Les Frenchies on the Early American Stage: From Character to Caricature
p. 171-187
Texte intégral
1S. E. Wilmer’s Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities and Kent G. Gallagher’s The Foreigner in Early American Drama: A Study in Attitudes discuss the extent to which foreign cultures helped define American theatre.1 Though both theatre historians cite specific cases where French characters appear in plays that trafficked the American stage from the 18th to the early 19th century, neither examines specifically how those characters served to shape an emerging American national identity evident in these plays. France did play an important role in America’s budding dramatic arts, not only in the development of theatre in the New World but also in the establishment of an American identity diffused to the public through that theatre. Rarely, however, was that image of France or of its culture positive. In fact, among the several French characters found on America’s republican stage between, and just after, its two wars of independence (the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812), nearly all were based on unflattering stereotypes, often comical, and almost always satirical. The reason for this (mis)representation, though, had more to do with America’s tempestuous relationship with England during the period than with its dealings, political or otherwise, with France.
2This essay examines how French culture and the French theatre were represented on the early American stage, and how French characters influenced the construction of an American identity through its theatre. The various French characters encountered in these plays function primarily as foils to the American types (e. g., the Cincinnatus warrior-farmer, the Yankee Jonathan, the native-like frontiersman, etc.), contrasting American no-nonsense with French (and European) affectation. In the early years of the American Revolution, and no doubt out of deference to France’s support in the victory effort, French characters appear respectfully as historical fixtures in the founding of the Republic, such as Monsieur de François in Mercy Otis Warren’s The Group (1775), a propagandist play aimed at exposing the American Tories in Boston in the early political stages of the Revolutionary War. At later times, though, the characters became mere caricatures: servants like Toupee in Samuel Low’s The Politician Out-witted (1789); buffoons like LaRole in Mordecai Noah’s She Would Be a Soldier; or, the Plains of Chippewa (1819), or ridiculed fops like the scheming Count Jolimaitre (and the naive maid, Millinette) in Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845). Almost always cast in subservient or eccentric roles, these later French characters in American plays demonstrate how republican playwrights and their jingoistic audiences needed foreign characters to embody an effete and ridiculed Old World, and France’s perceived elegance and eloquence were deemed no longer to be trusted or imitated.
3And yet, America had no real political reason to enter a war of the theatres with France. Instead, its sights were clearly aimed at England, whose political expulsion at the end of the 18th century was followed by repeated attempts at its cultural expulsion during the 19th century, and theatre was an obvious target given the predominance British plays had over American ones on the American stage throughout much of the two centuries.2 France was seemingly caught in the cross-fire. Thus the character-to-caricature progression of Les Frenchies on the republican stage resulted less from the need to satirize Europe collectively (though that was evident as well) and more from the efforts to distinguish it from England and the British, who were repeatedly cast between 1775 and 1850 as America’s true villainous Other.
American Theatre Contexts, 1776-1815
4As Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, “Si vous voulez juger d’avance la littérature d’un peuple qui tourne à la démocratie, étudiez son théâtre.”3 Though his words came nearly a half century after the American struggle for independence, they encapsulate singularly the frustration that many republican Americans felt toward their belletrist letters. In the decades following the Revolutionary War, many theatre critics were still bemoaning the state of the nation’s theatre and voiced their concerns that the nation’s theatre tethered the young Republic to its erstwhile colonizer. Such perhaps was not the case with American drama— that is, plays written in America by Americans, as opposed to those plays of British origin performed on the American stage—since it never acquired the status of literature in America until the 20th century and, therefore, never needed to be saved from any “damning” British influences.
5As such, American “drama” at the close of the war in 1783, just as it was during de Tocqueville’s 1831 tour, was essentially American “theatre”, that is, the performances of British plays or, if native grown, ones so heavily informed by English tastes that theatre historians have traditionally dismissed them as not being, despite their jingoistic rhetoric, truly American in nature. The most that American drama (a play’s text) or American theatre (a play’s performance on American soil) could ever hope to achieve was to provide a useful vehicle for British aesthetics or a didactic mouthpiece for the radicalism of an American people unified only by their political dissent. While there is certainly some truth behind this general assessment of American theatre/drama between the two wars for independence, many critics have already begun the long and arduous process of challenging these polarized conclusions.
