|
|
of choice, thus affixing a violent underside to O’Neill’s iconic status as “America’s greatest playwright.”18
The concept of a national character remains distressingly relevant today. It is an aspect of nineteenth-century romanticism growing out of Enlightenment conceptions of the individual and nationhood. Considering the United States, a key component of the nineteenth-century American theatre and arguably its most important feature as an historical subfield, is the representation of “Americanness” as we find it on stage. The nineteenth-century American jingoist was no less self-conscious about his or her national identity than today’s refuge-seeking patriotic scoundrel. Therefore, it is difficult for us to accept that a great part of the significant “representations” of Americans on the stage were those based on broadly conceived and executed stereotypes. Furthermore, the nineteenth century assumed differences in ethnicity or nationality were logical and even “scientific.” Indeed, in what was perhaps the last gasp of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the identification of “national” culture became a crucial identification point in the defining mechanism of what constitutes a “people,” Volk or narod.
During the years of the European migration to the North American continent, philosophers of culture came to define popular or folk art in a way that allows us to use the United States as an example or proof as much as it makes a valid channel for our inquiries. From Montaigne’s 1595 essay “On Cannibals” (translated into English by John Florio in 1603), springs a source for the idea of the “noble savage.” One aspect of the savage’s nobility that Montaigne stresses is poésie populaire. While we understand that populaire in this context is not “popular” as it is used in English, in an era of so-called viral marketing, can we still take its meaning as “from the people”? When Madison Avenue types cruise the “ ’hood” zealously seeking insight into the next