The words “Home, Sweet Home” are ubiquitously reproduced on doormats, embroidered wall-hangings, pictures and other items. These usually express the displayer's sentimental attachment to the place they adorn. “This is my home,” they announce; “it is where I live and where I find solace.” Often, the fact that such items have been crafted within the domestic environment adds to the sentimental load they bear. Think, for example, of the embroidered samplers so popular in the nineteenth century, usually the product of hours of unpaid female labour, undertaken within the home. In this instance, home is both the place of production and the site of display, creating an affective circularity centring on the domestic sphere and domestic economy in which women predominate. Indeed, what this mantra of home (for this is what the familiar phrase “Home Sweet Home” is) suggests is a reduction of a highly complex set of meanings of home into a single one, usually the bourgeois family home, typically a house. It is imbued with affective and expansive connotations of family, kinship, and belonging. Such conservatism has led to its counter in the ironic – or camp – display of such items, exposing an assumed connection (frequently made) between sentimentality and naivety. The displayer understands their ironic use of the sentiment as being shared by the “cognoscenti”Footnote 1 who witness the display: both share distaste for constructing the bourgeois family and its abode, the house, as normative and especially desirable: “This is how some people think about home. Let us pretend, for a moment, that you and I think like that too. How amusing it is.”
The reduced signification of home to house corresponds to the imperatives of the domestic ideology which was so significant to US women's writing and cultural productions in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and which has been the subject of important feminist critique. Yet this apparent reduction is produced by a sleight of hand, for, as the seminal work of Amy Kaplan has shown, the domestic and imperial were profoundly interrelated throughout this period. Home never simply signifies itself in such a reductive manner, is never simply universal, but is always situated within complex constellations of the domestic/national, foreign/imperial. Furthermore, the current growth of critical work on home emphasizes its multiplicity and shows how problematic it is to assume that home and house can be equated in such a simple formulation.Footnote 2
Home, sometimes constituted in domestic terms as signifying the bourgeois house, has played a considerable role within the culture of sentiment. This had its apotheosis in the nineteenth century yet remains culturally both visible and potent, despite the assaults routinely made on it.Footnote 3 Closely related to and drawing upon this is the tradition of theatrical melodrama, a genre of sweeping excesses and emotional outbursts, which grew up alongside it and moved from drama into the novel and then, in the twentieth century, into cinema and television. Home has an important place within both cultures and structures of sentiment and melodrama. Within both, it is represented as a sanctuary, a refuge and a mythic place in which the cares of the outside world can be left behind. It is a space, often (though not always) a house, in which the family can gather together. In these formulations home is represented as a kind of talismanic holy site providing a reminder of a set of values with which it is associated, centring on the family and connoting the nation. This corresponds to melodrama's formal conventions. Melodrama is frequently structured around key recurring motifs which include “the space of innocence,” often an “enclosed garden … surrounded by walls.”Footnote 4 This offers a sanctuary within which the protagonists can safely and happily exist. In many of the early nineteenth-century French plays that originated the tradition of theatrical melodrama, the protagonist is forced out of this space and becomes separated from it.Footnote 5 In the US melodramas that are the focus of this essay, that “space of innocence” is figured as home and as a sacred site of US identity formation.Footnote 6 Since melodrama is an ethical drama in which virtue and vice face each other, and home, as a crucial element of melodrama, is often precisely what is at stake, then home has a particularly significant and loaded status. Building on and bringing together critical investigations of home and of melodrama, I analyse representations of home in the melodramas of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. This was a period in which mass immigration, increasing