Review: Isadora by Amelia Gray

Reviewed by Sophia Ihlefeld

Isadora
A Novel by Amelia Gray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2017
$16.51, 401 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0374279981

Isadora tells the survival story of the radical American dancer, Isadora Duncan, after her two young children drown. Amelia Gray depicts the primal strength of motherhood and womanhood in Isadora with the same ruthless authorial bite her readers have come to crave—and even expect—after reading Gray’s previous work, like Gutshot and THREATS. Gray leaves us all, just like Isadora’s family, friends, and audience members, beholden to Isadora’s powerful persona.

Amelia Gray’s portrait of Isadora displays the power and intricacy of womanhood. After her young daughter and son drown in the Seine, Isadora, lost in the ambiguity of emotions as turbulent as the river itself, steps away from her skyrocketing dancing career. Gray illustrates the ways in which Isadora physically sculpts her grief—an anguish that leaves her “estranged from that knowledge, distant from my body, and lonely for myself”—just as she does her own physique in order to emerge more artistically affective than before. True to her insubordinate nature, she pioneers a revolutionary dance movement that stresses natural, organic movement over the rigidity of traditional ballet. In one of the novel’s final scenes, a newly pregnant Isadora choreographs and performs a dance symbolizing her own rebirth and revival. She turns her swelling form into a symbol of life, idolatry, and muscled power rather than a body conquered by its own pregnancy.

No other character in the novel necessarily wants to like Isadora, but she is too fascinating to resist. In Isadora, Gray takes this period of pause and mourning in the dancer’s life—the time between the deaths of her children and her return to her career—and imbues the reader with the same sense of unwilling magic that Isadora did to everyone she encountered. She is simultaneously detached and profoundly present, aloof while also inextricably bound to her triumphs and sorrows. Isadora’s complexity is perhaps most easily exemplified in the unpredictable nature of all her actions and decisions. Isadora enjoys making people uncomfortable. She is “ill at ease until she inspire[s] a row at any given party, stepping over the wreckage of another courtship or marriage as she pick[s] her teeth with the lady’s comb.” The peculiarities don’t end there. She ingests her cremated children’s ashes so they will always be a part of her; she performs farcical antics for her doctor until he provides a diagnosis that will allow her to continue dancing; she contemplates suicide almost daily and with dispassion. Isadora is entirely unashamed—not only of unconventional bodily movement, but unashamed too of nudity, sexuality, and the vocalization of sentiments no one else wants expressed.

Gray’s narrative includes not only Isadora’s first person accounts, but also third person chapters peeking into the lives of Paris Singer (Isadora’s practical lover and father of Isadora’s son), Elizabeth Duncan (Isadora’s sister), and Max Merz (Elizabeth’s lover). Though they know they can never fully or truly know Isadora, each is utterly aware of the dancer’s power: physical, sexual, emotional, and intellectual—a woman who is “far too strong to be felled by a symbol.” Gray makes certain her readers, too, know to both love and fear Isadora Duncan, a woman who refused to be conquered by anything or anyone—not her lovers, not her critics, not gravity, not normality, not her body, not even her own sorrow.