6For a start, theatre critics have begun seeing America as having a “particular fitness as both model for and movement toward a unified yet various democratic republic”4 and, as such, containing the seeds of its own Americanness. George Washington himself had intimated as much in a 1788 letter he wrote to Irish patriot Sir Edward Newenham about the post-revolutionary feeling in the nation:
“A greater Drama is now acting on this Theatre than has heretofore been brought on the American Stage, or any other in the World. We exhibit at present the Novel and astonishing Spectacle of a whole People deliberating calmly on what form of government will be most conducive to their happiness.”5
7By attaching words such as “democracy” to “drama”, “theatre” and “spectacle”, Washington was preparing the Republic for de Tocqueville’s commentary years later on the state of independence in America. But such language was essentially rhetorical in nature, for American “drama” itself was considered a poor barometer of cultural independence even by the time of de Tocqueville’s 1831 tour; and American “theatre” had not yet earned the respect of its own native audiences, let alone those of the West End in London, to proclaim an American “aesthetic” in the dramatic arts.
8William Dunlap, America’s first theatre historian, noted in 1832 that “the favorites in England were the favorites in America”.6 A nation in desperate need of asserting its cultural independence had to negotiate its way through the dilemma that what the politicians were proselytizing, American theatre consumers were by and large ignoring. And yet, while British plays were generally favored to native-grown ones well into the middle of the 19th century, “it would be wrong to suggest […] that American drama had entirely given up its struggle to assert an American identity”.7 Simply, the manners in which the plays were consumed allowed Americans to have their theatre and mock it, too. In other words, American theatre historians have demonstrated that the presence of British dramas on the American stage actually played into the nation’s calculated efforts to other the English all the while enjoying the productions. As Herbert Brown argues, the nation’s hunger for Georgian theatre’s sentimental plays reflected the Republic’s “sympathy for humanitarian reforms which in the English sentimental drama accompanied the didactic appeals”8 that were necessary for a nation trying to perfect itself.
9Wilmer elaborates on this need of a young Republic to import foreign plays and integrate foreign characters into its domestic theatre:
“Theatre has often acted as a site for staging national history, folklore and myths and for formulating national ideology in many parts of the world. With its rhetorical and semiotic features, theatre has offered a particularly effective means of conveying notions of what is national and what is alien. Furthermore, because plays purporting to express national values can be performed in the actual presence of the community (in a public theatre), they can serve not only to make claims for a national identity, but they can also gain immediate communal support or rejection of that assertion.”9
10Since the interwar years found America mostly at odds with England on national policies concerning sovereignty, it was thus only natural that the majority of foreign characters who filled the American stage were of British origin and inevitably antipathetic to American ideals. As Kent G. Gallagher concludes,
“And what could offer greater reward than to study how a people, young in sovereignty and adolescent in attitude toward the countries where their cultural conceptions originated, conceived of those foreigners against whom they fought and with whom they dealt for the first fifty years on independence. If the drama of the early Republic is examined for attitudes which reflect the variety of ways Americans thought of aliens, it reveals not only the obvious conclusions relative to antipathetic enemies in wartime plays, but also unfolds the mutating attitudes Americans held about themselves and their own accomplishments in relation to foreign institutions and systems.”10
11These interwar plays were “political propaganda in support of particular ideological attitudes”11 that directly confronted America and England. But the British were not alone in the dramatis personae of these republican plays. French characters, too, made their appearances, though significantly in fewer numbers. In the plays of the American Revolution, these French roles served as delegates of the republican cause or as proxies of flawed European ideologies that represented a threat to the nation’s burgeoning identity. Like their British counterparts, these early French characters show how early American playwrights repeatedly “denounce[d] foreign customs, titles, dress, and letters, at the same time [attempting] to inculcate an attitude of benevolence toward American society, manners, and mores,” where the “fullest condemnation falls upon an American who does not follow the dictates of republican sentiment and sensibility”.12 Though often grouped with the British in these plays as representations of Europe’s foreign devils, the French were also targeted separately, singled out for their political affronts toward America just prior to and in the wake of both nations’ republican struggles, or for their cultural eccentricities that were deemed innocuous compared to the more potent English threat facing the nation.
