ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Walter E. Deaves
Edwin Deaves, Walter’s son, described a family tradition of puppetry, beginning
with his grandfather. 76 In 1819, at the ripe age of ten, the also-named Edwin Deaves saw
a Boston puppet company, and spent the remainder of his life working as a traveling
puppeteer. An important highlight of the family legend occurs around 1840, when
Deaves introduced puppetry to a performance by the Virginia Minstrels. 77 The
connection to Deaves would lead to a significant transformation of the eidos of blackface
puppetry, filtered through his son, Walter, and the subsequent work of Daniel Meader.
While Deaves was in San Francisco, he met McDonough, and reportedly assisted
him with production improvements. The seasoned puppeteer had much insight into the
logistics of frontier production. 78 The most important result of their interaction was that a
twenty-year-old Walter E. Deaves, Edwin’s son, joined the McDonough company.
Though by 1875 he had set out on his own, Deaves helped transform the eidos of
blackface puppetry by introducing a less exaggerated, more sentimentalized frontality of
blackface than that produced by Bullock/D’Arc.
Edwin’s proximity to the Virginia Minstrels seems to have deepened Walter’s
interest in representing blackface, as the younger Deaves’s productions included stagings
of minstrel shows, as well as a specialty cakewalk danced by a puppet couple and
76
Paul McPharlin, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History, 1524-1948 (New York: Plays Inc,
1949), 185.
77 McPharlin’s report states that Deaves worked with the Virginia Serenaders in 1838, but no
playbill records exist for a company called the Virginia Serenaders prior to 1841. The Virginia Minstrels,
which were sometimes called the Virginia Serenaders, formed in 1841. See: Carl Wittke, Tambo and
Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Wesport: Greenwood Press, 1930), 42-49.
78
Paul McPharlin, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History, 1524-1948 (New York: Plays Inc,
1949), 185.
58