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The Naked Result
The Naked Result
How Exotic Dance Became Big Business

Jessica Berson

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law,
by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization.
Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Berson, Jessica.
Title: The naked result : how exotic dance became big business / Jessica Berson.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015023939 | ISBN 978–0–19–984620–7 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Striptease—History. | Striptease—Economic aspects. |
BISAC: MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Dance. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women’s Studies.
Classification: LCC PN1949.S7 B47 2016 | DDC 792.7—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015023939

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Sally Banes
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix

1. Introduction: Stripping, Sex, and Starbucks   1

2. Live Nude Girls: Notes on Being a Naked
Participant-Observer  31
3. Dancing Sexy: Difference and Desire in Two
Connecticut Clubs   61
4. Introducing McStripping: Corporeality, Corporations,
and the Advent of the Lap Dance in the United Kingdom   87
5. Dancing in the Combat Zone: Exotic Dance, Nostalgia,
and Urban Renewal   117
6. Taking Stock: Striptease, Stratification,
and the NASDAQ   153
7. Pasties and Pixels: Striptease and the Mainstream   179

Notes  223
Works Cited   255
Index  267
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has been in process for a very long time, and very many people
have contributed enormously to it. When I began working on this book,
I didn’t even know it. At the time I was living in New Haven, Connecticut,
with a boyfriend who is now my husband, while “finishing” my disserta-
tion at University of Wisconsin-Madison. For the grand sum of $1,000 per
month we shared a 3,600-square-foot industrial loft that had once housed
a handbag factory and was still zoned for business rather than residence.
Neither of us had lived with a romantic partner before, and Daggett Street
Square, full of artists, musicians, and eccentrics, was a strange and wonder-
ful place to start our life together. In March 2015 the city suddenly seemed
to notice that people were living as well as working in the building and
abruptly evicted all the residents; but way back in the early years of the
century, it was a thrilling place to live.
At the time, even my half of the rent seemed difficult to obtain without a
teaching assistantship, and I constantly searched for ways to earn more money
than I was teaching Pilates and leading workshops at a public middle school.
I scoured the job ads (in print!) and often saw postings for dancers—but on
further examination, these opportunities always turned out to involve exotic
dancing, something I had never considered. But one Sunday there was a
different kind of ad, for exotic dance instruction. I figured I had nothing to
lose—the lessons were cheap, and a convenient distraction from my looming
dissertation—and soon afterward I found myself in a side room of Backstage
Bill’s, one of the city’s oldest and seediest strip clubs, flailing around under
the disappointed gaze of my tutor. As I progressed from student to employee,
I never contemplated writing about striptease; it was only after leaving strip-
ping that I began to consider it as a potential research subject. Nearly a decade
ago I began doing fieldwork at strip clubs and pubs in London, imagining using
the resulting material for a journal article. But each question led to too many
others, and I soon realized that if I wanted to really engage with those ques-
tions I would have to write a book.
 Since then, I have visited many strip clubs and talked to many strip-
pers; dived into the bizarre field of marketing and read maddening tomes
on branding; and discovered a hidden historic world of erotic possibility
in my new city. We moved internationally twice, bought a house, and had
two sons seventeen months apart. I was diagnosed with breast cancer and
underwent eight surgeries over the course of two years, including a mastec-
tomy, as well as hormonal therapy I wouldn’t wish on anyone. As a lecturer
and “independent scholar,” I did not have the external motivation of tenure
to finish this book, and had many reasons not to. So it is a special pleasure
to thank the many friends, colleagues, and family without whom I never
could have completed it. First among them is my editor, Norman Hirschy,
who has offered unflagging support, encouragement, and wisdom as well
as seemingly infinite patience. Norman also introduced me to the fantastic
world of boylesque, for which I am forever grateful.
The women I danced with at Backstage Bill’s, most especially Summer,
showed me the ropes, taught me pole tricks, and shared their stories;
without their camaraderie and openness my time there would have been
very lonely, and this project would not have been possible. Many other
dancers and former dancers have graciously shared their time, thoughts,
and energy, among them Joy and Solitaire; Atmospheric Sophie; Lauri
Umansky; Julie Jordan/Miss Bicentennial; Michelle, a former waitress at
the Two O’clock Club; and Lucy Wightman, formerly known as Princess
Cheyenne, whose thoughtful analyses and narrative flair both confirm and
explode her Combat Zone reputation as “the thinking man’s stripper.” My
partner in the British Academy research grant that funded my London
fieldwork, marketing scholar Alan Bradshaw, brought humor as well as
expertise to the table, and joined me in drinking overpriced non-alcoholic
beer when I was pregnant. My sexy, smart friend and American Society for
Theatre Research conference compatriot Kirsten Pullen has both inspired
and mentored this work, reading drafts and offering insightful, incisive
comments, as well as sharing lovely cocktails in loads of cities. Kirsten’s
own work showed me that sexuality and sex work could be written about
seriously without erasing their sensuality or vitality. David Monaghan told
me the riveting story of London’s lap dance wars and showed me around the
best—and worst—strip pubs in Hackney. The sensational Kaitlyn Regehr
has continually reinvigorated this project through her boundless enthusi-
asm and goodwill; someday I hope to be half as organized and energetic.
Students from many phases of my teaching life have inspired my
thinking about the lives of girls and women. I am especially grateful to
Melanie Velo-Simpson, who was the most self-possessed and generous

[x] Acknowledgments
twelve-year-old I’ve ever met; Halima Hakim Hanni, who declared her-
self my “thesis police” while finishing her own senior year of college;
Aki Sasamoto, a bracingly original visual and performing artist; Beth
Norris, a passionate and kind poet, spoken word artist, and teacher; and
Julia Havard, a would-be scientist who just couldn’t stop herself from
becoming an artist. The dance historian Sally Banes, to whom this book
is dedicated, was the reason I went to graduate school in the first place.
A brilliant writer and joyful teacher, Sally’s model of lively scholarship
and fabulous fashion is one to which I and many of her former students
still aspire. In 2002 Sally suffered a massive, debilitating stroke, and
the dance and theater worlds have never quite recovered from the loss
of her effervescence.
My kids, like most, are obsessed with ranking things, and often ask me
who my best friend is. It is and always will be Maria Riley, with whom I have
shared love, loss, secrets, ice cream, fears, discoveries, and about ten thou-
sand games of gin rummy (all of which I lost—really) since we were both
two years old. Maria has listened me talk about striptease ad nauseam, and
has always been willing to hear more. My brother Will has always had my
back, as my partner in outrage, moral barometer, most articulate sounding
board, go-to shoulder to cry on, and fellow practitioner of what his wife
has generously termed “the Berson diplomacy.” Will read and commented
on many parts of this project at many stages, and invariably suggested
ways to make it smarter and more nuanced. And, if I’m honest, funnier,
though I can never hope to match his lightning quick and razor sharp
wit. My parents, Robin and Robert Berson, never expressed a moment’s
shock at my stripping work, despite what may have been swirling around
in their heads—and neither did my grandmother or great aunt, then both
in their mid-eighties. If I can write at all it’s because of my mother’s valiant
efforts as a teacher and editor. I do not, however, hold her responsible for
my inability to spell; that, I believe, I inherited from my dad. Both have
gone above and beyond any reasonable expectation of parental support
and have encouraged me to keep writing no matter what. Leo and Henry,
my beautiful boys, have put up with me ranting about sexism (especially,
oddly enough, when they were supposed to be going to bed), and are on
their way to becoming excellent feminists. Finally, my husband, Matthew
McDonald, has encouraged this project since its unintentional incep-
tion: he rode his bike through the mean streets of New Haven to Backstage
Bill’s to see me perform, accompanied me to many strip clubs and endured
quite a few lap dances, read and commented on numerous drafts, talked
through ideas good and bad, and made me promise to go to the Society of

Acknowledgments [ xi ]
Dance History Scholars conference session on publishing where I first met
Norman. I cannot thank him enough, but I’ll try: even in the many times
when I have given up on myself, he never has, and he has partnered me in
every way possible since the day we met. Mattie, you are the love of my
life—especially since you shaved that mustache.

[ xii ] Acknowledgments
The Naked Result
CHAPTER 1

Introduction
Stripping, Sex, and Starbucks

Dancing for Lenny was a powerful sensual experience. Without the distraction of conver-
sation, I got lost in my own bodily sensation, moving in ways that turned me on … Not
grabby or rude, he seemed more interested in viewing my pleasure than in “getting his,”
and in so doing opened up a space where I explored a different type of eroticism—mine.
R. Danielle Egan, “The Phenomenology of Lap Dancing”1

Why I go to strip clubs: because the mixture of artifice and truth in a strip club can be intoxi-
cating; because I believe that some dancers really are my friends; because three dimensions
beat two; because she can close her eyes and get lost in her body’s movements; because I wish
I were her for a night; because spending money in a strip club proves the absurdity of capital-
ism; because this place is alive and I fear death; and, most of all, because when the world is
really, really shitty, I close my eyes and see her liquid movements.
Émile Blauche, “Why I Go to Strip Clubs”2

DANCE SEXY

It’s my first visit to a strip club. I’m there not as a patron but to take lessons
in exotic dancing from a former stripper turned tutor named Michelle.
I answered Michelle’s ad in the New Haven Advocate and met her the previ-
ous week, at night, in the parking lot of a local KFC, where I handed over
a check for $150 for five sessions. I have no idea what to expect from the
club or even whether Michelle will show up. I wait for her outside the club’s
entrance and watch men go in. When Michelle arrives, we go in together;
though I later spent a lot of time at Backstage Bill’s, that was the last time
I used the front door.
 In the club’s foyer one of the bouncers agrees to waive the $10 entrance
fee, and we walk past the main bar to another room used only for feature
acts. On the way we pass a woman dancing on the stage who looks around
thirty-five years old, swinging her ample hips to 1970s hard rock. She’s
wearing a thong and six-inch platforms, and nothing else. I’m not really
sure where to look, but I settle on her eyes, and she gives me a warm,
sincere smile. On the spare stage, Michelle gleefully turns on the smoke
machine and the lights and puts in a sultry R&B CD that easily drowns out
the thin wailing of Led Zeppelin from next door. I’m afraid she’s going to
ask me to take off my clothes, but she does something even scarier: she
tells me to get up on the stage and “dance sexy.” I put on what at the time
I considered high heels, and do my best; but no matter what I do, she just
repeats, in a voice that is somehow simultaneously encouraging and disap-
pointed, “no, sexy. No, SEXY.”

In some sense this book began with this exhortation and my subsequent
sorry confusion. For about a year, dancing sexy became more than an eso-
teric academic inquiry for me: rather, it was a way to earn a living. I started
investigating striptease in part to ask what’s sexy: to ask what kinds of
movements are constructed as erotic by a dance form that depends on a
legible expression of sexual excitement and desire. Performing at Backstage
Bill’s in New Haven and at Diamonds in Hartford,3 I discovered that danc-
ing sexy assumed divergent meanings depending on who was dancing and
who was watching, and I was surprised by the extent of the differences
between the two clubs. My research as a practitioner granted me a kin-
esthetic understanding of striptease dancing and a first-person, embod-
ied experience of the sense of erotic subjectivity that this dance form can
offer female performers. However, when I began doing academic research
on striptease, I was struck by how little attention most scholars paid to
the actual dancing that striptease performers undertake. In the past two
decades a number of autobiographical, historical, and critical accounts of
striptease have emerged, but these discourses have often focused on any-
thing and everything but dance.4
Perhaps this absence stems in part from the training and perspectives
of many researchers, who often work within disciplines other than Dance
or Performance Studies. Watching a childhood friend perform striptease,
Women’s Studies scholar Catherine Roach even muses, “ ‘Dance’ is perhaps
not quite the right word for what the women do onstage.”5 In the preface
to her book Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers, Bernadette Barton, a
sociologist, writes about her distress at the quality of the dancing she views
during her first visit to a strip club:

[2] The Naked Result

 Although I was in researcher mode and avidly entranced with the space, I still
felt uncomfortable. I first noticed that the dancers lacked rhythm and grace;
they literally could not find the beat. This lack of skill was incredibly distract-
ing. Nor did their acts reflect any trained aesthetic, consisting largely of random
gyrations in front of men, interspersed with apathetic meandering around a
pole in the middle of the dance floor.6

It’s certainly possible that the dancers at this particular club weren’t very
good, or that the ones who might have been were having a bad night. But
I wonder if Barton, like many others who write about striptease, is simply
unable to recognize the dancing taking place before her eyes. This isn’t to
say that all or even most striptease dance meets the aesthetic criteria usu-
ally applied to theatrical dancing. However, as a sometimes uncomfortable
and discomforting hybrid of theatrical performance, popular dance, and
sex work, striptease dancing resists easy categorization as “good” or “bad,”
and the “skills” that Barton missed—“grace,” for example—may or may not
be those most useful to dancers. In most clubs, stage performances have
multiple purposes (some, but not all, of which overlap with those typical of
theatrical and popular dance): to entertain and seduce audiences; display
the dancer’s body; engage individual audience members visually, verbally,
and often physically; and, sometimes, to advertise the dancer’s availabil-
ity for private dances. If one is looking only for signs of skill or virtuosity
in terms of concert dance—elongated extensions of the legs, high jumps,
multiple turns, and so forth, which do in fact sometimes appear in strip-
tease dancing—one will miss the display of skills more imperative to the
form itself: those that constitute “dancing sexy.”
I wish to add to the growing scholarly interest in exotic dance by directly
addressing striptease as dance. In order to do so, I explore the movement
elements of the idiom—for example, the Laban Movement Analysis (LMA)
effort factors of weight, space, time, and flow, as well as intention, focus,
stage space, and so on—in much the same way as one would when dealing
with any other dance form.7 Dance anthropologist Deirdre Sklar describes
what she terms “qualitative movement analysis”:

Qualitative movement analysis entails, first of all, attention to movement in

the midst of every kind of interaction and event. It demands tuning perception
not just to the “what” of action but to the “how,” since the qualities of move-
ment, more than its quantification, give pointed clues to proprioceptive experi-
ence. A punch that is performed fast and hard is a very different experience and
expression than one that is performed slowly and without muscular tension. It
is the quality of the movement that makes the difference.8

Introduction [3]
In “Remembering Kinesthesia,” Sklar argues for LMA as a means for under-
taking this kind of analysis:

The dynamic factors of rhythm, speed, and duration; degree of muscular tension
or relaxation; and degree of giving into or resisting gravity (weightiness and
lightness) encode cultural dispositions as much as the shapes and spatial pat-
terns of movement do. Labananalysis [LMA], as Rudolf von Laban’s schema of
qualitative or “effort” factors is now called, offers a systematic way of observing
such dynamics. The system focuses on four core factors: Weight, Space, Time,
and Flow. While the system can be oversimplified, … it is the most potent
tool we have for guiding observation beyond the shapes and spatial patterns of
action toward kinetic qualities.9

