Contents: 1 introdiction 2

1.3 The Melodramatic Vision

Melodrama is particularly well suited as a form for the exposition of ideas because of its clarity of outline and coherence of vision. It is, Michael Booth observes,
a dream world inhabited by dream people and dream justice, offering audiences the fulfillment and satisfaction found only in dreams. An idealization and simplification of the world of reality, it is in fact the world its audiences want but cannot get…. One of the great appeals of this world is clarity: character, conduct, ethics, and situations are perfectly simple, and one always knows what the end will be, although the means may be temporarily obscure.
Recognizing the realistic novel as a melodramatic “dream world” accounts for its simplicity of characterization, its reliance upon one or two motivating forces to propel its plots, the repeated employment of coincidence in and the polarized arrangement of its action, and the frequency of romantic subplots and stilted dialogue—all of which have been disparaged as “flaws” by critics who see realism as a variation of realism. If one approaches the realistic novel as an extension of realism—as realism intensified or as realism that focuses on environmental determinism—then of course all of the above “excesses” diminish the realism of the fictional portrayal. But to understand realistic art as a projection of the melodramatic vision is to account for these characteristics and to explain their place in this fictional world. The realistic imagination does not intend to offer an “objective” depiction of theworld but an interpretation or recreation of the forces that control that world. As Frank Norris recognized in “The Novel with a ‘Purpose,’” the realistic novel is not a novel that shows us something; it is a novel that “proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man”.
This desire to “prove,” to show how the world and its universal laws operate, is the motive of the melodramatist, not of the realist. As most scholars of melodrama have recognized, melodrama is a didactic genre that reaffirms social and family order. Melodramatists stereotype their characters to demonstrate the universality or “justice” of social norms. David Grimsted, in his exhaustive survey of American melodrama up to 1850, describes the conceptual paradigm of melodrama as being “the victory of the forces of morality, social restraint and domesticity over what was dark, passionate, and anti-social” .Thus the inevitable triumph of the hero, the fall of the villain, the preservation of chastity. Departures from the formula rarely occurred, and if they did, plots were arranged to explain the anomaly and to reaffirm the social norm. If, for example, the heroine’s purity was sullied, shehadto die by the play’s end in order to maintain melodrama’s insistence upon clear moral values. As playwright Bronson Howard blithely announced, “The wife who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate herself in the world of art on this side of the grave; and so an audience looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman” (“The Autobiography of a Play,” qtd. in Quinn 45).
While the naturalists seldom depicted plots that end happily and reaffirm the “social and family order,” the didactic conceptual paradigm underlying melodrama—the belief that nature’s laws are comprehendible and inevitable—also extends to the realistic novel. One of the distinctions between realism and realism is that the former typically “observes” life, depicting the details of the commonplace without overt moralizing or authorial commentary, while the latter frequently moralizes or sets out to demonstrate a particular thesis. Realism, like melodrama, is therefore a literature of propaganda. As a literature with a purpose, to adapt Norris’s phrase, realism often employs the dichotomies and dramatic techniques of melodrama to articulate its thesis. Thus the prevalence of the sensational in plots, the emotional excesses in dialogue and characterization, the gothic portrayals of character, and the overt pronouncement of doctrine. In Sister Carrie (1900), for example, Dreiser frequently halts his narrative to explain why events are unfolding as they are. A well-known instance occurs at the beginning of chapter8, where Dreiser argues for the random quality of life, its essential purposelessness, in the polarities of melodrama:
Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason…. We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil….
In Carrie—as in how many of our worldlings do they not?—instinct and reason, desire and understanding, were at war for the mastery. She followed whither her craving led. She was as yet more drawn than she drew.
Such overt expression of Spencerian doctrine shows little difference as a narrative device from the melodramatic soliloquy; in both realism and melodrama, the authorial intrusion clarifies the values the work is promoting by making explicit the issues involved.
Recognizing the melodramatic quality of realism also enables us to account for other rhetorical strategies of realism usually dismissed as lapses in aesthetic judgment or as inconsistencies in conception. For example, few critics can resist disparaging the melodramatic ending of McTeague where Marcus Schouler handcuffs himself to McTeague moments before the dentist kills him. Comments range from that of Charles C. Walcutt, who reads the novel as ending “in outlandish melodrama rather than a controlled demonstration of inevitable consequences” , to Carvel Collins, who terms the increase of melodramatic elements of the final chapters “excessive” (xviii), to Richard Chase, who sees the essentially melodramatic form of the novel but tends to deride it as “forced” and “meretricious” .
