MAUD ALLAN: Acceptable Sexuality? Part 1...

Just a large snippet from a bit of research I did for one of my Masters essays- "Female Sexuality in Soho: "Foreignness", Public Decency and the Visibility of the Female Body in the 20^th-century". It just amazed me how a scantily-clad, orientalised woman was frolicking around on stage, decapitated head in hand, in 1908 West End of London and to boot the "Respectable"classes flocking to see her!! Maud Allan- what a woman huh?!

In 1908 the Palace Theatre, just off Shaftesbury Avenue and on the edge of Soho, welcomed Maud Allan to its stage. She was an interpretive dancer from North America and it was her almost nude performance of "The Vision of Salome" that thrilled the audience, whilst simultaneously arousing concern about her performance. Salome was a Jewish princess in the bible who demanded the head of John the Baptist after her spurned her advances. However, surprisingly Maud's portrayal of Salome did not provoke a public outcry despite the divisive storyline, a considerable lack of undergarments and a sexual undercurrent towards the "Oriental" style of the piece. Instead she received critical acclaim instead. One critic of the Times, a newspaper known for all things cultural for the well-to-do and the socially prominent (a large part of Maud's audience), could barely contain his praise:

"every movement was beautiful. There is no extravagance or sensationalism about Miss Allan's dancing; even when crouching over the head of her victim, caressing it or shrinking away from it in horror... [her performance] is absolutely free of offense." (March 10^th 1908)

Her performances in 1908-09 are not to be underestimated. Maud Allan's display of her body on the public stage was risky as it had only recently just become socially acceptable to be even on the stage, never mind with a stringy bra on, and there was also still a strong association between actresses and prostitution. As Salome, Maud enacted a sexually assertive female and her performance raised fears about female power and sexuality that were already developing due to the suffrage movement (which I shall mention in further detail later on....) Overall the performance did not threaten her audience because she displaced the errant sexuality onto a foreign woman. It was not a 'western' woman. This is an example of how 'foreignness'/cosmopolitanism exploded into popular culture during the Edwardian period and raised the spectre of the racial "other". Middle-class sensibilities could have been offended by the physical appearance as a half-naked woman on stage exuding aberrant sexuality towards the severed head of John the Baptist (at one point almost dry humping it!?), but Maud achieved a precarious balance of notoriety and respectability. She made the 'East' visible to the West, but kept the 'foreignness' separate from herself and the west, so was therefore not upsetting public decency. The cosmopolitan nature of this dance was reliant on a nationalist rhetoric depicting the colonies as female, weak and inferior. This "Orientalism", a discourse through which the "other" is represented by the West as subordinate thereby providing an intellectual foundation for domination, was present in the dance and the Western patriarchal social order of imperial power was maintained. In essence it was not subversive.

As a western woman presenting an 'eastern' woman on stage Maud was in an ideologically difficult position and there was a need to manipulate the rhetoric of separate spheres, of imperial power and of 'foreignness' to keep the "overlapping and mutually reinforcing categories of Western woman and native distinct" (Walkowitz). It is this nationalist discourse that promoted unity in a time of increasing challenge from women in the form of the suffrage movement during the first two decades of the 20^th century. With the increase of public violence from the militants there was a need to reassert clear boundaries of public order and gender roles. A common argument made against women's suffrage was that the female nature was ill-equipped to deal with the rigours of colonialism, therefore, despite the initial appearance of Maud being sexually subversive, the reason her first performances were considered "acceptable" and not contrary to public decency was that she upheld the separate spheres gender ideology.
Allan's successful transformation of what was "Eastern" into "Western" and what was "erotic" into something "spiritual", she is permitted to continue performing her dance.

The pervasive imperial and nationalist discourse running through Britain in the 20^th-century had a huge impact on culture and society. The use of the dichotomy of masculine west and feminine east shows how Maud's performance was socially acceptable and 'safe' once placed within the confines of the pro-West nationalist discourse, or "Orientalism". There was such an omnipresent discourse in Britain at this time about race deterioration and national degeneracy that the foreign 'other' and race and what it meant to be British was already present in the public psyche.
There was simultaneously a fascination with the cosmopolitan and a great deal of suspicion attached to it too. There was a "double-sided cosmopolitanism" towards dance in pre-war Britain (Walkowitz). There was a "convergence of disparate, even antagonistic, geo-political associations", which means that Maud Allan's place within society was subject to social changes. The binary oppositions of male/female, east/west is not static but jostling against one another for redefinition through the suffrage movement and later the First World War. The fact that Maud was a symbol of femininity yet portrayed cosmopolitan sexuality blurs the boundaries the separate spheres and places her in a luminal position. Maud's dance style was 'foreign' and her audience was mixed due to the Palace Theatre's location on the perimeter of Soho, yet she conducted herself outside the theatre, in public, as adhering to the ideology of separate gender roles denouncing the suffrage movement, thus separating herself from the militancy of the suffragettes and also distanced herself from the sexuality of Salome by calling her performance a spiritual awakening.

So, 'foreignness" was visible in theatrical culture but it was also attached to a dominating nationalist and imperial discourse that obscured the more 'sexual' and deviant themes. The way the negative aspects of the character are all ascribed to the character's 'foreignness' demonstrate how 'cosmopolitanism' was made 'respectable' by distancing the audience from that person. The publicly visible display of Maud Allan's scantily clothed body writhing on stage was seen as an acceptable form of cultural entertainment because it was supported with a nationalist discourse of superiority of the West over the colonial 'others' and that Maud personally distanced herself from the feminist movement. Here cosmopolitanism was an active part of the culture as long as it did not subvert the social hierarchy. Both men and women went to see Maud Allan's performance as a cultural experience and it was her performances that facilitated the entry of 'respectable' women into the cosmopolitan spaces of the commercial West End, which had hitherto been social suicide to venture into.