urbanization and expansion involving forced migrations were all contributing to shifting formations of the nation, creating a nostalgic longing for home.Footnote 7 Given the political potency of home in arguments about nation and identity, home has powerful potential to articulate issues of belonging and exclusion, citizenship and non-citizenship, desire and longing, security and stability. Home is, as Johannes von Moltke has noted, “ontologically unstable,”Footnote 8 however the symbolic meaning of home is simplified within binaries of the kinds that melodrama comprises.Footnote 9 Understanding home within those binaries threatens to accept the somewhat simplistic divisions of melodrama's moral universe at face value. This is what melodrama asks us to do.Footnote 10
In the first two parts of the essay I take the familiar phrase “Home, Sweet Home” and trace its journey through American popular culture, investigating its shifting meanings. The formulation first emerges in a song appearing in the theatrical melodrama of the early nineteenth century. It moves from this, developing its influence through the sheet music performed within American homes and on the American stage. Many “home songs” such as Stephen Collins Foster's “My Old Kentucky Home” and his “Old Folks at Home” were used in the mid-century stage melodramas such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Octoroon. They were also an important part of minstrel performances. In this way they substantially permeated US culture, initially being associated with representations of slavery and then gradually circulating as more generalized anthems of longing for home. Eventually, as traditions of melodrama and the popularity of sheet music were appropriated and adapted by early cinematographers, home songs including “Home, Sweet Home” became an important element of the cinematic melodrama of the early twentieth century. To illustrate this I take the example of one of the most celebrated and criticized American filmmakers, D. W. Griffith. In the final part of the essay I discuss two of his films, Home, Sweet Home (1913) and the foundational racist epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), both of which have profound debts to theatrical melodrama and to “Home, Sweet Home” itself. Between the song's first appearance and its use by Griffith and others almost a century later, substantial shifts had taken place within the United States.
Melodrama originated in France and travelled across the Atlantic, where it made a lasting impact. I argue that as it was reworked and rewritten to fit the concerns of a rapidly developing United States its own structures and themes were revised to suit its new cultural, geographical and political location. Racial melodrama developed in the nineteenth century as a form particularly suited to the United States. Home was coopted within its parameters. Home songs were important within the racial melodramas staged in the mid-nineteenth century and many of those songs are voiced by sorrowing slaves. “My Old Kentucky Home” was specifically associated with productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin in which it was sung by Tom himself. Yet, as Linda Williams has shown, a decisive shift takes place in two of Foster's home songs, “Old Folks at Home” (1851) and “My Old Kentucky Home” which was copyrighted a year later. This allows for a white audience to empathize with the suffering of the slave by envisaging it as being parallel to their own suffering rather than as the specific experience of the enslaved. Furthermore, she claims that “the shift from nostalgia for the ‘old plantation’ in ‘Old Folks’ to the more specific nostalgia for the ‘little cabin’ in ‘My Old Kentucky Home’,” while in itself “super subtle,” does allow for the white listeners to identify with either the plantation home or the cabin – the white slave-owner or the slave.Footnote 11 This has substantial ramifications, not least in that it allows home songs including “Home, Sweet Home” to be invoked within a white-supremacist argument which, using melodrama, associates the nation with the virtuous home and identifies that home as white. I argue here that understanding the function of home within what Peter Brooks has called “the melodramatic imagination” and developing this to investigate the significance of home within US melodrama shows the ongoing permeation of the United States’ culture in the twentieth century with melodramatic formations which have their origins in the previous century and in Europe. The dramatist whose work represents the earliest and most influential example of US melodrama was, arguably, John Howard Payne.
