4 - Melodrama and Law

Summary

Meanwhile, you and I will try to put

infinite shades of grey into black and white

(Kavanagh QC, 22 March 1999).

The title of this concluding chapter suggests a correlation between melodrama and law, and yet at first sight nothing could be more divergent: the former is a literary genre associated with the feminine because of its concern with the display of emotion, while the latter is a system of social control, using apparent rationality as its most crucial characteristic. Why would one want to compare such diametrically opposed fields? When writing the previous chapters it became increasingly apparent that an analysis of these dis/continuities would not only be pertinent but also mutually enriching to two disciplines with ostensibly unrelated aims. Both melodrama and law operate on binary oppositions and are decried for this reductionism. Both law and melodrama also converge in their potential for social change and their focus on the conflict of human relationships. It is these convergences, amongst other things, that this chapter examines. Using melodrama theory, in particular Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination (1985), and the law and literature debate as my theoretical framework, I will take the fiction of Burgos as a paradigmatic case to draw conclusions about the relation between law and melodrama. I will also draw on feminist critics as appropriate. It is my aim to show how two disciplines with disparate aims share important matters of common concern, and how transgressing the boundaries that separate them has a certain necessity. If law — supposedly the epitome of academic logic — is based on the same thought system as melodrama — purportedly the essence of emotional drivel — what does that tell us about the former's sophistication in argument? Does the very comparison and the subsequent findings of continuities between the two diametrically opposed fields condemn the former and/or elevate the latter? It is these questions that the following chapter tries to shed light on.

In his seminal text The Melodramatic Imagination (1985), Peter Brooks argues that the origins of melodrama go back to the French Revolution, ‘the moment that symbolically, and really, marks […] the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society, and the invalidation of the literary forms — tragedy and comedy of manners — that depended on such a society’ (Brooks 1985: 14-15).