Paper to work on
Re-do this with focus on struggle with men, struggle of living a higher calling, struggle of Dance, struggle of being authentic, struggle that allows for the only true form of living and fix grammatical/spelling errors/clean up messy areas:
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service." -Friedrich Nietzsche
The world will never know, in the full sense, the people of the past, but there are some who leave a legacy. There are some who create a lasting Will that transcends their historical self, and, by doing so, transcends into the present, flows into the future. Isadora Duncan is one of these people. She struggled just as any human does, but her struggle was for her Will. She chose her Will and immortalized herself through this decision. She realized the events of her life were not important, the force of her life was. “Facts were not Isadora’s concern” (Kurth, 6). She stands alone in her field, as a pioneer, the mother of modern dance. She did not create a school of dance, nor did she have any direct followers. She remains as an individual, whose Will stands on it’s own, inspiring those with the same creative spirit. “Isadora is generally considered an isolated pioneer rather than the progenitor of a new dance tradition”(Gardner, 267). The world may never know the person of Isadora Duncan again, but she left the world her Will. “‘She had no laws. She created.’ And inspired” (Kurth, X). She left room for the Will to rise and to create, she marked the world, and further advanced the freedom of the Human Will in the world.
Isadora Duncan faced difficulties. Like every person who is called to speak, express, and live the virtue of creative freedom so desperately, she faced hard decisions and turmoil. She was born “‘under the star of Aphrodite,’ as she told it, the daughter of ‘wind and wave and the winged flight of bird and bee’”(5). Her mother ate “oysters and champagne- the food of Aphrodite”(11) during her pregnancy with Isadora. She claims this is where she first began to dance, in the womb. She had a fiery passion from the start, and Isadora saw flames as the symbol of her creative expression. Her first memory was being tossed from a burning building. She recalls:
‘The gods sell their gifts dearly…For every joy there is a corresponding agony. For what they give of Fame, Wealth, Love, they extract Blood and Tears and grinding Sorrow. I am continually surrounded by flames…Always fire and water and sudden fearful death’ (6).
She knew that she was given a higher gift. She understood freedom, and was driven to use that freedom; the gift that would cause her to sacrifice and suffer.
The flames that Isadora saw surrounding her led her to believe she was a Promethean-like creature. Prometheus in mythology is the Titan who gave the fire from Mount Olympus to the world. She knew “that the characteristics of Prometheus were boldness, freethinking, and dedication to mankind…she would give dance to the people as Prometheus gave fire” (20). Isadora believed that her dancing was not her own invention, it was a rediscovery of the natural style that the Ancient Greeks expressed. “A rediscovery of the classical principles of beauty, motion, and form” (20). Her understanding of Greek culture was not trapped in the facts of history, but in the openness of imagination. She was dedicated in allowing creation and imagination to reign all of her being, giving herself fully to mankind in this way. She had to go under to do this, she had to dance. She had to go under through dance, so that she could have eternal life. “The Dance- it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun”(21). She saw it as the most fundamental form of artistic expression. It was through dance that she could express her creativity. “One explains the dance better by dancing than by publishing commentaries and treatises”(23). She had to dance to bring the fire of her Will to the world.
Her greatest sacrifice was found in her commitment to her art, a commitment that drove her to pioneer for the equality and emancipation of women in the arts. She met great opposition from men; men that were artists and producers, who could not understand her as a serious artist. She encountered a sculptor named Rodin, and Isadora was interested in speaking with him as a fellow artist. “She was struck by the sensual quality of the master’s relationship with his raw materials, his passionate engagement in the process of making art, and his impulse to equate the art object with the female form”(Farfan, 103). Isadora wanted to be seen as another artist, an individual, someone seen beyond her form as female. However, Rodin could not see her as a fellow artist. She danced for him, and began to tell him her theories behind her dance. He would not listen, only gaze, and approach her as a sexual object. “My whole desire was to yield to him my entire being and, indeed, I would have done so if it had not been that my absurd up-bringing caused me to become frightened”(104). Here Isadora allows for a bit of her struggle to be seen. She was so committed to her creative Will that she could not allow herself to play the role as the object of art, only the artist. In choosing her Will, she had to give up many of her own desires; this was her constant struggle and sacrifice.
She was not ashamed of her body and her sex as a female, but she fought against letting that become her identity. She was “determined to reclaim the female body from its objectification” (103). Isadora believed that this was the most fundamental and necessary requirement for the female liberation. “Duncan…was less interested in votes for women than in less directly political modes of social and cultural transformation. Duncan in fact believed that women’s emancipation was not possible unless it began with women’s bodies” (4). Her struggle always misunderstood, Elizabeth Robbins criticized her: “if she’d been a feminist, she’d have been less unhappy. She allowed [men?] to devastate her”(4). It was Isadora’s sacrifice, though. She had accepted her gift from the gods, and knew her life would be marked by sorrow and flame.
Despite men, Isadora remained committed to her emancipation of the female form. She especially sought to do this in ballet where she saw the bodies of women being destroyed by performing unnatural movements and having their feet shoved into boxes so they could dance on their toes. “It is ugly and against nature” (Kurth, 24). She favored the more natural way of dancing. “Having decided she did not like ballet, she then proceeded to examine her own movements to discover exactly where movement originated” (McDonagh, 3). It was finding the root of the most natural that spoke to her. This was evident not only in her movements, but in her dress as well. “Duncan’s challenge to dominant cultural prescriptions for women was wide-ranging and included her insistence on the right of women to dress in unconstraining clothing” (Farfan, 103).
Many of her ideas for dress reform mirrored the ideas of François Delsarte, “whose blueprint for movement and dramatic self-expression was the rage in Isadora’s childhood”(Kurth, 28). He observed people and their basic reactions to things. He believed in the “inner man” and freeing the women’s body from restraining clothing. Though Isadora denies his influence, the similarities of their ideas cannot be denied. Isadora danced barefoot, and in a toga. She was fixated with movement from an early age, after she rejected ballet for its acrobatics. She labeled it “a school of affected grace and toe-walking,” adding “the type which expresses America at its finest could never dance the ballet…an expression of Beauty and Strength such as no civilization has ever known” (23). The role of ballet, too, was never to express the individual on stage. It was to add to the aesthetic of a certain performance, of a certain orchestral piece. Isadora could only see the dancer as the expression of self, and was criticized for trying to instantiate this idea in performances. “Dancers were not suppose to have thoughts” (McDonagh, 4). She envisioned the Greek naturalism, and wanted movements that allowed her spirit to move, to be seen. “My art is an expression of my life. My dancing is of the imagination and spirit, not of the body. When my body moves it is because my spirit moves it”(Kurth, 23). It did not matter how she moved as long as she moved with her Spirit, a Spirit always focused upon it’s freedom. She knew only how to express this free Will through dance. She felt truth as freedom, an emotion that was fulfilled through movement. “‘Art meant Isadora,’ said John Dos Passos. ‘Art was whatever Isadora did’”(X). Though she was to be misunderstood, she never lost her determinism to bring about her natural dance.
Although dancing was how she breathed her Will, her freedom into the world, she would not let her dance define her. She herself said that she did not want to be called or known as a dancer. There was something more to her. Isadora was a creator, an artist, a free will, and she was also a teacher. “‘I am a teacher with a mission’; ‘If I were only a dancer I would not speak’”(Farfan, 105). And speak she did. She spoke out not only against the issues repressing women in culture and art, but she spoke about teaching, religion, philosophy, poetry and music.
She developed with her sister Elizabeth the “Isadora Duncan School of Dance.” The school and the history of it are not important. What role each sister played is not important. What is important is the Will of Isadora manifested in the role of the teacher. She saw children in a new light, and felt the urge to develop what she believed to be the best method for teaching children. Her central mission “was the education of children through the medium of dance”(Kurth, 165). Isadora was so committed to an understanding of self that she believed the best way of teaching children would begin with understanding the self. Her principle was “knowledge of the self would lead children to natural expression…I want a school of life…let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel…let us produce a dancing child”(165). She used images of nature as tools for understanding. Students were taught to envision landscapes and the natural movements of the outside world. Isadora tried to communicate the need for the natural communion with all that was felt. Isadora’s school ultimately failed, leaving her way of dancing without a following. She could only influence future dancers through her belief that dance is self expression, the most basic form of art. She had no theory, no technique, no method except for her passion of sharing the imagination of the creative spirit. “As an example of personal courage and aesthetic adventurousness, Isadora deservedly had an enormous influence. But her technical innovations were neither proficient nor consistent enough to spawn imitation”(Gardner, 267). Again, her Will was not to be understood. She could not communicate her driving force through words. As much as she explained what she was feeling and where it was stemming from, the power of the Will was lost on those who could not connect to it. It was something that could not be forced, but spoke on it’s own.
