| Abstract: | Dance historians frequently cite the spectacular display of creaturely flight in the 1832 production of La Sylphide as one of the hallmarks of ballet Romanticism. Drawing evidence from archival sources, I argue that the ballet's staged flight of monsters—sylphs and witches—vivified a preoccupation with feminine transgression during the period known as the July Monarchy. Interpreting the witch/sylphide dyad as a response to gendered French Revolutionary discourses in politics, philosophy, literature, and medicine circulating between 1794 and 1835, I show how alterity in La Sylphide targeted the mobility of women in the public sphere as contentious and undesirable. |
