36 pages • 1 hour read
Dion BoucicaultThe Octoroon
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1859A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Language and Vocabulary
The Octoroon uses language not only to convey the story, but also to delineate between the characters. The slave characters, such as Pete, use a broken English that shows their lack of education—“[G]ib it to ole Pete! he’s allers in for it. Git away dere!” (23)—while the white characters use a more “proper” English vocabulary to show their education and higher status. Wahnotee is depicted as even lower status than the black characters through his language, using a “mash up” of languages that few of the other characters can decipher and is often speaking in unrefined grunts like “Ugh!” (67).
The piece’s Southern setting is also depicted through regional vernacular, as characters use vocabulary and pronunciation that suggests their Louisiana accent. Ratts says to Sunnyside, for instance, that he’d like to say “summit soft” (48) to Mrs. Peyton.
The play also uses heightened language to convey the emotionality of the piece. This is most pronounced in depicting Zoe’s tragic arc, as she makes exaggerated statements like: “Now these tears will flow; let me hide them till I teach my heart. Oh, my—my heart!” (56).
Melodrama
The Octoroon is considered to be a melodrama, a genre popular in the 19th century that aimed to intensify the audience’s emotional experience. Melodramas of the time were typically both comic and tragic—although they leaned toward comedy—and featured large, supporting casts, as The Octoroon does. The Octoroon uses many tropes that were common for melodramas of the time: Injustice is a central theme; the plot involves the emergence of a secret document; the villain uses a mortgage as a pretext to displace the hero and heroine from their social and physical place; and, as in The Octoroon, there is often some sort of trial where the wrong person is accused first (as Wahnotee is), before the injustice is acknowledged and the correct identifications are made.
The Octoroon is also a typical melodrama in that it relies on stock character types—George as the romantic hero, Zoe as the heroine, M’Closky as the first villain, Pete as the comic man, etc.—and uses orchestrated spectacles, which Boucicault referred to as “sensation scenes.” The Octoroon’s sensation scenes include the central slave auction scene, as well as the fire that burns aboard the Steamer Magnolia while M’Closky and Wahnotee swim away.
One important way in which The Octoroon diverges from traditional melodrama is in its tragic ending, as melodramas typically had happy endings where the lovers were reunited. British audiences were upset by the divergence in form. They eventually pressured Boucicault to change the ending when the production was performed in the United Kingdom, in which Zoe and George left for England to be wed.
Photography
The Octoroon is believed to be the first time photography was used in a play as a major plot device, as a photographic plate depicting M’Closky standing over Paul’s body proves his guilt as a murderer. As a plot device, the camera—or “photographic apparatus” (38), as it is referred to here—serves to represent the objective truth in a story and society that revolves so heavily around prejudice and deceit. It allows Wahnotee, a Native American who is discriminated against, to avoid taking the fall for M’Closky’s crime. As Scudder tells M’Closky when the photographic plate is found, “the apparatus can’t lie” (65).
Zoe’s Death
Zoe’s tragic fate in The Octoroon, in which she commits suicide to avoid being M’Closky’s slave and end the illegality of her love for George, helps to represent and emphasize the horrors of slavery. It demonstrates the idea that slavery and being an African American—even if only one-eighth, as Zoe is—is a prison sentence that cannot be escaped except in death. Her death makes clear the distinct boundaries between races, which can never be crossed while she is still alive. In a letter to the editor to the Times of London published in the Broadview Anthology edition, Boucicault himself emphasizes the ending’s importance to the story, even though it was later changed for British audiences to whom slavery and miscegenation laws were a foreign concept. Boucicault explains:
In the death of the Octoroon lies the moral and teaching of the whole work. Had this girl been saved, and the drama brought to a happy end, the horrors of her position, irremediable from the very nature of the institution of slavery, would subside into the condition of a temporary annoyance (103).
