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chapter 12 Metamora’s Revenge Bruce McConachie given the amount of energy devoted over the last twenty years to interpreting and explaining John Augustus Stone’s play Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), the historian might be excused for believing that the “revenge” I note in my title refers to irresolvable conundrums left to future scholars by the playwright and Edwin Forrest, the star who commissioned the work. Looking to link Forrest’s immensely popular performances of this play to the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal in the 1830s, which killed thousands of members of eastern tribes, historians Donald Grose and Mark Mallet analyzed the play to accuse Forrest of pursuing a racist agenda for personal political gain.1 Others, notably Jeffrey Mason, Sally Jones, Jill Lepore, and Theresa Strouth Gaul, denied overt racist intent but concluded that Forrest’s and Stone’s Metamora indirectly legitimated racism and Indian removal by portraying a noble-but-doomed savage whose death was rendered inevitable by the march of civilization.2 Several of these historians broadened their analysis to include Forrest’s acting style but continued to make their case primarily on an analysis of the melodrama. Challenging both of these interpretations was a 1999 article by Scott Martin, who stated that the play and Forrest’s interpretation of the title role “comprise a rich fabric of interwoven and interacting symbols” open to many readings.3 Toward the beginning of this flurry of scholarly activity was my own take on Forrest and his star vehicle in 1992, which I developed in Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870.4 Fifteen years ago, I had nothing specific to say about possible relations among the play, the policy of Indian removal, and white racism but did note the importance of situating the drama’s reception in the context of Forrest’s charismatic star power and in several strands of Jacksonian ideology. Settling the possible meanings of Metamora for its antebellum audi- 194 Bruce McConachie ences (and, implicitly, for American history) is important, because the melodrama had an enormous impact on the “Indian” plays and their stage Indians that populated the American theater from 1830 through the 1870s.5 During this period, theatrical producers occasionally put Native Americans on the stage as curiosities, but Native Americans neither wrote nor performed in any of the plays that native Americans of European descent produced and enjoyed at their theaters. Most of the plays preceding Metamora that featured Native American characters depicted them in European terms as children of nature; a few, however, also showed them as warriors in Indian–white conflicts. After Metamora, heroic and occasionally vengeful Indians filled the stage, as playwrights and stars attempted to model their work on the huge success that Forrest was enjoying with his Indian chief. These melodramas included Carabasset (1830), Oralloossa (1832), Tecumseh (1836), Pontiac (1836), Nick of the Woods (1838), and Putnam (1844). The rage for Indian plays died down in the 1840s but revived again after 1865, when yellow journalism and dime novels pumped new conflicts on the frontier for melodramatic thrills. Although these later Indian plays usually attempted more realism and less romantic rhetoric than their predecessors, several also featured a heroic chief. Metamora, in other words, cast a long shadow; its popularity has relevance not only for understanding Forrest’s huge success in the role but also for understanding the place of the stage Indian in popular American culture. Given this brief overview of U.S. Indian plays in the nineteenth century , it may seem that those scholars who claim that Forrest’s 1829 vehicle helped to incite racism against Native Americans in the antebellum era are correct. Perhaps the scholarship linking Metamora to Indian removal is accurate. From my perspective, however, Scott Martin’s debunking of the connection between the play and the Jacksonian policy is more persuasive . As he points out, audiences came to the theater primarily to see and hear Forrest, regardless of the play he was performing that night. On the question of motives, although Forrest did consider running for office as a Jacksonian Democrat in the 1830s, the star had no political ambitions when he picked Metamora as his first-prize play in 1829. Further, the drama generally maintains the Indian chief’s nobility, despite his occasional lapses into savagery, to the end of the play. Besides, as Martin points out, no star would have chosen a vehicle that made him look like a villainous savage to his fans...

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