{"id":3268,"date":"2012-07-16T21:48:40","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T01:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3268"},"modified":"2012-11-04T21:37:17","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T02:37:17","slug":"in-a-conventional-dither-rodgers-and-hammersteins-camouflaged-critique-of-race-relations-at-mid-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=3268","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIn a Conventional Dither\u201d: Rodgers and Hammerstein\u2019s Camouflaged Critique of Race Relations at Mid-Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0\u201cIn a Conventional Dither\u201d: Rodgers and Hammerstein\u2019s Camouflaged Critique of Race Relations at Mid-Century<\/h2>\n

Published in The Hopkins Review, New Series 5.3, Summer 2012 Issue<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Standard histories of the African American experience in America like John Hope Franklin\u2019s or Manning Marable\u2019s agree that in most respects the years 1949-51 fell in the middle of a fallow period.\u00a0 The wave of political and social betterment for American blacks achieved during the New Deal and World War Two had crested, culminating with the 1947 admission of Jackie Robinson to the white major leagues and Harry Truman\u2019s 1948 order integrating the Armed Forces.\u00a0 After that, with few exceptions, the movement had reached a \u201cone step back\u201d moment.<\/p>\n

Red Scare<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Red Scare was largely to blame.\u00a0 Segregationists could with remarkable success tag all integrationist aspirations as Communistic, via the syllogism that international Communism sought to destabilize the U.S., integration would differ from and hence be destabilizing to the existing state of affairs in much of the country, and hence integration was Communistic.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Moreover, American Communists who had been, by all accounts, the most principled and consistent foes of Jim Crow laws and segregation in the workplace, were in full flight, being hunted into what would prove a permanent exile from the U.S. labor movement, academia, government, and entertainment.\u00a0 Incidental to that purge was fratricidal infighting on the American left between Communists and anti-Communists which took a particularly heavy and distracting toll on the NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 True, Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall were continuing their careful case-by-case assault on the legal citadel of Jim Crow, an assault that would reach its apex in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>, and Brown<\/em> would change everything.\u00a0 But while some of the five cases consolidated in Brown<\/em> had already been filed by 1951, it is significant that in four of them segregation was upheld.\u00a0 Fundamentally, Jim Crow laws and what might be called the Jim Crow state of mind, a sense that white privilege was a norm which could never fundamentally be overturned, continued to hold sway in 1949-51.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The anti-Communist hysteria also had well-known implications in the world of entertainment.\u00a0 Though the infamous Hollywood \u201cblacklist\u201d turned out not to affect Broadway employment much<\/a>, there was so much travel back and forth between the venues that the habits of circumspection the Red Scare brought to Hollywood could hardly fail to affect Broadway productions.\u00a0 And since, as noted, support for African American civil rights was viewed as a sign of Communist sympathies, it would not in turn be easy to espouse those civil rights on Broadway.<\/p>\n

Indirection<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In short, during the three-year stretch in which Richard Rodgers\u2019 and Oscar Hammerstein II\u2019s South Pacific<\/em> (1949) and The King and I<\/em> (1951) reached the Broadway stage, theatrical expressions of support for the equality of black and white were a dicey proposition, courting charges of Communist sympathies.\u00a0 And yet in these two musicals, lyricist and librettist Hammerstein found a way to voice that support.\u00a0 However, in keeping with the times as well as his temperament, he did so by indirection, and also with what might be called camouflage: presenting the \u201cdestabilizing\u201d message about race relations in a matrix that included remarkably conventional and reassuring, even retrograde, messages concerning the relations of the sexes and colonialism.\u00a0 The conservative American Weltanschauung<\/em> was being challenged, but only a little.\u00a0 Both the indirection and the camouflage were bound up with the showmanship and the temperaments of Hammerstein and his collaborator Richard Rodgers.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These two shows came at the fulcrum of R&H\u2019s career.\u00a0 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II created eleven musicals over the years 1941-1959.\u00a0 Five of them (Oklahoma!<\/em>, Carousel<\/em>, South Pacific<\/em>, The King and I<\/em>, and The Sound of Music<\/em>) were indisputably great: game-changers as to the whole genre of the musical theater, long-running, sources of popular hits and standards, and destined to be revived continuously through the changing tastes and mores of the succeeding years.<\/p>\n

