Tipping the Velvet. But the diary of the perpetrator, apparently providing a unique insight into the killer’s mind, is revealed to be a forgery when, in an unexpected development, Elizabeth Cree confesses to a priest on the eve of her execution that she is the author of John’s diary and the real Limehouse Golem. Those performances of identity both on and off stage literalize Susan Sontag’s view that “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. Unfortunately, he cannot comfort Peggy, and the narrator observes that Dan as an actor would have succeeded where Dan as a man failed: “He could find only the most frail and timid words of comfort now, whereas on the stage he could have delivered a great tirade of sorrow before spoofing his own grief” (206). It was all mime, of course, and in the beginning Dan took me through the steps and gestures as if I were about to become a regular Grimaldi. […] As a highly ritualized and codified space, the camp theatrical reproduces the discursive conditions of its enactment, it stages indeed power […]and it does so […] with a potentially denaturalizing gesture. Its purpose is thus not to steal a stylistic identity, but on the contrary to leave the breach unhealed and insist that this raising of the literary dead yields but a second identity. Cleto, Fabio. Namely, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem restores the dynamism of the lower classes of Victorian society by bringing both individual and anonymous voices and the significant influence of cockney culture back into the limelight. Lizzie’s diary constitutes an instance of what Helene Shugart terms a camp performance of femininity by a female (4), for it overplays stereotypes of femininity, such as innocence, naiveté, purity and fragility, with an excessiveness that obfuscates the presence of the aforementioned clues. The novel, loosely based on the biography of the eponymous nineteenth-century pantomime artist Dan Leno, uses on and off-stage female-to-male and male-to-female cross-dressing as both a backdrop and a dramatic drive for the police inquiry into the Limehouse murders. Dressing up: Transvestism and Drag: the History of an Obsession. “Introduction: Queering the Camp.”, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject; a Reader. Camp sets new standards, where theatricality and artifice are ideals (62), potentially doing away with the notion of morality and substance in favor of form and excessive playfulness. “The Dyer’s Hand”: Colours in Early Modern England, 1. […] To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. Shugart, Helene A., and Catherine Egley Waggoner. The jarring variety of the cultural references used in the text can read as playful random name-dropping, but according to Patrick Mauriès, the very eclecticism and gratuitousness of the references is one of the main features of the poetics of camp (110-11). Cet article se propose d’étudier la figure du travesti dans Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, roman d’inspiration néo-victorienne de Peter Ackroyd, qui utilise le motif des travestissements masculin et féminin à la scène comme à la ville, comme moteur et toile de fond d’une enquête policière. From exterior appearance to body postures and discourse, this description of the birth of “the Older Brother” breaks down the process through which a male character is conjured up into three steps, thus showing that a masculine identity can be constructed and appropriated: The pantomimic device, by breaking down the theatrical artifice, demonstrates quite literally that gender, being performed on stage, is thus performative: Lizzie’s performance soon exceeds the boundaries of the stage, however. Gibson, Jeremy, and Julian Wolfreys. Lizzie, who is in turns imitating Dan Leno, citing her mother or quoting the lines of a play, may be said to have set up such a stage, as if under her stage mask were another mask hiding yet another mask. Conversely, Dan Leno, whose behavior is a reversed image of his female counterpart, exemplifies an ethical practice of cross-dressing. , edited by Fabio Cleto, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. Such clues pointing to her guilt abound in her diary, yet remain ignored by the. 5The pantomimic device, by breaking down the theatrical artifice, demonstrates quite literally that gender, being performed on stage, is thus performative: Drag is an example that is meant to establish that ‘reality’ is not as fixed as we generally assume it to be. Kindle ed., Riverhead Books, 1998. 37-72. According to Caroline Radcliffe, from a Bakhtinian perspective, the carnivalesque dimension of the drag performance of gender in pantomime can be read as transgressive, that is to say, as reversing an established social order, but when contextualized, “it acts as a reinforcement of the very attitudes it parodies – and acceptance of the prevailing hegemony” (118). Regards croisés sur la Nouvelle-Orléans / 2. For Dan Leno, impersonating is a matter of “‘thinking through’ (as he used to put it) an entire a character” (194): “It was not enough to dress as Sister Anne or Mother Goose; it was necessary to become them” (194). From her mother, to her roommate Doris, her mentor Little Victor, and her husband, a trail of deaths by poisonous substances seems to follow Lizzie’s path throughout the novel. As she tries on Dan Leno’s leftover costume she realizes: “But what a picture I made in the mirror—I had become a man, from tip to toe, and there might have been a slangster comedian standing there” (150-51). Ackroyd, Peter. (248). According to Woolley, Leno was one of the most highly paid performers in the world at the height of his career. It's set in a very dark and different East London than the one you might know today, but is The Limehouse Golem a true story? However, cross-dressing also supposes a form of acceptance of gender stereotypes in order to be functional, paradoxically re-stabilizing the very codes that it purports to debunk. Like Lizzie, Nan and James throw a light on the position of limited power occupied by women in society, while underlining the possibility to eschew such limitations through cross-dressing. %PDF-1.5
