THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 21, Number 2 Spring 2009
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editor: David Savran
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Publications Committee
Robin Bernstein, Jonathan Chambers, Dorothy Chansky, William
Demastes, Harley Erdman, Michelle Granshaw, Kim Marra,
HeatherS. Nathans (chair), Ilka Saal, Sarah Stevenson, and
Robert Vorlicky
Managing Editor: Naomi Stubbs
Editorial Assistant: Kelly Aliano
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Circulation Assistant: Ana Martinez
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Student Affairs and
Publications
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
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OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF N EW YORK
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Philip Auslander
Una Chaudhuri
William Demastes
Harry Elam
Jorge Huerta
Stacy Wolf
Shannon Jackson
Jonathan Kalb
Jill Lane
Thomas Postlewait
Robert Vorlicky
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THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 21, Number 2
H EATHERS. NATHANS
Introduction
LAURA L. MIELKE
Spring 2009
CONTENTS
5
9
Sectional Patriotism and Heroic Eloquence in William Gilmore Simms's
Norman Maurice
LISA JACKSON- SCHEBETTA 29
Fantasies of a "Native Daughter": Seatde Repertory Theatre's Production
of My Name is Rachel Corrie
J ENNIFER A. KOKAl 49
Molding a Heroine: Patience Wright and Transadantic Notions of American
Female Patriotism
LAURA POLLARD 67
Consuming "Litde Girls": How Broadway and New York City Capitalized
on Peggy Sawyer and Little Orphan Annie's Big Apple Dreams
JASON BUSH 91
Ei Gran Reto: Celebrity, Cultural Commodification, and Andean Citizenship
CONTRIBUTORS 115
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 21, NO.2 (SPRJNG 2009)
Introduction
I have the privilege of introducing the American Theatre and Drama
Society's 2009 issue of The journal if' American Drama and Theatre, and, on
behalf of the ATDS Publications Committee, I would like to thank each
of our authors for sharing their new and engaging research with us. The
ATDS Publications Committee works intensively with the authors for the
annual spring issue, and I thank the committee- Robin Bernstein,
Jonathan Chambers, Dorothy Chansky, William Demastes, Harley
Erdman, Michelle Granshaw, Kim Marra, Ilka Saal, Sarah Stevenson, and
Bob Vorlicky-for its hard work and dedication. I am also very grateful
to Aaron Tobiason who helped with the preparation of the essays at the
University of Maryland. Lastly, I once again extend my appreciation to
]ADT for its ongoing collaboration with ATDS, and particularly to
Naomi Stubbs for all of her extraordinary efforts in bringing this issue
through its final stages of development.
For the Spring 2009 issue we invited colleagues to explore inter-
sections among theatre, patriotism, citizenship, and identity. We asked
them to question how these concepts have been performed, challenged,
and re-imagined in the playhouse, and by whom? Where has theatre led
the way and when has it followed the trends? Are there inherent contra-
dictions embedded in any of the terms listed above?
The responses to these questions proved as fascinating as they
were unexpected. Each essay in this issue engages in some way with the
tensions between regional and national identities, between local defini-
tions of citizenship and national imaginaries. The studies range geo-
graphically from the Pacific Northwest to metropolitan Lima to
Broadway, and temporally from the colonial period to the present day, yet
each queries intersecting issues of loyalty, performance, power, and the
process of cultural formation.
Both Laura L. Mielke's "Sectional Patriotism and Heroic
Eloquence in William Gillmore Simm's Norman Maurice" and Lisa
Jackson-Schebetta's "Fantasies of a 'Native Daughter': Seattle Repertory
Theatre's Production of My Name is Rachel Com'e'' examine theatre's
power to intervene in and mediate controversy over definitions of citi-
zenship. Mielke's essay uses William Gillmore Simms's Norman Maurice-
a play written for Edwin Forrest, but never performed-to reflect on the
ways in which the national debate over slavery became reconfigured
around pro-union and pro-secessionist politics in the late 1840s. Simms's
drama wrestled with competing models of citizenship and belonging, and
6
NATHANS
with the sacrifices that "true" patriotism demands. While Simms's for-
mula may sound familiar (echoing other heroic tragedies written for
Forrest in the 1830s and 1840s), his infusion of sectionalist tensions, and
his pointed local allusions, make his failed drama enormously revealing.
As Mielke argues, Simms's work suggests the ways in which contempo-
rary citizens understood the power of oratory as fundamental to the cre-
ation of citizenship, and how one playwright imagined that uniting pow-
erful writing and powerful performance might be enough to sway a
nation on the verge of civil war.
Jackson-Schebetta's essay on activist Rachel Corrie (killed while
protesting in Gaza), also exposes the interplay between regional concepts
of citizenship and more global definitions of loyalty and belonging. As
Jackson-Schebetta notes, the Seattle Repertory Theatre's choice to stage
this controversial piece on Corrie ignited a firestorm of debate among
local I sraeli and Palestinian communities that included public demonstra-
tions at every performance, as well as advertisements taken out in the the-
atre's own programs protesting the show. Yet these outbursts collided with
the region's determined efforts to claim Corrie as a local heroine, as well
as a strong loyalty to Corrie, her family, and the landscape that produced
her. Each of these elements played a significant role in the marketing,
reception, and public response to the show. Jackson-Schebetta peels back
the many layers of local knowledge and experience that informed this
production to analyze the ways in which this kind of "insider" status can
translate into the ability to generate regional, national, or international
dialogues.
Jenny Kokai's "Molding a Heroine: Patience Wright and
Transatlantic Notions of Female Patriotism," joins Mielke's and Jackson-
Schebetta's essays in questioning how a solitary voice or performance
may act as a catalyst to a community questioning its definitions of patri-
otism. Kokai describes the peculiar and peripatetic career of Quaker
artist Patience Wright, a wax sculptor who delivered impassioned politi-
cal and moral discourses during her performances. While the identities of
"Quaker" and "performer" may seem fundamentally incompatible,
K.okai argues that it was in fact Wright's Quaker upbringing that equipped
her to succeed in her performances of patriotism on the transatlantic cir-
cuit. Kokai also contends that once Wright transcended her local (colo-
nial) identity as a domestic female figure, meant to live modestly at home,
she established--outside the geographical borders of the colonies- a
"national" identity as a new kind of American woman. Through descrip-
tions of Wright's performances, her patriotic diatribes, and the critical
response to both, Kokai helps readers understand how Wright came to
INTRODUCTION 7
style herself as one of the "authors" of the American Revolution.
Laura Pollard's "Consuming 'Little Girls': How Broadway and
New York City Capitalized on Peggy Sawyer and Little Orphan Annie's
Big Apple Dreams," returns to more familiar territory in the realm of the
Broadway hit, but does so to examine how two popular musical theatre
heroines were transformed into icons of patriotic prosperity. Pollard
notes the irony in these two infantilized "girls" becoming the economic
saviors of a city in the throes of deep economic crises during the 1970s-
1980s. Not only did New York embrace these two characters as quintes-
sential success stories, Pollard suggests that the commercial impact of
these two plays helped that mantra of success resonate throughout the
nation, so that, through their identification with Broadway, New York,
and capitalism, Annie and Peggy became symbols of American prosperity
as well. More poignantly, she observes that the "girl" heroes of these
musicals often displaced the more mature female heroine, less easily clas-
sified or controlled.
Jason Bush's "E/ Gran Reto: Celebrity, Cultural Commodification,
and Andean Citizenship," also engages with issues of patriotism and the
marketplace. Bush describes the evolution of E/ Gran Reto, a te/enove/a that
married dance performance traditions of Lima's Andean immigrant pop-
ulation with a twenty-first-century understanding of how this popular
mass media form could be used to claim "cultural citizenship" (Bush 5).
E/ Gran Reto offered its audiences opportunities to experience the tradi-
tional "scissors dance" (danza de las tijeras) framed by a narrative that
crosses gender boundaries, that shows the transition from rural to urban
life, and that invites audiences to juxtapose the innovations of Western
culture with folk ways. In discussing the dance traditions that inspired E/
Gran Reto, Bush resists the urge to categorize the Andean folk culture as
"authentic" in opposition to its mediatized and mediated mass-marketed
forms. Rather, he suggests ways in which scholars might explore a per-
formance spectrum that raises a host of questions about who is or is not
eligible to present, control, or consume cultural products of traditionally
marginalized groups. As Bush notes, E/ Gran Reto implicitly challenged
audiences to explore their own definitions of citizenship and patriotism.
Each of the authors in this issue brings new insights and new
questions to the ever-evolving field of American theatre scholarship. It
has been a pleasure and a privilege to collaborate with them on this vol-
ume.
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 21, NO.2 (SPRING 2009)
Sectional Patriotism and Heroic Eloquence in William
Gilmore Simms's N orrnJn Maurice
Laura L. Mielke
Over the last two decades, author and editor William Gilmore Simms
(1806-1870) has received attention from literary critics less interested in
celebrating a prolific and unreconstructed Southerner than in examining
his complex and evolving vision of a nation formed out of distinct
North American regions.! Simms's fiction, poetry, criticism, and dramas
through the early 1850s clearly reflect his political, historical, and aes-
thetic vision of national unity achieved through sectional identity, one
expressed most clearly in his 1845 essay in Literature."
2
While recent scholarship in Simms has found in his historical romances,
border stories, and Romantic poetry "an alternative lexicon through
which to articulate political affiliation," very little has been written about
the representation of interwoven sectional identity and national citizen-
ship in Simms's published dramas.3 This is an unfortunate elision, for as
I I would like to thank John Evelev, Michael Everton, Stephanie Fitzgerald,
Melissa Homestead, Patricia Okker, Alexandra Socarides, and the publications committee
of ATDS, especially Heather Nathans, for their helpful commentary on various drafts of
this essay.
2 The best recent treatments of Simms's sectional nationalism-that is, his
understanding of the Unired States as politically, historically, and aesthetically constituted
by distinct cultures rooted in particular geographies-include: Eileen Ka-May Cheng,
"American Historical Writers and the Loyalists, 1788-1856: Dissent, Consensus, and
American Nationality," journal of the Ear!J Republic 23 (2003): 510-19; John D. Kerkering,
The Poetics of National and &cia/ Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Uteralure (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 68-80; Thomas M. Allen, "South of the American
Renaissance," American Literary History 16 (2004): 496-508; and Sean R. Busick, A Sober
Desire for History: William Gilmore Simms as Historian (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2005), 12-15.
3 Allen, "South of the American Renaissance," 499. The one newer contribution
on Simms's treatment of sectional politics in drama is Erma Richter's "A Rumpus, to Be
Sure: Simms's Michael Bonhan/' (Southern Quarter!J 41 (2003): 100-9), in which she places
Simms's Michael Bonham: or, The Fall of Bexar, A Tale of Texas in the context of Southern
interest in the admission of Texas. The two authoritative treatments of Simms's play-
writing, James W Dewsnap's "William Gilmore Simms's Career as a Playwright" (Mississi-
ppi Quarterly 29 [1976]: 14 7 -66) and chapter five of Charles Watson's A11tebellum Charleston
Dramatists (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1976), were published over thir-
ty years ago (though Watson returns to the subject in The History of Southern Drama,
10
MIELKE
Simms's sectional patriotism began to be tested in the late 1840s by
Congressional debates over the future of slavery in the West, he com-
posed a drama advocating popular sovereignty that perfectly captures his
growing pessimism regarding the coalition between free and slave states.
In this essay I seek to convince scholars of Simms and antebel-
lum U.S. theatre alike that Norman Maurice: or, The Man of the People, An
American Drama (first drafted in 1847) forcefully and uniquely captures a
turning point in the attitude of pro-union, pro-slavery Southerners
regarding the future of national union, largely through its melodramatic
presentation of a superlative and sacrificial orator. One of a series of
manuscripts with which Simms foolishly sought to gain the patronage of
theatrical star Edwin Forrest, Norman Maurice is a boldly political play
modeled on the Jacksonian melodramas that made Forrest famous,
namely Metamora, The Gladiator, and Jack Cade.
4
It follows an ambitious,
self-made hero from Philadelphia to Missouri, where he gains the love of
"the People" through his heroic eloquence as a lawyer and political can-
didate, but finally meets his tragic fate when his wife dies, the victim of a
corrupt partisan establishment. Previous scholarly treatments of Norman
Maurice, especially Charles S. Watson's meticulous account in Antebellum
Charleston Dramatists, note the play's pro-slavery politics, its barely veiled
criticism of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and the autobio-
graphical aspects of Simms's protagonist.S Overlooked is the drama's alle-
gorical presentation of the conflict between popular sovereignty and fed-
eral authority as embodied in and corrupted by the legal and political
establishment of the North. Also neglected is Simms's formulation, with-
[Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997], 67-9), and Edd Winfield Parks's inform-
ative treatment of his dramatic criticism in chapter four of William Gilmore Simms as
Literary Cn"tic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961) is even older.
4 All three works-Metamora by John Augustus Stone (which Forrest first per-
formed in 1829), The Gladiator by Robert Montgomery Bird (1831), and Jack Cade by
Robert T. Conrad (1835; rewritten for Forrest in 1841)-the actor acquired by sponsor-
ing American playwriting contests and performed them profitably for decades. On these
dramas and Forrest's performance of the Jacksonian Hero, see especially, Bruce A.
McConachie, "The Theatre of Edwin Forrest and Jacksonian Hero Worship" in When
They Wereni' Doing Shakespeare: Essqys on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre, edit-
ed by Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 3-
18; Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Socie!J, 1820- 1870
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 91-118.
5 David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 161-162; Watson, Antebellum Charleston
Dramatists, 129-42; John Caldwell Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1992), 198-201.
SEcrJONAL PATRIOTISM AND HEROIC ELOQUENCE II
in the context of sectional tensions, of an ideal democratic orator and his
inevitable fate at the hands of ruthless enemies. Never performed and
not published until 1851, Simms's ''American Drama" encapsulates a
transformative decade-roughly 1846 to 1856-during which the
Southern slaveholder's section-based U.S. patriotism became untenable,
as did the nation's faith in the power of oratorical and theatrical elo-
quence to effect political consensus.
A Drama of Missouri, of America
Drafted in 1847, Simms's Norman Maurice arises out of debates in
Congress and within the Democratic Party concerning James K. Polk's
administration's management of Texas annexation, in particular the
aggressive actions that had precipitated war with Mexico and the deter-
mination of slavery's place in the expanding West. The election of 1844
had been largely shaped by Simms's fellow South Carolinian, outgoing
Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, and his explicit representation of
annexation as being in the interest of slave states. Unwilling to support
annexation in those terms, Democrat Martin Van Buren essentially for-
feited his party's nomination; as a result, and with the help of the anti-
slavery Liberty Party's opposition to Whig candidate Henry Clay, the
party of Andrew Jackson (for whom Van Buren had served as Vice
President) sent the pro-annexation Polk to the White House. Once the
aggressive positioning of U.S. troops along the Rio Grande sparked mil-
itary conflict, the nation was committed to a war even Calhoun publicly
criticized.
6
At the center of the Democrats' disagreement over the future of
slavery in the West was a question that had pervaded Jackson's presiden-
cy and continued to haunt the party: How does one balance states' rights
with the authority of the federal government that unites them? Simms's
response to this question was evolving. In the early 1830s, he had come
out against Calhoun's Doctrine of Nullification, supporting Jackson's
assertion of federal jurisdiction in the matter of tariffs and afftrrning
national union as fundamental. By the late 1840s, Simms vocally opposed
federal attempts to determine the legal status of slavery in new states and
6 On the political conflict surrounding Texas annexation and the Mexican War,
see especially Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Uncoln (New York:
Norton, 2005), 559-601; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God W1ought: The Transjonnation
of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 701-91. It was during this
period that Simms penned Michael Bonham, a pro-annexation drama not published unril
1852 and performed in Charleston in 1855 (Richter, ''A Rumpus, to Be Sure," 101).
12
MIELKE
found himself ideologically alienated from the Van Burenites. It appears
he resolved to write a drama for immediate performance that would
employ a traditionally Democratic hero to settle the guestion of federal
authority with regard to slavery, not by directly defending the institution
of slavery but by establishing popular sovereignty as a moral imperative.
Simms well knew that the debate regarding federal jurisdiction over slav-
ery was complicated by the historical, religious, scientific, and legal argu-
ments marshaled by slavery's opponents and defenders alike. Writing for
the melodramatic stage, on which clearly defined forces of good and evil
battle for control, Simms made his hero the representative not of the
slaveholder, or even the Southerner, but "the People." Through what
Simms emphasized was an "American Drama," the hero champions the
electorate's open and direct expression, which in his estimation should
determine the future course of the nation. That an electorate in particu-
lar need of liberation from an overreaching and corrupt government
resides in Missouri, a state defined at its inception in 1820 by a congres-
sional compromise seeking to control slavery's westward extension, sig-
nifies Simms's particular rejection of federal authority over the peculiar
institution.
Theatre of the period provided Simms numerous precedents for
tales of the Common Man versus the Greedy Tyrant, as well as a star
whose fame rested on such melodramatic plots. Each of Forrest's popu-
lar American dramas had at its center a Jacksonian protagonist who led a
populist rebellion against a corrupt establishment that stripped the (male)
individual of his God-given role as father and spouse and of his right to
live independently in an idyllic homeland. A self-made man of honor,
physical vigor, and heartfelt words, this hero of yore was eternally poised
to employ his talents in a fight for the People's innate rights, to serve as
the iconic "breaker of bonds."
7
And while Forrest's American dramas did
not explicitly promote Democratic policies, in 1838 Forrest nonetheless
drew upon his association with this essentially Democratic figure when
he briefly took to the political platform. His Fourth of July Address to
7 Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American
Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 33. On the polit-
ical content of Forrest's American prize dramas, see especially Mark E. Mallett, "'The
Game of Politics': Edwin Forrest and the Jackson Democrats," journal of American Drama
and Theatre 5, no. 2 (1993): 31-46; Scott C. Martin, "I nterpreting Metamora: Nationalism,
Theater, and Jacksonian Policy," Journal of the Ear!J Republic 19 (1999): 73-101. Martin
writes persuasively that Forrest was less concerned with a Jacksonian agenda than a
Forrest-ian one, while Mallett notes that many of Forrest's "pragmatic career-building
steps and day-eo-day choices that the quest for stardom entailed . . . were bound up with
the political currents of the day .. . " (31-32).
SECfiONAL PATRIOTISM AND H EROIC ELOQUENCE
13
TH P'fU:StDNTAL 5WP'STAIU.S Of"
. ,. '
Figure 1: Thomas Hart Benton rides/endorses Martin Van Buren (a.k.a.
"the fox") but is skeptical of his chances. Benton's close association with Van
Buren contributed to Simm's harsh portrayal of the Missouri senator in
Norman Maurice. Courtesy of the Library of Congress,
http:/ /hdl.loc.gov /Joe. pnp/ cph.3a 10205/
the New York Democratic Party, quickly published and widely reviewed,
affirmed the necessity of laissez-faire economics and heralded Western
settlement as the solution to a corruption represented by the aristocracy
of the Old World and the "tyrannous habit" of Northern institutions.s
Forrest's flirtation with Democratic politics and the underlying
ideology of many of the star's vehicles help explain why in 1847 Simms
would transport the Forrest lead from figures of the distant past to the
present Philadelphian political scene, make him a fearless advocate of
popular sovereignty, and christen him the "Man of the People." (At the
same time, however, the playwright seems to have naively or stubbornly
overestimated the likelihood Forrest would embrace an implicitly pro-
slavery drama.) From the opening act of Norman Maurice, the protagonist
is revealed to be a noble example of the uncommon commoner, a hard-
working man who gains the respect of most and the jealousy of a few.
8 Edwin Forrest, Oration Delivered at the Democratic Republican Celebration of the
Sixty-Second Anniversary of the Independence of the United States, in the City of New-York, Fourth
Ju!J, 1838 (New York: Jared W Bell, 1838), 23. On Forrest as inspiration for Simms's
Norman Maurice, see Watson, Antebellum Charleston Dramatists, 134-35.
14 .MIELKE
His serpentine cousin, Robert Warren, plans to ruin Maurice through
false charges of forgery, and Mrs. Jervas, the aunt and guardian of
Maurice's beloved, Clarice, declares her niece must marry Warren or for-
feit financial support. These foes appear easily vanquished in the opening
act: Maurice elopes with Clarice and establishes himself as a successful
lawyer, then purchases from Warren what he believes to be the incrimi-
nating document. Yet the audience knows that Jervas is in league with
Warren and that Warren has sold to Maurice only a copy of the bill on
which Maurice long ago practiced (with Warren's prompting), signing
others' names and which Warren then used fraudulently to acquire
money. The original forgery Warren keeps for a future date. Though
innocent of Warren's scheme, Maurice senses that he will never be able
fully to thrive in his birth city, telling Clarice, "that's our native land alone
which suffers I That we take root and flourish;-those alone, I Our kin-
dred, who will gladden in our growth, I And succour till we triumph."9
Ironically, the city of brotherly love and cradle of liberty proves a hostile
environment for those without family or financial ties to the social elite.
Simms secures the political significance of the opening act and
its Philadelphia setting through Maurice's responses to the opponents of
his personal happiness. Ignoring the servant who falsely states that
Clarice is not at home, Maurice barges into Mrs. Jervas's residence, justi-
fying his decidedly revolutionary actions with reference to natural rights:
"rights of feeling, I That art can never stifle" and "Rights of the heart,
which make the heart immortal I In those affections which still show to
earth, I The only glimpses we have left of Eden" (13). In his meeting
with Warren and Richard Osborne, a lawyer who produces the copied
forgery and whom Warren has also blackmailed, Maurice declares that
Warren "made that guilty I Which in itself was innocent" through "his
perversion of a simple paper" (25, 28). For Simms, a strict construction-
ist, the meaning of other simple papers signed in Philadelphia, namely
the Declaration and the Constitution, had been perverted by a legal and
political establishment ever seeking, in his estimation, to weaken slave
power and curtail the slaveholder's property rights. The drama addition-
ally reflects a Democratic distrust of a federal Bank that would circulate
paper money, and with it manipulate a market better dependent on
specie; by the end of the play, Mrs. Jervas has lost all her wealth in a failed
bank. Warren's forged note, then, broadly represents a corrupt Northern
9 William Gilmore Simms, Norman Maurice; Or, The Man of the People, An
American Drama, 4th edition (Phlladelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853), 29. Subsequent
references to this work are provided in parentheses in the text.
SECTIONAL PATRIOTISM AND H EROIC ELOQUENCE 15
establishment that Simms believed inflated federal political and econom-
ic power and controlled naive states through the threat of disunion.
Maurice understandably decides that he and Clarice will leave
Philadelphia for a region unfettered by "Mere parchment, and the vain
parade of title" (31).
The patriot, it would seem, belongs in the West, which represents
to Maurice not simply "an open field, I And freedom to all comers" (31)
but a people worthy of his efforts. "I know this people-" he tell s Clarice,
Love them- would make them mine! I have ambition
To serve them in high places, and do battle
With the arch-tyrannies, in various guises,
That still from freedom pluck its panoply,
Degrade its precious rites, and, with vain shadows,
Mock the fond hopes that fasten on their words. (30)
The West in which the couple establish their domestic haven, a country-
side cottage not far from St. Louis, is certainly home to tyrants; Maurice
establishes his legal reputation, after all, as a defender of such victims as
the Widow Pressley, whose wealth has been appropriated by the local
bully and businessman, Colonel Blasinghame. The enemies here, as in
Philadelphia, Maurice readily identifies as:
that class of men, the mean ambitious,
Who, for the lowly greed of appetite,
Or hungering for a state they never merit,
Cringe with a servile zeal to wealth and numbers,
And nothing show but baseness when they rise. (35)
Maurice believes in the independence and moral acuity of Westerners,
especially as seen through the jury and the electorate, and that with their
blessing he will vanquish this corrupt class. In response to his client's
fears that the powerful Blasinghame will win, Maurice declares, "My faith
is in the people," to which the widow responds, "Mine in you, sir" (35) .
Though Blasinghame threatens the idealistic attorney with violence and
challenges him to a duel after the unfavorable verdict is announced,
Maurice never cowers. When approached by sympathetic politicians to
serve as an opposition candidate for Senate, Maurice takes the opportu-
nity to declare, "Our liberties are in the popular vote, I Their best secu-
rity, the popular heart, I Their noblest triumph in the popular will" (80).
Simms links the hero's effectiveness as a lawyer to the ability and willing-
16 MIELKE
ness of common Missourians to make their own decisions concerning
right and wrong (a point that resonates with Simms's unsuccessful advo-
cacy in the South Carolina legislature for the direct election of presiden-
tial electors).tO Maurice's deep faith in popular sovereignty assures his
ascent as noble politician.
The conflict of the play arises from Warren conspiring with par-
tisan leaders in Missouri to bring down Norman Maurice. More to the
point, the overreaching establishment of the North joins forces with cor-
rupt local leaders to suppress the popular will in the interest of protect-
ing its own power. When Warren slithers westward with the purported
forgery and a desire to ruin Maurice's public reputation and private hap-
piness, he finds eager accomplices in Blasinghame and Ben Ferguson,
lawyer for Blasinghame and Missouri's ruling political party's candidate
for the Senate. Only hinting at the nature of the document he plans to
use against Maurice, Warren nonetheless convinces the party operatives
he should reveal the secret at the caucus during which both candidates
will make their cases to a gathered crowd (which will presumably sway the
members of the state legislature responsible for electing the state's sena-
tor). Ferguson expresses mild hesitation-"! much prefer that we should
beat him, I In a fair wrestle" (72)-but concludes that victory necessi-
tates dirty politics. In contrast, Maurice tells his own advisors, "To use or
sanction fraud-to buy with money, I Or other bribe, the suffrage of the
people- I Is to dishonor them-degrade myself!" (80). While he does
not know that Warren's charges are fraudulent or that Warren plans to
bribe Clarice with the document prior to the caucus, Ferguson under-
stands that accusing Maurice of a past indiscretion will distract the audi-
ence from the political issues that matter. He will not, however, let moral
compunction or personal honor come between him and achieving the
group's goal.
Simms's dramatic denunciation of partisan corruption and the
malice of eastern institutions may not appear explicitly pro-slavery for
today's reader, but readers in the early 1850s recognized in Norman
Maurice a direct indictment of contemporary politicians. Charles S.
Watson has documented reviewers' acknowledgement that Simms based
Colonel Ben Ferguson on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri
(also known as "Colonel Benton"), a prominent Democrat and propo-
nent of westward expansion who represented to Simms the damnable
!0 Charles S. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of
William Gilmore Simms (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 9. South Carolina was the
last state wherein presidential electors were selected by the legislature. Simms served in
that body from 1844 to 1846.
SECTIONAL PATRIOTISM AND HEROIC ELOQUENCE 17
TH[ IUfOCII&TW FUIItii.U If 1141.
Figure 2: Thomas Hart Benton (second from left) helps bear the corpses of
Van Buren and Lewis Case, the Democratic presidential candidate. In Norman
Maurice, the Benton stand-in fatefully puts his Party before the People.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress,
http:/ / hdl.loc.gov /loc.pnp/ cph.3a 11392/
politician valuing partisan loyalty and compromise in the name of union
more than faithfulness to his constituents' ideals.
11
A master orator and
keen statesman, Benton was first elected to the Senate from Missouri in
1820, and in the years that followed proved himself loyal to Jackson, Van
Buren, and the Democratic Party. A slave owner who was ambivalent
about the ethics of chattel slavery, Benton was the only one of ten slave-
state Democrats to vote against Texas annexation in 1844 after Van
Buren publicly opposed the treaty, and he subsequently attempted to bro-
ker a deal dividing Texas into one slave district and one free district. In
1846, Benton grudgingly voted for the Mexican War after speaking
against the conflict on the Senate floor, and he remained at odds with
Polk's policy, despite the president's flattering efforts to make him com-
mander of the Army.12 Benton, who earned enemies among those sup-
porting slavery through his role in resolving the Oregon Question and his
11 Watson, Antebellum Charleston Dramatists, 131, 135-137.
12 .1\Iichael F Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American h ~ Party (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 221, 494-7; Wilentz, The Rise of American Democrary, 575-
8; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 680, 742-3, 750.