Hammerstein the Integrationist<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As chronicled by Jim Lovensheimer, author of the phenomenally well-researched and insightful study South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten<\/em> (2010), Hammerstein was an inveterate inegrationist.\u00a0 He had been part of the Writers’ War Board, a group formed two days after Pearl Harbor whose official mission was to help sell war bonds, but which was also dedicated to fighting racial prejudice as a form of American fascism.[1] Before that, during his movie-writing years, he had been the chair of an \u201cinterracial commission\u201d of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.[2]\u00a0 Lovensheimer also recounts that Hammerstein served as a member of the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People \u201cfrom the late 1940s.\u201d[3]\u00a0 Yet R&H never wrote a great civil rights musical.\u00a0 They never even wrote together a musical in which the rights and status of African Americans were directly addressed.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Instead we have South Pacific<\/em> and The King and I<\/em>, two masterpieces that express abhorrence for American racial prejudice and segregation, which was mostly about black and white at that time.\u00a0 Yet remarkably they do not include a single necessarily black character.\u00a0 (There were at least two African American actors in the original South Pacific<\/em> cast.\u00a0 One was a member of the male chorus with no individual lines but given the name Abner, portrayed by Archie Savage,[4] who was given to jitterbugging, understood as a race-specific activity then.\u00a0 The other was Juanita Hall, but portraying the Tonkinese Bloody Mary, not an African American character.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As is well-known, South Pacific<\/em> was hewn from James A. Michener\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific<\/em>(1947), sometimes called a novel but really more a collection of related and interwoven short stories following a military campaign in the New Hebrides (the area being a part of the nation now known as Vanuatu).[5]\u00a0 In the course of the book, various characters appear, disappear, and sometimes reappear.\u00a0 There is no one coherent tale.\u00a0 Of course that would hardly work for a musical, especially one of that era.\u00a0 So a drama had to be located and shaped within that raw material.<\/p>\n

Our Heroine<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The most important story chosen was \u201cOur Heroine,\u201d the story of the romance of Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse who comes \u201cfrom a small town in Arkansas,\u201d (in the musical a self-described \u201clittle hick\u201d) and Emile De Becque, expatriate French plantation-owner.\u00a0 The dissimilarity of these characters was emphasized by R&H\u2019s disparate original casting for these roles (Broadway-seasoned Texas gamine Mary Martin and Italian operatic basso Ezio Pinza).\u00a0 The audience is asked, nay forced by the plangent power of Rodgers\u2019 music and especially the song SOME ENCHANTED EVENING, to believe that these dissimilar souls are attracted, that they recognize something elementally alike in each other.\u00a0 Hammerstein tries to make this more credible by giving Nellie a line not suggested by Michener: \u201cWe\u2019re \u2013 we\u2019re the same kind of people fundamentally \u2013 you and me.\u00a0 We appreciate things! We get enthusiastic about things!\u201d\u00a0 This attempt to explain is both unnecessary (as Hammerstein the lyricist himself has Emile sing: \u201cFools give you reasons\u2013\/ Wise men never try\u201d) and beside Michener\u2019s point.\u00a0 Michener makes it clear enough that what draws them together is an expatriate spirit, a willingness to cut ties with an old life and to make a new one in an out-of-the-expected, if beautiful place.\u00a0 And ultimately R&H follow suit in that characterization.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The conflict in \u201cOur Heroine,\u201d and what undoubtedly drew Hammerstein to the material, was of course racial, posed not by the white skins of Nellie or Emile, but by the multi-colored skins of Emile\u2019s daughters, who are the products of Emile\u2019s various extramarital liaisons: Javanese, Polynesian, and Tonkinese.\u00a0 Nellie must learn to overcome the racism she was raised with to accept Emile\u2019s children as step-children, and she very nearly does not.<\/p>\n

Fo’ Dolla’<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Michener story which Hammerstein chose as counterpoint to \u201cOur Heroine\u201d was by far the longest of the tales in the book, \u201cFo\u2019 Dolla\u2019,\u201d which concerns a romance in which the parties are indeed of different colors: white and Philadelphia-and-Princeton aristocratic Marine Lt. Joe Cable and Tonkinese Liat.\u00a0 All the chemistry is auspicious, and the love is never in question: \u201cHe and Liat were experiencing a passion that few couples on this earth are privileged to share.\u201d\u00a0 But he cannot see any way to bring her back into his Stateside life, and embraces the opportunity to escape from her provided by orders that move him to a different theater of combat.\u00a0 We learn later, in the concluding pages of the concluding story, \u201cA Cemetery at Hoga Point,\u201d that Cable was so distraught over the experience that he effectively threw his life away by exhibiting excessive heroism invading a beachhead.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So R&H had two stories, one with a happy outcome, one tragic, both demonstrating how racial prejudice can threaten romance.\u00a0 And these became the core of the show.\u00a0 Cumulatively, they illustrate the point that racism causes unhappiness, not only to the non-white Others and those who, like Emile, love them, but also to the racists themselves.\u00a0 Nellie manages to overcome hers, thereby insuring her own happiness and that of Emile and his children.\u00a0 Cable cannot, and so brings misery to Liat, who must marry a French planter she does not love, and destruction to himself.<\/p>\n

