Abstract
Exploring questions of identity, commerce, and domestic labor, Bringardner’s chapter argues that medicine shows crafted explicit performances of domesticity that strategically couched their product pitches in the language of home. In doing so, these shows actively constructed an idealized vision of the family house as a tactic to woo potential consumers. However, Bringardner also demonstrates how audiences asserted agency, constructing and reconstructing their own identities as Southern and Appalachian through active participation in these shows. Whether choosing to become a purchaser or to remain a passive spectator, the individual participated in changing ideas of what it meant to be Southern and Appalachian, identities that ultimately relied upon specific understandings and dreams of home.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas J. LeBlanc, “The Medicine Show,” The American Mercury 5.18 (1925): 235–236.
- 2.
Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up. Rev. ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 140.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
See Bruce McConcachie’s Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870, Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Janet Davis’s The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top, Robert M. Lewis’s From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910, and Robert Hall’s Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture as examples.
- 10.
Works like Emma B. Miles’s The Spirit of the Mountains (1905) and Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers (1926) typify these narratives of Appalachian discovery. Henry Shapiro’s later work, including his book Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (1975) and his more recent chapter “How Region Changed Its Meaning and Appalachia Changed Its Standing in the 20th Century” in Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2005), puts the writings of Miles and Kephart into a larger context of Southern history, highlighting those narratives of discovery as critical to an expanding understanding of the multifaceted nature of Southern identity.
- 11.
Crandell A. Shiftlett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 6.
- 12.
McNamara, 50.
- 13.
LeBlanc, 233.
- 14.
LeBlanc, 235.
- 15.
Winifred Johnston, “Medicine Show,” Southwest Review 21.4 (1936): 397.
- 16.
LeBlanc, 235.
- 17.
Johnston, 397.
- 18.
“Free Show Tonight,” Narr. Roy Acuff. Dir. Paul Wagner and Steven J. Zeitlin, Folkstreams. 1983. Transcript. http://www.folkstreams.net/context,121. 5.
- 19.
“Free Show Tonight,” 6–7.
- 20.
Mae Noell, “Some Memories of a Medicine Show Performer,” Theatre Quarterly 4.14 (1974): 26.
- 21.
Noell, 26.
- 22.
“Free Show Tonight,” 19.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ann Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hambones: The American Medicine Show (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 142.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
McNamara, 132.
- 27.
William Slout, Theatre in a Tent: The Development of Provincial Entertainment (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1972), 83.
- 28.
Slout, 83.
- 29.
Neil E. Schaffner, The Fabulous Toby and Me (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 2.
- 30.
Slout, 84.
- 31.
Schaffner, 84.
- 32.
Ibid., 96.
- 33.
Ibid., 173.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Anderson, 41.
- 36.
Ibid., 42.
- 37.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 139.
- 38.
McNamara, 106a.
- 39.
Stewart, 135.
- 40.
Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 12, 13.
- 41.
Ibid., 33.
- 42.
Ibid., 65.
- 43.
Mae Noell, “Some Memories of a Medicine Show Performer,” Theatre Quarterly 4.14 (May–July 1974): 25.
- 44.
LeBlanc, 237.
- 45.
McNamara, 143, 147.
Works Cited
Anderson, Ann. Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hambones: The American Medicine Show. McFarland, 2000.
Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York University Press, 2011.
“Free Show Tonight,” Narr. Roy Acuff. Dir. Paul Wagner and Steven J. Zeitlin, Folkstreams. 1983. Transcript. http://www.folkstreams.net/context,121.
Johnston, Winifred. “Medicine Show,” Southwest Review 21.4: 1936.
LeBlanc, Thomas J. “The Medicine Show,” The American Mercury 5.18: 1925.
McNamara, Brooks. Step Right Up. Rev. ed. University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Noell, Mae. “Some Memories of a Medicine Show Performer,” Theatre Quarterly 4.14: 1974.
Schaffner, Neil E. The Fabulous Toby and Me. Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Shiftlett, Crandell A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Slout, William. Theatre in a Tent: The Development of Provincial Entertainment. Bowling Green State University Press, 1972.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.
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Bringardner, C. (2019). Pitching Home: Medicine Shows and the Performance of the Domestic in Southern Appalachia. In: Klein, E., Mobley, JS., Stevenson, J. (eds) Performing Dream Homes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01581-7_9
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