles are
simply, but explicitly drawn.

477
A selection from each of the eightpagers is illustrated.

478
According to Shawn Wilson, a librarian at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and
Reproduction, eightpagers were known as Tijuana Bibles because it was speculated that they were
produced there. These were underground publications, and there are numerous stories about their
production, including that Disney cartoonists may have worked on some of them. These books were also
known as, “Eight-Pagers, Two-by-Fours, Gray-Backs, Bluesies, Jo-Jo Books, Tillie-and-Mac Books, Jiggs-
and-Maggie Books, or simply as Fuck Books.” Bob Adelman, ed., Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in
America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930-1950s, with an introductory essay by Art Spiegelman, commentary by
Richard Merkin, and an essay by Madeline Kripke (New York: Simon & Schuster Editions, 1997), 6.
278
Eightpagers are comic book pamphlets produced mainly from the 30s to the early
50s. Art Spiegelman speculates that approximately 700-1000 different eightpagers were
published, and he describes these pamphlets as “cheerfully pornographic and downright
illegal”.
479
In an age when hard-core pornography is easily accessible, the racial slurs
and sexist attitudes in Tijuana Bibles might be more shocking to viewers today than the
cartoons themselves. They were poorly printed with high black or blue ink on white
paper, four inches high by three inches wide, and one panel per page.
480
They were
distributed under the table and often used public figures and characters from other
popular visual media like the newspaper comics.
481
Characters like Archie and Veronica,
Jiggs and Maggie, and Mickey and Minnie are depicted engaged in graphic sexual
activities. Though crude, the language employed is often dependent on double meanings.
Given the use of both real and fictional figures from popular culture and lowbrow humor
in the creation of a prurient medium, Tijuana Bibles might themselves be described as
burlesques. With their cheap, underground production, anonymous authorship, and
cartoon drawing style, eightpagers offered no pretension of a redeeming aesthetic or
cultural value; they can easily be categorized as pornographic. Given the well-
established association of burlesque theatre with obscenity, the use of Gypsy Rose Lee
and other burlesque figures and scenarios in Tijuana Bibles is not nearly as bizarre as
Veronica inviting Archie over to her apartment for oral sex and intercourse. Such

479
Spiegelman, Introductory Essay to Tijuana Bibles, 5.

480
Spiegelman, introductory essay to Tijuana Bibles, 6. Spiegelman notes that “the Tijuana Bibles were
the very first real comic books in America to do more than reprint old newspaper strips, predating by five
or ten years the format we’ve now come to think of as comics.” 5.

481
Ibid.
279
representation was just an extension of the sexualization of the burlesque performer on
stage. “Gypsy Rose Lee in Burlesque” and “The Hotel Room” represented the
fulfillment of what is suggested by striptease and burlesque dancing and humor and a
failure of the boundaries of the performer/spectator relationship.

Figure 4.19: Gypsy Rose Lee in Burlesque, c. 1935. Eightpager Collection, Kinsey Institute for
Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

Figure 4.20: The Hotel Room c. 1935. Eightpager Collection, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex,
Gender, and Reproduction

280
During and after WWII, when men’s magazines proliferated, pinup style
photographs of semi-nude burlesque performers appeared in many of these publications
for which the implied viewer was a heterosexual male. At this time, the striptease
completely dominated what remained of burlesque theatre, and the theatres were rapidly
disappearing. Strippers worked nightclubs and fairs, venues where there were even fewer
restrictions on the performance or, at least, where fewer restrictions were enforced. More
readily available in the open market than eightpagers, burlesque queens in men’s
magazines following the war were represented in a manner that was suggestive rather
than explicit. Publications like Cavalcade of Burlesque and Cabaret Quarterly in the
1950s that celebrated burlesque featured numerous pictures of striptease performers in
revealing costumes and sometimes with bare breasts.
482
The first volume of the Cabaret
Yearbook features Steiner’s Gypsy and Her Girls (Figure 4.1), but the images of popular
50s strippers that fill out the rest of the publication are for the most part far more bare and
suggestive.
483
The “Special Resort” issue features a topless image of Dixie Evans, who
was known as the Marilyn Monroe of burlesque (Figure 4.21). Monroe was a favorite

482
The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction has copies of these publications in
their collection. Both publications seem to have had fairly short runs. The first issue of Cavalcade of
Burlesque was published in Fall of 1951. The collection includes copies of Cabaret Quarterly and Cabaret
Yearbook. Not all volumes are dated. Judging from those that are, I would guess that publication began
around 1954.

