Annotated Lind Mania

Reading "Lind Mania"

In this annotated version of the article I published on Jenny Lind, I've tried to show you how I incorporated approaches and materials from multiple disciplines by color coding the text.

Black text is connective material – basic exposition, introductions, transitions, etc.
Red text discusses historical context and information
Orange text is textual analysis
Green text highlights moments when integration is most clear and important
Blue text deals with social processes and theoretical concepts

My comments in the right hand column reflect on the rhetorical and analytical function of each section.

Article Text

Sherry's Comments

On 2 September 1850, the New York Tribune reported on an event that would become an American legend. The steamship Atlantic was greeted upon its arrival in New York by "the spectacle of some thirty or forty thousand persons congregated on all the adjacent piers. . . . From all quarters, crowds . . . could be seen hurrying down towards the Atlantic's dock. The multitude increased so rapidly that we began to fear there would be difficulty making a way through it." As the "distinguished visitors" disembarked, the reporter noted, several people in the crowd were "severely bruised, some came off with bloody noses, and two boys, about twelve years of age, appeared to be seriously injured. Had not the rush been checked in time, many lives would have been lost."¹All this in honor of a "young, untitled woman," who had, the Tribune noted,
won her way by genius, by effort, by lofty achievement, to the society and friendship of the noblest and most eminent of her sex and to the hearts of admiring nations. . . . Surely the landing of such a woman on our shores may well call forth a burst of popular enthusiasm, which her talents, however peerless, would never have elicited had they not been paralleled by her truth, her goodness, and her boundless generosity. ²

This introductory paragraph uses the historical event of Lind’s arrival as well as a typical newspaper account of it to identify the subject of the study -- not just Jenny Lind but also her popularity.

The Tribune reporter's explanation of Jenny Lind's popularity--or, as it was termed by the popular press, "Lind mania"--is only partially accurate. As her biographers and those of her promoter, P. T. Barnum, have rightly noted, Americans were drawn to Lind because of a combination of her own talents and personal qualities and Barnum's successful manipulation of press and public. However, such arguments do not sufficiently consider the audience's responses to and uses of Jenny Lind as a public figure. Why was Lind's version of talent and virtue, as presented by the press, so attractive to mid-century Americans?
Here I pose the study's central question. As in most cultural studies research, the focus is not simply on describing a cultural phenomenon but on explaining it.

Understanding audience response is a key problem in the study of nineteenth-century popular culture. Private writings provide some insight, but they are too limited in number and representation to allow anything but a very rough approximation of the audience-based scholarship so useful in understanding twentieth-century popular texts. Based on their ethnographic studies of popular-culture audiences, critics such as John Fiske and Janice Radway have argued that texts achieve popularity because they offer audiences opportunities to construct versions of themselves and their worlds that appeal to their psychological and social needs. As Fiske suggests, audiences choose to make certain texts popular based on their relevance in contemporary culture, including their incorporation of current issues and images. He further argues that texts become popular because they are "producerly," offering both familiar motifs and multiple meanings. Radway's work suggests that readers might have been especially drawn to texts that offered useful ways of reading their own experiences. In her study of romance-novel readers, Radway argues that the novels meet their readers' psychological needs, in part because they offer women alternative models for reading their own lives. ³ These critical approaches offer useful guidelines for reading nineteenth-century texts, even if we cannot test these readings against representative audience responses. We should, they suggest, be attentive to the ways nineteenth-century texts use images and language from contemporary public discourse to offer opportunities for multiple readings and to the ways they represent their audiences.

Now I briefly identify the central theories from which I draw in my analysis, and I position the problem I face in this study in a broader cultural studies framework.

Jenny Lind offers a useful case study for such an approach. Her story provides important insights into the creation of public, popular culture and the construction of mass audiences during the period when entertainment was first becoming a commodity for mass consumption. Moreover, public writing provides an appropriate set of texts to consider. Lind's concerts attracted huge crowds, but her audience extended far beyond the walls of the concert hall to include thousands who never heard her sing. They observed Lind as we must, through newspapers, magazines, and books. These texts demonstrate that the Swedish Nightingale's tour provided writers and readers an opportunity for public discourse about gender, religion, business success, and public life. While these themes appeared in British and European accounts of her career, American writing explicitly emphasized Lind's connection with distinctly American concerns and narratives. American readers could, I suggest, read in stories about Jenny Lind representations of American culture and of their own lives.

To understand Lind's popularity, then, we need to examine closely the texts that, as Richard Brodhead puts it, "create the interest [they] pretended only to address." ⁴ These texts may not provide accurate representations of how audiences responded to Lind, but we can usefully read them as the cultural products to which audiences responded. As early as the mid-1840s, when the earliest references to Lind's European performances appeared in the United States, Americans learned how to respond to Lind by reading about her and about her other fans. In private writings, individuals borrowed the language of these public texts to express their feelings about Lind. In advertisements that attempt to link Lind to gloves or canes or hats, we can see evidence that business owners believed that her popularity would help their products sell. And in the continued attention Lind receives--almost two dozen books have been published about her in the United States since 1850--we can see that such texts did, indeed, create lasting interest in and enduring images of Jenny Lind.

Here I move back to the focus of my article, explaining why this project is worthwhile and introducing the materials and themes that I will use in the study. I also introduce my argument: Lind's popularity was created by and enacted through the texts written about her.

In identifying the central themes of these works, we can understand the deeper reasons for Lind's popularity. As Edward Wagenknecht put it in his 1931 biography of Lind, even after we have accounted for all of Barnum's promotional "devices," "the fact remains that this woman must have given her contemporaries something that nobody else gave them in the same degree." ⁵ I would further argue that what Lind gave them was not music, or not just music. ⁶ Other opera singers made successful concert tours of the United States in the two decades before Lind's arrival, yet none gained as much public attention and none remains familiar to Americans today.While nearly every account of Lind's tour described her singing, only the music periodicals gave her voice primary attention, and even they often spent more time on the events and attitudes surrounding her performance than on descriptions of her singing. In most cases, descriptions of her voice were framed by discussions of Lind as a person and descriptions of the scene at the theater (with great emphasis on the size and enthusiasm of the audience),suggesting that American audiences were not simply interested in Lind's music. Her popularity, as critics noted even then, had more to do with Lind's character than with her voice.In response to the announcement of Lind's tour, for example, the Message Bird noted, with some sarcasm, that it would succeed even if Lind were to die before reaching New York: "[H]er skin properly stuffed would be nearly as successful." Or, as Barnum himself is reported to have said, "[I]t is a mistake to say the fame of Jenny Lind rests solely on her ability to sing. She was a woman who would have been adored if she had had the voice of a crow." ⁷

Before I can go on into my own argument, I have to respond to one key objection that some of my readers might raise: the idea that Jenny Lind was popular because she was such a great singer.

To understand why, we must turn to the texts. In popular periodicals and books published near the beginning of Lind's U.S. tour, three central themes emerge: her feminine, Christian virtue; her professional success (and the opportunities for success she offered to others); and the effusive behavior of her large audiences. A brief examination of each of these will help us consider Lind as, to use Fiske's term, a "producerly text" that allowed readers to construct multiple interpretations of her significance as a public woman and themselves as participants in a public drama.

This short paragraph reiterates the materials to be studied and identifies the central themes that I see playing out in those texts. This paragraph basically states my argument in more specific terms, moving from the statement that written texts created Lind's popularity to suggesting the reasons why popular writing about her resonated with American audiences.

Newspaper and magazine accounts, commemorative biographies, and poems published during Lind's tour described her as an ideal woman and devoted Christian. Her performance of gender and religion would have appealed to her audiences, as these ideas were part of a continuing cultural debate during this period, and, as Ann Douglas has argued, the two themes were closely intertwined.⁸ According to some writers, Lind's feminine virtue was the primary reason for her popularity. In the Jenny Lind--a remarkable commemorative tabloid of gushing articles and poems, printed in gold, with an engraving of the singer on its banner headline--the editor explains that "[w]e honor the talent, the genius, the heart of this unrivalled songstress--we bless her for her boundless charities"; but, he concluded, "we respect her" because she is "a true woman, a noble type of her sex." Her "true womanhood" explained the power of Lind's performances, according to many reports. With the memory of her singing "lingering in his heart," one writer claimed,

a man could hardly commit a disreputable action; and we have no doubt that many an erring man might be reclaimed, and the better promptings of his heart once more brought to light, could he be frequently subjected to the influence of such a "concourse of sweet sounds"--sounds that would remind him of his childhood's home, his mother's love, his sister's kiss, and the sinless pleasure of early days. ⁹

