ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

century. 130 Its impact on puppetry was to relegate the majority of activity to schools and
children’s entertainment circles, while only a handful of artists, whose works were of, in
Bell’s words, “remarkable artistic integrity and beauty,” would be accepted in the
professional world. 131
Though blackface puppetry clumsily followed both trails, the trend throughout the
10s, 20s, and 30s was, in many cases, toward a curious division between exotic and local
blackface images. This corresponded with a division between richer dramas with
“realistic” images of blacks and simpler dramas with cruder images of blacks drawn from
minstrelsy. Exotic black roles (moors, Fridays, and other “foreign blacks”) increasingly
became the fare for full-length plays presented for paying audiences. By the 1930s,
artists like Ralph Chesse and Frank Paris were creating puppets from actual black
Americans, basing their images not on the crude designs of minstrelsy, but on the living
African American actors and entertainers around them. Traditional minstrel images did
not disappear, but became increasingly relegated to educational and children’s theatre.
McPharlin, more than any other, contributed to the establishment of this division
within blackface puppetry, by introducing his peculiar apperceptions (the observations
one has regarding a lived experience that is not self-evident in the reality of that
experience) to the developing discourse. His idea of blackface puppetry is clearly
130 For a deep analysis of this process, see: Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The
Emergence of a Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Levine
positioned supposedly “natural” cultural distinctions of elite and popular art, specifically in the historical
dynamics of the late nineteenth century. Levine demonstrates how, in the United States during the 1800s,
much of the arts, particularly Shakespearean drama and opera, was enjoyed with great interest by both the
lower and upper classes. Intellectual and social discourse in the late nineteenth century produced a rigorous
distinction between high and low art.
131
John Bell, Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (Detroit: The Detroit Institute
of the Arts, 2000), 11.
103