Melinda and Her Sisters: Reconsidering a Suffrage Operetta as Pageantry
Winter, Kendall.
2018
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Abstract: This thesis claims that the sui generis classification of Belmont and Maxwell's Melinda and Her Sisters as a suffrage operetta is to blame for the lack of extant scholarship on the work. In its place, I offer the analytical framework of pageantry. Relying on contemporaneous press and practical guides and recent histories of each genre, I reconstruct the commercial and critical atmosphere ... read morein the year the work was created, 1916. I also draw on suffrage propaganda, government documents, and court cases to convey the sociopolitical tension of the historical moment. By placing the two genres in dialogue, I reveal a chiasmus of gender and class coding attendant to each. I conclude that it was the relatively high cultural capital of "suffrage operetta," and not its aptness of description, that ultimately led the creators to market their work as such. As a genre case study, this thesis comments on the impact that ontology has on reception.
Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2018.
Submitted to the Dept. of Music.
Advisor: Stephan Pennington.
Committee: Melinda Latour, and Barbara Wallace-Grossman.
Keywords: Music, and Theater history.read less - ID:
- q811kx07z
- Component ID:
- tufts:24336
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
