ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

of the Moor, who is, though still made foolish by Punch, part of a grand tradition of rich
puppet theatre.
Assorted puppets and masks in his collection would further have reinforced this
distinction in the eidos of the blackface puppet. McPharlin owned four nineteenth-
century blackface puppets that appear to be minstrel players, but without any tag to
identify their author or source play. 151 They are among the crudest of objects from the
repertoire (see figure 22). Their eyes are drawn on carved concave scoops in the face.
Fig. 22. “Marionette, 1870-1890.” Unpublished Collection Photographs (Detroit: Detroit
Institute of the Arts, 2002).
Their noses are large but only vaguely articulated. In the case of the “female Negro,” the
nose is a half-cylinder in the center of the face. The object has only dots on the flat
bottom to represent nostrils. The crudeness of these objects intersects with their semiotic
151 The extent of their descriptions is “marionette, 1870-1890.”
114