Copyright by Amy Kathleen Guenther 2017
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Copyright by Amy Kathleen Guenther 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Amy Kathleen Guenther Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Pilgrims, Puritans, and Popular Culture: Performing Citizenship in the 20th Century National Imaginary Committee: Charlotte M. Canning, Supervisor Paul Bonin-Rodriguez Laura Gutiérrez Martin Kevorkian Rebecca Rossen Lisa B. Thompson Pilgrims, Puritans, and Popular Culture: Performing Citizenship in the 20th Century National Imaginary by Amy Kathleen Guenther, BFA, MA Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2017 Dedication For my amazing family: Jim and Mary Guenther, Kim, Mark, and Kathryn Saunders, and especially for Kevin, who believed in my work and me even when I was unsure. Acknowledgements Though writing a dissertation can be a fairly lonely task, I could not have completed it without the generous emotional, academic, and logistical support of my colleagues, friends, and family. First of all, I must thank my advisor Charlotte M. Canning. I looked up to her as a scholar even before I came to UT. She has provided invaluable modeling and mentorship on how to be a better scholar, writer, and teacher as well as how to create a sustainable academic career in the midst of constant chaos. Her feedback constantly pushes me to do better and to think harder but also reminds me that as Deborah Paredez once said to her, “it’s hard because it’s hard.” I would also like to thank my committee, who has guided me through various courses and conferences as well as provided feedback on various iterations of this research: Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Laura Gutiérrez, Martin Kevorkian, Rebecca Rossen, and Lisa B. Thompson. Additionally, I would also like to thank the rest of the Performance as Public Practice (PPP) program faculty, especially Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Deborah Paredez, and Andrew Carlson. Much of this research was only made possible through funding from the UT Graduate School, the College of Fine Arts, and the Department of Theatre and Dance. During the 2011-2012 school year, I received a Recruitment Fellowship from the Graduate School, which provided full funding for my first year at UT. I also received a Continuing Fellowship during the 2015-2016 school year from the College of Fine Arts. Both of these fellowships allowed me to focus fully on my research (and coursework). In the intermittent years, I received multiple assistantships from the Department of Theatre and Dance, which gave me the financial stability to focus on my studies as well as gain valuable teaching and research experience. v Over the years, my fellow PPP and UT graduate students have provided invaluable support, feedback, and community. I very much appreciate the various writing groups I’ve had over the years, including writing, sharing, and brainstorming with Oladotun Ayobade, Scott Blackshire, Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Brianna Figueroa, Natashia Lindsey, and Lydia Nelson. You have been invaluable in helping me to develop these ideas from the first very basic questions into a full dissertation. For those who have gone before me, I thank you for your support, mentoring, and answering numerous questions about the ins-and-outs of the PhD process, teaching, publishing, and the job market: Heather Barfield, Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy, Nicole Martin, Eleanor Owicki, Susanne Shawyer, and Katelyn Hale Wood. I would also like to thank the rest of the PPP community, spanning from those I’ve known since I began to those who I only met this year: Abimbola Adelakun, Khristian Méndez Aguirre, Laura Baggs, Cassidy Browning, Gustavo Melo Cerqueira, Zoë Crabtree, Russell Dembin, Jeffrey Gan, Christine Gwillim, James McMaster, Agatha Oliveira, Jess O’Rear, Bart Pitchford, Priya Raman, Rudy Ramirez, Katie van Winkle, and Eric Vera. Finally, my participation as a dramaturg in UT’s 2012 workshop and later world premiere of The Scarlet Letter is where my interest in the Puritans began. I must thank Steven Wilson (director) and Sarah Saltwick (playwright) for allowing me to go on this initial discovery process with them. This journey would also not have been possible without the support I’ve received from my previous institutions and various conference presentations. Thank you to the faculty and grad students in the Department of Theatre at Miami University, especially my mentors Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix and Paul K. Bryant Jackson. Thank you also to the theatre faculty at Catawba College, especially Janice Fuller, Beth Homan, and Woody Hood as well as Cindy Gendrich at Wake Forest University. I would also like to thank vi my colleagues at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, especially those in the Women and Theatre Program and the Theory and Criticism focus groups. Finally, I must thank those who have seen me through the day-to-day slog of researching, writing, and revising as well as trying to maintain a life outside the academy. Thank you to my proofreader and encourager Laura Clemens Trujillo. I also have to thank the Saunders family, Kim, Mark, and Kathryn, for frequently checking in with me and encouraging me. My parents, Jim and Mary Guenther, have been some of my biggest cheerleaders in everything I have set out to accomplish. Thank you for believing in me and encouraging me to follow a passion for the arts. Last, but not least, thank you to my partner Kevin Saunders who has now gone through all of the work of a dissertation without ever actually writing a word. This would not have been possible without you. vii Pilgrims, Puritans, and Popular Culture: Performing Citizenship in the 20th Century National Imaginary Amy Kathleen Guenther, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Charlotte M. Canning Pilgrims, Puritans, and Popular Culture argues that representations of the Puritans in the twentieth century were most often used to negotiate national identity in terms of hegemonic whiteness at moments when the idealized citizen as white, Protestant, heterosexual, and male was in crisis. Whether represented as proto-Americans or moralizing killjoys, they embodied the US’s national origin story and helped to define what citizenship meant in the twentieth century. Using performance as both the object of study and methodological lens, I demonstrate how national identity and citizenship are performed through actual bodies on stage playing Puritans. I organize my analyses around three common Puritan narratives adapted into stage performances: the First Thanksgiving, the Salem witch trials, and The Scarlet Letter. My examination of these texts focuses on what I call Puritan formations, an extension of sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) concept of racial formations. Using archival documents such as scripts, performance reviews, and programs, I theorize how a constructed historical memory can be embodied in and imposed upon present bodies. The introduction provides a brief overview of how Puritan formations began to function in the nineteenth century. As I argue, the traits twentieth-century citizens often criticized the Puritans for harken back to a nineteenth-century search for a unified viii national identity more so than the archive of the Puritans. Chapter one examines the early twentieth-century practice of using Thanksgiving plays in public schools to teach US history and assimilate Southern and Eastern European immigrant children into a unified (white) national identity. The next chapter continues through the mid-twentieth century with an analysis of Arthur Miller’s racial and performative adaptation of Tituba in The Crucible (1953). The third chapter concludes the twentieth century with an analysis of Phyllis Nagy’s 1994 feminist stage adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, comparing the play’s production context to Hawthorne’s. To conclude, I begin to consider what the use of a Puritan past might mean in the twenty-first century. Throughout, I suggest that tensions in Puritan formations reflect the tensions of remembering a national past steeped in settler colonialism, slavery, assimilation, and democracy. ix Table of Contents Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Puritan Formations: A Brief Summary .........................................................13 Literature Review and Methodology ............................................................29 Chapter Overview .........................................................................................51 Chapter One: Playing Pilgrim, Playing House: Performing White Domesticity in Early Twentieth-Century Thanksgiving Plays for Children .........................56 Thanksgiving: Celebrating Nation and Family .............................................63 Thanksgiving Plays in the Classroom ...........................................................76 Celebrating Domesticity: Plays About “Priscilla” ...............................78 Playing Indian: Plays With(out) Native Americans .............................94 Conclusion ..................................................................................................108 Chapter Two: (E)racing Tituba: Adapting Memory, History, and Race for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible ..................................................................................111 Tituba: A Racial Historiography