ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

A ninth grade Art Club in Oshkosh, Wisconsin designed wooden marionettes in the
minstrel tradition, as profiled by Marjorie Bathelder (see figure 43). These objects
Fig. 43. “Wood Constructed Marionettes.” Photograph by Marjorie Batchelder.
Magazine and Newspaper Clippings. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1930s.
represent the most radical stereotyping of the minstrelsy tradition but, more importantly,
demonstrate how blackface puppetry was as widely circulated as puppetry itself.
The latest original minstrel show presented with puppets is preserved only as a
listing in McPharlin’s Puppetry 1939 as Minstrel Show: Epaminondas. 235 Its name
suggests that, by 1940, conventional nineteenth-century minstrel shows has lapsed so
completely into obsolescence that visible puppet companies could not present one
without attaching it to another narrative.
Epaminondas was the title character in a children’s book similar to Little Black
Sambo. 236 In this illustrated novel by Sara Cone Bryant, young Epaminondas visits his
Auntie frequently, each time unsuccessfully returning with some gift. Each time he tells
his mother of the loss of first a cake, then a stick of butter, then a dog, then a loaf of
235
Paul McPharlin, Puppetry: A Yearbook of Puppets and Marionettes (Detroit: Puppeteers of
America, 1939), 108.
236 Sara Cone Bryant, Epaminondas and his Auntie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938).
186