Where other women used prayer, good housekeeping, or the example of their own patient, virtuous behavior to influence others, Lind was described as enacting these usually private, feminine virtues through her singing. This elision of voice and character allowed writers and, presumably, readers to imagine Lind as a private woman through her public performances (both on stage and in the press) and to assign to that imagined private woman all the virtues of ideal Christian womanhood. Descriptions of Lind emphasized her modesty, piety, purity (the quality perhaps most often used to describe her voice), and charity, reassuring audiences that the ideal of good womanhood was achievable and that it could exist in public space. As Brodhead points out, the public presentation of the female body and voice both fascinated and frightened American audiences. In part because her widely touted devotion to Christianity defined her as a virtuous woman before she ever stepped on stage, and because she almost never spoke but instead sang words written by others (mostly men), Lind demonstrated that a woman could appear in public but nonetheless represent feminine virtue and remain almost entirely silent. Her successful public silence might have soothed fears about women's emergence into the public realm at a time when women activists and public speakers still made many Americans nervous. Indeed, Lind's case of feminine-virtue-in-song, which could only fulfill its function through public performance, suggested not only that public womanhood was possible but that it might be preferable to the private version.

Here I introduce and begin to examine a central point in my argument:Lind gained popularity because she was portrayed as an ideal woman, an image that appealed to many Americans because ideas about “good womanhood” were important at that time. To make this argument, I have to draw both on historical patterns about images of women from the period and from the primary texts about Lind. At the end of the paragraph, I speculate about how these texts may have met readers' needs.

Some writers focused more narrowly on Lind's Christian faith. A writer for The Independent, a religious weekly that was refreshingly restrained in the attention it gave to Lind's tour, explained that it supported her because she used "a resplendent musical genius in the most noble accordance with the spirit of the Gospel." ¹⁰ The central evidence of her Christian virtue appeared in her generous donations to charitable groups and needy individuals, which were cited repeatedly. Lind's virtue, especially her charity, provided a concrete explanation, couched in the most respectable middle-class Christian terms, for fans to cheer at her concerts, crowd around her carriage, spend large sums to purchase tickets to her performances, and buy anything connected with her name.

Now I elaborate on that theme by looking for specifically at one of its elements, the portrayal of Lind as a good Christian.I also move from how Lind was portrayed to how fans responded, shifting the focus from the texts to the social processes and historical data.

Public writing about Lind as a businesswoman and a commodity suggests more complex, contradictory readings of her and of her audiences. Press reports wove together narratives of her personal success with stories of Barnum's promotional efforts and the commercial use of her name and image for business ventures ranging from book publishers to hatters to the makers of the Jenny Lind teakettle. This matrix of images positions Lind as both virtuous and businesslike, independent and well managed, a symbol of feminine Christian virtue and a hot commodity, and it reveals the complexity of Lind's popularity. The public image of Jenny Lind might well have emphasized her virtues, but it also connected those virtues to financial success in complex ways and, at the same time, made oppositional readings possible.

Writers created a narrative of success related to Lind's struggle to develop her singing voice and build her career. The short biographies presented in many newspaper articles and in Lind's concert programs, and the more extensive versions that appeared in books such as Charles Rosenberg's The Life of Jenny Lind (1850) and Nathaniel P. Willis's Memoranda of the Life of Jenny Lind (1850), paralleled familiar discourses about self-improvement and the "American dream" as they appeared in nineteenth-century women's novels and in advice manuals for young men. Briefly, the story goes like this: Lind was a poor, lonely child, who rose to become the best singer in the world through a combination of luck and hard work. She lost her voice early on, but she regained it through careful study, discipline, and, in some versions, an almost miraculous recovery. She struggled to develop her voice and overcome her teacher's skepticism, but she had faith in herself, and her perseverance paid off. Having achieved great success, Lind now devoted herself to sharing her gift, both through the music itself and through the money she earned. While musical performance may not be a typical career path, Lind's story seems an almost archetypal version of a common narrative structure from this period.

