Fashion by Anna Cora Mowatt

First published: 1850

First produced: 1845, at the Park Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Farce; satire

Time of work: The early 1840’s

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Adam Trueman, a vigorous seventy-two-year-old farmer from Catteraugus County
• Count Jolimaitre, a phony French nobleman whom Elizabeth wants Seraphina to marry
• Colonel Howard, a young American army officer and Gertrude’s suitor
• Anthony Tiffany, a New York financier involved in embezzlement
• Snobson, Anthony’s confidential clerk and accomplice, who blackmails him
• Elizabeth Tiffany, Anthony’s wife, a zealous devotee of fashion
• Prudence, Elizabeth’s gossipy spinster sister, who sees Adam as a potential husband
• Millinette, the Tiffanys’ French maid
• Gertrude, the sensible governess to Seraphina and granddaughter of Adam
• Seraphina Tiffany, a flighty young belle
• T. Tennyson Twinkle, a bad poet whom Elizabeth patronizes
• Augustus Fogg, a member of high society

The Play

Act 1 introduces the Tiffany household and demonstrates Elizabeth Tiffany’s slavish adherence to fashion. Humor lies in her use of French terms that she cannot pronounce and her attempts to transform her slave Zeke into Adolph, a continental butler. In conversation, Prudence, Elizabeth’s sister, reveals their humble origins, but Elizabeth sees herself as “fashionable.” She is a patron of T. Tennyson Twinkle, who maintains that a poet’s “velocity of composition” is the best measure of excellence. Another “fashionable” visitor is Augustus Fogg, a “drawing room appendage” who is indifferent to any subject mentioned. When Count Jolimaitre arrives, Elizabeth maneuvers him toward Seraphina, her daughter, but her machinations are thwarted by the arrival of Adam Trueman, an old farmer, who is openly contemptuous of everyone’s pretensions. Elizabeth considers Adam crude and threatens to throw him out.

In act 2, scene 1, Elizabeth’s husband, Anthony, and his clerk, Snobson, discuss their illegal business activities in Anthony’s office. Snobson threatens to reveal Anthony’s forgeries unless Snobson can marry Seraphina, and Anthony agrees to allow this courtship of his daughter. He indicates, however, his hopes for financial rescue from Adam, his father’s friend. When Adam arrives, he comments upon Anthony’s changed attitudes and values.

In a series of conversations during scene 2, characters reveal their interrelationships. Seraphina’s governess, Gertrude, and her suitor, Colonel Howard, are revealed as honorable characters, and their mutual affection is established. Gertrude’s encounter with Jolimaitre clearly demonstrates the contrast between his character and that of Howard. Adam overhears the count’s improper advances to Gertrude, and hostility between the two intensifies. Adam attempts to learn whether the Tiffanys’ corrupt values have influenced Gertrude. In a comic note, Prudence attempts to ensnare Adam in marriage. Her humorous role as a gossip is also developed as she incorrectly identifies everyone’s romantic relationships.

In act 3, scene 1, Anthony explains to Elizabeth that Adam is his only hope for financial rescue. Snobson arrives to court Seraphina, and Anthony is relieved when she seems pleased. Jolimaitre arrives, and the scene becomes a verbal duel between the Tiffanys, each attempting to influence Seraphina’s choice. In the next scene, the Tiffanys’ maid Millinette and Jolimaitre, alone for the first time, discuss their past. Entering unobserved, Gertrude discovers Jolimaitre is a fraud who intends to trick Seraphina into marriage. Gertrude resolves to expose him.

At a fancy ball given by the Tiffanys during act 4, scene 1, Gertrude manages to have Millinette occupied with guests while she invites Jolimaitre to meet her in the servants’ quarters. The gossipy Prudence overhears and reveals the meeting. Scene 2 provides the play’s crisis. Before Gertrude can force Jolimaitre to reveal the truth, other characters enter, and they believe Jolimaitre’s version of the story. Gertrude seems disgraced: She is fired by Elizabeth, condemned by Adam, and rejected by Howard.

In act 5, while preparing to leave, Gertrude writes a letter of explanation to her guardians. When Adam enters and rebukes her again, she gives him the letter to read. He realizes he has misjudged her, though he still criticizes her devious methods of trying to reveal the truth. Howard arrives to tell Gertrude farewell before he resigns his commission and heads west. As he and Adam engage in a heated argument, Gertrude shows the letter to Howard, who apologizes for doubting her. Prudence bursts in to say Seraphina and Jolimaitre have eloped. When the Tiffanys hear the news, Anthony despairs, believing Snobson will now incriminate him. Elizabeth is delighted that Seraphina will be a countess, though disappointed there will not be a large wedding. Next, Adam reveals that Gertrude is his granddaughter. Millinette tells everyone that Jolimaitre is really Gustave Treadmill, who has been a cook, a barber, and a valet, but never a French count. Seraphina and Jolimaitre, still unmarried, return to collect her jewels.