John Howard Payne's Clari and “Home, Sweet Home”
Payne was a long-term US expatriate and dramatist who lived a mobile life. He was born in New York in 1792 and earned early acclaim as a boy actor and theatrical adapter and author.Footnote 12 He moved to Europe, first to London in 1813, where he worked as an actor, and then to Paris where he wrote a series of highly successful adaptations of French melodramas. These were performed at the Drury Lane Theatre in London and from there some transferred to provincial British theatres. They were also were taken across the Atlantic to the United States, where they achieved popular acclaim. Payne returned to the United States in 1832. In 1841 he became the American consul to Tunis, dying there in 1852. By the 1880s he was very widely known and admired, less as a dramatist (though he certainly had a reputation in that area) and more as the author of a popular and well-loved song. Given his status, some felt that it was inappropriate that he was not buried in the United States. The philanthropist W. W. Corcoran started a campaign to have his remains returned to his country of origin, arguing in a letter to Secretary of State Frederick T. Freylinghuysen that “It has seemed to me that the precious dust of an American citizen who sang so sweetly in praise of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ should not be left to mingle with any soil less dear to him than that of the land which gave him birth.”Footnote 13 What might be called a “bring-him-home” campaign (which invoked a sentimental attachment to the literal soil and site of the United States) was eventually successful. In 1883 his remains were taken back to the US and were first held in state in New York and then interred at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, DC in front of a large crowd of admirers. His gravestone notes his authorship of the song lyrics. A choir sang “Home, Sweet Home” as part of the reinterment ceremony, welcoming home the “American citizen” who had lived almost half of his life abroad. Newspaper accounts suggest that it was a moving occasion. What made it especially affecting was the role which, by now, “Home, Sweet Home” had within popular culture. To understand how that happened and what it meant necessitates returning to the song's origins.
The song was premiered as part of Payne's 1823 operetta Clari, or the Maid of Milan, a melodrama set in Italy and penned by an American living in temporarily in France. The melody was written by the celebrated British composer Henry R. Bishop. A brief synopsis will contextualize its invocation of home within the highly conventional plot. The virtuous protagonist Clari, a beautiful young girl from a humble background, elopes with a duke with whom she is in love, believing that he is about to marry her. Once she moves from her village to his expansive estate she realizes that marriage is not what he intended and despairs about the dreadful fate awaiting her. She sings the plaintive “Home, Sweet Home” which tells of the pleasures of her village life over the obvious delights of a palace. The song measures home, virtue and family against pomp and splendour. The value of a good name is set against that of an aristocratic one. When a servant overhears her and asks the origins of this beautiful song, she replies,
It is the song of my native village – the hymn of the lowly heart, which dwells upon every lip there, and, like a spell word, brings back to its home the affection which e'er has been betrayed to wander from it. It is the first music heard by infancy in its cradle; and our cottagers, blending it with all their earliest and tenderest recollections, never cease to feel it's [sic] magic, till they cease to live.Footnote 14
Her account locates the song within a tradition of rural folk music, represented in a highly melodramatic way. Its ubiquity, magical properties – “like a spell word” – and vernacular tones suggest its wide availability as an anthem celebrating the power of home. In addition, her description emphasizes its democratizing influence. Home is a place but it is also “the peace of mind dearer than all!” Being “at home” implies being in a specific location but it can also mean inhabiting a psychological state in which comfort and safety combine.
The song also powerfully raises issues of exile and return, using multiple resonances of home to make its point. If Clari allows herself to be seduced by the duke she will have betrayed the values of the song and will never be able to go back to her village and parents. She will be permanently excluded from home. Whatever her gains in terms of wealth, they will be far exceeded by her losses. She will get a palatial dwelling, but it can never truly be home to her, as her unquiet conscience and equivocal status will ensure that she is never comfortably at home there. In addition, the words intimate that she may be near death, either the symbolic death associated with the loss of her virtue, or the suicide that will save her from that fate. Her resolve is bolstered by the effect of the song. She flees to her village to protect her honour and to find the kind of sanctuary offered by home. She is rewarded by marriage to the duke, who realizes how badly he has acted and repents. She returns to his estate (now her new home) as his lawful wife, her virtue rewarded, peace of mind secure once more, a happy future awaiting her, the values of home intact and carried with her. The song centres on quasi-legal claims associated with loss: of a name, of a set of rights associated with that good name, of a sense of community or kinship associated with home. Presumably once happily and safely married, any new rendition of her song will have a double resonance: just as the humble cottage becomes palatial when located in the context of home, so the palace can share with the cottage, becoming home. Structurally, the song and its meanings are evoked from the opening of the operatta with the melody first emerging in the overture and then repeatedly being invoked. One crucial moment is the point at which Clari stops before her house, building her courage before returning to her parents. As she stands, a group of passing villagers sing the song.Footnote 15 Such structure, in which music emphasizes the action and its moral message, would be maintained within cinematic melodrama – and indeed the moment at which Clari pauses outside her parental home is almost exactly reproduced within The Birth of a Nation in a scene which also uses “Home, Sweet Home” to make its point.
