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Rutgers University Press Rutgers University Press Chapter Title: The Same Show Boat? Edna Ferber’s Interracial Ideal Book Title: The White Negress Book Subtitle: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary Book Author(s): LORI HARRISON-KAHAN Published by: Rutgers University Press . (2011) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhz60.6 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Rutgers University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The White Negress. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 138.110.87.58 on Thu, 04 Feb 2016 19:17:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 / Te Same Show Boat? Edna Ferber’s Interracial Ideal While the heterogeneity of the early-twentieth-century stage opened spaces for the construction of new models of racial and gender identity, popular literature of the time ofers another venue for exploring such shifing ideologies as they relate to the black-Jewish imaginary. Te work of Jewish American writer Edna Ferber bridges the realms of literature and mass entertainment, and it was in minstrelsy that Ferber found one of her earliest sources of creative inspiration. In the frst volume of her autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure (1939), Ferber added detail to her portrait of the artist as a stage-struck youth by describing her childhood infatuation with minstrel shows. “When the curtain went up, revealing those rows of red-and-white candy-striped satin pants, those absurd wing collars, those black faces and rolling eyes, I began to laugh in an- ticipation. I knew the ritual by heart,” wrote Ferber. “Tere was always the cakewalk in the second half, as American (or as American Negro) as jazz itself.” Tough destined for a career as a prolifc and versatile writer, rather than an actress, Ferber always considered herself a “blighted Ber- nhardt,” and her love for the theater—and for theatricality—is evident in some of her best-known novels. Eventually, Ferber parlayed her stage aspirations into several playwriting ventures, most notably her collabo- rations with dramatist George S. Kaufman. Teir frst, Minick, produced in 1924 and based on one of Ferber’s short stories, had little to do with race, but its casting of a “Harlem actress rather than a white girl in black- face” in the role of “colored maid” broke new ground, according to Fer- ber. “We thought ourselves rather daring,” she recalled of this casting This content downloaded from 138.110.87.58 on Thu, 04 Feb 2016 19:17:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the same show boat? / 59 decision. “White and colored actors did not then ordinarily mingle. Te stage has grown in that direction, at least.”1 In a shif from the somewhat mournful tone with which she earlier lamented that minstrelsy “seems to have passed entirely out of the theater,” Ferber had come to take pride in her own progressive contribution to eradicating the racial segregation of the American stage.2 Ferber’s experiences working on Minick led to her next project, Show Boat, her 1926 novel about a group of thespians living and performing on a Mississippi riverboat.3 Epic in scale, Show Boat uses a multigen- erational family saga to chronicle the growth of the American stage, tracing the evolution of the variety show from the foating theaters of the post-Reconstruction South to the urban milieus of Chicago and New York in the mid-1920s. Show Boat thus conveys in fctional form the entertainment history surveyed in the previous chapter, reiterating how theatrical traditions have been shaped by—and have shaped—the nation’s racial ideologies. Like most of Ferber’s novels, Show Boat is also a female success story, featuring a protagonist, Magnolia Hawks, who defes gender and racial conventions to rise to fame as an actress. As a child, independent-minded Magnolia disregards the rules of seg- regation to form close relationships with the black servants on her fam- ily’s plantation-like showboat, the Cotton Blossom. Further fouting expectations for ladylike decorum, Magnolia grows up to become an amateur performer with the foating theater troupe. When an ill-fated union with her leading man, the gambler Gaylord Ravenal, leaves Mag- nolia to fend for herself and her young daughter in Chicago, she goes on to achieve renown as a “coon singer,” performing the black music that she earlier learned from her African American companions. Both the minstrel show of Ferber’s youth and the rapidly evolving Broadway stage of the early 1920s are present in Show Boat—and not just in the performances that the characters participate in throughout the novel. Ferber’s primary black fgures are drawn from the interlocking nineteenth-century traditions of minstrelsy and sentimental fction. Te chief servants of the showboat—Jo, the shifless man-of-all-work, and Queenie, the full-bosomed cook—are recycled stereotypes of the Uncle Tom and the mammy. Magnolia’s closest friend, the beautiful leading lady Julie Dozier, who passes for white in order to perform on a segre- gated stage, conforms to the trope of the tragic mulatto, but the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of this character and of miscegenation also op- poses racist theatrical practices, and racism in general. Magnolia may reap the benefts of her friendships with these characters to make a name This content downloaded from 138.110.87.58 on Thu, 04 Feb 2016 19:17:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 60 / the same show boat? for herself frst in vaudeville and then on the Broadway stage, but she ultimately sacrifces her celebrity status in favor of a return to her roots and a closer connection to black folk culture. Unlike the better-known musical adaptations, which reunite the protagonist with her wayward husband, the novel kills of Gaylord and ends with Magnolia returning alone to her childhood home in order to take over as proprietor of the showboat. Show Boat addresses a topic that has been the subject of endless schol- arly fascination in recent decades: the interplay between black and white culture. Despite the fact that Show Boat is very much a product of the 1920s, an era in which the “mongrelization” of culture was recognized and celebrated, Ferber’s novel has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism.4 Overwhelmingly, discussion of Show Boat focuses on its theatrical adaptation, with scholars in the felds of American studies and musical theater exploring both its racial politics and its pivotal role in entertainment history. In their compelling interpretations of the ad- aptation, for example, both Linda Williams and Lauren Berlant ft Show Boat into white melodramatic and sentimental traditions that ofer the pretense of progressivism through a narrative of black sufering. As they demonstrate, such white appropriations of black pain for the purposes of entertainment end up maintaining the strictures of the color line.5 Due to the fact that two Jewish men, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, were responsible for transforming Ferber’s novel into the classic musical, Show Boat has also become a contested text of the black-Jewish cultural imaginary. While its attempts to espouse liberal ideologies and showcase the rich history of African American oral culture have been duly noted, the musical is also viewed as part of a long-standing tradition of Jewish appropriations that, to quote Michael Rogin, “silences” black “voices and sings in their name.”6 One can see how a similar argument might be applied to Ferber as the novel’s Jewish author. When scholars have taken note of Ferber’s role as originator of Show Boat, it is usually to point out that the text marks a departure from her earlier fction, especially her autobiographical novel Fanny Herself (1917), which drew directly on the writer’s ethnic heritage and featured an explicitly Jewish heroine. As a “white negress,” Mag- nolia Hawks may vaguely evoke famous Jewish “coon-shouters” such as Sophie Tucker (or, more likely, one of her thin and more conventionally attractive contemporaries such as Nora Bayes or Anna Held), but Fer- ber does not make Show Boat’s heroine a Jew.7 In fact, Jews are all but absent from Show Boat, even as the novel’s time frame coincides with This content downloaded from 138.110.87.58 on Thu, 04 Feb 2016 19:17:51 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the same show boat? / 61 the increased presence of Jewish immigrants in the United States and on the stage. Te absence of Jewishness in Show Boat serves as proof for some critics that Ferber, in universalizing her fction, shed her Jewish identity and positioned herself as part of the white mainstream. June Sochen applies to Ferber the model of “blending the particular with the universal” that she used to analyze Tucker and Brice; she argues that Fanny Herself was an “exorcism” of the author’s Jewish identity that freed Ferber to focus on heroines who were ethnically and religiously uniden- tifed. In a more recent study, Carol Batker, examining the appearance of racial others in Ferber’s fction, argues that racist representations of African Americans allowed the author to situate herself as “white and assimilable.”8 Batker does not mention Rogin, but his paradigm of Jews becoming white through the exploitation of African American culture is clearly operative in her conclusions.
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