
2
Meanings of Melodrama
While several overviews have noted its semantic ambiguity, the term
melodrama seems to have adopted a more or less stable meaning
in contemporary film studies. Melodrama as it generally is used today
refers to a set of subgenres that remain close to the heart and hearth and
emphasize a register of heightened emotionalism and sentimentality.
But this was not at all the common usage in the early years of the film
industry (or even much later, as Steve Neale has discovered in his excellent
exhaustive research into the use of the word in trade journals in the
1950s).1
It is telling, for instance, that the word melodrama is never once
used in a 1910 magazine article entitled “The Tear-Drenched Drama,”
which discussed what would seem to be the direct theatrical antecedent
to Hollywood’s woman’s weepie. “The drama of heart-ache,” Alan Dale
observed, caters to “the rapacity of women for the love-woe. . . .
Marriage and its many variations being the biggest factor in the feminine
life, women take a breathless interest in woebegone stories that
delay it, or render it impossible, or offer it as the result of terrific strug-
gle.”2
Dale’s synopsis of one such drama, The Awakening of Helena
Richie, reads like the synopsis of a classical Hollywood domestic melo-
drama:
The heroine lived a life of unwedded marriage with a gay deceiver who,
in the eyes of the world, was her brother. When the guileless people of Old
Chester, Pennsylvania, were present, Helena Richie was a formal and
coldly affectionate sister to the man; when they were alone she would
spring into his arms and fervently tell him how much she loved him! Later
on, of course, her “past” was discovered by the “strait-laced” people of the
village, who had “early Victorian” ideas unlike those of Helena, who
talked about “living her own life” in her own way. She had adopted a boy
whom she grew to love. When her “past” was revealed the good gentleman
who had assigned the boy to her care felt it his duty to remove the lad. She
was not a fit person to be entrusted with the care of children. Her lover,
who had an adult daughter of his own, betrayed a marked disinclination
to marry Helena. . . . . At this point the tears were shed lavishly. After
scenes of pointless agony, in which Helena’s soul underwent all sorts of contortions
and gyrations, her “awakening” took place, and when she said
good-bye to the little boy, in the unhappy “big” act, of course there wasn’t a
dry eye in the house.3
By contemporary generic rubrics, this story is melodrama pure and
simple, an almost archetypal example. It anticipates many of the narrative
conventions that would define Hollywood melodramas of the
1930s and 1940s: centering around a sympathetic heroine, it deals with
the pathos of misplaced love and obstructed marriage, generational friction
and the pressures of filling an impossible maternal space (Helena’s
relationship with her lover’s daughter), the dignity and difficulties of
female independence in the face of conventional small-mindedness and
patriarchal stricture, and, above all else, the pathetic nobility of self-sacrifice.
The fact that “The Tear-Drenched Drama” should nowhere even
mention the word melodrama suggests the term’s dominant connotations
may have shifted since the decades around the turn of the century.
This is not to say that extreme pathos, domestic duress, and romantic
distress had no place in popular melodrama a century ago—on the
contrary. But it does suggest that in that period’s common conception
of melodrama, the sentimental side may have been somewhat overshadowed
by other aspects.4
Attempts to define melodrama can take a few tacks. One approach
is to highlight a primary defining element that manifests itself in various
ways throughout all the genre’s many permutations, or in other
words, to discern an underlying foundation that structures the genre’s
array of surface attributes and conventions. The essential element perhaps
most often associated with melodrama is a certain “overwrought”
 Meanings of Melodrama
or “exaggerated” quality summed up by the term excess. Although the
currency of this notion in film criticism stems from several sources, one
important one was Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s brief essay “Minnelli and
Melodrama” (1977).5
Nowell-Smith argued that the genre was subject
to a kind of textual “conversion hysteria.” Melodrama foments psychic
energies and emotions which the narrative “represses,” blocks from full
expression, gratification, or resolution, because they are fundamentally
incompatible with the demands of dominant patriarchal ideology. As a
consequence of this repression on the narrative level, the undischarged
emotions, “which cannot be accommodated within the action, subordinated
as it is to the demands of family/lineage/inheritance” (by which
Nowell-Smith presumably means emotions like Oedipal or homoerotic
drives), are diverted or “siphoned off.” Like neurotic symptoms, they
find an outlet through other channels of expression—especially spilling
into nonnaturalistic mise-en-scène and swelling music. In Sirk’s 1950s
family melodramas, for example, the mise-en-scène is conspicuously
oversaturated with glaring colors, overstuffed with too much furniture
and too many mirrors, and overdetermined with props that are often
“too symbolic,” too obvious in their sexual implications (such as the
ubiquitous phallic oil rigs in Written on the Wind, or, in the same film,
the five-year-old boy intently getting his jollies on a rocking horse just
as the protagonist is informed that he is impotent).
While the premise that texts can manifest symptoms just like
human psyches may not seem quite as compelling today as it did twenty
years ago, the basic idea of a connection between melodrama and
expressionist excess is widely accepted. The idea can be extended in useful
ways to incorporate other aspects of the genre. To begin with, melodrama
obviously showcases emotional excess. Hollywood melodramas
are brimming with characters on the verge of hysteria and collapse, or at
least by characters suffering extreme emotional duress. Classical melodrama—melodrama
based around a truly evil villain that victimizes an
innocent, purely good soul—portrays emotional excess in the villain’s
expressions of hatred, envy, jealousy, spite, or malice. Traditionally, particularly
in stage melodrama, these emotions were conveyed through
codified modes of histrionic “overacting” that further accentuated the
quality of excess.
