Item Detail
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17421
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0
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0
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English
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Rapists, Murderers, and Turks : Anti-Mormon Melodrama and American Identity, 1845-1900
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Minneapolis, Minnesota
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University of Minnesota
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Ph.D. diss.
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"In the late-nineteenth century, Utah was a real place whose representation in popular fiction served a "precise and determined function" in American society (Foucault "Other" 23). The tales of rape, pillage, murder, kidnapping, filth, drunkenness, insanity, and treason that thrived in Salt Lake City were what America believed it could become without the proper definition and dissemination of appropriate social beliefs, behaviors, and structures. This dissertation investigates how the performance of Mormons in nineteenth-century theatre invented, questioned, and reaffirmed normative behaviors. I examine several melodramas, such as Brigham Young ; or, The Prophet's Last Love, Evelyn Gray; or The History of Our Western Turks , and The Mormons; or, Life At Salt Lake City , in which Mormon characters were portrayed as rapists, murderers, and Turks. These anti-Mormon melodramas provided a community of difference, and created a space for audiences to imagine what it meant to be "American." The characterization of Mormons and Americans on stage intersected and refracted not just with each other, but also with a rich collection of real-life characters: western heroes, Mormon wives, travel writers, politicians, suffragettes, artists, religious leaders, and reformers. Understanding how the culture and society of nineteenth-century America was represented, contested, and inverted in the heterotopic space of the theatre reveals the impact of performance as a creator of identity. By specifically examining the portrayal of Mormons and Mormonism in melodramas, I focus attention on the importance of religion, sexuality, lawfulness, and ethnicity in late-nineteenth-century America, and how these contested sites helped to imagine a unified American identity." [Author's Abstract]