18
MIELKE
public opposition to Calhoun's assertions of Southern rights, found him-
self increasingly under fire back home. On 10 March 1849, the Missouri
General Assembly passed the Missouri Resolutions (a.k.a. the Jackson
Resolutions), which explicitly rejected federal authority over the legality
of slavery in any state or territory, affirmed popular sovereignty and slave
holders' "property" rights, and demanded Missouri's senators abide by
these principles. In response, Benton made a series of speeches in his
home state denouncing the resolutions as treasonous. The following
January, however, he found himself out of office.13
Simms, in an 1847 letter to his friend and former South Carolina
governor James Henry Hammond, angrily denounced Benton and con-
cluded that he represented the irreversible contamination of the
Democratic Party. "Salt cannot save it," Simms declared, "and the simple
object now for us ... is simply to elect a Southern president," even if that
Southerner be a Whig.1
4
In Simms's view, Benton was a traitor to
Missouri, an enemy of the South, and for this reason a threat to a nation
dependent on enfranchised white men of every state and region express-
ing their will directly. The portrayal of Ben Ferguson in Norman Maurice
represents not only an indictment of one particular senator, but of all
such politicians who betrayed what Simms understood to be the legacy of
Jacksonian populism by working through the federal government to con-
tain the spread of slavery and related sectional tensions. Simms updates
the Jacksonian hero to run against a stand-in for a five-term Democratic
senator and to counter all those opposed to the unbridled extension of
slavery.
The electoral plot of the drama culminates in the oratorical
l3 William M. Meigs, The Lift if Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott, 1904), 409-414;John D. Morton, '"A High Wall and a Deep Ditch': Thomas
Hart Benton and the Compromise of 1850," Missouri Historical Review 94 (1999): 1-24, esp.
6-1 0; Christopher Phillips, introduction to The Union on Trial The Political Journals if Judge
William Barclay Napton, ed. by Phillips and Jason L. Pendleton (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2005), 46-48. Though Benton purposefully "forged a stance of opposi-
tion to abolitionist and explicit free-soil legislation" in 1850, supporters failed to gain a
majority in the state legislature, and he was defeated in January 1851 after thirty years in
office (Morton, "'A High Wall'," 21). He returned to the U.S. House of Representatives
in 1852.
14 Simms to James Henry Hammond, 4 June 1847, in The Letters if William
Gilmore Simms, 6 volumes, edited by Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T.
C. Duncan Eaves (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952-1982), 2:322.
Indeed, Simms attended the July 1848 convention of Democrats in Charleston, SC,
speaking in favor of rejecting the candidacy of Democrat Lewis Cass and endorsing Whig
presidential candidate Zachary Taylor ("Taylor Meeting in Charleston," The National Era,
7 September 1848).
SECfiONAL PATRIOTISM AND H EROIC ELOQUENCE 19
showdown between Maurice and Ferguson at the City Hall of St. Louis,
Maurice's flawless performance, and the selection of Maurice as senator.
Through this caucus, Simms pointedly dramatizes as non-partisan and
popular in nature a political process that was most certainly not;
Missouri's legislature, not the voting public, elected senators in this peri-
od (though candidates for the state legislature could run on their affilia-
tion with particular candidates for the U.S. senate).
Simms thus modifies actual political practice to emphasize that a
senator must embody the active will of his constituents rather than an
established legislature or a party. Whenever the electorate breaks free
from the influence of a corrupt establishment and picks a representative
sensitive to local concerns, the health of the union is secured. As the
"Man of the People," Maurice is both a Missourian and an American, and
his attention to the interests of his constituents a sign of loyalty to the
uruon.
Simms's insistence on a sectional patriotism helps to explain his
dogged pursuit of Forrest for the role of Norman Maurice.
1
5 The pres-
ence of the Philadelphia star in a Southern playwright's defense of pop-
ular sovereignty would no doubt reinforce the drama's vision of union
through states' self-determination. Simms's dramatic promotion of pop-
ular sovereignty rests on an explicit criticism of a long-serving and wide-
ly respected Democratic senator closely aligned with Van Buren, as well
as a forgery plot allegorically indicting the legal and political establish-
ments of the North for maliciously subverting the will of Western resi-
dents through the misrepresentation and misuse of federal power. If
Forrest, as a native of Philadelphia and a prominent New York
Democrat, took up the mantle of Norman Maurice, he would both
endorse this analysis of the national political scene and represent, quite
personally, the potential for interregional consensus within the party and
the nation. Whether Forrest ignored Simms's pleas out of political prin-
ciple, aesthetic principle, or, most likely, annoyance, his refusal and the
ensuing closeting of Norman Maurice signaled just how far the Democratic
Party's and the nation's factions were from agreeing on the future of slav-
15 Beginning in 1837, Simms sent Forrest a number of plays which were, appar-
ently, largely unsolicited and generally ignored. In mid-1847, Simms sent Forrest the first
act of Norman Maurice, then waited in vain for a response. Forrest may never have read
beyond that fu:st act (which he apparently disliked), and Simms finally published Norman
Maurice serially in the Southern Literary Messenger from April to August of 1851 and in five
later editions, well after the play's political moment. Simms sought unsuccessfully to have
the play produced in Charleston in 1852 and in Nashville and St. Louis in 1854. See
Dewsnap, "William Gilmore Simms' Career as a Playwright," 149-61; Watson, A ntebellum
Charleston Dramatists, 116-20, 129-30; Guilds, Simms, 198-9.
20 MIELKE
ery in the country. I6
"With so much equal truth and eloquence!"
Simms intended to harness Forrest's commanding performance for the
promotion of popular sovereignty, the related extension of slavery, and
the author's own aspirations to dramatic success. Though he was no
doubt exasperated by the star's rejection of Norman Maurice, Simms may
have considered it appropriate, if disappointing, that he was unable to
have staged a play full of moments when speech he believed to be inher-
ently truthful is quashed. The drama links the articulate politician's rise to
prominence with his insistence on purifying political discourse, and it
paints his enemies as callous manipulators of the word who actively cor-
rupt or silence democratic speech. In this way, Norman Maurice serves as
linguistic melodrama, an emotionally charged battle between one who
speaks the truth and all who do not-a battle the hero wages on behalf
of those powerless to defend their innate rights and in the interest of
promulgating his irrefutable moral vision. The inherently ethical conflict
of melodrama, as Peter Brooks and Linda Williams assert, depends on
"virtue misprized and eventually recognized," especially through a "vic-
tim-hero" who suffers due to a tardy acknowledgment of his virtue.r7 In
Norman Maurice, the public applauds his virtue from the first moment he
sets foot on the public stage, but his election as senator comes too late to
protect him from the cunning devices of his enemies. And en route to
16 Critical speculations as to why Forrest rejected Norman Maurice abound.
Parks and others note Forrest felt the language of the blank verse drama insufficiently ele-
vated and that he perhaps nursed a grudge against Simms for an unfavorable reference in
his 1840 Border Beagles (an actor in the novel imitates "the guttural growl of Forrest, when,
with singular bad taste, he imitates even the death rattle in the throat of the obese
Vitellius"). Dewsnap surmises that Forrest's troubles in 1849-his association with the
Astor Place Riot and separation from his \\'ife-clistracted him. And Watson asserts that
Forrest may have avoided overtly political dramas after his 1838 speech to the New York
Democrats led the manager of New York's Park Theatre-who assumed the star had left
acting for politicking- to engage other actors for the season. See Parks, William Gilmore
Simms as Literary Critic, 69-71; William Gilmore Simms, Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi,
ed. John Caldwell Guilds (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996), 64; Dewsnap,
"William Gilmore Simms' Career as a Playwright," 156-8; Watson, Antebellum Chadeston
Dramatists, 135; Guilds, Simms, 198-9.
l7 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and
the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 27; Linda Williams, Pfqying
the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to 0.]. Simpson (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 29. I depend here and throughout on Brooks's and
\Villiams's incisive accounts of the melodrama's moral function and essential features.
SECTIONAL PATRIOTISM AND H EROIC ELOQUENCE
21
the drama's tragic conclusion, one finds multiple examples of what
Thomas Gustafson terms the "Thucydidean moment," "when fortune or
necessity or corruption defeats virtue, or when moral and political stabil-
ity-and the code of language that sustains that stability-collapses into
confusion and the muteness of violence." In a nation committed to "a
quest to end the corruption and tyranny of words or to establish a more
representative language," and in a period preoccupied with the relation-
ship between moral clarity and linguistic transparency, Simms crafted a
melodramatic plot in which the hero struggles to defeat the representa-
tives of corrupt partisanship and an abusive federal government so that
he might serve as the honorable voice of Missourians, and, by extension,
the American people. IS
Characters surrounding Maurice testify to the extraordinary
effectiveness of his speech in the courtroom- "He was born an orator!"
exclaims Warren's other victim, Robert Osborne (24)-and accordingly
his fitness for battle with the corrupt and the tyrannous. Two astounded
lawyers exiting the courtroom after Maurice's closing argument on behalf
of Widow Pressley describe a physically captivating performance.
Blasinghame, the first of them notes, became "a spectacle of ghastly
fury," crouching and biting his lips in "great agony" as he listened to the
charges against him (101). "No body heard, or cared to hear" Ferguson's
defense of Blasinghame, for Maurice had spoken the truth with untaint-
ed words that immediately provoked assent. When asked what the verdict
will be, the first lawyer responds,
Why, who can doubt? The insuppressible groan,
That broke from every breast-the gaze of fury
That blazed in every eye, when, pointing slowly,
And shaking with such dire significance,
The hand of Maurice fix'd on Blasinghame,
As still, with holy horror in his accents,
He spoke his wonder, that, with guilt so hideous,
He still could brave the gaze of man and justice! -
That groan and glance declared the popular judgment,
And such will be the verdict. (1 02)
The hero expresses the will of the entire courtroom through physical ges-
tures that simultaneously stir and register collective feelings and moral
18 Thomas Gustafson, Representative Wordr: Politics, Literature, and the Ametican
l...Linguage, 1776-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14, 2.
22 MIELKE
judgment. He emotes and judges, that the People may emote and judge,
and in the process emancipates the law as well as his client from the cruel
Blasinghame.
Simms had rich theatrical precedent for courtroom drama and a
popular model for the performance of a well-spoken lawyer who
reclaims and wields legal language on behalf of the downtrodden. In J.S.
Jones's comedy The Lal2:Jer, the hero, Robert Howard, disguises
himself as a common laborer while on the street, but in the courtroom
draws upon his significant learning and eloquence to protect the poor
from the wickedness of the rich. "Though the law may sometimes shield
a villain, with its broad hand of power," he declares, "in honest hands 'tis
an engine the evil-doer dreads."
1
9 Simms departs from theatrical prece-
dent, however, by not including a single courtroom scene. Here and
throughout the drama, Simms strategically omits or cuts short direct
demonstrations of the hero's articulacy. In doing so, he likely sought to
dictate audience response and build suspense for Maurice's political
speech in the drama's penultimate scene. The elision has a secondary and
related effect of underscoring the hero's struggle to exercise his oratorical
power on behalf of the People. Time and again, Norman Maurice uses the
figures of omitted or suppressed expression to highlight the hero's rep-
resentative, sacrificial campaign against a corrupt establishment.
Simms explores the limits of democratic oratory through lin-
guistic melodrama, establishing in the very first exchange between Mrs.
Jervas and Maurice the forces that will suppress the hero's words. As
mentioned above, Maurice justifies barging into Mrs. Jervas's Philadelphia
household in the first scene by declaring, in the voice of a revolutionary,
that she has violated their "Rights of the heart." Yet he concludes that
rational argumentation is fruitless with such a narrow-minded audience.
"I would have pleaded I Your calm return to judgment," he tells Mrs.
Jervas, "But that I know how profitless the pleading, I Which, in the ear
of prejudice, would soften I The incorrigible wax that deafens pride"
(14). Of course his declared self-censorship is itself a rhetorical strategy
aimed at shaming the cruel guardian (another echo of the Declaration),
19]. S. Jones, The a Comet!J in Two Acts (New York & London:
Samuel French, 1856), 22. Jones's play, sometimes titled Solon Shingle, premiered at the
National Theatre of Boston in 1839 and featured a popular representation of the stage
Yankee. Plot parallels with Norman Maurice are significant: Howard, like Maurice, is chal-
lenged to a duel and wins; whereas Maurice is falsely charged with forgery, Howard's client
has been framed for theft by his boss because he refuses to cover up the boss's forgery;
and both heroes represent victimized widows. The villain of Jones's play is Winslow and
his clerk/victim is Otis, while the villain of Simms's play is Warren and his clerk/accom-
plice is Osborne.
SECI10NAL PATRJ011SM AND HEROIC ELOQUENCE 23
and it wins him permission to speak privately with Clarice for a moment.
In that moment, despite interruptions from an impatient Mrs. Jervas,
Maurice convinces Clarice to steal away with him and elope, demonstrat-
ing that his oratorical skills will not be suppressed. The lovers' exchange
concludes, in fact, with Clarice's concise assent to the plan-"I'm
thine!"-and Maurice's affirmation of the restored power of speech-
" Tis spoken! I And now I live again!" (19) . Subsequent scenes in the play
repeat this pattern of the hero acknowledging the forces poised to stifle
his honest expressions only to orate his way out of it.
Yet Norman Maurice also foreshadows the hero's tragic fate
through such scenes, the repetition of which underscores his foes' relent-
lessness in their quest to silence him and those whose interests he shares.
Having pursued the Maurices to Missouri, for example, the disguised
Warren appears at the very moment Maurice has lightheartec!Jy agreed to
risk his reputation as a serious lawyer by reciting for Clarice his love poet-
ry. "You lead me erring, Clarice, to these trifles," he jests, adding, "You,
and the exulting feeling at my heart, I That deems this happiness sure!-
Ha! That knock!" (56). Intuiting "that evil at our threshold lurks," the
lover's playfulness evaporates and the audience never hears the verse with
"a mystic tone and character" that Maurice has situated in opposition to
the mundane jargon of the lawyer (56). Instead of expressing his love,
Maurice must once again confront, with scathing words, Warren, the
"Liar and reptile" who menacingly reminds him, ''That I have that to
speak against thy fame, I Shall blacken it forever" (60, 62). Despite
Maurice's physical prowess and willingness to use violence (time and
again Clarice begs him to desist), the drama's essential conflict is verbal.
The hero, as Gustafson would have it, struggles to cleanse through the
use of a tainted legalese and political rhetoric.
Maurice succeeds in his quest-besting Blasinghame in the
courtroom and afterward in a rather blooc!Jess duel, then winning a
Senate seat-through his eloquence. Yet his ambition to "the platform of
the nation" costs Maurice his domestic sanctuary (80). In the time it takes
Maurice to ascend to representative office, his enemies infiltrate his
home, the melodrama's treasured and endangered "space of inno-
cence."20 Once Maurice leaves the cottage to represent Widow Pressley
and speak at the political caucus in St. Louis, Warren arrives to make a
deal with Clarice: if she will meet him that evening in the woods and yield
"the sweet honey dew that lines thy lips, I The heaven that heaves in thy
embracing bosom" (93), he will surrender the actual incriminating docu-
20 Williams, Plqying the Race Card, 28.
24
MIELKE
ment he earlier pretended to give Maurice. Of course he has no intention
of doing so. Clarice agrees to the arrangement but resolves to kill Warren,
or to be killed trying, in order to protect Maurice's political ambitions.
Even in this subplot, Warren represents the forces intending to suppress
the voices of democracy; as Warren walks before her, Clarice imagines
the woods to be a place ''Where shadow and silence both invoke with
speech, I Too potent for my feeble pray'r and plaint, I A shadow and a
silence still more deep!" (110). Caught in Warren's web of malignant lies,
Clarice knows that her supplications to God and to man are of no use,
that words of truth and pleas for pity are silenced by lies and jealous
demands. Descending into madness, Clarice experiences auditory halluci-
nations linking her submission to Warren in the silent woods and
Maurice's vocalization of the People's will: "Another voice is sounding in
mine ears," she marvels, ''And many voices! One of them is Norman's"
(111). Her husband, she feels, beckons her to this deed, but she wavers as
his voice "sinks into a murmur- I Mixed murmurs follow of a crowd!"
Maurice has been literally drawn away from marital bliss by his desire to
speak in the courtroom and the Senate, and Clarice is left to protect his
voice from dissolution in the murmur of gossip and scandal.
Championing the People and forfeiting the family are two sides of the
melodramatic coin minted by Forrest;
21
in Simms's version of a Forrest
drama, the sacrificial wife submits to silence in the presence of demo-
cratic cacophony.
After Clarice and Warren's fatal encounter in the woods, the
action abruptly (but appropriately) shifts to Maurice's crowning oratori-
cal moment at the political caucus in St. Louis, when he triumphs over
the competition through the assertion of the "doctrines of Missouri,"
which he identifies as the conservative interpretation of the Constitution,
a limited federal government, and free trade-principles resonant with
the pro-slavery Missouri Resolutions and their affirmation of popular
sovereignty, states' rights, and individual property rights.zz Maurice's
approach to the Constitution he describes in terms of anticipating and
21 Sacrificial wives (and sons, an element Simms omits) abound in Forrest's
American dramas: after their son is shot and killed, Metamora stabs his wife, Nahmeokee,
so she will not be captured and enslaved by the Puritans; a Roman soldier kills Spartacus's
son and then his wife, Senona, as she attacks him in a rage; and Jack Cade's wife, Mariamne,
dies from madness in the aftermath of their son's death from starvation and her murder
of an enemy who attempts to rape her. Clearly Simms modeled Clarice on Mariamne.
22 Perhaps between fust drafti.ng the drama in 1847 and publishing it in 1851
(after Benton's defeat), Simms deliberately recast Maurice's speech to echo the l\.1issouri
Resoluti.ons of 1849.
SEC110NAL PATRIOTISM AND HEROIC ELOQUENCE 25
correcting abusive readings of the document, a focus reinforcing the alle-
gorical significance of Warren's sinister deployment of the alleged for-
gery in Philadelphia and now in Missouri. "I would have [the
Constitution]," Maurice declares
A ligament of fix'd, unchanging value,
Maintained by strict construction,-neither warp'd,
Nor stretch'd, nor !opt of it's [sic] now fair proportions,
By the ambitious demagogue or statesman,
Who, with the baits of station in their eyes,
Still sacrifice the State! (117)
The federal government exists as a safeguard for the "linked realm of
nations" known as the United States and thus has "no power but where
necessity, I Still under guidance of the Charter, gives it," thus taxing only
"to meet our exigence" and leaving "our people I ... free to share the
commerce of the world" (117). Central to Maurice's outline of the doc-
trines is an understood advocacy of popular sovereignty, the ideological
heart of the drama. In reference to the threat of "[t]he foreign despot"
(118), Maurice names Fran<;ois Guizot and Lord Palmerston, a French
prime minister critical of universal suffrage and the British Foreign
Secretary (soon to be Prime Minister) who oversaw Britain's "strong
stance" with regard to British-US. relations.23 Maurice concludes that
such men "cannot chain us," for "Balances of power, I Framed by cor-
rupt and cunning monarchists, I Weigh none of our possessions" (118).
Thus, through self-proclaimed "Freely delivered, frankly argued" opin-
ions, Maurice quite cunningly associates his opponent with European
monarchists and indicates his opposition to all who would either grant
the federal government powers beyond "necessity" or diminish the polit-
ical power of the enfranchised. In this way, Simms cleverly counters
Benton and others seeking to restrict slavery without ever naming the
true subject of his ''American Drama."
In this penultimate scene, we receive the most extensive example
of Maurice's oratorical skill and proof of his political commitment to
popular sovereignty and limited federal government, suggesting that
Clarice's actions have indeed safeguarded the "Man of the People." Yet
the drama continues to limit direct representations of oratory, for we
23 Aurelian Craiutu, "Guizot's Elitist Theory of Representative
Government," Critical Revie111 15, no. 3/4 (2003): 261-84; Rebecca Berens Matzke,
"Britain Gets Its Way: Power and Peace in Anglo-American Relations, 1838-1846," War
in History 8, no. 1 (2001): 19-46.
26 MlELKF.
never hear Ferguson's speech at Ci ty Hall, and we are privy to only the
final forty-seven lines of Maurice's address. Another character once again
describes for the audience the laudatory nature of Maurice's words and
delivery and the relative poverty of his opponent's performance.
Maurice's colleague declares:
me thinks,
That none who listened to the speech of Maurice,
But must have yielded to his clear opinions;-
Enforced by illustrations near and foreign,
Such full analysis, such profound research-
Statements so fairly made,-objections battled
So fearlessly-and arguments sustained
With so much equal truth and eloquence! (119)
While Simms presumably seeks to secure the opinion of the drama's
audience, even to model the appropriate response to political address, he
additionally prepares the way for a final confrontation between Maurice
and Ferguson, and the hero's heartbreaking realization of the personal
cost of his political quest.
Immediately after the gathered crowd shouts for the election of
Maurice and a party representative declares, "Such is the popular will!,"
Ferguson steps forward to say he cannot be silent when he has proof of
Maurice's shameful forgery (119). Here, as throughout the drama, Simms
curtails direct displays of legal and political oratory, as well as popular
responses to them, in the interest of dramatizing the forces that would
suppress those who speak " [w]ith so much equal truth and eloquence."
The news of Warren's murder empowers the formerly blackmailed
Osborne to clear Maurice's name and the crowd to revive its shouts for
his election, but Maurice flees the scene and rushes home to witness his
wife's death from a broken blood vessel, the result of psychological trau-
ma. As she dies, Clarice's auditory divination is realized, for the crowd's
jubilant shouts of "Hurrah for Norman Maurice!" mix with Maurice's
cry, "My wife! My wife!" (125). Given the abuses of a Northern political
establishment and a corrupt local party system, Simms asserts, the
People's will is realized only through great sacrifice: the silencing of the
Adamic spokesperson's beloved muse. Norman Maurice heralds the power
of the orator to restore the voice of the People, but in the final scene,
shouts drown out eloquence and the hero's personal lamentations over-
whelm his representative promulgation of rights.
SECTIONAL PATRIOTISM AND H EROIC ELOQUENCE 27
A Personal Tragedy
In their treatments of Norman Maurice, Watson and Guilds stress the
drama's "strongly autobiographical" nature. Though Simms grew up in
South Carolina, he idealized the West, where his own father had made his
fortune and to which he always regretted not moving. Simms was a noted
orator who had trained to be a lawyer and served a term in the South
Carolina legislature. And just as Maurice declares that he will not be "a
candidate" in the traditional sense, so too Simms told party operatives
who courted him that he would never campaign.24 One may readily con-
clude that Simms-a Southern intellectual who identified with the "cre-
ative but alienated genius" of Romanticism and a brusque, insistent man
who nonetheless "craved both personal intimacy and intellectual
approval" -embraced the adored and beleaguered hero of the
Jacksonian stage as an alter ego. After losing the 1846 election, Simms
mournfully admitted, "It was my boast that I had the sympathies of my
people- that they believed in me and were grateful for my labors."25
From the ashes of his political ambitions rose Norman Maurice, a pro-
jection onto Forrest of Simms's ideal self and a testimony to his person-
al sacrifices in the interest of articulating the truth.
Simms's autobiographically-informed conception of the heroic
lawyer-politician's struggle against a dominating and dishonest establish-
ment did not end with the publication of Norman Maurice in 1851. Five
years later, Simms himself stepped into the role of the sacrificial orator
as he set off on a Northern lecture tour in the wake of Preston Brooks's
caning of Charles Sumner over "The Crime against Kansas" address. In
his response, "South Carolina in the Revolution," Simms asserted what
Sumner had vehemently denied, the significant contribution of the
Palmetto State to the Revolutionary effort, and asked of "Massachusetts"
(i.e. Sumner), ''Ah! my friends, what real power, confident in itself, and
noble in its courage, ever descends to such an artifice?"26 Simms delivered
the lecture in Buffalo, Rochester, and New York City in November 1856,
24 Guilds, Simms, 201. On Simms's oratorical skiUs and his belief that he could
have succeeded in the West as a lawyer, see especiaUy the words of Paul Hamilton Hayne
quoted in ibid., 250-2. On Simms's political career, see ibid., 112-4. Watson links the play
to Simms's political involvement in Antebell11m Charleston Dramatists, 140-1.
25 Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intelleclllal in the Old
So11tb, 1840-1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 22, 30; Simms quot-
ed in Guilds, Simms, 123.
26 Simms, "South Carolina in the Revolution," in Letters of William Gilmore
Simms, volume 3, 548.
28 MIELKE
and a second lecture in Syracuse that same month, but in the face of hos-
tile newspaper reviews and dwindling audiences, he cancelled the remain-
der of his appearances and lost a substantial amount of money. A writer
for The Boston Dai!J At/as-whose unfavorable contrast of Simms's ora-
tory with that of "Col. Benton" must have truly irked the Southerner-
sneered, "[Simms] considers himself as a martyr to politics, when he is
only a martyr to his own dulU]ness."27 In "Antagonisms of the Social
Moral, North and South," an address the following year, Simms declared
audiences and newspapers of the North to be hopelessly prejudiced
against the South. For Simms, the Northern response to the Brooks and
Sumner affair and his own lectures had proven American oratory too
compromised to prevent inevitable war. "Simms's analysis of his own
narrative," as James P. Warren puts it, "tells a story of eloquence driven
into silence, of words leading to blows, of a society ceasing to speak or
to listen."2B Newly committed to secession, Simms apparently abandoned
the notion of nationalism founded on regional identity and secured
through simple, honest speech. He clung, however, to the melodramatic
image of the truthful orator as martyr.
The personal sacrifice of Norman Maurice, tied as it is to the
symbol of an overreaching federal government, encapsulates a defining
moment in Simms's life and in the political life of the nation. Simms iden-
tified with Maurice as an updated, pro-slavery Jacksonian hero whose
political victory signals the potential of popular sovereignty to sustain
rather than destroy the union, but whose personal misfortune suggests an
inability to purge the nation of a political corruption seeking to silence
the People. For both Simms and his hero, the individual's fate is insepa-
rable from that of the section and the nation. Though Norman A1aurice
was never performed-or perhaps because Norman Maurice was never per-
formed-it communicates Simms's mounting sense of public speech
under fire at the end of the Age of Oratory, and it affirms the nation's
fate as inextricable from the question of slavery's future in the West.
27 "The Democracy on Lecturing," The Boston Dai!JAtlas, 15 December 1856.
On Simms's disastrous northern lecture tour and his subsequent speeches, see especially
Miriam]. Shillings burg, "Simms's Failed Lecture Tour of 1856: The Mind of the North,"
in "Long Years of Neglect": The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simm;, ed. John
Caldwell Guilds (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 183-201; James Perrin
Warren, Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and &form in Antebellum America (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 155-67; Busick, A Sober Desire for History, 81-7.
28 Warren, Culture of Eloquence, 167.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAM.\ AND THEATRE 21, NO.2 (SPRING 2009)
Fantasies of a "Native Daughter": Seatde Repertory
Theatre's Production of My Narreis Radx1 Ca:rie
Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
The simple act of staging community narratives can
have a profound effect. Audiences who usually avoid
mainstream theatre because of cost and irrelevance to
their lives often express surprise and pleasure when they
attend community-based performances. 1
Theatre and performance, seen as an institution whose
chief function is the production of the social imaginary,
can play a potentially vital role in shaping social change.