Melodrama also activates various kinds of excess in the spectator’s
visceral responses. A good Hollywood melodrama is one that makes you
cry, or one that arouses strong sentiment, particularly powerful feelings
Meanings of Melodrama 
of pathos. Melodramatic excess is a question of the body, of physical
responses. The term tearjerker underscores the idea that powerful sentiment
is in fact a physical sensation, an overwhelming feeling.6
Over and
above the poignant emotion of pathos, melodrama thrives on stimulating
the sensation of agitation—for example, the physical, visceral thrill
created by situations of acute suspense. Classic cliffhangers (like North
By Northwest, with its literal cliffhanging, or virtually any contemporary
action film), or situations in which the protagonist is unaware of imminent
peril (such as in Rear Window when Lisa searches Thorwald’s apartment
as he is putting his key in the door to enter), or race-to-the-rescue
sequences with life-and-death deadlines (a powerful subgenre since
Griffith’s day), are designed to create a nervous charge in the spectator,
a kind of sensory excess.
Melodrama triggers another variety of agitation as well: the agitation
that comes from observing extreme moral injustice, the feeling of
distress, of being profoundly disturbed or outraged when we see vicious
power victimizing the weak, usually involving some kind of bodily violence.
A waif being battered (as in Broken Blossoms), an animal being
abused (Lassie Come Home), or a mother having her baby torn away
from her by a group of puritanical busybodies (for example, The Mother
and the Law, Way Down East, The Awakening of Helena Richie): such
scenes are designed to generate unbridled agitation, a mode of visceral
excess in the spectator. One could add to this the sensation of intense
hatred. Classical melodrama, particularly on stage, gave the audience the
cathartic pleasure of the very purest, unequivocal kind of hatred, repulsion,
or disdain for the villain. Melodrama was designed to arouse, and
morally validate, a kind of primal bloodlust, in the sense that the villain
is so despicable, hated so intensely, that there was no more urgent gratification
than to see him extinguished. It was this aspect of melodrama’s
visceral and emotional excess that prompted Ludwig Lewisohn, writing
in The Nation in 1920, to associate the genre with the primal brutality
of the mob:
[For the average American] his highest luxury is the mass enjoyment of a
tribal passion. War, hunting, and persecution are the constant diversions
of the primitive mind. And these that mind seeks in the gross mimicry of
melodrama. Violence, and especially moral violence, is shown forth, and
the audience joins vicariously in the pursuits and triumphs of the action.
Thus its hot impulses are slaked. It sees itself righteous and erect, and the
 Meanings of Melodrama
object of its pursuit, the quarry, discomfited or dead. For the great aim of
melodrama is the killing of the villain. . . . The villain, whether tribal
enemy, mere foreigner, or rebel against the dominant order, is always represented
as an unscrupulous rake. He attacks the honor of native women,
and thus—especially if his skin is a tinge darker—there is blended with
the other motives of pursuit the motive of a vicarious lynching party of the
orthodox kind. The melodrama of this approved pattern brings into vicarious
play those forces in human nature that produce mob violence in peace
and mass atrocities in war. Nations addicted to physical violence of a simpler
and more direct kind have cultivated the arena and the bull ring.
Those who desire their impulses of cruelty to seem the fruit of moral energy
substitute melodrama.7
As we will see in chapter 5, the association between melodrama and “the
mob” informed much of the criticism against it, although usually the
simple fact of the mass’s enjoyment of melodrama, irrespective of any
bloodlust, was enough to secure its ill repute.
* * *
Along with excess, another concept merits consideration as the essential
core of melodrama. In an ambitious essay, Lea Jacobs has suggested that
at the heart of melodrama is the element of “situation.”8
Situation is a
rather difficult concept to narrow down, but it could be defined as a
striking and exciting incident that momentarily arrests narrative action
while the characters encounter a powerful new circumstance and the
audience relishes the heightened dramatic tension. Situation often
entails a startling reversal or twist of events that creates a dramatic
impasse, a momentary paralysis stemming from a deadlock or dilemma
or predicament that constrains the protagonist’s ability to respond
immediately. Action might be temporarily suspended when characters
are stunned by shocking news (the villain who has been trying to kill the
heroine is really her uncle who has stolen her inheritance!), or faced with
a deadly peril (the hero looks with alarm as the buzz saw draws ever
nearer), or fixed in a deadlock among counterbalancing forces (the hero
is in a triangular gun standoff threatening death for all if anyone tries to
shoot first—a situation used, for example, in Pulp Fiction). Situation
involves a considerable amount of suspense—suspense about how the
deadlock will be broken, how the protagonist will get out of the plight.
Victorian stage melodrama literalized the aspect of arrested action in the
form of the tableau, in which actors froze in an arrangement that starkMeanings
of Melodrama 
ly revealed the dramatic conflict among opposing parties. A contemporary
counterpart might be the tense immobility just before the commercial
break in a TV soap opera when characters register facial reactions
to some kind of bombshell or stiffen in pensive contemplation of
the current interpersonal state of affairs. The notion of situation also
evokes the serial film’s cliffhanger climaxes where narrative action is suspended
not only while the wide-eyed protagonist assesses a grave peril
but indeed for a full week until the next episode resolves the predica-
ment.