The song moved quickly from its source in stage melodrama to a significant place in musical and material culture. It rapidly became a much-loved parlour piece, circulating as sheet music. It has been estimated that between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand copies were sold in the first year of its publication, taking the song about home into the heart of the home where it would be performed by amateur musicians.Footnote 16 Very early in its history the song entered the repertoire of professional performers who included the hugely popular Jenny Lind and Adeline Patti, both of whom had considerable transatlantic success. When Lind embarked on her 1850 American tour, the song was one of her staples. On Payne's last visit to the United States he attended a concert at which Lind performed the song, possibly to honour his presence there, but also because wherever she went, crowds wanted to hear it.Footnote 17 A letter to the Journal of Music noted that one of her performances “ ‘caused such an emotion as I never before experienced; it might be exquisite home-sickness,’ an effect this fan also said was strikingly achieved by Foster's “Old Folks at Home.’ ”Footnote 18 Patti, famously, performed it to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House. The couple were so entranced that they asked for an encore. This cemented the song's place in the centre of both Patti's repertoire and the American home.
The romantic myth of the unsettled American writer far from home penning lines about the home he longed for made it seem all the more attractive to audiences, particularly at such an early point in the new nation's history. His biography was often linked to the song as if it could explain why he wrote it. Payne fuelled this himself. He liked to suggest that it was ironic that he should have written a celebration of home when he himself had so little experience of a settled home. One biographer cites him writing to “home folks” from Paris shortly before composing it that
My yearnings towards Home become stronger as the term of my exile lengthens … I feel the want of you, parts of myself, in this strange world, for though I am naturalized to vagabondage, still it is but vagabondage … I long for a Home about me.Footnote 19
This affective relation to home was one certainly familiar to his intended audience, whose lives often involved mobility (geographical and social) and the associated uncertainty that comes with flux. Undoubtedly this was a key feature of the song which made it so appealing: it spoke to and for its audience, stirring longings they shared and understood in common no matter how disparate their individual experiences. It represented the desire for home as universal. It stripped it of problematic connotations and emphasized nostalgia.
By the end of the nineteenth century, then, Clari's song was ubiquitous. It can be traced to other celebrated works, most famously Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1900), in which Dorothy recognizes that there is no place like home. It was Baum's experience of writing and performing stage melodrama which allowed him to understand just how the cadences of “Home, Sweet Home” worked, though he would undoubtedly have encountered the song as sheet music too. Like Payne and Foster, his own life was typical of the mobile and decentred experiences of many Americans. The phrase was made even more memorable in the 1939 MGM production where Dorothy/Judy Garland's words end the film.Footnote 20 In Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918), set about twenty years before its date of publication and focussing on the transformation of Nebraska by European immigrants who make homes for themselves on the frontier, Jim Burden dances dreamily to “Home, Sweet Home” with Lena Lingard. Though much of the rest of the novel undermines the ideology – and sentiment – of the song, it is an important historical marker for Cather, suggesting a complex nexus of nostalgic longings centring on home.