Isadora’s own education and childhood played a large role in impacting her creative spirit. To reach such a heightened understanding of her Will and freedom, she looked toward her mother, who educated her children to be freethinkers. “Her real education was gained while lying on the rug at her mother’s feet” (Kurth, 18). There she listened to her mother play the piano. Music was what taught Isadora to dance. Her mother was a music teacher, and Isadora learned the value of music from an early age. “She interpreted music even as a small child and showed a precocious self-reliance before her teens” (McDonagh, 3). Beethoven and Wagner, in addition to Nietzsche, were labeled by her as being “the three great precursors of the Dance in our century”(Kurth, 23). The emotion they expressed inspired Isadora to move.
Isadora’s mother taught her children self-reliance and life lived without looking to other’s for meaning. Being an atheist, she directed her children away from religion. Mrs. Duncan would listen to the words of Robert Ingersoll, The Great Agnostic. He summed up Isadora’s philosophy: “Art in its highest forms increases passion, gives tone and color and zest to life…It is careless of conduct and consequence. For a moment, the chain of cause and effect seems broken; the soul is free…Under the influence of art the walls expand, the roof rises, and it becomes a temple” (16-17). Isadora took Ingersoll and her mother’s teaching to express them in her own way, like she did with everything. Isadora believed “The ‘Christian education’…does not know how to teach children Nietzsche’s superb phrase: ‘Be Hard!’ Only from an early age some spirit kept whispering to me, ‘Be Hard’”(15).
It was the idea of self reliance that led her mother to teach her daughters about the dangers men. Her father was a mysterious figure in her life. She barely knew who he was, and, though she longed for a relationship with him, she could not have a one. “The black shadow of this mysterious father of whom no one would speak, and the terrible word divorce was imprinted on the sensitive plate of my mind”(Kurth, 15). Mrs. Duncan urged her daughter’s against marriage: “‘Don’t trust men,’ said Mrs. Duncan. “‘Don’t marry them’”(14). This led Isadora to develop her own distrust of men, which created a struggle between herself and the men she knew. Love confused her, and she could not figure out this confusion that men brought her, forever struggling between being seen as an individual and being seen as an object. She decided on her own that “‘marriage was a pretty low-down proposition,’ resolving then and there ‘to fight against marriage and for the emancipation of women, and for the right of every woman to have a child or children as it pleased her, and to uphold her right and her virtue’”(15).
Her independence from men led her to a life of free love, where she had two children from two different lovers. One of these lovers was a man named Edward Gordon Craig. Craig was a set designer who, like the other men in her life, “attempted to reassign her to a traditional female role in the art-making process and subsume her into his own creative work” (Farfan, 106). Still, he was able to shake the commitment that Isadora made to live without dependence on men. Her affair with Craig “led to an unfamiliar confusion about what it meant to be an artist and a woman” (Kurth, 177). Isadora, in her confusion, became like a jealous child for Craig. He was love in with another woman, but wrote about Isadora in his private journal that he was “keenly attracted to Isadora, who may be a witch or a pretty child and I find it hard to be away from her. She not only attracts me, she revolts me. Love which torments is not love”(181). So overtaken by her confusion with Craig, she stooped to psychological games, acting always like a child. He had consumed her, and drove her away from her call. She let Craig overcome her; she went under for him. She proclaimed “Dancing is not the greatest in life. The greatest thing in life is- LOVE! Is it not true?...Love, it’s written across the sky”(183). The love she thought she knew was not real, and, in the end, she gave up visions of ever entering into a union with a man. She freed herself from Craig, and let her Will overcome her again. “She is not so unnatural as not to dream about family life with Edward Gordon Craig, but she refuses to be beguiled by such dreams, insisting that she is an artist and murmuring to herself immediately after giving birth, ‘I did it! All by myself! I did it!’”(Farfan, 111). This exaltation of independence cannot be without some conflict. In the 1968 biopic Isadora, director Karel Reisz portrays this struggle as the character Isadora says: “I’m a woman and I’m an artist and that’s hard”(111). She was always determined, and the sacrificing of a relationship was an act of going under for her creative spirit of freedom so that it could prevail.
Isadora had two individuals who helped her through her struggle; in these two individuals she was not alone, but found solidarity. They both understood the Will of the individual, and their writings constantly inspired and revived Isadora. Though they were her influences as first, Isadora Duncan should not be counted as separate from them, but as one of their kind, a driving force of Will and Spirit. The first was the person she called her hero, Walt Whitman; the second was the person she called her spiritual mentor, Friedrich Nietzsche. During her confusion with Craig, she struggled with these two thinkers, constantly wanting to dismiss their truth, but never being able to: “Walt made her feel like a tissue-paper fool. Not long after, she was reading Nietzsche on the train: ‘I feel such extraordinary convolutions going on…the changes come so quick & unexpected that I feel a bit rattled. Battled-rather say’”(Kurth, 177). Her time with Craig may have caused her to forget her commitment to her Will for a period of time, but it only shows that she was a human, struggling in exchange for her gift. The strength of both Whitman and Nietzsche, though temporarily misunderstood, revived her to reassure the commitment she made to the creative spirit.
She discovered Walt Whitman at a young age, and became inspired by his famous poem “Song of Myself”, published in 1855. He was committed to his own transcendent Will, expressing it through raw poetry that breathed life. Isadora shared Whitman’s “creative pressure welling from profound depths, and a boundless acceptance which expressed itself in an urgent inclusiveness rather than in the artful limits of deliberate design” (Whitman, xxvii). It was this “radical utterance out of the abysms of the Soul”(xxvii) that connected the two. Whitman described his task in writing “Song of Myself” as “to improve and transform life, to discern and set forth its miraculousness, and to sing the transcendence of human love, envisioned as divine”(xxxi). Though this may not have been the whole of Isadora’s reason for artistic creation, they both ultimately created as a “celebration of the individual…and of spiritual possibility”(xxxi).
“Song of Myself” became Isadora’s guide, her own spiritual text. She describes the experience of reading it as her “great spiritual realization of life from the lines of Walt Whitman”(Kurth, 7). In “Song of Myself”, Whitman channels his own will, and the truth of all of the world. His lines are free, and contain an open and natural approach to life. He wrote what he was feeling, what his insight into truth was. Certainly, to read “Song of Myself” and feel it, creates a spiritual experience of being connected to the speaker, to Walt Whitman. There is a force to feel, turning the immortalized words of Walt Whitman into the cry of man then, man now, and man forever. The details of the historical Whitman are unimportant; it’s Whitman’s Creative Spirit that allows for the future to feel him alive and connected to the present. He writes in verse 6 of “Song of Myself”:
“What do you think has become of the young and old men?/And what do you think has become of the women and children? /They are alive and well somewhere, /The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, /And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, /And ceas'd the moment life appear'd/ All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, /And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier”(Whitman, 31).
Isadora’s love of Whitman was the final step to developing her “so-called Greek dance with which I have flooded the world” (Kurth, 7). The Greece that Isadora loved “was the Greece of the Romantics…In Emerson’s words, ‘Our love of the antique is not the love of the old, but love of the natural’”(21).
Whitman wrote also about women and men, giving them equality. He found truth in the individuality of both men and women. Verse 21 states: “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man/ And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man/ And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men” (Whitman, 43). Whitman was her hero, he had “called for ‘the entire redemption of woman out of the incredible holds and webs of silliness, millinery, and every kind of dyspeptic depletion” (Kurth, 32). It is the freedom and liberation of life breathed through Whitman that attracted and kept the young Isadora Duncan. It is his “Urge and urge and urge,/Always the procreant urge of the world”(Whitman, 27) she most profoundly felt.