483
Steiner’s photograph appeared in the first volume of the magazine Cabaret. The image illustrated a
story titled “Stars Paid Truly Fabulous Salaries” that describes Las Vegas as a goldmine for celebrity
performers. The caption reads, “Strippers often get star billing at Las Vegas. Gypsy Rose Lee brought four
with her in Rolls Royce to play gambling town . . .” “Stars Paid Truly Fabulous Salaries,” Cabaret
Yearbook 1, n.d., 26.
281
pinup subject, and in the Cabaret image, Dixie, her burlesque doppelganger, bares her
torso in a pose evocative of the film icon for the pleasure of the burlesque aficionado.
484

The first issue of Cavalcade of Burlesque features an image of Gypsy Rose Lee
on the cover, with the subtitle, “History of Burlesque, Past and Present – 200 Gags and
100 Dolls.” In their introduction to the publication, Abbott and Costello define burlesque
as, a play of words based upon situations, dealing primarily with the most talked about
and written subject ‘Sex and its Human Behavior’, interspersed with laugh provoking
props, mingled generously with up-to-date music, and peopled by mirth provoking

Figure 4.21: Dixie Evans, "The Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque," Cabaret Quarterly.

484
Dixie Evans is now the curator of the Burlesque Hall of Fame. She imitated Monroe’s voice and
mannerisms in her striptease performance, and she will still do her imitation when she talks about her
career.
282
comics and girls attired in flashing wardrobes accentuating modern dances, wearing no
less covering than is seen on present day beaches.” While this description evinces a
nostalgia for a burlesque that successfully blended female spectacle and laughs and an
effort to represent a heroic burlesque history inclusive of its contemporary iterations in
the 1950s, a great many pages are devoted to nearly nude photographs of dubious artistry.
Cavalcade was published in Pennsylvania by the Burlesque Historical Company. The
introductions and articles offer nostalgia and often feature male comedians who got their
starts in burlesque. The editorial point of view is overwhelmingly male.
485
The May
1952 issue of the publication features a cover image of star stripper Georgia Sothern, a
contemporary of Gypsy, holding a phone to her ear and wearing nude fishnets, a brief
white lace halter over her breasts, and more white lace draped over her hip bones and
falling between her legs (Figure 4.22).
486
The phone was a regular prop in the pinup
genre and suggests a dialogue between the image and its viewer.
487
On opening this issue,
one is confronted with a photo spread of four (un)costumed strippers (Figure 4.23).
Provocative images of burlesque queens are the dominant visual impression. One might

485
A quarterly publication, the executive director of Cavalcade of Burlesque was Jess Mack, who
performed as a straight man in burlesque.

486
Another photograph of Georgia Sothern in this costume is credited to Bruno of Hollywood. Sothern,
born Hazel Anderson, began her career in vaudeville as a child performer. She started performing
striptease on the burlesque stage in 1931at the age of 13 and quickly received top billing. Sothern was
known for working very fast; her dancing style was extremely energetic. She also appeared in Star and
Garter with Gypsy and in the play written by Gypsy, The Naked Genius. Jane Briggeman, Burlesque: A
Living History (Albany, Georgia: BareManor Media, 2009), 228-229.

487
For more on this reading see Despina Kakoudaki, “Pinup: The American Secret Weapon in World War
II,” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 347-348.
She notes that Alberto Vargas incorporated the telephone in his imagery as early as 1922 and the references
to the telephone are prominent in “soft-core imagery,” becoming a feature of George Petty’s pinups in
1935.
283
argue that the context of the men’s magazine more firmly entrenches representations of
burlesque queens as objects to stimulate male arousal and that the active, speaking
potential exemplified by some images of Gypsy is negated by their use as pornography.

