Dancing Out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture

Dancing out of Line transports readers back to the 1840s when the craze for social and stage dancing forced Victorians into a complex relationship with the moving body in its most voluble, volatile form. Molly Engelhardt challenges our assumptions about Victorian sensibilities and attitudes toward the sexual/social roles of men and women by bringing together historical voices from various fields to demonstrate the versatility of the dance, not only as a social practice but also as a forum for Victorians to engage in debate about the body and its pleasures and pathologies. Engelhardt makes explicit many of the ironies underlying Victorian practices that up to this time have gone unnoticed in critical circles by partnering cultural discourses with representations of the dance in novels such as Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and Daniel Deronda. She analyzes the role of the illustrious dance master, who created and disseminated the manners and moves expected of fashionable society, despite his origin as a social outsider of nebulous origins. She describes how the daughters of the social elite were expected to u201ccome outu201d to society in the ballroom, the most potent space in the cultural imagination for licentious behavior and temptation. These incongruities fueled the debates and in the process generated new, progressive ideas about the body, subjectivity, sexuality, and health. Dancing out of Line will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Victorian studies, womenu2019s history, the nineteenth-century novel, dance and theater studies, and medicine and literature.

Table of Contents:
* List of Illustrations * Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction: The Natural Accidents of Dancing * Chapter One: Jane Austen and the Semiotics of Dance The Manner of Reading * Chapter Two: Reckless Debutantes and the Spectacle of "Coming Out" * Chapter Three: Sylphs in the Parlor ... Catch Them If You Can * Chapter Four: Seeds of Discontent Dance Manias, Medical Inquiry, and Victorian (Ill) Health * Chapter Five: The Mourning After Dancing the Victorians Past * Coda * Notes * Bibliography * Index

About the Author :
Molly Engelhardt is an assistant professor of English at Texas A & M University–Corpus Christi. She has published works on Jane Austen, dance manias in Victorian medicine, and American cheerleaders and feminists in the 1970s popular press.

Review :
"Like its topic, Dancing out of Line knows how to move: the pacing is brisk, the voice up-tempo, and the historical narrative insistent but light on its feet. In tracing the complex patterns of nineteenth-century dance and its novelistic representations, Engelhardt doesn't miss a step." - Emily Allen, author of Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel