Foreign Constellations in a National Drama: Becoming American in Boucicault's Belle Lamar

• Published in: Nineteenth century theatre and film Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 19 - 38
• Main Author: Meer, Sarah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 22.12.2012; Sage Publications Ltd. (UK); Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: 19th century; Actors; Actresses; American Civil War; American literature; Apologies; Civil war; Essays; Gulf languages; Hearing; Theater; Theatre; New York; United States > US; Chicago Illinois; American theatre; transatlantic; John Brougham; Dion Boucicault; melodrama
• DOI: 10.7227/NCTF.39.2.2
• ISSN: 1748-3727

This article examines Dion Boucicault's nearly forgotten 1874 play about the American Civil War, Belle Lamar. It discerns a ‘transatlantic imaginationrsquo; in Belle Lamar, which aptly reflected the New York theatre itself in the mid nineteenth-century. This theatre not only catered for a city of immigrants, but was itself transatlantic, since many of its actors, managers and writers were themselves tourists, migrants, or at least expatriates. The reception of Belle Lamar illustrates both an intense contemporary interest in developing a national drama and international, or cosmopolitan, expectations of the theatre. These were particularly manifested in attention to voice, vocabulary and accents. Although Boucicault is often treated as important to the development of a national drama, this article stresses his transatlanticism. It reveals points of similarity with John Brougham, a fellow Dubliner in New York, who provided a burlesque model for Boucicault's paradoxically transatlantic national drama. Burlesque offered both men strategies for an ironic expression of multiple and conflicted allegiances. Their work directs us to view this period of theatrical history not as insufficiently national, but as fascinatingly and productively fluid in its identities.