Figure 4.22: Cavalcade of Burlesque, May 1952.

Figure 4.23: Cavalcade of Burlesque, May 1952.

284
Despina Kakoudaki’s essay on the pin-up in WWII offers a useful paradigm for
understanding the liminal space between pornography and mainstream acceptability that
revealing photographs of female burlesque performers seem to occupy. Kakoudaki
argues that, “Soft-core images such as the pinup have a wide range of cultural uses
because of their ability to both ‘pass’ for mainstream images and to retain the excitement
and explicit sexuality of their pornographic component.”
488
Kakoudaki goes on to
identify the trouble with identifying “the function of the pinup through a visual
pornographic vocabulary (certain poses or certain clothes),” because the pornographic
element is located in the ‘interaction between the image, the caption, the magazine
context, the assumed or implied viewer, and a rhetoric of female exclusion.”
489
In
Kakoudaki’s analysis, the pinup itself is not pornographic; the context of the men’s
magazine and the effective silencing of the female voice are also necessary elements.
Though men’s magazines and the images that circulate in them do not exist in a
cultural vacuum, Kakoudaki argues that the viewers understand that the terms of address
in this context “are usually gender specific.”
490
This same argument could be made for
the burlesque theatre as a male (working class) space. Even if elements of subversion can
be read in burlesque performance and representations of burlesque theatre, in a space
dominated by a paying male audience and in publications geared to the male patron, the

488
The author presents a close reading of the George Petty and Alberto Vargas pinups published in Esquire
an the mobilization of these images as American morale boosters for the military industrial complex in
WWII. She links the pervasive sexuality of the pinup and its ability to “pass” in mainstream media to
selling power. Ibid., 344.

489
Ibid., 349.

490
Ibid.
285
male specific viewer is probably in on the joke. As burlesque theatres folded in the
1950s, the striptease (with far less emphasis on the tease) could still be found in
nightclubs, and its performers were represented in softcore pornography – both
photographs and films.
Burlesque in the Mainstream
Representations of burlesque striptease could be found in more mainstream media
as well. Around the same time that Steiner’s Gypsy and Her Girls appeared in Cabaret,
it was used in an advertisement for Springmaid Fabrics (Figure 4.24). The dress Gypsy
wore for Steiner’s shoot has been replaced with a lighter, strapless dress to advertise a
wrinkle resistant fabric. Though the photograph is altered somewhat, this demonstrates
that an image that burlesques burlesque can be read differently in a more mainstream
context. Images of burlesque queens in popular publications, like representations of
burlesque produced by print and paint artists for an audience that is not necessarily the
burlesque audience, offer broader interpretive scope. Gypsy Rose Lee is an example of a
burlesque performer who was represented as such in mainstream popular culture. In this
ad, Gypsy is identified in the caption as a “famous author, actress, and ecdysiast.” The
term ecdysiast was coined by famous critic H.L. Menken in 1940. From the Greek for
“to molt,” Mencken invented the word in a rather facetious response to a request from
burlesque queen Georgia Sothern to come up with a more acceptable term to replace
strip-teasing. Gypsy was not a fan of this term and mocked “Mencken’s
pretentiousness.”
491
The use of the term in this advertisement is very likely intended to

491
Frankel, Stripping Gypsy, 109-110.
286
avoid the vulgarity of stripper or stripteaser. Oblique, tongue-in-cheek reference to
Gypsy’s most famous skill is also found in the first sentence below the larger text in
which Gypsy supposedly states, “A tousled torso is a serious liability in my profession.”

