Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century

Jane Eyre, Twilight, and the Mode of Excess in Popular Girl Culture

Katie Kapurch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137590602
• eBook ISBN: 9781137581693
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

  

© The Author(s) 2016

Katie KapurchVictorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century10.1057/978-1-137-58169-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Melodrama, Power, and Girl Culture

Katie Kapurch¹

(1)

Department of English, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, USA

End Abstract

“Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong,” explains the adult female protagonist of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (61). Byatt’s words capture the essence of melodrama in girl culture. In many ways, girls’ ongoing preferences for the affective experience of melodrama are a Nietzschean affirmation that says “yes” to life’s suffering. Melodrama gazes at the abysses of life and offers redemption through affirmation, just like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the ‘most abysmal idea,’ nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence—but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, ‘the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen.’—Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying Yes” (306). Though Nietzsche himself would probably not recognize the commonalities shared by contemporary girls and Zarathustra, they are, in fact, alike. In spite of villainy’s perpetual pursuit of innocence, girls read and reread melodramatic texts, affirming the existence of suffering and bearing witness to it, often through their own tears. True to melodramatic form and in accordance with Nietzsche’s philosophy, girl culture optimistically hopes for positive resolutions—in spite of all the danger.

What is it about black-and-white extremes and life-and-death urgency that compel girls to turn again and again to melodrama, both in their choices of entertainment and in their own speech? Why do girls enjoy reading and viewing media that make them cry or scream? What does wallowing in lyrical and tearful whirlpools of emotion allow girls to express and confront? And why does melodrama, an outwardly conservative mode of discourse popular among Victorians, remain applicable to twenty-first-century girls, who have presumably benefited from more than a 100 years of feminist strides? These questions beg for a theory of melodrama’s ongoing popularity in girl culture.

Melodrama’s persistence in girl culture is an indication that we should look closely at the mode’s capacity to negotiate girlhood as a historically situated and socially constructed category. ¹ Western girlhood is historically laden with expectations inherited from the very same historical context that elevated melodrama to prominence: Anglo-American Victorian culture. Younger females’ participation in the nineteenth-century public sphere gave rise to English uses of the word “girl” to describe females in school and work settings: “Young lady and young person—like lady and woman—had class referents; girl is inclusive. It takes in work girl, servant girl, factory girl, college girl or girl graduate, shop-girl, bachelor girl, girl journalist, and office girl. It includes schoolgirl as well, but she is not a child” (Mitchell, New 39). The emerging English-language uses of “girl” reveal the word’s connections to economic class, work experiences, and to adult femininity—and this inheritance continues today. Born out of a similar contextual consciousness, melodrama and girlhood beg for a consideration of the rippling out of the nineteenth century.

Recognizing the form and function of melodrama, without fear of its historically pejorative connotations, offers scholars a tool for advancing interpretations of political, social, and cultural messages about girlhood ascertainable through the melodramatic mode. Melodrama has not been systematically theorized in a study of girl culture, which includes adult and girl-authored texts. ² Although children’s literature and adolescent literature scholars have made passing references to melodrama, it is often couched in apology or used as a derogative. ³ Recent literary studies (Blackford, “Mockingbird”; Bousquet) that do seriously consider melodrama and youth often consider only one textual phenomenon and do not consistently incorporate the responses of young readers to understand melodrama’s appeal to those audiences. ⁴

Feminist scholars in the late twentieth century have already reclaimed “feminine” genres, namely melodrama and romance, and their appeal for adult women. Around the same time as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, feminist scholars in literary studies paid a great deal of attention to Victorian women’s (writers’ and readers’) preferences for sensationalism and melodrama (see Mitchell; Auerbach; Showalter; Vicinus). Likewise, film and media studies scholars acknowledged twentieth-century film’s indebtedness to the Victorian theatrical and literary tradition to theorize filmic and serial television melodrama’s particular connection to women’s (domestic) experiences and female audiences (see Doane; Gledhill; Kaplan, Modleski; Williams). ⁵ In terms of romance, Janice Radway’s findings in Reading the Romance (1984), are now famous in feminist theory and media reception studies. Radway discovers how seemingly conservative romantic storylines can still contain elements of resistance—available even in the pleasure of the reading experience itself. ⁶ Subsequent scholars have considered Radway’s findings in light of adolescent romance (Christian-Smith) and to romance in Twilight (Morey) and to girl readers of Twilight (Behm-Morawitz et al.). ⁷ Generally, these studies all work to untangle the complicated relationship between feminism and romance, questioning the representation of stereotypical and conventional narratives in which a heroine is empowered through a heterosexual relationship.

