‌The Melodramatic Imagination Revisited

 

It has been almost forty years since Peter Brooks released his pathbreaking and influential book,  The Melodramatic Imagination:  Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess (1975).  Over these decades, and partly on account of Brooks's important arguments, melodrama has not only undergone critical rehabilitation; it has also become perhaps the most important category for those who would link twentieth-century cinema with the century that came before them.  But melodrama's mode of excess has deep connections with a sentimental mode of moderation that features emotion mediated by reciprocal sympathy.  The sentimental, it can be demonstrated, both set the conditions for melodrama's emergence around the time of the French Revolution and continued to co-exist with melodrama through figures like Mary Shelley and Dickens and into the age of cinema.  The kind of story Brooks wishes to tell, in short, becomes richer and more complex when melodrama's manichaean extremes of character, gesture, and style are understood to evolve from, and with, the moderating effects of "putting oneself in the place of the other."