Dion Boucicault: The Melodramatic Immigration of Transatlantic Identity (1860 – 1880)

Millette, Holly-Gale (2010) Dion Boucicault: The Melodramatic Immigration of Transatlantic Identity (1860 – 1880). International Symposium: Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging in American and British Contexts, NOVA University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. 03 - 04 Dec 2010. (Submitted)

Abstract

This paper investigates the theatrical impresario, and eventual American
immigrant, Dion Boucicault. Boucicault scholars have been aware of his
propensity to reinvent himself at various intervals during his personal and
professional life, but none have chosen to focus so specifically on the
relationship between mechanisms of reinvention, his prosperity and feelings of
belonging in the United States, and his decision to immigrate there. In this
discussion, I will reference themes of Victorian masculinity, not biologically
but historically constructed. I approach Boucicault as a self-made man
restructuring and re-imagining himself to suit the cultures of whichever
national environment he desired to belong.


For Boucicault, national and artistic non-recognition was perceived less as a
source of tension and more as a form of cultural conflict. Boucicault was a
conflicted man who often felt aspirations and desires of belong to social
circles that eluded him. As an Irishman, was an outsider in Britain; he
inhabited a space of difference and alterity where normality was in direct
opposition to his own sense of identity and belonging. The suggestion is that
Boucicault was a man who was deeply concerned with dispelling his sense of
marginality and finding a place in the centre. The Transatlantic exchange of his
work facilitated a financial prosperity and identity empowerment that offered
him a chance of belonging to a polity that more closely resembled his own
biography of self-madeness

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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