Melodrama's Modern

Introduction: Claiming the Modern

I first got interested in melodrama hoping to understand, as Linda Williams might say, how movies moved me. Melodrama – the conjunction of music and dramatic conflict – names an aesthetic mode that moves spectators through sensory and emotional experience. But because film studies' approaches to melodrama – as ideological subversion or as a specifically female genre – failed to capture fully its aesthetic reach, I turned to theatre, and recently, to art and music histories. Such historical distance offers a different perspective on the aesthetic impact of generic forms and dramaturgical practices that infiltrated the new medium of cinema, a medium often claimed as the acme of modernity. To speak, then, of ‘melodrama's modern’ confronts a paradox. On the one hand, melodrama is documented as a clearly demarcated, discrete nineteenth-century stage genre – one till recently critically dismissed for a ‘hyperbolic’ performance mode and outdated moral values. On the other hand, it is increasingly understood as an aesthetic modality that organises contemporary media fictions everywhere, from Hollywood to TV serials and round the world. How can these two perceptions be reconciled? How did the practices of an ‘old-fashioned’ theatre contribute to the modality shaping contemporary screen media?

In the first instance, theatrical melodrama's modernity is historically rooted in a system of production that – foreshadowing cinema's studio and distribution systems – generated a diversity of sub-genres, commercially targeted to amass the new and expanding audiences of industrialising and urbanising societies. What held – and continues to hold – melodrama's genre system together is an overarching modality capable of organising a wide diversity of materials into a mode of aesthetic experience shared across a range of generically differentiated fictional worlds. More problematic perhaps is the apparent ‘break’ between the worlds imagined on the Victorian melodramatic stage and the fictions of modern screen media. Victorian melodramas are rarely performed or even read, not only because they are framed within – although they may subvert – now questioned patriarchal moral systems, but also because the ‘hyperbolic’ way in which their values are declared contravenes contemporary criteria of psychological and social realism associated with the novel. Focusing on what these plays failed to do obscures what the plays did achieve and so the ways in which they did indeed participate in ‘modernity’. If the novel latterly gained pre-eminence as claimant on modern life by virtue of its realism, psychological interiority and complexity, it developed in tandem and exchange with melodrama; many melodramas were derived from or gave rise to novels and a number of writers worked in both mediums.

Thus, the novel and melodrama emerged out of the same socio-economic conditions, as a hierarchical and paternalistic society shifted towards an entrepreneurial and ruthless capitalism, while reinforcing changing conceptions of the individual. As Raymond Williams demonstrates in Keywords, the modern concept ‘individual’ is derived from its opposite, ‘indivisible’ – i.e. integrated into the collective – only gradually coming to designate the psychologically unique person central to the mental framework of socio-cultural modernity, while at the same time generating newly self-conscious – personalised – class, gender and racial identities. ¹ At stake, then, in claiming melodrama's foundation of modern media is the nature of the relation it forges between the individual and social forces. Melodrama, it is presumed, lacks the psychological depth offered by novels invested in interiority under pressure from an externally realised social world. Melodrama's characters are, it is still frequently suggested, defined by their monopathic emotions or drives; they have no psychology; rather they serve plotting driven by coincidences, chance encounters and deus-ex-machina happy endings – often to their critical detriment. ² However, psychological realism and interior complexity are literary conventions. In what follows I suggest melodrama's conventions offer complexity of a different order, summoning the social in a different way.

Paradoxically, the realist novel – along with attempts by the stage to come closer to its values in the well-made play and new drama – itself underwent an ideological displacement through the rise of a modernism that rejected its ‘realism’ as reproducing bourgeois constructions of the world. Both the novel and melodrama, then, need rethinking in their respective engagements with realism, interiority and modernism. In this perspective, ‘realism’ figures not as reflection or static representation of the ‘real’ world, but as itself a constructive and contested claim on a social reality continually on the move. As such, realism works in contradictory ways, both as a conservative verisimilitude – the conventions that confirm an accepted view of the world as ‘realistic’ or ‘true-to-life’ – and as a challenge to those very conventions, dynamically extending the boundaries of representation to include new social actors along with marginalised groups, ways of life and areas of experience that demand recognition. When the novel gives space to the latter, it draws on the means of projecting energies, imaginaries and social perceptions offered by melodrama's modality. And when melodrama evokes the material nightmares and fantasised hopes of a modernising world beyond the control of ordinary people, it must, if it is to command audience recognition, call on shifts in plausibility registered in the expanding verisimilitude of novelistic environment and character. Charles Reade's play, It's Never Too Late to Mend (1865) is clearly a melodrama, but Reade's aim was for a realism based on documented reality (he researched press reports about prisons and their punitive regimes), which made his second act prison scene, staging the brutalising use of the treadmill, a shock to conventional theatrical taste. ³

