The Happy Stripper

Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque

Jacki Willson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780857736420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

If the burlesque stripper, with her bawdy spirit and unruly insubordination, has emerged for many as a new 'empowering' model for the sexually aware woman, then she also strikes horror in the heart of second wave feminism. Embodied by high profile artistes such as Dita von Teese and Catherine D'Lish, the explosive revival of striptease, burlesque and overt female sexual performance has proved no less alluring to a new generation of women artists familiar with the provocative work of 70's performance artists such as Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneeman. Eloquent on 'prettiness' and power, desire and 'knowingness', money, sex and class, and with an extensive knowledge of burlesque's rich tradition, Willson raises long overdue questions about women's erotic expression within a 'postfeminist' condition. The 'new burlesque' demands above all a response - this fresh, brazen, provocative book at last provides it.

1.

Burlesque

WHAT IS BURLESQUE?

Crossing into the mainstream

We are in the thick of a new wave of burlesque. This formidable display of flesh seductively draws us back to a time of the eroticized pin-up. It propels us back into that era of hard glamour where such cinematic characters as Marlene Dietrich or Elizabeth Taylor reigned supreme. This provocative sexuality bubbles breathlessly from the fashion pages of glossy magazines and lures us from pop music videos and film. Does this forthright display of sexualized women take us right back to a prefeminist 1950s state, or does it communicate something much more pressing about our present post(-)feminist condition? Young women are embracing and indulging in the ‘feel good’ pleasures that come from this voluptuous posing and performing of ‘femininity’. Not only does this display seem to acquiesce with the dominant values of surface, profit and ‘vacuous’ gratuitous imagery but it also profoundly departs from the ‘speed’ and ‘slog’ of everyday toil. It basks in the deliciousness of living in both a sexual and sexualized body. In order to understand the pleasures and politics of this new burlesque movement it is essential first to investigate thoroughly the phenomenon of burlesque as a historical form and as a platform for its Stars and Queens.

Modern American burlesque was launched in the late nineteenth century by the British Blondes who took New York by storm in 1868 with their chaotic and nebulous combination of dancing, singing, minstrelsy, witty repartee, political commentary, parodies of plays and scant clothing – described as the ‘leg business’. At their peak in 1873 they completely cut out any reference to English plays and concentrated instead purely on frenzied can-can kicking, more revealing costumes and political witty interjections. By the 1930s the sexualized spectacle of the female performer became the catalyst for more sensation and scandal with the advent of the striptease perfected by ‘star’ strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee, who then moved into mainstream legitimate theatres. A ‘burlesque revival’ began in 1994 with striptease artistes like Dita Von Teese headlining in strip clubs all over the USA.

Burlesque’s anarchic and nonsensical concoction of forms and its figurehead sexualized, witty female performer had clear political intent. It fulfilled a necessary transgressive function, which was to undermine hierarchy in terms of authority, gender, form, skill, theatrical distance, social decorum and class. It was a testing ground that pushed and crossed boundaries aesthetically, culturally and politically. However pushing back and through limits set up a continual struggle between legality–legitimacy and illegality–illegitimacy. Burlesque teetered close to the edge of the law and consequently became an endless balancing act between pleasing censors and entertaining audiences. If burlesque can be read as sitting precariously in this in-between position then the periods in Northern American history between 1868 (the Blondes’ debut in the USA) leading up to the depression of 1873 and the early 1930s, from which this chapter draws, are extremely appropriate choices for examination.

These crucial periods (the precursory and declining years) saw burlesque at its most potent: they were burlesque booms. As well as being viewed as a ‘cultural phenomenon’ in the 1860/70s,¹ and in its ‘heyday’ in the 1930s,² burlesque was also being rebuffed by anti-burlesque campaigners (ministers, suffragettes, literary figures and legislators) as a ‘disease’. Clear parallels can be drawn between both eras to account for these extreme polar reactions. Both eras were periods of depression, repression and suppression, with a population reeling from war and anxious about national, social and personal security. Ultimately they were also times of hedonism: the boom and bust of capitalism’s unbridled free market. Depressed by war (the American Civil War, 1861–5) and repressed by the bifurcation and ‘bourgeoisification’³ of the theatre and the outlawing of alcohol (which effectively closed down the honky tonk and created the subterranean culture of the speakeasy in the late 1920s), audiences were ready for something fresh, appealing and raw – and, in the case of the 1930s, cheap!

