Little Dancer Aged Fourteen by Camille Laurens

Author:Camille Laurens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

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IN THIS CONTEXT, what is to be made of the Little Dancer? What is Degas telling us about her? That she is prone to vice? To crime? Really? Only that? If he had wanted to show us her budding depravity, would he not have sexualized her more? At that time, of course, the image of a dancer in itself represented vice. But so young? He specified her age in the work’s title, after all, though it was not usual. What meaning are we to assign to her half-closed eyes? Some have interpreted the girl’s offered face as an invitation to sensuality, and the forward thrust of her hips as a sexual signal, unsettling, a provocation that makes the viewer uneasy. But are the almost closed eyes of the Little Dancer truly watching the stranger who is about to grab her and kiss her on the lips? Are they not directed inward instead, oblivious to others? Do they not telegraph a kind of absence from the world? Unlike an artist such as Balthus, who, fifty years on, would make his passion for very young girls plain, Degas does not try to capture an erotic aura. When Balthus paints thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Lolitas in ankle socks with their underwear showing, their eyes closed, and stretching next to a cat, he means to capture, so he explains, the mystery inherent in adolescence at the dawn of womanhood and sexuality: “Adolescent girls stand for the future, before the transformation that will perfect their beauty. A woman has already found her place in the world, an adolescent has not. The body of a woman is already whole. The mystery is gone.”48 The sense we get from Degas’s sculpture is similar to what Balthus describes, but the young girl’s mystery is less overtly erotic, at least for today’s spectators. And if Marie stood for the future in the eyes of contemporary viewers, it was a closed-off future, leading only to her isolation. Her mystery therefore comes closer to what Rilke has suggested about Balthus, whom he described as “the painter of young girls, who are offered to every desire, but in a closed world that sends them back to their own solitude.”49 If we replaced “young girls” in this sentence with “dancers,” would this not aptly describe Degas’s world, and more specifically his Little Dancer Aged Fourteen? “The painter of dancers” created few landscapes and outdoor scenes; most of his subjects are found in performance halls, brothels, cafés — places where women, even when they are with others, even accompanied, are alone and with no opening to the world outside. Of course, the Little Dancer, being a sculpture, is freer in space than Degas’s painted subjects. But let’s not forget the glass cage that imprisoned her and the negative reception that greeted her when the sculpture was first shown. Is she not “offered to every desire,” even the most unacceptable, but then dismissed “back to her own solitude”? Her nearly closed eyes suggest the way a person who is alone might plunge into herself to escape from suffering.

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