The importance of situation as a peculiar earmark of melodrama is
indicated by the frequency with which the term appeared, sometimes in
quotation marks, in discussions of melodrama. As a critic maintained in
1907: “What people have always come first to care for [in melodrama]
is dramatic situation. . . . They [are] eager to see something happen; they
want to have their emotions stirred, their blood quickened. . . . There is
an abundance, an inordinate abundance, of situation.”9
A 1914 essay
called simply “Ten-Twenty-Thirty” similarly remarked, “There must be
a ‘situation’ . . . two wills clashing together; words that lead and parry,
words with a ‘punch’ behind them.”10
A critic writing in 1919
bemoaned the fact that, “At present the method adopted [in writing
melodramas] would appear to be that some person conceives an abomination
known as ‘a situation’: the more ludicrous and revolting it be the
more he treasures it.”11
While the notion of situation provides a valuable conceptual lens
for examining melodrama, and while it is clearly applicable to a great
many melodramatic moments, one might question whether it can be
generalized as the genre’s essential defining element.12
One problem is
that it is a very broad and malleable concept and the boundary between
a bona fide situation and a more “ordinary” level of dramatic incident is
rather hazy. Situation may be a distinguishing feature of melodrama, but
one could argue that it is the foundation of many other kinds of stories
as well. To this objection one could reply, probably with some justification,
that there is indeed a qualitative difference in the intensity of situation
in melodrama. Perhaps a more difficult problem has to do with
the question of whether situation is in fact a necessary component of all
melodrama. Does it pertain equally well to both classical melodramas
and Hollywood family melodramas and women’s pictures of the
1930s–1950s? What if a narrative does not contain an urgent climax
involving a shocking reversal or revelation, or a deadlock, or a tem
Meanings of Melodrama
porarily immobilizing deadly peril? While Hollywood melodramas may
have high points of strong emotion and swelling music, some might
maintain a more even dramatic tenor, or contain dramatic peaks that are
not sudden, startling, tense, or perilous enough to deliver the kind of
swift, powerful impact distinctive of a situation.
Jacobs is mindful of the need to relate the concept of situation not
only to classical melodrama but to Hollywood melodrama as well. There
is a connection, she suggests, in that the female protagonists of
Hollywood melodrama are characteristically caught in no-win dilemmas
that prevent them from effecting meaningful positive change in their
lives. Drawing on an observation by Thomas Elsaesser, Jacobs notes
that, “Melodrama tends to generate impasses in which the characters are
trapped and find it difficult to take action, to make choices, or to move
directly towards some goal.”13
The connection Jacobs proposes highlights
the element of arrested or suspended action, action made difficult
to implement. There would seem to be a difference, however, between
Jacobs’s original conception of situation as a brief, climactic local instant
of arrested action and the much more diffuse condition of frustration or
futility spanning almost the entire plot of a typical Hollywood melodrama.
An example of the latter would be the premise of Written on the
Wind as described by Elsaesser: “Dorothy Malone wants Rock Hudson
who wants Lauren Bacall who wants Robert Stack who just wants to
die.”14
As I understand her argument, Jacobs would consider this scenario
an example of situation because of the narrative impasse portrayed—the
characters’ inability to fulfill their desires. The definition of
situation appears to have slipped from meaning something roughly
equivalent to a “thrill”—a highly focused charge of narrative excitement—to
meaning something more like an entire scenario. Both classical
melodrama and Hollywood melodrama present human crises, but
the crises are “situational” in different ways. In the latter, they tend to
be more general life crises whose causes span relatively long periods in
the protagonist’s personal history. Although the films may be punctuated
with moments of crisis (for example, people falling down grand stairways
as in Written on the Wind, Gone with the Wind, or La Signora Di
Tutti), in general the situations in Hollywood melodramas do not quite
match the definition of a situation as an intense, climactic plight that is
crystallized in a flash and, after a moment of suspense, broken to allow
another thrill to develop. Although a very productive critical tool, it
remains an open question whether the concept of situation is able to
Meanings of Melodrama 
function as a common denominator or essential element linking all
forms of melodrama.
* * *
An alternative approach toward a definition of melodrama is more
piecemeal and hence less prone to the difficulty of fitting everything
under one umbrella. Rather than looking for a single essence or foundation,
I prefer to analyze melodrama as a “cluster concept,” that is, to
view melodrama as a term whose meaning varies from case to case in
relation to different configurations of a range of basic features or constitutive
factors. If a word has a set range of applicable features, the
meaning of the word in any given instance will depend on precisely
which features come into play, and in what combinations.15
Charting
melodrama’s genealogy has proven so problematic, and the literature on
melodrama is so inconsistent, because over the last two hundred years
the genre’s basic features have appeared in so many different combinations.
An early attempt to define melodrama as a cluster concept was
made by William S. Dye in a 1919 dissertation: “In reality, no one form
of melodrama exists today. . . . A fair definition would include many
characteristics, not all of which might be found in any one play. The
definitions might with truth state that either singly or in combination
[a range of] elements are to be found in melodrama.”16
Dye goes on to
list more than a dozen typical features of melodrama.17
I will focus on
five key constitutive factors (some of which have already been touched
on), although certainly more could be justified, as Dye’s breakdown sug-
gests.
Pathos The presentation of strong pathos (i.e., the elicitation of a powerful
feeling of pity) is, of course, a common element of melodrama,
particularly as it is understood in contemporary film studies. Aristotle
defined pity as “a sort of pain at an evident evil of a destructive or
painful kind in the case of somebody who does not deserve it, the evil
being one which we might imagine to happen to ourselves.”18
This is an
insightful definition. The first part aptly describes the experience of
pathos as a kind of visceral physical sensation triggered by the perception
of moral injustice against an undeserving victim. The second part
touches on the sense in which pathos requires identification, which, by
extension, leads to the notion that pity often (or always?) involves an
element of self-pity. Eric Bentley made this observation very directly:
“The tears shed by the audience at a Victorian melodrama come under
 Meanings of Melodrama
the heading of a good cry. . . . The phrase ‘having a good cry’ implies
feeling sorry for oneself. The pity is self-pity. . . . Most pity is self-pity.
We are identified with those others who are threatened; the pity we feel
for them is pity for ourselves.”19
This conception affirms the degree to
which the power of pathos derives from a process of emotional identification
or, perhaps more accurately, of association, whereby spectators
superimpose their own life (melo)dramas onto the ones being represented
in the narrative. Melodrama is so moving because it hits home.
(Offering support for this notion, students in my melodrama class have
often reported that the first thing they did after our screening of Stella
Dallas was to rush back to their dorm rooms to call their mothers to say
how much they love them and to thank them for all their sacrifices.)
