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Boucicault's misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14788810802696287

1740-4649

Sarah Meer,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Abstract This article challenges a number of myths the Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault himself created about his play The Octoroon. Boucicault claimed that London theatre audiences were dissatisfied with the ending, in which the heroine commits suicide, because they had become unsympathetic to American slaves. He rewrote the play for these audiences, and the two versions of The Octoroon have subsequently been used to suggest differences of attitude between New York and London, a shift in British racial politics in the early 1860s, and an antislavery position in Boucicault himself. This article questions all of these interpretations using contemporary reviews, Boucicault's advertisements and self-promoting articles, and much hitherto undiscussed material: a Boucicault letter, his evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, and the source of Boucicault's play, Mayne CitationReid's novel The Quadroon. Boucicault was a showman and self-promoter, and his assertions ignored the political uproar the play had caused in New York, and deliberately misinterpreted his audiences in London. The article demonstrates that British audiences were in many cases more sympathetic to American slaves than Boucicault himself, that they objected to the play on aesthetic rather than political grounds, and that Boucicault changed the ending for commercial reasons. It also reveals what the rewriting controversy has obscured: Boucicault's close attention in the play to the subtleties of the plantation social hierarchy. His concern with social differences and distinctions ties The Octoroon more closely to his Irish plays than has been recognized and illuminates contradictory impulses in The Octoroon, which also help to explain the two endings. While the ‘tragic ending’ reinforces the racial determinism that many critics have observed in the play, the scenes where an outside observer fails to comprehend the racial and social hierarchy on the plantation reinforce an alternative vision that helps justify the ‘happy ending’ versions. Both Boucicault and his play were more interestingly equivocal than the Octoroon myths have allowed. Keywords: Dion Boucicault The Octoroon nineteenth-century theatreraceslaverytransatlantic Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Angela Groth-Seary and Sue Gabtree in the Templeman Library at the University of Kent for their great help in navigating the Boucicault holdings. Notes 1. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead, 180. Katy L. Chiles draws on this to suggest that there are echoes of the Mexican-American War and the role of the Lipan Apache in the play: “Blackened Irish and Brown-faced Amerindians: Constructions of American Whiteness in Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon,” 28–50. 2. Jennifer DeVere CitationBrody, Impossible Purities, 48; Werner Sollors, Neither, 121–2, 355–9. 3. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 30–48. 4. “To the Editor of The Times,” The Times, 20 Nov 1861, 5. 5. “Mr Boucicault,” classified advertisement, The Times 9 December 1861, 6. 6. Nils Erik Enkvist, “The Octoroon,” 167, 169; Richard Blackett, Divided Hearts, 45. 7. John A. Degen, “How to End The Octoroon,” 170–78. 8. Martin CitationCrawford, The Anglo-American Crisis, 103–4. 9. “Adelphi Theatre,” The Times, 12 December 1861, 12. 10. “Adelphi – ‘The Octoroon,’” The Era, 24 November 1861, 10. The piece called darkening the front of the central group, while displaying the back with concentrated light, “an ‘old, worn-out effect.” New York reviewers also protested: Degen, “How to End The Octoroon,” 171. 11. “Adelphi Theatre,” The Times, 12 December 1861, 12. 12. “Saving the Octoroon,” Punch, Or, the London Charivari (vol. 41), 21 December, 1861, 252; [Tom Taylor], “Our Dramatic Correspondent,” Punch, Or the London Charivari (vol. 42), 4 January 1862, 3. Degen discusses Punch's coverage of the change: 176–7. 13. “Adelphi Theatre,” The Times, 12 December 1861, 12; “The Theatres,” The Illustrated London News, 14 December 1861, 597. “The Theatres,” The Era, 15 December 1861, 10. 14. “New Theatre Royal, Adelphi,” classified advertisement, The Times, 7 December 1861, 8. 15. “The Adelphi,” The Times, 12 December 1861, 12. 16. “Full and Original Account of all the Christmas Entertainments,” The Era, 22 December 1861, 10. 