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  • Imperialism Through Melodrama
  • Dennis Denisoff
Neil Hultgren. Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014. xi + 259 pp. $59.95

EARLY ON in this innovative and thoughtfully formulated monograph, Neil Hultgren explains that, while “stage productions and public ceremonials of the [late-Victorian] period were notable for their melodrama,” he is looking at it not as a dramatic genre but as a rather chameleon-like mode. As a result, the book addresses dramas less often than other forms of writing, envisioning melodrama as akin to an attitudinal worldview, a cultural perspective that defines and directs communities and even nations. The study is divided into sections defined by particular modal factors that helped make “the British Empire understandable”—its plotting, its emotionality, and its notion of community. Hultgren has selected these three elements not for their influence, but because their textual manifestations provide particularly insightful examples of the ways in which Victorians imagined their imperialist activities through and as melodrama.

As various scholars have noted, melodrama did not gain its initial cultural influence through the written word and a reading audience. Juliet John (“Melodrama,” in Charles Dickens in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2011) reminds us that in England it was in fact first associated with the illiterate, the genre being nurtured by the Licensing Act of 1737, which until 1834 limited the performance of spoken dramas to theatres within the City of Westminster. Beyond a couple of key theatres, performances in which characters spoke to each other were not allowed on the stage. Appropriately, the French author Guilbert de Pixérécourt, who self-identified as the father of “le mélodrame,” [End Page 531] recognized himself as “writing for those who cannot read.” With the populist genre’s standard discourse having been formed and sustained primarily based on music (Greek: melo) and emotion, Hultgren’s decision to address the written brings attention to often underexplored aspects of melodrama. Indeed, despite its characteristic engagement with a nonreading public and its emphasis on nonverbal modes of engagement, melodrama quite comfortably permeated the railway novels, pulp fiction periodicals, and other works that saturated the market at the time.

The connections between melodrama and imperialism are extensive. For Marty Gould (Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter, Routledge, 2011), the dramatic genre played a central role in establishing a collective British perspective on empire. Carolyn Williams, meanwhile, proposes (“Melodrama,” in History of Victorian Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2012) that melodrama, “from grand opera to soap opera, from Gothic and nautical to domestic, urban, and imperial,” has been a major influence on modernity itself for over two centuries. Hultgren observes, however, that melodrama’s “fraught ideological position in relation to violent imperialism” resulted in writers who “did not merely excuse British atrocities but condemned them.” Recognizing the genre as difficult to define because contextually sensitive, he adapts Ben Singer’s view (Melodrama and Modernity, Columbia University Press, 2001) of it as the clustering of constitutive factors such as excess emotion and moral binaries.

The first section of the study, “Melodrama as Plot,” takes up half the book. It opens with a chapter on “providential plotting” in Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens’s story “The Perils of Certain British Prisoners” (1857) and Collins’s novel The Moonstone (1868). The authors developed a plot technique, Hultgren argues, that was fully imbricated with the notion of providence common to melodrama, where the ethical logic of good and evil was to give audiences a sense of overarching comfort and assurance. He notes, however, that Collins and Dickens often used this rhetorical tool to subvert such expectations, even proposing “multiple providences.” Both pieces of fiction raise elements such as the fantastic, the curse, talismanic children, and magical thinking—the idea that thoughts or wishes can influence events—to engage actual political events such as the Sepoy Rebellion. As Hultgren observes, in melodrama the means of plot resolution often seem contrived and unlikely, but the turn to the mystical (including non-Christian and non-British modes) shifts attention more forcefully onto questioning the [End Page 532] validity of a singular providence while engaging a more global set of perspectives.

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