Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Gabriella Varró: The Theme of Comic Love in Blackface Minstrelsy: The Anatomy of the Grotesque

this type of theater also employed "bestial masks and used exaggerated gestures, grimaces and obscene body language" (Barasch 560), as well as stock characters of various sorts. Here, for the first time in literary history, we might see a long line of grotesque paraphernalia, stock characters, masks, gestures and grimaces, which the 19th-century minstrel theater was to incorporate next (clearly entirely irrespective of and independently of the heritage of the Roman theater)

. By the Middle Ages this aesthetic quality had infiltrated a widening spectrum of literary forms and types, and thus the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the rise of bawdy tales and roguish jests primarily through the stories of Boccaccio and Chaucer. Among the new grotesque character types we witness the emergence of comic sinners, tricksters, dupes, many of whom "convey animalistic images harbored within the varied forms of mankind" (Barasch 561). The thematic realm of the grotesque also broadened while the 15th century was going to introduce its chivalric romances about the struggle between the monstrous and the beautiful, which finally coalesced in the paradigm'of the beauty and the beast. The war between good and evil for the soul of man discussed in the morality plays is probably one of the most elemental representations of the essence of the grotesque through literary history. The Renaissance period with its literary innovations of grotesque techniques, style and genres is most likely the age to which we should turn to look for the actual sources of the minstrel genre. This period's great inventions in terms of the grotesque are exaggeration (which the minstrel theater is going to be founded upon through its exaggeration of character, speech, and situation), the appearance of the horrificcomic style, and ambivalence as the keyword to understand grotesque logic (Barasch 562). To what extent and how these European, predominantly French and English, innovations could be influential on 19th-century blackface theater is almost impossible to trace here;

1 1 Theories of intercontinental borrowings are at best dubious and questionable, and also without historical documentation to support their arguments. Two facts can be 89