Figure 4.24: Advertisement for Springmaid Fabrics, c. 1950s, in Stripping Gypsy.
The irony of an advertisement for fabric that features a woman best known for taking
things off is emphasized in the ad’s text. Burlesque, in the form of its most famous
queen, was burlesqued in the service of mainstream advertising for a female consumer.
The send-up of suggestive imagery and class in Gypsy and Her Girls and the tangible
287
artifice of the photograph utilizes a burlesque aesthetic of excess, exoticism and humor to
draw the viewer’s attention to the conventions of sexually suggestive representations of
women. What characterizes Gypsy as a burlesque representation is that, as in the
burlesque of the mid nineteenth century, broad satire combined with female spectacle
made for a broad audience. Gypsy’s fame as a stripteaser who actually teased and who
applied burlesque humor to the performance of nudity survived the fall of burlesque in
New York and its gradual decline in the United States.
As exemplified by the example of Star and Garter, burlesque lived on in
Broadway productions and in Hollywood films in nostalgic representations of female
burlesque that often emphasized theatricality but without doubt still capitalized on sexual
suggestiveness. The 1940 Rodgers and Hart production Pal Joey and its subsequent
revivals feature a number called “Zip,” which is a spoof on Gypsy’s “Intellectual
Striptease,” performed by a reporter in a nightclub. In the 1957 film adaptation of Pal
Joey, Vera Simpson (Rita Hayworth), a wealthy socialite and widow who was previously
known as Vanessa the Undresser in New York, performs “Zip” at a high society charity
event she is hosting.
492
At the behest of Joey (Frank Sinatra), the cad, Vera is bound to
perform the act that made her famous for a five thousand dollar donation to her charity.
Singing Gypsy’s famous lines, Vera removes her gloves and artfully maneuvers the train
of her evening gown, a performance that is ultimately warmly received by her wealthy,

492
There are significant differences between the Rodgers and Hart musical and the film version. In the
film, Joey comes to San Francisco for a break. He meets ingénue Linda at a low down nightclub where he
gets a job through pure moxie. He performs with the band at a charity event hosted by Vera Simpson, who
is a widow rather than a cheating wife, and who is also a former striptease artist.
288
classy audience. At the end of the film, Vera turns out to be a former stripteaser with a
heart of gold – worldy wise but sympathetic.
In both the stage and film versions of Gypsy, which are based on Gypsy’s 1957
memoir, Gypsy is introduced to burlesque by three aging, brassy stripteasers whose
gimmicks are so over the top that the ridiculous effect almost overtakes the performance.
Nudged into striptease when the star stripper is arrested for soliciting, Gypsy’s path to
stardom begins. On the stage, as Rose says to Herbie in the 1962 film version, “There’s
an invisible wall between her and the audience.” In the film, the gimmick that makes
Gypsy so famous and successful, her use of dialogue and her emphasis on the tease, is
used to challenge this wall and confront the audience with their desires. Gypsy
emphasizes the combination of wit and suggestive performance in Gypsy’s routine and
her formation as a performer. Mainstream media representations of burlesque
emphasized the excesses of the burlesque aesthetic and the humor that mediated the
sexually suggestive performance. Representations of Gypsy that employ recognizable
excess and incongruity to mock the artificiality of class and the sexually provocative
performing woman epitomize the burlesque aesthetic of popular memory.
289
Conclusion

Since the late 1990s, the growing scholarly interest in burlesque has been
paralleled by the growing popularity of the nostalgic neo-burlesque movement. Both
female and male drag performers have appropriated American burlesque of the striptease
era; claimants range from the performance art of HyperGender to the far more
commercial “alternative” erotica tendered by the Suicide Girls. A poster for the premiere
event of the neo-burlesque movement, the “Exotic World Weekend” sponsored by the
Burlesque Hall of Fame, features a dark-haired striptease dancer with exaggerated curves
dancing on a table for four slobbering wolves (Figure C.1). The dancers hips are thrust
back as if in the midst of a cooch dance and her attire consists of pink pasties with tassels,
a pink g-string, pink heels, and two sheer veils suspended from her waist that are
reminiscent of the exotic costumes of the past. The leering wolves suggest an aggressive
lust that is just barely contained. The wolves clutch their drinks and the tablecloth and
puffs of smoke billow from their nostrils. Garbed in matching suits, the wolves each
wear a Shriner’s red fez adorned with a scimitar, crescent moon, and star. The Shriners
are a Masonic fraternity known for enjoying life’s pleasures as well as for philanthropy.
The fez and its symbols also evoke the near East and thus in this neo-burlesque image,
the spectator’s garb also alludes (though perhaps not intentionally) to a tradition of
exoticism in burlesque representation. As an homage to burlesque representation, the
poster reflects the mission of the Burlesque Hall of Fame of “fostering an appreciation for
290
and understanding of the unique history and heritage of vintage Burlesque.”
493
This
garish image captures the use of humor, exotic elements and exaggerated female display
as well as the carefully mediated tension between spectacle and spectator that
characterize burlesque representation.

