Rewriting Melodrama. The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater

Abstract

Rewriting Melodrama. The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater. By Wadda C. Rios-Font. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP and Associated UP, 1997. 233 pages. In Rewriting Melodrama, Wadda Rios-Font reminds us that the prevailing esthetic form in late nineteenth-century Europe was melodrama, both in fiction and on the stage. The form's association with low culture explains, perhaps, its relative neglect by serious scholars until Peter Brooks published his ground-breaking study, The Melodramatic Imagination, in 1985. The theoretical framework provided by Brooks coincided with the rise of cultural studies to prompt a new look at this popular theatrical form. Rewriting Melodrama examines the genre in Spain, tracing its history from Jose Echegaray, who established the melodramatic paradigm in Madrid, to Valle-- Inclan, the playwright who, by subverting melodrama, opened the stage to modernizing tendencies. over fifty years Spanish playwrights and audiences identified melodrama with the very essence of theater. We have Wadda Rios-Font to thank for charting the rise and fall of this popular theatrical genre in Spain. Why rewriting melodrama? Rios-Font argues that Echegaray was so successful in equating theater with melodrama that all of Spain's elite playwrights from the 1870s to the 1920s had to engage the form, either to adapt it to new horizons (Eugenio Selles, Leopoldo Cano, Jose Feliu y Codina, Joaquin Dicenta), to write against it (Enrique Gaspar, Galdos, Benavente) or to subvert it from within (Valle-Inclan). The idea is convincingly argued and provides an artistic gauge of Spain's resistance to modernization from the Restoration to Primo de Rivera's coup in 1923: unlike Spanish society in general, the theater evolved slowly, stretching a traditional moral paradigm to fit swiftly changing social circumstances until the rupture between stage and life could not be avoided. Melodrama, as RiosFont explains, was not just a theatrical code. It was a ritualized representation of the struggle between good and evil in a society that was experiencing the loss of the Sacred and the dissolution of the correspondence between signs and their referents. For a bourgeoisie overwhelmed by vertiginous innovations in science, politics and economics, as well as concerned about controlling the very social mobility that had raised it from poverty, melodrama's traditionalism and reliance on institutional structures of power were comforting (35). …