What is Melodrama?

After having been reading about the genre of Melodrama for the past month and half, I have yet to come across a cohesive and coherent definition of melodrama that describes its generic conventions and tendencies. As such, this is to be an ongoing post in which I shall compile any and all definitions that I find in order to formulate my own, working definition:

"The characteristic 'excess' of the woman's melodrama, for example, is explained by Cook in terms of the genre's tendency to '[pose] problems for itself which it can scarcely contain" (Kuhn, "Women's Genres" 439).

"Much recent feminist film criticism has divided filmic narrative into male and female forms: 'male' linear, action-packed narratives that encourage identification with predominantly male characters who 'master' their environment; and 'female' less linear narratives encouraging indentification with passive, suffering heroines" (Williams, "Something Else Besides a Mother" 480).

"...Melodrama is a form that does not pretend to speak universally. It is clearly addresed to a particualr bourgeois class and often- in works as diverse as Pamela, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or the 'woman's film- to the particular gender of woman" (480) (Williams, "Something Else Besides a Mother, 480).

"ALL THAT HOLLYWOOD ALLOWS" Jackie Byars:

"...A drama in which the spoken voice is used over a musical background... Melodrama, as a mode, pervades many genres and though them presents a way to refuse recognition of a world drained of transcendence" (10,11).

"The tragic hero- indicative, in Greek tragedy, of a social group- became the melodramatic hero, an individual capable of individual error; after all, the myth most basic to the bourgeoisie is the myth of classlessness. The social, in melodrama, came be expressed as the personal " (10)

"Usurping the place of religious education, melodrama has operated since as a site for struggles over deeply disturbing material and fundamental values. Melodrama became for the Western world the ritual through which social order is purged and set of ethical imperatives are clarified... The insistence on the importance of the ordinary at least partially accounts for the melodrama's ongoing popularity and flexibility- first in its theatrical forms and later in its various novelistic, filmic, and televisual forms. Melodrama's primary drive is the identification of moral polarities, of good and evil, and... it speaks in any discourse "that demarcates the desirable from the taboo"" (11)

"Melodramatic characters, generally of a lower social status then tragic characters, confront clearly identified antagonists, and the courageous and psychologically unified protagonist expels the external adversaries" (12)

"Melodrama was generally denigrated and relegated to working-class entertainments" (12)

Characteristics (12):
Fairly constant constellation of characters (the suffering heroine, or hero, the persecuting villain, the benevolent comic)
Extensive mimed action
Music for dramatic emphasis combine to emphasize clear-cut solutions to conflict
Choices are clear, the major characters are not leaders; rather, they take a side and accept choices made by those who formulate policy. The social order is purged, and its ethics are clarified; they are made legible

"Realism, understated and underplayed, come to be associated with the masculine, and melodrama, associated with "feminine" emotionalism, became a term of derision... The western, the gangster film, and the "adult" realist drama were constructed as masculine, while only the romantic and family melodramas maintained a nominative association with their melodramatic heritage. And in them the figure of woman became a primary site for the battling voices that expressed themselves in the overlay of genre and epistemology" (12-13)

"Melodrama, like realism, roots itself in the everyday, but melodrama exploits excessive uses of representational conventions to express that which cannot (yet) be said, that which language alone is incapable of expressing" (13)