Vernon Lee’s "The Ballet of the Nations": A Modern Morality, an Intermedial Mosaic

Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915) documents the rise of nationalist discourses that led to World War I, as well as Lee’s zealous commitment to the promotion of pacifist values in contradiction to the rhetoric that had been fuelling the hostilities. In this article I argue that The Ballet of the Nations stands out as an intermedial mosaic, an imbrication that is formed of a complex, multifarious web of hints and suggestions. Besides paying homage to the tradition of morality plays, Lee’s allegory incorporates into her prose the visual representations of the ‘Danse Macabre’ and ‘The Triumph of Death’. Moreover, I suggest that The Ballet of the Nations should be placed within the context of nineteenth-century experimentation in the fields of music and ballet, with Franz Liszt’s Totentanz (1849), Camille Saint- Saëns’s tone poem Danse Macabre (1874), and the Italian extravaganza Ballo Excelsior (1881), providing representational models for Satan’s dominion as well as the implicit faith in a future brotherhood of the nations.