Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes

Notes

195 Notes Introduction: “At Last!” and “Too Late!” 1. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 35. 2. For more on these productions see Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167–68, 173–88. 3. Ziter, 174. Marty Gould has also described how an 1843 play, The Affghanistan War! similarly represented the failed First Afghan War as a British victory (Marty Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter [New York: Routledge, 2011], 164–65). 4. Heidi J. Holder, “Melodrama, Realism and Empire on the British Stage,” chap. 3 in ActsofSupremacy:TheBritishEmpireandtheStage,1790–1930, by J. S. Bratton et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 141, 149n43. 5. Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 196. 6. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 206. 7. Ibid. 8. J. S. Bratton, “British Heroism and the Structure of Melodrama,” chap. 1 in Bratton et al., Acts of Supremacy, 18–61. 9. John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 49. 10. In discussing melodrama as a way for the British Empire became comprehensible , I am especially indebted to the research of Marty Gould, who argues persuasively for how the nineteenth-century theater served as a site where the farflung British Empire ceased to be an abstraction for the British populace (15). Gould emphasizes the visual and “performative” aspects of imperial theater and comments on the ways that Britishness was performed and the empire “staged” (6, 10). By examining many works that were not performed publicly, I frequently discuss more abstract aspects of British imperialism, notably, how it was comprehended or organized via narrative, especially in moments of crisis. 11. For a discussion of the siege narrative, see John Peck, War, the Army and Victorian Literature (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Macmillan, 1998), 165. Notes to Pages 6–9 196 12. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin, 2001), 106. 13. Holder, 133. 14. Though she focuses on British culture until 1885, Elaine Hadley makes a parallel case for the melodramatic mode’s importance for literary texts, cultural texts, and public performances (Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1880–1885 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995], 3–4). 15. Film criticism has been especially attentive to the importance of heightened emotion in melodrama. Christian Viviani notes that “successful melo maintains the difficult equilibrium between its narrative form—often of a baroque complexity—and its emotional content of disarming simplicity” (Christian Viviani , “Who Is Without Sin? The Maternal Melodrama in American Film, 1930– 39,” trans. Dolores Burdick, in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill [London: British Film Institute, 1987], 83). Similarly, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argues that the music of melodrama is used to contend with the genre’s “undischarged emotion” (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 73). 16. Jeffrey N. Cox, “The Death of Tragedy; or, the Birth of Melodrama,” chap. 8 in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 175–76. 17. Matthew Kaiser, TheWorldinPlay:PortraitsofaVictorianConcept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 62. 18. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 15. 19. Hadley, 177. 20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7. 21. M. Gould, 2. Gould emphasizes how performances in London were, for many living in the metropole, “their only contact with the people and lands under British dominion” (3). My study focuses less on the immediate contact and identity formation of those in the theaters of the metropole and more on the understanding and interrogation of imperialism enabled by the print resources available outside the theater. 22. Ibid., 10. 23. Melodrama’s providential plotting is taken more loosely than that found in other works featuring a “providential narrative” related to Puritan Christian theology. In contrast to eighteenth-century works such as Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Progress that J. Paul Hunter has connected to the “Providence tradition” ( J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method...