Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T03:18:39.317Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Dangerous Woman of Melvillean Melodrama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Elaine Aston  and
Ian Clarke
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Almost in its death throes at the turn of the present century, sensational melodrama threw up a curious mutation at the hands of the prolific playwrights and managers, the brothers Walter and Frederick Melville. In numerous of their plays performed in the decade or so before the First World War, the ‘New Woman’, whose rights and rebellions were simultaneously the focus of debate in so-called ‘problem’ plays, took on a new and threatening aspect – as the eponymously ‘dangerous’ central character of The Worst Woman in London, A Disgrace to Her Sex, The Girl Who Wrecked His Home, and a score or so of similar titles. In the following article Elaine Aston and lan Clarke explore the nature of these ‘strong’ female roles, both as acting vehicles and as embodiments of male fears and fantasies, in a theatre which existed in large part to serve such needs and which, through such characters, at once fictionalized and affirmed the fears of ‘respectable’ society about the moral stature of the actress. The authors both teach in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, where lan Clarke is Director of Drama, having previously published his own study of Edwardian Drama in 1989.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 45 , February 1996 , pp. 30 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

The authors would like to acknowledge Professor David Mayer's encouragement of their work on the Melvilles, and his careful and constructive criticism of an early draft of this essay.

1. Nicoll, Allardyce, English Drama 1900–1930: the Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 180Google Scholar.

2. Walter Melville's prolific output is affectionately satirized in the cartoon of his ‘drama factory’ on page 39.

3. Brief accounts of the Melville family may be found in Stageland, 1 (September 1905), p. 1–2, and Bournemouth Graphic, 16 February 1905, p. 108.

4. Bournemouth Graphic, 16 February 1905, p. 108.

5. See Greatorex, Harry N., Melville's Derby Legacy (Derby: Breedon Books, 1985), p. 50Google Scholar.

6. In addition to the playtexts deposited in the Lord Chamberlain's collection, there are collections of Melville material in the Theatre Museum and the Templeman Library, University of Kent at Canterbury.

7. Scudamore's name is also included in Nicoll's list of popular authors.

8. Disher, M. Willson, Melodrama: Plots That Thrilled (London: Rockliff, 1954), p. 166Google Scholar.

9. Nicoll, op. cit., p. 180, 181.

10. Disher recalls, for example, that ‘Hoardings advertised that the Melvilles’ dramas would be daring. They brought colour to our cheeks as well as to our streets. There was never anything improper about them, but they alarmed those who disapproved of “the sensational”. The titles were alarming in themselves even without the more than life-size figures that illustrated them. There were never such posters before or since. Usually an accusing finger created a centre of interest in a colour-scheme of yellow and red surrounding one or two arresting female figures' (p. 165). Examples of Melville publicity material are housed in the collection at the Templeman Library.

11. Disher, op. cit., p. 168.

12. The Era, 28 October 1899, p. 11. Olga Audré went on to create other heavy lady roles in the Melvilles' melodramas, including Vesta le Clere in The Girl Who Took the Wrong Turning, which was acknowledged as being yet another of ‘her triumphs in this special line of business’ (The Era, 6 October 1906, p. 15). Her depiction on stage of the dangerous woman figure was central to the creation of the theatrical text of the Melvillean melodrama.

13. Disher, op. cit., p. 171.

14. The Era, 28 May 1904, p. 13.

15. The Era, 9 October 1909. p. 17. The image is encapsulated in the photograph of Violet Englefield on the front cover of the Souvenir celebrating the one hundredth performance of The Bad Girl of the Family at the Aldwych on 11 March 1910: her face, which dominates the photograph, faces the camera, but her eyes are turned upwards and away in a knowing, possibly suggestive, wink to an unseen observer (see page 35).

16. Undated typewritten note from Frederick Melville attached to one of the typescripts of The Bad Girl of the Family, housed in the Theatre Museum's Melville collection, Box 35.

17. Aldrich, Zoë, ‘The Adventuress: Lady Audley's Secret as Novel, Play, and Film’, in The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914, ed. Gardner, Viv and Rutherford, Susan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 159–74Google Scholar.

18. Modleski, Tania, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 97Google Scholar.

19. A contemporary account of the audience response to The Worst Woman in London in Stageland, 1 (September 1905), p. 6, supports this contention: ‘The audience express their disapproval of her methods with a deafening chorus of groans and hisses, but they admire her superb taste in dress, her resource, and daring career’. Similarly, Shaw remarked of the audience's response to the glamorous spectacle and the conventional punishment of the stage courtesan: ‘Naturally, the poorer girls in the gallery will believe in the beauty, in the exquisite dresses, and the luxurious living, and will see that there is no real necessity for the consumption, the suicide, or the ejectment’. See , Shaw, Preface to Mrs Warren's Profession, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Vol. I. Plays Unpleasant and Plays Pleasant (London: Bodley Head, 1970), p. 237)Google Scholar.

20. Modleski, op. cit., p. 98.

21. For further discussion of this point in the theatrical context, see Case, Sue-Ellen, Feminism and Theatre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Quoted in Fitzsimmons, Linda and Gardner, Viv, eds., New Woman Plays (London: Methuen, 1991), p. 30Google Scholar.

23. Sheila Stowell, ‘Drama as a Trade: Cicely Hamilton's Diana of Dobson's’ in The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914, op. cit., p. 177–88.

24. Stowell, op. cit., p. 183.

25. Various lighting and property plots are included in a typescript of The Bad Girl of the Family, Melville collection, Theatre Museum, Box 35.

26. Sue-Ellen Case makes the general point: ‘When the ingénue makes her entrance, the audience sees her as the male protagonist sees her. The blocking of her entrance, her costume and the lighting are designed to reveal that she is the object of his desire’ (p. 119).

27. The police raid at the end of the scene represents yet another male intrusion into what in Diana of Dobson's is a discrete female space. This process is reiterated in the hundredth performance souvenir. Of the thirteen photographs representing scenes from the play, no less than five are taken from either the dormitory or bedroom scenes and show female characters partially undressed or in nightclothes.

28. Davis, Tracy C., Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Ibid., p. 146.

30. In 1854 a play which indexed female criminality in its title, Rotherhithe in the Olden Time; or, the Female Housebreaker, was initially refused a licence for a number of reasons, one of which was the divestment of female clothing to reveal underclothing beneath. The following stage direction was underscored in red ink by the censor: ‘Pulls off her gown and discovers her in a short petticoat.’ Later, in 1901, the censor also objected to the comedy Corelie & Co. Ltd, insisting that ‘it must be clearly understood that “Ethel” does not take off her dress. The “business” is to be strictly kept to “measuring for” and not “trying on”.’ See Stephens, John Russell, The Censorship of English Drama 1824–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 69–70, 149Google Scholar.

31. Davis, op. cit., p. 142.

32. Stokes, John, In the Nineties (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 54–5Google Scholar.

33. A combination of current feminist approaches to women in soap opera, which concentrate on the positioning of the female spectator, and research into the historical and theatrical context of the Melvilles' melodrama, might illuminate what a female response to the plays may have been. It might suggest, for example, what the possible pleasures of identification for the shop girl in the gallery might have been in their spectatorship of Bess in The Bad Girl of the Family.