Content area
Full text
SPECTACLES OF REFORM: THEATER AND ACTIVISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA. By Amy E. Hughes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012; pp. 264.
For the past few decades, scholars have been filling in the gaps in America's theatre history, examining, for example, the relationship(s) between the so-called legitimate theatre and popular entertainments; plays for the uneducated and disenfranchised, as well as for the socially elite; and such disparate cultural elements as morality and the professional theatre (which many in the nineteenth century believed to have been patently immoral). Recent scholars of American theatre have ventured into the areas of gender construction and relationships; the nature and development of African American, Asian, Chicana/o, LGBT, Native American theatre(s); and the ways in which the theatre embraced, defined, and advanced the various reform efforts during the nineteenth century. It is in this last category that Amy Hughes has chosen to concentrate her study and to distinguish herself. Hughes, whose earlier work advanced our knowledge of how theatre aided the nineteenth-century temperance cause, reveals in Spectacles of Reform how spectacle influenced the ways that an audience saw the world (both onstage and in real life) and played a crucial role in American reform activism.
Hughes's central focus is on how the human body was displayed to create spectacle. She organizes her analysis into an examination of the human body as the spectacle, the human body in the spectacle, and the human body at the spectacle. Her opening chapter studies freaks, both lustus naturae (natural freaks) and so-called...