Tis’ Himself”: A Sensational Melodrama featuring Dion Boucicault

Millette, Holly-Gale (2015) Tis’ Himself”: A Sensational Melodrama featuring Dion Boucicault. Sensational Men: Victorian Masculinity in Sensation Fiction, Falmouth University , Falmouth, United Kingdom. 18 - 20 Apr 2015. (Submitted)

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

This paper discusses Dionysus Lardener Boucicault, the illegitimate progeny of an English father, was born an Irishman in 1820 and Christened with a Greek forename and a French surname. He departed Ireland as a youth, was educated in London, married, went to France and returned – having accidently lost his wife off a cliff top. He again married – Actress and foundling ward of an acting family – and subsequently became feted throughout the century as a theatrical impresario. An actor, writer and theatrical impresario, he is credited with inventing the Sensation Melodrama, the theatrical “matinee” for Ladies, and numerous technical stage devices that produced sensation effects. Yet, like the characters he wrote for himself and others, Boucicault inhabited spaces of alterity and conflict. He was secretive, sly, entrepreneurial and dandified and he suffered constant disappointment over the course of his ambition – desiring and aspiring to social circles that eluded him.

For Boucicault, national and artistic non-recognition was perceived less as a source of creative tension and more as a form of personal conflict. As an Irishman, he was an outsider in Britain; he inhabited a space of pronounced racial effeminacy (connected to his ability to write melodrama) and racial difference (connected to colonial politics). Boucicault had – and exploited – a unique ability to access the many affects of the late Victorian alienation in his audience and in his the characters of his melodramas. But his skill and speed at this trapped him in a double-bind of financial and popular success on the one hand, and the critical derision such light entertainment drew from his more erudite peers, on the other.

The provocation that this paper makes is that Boucicault was a sensation of a man, deeply concerned with dispelling feelings of marginality who sought a normalized and empowered identity position, validation from his male social group, and a chance of belonging to a polity that more closely resembled his own biography of self-madeness. Boucicualt was a man who could turn on a dime in order to make one and a man adept at restructuring and re-imagining himself to suit. Boucicault scholars have been aware of his propensity to reinvent himself at various intervals during his personal and professional life, but all too often his conflicted relationship to tropes of Victorian masculinity in this arrangement have not been given the attention they deserve. This paper seeks to address this.

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