Song Character Analysis Worksheet - The University of North ...

separate seating arrangements). The audience of the upper class orchestra section was
just as boisterous as the working class and slave participants in the balcony (later known
as the “gallery gods”) in their approval and disapproval of the performers. Theater
management enacted an educational campaign in the 1860s to instill the bourgeoise
manners of European propriety in their audiences. This campaign included the banish-
ment of cigars in the concert hall, applause only at the end of works rather than shouting
during the performance, and the removal of ladies’ hats for the view of other patrons.
Perhaps even more telling of nineteenth traditions was an effort to curb prostitution in the
theater; women were no longer allowed without an escort. The B. F. Keith and Orpheum
vaudeville circuits also sought to book more artistic (“legitimate”) acts in an overt
attempt at respectability by catering to the Victorian female patrons. 8
During the 1890s, an elitist division of the arts was exacerbated by three societal
trends that coalesced into the emergence of highbrow and lowbrow culture in the twen-
tieth century. The first trend was the upper class’ need to assert its leadership and social
power in the midst of Anglo identity displacement through the “sacralization” of culture.
They began erecting monumental temples of art (museums, concert halls, archives) to
protect and perpetuate the classics of western civilization. The patrons of this new reli-
gion publicly left the popular entertainments to the working class immigrant, but still
made surreptitious visits. The second trend was an elitist attitude that American art was
inferior to European works in quality, which is still true in many cultural canons. An
appreciation and knowledge of European art became a desired sign of breeding and class.
8 Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 5.
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