French Characters, 1766-1798
12Before examining plays from the interwar years that included French characters, it is important to see how the French were first perceived by the “Americans”, though the notion of an American identity that was still inchoate at the time. During the French and Indian War (1754-1763) that pitted a Franco-Indian coalition against Britain in the conquest of America, it is only logical to find the French ridiculed on the American stage. That is certainly evident in Ponteach; or, The Savages of America, A Tragedy (1766), the first extant play in English written in America and “America’s first tragedy on a native subject”.13
13Penned by Major Robert Rogers, a British officer, the play recounts the destructive megalomania of an Ottawan leader, the flawed political bargaining between tribal nations, the treacherous machinations behind sibling rivalry, and the doomed future of a pair of star-crossed lovers. What is striking though, is how, in a play ostensibly about a war fought against the British, the French are invisible, marginalized to the infrequent appearance of one character—a conniving Priest. For reasons identical to those discussed later in a play about the War of 1812, Rogers centers his play around the Native American threat and not on the French one in order to belittle their European bugbear and to acknowledge that the country’s future lay with native grievances, not French ones.
14The French are not entirely spared direct abuse in Ponteach, however, since the country is singularly represented in the scheming and lecherous Priest, through whom Rogers provides a one-two punch against France’s “philanthropic” experiments with native peoples and its exportation of a Catholic tradition to the New World. Ostensibly providing council to the tribal chiefs to aid them in their war effort, the Priest, who views the natives as children, is surreptitiously plotting to trick them out of their wealth. The Priest’s council proves effective, as he boasts of his efforts to convince Ponteach to declare war on the British:
“Now he is fix’d—will wage immediate War—
This will be joyful News in France and Rome,
That Ponteach is in Arms and won’ t allow
The English to possess their new-gain’d Empire.”14
15With spoils being sought for King and Pope, the French are thus portrayed as, in addition to ignoble ravishers of the land and its native inhabitants, conniving opportunists and religious mercenaries, using the Indians to fight their battles for them against the British and the spread of Protestantism throughout the New World.
16So loathsomely is the Priest’s character drawn, in fact, that at one point in the play he even attempts to rape the Chief’s daughter, Monelia:
“Monelia: [Struggling with the Priest, and trying to disengage herself.]
No, I would sooner die than be dishonour’ d—
Cut my own Throat, or drown me in the Lake.
Priest: Do you love Indians better than us white Men?
Monelia: Nay, should an Indian make the foul Attempt,
I’d murder him, or kill my wretched Self.
Priest: I must. I can, and will enjoy you now.”15
17Since the idea of an “American” did not yet exist in the New World, the hostilities in the play toward the French must be seen as coming from a British officer, who would later commit atrocities against the Abenaki nation at Saint-Francis in Quebec. If both the French and the Indians were despicable enemies, according to Rogers, at least the Indians were noble in their attempts to defend their homeland, and that alone merited their sole treatment in the play.
18Once the Americans began turning against their British colonizers and waged a revolution against King George III, the need to recover a positive image of the French was paramount. After all, the French respected the indignant colonists in their fight against monarchical order on the eve of their own revolution; the fact that the Americans would deal the British the same blow it had been dealt them in the French and Indian War no doubt also played into France’s “américanophilie” at the time.16 American plays about the Revolutionary War thus cast French characters in relatively more respectful light.17 As Daniel Havens writes, “Anti-British feelings were naturally highest on the eve of the Revolution, but they continued into the early decades of the nineteenth century. During [Royall] Tyler’s period, before 1800 roughly, these feelings manifested themselves in a chauvinistic rejection of most things foreign and a defense of those things native”.18
19One example of this reversal of French representation in America’s dramatic arts can be seen in Mercy Otis Warren’s The Group, written and published anonymously in 1775, just two weeks prior to the outbreak of war. The Group inaugurates the dramatic tradition of setting American Republicans against the British Loyalists and the American Tories who supported them. The play was a direct attack on Thomas Hutchinson, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts who supported the Tories’loyalist efforts, as Brigadier Hateall (the fictional equivalent to Timothy Ruggles) says:
“Curse on their coward fears, and dastard souls,
Their soft compunctions and relenting qualms,
Compassion ne’er shall seize my steadfast breast
Though blood and carnage spread thro’all the land;
Till streaming purple tinge the verdant turf,
Till ev’ry street float with human gore,
I Nero-like, the capital in flames,
Could laugh to see her glotted sons expire,
Tho’much too rough my soul to touch the lyre.”19
20As his name suggests, Hateall represents British/Tory insolence to an extreme, but propagandistic closet drama such as this one needed to make clear distinctions in attitudes and actions. As Arthur Quinn notes, Warren’s play can be summarized as essentially an anti-Tory “outcry of democracy against oligarchy, of liberty against prerogative, of the descendant of the Puritans against the upholders of kingship and oppression”.20
21Among the despicable British and Tory figures we find in the play, we also encounter Monsieur le François, who appears at first the noble image of France as America’s savior:
“Monsieur: […] Oft have I hung upon my parent’ s knee
And heard him tell of his escape from France;
He left the land of slaves, and wooden shoes;
From place to place he sought a safe retreat,
Till fair Bostonia stretch’d her friendly arm
And gave the refugee both bread and peace. […]
With his expiring breath he bade his sons
If e’re oppression reach’d the western world,
Resist its force, and break the servile yoke.”21
22Historically, the French would become America’s ally in 1778 against a mightier British army. Decisive French victories at Yorktown eventually helped the Americans win their freedom. Yet Monsieur Le François cannot be considered as a heroic French figure in the play (it was penned prior to France’s military support in the war) because he later recants his revolutionary rhetoric and agrees with the Tories that obtaining high positions and luxury are the true goals of political economics in America. Warren’s message is unequivocal: the French are less despicable than the British or the American Tories, but they are still bent on a hegemony that true Americans should disdain.
