Abstrakt
For an average reader/viewer, melodrama is, and at the same same is not, a firstchoice
genre. This oxymoronic approach to melodrama results from the fact
that, in mass perception, the convention performs as, first and foremost, a text
whose underlying aim is to reveal emotional truths via dramatic action. Melodrama’s
affective provenance is, therefore, to blame for the popular demarcation
of the genre in ‘womanly’ terms. Considering the still unequal, if not degraded,
position of women in the global patriarchal system, such a delimitation entails,
in turn, the further conceptualisation of the melodramatic convention as
a provider for simplified emotions, stereotypical characters, and, last but not
least, Manichean philosophy as determinants of the said ‘emotional truths’ to
discover. It is no wonder, then, that audiences do (not) favour melodrama:
its excessive binary drive – which tends to allegedly re/construct the world
envisioned as an extensive network of moral absolutes hence of clichés and
formulas – seems to confine viewers of melodramatic fictions, too, in the category
of the undemanding, even the debased; thereby an embodiment of the
victimisations which melodrama typically stigmatises and with which it at the
same time sympathises.