Narrative Analysis and Melodrama
by Jenny White, MSc Student at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
For the past few weeks, narrative scholar Samantha Hardy has been visiting us at the Center for Narrative and Conflict Resolution, teaching classes and hosting events around the concept of Melodrama in narrative.
This form of analysis stems from genre analysis, and asserts that, in conflict narratives, we sometimes fall into framing the conflict as a melodrama. In a melodramatic story, whoever is at the center of the conflict is the heroine of their own story, passive and unable to do anything to improve the situation. The heroine of the story is in conflict with the villain and has framed that person as almost entirely evil, with sinister intentions and no redeeming qualities that are relevant to the story.
In traditional literary examples of melodrama, there is a father figure in the story who acts as the savior. He intercedes on the heroine’s behalf and helps achieve “dream justice”, which restores the heroine to her original, virtuous position and rids the story of the villain. The notion of “dream justice” suggests that the conflict exists outside of normal life, outside of any context. The conflict only occurred because the villain has disrupted the order of life, so the ideal, the “dream justice” is to restore life to the way it was before. A key aspect of melodrama from a conflict resolution perspective is that the audience is meant to feel motivated to save the heroine, perhaps even by entering the story to save her as the father figure.
Presented in this way, its easy to see that melodrama is not often the reality. Many conflicts that occur don’t happen because someone is just out to disrupt our lives or because we have done nothing to cause them.
In our Narrative Analysis class this semester, Dr. Hardy discussed the possibility of transforming a melodramatic story into a tragedy. This might sound strange, but traditional Greek tragedies included characters that were not as one-dimensional as those in melodrama. The hero in a tragic story is complex, doesn’t always make the most “virtuous: decisions, and has a tragic flaw that is relatable to the audience. The villain is not always framed as motivated by a desire to challenge the virtue of the protagonist, but is driven by other goals and objectives. Dream justice in tragedy is revealed to be less satisfying than it might appear, and highlights the importance of context in the story. Tragedy serves a better conflict story genre because it opens up the story to other endings other than “dream justice” because of the complexity of this genre. There are other solutions available to the hero (heroine in melodrama), and more context to draw possibilities of resolution from. The hero has to forgo the idea of “dream justice”, but through this transformation from melodrama to tragedy, they gain agency to form a better, more nuanced story.
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