The N-Word<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But this story is told without black people, at least without them being directly involved or placed on the stage in front of the audience.\u00a0 This reflects what appears to be a similar pulling of punches in the source material.\u00a0 Michener\u2019s Emile has no fewer than eight daughters, with various mothers: Javanese (Indonesian), Polynesian, and Tonkinese (Vietnamese).\u00a0 But this story takes place in the New Hebrides, whose natives are Melanesian.\u00a0 Melanesian skins are blacker on average<\/a>, than those of the mothers of Emile\u2019s children.[6]\u00a0 In his autobiography, Michener commented on the comparatively darker skin of Melanesians \u2013 and on his observation that whites generally find Polynesians comelier.[7]\u00a0 One wonders whether Michener hesitated to have Emile actually fathering half-Melanesians, even in the midst of the New Hebrides where Melanesians predominated.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On the other hand, perhaps Michener was making a tougher point in a roundabout way.\u00a0 Michener\u2019s Nellie, unlike Hammerstein\u2019s, is aware, before she meets any of Emile\u2019s eight children, that his children are of mixed race.\u00a0 She decides to await an actual meeting to gauge her own reaction.\u00a0 When she encounters his two Polynesian children, she clutches.\u00a0 Michener makes the language harsh, and quite applicable to U.S. race relations:\u00a0<\/p>\n

But before her were … indisputable facts!\u00a0 Two of them!\u00a0 Emile De Becque, not satisfied with Javanese and Tonkinese women, had also lived with a Polynesian.\u00a0 A nigger!\u00a0 To Nellie\u2019s tutored mind any person living or dead who was not white or yellow was a nigger.\u00a0 And beyond that no words could go!\u00a0 Her entire Arkansas upbringing made it impossible for her to deny the teachings of her youth.\u00a0 Emile\u00a0 De Becque had lived with the nigger.\u00a0 He had nigger children.\u00a0 If she married him, they would be her step-daughters.\u00a0 She suffered a revulsion which her lover could never understand.<\/p>\n

Arguably, Nellie\u2019s bracketing of Polynesians with American blacks as \u201cniggers\u201d more thoroughly illustrates the unreasoning quality of Nellie\u2019s racism than would be possible if the children were part-Melanesian instead.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In any case, there is no use of the n-word in Hammerstein\u2019s adaptation and even the word \u201ccolored\u201d was stripped from the 1949 script (though it was reinstated in the archival 2008 Lincoln Center production).\u00a0 There are only two children, and only one mother (and she a deceased wife).\u00a0 The children are half-Polynesian, and that in itself, bracketing aside, seems enough to turn Hammerstein\u2019s Nellie away for a time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0NELLIE\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It means that I can\u2019t marry you.\u00a0 Do you understand?\u00a0 I can\u2019t marry you.<\/p>\n

EMILE\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nellie\u2013 Because of my children?<\/p>\n

NELLIE\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not because of your children.\u00a0 They\u2019re sweet.<\/p>\n

EMILE\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is their Polynesian mother then\u2013their mother and I.<\/p>\n

NELLIE\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 … Yes.\u00a0 I can\u2019t help it. \u00a0It isn\u2019t as if I could give you a good reason.\u00a0 There is no reason.\u00a0 This is emotional.\u00a0 This is something that is born in me.[8]<\/p>\n

\u00a0Cable, who has witnessed the exchange, then gives voice to the most pointed commentary Hammerstein permits himself in the musical, the song YOU\u2019VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT, a bombshell that lasts only 1:19 on the original cast recording.\u00a0 The song concludes:<\/p>\n

\u00a0You\u2019ve got to be taught before it\u2019s too late,<\/address>\n
Before you are six or seven or eight,<\/address>\n
To hate all the people your relatives hate \u2013<\/address>\n
You\u2019ve got to be carefully taught!<\/address>\n
You\u2019ve got to be carefully taught!<\/address>\n

