What's Love Got To Do With It?: History and Melodrama in the 1940s Woman's Film

Introduction

In "Melodrama Revisited," a reevaluation of film melodrama and, by extension, of classical Hollywood film, theorist Linda Williams reviews the Anglo-American scholarly traditions that grew up around melodrama as a critical category within film studies and rightly observes that melodrama tended to focus on what it usually termed an anti-realist form of expression in a cinema otherwise presumed to be realist. Williams, however, presents "a revised theory of a melodramatic mode--rather than the more familiar notion of the melodramatic genre" (43), in which she asserts that "[m]elodrama should be viewed … not as an excess or an aberration but in many ways as the typical form of American popular narrative in literature, stage, film, and television" (50, italics mine). Williams' article has changed critical thinking about melodrama in film, but it has also offered an important and useful way of re-structuring the history of classical American narrative cinema itself--from the old set of reductive oppositions (e.g., realist vs. anti-realist, content vs. form, narrative vs. spectacle) to a multifaceted representational system that places melodrama at the center--and thus radically alters our conception of any history operating "inside" a film.

I turn, then, to the heart of melodrama: the woman's film of the 1940s. Following the early male-dominated discussions of melodrama as a genre, conducted by Thomas Elsaesser, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and others, a great deal of feminist criticism was devoted to the woman's film in the 1970s and 80s (e.g., the groundbreaking work of Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen, as well as the somewhat later body of work anthologized by Christine Gledhill in Home Is Where the Heart Is and in Mary Ann Doane's The Desire to Desire). This discussion was then superseded by the influence of Cultural Studies in the 1990s, which, in the proliferation of new media and the increasingly globalized era of production and reception, raised new issues of class and ethnicity that, although essential, sidelined debates about melodrama before they had entirely run their course--before a systematic exploration could be made of how woman's films, as the sine qua non of melodrama, register "history," although the work of several scholars (e.g., Sue Harper, Maureen Turim, and Ellen Draper) are notable exceptions. This paper re-opens that debate around the woman's film generally and its relationship to history specifically--not to assay matters of historical accuracy, per se, which is something of a losing (and ultimately uninteresting) proposition, but rather to consider how historical figures and events are represented within specific cinematic categories.

The issue of accuracy in historical films generally and melodrama specifically has been vexing and often unproductive for both historians outside of cinema studies and film scholars alike because, all too frequently, such discussions foreground historical issues at the cost of cinematic ones, the former occluding the latter and leading to unbalanced discussions and debates in which "history" (usually presumed to mean simple mimesis: a faithful depiction of real-life events) is granted a primacy that cinema, even in its supposed high-realist classical mode (a supposition that Williams' work has asked us to question) fails to accord it.

In an article on Alexander Korda's 1941 film That Hamilton Woman--a work I find interesting precisely because its general tenor and specific arguments directly oppose my own, as I will discuss later--critic Ellen Draper has asked, "What is it about melodrama that gives the genre its apparent disregard for historical accuracy – even when specific historical details are the basis of the film narrative?" (58). From my perspective, however, the salient question is not so much "Why does melodrama disregard history?" but rather, "What does melodrama--in this instance, a woman's film from 1940--do with the history it chooses to represent, and why?" The differences between Draper's argument and my own, which I will lay out here, hinge on different conceptions of melodrama itself. Draper discusses it as a fundamentally ahistorical form:

In its drive for narrative transcendence, melodrama seeks to...