Overwrought Emotion Overlapping the strand of pathos to a very
large degree, but not entirely, is melodrama’s interest in overwrought
emotion and heightened states of emotive urgency, tension, and tribulation.
As a 1914 screenwriting manual says, “in melodrama . . . all emotion
is passion.”20
While the representation of pathos generally involves
this kind of dramatic intensity, not all instances of highly charged emotion
necessarily involve pathos. For example, the intense emotions portrayed
in daytime TV soap operas (jealousy, compassion, envy, greed,
spitefulness, lust, etc.) often involve a melodramatic register of overwrought
feeling (particularly as amplified by soap opera codes of acting
and camerawork) without necessarily depicting the kinds of martyrdom,
miscommunication, or helplessness characterizing pathos. A cinematic
example might be the scene in the Sirk version of Imitation of Life in
which the Meredith daughter (Sandra Dee) confronts her mother (Lana
Turner) with anger/frustration/resentment/disappointment about the
fact that she (Mom) was always too busy with her acting career to really
be there for her as a conventionally nurturing mother. This outburst
is followed by the mother’s own self-defensive reaction of anger/frustration/resentment/disappointment.
The scene is melodramatic in its
expression of raw emotion, the overcoming of repression in a supercharged
climax of full articulation, but there is nothing especially
pathos-inducing about the scene.
Moral Polarization An aspect of melodrama invariably mentioned by
turn-of-the-century critics is an extreme moral polarization between
good and evil—a moral absolutism and transparency in which, in the
Meanings of Melodrama 
blunt phrasing of the 1914 manual cited above, “the hero and the heroine
are very, very good; the villain and the adventuress are very, very
bad.”21
Melodrama’s worldview is simplified; everyone’s ethical status is
immediately legible. As a critic commented in 1907,
The crowd behind the footlights hisses [at the villainness]. . . . She is very
wicked, and the wicked are to be held in derision. That is to say, in melodrama.
In real life it is often difficult to distinguish between the wicked
and the elect; but here,—why her very name is Zidella St. Mar. Can any
good come out of Zidella? [Melodrama offers] dear familiar sentiments of
primitive black and white morality.22
Another critic writing about a decade later reiterated the motif of black
and white moral clarity: “In melodrama black is black and white is
white; and the black is of coal-like hue and the white akin to driven
snow; there are no half-tones in the coloring.”23
The clarity of melodrama’s
moral dichotomy stemmed from “a normal sympathy for virtue
and hatred for vice [that] wants to express itself,—a sympathy which in
real life is often puzzled by circumstances, but which here finds all lines
sharply drawn, all actions clearly labeled upon the stage.”24
Melodrama’s
interest in moral intelligibility reflected, as this writer suggested, a fundamental
human impulse, but it was also an impulse inflected by history.
Many recent scholars (as I discuss in chapter 5) have interpreted
melodrama’s insistence on moral affirmation as a symptomatic response
to a new condition of moral ambiguity and individual vulnerability following
the erosion of religious and patriarchal traditions and the emergence
of rampant cultural discontinuity, ideological flux, and competitive
individualism within capitalist modernity. Melodrama expressed the
anxiety of moral disarray and then ameliorated it through utopian moral
clarity.
Nonclassical Narrative Structure A fourth aspect of melodrama has
to do with what one might call its nonclassical narrative mechanics.
Compared with the classical narrative’s logical cause-and-effect structure,
melodrama has a far greater tolerance, or indeed a preference, for
outrageous coincidence, implausibility, convoluted plotting, deus ex
machina resolutions, and episodic strings of action that stuff too many
events together to be able to be kept in line by a cause-and-effect chain
of narrative progression. This is a dimension of melodrama that bourgeois
critics traditionally have found particularly objectionable. As
 Meanings of Melodrama
Boston newspaper reviews complained about an 1891 production of
The Wolves of New York: “Inconsistency and incongruity play very
prominent parts in this play. . . . Plot is conspicuous only by its almost
utter absence. . . . The spectator goes home with but a vague idea of the
plot which he has seen.”25
Rollin Lynde Hartt reiterated this gripe in
1909: “Conceived as a play, [melodrama] involves non sequiturs, discrepancies,
contradictions; it makes your head swim. . . . No one cares
if there are too many scenes. Nobody cares if the scenes won’t hang
together.”26
In the same vein, Harry James Smith noted in 1907:
To attempt to give an account of the plot would be useless. The more you
examine it, the less there is. There is an abundance, an inordinate abundance,
of situation, . . . but when you try to work out the interrelations
you are doomed to failure. It would take a higher intelligence to answer
all the hows and whys. . . . If your mind is sophisticated enough to insist
on logic, it is bound to be left in some confusion.27
A British touring manager in the late Teens carped:
Modern melodrama is a shapeless, formless thing. . . . Your melodramatist
is ignorant of the rudiments of play-making. The absence of construction
in most of his efforts is amazing: no form, no coherence; a story that lags,
falters half-way, dodges down blind alleys. . . . A main theme that will
carry the play through from beginning to end is hard to find. Without a
backbone, wobble is inevitable.28
And, lest there be any doubt about melodrama’s deviation from the classical
model, Henry Tyrell bemoaned in 1904:
In the bright lexicon of the melodramatic playwright, there are no such
words as “motive,” “character,” or “logical development”; but “scene,”
“startling situation,” “appalling peril and heroic rescue” are writ large. His
world is indeed a strange one, where the impossible is of everyday occurrence;
where miracles come and hunt people up to participate in them;
where it is biff! bang! a constant series of phenomena, without preparation
or proper sequence.29
All these critics point to a melodramatic tendency toward episodic
construction resulting from a greater concern for vivid sensation (or “situation”)
than for narrative continuity. Continuity and “sustained elaboration”
was relatively unimportant in melodrama since, as Hartt put it:
“Each new shocker obliterates its predecessor, and it is precisely this
Meanings of Melodrama 
brevity of perspective that makes a series of unrelated episodes more
facile of interpretation. . . . Make scene depend upon scene and you cruelly
overtask the Neolithic mentality.”30
Although with a somewhat
milder presumption of stupidity, Smith similarly noted the melodrama
audience’s short attention span and anticontemplative nature:
Whatever situation is proposed must come to its culmination rapidly,
directly, and by means which require no thought in order to be fully
grasped. There can be no real plot structure here: only episodes; the situations
presented simply become more and more startling as the play nears its
conclusion.31
Melodrama, Smith stressed, constituted an aesthetic of astonishment, an
aesthetic whose focus on rapid, powerful impressions worked against
measured causal progression. A variation on this notion has become
familiar to recent scholars in the form of “the cinema of attractions.”
