Out of the frying pan and into the fire: An Irish playwright abroad – The case of Boucicault’s The octoroon

Millette, Holly-Gale (2013) Out of the frying pan and into the fire: An Irish playwright abroad – The case of Boucicault’s The octoroon. Ireland, Slavery, Anti-slavery, Empire Symposium, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland. 24 - 25 Oct 2013. (Submitted)

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Dionysus Lardener Boucicault was born an Irishman in 1820, but he died an American in 1890. Like the characters he wrote for himself, Boucicault inhabited spaces of alterity and he often imbued his melodramas with complex questions of race, empire, economic equality, and political subjectivity. Boucicault felt the indignity of one race being beholden to another and while on an extended tour to the States in the mid 19th century his pen turned to abolition, slavery and miscegenation.

I would like to look again at Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama, The Octoroon, as contextual popular cultural material produced by an Irishman on the front lines of American slavery debate. On it’s opening, he was accused of taking advantage of abolitionist sentiment to write a ‘pernicious’ play, which tried “to break down caste, and elevate the Negro to the same level with the whites” and was forced – due to the incendiary reaction of Southern audiences and the anti-miscegenation laws – to change the ‘happy ending’ to avoid the catastrophic portrayal of a mixed marriage. This paper argues that it was his subjective relationship to imperial discourse that armed him with the temerity to challenge such socio-political behavior while a guest in Yankee country.

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