In 1859, Irish actor and playwright Dion Boucicault [Image] wrote The Octoroon, a plantation melodrama set in Louisiana, and produced it for New York audiences. The play's eponymous heroine, Zoe, is a mixedrace woman, sold into slavery after the death of her white father/owner who had intended to free her. Antimiscegenation laws in the US at the time would have prohibited Zoe and her white suitor George from marrying, so in the original American version of the play, she is driven to suicide. The play was controversial. However, when the play was produced in Britain in 1861, where slavery had been abolished for decades, it was equally controversial. London audiences were appalled at the injustice of the black heroine’s death. In answer to British protests, Boucicault changed the ending to one "written by the audience." In it, Zoe lives and marries George, as the playbill announces. Fluid Text.
Digital Solutions
Because The Octoroon was staged in at least two versions—American and British—it is a “Fluid Text.” Like any work that exists in multiple versions, the differences in this fluid text tell us a great deal about how cultures revise literary works. In fact, Boucicault’s play exists in other versions, such as printed US, UK, and Australian prompt books with actors’ handwritten notes and advertising playbills.
Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon’s digital archive, The Octoroon, created at Hofstra’s Digital Research Center, assembles images related to the play and its actors (including Boucicault’s wife , Agnes Robertson, as well as of the US and UK versions. With DRC’s fluid-text editing tool, TextLab, we will also publish an edition of The Octoroon that transcribes both versions and allows users to navigate the differences and create “Revision Narratives” that discuss the cultural meaning of the changes.
Dion Boucicault, Author of The Octoroon
Agnes Robertson, Boucicault’s wife
Research Problems Promptbook from 1871 production of the Octoroon
Prof. Lisa Merrill Dr. Theresa Saxon Project Directors Hofstra University
How can we edit Boucicault’s The Octoroon so as to make these textual differences visible, accessible, and interpretable for modern readers? How did spectators in antebellum US react to theatrical representations of enslavement and interracial marriage as opposed to spectators in Britain, where slavery had been abolished for decades?
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Slave auction scene as depicted in the Illustrated London News - Jan. 1861