Indeed, Smith made an overt connection between popular melodrama
and early cinema. It was no coincidence, he suggested, that the other
amusements preferred by the melodrama audience—vaudeville and
“penny-in-the-slot arcades” (i.e. movie peep-show kinetoscopes)—were
similarly “disjointed and scattering in [their] make-up.”
Sensationalism The final constitutive factor of melodrama I propose
follows from the one just described. Crucial to a great deal of popular
melodrama was sensationalism, defined as an emphasis on action, violence,
thrills, awesome sights, and spectacles of physical peril. This may
have been the term’s key denotation around the turn of the century—
and presumably the one intended for Melodrama in the 1915 Edison
quality-control chart mentioned in the introduction. As Frederic Taber
Cooper noted in a 1906 article entitled “The Taint of Melodrama”: “Ask
the next person you meet casually how he defines a melodramatic story,
and he will probably tell you that it is a hodge-podge of extravagant
adventures, full of blood and thunder, clashing swords and hair’sbreadth
escapes.”32
Christopher Strong, writing in 1912, declared: “The
paranoic who wrote the plays did so because he didn’t know Art from
Hank; he did know that people like action, so he gave them more action
(and of the same sort) than you would find in an asylum full of delirium
tremens fiends and St. Vitus’s dance artists.”33
Melodrama’s classic
iconography, as described by an essayist in 1908, included: “Trap-doors,
bridges to be blown up, walls to be scaled, instruments of torture for the
 Meanings of Melodrama
persecuted heroines, freight elevators to crush out the lives of the deserving
characters, elevated trains to rush upon the prostrate forms of
gagged and insensible girls.”34
A Harper’s Weekly essayist put it concisely
in 1890: “Melodrama . . . must reek with gore.”35
The equating of
melodrama with action and violence was reiterated once again in 1919
by Pennsylvania’s chief film censor: “One speaks of melodrama as meaning
that it in some way is devoted to the exploitation of crime; there is
a good deal of crime in it—a murder or two, some robbery and all sorts
of violence and everything of that kind. That is the basis of a melodra-
ma.”36
At the heart of the sensationalism of classical melodrama was not
simply action and violence but also a peculiar mode of scenic spectacle
that tried to combine amazing sights with credible diegetic realism. As
William S. Dye wrote in 1919,
Melodrama . . . is a play of . . . dire distresses, of hazardous situations, of
thrilling rescues, of theatrical and sensational clap-trap, of suspense and
surprise. . . . Throughout all, there is a liberal use of mechanical and electrical
effects that run the gamut from a representation of a thunder shower
with real rain to a train wreck, a burning steamboat, or an automobile
accident, and heroes and heroines are rescued in the nick of time from
burning buildings or pulled from the very teeth of huge circular saws in
real log-sawing machines, while villains are strapped to switchboards and
light through the bodies the great white ways of cities.37
In chapter 6 I will explore in depth sensational melodrama’s efforts at
spectacular scenographic realism. In the meantime, a brief excursus on
melodrama and realism will help avoid some of the confusion that often
surrounds the issue.
* * *
Discussions of realism and melodrama can get rather convoluted
because several different senses of the word begin to stumble over one
another. In many ways, melodrama is patently antirealist—and critics
never tired of deriding it as “glaringly false-to-life,” “lacking any true
realism,” and so on. Here, realism would denote something basically
akin to “naturalism”—the depiction of ordinary quotidian reality, with
an attempt to portray fully developed, psychologically multidimensional
“real” characters experiencing “real” situations.38
Popular stage melodrama
occupied the other end of the spectrum—its sensational situations
were strikingly out-of-the-ordinary, characters were one-dimenMeanings
of Melodrama 
sional ethical stand-ins, plot twists were highly implausible, acting was
grandiosely artificial, etc. As a critic commented in 1904, “Of any effective
analysis of . . . character motives the yellow drama is utterly and
grotesquely incapable.”39
A critic writing in 1912 concurred:
“Melodrama went on the general principle of taking what was diametrically
opposed to actual life and playing that falsity up with all the
feverish activity of a lunatic asylum.”40
Melodrama offended the aesthetic
sensibilities of cultured theatergoers, who preferred works by
Ibsen and others in “the modern school of [drama], the repressed-quietude-of-realism
sort.”41
“What is wrong with the melodrama of today,”
complained a critic in 1919, “[is that playwrights do not] endeavor to
make it at least an approach to a reflection of life and reality.”42
Melodrama was, according to a 1906 essay, “a series of happenings that
would be impossible in real life, [which] makes you look upon life
through defective lenses that magnify and distort reality to the verge of
caricature.”43
With this background, it might appear incongruous that melodrama
around the turn of the century was often referred to as “the realistic
class of plays.”44
This phrase points to the fact that melodrama immediately
conjured up the aspiration toward spectacular diegetic realism.
