Blackface Minstrelsy

I. General Overview

Minstrelsy was a form of popular theatre like melodrama that spread in the 19th century, appealing especially to lower class and working class audiencces, but crossing over in a variety of ways to appeal to middle class audiences. It was one of the first major forms of popular theatre to the develop in the United States, where it contributed significantly to the development of most modern forms of American entertainment including circus, vaudeville, musical theatre, standup comedy and early television and film. The music of minstrel shows influenced jazz, ragtime, musical show tunes and other forms of American popular music. In short, there’s hardly a genre of American pop culture that can’t trace some part of its development to minstrelsy. For this reason alone, its an important thing for any American theatre artist to know about.

At the same time, minstrelsy has played an extremely ambivalent role in African-American history. The stories and their characters depend on racial stereotypes of African Americans that from a contemporary perspective are blatantly racist. At the time, the characters were understood to represent an “Ethiopian delineation” that occupiied a low position within pseudo-scientific taxonomies of race.

Blackface performers would add water to burnt cork to make a pitch-black paste, use red lipstick to make the performers lips seem thick and wear white gloves to provide stark contrast to the dark face so that every character became a kind of racial grotesque. On the other hand, some scholars have argued that blackface minstrelsy became popular in working class communities in the 1840s where aspects of African-American identity were taken on as a medium for expressing dissent and class consciousness. From this perspective, minstrelsy might be likened to the radical meaning ascribed to rap music and other aspects of contemporary African American culture which is adapted by other identity groups. Although some of these same critics argue that whatever radical character minstrelsy had was co-opted in the 1850s. As we’ll discuss on Wednesday, adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin into melodrama and minstrelsy in the 1850s and 1860s made blackface more genteel at the same time as it addressed the controversies of slavery. The fact that by the 1870s, there were many minstrel troupes comprised of African-American performers complicates the issue further. The history of African-American performance passes directly through blackface minstrelsy.

II. Origins and development

Although there are a variety of more disperse sources for blackface minstrelsy, the practice emerged clearly in 1824 when an Englishman, Charles Matthews, created a sensation in London by performing caricatures of black people he claimed to have seen in the United States. He performed a character named Agamemnon, who was a fat runaway slave fiddler, and a pretentious black actor performing Hamlet (a caricature of the great African-American actor, Ira Aldridge, who was performing Shakespearean roles in Europe at the same time).

Indeed, minstrelsy seems to offer a catalogue of racial types against which African-Americans have struggled for the past century. Let’s consider a few that remained in the repertoire:

George Washington Dixon developed blackface minstrel performances in the working class Five Points district of lower Manhattan. (If you’ve seen Gangs of New York, you have a fairly vivid impression of what this was like). Dixon’s performances were raucous compared to those of Matthews and TD Rice. He invented the character Zip Coon, the uppity Northern dandy, overdressed and ambitious, caricaturing free blacks in the northeast.

Jim Crow, the joyful Southern slave, was the character originated by Thomas Dartmouth Rice in 1830, which gave birth to minstrelsy in the United States. Jim Crow was a kind of anarchic black harlequin who sang and danced a jig. Black drumming infected him with rhythm, making him wheel around, sing and clap.

In the 1840s, the popularity of performers like Dixon and Rice gave way to traveling minstrel troupes consisting of 4 to 6 performers. The programs became more standardized, and by the 1850s had a regular structure of three parts. The first introduced the whole company with music and comedy acts and closed with a big chorus number. There would be a semi-circle of musicians with the end men on one side (Mr. Bones playing bones and Mr. Tambo tambourine) mocking the dignified emcee, or Mr. Interlocutor on the other side. (Spike Lee recreates this kind of an opening part in the section of Bamboozled we’ll watch).

Then there would be an intermission, followed by the olio, a series of specialized individual variety routines like skits, dances, stump speeches (mocking contemporary politicians), or sentimental songs (like those of Stephen Foster). The olio would eventually develop into vaudeville.