23Warren’s message proved prophetic, as the French Revolution of 1792, the First Coalition Wars (1793-1797), the X, Y, Z Affair, and the Quasi War of 1798—to say nothing of the Napoleonic Wars that followed—all combined to significantly strain Franco-American relations after the Revolutionary War. John Jay’s 1784 treaty with the British, for example, was seen by the French, who were then at war with the British, as an Anglo-American alliance. Tensions mounted when John Adams criticized the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, even though the French saw it as their equivalent to America’s revolution. This led to the X, Y, Z Affair of 1789 and to heated disagreements between the French and Americans in terms of their political relations, escalating into the undeclared Quasi War of 1798, when France began seizing American ships trading with Great Britain and engaging with American naval fleets for the next two years. And yet, while the political ties between the two nations were permanently severed, or nearly so, during this time, America’s artistic war was still being waged against entirely against England.
24Even at the time of the Quasi War of 1798 with France (in which twenty Americans lost their lives), John Daly Burk wrote and produced an anti-English play (based on Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part I), showing again how the English remained this perennial Other on the American stage, regardless of the nation’s political entanglements with France. It would make more sense to find France vilified in American plays of the day, but instead Burk offers the American public one that is centered on a mythical French heroine. Female Patriotism; or, the Death of Joan D’Arc (1798), a blank-verse tragedy performed at Park Theatre in New York that April, was thus an attempt to draw on revolutionary French spirit to improve the rights of women in America:
“[…] I saw no sights but all of you did see:
France torn by feuds and foul dissentions;
France desolate beneath a stranger sword.
I saw the fairest kingdom on the earth,
The gallantest and proudest people,
And these my country and my countrymen,
Groan in the bondage of a meaner state.
This only was my inspiration;
And it was not enough—Forbid it heaven,
The time should ever be, when France doth look
For a more powerful, sacred call than this,
To rouze her to resistance.”22
25Joan’s advocacy of reason and republicanism during a time of revolution, and her patriotic message “that ordinary people can take power into their own hands and change society for the better”,23 were very pro-American at the time. Burk had gambled (as had William Dunlap with André)24 that American audiences would put aside their recent political differences and instead recognize the France of a different era, one long before its political scuffles with America. But the American public’s anti-French sentiments, fresh from to the X, Y, Z Affair and Quasi War of 1798, nullified any efforts Burk had made in selling a French heroine to the new Republic.25 The play, which Burk’s contemporary Dunlap described as being “not well attended on the first night and [even] laughed at and hissed”,26 was proof that national identity in American plays mattered more to American audiences than the play’s overall patriotic message: true American characters on stage was what counted most, not simply American ideology.
French Caricatures, 1803-1845
26When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, just after U. S. and French diplomats concluded negotiations to end the Quasi War, France’s decade-long war with Great Britain began. America maintained its neutrality until relations with the Crown broke down over Britain’s frequent incursions with American vessels in search of British deserters needed for the war effort against France. Although the incursions led to the War of 1812 between America and England, American President James Monroe considered going to war against France as well. Such was the political climate that shaped 19th century American playwrights’ British and French characters. Again, though, if both nations were hostile to America at the time, the characters that represent them in the plays are not treated with equal amounts of enmity. As the United States was only at war with England—with many Americans considering it a second war for independence (more for isolationist reasons than for domestic sovereignty)—the English characterizations in these plays are more controversial than the French, who are merely dismissed through caricaturization.
