THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 17, Number 1 Winter 2005
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editor: David Savran
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Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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..-
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OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
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Robert Vorlicky
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 17, Number 1
Winter 2005
CONTENTS
SEAN P. HOLMES 5
CANNED COOKING: STAGE ACTORS, SCREEN ACTING
AND CULTURAL HIERARCHY IN THE UNITED STATES 1912-1929
PEACH PITTENGER
ETHEL WATERS AND RACIAL STEREOTYPES:
CRAFI"ING A CAREER IN THE PRE- CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
PENNY FARFAN
THE ANTIPHON AS PARODY:
DJUNA BAR.J.'\!ES AND THE LITERARY TRADITION
J'v1AURA L. CRONIN-) ORTNER
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMINATION
JONATHAN'S SPATIAL TACTICS ON THE JACKSONIAN STAGE
NGHANA LEWIS
NEO-SLAVE DRAMA: NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE
IN ALICE CHILDRESS'S WEDDING BAND
CoNTRIBUTORS
25
46
61
79
96
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 17, NO. I (WINTER 2005)
CANNED COOKING: STAGE ACTORS, SCREEN
ACTING, AND CULTURAL HIERARCHY IN THE
UNITED STATES, 1912-1929
SEAN P. HOLMES
Academic treatments of the relationship between stage and
screen during the formative years of the film industry generally frame the
encounter between theatrical performers and the new medium in tech-
nological terms. What they often lose sight of is the degree to which that
encounter was shaped by the wider cultural context in which it took place
and, in particular, by debates about the nature of the cultural hierarchy in
an age in which performance as a commodity could be mechanically
reproduced. The stage stars who tried their hand at screen acting in the
teens and early twenties brought with them into the motion-picture stu-
dios a set of ideological baggage that played a key role in determining
their perception of the work in which they were engaged. Convinced
that, as theatre historian Mark Hodin recently put it, "conventionally
staged drama ... provided the best occasion and opportunity available for
acquiring cultural prestige," they saw themselves as the supreme practi-
tioners of the actor's art.
1
As soon as it became clear that stage reputa-
tions were no guarantee of screen success, therefore, they began to dis-
tance themselves from the movies, lamenting the waning of their cultur-
al authority and taking refuge in what modernist critics derisively referred
to as the genteel tradition in American culture.
The movies, as historian Robert Sklar has reminded us, "rose to
the surface of cultural consciousness from the bottom up, receiving their
support from the lowest and most invisible classes in American society."
2
In the late 1890s, storefront theatres, or nickelodeons, began to spring up
in the working-class neighborhoods of industrial cities across the United
States. By 1911, there were 201 such theatres in Manhattan alone, attract-
1
Mark Hodin, "The Disavowal of Ethnicity: Legitimate Theatre and the Social
Construction of Literary Value in Turn-of-the-Century America" Theatre journal 52 (May
2000): 212.
2 Robert Sklar, Movie Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New
York: Random House, 1975), 3.
6
Hou.ms
ing a weekly audience in excess of 900,000.3 Conscious of the deep-seat-
ed class prejudices of the old theatrical elite, historians have tended to
assume that the stars of the legitimate stage distanced themselves from
the nascent American ftlm industry primarily because they did not wish
to associate themselves with the cheap amusements of the urban poor.4
Though not entirely unfounded, this is an argument that oversimplifies
the complex relationship between stage and screen. In fact, the new
medium made little or no impact upon the collective consciousness of
American stage actors prior to about 1907 because, as Richard de
Cordova has persuasively argued, up until that date appearing in motion
pictures was simply not equated with the art of the stage actor. During
the formative years of the American cinema there was no discourse of
screen acting. Articles in the press focused upon the technology of mov-
ing pictures, paying scant attention to the human labor involved in the
production of films and fostering what de Cordova terms "the reification
of the apparatus."s
As American producers began to standardize their production
practices and the balance of their output shifted decisively in fa\'or of fic-
tional narratives, however, a discourse of cinema emerged that prioritized
the performances of those who appeared in moving pictures over the
technological dimensions of the new medium. A growing sensitivity to
the fictive nature of cinematic texts helped to establish the filmed body
as a site of fictional production and commentators upon the rapidly
growing output of the motion picture industry began for the first time to
make reference to "picture performers." Nevertheless, the representation
3 Statistics are from r-.Iichael M. Davis, Jr., The E:>..ploitation of Pleasure: A S tutjy
of Commercial Recreations in New Yotk City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), 28,
30, 33. For more on the movies as a preserve of the immigrant \\'orking classes see Sklar,
Movie-Made America, 3-16; Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Rise of Mass Culture and the
Motion Picture Industry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 27-36; Roy
Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We WilL Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-
1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni,ersity Press, 1983), 192-208; Kathy Peiss, Cheap
Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-ofthe Century New York (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1986), 139-62.
4 See, for example, Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture 1880-1920
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 192.
5 Richard de Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in
America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 23-26. For an earlier ver-
sion of the same argument, see Richard de Cordova, "The Emergence of the Star System
in America," Wide Angle 6, no. 4 (1985): 5.
CANNED COOKING 7
of their labor as acting remained decidedly problematic. As de Cordova
makes clear, much of the early writing on the so-called "picture per-
former" was characterized by a marked hesitancy about applying the term
acting, with all its connotations of high art, to a medium which lacked the
cultural legitimacy of the theatre. Not until the French company Pathe
began to release its Films D'Art, a series of fllms based upon celebrated
stage plays, in the United States in 1909 did a fully articulated discourse
of film acting begin to emerge. Drawing upon well-established theatrical
traditions, Pathe sold i ts products by publicizing the names of perform-
ers and highlighting their identity as creative artists, a strategy that vali-
dated the notion that the people who appeared in films were actors. With
the appearance of Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated stage actress of
the day, in its 1912 production of Camille, the argument that motion pic-
ture performers were engaged in something other than acting ceased to
be tenable.6
American film producers were just as eager as their French coun-
terparts to invest their motion pictures with a degree of artistic legitima-
cy. As early as 1907 they had begun to tap into the traditional cultural
heritage by adapting famous literary and dramatic works for the screen.
Their early "high-class" features had not, however, drawn upon the tal-
ents of well-known stage actors and the industry had continued to rely
for its labor force almost exclusively upon the vast reservoir of unknown
actors at the base of the theatrical hierarchy. The decisive shift towards a
policy of systematically exploiting the status of established stage stars
came in 1909 when the Edison Company signed up the French pan-
tomimist Pilar-Morin as a member of its stock company and began to use
her formidable reputation as a theatrical performer as a promotional
device. Recognizing a strategy that would enable them to differentiate
their products from those of their rivals in an increasingly competitive
market, other producers quickly followed suit and began hiring theatrical
luminaries to recreate their greatest roles on ftlm. This trend found its
fullest expression in the output of Famous Players, a film production
company set up in 1912 by one-time nickelodeon proprietor Adolph
Zukor to provide middle-class audiences with what he believed they
wanted to see-"Famous Players in Famous Plays."?
6 de Cordova, Picture Personalities, 26-39.
7
de Cordova, Picture Personalities, 40-45. See also, McArthur, Actors and Ameni:an
Culture, 195-96; Sklar, Movie-Made America, 41-45.
8 H Ou'>lES
Signing up the elite of the legitimate stage was not always a
straightforward process, however. Though Zukor was able to come to an
agreement with theatre magnates Charles and Daniel Frohman under
which they undertook to provide him with a steady supply of acting tal-
ent, most theatrical producers proved inimical to the idea of their star
performers accepting work in the movies. A. H. Woods, for example,
even went so far as to insert a clause into his contract that forbade actors
and actresses in his employ from accepting movie work.B Among actors
themselves, moreover, there was considerable hostility towards moving
pictures. In part, this stemmed from a reluctance on the part of many
members of the theatrical aristocracy to associate themselves too closely
with a mode of performance that lacked the cultural legitimacy of the
stage. Maude Adams, John Drew, David Warfield, Henry Miller, and
Frances Starr all turned down lucrative offers from movie producers on
the grounds that they did not wish to compromise their artistic integrity.9
Just as important, though, was a widespread fear among prominent stage
actors that the mass production of their stage performances would
reduce their exchange value in the theatrical marketplace. When James
K. Hackett, for instance, announced that he had signed up with Famous
Players to recreate his starring role in a theatrical version of The Prisoner
of Zenda, naysayers within the acting community warned him:
that he was making a grave mistake, that he was lower-
ing the price of his personality and his art, that the pub-
lic, able to see him at the 10 cent cinemas, would not pay
the high prices he charged at the theatre.lo
Such arguments notwithstanding, many celebrated stage per-
formers, Hackett among them, accepted offers of motion picture work
without any hesitation whatsoever. They did so for a variety of reasons.
Not least was the opportunity to earn salaries that were astronomical
even by the standards of the legitimate theatre. By 1913, an actor with
8 Pauline Frederick, "Why I Forsook the Stage for the Screen," Theatre Magazine
22 (Noyember 1915): 241. According to this article, Frederick was so incensed by Woods's
attempts to control her career that she retired from the stage altogether.
9 Harold Edwards, "The Menace of the Movies," Theatre Magazine 22 (October
1915): 178.
10 Verne Hardin Porter, "It's Like the Rush After a Strike of Gold," Green Book
Magazine 12 (November 1914), 824.
CANNED COOKING 9
an established stage reputation could reasonably expect to make between
$1500 and $3000 a week with a company like Zukor's Famous Players.11
Money was by no means the only factor at work, however. Some stage
performers saw in the motion pictures a means of elevating the tastes of
the masses. The famous tragedian E. H. Sothern, for example, claimed
to be fascinated by the idea of reaching out across the cultural and eco-
nomic gulf that separated the movie theatre from the playhouse. "One
reason that I find motion pictures intensely interesting is the great audi-
ence to which an actor plays," he explained to an interviewer while film-
ing The Man of Mystery with the Vitagraph Company in 1916.
Cheap amusement is popular amusement. Popular
amusement gives me an immense audience. . . .
Entertainment and instruction and inspiration can be
furnished at the price of six cents to those who could
never expect to pay a dollar-and-a-half, or even seventy-
five cents to go to a theatre to see a play.12
For other actors and actresses, unaware that nitrate stock had only a lim-
ited li fespan, the appeal of fllm lay in its capacity for capturing a per-
formance on celluloid and preserving it for posterity like any other great
work of art. It was an appeal that took on an added intensity as the
expansion of location shooting opened up opportunities for stage lumi-
naries to perform in rather more salubrious settings than the average
Broadway playhouse. "It is a significant factor," observed actress Pauline
Frederick in an article explaining her decision to abandon the stage for
the movies:
that when the Famous Players determined to adapt [Hall
Caine's novel The Eternal Ciry] to the screen, they decid-
ed to stage the production in Rome itself instead of
using the ubiquitous backdrop. While working in the
1
1 Salary figures are from Sklar, Movie-Made America, 72. For more on salaries in
the motion picture industry see McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 196-97.
1
2 Ada Patterson, "Mr. Sothern in the Movies," Theatre Magazine 24 (November
1916): 292.
10
shadow of the Coliseum and the other old buildings of
a bygone era, the thought occurred to me that the cam-
era was making a permanent record of my association
with those venerable edifices and the idea made a pro-
found impression.l3
HOLMES
The theatrical performers who took the motion-picture plunge
responded to the challenges of working in the film industry in a variety
of ways. A handful expressed unreserved enthusiasm for acting in the
movies, choosing to highlight the liberating aspects of their experience.
In an interview with theatrical commentator Richard Savage, for exam-
ple, one anonymous actress asserted that working in the film industry was
a rejuvenating experience for stage players who had grown stale in the
service of the legitimate theatre. "My idea," she explained:
is that it is a kind of school for spontaneity, if we can't
use so big a word as inspiration. Practice in it freshens
up the old actor wonderfully. He is apt to become per-
functory in his playing as any other professional man
who is filed down by the trite and the monotonous.14
Others were rather more circumspect, confessing to finding motion-pic-
ture work interesting but refusing to concede that it was any more taxing
than stage work. E. H. Sothern, for instance, was adamant that a day's
work before the cameras was less tiring than performing a demanding
theatrical role, claiming that his wife, tragedienne Julia Marlowe, fre-
quently had to be ministered to by a physician after playing the f10al scene
of Romeo and juliet on stage.15 Such braYado aside, though, the majority of
stage stars who made the switch struggled to adapt to the demands of the
moving pictures. In part, their difficulties stemmed from the ways in
which working conditions in the motion picture industry differed from
those in the legitimate theatre. Equally significant, however, were the
ways in which the new medium was redefining the very nature of acting.
Production practices in the rapidly maturing American fllrn
industry turned the daily routines of transplanted stage players upside
down, transforming the rhythm of their working lives. Actors and
13 Frederick, "Why I Forsook the Stage," 241.
14 Richard Savage, "Trying Out for the Movies," Theatre Magazine 23 (February
1916):75.
15 Patterson, "Mr. Sothern in the Movies," 292.
CANNED COOKJNG 11
actresses who were accustomed to performing in the evening, socializing
until well after midnight, and sleeping late the following morning sud-
denly found themselves having to rise early and work for the entire day.
Many found it hard to make the adjustment. ''All my life," observed one
stage star rather ruefully upon completing her first film,
I have lived so as to reach my highest point of vitality
between eight and eleven. That was when my work was
timed. But in [the movies] one begins work at nine in
the morning. It is extremely difficult to reach one's best
then. 16
To many members of America's industrial workforce in the early twenti-
eth century, her grievance would doubtless have seemed remarkably triv-
ial but, to paraphrase E. P. Thompson, it was entirely valid in terms of
her own experience.
Inside the early motion-picture studios, the men and women of
the legitimate stage encountered a set of power relations that stripped
them of much of their accustomed autonomy. "In the theatre, a star has
pretty much her own way in the matter of direction," explained actress
Laurette Taylor in an article detailing her experiences in the movie indus-
try, "but [in the movies) the director is an absolute monarch." Different
directors exercised their authority in different ways. Ernst Lubitsch, for
instance, allowed his casts very little creative freedom. "He used to show
them how to do everything right down to the minutest detail," recalled
his fellow director Clarence Brown in an interview in the 1960s,
He would take a cape and show the star how to put it
on. He supplied all the little movements. He was mag-
nificent because he knew his art better than anybody.
But his actors followed his performance. They had no
chance to give one of their own.17
1
6 Laurette Taylor, "Movie Acting," Equiry 8 (February 1923): 9.
17 Qrd. in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By (1968; reprint, London:
Columbus Books, Ltd, 1989), 150-51.
12 HOLMES
Brown himself was rather less autocratic, choosing to allow the per-
formers under his direction a greater degree of freedom in developing
their roles. Nevertheless, even he conceded that "in silent pictures ...
everything was transmitted by the director."
1
8 To be sure, some stage
actors were very conscious of their lack of experience in the new medi-
um and welcomed the guidance of the man behind the camera. Many
others, however, resented what they regarded as the loss of an important
star prerogative.
To make things even more difficult for the men and women of
the legitimate theatre, flim as a technology effected a thoroughgoing
reconfiguration of the performance process, further eroding the degree
of control that they exercised over their work. The "primitive" cinema of
the period prior to about 1909 had left the performance conventions of
the stage largely intact. For the most part, it had situated the spectator at
a fixed distance from the action and framed and staged individual scenes
in theatrical-style sets with the consequence that the vast majority of early
fllms amounted to little more than theatrical performances committed to
celluloid. By the time the stars of the legitimate stage began to move into
the movie industry in significant numbers, however, a profound shift in
both narrative and stylistic practices was underway which presaged the
emergence of what f.tlm historians have termed the classical mode of
film production. Moviemakers were beginning to employ new stylistic
devices that moved the viewpoint of the spectator back and forth with-
in the narrative space and, as a consequence, the shot had replaced the
scene as the basic unit of cinematic construction. Production schedules
dictated by the imperatives of industrial efficiency, moreover, meant that
fllms were rarely shot in dramatic order.
1
9 Denied what Barry King terms
"control over the pacing and behavioural architecture of [their] perform-
ance[s]," many transplanted stage actors experienced a profound sense of
disorientation in the motion-picture studios.
2
0 ''Acting here in New York
on the stage I go on for a thirty-minute stretch," explained Laurette
Taylor,
18 Qtd. in Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 151.
19 On the shift from the primitive to the classical, see Da,id Bordwell, Janet
Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hoi!Jwood Cinema: Film Sryle and Mode of
Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), 157-73.
20 Barry King, "Articulating Stardom," Screen 26 (September-October 1985): 32.
CANNED COOKING
I am allowed to progress step by step to a climax
through logical shades and nuances of feeling. But for
pictures one does three minutes of acting and then there
is a wait of half an hour while cameras are brought in
closer and lights are adjusted. Then the actor must
begin where he left off a half-hour before, striking the
exact shade he was employing.2t
13
In mechanically reproducing their commodified labor, film as a
technology also denied motion-picture performers a direct and unmedi-
ated relationship with their audiences. In the theatre, stage players had
always depended very heavily upon the responses of the men and women
who paid to watch them perform. "However good an actor may be the
audience makes him better," explained George Arliss, one of the very few
stars of the legitimate stage to achieve lasting success in the movies, in his
autobiography.
It is the audience which tells the actor of imagination
just how far to go in the expression of an emotion. It
is his audience which causes to jump into his head effec-
tive bits of business and new and better readings. It is
that magnetism which on occasion will lift an actor
above himself and cause him to achieve a great moment
which he may never be able to repeat. He is uplifted by
his audience and inspired by his art.
22
On the movie set, by contrast, he performed only in front of the direc-
tor and his various technical assistants. For some stage actors, Arliss
amongst them, this new environment brought welcome relief from the
anxieties that afflicted them before going on stage in front of a live audi-
ence. For the majority, however, performing in such a thoroughly unthe-
atrical atmosphere proved somewhat intimidating. Laurette Taylor, for
example, compared the experience of acting in front of technicians who
scrutinized her every move through tinted eye-glasses to "being in a room
with a crowd of fantastic ogres, all with the eye of a Cyclops, and that
orb a dark, forbidding blue."23
21 Taylor, "Movie Acting," 10-11.
22 George Arliss, My Ten Years in the Studios (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1940), 43.
23 Taylor, "Movie Acting," 10.
14 HOLMES
In this new and unfamiliar environment, the stars of the legiti-
mate stage had very little to fall back on in terms of their reservoir of
professional skills for the silent pictures robbed them of what had always
been their chief means of artistic expression-their voices. Even in an
era of stage spectacle and elaborate set design, theatre in the United
States remained an aural as much as a visual art form and all stage actors
relied very heavily upon their vocal abilities, particularly when called upon
to portray extremes of emotion. "When an actress on the speaking stage
is shouting or acting disagreement or violence," claimed Laurette Taylor,
"the audience hardly looks at her face. Her voice is everything."24 The
silent cinema, by contrast, was an essentially visual medium and stage
players who accepted motion picture work found that they had to rely
exclusively upon movement, gesture, and facial expression-hitherto
only secondary weapons in their professional armory-to convey mean-
ing to their audiences.
To complicate matters still further, screen acting in the United
States was in the midst of a major transformation even before Adolph
Zukor launched his "Famous Players" concept. With the shift towards
filmic narratives driven by character psychology, as Roberta E. Pearson
has demonstrated, screen actors had started to move away from a histri-
onically coded style of performance that drew upon the conventions of
theatrical melodrama towards a verisimilarly coded style of performance
that evoked "real life." In the process, they had dispensed with the "prim-
itive" cinema's pre-established repertoire of stock gestures in favor of a
less prescriptive approach to acting that depended upon the detailed
observation of human behavior. Under the direction of D. W Griffith, a
key figure in the transition to the verisimilar code, performers like Lillian
Gish and Mary Pickford had embraced a style of acting that relied upon
facial expression as opposed to extravagant body language for the trans-
mission of thoughts and emotions. To heighten the effectiveness of what
was quickly labeled the "American style," moreover, Griffith and other
directors had broken with traditional aesthetic principles and begun to
employ closer framings in their ftlms, a cinematic technique that demand-
ed restraint rather than self-conscious theatricality on the part of the per-
former.2S
24 Taylor, "Movie Acting," 9.
25 On the shift from the histrionic code to the verisimilar code in the American
cinema, see Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Peiformance Style in
the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 38-51. See
also Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Holly1vood Cinema, 189-92.
CANNED COOKING 15
The stars of the legitimate stage were by no means unfamiliar
with the tenets of dramatic realism. Though D. W Griffith subsequent-
ly did his best to persuade cinemagoers that stage acting was synonymous
with the histrionic code, the verisimilar code had been the dominant style
in the legitimate theatre since the late nineteenth century.
2
6 Nonetheless,
realism in the context of the American cinema required an approach to
acting that was markedly different from that which prevailed on the
American stage. An early handbook for would-be screen actors explained
the difference in the following terms:
On the stage it is necessary to overdraw the character in
order to convey a realistic impression to the audience;
exact naturalism on the stage would appear as unreal as
an unrouged face under the spotlights. The camera,
however, demands absolute realism. Actors must act as
naturally and as leisurely as they would in their own
homes. Their expressions must be no more pro-
nounced than they would be in real life. . . . Any devia-
tion from this course leads to the most mortifying
results on the screen. The face, enlarged many times,
becomes clearly that of an actor instead of a real per-
son. The assumed expression of hate or fear which
would seem so natural on the stage is merely grotesque
on film.n
George Arliss claimed that the adjustments stage actors had to make
when they performed in front of the camera were "merely an accentua-
tion of the difference we make in the rendering of scenes in large and
small theatres."28 Many transplanted stage stars, however, struggled to
adapt to the demands of cinematic verisimilitude and experienced a pro-
found loss of confidence upon seeing their performances projected onto
the screen. When Laurette Taylor, for instance, saw the rushes of her first
day's work on Peg 0' My Heart in the early twenties, she was appalled. "It
was," she recalled, "all character- and grimaces."29
26 Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, 21-27, 94-95.
27 John Emerson and Anita Loos, Breaking into the Movies (New York: The James
A. McCann Company, 1921), 9- 10.
28 Arliss, My Ten Years in the Studios, 54-55.
29 Taylor, "Movie Acting," 9.
16 HOLMES
In the end, very few of the theatrical luminaries who tried their
hands at motion-picture acting succeeded in translating their stage appeal
into screen success. As Laurette Taylor's experiences demonstrate, the
flow of prominent actors from stage to screen would never entirely dry
up. By 1916, however, it was clear to most commentators that cinema as
a medium was no respecter of stage reputations. As Harry Edwards
observed in a 1915 article for Theatre Magazine,
Mrs. Leslie Carter in Dubarry and The Heart of Maryland
was presented before thousands of people in a most
unfavorable light that gave no suggestion of her per-
formances when these plays were acted on the stage.
An audience judging of Henrietta Crosman's capabilities
from her screen appearances would never suspect that
she was a most engaging light comedienne. William
Faversham in pictures is no better than a hundred other
actors who on the stage would be leading men in small
city stock companies. Lillian Russell's reputation for
beauty has not been enhanced by the testimony of the
camera. Forbes Robertson in a picture version of
Hamlet-an impossible undertaking to begin with-
showed nothing of his histrionic attainments, and so the
list might be continued at great length.30
Disappointed at the relatively meager returns on their investment in the
grandees of the American stage, movie producers shifted their energies
back to the promotion of performers with proven cinematic appeal,
many of whom had bypassed the legitimate theatre altogether ..
As early as 1909, so-called "picture personalities"- screen per-
formers whose fame rested not upon their previous work in the theatre
but upon their appearances in motion pictures-had already begun to
emerge out of the efforts of film companies to publicize their products.
As Richard de Cordova has demonstrated, though the discourse that pro-
duced the early "picture personalities" had sought to legitimize their on-
screen work by making reference to their theatrical backgrounds, their
30 Edwards, "The Menace of the Movies," 178. For a refutation of Edwards's
claim that good stage actors made poor movie actors, see Daniel Frohman and W. A.
Brady, "Do Motion Pictures Mean the Death of the Drama?" Theatre Magazine 22
(December 1916): 309-10.
CANNED COOKJNG 17
identities had been constructed primarily through the films they appeared
in, together with the publicity materials that surrounded those ftlms. In
essence, these early "picture personalities" were prototype movie stars
rather than simply old-style theatrical stars appearing on fllm.31 With the
virtual abandonment of the "Famous Players" concept after 1916, stage
experience ceased to have any great relevance in the context of the
American cinema. Director D. W Griffith even went so far as to claim
that theatrical training was an impediment to the would-be screen actor.32
The focus of the emerging discourse of motion picture acting shifted
from the professional experience of motion-picture performers to their
existence outside of the flims in which they appeared. Screen success,
meanwhile, came to depend less upon acting prowess in the traditional
sense than upon "personality," an altogether more nebulous quality
which, in the words of one contemporary acting manual, combined "tal-
ent, health, mental and commercial ability, and personal appearance."33
The emergence of screen acting as a discrete branch of the per-
forming arts coincided with a gradual shift in the axis of the motion-pic-
ture industry from New York City, the long-time capital of American
show business, to Hollywood, its new frontier. By 1915, southern
California was already the most important center for the production of
motion pictures in the United States, accounting for between 62 percent
and 75 percent of the American film industry's total output. A number
of firms resisted the temptation to relocate to California, most signifi-
cantly Famous Players-Lasky which continued to produce pictures in its
studio in Astoria, Queens well into the twenties and remained heavily
reliant on talent from the Broadway stage. By 1922, however, most of the
major companies had consolidated operations in their West Coast facili-
ties and Hollywood's share of production had increased to somewhere in
the region of 84 percent. 34 With the bulk of motion-picture production
31 On the emergence of the "picture personality," see de Cordova, Picture
Personalities, 50-97. See also de Cordova, "The Emergence of the Star System in America,"
8-10.
32 On Griffith's attitude towards stage actors, see Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, 94-
95.
33 This description of the prerequisites of motion-picture success is from
Frances Agnew, Motion Picture Acting (New York: Reliance Newspapers Syndicate, 1913),
31.
34 On the shift in the axis of the motion-picture industry, see Richard
Koszarski, An Evening} Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1990), 98-102.
18
HOlMES
concentrated in California, the specificity of screen acting took on an
added intensity. By 1920, the majority of screen actors went into the
motion-picture studios without ever having trodden the boards.
Moreover, as Richard de Cordova has noted, the discourse of stardom
that began to emerge during the teens and early twenties worked to dis-
tance movie actors from many of the traditions of the legitimate stage.
On screen, the men and women of the silver screen projected an image
of youth, beauty, and healthy sexuality. Off screen, they enjoyed a luxu-
rious lifestyle which was the consumer ideal made real. Impossibly dis-
tant yet uniquely visible, they rapidly displaced their counterparts on the
legitimate stage as objects of popular fascination.35
The emergence of the movies as a central institution in the cul-
tural life of the United States had devastating consequences for the legit-
imate theatre. In New York City, still the nation's theatrical capital, it con-
tinued to flourish. Out in the provinces, however, it drifted into an irre-
versible decline during the 1920s as the audience that had once patron-
ized the opera houses of small-town America turned instead to the
cheaper and more reliable form of commercial entertainment on offer in
picture houses. Between 1910 and 1925, the number of theatres available
for legitimate productions outside the major metropolitan centers fell
from 1549 to 674. During that same period, the average number of com-
panies on tour in an average week dwindled from 236 to 34.36 Though
theatrical impresarios like Lee Shubert continued to claim that the
American theatre industry was in perfectly good health, many observers
began to predict that it was about to collapse altogether with catastroph-
35 On the emergence of a discourse of stardom and the movie actor as an idol
of consumption, see de Cordova, Picture Personalities, 98-116. On the concept of a "cul-
ture of abundance," see Warren I. Susman, "Toward a History of the Culture of
Abundance," in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), xix-xxx.
36 Figures for the number of provincial theatres a\ailable to touring companies
are from Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 29. Figures for the decline in the number of travel-
ling companies are from Robert McLaughlin, Broadway and Hoi!Juood: A History of
Economic Interaction (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 1. The latter figures presumably refer
to New York-based companies rather than to the dozens of small road sho\\'S that toured
the minor theatrical circuits of rural America during the 1920s. In a surYey of the theatre
business sponsored by the Actors' Equity Association, Alfred Bernheim reported that
there were still some 300 tent-rep companies touring the small towns of the South and
Midwest during the summer of 1926. See Alfred Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre
(New York: Actors' Equity Association, 1932), 98-99.
CANNED COOKJNG 19
ic consequences for the cultural life of the American people. "Outside
of New York City, in practically all cities of less than 100,000 the road is
dead and in most cities up to 1,000,000," lamented the prominent the-
atrical commentator Walter Prichard Eaton in 1926.
The time is fast coming when the spoken drama, the lit-
erary vehicle through which has for twenty-four cen-
turies voiced the highest aspirations, expressed the
deepest poetry of mankind, will be unknown to the
greatest proportion of Americans so far as our profes-
sional theatre is concerned.37
Given the inadequacies of published census data relating to the
number of people employed in the entertainment industry in the 1920s,
it is impossible to assess in precise statistical terms how the death of the
road impacted upon the American acting community. Impressionistic
evidence, however, suggests that, while the stars of the legitimate stage
were scarcely affected, it ended the stage careers of the many hundreds
of performers who lacked the professional prerequisites for finding reg-
ular employment either in the major theatrical centers or in other branch-
es of the performing arts. "The moving pictures have eliminated ... a
certain type of actor that was familiar in my early days," observed George
Arliss from the vantage point of the late 1930s.
I refer to the ageing actors and actress whom we have
never heard of, but who nevertheless have "had their
day," whose past successes are remembered by no-one
but themselves, and are recorded only in scraps of yel-
lowing newspaper preserved and guarded as though
they were the family jewels (as indeed they are). They
have always seemed pathetic figures. And there are the
men and women who have grown gray in the service of
the theatre and have never arrived at the dignity of a
press notice except in the chilly environment of "Other
parts were taken by ... "or "Amongst those who gave a
37
Walter Prichard Eaton, "The Strangling of Our Theatre," Vaniry Fair 26
(April 1926): 47. For an alternative ,iew as put forward by a prominent theatrical impre-
sario, see Lee Shubert, ''All's Right With the Theatrical World" Vaniry Fair 26 (June 1926):
48, 11 7.
20
good account of themselves may be mentioned ... " or
"We must not omit a word of praise to ... " always fol-
lowed by a list of names which nobody ever reads.J8
HOLMES
Faced with a marked diminution in their collective status, the
men and women of the legitimate stage began to cast around for ways of
reestablishing their cultural authority. In so doing, they found themselves
drawn into a much wider debate about the nature of cultural hierarchy.
By the 1920s, a growing number of cultural commentators, confronted
by a kaleidoscopic array of new cultural forms, had rejected the high-
brow /lowbrow binarism that had structured the market for commercial
entertainment since the middle of the nineteenth century and embraced
an increasingly inclusive view of what constituted art. Gilbert Seldes, for
example, emerged as a vocal champion of the democratization of culture,
condemning what he saw as a tendency among many Americans to
assume "that which is serious and pretentious is by nature high art and
that which is simple and cheap cannot possibly have any artistic value."
Placed in this conceptual framework, the cinema was an art form in its
own right, to be assessed on its own terms rather than in relation to the
legitimate theatre or any other branch of the performing arts. In his
extensive and highly influential writings on what he termed the "lively
arts," Seldes repeatedly warned against making comparisons between
stage and screen, insisting that the two were entirely separate media and
that the latter owed little or nothing to the former.39 Even when they
ignored his admonitions and turned their attention to the relative merits
of screen acting and stage acting, like-minded critics were quick to
acknowledge the achievements of the men and women who earned their
living in the motion-picture studios. In a 1927 article in Theatre Magazine,
for example, Benjamin De Cassares was fulsome in his praise for the stars
of the silent screen, asserting that "the speaking drama cannot surpass
the art of Emil Jannings, Charlie Chaplin, Janet Gaynor and Adolphe
Menjou in their spheres."40
38 Arliss, My Ten Years in the Studios, 3.
39 On Gilbert Seldes and his significance as a cultural critic, see .t'vfichael
Kammen, The Livefy Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the
United States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. 83-119, 209-43.
For Seldes's views on tbe relationship between stage and screen, see Gilbert Seldes, "How
tO Save the Movies From Stage Blight" Theatre Magazine 42 (November 1925): 22.
40 Benjamin De Casseres, "Are the Pictures and the Stage Antagonistic?"
Theatre Magazine 47 Ganuary 1924): 23.
CANNED COOKJNG
21
To guardians of what Seldes termed the genteel tradition in cul-
tural criticism, however, such views were tantamount to heresy and they
continued to dismiss motion pictures as cheap amusements and, as such,
unworthy of comparison with the high art of the American stage. Even
as the legitimate theatre drifted towards the periphery of cultural life in
the United States during the 1920s, a theatrical discourse began to emerge
which equated stage plays with the high-quality output of skilled craft
workers and movies with the standardized commodities churned out by
factories. "The motion picture does not constitute an art, it is more in
the nature of an industry," asserted Maxwell Perriton, editor of Theatre
Magazine, in a 1927 article that exemplified the traditionalist point of
view.
Its whole object is the portrayal of certain human emo-
tions in a manner that shall interest the greatest number
of individuals. . . . The theatre appeals to a few and
almost a discriminating few. It is the difference between
custom tailoring and the ready-made variety of cloth-
ing.41
Insofar as the rationalizing tendencies at work in the commercial
theatre and in other culture industries in the early twentieth century fos-
tered high levels of standardization and left only limited space for artis-
tic innovation, the traditionalist argument was a specious one. But to the
aristocrats of the American stage, unable to make their mark on moving
pictures and anxious to sacralize the legitimate theatre as the highest
expression of the actor's art, it held considerable appeal. Some promi-
nent stage performers, seizing upon the suggestion that a smaller audi-
ence was, by definition, a more discriminating audience, tried to dress up
the contraction of the market for theatrical entertainment as a positi,e
development. Writing in Vaniry Fair in 1926, for example, actor John
Emerson called upon his fellow performers to "cease mourning the loss
of the true theatre to our great moron population" and to welcome the
opportunity to cultivate a more select audience for their talents. ''The
Great Mass," he asserted,
41 Maxwell Perriton, "Why Compare the Stage \'l:'ith the Screen?: Editorial"
Theatre Magazine 45 (11arch 1927): 16.
22
never patronized the theatre because they liked it but
only because no other form of entertainment was avail-
able to them ... . For let us not forget in all this senti-
mentalizing about the disappearance of the one-night
stand, that there were never enough intelligent people in
one-night stands to support good plays. It was always
the tawdriest and least worthwhile "shows" that caught
the fancy of the small-town crowd and the intelligent
people of those places waited for their theatre going
until they visited the larger centers just as they do today .
. . . So for this desertion we should give them thanks and
bend our energies towards continuing to give mental,
emotional, and spiritual nourishment to the intelligent
minority who are left to us, and for whom the real the-
atre exists.42
HOLMES
Other grandees of the legitimate stage preferred to focus upon the qual-
ity and artistic authenticity of their commodified labor, assuring both
their fans and their fellow performers that, whatever their merits, the
movies would never displace the theatre at the summit of the cultural
hierarchy. "I don't think the theatre will die in ten years or in ten thou-
sand years because I don't think it is possible to destroy beauty," declared
acclaimed actress Frances Starr in a 1928 article in Theatre Magazine that
reflected the views of many of the old theatrical aristocracy.
The speaking stage ... must survive as the ultimate reply
to the artistic imperative, must always remain the high-
est common denominator for artistic expressiveness.
The vital need for beauty which links actor and audi-
ence, which assembles the essential souls in the theatre,
properly distributing them before and behind the foot-
lights, testifies in itself to the fact that death can no
more confront the theatre, the speaking theatre, the elo-
quent, lyric, singing theatre than it can confront any
abstract thing. In the movies you have a splendid feast
but it is canned cooking. In the theatre you have the real
thing.43
42 John Emerson, "The Great Public and Its Theatre," Vaniry Fair 27
(September 1926): 65, 96.
43 Frances Starr, "The Theatre Will Not Perish," Theatre Magazine 47 Ganuary
1928): 23.
CANNED COOKING
23
Regardless of the terms in which they articulated their position, howev-
er, most stage stars had taken refuge by the mid 1920s in the view that
cinema was the bastard offspring of more elevated cultural forms and, as
such, unworthy of comparison with the high art of the legitimate stage.
The relationship between stage and screen is a complex one and
one that is subject to a constant process of renegotiation. What emerges
from an examination of the culture wars of the 1920s is that the genera-
tion of stage actors that reached maturity before the advent of ftlm and
that failed, for the most part, to rise to the challenges of the new medi-
um came to define it in adversarial terms. Unwilling to acknowledge the
degree to which the movies had transformed the cultural landscape of
the United States, members of the old theatrical aristocracy continued to
represent themselves as guardians of the highbrow tradition in the per-
forming arts and, by extension, the natural arbiters of what constituted
good acting. The development of sound in the late 1920s presented the
men and women of the legitimate stage with another opportunity to
stamp their authority on the motion-picture industry. Though "talkies"
were guickly brought into conformity with the classical paradigm that bad
emerged during the silent era, the immediate effect of the new technolo-
gy was to precipitate a reversion to an older and more theatrical style of
ftlmmaking.44 Desperate for performers with trained voices and experi-
ence of delivering dialogue, Hollywood producers turned once more to
the Broadway stage for acting talent.45 Fearing that they were about to be
displaced, screen actors reacted angrily to the sudden influx of stage play-
ers into the f.tlm studios. It guickly became clear, however, that their anx-
ieties were largely unfounded. The parvenus of the Broadway stage, like
their predecessors in the "Famous Players" era, struggled to adapt to the
demands of a medium that still prioritized the visual over the aural and
very few were able to make an impact in motion pictures. Even so, the
uncertainties of the changeover period left a lasting legacy of bitterness
in Hollywood that manifested itself in an unwillingness on the part of
44 On the insertion of sound into the stylistic paradigm of the classical
Hollywood cinema, see Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema,
301-04.
45 On the demand for stage personnel in Hollywood after the advent of sound,
see McLaughlin, Broadwtry and Hollywood, 105-07.
24 HOL'\fES
most screen actors to defer to the grandees of the legitimate stage on any
matter relating to their professional lives. "Once we of the motion pic-
ture world listened with eager ear to every piece of advice that dropped
from the lips of the people of the theatre," wrote movie star Carmel
Myers in a 1929 article that highlighted the widening gulf between stage
actors and screen actors. "Today, hard experience has taught us that we
know more of our own work than any outsider can teach us."46
4
6 Carmel Myers, "\X'hy Stage Actors Fail in the Talkies," Theatre Magazine 49
(February 1929): 32. For more on the growing animosity of screen actors towards stage
actors as it manifested itself in the late 1920s, see Sean P. Holmes, ''And the Villain Still
Pursued Her: The Actors' Equity Association in Hollywood, 1919-1929," Historical
Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 25 (l\-farch 2005): 27-50.
jOURNAL OF A\1ERJCAN DRAMA AND 17, NO. 1 (WINTER 2005)
ETHEL WATERS AND RACIAL STEREOTYPES:
CRAFTING A CAREER IN THE PRE-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
PEACH PITTENGER
On January 3, 1939, Ethel Waters made her Broadway debut as
a dramatic actress in Dorothy and DuBose Heyward's southern melodra-
ma, Mamba's Daughters. Waters thus joined a number of starring actresses
who performed on Broadway during the 1938-39 season, including
Katherine Cornell in No Time for Comec!J, Katharine Hepburn in The
Philadelphia St01]', and Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes. Waters was
well aware that she had crossed both a professional and color line that
year.
1
Recalling her opening night, Waters proudly reflected, ''While the
carriage trade was arriving outside, I sat at the [Empire Theatre) dressing
table where all the great actresses, past and present, had sat as they made
up their faces . . . Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes,
Katherine Cornell, Lynn Fontaine, and all the others."
2
Mamba's Daughters, directed by Guthrie McClintic, had a large,
mixed-race cast of 27 performers including Georgette Harvey, Willie
Bryant, Canada Lee, Alberta Hunter, and Jose Ferrer; an ensemble of
thirteen actors portraying plantation workers completed the cast. Prior to
this production, Waters had enjoyed a successful career as a musical star,
combining tours on the black vaudeville circuit with appearances in New
York nightclubs and musical revues. In addition, she had become a pop-
ular blues-recording star. Despite these substantial successes, the dramat-
ic role in a Broadway play marked a giant step up for Waters. She claimed
that it was a miracle that "they would even consider her, the heat-waving
torch gal, for the powerful part."3
1 Waters's career advance into drama is highlighted by the fact that Swingin' the
Dream, a black musical version of A Midsummer Nigbt's Dream starring Louis Armstrong,
"Moms" Mabley and Butterfly McQueen, was also running on Broadway; at an earlier
time in her career, Waters mighr have been a shoe-in for a lead role in that musical pro-
duction.
2
Ethel Waters, His Eye is on the Sparrow (New York: Bantam, 1952), 303.
3 Sidney M. Shalett, "Harlem's Ethel Waters: Notes on the Lady Who
Currently Appears in 'Cabin in the Sky,' " New York Times, 10 November 1940, sec. 9,
1+.
26 PITIENGER
Waters's dramatic performance in Mamba's Daughters is emblem-
atic of the artistic challenges faced by black performers who played to
predominately white audiences during the pre-Civil Rights era. An exam-
ination of the text and Waters's performance, viewed within the context
of her long-term career, reveals a complex cultural web of race-based
beliefs, assumptions, and expectations by white America that severely
hampered its ability to respond to black experience, or the expression of
that experience through performance, outside of a deeply ingrained racist
paradigm. Like other black performers of the era, Waters was caught in
an impossible dilemma when it came to self-expression. She wanted to
articulate her own authentic (i.e., individual and specific) black experi-
ence, but she played to a predominately white audience that was mired in
a cultural miasma of racial stereotyping and primitivism. The disconnec-
tion between Waters's intentions and the spectators' assumptions result-
ed in diametrically opposed ideas about representation of a black authen-
ticity.
Waters's dramatic debut reveals the layered complexities of the
challenge she faced. The Heywards, well-meaning liberal playwrights,
naively assumed that they could create a black character who transcend-
ed minstrel traditions and stereotypes. Waters used the character in an
attempt to renegotiate black authenticity and representation with white
audiences and critics, both of whom were conditioned by decades of
racist theatrical stereotyping. Theatre critic Brooks Atkinson, who tried to
evaluate Waters's performance without conceding to racially based, low-
ered expectations, found himself in the midst of a controversy. Everyone
involved-the playwrights, Waters, audiences, and critics-approached
the production with good intentions, but none recognized the complexi-
ty of Waters's dilemma as a black female actor. Her dramatic debut serves
as a window into the complex racial climate of the theatrical world of the
pre-Civil Rights era, especially the ongoing negotiation for control of
black representation between performer and audience.
Waters's performance as Hagar proved to be a turning point in
her career, as she moved from blues and musical revue performer to dra-
matic actress specializing in matriarchal and "mammy" roles. After
Mamba's Daughters, she appeared as Petunia, a wronged but loyal wife, in
the stage and movie productions of Cabin in the S.-9' in the early 1940s; a
grandmother in Elia Kazan's 1949 movie Pin.-9', which earned Waters a
best supporting actress nomination; and as Beulah, a domestic in her own
television show in 1950. Today, she is best remembered for her perform-
ance as Berenice, a classic "mammy" role, in Carson McCuller's play
(1950) and movie (1952) The Member of the Wedding. Despite Waters's
WATERS
Young, handsome Ethel Waters as a singing star circa 1920s.
Photo by courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations;
photographer: Craine of Detroit.
27
28
PITTENGER
attempt to transcend stereotyping constraints, she managed to extend her
career by two decades only by surrendering to them.
Waters's musical career had declined dramatically after the 1933-
34 season, in which she peaked as a high-salaried, popular performer in
Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer. Between that show and Mamba's
Daughters six years later, Waters's only notewor thy appearance was as a
special guest in the 1937 Cotton Club Express revue. One reason for the
decline was the effect of the Depression on the music business. The
recording industry was devastated and the black vaudeville circuit Theatre
Owners Booking Association ceased operations in 1930, with the result
that many musical performers' careers did not survive the decade.4
Waters's own opportunities in black musical revues declined. In addition
to the dire economic conditions, Waters, in her mid-thirties and fighting
a losing battle with weight, was past her prime as a sexy musical star.
Waters's problems, however, were not just economic or personal.
Two decades earlier, during the Harlem Renaissance, black
artists, writers, and performers all faced the same dilemma. Should black
artists create literature, music, art, and theatre that derived from and
spoke to black identity, or should they sublimate their individual, specific
black experiences in favor of art that addressed a broader, more univer-
sal (i.e., not racially centered) human identity? Was universal art created
by black artists even a possibility in a racially divided country? And to
whom should they direct their art? Richard Wright declared that black
artists had only two choices-to either help blacks mold a much-needed
new consciousness or, by addressing whites, to merely "continue begging
the question of black humanity."S For most artists, however, the dilemma
was much more complicated, due to the artists' own identity issues, artis-
tic purposes, fi nancial needs, and desire to be recognized and accepted by
white American society. As a result, W E. B. Du Bois's concept of dou-
ble consciousness-self awareness through the eyes of others, feeling
one's "twoness" as "an American, a Negro" -emerged as the core dilem-
ma for the Harlem Renaissance generation.6 The artists of the 1920s
4 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesry: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Noonday Press, 1995), 410-13.
5 Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," The Portable Harlem
Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 194-
205.
6 WE. B. DuBois, The Soul of Black Folks, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and
Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W W Norton & Company, 1999), 11.
'X'ATERS 29
grappled with the impossible challenge of expressing an authentic (i.e.,
specific, individual) black identity and experience within the confines of
a divisive society that imposed its own racial beliefs, prejudices, and
stereotypes onto black Americans.
In 1939, Waters still struggled with that same dilemma. Even
though she believed that the role of Hagar offered a rare opportunity for
artistic expression of her authentic self, it is equally true that, with this
role, Waters traded one racial stereotype for another in order to prolong
her career. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues, only two categories of rep-
resentation were available to black women:
At the bottom of the social hierarchy 1s the black
woman ... manipulated as sexual object or as servant
... [f]wo images predominate: the black woman who is
regarded as sexually available and equated with the pros-
titute- "Brown sugar": and the desexualized mammy
of the Aunt Jemima type.7
Waters's Hagar fits within Pieterse's framework as a transitional role
between prescribed racial representations, with Waters moving from
"brown sugar" to "mammy." Waters and her supporters attempted to
counter the stereotype by portraying her as an immensely talented natu-
ral-born actress whose performance transcended race. Yet Waters's
achievement was limited at best, hobbled by not only the Heywards' lurid
script and stereotypical characters, but also her own untrained acting
method and the racial climate in which she performed in 1939. Mamba's
Daughters appealed to a voyeuristic white audience, whose idea of black
authenticity was based on a long history of racial stereotypes. The audi-
ence's understanding stood in direct opposition to Waters's own ideas,
which resisted a racially centered identity but included race as an impor-
tant component of the whole. Depending upon one's point of view,
Waters's Hagar could be perceived as either a fully realized dramatic char-
acter or a dangerously thrilling and fearful racial stereotype.
Waters expected that the "staggering emotional impact [of]
Mamba's Daughters, written by a Southern white man and his wife" would
be the vehicle that earned her a place alongside the great Broadway
7 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western
Popular Entertainment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 178.
30
PnT ENGER
actresses who had also performed at the Empire, several of whom were
regarded as first ladies of the American theatre.s However, Waters's tim-
ing for her Broadway debut was less than auspicious. Hattie MacDaniel
won an Oscar for Mammy in Gone with the Wind that year. In fact, Waters
and a m b a ~ Daughter had more in common with MacDaniel and Gone
with the Wind than Katharine Hepburn and The Philadelphia Story.
Dorothy and Du Bose Heyward's script-a simplistic, sensation-
alistic melodrama that invokes, and depends upon, racial stereotypes-
seems an unlikely vehicle for Waters's dramatic debut. The story spans 20
years, from the 1910s to 1930s, and is set in South Carolina. Hagar, a
large, slow-witted woman, is convicted of assault and "sentenced" to a
plantation in the Sea Islands where she works as a field hand. She pro-
vides money for her daughter Lissa, who is being raised by Hagar's own
mother, Mamba, in Charleston. Hagar and Lissa have little contact until
Lissa, as a young woman, visits the plantation before embarking on a
singing career in New York. During the visit, Lissa is raped by Gilly, one
of the plantation men. When Hagar and Mamba conceal the resulting
pregnancy (including the birth and death of the baby), Gilly blackmails
them. Hagar, simplistically noble and impulsively violent, kills Gilly and
then commits suicide in order to preserve Lissa's reputation and career.
The plantation mise-en-scene, anachronistic for a play set in the
early 1900s, provides an odd mix of romanticized Dixie life filled with
"happy darkies" who live low lives of immorality and violence; the plan-
tation is a safe place away from the evils of the world and, at the same
time, a world unto itself, rife wit h crime, passion, double-crossings, and
danger. The action of the play includes a rousing church service, gospel
singing, dancing, craps games, and the obligatory razor fight. EYen as the
Heywards attempted to write an honest play about black life, they repro-
duced and reinforced the prevailing stereotypes, not fully recognizing the
complexity of racial representations of the era. Their 1927 Broadway
endeavor, Porgy, also employed racial stereotyping such as superstitious
characters, gambling, and spirituals. Black critics found both Porgy and its
offshoot, George and Ira Gershwin's 1935 Porgy and Bess, problematic due
to the outsider status of the white authors. Hall Johnson criticized
Gershwin's inauthentic black music, supposedly based on trips to
Charleston for local color. He also found fault with the stereotypical char-
8 Waters, His E)'e, 303.
WATERS 31
acters, which were "imprisoned in white Broadway's conceptions of black
culture."
9
The Heywards' theatrical representations of black life, derived
from minstrelsy's comedic and musical depiction of plantation life, had
been present in plays and musicals for decades. By the 1880s, the ubiqui-
tous Uncle Cabin revivals often featured nostalgic musical numbers
performed by large plantation choruses. In addition to the romanticized
plantation setting, blacks were theatrically represented as dangerous and
violent, as exhibited in the popular coon songs of the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Charles Trevathan's "The Bully Song," sung by May Irwin in the
Broadway show The Widow Jones in 1895, centered on a razor fight
between two black men: "Razors 'gun a flyin' ,/ niggers 'gun to
squawk, ... /When I got through with bully, a doctor and a nurse/Wa'nt
no good to dat nigger, so they put him in a hearse." The tradition of
racial stereotyping continued in the early twentieth century with Al
]olson's performance of the plantation song "Swanee" in 1919, the musi-
cal revue Africana's portrayal of the "hypothetical delights of a Dixie par-
adise" in 1927, and Porgy and Bess in 1935, which featured a deadly craps
game as well as the character of Sportin' Life, a modern-day version of
minstrelsy's urban, craps-shooting Zip Coon character.
1
o Although put
forward by the Heywards as a serious representation of black and
characters, Daughters nevertheless retained a strong element of
derivative melodrama and racist stereotypes, rooted in minstrelsy and
black musical revues.
The stereotypes were enhanced by the black characters' lan-
guage, which was derived from both the indigenous Gullah (Creole
English) dialect of the Sea Islands and a theatricalized, nonrealistic black
dialect. The Heywards made no attempt to replicate the Gullah dialect;
for instance, they simply noted in the stage directions that Gilly's lan-
guage is "halfway between Gullah and white folks' talk." But they wrote
his lines in standard English. In contrast, the Heywards specified the non-
Gullah black dialect, with the result that the familiar black stereotypes are
further reinforced. The theatrical black dialect is exaggerated, as shown
9 Johnson Hall, "Porgy and Bess-A Folk Opera," Theatre A rts Month(y Ganuary
1936): 24-28, qtd. in Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (New
York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 172-73.
t O See Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Noonday Press, 1995), 102, 370, and 378; Don B.
Wilmith and Tice Miller, ed., Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 27-9; Allen Woll, 1-3, 119.
32 P ITTENGER
by Mamba's line: "I bring dis chile up different from you. Since I been
workin' wid white folks I see how de white chillun is raised an' I gib dis
chile a bath ebery day."
11
The combination of dialect and subject matter
creates an image of blacks who are ignorant and less civilized than
whites; Mamba not only speaks improper English, but she is also unaware
of the standards of hygiene until whites demonstrate them for her.
Based on the music, as well as the focus on black characters, a
strong argument can be made that the drama is actually a variation of
early black musicals. A radio figures prominently in the play, with charac-
ters gathered around it in several scenes, listening to lengthy "live" musi-
cal broadcasts. Also, live music and dance are featured, with the planta-
tion characters serving as chorus. Gospel singing is integral to the elabo-
rate church meeting scene. Not surprisingly, critic Brooks Atkinson
found the musical numbers hackneyed and predictable, noting that they
were "staged like scenes in a stereotyped Harlem revue and in the
inevitable low comedy and frenzy of the spiritual singing in a ramshackle
darky church."12 Atkinson's criticism suggests that the purpose of the
musical interludes was to provide white audiences with a familiar element
of entertainment, imposing aspects of black musical revues onto the
black melodrama.
Nevertheless, Waters attempted to use the songs as acting
devices for conveying Hagar's deep feelings. During a clandestine, late
night trip home, Hagar finds a moment of tender happiness as she rocks
her small, sleeping daughter and sings a lullaby. Hagar and young Lissa
are alone on stage and the visual image of a rare, intimate moment
between mother and child is established prior to commencement of the
song. According to stage directions, Hagar begins to hum "Motherless
Child," then sings in a low voice, gradually building in volume while
retaining the lullaby cadence.n The scene is significant because it reveals
a nurturing, loving, and maternal side of Hagar, who is essentially an
absent mother in the play. Hagar's alienation and loneliness is also evident
in her rendition of Jerome Kern's mournful ballad, "Lonesome Walls,"
which was performed as a full-scale musical number. Waters delivered it
11 Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward, Mamba's Daughters (New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), 83.
1
2 Brooks Atkinson, "Concerning Mamba's Waters," New York Times, 15
January 1939, sec. 9, 1.
13 Heyward and Heyward 89.
\X'ATERS 33
as a solo, supported by the plantation chorus on the refrain. Despite the
musical staging, the song served as dramatic dialogue and a means of
character development. The stage directions indicate that it "should
emerge casually, in the folk manner, and should start almost upon a con-
versational note." Brief lines of dialogue between Hagar and her sup-
porting chorus are interspered between the stanzas, further emphasizing
the dramatic purpose of the song. The Heywards also provided direc-
tions for the emotional arc of the song, which laments a woman's loss of
man and child; each stanza includes acting instructions such as "plead-
ingly" or "sadly, with resignation."14
Even though Waters relied upon her well-established musical tal-
ent to help her in the dramatic role, its impact upon an audience cannot
be dismissed. Her career as a blues singer, which predates her rise to star-
dom in black revues, proved that she excelled in delivery of powerfully
emotional songs. Rudolph Fisher, recalling Waters, described her pre-
Harlem Renaissance performance for a black audience at Edmond's
nightclub:
Here a tall brown-skin girl, unmistakably the one guar-
anteed in the song to make a preacher lay his Bible
down, used to sing and dance her own peculiar num-
bers, vesting them with her own originality ... She knew
her importance, too . . . She would stride with great
leisure and self-assurance to the center of the floor,
stand there with a half-contemptuous nonchalance, and
wait. All would become silent at once. Then she'd begin
her song, genuine blues, which for all the humorous
lines, emanated tragedy and heartbreak. JS
Fisher's reminiscence evokes a vivid image of Waters's strong, self-confi-
dent stage presence, as well as her emotionally open delivery. The per-
formance circumstances-a Harlem nightclub and all-black clientele-
provided the best possible opportunity for Waters's artistic self-expres-
sion without the double consciousness imposed by the presence of white
listeners.
14 Ibid, 114-16.
15 Rudolph Fisher, "The Caucasian Storms Harlem," American Mercury
(August 1927): 393-98.
34 PITI"ENGER
By 1933, Waters had begun to sing for predominately white audi-
ences in black musical revues and was aware of the challenge she faced
as a black performer. In As Thousands Cheer, she performed Irving Berlin's
"Suppertime," a song in which a woman prepares supper for her husband
who, unknown to her, has been lynched. Waters wrote, "In singing it, I
was telling my comfortable, well-fed, well-dressed listeners about my peo-
ple."I6 Her comment encapsulates Waters's position within the double-
consciousnes bind: as she sang of a black experience, attempting to con-
vey her own concept of authentic black identity, she was fully aware that
her audience viewed the performance through a white perspective. Six
years later, Waters encountered a similar situation in A1amba's Daughters. in
which she used a "genuine blues" song to reveal Hagar's feelings of loss
and heartbreak to a predominately white audience. Double consciousness
is rarely an "ali-or-nothing" phenomenon; Waters, like all black artists,
operated within a complex system of creativity-striving for self-aware-
ness and expression, resisting the otherness and alienation caused by dou-
ble consciousness, and always attempting to renegotiate her black authen-
ticity with white audiences.
The concept of an authentic black experience, theatricalized for
a white audience, has a long American history that often includes racial
stereotypes of blacks as primitives. A 1895 production of Black America,
which depicted scenes of life on a plantation, was reported to be per-
formed by black non-actors who just acted naturally; David Krasner
notes, "Although [the production was] falsely conceived, whites had every
reason to believe that they were viewing something authentic yet
benign."17 By the 1920s, white audiences had developed a deep fascina-
tion with "the primitive." White New Yorkers were often drawn to the
Harlem nightclubs by the supposed primitivism of black performers,
who offered the thrilling potential of a contagious loss of control at any
moment. In 1930, George Tichenor wrote about the joys of "slumming":
16 Waters, His Eye, 271 -72.
17
David Krasner, Resistance, ParOtl:;\ and Double Consciousness in African American
Theatre, 1895-1910 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 23-24.
WATERS
35
Georgia Burke, Ethel Waters, and Willie Bryant in a publicity photo for the
1939 production of Mamba's Daughters. The photo is not an accurate rep-
resentation of the murder scene in which Waters's character Hagar kills her
daughter's rapist with her bare hands. Georgia Burke, who played Mamba,
was not actually in the scene. The photo also fails to convey the high emo-
tion and violence of the scene as described by Waters.
Photo by courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations;
photographer: H. A. Atwell Studio.
36 PITIENGER
[W]e love the rich human-ness of Negro art, its earthy
saltiness. It is also characteristic and enjoyable that the
emotions of both audience and performers are always
on hairtrigger .... If the booming drum should move
the rhythm faster, much faster . . . until the last restric-
tion broke .. [.)18
Tichenor's unfinished sentence implies a potential for total abandonment
of civilized behavior on the part of audience and performer. Yet he con-
clude with the observation that the audience returned to its original state:
"staid, proper and a community pillar."19 The nightclub patrons experi-
enced a vicarious thrill, driven by the possibility that a performer, in a
"hairtrigger" emotional state, might lose all inhibitions and connect with
an authentic primitivism. The phenomenon of "slumming" was based on
upon a split consciousness in the white spectator's mind. Although fully
aware that the performance was theatricalized, the voyeurs accepted it as
an authentic representation of black experience; at the same time, they
were aware of the potential for a real "authentic" experience to erupt,
with art and life then becoming indistinguishable. Thus the audience was
essentially duped by its own racism, failing to realize that the "exotic
primitive" existed only in its own mind.
During the 1920s, this layered racial stereotyping and split con-
sciousness among whites was present in the theatre as well as Harlem
nightclubs. As David Krasner notes, "Modernism promoted the idea of
'authentic' African Americans onstage as opposed to white minstrel imi-
tations in blackface," yet "the [modernist] image was based on racist pre-
sumptions."ZO Glenda Gill argues that white playwrights were inspired by
singer Josephine Baker's "exotic primitive" mystique and that both
Eugene O'Neill and Paul Green capitalized on the stereotype in their
plays for black actors.21
1
8 George Tichenor, "Colored Lines," Theatre Arts Montb!J Qune 1930) : 485-
90.
19
Ibid., 490.
20 Krasner, 1 9.
21 Glenda Eloise Gill, No Surrender! No Retreat!: African American Pioneer
Performers if Tiuentieth-Century American Theatre (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 9.
WATERS 37
In 1939, the Heywards struggled with the same challenges that
O'Neill faced with The Emperor jones. In both instances, white playwrights
attempted to break black stereotypes and examine a common aspect of
the human experience through black characters. Charles Gilpin, who
originally played Brutus Jones, was well aware of the inherent racism of
the play. O'Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb report that Gilpin,
who "had suddenly grown finicky about using the word 'nigger' (called
for by the script) was rewriting the role" and "substituting 'black baby'
and other terms he considered more genteel."22 O'Neill replaced Gilpin
with a more compliant Paul Robeson when the show moved to London.
Paul Robeson argued that O'Neill's play was an "exultant tragedy of the
disintegration of a human soul." Robeson revealed that he himself was
caught in the racist logic embedded in the primitivism vogue, noting that
Jones threw off the layers of civilization (presumably white) as he
"return[ed] to the primitive soil from which he (racially) came."23
Primitivism assumed that blacks were naturally closer to an uncivilized,
less evolved state of being, which supported racist beliefs in black inferi-
ority. As a result, plays that attempted to reveal universal truths through
primitive black characters could never completely overcome white audi-
ence's racially flltered responses. Black actors confronted that fact each
time they performed for a white audience whether or not they con-
sciously acknowledged it. And despite Waters's belief in the authenticity
of her performance, she was caught in the crux of an impossible, irre-
solvable cultural paradox.
Waters's negotiation of black authenticity in a m b a ~ Daughters
was complicated by the Heywards' attempt to create a complex, fully
developed character that went beyond racial stereotype. Hagar is
described as a "young woman of large proportions, unusually tall, unusu-
ally broad and giving an immediate impression of great strength. Above
her superb body is a pleasant, childlike face."2
4
It soon becomes apparent
that Hagar is childishly slow-witted and quick tempered, which results in
22 Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York: Harper and Sons, 1962), 449.
23 Paul Robeson, "Reflections on O'Neill's Plays," Opport11nity (December
1924): 368-70.
24 Heyward, 19.
38 PrrrENGER
a character dichotomy-both a gentle giant who is morally good and a
dangerous woman whose presence is powerfully threatening. In fact, the
character is reminiscent of Lenny in Steinbeck's OJ Mice and Men, which
opened on Broadway in 1937.
2
5 Both characters are giants of powerful
physical strength who don't fully realize their destructive potential. Hagar
also evokes images of Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in the novel
NativeS on, which was published in 1940, then dramatized by Paul Green,
John Houseman, and Orson Welles in 1941. Both Hagar and Bigger are
victimized African Americans who respond violently to a world that is
beyond their understanding or control, but while Hagar appears to be a
dramatic representation of black Southern life in all its pathos, Bigger
Thomas is a more fully developed psychological character. Through him,
Wright indicts a racist society.
Despite the Heywards' intentions, they were only partially able to
transcend racial stereotypes of the era. In 1933, Sterling Brown identified
the five main black stereotypes in American fiction: "the contented slave,
the comic Negro, the exotic primitive, the tragic mulatto, and the brute
nigger."26 Most of these types are present in Daughters; the
ensemble includes a plantation mammy ("contented slave"), promiscuous
black women ("exotic primitives''), a hypocritical preacher ("the comic
Negro"), and a citified con artist and rapist ("the brute nigger''). Despite
Hagar's relative complexity, she can be viewed as a hybrid stereotype,
embodying the "mammy" (or nurturing matriarch) and "brute nigger."
Hagar's "mammy" is masculinized; despite her love and dedication,
Hagar is an absent mother, fulfilling her parental role as breadwinner,
provider, and, in the end, fierce protector and avenger-all roles typical-
ly fulfilled by fathers. Hagar's violent behavior invokes the "brute nigger"
stereotype, which is traditionally masculine: a primitive, violent man who
lacks elemental civilization and lives by physical violence. The Hey-wards
themselves were unable to escape the deeply embedded racial stereotypes,
conflating two gendered racial types into the character of Hagar.
25 Mamba's Daughters is based on the Heywards' 1929 novel of the same name.
however, it was substantially revised when adapted for the stage, with the minor charac-
ter of Hagar reshaped and made the protagonist of the piece. lt is possible that
Steinbeck's novel, published while the were in the process of adaptation,
influenced the character revisions for Hagar.
26 Pieterse, 152.
WATERS
39
Apparently it was the innovative and dangerous characterization
of a masculinized, "brute mammy" that thrilled white Broadway audi-
ences. The stage directions for a fight scene call for a melodramatic visi-
ble transformation when Hagar is provoked into violence, so that she
becomes a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character:
In her distressed, childlike face there grows slowly an
expression of such savage hate and rage that Gilly's jaw
drops and he shrinks back against the wall, his lmees all
but giving under him .... Hagar is upon him. Has him
around the throat. He beats wildly against her ... Hagar's
back to the audience, her great shoulders arched by the
power of her grip. Gilly's arms cease to annoy her. They
feebly beat the air.27
The second violent encounter between Hagar and Gilly, which ends with
his murder, has a similar arc. It begins with Hagar slowly and deliberate-
ly approaching Gilly with "murder in her eye." Then the scene develops
into an increasingly violent confrontation in which Hagar struggles with
Gilly, flings him across the room, and eventually kills him with her bare
hands. The scene is staged in relative darkness (the lamps having been
destroyed during the struggle); Hager's hands "close around his throat
and their figures sway together into the surrounding blackness." Finally,
with the sound of "a brief, dreadful gasping for breath," Gilly is mur-
dered.28 It is Hagar's violence in these scenes that distinguish Mamba's
Daughters from numerous other romanticized race plays set in Dixie.
Waters's acting style, which she claimed was nothing more than
a sensory recall of the violence in her own life, further complicated the
authenticity issue for both Waters and her white spectators. She claimed
that, as an untrained actress, she lived the scenes rather than acted them.
For each performance, she invoked sensory recall of events in her own
life. She once said, "I have no acting technique. I act instinctively. That's
why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life."29 Other
black actors of the era also eschewed formal training. Canada Lee, who
2? Heyward, 130-31.
2
8 Ibid., 164.
29 Gerald C. Fraser, "Ethel Waters is Dead at 80," New York Times, 2
September 1977, 1 +.
40 PITTENGER
played Bigger Thomas, stated, "I never studied acting ... What could a
black man study in acting school, anyway? 'How yuh boss, yas suh boss.' "30
Waters's acting apparently blurred the lines between perform-
ance and reality during the fight scenes. Susannah McCorkle relates a har-
rowing account of Waters's acting experience:
[S]he simply "lived" her part over and over, giving every-
thing she had every night. A telling dressing-room inter-
view ... describes her as shivering with fatigue after the
final curtain. "It's made me feel cold and numb, and I
don't feel anything any more .... We really fight onstage.
I don't know how to play-fight. We get hurt ... I don't
know what I'm doing."Jl
The interview could be chalked up to actor bravado except that Waters
actually had a lifetime of violent experiences to call upon. In her autobi-
ographies, Waters recalled her hardscrabble childhood on the streets and
related a litany of brutal assaults. As an adult, she beat her boyfriends
while in jealous rages. On another occasion, using her boxing training,
she broke a man's jaw with a "terrific short jab."32 According to Waters,
her violent nature was evident from early childhood: "I was so strong and
violent as a child that I didn't want anyone to touch me for fear I could-
n't restrain myself."33 An episode of homicidal fury at age eleven not only
illustrates the point but also mirrors Hagar's own violent transformation.
\XThen her older sister attacked Waters with a hatchet, she struck back
with her bare hands:
I don't remember anything after that. I was temporarily
insane and I must have choked and punched, kicked and
gouged Vi in my maniacal fury. [The man next door]
30 Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biograp!:(y of Orson Welles (New York:
Scribner's Sons, 1988), 296.
31 Susannah McCorkle, "The Morher of Us All," American Heritage
(February/March 1994): 60-73.
32 Waters, .Sparrow, 144 and 234.
3
3
Ethel Waters, To Me It's Wondeiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 16.
\X'ATERS
pried my hands from Vi's throat and stopped me from
killing her. I never would have let go by myself until she
was dead.34
41
Waters's autobiographies were written after her religious conversion, so it
is possible that she "juiced up" the accounts of her violent nature in
order to emphasize the magnitude of her salvation. Nevertheless, the
number of violent events and their consistent presence throughout her
early life argue for a strong measure of truth in her accounts.
Waters's well-known violent nature became a central element of
her performance: art and life conflated, creating an element of danger, an
implicit understanding that real, life-threatening violence could occur
during any performance. Consequently, for a white audience, Waters's
acting, which included a strong element of primitivism, added yet anoth-
er layer of authenticity that played into her audiences' racist fascination
and expectations. From a white spectator's point of view, a m b a ~
Daughters delivered a logical duality- Hagar, the "brute mammy," per-
formed by Waters, the brute actress. Since Waters considered her per-
formance a dramatization of her own black experience, it also reinforced
contemporary white audiences' racist beliefs about black violence and
primitivism. In that respect, a m b a ~ Daughters was the theatrical equiva-
lent of "slumming" in Harlem nightclubs; in both cases, white audiences
went in search of an authentic-i.e., exotic, primitive, and less civilized-
experience via black entertainment.
