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MELODRAMA ON AND OFF THE STAGE
Jim Davis
Since so much has been written about melodrama over the last five decades, there may be a case for arguingthat there is nothing more to say for the moment. Among the most influential books of recent years have been Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination, focussed on French melodrama and its impact on French literature and using a methodology partially based in psycho-analytic theory; Martin Meisel’s Realizations, which links melodrama (and other genres) to the visual arts and the nineteenth-century novel; Elaine Hadley’s Melodramatic Tactics, which demonstrates how melodrama operates as an extra-theatrical force within nineteenth century culture and politics; and Ben Singer’s study of melodrama and modernity and their impact on early cinema.[i] There has also been a considerable amount written about melodrama’s political impact (or lack of it) and debates around the perhaps over-simplified binaries of subversion versus escapism, efficacy versus containment.
In this chapter I want to argue for a more pluralistic view of melodrama and also to suggest that there are still many avenues totally or partially unexplored. Traditionally melodrama has been written about as a national phenomenon. Thus Frank Rahill’s early study The World of Melodrama is carefully divided into sections on French, English and American melodrama, while Michael Booth focuses solely on English melodrama and a number of other studies focus on American or Australian melodrama.[ii] Yet overall, with some notable exceptions, there has been a reluctance to focus on melodrama as a transnational phenomenon and to ask what it means, say, when East Lynne suddenly becomes successful in North America and Australia or Uncle Tom’s Cabin is performed in Britain. Boucicault’s melodramas were, of course, performed and even toured by him internationally and, by the end of the nineteenth century, many other actor managers were very much alive to the potential attraction of good melodramas as vehicles for international touring. Even in discussions of the origins of melodrama there is a case for further exploration of the interactions between French, English and German drama and literature during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
Yet, before following through the notion of melodrama as a transnational phenomenon, it is necessary to be a little clearer about what we mean by melodrama. There has been a tendency among scholars to label as melodramas plays that were not labelled as such by their own authors or by the theatres that staged them. Not all of the plays that we would define as melodrama today were so regarded by their contemporaries. Many were labelled as dramas, nautical dramas, dramatic romances, domestic dramas, temperance dramas or plays, but there is no evidence that their authors or contemporary audiences regarded them as melodramas in any strictly generic sense of the word, although many of these plays share melodramatic characteristics. Moreover, in so far as melodrama as a genre is often defined through character stereotypes, moral absolutes and conventional plot structures, we find that many so-called melodramas defy such simplistic categorisation from John Walker’s The Factory Lad (1832; a domestic drama) to Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (1871; a drama) and Paul Potter’s Trilby(1895; not categorised). Indeed, The Factory Lad raises another problem. Performed for a week at the Surrey Theatre in the 1830s and revived briefly at the Victoria Theatre a few years later, it is both atypical and even insignificant in its impact, but has nevertheless been accorded a lot of arguably disproportionate space in critical discussions of the genre.
Much of what we call melodrama is not really melodrama at all and there is a danger that it has merely become an easy device through which to define and limit our responses to the wide, diverse field of nineteenth-century drama. Equally, the failure by some critics to explain ways in which spectacle and acting style and even the use of music were mandated by the increasing size of theatres from the 1790s onwards can lead to dismissive comments about the drama of the period, even while the impact of these changes on operatic or Shakespearean productions is readily accepted. The rhetorical language and visual appeal of nineteenth-century drama is not out of place in theatres with audience capacity of 3,000 or more, while a scene such as William’s court martial in Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan, which takes a minute to read, actually lasted for ten minutes or more in performance, as the original musical score for the play clearly indicates. Nineteenth-century dramas need to be read carefully by contemporary critics, since the theatres and actors for which they were written, and the musical scores, form the primary footnotes to our understanding of these plays in performance.
The Evolution of Melodrama and the Supernatural
If, despite these provisos, we loosely define many nineteenth-century plays as characterised generically by melodramatic features, we still have to confront a further issue. Melodrama evolved and changed throughout the nineteenth century and, as a genre, demonstrates continual slippage and refashioning and not only through the series of sub-genres that Booth or Rahill define in their studies. If we take the treatment of the supernatural as an example, we might consider the last act of Trilby, in which we learn that a character named Zouzou has passed a disgusting old man in the street, reminiscent of the now deceased Svengali, carrying a portrait. He is quite shaken, for he thinks he has seen Svengali’s ghost. Shortly afterwards a portrait is delivered to Trilby: unveiled, it turns out to be a portrait of Svengali. Even from the grave, it seems, Svengali maintains his hypnotic power over Trilby - the mesmerising power of the eyes in the portrait so overwhelms her that she expires. Whether the power of suggestion is too great or the other worldly, quasi supernatural implications of the ending bring closure, the play concludes with a moment worthy of an M. R. James short story, one that hopefully sends shivers down the spines of its spectators. Yet, If we take a step backwards from the late 1800s to the late 1700s we might find ourselves confronting another spine-shivering moment in M. G. Lewis’s 1797 drama The Castle Spectre, considered by many to be a Gothic harbinger of melodrama. Angela has just confronted Earl Osmond with the poniard with which he killed her mother and caused him to faint. Now she must save her father, but a plaintive voice, with (supernatural) guitar accompaniment, sings to her, informing her that her father is on his way, as folding doors unclose and the oratory is seen illuminated
In its centre stands a tall female figure [her deceased mother], her white and flowing garments spotted with blood; her veil is thrown back and discovers a pale and melancholy countenance; her eyes are lifted upwards, her arms extended towards heaven, and a large wound appears upon her bosom.[iii]
Angela sinks to her knees, then, as the spectre vanishes to an organ swell and full chorus of female voices chanting ‘Jubilate’, enhanced by a blaze of light flashing through the oratory and the clang of the doors closing, she falls motionless on the floor.