Melodrama's hold on the real world is partly rooted in the legal conditions of its formation, which initially enforced dramatic enactment through song, dance, acrobatics and printed texts, leading to heterogeneous mixing of cultural forms and often plagiarised or adapted materials – from high tragedy, to comic turns, folk song and urban entertainments, dance, popular paintings and prints, and news gazettes. Such melange of practices and materials enabled a fusion of aesthetic affect with what at the time would be recognised as elements cut from everyday life, but now, with historical hindsight, we can understand generically as ‘cultural documents’. ⁴ What these plays made possible for the next century's media fictions, then, is not accurate ‘representation’ or explanation of the modern, although they certainly brought ‘documents’ of the real world onto the stage – witness Charles Reade's treadmill – and responded to real social crises. Rather their legacy lies in aesthetic practices capable of fusing on the surface of the drama the affective dimension of individual experience with socio-economic forces. Thus, melodrama's modality was forged from the convergence between two interdependent, converging routes: one centring on socio-emotional protagonists caught in extreme, attention-compelling crises; the other organising a social world through its own artefacts and discursive productions. At the same time, interchanges between novel and stage, as they responded to each other's evolution, merged the novelistic and melodramatic in a modality that would serve twentieth- and twenty-first century screen media, generating a new form of audio-visual fiction that absorbed melodrama's aesthetics into a contemporary verisimilitude that has till recently obscured their nineteenth-century sources.

In what follows I attempt to delineate something of melodrama's complexity, first through its personalising ‘affects’ and then its discursive use of ‘cultural documents’.

Human Interest, Sensation and Empathy

Richard Allen's examination of Italian Renaissance representations of the Passion of Christ exemplifies an appeal to human embodiment that would be important to the later aesthetics of melodrama. ⁵ In representations of the Crucifixion story, Allen demonstrates a shift from Christ as Godhead, to Christ as human body, subjected to extreme and unjust suffering. Crucial is the haptic address of paintings and sculptures to surrounding witnesses, whose agonised gestures embody a move from transcendental awe to a call on the congregation for empathy with a tortured, human body. Not only did such realignment of Christian theology with a newly emerging humanism make good and evil a matter of individual conscience and action, it pointed towards the ‘haptic’ aesthetics of melodrama, enacted upon and through the bodies of feeling characters and feeling spectators. Such investment in the tortured body re-emerges at the end of the eighteenth century with the turn to all things Gothic, including the many crossovers between Gothic novel and stage, paradigmatically represented by Monk Lewis's The Castle Spectre (1797) and by the first play in England to be named a melo-drame, Thomas Holcroft's, A Tale of Mystery (1802). Central to melodrama's later leap from nineteenth-century stage to twentieth-century screens is this focus on individual bodies in physical and emotional extremity.

It is possible to track the switchbacks between the emergence of personalised conscience and bodily affect by tracing the path that veers between the reputedly first domestic novel, Oliver Goldsmith's 1766 The Vicar of Wakefield, through Amelie Opie's 1800 development of one of its strands in her novella, The Father and the Daughter, to Marie-Therèse Kemble's 1815 use of Opie's central incident in her mixed genre play, Smiles and Tears, and finally to its full three act development in William Moncrieff's domestic melodrama, The Lear of Private Life (1820). If in Goldsmith's mid-eighteenth-century novel, the fatherly Vicar calls on rationalised personal sentiment to ameliorate the punitive moralities that immiserate prison populations and threaten the sanity of his errant daughter, Mrs Opie's The Father and Daughter turns the Vicar's humanism into the insanity of a grief-stricken father and, under pressure of unbending neighbours, self-inflicted penance of the fallen daughter. The story's agonising moral dilemma is then recouped in Mrs Kemble's Smiles and Tears under the new rubric of the ‘interesting’, revealing a shift in meaning from ‘interest’ in its earlier economic or proprietary application, to its hold on a spectator's immersive attention. Thus, Emily is reproved by her Uncle for finding the daughter's painful situation ‘interesting’:

Interesting! Psha! Don't prostitute the epithet, Emily; the virtuous only should be interesting – but now a-days, everything is interesting – let a Lady abandon a worthy husband and half a dozen lovely children … and the cry directly is, ‘but she's so interesting!’

In the Uncle's view, what is ‘interesting’ has been decoupled from economic investment and moral rectitude in favour of a seemingly amoral curiosity. However, to his later admiration for the daughter's devoted care for her deranged father, Emily quips, ‘And may I not call that creature interesting?’ – leading to her more significant question: ‘But what were … her father's sensations when he first beheld her?’ (5:1 – my italics). Long after play advertising had dropped explicit identification as melodrama, the term ‘interesting’ remained key in promotion and critical reviewing, announcing respective dramas as: ‘deeply interesting’, ‘powerfully interesting’, ‘of intense interest’, ‘of peculiar interest’ and so on. However, Emily's move from the ‘moral’ through the ‘interesting’ to ‘sensation’ suggests the direction of travel towards a haptic aesthetics aimed at the senses and emotions, pulling the melodramatic spectator towards vicarious immersion in the sensations of characters caught in threatening or ambiguous personal, moral and social situations. The groundwork is laid for twentieth-century media focus on ‘human interest’ stories, scandal and sensationalism.

