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The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess

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Peter Brooks' book, "The Melodramatic Imagination," would be helpful even due only to its serious examination of the structural and philosophical underpinnings of traditional French melodramatic theatre. However, what makes this study necessary reading is its convincing argument that melodrama exists as a driving force, not a distracting or somehow 'lower' element, in the creation of the modern novel. The melodramatic structure, shaped by high moral conflict and determined by its motion towards a final revelation of virtue as innocence, and is held together by a system of characters, images and actions become part of a signifying code that opens onto a moral world more cohesively meaningful than the literal world that can be represented by a more straightforward, perhaps more materialist realism. Authors of the nineteenth century novel needed this structure to retain urgency and significance in works from which motivations based on the sacred or the mythic had been discarded, and to make 'interesting' stories seeking to represent the lives of human beings in time rather than the explanatory deeds of timeless, imortal figures. A willingness to historicize a bit more, to relate an explanation of changing modes of representation to changing modes of production, would have made this work even stronger.