"Dark catastrophe of passion": the "Indian" as human commodity in nineteenth-century British theatrical culture.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-02

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THE MELANCHOLY NATIVE AMERICAN MAY HAVE GAINED CULTURAL ASCENDANCY in England through the popularity of American writers like James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, but the sorrows of the "Indian" appealed to the nineteenth-century British subject for reasons different from those for which the mourning "Indian" attracted Americans. The appropriation of Native American land by the American government and the possible Celtic origins of the Native American tribes are two themes that surface in the Gentleman's Magazine and other British periodicals of the 1810s and 1820s. (1) These themes in combination reveal the British public's identification with the Native American as the victim of American imperialism and the public's association of the Celt, the original British person, with Native Americans. This identification with "Indian" suffering occurred as Britain mourned for the American colonies lost in the American Revolution and again in the War of 1812. What Nancy Moore Goslee describes as the "violent expropriation of Indian territory" was now the fault not of the British colonists but of the Americans, who were also responsible for the territorial losses of the British. (2) The loss of empire installed a compensatory imperialist fantasy in British culture. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the cult of the Native American grew as William Wordsworth, Amelia Opie, Felicia Hemans, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and others wrote poems and plays featuring the tragic "Indian." (3) All of these British writers portrayed the colonized "Indian" as mourning over a lost relative, tribe, or homeland, or over imminent personal demise. In tracing a resemblance between the "Indian" and British losses of American lands, British writers legitimated the British imperial right of possession by portraying white Americans as the robbers of innocent "Indians" and Britons alike. Yet British artists not only appropriated the image of the sorrowing "Indian" to justify British empire, but also marketed this figure for money and prestige. The mourning "Indian" serves British imperialism and exemplifies a widespread romantic economic melancholia.

Here seen in British cultural production, the displacement of mourning through ambivalent identification with an impoverished object is symptomatic of melancholia. Well-known to nineteenth-century British culture, the theories of melancholia developed by early modern medical thinkers like Robert Burton were eventually given a psychological structure by Sigmund Freud. (4) Freud describes the cause of melancholia as the subject's refusal of the loss of a beloved object. Unlike the melancholic, the subject who successfully mourns the lost object prolongs the existence of the object while testing the reality of that object's absence. Finding the object irretrievable, the subject severs his attachment in order to preserve himself. But instead of gradually weakening his attachment to this lost object, the melancholic subject refuses to let go of the object. Faced with loss, the melancholic subject refuses it by identifying himself with the lost object. This identification is painful because "identifications are never brought to full closure; identifications are inevitably failed identifications," as Diana Fuss observes. (5) The subject thus emerges through his melancholic refusal of his own incompleteness: desire sustains subjective identity while testifying to its impossibility. Like Fuss's melancholic subject, Britain defined itself through its melancholic identification with a surrogate object that was outside the nation and yet belonged "inside" it due to the nation's attachment to it. (6) When romantic artists offered up the surrogate object of the "Indian" image, melancholy Britain's imperial loss was transformed into a symbolic gain for commodity culture.

British commodity culture formed around a commodity economy produced by capitalism. As the capitalist mode of production emerged from the residual structures of feudal agrarianism, British society concentrated laborers and changed their function from producers to a means of production equivalent to, dependent on and reducible to mechanical tools of industry. The booming bureaucratic, mercantile, agricultural, and civic institutions similarly instrumentalized their workers. For British society, the factory worker became a symbol of the dehumanizing effect of the march of capitalist technology. (7) The cultural melancholia for "humanness" reflected not a real loss of pre-capitalist subjecthood, but a market-generated desire for a surplus-value attainable outside the transactions of the economy. The consuming subjects who could not attach a permanent, absolute value to the consumable commodity imagined that the source of absolute value was locatable in the "humanness" of the subjects who produced the commodity. (8) The circulation of value that sustained the economy, though, necessitated the impossibility of absolute value, rendering desire for it melancholically frustrated. Guinn Batten suggests a British economic melancholia when in writing on romantic commodity culture she argues: "Even as the ideology of capital urges modern subjects to work, to defer, to save, it also and in open contradiction urges them to desire, to spend, and to consume." (9) The work and deferral that Batten calls mourning find their antithesis in the desiring and consuming that I maintain is the melancholic action of the romantic commodity economy. Through fantasies of absolute value, British consumers melancholically refused the impossibility of attaining such an absolute value. When consuming subjects insisted on their desire for absolute value, the imperialist fantasy of absolute possession of the Other through identification with it acquired new force. The "primitive" humanness of the "Indian" supplied to commodity culture the fantasy of an absolute value originating outside economic exchange. Taking my cue from Jean-Christophe Agnew's argument that the theater figuratively expressed romantic commodity culture, (10) I will show the importance of the "Indian" commodity to the theater through a reading of the productions of Joanna Baillie and Edmund Kean.

Baillie was the most respected dramatist of the first third of the nineteenth century, Kean the most celebrated actor. Baillie in her theater theory and Kean in his acting practice championed a dramatic economy based on intense passions produced by the actors of the drama and consumed by the spectators. On one occasion, Kean and Baillie actually worked together on a theatrical production. In 1820, Lord Byron invited Kean to stage a revival of Baillie's De Monfort at Drury Lane in order to improve what Byron and many others saw as the lamentable aesthetic quality of staged drama. (11) Kean asked Baillie to revise the play, the first staging of which by John Kemble in 1800 had been a failure. The collaborators worked amicably, and De Monfort was performed to the playwright's satisfaction, lasting for five performances. (12) This brief theatrical partnership reveals the intersection of Kean's and Baillie's representational practices. In the collection of productions that includes De Monfort's spectacle of "savage" passion, Baillie's dramatic theory, and Kean's performances of "savage" passion both onstage and off, the tragic actor and the Native American appear consistently as the bearers of valuable human passion. The actor and the "Indian" function similarly in Kean's and Baillie's dramatic economy. The two figures' correspondence suggests that, like the commodity economy, the dramatic economy depends for its existence on a cultural fantasy of an intrinsically valuable humanness. The embodiment of this cultural dream of a humanness that both exceeds and creates economic value is the "human commodity," the commodity-object that has a human form and function. (13)

Kean himself registers an awareness of the allure of the "Indian" for British theatrical culture. Near the end of his disappointing American tour of 1826, Kean received an unexpected honor. In Quebec after months of other cities' restive audiences and the constant threat of riot, Kean was introduced to four Huron chiefs, to whom he presented medals marking the occasion. In return, they adopted Kean into their tribe, giving him the name "Alanienouidet." Kean was ecstatic over this adoption and later told a friend in New York that "he was uncertain what to do--whether to seek...

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