In shifting from moral judgement towards immersive experience, melodrama, against the linear conventions of causal logic and psychological development, orchestrates time to produce its dramatic encounters at moments of maximum impact, piquant sensation or lightening recognition. In melodrama's temporal arcs, causes are only pretexts for staging consequences, all the more affecting in the circular work of coincidence, chance or fate, registered for spectators as shock, drawn-out suspense or vacillation between hope and the inevitable. Thus, in The Lear of Private Life, Moncrieff's dramatisation of Opie's novella, the traumatic encounter between errant daughter and demented father first takes place as their paths coincidentally cross in a wood on a wild stormy night. The father, escaped from an asylum, searches for his daughter's grave, while she, unaware of his predicament, penniless, illegitimate babe in arms, tries to find her way home. This encounter switches between the father's threat to kill the unrecognised girl's baby; the daughter's guilt-ridden shock as she recognises her father; his empathic response to her tears – ‘Tears? In tears? … poor thing, poor thing, don't cry, don't cry’ – and a potential reunion brutally broken up by retributive asylum keepers, who physically tear daughter and father apart: ‘Aye, aye, you may well weep! But your tears come a little too late, my fine lady’ (2:3).

Emily's curiosity about the piquant meeting between an errant daughter and father, and Moncrieff's development of its full-blown sensations foreground the role of explicit moral codes for melodrama's effects. If performed with serious force, it doesn't matter that Victorian morality is now – and often at the time – deemed outdated; its distortions and prohibitions tap into the murky regions where social control interacts with bodily and psychical forces, producing the frissons, ambiguities, and compulsions of boundaries crossed, desires given rein, and primary values threatened. In this sense, melodrama's moral codes function as both documented discourses circulating at the time and as aesthetic mechanisms to fuel resistant or explosive actions. Melodrama's modality, like images of Christ's Passion, seeks to reach into the body and perceptions of readers and audiences, linking isolate individuals with others in fascinated attraction, horrified repulsion or empathic identification. In this respect, sensation binds together melodrama's two seemingly divergent sides – spectacular action and pathos – creating the conditions for an intersubjectivity that challenges the separations of the individualism characteristic of modern life.

The Melos of Melodrama

Such switchbacks between different emotional states embodied in characters caught in swiftly changing circumstances are facilitated by music, contributing to the immersive ‘human interest’ that, as early film commentators would say, ‘gets over’ to an audience. Musical interjections – anticipating, underscoring, interrupting action and contributing to character identity – support the embodied emotions of both characters and audiences, allowing the actor an operatic expansion of bodily performance and rhetorical vocalisation – for example, melodrama's held gestures or triple verbal exhortations. As David Mayer suggests, ‘music is to [melodrama's] actor what water is to the swimmer’. ⁶ Music, however, is important not only to emotionalised performance and theatrical action, but to melodrama's use of the spoken word.

Music had always been part of theatrical entertainments, but contemporary musicologists are giving increasing attention to eighteenth-century experiments in music-drama or mélo-drame, the latter term transferred to the theatrical genre that emerged in French post-Revolutionary theatres. While Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1770 lyric drama Pygmalion is frequently cited as the ‘first’ melodrama, the cross-over between eighteenth-century German court experiments combining musical form and stage acting and the hybrid mixing of music, song, dance and acrobatics in French Boulevard entertainments needs untangling in order to determine the significance of one for the other. Rousseau's experimental use of musical ritornelles alternating with broken speech gave the actor moments of silence for mimed inarticulate gestures that, according to eighteenth-century theories about the origins of language, promised unmediated access to authentic subjectivity. Rousseau quickly lost interest in the form, but German composers developed mélo-drame further, similarly drawing on classical Greek legends while experimenting with a through line of composed music broken by the actor's speaking voice, and incorporating familiar musical tropes that anticipated or delivered the conflicted feelings of a single tragic character.

At the same time, adapting the musical underscoring of recitative, melodrama democratises opera by bringing its expansive and emotional resources to bear on ordinary people's lives. Here music, giving way not to song but to spoken words, not only enables speech to access a musicalised dimension, but gives body to the voice, creating another form of personalised characterisation. Peter Brooks's villain, for example, is characterised as ‘a swarthy, cape-enveloped man, with a deep voice’. ⁷ Martin Meisel, discussing Bernard Shaw's re-appropriation of melodramatic techniques for his drama of ideas, records his demand for acting voices of particular musical pitch and tone, organising character exchanges through vocal contrast rather than psychological development – a dimension of Shaw's work expanded in Fintan O'Toole's recent book, Judging Shaw (2017). ⁸ Recognising melodrama's condition as a musicalised modality suggests a playscript written as a libretto for the speaking voice, its crescendos, diminuendos, dissonances, rhythmic repetitions and pauses interweaving feelings and social perceptions like musical themes. In this sense, the musicalisation of speech is crucial to the integration of its protagonists within the semantic world in which they live and act.

