Eliza's Narrative Agency and Historical Memory in Hamilton

Abstract

Hamilton concludes the American founding narrative with the question "Who tells your story?". This paper takes the 2015 Broadway version as the research object, selects six core songs and supplements with three related songs, and examines the changes of Eliza in four dimensions: vocal position, consequential actions, archive control, and relational dependence. To make the cross-song comparison have a testable explanatory boundary, this paper constructs a narrative agency index based on the 0-2 level heuristic coding. Close reading shows that she first enters the narrative with choral, marital, and caregiving voices, obtains negative archive sovereignty by burning letters in "Burn", and changes the relationship with almost wordless physical actions in "It's Quiet Uptown", and finally returns to history. The finale grants her narrative power, but still takes maintaining Alexander Hamilton's legacy as the main condition. This paper summarizes this position, which combines action ability and structural limits, as "constrained historical subjectivity", thereby revealing how caring labor transforms into historical production and also revealing the naming boundaries that still exist when women are incorporated into the grand narrative.