Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States by Laura L. Mielke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States by Laura L. Mielke Gordon Alley-Young Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States. By Laura L. Mielke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. pp. ix + 284. $75.00 hardcover. In the introduction to Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States, author Laura Mielke asks, "How did types from the stage, in a manner akin to the representative passages in eloquence textbooks and the culture's canon of celebrated speakers, inform the pursuit of promulgating slavery's demise?" (15). As Mielke explores, the answer to this question is not straightforward, as the era's theatrical and oratorical spheres engaged antislavery debate with plays and orations that were incendiary, progressive, placatory, and/or problematic, sometimes all at once. Thus, the goal, Mielke clarifies, is not to deem any theatrical form as pro- or antislavery, but to locate "instances of charged resemblance, citation, revision, and overlap between theatrical performance and antislavery speech in the lead up to the Civil War" (21). Mielke asks readers to look at the antebellum performative works featured in her book not with an expectation of finding political consensus within any production, character, or performer but to see a web of intertextual connections between the antebellum antislavery speech and theatrical performances that she explores. Mielke's work is organized into five chapters coalesced around the project of tracing the intertextual and interperformative connections between antebellum antislavery oratory and performance. Chapter 1 examines the July 4, 1838, oration by Edwin Forrest, one of the nation's first homegrown theatrical celebrities. Mielke traces the interplay of the fiery acting roles that had elevated Forrest into the sphere of celebrity as contrasted with his sober oration on the principles of the New York Democratic Party and their alignment with the values of rationality over violence during the American Revolution. The effect, [End Page 171] Mielke notes, is a message that urges restraint and rationality, while the association of Forrest with fierce lead characters fighting to overthrow tyranny speaks to the necessity of force in the face of those who would oppose rational deliberation. In chapter 2, Mielke explores how African American actress and orator Mary E. Webb and African American abolitionist lecturer and novelist/playwright William Wells Brown used the tool of dramatic suasion in their messages. The chapter details how Harriet Beecher Stowe could not prevent unauthorized adaptations of the previously published Uncle Tom's Cabin; however, she deployed The Christian Slave in 1855, written to be performed as a recitation by Mary E. Webb, to reclaim the abolition message that had been diluted via the injection of minstrelsy and other broad licenses taken by adaptors of her earlier work. On Wells Brown's performance of Experience or How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone in 1856, Mielke cites Wells Brown's remark that patrons who would never attend an antislavery meeting would pay to receive an abolition message embedded in a dramatic reading (56). Both performers referenced the violence prompted by abolition rhetoric to condemn the practice of slavery, and in so doing they created space in the social sphere for the eloquence of the enslaved person. Further, they positioned the slave master in opposition to principles of US democracy due to their increasing use of violence to suppress antislavery speech and its speakers. In this chapter, Mielke considers the impact of Webb's body in performance, and readers might like this chapter to delve more deeply/critically into the rhetorical space that provocative eloquence created for African American performers and indeed African American citizens of the era. Chapter 3 is contextualized around the beating of abolitionist Republican Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by proslavery Democratic South Carolina representative Preston Brooks on the US Senate floor in 1856 after the former called out the latter's family member in a speech against slave owners. This same year, Lawrence, Kansas, was sacked when proslavery agitators attacked antislavery settlers from Massachusetts who had hoped to make the then-territory of Kansas a free state. Against this backdrop, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Dred; A Tale of the...