The uses of melodrama

Abstract

The first use of melodrama, to quote Levy, is that it serves as ‘the means by which James infuses his most deeply felt moral concerns with a sense of peril and crisis’ (p. 116). Melodrama looks back toward the Gothic tradition with its pure damsels, evil villains and sinister mansions. In melodrama, the suffering is horrible; in The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw, it seems to be endless. Perhaps this is necessary. Perhaps the heroines must suffer so that we may not. Were they to be anything other than sacrificial, the evil they nullify through sacrifice might be vented on such weaker figures as ourselves. When old Daniel Touchett says, ‘ “The ladies can save us” ’, he may be saying that they can only do so at a tremendous price to themselves. (It goes without saying that James created many long-suffering male characters as well.)