In a time when much theatre practice, especially in com-
mercial and regional venues, seems anemic or irrelevant
to public life, the affirmation of this constitutive func-
tion of theatre is essential. It means that we will have to
reconceive of our theatres as a place of democratic
struggle.2
In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai writes that globalization has creat-
ed transnational flows of money, media, information, and people; the
flows of media and migration, in particular, have transformed the imag-
ination into a "collective social fact" through which people create new
subjectivities, unbound by national affiliations or primordial associa-
tions.3 Both Rachel Corrie the woman and My Name is Rachel Corrie the
script attest to this, as well as to the role theatre can play in the formation
1 Tobin NeUhaus and Susan C. Haedicke, "Introduction," in Peiforming
Democrao: International Perspective on Urban Community Based Theatre, edited by Tobin
NeUhaus and Susan C. Haedicke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 19.
2 Janelle Reinelt, "Notes for a Radical Democratic Theatre: Productive Crises
and the Challenge of Indeterminacy," in Staging Resistance: Esscrys on Political Theatre, edited
by Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2001), 289.
3 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 5.
30 JACKSON- SCI-!EBEITA
of spectator-citizens.
4
Internationally, Corrie's death, its subsequent
investigation, and the struggle to lay blame for it sparked media debates
within and between ethnic and political communities in the United States
and the world. Her actions and activities (as well as she herself), were
alternately categorized either as American, idealistic, and worthwhile, or
un-American, stupid, and anti-Semitic. She intervened in and destabilized
discourses on nationalism, citizenship, activism, religion, peace, and vio-
lence. My Name is Rachel Corrie also engendered a public sphere of the
social imaginary through theatre. For both artists and audiences, My Name
is Rachel Corrie, in its realized and cancelled productions, became rallying
points around which one could ratify or interrogate political identity and
civic engagement.
In Seattle Repertory Theatre's March 2007 production of My
Name is Rachel Corrie, the volatile potential of the show to engender
"spectator-citizens" (audience members, as Janelle Reinelt theorizes,
motivated to debate, imagine, and enact civic dialogue and/ or social
change) might have been keenly felt.S Not only was the production tak-
ing place within an hour's drive of Corrie's hometown and college, but
the city of Seattle was sorting through tensions in its Israeli and
Palestinian communities, tensions that had erupted in a fatal July 2006
shooting incident at the downtown Jewish Federation. The Muslim per-
petrator claimed to have been motivated by anger at U.S./Israeli cooper-
ation. The city was ripe for the provocative Rachel Corrie to excite debate
and conversations across Seattle neighborhoods and populations. The
Rep was positioned to connect, through theatre, the loss felt by Corrie's
friends and family with that of the extended local communities, and to
sift through the pain of both international and immediate ethnically
motivated violence.6
My Name is Rachel Corrie carried the possibility, in Seattle, to move
the collective imagination towards what Appadurai identifies as a "stag-
4 Rachel Corrie was killed in Rafah, Gaza in March 2003. She had traveled to
Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. Her family and community estab-
lished the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice in honor of her work and
ideals. See http:/ /www.rachelcorriefoundation.org/site/ for more information.
5 See Reinelt, " otes for a Radical Democratic Theatre," 283-300.
6 The very definition of what is a "community," related to questions about how
a "community" is constructed, delineated, and produced, is itself a troubled concept, to
which I will return at the end of the paper. For a brief overview on contemporary theo-
retical debates about the term, see Mirand Joseph, "Community," in Kry1vords for American
Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York
University Press, 2007), 57-9.
FANTASIES OF A "NAT!\'E DAUGHTER" 31
ing ground for action," and, indeed, multiple intentional and circumstan-
tial aspects of the production worked towards that end. At the same time,
many production and publicity choices at the Rep failed to realize, or
chose to downplay, that potential. In investigating how and why, we can
interrogate the role of contemporary theatre in the creation of national
and regional identities and in the production of civically engaged prac-
tices and processes in the United States. Seattle Rep's production is par-
ticularly compelling because it presents a model of theatremaking that is
neither clearly professional/ commercial nor community-based, but-
because of the theatre's location, the young, local creative team hired to
realize the production, and Corrie's affiliation with the region-a combi-
nation of each practice's ideals. By parsing out the multiple dynamics of
the production, seeing them as situated at a nexus of identity formations,
and laying out both its failures and successes at community engagement,
we can, I propose, push ourselves as scholars to reconceptualize the pos-
sibilities of theatre, the failing models of theatre production stultifying in
regional organizations, and the contemporary theatre's civic function. My
project, in the following pages, will move between analyses of Seattle's
media, the text of My Name is Rachel Corrie, the production of the show,
and the multiple contexts in which it was situated.
Not "Too Hot to Handle" for Seattle: Local-ness Produced via
Corrie/ Carie
On 17 February 2006, The New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) post-
poned My Name is Rachel Corrie. The play, constructed by Alan Rickman
and Katherine Viner from Corrie's journals and emails, had enjoyed a
sold out run at the Royal Court in London. A media storm brewed over
NYTW's postponement. The Royal Court cried foul, and NYTW strug-
gled to come up with a rationale satisfactory to the press and the artistic
community. While New York and London squabbled over the show, audi-
ences and artists on both sides of the Atlantic championed or decried it.
The center of the global theatrical world was shaken, along with the iden-
tities of its two leading cities. The question "Why London and not New
York," or, as the cities are often used to stand in for their nations in terms
of theatre, "why Britain and not the States," seemed implicit in the
debates, but it masked the fact that other cities were involved in the ini-
tial jockeying for American production rights. Seattle had already made its
bid for Rachel Corrie, staked on regional, rather than national, ethnic, or
political identity. At the Rep, the show was important primarily because
its subject, Corrie, was a local heroine. Her identity as such had been con-
32 jACKSON-SCHF.BETTA
structed through Seattle's newspapers, and, by extension, embedded into
the imaginary of the region.
7
According to Braden Abraham, then the Literary Manager for
Seattle Rep and eventual director of the &chef Corrie production, his the-
atre had committed to producing Corrie in March of 2007 (before the
NYTW brouhaha erupted).B Corrie being from the area, he said, made it
a "no-brainer" that Corrie needed to be produced in the Pacific
Northwest.9 Then Artistic Director DaYid Esbjornson agreed and stated
in March of 2006 that "The fact that Rachel Cor rie was from Olympia,
and went to college at Evergreen [State College], is a big part of why we
want to do this .... This is about someone local, who could have been
any of us."JO Rather than casting out of town, the Rep chose young, local
artists to carry the bulk of the production. Braden Abraham, Jennifer
Zeyl, and Marya Sea Kaminiski were well-established in the non-com-
mercial and smaller venues of Seattle, but fairly new to the main-stages
of the Rep; the theatre thus enacted a further commitment to locality.
Abraham and Esbjornson's feelings about the play echoed the
Seattle headlines that surrounded Corrie's death: "Israeli Bulldozer Kills
Activist from Olympia," "Local Protestor Dies in Gaza," "Israeli
Bulldozer Kills Olympia Woman."
11
Quotes from friends and family,
teachers, and acquaintances, filled the news articles. Alongside the details
of her death, newspapers recounted the events and aspirations of
Rachel's life: her decision to go to Evergreen, her intention to set up a sis-
ter city relationship between Rafah and Olympia, and her goal of arrang-
ing pen pal exchanges between the children of both cities. Local papers
documented the memorials held in Olympia and throughout Seattle, at
7 I am influenced by Benedict Anderson's analysis of the role of print media in
engendering shared identities through the implied audience constructed through local,
regional, and national newspapers. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and
New York: Verso, 1991), 33-46.
8 The Minetta Lane Theatre, an off-Broadway house, slid quietly into the fray
and picked up the New York production rights in June of 2006. They opened My Name
is Rachel Corrie before Seattle, on 15 October 2006.
9 Braden Abraham, interview with the author, 14 August 2007.
10 Misha Berson, "Politically Charged 'Rachel Corrie' Leads Bold Rep Season,"
Seattle Times, 26 March 2006, J3.
11
Florangela Davila, "Israeli Bulldozer Kills Activist," Seattle Times, 17 March
2003, A 1; Heath Foster, "Local Protester Dies in Gaza," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 17 March
2003, A1.
FANTASIES OF A "NATIVE DAUGHTER"
33
the University of Washington and in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in
Seattle, and reported on the efforts of regional congressmen to exert for-
mal and public pressure on the State Department in the investigation of
Corrie's death.
Despite the fact that Olympia is over sixty miles from Seattle, the
Seattle newspapers specifically celebrated Corrie's Pacific Northwest
affiliation, thereby transforming her into a regional identity marker for
the city of Seattle as well as Olympia. Columnist Robert Jamieson
claimed that Rachel put a "local face on faraway suffering." He indicated
that it was this localness, for people from the Pacific Northwest, more
than her American-ness, that made her death so startling:
People here may not know-or care-about
Palestinians who suffer a daily barrage of bullets and
bulldozers. Then someone like Rachel-an activist com-
mitted to peaceful protest, is killed and we all sit up and
take notice .... [She] looked like the girl next door, which
in fact she was.12
When Israel was cleared of responsibility in Corrie's death, the Seattle Post
Intelligencer claimed the Carries learned of the exoneration not from "the
US or Israeli government, but from a Seattle Post Intelligencer reporter."13
Whether this statement is accurate or not, it exhibits the tensions Corrie's
death caused, not just between nations, but between the nation of the
United States and a region within it. The Corrie family, in this anecdote,
found more solidarity with local resources than with any national or inter-
national governmental or media organization.
Appadurai writes that a local subjectivity requires "a sense of
social immediacy" to be felt among its members. They must have access
to technological means of "interactivity," such as electronic and other
forms of media. Additionally, they must participate in a "relativity of
contexts," such as a shared sensibility, a sense of, or allegiance to, places,
geography and/ or history.1
4
Rather than submitting to the schisms
Corrie's death produced in the nation, the Pacific Northwest, and Seattle
1
2
Robert L. Jamieson, "A Local face on Faraway Suffering," Seattle Post-
Intelligmcer, 29 March 2003, Bl. Emphasis mine.
13 Matthew Craft, "Israelis cleared in Activist Death," Seattle Post-Intelligmcer, 27
June 2003, Bl.
14 Appadurai, Modernity at LArge, 178.
34 jACKSON-SCHEBETIA
in particular, used the event to reify its own locality-an identity situated
within, yet different from, that of America. Predicated on a local woman's
controversial life and death and the subsequent struggle of her family,
this locality was immediate, interactive, and shared. For Seattle in 2003,
the story of Rachel Corrie was not only about the Israel/Palestine con-
flict, but the local face she put to it, a face that, for the Pacific Northwest
(as constructed by Seattle news media), demonstrated the region's toler-
ance, idealism, and politically-forward thinking. The Rep, in its commit-
ment to produce lv!.J' Name is Rachel Come, both capitalized on and carried
forward this momentum.
If America was cagey about owning Rachel Corrie as its own, the
Pacific Northwest, overall, was not. The region took the lead in 2003 in
documenting Corrie's death and its investigation. The theatre communi-
ty, embodied by the Rep, followed suit three years later, claiming her as a
"native daughter," while at the same time positioning itself as a major
national theatrical player, bolder and braver than New York.JS In March
of 2006, the Seattle Rep published its 2006-2007 season, with My Name
is Rachel Corrie (director and production team as yet un-named), slated for
March of 2007. The production (of the very script New York had balked
at) seemed like the crowning achievement of regional pride that had
begun with Rachel Corrie herself.lG
Yet by the time the script reached production in Seattle, the
"locality" its factual subject had produced, and her "Personification" of
"Northwest Idealism"
1
7 (wherein there existed a "sense of community
that everyone in the world belonged to"
1
B), had been ruptured. In March
of 2006, the city was congratulating itself on Bread and Puppet's version
of Rachel Corrie's story, performed in Seattle, as well as celebrating its
largest theatre's commitment to My Name is Rachel Corrie. By July, the con-
texts of the city had shifted; a shooting at Seattle's Jewish Federation
Center, exposed the kind of political strife which had led to Corrie's
death when she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer when positioning
herself as a human shield for the Palestinian homes.
lS Misha Berson, "Controversy Follows 'Corrie' to Seattle Stage," Seattle Times,
20 March 2007, Al.
16
The Rep's season was announced in the Seattle Times on 16 March; the
Minetta Lane production in New York was not set until October.
17
Joe Copeland, "Corrie Personified Northwest Idealism," Seattle Post-
Intelligencer, 29 April 2007, ]2.
18 Foster, "Local Protestor," A 1.
FANTASIES or A "NATIVE DAUGHTER" 35
Locality Ruptured: Ethnically Motivated Violence in Seattle
On 28 July 2006, a Muslim American native of Everett, Washington
named Naveed Afzal Haq burst into the Jewish Federation Center (an
umbrella organization offering social, educational, and philanthropic
services to the Jewish community) and opened fire. Five women were
injured and one was killed. Haq, who had a history of mental imbalance,
was motivated, he claimed, by his anger over United States and Israeli co-
operation. On the same day, "dozens" of members of Seattle's Palestine
Solidarity Committee were gathered in Westlake Park to protest Israel's
occupation of Palestine.t9 Although Haq was not tied to the group, the
coincidence prompted Claudia Rowe of the Seattle Post-Inte/ligencer to
headline her story: "Shooting Exposes War at Home; Tension Simmers
Here, but Rarely Reaches the Surface."20 The shooting sent ripples of fear
throughout the nation's Jewish community, and many organizations were
instructed to increase vigilance and tighten security. Newsweek declared
that "historically tolerant Seattle" had been shaken.2t Debates over
whether Haq's actions qualified as a hate crime or not, and if the death
penalty should be sought, threaded their way through the newspapers for
weeks.
22
Community leaders struggled to confront the issue that had-to
paraphrase Rowe-"risen to the surface." In October of 2006, Rabbi
Anson Laytner, the executive director of the Seattle chapter of the
American Jewish Committee, and Jeff Siddiqui, a representative for the
American Muslims of Puget Sound, wrote in a column for the Seattle Post-
Inte//igencer that "International conflicts rarely manifested themselves on
the Seattle scene. In recent years, unfortunately, this has changed."23
19
Ibid.
20 Claudia Rowe, "Shooting Exposes War at Home; Tension Simmers Here, but
Rarely Reaches the Surface," Seattle Post Inte/ligencer, 31 July 2006, At.
21 Karen Breslau and Steven Tuttle, "An Alarming Shooting in Seattle,"
New!Week, 148:5, 7 August 2006, 40.
22 ln January of 2008, the charges against Haq totalled nineteen. His trial was
rescheduled from January to April 2008. In April of 2008, the jury was deadlocked over
whether or not to accept Hag's plea of guilty by insanity. A mistrial was declared, and in
July of 2008 newspapers reponed that a second trial for Haq would be rescheduled for
early 2009. At the time of writing this, no date has been set.
23 Anson Laytner and Jeff Siddiqui, "Bridging Cultural, Geographic Gap,"
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 27 October 2006, 812.
36 J ACKSON- SCHEBETT A
While Laytner and Siddiqui organized a story circle for Jewish and
Muslim survivors of violence and war, other people expressed pessimism
at what they saw as a regional tendency to sublimate issues. Robert
Jacobs, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, stated: "This is
Seattle. The issues don't get resolved."24 The identity of the Pacific
Northwest, emblematized by Seattle, was in a state of flux regionally and
nationally, par ticularly in regards to its tolerance for religious and ethnic
dissension. It was time for the performative Rachel Corrie to intervene
and open the gaps wider.
A Subject in Motion: The Text of MyNarreis&uhl Cooi.e
The performance text of My Name is Rachel Corrie follows Corrie from
her bedroom in Olympia to her position with the International Solidarity
Movement in Rafah. The second half of the play is comprised largely of
Corrie's email correspondence and journal entries from Rafah, reflecting
her own immediate preoccupations. As the play progresses, Corrie strug-
gles to make sense of her experience and of herself. In the last of her
monologues, she writes to her mother: "[fjor a long time, I have been
operating from a core assumption that we are all essentially the same
inside and that our differences are largely situational ... . I know there is
a good chance that this assumption is wrong."25 Corrie often loses her
bearings as well her sense of rootedness. For example, on page eleven of
the script, Corrie signifies her close relationship to, and faith in, her home
by saying that the Northwest salmon "talked her into a lifestyle change."
Upon arrival in Rafah however, (eighteen pages into in the text), her faith
is shaken: "Nothing," she says, "could have prepared me for the reality of
the situation here."
Appadurai writes that electronic media, the ever expanding
facets of life unique to our present moment, "are resources for experi-
ments with self-making ... (and) self-imagining."26 Access to information
compels one to create a multiplex identity enacted in daily life. It can then
be disseminated back through many of the same electronic media to
enter into the flow of information and images that traverse the globe. As
such, a second attendant condition of modernity is increased migration,
2
4
Rowe, "Shooting Exposes War at Home," A 1.
25 Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, My Name is Rachel Corrie (New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 2003), 49.
26 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 3.
FANTASIES OF A "NATI VE D AUGHTER" 37
not only of information and images, but also of people, either by force
or choice. When migration is "juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass
mediated images, scripts and sentiments," there is a "new order of insta-
bility in the production of modern subjectivities."27
In this condition, the imagination, and one's self-imagination,
remains in perpetual motion, and permits holes to form in an individual's
discourse of identity- holes that can and will be filled in any number of
ways. The imagination becomes a site of contestation and a territory to
be fought over. The "holes" can be colonized or claimed, filled, and
sealed off. In the terminology of Appadurai, the imagination would thus
be transformed into passive fantasy, a private, isolated, and impotent
force. However, the holes can just as well be courted, opened wider,
prodded at, or left gaping. Through this process, the imagination is trans-
formed into "fuel for action," and creates a collective force with the
power to act differently than the fantasied, or individualized, allegiances
to religion, state, or nations would otherwise permit.
From the play text, we understand that Rachel Corrie was com-
pelled by global events, which reached her through national and interna-
tional media sources, to become a migrant in support of her political
convictions. She imagined other worlds and herself within them. On
page eight of Viner and Rickman's script, Corrie, (reflecting on her deci-
sion to go to Gaza), comments on the tension she feels by being both
constrained and liberated by media and geography. From her journal, she
tells us
I've been orgaruzmg for a little over a year on anti
war/ global justice issues. And it started to feel like this
work was missing a connection to the people who are
impacted by US foreign policy ... . I feel pretty isolated
from the world living in Olympia my whole life and my
activism at this point has been extremely tied to
Olympia. But I have had this underlying need to go to a
place and meet people who are on the other end of the
tax money that goes to fund the US military.zs
The theme of being disconnected from the larger world by and through
her own regionalism and nationhood resurfaces throughout the play; she
27
Ibid., 3-4.
28 Rickman and Vi ner, My Name is Rachel Corrie, 8.
38 JACKSON-SCHEBETTil
combats it by compulsive email writing, sending updates to her family,
friends, and to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) of her mate-
rial experience in Rafah. She attempts at once to set more images in
motion and to contradict the most widely circulated ones, to cultivate the
holes in her own subjectivity and to open some into the identities of any-
one who will listen to her. As constructed by Viner and Rickman, the text
of My Name is Rachel Corrie leaves space for the audience to participate in
these "holes," to imagine new subjectivities for themselves along with
Rachel. The text, as much as Corrie, is in motion, a motion increased by
the attendant controversy over her death and the performances of the
play.
Yet a text is only a blueprint for performance; in production, the
motion of a text and its subject can be encouraged or arrested. The text
yields imagination, a "staging ground for action," and the production
generates fantasy, an impotent and momentary escape. In the Rep's pro-
duction of My Name is Rachel Corrie, we can trace both imagination and
fantasy, but first we need to situate the performance within its historical
and material context.
Seattle Rep's Carie Extra-theatrical Performances
On 15 March 2007, My Name is Rachel Corrie opened at Seattle Rep.
Tensions between Israeli and Palestinian communities continued to sim-
mer and were made apparent in extra-performance activities. Outside the
theatre, at every performance and on the show's dark days, volunteers
from pro-Israel and pro-Palestine community groups handed out pam-
phlets. Situated on either side of the walkway leading into the theatre, the
pamphleteers politely asked patrons if they were going to see Rachel
Corrie. Whether they were or not, they were invited to take a pamphlet
expressing the organization's view of the show and the issues it
addressed. The Jewish Federation purchased an advertisement in the
show's program, juxtaposing a picture of Rachel Corrie with six other
Jewish "Rachel's," all of whom had been killed by Palestinian violence.
The Anti-Defamation League also bought an advertisement, encouraging
audiences to view MY Name is Rachel Corrie as one-sided and to seek a
more balanced perspective. Rachel Corrie was clearly not a "native daugh-
ter" for everyone.
The play stirred the city, and it was a city that had recently been
marked by a local act of violence- one that was contingent on the inter-
national violences witnessed and protested by Corrie. The Rep acknowl-
edged the controversy. In Esbjornson's forward to the program, he stat-
FANTASIES OF A "NATIVE DAUGHTER" 39
ed: "Buying ads in our program to denounce the work on our stage is
unprecedented." He accepted the advertisements as an exercise of free-
dom, on a par with the production of Rachel Corrie. He then invited audi-
ences to take advantage of Seattle's "long and admirable history of open
dialogue on complex and controversial issues,"29 an invitation he reiterat-
ed in the Seattle Times.30 Esbjornson further expressed his sadness that
many of those most critical of the play had not, in fact, seen it.
The Rep appeared to desire a diverse audience for the show.
Esbjornson met with Jewish and Palestinian community leaders, and
Abraham appeared on Al-Jazeera. Yet no special effort was made to bring
in audiences other than those habitual to the Rep.31 The nine talkbacks
scheduled were in keeping with the Rep's usual programming, and,
although Rabbi David Weiner and ISM member Ed Mast ("both consid-
ered moderate voices in the Israeli Palestine debate"32), were present, they
were not on stage but in the house. Abraham remembered that "they [did
not] field a single question .... [A]udiences wanted to talk to Marya [the
actress who played Corrie] and about the play." Adding additional activi-
ties or "over-contextualizing the play," the Rep felt, might have either
"insulted the audience" or sounded an "unnecessary alarm." When asked
how the July 2006 shooting affected or contextualized the production,
Abraham replied that "the incident didn't affect the production at all."33
While controversy bubbled outside of the theatre, in blogs and editorials
in the newspapers, there was no concerted effort to bring that energy into
the theatre. Mast and Weiner's presence off-stage signified that they and
their organizations were not part of the production.
Still, the text of lv[y Name is Rachel Corrie is a text rife with con-
tradiction, a text in motion, that contains the potential to agitate even an
exclusive audience, and Abraham explicitly sought to honor Corrie's
local-ness as well as her controversial politics. Appadurai writes that
29 David Esbjornson, "From the Artistic Director," Production Program for
My Name is Rachel Corrie (Seattle: Seattle Repertory Thearre, 2006), 6.
30 Berson, "Controversy Follows," Al.
31 Abraham, interview with the author, 14 August 2007. The production sold
out and was extended due to demand for tickets. As I will point out, the show may indeed
have drawn younger or newer patrons. My point here is that efforts made specifically
toward Israeli and Palestinian communities were ultimately underdeveloped.
3
2 Ibid.
33 Braden Abraham, email exchange with the author, 24 August 2007.
40 jACKSON-SCHEBETTA
"global processes involving mobile texts and migrant audiences" can
"create implosive events that fold global pressures into small, already
politicized arenas, producing locality in new, globalized ways."34 Even if
Seatde's diverse populations were not openly courted by the theatre, the
community was arguably still ready for a new locality, a new shared imag-
inary, one that would actively address the sublimated controversies brew-
ing in the city. In a unique confluence of events, the theatre was in a posi-
tion to play an active part in the process. Abraham and his production
team, whether intentionally or intuitively, made choices that both enabled
and arrested this imaginative potential.
Corrie/ Cane Performance, Representation and Possibility
At the end of the script, Rachel Corrie exits the stage after a lengthy
monologue. Uninterrupted by journal entries or other activities, the
monologue is the longest unbroken period of time the audience has
spent with Corrie. It permits a glimpse into the way Corrie's mind, in her
writing, develops lines of thought and patterns of argument. The audi-
ence is swept up; her exit at the end of the monologue is the first time
she has exited the stage; over an hour of performance time has been
shared solely between her and the audience.
After Corrie's exit, per the script: "From the TV set, a recording
of the transcript of an eyewitness account by Tom Dale." The male
voice, representing a canned character or voice over, tells the audience:
Rachel walked to place herself in between the home and
the bulldozer. As the bulldozer turned towards them, it
had about 20 meters or 10 seconds to clear time direct-
ly with her in its view to see where he was. It continued
toward her at some pace. 35
Dale's voice continues to recount, in short sentences, the entire event of
Corrie's death. To replace a live young woman with male voice-over or
television image, jolts the audience out of whatever space they had just
been in with Rachel. We are abruptly jolted from our connection with her
and her impassioned politics by cold, hard facts. In a veifremsdungiffekt, the
whole experience of the evening is suddenly made strange and we
remember to puzzle over the circumstances of Corrie's death, to con-
34 Appadurai, Moderniry at Large, 9. Emphases mine.
35 Rickman and Viner, My Name is Rachel Corrie, 52.
FANTASIES OF A " t ATIVE DAUGHTER" 41
front its violence and to face the media's-and our own-possible com-
plicity in it.
The play does not end there, however. Viner and Rickman
employ yet another verfremsdungeffekt. the final moments of the play are
devoted to viewing a short video of ten-year-old Rachel Corrie earnestly
calling for an end to world hunger. "We have got to understand that they
are us. We are them," the small girl says on screen.36 The audience is
reminded they have watched a constructed account of a young woman,
performed by an actress. At the same time, the real-child Rachel Corrie
suggests ways of confronting our own action, or inaction, in the world.
We are made strange again: to the woman who has moved us, to the
account of her death, and, finally, to ourselves. We are both distanced
from and emotionally connected to the television screen. Our conflicted
relationship to media, as well as the manipulation of our emotions and
politics by electronic media and by live performance, is exposed. We are
left to question what we are to do.
In Seattle Rep's production, Abraham did not have a television
on the set, nor did he use Tom Dale. He kept the text intact, but elected
to have it spoken in voice over, each line shared between eight voices-
male and female. All the voices were American and without regionalism,
except for a twinge of West Coast rhythmic and vowel inflections. Tom
Dale's voiceover or mediated image would have been "too alienating" for
the audience. A male, British voice, Abraham contended, would have
"undone" the connection created by Marya Sea Kaminski (who played
Rachel) with the audience, and would have made the end "uncomfort-
able" or "taken away from the emotion of the evening, especially for a
Northwest or Seattle audience."37 Abraham may have been correct in his
assessment; a British voice might have alienated our ears as an audience
and asked us to question where we, as a region and as a nation, stood in
relationship to Rachel Corrie, and by, extension, to local and global vio-
lence. The audience was not asked to confront themselves; the multivo-
cal account of Corrie's death made those of us viewing the performance
into witnesses of her death, a collective and uncritical entity of shared
and established identification with the subject. In her review of the play,
Misha Berson wrote that, despite the controversy that had surrounded it,
"[n]o one is shouting yet at Seattle Repertory Theatre."38 The audience
36 Rickman and Viner, My Name is Rachel Corrie, 52.
37 Abraham, interview with the author, 14 August 2007.
38 Berson, "Controversy Follows," A 1.
42
jACKSON-SCHEBETfA
was ostensibly not given the opportunity, nor the permission, to do so.
Yet, while some of Abraham and his team's interpretive choices
lulled the audience into quiet reception, others implicated them in specif-
ically intimate and inescapable ways. Abraham had two top choices for
the role of Rachel Corrie: Marya Sea Kaminski or Elise Hart, both local
actresses. Kaminski, by the time the show was being cast, was a young,
up-and-coming local star in the theatre scene and the press. A graduate
of the University of Washington's MFA program in acting, she had per-
formed roles at the Intiman, Seattle Shakespeare Company, and
Washington Ensemble Theatre, and worked as an acting teacher through-
out the city. Kaminski's presence in and commitment to the theatre com-
munity of Seattle ranged from professional, equity houses to smaller,
edgy venues, where she showcased her one-woman shows.39 Hart was
comparatively unknown.
4
0 Abraham chose Kaminski. Hart, he said,
would have made the show "very different, rawer"; Kaminski's "likeable"
stage presence effectively "bumped up against the text (and) made it eas-
ier to hear."
