"The Genuine Indian Who Was Brought Upon the Stage": Edwin Forrest's Metamora and White Audiences

THERESA STROUTH GAUL "The Genuine Indian Who Was Brought Upon the Stage": Edwin Forrest's Metamora and White Audiences Beginning in the 1820S and continuing through the next decades , "Indian dramas," a designation that refers to plays written by whites about American Indians, were one of the hottest phenomena on the American stage.1 With the roles of American Indians played by white actors, Indian dramas were the first theatrical form to put a supposedly genuine version of the racial other before the American public .2 As such, they bring crucial questions of race, representation, and audience reception sharply into focus. I aim to illustrate, through the example of the most enduting of the Indian dramas, how the staging of an imagined redness enabled audiences to reaffirm their sense of their own whiteness. At the same time, the instabilities inherent in performance potentially unsettled that process of racial identification, challenging the behavior of a white American citizenry which acted and legislated out of a sense of its racial superiority. Metamora, or Last ofthe Wampanoags (1829), a play called "wholly American in its character and incidents" ("Tribute to Edwin Forrest"), was one of the most popular and long-lasting plays in American theater history.3 Opening on the eve of the passing of Indian removal legislation , Metamora exerted long-lasting influence on American culture, especially in shaping white conceptions of American Indians and enabling the solidification of white racial identities during a period of Arizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 1, Spring 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Theresa Strouth Gaul intense racial controversy.4 Written by John Augustus Stone, the play purports to record the history of Metacomet, called Metamora in this version and also known by the English name King Philip. Set during the period of King Philip's War, the drama moves from the time of the breakdown in relations between the Wampanoags and the English settlers to Metamora's death at the hands of the English.5 In addition to the story of Metamora's life and the war, the drama is organized around the romance plot of two young English colonists as they are threatened by a dastardly English nobleman. Viewed by one observer as the "commencement of our national dramatic literature" ("An Indian Memoir "), Metamora helped to solidify the popularity of American drama. Even more than the play itself, the performance of Edwin Forrest ( 1806-1872) in the title role was a phenomenon never before witnessed . The 22-year-old actor gained national celebrity through his impersonation of an American Indian, a role he performed more than two hundred times over the next forty years (Jones 66). As the first nativeborn actor to achieve fame, Forrest styled himself as the quintessential American. His official biographer, William Rounseville Alger, described Forrest as "home-born on our soil, intensely national in every nerve" and called him "the first great representative American actor" (17).6 Journals of the day applauded him as the United States' first important native tragedian. After years of reviewing English or European plays and English actors, the New-York Mirrorreported possessing a "national pride which we feel in claiming him as an American" (126). The journal responded to English ctiticisms of American culture, such as Sydney Smith's famous 1820 taunt "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play?" (79), by arguing that Forrest's fame stood "in contradiction to the generally received opinions among our transatlantic friends, that we have nothing hete to boast of, and that, if we had, it would not be justly appreciated" (71). Alger stressed that Forrest's status as a representative American permeated all aspects of his life: "All the outlines and settings of Forrest's career , the quality and smack of his sentiments, the mould and course of his thoughts, the style of his art, were distinctly American" (28). Such a broad and inclusive American identity marked Forrest as unique during a period when imitation of the English still dominated American cultural productions. In addition, Forrest enthusiastically assumed the role of patton of Ametican arts. Stone wrote Metamora in response to Forrest's...