Louis S. Warren
Page 47
There was something more than envy in these demonstrations. Unrest in the London theatrical world echoed a wider public dissatisfaction with the queen’s continuing insistence on private showings of the few entertainments she did attend, and exclusive, private viewings of public exhibits, including the American Exhibition, which was closed to the public during her visit. “It would not have done any harm had her Majesty, just for once, tolerated the presence of her subjects in the same public building as herself” when she attended the American Exhibition, wrote one columnist.123 Wrote another, “It is evident by her recent actions that her Majesty is not altogether disinclined to be amused, provided, of course, that her subjects do not witness her enjoyment.”124
The queen’s unwillingness to be seen was a constant theme among penny papers and highbrow society journals because it was no trivial matter. Like the inhabitants of many nations, Britons were riven by distinct regional identities, class tensions, and fierce party differences, all of which were apparent in 1887 as they rarely had been before. Against the surge of Irish nationalism, workingmen’s strife, and other disputes that tore at the fabric of the United Kingdom, “the Queen is the symbol of the unity of the nation; she represents the integrity of the Empire,” wrote the editor of The World. It was, after all, to see the queen that “her children, from every quarter of the world, flock to this island, recognising in it … their real home and Mother Country.” 125
With a monarchy that was long on tradition and short on ceremony, the foremost ritual of the British nation was the viewing of the queen. 126 She was the head both of the church and of the state. Royal representatives, symbols, and images of Queen Victoria were legion, but only the presence of this most hereditary monarch could provide her disparate peoples an authentic bond with the nation and its storied history. Only the proximity of her person allowed the ritual of nationhood to commence. For the great pageant that was the Jubilee, the celebration at a half-century’s reign, to function as it should, for the nation to be united, the queen had to make an appearance, or, rather, many appearances. Her passage through a street or a hall allowed bystanders to unite in adoration, whether that meant cheering her coach or simply gathering to watch respectfully while she performed official duties. No other institution provided the cohesive power of the British monarchy—but that power could only be exercised if she made herself visible to her subjects.
And this was the essence of her failing in 1887, a reclusiveness so complete that it bordered on a crisis of state. Controversy swirled around her unwillingness to be seen on the way to the Jubilee service at Westminster Abbey, with editorialists lamenting that “the reasonable wishes of hundreds of thousands of people to see the Queen on her way to the Abbey, and to witness some kind of State, have been yielded to with extreme reluctance.” 127 Observed another, “The Monarchy is in part a pageant and a symbol, and a pageant which is not displayed, a symbol which is not shown, cease to be a pageant and a symbol.”128
At a moment when socialists advanced the cause of abolishing the monarchy, these critics implicitly made the point that Victoria’s ongoing seclusion was doing the job for them. Describing her tour of the working-class districts of the East End, one journalist was troubled by the pointed reproofs to the crown in the banners draped across the street: “God bless our Queen. May she come more frequently to the East End” and “We love our Queen, but we don’t often see her.” Such informal, and reproachful, messages gave the impression that “long disuse and hard times have both helped to make street adornment a lost art in London.”129 If only Victoria would be seen more often, “street adornment” and its corollary, class deference, could perhaps be reestablished.
This was the political context of the Wild West show’s audience with Queen Victoria. In a limited sense, Cody’s attraction was analogous to the queen’s. The “representative man” of the American frontier was a living bond between spectators and the frontier history of Britain’s former colonies, just as the queen connected her audience to mythic national unity. But where Cody’s show was an amusement that allowed spectators to decide what was real man and what was representation, where authentic frontier stopped and fake began, Victoria’s authentic presence among her subjects was the central pillar of the British state. Commentators insisted on it because, for all the superficial similarities between royal appearances and show business, the queen’s progress was not just another “show.” In this sense, Cody—showman, businessman, and American—was an unsuitable attraction to place before her hallowed British self. For many Britons, her eagerness to be seen by his large assemblage of primitives, but not by her own subjects, was insulting and worrisome.
