An Octoroon

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2015

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Act II

Acts III-V

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Blood

During the centuries of American slavery and the post-Reconstruction era of Jim Crow segregation laws, status as an enslaved or Black person was a matter of blood quantum. As white enslavers began raping and impregnating enslaved women, the resulting children inherited enslaved status from their mother, a legal caveat to prevent these children from staking any claim on their father’s position or estate. Reportedly, Thomas Jefferson fathered about six children with Sally Hemmings, an enslaved woman who worked on his estate. Mixed-race children might appear to be white, but bloodlines determined their status over skin color.

The concept of “blood” as a symbol of inherited status goes beyond race. When McClosky is plotting to buy Terrebonne out from under the Peytons, Dora replies that with the promise of money coming in, any of the Peytons’ rich neighbors wouldn’t hesitate to loan them what they needed “to keep their name and blood amongst us” (25). This leads McClosky to an angry aside about his own blood: Because he has become wealthy relatively recently, rather than inheriting his wealth from his ancestors, his blood isn’t good enough for the Peytons to consider him an equal, making his “blood so hot [he] hears [his] heart hiss” (25)—an expression that moves from one conventional metaphor (of blood as inheritance) to another (of blood as passionate emotion).

Zoe, who has internalized the racism of the white people she lives among, imagines her blood as containing one drop of poison for every eight drops. She sees her Black blood as dirty, separate from her identity but ultimately making her “an unclean thing” (31). Zoe embodies the liminal space of being mixed-race, as she appears white, but her blood categorizes her as Black. Zoe has been raised as if she were a white girl and given a proper education. She tells George that her whiteness allows her to love and hope as he does, which tacitly suggests that Black people don’t have real emotions—a common belief used to justify slavery at the time.

At the end of Act II, McClosky kills Paul with a blow to the head from a tomahawk, and the stage directions dictate that a large pool of blood spreads from his head wound and around McClosky’s shoes. The blood Paul spills is the same type of blood that Zoe disparages: Black blood. If it is dirty and poisonous, it is also staining McClosky’s feet and, literally and metaphorically, his hands. Paul’s death is senseless. He did nothing to deserve it. McClosky could likely have found other ways to get his hands on the letter, but he saw Paul as disposable. The only reason that Paul’s murder inspired a lynch mob was because he was popular among white people who were mostly entertained by his singing and dancing.

Paul’s puddle of blood is also a logistical inconvenience, difficult to get off the stage before transitioning to the auction scene inside the Peyton’s house. A director might choose to take the time to mop it up entirely, cover it up so his blood is still there underneath, or perhaps even leave it there. When George tries to control the lynch mob, he acknowledges that they are bloodthirsty for revenge. Once accused, when it seems like George will let Wahnotee kill him, McClosky cries, “You are a white man; you’ll not leave one of your own blood to be butchered by the redskin?” (52) And George does stop Wahnotee, but when McClosky escapes, Wahnotee catches him, spilling his blood before dragging him away.

The Camera

In the fourth act, as BJJ and the Playwright are trying to explain the sensational events they don’t have resources to show, BJJ attempts to describe the 19th-century significance of the camera to a 21st-century audience. It’s difficult to relay the excitement of seeing such brand new technology onstage to an audience of people who have tiny computers in their pockets, who are accustomed to photos for both fun and crime scene evidence. Melodramas were theatrical events that worked to impress and awe audiences with sensationalism and spectacle. Some of these spectacles were based on innovative technical marvels, such as the exploding boat, and others were spectacular for being emotionally charged. For instance, the auction in Act III is an emotionally charged spectacle, which Branden Jacobs-Jenkins suggests in the stage directions might be staged in such a way that the audience might be forced into participating. For a contemporary audience, witnessing the auction as a spectator, sitting in the seats of the auction attendees regardless of participation, is unsettling. To Boucicault’s audiences, sensation arose from the shock of a white-passing woman (played by a white actress) on the auction block.