Now I introduce another point in the argument:Lind appealed to Americans because she was portrayed as a business success. This image linked virtue with the market and the American dream.

According to Nina Baym, mid-century "woman's fiction" used a common, repeated narrative of feminine success through hard work, Christian virtue, and luck. We see similar ideas about success, though without the narrative closure of marriage or the emphasis on finding the right mate, in advice manuals for young men. Lind's biography shares the narrative pattern of the isolated but determined heroine's struggle to make a place for herself in the world, and the ideal of a feminine version of success that combined emotional and spiritual qualities with financial security. ¹¹ The novelist Frederika Bremer wrote of Lind, for example:

There was once a poor and plain little girl dwelling in a little room, in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. She was a poor little girl indeed then; she was lonely and neglected, and would have been very unhappy, deprived of the kindness and care so necessary to a child, if it had not been for a peculiar gift.
Bremer ends her version of Lind's biography this way: "the poor little girl, of former days, the celebrated singer, now-a-days." ¹² Alice B. Neal picks up this theme in Godey's, offering her explanation of Lind's popularity:
We loved her for the trials which she encountered in the very outset of her career, for the pangs of many a disappointment, for the sketches of hope deferred, and the noble energy of character which had baffled all discouragement, and surmounted every obstacle which fate and fortune had placed in her path. ¹³

As this comment suggests, Lind might well have seemed like a real version of popular fictional heroines, even though her story did not end with marriage.Indeed, her story might have appealed to some readers because it followed the familiar pattern but with a different ending. ¹⁴ Writers also emphasized Lind's work ethic. A writer in the Jenny Lind admiringly pointed out Lind's "immense labor" and her "persevering disposition." The American Monthly Musical Review suggested that it was "the union of energy and application, guided by a pure conscience" that explained the quality of Lind's voice. It "carries back the mind to her early years, and step by step recounts all the struggles and triumphs of her past." ¹⁵ This emphasis on Lind's hard-won victory over adversity, her dedication, and her consistent virtue echo the advice to young men to work hard and lead virtuous lives in order to succeed.The narrative emphasis on her struggle to achieve success allowed Americans, male and female, to see this foreign woman as a kindred spirit and to admire her as a model of success through hard work.

In this section, I look more closely at how the story of Lind as a professional success fit with popular texts about women but also ideas about how hard work could be the key to success.
Note that this section focuses in the texts, until the very end, when I link the texts with ideas about social processes, which lead me to consider not only what is IN the texts, but also how audiences might have USED them.

Writers expressed admiration for Lind's financial success, though reports also highlighted questions about her motives and whether she really deserved so much money. While newspapers and magazines reported in detail on Barnum's contract with Lind, trumpeted the great sums her concerts earned, and printed lists of Lind's contributions to local charities, public discussion of her earnings was full of contradictions. As a good woman, she should have existed in a "separate sphere" from the difficult labors and struggles of the business world, but she was also a hard and successful worker. She was a good Christian, selflessly giving to others, caring more for the poor and downtrodden than for her own wealth, but she was also a wise businesswoman. A note in the Batavia Times describes how Lind renegotiated her contract with Barnum (to increase her earnings) when she realized how much money the promoter would take in for each concert. "This arrangement shows that Jenny is as shrewd at a bargain as she is superior in singing," the paper commented. ¹⁶ Its admiring tone was typical of most press reports on the financial aspects of Lind's tour.Yet public writings also suggest that Lind's income and economic motives were subjects of popular debate. In Barnum's Parnassus, a collection of poems parodying the Jenny Lind Prize Song Competition Barnum held before Lind's arrival, William Allen Butler includes these lines highlighting Lind's interest in financial gain:

I'm a famous Cantatrice, and my name it is Miss Jenny,
And I've come to these United States to turn an honest penny.
To which Barnum replies:
And you will touch their hearts, and I will tap their pockets,
And if between us both, the public isn't skinned,
Why my name isn't Barnum nor your name Jenny Lind. ¹⁷
While such a direct challenge to Lind's motives was rare, the debate appears in a number of periodicals of the time. In most cases, writers present responses to those who were, apparently, complaining about Lind's salary. The New York Tribune noted: "We hear in some of the journals cavils . . . at the large sums which Jenny Lind receives for her services. Is not this ungenerous?" Anticipating cynical responses from readers to Lind's charitable behavior, the Tribune staged the argument as follows:
"Bah," says some cynic, "why make such parade about an act of bounty? Won't she get all her money back, and more too, through the public admiration of her generosity?"--Yes, Sir, she will--at least, we hope so--and that is an additional reason for speaking well of it. For six thousand years, every generous and philanthropic act of every human being has been abundantly, surely rewarded, and yet generous, humane actions are too few to-day [sic]. . . . Blessed be the deed that teaches men that doing good always does and must promote their own interest! ¹⁸
By emphasizing that hard work deserves a large salary and by illustrating the potential for individual benefit from Christian behavior, this passage and similar arguments resolve any potential conflict between Christian morality and economic ambition. Yet while they clearly stand on Lind's side of the debate, these passages also keep the debate alive. We cannot know whether such texts assuaged or encouraged readers' doubts about Lind's economic value, but the presence of the debate in public writing suggests that not all Americans were content with the notion that a woman of "unimpeachable virtue" deserved so much money.
The press also commented on Lind's collaboration with Barnum, another potential site of contradiction. Writers argue both that Barnum was entirely responsible for Lind's popularity and that Lind was so virtuous and talented that Barnum's job was easy. On one page of the Jenny Lind, one article suggested that Lind was not a woman who could be easily manipulated by a promoter ("Jenny Lind's Independence"), and one claimed that with Barnum's management Lind "need neither merit nor earn" the attention given her because "Barnum will do it all." Such writing at once supports and undercuts the image of Lind as a successful businesswoman. Public writings also reveal some discomfort with the odd coupling of Barnum the showman and Lind the artist. In Mahomet; or, The Unveiled Prophet of Inistan: A Boquet [sic] for Jenny Lind, the unnamed "authoress" describes Lind as a "'jewel' hung in a swine's snout." Thaddeus W. Meighan, writing as "Asmodeus," lambastes Barnum for using the lavish contract itself as a marketing ploy, "one of the various and many devices whereby the grand master of art, hocus pocus, humbug monstrous, was to derive revenue!" ¹⁹The Independent, on the other hand, notes that "Mr. Barnum is fully entitled to his share, for he has invested a large amount of time and capital in this enterprise, and has assumed personally a risk which few companies would have taken," though the writer also expresses the "hope that [Barnum] may never resort to a more questionable means of money-making, and that he will learn from his generous protégé the best way of using money." ²⁰ The criticism in these texts focuses on Barnum, but even when Lind is explicitly positioned as separate from and innocent about the financial and promotional dealing, she remains associated with a discourse that questions the morality of her own promotion.

Here I begin to identify tensions in popular writing about Lind, such as the idea that she was primarily concerned with making money, and how such contradictions were often resolved by emphasing her Christianity and good womanhood. As with other sections, in order to make the argument, I have to move back and forth between primary texts and broader historical patterns, and I have to speculate about how the texts may have served audience needs.

In addition, "Jenny Lind"--the name and the woman--was defined as a commodity. Barnum sold a first block of tickets for Lind's early New York and Boston concerts at a series of auctions, creating a publicity opportunity but also furthering the commodification of Lind. Reports of these auctions noted the number of people attending (3,000, according to one Tribune report), the crowd's enthusiasm, and the amounts paid for tickets (as much as $625). ²¹ Another aspect of this commodification appears in the marketing campaigns and business ventures that used Lind's name. Advertisers regularly used Lind's name as a headline for their ads or in the name of their products. In some cases, Lind's performances and the use of her name as a marketing device were linked, as in ads boasting that a certain hatmaker had paid $225 for the first ticket auctioned in New York--a link that presumably would create great demand for his hats.

Popular writings about Lind were, themselves, a commodification of the singer, a way of packaging her for those who could not attend the concerts or haunt the streets near her hotels. Books and periodicals were more reproducible, affordable, portable forms of entertainment than Lind's concerts. In cities where Lind did not perform, newspapers reprinted reports of her arrival, reviews of her performances, and accounts of the various forms of "Lind mania." They provided a vicarious experience of being in the audience, thereby extending her audience well beyond the boundaries of the concert hall or her itinerary. Even for those who did attend the concerts, publications offered commemorative versions of Lind-as-commodity. Some seem clearly intended for this purpose, such as the gilt-print Jenny Lind tabloid and a variety of gift books featuring Jenny Lind motifs.
Yet these texts did not just offer buyers versions of Jenny Lind. The texts' emphasis on audience response suggests that purchasers wanted to own not just Lind but also the experience of being part of the public that adored her.This, I think, is central to understanding Lind's popularity: she offered audiences opportunities to create meanings not only about her but also about themselves.Writers gleefully described the behavior of Lind's fans: a whole regiment of firefighters escorting a New York music society to Lind's hotel for a serenade; the large, enthusiastic, loud but surprisingly orderly audiences inside Castle Garden; and the less orderly crowds outside the concert halls who sometimes strained to hear Lind's voice but more often simply added their cheers to the din. The first reports of such behavior were reprints of British newpaper articles that appeared before Lind arrived in the United States and in a biography of Lind published in July 1850. ²² They might have given Americans ideas about how to treat Lind, while the comparison with Europe may have stirred American pride and incited audiences to even greater exhibitions of public adoration. Public writing about such behavior combines excitement and approval with questions about Americans' sense of propriety and public manners. Some criticized this behavior. In The Jenny Lind Mania in Boston, Meighan chastized Bostonians for behaving so foolishly. After describing the cheers when a Boston hatter paid more than anyone in New York had for a ticket to one of Lind's concerts, he notes, "I had thought all the d--d fools had gone off to Mexico, once upon a time, and remained there or somewhere else, but alas! plenty more were got around me." ²³ A writer for the Independent notes sadly that public behavior "connected with Md'lle Lind's arrival and her concerts has been excessive and even foolish," though he points out that the size of crowds gathered near Lind's hotel and at the wharf had been hugely overstated. The Boston Transcript, however, responded that "[w]e see nothing reprehensible in the exhibition." ²⁴
Indeed, writers often cast public enthusiasm about Lind as evidence of American good taste and public virtue. Anticipating Lind's arrival in Boston, the Independent wondered whether "the rabble of Boston possess as high an appreciation of musical genius and personal worth as do their brethren in New York," a question that would, apparently, be answered through public demonstrations of enthusiasm. Willis, in his series of columns on Lind in the Home Journal, argues that enthusiasm for Lind demonstrates that "[o]pera music has, in a couple of months, become a popular taste. An ear for music is neither the result of luxury nor refined education." In a period when American culture was beginning to define itself as more than a mere outpost of European culture, evidence of the public's ability to appreciate high-quality music would suggest the potential for American high culture. Audiences might also have seen in their own enthusiasm evidence of their moral virtue. Willis attributes the response to Lind as evidence of public "admiration of her goodness," an "impulse" that he suggests is "signally creditable to our country." ²⁵ Amid public debates over gender roles, slavery, and the relationship between morality and business, this public demonstration of the people's enthusiasm for a generous, pious, public but silent woman artist might have been quite reassuring.

Now my third argument:Lind’s popularity was both a result and a subject of popular writing about her.She became a commodity, and one of the ways she was available for purchase was in written materials that reported on her success and popularity.This suggests that her audience enjoyed not only Jenny Lind and what she stood for.They also enjoyed thinking of themselves as participants in the Jenny Lind mania.