\u00a0It gives the lie to Nellie\u2019s \u201cborn in me\u201d excuse, and suggests the path to her redemption, which is a process of un<\/em>learning what she had been carefully taught.\u00a0 And of course it would also be Cable\u2019s path to redemption, could he but take it.\u00a0 Again, not once is there anything explicitly about the American black-and-white situation, but the song is nonetheless aimed directly at it, and was naturally understood as such by the original audience.\u00a0 R&H were under great pressure to remove even so elliptical a set of references to America\u2019s racial problem by cutting the song during tryouts on the road, but stood their ground.<\/p>\n

Unprivileged Others<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The pattern was repeated with The King and I<\/em>.\u00a0 If possible, the ostensible subject matter (the years spent by a British schoolteacher in the royal Siamese court in the 1860s instructing women and children of the harem) was even further from contemporary racial conflicts.\u00a0 Yet the story is in a way even more on-point.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In The King and I<\/em>, the focus is on privilege, and the un-privileged Others are women, Southeast Asians, even whites \u2013 in fact everyone who is not the King himself is in a non-privileged status at some point vis-\u00e0-vis the King.\u00a0 Even the King, it emerges, is un-privileged and suspect next to the monarchs of the European colonizing powers.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 U.S. race relations are explicitly dragged in only as a critique of gender relations in the Siamese court, via the \u201cSmall House of Uncle Thomas\u201d pantomime and ballet, in which an American tale about race is presented as a Siamese story about monarchical privilege.\u00a0 But every status disparity in The King and I<\/em>, whether between men and women, Thais and Burmese, a king and his subjects, Simon Legree and Eliza, or Queen Victoria and King Mongkut, is shown an enemy to human potential and happiness.\u00a0 It is hard to imagine a musical in which the baneful effects of privilege are more fully limned and pilloried.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, privilege is one thing and race relations somewhat separate. Nonetheless, what R&H saw in the story of Anna Leonowens and King Mongkut of Siam was an array of privilege issues that mirrored the privilege issues in U.S. race relations of that era.\u00a0 Consider a few key aspects of the plot.<\/p>\n

Unenforceable Rights<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The struggles between Anna and the King begin almost at once, as Anna discovers upon arrival at Bangkok that the contractually-stipulated house outside the palace will not be made available to her.\u00a0 As the Kralahome, the prime minister, advises her: \u201cKing do not always remember what he promise.\u00a0 If I tell him he break his promise, I will make anger in him.\u201d\u00a0 This pattern, whereby rights and interests of those with lesser privilege can be ignored by those with greater privilege, and then those with greater privilege can prevent grievances merely by avoiding or changing the subject, or preemptively forbidding the raising of a grievance at all, runs throughout the play.\u00a0 It also parallels the kind of problem those fighting for African American rights kept encountering: an inability to lodge grievances.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A concrete example of this problem in then-contemporary America was the way black sharecroppers would be cheated, and without appeal, by their landlords.\u00a0 Isabel Wilkerson, in her recent study The Warmth of Other Suns<\/em> (2010) recounts how at the annual accounting, black sharecroppers would regularly come up with no compensation at all, based on the landlord\u2019s unchallengeable computations.\u00a0 Wilkerson quotes anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, who had studied sharecropping in the 1930s:<\/p>\n

One reason for preferring Negro to white labor on plantations is the inability of the Negro to make or enforce demands for a just statement or any statement at all.\u00a0 He may hope for protection, justice, honesty from his landlord, but he cannot demand them.\u00a0 There is no force to back up a demand, neither the law, the vote nor public opinion.\u201d[9]<\/p>\n

Later, when Anna seizes an opportunity to address the King directly on the contract, she says: \u201cThose were your words in your letter.\u201d\u00a0 The King replies: \u201cI do not remember such words … I will do remembering.\u00a0 Who is King?\u201d[10]<\/p>\n

Liberties<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As early as Scene 1.2, we are plunged into the story of Tuptim, a \u201cgift\u201d from the ruler of Burma to the King.\u00a0 By singing MY LORD AND MASTER, Tuptim makes clear at once that, though she is dedicated to the King\u2019s sexual service, her heart belongs to another, Lun Tha, the emissary who has brought her from Burma.\u00a0 Of course, the chattel slavery which had enabled widespread sexual exploitation of African Americans by their white owners was gone from the American scene by 1951, but imbalances of power nearly as grotesque, many of them sexual, were everywhere to be seen.\u00a0 Here is Wilkerson again, on the situation in Florida in the 1930s:<\/p>\n

