Melodrama and the Modes

of the World

Agustin Zarzosa

Whereas the notion of genre suggests a category within an artistic

medium, the notion of mode suggests afinities unencumbered by
medium. For this reason, the argument that melodrama operates
beyond the conines of its generic conventions and outside the
theater itself relies heavily on the notion of mode. In his seminal
work on melodrama, Peter Brooks employs the notion of mode to
encompass under a single category both stage melodrama and its
extrapolated forms in literature, speciically, the novels of Honoré
de Balzac and Henry James.1 In ilm studies, the term has extended
the limited scope of the melodrama genre: Thomas Elsaesser has
characterized all silent-ilm drama as melodramatic; Christine
Gledhill has described male genres such as the Western and the
gangster ilm as melodramas; and Linda Williams has proposed
melodrama as the dominant mode in American literature, stage,
ilm, and television.2
Perhaps because of its substantial scope, mode has remained
an ill-deined, vague concept. Symptomatic of this vagueness is
the array of terms Brooks uses to deine his object of study: an
aesthetic, a mode of the modern imagination, a mode of concep-
tion and expression, a cultural form, a semantic force of ield, a
sense-making system, and an outlook.3 More recently, John Mer-
cer and Martin Shingler have referred to this luid understanding

Discourse, 32.2, Spring 2010, pp. 236–255.

Copyright © 2011 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 237

of melodrama as “style, mode, sensibility, aesthetic, and rhetoric.”4

This extraordinary metonymic slide results from the fact that, since
Brooks’s coinage of the melodramatic mode, “mode” has functioned
as an empty noun that simply completes the process of substantiviz-
ing the adjective “melodramatic.”5 In fact, Brooks explicitly speaks
of a movement “from adjective to substantive.”6 And to the extent
that Brooks attributes agency to the mode—after all, he does sug-
gest that the melodramatic mode shapes the works of Balzac and
James—this process of substantivization appears as a textbook case
of the critical act of reiication.
We may, however, dispel this charge of reiication—as well as
the charge of vagueness—by distinguishing two senses in which
Brooks understands the melodramatic mode: irst, as the urge to
make sense of a collapsed moral order and, second, as the model
of reality that emerges from such an effort. Only as an urge to orga-
nize and dramatize experience does the melodramatic mode act
upon the world and shape cultural texts. As a model of reality, a
mode does not properly exist (that is, it lacks agency); it simply
regulates our knowledge of reality without constituting it.7 By fail-
ing to distinguish these two different acceptations of mode—as the
necessity to dramatize experience and as the model that results
from this effort—one collapses a primary human function into a
metaphysical speculation. For this reason, we should locate the
proper level of modes beneath—rather than above or beyond—the
level of genre. Modes run across genres lines (and apply to more
works than genres) not because they are broader or more abstract,
but rather because they involve the primary need of dramatizing
experience.
This essay theorizes the melodramatic mode—and modes in
general—not as a model of reality based on a set of ideas but as a
strategy to solve practical problems of experience. Modes are not
overarching conceptions of the world that inform artistic works;
ictional works necessarily evoke modes because we, as the protago-
nists of our own ictions, already employ these strategies to map
our own experience. And although these strategies might very well
make use of ideas (or models of reality), they don’t depend on
any speciic idea—hence, the impossibility of deining the melo-
dramatic mode in terms of the ideas it employs. I deine melodrama
as the mode that, in order to ameliorate suffering, tests the efi-
ciency of ideas. To arrive at this notion of melodrama, the essay
is structured as follows: the irst section discusses the historicity of
the notion of mode; the second one outlines the classiication of
modes within which melodrama acquires its speciicity; the third
section develops the concept of melodrama; and, inally, the fourth
238 Agustin Zarzosa

section analyzes Ismael Rodríguez’s La Oveja Negra (The Black Sheep,

1949) as a case study of my conception of melodrama.

Universality through Historical Speciicity

Although Brooks accepts the conception of melodrama as a con-

stant of the human imagination and as a constant among literary
modes, he claims that, at least for the purposes of his study, melo-
drama should be deined as a modern form whose origins may be
located within the context of the French Revolution. He argues
that whereas stage melodrama is the reductive version of the melo-
dramatic mode, the novels of Balzac and James exemplify the mode
at its most ambitious. Brooks understands these works as an urgent
response to the radical social reconiguration that followed the
French Revolution: melodrama appears as a coherent mode after
the collapse of the traditional sacred; its institutions—the Church
and Monarchy; the hierarchical society it sustained; and its corre-
sponding literary forms—tragedy and comedy.8
Clearly, Brooks conceives of this urge as a fundamentally artis-
tic phenomenon; authors such as Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dostoyevsky,
and James embark on what he calls the “Promethean search to
illuminate man’s quotidian existence by the relected lame of the
higher cosmic drama.”9 This understanding of modes as an artistic
explanation of quotidian experience obscures the conception of
modes as actual solutions to problems of quotidian experience, a
conception that Brooks seems to overlook. Symptomatic of the era-
sure of quotidian experience in Brooks’s model is that characters
do not articulate the melodramatic mode themselves but rather
become the vehicle of its artistic expression.10
In “Tales of Sound and Fury,” Thomas Elsaesser draws the
same distinction between melodrama as a mode of social expe-
rience and as a mode of artistic expression. As a mode of social
experience, melodrama is characterized by a sense of discontinuity
that irst resulted from the intense spiritual and social crises of the
nineteenth century.11 As a mode of artistic expression, melodrama
translates this discontinuity into an imbalance between storyline
and style or, more precisely, between the moral values implicit in
the plot and their stylistic articulation; according to Elsaesser, stylis-
tic articulation may uncover the falsity of moral values by providing
an ironic parallelism. Put differently, as artistic expression, melo-
drama both registers the ruptures that characterize melodrama as
a mode of social experience and critiques the moral values that this
social experience generates. In this model, the function of melo-
drama as a mode to cope with problems of experience becomes
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 239