As Sklar indicates, LMA is an imperfect system and can be especially tricky

when deployed for sociocultural analyses. In my use of LMA, I do not mean
to suggest that it is either universally applicable to or sufficient for under-
standing all modes of dance performance, but that it is one important tool
that has been often overlooked in discussions of striptease.10
Movement analysis can be understood as analogous to the kind of “close
reading” one might apply to a written text; it’s a way of breaking down
complex, multivalent movements into their component elements, and
then rigorously examining each aspect as a means toward creating greater
understanding of the whole. For example, when comparing dance styles
at independent and corporate clubs in Connecticut, focusing on dancers’
use of the weight factor revealed striking differences in their relationships
to their own movement: engagement with weight, especially toward the
strong end of the continuum, was associated with a sense of presence and
self, while the absence of weight indicated a kind of vacant, rote approach
to movement. Analyzing the dancing I did and saw at strip clubs using LMA
categories led me toward an understanding of how striptease dancing can
generate possibilities for erotic agency within its performance, and also
how those possibilities can be undermined and subverted.
Understanding striptease dancing as dance also has legal and economic
ramifications, as Judith Lynne Hanna describes in “Undressing the First
Amendment and Corseting the Striptease Dancer.” In 1995, a lawyer rep-
resenting exotic dancers and club owners in Seattle, Washington, asked
Hanna to be an expert witness in a First Amendment case in which he
argued that exotic dance is a form of expression and therefore constitu-
tionally protected; since then she has testified more than one hundred
times in similar cases.11 This definition of striptease as expression—often
asserted by exotic dancers, but usually scoffed at by those outside the

[4] The Naked Result

profession—offers new possibilities for our understanding of the social,
cultural, and political debates it provokes. And striptease does provoke: as
Hanna notes, “In a unique way, the stigmatized but poorly understood
exotic (also referred to as erotic, striptease, stripper, topless, titty bar,
nude, go-go, and barroom) dance clubs are a lightning rod for certain cul-
tural conflicts in the United States.”12 The conflicts on which Hanna focuses
her efforts involve rifts between individual freedom and community stan-
dards, church and state, expression and repression. In her recent book The
Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, and a Christian Right, Hanna describes
how striptease has become a battleground in right-wing Christian politi-
cal organizations’ pervasive theocratic agenda. The religious attack that
Hanna documents reveals a quintessentially American perspective on the
meanings of exotic dance. However, in the final years of the twentieth cen-
tury and the early years of the twenty-first, a new force began to shape
these and all such concerns: the corporate brand.
As I experienced as a dancer, striptease embodies an ongoing global
debate about the power of corporations and brands within every facet of
our cultural and personal lives. The past two decades have seen a radical
shift from individual ownership and management of clubs perceived as
seamy dens of illicit desire toward the domination of large chains that proj-
ect an aura of wholesome, middle-class good fun. Film and television, the
fitness industry, and even toy manufacturing13 have begun to market strip-
tease as a mainstream activity that is naughty but harmless—and even
empowering—while corporate clubs have sought to make over its image
through advertising and other branding strategies. Starting in the 1970s
with the advent of the “gentlemen’s club,” and especially since the develop-
ment of international strip club chains like Spearmint Rhino in the 1990s,
dancing sexy has become a global commodity, draped in demographically
designated accoutrements and stripped of its potential to create spaces for
the expression of pleasure—and power.

THE BASIC MOVES IN BLACK AND WHITE

At my second lesson with Michelle I was introduced to her business part-

ner, Wes, a former Alvin Ailey dancer who had worked as a male stripper.
Wes knew his way around a pole, and because we shared a background in
modern dance he was able to instruct me with more nuanced corrections
than “no, sexy.” Each teacher assumed responsibility for passing on a differ-
ent set of skills. Michelle taught me hip-rolls, floor work, poses, and shim-
mies. Wes focused on using the pole, developing a routine, and poise. Like

Introduction [5]
 Dancer in New York City club. Photograph by Elyssa Goodman.

Michelle, Wes wanted me to “dance sexy,” but he had a specific methodol-

ogy in mind: he insisted that the way to be sexy was to discover one’s own
movement preferences and then indulge and exaggerate them onstage. He
thought that girls14 who like to move in quick sharp bursts should hone
their edges, and those who felt most sensual in sinuous, sustained move-
ments should emphasize their fluidity—and that all dancers should explore
the movement qualities that were opposite to their own in order to provide
contrast and dynamic variation. According to Wes, different men liked dif-
ferent types of women and different types of movement: the key to dancing
sexy was to commit fully to a specific set of qualities, a particular persona.

[6] The Naked Result

 As a dancer and Laban Movement Analyst, I was intrigued by this
individualized, movement-oriented approach to sexuality. However, once
I began working as a stripper, I realized that the opportunity and apprecia-
tion for individual expression varied greatly depending on the venue. Like
most dance idioms, exotic dance encompasses a specific set of technical
and qualitative characteristics. These characteristics are in the process of
being more broadly codified—and commodified—by the fitness industry
under monikers like “strippercize” and “cardiostrip,” and the International
Federation of Pole Dance teachers (unsuccessfully) circulated a petition to
include pole dancing in the 2012 London Olympics. However, despite cur-
rent trends in a variety of industries—striptease itself, fitness, and main-
stream entertainment—toward standardization, individual and cultural
differences remain.
As I have noted, discussions of choreography are somewhat rare in strip-
tease scholarship, and even very good analyses often seem to ignore differ-
ences in movement vocabularies that may be tied to race and/or class. Both
Hanna and Performance Studies scholar Katherine Liepe-Levinson provide
lucid descriptions of dance moves they observed during large studies of
primarily white, heterosexual clubs in the United States. Hanna approaches
her subject as an anthropologist and movement analyst, and categorizes
movements in terms, for example, of locomotion, gesture, place, levels, and
costuming. She writes:

In exotic dance, the performer uses body movements often simulating cultur-
ally constituted rhythms of lovemaking, for example flirting, foreplay, and
intercourse. … The semantics of exotic dance draw heavily upon metaphor and
metonym expressed through a dance-vocabulary of movements highlighting
secondary sex characteristics, such as breasts, buttocks, and hips, in addition
to the genitals.15

Hanna brings attention to the aesthetic values of exotic dancing and to the
fact that those values are “culturally constituted.” She delineates specific
movements such as crawling on the floor, hip rotations, breast shimmies,
and various kinds of self-touch, including intimate exposures that Hanna
calls “going pink.”16 Many of these movements are highly stylized and can
be only tangentially imagined to be representing actual sexual activity.
Rather, they participate in a particular cultural construction of sexual-
ity: one that, though Hanna doesn’t explicitly say so, is largely white, het-
erosexual, middle class, and American.
Liepe-Levinson devotes two chapters of her book to choreography and
brings a more critical perspective to her descriptions. She notes “basic

Introduction [7]
moves” like the shimmy, the bump and grind, body stroking, and the strut,
and provides a historical context for each. She describes early striptease17 as
“a whole-body choreography that defied conventional ideas about the natu-
rally sedate, physically contained comportment of females, which included
the old adage of the night—‘Ladies do not move.’”18 From this perspective,
striptease dancers asserted their erotic subjectivity not only through their
radical demonstrations that ladies do in fact move but also through the
“whole-body”-ness of their choreography: rather than isolating body parts,
these dancers moved as fully integrated, complete bodies. Performing solo,
they confronted audiences with directness and humor, often commenting
on their dancing as they danced.19 Though they may have been performing
for the titillation of a male audience, early striptease dancers also enacted
new visions of female empowerment.
Liepe-Levinson’s central argument is that striptease disrupts as much
as reinforces stereotypical gender norms, and she perceives this paradox
in some of the movements she describes. For example, of the bump and
grind, she states:

The image of an upright, glamorous Burlesque queen gyrating her way through
a routine may indeed represent quintessential striptease through her portrayal
of an ultra- or hyper-femininity. However, the actual movement of the bump
and grind, especially when highlighted by the prone position of the stripper,
are arguably more in keeping with the social expectations about the aggressive
activity of males during sex (vis-à-vis various pelvic thrusting and grindings).
Since prone-position bumping and grinding so clearly refers to masturbation
and copulation, and since these moves suggest the “active” sex partner as well,
such performances by female strippers are doubly transgressive.20

Liepe-Levinson writes that her focus on white, heterosexual clubs was

informed by her broader interest in investigating “the strangeness of
[her] own political and personal spheres.”21 In my own experience and
observations, prone-position bumping and grinding was a move that was
considered “low class” by many girls and performed more often in working-
class clubs and by non-white dancers. It isn’t clear how this might color
Liepe-Levinson’s reading—would this additional layer of coding make the
movement seem more or less transgressive?—but the influence of differ-
ences in class and race on dance style are largely left out of both her own
and Hanna’s accounts.
Backstage and in online web communities like Stripper Web, danc-
ers designate some moves as trashy, or classy, or slutty, or “trying too
hard.” In most clubs, dancers make use of the floor in their performances,

[8] The Naked Result

crawling sinuously and demonstrating flexibility with exaggerated
stretches. However, some dancers, especially those who have worked in
shadier venues, view the floor with the disgust of a germaphobe and per-
ceive dancing on the floor as degrading. Similarly, violating the smooth
surface of the body by “going pink”—spreading the labia and allowing
audiences to peer inside—is often construed as vulgar by dancers aiming
for “class.” Some dancers perform dazzling gymnastic routines on the pole,
while others maintain that the introduction of the pole destroyed the art
of striptease dancing by reducing a subtle idiom to base tricks. While much
of the movement vocabulary of striptease is utilized across class, race, and
venue-specific lines, certain movements are classified as markers of partic-
ular matrices of identity. Strip club conglomerates like Rick’s Cabaret reify
these differences by designing different clubs for different demographics—
“high-end” clubs that cater to “white-collar businessmen,” rougher clubs
for “working men,” and venues like Club Onyx for “black and Hispanic pro-
fessionals and athletes,” each under its own brand name.22
Dancers and customers also categorize certain ways of moving as “black.”
Considering constructions of race in relationship to dance or performance
can entail recapitulating sometimes destructive stereotypes, even if in
order to challenge them, but in order to think through issues of race and
dance style it has to be done. There is enormous variation among individual
black exotic dancers, of course, but there is also no doubt that there are
(socially constructed, historical) associations between certain ways of per-
forming exotic dance and notions of “blackness,” and that individual danc-
ers are affected by these associations.23 In one thread on Stripper Web titled
“my night@club onyx,” Deja, a veteran African American dancer, wrote of
her first night dancing at a “black” club:

Girls just got up there and did a whole bunch of ass popping and shaking …
nothing wrong with that … but it’s a problem when the guys WILL NOT TIP
unless you do it and do it well. I’m black, I got ass … but I can’t dance like
that … and I was not tipped on stage. . . 24

Many dancers seemed able to relate to Deja’s dilemma, and Harlow

responded:

I’m so sorry that your experience at this club was so negative for you.
But … this problem might be more of an age issue or a class issue (not that the
wealthy can’t be rude—on the contrary) than a race issue. It just BOTHERS
THE HELL OUTTA ME when men expect all women to be the same, act the
same, etc. If those other chicks stuck veggies in their “pocket books,” they’d

Introduction [9]
 expect you to do it too. And hey, let them get up there and do some booty
clapping. I can do these butt tricks to an extent, but I can’t flex one ass cheek
at a time. That SHIT is hard. DO these boneheads realize that we aren’t born
with these talents and that we all have different abilities and different pri-
orities. Maybe YOU don’t want to dance like that. Maybe you think a slow,
sensual dance is more classy and better suited for your style. Why can’t we
be individuals instead of cookie cutter clones?! Best of luck in all you do and
with your next job at a place that appreciates a woman with style and class.
Cheers!!!25

Harlow highlights some of the overlapping territories between class and

race: a “slow, sensual dance” is viewed as “more classy,” and also, implic-
itly, as less black. She rails against audience expectations of “cookie cutter
clones,” but those expectations are dependent on demographics and are far
from universal. Clearly, despite the growing standardization of striptease
dance vocabulary through its use in music videos, club dancing, and main-
stream film and television, it still demonstrates striking, sociologically
loaded variations. As both a dancer and a consumer of striptease, I have
found Harlow’s observation that “this problem might be more of an age
issue or a class issue” to be somewhat true—age and class often seem to
trump race as factors that shape customers’ expectations and experiences.
However, race intersects with these other markers of identity, and influ-
ences both choreographic choices and audience reception of those choices.
Even within the same club and culture, there are often differences
between what kinds of movement dancers and customers perceive as sexy.
Exotic dancers describe their performances as largely improvisational; as
in contact improvisation,26 there are technical skills and combinations,
but they are employed in an ad hoc, flexible framework. In my routines at
Backstage Bill’s, for example, I often utilized modified dance phrases that
I had developed while teaching modern dance classes, interspersed with
basic turns or glides around the pole. On Stripper Web, a “newbie” forum
offers advice from experienced dancers. In response to a query about “the
basic moves,” Mia M. wrote:
The three basic stripper moves:

1. Move slowly
2. Make eye contact
3. Smile

Anything else you do is just icing on the nekkid cake.27

[ 10 ] The Naked Result

Other dancers wrote: “Just go up there and do what feels natural. Don’t
make a routine because it will look scripted and boring. … As long as you
are having fun, that’s all that matters.” And “Just relax. People are usually
busy looking at your body before they get all hung up on your choreogra-
phy. I would advise trying to be ‘smooth’ and sexy in your movements …
the first week I danced I was advised about this.”28
For customers, on the other hand, the main objective of striptease
dance may be the advantageous display of key body parts. A male patron,
Phil-W., added:

Excellent advice. … The average dancer will try to put on a sexy/sensual show by
moving in the most seductive way. The average customer, driven by your stan-
dard basic male instinct, will be trying to get the best view of the finer points
of your anatomy. … Sorry to sound cynical about this, but having good moves
is probably secondary to making sure your customer has the best possible look
at you.29

The choreographic directions to “move slowly” and “be smooth” seem in

line with the customer’s desire to “get the best view”: it is certainly eas-
ier to visually apprehend the parts of the whole if that whole isn’t swiftly
slipping into new configurations. However, presenting “the finer points
of your anatomy” is antithetical to the whole-body choreography of early
striptease—a fixation with specific parts diminishes the ability to appreci-
ate the whole. Both sets of advice seem at odds with the sort of dancing
Deja and other dancers felt was demanded at black clubs, which centered
on quick, sharp movements and rapid joint isolations. As many respon-
dents to Deja’s initial post pointed out, these stylistic preferences are not
monolithic, and there is of course variety among black clubs and black
dancers; Deja’s concern was about her ability and desire to fulfill a rather
stereotypical version of what one respondent termed “black stripping.”30
However, there are differences in striptease vocabulary that are connected
to notions of race, just as there are in many other forms of social and popu-
lar dance; and, as I discovered dancing at Diamonds, there are analogous
differences in relation to class. Striptease, like many other forms of popular
dance, has historically borrowed (and/or appropriated) movements from
an eclectic range of popular and cultural dance forms, as its alternative
moniker “exotic dance” implies.31 However, as corporations take over the
industry, market segmentation increasingly segregates dance styles as a
way of creating more easily manipulated target populations and generating
greater profit.