4
t By casting Kaminski, Abraham chose to mediate the text
of My Name is Rachel Corrie through a familiar, and seemingly innocuous,
figure. With Kaminski, there was perhaps less of a chance that the audi-
ence might engage critically, or oppositionally, with the text, but also less
of a chance that the audience would feel attacked or would not listen to
Corrie's words. Kaminski was becoming well known and well loved; in
casting her, Abraham subtly negotiated with his audience. Their brains
and their hearts would be engaged by the combination of the script and
Kaminiski's presence.
4
2
39 The respect and affection for Kaminski in the Seattle theatre scene is exem-
plified by her impressive collection of local awards including Seattle Magazine's "Artist of
The Year" (2007) and Seattle Week(y's "Best Local Stage Actor" (2008) and "Best
Performing Artist" (2006). She has also been short-listed three times for The Stranger's
Genius Awards. Kaminiski recently played Elsa in Athol Fugard's The Road to Mecca at
Seattle Rep.
40 Hart graduated with her BA from University of Washington and was, along
with Kaminski, part of the artistic stewardship team of Washington Ensemble Theatre.
In the fall of 2007, Hart landed a key role in The Women at Seattle's ACT Theatre and has,
of late, risen in popularity.
41 Berson, "Controversy Follows," Al.
42 Both Kaminski and Corrie remained present in the production. As Carol
Martin points out, "as a condition of performance, the actors on documentary stages per-
form both as themselves and as the actual personages they represent. What makes docu-
mentary theatre interesting is the way in which it strategically deploys the appearance of
truth, while imenting its own particular truth." Carol Martin, " Bodies of Evidence,"
fANTASIES OF A "NATIVE DAUGHTER" 43
Figure 1: Marya Sea Kaminski as Rachel Corrie in i\1_y Name is Rachel Corrie at
Seattle Repertory Theatre. Photo copyright Chris Bennion.
Figure 2: Marya Sea Kaminski as Rachel Corrie in My Name is Rachel Corrie at
Seattle Repertory Theatre. Photo copyright Chris Bennion.
44 )ACKSON-SCHEBETIA
In The Stranger, Brendan Kiley wrote that "Corrie the woman is a
hero out here, a liberal martyr."43 Kaminski helped ensure Corrie the
character would also be seen as a hero, not only through her onstage per-
formance but through her self-performances on the Rep's blog site. She
filled the blogs (a link to which was centrally located on the theatre's
homepage) with an outpouring of admiration for Corrie. On 10 March
she wrote: "I am happier than I have ever been, getting to know this
woman. This girl ... [this] extraordinary person in the middle of the
place where she grew up .... I will never be the same." On 10 April2007,
Kaminski posted a Happy Birthday poem to Corrie: "I am so glad you
were born. Which is what I say to all my best friends on their birthdays.
Glad. Certainly. Does not say it .... I want to thank you. For introducing
me to bravery."
4
4 Through these self performances, Kaminiski actively
reached out to her audience: to those patrons already signed up through
a season subscription, or those with a personal interest in seeing My Name
is Rachel Corrie, and to those who might, out of curiosity or by accident,
click through the Rep's website. The intimacy and selflessness with which
Kaminiski engaged with the complex "character" of Corrie brought the
"real" Corrie home again, and presented her to her local community
anew. As Berson wrote in a review of the show, "[t]his actor [K.aminski]
makes you care about Corrie even if you don't share her politics."4S
Joe Copeland, reflecting on the production, said "Corrie's beau-
tiful life and sad story echo with the Northwest: idealism, independence
and adventure."46 The set design further prioritized the local context of
the piece. Jennifer Zeyl, the set designer, was, like Abraham and
Kaminski, a young, local rising star_47 She chose to recreate onstage (as
exactly as possible) a mural from Rachel Corrie's Olympia bedroom. In
TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (Fall 2006):10.
4
3 Kiley, Death," 28.
44 Marya Sea Kaminiski, "Backstage at the Rep," Seattle Repertory Theatre
Blog Archive, http:// seattlerep.blogspot.com/2007 _03_01_archive.html and http:// seat-
tlerep.blogspot.com/2007 _04_01_archive.htm1 (accessed July 29, 2007).
45 Misha Berson, "Olympia Woman's Words Brought to Life," Seattle Times, 23
March 2007, E3.
46 Copeland, "Corrie Personified," ]2.
47
Zeyl had designed, and continues to work, at all the major houses in Seattle.
Her awards include: The Stranger Genius Award (2006), Seattle Times Footlight Award
(2006), and Seattle Mayor's Office of Art and Cultural Affairs City Artist Award (2007).
FANT:\SIES OF A "NATIVE DAUGHTER" 45
the program, the set piece was shown in detail, and served as a specific,
emotional counterpoint to the anti-Palestine ads bought for the program
that I mentioned earlier. In the staging of the play, Kaminski/Corrie, as
she prepared to leave her bedroom and head for Gaza, spent time with
the collage, taking bits of it off the wall and stashing the bits in her knap-
sack. Carrie-the-character, played by likeable, local, young Seattle actor
Kaminiski thus merged with Carrie-the-woman, the controversial, local,
young woman from Olympia who carried her home with her, even to her
death. Carrie-the-woman was affiliated with multiple communities in her
life, as Carrie-the-character does in the play script. Zeyl's design ensured
that Corrie would be represented as a Northwesterner, no matter her pol-
itics or actions. Consequently, Corrie could not be unmoored from the
subjectivities of a local Rep audience.
In its decision to produce My Name is Rachel Corrie, the Seattle
Rep succeeded in distinguishing itself and its city as brave and progres-
sive. If its commitment to the show, unwavering despite national and
international protests and controversy, was not risky enough, its decision
to lay the production in the hands of very local, very young theatre artists
was. In the realization of Corrie, Abraham, Kaminski, and Zeyl certainly
compromised some of the script's radical potential, but, at the same time,
we must take into account their own location within Seattle's largest the-
atre organization. Abraham-well known in the fringe scene of Seattle-
had never directed at the Rep. He was negotiating his emotional alle-
giance to Corrie and the knowledge that the show would travel to
Olympia for a number of performances, alongside his position within
Seattle's "flagship theatre." The local-ness and youth of the artists, com-
bined with the regional status of Corrie, and the Rep as an institution,
presents a moment of theatre that is neither wholly commercial nor
clearly community-based. The artists were trained professionals, but they
were not out-of-towners jobbed into a major regional theatre for a gig;
Abraham, Zeyl, and Kaminski were specifically Seattle artists with ties to
the community. Likewise, although the Rep is a major regional player, the
story of Corrie is tied to the Pacific Northwest and, therefore, is com-
munity-based. As such, the Rep's production, in some ways, combined
practices of community-based theatre with the practices of the profes-
sional and disturbed the dichotomy often set up between the two.
Corrie/ Carie Layers of Risks and Rewards
In its interpretation of My Name is Rachel Corrie, the Rep created a memo-
rial to Rachel Corrie. The play, with "any luck," wrote Copeland in the
46
JACKSON-SCHEBETfA
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, would be "a step toward further explanation of this
remarkable young woman."48 Still, the text of My Name is Rachel Corrie is,
structurally, aimed towards insisting that the spectator of its production
ultimately examine him or herself, rather than the play's main character.
The theatre was committed to easing the pain of loss felt by a portion its
community, but at the same time failed to invest in that community's
underlying social tensions. In representing Corrie so fully, the production
absented her colleagues in Rafah, as well as the Muslim and the Jewish
communities in Seattle. Only the suffering of Corrie's family and friends
was foregrounded in the show; the suffering of Haq's family and his vic-
tims' families were eclipsed.
The Rep's resources in terms of staff, creativity, and money did
not support an outreach campaign for a diverse audience. Nor did the
theatre attempt to instate a rigorous engagement with the politics of
Corrie and their unique resonances in Seattle in its historic moment. On
the one hand, one may ask, why should they? The production played to
packed houses, was extended, and traveled to Olympia. Given the con-
troversy that surrounded the script, simply by committing to the show
and handing it over to young artists, the Rep took a large enough com-
mercial risk that fortunately happened to pay off. I respect this position,
and I laud both the Rep and the creative team of My Name is Rachel Corrie
for sharing the script with the public. Yet, what inspires me-particular-
ly in these early days of 2009, considering the economic crisis of the
United States, the strife in Gaza, and the continuing struggle of regional
theatres to secure funding and audiences-are the possibilities unreal-
ized, yet represented, in the Rep's production. The Rep took a large risk
and hence presents a model from which to move forward, an example in
which the faithful audience was respected and celebrated, and a new audi-
ence might have been courted.
The Rep's mission statement includes the following objectives:
"To be an organization in search of ways to say 'yes'-to artists, audi-
ences and the SRT community," and "[t]o engage audiences of diverse
ages, cultures and economic backgrounds."
4
9 My Name is Rachel Corrie
brought with it multiple creative ways of not only fulfilling these objec-
tives, but of examining what the very word "community" might mean. It
is neither impossible nor unreasonable for a theatre to mindfully take into
account the resonances a script's story has beyond the theatre's walls. "In
4
8 Ibid.
49 Seattle Repertory Theatre, Mission Statement. http:/ /www.seatderep.org/
Press/SRTPRessPacket/Introduction.pdf (Accessed 18 January 18 2009).
FANTASIES OF A "NA1TVF. DAUGHTER" 47
democracy," writes Reinelt, "antagonisms have to be met head-on, nego-
tiated, and fought through. Artists have sometimes, often, wanted to stay
above the fray or at least out of its way. But we can't."SO A space could be
created in which even the most contentious resonances might be publicly
explored, not in order to create sensational or polemical shouting match-
es, but in the interest of listening carefully to our texts, our selves, and the
layers of meaning that happen in the delineations of "community" with-
in our cities or regions.
The Rep's production did not go as far as it might have in reach-
ing out to audiences across communities, but it made a commitment to
local artists and a local story that immediately linked the theatre's identi-
ty to that of its region. Had the Rep pushed just a little further, and faced,
head-on or partially, the politics and pain in the city of Seattle's extended
communities, regional theatre's relationship to (defining and participating
in) community, the academy, and civic life might have been radically
reconceptualized. That I can even posit such a possibility attests to the
risks the Rep and its artists succeeded in taking.
50 Reinelt, Notes for a Radical Democratic Theatre, 298.
jOURNAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 21, NO.2 (SPRJNG 2009)
Molding a Heroine: Patience Wright and Transatlantic
Notions of American Female Patriotism
Jennifer A. Kokai
While on the surface, an eighteenth-century enthusiasm for a wax sculp-
tor may seem to have little overt connection to either the development of
American performance culture or notions of American patriotism,
Patience Wright- Quakeress, sculptor, performer, and political activist-
managed to transform her unusual profession into performances that
challenged transatlantic notions of gender and class, as well as national
identity.l Scholars of theatre history have paid little attention to Wright's
career, although historian Jay Fliegelman mentions her in his discussion
of debated notions of "natural theatricality" that emerged with the new
nation.
2
Wright merits investigation as a woman whose performances
excited international attention, and whose politicization of her art even-
tually forced her to flee to France for safety.
Much of Wright's fascination and significance lies in her lower
class, gendered identity, and her status as a religious outsider. An engrav-
ing from the 1 November 1775 issue of The London Magazine shows the
matronly wax sculptor Patience Wright clothed in a voluminous dress, her
hair demurely covered by a bonnet, face turned in prof.tle to the right as
she gazes off into the distance. She presents the very picture of middle-
aged female respectability, just as a widowed Quaker visiting England
from the American colonies might wish to be seen. Yet as the viewer
studies the image, he or she sees that just below Wright's gaze, a man's
torso and head is visible. His body is wrapped in her skirts in such a way
that he appears to be wearing a coat, his head covered by a wig.
Presumably, the image is meant to capture the climactic moment in
Wright's English performances, when she ceased her narrative and pulled
1 I would very much like to thank Heather Nathans for her insightful com-
ments and suggestions on this essay. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for
their feedback that helped shape the final version.
2 Fliegelman argues, "like the contemporary oratory mired in the paradox of nat-
ural theatricality (simultaneously imitating and realizing nature), this was art that was simul-
taneously intensely natural and intensely theatrical: surreally mimetic." Though Fliegelman
relates Wright's "art," that is, the wax works, to oratory, he does not consider the theatrical-
it:y of her monologue or the embodied construction of the works in the moment, i.e. the
performance as a whole. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language &
the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 87.
so
KOKA!
the completed bust she had been molding from wax, warmed between
her thighs, from below her skirt, revealing it to the audience. The cos-
tuming of the male figure, as well as its expressive face (more expressive
than Wright's), however, makes it look as if the male figure is alive, sup-
porting Wright's weight, and that the two are engaged in an all together
different activity than the production of art.
The dichotomy illustrated in this picture, between the silent, still
matron on top and the far more active and unusual lower half of the pic-
ture, can be taken as a representation of Wright's unique career trajecto-
ry. The top half of the engraving, where she is silent and expressionless,
mimicks the first part of her career in the American colonies from 1770
to 1772, when she reflected notions of public female restraint by exhibit-
ing her wax sculptures on their own, without inserting a sense of self
through her narrative or performance context. The lower half of the
image, somewhat tawdry, completely unexpected, and totally unique,
reflects her decision to make her identity the main feature of a perform-
ance for a British audience. She moved to a model in which she created
the sculptures in front of an audience-all the while delivering a far rang-
ing, improvisitory monologue-until she found herself more or less
exiled to France in 1781 for her well known antimonarchist sentiments.
The jarring contrast in this image embodies the sharp schism in the
transatlantic notions of what constituted acceptable representations of
''American" female identity.
In America, \'\fright focused on appealing to the urban elite when
she and her sister, Rachel Wells, displayed their art works as a static exhi-
bition. They hid their own lower class backgrounds, and relied on con-
ventional narratives of feminine respectability to justify their forays into
the public eye. Historians such as Linda Kerber have argued that the ideal
of model public and political participation for women in the late-eigh-
teenth-century Anglo-American colonies was the "republican mother."
Kerber writes: "the model republican woman was to be self-reliant (with-
in limits), literate, untempted by the frivolities of fashion."3 Historian Jan
Lewis defines the theoretical underpinnings of the term "republicanism"
in this context, writing that it was "not only classical republicanism but
also that fusion of civic humanism and evangelical ardor achieved by
Americans at the eve of the revolution."
4
Women were idealized in news-
3 Linda Kerber, Women if the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America
(New York: \Y/.W Norton & Co., 1986), 228.
4 Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early
Republic," The William and Mary Quarter!J 3rd Series, 44, no. 4 (October, 1987): 689.
MOLDING A H EROINE 51
WRI fTJI1' .
. /.J/J/...-ttl, ,</..; /,
Figure 1: Patience Wright at work. From the November 1775 issue of The
undon Magazine. Although the illustration says it was meant for publication in
December, and most other sources say it is from the December issue, archives
show it is in the November issue.
papers, plays, and other forms of popular discourse as the moral leaders
of their home: they represented orderliness, goodliness, and respectabil-
ity. When those with high social standing, like Mercy Otis Warren or
Abigail Adams, participated in political conversation, their intervention
was often explained or negotiated through their roles as wives or moth-
ers of patriotic men.
Despite the ability of a handful of women to establish a more
legitimate space for themselves on the world stage, in general, women's
participation in public activities was culturally fraught, and it was difficult
for them to combine conventional notions of respectability with express-
ing their opinions to a larger audience. Often discussions of politics or
published writings were prefaced by apologies for trespassing into the
world of men. Some, like playwrights Judith Sargent Murray, and even
52
KoKAI
Mercy Otis Warren, found writing plays pseudonymously a neat way to
sidestep this dilemma. Their words became embodied while they them-
selves remained behind the scenes. Historian Gay Gibson Cima calls this
creating a "host body," and argues that: "because of its nonmaterial sta-
tus, the host body provides the woman critic with a certain safety. It acts
as a prophylactic against censorship or censure."S She extends this surro-
gate self to women who were writing drama, appearing in print, or par-
ticipating in religious activities. Cima argues that "the theatre-more than
the privately read or performed novel, poem, or essay-negotiated
women's flesh and blood into the public sphere."6 Unlike other forms of
writing, theatre allowed women to create a more materialized body. This
could, however, entail enduring more criticism, because plays and per-
formances transcended traditional gender conventions and gave women
greater agency, which caused greater anxiety.
The exhibitions Wright and Wells toured in America from 1770
to 1772 reflect the colonial expectations for women to remain in the
shadows, but they also conjure the "host bodies" that Cima describes. In
their early performances, Wright and Wells literally realized host bodies,
creating other bodies out of wax for public display and absenting their
own. However, when Wright moved to England by herself on 3 February
1772, a new strategy emerged: she moved out of the shadows and began
to perform a carefully crafted version of herself that situated her along-
side her "host" and that revealed the dual nature of women's bodies,
voices, and performances. Her British performances drew aside the cur-
tain (or in this case, the skirt) to reveal the act of ventriloquism that had
been concealed from the audience. Instead of using a host body, she
relied on British stereotypes of American savagery to dissuade potential
criticism. In performance, she now highlighted her lack of education in
schooling or etiqutte, her unusual upbringing, and her determined icono-
clasm, confirming stereotypes of peculiar rugged colonial women.
Ultimately, this strategy also failed, demonstrating that perhaps being a
woman in the public eye was simply impossible to sustain, being ulti-
mately dependent upon the support and patronage of capricious wealthy
men.
At home, where cultural elites (who set aesthetic tastes) were
concerned with decorum and propriety, her lower class identity and out-
landish personality were insurmountable obstacles to her becoming
5 Gay Gibson Cima, Early American Women Critics: Peiformance, Religion, Race
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4.
6 Ibid., 167.
MoLDING A HEROINE 53
accepted as an icon of American womanhood. When Wright moved to
England, she began performing the very qualities that colonists found
objectionable, creating a renowned image of a savage American artistic
savant. Perhaps the most perplexing question of all is how a young
Quaker woman from Long Island came to envision herself as a voice for
not only American female identity, but American national identity.
Wright in America
Patience was born to the Lovell family in Long Island, New York, in
1725. She was the fifth of ten children-nine girls and one boy. Her fam-
ily were fairly well-off farmers, and lived among other Quakers. Though
the Quaker religion itself had at various times attracted suspicion and
persecution within the colonies, Wright's family faced additional chal-
lenges because they followed the dictates of Thomas Tryon, an English
author and Anabaptist mystic who advocated a radical lifestyle of auster-
ity.? Tryon's beliefs overlap in some ways with the Quaker values: like the
Quakers, he advocated pacisfism, but he also believed strongly in vege-
tarianism and animal rights, wearing all white, and avoiding things like
"wanton discourses" and "fawning addresses," which were said to pro-
duce "dire effects," along with dramas and romances. a As a sculptor who
worked in animal fats and was famous for her effusiveness and long
improvisitory speeches, it is difficult to say how much of Tryon's dictates
she followed in her adult life. Certainly, she may have justified her refusal
to use formal titles as a rejection of " fawning"; more importantly, how-
ever, she capitalized on the extreme nature of Tryon's dictates to create
interest in her unusual childhood with her audience, and she used Tryon
to make connections with another famous follower, Benjamin Franklin.
7 Though the Quakers had been persecuted, most notably by the New England
Puritans, Barry Levy notes in Quakers and the American Fami!J, that Quakers were " the third
largest religious group by 1750 in early America. Their numbers and power declined pre-
cipitously, however, after an internal reform movement from 1754 to 1790." Though they
had a large presence in the colonies, Levy records how the English press mocked and
reviled them, and quotes Lord Jeffrey, writing in 1806 that they "grew up to be adults who
were 'very stupid, dull, and obstinate'" Bar ry Levy, Quakers and the A merican Jami!J: British
settlement in tbe Delaware ValkJ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6-7.
8 Tryon laid out his principles on religion, morality, war, farming, arts, and edu-
cating children in his book, originally published in London in 1691. Thomas Tryon,
Tryon s letters, domes tick and foreign, to several persons of quality : occasionallY distributed in subjects,
v ~ pbi1osophica4 theological, and moral (England: Geo Conyers, 1700), Google Books,
http:/ /books.google.com/books ?id =TGo 1 AAAAMAA J &printsec= toc#PPP7 ,M 1
(accessed 24 June 2008), 78.
54 KOKA!
In her teens, Wright left her family to settle in Philadelphia,
where she worked as a mantua maker while pursuing an artistic career. In
1748, she married an older Quaker man, Joseph Wright, primarily for
financial reasons, and was widowed in 1770, shortly before the birth of
their fourth child, at the age of thirty-five. Left in serious financial straits,
she apparently decided that the art that had been a hobby could be more
profitable than making clothing, and began collaborating with her sister,
Rachel Wells, creating sculptures out of tallow wax, a childhood hobby of
theirs, and exhibiting the finished pieces for an invited audience of
wealthy potential patrons. These primarily took the form of "bustos," the
head and torso of a human figure. At first, the two made and displayed
only mythological figures such as Prometheus or biblical figures like the
Prodigal Son, and they solicited privately commissoned portraits and
momentoes, such as wax sculptures of babies who had died in infancy.
Though in the Renaissance wax sculpture was considered high
art, art historian Roberta Panzanelli notes that it lost its elite status as "the
discourses of realism and naturalism favored more permanent and
solemn media and formats."9 By the time Wright was working, wax as a
genre was often conflated with novelty and popular amusements and was
not included in elite artistic displays such as those held at the Royal
Academy in London, which dictated what constituted "good" art to
upper class colonists.1 Though Wright longed to move in elite artistic cir-
cles-which included figures like Benjamin West, Charles Wilson Peale,
Gilbert Stuart, and others who had native talent and English training-
her wax figures straddled the line between high art and novelty.
Wright and Wells' efforts for their work to be seen as high art are
evident in the subjects they chose to model and the ways they chose to
frame their exhibitions. Within the formal art world on the Continent-
standards for which were replicated in art manuals created in England
and circulated widely in America for both men and women-a hierarchy
of artistic subjects was firmly in place. At the top was "history painting,"
of which art historian Lynda Nead states: "History painting was con-
ceived of as a moral endeavor; the subjects it represented (derived from
the bible, ancient history, and classical mythology), were intended to
9 Roberta Panzanelli, Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure (Los
Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2008), 5.
10 In her 2003 book, scholar Pamela Pilbeam notes that the most common wax
forms purchased by individuals as art were miniatures. Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud
and the History of WaX7vorks (London: Hambledon and London, 2003), 11.
MOLDING J\ H EROINE
55
instruct and improve."1
1
An artist was not considered truly great unless
s/he had mastered this genre. Portraiture was in second place, followed
by landscape, and then finally still life. Art historian Margaretta M. Lovell
notes that, regardless of this, in America portraiture was the only poten-
tially profitable genre of art. Lovell writes, "[n]ot just a result of colonial
remoteness from Europe or of provincial pragmatism ... this phenom-
enon suggests active choice. Americans bought portraits."12 Wright and
Wells' choice to exhibit history works was a choice to privilege their artis-
tic reputation over their financial concerns.
While Wright and Wells established a public face to their work,
presenting classical scenes and heroes, they also used their skills and their
identities as women and mothers to infiltrate a more private realm, and
to perhaps help support their more artistically elite output. By seeking
commissions to create portraits of dead children, Wright and Wells were
domesticating an art form that had begun as the province of the elite.
They were also demonstrating how two women artists could create works
with both emotional and aesthetic value, as opposed to pieces that mere-
ly hewed to abstract aesthetic standards. Mourning was itself a heavily
gendered (female) task in early America. Alfred F. Young writes in his
article "The Women of Boston" that, "women played a major role in the
massive rituals of community mourning for the victims of the British."13
Young notes that figures of women were at the center of many of the
prints that captured the patriotic response to the Boston Massacre and
other acts of violence, including Revere's famous 1770 engraving of the
Massacre (plagiarized from Henry Pelham), that prominently features a
woman in widow's weeds. In general, it was women who sewed and wore
mourning clothes, women who prepared the funerals, and women who
were seen as the representatives of grief and emotion in the face of
death. Often, for women, this grief was for the untimely passing of a
child.
-
Wright and Wells feminized and made tangible the more
11 Lynda Nead, The Fen1ale Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 47.
12
Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylnnia Press, 2005), 8.
13 Alfred F. Young, "The Women of Boston: 'Persons of Consequence' in the
Making of the American Revolution, 1765-76," Women a11d Politics in the Age of the
Democratic Revolution, edited by Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1990), 200.
56
KOKAI
metaphorical and philosophical (and thus masculine) abstractions of
death.
14
Historian Susan Stabile charts the ways that wax was metaphori-
cally entwined with mourning rituals. She quotes a contemporary poet
writing that "mourning is a tender time, while the soul is more suscepti-
ble of impression, and turns more easily, as the softened wax to the
seal."IS According to the myth of Mnemosyne, a Greek myth popular at
this time of renewed interest in classical writing and art, memory was an
imprinted wax tablet. Wright and Wells made a tangible wax memory for
grieving mothers, giving them something physical in place of a mere
metaphor.
The success of an emotional activity such as creating a replica of
a dead child would likely have depended upon Wright's audience seeing
her as respectful and decorous in her behavior. Perhaps to help keep their
wax sculptures framed as art-in opposition to other famous wax mak-
ers such as Mrs. Salmon, whose British museum featured "a representa-
tion of the frequently-modeled London witch, Mother Shipton, (that] lit-
erally kicked out the customers at the end"I6-Wright and her sister had
constructed their presentation in such a way as to emphasize this, adver-
tising it through word of mouth as an "exhibition," and presenting it in
a private space, not a tavern or other public site designated for entertain-
ment purposes. 17
By June of 1771, Wright and Wells were sufficiently well estab-
lished that news of a fire that destroyed much of their work was pub-
lished throughout New England, in papers such as the New York Journal,
the Providence Gazette, and the Penn.rylvania Chronicle.
1
B But the fire itself
14 Susan Stabile argues that "[c]onsolation manuals and elegies typically gender
gri ef as the feminine other, ro be overcome by the rational, male mourner." Susan Stabile,
Memory's Daughters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 181.
1
5 Ibid., 185.
16
For more on her, see Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud, 11.
17 Lovell writes that "Some American artists advertised their portrait skills, but
London artists did not, and the more upscale American artists did not" (Lovell, Art in a
SeaJon of Revolution, 13). Their decision to use word of mouth and references ro attract
patrons to their exhibition is another way in which they were clearly striving for a more
elite status.
1
8 "New-York, June 10" Providence Gazette, 8-15 June 1771, volume VIII, issue
388, 94; [No Headline) New-York journal, 6 June 1771, issue 1483, 365; and "New York,
MOLDING A HEROINE 57
made clear to Wright one of the pitfalls of relying upon completed art
works. They were easily destroyed, and with them her livelihood, at least
until they could be replaced. As Wright biographer Charles Coleman
Sellers writes, "U]t became apparent that with Wright and Wells the exhi-
bition was more profitable than the individual commissions."
1
9 Many
people had the money to buy tickets to the display, but few had the
money to commission a sculpture. With no exhibit, Wright was left with
no way to provide for herself or her children.
Wright in England
As many artists did during the colonial period, Wright decided there was
more potential profit and artistic fame abroad. England had a far more
financially robust art scene, and American artists who studied abroad
were also perceived to be better trained and garnered larger commis-
sions.2o But she did not simply begin exhibiting abroad. Instead, she rad-
ically altered the focus of her show, and for the first time began empha-
sizing the process of creation rather than the finished product, turning an
art exhibit into a form of performance art. With the decision to go to
England, she and Wells split up their partnership, as Wells was uncom-
fortable with the idea of public performance and chose to continue the
exhibitions in Philadelphia.
In a typical description of Wright's British performances,
Elkanah Watson recalls:
She would utter language in her incessent volubility, as if
unconscious to whom directed, that would put her hear-
ers to the blush ... By mere force of a retentive recol-
lection of the traits and lines of the countenance, she
would form her likeness, by manipulating the wax with
the thumb and the finger. Whilst thus engaged her
strong mind poured forth an uninterrupted torrent of
June 6" Penn.rylvania Chronicle, 3-10 June 1771, volume V, issue 20, 79. Provider for all
newspaper sources: Ne\\sBank/Readex, Database: America's Historical Newspapers.