Both Whitman and Duncan believed that what they were doing was not a solo undertaking. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” indicates that he understood himself as filled with many things: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes)”(Whitman, 77). Further, Whitman wanted his poetry to be seen as an “ensemble-like a great city to modern civilization & a whole combined clustering paradoxical identity a man, a woman”(xxvii). Likewise, Isadora Duncan “claimed that she had ‘never once danced a solo’ and thought of her dance ‘as a chorus or community expression’”(Farfan, 114). Though Isadora and Whitman are clearly connected in spirit, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who struck Isadora in another way; Whitman felt the Will, but Nietzsche understood it in a way that allowed him to become a prophet.
Friedrich Nietzsche has been called the Philosopher of Dance. This title is not to describe his ideas about dance, but to explain the greatest manifestation of his philosophy- the act of dancing. He was born only a few decades before Isadora Duncan, and she was twenty three years old when he died in 1900. She saw him as the one who had committed her spirit to philosophy.
Nietzsche had developed a philosophy in the 19th century that defied and challenged the history of Western Philosophy that came before him. He could not feel it illuminating the human experience, for it fit into systems aimed at creating an ordered whole. For this reason, Nietzsche historically found problem with the religious. He was famous for proclaiming that “God is Dead!” For this, he was greatly misunderstood and rejected. For him, religion (Christianity in particular) was not about truth or love or life, but about ordered systems of ethics, and means for people to escape their selves. The religious looked outside of their selves to find the meaning and the source of their life. They gave up life as a preparation for death, and never realized the Will of their own. Nietzsche stresses this in his philosophical text “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, a text that Isadora found to be inspired. It is in this text that Nietzsche introduces his idea of the Übermensch. He describes the Übermensch as the one who has overcome man: “Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” (Thus Spoke, 41). Nietzsche saw man as being between animal and the Übermensch. Every creature is called to create something more, and man is called to create the Übermensch. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra acts as the prophet, coming down to proclaim this overcoming and undergoing of man. He is fearful that men will not overcome themselves, but progress back to the animals, stay as men, and not create anything more. It is ultimately the Will that Nietzsche is trying to communicate through the words of Zarathustra. The Übermensch will be ruled by his own Will, overcoming him as man, and allowing him to “live longest” (46). The Will is to overcome man, and allow him to be a creative force of life. Men guide their lives by reason and order, but, if they are to overcome, they will be guided by Will, the passionate spirit of life.
Isadora Duncan is one of those who lived her life as a going under. She read the words of Nietzsche, but he did not create her Will. She had the Will and spirit before. Nietzsche’s words motivated her; he was a source of communion, someone else who lived a going under. Like the true individual going under to overcome man, she let her Will rule her life. She found the force of her movement and existence, and let it speak for her. Zarathustra speaks, “I love those who do not first seek beyond the stars for reasons to go down and to be sacrifices: but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may one day belong to the Superman” (44). Isadora is definitely one who has sacrificed to the earth, so that the Will can flourish. Isadora lived these words of Nietzsche: “I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you”(46). She channeled her chaos, and gave birth to her virtue of freedom. Nietzsche said that he would “only believe in a God who danced.” Here is his God. The one who has a will to dance, to feel spirit and emotion as truth, and expresses it the most natural way how- through the body.
Nietzsche, like Isadora, was a lover of the Greek culture. They both understood the Beauty that the Greeks held. He, in particular, developed a love of Epicurus. Epicurus was simple, who lived life out through the things which he enjoyed. Nietzsche meditates on him: “Such happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually. It is the happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm, and now they can never weary of the surface and of the many hues of this tender, shuddering skin of the sea”(Gay Science, 110). Isadora could be such an image as well. In one of her letters to Craig she described her happiness:
To wrench oneself from Time &[sic] place and self & enter where time & place & self do not exist- that is a great pain- but then also a great reward. Is anything comparable to the feeling of having come in contact with that eternal idea of Beauty- a wrench, an awful suffering, a feeling of battering for ages against an impassable barrier, & then suddenly & sharply a glow, a light, a connection with the idea like entering into a God- a happiness indescribable, triumphant (Kurth, 212).
This happiness was for those who felt the force of life so great, so much that it pained them, that when they saw Beauty they could not turn their eyes away. It was such happiness to be so fully alive in front of such great Beauty. Isadora may have expressed the feeling in her own words, but she gave this Beauty to others through her dance. Craig writes about Isadora:
She danced more perfectly than ever and with more care more freedom more love- there they sat still and stupid. How strange a sight. An ugly little theatre full of ugly and foolish people and on the darkened stage a figure growing at each movement more perfect- lavishing beauty on each side of her (182).
Not only was Isadora the receiver of such great Beauty from her constant suffering, but she was the source of great Beauty as well. It was a struggle to feel life so fully, but it could only be seen as Beautiful.
Nietzsche suffered in trying to communicate the Beauty of life. He wanted every person to be expressions of it, and became very critical when the majority did not understand. He was highly critical of women, and posed a challenge to the female. For Nietzsche, women were weak; to be female or feminine was to be insincere, dependent, and pathetic. Femininity was a negative thing, but this did not mean that all women were to be seen this way. Nietzsche had respect for the individual, the one who was “hard.” He found very few women to be this way, and he personally suffered at the hand of women with whom he had relationships. Duncan, though being a female by form, also found contempt for those women who prolonged the entrapment of the female form. That was her ultimate goal, emancipating women, and felt Nietzsche’s frustration that her Will could not overcome all. The body changes, but the Will does not. It always transcends, it is always an expression of freedom. Duncan strived, like Nietzsche, to communicate that truth to the world.
As Nietzsche spoke through Zarathustra’s mouth: “I love him who keeps back no drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be the spirit of his virtue entirely: thus he steps as spirit over the bridge; I love him whose soul is overfull, so that he forgets himself and all things are in him: thus all things become his downfall; I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the bowels of his heart, but his heart drives him to his downfall” (Thus Spoke, 45). Man will be guided by his Will, allowed to determine how to channel it through his mind, and with his heart, he lets the Will overtake him. This downfall is what allows the spirit, the Will to be. The death of the physical body, of man, is the ultimate releasing of the Will into the world. Isadora Duncan is one who gave her Will up completely to her virtue, freedom. She became the virtue of freedom, so that it could exist at its fullest in the world. This is the ultimate sacrifice of the artist, of the free person: allowing their virtue, freedom, to grow in the world, preparing for the day when the Übermensch will come, the day when the Will and the virtue of freedom have taken over man, and man is freed in it.
Isadora’s own death may be seen as tragic, but it is just a mere aspect of the downfall she had to suffer to allow for the Will to reign free. Her death came at the age of fifty, when she was driving her two children, and the scarf that she wore as a symbol of her freedom became trapped and strangled her; Isadora and her two children were killed. There has been great speculation about her death, and a huge emphasis upon marking her life as tragic. This attention to her death and tragedy diminishes the actual purpose of her true suffering; it does a great injustice to the fact that it is her Will that has marked her life, not her death. Her Will is what has allowed for her life to remain in this world, influencing others, regardless if they ever know the details and facts about her life and death. Her death only finds importance as an illustration of her going under, her sacrificing for her freedom.
For those that knew Isadora Duncan, her death was fitting. Penny Farfan, in her book Women, Modernism, and Performance, writes a chapter about Isadora titled “Feminism, tragedy, and the fate of Isadora Duncan”. This chapter contains multiple interpretations of Duncan’s death from both those who knew her and those who analyzed her as a tragic figure. Max Eastman recalls about the scarf that strangled her:
It had caught up and wound up in a wheel of the speeding car, and destroyed her like a living thing. And how living a thing it was! How she breathed into that frail instrument the bounding pulse of her passion for beauty and freedom! Everyone groped for the symbolism in its turning upon her at the last, but to me it was painfully clear (Farfan, 109).