Figure C.8: Mitch O'Connell, "Exotic World Weekend 2007," 2007, from Burlesque Poster Design:
The Art of the Tease

493
The Burlesque Hall of Fame [online], Mission Statement, accessed June 1, 2010,
http://www.burlesquehall.com. The Burlesque Hall of Fame, now headquartered in Las Vegas although
there is no exhibition space, was formerly the Exotic World Movers & Shakers’ Burlesque Museum and
Striptease Hall of Fame, which was located in Helendale, California, approximately halfway between Los
Angeles and Las Vegas.

291

The poster for the 2007 Exotic World Weekend effectively exploits nostalgia for a
theatrical form that evolved from the introduction of female spectacle to American
burlesque in the late 1860s. When Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes first
performed in New York in 1868, American audiences were exposed to a titillating
combination of the female body on display and travesty performance. The craze for
collecting cartes de visites , and later, cabinet cards, of public figures helped to circulate
the image of the female burlesque performer beyond the confines of the stage.
Photographs of burlesque actresses like Lydia Thompson often featured the performer in
costume as a particular character in a pose suggestive of the characterization in the
tradition of actor/actress portraits. What distinguished these photographs is the
attentiveness to the display of the body, particularly the legs, in costumes that were
hyper-feminine (even when they were costumes for a male role) with elaborate, often
exotic details.
As the popularity of Thompsonian burlesque waned and the American burlesque
theatre was increasingly associated with the salacious display of the female body and a
lower class male audience at the end of the nineteenth century, theatrical posters for
burlesque companies utilized the figure of the female burlesque performer in revealing
and often over-the-top costumes. This figure was depicted in spectacular exotic settings
and in scenes that playfully render the female performer in a masculine role or engaging
in masculine behavior. Some posters introduced the burlesque spectator to the scene in
the form of male figures who are enraptured and even controlled by the female
performer. As caricatures, these images exaggerated the gender inversions associated
292
with burlesque performance, the glamorous appeal of the female performer, and the
helplessness of the male spectator.
The last decade of the nineteenth century also saw the growing popularity of the
exotic dancer in American culture, which culminated with the Salome craze in the first
decade of the twentieth century. Exotic dancers were featured in a variety of theatrical
venues from high to low. Images of these performers ranged from publicity photographs
to tabloid illustrations to paintings by established and influential American artists. The
exotic, or cooch, dancer was adopted as a feature of the burlesque show. The similarities
between high art and mass media representations of this figure, whose performance
involved sexually suggestive movements and revealing costumes whether in the context
of a Richard Strauss opera or essentially stripped of that context on the burlesque stage,
reveals the permeable boundaries between high and low culture and the broad appeal of
the performing female body.
From the mid-twenties, the cooch dancer and increasingly, the stripteaser reigned
on the burlesque stage. A number of American artists turned to these performances as the
subject for paintings, prints, and illustrations for popular magazines like Vanity Fair. By
this time, burlesque had long been considered low brow, but mainstream publications, the
circulation of prints, and showings of artists’s works brought representations of burlesque
to middle and high brow audiences. Although the treatment of the burlesque theatre as a
setting reflects an interest in depicting contemporary American life for a number of
realist artists, it also afforded an opportunity to view and show the viewing of the female
body in a performance of nudity. In the tradition of the nude, the body is transformed by
293
the artist into a nude, a work of art. Burlesque striptease plays on the tension between
what is hidden and what is revealed by the performing woman, and this tension is as
much the subject in representations of burlesque performers as their flesh and form. The
inclusion of the spectator in many of the images suggests the preponderance of spectacle
in American life and connects the audience represented and the audience of the image,
further blurring the boundaries between high and low.
In her famous burlesque striptease, Gypsy Rose Lee explicitly linked the
performance of nudity to cultural distinctions. As a burlesque performer whose fame
outstripped the limitations of the burlesque stage, Gypsy herself was a mainstream
representation of burlesque even as the theatrical form was fading. Her costume and self-