Melodrama and Home in the United States
Clari's themes and structure correspond closely to conventions of the French stage melodrama which Payne knew well. The pattern of his melodrama drew on a form that had its origins in the theatre of post-Revolutionary France and its newly democratic imperatives filling the gap left by the destruction of the monarchy and Church.Footnote 21 Melodrama emerges as a mode of rethinking the sacred in personal terms, replacing a tradition of tragedy which better articulated the combination of the sacred and monarchical which had now been swept away. As a mode of representing and organizing experience, melodrama relies on important symbols that suggest its engagement with a world of moral absolutes in which virtue (or vice) is recognized and rewarded (or punished). Music was crucial for establishing the moral and structural parameters of melodrama.Footnote 22 This is still maintained in films where music creates mood and sustains aural motifs.
Home occupies its significant position within melodrama precisely because of the opportunities it provides for signifying innocence, stability and security, but also for symbolically elucidating the consequences of rupture and discordance. Since home can (and often does) signify family as well as nation, representing the dangers home is subject to can be used as a way of reflecting upon larger political and ethical concerns. The stable and loving home could easily be transformed into a space of violence and disarray simply by the presence of an outsider (such as a predatory villain) or a threat experienced within the home itself (drunkenness, poverty, illegitimacy, the revelation of a secret and so on). Such narratives were pressed into service in the United States to reflect political issues that involve ethical dilemmas that dominated the moral reform melodramas of mid-century, such as temperance in William H. Smith's The Drunkard (1844) and slavery, notably in Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859).
Boucicault's play is a prototypically transatlantic text and was a great success on both sides of the Atlantic. It was written by an Irish dramatist of French and Irish stock, who eventually settled in the United States. Clari maintained the European setting of melodrama. But in The Octoroon Boucicault transposed the form of French melodrama into one which spoke to a specifically American concern – slavery. Like Clari, the play depicts a classic sexual crisis in the life of a young woman, the virtuous but doomed octoroon Zoe. Home plays a crucial part in the plot. Zoe has been brought up within her white father's household, a Louisiana plantation, and is the pet of all those who encounter her, including her father's wife, Mrs Peyton. The latter loves Zoe as if she is her own daughter and overlooks the infidelity which her very presence attests to. Zoe is due to be sold as a slave when the estate faces financial collapse. Threatened with certain sexual ruin at the hands of the villain Jacob M'Closky, Zoe decides to kill herself. This is not simply represented as an act of self-preservation but one of altruism. Once she is dead, her white lover George will be free to marry the wealthy white heiress Dora, who loves him. The marriage will make the sale unnecessary and save the plantation and the other slaves. While the themes of conventional melodrama are apparent, what is distinctive, though by no means unique, about this American melodrama is the emphasis on the impact of slavery on the protagonist's dilemma and the representation of a nonwhite protagonist as one for which a white audience is encouraged to feel sympathy.
Standing in the parlour of the house, Zoe reflects upon what she is about to lose:
My home, my home! I must see you no more. Those little flowers can live, but I cannot. To-morrow they'll bloom the same – all will be here as now, and I shall be cold. O! my life, my happy life: why has it been so bright?Footnote 23
The transformation of Zoe's joyful existence is figured by her as the loss of her peaceful and loving home, a place which once nurtured her but now is transformed into the site of her imminent sexual violation. Zoe's home can never really be home in the way that it would be if she were white. Her status as a slave means that the loss of home will be accompanied by sexual threat. While Clari, the conventional white heroine, can invoke home as a site of safety, for Zoe home is more problematic. Home was always an illusion for her: never a place of sanctuary or true “space of innocence,” though she had perceived it as such. Slavery ensures that British and US audiences were presented with different endings in order to assuage public sentiment. In the American version she chooses suicide, dying in the arms of George. She sacrifices herself, believing that in this way she has saved home. In the British version, however, she marries George and presumably lives happily ever after, like Clari. The American ending shows her preserving her virtue while saving the audience from the ethical and political dilemma of witnessing and having to sympathize with an interracial marriage. Her sacrificial death (rendered unnecessary in plot terms by the last-minute discovery of a letter which would have saved her) allows the white characters George and Dora to marry. Equally, while resolving the immediate dilemma of the plot, the ending does not address the ethics of slavery. Instead it relies on traditions of the happy plantation home in which good-hearted white paternalism ensures that virtuous and childlike slaves are looked after by their superior white masters and mistresses. The dialogue concludes with the virtue of the heroine depicted and acclaimed, and with Zoe given the last words in the play, as she dies in George's arms. Immediately after this there is a tableau which shows M'Closky lying dead on the grave of a virtuous slave, Paul.