Eastman is ultimately not talking about her scarf, but her body and life. He emphasizes the aspect of Isadora that was a living thing. She had breathed into her own body, her own life (“that frail instrument”) her Will, her passion, her need for freedom. To speak like this is to admit that Isadora was ultimately more than her life. Saying that she breathed into her life suggests that she was beyond her own life. Her passion that was breathed into her life was the fundamental part of her Will, and this is what has transcended her death, pushing her forever into the future as such passion.
Another angle to her death is the idea of Greek tragedy. It is appropriate to draw this parallel, for Isadora believed in her rediscovery of Greek ideals. Some draw the conclusion that her death was ultimately in her from the start. She lived tragically, and died tragically. The Ancient world tells us that the women of Greek tragedy primarily committed suicide, and usually “in regions of the throat” (109). This is to illustrate the silencing of women. Duncan’s death was not a suicide, but it could be argued that it was merely not an intentional suicide, though still a suicide in some way. To understand this, one should look at “a principle outside the universe of tragedy…move toward the gynecological thinking of the Greeks, where woman is caught between two mouths, between two necks, where vagaries of the womb suddenly choke the voice in a woman’s throat” (109). Duncan’s own two distinct voices and necks were not found in her children, but in her most faithful allowance of her Creative Will to speak, not her reason. Her physical existence was the womb in which her Will and Creative Freedom lived and reigned over the order of reason. Isadora gave birth to it, and it overcame her. She went under for her Will, and it transcended the physical existence of Isadora. The mouth and neck of her Will had to end the finite life of Isadora, so that it could exist on its own. Her Will felt the urgency of life at all times, causing her to live in such a tragic way. Her death had to come by her own Will. Adding more understanding to her physical death, is the death of her two children. These children, if they lived, would have allowed Isadora to continue on in a physical legacy through her children. They could not be creators in a legacy for Isadora; they could not allow her to exist in a physical manner at all. Her Will had to stand alone, being the part of her strong enough to transcend into the future. She went under for the virtue of freedom, and it overcame her. If to live by one’s Will, one’s spirit, is Truth, then it would stand that she could forever live as the creative force, existing in her commitment to the Earth and as an act of inspiring freedom. Isadora believed that The Dance, the movement of her Will, was the movement of all those who died in order to live again. She was freed from her physical form, and had longer lasting life in her Will. Isadora brought her fire to the world, so that it may burn eternal.
Not every person who enters into this world understands the need to live, the procreant urge. They are lost in the order and structure of the world. The ones, however, who do understand their Will may not live perfect lives, may suffer completely throughout their lives, but they have lived in the fullest. They have allowed their Will to guide their reason, and they have created and put forth their spirit into the world. It is for these people that humanity continues. It is for the future that they give their selves over to their Will to transcend, and for their present lives that they allow their Will to dominate. Nietzsche says:
Indeed, pain itself gives them their greatest moments. This is the heroic type, the great pain bringers of humanity, those few and or rare human beings who need the very same apology that pain itself needs- and truly, one should not deny it to them. They contribute immensely to the preservation and enhancement of the species, even if it were only by opposing comfortableness and by not concealing how this sort of happiness nauseates them (Gay Science, 253).
To have gifts, like Isadora Duncan, comes with a price, but the price would always be paid by those who really lived. “Is our life really painful and burdensome enough to make it advantageous to exchange it for a Stoic way of life and petrifaction?”(257). These who live through their Will, would most certainly say no. Nietzsche knew this feeling, the urge to live, and he expressed it in his meditation on The Greatest Weight, and Eternal Recurrence. He posed a question to all the world, a challenge- if a demon were to come to in the middle of the night and tell you that you shall live this life over and over again for all infinity, that no part shall change, would you cry in despair or would you leap for joy? “The question in each and everything, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight” (Gay Science, 273). Isadora Duncan and the other creative forces of this time must be the ones to respond with joy, for they could not waste a second of life stifling life. Nietzsche spoke the proclamation of the creative force that would take over in men. The movement of the Lost Generation, of those living in a Post WWI age, was a taking up of Nietzsche’s spirit. Isadora Duncan stands as the greatest manifestation of this spirit, the dancer.
The cry of Isadora Duncan and the many others who have shared the same cry will not be forgotten, they will be remembered in those who share the same spirit, the same virtue of freedom. They are those who live by their virtue of freedom, in order to allow the Will and creativity of man to reign in the world. They suffered and sacrificed to find a way to live and create within the conditions of society at their time, so that someday the Will may not have to sacrifice and suffer because of society, but reign above it, completely free. They are those who do not “perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering”(Gay Science, 255). They may be alone in their message, their art, their need to live, to simply be, but they will always find solidarity with the other individuals who share the same drive, the same going under, in order to create, to live, to breathe. They are the one’s who, in their own way, have preserved the world, and will continue to preserve the world by allowing the human spirit to prevail. They will preserve the world through their continuous creation, a necessity for life to flourish. If the Will is strong it can transcend any structure, any form. Those with a strong Will, like Nietzsche believed, will the way to live by it.
Tragedy may have played a role in Isadora Duncan’s life, but the focus should not be on her limited time here, the facts of her life. Her body, her instance of life, are expressions of her Will, and that can be felt without knowing the historical Isadora Duncan. Her freedom is inspirational without even having to see her dance. She created herself as freedom, and allowed all the future to be less restrained by her freedom. The real tragedy is not the historical facts of her life and death, but her being misunderstood, her life as not being recognized in full freedom. She knew from an early age that she would be misunderstood: “the city proved inhospitable to her ideas” (Kurth, 33), but this did not stop her. She shares this great misunderstanding with individuals like Nietzsche, Picasso, Hemingway, Whitman. Tragedy does not prevail over her or any of them, though. As long as one person is inspired by her freedom, the virtue that she gave her life up for, that freedom will not die. Going under for one’s will to prevail will never be a mistake. It is up to each person to let the freedom of their will reign. It is up to each person to dance their own dance.
I cannot help but long to put my own spirit in this paper. To write about the spirit of other’s seems to diminish my own spirit if I cannot mention mine as well. I am challenged by looking to the past, trying to create a time where the consciousness of man is the same consciousness that I know now. I have to create parallels between Isadora and myself, and these make me realize that we are not so different. I can only abstract a personality from her words and the words of those who knew her, but I have to imagine this personality. I have to imagine her personality as being close to mine, and, in doing this, her life is illuminated, it begins to make sense. I have a Will that is very much my own, but I do, like Isadora, find solidarity with the individuals that express the same emotion. These are musicians and writers, philosophers and dancers, these are people who use life as their creative canvas. Then I realize I face a difficulty like Isadora’s. It is the question of what is most noble in life- Love of another person or Creation? Can a person honestly be true to both? I hope so, and I think so. Freedom may be the virtue to live by, but freedom is not found only in living a fully independent life. It is found in honesty, pure honesty, so that nothing ever has to be concealed. One can remain honest while in a committed union, but then I doubt again. I feel a calling to go under, and to let the part of me which cries inside of me to cry into the world. I feel the urge to do this alone, and I have to, it is my own journey. Then I begin to think that I have not suffered enough, but it comes to me that maybe the true suffering is that I understand the Will, I understand my own Freedom. I am not blindly going through life, waiting to be guided, but I must guide and take responsibility for myself. It is a thought that terrifies at first, but then slowly creates a struggling happiness. I feel the urge to dance always; outdoors, in my room, with others, alone, I long to dance. I do believe that when I think of living this life an innumerable amount of time, I can take joy in Nietzsche’s question of Eternal Recurrence. I have the Will and I have no excuse to not follow in the footsteps of those that felt the procreant urge. I, like they, will protect humanity, will never be bored, and will always make sure that life is moving. I can only hope that there will be others, and more, in the infinite future that feel the Will, and always shine that Will forth. I breathe out the past and breathe in the future. I dance my own dance.
Thought/Coincidence: I keep important conversations. One conversation that took place in March '08 was recently pulled up. It contained ideas related to another paper I was working on. In this conversation, the best friend I was speaking with told me I was like Promethius. Having taken place two years before my knowledge of Isadora Duncan and this paper, I'd like to think that's pretty cool. Not that I want to give credit to myself as being like that, but give credit to another running thought I have- the Eternal Return of the Reincarnated Life. And give credit to my friend for being an ultimate midwife of knowledge and spirit and creative passion in me and, I believe, in others.