somewhat trivialized to the extent that its very critique constitutes

the main value of its artistic expression.
This stress on artistic articulation derives, most probably, from
the attempt to account for the import of social experience upon
cultural texts. I am suggesting that the proper problem of modes is
not this mediation between social experience and dramatic works,
but rather the coniguration of experience as a dramatic scenario.
Although the difference might seem slight, its repercussions are
signiicant: the latter formulation enables us to appreciate that a
coniguration of experience may exist independently of artistic
works that have made this coniguration of experience apparent
in the irst place. Paradoxically, by extricating the melodramatic
mode from the melodrama genre—and, consequently, by extri-
cating the deinition of the melodramatic mode from the histori-
cal origins of the genre—we can better explain the persistence of
melodrama beyond the speciic context in which it irst appeared.
A theme that recurs throughout Wimal Dissanayake’s anthol-
ogy on Asian melodrama is the anxiety to extrapolate Western
melodrama theory to the study of ilms produced in a context
where an equivalent to the term melodrama might not even exist.
In one of his contributions to the collection, William Rothman
argues that the transposition of French theatrical melodrama to
the American woman’s ilm is as problematic as its transposition
to Asian cinema: he claims, irst, that whereas French theatrical
melodrama stages the struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and
the dying aristocracy, no aristocracy existed in the American con-
text; second, he points out that such an extrapolation denies any
difference—that is, any conversation—between ilm and theater.12
According to Rothman, the problem lies not in Brooks’s insistence
on historical speciicity but rather in the way in which he speciies
this historical moment. Rothman exempliies this argument by not-
ing that Brooks leaves out the conversation between Europe and
India in his model of melodrama—conversation concurrent with
the French Revolution and its aftermath—discouraging compara-
tive studies of melodrama. Contrary to Rothman, I suggest that in
this case the emphasis on historical speciicity might be the prob-
lem itself. By privileging a particular historical manifestation and
turning it into the absolute origin of melodrama, Brooks’s model
must consider any earlier manifestations as precursors of the origi-
nal form and any later ones as its derivations. In other words, his
attention to historical speciicity universalizes the manifestation of
melodrama as a bourgeois mode of experience.
In fact, the inluence of his study on ilm scholarship seems
surprising if one considers that his deinition of melodrama does
not aptly describe some—if not most—canonical ilm melodramas.
240 Agustin Zarzosa

As I’ve already noted, Brooks theorizes melodrama as an anxious

response to the loss of the sacred in the West. In this milieu, in
which the sacred has lost its power to hold the social body together
and ethics has been called into question, the melodramatic imagi-
nation struggles to recuperate what Brooks calls the moral occult
(the modern remnants of sacred myth) as individual expres-
sion. Accordingly, Brooks deines melodrama as a kind of drama
that “strives to ind, to articulate, to demonstrate, to ‘prove’ the
existence of a moral universe which, though put into question,
masked by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist and
can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among
men.”13
One would be hard-pressed to ind this effort to prove the exis-
tence of a moral universe in a melodrama such as Stella Dallas (dir.
King Vidor, 1937). I will focus on the ending of the ilm, which
raises several moral questions. After painfully realizing that she has
become a hurdle in her daughter Lauren’s (Anne Shirley’s) quest
for happiness (i.e., marrying a successful man), Stella (Barbara
Stanwyck) decides that Lauren should live with her upper-class
father (John Boles) and his sophisticated wife (Barbara O’Neil).
To convince Lauren to move in with her father, Stella erases her-
self from Lauren’s life by staging a scene in which Stella, having
lost interest in motherhood, anxiously awaits her lover. Stella’s sac-
riice is rewarded when she witnesses, through the window, Lau-
ren’s wedding. Certainly, Stella Dallas is a moral drama; however,
the ilm neither strives to prove the existence of a moral universe
nor takes place in a context in which the existence of morality has
been called into question. In fact, the effectiveness and legibility of
the ilm rely on the unquestioned existence of morality. Regardless
of how we respond to the ilm—either moved by the magnanimity
of Stella’s gesture or outraged by the social mores that lead her
to embrace her self-effacement—this response presupposes the
notion that both social mores and human action entail a moral
dimension.
Rather than reacting to the loss of a moral universe, Stella Dal-
las asks what virtue or evil might consist of in the moral universe
in which the ilm takes place. The ilm poses moral questions such
as the following: Are adult pleasures and child care incompat-
ible? Is self-effacement an appropriate form of sacriice? Is Stella
a good mother? How do class prejudices shape our notion of a
good mother? The fact that Stella Dallas poses these moral ques-
tions without offering deinitive answers partly accounts for the
mixed emotions and intense debate the ilm has generated. But,
more speciically, what generates these disparate responses is the
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 241

