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155 MELODRAMA In Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie (1896), sensational drama offers life-enhancing make-believe as well as pleasing fantasy and forgetfulness. The evening’s entertainment allows the poor seamstress to forget her drunken mother and the squalid tenement apartment in Rum Alley, and the day spent sewing cuffs and collars in the garment factory. Everyone in the cheap Bowery variety saloon responds enthusiastically to the dime-novel plot. Even the rogues watching ‘‘revolted from the pictured villainy,’’ ‘‘hissed vice and applauded virtue’’ with ‘‘untiring zeal.’’ More than a decade later the Progressive reformer Jane Addams labeled the neighborhood nickelodeon the ‘‘house of dreams’’ because it so captured the imagination of the young. In similar fashion, the cheap theater gave Maggie hope—‘‘raised spirits’’ and ‘‘made her think’’—that middle-class gentility might be within reach for a sweatshop machinist. This entertainment was not mere escapism: ‘‘To Maggie and the rest of the audience, this was transcendental realism.’’1 Melodrama was not the antithesis of realism; it included sufficient and sufficiently realistic details to make the narrative credible. According to the late-eighteenth-century formulation, it had originally been pantomime set to music. However, although music remained a signifier of emotional stress and dramatic tension in the nineteenth century, visual spectacle became the dominant strain. In the 1830s and 1840s, Thomas Hamblin, the English-born manager of the Bowery Theatre, introduced the popular songs, farces, and melodramatic plays of adventure that had proved so popular in London, but given contemporary relevance with flamboyant staging and lighting. Where novel blackface representations thrived, so did plays distantly European in origin but with an American accent. Authentic details of locale mattered. What audiences expected was hyper-reality. ‘‘Common sense was not wanted in the highest level of melodrama,’’ writes David Grimsted, ‘‘but rather something stylized, refined, elevated above the level of ordinary existence .’’2 Melodrama suited an age of class conflict, of industrial capitalism, of sudden urbanization and the onset of a market economy, of evangelical religion and its armies of the damned and the almost-saved. Sin was generally MELODRAMA 156 depicted as the product of character rather than circumstance. When selfhelp literature told of ascent from log cabin to White House and from the factory floor to business magnate, it taught that determined individuals, and not grand impersonal forces, lay behind such transformations. In frothy dimenovel romances of mill girls and millionaires or tramps and tycoons, Michael Denning has shown, ‘‘the pressure of the real persisted.’’3 The more successful melodramas transported fairy-tale characters to recognizable local scenes stocked with familiar social types in a dramatic form that melded folk tale and modern saga. Within melodrama there were class accents. The mainly working-class audiences of New York’s Bowery and Chatham Theatres enjoyed actionpacked scenes of emotional and physical conflict. Bruce McConachie has described these melodramas as ‘‘apocalyptic.’’ Amid scenes of general catastrophe —fire, flood, shipwreck, massacre, all displayed graphically with every scenic effect in the producer’s arsenal—the villain met divine retribution. Vengeance for past wrongs was inevitable. Heroes of sound republican virtue triumphed over villains and rescued helpless damsels in distress. John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1828), where the doomed Indian chief bravely defended land, honor, and womanhood, was a platform for Edwin Forrest, the actor favored by the Bowery. Forrest moved, wrote a less-than-enthusiastic critic, with exaggerated physical vigor, with ‘‘a sudden entrance, impressive invocations to heaven, certain menacing falls of the brow, and numerous seizures of a sort of histrionic asthma or shortness of breath.’’4 The middle classes retreated to more salubrious dime museum lecture rooms. There were fewer thrilling chases in their favorite ‘‘sensation’’ plays of moral uplift, but vivid emotional turmoil. The temptation, ruin, and shame, and occasionally, reformation, of drunkards and slaveholders gave both diversion and reassurance. If virtuous individuals died, virtuous moral principle ascended triumphant. The best-known scene was the conclusion of George L. Aiken’s dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with appropriate symbolism in unmistakeably vast form: ‘‘Gorgeous clouds, tinted with sunlight. Eva, robed in white, is discovered on the back of a milk-white dove, with expanded wings, as if just soaring upwards. Her hands are extended in benediction over St. Clare and Uncle Tom, who are kneeling, and gazing up to her. Impressive music—Slow curtain.’’5 Melodrama was a study in contrasts. It depicted...

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