Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American CultureRobert Allen's compelling book examines burlesque not only as popular entertainment but also as a complex and transforming cultural phenomenon. When Lydia Thompson and her controversial female troupe of "British Blondes" brought modern burlesque to the United States in 1868, the result was electric. Their impertinent humor, streetwise manner, and provocative parodies of masculinity brought them enormous popular success--and the condemnation of critics, cultural commentators, and even women's rights campaigners. Burlesque was a cultural threat, Allen argues, because it inverted the "normal" world of middle-class social relations and transgressed norms of "proper" feminine behavior and appearance. Initially playing to respectable middle-class audiences, burlesque was quickly relegated to the shadow-world of working-class male leisure. In this process the burlesque performer "lost" her voice, as burlesque increasingly revolved around the display of her body. Locating burlesque within the context of both the social transformation of American theater and its patterns of gender representation, Allen concludes that burlesque represents a fascinating example of the potential transgressiveness of popular entertainment forms, as well as the strategies by which they have been contained and their threats defused. |
Contents
| 1 | |
The Intelligibility of Burlesque | 23 |
The Historical Contexts of Burlesque I The Transformation of American Theater | 43 |
The Historical Contexts of Burlesque II Women on the Stage | 79 |
Ixion Revisited | 119 |
The Institutionalization of Burlesque | 157 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
American Burlesque American theater appeared Astor Place audience ballet Barnum Barnum's American Museum became Black Crook blackface blonde Bon-Ton Boston bourgeois Bowery Broadway burlesque performer burlesque theaters burlesque troupes burlesque's called carnival century City comic concert saloon cooch dancer costumes culture dance discourse drama dress Female Minstrels feminine sexual feminine spectacle films gender girl grotesque High Rollers High Rollers Extravaganza History of Burlesque Howells humor Ibid inversion Ixion John Brougham Keith legitimate theater lesque Library of Congress living pictures Logan Lydia Thompson male manager Menken middle-class Minsky Minsky's Burlesque minstrel show minstrelsy moral Mutoscope Niblo's onstage opera P. T. Barnum patrons Photographs Division play pleasure police popular entertainment Prints and Photographs production prostitution riot role season sexual display social songs street striptease theatrical Thompsonian burlesque tion tour transgressive variety vaudeville Weber and Fields White woman women working-class York Clipper Ziegfeld