Introduction [ 11 ]
 Dancer in New York City Club. Photograph by Elyssa Goodman.

CLASS ACTS

He is an elegantly dressed gentleman in his mid-fifties, slightly overweight

in a way that calls forth the word “portly” from some high school English
class vault in my memory. He is soft spoken and a little dull, but he pays
me to listen—two or three nights a week, he comes to the club and buys
me drinks and tells me his troubles, but never demands a dance. He likes
me because I don’t try to get more from him; I’m frankly thrilled with the
arrangement as is, and I can tell he doesn’t appreciate the hustle that is
the usual stripper modus operandi. And, he says, he likes me because I am
“classy”—in fact, he tells me, I’m too classy for this place. I look around
Backstage Bill’s: smoke hangs languidly in the air, untroubled by air con-
ditioning or filtering machines; 1970s-style wood paneling lines the walls;
AC/DC throbs from the sound system; customers wearing T-shirts and
baseball hats beckon dancers who wear neon string-bras and thongs. It’s
a dive bar, just one that happens to have a lot of half-naked women in it.
He recommends that I audition for Diamonds, another club he frequents,
about forty-five minutes away in Hartford. Backstage Bill’s is owned by
three unlikely friends: a cop, a Hell’s Angel, and a rarely seen, extremely
well-groomed man said to be a member of the local Mafia. Diamonds, how-
ever, is part of a regional chain and thus more smoothly run. Backstage
Bill’s can be unsettlingly unpredictable sometimes: you never know who
will be there or when the bouncers will be required to eject some miscreant

[ 12 ] The Naked Result

who refuses to pay up. But at Diamonds, everyone knows what to expect,
and everyone follows the rules. I’d get a better class of customer, he says,
and be more appreciated.
So the following week I drive to Hartford, finding the club on a desolate
service road adjacent to the highway. It’s early in the evening, and the few
customers in attendance wear button-down shirts and pressed slacks, with
some even sporting ties. The enormous circular bar sits at the center of the
main room, its chrome bar rail reflecting the cool grays that comprise the
club’s color scheme. Several dancers share the stage, each moving gently as if
being blown by a warm breeze. Their costumes look like what I see the under-
grads wearing as they shiver outside dance clubs in New Haven: crop tops,
strapless mini-dresses, and hot pants. A large man in a suit asks if he can help
me, and directs me to the manager’s office. The office is organized and clean,
and conspicuously lacking posters of porn stars. The manager looks me up
and down and then does something shocking: he asks for my I.D. For their
records. I realize I am in a new realm of corporate accountability.

The distinction between independent and corporate ownership is similar

to, but not the same as, distinctions among perceived “classes” of clubs,
which have received somewhat more critical attention. In “Doing Gender,
Doing Class: The Performance of Sexuality in Exotic Dance Clubs,” Mary
Nell Trautner links the presentation of femininity and female sexuality
with presentations of class:

Because the central features of the organizational culture within exotic dance
clubs are the commodification and commercialization of women’s sexuality, the
clubs are premised on the consumption of women’s bodies and the presence
of those bodies in hegemonic male fantasies. Thus, women work not only as
women but as sexualized women. Yet despite having similar underlying institu-
tional logics, clubs offer noticeably different presentations and performances of
gender and sexuality. . . . Those clubs that cater to a middle-class audience pres-
ent one version of sexuality, while a quite different type of display can be found
at working-class clubs. As a result, women in exotic dance clubs work not only
as sexualized women but as classed women.32

Trautner goes on to describe some of the ways in which exotic dance clubs
establish class identity: physical characteristics such as décor, lighting,
and sound; amenities offered to customers; and the physical characteris-
tics, costuming, and choreographic style of dancers. She concludes that
working-class and middle-class clubs create two competing types of sexual-
ity, noting that

Introduction [ 13 ]
 [Middle-class clubs] appear to make every effort to insulate customers from
everyday reality by providing them a safe haven in which they can desire and
appreciate women and be treated like “gentlemen.” These clubs, as I will dem-
onstrate, are characterized by performances of desire and gazing at the female
form from a distance, constructed to appear as admiration and respect. I refer
to this as “voyeuristic sexuality.” In contrast, the working-class clubs create an
atmosphere conducive to pure physical pleasure and lust. … These clubs are
havens for the viewing of women as sex objects, for the imagining of these
women as sexual partners, and for the enactment of male power. This form of
sexuality I call “cheap thrills” sexuality.33

While it is certainly true that sexual expression can be and is classed, I find
Trautner’s terms problematic. It is hard not to read an almost moralis-
tic evaluative tone in the distinction between “voyeuristic sexuality” and
“cheap thrills sexuality,” the former based on the appearance, at least, of
“admiration and respect,” while the latter wallows in “pure physical plea-
sure and lust.” Trautner’s descriptions of dancers at working-class clubs,
whom she characterizes as unattractive and rather slatternly relative to
their middle-class counterparts, belie a similar sense of condescension.
However, Trautner quotes one dancer who points toward a quality of
working-class clubs that resists reductive categorization: “At ‘blue col-
lar’ clubs you can see more of the personalities of all these people, which
is what I’m really interested in. The girls can do whatever they want,
and do.”34
This potential for variety, individuality, agency, and even eccentricity
is what I’m really interested in too. However, rather than simply being
the domain of a particular class identity or style of sexuality, I believe
this quality also reflects a spirit of heterogeneity that can only thrive
in independently owned venues. Baristas at your neighborhood coffee
shop (should you be so lucky as to still have one) might play their favor-
ite band on the stereo; at Starbucks, the playlist is dictated by upper-
level management and consists largely of music available for purchase
on the company’s own label. This isn’t to say that there are no limits on
the independent coffee shop worker’s musical choices, or, by extension,
on the performances of dancers at independent clubs—often even very
small clubs mandate certain aspects of dancers’ conduct, dress, and so on.
However, the very notion of choice is obviated in corporatized work envi-
ronments, in which managers whom most workers will never see decide
that the playlist will include Paul McCartney or that heels must be no
more than six inches.35 Dancing at Backstage Bill’s and Diamonds and

[ 14 ] The Naked Result

talking with dancers who had worked in many other clubs, I found that
independently owned clubs operated with an open-ended definition of
what was sexy that could encompass diverse demographics and perfor-
mance styles, while corporate clubs tended toward homogeneity in club
management, customer relations, and choreography.
There are numerous studies that examine the intersections of class and
eroticism, including several specifically related to striptease.36 In G-Strings
and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire, Katherine Frank notes
that many strip club customers link perceived class with the potential
“authenticity” of dancers in different venues. She writes:

[Some] men distinguished between the upper- and lower-tier clubs by the
amount of cultural or educational capital they imagined the dancers to have,
and this was in turn related back to both the sincerity of the dancers and the
potential realness of the exchange. … To other men, however, professional-
ism implied a standardized and emotionless atmosphere where the dancers
were only out to make a profit. … Ross believed he was more likely to have
a genuine encounter in a lower-tier club: “It’s not very extreme, which to me
is like you can get to know everybody there and it’s much less of a barrier
there. Even the dancers … I can get to know them. … [W]‌e can sit and make
a human connection.37

Making a human connection is the secret hope of many strip club patrons,
working-, middle-, and upper-class alike. In Chapters 2 and 3, I discuss the
role of intimacy and connection in more detail, but it is important to note
here that one-to-one relationships between dancers and customers tran-
scend the particularities of different types of venues. However, the nature
of those relationships, and the ways and extent to which they are regu-
lated, vary a great deal.
Discussions of class are entwined with those of corporatization, but
corporatization encompasses a different—and broader, and perhaps
trickier—scope of consideration. It can be tempting to conflate indepen-
dent and working-class clubs, and corporate and middle-/upper-class ven-
ues, but this is a temptation I want to avoid. Corporate clubs tend to follow
the upper-tier, “gentlemen’s club” model, embedding markers of upper-
middle class identity in their physical facilities, food and beverage offer-
ings, sound design and décor, the appearance and costuming of employees
and dancers, and behavioral codes. But the “classiness” of these clubs isn’t
merely an expression of the taste or social stratum of their owners; instead,
it is part of a marketing strategy deployed to generate brand identity and

Introduction [ 15 ]
consumer loyalty. In contemporary consumer culture, choice and agency
are but fertile ground for branding, as Maurya Wickstrom writes:

The emotional life of the “customer” is targeted as a place of production, a deep

field for the invention of memories, associations, and affinities. Here the brand
can be shaped, evolved, and manifested, its post-production value extracted or
reaped by the corporation when the time is right.38

Corporate clubs like Diamonds use class as one of a number of means of

creating a branded experience. The corporate club model rejects the seedi-
ness of working-class clubs, but also the excesses of high-end clubs, so as
not to risk alienating middle-class customers. It provides touches of luxury
that signal a lifestyle somewhere between what customers encounter in
their “real” lives and one to which they might aspire: velvety banquettes,
expensive liquor, and well-appointed women. Not all corporate clubs follow
this model, and there are several chains aimed at non-white or working-
class customers that operate with different schematics. However, the
most cogent aspect of any corporate club is homogeny: in order to fulfill
the imperative of the brand, dancers must look and act the same, inter-
actions with customers must follow the same script, choreography and
performance must adopt the same style. There is no room in this model
for individual expression, or ambiguity, or eccentricity, or the ever-elusive
“authenticity.” Both dancers and customers instead enact what Wickstrom
terms “corporate performance,” continually recreating a living brand.

War Games

I sit at the end of the large oval conference table, with a bright florescent
light directed at my jet-lagged face. It is 8 am. Gathered around the table is
a group of august and aiming-for-august faculty of a highly ranked Theater
and Performance Studies department; before each one is a thick file with my
name on it. They flew me out to interview for a job, but now that I am here
I fear they may be regretting their decision. Making the de rigueur small
talk, they wait for the last members of the committee to arrive. Finally, an
austere woman about my own age slaps down her manila folder and asks the
first question, prefaced with a deep sigh of exasperation and simultaneous
roll of her eyes and shoulders: “Why should we care about your research?”

Questions like this one, and annoyance like the questioner’s, arise often,
and most often from other women. Why write about strippers? And if one

[ 16 ] The Naked Result

 Dancer Abel Fox. Photograph by David Burke.

does, why argue for anything but their oppression and objectification?
I am certainly not the first scholar to face such questions, nor the last; but
I hope this work can productively intervene in the debates among feminists
unfortunately termed the “sex wars.” In Live Sex Acts, Wendy Chapkis delin-
eates some of the opposing camps: “Pro-positive” sex feminism, which con-
demns pornographic and commercial sex as “male,” but seeks to encourage
the development of “female” eroticism (e.g., Kathleen Barry); “anti-sex
feminism,” which frames all sexual activity as contaminated by patriar-
chal power (e.g., Andrea Dworkin); “sexual libertarianism,” which largely
offers a simple reversal of this formulation, one in which women, rather
than men, create and maintain power via sexual encounters (e.g., Camille

Introduction [ 17 ]
Paglia); and “sex radical” feminism, which argues that although sex, like
every other activity, occurs within gendered, classed, raced, and other-
wise circumscribed social contexts, it is not merely a production of those
contexts, and can subvert dominant and destructive constructions (e.g.,
Pat Califia, Carol Queen, Kirsten Pullen). Chapkis is most concerned with
attitudes toward prostitution, but her taxonomy can be usefully applied
to exotic dance as well. The commodification of female sexuality raises the
same hackles whether in a brothel or a strip club.
The figure of the sex worker incites discomfort, anxiety, dismay, and pity
for many feminists, even if they have outgrown the strictures of anti-sex
feminism. Anne McClintock notes:

In the arguments of the anti-sex work lobby, the prostitute becomes the oth-
er’s other. A mute, cut-out paper doll onto which the relatively empowered
professional women often project their feelings of sexual frustration, political
impotence, and rage. The slave doll image serves as a ventriloquist’s dummy
through which (generally white, middle-class) women voice their interests, at
the expense of sex workers’ needs.”39

Books such as Chapkis’s, Jill Nagle’s Whores and Other Feminists, and
Kirsten Pullen’s Actresses and Whores have worked to recuperate this image
and give voice to the ventriloquist’s dummy, allowing sex workers to speak
for themselves. With the inclusion of sex workers’ perspectives—as well
as those of others “othered” by traditional feminist discourse—the rela-
tionships among female sexuality, commercialized sex, and female agency
become too complicated and nuanced to be accommodated by pro-positive,
anti-sex, or sexual-libertarian feminisms. While sex radical feminism can
be criticized for sometimes overemphasizing individual narratives at the
expense of broader sociopolitical analyses, it offers the possibility of ambi-
guity and multiplicity that many other strands of feminist discourse deny.
Many more traditional feminists, including those I encountered in that
brightly lit interview room, demonize exotic dance, sex work, and many
kinds of sexual experience as oppressive and objectifying; on the other
hand, many sex radical feminists celebrate these same activities as empow-
ering and transgressive. Both groups are right, and both are wrong—the
binary is false. The meanings of sex work are not stable, but rather shift
and evolve within different frameworks and for different participants.
A middle-class white woman who chooses sex work because she enjoys
sex will report one kind of experience, while a working-class Latina who
chooses sex work as an efficient means of paying for college will report
another, while a teenage runaway who feels she has no other options will

[ 18 ] The Naked Result

report a third.40 Exotic dancers at a club with high expectations of physical
contact with customers may perceive their work differently from those at a
club with more stringent regulations, but not always in the ways one might
expect.41 One of the projects of sex radical feminism has been to assert the
authority of women in sex work, arguing that

practices of prostitution, like other forms of commodification and consump-

tion, can be read in more complex ways than simply as a confirmation of male
domination. They may also be seen as sites of ingenious resistance and cultural
subversion. For this reason … the position of the prostitute cannot be reduced
to one of a passive object used in a male sexual practice, but instead can be
understood as a place of agency where the sex worker makes active use of the
existing sexual order.42

Women who perform erotic labor are not simply passive recipients of the
blows struck by patriarchal oppression—they have the power to speak
back, and to utilize the tools of their trade to throw punches of their own.
Both Chapkis and Jill Nagle, in her introduction to Whores and Other
Feminists, link queer identity politics to mainstream discourses on women
and sex work; Chapkis notes that “The queerer I became, the more I found
myself admiring and identifying with politicized whores.”43 Nagle perceives
a conceptual connection between the “threat” to the social order posed by
bisexual women and sex workers:

