Seeking “a sort of clairvoyant material plane”: Spirituality and the Moving Body

Abstract

In Kay Boyle’s 1934 novel, My Next Bride, her young, penniless American protagonist, Victoria, goes to work for a Paris commune led by a shady but charismatic dancer, Sorrel. As Victoria enters the “colony,” she finds a mad performance in progress—”an endless weave of movement, a turning and leaping of many bodies”—led by the Christlike Sorrel, dressed in a robe and sandals and sporting long white tresses (39, 36). This is not simply a dance class, not merely a portrayal of a “back-to-nature” leftist commune, for Boyle saturates her descriptions of the man and the scene with religious language. Sorrel wears

an exaltation which gave him the look of a divine. He might have been a preacher exhorting his people… and so might this place have been the temple to which he drew them, wilfully [sic] blind to their shortcomings, wilfully [sic] deaf to what they spoke in sin…. [T]hey cast about behind in chaos for the grace and fervour to subdue their unexpected limbs. (40–41)