The Turnout and female perfectionism

Megan Abbott’s The Turnout reflects our cultural fixation with the rarefied world of ballet and ‘feminine’ sports

Source: Pixabay

“Every girl wants to be a ballerina”, muses Megan Abbott on the opening page of her novel, The Turnout, a coming-of-age tale of two ballerinas. It is a tale of innocence lost and freedom found. After a car accident kills their parents and turns their life upside down, the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, inherit their mother’s ballet school, a “cramped, sweaty, stenchy place, ripe as the hollow of a dancer’s pointed foot”, and a decaying “Hansel and Gretel house” out of the Grimmian world of dark fairytales. The novel is laced with references to Tchaikovsky’s ballet – toy soldiers, mice – yet disentangles itself from its heavy, Christmassy romanticism. Instead, Abbott leans into E.T.A Hoffmann’s twisted, oneiric fairytale. Her heroine shares her name, Marie (who would become Clara in the ballet adaptation of The Nutcracker), with Hoffmann’s protagonist, and she picks up on the current of sexual sublimation in the original, interpreting Marie as a teenager splintered by her nascent sexuality.

The Gothic sensibilities of the novel are established in the uncanny Clara / Marie doubling. The love triangle between Clara, the Nutcracker Prince and the Mouse King is mirrored in the pas de quatre Marie choreographs with herself, her sister Dara, Charlie, an injured ex-protege, and her new romantic interest, Derek, a parasitic contractor who creeps onstage with “his too-tight dress shorts, his dual phones, his throbbing beeper”. Derek’s dialogue is riddled with double-entendres, and he seduces Marie with a perverse charm the “Big Bad Wolf” whose brute sexuality and emphatic masculinity leaves scars on her skin. He is an interloper, a noir staple, the agent by which the trio’s delicate balance is disturbed, and to whom Marie abandons herself physically and psychologically. 

The Turnout entwines desire and dance, probing the symbiotic relationship between the two, “how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself”. The true locus of the novel is not murder or suspense, but Abbott’s dramatisation of the female sexual paradigm – where sex, like ballet, is simultaneously self-destructive and self-affirming. A turnout, the position after which Abbott names her novel, where a dancer rotates her body 180 degrees from the hips to the toes and is “split open, laid bare” like “a doll with its legs put on backward”, is framed as a loss of virginity, of innocence: “the moment you achieve it you’ve become a woman”. Women’s desires are dangerous but essential. Dara’s depiction of sex is visceral; she gazes at Derek turning Marie “inside out. Turning her out”, and ballet and sex spin together into a dizzying vortex - to fall out of it would be to fall off the edge. Bodies long, ache, arch and stretch as characters discover their sexual currency, acting on their primal longings. 

Perhaps, at times, Abbott oversexualises dance during a cultural climate in which ballerinas and their visual cousins, gymnasts, are still dismantling the systems of abuse that oppressed them. Her writing is highly figurative and she saturates it with innuendos. A novel with a fixation on women with prepubescent bodies and libidinal desires could be semblant of a male, Lolita-esque fantasy. However, The Turnout dissects the female body in anthropological, unsentimental language; Dara describes little girls as “pigeon-breasted”, subverting the lyrical euphemisms we have come to expect in literature, and much of her diction hums with her own physical self-disgust. Abbott often wields the conventions of noir fiction but shifts the perspective: in her novels the femme fatale, or the ‘unlikeable’ woman, tells her story. Dara tells this story in vignettes, in flashes rather than streams of consciousness, so that we might peer through the cracks to glimpse her subliminal trauma and the shame that suffuses her memory. 

Ballerinas, gymnasts and skaters exist within a liminal space between girl and woman, cygnet and swan; these cultural icons of femininity actually frequently deny womanhood, for female functions are a sign of weight gain. Ballet has been obsessed with mirrors for centuries – those that refract as well as reflect, distorting; ballerinas train in front of a mirror, envisioning the ideal versions of themselves as well as scrutinising their flaws. Repressed bodies, inhibited sexuality and truncated careers – ballerinas peak in their twenties - perpetuate a culture of infantilism, and Dara desires to preserve her life in a stasis. The Turnout spins a bildungsroman, however, and the sisters emerge, purged of innocence, from their insular dreamscape on the threshold of adulthood, like Clara in the ballet.

Abbott conjures a fraught, bowstring tension to echo the crescendos of Tchaikovsky; the novel itself cultivates the heightened feeling of performance in its expertly orchestrated final act. Many ballet-centric narratives are non-naturalistic, a reminder of the artificiality and quixotism of the art form, of the façade that ballerinas manufacture. Four years ago now, I heard two-time Olympian Johnny Weir describe ladies figure skating as “brass knuckles under velvet gloves”, a metaphor that has stuck with me ever since, and one that acutely encapsulates the interplay between strength and delicacy that underlies so many female-dominated artistic sports. 