The last part was the closest to an actual play, consisting basically of a one-act farce. Sometimes a parody of a serious play, it was usually a sketch set in a center of African-American life (usually a Southern plantation or a northern city), mixing dialogue and slapstick comedy with music and dance—like a miniature musical comedy.

III. Other stock characters

The Coon is “the stupid, malapropism-spouting, grinning, dancing, cowardly character who appeals to white audiences for mere entertainment value. He is the no-account, unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creature, good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting craps or butchering the English language.” (Dicker/sun 22) (See Spike Lee clip).

A variant is the picaninny, a harmless little screwball whose eyes pop and hair stands on end at the slightest provocation (Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

The tragic mulatta is of mixed blood, irrevocably stained by (as little as) one drop of Negro blood (like Boucicault’s The Octoroon who is one eighth black). Her white blood makes her self-sacrificing and sympathetic, and she’s always trying to pass as white.

The Mammy “is big, fat, dark, cantankerous, fiercely independent, and asexual. She can also be generally sweet, joplly, good-tempered, and completely dedicated to her white family, especially to the children.” (eg. Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Aunt Jemima)


VI. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled!

One of the most perplexing aspects of blackface minstrelsy is that in the 1870s, it started to attract a growing number of African-American performers. Before the Civil War, black performers were prohibited from appearing in Minstrel Shows. But by the early 20th century, some of the mst famous minstrels were black. For example, Bert Williams was an African-American who performed in blackface, was part of the famous Williams and Walker vaudeville team, joined Ziegfield’s Follies in 1910, and continued performing into the 1930s. In some situations, African-American minstrels would parody white minstrels, but in most cases they added a paradoxical “authenticity” to the racial stereotypes.

In Bamboozled!, Spike Lee takes a controversial look at how African-American culture can be complicit in perpetuating the kind of racial stereotypes of minstrel shows. The basic premise of the movie is that an African-American TV producer ironically creates a contemporary minstrel show for television. To his horror, it is wildly successful, suggesting that contemporary audiences are not nearly so enlightened about race as they think they are.

Love Suicides at Amijima (1720), a shinju mono puppet play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Contrary to our usual association of puppetry with simple children's stories and fairy tales, the art of bunraku puppetry developed in connection to stories of great tragedy and psychological complexity. Some of the most popular plays within the repertoires belonged to the shinju mono (double suicide play) sub-genre. In a feudal Japanese society in which it was extremely difficult for young people to form relationships across social rank and political alliance, there were many "Romeo and Juliet" stories of young lovers ending their lives in despair at their thwarted romance. Love Suicides at Amijima (1720), Chikamatsu's most famous shinju mono plays, was based on just such a real event in 18th century Japan. Theatre, and especially puppet theatre, provided an opportunity for Japanese audiences to experience and grieve over these issues, which might be too scandalous and controversial to discuss directly.

Chikamatsu's play for bunraku puppets remains in the repertoire at the National Bunraku Theatre. It was also adapted into a very popular version for the live kabuki theatre. Lastly, as you can see in the clip below, the story has found its way into Japanese avant-garde film. This trailer (with English subtitles) is for an avant-garde Japanese movie, "Double Suicide" (1969), directed by Masahiro Shinoda, and adapted from Chikamatsu's puppet script. About halfway through this clip, the director interpolates some images of puppets used in the bunraku version, invoking a tension between the sensuality of the live actors' bodies and the uncanny mythic life of their puppet models. This kind of layering of meaning makes for a rich textual and performance tradition.