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service." -Friedrich Nietzsche
The world will never know, in the full sense, the people of the past, but there are some who leave a legacy. There are some who create a lasting Will that transcends their historical self, and, by doing so, transcends into the present, flows into the future. Isadora Duncan is one of these people. She struggled just as any human does, but her struggle was for her Will. She chose her Will and immortalized herself through this decision. She realized the events of her life were not important, the force of her life was. “Facts were not Isadora’s concern” (Kurth, 6). She stands alone in her field, as a pioneer, the mother of modern dance. She did not create a school of dance, nor did she have any direct followers. She remains as an individual, whose Will stands on it’s own, inspiring those with the same creative spirit. “Isadora is generally considered an isolated pioneer rather than the progenitor of a new dance tradition”(Gardner, 267). The world may never know the person of Isadora Duncan again, but she left the world her Will. “‘She had no laws. She created.’ And inspired” (Kurth, X). She left room for the Will to rise and to create, she marked the world, and further advanced the freedom of the Human Will in the world.
Isadora Duncan faced difficulties. Like every person who is called to speak, express, and live the virtue of creative freedom so desperately, she faced hard decisions and turmoil. She was born “‘under the star of Aphrodite,’ as she told it, the daughter of ‘wind and wave and the winged flight of bird and bee’”(5). Her mother ate “oysters and champagne- the food of Aphrodite”(11) during her pregnancy with Isadora. She claims this is where she first began to dance, in the womb. She had a fiery passion from the start, and Isadora saw flames as the symbol of her creative expression. Her first memory was being tossed from a burning building. She recalls:
‘The gods sell their gifts dearly…For every joy there is a corresponding agony. For what they give of Fame, Wealth, Love, they extract Blood and Tears and grinding Sorrow. I am continually surrounded by flames…Always fire and water and sudden fearful death’ (6).
She knew that she was given a higher gift. She understood freedom, and was driven to use that freedom; the gift that would cause her to sacrifice and suffer.
The flames that Isadora saw surrounding her led her to believe she was a Promethean-like creature. Prometheus in mythology is the Titan who gave the fire from Mount Olympus to the world. She knew “that the characteristics of Prometheus were boldness, freethinking, and dedication to mankind…she would give dance to the people as Prometheus gave fire” (20). Isadora believed that her dancing was not her own invention, it was a rediscovery of the natural style that the Ancient Greeks expressed. “A rediscovery of the classical principles of beauty, motion, and form” (20). Her understanding of Greek culture was not trapped in the facts of history, but in the openness of imagination. She was dedicated in allowing creation and imagination to reign all of her being, giving herself fully to mankind in this way. She had to go under to do this, she had to dance. She had to go under through dance, so that she could have eternal life. “The Dance- it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun”(21). She saw it as the most fundamental form of artistic expression. It was through dance that she could express her creativity. “One explains the dance better by dancing than by publishing commentaries and treatises”(23). She had to dance to bring the fire of her Will to the world.
Her greatest sacrifice was found in her commitment to her art, a commitment that drove her to pioneer for the equality and emancipation of women in the arts. She met great opposition from men; men that were artists and producers, who could not understand her as a serious artist. She encountered a sculptor named Rodin, and Isadora was interested in speaking with him as a fellow artist. “She was struck by the sensual quality of the master’s relationship with his raw materials, his passionate engagement in the process of making art, and his impulse to equate the art object with the female form”(Farfan, 103). Isadora wanted to be seen as another artist, an individual, someone seen beyond her form as female. However, Rodin could not see her as a fellow artist. She danced for him, and began to tell him her theories behind her dance. He would not listen, only gaze, and approach her as a sexual object. “My whole desire was to yield to him my entire being and, indeed, I would have done so if it had not been that my absurd up-bringing caused me to become frightened”(104). Here Isadora allows for a bit of her struggle to be seen. She was so committed to her creative Will that she could not allow herself to play the role as the object of art, only the artist. In choosing her Will, she had to give up many of her own desires; this was her constant struggle and sacrifice.
She was not ashamed of her body and her sex as a female, but she fought against letting that become her identity. She was “determined to reclaim the female body from its objectification” (103). Isadora believed that this was the most fundamental and necessary requirement for the female liberation. “Duncan…was less interested in votes for women than in less directly political modes of social and cultural transformation. Duncan in fact believed that women’s emancipation was not possible unless it began with women’s bodies” (4). Her struggle always misunderstood, Elizabeth Robbins criticized her: “if she’d been a feminist, she’d have been less unhappy. She allowed [men?] to devastate her”(4). It was Isadora’s sacrifice, though. She had accepted her gift from the gods, and knew her life would be marked by sorrow and flame.
Despite men, Isadora remained committed to her emancipation of the female form. She especially sought to do this in ballet where she saw the bodies of women being destroyed by performing unnatural movements and having their feet shoved into boxes so they could dance on their toes. “It is ugly and against nature” (Kurth, 24). She favored the more natural way of dancing. “Having decided she did not like ballet, she then proceeded to examine her own movements to discover exactly where movement originated” (McDonagh, 3). It was finding the root of the most natural that spoke to her. This was evident not only in her movements, but in her dress as well. “Duncan’s challenge to dominant cultural prescriptions for women was wide-ranging and included her insistence on the right of women to dress in unconstraining clothing” (Farfan, 103).
Many of her ideas for dress reform mirrored the ideas of François Delsarte, “whose blueprint for movement and dramatic self-expression was the rage in Isadora’s childhood”(Kurth, 28). He observed people and their basic reactions to things. He believed in the “inner man” and freeing the women’s body from restraining clothing. Though Isadora denies his influence, the similarities of their ideas cannot be denied. Isadora danced barefoot, and in a toga. She was fixated with movement from an early age, after she rejected ballet for its acrobatics. She labeled it “a school of affected grace and toe-walking,” adding “the type which expresses America at its finest could never dance the ballet…an expression of Beauty and Strength such as no civilization has ever known” (23). The role of ballet, too, was never to express the individual on stage. It was to add to the aesthetic of a certain performance, of a certain orchestral piece. Isadora could only see the dancer as the expression of self, and was criticized for trying to instantiate this idea in performances. “Dancers were not suppose to have thoughts” (McDonagh, 4). She envisioned the Greek naturalism, and wanted movements that allowed her spirit to move, to be seen. “My art is an expression of my life. My dancing is of the imagination and spirit, not of the body. When my body moves it is because my spirit moves it”(Kurth, 23). It did not matter how she moved as long as she moved with her Spirit, a Spirit always focused upon it’s freedom. She knew only how to express this free Will through dance. She felt truth as freedom, an emotion that was fulfilled through movement. “‘Art meant Isadora,’ said John Dos Passos. ‘Art was whatever Isadora did’”(X). Though she was to be misunderstood, she never lost her determinism to bring about her natural dance.
Although dancing was how she breathed her Will, her freedom into the world, she would not let her dance define her. She herself said that she did not want to be called or known as a dancer. There was something more to her. Isadora was a creator, an artist, a free will, and she was also a teacher. “‘I am a teacher with a mission’; ‘If I were only a dancer I would not speak’”(Farfan, 105). And speak she did. She spoke out not only against the issues repressing women in culture and art, but she spoke about teaching, religion, philosophy, poetry and music.
She developed with her sister Elizabeth the “Isadora Duncan School of Dance.” The school and the history of it are not important. What role each sister played is not important. What is important is the Will of Isadora manifested in the role of the teacher. She saw children in a new light, and felt the urge to develop what she believed to be the best method for teaching children. Her central mission “was the education of children through the medium of dance”(Kurth, 165). Isadora was so committed to an understanding of self that she believed the best way of teaching children would begin with understanding the self. Her principle was “knowledge of the self would lead children to natural expression…I want a school of life…let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel…let us produce a dancing child”(165). She used images of nature as tools for understanding. Students were taught to envision landscapes and the natural movements of the outside world. Isadora tried to communicate the need for the natural communion with all that was felt. Isadora’s school ultimately failed, leaving her way of dancing without a following. She could only influence future dancers through her belief that dance is self expression, the most basic form of art. She had no theory, no technique, no method except for her passion of sharing the imagination of the creative spirit. “As an example of personal courage and aesthetic adventurousness, Isadora deservedly had an enormous influence. But her technical innovations were neither proficient nor consistent enough to spawn imitation”(Gardner, 267). Again, her Will was not to be understood. She could not communicate her driving force through words. As much as she explained what she was feeling and where it was stemming from, the power of the Will was lost on those who could not connect to it. It was something that could not be forced, but spoke on it’s own.