27To be sure, early post-Revolutionary caricatures of the French existed in American plays a good decade before the X, Y, Z Affair and the Napoleonic Wars, which suggests that cultural relations between the French and the Americans were already growing fragile just after the Revolutionary War. In Samuel Low’s The Politician Out-witted (1789), for example, France is all but dismissed as a political threat through its allegorical representation of a comic figure, while the play’s real targeted Other remained the American Tory. In these years, if the British were downright despicable to most republican Americans, the French were merely amusing. We see this in Monsieur Toupee, an immigrant coiffeur so ignorant of national affairs that he cannot distinguish between the common usage of the word “constitution” and the day’s heated debate concerning the adoption of the U. S. Constitution:
“Trueman: What is the matter, Mr. Toupee?
Toupee: I vill tella your honare of the fracas. I vas vait on monsieur a—chose, and make ma compliment avec beaucoup de grace, ven monsieur vas read de news papier, so I say, is your honare ready for be dress? De great man say, ‘No—, d—n de barbare.’ I tell de parsone, sare, I have promise’pon honare for dress one great man dat is belong to de Congress,’bout dis time, sans manquer: De answare vas (excuse moy, monsieur), ‘go to h-ll, if you please; I must read’ bout de Constitution.’Dis is de ole affair, monsieur, en verité.
Loveyet: Sixty-three, indeed! Heavens forbid! But if I was so old, my constitution is good; age is nothing, the constitution is all,—ugh, ugh, ugh.
Toupee: Sare, you will give me leaf, vat is dat Constitution?”27
28As Toupee repeatedly confuses the discussion of the U. S. Constitution for the old man’s physical constitution, Humphrey offers the following jingoistic assessment of the Frenchman’s inabilities to understand politics:
“Humphry: You ill-looking, lousy, beard-combing, head-shaving rascal! Did you ever know any body for to have a beard upon their hand?
Toupee: You be von big ’merican brute, sur mon âme!
Humphry: You lie, as the saying is. What a mouth he makes whenever he goes for to talk his gibberage!—He screws it up for all the world like a pickled oyster.”28
29Through Toupee, France is discredited as much for its political naiveté as it is for its repeated slaughtering of the English language, a trait that would follow French caricatures well into the next century and beyond.
30Years later, Mordecai Manuel Noah would repeat this mockery of the French in She Would Be a Soldier; or The Plains of Chippewa (1819). A popular play intended to capture the long-sought-after title of the “first” truly American play, She Would Be a Soldier is a typical love story set against the chauvinistic backdrop of “the historical battle of Chippewa Plains in July of 1814”.29 Here, an Indian Chief leads a British misfit and his halfwit French servant against the Americans during a Canadian campaign of the War of 1812. Though as much at war against the Native American population, united under the charismatic Shawnee leader Tecumseh, Noah was more hostile to the British in his dramatic representation of the war (similar to Rogers’s strategy in Ponteach), partly because the Americans found the British more of a threat, but mostly because they knew that questions of national identity lay with the native population that would remain once the war had ended. As such, the Indian Chief, though an enemy to the Americans, is portrayed as noble and dignified in the play, whereas both the British and the French characters are ridiculed.
31For example, the British Captain Pendragon is characterized as a fop demanding all the comforts of home in a camp in the wilderness of Upper Canada (present day Ontario). He dresses in his finest liveries and requires sherry and anchovies for his meals. When he is forced to eat bear meat, because that is all that is available, he mocks the savage nation and longs for the glorious wars on the European continent where he was more respected—and better fed. It was in Spain that he fought against Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Vitoria and managed—one surely questions how—to take a Frenchman prisoner, LaRole, who now serves as his “jentiman” in Canada during the War of 1812. Why LaRole should still be serving Pendragon we are not told, but the Frenchman does not find his position objectionable, which is a caricature in and of itself:
“Oho, le champ de bataille; I shall tell you, madamoiselle, I did fight at the bataille de Vittoria, com un diable, like littel devil. I did kill beaucoup d’Anglais. Mai my maître, le capitain, he did give me a dam tump on my head with his rapier, and did knock me down from top my horse, and make a me von prisonier. […] Oui, ven I could not run away, beggar I surrender like von brave home, and now I am jentiman to capitain Pendragoon; I do brus his coat, poudre his hair, and pull his corset tight, and wen he was order to come to Amérique, and fight de Yankee Doodel, beggar me come too. […].”30
32LaRole is, of course, trying to seduce a maid as he tells the story of his coming to the New World, which, in addition to his Pidgin English, denotes another caricature trait that will mark American representations of the French through the centuries.
