Melodrama, or: Life Among the LowlyWednesday, January 22

Origins of Melodrama•First full-length play to be called a “mélo-drame”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762, first performed 1770); so-called because it consisted of speech accompanied by music. French pantomime plays set to music were also sometimes called “mélo-drame.”

•The playwright who set the formula for the melodrama genre: René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1884), whose first big hit was Coelina, or The Child of Mystery (1800).

•Melodrama at a time of tremendous popular unrest (roughly 1800 to 1870), which created a hunger for stories that catered to popular tastes and vindicated the beliefs and fantasies of “regular folk.”

Features of the Melodramatic Formula• Heavy reliance on textual borrowing and uncredited adaptation—plots

lifted from novels, operas, narrative poems, history, and other plays.

• A set of stock roles, including the virtuous, persecuted heroine; the hero; the villain (almost always a corrupt authority figure—judge, landlord, banker, military officer, aristocrat); the kindly old man; the clown.

• Five-Act Structure, with each Act ending in a tableau.

• At least one “sensation scene”—an eye-popping action scene with expensive visual effects and stage machinery (the tenement fire in The Poor of New York, Eliza crossing the ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

• An ending in which the villain is punished, the virtuous characters are vindicated, and a clear moral lesson is articulated.

Melodrama, Fairgrounds, and Variety Theatres

Images of the Foire St. Germain, Paris

The “Boulevard of Crime”• Nickname of the Boulevard du

Temple in Paris, where most of Paris’s popular theatres stood from the 1780s until the 1860s.

• Many of these theatres were founded by performers who moved indoors after the Foire St. Germain burned down.

• In addition to theatres showing melodramas, there were follies, puppet theatres, street acrobats, curiosity booths, and a wax museum.

Louis Daguerre’s photo of the Boulevard du Temple, 1838

Influences Outside of Theatre• Gothic Fiction (Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis)

• Swashbuckling novels (Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas)

• Sentimental novels (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise)

Sentimentalism• The belief that unfettered emotion—especially love—

is a more powerful positive moral force than reason.

• Sentimentalists asserted that individuals naturally possess a moral intuition that is sharpened by art that appeals to their moral sensibilities and dulled by “civilizing” influences that detach people from “nature.”

• Unlike classical thought (e.g., Seneca), it associates emotionalism with strength and goodness rather than with moral weakness.

Melodrama and Early Tabloid Culture• A large proportion of melodramas

in France, England, and the US were based (usually quite loosely) on recent news events or urban legends.

• Favorite topics included stories about bandits, pirates, housebreakers, and scandalous murders. The market in “penny dreadful” books and tabloids fueled interest in these stories.

• Usually, the real events would be adapted into a story that at least loosely fit the accepted melodrama recipe.

Criminal justice itself was a kind of theatre in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and criminals were among the first modern celebrities.

Melodrama and the Working-Class Hero

The growth of melodrama roughly coincides with the growth of the modern labour movement following the industrial revolution.

Melodrama introduces the still popular formula of pitting poor or dispossessed “underdog” heroes and heroines against rich villains.

While politically reactionary melodramas existed, melodrama tended to privilege republican values over aristocratic ones.

A still from a US production of Douglas Jerrould’s Black-Eyed Susan

Melodrama and MemorabiliaTouring melodramas were often accompanied by sideshows. Some of these featured relics or memorabilia from the real-life stories that they “truthfully” depicted. Right: relics

associated with the infamous “Red Barn Murder,” a popular subject of English melodrama

Above: a book purportedly made from the skin of murderer and corpse thief William Burke

The Moral Universes of Tragedy, Medieval Drama, and MelodramaTragedy Medieval Drama

(Morality and Mystery Plays)

Melodrama

Powerful individuals are punished when their own errors in judgment lead to catastrophe.

Humans are oppressed by earthly powers, but Christ judges all equally in the end.

Natural goodness is persecuted/misjudged by power, but virtue overcomes all obstacles in the end.

Gods are proud and capricious schemers; obeying may conflict with other moral imperatives.

God is the ultimate source of morality and order in the universe.

Virtue is often described with religious terminology, but God is absent—human virtue prevails over human vice.

Wants to evoke pity and fear to make you think more about difficult social or philosophical problems

Wants to save your soul by teaching you how to avoid damnation on Judgment Day

Wants to make you kinder to your neighbor by appealing to your tender sensibilities.

Tableaux and Dioramas in 19th-Century Visual Culture

Dutch allegorical tableau vivant from the 1850s

Tableaux and Dioramas in 19th-Century Visual Culture

Tableaux and Dioramas in 19th-Century Visual Culture

Louis Daguerre’s diorama theatre (Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS)