Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America by Amy E. Hughes (review)

For the past few decades, scholars have been filling in the gaps in America’s theatre history, examining, for example, the relationship(s) between the so-called legitimate theatre and popular entertainments; plays for the uneducated and disenfranchised, as well as for the socially elite; and such disparate cultural elements as morality and the professional theatre (which many in the nineteenth century believed to have been patently immoral). Recent scholars of American theatre have ventured into the areas of gender construction and relationships; the nature and development of African American, Asian, Chicana/o, LGBT, Native American theatre(s); and the ways in which the theatre embraced, defined, and advanced the various reform efforts during the nineteenth century. It is in this last category that Amy Hughes has chosen to concentrate her study and to distinguish herself. Hughes, whose earlier work advanced our knowledge of how theatre aided the nineteenth-century temperance cause, reveals in Spectacles of Reform how spectacle influenced the ways that an audience saw the world (both onstage and in real life) and played a crucial role in American reform activism.

Hughes’s central focus is on how the human body was displayed to create spectacle. She organizes her analysis into an examination of the human body as the spectacle, the human body in the spectacle, and the human body at the spectacle. Her opening chapter studies freaks, both lustus naturae (natural freaks) and so-called gaffed freaks (self-created freaks like the tattooed lady), zoological and anthropological dime-museum exhibits like encampments of Zulus and Native Americans, baby shows, and the like—examples of the body as spectacle. After this, Hughes advances three case studies of theatre-makers’ use of the body in the theatrical spectacle. This she accomplishes by focusing on three of the most iconic sensation scenes in the history of American melodrama: the delirium tremens scene in the temperance classic The Drunkard; Eliza crossing the ice-filled Ohio River in stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the person tied to the railroad tracks in Under the Gaslight.

Hughes’s treatment of the nature and dramatic functions of the delirium tremens (DTs) scene (chapter 2) not only describes the sensational nature of the phenomenon, but provides the most comprehensive and accessible explanation of the DTs outside of medical journals and the literature specifically on intemperance. Her detailed analysis of theatre-makers’ use of the DTs in their dramas explains not only why the scene was sensational in The Drunkard and other temperance plays and its emotional impact on theatre audiences, but why nineteenth-century actors frequently selected it as a performance piece for their benefits (an evening that honored a single actor/actress and featured that person in a selected performance from their repertoire).

The second iconic image of the nineteenth century—Eliza’s flight to freedom across the ice floes in the Ohio River—was arguably as inherently spectacular as the DTs scene. The image of a young African American mother with her child in her arms being pursued by professional slave hunters—the classic melodramatic chase scene with racial overtones—was inherently sensational and could hardly fail to arouse sympathy for runaway slaves just a few years after the passage of a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act (1850). Furthermore, the scene was rich in symbolic significance, for it signified Eliza’s transformation from property into personhood—and, by extension, the possible end of slavery.

While Hughes’s treatment of the river scene in Stowe’s novel and the first two major productions of the story proves her contention that it is one of America’s most influential sensation scenes, she nevertheless misses an opportunity to ramp up her case for Eliza’s flight as spectacle by ignoring one of the central elements in an actual pursuit of an escaped slave: the presence of vicious dogs to track, chase, and tree the runaway. This was not an...