(Accessed 5 December 2008). Other cities whose papers reprinted this article included
Salem and Boston in Massachusetts and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
19 Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III's
London (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 37.
2
For more on this, see Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative
Years, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
58
wild thought, and anecdotes and reminiscences of men
and events.zt
K OKAI
Wright began to make herself as important to the performance
as the sculptures. Moreover, what Watson does not mention here is that
during these monologues Wright placed the wax under her skirts and
between her thighs to warm it for sculpting. This added an undeniably
sexual element to the performance (and probably added to those blush-
es). Unlike Watson, an American military courier working abroad, the
majority of those who wrote about Wright's performances were upper
class Englishmen. But Watson's bemused tone, as if he was describing a
strange novelty, resonates throughout other reports of her performanc-
es.
Wright emphasized her upbringing and minimized her marriage
and extended time in Philadelphia, and so worked to establish an image
of her own simplicity: she was just a farm girl from rural New York.
Observers such as Captain Philip Thicknesse visited her studio, watched
her perform, and recorded her monologues. Thicknesse even included
his notes on her work in his guide to the artists and society of Bath, in
the New Prose Bath Guide, 1778. Known as "Dr. Viper," he was apparent-
ly among the most "querulous" men in England.22 It is no small testa-
ment to Wright's charm, then, that he became a good friend and sup-
porter. In his discussion of Wright's history, he first stresses that she is a
"Lady (though born in the wilds of America)."23 Despite depicting Wright as
having savage origins, he also claims that her father was ''A VERY RICH,
AND VERY HONEST MAN; ie He had large Tracts of land, Houses,
Horses, Oxen, Sheep, Poultry." He also states that her husband was very
"substantial" as well, but that upon his death, Wright was left with noth-
ing but the "Ingenuity of her Head and the cunning of her Finger."
Obviously Thicknesse had little knowledge of Wright's origins beyond
what she told him. Wright's narrative positions her as upper class by birth
21 Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution: Or, Memoirs of Elkanah
Watson, Including Journals of Travels in Europe and America, from 1777 to 1842, with His
Correspondence with Public Men and &miniscences and Incidents of the Revolution (Appleton & co.,
1861), Googlc Books, http:/ /books.google.com/books?id=lVOSAAAAYAAJ (accessed
15 January 2009), 187.
22 Philip Gosse, Dr. Viper, the Querulous Life of Philip Thicknme (London: CasseU,
1952).
23 This and the following excerpts from Thicknesse's New Prose Bath Guide
[1778] are quoted in Sellers, Patience Wright, 21-2.
MOLDING A HEROINE 59
(important in the explicit aristocracy of England), but also exotic in her
rural, religious upbringing.
24
By focusing on her widowhood and fall from
wealth to poverty, her story provides a justification for her "masculine"
career as a public artist. Her narrative elides the fact that, prior to
embarking on a career as a performer, she made a modest living as a man-
tua maker. Such a detail might have confused audiences about Wright's
choice to take to the stage, but it does raise intriguing questions about
Wright's own decision to forfeit a more traditional feminine profession
for one with far greater risks and far less guarantee of steady income.
When constructing her persona, Wright understood that main-
taining a lack of education in elocution and formal deportment could be
used to her advantage in England. When Wright switched to a perform-
ance model, creating the work on the spot, and began delivering a mono-
logue to an audience, her education, and perhaps her religious back-
ground, became a factor. Though she had spent a great deal of time with
upper class society and could easily have afforded to improve her per-
sonal appearance and to modify her speech to sound as they did, she
chose instead to present herself in a way that was intepreted by her audi-
ence as wild and erratic. As one British visitor, Colonel Isaac Barre, com-
mented, "Mrs. Wright was a 'sensible woman' who 'wou'd have shone
more eminently' had her 'education been equal to her natural abilities."'25
Though Americans like Abigail Adams found this style of communicat-
ing unattractive-Adams observing in a letter written to her sister from
a trip to England on 6 July 1784 that "her tongue runs like Unity
Bedlam's,"
2
6-for English audiences, Wright's stream-of-consciousness
rambles allowed them to marvel at the talented artist produced from "the
wilds of America."27 Her lack of manners rendered her an "exotic prodi-
gy," and her lack of education added to the audience's experience,
increasing the novelty and strangeness of the speaker they saw before
them.
24 Thls is a repeated trope, as Elkanah Watson also commentS that Wright "was
a tall and athletic figure; and walked a firm, bold step, and erect as an Indian" (Watson,
Men and Times of the &volution, 187).
25 William Forester, 24 February 1776, originally quoted in Friends Historical
Socie(J}ournal, volume 20 (1923), 96; taken from Sellers, Patience Wright, 63.
26 Abigail Smith Adams, "Letter from Abigail Smith Adams to Mary Smith
Cranch." In Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of john Adams, edited by Charles Francis Adams
(Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1841.), 282.
27 Sellers, Patience Wright, 21.
60 KOKAI
Although Jay Fliegelman's Declaring Independence addresses only
Wright's finished art works and not her performance monologues, I
would argue that they were, nevertheless, a form of "natural oratory," as
he describes it. Fliegelman quotes John Adams, who wrote that "the
point was to adapt one's voice not to the passion he felt but 'to the pas-
sion he would move."'28 In her repetition of the same events and her
careful analysis of her audience, Wright, though uneducated, was a prac-
ticed orator. As historian Sandra Gustafson writes, "Early American ora-
tors understood the contextual nature and strategic uses of speech and
writing as signs relating the individual body to the social body. Speaking
from a range of cultural positions, they adapted that system of symbols
to their own ends."
2
9 Wright is certainly an example of someone who
analyzed her audience and adapted oratatorical traditions to emphasize
her "exotic" background.
Some of Wright's performance choices were likely influenced by
her Quaker heritage, which often seemed strange to those unfamiliar with
the faith. The monologues that visitors describe as a key part of her per-
formance resemble the Quaker "testimonies" at meetings-which both
men and women delivered-in her use of autobiography and a narrative
of eventual triumph. As historian Mary Anne Schofield writes, "[f)inding
one's voice, giving testimony audibly, and publicly proclaiming oneself
were inherent in the very nature of Quakerism."30 Wright's use differs, in
that, according to Schofield, Quaker testimonies by women generally
spoke of their own oppression and eventual rescue by men. In Wright's
narrative, it is her own talents and achievements that have brought her
success: she is her own rescuer; she is the heroine.
Wright used the anecdotes of her religious upbringing, in spite
of the ridicule Tryon received from the majority of society and prejudices
against Quakers, as fodder for her monologues. Both Abigail Adams and
Alan Thicknesse record Wright emphasizing these experiences. Adams
writes
"There," says she, pointing to an old man and woman,
who were sitting in one corner of the room, "are my old
28 Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 80.
29 Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Peiformance in Ear!J Anurica
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xvii.
30 Mary Anne Schofield, "'Women's Speaking Justified': The Feminine Quaker
Voice, 1662-1797," T11/sa Sllldies in Women! Literat11re 6, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 62.
MOWING A HEROINE
father and mother; don't be ashamed of them because
they look so. They were good folks;" (these were their
figures in wax-work;) "they turned Quakers, and never
would let their children eat meat, and that is the reason
we were all so ingenious; you had heard of the ingenious
Mrs. Wright in America, I suppose?"3J
Gl
Though Adams' description is generally sarcastic, it does suggest
that Wright attributed her artistic achievements to the dictates of Tryon;
the reason she is "ingenious" is because she did not eat meat. Wright also
excuses away her parents' clothing and appearance, which perhaps indi-
cated that they were wearing Tryon dictated outfits, or the old fashioned
styles chosen by the Quakers.32 Wright is simultaneously giving her audi-
ence potential avenues of criticism, and mitigating those critiques by
assigning them the origins of her abilities. Here, it is clear where Wright's
behavior is departing from Cima's notion of a host body. Rather than use
the religion to deflect criticism, Wright offers her own resume.
Thicknesse's description of Wright's father, which conflates
Quaker philosophies and Tryon's doctrines, further demonstrates
Wright's effective exploitation of her background as a curiosity:
being one of that Sect called Quakers (I would to GOD we
were all so). He became so singularly conscientious, that
he could not bring himself to believe, that GOD per-
mitted Men to spill the Blood of Animals for their daily
food .... The Genius of his ten Children (though they
never ate Meat) broke out in a Variety of Shapes; for
though they were denied earthly Masters, they had the
GREAT MASTER OF ALL NATURE FULL IN
VIEW33
He elaborates in much greater detail, describing their clothing,
their education, and their pacifism. Wright obviously repeated these sto-
31 Adams, "Letter From Abigail Smith Adams," 282.
3
2
Susan E. I<Jepp writes that "Quaker women's clothing was not so much
unique as our-of-date." Susan E. Klepp, Riot arrd &velry irr Ear!J America, edited by William
Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2002), 167.
33 Sellers, Patierrce Wright, 22.
62
KoKAI
ries over and over again, using her religious severity to mark her as
unique, both for her moral convictions and for her "exotic" appearance
and conduct.
Wright's refusal to maintain social conventions and the difficul-
ties this may have caused her are evident in what is written about her. In
her letter from England, Adams called Wright "the Queen of Sluts."34
She writes:
From thence I went to see the celebrated Mrs. Wright,
Messrs. Storer and Smith accompanying us. Upon my
entrance, (my name being sent up,) she ran to the door,
and caught me by the hand; "Why, is it really and in
truth Mrs. Adams? and that your daughter? Why, you
dear soul you, how young you look. Well, I am glad to
see you. All of you Americans? Well, I must kiss you
all." Having passed the ceremony upon me and Abby,
she runs to the gentlemen. "I make no distinction," says
she, and gave them a hearty buss; from which we would
all rather have been excused, for her appearance is quite
the slattern .... Her person and countenance resemble
an old maiden in your neighbourhood, Nelly Penniman,
except that one is neat, the other the queen of sluts.JS
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1784 a "slut"
meant ''A woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance; a foul
slattern." Adams' reference to Wright's appearance and her use of the
word "slattern" persuades me that her primary complaint was Wright's
unkempt appearance. However, the modern connotation of the term slut
as ''A woman of a low or loose character; a bold or impudent girl; a hussy,
jade" was also in common usage by the late eighteenth century. Though
Adams does not suggest that Wright engaged in sexual misconduct, her
description of Wright kissing both men and women, and her distaste for
Wright's art, underscores her distaste for Wright's open transgression of
more traditional (and gendered) behaviors between men and women.
Refusal to acknowledge social distinctions could be attributed to religion,
as could pacifism, which allowed her to negotiate the tricky status of a
34 As Abigail Adams was abroad in England, she wrote one long letter to her
sister detailing the events of the trip. The document was begun 6 July and is so catalogued
in her letters; however the portion concerning Wright is dated 25 July.
35 Adams, "Letter From Abigail Smith Adams," 282.
MOLDING A HEROINE
63
colonist in England when tensions between the colonies and mother
country were at an all time high. Wright could claim neutrality, arguing
that she opposed England's violence against the colonies on moral (rather
than political) grounds.
It was not, however, a matter of her sexuality, informality, untidi-
ness, or transgressions of women's roles that finally ended Wright's
career. As tensions between Britain and America grew higher and it
became clear that revolution was imminent, Wright renounced her paci-
fism and began defending America's cause. While this seems a foolish
choice for an American living in England and relying on English patrons
for her art, her established persona may have made it a necessary step.
Wright was most famous, after all, for being an eccentric, exotic American.
What made Wright's studio appealing was not just the art she produced,
though she was a gifted sculptor, but the eccentric persona she enacted
while making the art. Visitors to her British studio commented on her
especially effusive greetings for American visitors. Adams recorded her as
saying ''All of you Americans? Well, I must kiss you all" and "I love every-
body that comes from America."36 Watson remembers, "I was assailed by
a powerful female voice, crying out for an upper story, Who are you? An
American, I hope!'"37 Being "American," and particularly one with "sav-
age" and "exotic" mannerisms, gave her the excuse to act outside the
bounds of propriety. It was what gave her entry to the world of the King
and the Queen and then allowed her to call them George and Charlotte.
Ultimately, this fervent and open patriotism ended her career in
England. Wright began sending home various pieces of information she
gathered from her British patrons, concealing these messages inside her
wax heads. Though these letters contained more "vague apocalyptic chaf-
fering," than specific information that would help the war effort, they
marked Wright's turn away from concern with art, prestige, and money
and towards her interest in demonstrating her identity as a patriot.38
Wright warned the King that she thought his behavior towards the colony
was unfortunate, both in person and through the press. One of Wright's
biographers argues convincingly that she branched out from wax and
designed at least one political cartoon critiquing the situation in 1 780 that
was attributed to Patience's secretary, John Williams, and published as an
36 Ibid.
37 Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, 188.
38 Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, The F11neral Effigies of Westminster
Abbry (London: Boydell Press, 1994), 167.
64
KOKAI
independent work by publisher Matthew Darly. It featured an image of a
scale and abstract mystical language similar to the sort Wright was send-
ing home in the heads. Interestingly, Wright herself appears in the other
cartoon attributed to Williams; "The Heads of the Nation in a Right
Situation" depicts three heads, those of Lord North, Lord George
Germain, and the Earl of Bute, impaled on stakes with a woman, dressed
just as Wright was in the 1775 engraving described at the beginning of
this essay. In the 1780 cartoon, her character examines the three heads,
declaring "this is a sight I have long wish to see." The presence of the
woman and the pun in the title clearly point to Wright, and serve as use-
ful indicators of the extent to which her fame had spread throughout the
transatlantic world.39
To the English, Wright's own definitive antimonarchy statement
came in the form of a 1780 painting by her son, Joseph Wright. As an
adult, Joseph had joined his mother in England to study art at the Royal
Academy. He apparently shared her pro-American sentiments. His paint-
ing, "Mrs. Wright Modelling [sic] a Head in Wax," unfortunately no
longer exists, but descriptions of the image survive. The painting is said
to depict Wright sculpting the head of King Charles I (who was execut-
ed), while looking at a portrait of I<:.ing George III and Queen Charlotte.
The image implies that the current king and queen will soon follow in the
footsteps of their predecessor. The anti-George newspaper, the London
Courant, noted:
Should the instructive lesson, which this piece appears
calculated to convey, be properfy attended to ry those whom it
more immediatefy concerns, and to whom perhaps it was
directed, Mrs. Wright will merit the most magnificent
reward that royalty can bestow.40
Though it was her son who painted it, as Wright willingly posed
for the image and her beliefs were well known, the Courant and others
attributed the message to Patience Wright. Faced with political pressure
and feeling concern for her life, Wright fled to safety in France where she
lived out the rest of her days.
At the beginning of her career, Wright cultivated the image of a
39 Sellers, Patience Wright, 126.
40 Quoted in Holger Hoock's The King's Artists: The Royal Academy 1 Arts and the
Politics 1 British Culture, 1760-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 159. Italics
in original.
MOLDING A HEROINE 65
poor widow seeking a living for her family. The image described at the
beginning of this essay suggests the complicated schism she negotiated
between traditional roles, male and female, public and private. By the end
of her career, she had re-imagined herself as a patriot who used her art
as a medium for her political message. She was the active, expressive sub-
ject in the painting, while royalty passively gazed past her. Yet while her
image as an eccentric and outspoken American "savage" had initially gar-
nered the attention and indulgence of British audiences willing to patron-
ize a colonial widow, it eventually came to symbolize all that was threat-
ening and subversive in the rebellious colonies.
As the artist Charles Wilson Peale recalled, Benjamin West plead-
ed for her to cease her political agitation, stating, "petticoats would not
protect her."
4
1 Wright had chosen to act outside the bounds of feminin-
ity in England, and could not expect to retreat to the presumed apolitical
stance of a lady. Refusing to adopt some kind of safe "host body" meant
that, in Joseph \'<'right's painting, it was not an anonymous or symbolic
lady threatening the king; rather it was Patience Wright, the famous wax
modeler, openly declaring that the king should be beheaded.
Wright performed an identity far ahead of what many colonists
were comfortable with, as a woman performer and as a woman patriot.
Rather than attempt to force herself to fit conventional notions of fem-
ininity, Wright insisted on being the patriot and the woman she wanted to
be. Wright's claims occasionally verge on the grandiose, as when she told
Franklin, "I have travild through all the diftrent ways of providence to
Bring about the grand and most Extrordary Revolutions by the most
unlikly means [sic)."42 One can hardly attribute the success of the
Revolution to Wright's waxworks or her performances, yet her statements
describe the process by which American citizens came to believe in their
own sense of agency and empowerment, and the way in which
Americans were encouraged to participate in the myth that every indi-
vidual citizen staged the Revolution in his or her own world. Her words
also describe a woman who had thrown away notions of host bodies or
polite behavior and instead had found a way to put her identity at the cen-
41 Anne Hollingsworth Wharton and Emily Drayton Taylor, Heirlooms in
Miniature Q.B. Lippincott Company, 1898), Google Books, http:/ /books.google.com/
books?id=T2wsAAAAYAAJ&printsec=toc (accessed 20 January 2009), 116.
42 Patience Wright "Letter to Benjamin Franklin," 29 March 1778, The Papers of
Benjamin Franklin, The American Philosophical Sociery and Yale University,
http:/ /www.franklinpapers.org/ franklin/yale?vol""26&page= 190a&ssn=001-90-0194
(accessed 18 August 2007).
66
KOKAI
ter of the performance and become an actor, both theatrically and polit-
ically.
JOURNAL OF A.\iERJCAN D RAMA AND THEATRE 21, NO.2 (SPRJNG 2009)
Consuming "Little Girls": How Broadway and New York
City Capitalized on Peggy Sawyer and Little Orphan Annie's
Big Apple Dreams
Laura Pollard
Towards the end of the musical Annie, Daddy Warbucks sings to Annie,
"The world was my oyster but where was the pearl? Who dreamed I
would find it in one little girl?"t Warbucks was not alone: he and
Broadway had found the pearl, a cute and spunky little girl whose singing
and dancing sold tickets to the tune of $100 million within just five years
of opening.
2
Annie opened in 1977, at the end of a recession that had
been testing New York since 1969, a period punctuated by the fiscal cri-
sis of 1975.3 New York City had faced "[s]erious economic losses in
terms of population, jobs manufacturers, shipping, and corporate head-
quarters."4 With growing welfare rolls, high unemployment, and extensive
homelessness, through the 1970s the city had, as during the Depression,
been unable to provide for many of its residents. Annie glorified the spir-
it and determination of ew Yorkers in 1933 while nostalgically present-
ing poverty and commodifying a little orphan girl. Its overture medley of
happy tunes, traditional book structure, and chorus members doubling or
tripling up roles referenced classic 1950s musicals rather than contempo-
rary musical theatre trends.
Three years later, Annie was joined on Broadway by another
spirited young girl, Peggy Sawyer, in the stage adaptation of the film 42nd
Street. Director-choreographer Gower Champion presented a catalogue
of his greatest work in 42nd Street, a final gift to Broadway before his
untimely death on opening night. Both girls were equally determined to
make their dreams come true despite the Depression. New York is the
1
Thomas Meehan (book), Martin Charnin Qyrics) and Charles Srrouse (music).
Annie (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Thearre Division,
Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, Archival video NCOV 235), f!lmed at the Uris
Theatre, New York, 22 December 1982.
2
Otis L. Guernsey, ed., The Best Plqys of 1980-1981 (New York: Dodd, Mead &
Company, 1981), 7.
3 Joanne Reitano, The Restless Ciry:A Short History of Ne111 York from Colonia/Times
to tbe Present (New York: Routledge, 2006), 183.
4
Ibid.
68
POLLARD
background for their stories, and their dreams mirror those of many New
Yorkers then and now: success, sometimes at high cost, in a city recog-
nized for its excellence. This article examines the adaptation of Little
Orphan Annie and Peggy Sawyer, from the long-running Harold Gray
comic strip and the Busby Berkeley ftlm 42d Street (1 933), to investigate
why their experiences in 1933 New York City inspired musical theatre
creators of the late 1970s and thrilled audiences into the 1980s.
The Broadway musical has always been a business venture for its
producers and the businessmen behind Annie and 42d Street were not the
first to bankroll productions because of their potential profit on the pop-
ular culture market. The use of simple, iconic logos, however, con-
tributed to branding each show, as Ethan Mordden explains: "[David]
Merrick had adopted a poster logo in the soon-to-be influential pop
opera style: one pictorial image (here, a pretty lady) against a solid color
field (Merrick's favorite red), and no names featured .... 42d Street's win-
dow cards suggested an ensemble show without leads of professional
authority, a bald misstatement."S The logo and poster for Annie also fea-
tured one pictorial image, the original cartoon of the uttle girl, and also
on a red background. This kind of marketing branded the musicals at a
time when Broadway and New York City were only beginning to discov-
er the power of simple, logo-based marketing campaigns. These logos
developed the Broadway musical not only as an entertainment product
but also as a highly coveted brand experience long before Cameron
Mackintosh made millions from a pair of eat's eyes.
Commodification takes place in these musicals in even more
complex ways which I examine here for their cultural impact. "Successful
theatrical commodification depends on products resonating with existing
ideological structures, whether affirmatively or negatively," Christopher
B. Balme writes, and the commercial success of these musicals may not
have been possible without the cultural valuation, or commodification, of
their characters' behaviours and attitudes.6 Annie and 42d Street not only
promote themselves as theatrical commodities in the Broadway aesthetic,
but function also as what Balme calls "a cuJtural processing machine,"
assessing women and women's social roles.7 These musicals market cer-
5 Ethan Mordden, One More I<Ju (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 250.
6 Christopher B. Balme, "Selling the Bird: Richard Walton Tully's The Bird of
Paradise and the Dynamics of Theatrical Commodification," Theatre journal 57, no. 1
(March 2005): 9.
7
Ibid., 4.
CoNSUMlNG "Lnn.E GIRLS" 69
tain "norms" to audiences for thinking about and relating to women by
demonstrating the consumption of women as commodities in the rela-
tionships they have with men. This article suggests that rather than
reflecting the progress of American women in the 1970s and 1980s and
acknowledging their increasing agency within society, these musicals go
back in time to affirm more traditional gender roles, giving women a
value as a thing to be acquired in the social and cultural setting of
America.
Annie and Peggy Sawyer had much in common with Horatio
Alger's hero, Ragged Dick, who first appeared in an 1867 dime novel, and
their male protectors, Daddy Warbucks and theatre impresario Julian
Marsh, were not dissimilar to the socially conscious elite featured in
Alger's stories. In Ragged Dick, Alger depicted New York City as a symbol
of excess and exploitation, reassessment and promise. "Ragged Dick was
the first American book to depict the city in positive terms as a source of
fascination and opportunity as well as, but not solely, a place of suffering
and sin," Joanne Reitano explains. "Its poor could prosper if fr ugal, hard-
working, honest, and lucky."8 Historian George Lankevich characterizes
New York as a place where "every day of its existence featured an unend-
ing battle for advantage among its aggressive citizenry. Hard dealing and
acquisitiveness have always been the rule on its mean streets, those are-
nas of constant challenge, fabled congestion, vicious competition and
ephemeral triumph."9 Both Annie and 42d Street feature the largesse of
men who have succeeded precisely as hard dealers. Warbucks chooses to
open his home to an orphan for Christmas, while the prospect of unem-
ployment runs through 42nd Street, with Marsh reminding Peggy of all the
jobs at risk if she does not make the show-within-a-show a hit. It was
these characters' strong morals which made the gap between rich and
poor bridgeable and made Dick, Annie, and Peggy's dreams a reality.
Acknowledging the acquisitiveness of New Yorkers as identified by
Lankevich, I will posit that these "little girl" heroines ultimately became
both cultural and commercial commodities, desired by New York suc-
cess-seekers and tourists alike.
Both musicals became huge hits and ran for years, but their suc-
cess seems to overlook any progress in women's roles in American soci-
ety. While Annie and Peggy Sawyer are admirable characters for their
courage and determination, they ultimately rely on men to achieve their
8 Reitano, The Restlm City, 79-80.
9
George Lankevich, New York City (New York: New York University Press,
2002), VW-DL
70 Poll.ARD
success and are groomed through their musicals to be enjoyed by men.
By looking back in time for inspiration, the Broadway musical privileged
girlishness and a willingness to be shaped by men, rather than women's
independence and contributions to modern American society. Running
into the 1980s, these musicals are an intriguing reflection of the status of
women in American society. Annie and Peggy Sawyer are certainly not
modern American women, yet they were the central female characters in
two of the most popular and successful musicals on Broadway in the late
1970s and early 1980s, and were therefore two of the primary depictions
of the American woman available to consumers of Broadway musicals at
that time.
'Young and healthy': Commodified "little girls" Usurp
Broadway's Leading Ladies
The increasing popularity of rock and roll, coupled with the decline of
the Broadway theatre district through the late 1960s into the 1970s, con-
tributed to reducing both the popularity of musicals and their ability to
reach a wide audience, much less deliver statements on the status of
American women. ''A startling conglomeration of ills confirmed New
York's image as the worst of all possible worlds," Reitano points out.
Arson, disease, poverty, drug use, corruption, and scandal horrified the
rest of the country. "Gotham epitomized the problems everyone else
hoped to avoid. It symbolized the urban crisis."lO By the early 1980s, two
of Broadway's most popular female stars were characters rather than per-
formers, young girls applauded for their charm and spunk, perky smiles
and short dresses. Plucked from obscurity for their Broadway debuts as
Peggy and Annie, actresses Wanda Richert and Andrea McArdle both
shot to stardom. Richert was spotted by Gower Champion when she
auditioned for a spot in the 42nd Street chorus, while McArdle was pro-
moted from the chorus to the title role at the eleventh hour.
Their personal success as individual performers recognized as
more special than other young women in the chorus illustrates a contra-
diction routinely faced by American women in the latter half of the twen-
tieth century as they questioned their social status: whether to embrace
the nascent community of sisterhood or continue pursuing the tradition-
al American value of individualism. Susan Douglas writes:
The competitive spirit was what animated individualism,
and it is hard to think of an American value more
lO Reitano, The Restless Ciry, 181.
CONSUMING "LnTLE GIRLS"
enduring than rugged individualism. Each of us was
special and unique; each of us had a shot at being dis-
tinctive in some way; each of us was encouraged to
imagine herself apart from the herd, as someone people
somewhere, someday, would notice stood out.ll
71
As characters, Annie and Peggy had sisterhoods of their own, of
orphans and chorus girls, but as the central character in a musical, each
was routinely singled out from her sisterhood for her uniqueness. The
growing cult of individualism Douglas identifies in America in the 1970s
can be read as a possible cause of young girls' ascendance in these musi-
cals over the "competition" of their more mature female co-stars,
Dorothy Loudon as the orphanage keeper Miss Hannigan in Annie, and
Tammy Grimes as leading lady Dorothy Brock in 42nd Street. The concept
of sisterhood was both exciting and uncomfortable for American women
in the 1970s, so rather than explore the awkwardness of that tension,
Annie and 42nd Street skirted the issue and set up a more natural competi-
tion between young and old.
1
2 This allows the sisterhood established in
each show to function more easily as an ally or a support to Annie and
Peggy, rather than asking the young girls to choose between their indi-
vidual goals and their membership in a female community.
Pitting one generation of women against another, rather than
framing these musicals as stories of women pursuing their goals in a
man's world, casts the male characters as rewards rather than adversaries.
Dorothy Brock ultimately sheds no tears in relinquishing her starring role
to Peggy, confessing, "For ten years the theatre has kept me away from
the only thing I ever really wanted. And it was a broken ankle that final-
ly made me realize it. Pat Denning and I were married this morning."JJ
While Brock wishes Peggy every success, she also implies that a career
prevents a woman from truly being successful as a woman, as a happy
wife. Under the auspices of coaching her for the stage, Brock teaches
Peggy to sing the song "About a Quarter to Nine," and is effectively
11
Susan ]. Douglas, Where the Girls Are (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1994), 224.
