Women's solo performance: A new genealogy of modernism

Solo performance provides a flexible rubric for analyzing the range of performances, poetic texts, choreographies, images, and silent films that establish women's contributions to the concept of the female individual in modernism. I define solo performance as the use of various expressive modes to present a dramatic "I" associated with a character, usually drawn from myth or religion. Several solo forms, dominated by women, became popular in the nineteenth century: attitudes featured a sequence of poses in the shapes of classical or Christian statues, and monodramas presented a passionate mythological heroine through gesture and declamation. Using figures such as Emma Lyon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Augusta Webster, I demonstrate that the dramatic monologues written by Victorian women emerged from these forgotten performances. Modern dance, as initiated by Isadora Duncan, also shares this history of solo performance, and Duncan redefined the female body and spirit for artists and performers, including H.D. I argue, against received ideas of imagism, that H.D.'s dramatic monologues and her overlooked performances in three silent films can also be understood as solo performances. As first-person presentations in movement, speech, and character, these solos imagine a female individual as a provisional cultural production. Recent feminist studies have abandoned categories like "the individual" as inadequate for cultural critique or political action, but they overlook the significance and complexity of individualism in Victorian and modernist women's texts and performances. Understood as a soloist rather than an essential, impermeable self, the female individual at the foundations of first wave feminism demonstrates tensions that would be posed at the center of modernism.