gap between social mores and individual happiness apparent in

the ilm; this gap raises a moral problem and demands the viewer’s
moral judgment, but is unconcerned with the loss or inexistence
of morality itself. Like Stella Dallas, most melodramas stage moral
ideas to test the eficiency of these ideas; this practice does not
presuppose the loss of a moral order but rather its contingency and
our capacity to relect upon its state.
In defense of the applicability of Brooks’s theory of melo-
drama, one might suggest that the anxiety provoked by the loss of
a moral order is necessary only for understanding the inception of
the melodramatic mode and, therefore, that the mode may oper-
ate after this original anxiety has been overcome. In the speciic
case of a ilm like Stella Dallas, the melodramatic mode would more
modestly question the speciic articulations of virtue in a speciic
social context. This solution simply points to the actual problem:
Brooks’s conception of the melodramatic mode is tied to the his-
torical context in which he argues that the mode irst appeared. If
melodrama may operate without the anxiety that Brooks postulates
(and if melodrama may serve purposes other than establishing the
existence of a moral order), perhaps this anxiety is an essential
component of only a speciic kind of melodrama (however original
this form of melodrama is supposed to be). Once we deine modes
as a fundamental aesthetic articulation that shapes human experi-
ence rather than as an artistic response to a speciic social experi-
ence, problems of cultural translation disappear.
Modes act historically but not because they mediate aesthetic
forms and social experience: rather than historical forms of per-
ception and expression, modes are dramatic strategies that open
experience to history by providing human action with an aim that
involves the transformation of the self and of the world. As I argue
in the following section, modes are concerned mainly with the
problem of servitude, a problem that implies different modalities,
that is, diverse ways in which it may be approached. And because no
solution to this problem is entirely adequate, modes transmute—
rather than solve—the problem of servitude. In this transmutation
lies the historicity of modes.
Modes are also neither innate categories of the human mind;
modes inhere, more properly, in the existential problem of servi-
tude. We can imagine without contradiction a situation in which
servitude is not experienced as a problem but rather as a given.
In such a case, the modes outlined in the next section would be
unnecessary. Nevertheless, whenever servitude is experienced as a
problem, these modes constitute the only dramatic possibilities to
tackle it. If these modes appear as eternal forms or as constants
242 Agustin Zarzosa

of the human imagination, it is only because of the persistence of

servitude as an existential problem.

“Because we suffer . . .”14

In her inluential essays on melodrama, Christine Gledhill breaks

with the dichotomy between the classical text and its melodramatic
excess by positing three distinct artistic and epistemological modes
in the post-Enlightenment era: realism, melodrama, and modern-
ism.15 In this tripartite design, melodrama appears as a compromise
solution between realism and modernism: like realism, melodrama
accepts the premises of lived experience; like modernism, it rec-
ognizes the limitations of the conventions of representation. As
a result, melodrama tries to force the unthinkable and repressed
into the realm of representation.16 Gledhill writes,

[w]hile the drive of realism is to possess the world by understanding it,

and the modern and post-modern explore in different ways the conse-
quences of this ambition’s disillusion, the central drive of melodrama is
to force meaning and identity from the inadequacies of language.17

Clearly, beneath Gledhill’s distinction between realism and mod-

ernism lies the epistemological opposition between dogmatism
(conidence in our capacity to apprehend the essence of things)
and skepticism (doubt regarding our capacity to apprehend such
essences), even if such an opposition has been extrapolated to the
cultural realm.18
Whereas Gledhill views melodrama as a response to an epis-
temological problem, I understand it as a response to a practical
or existential one, namely, the problem of coping with suffering.
Consequently, I do not deine melodrama in relation to epistemo-
logical positions but rather in relation to practical philosophies
that offer solutions to problems of experience. Since practical phi-
losophies are primarily concerned with orienting human behavior,
they subordinate epistemological questions to ethical problems.
And, although practical philosophies require corresponding epis-
temologies, the primacy of practical problems over epistemologi-
cal concerns implies a radical change in regard to the relationship
between realism and melodrama. As Gledhill points out, realism
trusts that reason (and language) may reveal the truth of the world;
however, melodrama does not offer a different solution to the same
problem as much as it already operates within a different realm
and, therefore, addresses a different question. The realm of melo-
drama is not a world inhabited by things whose essence threatens
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 243

to escape us; it is a world in which ideas inlict suffering and, con-

sequently, the epistemological quest is not for an idea that might
reveal the essence of things, but for one that might obliterate suf-
fering or, at least, for an idea that might give suffering a rational
sense.
To theorize melodrama as a mode that addresses the problem
of suffering, I situate melodrama in relation to the Hegelian triad
of stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy consciousness—a triad that
deals with the question of suffering in the context of bondage. My
understanding of melodrama has a close afinity with Hegel’s Phe-
nomenology of Spirit, whose philosophical strategy, as Slavoj Žižek
notes, consists in undermining “a given theoretical position by
‘staging’ it as an existential subjective attitude.”19 In an analogous
way that Hegel dramatizes philosophical ideas to show how they fall
into contradictions, melodrama stages social ideas to analyze how
they generate suffering.
Speciically, I have selected this triad for two reasons. First, as
practical philosophies, these igures construct a conceptual grid to
address a speciic problem of existence, namely, servitude and the
suffering it implies. Unlike zeitgeists, these conceptual grids are not
associated with a particular period but rather with a speciic exis-
tential problem. These conceptual grids set up dramatic scenarios
to cope with the choice (either real or imaginary) of obedience
over death. In Phenomenology of Spirit, these igures immediately fol-
low the famous master/slave dialectic in which the slave comes to
be by means of this choice of obedience over death. My premise is
that the melodramatic mode proceeds from a more general slavish
imagination that establishes a dichotomy between world and self:
bondage as the quintessence of the empirical world and freedom
as the destiny of the self. The problem of obedience resides at the
core of the question of modes because the dramatic solutions to
this problem entail, irst, a conception of the self; second, an idea
of the world; and, third, a dramatic strategy to realize the essence
of the self in the world. These modes are, in short, the dramatic
scenarios through which the (slavish) self projects itself onto a hos-
tile world.
This speciic triad constitutes an ideal theoretical space in
which to inscribe my conception of melodrama for another reason.
The igure that results from the triad’s ultimate failure to address
the problem of suffering successfully—igure that Hegel refers to
as Reason—does not distinguish between an empirical realm of
bondage and a spiritual realm of freedom but instead postulates
that ideas govern the empirical world. This conception of a world
governed by ideas, I contend, constitutes the ground of melodrama.
244 Agustin Zarzosa

Whereas stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness for-

mulate personal narratives as a means of resistance, melodrama
invokes personal narratives only to the extent that they stage ideas
that question the moral state of the world and stretch the possibili-
ties of life.
Before elaborating on the concept of melodrama, I will briely
describe how these three practical philosophies tackle the problem
of servitude. One should note, irst of all, that Hegel distills a single
formal strategy from each of these practical philosophies that have
had a long history, which involves development, contradictions, and
lack of consensus. In a certain way, Phenomenology of Spirit registers
the historical recurrences and variations of these formal strategies.
The most obvious example would be the long chapter on religion
toward the end of the book—a chapter that delineates the logical
development throughout history of the unhappy consciousness.
As the irst igure of the triad, the stoic inds freedom by with-
drawing into an inner world of rationality; therefore, the stoic
mode dramatizes the self’s quest for interior freedom in a hostile
environment. The skeptic inds tranquility by negating the empiri-
cal world. What the skeptic mode dramatizes is the existential
contradiction that this epistemological position involves; skeptics
will waver between the social identity imposed upon them by the
empirical world and the rational identity of their own creation.
Finally, the unhappy consciousness (or the devotional mode, as I
refer to the mode that corresponds to this third igure) inds hope
in the otherworldly. We could say that the devotional mode counters
obedience with obedience itself; it simply substitutes a divinized
master for the worldly master.
These three igures elaborate dramatic scenarios in which they
appear to themselves as free. I would like to stress the primacy that
Hegel places on the problem of freedom: the philosophical systems
and cosmologies that these strategies imply serve the purpose of
imagining the self as free. These three dramatic modes have two
more things in common: irst, they do not attempt to change the
world directly; and, second, instead of ighting the agent of exter-
nal pain, they attempt an internal transformation that would either
minimize suffering or give it a rational sense. In other words, these
modes constitute ways of warding off the world, and their inability
to engage with the world ultimately accounts for their failure to
ameliorate suffering. The failure of these modes equals the recog-
nition that freedom might not be found in an unpolluted realm
but rather in the empirical world itself. As a result of this recogni-
tion, the world in fact changes; instead of a world divided between a
realm of bondage and a realm of rational or spiritual freedom, the
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 245

world becomes populated by ideas that traverse both realms. Melo-

drama operates in this resulting rational world. In melodrama,
we understand suffering not as a direct consequence of bondage
but rather as a result of the ideas that regulate our lives. For this
reason, unlike the three modes outlined above, melodrama does
attempt to change the world, setting off ideas against one another
and hoping to ind an idea that would eventually eradicate suffer-
ing altogether.
In this endless quest for an idea that would eradicate suffer-
ing lies the historicity of melodrama. This fundamental operation
of melodrama does not require any speciic historical conditions;
instead, it requires an understanding of suffering as a result of
reigning (but otherwise transient) ideas. In other words, the only
historicity that melodrama requires is the historicity of ideas and
values themselves. Consequently, asking whether melodrama is a
historical phenomenon or a constant of the human imagination
misses how melodrama operates: before congealing into an artis-
tic form, melodrama is an aesthetic operation—a function of the
human imagination—that tests the eficiency of ideas and their
role in suffering. This operation is neither a historical nor a univer-
sal form: it is simply a dramatic solution to a persistent problem.

Mediation, or How to Redistribute Virtue and Evil

More clearly than the stoic or the skeptic modes, the devotional
mode makes explicit the pursuit of immediacy that character-
izes these three modes; the feeling of immediacy with the abso-
lute constitutes the unhappy consciousness’s very goal. However,
the unhappy consciousness ultimately retreats from this quest for
immediacy and accepts the priest as a mediator between itself and
the absolute.20 More generally, this acceptance of mediation implies
that the absolute is no longer located in the beyond; human action
now determines its content. This acceptance of mediation as a
necessary means of contact with the spiritual world prepares the
ground for a different strategy, one that does not search for an
unpolluted realm of freedom but instead attempts to create free-
dom in the empirical world.
This acceptance of mediation also changes the world itself: the
unhappy consciousness inds refuge from the empirical world by
retreating into the spiritual realm; in the resulting realm—which I
identify with melodrama—the world itself becomes the realm that
mediates the individual and the universal. In other words, the spiri-
tual and empirical worlds are no longer opposed; the empirical
246 Agustin Zarzosa