33Soon afterwards, Pendragon arrives with all of his outlandish demands for British comforts, which the Indian Chief abruptly puts an end to when he informs Pendragon that he is under the Chief’s command. The Chief, who speaks eloquently (and not in LaRole’s Pidgin English or Pendragon’s highfalutin rhetoric), is similarly caricatured but in a romanticized way that offers the Americans a positive image of themselves now that the war had ended. For example, when Pendragon suggests that they will “flog them [the American army] without much fatigue,” the Chief corrects his assessment of the Yankee enemy:
“Not so fast, young soldier; these pale-faced enemies of ours fight with obstinacy; accustomed to a hearty life, to liberty and laws, they are not willing to relinquish those blessing on easy terms; if we conquer them, it must be by no moderate exertions: it will demand force and cunning.”31
34Prophetic words from a Native American just decades from removal or extinction, the Chief’s speech confirms the true nobility of America’s “enemy”, while giving audiences repeated opportunities to sneer at the British and laugh at the French.
35At the end of She Would Be a Soldier, the Indian Chief and his aides are defeated in battle, and the (of course, brave and just) American General shows his nation’s leniency toward its enemies by sparing their lives, an act which wins over the affections of the Chief and his tribe’s “unjust anger”. “I have urged you far to end my life,” the Chief says; “you have tempered your passions with mercy, and we are no longer foes”.32 LaRole is equally impressed with the General’s graciousness:
“Sair, mon general, you sall here vat I am going to say. I am von Frenchman; in my contree every Frenchiman he is von soldat. [...] Begar, sair, I must fight wid somebody, because it is my bisness. In de Egypt; I did fight’gainst de Turc; in Europe I did fight de whole vorld vis de Grand Napoleon, and in Amérique I did fight against you vid myself. Mais, you take a me de prisonier, I can fight no more; I vill stay here and eat ros beef vid you, and mon capitain là, he may go to the devil.”33
36Even the French clown has effectively othered the British captain here, further demonstrating where in terms of political hierarchy the British were with respect to the French in America. Not only is peace restored, but the three enemies have now been convinced of America’s graciousness and great promise. Americans, Noah’s message becomes clear, do not defeat their enemies through strength, but conquer them through magnanimity, a lesson Europe would do well to heed. Such was the narrative that brought American theatre and the nation finally together.
37Wars and political struggles have historically helped many a people define their nation, and the case is particularly revealing with America’s turbulent past. And more than any other literary form (because it does not require literacy or training in aesthetics), drama proved to be the best weapon against the enemy—without and within the nation’s borders. A play in production may reached only those few in attendance, but its word spread like wildfire through the incendiary years of the early Republic. And just as Americans had fought constant battles on two fronts—against invading foreigners bent on re-conquering lost land, and those Americans who abetted them—so did their early plays toe a rhetorical line between damning the enemies abroad and swaying those at home. Republican drama in American, if nothing else, is a perfect example of duplicitous Yankee diplomacy.
38Among those foreign enemies who were treated in American plays and whose identities were forged under (or just after) the heat of battle—from the French and Indian War to the Quasi War, from the Napoleonic Wars to the War of 1812—few evolved from early representations to late ones. Americans long considered the British to be insufferable snobs and the French as sex-starved rakes. Time has done little to alter these stereotypes even today, though few may know or remember why the characters and caricatures were created in the first place. For example, more than thirty years after the War of 1812, when America enjoyed national sovereignty enough that it began turning its conflicts inward over issues of state’s rights and slavery, American plays were still churning out the same routines, the same caricatures, the same foreigners who had first trafficked the stages of its many theatres.
39In Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845), we encounter once again the deceiving French lover and the naive French maid. Politically speaking, they no longer represented a challenge to American sovereignty; culturally speaking though, they represented a clear and present danger, for they still influenced how Americans perceived their newly-formed national identity. As such, the conniving French Count Jolimaitre, who is not a Count at all but a mountebank fixed on swindling rich New York women, must still be imprisoned within a stereotype, confined to a caricature lest he make Americans long for a past they have fought ardently to separate themselves from. For Mowatt, Americans should be glad they still have watchdogs like Gertrude, who expose foreign sham and reassert the glamour of Yankee simplicity:
“Count: My dear Miss Gertrude, let me explain—aw—aw—nothing is more natural than the situation in which you find me—
Gertrude: I am inclined to believe that, Sir.