Bisexual women confound both the conservative and liberal constructions of

lesbianism, just as feminist, part-time, and unashamed sex workers confound
both conservative and liberal notions of whoring. … Like the bisexual woman,
the proud harlot, the lesbian feminist stripper, and the part-time whore work-
ing her way through grad school all suggest that women can choose the less
socially sanctioned of the good/bad girl boxes, and can do so out of liberation
rather than compulsion, or can refuse the binary entirely.44

Queer history is full of figures who operate in the space between, in the
gaps left by rigid categorization, who subvert norms of gender and sexual-
ity via knowing performances of those very norms. Chapkis and Nagle,
along with a number of other feminist critics and scholars, extend this
same possibility to sex workers. As Rebecca Schneider notes in The Explicit
Body in Performance, “By showing the show of their commodification, by
not completely passing as that which they purport to be, [prostitutes] can
talk or gesture back to the entire social enterprise which secret(s) them.”45
Many of the women I worked with at Backstage Bill’s used performance

Introduction [ 19 ]
strategies like humor, costuming, exaggeration, and character to com-
ment on their own objectification by viewers, even calling out specific
audience members and naming their voyeurism. And many of us danced
for our own pleasure, enjoying our performances surely as much as did our
audiences.
But what does such enjoyment mean? The word “empowerment” is
unavoidable in this research terrain, ready to trip us up like roller skates
carelessly left out on the stoop. Just because I felt sensual pleasure and
a sense of embodied agency while dancing doesn’t mean that agency
was real. Feeling empowered isn’t the same as being empowered, and
despite—or perhaps because of—its ubiquity, the term itself is only
vaguely defined. The possibility that sex work and sexually explicit
performance might empower women, rather than degrade them, has
become a familiar trope in the “sex wars” and in debates about the
“sexualization” of mainstream culture. Rosalind Gill summarizes the
argument:

On the one side are those who mobilize women’s “choice,” “agency,” and “empow-
erment” to champion aspects of “sexualized” culture such as pornography,
burlesque, or the popularity of pole dancing as a recreational activity—these
activities can be defended (or even celebrated) because they are “empowering.”
On the other, empowerment is regarded merely as a cynical rhetoric, wrapping
sexual objectification in a shiny, feisty, post-feminist package that obscures the
continued underlying sexism.46

As is so often the case, the polarization between these two sides obfuscates
more important and interesting questions about the possible meanings of
“sexual empowerment” and relationships between ideas about individual
agency and broader structural change. Whether heralded as an epiphany or
condemned as false consciousness, sexual empowerment is nearly always
framed as a matter of individual development rather than as a potential
issue for social or political action.
I share with Gill her sense of “fatigue” in facing these discussions;47
however, I also feel a need to position myself within them. Throughout
this project I want to challenge the either/or dichotomies that dictate so
many conversations about women and sexuality. There is no way to know
what “female” sexual experience and expression would look like beyond
the influence of patriarchy, although feminist pornographers like Annie
Sprinkle deserve commendation for trying. And there is no denying the
damage done by hypersexualized representations of women in popular
culture, although that damage is often oversimplified. But neither ought

[ 20 ] The Naked Result

we deny women’s own accounts of lived experience: within the limiting,
misogynist, unjust boundaries of contemporary sexuality, many women
report desire, pleasure, power, and self-awareness.
Rather than stumbling into the chasm between “either” and “or,” I want
to travel in the realm of “both/and,” or even “both/and/and the other.” We
can simultaneously trust women to understand and narrate their expe-
riences of embodiment and sexuality and interrogate the systemically
oppressive structures in which those experiences take place. In “Uses of
the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes:

There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual
plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.
In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those
various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide
energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a
considered source of power and information within our lives.48

I must admit trepidation whenever “female” and “spiritual” occur in the

same sentence, but Lorde’s understanding of the erotic points toward
a less-bloody navigation through the sex wars. Lorde celebrates sexual-
ity as a source of not just personal but also political power—of “energy
for change.” At the same time, she laments the ways in which this power
has been suppressed, and later in the essay Lorde delineates differences
between eroticism and pornography; pornography, she states, “emphasizes
sensation without feeling.”49 Lorde’s concern resonates with Ariel Levy’s
dismay in Female Chauvinist Pigs:

The women who are really being emulated and obsessed over in our culture right
now—strippers, porn stars, pinups—aren’t even people. They are merely sexual
personae, erotic dollies from the land of make believe. In their performances,
which is the only capacity in which we see these women we so fetishize, they
don’t even speak. As far as we know, they have no ideas, no feelings, no political
beliefs, no relationships, no past, no humanity.50

Both Lorde and Levy insist that the “truly” erotic necessarily involves
emotional, even spiritual, engagement. Stripped of this connection, the
erotic is reduced to the sexual: vulgar, oppressive, and dehumanizing.
McClintock’s ventriloquist’s dummy and Levy’s erotic dolly are one and
the same: a woman made to speak in the voice of male desire, a manipu-
lated symbol without a thought in her pretty head or feeling in her candy

Introduction [ 21 ]
heart. Ironically, although both Lorde and Levy argue against patriarchal
constructions of sexuality, their position recapitulates some of those very
constructions, limiting sexual desire to a dictum prescribed by heteronor-
mative, misogynist convention: that, as my mother was told by hers, men
want sex while women want love.
However, despite this surprisingly retrograde formulation, Lorde’s
notion of female erotic power points toward “both/and/and the other”
arguments in debates about sexual empowerment. If we understand sexu-
ality as a fundamental, “deeply rooted” force in our embodied selves, we
can better appreciate why women experience a sense of reinvention and
reclaiming when they finally feel that they can access that force. And if
we also accept that female sexuality has been suppressed and distorted
by dominant social structures, we can perhaps approach the ways that
women engage their sexuality with more compassion. Women seeking
erotic expression find a terribly narrow array of possibilities represented
in mainstream culture—the continuum from slutty to sluttier that Levy
so vociferously decries. Perhaps, rather than accusing women who claim
empowerment through various forms of sexual display of operating with
false consciousness, we might recognize that many of them are simply
working with the images and scripts available to them: as Lorde herself
noted, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”51 Levy
writes:

If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range
of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves
the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mim-
icking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be sexual
liberation.52

In many ways I couldn’t agree more, but I wonder how Levy imagines
women might explore “the variety of human desire” in a world in which
desire is so circumscribed, manipulated, and exploited. What Levy pro-
poses is overwhelming at the level of individual agency—as many sex
radical feminist writers and activists have asserted, the “freedom to figure
out what we internally want from sex” requires other freedoms, ones that
entail enormous cultural and political upheavals. Developing a liberated
female eroticism, with its own lexicon of sexual imagery and ideas, would
demand a concurrent overhaul of all manner of misogynist practices and
power structures. However, I believe this is a two-way street: the pursuit
of just such an eroticism is also essential for efforts toward broader social
change.

[ 22 ] The Naked Result

 Union Square Pole Dancing. Photograph by J. Elizabeth Clark.

WHAT’S IN THIS BOOK AND WHY

Summer and I sit together on the bed, watching the second half of a
Lifetime made-for-TV movie. There isn’t anywhere else to sit in the small
motel room, so we get as comfortable as we can. I’m there because we’ve
had such a good time at the club together; we share an appreciation for
the absurd, and I am an excellent audience for her many tales of adven-
ture. She tells me about how she’s only in New Haven because all her gear
was stolen while she was on her way to New York, about lying naked next
to naked celebrities when she lived in LA and worked as an escort, about
the time she and her ex-husband lost their Mercedes—for good—because
they couldn’t remember where they had parked it when they were high.
I’m pretty sure that at least the first story is true, because when she
showed up at Backstage Bill’s she had only one outfit, a red spandex dress,
which she wore every night until a bunch of us started giving her clothes
just to break up the monotony. She is more intellectually inclined than
many of the other women I work with, or at least more open about being
smart, and we chat about pop culture and books when business is slow.
But here in her room, whatever closeness we’ve felt seems forced. She
makes sure I know she doesn’t plan on being here long—she’s a traveling

Introduction [ 23 ]
stripper, on her way, she hopes, to American Samoa, where she says danc-
ers earn a thousand dollars a night. She grows more and more enthusi-
astic as she describes this tropical, lucrative destination, and suddenly
invites me to go with her. An unspoken agreement springs to life in the
tiny space between us: I know that she’ll never make it to Samoa, and she
knows that I know, but we laugh and I say sure, when I can save enough
for a ticket.

There are many, many stripper memoirs. If you feel so inclined, you can
type “stripper memoir” into Amazon.com, or you can just take my word
for it: MANY. This is not one of them. However, I would not be writing
this book if I had not had the experience of working as an exotic dancer,
and I use that experience both to ground my research and as a form of
research in itself. Because of the interdisciplinary, “messy” nature of my
topic and argument, there are several strands in my approach, among them
ethnography, autoethnography, movement analysis, historical and archi-
val research, theoretical inquiry, and what I can only call old-fashioned
detective work.
The following chapter delves into many of these, focusing on those
that may seem the most controversial, at least in academic circles. When
I began this work I didn’t know that there was such a thing as “autoethnog-
raphy,” an entire field of sociology devoted to first-person narrative—or
that this field had been so thoroughly theorized—and I felt quite tenta-
tive about even mentioning my own lived experience. Chapter 2 explores
autoethnography as a form of research and writing, attempting to address
both its many potential uses and its many pitfalls. Autoethnography has
been described as a tool for resistance against dominant and oppressive
discourses, including colonialism, gender discrimination, and racism; it has
also been vilified as glorified navel-gazing and can be cringingly cloying to
read. As with so many other forms of academic writing, autoethnography
tends to neglect a sense of embodiment, even when focusing on bodies.
Primarily the domain of women writers, this form often examines bodily
extremes, such as eating disorders, sexual trauma, or self-harm; however,
the ways in which authors depict and describe the body can fall back on
Foucauldian tropes of inscription and subjectification. Autoethnography
advocate Tami Spry writes:

When the body is erased in the process(ing) of scholarship, knowledge situated

within the body is unavailable. Enfleshed knowledge is restricted by linguistic
patterns of positivist dualism—mind/body, objective/subjective—that fix the
body as an entity incapable of literacy.53

[ 24 ] The Naked Result

But Spry’s desire to ascribe “literacy” to the body seems to me
misguided—the body has its own ways of understanding and its own
modes of production, and despite myriad attempts to categorize these as
linguistic they simply aren’t. In the following chapter I bring the concept
of kinesthesia to bear on the practice of autoethnography, attempting to
develop a mode of embodied witnessing that takes into account both sen-
sate experience and the capacity for critical analysis.
My choice of sites through which to examine the corporatization of
striptease was largely dictated by proximity and luck. I am indebted to
scholars like Judith Lynn Hanna and Katherine Liepe-Levinson, who have
undertaken vast, thorough studies of striptease dance that entailed mul-
tiple visits to scores, and in some cases hundreds, of clubs. But this type
of scholarship is not something I desired to do myself, nor for which I had
the training or resources. Rather, I wanted to focus the project on just a
few case studies, starting with the ones I knew best: Backstage Bill’s in New
Haven and Diamond’s in Hartford. My differing experiences at these two
clubs instigated my interest in exotic dance as a research area, and led me
to examine the increasing corporate takeover of the exotic dance industry.
Chapter 3 describes these two venues in detail, using them to elaborate the
broader arguments of the book. Investigating the ways that corporations
have shaped exotic dance required a foray into marketing and brand man-
agement, strange new worlds for an artsy academic such as myself. In this
chapter I use marketing theory to examine the interplay of regulation and
play at work in corporate chains.
My first teaching position after my stripping year was in the United
Kingdom, where I learned about the arrival of the lap dance and how it had
altered striptease in London. The story of American lap dance’s coloniza-
tion of the native stripping culture illuminated precisely the kinds of issues
I sought to examine. While table dancing and lap dancing were integral
to striptease in the United States as early as the 1970s, they invaded the
exotic dance scene in the United Kingdom only in the mid-1990s, driven by
the force of American entrepreneurship; until the mid-1990s, striptease in
Britain took place in basement pubs and involved women carrying empty
pint glasses from customer to customer to solicit tips in order to perform
on makeshift stages.54 In Chapter 4, I investigate the emergence of lap danc-
ing in the United Kingdom and explore how this new idiom—and the new
chains established to showcase it—transformed British striptease dancing,
both on stage and in private booths. Much of my fieldwork for this chap-
ter was funded by a grant from the British Academy, which allowed me to
undertake interviews and movement observations in a range of venues in
London (and receive numerous lap dances). The chapter concludes with a

Introduction [ 25 ]
consideration of alternative striptease performances that resist the hege-
mony of corporate striptease, including the explicitly transgressive (and
just plain explicit) annual Erotic Awards Showcase.
From the United Kingdom I moved to Boston, which turned out to har-
bor its own fantastic striptease story. A photography exhibit at the Howard
Yezerski Gallery introduced me to the Combat Zone, an adult entertain-
ment district established in 1974 by the city of Boston after it destroyed
the burlesque theaters and strip clubs in Scollay Square as part of the plan
for the “New Boston.” Rather than risk the invasion of residential neighbor-
hoods by evicted exotic dancers and prostitutes, the city chose to contain
the sex industry within two downtown blocks. By the early 1990s the Zone
was gone, replaced by luxury condominiums, retail outlets, and legitimate
theaters, but the Yezerski exhibit stirred the city’s collective memory, and
I kept encountering wistful reminiscences of a time and place that seemed
nearly unimaginable in this puritanical, mercantile city. Fascinated, I began
to seek out more information, and soon found myself in a flood of (virtual)
newspaper clippings, photographs, and chat rooms. Although many people
recalled the Zone as someplace “authentic,” it was already a ghost of the for-
mer Scollay Square and Old Howard Theater, where burlesque luminaries
like Ann Corio performed for audiences including a young John Kennedy.
Bostonians’ perception of the Zone’s authenticity has been magnified by
time, and by the contrast between the neighborhood then and now: where
once the Naked i promised live performance and erotic imagination, now
there is a parking garage; where once the Pilgrim Theater screened x-rated
movies, now looms a luxury apartment tower where rent for a studio starts
at $2,800 per month. The history of the Zone and its demise includes a
narrative of civic and corporate entities at first in conflict, then in cahoots,
offering a unique site through which to explore these dual pressures on
exotic dance.
The following chapter centers on Rick’s Cabaret, a publicly traded, clean-
cut topless strip club chain based in Houston and a model of a carefully
constructed corporate brandscape. Now formally known as RCI Hospitality
Holdings LLC, Rick’s owns over forty venues across the United States,
including a World War II–themed chain of “breasturaunts,” and is pub-
licly traded on NASDAQ (as part of my research for this chapter, I bought
shares in Rick’s Cabaret and have followed its market performance as a
shareholder as well as an interested observer). Like other behemoth retail
chains, such as Barnes and Noble Booksellers or Starbucks, Rick’s employs
a “consolidation model” to acquire “independently owned mom-and-pop
operations”55 that can be quickly and easily converted into Rick’s outlets.