presentation suggested feminine ideals of the past, references that are repeated in her own
artistic production. As a representation of burlesque, Gypsy brought the subterfuge of the
performing female body to the surface and called mocking attention to the class
distinctions that marked burlesque as low. Representations of Gypsy highlight the
performance, the show of the burlesque queen, which has proved to be attractive in
Broadway and Hollywood depictions of the frequently aspirational figure of the female
burlesque performer.
Representations of burlesque in American art and visual culture engage issues of
art and obscenity, high and low, spectator and spectacle. Images of women in burlesque
simultaneously make use of and challenge conventions for representing the female body
in both popular media and art. As in American burlesque shows, which were dominated
by female spectacle after 1868, representations of women in burlesque performance
294
contravened prevailing mores in American culture regarding nudity and sexual
suggestiveness. The potential of these representations to challenge social and
representational norms was and is complicated by the status of the burlesque performer as
a figure who was distinct from ideals of womanhood and was a commodity, yet not a
prostitute.
The prints, photographs, posters, films and paintings that depicted and/or
promoted burlesque theatre and its female performers employ a number of visual
characteristics that reflected and helped to constitute burlesque as sexually suggestive and
beyond the boundaries of predominant behavior and taste. When on stage, the
movements of the burlesque performer evoke sexual aggression. Images of the
performance often suggest this movement in poses and scenes that bring to mind an
exotic dance or the performer’s progress across a stage. The exotic details of costumes
and props associated with the femme fatale are frequently emphasized in images of
burlesque performers. Excess and exaggeration point to the fallacies of the glamour that
renders the spectacular female figure as an object of desire. The parody and ridicule that
historically defines burlesque as a literary and theatrical form is evident in inversions of
gender expectations and pointed references to class distinctions. Finally, the images
often draw attention to the relationship between the male spectator and the female
spectacle.
These characteristics reveal productive tensions in the representation of women,
although these tensions are ultimately mediated. The movement of the sexually
aggressive burlesque performer is stilled by the image itself. The dangerous appeal of the
295
exoticized performer is negated by her “otherness”, and the exotic eventually becomes an
innocuous trope that signals sexual availability. Burlesque humor often diffuses the
potential threat of the female performer even while it draws mocking attention
conventions of female display, and traditional codes of viewing remain intact despite
attentiveness to the spectatorial relationship.
As burlesque theatre is gradually overtaken by striptease beginning in the 1930s
and eventually fades as a distinct theatrical format in the 1960s, the thin illusion that kept
representations of burlesque on the edge of art, pornography, and transgression seemed to
dissipate. By the 1960s, the burlesque theatre had all but disappeared from the landscape
of American popular entertainment, though the remnants of female spectacle in burlesque
could be found in the Vegas showgirl, the stripper who performed in nightclubs, in
carnivals that featured girl shows, and in nostalgic representations of burlesque in theatre
and Hollywood films.
296
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Appendix
Archives Consulted

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Asset Metadata

Creator Miller, Jennifer Munro (author)

Core Title In the flesh: the representation of burlesque theatre in American art and visual culture

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 09/16/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American burlesque theatre,early 20th century American realist art,late 19th century American visual culture,OAI-PMH Harvest,representations of burlesque queens,representations of performing women

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Meyer, Richard E. (committee chair), Holo, Selma (committee member), Schwartz, Vanessa R. (committee member)

Creator Email jennifermmiller@me.com,jennifmm@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3452

Unique identifier UC1299681

Identifier etd-Miller-4023 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-396449 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3452 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Miller-4023.pdf

Dmrecord 396449

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Miller, Jennifer Munro

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu