Musical Theater Meets Historical Romance: Hamilton plus Alex and Eliza! by Diane Scrofano

I have mentioned this before when talking about the recent YA Summit, but the best part is always the people. Always. Everyone had the opportunity to renew connections, start new projects, and meet new friends. One of my new friends is Diane Scrofano. I didn't know Diane at all, she submitted a dynamite proposal and few months later she is teaching all of us at the event about Hamilton and how YA literature is connected to this cultural phenomenon. Even more interesting, Diane had a chance to meet Kia Richmond. Low and behold, Kia has been quoting some of Diane's work on YA and mental illness for her new book. A new friendship, mutual academic respect, and, who knows, a future collaboration might be down the road.

​See Kia's previous work for the blog here.  Her blog post was entitled Language and Symptoms of Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature.
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Both Kia and Diane have provided handouts and pdfs of their PowerPoint presentation during the summit (Find them on the summit page) They did excellent work and inspired many teachers. You will want to check out their work.

For now, however, I turn to Diane to give us an introduction to Melissa de la Cruz's YA works related to Hamilton.

Musical Theater Meets Historical Romance: Hamilton plus Alex and Eliza! by Diane Scrofano

It began, as so many things do for women my age (40), at Target. The pink cover with the big heart practically steered my cart right over to the YA fiction aisle. I had already been planning to teach Hamilton: An American Musical in my fall 2017 Introduction to Literature class (thanks for making the music and lyrics all free on Genius.com, Lin-Manuel Miranda!) at Moorpark College in southern California. We had just selected it as our campus’ common reading selection, and I quickly concluded that I could use Alex and Eliza in conjunction with the musical in the spring of 2018 when I would teach that same introduction to literature class as a lower-division young adult literature course in collaboration with the local CSU’s upper-division YA literature class. While I probably could’ve just stuck with the musical, as it is much beloved by adolescents (one of my fall students got a “Rise Up” tattoo with the show’s iconic star image on her eighteenth birthday), I wanted to add Alex and Eliza because it was specifically marketed as YA (and written by a well-known YA author, Melissa De La Cruz—Disney Descendants, Summer on East End, and Blue Bloods series) and because I thought the novel’s focus on Eliza 

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​Sure enough, gender considerations provided us with some of our richest conversations on the novel. One of my best students mentioned right off the bat that it was a bit embarrassing to carry around this big, pink, heart book. I reminded him that one benefit of a hardback is that the book jacket is removable, but of course the bigger question is why, in this day and age, is it still embarrassing for boys to carry around girl stuff but not for girls to carry around masculine-looking material? “Suck it up,” I exclaimed, feigning frustration, “We women have been carrying around your manly war books for decades!” Even so, as we continued to study the book, I caught myself playing into the same stereotypes as my students. I would down-play, smile, or joke about the “lovey-dovey” parts of the romance in a way that I wouldn’t for any other genre fiction.

​We all noted that we wouldn’t be as dismissive or ashamed to admit we liked mysteries, for example, in the same way as romances. Sometimes sci-fi and fantasy genre fiction gets put-down, but that’s for geekiness, not girliness. I felt often on the defensive, reiterating to my students that we were doing scholarly study of this book, not just reading “hot trash,” as that same high-achieving student called it. “Yes, I know this is silly,” I seemed to say, “but we are looking at its cultural significance!” But then I would recollect myself, and I would challenge the students: Why should romance be deemed more trivial than any other part of life? Or family and personal life? (Perhaps it’s time to revisit “The Personal Is Political.”) One student objected to the main conflict in the novel, which was Eliza’s needing to be rescued from an unappealing arranged marriage, not only because it was historically untrue but also because “History is exciting…just imagine a line of six pound cannons firing or a cavalry charge cutting down fleeing infantry. Exciting and badass things were happening back then.” In other words, why focus on mushy love stuff when you could write about cannon fire? War and politics—those things, not love, are the stuff of interesting stories. I remember hastily scrawling in the margins, “Don’t you think your idea of what’s exciting is gendered?” 

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​Most students, not just this one, were disappointed to learn that, although Henry Livingston was a real person who existed in history, he was never engaged to Elizabeth Schuyler and that she never needed Alexander Hamilton to rescue her from a sexual assault by this very Livingston. In response to the climax of the story being fictionalized, the student above thought this too much a departure from the facts: “the premise for the major conflict in the story [is] completely false and untrue.” Others expressed similar disappointment. I asked students if De La Cruz should’ve included a table or author’s note at the end to specify which parts were true and which were made up. Perhaps others have offered up the same concern; De la Cruz does provide a brief author’s note in the second book in the to-be three-volume series, Love and War, which was just released last month (April 2018). After I read the novel, I ran to my colleague in the history department to check on some facts myself. In short, we were all stuck on what Joanne Brown calls “the problem of truth” and “the problem of accuracy” in her section headings in “Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults,” a 1998 ALAN Review article that gave my students and I a helpful overview of common concerns and issues that could help us evaluate Alex and Eliza as a piece of historical fiction.  

