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Fashionable Mowatt

October 17, 2011 in City on Stage, Fashion, Writing New York by Bryan

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.
It was during these recitations that her name, prefixed to occasional tales, sketches and brief poems in the magazines, first attracted an attention that, but for the recitations, it might not have attracted.

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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Paul Bunyan in Billyburg

February 4, 2010 in Fashion by Bryan | 2 comments

Did I call this one in lecture the other day or what? This week’s New York Magazine contains the late-breaking news that — imagine! — plaid flannel shirts are back. (Thank God they’re fitted this time around, is all I have to say: if this really were a 90s grunge revival we’d all be back to wearing things two sizes too large, and NOBODY wants that.)

Earlier this semester I suggested that the proliferation of red flannel, lumberjack boots, and beards among urban hipsters is a 21st-century version of the cowboy craze that took over the East Village in the late 1960s. Back then, the whole Lower East Side was the frontier. Now Brooklyn’s Alaska, apparently. None of this is all that new: the indie rockers have been sporting big old beards for years now. My Melvillean beard done came and went a long time ago.

Of course, whenever I hear someone talking about fashion-forward urbanites in red flannel it puts me in mind of Bowery B’hoys like Mose, above left. The New York Magazine feature made me wonder: Was the Mose get-up self-consciously mimicking the costume of the California miner 49ers? Or were the red shirts standard fireman issue? Anyone have a better origin story for Mose’s suspenders and red flannel work shirts?

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City on Stage

August 6, 2008 in City on Stage by Bryan

There’s a famous anecdote about the first appearance of Mose the Bowery B’hoy on the New York stage. Played by neighborhood boy Frank Chanfrau, Mose, the fireman-butcher, makes his entrance in Benjamin Baker’s 1848 farce A Glance at New York by vowing to break with his fire company: he ain’t gonna run with his machine no more. As the story goes, Mose’s opening line brought down the house.

200px-Frank_Chanfrau_as_Mose.jpg

The success of Baker’s play is often attributed — like that of an earlier, more genteel comedy, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) — to the audience’s desire to see itself portrayed on stage. When haven’t New Yorkers liked to watch themselves on stage or screen? Mose the Bowery B’hoy looked and sounded like his most important audience members, the Bowery working class, just as Tyler’s target audience was expected to identify with his principals, especially the ones who gently parodied the new republican elite. But unlike many middle-class portraits of city life, there’s no railing against fashion in Baker’s play; instead, Mose crystallized a popular street style and probably reinforced it for years to come. (I’d like to know more than I’ve been able to find out about the popularity and endurance of Bowery B’hoy fashion.)

Both plays are too
simplistically understood as a form of New York narcissism, though. For one thing, the half-century that intervenes between the plays allows Baker to write working-class characters who, though they still delight in fleecing naive rubes visiting from the country, win the play’s sanction rather than its opprobrium.

But both plays should be
taken more seriously still, as demonstrating how theater has, in different ways over time, informed controversies about social division and public space. I’ve been thinking through a half dozen or so such “City on Stage” plays for my contribution to our Cambridge Companion, and I taught an advanced undergrad seminar on the topic last spring. One thing I’ve noticed about the century or so following Tyler’s first portrait of New Yorkers on the New York stage is how consistently these plays obsess about the city’s public spaces. From the class-stratification encouraged by eighteenth-century theater architecture (when audiences were divided along class lines into different portions of the audience space) to the mid-nineteenth century, when increasingly pronounced class divisions had led to separate theaters altogether based on class, from anxieties about women’s theater attendance to Barnum’s innovation of separate “Negro” showtimes for black audiences, theaters served as a highly visible crystallization of urban anxieties and conflicts, which sometimes — especially for upper class audiences — masqueraded as a fear of “the city” itself. In what ways did “City on Stage” plays aim to quell such anxieties, and in what ways did they foster them?

If Clyde Fitch’s 1909 Broadway play The City is any indication, the
blame for vice had shifted from the city itself to the individuals who inhabit it — regardless of class. In response to the play’s grisly portrait of political corruption, sexual
decadence, and drug use, the chastened protagonist, who will lose his bid for New York’s governorship due to a series of family scandals, begs his audience not to blame the city: “It’s not her fault! It’s our own! What the City does is to bring out what’s strongest in us. If at heart we’re good, the good in us will win! If the bad is strongest, God help us!” The city is a stage, here, in other words, for proving one’s self, in a way
a country village will never allow you. A “big, and busy, and selfish, and self-centered” city is a virtue: “she comes to her gates” and welcomes the man coming from the country village, “and she stands him in the middle of her market place . . . and she paints his ambition on her fences, and lights up her skyscrapers with it! — what he wants to be and what he thinks he is! — and then she says to him, Make good if you can, or to Hell with you! And what is in him comes out to clothe his nakedness, and to the City he can’t lie!” The emphasis here on advertising, clothing, ambition, and the market suggests that one function of the “City on Stage” trajectory over the course of the century was to naturalize what was still deeply problematic when Tyler wrote The Contrast. If, in Fitch’s play, there’s still very little distance between the stage and street, by the early twentieth century performance and artifice were taken to be the deepest expression of who a person is.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from the century-long pattern of New Yorkers putting themselves on stage, then, is the relationship between the institution of the theater and what would become modern consumer culture. What does the culture of consumption do to class divisions in the modern city? My hunch is that the answer has to do with the kinds of performance involved in high-fashion promenades — the problematic starting point of Tyler’s play, but something Mose and his G’hal take, as it were, in stride.

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