Abstract
This article considers representations of melodrama audiences by Louis-Léopold Boilly and Honoré Daumier and what they may or may not tell us about spectator response. It also looks at emotional response to melodrama as a form of active spectatorship.
L’Effet du Mélodrame (Figure 1), a painting by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845) dated to around 1830, shows a woman who has fainted during a melodrama performance, overcome perhaps by what she has been watching, although her fainting fit has created its own melodrama within the theatre auditorium. The drama is taking place in a theatre box, which frames the event, and which suggests these are reasonably affluent or even upper-class spectators. This is a classically contrived composition, like a pieta, structured to emphasise the face of the fainted woman, and has triggered multiple interpretations.
Louis-Léopold Boilly, L'Effet du Mélodrame, c. 1830, oil on canvas, 32.5 × 42 cm. Musée Lambinet, Versailles. © Bridgeman Images UK.
Boilly had settled in Paris in 1785. He lived through the French Revolution, the Terror, the Napoleonic period and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. His output was prolific, but it is his genre paintings and crowd scenes depicting contemporary urban life that are pertinent here. In an introduction to a recent exhibition of Boilly's paintings at the National Gallery in London, Francesca Whitlum Cooper writes: Whether depicting an audience and performance in a genre scene, or letting us spy on an aristocratic interior … Boilly was fascinated by the art of looking and the art of being looked at.
1
Boilly provides an ongoing commentary on Parisian society throughout his career and L’Effect du Mélodrame is clearly a part of that commentary. He composed L’Effet du Mélodrame after he had officially retired as a professional artist. This was not long before his depiction of an outdoor puppet performance in The Poor Cat (1832) and A Carnival Scene (1832), with the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin providing part of the background to the latter painting. Both provide evidence of his ongoing interest in spectacle and spectatorship, an interest demonstrated in many earlier works, including L’Entrée du Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique à Une Représentation Gratis (1818).
What does L’Effect du Mélodrame tell us about melodrama audiences? Patricia Smyth considers: Literally unconscious and therefore oblivious of beholders, the display of sensibility should suggest revelation. But the scene has a choreographed quality. Only the children present respond with genuine alarm, uninitiated into what Boilly suggests is a form of social ritual.
2
Anthony Strugnell states that the work highlights ‘the ambivalence of audience responses to melodrama’: the fainted woman, in his view, appears not only to be the central figure of the melodrama, but also emblematic of Virtue in Distress, dressed in white and largely encircled by men. 3 Denise Davidson, in her monograph France after the Revolution, suggests that Boilly's painting depicts an upper-class woman so moved by the play she is watching that she has fainted dramatically into the arms of her companions. Although Davidson affirms that ‘we cannot accept such images as unproblematic representations of social reality, their emphasis on female consumers of melodrama and their heightened sensitivity makes clear that this was an issue which attracted enormous attention’. 4 However, it may also be arguable that any authenticity of emotional response in the painting is compromised by the constructed picturesque nature of its representation. That, in effect, it depicted affect as rhetorical rather than genuine. In turn, such an opinion may be too heavily influenced by Thomas Rowlandson's sardonic representations of English audiences, as in his 1807 satire, ‘Tragedy in London’, in which many spectators, and even a member of the orchestra, are weeping. There is something rather comic and absurd about Rowlandson's audience, in which emotional sincerity and sensibility seem to be mocked and spectator response is embodied as a grotesque form of performance. There is no evidence, however, that this is necessarily the intention behind Boilly's painting.