Waters encouraged the public's perception of her untrained per-
formance as an authentic representation. Writing in 1947, Edith Isaacs
observed that "there is no remark so disparaging to the Negro actor,
singer, musician, as the one--often intended as a high compliment-that
he is a natural born actor, who does not benefit by training."35 Waters
proved to be an exception, as revealed in a 1940 article in The New York
Times:
She says she never has had any formal education in
music .... Likewise, when she played Hagar ... she was
completely lacking in dramatic training ... . Making the
comparison in the highest complimentary way possible,
Ethel Waters is as much a born artist as the so-called
"primitives" in the fields of painting and sculpture.36
34 Waters, Sparro1v, 57.
35 Edith]. R. Issacs, The Negro in American Theatre (College Park: McGrath,
1947), 79.
36 Shalett.
42 PnTENGER
Waters considered a m b a ~ Daughters a biography of her own life- with
Mamba being the grandmother who raised her, Hagar being her own
mother (who gave birth to Waters at age twelve, as the result of a rape)
and the daughter being herself, who managed to "go out into the world
and become a successful singer."37 a m b a ~ Daughters gave her a rare
opportunity to show white audiences the truth about her own life as a
black woman: "I had shown them all what it is to be a colored woman,
dumb, ignorant, all boxed up and feeling everything with such intenseness
that she is half crazy."38 Waters believed that her performance shattered
racial stereotypes, revealing a real black woman instead. She thought that
she had committed an act of honest self-revelation and, by doing so, dra-
matically revealed a truly authentic black consciousness to a white audi-
ence that comprehended and appreciated it on her terms.
However, Waters's reading of her performance was naive in sev-
eral ways, due to her denial of the limitations imposed upon black repre-
sentation by white society. She could not single-handedly alter the deeply
entrenched racial attitudes of white Broadway audiences. Du Bois called
attention to the circumscribed roles available to black actors, noting,
"[W]e can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to
Negroes; but for anything else there is still small place for us." More sig-
nificantly, he cited Porgy and Bess, arguing that white audiences would not
have accepted the same story with white characters. He wrote, "The only
chance [Heyward] had to tell the truth of pitiful human degradation was
to tell it of colored people."39 Du Bois's observation captures the irony
of Waters's dilemma; the role of Hagar presents a human condition pack-
aged in a representation of black experience, creating a safe emotional
distance for white audiences. Conseguently, many spectators found
Waters's performance emotionally powerful and deeply moving, yet they
understood it as a realistic portrayal of black life rather than as a set of
well-established stereotypes about black people. And for some spectators,
this representation reinforced the idea of black primitivism. Within this
framework, Waters's authentic artistic expression co-exists with, but is
ultimately dominated by, white audiences' own stereotypical beliefs about
black authenticity.
37 Waters, Sparrow, 292.
38 Ibid., 304.
39 WE. B. DuBois, "Criteria of Negro Art," Crisis (October 1926): 290-97.
WATERS 43
The complicated issue of theatrical black authenticity was
reflected in the critical responses to the play as well. Burns Mantle, pre-
suming a natural artistic inferiority in black performance, critiqued
Waters according to his lowered expectations:
Guthrie McClintock . . . [holds] his colored players to the
simple actions that are safely within their range. He has
used the same care in the direction of Miss Waters .. . .
He does not permit the actress ever to attempt an exhi-
bition of acting and thus she is able to reveal herself a
simple and natural actress in situations she perfectly
understands and simply and easily dominates.40
While Mantle's comments mirror Waters's own explanation of her per-
formance and thus appear to validate her claim of autobiographical per-
formance, there is a significant difference. Waters believed that the role
afforded her the opportunity to perform her own experience, but Mantle
assumed that Waters's life experience was typical of black women in gen-
eral, thus reflecting the racist beliefs of Waters's white audiences in search
of an authentic black experience.
The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson found himself
caught in the middle of a controversy regarding Waters's performance
because he attempted to apply the same demanding standard of judg-
ment to Waters as he applied to white actors. The controversy cuts to the
heart of Waters's complicated authenticity dilemma, with both blacks and
whites attempting unsuccessfully to view Waters's performance from a
racially neutral position. In his first review, Atkinson panned Waters's per-
formance:
[A)lthough Miss Waters plays with her usual rangy and
gleaming wholesomeness, she does not go very deep
inside her part. . . . The play is curiously inarticulate
about the aspects of character that should distinguish
'Mamba's Daughters' from synthetic plays about
Negroes. Part of this is the result of limitations in Miss
Waters's acting of Hagar. She is personally earnest and
40 Richard Watts, Jr., "The Theattes," New York Herald Tribune, 4 January
1939, 10; and Burns Mande," 'Mamba's Daughters' Starts Audience Cheering Ethel
Waters," New York Dai!J News, 4 January 1939, 47.
44
PITrENGER
magnetic enough to win everyone's personal respect and
good wishes, and she gives the whole play a sturdy qual-
ity in the scenes she plays. But her limp, plodding style,
which she seems unable to vary, results in a performance
rather than the expression of a character.41
Although Atkinson found fault with the script, his major cntlctsm
focused on Waters's limitations as an actress. Later that week, Carl Van
Vechten organized an impressive theatrical coterie that protested
Atkinson's review in a paid advertisement in The New York Times. Praising
Waters's "superb performance" as a "profound and emotional experi-
ence," they called it "a magnificent example of great acting, simple,
deeply felt, moving on a plane of complete reality."
42
Among the nine-
teen people who signed the review were Judith Anderson, Tallulah
Bankhead, Norman Bel Geddes, and Burgess Meredith.
Under pressure from Van Vechten's group, Atkinson agreed to
re-review the play the following week. Still, he found it difficult to com-
promise or give Waters a positive review. He lambasted the character of
Hagar as a "sluggish-witted ... inarticulate [and] lumbering creature of
elemental emotions," admitting only that Waters's performance was
"valiant" considering the script. Atkinson concluded-somewhat
obliquely-that, in the end, Waters's Hagar became the "tragic queen of
the marshland plantation."43 This time Atkinson adroitly avoided criticiz-
ing Waters, directing his attention instead to the script, including Hagar's
character and the melodramatic plantation mise-en-scene.
Although a m b a ~ Daughters failed to catapult Waters into the
upper echelons of dramatic acting, it did provide a new route for her
declining career, prolonging it for another fifteen years. The triumph that
Waters and Van Vechten expected in 1939 finally manifested itself in
1950, with her memorable appearance in The Member if the Wedding. The
critics were unanimous in their praise of Waters's performance as
41 Brooks Atkinson, "The Play: Ethel Waters Plays Her First Dramatic Role
in the Heywards' 'Mamba's Daughters,' "New York Times, 4 January 1939, 24.
42 Advertisement, New York Times, 6 January 1939, 24.
43 Brooks Atkinson, "Concerning 'Mamba's Daughters,'" New York Times, 15
January 1939, sec. 9, 1.
WATERS 45
Berenice, the classic "mammy" role. Atkinson, perhaps atoning for his
negative reviews of a m b a ~ Daughters, wrote that she gave "one of those
rich and eloquent performances that lay such a deep spell upon any audi-
ence that sees her."44 Critic William Hawkins echoed Atkinson's praise:
"Lnes roll from her lips with such genuine emotion .... Her description
of her marriages is a masterpiece of comedy and pathos, and when she
soothes the two distraught children with an old hymn, only a pinhead
could remain unmoved."45 Hawkins's critique reveals that Waters's per-
formance was viewed within the confines of a familiar stereotype,
Berenice being an icon of the romanticized "mammy" character.
The critics' acclaim for Waters's natural acting style is remarkably
similar to Waters's own claims about her performance in Mamba's
Daughters. Although Hagar was primitively violent and Berenice was lov-
ingly maternal, audiences viewed both performances as authentic exhibi-
tions of Waters's own personality and life as a black woman. Even as
Berenice-a heartwarming, beloved character-Waters's humanity, as
well as her theatrical success, was defined by white spectators within the
confines of unchanging racial stereotypes. For black artists in the pre-
Civil Rights era, little had changed between the Harlem Renaissance of
the 1920s, a m b a ~ Daughters in 1939 and The Member of the Wedding in
1950. Perhaps Waters received acclaim as Berenice rather than Hagar
because the element of primitivism was absent, leaving white audiences
with an uncomplicated, familiar, and reassuring "mammy" stereotype. At
any rate, the elusive respect that Waters sought for her performance in
a m b a ~ Daughters was finally attained in 1950 when critic Robert Garland
declared that Waters's performance in The Member of the Wedding placed
her "high up among the first ladies of the American theatre."46
44
Brooks Atkinson, "At the Theatre," rev. of The Member of the \X'edding,
New York Times, 6 January 1950, reprinted in Rachel W Coffin, ed., New York Theatre
Critics' Reviews 1950 (New York: New York Theatre Reviews, 1951).
45 \X'illiam Hawkins, "Waters, Harris Roles Spark 'Wedding,' " rev: of The
Member of the Wedding, New York World Telegram, 6 January 1950, reprinted in Coffin.
4
6 Robert Garland, "Something Special but Not Quite a Play," rev. of The
Member of the Wedding, New York Journal American, 6 January 1939, reprinted in Coffin.
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 17, NO.1 (WINTER 2005)
THE .ANrlPHON AS PARODY:
DJUNA BARNES AND THE LITERARY TRADITION
PENNY FARFAN
Although most widely known for her 1936 novel Nightwood, the
modernist writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was also a theatre critic and
playwright whose last major work was a three-act verse drama, The
Antiphon, which took her some twenty years and twenty-nine drafts to
complete and which was published by Faber and Faber in 1958.
1
Written
in the style of an early modern revenge tragedy and in language so dense
and complex that T.S. Eliot required three dictionaries to deal with its
"lexical obscurities" while editing it for publication,z The Antiphon has
rarely been produced and has received little attention from theatre histo-
rians, while literary scholars have tended to emphasize its autobiographi-
cal dimensions. Close readings of Barnes's early one-act plays, however,
particularly To the Dogs and The Dove, reveal a deep feminist engagement
with the hegemonic representational tradition that in turn invites recon-
sideration of The Antiphon as something more than a dramatization of
Barnes's personal history. In this essay, I will suggest that The Antiphon is
best understood as part of Barnes's ongoing feminist critique of the
male-dominated literary tradition, but I will also consider how her femi-
nist revisionist project was undercut by her modernist commitment to
textual difficulty, thus contributing to her status as, in her own words, the
"most famous unknown author in the world."3
1
Lynda Curry, " 'Tom, Take Mercy' : Djuna Barnes' Drafts of The Antiphon,"
Silence and Po111er: A Reevaluatio11 of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 404, note 2; 286.
2 Phillip Herring, Dpma: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking,
1995), 275.
3 Djuna Barnes, qtd. in Ruth Ford, "Reminiscences," Silence and POJver: A
Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1991), 341. See also Chester Page, "Reminiscences," Silence and Po111er: A
Reevaluation of Djzma Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1991), 362; and Herring, who quotes a letter from Barnes to Natalie
Barney in which she states, "I am the most famous unknown of the century!" (348, note
1).
THE ANI1PHON
47
The difficulty of The Antiphon was a recurring concern for the
original reviewers of the published text. John Wain, for example, com-
plained that Barnes's language in the play was "too opaque not only for
stage performance ... but even for solitary reading";
4
Lionel Abel
remarked, "how hard it is to read! I sat up all night over it, and would
never have kept on reading if I didn't have my review to write";S Richard
Eberhart found the play "esoteric," though he admired Barnes's "startling
bloom of language" which "would flabbergast an ordinary, cultivated
reader, give pause to a brave lexicographer";6 and Howard Nemerov was
positive in his response but confessed that he was "still mighty hesitant
about such understanding as two readings have produced.''
7
The editori-
al history of The Antiphon may account to some degree for its obscurity
in that even after Barnes had already complied with Eliot's suggestions
for extensive revisions, he required her to make further very substantial
cuts to her manuscript, stating that he "[felt] sure there are pages in the
middle"-"twelve to fifteen"-"which can be disposed of."8 But while
research on Barnes's various drafts has revealed the cost of these cuts in
terms of the clarity of the play,9 even taking the omitted passages into
account, The Antiphon remains an extraordinarily challenging text: as
Barnes herself stated in her "Cautionary Note" on the play, "a misread-
ing of The Antiphon is not impossible."lO
4 John Wain, "Second Curtain," The Observer (2 February 1958): 6.
5 Lionel Abel, "Bad by North and South," Partisan Review 25 (Summer 1958):
465.
6 Richard Eberhart, "Outer and Inner Verse Drama," Virginia Quarterly Review
34 (Autumn 1958): 623, 620, and 619.
7 Howard Nemerov, "A Response to The Antiphon," The Northwest Review
(Summer 1958): 90.
8 T. S. Eliot, qtd. in Curry, 286-87.
9 Curry, 286-98.
10 Djuna Barnes, "Cautionary Note," The Antiphon, The Selected Works of Djuna
Barnes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962), 79; subsequent references to the play
will be to this edition unless otherwise specified and will be given parenthetically in the
text. The 1962 version includes a number of small revisions and was considered by
Barnes to be superior to the 1958 version (see Hank O'Neal, "Life is painful, nasty &
short .. . in my case it has only been painful & nasty.": Djuna Barnes 1978-1981: An Informal Memoir
(New York: Paragon House, 1990], 22).
48 FARFAN
It is worth noting, however, that, according to Barnes's one-time
assistant Hank O'Neal, a prominent feature of the tiny, cluttered
Greenwich Village apartment in which she spent the last forty-two years
of her life was "(a] set of English dictionaries, very old and very large,"JJ
and that Shari Benstock has described Barnes as "the one woman
Modernist whose writing consistently turns on classical sources of
English words."
1
2 The Oxford English Dictionary defines "antiphon" as "[a]
versicle or sentence sung by one choir in response to another"; "[a] com-
position, in prose or verse, consisting of verses or passages sung alter-
nately by two choirs in worship"; and, more generally, as "[a] response
[or] answer." Yet given Barnes's characteristic interest in the lexical par-
ticularities of words, it is not insignificant that, as Linda Hutcheon has
observed, "the etymological root of the term ['parody' is] in the Greek
noun parodia, meaning 'counter-song,' " " 'beside' "-song13-or, I might
add, "antiphon." T.S. Eliot stated in his dust-jacket blurb for Faber and
Faber that The Antiphon was "the nearest thing written in our time to the
tragedies of the Jacobean poets-Middleton, Webster, Ford or
Tourneur,"14 and while he did not elaborate on the specific nature of the
intertextual relationship between Barnes's work and the Jacobean drama
that it echoes, the etymological pun of Barnes's title suggests that The
Antiphon should be understood as parody.
Rejecting the conventional association of parody with "ridiculing
laughter" as being too limited to encompass twentieth-century manifes-
tations of the genre, Hutcheon argues that parody should instead be
understood as "repetition with critical clistance,''JS "a modern recocling
11 O'Neal, 8.
12 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: UniYersity
of Texas Press, 1986), 25.
13 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parocfy: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art
Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 32.
14
T. S. Eliot, qtd. in Miriam Fuchs, "Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: Authority,
Resistance, and Acquiescence," Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 305.
IS Hutcheon, 6.
THE ANIIPHON
49
which establishes difference at the heart of similarity."16 Reviewer
Howard Nemerov identified in The Antiphon "[a]n art of serious parody"
that he associated with modernism,
17
but he did not fully explore the
nature of the differences between Barnes's text and the Jacobean drama
that it echoes. Other early critics-Kathleen Raine and Donna
Gerstenberger, for example-remarked on the disjuncture between the
modern and the archaic in The Antiphon, but concluded that the lack of
reconciliation between these two modes was an aesthetic failure on
Barnes's part rather than a deliberate choice, IS as suggested by Hutcheon's
conception of parody as "repetition with critical distance." Yet parody is,
as Hutcheon explains, "a form of inter-art discourse," and while it "can
manifest itself in relation to either particular works or general iconic con-
ventions," its " 'target' text is always another work of art or, more gener-
ally, another form of coded discourse."
1
9 Reading The Antiphon as parody
thus requires consideration of how it is at once like and not like the
Jacobean drama that it echoes as it is through the critical difference with-
in the repetition that the point of parody emerges.
In addition to what reviewer Dudley Fitts described as the "intri-
cate, rich, almost viciously brilliant discourse" that he, along with Eliot
and a number of other critics, saw as having been "modeled more or less
on the murkier post-Elizabethans,"20 The Antiphon deploys a number of
1
6 Ibid., 8.
17
Nemerov, 88.
18 Kathleen Raine, "Lutes and Lobsters," New Statesman 55 (8 February 1958):
17 4-75; Donna Gerstenberger, "Three Verse Playwrights and the American Fifties,"
Modern American Drama: Essqys in Criticism, ed. William E. Taylor Gacksonville, FL:
Convention Press, 1968), 117-28.
19 Hutcheon, 2, 12, and 16.
20 Dudley Fitts, "Discord and Old Age," New York Times Book Revim.1 (20 April
1958): 22. See also John Wain, who noted that the play was "an imitation of the idiom of
the English Jacobean drama, full of ghastly mock-Elizabethan lines" ("Second Curtain,"
6); William Boyd, who saw it as "a ponderously overwritten and overblown attempt to
recreate a Jacobean play'' ("Morbid Flappers," TLS 4041 [12 September 1980]: 984) and
Kathleen Raine, who wrote that "[t]here are many ... phrases and fragments [in the play]
that would not disgrace a Revengers Tragetij' (175).
so FARFAN
characteristic features of Jacobean revenge tragedy. Its main action, for
example, is driven by a mysterious malcontent-figure, the coachman Jack
Blow, who is really the protagonist Miranda's brother Jeremy in disguise.
Like Jacobean revengers motivated by past sexual crimes against loved
ones, Jack seems to want to avenge his sister's childhood rape either by or
with the consent of their now-dead father Titus, whose sexual appetites
rivaled those of the rapacious Italian dukes of the Jacobean dramaturgi-
cal imagination. To achieve this end, Jack stages the equivalent of the
play-within-the-play that is a common feature of Jacobean drama, bring-
ing onto the stage a doll-sized replica of the family's childhood home and
forcing his elderly mother Augusta to peer through the attic window of
the dollhouse to witness a replaying in miniature of the rape of Miranda
that she knowingly allowed to happen.2
1
A subplot involves Jack and
Miranda's comically stupid yet menacing brothers Dudley and Elisha,
who lurk about the stage intent on alleviating grievances against their sis-
ter and their mother Augusta and who, in a kind of grotesque masque,
don animal masks and assault the two women. An extended verbal "duel"
between Augusta and Miranda in the final act reaches a violent culmina-
tion when Augusta brings a curfew bell down upon both Miranda and
herself.22 The entire action of The Antiphon takes place at Burley Hall, the
British-born Augusta's crumbling ancestral home and the equivalent of
the darkly decadent courts of Jacobean drama. The steward of Burley,
Augusta's brother Jonathan, is the figure of decency, objectivity, and wis-
dom who is left alone onstage with the bodies at the end of the play, fol-
lowing a cursory summation of the tragic action by the malcontent Jack,
who is finally revealed as Jeremy.
But while The Antiphon reproduces certain preoccupations, struc-
tural devices, character types, and stylistic features of Jacobean revenge
tragedy, it also departs in significant ways from the genre that it parodies.
Barnes specifies in her "Cautionary Note" that the "play is more than
merely literal,"
23
and it is worth noting that Jack wears a patch over one
eye, suggesting limited perception on the part of the revenger, a fact that
21 For Raine, this scene with the dollhouse "recalls some Jacobean masquerade
in which the lover is made to kiss the skull of his dead mistress, or is poisoned by a por-
trait" (174) .
22 Barnes, "Cautionary Note," 79.
2
3 Ibid., 79.
THE A NTIPHON 51
he himself calls attention to when he compares his vision to that of his
sister: "I, with the single, she, the compound eye" (104). The outcome of
this difference in the perception of the revenger and that of the loved
one whose violation his actions were intended to revenge is evident at the
end of the play when Jeremy, no longer disguised as Jack, is faced with
Miranda's death and recognizes that she was "weary of the world, I And
all the boodess roar of vindication" (223), that he could not know the
cost "[t]hat cashing in the utmost treasure would exact" (223), and that
his own motives were perhaps less than pure:
As the slayer snuffling 'round the kill,
Breathing his contagion out before him
Draws up the victim with his steaming nose-
So I, who thought to medicine contumely
With a doll's hutch-that catches villains!-
Find I've breathed up disaster and myself,
Say I was of home so utterly bereft,
I dug me one, and pushed my terror in (224).
This flawed perception on the part of the revenger is linked to
metatextual references within The Antiphon to the question of dramatic
structure. Jack, for example, who has comported himself like a showman
from the start of the play when he entered "holding his billycock straight
up over his head, as though he expected applause from the gallery" (82),
says "let us begin it" (114) just as Miranda and Augusta are about to meet
at the end of Act I, suggesting that he sees the key event of the play as
the dollhouse scene that he stages in Act II to expose and punish his
mother for her passive collusion in Miranda's rape. Correspondingly,
Augusta, who prefers her sons- particularly Jeremy-to her daughter,
says when she and Miranda are alone in Act III, "The epilogue is over, I
The boys asleep, and we are girls again I Nor need not think of them this
part of night" (193), and again, "The play is over and the boys are put to
bed" (197), indicating that, to her mind, the real dramatic action-the
part inYolving the men-has concluded. Few readers would agree, how-
ever, with Jack and Augusta's assessment of the structural emphasis of
The Antiphon, which is certainly on the confrontation between Mjranda
and Augusta in Act III.
The fact that Miranda is a writer and theatre artist is another
metatextual device and when Augusta accuses her of having become
"revengeful," she replies, "Not revengeful, but much another thing"
(197), thus signaling Barnes's crucial departure from the key premise of
52
FARFAN
the male-authored revenge tragedies that The Antiphon parodies. Rather
than vengeance, what Miranda seeks is in fact some kind of reconcilia-
tion. Thus, at the end of Act II, following the dollhouse scene, she con-
fides to her Uncle Jonathan her love for and sense of identification with
the mother who betrayed her and her intention to attempt to make of a
"divided beast / An undivided bed" (189). The literal "divided beast" to
which Miranda refers is a gryphon that is a key scenic element in the play
and that was once a roundabout car but was sawed in half by her father
Titus (154). Less literally, though, as a composite beast-part eagle, part
lion-the gryphon is an ambivalent figure24 and is therefore suggestive of
the relationship between Augusta and Miranda, of which Barnes states in
her "Cautionary Note," "their familiarity is their estrangement."ZS
Notably, though Jack regards Miranda as a tragic figure (102, 104), for
Miranda herself, the real tragedy is not so much her past sexual victim-
ization but her irremediable alienation from Augusta, to whom she says
in Act III, "we're about a tragic business, mother" (205).