Japanese Puppetry: from ko-joruri to bunraku

The collaboration that gave birth to bunraku: Playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), and Chanter, Takemoto Gidayu (1651-1714)









I. Conventions of bunraku

Bunraku is typically described as the combination of three previously separate arts: ayatsuri (puppet manipulation), katari mono (storytelling) and shamisen. The puppets are divided into many character types, distinguished primarily by their heads, which are built to be separate from the rest of the puppet. The scenery and stagecraft is related to kabuki, but less intricate, because the puppeteers and puppets themselves take up so much space. The omu zukai (chief puppeteer) wears high clogs to allow better manipulation of the right hand, head and torso. He changes his costume depending on the play, and usually exposes his face. Although the omu zukai’s face is understood to be expressionless, there is a subtle relationship between his embodiment and the actions of the puppet. The hidari zukai (left arm operator) and ashi zukai (leg operator) wear a black robe and hood so that no part of their bodies complicates the character image. The chanter and the shamisen player sit on a special platform at stage left.

II. Placing bunraku within the historical development of Japanese puppetry

There are records of puppet theatre in Japan going back at least to the eighth century, with handheld puppets or stick puppets performing on miniature portable stages. Traveling puppeteers would perform as part of temple festivals and rituals.

In the seventeenth century when bunraku first appeared, the prevailing form of doll puppetry in Japan was called ko-joruri (old joruri, based on the name of Lady Joruri, a character from 12th century history). Ko-joruri grew out of performances by chanters telling stories from the 14th century Tale of Heike. The form of joruri appeared by the 1590s with chanters telling the story to the accompaniment of the shamisen (three-stringed Japanese lute). Ko-joruri was popular in Kyoto and Osaka in the early 17th century, and there were several theatres established just for its performance, and special musical narrative styles (bushi) that developed into the styles of bunraku. Compared to bunraku, the puppets were also relatively simple, requiring only one operator.

The transition started with the chanter-playwright, Uji Kaganojo, who in the late 17th century shifted from the old mythic plays to stories depicting real human emotions, and changed the dramatic structure of the plays to the kind of jo-ha-kyu development practiced in noh and kabuki. Another important step came with the collaboration of two disciples of Kaganojo: the playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon and tayu (chanter) Takemoto Gidayu. Chikamatsu wrote The Soga Heir (1683) and Kagekiyo Victorious (1685) for Gidayu, introducing a more literary text with psychologically complex characters and stories drawn from contemporary and historical sources, requiring the kind of sophisticated arts we saw in the video. They created many of the basic genres of plays used in both bunraku and kabuki: jidai mono (history plays), sewa mono (domestic plays), and shinju mono (a subset of domestic plays built around double suicides, such as the Love Suicides at Amijima, 1720). These double-suicide plays were particularly popular and startling to audiences as they depicted events “ripped from the headlines”—real suicides that had occurred in living memory. From this point on, chanting and playwriting became separate occupations, and the playwrights often wrote for both bunraku and kabuki.

The kind of mechanical puppets that developed into bunraku were probably introduced from China in the fifteenth century, and some other styles probably came with Portuguese and other Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century. The kind used today developed with bunraku starting in the late 17th century. The limbs were developed in the 1690s, and the techniques used to manipulate eyes, mouth and eyebrows in the 1720s and 1730s. Originally, the performers were completely concealed. In 1703, Takamatsu Hachirobei performed behind a translucent screen but in full view of the audience for the first time. Then in 1705, he eliminated the screen, leaving the manipulator completely exposed like today. In 1734, the sannin zukai (three-man puppeteering) technique was introduced, and so the techniques of apprenticeship described in the film developed. A manipulator begins operating the lower limbs, advances to the left hand and then finally to becoming the primary manipulator of the head and right hand. From this point on, only minor characters were performed with one operator. These more elaborate puppets responded to the need in the plays of Chikamatsu and his successors to portray more complex emotions and psychological states in stories based on real events.

III. Bunraku and Kabuki

Bunraku and kabuki developed alongisde each other for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, competing for audiences and adapting many of the same plays. From the 1690s to the 1760s, it was bunraku that was the more popular, and many of the masterpieces of kabuki from this period were drawn from puppet scripts. This was the case, for example, with Kandehon Chushingura (The treasury of loyal retainers, 1748) by Takeda Izumo II, a few scenes of which we saw in the film. Playwrights from this golden age of bunraku “dramatized the emotional turmoil of characters embroiled in impossible historical conflicts or burdened by unbearable social obligations: the classic conflict was between duty and emotion created under the constraints of Confucian-inspired morality.” (Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre 580)

In the 1760s, kabuki began to outshine bunraku in popularity and by the end of the century, it had almost died out. It was revived by Uemora Bunrakuken (1737-1810) who re-established the form in Osaka, and after whom it is now named. Bunraku lived on in Osaka through the 19th century and gained some popularity again, but it ran into trouble again in the 1920s. The main theatre burned down, and audiences started dwindling. In 1933, the government essentially nationalized it, then supported bunraku through WWII by using it for propaganda plays. The theatre was destroyed again by US air raids in 1945, destroyed all the old puppet heads and props. In 1963, the Bunraku Association was formed as a foundation of performers and government representatives dedicated to preserving the art. When the National Theatre opened in Tokyo in 1966, it included a smaller stage for bunraku. Finally, in 1984, the government opend the National Bunraku Theatre in Osaka, which remains the primary venue for seein bunraku in Japan, and where most of the performances take place in the video.

From Marionettes to Victor Hugo's Hernani

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) & Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

I. Goethe, Kleist and Hoffman

Goethe was fascinated with puppets since childhood. He wrote a marionette play in 1769, Das Jahrmarkts-Fest zu Plundersweilern (Junkdump Fair) – uses puppetry to invoke the old medieval fairgrounds—“the audience is regaled with the rough humor and slapstick of the traditional puppet theater.” (Segel 12) It makes use of French ombres chinoises (projected Chinese silhouette puppets) to present a biblical parable. Segel suggests that Goethee could have seen a French puppeteer who exhibited the form at a Frankfurt fair in 1774. It is these allegorical puppets in Goethe’s play who denounce the immorality of the characters. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe depicts a young man who defied his father’s disapproval by taking an interest in puppet theatre. An apparent cipher for Goethe himself, the character is transfixed by how the puppets are animated, how a performer brings an object to life. (14)

Kleist wrote Uber das Marionettentheater in 1810. “By devoting a serious essay to a popular theatrical form largely regarded in Kleist’s time as a diversion for children and an unsophisticated populace, the dramatist sought to explore the possible contribution of ‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture to a reanimation of ‘high’ art.” (Segel 14) “On a higher level, Kleist’s essay on the marionette evidences the Romantic belief in the cognitive and creative superiority of the unconscius over the conscious, of spontaneity and intuition over reason. Because the puppet, or marionette, lacks the ability to think, to reason, it can be made capable of an extraordinary fluidity of motion, of movements beyond the reach of the living actor. precisely because he can think and reason, because he is always conscious of his actions and gestures, the living actor can never achieve the spontaneity of the marionette; thus the grace of the inanimate figure remains ever elusive.” (15)

“Affectation appears… when the soul is located at any point other than the center of gravity of movement.” (16)

Marionettes possess countergravity: “the force that lifts them into the air is greater than that which binds them to earth.” (16)

Hoffman wrote The Sandman (1816) and various other nachtstucke (night pieces) with some inspiration from Kleist. Sandman is a kind of Pygmalion story of the madness of a young man who falls in love with a mechanical woman. Freud would be inspired by this and other Hoffman stories to develop his idea of the unheimlich (the uncanny)—that supremely gothic fascination that we feel towards beings that are somehow inbetween life and death, such as animated automata and performing objects.


