Once upon a time, drama was good and melodrama wasn't. Plays by Tennessee Williams were good. Soap operas like General Hospital, going strong since 1963, were bad.
Then along came teenagers, who muddied the issue by inventing their own drama. If you've ever had a teenager, you know what I'm talking about.
The word "drama" was always meant to convey life as we knew it, or at least related to it. Dramas were stories that pulled us in, that turned books into page-turners.
Melodramas were dramas given to "extravagant theatricality," works where "plot and action predominate over characterization." (Webster.)
It started out simple, and I insist it's still simple: Dramas are meaningful to us as stories. Melodramas aren't. In the end, we get to decide which is which. It's all a matter of taste.
This question came up for me as I was reading a novel entitled Illuminations by one Mary Sharratt, published in 2012.
It tells the story of a real person, Hildegard von Bingen, who lived in what is today Germany in the 1100s, Medieval times. Even as a little girl, Hildegard had visions. Her family thought her visions were causing them bad luck, so naturally her parents arranged for her to be sent away to a remote monastery where she was walled in with another child who was thought to be insane. Yes, bricked in.
So, as you're reading this beautifully written book—I hope I'm not giving you the impression that I think anything otherwise—on one level you may read Illuminations as a historically accurate commentary on how they "disposed" of special children back then.
Both these children (both about seven years of age) who were walled into a two-room living quarters directly off the main sanctuary of a monastery with a chain-link fence (a Middle-Ages version of chicken wire?) were of noble birth. The one called Gutta, who was considered insane came from a wealthy family. Why would the monastery take care of these two children for a lifetime? Along with her child, Gutta's mother gave a sizable "dowry" to the male leaders of the monastery.
It's no spoiler if I report both girls grew up to eventually be canonized by the Catholic Church as saints. The servant girl—the one with the visions—is the real-life story of Hildegard von Bilgen who first was walled-in as a servant-prisoner, then was freed and became a nun, then was made leader of her own monastery, and was finally canonized. Books that she wrote during her lifetime, all based on her visions, still exist today.
It should come as no surprise: Hildegard came close to being burned at the stake for having the temerity to write books about her visions.
As I read the novel, I was amazed at how the novel sometimes veered wildly from drama to melodrama and back to drama again.
The early parts where Gutta and Hildegard are both walled in work best; we uniformly and roundly hate both families for treating their special children in this inhumane way. We read it as social commentary, and it has strong appeal.
As soon as Hildegard frees herself from imprisonment immediately after the noble woman she served dies of starvation, (I believe she had OCD and an eating disorder) many events ensue. I read some of them as melodrama.
Here's the challenge: Mary Sharratt is writing a novel that took place during The Age of Faith.You might say a novel written today that depicts current times is written during The Age of Tik-Tok.
I think the drama-melodrama extremes in the second half of the novel are based on where you believe God has intervened at each turn to keep Hildegard from being burned at the stake as a witch.
The Passover Holiday will soon be upon us. Do you read Moses parting the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape and then causing the waters to come rushing back together and drown Pharaoh's army as melodrama or drama? I guess that depends on whether you believe it or not. Well, to its credit, The Bible is written in third person.
This is important. It accounts for the development and acceptance of magical realism as a writing style worthy of winning its literary practitioners Nobel Prizes for Literature. No itty-bitty thing.
In the case of Illuminations, matters are made worse because the entire novel is written in first-person; that is, in the voice of Hildegard herself. In my view, the entire narrative becomes unhinged when Hildegard has no choice but to describe astounding events in her own voice, for example, how she freed herself from the head of the monastery, Cuno. He is her nemesis, and when Hildegard and her nuns sing a song composed and lyrics written by Hildegard, a visiting, higher-llevel church official overrules Cuno and declares her poetry and music to be God-inspired. He blesses it, in other words. Hildegard is saved and freed from being under the thumb of that horrid man. But all we have is Hildegard's plain "voice" or writing style to tell us very matter-of-factly that this has happened. All the potential tools a writer writing in third-person has at her disposal--poetry, image, metaphore, etc.--are short-circuited, rendered null-and-void. As a result of that, its plain style at major plot turning points, the novel starts feeling to me at that moment like the hero who unties the damsel in distress from the tracks (the villain has just tied her to) moments before the train happens to come along. I read it and the word "melodrama" comes to mind. Another reader—-someone who might vervently wish to believe this is what happened--might take the bait hook, line and sinker, and believe it.
In summation, perhaps my experience of the novel might be wholly different if throughout Illuminations we had a third-person narrator who we could trust to be reporting, as they said on the TV show, Dragnet, "The Facts, M'mam. Just the facts!" In this case, the reader's belief in the narrative would be enhanced, I would argue. What do you think?