According to Hutcheon, parody "[imitates] art more than life,"26
but Barnes's portrayal of the relationship between the adult daughter and
her aging mother is full of pathos, the archaic form and cryptic language
of the play as a whole serving to clarify their tragic encasement within
23 Ibid., 79.
24 According to J. E. Cirlot, the gryphon is: [a] fabulous animal, the front half
of "hich is like an eagle and the rear half like a lion, with a long, serpentine tail. The
blending of these two superior solar animals points to the generally beneficent character
of this being; it was consecrated by the Greeks to Apollo and Nemesis ... . The griffin,
like certain kinds of dragon, is always to be found as the guardian of the roads to salva-
tion, standing beside the Tree of Life or some such symbol. From the psychological point
of view it symbolizes the relationship between psychic energy and cosmic force . ... In
mediaeval Christian art, .. . the griffin is very common, being associated with signs which
tend toward ambivalence, representing, for instance, both the Saviour and Antichrist ...
(A Dictional)' of Symbols, 2nd ed., ttans. Jack Sage [New York: Philosophical Library, 1971],
133).
25 Barnes, "Cautionary Note," 79.
26 Hutcheon, 27
T HE ANTIPHON 53
their insurmountable past experience as female members interlocked in
the dynamics of the patriarchal family unit. Wanting Augusta to address
the present reality of their lives together before it is too late, Miranda says
to her in Act III, "Mother, there's no more time. All's done" (199), but
how can the elderly mother who is approaching death overcome her
resentment of her daughter for her own unlived life and how can the
aging daughter forgive her mother for a lifetime of betrayal without deny-
ing her own being? It is, as Kathleen Raine wrote, a fight "to the death,"27
but the accord that the writer-figure Miranda is unable to achieve in life
is effected through art by the writer Barnes as she structures the battle of
mother and daughter into the poetry of their discordant final antiphon
and lays both women to rest together on the "stage" (192), as Augusta
calls it, of the ambivalent gryphon, whose divided halves may now be
unified but who remains an essentially divided beast. Thus, Miranda says
near the end of the play,
As the high plucked banks
Of the viola rend out the unplucked strings below-
There is the antiphon.
I've seen loves so eat each other's mouth
Till that common clamour, co-intwined,
Wrung out the hidden singing in the tongue
Its chaste economy-there is the adoration.
So the day, day fit for dying in
Is the plucked accord (214).
Reflecting on the limitations of the female characters created by
canonical male authors, Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1929 essay A Room
of One's Oum,
All these relationships between women, I thought, rap-
idly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women,
are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted .
. . . They are now and then mothers and daughters. But
almost without exception they are shown in their rela-
tion to men .... And how small a part of a woman's life
27 Raine, 174.
54
is that; and how little can a man know even of that when
he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles
which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the pecu-
liar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing
extremes of her beauty and horror; her alterations
between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity .... 2s
FARFAN
The Antiphon revealed Barnes's corresponding feminist-modernist sense
of the limitations of the male-authored literary canon, her focus on the
mother/ daughter relationship 10 itself-rather than on Jack
Blow/Jeremy's concern with his sister's violation (223)-marking the crit-
ical difference within her parodic repetition of Jacobean revenge tragedy.
The fact that The Antiphon includes a female writer-figure and
draws on Barnes's own extraordinary childhood experience of sexual vic-
timization within the patriarchal family unit, including incest with her
paternal grandmother and enforced marriage to a much older man who
was the brother of her father's mistress, has caused some critics to read
the play as Barnes's personal act of revenge against her family rather than
as the parody of Jacobean revenge tragedy that I have described. Louise
DeSalvo, for example, includes a chapter on The Antiphon in her study of
"literature as revenge" in Conceived with Malice, and Phillip Herring sug-
gests in his biography of Barnes that a "revenge motive" was behind her
writing of The Antiphon.29 But while there are indeed autobiographical
dimensions in The Antiphon, while Barnes's work on the play was by her
own account impelled by rage,30 and while her brother Thurn experi-
enced it as "a fixation or sort of revenge for something long dead and to
be forgotten,"31 Barnes's took care to extend the significance of the per-
28 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One1 Own (San Diego: Harvest/HE), 1981), 82-
83.
29 Louise DeSalvo, Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge in the Lives and Works
of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller (New York:
Plume, 1995), 209-73; Herring, 263. See also Meryl Altman, "The Antiphon: 'No Audience
at All,'" Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 280.
30 Barnes once stated, "I wrote the Antiphon with clenched teeth, and I noted
that my handwriting was sa\"age as a dagger" (qtd. in Herring, 263).
31 Thurn Budington (Barnes), qtd. in Herring, 280-81.
THE AN11PHON 55
sonal experience that she drew upon beyond its uniqueness so that her
own family functioned like one of those "few houses" that Aristotle sug-
gests in The Poetics are the best subjects for tragedy-those that include
the likes of Oedipus, Orestes, and Thyestes, for example, "and those oth-
ers who have done or suffered something terrible."32 She achieved this
extension of significance in part through a range of allusions and direct
references to other literary works. Miranda's experience of violation by or
with the consent of her supposedly free-thinking American father, for
example, reads as an ironic comment on Shakespeare's Miranda's "Oh,
brave new world, / That has such people in 't,"33 and indeed, Louise
DeSalvo has read The Antiphon as Barnes's response to The Tempest.34 Yet
this allusion is only one of a number of intertextual references to literary
works that resonate, but do not exactly correspond, with the plot, char-
acters, and themes of The Antiphon. The name of Miranda's father Titus,
for example, suggests Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, whose daughter
Lavinia is raped and mutilated; Miranda's exclamation "No, no, no, no,
no, no!" (114) at the unexpected and ultimately fatal approach of her
mother recalls King Lear's lamentations over his dead daughter Cordelia,
with whom he has recently been reunited; Lear and Cordelia are again
echoed through the reiteration of the word "nothing" when Augusta
makes demands of Miranda that are impossible for her to fulfill (202-03);
and it is hard not to think of Ibsen's motherless daughters, including
Nora Helmer, as Augusta peers into the dollhouse to witness Miranda's
rape either by her father or with his consent. There are, moreover, fur-
ther allusions or direct references in the play to such figures as Adam and
Eve (132, 193-94), Oedipus (204), Hamlet and Gertrude (137), the wolf
in "Little Red Riding Hood" (129), Cinderella (193), and, in the 1958 ver-
sion, the incestuous Cenci.3
5
Through this strategy of allusion and refer-
3
2
Aristotle, Poetics, in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks lo Grolowski, ed.
Bernard F. Dukore (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 42.
33 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 5.1.183-84.
34 Louise DeSalvo, " 'To Make Her Mutton at Sixteen': Rape, Incest, and Child
Abuse in The Antiphon," Silence and Power: A Reevaluation o/ Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn
Broe (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991 ), 300-15.
35 Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 127. In the
1962 version, this reference has been changed to "Medici" (223) .
56
FARFAN
ence-through these intertextual echoes, I might say, to invoke another
meaning of the play's title-The Antiphon transcends its sources in
Barnes's family history to encompass what Eliot called, in his well-known
1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "the mind of
Europe."36 The play's broad cultural resonance combines with the fact
that it is set in 1939, just after the start of the war, to raise disturbing
questions-like Virginia Woolf's 1941 novel Between the Acts,37 about the
interdependence of purportedly private matters, such as sexual relations
and family dynamics, and the public affairs of state, a relationship that is
a given in Jacobean tragedy, where sexual depravity and political corrup-
tion are inextricably linked. In this way, Barnes's feminist-modernist revi-
sion of Jacobean revenge tragedy exemplifies what Hutcheon, borrowing
from Edward Said, calls "the 'worldliness' of parody," which "historicizes
by placing art within the history of art."38 And as Howard Nemerov
remarked in the context of his review of The Antiphon as an allegory of
"the fall of civilization," "it has been rare in literature for 'this history' to
be told us by a woman."39
In a 1960 essay, John Wain identified nostalgia as a prime moti-
vator for modern writers of verse drama,
4
D and his view was borne out in
T.S. Eliot's critical writings, where the fullness and versatility of the poet-
ic dramatic expression of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are regu-
larly extolled as standards by which to justify Eliot's own interest in verse
drama,
41
which he hoped would "reconquer its place" and so provide
36 T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Critical Tradition: Classic
Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: Bedford, 1989), 468.
3
7
For comparative discussions of The Antiphon and Behveen the Acts, see Bonnie
Kime Scott, "Woolf and Female Modernism," Virginia Woolf Themes and Variations: Selected
Papers .from the Second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Vara Nemerov-Turk and Mark
Hussey (New York: Pace University Press, 1993), 25-32; and Bonnie Kime Scott, Rijiguring
Modernism, Volume 2: PosfT!lodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), 164-75.
38 Hutcheon, 100 and 109.
39 Nemerov, 90 and 91.
40 John Wain, "Why Write Verse Drama?" London Magazine 7, no. 2 (February
1960): 58.
41
See, for example, T. S. Eliot, "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama," The Sacred
Wood (London: Methuen, 1928), 60-70; and "Poetry and Drama," On Poetry and Poets (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 75-95.
THE ANTIPHON 57
moments when "our own sordid, dreary daily world would be suddenly
illuminated and transfigured."42 Barnes admired Eliot's criticism,
4
3 but
her purpose in adopting an anachronistic form in The Antiphon appears to
have corresponded less with his arguments in favor of poetic drama than
with the ideas set forth in his well-known 1919 essay "Tradition and the
Individual Talent." There, Eliot argued-using exclusively masculine pro-
nouns- that poets must possess what he called a "historical sense,"
which "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but
of its presence," and that "[n]o poet, no artist of any art, has his com-
plete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation
of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone;
you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."4
4
Moreover, Eliot added,
what happens when a new work of art is created is
something that happens simultaneously to all the works
of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form
an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by
the introduction of the new . . . work of art among
them. The existing order is complete before the new
work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention
of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so
slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values
of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted;
and this is conformity between the old and the new.45
42 Eliot, "Poetry and Drama," 87.
4
3 O'Neal, 36.
44 Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," 467.
45 Ibid.
58
FARFAN
In The Antiphon, Barnes's use of the form of verse drama was motivated
less by nostalgia than by her "historical sense" of the incompleteness of
the existing literary order. Notably, though the title of The Antiphon has
often been associated with the extended dialogue between Miranda and
Augusta in Act III,46 the play was inspired in part by Barnes's 1936 visit
to her English mother's ancestral home, which, she noted, was at one
time a "College of chanting Priests,"47 as is Burley Hall where The
Antiphon is set. Barnes's verse drama was a parodic response to Eliot's
"priestly" canon, so to speak, an "antiphon" meant to alter "the relations,
proportions, values" of the literary order by the "supervention of (the]
novelty" of a feminist-modernist voice positing a "conformity" of dis-
sonance "between the old and the new."
The Antiphon has rarely been staged,48 and though Meryl Altman
has made a case for its inherent theatricality,
49
if Hutcheon is correct that
parody is indeed primarily "a form of inter-art discourse" (2), then the
question of whether the play is stageworthy or should more rightly be
regarded as a closet drama, as it has been by a number of critics,so may
be beside the point, which would explain Barnes's own contradictory
46 See, for example, Wain, "Second Curtain," 6; James B. Scott, Djuna Banzes
(Boston: Twayne, 1976), 128; and Louis F Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes (New
York: New York University Press, 1977), 145.
47 Djuna Barnes, qtd. in Herring, 265.
48 I know of three productions of the play: a disastrous staged reading by the
Poets' Theatre Company at Harvard in 1956, arranged by Edwin Muir and attended by
Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and I. A. Richards; a successful production by the Royal
Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1961 that was the result of the advocacy of the United
Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold, who admired the play; and a Dutch-
Belgian co-production by a company called Toneelgroep Amsterdam that was reviewed
in The Village Voice in 1996 Qulie Phillips, "A Rip in Nature: Djuna Barnes's The Antiphon
in Holland," The Village Voice 43, no. 3 (16 January 1996]: 62).
49 Altman, 271-84.
50 See, for example, Abel, 465; Eberhart, 620; Rudd Fleming, qtd. m
Kannenstine, 154; and Kannenstine, 154.
THE AI\/TIPHON 59
statements on the matter.51 Still, the question about stageability may be
related to the larger issue of the difficulty of the text. In his essay ''The
Metaphysical Poets," T. S. Eliot wrote,
it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists
at present, must be difficult. Our civilization compre-
hends great variety and complexity, and this variety and
complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must pro-
duce various and complex results. The poet must
become more and more comprehensive, more allusive,
more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning.s2
Despite her own always precarious financial circumstances, Barnes
shared Eliot's modernist commitment to poetic difficulty, and in her
tongue-in-cheek 1930 essay "Hamlet's Cusrard Pie," written under her
journalistic pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, she lamented what she saw as the
dumbing-down of drama through the increasing prevalence of what she
thought of as commercially motivated pie-in-the-face-type plays. Not
spectacle and physical action, she argued, but "(t]he will-to-see-things-
through with the mind," the ability "to put feelings into words," "is the
thing that has made history."53
51 Kannenstine makes reference to a letter from Barnes in which she states that
"Toe Antiphon was written not for acting but primarily for the writer" (154), and O'Neal
reports that "Barnes referred to her creation as a 'closet drama' and told me any number
of times she never intended it to be performed" (109). James B. Scott cites similar state-
ments by Barnes, but also notes her apparent incomprehension of the staging challenges
The Antiphon presents: "Speaking of its Swedish premier in 1961 ... she declared, 'You
can't act it. It wasn't meant for acting. I wrote it because I wanted to. I wrote it as a verse-
drama because I liked the form. But it can't be acted. I know that.' Then she turned to
me, puzzled: 'Did you ever see anything flop like Antiphon? I can't understand it.' Such
contradictions were typical." Qames. B. Scott, "Reminiscences," 344)
52 T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essqys, new edition (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1950), 248.
53 Djuna Barnes, writing as Lady Lydia Steptoe, "Hamlet's Custard Pie," Theatre
Guild Magazine 7 Quly 1930): 34, 35, and 34.
60
[M]an was born a fumbler, but he was also born with a
brain. Now as we move away from the domain of the
mind, that factor which makes of the primitive impulse
the civilized action; as we advance on reality without
contemplation, which is a mad effort to capture life
unarmed, what do we see? Hamlet, making of his trou-
bled soul not that superb and deathless tower of speech
from which he cast himself, to be picked up, generation
after generation, with love and reverence, but a Hamlet
who says it with pies. And who is, consequently, forgot-
ten with haste . .. _54
F ARFAN
Barnes's commitment to textual difficulty in The Antiphon resulted in
obscurity rather than enduring interest, however; indeed, her incorpora-
tion of a few spectators into the play- occasional travelers on the same
route as the writer-figure Miranda in her fatal pilgrimage to her mother's
place of origin (186-87)-might be read as a self-reflexive anticipation of
a limited audience for her work. Yet Hutcheon has pointed out that par-
ody is, paradoxically, "authorized transgression" in that, through the act
of imitation, "even with critical difference," it "reinforces" that which it
repeats.ss Insofar as the difficulty of The Antiphon might account for the
limited interest it has generated not only in theatre practitioners but in
theatre historians and scholars of dramatic literature, Barnes may have
reinforced the limited perspective of the traditional "literary order" that
she sought to expose through her play's critical difference from the genre
that it parodied.
5
4
Ibid., 34.
55 Hutcheon, 26.
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEA1RE 17, NO. 1 (WINTER 2005)
EXPANSION, EXPULSION, AND DOMINATION:
JONATHAN' S SPATIAL TACTICS ON THE JACKSONIAN
STAGE
MAURA L. CRONIN-JORTNER
After giving only a moment's thought, we would all probably
agree that Uncle Sam is a quasi-political figure. After all, he shows up on
all kinds of promotional artifacts for the military, always claiming to want
any and every American who is in striking distance of his long pointer
finger. He also shows up at many Forth of July festivities, sometimes in
hometown parades, sometimes as a figure on stilts meandering through
the crowd awaiting the fireworks display. Perhaps we have witnessed him
in political cartoons as a laughable figure mocking Bill Clinton's many
sexual forays, or as a satiric George W .Bush in the midst of yet another
unfortunate malapropism. Too we (at least we in the theatre world) have
probably experienced this figure in political-motivated performances, like
those done by Bread and Puppet or The San Francisco Mime Troupe.
The Yankee figure, often called Jonathan, worked the same way
in the nineteenth century. As Uncle Sam's precursor, he functioned simi-
larly: a bit comic, a bit serious, but always linked to the socio-political
landscape. For example, he was linked with the popular ditty "Yankee
Doodle," a highly malleable song used by both the colonial regiments and
British forces to mock their opponents during the Revolutionary War.
Likewise, he was featured in some of the first political cartoons. Directly
following the War of 1812, for instance, he appeared in a cartoon along-
side John Bull called, "Brother Jonathan's Administering a Salutary
Cordial to John Bull," which appropriately showed the Yankee forcing
liquid down the emblematic Englishman's throat.' In the Jacksonian peri-
od (roughly 1828-1844) Jonathan's popularity exploded. Perhaps because
of the emphasis on "the common man" in this age, the Yankee showed
up everywhere. Gary A. Richardson notes the Yankee's prominence on
the stage, saying, "Between 1825 and 1855 the entire population of New
1 See Cameron C. Nickels, New England Humor: From the Revolutionary War to the
Civil War (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 120.
62 CRONIN-) ORTNER
England seemed to be migrating to urban stages as one Yankee after
another sallied forth to amuse and enlighten his city cousins."2 But like-
wise, he also habitually appeared in cartoons, newsprint, short fiction,
and within mock essays. The Yankee was, in many ways, a perfect symbol
for the age, and thus gained popularity like never before.
But whether appearing in cartoon, newsprint, short fiction, or on
stage, each Yankee carnation was tied to the socio-political culture. A
Yankee created in 1825 by George Arnold, named "Joe Strickland," for
example, urged readers to try their luck at the New York lottery system.
William Dunlaps's Yankee in A Trip to Niagara (1828) gloried in modern
marvels such as the Erie Canal, and Jonathan from Samuel Wentworth's
The Forest Rose (1825) epitomized the racist attitudes with his often-
repeated tag line, "I wouldn't serve a negro so." 3 Others were more tied
to the political landscape. "Sam Slick, the clockmaker" (created by
Canadian Thomas Haliburton), for example, lobbied for Toryism. "J.
Downing" (created by Charles Augustus Davis) voiced a Whigish philos-
ophy. Likewise, "Major Jack Downing" satirized Democratic beliefs and
policies (particularly those tied to Jackson), without party affiliation. The
Yankee was so immersed in the culture that most important issues were
discussed by this comic figure imagined to reside in New England. If it
was important to the culture, most likely the Yankee was involved some-
how, either mocking it from the stage or petitioning readers to give it a
try.
Attempting to understand why the Yankee was so attractive to
Jacksonian audiences- particularly as he was linked to socio-political ide-
ologies of the day-I will explore this character as a figure of cultural
negotiation. Drawing on scholars of national formation and spatiality, I
2 Gary A. Richardson, "Plays and Playwrights: 1800-1865" in Wilmeth, Don B.
and ChristOpher Bigsby (eds.) The Cambridge History of American Theater. Volume 1:
Beginnings to 1870, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 276.
3 I am drawing on this example because although Wenrworth's piece first pre-
miered in 1825, it gained immense popularity in the 1830s when George ''Yankee" Hill
performed it all over the country. It was, perhaps, ahead of its time, for the play resounds
with Jacksonian cultural issues. See Alexander Saxton, Bruce McConachie, and Rosemarie
K. Bank's analysis respecthely in The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and
Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Theater Culture in America, 1825-1860 (New York:
Verso, 1990), "American Theatre in Context" in The Cambridge History of American Theatre:
Volt1me 1: Beginnings to 1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Theatre
Culture in A merica, 1825-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMINATION
63
will show how the Yankee reflected and reified the socio-political world
of the 1830s. More specifically, I will be combining Loren Kruger's
understanding of theatre as a cultural institution and Doreen Massey's
notion of space as a construction with political intension and possibility
to examine how the Yankee deals with and in Jacksonian space. By look-
ing at JosephS. Jones's The Green Mountain Bqy (1833), a hugely popular
play of the period, I will discuss how the stage Yankee both reflected and
reified the Jacksonian use and understanding of space. In this work the
Yankee makes space for himself in terms of imagined geography, lin-
guistic practices, and dramaturgical structures. As aggressive and expan-
sive as the outside world, the Yankee affected the Jacksonian culture just
as the culture impacted his creation.4
*
The movement of an ideology from socio-political philosophy
to stage becomes most clear when we understand the theatre as a com-
plex site of national formation. My understanding of this phenomenon
stems largely from Loren Kruger's work. In The National Stage Kruger
positions theatre centrally within national formations. Presenting it as a
site of hegemonic struggle she claims, "[t]he intersection of political,
economic, and aesthetic spheres in the institution of theatre as well as the
ambiguity of these relationships makes theatre an exemplary site for
investigating the complex and contradictory relationships among the dis-
courses and practices sustaining cultural hegemony."s Theatre, for
Kruger, is not only a site of the public sphere, but one of the best are-
nas to study the battle for national identity and national culture because
of the ambiguities it brings (as mentioned above) to both the site and the
struggle for hegemony.
4 I am interested in writing closely alongside Rosemarie K. Bank. She looks at
Jonathan's spatial identity in The Forest Rose, identifying him as the representative of the
town within a culture tied to closely to transcendentalism. Though similar in underlying
thinking, I am interested in the play as it was performed in the Jacksonian age, rather than
the earlier version, which came out in 1825. Thus, the spatial concerns change. The
Jacksonian world, unlike the years of the late Republic, was less interested in transcen-
dental concerns. Rather the upward movement of the earlier time seems to have been
redirected; it now moved outward into the seemingly open, ever abundant, and empty
space.
5 Loren Kruger, The Nahonal Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England,
France, and America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 13.
64 CRON!N-jORTNER
In Kruger's analysis, because the theatre relies on economics and
aesthetic tastes, certain ideas and images are legitimated. Dominant cul-
tural institutions are not able simply to approve of one image or to pro-
mote only one view. In a theatre of mass production (and) with mass rep-
resentation, ideological stances may be contested; also those outside of
the hegemonic view may be promoted or justified. But because of the
inherent economic concerns involved in a theatrical production in both
cases, such views must be shown alongside dominant cultural ideas. In
popular art, the hegemonic view may be opposed, but it can be so only
as much as the audience is willing to accept it. Thus, for the most part the
hegemonic view is what is shown. On the other hand, because theater
offers new texts within traditional places and semi-fluid performance tra-
ditions, change is possible. Thus, theatre offers the scholar a unigue view
into the culture.6
Kruger's understanding of theatre is important here, not only
because it posits the stage as a site of national ideological formation, but
because it complexly links this performance site to the socio-political
world. In stretching Kruger's analysis to its logical conclusion, we might
say that theatre, as a cultural institution of huge importance, has the abil-
ity both to affect space and spatial practices in the cultureand to be affect-
ed by space and spatial practices in the culture. To clarify the issue of
space, however, I would like to introduce Doreen Massey's article
"Politics and Space/Time." In this work, Massey outlines space as having
6 Though Kruger points to the 1930s in her work, The National Stage, her analy-
sis could be put to use for the nineteenth century, for at this time theater functioned as a
site of mass representation and mass reproduction as well. Richard Butsch, for example,
describes theatre's popularity, mass appeal and mass availability in the late Federalist peri-
od saying, "In this first American year of flourishing drama theater was a much a place
of public debate as of dramatic entertainment. It had become the protOtype of the pub-
lic sphere, including a broadened range of classes, albeit narrowed in gender". He con-
tinues, describing the 1830s "By the Jacksonian era drama had become a regular enter-
tainment for a wide assortment of people in cities and towns, east and west, qualifying it
as popular entertainment. Workmen's wages had risen significantly since the War of 1812.
