Melodrama

Abstract

A genre of theater that emerged in late eighteenth‐century France, melodrama is distinguished by spectacle and sensationalism, intense and extravagant displays of emotion and affect (often through the use of stage tableaux), polarized characters who are hapless victims, dastardly villains, and virtuous heroes, highly schematized plots centered around family secrets, domestic scandals, or calumnious mysteries, and the ultimate revelation and resolution of such affairs when the forces of good triumph over evildoers. Peter Brooks's important study (1976, The Melodramatic Imagination) points to French playwright François‐René Guilbert de Pixerecourt (1773–1844) as the founder of this genre. But the influence of melodrama extends beyond the stage onto the pages of the modern European and Anglo‐American novel, exemplified by Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835, Father Goriot) and Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (1902). Responding to modernity's desacralization and loss of tragic vision (see modernism ), the melodramatic imagination in the modern novel underscores the theatricality and excess of fictional representation. This dramatic excess locates and articulates the “moral occult,” namely “the domain of spiritual forces and imperatives that is not clearly visible within reality,” but has to be revealed (Brooks, 20). James's characteristic dense and sinuous prose, and his portrayal of female protagonists like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), can be read as the work of a melodramatic imagination. Similarly, Balzac's combination of literary realism and theatrical melodrama may be thought of as subversions of the prevailing social conventions underpinning these genres .