1
Through a discussion of specific aspects and detail of your chosen texts, discuss the
intersections between ideology and aesthetics in stage and/or screen melodrama. Your
essay should use detailed close readings of three melodrama texts (plays and/or films, as
you prefer).
In your essay, you should discuss 3 melodrama texts in detail. You can focus on texts
we’ve looked at in seminars, but you are encouraged to read/view beyond those texts.
Your answer should demonstrate your reading/viewing in the module as a whole, and
your understanding of the issues and themes raised in the module.
Texts Chosen:
Now, Voyager. 1942. Directed by Irving Rapper. New York: Warner Bros.
Stella Dallis. 1937. Directed by King Vidor Samuel. New York: Goldwyn Productions.
Palmer, T.A. 1875. East Lynne: A Domestic Drama in a Prologue and Four Acts. London:
Samuel French.
In this essay, I will be exploring the implications of the intersections between ideology and
aesthetics through analysing the representation of gender in Stella Dallas (Vidor, 1937) Now
Voyager (Rapper, 1942) and East Lynne (Palmer, 1875.) I’m particularly interested in the
ideologies of sexual difference, specifically the presentation of female sexuality, sacrifice,
and suffering due to the oppressing societal expectations operating in their respective time
periods. Through a detailed examination of specific scenes in these texts, I will be analysing
how particular aesthetic melodramatic features and dramaturgy methods emphasise these
ideological drives. In commentating on the relationship between gender and melodrama,
Laing notes how together they inform the audience of these ideological ideas through ‘the
combination of romantic conceptions of emotion, music and gender, and more ancient
, 2
archetypes of musical, emotional, sexual and (anti-)social behaviour’ (Laing, 2007:7) These
melodramatic tropes including a focus on excess, suffering, and pathos are clearly seen in all
three highly emotional texts which I will argue can be seen to heighten emotion and audience
sympathy for the protagonists. Concerning the melodramatic conventions prominent in these
three texts, many of the themes and emotions elicited in a melodrama can be argued to be
also present in a woman’s film, a genre that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Often cited as
examples of a woman’s films, Stella Dallis & Now Voyager align with the conventions of this
genre in that they both ‘treat problems defined as ‘female’’ (Whelehan, 2007:138) and
therefore are geared towards female audiences. With regards to the relationship between
melodrama and the Woman’s film, Whelehan further notes that ‘films in this grouping largely
come under the categories of melodrama with their focus on the domestic and drive to expose
the realities of the inequities of women’s lives’ (Whelehan, 2007:138) and these ideologies
can be seen to be explored through melodramatic storytelling techniques in not only Stella
Dallis & Now Voyager but also Palmers play, East Lynne. Overall, through detailed scene
analysis, I will explore the intersections between how meaning is constructed and how
melodrama points to particular issues of social conflict and ideological matters regarding
gender and class. This analysis will hopefully prove my opinion, which is aligned with
Rosenman’s, that these melodramatic stories ‘tell us that pain is gendered, not in and of itself
but in its meanings and aims through the distinctive demands that ideology places on men
and women’ (Rosenman, 2003: 22).
In discussing the intersections between aesthetic composition and ideological matters
regarding female sexuality, suffering, sacrifice, and I have chosen to focus on King Vidor’s
Stella Dallis (Vidor, 1937.) The film follows Stella Dallis’ desire to become the ideal upper-
class woman, and throughout, we watch her failure to achieve permanent upward social