As the play ends, Adam resolves everyone’s problems. Gertrude will marry Howard. Snobson will not incriminate Anthony because Adam threatens to expose Snobson as an accomplice; instead Snobson heads west. Adam will provide money to rescue Anthony, on the condition that he sell all possessions and move his family to a rural area other than Catteraugus County. Jolimaitre will marry Millinette and, with Adam’s financial support, begin an honest career as a restaurateur.

In an epilogue, Gertrude insists virtue should be its own reward, then asks the audience’s verdict on the play’s realistic portrayal of the “just value” of Fashion.

Dramatic Devices

Fashion plays well because it employs elements of farce. Characters overhear key conversations, frequently misunderstanding what they hear and misinterpreting what they see. For example, Prudence hears Gertrude set up a meeting with Jolimaitre and assumes it is an assignation. Adam and Howard find Gertrude alone with Jolimaitre and draw negative conclusions about her virtue. These misunderstandings are resolved by methods typical of farce: truths revealed by coincidental overhearing of a conversation or reading of a letter, strategically timed revelations, and abrupt changes in attitude or behavior. Among the comic characters are several stock characters of farce: the poet or pedant, the fop, the meddling gossip, the desperate spinster, the saucy maid, the socially ambitious matron, the flighty belle, the young man with financial problems, and the wise older man who sets everything and everyone right in the end.

Anna Cora Mowatt also employs conventions from melodrama. Most characters are one-dimensional, their actions governed primarily by plot requirements. Potentially dire consequences are averted by fortuitous coincidences. Adam enters as Gertrude finishes her letter. Seraphina returns still unmarried because she forgot her jewels. Millinette reveals the truth just before Jolimaitre returns. Snobson decides to head west instead of incriminating Anthony. Jolimaitre resolves to become an honest man. The Tiffanys agree to adopt agrarian virtues and lifestyle. Perhaps most melodramatic of all is the epilogue, where Adam, Anthony, and Gertrude discuss the “moral” of Fashion, which Gertrude defines as the idea that virtue should be its own reward.

Critical Context

Mowatt’s interest in social history and customs dates from her earliest published work, Pelayo: Or, The Cavern of Covadonga (1836), a critically panned poetic romance dealing with the Asturias in 718. In the 1840’s Mowatt’s eyewitness accounts of European social customs appeared in several American periodicals including The Ladies’ Companion and Sargent’s Magazine. Detailed portrayal of New York social life appeared in The Fortune Hunter: Or, The Adventures of a Man About Town, A Novel of New York Society (1844) and Evelyn: Or, A Heart Unmasked (1845), novels published under the pseudonym Helen Berkley. These novels satirized New Yorkers’ romantic sentimentalism and pursuit of fashion; they also began Mowatt’s lifelong battle in defense of actors’ morality, a theme developed more fully in later novels: Mimic Life: Or, Before and Behind the Curtain, A Series of Narratives (1856), Twin Roses: A Narrative (1857), and The Mute Singer: A Novel (1866). Mimic Life includes several episodes that parallel Mowatt’s own experiences as described in Autobiography of an Actress: Or, Eight Years on the Stage (1853).

Melodramatic incidents are also a staple of Mowatt’s work. In Gulzara: Or, The Persian Slave (pr., pb. 1841), when the honorable young heroine is captured by Sultan Suliman’s soldiers and thrown in prison, she remains faithful to her true love, Hafed, who actually is Suliman in disguise. Likewise, in Armand, Or, The Peer and the Peasant (pr., pb. 1849), Armand defies King Louis XV to defend the virtue of Blanche. In Evelyn, the melodrama makes Mowatt’s social satire more biting as it leads to tragic results for the Willards.

Fashion, Mowatt’s best-known work, combines elements of social satire, melodrama, and farce. In the satiric tradition established by Royall Tyler’s comedy The Contrast (pr. 1787, pb. 1790), Mowatt clearly demonstrates the superiority of the United States’ agrarian values as both plays end with major characters discarding artificial European fashions in favor of simple rural life. First, though, misunderstandings place several characters in jeopardy: Gertrude’s virtue is questioned, Anthony may be imprisoned, and Seraphina appears destined to make a disastrous marriage. All problems are resolved, however, by improbable coincidences, expeditious revelations, and the wisdom of the sturdy American farmer.

Sources for Further Study

Abramson, Doris.“’The New Path’: Nineteenth Century American Women Playwrights.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schleuter. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.

Fowler, Lois Josephs. “Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt, 1819-1870.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Denise D. Knight. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Hutchisson, James M. “Poe, Anna Cora Mowatt, and T. Tennyson Twinkle.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1993): 245-254.

Ito, Akira. “Early American Drama, III: The Flattering Mirror of an Age.” Language and Culture 5 (1984): 1-25.

Shaffer-Koros, Carole M. “Edgar Allan Poe and Edith Wharton: The Case of Mrs. Mowatt.” Edith Wharton Review 17, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 12-16.