Isadora’s own education and childhood played a large role in impacting her creative spirit. To reach such a heightened understanding of her Will and freedom, she looked toward her mother, who educated her children to be freethinkers. “Her real education was gained while lying on the rug at her mother’s feet” (Kurth, 18). There she listened to her mother play the piano. Music was what taught Isadora to dance. Her mother was a music teacher, and Isadora learned the value of music from an early age. “She interpreted music even as a small child and showed a precocious self-reliance before her teens” (McDonagh, 3). Beethoven and Wagner, in addition to Nietzsche, were labeled by her as being “the three great precursors of the Dance in our century”(Kurth, 23). The emotion they expressed inspired Isadora to move.
Isadora’s mother taught her children self-reliance and life lived without looking to other’s for meaning. Being an atheist, she directed her children away from religion. Mrs. Duncan would listen to the words of Robert Ingersoll, The Great Agnostic. He summed up Isadora’s philosophy: “Art in its highest forms increases passion, gives tone and color and zest to life…It is careless of conduct and consequence. For a moment, the chain of cause and effect seems broken; the soul is free…Under the influence of art the walls expand, the roof rises, and it becomes a temple” (16-17). Isadora took Ingersoll and her mother’s teaching to express them in her own way, like she did with everything. Isadora believed “The ‘Christian education’…does not know how to teach children Nietzsche’s superb phrase: ‘Be Hard!’ Only from an early age some spirit kept whispering to me, ‘Be Hard’”(15).
It was the idea of self reliance that led her mother to teach her daughters about the dangers men. Her father was a mysterious figure in her life. She barely knew who he was, and, though she longed for a relationship with him, she could not have a one. “The black shadow of this mysterious father of whom no one would speak, and the terrible word divorce was imprinted on the sensitive plate of my mind”(Kurth, 15). Mrs. Duncan urged her daughter’s against marriage: “‘Don’t trust men,’ said Mrs. Duncan. “‘Don’t marry them’”(14). This led Isadora to develop her own distrust of men, which created a struggle between herself and the men she knew. Love confused her, and she could not figure out this confusion that men brought her, forever struggling between being seen as an individual and being seen as an object. She decided on her own that “‘marriage was a pretty low-down proposition,’ resolving then and there ‘to fight against marriage and for the emancipation of women, and for the right of every woman to have a child or children as it pleased her, and to uphold her right and her virtue’”(15).
Her independence from men led her to a life of free love, where she had two children from two different lovers. One of these lovers was a man named Edward Gordon Craig. Craig was a set designer who, like the other men in her life, “attempted to reassign her to a traditional female role in the art-making process and subsume her into his own creative work” (Farfan, 106). Still, he was able to shake the commitment that Isadora made to live without dependence on men. Her affair with Craig “led to an unfamiliar confusion about what it meant to be an artist and a woman” (Kurth, 177). Isadora, in her confusion, became like a jealous child for Craig. He was love in with another woman, but wrote about Isadora in his private journal that he was “keenly attracted to Isadora, who may be a witch or a pretty child and I find it hard to be away from her. She not only attracts me, she revolts me. Love which torments is not love”(181). So overtaken by her confusion with Craig, she stooped to psychological games, acting always like a child. He had consumed her, and drove her away from her call. She let Craig overcome her; she went under for him. She proclaimed “Dancing is not the greatest in life. The greatest thing in life is- LOVE! Is it not true?...Love, it’s written across the sky”(183). The love she thought she knew was not real, and, in the end, she gave up visions of ever entering into a union with a man. She freed herself from Craig, and let her Will overcome her again. “She is not so unnatural as not to dream about family life with Edward Gordon Craig, but she refuses to be beguiled by such dreams, insisting that she is an artist and murmuring to herself immediately after giving birth, ‘I did it! All by myself! I did it!’”(Farfan, 111). This exaltation of independence cannot be without some conflict. In the 1968 biopic Isadora, director Karel Reisz portrays this struggle as the character Isadora says: “I’m a woman and I’m an artist and that’s hard”(111). She was always determined, and the sacrificing of a relationship was an act of going under for her creative spirit of freedom so that it could prevail.
Isadora had two individuals who helped her through her struggle; in these two individuals she was not alone, but found solidarity. They both understood the Will of the individual, and their writings constantly inspired and revived Isadora. Though they were her influences as first, Isadora Duncan should not be counted as separate from them, but as one of their kind, a driving force of Will and Spirit. The first was the person she called her hero, Walt Whitman; the second was the person she called her spiritual mentor, Friedrich Nietzsche. During her confusion with Craig, she struggled with these two thinkers, constantly wanting to dismiss their truth, but never being able to: “Walt made her feel like a tissue-paper fool. Not long after, she was reading Nietzsche on the train: ‘I feel such extraordinary convolutions going on…the changes come so quick & unexpected that I feel a bit rattled. Battled-rather say’”(Kurth, 177). Her time with Craig may have caused her to forget her commitment to her Will for a period of time, but it only shows that she was a human, struggling in exchange for her gift. The strength of both Whitman and Nietzsche, though temporarily misunderstood, revived her to reassure the commitment she made to the creative spirit.
She discovered Walt Whitman at a young age, and became inspired by his famous poem “Song of Myself”, published in 1855. He was committed to his own transcendent Will, expressing it through raw poetry that breathed life. Isadora shared Whitman’s “creative pressure welling from profound depths, and a boundless acceptance which expressed itself in an urgent inclusiveness rather than in the artful limits of deliberate design” (Whitman, xxvii). It was this “radical utterance out of the abysms of the Soul”(xxvii) that connected the two. Whitman described his task in writing “Song of Myself” as “to improve and transform life, to discern and set forth its miraculousness, and to sing the transcendence of human love, envisioned as divine”(xxxi). Though this may not have been the whole of Isadora’s reason for artistic creation, they both ultimately created as a “celebration of the individual…and of spiritual possibility”(xxxi).
“Song of Myself” became Isadora’s guide, her own spiritual text. She describes the experience of reading it as her “great spiritual realization of life from the lines of Walt Whitman”(Kurth, 7). In “Song of Myself”, Whitman channels his own will, and the truth of all of the world. His lines are free, and contain an open and natural approach to life. He wrote what he was feeling, what his insight into truth was. Certainly, to read “Song of Myself” and feel it, creates a spiritual experience of being connected to the speaker, to Walt Whitman. There is a force to feel, turning the immortalized words of Walt Whitman into the cry of man then, man now, and man forever. The details of the historical Whitman are unimportant; it’s Whitman’s Creative Spirit that allows for the future to feel him alive and connected to the present. He writes in verse 6 of “Song of Myself”:
“What do you think has become of the young and old men?/And what do you think has become of the women and children? /They are alive and well somewhere, /The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, /And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, /And ceas'd the moment life appear'd/ All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, /And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier”(Whitman, 31).
Isadora’s love of Whitman was the final step to developing her “so-called Greek dance with which I have flooded the world” (Kurth, 7). The Greece that Isadora loved “was the Greece of the Romantics…In Emerson’s words, ‘Our love of the antique is not the love of the old, but love of the natural’”(21).
Whitman wrote also about women and men, giving them equality. He found truth in the individuality of both men and women. Verse 21 states: “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man/ And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man/ And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men” (Whitman, 43). Whitman was her hero, he had “called for ‘the entire redemption of woman out of the incredible holds and webs of silliness, millinery, and every kind of dyspeptic depletion” (Kurth, 32). It is the freedom and liberation of life breathed through Whitman that attracted and kept the young Isadora Duncan. It is his “Urge and urge and urge,/Always the procreant urge of the world”(Whitman, 27) she most profoundly felt.