Theater ticket prices were reduced in 1823 and by the 1830s were half what they had been
a couple of decades earlier. As a result, theater was an affordable and attractive diversion
and young working men with spare time and money attended frequently". Though per-
haps only a "prototype" for the public sphere (as Butsch claims), theater attracted mass
audiences and allowed for a kind of public debate as well as institutional debate for
national formations at this time (albeit, as Butsch also points out, of narrowed gender
makeup). Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-
1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000),42 and 45.
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOM1NATION 65
four considerations. First, she claims, "we should try to get away from a
notion of society as a kind of 3-D . .. slice which moves through
time ... we should consider space instead as being contained in a four-
dimensionality ... [because] space is not static, nor time spaceless."7 To
this, she adds, "we need to conceptualize space as constructed out of
interrelations, as the simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations and
interactions ... from the most local ... to the most global. .. [, for] the
social is inexorably also spatial."S Third, Massey asks us to consider that
"the spatial has both an element of order and an element of chaos" and
"all this leads to a fourth characteristic of an alternative view of space, as
part of space-time. Spatial form as 'outcome' (the happenstance juxtapo-
sitions and so forth) has emergent powers which can have effects on sub-
sequent events. Spatial form can alter the future course of the very his-
tories which have produced it."9
Using this notion of space, Massey avers, we can understand
space as both producing and impacting the political world. Scholarly
notions in the past have not understood space in a way that includes the
political dimension. Massey's main purpose is to communicate this point.
Concluding her essay, she states, "the spatial is integral to the production
of history, and thus to the possibility of politics, just as the temporal is
to geography."
10
In looking at the Jacksonian geography, spatial uses, and
linguistic practices, alongside the Yankee's use of the same considera-
tions, I hope to ground my argument specifically in Massey's understand-
ing of space.
*
So what was the Jacksonian "space" like? An inquiry into the cul-
tural-impacted geography will begin to give us an idea of its complex
makeup. First, the Jacksonian landscape changed in radical ways. Rather
than continue along its agrarian path, America embraced urbanity in a
7 Doreen Massey, "Politics and Space/Time" in Michael Keith and Steve Pile,
eds,. Place and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1993), 154-55.
8 Massey, 155.
9 Ibid., 155
tO Ibid., 155
66
CRON!N-JORTNER
new way. Historian Edward Pessan, in jacksonian America: Society, Personality
and Politics, notes the extraordinary growth in cities at this time. New
York, for example, went from a population of 200,000 at 1830 to half a
million by 1850; Philadelphia grew from 160,000 to 340,000 and Boston,
New Orleans, and Cincinnati all gained populations numbering over
100,000 at this time. More and more people moved into urban centers. In
fact, according to Pessan, "Urban population ... increased twice as fast as
rural. Where in 1830 not quite 10 percent of the people lived in towns or
cities of 2,500 or more people, by mid-century the proportion had almost
doubled."
11
City population grew for many reasons. First of all, America
was experiencing an economic boom. Businesses were popping up seem-
ingly everywhere, land speculation was on the rise, and everyone, it
seemed, was making money. Since most businesses were located in urban
centers, many Americans easily justified a move into their folds. Second,
immigration rates rose substantially. The Irish came to America in droves
and most of these new citizens settled in cities. The American landscape
was becoming more and more populated with urban spaces and people
everywhere were leaving their small, rural communities to live within the
growing metropolis centers-a trend that did not and would never have
happened before in American history.
This change in geography impacted Americans in personal ways.
Lawrence Frederick Kohl for example, addresses the ideology of the
"self-made man," which was not only created, but rose substantially in
this time period. Never before had so many Americans left their rural
communities to embrace urban life. This trend changed more than just
census reports. It affected Americans on a personal level. According to
Kohl, it created a different kind of American, one less interested in com-
munity and far more interested in personal self-gain.
The nation's boundaries also grew at this time. The Jacksonian
age was the time of national expansion. It was the time of Manifest
Destiny and westward movement. Kohl, reports: "The nation's bound-
aries had been pushed southward to the Gulf of Mexico and westward
to the foothills of the Rockies."12 Likewise, Eric]. Sundquist informs us
1
0 Ibid., 155
11 Edward Pes sen, Jacksonian America: S ocie!J, Personaliry and Politics (Illinois: The
Dorsey Press, 1978), 54.
12 Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American
Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4.
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMINATION 67
of similar facts: "the United States in the four decades before the Civil
War enveloped an enormous contiguous territory between the eastern
seaboard and the Pacific coast" causing it to expand to "[r]oughly twice
the size of the former U.S. holdings."13
Geographical expansion was all around the typical Jacksonian-
whether s/he lived in a small town, a city or on the frontier. Borders were
constantly being changed, moved and/ or enlarged. Land was being incor-
porated and added to every commercial institution, including the country
itself. Space seemed endless and infinite. There was more open space
than could ever be conquered in the American imagination.
This mode of expansion had a darker, more aggressive side to it.
Michele Chevalier, a visiting Frenchman who became famous after pub-
lishing his travelogue on America, for instance, recorded how a political
parade in New York led to racial and ethnic rioting.14 Though cities were
expanding outward, taking up more geographical space, internally they
were becoming more crowded. Pessen explains that cities grew with
"sudden, unprecedented, and unanticipated" fury, and this led to further
chaos15 Says he, the "urban communities [of Jacksonian America] were
ill-equipped to cope with the pressures resulting from their sprawling new
populations. Massive Irish immigration exacerbated tensions, producing
disorder" and "ethnic rioting caused enormous damage to life and prop-
erty in the 1830s and 1840s."16 Part of the problem was that in this era
of changing space, citizens often did not know what boundaries were
appropriate to cross and which ones should remain secure. Likewise,
racial tension brimmed to an all-time high. External Others, such as the
recently immigrated Irish, as well as Internal Others, such as the Native
American and African-American populations, suffered greatly. Racism
was seemingly everywhere, converging onto the non-white population
with increasing ferocity.
13 Eric]. Sundquist, "The Literature of Expansion and Race," in The Cambridge
History of American Literature, Volume 2: 1820-1865 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 28.
14
Qtd. in Anne C. Rose, Voices of the Marketplace: American Thought and Culture,
1830-1860 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 89.
15 Pessen, 55.
1
6 Ibid.
68
CRONIN-] ORTNER
The Indian Removal Act was perhaps the most aggressive spa-
tial expansion of this generation. Sandquist relates the grim details: "By
the policy of Removal, the population of American Indians east of the
Mississippi was reduced from the 1820s through the 1840s to a quarter
of its original size. In the case of the Cherokees alone, about four thou-
sand out of twenty thousand died from disease and starvation in the jour-
ney from Georgia to Oklahoma."
17
He continues, "To extend America's
"area of freedom" as Andrew Jackson called it necessitated the absorp-
tion or the subjugation of American Indian tribes and Mexicans."18 With
the proposal and passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (not to
mention the stacking of his cabinet with pro-Removal politicians),
Jackson singularly provided the means to showcase the menace of
American expansion. Expanding space in the Jacksonian period was pro-
ductive and massive. Yet it could also be aggressive and menacing.
Boundaries were being reformulated every day. Borders were being
pushed back and spatial relationships were being remapped. This expan-
sive energy made way for improvements, innovations and modernity, but
it also transported an aggressive attitude into American midst, which
affected every citizen.
Expansive, aggressive qualities are also found in Jacksonian lin-
guistic practices. This quality came out in novels and in everyday speech
utterances. Anne C. Rose illustrates it in novels of the 1830s: "As nine-
teenth-century technology moved toward increased precision," she
claims, "language became more copious."
1
9 Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle
o m ~ r Cabin might be seen as the perfect example. Stowe's style is linger-
ing and profuse. She offers the reader numerous details within her pro-
longed storyline and includes many tangential points. Such a writing style
might have been considered far too protracted only a decade earlier. This
feature of language also showed up in everyday speech use. Rose claims,
"antebellum Americans were not content to enjoy imagination simply as
consumers of culture but insisted on becoming producers of texts as
well. There were strong and widespread impulses toward self-expression
and communication, as if storytelling held an irresistible fascination."ZO
17 Sundquist, 178.
18 Ibid., 128.
19
Rose, 87.
zo Ibid.
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMIN.\TION 69
But when they did create such texts, she continues, "[p]eople wrote let-
ters with a passion that revealed deeper motives than merely transmitting
information. When couples exchanged hundreds of letters during
courtship or when friends corresponded faithfully for decades, it seems
clear that the writers took please in framing their experience in lan-
guage."21 Americans at this time enjoyed expansive language. They
expanded the linguistic space they read, enjoyed, or used everyday.
Anne C. Rose is not the only observer of this trait in Jacksonian
culture. Frances Trollope, a famous English traveler and travelogue writer
likewise noted copious American speech patterns. She recorded one con-
versation between two New Englanders she overheard while on a boat
which perfectly exemplifies this characteristic:
Well, now, which way may you be traveling?
I expect this canal runs pretty nearly west.
Are you going far with it?
Well, now, I don't rightly know how many miles it may
be.
I expect you'll be from New York?
Sure enough I have been at New York, often and often.
I calculate, then, 'tis not there as you stop?
Business must be mined, in stopping and in stirring.22
"So on they went," she wrote, "without advancing or giving an
inch 'till I was weary of listening."23 While this quote is highly suspect, it
cannot be dismissed quite so easily for other more reliable travelers to
America also noted this trend. Edward Pessen summarizes, "The harsh
conclusion of a number of observers was that though Americans talked
at great length they said nothing that was worth hearing."
2
4
21
Ibid., 87-88.
22 Qtd. in Pessan, 16.
23 Ibid . .It should be noted that Trollope's work is largely an exaggeration of
American manners meant to mock Americans; it should not be taken to mean that all
Americans spoke this way. An avid theatre-goer, Trollope is perhaps juxtaposing the stage
Yankee's speech onto "real" Americans here, or simply exaggerating their conversation to
prove her point. In any case, her report is unreliable.
2
4
Ibid., 16.
70
CRONIN-] ORTNER
*
On stage, the Yankee mirrored many of the spatial trends seen
in the larger culture, landscape, and linguistic practices. Like many
Jacksonian citizens, Jonathan traveled far from home. He moved into
cityscapes previously unknown to him and, like the average Jacksonian,
he did so to increase his personal capital. In The Green Mountain Bqy, for
example, Jedediah divulges that he is far away from home when he says,
"Wal, now I guess I look about as piert as anybody that travels this sec-
tion of the country."25 Others are able to quickly identify him as an
Outsider. Tomkins, his soon-to-be-employer for instance, recognizes him
as a country lad at first sight. Upon seeing Jedediah he remarks, "Who's
this? A country lad sent by Bustle, I presume."26
Jedidiah has left his New England home and he has done so
seemingly within the ideology of the "self-made man," for the first thing
he does is ask Tomkins for work. He bluntly exclaims that his house is
"nice," but he "ought to give it a new coat of paint last spring."2
7
Though
Tomkins does not know who Jedediah is and does not recognize any of
the family names he spouts off, the old Squire agrees to hire him. This
quite forward remark divulges the Yankee's aggressive, self-serving man-
ner, but his hostile nature is further explored in the text. For example,
while employed by Tomkins, the Yankee hardly does any work. He refus-
es to serve at the dinner table, he dodges chores in order to try on new
clothes, and he constantly bothers and belittles other characters. This
Yankee not only makes room for himself within this new environment,
he also takes control of the environment immediately, draining it of its
resources, expanding his personal capital as much as possible. Similar to
Jacksonian spatial tactics, this Yankee aggressively pushes himself into
what he perceives to be an open space- Tomkins' house could use a new
coat of paint-and though this may or may not really be the case
(Tomkins, after all, already has a servant at his disposal), he aggressively
pushes into the space anyway.
This trend occurred in many other Yankee plays. In William
Dunlap's A T np To Niagara (1828) a Yankee shows up on the eastern
frontier, following an English couple traveling through the American
countryside and then to Niagara Falls. In Job Fox; or, The Yankee Valet a
Yankee goes to an English household looking for work. In The Yankee
25 Jones, 18.
2
6 I bid., 9.
2
7 Ibid., 9
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMINATION 71
Pedlar; or Old Times in Virginia (1835), a Yankee character turns up in the
Deep South, and in Lion of the East, or Lift in New York (1835), a Yankee
travels to New York. The Yankee was constandy crossing borders at this
time and he was consistendy doing so through aggressive means.
The Yankee's ability and desire to cross boundaries did not stop
at regional boundaries, though. He also traveled the globe through many
dramatic venues. For example, in Augustus Stone's The Knight of the Golden
Fleece (1834) he appeared in "the Spanish world of Orsario de Luna,
Malvento and Don Emanuel."28 He journeyed to England many times
through works such as, Jonathan Doubikins; or, Jonathan in England (1833) ,
and John Buff at Home; or, Jonathan in England (1828), to France in A Dcg in
France (1838), and to Tripoli in The Adventure, or, the Yankee in Tripoli (1835).
Jonathan at this time was an international traveler. How different he is
from Jonathan in The Contrast, the first Yankee play by Royall Tyler. His
Jonathan, who obedienrly follows Colonel Manly, would, like his elite
counterpart, probably never even desire to journey overseas for fear that
it would taint his opinion of his native country. In Jacksonian times,
Jonathan had no such reservations. Breaking national boundaries, it
seems, was in fact part of his American identity, for Peter Buckley has
claimed, "Donathan's] new 'Jacksonian independence' was ... heightened
by his placement in an international setting."29 Wherever the Yankee went
he made space for himself. Underlying this movement, however, is an
aggression that mirrored Jacksonian spatial politics. Unable or unwilling
to stay within his New England boundaries, the Yankee made his way into
space belonging to others, claiming it as his own.
Just as the Jacksonian notion of expansion incorporated a racial
bias, so did the Yankee's spatial tactics. An early version of The Green
Mountain Bqy, recorded in George "Yankee" Hill's journal, best demon-
strates this aspect of the play. In this version, Jedediah comes into con-
tact with a free black man, named (purposefully) Bill Brown. Upon see-
ing him, he exclaims, 'Well that's the etarnellest black looking chap I ever
see. I never seen one only in the pictur-books; proud as a peacock he
was-did'nt even look on me."30 The Yankee is upset that Bill didn't
28 Hodge, 179.
29 Buckley, 454.
30 George Hill, Scenes from the Life of an Actor (New York: Garrett & Co., 1853),
168.
72 CRONIN-j ORTNF..R
acknowledge him, but Bill is in the middle of working. There is no rea-
son he should have greeted the Yankee. Jedidiah wants Bill's attention
simply because he wants it, and he feels he deserves it because he is
socially "above" him. According to Jedidah's mode of thinking, Bill
should have greeted him because a white man was sharing the space with
a black man and the "lesser" should acknowledge the "better." Without
such a greeting, Bill is automatically labeled as proud.
When the Yankee finally does get Bill's attention, he asks, ''Are
you a nigger? I never seen a real one, but I guess you be. Ar'nt ye-
you?"31 Jedidiah seems to want to confirm his suspicion that this is a
black man. But it is not simple naivete. A darker spatial rhetoric is at work
here, for in this seemingly simple question Jedidiah shows his wish to cat-
egorize the "nigger," to label him as such and place him in a racial box.
He is making sure that this black man knows his place (within this space
that includes a white man). He is a "nigger"; and according to the Yankee
(and the general practice and belief of the time) this is far below any
white person. In actuality, however, this conversation took place between
two white men. Racism of the time banned black actors from the (white)
stage. A white actor surely played this part, with all exposed skin covered
in burnt cork. Thus, Bill's answer to the Yankee's question with, "Who's
you call 'nigger'?," is wonderfully compact.32 In one sense the black
man/ character fights Jedidiah's linguistic containment strategies. In
another sense, the white man/ actor calls attention to his own race. The
white not only dominates the black on stage through labeling and cate-
gorizing, but it does in a very physical way.
Jedidiah's deep racism comes out to a greater extent following
this talk of "niggers." He begins an argument with Bill, prodding him on
his race/ social standing:
Jed: Why he's mad as a hen a'ready. Did you mother
have any more on you?
Bill: Dere child, you better keep quiet, and min what you
say to me, you little bushwacker. If you am saucy, I'll
spile your proftle. You mind dat now.
Jed: Oh, darn it all, don't get mad, Jack; I only said so
out of deviltry, that's all.33
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMINATION 73
Not only is Jedidiah a racist, he continues to dominate Bill lin-
guistically. For example, the young Yankee admits to having no experi-
ence with "niggers"-indeed, he says he never even saw a "real one"-
but this lack of experience does not stop him from prejudging Bill and
enticing him into an argument. His tactics leave Brown with little choice:
he can be silent entirely, ignoring the Yankee, or fight back, as he does.
Neither prospect is a good one for Bill who would rather simply finish
his work. He chooses to fight back and because of this he opens himself
up to more abuse dealt by the Yankee. Even when he asks Jedidiah to
leave him alone, the Yankee will not. He continues haranguing the black
servant.
As the scene continues, the racial tension persists. Jedediah
annoys Bill with his racist attitude until he finally provokes him into a
physical altercation. But with actual danger at hand, the Yankee shows his
true colors. Bill takes a boxing stance. The Yankee, however, begins to
run away. That is, until he sees the (white) hotel owner entering the play-
ing space, at which he cries out, pretending to be hurt. The hotel owner
quickly orders Bill to leave. The African American does not enter the
stage space again. Though a coward in the shadow of physical violence,
the Yankee is spatially aggressive throughout this scene. Jedidiah divulges
his forceful and racist Jacksonian attitudes, whether through silencing
Bill, dominating him linguistically, or finding a way to force him off of
the stage.
The Yankee was also aggressive in terms of the dramaturgical
space. In the above scene, he forces the African American off stage,
never to be seen again. Because he forces the main players to take a back
seat to his comic antics, he actually changes the genre of the work. In the
Yankee one finds a character that pushes and prods the very generic
boundaries that incorporate him. To explain further: the Yankee, most
often, is hardly central to the script in which he is found. Jedidiah, for
example, plays only a secondary part. Yet he expands his dramaturgical
position by taking up linguistic (time/)space in the drama. He is a comic
figure incorporated into a melodramatic script, yet because of his promi-
nence, the play itself became a Yankee Theatre work.
A plot outline will help to clarify. In The Green Mountain Bqy Mr.
Tomkins is a social snob. Only valuing empty titles and foreign wealth, he
denies Ellen, his ward, the right to marry her love, Edward Merton of the
U.S. Navy. He arranges a marriage for her to Lord Montague, a supposed
English lord. Montague however is not English royalty. He is an evil man
who has not only concocted such a lordship to fool Tomkins, but in years
past actually sent Tomkins's brother, Sanfield, to prison for a crime that
74 CRONI N-) ORTNER
he committed. Merton returns from his duty in the U.S. Navy shortly
before Ellen's arranged marriage is to take place. He plans to elope with
her but a friend, actually Sanfield in disguise, encourages him to wait a
few days. Sanfield is all too familiar with Montagues's evil ways, so in dis-
guise he meets with Tomkins and warns him of the false English lord's
plans. To prove his accusations, Sanfield sets a trap for Montague. He
hides Tomkins in the shadows of the room and accuses Montague of his
past crimes. Montague admits his past deeds and attempts to bribe him.
In the end, all ends happily. Tomkins, now aware of the truth, allows
Ellen to marry her love. He is reunited with his long-lost brother, and
swears to give up his admiration of empty titles.
Jedidiah, one will notice, is not part of the action at aU. He fits
into this play as a secondary character. The plot happens around him, and
like most low-comedy characters, he is part of the drama only to lighten
the mood. Most characters in this dramaturgical position keep their place.
Joe Shakespeare, the poetic servant, for example, does not stay on stage
for long intervals, nor is he allowed much stage time. This could be said
for hundreds of low-comedy characters before the Yankee, and even for
all the remaining low-comedy characters in The Green Mountain Bqy. But it
is definitely not true for the Yankee, for though part of the secondary
character list, Jedidiah is constantly on stage, and constantly speaking. In
fact, it is hard to shut him up once he begins. In the beginning of the play,
for example, Jedediah explains (or tries to explain) his relation to
Tomkins. Tomkins has merely asked the young boy his name, yet instead
of a straight answer, the Yankee says:
Wal, you see my day's first wife was a second cousin to
Ben Hannerferd's daughter Jerusha,-she that married
Ike Armstrong; and arter they'd had four children, -
two gals, one boy, and a cripple, -she died, one day, eat-
ing artichokes when she had the chickenpox, and left all
the children on Ike's hands. But he seems to get along
pruty well, and I guess they don't want for nothing.34
The Yankee spins out his speech unhurriedly, taking up stage time and
making ever yone-characters as well as audience-listen to him whether
they want to or not.
34 Jones, 9.
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMINATION 75
The Yankee not only took up more time on stage than other
characters and carried more narrative strength than other characters, but
he also held center stage for a longer time. Speaking to himself or in dia-
logue, the Yankee rarely let other characters get a word in edgewise. Once
a Yankee started talking, there was little that anyone could do or say until
he left the playing space by his own volition. Forcing the Yankee off stage
was vitually impossible. For example, in the last part of The Green
Mountain B f!)'J Tomkins is trying to have a serious conversation with a mys-
terious, unknown man-actually Sanfield, his long-lost brother in dis-
guise. Because such a serious conversation is taking place, Tomkins asks
Jedidiah to leave the room. But the Yankee is not gone for long. Through
their conversation Jedediah continually re-enters the space, spouting near
nonsense. The first time he interrupts, he barges in the room saying, "Say,
square! There's tat there big yaller dog"; to which Tomkins replies, "Leave
the room, sir. How dare you!" After being driven off, Jedediah enters
again only a few moments later, saying, "Say, squire! That yaller dog has
broke his chain, and bit a nigger!" Tomkins quickly sends him away again:
"Get out you scoundrel." But Jedediah continues in his interruptions;
only a few moments pass before he barges in with, "Square, your black
hen has been and gone and laid a white egg!"35 This Yankee simply can-
not be stopped. Even though this is a point of high melodramatic ten-
sion in the script, the Yankee interrupts it and disrupts it, taking the lin-
guistic space available for himself and stealing the dramaturgical space in
the process.
Yankee characters intrude where they were unexpected and even
unwanted. They encroach on the action of serious plays yet because they
demand such engorged dramaturgical space, they actually change the
genre of the work. Though most works in which this character appears
might be accurately categorized as domestic melodramas, they are not.
They are recorded as ''Yankee Plays." The action, incidents, tone, and
central crisis all point to a melodrama of the domestic kind, but the
Yankee undoes this all. Once he enters the action, the play becomes a
Yankee Play. It is categorically altered by his presense. The Yankee's
aggressive presence is also marked in unexpected ways. For example, they
often seem to gain in symbolic importance. They transcend their "low"
35 Ibid., 24-5.
76 CRONIN-jOR'INER
status and move towards centrality. Most often the Yankee ends the show
within the final tableau-claiming an undeserved dramaturgical position.
