Cultivating National Identity through Performance

American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment

N. Stubbs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137326874
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

As outdoor entertainment venues in American cities, pleasure gardens were public spaces where people could explore what it meant to be American. Stubbs examines how these venues helped form American identity and argues the gardens allowed for the exploration of what it meant to be American through performance, both on and off the stage.

1. Performing Nation: The Pleasure Garden as a Space for Defining America

Ye Belles and Beaux, who take delight,

In pastimes gay to spend the night,

To Vaux-Hall Garden each repair,

Where music soft and debonnaire,

With pleasing raptures fires the mind,

And dying murmers to the wind;

Where the jet d’eau delights the eye,

Throwing water to the sky;

Describing a typical evening at a pleasure garden, the first part of this 1799 poem describes a scene that could easily be set in Vauxhall of London; the simple amusements, choice of language, and even the name of the garden itself all conjure up an evening spent at Vauxhall in London. Yet the closing couplet places us firmly outside of England:

While Hail Columbia! from the band,

Proclaims a free and happy land.¹

The evocation of a distinctly English entertainment venue followed by a proclamation of freedom from the same country presents a revealing juxtaposition. This poem, printed in a Charleston newspaper, was one of several such descriptions of the numerous pleasure gardens found throughout the United States of America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that was suggestive of the London site while also asserting independence. Despite appearing to be the same as the British exemplars “in heritage, in plan, in ambience, in entertainments offered, in refreshments offered, and even in admission procedures,” the American pleasure gardens were also decidedly distinct, and assertions of similarities were frequently accompanied by declarations of difference.² In this manner, the pleasure gardens were popular sites in which the complex operations of nation building and identity creation functioned on a local level in various experimental, contradictory, and ever-fluid ways.

“Nation” and “national identity” are loaded and elusive terms, yet are crucial to any discussion of how the gardens operated at this complex point in American history. There are various schools of thought on these terms, and as some definitions exclude antebellum America from considerations of nation (with some scholars even arguing the United States was not, in fact, a nation prior to the Civil War), it should not be taken for granted that theories of nationalism apply to all periods equally.³ The modernist school is the most applicable to this discussion, as it positions “nation” as a modern construct, and not the product of a continuous ethnic and cultural history, thus allowing for modern nations such as the United States of America to be given due consideration. The definition of a nation proposed by Anthony D. Smith draws from this school and is a helpful one: “A named human population occupying a historic territory and sharing common myths and memories, a public culture, and common laws and customs for all members.”⁴ It is this definition that I find to be a good touchstone and so will build upon it here.

Yet applying this definition to a discussion of the United States presents certain immediate questions—what were the common myths and memories in this new nation? Was the Revolution the only shared memory? What were the customs and public culture to be, and how were they to be different from those of England? The often unconscious attempts to answer these questions led to much redefining of what the American nation was and how it functioned, with history and memory being actively constructed. In doing this, national identities were constructed.

National identities need to be fostered and actively pursued in order for a nation to be perceived as such by citizens. Drawing from Smith a second time, national identity is “the maintenance and continual reinterpretation of the patterns of values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that form the distinctive heritage of the nation, and the identification of individuals with that heritage and its pattern.”⁵ The “continual” aspect is an important consideration here, as identities are constantly in flux at the best of times, but at this especially dynamic and uncertain period, much was at stake in identifying and maintaining these “patterns.” Such “patterns” were addressed in American pleasure gardens in two distinct ways: the questioning of the relationship of America with the former imperial power (and related reassessments of relationships with other established nations) and the repeated attempts at legitimizing the new nation through public celebrations and commemorations. In both instances, the gardens provided a physical space in which citizens could align themselves with the expressions of national identity presented through entertainments, policies, advertisements, and music (among other aspects), and patrons were able to participate in—and thus identify with—the patterns and heritage presented.

In this chapter, I investigate the manner in which both proprietors and patrons used the gardens to explore and create national identity. The American gardens are first examined in relation to invocations of the English gardens, allowing for an investigation into American national/cultural identities as being formed in opposition to England.⁶ As the pleasure gardens of America flourished after the Revolution, the changing relationship between America and England was complex and constantly in flux. I challenge the commonly accepted idea that American pleasure gardens were simply direct imitations of English venues, instead examining the simultaneous alignment with and distancing from English culture.⁷ The relationship between the American gardens and those of France also warrant attention, as celebrations of French political figures and holidays reveal ideological affiliations. I argue that attempts to create and define American national identities were seen within the operations of the pleasure gardens in the attempts to position them as distinct from the British exemplars through drawing contrast between them. Simultaneously, however, these same American gardens borrowed elements from the British sites both consciously and unconsciously in order to assert the “heritage” required for national identities. In doing this the gardens operated as effective heterotopias, allowing for multiple (often contradictory) meanings and functions to operate concurrently.

