Melodrama as a Form of the Moral

멜로드라마, 그 근대적인 모럴의 형식

  • Received : 2013.01.31
  • Accepted : 2013.03.16
  • Published : 2013.04.30

Abstract

Melodrama emerged as a form of the moral in the early modern age. As an approach 'the moral' not only means that rewarding virtue and punishing vice, but also refer to a principle of spiritual life and a way of life. -Melodrama theatricalizes a new vision of human life and society through a new type of the virtuous protagonist and sentiment/-ality. -This allows melodrama to be a dominant cultural form in this modern age, beyond the borders of the theater, mass-media, and literature. Virtue and sentiment/-ality are the core elements of melodrama, which differentiate it from tragedy and comedy especially in the structure and effect of the drama. Actually virtue and sentiment/-ality have been a main target of criticism. Virtue has been regarded as a trite quality of the stereotypical protagonist, and sentiment/-ality as a banal emotion which paralyzes an audience's recognition of reality. -However, this thesis regards both virtue and sentiment/-ality as vehicles for showing and sharing the morals of the modern age. First, the virtues of the protagonist included the general and universal ones of the bourgeois -at that times, the bourgeois represented themselves as a human being- such as the responsibility and obedience of a father, a mother, a wife, a husband, a daughter and a son. They also included the professional ethics such as courage, honesty, and justice and so on. The fall or salvation of the protagonist is largely determined by his/her private individual virtue. Second, sentiment/ality is a theatrical device that makes the audience internalize the protagonist's virtue. The protagonist expresses his/her universal virtue sentimentally, and the audience also expresses their virtue by sympathizing with the protagonist's virtue sentimentally. However, the melodramatic protagonist as an individual, is not connected with society, but remains isolated. As a result, s/he has no influence on the society, where s/he can only ends her/his play alone with a happy-ending. S/he is happy alone, or at best happy with his/her own family. On the contrary to this, tragic protagonist usually fixes social disorder through his/her fall. In that sense, we can say that melodrama presents only the half of the human life.

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