[ 26 ] The Naked Result

 Rick’s is especially useful for this study because of its strategies to
achieve upward mobility and middle-class acceptance as part of its cor-
porate project. When Rick’s opened in midtown Manhattan in September
2005, it introduced a new level of branded slickness and segregation to
a stripping scene that was still reeling from the purifying fury of Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani. With its upscale décor, food and beverage offer-
ings, and bureaucratized infrastructure, Rick’s fit right into gentrified
Times Square, aligning itself with the city’s resurgent bourgeois values.
However, Rick’s may have been too successful for its own good in its
quest for legitimacy. Like several other chain clubs, Rick’s has been the
subject of numerous lawsuits by dancers claiming that the company’s
micromanagement constitutes its workers as employees rather than
independent contractors and entitles them to minimum wage, health
insurance, and other employee benefits. At the time of this writing,
Rick’s dancers in New York had just won a judgment of over $10 million
in a class-action suit.
The final chapter is not so much a conclusion as an expansion of my
inquiry, looking at the ways that the new corporate striptease is trans-
forming exotic dance’s engagement with commercial and social contexts.
Striptease has become an academic avatar for the escalation and intensifi-
cation of sexuality in popular culture: what Brian McNair calls “Striptease
Culture,” Fiona Attwood terms “the sexualization of culture,” and Ariel
Levy and others call “porn chic.” One of the major factors in the “main-
streaming” of striptease has been its repackaging as a means for women
to reclaim sexual and emotional agency. Looking at exercise/empower-
ment regimes such as Sheila Kelley’s “The S-Factor” and the “Art of Exotic
Dancing,” I argue that these programs for self-improvement serve as
part of a larger corporate project aimed at the appropriation and recod-
ing of striptease toward a consumer-friendly homogenization of sexuality.
Finally, I examine two possible alternatives to mainstream exotic dance,
one alluding to the past, the other to the future. The former, neo-burlesque,
is a movement that offers exciting alternatives to mainstream exotic dance
while simultaneously enforcing some of the problematic discourses of class,
commercialism, and sexual empowerment discussed throughout the book.
The latter is camming, an interactive Internet practice in which customers
pay performers both to watch and be watched. A hybrid of stripping and
pornography, camming raises questions about the power of looking and
the relationships between embodiment and intimacy that permeate this
project; I cannot answer them, but a brief exploration of camming under-
scores their resonance.

Introduction [ 27 ]
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT MY RESEARCH?

More women are employed in exotic dance than in all other dance idioms
combined. If you are interested in dance in the contemporary Western world,
you should be interested in striptease if only for this special status. But of
course my own reasons are more complicated: this arena provokes questions
that I find meaningful—professionally, personally, and politically. Over the
course of nearly twenty years of teaching girls and women, I have become
convinced that women’s sexuality contains a crucial key to modernity, equal-
ity, and freedom. Does that sound absurd? Look around: find the places
where women’s sexual expression is most suppressed, and you will find the
most oppressive, anti-intellectual, anti-human rights places on the globe.
But we needn’t confront the complexities of cultural difference: even within
the boundaries of the mostly upper-middle-class, majority white students
I have recently taught at Yale and Harvard, female embodiment and sexuality
are telling barometers of larger social ills. My female students spend untold
hours despairing about imaginary corpulence and imagined erotic display,
wasting away their formidable intellects on idiotic taxonomies and patently
masculinist categorizations. Exotic dance, and issues surrounding it, can feel
far afield from the institutions in which I teach, but my female students are
not so far from the strippers I worked with—and, even in my current rather
bourgeois incarnation as wife, mother, and teacher, neither am I.
Why should you care about my research? Because it’s important to acknowl-
edge that many pioneering feminists—often for sound reasons—neglected
the body in order to valorize the mind, and we have to start somewhere to
repair this dissonance. The historical conflation of “woman” and “body”
pushed some early feminist critics toward a rigid cerebralism, but even many
contemporary scholars dismiss embodiment and eroticism as tainted and
taboo. We desperately need to address female sexuality as “a considered source
of power and information within our lives” in order to move forward as fully
realized people, citizens, and activists. One of the most intriguing dancers
I encountered in this research process is Lucy Wightman, who, then known as
Princess Cheyenne, was the star performer of the Combat Zone. After leaving
exotic dance Wightman worked as a professional bodybuilder, psychothera-
pist, and photographer, and has spoken and written about her experiences as
a stripper and feminist. In an email correspondence she wrote:

I can’t really go into the part about me. What I can say is that being comfortable
with one’s sexual energy has to be explained in our culture to metabolize the fear
it evokes. I have heard many women over the years try to explain it away, almost
excusing the experience. It is true that not every woman was comfortable with

[ 28 ] The Naked Result

 stripping, or with the connotations, and this leads back to the same process of
explaining their choices to the culture at large.56

Like any other dance form, striptease is about more than the bodies per-
forming it, but because of its explicit evocations of sexuality and desire it
cannot be contained by a purely discursive analysis. Thinking and writing
about exotic dance necessarily exposes deeply contested questions about
women and sexuality that cannot be politely finessed into the lexicon of
disembodied scholarship or normative discourse.
However, if you are uninterested in the serpentine questions that sur-
round female eroticism, you may still find reasons to care about this proj-
ect. Like most of us, you may have grown quite complacent about the reach
of corporations into many facets of your life. Perhaps bought this book on
Amazon.com from your iPhone while sipping a Starbucks Caramel Ribbon
Crunch Frappacino® Blended Beverage, or maybe you were on your way to
Niketown to buy new Nike Air Max 1 Ultra Moire sneakers, or perhaps you
were purchasing a Disney Frozen Sparkle Princess Elsa doll from Target.
But even the most brand-happy consumer ought to feel just a touch of
unease when confronted by the corporate colonization of a historically
subversive form of erotic expression and communication. If the pleasures
and perils of exotic dance can be subjected to marketing strategies, what
aspect of contemporary life is exempt? Striptease is an ideal site through
which to examine the corporate impulse to brand experiences as well as
things, and to ask ourselves where and how we might wish to resist cor-
porate hegemony. Through the corporatization of striptease, the exotic
dance club has become but one more brandscape; the potentially transgres-
sive dance idiom of striptease has become merely a mode for performing
social norms; and intimate interactions between dancers and customers
have become scripted dialogues dictated by employee handbooks. Those
of us concerned about corporate power ought to wonder about this transi-
tion, even those who have never set foot in a strip club. I offer this book
in the spirit of that questioning, and hope that it will encourage your own
curiosity—and perhaps even alarm.

Introduction [ 29 ]
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
died in bed, knew what his progenitors had been spared. Even in the
soberly civilized eighteenth century there lingered a doubt as to the
relative value of battle-field, gallows and sick-chamber.

“Men may escape from rope and gun,

Some have outlived the doctor’s pill;”

sang Captain Macheath to the fashionable world which thronged to

hear the verities of “The Beggar’s Opera.”
Fighting and making up, alternate friends and foes, the nations of
Europe have come in a thousand years to know one another fairly
well. There was a short time when Napoleon’s threatened invasion
awakened in England’s breast a hearty and healthy abhorrence of
France. There was a long time when the phrase, “virgin of English,”
applied to a few perilously placed French seaports (Saint-Malo, for
example), revealed, as only such proud and burning words can ever
reveal, the national hatred of England. Over and over again history
taught the same lesson; that the will of a people is stout to repel the
invader, and that a foreign alliance offers no stable foundation for
policy. But a great deal is learned from contact, whether it be friendly
or inimical; and the close call of the Great War has left behind it a
legacy of percipience. It was an Englishman who discovered during
those years that the French officers snored “with a certain
politeness.” It was a great American who said that France had
“saved the soul of the world.” It was a Frenchman who wrote
comprehensively: “To disregard danger, to stand under fire, is not for
an Englishman an act of courage; it is part of a good education.”
When gratitude is forgotten, as all things which clamour for
remembrance should be, and sentimentalism has dissolved under
the pitiless rays of reality, there remains, and will remain, a good
understanding which is the basis of good will.
At present the nations that were drawn together by a common peril
are a little tired of one another’s company, and more than a little
irritated by one another’s grievances. The natural result of this
weariness and irritation is an increase of sympathy for Germany,
who now finds herself detested by her former allies, and smiled upon
by at least some of her former foes. All that she says, and she has a
great deal to say, is listened to urbanely. General Ludendorff has
assured the American public that Prussia was innocent of even a
desire to injure England. What she sought was peace “on conditions
acceptable and inoffensive to both parties.” The Crown Prince’s
memoirs, which have been appreciatively reviewed, set forth in
eloquent language the Arthurian blamelessness of the
Hohenzollerns. “The results of the excessive Viennese demand upon
Serbia involved us in the war against our will.”
The breathless competition for the memoirs of the exiled Kaiser
was a notable event in the publishing world. The history of literature
can show nothing to resemble it. In 1918 we gravely discussed the
propriety of trying this gentleman for his life. In 1922 we contended
with far more heat for the privilege of presenting to a gratified public
his imperial views upon his imperial policy. Americans exulted over
the acquisition of these copyrights as they exulted over the
acquisition of the Blue Boy. It is a grand thing to be able to outbid
one’s neighbour, and pay a “record-smashing” price for any article in
the market. Certain inflexible and unhumorous souls took umbrage
at this catering to a principle we professed to reject, at the elevation
of Wilhelm the Second to the rank of the world’s most favoured
author. They thought it implied a denial of all we reverenced, of all
we fought for, of all we knew to be good. It really implied nothing but
curiosity; and curiosity is not to be confounded with homage. Saint
Michael is honoured of men and angels; but if he and Lucifer gave
their memoirs to the world, which would be better paid for, or more
read?
 They Had Their Day
“To a man,” says an engaging cynic in Mr. Stephen McKenna’s
“Sonia,” “sex is an incident: to a woman it is everything in this world
and in the next”; a generalization which a novelist can always
illustrate with a heroine who meets his views. We have had many
such women in recent fiction, and it takes some discernment to
perceive that in them sex seems everything, only because honour
and integrity and fair-mindedness are nothing. They are not swept by
emotions good or bad; but when all concern for other people’s rights
and privileges is eliminated, a great deal of room is left for the
uneasy development of appetites which may be called by any name
we like.
Among the Georgian and early-Victorian novelists, Richardson
alone stands as an earnest and pitiless expositor of sex. He slipped
as far away from it as he could in “Sir Charles Grandison,” but in
doing so he slipped away from reality. The grossness of Fielding’s
men is not intrinsic; it is, as Mr. McKenna would say, incidental. Jane
Austen, who never wrote of things with which she was unfamiliar,
gave the passions a wide berth. Scott was too robustly masculine,
and Dickens too hopelessly and helplessly humorous, to deal with
them intelligently. Thackeray dipped deep into the strong tide of life,
and was concerned with all its eddying currents. Woman was to him
what she was not to Scott, “une grande réalité comme la guerre”;
and, like war, she had her complications. He found these
complications to be for the most part distasteful; but he never
assumed that a single key could open all the chambers of her soul.
When Mrs. Ritchie said of Jane Austen’s heroines that they have
“a certain gentle self-respect, and humour, and hardness of heart,”
she must have had Emma in her mind. Humour hardens the heart, at
least to the point of sanity; and Emma surveys her little world of
Highbury very much as Miss Austen surveyed her little world of
Steventon and Chawton, with a less piercing intelligence, but with
the same appreciation of foibles, and the same unqualified
acceptance of tedium. To a modern reader, the most striking thing
about the life depicted in all these novels is its dullness. The men
have occupations of some sort, the women have none. They live in
the country, or in country towns. Of outdoor sports they know
nothing. They walk when the lanes are not too muddy, and some of
them ride. They play round games in the evening, and always for a
stake. A dinner or a dance is an event in their lives; and as for acting,
we know what magnificent proportions it assumes when we are told
that even to Henry Crawford, “in all the riot of his gratifications, it was
as yet an untasted pleasure.”
Emma, during the thirteen months in which we enjoy her
acquaintance, finds plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. Her
unwarranted interference in the love affairs of two people whom it is
her plain business to let alone is the fruit of ennui. Young, rich,
nimble of wit and sound of heart, she lives through days and nights
of inconceivable stupidity. She does not ride, and we have Mr.
Knightley’s word for it that she does not read. She can sketch, but
one drawing in thirteen months is the sum of her accomplishment.
She may possibly have a regard for the “moral scenery” which
Hannah More condescended to admire; but nature is neither law nor
impulse to her soul. She knows little or nothing of the country about
her own home. It takes the enterprising Mrs. Elton to get her as far
as Box Hill, a drive of seven miles, though the view it commands is
so fine as to provoke “a burst of admiration” from beholders who
have apparently never taken the trouble to look at it before. “We are
a very quiet set of people,” observes Emma in complacent defence
of this apathy, “more disposed to stay at home than engage in
schemes of pleasure.”
Dr. Johnson’s definition of a novel as “a smooth tale, generally of
love,” fits Miss Austen well. It is not that she assigns to love a heavy
rôle; but there is nothing to interfere with its command of the
situation. Vague yearnings, tempestuous doubts, combative
principles, play no part in her well-ordered world. The poor and the
oppressed are discreetly excluded from its precincts. Emma does
not teach the orphan boy to read, or the orphan girl to sew. She
looks after her father’s comfort, and plays backgammon with him in
the evenings. Of politics she knows nothing, and the most
complicated social problem she is called on to face is the
recognition, or the rejection, of her less fashionable neighbours. Are,
or are not, the Coles sufficiently genteel to warrant her dining with
them? Highbury is her universe, and no restless discontent haunts
her with waking dreams of the Tiber and the Nile. Frank Churchill
may go to London, sixteen miles off, to get his hair cut; but Emma
remains at Hartfield, and holds the centre of the stage. We can count
the days, we can almost count the hours in her monotonous life. She
is unemotional, even for her setting; and it was after reading her
placid history that Charlotte Brontë wrote the memorable
depreciation of all Miss Austen’s novels.
But, though beset and environed by dullness, Emma is not dull.
On the contrary, she is remarkably engaging; less vivacious than
Elizabeth Bennet, but infinitely more agreeable. She puts us into a
good humour with ourselves, she “produces delight.” The secret of
her potency is that she has grasped the essential things of life, and
let the non-essentials go. There is distinction in the way she accepts
near duties, in her sense of balance, and order, and propriety. She is
a normal creature, highly civilized, and sanely artificial. Mr.
Saintsbury says that Miss Austen knew two things: humanity and art.
“Her men, though limited, are true, and her women are, in the old
sense, absolute.” Emma is “absolute.” The possibility—or
impossibility—of being Mr. Knightley’s intellectual competitor never
occurs to her. She covets no empty honours. She is content to be
necessary and unassailable.
Mr. Chesterton has written a whimsical and fault-finding paper
entitled “The Evolution of Emma,” in which he assumes that this
embodiment of domesticity is the prototype of the modern welfare
worker who runs birth-control meetings and baby weeks, urges
maternity bills upon legislators, prates about segregation, and
preaches eugenics and sex hygiene to a world that knows a great
deal more about such matters than she does. Emma, says Mr.
Chesterton, considers that because she is more genteel than Harriet
Smith she is privileged to alienate this humble friend from Robert
Martin who wants to marry her, and fling her at the head of Mr. Elton
who doesn’t. Precisely the same spirit—so he asserts—induces the
welfare worker to conceive that her greater gentility (she sometimes
calls it intelligence) warrants her gross intrusion into the lives of
people who are her social inferiors. It is because they are her social
inferiors that she dares to do it. The goodness of her intentions
carries no weight. Emma’s intentions are of the best, so far as she
can separate them from her subconscious love of meddling.
This ingenious comparison is very painful to Emma’s friends in the
world of English readers. It cannot be that she is the ancestress of a
type so vitally opposed to all that she holds correct and becoming. I
do not share Mr. Chesterton’s violent hostility to reformers, even
when they have no standard of taste. There are questions too big
and pertinacious for taste to control. I only think it hard that, feeling
as he does, he should compare Emma’s youthful indiscretions with
more radical and disquieting activities. Emma is indiscreet, but she is
only twenty-one. At twenty-two she is safely married to Mr. Knightley,
and her period of indiscretion is over. At twenty-two she has fulfilled
her destiny, has stepped into line, and, as the centre of the social
unit, is harmoniously adjusted, not to Highbury alone, but to
civilization and the long traditions of the ages. That she should
regard her lover, even in her first glowing moments of happiness, as
an agreeable companion, and as an assistant in the care of her
father, is characteristic. “Self-respect, humour and hardness of heart”
are out of hand with romance. So much the better for Mr. Knightley,
who will never find his emotions drained, his wisdom questioned, his
authority denied, and who will come in time to believe that he, and
not his wife, is “absolute.”