A second model of national identities allows for a study of the use of pleasure gardens in the performance of nation through celebrations and commemoration, without opposition to other nations being explicitly invoked. Fourth of July celebrations were particularly important in terms of this exploration, and as the gardens often played a central role in the festivities, the events held there are examined here in terms of their facilitation of the performance of nation at a local level. Drawing on David Waldstreicher, Len Travers, and Simon Newman, I explore the role of celebration and commemoration in creating and sustaining national identities. In doing this, I do not aim to present one narrative for the manner in which these gardens witnessed the development of national identities, but rather to explore how these gardens allow us to gain insight into multiple manners of creating and understanding American identities.

AMERICA AND ENGLAND

America and England share a past fraught with intimate connections and passionate conflicts. This history need not be recounted here, but it is nonetheless obvious that any attempt to forge American national identities inevitably involved renegotiating the links to England. Examinations of the cultural relationship between the two countries have often set up a binary with American cultural and national identities being formed in direct opposition to British cultural identity.⁸ Various scholars have argued Americans sought to define themselves as a nation committed to the ideas of equality, democracy, and self-reliance, and in opposition to the monarchical country of England with its strict hierarchical class structure determined by birth. Discussions of this binary can be seen in David Gerstner’s exploration of how British and American art were gendered as female and male opposites, for example, and in Kim Sturgess’ assertion that all American culture has been constructed in direct opposition to British culture, with the single exception of Shakespeare.⁹

An alternative approach has been to consider early American culture to be the same as British—a mere replica. Noting the British origins of many of the early settlers, it has been suggested that the colonists simply brought their culture to America with them. The theatre of the period under discussion here in particular has been characterized as a wholesale import, from the design of the theatres to the plays and the actors that toured them. In his book on identity in American theatre, for example, Jeffrey Richards notes that the stage “types” seen on the American stage in American-authored plays were essentially the same as the British prototypes.¹⁰ Similarly, in his study of American theatre during the Revolution, Jared Brown argues that the “theatre in America was predominantly British Theatre.”¹¹

Yet, American culture in its entirety was neither the same as nor opposite to that of England. When looking at early American dramatic literature, attempts to distinguish works from their British counterparts were seen in writings such as Royall Tyler’s The Contrast in which he proclaimed that American “native themes” could be depicted in literature with a “refinement [which] may be found at home” in “homespun arts.”¹² Yet even within this attempt to present a “native” and “homespun” play, its structure and form reflected that of English drama; Tyler set out to distance his play from English drama, yet at the same time, embraced it.

The problem of defining a new American culture while simultaneously drawing on that of England (whether seeking to emulate it or using it unconsciously) was a problem tackled within the pleasure gardens of America. On the one hand, Americans were embracing the form of the British pleasure garden complete with the design, entertainments, and exhibits, even stressing the similarities as a means of establishing their own cultural value, and on the other, they were actively seeking to create a new national and cultural identity by distancing their entertainment forms and social conventions from the English. Proprietors of gardens argued for the value and significance of American cultural forms by citing England’s version as a source of legitimacy, while concurrently dismissing the English venue as inferior and immoral. The establishment of pleasure gardens in America spoke to the aims of asserting a culture of national value and worth by both drawing on England for legitimacy, and dismissing the English model as corrupt and/or inferior.

Recent scholarship by Schueller and Watts and Michael Warner proposes a variety of ways to view the relationship between England and America. Rather than advocating for a simplistic view of Americans having merely adopted British culture as their own, these scholars, working within a postcolonial framework, identify a more complex use of British culture by Americans. Warner identifies a shift in which “white Creoles in British America learned to think of themselves as colonized rather than as colonizers,” while Schueller and Watts advocate for an awareness of the “messiness” of the founding of the American nations, noting that “the struggle between imperial and local claims to cultural authority,” the establishment of and resistance to “Anglophone colonial power,” and the “entanglements” that result are the main areas demanding focus.¹³ These approaches allow for a more nuanced reading of the relationship between England and America, working within a dialectical relationship between nations. In terms of the American pleasure gardens, the proprietors of these various sites pursued conflicting impulses of adopting the culture of their heritage and defining themselves in opposition to it.

Before pleasure gardens became popular in America, they were well known as a British form, with Vauxhall having especial popularity. Views of Vauxhall, London, were advertised for sale as early as 1754, and sheet music for the songs performed there was sold from 1768.¹⁴ The theatres of Charleston and Philadelphia presented performances of the Vauxhall Ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.  Performing Nation: The Pleasure Garden as a Space for Defining America
• 2.  Performing Place: The Rural/Urban Tension
• 3.  Performing Class: The Challenge to and Reaffirmation of Class Divisions and Hierarchies
• 4.  Performing Race: Native Americans and African Americans Within the Gardens
• 5.  Beyond the Pleasure Garden
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index