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Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859

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Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859 Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2015 Performing Placeslessness: Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859 James R. Holsinger Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Holsinger, James R., "Performing Placeslessness: Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859" (2015). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 5816. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/5816 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Performing Placeslessness: Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859 James R. Holsinger Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Timothy Sweet, Ph.D., Chair Cari Carpenter, Ph.D. Ryan Claycomb, Ph.D. Peter Reed, Ph.D. Kathleen Ryan, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2015 Keywords: Early American Drama, Performance, Theories of Space and Place, Antebellum Drama Copyright 2015 James R. Holsinger ABSTRACT Performing Placelessness: Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859 James R. Holsinger In Performing Placeslessness, I argue that the lack of a consistent attachment to place—the geopathology that manifests in the problem of placelessness—contributed to the incoherence of American identity from the Revolutionary War through the mid-nineteenth century. In making this argument, I bridge the critical gap between Martin Brueckner’s description of the geographic revolution (late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century) and Una Chaudhuri’s Staging Place, in which she characterizes place as a problem in modern realist drama. Examining dramatic publications and performances from 1775-1859, I treat drama as a key site of negotiating problematic conceptions of space and place in America. This period was characterized by a number of spatial disruptions: political geographies were redrawn, frontiers were no sooner defined than pushed further west, and colonial outposts became populous cities through the process of urbanization. Place was paramount on the early American stage both because the theatre reflected the displacement at the heart of early American life (and thus achieved a level of anxiety-provoking mimesis) and because the stage was inherently dislocated in its phenomenology. While all theatre takes us “somewhere else,” the early American theatre was distinctive in its capacity to comprise both a mimetic and phenomenological placelessness. Displacement wasn’t merely an obstacle to the formation of a sense of nation (though this was indeed the case). The displacement experienced by early Americans was at once a central and disavowed component of identity formation. The same early Americans who experienced their own anxieties of placelessness came to define themselves in opposition to displaced others. Native Americans were pushed further from the eastern seaboard, and slaves, by their very presence in the nation, contradicted the symbol-making process described by Brueckner. That is, for whites to locate their place of entitlement in the colonies, they needed to disenfranchise those enslaved blacks and Native Americans who could be found within colonial borders. We see the erasure of those who didn’t “count” within the nation most clearly in the dramatic performances of George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), as these plays resituated the South, its slaves, and lingering Native Americans as foreign to Northern theatregoers. Thus non-white bodies were effectively disenfranchised and displaced, both literally and figuratively, during stage performances that many associated with the fight for abolition. At the same time, I argue that the dramatic mode enabled the comparatively marginalized—women playwrights like Mercy Otis Warren and Charlottes Barnes, or a mixed- race former slave like William Wells Brown—to re-orient and resist their own displacement through the spatial orientations of drama. Table of Contents Introduction: 1 Performing Placelessness: Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859 Chapter One: 23 Resituating Public and Private Space: The Political Drama of Mercy Otis Warren Chapter Two: 56 Pocahontas Plays, Melodrama, and the Displacement of History Onstage Chapter Three: 94 Misplaced Sympathy: Depicting Slaves in “Foreign” Lands Chapter Four: 130 The One-Man Show as Counter-Performance: William Wells Brown’s The Escape and the Segregation of Dramatic Space Epilogue: 161 All Theatre is Environmental, All Performance is Site-Specific Works Cited: 167 Holsinger 1 Introduction: Performing Placelessness: Early American Drama and the Liminal State, 1775-1859 When William Hallam set out to bring the first professional theatre company to America’s shores in 1754, he did so after failing to find the success—and wealth—he sought in London.1 The American colonies held the promise of a new start and, as for so many others who voyaged to this “new world,” the possibility of financial gain. The enlisted actors who agreed to make the dangerous voyage met at Hallam’s home to discuss their plans, where they gathered costumes and scenery so as to begin productions immediately upon arrival. According to William Dunlap, successful playwright, producer, and the first historian of the early American stage, once assembled, Hallam introduced the plays that would be produced, assigned parts “both private and public, behind and before the curtain,” and appointed Lewis, William’s brother, as “manager, chief magistrate or king” and William as ‘Viceroy over him’” (qtd. in Hornblow 73).2 This description is telling in its reliance on a metaphor of colonization. William Hallam organizes his troupe by mimicking the colonial system already in place in America: players become colonists, performing under the tutelage of Lewis, who ultimately acts in the best financial interests of his brother, half a world away. Before Hallam’s company could become the first professional performance group in North America, though, the troupe had to weather a long and perilous passage across the Atlantic. Given the troupe’s desire to start performing—and making money—upon their arrival, the company made the most of their lengthy voyage. Dunlap describes the troupe’s time at sea with the characteristic flair of a man well-versed in the dramatic arts: The foresight exercised by the Hallams in preparing their company for immediate action on their arrival in America, merits applause. The pieces had been selected, cast, and put Holsinger 2 in study before embarkation; and during the passage they were regularly rehearsed. The quarter-deck of the Charming Sally was the stage, and whenever the winds and weather permitted, the heroes and heroines of the sock and buskin performed their allotted parts, rehearsing all the plays that had been selected, particularly those fixed upon to form the first theatrical exhibition which was to enliven the wilds of America. (11) Dunlap’s comparison of the stage on the Charming Sally to the wilderness that awaits these performers is telling in its insistence on America as tabula rasa, awaiting inscription by British hands. Taken together, Hallam’s traveling-troupe-as-colonial-project metaphor and Dunlap’s description of the birth of professional performance in America share an interest in American genesis, as origin stories not of Euro-Americans (like John Smith’s Generall Historie) but of professional players in the new world. Dunlap’s description, with its thematic of placelessness, gestures towards the interrelation of place, stage, and nation from the American stage’s conceptual beginning. Beneath the rhetorical bluster, behind the “heroes and heroines of the sock and buskin,” and at the heart of Dunlap’s mythology of the American theatre’s origins, we find in this performance at sea a microcosm of theatre culture that persisted in early America, where performances took place in cities and towns that were, like the Charming Sally, inhabited by a people unmoored, set adrift. In urban centers rural patrons must have felt a sense of dislocation as they were often meant to see themselves in characters that were similarly displaced. During and after the Revolution, American soldiers were displaced from their homes, while British soldiers staged dramatic performances on colonial soil, a useful distraction when in an unfamiliar land, far from home. For others, the dislocation and displacement of everyday life resisted representation altogether. Native Americans were repeatedly displaced as the “frontier” shifted west, and, as property, Holsinger 3 slaves experienced a “geographic confinement” that led to “a despatialized sense of place” (McKittrick, Demonic, 9). Colonists, Native Americans, and slaves
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