Lady Menken's Secret: Adah Isaacs Menken, Actress Biographies, and the Race for Sensation

His study, no doubt, confirms what Hortense Spillers has claimed, that the figure and the term "mulatta" "tells us little or nothing about the subject buried beneath [it], but quite a great deal more concerning the psychic and cultural reflexes that invent and invoke them" (166). Hence, [John S. Kendall]'s construction of Menken as possessing a "moody" and "violent temper" along with "sketchy morals" supports his preconceived hypothesis of the "octoroon" heroine and illustrates Spillers's contention that "a semantic marker, already fully occupied by a content and an expectation, America's `tragic mulatto' exists for others -- and a particular male other" (167). Indeed the "mulatto/a" figure functions as "a creation myth" which names and celebrates patriarchal law and "phallic violence." The fastidious detail which Kendall's article pays to filling in the gaps of Menken's nebulous paternal history demonstrates the way that the "mulatta" figure serves as the sensational connection to a white, patriarchal phallus. Menken's very body bears/bares the symbolic traces of her own as well as the antebellum South's public "secrets" of miscegenation and the so-called "sins of the fathers." Menken's history, her "unspeakable" past, her literal figure sustains the traces of the public "secret" of New Orleans race relations.(5) Yet Kendall's research, which subsequent biographers have firmly upheld, confirms that it was probably Menken's father and not her mother who was a "free-born mulatta." With this sensational inversion of the absent father's conventional identity (from white to black), the white patriarchal figure who begets and reaps the benefits of his miscegenous fruits is temporarily displaced in Menken's genealogical history, only to return here discursively and allegorically in the form of the biographers' detective work.(6) (8). See Carol Groneman, "Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality" (235). Gerson organizes this chapter of his biography, entitled "Queen of the Plaza," in meticulous detail. The Baron's "seduction" is described as having begun in "mid-October, 1853" at which time Menken's "Diary" is said to "contai[n] a single, hastily scribbled line: `F. von E. loves me!'" (38). The "courtship" section offers intimate anecdotes wherein Gerson quotes Menken as having said "blithely" that "`I have brought very little lingerie.'" Gerson claims also that, according to the "Diary," the "Baron's love-making disappointed Adah" (40). Upon