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As for the facts that I checked on with my colleague, Moorpark College History Professor Susan Kinkella, there is no evidence that Elizabeth Schuyler inoculated Revolutionary War soldiers for smallpox, but Abigail Adams did, so it’s realistic for women of that era. The novel also depicts Eliza as part of the homespun cloth movement of the era and as someone who sewed uniforms and visited wounded soldiers. While we don’t know for sure if she did these things, they’re not out of the realm of possibility, especially considering that her father, General Philip Schuyler, brought her to a major negotiation with the Iroquois Nation when she was only a pre-teen (thanks for that tid-bit, Susan!). For more about Eliza and what we do and don’t know, you can watch Susan’s half (the first half) of the talk (Eliza: Historical and Literary Representations of Hamilton’s Better Half) we gave on March 21, 2018, as part of women’s history month. 

In my half of the talk, I got back to the issue of why I chose the novel: it put the focus on Eliza. In the novel, she’s the protagonist. In the novel, we hear more from her point of view. In the novel, she’s more politically involved. That brought up the question as to whether the novel and the musical were feminist works of literature. What this really came down to, for my students and me, was how you define feminism. Was the novel more feminist because it depicted Eliza as more politically active early in her life than the musical did? As I said above, the novel has her inoculating soldiers, and later it also shows her awareness of the philosophical issues involved in breaking away from Britain. By contrast, in the musical, she’s “Helpless” and sings a clichéd love song mostly about Alexander’s eyes, though there is fleeting mention of his mind (Track 10). Though the musical shows Eliza excited about the American Revolution in Track 5 of Act 1 “Look around, look around at how / Lucky we are to be alive right now. History is happening in Manhattan…,” by Track 23, she is pleading with Alexander to come home and put family over career.  So, is it more feminist to depict a character breaking boundaries by getting involved in the traditionally male realm of politics, or is it more feminist to show a woman demanding that the patriarchal society pay attention to the historically female realm of home and family? Extrapolating from, and probably oversimplifying the difference between American feminism and French feminism, I tell my students: American feminism has emphasized the ability of women to do traditionally male things, while French feminism, by contrast, seeks to bring women’s experiences such as women’s experiences of sex and motherhood to the forefront of the culture. In short, must a woman act like a man to be feminist? 

It would seem so if you read some feminist critiques of the musical: In a New Yorker article, Michael Schulman looks at the large part that Eliza played in preserving Hamilton’s legacy, which is emphasized at the end of the musical: “Is it a feminist ending? Almost. The notion that men do the deeds and the women tell their stories isn’t exactly Germaine Greer-worthy.” In Princeton’s Feminist Spectator, Stacy Wolf concludes that “In the end…the three women in the musical occupy the most conventional and stereotypical roles [of women]—muse, wife, whore—which is all the more troubling since Hamilton goes such a long way to dismantle stereotypes of race and masculinity.” After the talk, a student audience member asked me if a piece of historical fiction could be feminist only if it portrayed women as being more politically active than they likely would’ve really been at the time. In other words, would feminist historical fiction necessarily have to be factually inaccurate? Could a piece showing a woman in what Wolf calls a “conventional” role ever be considered feminist? 

​Like a good professor, I deflected the question back to him to determine for himself. But I think that it all comes down to how one defines feminism. Depictions of women doing non-traditional things is not the only type of feminism. When Eliza advocates for home and family, this is feminist in the French sense, I would argue. Another project of feminist literary criticism is to seek out voices that have been silenced, so to attempt to write a book from Eliza’s perspective when in life we have none of her letters, is an attempt at resurrecting her voice. In the musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Burn” (Track 38) gives Eliza license to express anger about the Reynolds affair, which she could never have done publicly in the historical period she lived in. However, when we try to fictionally reconstruct the story and point of view of those whose historical voices have been lost, we run the risk of anachronistically imposing our own worldviews on people from past times. Joanne Brown explains in the section “The Problem of Accuracy,” that “Some critics have insisted that historical fiction reveals more about its author than its historical subject, or as Henry Seidel Canby has said, historical fiction is ‘more likely to register an exact truth about the writer’s present than the exact truth of the past.’”