II. Heinrich von Kleist’s Uber das Marionettentheater (1810)

Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theatre” describes an encounter between himself and an associate who is an afficionado of the puppet stage. He lauds the grace of the inanimate human representation, which he connects with its perfect subjection to natural mechanics and gravitation. He and his associate agree that it is the marionette’s absence of human consciousness while replicating the superficial human form that allows it to evoke a connection to the divine. The associate relates another story in which a bear easily parried his own attacks with a sword. The animal moved economically and gracefully in harmony with gravity, succumbing to no deceptions or imbalances. Von Kleist imagines that an actor who could imitate such motion would evoke a transcendent aesthetics.

Kleist envisions the human sphere as graceless, ignoble and debauched. His metaphysical views of consciousness might both be rendered reasonably as circles with human space/time occupying an arc with marionette space and divine space on either side and connecting on the opposite side of the circle from human space. A human, occupying conscious space may reach divine consciousness by travelling directly to it along the circle (i.e. the path of the great sage.) However, Kleist (via Kant) believes that the limitations of human reason make this path impossible. He suggests instead to reach divine consciousness by way of absence of consciousness where they meet on the opposite side of the circle. Put another way, human space/time is seen as the cage that prevents man from experiencing the divine. The marionette moves in accordance with the laws of the universe, not those of humanity. The transcendence of the performing object for Kleist is absolutely predicated on the notion of a gulf between socialized human space/time and divine universal space/time. He also considers that the marionette, as a human image, serves as a specifically human space within divine universal laws.

Kleist’s ascription of grace to the suspended marionette might also be thought of as the opposite of Diderot’s description of David Garrick as the unfeeling craftsman of emotion. Indeed, the kind of spontaneity and naturalness that Kleist ascribes to the marionette at the beginning of the nineteenth century is paradoxically closer to what Stanislavsky will promote at the end of the nineteenth century. Both Kleist and Stanislavsky both believe that it is the lack of self-consciousness that allows a performer to seem spontaneous onstage. For Kleist, this is grace, for Stanislavsky, the reality of doing.


III. Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830)

As we discussed in class, the 1830 premiere of Hugo's Hernani was important at least as much for the "riot" it sparked as for the play itself. This confrontation is often seen in retrospect as the victory of Hugo and the romantics against the old guard of neoclassicists. After this, the French drama moved further towards the kind of values we've been discussing for the past few weeks. For Hugo, what was particularly important here is that the new drama, built on the inspiration of Shakespeare, would derive pleasure from the juxtaposition of the sublime and the grotesque. From Hugo's perspective, the sublime incorporated all the enobling and mystical aspects of Nature and the kind of grace that Kleist invokes in his essay on marionettes. It might be seen as a transformation of the old classical aesthetic of beauty to be more in line with post-revolutionary romanticist sentiments. The grotesque, in contrast, contains all that is earthy and coarse in the ordinary realm of human life; bawdy humor, deformation and ugliness, lack of civilization and refinement. Think of Hugo's story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame-- a paradigmatic mingling of the sublime and the grotesque!

Hugo's Hernani suggests this mingling of the sublime and the grotesque through startlingly ignoble behavior on the part of noble characters, ordinary speech mixed with lofty declarations, and most especially the character of Hernani himself: a bandit with an noble code. The play also challenges the conventions of French neoclassicism in a variety of ways. For example:

• The naturalistic acting style that Hugo developed for his actors (moving freely within the setting rather than in front of it. Actors sitting on or leaning against the scenery)
• Furthermore, emphasis on environment (portrait scene in which attention is called to each of the portraits).
• Emphasis on specific costuming
• Breaking out of alexandrines (short speeches and stichomythic dialogue)
• portraying violence onstage

Although Hugo distanced himself from the popular melodrama, there is much in this "high" romantic drama that resembles that genre. After the French revolution, European dramatists looked to represent a world in which heroism could be found amongst ordinary people, and the welfare of the people and their nation was a greater good than the honor of kings and aristocrats.