That kind of realism, for which A. Nicholas Vardac proposed the term
“Romantic realism,” aimed at credible accuracy in the depiction of
incredible, extraordinary views. A 1916 publicity article entitled “Risks
Life for Realism,” describing a scene in a film serial in which a car drives
across a 35-foot chasm at 60 mph, proclaimed, “It will give a thrill to
the story, and that is what we are after, realism with a big ‘R.’”45
In
chapter 6 I try to refine this conception of realism by distinguishing
between two varieties of spectatorial apprehension, which I call apperceptive
realism and absorptive realism. For now, it will suffice simply to
underscore that sensational melodrama was preoccupied with diegetic
realism in general, which involved both efforts at verisimilar mise-enscène
and the use of real objects on stage—real horses, real fire engines,
real pile drivers, real water, etc. This sort of realism, not surprisingly, did
not assuage proponents of naturalism. As Alan Dale argued in 1899,
“Life is generally neglected in melodrama for the sake of a real lamp
post, a noisy fire engine, or a mimic storm. . . . Real fire engines and
unreal men and women make no appeal to the fastidious.”46
An 1894
review of A Nutmeg Match could barely suppress its contempt:
 Meanings of Melodrama
[This melodrama] was evidently written to appease the yearning among
playgoers for a drama with a real steam pile-driver in it. It was intended
to supply a long-felt want such as those that had been satisfied by the
introduction of real fire engines, real patrol wagons and real locomotives as
stage properties. The author’s task was to take a pile-driver and write a
play around it. . . . Now all the good people who were pining for a real
pile-driver on the stage and declaring that they would never be truly
happy till they had found one there should go and see A Nutmeg Match.
For others, the show possesses only a minor interest. The story is that of a
good man and a bad man, who are enemies and rivals. The bad man is
about to demolish the good man with the pile-driver when a good girl
comes along and saves the good man’s life.47
For proponents of naturalism, spectacular diegetic realism was just
superficial surface realism. It diverted attention from subtler, more
interesting things like character psychology.
Despite melodrama’s unabashed fascination with superficial spectacular
realism, a considerable amount of criticism upholds melodrama
as a genre possessing a kind of profound, beneath-the-surface realism.
As Thomas Elsaesser noted in 1972, “Even if the situations and sentiments
defied all categories of verisimilitude and were totally unlike anything
in real life, the structure had a truth and a life of its own.”48
This
third conception of realism shares with traditions of Platonic philosophy
and Marxist aesthetics (among others) the presumption that true
reality is not to be located in surface appearances. It can be found only
at a deeper level, in the underlying forces governing surface phenomena.
This approach to melodrama points to its power to expose important
underlying dimensions of experience. For example, even though its
characters lack psychological depth, melodrama has been championed
for its capacity to reveal the reality of the psyche. Melodrama overcomes
repression, giving full expression to the magnified passions, the intensities
of love and hate residing deep (or not so deep) within us all. Peter
Brooks has elaborated this notion most fully, but an earlier concise articulation
is from Eric Bentley:
I am arguing, up to a point, that melodrama is actually more natural
than Naturalism, corresponds to reality, not least to modern reality, more
closely than Naturalism. . . . The melodramatic vision is in one sense simply
normal. It corresponds to an important aspect of reality. It is the spontaneous,
uninhibited way of seeing things. . . . Melodramatic acting, with
Meanings of Melodrama 
its large gestures and grimaces and its declamatory style of speech, is not an
exaggeration of our dreams but a duplication of them. In that respect,
melodrama is the Naturalism of dream life. . . . Melodrama is not so
much exaggerated as uninhibited. In The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud says that neurotics, like children, “exhibit on a magnified scale feelings
of love and hatred for their parents.” . . . Any nonmagnified feelings
represent an ideal standard, and what we all have are the magnified feelings
of the child, the neurotic, the savage.49
In a somewhat different vein, melodrama may be said to reveal a basic
existential truth about the human condition. As Clayton Hamilton
observed in 1911:
[In] melodrama . . . the incidents determine and control the character. In
both tragedy and comedy, the characters control the plot. . . Life is more
frequently melodramatic than tragic. . . . Much of our life—in fact, by far
the major share—is casual instead of causal. . . . Nearly all the good or ill
that happens to us is drifted to us, uncommanded, undeserved, upon the
tides of chance. It is this immutable truth—the persistency of chance in
the serious concerns of life and the inevitable influence of accident on
character—that melodrama aims to represent. . . . Since the purpose of the
drama—like that of all the arts—is to represent the truth of life, the theatre
must always rely on melodrama to complete its comment on humanity.50
Melodrama has persisted as a dramatic mode because, in a fundamental
sense, it succeeds in expressing “the truth of life,” capturing a crucial
existential truth, an aspect of life that affects everyone—namely, that,
ultimately, we are all governed by random forces of happenstance. We
are all flotsam and jetsam adrift in the “tides of chance.” In literature this
perspective is particularly evident, as Elsaesser recognized, in Dickensian
melodrama:
What seems to me important in this form of melodrama . . . is the emphasis
Dickens places on discontinuity, on the evidence of fissures and ruptures
in the fabric of experience, and the appeal to a reality of the psyche—to
which the notions of sudden change, reversal and excess lend a symbolic
plausibility.51
The universal force of chance and discontinuity may be a metaphysical
constant, but it is also one with a sociohistorical trajectory. It
loomed large during the rise of modernity, an era defined by cultural
 Meanings of Melodrama
and personal discontinuity, and it possessed particular pertinence for the
working class that comprised melodrama’s core audience. Hartt, in
1909, argued that there was a basic affinity between melodrama and the
volatile nature of working-class life.
In the Grand [i.e., 10–20–30], pray notice, there are many who have had
first-hand—or at least second-hand—acquaintance with the melodramatic.
