ABSTRACT
Some three decades after Karen Halttunen first pinpointed the ‘self-conscious and theatrical forms of bourgeois etiquette’ which emerged in America during the early nineteenth century, scholars have begun to pay renewed attention to the destabilization of social identities which attended the market revolution. 1 Examining how an accelerating social mobility and an increasing urban anonymity necessitated the development of new codes of conduct, historians such as Thomas Augst, Rowena Olegario and Stephen Mihm have all emphasized the ambiguously performative nature of relationships now built on confidence and credit rather than hard currency and familiarity. 2 But while these historians offer keen insights into what Augst calls ‘the ongoing performance of character’, they tend to neglect the more literal instances of role-playing which were available to nineteenth-century Americans. 3 It is one of the intentions of this chapter, then, to reconnect the work of these historians to the theatre itself, as a primary site for the modelling and display of market relations. Moreover, it is also my desire to resituate this rapidly advancing market culture within a broader transatlantic framework. For, as David J. Hancock has pointed out, we cannot comprehend the antebellum economy:
… by confining history to the limits of the nation-states that became all-encompassing over the course of the nineteenth century. The later, narrower perspective of most historians writing today misses the internationalism and porousness of early American life … the creativity of widely dispersed American agents, and the continuous, conversational interaction among levels in a large, geographically diffused, and economically unbounded oceanic economy. 4
