H ERBERT G RABES Melodrama Against the Revival of Racism? : Bartley Campbell’s The White Slave (1882) Whether W.H. Auden was right when he stated that “poetry makes nothing happen” 1 may be open to discussion; that the novel and also the drama can help to make something happen, at least under special conditions, has been shown beyond doubt. What I am referring to in the present context is, of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1851 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its many stage versions, of which George Aiken’s dramatization was one of the first and - in the form revised by George C. Howard - by far the most successful. This melodramatic staging of the sufferings of African-American slaves not only helped the abolitionist cause by creating a strong emotional reaction against slavery in the period leading to the Civil War; it was also to become an unheard-of success in the American theatre, with about five hundred Tom companies still touring throughout the country by the end of the nineteenth century. 2 No wonder one of the most dextrous writers of melodrama at the time, Dion Boucicault, took up the theme of slavery and tried to appeal even more to the sympathy and moral outrage of a white audience by creating, in The Octoroon (1859), a heroine who was white in appearance, upbringing and behavior yet a slave according to the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem - that is, “if the mother is a slave, the child will also be a slave.” 3 Though by no means the first work in which a stereotype known as the “tragic mulatto” was given literary expression, 4 The Octoroon is quite important in the present context because Campbell borrowed more than a few details from it when much later writing his play The White Slave. The stock feature of melodrama employed, a beautiful and virtuous damsel in distress, was in itself most effective in stirring up the emotions of an audi- 1 “In Memory of W.B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939).”Modern Poets - Three, ed. Jim Hunter (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 25-26; p. 26. 2 Daniel C. Gerould, “The Americanization of Melodrama.” American Melodrama, ed. Daniel C Gerould (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), 7-29; p. 14. 3 An enlarged edition of Richard Hildreth’s antislavery novel The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) appeared, for instance, in 1852 under the title The White Slave: or, Memoirs of a Fugitive. Cf. Lawrence R. Tenzer, Ed. D. and A.D. Powell, “White Slavery, Maternal Descent, And the Politics of Slavery in the Antebellum United States.” Originally presented at University of Nottingham Institute for the Study of Slavery, July/ August 2004. Online: http: / / multiracial.com/ context/ view/ 462/ 27/ 4 Cf. Tenzer and Powell, “White Slavery,” p. 1 and Fn. 5. 260 H ERBERT G RABES ence and winning it over to the side of threatened innocence. Yet the impact was even stronger when the helplessness of the heroine was heightened by making her a slave, and the immoral sexual pursuit of the villain even more fiendish when - as in The Octoroon - she was white in appearance, education and behavior or even - as it turns out in The White Slave - purely white by descent and thus also legally so according to the partus principle. 5 The fact that this law was first instituted in Virginia as early as 1662 shows, by the way, that it was not only the result of an anxiety regarding the social status of the white settlers but also a consequence of the much more deeply rooted Puritan conviction that they were the chosen people. And as in Old Testament religion, it is maternal descent that decides whether one belongs to this people. Soon color was not a reliable marker anyway, because, as Tenzer and Powell state, “Several generations of interracial sexual relations between black slave women and white plantation masters or other white men created a population of white slaves, so-called white mulattoes, slaves who looked white and showed no visible African ancestry whatsoever.” 6 Campbell’s procedure in lifting many features from the earlier play The Octoroon was not unusual, because “melodrama has always been an art of wholesale borrowing.” 7 As he was writing a quarter of a century later, the fact where he imitates Boucicault and where he differs can, I assume, tell us something about his particular intention as well as the changed historical situation. As Gerould has rightly pointed out, “Melodrama is place-oriented,” 8 and though the action of Campbell’s play which is set in 1857 necessitates a change of place after the second act from a plantation in Kentucky to one further south in Mississippi, while Boucicault places all the events of his play from 1859 on a Louisiana plantation, we are dealing in both plays with a quite similar social setting. That the action is located on or quite near the Mississippi river has some historical truth to it because at least the older plantations depended on a waterway to transport their products. What seems more important in both plays is, however, the fact that this location allows for spectacular escapes through the waves and special theatrical effects like the simulation of a burning boat on the river. With regard to plot, in both plays the situation becomes immediately precarious for the heroine - and of course for the other slaves - because it turns out that, after the death of the respective owner, the plantation is 5 For this principle, see Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 43-49 and 411-12. 6 Tenzer and Powell,”White Slavery,” 1. 