4PROLOGUEthe political stance of Degas, who painted the working classes with a dig-
nity and simplicity that assimilated the realism of Courbet and Daumier.
And it was, in fact, a chance encounter with Manet, while copying paintings
at the Louvre in 1864, that reportedly changed Degas’s approach to paint-
ing. Then, the artist’s work stylistically vacillated between the neoclassi-
cal rhetoric of Ingres and the darker romanticism of Delacroix. But in
many ways, classical art loomed large in Degas’s formation as a painter.
Manet introduced Degas to his abrasively realist approach to painting
and encouraged an interest in ever yday life—one deeply shaped by Cour-
bet’s political desire to annoy, challenge, question, and shake up social
stability. But if Courbet knew how to produce “annoying images” de-
signed to reveal naturalized social structures, Manet knew how to make
one look at them. He knew how to capture people’s attention in order to
grant resonance to his message. Well before Duchamp, Manet intro-
duced controversy as the essential element of good art—art that makes
people talk and share their views, art that makes people uncomfortable
and that challenges preestablished norms: art with a pronounced agency
capable of impacting social structures. In this context, Little Dancer Aged
Fourteen emerges as a work of art that, as Charles Millard argued, func-
tions as the “paradigm of the development of sculpture in nineteenth-
century France, a resume of its statements and problems, its exploratory
and modern strains.”^2
Degas’s Little Dancer is therefore better understood through these in-
fluences. The sculpture was intentionally cast as a far cry from the elegant
and idealized forms of the neoclassical works that dominated the Pari-
sian art scene. The proportions of her body did not match those of a “first-
class dancer,” and Degas had deliberately altered her physiognomy to
conform with popular scientific notions of what was then considered
morphological degeneracy.^3 The artist, as he did in paintings of laun-
dresses and prostitutes, chose not to immortalize the hero, not the étoile
basking in the glory of an ovation, but what the French generally referred
to as the rat.^4 Rats were the anonymous young dancers whose careers
failed. Within the complex and harsh social structure of the Opéra in
Paris, they were destined to round off their meager wages with prostitution.
Through the second half of the nineteenth century, ballerinas were, most
often, daughters of working class families. Like acting, the profession was
not suited to aristocratic or upper-middle-class girls. But in that world,