dc.description.abstract | Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen was first exhibited at the Sixth Independent Exhibition in 1881. It was a wax sculpture, roughly 1 meter in height, dressed in a ready-made tutu, corset, and ribbon. The wax-made skin is polychromatic, with mixed-media internal structure, and is posed with the arms locked together behind the torso, and legs stepped out as in the fourth position of ballet. It elicited an unsettled feeling among critics, who used especially negative rhetoric in their criticism. This paper focuses on this single work and discusses how the unique representational strategies of Degas, and the general trend of body-reading technique during the fin-de-siecle in France, mutually constituted the underlying causes of this disturbance.
This paper broadly consults the related reference materials, considering the issues that existing research of Degas’s sculptures have regularly touched on. Discussing them under four main approaches: history of sculpture, gender issues, a detailed reading of the body, and nineteenth-century art criticism, this paper will try to discover the limits of these frameworks, and reconsider the reality that Little Dancer’s body is neither a sculpture which aims only at challenging the established academic paragons, nor is it made to claim a certain gender position, nor is it intended to be read through any specific body part. Instead, through a holistic reading, this paper will investigate how Little Dancer’s body responds to multiple body-reading techniques. This thesis will begin from the single artwork itself, and observe how it embodies a complicated gender politics that cannot be reduced to a single gender position. At the same time, this paper will discuss how contemporary observers viewed Little Dancer as “somebody” personified, more than a mere representation, and how their body-reading technique failed to unambiguouly decipher the Little Dancer.
Tracing the texture of Little Dancer’s body, this paper will read the artwork from the external layer toward the inner layer. That is, from the outermost skins (the membrane), to the main body (muscular body), and finally toward the vision and the feeling of anxiety (eye and mind). Sequentially examining the work in the manner of the contemporary critics, and parallelizing the actual layers of the sculpture, this paper will carefully examine the different layers and body particulars to understand the causes of anxiety corresponding to different reading habits directed at each layer. After the layer by layer discussion of the body, the paper will discuss the overall body-reading habits of contemporary viewers as well as of the artist himself, and the breaking of these body-reading habits through the means of art.
Degas had once said that, “[an art work] calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.” This paper argues that Degas surely arranged a scene with many shaky clues to mislead the audience. However, he had never intentionally and clearly profaned the subjects he represented as criminals. Little Dancer’s “woven membrane,” “applied and dyed skin,” “kneaded face,” and “molded physique,” invited contemporary viewers to decipher these elusive and specious codes. On one hand, these codes led to the interpretation of the symbols/symptoms as maladies and disorders which made the viewers anxious. On the other hand, Degas avoided overt legibility in these codes to create ambiguities that resisted specific inferential thinking, giving rise to yet another new form of anxiety. | en_US |