“The formal stars do travel so,

That we their names and courses know;
And he that on their changes looks
Would think them govern’d by our books.”
 Miss Austen’s views on marriage are familiar to her readers, and
need no comment. They must have been drawn from a careful
survey of the society which surrounded her, a society composed for
the most part of insensitive, unrebellious men and women who had
the habit of making the best of things. At times the cynicism is a trifle
too pronounced, as when Eleanor Dashwood asks herself why Mr.
Palmer is so ill-mannered:
“His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many
others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of
beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman. But she knew that
this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be
lastingly hurt by it.”
At times simplicity and sincerity transcend the limits of likelihood,
as when Elizabeth Watson says to her young sister:
“I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than
yourself; but I do not think there are many very disagreeable men. I
think I could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable
income.”
At times a delicacy of touch lends distinction to the frankest
worldliness, as when Mary Crawford generously applauds her
brother Henry’s determination to marry Fanny Price:
“I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women; and
that even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the
liberality and good breeding of a gentleman.”
There is a lamentable lack of sentiment in even this last and
happiest exposition of married life; but it expresses the whole duty of
husbands, and the whole welfare of wives, as understood in the year
1814.
If Jane Austen and Thackeray wrought their heroines with perfect
and painstaking accuracy, Scott’s attitude was for the most part one
of reprehensible indifference. His world was run by men, and the
ringleted sylphs of seventeen (the word “flapper” had not then cast
discredit on this popular age) play very simple parts. Ruskin, it may
be remembered, ardently admired these young ladies, and held
them up as models of “grace, tenderness and intellectual power” to
all his female readers. It never occurred to the great moralist, any
more than to the great story-teller, that a girl is something more than
a set of assorted virtues. “To Scott, as to most men of his age,”
observes an acute English critic, “woman was not an individual, but
an institution—a toast that was drunk some time after Church and
King.”
Diana Vernon exists to be toasted. She has the

“True blue
And Mrs. Crewe”

