Sites and Sights: The Iconology of the Subterranean in Late Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Drama

"So you see," said Li Van Hgoc as he brought down the periscope and locked it with a silver key, "things may be viewed from many angles. From down below, or from inside out, you often discover entirely new understandings." The Lower East Side audience at the 1881 premier of Edward Harrigan's Squatter Sovreignty watched the curtain rise on a shantytown kingdom, complete with its own king, despite the fact that the imagined setting was located within New York City. The squatter settlement on stage portrays a Central Park commandeered by evicted tenants who have created a ramshackle sub-nation. The play's scenes feature two shantytown household interiors, those of the Widow Nolan and her neighbor, an eccentric amateur astronomer whose telescope is directed upwards from the squalid encampment. But these are not the play's sole domestic glimpses: action outside the shantytown in the park introduces the audience to the above-ground brownstone of the landlord responsible for the tenants' misery. Harrigan's drama emphasizes the contrast between high and low in terms of economic power, social privilege, and even height of characters' residences, the last given concrete embodiment in the stage sets that represented contemporary New York. The mapping of the modem metropolis, especially in its extremes of tenement deprivation and uptown luxury, became a powerful aspect of nineteenth-century melodramatic theme and setting as the earlier melodramatic pattern of contrasting the peasant cottage with the nobleman's castle became less relevant to mid nineteenth-century audiences, particularly urban audiences more than a generation removed from rural life. Although the concerns of melodrama in some ways remained constant through the urbanization process,(1) in the United States, scripts by Irish-American playwrights from Dion Boucicault through Eugene O'Neill exploited the implicit social commentary of the city's contrasting man-made structures, underlining the thematic focus on the poor with set descriptions that in production exploited verticality and emphasized a subterranean world as normative, situating stage set and audience seating in a relationship that maximized the audience's potential inclusion in and identification with the society depicted in the subsurface scenes. The crowded basement family dwelling occurred in nineteenth-century Irish-American urban life, and was occasionally portrayed: the kitchen/bedroom at the beginning of Harrigan's No Irish Wanted Here, or Out on a Strike is an example of such use of stage space. But Irish-American dramatists presenting underground space in American settings emphasized not domesticity but the public aspect of the space, as in the ironically named Jacob's Ladder where destitute immigrants seek shelter in Augustin Daly's A Flash of Lightning: A Drama of City Hearth-sides and City Heart-Aches (1868). The very subtitle of Daly's drama as advertised highlights the vogue of urban subject matter; seventeen years later, the same play was printed for the author with the revised subtitle "A Drama of Life in Our Day in Five Acts." Scene 3. Jacob's Ladder. An all-night's lodging cellar. A resort for sailors, and immigrants of the poorer class, and thieves. A circular staircase left of center leads from ground to an aperture in the ceiling. At back a row of steps lead [sic] to a low door, set high up in the wall. On right and left are rows of bunks of a squalid character. Stove on right in a sand-tray, pipe leading off. Kettle on stove. Low stools near it. The street lamp is supposed to shed a pale light through the aperture in the ceiling.(II.3) The convention of subterranean space discussed here constituted an Irish-American theatrical strategy for the portrayal of public space in the multi-ethnic American city, an effect achieved by crowding characters into a confined space at the bottom of a set's vertical span and often quite literally underground. …