An Octoroon

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2015

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Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Act II

Acts III-V

Character Analysis

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Background

Literary Context: Boucicault’s The Octoroon

Although Dion Boucicault’s wildly popular 1859 melodrama The Octoroon is often read as an abolitionist play, and it certainly played a role in catalyzing conversations about the morality of slavery only two years before the start of the Civil War, Boucicault’s approach to the then-controversial topic is demonstrably ambiguous. Contemporary critics acknowledged that the play was hardly abolitionist propaganda, and that Boucicault simply exploits the inherent melodrama of a hot-button issue, using the institution of slavery and “anti-miscegenation” (a racist term) laws to create a sensational scenario of forbidden love. Boucicault himself confirmed that the play was not taking a stance.

The word “octoroon” comes from slavery-era blood quantum laws under which a person whose lineage was one-eighth or more African was considered Black. Zoe, the “octoroon” of the title, is considered right on the cusp of whiteness but just Black enough to be forbidden to marry a white man. Although she is raised by the Peyton family as a daughter, she is also entangled by the legalities under which she is still technically enslaved, as the late Judge Peyton failed to properly free her before dying. At the end of the play, Zoe has been purchased by the villainous Jacob McClosky, who is in love with her. Zoe and George love each other, but they can’t be married. When Zoe overhears George asserting that he’d prefer to see her dead rather than owned by McClosky, Zoe obliges by poisoning herself. As she is dying, Zoe tells George that she would rather die than continue to stand as an obstacle between George and Dora, the white heiress whose love for George is unrequited.

The Octoroon was a smashing success on Broadway, spawning seven US tours, but when it transferred to the West End, audiences despised Zoe’s tragic ending. For American audiences, the only solution to the messiness of a white man and a mixed-race enslaved woman in love was to give her a tragic, heart-wrenching death. Since a key element of the genre of melodrama is that good triumphs over evil, British audiences complained that Zoe ought to triumph, and her death made the play a tragedy. At first, Boucicault resisted these demands from the public, but ultimately, he gave in with an act of malicious compliance. He revised the fifth act by packing it with spectacular dramatic action in which Zoe must be rescued and McClosky chased down and shot. With McClosky dead, George declares that he and Zoe will leave the United States for another country where they can legally marry.

Though Boucicault intended this ending to be ridiculous—a sarcastic response to his critics—British audiences unironically adored it. Boucicault hated it so much that he refused to allow it to be published as it was performed. Instead, the American publication kept Zoe’s tragic end, and the published British version simply left out Zoe’s poisoning. The hyperbolically dramatic version of the fifth act has been lost to the ages. Through a contemporary lens, it’s easy to interpret Zoe’s death as a condemnation of slavery, as without slavery and racist laws, Zoe could have lived and married George. But this underestimates the extent to which American audiences required her death to tie up the play’s loose ends, since to many, the alternative—interracial marriage—was unthinkable.

For more in-depth summary and analysis, check out the study guide for The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault on the SuperSummary website.

Historical Context: Blackface and White Authors’ Portrayals of Black Speech

In considering whether Boucicault’s The Octoroon ought to be considered an abolitionist play, it’s important to remember that when the play premiered in 1859, none of the Black characters were played by Black actors. The first Black actor to perform on Broadway as an equal cast member with white performers wouldn’t occur for another 50 years, when Bert Williams joined The Ziegfeld Follies in 1910. Black characters were played by white performers in blackface.

In the original production, Wahnotee, the Indigenous American character, was played by Boucicault himself in redface. Notably, Zoe, who in the play is considered to be Black because of her lineage, was played by Boucicault’s wife, a white Scottish woman, although Zoe’s supposed physical markers of Blackness—a blue tinge on her nails and the whites of her eyes—are invisible to the audience but still treated with social significance. A white actor playing Zoe is, in a sense, in metaphorical blackface, and the character is required to self-report her Blackness to avoid breaking the law.