The plot centres on the threat of the loss of home, evoking sympathy for a light-skinned black woman who loses her “freedom” once the economic basis of her southern home is undermined. The stage directions which accompany Zoe's monologue on home state that unspecified music is played as she speaks. Doubtless in some productions this would have included “Home, Sweet Home” or one of the many other home songs circulating in the period. Musical accompaniment emphasized not just the drama of Zoe's decision but its pathos, too. Crucially, the fact that Zoe's decision is taken at home shows that the site of home is at the centre of the moral world of the play. It is where her father's sexual transgression took place and where his daughter's sacrifice effaces its consequences. Equally, by placing her speech within the parlour of the house and giving it musical accompaniment, the scene operates within what will become the site of melodrama's repeated symbolic re-enactment: home itself. Zoe's dilemma prompts the sympathy of a white audience who can be moved by the depiction of her virtue, beauty and sacrifice.
Zoe has obvious connections to Eliza Harris, whose dramatic escape across the ice was popularly reproduced in the many stage and visual interpretations of Uncle Tom's Cabin which proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century. Zoe chooses death, Eliza escape, but each represents a beautiful young woman, the product of interracial sex, who is sexually threatened and retains her virtue. While Boucicault emphasizes the tragic fate of Zoe, Stowe's novel depicts Eliza as an energetic heroine motivated by her anxiety about, and altruistic concern for, her son and husband. The connections between Boucicault's melodramas and the multiple reproductions of Stowe's novel, on stage and popular performance, circulating in the period extend well beyond the depictions of the two women.
D. W. Griffith and “Home, Sweet Home”
The model of Clari was obviously important to the development of nineteenth-century US theatrical melodrama. This, in turn, was foundational to the development of cinematic melodrama at the turn into the twentieth century. That gradual process is exemplified in the work of D. W. Griffith, a figure whose work was significantly influenced by nineteenth-century melodrama in general and by Payne's words and their musical articulation specifically. Two of his films, Home, Sweet Home and The Birth of a Nation, are explicitly indebted to Payne's work. Griffith took the idea of home out of the contexts of nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama and transformed it into developing twentieth-century cinematic culture. In doing this he participated in the continued adaptation and Americanization of what had started as a French cultural form. This retained its core elements – the opposition of vice and virtue, to take the obvious example – but emphasized its democratic elements. The villain was no longer an old-fashioned aristocrat demanding droit de seigneur, but instead might be a newly minted plutocrat, a more appropriate signifier of a postrevolutionary industrial nation.
While all Griffith's work relied on and extended traditions of melodrama, his most obvious use of Payne's song was in his 1913 film Home, Sweet Home. This follows the life of Payne, cementing the relationship between song and author and also, less directly, demonstrating how the transatlantic circulation of melodramatic tropes developed US melodrama. Griffith relies on the song to produce a powerful morality tale. Home, Sweet Home juxtaposes a stylized (and somewhat fanciful) life of Payne, in which his steady decline via the theatre, debtors’ jail (he had been briefly imprisoned after a failed attempt at managing Sadler's Wells Theatre) and death in a foreign land is overlaid by the love and prayers of his religious mother. In fact his mother had died when he was a boy, yet her presence in the film suggests the home he has left behind and a loving figure who still hopes for a happy outcome. The decline of a young white American man does allow for the melodramatic moment in which, at rock bottom, he pens the song for which he is best known, “Home, Sweet Home.”
