Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Carolyn Sorisio

When Elizabeth Keckley wrote her 1868 autobiography Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, one of her primary goals was to defend herself and Mary Todd Lincoln from public ridicule. Because Keckley had "been most intimately associated with that lady in the most eventful periods of her life," she tells readers that her "own character, as well as the character of Mrs. Lincoln, is at stake" (xiv). Keckley was particularly concerned about public reaction to the "old clothes scandal," a scandal that erupted when the widowed Lincoln met Keckley in New York City and arranged to sell pieces of her wardrobe in what quickly degenerated into an event reminiscent of a circus sideshow. [1] Keckley thought that by providing more information she could demonstrate Mrs. Lincoln's positive characteristics and pure intentions, and, from what we know about Keckley, we have little reason to doubt her affection for Lincoln or overt motivation for writing her book. [2]

Despite Keckley's sincere intentions, Behind the Scenes was met with public ridicule and the media's wrath. Putnam's Magazine. for example, called it the "latest, and decidedly weakest production of the sensational press," which "ought never to have been written or published" and could not be read by "any sensible" person "with pleasure or profit" (119). The New York Times questioned Keckley's authorship and said she would have been better off to "have stuck to her needle" as "the disclosures made in" her book were "gross violations of confidence" (10.) [3] Perhaps nowhere is the wrath against Keckley more evident than in the vicious parody spawned by her text, Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis. [4] This parody reveals the author's anxiety over an African American woman's rising in class and social status, and is intent on proving that, even if Keckley were no longer a slave, she would always be a "nigger" (a word that appears six times in the first paragra ph alone). In Keckley's personal and social circles, the response to Behind the Scenes was not much better. Mary Todd Lincoln read the book in early May and "thereafter renounced the 'colored historian' as friend and confident" (Baker 280). Later in her life, Keckley attempted to talk with Robert Lincoln (who reportedly requested that the book be removed from circulation), but he refused to see her because Behind the Scenes reprinted his mother's private letters to Keckley, a decision that was made, apparently, without Keckley's consent (Washington 241). [5] Within the African American community, according to Frances Smith Foster, some believed Keckley "had been victimized but most were angered by their fear that the backlash from her actions would jeopardize their own positions" (129). For a combination of reasons, Foster notes that the book was eventually withdrawn from stores, and Keckley was left to earn her living by sewing and from a small pension she received for her son's death in the Civil War. [6]

As the reviews, parody, and community's reaction reveal, the attacks on Keckley were so severe that her life was never the same after she published Behind the Scenes. Why, we might ask, was the public so outraged by Keckley's decision to write about Mrs. Lincoln? Certainly, the censure was not the result of the public's excessive love for Abraham Lincoln's grieving widow. By the time the book was published, Mary Todd Lincoln was considered by many to be extravagant and improper in her dress, manners, and actions. [7] Nor can we argue that Keckley's public discussion of Lincoln was unprecedented. As Keckley notes in her Preface, Lincoln had already "forced herself into notoriety" by stepping "beyond the formal lines which hedge about a private life, and invited public criticism" (xiii). She comments:

I do not forget, before the public journals vilified Mrs. Lincoln, that ladies who moved in the Washington circle in which she moved, freely canvassed her [Lincoln's] character among themselves. They gloated over many a tale of scandal that grew out of gossip in their own circle. If these ladies could say everything bad of the wife of the President, why should I not be permitted to lay her secret history bare, especially when that history plainly shows that her life, like all lives, has its good side as well as its bad side? (xv)

In this and other passages, Keckley represents herself as joining (relatively late) an already public conversation about Mary Todd Lincoln, one that began in the social circles of the capital and continued in the media. She insists that, had "Mrs. Lincoln's acts never become public property," she "should not have published to the world the secret chapters of her life" (xv).

Even if Keckley (rightfully) argues that she did not initiate public debate, her prefatory justifications indicate that she understood she might be accused of indecorum in writing about Mary Todd Lincoln. Nonetheless, she could not have been prepared for the extent of the furor her book aroused, and, indeed, she told people late in her life that the public's reaction caused her much sorrow (Washington 221). Why, we might ask again, did her book cause so much outrage? Although reasons for the anger Keckley faced are many, this essay argues that one significant basis for the wrath was the means by which Keckley's memoir jeopardizes the increasingly delicate self-construction of the white American middle class, what Karen Halttunen calls their "genteel performance." When the New York Citizen declared that Keckley's offense was "of the same grade as opening other people's letters" and "listening at keyholes" (qtd. in Foster 128), it revealed what Halttunen describes as a deep-rooted fear of many middle-class Ame ricans that any "vulgar boor" could suddenly "rip the fragile mask of the manner from the genteel performer and expose the would-be social climber in all his or her own underlying vulgarity" (116). The fact that Keckley was an African American woman writing about Lincoln intensified this fear, because the middle class's self-fashioning relied on an implicit juxtaposition of white and black womanhood. Keckley's text, intentionally or not, splinters the fragile veneer of middle-class culture in mid-nineteenth-century America, revealing and challenging the racial, gendered, and class ideologies that were inextricably tied to the middle class's increasingly precarious social status.