From among [them] come firemen, policemen, seamen, and those who
gain their bread in trades replete with danger and daring. Meanwhile the
tenement street has its daily melodramas, such as they are,—melodramas
of crime, drunkenness, and frightful vice, though generally lacking the
completeness that would fit them on the stage. . . . The life of the people
gives a tremendous reality to the melodramatic.52
In other words, incongruous as it may sound, sensationalism actually
contains a considerable degree of realism. Melodrama’s sensation scenes
of course surpassed those of ordinary experience (few members of the
audience had dagger fights on the bottom of the East River, or hurtled
off the Brooklyn Bridge after their automobile exploded), but the events
portrayed nevertheless correlated, even if only loosely, with certain qualities
of corporeality, peril, and vulnerability associated with workingclass
life.
* * *
The contrast between blood-and-thunder sensational melodrama—the
melodrama of spectacular diegetic realism—and Hollywood family and
maternal melodrama could not be more marked. Sensational melodrama
had no interest in exploring emotional nuances in the portraiture of
female martyrdom, disillusionment, repression, anxiety, resignation,
and frustration. If the family melodrama can be described as a form in
which, as Sirk said, everything happens “inside”—within a zone that is
doubly “inside,” concentrating on the interior spaces of the home and
the heart—sensational melodrama was distinct in its externalization, its
insistence that everything happen on the outside.53
It virtually eradicated
any characterological complexity, emotional entanglement, or sentiment
in favor of a focus on physical action and violence. Sensational
melodrama externalized psychology by proclaiming obvious, unequivocal
dispositions of villainy, virtue, and valor. At the same time, it externalized
its focus of diegetic interest, avoiding the private sphere in favor
of an adamantly nondomestic mise-en-scène of criminal dens, submarines,
lumber mills, diamond mines, munitions factories, racetracks,
Meanings of Melodrama 
abandoned warehouses, gothic mansions, military front lines, rooftops,
airfields, highways, and railways.
As this contrast suggests, melodrama’s nature as a cluster concept
means that the genre’s key constitutive factors can appear in any number
of different configurations. One might have two completely distinct
combinations—sharing none of the same elements—yet both warranting
the label melodrama. Presumably, sometimes all five elements would
manifest themselves within the same text, but more commonly, only a
few of the factors combined to form particular varieties of melodrama.
Hollywood melodramas of the studio-system era generally involved just
two of the basic elements: pathos and emotional intensification. In fact,
many Hollywood melodramas hinged on the absence of the element
most accentuated in classic stage melodrama—i.e., moral polarization
between good and evil. Hollywood melodramas focused not on the battle
between good and evil characters, but rather on the pathos of situations
of moral antinomy in which two or more morally good (or at least
nonvillainous) characters find that their interests are fundamentally
incompatible. The poignancy of Stella Dallas, for example, derives from
the fact that one sympathizes with the mother and recognizes her goodness
at the same time as one sympathizes with the daughter and recognizes
the validity of her embarrassment about her mother’s poor taste.
The antinomy involves the incompatibility of two ethical imperatives:
preserving the maternal family versus allowing the daughter to achieve
the upward mobility for which she is so obviously suited. Sirk’s
Imitation of Life, in a similar way, involves the pathos of having to
choose between two morally good but irreconcilable options: preserving
the mother-daughter bond between Annie and Sarah Jane versus allowing
Sarah Jane to escape the injustices of racial bigotry. A secondary
(although, as mentioned earlier, somewhat less pathetic) antinomy
opposes Lora Meredith’s professional freedom as an ambitious actress
against her maternal presence in the home—both morally positive but,
in the film’s logic, contradictory values. Written on the Wind also exemplifies
the Hollywood melodrama’s eschewal of moral polarization. Kyle
Hadley, the volatile husband—the person responsible for the wife’s suffering—is
not vilified and punished, but rather pitied as a victim of
alcoholism, depression, and bad parenting. Similarly, the suffering and
loneliness of the Rock Hudson character Mitch Wayne (due to unrequited
love for his best friend’s wife) cannot be blamed on any sinister
force, but rather results from his own moral code that compels him to
honor the sanctity of marriage.
 Meanings of Melodrama
These examples illustrate the degree to which the melodramatic
element of pathos often presupposes the exclusion of the melodramatic
element of moral polarization. In contrast, action-oriented melodramas
often reverse this formula: they present moral polarization without
pathos. For example, serial-queen melodramas like The Perils of Pauline
(1914) and The Hazards of Helen series (1913–1917), which I investigate
in chapter 8, pit nefarious villains against plucky, athletic heroines
that are entirely good but in no way pathetic. Because of their heroic
agency, or at least their eagerness for risky adventure, the serial-queens’
physical victimization never seems to translate into pathos, as it does in
a melodrama like Broken Blossoms where the imbalance of power is more
grossly lopsided and not activated by a voluntarily risk-taking heroine.
As a rule, in action melodramas, villains victimize protagonists—
through abduction, torture, and every form of imperilment—but if the
victimization serves to showcase the protagonists’ bravery and resilience,
they do not really come across as victims. There is no intimation of
weakness or pity, as there is in a pathetic melodrama where the protagonist
suffers physical abuse and emotional distress without the power to
fight back or respond without profound self-sacrifice.
My argument here differs with one made by Linda Williams. She
writes:
Melodrama . . . offers some combination of pathos and action. . . . The
important point is that action-centered melodrama is never without pathos
and pathos-centered melodrama is never without, at least some, action.
The dialectic of pathos and action is a crucial feature of all melodrama. . .
. The study of melodrama has often suffered from the misperception that it
was one or the other of these poles. Melodrama’s greatest interest as a form
is in the dialectic between them.54
I would certainly agree that a great deal of melodrama interweaves
pathos and action. Way Down East, which Williams analyzes, is an excellent
example: there is superabundant pathos in the guiltless heroine’s
victimization and self-abnegation, and an impressive dose of action in
the climactic waterfall-rescue sensation scene. Williams is astute, furthermore,
in stressing that pathos and action serve the same function in
the sense that they both establish moral legibility. It is through situations
both pathetic and/or active that virtue and villainy are designated.
