The Liberation of Bafflement: Gypsy Rose Lee and Esoteric Gender Performance

In her novel Possession (1990), A. S. Byatt remarks that one of her characters may have written a diary not to capture a portrait of herself, but instead simply “to baffle.”  The same could be said of the American burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, whose voluminous and contradictory self-presentations serve more to obscure than to illuminate Lee’s inner identity and thoughts.  Drawing on archival material from Lee’s papers as well as on her published writings and videotaped performances, this paper seeks to place Lee within a tradition of twentieth-century public figures who sought to protect their innermost selves from view through the simultaneous performance of multiple gender roles.  Although Lee was one of many such figures – others include evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, astrologer and medium Madame Marcia, rigged quiz show participant Charles Van Doren, and con artist Frank Abagnale – Lee is particularly noteworthy because of the incisiveness of her commentary and because her public disrobement explicitly contradicted her implicit goal of private concealment.  Borrowing from philosophy the concept of esotericism (the encoding of hidden meanings accessible only by a select few within texts available to many), the paper identifies these performance practices as forms of “esoteric gender performance”; Lee and others found liberation in simultaneously masking and selectively revealing the gendered realities of their lives and experiences.  The paper concludes with some tentative explorations of why esoteric gender performance may have played a surprisingly significant role in twentieth-century American history.