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COMPOSING THE BODY: NARRATIVE IN THE AGE OF IMPROVISATION, 1770-1867 BY REBECCAH B. BECHTOLD DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Trish Loughran, Chair Emeritus Professor Leon Chai Assistant Professor Justine Murison Nicholson Professor Gillen Wood ii Abstract In 1820, Thomas Hastings wrote the first dissertation on music published in the United States, claiming “Here, then, is seen the great secret of musical expression. Feeling begets feeling.” My dissertation, Composing the Body: Narrative in the Age of Improvisation, 1770- 1867, explores the social, cultural, and formal intersections of this kind of musical “feeling” with its better-known literary counterpart, the sentimental tradition. Through readings of novels, song sheets, engravings, and a host of other primary materials, I show how music reshaped prevailing attitudes toward sentimentality and the production of emotion in the United States. Early advocates of music literacy had long maintained that music’s vibrations appealed directly to— and consequently managed—an individual’s feelings. But the emergence of improvisational music, made popular in antebellum America by touring European virtuosos like Jenny Lind, Leopold de Meyer, and Ole Bull, advocated a new form of listening that challenged music’s role as an instrument of social regulation. Defined by its expression of unrestricted emotion, such music evoked the “wild, sad strains” of the slave. My work traces how figures like Caroline Lee Hentz, Augusta Evans, Herman Melville, and Lydia Maria Child reference this improvisational tradition, both through formal experimentation and through the figure of the female improvisatrice. In this way, my dissertation contributes to a number of different ongoing conversations in American literary studies—conversations about the history and cultural logic of sentiment as well as the relationship between popular culture and literature, with special emphasis on questions of race, gender, and literary form. Whereas scholars like Eric Lott and W.T. Lhamon have long emphasized the masculine, working class musical tradition of minstrel sound and stage, my work uncovers another side of antebellum music: a female, middle-class, utopian, and at times even subversive tradition. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………...………………………………………………1 CHAPTER 1: THE “LANGUAGE OF FEELING”: MUSIC, SYMPATHY AND THE VIBRATING BODY IN EARLY AMERICA ………………………………………………….20 CHAPTER 2: “THE MOST INTERESTING MONSTROSITY”: JENNY LIND’S 1850-1851 AMERICAN TOUR …………………………………………………………………………….61 CHAPTER 3: A SOUTHERN LITERATURE OF MUSIC: CAROLINE HENTZ AND AUGUSTA EVANS……………………………………………………………………………109 CHAPTER 4: LUSUS NATURÆ: THE MELODIOUSNESS AND MOURNFULNESS OF HERMAN MELVILLE’S PIERRE ……………………………………………………………172 CHAPTER 5: DISCOVERING A MUSICAL RACE: LYDIA MARIA CHILD’S A ROMANCE OF THE REPUBLIC……………………………………………………………………………211 CODA: THE GREAT NATIONAL PEACE JUBILEE………………………………………..258 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..264 1 Introduction “Music is both body and soul, like the man who delights in it. Its body is beauty in the sphere of sound,--audible beauty…” John Sullivan Dwight (1849) Housed at the New-York Historical Society is a wooden wastebasket decorated with sheet music (see Figure 1). Now yellow with age, the wastebasket prominently features the cover to musical selections from La fille du régiment, a popular opéra comique by Gaetano Donizetti performed in the United States not long after its 1840 debut in Paris, first in New Orleans and then later at Niblo’s Opera House in New York City. Accompanying Donizetti’s opera is sheet music from four morceaux, selected from the operas of Vincenzo Bellini (La Sonnambula and I Puritani) and Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le Diable). Carefully pasted to the inside are the “Farewell Songs of Jenny Lind in America”—with lyrics to the ballad “Auld Robin Gray” visible—and the “Jenny Lind Polka,” a duet for two pianos printed by Oliver Ditson in Boston. Displaying music popularly performed and bought in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, the wastebasket gestures toward the rapid growth of a cosmopolitan music culture in New England in the antebellum period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sacred music dominated American musical practice, largely influenced by the congregational singing and musical needs of Euro-American religious denominations. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, the musical scene exploded, introducing musical genres and styles hitherto unavailable to middle-class Americans: a mixture of European and folk music traditions where blackface minstrelsy and sentimental ballads were heard alongside the Italian operas of Donizetti and the classical compositions of the European “greats,” from Mozart and Beethoven to Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Liszt. 