14 - Melodrama and the Realist Novel

Summary

This essay argues for ‘melodramatic realism’, comparing it to novelistic realism in several respects. First considering the importance of probability for realism, the essay mounts a defense of the melodramatic happy ending, often taken to be improbable. An exploration of the typed characters of melodrama ends by revealing the ways that typification figures prominently in realist fiction, for purposes of representing a social whole. Both melodrama and the novel contribute to the development of categories of social analysis such as gender, class, nationality, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Finally the essay turns to describe melodramatic realism in detail: its focus on ordinary life; its journalistic reference to ‘real-life’ events; its physiognomic aesthetic of social recognition; its class-inflected forms of speech; its generation of sympathy through music; its pictorial dramaturgy, in particular its use of tableaux that both imitate the real world and emphasise the artifice of that representation; and its representation of psychological interiority. Taking melodramatic realism seriously would lead to revisions in nineteenth-century theatre history and the history of the novel.