world has become spiritualized. Melodrama takes place in this spir-

itual world inhabited by ideas. Furthermore, the pain that plagues
the unhappy consciousness is explained no longer as the feeling
of separation between devotee and deity, but rather as the result
of prevailing ideas. Any idea becomes fair game in melodrama,
even the notion of the beyond that the unhappy consciousness
embraces. Melodrama does not result from the loss of the sacred as
much as this loss is already a melodramatic enactment of an ideol-
ogy that has not eliminated suffering.
My understanding of melodrama as a mode of mediation is
at odds with one of the most entrenched ideas about melodrama,
namely, that its ultimate aim is to evince the presence of good
and evil. Brooks has offered the most sophisticated and inluen-
tial account of this long-standing argument. According to him,
melodrama arises as an anxious reaction to the loss of a irm moral
ground, trying desperately to uncover, demonstrate, and express
morality in a post-sacred world. And, since mythmaking has lost
its categorical and cohesive form, melodrama can resacralize the
world only in personal terms. As a result, human conlict becomes
the stage where virtue and evil, as nonmediated and irreducible
imperatives, clash.21
What Brooks does not take into account is that the loss of a
irm ethical framework does not constitute an actual problem as
much as a failed solution to a different problem. As Hegel suggests
in his discussion of Antigone and the ethical order, one of the main
functions of ethics is to impose a rational sense upon suffering.22
Tragedy postulates a violated ethical order that comes into exis-
tence only by means of the suffering it imposes and, consequently,
the suffering it explains. The loss of an ethical framework involves
anxiety not because of the loss itself but because such a loss ren-
ders suffering senseless. For this reason, melodrama does not really
attempt to rebuild a shattered ethical order; on the contrary, melo-
drama operates on a social ground in which ideas debunk one
another by showing how competing ideas bring forth suffering. In
this sense, melodrama is more ambitious than tragedy; melodrama
seeks not only to explain suffering but also to eliminate suffering
altogether. Put differently, rather than dramatizing suffering to
demonstrate the existence of virtue and evil, melodrama drama-
tizes virtue and evil to eliminate or ameliorate suffering. The clear
display of virtue and evil is not an end in itself but rather a means—
among others—to ameliorate suffering.
If the Hegelian triad of stoicism, skepticism, and unhappy con-
sciousness illuminates the problem of melodrama, it is because it
explains how the need of a irm ethical ground develops. In the
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 247

Hegelian scenario, morality is nothing but the slave’s response to

oppression. As Judith Butler puts it, “Hegelian ethical imperatives
irst emerge in a defensive response to absolute fear, and their
emergence must be construed as a permutation and refusal of that
fear.”23 The Hegelian explanation of ethics suggests that what pro-
duces anxiety is not the loss of an ethical order per se, but rather
the reemergence of this fear, which the dying ethical order no lon-
ger transigures into a positive system. Once a irm ethical order
loses its explanative power, what must be articulated are not the
remnants of such an order, but an alternative and more malleable
system of signiication capable of conferring sense and purpose to
the suffering that lingers after the failed attempts at coping with
obedience.
This unquestioned acceptance of the need for the ethical
order leads Brooks to confuse cause and effect. Ultimately, he
tries to explain the emergence of melodrama through the failure
of previous efforts to give sense to suffering, bypassing the causes
that initially generated these previous efforts. Symptomatically,
Brooks’s theory of melodrama deemphasizes suffering; he under-
stands suffering as part of the process that virtue must undergo
to be recognized.24 For Brooks, melodrama invokes suffering as a
means of proving the pertinence of an already dead ethical order. I
argue that, in melodrama as in tragedy, ethics functions as a means
of making sense of suffering. However, tragedy and melodrama
achieve the same end by different means: whereas tragedy invokes
ethics to justify suffering, melodrama attributes suffering to ethi-
cal imperatives; whereas tragedy proposes an enduring order to
explain suffering, melodrama, operating in an ever-changing
realm, questions speciic ethical imperatives to move toward the
rather utopian elimination of suffering. Paradoxically, to ight
these ethical imperatives, melodrama usually invokes contesting
ones.
Despite emphasizing the historical speciicity of the melodra-
matic mode, Brooks understands the notions of virtue and evil as
unmediated and uncompromising forces. The mode’s historicity
remains external to melodrama itself: if the meaning of virtue and
evil were to shift, this change would have to take place outside melo-
drama—arguably, in the social sphere. My point is that melodrama
does not consist in such an unmediated clash but rather in the
struggle to determine the content of virtue and evil. In this sense,
the historicity of melodrama resides in the evolving notions of vir-
tue and evil. Even though virtue and evil are actually moral ideas,
they have no deinite content other than their respective positive
and negative values; they are a formal dyad that may attract any
248 Agustin Zarzosa

given content. What I refer to as moral ideas excludes this purely

formal dyad; a moral idea is the deinite content that we locate in
any of these poles.
Conceived as a retelling of the biblical tale of Cain and Abel,
East of Eden (dir. Elia Kazan, 1955) illustrates how melodrama stages
the changing contents of virtue and evil. Adam (Raymond Massey),
a deeply religious farmer, has two sons: a good one (Aron [Rich-
ard Davalos]) and a bad one (Cal [James Dean]). As the bad son,
Cal acts strangely, envies Aron, and tries to please his father the
wrong way. Magnanimously, Adam forgives Cal’s continual errors,
reinstating each time their respective roles as forgiving father and
evil son. On one occasion, after forgiving Cal, Adam forces him to
read the Bible: “I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity
have I not hid” (Ps. 32:5, King James Bible).
The ilm makes the case that it is Abel’s biblical mind-set that
categorizes Cal as evil and that, no matter how hard Cal tries to
be good, he will remain evil in the eyes of his father. At irst, Cal
internalizes his father’s vision of him, acknowledging that he envies
his brother, hates his father, and takes after his mother Kate (Jo
Van Fleet), who left her family to run a brothel. After listening to
her mother’s side of the story and failing to satisfy his father, Cal
devises a different narrative to explain his wrongdoings. He still
aligns himself with his mother, but this time the roles are reversed:
it is Adam who is evil: “You kept forgiving us, but you never really
loved us,” Cal tells his father.
Melodramatically, the ilm redistributes virtue and evil: it
shows how the story of a vain, murderous son conceals the story
of a tyrannical father. The ilm is about the tyranny of a traditional
understanding of virtue: it not only redeines virtue and evil in sec-
ular terms but also thinks less of them as inherent characteristics
of people than as relations between them. If the beginning of the
ilm contrasts Cal and Aron, the ending contrasts how Adam and
Kate, and later Adam and Cal, resolve their differences. At differ-
ent points of the story, both Kate and Cal wish to leave their home.
We learn that, when Kate decides to leave, Adam violently tries to
stop her and she responds by shooting him. In a repetition of the
attempted departure, Adam quietly asks Cal to stay home and take
care of him. Virtue ceases to mean righteous behavior to signify
assumption of guilt and mutual understanding.
As this example shows, melodrama does not demonstrate the
existence of virtue and evil; their existence is already the ground
for melodrama. Melodrama is more concerned with redistributing
virtue and evil than with rendering their existence visible; it articu-
lates the struggle between contesting notions of virtue and evil by
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 249

mediating them, that is, by staging the effects of each upon the
world.

