The Dysfunctional Families of Jacksonian Melodrama

ALAN ACKERMAN The Dysfunctional Families ofJacksonian Melodrama I ? America the family, in the Roman and aristocratic signification of the word, does not exist. All that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first yeats of childhood, when the father exercises, without opposition, that absolute domestic authority which the feebleness of his children renders necessary and which their interest, as well as his own incontestable superiority , warrants. But as soon as the young American approaches manhood , the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day; master of his thoughts, he is soon master of his conduct. In America there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence: at the close of boyhood the man appears and begins to trace out his own path. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America The tortuous plot of The Broker of Bogota, an 1834 romantic verse tragedy by Robert Montgomery Bird, gains power and coherence from the dtama's obsessively repeated central theme: the mutually destructive energies offathers and sons. In fact, the final line ofthe play resonates with the naming of that fraught relationship, though notably it is couched in an aphorism that the rest of the play does not support: Heaven, that strikes the malefactor down, Even with the greater culprits smites the less— The rigid sire and disobedient son. (235) Though invoked throughout the play, heaven and justice of any traditional stamp are ineffective. Announcing their importance in this culminating statement, and in such overdetermined form, Bird's drama indicates, to an exceptional degree, a widespread anxiety in his generation that stable father-son relationships had been seriously eroded if Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 3, Autumn 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 32Alan Ackerman not entirely lost. Ultimately it is unclear even who the greater or the lesser culprit is. The problem of paternal authority in Bird's world is charged with sociopolitical significance. In one of his first full-length plays, The City Looking Glass: A Philadelphia Comedy (1828), there are two fathers whose first meeting, accompanied by their romantically involved children , becomes a heated political argument about slavery, states' rights, and the Tariff. Yet the dispute is leavened by the author's delightfully self-conscious manipulation of comic conventions. When Raleigh, Sr., the Virginia plantet, entets the Philadelphia home of Headstrong, his son exclaims with pleasure, "By all that's wonderful, that's pop!" Raleigh , Jr. expects the fathers to concur quickly in arranging what is clearly a respectable marriage, and Headstrong, the father of Diana, does, in fact, offer him her hand. But Raleigh, Sr. applies the brakes: "Matrimony, sir, is a serious thing, and not to be ventured upon without seeing how the parties agree: And therefore, sir, let me ask you what you think of the slave system." The abrupt shift from matrimony to slavery may be comically incongruous, but it also suggests the pervasiveness of political topics (more prevalent perhaps in the election year) in domestic situations. The "parties" in question cannot be reduced to those that vied for the presidency in 1828, the short-lived National Republicans of Adams and Clay and the Democrats of Jackson, but the anticipated matriage clearly is more than a union between two individuals. Headstrong, the Philadelphian, favors positions later associated with the Whigs (as the Philadelphian Bird, who strongly considered entering politics when several influential Whigs sought to nominate him for a Congressional seat in 1842, would too), and the fathers obviously represent regional interests. The playful interaction between political rhetoric and domestic comedy deserves to be quoted at length. Headstrong. I think it [slavery] a system abhotrent to the general principles of morality and justice, and disgraceful to the character of our country. RaI. Sr.Humph! RaI Jr.Lord! now for a squabble! Father, I forgot to tell you— RaI. Sr.Stand aside, puppy.—In what light do you look upon the Tariff, Mr. Headstrong? Jacksonian Melodrama33 Head. As an excellent encourager and preserver of domestic enterprise: — RaI. Jr. Confound 'em! they'll be at it! Mr. Headstrong — Head. And as the surest and speediest means of creating the same independence in our national economy, which already exists in out national spirit...