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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2010
When artist-inventor Samuel B. Morse alleged that the Bowery Theatre performance of French ballerina Madame Hutin was “to all intents and purposes the public exposure of a naked female,” he was expressing an opinion that conflicted with that of other critics, who felt that the performance of French dancers would “put to shame our splay-footed indigenous sprawlers, and will greatly refine the taste in dancing in the play-going public.” In Jacksonian American, citizens who were concerned with the direction of the nation's culture engaged in a debate about the respective merits of the less-polished art created in the New World and the more refined offerings of the Old World that was played out in critical reactions to an increasingly popular theatrical form: ballet. Ballet gradually became an important part of American theatre during the first half of the nineteenth century as dancers appeared on stages in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston in front of the same audiences that attended the dramatic plays whose productions have received the bulk of academic attention. Three waves of European dancers came to the Americas during the period 1790 to 1845. The first wave (1790–1825) consisted of small companies who presented dance to a broad range of audiences, typically before other plays or during entr'actes. This article focuses on performances that occurred during the second wave (1825–40), when impresarios recruited established (though not top-tier) European ballerinas to come to specific theatres. These dancers brought the repertoire and styles of the Romantic ballet to America, including evening-length performances with fairy-tale plots and an emphasis on charismatic female stars, such as La Sylphide. The first American ballerinas, Mary Ann Lee and Augusta Maywood, made their debuts during this period. The third wave (1840–5) consisted largely of “headliners” such as Fanny Elssler, who toured the country performing selections from their famous roles and pas with a corps de ballet recruited from each city they visited.
1. Morse, Samuel B., New York Observer, 3 March 1827Google Scholar.
2. “The Drama,” Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature [hereafter Albion], 10 March 1827, 312.
3. The Romantic ballet is generally considered to have begun with the 1827 production of Le Sicilien and to have ended with Coppélia in 1870, peaking during the years 1830–45. See Lee, Carol, Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1987), 135–71Google Scholar.
4. Recruiting local dancers as a corps de ballet (supporting cast) was a common practice for ballerinas touring in Europe. Those who followed this practice encountered problems in the New World, which lacked an infrastructure for the systematic training of ballet dancers. This was one reason why many of the best and brightest of the dancers from the Paris Opéra refused to travel to the United States, along with the perception that it was a small backward country with no appreciation for the arts. Fanny Elssler's correspondence in anticipation of her American tour is quite clear about the trepidation she experienced; see “Fanny Elssler at Paris,” Albion, 24 January 1844, 43.
5. Richards, Jeffrey H., Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the New American Republic (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6. Nathans, Heather S., Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
7. Dudden, Faye E., Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
8. See Stern, Madeline B., We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962)Google Scholar; and Costonis, Maureen Needham, “‘The Wild Doe’: Augusta Maywood in Philadelphia and Paris, 1837–1840,” Dance Chronicle 17.2 (1994): 123–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9. This is the 1830 Taglioni opera-ballet with music by Auber, Le Dieu et la Bayadère; ou, La Courtisane amoureuse, and is not to be confused with the later Petipa–Minkus La Bayadère (1877).
10. Quoted in Moore, Lillian, “Mary Ann Lee, First American Giselle” [1943], in Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Magriel, Paul (New York: Da Capo, 1978), 103–17Google Scholar, at 104.
11. Perhaps the differences in their stations played a part in Augusta's superior skills. Augusta's mother, after an unhappy first marriage to an actor, met and wed Robert Maywood, who was at that time the manager and chief lessee of the Chestnut Street Theatre. Mary Ann Lee, on the other hand, was a child of poverty whose father, Charles Lee, was an actor and circus performer better known for his amiability than for any particular talent. Charles Lee died when Mary Ann was a child, and soon after his death the young girl took to the stage, performing “everything from Shakespeare to burlesque … La Sylphide to the Sailor's Hornpipe, and on occasion even sang” (Moore, 103).
12. Ballerinas were almost universally referred to by a single name, unless there was the possibility that this might be confusing. Augusta Maywood was called “petite Augusta” to differentiate her from Augusta St. James, and Madame Lecompte was so called to differentiate her from her daughter, Anne.
13. Richards, 314.
14. This was the special issue entitled “Theatre History in the New Millennium: A Forum.”
15. Taylor, Nancy, “John Weaver and the Origins of English Pantomime: A Neoclassical Theory and Practice for Uniting Dance and Theatre,” Theatre Survey 42.2 (2001): 191–214Google Scholar.
16. Wemyss, Francis Courtney, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer, & Co., 1846), 292Google Scholar.
17. Gautier, Théophile, review of 25 November, in Gautier on Dance, trans. Guest, Ivor (London: Cecil Court, 1986), 79–81Google Scholar. Lawrence and Redisha were an English comic-acrobat team: Yates, W. E., Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776–1995 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 33 (London: J. Limbird, 1839), 198.
18. Costonis, Maureen Needham reprints several of these reviews; see “‘The Wild Doe’: Augusta Maywood in Philadelphia and Paris, 1837–1840,” Dance Chronicle 17.2 (1994): 123–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19. Gautier on Dance, 80.
