Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent

Derek Wang and Julian Young

Adah Isaacs Menken

Lived from June 15, 1835 - August 10, 1868
Left her husband and set out for New York City in 1859
Decided to make a name for herself in the world of
theatre
Used the ideas of race and gender in theatre to generate
fame and stardom
Played many roles in theatre, from man-child heroes to
gambling gentlemen
Best known for her production of Mazeppa, in which she
disrobes in the cross-dressed role of a prince

Adah Isaacs Menken (contd.)

Menkens personal life is widely speculated
Many biographers believe Menken to be Jewish, Irish, Spanish,
French, even African American passing for white
Notes of Her Life in Her Own Hand
A self-authored article posthumously published displaying her
many alter-egos which include:
a white American working-class survivor
a New Orleans child performer
a Jewish daughter in exile
First considered to be Jewish, now more recently believed to be
of African descent, perhaps from New Orleans

Sojourner Truth
African American abolitionist and womens rights
activist
Born in 1797 and died on November 25, 1883
Was born into slavery but escaped in 1826
Due to Truths illiteracy, she had very few self
authored written works
Similar to Menken, Truths image has weathered a
mangling for over a century she too has served as
the fodder for mythical legends of corporeal spectacle
in cultural history(157)

Performance Techniques of Menken

Writing -Notes of Her Life in Her Own Hand
By creating alter-egos, Menken assumes the role of
many identities with various racial and cultural
backgrounds
Forces biographers and scholars to find a method to
define race
Is race internal or external?
Does Menken have a pure racial identity?

The body as a performing technique

Menken uses her body as a performative instrument

Stages a striptease of her own accord with mythological texts
wrapped around her
Uses her body as a narrative to make historical fictions
Author considers her to have mastered the art of the pass
Used not to deceive, but to move from the margin to the
center of American identity
apparatus of the pass (p. 163)
the passer

Amy Robinsons
apparatus of the pass

the passers
in-group

the dupe

The body (contd.)

Similarly, Sojourner Truth uses her body through performative mutiny

Truth reveals her breasts and the deeds done in [her] body to
display her gender as well as instill the history of slavery
By revealing herself to the whole audience, Truth is rejecting
the attempt to subdue her womanhood
Revealing the body can create different meanings, opacity
Both Menken and Truth use their bodies to provide an authentic
text of identity
The legacies that Menken and Truth left behind are based
almost solely on their performances
Can people write themselves into history by using their body to act
themselves into history?

Performance to Disturb Stereotypes

Menken and Truth ultimately did disturb stereotypes of
women and people of color
Menkens on and off stage characters/personas and
drag performance in Mazeppa blurred the lines
between the overdetermined characteristics for
men and women
Truth acted with agency by using her body to
address critics and fought for equal rights through
her speeches.

Criticism and Reception of Mazeppa

Mark Twain did not consider Menken as a good performer, but rather a
shape actress who didnt have any histrionic ability or deserve any
more consideration than a good circus rider
Others believed that her role in Mazeppa was designed to be more of an
ornament to her sex
Menkens bodysuit in Mazeppa circumvented the modest fashion of the
time, and fell close to Victorian pornography
Some audiences thought they were witnessing a nude of a white
female body
Historian Faye Dudden believes that a naked woman on stage robs [her]
of any authentic sense of self because to act is to be seen

Criticism (contd.)

Tessa Ardenne writes, Physically [Menken] is a glorious creature, proud

and defiant as a goddess. Her forte is in the almost super-human power
she has over her body. It obeys her. It is the servant of her will. It
assumes every possible attitude at her bidding while her face, with its
luminous eyes, tells the story of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, more
plainly than the tongue of another can speak it. But visible to one who
studies her face at all, are marks of a hard battle fought single-handed
with the world, fought and won-- much of it perhaps for that daily
bread for which we pay.

So can people write themselves into history by using their body to act
themselves into history?

Works Cited
Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular
Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910
(Durham: Duke UP, 2006)
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol,.
W.W. Norton, 1997. 370. Web.