The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (review)

Although many critics have recognized the theatrical nature of much nineteenth-century American literature, few have attempted to account for it in the concrete theater of the time. Here, Alan Ackerman examines selected writers of the second half of the nineteenth century for their relationship as poets and fiction writers to the evolving theater of Edwin Forrest at one end and the new dramatic realists at the other. As Ackerman explains, the cultural politics of a democratic and largely melodramatic theater in the first half of the century may have inspired a Whitman to the oratorical flourishes of his poetry, but the stage provided a more problematic subtext in the post–Civil War rise of parlor spaces and fourth-wall conventions when it included a theater self-consciously designed for elite audiences. Whitman, Melville, Howells, Alcott, and James each get separate chapters, with James’s movement between his dramatic experiments and his late novels seen at the end as prophetic of a new theater, even as James succeeds almost entirely in fiction.

Ackerman himself succeeds best in the individual chapters. He makes fresh use of the well-known rivalry between William Macready and Forrest, culminating in the Astor Place Riot, to illuminate tensions in Whitman’s and Melville’s work, for instance, and his chapter on the complex interaction of drama with fiction in James’s work is one of the volume’s best pieces. With Howells, Ackerman is more content to explore the theory of realism and Howells’s plays than to relate both to the fiction. His piece on Alcott probes the world of the private theatrical, not just as a social phenomenon but also as a register of the peculiarities of rendering subjectivity both in fiction and on stage when private life is theatricalized. Even for readers familiar with the theater of the time, Ackerman’s book provides intriguing new readings to force one to rethink old assumptions about, say, James’s “failure” in the drama.

Because Ackerman focuses so intently on individual authors, however, one misses the larger sweep of a period the writer clearly knows well. There is no concluding summary chapter, for instance. At the same time, Ackerman chooses not to mention some primary or secondary works that would have proved useful, such as C. Carroll Hollis’s Language and Style in “Leaves of Grass” (1983) in discussing the speech-act dimension of Whitman’s poetry or Louisa May Alcott’s novel Work (1873) and its chapter on Christie Devon’s experience as an actress. Nevertheless, Ackerman’s book is essential reading for unpacking (to use a James metaphor exploited brilliantly by the author) the relations between an often ignored popular theater and the “portable theater,” in Howells’s phrase, of the better-known novelists. Americanists should understand that both theaters are inextricably linked, and Ackerman makes a deft guide to opening a treasure-laden box.