Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton (review)

Opera lovers and literature lovers alike will discover much to appreciate about Overtones of Opera. In clear and engaging prose Skaggs explores the different ways opera influenced seven American authors, including Henry James. As she states in the book’s coda, opera is an underutilized critical lens for examining American literature. This work offers a solid contribution to the small body of existing scholarship on opera and American literature. Skaggs writes for those readers who are not familiar with opera, defining key operatic terms, as well as those who are familiar, conveying a deep knowledge of opera and its performance history. Her exploration of opera and literature spans several decades and varying literary purposes:

Writers from Whitman to Wharton found the art form uniquely suited to the American canvas. For some, opera provided a powerful artistic medium for expressing a private aesthetic experience. Writers like Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Louisa May Alcott, and Willa Cather recognized that the artifice and convention of opera did not detract from its ability to illustrate unbridled passion and emotion. In opera, they discovered the embodied voice of the artist. Others, like Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Edith Wharton found the spectacle of opera as well as its spaces, the opera houses and boxes, perfectly suited for displaying the class-based and commodity-driven aspirations of America’s new aristocracy.

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The book opens with a brief history of opera in America, informing readers that New Orleans was the center of opera productions from the late 1700s until the Civil War (1). By the 1850s opera was well established in New York and Boston, where most of the authors that Skaggs discusses were introduced to opera.

Each of the book’s chapters begins by establishing the examined authors’ familiarity with opera. Skaggs’s careful biographical work in these portions should prove a useful foundation for future scholars. The first half of the book examines the influence of opera on pre-Civil War authors. In the first chapter, Skaggs lucidly examines Whitman’s adaptation of the heroism, nobility, beauty, and equality he heard in the voices of opera singers to the poems “Song of Myself,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “Proud Music of the Storm” (23). Though we normally think of opera as a cultural activity enjoyed only by the upper class, she concludes that through his use of operatic voice, Whitman offers his translations to every reader, democratizing opera (33).

In chapter 2 the focus moves to the opera house in short stories by Poe and Alcott. Here it becomes noticeable that as the book moves chronologically through the century, there is little sense that Skaggs is building to an overarching claim concerning the role of opera in nineteenth-century American literature. But this is a minor weakness that is strongly overshadowed by the fascinating readings that Skaggs offers of each work. Her discussion of Poe cogently establishes his appreciation of opera, a challenging task because “unlike Whitman, he [Poe] left little evidence of his exposure to opera in journal entries or letters” (35). She then examines Poe’s exploration of the theme of vision and vanity through opera in “The Spectacles.” In the opera house and the drawing room scenes, Poe chooses “excerpts from operas that revolved around misperceptions and deceptions” (45). Closely examining Poe’s merging of the comic with the Gothic through overtones of opera, Skaggs brings delightful attention to this critically overlooked story. In a similarly overlooked Alcott story, “The Rival Prima Donnas,” Skaggs correlates Alcott’s fictional prima donnas with two historical opera singers, showing how Alcott exploits the tension that women were experiencing between the private, domestic sphere and the public sphere. Synthesizing the two dominant interpretations of the story through its operatic allusions, Skaggs concludes that Alcott rewrote the operatic tradition of female characters who were only allowed to protest through madness: “Alcott offers a heroine who will not be silenced—even if the...