Melodrama is usually thought of as an inferior genre. It pits bad people against good ones, as if it were not a simplification to separate people in that way. Melodrama also has exaggerated emotions which people dwell on for much too long and present themselves as victims rather than as active participants in their own lives, and so lose or lessen their dignity. Moreover, melodramatic plots are resolved by arbitrary intrusions of coincidence or derring do, when what ordinarily happens is that people work their way through circumstances and character. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is melodrama because his escape allows his hero to engage in a passion for revenge so as to exquisitely appreciate the suffering inflicted to make up for the suffering that has been caused, everyone drowning in their bad feelings, everyone, including the protagonist, a victim and also malevolent. This is the set of feelings that settle into the Nineteenth Century, supposedly because a more popular audience was not well enough educated to consider finer feelings, though one wonders whether the audiences for Greek tragedy were as elevated as the spectacles to which they attended.
To the contrary, melodrama is a fully formed and distinct genre that places itself alongside comedy and tragedy as the core forms of the genres, although there are also unrealized other genres, such as dramedy, or such minor forms as farce. A tragedy makes people noble or better than we think people are because they have to deal with essential cruxs of human existence, as happens when Oedipus deals with his mother but even more importantly is always, like anyone else, burdened by what unknown the future might hold that would undercut a person’s integrity, however valiant a person might be. So, as Aristotle told us, we are incurred to the facts of our existential condition and carry on because there is nothing else to do otherwise. Comedy, for its part, makes us all too human, somewhat diminished, in that we all are trying to deal with the social customs and socially condition beliefs and sentiments offered for us, and it is somewhat laughable to see people struggle to overcome difficulties that are illusionary rather than real. It is both funny and might be sad were it not protected that people get through their petty ways when, for example, you have a youthful love affair or prance, like Malvolio, in his cross garters to get his love, though to be remembered is that Malvolio is left out of the final pairings and so is melodramatic in that his heartfelt quest is not accomplished, only an illusion robbed in most performances without substance. Melodrama is distinctive for its own part in that the actors and characters dwell in the life of social custom rather than in existential issues, but to some pain or disservice, people living in some pain as that is inflicted by others who are, to the protagonists, adversarial and so in some sense “bad”. And melodramatic protagonists are small because they cannot escape from those social settings, while the audience and reader feels elevated because of having come to understand the melodrama, of knowing how confined others are to their social conditions, the audience and readers have escaped or at least understood their conditions. Dickens makes people sorry for Tiny Tim and that makes “A Christmas Carol” melodramatic even if the later Dickens, from “Great Expectations” on, makes the reader feel neither pathos nor humor but the relentlessness of a reality emerging from illusionary dross.
As I suggest, there are other not fully formed genres to add to the list of genres. Shakespeare had Polonius say correctly that there were any number of crossings of types. Polonius never was a fool, and his advice to Laertes in”The Big Talk” Polonious had with a son beginning to make his own life in the world was not about sex or glitter but about finances, something a son might disregard at his own peril. Polonius had been right to query Hamlet to see if he was sane, and Hamlet’s rebuff that Hamlet was not to be easily understood was just a defensive rejection of him having had himself probed as to his mental state. Indeed, Shakespeare had himself indulged in the historical genre of his art early on in his career with Henry VI and had been a one genre devotee for the rest of his career, except that he made Richard III into being a tragedy, staying with that genre for a long time, even though he had returned to the history plays in Henry IV and then stretched it into something very different and spectacular, when Henry V becomes something of an epic, even if it were that minor form of the play rather than the extended poem which he never would write. Other crossed genres exist. There are the Twentieth Century horror melodramas of Stephan King and the screwball comedies of the movie Thirties like “Bringing Up Baby” but the genres that get sustained are, as I say, just those three: comedy, tragedy and melodrama, and the last of the three, just like the other two, have always been around and can be found in antiquity.
Here are three texts in the Old Testament that are properly classified as melodramas. The most extended one is the story of Joseph, which is a more like a novel than it is like the very brief stories that prior to that had made up “Genesis”, as if to indicate that something was ending, which had to do with the interaction between God and man, and now entering into a world where God was more remote and filtered through burning bushes and great events like manna from heaven and the splitting of the Red Sea.
The most clear example of the melodramatic nature of the Joseph story is its coda. Joseph has become the Egyptian czar of disaster relief. He presides over giving the storied granaries to the needy populace. Joseph’s brothers show up also wanting food and Joseph recognizes them. So what should he do? He could have just killed them because they had so long ago either intended to kill him or sell him into exile. That would be melodramatic. He could have immediately embraced him, and so turned the scene into comedy as a rewedding together of a lost relative. He might have disregarded the brothers he recognized as no longer relevant to his station, a tragic fact about how lives can be separated and never put together because of events that transpired. Instead, he does the poignant and cruel thing of asking Jonathan to join him, the brothers fearful for his life, as if to extend the moment of suspense of revenge, and then reconcile for what had been done, and so this is clearly melodramatic, extending the event so as to milk all of the feelings and the alternatives out, and then being humane after being cruel, which is what ordinary people are likely to do, when Joseph should have been a nobler man given what he had done and to how much he had triumphed. The tone of the coda remains ambiguous and unsettling, indicating not clearly where it should land. All that can be said is that the sorrow gets extended and so is melodramatic.