Both Whitman and Duncan believed that what they were doing was not a solo undertaking. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” indicates that he understood himself as filled with many things: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes)”(Whitman, 77). Further, Whitman wanted his poetry to be seen as an “ensemble-like a great city to modern civilization & a whole combined clustering paradoxical identity a man, a woman”(xxvii). Likewise, Isadora Duncan “claimed that she had ‘never once danced a solo’ and thought of her dance ‘as a chorus or community expression’”(Farfan, 114). Though Isadora and Whitman are clearly connected in spirit, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who struck Isadora in another way; Whitman felt the Will, but Nietzsche understood it in a way that allowed him to become a prophet.
Friedrich Nietzsche has been called the Philosopher of Dance. This title is not to describe his ideas about dance, but to explain the greatest manifestation of his philosophy- the act of dancing. He was born only a few decades before Isadora Duncan, and she was twenty three years old when he died in 1900. She saw him as the one who had committed her spirit to philosophy.
Nietzsche had developed a philosophy in the 19th century that defied and challenged the history of Western Philosophy that came before him. He could not feel it illuminating the human experience, for it fit into systems aimed at creating an ordered whole. For this reason, Nietzsche historically found problem with the religious. He was famous for proclaiming that “God is Dead!” For this, he was greatly misunderstood and rejected. For him, religion (Christianity in particular) was not about truth or love or life, but about ordered systems of ethics, and means for people to escape their selves. The religious looked outside of their selves to find the meaning and the source of their life. They gave up life as a preparation for death, and never realized the Will of their own. Nietzsche stresses this in his philosophical text “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, a text that Isadora found to be inspired. It is in this text that Nietzsche introduces his idea of the Übermensch. He describes the Übermensch as the one who has overcome man: “Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” (Thus Spoke, 41). Nietzsche saw man as being between animal and the Übermensch. Every creature is called to create something more, and man is called to create the Übermensch. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra acts as the prophet, coming down to proclaim this overcoming and undergoing of man. He is fearful that men will not overcome themselves, but progress back to the animals, stay as men, and not create anything more. It is ultimately the Will that Nietzsche is trying to communicate through the words of Zarathustra. The Übermensch will be ruled by his own Will, overcoming him as man, and allowing him to “live longest” (46). The Will is to overcome man, and allow him to be a creative force of life. Men guide their lives by reason and order, but, if they are to overcome, they will be guided by Will, the passionate spirit of life.
Isadora Duncan is one of those who lived her life as a going under. She read the words of Nietzsche, but he did not create her Will. She had the Will and spirit before. Nietzsche’s words motivated her; he was a source of communion, someone else who lived a going under. Like the true individual going under to overcome man, she let her Will rule her life. She found the force of her movement and existence, and let it speak for her. Zarathustra speaks, “I love those who do not first seek beyond the stars for reasons to go down and to be sacrifices: but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may one day belong to the Superman” (44). Isadora is definitely one who has sacrificed to the earth, so that the Will can flourish. Isadora lived these words of Nietzsche: “I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you”(46). She channeled her chaos, and gave birth to her virtue of freedom. Nietzsche said that he would “only believe in a God who danced.” Here is his God. The one who has a will to dance, to feel spirit and emotion as truth, and expresses it the most natural way how- through the body.
Nietzsche, like Isadora, was a lover of the Greek culture. They both understood the Beauty that the Greeks held. He, in particular, developed a love of Epicurus. Epicurus was simple, who lived life out through the things which he enjoyed. Nietzsche meditates on him: “Such happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually. It is the happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm, and now they can never weary of the surface and of the many hues of this tender, shuddering skin of the sea”(Gay Science, 110). Isadora could be such an image as well. In one of her letters to Craig she described her happiness:
To wrench oneself from Time &[sic] place and self & enter where time & place & self do not exist- that is a great pain- but then also a great reward. Is anything comparable to the feeling of having come in contact with that eternal idea of Beauty- a wrench, an awful suffering, a feeling of battering for ages against an impassable barrier, & then suddenly & sharply a glow, a light, a connection with the idea like entering into a God- a happiness indescribable, triumphant (Kurth, 212).
This happiness was for those who felt the force of life so great, so much that it pained them, that when they saw Beauty they could not turn their eyes away. It was such happiness to be so fully alive in front of such great Beauty. Isadora may have expressed the feeling in her own words, but she gave this Beauty to others through her dance. Craig writes about Isadora:
She danced more perfectly than ever and with more care more freedom more love- there they sat still and stupid. How strange a sight. An ugly little theatre full of ugly and foolish people and on the darkened stage a figure growing at each movement more perfect- lavishing beauty on each side of her (182).
Not only was Isadora the receiver of such great Beauty from her constant suffering, but she was the source of great Beauty as well. It was a struggle to feel life so fully, but it could only be seen as Beautiful.
Nietzsche suffered in trying to communicate the Beauty of life. He wanted every person to be expressions of it, and became very critical when the majority did not understand. He was highly critical of women, and posed a challenge to the female. For Nietzsche, women were weak; to be female or feminine was to be insincere, dependent, and pathetic. Femininity was a negative thing, but this did not mean that all women were to be seen this way. Nietzsche had respect for the individual, the one who was “hard.” He found very few women to be this way, and he personally suffered at the hand of women with whom he had relationships. Duncan, though being a female by form, also found contempt for those women who prolonged the entrapment of the female form. That was her ultimate goal, emancipating women, and felt Nietzsche’s frustration that her Will could not overcome all. The body changes, but the Will does not. It always transcends, it is always an expression of freedom. Duncan strived, like Nietzsche, to communicate that truth to the world.
As Nietzsche spoke through Zarathustra’s mouth: “I love him who keeps back no drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be the spirit of his virtue entirely: thus he steps as spirit over the bridge; I love him whose soul is overfull, so that he forgets himself and all things are in him: thus all things become his downfall; I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the bowels of his heart, but his heart drives him to his downfall” (Thus Spoke, 45). Man will be guided by his Will, allowed to determine how to channel it through his mind, and with his heart, he lets the Will overtake him. This downfall is what allows the spirit, the Will to be. The death of the physical body, of man, is the ultimate releasing of the Will into the world. Isadora Duncan is one who gave her Will up completely to her virtue, freedom. She became the virtue of freedom, so that it could exist at its fullest in the world. This is the ultimate sacrifice of the artist, of the free person: allowing their virtue, freedom, to grow in the world, preparing for the day when the Übermensch will come, the day when the Will and the virtue of freedom have taken over man, and man is freed in it.
Isadora’s own death may be seen as tragic, but it is just a mere aspect of the downfall she had to suffer to allow for the Will to reign free. Her death came at the age of fifty, when she was driving her two children, and the scarf that she wore as a symbol of her freedom became trapped and strangled her; Isadora and her two children were killed. There has been great speculation about her death, and a huge emphasis upon marking her life as tragic. This attention to her death and tragedy diminishes the actual purpose of her true suffering; it does a great injustice to the fact that it is her Will that has marked her life, not her death. Her Will is what has allowed for her life to remain in this world, influencing others, regardless if they ever know the details and facts about her life and death. Her death only finds importance as an illustration of her going under, her sacrificing for her freedom.
For those that knew Isadora Duncan, her death was fitting. Penny Farfan, in her book Women, Modernism, and Performance, writes a chapter about Isadora titled “Feminism, tragedy, and the fate of Isadora Duncan”. This chapter contains multiple interpretations of Duncan’s death from both those who knew her and those who analyzed her as a tragic figure. Max Eastman recalls about the scarf that strangled her:
It had caught up and wound up in a wheel of the speeding car, and destroyed her like a living thing. And how living a thing it was! How she breathed into that frail instrument the bounding pulse of her passion for beauty and freedom! Everyone groped for the symbolism in its turning upon her at the last, but to me it was painfully clear (Farfan, 109).
Eastman is ultimately not talking about her scarf, but her body and life. He emphasizes the aspect of Isadora that was a living thing. She had breathed into her own body, her own life (“that frail instrument”) her Will, her passion, her need for freedom. To speak like this is to admit that Isadora was ultimately more than her life. Saying that she breathed into her life suggests that she was beyond her own life. Her passion that was breathed into her life was the fundamental part of her Will, and this is what has transcended her death, pushing her forever into the future as such passion.
