Variant Rebellions: Psychic Compromise in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack

Abstract

This paper explores certain fundamental aspects of melodramatic theatricality used to depict the colonial world on the London stage at the turn of the century. As melodrama was a hybrid of comedy, tragedy, pantomime, and sentimentalism, the juxtaposition of a variety of these compositional strategies opens up the interpretation of John Fawcett's successful pantomime Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and its later 1830 melodramatic adaptation by William Murray. As examples of racial melodramas, these plays disrupt the otherwise conventional moral polarity typical of melodramas by situating archetypal melodramatic characters in a morally ambiguous, theatrically conceptualized colonial space. Stage apparatus and performance were but two aspects of melodramatic theatricality that were deployed to recreate the colonial world. The basic argument in this paper explores the contrary pulls within these plays. On the one hand, the spectators' cathartic celebration of the rebels' expulsion at the end of the play entrenches their identification with British imperial ideology by arousing collective feelings of patriotism, thus consolidating the national identity of spectators as British imperialists. On the other hand, the visuals and the music that depict the colonial social order of a slave colony and the heroic feats of the rebel slave opened up a space of possible critique of British imperial ventures. These contrary drives within the melodramatic form are reformulated in terms of a "psychic compromise" in which the act of rebellion is endorsed for its dramatic potential to arouse fantasies of heroic revolt but is ultimately compromised in a larger ideological frame that celebrates the empire and the reconstitution of colonial order. This paper offers insights into the popular cultural perception of the empire, obliquely illuminating the larger historical processes of empire building during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.