The ending of McTeague borrows from melodrama the device of the tableau, a climactic silent arrangement of actors that offers a symbolic picture of the preceding conflict. In such scenes of stasis, Peter Brooks observes, “we grasp melodrama’s primordial concern to make its signs clear, unambiguous, and impressive” (48). The advantage of the tableau is that it impresses on the audience the didactic point of the drama; a form of dramatic resolution, it is as essential to the melodrama as is the expositional soliloquy that expresses the thematic values of the play. In the closing paragraphs of McTeague, Norris sketches the final confrontation between Marcus and McTeague in the fictional equivalent of the tableau:
As McTeague rose to his feet, he felt a pull at his right wrist; something held it fast. Looking down, he saw that Marcus in that last struggle had found strength to handcuff their wrists together. Marcus was dead now; McTeaguewas locked to the body. All about him, vast, interminable, stretched the measureless leagues of Death Valley.
McTeague remained stupidly looking around him, now at the distant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison.
The scene is not an instance of mere “melodramatic excess” because the “signs” in this scene— the handcuffs, the two men, one live, one dead, the wasteland of Death Valley, and especially the canary imprisoned in its imitation gold cage—depict the normative values of the story in a final stasis. We readers recognize the efficacy of the signs, for they portray the abstractions of greed, jealousy, moral imprisonment, and fate in a final resolution, a symbolic image denoting the ironic futility of attempts to escape one’s elemental nature and environmental influences. The scene is certainly melodramatic, but it effectively conveys the values and imaginative framework within which this fiction exists.
The naturalists’ adaptation of melodrama also extends to their portrayal of character. The melodramatic hero is an essentially unified character, undivided by the complexities of conflicting motives or values. Indeed, characters typically lack psychological complexity—the villain is merely the personification of lust, avarice, or cruelty, an integer to set off the hero’s honesty, fortitude, and bravery and the heroine’s purity, dutifulness, and charity. “In this quasi-wholeness,” Robert B. Heilman observes, the melodramatic character “is freed from the anguish of choice, and from the pain of struggling with counterimpulses that inhibit or distort his single direct ‘action’” (84–85). This is not, however, to say that the “monopathic” character’s motivation may not be complex, or that he or she may not vacillate between conflicting obligations, or that there are no alternatives presented. The typical dilemma in much melodrama, for example, is the heroine’s choice between duty and passion—whether to obey her parents’ (usually her father’s) wishes or to follow her own desire to marry her lover. But the conflict is imposed from without; the heroine is never torn between an ethical determination to remain virginal and a conscious desire to experience sex. She is simply faced with some external obstruction that momentarily frustrates her ability to choose the correct course of action. Similarly, the melodramatic villain does not ponder the moral or ethical choice between altruism and self-interest. He is aware of but one desire, though circumstances may frustrate his acting on it. For the melodramatic character, there is no mixture of contradictory motives, no true moral or ethical dilemma of which he or she is conscious.And to maintain the character’s singleness of purpose, the melodramatist usually orchestrates any conflict of motive so as to invalidate the dilemma by letting the choice occur through chance or unexpected revelation. As a result, there is no true anxiety attached to the choice, no incapacitating anguish, no psychological self-betrayal.
Rather than simply accept, as the melodramatist does, the moral nature of people as an ethical given—as a “moral abstraction,” to use David Grimsted’s phrase —the naturalists focus much of their narrative on the causal forces that determine behavior. Yet the naturalist rarely attempts to portray a complex mental psychology that we would recognize as “modern”—a psychology that attempts to depict the conditional, to register the density of motive and its complex interrelations, and above all to render the uncertainty reflective of modern consciousness. For the naturalists, casual explanations for human motivation are typically reductive. Their portrayals of behavior concentrate on such externals as socioeconomic forces or elemental emotions of greed, lust, or ambition rather than indecision and reflective consciousness.