12
Ibid.
l3 Mark Bramble, Michael Stewart (book), AI Dubin Qyrics) and Harry Watren
(music), 42nd Street (New York Public Libraty for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre
Division, Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, Archival video NCOV 172), f.tlrned at the
Majestic Theatre, New York, 15 July 1981.
72 POLLARD
preparing her for the greater excitement and satisfaction a romantic rela-
tionship can offer over a career. Peggy should be "waiting for him on
needles and pins," having it all because of a man, not because of inde-
pendence achieved through employment.
Peggy learns Brock's lesson quickly and in her final line of the
musical, despite being a smash hit as a professional leading lady, seeks to
secure herman-as-prize, the show's director, Julian Marsh. Repeating one
of her character's lines from the show-within-a-show, she invites Marsh
to accompany her to "the kids'" (reminding him of her girlishness) open-
ing night party, saying, "[i]t would be, grand, grand, grand if you could
come."
14
Brock's final line to Peggy, "Make me hate you," pits woman
against woman, undermining the sisterly bond they had only just devel-
oped in song, suggesting women cannot be supportive of one another's
skills, talents, or achievements, but must always be adversarial.IS Indeed,
earlier in the musical Brock feels so threatened by Peggy that she casts
her as an adversary of the man Brock ultimately secures. As Beth Bailey
notes, "[w]omen understood that they were competing with not only the
real women in their immediate sphere but also with the 'ideal' women of
screen and magazine."16 T hus Peggy and Brock not only demonstrate a
potential rivalry, but might also be read, by women in the audience, as dif-
ferent "ideal" women.
How did the leading ladies of the Broadway musical like
Dorothy Brock fade into the background of the form which they used to
command and relinquish the stage to youngsters? American women had
accomplished so much that the musical theatre idiom might have cele-
brated. Just over a decade earlier, leading ladies glittered in Broadway
musicals as they portrayed self-sufficient, often transgressive characters in
shows such as Fun'!} Girl (1964), Hello) Doi!J! (1964), Mame (1966), and
Sweet Charity (1966) (incidentally, musicals also set in New York City).
These titular characters consistently (though to varying degrees) ques-
tioned male authority and pursued goals which developed their inde-
pendence. Audiences accepted and admired these determined and hard-
working women. In observing mid-century musicals Stacy Wolf notes:
"The Broadway musical is the one performance form that features
1
4
Ibid.
IS lbid.
1
6 Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back .5' eat: Courtship in Tu;en/ieth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 73.
CoNSUMING "LirrLE GIRLS" 73
women as neither passive objects of desire nor subjects of vilification."
17
Opening in the mid-1960s, these musicals enjoyed long runs and com-
mercial success. They were introduced to millions of Americans through
cast recordings and television appearances made by their stars, but at a
time when the rapidly growing popularity of other popular culture forms
exceeded the musical's ability to capture large audiences.ts
In writing about historical operas, Herbert Lindenberger sug-
gests "History, or at least the semblance of history, has proved a partic-
ularly convenient way of establishing that distance between a real and a
represented world that opera has traditionally cultivated."
1
9 Read togeth-
er, leading ladies such as Fanny Brice, Marne, and Dolly suggest that the
use of a different historical period as a musical's setting establishes a safe
distance between the representation of their central female characters
and their contemporary audience. These "historical" women can there-
fore behave more transgressively than, for example, the contemporary
Charity Hope Valentine, whose own friends scoff at her dream of find-
ing something better in life than her career as a dance hall hostess.20
Similar to the "historical" women, Annie and Peggy Sawyer, hard-work-
ing and successful though they are, exist in the past for their audiences,
distancing admiration and making it convenient and safe.
In songs such as "Before the Parade Passes By," "Open a New
Window," and "Don't Rain on My Parade," the ladies of the late Golden
Age all literally seize the day, parading around the stage, singing about all
the action they are going to take in their lives. In contrast to Dolly, Marne,
and Fanny, Annie sings about how much she loves the promise tomor-
row offers-without suggesting what action she might take-by singing,
"you're only a day away," in effect postponing her need to act and negat-
ing any agency she might possess.2
1
Peggy famously insists that show
17 Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria (Ann Arbor: UniYersity of Michigan Press,
2002), 17.
18 Ibid., 8.
19
Herbert Lindenberger, "Opera as Historical Drama: La Clemenze di Tito,
Khovanschina, Moses und Aron," in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiograpf?y of
Peiformance, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1989), 119.
20 Neil Simon (book), Dorothy Fields (lyrics) and Cy Coleman (music). Sweet
Charity, in The Collected Plqys of Neil Simon, vol. 3 (New York: Random House, 1966 (1991]), 53.
21 Meehan, Charnin, and Strouse, Annie, f!.lmed at the Uris Theatre, New York,
22 December 1982.
74 POUARD
business is not for her and that she is returning to Allentown, requiring
an entire production to persuade her to "listen to the lullaby of old
Broadway" and take her place as star of the show.zz A more mature and
perhaps more transgressive leading lady would have reached inside her-
self at such a moment of discouragement and sung for herself, as Fanny
does with a reprise of "Don't Rain on My Parade," or Marne does with
"We Need a Little Christmas," but their youthful counterparts had not
had the life experience to develop as much self-reliance.
Together Marne, Dolly, and Fanny represent varying degrees of
empowered independence, but within their historical contexts they are
unable to engage directly with any restlessness felt by American women
in the mid-1960s. Progress to this type of female character in the musi-
cal, then, might be to allow her to exist in a modern day setting. Instead,
these "historical" leading ladies perpetuate the model of central female
characters in musicals as identified by Wolf, already transgressive and
therefore offering little scope for further progression. The contemporary
Charity remains much the same as she was at the musical's beginning,
ever hopeful that fate will change her life, but ultimately showing little
nerve, endeared to the audience for her charm. Women certainly contin-
ued to appear on the Broadway musical stage beyond the mid-1960s, but
the characters they portrayed rarely acknowledged any progress their gen-
der had achieved in social and professional status, nor did they reflect the
contemporary sisterhood experienced by women who were united and
supporting one another across the country through outlets such as
protest, consciousness raising groups, and Ms. magazine.
As the women's movement continued through the 1960s and
into the 1970s, popular female icons such as Jackie Kennedy or televi-
sion's perky teenager, Gidget (1965-66), gave way to "real girls getting real
political. And what led them to this awakening was that they now had the
opportunity to go to college," Douglas writes.23 Young women's change
in outlook happened gradually at college through closer engagement with
social and political issues. "The first step was girls thinking they had a
duty to champion the rights of others. The next step was realizing they
had to champion rights for themselves," Douglas explains.24
Despite their being in a better position, as more financially inde-
22 Bramble, Stewart, Dubin, and Warren, 42d Street, filmed ar the Majestic
Theatre, New York, 15 July 1981.
23 Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 141-2.
24 Ibid., 143.
CONSUMING "LITILE GIRLS" 75
pendent twenty-somethings, to consume musicals in urban centers than
they might have been as children growing up in the suburbs, many young
women's popular culture of choice continued to be affordable, accessible,
and easily consumable music. Their tastes may have expanded, though, to
take in rock or folk, as they traded the Beatles for women such as Joan
Baez and Judy Collins who did not buy into gender norms or strive to
meet conventional expectations of physical appearance and behavior.zs
Female consumers could relate to these performers' attitudes, lifestyles,
and appearance, as the distance between performer and audience shrank,
thanks to more spontaneous, interactive performance styles and a rejec-
tion of packaged pop-style corporate control and structure.26 The cen-
tralized and commercialized Broadway musical did not offer a compara-
ble experience for young women.
Singer-songwriter Carole Klng expressed ideas consistent with
the women's movement's urgings that women find careers and pursue a
variety of experiences for themselves and not for others. Her 1970 album
Tapestry,
Marketed women's possibilities without offending other
audiences. It made no overt references to feminism, and
neither did Klng publicly. Instead, she embodied a
muted feminism that straddled the counterculture and
the women's liberation movement, an apolitical, some-
what essentialist stance that validated and celebrated
women's differences from men. It vested women's
stereotypic qualities-nurture and community-with
new value, acknowledging women's roles as household
producers and mothers but also forefronting female
sexuality.
27
In ways which a Broadway musical might have but did not, King,
Baez, Collins, and other female performers such as Joni Mitchell and
Cady Simon responded to the new ground being forged by women who
sought experiences in life other than marriage and a family. What they
25 Ibid., 146.
26 Judy Kutulas, '"I Feel the Earth Move': Carole King, Tapestry, and the
Liberated Woman" in Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s, edited by A vital H.
Bloch and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 268.
27 Ibid., 269.
76 P OLLARD
expressed represented a lack of formality and structure, and most visibly,
a lack of a man-all traditional and expected elements of a Broadway
musical. The musical form might have begun to evolve and embrace the
women's movement in all its varieties, but while the concept musicals pio-
neered by Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince experimented with alterna-
tive structures, they nevertheless found some closure and resolution that
King and others were not compelled to seek. "Liberation, independence,
and self-sufficiency remained the qualities women's music emphasized,"
but with very few women contributing to the authoring of Broadway
musicals, how could the form emphasize those qualities which so attract-
ed female consumers to popular music?2B Micki Grant,29 as well as
Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford,30 enjoyed isolated successes with musi-
cals addressing contemporary women's issues, but they did not develop
an enduring commercial presence as musical theatre authors.
Gerald Bordman explains how excellent songs from musical
comedies in the 1970s "have been denied the fame they deserve because
of the rage of rock and roll and the unwillingness of radio and television
to promote theatre music the way they once did."31 But Bordman also
admits that Broadway was somehow unable to respond to rock and roll
the way it had earlier responded to ragtime and jazz.32 As rock became a
more structured, mainstream form of music, new forms such as punk
rock, funk, and disco emerged. These sounds, each accompanied by a dis-
tinct aesthetic, opposed rock and only offered Broadway a greater chal-
lenge to keep up with the times. Further, by the 1970s musicals were no
longer thought of as a Gershwin show or a Porter show, the emphasis on
Broadway having shifted from songwriters to directors and choreogra-
phers (Stephen Sondheim excepted).
28 Ibid., 274.
29 Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope (1972).
30 I'm Getting My Act Together And Taking It On The Road (1978).
31 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comec!J (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982), 189.
32 Hair (1968) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) are two of the most successful
Broadway rock musicals. However, as Bordman notes, their success was the exception
rather than the rule, as rock musicals in the 1970s failed to see their songs cross-over as
popular mainstream hits, unlike earlier shows which had responded to ragtime and jazz.
See Elizabeth L. Wollman, The Theater Will Rock (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2006) for a history of the rock musical.
CONSUMING "LlTI1.E GIRLS" 77
Two vehicles for Lauren Bacall seemed to allow a transgressive
leading lady to thrive in the modern day, updating the settings of the films
on which they were based and, therefore, not seeking as great a distance
between the real and represented world that Lindenberger describes.33
Applause (1970) and Woman if the Year (1981) could consequently not only
reflect contemporary fashion and music trends, but also current events.
This progress, in both the depiction of American women by the musical
and the function of the female performer within it as demonstrated by
Lauren Bacall, troubles the appearance and success of historical girls like
Annie and Peggy, who despite their historical setting did not act nearly as
transgressively as their "historical" predecessors. Though her characters'
words, music, and movement were almost all authored by men (Betty
Comden co-wrote the Woman if the Year libretto), Lauren Bacall explored
women's independence and self-sufficiency in two performances on the
musical theatre stage in 1970 and in 1981. Her performances may have
been the closest the Broadway musical had come, by the early 1980s, to
acknowledging and engaging with women's changing status in American
society. As Margo Channing in Applause (1970), an updating of the clas-
sic Hollywood film All About Eve (1950), she interpreted the challenge
professional women faced in pursuing a career and domestic life. In the
subsequent Woman if the Year (1981), she offered what is, in some ways,
an antidote to Annie and 42nd Street, playing a contemporary version of
the 1942 Katharine Hepburn-originated Tess Harding role.
Tess had no sisterhood, and no female competition. She sang
about being "One of the Boys"3
4
but also struggled with achieving and
enjoying domestic bliss, concluding with a happily married housewife that
"The Grass is Always Greener"35 in someone else's relationship. A cele-
brated television broadcaster, Tess enters a TV studio dressed in a fash-
ionable one-piece jumpsuit, but seconds before going to air masks her
more masculine appearance; the stage direction reads, "It's a dickie-like
blouse that fits over her jumpsuit and ties in the rear-it \\'ill give her a
more feminine look when she sits to face the cameras."36 Her male co-
host is quickly emasculated to underscore Tess's centrality, telling a hair
33 Lindenberger, "Opera as Historical Drama," 119.
34 Peter Stone (book), John Kander (music) and Fred Ebb Oyrics), Woman of the
Year (New York: Samuel French Inc., 1981), 45-6.
35 Ibid., 91 -96.
36 Ibid., 17.
78 POLLARD
and makeup assistant, "I need a spritz."3
7
Bacall as Harding seems to rep-
resent a compromise in the long-standing disagreement between feminist
and anti-feminist camps, of whether to seek equal rights and privileges
with men, or to celebrate "women's unique and superior qualities with ..
. an emphasis on mothering as both source and ultimate expression of
these qualities."38 Douglas suggests such pop culture versions of the lib-
erated woman were "a powerful tool for managing an extremely threat-
ening, even revolutionary social movement."39 With Woman of the Year,
had the Broadway musical managed to accurately interpret the paradox of
the modern woman's life?
The musical theatre Tess Harding is not a mother and as Stacy
Wolf points out: "In contrast to the many representations of 'perfect'
mothers on television and fJ..!m, in musicals, motherhood as a biological,
familial role is seldom represented."
4
0 Bacall's source character struggled
on ftlm with an adopted child, but this opportunity was tellingly omitted
from the musical adaptation. When given the opportunity, why did musi-
cal creators perpetuate the standard Wolf identifies and choose not to
centrally engage with motherhood when it continued to be a major facet
of the American woman, and one integral to the advancement of
women's progress? As "one of the boys," is Tess aligning herself with lib-
eral feminists and seeking parity with men, rather than with radicals seek-
ing acknowledgement of their biologically different functions?
When the men she is surrounded by are routinely emasculated,
Tess's liberalism reads not as progress, but as the kind of transgressive
behavior expected from a traditional musical theatre leading lady follow-
ing in the footsteps of Dolly, Marne, and Fanny Brice. Though success-
ful in his own right, Tess's eventual husband, Sam Craig, is portrayed as
a meek cartoonist, while the Soviet ballet dancer whose defection she
reports on gives up his new freedom in order to return home to his wife.
When the dancer sings to Tess about how happy he is to wake up in the
morning with his wife, the show seems to suggest that if a man can com-
promise his career for the pleasures of domesticity, women can also
unashamedly prioritize their wifely and/ or motherly duties over profes-
37 Ibid.
38 Linda Gordon, "What's ew in Women's History," Feminist Studies/Critical
Studies, edited by Teresa de Lauretis (BloomingtOn: Indiana University Press, 1986), 27.
39 Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 194.
40 Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 16.
CONSUMING "LITTLE GIRLS" 79
sional ones. The musical concludes with Sam and Tess vowing to be the
couple of the year, leaving audiences to decide for themselves whether
Tess has struck a balance they can relate to or approve of.
Regardless of what kind of feminist Bacall may have portrayed,
both Woman of the Year and Applause ultimately drew audiences because of
her appeal as a star, rather than because of any engagement with issues
facing contemporary American women. Bacall's portrayal of Tess
Harding was among the last performances by classic Hollywood stars
(including Ruby Keeler and Ann Miller) reviving their careers in often
nostalgic musicals through the 1970s to the early 1980s. Marilyn L.
McKay has suggested such Hollywood stars contributed little to devel-
oping the musical form when they appeared on Broadway in the 1970s.4
1
With stage stars such as Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, and Carol
Channing having already developed the role of the leading lady in the
Broadway musical in the 1940s and 1950s, McKay asserts that stars such
as Bacall, with limited skills as triple-threat musical theatre performers,
could nevertheless find work as a leading lady in a musical, "a ready made
role and one associated in the audience's minds with established female
stars."
42
While, as characters, Annie and Peggy Sawyer had replaced the
leading lady performers of the Golden Age as the star attraction on
Broadway, singer-songwriters such as Carole King and icons such as Jane
Fonda and Billie Jean King became the most transgressive women in
popular culture. Andrea McArdle and Wanda Richert, the leading ladies
of Annie and 42nd Street, were frequently reported on by the media, but
they did not even feature prominently in the marketing of t heir musicals,
the shows' simple logos communicating the branded show they repre-
sented rather than specific performers.
I Love New York
In 1970, 125 Fortune 500 companies were headquartered in New York
City. As in the 1920s, to many it seemed a prosperous time. But discon-
tent with New York's crime, dirt, and taxes was growing among execu-
tives, leading to a corporate exodus that reduced the number of head-
quarters in New York City to a mere ninety-four by 1975. A white flight
followed, with New Yorkers succumbing to the safety and attraction of
41 Marilyn L. McKay, The Relationship BetJVeen the Female Petformer and the Female
Character in the American Musical. 1920-1974 (PhD. Diss., University of Georgia, 1983), 241.
42
Ibid., 6.
80 Pou.ARD
suburban living. The city's fiscal circumstances were all too similar to the
Depression years. Having provided the widest possible spectrum of serv-
ices to its citizens for two decades, the city's bills were about to come
due.43 Yet there was no recognition of an impending fiscal trauma by
Mayor John Lindsay, as he and his comptroller, Abraham Beame, annual-
ly announced balanced budgets, and as with the run up to the 1929 crash,
"everyone assumed that the good times would last forever."
Unable to meet its everyday operating expenses, by April 1975
the city had run out of money. Municipal workers were threatened with
layoffs, and wages and benefits were sacrificed. A year of economic
stagflation followed, with President Richard Nixon's resignation adding
further to the crisis. Hugh Carey, elected New York State Governor in
November 1974 pledged to save the city and began a series of salvage
operations. The national Bicentennial in 1976,Jimmy Carter's nomination
at the Democratic National Convention, and the Yankees not only
returning to a new stadium but also winning the pennant were all major
events encouraging New Yorkers to celebrate their city's recovery. "Fiscal
disaster and loss of city sovereignty had been overcome," Lankevich
notes, "[a]nd the city was again ready to lead the nation forward."
4
S
Tourists began returning in response to aggressive marketing campaigns
branding the city as the Big Apple, illustrated with the "I Love New
York" logo from 1977 onward. With optimism in the air after Carter's
election, anything seemed possible.
The Great Depression and the fiscal crisis New York City suf-
fered in the mid-1970s were both preceded by periods of high optimism
and confidence in financial markets. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and
Governor Carey both instituted reforms which contributed to reviving
the city, as did newly elected mayors Fiorello LaGuardia and Edward
Koch. These parallels, I would posit, support the willingness, if not need,
of the makers and consumers of Broadway musicals to embrace an ear-
lier moment of perseverance in their city's past in order to bolster and
celebrate their own survival and flourishing. As Annie's director and lyri-
cist Martin Charnin admits, ''Annie was the perfect manifestation of all
the promise and hope and spunk and optimism that I and my colleagues
wanted not only for ourselves, [but for] our children, our country, our
43 Lankevich, New York Ci!J, 212.
44
Ibid. , 213.
45 Ibid., 229.
CoNSUMING "LnTLE GIRLS"
81
world."46 Though women had come a long way, as noted by the Phillip
Morris Company through its Virginia Slims cigarette advertising cam-
paign from 1968 onwards
47
(and by Tess Harding in Woman of the Year4
8
),
rather than acknowledge such achievements as a source of optimism and
future promise, musical makers reverted instead to embodiments of
women reminiscent of Ziegfeld's Follies girls, all smiles and legs, com-
modified for their physical attributes.
Advertising campaigns for beauty products in the late 1970s and
early 1980s reflected this shift, emphasizing female fitness as a source of
empowerment. Susan]. Douglas explains:
Buns of steel have taught us to be ashamed of the way
we live our day-to-day lives; of the fact that whatever
we're doing, we aren't working hard enough; that we
don't have that badge of entitlement; that we don't real-
ly have enough self-respect and dignity; that we aren't
enough like men; and, worst of all, that we're adult
females in a culture that still prefers, by and large, little
girls.49
Women may have begun to contribute even more significantly to gov-
ernment, business, education, and science by the early 1980s, but the
American cult of individualism isolated women and encouraged their
competition with each other. Annie and 42nd Street reflect this in their
heroines' achievements and through their physical appearance, Peggy in
particular, as she is a dancer reliant on her body for her profession.
Professional women with thicker thighs, working unglamorous office
jobs, have never inspired the makers of American musicals. Bacall's Tess
Harding did ring true in one aspect of the liberated woman's life, which
Douglas identifies:
The American cult of individualism, which urged us to
make something of ourselves, and which also helped us
46 Martin Charnin cited in Lawrence Thelen, The Showmakers (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 19.
47 Philip Morris famously targeted its new brand, Virginia Slims, at women with
the slogan, "You've come a long way, baby."
48 Stone, Kander, and Ebb, Woman of the Year, 15-16.
49 Douglas, Where the Girls Are, 264.
82
to become feminists, was retooled in TV shows,
women's magazines, and cosmetics ads in the 1970s and
'80s to emphasize our isolation from and competition
with other women. 5o
POlLARD
Tess Harding has no competition and no sisterhood, she isolates herself
but is also isolated from other women, and is the default winner, the tit-
ular Woman of the Year.
By the end of the 1970s, foreign corporations were eager to take
advantage of the weak U.S. dollar and filled the corporate gap left by
Fortune 500 companies. New Yorkers exemplified Reagan's privileging of
individual accomplishment as unrestricted capitalism became the ruling
spirit of the 1980s. Wall Street was once again an icon for the success-
driven city. Many young professionals born and raised in the suburbs set
their sights on New York after college years spent at institutions based in
big cities. They became a new breed of city dwellers and contributed both
to the city's business boom and to the changing make-up of Broadway
theatre audiences. Otis L. Guernsey noted new theatergoers on
Broadway, lining up for discount ticket at the TKTS booth in Times
Square and helping to sustain revivals in particular.51 In Richard
Alleman reported that by 1978, the number of overseas visitors to New
York had doubled since 1968 to two million, explaining, "[f]oreigners
have added another NYC attraction to their list of must-sees ... the
Broadway theatre."52
In their 1984 sociological study of New York, The Apple Sliced,
Boggs, Handel, and Fava call the city, "[n]ot only a spatial location, but a
symbol. 'Big Apple' means the big time, the pinnacle of success, the top
of the heap."S3 Annie and 42nd Street confirm New York City as site in
which to pursue excellence, the prime location for exceptional people to
achieve success. Visitors to the city expect such excellence and these two
musicals fulfilled expectations, extolling New York's ability to polish the
roughest diamonds. The young girl who bursts on-stage in a production
50 Ibid., 291.
51 Otis L. Guernsey, ed. The But Pla;s if 1976-1977 (New York: Dodd, Mead
& Company, 1977), 6.
52 Richard Alleman, "Foreign Tourists: the newest Broadway audience," Plqybi/1
(December 1979), 6.
53 Vernon Boggs, Gerald Handel, and Sylvia F. Fava, eds. The AppleS /iced (New
York: Praeger, 1984), 269.
CoNSUMING "LrTfLE GIRLS" 83
number as Daddy Warbucks tours Annie around New York, credited only
as ''A Star to Be," exemplifies the confidence and aggression of new-
comers aware of the city's promise, their anonymity no barrier to achiev-
ing success. Her goal is in sight (name in lights, penthouse) but staying at
the Y for the time is nothing to scoff at: it is a New York City Y and
therefore better than any other. The final verse might be describing the
city's resourcefulness and rebound of the late 1970s (with New York
being popular once more) but also acknowledging the city itself as a per-
formance to behold and praise.
Both musicals fail to reflect the ethnic diversity of New York
City in the late 1970s and early 1980s and might therefore be criticized as
predicting affluence for white Americans above any other ethnic group.
This may not surprise sociologists or economists aware of the burden
ethnic minorities put on the city during its fiscal crisis. Instead of reflect-
ing New York City's ethnic diversity, the major production numbers of
these musicals foregrounded class differences, featuring New Yorkers
from different walks of life, in scenes of prosperity and adventure which,
excepting their whiteness, were not unlike many contemporary, real-life
city scenes. Further, the surge of black musicals in the 1970s-shows
such as Pur/ie (1970), Raisin (a 1973 musical version of A Raisin in the Sun)
and The Wiz, a hugely successful black adaptation of The Wizard of Oz
which opened in 1975 and which would later be adapted to fUm-likely
kept the question of reflecting New York City's diversity in their shows
off the radar of Annie and 42nd Streets authors and producers. Broadway
was still nearly two decades away from embracing color-blind casting.s4
In Annie, "NYC" begins with a saxophone solo typical of a
Times Square busker, and is later joined by swelling brass and a full
ensemble representing a cross section of citizens, all fulfilled and prais-
ing the city for its rich offerings and unique character. The ballet of 42nd
Streets title song similarly portrays a range of (white) New Yorkers expe-
riencing the city's romance, crime, and drama, ironically identifying it as a
place for the underworld to meet the elite at a time when the elite were
only gradually becoming more comfortable with venturing into the seedy
Times Square area. When Peggy calls it "a crazy quilt that Wall Street jack
built," she provides a link between business and pleasure in the city, effec-
tively encouraging and welcoming 1980's Wall Street executives to linger
5
4
The casting of black actress Audra McDonald as the traditionally white
Carrie Pipperidge in the 1994 revival of Carousel has been a touchstone for this develop-
ment. After Carrie marries Mr. Snow, played by a white actor, both black and white chil-
dren performed as their children.
84 POllARD
and consume the product Broadway has to offer.55 Sociologist George
Handel suggests that going to a Broadway play in New York, rather than
elsewhere, holds a special cachet: "There is a sense of participating in
something outstanding, of having an experience larger or more intense
or more distinctive than can be described by the activity itself."56 With
their slice-of-life New York scenes, Annie and 42nd Street built upon this
impression of having an exceptional encounter for visitors, while reaf-
firming for (white) New Yorkers the intensity and distinction of the lives
they led in the Big Apple.
The escape these musicals offered, if any, was from the serious
subjects and pop opera idiom popularized through the 1970s and detest-
ed in particular by 42nd Street's producer, David Merrick, who said, "I'm
thinking of how to create the sort of lively, lavish, frivolous musical I
believe people have been missing. I think the musical public is fed up with
these solemn ones and those tiny little ones of a half-dozen people,
skimpy sets and squeaky orchestras. I think it wants what I call this-a
song-and-dance extravaganza."S7 The business community and the
Broadway community were united in their desire for a period of opti-
mism, and both pursued it through excess.
Consuming Little Girls
Annie and Peggy Sawyer's determination reflected modern Americans'
commitment to persevering through economic, social, and political
upheaval, many of whom were motivated by capitalist dreams. Audiences
could relate to these young girls with nothing, dreaming big dreams and
ultimately finding happiness and success in N ew York City. For
Americans in big business, these musicals also condoned the pursuit of
profit in the developing American corporate culture. Whether business-
men, aspiring stars, locals, or tourists, these musicals' audiences witnessed
aspects of their personal New York City experience live on stage.
Talented, determined, and resourceful, Annie sought a family and Peggy
Sawyer a career in a city of excellence. Women in particular, pursuing
55 Bramble, Stewart, Dubin, and Warren, 42nd Street, filmed at the Majestic
Theatre, New York, 15 July 1981.
56 George Handel, ''Visiting New York," in The Apple Sliced, edited by Vernon
Boggs, Gerald Handel and Sylvia F. Fava (New York: Praeger, 1984), 295.
57 David Merrick, quoted in John Anthony Gilvey, Before the Parade Passes By
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), 277.
