A post-revolutionary genre

Abstract

Peter Brooks explains that as a genre melodrama was born in the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath and that it seeks new definitions in a world without fixed values. Tragedy, a pre-Revolutionary genre, seeks resolutions for moral problems that are easily apprehended within the framework of a shared value system. In contrast, melodrama can only attempt to express all, to articulate everything. Brooks says that ‘the ritual of melodrama involves the confrontation of clearly identified antagonists and the expulsion of one of them’, even though ‘it can offer no terminal reconciliation, for there is no longer a clear transcendent value’ (p. 17). Clearly this is the case in The Portrait of a Lady (as it will be also in The Turn of the Screw). The wronged Isabel Archer is in the right, regardless of her complicity in her downfall, and the neutral-seeming or even desirable Osmond is identified as a villain before the novel is done, then expelled from his role of benign husband and pater familias. And of course there is no reconciliation, no embrace of transcendent values, as the abundance of criticism makes clear.