In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Melodrama of the Spirited Woman Aventurera gilberto perez Everybody speaks of melodrama, often disparagingly, but it’s not easy to define it. The definition I heard as a kid was that melodrama makes the characters subordinate to the plot, but when I read the Poetics I saw that Aristotle prescribed the same thing for tragedy. Some would define melodrama by its play on our feelings, by the intensity of emotion that it elicits, but that again scarcely distinguishes it from tragedy. Looking to the audience, others would distinguish melodrama as popular art from tragedy as elite art, but then few tragedies would make the grade besides the courtly French ones, and Shakespeare’s would be melodramas. Once I asked an older colleague at the school where I teach what the difference was between tragedy and melodrama, and he answered: “If you don’t like it, it’s melodrama.” Still others would say that the crux of melodrama is a simplified moral scheme, an unqualified conflict between good and evil, virtue and villainy, but look, for example, at Stella Dallas, a melodrama if there ever was one, and you will find no villains. If, like tragedy, melodrama tells a sad story, often enough, like comedy, it comes to a happy ending. It should be considered not only in relation to tragedy but also to comedy.1 Comedy and tragedy are ancient, whereas melodrama, Peter Brooks maintains, “appears to be a peculiarly modern form” whose origins “can be accurately located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath” (14). But a form arising from a break with tradition may still have links to traditional forms. This is how John G. Cawelti describes the melodrama of the late eighteenth century: The central figure . . . was usually a virtuous young lady of some lower or ambiguous status—village maiden, orphan, daughter of parents in reduced circumstances—who was pursued by a male character of higher status and dubious intentions, a figure of aristocratic, erotic, financial, and social power; in other words, some form of the stereotypical squire with curling mustaches. The sorely beset heroine commonly loved a more worthy and innocent young man, who was himself enmeshed in status difficulties, often because his true parentage was concealed for one reason or another. This primary triangle was the essence of melodrama and was capable of two major permutations, corresponding loosely to comic and tragic modes of action. In the first case, the heroine resisted the entreaties and threats of the villain and was ultimately united in marriage with the noble young man. . . . In the tragic melodrama, the heroine succumbed to the villain’s plots. . . . The single most important outcome of any melodrama was the marriage of the virtuous heroine to the right man—or, in the tragic version of melodrama, the degradation and death of the fallen heroine. (33–34) This largely remains, more than a century later, the plot of Griffith’s Way Down East—except that the Lillian Gish heroine, even though she succumbs to the villain, nonetheless abides in her virtue, narrowly escapes death, and marries the noble hero. The tragic and comic modes of melodrama that Cawelti differentiates come together in this movie. They are not so far apart, after all: the desired outcome, marriage to the right partner, is in both cases the same. And that is also the desired outcome of comedy, what Aristotle might call the final cause of the plot. Whether comic or tragic, melodrama can be said to be in that way essentially comic. The melodramatic plot that Cawelti outlines recalls the plot of New Comedy , in which young lovers meet with opposition to their union and, through developments as contrived as those in melodrama, get the better of the blocking figures in their way and reach the happy ending of marriage. There are differences, of course. Neither virtue nor villainy is as heightened in comedy as it is in melodrama. The heroine’s virtue is not so crucial in comedy, the young woman herself usually not so central, the blocking figures not so sinister as the villain of melodrama. Marriage in comedy is not the matter of life and death that it is in melodrama. But it is a matter of life: comedy seems to have originated in rituals of fertility, and the concluding union of the young lovers celebrates procreation. And more than a personal affair, their marriage is a matter of life in society: like the melodramatic villain, the comedic blocking...

Share