Dime Novel Theater

Rachael

I find it quite interesting that Denning can find a connection between the proliferation of the dime novel and the stratification of American theater, in both literal and metaphorical tendencies. Some plots were taken from theatrical performances and remediated into the serial form, which alluded to a common ground between the audiences of the two forms. Denning uses this serialization process to open the question of class-consciousness to further theatrical embodiment: “after 1850, the melodrama and the dime novel increasingly found a predominantly working class audience. Moreover, the narrativization of stage productions indicates a new mode or character in the reading of dime novels and story papers; reading became a way of preserving and recapturing a public moment or a favorite performance.” (25) Denning also points to the Astor Place Riot as a touchstone for the end of a “theater that united different classes.”

There are several theories as to the cause of the riots on May 10, 1849, including causes linked to class distinctions. Up to this point in the nineteenth century, the theater had been a place where all levels of class could come together to enjoy a performance. There were usually several aspects of a night’s performance: a tragedy, comedy or farce, and musical interludes. There was then always something to satisfy different tastes. Trouble began with the construction of the Astor Place Opera House, an exclusive upper-class facility in a predominantly lower-class neighborhood, the Bowery. The riot, which left 20 people dead and over a hundred injured, was said to be the “beginning of the end of theater in the United States as a conglomerate entertainment for a heterogeneous audience. ‘The Astor Place Riot intimated that this union was no longer possible,’ writes theater historian David Grimsted. ‘The country had grown up, and grown apart. The theater after midcentury followed this development. It expanded and divided – into legitimate drama, foreign-language, farce, vaudeville, circus, burlesque, minstrelsy, opera, symphony – each with its separate theater and separate audience.’” (Stempel, Showtime, 33) It was these divisions, a fine-tuning of cultural entertainment, which created a niche for the dime novel and its audience.