prostitutes, the era’s other “public women,” in the language of the day, was well founded by the standards of the respectable. The more elastic sexual norms of the working-class milieu from which most actresses emerged, their initially low wages, and the desire to accrue the publicity that might follow from attracting well-placed paramours all discouraged a moralistic view of sex. Moreover, the presence of alcohol and prostitutes, as well as the celebration of sensuous display and illusion, made the theater virtually synonymous with corrupt aristocratic tastes, earning it a reputation as the enemy of the middle-class family as that class’s “cult of domesticity” took hold. A flat prohibition by the Protestant church followed. Legal scholars consider the special regulation of theatrical exhibitions an anomaly of English law reflecting the conviction of this rising middle class that the play house debased audiences, particularly vulnerable female ones. White men could ignore the church and partake of the play house’s pleasures with little consequence, but women who wished to remain ladies could not. Thus, through performance and space, this theater communicated the same message about women’s place in public: left alone without male protection women moved outside the moral order, inviting the surveillance of strangers that led to sexual exchanges and ruin.10
As the nation’s capitalist expansion sent ever more people scuttling toward markets in cities and towns, leisure assumed more industrialized forms in which the star system and its celebrity culture played an increasingly central role. A theater manager in Philadelphia bemoaned how “a spirit of locomotiveness hitherto unexampled” erupted during “a commercial season of great excess,” making “the system of stars the order of 1835.”11 A set of emerging business practices tied to consumer capitalism’s growth, the star system offered the best means to fill the era’s larger and more numerous play houses. The theatrical entrepreneurs who sped the star system’s development jettisoned the elite man as the theater’s most important protagonist and patron. Instead, they publicized a more diverse set of players in different kinds of melodramatic plays that aimed to attract larger and more specific segments of the public.12 In this way, the star system encouraged the theater’s splintering along lines of class and gender.
Inside and outside these more plentiful theaters, a commercial culture of print and performance resounding with melodramatic expression offered an aesthetic register to express the democratization of fame. Faith in the principle of poetic justice and the possibility of self-transformation for those long excluded from the heroic role distinguished melodrama’s form from the start. For this reason, some critics contend that melodrama’s roots share the same soil that produced fairy tales and ballads. Wherever its origins, the melodramatic form dominated the commercialized popular culture of the nineteenth century created by the spread of literacy, cheaper reproduction methods, and theatrical exchanges. Varying widely in setting and action, most melodramas relied on a plot structured around the protagonist’s triumph over villainy, dished out with strong emotion and leavened with comedic touches. By displacing the elite man as central patron and protagonist, according to writer Robertson Davies, melodrama appealed to the “poor working man and his female counterpart, or bourgeois citizen toiling to keep his place in a hurrying world,” encouraging their identification “with the Hero, the Heroine, or the Villain.”13 The variety of terms used to modify the melodramatic plays produced on the era’s soaring number of stages—including “apocalyptic,” “heroic,” “problem,” “nautical,” “sensational,” “immoral,” “domestic,” and “horse”—signaled not just the form’s ubiquity but the desire of producers to target and attract specific slices of an ever widening circle of fans. All variations enticed with skillful spectacles and shared an impassioned register that elevated the apparently average speaker and furthered his or her cause. Much like what the star system aimed to do with its production of intimate strangers, this heart-stopping aesthetic used strong emotions to bridge the chasm separating character from audience. Paradoxically, then, melodrama celebrated the individualism that mass society advanced and acted as an antidote to its isolating effects, making it peculiarly suited to popular culture fashioned in the American grain.14
Stars who excelled in heroic or apocalyptic melodramas commanded the country’s expanding and increasingly democratic theatrical scene. Producers in cities like New York filled new theaters like the Bowery and the Chatham by encouraging young working-class men to shift the customary site of their all-male socializing, excluding prostitutes, from saloons. Cheaper tickets attracted these urban rowdies, but entrepreneurs discovered that magnetic actors performing in these melodramas drew them back. Privileging the roles and tastes of the city’s growing number of proletarian men, this mobile network of male stars disrupted the traditional balance of power between managers and players, and among men of different classes in the audience. Here arose the first American audience, lovingly chronicled by historian Lawrence Levine. The opinionated, passionate, and participatory style of this audience displayed how white men’s expanding political rights gave them the confidence to attempt sovereignty over performers and elites alike. Yet, rather than offering a truly democratic space, this theater presented a contained performance of the masculine conflicts and style animating the rise of the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson.15
The celebrity of Edwin Forrest, the first great American star, crystallized the type of man idealized by this political culture. Inside now largely class-segmented theaters, Forrest played the common man’s champion, a fearless destroyer of tyrants in plays like Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829), the tale of a doomed “noble savage” who refuses to submit to the white man’s rule. To his legion of male fans, the public performer and the private man were indivisible. “It is no painted shadow you see in Mr. Forrest, no piece of costume,” boasted one reviewer, “but a man, there to do his four hours of work brawinly [sic], it may be, and sturdily, and with great outlay of muscular power but there’s a big heart thrown in.”16 Forrest was no effete English fop, but a vigorous American democrat and Democrat who actively supported the party of Jackson. On stage and off, he displayed what his friend and official biographer called the “one essential ideal” that distinguished him in this homosocial arena: his “fearless faithful manhood.”17 Thus Forrest’s fame grew from his performance of the qualities that his fans believed he possessed in private. However ersatz the display, Forrest inspired a devotion based on his seemingly authentic personification of the new social order’s dominant political culture in ways that drew on established modes of fame.18
Women found little room in this theater as long as it aimed primarily to satisfy the “mechanics” whose wild and, at times, riotous behavior became part of the show. Such displays climaxed with the Astor Place Riots of 1849, a conflagration that pitted supporters of the aristocratic English star William Macready against Forrest’s “native” American fans and left twenty-two dead. By quickening the drive to segment theaters along class lines and to tame this audience’s participatory style, the event sped what cultural historians call the feminization of American culture and its resulting sacralization as Shakespeare moved out of the mechanics’ houses. The drive to clean up theaters—to make them spaces fit for the ladies of any class—dramatically diminished workingmen’s power in the pit by limiting their ability to use the theater as a space to strengthen solidarities of gender, class, and party.19
Yet, from the perspective of the opposite sex, the move to reconfigure the gendered moral taxonomy of the theater opened up as much as it shut down. Not only did a theatrical culture aimed at men figure all women who joined its public as immoral, but its celebration of a fighting-style of masculinity also disadvantaged women performers. Shortly before she turned to film acting, Pickford recalled “the great difficulty” of performing before the remnants of this audience in the “ten-twenty-thirty” theaters, so called for their popularly priced tickets. Tellingly, Pickford played a small boy in a play in which the few parts for women continued to mirror the ideal of true womanhood that had pervaded popular conventions during the Victorian era. Originating among white middle-class urbanites, the ideal held that Woman should embody everything that Man—ever more consumed by the hurrying, competitive outside world of commerce—did not. Leading a pious, passive, and asexual existence, the true woman was a well-kept “angel in the home” who exercised spiritual
