The Dialectics of Melodrama

Abstract

What do our amusements say about our culture? For decades only a handful of historians thought this a worthwhile question, pioneering figures like Constance Rourke, in her Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928), or Foster Rhea Dulles, in his America Learns to Play (1940). In the 1950s leisure pursuits became the subject of sociological study, most artfully in Reuel Denny's The Astonished Muse (1957). Only since the 1960s and the flourishing of social and cultural history have entertainment studies come of age. The last decade's work has focused in particular on working-class amusements, emphasizing class conflict and resistance to Victorian propriety in recreation.1 The history of the legitimate stage is often seen as something apart from vaudeville, burlesque, movies, dance halls and other diversions intended for working people. Post-Civil War theater in particular has been considered too middle class, too concerned with refinement-too stuffy-to be reflective of an evolving American popular culture. The result has been that legitimate theater has not had the attention the historical profession has given other entertainments. David Grimsted's important work Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture 1800-1850 (1968) provides an overview of antebellum theater. My own Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (1984) has a somewhat narrower focus on a later theatrical era. Apart from these examples, American theatrical history has usually been the preserve of scholars from theater departments. To be sure, theater scholars have written much good history. But frequently it is also insular, lacking extended connections with broader social themes. Not however, Bruce McConachie's Melodramatic Formations. McConachie, a theater scholar at William and Mary, has wedded theatrical history to both recent historiography and to an eclectic blend of social and literary theories. He casts a broad net across the academic waters in search of explanatory concepts, from Meadian sociology, materialist feminism, new historicism, and the rhetoric of Kenneth Burke (p. xi). More fundamentally, a Marxist