The Feminist Occult in Florence Farr’s Dancing Faun
Guest post: Professor Dennis Denisoff, University of Tulsa
The ubiquity of drama within the culture of decadence cannot be overstated. Specifically, many works of decadent fiction, poetry, and visual art reflect their authors’ deep investment in the symbolism of performance and ritual as a means of engaging with a spiritual realm. In this post, I look at a novel by one such writer, the feminist Florence Farr (1860-1917). An actress, playwright, and director, Farr was also a leader within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—a highly influential occult society with an explicit recognition of gender equality. For Farr, performance was a form of symbolist engagement with spiritual forces. In its occult and feminist interests, her work offers a variation on the main symbolist strain running through decadence. Although Farr co-authored two ritual plays with Olivia Shakespear—The Beloved of Hathor and The Shrine of the Golden Hawk (both 1901), I wish to focus here on her novel The Dancing Faun (1894), in which she most explicitly situates her unique form of decadent symbolism within the 1890s London theatre scene. This attention to a novel is not a stretch beyond the subject of the staging of decadence, but an acknowledgement of the importance of the stage and performance within decadence in all its manifestations, including as aesthetic theory and as an approach to the spiritual.
Farr’s career as an actress began in 1880, when she was 20, and quickly wove together her decadent and occult interests. W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw—both of whom Farr took as lovers—first saw her act in John Todhunter’s play A Sicilian Idyll (1890), in which she performed the role of the pagan Priestess Amaryllis. In The Countess Kathleen (1892), Yeats wrote the role of Aleel, a mystical male poet and seer, specifically for her. By 1894, she was directing a season of new plays at the Avenue Theatre, including works by Yeats and Todhunter (both also members of the Golden Dawn), as well as Shaw. The poster for the season was designed by Aubrey Beardsley. This debut was bumpy (the Todhunter was a flop) but eventually lead to Farr, in 1898, becoming stage manager of Yeats’s Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin and, in 1905, directing the first performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891; English: Salome) on an English stage, at the Bijou Theatre in London. Meanwhile, her occult interests were also flourishing. Initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1890, Farr rose by 1897 to the position of Chief Adept in Anglia, the Order’s most powerful position in Britain. She also developed a vision of occult alchemy as a female-centered practice—the transmutation of the individual mind from everyday perception to a spiritual reality rooted in the ‘wisdom Goddess’ (i.e. Athena).[1]
These two channels of interest in theatre and ritual came together in her 1894 novel The Dancing Faun, published in the Keynotes series run by John Lane, the main publisher of 1890s British decadence (Fig. 1). The work offers the light, witty banter of the well-to-do that had come to give the decadent movement both its popularity and its reputation for vapidity and elitism. That said, Farr’s narrative actually undermines the personae of dandies and upper-class egotists by using the Wildean dramatic style as a counterpoint to the novel’s occult-inflected gender politics. Farr situates the novel’s analysis of women’s agency in the (itself rather hermetic) inner circle of the theater world. Her heroine, Lady Geraldine, is a strong-willed, Ibsenesque woman whom the author modeled in part on herself, having performed Ibsen in the past. At one point, Geraldine asks in anger, ‘Why should there be one law for men and another for women?’[2] Elsewhere, she disparages the mechanised system by which young women are brought out for social consumption: ‘in another season, girls now in the schoolroom will be going through the mill exactly in the same way as I am doing. How one longs for something different!’ (13-14). Ultimately, Geraldine murders her lover, a manipulative, self-assured young man (believed to be modelled in part on Shaw).
Figure 1: Inside page from Florence Farr’s novel The Dancing Faun (1894). The illustration by Aubrey Beardsley is a caricature of painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler as a domesticated satyr—a mild mockery of the commercialization of decadent sensuality.
The spiritualised politics of the dramatic arts arises early in the novel. Geraldine’s mother compliments the power and beauty of her voice (qualities shared with Farr, according to Yeats and others who saw her perform), and then observes: ‘In art all are equal. There is something so beautiful in that thought’ (3). The axiom establishes artistic performance as a site of social equality within modern society, a view supported by the Golden Dawn’s own declaration that women and men were equal within the Order. Meanwhile, having studied the Enochian language of Elizabethan occultist John Dee, Farr herself lectured on how the sounds of its vowels have the power to vibrate in sympathy with the ether on the astral plane. For Farr, her acting and her performances in Britain and North America reciting Yeats’s and other’s words while playing her psaltery would have participated in this essential harmony between the performing arts and the otherworldly.
As The Dancing Faun makes clear, however, the author’s interests in performance were also grounded in modern politics. The heroine Geraldine’s seeming rival in love is the actress Grace Lovell, another independently minded female who defines her life on the stage as an ephemeral, aesthetic ideal. Grace’s husband mocks her: ‘You appear to think what people say on the stage is real life, and what you see behind the scenes is play acting,’ to which she counters, ‘we all play our parts there, [in everyday life,] but we put all of reality we have in us into our acting’ (46). The dictum is strongly suggestive of the actress Sybil Vane’s worldview in Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891/1892). In contrast to the artifice of social customs such as the marriage market, Grace finds in performance the inspiration for her esoteric feminism: ‘As she listened to the laments of Beatrice di Cenci, it seemed to her some inspired spirit had entered her body and was making use of her voice to reveal to her what life, and love, and divine sorrow meant’ (53). The empowered spirit arises from reciting lines from Percy Shelley’s 1819 The Cenci, a play in which Farr herself had performed the role of Beatrice.[3] This vital aspect of Grace’s acting leads her to focus on ‘making every sound she uttered beautiful’ (54), turning art into her real life, just as it turns spirit into the wellspring of Grace’s feminist defiance. Depicting the theatrical and spiritual as inseparable, Farr suggests the public and the private are part of a single, trans-temporal, egalitarian system. The symbolic ethereal that she found upon the stage itself proffered a power to herself as a feminist, a power that carried the possibility of political change in her time and beyond it.
Professor Dennis Denisoff works in Victorian and Modernist literature and culture, with particular expertise in decadence and aestheticism, environmental humanities, gender/sexuality/queer studies, and paganism. He is the author of 6 books and co/editor of 9. His latest books are the edition Arthur Machen's Decadent and Occult Works, and the co-edited collection The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature. He is also completing a monograph on Decadent Ecology and the New Paganism, 1860-1920, forthcoming from Cambridge UP. He is past president of the North American Victorian Studies Association. He edits the Routledge Book Series Among the Victorians and the Modernists.
Notes
[1] Florence Farr. ‘An Introduction to Alchemy’. A Short Enquiry Concerning the Hermetic Art, and Euphrates or the Waters of the East, by a Lover of Philalethes, 1714 (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1894): 9-13, 10.
[2] Florence Farr. The Dancing Faun (London: Elkin Matthews and John Lane, 1894), 99. Further references from this novel appear directly in the main text.
[3] Anon, ‘Dramatic Gossip.’ The Athenæum, no. 3376 (July 9, 1892), 76.