Even such works as Martin Eden, McTeague, and Vandover and the Brute, while locating scenes of conflict within the protagonist’s mind, do not really vary the basic melodramatic ascription of behavior to a set of basic causes, nor do they attempt to render the complexity of character. The oft-noted scene in McTeague, where the dentist battles the brute within while Trina lies unconscious in his dental chair, illustrates the naturalist tendency to depict mental conflict in terms of the clash of elemental forces rather than through reasoned choices:
Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring.
It was a crisis—a crisis that had arisen all in an instant; a crisis for which he was totally unprepared. Blindly, and without knowing why, McTeague fought against it, moved by an unreasoned instinct of resistance. Within him, a certain second self, another better McTeague rose with the brute; both were strong, with the huge crude strength of the man himself. The two were at grapples. There in that cheap and shabby “Dental Parlor” a dreaded struggle began. It was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world—the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted, and the simultaneous arousing of the other man, the better self that cries, “Down, down,” without knowing why; that grips the monster; that fights to strangle it, to thrust it down and back.
While Norris does depict conflicting motives—the brute versus the better self—McTeague is passive; he has little agency; and while he cries, “‘No, by God! No, by God!’” the elemental force of desire obviates choice: “Suddenly he leaned over and kissed her, grossly, full on the mouth.” McTeague lacks the capacity to comprehend moral choice, just as he is powerless to resist the force of instinct: “its significance was not for him,” Norris writes. “To reason with it was beyond him. He could only oppose to it an instinctive stubborn resistance, blind, inert” .Heilman’s distinction between the tragic and the melodramatic hero is helpful in understanding the aim of the naturalist. The distinguishing characteristic of the tragic character, Heilman suggests, is his divided mind:
he is caught between different imperatives each of which has its own validity, or … he is split between different forces or motives or values. In other words, his nature is dual or multifold, and the different competing elements are present at the same time, are operative in the dramatic situation, and are known to us as realities that have to be reckoned with.
By “competing elements,” Heilman means that a character’s motives or values present him or her with irreconcilable alternatives. Macbeth is prompted to murder by his avaricious desire to attain the crown, yet he hesitates to act because he knows that such an act undermines what that crown represents. Macbeth is a divided character; his motives are in conflict, and no single motive or value explains or accounts for his behavior. Moreover, he is always conscious of his alternatives and vacillates between them.
In the realistic novel, as in the melodrama, characters are essentially whole.
McTeague does not experience any meaningful self-awareness; he is only dimly conscious of conflicting desires; he is propelled by a single force, a latent atavism that manifests itself in instinctive, physical desires. Norris, it is true, details the operations of this atavism, but McTeague remains unchanged at the novel’s conclusion, essentially the same as when the novel began. Similarly, Martin Eden’s strength of will never wavers—he never exhibits any real self-doubt of his intellectual abilities; the obstacles he faces are imposed by others, not by inner vacillation. Vandover is perhaps realism’s best claim to a fully developed character in the modern sense in that at times he approaches self- awareness:
And with the eyes of this better self he saw again, little by little, the course of his whole life, and witnessed again the eternal struggle between good and evil that had been going on within him since his very earliest years. He was sure that at first the good had been the strongest. Little by little the brute had grown, and he, pleasure-loving, adapting himself to every change of environment, luxurious, self-indulgent, shrinking with the shrinking of a sensuous artist-nature from all that was irksome and disagreeable, had shut his ears to the voices that shouted warnings of the danger, and had allowed the brute to thrive and to grow.
But even here, Norris has depicted Vandover’s marginal consciousness in melodramatic dualities; Norris has merely shifted the usual external battle between forces of good and forces of evil to Vandover’s mind. Vandover does have some consciousness of the brute within and of his “artist-nature,” but Norris paints him as the passive observer of his own degradation into the brute. Vandover is completely helpless to make an effective choice between his two natures; he is not free to act upon his self-awareness.
Although Norris prolongs the decline of his protagonist and allows him to be aware of his own decline, Vandover’s behavior reveals Norris’s essentially melodramatic conception of the world and of his characters’ place in it. In the realistic novel, as in the melodrama, characters are polarized both in their depiction and in their actions. Garland’s farmers are on the side of right, the land speculators on the side of wrong; the former are motivated by the dream of success and the work ethic, the latter by greed. McTeague is an ignorant and unconscious but sympathetic everyman; he is blocked from achieving happiness by his own brute nature and by Trina’s greed and by Marcus Schouler’s jealousy.