The two are also related as triggers of affective arousal. As Alan Reynolds
Thompson remarked in 1928, with reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
Meanings of Melodrama 
We should not be surprised that the emotional instability that permits sentimentality
makes it possible for the same spectator to feel at the same play
a lust for blood and horror. The liberated pendulum of passion swings
from the one to the other, and unreasoning sympathy for a victim demands
unreasoning hatred for an oppressor.55
Pathos and action both share a power to swing “the liberated pendulum
of passion.”
However, I think it is an overstatement to assert that melodrama
must necessarily incorporate both pathos and action. One need only
think of any James Bond action thriller. I suppose one could say, with a
bit of a stretch, that James Bond is a victim inasmuch as he is the target
of attacks by villains intent on killing him, but his predicaments certainly
never elicit anything that legitimately could be called pathos. The
British playwright and essayist Richard Steele, writing in The Tatler in
1710, articulated the key distinction:
Gallant men who are cut off by the sword move our veneration rather
than our pity, and we gather relief enough from their own contempt of
death to make it no evil [since it] was approached with so much cheerfulness,
and attended with so much honor. [However,] when we let our
thought wander from such noble objects, and consider the havoc which is
made among the tender and the innocent, pity enters with an unmixed
softness, and possesses all our souls at once.56
We pity the perennially powerless who endure pain through no fault or
action of their own. But hardship, abuse, punishment, even death, do
not generate pathos if the victim enters into dangers voluntarily, or
exhibits sufficient strength, skill, and fortitude of will to allow for the
possibility of recuperation, retaliation, or glorification.57
* * *
It is important to recognize that just as one can have melodrama without
pathos, one might also have pathos without melodrama. Although
most narratives that elicit strong pathos are melodramas, they are not
necessarily so. An example that comes to mind is Visconti’s Death in
Venice. The drama of a dying man longing for, and mourning the loss
of, youth, beauty, and impossible erotic plentitude, and particularly the
final scenes in which he tries to disavow his decay through a grotesquely
unsuccessful dandifying makeover, could not possibly be more
poignant and pathetic. Like sentimental melodrama, Death in Venice
 Meanings of Melodrama
revolves around the pathos of desire for unrealizable love, the pathos of
enduring pain caused by forces beyond control, of loss that can never be
regained, of the irreversibility of time.58
Nevertheless, I doubt anyone
would categorize the film as part of the melodrama genre, or even as an
example of a “melodramatic mode.”
Why isn’t Death in Venice a melodrama? This is a difficult question
to answer. To some extent, it may have to do with the naturalism of
Dirk Bogarde’s performance style. While clearly his character is experiencing
emotional turmoil, his expression of emotion (even as underscored
by the emotiveness of the Mahler soundtrack) does not seem
overwrought or excessive relative to his situation. Another explanation,
following Thompson (who follows Clayton Hamilton), might assess the
“universality” of the character’s duress. For these critics, a defining feature
of melodrama is that it preoccupies spectators with immediate sensational
crises that have no broad implications beyond the specific narrative
situation. The spectator is wrapped up in suspenseful agitation
about whether Pauline will escape the buzz saw. Tragedy, on the other
hand, supposedly provokes issues and identifications that have philosophical
or spiritual weight and universal meaningfulness. Tragedy—
and they would see Death in Venice as an example—prompts contemplation
about the nature of the human condition. As Hamilton put it,
tragedy “reveals some phase of the absolute, eternal Truth,” that which
has relevance to humanity as a whole, not just to the specific characters
depicted. While this hypothesis merits further analysis, it is not immediately
convincing because it obviously rests on a number of questionable
assumptions (for example, about the universality of human nature,
about the existence of something called Truth, or about the impossibility
of extracting broad sociopsychological significance from melodramatic
plights).59
A third possible explanation pertains to the complexity of character
psychology. Robert B. Heilman proposes the distinction that melodrama
characters are “whole” or “monopathic”: they are defined by onesided,
unified, unchanging psychological attributes, and the problems
that beset them derive from external forces. Tragedy, on the other hand,
is built around protagonists who are “divided” or “polypathic,” conflicted,
torn between contradictory impulses and imperatives; and the problems
they experience derive from drives within themselves.60
Although
Death in Venice centers around a problem that is, strictly speaking, external
and beyond control (human ephemerality, the impossibility of
Meanings of Melodrama 
reversing time, the painful lure of unattainable beauty), the protagonist’s
situation definitely sets off a complex range of internal anxieties, fears,
passions, doubts, and conflicting impulses. It may be the complexity,
ambiguity, and delicacy of characterization that keeps Death in Venice
from being a melodrama. But then again, considering Hollywood
melodrama’s structure of moral antinomy mentioned earlier, it is perhaps
an oversimplification to suggest that melodramas cannot also feature
the characterological complexity of divided protagonists. Sarah Jane
in Imitation of Life is clearly anguished by her conflicting impulses as a
daughter who loves her mother, and as a young woman refusing to
acquiesce to a pernicious system of racial injustice. Why a film like
Imitation of Life is a melodrama, but a film like Death in Venice is not,
remains an open question.
* * *
Despite some lingering ambiguities, melodrama, I have argued, is a
highly variable but not utterly amorphous genre. It contains works constructed
out of many different combinations of a set of primary features:
pathos, emotionalism, moral polarization, nonclassical narrative form,
and graphic sensationalism. Whereas most film studies work on melodrama
has focused on the first two of these elements, the chapters that
follow concentrate on a form of melodrama that potentially combines
all five elements, but at minimum absolutely requires two—moral
polarization and sensational action and spectacle. Before examining the
nature and history of sensational melodrama in popular-priced theater
and cinema, we begin, in the next two chapters, by exploring melodrama’s
context in a broad sense, focusing not on melodrama specifically
but on the phenomenon of modern sensationalism in general.
 Meanings of Melodrama