[C]olored men had little say over their wives since the days when slave masters could taken their women whenever they pleased and colored men could do nothing about it.\u00a0 Planters were known to take the same liberties the slave masters had, and the contradictions were not lost on colored men: white men could do to colored women what colored men could be burned alive for doing to white women.[11]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Anna also encounters, and expresses strong disapproval, of protocol which demands ritualized servility.\u00a0 Anna\u2019s take, expressed in SHALL I TELL YOU WHAT I THINK OF YOU?:<\/p>\n

\u00a0All that bowing and kowtowing<\/address>\n
To remind you of your royalty,<\/address>\n
I find a most disgusting exhibition.<\/address>\n
I wouldn\u2019t ask a Siamese cat<\/em><\/address>\n
To demonstrate his loyalty<\/address>\n
By taking that ridiculous position!<\/address>\n

In similar fashion, the best-known aspect of Jim Crow was the way it reinforced black servility by mandating it, enforcing that mandate by law and by lynching.\u00a0 Once more Wilkerson, on the informal education of Southern black children of that era: \u201cAll this stepping off the sidewalk [when a white person was coming], not looking even in the direction of a white woman, the sirring and ma\u2019aming and waiting until all the white people had been served before buying your ice cream cone, with violence and even death awaiting any misstep.\u201d[12]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And then, of course, there is the \u201cSmall House of Uncle Thomas\u201d ballet, which makes the parallels explicit: the King\u2019s regime is likened to that of \u201cKing Simon of Legree.\u201d\u00a0 This is not to say that the attack on privilege is nothing but an allegory of U.S. race relations, but it certainly is that.<\/p>\n

Leonowens<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On this point it is instructive, as it was with R&H\u2019s treatment of Michener, to see what use they made of their sources.\u00a0 Here, the work was nominally adapted from Margaret Landon\u2019s book Anna and the King of Siam<\/em> (1944).\u00a0 Landon\u2019s book was itself largely an adaptation of Leonowens\u2019 two volumes The English Governess at the Siamese Court<\/em> (1870) and The Romance of the Harem<\/em> (1872), and it is clear from many aspects of the musical that R&H had had access to Leonowens\u2019 own books.[13]\u00a0 Taking these sources together, they would have recognized Leonowens as a woman of many parts.\u00a0 Leonowens was far more than a memoirist recounting her time at the court.\u00a0 She was also vastly knowledgeable about Siamese history and geography.\u00a0 She could turn her hand to travelogue, going into great detail, for instance, about a visit to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.\u00a0 She provided interesting, if somewhat arch, observations on and comparisons of the religions practiced in Siam: not only Buddhism, but Hinduism and various stripes of Christianity.\u00a0 She also had some talent as a Sheherezade, a spinner of exotic and sentimental tales, even if they are not all to modern taste.\u00a0 Although she was far from innocent of European condescension to some of what she saw, it is also true that she found much to learn in Siam, and she was an apt pupil.\u00a0 And even when she despised what she saw, she took the trouble to anatomize it carefully.\u00a0 Chapter XXX of her second book is a long and minute description of the laws and customs regarding slavery in Siam; remarkably the summary is based on a code of slave laws provided her by the King himself.\u00a0 In short, like the Anna of the lyrics of the musical, although not (I submit) the plot, she agreed that: \u201c[I]f you become a teacher\/ By your pupils you\u2019ll be taught.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 R&H were of course constrained by the demands of their medium to simplify this complex and accomplished woman enough so she would fit into two Broadway hours and provide a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence into the bargain.\u00a0 What was largely lost in the process was a sense of her self-sufficiency.\u00a0 Leonowens does not expatiate on her widowhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow many years your husband has been dead?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

I replied that his Excellency had no right to pry into my domestic concerns.\u00a0 His business was with me as a governess only; on any other subject I declined conversing.\u201d[14]<\/p>\n

This exchange is somewhat reproduced in the musical, in Scene 1.1, but in the books Leonowens keeps her own stated counsel and says little more about her romantic past.\u00a0 In the musical, though, she sings HELLO YOUNG LOVERS, and discloses her past love life to the women of the harem.\u00a0 Clearly her deceased husband Tom remains central to her identity.\u00a0 One thing this revelation does is provide a counterpoint to Tuptim\u2019s previously mentioned MY LORD AND MASTER; it shows the superiority of freely-chosen love to the broken hearts and enforced sex that concubinage brings.\u00a0 But it also diminishes the independence of Leonowens\u2019 personality.\u00a0 Actually, R&H do the same with the flight from the harem of Tuptim, who as both Leonowens and Landon depict her is not following a romantic dream built around a man but rather a quest for freedom.<\/p>\n

