Public death: Lynching drama in the years of its genesis, 1858--1919.
Item
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Title
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Public death: Lynching drama in the years of its genesis, 1858--1919.
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Identifier
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AAI9969707
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identifier
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9969707
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Creator
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Lewis, Barbara Brewster.
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Contributor
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Adviser: James V. Hatch
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Date
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2000
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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 | Literature, American
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Abstract
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Ten lynching dramas are studied in this dissertation. In all ten, written from 1858 through the end of World War I, four elements are included, whether implicitly or explicitly. These four elements are chase, capture, chastisement, and consumption. In Escape (1858), by William Wells Brown, three slaves and a Northern abolitionist, are chased by a lynch mob but not caught, and therefore not consumed. Escape is the only one of the lynching dramas under review in this dissertation in which a lynching---as extralegal capital punishment---is threatened but avoided. All the other plays include a full-fledged lynching, whether in the past or present, and sometimes both. That is the case with The Noose (1919), chronologically the last play studied in this dissertation. In that play which is written by Tracy Mygatt, a hued man is accused of rape and is chased and captured. This lynching recalls an earlier one that occurred in the same southern town when the mother of the main character was a young girl. Together, these two lynchings chart a line of development in the arc of lynching. The second lynching wave, which became institutionalized around the time of the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation in Atlanta, adapted itself to technology and was more extensive in its effect than the first, which ensued after the Civil War and was generally local and clandestine. During the 1890s, mass media and technology began to influence the discourse of lynching, and the height of lynching fever was reached. At the same time, the hued had their own newspapers and a number of editors and publishers denounced the lynching onslaught with virulent words. One such editor is the target of a lynching bee in the first lynching drama written by a woman of hue; that play, Rachel (1916), initiated a feminine response in drama to the lynching outrage. The second half of the dissertation addresses the four plays written by women in opposition to the phenomenon of lynching, which, as it became more nationally known through technology, acquired religious connotations of communal feasting and sacrifice.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