Melodrama's Discursive World

Although melodrama has largely been discussed for its visual mise-en-scène, spectacle and embodied performance, its verbal language, as Jacky Bratton and Simon Shepherd have each pointed out, is equally important to its oblique registration of a modernising world. ⁹ This is less a matter of what the characters say about that world than the linguistic resources they draw on, including current vernacular idioms, social exchange formats, clichés and images carried in songs and common sayings. Use of such heteroglot materials put into play the ‘structures of feeling’ within which dramatist and audience live. In wielding the idioms, turns of speech, imagery of their culture as personal signifiers, melodrama's characters register the felt impact of social change on individual lives, in a practice that Miriam Hansen, writing about early American cinema, has termed ‘vernacular modernism’. ¹⁰

Act two of Thomas Parry's Eugenia Claircille; or, The New Found Home (1846) introduces Hugh Matlock, a secondary ‘heavy’ villain, embittered by unjust transportation and now returned to England. Approaching a ‘low beer house’, he curses the rural conviviality within, calling on contradictory tropes that both signify and contribute to the precarious reality of the poor:

Fools! Drown your misery in noise! Forget if you can! The starving, homeless wretch crawls his way singing ‘Happy Land!’ Well, well! ‘Happy Land’ is a romance he may safely be allowed to revel in! … what matters it now? I curse the past as I defy the future! …

Here Matlock's personal misery is registered through the contradiction between the ‘starving homeless wretch’ of many a Chartist pamphlet, and the wish-fulfilling popular song. In melodrama's musicalised script, the embittered vocal tones demanded of the actor to channel such sardonic perceptions work in counterpoint to the apparently carefree singing in the beer house.

Charles Reade's It's Never Too Late to Mend opens by setting traditionally virtuous structures of feeling, represented in the impoverished labourer George Fielding's attachment to the land, against the underhand machinations of capitalist exploitation, spelt out by the appropriately named corrupt attorney, Crawley. This juxtaposition is written as a series of images, cultural practices and choral refrains, requiring vocal contrasts. Offered the chance of emigration to Australia and the gift of 500 sheep from Mr Winchester, whose daughter Fielding seeks to marry, he replies: ‘Leave England and the plough to keep sheep in the wilderness? Why, sir, you might as well try to transplant an old oak tree as a Berkshire farmer’. Spying on their conversation, Crawley muses with mordant irony on his relationship to the unscrupulous corn factor and property dealer, Mr Meadows:

That for the rolls! I have got Mr Meadows. That is to say, he has got me. A great man … He saw that I was a clever man – a clever little man but unfortunate, fond of a drop. He bought up my debts … he held the axe of the law over my head with his right hand, and with his left offered me his friendship – on one condition; that I should be his slave … Well, I am. This great man and I, we do a deal of dirty work together … I am an attorney of wood, a puppet attorney; he pulls my strings out of sight and I do the movements. Where shall we all go to?

Crawley's switch backing between ‘great’ and ‘little’ men and the tortuous rhythms of his phrasing verbally embody the opportunism and self-deception of the consolidating capitalist order, while his catchphrase, ‘Where shall we all go to?’ threads through the play like a choral refrain, returning with different emphasis at each twist of the plot. The image of Meadows as the behind-the-scenes puppeteer appears in several nineteenth-century melodramas as a potent trope for new forms of power; Crawley's play on the symbiosis of great and little men and on their divergent but complicit left- and right-handed operations invokes the unpredictably shifting ground of the new economic order. Their mordantly comic relationship is both sinister and surreal as Crowley dances pantomimic attendance on his master's devious plots to bring financial ruin to George Fielding, a sado-masochistic compact that seems to anticipate the ‘absurd’ relationship of Samuel Becket's Pozzo and Lucky: Meadows:

You are my instrument. You shall have no more anger, nor fear, nor any other passion than my razor has.

Melodrama's modern, then, lies less in representations of accurately observed local detail or in analysis of changing social formations than in metaphorical quipping and contorted verbal gymnastics, using the common idioms and musicalised rhythms of everyday speech. Thus, its heterogeneity makes the melodramatic text a kind of fabric in which the cultural, social, perceptual and emotional interweave, capturing the processes of modernisation as liminal, shifting and competing structures of feeling.

The Socio-Emotional Protagonist

A common critique of melodrama, as of the bourgeois novel, is that it displaces ‘real’ social relations into the ‘private’ emotions and personal problems of individuals. However, if melodrama and the novel both focus the individual protagonist as the centre of social action, they figure this relationship differently. Whereas for the realist novel, the social performs explanatory context within and against which individual characters struggle, melodrama threads social forces through its protagonists’ desires, actions and turns of speech. However, while belief in the emotional authenticity of spontaneous bodily and facial expression underpinned melodrama's use of gesture and vocal intonation, their precise codification in popular acting handbooks reveal their socialised foundations. From a cultural studies perspective, Deidre Pribram's work on emotions rethinks such embodied identities. ¹¹ In her explanation, rather than arising from a unique individual psychology, emotions respond to and are channelled by the social discourses, practices and institutions through which we live. The personal, then, incorporates the social and vice versa; emotional experience channels the social through the individual, or in Pribram's terms, the ‘socio-emotional’ being, and, projected outward, reinforces, resists or challenges social institutions.

This concept highlights the affective dialogism in melodramatic construction. In Mikhail Bakhtin's argument on the ingrained genericity of language, ‘Our speech – all our utterances – is filled with other's words, varying degrees of otherness and our-own-ness’. ¹² If speech (whether spoken or written) always contains the thinking and feelings of past others, then emerging perceptions or desires must inflect, resist or overcome those embedded meanings. In melodrama's aesthetics of emotion, the feelings of characters and the others they interact with are locked into the communicative forms of prevailing and past cultures, releasing psychically and socially driven emotional forces that interrupt or short-circuit the ostensible logic of verbal exchanges. Rather than overstepping norms, melodrama's ‘affective aesthetics’ make felt the unacknowledged power exercised by emotions in the discourses of so-called normal, everyday life. Melodrama's characters, then, must channel their affective experiences and social goals through available discursive forms and cultural tropes, for these constitute the ‘reality’ of interpersonal relationships at any given time in history. It is this form of discursive realism – rather than the novel's authorial analysis or the psychological interactions and soliloquies of drama – that ensures audience recognition of their motives and crises, despite elision of environmental detail or short-circuiting of plot.

