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Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century American Literature The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Fall 12-2011 Moral Performances: Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Jeffrey Taylor Pusch University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Other Theatre and Performance Studies Commons, and the Theatre History Commons Recommended Citation Pusch, Jeffrey Taylor, "Moral Performances: Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century American Literature" (2011). Dissertations. 508. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/508 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT MORAL PERFORMANCES: MELODRAMA AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE By Jeffrey Taylor Pusch December 2011 Despite a high number of ticket sales, theater reviews, and innumerable letters and diary entries detailing trips to the theater, the stereotype that theater in nineteenth-century America was almost culturally invisible continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century drama, even though figures like Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights. Just as it did in American life, theater exhibits a strong presence in the literature of the time. Considering theater’s pervasiveness, this dissertation seeks to restore it to its proper place in our study of nineteenth-century American literature. By contextualizing nineteenth-century literature within a framework of theater, specifically melodrama, we might be able to discern how writers of the period used theater as a vehicle to grapple with form, genre, and approach to audience. This dissertation examines the Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie , Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick , Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance , and Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask. In their novels, these writers harness the power of theater for thematic or generic purposes while simultaneously exposing the inherent weakness of the dramatic form. There is strength in theater, they argue, but ultimately the effect is reduced to nothing more than shadows on the cave wall. For this reason, American writers utilized melodrama’s strengths while, at ii the same time, built a case for fiction’s primacy and consequently made arguments for the existence of their own writing. iii COPYRIGHT BY JEFFREY TAYLOR PUSCH 2011 The University of Southern Mississippi MORAL PERFORMANCES: MELODRAMA AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by Jeffrey Taylor Pusch A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved: ____________________________________ Director ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Dean of the Graduate School December 2011 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank the dissertation director, Dr. Ellen Weinauer, and for the other committee members, Dr. Luis Iglesias, Dr. Jonathan Barron, Dr. Maureen Ryan, and Dr. Ken Watson, for their advice and support throughout this project. I would especially like to thank Dr. Weinauer for her patience and presence through multiple drafts, frantic emails, and changes in the project’s direction. The author also wishes to thank members of the Graduate Writing Workshop, Cecily Hill, Kelli Sellers, Heather Peerboom, and Heather Tate, for their advice during the proposal process of this project, and help in early drafts of Chapter III. Special thanks should also be extended to Jill Balaski McCarty for providing the post-colonial terminology in Chapter II. The author also wishes to acknowledge Jen Robertson, as well as Greg Stone and Steven Petersheim of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, for their reading and suggested revisions of Chapter IV. This project could not have been completed without the emotional support of the author’s family. The words “special thanks” are inadequate to describe the gratitude the author feels for William and Shirlee Pusch, and Jennye Pusch. This one’s for you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii CHAPTER I. SETTING THE STAGE FOR AMERICAN THEATER ...........................1 II. RESTING ON PERFORMANCES: ENACTING MELODRAMA IN HOPE LESIE .............................................................................................22 Hope Leslie and Theater: Sedgwick’s Quarrel with History Magawisca’s Recital: Sedgwick’s Quarrel with Melodrama Hope’s First Melodrama: Emotion and Rebellion Hope’s Second Melodrama: Emotion for the Common Good III. THE THAUMATIC EXPERIENCE: DRAMA AND AUDIENCE IN MOBY-DICK .........................................................................................63 Melville and the Nineteenth-Century Stage How to “Tell the Truth”: Ishmael’s Problems with Audience and Interpretation Explaining the Unexplainable: Ishmael, Ahab, and Thauma Achieving Balance IV. SHOWING LIKE AN ILLUSION: THE FAILURE OF SYMPATHY IN THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE ..............................................................104 Turning the Affair into a Ballad: Coverdale’s Melodramatic Project “Nothing but self, self self!”: The Failure of Melodrama Showing Like an Illusion: The Romance as an Alternative to Melodrama V. OF HEART AND HOME: LOUISA MAY ALCOTT’S DEFENSE OF MELODRAMA .......................................................................................138 Social Theatricalism: Parlor Theatricals and “Mr. John Smith.” Jean Muir the Actress: Behind a Mask ’s Anti-Sentimental Stance Sensationalism, Eroticism, Melodrama Jean Muir as Storyteller: Alcott’s Defense of Sensational Fiction Coda: Once More, With Feeling WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................180 v 1 CHAPTER I SETTING THE STAGE FOR AMERICAN THEATER In the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), Alexis de Tocqueville writes, “Although spectators and spectacles have increased enormously in the United States in the last forty years, the population still indulges in this genre of amusement only with extreme restraint” (468). The statement seems humorously paradoxical, implying that American theater in the early nineteenth-century was immensely popular yet rarely patronized. The theater, de Tocqueville seems to argue, is both everywhere and nowhere; it is a popular form of entertainment that is somehow occluded from national consciousness. Despite de Tocqueville’s assertion that theatrical attendance “increased enormously,” not just for imported European dramas (read: Shakespeare) but for native productions as well, theater itself seemed almost invisible. 1 The stereotype that theater remained invisible, despite evidence of ticket sales, continues into the twentieth century. Indeed, a scan of anthologies of American literature fails to yield any examples of nineteenth-century American drama. For example, both the Norton and the Macmillan anthologies of American literature include Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1790), but neither anthology includes any drama from the 1800s, even though canonical figures like William Dean Howells and Henry James were also theater critics and playwrights themselves. The Norton Anthology’s next example of American drama, after The Contrast , is Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1917), while the Macmillan’s next is The Hairy Ape 1 Theater historian and critic Susan Harris Smith argues that many factors, some originating in the nineteenth century and instantiated by twentieth-century universities work to subordinate drama’s position in the canon. She cites Puritan distrust for theater (a distrust that lingered far beyond the 17 th century), the New Critics’ denigration of nineteenth-century drama’s simplistic language, universities’ fear of liberal/vulgar//subversive performances by students, and the primacy of poetry in college classrooms and anthologies. For a more in-depth analysis, see Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art. 2 (1922), by Eugene O’Neill. A student who believes such anthologies to be an accurate cross-section of American literature might forget that drama existed altogether in nineteenth-century America. Not only did theater exist in nineteenth-century America; it flourished. Indeed, the theater itself was a popular sight in pre-Revolution America, and became ubiquitous in the early decades of the subsequent century. While not a publicly subsidized institution as it was in France, the theater nevertheless constantly made its presence felt. Constance Rourke, for example, calls Americans a “theatrical race,” stating that even in some of the more far-flung towns of the American frontier, amateur actors would stage their own theatricals (110). Both William Dunlap and Dion Boucicault became renowned for their adaptations of European plays. The clamor for national literature in the early
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