In a similar vein, Katrin Horn’s reading of the poetics of camp highlights its potential for producing a politically committed critical discourse, for “at its most basic level, [it] is the inversion of taste in favor of the neglected, the other, the marginalized” (5). 1 My translation of : “Autre caractère frappant de l’attitude camp: l’incohérence violente de ses diverses références. 37-72. Peter Ackroyd, using a female male impersonator as his main focalizer, could be construed as a cross-dresser himself. Dan as a comedian can provide what Dan as a man cannot: an appropriate language to comfort the other, in the words of others, through a cathartic practice of his art as an impersonator. To a Victorian audience, the music hall stage is a cathartic space where order can be safely challenged and therefore ultimately restored. Translated by Joseph Chamonard, Garnier Flammarion, 1966. Peter Ackroyd: the Ludic and Labyrinthine Text, Gutleben, Christian and Julian Wolfreys. Disease and Pain: American Voices, 1. Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet similarly features Nan Astley’s transformation into stage character Nan King, and her subsequent life as a male prostitute in the streets of London. Finally, it demonstrates that the politics and aesthetics of cross-dressing are tied to a spiritual experience, reconnecting transvestism with its initial shamanic or religious dimension, thus turning the writing experience into a sacred performance of dispossession of identity. In this perspective, pantomime both destabilizes yet at the same time reinscribes the Victorian patriarchal order on the stage. “Memory and Innovation in Post-Holocaust France.”, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Cleto, Fabio. Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in U.S. Popular Culture, 1. Arguably, the neo-Victorian genre itself, using the garment of the Victorian era in a contemporary context, might be said to be a narrative in disguise, while. %����
In her landmark essay on the notion, Susan Sontag defines camp as a “sensibility” (53) rather than a genre or a style, and as a “way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon” (54), whose essence is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (53). Indeed, the noted-above ambivalence of the drag performance towards stereotypes of genders may be transferred to the intertextual parody of Victorian subtexts. Dressing up: Transvestism and Drag: the History of an Obsession, Ackroyd, Peter. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. […] In that respect, it may be interpreted as some failed work of mourning which endlessly commemorates voices that were once incarnate and vibrant with a sense of presence. Lizzie, first introduced on stage as a female comedic character, “Little Victor’s Daughter” (104) soon turns to male impersonations, creating the role of “Little Victor’s Daughter’s Older Brother” (151). A Death of One’s Own, 1. Such a narrative twist can only function with the reader’s blind reliance on pre-conceived ideas of masculinity, and the belief that such a violent behavior and longing for acknowledgment and fame could only be male features. 202-204. 1 In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, Peter Ackroyd draws on the gothic atmosphere of the Victorian past to weave a hybrid narrative web of testimonies, storylines and pseudo archival documents. Within feminist theory, such parodic identities have been understood to be either degrading to women, in the case of drag and cross-dressing, or an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the heterosexual practice [...]. What was the real Dan Leno like and what was his relationship like with women? Justine GONNEAUD, « Camp Transvestism in Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) », E-rea [En ligne], 16.2 | 2019, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2019, consulté le 10 novembre 2020. This body language is completed by the acquisition of a new language: “I was a good gagger, too, and after a while I developed my own masculine slanguage.” (192). In the words of Fabio Cleto, “the deliberately camping subject fashions itself through self-parody, setting up a pantomime stage in which s/he is fully, and centrally, as at once actor and spectator, part of it” (25). Drag parodies and mocks women – it is misogynistic both in origin and in intent, which transvestism clearly is not. Arguably, the neo-Victorian genre itself, using the garment of the Victorian era in a contemporary context, might be said to be a narrative in disguise, while Peter Ackroyd, using a female male impersonator as his main focalizer, could be construed as a cross-dresser himself. In this passage, Dan’s practice of citation radically differs from Lizzie’s, for, using the words of others, Dan manages both to be present to the other, yet separate from the grief that only the powers of illusion can help transcend, for the “beauty of pantomime” is that “it is believed only while it is being performed” whereas “in real life, things are a bit harder” (206). Thus, turning the drag performance into a transvestite exercise while passing for male off stage, Lizzie stresses the liberating power of cross-dressing, which allows her to access the shadiest parts of London that would otherwise be too dangerous for a woman: “I could be girl and boy, man and woman, without any shame. Indeed, the dramatic drive of the detective story is also based on a seminal act of transvestism, turning the contemporary reader into the dupe of the comedy of gender that is played at a macrostructural level. (. « L’écriture qui voyage », L’ordre des mots dans l’espace de la phrase, Kay Boyle / Rachel Cusk: (Neo)Modernist Voices, De la démocratie au Royaume-Uni : perspectives contemporaines, Revolving Commitments in France and Britain, 1929-1955, The Reception of Henry James in Text and Image, La République et l'idée républicaine en Grande Bretagne, Consignes aux ‘guest editors’ / rédacteurs invités, Portail de ressources électroniques en sciences humaines et sociales, licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International, Catalogue des 546 revues.
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