Lind also gave audiences opportunities to observe themselves as participants in a "carnival," a public event that violated many unwritten rules of propriety and that commented satirically on American culture. After all, Americans demonstrated their commitment to high culture in part by writing limericks and parodies, by cheering so loudly at some concerts that the music could not be heard, and by purchasing not only Jenny Lind gloves but also Jenny Lind brandy. Her American fans demonstrated that they could have the artistic good taste of Europeans but also that they could do so in the context of a democratic, egalitarian culture,as Willis pointed out in his Home Journal columns. Lind was popular with "the fashion," he notes, but also with "the majority of the population of New York." Not only does Lind appeal to Americans of all social classes, Willis notes, but Lind herself "prefers to be the 'People's choice,' and would rather sing to the Fifty Thousand than to the Five Hundred--but she touches a chord that should vibrate far deeper than the distinctions of society." ²⁶Because fans' sometimes unruly public behavior was so closely tied with the themes of good womanhood, Christian virtue, and business success; because it occurred in conjunction with a legitimate form of performance--a concert that included religious music sung by a "saintly" woman rather than a theatrical production; ²⁷ and because it enacted the American ideal of an egalitarian society, audiences could violate rules of public decorum and view themselves at the same time as acting in support of the highest ideals of American life.

Moving toward a conclusion, I pull the themes together and suggest how they served the public's needs. As in earlier parts of the argument, interdisciplinarity comes into play whenever the discussion shifts from how Lind was described to how audiences used her image and what their responses tell us about American culture.

Reading the public writing about Lind not as a source of information about her audiences but as the source that constructed her audience, we can see that the ideas of twentieth-century critics might well apply to nineteenth-century audiences. Popular press reports on Lind are good examples of what Fiske terms "producerly texts." Through repetition of familiar motifs and the potential for multiple interpretations, these texts offered opportunities for readers to position Jenny Lind as part of mid-century discourse about gender, religion, and success. Further, press reports allowed Americans to view themselves as both "cultured" appreciators of high art and actors in a public spectacle that derided propriety and class divisions. Whether these reports are accurate does not matter; what is important is that they appealed to American readers. They suggest the value of reading Lind mania not as a response to one "young, untitled woman" but as the mirror chosen and constructed by American audiences to represent themselves.

In this last paragraph, I move out from the specific reading to a broader statement of its significance.