Melodrama's modality, then, refuses the opposition between social and individual, between personal and political and between emotion and rationality. In melodrama, social forces are materialised in the drives of its protagonists; social conflicts enacted as clashes of personality constructed out of emotionally driven, culturally derived, speech acts. If the social is threaded through the personal, the personal acts on others as an externalised force of compelling attraction or threat. In It's Never Too Late to Mend, for example, Meadows's rapacious economic dealings fuse with an overpowering desire for George Fielding's beloved, Susan Merton. In answer to Crawley's inquisitiveness, Meadows is drawn into confession: ‘You ask – me – what I scarce dare whisper to myself. Well: I will. For it burns my heart’. Crawley's astonished response as sardonic commentator, twists this new turn of affairs through his ‘great’ v. ‘little’ grid, the rhythm of his verbal constructions exposing the channels through which the emotional drives of social discourse are routed, while explicitly laying out the gender debasement on which it rests: ‘You love a woman? What are we coming to? A great man like you love such a small thing – compared to yourself – as a woman?’ (1:1). It is as if here the drive for power that underlies the accumulation of capital opens a lack: a repressed sexual-emotional hunger that leads the villain into over-reaching and ultimate downfall. John Meadows's desire ruins George Fielding's endeavours in Australia through sabotage, having his sheep poisoned; he separates Susan from George by blackmailing the postmaster into intercepting their letters, and finally by stealing the £7,000 George brings home from the sale of gold as proof of his financial solidity. But as Meadows is about to marry Susan, he finds only emptiness: ‘Ay, Susan is cold as marble. She believes me; she marries me; but she shrinks from me. It is my wedding eve; and I am sick of my life’ (4:1). Melodrama's gestural languages of emotional embodiment are, then, neither inherently simplistic nor incapable of complexity.

Reflexive Modernity

Melodrama's orchestration of drama out of the currency of its heterogeneous materials draws on techniques – the overheard or spied on event; the aside; the engineered misrecognition; the lost or purloined letters; the sudden discovery of documents; the use of disguise and masquerade – that make a reflexive dramaturgy out of socio-cultural and linguistic constructions and mis-readings.

For example, Colin Hazelwood's 1863 stage adaptation of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Lady Audley's Secret (1862) distils the novel's play on cultural constructions of femininity – not least by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – and the bigamous heroine's manipulation of the masquerade. Here, discourses of acting and gender construction merge in a drama ignited by the ideologies of ‘true womanhood’. Alicia – responding to her cousin's question about her new step-mother, Lucy Graham, now Lady Audley – declares her a pantomimic masquerade of femininity: ‘a perfect wax doll, as regards complexion; as fair as day when in a good temper, but as black as night if she can't rule anybody as she likes’ (1:1). Lucy Audley herself, faced with the unexpected return of her legal husband, claims her independence from normative femininity: ‘I am no longer the weak and confiding girl you first knew … I am a resolute woman’. But, faced with George's determination to unmask her, she is quick to call on male chivalry: ‘Then you will war with a woman?’ To his misfortune, he declares a struggle ‘to the death’, inadvertently opening up a new route for his wife from word to action, as in an aside she mutters, ‘Death! Death! Aye, that is the word – that is the only way of escape’, and, pretending faintness, she manoeuvres George to the edge of the fatal well and his apparent demise (1:1). Similarly, it is her maid Phoebe's fear that, in his state of habitual drunkenness, her husband Luke may set fire to the inn where Robert Audley – seeking to solve George's disappearance – is staying which suggests arson to Lucy as another means of escape. Thus, her villainy consists almost entirely in manipulation of gender discourses in response to others’ verbal cues. In this way, the devices of melodrama channel emotional impulses, desires, fears through discursive pathways into theatrical action.

In T. A. Palmer's East Lynne (1874), the device of the overseen event activates the disastrous possibilities of misrecognition – of interpreting what is seen through the ideological scripts of middle-class, paternalist culture within which its characters live. As seducer, Levison provokes Isabel's jealousy of her husband's childhood friend, Barbara Hare, by directing Isabel's look towards their encounters and dropping subtly manipulative hints. An interpretative struggle is then set going over several scenes, as Isabel, ‘Angel of the House’, draws on discourses of marital rectitude to ward off Levison's suggestions, while he – leaning casually on the mantle-piece or oppressively over the back of her chair – insists, against her weakening attempts at loyalty and disdain, that she should see adultery in play: ‘There, dear Isabel, will you believe your own eyes … [Isabel goes into verandah] … You see now why he could not accompany you – you see why he is so anxious for your retirement at Trouville’ (1:4). But Isabel sees what she is led to believe, not the other way round.