For all the performativity of the novel, however, it addresses themes such as the crushing weight of perfectionism and the ballerinas’ fragile mental health, locating a necessary element of realism. Absolute perfection, even for a fleeting moment, requires absolute sacrifice, and so artistic breakthrough often fuses with mental breakdown. Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka have revolutionised athletics, freeing themselves of the demand for total submission to their sport: the show, sometimes, should not go on. Balancing on a half-an-inch thick blade or 4-inch-thick beam, one wrong step can close the velvet curtains forever. Perhaps our knuckles are in fact not brass but glass; hard yet brittle, vulnerable to breakage where pressures or stresses are present. 

Skating internationally and nationally for the last 13 years, I have experienced and witnessed the victories and falls from grace, the ebbs and flows of an obsessive pursuit of perfection, and the toxic climates that foster eating disorders and abusive relationships, whether that be emotional or sexual – in a sport which hinges upon external validation. As ballet, gymnastics and figure skating are often projected as images of stylised girlhood, many forget the cracked bones, bloodied ballet shoes and fractured psyche beneath the glimmering veneer of beauty. The ethos of ballet, as with womanhood, is to maintain this romantic image and conceal the internal suffering that is our physical destiny - period pains and childbirth – to portray a vision of ease that is illusory.

In film and fiction, ballet, a medium of expression in itself, often functions as a metaphor – for the split self, for artistic obsession. Here, ballet, and the subculture of women to which it belongs, is a microcosm of femininity. Femininity is empowering; ballerinas train their bodies into instruments of power and flexibility, fusing athleticism and aestheticism. But it is also a straitjacket; the Balanchine type, a physical ideal where the female body is linear, lithe and leggy, is an impossible structure that confines (and contorts) women. Abbott dips into this harsh underbelly of femininity with hypnotic prose, a sensual fog that permeates. She explores the interior workings of ballet, breathing life into the latent cruelty of the art. In her corpus, women can be both: elegant and evil, beautiful and brutal – at a remove from the artistic binaries to which they are often subject. Rivalry is a trope of female-centered narratives, and, in particular, ballet is a stage of controlled savagery where rage coexists with eroticism: in The Turnout, understudies slip razor blades into the slippers of prima ballerinas, while in Black Swan this rivalry translates into something more sapphic. 

Indeed, there are striking parallels with another psychosexual drama, Black Swan, in which ballet is director Darren Aronofsky’s vehicle to explore the madness that pervades the tortured artist. Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers is the sexually naïve white swan, a surrogate for her mother’s unrequited ambition, who fears penetration – of the mind, of the body – and being supplanted in the eyes of a powerful man. Like Abbott, Aronofsky probes the extremities of female desire – for freedom, for success, or in lust – and the implicit judgment of these desires by other women. He is also similarly preoccupied with bodies, pain and sex. Aronofsky also delves into the human extremes of pain and pleasure; ballet is a masochistic profession in which Nina self-mutilates – abrasions on her back fall where wings might sprout and her toes web together. It is a fable of porcelain perfectionism, pushed to its most grotesque iterations, a cautionary tale for female dancers of how dedication can shudder into obsession. Black Swan is a thriller whose chills emerge not from the horror but from the unsettling and unnatural swanlike figures (formed by reshaped and disembodied limbs), the underlying bulimia and anorexia and the abuse of ingénues.

Like Abbott, Aronofsky mines the sexual subtext of ballet: ballet is a physical art form, so the power dynamics seem more intensely physical; evil magicians, company directors and contractors control swans and women, dominating and inflaming them. Thomas, the company’s director, who himself slides a wanton hand down Nina’s leotard while she turns, instructs Nina to touch herself in order to cultivate her (as of yet, unlived) passions and encourages intimacy with the new ballerina, Lily (Mila Kunis). Lily embodies the persona she must adopt, her id actively tormenting her, and the dualities of white-black, virgin-whore and passive-active that are physicalised by her and Nina are sexist, melodramatic clichés which Aronofsky embraces and ultimately deconstructs, winking as he does. In her swan song, Nina’s repressed forces erupt into a transcendental performance – precision and perfectionism do not negate passion but nourish it; her mask-like beauty transmutes into a horror-mask and she is, finally, the black swan.

Black Swan and The Turnout both suggest that while “every girl wants to be a ballerina”, they must be irrational, masochistic and erotic to be one. They are fables of female perfectionism, studies of female breakdown that showcase the psychological and physiological complexities of being a ballerina, but also of being a woman.