Griffith used two main narrative sources for his film. First, he drew on popular mythologizing of Payne's life, which was well established by the time he made the film. Second, he invoked the moral typology of nineteenth-century sermons. In these miniature dramas of badly spent lives, repentance and moral salvation, the song was often invoked to suggest that its lyrics could persuade transgressors to change their lives. The song's potential is certainly developed in Griffith's film. In the second, third and fourth parts it prevents characters from acts of bad faith (respectively abandoning a sweetheart for an advantageous marriage, murder, adultery). It acts as a charm, as it did for Clari herself in its initial outing. In the Epilogue viewers are asked to forgive Payne for his faults as by his work he has prevented many heinous crimes and falls from grace. The idea of home, epitomized by Payne's song, becomes a mode of asserting moral order. The song reminds characters of their own origins and of the loving mothers left behind at home. To this extent it looks backwards, locating itself in a United States past whose history is represented as being foundational to the present moment. This thematic trope is certainly true of Griffith's work more generally. What is significant to note is that the idea that a song can be so powerful that it can turn a life round is given full credence. The power of sympathy and sentiment to produce life-changing decisions is unambiguously asserted.
The cast of Home, Sweet Home included a number of actors who would feature prominently two years later in Griffith's most infamous work, The Birth of a Nation. Spottiswoode Aitken, Mary Alden, Donald Crisp, Lilian Gish, W. H. Long, Mae Marsh, Henry Walthall and Josephine Crowell would all go on to have roles in that film. Joseph Carl Breil composed the score of The Birth of a Nation and “Home, Sweet Home” reappeared once more. The two films bear a powerful relation to each other, in terms of both the invocation of the song and their use of home as the locus of virtue. This continuity was undoubtedly due to the controlling hand of the director. Griffith was well known for the attention he paid to the music used in his films and for his musical knowledge. He not only involved himself in the composition as far as he was able but he oversaw each element of the film's premiere in the various cities it opened in, making sure of every detail.Footnote 24 What he recognized was that in the silent era, the relationship between the visual elements of his films and their musical accompaniment was crucial. Many of the accounts of early viewings of The Birth of Nation reveal the profundity of the visual and aural (that is to say, musical) elements of the film.Footnote 25
While there is no “fixed and singular”Footnote 26 version of the musical text for the film, “Home, Sweet Home” was certainly included in the Breil score which Griffith was very involved in and highly approved of. That score contained twenty-six borrowed tunes, including parlour songs, minstrel tunes and traditional songs – which of course extended to the songs of Stephen Collins Foster, by now old favourites.Footnote 27 These were well-known pieces of music that an audience would be likely to have encountered elsewhere. This kind of aural familiarity encouraged audiences to empathize with other familiar elements of the film, notably its moral framework, in which home and nation are mutually constitutive. But Griffith was in a position to take decisive advantage of the slippage by which songs used to promote sympathy for African Americans instead spoke to the experience of whites at the expense of African Americans. This has already been outlined above, in the discussion of Foster's home songs which were themselves popular within minstrel shows and stage productions such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Famously, the decision of Thomas Dixon (whose 1905 novel The Clansman inspired Griffith's infamous film) to write a defence of the South from a white-supremacist perspective was provoked by his anger at seeing a “pro-Tom” play in 1901.Footnote 28
Griffith's The Birth of a Nation represents the Civil War as a domestic conflict, figuring the nation as home by focussing on the households and relationships of two representative white families, the northern Stonemans and southern Camerons. “Home, Sweet Home” appears in a sequence depicting the doomed Flora Cameron, who will later meet her death in a suicidal leap to avoid the sexual attack of the rapacious black villain Gus. To a limited extent, Flora's dilemma revives Clari's narrative. Yet whereas Payne's white aristocrat is capable of reflection, restraint and repentance and therefore is ultimately worthy of Clari, Gus is not considered capable of any such possibilities in Griffith's racist portrayal. As the well-known melody plays, Flora stands outside the front door of the Cameron house and reads a letter from her brother Ben, who is fighting in the war. The score suggests his nostalgia for his southern home, depicted in loving detail, but also ties Ben and Flora into a powerful relationship that the film connects to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. It is the pure blood of the sacrificial virgin Flora which Ben will use to soak a Klan flag later in the film.