quality associated in our minds with clinking glasses, and loud-

spoken loyalty to Stuart or to Hanoverian. She has always caught
the fancy of men, and has been likened in her day to Shakespeare’s
Beatrice, Rosalind and Portia, ladies of wit and distinction, who
aspire to play adventurous rôles in the mad medley of life. She is as
well fitted to provoke general admiration as Julia Mannering is to
awaken personal regard. She is one of the five heroines of English
fiction with whom Mr. Saintsbury avows no man of taste and spirit
can fail to fall in love. He does not aspire, even in fancy, to marry her.
His choice of a wife is Elizabeth Bennet. But for “occasional
companionship” he gives Diana the prize.
Occasional companionship is all that we get of her in “Rob Roy.”
She enlivens the opening chapters very prettily, but is eliminated
from the best and most vigorous episodes. My own impression is
that Scott forgot all about Miss Vernon while he was happily engaged
with MacGregor, and the Bailie, and Andrew Fairservice; and that
whenever he remembered her, he produced her on the stage as
mysteriously and as irrelevantly as a conjurer lifts white rabbits out of
his hat. Wrapped in a horseman’s cloak, she comes riding under a
frosty moon, gives Frank Osbaldistone a packet of valuable papers,
bids him one of half-a-dozen solemn and final farewells, and
disappears until the next trick is called. It was a good arrangement
for Scott, who liked to have the decks cleared for action; but it makes
Diana unduly fantastic and unreal.
So, too, does the weight of learning with which Rashleigh
Osbaldistone has loaded her. Greek and Latin, history, science and
philosophy, “as well as most of the languages of modern Europe,”
seem a large order for a girl of eighteen. Diana can also saddle and
bridle a horse, clear a five-barred gate, and fire a gun without
winking. Yet she has a “tiny foot”—so at least Scott says—and she
rides to hounds with her hair bound only by the traditional ribbon, so
that her long tresses “stream on the breeze.” The absurd and
complicated plot in which she is involved is never disentangled.
Dedicated in infancy to the cloister, which was at least unusual, she
has been released by Rome from vows she has never taken, only on
condition that she marries a cousin who is within the forbidden
degree of kindred. Her numerous allusions to this circumstance
—“The fatal veil was wrapped round me in my cradle,” “I am by
solemn contract the bride of Heaven, betrothed to the convent from
the cradle”—distress and mystify poor Frank, who is not clever at
best, and who accepts all her verdicts as irrevocable. Every time she
bids him farewell, he believes it to be the end; and he loses the last
flicker of hope when she sends him a ring by—of all people under
Heaven—Helen MacGregor, who delivers it with these cheerful
words: “Young man, this comes from one whom you will never see
more. If it is a joyless token, it is well fitted to pass through the hands
of one to whom joy can never be known. Her last words were ‘Let
him forget me forever.’”
After which the astute reader is prepared to hear that Frank and
Diana were soon happily married, without any consideration for
cradle or for cloister, and without the smallest intervention from
Rome.
Miss Vernon is one of Scott’s characters for whom an original has
been found. This in itself is a proof of vitality. Nobody would dream of
finding the original of Lucy Bertram, or Isabella Wardour, or Edith
Bellenden. As a matter of fact, the same prototype would do for all
three, and half-a-dozen more. But Captain Basil Hall expended much
time and ingenuity in showing that Scott drew Diana after the
likeness of Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun, a young lady of Edinburgh
who married an Austrian nobleman, and left Scotland before the first
of the Waverley Novels was written.
Miss Cranstoun was older than Scott, well born, well looking, a
fearless horse-woman, a frank talker, a warm friend, and had some
reputation as a wit. It was through her that the young man made his
first acquaintance with Bürger’s ballad, “Lenore,” which so powerfully
affected his imagination that he sat up all night, translating it into
English verse. When it was finished, he repaired to Miss Cranstoun’s
house to show her the fruits of his labour. It was then half-past six,
an hour which to that vigorous generation seemed seasonable for a
morning call. Clarissa Harlowe grants Lovelace his interviews at five.
Miss Cranstoun listened to the ballad with more attention than
Diana vouchsafed to her lover’s translation from Ariosto (it was
certainly better worth hearing), gave Scott his meed of praise and
encouragement, and remained his friend, confidant and critic until
her marriage separated them forever. There are certain points of
resemblance between this clever woman and the high-spirited girl
whom Justice Inglewood calls the “heath-bell of Cheviot,” and
MacGregor “a daft hempsie but a mettle quean.” It may be that
Diana owes her vitality to Scott’s faithful remembrance of Miss
Cranstoun, just as Jeanie Deans owes her rare and perfect
naturalness to his clear conception of her noble prototype, Helen
Walker. “A novel is history without documents, nothing to prove it,”
said Mr. John Richard Green; but unproved verities, as unassailable
as unheard melodies, have a knack of surviving the rack and ruin of
time.
When Thackeray courageously gave to the world “a novel without
a hero,” he atoned for his oversight by enriching it with two heroines,
so carefully portrayed, so admirably contrasted, that each
strengthens and perfects the other. Just as Elizabeth Tudor and
Mary Stuart are etched together on the pages of history with a vivid
intensity which singly they might have missed, so Amelia Sedley and
Becky Sharp (place à la vertu) are etched together on the pages of
fiction with a distinctness derived in part from the force of
comparison. And just as readers of history have been divided for
more than three hundred years into adherents of the rival queens, so
readers of novels have been divided for more than seventy years
into admirers of the rival heroines. “I have been Emmy’s faithful
knight since I was ten years old, and read ‘Vanity Fair’ somewhat
stealthily,” confessed Andrew Lang; and by way of proving his
allegiance, he laid at his lady’s feet the stupidest repudiation of
Rebecca ever voiced by a man of letters. To class her with Barnes
Newcome and Mrs. Macknezie is an unpardonable affront. A man
may be a perfect Sir Galahad without surrendering all sense of
values and proportion.
When “Vanity Fair” was published, the popular verdict was against
Becky. She so disedified the devout that reviewers, with the awful
image of the British Matron before their eyes, dealt with her in a spirit
of serious condemnation. It will be remembered that Taine, caring
much for art and little for matrons, protested keenly against
Thackeray’s treatment of his own heroine, against the snubs and
sneers and censures with which the English novelist thought fit to
convince his English readers that he did not sympathize with
misconduct. These readers hastened in turn to explain that Becky
was rightfully “odious” in her author’s eyes, and that she was
“created to be exposed,” which sounds a little like the stern creed
which held that men were created to be damned. Trollope,
oppressed by her dissimilarity to Grace Crawley and to Lily Dale,
openly mourned her shortcomings; and a writer in “Frazier’s
Magazine” assured the rank and file of the respectable that in real
life they would shrink from her as from an infection. One voice only,
that of an unknown critic in a little-read review, was raised in her
defence. This brave man admitted without flinching her many sins,
but added that he loved her.
The more lenient standards of our day have lifted Rebecca’s
reputation into the realm of disputable things. So distinguished a
moralist as Mr. William Dean Howells praised her tepidly; being
disposed in her favour by a distaste, not for Amelia, but for Beatrix
Esmond, whom he pronounced a “doll” and an “eighteenth-century
marionette,” and compared with whom he found Becky refreshingly
real. As for Thackeray’s harshness, Mr. Howells condoned it on the
score of incomprehension. “His morality is the old conventional
morality which we are now a little ashamed of; but in his time and
place he could scarcely have had any other. After all, he was a
simple soul, and strictly of his period.”
This is an interesting point of view. To most of us “Vanity Fair”
seems about as simple as “Ecclesiastes,” the author of which was
also “strictly of his period.” Sir Sidney Low, the most trenchant critic
whom the fates have raised to champion the incomparable Becky, is
by way of thinking that in so far as Thackeray was a moralist, he was
unfair to her; but that in so far as he was a much greater artist than a
moralist, she emerges triumphant from his hands. “She is the first
embodiment in English fiction of the woman whose emotions are
dominated by her intellect. She is a fighter against fate, and she
wages war with unfailing energy, passing lightly, as great warriors do,
over the bodies of the killed and wounded.”
She does more. She snatches a partial victory out of the jaws of a
crushing defeat. The stanchest fighter expects some backing from
fate, some good cards to lay on the table. But Becky’s fortunes are in
Thackeray’s hands, and he rules against her at every turn. Life and
death are her inexorable opponents. Miss Crawley recovers (which
she has no business to do) from a surfeit of lobster, when by dying
she would have enriched Rawdon, already in love with Rebecca.
Lady Crawley lives just long enough to spoil Becky’s chance of
marrying Sir Pitt. It is all very hard and very wrong. The little
governess had richly earned Miss Crawley’s money by her patient
care of that ungrateful invalid. She would have been kind and good-
tempered to Sir Pitt, whereas his virtuous son and daughter-in-law
(the lady Jane whom Thackeray never ceases to praise) leave the
poor old paralytic to the care of a coarse, untrained and cruel
servant. Becky is not the only sufferer by the bad luck which makes
her from start to finish, “a fighter against fate.”
Sir Sidney is by no means content with the somewhat murky
twilight in which we take leave of this great little adventuress, with
the atmosphere of charity lists, bazaars and works of piety which
depressingly surrounds her. He is sure she made a most charming
and witty old lady, and that she eventually won over Colonel Dobbin
(in spite of Amelia’s misgivings) by judicious praise of the “History of
the Punjaub.” And I am equally sure that she never suffered herself
to lose so valuable an asset as young Rawdon. Becky’s indifference
to her son is the strongest card that Thackeray plays. By throwing
into high relief the father’s proud affection for the boy (who is an
uncommonly nice little lad), he deepens and darkens the mother’s
unconcern. Becky is impervious to the charm of childhood, and she
is not affectionate. Once in a while she is moved by a generous
impulse; but the crowded cares and sordid scheming of her life leave
no room for sensibility.
Nevertheless, if the Reverend Bute Crawley and his household
look upon little Rawdon with deep respect as the possible heir of
Queen’s Crawley, “between whom and the title there was only the
sickly pale child, Pitt Binkie,” it is unlikely that Rebecca the farseeing
would ignore the potential greatness of her son. She cannot afford to
lose any chance, or any combination of chances, in the hazardous
game she plays. There is nothing like the spectacle of this game in
English letters. To watch Becky manipulate her brother-in-law, Sir
Pitt, is a never-ending delight. He is dull, pompous, vain,
ungenerous. He has inherited the fortune which should have been
her husband’s. Yet there is no hatred in her heart, nor any serious
malice. Hatred, like love, is an emotional extravagance, and Becky’s
accounts are very strictly kept.
Therefore, when she persuades the Baronet to spend a week in
the little house on Curzon Street, even Thackeray admits that she is
sincerely happy to have him there. She comes bustling and blushing
into his room with a scuttle of coals; she cooks excellent dishes for
his dinner; she gives him Lord Steyne’s White Hermitage to warm his
frozen blood, telling him it is a cheap wine which Rawdon has picked
up in France; she sits by his side in the firelight, stitching a shirt for
her little son; she plays every detail of her part with the careful and
conscientious art of a Dutch painter composing a domestic scene;
and she asks no unreasonable return for her labours. Rawdon, who
does nothing, is disgusted because his brother gives them no
money; but Rebecca, who does everything, is content with credit. Sir
Pitt, as the head of the family, is the corner-stone upon which she
rears the fabric of her social life.
The exact degree of Becky’s innocence and guilt is a matter of
slight importance. There is no goodness in her to be spoiled or
saved. To try to soften our judgment by pleading one or two acts of
contemptuous kindness is absurd. Her qualities are great qualities:
valour, and wit, and audacity, and patience, and an ungrumbling
acceptance of fate. No one recognizes these qualities except Lord
Steyne, who has a greatness of his own. It will be remembered that
on one occasion he gives Rebecca eleven hundred pounds to
discharge her indebtedness to Miss Briggs; and subsequently
discovers that the amount due the “sheep-dog” is six hundred
pounds, and that Rebecca has been far too thrifty to pay any of it out
of the sum bestowed on her for that purpose. He is not angry at
being outwitted, as a small and stupid man would have been. He is
charmed.
“His lordship’s admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this
proof of her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing—but getting
double the sum she wanted, and paying nobody—it was a
magnificent stroke. ‘What an accomplished little devil it is!’ he
thought. ‘She beats all the women I have ever seen in the course of
my well-spent life. They are babies compared to her. I am a green-
horn myself, and a fool in her hands—an old fool. She is
unsurpassable in lies.’”
With which testimony, candid, fervent, and generous withal,
Becky’s case can be considered closed. Discredited, humiliated, and
punished in the irrepressible interests of morality, she is left stranded
amid life’s minor respectabilities which must have irked her sorely;
but which Thackeray plainly considered to be far beyond her merits. I
hope it comforts her in that shadowy land where dwell the immortals
of fiction to know that her shameless little figure, flitting dauntlessly
from venture to venture, from hazard to hazard, has never been
without appreciative observers. I had almost said appreciative and
pitying observers; but Becky’s is the last ghost in Christendom whom
I should dare to affront with pity.
 The Preacher at Large
The spirit of Hannah More is abroad in the land. It does not preach
the same code of morals that the good Hannah preached in her
lifetime, but it preaches its altered code with her assurance and with
her continuity. Miss More preached to the poor the duty of an
unreasonable and unmanly content, and to the rich the duty of
personal and national smugness. Her successors are more than
likely to urge upon rich and poor the paramount duty of revolt. The
essence of preaching, however, is not doctrine, but didacticism.
Beliefs and behaviour are subject to geographical and chronological
conditions, but human nature lives and triumphs in the sermon.
Hannah More was not licensed to preach. She would have paled
at the thought of a lady taking orders, or climbing the pulpit steps.
She had no intellectual gifts. Her most intimate critic, the Honourable
Augustine Birrell (the only living man who confesses to the purchase
of her works in nineteen calf-bound volumes, which he subsequently
buried in his garden), pronounced her to be “an encyclopædia of all
literary vices.” Yet for forty years she told her countrymen what they
should do, and what they should leave undone, in return for which
censorship they paid her boundless deference and thirty thousand
pounds, a great deal of money in those days.
Miss More is a connecting link between the eighteenth century,
which moralized, and the nineteenth century, which preached. Both
were didactic, but, as Mr. Austin Dobson observes, “didactic with a
difference.” Addison was characterized in his day as “a parson in a
tie-wig,” an unfriendly, but not altogether inaccurate, description, the
tie-wig symbolizing a certain gentlemanly aloofness from potent and
primitive emotions. Religion is a primitive emotion, and the
eighteenth century (ce siècle sans âme) was, in polite life, singularly
shy of religion; reserving it for the pulpit, and handling it there with
the caution due to an explosive. Crabbe, who also lapped over into
the nineteenth century, was reproached by his friends for talking
about Heaven and Hell in his sermons, “as though he had been a
Methodist.”
From such indiscretions the tie-wig preserved the eighteenth-
century moralists. Addison meditates for a morning in Westminster
Abbey, and the outcome of his meditation is that the poets have no
monuments, and the monuments no poets. Steele walks the London
streets, jostling against vice and misery, and pauses to tell us that a
sturdy beggar extracted from him the price of a drink by pleading
mournfully that all his family had died of thirst; a jest which took
easily with the crowd, and might be trusted to raise a sympathetic
laugh to-day. It is plain that these gentlemen felt without saying what
Henry Adams said without feeling, that “morality is a private and
costly luxury,” and so forbore to urge it upon a bankrupt world.
The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it
is to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose
business it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I
open two magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on
“The Vanishing Sermon,” and “Will Preaching Become Obsolete?” I
exchange them for two others, and find lengthy articles entitled “Can
We Control Our Own Morals?” and “Spiritual Possibilities of
Business Life.” Now, if a disquisition on “Spiritual Possibilities of
Business Life” be not a sermon, of what elements is a sermon
composed? Yet when I endeavour to ascertain these possibilities, I
read that business men often refuse to listen to professional
preaching, because, while their democratic ideals, their enthusiasm
for human values, and their passion for scientific perfection in their
products “leave them not far from the Kingdom of Heaven,” the
Church, unhappily for itself, “has not been big enough or strong
enough to captivate their imagination, and hold their allegiance.”
This would seem to imply that business men are too good to go to
church—a novel and, I should think, popular point of view.
Congregations hear little like it from the pulpit, the average
clergyman being unable to observe any signs of a commercial
Utopia, and having a tiresome and Jeremiah-like habit of pointing out
defects. As for asking a group of magazine-readers if they can
control their own morals, the query is a vaporous one, not meant to
be answered scientifically, but after a formula settled and approved.
Even the concession to modernism implied in its denial of religion as
a compelling force gets us no nearer to our goal. “The faith we need
is not necessarily faith in any supernatural help; but only in the
demonstrated fact of the possibility of controlling our own minds and
morals by going at it in the right way.” The tendency of a simple truth,
that abstraction which we all admire, to develop into a truism, is no
less noticeable when set forth in the persuasiveness of print than
when delivered with ecclesiastical authority.
Personally, I cannot conceive of a sermonless world. The
preacher’s function is too manifest to be ignored, his message too
direct to be diverted. Joubert said truly that devout men and women
listen with pleasure to dull sermons, because they recognize the
legitimate relation between priest and people, and their minds are
attuned to receptivity. And if a dull sermon can command the
attention and awaken the sympathy of a congregation honest
enough to admit that dullness is the paramount note of human
intercourse, and that it is as well developed in the listeners as in the
speaker, think of the power which individual intelligence derives from
collective authority. This is the combination which so fascinated
Henry Adams when he speculated upon the ecclesiasticism of the
thirteenth century; its nobility, lucidity and weight. “The great
theologians were also architects who undertook to build a Church
Intellectual, corresponding, bit by bit, to the Church Administrative,
both expressing—and expressed by—the Church Architectural.”
With the coming of the printed word, the supreme glory of the
spoken word departed. Reading is the accepted substitute for
oratory as for conversation, a substitute so cheap, so accessible, so
accommodating, that its day will wane only with the waning warmth
of the sun, or the exhaustion and collapse of civilization. Yet even
under the new dispensation, even with the amazing multiplicity of
creeds (twenty-four religions to one sauce, lamented Talleyrand a
hundred years ago), even though ecclesiastical architecture has
ceased to express anything but a love of comfort and an
understanding of acoustics, the preacher holds his own. There are
always people interested in the relation of their souls to God; and
when it happens that a man is born into the world capable of
convincing them that the only thing of importance in life is the
relation of their souls to God, he becomes a maker of history.
John Wesley was such a man. I read recently that, when he was
preaching at Tullamore, a large cat leaped from the rafters upon a
woman’s head, and ran over the heads and shoulders of the closely
packed congregation. “But none of them cried out any more than if it
had been a butterfly.” There was a test of the preacher’s supremacy.
What other influence could have been so absolute and coercive?
When I was a very little girl I was taken to see Edwin Booth play
“Hamlet,” in the old Walnut Street theatre of Philadelphia. That night
a cat entered with the ghost, and paced sedately in his wake across
the ramparts of Elsinore. The audience shouted its amusement, and
the poignancy of a great scene, interpreted by a great actor, was
temporarily lost. “Spellbound” is a word in common use, expressing,
as a rule, very ordinary attention. Booth cast a spell, but it was easily
broken. Wesley cast a spell which defied both fear and laughter.
Nothing short of dynamite could have distracted that Tullamore
congregation from the business it had on hand.
That the sermon was tyrannical in the days of its pride and power
is a truth which cannot be gainsaid. Eloquence in the pulpit has no
more bowels for its victims than has eloquence on the rostrum.
History is full of instances that move our souls to wonder. When
Darnley, new wedded to Mary Stuart, and seeing himself in the rôle
of peacemaker, went to hear Knox preach in Saint Giles’, that
uncompromising divine likened him to Ahab, who incurred the wrath
of Jehovah by acquiescing in the idolatry of Jezebel, his wife. James
Melville says that when Knox preached, “he was like to ding the
pulpit to blads, and fly out of it.” Darnley, furious, or frightened, or
both, left the church while the victorious preacher was still
marshalling the hosts of Israel to combat.
Charles the Second was wont to recall with bitter mirth a certain
Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch
subjects to hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty.
Paris may have been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre; but all
Scotland was not worth six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the
memory of that Sunday sweetened his return to France and to
freedom.
It is a far cry from Knox hurling the curses of his tribal God at alien
tribesmen, from Wesley convicting his narrow world “of sin, and of
justice, and of judgment,” even from that “good, honest and painful
sermon” which Dr. Pepys heard one Sunday morning with inward
misgivings and troubled stirrings of the soul, to the sterilized
discourse which offends against no assortment of beliefs, and no
standards of taste. Frederick Locker gives us in his “Confidences” a
grim description of the funeral services of George Henry Lewes, at
Highgate Cemetery. Twelve gentlemen of rationalistic views had
gathered in the mortuary chapel, and to them a thirteenth gentleman,
also of rationalistic views, but who had taken orders somewhere,
delivered an address, “half apologizing for suggesting the possible
immortality of some of our souls.”
This may indicate the progress of the ages; but does it also
indicate the progress of the ages that the moral essay, which was
wont to be satiric, is now degenerating into the printed sermon,
which is sure to be censorious; that the very men who once charmed
us with the lightness of their touch and the keen edge of their
humour are now preaching thunderously? For years Mr. Chesterton
gave us reason to be grateful that we had learned to read. Who so
debonair when he was gay, who so incisive when he was serious,
who so ready with his thrust, who so understanding in his sympathy?
We trusted him never to preach and never to scold, and he has
betrayed our trust by doing both. He calls it prophesying; but
prophesying is preaching, plus scolding, and no one knows this
better than he does.
The earth is a bad little planet, and we hope that other planets are
happier and better behaved. But the vials of Mr. Chesterton’s wrath
are emptied on the heads of people who do not read him, and who
have no idea that they are being anathematized. Swift used to say
that most sermons were aimed at men and women who never went
to church, and the same sort of thing happens to-day. We, Mr.
Chesterton’s chosen readers, are not capitalists, or philanthropists,
or prohibitionists, or any of the things he abhors; and we wish he
would leave these gentry alone, and write for us again with the old
shining wit, the old laughter, the old mockery, which was like a dash
of salt on the flavourless porridge of life.
Twenty-one years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published an
American edition of the “Letters from a Chinese Official,” a species of
sermon, it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly, in
suave and gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by
the graceful lightness of its speech. American readers took that book
to heart. We could not make over the United States into a second
China. “Some god this severance rules.” But we accepted in the
spirit of reason a series of criticisms which were reasonably
conveyed to our intelligence, and a great deal of good they did us.
Much has happened in twenty-one years, and few of us are so
light-hearted or so reasonable as of yore. Is it because we have
grown impatient of strictures that Mr. Dickinson’s sermons now seem
to us a trifle heavy, his reproaches more than a trifle harsh? We did
not mind being compared adversely to China, but we do mind being
blamed for Germany’s transgressions. When, as the mouthpiece of
suffering Europe, Mr. Dickinson says, “America is largely responsible
for our condition,” a flat denial seems in order. America did not
invade Belgium, she did not burn French towns, she did not sink
merchant ships. It seems to be Mr. Dickinson’s impression that our
entrance, not without provocation, into the war “prolonged” the
struggle, to the grievous injury of the Allies as well as of the Central
Powers. There is a veracious paragraph in one of Mr. Tarkington’s
“Penrod” stories, which describes the bewilderment of an ordinary
American boy who does something he cannot well help doing, and
who is thrashed or rewarded by an irate or delighted father,
according to a point of view which is a veiled mystery to him. So, too,
the ordinary American adult gapes confusedly when a British pacifist
tells him that, by fighting the war to a finish, he and his nation are to
blame for the economic ruin of Europe.
There is the same misunderstanding between unprofessional as
between sectarian preachers, and the same air of thoughtful
originality when they deal with the obvious and ascertained. When I
see a serious essayist hailed as “the first wholly realistic and
deductive moralist” that the country, or the century, has produced, I
naturally examine his deductions with interest. What I find is a
severe, but well-merited, denunciation of the civilized world as
hypocritical, because its practice is not in accord with its profession.
Readers of the New Testament will recall the same divergence
between the practice and the profession of the Jews two thousand
years ago. It has been neither unknown nor unobserved in any age,
in any land, amid any people since.
There were a great many clergymen preaching in Hannah More’s
day, and there are a great many clergymen preaching now.
Churches and temples and halls of every conceivable denomination,
and of no conceivable denomination, are open to us. There is
something fair and square in going to a place of which sermons are
the natural product, and hearing one. There is also something fair
and square in taking a volume of sermons down from the shelf, and
reading one. I am not of those who believe that a sermon, like a
speech, needs to be spoken. A great deal of quiet thinking goes with
the printed page, and the reader has one obvious advantage over
the listener. He can close the book at any moment without
disedifying a congregation. But just as Hannah More intruded her
admonitions into the free spaces of life, so her successors betray us
into being sermonized when we are pursuing our week-day
avocations in a week-day mood, which is neither fair nor square. It is
the attitude of the nursery governess (Hannah was the greatest living
exemplar of the nursery governess), and there is no escape from its
unauthorized supervision.
When a hitherto friendly magazine prints nine pages of sermon
under a disingenuous title suggestive of domestic economy, and
beginning brightly, “What right has any one to preach?” we feel a
sense of betrayal. Any one has a right to preach (the laxity of church
discipline is to blame); but a sense of honour, or a sense of humour,
or a sense of humanity should debar an author from pretending he is
not preaching when he writes like this: “If we have a desire that
seems to us contrary to our duty, it means that there is a conflict
within us; it means either that our sense of duty is not a sense of the
whole self, or that our desire is not of the whole self. This then is to
be aimed at—the identity of duty and desire.” And so on, and so on,
through nine virtuous pages. The reluctance on the part of magazine
preachers to refer openly to God tends to prolixity. Thomas à
Kempis, reflecting on the same situation, which is not new, briefly
recommends us to submit our wills to the will of God. Monk though
he was, he understood that duty and desire are on opposite sides of
the camp, and refuse to be harmoniously blended. This is why living
Christians are called, and will be called to the end of time, the church
militant.
A sanguine preacher in “The Popular Science Monthly” holds out a
hope that duty and desire may be ultimately blended through an
adroit application of eugenics. What we need, and have not got, is a
race which “instinctively and spontaneously” does right. Therefore it
behooves us to superinduce, through grafting and transplanting, “the
preservation and perpetuation of a human stock that may be
depended upon to lead moral lives without the necessity of much
social compulsion.” It sounds interesting; and though Mr. Chesterton
loudly asserts that eugenics degrade the race, we are too well
accustomed to these divergencies on the part of our preachers to
take them deeply to heart.
Mr. Chesterton has also used strong language (understatement is
not his long suit) in denouncing “the diabolical idiocy that can regard
beer or tobacco as in some sort evil or unseemly”; and I am
disposed, in a mild way, to agree with him. Yet when some time ago I
read a pleasantly worded little sermon on “An Artist’s Morality,” being
curious to know how a moral artist differed from a moral chemist, or
a moral accountant, the only concrete instance of morality adduced
was the abandonment of tobacco. As soon as the artist resolved to
amend his blameless life, he made the discovery that its chief
element of discord was his pipe. “As a thing of sudden nastiness, I
threw it out of the window, drawing in, almost reverently, a deep
breath of cool October air.”
It is possible that the American public likes being preached to, just
as Hannah More’s British public liked being preached to. This would
account for the little sermons thrown on the screen between moving
pictures, brief admonishments pointing out the obvious moral of the
drama, deploring the irregularity of masculine affections, the soulless
selfishness of wealth; and asserting with colossal impudence that the
impelling purpose of the entertainment is to bring home to the hearts
of men an understanding of the misery they cause. As it is the rule of
moving-picture plays to change their scenes with disconcerting
speed, but to leave all explanatory texts on the screen long enough
to be learned by heart, these moral precepts dominate the show. The
franker its revelations, the more precepts are needed to offset them.
Rows of decent and respectable men, who accompany their decent
and respectable wives, are flattered by being accused of sins which
they have never aspired to commit.
“I must acknowledge that some writers upon ethical questions
have been men of fair moral character,” said Sir Leslie Stephen in a
moment of expansion which was no less wise than generous, seeing
that he was himself the author of two volumes of lay sermons,
originally delivered before ethical societies. Didacticism can go no
further than in these monitory papers. There is one on “The Duties of
Authors,” which is calculated to drive a light-minded or light-hearted
neophyte from a profession where he is expected in his most
unguarded moments to influence morally his equally unguarded
readers. But Sir Leslie played the game according to rule. A plainly
worded notice on the fly-leaf warned the public that the sermons
were sermons, not critical studies, or Alpine adventures. If they seem
to us overcrowded with counsel, this is only because they are non-
religious in their character. When religion is excluded from a sermon,
there is too much room left for morality. Without the vast compelling
presence of God, the activities of men grow feverish, and lose the
“imperious sweetness” of sanctity.
If our preachers are trying to recivilize humanity, it behooves us,
perhaps, to be more patient with their methods. All civilizing formulas
are uneasy possessions. Ruskin evolved one, and no man could
have been more sincere or more insistent in applying it. So painfully
did he desire that his readers should think as he did, that he grew to
look upon the world with a jaundiced eye because it was necessarily
full of people who thought differently. Even Hannah More had a little
formula for the correction of England; but it gave her no uneasiness,
because she could not conceive of herself as a failure. Advice flowed
from her as it flows from her followers to-day. There was but one of
her, which was too much. There are many of them, and great is their
superfluity. The “Vanishing Sermon” has not vanished. It has only
changed its habitat. It has forsaken the pulpit, and taken up quarters
in what was formerly the strong-hold of literature.
 The Battle-Field of Education
Readers of Jane Austen will remember how Mr. Darcy and Miss
Bingley defined to their own satisfaction the requirements of an
accomplished woman. Such a one, said Miss Bingley, must add to
ease of manner and address “a thorough knowledge of music,
singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages.” To which Mr.
Darcy subjoined: “All this she must possess, and she must have
something more substantial in the improvement of her mind by
extensive reading.” Whereupon Elizabeth Bennet stoutly affirmed
that she had never met a woman in whom “capacity, taste,
application and elegance” were so admirably and so formidably
united.
Between an accomplished woman in Miss Austen’s day and an
educated man in ours, there are many steps to climb; but the
impression conveyed by those who now seek to define the
essentials of education is that, like Miss Bingley and Mr. Darcy, they
ask too much. Also that they are unduly influenced by the nature of
the things they themselves chance to know. Hence the delight of
agitators in drawing up lists of ascertainable facts, and severely
catechizing the public. They forget, or perhaps they never read, the
serene words of Addison (an educated man) concerning the
thousand and one matters with which he would not burden his mind
“for a Vatican.”
With every century that rolls over the world there is an incalculable
increase of knowledge. It ranges backward and forward, from the
latest deciphering of an Assyrian tablet to the latest settling of a
Balkan boundary-line; from a disconcerting fossil dug out of its
prehistoric mud to a new explosive warranted to destroy a continent.
Obviously an educated man, even a very highly educated man, must
be content, in the main, with a “modest and wise ignorance.”
Intelligence, energy, leisure, opportunity—these things are doled out
to him in niggardly fashion; and with his beggar’s equipment he
confronts the vastness of time and space, the years the world has
run, the forces which have sped her on her way, and the hoarded
thinking of humanity.
Compared with this huge area of “general information,” how firm
and final were the educational limits of a young Athenian in the time
of Plato! The things he did not have to know fill our encyclopædias.
Copra and celluloid were as remote from his field of vision as were
the Reformation and the battle of Gettysburg. But ivory he had, and
the memory of Marathon, and the noble pages of Thucydides. That
there were Barbarians in the world, he knew as well as we do.
Some, like the Ethiops, dwelt so far away that Homer called them
“blameless.” Some were so perilously near that the arts of war grew
with the arts of peace. For books he had a certain delicate scorn,
caught from his master, Plato, who never forgave their lack of
reticence, their fashion of telling everything to every reader. But the
suave and incisive conversation of other Athenians taught him
intellectual lucidity, and the supreme beauty of the spoken word.
“Late and laboriously,” says Josephus, “did the Greeks acquire their
knowledge of Greek.” That they acquired it to some purpose is
evidenced by the fact that the graduate of an American college must
have some knowledge of Plato’s thinking, if he is to be called
educated. Where else shall he see the human intellect, trained to
strength and symmetry like the body of an athlete, exercising its
utmost potency and its utmost charm? Where else shall he find a
philosophy which has “in all ages ravished the hearts of men”?
A curious symptom of our own day is that we have on one hand a
strong and deep dissatisfaction with the mental equipment of young
Americans, and on the other an ever-increasing demand for
freedom, for self-development, for doing away with serious and
severe study. The ideal school is one in which the pupil is at liberty to
get up and leave the class if it becomes irksome, and in which the
teacher is expected to comport himself like the kind-hearted captain
of the Mantelpiece. The ideal college is one which prepares its
students for remunerative positions, which teaches them how to
answer the kind of questions that captains of industry may ask. One
of the many critics of our educational system has recently
complained that college professors are not practical. “The
undergraduate,” he says, “sits during the four most impressionable
years of his life under the tuition and influence of highly trained,
greatly devoted, and sincere men, who are financial incompetents,
who have as little interest in, or understanding of, business as has
the boy himself.”
It does not seem to occur to this gentleman that if college
professors knew anything about finance, they would probably not
remain college professors. Learning and wealth have never run in
harness since Cadmus taught Thebes the alphabet. It would be a
brave man who should say which was the better gift; but one thing is
sure: unless we are prepared to grant the full value of scholarship
which adds nothing to the wealth of nations, or to the practical
utilities of life, we shall have only partial results from education. And
such scholarship can never be generally approved. It is, and must
forever remain, says Augustine Birrell, “in the best and noblest sense
of a good and noble word, essentially unpopular.”
The educational substitutes, now in vogue, are many, and varied,
and, of their kind, good. They can show results, and results that
challenge competition. Mr. Samuel Gompers, for example, writes
with pardonable complacency of himself: “When I think of the
education I got in the London streets, the training acquired by work
in the shop, the discipline growing out of attempts to build an
organization to accomplish definite results, of the rich cultural
opportunities through human contacts, I know that my educational
opportunities have been very unusual.”
This is, in a measure, true, and it is not the first time that such
opportunities have been lauded to the skies. “If a lad does not learn
in the streets,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “it is because he has no
faculty of learning.”—“Books! Don’t talk to me of books!” said Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough. “My books are cards and men.” It will even
be remembered that old Weller boasted to Mr. Pickwick of the tuition
he had afforded Sam by turning him at a tender age into the London
gutters, to learn what lessons they could teach.
 Nevertheless, there is an education that owes nothing to streets,
or to work-shops, or to games of chance. It was not in the “full, vivid,
instructive hours of truancy” that Stevenson acquired his knowledge
of the English language, which he wrote with unexampled vigour and
grace. It is not “human contact” that can be always trusted to teach
men how to pronounce that language correctly. This is an
educational nicety disregarded by a practical and busy world. One of
the best-informed women I ever knew, who had been honoured by
several degrees, and who had turned her knowledge to good
account, could never pronounce the test word, America. One of the
ablest and most influential lawyers I ever knew, a college man with
an imposing library, came no nearer to success. The lady said
“Armorica,” as if she were speaking of ancient Brittany. The
gentleman said “Amurrica,” probably to make himself intelligible to
the large and patriotic audiences which he addressed so frequently
and so successfully. The license allowed to youth may be held
accountable for such Puck’s tricks as these, as well as for
grammatical lapses. A superintendent of public schools in Illinois has
decided on his own authority that common usage may supplant time-
worn rules of speech; and that such a sentence as “It is I,” being
“outlawed” by common usage, need no longer be forced upon
children who prefer to say “It is me.”
Because the direct products of education are so limited, and the
by-products of such notable importance, we permit ourselves to
speak contemptuously concerning things which must be learned
from books, without any deep understanding of things which must be
learned from people armed with books, and backed by the authority
of tradition. When Goethe said that the education of an Englishman
gave him courage to be what nature had made him, he illuminated,
after his wont, a somewhat shadowy subject. William James struck
the same note, and amplified it, not too exhaustively, in “Talks to
Teachers”: “An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified
reactions, a creature who, for all the emergencies of life, has his line
of behaviour distinctly marked out for him in advance.”
If this be the result of a system which, to learned Germans, lucid
Frenchmen, and progressive Americans, has seemed inadequate,
they may revise, or at least suspend, their judgment. And
Englishmen who have humorously lamented the wasted years of
youth (“May I be taught Greek in the next world if I know what I did
learn at school!” said the novelist, James Payn), need no longer be
under the obligation of expressing more dissatisfaction than they
feel.
In the United States the educational by-products are less clear-cut,
because the force of tradition is weaker, and because too many boys
are taught too long by women. The difficulty of obtaining male
teachers has accustomed us to this anomaly, and we have even
been heard to murmur sweet phrases concerning the elevating
nature of feminine influence. But the fact remains that a boy is
destined to grow into a man, and for this contingency no woman can
prepare him. Only men, and men of purpose and principle, can
harden him into the mould of manhood. It is a question of character,
which great by-product of education cannot be safely undervalued
even in a busy and clever age. “It was always through enfeeblement
of character,” says Gustave Le Bon, “and not through enfeeblement
of intellect, that the great peoples disappeared from history.”
And this truth paves the way for an assertion which, however
controvertible, is not without strong support. Of all the direct products
of education (of education as an end in itself, and not as an
approach to something else), a knowledge of history is most
essential. So, at least, it seems to me, though I speak with
diffidence, being well aware that makers of history, writers of history,
and teachers of history, have agreed that it is an elusive, deceptive
and disputable study. Yet it is the heart of all things, and every
intellectual by-path leads to this central theme. Most firmly do I
believe with “the little Queen-Anne man” that

