Female impersonation in nineteenth-century American blackface minstrelsy

The first, original American popular entertainment, nineteenth-century American blackface minstrelsy reflected the polyvalent nature of popular performance as it combined the influences of cultures with the subject of gender. From its formalized beginnings in the late 1820s in the act of blacking up to perform African American people singing and dancing, minstrelsy also allowed and encouraged white males to don dresses to portray African American femininity on stage. The American popular notions of blackness and femaleness were irreversibly linked in 1840 when the first minstrel female impersonator stood on the stage in blackface drag, silently adorning a song about slave love. Indeed, minstrelsy was a popular entertainment rooted in the inherent theatricality of imitation, but it also revealed the limitlessness with which American popular entertainment empowered itself through mimicry. The female impersonator was established by the minstrels as a thoroughly contained woman. The epitome of the contained woman in America was the African American slave woman, and the minstrels mined this fact in their female characterizations. In this dissertation, I consider this imitation of African American women by white minstrels in drag as an effort to contain African American and white femininity on stage.;I outline the probable influences of cross-dressed performance on minstrelsy through the traditions of play-boys in Renaissance drama and castrati in European opera. Additionally, I outline the evolution of the female impersonator in minstrelsy, and then focus on one notable example, Francis Leon. Then, I deconstruct the songs sung by female impersonators, wench songs. After these discussions, I look to African American minstrelsy and explore the continuation of gender impersonation. Finally, I look to the twentieth century and the nightclub singer Gladys Bentley. Her performance of African American femininity attempted to break out of the molds of containment constructed during blackface minstrelsy for African American women on stage.