Redirecting Melodrama: Gish, Henry King, and Romola

In his 1927 essay, "Lillian Gish: An Interpretation," Edward Wagenknecht praises Gish's lead performance in Henry King's Romola (1924), a cinematic adaptation of George Eliot's historical novel set in late fifteenth-century Florence. In the film Gish plays Romola de' Bardi, a patrician scholar's daughter who marries, and is eventually betrayed by, a handsome young Greek, Tito Melema. Wagenknecht especially admires Gish's performance for its "repressed" dramatic intensity, free of "the old-time violence, the occasionally hysteric quality that was the hangover from her Griffith days ..." (246). Despite his praise for Gish, Wagenknecht thought the film "wholly lacked the melodramatic appeal which a great costume film must have if it is to capture the movie public" (245). We believe, in contrast, that Henry King successfully recast Eliot's 1863 realist narrative as a 1920s Hollywood melodrama. But we agree with Wagenknecht that Lillian Gish's authority as an actress enabled her occasionally to circumvent the patriarchal conventions of the genre. By reading King's film against Eliot's novel, viewers can discern the ways in which each text accepts and rejects a melodramatic identity. Victorian domestic melodrama, in its nineteenth-century literary and theatrical forms and in Hollywood films of the 1910s and 1920s, presents the major dramatic conflict of this narrative mode as a challenge to the hierarchically structured family in which women are dominated by men (Brooks 30-35; Gledhill 31 ; Lang 3-13). Rising to prominence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the rise of the bourgeoisie, melodramatic narratives sought to uphold moral values that privileged the patriarchal family: for example, values regulating sexual conduct and social order. Yet, in so doing, they promoted a regressive ideology that undercut personal moral agency by relying on a conservative belief in moral fate. As Peter Brooks has argued in his influential study, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), the confrontation with patriarchy is seen in ethically cosmic proportions as a battle between Good and Evil. Because of this stark moral polarity, characters, as Brooks argues, have a fixed and immutable moral nature, being indelibly marked as virtuous or villainous. They cannot change their moral stripes; they cannot be corrupted if innocent, nor develop a conscience if morally tainted (30). Thus, melodramati.c narrative closure can only achieve a poetic justice: Characters must be rewarded or punished according to their respective fixed villainous or virtuous natures. This context of moral fatalism, while heightening the sense of inevitability to the drama, also reduces the depth and complexity of the characters, rendering them stereotypical. Melodrama, Brooks persuasively argues, "typically ... is about virtue made visible and acknowledged"; it is "the drama of a recognition" (27). However, the heroes or heroines themselves are restricted in their ability to achieve moral recognition and to counter challenges to their blameless reputations. In the melodramatic master plot, the narrative begins with the presentation of certain characters as virtuous and innocent (29). A disruptive agent, the villain, then seeks to compromise their innocence by provoking a misrecognition of their moral identities: the innocents are taken to be villains; the villain can be misperceived as virtuous. In fact, the villain can even be a father whose tyrannical oppression subverts the patriarchal family, as in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). In the face of this misrecognition, hero and heroine cannot actively restore their true reputation. Only a patriarchal figure, or some public gathering supportive of patriarchal values, can correct this wrong impression. Thus, while melodramatic characters can act to change the course of narrative events, they cannot control what moral value is assigned to their reputations.1 They are restricted in their ability to create their own character. …