ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 165

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN indispensable foreplay to the sexual acts that follow every rehearsal and performance.82 The effect of buttocks on the Englishman’s libido is legendary, and fulsomely justified in Victorian erotica which links the tights fetish with birching of ‘the biggest, the most beautiful, the most richly furnished, and the most silkily smooth, and satin-like posterior’ of Mariska the ballet girl.83 The linking of corporal punishment and the ballet may be due to the regimentation of the training and an association between dancing and other postural ‘corrections’ and controls agonizingly beloved by fetishists It is probably not a sublimated punishment of ballerinas as deviant women, for in one episode in My Secret Life the rod is wielded by a woman dressed up as a dancer Stephen Marcus identifies the confusion of sexual identities as a central theme in flagellant literature, and the ballet provides an excellent pretext for adventures Infantilization, gender confusion through dress, exposure, role play, and bisexuality characterize flagellant literature, but also impinge on the burlesque plot, the casting of some ballets, and music hall lyrics In flagellant erotica, ‘the principal character in such scenes seems to be rehearsing some twisted recollection from early childhood’,84 which is not unlike the pretence of the late Victorian up-to-date pantomime plot, though a much sadder scenario in a dark nursery of topsyturvydom Neutralization through repetition may have worked for some spectators, but for fetishists (and anyone aware of the fetishistic discourse) theatrical costume remained charged with powerful sexual meanings Access to these meanings and to the literature articulating them was sufficiently controlled that the costumes could be displayed in forums as conservative and accessible to women as the Illustrated London News, and in entertainments as professedly family-oriented as pantomime Whether the encodings were recognized as erotic or simply suspected of inconsistency with the propriety of normal society, the implications for the private reputation of female performers are clear 136