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

In Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America, Amy E. Hughes examines the nineteenth-century experience of “spectacle”: those exciting effects, tableaux, sensation scenes, and heightened moments that spectators encountered on the melodramatic stage, but also in the lyceum, on the speaker’s platform, in museums, and as images on material objects. Building upon, broadening, and sometimes contesting earlier studies of theatrical melodrama, Hughes sets American spectators’ reception of sensational scenes onstage in relation to the social and political reform movements of the time. This innovative approach allows for both a richer and more nuanced understanding of each.

Insightfully, Hughes invites readers to consider spectacle “as methodology: a unique system of communication, employed in myriad contexts, that rehearses and sustains conceptions of race, gender, and class in extremely powerful ways” (4). This approach leads Hughes to focus on bodies that were exhibited or represented in spectacular ways and the embodied responses to such sensation scenes of American audiences and readers. By exploring such “tactics of seeing” and the affective responses they engendered, Hughes leads readers to “consider how the visual is visceral” and demonstrates that “the connection between sight and sensation helps to explain the power, popularity, and persistence of spectacle,” both onstage and in mid-nineteenth-century American reform movements (15).

The book presents case studies of three sensational scenes and the reform movements that informed them: (1) “delirium tremens” scenes in melodramas like The Drunkard, which Hughes explores in the context of the temperance movement; (2) “fugitive slave escape” scenes like that of Eliza fleeing across the ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she examines in the context of the abolition movement; and (3) the “railroad rescue” scene in melodramas like Under the Gaslight, which she analyses in the context of the suffrage movement.

In each of these extended case studies, Hughes does a close reading of a particular sensational scene in theatre. Yet, by also explicating the political and social context and the contests over political reforms being played out at the time, Hughes offers readers unique insights into the ways that “different modes of cultural production promiscuously borrowed from and referred to one another” and establishes that “they were neither independently constituted nor unilaterally perceived” (19). The strength of this approach is evident in Hughes’s discussion of the sensational depictions of alcohol-induced insanity in moral reform dramas like W.H. Smith’s The Drunkard, or the Fallen, Saved (1844). Examining the wide popularity of such depictions on the theatrical stage and in “respectable” museum theatres in light of the temperance movement, Hughes introduces readers to shifting medical conceptions of insanity and addiction at this time. She explores how these notions were embodied in the lyceum performances of temperance orator John Gough and in other “experience speeches” by reformed inebriates. By focusing on audiences’ reactions to the moments of “insanity” performed in “delirium tremens” scenes by actors onstage and on their relationship to those performed by actual persons testifying to the deleterious effect of alcohol on their own lives, Hughes reveals how “antebellum temperance discourse and iconography tended to spectacularize normalcy and deviance” (84).

Hughes’s second case study focuses on representations of the fugitive slave Eliza crossing the ice floes, in stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Hughes effectively interweaves close readings of this iconic sensational scene with an analysis of how the tortured bodies of enslaved persons were described in abolition addresses by former slave orators like William Wells Brown. Both in abolition literature attesting to the brutality enslaved persons experienced and in advertisements in the press that identified fugitives by their scars and other wounds, audiences regularly encountered descriptions of the torture that slave masters inflicted on enslaved persons. Hughes claims that such advertisements, and the stock illustrations that accompanied them, were so ubiquitous as to appear formulaic. Reading images of the flight...