CONSUMING " LITILE GIRLS" 85
their own independence, might have related to these young girls' drive
and passion to pursue their dreams. The competition for jobs at the audi-
tion which opened 42nd Street is not unlike the orphans in Annie seeking
adoptive parents. Their shared desire to be chosen and recognized as a
cut above the rest reflected the drive and determination required by new
arrivals in New York in order to secure jobs and succeed.
But despite feminism and the women's liberation movement,
these girls' dreams inevitably required men to fulfill them, and so male
audience members could enjoy relating to powerful director Julian Marsh
or millionaire Oliver Warbucks. As Jill Dolan explains, "[p]erformance
usually addresses the male spectator as an active subject, and encourages
him to identify with the male hero in the narrative. The same representa-
tions tend to objectify women performers and female spectators as pas-
sive, invisible, unspoken subjects."58 Men in the audience could also prac-
tice a traditionally male dominated area of busLness-that of acquiring
commodities for consumption- enjoying the charming and loveable
Annie and Peggy, constructed as characters to be loved by and pleasing
to the men in their lives. like Annie Oakley wanting to be pink and white
for Frank Butler decades before them, and "modern" Millie Dilmount
craving love and wealth over independence twenty years later, for all their
dreams and drive, Annie and Peggy relied on men to re-fashion their
identities and fulfill their desires. Dolan suggests that if a woman identi-
fi es with the male hero, "she becomes complicit in her own indirect
objectification," yet if the female audience member admires Annie or
Peggy, particularly as a consumable object, "she participates in her own
commodification."S
9
Annie, by the musical's end, has transformed into
the girl from the musical's logo with her curly hair and red dress. Peggy
is a Broadway star. Their dreams have come true, but they are simultane-
ously being consumed by their male co-stars and audience, male and
female, for their cuteness and charm, prettiness and perky smiles. One of
42nd t r e e t ~ production numbers, sung by the male chorus, even empha-
sizes "Dames" as objects to consume, not worth recalling their names,
remembered only for their physical attributes.60
With her star rising by the end of 42nd Street and its show-with-
SB Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1991), 2.
5
9
Ibid., 13.
60 "Dames" in Bramble, Stewart, Dubin, and Warren, 42nd Street, filmed at the
Majestic Theatre, New York, 15 July 1981.
86 POli.ARD
in-a-show, Pretry Lacjy, Peggy Sawyer exclaims to Marsh, her director,
"Oh, I said the lines and I sang the songs and I did the steps. But you
were inside me pulling the strings. So I congratulate you," effectively
denying her own agency, talent and skill.6
1
Many audience members may
not have been as offended or surprised by Peggy's assertion as we might
expect them to be today. In 1977, the year Annie opened, a survey found
that sixty-two percent of Americans thought married women whose hus-
bands could support them need not hold jobs if jobs were scarce, though
two thirds of the survey sample still supported the Equal Rights
Amendment.62 Annie also recognized traditional gender roles and ideal-
ized them in song with "Maybe." She demonstrates her awareness of
family values, singing, "Betcha he reads, betcha she sews," imagining her
real-life parents but noting, "[t]heir one mistake was giving up me."63 In
a simple phrase, she confirms gender stereotypes while also underlining
her own value as something to be had.
Conservative Phyllis Schlafly had started her campaign against
the ERA in 1971, when its endorsement by Congress still seemed quite
certain. She emphasized the danger in absolute equality, insisting house-
wives in particular would be put at risk, and asserted the Amendment
would actually transfer women's existing rights to men, without granting
women any new, additional rights. Rosalind Rosenberg attributes the
decline in support for the Equal Rights Amendment and its ultimate fail-
ure to ambivalence. She explains, "There was substantial support for for-
mal equality, but lingering opposition to substantive change. In short, a
majority of men and women approved the principle of equal rights only
as long as it did not change much in practice."64 With their plucky young
heroines finding their greatest success and happiness when guided and
supported by a man, Annie and 42nd Street promoted traditional American
values and gender roles rather than advocating any substantive change.
Writing on popular music of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Richard
Crawford notes, "[e]ven as women's identity changed, sex remained gen-
der-bound, with men still the main sexual consumers and women the sex-
ual commodities. Though freed from earlier stereotypes, women were
6
1
Ibid.
62 National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey (1977) cited in
Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives (New York: Hill and \X'ang, 1992), 222.
63 Meehan, Charnin, and Strouse, Annie, filmed at the Uris Theatre, New York,
22 December 1982.
64 Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 222.
CONSllMJNG "LiiTLE GIRLS" 87
assigned new ones, still subordinate to men."65
This kind of conservatism, James T. Patterson explains, grew
into American society as President Carter called on Americans to com-
promise the living standards they had become accustomed to through the
1950s and 1960s and practice conservation:
A majority of Americans were obviously tired of Carter
and hoped that the ever optimistic Reagan would deliv-
er them from the dark days of the late 1970s. In this
sense, the election resembled that of 1932, when voters
had chosen the jauntily optimistic FDR over the incum-
bent, Herbert Hoover, the dour embodiment of hard
times.
66
A chorus of tramps sings in a shantytown (known in the 1930s as a
Hooverville), in contrast to FDR's appearance as a close personal friend
of Warbucks, suggesting librettist Thomas Meehan and lyricist Martin
Charnin had their fingers on the pulse of American society. FDR not
only welcomes Annie to the White House but sings with her about the
promise of tomorrow, forecasting the "tomorrow" which was just
around the corner with Reagan.
I Don't Need Anything But You?
Annie defines her happiness from the start with material possessions.
The parents she dreams of would collect things like ashtrays and art, and
have a closet full of clothes for her. She believes already that things are
what make people happy, and may be fulfilled simply by feeling she is, by
the musical's end, a valuable enough "thing" to be collected. Warbucks
calls her his pearl, the something (not someone) that was missing from his
life. Peggy Sawyer markets herself as being ''Young and Healthy" and
therefore a desirable commodity. In the rebound years after a period of
staggering inflation, attitudes towards money shifted significantly.
Americans became more likely to borrow money in order to finance their
consumer spending. ''A brave new world of credit cards and high-risk
65 Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life (New York: WW Norton &
Company, 2001), 816.
66 James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: the United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 150-1.
88
POll.ARD
personal fmance was at hand," Patterson notes.67 Annie and 42nd Street
support such consumer trends on a number of levels, as entertainment
products branded by their iconic logos, but more significantly, by com-
modifying their young heroines as goods to be acquired by men, even
encouraging them to define and describe their own value as things to be
consumed. With American culture increasingly centered on consump-
tion, songs such as 'We're in the Money'' (42nd Street) and ''A New Deal
for Christmas" (Annie) only valorized and encouraged widespread spend-
mg.
Wealth, popularity, success, and happiness were presented as
worthy and valuable things to want. Both creators and consumers of
Annie and 42nd Street looked back in time in order to celebrate the history
they themselves had made, and the glory of the city which made it pos-
sible. But in looking back, they reafftrmed the role of a dominant male as
the anchor of a woman's life. "New Yorkers are not born, they are made.
As survivors of a cruel winnowing process, they are arrogantly certain
that 'no other place is good enough' for them," Lankevich points out.
68
Many confident, talented and strong women might not disagree, striking
out to achieve their goals in New York City. However, they may not all
have related to Annie and Peggy's willingness to depend on men to sur-
Yive that winnowing process.
Annie and Peggy Sawyer did have company on Broadway, from
a woman who debated the necessity and utility of an anchoring man as a
dominant force in her life. Tess Harding, as portrayed by Lauren Bacall
in Woman of the Year, is a totally modern woman whose experiments in
balancing a personal and professional life come closer than any other
musical of its time to reflecting the struggles of contemporary American
women. As a glamorous star appearing on Broadway, Bacall's perform-
ance culminates a tradition of strong women performers dominating the
musical theatre stage before relinquishing it, to a certain degree, to feisty
young girls.69 Sutton Foster, Kristen Chenoweth, and !dina Menzel are
the leading ladies of today's long-running hit shows, and routinely per-
form as teenaged girls or young adults. "The interaction of politics, eco-
nomics, and changing communities has given the city a resilience and
67 Ibid., 127.
68 Lankevich, New York Ciry, 257.
6
9
Leading ladies such as Patti LuPone, Donna Murphy, and Bernadette Peters
continue to appear on Broadway, but they typically star in revivals of classic leading lady
roles rather than consistently originating new roles.
CoNSU.MlNG "LITTLE GiRLS" 89
power beyond its statistics," Lankevich muses, and these influences simi-
larly developed the musical's resilience as a popular culture form and
profitability as a commodityJO Though failing to significantly engage with
the changing status of women in contemporary American society, Annie
and 42nd Street reflected an emerging new conservatism. Their long runs
and record-breaking grosses confirmed the economic impact of
Broadway on New York City. Having come to New York City to seek
their fortunes, musical makers and many audience members, like Annie
and Peggy, are cast both as consumer and commodity, in the market that
is the city.
70 Lankevich, New York City, xii.
jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 21, NO.2 (SPRING 2009)
El Gran Reto: Celebrity, Cultural Commodification, and Andean
Citizenshipl
Jason Bush
Indian peasants live in such a primitive way that com-
munication is practically impossible. I t is only when they
move to the cities that they have the opportunity to min-
gle with the other Peru. The price they must pay for
integration is high-renunciation of their culture, their
language, their beliefs, their traditions, and customs, and
the adoption of the culture of their ancient masters.
After one generation they become mestizos. They are
no longer Indians. Mario Vargas Llosa, 19902
We felt forgotten in our own country, but now we are
very satisfied with the ratings our miniseries has
received. A few days ago I was performing at a school
and the students approached to ask me for my auto-
graph. I felt something special because that had never
happened to me before.
Damien de la Cruz Ccanto "Ccarccaria," 20083
Peruvian national identity has been marked by an unresolved dramatic
tension that literary critic Misha Kokotovic calls the "colonial divide,"
"denoting a social division of colonial origins."4 In Peruvian historiogra-
phy this division has often been dramatized in the event of the capture
of Atahualpa, the last Incan King, at the hands of Pizarro. According to
legend, Pizarro sent a written message to Atahualpa demanding he sub-
mit to the Spanish crown and convert to Christianity. When the I nca
1
Research for this essay was generously funded by The Ohio State University
Office of International Affairs.
2 Mario Vargas Llosa, "Questions of Conquest: \X 'hat Columbus Wrought and
What He Did Not," Harpers 281 (December 1990): 52-3.
3 Damian de Ia Cruz Ccamo, "Rating Sube como Espuma," Diorio el Ojo Oune
2008).
4 Misha Kokotovic, The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative: Social Coiflict and
Transculturation (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 2.
92
BusH
leader refused (although his comprehension of the demands are doubt-
ful since he neither spoke Spanish nor read Western forms of writings),
he was captured and eventually executed. Thus, the mythic origin of the
Peruvian nation lies in a violent, traumatic event, and a problem of trans-
lation between two distinct worlds.s The social division represented by
this originary event has been deeply inscribed into the national geogra-
phy. The rough terrain of the Andes has been both positively and nega-
tively valued as the antithesis of Western modernity. The coastal cities on
the other hand, especially Lima, are perceived to have inherited both
Western modernity and hegemonic power from the colonizer.
As the first epigraph, by prominent Peruvian novelist Mario
Vargas Llosa, illustrates, the crio/lo elite imagines Andean geography and
culture as archaic and dislocated from modern Peru.6 Vargas Llosa's dis-
course constructs an ahistorical and essentialist ~ d e a n tradition" that is
incompatible with modernization. He suggests that the only solution to
national division and under-development is for the indigenous masses to
submit to the superiority of Western modernity and shed their ancestral
cultural heritage. Written less than two decades ago, Vargas Llosa's words
now seem quite out of touch with "a changing Peru, one in which the old
categories of race and class are being turned inside out, even as the terms
that govern social interaction lag far behind."
7
The Andean peasants who
have migrated en masse to Lima and other urban areas over the past sixty
years have not simply shed their cultural traditions in favor of "the cul-
ture of their ancient masters." Rather, this emergent Andean public has
found more complex and innovative ways to reproduce and reinvent their
cultural heritage in the heart of modern Lima, challenging the "reified
divide between 'the Andean' and 'the modern."'B
The Peruvian culture industries have begun to take notice of the
emergent public and the expanding consumer power of Andean migrants
in Lima. Channel 2, Frequencia Latina, has recently produced a slate of
5 For a chapter on this event as imagined as the original sin of rhe nation, see
"Capitulo II: La Escena Primordial: Cajamarca, 1532," in Selma Baptista, Una Concepcion
Trcigica de Ia Cultura (Lima: PUCP, 2006).
6 In the colonial period, the term criollo referred to a person of Spanish descent
who was born in Peru. The term has evolved to describe the culture of the coastal elite
which is inherited from rhe culture of rhe colonizing Spanish.
7 Joshua Tucker "Sounding Out a New Peru: Music, Media, and rhe Emergent
Andean Public" (PhD diss., University of :Michigan, 2005), 2.
8 Ibid., 23.
EL GRAN RETO 93
Figure 1: Scissors dancer Paccha Ccapari dancing at the Festival of Water in
Cabana Sur, Ayacucho, 2008. Photo by author.
short telenovelas, which thematically explore the contours of Andean cul-
tural heritage and increasing modernization, including biographical
sketches of commercial folklore stars Dina Paucar and Chacalon.
9
In July
2008, the mini-series referred to in the second epigraph, El Gran Reto,
premiered on Frequencia Latina. Advanced promotional advertisements
of the six-week telenovela promised "magic and mysticism," "a millenary
tradition," "where every movement indicates a destiny," and "much more
than a dance."JO The millenary tradition referred to in the advertisement
is danza de las tijeras (scissors dance), an acrobatic ritual dance from the
departments of Ayacucho, Apurimac, and Huancavelica in the central
9 Chacal6n was a star of chicha music during the 1980s and early 1990s. Chicha
was a popular style amongst Andean migrant audiences that fuses the ubiquitous Andean
folksong form, Huqyno, with Columbian Cumbia. He tragically died of misdiagnosed dia-
betes in 1994 at the age of only forty-four. He has since become a folk saint amongst
Lima's Andean underclass. Dina Paucar is currently the most popular recording star in
Peru. She sings a commercial style of I-!uqyno known as I-fuqyno Norteno or simply folklore.
Born in Huanuco in the Northern Sierra, she migrated to Lima as a child. Like Chacal6n,
her appeal is at least partially due to her rags to riches story. She now often sells out large
arenas filled with Peruvian immigrants in New York and New Jersey without a single
advertisement in the English-language media.
10 This advertisement is available at: EL GRAN RETO MUY PRONTO [video],
from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTEqL915zoM (accessed 14 March 2009).
94
BUSH
Andes of Peru.
11
The dancers, almost exclusively male, are ritual special-
ists who mediate between the rural Andean community and autochtho-
nous nature deities- found in mountains, caves, lakes, rivers, and water-
falls-known as Wamani.
12
Accompanied by a musical ensemble of
Andean harp and violin, the dancers hold two independent pieces of steel
in the style of scissors, which they click together like castanets. During
local patron saints festivities, the dancers compete against each other
individually through a series of rapid stepdancing, and acrobatic maneu-
vers. These competitions terminate in pruebas de valor (tests of bravery),
where the dancers pierce their skin with knives, pins, or sickles, swallow
fire or swords, or eat frogs, snakes, and mice. Although marginalized and
suppressed over the colonial period for its purported connections to dia-
bolicism, the dance has recently achieved a high degree of visibility in
national and transnational arenas.13 Through touristic display, interna-
tional tours, and media representations the dance has captured the atten-
tion of national and international audiences due to its spectacular chore-
ography and its links to pre-modern forms of Andean mysticism and
spirituality.
While the exoticized discourse of the advertisement echoes the
representational strategies used to display the dance for the Western gaze,
the intended audience for the miniseries was quite different. The program
was a tremendous ratings success primarily because the audience was
II The region is the poorest and considered to be the most indigenous area in
Peru. Historically, it has been pejoratively called Mancha India (Indian Stain). Canonical
Peruvian anthropologist Jose Maria Argued as named this entire area the Chanka cultural
region after the well-known pre-Inca confederacy. The Chanka remained rivals of the Inca
and never lost a distinctive identity even after they were conguered. Arguedas explained
that the region shared distinctive cultural traits including a dialect of Quechua and danza
de las tijeras. See: Jose Maria Arguedas, "Notas Elementales Sobre eJ Arte Popular Religioso
y Ia Cultura Mestiza de Huamanga," Formacion de una Cultura Nacional Indoamericana
(Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores S.A., 1977): 148-172.
12 Although the dance was traditionally limited to male dancers, the modern
innovation of female scissors dancers (Warmi Danzaq) has been introduced. The first
Warmi Danzaq emerged from Huancavelica in the 1970s. Huancavelica has Jed the way in
this area with several well-known Warmi Danzaq, but now there are several female dancers
from Ayacucho and Apurimac as well.
13 The scissors dancers have long been thought to have a pact with the devil.
This belief is a residue of Peru's seventeenth and eighteenth century extirpations of idol-
atry that considered all native deities agents of the devil. Although contemporary scissors
dancers often refuse all mention of diabolic iconography, older dancers represent them-
selves as having a pact with the devil. However, what they mean when they say devil does
not necessarily imply evil, but rather the spiritual entities of the natural landscape.
ELCRAN RETO 95
Figure 2: Scissors dancer from Huancayelica performing backflips at a festival
in the district of Ate-Vitarte in Lima, 2007. Phow by author.
Figure 3: Scissors dancer Cusi Cusi performing pruebas de valor (tests of brav-
ery) at Qori Sisicha's anniversary event, 2008. Photo by author.
96 BusH
comprised of Andean migrants and their children. Mediating between
the faceless bureaucracy of the network and this intended public were the
two most publicly recognizable scissors dancers, R6mulo Huamani, and
Damian de la Cruz Ccanto, better known by their artistic names of Qori
Sisicha, and Ccarccaria respectively.
14
They lent their names and personas
to two of the principal characters.
1
5 They trained the actors in the basic
steps of the dance, and replaced them as stand-ins during the more dif-
ficult sequences. Perhaps most importantly, they served as the public
faces of the E/ Gran Reto. Their participation legitimated its representa-
tion in order to promote it for an Andean audience. Qori Sisicha and
Ccarccaria made numerous appearances on news, talk shows, and come-
dy programs, promoting the series and danza de las tj;eras more generally.
The dancers clearly saw an opportunity to consolidate the public's asso-
ciation of danza de las tijeras with their own public personas. They pro-
duced and profited from performance events that offered E/ Gran Reto en
Vivo (Live). Although Frequencia Latina had little to do with the produc-
tion or planning of these events, they benefited greatly from the free
publicity the events generated. In several sites throughout the outskirts of
Lima where migrants have settled, thousands of spectators came to see
"real" scissors dancers perform live, and to have their photos taken with
the actors.16
In the second epigraph, Ccarccaria describes his experience in
the spotlight as a celebrity participant in E/ Gran Reto. Although the quote
is tinged with its author's knack for hyperbole, I maintain that it reveals a
claim to inclusion and cultural citizenship against a history of marginali-
14 Each scissors dancer takes a Quechua artistic name during initiation rites;
Qori Sisicha is Quechua for Little Golden Ant and Ccarccaria is Quechua for Incestuous
Demon. The dark aspect of Ccarccaria's name reflects both the syncretic taint of diabol-
icism in scissors dance mythology and a personal story I will explain later.
15 The dancers were portrayed by veteran Peruvian television actors. Qori
Sisicha was played by Pold Gastello and Ccarccaria by Gerardo Zamoa.
16 These outlying districts of Lima's Metropolitan area are called conos (cones)
or pueblos ;ovenes (young towns). They began as land invasions of abandoned or uninhab-
ited land outside of the city. These takeovers eventually require the state to extend city
services to these areas. Today, many neighborhoods in the conos have been deYeloped to
the extent that they have been integrated as legitimate parts of the city. There is highly
uneven economic development berween neighborhoods and even berween houses on the
same block. The bustling growth of Peru, and Lima in particular, has reached many of
these areas. Some migrant districts, such as Comas, feature Western style malls, where res-
idents consume indulgently, even as they hold onto some aspects of traditional Andean
identity and culture.
EL GJVL'\' RETO 97
ty and exclusion. Through marketing savvy, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria
have succeeded in expanding the public discourse in Peru on indigenous
spiritual practices and their continuing relevance for inhabitants of met-
ropolitan Lima, who otherwise lead modern lifestyles. In this essay I
examine the complex process whereby indigenous ritual dance is trans-
formed into mass entertainment. How are the celebrity personas of Qori
Sisicha and Ccarccaria implicated in the recognition of Andean cultural
citizenship? How did a pair of Andean migrants gain the cultural capital
to stage this formerly "satanic" ritual on national television? Why have
they amplified their discursive and embodied performances of indige-
nous identity, even as they have mastered repertoires of self-representa-
tion in modern and transnational public spheres?
Ironically, the opposition between Andean culture and moderni-
ty that has served the interests of the hegemonic criol/o elite in Lima, has
its counterpart in the supposed champions of Andean "folk" culture.
Anthropology and Folklore Studies in Peru have participated in "a struc-
tural-functionalist tradition that has contributed to the creation of a
homogenized and many times synchronic cultural referent, objectified in
the notion of lo Andino."l7 The transformation from rural ritual to urban
mass entertainment is a recurrent theme in pervious ethnographic stud-
ies of danza de las tfjeras. These studies attempt to clearly distinguish
between authentic ritual performances and artificial entertainments
staged in Lima. In 1977, anthropologist Alejandro Vivanco introduced
his article with the following:
Since the 1950s the scissors dance has been presented
with certain frequency in theatres in Lima. It is consid-
ered by people of scant information as a simple mani-
festation of grotesque movements, tremendous acro-
batic abilities, that seems to have no other function but
the entertainment of the spectator. IS
After trivializing the function of these "entertainments" he goes on to
explain the "true" value of the dance in its "relation with the magic-reli-
gious conception of the world of the spirits in the cosmovision of
17 Gisela Canepa Koch, "The Geopolitics of Identity: Migration, Ethnicity, and
Place in the Peruvian Imaginary. Fiestas and Devotional Dances in Cuzco and Lima"
(Ph.D diss., University of Chicago, 2003), 2.
18 Alejandro Vivanco, La Danza de las Tijeras (Lima: UNMSM, 1977), 39.
98 B USH
ancient Peru."19
The most sophisticated study of this dynamic between ritual and
entertainment, with respect to danza de las tijeras, is the book Los Dansaq
by Lucy Nunez Rebaza. The author chronicles in-depth the (dis)continu-
ities in the practice of danza de las tiJeras (noting that most of its practi-
tioners have migrated to Lima). Her study recognizes that authentic
forms of transmission and representation are possible within urban
spaces. However, she also falls back on a dichotomy between the authen-
tic-represented by the reproductions of local Andean fiestas staged by
migrants associations-and the artificial-represented by representations
of the dance in the mass media. She concludes:
The communications media manipulates popular art
and the artist, who are converted into wage-workers
without control over the outcome of production, pro-
gressively lose their identification with their region and
social class through their assimilation of the competi-
tion and individualism generated by a few empresarios
that exercise control not only of communications
media, but also of labor and artistic markets.zo
However, nearly twenty-five years after Nunez Rebaza complet-
ed her fieldwork, it is clear that these types of events cannot be neatly
separated. Commodification bleeds into popular forms of the celebra-
tion of migrant identity in multiple ways, and vice versa.
There are numerous problematic assumptions with the binary
logic that neatly separates authentic from artificial performances of folk-
lore. First, it denies agency to the "folk" performers who participate in
commercial representations of the dance. They are perceived to be
exploited victims or worse in the incorporation of Andean folk culture
into national and global hegemony. To return to the words of the second
epigraph, Ccarccaria does not experience his participation in El Gran Reto
as exploitation, but rather as an empowering moment of personal and
collective recognition. Second, this binary approach opposes an idealized
collectivism of rural Andean communities against the individualism and
competition of capitalist societies. Empirical research in both Lima and
the provmces should make it clear that this is a false dichotomy. We
19
Ibid., 39.
20 Lucy Nunez Rebaza, Los Dansaq (Lima: Museo Nacional de Ia Cultura
Peruana, 1992), 137.
ELGRAN RETO
99
should remember that even in the most traditional contexts of rural
Andean festivities, scissors dancers are contracted, individual performers
who compete against each other and gain or lose personal status accord-
ing to their performance. Collectivist notions of qyni, or reciprocity, also
manifest themselves in surprising ways in urban spaces, even during com-
mercial transactions.21
Perhaps the most important assumption that underlies the bina-
ry logic of separating authentic from artificial is that Andean traditional
culture is pure, unified, and outside of history. According to this view,
"folk" culture only becomes part of history as it is corrupted by moder-
nity and transformed into "mass" culture. In anthropological discourse,
"mass" culture, entertainment, and spectacle are synonyms which feed
into long-standing, anti-theatrical discourses that represent the artificiali-
ty and fragmentation of modernity itself. As Jesus Martin Barbero argues:
The formation of mass culture has most commonly
been interpreted from a "culturalist" perspective, name-
ly as the loss of authenticity or cultural degradation, and
relatively little attention is given to the changes in the
social function of culture itself or to the relation of the
formation of mass culture to two other movements,
urbanization and the emergence of a new form of the
popular in mass culture.22
I contend, along with Martin Barbero, that instead of mourning the death
of "folk" authenticity in scissors dance performance, we need to histori-
cize the social changes that have lead to the transformation of the dance
into an icon of Andean identity that is staged in multiple ways in urban
and global mass culture.
A promising approach to the complex relationship between
"folk" culture and "mass" culture during an age of increasing globaliza-
tion is captured in the term "public culture," coined by Arjun Appadurai
21 For example, it is now customary for high ranking dancers to stage an
anniversary event each year. Nthough these are commercial events designed to make
money for the dancer, contributions from friends and family are sought to help meet
expenses for the event. Other dancers are expected to help the celebrated dancer with
labor and monetary contributions. They can expect these favors to be returned during
their own commercial events. In such ways, traditional concepts such as t!Jni are reworked
for new siruations.
22 Jesus Martin Barbero, Communication, Culture, and Hegemony: From the Media to
Mediations, translated by Elizabeth Fox and Robert White (London: Sage, 1993), 120.
100 BUSH
and Carol Breckenridge. They argue that the concept of "public culture"
Allows us to describe not a type of cultural phenome-
non but a zone of cultural debate .... The contestatory
character of public culture has much to do with the ten-
sions and contradictions between national sites and
transnational cultural processes. These tensions generate
arenas where other registers of culture encounter, inter-
rogate, and contest one another in new and unexpected
ways.23
Appadurai and Breckenridge offer us a way to think about folklore's rela-
tion to modernity in ways more complex than simple binary oppositions
between authentic "folk" culture and artificial "mass" culture. They
define the relation between these forms as complex and contradictory
zones of negotiation and contestation. In a later work, Appadurai further
defines this zone of contestation as "neither purely emancipatory nor
entirely disciplined but as a space of contestation in which individuals
and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the 'mod-
ern."'24
It is within the zone of "public culture" that Qori Sisicha and
Ccarccaria have brought a self-promotional ethos to using various media,
including international tours, public performance events in Lima, and
commercial audio and video recordings, to disseminate their tradition in
national and transnational public spheres. They have consciously con-
structed their public personas from the juxtaposition of seemingly con-
tradictory narratives. They represent themselves as living embodiments
of the continuity of Andean ritual practice. Thus, they performatively
embody the iconic Andean authenticity of danza de las tf;eras itself. Yet, it
is that very embodiment of authenticity that has enabled them to travel
the world and participate in a modern cosmopolitan lifestyle, forging rela-
tionships with cultural institutions, NGOs, international indigenous
organizations, the mass media, and ethnographic researchers. I contend
that Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria have become what Marisol de la Cadena
describes as "grassroots intellectuals," which she defines as "nonacadem-
23 Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, "Public Modernity in India,"
Consuming Modemiry: Public Culture in a South Asian World, edited by Carol Breckenridge
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 5.
