Isadora Duncan

Isadora Duncan is presented as a performer who makes beauty an offering to an audience, and as a revealing case in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of narcissism. Her account of the dancer’s loveliness after a performance gives that self-display a generous purpose: beauty is meant to be enjoyed, and an exhausted man is invited to find comfort and forgetfulness in her arms. Yet Beauvoir reads Duncan’s dependence on admiration as a vulnerability as much as a triumph. The same performance that elevates the self before spectators can estrange a person from reciprocal relationships, while the public image itself depends on money and on the men whose attention helps sustain it.

Performance as an Offering

Duncan describes herself after performing in a tunic, her hair crowned with roses, as so lovely that others should be allowed to enjoy her. She imagines the man who has labored all day with his brain being received into beautiful arms, where he may be comforted and briefly forget his pain. The scene makes display more than vanity: her beauty is cast as a gift, and the performer as the one who offers it. But the gift also organizes the encounter around Duncan’s visible image and the audience’s response. The spectator receives comfort, while the performer’s loveliness becomes the center of the scene.

That double function helps explain why Beauvoir places Duncan among women whose self-image is affirmed through the admiring gaze. An audience does not simply witness the narcissist’s glory; its admiration helps produce and confirm it. The performer’s self-presentation can therefore appear generous while remaining bound to the need to be seen. Duncan’s stage image—tunic, roses, arms opened to another—joins an invitation to the spectator with a continuing assertion of the self as an object of beauty.

Grief, Gesture, and the Limits of Self-Display

Beauvoir distinguishes the theatrical character of Duncan’s public gesture from the reality of her loss. She says Duncan undoubtedly shed real tears when her children died, but interprets the casting of their ashes into the sea, performed with a grand gesture, as an act of theatrical self-presentation. In Duncan’s memoir, sorrow is narrated through close attention to the body: its warmth, bare legs, breasts, continually moving arms, and eyes seldom dry when she is alone. The passage makes grief bodily and intimate, even as Beauvoir finds its presentation self-conscious and embarrassing.

The tension is not simply between genuine feeling and falsehood. Beauvoir’s argument is that a person may feel real sorrow while also turning that feeling into a scene in which the self is displayed. Duncan’s account gathers pain into an image of her own body marked by weariness and sorrow; the spectacle does not cancel the grief, but it shapes how the grief is made legible. In Beauvoir’s reading, this is the danger of narcissistic self-contemplation: experiences that should open a person toward others can instead be absorbed into a portrait of the self.

Praise, Prestige, and the Imagined Radiance

Duncan also describes Gabriele D’Annunzio’s ability to make women feel lifted out of ordinary life. As she recounts it, his praise wraps each favored woman in a shining veil, making her seem radiant and central to the universe; when his caprice ends, the radiance disappears and she falls back into commonness. Duncan compares the power of this praise to Eve hearing the serpent in Paradise. The image captures both the intoxication of being singled out and the precariousness of a transformation bestowed by another person.

Beauvoir uses Duncan’s account to explain why social prestige and flattering speech can arouse passion even without physical charm. A man’s elevated position can make his approval seem to pronounce truth: the woman he praises experiences herself as newly valuable. Yet the veil in Duncan’s story is temporary. The beloved’s exaltation lasts at the pleasure of the person who confers it, and its disappearance exposes how much the woman’s sense of worth has been entrusted to an external judgment. Duncan’s testimony thus illuminates the mechanism of admiration while also showing its instability.

Material Dependence and the Cost of the Idol

For Beauvoir, narcissistic self-display does not free a woman from dependence. The effort to make and maintain an idol requires resources, while the body and face that support its image remain vulnerable to time. She notes that Marie Bashkirtseff consented to marry for money to preserve her form in immortal marble, and that masculine fortunes paid for the offerings Isadora Duncan and Cécile Sorel placed at the feet of their thrones. Duncan’s public image is therefore linked not only to the audience’s gaze but to the material support that allows the spectacle to endure.

Beauvoir describes a further trap in the effort to make the male an instrument of one’s own power: to capture his attention, a woman must still please him. The apparent reversal of mastery does not break the relation of dependence. In the account’s broader argument, the narcissist who escapes an individual man’s domination may remain subject to public opinion, since the admiration on which her image depends is capricious and cannot be commanded. Duncan’s beauty can be offered as a gift, but the conditions supporting its public display remain entangled with other people’s resources and approval.

Narrative Role and Significance

Duncan’s examples give Beauvoir a way to hold together competing truths about narcissism. The performer’s account makes self-display vivid and inviting; the story of the ashes exposes the risk that even suffering can become a theatrical gesture; and the episode of D’Annunzio’s praise shows how an admired woman’s radiance may be granted and withdrawn by a man. Across these scenes, performance is neither merely deceit nor uncomplicated generosity. It is a form through which beauty, need, grief, and dependence become visible at once.

Duncan consequently occupies a double position in Beauvoir’s discussion: she is both an example through whom the critique is developed and a witness whose descriptions disclose the force of the experience being analyzed. Her memoirs furnish images of beauty offered to spectators, bodily sorrow, and praise that lifts a woman into an imagined divine radiance. Beauvoir’s interpretation emphasizes the cost of making the self into an idol: attention may seem to confer sovereignty, yet the idol remains exposed to time, material dependence, and the changing gaze of others.