Another angle to her death is the idea of Greek tragedy. It is appropriate to draw this parallel, for Isadora believed in her rediscovery of Greek ideals. Some draw the conclusion that her death was ultimately in her from the start. She lived tragically, and died tragically. The Ancient world tells us that the women of Greek tragedy primarily committed suicide, and usually “in regions of the throat” (109). This is to illustrate the silencing of women. Duncan’s death was not a suicide, but it could be argued that it was merely not an intentional suicide, though still a suicide in some way. To understand this, one should look at “a principle outside the universe of tragedy…move toward the gynecological thinking of the Greeks, where woman is caught between two mouths, between two necks, where vagaries of the womb suddenly choke the voice in a woman’s throat” (109). Duncan’s own two distinct voices and necks were not found in her children, but in her most faithful allowance of her Creative Will to speak, not her reason. Her physical existence was the womb in which her Will and Creative Freedom lived and reigned over the order of reason. Isadora gave birth to it, and it overcame her. She went under for her Will, and it transcended the physical existence of Isadora. The mouth and neck of her Will had to end the finite life of Isadora, so that it could exist on its own. Her Will felt the urgency of life at all times, causing her to live in such a tragic way. Her death had to come by her own Will. Adding more understanding to her physical death, is the death of her two children. These children, if they lived, would have allowed Isadora to continue on in a physical legacy through her children. They could not be creators in a legacy for Isadora; they could not allow her to exist in a physical manner at all. Her Will had to stand alone, being the part of her strong enough to transcend into the future. She went under for the virtue of freedom, and it overcame her. If to live by one’s Will, one’s spirit, is Truth, then it would stand that she could forever live as the creative force, existing in her commitment to the Earth and as an act of inspiring freedom. Isadora believed that The Dance, the movement of her Will, was the movement of all those who died in order to live again. She was freed from her physical form, and had longer lasting life in her Will. Isadora brought her fire to the world, so that it may burn eternal.
Not every person who enters into this world understands the need to live, the procreant urge. They are lost in the order and structure of the world. The ones, however, who do understand their Will may not live perfect lives, may suffer completely throughout their lives, but they have lived in the fullest. They have allowed their Will to guide their reason, and they have created and put forth their spirit into the world. It is for these people that humanity continues. It is for the future that they give their selves over to their Will to transcend, and for their present lives that they allow their Will to dominate. Nietzsche says:
Indeed, pain itself gives them their greatest moments. This is the heroic type, the great pain bringers of humanity, those few and or rare human beings who need the very same apology that pain itself needs- and truly, one should not deny it to them. They contribute immensely to the preservation and enhancement of the species, even if it were only by opposing comfortableness and by not concealing how this sort of happiness nauseates them (Gay Science, 253).
To have gifts, like Isadora Duncan, comes with a price, but the price would always be paid by those who really lived. “Is our life really painful and burdensome enough to make it advantageous to exchange it for a Stoic way of life and petrifaction?”(257). These who live through their Will, would most certainly say no. Nietzsche knew this feeling, the urge to live, and he expressed it in his meditation on The Greatest Weight, and Eternal Recurrence. He posed a question to all the world, a challenge- if a demon were to come to in the middle of the night and tell you that you shall live this life over and over again for all infinity, that no part shall change, would you cry in despair or would you leap for joy? “The question in each and everything, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight” (Gay Science, 273). Isadora Duncan and the other creative forces of this time must be the ones to respond with joy, for they could not waste a second of life stifling life. Nietzsche spoke the proclamation of the creative force that would take over in men. The movement of the Lost Generation, of those living in a Post WWI age, was a taking up of Nietzsche’s spirit. Isadora Duncan stands as the greatest manifestation of this spirit, the dancer.
The cry of Isadora Duncan and the many others who have shared the same cry will not be forgotten, they will be remembered in those who share the same spirit, the same virtue of freedom. They are those who live by their virtue of freedom, in order to allow the Will and creativity of man to reign in the world. They suffered and sacrificed to find a way to live and create within the conditions of society at their time, so that someday the Will may not have to sacrifice and suffer because of society, but reign above it, completely free. They are those who do not “perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering”(Gay Science, 255). They may be alone in their message, their art, their need to live, to simply be, but they will always find solidarity with the other individuals who share the same drive, the same going under, in order to create, to live, to breathe. They are the one’s who, in their own way, have preserved the world, and will continue to preserve the world by allowing the human spirit to prevail. They will preserve the world through their continuous creation, a necessity for life to flourish. If the Will is strong it can transcend any structure, any form. Those with a strong Will, like Nietzsche believed, will the way to live by it.
Tragedy may have played a role in Isadora Duncan’s life, but the focus should not be on her limited time here, the facts of her life. Her body, her instance of life, are expressions of her Will, and that can be felt without knowing the historical Isadora Duncan. Her freedom is inspirational without even having to see her dance. She created herself as freedom, and allowed all the future to be less restrained by her freedom. The real tragedy is not the historical facts of her life and death, but her being misunderstood, her life as not being recognized in full freedom. She knew from an early age that she would be misunderstood: “the city proved inhospitable to her ideas” (Kurth, 33), but this did not stop her. She shares this great misunderstanding with individuals like Nietzsche, Picasso, Hemingway, Whitman. Tragedy does not prevail over her or any of them, though. As long as one person is inspired by her freedom, the virtue that she gave her life up for, that freedom will not die. Going under for one’s will to prevail will never be a mistake. It is up to each person to let the freedom of their will reign. It is up to each person to dance their own dance.
I cannot help but long to put my own spirit in this paper. To write about the spirit of other’s seems to diminish my own spirit if I cannot mention mine as well. I am challenged by looking to the past, trying to create a time where the consciousness of man is the same consciousness that I know now. I have to create parallels between Isadora and myself, and these make me realize that we are not so different. I can only abstract a personality from her words and the words of those who knew her, but I have to imagine this personality. I have to imagine her personality as being close to mine, and, in doing this, her life is illuminated, it begins to make sense. I have a Will that is very much my own, but I do, like Isadora, find solidarity with the individuals that express the same emotion. These are musicians and writers, philosophers and dancers, these are people who use life as their creative canvas. Then I realize I face a difficulty like Isadora’s. It is the question of what is most noble in life- Love of another person or Creation? Can a person honestly be true to both? I hope so, and I think so. Freedom may be the virtue to live by, but freedom is not found only in living a fully independent life. It is found in honesty, pure honesty, so that nothing ever has to be concealed. One can remain honest while in a committed union, but then I doubt again. I feel a calling to go under, and to let the part of me which cries inside of me to cry into the world. I feel the urge to do this alone, and I have to, it is my own journey. Then I begin to think that I have not suffered enough, but it comes to me that maybe the true suffering is that I understand the Will, I understand my own Freedom. I am not blindly going through life, waiting to be guided, but I must guide and take responsibility for myself. It is a thought that terrifies at first, but then slowly creates a struggling happiness. I feel the urge to dance always; outdoors, in my room, with others, alone, I long to dance. I do believe that when I think of living this life an innumerable amount of time, I can take joy in Nietzsche’s question of Eternal Recurrence. I have the Will and I have no excuse to not follow in the footsteps of those that felt the procreant urge. I, like they, will protect humanity, will never be bored, and will always make sure that life is moving. I can only hope that there will be others, and more, in the infinite future that feel the Will, and always shine that Will forth. I breathe out the past and breathe in the future. I dance my own dance.
Thought/Coincidence: I keep important conversations. One conversation that took place in March '08 was recently pulled up. It contained ideas related to another paper I was working on. In this conversation, the best friend I was speaking with told me I was like Promethius. Having taken place two years before my knowledge of Isadora Duncan and this paper, I'd like to think that's pretty cool. Not that I want to give credit to myself as being like that, but give credit to another running thought I have- the Eternal Return of the Reincarnated Life. And give credit to my friend for being an ultimate midwife of knowledge and spirit and creative passion in me and, I believe, in others.