Women Walking, Women Dancing: Motion, Gender and Eurocentrism

In early-twentieth-century Europe, the representational trope of ‘walking women’ takes on a specific connotation of gracefully focused, directional energy, predicated on women in the aftermath of first-wave feminism. The trope is widely diffused and for that reason often ambient rather than salient, and liable to escape notice. This chapter focuses on the trope in the context of neo-classicist aestheticism, c. 1900, as exemplified by Wilhelm Jensen’s (1837-1911) novella Gradiva (1903) and German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) figuration of the nymph as Renaissance dynamism. As such it also becomes a marker of Eurocentrism. As a classicist-European auto-image, the trope becomes more salient when contrasted with its contemporaneous exoticist counterpart: the Orientalist mirage of the ‘dancing woman’, specifically the temple dancer or bayadere.