In The Green Mountain Bqy, Jedediah actually ends squarely center stage
Though the Yankee does not push the action of the play, he symbolical-
ly overcomes his low-comedy status, ending the work posed as the cen-
tral player.36
This quality of the Yankee was a new characteristic in Jacksonian
Theatre. Stage Yankees did not always speak so much, nor did they always
take up so much narrative space. Likewise, they were not scenographical-
ly noted as important to the work (having a place in the final tableau). The
Contrast certainly did not give such importance to Jonathan, nor did works
like Love and Friendship; or, Yankee Notions (1810) by A. B. Lindslay, or Tears
and Smiles (1809) by James Nelson Barker. Peter Buckley notes the
Jacksonian quality to this characteristic when he claims: Yankees actually
"gained in narrative strength" in the 1830s as they began to "[spin] out
tales in an endless thread of neologisms."37 Mirroring the Jacksonian cul-
ture, the Yankee expanded in linguistic (time/)space. He took up more
time on stage, aggressively forced other characters and audience mem-
bers to listen to his long, rambling speeches, and in doing so gained sym-
bolic importance.
*
By looking at The Green Mountain Bqy, I have shown how this
Yankee reflected changing spatial politics within the Jacksonian age.
Making space for himself within geographical boundaries, linguistic
structures, and dramaturgical formations, the Yankee reflects not only the
emergent individualism of the age, but also the rhetoric of expansionism
which was so prevalent in the 1830s. But the Yankee did not simply
reflect this ideology within the culture, he also reified it. This process is
difficult to decipher, first of all, because of his comic status. He was, after
all, most often dressed in striped pants which were either too big or too
long for him, a large bell hat, and a long frock coat which would have
36 Plays such as The Green Mountain Bqy were written specifically for Yankee
actors, like George "Yankee" Hill, who commissioned this work. Despite this qualifica-
tion, I am convinced that there is something here, that there is spacial work being done,
for the Yankee overtakes the entire melodramatic form despite his limited involvement in
the plot.
37 Buckley, 454.
EXPANSION, EXPULSION AND DOMI:-JA"DON 77
been horribly out of style. He spoke in a funny accent and used unusual,
outmoded words. Likewise, because he was a low-comic character, audi-
ence members would not imagine themselves akin to such a fool. They
would not dress like him, nor would they think they acted in a like man-
ner. But the Yankee was more than a stage clown. He was the nineteenth-
century's version of Uncle Sam. He was in other words a national icon.
Thus, his stage antics can be read with more seriousness. What may have
appeared as simple plain foolery in actuality was a culture expressing its
desires and needs. The Yankee was the perfect spatial aggressor in comic
form, thus reifying the ideologies and beliefs present in the culture in a
physical way. He made their sociopolitical world (both real, imagined, and
desired) more concrete, alive, and attainable.
Kruger's analysis of theater's place in society helps to clarify this
position. Autonomy, she claims, "could be defined as the 'legitimating
translation' of economic, political or social domination ... into aesthetic
value."38 Yet, she assesses, "at the same time as we acknowledge the
extent to which the apparently autonomous conventions of dramatic lit-
erature are penetrated by the economic, social, and political 'conditions
of emergence,' we should nonetheless beware of reducing any particular
dramatic text or genre to a mere symptom of domination."39 Likewise,
she continues, "dramatic strategies of representation cannot be dissolved
into social relations of power, though they may represent them."40 Social
forces do not dominate theater, yet social forces produce it. To vastly
simplify Kruger's point, we might say that theatre and culture are not only
reflective of each other but also work to produce each other. Power
structures might begin in the culture and be reflected in the theatre; yet
they might also be contested in the theatre, thereby creating new power
structures and movement within the culture. They might be started from
within the theatre and reflected out into the culture. So subtle is the
movement from stage to culture, though, it is difficult for any historian
to prove except in the broadest terms. This is, I believe, how Kruger's
work is most useful, because it allows us to speculate on these larger con-
nections between stage and culture.
3B Kruger, 18.
39
Ibid.
40 Ibid., 19.
78 CRONIN-) ORTNER
Yankee Theater worked this way. The Yankee reflected
Jacksonian spatial tactics and/ as he simultaneously produced them. Yet,
as Kruger suggests, all of his actions and characteristics were regulated
by the economic demands placed on every theatre production. To sur-
vive, the Yankee had to be extraordinarily attractive to audiences, partic-
ularly in a time when theatrical shows normally lasted no longer than a
week. The Green Mountain Bqy reached the height of popularity. It was pro-
duced hundreds of times during the Jacksonian period across the entire
continental U.S. As a cultural construction, the Yankee's identity could be
seen as a site of struggle and, in the same way, his use of space was also
a site of struggle. It reflected, contested, produced, and reified how the
average Jacksonian could deal with, relate to, and/ or work within their
own national space.
The theatre was a powerful cultural arena in the nineteenth cen-
tury. It was a site of cultural negotiation and a site of struggle for nation-
al identity. When this site holds a character that is representative of the
new nation, we need to see him as a political being, comic though he may
be. Dressed up as a cultural icon and amusing audiences across the coun-
try, the Yankee worked to both reinforce and impact the culture. Writers
might have placed the Yankee in these prevailing spatial terms unknow-
ingly, but as audience members watched Jonathan on stage, their own
aggressive use of space could be affirmed. In this way the Yankee's use
of space is in some way as political as Jackson's policies regarding
American borders, as aggressive as his proposal to remove all Native-
Americans from U.S. claimed territory. It is just as political as the rheto-
ric of expansion and as aggressive as the acts of Manifest Destiny. It is
just as political as growing cities, the laying of national railways, or the
growth of individualism. Massey claims, "One way of thinking about all
this is to say that the spatial is integral to the production of history, and
thus to the possibility of politics."
41
So too, the Yankee produces history
as he reflects it. And he too enters the world of politics. This political
link stays with us today. Uncle Sam still holds a quasi-political place as an
image of ''America" in our culture.
41 Massey, 159.
JOURNAL OF .AME RICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 17, NO. 1 (WINTER 2005
NEO-SLAVE DRAMA: NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE
IN ALICE CHILDRESS's WEDDING BAND
NGHANA LEWIS
Despite renewed interest in black female playwrights, particular-
ly given the mainstream success of Suzan-Lori Parks's Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning TopDog/Underdog (2001),
1
the work of prolific playwright Alice
Childress continues to be neglected.Z Further, critics who have addressed
Childress's work, specifically her play Wedding Band A Love/Hate Story in
Black and White (1966), have not adequately accounted for its aesthetic
merit, both in terms of the range of responses it provokes and, correla-
tively, its dramatic elements) Childress's experimentation with character-
I I say renewed because of the mass appeal of Lorraine Hansberry's work in
the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and Ntozake Shange's work throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Parks became the first black female playwright to win the Pulitzer, for TopDog/Underdog,
in 2002. Parks's recent debut as a fiction writer (Getting Mama's Bocjy, 2003) prompted me
to think about Childress's critical neglect.
2 For Childress's biography, see Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the
Stage: Black Women Plqywrights in America (New York: Praeger, 1988); Olga Dugan, "Telling
the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright," Journal of African American History
81 (1996): 123-36; Trudier Harris, introduction to Alice Childress, Like One of the Famijy
(New York: Beacon, 1986); Polly Holliday, "I Remember Alice Childress," Southern
Quarterjy 25 (Spring 1987): 63-65; and La\rinia Jennings, Alice Childress (New York:
Twayne, 1995).
3 See, for example, Brown-Guillory; LaVinia Jennings, "Segregated Sisterhood:
Anger, Racism, and Feminism in Alice Childress' Florence and Wedding Band," in Black
Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage, ed. Carol Marsh-Lockett (New York:
Garland, 1999); Rosemary Curb, "An Unfashionable Tragedy in American Racism: Alice
Childress's Wedding Band," MELUS 7 (Winter 1980): 57-68; and Catherine Wiley, "Whose
Name, Whose Protection: Reading Alice Childress' Wedding Band," in Modern American
Drama: The Female Canon, ed. June Schlueter (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1990), 184-97. Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown comes closest to giving Childress's
craftsmanship its just due in focusing on the "dramatic representation of the legal and
sociocultural mechanisms of subjugation and control" in Wedding Band (Alma Jean
Billingslea-Brown, " 'The Blight of Legalized Limitation' in Alice Childress's Wedding
Band," in Law and Literature Perspectives [New York: Peter Lang, 1996], 39). But, like critics
before her, Billingslea-Brown reads this process almost exclusively through Childress's
indictment of anti-miscegenation laws, which, well into the latter half of the twentieth
century, remained on record in many southern and midwestern states. Donna Lisker also
offers a close reading of Childress's aesthetics that is both penetrating and convincing, but
she focuses on Trouble in Mind (1971) and Florence (1950) (Donna Lisker," 'Controversy
Only Means Disagreement': Alice Childress's Activist Drama," in Southern Women
Plqy1vrights, ed. Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige [Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama, 2002], 73-88).
80
LEWIS
ization, voice, and music in Wedding Band harks back to a time of height-
ened racial, class, and gender conflict in America to expose the persistent
legacy of institutionalized slavery in the moment of the play's origins as
well as in its historical setting. Childress conceded herself, "Events from
the distant past, things which took place before I was born, have influ-
ence over the content, form, and commitment of my work."4 The con-
sequences here are significant because they open the play to a reading that
places Wedding Band within the neo-slave narrative tradition while also
amplifying the possibilities for a sense that, according to Ashraf Rushdy,
this genre "assume[s] the form, adopt[s] the conventions, and take[s] on
the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative" to "engage in an
extended dialogue" about "this historiographical representation of slav-
ery" in the text's own moment of origins.s
Neo-slave drama is not to be confused with agitprop drama, a
form made popular in the 1930s by the widespread critical and popular
success of plays such as Clifford Odets's Waitingfor Lefty (1935). In con-
trast, neo-slave drama instances a radical theatrical practice that inter-
venes into the cultural-political spaces of the past to comment on the
conditions of those for whom the legacies of slavery bear particular sig-
nificance. The historical boundaries of neo-slave drama are not limited to
the period of legalized U.S. slavery. Questions of subjectivity, culture,
identity, and agency associated with the period are, however, at stake in
the staging of events as well as the construction and directions of char-
acters, their actions and interactions. In addition, narrative becomes a
crucial mediating device the playwright uses to draw audiences in, com-
pelling them to "inhabit"6 the people who labored under the peculiar
4 Alice Childress, "A Candle in a Gale Wind," in Black Women Writers (1950-
1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor, 1984), 111. A shorter ver-
sion of the essay titled "Knowing the Human Condition" appeared in 1981 in R. Baxter
Miller, ed., Black American Uterature and Humanism (Louisville: University Press of
Kentucky, 1981), 8-10.
5 Ashraf Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
3. For a general discussion of neo-slave novels, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), especially pages 218-20. For a discussion of
the genre in relation to black women writers specifically, see Elizabeth Beaulieu, Black
Women Wnters and the American Neo-Slave Narrative (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).
6 In an interview with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison discusses the opportunities
literary representations of slavery allow contemporary audiences to experience vicarious-
ly the horrors of the institution and the enduring spirits of the people who survived it
(Paul Gilroy, Small Acts [London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), 175-82, at 179.)
NEO-SLAVE DRAMA
81
institution, to experience vicariously their trials and triumphs through
characters' verbal and nonverbal speech acts.
Though set in the aftermath of the Civil War when slavery is ille-
gal, Wedding Band deploys a range of rhetorical and dramatic devices to
illustrate the legal, social, and cultural mores that sustained de facto slavery
in the American South throughout the modern period. The politics of
miscegenation, the most widely analyzed strand among critics of the play,
constitutes one of several vehicles through which the play signifies on the
revisionist process. The politics of female kinship constitute another. 7
Reading black/white female kinship across time and space in the charac-
terizations of Julia, Mattie, Lula, Fanny, Herman's mother, Frieda (Miss
Thelma), and Herman's sister Annabelle, Wedding Band inscribes resist-
ance in terms of solidarity.S It draws upon-and revises-a convention-
al discourse through which classic slave narratives dictate that "slavery"
and "freedom" must be understood by reenacting these characters'
unending day-to-day hard work of managing their peculiar struggles
within patriarchal power structures. The setting of the play and the sym-
bolically extended racial and gender mythologies that combine with pro-
jections about social class and sexuality throughout the play work to com-
plicate and clarify the network of relations among these women.
Concomitantly, dialogue and music work as standard dramatic techniques
that assume ironic political symbolism, invoking aspects of the black ver-
nacular tradition to unite the fragmented elements of the characters'
identities. Scenes in the play are paced somewhat musically, with each
building, climax.ing, dropping down, and easing off as the female charac-
ters and their respective conflicts take shape. In the face of their shared
and oppositional codes of ex.istence and mutual recognition of the limi-
tations and possibilities created by their existences, the women form
complex bonds that enable them to challenge, if not completely over-
7 The concept of miscegenation relates to the notion of female kinship I de\el-
op in this essay when miscegenation is loosely defined as racial mixing without specific
reference to its sexual, historical, and legal ramifications.
8 Here I disagree with LaVinia Jennings's claim that Childress's signification on
the dialectic of "black woman-white woman segregated sisterhood" in Wedding Band seeks
largely to accentuate rather than reconcile conflicts between black and white women
Gennings, "Segregated Sisterhood," 43).
82 LEWIS
come, their oppressed status. The play's emotional pull, interwoven with
its revisionist structure, can thus be said to "lyricize" black/white female
kinship, casting its value in a light similar to the sacred-secular songs that
"carried" the American South out of slavery into freedom. In a fashion
reminiscent of the "sacred songs created by slaves"9 as well as the bal-
ance and harmony in Billie's plaintive wail and Bessie's defiant croon,
Wedding Band expresses the situational parallels of black and white women
in a complex lyrical narrative of resistance and solidarity.
The history of black and white women's mutual subjugation
with.in American cultural systems has been well documented. "The desire
among the powerless to unite in order to gain some control over their
own lives is," according to Elizabeth Beaulieu, "not uncommon" (35).
Nevertheless, unmistakable overtones of class and race-consciousness
have, more often than not, permeated the experiences-and associa-
tions-of black and white women, particularly in southern contexts.
1
0 A
classic representation of the complexity of their interactions and the
resulting uneasy bond is offered in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl. Jacobs's narrative persona Linda Brent accounts for the degra-
dation to which Mrs. Flint, her mistress, subjects her to, because of Mr.
Flint's sexual pursuit of Linda. Still, Linda concludes, "I could not blame
her. Slaveholders' wives feel as other women would under similar cir-
cumstances." And despite the abuse, indeed, perhaps, because of it,
Linda finds herself pitying Mrs. Flint because of the "deadening" hold
that slavery takes over her and other white women's "moral sense" (36) .11
9 Bernice Johnson Reagon, "If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me": The African
American Sacred Song Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2001), 104.
10 See, for example, Minrose Gwin, Black and White ~ o m e n of the Old South: The
Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985);
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South (Chapel Hill: University of lorth Carolina Press, 1988); Anne Goodwyn Jones, ed.,
Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottes,;!le: University Press of Virginia,
1997); Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War
Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire:
Reconstructing Southern Women$ Wnting, 1930-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000).
11
This tension runs through most dramatic accounts of black-white southern
women's relationships. For a more recent version, see Tony Kushner, Caroline, Or Change
(New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004).
NEO- SLAVE DRAMA
83
In the aftermath of slavery and throughout the flrst half of the
twentieth century, many forward-looking black and white women in the
South began working to expose the effects of slavery on the moral con-
stitutions of enslaved and slaveholding populations alike. Through mis-
sionaries, social clubs, and political campaigns, these activists sought to
raises consciousnesses at local levels, targeting pernicious state legislative,
judicial, and educational policies that denied them equal protection under
the law.12 A pattern of interaction emerged in t the causes black and white
women advocated, emerged. The interests of black and white women,
though still different and contentious on some fundamental levels,
increasingly converged in recognition of their mutual desires to realize
racial and gender equality.13
The range of black and white women's interests, diverging and
converging, contentious and harmonious, continued to resonate in the
moment of Wedding Bands composition, a time marked by the Civil
Rights, Black Power, and Women's Liberation Movements.1
4
As bell
hooks has frequently pointed out, black men, "socialized to accept sexist
ideology," often perpetuated the sexist oppression of black and white
women activists, even as they collectively agitated for freedom of oppor-
tunity and expression.1
5
Robyn Weigman, writing specifically of the Black
Power Movement, maintains that the resulting conflict of interests
hinged essentially on privileging discourses within the movement which
"turned repeatedly to the historical legacy of race and gender in order to
deflne and articulate a strident black masculinity." The result was the
patent prioritizing of "the black phallus" in ways that ultimately displaced
"both the specificity and legitimacy of black female"-and, I would add,
white female-"articulations of political disempowerment."
1
6 Still, dis-
12 For a general overview of these developments see Dewey Grantham, The
South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 57-58 and 306-
07.
1
3 See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames
andthe Women's Campaign Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979)and
Hghana Lewis, "We Shall Pave the \X'ay: Willa Carter and Lillian Smith's Aesthetics of
Civil Rights Politics," Arizona Quarterly 60.4 (Winter 2004): 33-64.
14 See, for example, Lynne Olson, Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the
Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001).
1
5 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge: South End
Press, 1984), 76.
16 Robyn Weigrnan, American Anatomies (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995), 86,107-08, 150-51.
84
LEWIS
cursive discord also accounts for the problems hooks observes with the
women's liberation movement, wherein "the rhetoric of commonality"
embedded in the language middle-class white women used to promote
the movement, undermined the (often opposing) interests of the masses
of black and poor white women active in the cause.n In their demand for
cultural and political authority throughout the twentieth century one fac-
tor seems to have remained: black and white women had to critique
inequalities that conditioned, connected, and challenged their social
econom1es.
The Freedom Song, a cornerstone of modern liberation move-
ments, was a principle mechanism for leveling their critique and, in the
process, realizing their fundamentally connected, if not entirely uniform,
conditions. Here, Bernice Johnson Reagan's description of the consub-
stantiating effects of music is worth noting. For Reagan, a renowned vet-
eran of the Civil Rights Movement and founder of the Grammy Award-
winning a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, the value of the free-
dom songs rested in their capacity to connect the "living" leaders of
modern freedom movements with their ancestors who set the tone for
resistance. "Somewhere between singing the songs of our people as we
struggled in daily confrontation against racism," she muses, "I began, in
a healing way, to be reconnected to the nineteenth century, beyond
known lines of my biological family."
1
8 The dramatization of this kinship
process in Wedding Band evinces both the pragmatism and principle of
Childress's aesthetic executions.
Childress once metaphorically observed that writing was, to her,
"a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a
gale wind . . .. I try to bend my writing form, to most truthfully express
content; to move beyond the either/ or of 'artistic' and politically
imposed limitations" because "either/ or is too confining a pattern," and
"even when a writer seeks to evade and omit all that is political, because
it is politic to do so, that then becomes political."19 As a consequence,
Childress concedes to crafting even her novels in the spirit with which
she writes drama,zo "mainly in terms of visual, staged scenes and live
17
hooks, 6.
18 Reagon, 104.
19 Childress, "A Candle," 111, 114, and 112-13.
20 Childress's young adult novels include A Hero Aint's N othin' But a Sandwich
(1973), Rainbow Jordan (1981), and Those Other People (1989). She published one adult novel,
A Short Walk (1979).
NEo-SLAVE DRAMA 85
actors in performance," because "the stage play, confined to one area,
taxes the imagination more than other forms. It is the greatest challenge,"
she concludes, "because it also depends heavily on the cooperation of
many other individuals with several approaches to creative expression."
21
Crucially, within Childress's aesthetic purview, drama must be
understood not only in terms of what Patricia Schroeder calls its "mimet-
ic power," but also in terms of the kinetic process it enacts.
22
As
Angeletta Gourdine succinctly puts it, writing specifically of black
women's drama, drama must provide "the viewer with an opportunity for
imagining and imaging the actuality of the story the script contains."
2
3 In
Wedding Band, the imaging/imagining process is rooted in Childress's
manipulation of call and response, what Samuel Floyd, Jr. refers to as the
"the master trope, the musical trope of tropes" within black expressive
culture.2
4
Call and Response is a form of signification that works to trans-
fer, "achieve[,] or reverse power" by performing a "kind of sonic mimic-
ry that creates the illusion of speech or narrative conversation."
25
The
result is "a dynamic interplay of music and aesthetic power," lending to
the signifying speech act/ narrative/ music the authority at once to criti-
cize and recreate the speech act/ narrative/ music signified upon. The
communicative acts upon which Wedding Band signifies shape the ideolo-
21 Childress, "A Candle," 115.
22 Patricia Schroeder, "Remembering the Disremembered: Feminist Realists of
the Harlem Renaissance," in William De Mastes, Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition
(Tuscaloosa: Uni\ersity of Alabama Press, 1996), 91 -106.
23 Angeletta Gourdine, "The Drama of Lynching in Two Blackwomen's
Drama, or Relating Grimke's Rachel to Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun," Modern Drama 41
(Winter 1998): 541. In an early interview, Amiri Baraka argues along similar lines in defin-
ing (what should be) the objectives of black theater. "Black Theater," he affirms, "is an
act of liberation." And the point at which black theater must arrive finally is one where
"the theater is as an organic part of the community as anything else" (Amiri Baraka,
"What is Black Theater?" (1971, interview with Mike Coleman], reprinted in Conversations
with Amiri Baraka, ed. Charles Reilly Qackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994], 84-
88. For readings of the relation berween Childress's theatrical theories and her work, most
notably, Florence and Trouble in Mind, see Brown-Guillory, Their Place on Stage; Dugan; and
Lisker.
24 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa
to the United States (New York: Oxford, 1995), 95.
2
5 Ibid., 96.
86 LEWIS
gy of the southern plantation. The primary mechanisms through which
Childress invokes, interrogates, and indicts the plantation ideology are the
communicative acts shaping black and white women's interactions in the
play. The resulting reciprocity between these acts and interactions, these
calls and responses, underscores the theme of black-white female kin-
ship. These reciprocities establish a lyrical pattern, which, when tethered
to the acts of defiance configured in the play's setting and taking place
well before we meet the key female players, sustains the narratives of
resistance so central to the drama Wedding Band stages.
Though four houses are alluded to in the stage setting at the start
of Act I, scene 1, only three stand at center stage. These three are rental
houses located in the backyard of a fourth house occupied by the land-
lady. The fourth house, we are told, is located "offstage," along with an
outhouse and hydrant, which supplies both the tenants' and the landla-
dy's water.26 Not yet fully modernized, the scene invokes the Old Order
in its reproduction of the architectural economy of a southern planta-
tion. The three visible houses are the tenants' or (symbolic) slaves' quar-
ters, while the landlady, or (symbolic) "master" of the tenants' dwellings
resides, in the "big house"-offstage. Of the three houses on stage, the
one at the center stands in marked contrast to the ones at stage left and
right. Unlike these two "weather-beaten and shabby" houses, the center
house is "newly painted" and "gingerbready''-its display of "odds and
ends" give it a "beautiful, subdued splendor" (1184). The stage directions
tell us that "old and new mingle" at this location "in defiance of style and
period"" (1184). Surrounding the center house at center stage but in the
backyard of the "big house" offstage is a sense of order, or organization,
fomenting amid chaos and destruction. Julia's first hesitant then deter-
mined rise and exit from the house at center stage to calm the storm that
her neighbors at stage right and left are brewing underscores the sym-
bolism of this nascent sense of order. Julia's home is, in other words, the
site of something emergent and subdued, new and beautiful, splendid
and defiant, and that something, we learn, brings about a sense of
(restored) order and harmony among the three houses that occupy the
stage.
