Snow Day Assignment

Happy snow day! I hope you are enjoying the break in your usual Monday schedule.

How did you like the two plays you read for today? What questions do they raise for you? Take a moment to note your first impressions before moving on to the more elaborate “lecture” below.

In an attempt to reproduce the contents of today’s class on Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), please read the following:

For today’s discussion, please consider this question:

  • How does an ethnic sensibility—one, that is, defined by categories of national origin rather than, or in addition to, race—create space for a flexible performance of racial identity in these plays?

This question arises from the ethnic presence—Boucicault’s Irishness—in two dramas that appear to play in racial binaries, white and black, but also incorporate other racial and ethnic identities as well (Native American, Yankee, Louisiana Creole). Significantly, both works seem to offer an opportunity to think creatively outside the boundaries of racial stereotyping.

The first reading, a definition and brief history of melodrama in the Cambridge Guide to Theatre, may be helpful in providing a historical context for this somewhat amorphous term. It is important to have a precise definition, as Boucicault is actively using and innovating on the form, and Jacobs-Jenkins has studied it extensively.

  • Note that Jacobs-Jenkins’ play begins with an epigraph from Boucicault’s "The Art of Dramatic Composition" (North American Review 126.260 (1878): 40-52) and that Verna A. Foster, in the article noted below, speaks of Jacobs-Jenkins’ appreciative reading of Boucicault’s theatrical art.

The second reading, an essay by Marjorie Howes on Boucicault’s use of melodrama in three works including The Octoroon, places him within a historical shift from “status” to “contract” socioeconomic systems in the Atlantic world.

  • In blending mortgage melodrama with the figure of the “tragic mulatta,” Boucicault draws on popular melodramatic plots that seem fixed in their acceptance of simple moral conflicts (heroes and villains), broad emotions and gestures, and resolutions brought about by contrived and mechanical plot structures.
  • Howes argues, however, for Boucicault’s innovations on hackneyed melodramatic forms. Her use of the historical argument about changing economic systems suggests that Boucicault placed these standard features of melodrama in a fluid world defined not by the property ownership and social status hierarchies of the past but by a changing transatlantic universe in which contracts signal new relationships between old orders.
  • The ethnic experience of migration and adaptation gives artists like Boucicault tools for rethinking outdated social structures, even as he delivers entertainment that depends on them.

Jacobs-Jenkins has the advantage of thinking critically on Boucicault’s practices and of viewing them in a 21st-century perspective. The third reading by Verna A. Foster, introduces a particularly apt term, “meta-melodrama,” to describe Jacobs-Jenkins’s strategy of dramatic adaptation: one that focuses on the audience as not simply “feeling” something (the response that Boucicault’s “sensation” melodrama aimed to evoke) but also seeing themselves feeling something—a level of self-awareness that his troubling material seems urgently to call for.

  • Using a frame story that brings the two playwrights directly onto the stage, Jacobs-Jenkins both “appropriates” Boucicault’s play and writes a “palimpsest” of his own, through which one may view the past through a critical lens.
  • This perspective allows Jacobs-Jenkins to appropriate the sensational and entertaining aspects of Boucicault’s play while also addressing its shocking historical implications and contemporary reverberations.

So that’s what I might have said to start off the discussion. Now let’s approach my starting question: How does an ethnic sensibility—one, that is, defined by categories of national origin rather than or in addition to race—create space for a flexible performance of racial identity in these plays?

In lieu of class discussion, I’d like you to read the materials above and write a response paper of whatever length suits you on some aspect of this collection of readings. That’s a lot of material, so here are some suggestions:

  1. Select one of the plays to examine more closely and highlight a passage that seems to you an apt example of or rejoinder to one of the points in the essays above. Discuss.
  2. Consider the “ethnic” question in relation to the relative social positions of Dion Boucicault Irish immigrant and entrepreneur, and Branden Jacob-Jenkins, African-American graduate of Princeton, NYU, and Juilliard, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow. Who has the more “authority” over his subject?
  3. Compare the way the two authors have treated common material in presenting a specific character or scene. Alternatively, you might consider what Jacobs-Jenkins adds to his Boucicault source and how his changes reflect on the play’s meaning.
  4. 19th-century melodrama made the most of new technologies of theater and of society as well. Imagine how Boucicault produced a steamboat explosion on stage! But just as exciting to audiences would have been the use of photography for forensic analysis of a crime scene. What technologies does Jacobs-Jenkins feature? What is the effect of using new technology in one or both of the plays?

Please submit your response within 24 hours of today’s class time. I will use them to develop a brief wrap-up in class on Session 3 before we go on to discuss Toni Morrison’s Jazz.