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The modernist, the dancer and the dance: An interdisciplinary approach to Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence and Williams

Mester, Terri Ann
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1056739482

Abstract Details

1993, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
Snubbed by literary critics, dance in the first quarter of the century contributed to the shape of modernism by influencing four of its major practitioners. This study makes biographic, thematic, technical and figurative cases that Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence and Williams turned to its theatrical and non-theatrical forms to reinvigorate their literary practices. The first chapter maps out some commonalities between the two arts, like a preoccupation with Oriental and "primitive" themes. It then explores the modernist fascination with dance's formal qualities, like its "impersonality" and fusion of mind and body. Chapter two analyzes the forty year evolution of Yeats's dancer and her sources in Michio Ito, Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, the Hindu god Shiva and decadent Salome of Wilde, Symons and Mallarme. Because her "body is not bruised to pleasure soul," she is Yeats's figure for unity of being, a spiritual truth similar to Mallarme's idee, which man could embody but never know rationally. Eliot envisioned dance as a form of religious asceticism based on his observations of two stars from the Ballet Russe. Vaslav Nijinsky's legendary roles are a subliminal source behind much of his verse and L eonide Massine's self-discipline and sacrifice to ballet's four hundred-year-old tradition may have led Eliot to his theory of impersonality in art. Lawrence approximated the dance mimetically through a highly rhythmical prose. The dance scenes in his major fiction uncover the deeper, "allotropic" self hiding beneath the "old stable ego of the character." Dance is demonic for the Brangwen women as long as they suffer from an imbalance of mind over body, while it constitutes "phallic consciousness" for Kate Leslie and Constance Chatterley, because they are capable of "letting go" their egos. For Williams, dance exists at a pre-reflective level of consciousness and is a figure for the poetic process. His search for a "new measure" led him back to verse's origins in the "old measure" of dance. Two dance rites loosely based on the Dionysus and Persephone myths are discernable in his poetry, in which the dance either connects the poet to the sensuous world or his creative, feminine nature.
William Marling (Advisor)
291 p.
modernist dancer dance interdisciplinary approach Yeats Eliot Lawrence Williams

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Mester, T. A. (1993). The modernist, the dancer and the dance: An interdisciplinary approach to Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence and Williams [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1056739482

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Mester, Terri. The modernist, the dancer and the dance: An interdisciplinary approach to Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence and Williams. 1993. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1056739482.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Mester, Terri. "The modernist, the dancer and the dance: An interdisciplinary approach to Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence and Williams." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1993. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1056739482

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1056739482
944
© 1993, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.