James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess: the role of the operatic melodrama in the establishment of an American belles-lettres

James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage, is the first extant play based on the Pocahontas myth and one of the first 'American' operatic melodramas. Such was the impact The Indian Princess had on the burgeoning theatrical scene in America that it also elevated the Pocahontas story to one of the nation's most celebrated myths, which speaks volumes about what it did for the nation's belles-lettres as well. Was it the myth alone that lent the play its wide appeal, or was it more the musical genre - so popular then on the British stage - that attracted American audiences? To be sure, the myth and the genre were both recognizable traits of the Georgian theatre, and what was deemed the best of American theatre was essentially derivative in nature. And yet the operatic melodrama also evokes much of what was then at stake for a nation in search of its own belles-lettres, for Barker was less interested in evoking the mysteries of an intercultural romance than he was in penning the nation's 'first' play. This essay proposes to study The Indian Princess in light of that theatrical context to determine to what extent the Native American story and the British musical genre competed or combined to lend the melodrama its 'Americanness'.