Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage (Studies Theatre Hist & Culture)

Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. Its famous dramatic and operatic victims—Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata , Mimì in La Bohème, Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin , and Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night , to name but a few—are among the most iconic figures of the Western stage. Its classic symptoms, the cough and the blood-stained handkerchief, have become global performance shorthand for life-threatening illness. The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice—and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die. "Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of one of the most paradoxically popular figures in transatlantic theatre history: the stage consumptive. Consumption, or tuberculosis, remains one of the world's most deadly epidemic diseases; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, it was a leading killer, responsible for the deaths of as many as one in four members of the population. Despite-or perhaps because of-their horrific experiences of tubercular mortality, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century audiences in these same countries flocked to see consumptive characters love, suffer, and die onstage. Beginning with the origins of the stage consumptive in Romantic-era France and ranging through to the queer theatres of New York City in the 1970s, this book explores famous plays such as La dame aux camélias (Camille) and Uncle Tom's Cabin alongside rediscovered sentimental dramas, frontier melodramas, and naturalistic problem plays. It shows how theatre artists used the symptoms of tuberculosis to perform the inward emotions and experiences of the modern self, and how the new theatrical vocabulary of realism emerged out of the innovations of the sentimental stage. In the theatre, the consumptive character became a vehicle through which-for better and for worse-standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self aims to uncover some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice-and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die"-- Provided by publisher Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction. The Symptom, the Stage, and the Transmission of the Self 14 Part I. Consumptive Poetics 40 Chapter One. “La Poétique du Poitrinaire”: The Making of the Stage Consumptive, 1828–1833 42 Chapter Two. Death and the Working Woman: Subtexts of the Consumptive Heroine, 1848–1855 66 Part II. Sentimental Transmissions 88 Chapter Three. Camilleology: The Stage Consumptive as Transnational Vector, 1852–1877 90 Chapter Four. The Ills of the Parents: Heredity, Sentiment, and the Stage Consumptive Child, 1852–1900 116 Chapter Five. Ailing Nations: Consumption, the Stage, and the Body Politic, 1857–1900 142 Part III. The Sentimental Survival 170 Chapter Six. Sentimental Resistance: The Stage Consumptive in the Age of the Bacillus, 1879–1906 172 Chapter Seven. The Con That Tells the Truth: The Consumptive Repertoire and the Autobiographical Impulse in American Theatre, 1912–1977 196 Afterword. A Living Repertoire 222 Notes 226 Bibliography 272 Index 298 By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice - and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.