"Want of Serenity": James, Sargent, and the Queer Problem of Divas

Abstract

Abstract:By the early 1880s, when James met John Singer Sargent, he was already uneasy about the relation of women and music. His early friendship with Sargent, though, connected him to an active figure in the Paris art world and to a friend who pursued a deep passion for music and the queer transgressions sometimes embodied in musical women. Sargent's habit of playing the piano in social settings fit well into James's cultured London circle. But Sargent's passion for modern, experimental, or ethnic music and exotic dancers unsettled James. James condemned Sargent's El Jaleo (1882) for the "want of serenity" embodied in its central figure, a female cabaret dancer, which exampled the "divas" emerging in fin-de-siècle culture. James's critique contradicted Sargent's bold intentions in this painting and highlighted Sargent's and James's contrasting attitudes toward musical, theatrical, rule-breaking women and the coded transgressions they embodied.