Explicit parallels can be drawn with contemporary North American history, which presents similar patterns. The terrorist events of 9/11 created a deep-seated sense of insecurity and suspicion of the ‘other’, in particular the Arab or Muslim ‘other’, and with it came a tightening up of national borders and individual citizenship. My argument makes clear comparisons between the present boom in burlesque and the other key burlesque boom periods that have been interpreted as similarly unsettling times.⁴

During the earlier key burlesque boom periods migrants and immigrants were coming to live and work in the city, bringing with them different cultural, political and theological values. The harshness of material existence also exerted its rigours on family life. Facing challenges to his role as the sole provider, the father/husband was also forced to concede some of his control over the household, sparking re-negotiating debates over gender and sexual roles. Industrial growth, overproduction and depression (the Long Depression, from 1873 to mid-1890s, and the Great Depression, 1929–36) created a transitory, dispossessed, disillusioned urban population. As with the contemporary era, there was a creeping cynicism with regard to governance.

Burlesque expressed this sense of chaos, instability and the mélange of a newly structuring, harsh, unsettled yet exciting urban environment. It needed to entertain and please a wide ethnic, cultural and racial mix without homogenizing. It did this by poking fun at all, like a court jester; a great leveller at a time when difference and hierarchy could so clearly have been a source of acute tension. This present moment in history also echoes this instability in terms of race, ethnicity and culture, with the evident tension in relation to terrorist attacks against the USA on 11 September 2001 and against Britain on 7 July 2005 – and also with race and immigration dominating pre-election campaigning in both countries (the run up to the 6 May 2005 elections in the UK and re-election campaign of George Bush in November 2004 in the USA). Burlesque, it seems, takes off at particularly tense and potentially eruptive pressure points in history when hierarchy, borders and boundaries oscillate and reshuffle.

The first ‘wave’ of burlesque was steeped in excess. It gluttonously consumed the city’s energy and values – its speed and vitality as well as its harshness – communicating viscerally, theatrically and verbally the social and personal impact of industrialization. It insubordinately mimicked the greed and opportunism of the mainstream business economic boom whilst refusing to accept the limits of appropriateness imposed on the body and the mind by that very system. The effects of this insubordination became more fascinating and more subversive when burlesque ‘crossed over’ successfully to the middle-class audience. When the British Blondes hit the headlines in 1868 in their daring, shocking costumes the performances were at first welcomed excitedly, as they added fruitiness to an otherwise dull, predictable and passive theatre experience. As realization sunk in of their fast-growing popularity and their effect, however, what at first was seen as a refreshing distraction was soon perceived to be a glaring cause for concern.

The Blondes’ streetwise coarse language and explicit, exuberant spectacle of female sexuality put class, gender and sexuality firmly at the centre of the social agenda. This was not pure titillation, went the cry; it was polluting, it was immoral. The focal point for this furore was the female figure of the burlesque ‘Queen’ (Lydia Thompson or Pauline Markham of the British Blondes) or ‘Star’ (Mae West, Gypsy Rose Lee, Ann Corio). Their unruly burlesque body contravened or exceeded what was appropriate for female behaviour with their ‘horrible prettiness’, so consequently they were punished either by arrest or caricatured humiliation. With ‘star’ strippers like Gypsy Rose Lee, it was not purely about the ‘strip’ or about the ‘script’. It was not just the sexual allure of their bodies that was seen to be alarming but, more provocatively, the performer’s ability to address their audience directly. In 1931 Gypsy Rose Lee formulated a parody patter, ‘The Psychology of the Stripteaser’, which she relayed to the audience whilst stripping:

Have you the faintest idea about

the private thoughts of a strip teaser?

Well the things that go on in a strip-teaser’s mind,

Would give you no end of surprise…

For example,

When I raise my skirt with slyness and dexterity,

I’m mentally computing just how much I’ll give to charity…⁵

In a sense though, the exact words that Gypsy Rose Lee said during her performances are irrelevant. Much of her legacy is constructed around her reputation for cleverness and wit as the ‘intellectual stripper’,⁶ being recognized as the ‘perfect compromise between sex and brains’,⁷ ‘most admired in the business by the highbrows and intellectuals of the city’⁸ and as the ‘teaser with a wink… sophisticate, author… superior in intelligence’.⁹ It was her public image that counted, how she came across in the newspapers, in her publicity, by word-of-mouth, in the audience’s memory and in her own accounts and public appearances. John Steinbeck wrote on the back cover of her memoirs, Gypsy, ‘I found it quite irresistible. It’s quite a performance. I bet some of it is even true, and if it wasn’t, it is now.’¹⁰ What Gypsy really said and really did does not seem to matter, but what does matter is how she was perceived and how she profited from and built upon this perception.