Poor Devil

The stoic, skeptic, and devotional modes make of bondage a hur-

dle in a narrative of personal freedom. The common strategy of
these three modes consists in modifying one’s position in relation
to bondage rather than in attempting to eliminate servitude alto-
gether. Conversely, in the world of transient ideas in which melo-
drama takes place, transforming one’s living conditions becomes
a real possibility. A subtle, yet extraordinary, change takes place
in melodrama. The other three modes take on the suffering that
bondage involves to demonstrate that their slavish condition is
rather inessential, that is, to demonstrate that their real self lies
beyond worldly suffering. In melodrama, on the other hand, suffer-
ing ceases to be an indication that the self has somehow surpassed
its slavish condition; suffering becomes proof of social injustice or,
more speciically, an argument against a reigning idea (or, at least,
against an interpretation of such an idea). Because melodrama
attempts to shape the world after its own image, the slavish imagi-
nation inds its most sophisticated form in this mode. The problem
that melodrama attempts to solve is no longer how to cope person-
ally with bondage but rather how to change social mores through
the spectacle of suffering.
This section analyzes Ismael Rodríguez’s La Oveja Negra (The
Black Sheep) as a case study of my theory of melodrama. Like other
comedias rancheras (ranch comedies), the ilm is vaguely set in pro-
vincia, that is, somewhere in the provinces outside Mexico City. As
Mexican critic Jorge Ayala Blanco has pointed out, this sociological
indeterminacy allows the comedia ranchera to treat the traditional
Mexican family as an unobjectionable structure beyond history.25
The traditional Mexican family is characterized by the father’s rule
over mother and children, an admiration for the mother’s abnega-
tion, and the exclusion of women who do not live up to the image
of the self-sacriicing mother. In this case, however, La Oveja Negra
uses this indeterminate setting precisely to test the necessity of the
family structure in any context.
Like Stella Dallas, La Oveja Negra does not attempt to demon-
strate the existence of a moral order that has been put into ques-
tion. The ilm poses questions within the context of a speciic moral
order—in this case, an order that overlooks the transgressions of
the patriarch and expects the docility of both mother and son. The
250 Agustin Zarzosa

ilm asks, speciically, the following questions: Should mother and

son acquiesce to the patriarch’s violence? Which of the patriarch’s
transgressions would justify their rebellion? To what extent is the
mother complicit in the son’s submission to the patriarch and in
his eventual identiication with this igure? Does this familial struc-
ture generate unnecessary suffering? And, more incisively, to what
extent are Cruz’s (Fernando Soler’s) transgressions inherent to the
role of the patriarch?
The plot advances by following the family dynamics in three
different spheres. The irst sphere is strictly private, as it is restricted
to the family nucleus: the father, the mother, the son, and the
nanny. While Silvano (Pedro Infante) runs the family ranch, Cruz,
his father, gets drunk and gambles. The irst scene of the ilm
clearly establishes the family dynamics. After having been absent
for two days and suffered gambling losses, Cruz returns home while
his wife, Bibiana (Inés Íñiguez) and Silvano are having lunch. Cruz
preemptively fends off their grievances by humiliating both Silvano
(“Go eat with the pigs!”) and Bibiana (“It’s time that you abandon
your spoilt missy manners”) and by positioning himself as a victim
(“Nobody wants me in this house”). Only his elderly nanny (Ame-
lia Wilhelmy) stands up to Cruz; she slaps him, scolds him, and
calls him “the family’s black sheep.” Because of Cruz’s pride, the
other members of the family must work together behind his back
to settle his debts: as the only one in whom Cruz can conide, the
nanny discovers the name of Cruz’s debtor and the amount of the
debt, Bibiana relinquishes an heirloom as form of payment, and
Silvano himself gambles to pay off his father’s debt (and to save his
mother’s necklace).
The irst scene already deines the conlict of each of the three
main characters in terms of obedience. Bibiana blindly accepts
her role as forgiving and long-suffering spouse, expressing her dis-
content through increasingly overwrought spectacles of suffering;
Cruz compensates for his inability to assume the responsibilities
of the patriarch by threatening to exert the patriarch’s rights over
mother and son; inally, Silvano wishes to rebel against his tyranni-
cal father but is restrained by his mother’s pleas. Caught between
his mother’s unmitigated identiication as a victim and his father’s
failure to comply with the patriarch’s obligations, Silvano wavers
between submitting to the maternal desire to preserve the family
order and giving free reign to his own desire to rebel against Cruz’s
spurious incarnation of patriarchy. Because the ilm does not focus
on a personal quest to escape a speciic social world, but on the
dificulties inherent in embodying the igures predetermined by
this social coniguration, suffering in the ilm never translates into
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 251