26 Alice Childress, Wedding Band, in Cafl and Response, ed. Patricia Hill, et. al.
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 1184-1212, at 1184. Subsequent references will
hereafter be parenthetically cited in the text.
N EO-SLIWE DRAMA 87
As the opening scene progresses, focus shifts from Julia's house,
the site of order, to the surrounding chaos. Fanny, the landlady, econom-
ically self-sufficient and decidedly single "cause nobody's come up to
[her] high standards," she boasts, emerges at once to tell and solicit gos-
sip. Of Mattie, the tenant residing in the house at stage right, she
observes, "That loud-mouth . . . used to work in a white cat-house." ''A
what?" Julia queries. "Sportin' house," Fanny retorts, a "house of ... a
whore house ... Used to wash their joy-towels .... Vulgarity," she
deduces, allegorically summarizing her opinion of Mattie and her work.
Of her tenant at stage left, Fanny observes: "Sweetface Lula killed her
only child ... in a way-a speakin'. And then Gawd snatched up her triflin'
husband. One nothin' piece-a man. Biggest thing he ever done for her
was to lay down and die. Poor woman. Yes indeed". When Julia declines
to contribute to Fanny's gossip- "Miss Fanny, I don't talk about people,"
she says, "I really do stay busy"-Fanny starts questioning Julia about her
situation. "Doin' what?" she asks. "Seein' your beau? You have a beau
haven't-cha?" (1186).
Julia finally succeeds in dismissing Fanny; but not before con-
firming that she does indeed have a beau and not before listening to
Fanny's unsolicited testimony of her material and, we are to assume, her
hereditary wealth. "I got a horsehair settee and a four piece, silver-plated
tea service," she boasts, "first and only one to be owned by a colored
woman in the United States of America." "My mother was a genuine,
full-blooded qualified Seminole Indian," she proclaims, as Mattie re-
enters the stage "wearing a blue calico dress and striped apron" (1186-
87).
The apparent disconnection between Fanny's shift in focus from
her material possessions to her ancestry later dissipates when we discov-
er that both Julia and Mattie are targets of Fanny's repressed inferiority
complex. Both women have what Fanny most desires but cannot buy
with either money or heritage: a man. As she later confesses to Nelson,
"I'm damned tired-a ramblin' round in five rooms by myself. House full-
a new furniture, the icebox forever full -a goodies. I'm a fine cook and I
know how to pleasure a man, ... he wouldn't have to step outside for a
thing, ... food, fun, and finance ... all under one roof" (1 199). She goes
on formally to sexually proposition Nelson-to no avail-ironically
descending to the very level of immorality she professes to detest in
Mattie. For the moment, however, Fanny's judgment of Mattie and Lula,
coupled with the visual impression of chaos in the houses at stage right
and left, mark the start of act 1, scene 1 as disorderly.
Fanny, whose economic success as property owner and landlady
88 L EWIS
makes her the self-proclaimed spokesperson for the black race, stands lit-
erally and figuratively within and outside of the scene, looking down
upon her sisters in their struggle for socioeconomic and, by extension,
political freedom. Hers is the master's gaze, or the master's gaze co-opted,
by a character whose repressed desires and feelings of inadequacy cause
her to exploit the oppressed conditions of others while denying her hand
in their oppression-and, by extension, her own oppression, because she
is a black woman. Fanny is conscious of the social politics operative
between the races, as her explaining why the white townspeople throw
dirty water on Nelson, a veteran of World War I, evidences: "A black man
on leave got no right to wear his uniform in public," she remarks. "The
crackers don't like it. That's flauntin' yourself" (1185). But among fellow
blacks Fanny unabashedly flaunts her possessions, the economic and
intellectual wealth she claims to have and believes they desire. Until Julia's
arrival, Mattie's and, to a lesser extent, Lula's aggravated responses to
Fanny's baiting only sustain Fanny in her distorted beliefs.
The audience is flrst introduced to Mattie as she runs from the
house at stage right loudly threatening to beat her daughter, Teeta, for
losing "the only quarter [she] got to her name". As Mattie hysterically
searches the grounds for the money needed to buy the sugar she uses to
make candies which she sells part-time to sustain her daughter and her-
self, Fanny banters with, chides, and threatens Mattie over her financial
situation. "That's all the money I got," Mattie proclaims, upon discover-
ing the quarter lodged out of reach under Julia's house. ''I'll tear this
damn house down!" she warns. ''And I'll blow this police whistle," Fanny
retorts. (1185)
The action that ensues, however, enacts a critical reversal of
what we can assume constitutes Fanny's habitual derisive/ divisive behav-
ior, until Julia's arrival. Julia emerges and, upon discovering the source of
Mattie's discontent, "gets a quarter from her dresser," in accordance with
the stage directions. "Oh, my, dear-heart, don't cry," she says. "Take this
twenty-five cents." Both Fanny's refusal and Julia's willingness to come to
Mattie's financial aid signify the reformative potential of Julia and Mattie's
exchange. Reform resonates in a later scene when Julia agrees to read
Mattie's letter from October free of charge, after Fanny ridicules Mattie's
illiteracy, then demands ten cents to read her husband's letter to her. It
resonates, too, in the exchange between Julia and Lula that follows close-
ly on the heels of Fanny's boastings.
Nelson, Lula's son, asks Julia to join him for a drink. When Julia
resoundingly refuses, Lula insinuates that her motives are elitist. "He's got
a lady friend, her name is Merrilee Jones," she announces. ''And he was
N EO-SLAVE DRAMA
89
just tryin' to be neighborly. That's how me and Nelson do. But you go on
and stay to yourself." Julia, who, notably, previously declined to share
information with Fanny, immediately explains her situation to Lula: "Miss
Lula! I'm sorry I hurt your feelin's. Miss Lula! I have a gentleman friend,
that's why I said no." Lula's simple reply: "I didn't think-a that" (1187) .
The significance of Julia and Lula's exchange is in keeping with Julia's
handing Mattie a quarter. One is dialogic, the other economic: both, nev-
ertheless, open lines of communication among the three women and
consequently, their houses at stage right, center, and left. In these organi-
zational and discursive frameworks and again later, when Julia reads
October's letter, Julia, Mattie, and Lula have occasion to tell their stories
to one another-or, in Mattie's and Lula's cases, to retell their stories (in
as much as Fanny has already rendered her version). In each case, thenar-
rative process invokes a pattern of communication that is antiphonal.
In the context of the Black Aesthetic antiphony is said to privi-
lege both the written and spoken word in the development of black lit-
erary traditions. As Paul Gilroy observes, antiphony "has come to be seen
as a bridge from music into other modes of cultural expression, supply-
ing, along with improvisation, montage, and dramaturgy, the hermeneu-
tic keys to the full medley of black artistic practices."27 Yet where Gilroy
believes the invocation of this pattern among Black Arts Movement
enthusiasts served to symbolize and anticipate "new, non-dominating
social relationships" to come, Wedding Bands play on call-and-response
characterizes voice as a focal point of power, indicating the larger theme
of a specific, subversive female kinship at work. This execution critiques
the perhaps too optimistic assumptions of some Black Arts proponents
for whom Call-And-Response was a cure-all for the problems that
plagued black communities throughout America and, in important
respects, divided it along gender and class lines.28 If the women's experi-
ences in Wedding Band are not identical, they emerge as fundamentally
related to one another and distinguishable from those of the male char-
acters in the play.
27 Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 78.
28 For more on the complexity of Childress's engagement of issues central to
the Black Arts Movement, see John 0. Killens, "The Literary Genius of Alice Childress,"
in Black Women Writers: A Critical E valuation, 1950-1980, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City, NY:
Anchor, 1984), 129-33.
90
LEWIS
"I live by myself," Julia begins, as partial explanation for why she
and Herman have not "cut the cake." "But he visits," she continues. "My
husband," declares Lula, "Gawd rest the dead, used to run 'round with
other women; it made me kind-a careless with my life. One day, many
long years ago, I was sittin' in a neighbor's house tellin' my troubles; my
only child, my little boy, wandered out on the railroad track and got
killed" (1187). The women go on to contemplate the weight their respec-
tive "sins" leave on their "souls" and the process by which they can gain
absolution. The two break into song, loosely harmonizing to the lyrics of
"Climbin' Jacob's Ladder": "Every round goes higher and higher," Julia
sings. "Yes, rise higher than the dirt," Lula chimes in, "and you'll be free,
free without anybody's by-your-leave" (1188). The chorus climaxes with
Julia asking Lula if she feels free. "No, not yet," Lula responds. "But I
believe Gawd wants me to start a new faith; one that'll make our days
clear and easy to live," she concludes. The linkage drawn here between
Julia's legal and Lula's psychological dilemmas acutely suggests that the
renewal these women seek not only has material and spiritual climension
but also derives from the consubstantiating effects of telling and listen-
ing to one other's stories. A similar call and response patter develops
when Julia, Mattie, and Lula gather to read October's letter. Here the
resulting harmony is critical, because it accentuates the socioeconomic
impact of (black) male neglect on (black) women, a persistent concern of
the play, as Nelson later boasts of being "a rollin' stone" and having
"nothin to offer [a woman] but a hard way to go" (1199, 1197). In his let-
ter, October similarly intimates to Mattie that he too hasn't much more
than his name to offer her. (And as we later discover, Mattie is eventual-
ly literally deprived of the benefits that having October's name should
offer her, because they are not legally married.)
The merging of these women's voices to tell, listen to, and affirm
each others' stories nevertheless reminds them that they are not alone,
that their troubles, though not the same, are certainly intimately linked,
and that their situations are not static. The harmony Julia, Mattie, and
Lula achieve implies, in other words, that a solution to the problems cre-
ated by male neglect lies in the female collective, metaphorically signified
in their song. Their lyrical kinship is a crucial inclication of the substruc-
tures of race and gender operative in these women's narratives as well as
the desires for freedom of opportunity and expression which they artic-
ulate. The song's symbolism can be said to extend beyond the context of
the play to signify on the sexist politics elided in the anthem of the Civil
llights Movement, 'We Shall Overcome." According to Belinda Robnett,
"gendered hierarchy and racial and class constraints" structured "the civil
NEO- SLAVE DRAMA
91
rights movement and defined the nature of activist participation." Rather
than allow their contributions to the movement to be "circumscribed by
community and societal norms," however, the masses of black and white
women activists tended to operate and flourish within tiers of "bridge[d]
leadership," akin to my notion of the female collective in that these net-
works among women who worked "behind the scenes" without the
media attention that male leaders garnered were able to perform most of
the recruitment and mobilization needed to sustain the movement.29
It is important to note, however, that though Childress certifies
the strength of the female collective in the play, in keeping with histori-
cal record, she does not allow the collective to go untested. In fact the
sequence of events which converge near the middle of the play into a
kind of crescendo passage exposes the corrosive influence plantation
slavery and its legacies inevitably had/has on black/white female kin-
ships. In this context, the play references signs of white male libido and
black female sexuality in ways that unmistakably point up their historical
markings and sociopolitical implications. Here critical attention has been
given to Herman and Julia's relationship and the social forces operating
against it in a southern framework. Little to no critical attention has been
given to Julia's and the other female characters' relationship with the Bell
Man, a figure who, because of his sexual identity and class status, per-
petually drives and displaces the underlying theme of white domina-
tion/ supremacy so crucial to the play's marshalling of the female collec-
tive.
In the aftermath of Julia and Lula's initial dialogue, just as Julia
thanks Lula for sharing her song, for harmonizing in song, the melody of
the Bell Man, "a poor white about thirty years old" to whom time has
dealt "some hard blows" chimes in. The syncopation of his rhythms,
symbolically accentuated by the dance he cuts, snuffs the spirited rhythm
of the women's exchanges. "Stay where you at, Aunty!," he calls to Lula
and then to Julia in the aftermath of their initial chorus. "You used to live
on Thompson Street," he says, addressing Julia. "How's old Thompson
Street?" Charged to respond to the Bell Man's call, to maintain the
"cover" on her relationship with Herman, Julia says simply that she'd
moved from that location '"bout a year ago." "Move a lot, don'tcha?," the
29 Belinda Robnett, How Long, How Long? African American Women in the Struggle
for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford, 1997), 17, 19, and 21.
92 LEW'!S
Bell Man quips, before breaking into a second song, "a fast sales spiel"
with dance accompaniment, in "regular minstrel walk-around" fashion,
parading his merchandise before Julia and Lula and enlisting Mattie's
daughter Teeta in his pitch. The two do the walk-around and sing two
rounds of "And a-ring-ting-tang/ And-a shimmy-she-bang/While the sun
am a-shinin' and the sky am blue" before a visibly annoyed Lula "swats
at Teeta," driving her into Mattie's house and away from the Bell Man
(1188).
Lula's shielding initiative does not go unnoticed by the Bell Man
who "coldly'' queries her about her debt: "Whatcha owe me, Aunty?" he
asks. "Three dollars and ten cent," she replies with the note that she doe
not "have any money today". He questions: "When you gon' pay?" So as
to "divert his attention from Lula," Julia asks about sheets. The tactic suc-
ceeds in shifting the Bell Man's focus from Lula to Julia. Nonetheless, his
questions begin to turn more pointedly on symbolic issues of black
female exchange and white male entitlement, which his indiscriminate use
of the signifier his gratuitous playfulness with young Teeta, and
his lewd quips about extended payment plans-"one long, sweet year"
(1188)-suggest.
Following Julia into her bedroom, where she goes to retrieve a
dollar to pay for the sheets, the Bell Man signals his awareness of and
assumptions about the nature of Julia's relationship with Herman. "I seen
you one time coming out that bakery shop on Thompson street," he says,
before boldly propositioning her sexually: "Sister, Urn in need for it like
I never been before. Will you 'comodate me? Straighten me, fix me up,
will you?" Undaunted by the inherent perils both in resisting a white
man's racial privileges and threatening to assault him, Julia picks up a coat
hanger and summarily dismisses him. "Get out!" she demands, "Out,
before I take a stick to you". The Bell Man leaves, but not before calling
Julia an "unfriendly sick-minded bitch," condemning his mother, and
damning all women alike (1189).
The exchange between Julia and the Bell Man signals the depth
to which the sexual codes of the plantation continue to influence the
socioeconomic spaces black women and white men share. It reminds us
of the historical setting of the play in its reversal of the "thread-bare lie,"
the myth that black men desire white women's bodies, an untruth sys-
tematically used to justify black male lynchings even beyond the onset of
the Southern Civil Rights Movements.30 In a time of renewed political
30 While historical accounts of the horrors of lynching tend to focus on black
men, it must be noted that many black women were victims of this crime. For more on
NEO-SLAVE DRJ\MA 93
agitation among women, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, the
exchange also reminds us of the historical context under investigation.
The cacophony created by the Bell Man's misogyny thus extends beyond
to connect the play's symbolic and literal historical frameworks. As a con-
sequence, the exchange comes to represent a practical, standard dramat-
ic technique, a foreshadowing, whereby Childress drives the remainder of
the action of the play forward in the decidedly racialized and gendered
lyrical terms in which she advocates for the female collective.
At the start of act 2, it appears that Julia's memory of her
exchange with the Bell Man initially empowers her to withstand the
insults Herman's mother levels against her upon their first meeting. ''A
lady oughta learn how to keep her dress down," Herman's mother retorts,
after Julia coolly refuses to "match words" with her mother-in-law who
implies that the money her son gives Julia from the bakery's profit is in
exchange for sex (1203). But as the scene progresses, we realize an iron-
ic, larger purpose that Julia's earlier exchange with the Bell Man serves.
"I put up with a man breathin' stale whiskey in my face every
night," Herman's mother begins, in justification of her objection to Julia
and Herman's relationship, "pullin' and pawin' at me ... always tired,
inside and out." Revealjng what the stage directions indicate is her "deep-
est confidence," Herman's mother goes on to concede that though she
has only two children, she actually "gave birth to seven ... five-a them
babies," she declares, "couldn't draw breath." The disclosure leads
Annabelle to ask, "Did you love Papa, Mama? Did you ever love him?"
"Don't ask me 'bout love," she responds, "I don't know nothin' about it"
(1204).
Herman's mother's moment of reflection/ confession marks a
lull in her otherwise unbridled ranting. A critical connection between Julia
and her common-law mother-in-law, borne out of their mutual states of
male-inflicted anxiety and despair, emerges. Julia's exchange with the Bell
Man, which has already bared the relative socioeconomic, political, and
historical implications, foregrounds the connection. Without fully exon-
erating Herman's mother in the face of the ideals of intolerance and
racial superiority she promotes, Childress at least allows a set of mitigat-
ing circumstances to develop out of the dialogue that bring closure to the
lynching as reality and metaphor see Jacqueline Dowd Hall, &volt Against Chivalry: Jessie
Daniel Ames and the Womens Campaign Agaiml Lynching (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1979); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary L:Jnchitrg and Burning
Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); and William Pinar, The Gender of
Racial Politics and Violence in America (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
94 LAST NAME
scene by recalling the exchange between Julia and the Bell Man. With
their exchange in mind, we witness Julia not only matching words with
her mother-in-law but also spitefully calling her by her "real" German
name, Frieda.
"Miss Thelma my ass!," she repugnandy proclaims, as Fanny
"holds Julia" in defense of Frieda who earlier introduced herself to
Fanny as "Miss Thelma,". Julia undercuts the meaning the name ~ f i s s
Thelma" holds for both Fanny, who naively believes that being on a near
first-name basis means that she is Herman's mother's equal-or at least
is recognized as such-and Herman's mother, who renmaes herself in
reaction ti American xenophobia.Jt In so doing, Julia's exposure effects
an intervention akin to the hold her actions and words earlier place on
Fanny's injurious treatment of Lula and Mattie. In a war climate now as
hostile to Germans as to blacks, Julia compels Frieda to acknowledge,
without necessarily fully coming to terms with, their common status as
exploited and disenfranchised subjects. The verbal assaults they level
against one another-"Black, sassy nigger!," "I<.:raut, knuckel-eater, red-
neck," "Nigger whore," "White trash! Sharecropper!," "Dirty black
bitch!," "Daughter of a bitch" (1206)-become less manifestations of
their mutual hatred of one another than their mutual hostility toward and
desire to negotiate the forces that oppress them. As a consequence, their
exchange can be said to approximate the call-and-response pattern earli-
er established by Julia, Lula, and Mattie's communications. Their
exchange, in other words, stands in abstract signification of their mutual
conditions as women because the terms they use to disparage each other
invoke histories that actually underscore the relatedness of their strug-
gles.
31 American anti-German sentiments were especially heightened in the after-
math of WWI. It should be duly noted, however, that American xenophobia applied fair-
ly evenly to all non-U.S. citizens around the time the play is set, as the passage of the
Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 makes clear (Walter Benn Michaels, Our America:
Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 30-32). Though
an in-depth discussion of the (anti)nationalist sentiments of the play extends beyond the
scope of this essay, it is worth noting that Childress does an effective job of linking the
discourses of nation-formation and racial and gender oppression to one another, partic-
ularly in scenes that center Nelson's military status.
NED-SLAVE DRAMA 95
In this way, the chaos exhibited in the name-calling scene also
comes to approximate the chaos marked by the three houses at the start
of the play. Here again Julia comes to symbolize the character through
which the potential saving power of the female collective is called for and
signified. The play can thus be said to come full circle at this intense, con-
tentious, and bitter moment, instead of when, upon reconciling with
Julia, Herman dies. The focal shift from Herman and Julia's relationship
to Julia's relationship with the play's other central female characters is cru-
cial because the reader sees Frieda and Fanny, symbols of the Old
(destructive) Order, and Lula, Mattie, Annabelle, and Julia-symbols of a
modern generation-in a collective light. Importantly, however, Childress
does not easily negotiate the questions of what to do when the goals of
the individuals within the female collective do not fully square with one
another. But she anticipates a solution to the problems borne out of the
institution of slavery and driven by self-hatred and division among black
and white women in their calls and responses, in the antiphonal patterns
of communication used to negotiate the obstacles they historically have
had to confront as women.
The uneasy yet measurable harmony Wedding Band brings to its
central female players through setting, dialogue, and the rhythmic rise and
fall of action promotes the female collective as a kind of dramatic prac-
tice that takes shape and changes over time. It demonstrates, as I have
argued, how the norms governing the production of the play drive the
demand for an enduring female collective, a sustaining ritual of
black/white female contact, communication, and connection in the
moment of the play's composition as well as in its historical setting.
Childress's aesthetic genius in Wedding Band is marked by the pre-
cision with which she lyrically dramatizes black and white female desire
to know and experience freedom. By mapping that genius, as this essay
has done, the pathway is clear to ask new questions that bring the possi-
bilities of music and drama together with the exigencies of resistance and
change in Childress's other writing. It makes it possible also to locate and
(re)center the merit of Childress's cultural work within the whole of the
black American playwright tradition.
96
CONTRIBUTORS
PENNY FARFAN is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of
Calgary. Her work has appeared in such journals as Text and Performance
Quarter!J, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, Woolf
Studies Annual, American Drama, and The journal of Dramatic Theory and
Criticism, and she has served as the book review editor of Modern Drama.
Her book Women, Modernism, and Performance was published by Cambridge
University Press in 2004.
SEAN P. HOLMES has a doctorate in American History from New York
University. He teaches in the American Studies programme at Brunei
University in London and is currently working on a book on the union-
ization of stage actors entitled Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Constructing an
Occupational Identity in the Actors' Equity Association, 1913-1934.
Correspondence should be directed to Dr. Sean P. Holmes, School of
Arts, Brunei University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK. E-mail:
Sean.Holmes@brunel.ac.uk
MAURA L. CRONIN-jORTNER is currently finishing Ph.D. work at the
University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation, entitled "Jonathan in England
and Jonathan at Home," examines the stage Yankee through a post-
colonial lense. Other research interests include nautical melodrama and
nineteenth-century aquatic performances, historic travel literature, and
captivity narratives. Her most recent publication, "In Soldier's Clothes:
Adah Isaacs Menken goes to War," will be appear in Nineteenth-Century
Theatre and Film.
NGHANA LEWIS is an assistant professor in the Department of English
at Louisiana State University. She is currently completing a book manu-
script titled Literary Kin: Aesthetics, Race Consciousness, and Identity Politics in
the Writings of Ernest Hemingwcry and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.
PEACH PITTENGER is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre Department at
The Ohio State University. Her research interests include women in
American popular entertainment. Her article on the Cherry Sisters was
recently published by Theatre History Studies.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEIRS OF
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FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES OF THE
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Witkiewicz . . . takes up and
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culminated in the masterpeices of the dramatists of the absurd- Becket/, Jonesco,
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