Instead of portraying psychological complexity, the naturalist exteriorizes conflict, as does the melodramatist, in what Peter Brooks terms “a drama of pure psychic signs—called Father, Daughter, Protector, Persecutor, Judge, Duty, Obedience, Justice”. Multiple motivations, in the sense of causal determinants, may be ascribed to the characters, but the causal forces are seldom in conflict with themselves and, more important, the characters are seldom aware of the existence of potential conflict. In short, while the realistic imagination often seeks to explain human behavior by attributing actions to several causes (such as Trina’s greed and her masochism; McTeague’shereditary drive, his stupid passivity, and his fierce irritability; Schouler’s jealousy and his vengefulness), the characters lack the ability to alter their course of action. To be a “monopathic” character—that is, to enjoy a “singleness of feeling that gives one the sense of wholeness” (Heilman 85)—is not necessarily to be unaware of choice or not to choose. Lee Clark Mitchell points out that while naturalist characters do have choices and do choose, they can never refrain from acting as their desires compel them to act, even if they have resolved to act otherwise (8–9). Vandover, for example, many times resolves not to give in to the brute, but time and again his self-indulgence and his “pliable nature” compel him to ignore his own resolve. Carrie Meeber knows that social morality proscribes living with a man without marriage, but her pliable and comfort-loving nature causes her to “drift” passively while stronger natures choose for her.
If the naturalist shares with the melodramatist a tendency to see the world in terms of a Manichaean struggle between opposing forces, the naturalist also tends to depict this struggle in allegorical terms. In melodrama, characters function as types representing abstractions: the hero typifies virtue, fidelity, fortitude, patience, and so forth; the villain represents greed, lust, heartlessness; the heroine, chastity, purity, domesticity, obedience. The naturalist tends to borrow from melodrama this allegorical typing to depict people and their conflicts as concrete manifestations of abstractions. The naturalists were likely attracted to melodrama because of its ability to depict what Peter Brooks terms “the moral occult.” In tracing the melodramatic nature of much of Balzac’s and James’s fiction, Brooks argues that their “deep subjects, the locus of their true drama,” is “the domain of spiritual forces and imperatives that is not clearly visible within reality, but which they believe to be operative there, and which demands to be uncovered, registered, articulated” (20–21). This interest in making the unseen visible, in exposing the hidden forces that motivate human interaction, thus leads the naturalists to adopt the methods of melodrama, with its clear visual enactments of right and wrong, justice and injustice, duty and passion, charity and exploitation.
Melodrama therefore becomes an ideal vehicle for the exposition of ideas—the naturalist can embody the idea in a character or in a conflict to reveal, dramatically and emphatically, the meaning of the idea as it impinges upon human lives. In Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw,” written to advocate Henry George’s doctrine of the single-tax as an equitable solution to the injustice of land speculation, the melodramatic conflict between landholder and tenant is only the concrete embodiment of the clash of two ideas. The farmers are heroic toilers of the soil, the principle of labor exerted to increase the value of property; the landholder, Jim Butler, is the heartless villain, the exploitation of labor to yield unearned increment of profit. The characters are types, representing honest labor and dishonest gain. To increase our sympathy with the farmer, Garland even adopts the language of melodrama, explicitly identifying the farmers with the forces of good: “There are people in this world who are good enough t’ be angels, an’ only haff t’ die tobeangels,” Haskins says of the charitable Stephen Council .
The “distinct value” of melodrama, Peter Brooks observes, is that it is “about recognition and clarification, about how to be clear what the stakes are and what their representative signs mean, and how to face them” . Realism, then, at its core expresses a melodramatic vision of human beings at the mercy of forces over which they have little control but whose purpose is ultimately intelligible. The predominant characteristic of the melodramatic vision, I have suggested, is a tendency to see the world in terms of a polarized conflict between representatives of some simplified set of ideas. Such a cosmic melodrama occurs not only in the various allegories of “good” versus “evil” so characteristic of traditional stage melodrama, but also in the novels of naturalists such as Garland, Norris, London, and Dreiser.