Melodrama's interplay between powerful discursive constructions and manipulated seeing exposes the work of discursive acculturation, not reflecting on reality, but setting into play the very languages, performances, imagery, stereotypes by which personal, social and political forces intermesh and social reality is constructed and challenged. The plot of Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn (1860), turning on the colonial problem of cross-ethnic, cross-class desire, is almost completely constructed from the power of language and discursive framing activated by melodrama's dramaturgical devices of aside, eavesdropping, spying, linguistic evasion or manipulation of signs, which produce the misrecognitions that drive events towards near catastrophe. Anglo-Irish, upper-middle-class Hardress Cregan cannot reveal his secret and socially equalising marriage to the peasant girl, Eily, because his widowed mother is beset by her late husband's agent pressing marriage as the price of debt forgiveness. She needs Hardress to marry the heiress, Anne Chute, to whom he has been engaged since childhood, but whose own desire for Kyrle Daly appears blocked by his poverty-induced reticence. The convolutions of these intertwining dilemmas are dramatised not only in the contention of class, ethnic and gendered discourses but also by Hardress's crippled retainer, Danny, whose simple-minded loyalty conceals the cunning of the puppet-master. Confiding to the audience, ‘I’ve got my eye on all of them’ (2:2), he becomes mainspring of the action, when, imagining he is rescuing the Cregans from ruin, he creates multiple misperceptions among friends and family and sets up a murder attempt on Eily. Melodramatic plotting, then, directs the convergence between emotional drives, speech acts and cultural documents into dramatic action.

The Melodramatic Self

If as Brooks contends melodrama's characters are morally identified through their emotions, and emotions, as Deidre Pribram argues, arise from and run through socio-discursive and institutional channels, then melodrama highlights the imbrication of social and personal, psychical and political forces as the core of selfhood and dramatic impact. Far from monopathic, the fully staged melodramatic character is both caught in and driven by conflicting constructions through which his or her life energies seek outlet. The pathos of The Colleen Bawn lies in conflicting perceptions of Irish Eily: romanticised centre of uncultured feminine virtue for Anglo-Irish upper-class Hardress, and uncultured peasant for his mother and crippled family retainer, Danny. Eily herself is caught in these conflicting constructions in her struggle to meet Hardress's expectations. Thus changing the way she speaks and behaves is the price of crossing into the ascendant Anglo-Irish class: ‘I’m getting clane of the brogue, and learnin’ to do nothing – I’m to be changed entirely’ (1:3). On the other side, once their secret wedding becomes known, her companions invoke religious and community loyalties against Hardress's need to retrieve her marriage certificate. The reflexive question lurking beneath such struggles is where the real self lies, or indeed, if it exists.

This point is made in Lady Audley's Secret, in an exchange between Lucy and her husband, which reads almost as a nod to the discourses of the actors’ handbooks: Sir Michael.

My dear light-hearted wife, I don't believe you ever knew a moment's sorrow in your life.

He is confident that, as the actors' handbooks have it, her face is ‘index to the mind’. However, as she points out to the audience in an aside, ‘We may have two faces’ (1:1).

As David Mayer has noted in relation to the later nineteenth-century use of the doubled character and Carolyn Williams has discussed in relation to Mathias in The Bells, the conflicting forces that drive the melodramatised self may summon up an external projection whereby protagonists meet themselves or encounter their worst fears. ¹³ In It's Never Too Late To Mend, Crawley, spending much of his time spying on others, is beset towards the end by a vision that mixes his own alcohol fuelled fears with the probing eyes of his and Meadows's future unmasker, peering at him through a secret panel. Memory, vision and reality converge as Crawley stage manages his own terror:

Something is coming now; that is mostly how it begins; the wall opens gradually and the phantom sits or stands in it, and eyes me, and eyes me, and eyes me, till I am dead with terror. (He shrinks flat against the wall as a panel is opening very slowly indeed.)(4:2)

That Reade was aware that Crawley's process of auto-suggestion might be difficult to perform is indicated by a stage direction at the beginning of this sequence: ‘NOTE: no comic business is admissible just here’. Against the knowing rationality of ‘modern’ sensibilities, melodrama's aesthetic both insists on the reality of evil and increasingly locates its fascination and horror close to home. Whereas contemporary film studies recuperating melodrama tend to focus on the pathos of unjust suffering and victimhood, Shepherd and Womack quote Dickens on the aesthetic compulsion to stage villainy: ‘The mystery of evil is as interesting to us now as it was in the time of Shakespeare; and it is downright affectation or effeminacy to say that we are never to glance into that abyss’. ¹⁴

Closely linked to the vision scene is the tableau, analysed by Carolyn Williams in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda as an oscillation between a moment of pictorially materialised reality and uncanny subjective possibilities beyond referential interpretation. ¹⁵ We pause in the midst of an action to contemplate liminal but immanent sensations and meanings in a theatricalised picture. As oblique social reference, melodrama's use of the vision scene registers the regulatory force of looking and surveillance in a society of atomised individuals and the consequent pressure towards self-surveillance. But as Carolyn Williams suggests, melodrama's visionary interventions dramatise the indeterminate boundary between subjective perception and objective apprehension by others.