Count: Now—’pon my honor, that’s not fair. Here is Millinette will bear witness to what I am about to say—
Gertrude: Oh, I have not the slightest doubt of that, Sir.
Count: You see, Millinette happened to be a lady’s maid in the family of—of—the Duchess Chateau d’Espagne—and I chanced to be a particular friend of the Duchess— very particular I assure you! Of course I saw Millinette, and she, demme, she saw me! Did n’t you, Millinette.
Millinette: Oh! Oui— Mademoiselle, I knew him ver vell.
Count: Well, it is a remarkable fact that—being in correspondence with this very Duchess—at this very time—
Gertrude: That is sufficient, Sir—I am already so well acquainted with your extraordinary talents for improvisation, that I will not further tax your invention—.”34
40Later plays like Mowatt’s Fashion still needed to perpetuate the foreign stereo-types established in the republican drama, not to rouse Americans to action during (or just after) a given war, but to respond to the nation’s repeated call for an “American” theatre filled with American plays and American heroes, with whom it, and the rest of the world, could identify and admire. In the same year that Mowatt’s play was performed, Edgar Allan Poe penned the following editorial entitled “The American Drama,” in which he bemoans the failure of American plays to assert such a national identity:
“The first thing necessary is to burn or bury the ‘old models,’ and to forget as quickly as possible, that ever a play has been penned. The second thing is to consider de novo what are the capabilities of the drama—not merely what hitherto have been its conventional purposes. The third and last point has been reference to the composition of a play (showing to the fullest extent these capabilities) conceived and constructed with Feeling and Taste guided and controlled in every particular by the details of Reason—of Common Sense—in a word, of a Natural Art.”35
41For many theatre historians, American had to wait another half century before it could finally proclaim, in the plays of Eugene O’Neill, a dramatic voice worthy of its national identity; for others, such as myself, that “American” play was written more than a century before O’Neill, and what helped define it was precisely its non-American characters, most notably the British and the French.36
Bibliographie
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Bibliography
Bak J. S., “James Nelson Barker’s The Indian Princess: The Role of the Operatic Melodrama in the Establishment of an American Belles-lettres,” Studies in Musical Theatre 2.2, 2008, p. 175-193.
Bak J. S., “‘[A] n original relation to the universe’: les Amérindiens et la construction d’un théâtre américain,” Théâtre des minorités,Brasseur P. et Gonzales M. (dir.), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, p. 173-188.
10.2307/2919524 :Brown H. R., “Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century American Drama,” American Literature 4, 1932, p. 47-60.
Burk J. D., Female Patriotism; or, the Death of Joan D’Arc, New York, R. M. Hurtin, 1798.
De Tocqueville A., De la Démocratie en Amérique, vol. 2, [1835], Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1981.
Downer A. S. (ed.), American Drama, New York, Crowell, 1934.
Dunlap W., History of the American Theatre, [1832], New York, Burt Franklin, 1963.
10.1515/9783111370712 :Gallagher Kent G., The Foreigner in Early American Drama: A Study in Attitudes, The Hague, Mouton, 1966.
Havens D. F., The Columbian Muse of Comedy: The Development of a Native Tradition in Early American Social Comedy, 1887-1845, Carbondale, University of Southern Illinois Press, 1973.
Moses M. J. and Brown J. M. (eds.), The American Theatre as Seen by Its Critics, 1752-1934, New York, Norton, 1934.
Odell G. C. D., Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 2, New York, Columbia University Press, 1927.
10.2307/426396 :Quinn A. H., A History of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War, [1923], New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943.
Rinehart L., “A Nation’s ‘Noble Spectacle’: Royall Tyler’s The Contrast as Metatheatrical Commentary,” American Drama 3.2, 1994, p. 29-52.
Roger P., Rêves & cauchemars américains: Les États-Unis au miroir de l’opinion publique française (1945-1953), Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1996.
Vaughn J. A., Early American Dramatists from the Beginnings to 1900, New York, Ungar, 1981.
Watt S. and Richardson G. A. (eds.), American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary, Fort Worth, TX, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995.
Wilmer S. E., Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Notes de bas de page
1 – Wilmer S. E., Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; and Gallagher Kent G., The Foreigner in Early American Drama: A Study in Attitudes, The Hague, Mouton, 1966.
