Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Louise McReynolds is Professor of History at the University of Hawai'i.

Joan Neuberger is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas.

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"Melodrama bore all the defects and virtues of its parent, the French Revolution. Given to wild flights, neck-breaking twists and turns, stark judgements of good and evil, the genre also brought public attention onto private life and the vicissitudes of underprivilege. Melodrama taught much to the Russians who appropriated it. As the contributors to the present volume demonstrate, it taught them how to see, to understand and even how to accomplish history. An imitator surely, but also a creator of life--we can all be grateful to Neuberger and McReynolds for bringing this to our attention."--James von Geldern, Macalaster College

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Imitations of Life

Duke University Press

Chapter One

Imported Melodrama in the Twilight of Serfdom

O, So Melodrama!

Traditional soviet readings of melodrama were not much different from the older, simple ones written in the western world. The Theater Encyclopedia of thirty years ago offered an elitist and politicized discussion of melodrama-barely admitting the genre's existence in Russia. Melodrama's cardinal sin was that its alleged concern for the poor and the weak was offset by an affirmation of the "bourgeois" order and a preachy message of class peace. The genre thus masked real, systemic social evils behind a war between abstractions of good and evil. In actuality, the opposite may have been the case: Russian audiences who regularly saw legally permitted productions about the struggle of the poor and the weak against the rich and the strong in a secular setting may have become as attuned to social evils as did the far fewer readers of antiserfdom novels and essays. In any case, there is no denying melodrama's enormous popularity in the last half century of serfdom when it flourished on the Russian stage.

Today's viewers come equipped with a well-established antimelodrama lexicon bulging with as many cliches as are found in the genre itself. In a world where horse opera has been with us for a century and soap opera for seventy years, it is not hard to be "sophisticated" about melodrama. Even some of its avid consumers utter the word as a sneer. Original melodrama as it emerged out of the French Revolution, the storm and stress of early romanticism, and "bourgeois sentimentalism" had its instant critics, but not a long history of dismissal. Melodrama was born on stage-a story in dialogue spoken by actors, visually decorated, and accompanied by music. The European public enthusiastically devoured vaudevilles and melodramas along with operas-many of which had melodramatic story lines. All evidence shows that audiences enjoyed the wonderfully outrageous plots. They identified with characters, wanted a certain plausibility, and accepted colorful exaggeration of that plausibility. When the genre was young, consumers of all classes were able to suspend disbelief. One did not have to be a gruff merchant or a poor clerk to immerse oneself in the toils of Pixerecourt or Kotzebue or Scribe.

In melodrama, certain character types and situations recur constantly. A useful typology, although not rigorous or unfailing, suggests the melodramas of the grotesque, the adventure, and the family setting. The first drew on gothic novels of the eighteenth century, ruled in the "bloodbath theater" of London, and culminated at the turn of the twentieth century in the Paris Grand Guignole. The "cape and sword" adventure journeyed out to exotic places and back to historical times imagined. The family or domestic melodrama differed, and still does, from these two. In fact a more basic division lies between the melodrama of effect (or action) and that of affect (or emotion)-or, more bluntly, that of blood and that of tears. The gender appeal for the latter seems clear, and the playwrights of the age were fully aware of the growth of female audiences everywhere. Of the three works I will discuss, the Kotzebue domestic melodrama is of the second type and the two French pieces are of the first. Each partook of the other's modes; and all employed sensational devices. These devices were especially effective-because unexpected-in the family or domestic play, whose finale was often acted out in a wild place-from the mountains of Savoy in Pixerecourt's Coelina (1800) to the rushing ice floes of D.W. Griffith's film Way Down East (1920).The sensation could also be provided in the gritty urban version of domestic melodrama by a contrastive visit to back alleys and slums.

Melodrama is replete with much-scorned coincidences, with deus ex machina, and with the tricks of switched babies, mistaken identities, and the stirring moment of reconnaissance, or discovery of true identities. Such features are also found in classic drama, but in melodrama, justice-usually poetic-triumphs, wrongs are righted, and villains are punished. Tragic catharsis, the property of high art, never occurs. In the moral sphere, early European melodrama effected a transfer of revolutionary virtue and justice and populist values to the stage. Added pathos arose from inflicting evil on the already afflicted-the poor, the female, the weak, the child, the orphan, the blind, the deaf, the slave, the convict. The villains could come from outside the law-bandits and pirates; or they could emerge, slimy and unambiguously wicked, from respectable social milieux. A recurring conflict was that between a maiden ready to sacrifice her life to preserve her purity and the villain who falsely denounces her after his sexual advances are rebuffed. This surely resonates with Christian hagiography: Saints Agatha, Lucia, Margaret, and many others were martyrs not only to their faith but to the frustrated lust of men who brought about their deaths.

Scholars of great drama enjoy the advantage of being able to supplement textual study with live performance, however different the present versions are from the originals. It is now almost impossible to see melodramas of bygone days on stage. There is no market in the theater, and no interest in the academy. Historians must thus be doubly alert to what audiences might have seen and heard when melodramas were performed, including the setting, the seating, and the theater building itself. Stage effects in the more successful houses played for sensation: exotic locales and elaborate machinery imitating warships, fortresses, grottoes, alpine crevices, jungles. When the taste for historical, biblical, and mythological themes declined, more weight was given to urban contemporary settings, particularly in the 1840s in France under the influence of Eugene Sue's novel Mysteres de Paris. Acting styles are hard to imagine even when we have script notes: the story was told by declamation, exaggerated gestures, coded movements, tirades, soliloquies, and asides-in which, for example, the villain would confide to the public his evil designs. A feel for the style may be gotten by watching the silent film melodramas of the 1910s.

Music is often overlooked in theater history, and it is all but gone today on the drama stage where it was a vital component in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's incidental music to Goethe's Egmont and Mendelssohn's to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream was the fruit of a common practice even in high drama. Melodrama always used music, not only in the overture to get people seated but to signal entrances, exits, and dramatic moments; and as a means for emotional and character underlining-a plaintive flute for the innocent heroine, growling double basses to announce the villain, a lively tune for the comic. These devices were drawn straight from German musicological doctrine of the eighteenth century, a code known as Affektenlehre according to which minor slow meant elegiac; major slow, majestic; major fast, vigorous and triumphant; minor fast, menacing. This code guided composers of nineteenth-century...