WOMEN WHO FLY: AERIALISTS IN MODERNITY (1880-1930) by BIEKE GILS M.A., University of Windsor, 2009 M.A., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2006 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Kinesiology) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) November 2013 © Bieke Gils, 2013 ABSTRACT Around 1900, Charmion (alias Laverie Vallée) introduced a provocative ‘trapeze disrobing act,’ combined with feats of strength to her audiences in vaudeville theaters in New York. She was one of a wave of female aerialists whose performances quite literally ‘flew’ in the face of Victorian values. Trapeze artists in circuses and in vaudeville theaters, as well as stunt flying aviators showcasing their courage and abilities during local fairs or aerial exhibitions from the 1910s on, indeed pushed the boundaries of what was deemed possible in terms of the human body’s physical capacities while challenging traditional notions of gender, race, class, and sexuality through their unconventional performances. In this study I explore three cases of aerialists who navigated both the demands of managers/spectators for spectacular and titillating acts and their personal aspirations within the confines of the increasingly capitalist entertainment industries in the West between 1880 and 1930. Besides Charmion, my study takes shape around the performances of “Barbette” or Vander Clyde who took Parisian theaters by storm with an amalgamation of trapeze artistry and female impersonation in interwar France; and Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to gain a pilot license and to set up her own flying shows throughout the United States in the 1920s. For each case study I conducted exhaustive archival searches and analysed relevant newspaper articles, magazines, show reviews, photographs and silent film. I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, and on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality to illustrate how aerial performances between 1880 and 1930 functioned as sites of creative resistance, opening up possibilities for a rethinking and redefinition of social categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality. I show how the performances of Charmion, Coleman and Barbette simultaneously reflected and challenged the ii anxieties and optimism of a society forced to revisit traditional beliefs regarding the gendered/racialized/classed/sexualized body. In demonstrating how these performers helped question modernizing beliefs regarding the human body’s capacities, and the female body’s physical abilities and appearance in particular, I argue they suggested new types of embodied agency for both women and men at the time. iii PREFACE A modified version of Chapter V has been published in Stadion in 2011. Bieke Gils. “‘The Only Race Aviatrix in the World’: A Tribute to Bessie Coleman (1892-1926),” Stadion 37 (2011): 55- 81. A modified version of Chapter III has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Sport History and will be published early on in 2014. Bieke Gils, “Flying, Flirting and Flexing,” Charmion’s Trapeze Act, Sexuality and Physical Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Sport History (2014). iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... ii PREFACE ........................................................................................................................................ iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................................................v LIST OF IMAGES ............................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................. viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. ix DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................................x Chapter I: Women Who Fly .........................................................................................................1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Destabilizing Categories ............................................................................................................. 7 Contextualizing the Case Studies .............................................................................................. 10 Thesis Structure ........................................................................................................................ 21 Chapter II: Framing and Tracing the Aerial Body ..................................................................24 Framing ..................................................................................................................................... 24 Introducing Bakhtin .............................................................................................................. 24 Carnival and the Carnivalesque ....................................................................................... 27 The Grotesque Body .......................................................................................................... 29 Bakhtin and the Omission of Women’s Voices ................................................................. 34 Victor Turner and Liminality ................................................................................................ 39 Bakhtin, Turner, and Agency ................................................................................................ 42 Tracing ...................................................................................................................................... 46 Reconstructing the Aerial Body ............................................................................................ 50 Biographical Case Studies ................................................................................................ 52 Sources/Traces .................................................................................................................. 54 Searching for Charmion, Barbette, and Bessie Coleman ...................................................... 57 Searching for Charmion ................................................................................................... 58 Bringing Barbette to Light/Life ......................................................................................... 61 Commemorating Coleman ................................................................................................ 63 Chapter III: Flying, Flirting and Flexing: Charmion’s Trapeze Act, Sexuality, and Physical Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century .........................................................................66 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 66 From Unabashed Burlesque to Respectable Vaudeville ........................................................... 70 Charmion the Parisian Sensation .............................................................................................. 74 A Woman with the Muscles of Sandow ................................................................................... 80 To View and Be Viewed ........................................................................................................... 86 Swinging Between Freedom and Constraint ............................................................................. 92 v Chapter IV: Le Numéro Barbette: Destabilizing Gender on the High Wire, the Rings and the Flying Trapeze .......................................................................................................................94 Barbette Beginnings .................................................................................................................. 97 Paris Was the Experience… .................................................................................................... 102 Des Gens Ne Voient Dans les Spectacles Que Ce Qu’ils Sont ............................................... 103 Their Love-life is Even Sadder… ........................................................................................... 107 Une Eve Future ....................................................................................................................... 110 Un Hommage à La Femme ..................................................................................................... 113 Life after 1938 ......................................................................................................................... 117 Chapter V: Bessie Coleman: “The Only Race Aviatrix in the World” ................................121 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 121 The Winged Gospel’s Female Missionaries ........................................................................... 126 Dreams of Flight ....................................................................................................................