Reactions to the use of ghosts in late-eighteenth century drama were polarised between those who saw it as blasphemous and those who saw it as inappropriate in a post-enlightenment age. Subsequently, the use of the ghost in Lewis’s play spawned not only a debate about the legitimacy of using the supernatural in the drama, but also a whole series of imitations in future plays. As a result spectres of all shapes and sizes haunt nineteenth-century British drama, raising the obvious question as to why ghost effects retained their popularity throughout the nineteenth century and the need to move beyond the obvious answer, applicable to The Castle Spectre and much else besides, that the growing demand for spectacle and new developments in stage technology inevitably encouraged this sort of effect. In the light of this one might have expected the Victorians to be more sceptical about ghosts than their predecessors, but the reverse turned out to be the case. Despite scientific and technological progress and the impact of Darwinism, curiosity about, fascination with, as well as investigation of, the supernatural became much more marked, especially on account of the growing interest in spiritualism, mesmerism and the embedding of the tradition, by Dickens, of the Christmas ghost story, as well as ongoing discussions of ghosts and the supernatural in the journals Dickens edited.[iv]
New technologies enhanced the mechanical sophistication of the means by which the appearance and sudden disappearance of supernatural beings could be effected on the stage from the vampire trap devised for J. R. Planche’s 1820 romantic melodrama The Vampire to the Corsican trap devised for Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers in 1852and the first theatrical use of Pepper’s Ghost (dependent on a sheet of plate glass and reflection) in Britannia melodramas in 1863, sensationally superseding the earlier impact of the phantasmagoria displays of the supernatural at the beginning of the century. These all appealed to the visual or ocular senses that are fundamental to an apprehension of the supernatural and which, of course, place theatrical display in a different category from the novel or short story, in which the appearance of ghosts and spectres may be rendered far more ambivalent and uncertain. Once the spectre is made visible, then there is less room for doubt. Thus the ambiguities of Dickens’ Christmas Stories are sacrificed in the many stage dramatisations which give the ghosts a concrete form. Ambivalence makes way for spectacle.
Within the context of modernity the function of the supernatural in the Victorian theatre is arguably more complex than merely providing an excuse for the presentation of special effects. The ghost in the machine (to use the phrase anachronistically for the moment) becomes more interesting than the mechanised ghost, which might anyway prove unreliable. Indeed, the use of special supernatural effects materialised more in plays where the visions or hallucinations were internal, perhaps most famously in Leopold Lewis’s The Bells in 1871, when Mathias sees a vision of his murder, many years before, of a Polish Jew and later a vision of a court scene in which, through the agency of a mesmerist, he is forced to reveal his long suppressed guilt. The possibility that manifestations of the supernatural might, as it were, be in the mind’s eye or in those dream-like, hallucinatory moments between sleeping and waking, had long been discussed by the Victorians and even earlier. In effect, they were the result of physiological and psychological processes, manufactured within the mind of the spectator. Now, as in the instance of The Bells or in the uncanny power of Svengali’s portrait to mesmerise and kill Trilby by some form of auto-suggestion, the supernatural is internalised and we are confronted not so much by haunting but self-haunting. We move into the realm of psychology: it is not mesmerism, but fear of mesmerism, that kills Mathias; it is the hypnotic power of suggestion embodied in Svengali’s portrait, not Svengali’s ghost, that kills Trilby.