Melodrama Cinematised

This interpenetration of subjective and objective vision leads back to my initial question: how might returning to stage melodrama illuminate its work in contemporary screen media? or, to put it another way: how, as melodrama's rhetorical practices were challenged by increasingly dominant values of realism and naturalism, did screen media give melodrama a new arena into which – like Henry James's melodramatic fish – it could ‘leap’, exploiting cinematic techniques for its continuous evolution? ¹⁶

While many of melodrama's sub-genres found new life as they morphed and proliferated into new generic forms on screen, the core appeals of melodrama – spectacle, haptic sensation, centrality of ‘human interest’ – found renewed outlets through cinematography. In particular, camera angle, shot scale, movement, lighting and editing realised many of the gestural practices of melodramatic performance, freeing the actor into the new style of underplaying promoted by naturalist drama. Fulfilling the functions of aside or tableaux, close-ups on the actor's face, eyes, hands or feet, captured the minutest movement of a muscle; cross-cut editing between glances dramatised eye contact; choreographed camera movements animated bodies – such techniques continued to focus the emotions of characters caught in extreme, piquant, ambiguous or revelatory situations.

In the process, the camera's capture of apparently unpremeditated, spontaneous and fleeting signs of thinking or feeling was increasingly attributed to the actor rather than the character, shifting attention from ‘acting’ to the notion of ‘personality’. As Gordon Gassaway commented in 1915, ‘Today, from the manager of a Moving Picture theater to the actor appearing upon the screen, personality is without doubt the prime factor which is putting the “move” into Moving Pictures’. ¹⁷ Rather than sinking the actor in different roles, repeated roles become the means to reveal the personal being of the actor, fuelling a public fascination that would ground the star system as new outlet for melodramatic embodiment.

In Stars, Richard Dyer shows how star images, combining film roles, extra-cinematic publicity, media interviews, and reported life-stories condense meanings and values circulating in the culture. ¹⁸ Star charisma emerges when such values are in contention, fighting for recognition or under threat. In this sense, like melodrama's embodied socio-emotional protagonists, star images are both highly personalised and highly discursive constructions, authenticating through the apparent naturalism of the recording camera new character types and gestural repertoires that effectively updated the nineteenth-century actors' handbooks for twentieth-century recognition. Star charisma draws on melodrama's appeal to ‘human interest’, offering to spectators what it means or feels like to be a particular kind of person in a particular situation.

The pursuit of personality, Dyer elsewhere suggests, both intensified and further shifted the meaning of the ‘individual’. ¹⁹ Whereas during the nineteenth century, personal validation was based – as in stage melodrama – on the individual's social acts, twentieth-century judgement asked whether those acts were true to the individual's ‘self’. Paradoxically, argues Dyer, by the turn of the century the theories of Freud, Darwin and Marx had challenged the integrity of individual selfhood, while the rise of advertising, mass publicity and media hype threatened its authenticity. Against such anxieties, modern media, and the star system in particular, became (and still are) frenetically invested in the seemingly unmediated access offered by the screen to the ‘real person’ behind the hype. However, as Linda Williams has pointed out, the ‘screen’ is itself an ambiguous concept, both concealing and revealing. ²⁰ Moreover, the history of the concept of the ‘person’ shows a shift from its Latin derivation, ‘persona’, denoting a mask or fabricated character, through its later meaning of the public figure defined by role, to the Oxford English Dictionary's more recent ‘actual self’ or Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary's ‘living soul, self-conscious being’ – modes of existence supposedly hidden from public view.

The promise of access to the actor's personality recast melodrama's impact on audience senses in a new, haptic camera–performer–viewer relationship, whereby the performer's ‘actual self’ or ‘living soul’ seemed to reach from the screen and infiltrate the viewer's being. For Louis Reeves Harrison, Florence Turner in Jealousy (1911) effected ‘a transmutation of life into pictorial art and back again to life as it pours through the channels of our being’. ²¹ Another critic found in Mary Pickford ‘a personality … that gripped the heart … reach[ing] out from the screens of a million picture theaters in every land on the globe’. ²² To some, however, this haptic connection with the screen was uncanny. Alice Coon Brown noted that ‘in everything [Mary Pickford] does there is a strange, unexplainable eerie quality’. ²³ Stage actors engaged in film work remarked the camera's uncomfortable power of penetration, particularly through its focus on face and eyes, crossing the boundary between actor's performing body and presumed inner self. This goes beyond bodily impersonation of the character actor, or even the star personality that ‘gets over’ to the audience: the camera looks into the actor's eyes and reveals the liminal movements of selfhood that are no longer the actor's, but belong to the melodrama of cinema. Such haptic and uncanny sensations that connect screen bodies and spectators work to cinematise melodrama's neuralgic encounters. In this sense, the performer's body, interacting with cinematography, became an instrument of both euphoric revelation and of threatened contact with otherness.