​The most troublesome issue with writing historical fiction, whether it’s a musical or a YA novel, of course is how to cover race and slavery. Despite its status as beloved by a modern, liberal audience, Hamilton the musical has received criticism in this regard. To get the gist of such criticism, I recommended that my students read a Slate interview with historiographer Lyra Monteiro. Basically, some of the criticisms of the musical are these: you can have people of color play the Founding Fathers, but the Founding Fathers really weren’t people of color; they were white and their status as slaveholders is largely disregarded by the musical while the stories of actual people of color who lived during Revolutionary times remain unknown. (For a young readers’ series that fictionally explores the lives of African Americans during the Revolutionary War, see Laurie Halse Anderson’s Seeds of America trilogy, including Chains, Forge, and Ashes! In fact, on her website, Anderson provides a list correlating chapters of these books to various songs from Hamilton: An American Musical!) In addition, I tell my students that many historians regard Hamilton as an elitist; he didn’t want Washington to step down and many worried that Hamilton’s views would lead to a continuation of the monarchy. While the musical depicts Hamilton as the common man who came up from nothing, Jefferson advocated for the small farmers of the early U.S. while Hamilton could be seen as the creator of the Wall Street one percent. The musical as well as the novel present Alexander as despising slavery, yet students should know that, while there is no evidence that Alex and Eliza owned slaves, Ankeet Ball, on the Columbia University and Slavery website, describes Hamilton as advocating against slavery only when it was convenient for him career-wise.  

​The novel Alex and Eliza, too, is problematic in its treatment of slavery. With Alex and Eliza set while she was still single and living in her parents’ house, there are mention of “servants,” but not of “slaves,” presumably to reflect the fact that Philip Schuyler called his slaves “servants,” according to the Schuyler Mansion Historical Society.  However, what does this lead young readers to think? If they don’t know that Philip Schuyler (as did most other wealthy New Yorkers at the time) owned slaves, why wouldn’t they picture white servants? Especially troubling is the line, spoken by Eliza, declaring that “We Schuylers have always, always espoused a belief in the equality of black and white souls” (178). At this point in the novel, Alex is asking Eliza if she supports the abolition movement. I’m surprised that De La Cruz has Eliza respond not about herself merely but about the whole family and suggest that they have historically been abolitionist. The only reference I could find to the color of the “servants” in the whole book was in a sentence in which guests to Eliza’s Aunt Gertrude’s house “dump” their hats and coats “into the servant girl’s thin brown arms” (169). One might expect more of De La Cruz, a Filipina immigrant, herself a woman of color, but perhaps the issue is with the publisher, Putnam, sweeping the issue under the rug, as mainstream media has often done. In any case, Joanne Brown’s criteria for evaluating historical fiction can be brought up again: “Strict adherence to historical accuracy can pose a problem if ‘accuracy’ involves brutal or immoral behavior. What are the writer’s options when the intended readers are young adults, an audience for whom some readers may desire a subdued version of historical events?” A good question for students is who are the “some readers” who want a “subdued version” of history and why? Who does that “subdued” version protect? Who does that “subdued” version of history erase? 

​By the time the unit was over, my student who complained about the book cover did concede that this book was more than just a “cash grab” riding the coattails of the musical’s success. Since it brings up  all these issues to discuss, I would agree. I’m eager to read Love and War.

Reference

Anderson, Laurie Halse. “Connect with the Hamilton Musical!” Laurie Halse Anderson.   http://madwomanintheforest.com/hamilton/.

Ball, Ankeet. “Ambition and Bondage: An Inquiry on Alexander Hamilton and Slavery.” Columbia University and Slavery. Columbia University. Retrieved from https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/ambition-bondage-inquiry-alexander-hamilton-and-slavery

Brown, Joanne. (1998). "Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults." The ALAN Review, Vol. 26, No. 1. Retrieved from https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html

De La Cruz, Melissa. (2017). Alex and Eliza: A Love Story. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
——. (2018). Love and War: An Alex and Eliza Story. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Funiciello, Danielle.  (5 Jun 2016). “An Overview of Slave Trade in New Netherland, New York and Schuyler Mansion.” Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site. Retrieved from http://schuylermansion.blogspot.com/2016/06/an-overview-of-slave-trade-in-new.html

Hanisch, Carol. (1970). “The Personal Is Political.” Retrieved from http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html
Kinkella, Susan and Diane Scrofano. (21 Mar. 2018). “Eliza: Historical and Literary Representations of Hamilton’s Better Half.” Moorpark College. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS7K8ooUR_A&feature=share
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Miranda, Lin-Manuel. (25 Sept. 2015). Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording. Genius. Retrieved from https://genius.com/albums/Original-broadway-cast-of-hamilton/Hamilton-original-broadway-cast-recording
Onion, Rebecca. (5 Apr. 2016). “A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Play Isn’t as Revolutionary As It Seems.” Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2016/04/a_hamilton_critic_on_why_the_musical_isn_t_so_revolutionary.html
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Wolf, Stacy. (24 Feb. 2016). “Hamilton.” The Feminist Spectator. Princeton University. Retrieved from http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2016/02/24/hamilton/

You can contact Diane at: dscrofano@vcccd.edu

​Until next week.