“The proper study of mankind is man”;

and how shall we reach him save through the pages of history? It is
the foundation upon which are reared the superstructures of
sociology, psychology, philosophy and ethics. It is our clue to the
problems of the race. It is the gateway through which we glimpse the
noble and terrible things which have stirred the human soul.
A cultivated American poet has said that men of his craft “should
know history inside out, and take as much interest in the days of
Nebuchadnezzar as in the days of Pierpont Morgan.” This is a
spacious demand. The vast sweep of time is more than one man can
master, and the poet is absolved by the terms of his art from severe
study. He may know as much history as Matthew Arnold, or as little
as Herrick, who lived through great episodes, and did not seem to be
aware of them. But Mr. Benét is wise in recognizing the inspiration of
history, its emotional and imaginative appeal. New York and Pierpont
Morgan have their tale to tell; and so has the dark shadow of the
Babylonian conqueror, who was so feared that, while he lived, his
subjects dared not laugh; and when he died, and went to his
appointed place, the poor inmates of Hell trembled lest he had come
to rule over them in place of their master, Satan.
“The study of Plutarch and ancient historians,” says George
Trevelyan, “rekindled the breath of liberty and of civic virtue in
modern Europe.” The mental freedom of the Renaissance was the
gift of the long-ignored and reinstated classics, of a renewed and
generous belief in the vitality of human thought, the richness of
human experience. Apart from the intellectual precision which this
kind of knowledge confers, it is indirectly as useful as a knowledge of
mathematics or of chemistry. How shall one nation deal with another
in this heaving and turbulent world unless it knows something of
more importance than its neighbour’s numerical and financial
strength—namely, the type of men it breeds. This is what history
teaches, if it is studied carefully and candidly.
How did it happen that the Germans, so well informed on every
other point, wrought their own ruin because they failed to understand
the mental and moral make-up of Frenchmen, Englishmen and
Americans? What kind of histories did they have, and in what spirit
did they study them? The Scarborough raid proved them as ignorant
as children of England’s temper and reactions. The inhibitions
imposed upon the port of New York, and the semi-occasional ship