Cody aggravated these anxieties by bragging about his triumphs to a Texas friend in a letter which American and British newspapers soon reprinted, and which Stoker no doubt saw. “I have captured this country from the Queen down, and am doing them to the tune of 10,000 dollars a day.” Cody made it abundantly clear that to him the patronage of Britain’s hallowed monarchy was a crass commercial triumph:
Talk about show business, there was never anything like it ever known, and never will be again, and with my European reputation, you can easily guess the business I will do when I get back to my own country. It’s pretty hard work with two and three performances a day, and the society racket, receptions, dinners etc. No man … was received better than your humble servant. I have dined with every one of the royalty, from Albert, Prince of Wales, down.130
Queen Victoria’s enthusiasm for Cody’s Wild West show—the fact that he had “captured this country from the Queen down”—underscored his sensual appeal, to common women as well as the elites listed in Debrett’s social register, according to one humorist.
All the women in London are what is metaphorically and obscurely known as “dead nuts” on Buffalo Bill. I don’t know if there be a Mrs. Buffalo Bill. If there is, she must at this moment be tearing her own or (more likely) her husband’s lovely black hair out by the yard with jealousy. One female possessor of the Blood Royal, three Duchesses, seven Countesses in their own right, and eighty-six dittoes with no rights excepting wrongs, have each and every Debretted one of ’em offered up their richly jewelled hands and highly chaste hearts to beauteous Buffalo Bill.131
Cody had at least two affairs during the late 1880s, although both of these were with American women, as we shall see in another chapter. But Cody’s appeal to British women was a constant subject in the London press. The attraction of numerous women to Buffalo Bill’s show, to his table, and, it was widely presumed, to his bed, was threatening to English people concerned that racially degenerate Englishmen no longer captured the fancies of Englishwomen. 132 In a humorous penny press verse in 1887, an anonymous woman admirer celebrates Cody as “Nature’s perfected touch in form and grace.” Lamenting that her male compatriots do not wear clothes like Cody’s, she pulls back from this last appreciation as she realizes:
But, ’tis the MAN we lack—not costume. Place
Yours on the usual product of the race
And see how soon ’twould look absurd and vain,
And tailors’ art be welcomed back again.
As if to emphasize the point, the verses were followed by a brief essay on the great opportunity awaiting “the genius who invents a male bathing dress that will not give away the fact that the wearer is bow-legged, cross-eyed, knock-kneed, flat-footed, and hump-backed.”133
Degeneration theory was always a province of the “respectable classes,” a way of ascribing biological causes to subversive social change.134 That Cody should become an icon for those classes is perhaps not surprising, and in the first few months of his English fame, they made an almost exclusive claim to Cody’s associations.135 As one writer commented on the show’s opening: “Such a vast concourse of the cream—or it may be as well to say the creme de la creme—of society is seldom seen at any function.”136 For an aristocracy spiraling downward in power, wealth, and influence, beset by demands for power sharing from their social in
feriors, the show’s implicit teaching that history’s most important contests were between races, not classes, must have seemed reassuring.137
Aristocratic enthusiasm was tempered, though, by the nagging anxiety behind the fanfare, a warning refrain about the American expansion and eagerness for combat that were so much on display in “Wild” West London. “The Buffalo Bill furore is becoming ridiculous,” wrote one editorialist. Granting that Cody was a better showman than even P. T. Barnum, the writer asked, “But are these credentials sufficient to justify an outburst of fashionable fetish worship?” Lord Charles Beresford came in for particular criticism, for having “given the Yankee showman a mount on the box-seat of his drag at the Coaching Club meet. Noblesse oblige; there is a want of congruity in the companionship of an illustrious British officer who fills an important position in the Government with a gentleman chiefly famed as an adroit scalper of Red Indians.”
