England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [82]
Male spectators wished that Emma would strike erotic poses. A Parisian aristocrat, the Comte d'Espinchal, declared that she should forget dreary Minerva and dance about as lovely Hebe, Venus, and the Graces, then recline in a sumptuous boudoir and pretend to be "Cleopatra ardently greeting Mark Antony."6
Since Emma performed from her early twenties until her late forties, the Attitudes were constantly changing. Her performances never fell out of favor because she kept up with the latest fashions, styles, and issues, incorporated new references, and altered her props and costumes. As she became more experienced, she gave roles to guests and servants, retained hairdressers to vary her look, and added songs. She tried hard to use her face to show the change of mood. Her audience were habituated to seeing acting at a distance onstage, in which loud noise and exaggerated movement often took the place of communication, and they found her ability to show different emotions through facial expression truly startling.
Emma tailored her Attitudes to her audiences. To spectators in Naples, fresh from art history courses and tours of Pompeii, Emma showed classical postures. In England, she aimed for a populist audience by pretending to be a Neapolitan peasant woman, posing as a captive in a Turkish harem, or, capitalizing on her fame as a model, imitating famous statues and paintings. She also chose her Attitudes to promote her ambitions. As a mistress and then newly married, she performed a Magdalen, the woman penitent for her early life. After 1791, when she was advocating Queen Maria Carolina's desire to defend Naples against the French, she imitated figures from classical history who resisted tyranny and invasion. When she returned to England, she emphasized her pregnancy by performing postures of a mother and showed herself as Cleopatra, matching the media's representation of her as the sexy, powerful, exotic queen.
In 1794, the German painter Frederick Rehberg drew twelve of her poses, including a sibyl, Mary Magdalen, and Cleopatra. There was such demand for prints that his drawings were published as a book and distributed across Europe. Ladies in their salons, courtesans, and dancers had poses to copy and guidance on dress and they all tried to imitate Emma's performances. Soon guests were balancing on chairs to see the great beauty of Napoleonic France and intimate of the Empress Josephine, Juliette Re-camier, performing similar poses in her Paris salon. Her elderly banker husband trotted around placing napkins under their feet to protect the upholstery. Increasingly, women began to adopt Grecian dress in imitation of Emma's fashions in Rehberg's pictures and abandon their hobbling high-heeled, point-toed shoes for her signature flat pumps. The Attitudes were equally influential on styles of dance. As ballet in the eighteenth century was formal and stilted and the dancers paused frequently between positions, Emma's plasticity and rapid movement were revolutionary. When Isadora Duncan reworked her techniques a century later, performing sensual, fluid dances in classical garb, she set Victorian London on fire.
Incorporated into books, pictures, cartoons, and caricatures, the performances inspired artists and writers. Corinne by Madame de Stael, Europe's most influential writer during the Napoleonic Wars, features a tall, slightly plump Englishwoman living in Italy who has become the most famous woman in England through reciting poetry and performing her Attitudes. Wearing a white dress and a turban, like Emma, she performs the sufferings of a sibyl. Her performances entrance the English sailor and great leader Lord Nelvil (a name too reminiscent of Nelson to be coincidental). Corinne's performances underline her belief that Italy should resist Napoleon's armies. By the 1790s, Emma too performed Attitudes that extolled the virtues of