Sisters of Salome -- Excerpt 1
The personal quest that led me to this book began years ago with a single image of Sidonie Gabrielle Colette’s left breast. I was eighteen when I discovered the French writer’s novels and, while interest quickly became obsession, I devoured as many of them as I could find in fast succession. I fell completely in love with this woman who seemed to speak the unspeakable about the pursuit of love, the pain of desire, and the tenderness that binds the two. Then I saw the photograph of my heroine that I would never forget. She was posing in profile on a stage set, her short, curly hair a thick halo about her head, her right arm was raised softly before her uplifted face, her palm facing up and away. Her steady gaze looked reverently into the distant horizon beyond her hand while, paradoxically, shielding herself from its onslaught. It was a lyrical and yearning gesture that, as a young Balanchine dancer, I recognized from the opening of his ballet Serenade made almost thirty years later. Colette looked fabulous and I was thrilled to see that brains and beauty could indeed coexist in one woman.
But it got even better -- she was dressed in a torn slip of white linen, her left breast exposed and aiming at the camera lens with shameless pride. The nakedness continued down the left side revealing a rounded, expertly posed thigh that ended its length in a slipper tied with suggestive black laces. She offered her bosom with a demure gesture of surrender tempered by the grace of an aristocrat.
Her breast was beautiful and the woman of words suddenly became flesh and blood -- and curiously naughty. “Colette’s Breast,” as I came to think of the image, symbolized for me something that I wanted for myself though I was not sure exactly what that was. Did I want the power of her pen? Or the power of her bosom? Her assertive intellect? Or her alluring magnetism? My search was furthered by a second vision that came a few years later. George Balanchine, my boss at the time, led me to it. . .
I knew that my urge to strip in public was an archetypal will to power and I could not be alone. Turning writer again I looked to the past to find my sisters, to find out why other women had chosen to remove their robes. I became fascinated with the ancient ritual of naked dancing that still endures despite endless attempts by the keepers of public morality to exorcise it.
Beginning in 1066 with Lady Godiva, history revealed numerous notable women who had taken off their clothes to considerable renown -- from Josephine Bonaparte, Lady Emma Hamilton and Lola Montez to Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker and Madonna. Here was a small but significant group of women who had used their bodies and their beauty to achieve just about anything and everything they might want: fame, fortune, sex, matrimony, political change. Then there were the purists who just did it for fun and provocation. None met with indifference.
My survey narrowed itself to an unmistakable congregation of women who, at the turn of twentieth century -- and all within two years of each other -- found stripping in some exotic manner to be a very attractive endeavour. Four of these women -- Maud Allan, the Canadian Isadora Duncan; Mata Hari, the Dutch spy; Ida Rubinstein, the Russian performance artist; and Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, the French writer -- are the heroines of this book.
Why did these women dance naked? Was there coercion? Financial or sexual reward? Or was it by choice, some subliminal erotic instinct, some recessive Salome gene that led to a kind of power in societies where women were mostly mute. Ever since Eve arrived in Adam’s world, throwing off one's clothing in public has always had the magical effect of clearing a little room of one’s own, though it is not, perhaps, the method Virginia Woolf had in mind. They subverted the existing rules to search out a new identity. These women recognized without moral constraint or fear, that the body is basic, and men through the ages have shown a negotiable weakness for it, even when they've shown little for other forms of appeal.
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