Beyond the Moulin Rouge - (Peculiar Bodies) by Will Visconti (Paperback)

About the Book

"Beyond the Moulin Rouge: The Life and Legacy of La Goulue is the first biography of La Goulue in English debunking the myths about the performer La Goulue, Louise Weber. Using overlooked archival sources, including Weber's own diaries, this book considers why Weber made the choices that she did and how she challenged contemporary thinking about work, class, gender, and sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"--

Book Synopsis

Best known by her stage name, La Goulue (the Glutton), Louise Weber was one of the biggest stars of fin de siècle Paris, renowned as a cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge. The subject of numerous paintings and photographs, she became an iconic figure of modern art. Her life, however, has consistently been misrepresented and reduced to a footnote in the stories of men such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Where most accounts dismiss her rise and fall as brief and rapid, the truth is that her career as a performer spanned five decades, during which La Goulue constantly reinvented herself--as a dancer, animal tamer, sideshow performer, and muse of photographers, painters, sculptors, and filmmakers.

With Beyond the Moulin Rouge, the first substantive English-language study of La Goulue's career and posthumous influence, Will Visconti corrects persistent myths. Despite a tumultuous personal life, La Goulue overcame loss, abusive relationships, and poverty to become the very embodiment of nineteenth-century Paris, fêted by royalty and followed as closely as any politician or monarch.

Visconti draws on previously overlooked materials, including medical records, media reports across Europe and the United States, and surviving pages from Louise Weber's diary, to trace the life and impact of a woman whose cultural significance has been ignored in favor of the men around her, and who spent her life upending assumptions about gender, morality, and domesticity in France during the fin de siècle and early twentieth century.

Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories

Review Quotes

Will Visconti presents new facts about the life of Louise Weber, searches for the truth behind the myths, and locates her as a woman taking charge of her own image and career, all of which is welcome in a broadly feminist context that pays attention to women's overlooked contributions to the arts and entertainment.

--Melanie C. Hawthorne, Texas A&M University, author of Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality: The Transnational Lives of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney

About the Author

Will Visconti teaches Art History at the University of Sydney and the Workers' Educational Association, NSW. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.