i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

154 / The Extended Familyasserts. Neel’s active self-display is comparable here to the Greek mythologicalƒgure of Baubo, who shook Demeter out of her mourning for her child Persephoneby displaying and playing with her pudenda, an act Peter Wollen hasdescribed as a “display to another woman [whose] effect is to provoke laughter...”17 In postmodern parlance, Neel, like Baubo, is “a ƒgure who residesoutside the regime of phallocentrism, undermining its logic.” 18Neel’s uninhibited, female version of the Bacchanal may refer as well to theconventions of modern dance. At the turn of the century, the founders of moderndance such as Ruth St. Denis, Mary Wigman, and Isadora Duncan hadtransformed their socially assigned traits of animal sexuality and irrationalityinto expressive ones. Modern dance, unlike other modern art forms, was considereda uniquely, indeed essentially feminine medium. So convincing weretheir representations of elemental female sexuality that D. H. Lawrence’s descriptionof the newly sexually liberated Lady Chatterley makes a generalizedreference to them: “She . . . ran out with a little wild laugh, holding up herbreasts to the heavy rain . . . and running blurred in the eurhythmic dancemovementsshe had learned so long ago in Dresden.” 19 For Lawrence, however,the “lady” is an animal who performs for his own pleasure: “bending sothe rain beat and glistened on the full haunches . . . then stooping again so thatonly the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him,repeating a wild obeisance.” 20 As Kate Millet would point out in Sexual Politicsin 1969, Lady Chatterley is Mellor/Lawrence’s sexual slave.Neel may have accepted Lawrence’s notion that “The body’s life is the lifeof the sensations and emotions,” but may not have acquiesced to Lawrence’sversion of its cosmic signiƒcance, in which the “balance of male and female inthe universe” was maintained through the worship of the male principle. Johnis a participant in rather than the choreographer of this primitive performance;it is he who is the “„apper,” whereas Neel herself effects the metamorphosis ofwoman into animal that Lawrence imposes through his look. Since she is playingat being an animal, she cannot actually become one—her guise is thus herprotection. Was she deliberately mocking Lawrence’s charge that the new Villagebohemians failed to give sufƒcient respect to (his version of) sexuality?“These young people scoff at the importance of sex, take it like a cocktail . . .The body of men and women today is just a trained dog. And of no-one is thismore true than of the free and emancipated young.” 21Maybe for the cocktail-snorting dancing pig, sex was not the origin and endof existence. Maybe, like Mike Gold, she was mocking the decade’s obsessionwith sex: “You can read essays by American intellectuals to prove . . . that AbeLincoln made the civil war because he was undersexed; that history is sex; thatAmerica is sex; that sex is soul; that soul is all; Oom, oom, pfui!” 22 On the other