"Grief became my friend, my work:"

Schäfer, Stefanie

doi:10.18422/74-1391

"Grief became my friend, my work:"

dc.bibliographicCitation.article	9
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume	74
dc.contributor.author	Schäfer, Stefanie
dc.date.accessioned	2025-02-26T08:29:18Z
dc.date.available	2025-02-26T08:29:18Z
dc.date.issued	2023
dc.description.abstract	This essay examines the politics of service vested in the First Lady role and her affective labors by turning to a contemporary fictional representation of Mary Todd Lincoln. In Savage Conversations (2019), LeAnne Howe considers issues involving US national memory, White womanhood, and settler colonial violence. The play imagines Lincoln’s insanity episode in the Bellevue asylum in the 1870s, where, as Lincoln told her doctor, an “Indian” visited her every night, scalping her and wiring her eyelids open. By outlining Mary’s performance of caring widow and her petitioning for compensation for her public service, Howe reveals Mary’s complicity in the Lincoln presidency’s settler violence. The play recalibrates the gendered renditions of (public) service inherent to the narratives of mourning, motherhood, and insanity tied to Mary’s persona and shows the flip side of the care narrative, connecting the long 19th century to the First Lady persona of the present.
dc.identifier.doi	10.18422/74-1391
dc.identifier.uri	http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/3370
dc.language.iso	eng
dc.relation.issn	2750-7327
dc.relation.journal	New American Studies Journal
dc.relation.journalalt	A Forum
dc.rights	L::CC BY 4.0
dc.subject.ddc	ddc:810
dc.subject.ddc	ddc:792
dc.subject.ddc	ddc:305.3
dc.subject.field	americanstudies
dc.subject.field	literarystudies
dc.subject.field	theatrestudies
dc.subject.field	genderstudies
dc.title	"Grief became my friend, my work:"
dc.title.alternative	Mary Todd Lincoln's Uneasy Union with Memory in LeAnne Howe's 'Savage Conversations' (2019)
dc.type	article
dc.type.version	publishedVersion
dspace.entity.type	Publication