56
FRANK KERMODE
Fuller as representing the Dance, and most of what follows is
concerned with these dancers. Like Fuller, Avril had the repu–
tation of literacy, and enjoyed the friendship of Lautrec, Renoir,
Thcodor Wyczewa, Maurice Barres. It is cleM' from Lautrec's
posters that what interested him was the lack of conventionality,
almost the
gaucherie,
in her attitudes, her being set apart from
all the other girls. She danced a good deal alone, and not only
in the solo variation of the quadrille; she designed her own
dresses, and got some of her effects by whirling movements pos–
sibly learned from the English dancer Kate Vaughan, who was
also perhaps a source of inspiration to Fuller-she was well
thought of in the Eighties and later for bringing back long skirts
for dancers. Avril, again like Fuller, lacked formal training and
mechanical predictability; Pierre Charron said she was like
une Fleur balancee, troublante
Au souffle du vent chaud qui l'endoTt doucement
...
There is small doubt-and here lies much of her interest–
that this dancer owed most to the
air
of morbidity of which
Symons speaks, and specifically to the long time she spent in her
'teens as a patient of Charcot at the Salpctriere.
This
hospital,
and particularly the ward of the
grandes hysteriques,
in which
Avril had been treated for her chorea, was used as a kind of al–
ternative to music-halls; Charcot and
his
patients welcomed
visitors, and the symptoms of hysterias were well-known to a
large public. Charcot is celebrated for having turned Freud
"from a neurologist into a psychopathologist," but despite his
discovery that he could induce hysterical symptoms by hypno–
tism, and his observation that certain nervous disorders were
always a question of
"La chose genitale"
ChM'cot
himself
did not
3. Still thought of as a female disorder; Freud's Vienna papeI; on a male
hysteric brought him a reproof from a senior who said that
if
Freud
had known any Greek he would have seen that male hysteria is an
impossibility. (E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. I.
(1953) .