The specific appeal of melodrama, a mode that pervades different genres and media, and its appeal to girls has not been theorized in relation to Twilight—or to girl culture writ large. The melodramatic mode houses a consideration of romance but does not limit the focus to romantic relationships. Indeed, a concern for melodrama finds sensational and even erotic potential in the melodramatic conventions themselves, which often favor circular patterns of heightened emotions related to suspense and anxiety, in addition to sexual desire (see Chaps. 4 and 7). Although literature and film and media studies scholars exhaustively addressed melodrama’s appeal to adult women, with a few exceptions (see Mitchell; Karlyn) they ignore the readership and representations of female youth. The musicologist Jacqueline Warwick has recognized melodrama in girl-group discourse, but that insight does not extend past pop music. And while Kirsten Drotner recognizes girls’ discursive preference for melodrama from a sociological perspective, this understanding is not connected to other realms of girl-oriented mass media. ⁸ In short, no study has explored melodrama as a mode of discourse in girl culture in order to answer the question: why is melodrama so popular with girls?

The gap in scholarship related to melodrama and girls became entirely evident in the initial reception and critical assessment of Twilight. Displeased with girls screaming and crying over a seemingly passive girl’s obsessive romance with a potentially violent, sparkly male vampire, many critics were quick to judge Twilight as harmful to female youth. But Barbara Ehrenreich, Gloria Jacobs, and Elizabeth Hess have already encouraged scholars to appreciate why girl fans scream for popular teen idols. In the case of Beatlemaniacs in the 1960s, the scream was, in fact, liberating. Ehrenreich et al. suggest the girls’ screams implied a kind of collective agency that anticipated the feminist movement that would gain traction as the decade went on. Given the sexually restrictive culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s, girl fans’ screaming was more about the girls than the Fab Four: “It was hard to miss the element of defiance in Beatlemania. If Beatlemania was conformity, it was conformity to an imperative that overruled adult mores and even adult laws” (17). Understanding girls’ emotional reactions to Twilight as evidence of their own affective agency is a finding unearthed by an exploration of melodrama in girl culture. As I argue, Twilight’s adherence to the melodramatic mode may empower girls, rather than inhibit them.

Melodrama’s capacity to champion the powerless cuts to the heart of melodrama’s popularity in girl culture: melodrama persists because, through excess and overstatement, cultural restrictions facing female youth are exposed and critiqued. Melodrama consistently works to validate girls’ emotional lives, especially their affective responses to coming-of-age experiences. More specifically, melodrama’s circular patterns evoke heightened emotions that permit the representation of girl characters’ sexual desire and anxiety—and replicate those sensations for the reader at the same time. Through such confession and revelation, melodrama promotes empathy and intimacy among girls. Melodrama’s extremes, in fact, create a space for critical renegotiations of meaning, especially because of the mode’s capacity to critique the very extremes it represents.

Why Twilight? Girlhood Reading

This book is about Twilight—but it’s not really about Twilight. The Twilight Saga is just one popular work featuring a coming-of-age girl and melodramatic excess. Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a forerunner for Stephenie Meyer’s literary series, which turned into a multimedia phenomenon including film adaptations and fan communities—both full of their own melodramatic discourse. When they translate Bella’s melodramatic subjectivity to the screen, Twilight’s cinematic adaptations express a girl’s emotional feeling using cinematic techniques associated with filmic melodrama as well as conventions of girls’ media. In the media girls themselves produce, Twilight fan productions also offer frequent examples of emotional and affective reactions to the saga’s melodramatic impulses. During the height of the Twilight phenomenon’s popularity (circa 2007–2010), on discussion forum on the website TwilightTEENS, girls from all over the globe went online to talk about their reactions to reading Meyer’s saga. Likewise, on TheTwilightReader’s YouTube channel, a 12-year-old girl, Liza, posted videos she made, sometimes joking about her parents’ reactions to her intensity of feeling for the literary and cinematic versions of the vampire romance. The Bella Cullen Project, a band started by three 13-year-old girlfriends from Texas, channeled a similar kind of affective energy into composing and singing Twilight-inspired songs that were distributed in other online spaces. These girls’ online activities, however, are all past tense; their fan communities are no longer active (see Appendix for detailed descriptions of these communities, as well as methodology for research girls online).