Melodrama and Realism
As melodrama evolved, its use of the supernatural evolved too, emerging in more credible or psychologically-driven manifestations. Increasingly, melodrama reflected everyday life. The oppositional way in which the coming of naturalism and realism is often seen as a late-nineteenth century antidote to popular drama fails to grasp that the various categories of drama generically defined as melodrama were grounded in the real. This point is astutely made by Julia Swindells, who argues that the fundamental interest of pre-Victorian drama and melodrama
is in this everyday world of ordinary people, not kings and queens, not the nobility (except for their vices), but the lives and perspectives of factory workers, oppressed wives and daughters, cottagers, farmers and farm labourer, domestic servants and other representative of daily life in Britain.[v]
While one may argue for a wider social basis or bias in the drama of the Victorian period, the fact is that melodrama, however heightened though spectacle, conventional plotting and character stereotyping, works because it is rooted in the real, just as David Wilkie’s pictures of everyday life, Augustus Egg’s narrative paintings or W. P. Frith’s representations of everyday spectacle also appeal because they embody the familiar. Some, like William Bodham Donne, the Examiner of Plays from 1857-74, complained that an obsession with the everyday stifled the imagination[vi], a lament articulated more graphically by Percy Fitzgerald writing in 1870, who noted that even in the theatre we are no longer separated from the objects of everyday life, and ‘meet again the engine and train that set us down almost at the door; the interior of hotels counting-houses, shops, factories, the steam-bats, waterfalls, bridges, and even fire-engines’.[vii]
The real, as Swindells implies, goes deeper than the pictorial representations criticised by Donne and Fitzgerald. A number of studies have demonstrated that melodrama was often rooted in the everyday experience of its spectators and it was even a modus operandi of Victorian society outside of the theatre. This is the persuasive case made by Elaine Hadley in Melodramatic Tactics, arguing for a historicist view of melodrama rather than for an aesthetic or personalised discussion of melodrama as genre. Particularly valuable is her comment on the limitations of Peter Brooks’s influential study, The Melodramatic Imagination:
Brooks’s title articulates our fundamental differences, for in his attribution of melodrama to the imagination—what amounts to a melodrama of consciousness—he locates melodrama within the psyche of the individual. Thus, the rhetoric of melodrama becomes an aestheticized form of psychological expression and its tropes a series of psychic pressure points that move melodrama out of history and, occasionally, into pathology.[viii]
For Hadleigh the melodramatic mode ‘erupts throughout nineteenth-century public life, often as ‘a reactionary rejoinder to social change’.[ix] Hadley sees this mode as operative verbally and non-verbally, often theatrically reinforcing traditional values and social formations, to which stage melodrama is a contributing factor. The melodramatic mode, in Hadley’s view, is not discursive, but nevertheless contributed to the shaping of nineteenth-century society. Even if, in real life, the villain, embodying ‘all the evils of modernising Victorian capitalism’, won in the end and rewrote nineteenth-century history from his own perspective, the ‘melodramatic mode’ provides a multiple and more variegated manifestation of the ‘conflict, struggle, unmanaged excess, insistent variety in the historical record’.[x]
Hadley provides a sophisticated approach to the relationship of melodrama with nineteenth-century life, one that liberates us from too close an engagement with romantic individualism and psychoanalytic theory as key elements of the genre and its applications. Ben Singer has also argued for a recognition that melodrama is neither anti-realist nor confined to the superficially external realism evoked by realistic scenery and objects, but that by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the sensation scenes of melodrama, reflecting the cultural and personal discontinuities of modernity, contained a considerable degree of realism, insofar as the events portrayed ‘correlated, even if only loosely, with certain qualities of corporeality, peril and vulnerability associated with working-class life’.[xi] That melodrama is a means of coming of terms with modernity or certainly provides ways of dealing with is complexities takes us in the direction of Jacky Bratton’s broader notion of the ‘contending discourses’ of melodrama’.[xii] Melodrama, in her view, enabled its spectators to negotiate change in a period of imperialism, industrial growth and socio-economic instability, often through the use of contrast, humour and irony. Again the emphasis here is on melodrama from a cultural materialist and historicist perspective, acknowledging the ambiguities and complexities of its interaction with everyday life and experience.
Melodrama’s engagement with the quotidian is prevalent in many of the plays categorised within the genre. Both Tom Taylor’s The Ticket of Leave Man (1863) and Colin Hazlewood’s The Casual Ward (1866) have provoked essays specifically on their relationship to everyday life.[xiii] The latter play, based on James Greenwood’s sensational series of essays ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, published in the Pall Mall Gazette[xiv], was staged simultaneously at the Marylebone, Britannia and Whitechapel Pavilion Theatres: the Marylebone production even featured one of the workhouse inmates described in the Greenwood articles, ‘Old Daddy’, among its cast. Punch (17 March, 1866) denounced this mania for realism as tasteless, while All the Year Round was equally condemnatory.[xv] Yet the depiction of the casual word on stage was praised in many reviews and the humiliating experiences of new inmates, as described by Greenwood, were also incorporated into the script. At a time of chronic unemployment, an increase in sweated and casual labour, growing poverty and economic instability, it is neither surprising that over 100,000 paupers sought relief from parish charities in the metropolitan areas of London in the last week of April 1866 or that the play should attract audiences in the predominantly working-class neighbourhoods to the west and the east of London, when it was first staged. Hazlewood is among those dramatists who, however faithful to the conventions of melodrama and the expectation of a happy ending, frequently demonstrate the injustices and inequalities of working class life, as, for example, in The Work Girls of London (1864).[xvi] Yet the happy ending of melodrama, with its seeming endorsement of a benevolent providence and emphasis on ‘affect’, is one that, I believe, should be read with a certain degree of irony. The exigencies of plotting should not be allowed to undermine the realism that is often a concomitant aspect of melodrama, however benign its endings. Indeed, many melodramas do not end happily, as we have already seen in the cases of The Bells and Trilby. John Walker’s The Factory Lad and Douglas Jerrold’s Mutiny at the Nore (1830) both end bleakly, as does the perennially popular East Lynne.