'A natural and cultivated gracefulness': how to move in the Eighteenth Century

The ideal of the graceful figure presented in popular physiognomic treatises and Romance novels during the eighteenth-century belied an anxiety that, despite the transparency of the body, it could be trained to ‘perform’ innate qualities such as those associated with grace. John Weaver’s 1721 treatise Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing is one such example of the ambivalence surrounding the idea that graceful movement could be taught. Weaver finishes his treatise with the caveat ‘a peculiar Grace and Air to the Motion; which is not only very difficult to attain; but much more so, to lay down Rules for them.’ However, earlier in the treatise Weaver presented detailed anatomical descriptions of how to attain graceful positions of the head, feet and limbs. This tension is exacerbated by the concept of grace itself, standing as it does at a crossroads between a range of theological, ethical, and aesthetic discourses. How did the differing status of grace as innate or performed permeate popular eighteenth-century texts? In this paper I will consider a range of sources, including conduct books and dance treatises, in an effort to explore the pedagogy of grace.