In the scene that follows this reading of Ben's letter, the Cameron house is under attack by a rogue group of black soldiers under the command of a white officer. The women of the family are forced to hide until they are rescued by heroic whites. In this way the vulnerability of white homes and white women is vividly represented within a paradigm that demonizes and sexualizes black men.Footnote 29
“Home, Sweet Home” reappears in a scene titled “Homecoming” in which Ben, by now the only living son of the Cameron family, returns defeated from war. This scene revives the moment in which Clari hesitates outside her parents’ home. Whereas the song gives Clari the courage to return home, in Griffith's film the song emphasizes all that Ben (and, by implication, southern whites) have lost. Payne has his cheerful villagers singing in a happy and contented way, whereas Griffith uses the mournful and plaintive brass sounds to depict profound loss. Martin Marks describes this scene well:
Ben now stands pensive and alone on the sidewalk, surveying the desolate street and his ruined home. Although Griffith cross-cuts more than once to shots inside the home, where Flora and the others expectantly await him, the music remains focused on Ben and emphasizes his solitude: played by two solo horns in simple thirds and sixths and in triple gentle meter (andante) …Footnote 30
The depleted figure is met by Flora just outside the front door – on the very spot in which she had previously read his letter. As the pair encounter each other their mutual shock (Flora at Ben's appearance and the realization that her other brothers are never returning home, and Ben at the devastation wrought upon his family home) makes the score particularly poignant. As the two walk slowly into the house, their mother's hand is seen emerging from the doorframe and clasping her son as she brings him, and her daughter, back into the family home and her maternal embrace. The camera does not follow the family into the home and in this shot the maternal hand is all that is visible of the mother figure. As Ben arrives home, the use of the musical score – first “Home, Sweet Home” and then, briefly “My Old Kentucky Home” – powerfully reinforces the pathos of his return.Footnote 31 Its association between these melodies and a white southern household in a film that explicitly links white identity with US national identity, albeit one “asserted in southern terms,”Footnote 32 suggests that “Home, Sweet Home” has become a white US home from which the new nation, one in which racialized hierarchies are strongly endorsed and policed, will appear.
The front door of the Cameron house is a site of repeated attention and symbolic significance. Later in the film Ben will carry Flora's body through the doorway through which he has earlier passed on his return from war, associating home with her virtuous death, heroic brother and their shared whiteness and southern heritage. The ethical world of melodrama is coopted into a film which associates home/virtue with nation and whiteness, under threat from vice which it associates with blackness.
Home in The Birth of a Nation becomes the post-Reconstruction South policed by the Ku Klux Klan, who aim to make it safe for whites. For Griffith, Thomas Dixon and their fellow southerner and friend Woodrow Wilson, home was a place in which aggressive imperialism and anxieties about racial unrest were important aspects of the context in which they were pursuing their ideological campaigns.Footnote 33 The relation between home and the foreign both within and outside the United States and the kinds of policy pursued in national and international contexts are crucial to the context in which the film should be read. As Michael Rogin puts it, “Imperialists like Wilson and Dixon tied the racial question at home to America's world mission abroad.”Footnote 34 As I have argued, it is precisely the structures of melodrama – which are built on binaries of virtue and vice – which allow for this kind of representation. Using melodrama allowed Griffith to depict a rigid moral universe of virtue and vice, white and black, of those who belonged to the home-as-nation and those who did not. In Griffith's work “Home, Sweet Home” remains a sacred text – and a fundamentally American text – but it becomes a highly charged, racist and exclusionary one too.