personal aggrandizement beyond social expectations. And pre-

cisely because the ilm does not imagine a parallel realm of per-
sonal freedom but instead dramatizes the problems that a speciic
social coniguration imposes upon individuals, we are within the
conines of melodrama (and not within the conines of the per-
sonal modes). As Jorge Ayala Blanco explains, Silvano and Cruz
struggle to salvage their aspirations from the inalterable masks they
are forced to wear.26
The second sphere consists in the space in which the private
extends into the public, as Silvano searches in the community for a
itting wife to start his own family. Silvano has recently abandoned
Justina (Virginia Serret), a licentious woman, to marry Marielba
(Amanda del Llano), a saintly woman reminiscent of his mother.
Full of spite, Justina swears to avenge Silvano’s betrayal. The oppor-
tunity presents itself when Cruz pursues Justina; he chooses to
ignore that she has been Silvano’s lover. When told about rumors
of their involvement, Cruz replies that Silvano “knows nothing
about men’s affairs.” If Cruz’s competition with Silvano for Justina
is masked by the infantilization of Silvano, Silvano’s revived interest
in Justina is masked by the external necessity to save his parents’
marriage. Silvano agrees to marry Justina (and, consequently, to
renounce Marielba) only to force his father to return home with
Bibiana, who lies on her deathbed.
The third sphere of conlict is mainly public, as Cruz and Silvano
compete to become the town’s prefect. As in the case of the strug-
gle over Justina, noble intentions mask Silvano’s wish to compete
against his father. Silvano decides to run against Cruz, supposedly
to rescue him from the corrupt politicians who are manipulating
Cruz and, once again, to save his parents’ marriage.
The ilm makes the most of the interplay between Silvano’s
and Cruz’s respective public and private roles. After Silvano’s elec-
toral triumph, Cruz crashes the celebration in which Don Licho
(Antonio R. Frausto) announces Silvano’s engagement to Mari-
elba. Manipulated by his political allies, Cruz challenges Silvano
to exert his authority as prefect over him by insulting and hitting
a boxer (Wolf Rubinskis). Moreover, per his father’s request, Sil-
vano must clean Cruz’s shoes. Because of his mother’s silent pleas,
Silvano acquiesces and explains to the crowd, “The prefect will do
justice tomorrow, but today I am only his son.” Cruz evokes the
same symbolic distinction the following morning at the prefecture.
When Cruz realizes that Silvano is smoking, he says, “I see that my
sleepless nights and humiliations have served no purpose. You are
smoking in front of your father!” Cruz explains that he has chided
not the prefect, but his son.
252 Agustin Zarzosa

The ilm moves steadily toward the dissolution of their respec-

tive symbolic positions. Silvano renounces his position as prefect
after incarcerating Cruz, and begins to behave like Cruz, losing
his temper and brutally beating up those who incited Cruz. At the
same time, Cruz breaks all ties with Silvano and Bibiana, declaring
both of them dead. Cruz begins to wear nothing but black clothes.
Of course, the black attire expresses not only his mourning but also
his full assumption of villainy. His most violent outrage happens
when, after being told that Silvano will marry Justina, Cruz returns
home to confront Silvano. He tells Silvano, “I am here as a man, not
as a father.” Silvano promises his mother that he won’t confront his
father and, consequently, lets Cruz slap him repeatedly with a gun
without offering any resistance. Cruz stops only when his nanny
intervenes. And it is his nanny’s accusatory stare that reminds Cruz
of the symbolic tie between him and Silvano. “He is your son!”
she cries. Paralleling those moments in which Cruz views Silvano
one moment as a prefect and the next as his son, a melodramatic
realization leads him to view Silvano no longer as the loathed rival
but as the battered son—Cruz stumbles, closes his eyes, shakes his
head, looks at the gun in disbelief, covers his face, and stumbles
away in shame. Signiicantly, only through his nanny’s accusatory
stare may Cruz adopt the external perspective from which he can
view his own villainy. Unlike the original master/slave dialectic, this
melodramatic stare demands not recognition of one’s mastery, but
the recognition of a common slavishness, that is, the recognition of
an idea’s power over us.
This melodramatic stare demands of villains that they recog-
nize that, to a certain extent, they, too, are victims of the ideas that
fuel their villainy. Consider the last scene of the ilm, which begins
when Bibiana’s bedroom door opens and the doctor, hopeless,
exits. After blaming herself for Cruz’s behavior, Bibiana prepares
to die and stages the reconciliation between father and son. She
tells them, “Let your reconciliation be the last thing I see.” This
request turns the rivalry between Silvano and Cruz into a spectacle
staged for Bibiana. Her triumph over Cruz consists in forcing him
to participate in a spectacle in which he is judged, forgiven, and
transigured. This projection of the victim’s perspective upon the
villain constitutes the violence characteristic of melodrama. The
violence of villains provides not only the occasion for the victim’s
suffering but also the starting point of the villains’ own journey,
through which they will eventually separate themselves from the
ideas purportedly responsible for their violence.
The ilm, then, condemns Cruz’s overidentiication with his
social role (or his failure to embody this role properly) only to a
certain extent. In fact, the ilm redistributes virtue and evil precisely
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 253

