ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 163

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN

of white satin and multiple transparent skirts, from which your
legs will emerge, rosy under their stockings…. He will tell you
again that there is nothing comparable to you at the Opera…or
in Eden!77
Such dishabille may have been ‘natural’ in the Second Empire, but it
was never ‘moral’ attire. After the 1830s, the negligée of Romantic
fashion was improper, but the ballerina constantly recalled it in what
became her uniform and remained as the sign of her occupation. The
male reader of La Vie Parisienne is described as wanting to put the
petticoats on a bride, not take them off, so like a true fetish they
functioned as a surrogate for their referent and were stimulating in
and of themselves.
In Intrigues and Confession of a Ballet Girl an erotic novel dating from
the early 1870s, the narrator describes her first rehearsal in the corps
de ballet of Drury Lane Theatre:
What a novel scene; here were girls of all ages, from ten to
twenty…each dressed as their fancy pleased them; some with
short skirts barely reaching to the knee, others with loose
drawers, without skirt at all; most of them had light polka jackets
made either of cotton or silk, and all with fleshings that reached
from the waist downwards. By this style of dress their limbs
were as free as when they appeared on the stage at night.78
These ‘fleshings’ are pink-coloured tights, the article most heavily
invested with indexical signification of skin, eroticism, and sexual
stimulation. The Mysteries of Verbena House, the pornographic novel of
1882 sometimes ascribed to the journalist and dramatist George
Augustus Sala, graphically describes the effect of tights on the dancer,
as well as their contiguity with earlier erotic cross-dressing:
A lady, putting on her riding trousers becomes, consciously or

unconsciously, akin to a hoyden assuming man’s clothes, or
nearer still, to a ballet girl drawing on her tights. She is subject
to contact of the most perilous kind. The warm close substance
that passes close to her flesh, that clasps her loins, and embraces
her bum, and insinuates itself between her thighs, has, all
senseless leather, cloth, or silk, as the case may be, something of
the nature of a man’s hand in it.
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