Given A Pass<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Another liberty along these lines, of course, is the decision to put an entirely fictional element of romantic attraction into the relationship between Anna and the King.\u00a0 They are given a moment to act like lovers in the grand polka SHALL WE DANCE?\u00a0 And, via the tropes of romance, the King is also given a partial pass on all of his other abuses, when his head wife, Lady Thiang, sings SOMETHING WONDERFUL.\u00a0 She is in love with him because of his yearnings to improve matters, even if matters don\u2019t seem to have improved much on his watch.\u00a0 It is a \u201cStand By Your Man\u201d moment on a par with WHAT\u2019S THE USE OF WOND\u2019RIN\u2019 from Carousel<\/em>, giving the man a pass on all of his defects.\u00a0 This treatment ignores that the King\u2019s personal defects bring consequences for all his subjects.\u00a0 The personal is far more political than this handling of it suggests.\u00a0 Considering the ease with which his son and heir, Prince Chulalongkorn, ends kowtowing, with an edict before the dying King\u2019s body is even cold, it seems as if the King\u2019s failure to resolve any of the grievances against his regime is not so much a matter of incompetence as of design.\u00a0 (The historical Chulalongkorn also ended slavery and concubinage.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lovensheimer has well summarized the shifting message American society was giving women after World War II and during the early Cold War.\u00a0 And the change is beautifully summarized in the last few minutes of the 1984 movie, Swing Shift<\/em>, as the forcibly retired female aircraft assemblers are shown a propaganda film designed to make them feel good about being laid off to make room for returning male workers.\u00a0 Rosie the Riveter was being eased out, and the domestic goddess, heroine of a thousand sitcoms, was the icon called upon to replace her.\u00a0 Nellie Forbush, a forward-deployed Rosie, may be the type to, as she sings, \u201cstand on my little flat feet,\u201d but in the final image of South Pacific<\/em> she becomes a materfamilias<\/em>.\u00a0 Henceforth her value will derive largely from Emile\u2019s love, his<\/em> flat feet.\u00a0 She will become the stepmother of two legitimate children (rather than, as in the book, eight illegitimate ones).\u00a0 Likewise, Anna\u2019s stature is greater because she was loved once, and Tuptim\u2019s story is largely about the value (and not the cost) of trying to love a man.<\/p>\n

Reviving the Empire<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Similarly with the political message.\u00a0 The old empires were dying at mid-century, but the fight to continue white cultural hegemony and the political influence of the former colonial powers was continuing.\u00a0 Both musicals were set in what would soon be called the Third World, the object of a contest between East and West.\u00a0 Each of these musicals conveys wholehearted support for the rightness and the continuation of white and Western influence and dominance.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Consider again that same closing tableau in South Pacific<\/em>.\u00a0 Lovensheimer quotes tellingly from a study by Christina Klein on the subject.\u00a0 This just-constituted family:<\/p>\n

… invigorates an aging and weary France, gives provincial America access to the colonial sources of French wealth and prestige, and maintains the childlike Asians in a condition of security and dependence…. It visualizes and narrativizes America\u2019s emerging role in Southeast Asia.[15]<\/p>\n

Indeed.\u00a0 Nor should it escape notice that part of the triumphant mood at the end of the musical owes to the spectacle of U.S. military forces enthusiastically moving out to occupy Third World turf.<\/p>\n

Anna the Westernizer<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And it can be said that The King and I<\/em> conveys a similar message in far more concentrated form.\u00a0 Anna is hired specifically to bring a \u201cscientific\u201d Western body of knowledge and outlook to the children of the King, presumably members of the future Siamese\/Thai ruling class including the next monarch.\u00a0 She is also retained to assist the King with his correspondence and the related tricky business of helping the King put up a Westernized front to fend off impressions that he is a \u201cbarbarian\u201d whose country is unfit (in the eyes of the colonial powers) to remain independent.\u00a0 The one lesson we witness, Scene 1.4, is about demonstrating to the pupils how small Siam is (using, however, a Mercator projection map that unfairly minimizes Siam\u2019s relative size).\u00a0 The things she objects to in Siam are all signs of the country\u2019s backwardness, and not matters of difference between equally valid cultures.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is no question that Leonowens despised slavery, but she also evidenced a great admiration for Siamese culture and took a somewhat relativistic approach to the various religions competing there.\u00a0 And while R&H pay lip service to that outlook (\u201cby your pupils you\u2019ll be taught\u201d), I can discern no evidence that the stage Anna actually learns anything beyond the information that comes with mere acquaintance.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Instead, we see the King literally dying because he cannot bring himself absorb Anna\u2019s westernizing lessons, while upon his demise his son, under Anna\u2019s tutelage, proudly proclaims the changes Anna directed.\u00a0 Anna, unlike the historical Leonowens, either of her memoirs or of Landon\u2019s adaptation, remains on the scene.\u00a0 Civilized Westerners need to stay on the scene to keep things from going awry.<\/p>\n

