{"id":19059,"date":"2011-12-17T21:28:36","date_gmt":"2011-12-17T21:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19059"},"modified":"2014-11-27T03:40:37","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T03:40:37","slug":"boucicault%e2%80%99s-misdirections-race-transatlantic-theatre-and-social-position-in-the-octoroon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19059","title":{"rendered":"Boucicault\u2019s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boucicault\u2019s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Atlantic Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 6, Number 1<\/a> (April 2009)
\npages 81-95
\nDOI: 10.1080\/14788810802696287<\/a><\/p>\n

Sarah Meer<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer of English
\nUniveristy of Cambridge<\/em><\/p>\n

This article challenges a number of myths the Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault<\/a> himself created about his play The Octoroon<\/a><\/em>. 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<\/em> 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 Reid’s<\/a> novel The Quadroon<\/em>. 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<\/em> more closely to his Irish plays than has been recognized and illuminates contradictory impulses in The Octoroon<\/em>, which also help to explain the two endings. While the \u2018tragic ending\u2019 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 \u2018happy ending\u2019 versions. Both Boucicault and his play were more interestingly equivocal than the Octoroon<\/em> myths have allowed.<\/p>\n

Dion Boucicault\u2019s 1859 play The Octoroon<\/em> has figured frequently in recent analyses of representations of race, slavery and the transatlantic in the nineteenth century. Joseph Roach\u2019s<\/a> influential study of what he called the \u2018\u2018circum-Atlantic\u2019\u2019 made The Octoroon<\/em> a touchstone of its argument about theatrical and ritual performance in \u2018\u2018the circulation of cultures, material and symbolic\u2019\u2019, around and across the Atlantic. Jennifer DeVere Brody<\/a> also drew on the play in her study of the \u2018\u2018mulatta<\/a>\u2019\u2019 in nineteenth-century British\/Black Atlantic culture, and Werner Sollors<\/a> identifies in it many of the central characteristics he discusses in his study of “interracial” literature. Daphne Brooks<\/a> examines it as a transatlantic \u2018\u2018spectacle of race.\u2019\u2019 The play\u2019s attraction for critics interested in cultural contact, hybridity and creolisation is obvious. As Roach remarks, it was written \u2018\u2018after a brief period of residence in New Orleans by an Anglo-Irishman of French ancestry\u2019\u2019 (183). It is also concerned with the socially impossible position of the daughter of a planter and a slave, a woman deemed to have seven-eighths white ancestry, and one-eighth black<\/a>…<\/p>\n

…This article examines Boucicault\u2019s 1866 testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee, an 1855 letter indicating his views on slavery, and New York and London reviews, advertisements and play scripts. Together they reveal a number of contradictions in the impression Boucicault created of the Octoroon incident, as does Boucicault\u2019s source for the play, Mayne Reid\u2019s 1856 novel The Quadroon<\/em>. The significant changes Boucicault made in adapting the novel provide a fascinating index to Boucicault\u2019s attitudes on race, interracial marriage and the nature of plantation society in the Southern United States. Boucicault\u2019s focus is very different from Reid\u2019s. His original play seems to insist on the unbridgeability of racial divisions, whereas Reid\u2019s characters overcome them. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Boucicault incorporates into The Octoroon<\/em> the dramatic interest in social distinctions and hierarchies which is evident in his other plays, including the \u2018\u2018Irish dramas,\u2019\u2019 The Colleen Bawn<\/em> and The Shaughraun<\/em>. This is particularly evident in the dynamics of Boucicault\u2019s dialogue. Many readings of The Octoroon<\/em> concentrate on single speeches and pay relatively little attention to dramatic interaction, but as I shall show, it is in the interplay between characters that Boucicault displays a dramatic sensitivity to social relationships and institutions. The play\u2019s exploration of the social implications of the \u2018\u2018Octoroon\u2019s\u2019\u2019 mixed heritage balances its sensationalist racial essentialism, and this may help to explain the complicated and contradictory ways in which contemporaries interpreted its stance on slavery…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read or purchase the\u00a0article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boucicault\u2019s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon Atlantic Studies Volume 6, Number 1 (April 2009) pages 81-95 DOI: 10.1080\/14788810802696287 Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English Univeristy of Cambridge 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6940,10,20],"tags":[2784,1627,8767],"class_list":["post-19059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-uk","category-usa","tag-atlantic-studies","tag-dion-boucicault","tag-sarah-meer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}