17. Degen speculates that the 4-act version published by Lacy's and Dicks stems from an 1866 production, which would represent a “compromise” after Boucicault had recovered from what he sees as the earlier bitterness, 177. 18. “Adelphi Theatre,” The Times, 12 December 1861, 12. 19. “Princess's Theatre,” The Times, 12 February 1868, 6. There is yet another Octoroon, which may have been altered by other hands than Boucicault's: the Dicks Standard Plays Penny Edition has four acts and saves Zoe silently, George rushing onstage in the final scene with her alive in his arms: “The English Happy Ending,” reprinted in CitationParkin, Selected Plays, 184–90. 20. On dramatizations see Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 133–60; Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage, 155–85. 21. Waters, 135–43. 22. “The Octoroon,” The Era, 24 November 1861, 5. 23. CitationMinutes of Evidence, 142. 24. Degen, 173. My translation: the phrase is a slight misquotation from The Aeneid, I: 574. Reprinted in the Adelphi Programme, 10 February 1862, University of Kent Calthrop Collection. 25. Joseph Jefferson's Autobiography, 162. 26. Mrs Dion Boucicault [Agnes Robertson], “In the Days of my Youth. Chapters of Autobiography,” M. A. P., 1 July 1899, 636-8, 638; “A Splendid Record. Mrs Dion Boucicault,” The Sketch, 16 May 1894, 146. 27. CitationAdams, 150. 28. Ottilie Assing, “Literary War,” 181–3, 183. 29. Adams, 148-9. 30. “The Octoroon,” Spirit of the Times, 17 December 1859, 359. 31. Seldon Faulkner, “Octoroon War,” 33–8. The publicity worked: there were four productions in New York in 1861, one each in Boston and Philadelphia, and P. T. Barnum put it on in 1862. Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 157. 32. Sidney CitationKaplan, “The Octoroon”, 547–57. 33. Dion Boucicault to unknown recipient, New York, 15 September 1855. Quoted with permission from Yale University Library. 34. “To the Editor of The Times,” The Times, 20 Nov 1861, 5. 35. “The Octoroon,” The Era, 24 November 1861, 5. 36. Brody; Sollors; Jules CitationZanger, “The ‘Tragic Octoroon,’” 63–70. Adams also compares Reid with Boucicault, arguing that Reid achieves “a clear indictment” of slavery, which Boucicault fudges by attributing all villainy to M'Closky: 149–50. I want to show that their different attitudes to interracial relationships and treatment of plantation society also warrant examination. 37. Mayne Reid, The Quadroon, vol. 1: 210. 38. Reid, vol. 3, 48. 39. Reid, vol. 1, 125-6; vol. 1,166–7. 40. Reid, vol. 1, 233. 41. Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, reprinted in Parkin, 3.1. 42. Boucicault, The Octoroon, 1.1. Harriet Beecher CitationStowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 218. 43. Quoted in Kaplan, 550; and “The Octoroon,” The Spirit of the Times, 17 December 1859, 359. 44. “To the Editor of The Times,” The Times, 20 Nov 1861, 5. 45. Werner Sollors demonstrates that such signs of blackness recur often in “Tragic Mulatto” fiction, reinforcing racial thinking such as the legal definition of “blackness” as “one drop” (of black “blood”): Neither Black nor White, 121, 127, 143. On racial theory and “amalgamation” see Robert J.C. CitationYoung, Colonial Desire. On this speech, see Brooks, 38; Brody, 50. 46. “To the Editor of The Times,” The Times, 20 Nov 1861, 5. 47. “Theatre Royal, New Adelphi,” classified advertisement, The Times, 23 November 1861, 8. 48. Brody, 48; Roach, 217. Adams points out that this tactic was nevertheless a challenge to proslavery racial theory, 155. 49. “Theatre Royal, New Adelphi,” classified advertisement, The Times, 23 November 1861, 8. 50. “Theatre Royal, New Adelphi,” classified advertisement, The Times, 23 November 1861, 8. Both this story and the “Miss Winchester” one below also appear in a manuscript cited in Brody, 47. 51. “Theatre Royal, New Adelphi,” classified advertisement, The Times, 5 February 1862, 8. 52. Chiles, 32. He is called “a bit of Connecticut hardware” (I.1), making him more obviously the Yankee overseer type derived from Uncle Tom's Simon Legree. 53. Scott Boltwood, “‘The Ineffaceable Curse of Cain,’” 383–96. 54. “New Theatre Royal Adelphi,” classified advertisement, The Times, 26 November, 1861, 8. 55. Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn (1860) reprinted in Parkin, 1.3. 56. Dion Boucicault, The Shaughraun (1874), reprinted in Parkin, 1.1. 57. Roach, 219; Brooks, 36. 58. “The Octoroon,” The Spirit of the Times, 17 December 1859, 359. 59. On the term miscegenation see Sydney Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue,” 274–343. 60. “The Octoroon,” The Spirit of the Times, 17 December 1859, 359.