ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 165

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN

indispensable foreplay to the sexual acts that follow every rehearsal
and performance.82 The effect of buttocks on the Englishman’s libido
is legendary, and fulsomely justified in Victorian erotica which links
the tights fetish with birching of ‘the biggest, the most beautiful, the
most richly furnished, and the most silkily smooth, and satin-like
posterior’ of Mariska the ballet girl.83
The linking of corporal punishment and the ballet may be due to
the regimentation of the training and an association between dancing
and other postural ‘corrections’ and controls agonizingly beloved by
fetishists. It is probably not a sublimated punishment of ballerinas as
deviant women, for in one episode in My Secret Life the rod is wielded
by a woman dressed up as a dancer. Stephen Marcus identifies the
confusion of sexual identities as a central theme in flagellant literature,
and the ballet provides an excellent pretext for adventures.
Infantilization, gender confusion through dress, exposure, role play,
and bisexuality characterize flagellant literature, but also impinge on
the burlesque plot, the casting of some ballets, and music hall lyrics.
In flagellant erotica, ‘the principal character in such scenes seems to
be rehearsing some twisted recollection from early childhood’,84 which
is not unlike the pretence of the late Victorian up-to-date pantomime
plot, though a much sadder scenario in a dark nursery of topsyturvydom.
Neutralization through repetition may have worked for some
spectators, but for fetishists (and anyone aware of the fetishistic
discourse) theatrical costume remained charged with powerful
sexual meanings. Access to these meanings and to the literature
articulating them was sufficiently controlled that the costumes could
be displayed in forums as conservative and accessible to women as
the Illustrated London News, and in entertainments as professedly
family-oriented as pantomime. Whether the encodings were

recognized as erotic or simply suspected of inconsistency with the
propriety of normal society, the implications for the private
reputation of female performers are clear.

136