by shifting its condemnation: it begins by condemning Cruz’s char-

acter and ends by condemning the family structure as a whole. If,
at the beginning of the ilm Cruz’s assumption of victimhood rings
false, by the end of the ilm he has fully earned the right to be
a victim. A telling scene toward at the end of the ilm succinctly
records this shift from villain to victim. In a conversation with Lau-
reano (Andres Soler), Cruz declares himself the devil. However, he
immediately rectiies, “Yes, but a poor devil.” Like the sophisticated
American melodramas that Elsaesser analyzes in “Tales of Sound
and Fury,” the ilm presents all characters as victims; ideas function
as the melodrama’s actual villain, even if “the characters themselves
unwittingly collude to become their agents.”27 Even though Cruz
oppresses both Silvano and Bibiana directly, what keeps them in
check is not Cruz’s villainy but the weight of his symbolic position.
As in many melodramas, what is at stake is never what one charac-
ter does to another character per se, but what one does to one’s
father, one’s mother, one’s spouse, or one’s son. For instance, in
this irst scene, Cruz predicts that soon enough Silvano will “raise
his hand against his own father.” Cruz is the agent of an idea that
oppresses not only those around him but also an aspect of himself.
Melodrama expresses this aspect of the self—an afliction—as an
aspiration buried by social ideas, and this afliction constitutes the
bodily remnants of the stoic’s original light from oppression into
interiority.
Appealing to this aflicted aspect of the self, melodramas like
La Oveja Negra portray symbolic positions as external forces that
inlict suffering on a truer self. However, the condemning stare
of victims evident in La Oveja Negra suggests that the self of melo-
drama does not reside merely in this bodily afliction. Failing to
embody these symbolic positions, the characters in La Oveja Negra
are acutely aware of the social mores that oppress them. By accept-
ing these rules, they appear to desire their own suffering. We clearly
have, on the one hand, a masochistic acquiescence to suffering (or,
at least, a giving of oneself to suffering); on the other, we have
a moral conscience that knows these social mores and observes
the suffering they cause. The split between an external realm of
oppression and an internal realm of freedom characteristic of the
three other modes devolves in melodrama into a split between a
body that assumes suffering—or, more speciically, one’s role in the
distribution of suffering—and a conscience that tests the suffering
quotient of ideas. As in the other modes, the true self of melo-
drama lies beyond the bodily suffering it endures.
It is not surprising, then, that both Brooks and Elsaesser distin-
guish between unknowing melodramatic characters and an artistic
vision that analyzes the suffering of these characters. However, as
254 Agustin Zarzosa

La Oveja Negra illustrates, the plight of any unwitting melodramatic

character already demands this apparently external vision that
witnesses its plight and poses the question about its justiication.
Melodrama is essentially an idealist mode because it offers bodily
suffering as evidence of an idea’s shortcomings. This idealism is
doubled in that this analytic consciousness might not ind the rec-
ognition it seeks beyond the imaginary scenarios that melodrama
devises. But even if the world might resist the changes that melo-
drama demands, the spread of this practice—inding pleasure in
the private observation of one’s own suffering—attests to the vic-
tory of melodrama.

Notes
1
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (1976; repr., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 12.
2
Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family
Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film,
ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 43–69, esp. 50–51;
Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Gledhill, Home Is
Where, 34–35; and Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White
from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 17.
3
Brooks, preface of the original edition, in The Melodramatic Imagination,
xiv–xviii.
4
John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (London:
Walllower, 2004), 78.
5
This vagueness also derives from the way in which Brooks, Elsaesser, Gled-
hill, and Williams historicize the notion of mode. They theorize the melodramatic
mode as an existing social imaginary, as the dominant zeitgeist of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. As an alternative, Fredric Jameson locates the historicity of
modes in the process by which socially determined codes replace the constitutive
raw materials of a mode. See Brooks, “Melodramatic Imagination,” xv; Elsaesser,
“Tales of Sound and Fury,” 49–50; Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Rein-
venting Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold,
2000), 232–34; Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Lit-
erary History 7, no. 1 (1975): 142–43; and Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,”
in Reiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 42–62.
6
Brooks, preface, xvi.
7
It is in this sense that, as Brooks notes in Melodramatic Imagination, the melo-
dramatic mode results from his own act of interpretation (xvii).
8
Ibid., 14–20.
9
Ibid., 21.
10
Ibid., 35–36.
Melodrama and the Modes of the World 255

11
Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 48–50.
12
William Rothman, “Overview: What is American about ilm study in Amer-
ica?” in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake, Cambridge Studies in
Film series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 254–78, 269.
13
Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 20.
14
The line from Antigone (I, 926)—“Because we suffer we acknowledge we have
erred”—frames Hegel’s discussion of pathos and the ethical substance. See G. W. F.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977, 284.
15
Brooks begins Melodramatic Imagination by explaining that melodrama
searches for spiritual truth by “pressuring the surface of reality” (1). In other
words, the limitations of realism constitute melodrama’s main premise. He con-
cludes the book by distinguishing melodrama from modernism. Like melodrama,
modernism “discerns the void but refuses to read it as the abyss of occulted mean-
ings”; for this reason, he calls melodrama “a central poetry” (198). Gledhill’s theori-
zation of melodrama depends on a more schematic tripartite distinction of these
post-Enlightenment modes (Gledhill, “Dialogue,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (1986):
44–48, quotation on 45; Gledhill, “Melodramatic Field,” 33).
16
Gledhill, “Dialogue,” 45.
17
Gledhill, “Melodramatic Field,” 33.
18
Under this light, melodrama’s apparently paradoxical position of accepting
the realities of life while rejecting the conidence of realism constitutes a popu-
larized version of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In a nutshell, Kant recognizes
the impossibility of asserting the existence of the ideas of reason (God, the self,
and the world), yet—despite the limitations of human understanding—he insists
on the necessity of these ideas to regulate our lives. In attempting to bring forth the
unthinkable—as unthinkable—to the realm of representation, melodrama would
follow a distinctive Kantian impulse, which is patently manifest, for instance, in
paragraph 49 of Critique of Judgment section in which Kant discusses the sublime in
terms that both Brooks’s and Gledhill’s discussion of melodrama clearly echo. This
Kantian impulse is readily visible in Brooks’s conception of the melodrama of con-
sciousness in which the moral occult appears as an unknown force.
19
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture, October Books series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.
20
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 136–38.
21
Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 15–16.
22
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 279–89.
23
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 53.
24
Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 24–55.
25
Jorge Ayala Blanco, La Aventura del Cine Mexicano en la Época de Oro y Después,
Spanish ed. (México City: Grijalbo, 1993), 57.
26
Ibid., 83.
27
Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 64.