Camouflage<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The messages that women are validated by their male and family relationships and that the West had an important role to play in the Third World would have been comforting, not challenging to even the sternest segregationists in the Broadway audiences of mid-century, and would have taken away a great deal of the sting and discomfort inflicted by the indirect messages about race relations.\u00a0 And Rodgers and Hammerstein, master showmen, would have known this perfectly well.\u00a0 We can argue about whether these sustained exercises in talking about a problem without mentioning it much are tours-de-forces<\/em> or cowardly evasions.\u00a0 But the artistry cannot be disputed. \u00a0When Nellie goes into \u201ca conventional dither\u201d about Emile, we are going to be swept along, and rendered defenseless against a few indirect lessons that might otherwise not be welcome.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1].\u00a0 Id., at 30-31.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2].\u00a0 Id., at 17-19.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3].\u00a0 Id., at 31.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4].\u00a0 Concerning Savage, see id., at 105.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5].\u00a0 Michener drops a great many hints as to the setting, some of them hard to reconcile.\u00a0 His nameless narrator recounts that \u201cI served in the South Pacific during the bitter days of \u201841 through \u201843,\u201d and also mentions that he knew and dealt with various heroes of the Battle of Guadalcanal, which ended in February 1943.\u00a0 Yet: a) there is no suggestion that the action takes place on Guadalcanal; and b) Guadalcanal is not in the New Hebrides, although it is in the South Pacific.\u00a0 Operation Alligator, the campaign around which the book revolves, actually sounds a bit like the campaign up the \u201cSlot\u201d made possible by the success of the Guadalcanal campaign, but both the location and the timing are wrong.\u00a0 As presented in the musical, the campaign resembles the beginning of the \u201cSlot\u201d campaign added to the actual history of the New Hebrides occupation as the U.S. military\u2019s jumping-off point for Guadalcanal and the first land offensive of the War in the Pacific.\u00a0 (To be clear, however, the Japanese never occupied the New Hebrides, and did not have to be driven out, so that no land fighting occurred until the campaign of the Solomons which began with Guadalcanal.\u00a0 In other words, Alligator could not have occurred there, and a planter like Emile De Becque could not have used local knowledge to serve as a land watcher assisting such an operation.)\u00a0 In his memoir, Michener speaks of having been an observer through much of the Slot campaign.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6].\u00a0 The reader can compare the opening scenes of The Thin Red Line<\/em>, streamable on Netflix, based on James Jones\u2019 novel, mainly about the invasion of Guadalcanal, but which starts out probably in the same general area as South Pacific<\/em> does, showing some of the soldiers hanging out AWOL with Melanesians.\u00a0 They do not look remotely Polynesian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7].\u00a0 Michener, The World Is My Home: A Memoir<\/em> (1992) at 35-36.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[8].\u00a0 Scene 2.4.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[9].\u00a0 Wilkerson at 54, quoting Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural History of the Deep South<\/em> (1939) at 86.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[10].\u00a0 Scene 1.4.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[11].\u00a0 Wilkerson, at 52.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[12].\u00a0 Id., at 62.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[13].\u00a0 For instance, as mentioned above, the first conflict appearing in the musical is over whether Anna can have her own house.\u00a0 This fight is greatly downplayed in Landon\u2019s book (where, from aught that appears the initial failure to comply may have been an oversight), Landon at 84, but it forms a major part of the early action in Leonowens\u2019 first book, spilling over Chapters I, VII and VIII.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[14].\u00a0 Leonowens, Chapter II.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[15].