ALISON J. VAN NYHUIS gaps between pocomania and marriage, disrespectability and respect- ability, and therefore, between the lower and middle classes. The play's concluding remarks prompt the audience to re-vision Ja- maican cultural values and history. Instead of continuing to socially and legally repress pocomania because of its disrespectable, demonic, illegitimate status, people should seriously consider how pocomania could benefit Jamaican nation-building projects. Stella becomes an allegorical representation of the Jamaican nation, projecting how Ja- maica should construct a nation. Jamaica could balance "a little mad- ness"-a little ancestral heritage, a little passion, a little more female power, a little more participation in more respectable versions of pocomania, and more folk influence-with respectable middle class practices like marriage. Making marriage a mark of respectability ex- cludes many lower-class Jamaicans who could not afford to marry. Even if lower class members' African history and folk position includes them in the envisioned Jamaican nation, their economic status will exclude them from achieving a respectable status-unless Jamaica takes addi- tional steps to aid the economically repressed lower classes. The play's privileging of the middle class should not undermine Pocomania's subversive bridging of substantial ideological gaps be- tween the lower and middle classes. In 1938, the year Pocomania was performed in Kingston, laws prohibited pocomania practices and pun- ished those who associated with pocomania followers.18 Despite pocomania's legal repression and widespread middle-class disdain, Pocomania seems to purposely break away from the historical reflec- tion of respectable middle class pocomania criticism to project believ- able images of a more positive, desirable form of pocomania for the middle class. The play's 'open' ending, its allowance for a more posi- tive middle-class reading of pocomania, makes Pocomania a subtly subversive contribution to Jamaican nation-building discussions. A version of this essay was presented at the Florida College English Association Annual Conference, October 2002. w See Laws of Jamaica, Volume 5, 1938, Chapters 421 and 422 (qtd. in Simpson 406).