In both plays, the auction culminates in a knife fight, although only Jacobs-Jenkins places the fight between two characters played by the same actor. In Boucicault’s version, Zoe’s dramatic death at the end is also a sensational spectacle, tragic and sad but necessary to tie up loose ends. She does it to fulfill George’s off-the-cuff wish, and she dies dramatically in his arms, freeing him to love Dora. Jacobs-Jenkins denies the audience this spectacle, ending with Minnie and Dido rather than following Zoe after she steals the poison.

At the end of each act, as is usual in melodrama, the actors form a tableau in which they freeze in place for several moments, creating a stage picture that sums up a dramatic or sensational event. These tableaux were often drawn or painted by artists, so a series of painted tableaux could tell a story. In An Octoroon, these tableaux are treated as an interruption of the action, and their awkwardness and artificiality serve as a metatheatrical gesture pointing to the artifice of the play as a whole. When Minnie and Dido enter while McClosky is trying to make a tableau at the end of Act I, for example, their presence makes his posturing look vain and comical. In Boucicault’s era, these tableaux were a form of spectacle, showing the desire for stage images to sum up the action and hold still—offering a narrative of simplicity that Jacobs-Jenkins actively undermines. In this way, tableaux were like photographs, which in the 19th century were widely seen as offering an objective record of the truth.

Cameras in the play are similarly used to reveal factual truths that would be invisible without them. George’s fictional invention of self-developing solution foreshadows the moment near the end of the play when his smashed camera is found to contain a self-developed photo of McClosky murdering Paul. Thus, the camera doesn’t just appear onstage as a fascinating bit of technology, but it is the deus ex machina that exonerates Wahnotee and forces McClosky to answer for his crime. The camera serves as a mechanical witness, an objective eye that allows the characters to see things they would not otherwise have seen.

Br’er Rabbit

In the play’s Prologue, BJJ says that everything he writes is automatically viewed through the lens of reading a Black playwright. Even when he wrote about talking farm animals, a literary manager insisted, “You’re totally deconstructing African folktales, aren’t you?” (10), refusing to accept that he wasn’t. Twice in the play, characters mention stories about a rabbit. First, George comments that Pete was telling him folk tales about “a rabbit who wants to put on a show for the rest of the animals” (20). Later, in the last moments of the play, Dido asks Minnie to tell her the rest of the story about the rabbit. Br’er Rabbit wanders in and out of the play’s action, unseen and never interacting with people onstage or saying a word. He primarily stares at and studies the audience with increasing intensity on each entrance.

Br’er Rabbit functions as a metatheatrical element, a weird creature that can’t be confused for a part of the main narrative, to remind audiences that they are watching a play. Whereas melodrama audiences were encouraged to make noise and respond verbally as they become engrossed in the story, Br’er Rabbit calls for a different kind of interaction. As he studies the audience silently, the audience studies him back. They wonder why he is there and what he means. They are self-conscious of his gaze, maybe laughing uncomfortably as they are taken out of the illusion of realism.

Before he was appropriated by Disney, Br’er Rabbit was a trickster character in the kinds of African folk tales that the possibly imaginary literary manager was referencing, although similar characters have also been found in folklore all over the world. Br’er Rabbit is smart and quick-thinking, an underdog who uses his wit to wriggle out of situations when he is overpowered. In one of the most famous tales, Br’er Rabbit is up against Br’er Fox, who makes a doll out of tar—tar baby—to trap him. Br’er Rabbit comes along and greets the tar baby. He gets angry about being ignored and punches it, finding himself entirely trapped. When Br’er Fox returns and debates what to do with the tar-covered bunny, Br’er Rabbit begs and pleads with the fox to do anything but toss him in the briar patch. The sadistic fox does exactly that, and Br’er Rabbit runs away happily, completely at home in the briar patch.

If, as George says, the rabbit is trying to put on a show for the other animals, Br’er Rabbit may represent Jacobs-Jenkins himself. In fact, in the original production at Soho Rep, Jacobs-Jenkins was the person inside the bunny costume, making the character of BJJ a sort of decoy for the audience, as the real Jacobs-Jenkins was free to wander around and encounter the audience. Br’er Rabbit becomes a metaphor for enduring as an enslaved person, and later as a Black person in America, using cleverness and wit to survive another day, just as Minnie advises Dido at the end of the play.