Notes
1. "Arrival of Jenny Lind," New York Daily Tribune, 2 September 1850, 1. This report and others from the Tribune's coverage of Lind's first weeks in the United States were reprinted and excerpted in a number of other American newspapers.
2. "Jenny Lind in America," New York Daily Tribune, 2 September 1850, 4.
3. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). In both cases, these arguments are made in depth over the course of several chapters; my brief summaries here do not fully reflect the richness, or the possible weaknesses, of either critic's approach. My intention is simply to suggest, briefly, how some of their key ideas can provide critical inspiration for scholars who cannot fully emulate their methodologies.
4. Richard H. Brodhead, "Veiled Ladies: Toward a History of Antebellum Entertainment," American Literary History 1 (Summer 1989): 273-94.
5. Edward Wagenknecht, Jenny Lind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 21.
6. For critical discussions of Lind's significance in the history of women singers, see Adrienne Fried Block, "Women in American Music, 1800-1918," in Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 142-72; see also Block, "Two Virtuoso Performers in Boston: Jenny Lind and Camilla Urso," in New Perspectives on Music: Essay in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright with Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 355-71. Lind the singer is also discussed in many nineteenth-century biographical collections, such as Ellen Greathorne Clayton's Queens of Song (New York: Harper & Bros, 1865) and George T. Ferris's Great Singers: Malibran to Titens (New York: Appleton, 1894). In general, these texts credit Lind with a powerful, unusually clear voice, though there are many comments suggesting that hers was not, despite all the hype, the best or strongest woman's voice of the century. Equally important, critics note that Lind gave Americans a positive model of the professional woman singer.
7. "Musical Items, Foreign and Domestic," Message Bird 1 (14 November 1849): 135. Barnum is quoted in Wagenknecht, 25.
8. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, (1977; rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1988).
9. Editor's note and "The Lind Mania," both in The Jenny Lind (Boston), n.d., 3.
10. "Jenny Lind," Independent 2 (3 October 1850): 162.
11. See Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
12. Bremer's sketch appears in the Home Journal, 14 September 1850, 1, and again in Nathaniel P. Willis's Memoranda of the Life of Jenny Lind (Philadelphia: Robert E. Peterson, 1851), which reprinted many of Willis's own columns and other writing on Lind from the Home Journal.
13. Neal, "A Reminiscence of Jenny Lind," Godey's Ladies Book 33 (November 1850): 353-55.
14. Lind did marry during her American tour, to Otto Goldschmidt, her German-Jewish pianist. The marriage was not seen, however, as a happy ending for Lind. Goldschmidt was younger, less famous, less rich, and, according to reviewers, less talented than the singer.
15. "Sketch of Jenny Lind," The Jenny Lind (Boston), n.d., 1. American Monthly Musical Review 1 (October 1850): 118-21.
16. Reprinted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 4 October 1850, 2.
17. Butler, Barnum's Parnassus; being Confidential Disclosures of the Prize Committee on the Jenny Lind Song with Specimens of the Leading American Poets in the Happiest Effulgence of their Genius (New York: Appleton, 1850), 19.
18. "Jenny Lind's Recompense," Tribune, 3 September 1850, 4; "Jenny Lind's Charities," Tribune, 13 September 1850, 4.
19. Mahomet; or, The Unveiled Prophet of Inistan: A Boquet [sic] for Jenny Lind (New York: Published by the authoress, 1850) and "Asmodeus," The Jenny Lind Mania in Boston; or, A Sequel to Barnum's Parnassus (Boston:, n.p., 1850), are two examples of books that present Lind with a more cynical eye, though neither attacks Lind so much as Barnum and Lind's fans. The title page of The Jenny Lind Mania has "Thaddeus W. Meighan" written in under "Asmodeus"; no identification is provided for the "authoress" of Mahomet.
20. "Jenny Lind," Independent 2 (19 September 1850): 154.
21. "Jenny Lind Ticket-Auction," Tribune, 9 September 1850, 2.
22. The earliest mention of Lind I have found in American journals is in the National Press Journal in 1846. In a review of a performance by Julia Grisi, the writer posits that Grisi comes closest to demonstrating "genius" of all the women singers of the day, but this is qualified by a parenthetical note that "we have not yet heard" Jenny Lind (30 May 1846: 4). The phrasing here suggests that the writer assumed his audience knew about Lind. The National Press Journal later became the Home Journal, which provided steady coverage of Lind's career starting in 1848 and gave extensive front-page attention to Lind's tour in 1850, much of it written by Willis, who seems to have been Lind's biggest American admirer. See also Charles G. Rosenberg's Jenny Lind: Her Life, Her Struggles, and Her Triumphs (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1850).
23. "Asmodeus," 26.
24. "Jenny Lind," Independent 2 (19 September 1850): 154. The Boston Transcript comment was reprinted in the Home Journal, 14 September 1850, 1.
25. "The Jenny Lind Mania at Boston," Independent 2 (26 September 1850): 158. Nathaniel P. Willis, "Rural Letter from Mr. Willis," Home Journal, 14 September 1850, 1 (italics in original).
26. "Letter from Mr. Willis," Home Journal, 21 September 1850, 1.
27. Several writers pointed out that Lind rejected the theater and praised her for choosing a more proper type of performance. An article in the Jenny Lind explained approvingly that she started performing in concert settings because she wanted to "get away from many things in theatrical performances for which she has long had an increasing repugnance" (1). In another vein, the Independent (3 October 1850, 162) included this point in its defense of the high prices of Lind's concerts: "If she were a dancing nymph, whose virtue was as elastic as her muscles; if she were a mere musical wonder reaping enormous riches; if she were a handsome woman charming the sense of crowds by her grace and guise, we should protest." But, the article continues, Lind's performance reflects her Christian faith, so both it and the prices charged for admission are acceptable.