She wore the evidence of her appetites, in the form of plump arms and calves, round belly, and soft chin, with grace and pleasure. She regarded her body as a vehicle for beauty, famously discarding the corsets and stockings that bound nineteenth-century women (even dancers) in exchange for loose tunics, bare legs, and bare feet. “Some people may be scandalized,” she conceded, “but I don’t understand why.” As far as Isadora was concerned, she never felt herself to be guilty of any sin or impropriety. She was unafraid to appear ridiculous for her appetites, and she disdained “the conclusion formed by so many women that, after the age of forty, a dignified life should exclude all love-making.” Imprinted in the womb by her mother’s taste for the food of Aphrodite, Isadora kept drinking at the fountain of love until the moment in her fiftieth year when, driving to an afternoon’s assignation, her colorful shawl caught in the axel of her car and strangled the life from her. At twelve years old she read George Eliot’s Adam Bede and decided that she would “live to fight against marriage and for the emancipation of women.” She practiced what she preached, throwing herself ecstatically into affairs, whether for a night or for a year. She would buy buckets of champagne to drink with friends even when she was too broke to rent a room where she could spend the night. Better just to stay up till dawn drinking.Ī self-described bacchante, Isadora gave herself to the pleasures of the body with the same abandon as those erstwhile priestesses of Bacchus. “I have never ceased to be madly in love,” Isadora wrote in her memoir My Life, a chronicle of her countless erotic encounters, as much as a narrative of her evolution as a dancer. And she kept right on drinking champagne and dining on luxuries until her dying day. Isadora danced her first dances in the womb, she claimed, under the influence of those effervescent bubbles and slippery molluscs.
When Isadora Duncan’s mother was pregnant with the dancer, she could eat only iced oysters and iced champagne.
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