2
4
Arjun Appadurai, Moderni!J at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.
EL GRAJ\' RETO 101
ic thinkers who, by organizing and engaging in persuasive activities, con-
tribute to bringing into being new modes of thought shaped after their
own conception of the world and conscious line of moral conduct."
2
5
Thus, in the remainder of this essay I wish to emphasize their agency in
representing themselves and their cultural heritage through commercial
spheres.
R6mulo Huamani was born in the small village of Chipao in
Ayacucho. At age five he migrated with his family to Lima. He learned
danza de las tijeras as a child from his uncle, a dancer known as Qori Wayra.
In his twenties he joined the theatrical ensemble led by well-known vio-
linist Maximo Damian Huamanf.26 In 1982 he left Maximo Damian's
group and formed his own theatrical ensemble known as Los Danzag de
Ayacucho. The ensemble has toured extensively in international folklore
festivals throughout South America, Europe, North America, and Asia.
The theatrical spectacle Qori Sisicha has choreographed for these inter-
national tours builds upon the conceit of one-on-one competition in
order to theatricalize the dance. In a video documenting a performance
at the Kennedy Center in 2003, Qori Sisicha competed against a younger
dancer known as El Chino de Andamarca. The two dancers played direct-
ly to the crowd, trying to outdo each other with increasingly virtuosic
acrobatic movements. With its acrobatic virtuosity and a showman's sen-
sibility, the format plays directly into Qori Sisicha's strengths. Although
Los Danzaq de Ayacucho is an ensemble of performers, publicity for the
group focuses almost entirely on the celebrity of its director.27
25 Marisol de Ia Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in
Cuzco Peru, 1919-1991 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 7.
26 Maximo Damian Huamani is well-known in Andean folklore circles due in
large part to the efforts of anthropologist Jose Maria Arguedas. In the 1950s, Arguedas
discovered the violinist performing in a large commercial venue. The two became friends
and Arguedas even dedicated his last novel, Ei Zorro de Arriba ei Zorro de Abqjo, to him.
He has continued to perform with scissors dancers and maintains his own theatrical
troupe which, until Qori Sisicha's and Ccarccaria's successes, was one of the only groups
to tour internationally.
2
7
The cover for the DVD for this Kennedy Center performance announces
"Los Danzaq de Ayacucho" in very small letters at the top. "Qori Sisicha" appears in
much larger type below. The remainder of the space of the front coyer, as well as the
entire back cover, is filled with photographs of Huamani performing posed steps of the
scissors dance repertoire in full cosrume. The group is made up of several other well-
known individual artists. For example, the group's violinist, Andres "Chimango" Lares,
maintains his own highly professional website, and frequently collaborates with other
musicians such as Manuelcha Prado and Jose Navarro on various audio and video record-
ings. However, Chimango and the other individual artists of Los Danzaq de Ayacucho
102 BUSH
Ccarccaria also rose to prominence by forming a touring theatri-
cal ensemble, Los Galas de Villallacta.
2
B Ccarccaria developed a style of
theatrical scissors dance choreography he calls ballet de Ia danza de las tijeras.
Unlike Qori Sisicha's loose improvisations based upon the
competitions of Andean festivities, Ccarccaria creates tightly-knit unison
choreographies. He has also taken credit for aestheticizing the costumes,
including making them more colorful and uniform. A number of later
theatrical ensembles from Huancavelica have adopted both of these
innovations, perhaps explaining their higher visibility both in Lima's pen(u
and in international festivals.29
Qori Sisicha's publicity explicitly represents him as a living
embodiment of the continuity of Andean tradition. According to
nalist Jesus Raymundo, "[w]ith his steps inspired by the footprints of his
masters and the force of the mountains Qori Sisicha will continue to lead
the cultural resistance of the dance that symbolizes the liberty and the
faith of the Andean people."30 A similar narratiYe opens another hagio-
graphic profile:
His acrobatic steps are guided by the telluric force of
the Andes. They are inspired by the profound respect of
nature and in the persistent defense of his origins. And
they indicate the encounter with the pachamama (earth-
mother), the apus and wamanis (sacred mountains), the
tqyta inti (sun god), and the hatun qocha (seas and rivers).
But R6mulo Huamani e/ danzaq- scissors from
Ayacucho, in each presentation also remembers the
masters of his native land, Lucanas.31
subordinate themselves to the celebrity of their director. "Agrupacion Cultural Los
Danzaq de Ayacucho: Qori Sisicha." DVD 2003.
28 Los Galas is the local name of danza de las tijeras in the Huancaveuca region,
because of its similarities to Galecian dances from Spain. Villallacta is a nickname for the
capital city of Huancaveuca, with "villa" being Spanish for village, and "llacta" Quechua
for village. In English this nickname literally translates to "village village."
2
9
Penas are folkloric dinner theaters where tourists or middle-class Peruvians
on special occasions enjoy a buffet of typical Peruvian food and a show of typical dances
from different regions of Peru.
30 Jesus Raymundo, "Danzante de los Apus," Diario Ia Primera Penl, 6 July 2008, 3.
3! Jesus Raymundo, "Las Tijeras que Danzan," El Peruano, 19 June 2002, 27.
ELCRAN RETO
103
Both of these authors draw connections between the dancer's move-
ments and the natural Andean landscape, as well as the continuity of the
form over time represented in the figure of the master. They also bridge
the gap between the numerous local cultures called "Andean" and imag-
ine an ahistorical Andean spirit embodied by Qori Sisicha's performanc-
es.
Qori Sisicha skillfully uses this narrative in order to appropriate
authority over the future of the tradition. He locates authenticity in the
ritualized connection between the initiated dancer and the spiritual enti-
ties of the natural world. In an interview, he exclaims "dancers are not
complete masters if they do not know how to work with metal, if they
do not know how to construct their own costumes, and if they do not
play their scissors at the rhythm of the harp and violin."32 The negative
construction of this statement indicates his view that these values are
threatened. He has confided in me on numerous occasions his worries
that younger dancers are learning the tradition not from initiated masters,
but rather imitating movements from popularly circulating DVDs and
representing themselves as danzantes de t!Jeras.33
Ccarccaria's publicity also represents the dancer as a living
embodiment of Andean tradition. A profile of the dancer that appears
on Promperu's (the state tourist board website) emphasizes the exotic spir-
itual elements of the dance. Ccarccaria tells us, "We professional dancers
read coca leaves as a way of getting closer to the future. They only give
us an idea."34 He is well aware of these exotic tropes, both exploiting and
resisting them for his own benefit. In the same profile the dancer is quot-
ed as saying, "We dance all night without stopping and to recover our
strength we eat frogs at dawn ... . They help us tolerate the cold of the
Andean night. They taste like any other meat and since I started eating
them I have never had the flu nor a headache."3S He normalizes and
downplays the pruebas de valor, which some observers believe are diaboli-
cal and savage. In doing so, he links eating frogs with a more enduring
and safer stereotype of indigenous cultures as holders of traditional heal-
ing powers and spiritual knowledge. He later offers a more profound
interpretation of the significance of the pruebas de valor, suggesting,
32Jbid.
33 R6mulo Huamani, interview by author, 21 December 2007.
3
4
"Damian, the Man who Dances with Narure," Kilca Peru, February 2003, 3.
35 I bid.
104 BUSH
"[w]ithout speaking, we show that we suffered during the time of resist-
ance."36
Ccarccaria is a talented storyteller and is not ashamed to boast of
his own accomplishments. He seems to have a number of standard self-
aggrandizing stories that he tells in slight variations to different inter-
viewers. Two of these tales explain his given and artistic names. The three
parts of his given name symbolically link Ccarccaria to the transculturat-
ed elements of the dance itself. Damian, of course, translates to
"Damian" or "demon," de la Cruz to "of the cross," and Ccanto is the
Quechua word for the Cantuta flower, an icon of the Andes. Diabolic,
Catholic, and Andean elements coexist in order to name a dancer whose
tradition's history combines all three. With regards to his artistic name, he
explains that he had a pair of cousins who married. He took the name
Ccarccaria, a mythical demon created by incest, in order to take away the
stigma attached to their relationship. He pledged as a young dancer that
someday the name would no longer be associated with incest but rather
affectionately with danza de las tijeras. He maintains that he has succeeded
in this goal and has taken away the stigma of incest.37
Innovative cosmopolitanism is also an important element of
Ccarccaria's persona. He frequently exploits his associations with other
celebrities to evoke his own prestige. He claimed friendship with Mexican
ranchera singer Juan Gabriel, exclaiming, "Juan Gabriel is a man with many
virtues, but above all he is a human being that values people for what they
are and not what they have."38 In another article he boasts, "I have
danced for President Clinton, in governmental palaces, in cultural fairs.
When you stand on the points of your toes or jump from your backside
the gringos get excited and scream."39 When I attend events he has pro-
duced, Ccarccaria often exploits my presence to demonstrate his cos-
mopolitanism. It is quite clear that my subject position as American and
as gringo adds legitimacy to the dancer's fame in the eyes of the dancer
himself and his audience. Perhaps a more auspicious exploitation of his
association with gnngos is his boastful claim to have fallen in love with a
36 Ibid.
3
7
Damian de Ia Cruz Ccanto, interview by author, 22 December 2007.
38 "Danzante de Tijems Ccarccaria Celebra 31 anos de Vida Artistica" RPP
Noticias, 5 May 2007, http:/ /cms. rpp.com.pe/ponada/entretenimiento/76524_1.php
?font=3 (accessed 16 February 2008).
39 Nilton V. Torres, "El (no tan) Joven Manos de Ti jeras," La Republica, 17
August 2006, 18.
EL GRAN RETO 105
French anthropologist and to have "a gringo son with green eyes."40 I do
not suggest that the relationship itself is opportunist, but rather that the
dancer feeds into a dominant ideology in Peruvian culture, where the
physical traits of "whiteness" are coded as symbols for cosmopolitanism
and modernity, and are privileged over those of the indigenous majority.
While Ccarccaria more easily plays the role of modern innova-
tor, Qori Sisicha is hardly portrayed as a relic of the past. Much of his
publicity focuses on his use of modern technology and the prestige of
celebrity in the service of preserving tradition. He told one interviewer:
"It is a new experience for us to get to know new cultures and new
lifestyles. We have committed ourselves to danza de tijeras and Andean cul-
ture. Therefore we dedicate ourselves to representing it with responsibil-
ity."41 In another article, he explains, "The goal of these activities is to
gain recognition for Peruvian culture. Our presence in other festivals has
allowed that today the scissors dance is recognized as one of the most
beautiful dances on the internationallevel."42 These statements seamless-
ly connect his opportunities to travel the world to his responsibility for
the tradition. In 2007, the dancer embarked on a tour of Europe, not
only with danzantes de tijeras, but also other lesser-known dances from
Ayacucho. He uses his own international acclaim to promote the folklore
of Ayacucho as national culture. The folklore of the region, perceived to
be poor and backward in the national imaginary, is gaining recognition in
transnational arenas, thus raising its profile within national spaces.
Perhaps it is the contradictory roles of both modernizers and
traditionalists that Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria have played that have
bound the two performers together in fruitful collaborations. In 2000,
they attempted to form a national school of danza de las tijeras supported
by and housed in the Instituto Naciona! de Ia Cultura (INC) . This school
included a third instructor, Walter Velille (Qesqento), a practitioner of the
regional strain of Apurimac.
4
3 The attempt was short-lived, as the fund-
40 Moises Quihue Flores, "Ccarccaria: Nuestro Exito Depende en uno Mismo,"
Diario El Correo (9 September 2008), 2.
41 "Las Tijeras que Danzan," E/ Peruano, 19 April 2002, 27.
42 Jose Vadillo Villa, "Tiempo de Tijeras," El Peruano, 11 April 2007, 32.
43 Velille is a dancer from Apurimac, yet the distinct style from Apurimac is dis-
appearing. In reality, he dances both this distinct style and the variant from Ayacucho. He
was incorporated into the group Los Danzaq de Ayacucho. He has recently immigrated
to the United States and has formed a group Los Chankas with the Ayacuchano dancer
Luis Aguilar, in New York.
106 BusH
ing for the project dried up, and they became frustrated by the bureau-
cracy of the INC. However, the few class sessions that did happen were
widely considered a success. Having three masters from the three distinct
regional strains of the dance allowed them to teach the same group of
dancers the similarities and differences between the distinct styles. In this
way, they could create interaction between the distinct styles without
completely homogenizing the tradition. Both Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria
demonstrate the political efficacy of uniting the dispersed community of
scissors dancers as a collective.
They have continued to struggle to construct a Casa de Ia Danza
de las Tijeras. Since 2004, there have been occasional press reports that the
opening of the Casa and the formation of the National School is immi-
nent in such and such location. Unfortunately, funding for this project
has never quite materialized. They intend for the Casa to be the main
institution supporting the production of knowledge about the tradition,
and maintaining and modernizing traditional modes of face-to-face cul-
tural transmission. They also hope the institution will serve as a mecha-
nism to bridge relations between newly integrated communities of scis-
sors dancers, as well as aficionados and researchers. Their first priority is
the construction of the school, but they also plan to construct an archive,
performance space, and temporary housing for rural dancers visiting
Lima. They intend for the institution to mediate the local tradition and
national and transnational publics. At the same time, it is a response to
new forms of transmission facilitated by the electronic media in order to
maintain the integrity of traditional teaching methods and open the face-
to-face transmission to a wider public. In June 2007, they were invited to
perform for the President of Peru, Alan Garcia, and invited guests. Qori
Sisicha took the opportunity to request that the President grant them a
piece of land in order to construct their institution. After all, the dance is
considered to be a Cultural Patrimony of the Nation and is one of the
most visible Peruvian folk dances internationally.
44
President Garcia
promised them a small vacant lot in the working class neighborhood of
Santa Anita. However, they have not been able to begin building because
of a border dispute with the evangelical church next door.
In order to raise visibility and capital for the construction of the
Casa de Ia Danza de las Tfjeras, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria staged a large
performance spectacle in November of 2007 in Lima's Parque de Ia
Exposici6n. The event, entitled Ef Gran Desafio de Ia Danza de las Tijeras
(fhe Great Scissors Dance Challenge), offered more than fifty scissors
4
4
The Institute Nacional de Cultura declared danza de las tijeras a Patrimonio
Cultural de Ia Naci6n (Cultural Patrimony of the Nation) in 2005.
EL GRAN REm 107
dancers in competition. The program opened with a synchronized ballet
of child scissors dancers choreographed by Ccarccaria. Perhaps nothing
wins over a general public more than child performers completing t he
acrobatic choreography of danza de las tijeras. The main competition last-
ed the entire afternoon. In the evening, various musical acts, including
Andean guitar virtuoso Manuelcha Prado, entertained the crowd. Perhaps
the most interesting moment of the event came during the performance
by Peruvian rock group, La Sarita. This group has incorporated scissors
dancing into several of their songs. While performing their song Danza
La RaZ"fl, an arrangement of traditional music set to rock instruments, the
band was joined by the dancing of Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria them-
selves. In this vein, the dancers linked the reaffirmation of the dance in
Andean migrant communities with a broader reaffirmation of the same
dance in Peruvian artistic circles.
El Gran Desafto was particularly notable for the space of its per-
formance. Until very recently, the Parque de Ia Exposici6n was a bastion of
recreation and leisure for Lima's criollo elite. Even today, the park's
grounds seem like a nostalgic oasis of Lima's garden city past in the midst
of the movement and chaos of downtown Lima. In a televised interview
which aired the day after the event, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria clearly
took indigenous subject positions, claiming that the dance represented
the resistance of Andean spirituality in the face of centuries of colonial
oppression. By invading public spaces formerly reserved for the criollo
elite and acting as serious representatives of Andean culture in the news
media, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria concretely dramatized the dynamic
changes in Peruvian society that scholars have described with images of
the "invasion," "Andeanization," "indigenization," "ruralization," and
"reconquest" of Lima.45
El Gran Reto was born directly out of El Gran Desafto. Attending
the El Gran Desafio event was successful television producer, Susan
Bamonde. She later approached Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria to secure
their participation in a new television mini-series based on danza de las
tijeras. The original idea for the series sprang from a recent Chinese ftlm,
Bian Lian, about a young girl's apprenticeship with a traditional mask-
maker. Bamonde adapted Bian Lian to the more local idiom of danza de
las tfjeras, citing the intense spiritual and physical intensity of the dance.46
45 See Jose Matos Mar, Desborde Popular y Cnsis del Estado: E l Nuevo Rostro del Peni
en Ia Decada de Ia 1980 (Lima: Institute de Estudios Peruanos, 1986).
46 Jose Puga, "Magia y Leyendas en el Mundo de los Dansaq," El Commercio, 24
January 2008, C8.
108 BusH
Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria immediately agreed to participate, without
pay, as advisors for the program. Although Qori Sisicha has expressed his
feelings that the network has exploited him, he approaches these feelings
with resignation. ''Asi es nuestra Peru" (This is our Peru)" he rold me.47
Agreeing to participate in the series without pay was a pragmatic decision
that has allowed the dancers to further consolidate their power and access
to public representations of the dance. They told me that if they did not
participate in the production, then other less famous and less knowl-
edgeable dancers would. They defended their authority and they
expressed genuine concern for how the dance is represented and their
desire to raise its profile to that of a national symbol that represents all
of Peru.
48
The central plot of El Gran Reto follows its source, Bian Lian,
quite closely. An adolescent girl, Julia, vows to avenge her father, a scis-
sors dancer killed by the sorcery of a rival, by becoming a complete dan-
zante and besting Cirilo, her father's murderer. She is constrained by tra-
ditional limits that only allow men to become danzantes. Dressing as a boy,
she searches for a new master in order to complete her training. She flnds
Qori Sisicha, and with some reluctance, he agrees to become her new
master. In the meantime, the villainous Cirilo challenges Qori Sisicha and
Ccarccaria to a major competition. Cirilo is an inexperienced dancer, but
his powers are supplemented by the pact he has made with SuptfY, the son
of the devil.49 Like a typical telenovela, the melodramatic plot is filled with
too many twists to adequately summarize here. The series leads up to the
flnal competition where Qori Sisicha, Ccarccaria, Julia, and Ccarccaria's
son Alex attempt to defeat the evil powers of Cirilo and Supqy.
Eventually, it is an undisguised Julia, and not her more experienced mas-
ters, who is able to vanquish Cirilo. She gathers this strength from her
romantic young love with Alex.
Through its melodramatic plot, El Gran Reto was able to address
both the desires and anxieties of an audience dealing with the Andean
culture's entrance into modernity. The protagonists leave the Andes
47 Romulo Huamani, interview by author, 23 April 2008.
4
8
Romulo Huamani and Damian de La Cruz Ccanto, interview by author, 6
May 2008.
49 Supay is a Quechua word usually translated as demon or devil. However, it is
a Pre-Columbian concept that referred to underground spirits associated with death and
destruction, but not wholly evil. Like other Andean deities, they responded to favor and
offerings. After the conquest, the term came to be associated with the Christian devil, and
now is used quite ambiguously within Andean culture.
ELGRAN RETO
109
shortly after the opening episodes and spend the majority of the series
training in Lima. The act of urban migration is represented in sanitized
form. When the characters arrive in Lima, they are not forced to overpay
for an overcrowded apartment in Lima's dangerous slums, or toil for
years to build a house from scratch in a pueblo joven. Rather, they rent a
nice house in a residential district of Lima that looks a lot like high-rent
Miraflores. In other ways, the potential obstacles of poverty and racism
are elided, and a certain continuity and harmony is portrayed between
Andean traditions and modern life. In one scene, Ccarccaria heals the ail-
ing Amelia, Qori Sisicha's sister, with traditional medicine and mystical
curing powers. Her doctors are at first shocked, but they quickly realize
an affinity between traditional and Western medicine. Later, Amelia
works with an NGO to set up a profitable business selling Andean woven
blankets to European buyers.
At the same time, El Gran Reto expresses certain anxieties about
the excesses of modern life, through the character of Cirilo. Cirilo pres-
ents danza de las tijeras at a pena called El Senorio Criollo.so He dances with
several scantily-clad girls, and he performs explicit, sexualized gestures
between two of the female dancers. When Alex and Julia enter the club,
they are disgusted by the manner in which their competitor is violating
the sacred tradition. The character of Cirilo represents the anxieties that
Qori Sisicha, Ccarccaria, and other middle-aged scissors dancers have
expressed towards younger dancers who learn the dance in Lima. Like
these younger dancers, Cirilo is inexperienced and attempts to go beyond
his skill without going through the training necessary to become a "com-
plete" dancer. He could be seen to represent the "dangerous" powers of
new forms of transmission that threaten traditional forms of authority.
In this case, modern technology is displaced onto black magic,
Gender is a particularly important site where traditional bound-
aries are allowed to loosen, at the same time that anxiety is expressed at
the complete undoing of traditional gender roles. One by one, the char-
acters learn of Julia's actual gender. The last to know is Qori Sisicha, who
feels betrayed and refuses to train a woman. Yet, by the end of the pro-
gram, he allows her to compete in El Gran Reto. She succeeds in defeat-
ing Cirilo where her master failed. Although the show allows for the pos-
sibility of modernizing women's roles in "modern" Andean culture, it
also portrays a significant amount of anxiety over homosexuality. Julia's
gender disguise causes several instances where heterosexual desire is mis-
50 EJ Senorio Criollo is an actual peiia located in the district of Surco, close to
where my apartment in Lima was located. As far as I know, they do not present danza de
las tijeras as part of their show.
110 BUSH
taken for homosexuality. Both Alex and Amelia's young son, Huascar,
question their own sexuality as they find themselves sexually attracted to
a chance view of Julia's naked back. When Ccarccaria discovers Julia and
Alex kissing, he is at first furious because he thinks Julia is a boy. When
he learns that he is actually a she, he blesses their relationship and sup-
ports Julia's bid to become a danzante. While the presence warmi danzaq is
portrayed as an inevitable and perhaps even desirable consequence of
modernity, homosexuality is represented as deviant and a threat related to
other excesses of modern life.
When it became clear that El Gran Reto was a ratings success,
Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria organized live, interactive events for the pub-
lic to meet scissors dancers and the actors of the series. They presented
three events in Lima, and then embarked on a national tour of different
cities throughout the country. I attended two of the events in lima, as
well as in Cuzco and Huancavelica. In each event, thousands of enthusi-
astic spectators attended, and in most cases seemed to leave quite satis-
fied, despite some overambitious and misleading advertising.5t This audi-
ence paid between five and fifteen soles for the right to see between fif-
teen and twenty-five scissors dancers compete live. 52 The principal actors
of El Gran Reto also attended the event. They addressed the audience sev-
eral times during the spectacle, and for an additional fee signed auto-
graphs and took their photos with adoring fans. Often, the most enthu-
siastic audience members were children. What struck me as particularly
fascinating was that that the event in Cuzco drew the largest crowd with
the most enthusiastic audience that I witnessed. 53 Danza de las tjjeras is not
well known in Cuzco, which has its own proud, local tradition of staged
folk dances. However, those that attended the event had clearly viewed
the miniseries and identified with its themes. I even saw several children
happily imitating the movements of the dance.
Despite, or probably because of, their fame and success, Qori
Sisicha and Ccarccaria, are viewed ambivalently within the community of
scissors dancers and musicians in Lima. When I began my research, I was
51 This advertising claimed over two-hundred scissors dancers performing at
the event, when the number was usually closer to twenty.
52 The sol is the currency of Peru. The exchange rate as of this writing is just
abm:e three soles per dollar.
53 Cuzco is the former capital of the Inca Empire, and now one of the most
popular tourist destinations in South America. In the 1920s and 1930s, Cuzqueiio indige-
nenista intellectuals pioneered the collection, study, and staging of local indigenous folk-
lore for the purposes of cementing regional and national identity.
ELGRAN RETO
111
Figure 4: Advertisement for El Gran Reto live event in Cuzco, 2008.
Photo by author.
Figure 5: Warmi Danzag (female dancer), Pura Sangre, performing at El Gran
Reto Live event in Huuncavelica, 2008. Photo by author.
112 BUSH
surprised by the professional jealousies I encountered amongst the
dancers. Some dancers accuse Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria of attempting
to claim all public authority of the dance's representation for themselves.
While their artistic mastery is generally accepted, many dancers claim that
far greater practitioners are not receiving due attention because they do
not possess Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria's marketing skills. Others have
challenged their moral character, citing vague accusations of fraud and
embezzlement while they were in charge of associations of scissors
dancers. The majority of musicians and dancers support a national insti-
tution dedicated to teaching, researching, and disseminating the dance.
However, many believe that Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria, often viewed as
motivated primarily by their own fame, are not the best leaders for such
an institution. Despite these ambivalences, the same dancers who com-
plain privately display friendly camaraderie toward their more famous
counterparts in public and willingly participate in their events and proj-
ects.
A growing number of cultural theorists recognize that emerging
public spheres in the contemporary period of globalization are spaces of
consumption related to the mass media and globalizing markets. George
Yudice posits that the contemporary period we call globalization or post-
modernity is defined by a new episteme he calls performativity, which he
claims "refers to the processes by which the identities and entities of
social reality are constituted by repeated approximations of models."S
4
Yudice's notion of performativity as episteme offers us a way to theorize
the resignification of culture, transformation of the public sphere, and
emergent ways of enacting citizenship. These transformations are
explained in the thesis of Yudice's book, when he writes that "culture is
increasingly wielded as a resource for both sociopolitical and economic
amelioration."Ss Thus, I argue that we can look to Qori Sisicha and
Ccarccaria to see how formerly marginalized subjects in many parts of
the postcolonial world are using their cultural practices as a resource to
gain access to public spheres formerly closed to them. These celebrity
scissors dancers embody the reaffirmation of Andean ethnic identity by
staging Andean authenticity as a resource in order to claim a modernity
and inclusion within Peruvian national culture for themselves and other
contemporary Andean subjects. By fusing narratives of authentic conti-
nuity and global cosmopolitanism within their celebrity personas, they
5
4
George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in a Global Era
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 31.
55 Ibid., 2.
E L GRANRETO 113
challenge sedimented notions of indigeneity as being outside of and
oppositional to modernity. However, in assessing their practice, we can-
not simply dismiss received notions of "authenticity" handed down from
classical anthropology; we have to take into account how these artists
manipulate these narratives as a marketing strategy. Narratives of
"authenticity" become performative resources which Qori Sisicha and
Ccarccaria use paradoxically to gain access to modernity and recognition
for their cultural heritage within national and transnational public
spheres. Thus, it is through such narratives of "authenticity" that the
terms of modernity and citizenship are negotiated by Andean subjects
such as Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria.
Contributors
Jason Bush is a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies at The Ohio State
University, where he is also pursuing a graduate minor in Folklore Studies.
His research interests include: ethnography /historiography and perform-
ance, the commodification of cultural heritage, and emergent forms of
cultural citizenship within the globalization of culture. Jason's disserta-
tion examines the staging of Peruvian indigenous dance as transnational
commodity and spectacle.
Lisa Jackson-Schebetta is a third year PhD student in Theatre History,
Theory and Criticism at the University of Washington. Her research
focuses on theatre's intersections with urban warfare, civic engagement,
and conceptualizations of international citizenship.
Jennifer A. Kokai is a recent graduate from the doctoral program in
Performance as Public Practice at The University of Texas at Austin. Her
current research explores U.S. women's use of performance as a mode of
social and political engagement around the time of the American
Revolution.
Laura L. Mielke is an assistant professor of English at the University of
Kansas. The author of Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question
in Antebellum Literature (2008) and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on
American Indian performance in early North America, she is currently at
work on a book treating representations of oratory in antebellum theatre.
Laura Pollard is completing her PhD in American Studies at the
University of East Anglia. She received an MA in Drama from the
University of Toronto and an MSc in International and European Politics
from the University of Edinburgh. This article will be part of her disser-
tation, "Selung what People Need: How the Modern Broadway Musical
Capitalized on Economic, Social, and Political Change."
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