Show Boat by Edna Ferber

First published: 1926

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical

Time of plot: 1870 to the 1890’s

Locale: Chicago and Mississippi River region

Principal characters

• Andy Hawks, a steamboat captain and owner of the Cotton Blossom
• Parthenia “Parthy” Hawks, his wife
• Magnolia “Maggie” Ravenal, their daughter
• Gaylord Ravenal, Magnolia’s husband
• Kim Ravenal, their daughter

The Story:

Magnolia Ravenal is giving birth to her first child on a boat, the Cotton Blossom, on the Mississippi River in a storm. Her shrewish mother, Parthenia, or Parthy, Hawks is with her. Magnolia is the daughter of the boat’s owner and captain, Andy Hawks, and, like her father, loves the theater, the river, and her husband, Gaylord Ravenal, who plays romantic leads opposite Magnolia in the showboat’s troupe.

Magnolia’s story goes back to the time when she had been growing up on the Creole Belle during the summers and in Massachusetts during the winters. Young Maggie, the story goes, hangs out in the pilothouse with Windy, the colorful old pilot. She is a sharp observer and imitator of the variety of passengers and troupe members who travel and work on the boat. Indeed, she is entranced by the “show people.” She adores her father, the captain and king of the boat who knows every inch of the river, from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana; but she is rebellious toward her strict and overbearing mother.

Cap’n Andy, as the captain is also known, buys a new boat, the Cotton Blossom, and proposes to live on it year-round. However, Parthy refuses to travel on it, until young Maggie throws tantrums. Gradually, Parthy is seduced by the boat’s well-equipped kitchen and consents to live on the boat when she sees the actresses flirting with her husband. She and Maggie spend more and more time afloat and soon get used to the lifestyle: the morning band-concerts ashore when Cap’n Andy hands out playbills; afternoon rehearsals and evening performances from the troupe’s repertoire of melodramas; and talent shows, after which the cast and crew rehash the latest performance while eating a late supper. Young Maggie learns all the plays by heart, simply by listening.

One day, Julie Dozier, the troupe’s star actress, becomes too ill to perform at a town in Mississippi. Her illness, it turns out, had been feigned: She had been trying to evade the local sheriff, who had come aboard the boat with a warrant to arrest Julie and her actor husband, Steve. It soon emerges that Julie is an octoroon, that is, a person of one-eighth black ancestry. She is married to a white man—a marriage in violation of Mississippi’s antimiscegenation laws. This news sparks a frenzy of hate toward Julie from Elly Chipley, the other actress in the troupe. The sheriff orders Andy to clear his boat, and his “mixed-blood” cast, from town.

Julie and Steve leave the troupe at the next town. Shortly afterward, Elly runs off with a gambler, and her husband, Schultzy, the troupe’s director, leaves as well to find her. Eighteen-year-old Maggie then steps in to fill the actresses’ roles, playing ingenue leads.

Maggie’s first performance is so realistic that a rube in the audience pulls a gun to shoot the actor playing the villain, which causes Andy to have to refund everyone’s money. Maggie thrives on the acting life. The actor who plays the villains falls in love with her, so much so that he cannot act sufficiently evil while he is on stage with her. The need for a leading man to replace Steve leads Andy to pick up Gaylord Ravenal, an idle but elegant young man hanging around the wharf at New Orleans. He is set to play opposite Maggie and take Schultzy’s place as director. Gaylord is an out-of-luck gambler on parole for murder; he had been looking for a way out of town. After he sees Magnolia, however, he accepts the acting-directing job.

Maggie’s mother, Parthy, distrusts Gaylord and his claim that he belongs to an illustrious family, but he is adored by the showboat’s audiences. Magnolia and Gaylord become famous stars along the river. Gaylord dresses exquisitely and shows Maggie New Orleans. The two fall in love despite Parthy’s opposition and elope to a riverside church, where they are married.