7 Gerould, “The Americanization of Melodrama,” 10 8 Gerould, “The Americanization of Melodrama,” 16. Melodrama Against the Revival of Racism? … 261 heavily mortgaged and will soon be for sale. The young heroines, however, do not yet realize the danger they are in, because they have been brought up like white ladies and never so far been treated as slaves. They also know that freedom papers have been signed for them and do not suspect that the villains who want to possess them by fair means or foul will soon discover that these papers are not valid, their masters being in debt when they signed them. If anything, the law that one was not entitled to free one’s slaves if in debt makes clear that these human beings were treated legally exactly like real estate or cattle or horses. In a manner typical of the development of melodrama, the situation in The White Slave is - as revealed at the beginning only to the audience - much more complicated, since the supposed white-looking octoroon is in reality (that is: in the improbable fictitious reality of the play) the daughter of the dying plantation owner’s daughter and a French marquis, consequently of purely white descent. Her only - yet as it turns out quite severe - plight is that her grandfather, who brought his granddaughter home when the mother died shortly after giving birth and the aristocratic European father irresponsibly ran away, was so much under the spell of the code of honor of his old Southern family that he would rather pretend that the heroine was the child of a quadroon slave of his than the product of his own daughter’s extramarital relations. The alleged slave mother is even made to swear an oath that she will never reveal the secret and will go to live with Lisa abroad, where nobody will know them. That all this sounds very improbable does not matter in the domain of melodrama; what counts is that in this way we get a white slave and the resulting pent-up emotions with which the audience will observe the course of fate. Most important for this fate is, of course, the obligatory love story. In The Octoroon it was the young heir of the plantation who fell in love with the heroine and was even ready to go abroad with her in order for them to be able to get married. She, however, meant that “There is a gulf between us, as wide as our love, as deep as my despair,” because she wore some “fatal mark”: “the ineffable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black - bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood.” 9 And this seemed to her even more aggravating as there was a white girl, the wealthy daughter of another plantation owner, who was also in love with her friend. So while it is true that she later poisoned herself in the first place to escape the clutches of the villain of the play who had bought her as a slave, the very ending of the play showed that there was also another reason: “I loved you so, I could not bear my fate,” she tells him 9 Dion Boucicault, “The Octoroon.” Representative American Plays From 1767 to the Present Day, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn. 7th edition (New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1957, 371-398; p. 383. 262 H ERBERT G RABES when she is dying, “and then I stood between your heart and hers. When I am dead she will not be jealous of your love for me, no laws will stand between us. […] Oh, George, you may, without a blush, confess your love for the Octoroon.” 10 Being in love with the young man who runs the plantation, Lisa, the heroine of The White Slave, is spared such a tragic fate because her purely white descent is revealed and proved in time and there is no competition of another girl for the favors of her friend. Nevertheless, her love is severely tested and she has to overcome many obstacles before she can confidently look forward to a life with him as her husband on the plantation on which she had enjoyed a happy childhood. Only after it is revealed that the slave trader and villain of the play was a false friend who made him put the plantation in debt and sell the slaves, does her beloved Clay begin to fight for her, and she has to prove as steadfast as behooves a heroine when threatened by her new master, “I can send you to the fields to work all day among the common niggers - a hoe in your hand, rags upon your back.” Typical of melodrama is her often quoted retort, “Rags are royal raiment when worn for virtue’s sake, and rather a hoe in my hand than self contempt in my heart.” 11 Good that she is spared that ordeal, because immediately her friend appears and they can flee together. This flight, though futile in the end, forms the most adventurous part of the action: Her overseer has to be overcome, her new master’s mistress loses her life when trying to stop him, a whole riverboat has to be put on fire to give them a chance to escape to a desolate island, and when discovered and threatened by renewed slavery, the heroine asks her friend to kill her, and when he can’t, attempts to kill herself, yet not before she - just like Boucicault’s octoroon - has told him, “I was only an octoroon, but I rose above my place and in the ecstasy of bliss forgot I had imprisoned in my nature the inheritance of Cain.” 12 As we must all be descendants of Cain because Noah and his family as the only ones to survive the deluge also were, this story that it was the African Americans in particular that bore the mark of Cain was obviously one of the religious ploys to justify racism. By the time the desperate lovers are brought back to the slave trader’s plantation, it is fortunately proven that Lisa is, indeed, a white woman by descent, and the villain is arrested by the sheriff for having killed his octoroon mistress and is even shot by him in self-defense. Only now are the 10 “The Octoroon,” p. 398. 11 Bartley Campbell, The White Slave & Other Plays, ed. Napier Wilt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1940), 199-248; p. 227. 