Telling Bodies: Reading, Dancing, and the Nineteenth-Century English Novel is a full-length book project that contrasts the embodied language of fictional characters--in novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot--with the performance language of Romantic ballerinas in order to investigate how bodies conveyed meaning through movement in nineteenth-century Britain. Actual ballet bodies and characters' bodies show us the spectrum of nineteenth-century physical narratives: I argue that reading across the wordless stories performed by bodies and the bodies created through words in narratives offers a new way of filling in the spaces between language and gesture. Reading fiction and ballet, two art forms both rich in embodied language, against each other, I discover how the nineteenth century brought movement and narrative together in provocative ways. Dance's Romantic period provides the moment when ballet successfully and inextricably weaves narrative into movement for the first time, while concurrently, in Romantic and Victorian novels, physical gesture becomes an integral part of fictional characters' mutual interpretation. The fictional bodies of these characters--bodies that exist only as text--form a provocative counterpoint to the historic figures of Romantic ballerinas, women who were famous precisely because they had real and public bodies, but whose bodies performed without using any words.
In order to access these nineteenth-century moving bodies, which make and are made by narratives, this project considers several types of physical articulation: the communication of characters through dance in Austen's texts, the "realization" of physicalities in Romantic ballet narratives, the internalization of Romantic ballet in Brontë's work, and the revelation of (unconscious) emotions through artistic poses in Eliot's novels. I conclude the project with an examination of how narrative and ballet are distinguished from another in Michel Fokine's Les Sylphides, investigating how it is possible for ballet movements, newly removed from narratives, to convey meaning in abstract choreography.