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Article Excerpt
So much critical attention has surrounded John Augustus Stone's 1829 melodrama, Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, that its stepsister, John Brougham's 1847 burlesque, Metamora; or, the Last of the Pollywogs, almost has been forgotten. (1) The pairing of the two plays is uncanny and risky not only in the genres' differences and audiences' expectations, but also in signaling the plays' ideological functions and implications vis-a-vis the "Indian problem" troubling mid-nineteenth-century audiences' sense of whiteness and citizenship. Such an examination could prove productive in fore grounding the burlesque's rewriting of "the last Indian syndrome"--which many so-called Indian plays shared in the nineteenth century--in challenging the playwrights', the actors', and the audiences' consensual reading of the "vanishing Indian" in the melodrama, on the one hand, and in fore grounding the mocking performance of staged Indianness and of representation itself in the burlesque, on the other.
In Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, Eugene H. Jones (63-83) delineates a general trend in the Indian plays written and performed in the 1830s and 1840s of representing Indian heroes "on their way to extinction" (63). The titles of the plays Jones brings to critical attention reinforce his concept of "The Last Indian Syndrome" permeating white America's imaginary and its popular stage. Plays such as The Last of the Serpent Tribe, Last of the Noridgewocks, Last of the Shikellemus, Last of the Mohicans, or Last of the Wampanoags, notwithstanding their romantic titles, express a complex yet consensual wish to remove American Indians both from white America's imaginary and from American lands. White America, however, delighted in contemplating the "last Indian," on- and offstage, celebrating the imminence of the vanishing Other. Jones also signals the parallels between the Jacksonian era's mission of eradicating Indian presence during the expansion of the republic and the era's representational politics: "the Noble Savage was more often thought of as a dying savage and shown as such on the stage." In both cases, Jones suggests, "the Indian came to be thought of as a greater problem than ever before" (80).
Ironically, as Indian removal relegated Indian presence to a life on the fringes of the republic and opened the golden door to the first massive wave of European immigrants in the early nineteenth century, the Irish immigrant dramatist John Brougham made the first attempt to challenge the syndrome of the vanishing Indian on the American stage. Brougham offered, instead, the human image of an Indian sachem with potential for survival who dared to laugh at himself, the audience, "the great American tragedian" Edwin Forrest, and the colonizers' genocidal fantasies in what has become one of the great forgotten burlesques of the nineteenth century: Metamora; or, the Last of the Pollywogs.
In this essay I argue that John Augustus Stone, using the idiom of colonial discourse in portraying the "last Indian" onstage, offers in Metamora what Robert F. Berkhoffer has termed "the idea of the Indian," which is "a White image or stereotype," hence an invention, a simplification (3). Without denying many of the merits of Stone's melodrama, I argue that John Brougham's parodic gesture in his version of Metamora responds critically to the "serious" play glorifying the dead Indian chief. Informed by its own time and crafted for a changing audience in the American theatre, the burlesque reflects changes in the intervening two decades in dramatic culture and in American culture at large. Edwin Forrest's performance of the melodramatic Metamora for forty years undoubtedly contributed to the simultaneous reiteration, through words and bodies, of Jacksonian politics in its vilest materialization--the Indian removals of the 1830s. Through a repetitive mimesis of Indianness on stage, without much variation in costume, pose, or movement, Forrest's performance contributed to the fixity of the image of the aesthetic Indian in the American imaginary of manifest destiny.
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Brougham's revision of Stone's play--in its rewriting and performance, under patron Forrest's somewhat sympathetic gaze, along with Forrest's own seeming ambivalence toward the melodrama and the Indian question at the end of his career--opens another revisionist glitch that troubles the nation's fascination with playing Indian. I read the burlesque's combination of familiar themes and plot lines from the original, with puns and reversals of fortune, as symptomatic of the triumph of the "Vanishing Indian" who refuses to vanish. Taking the ludic dimension of the play a few steps further than most critical studies of the burlesque so far, I argue that Brougham's own dramatic and political agendas inform a play that takes mimicry seriously and mocks the seriousness of Stone's historical mimesis or adaptation of history for expansionist agendas. Reading mimicry in Brougham's play as a potential site for rewriting the white man's Indian on the mid-nineteenth-century American stage, I revisit the contexts of both plays' production and reception, fore grounding the role of the actor in marketing political ideals and the role of the audience in embracing models of Anglo masculinity and paternalism. Then I consider how Brougham's burlesque rewrites Stone's melodrama through what, following Philip Deloria, I call "playing at playing Indian," and examine the relation between dramatic and social performances of Metamora.
Playing Indian: Melodrama and Its Discontents
In his study of "classic American literature" (1923), D. H. Lawrence writes: "There has been all the time, in the white American soul, a dual feeling about the Indian. [...] The desire to extirpate the Indian. And the contradictory desire to glorify him. Both are rampant still, today" (36). Almost a hundred years earlier, in the wake of the Indian removals (1830s), eight separate plays glorified Metacom, known to the early colonists as King Philip, who died during King Philip's War of 1675-6, when over half the native population in New England was massacred (S. Jones 13-15). Representations of Metacom's heroic death opened a series of "Indian" texts and performances by white dramatists and actors who delighted in "playing Indian." Of the eight plays, only the text of Stone's Metamora survived, and it became "the Indian drama of the nineteenth-century American theater," offering the audience "the extraordinary power and aboriginal delineation of Metamora" and a new star: Edwin Forrest (Grose 183; Sayre 2). (2) Later in the century, Metamora as the "model Indian," both onstage and in public life, would often lend his name to towns, taverns, vessels, and steamboats; the dramatic "model Indian" Metamora also marked the "height of a craze for Indian chiefs as tragic heroes" (Sayre 1) on the American stage, which aggravated the spread of the "last Indian syndrome" in the American cultural imaginary (E. Jones 63).
Before 1830, performances in American theatres were rarely American in subject matter. By 1830, liberal capitalism--promoting values such as acquisitive individualism and competitive market relations--had triumphed on the American stage, making room for yeoman heroes fighting tyrants, rescuing women in distress, and seeking to return to precapitalist independence and morality. At the same time, theatrical stardom was often as charismatic as political leadership, and the star status took on a social role emerging more from the relation of the star with his fans than from the star's dramatic qualities. New theatrical conventions of "institutionalized stargazing" (McConachie 75) were also emerging: the curtain speech, the floral tribute, and the play contest were becoming standard practices of melodrama. The stars were often eager to have their own repertoire, in opposition to the traditional practice whereby a theatrical stock company rarely commissioned a play for an individual actor. Following rival William C. Macready's example in England, Edwin Forrest started the first play contest in America in 1828, and Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags was born, instantly launching Forrest's heroic stardom.
Despite the play's immense success with the popular audiences, the literary merits of Stone's play are questionable. There is a critical consensus that the play would not have survived were it not for Forrest's investment in the melodrama and its performance. (3) In his first playwriting contest, Forrest participated in the nationalist agenda of Westward expansion and Indian assimilation by commissioning, for the sum of $500, an American drama, "the best tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero or principal character shall be an aboriginal character" (Moody, "Lost and Now Found" 353). The play's initial production was, therefore, a response to the demand-supply paradigm. Forrest's investment proved lucrative not only in the material profits the actor earned, but also in the political capital it contributed to Indian removal policies. Later in his career, when Forrest or the management needed a boost at the box office, they would often schedule Metamora (Moody, Edwin Forrest 99). Stone's play premiered on December 15, 1829, at the Park Theatre...
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