Our Genius, Goodness, and Gumption: Child Actresses and National Identity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

"Genuine Genius, Goodness, and Gumption: Acting Daughters and Mid-Nineteenth-Century National Identity" argues that mid-nineteenth-century theater in the United States became an arena in which the middle-class constructed childhood in a variety of ways that bolstered national identity. American audiences celebrated children whose public personae answered national questions and assuaged national anxieties. International inferiority was pacified by the young Bateman Sisters' genius for interpreting Shakespeare. Journalists called them "national treasures" that proved the United States the cultural equal of Great Britain and Europe. As sectional issues eroded American's sense of moral integrity, four-year-old Cordelia Howard's embodiment of child martyrs like Little Eva earned her stardom. A decade later, rambunctious Lotta Crabtree reassured audiences that the spirit of the Wild West could revitalize a rebuilding nation. These performers embodied the imagined child as actors with the power to amaze, redeem, and liberate. The seemingly antithetical traits encouraged in child stars reflect what Americans at this time feared they lacked: intellect, virtue, daring, and above all authenticity. Forwarding current scholarship that examines the mid-nineteenth-century middle-class obsession with sincerity, this article locates the common factor behind each child's popularity: the ability to appear genuine. The artistic child became the source of artlessness; their seeming lack of guile became, itself, a commodity. My research builds upon current scholarship that finds popular culture a rich historical source. The success of theatrical child stars generated huge amounts of discourse in national and international journals, newspapers, letters, diaries, and memoirs concerning the relationship between childhood and nationhood. My research mines these sources, analyzing the motivations behind the nineteenth-century fascination with childhood and arguing that "the infant phenomenon" was closely interwoven with nation building. Although much of your journal's recent publications explore children and childhood outside the United States, I believe this article offers a transnational model for exploring childhood and the lives of children through the arts, entertainment, and performance. Too often theater is considered an anomalous world where historians fear to tread. This manuscript argues that child actors are in fact still children, whose public and private lives reflect much about their culture's hopes and fears.