Performing the Nation State: Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the American Cultural Imagination

Abstract

This essay examines representations of women on the nineteenth-century American commercial stage and the ways in which women’s staged presence spoke to—and against—a nation in the midst of defining itself against the backdrop of white patriarchal systems of power. Representations of women stitched together culturally normative expectations of sexuality and gender, defining female citizenship as existing in relationship to women’s dependence on male desire and racial/racist hierarchies. White heteronormative desirable women served as both the ideal and the norm with all other female identities represented as deficient. The bodily presence of women on stage, however, and the counter-narratives to white male-authored visions of female gender norms complicated simplistic definitions of American womanhood. This essay explores three character types—‘The Indian Maiden’, ‘The Tragic Mulatta’ and ‘The Comic Spinster’—as a means to engage the complex dynamics between performance and nation-building.