This critique might be read as a reminder to the upper classes not to go slumming with American arrivistes, but it contained more than a hint of fear about American—and particularly Cody’s—intentions and even racial identity, and it resonated with cultural concerns about the “American invasion.” Earl’s Court earned various nicknames in the press that season, including the “Yankeries” and the “Buffalo Billeries.” Cody displayed Yellow Hair’s scalp so prominently in his tent it earned some public condemnation; he put it away, but it persisted in another nickname for the showground, the “Scalperies.”138 Some saw Cody as a bloodthirsty con man, a covert savage. One artist lampooned London elites and their Buffalo Bill fixation with a racially charged cartoon, “Our Drawing Room Pets,” in which beautiful Englishwomen at a fashionable ball dote on a bearded, suit-wearing Australian aborigine. Identified as “Kangaroo Jim, the Champion Australian Boomerang-Thrower,” whose “adventurous youth” was spent “in the Cookaboo Islands” where he has “frequently partaken of roast missionary … in banquets he describes with inimitable gusto,” he is really nothing more than a “professional street acrobat” in his native Melbourne.139 Indeed, although Cody advertised himself as a white man, the British press tarred him with the brush of frontier savagery and mixed-blood deceptiveness on more than one occasion. “A fine looking fellow,” concluded one journalist, “his face bearing evidence of the presence of Indian blood.”140
Since 1868, Cody had constructed his white Indian imposture and much of his career by standing as near the race boundary as possible without crossing over, by posing beside Indians without actually being of them. Not surprisingly, European critics who were less familiar with all his military patrons and his frontier biography were sometimes uncertain whether and how much his whiteness was colored by this high-wire act on the color line. These critics issued dark warnings, with veiled allusions and comparisons to confidence men who were not quite (or not even) white. In addition to the comparisons to the legendary Nepalese seducer of Englishwomen, Jung Bahadur, the public adoration of Buffalo Bill recalled events seven years earlier, when the Zulu king Cetshwayo was feted by the upper classes in London shortly after leading his armies to stunning victories over British forces in South Africa, and after being defeated and exiled to London. The glittering public image of the Yankee frontiersman was shadowed by the disgraceful memory. Before worshipping at the “shrine” of Buffalo Bill, “London society should remember the shame which subsequently fell upon it for its adoration of the black miscreant.”141
“Our Drawing Room Pets.” Punch magazine satirizes Buffalo Bill as a cannibalistic Australian Aborigine, “Kangaroo Jim.” Punch, July 2, 1887.
The comparison to Cetshwayo points out the ways that the Wild West show sharpened older concerns about the danger of a war with Americans, a preoccupation of English politicians for much of the nineteenth century, when the British and Americans clashed over the Oregon question, the Southern secession, fishing rights, and a host of other issues.142 Anxieties about war found official acknowledgment in the proposal to create a permanent court of arbitration to resolve future differences between the United States and the United Kingdom. The first meeting to discuss the idea took place at the American Exhibition of 1887. Indeed, it was timed to coincide with the closing of the Wild West show in November, so that The Times could observe, “Civilization itself consents to march onward in the train of Buffalo Bill.” In endorsing the court of arbitration proposal, The Times summed up the simultaneous adoration and fear that the Wild West show inspired. Crediting Cody for “bringing America and England nearer together,” the newspaper also warned that “a serious quarrel between England and the United States would be almost worse than a civil war,” a judgment likely shared by the audiences who witnessed the American love of gunplay and combat in Cody’s arena.143
London audiences of the Wild West show were thus caught in an ongoing double take. The “creme de la creme” cheered for the regeneration of the Anglo-Saxon race on the American frontier. But the shouts were punctuated with furtive glances at these armed, aggressive, and racially vigorous visitors to—or invaders of—an England on a downhill slide. Thus a cloud of anxiety hovered, the bright spectacle of frontier energy and victory dimming now and again amid a drifting fog of worries about expanding slums, the restless colonies, the declining industrial position of the country, themselves all symptomatic of England’s precipitous racial degeneration.