Cinema Melodramatised

Linda Williams makes the link between melodrama as an art of moving emotions and cinema as a moving-image medium. ²⁴ Although Hollywood's film stars foreground the cinematisation of melodrama's protagonists, they are themselves orchestrated into a larger choreography as the dynamics of shot scale and angle, light and shadow, moving camera and bodies, accompanied by music, create a cathexis between the emotional movement on screen and the emotional movement undergone by spectators. The British filmmaker, Anthony Asquith, torn between music and cinema, and, in the 1920s, schooled both in German studios noted for cinematic expressionism and in popular genre and star-centred Hollywood, developed through his late silent films such cinematised melodrama. Although emphasising the importance of an audience's belief in the characters, his interest lay in the ‘movement of emotion’ between them as it was registered by camera and editing. Using musical analogies of tone and tempo, he argued that ‘actual physical movement is integral to film … the movement of camera … [whether] a continuous slide or abrupt staccato leap from one shot to another’. Arguing that ‘actors are subordinate to the general visual pattern … the drama conveyed as much or more by camera angle as by actors themselves’, Asquith saw the power of the moving camera to produce ‘the internal movement of the scene … [foregrounding] the invisible points of tension in the dramatic current’, and creating the moving situations that would in turn move the audience. ²⁵

For example: the closing sequences of his silent 1929 Cottage on Dartmoor, which, circling back to the film's beginning, find Sally (Norah Baring), typed earlier as flirtatious manicurist, now confronting the return of her past, when Joe (Uno Henning), the awkward and lonely barber's assistant whose attentions she had spurned, escapes from prison where he has been incarcerated for assaulting his rival. While as characters, the actors had earlier embodied acculturated signs of their social identities, here their performativity is subordinated to cinematography, the characters' conflicting emotions evoked through cross-cutting between Sally's fearful, uncomprehending gaze at Joe as she backs away, and an expressionistically lit close-up on Joe's staring eyes, the moving camera embodying both her fear and his threat as it tracks before his approach. In Strand Magazine Asquith wrote, ‘the camera can identify our eye not only with the physical eye of a character but also with what I may call his emotional eye’. ²⁶ Later, Asquith, citing German expressionist directors, argued that ‘there was another way, apart from the actor's face, of conveying emotions. It was to take the emotion and’ – using the techniques of cinematography, lighting and set design – ‘distil it into a kind of dye, with which the whole picture was steeped – that is, not only to make the heroine look frightened but to make what she saw look frightening’. ²⁷ Asquith's emphasis on the eye recalls the actor, Henry Neville's comment, ‘We touch each other with the sense of sight’, suggesting haptic connections of both desire and threat, noted by early film commentators in the contact between film actor and audience. ²⁸

In the above sequence from Cottage on Dartmoor, the melodrama of eye contact animates the uncanny, haptic threat of, and vulnerability to, the force of another's self and will – recalling Dickens's insistence on the attraction of what we dread. As Sally makes a dash for the staircase leading to her baby's room, camera movement takes over the actors' twisting bodies and through canted angles, cross-cutting, expressionist light and shadow, integrates them into the cinematic apparatus. When the baby upstairs cries and Joe chases Sally up the staircase, grabbing her and putting his hand over her mouth, a knock at the door from prison warders changes the mood entirely. Joe sinks on the stairs amid deep shadows, while Sally, guarding her baby's door, looks down wonderingly at him. The crisis is held in a suspenseful pause, as, his passion subsiding, Joe bows his head, awaiting her next move. Her gaze is held, her fear subsiding, while lighting and her changing stance, leaning one arm protectively behind her head against the door, creates a Madonna effect: looking down on him, a slight shake of her head shifts fear to compassion. Underscored on the BFI's DVD by Stephen Horne's sympathetic piano accompaniment, melodrama's haptic experiences – threat, suspense, pathos and empathy – are fully cinematised.

But, if melodrama is cinematised, cinema is melodramatised. Asquith, committed to the expressive potential of cinematography, argued that the moving camera, untied from the character, ‘becomes a protagonist’, effectively freed into direct materialisation of complex and contradictory feelings. ²⁹ At the end of Underground (1928) – according to Asquith, ‘a roaring melodrama of London life’ – the camera focuses on the nervously shivering figure of Kate, impatiently waiting for a meeting with her treacherous lover. ³⁰ An intertitle tells us, ‘I can't wait: I must see Bert now!’ and she starts to run towards the power station where he works. As her coat falls from her frail figure, the moving camera overtakes her headlong dash, to pan past the walls and over the chimneys of the power station, independently enacting her intensifying feelings as she runs towards her fate. Similarly, in the final shots of Cottage on Dartmoor, after Joe has escaped the police surrounding the cottage, the camera focuses his figure paused on the moor's skyline, looking back to the lights of the farm. No title this time, as he starts to run, drawn back ‘home’; rather a series of moving shots intercut with his running across the moors: waves crashing on a shore, bent grass waving in the wind, foam running up a beach. Asquith argued, ‘All these shots were part of a movement, they had a full flow. These were visual metaphors of urgent movement. Not symbols, but metaphors': in other words, cinematic embodiments of the ‘ecstatic feeling’ that propels Joe to run back towards armed police and death in Sally's arms. ³¹

Cinema is thus melodramatised as ‘melodrama's modern’ takes over the new technologies and devices of cinematography and editing, recasting its theatrical techniques of performance, plotting and staging for the twentieth century and beyond. In this sense, the cinematisation of melodrama's modality represents not the modernisation of an old-fashioned form but rather its continuing evolution within changing aesthetic and social conditions. The persistence of melodrama's ways of imagining the modern re-stages through new technological resources the complex binding of social into the personal, made palpable through an aesthetic built out of socio-cultural images and discursive materials, while reaching for the condition of music to intimate regions of experience beyond representational interpretation.