Acts of Manhood : The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828–1865

Exploring the performance of masculinity on and off the nineteenth-century American stage, this book looks at the shift from the passionate muscularity to intellectual restraint as not a linear journey toward national refinement; but a multitude of masculinities fighting simultaneously for dominance and recognition. Investigates how and why the performance of American masculinity changed so dramatically on and off the nineteenth-century American stage. Exploring the performance of masculinity on and off the nineteenth-century American stage, this book looks at the shift from the passionate muscularity of Edwin Forrest to the intellectual restraint of Edwin Booth was not a linear journey toward national refinement; but rather, a multitude of masculinities simultaneously fought for dominance and recognition. Actors and audiences mutually constructed manly ideals unique to each splintered group, while simultaneously seeking national identity and communal belonging. Kippola integrates dramas, manly rhetoric, advice literature, and masculine performances on political and theatrical stages to trace fragmenting and competing masculine identities in antebellum America Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: A New Race of Men....Pages 1-20 Act Like a Man: Images and Rhetoric of Reconstructed Manhood....Pages 21-51 “A Glorious Image of Unperverted Manhood”: Edwin Forrest as Masculine Ideal....Pages 53-88 A Masculine Identity Worth Dying For: The Astor Place Riot....Pages 89-116 Decorum and Delicacy: The Feminized Manliness of Edwin Booth....Pages 117-146 Impossibly Genial: The Masculine Transformations of John McCullough....Pages 147-171 Conclusion: Affirming White Masculinity by Deriding the Other....Pages 173-190 Back Matter....Pages 191-251