ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

However, the essential realism of the portrait puppets does not disappear with the
appearance of the masks, and audiences would not experience the same brand of
grotesqueness seen in more traditional blackface marionette performance. Compared to
other minstrel-derived blackface puppet images, these objects contradict racial
stereotyping with their still visible red hair and pink skin. Even if the Lauer Sisters
adopted the standards of puppetry that placed a “mammy puppet” in a debased aesthetic
position for no other purpose than a convenient performance frame, they complicated the
tradition by adding masks to their own portraits rather than replacing them with actual
mammy puppets.
The addition of masks suggests the fictional character of minstrel-derived
puppetry, commenting directly on the nonrealistic nature of the form. The audience,
observing a marionette whose body and hair are European, and whose masks are black,
would be encouraged to associate blackface with both clowning and artificiality, to laugh
at both the blackface repartee and the fundamental artistic concept of blackface. Where
other puppeteers created wholly corporeal representations of a tradition that was
essentially a mask, these puppeteers create marionettes that call direct attention to the
mask. Comic exaggeration here targets blackface puppetry, where previously it had
targeted race through blackface representation.
While Frank Paris was constructing portraits of Josephine Baker, and the Lauer
Sisters were using mammy masks that may have commented on the artificiality of
minstrel shows, other puppeteers were reproducing the minstrel shows of the nineteenth
century with nostalgic fervor. In professional circles, minstrel puppet shows seemed to
be largely a phenomenon of the previous eon. With the advent of marionette fellowships
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