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

But Keckley refuses to acknowledge her prescribed place in society, and therefore complicates the codes of gentility that dominated her time. One way of understanding the full extent of her challenge is to situate her book in relation to the major components of the genteel performance. Because the "line between true gentility and false etiquette was perilously thin," the genteel performance was only made possible by hundreds of rules that Halttunen divides into three areas: "the laws of polite social geography, the laws of tact, and the laws of acquaintanceship" (101). Additionally, as Halttunen explains, the rules governing mourning were increasingly important to the genteel performance as the century progressed. All four of these aspects of the genteel performance are critical to understanding the backlash toward Keckley's work. The first, "the laws of polite social geography," functioned to establish the parlor "as the stage upon which the genteel performance was enacted." Drawing upon the work of Erving Goffman, Halttunen argues that, in "societies built on the promise of social mobility, high demands for control over bodily and facial expressiveness made necessary a division of living space into front regions and back regions." In the front region, the social actor is "onstage or 'in character,' "but in the "back regions" a genteel performer could momentarily relax. The daunting task of the genteel hostess was to "keep all private domestic arrangements from intruding upon the genteel performance," particularly her servants, as hostesses' "own gentility rested in part on" their servants' "ability to remain inconspicuous" (104-06). One manual, Etiquette at Washington: and Complete Guide through the Metropolis and its Environs, published eleven years before Behind the Scenes, instructed readers in what Halttunen calls an "unusually explicit statement of the theatrical nature" of the hostess's task that "the internal machinery of a household, like that portion of the theater 'behind the scenes,' should [ldots] be studiously kept out of view" (qtd. in Halttunen 105).

When one considers "the laws of polite social geography" in general and the idea that the household's machinery was to be kept behind the scenes in particular, one begins to realize the subversive implications of Keckley's title. How could a genteel lady ensure her family's status by keeping the domestic machinery behind the scenes if her friends and/or servants could at any moment lift the curtain and reveal the messy, emotional, unrestrained actions that took place in the back regions? It is not so much, then, that Keckley revealed Mary Todd Lincoln's secrets but, rather, that this revelation demonstrated just how fragile the theatrical performance of parlor etiquette was for the typical middle-class aspirant. Seven years earlier, Jacobs told readers that, if "the secret memoirs of many members of Congress should be published, curious details would be unfolded" (142). Now, rather than threatening to go public with private sexual information involving African American women and white men, Keckley went publi c with private, domestic information involving, primarily, white women. True, what we learn is not all that scandalous in relation to nineteenth-century journalism. However, Keckley's revelations about Mary Todd Lincoln are threatening because they unmask a white woman's genteel performance.