From Huntress to Heroine: Gender Role Subversion in the Ballet, Sylvia

by Yuhua Emma Zhang

19 July 2025

From the sweeping, sorrow-drenched dramas of Giselle, Swan Lake, and La Bayadère, classical ballet has long echoed the same refrain: a woman, pure yet fragile, falls in love too quickly, pays dearly for it, and involves the same traditional romance arc: where the male either devastates or saves the female protagonist. She must be ethereal, breakable, and helpless against the tide of fate or male betrayal. Think of Giselle, who dances herself to death for love. Or Odette, trapped in a swan’s body, whose fate hinges on male fidelity. Or Nikiya, a bayadère whose death comes not from rebellion, but from romantic devotion. Classical ballet frames the female therein in a Madonna-esque manner; she embodies the 19th century ideals of the elegant women. 

And then there is Sylvia.

Sylvia’s Characterization 

Originally choreographed by Louise Merante in 1876, Frederick Ashton’s 1952 revival of Delibes’ 19th-century ballet is a radical detour from this narrative. In a genre obsessed with feminine vulnerability and masculine conquest, Sylvia completely alternates the idea of classical ideals from Greek mythology with a decisive, arrow-shot shift in tone, characterization, and movement from both the female and male counterparts. 

In Sylvia, the title character is a proud, emotionally distant huntress and priestess of Diana, goddess of chastity. She mocks love until Eros strikes her with an arrow, initiating her uncontrollable feelings for Aminta. Meanwhile, Aminta, a gentle shepherd deeply in love with her, is wounded by Sylvia’s indifference but ultimately revived by Eros. When Sylvia is abducted by the brutish Orion, she cunningly escapes using her intellect, not force. She and Aminta reunite, but Diana initially forbids their union. Only when Eros reveals that Diana herself once loved a mortal does the goddess relent, allowing Sylvia to choose love on her own terms.

Marianela Nunez and Vadim Muntagirov in Sylvia. © Dave Morgan, courtesy the Royal Opera House.

Sylvia is no gentle ingénue. Her role as a priestess for the Goddess Diana sanctifies her emotional distance from men rather than villainizing it. Her coldness towards romance and sexuality isn’t painted as cruelty, but as sacred power. She opens the ballet armored in indifference. Where heroines like Aurora (The Sleeping Beauty) or Swanhilda (Coppélia) fall in love with naïveté and immediacy, Sylvia resists. Where Giselle collapses under the weight of unreciprocated feeling, Sylvia deflects it with steely calm.

Romantic Reversal in Sylvia 

Love, in Sylvia, is not bestowed upon the heroine like a gift. It is earned, unlike in other Classical ballet librettos. Aminta, her would-be lover, must wait.This patience, this reversal of pursuit, is extraordinary in the canon of 19th-century ballet. Typically, it is the woman who waits, weeps, pines, dies. But here, it is the man who suffers longing. It is the man who must prove himself worthy of being seen.

Aminta is a poet, not a warrior. He offers tenderness, not conquest. And ultimately, he is the one who "wins" Sylvia, not by overpowering her, but by enduring the pain of unrequited love. This alone is a seismic inversion of the genre's gender norms in comparison to other classical ballets. 

Marianela Nuñez and artists of the Royal Ballet in Frederick Ashton's 'Sylvia'. © ROH/Tristram Kenton

Meanwhile, the “strong” male Orion, the abducting brute, fails in his conquest for her admiration. His hypermasculine energy, so often rewarded in ballets like Le Corsaire or Don Quixote, is here a dead end. Drunk, mocked, and outwitted, he is not a serious rival. He is a caricature of force by abducting her, standing in contrast to Aminta’s sincerity. 

Moreover, Sylvia She evolves, but not in the way typical heroines do. She is not tamed or broken. Instead, Ashton gives her the dignity of choosing vulnerability. This dignity is a choice that deepens her strength rather than diminishes it. This emotional arc is reinforced in the choreography itself. Ashton additionally rewrote the ballet’s physical language.

Opposition in Historical Ballet Movement

Sylvia’s choreography is sharp, explosive, and commanding. Her entrances are leaping, spear-wielding declarations of autonomy. Critics marveled at Margot Fonteyn’s performance in the role, not because it was delicate, but because it was dazzlingly athletic. Fonteyn, long associated with lyricism and romantic purity, stunned audiences with her physicality in Sylvia. Dance historian Lynn Garafola once noted that Ashton “fused the classical ballerina with a goddess-warrior,” giving Sylvia a power vocabulary previously reserved for male heroes.

Polina Semionova in Sylvia. © MIRA.

In contrast, Aminta’s movement is fluid, lyrical, and receptive. His solos are filled with adagio lines and sweeping port de bras which are movements ballet has long coded as feminine and delicate. Ashton’s choice to feminize the male role, while masculinizing the female, is a deliberate mirror-flip of ballet’s traditional grammar.

Whereas ballets like Don Quixote and Le Corsaire glorify masculine flair in choreography such as big jumps, turns, and chest-forward dominance. Sylvia therefore elevates restraint and interiority in the male role. Masculinity, here, is reimagined not as swagger but as softness. And femininity is not passivity, but command.

This reversal goes beyond choreography. It speaks to a deeper rewriting of what power looks like in a reimagined world of classical ballet and who gets to hold it.

By casting Sylvia as the emotionally reserved hunter, and Aminta as the emotionally open dreamer, Ashton interrogates and dismantles the binary of cold masculinity and fragile femininity. He does not simply gender-swap behavior; he reclaims both archetypes, revealing that emotional distance can be feminine, and emotional need can be masculine — without either being signs of weakness.

In a world where ballet has so often punished women for power and men for tenderness, Sylvia dares to reimagine romance as mutual evolution. Not conquest. Not surrender. But choice.

In the end, Sylvia isn’t reduced to a girl in love, but she remains a goddess, even in her vulnerability; this is the true revolution of classical ballet gender roles.