Sensation, spectacle, and reform in the mid -nineteenth -century American theatre
Item
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Title
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Sensation, spectacle, and reform in the mid -nineteenth -century American theatre
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:c94c185597ea:10317
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identifier
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10222
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Creator
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Hughes, Amy E.,
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Contributor
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Marvin A. Carlson
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | American studies | American history | activism | affect theory | drama | embodiment | nineteenth century | visual culture
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Abstract
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By the second half of the nineteenth century, the rhetoric of sensation had fully permeated U.S. popular culture, surfacing in advertisements, criticism, and other forms of commentary. Its ubiquity suggests that sensation operated as a kind of capital, negotiated and exchanged in actual and metaphorical economies. Simultaneously, individuals and institutions worked to discipline American subjects through the establishment of social conventions and behavioral norms. In this project, I investigate the rapid perpetuation of both sensationalism and normalization during the mid-nineteenth century by exploring the relationship between spectacle and reform. Specifically, I study how "sensation scenes"---climatic moments in melodramas, usually featuring elaborate scenery and special effects---reflected and sometimes challenged ideological positions associated with temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage.;Several questions shape my analysis: How were conceptions of race, gender, and class rehearsed and sustained by way of spectacle? Why were reform-minded theatre managers and audiences attracted to sensational aesthetics---or, conversely, why were producers and consumers of melodrama attracted to reform politics? How did the imagery and affect embedded in spectacular displays extend beyond the theatre's walls?;To address these questions, in the first chapter I map the dynamics of what I call the spectacular instant: a heightened, palpable moment in performance that captivates the spectator through multiple planes of engagement. I interrogate the manifold meanings of "sensation" itself, involving both the body (corporeal response) and culture (exciting or titillating events). In subsequent chapters, I assess how a particular stage image---the delirium tremens in W. H. Smith's The Drunkard (1844), Eliza crossing the ice floes in adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and the victim tied to the railroad tracks in Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight (1867)---worked in tandem with oratorical performance, printed media, and visual and material culture to convey, allay, and even deny stories about the body circulating within diverse publics. Ultimately, I propose that these spectacular instants illuminate the complex ways in which activists leveraged and audiences consumed sensation, and that the visual and visceral mechanisms of spectacle may have been central to the dramaturgy of reform itself.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Theatre
