This is a study of Victorian dance, written in a lively style that would seem to mirror its main theme of excitement, except Engelhardt's topic is “excitement” in quotes. Dancing Out of Line explains how that emotion became decisively linked to dance rituals in the Victorian era and emphatically gendered as feminine. Molly Engelhardt's argument and insights cut across various scholarly disciplines from dance history, medicine as literature, cultural studies, history of the novel, as well as the growing field of affect studies.

Engelhardt begins her narrative in the eighteenth century, with the growing controversy over the male ballet dancer. The disagreement arose over whether male performers lost their masculinity when subjected to the public gaze; this debate concerning dance, gender, and morality crossed over into a dispute regarding the professional dance master. Dance instructors claimed to provide a unique service for aristocratic families, in that dance lessons also imparted the manners and deportment necessary for entrée into polite society. Condemned in the public sphere as cynical opportunists, dance masters retaliated by taking up the pen. They sought to legitimate their profession by aligning their work more closely with empirical philosophy, reiterating John Locke's claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) that dance lessons trained children in the art of “manly” thinking.

In Engelhardt's view, this controversy over manners, morality, and gender provides a crucial context for understanding the novels of Jane Austen. Not surprisingly, Austen takes the middle ground in the dispute. Whereas Mary Wollstonecraft advocated that women cultivate reason for their own self-improvement and eventually for the purpose of social transformation, Austen heroines model a more pragmatic strategy for disenfranchised women. They learn the importance of close reading their own emotions as well as become industrious information gatherers in regard to prospective suitors. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Engelhardt argues, Austen not only responds to debates of the moment but anticipates an emergent Victorian structure of feeling with her portrait of Darcy: the “new man” whose refusal to take part in the codified dance rituals at Meryton suggest his liberation from dominant notions of masculinity characteristic of an earlier era.

From here, Engelhardt proceeds to situate the Victorian ballroom within a broader history. The ballroom was a setting where wealthy daughters “came out” into society as available marriage partners. Engelhardt argues that the popular culture of dance effected a major formal change in the Victorian novel. Unlike Austen's fiction, where the marriage plot becomes the central means to achieve narrative closure, Victorian novelists will tend to expand around the middle, lingering on courtship rituals in which the ballroom plays an essential part. Engelhardt provides a vivid account of the exorbitant demands placed on young women by the ritual “coming out”: the complex protocols of the dance card, the regimented carriage rides, and the precisely timed meetings with prospective suitors—all of which suggest the crucial role of dance in facilitating a more expansive social reproduction. Brief but compelling readings of fiction by Anthony Trollope and “Silver Fork” writer Catherine Gore illustrate the function of the ballroom trope in producing a new affective link between writer and reader.

Chapter 3 is perhaps Englehardt's principal intervention in nineteenth-century dance history. Against a scholarly consensus that holds the Victorian ballet dancer signified as unbridled female sexuality, one both attractive and Other within the culture, Englehardt argues that the mid-Victorian diva chiefly represented an emerging professionalism. The popular image of the hypersexualized dancer was a late Victorian notion, coinciding with a period of artistic decline for ballet in Britain. In contrast, the mid-Victorian dancer had new and growing access to middle-class households, teaching children the steps of the exotic “folk” dances that had become bourgeois favorites: the polka, mazurka, and the fast waltz.

It was in the context of the new professional ballet dancer that the fairy-like figure of the sylph emerged as the key figure of popular ballet, most notably in Giselle (1841). To the Victorians, these imaginary creatures recalled a rural past increasingly lost in an industrial world. At the same time, the sylph as ballet diva was a high-tech spectacle, requiring state-of-the-art lighting, costuming, and set design in order to be staged. Most important, the sylph encapsulated the new ambiguous power of the woman dancer. The ethereal, mobile sylph stirred male desires but remained outside male control. Engelhardt argues that the fantasy figure on stage inspired Victorian novelists to imagine a new feminine type that was within the household without being defined or contained by it. Charles Dickens was alarmed that professional dance provided women with a means to advance up the social ladder by virtue of their own training and skilled labor. Yet, as Engelhardt observes, even he would imaginatively link his paragon of domestic femininity, Amy Dorritt, with the ballet dancer. For Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Engelhardt notes, the ambivalent power of the ballet diva sparked the creation of new, ambiguous female protagonists in their fiction. Charlotte Brontë's Ginevra Fanshawe (Villette, 1853) and George Eliot's Gwendolyn Harleth (Daniel Deronda, 1876) share with the sylph a capacity to escape categories, neither social outlaws nor Angels in the House.

Chapter 4 is the most morbidly interesting chapter of the book. It focuses on the growing association between dance and disease for Londoners of the mid-Victorian era, a time of widespread flu and cholera epidemics. An original genre of writing emerged in response to the moment, which blurred the lines between medicine, history, and dance manuals. Focusing on scientific treatments of popular disease written for a broad audience, such as J. F. C. Hecker's The Epidemics of the Middle Ages (1832), Engelhardt claims that a new consensus about dance and the body emerged. Dancing posed no peril in itself: it was the context of dance, specifically the relation between bodies and socially constructed space, which posed the danger. Engelhardt claims that mid-Victorian writing on dance and illness comprises a subterranean current of materialist thought in mainstream Victorian culture.

For me, Engelhardt's last chapter contains her deepest reflections on the relation between dance as feminine excitement and authorship. The chapter provides convincing close readings of Thomas Hardy (focusing on the writer's interest in dance as a way of imagining historical continuity) and George Eliot (where, like Dickens, the dance trope destabilizes the author's broader project, in this case, literary realism). The tour de force is Engelhardt's analysis of Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). From a reading of Woolf's diaries and her novel, Engelhardt weaves a compelling argument about the role of dance and excitement in constructing a specifically modernist aesthetic. As Engelhardt illustrates, the affect of excitement linked to the dance could result from the recollection of being either unwilling or incapable of joining others in this social ritual. Such was the case for both Eliot and Woolf. Engelhardt argues that the dance was linked both to excitement and traumatic memories for Woolf; writing about the dance provided Woolf with a way to engage the past without being dominated by it. In Woolf's case, this mostly meant fending off painful memories—of incestuous desire, Lost Mothers, and Oppressive Fathers—and thus achieving the balance between individual talent and tradition that comprised the modernist ideal.

Dancing Out of Line makes the compelling case that understanding the social ritual of Victorian dance is a necessary prerequisite for grasping the Victorian construct of femininity. It is an outstanding work of feminist cultural studies and essential reading for any scholar of nineteenth-century social history.