ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Thus, the structure of the play presses the viewer toward the vigorously anti-civil-rights
view that slavery was a force that protected blacks from harm, and that releasing them
guaranteed that they would suffer at the hands of their enemies. The play, though making
a humorous pun on the novel that many claimed started the Civil War, suggests lynchings
and other brutal murders of African Americans, in its barbecue of the symbolic “Negro
puppet.” McPharlin’s decision to help develop this production is problematic by modern
standards. Yet it does seem logical, since he was an advocate of all puppetry no matter
its challenges to social justice. His decision to have the pig speak with the dialect of
minstrel shows further indicates his apperception that “Negro puppets” derived from
American minstrelsy are most appropriate to clown roles.
Paul McPharlin participated directly in blackface puppetry only occasionally. Yet
his massive authorship and organizing efforts must have exerted considerable influence
on the shifting characteristics of blackface puppetry in the early twentieth century. One
finds in the records, both in his influences and his own writings, in his artistic creations
and archived works by others, apperceptions that divided blackface into two polar
categories. These equate American minstrel characterization with lowbrow
entertainment, designed for schools, children, or amateurs, and equate exotic racial
characteristics, particular those of foreign blacks, with highbrow, sophisticated,
innovative artistic work for professional endeavors. He owned some of the crudest
objects from nineteenth-century puppet minstrelsy and some of the most fascinating
works from Asian mask tradition. He read histories that debased the Jim Crow puppet
and ennobled the Shallabalah, and wrote books distinguishing sophisticated work from
burlesque. His own artistic projects reserved blackface buffoonery for children’s plays
124