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

by Peter Brooks

In this lucid and fascinating book, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the nineteenth century, he moves on to Balzac and Henry James to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using the rhetoric and excess of melodrama - in particular its secularized conflicts of good and evil, salvation and damnation. The Melodramatic Imagination has become a classic work for understanding theater, fiction, and film.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Essays, Nonfiction, Literature, Criticism, History, Writing

251 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.

Reviews

[John Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up in conjunction with a class, and I'm so glad I did. The first several chapters discuss melodrama as a "mode." The analysis is fascinating and helps to shed critical light on a form that is so often thrown away. And I loved that most of the examples were from theatre. The last two chapters focused on the melodramatic imagination in the works of Balzac and Henry James. Not quite as interesting as the rest of the book but still v. cool.

[aa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has changed how I perceive novels and movies, and my own preferences for them. I highly recommend it.

[Christina knox]

i read this during 9/11 in a course of the same name where the topic switched from sirk to cnn after the planes hit.

[Jsph · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting book but written at a college level and much of the discussion is about once popular but now obscure plays.

[Robt. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read enough Balzac and James to really get much out of this book, but it was nonetheless illuminating. The following paragraph from the conclusion speaks to the current political moment much more than to the post-Watergate time when Brooks was writing:

“As the modern politics of created charisma—inevitably a politics of personality—and self-conscious enactments must imply, we are within a system of melodramatic struggle, where virtue and evil are fully personalized. Rarely can there be the suggestion of illumination and reconciliation in terms of a higher order of synthesis. It is indeed struggle that alone matters: the modern political leader is obliged to posit continuous battle with an enemy. If it is not another suborning political power or leader, it may be a natural scourge on which ‘war’ is declared, poverty or hunger or simply inflation. The leader must imagine himself in constant bipolar dynamism with the enemy, winning the war, gaining the upper hand, on the verge of achieving expulsion; or else succumbing, or cataclysmically struck down. The melodramatist of modern politics suggests again that Robespierre and Saint-Just are the ultimate models of reference, in their increasingly manichaeistic struggle of virtue … against vice, the enemies of the Republic, the traitors, the uncitizens, the nonpersons.”

[Jack Bentele]

The moral occult and the meaning we must squeeze from the firm grip of the abyss.

“The dissipation of the mythic orders that made true tragedy possible is an irreversible condition that is better accepted than masked with spurious appeals to synthetic mythologies.”

And this is what led to Mad Men being the best melodrama of them all

[Mills College Library]

809.3 B8736 1995

[mirella · Rating 5 out of 5]

me sirve (y mucho) para mi tesis, un clásico!

[Apoorva · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ideas are extremely interesting but I find the omission of Dostoy quite sad. However it has given me the desire to read Balzac and James for the upcoming exam, which is what it was assigned for.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brooks argues that melodrama--usually associated with low, simple tastes--actually influences higher realist fiction in the 19C.

[Haimaneltohamy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful study.