Introduction

For Stanley Cavell, thinking about the commitment of Hollywood melodrama to human expressions and needs also means considering the moral imagination articulated by Hollywood melodrama and how significant its contribution to American culture's conception of itself has been. Highlighting the artistic achievements of Hollywood movies from the 1930s and 1940s, Cavell understands melodrama's pattern of desire and disappointment as interrogating the relationship between an individual self and the (social, political) world shared with others.

In his study Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Cavell refers to Peter Brooks's distinctive understanding of melodrama as an imaginative cultural mode for the post-Enlightenment era. Brooks defines melodramatic aesthetics as a historically and culturally located theatrical mode of imagining, which turns the characters’ expressive bodies and their affective meaning into the sites of dramatic or novelistic representation. With regard to the modern literary sensibility that followed the Enlightenment, Brooks's conception is that the religious foundations of moral values and maxims have been transformed into a non-metaphysical vision of the social world, which provides the scene for an expressive enactment of moral justifications and displays compensatory solutions to the injustice of the present state of society. According to Brooks, melodramatic texture and dramaturgy entail a polarization into moral absolutes; they hypostatize a heightened conflict between good and evil by starkly juxtaposing suffering innocents with triumphant scoundrels, culminating in denouements which eventually reveal the victim's true moral virtue and the villain's fraudulence and wickedness.

It is by elaborating the tensions in Immanuel Kant's declaration of the limits of experience and the limits of knowledge that Cavell explains why Brooks's characterization of melodrama as a response to the Enlightenment introduces a causal dependency to the theory of melodrama in that, misleadingly, response is subordinated to event. For Cavell, Brooks's assumption of a melodramatic, expressive aspiration for the “moral occult, which melodramatic texts suppose to exist “behind or beyond the facade of reality,” perpetuates melodrama's operative semantic formation of the supplementary status of morality. For Cavell, then, the problem that emerges from such an account is the negation of “Kant's claim that the moral provides the ground of the religious.”