20. New-York Mirror, 9 January 1841, 15.
21. The Literary Gazette and American Athenaeum, 10 February 1827, 174–5.
22. Morse received commissions to paint the U.S. House of Representatives in 1821 and the Marquis de Lafayette in 1825. For more on Morse, perhaps best remembered for his patent of the telegraph, see Silverman, Kenneth, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)Google Scholar.
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24. Emily Burrel Hoffman to Bridget Wickham, 14 March 1827, Villiers-Hatton Collection, New-York Historical Society, quoted in Swift, Mary Grace, Belles and Beaux on Their Toes (New York: University Press of America, 1980), 26Google Scholar. Miss Kelly was a popular singer-actress who regularly appeared on the same stages as Madame Hutin.
25. Robert Allen suggests that Hutin, Madame wore “loose trousers gathered at the ankle covered by a long silk skirt. She was hardly naked (not an inch of flesh beneath her waist showed), nor was her costume even translucent.” Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 89Google Scholar.
26. “The Drama,” Albion, 10 March 1827, 312.
27. U.S. dancers were at a great disadvantage in the absence of any kind of state sponsorship, let alone the kind of underwriting performers at the Paris Opéra enjoyed.
28. This Madame Vestris is not to be confused with the more famous English singer-actress Lucia Elizabeth [Lucy] Vestris (1797–1856), also known as Madame Vestris and also married to a Charles. (Her first husband, Armand, was a cousin of Maria Ronzi Vestris's husband.) “Vestris [Vestri],” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, entry online at http://kosiv.info/ed/grove/Entries/S46107.htm (accessed 6 February 2010).
29. “Bowery. The Ballet,” The Critic, 22 November 1828, 64.
30. “Drama: Remarks on the Ballet,” The Critic, 20 December 1828, 127–8.
31. For more on Leggett, see Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Melodrama of Panic: William Leggett and the Literary Logic of Jacksonian Political Economy,” paper presented at the Program in Early American Economy and Society, 2007, online at http://www.librarycompany.org/Economics/2007Conference/papers.htm (accessed 6 February 2010).
32. “Drama: Remarks on the Ballet,” The Critic, 20 December 1828, 127–8.
33. “Theatrical Exhibitions,” Christian Register, 8 December 1827, 194.
34. Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven Yale University Press, 1982), 57Google Scholar.
35. Alcott, William, Familiar Letters to Young Men on Various Subjects (Buffalo: George H. Derby & Co., 1850), 180Google Scholar. Alcott was a physician and the author of dozens of popular advice manuals. He “engaged in various reforms in morals, education, and physical training, having for his object the prevention of vice, disease, poverty, and the dissemination of physiological knowledge.” Drake, Francis Samuel, The Dictionary of American Biography (Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1879), 12Google Scholar.
36. “Theatrical Exhibitions,” Christian Register, 8 December 1827, 194.
37. Bloch, Ruth H., “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13.1 (Autumn 1987): 37–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 41.
38. For more about the reaction of clergymen and male antislavery activists to the first female public speakers, see Lerner, Gerda, The Grimké Sisters of South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39. There has been a great deal of nuanced work on this subject since the publication of Barbara Welter's “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18.2, pt. 1 (Summer 1966): 151–74. Both Kelley's, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar and Matthews's, Glenna“Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar seek out sites of resistance against and tension with the “cult of true womanhood” Welter described.
40. Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89.3 (June 1984): 620–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 621.
41. “The Drama,” New-York Mirror, 25 March 1837, 312.
42. Spirit of the Times, 2 December 1837, 329.
43. Ibid.
44. Lee, 148.
45. Parallels can be found in other instances where women behaved in a manner considered unladylike; consider the Grimké sisters' encounter in 1837 with Protestant and Quaker ministers regarding their participation in the American Anti-Slavery Society; see Lerner.
46. Julia Anna Turnbull (1822–87) was a child actress in New York and by age twelve a company member at the Park Theatre. In June 1839 she and Lee costarred at the Bowery in the ballet The Sisters. A year later Turnbull was touring the United States in Fanny Elssler's company.
47. I have discovered no newspaper accounts offering further information regarding exactly what kind of illness Lee contracted.
48. New-York Mirror, 24 February 1838, 279.
49. Spirit of the Times, 17 February 1838, 8.
50. Ibid.
51. “Editors Table,” Ladies Companion, October 1843, 305.
52. Philadelphia Saturday Courier, 6 January 1838, quoted in Stern, 11.
53. “Green Room Intelligence,” Spirit of the Times, 31 May 1845, 164.
54. “The Drama,” Anglo American, 11 April 1846, 596.
55. “Theatricals in New Orleans,” Spirit of the Times, 11 February 1843, 602; italics in the original.
56. “Green Room Intelligence,” Spirit of the Times, 31 May 1845, 164.
57. Marian Hannah Winter, “Augusta Maywood,” in Chronicles of the American Dance, ed. Magriel, 119–37, at 133.
58. Daily Evening Traveller, 15 January 1853.
59. Wemyss, 293.
60. “Miss Emma Ince,” The Dramatic Mirror, and Literary Companion, 20 November 1841, 113.
61. Brooklyn Eagle, 10 July 1845, 2; “An American Danseuse.” Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 3 February 1855, 8, 5, p. 75.
62. “The Gossip of London,” Spirit of the Times, 15 April 1848, 85.
63. Richards, 315.
