Pilgrims, Puritans, and popular culture : performing citizenship in the 20th century national imaginary

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dc.contributor.advisorCanning, Charlotte, 1964-
dc.contributor.committeeMemberBonin-Rodriguez, Paul
dc.contributor.committeeMemberGutiérrez, Laura
dc.contributor.committeeMemberKevorkian, Martin
dc.contributor.committeeMemberRossen, Rebecca
dc.contributor.committeeMemberThompson, Lisa B.
dc.creatorGuenther, Amy Kathleen
dc.creator.orcid0000-0001-7284-9394
dc.date.accessioned2019-08-28T16:12:52Z
dc.date.available2019-08-28T16:12:52Z
dc.date.created2017-05
dc.date.issued2017-05-11
dc.date.submittedMay 2017
dc.date.updated2019-08-28T16:12:52Z
dc.description.abstractPilgrims, Puritans, and Popular Culture argues that representations of the Puritans in the twentieth century were most often used to negotiate national identity in terms of hegemonic whiteness at moments when the idealized citizen as white, Protestant, heterosexual, and male was in crisis. Whether represented as proto-Americans or moralizing killjoys, they embodied the US’s national origin story and helped to define what citizenship meant in the twentieth century. Using performance as both the object of study and methodological lens, I demonstrate how national identity and citizenship are performed through actual bodies on stage playing Puritans. I organize my analyses around three common Puritan narratives adapted into stage performances: the First Thanksgiving, the Salem witch trials, and The Scarlet Letter. My examination of these texts focuses on what I call Puritan formations, an extension of sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) concept of racial formations. Using archival documents such as scripts, performance reviews, and programs, I theorize how a constructed historical memory can be embodied in and imposed upon present bodies. The introduction provides a brief overview of how Puritan formations began to function in the nineteenth century. As I argue, the traits twentieth-century citizens often criticized the Puritans for harken back to a nineteenth-century search for a unified national identity more so than the archive of the Puritans. Chapter one examines the early twentieth-century practice of using Thanksgiving plays in public schools to teach US history and assimilate Southern and Eastern European immigrant children into a unified (white) national identity. The next chapter continues through the mid-twentieth century with an analysis of Arthur Miller’s racial and performative adaptation of Tituba in The Crucible (1953). The third chapter concludes the twentieth century with an analysis of Phyllis Nagy’s 1994 feminist stage adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, comparing the play’s production context to Hawthorne’s. To conclude, I begin to consider what the use of a Puritan past might mean in the twenty-first century. Throughout, I suggest that tensions in Puritan formations reflect the tensions of remembering a national past steeped in settler colonialism, slavery, assimilation, and democracy.
dc.description.departmentTheatre and Dance
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/2152/75678
dc.identifier.urihttp://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/2782
dc.language.isoen
dc.subjectPilgrims
dc.subjectPuritans
dc.subjectThe Scarlet Letter
dc.subjectNathaniel Hawthorne
dc.subjectPhyllis Nagy
dc.subjectThanksgiving
dc.subjectArthur Miller
dc.subjectThe Crucible
dc.subjectPerformance
dc.subjectDrama
dc.subjectTheatre
dc.subjectTituba
dc.subjectSettler colonialism
dc.subjectCitizenship
dc.subject20th century
dc.titlePilgrims, Puritans, and popular culture : performing citizenship in the 20th century national imaginary
dc.typeThesis
dc.type.materialtext
thesis.degree.departmentTheatre and Dance
thesis.degree.disciplineTheatre
thesis.degree.grantorThe University of Texas at Austin
thesis.degree.levelDoctoral
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy

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