Identifying melodrama as a mode in girl culture, rather than a genre, has important implications because the saga’s multimedia nature allows us to see melodrama’s ubiquity in adult-authored and girl-generated media. Pairing Twilight, a popular but maligned phenomenon with Brontë’s now celebrated proto-feminist novel serves several purposes. For skeptics of the saga, the Brontë connection may help legitimize Twilight’s melodramatic impulses. True, Jane’s narrative voice and Brontë’s prose style are much more compelling than Bella’s and Meyer’s (Silver, “Twilight” 135). Yet Jane also experiences the paralyzing effects of self-consciousness brought on by social judgment and restrictions related to gender, class, and age. These limitations, often depicted in exaggerated hyperbole, correspond to actual controls associated with the social construction of both Victorian and twenty-first-century girlhood.

Defining melodrama first through the Brontë-Meyer pairing reveals the mode’s form and function, offering clues to both texts’ appeal, especially their capacities to validate emotion, critique restrictive discourses of girlhood, and foster intimacy between girls. Jane Eyre and the Twilight Saga invoke the mode of excess to address the social construction of girlhood and to appeal to girls. Scholars have gained fruitful insight into the melodramatic nature of contemporary works through their relationship to nineteenth-century texts. Holly Virginia Blackford, for example, uses a comparative framework ⁹ to understand how melodrama operates in To Kill a Mockingbird, a mid-twentieth-century novel whose girl narrator retrospectively recounts her experiences as a child growing up in the racially segregated American South. Blackford explicates melodramatic conventions and their critical functions in Harper Lee’s novel through connections to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). ¹⁰ By revealing Lee’s inheritance and transformation of a Victorian melodramatic convention (innocence’s persecution), Blackford discovers how the twentieth-century novel addresses racial injustice, a social issue Stowe’s novel was certainly calling upon melodrama to confront.

Discerning melodramatic conventions particular to the nineteenth century is not to say, however, that Jane Eyre and Twilight are identical to Victorian stage melodramas, ¹¹ which favored externalized expression uttered onstage. Swarthy villains, sweetly spoken heroines, and dashing heroes were the key players in predictable plots of excitement and improbability punctuated by moments of levity—and intense suffering. ¹² These sensations were elevated on the backdrop of over-the-top sets and props (such as a large ship thrust onto the stage), and, of course, thrilling musical accompaniments. Music cued audiences to boo and hiss the villain and to cheer (or tear) for the plights of hero and heroine (Booth, Theatre 151–52; McWilliam 56). ¹³ But even though these tropes are recognizable in Jane Eyre and the saga, melodramatic expression comes from within the protagonist.

In the nineteenth century, Brontë invoked melodramatic tropes in the portrayal of her protagonist’s interior drama. These narrative choices are similar to the kind of stage-to-page process that was occurring among other novelists of her day. Drawing on the works of French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and American-born English writer Henry James (1843–1916), Brooks recognizes how stage melodrama informed the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century: “The nineteenth-century novel needs such theatricality [...] to get its meaning across, to invest in its renderings of life a sense of memorability and significance. With the rise of the novel and of melodrama, we find the entry into literature a new moral and aesthetic category, that of the ‘interesting’” (13). Informed by Brooks’s perspective, I locate melodrama in the works of Brontë and Meyer not to prove a one-to-one influence (even though it exists as I explain later), but to appreciate the “memorability and significance” (13) with which melodrama invests coming-of-age girlhood—both on the page, onscreen, and in the variety of discourse created by girls themselves.

The Jane Eyre-Twilight connection offers direct evidence of the nineteenth-century’s ongoing legacy of melodrama in girl culture today. Meyer’s affinity for the Brontës is clear from the beginning of the series when Bella’s own worn copy of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is introduced at the beginning of Twilight. Eclipse explicitly acknowledges Emily’s Wuthering Heights, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Melodrama, Power, and Girl Culture
• 2. Powerless Protagonists: Melodramatic Heroines of Victorian and Postfeminist Girlhood
• 3. Spatial Invasions and Melodrama’s Narrative Structure: Innocence, Villainy, and Vigilance in Girlhood
• 4. Musical Gestures: Melodramatic Lullabies of Anxious Desire
• 5. Secrets Revealed, Feelings Moralized: Girls’ Confessional Intimacy and Emotional Agency
• 6. Melodrama’s Gothic Remnants: Nightmares and Vampire-Girl Doubles
• 7. Suffering, Separation, and Crying: Melodrama, Tears, and Girls’ Emotional Empowerment
• 8. Melodrama’s Happily Ever After? Girls, Rereading, and Resistance
• Backmatter