Most often, blackface is associated with minstrelsy, which was a type of performance beginning in the early 1800s in which white actors used burnt cork to blacken their faces and used makeup to draw on exaggerated lips. These performances were like variety shows, with blackface actors singing and dancing, playing instruments, and performing usually comic sketches and parodies of popular culture as racist stereotypes of Blackness. Performers spoke in a ubiquitous and recognizable dialect, in which broken English and language mistakes were used for comic effect.

Minstrelsy is considered to be a homegrown American performance tradition, but its popularity reached all over the world, particularly in England. Although the form is certainly racist, it was not always understood as a deliberate mockery of Black people, speaking instead to a larger malevolent ignorance that pervaded Western countries and continues to persist today in various forms. Some white performers visited plantations and appropriated the music, dances, and storytelling of enslaved people, and when they brought their adulterated versions of these performances to audiences, they billed their shows as performances of authentic Blackness. Often, blackface minstrel performers would wear gloves, and during the performance, they would remove a glove to prove to the audience that they were white. In fact, the remnants of this tradition can be seen in cartoon characters, such as Bugs Bunny, who wears white gloves.

Minstrel shows reified distinct tropes of Blackness, such as the “mammy” character, the “pickaninny,” the “jezebel,” and the “young buck.” Notably, when Black actors began to perform in minstrel shows, they were also required to “black up” with exaggerated features and act out stereotypes. But blackface onstage and in film didn’t begin or end with American minstrelsy. One example of non-minstrel blackface is in Shakespeare’s Othello, in which Othello isn’t a caricature, but his Blackness is tied to his ultimately murderous temper. In mid-19th century America, as Black characters were incorporated into drama and melodrama, blackface actors performed the same minstrel show tropes that often had an added dimension of complexity.

Rhetorical Context: Melodrama

For many reasons, not the least of which is the racist representations of Black characters, The Octoroon has long been relegated to the status of unrevivable plays. However, it lives on as a staple in theater history classes as a prime example of 19th-century American melodrama. Theater history is a recurring theme in Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays, from blackface minstrelsy in Neighbors (2010); Everybody (2017), a reimagining of the medieval morality play Everyman; to Girls (2019), his adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae.

In An Octoroon, the playwright takes on one of the most popular plays and widely attended genres from the formative years of the American theater. Often, the term “melodramatic” is used interchangeably with overly emotional acting and maudlin dialogue. But if historical melodramas like The Octoroon seem that way to contemporary ears, it might be surprising that melodrama comprises much of the most currently popular films and performances, such as superhero movies, action films, and even horror.

At the core of melodrama is a struggle between good and evil in which good always wins in the end. Plotlines are generally simple and use recognizable stock character types and narrative tropes. The form first emerged in France near the turn of the 19th century when industrialization led to more densely populated cities as the laboring class moved in for the sake of employment. Workers wanted theatrical entertainment that wasn’t high-brow or literary, although melodrama was well-attended by people from all classes. When the genre was exported to England, strict licensing laws as to which theaters could perform certain types of plays led to the addition of music, which is how it became known as melodrama—melodic drama.

By the 1820s, melodrama was one of the most popular forms of theater in the United States as well. Along with plotlines full of heightened drama, playwrights began to compete to pull off the most impressive spectacles. Spectacles included trained animals, elaborate scenery, the supernatural, battles, and extensive special effects. One of the most famous special effects in American melodrama came in Augustin Daly’s 1867 play Under the Gaslight, in which the heroine rescues the comic sidekick character who has been tied to the railroad tracks. She frees him just in time before the train barrels past. In the climax of The Octoroon (1859), a steamboat explodes onstage, one of many stagecraft innovations by Dion Boucicault.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, it started a cultural obsession that led to hundreds of stage adaptations, including the most famous, which was an 1852 melodrama by George Aiken. The play made a grand spectacle of the villain’s dogs hunting and chasing Eliza, a runaway enslaved person. It also marked the beginning of a uniquely American melding of minstrelsy and melodrama. Black characters were still racist stereotypes played by white actors, but they had more depth. Uncle Tom was the first serious blackface role in American theater who solicited empathy and wasn’t played for laughs. Certainly, the country had (and still has) a long way to go in representing Black characters, but mid-19th century melodrama reflects the growing tensions of the coming Civil War.