Melodrama, Part II! Pixérécourt & Boucicault

René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844) & Dion Boucicault (1820-1890)

In his case study on melodrama in your Zarrilli text (254-60), McConachie compares two nineteenth century melodramas that both achieved significant international popularity in their respective times. He argues that these two plays can give us some insight into the development of the form from its earliest context amidst the upheval of the French Revolution to later plays that responded to the conditions of the Industrial Revolution. Here we see the genre that we have defined somewhat narrowly demonstrating its capacity to be adapted to changing circumstances (an important test for any artform!)

I. Guilbert de Pixerecourt's Coelina, or The Child of Mystery (1800)

McConachie argues that Coelina, through its popularity, became a prototype for a sub-genre of melodrama called providential melodrama, which was popular from around 1800 to 1825. The characteristic elements of this play and its sub-genre include: "a single villain, alienated from the social institutions that provide order in this society of hard-working peasants and small shopkeepers"; a happy ending ensured by the fact that "God watches over innocent goodness" in which the villain departs and "the good characters return to the rural utopia from which they started. (255); and virtue prevails without having been compromised in any way.

II. Dion Boucicault's The Poor of New York (1857)

McConachie argues that Boucicault's play inspired a generation of materialist melodrama popular from around 1855 to 1880. Typical of this sub-genre, the play is set in a specific "time-bound, historical reality"; justice is provided not by God, but by "the institutions of liberal, bourgeois government and society" whose rules are broken by the villain; human agents like the detective in this play are required to unravel the mysteries of human injustice; and though justice is restored at the end, there is a great deal of Chance involved and the villains are not banished, but re-incorporated into society. In materialist melodrama, there are appeals to "bourgeois respectability" and much consciousness of class.

In summary:

Providential melodramas use timeless, universal settings; autocratic institutions ensure order; natural innocence is glorified; God ensures a happy ending; and there is a return to a utopian paradise.

Materialist melodramas use time-bound, historical settings; liberal, bourgeois institutions ensure order; social respectablity is honored; chance puts happy endings at risk; and there is acceptance of the material status quo. (257)

III. Why the change between the 1820s and 1850s?

McConachie argues that beyond the individual styles of the two playwrights, we can make sense of the shift from providential to materialist melodrama in relation to a change in audience tastes, and these tastes reflect the social morality, values and emotions of the audiences.

Providential melodrama thrived in the climate of the first decades of the 19th century in which Napoleon and the Catholic Church enjoyed considerable prestige for restoring order and stability to France while the utopianism and belief in natural intuition of the Revolution were still influential. The audiences of these melodramas were reactionaries who applauded the restoration of absolutism.

By the 1850s, the spread of industrialism and capitalism had created a very different climate that favored materialist melodrama. These melodramas reflected the decline of faith in old social heirarchies and religious beliefs that no longer seemed relevant to the new class mobilities, while at the same time protecting the captains of industry from criticism that might be dangerous by clothing them in bourgeois respectability.

Although we might initially guess that materialist melodrama would be more conducive to socialism or Marxism (recall that Marx's Communist Manifesto was published in 1848), McConachie counters that "this kind of melodrama was even more antithetical to working-class interests than the providential kind because it rendered fundamental reform unthinkable in a chance-ridden world." (260)