In the epilogue to Anna Cora Mowatt’s comedy Fashion (1845) — modeled, as Edgar Allan Poe pointed out in an early review, on Sheridan’s plays — one character expresses her hope that Fashion will become fashionable. The play’s republican hero, an overprotective grandfather, reiterates his distrust of fashion, and yet another character, the heroine, concludes by asking the audience both to show mercy on the performers and to give them “your honest verdict,” which will allow them to “learn to prize at its just value — Fashion.”
All the punning on Fashion/fashion seems to betray not only an anxiety about the status of fashion in the antebellum city but about the reception of Mowatt’s play. As it turns out, Mowatt had a hit, which eventually opened the door for her to take the stage as a professional actress. If her play seems awfully like Tyler’s The Contrast in its Sheridean debts, there does seem to me to be less equivocating about its accommodation of fashion. Mowatt’s republican mouthpiece is now a grandfather rather than a bachelor hero, and the heroine’s concluding speech doesn’t reject fashion so much as accommodate it. For Mowatt, the nouveaux riches pose the biggest danger, because they overvalue fashion and seek to use it as part of their scramble for upward mobility. If you value fashion (and Fashion) justly, by contrast, you must be part of that natural nobility Trueman was always blathering about.
There’s much more to be said here than I have time to write about today, but it’s worth noting how performances of age, race, and gender play into this discussion of fashion — and performances of authorship as well. That’s the angle Poe took up when he wrote about Mowatt in his essay series “The Literati of New York.” He begins:
Mrs. Mowatt is in some respects a remarkable woman, and has undoubtedly wrought a deeper impression upon the public than any one of her sex in America.
She became first known through her recitations. To these she drew large and discriminating audiences in Boston, New York, and elsewhere to the north and east. Her subjects were much in the usual way of these exhibitions, including comic as well as serious pieces, chiefly in verse. In her selections she evinced no very refined taste, but was probably influenced by the elocutionary rather than by the literary value of her programmes. She read well; her voice was melodious; her youth and general appearance excited interest, but, upon the whole, she produced no great effect, and the enterprise may be termed unsuccessful, although the press, as is its wont, spoke in the most sonorous tones of her success.
The same goes for Fashion‘s success: “Her first decided success was with her comedy, ‘Fashion,’” he writes, “although much of this success itself is referable to the interest felt in her as a beautiful woman and an authoress.” He concludes with an extended gloss on her beauty. (Read the full sketch here.) Though he has some appreciative things to say about her writing, it seems clear that Poe dismisses her success as itself the whim of fashion. He may have been right, of course, given that her status at the apex of female American authorship was extremely short-lived, requiring her to be perpetually rescued by literary and theater historians.
If you have access to JSTOR, you might be interested in two relatively recent pieces on Mowatt: one on Poe as prototype for the play’s character T. Tennyson Twinkle, and the other on the creation of Mowatt’s public persona.
Of course, whenever I think about Mowatt’s play, this is what comes more immediately to mind:
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