2 Fig. 1: Wastebasket (1820-1850) made of wood, paper, and gilding. Gift of Leonidas Westervelt, The Jenny Lind Collection of Leonidas Westervelt, New- York Historical Society. Supported by the emergence of a distinct middle-class in the nineteenth century, musical culture in urban centers like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and New Orleans responded to and reinforced the values that defined mainstream culture.1 While performance venues rather than styles of music determined a “higher” music from it working-class counterpart, appreciation for all types of music—from the entertaining to the morally uplifting— indicated an individual’s taste as well as his ability to indulge that taste. Music manuals, primers, 1 Performing organizations like the Musical Fund Society in Philadelphia and the Handel and Haydn society in Boston introduced their listening public to increasingly diverse programs. American factories began producing popular instruments like the piano and the guitar making them more affordable to their middle-class clientele while publishing firms developed new print technologies that allowed for music (particularly sheet music) to be published in larger numbers, with greater diversity, and at a lesser cost. For a quick outline of the changes that led to this explosion—from urban growth to advancements in print technologies allowing for more affordable music—see Dale Cockrell’s “Nineteenth-Century Popular Music” and Katherine Preston’s “Art Music from 1800 to 1860,” both published in The Cambridge History of American Music, edited by David Nicholls. 3 and general textbooks and theories on music published in the early to mid nineteenth century further encouraged readers and potential music enthusiasts in this regard. The first of its kind published in the United States, Thomas Hastings’ Dissertation on Musical Taste (1820), for instance, provided readers with seventeen chapters devoted to the definition and cultivation of musical taste, arguing in the introductory chapter that while “[t]aste in music may justly be regarded as an acquired faculty,” this faculty could be matured through “timely indulgence” and “enlightened observation” (11). Guidebooks, advice manuals, and articles on proper etiquette similarly suggested that how one listened to music not only spoke to his taste level more generally but also indicated his status in society. Women’s journals like Godey’s Lady’s Book frequently included fashion plates for dresses appropriate at the opera or concert hall and even printed instructions on comportment, warning that “loud thumping with canes and umbrellas, in demonstration of applause, is voted decidedly rude” (“Points of Etiquette”). With its collage of popular music, the wooden wastebasket now preserved at the New- York Historical Society survives as an artifact of this cultural moment. A visual record of its owner’s musical proclivities, the wastebasket quickly indicates to passing observers the owner’s participation in the musical fashionable world. By the 1850s, Americans had become prodigious consumers of music. Encountering music in a variety of places, from street vendors to the concert hall, Americans discussed, wrote about, and frequently purchased music to be performed and re-performed in the privacy of their own homes. The Oliver Ditson music-publishing firm, housed on Washington Street in Boston, alone boasted of an inventory of nine million sheets of music spread out in two of the building’s floors (Tawa, From Psalm 103). To keep up with the constant demand for new music, one floor was also dedicated to the running of twelve printing presses and another to the engravers, stampers, and supplies of paper required for music 4 production (Tawa, From Psalm 103). The increased affordability and accessibility of music encouraged the development of new tastes. While some music remained popular with Americans well into the twentieth century—Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home,” Felix Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words, Dan Emmett’s “Old Dan Tucker”—others were quickly replaced by new versions and variations. Recycled into an object that contains the unwanted, the easily discarded, the sheet music wastebasket inadvertently reflects how quickly certain songs grew outdated, replaced by a seemingly never-ending supply of new operas, ballads, and piano duets. No longer used for its original purpose but still a “decorative” art, the music lining the wastebasket is a symbol of waste, from the garbage it collects to the luxury and leisure