Soon, Magnolia and Gaylord have a daughter, Kim, and she is fast growing up on the boat. After Kim’s birth, her parents had stayed for a while with Parthy and Andy on the boat, but Cap’n Andy drowns suddenly in a spring flood. Parthy decides to continue on the boat as its captain and the head of the show company. Gaylord yearns to return to gambling and asks Magnolia to choose between him and her mother. Maggie decides on Gaylord. They secure Maggie’s inheritance, leave the showboat, and move to Chicago.

In Chicago, they live a rags-to-riches-to-rags life that is dependent on Gaylord’s luck at the card game faro. They live in posh hotels when they have money and have to pawn his cane and her jewelry for money when his luck turns. Maggie sees the seedy life of Chicago, with its gambling dens and prostitutes, and becomes nostalgic for the river and the indolent showboat life.

Maggie sings all the old African American river songs to Kim. When Kim becomes old enough, she is enrolled in a convent school and thrives on the orderly routine. Unlike Maggie, Kim is a serious child. Gaylord continues to dress elegantly and play the gentleman, and Maggie is still in love with him. In letters to her mother, she lies about not being poor, and so refuses to ask her for money. Maggie needs money, though, for Kim’s future, and she asks her husband if she can return to acting. He derides her request, but at a rough party, Maggie sings for the guests; they love her river songs. She learns that the uncouth molls of Chicago’s underworld are similar to the riverside farm girls she had known in her youth, and she believes she can succeed as a professional entertainer.

As time goes on, Chicago begins to reform its crude, vulgar image, and many of the gambling dens disappear, giving way to respectable businesses. The reformers spell hard times for gamblers, and Gaylord, who is no longer faithful to Magnolia, has reached bottom. One night he borrows one thousand dollars from a notorious madam. Magnolia soon returns it, recognizing the madam as Julie, the former showboat actress.

Determined to make some money legitimately, Maggie tries out for a vaudeville show. Then Gaylord disappears, leaving only a note and some cash. Maggie uses the money to buy a banjo and then begins to practice singing. She eventually becomes a successful singer in vaudeville and raises Kim alone. Kim grows up to marry a producer and becomes a famous New York actor herself.

Gaylord dies in San Francisco, and Parthy dies on the showboat at the age of eighty. Maggie returns to the South to attend her mother’s funeral. Maggie, who soon discovers that Parthy had become locally famous for running the showboat, now realizes that her home is on the river. She inherits the Cotton Blossom and its company and decides to take over in her mother’s place, giving her inheritance money to Kim to start a new American theater company.

Bibliography

Batker, Carol. “Literary Reformers: Crossing Class and Ethnic Boundaries in Jewish Women’s Fiction of the 1920’s.” MELUS 25, no. 1 (Spring, 2000): 81-104. Analyzes the work of Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Anzia Yezierska, focusing on how Ferber depicts African American characters and class mobility.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Jewish Women Fiction Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1998. Provides biographical information, a wide selection of critical excerpts, and bibliographies of Ferber and nine other female Jewish American writers. Designed for high school and undergraduate students.

Botshon, Lisa, and Meredith Goldsmith, eds. Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920’s. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. A collection of essays that examines the work of writers who were both critically acclaimed and commercially successful in the 1920’s. Two chapters are devoted to Ferber.

Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle—A Biography. New York: Applause, 1999. A well-researched biography that considers Ferber a romantic realist. Notes that although she was not opposed to working with the system, she created her own unique niche within it. Includes an index.

Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2004. Offers a nonscholarly, entertaining look at Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Zelda Fitzgerald, chronicling the lives of these writers in the Roaring Twenties.

Shaughnessy, Mary Rose. Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber. New York: Gordon Press, 1977. An examination of Ferber’s life and work that provides an assessment of the author’s place in the American women’s movement.

Smyth, J. E. Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. A look at the artistic and business partnership between Ferber and the Hollywood studios, who adapted her often controversial work into popular films. Explores the “research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood’s Ferber franchise.”

Watts, Eileen. “Edna Ferber, Jewish American Writer: Who Knew?” In Modern Jewish Women Writers in America, edited by Evelyn Avery. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. An essay interpreting Ferber’s work from the perspective of her Jewish heritage is included in this collection devoted to the discussion of American women writers whose lives and work have been influenced by Judaism.