Lydia Thompson’s reputation for direct retort was equally moulded and exacerbated by the media gossip, reviews and public hearsay and conjecture of her time. The infamous horsewhipping of the editor of the Chicago Times in February 1870, which purportedly ended in a court showdown and fine, was enough to arouse the public’s attention and draw in huge crowds. Headlines relished the event: ‘WHEN LYDIA LAID ON THE LASH… Chicago’s Editor had Attacked the “Blondes” and Received a Severe Castigation’.¹¹ Allegedly, on the very same night the episode was recounted during her performance, with humorous ad-libbing. At the end Thompson addressed the audience, thanked them for their support and stated that although she had breached the law:

The persistent and personally vindictive assault in the Times upon my reputation left me only one mode of redress… They were women whom he attacked. It was by women he was castigated… We did what the law would not do for us.¹²

The story changes in every account. Bernard Sobel claims in his account that Lydia Thompson admitted that it did not even happen: ‘there had never been a horsewhipping; Mr. Story had not attacked her morals.’¹³ Whether true or not the story caused a stir, its impact resonating with the audience both inside and outside the theatre. The dissonance and excess of burlesque therefore spilled out of the confines of the theatre and played out in the law courts, newspapers, streets and homes.

It was this cross-fertilization between the outside and the inside, fact and fiction, the public and the private, initiated and channelled through the independent, scathing, uncontrollable and witty address of the female burlesque performer that was considered so dangerous to the status quo. She was expressing and challenging (verbally and physically) certain values and behaviour that were anathema to what was expected of women in society. Ramona Curry in her essay on Mae West states that it was the technique of the address that signalled a star’s presence; the characters that West played were seen as mouthpieces through which her own values and morality were voiced. So when West’s character stated in Goin’ to Town (1935): ‘You’re all right to play around with, but as a husband, you’d get in my hair!’ audience members immediately took this to be West’s own flippant attitude towards marriage and men, and a conspiratorial bond was created. The words were read ‘extracinematically as well as diegetically’,¹⁴ which politicized by publicizing private, taboo thoughts. It gave women permission to laugh and permission to think beyond the accepted. Worst of all, from the point of view of her critics, Mae West as an influential icon was acting as a positive, glamorous example (probably the reason why she was so heavily censored), giving such transgressive behaviour and thoughts credence. Her address united and encouraged other women through subversive humour and wit.

Female performers of burlesque, the soubrettes, with their strong, politicized, charismatic and independent public personae, embodied the more visible and insubordinate female presence. They also embodied the potential threat that women held as future workers and family members. The fact is that women had only formed part of the workforce because of an economic demand during the downswing, and burlesque performers were only getting the work because men reeling from the depression sought cheap, sexy entertainment – but it also left an opening for women to begin to define their newly forming identities as well as their newly politicized female pleasure in resistance. Within their address was the possibility, even if it did not materialize, of permanent transformation at home and in the workplace. Lydia Thompson and the Blondes violated gender norms with their topsy-turvy bold speech and male clothing that revealed their female contours.

The demand for this spectacle of late-1860s Thompsonian burlesque was launched in the USA quite ‘by accident’¹⁵ when its direct predecessor The Black Crook, an all-women ballet troupe, performed at Niblo’s Garden on Broadway in 1866. This ‘mass display of ladies’ legs on stage’¹⁶ was only given theatrical space to help out the managers, who had a London ballet troupe and scenery but no theatre, after the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street burned down. This parade appealed to bored theatre-goers and played to full houses as revivals over 25 years.

The great success of Adah Isaacs Menken, ‘The Naked Lady’, also created the phenomenal demand for more risqué entertainment. In 1861 Menken starred in a production adapted from Byron’s Mazeppa when she rode onto stage on horseback, as if naked, in a flesh-coloured bodysuit. However, these performers did not directly address the audience. What was seen to be more dangerous about the British Blondes as a cultural phenomenon was not just that these women were parodying and sexualizing their historical moment but, more dangerously, that they were directly communicating with and politicizing an audience, beyond the confines of the mainstream theatre.

Why is burlesque a cultural phenomenon once again? Indeed, there has been a recent surge in books on burlesque and striptease.¹⁷ Pushing burlesque even further into the mainstream, in 2006, the Undisputed Queen of British Burlesque, Miss Immodesty Blaize (whose signature trademark is an 8ft sparkling rocking horse), launched the Dior rouge lipstick range. In June 2007 she won the coveted Miss Exotic World title in Las Vegas. (Immodesty is now seen to be the performer who brought British burlesque out of the underground, having danced in Goldfrapp’s music video for the single ‘Train’ in 2003.) Indeed in the UK burlesque has now even reached the West End, with the production Immodesty Blaize and Walter’s Burlesque. What does this re-emergence of the female burlesque star say about our contemporary post(-)feminist condition?

In order to understand how this figurehead of burlesque impacts on our present cultural situation it is first necessary to plot in greater depth the economic, political, social and cultural function, and impact of burlesque as a form of entertainment and as a business.

Democratic ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Burlesque
• 2. Body as Spectacle
• 3. The ‘Leg Business’
• 4. Powers of Seduction
• 5. Guerrilla Theatre
• Conclusion: Showdown
• Notes
• Bibliography