\u00a0 Lovensheimer at Page 178, quoting Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961<\/em> (2003) at 168.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Theater Reviews Page<\/a> | Previous Theater Review<\/a> | Next Theater Review<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the three-year stretch in which Richard Rodgers\u2019 and Oscar Hammerstein II\u2019s South Pacific and The King and I reached the Broadway stage, theatrical expressions of support for the equality of black and white were a dicey proposition, courting charges of Communist sympathies. And yet in these two musicals, lyricist and librettist Hammerstein found a way to voice that support. However, in keeping with the times as well as his temperament, he did so by indirection, and also with what might be called camouflage: presenting the \u201cdestabilizing\u201d message about race relations in a matrix that included remarkably conventional and reassuring, even retrograde, messages concerning the relations of the sexes and colonialism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,3098],"tags":[3539,3540,3581,3628,3610,3605,3604,3561,961,3563,1062,3611,3600,428,1244,3551,3613,3630,3619,3631,3588,3584,3552,3548,3549,3572,3574,3559,3578,3623,363,3615,3612,3560,3546,3629,3535,3544,3545,1981,3632,3565,3626,3576,1078,3556,3579,3541,3562,3621,3592,3597,3580,3601,1392,3542,3606,3573,3583,3538,3598,3582,3547,1370,3571,3569,3567,3553,3292,3570,3557,1908,3577,364,3620,3587,3591,1973,3586,3543,3537,3536,3594,1974,3603,3616,3595,3614,3602,3593,1081,3589,3575,3617,1245,3566,1773,3607,3554,3608,3624,3555,3625,3596,3627,3550,3564,3609,3599,3590,3568,3622,3618,3558,3585],"class_list":["post-3268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","category-theater-reviews-and-commentary","tag-3539","tag-3540","tag-a-cemetery-at-hoga-point","tag-after-freedom-a-cultural-histor-of-the-deep-south","tag-angkor-wat","tag-anna-and-the-king-of-siam","tag-anna-leonowens","tag-archie-savage","tag-arkansas","tag-bloody-mary","tag-brown-v-board-of-education","tag-buddhism","tag-burma","tag-cambodia","tag-carousel","tag-charles-houston","tag-christianty","tag-christina-klein","tag-chulalongkorn","tag-cold-war-orientalism","tag-colonialism","tag-colored","tag-communism","tag-congress-of-racial-equality","tag-core","tag-emile-de-becaue","tag-ezio-pinza","tag-fascism","tag-fo-dolla","tag-guadalcanal","tag-harry-truman","tag-hello-young-lovers","tag-hinduism","tag-hollywood-anti-nazi-league","tag-hollywood-blacklist","tag-hortense-powdermaker","tag-in-a-conventional-dither","tag-integration-of-armed-forces","tag-integration-of-baseball","tag-isabel-wilkerson","tag-jackie-robinson","tag-james-a-michener","tag-james-jones","tag-javanese","tag-jim-crow","tag-jim-lovensheimber","tag-joe-cable","tag-john-hope-franklin","tag-juanita-hall","tag-king-chulalongkorn","tag-king-mongkut","tag-kralahome","tag-liat","tag-lun-tha","tag-lynching","tag-manning-marable","tag-margaret-landon","tag-mary-martin","tag-melanesian","tag-mid-centure","tag-my-lord-and-master","tag-n-word","tag-naacp","tag-national-association-for-the-advancement-of-colored-people","tag-navy-nurse","tag-nellie-forbush","tag-new-hebrides","tag-oklahoma","tag-oscar-hammerstein-ii","tag-our-heroine","tag-paradise-rewritten","tag-pearl-harbor","tag-polynesian","tag-president-harry-truman","tag-prince-chulalongkorn","tag-privilege","tag-queen-victoria","tag-race-relations","tag-racial-privilege","tag-red-scare","tag-richard-rodgers","tag-rodgers-hammerstein","tag-royal-prerogative","tag-segregation","tag-shall-i-tell-you-what-i-think-of-you","tag-shall-we-dance","tag-sharecroppers","tag-sheherezade","tag-siam","tag-simon-legree","tag-slavery","tag-small-house-of-uncle-thomas","tag-some-enchanted-evening","tag-something-wonderful","tag-south-pacific","tag-tales-of-the-south-pacific","tag-thailand","tag-the-english-governess-at-the-siamese-court","tag-the-king-and-i","tag-the-romance-of-the-harem","tag-the-slot-campaign","tag-the-sound-of-music","tag-the-thin-red-line","tag-the-warmth-of-other-suns","tag-the-world-is-my-home","tag-thurgood-marshall","tag-tonkinese","tag-travelogue","tag-tuptim","tag-uncle-toms-cabin","tag-vanuatu","tag-westernizing","tag-whats-the-use-of-wondrin","tag-writers-war-board","tag-youve-got-to-be-carefully-taught"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3268"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3472,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3268\/revisions\/3472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}