GIVEN THE MANY LAYERS of anxiety his show generated, what is perhaps most surprising is how Cody overcame these obstacles and continued not only to profit from his English and European appearances, but to go down in European history as one of the most beloved of American entertainers. To this day, stories of Buffalo Bill’s English tours are told and celebrated in pubs, on BBC radio, and in the British press. In extraordinary numbers, European tourists make pilgrimages to the town of Cody, Wyoming, and its state-of-the-art Buffalo Bill Historical Center (where, in the summer of 2004, I saw two teenagers listen in almost sacred devotion as their mother earnestly translated museum exhibit placards into French). Suffice it to say that Cody’s showmanship, his attention to entertainment and amusement, his close (but not too close) relationship with European royals and, later on, with European working people, his presentation of Indians in ways that Indians enjoyed and profited from—all these contributed to a show career that was mostly successful in Europe and generally remembered with great fondness. Add to this the history of the twentieth century, the rise of an Atlantic alliance that saw the defeat of Nazism and the Soviet Union, the growth of stable European democracies and social welfare programs that have taken much of the edge off Victorian-era class strife, and the ambiguity of European response to Cody is easily forgotten.
Nonetheless, the dark fears of American power were real in 1887 (and have reemerged today in England and Western Europe), and they point us toward Cody’s influence on gothic fiction. The froth of fear on Cody’s sunny wake caught Stoker’s eye, as he imagined the fictional world of Dracula and began inventing a savage race monster from a distant frontier, as well as the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon posse—and the dubious American ally—that chased him down. As distinct as Cody’s show and Stoker’s classic might seem at first, even a cursory reading of the novel suggests the many ways in which the American frontier is bound up in it. Stoker’s gothic world expressed much of the admiration and fear that English audiences felt for Buffalo Bill, and for Americans generally, through a conflation of frontiers east and west, European and American, like the Wild West arena, a vast borderland of race origin and race war which is the story’s true context.
On the surface, Dracula is a conventional tale of female vulnerability and male gallantry. The action begins with a young Englishman, Jonathan Harker, traveling to Transylvania to meet the count after Harker’s law firm has been commissioned to buy property for the aristocrat in London. The count is a vampire, although his guest does not realize this. He traps Harker in the castle and turns him over to his three minions, female vampires who live in the castle’s recesses. Harker escapes an
d returns home, but Dracula has already left for London, where he plans to use his newly purchased properties as bases for his forays into England. There he will suck the blood of Englishwomen and reduce the country to his domain.
He prevails first upon Lucy Westenra, a wealthy young woman who is a friend of Mina Harker, Jonathan’s wife. But Jonathan has glimpsed the count in London, and together he and Mina join forces with Abraham Van Helsing, an elderly “Dutch,” or German doctor; Dr. John Seward, who runs a mental asylum; his friend Lord Godalming, who is also Lucy’s fiancé; and Quincey Morris, the colorful Texan.
After turning Lucy into a vampire—whom the protagonists skewer with a huge wooden stake—Dracula bites Mina and forces her to suck his blood while she is in bed with her unconscious husband. Desperate to save Mina from becoming a vampire, Harker and his friends pursue the count back to Transylvania, where they arrest and reverse Mina’s transformation by killing Dracula just before he reaches his castle.
It is not difficult to imagine how Stoker might have drawn on Cody’s popularity to enhance his fictional drama. The bite of Count Dracula constitutes a kind of “abduction” and rape of white women. Since much of Buffalo Bill’s heroic persona was connected to redeeming women captured by savages, and given the fabulous plots into which fiction writers inserted him, it is not too outlandish to imagine Nature’s Nobleman arriving to do battle with the Lord of the Undead in an effort to rescue the virtuous Mina from impending “vampirehood.” We can easily picture what Cody’s role in such an adventure might be. Joining the novel’s small party of protagonists, Buffalo Bill would race across Europe to intercept the count, “to cut him off at the pass” before he reached his stronghold. He would ensure the party was stocked up on rifles, and lead scouting expeditions to reconnoiter the territory. Dashing to the final confrontation in the Transylvanian twilight, he would dispatch the count’s Gypsy troops and deal the death blow to the vampire, plunging his knife—not a wooden stake or a European dagger, but a frontiersman’s bowie knife—into Dracula’s dark heart.