Queerness and modernism go hand in hand. Over the past several decades, theatre historians, including Laurence Senelick, Alan Sinfield, and Kaier Curtain, unearthed and highlighted the first examples of queerness and queer sensibility in theatre from the fin de siècle. Subsequently, scholars such as Heather Love have shown how modernist ideas and aesthetics directly intersected with burgeoning queer identities of the early twentieth century. In Performing Queer Modernism, Penny Farfan validates this ideological linkage, connecting several notable plays, dance works, and performance pieces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with contemporary notions of queerness. Farfan posits that queerness should be considered “a subversive yet insufficiently recognized aspect of modernism” (87). The turn of the century presented opportunities in performance for explorations of homosocial intimacy, queer desire, androgyny, and nonnormative heterosexuality, often manifesting as coded language, gestures, and themes. In her book Farfan foregrounds works that conveyed unconventional sexualities through nontraditional expression, and also investigates queer readings of modern work that extend beyond gender and sexual dissidence. The book is roughly chronological, beginning with the theatre of 1893 and taking us through to 1930 Noël Coward, but Farfan does not attempt a progressive or linear narrative. Performing Queer Modernism is especially refreshing in Farfan's inclusion of dance pieces in her analysis, equally privileging text, dramatic performance, and the moving body as emblematic of an emerging (albeit coded) queer sensibility in modernism.
In Chapter 1, Farfan considers Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) an example of queer modernism hiding in plain sight, applying Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's definitions of homosocial and homosexual to elucidate the play's queerness. Farfan sees Paula, the fallen woman, craving approval not from her husband but from his daughter, Ellean, the good woman, whom she both desires and desires to be. Moreover, the play challenges the standard dichotomous narrative of the fallen versus the good woman; Paula wants to win the “love of a ‘good’ woman” in order to find redemption for her past (6). Farfan uses critical responses to the play to demonstrate its popularity with audiences (mostly women) as well as critical anxieties about that popularity. In Farfan's view, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is an example of subversive material that challenged aesthetic standards of the time, which had an impact on a larger, mainstream audience and opened up the potential for more overt expressions of queer desire and intimacy on stage.
Chapter 2 analyzes Loie Fuller's Fire Dance (1895), an adaptation of the Salome myth from the New Testament. The piece is famous as a technological feat of lighting effects manipulated onto Fuller's costume fabric in motion. It first appeared onstage a few years after Oscar Wilde's version of the Salome tale and, consequently, at the same time that Wilde's obscenity trial began. For Loie Fuller, the connection to Wilde through their respective projects needed to be severed to protect her career and hide her queer sexuality from the public sphere. For Farfan, Freud's notion of the uncanny pertains to Fuller's performing “ghostly” body, as recounted by her audiences, but one could also use the uncanny to describe the ghost of Wilde's Salome adaptation that haunted Fuller's version.
The following chapter is also devoted to a dance piece, Nijinsky's ballet Afternoon of a Faun (1912), which Farfan argues is an embodiment of ambiguously gendered queer masculinity divorced from standards of masculine presentation and performance. Nijinsky's characterization showed a feminine eroticism with an indeterminate object choice, opening up a potential queer reception by audiences at the time. The Faun character's disinterest in the female nymphs onstage challenges traditional narratives in ballet that focus on heterosexual love and desire. Additionally, the strict choreography, an “unsentimental and two-dimensional movement scheme” (46), deviated from conventions of ballet and modern dance, thus presenting another form of aesthetic queering.
The fourth chapter returns to the theatre with Noël Coward's Private Lives (1930). Farfan suggests that the play is a queering of heterosexual characters and of the structural conventions of comedy. Noting Coward's friendship with Virginia Woolf in the late 1920s and the subsequent popularity of Woolf's novel Orlando (1928), Farfan interprets Elyot and Amanda's relationship as an amalgam of modernist notions of androgyny along with Aristophanes’ concept of a third sex, a male/female figure embodying two halves of a singular whole, as related in Plato's Symposium. Forming an androgynous heterosexual bond, distinctive from the conventional heteronormativity of their counterparts Sibyl and Victor, Elyot and Amanda refuse to obey the rules of normative gendered behavior. Furthermore, Private Lives queers dramatic structure with its uncertain conclusion and refusal to provide the central couples the requisite happy ending of comedies. The song “Someday I'll Find You,” a musical leitmotif within the play, confirms the irresolution of all the romantic relationships therein.
Chapter 5 looks at Djuna Barnes's one-act plays To the Dogs and The Dove (1923) for their significance to contemporary queer scholarship. Farfan notes Barnes's creative intention: to craft purposeful dramatic failures in the form of avant-garde parodies of dramatic realism, challenge audience expectations of dramatic form and structure, and critique representations of women in modern drama. Farfan considers the plays’ critical failure in their own time as their own “performance,” a kind of receptional othering. Djuna Barnes's plays have subsequently been reclaimed by scholars as revolutionary works that anticipated contemporary queer and feminist theory, “exemplify[ing] the continuing performativity of queer modernist performance … across time, into the present and beyond” (81).
Overall, this book is a well-researched, thoughtful articulation of the significance of queerness to modern drama and dance studies. Performing Queer Modernism stands alongside texts such as Anne Herrmann's Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances (2000), Nick Salvato's Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (2010), and several essential essays in Bonnie Kime Scott's anthology Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007). What makes this particular book inviting is the seamlessness with which contemporary queer theory is woven into Farfan's archival research. It is a valuable addition to any course on modern drama and/or queer performance history and a compelling read for scholars of early twentieth-century theatre and dance.