2 –I develop this argument elsewhere as it pertains to the evolution of American operatic melodrama and the appropriation of Amerindian culture for American theatre. See Bak J. S., “James Nelson Barker’s The Indian Princess: The Role of the Operatic Melodrama in the Establishment of an American Belles-lettres,” Studies in Musical Theatre 2.2, 2008, p. 175-193; and “‘[A] n original relation to the universe’: les Amérindiens et la construction d’un théâtre américain”, Théâtre des minorités, Brasseur P. et Gonzales M. (dir.), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008, p. 173-188.
3 – De Tocqueville A., De la Démocratie en Amérique, vol. 2, [1835], Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1981, p. 101.
4 – Rinehart L., “A Nation’s ‘Noble Spectacle’: Royall Tyler’s The Contrast as Metatheatrical Commentary,” American Drama 3.2 (1994), p. 30.
5 – Ibid., p. 30.
6 – Dunlap W., History of the American Theatre, [1832], New York, Burt Franklin, 1963, p. 67.
7 – Bak J. S., “The Role of the Operatic Melodrama,” op. cit., p. 177.
8 – Brown H. R., “Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century American Drama,” American Literature 4, 1932, p. 51.
9 – Wilmer S. E., op. cit., p. 1.
10 – Gallagher K. G., op. cit., p. 10.
11 – Wilmer S. E., op. cit., p. 69.
12 – Ibid., p. 62.
13 – Vaughn J. A., Early American Dramatists from the Beginnings to 1900, New York, Ungar, 1981, p. 10.
14 – Moses M. J. and Brown J. M. (eds.), The American Theatre as Seen by Its Critics, 1752-1934, New York, Norton, 1934, p. 162.
15 – Ibid., p. 174.
16 – For French attitudes towards Americans during the same era, see Philippe Roger’s discussion of the “mirage américain” in chapter one of his Rêves & cauchemars américains: Les États-Unis au miroir de l’opinion publique française (1945-1953), Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1996. Roger examines some of the reasons why the French, who had no reason to admire the Americans during their Revolutionary War since they had just fought against them in the French and Indian War (Guerre de la Conquête) a decade earlier, entertained a notion of “améraconiphilie” (“Rien ne prédisposait donc les Français à considérer avec faveur les colons américains”, p. 22).
17 – I add the caveat “relatively” here because the French are not yet ridiculed, as they will be later in American plays; they are still foreigners, and thus despicable creatures, but at least they are not British, and that is what counts the most.
18 – Havens D. F., The Columbian Muse of Comedy: The Development of a Native Tradition in Early American Social Comedy, 1887-1845, Carbondale, University of Southern Illinois Press, 1973, p. 45.
19 – Ibid., p. 225.
20 – Quinn A. H., A History of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War, [1923], New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943, p. 46.
21 – Moses M. J. and Brown J. M. (eds.), op. cit., p. 228.
22 – Burk J. D., Female Patriotism; or, the Death of Joan D’Arc, New York, R. M. Hurtin, 1798, p. 19.
23 – Wilmer S. E., op. cit., p. 71.
24 – Dunlap’s, André, also written and performed in 1798, depicted the story behind the infamous American Revolutionary War traitor, Major John André. André, who was captured on 23 September 1780, condemned for spying, and hanged on 2 October 1780, was hardly a sympathetic hero, tragic or otherwise, to American audiences of the day. Dunlap was forced to rewrite the play in 1803, this time choosing a more patriotic title, The Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry! Dunlap not only abandoned English blank verse for American prose in the play, he also made André less of a tragic figure, valorizing instead his patriotic captors.
25 – George Odell lists several pantomimes on the Joan of Arc myth that were popular at the time, which may have influenced Burk in his decision to write the play. See Odell G. C. D., Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 2, New York, Columbia University Press, 1927, p. 20-22.
26 – Wilmer S. E., op. cit., p. 69-70.
27 – Moses M. J. and Brown J. M. (eds.), op. cit., p. 362.
28 – Ibid., p. 348-385.
29 – Vaughn J. A., op. cit., p. 60-61.
30 – Ibid., p. 132.
31 – Ibid., p. 133.
32 – Ibid., p. 140.
33 – Ibid., p. 141.
34 – Watt S. and Richardson G. A. (eds.), American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary, Fort Worth, TX, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995, p. 101.
35 – Downer A. S. (ed.), American Drama, New York, Crowell, 1934, p. 6.
36 – I would like to thank Professeur Richard Tholoniat and Hélène Lecossois, both from the Université du Maine, for their advice on improving this essay.
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