Suspension of Disbelief, Marionettes & Melodramatic Suspense

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Heinrich von Kleist (1771-1811)


I. Suspension of Disbelief and the Suspended Performer

In Biographia Literaria (1817), chapter 14, Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduces his most famous concept: Suspension of Disbelief. This is probably the most widespread, popular explanation of how it is that we can accept the reality of fictions presented onstage or other genres so much that they move us to real emotions. Coleridge offered the supremely romanticist explanation that we are able to access true feelings as spectators because we suspend our rational faculties that tell us it’s all make-believe. It may not be the best objective explanation of how plays work, but Coleridge’s idea of “suspension of disbelief” connects theatre to a major trope of romanticism.

Suspension thematizes gravity; that is to say, our earth-boundedness. Intimations of the tragic attend suspension insofar as falling to earth is always imanent. If the suspended performer falls, if the bridge collapses, it is not entirely shocking. We always knew it could happen, and may in fact be surprised in retrospect that we had allowed ourselves to imagine otherwise; that we had so successfully suspended our disbelief. The good characters in melodrama operate in a state of suspense from which they can only be delivered by divine providence or the justice of human institutions.

And of course, suspension also describes the techniques of certain forms of puppetry that were especially popular in the late 18th and early 19th century: marionettes.

One can consider different styles of puppetry in terms of the distance between the performer and the puppet or character image. Hand puppets, for example, (such as most muppets), use very little distance. The hand of the operator (i.e. demiurge) moves the puppet directly. Projected puppets (from shadow puppets to online avatars) have considerably more distance, i.e. greater mediation, though this may vary depending on the technology.

What Kleist captures in his essay “On the Marionette Theatre” is the subjective perception of suspension as sublime grace vis-à-vis manipulation (i.e. conscious human behavior). This is a perception that does not extend to forms of object performance that do not rely on suspension (neither muppets nor shadow puppets produce this experience), but it is a perception frequently experienced in relation to dance and one that often plays a role in our spiritual receptions of nature.
Think about the wonder we experience at suspension in nature. Cottonwood tufts and leaves wafting through the air on a fall day. Snowflakes drifting down or being blown about. The way a bird appears motionless, suspended in the wind.



Consider what is fascinating about seeing a marionette undergo a metaphysical/psychological reckoning in this opening sequence of "Being John Malkovich" (1999) with marionettes by Phillip Huber

II. Fascination with puppets, marionettes and automata in the age of revolution

In the midst of the romanticist movement, many of the leading theatre figures, especially in Germany, became fascinated with puppet and marionette theatre. They idealized childhood experiences of seeing puppet theatre, wrote philosophical treatises about puppet theatre, wrote works for puppet theatre, and even thought about puppets in writing some of their major works for live actors, like Goethe’s Faust. This might seem like a minor diversion in the history of theatre, but it’s important for a few reasons:

a. this early fascination with puppets would return in the avant-garde at the end of the 19th century with the symbolists (Edward Gordon Craig) and Alfred Jarry whose approaches to puppets would carry an interest into the twentieth century.

b. a significant way of dismantling the distinction between high and low culture and the supposed superiority of “adult” entertainment that coincides with Herder’s notion of a national culture rooted in popular folk traditions.-- primitivism

c. a way of reviving medieval and “oriental” theatrical techniques and aesthetics within the context of a new modern theatre—the gothic and orientalist aesthetics

d. an insight into how romanticist mysticism, spirituality and metaphysics translated into theatrical aesthetics and performance techniques.

For all of you who have seen or been involved, and the two of you who have actually been suspended in PittRep's current production of Angels in America: Perestroika, think about whether any of these issues get at aspects of that experience. Why is it so wonderful to see actors flown above the stage?

the romantic fascination with marionettes

For Monday, read pages 11-23, "German Sturm und Drang to Romanticism: Goethe, Kleist, ETA Hoffmann" in Harold Segel's Pinocchio's Progeny. Go to Google Books (www.books.google.com) and put "Pinocchio's Progeny" into the search engine. You should be able to scroll through the entire text.

