Cultures of Social Distance and Difference

Abstract

Frank Mott’s “reflection theory” of the periodicals as “mirrors” of society, as Scott E. Casper has noted, has given way to “a more reciprocal vision of the relationships among magazines (and their editors and publishers), authors and literary works, and reading publics” (262). Therefore, one way to read the dramatic texts in periodicals is to contextualize them as entertaining and edifying literature being brought to the attention of a reading public, a largely bourgeois, upper- and middle-class audience, in contiguity and conversation with the essays, poems, fiction, illustrations, and advertisements in the “highbrow” and “middlebrow” periodicals as well as the “quality” and “ten-cent” magazines. In this context, an important critical task is to try to recover what was at stake for the reader and for the nation in the publication and circulation of dramatic texts in periodicals and to determine how they participated in and were instrumental in producing the national imaginary. Of particular interest are the ways in which the plays established their own cultural zone, which marked social distance and difference, separating Americans into groups according to race, ethnicity, and especially class. When readers entered this privileged zone, they temporarily participated in an artificially stable but inherently troubled and threatened network of closed social relations, a fictive nation of secure exclusion.