Upon reading The Octoroon, I was struck by how Dion Boucicault felt the need to write two different endings – the American, tragic ending, and the British, happy ending. One ending contains the death of Zoe, and one ending leads to George and Zoe getting married. I wanted to think about just what the changing of the ending does for the play, since the change is a major one. I feel as though taking away Zoe’s death and allowing the play to have a happy ending (with justice served, a marriage, and Zoe being set free) takes away the message of the play. Zoe’s suicide serves as an important event, and it places her tale among one tradition of slave narratives. The trope of committing suicide or homicide in order to prevent the pain that comes from slavery is a common one (for example, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved). Placing Zoe, a woman who looks white, into this category of slave literature is probably meant to make audiences at that time uncomfortable. First because the idea of a white woman being subjected to slavery is uncomfortable in general for a white audience, and second because she ends up dying for no reason in the end. This uncomfortable feeling is necessary to the story. Without it, it is harder to pass on a message. The British ending downplays the seriousness of the issue of the “drop of blood” rule, because in the end everything works out alright. I think that changing the ending was not the best decision to make, even if the British audience was unhappy with it.
Trapped
Bodies bear history. This is the idea that stuck with me the most this week. In “The Octoroon”, Zoe’s body bears the history of sexual abuse and racial encounter. She is the manifestation of crisis, violence, and liminality. Viewing Zoe from this lens is trapping. We are born with one body – Zoe cannot change the circumstances around her birth or the history that her body represents. Her body bears a story that cannot be simply erased.
Zoe feels trapped in her body, in her state as “The Octoroon”. She is disgusted by the impurity in her blood. She feels liminality in her identity, and to have power over her body she commits suicide. Zoe feels no other option.
This past semester I took a course in human genetics. We studied the concept of epigenetics, or how our DNA changes after we are born based on our environment. For example, identical twins, whose genetic makeup comes from the same egg, can have differences in their genome later in life based on their environment. This poses an interesting question to how the octoroon would be perceived today in the context of new innovations in science. We are learning so much about how to control and change our DNA, which Zoe feels so trapped by.
Another concept in epigenetics that focuses on bodies carrying history is how changes in our parent’s DNA can be passed down to us. It was long thought that changes in DNA throughout someone life were not passed onto children. But, it was found through studies of a famine in Holland during World War II, that changes in DNA caused by malnutrition were passed onto successive generations. I think epigenetics is interesting to look at concerning “The Octoroon”, which is so focused on the makeup of Zoe’s DNA and how it defines her status.
A Glimmer of Hope in a Troublesome Text
Throughout this week, I have had some difficulty trying to discover key takeaways from Boucicault’s The Octoroon. From my first reading of the work, I was disgusted by Boucicault’s attempts to mimic African-American language in the text and his portrayal of the savage, barely able to speak Native American (played by himself). By the end, I was ashamed of my interest in the plotline despite the blackface presented throughout the play. Yet Daphne Brooks’ reading of the text changed my views and one specific point opened my eyes to the way this text could be viewed in a somewhat more positive moral light. Brooks describes Zoe, the title character, as a representation of disunion, a “manifestation of the crisis that miscegenation law sought to police,” and “impossible” (Brooks 34). In other words, Zoe was a tragic mulatta whose color-mixed existence disrupted order in the universe of the play. In order to restore order, the tragic mulatta must die (either socially or physically), which Boucicault adheres to in this work. Yet he does this with a sharp provocation of the racist society, as Brooks describes through Zoe’s death scene: “With her eyes changing color as well, Zoe is at once ‘cleansed’ of her blackness and blackened by the act of suffering as a horrified array of onlookers watch her rapidly transmuting body (41).” As this quote asserts, Boucicault grants the audience’s wish to restore order but ensures that Zoe’s whiteness is restored as she dies. George describes her features as white as she passes away. Thus, the audience sees a white woman lying dead on the stage, a victim of the slave society. It is a powerful critique of an oppressive system. While I am not sure this point absolves Boucicault of the other troublesome aspects of this reading, Brooks shows that, within this troubling presentation, there exists at least a hint of resistance to the oppressive slave society and racial hierarchy well-known to his audience.