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- Title
The Serious Play of Gender: Blackface Minstrel Shows by Mary Barnard Horne, 1892-1897.
- Authors
Recchio, Thomas
- Abstract
Until the 1890s, blackface minstrel shows were performed almost exclusively by men and in professional venues. As amateur theatre flourished in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, blackface minstrelsy became a significant part of amateur performance. And since many amateur performances were dominated by women in both the running of stage venues and the writing and performance of plays and entertainments, women became involved in the writing and performance of blackface minstrel shows. This essay will explore three scripts for minstrel shows written by Mary Barnard Horne in the 1890s in an effort to tease out what those scripts may tell us about the way amateur performance inflected blackface minstrel shows for socially progressive purposes. Despite the fact that blackface minstrel shows were most emphatically a vehicle for whites to ridicule African-Americans, they also became a means as early as the 1840s by which African-Americans could themselves begin to perform on stage. This highly popular and lucrative form of entertainment based on mockery and the defense of a racist status quo also functioned as a venue for affirmative cross-racial interaction between blacks and working-class whites. Minstrel performance was also inflected by black performers for the purpose of professional legitimacy; the presence of black actors in black face imitating white actors in black face imitating blacks gives the performance a sense simultaneously of authenticity while adding an implicit subversive element by the blackface mask concealing not a white but a black face. A similar paradox, it seems to me, was at play when women began to write and to perform in minstrel shows. Women in blackface mimicking men dressed as women in blackface comically evoke and half-correct the images of their cross-dressed male counterparts, enhancing, thereby, the racial mockery of the genre while introducing an element of gender instability to it. When we consider that in the 1890s women were still politically marginalized in America, particularly in terms of voting rights, their legal status being not unlike the unstable legal status of African American men (consider the prevalence of 'Jim Crow' laws in the American south), they were able to deploy the genre for gender-inflected ideological ends within their immediate communities. In the process, they powerfully, though indirectly, argued for the common humanity shared by white and black Americans, male and female.
- Subjects
UNITED States; MINSTREL shows; BLACKFACE entertainers; HORNE, Mary Barnard; AMATEUR theater; ACTRESSES; RACE relations in the United States
- Publication
Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film, 2011, Vol 38, Issue 2, p38
- ISSN
1748-3727
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.7227/NCTF.38.2.6