12 The White Slave, Act V, p. 240-41. Melodrama Against the Revival of Racism? … 263 lovers inseparable, and we learn that they will return to their “home in old Ken-tuck” after they have bought back all the slaves from the old plantation. How often a plantation owner or slave trader was indeed arrested by a southern sheriff for having killed one of his slaves remains to be proved. In this melodrama from 1882 it is shown to have happened in 1857 because the real hero of the play is not the heroine’s lover or some sort of cowboy figure but a funny-looking elderly lawyer who not only charges the villain for murder but also decides the fate of the heroine by coming up with the papers that document her descent and prove that she is a purely white woman. This lawyer, with the jolly name “Stitch,” by no means stands alone: together with a wealthy and haughty widow he keeps courting with great perseverance, and with her daughter and his nephew, who is in love with the girl, he forms the centre of what is a side plot rather than a mere subplot. The widow represents white racism, telling the heroine at the beginning, “Your white skin and dainty rearing cannot obliterate the fact that you belong to a race of slaves” - a remark that prompts Lisa to complain to her alleged slave mother: “Why didn’t you insist on my being kept in my place; among my own race, so ignorant that I would never realize the depth of my degradation.” 13 Besides this, however, this side plot introduces some comic relief, because the lawyer looks somewhat ridiculous in his romantic courting, and the way in which the widow’s daughter overrules her mother’s strong objections to her poor friend by just letting her know that she has already married him is also a feature typical of comedy. When Stitch’s courting proves successful after all, the melodrama ends with three pairs of lovers united. Only the heroine’s remark that she will take care of the child of the octoroon slave killed by her master reminds the audience that despite this happy comedy ending all is not well, nor has been so. For even the scenes that are meant to represent what John Blassingame has called “The Slave Community” 14 are not free of suffering. As earlier in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, families are separated when slaves are sold. So the heroine loses her alleged mother, who is sent to the slave market in New Orleans, and on the plantation of the slave trader an elderly couple is separated without further reason. Yet there is also the Uncle Tom figure of an old preacher who survives by considering his own fate and that of the other slaves as God-given and therefore to be borne with patience. And there is, because expected by an audience used to minstrel shows, the “ole man” who keeps playing the banjo and sings in the evening until his wife, from whom 13 The White Slave, Act I, p. 206. 14 John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community. Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 264 H ERBERT G RABES he has been separated, comes and starts to dance in spite of her rheumatism. If we are to judge from a review in the Chicago Tribune of October 31, 1882, where it says that “to an interesting story is joined that medley of nigger songs and dances,” 15 those who directed the play must have extended this element considerably to cater to popular taste. Which brings us to the question of why we should devote attention to a historical piece of writing that was already at the time of its first appearance criticized for its lack of literary value. “Literary work it is not dramatic work it assuredly is not, and if in despair one calls it a play, the word must be received in its most liberal acceptance,” it said in the same review. 16 Yet to be fair one has to say that Campbell’s play was no worse that any other play written in the United States at that time, and a more distanced view presented in the London Graphic on August 23, 1884 indicates why his play was so successful: “The White Slave has been found,” we can read there, “to be greatly to the taste of American audiences. For English sympathies it is a little too heavily weighted with exciting and harrowing incidents. In other words, it is rather ponderously elaborate melodrama” 17 It is its wide and long lasting success on the American stage that lends it some value in terms of cultural history. In the present context, however, it is less the “special effects” of the pre-film days, like the illusion of a burning boat on the Mississippi river created on a theatre stage, that is of primary interest. It is, rather, the dissemination of a particular ideological stance regarding the concept of race by a popular play like this. Witnessing the events of a staged melodrama of the kind of The White Slave implied the arousal of strong emotions, and such an experience could be quite influential on a larger scale when shared by a great number of people. Richard Gerrig has even claimed for the reading of narratives that the “traveler returns to the world of origin, somewhat changed by the journey.” 18 This is all the more true in the case of melodrama because the typical heightening of vices and virtues appeals strongly to the unconscious fears and desires of the audience. Regarding the issue of race, then, the play was most probably doublecoded in order to appeal to a wide audience. There is, on the surface of it, certainly no wavering regarding the issue of slavery. Slavery is presented as being quite inhuman in every aspect, and it is not by coincidence that the villain of the play is someone who deals in “niggers and horses” and to 15 Quoted from Napier Wilt, “Alphabetical List of the Plays of Bartley Campbell.” The White Slave, p. lxxxi. 16 Quoted from Wilt, “Alphabetical List …,” The White Slave, p. lxxxi. 17 Quoted from Wilt, “Alphabetical List …,” The White Slave, p. lxxxi. 