Then take a look at this short video excerpt from a film version of Goethe's Faust by the great Czech animator, Jan Švankmajer. As you read in Segel, many of the theatre artists and dramatists of the period took inspiration from puppet theatre, and Goethe knew the story of Faustus especially from puppet theatre renditions. Think about what it is about marionettes and other puppets that fit with the aesthetics and values of such artists as Goethe, Kleist and Hugo even as the genre of melodrama is becoming so popular. How do both providential melodrama and this fascination with what today we might call "object performance" fit within the spirit of an age rocked by the French revolution and the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism?

Melodrama, Part II! Pixérécourt & Boucicault

René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844) & Dion Boucicault (1820-1890)

In his case study on melodrama in your Zarrilli text (254-60), McConachie compares two nineteenth century melodramas that both achieved significant international popularity in their respective times. He argues that these two plays can give us some insight into the development of the form from its earliest context amidst the upheval of the French Revolution to later plays that responded to the conditions of the Industrial Revolution. Here we see the genre that we have defined somewhat narrowly demonstrating its capacity to be adapted to changing circumstances (an important test for any artform!)

I. Guilbert de Pixerecourt's Coelina, or The Child of Mystery (1800)

McConachie argues that Coelina, through its popularity, became a prototype for a sub-genre of melodrama called providential melodrama, which was popular from around 1800 to 1825. The characteristic elements of this play and its sub-genre include: "a single villain, alienated from the social institutions that provide order in this society of hard-working peasants and small shopkeepers"; a happy ending ensured by the fact that "God watches over innocent goodness" in which the villain departs and "the good characters return to the rural utopia from which they started. (255); and virtue prevails without having been compromised in any way.

II. Dion Boucicault's The Poor of New York (1857)

McConachie argues that Boucicault's play inspired a generation of materialist melodrama popular from around 1855 to 1880. Typical of this sub-genre, the play is set in a specific "time-bound, historical reality"; justice is provided not by God, but by "the institutions of liberal, bourgeois government and society" whose rules are broken by the villain; human agents like the detective in this play are required to unravel the mysteries of human injustice; and though justice is restored at the end, there is a great deal of Chance involved and the villains are not banished, but re-incorporated into society. In materialist melodrama, there are appeals to "bourgeois respectability" and much consciousness of class.

In summary:

Providential melodramas use timeless, universal settings; autocratic institutions ensure order; natural innocence is glorified; God ensures a happy ending; and there is a return to a utopian paradise.

Materialist melodramas use time-bound, historical settings; liberal, bourgeois institutions ensure order; social respectablity is honored; chance puts happy endings at risk; and there is acceptance of the material status quo. (257)

III. Why the change between the 1820s and 1850s?

McConachie argues that beyond the individual styles of the two playwrights, we can make sense of the shift from providential to materialist melodrama in relation to a change in audience tastes, and these tastes reflect the social morality, values and emotions of the audiences.

Providential melodrama thrived in the climate of the first decades of the 19th century in which Napoleon and the Catholic Church enjoyed considerable prestige for restoring order and stability to France while the utopianism and belief in natural intuition of the Revolution were still influential. The audiences of these melodramas were reactionaries who applauded the restoration of absolutism.

By the 1850s, the spread of industrialism and capitalism had created a very different climate that favored materialist melodrama. These melodramas reflected the decline of faith in old social heirarchies and religious beliefs that no longer seemed relevant to the new class mobilities, while at the same time protecting the captains of industry from criticism that might be dangerous by clothing them in bourgeois respectability.

Although we might initially guess that materialist melodrama would be more conducive to socialism or Marxism (recall that Marx's Communist Manifesto was published in 1848), McConachie counters that "this kind of melodrama was even more antithetical to working-class interests than the providential kind because it rendered fundamental reform unthinkable in a chance-ridden world." (260)