The Judicial and the Melodramatic Stage: Trial Scenes in Boucicault’s Arrah-na-Pogue and The Octoroon

Abstract

While it is important to read the trial scenes in Dion Boucicault’s melodramas as popular entertainment, it would be a serious mistake to allow their political valences to go unexplored. The trial scenes in Arrah-na-Pogue and The Octoroon contain an edge of social critique that, while turning neither play into a political tour-de-force , reveals a far more subtle and perceptive political acumen than Boucicault is generally given credit for. Both scenes reveal judicial systems dangerously poised between two forms of excess that threaten to inhibit their ability to legislate fairly. Legal language becomes a form of institutional excess that, through its failure to translate the experiences of marginalized characters adequately, allows its privileged speakers to abuse their power. At the other extreme, the trial scenes expose the court’s equally dangerous susceptibility to popular opinion, its theatricality suggesting a potential to be swayed unfairly by personal charisma and flashy oratory. In thus staging a nuanced portrayal of the law’s uneasy position between two equally dangerous forms of excess, Boucicault invites his international audiences to consider their own judicial systems, to examine what lies beneath the court’s unique blend of theatricality and political power. While both plays hint at the fallibility of both authoritarian and populist interpretations of justice, Arrah-na-Pogue most explicitly recognizes the danger of a powerful, univocal court, while the impromptu trial in The Octoroon registers the potential for chaos and confusion in a democratic judicial system.