18 Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 16. Melodrama Against the Revival of Racism? … 265 whom “a blubbering nigger is no more […] than a yelping dog.” 19 While it seems already revolting that a white looking and beautiful young woman should have become the slave of such a brute, the audience must have been truly outraged when it turns out that the heroine is purely white. But the situation is more complicated than this. It is true that when still thinking she is an octoroon, the heroine’s white lover tells her before they flee together: “I have come here to take you out of bondage or share it with you,” and that he answers her objection, “But you forget what I am,” by saying “I forget everything - but that I love you.” 20 This does not mean, however, that racial difference has been abolished. It has merely been “forgotten” under the impact of individual love and this actually serves to prove how strong this love must be. Also, the forgetting is not so difficult in this case, because Lisa looks so white that even the widow with her racist views has to admit that “No one would believe she had a drop of African blood in her veins.” 21 And the gist of the play is, after all, that she is also “white” in the sense that indeed no “drop of African blood” is “in her veins.” Therefore I do not share Diana Paulin’s view that The White Slave is one of the works that “engage the issue of interracial desire,” 22 works that “directly challenge fixed definitions of black and white.” 23 As to desire, it quite clearly is ruled by the principle “The whiter the better,” and as the villain Lacy does not really want a peer partner but rather a sex slave, a “white slave” like the heroine Lisa would be the fulfillment of his weird dreams. These dreams cannot, however, be fulfilled, because there is a quite clear definition of black and white in this play, namely the legal definition based on the partus principle of descent. Thus Lisa complains at the beginning about “my heritage; of the doom attendant on the birth of a slave. Mother, I owe this to you,” 24 and later it is only the “baptismal record of the child of Marquis De Bernaugre and Grace Hardin” 25 that proves that she does not belong to a “race of slaves” 26 and not only looks white but counts as “white.” What I mean by double-coding is Campbell’s strategy of keeping the legal demarcation line of racial difference intact, to allow, however, for an incidental “forgetting” of this difference in order to demonstrate the power 19 The White Slave, Act II, p. 220. 20 The White Slave, Act III, p. 229. 21 The White Slave, Act III, p. 229. 22 Diana Paulin, “Representing Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions, Surrogacy, and Performance,” Theatre Journal 49.4 (1997), 417-39; p. 420. 23 Paulin, “Representing Forbidden Desire …,” p. 421. 24 The White Slave, Act I, p. 206. 25 The White Slave, Act VI, p. 246. 26 The White Slave, Act I, p. 206. 266 H ERBERT G RABES of love; yet once this power has been demonstrated, those in the audience romantic enough to sympathize with this kind of oblivion are saved the worry about racial mixing or what since a notorious pamphlet from 1864 was called “miscegenation” 27 by turning the octoroon into a truly white woman. No wonder Campbell met the expectation of a very wide (and white) audience that was fond of strong emotions yet not ready for the considerable changes regarding race they would actually demand. The White Slave was successfully staged until 1918, yet the anti-miscegenation laws lasted much longer. When declared unlawful by the US Supreme Court in 1967, no fewer that sixteen states still had them, and the last one, in Alabama, was not repealed until November 2000. Quite apart from this, the villain of the play seems to be not alone in his desire to own a white slave: replicas of a suitable theatre poster are still offered for sale on the internet 28 right next to a column of pinups. 27 Miscegenation: The Theory of Blending the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, anonymously published in New York but actually written by David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman in order to discredit the abolitionist cause. 28 http: / / www.rainfall.com/ posters/ Theatrical/ 3226.htm Melodrama Against the Revival of Racism? … 267 Works Cited Auden, W.H. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939).” Modern Poets - Three. Ed. Jim Hunter. London: Faber and Faber, 1968. 25-26. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community. Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford UP, 1972. Boucicault, Dion. “The Octoroon.” Representative American Plays From 1767 to the Present Day. Ed Arthur Hobson Quinn. 7th ed. New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1957. 371-398. Campbell, Bartley. The White Slave and Other Plays. Ed. Napier Wilt. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1940. 199-248. Croly, David Goodman, and George Wakeman (published anonymously). Miscegenation. The Theory of Blending the Races. Applied to the American White Man and Negro. New York, 1864. Gerould, Daniel C. “The Americanization of Melodrama.” American Melodrama. Ed. Daniel C. Gerould. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983. 7-29. Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Hildreth, Richard. The Slave: or Memoirs of Archie Moore. Boston: John H. Eastburn, Printer, 1 1836. Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1960. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Paulin, Diana. “Representing Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions, Surrogacy, and Performance.” Theatre Journal 49 (1997): 417-439. Tenzer, Lawrence R., Ed. D. and A.D. Powell, “White Slavery, Maternal Descent, And the Politics of Slavery in the Antebellum United States. http: / / multiracial.com/ context/ view/ 462/ 27/ Theatrical Poster. http: / / www.rainfall.com/ posters/ Theatrical/ 3226.htm Wilt, Napier. “Alphabetical List of the Plays of Bartley Campbell.” The White Slave and Other Plays, Ed. Napier Wilton. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1940. Introduction.