Another ancient text, “The Book of Ruth”, seems not to be melodramatic because it seems so serene as Naomi with great sureness manages to arrange for a marriage between Ruth and Boaz, a rich landholder, when Ruth is both poor and a stranger in the land. But there is a great deal of stress in the proceedings in that the woman might engage in a misstep in the customs of courtship and the young woman might become characterized as a whore rather than earned as a wife. When should Ruth approach him when just asking to take the loose grain? Is it an overture for sex or is she so modest that she is not associated as an offer even if she conveys to Boaz that she is attractive and also well spoken? The same is true when she enters Boaz’s room and, as the text deals with euphemism, strokes Boaz’s member. Is this appropriate because it is preliminary to a wedding, or is it an attempt to show how pleasing Boaz will be and so overcome the poverty and alien character of the young woman? So customs are difficult to gauge as well as arbitrary while we are also somehow bound with them. This is Hedy Lemarr in Hollywood’s America. Will there be a misstep, and that is melodrama, even though the author as happens in other melodramas does not overtly show what is dark and does not make anyone either good or bad, even though the question is who will be labelled as such.
A more familiar version of melodrama is found in “Judith”, an apocryphal text in the Old Testament. She gets into the tent of the general who is persecuting the Jeews and she kills him, which might be enough to make her overwrought about what had happened. But she adds on that she had preserved her chastity, as if compromising herself was far more minor than having killed someone. Judith is concerned to be prim, which suggests that the customs related to sexual activity had a priority over the existential question of life and death. Woe is me if people think your skirts were ruffled!
In the ancient world can be found Heliodorus’ “An Ethiopian Romance”. Probably written in the second or third century A.D., it is a novel length work that is clearly a melodrama that deliberately or not so departs from the idea of classical tragedy in its emotions and themes. The book begins with an astonishing set piece that establishes what might be considered then a distinctive tone. It describes a fully laden ship on the shore that has been abandoned except for a wounded man and a goddess-like woman attending to his wounds. Pirates come on the scene and go forward but the pirates are chased away by people from the marshland who rescue the two and bring them to their homeland. The best way to describe the scene is as a long pan whereby the camera moves closer to the man and woman as the two waves of people come and depart from the otherwise deserted ship, most of the action done in gestures rather than in words, the goddess assured that she will kill herself rather than sacrifice her chastity. The tone of the scene, and that is what makes it melodramatic, is suspense and fear, these pervasive in that it is unclear why those sailors had left and what were the intentions of each of the two bands of people who arrived on the shore. Each of the three abandoned or arriving bands of people might be dangerous and might fight with one another should any two of them collide, but no sailors presented themselves, and the pirates of the first approaching band just left rather than contest the later arrivals and the newer arrivals proved to be civilized and therefore trustworthy rather than fearsome. We might see “An Ethiopian Romance” as a costume movie about pirates or Spanish galleons or British ships becoming acknowledged as friend or foe when first recognized, knowing that a particular beauty, some lady or other person of rank having for some reason found herself amidst dangers. A reader might add that the language is very well wrought and so gives confidence that the writing was intended to establish its uniform tone.
The second story in “An Ethiopian Romance” is very different from the poetical cadences of the first story and it fills out more of the idea of what is melodramatic. The person who is translator for the pair of the hero and goddess-like pair is a Greek who relates his tale of woe so as to ease his sorrow, and so points out that melodrama is a form in which people elaborate on their own or the sufferings of others, as if that were natural or satisfying. The story he tells is a version of an incest tragedy, but altered to make it socially more acceptable in both the situation and in the feelings. The woman in question is his father’s second wife rather than, as in “Oedipus Rex'', his own mother. She is aggressive in having a sexual relationship with her, which he rejects. And, like Joseph’s sexual approach of Potipher’s wife, he remains blameless, while the question of “Oedipux Rex” has for thousands of years concerned of what he might have been blameworthy: of just the fact of incest, or whether he had a flawed character in that he was an overreacher, or whether he should have wondered more about the circumstances that led him to kill the unknown man at the crossroads, or the woman old enough to be his mother who became his bride. Instead, the Greek translator is beaten by his father for having made overtures to his wife but doesn’t even bother to make a charge against him, as if there were no need to respond to an accusation before there being a punishment, so wrought is the father over what he believes to have been an outrage. So there are multiple ways by which the translator has been abused, including him being tricked by a lover to think that the man in bed is not his father and so wields a knife against him. Everywhere, the translator is beset by bad people and bemoans the coincidences and stratagems to make him seem in a bad light and so to be banished and sold to a foreign tribe. This is melodramatic rather than tragic because people are either good or evil or some degree of that, and people are victimized rather than forthright in their natures. Melodramas are tragic only in the sense that bad things happen rather than that bad things that do happen are interwoven with the characters and circumstances of life that are inevitable. As Aristotle said, tragedians go beyond pity and terror, while meleodramatists, I say, wallow in pity and terror, which is something everywhere present not only in literature but in most aspects of real life, only very few such encounters raising themselves to tragedy, readers and writers contented with observing what is the fact that people feel sorry for themselves because of slights made to them by the bad guys, and often for reasons of embarrassment or shame because of the social proprieties rather than because of the existential situation.
That is clear enough in the episode after the translator has confronted his father inadvertently. He is brought to a court where the father laments at length what has happened and is faux heroic in refusing to himself engage in the death penalty, prefering justice to blood, but obviously enough self serving in his supposedly noble intentions, just as when the Nazi movie “Jew Suss” presents the good people agonizing over whether to condemn the Jew, when there was little agonizing about what was happening to Jews in Germany. The multi thousand jurors are so outraged by the translator that they will not hear his defense, something contrary to justice, but not at all contrary to normal practice when people are engaged in overwrought times, and so did not allow Al Franken to be given due process by the Senate that pushed him out of office. We all do our weaker rather than our most noble ideals, which includes changing one’s mind, as happens when the second wife dies and c’s father is now bereft of his son. Tragedies are made of sterner stuff, Antigone beholden to her principles, and even Willy Loman similarly driven to pay off his mortgage, while most people just play act nobility and fall into their weaker selves, and that is why melodrama is so accurate a form of genre.