L’Effet du Mélodrame has a companion piece Une Loge le jour de spectacle gratuit (Theatre Box, The Day of the Free Performance) (Figure 2), also dated around 1830: the two paintings have been designed as pendants – that is to say, conceived as a pair to hang beside each other. The second painting shows a plebeian audience, attending a free performance at the theatre, framed largely within what appears to be a box setting. Such performances were occasional events, providing free admission to all comers. Susan Siegfried, in her monograph on Boilly, argues that ‘the theme of viewing operates here at several levels, for the paintings are not only about viewing theatre, but more specifically, about viewing the audience at the theatre, which was to become such a pervasive theme of art and literature in the nineteenth century’. 5 Siegfried believes Boilly is influenced by Hogarth's contrast between different classes of audience in The Laughing Audience (1733), but that he chooses to do this through a contrast between two separate paintings:
In Boilly's painting the middle class is animated by compassion and worry, as its members collectively bend to the aid of a lady who has fainted in their midst, overcome by her emotional response to the melodrama. The lower class, by contrast, he portrays as uncivilized and animal-like, its members gawking, not at the play but at the disturbance caused by the middle-class lady collapsing, who shows an emotional sensitivity utterly foreign to them … Compassionate looking is here an attribute of the middle class, while the rabble – leering, gawping, mocking and gloating – exacts its emotional revenge on the faint-hearted lady. Yet for all that Boilly caricatures the lower class, he parodies the middle class as well; the lady's melodramatic swooning was widely regarded at the time as false sentiment. In the end the rabble seems justified in mocking the hollow sentimentality of the middle class with its fluttering show of charity and family values. 6
Louis-Léopold Boilly, Une Loge le jour de spectacle gratuit, c. 1830, oil on paper laid down on canvas, 32 × 44 cm. Musée Lambinet, Versailles. © Bridgeman Images UK.
Siegfried emphasises the differentiation between the classes in these paintings: the middle-class are compassionate and worried, whereas the lower class are portrayed, according to Siegfried, as uncivilised and animal-like, gawping (because of the pendant effect) at a middle-class lady whose emotional sensitivity is totally foreign to them. Of course, the pendant effect does not represent the actual spatial or even temporal relationship between the two groups in an actual theatrical space, as Siegfied realises: (Figure 3)
This kind of back and forth between the theatre pieces works – because in part Boilly conceived of them as objects in real space, installed side by side. He made the viewing in the depicted spaces of the paintings extend into the real space of the wall or room, and then prompted the viewer to envisage narrative dialogue taking place between the two canvases. The dialogue is spatially more complex than those of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ sequences so common in eighteenth-century art because Boilly's characters lean out of the fictional spaces they occupy and, in The Free Performance, actually lean toward and look at the audience depicted in the other canvas. Boilly was not mimicking the actual space of the theatre – the audience of the paradis would have looked down on, not over at its social betters – but he was involving the spectator in a new kind of interplay between the canvases. The real viewer becomes an accessory to the narrative drama enacted by these audiences, as well as the spatial interplay between the canvases. 7
Pendant effect.
Nevertheless, Siegfried's interpretation is conjectural and possibly flawed. She disregards the playfulness that can also be read into this juxtaposition through her insistence in reading the pendant effect as a commentary on class distinction and as a critique of the lower classes. In fact, Une Loge Le Jour de Spectacle Gratuit may be more indicative of Boilly's interest in caricature as evidenced in his print series Les Grimaces (1823–28) or Réunion de 35 têtes diverses (1823–28) (Figure 4). The comparison with Hogarth does not quite work either. Hogarth contrasts the upper and middle classes in The Laughing Audience, whereas the contrast implied by Siegfried in the Boilly paintings is between working class and affluent middle-class spectators. Hogarth's representation is allegorical, representing subscribers for his prints and those who feature within them. The analogy, separated as it is by country and almost one hundred years, is highly problematic.
Louis-Léopold Boilly, Réunion de 35 têtes diverses, oil on canvas, c. 1823–1828, 40.7 × 54 cm. William I. Koch Collection. © Bridgeman Images UK.
In another reading of L’Effet du Mélodrame, in Romantic Paris, Michael Marrinan refers to the woman's ‘involuntary loss of composure’ and suggests that the discipline with which the adults behave contrasts with the young boy's ‘expression of panic’. ‘The lesson is simple’, says Marrinan. ‘We learn over time to discipline our emotions’. He follows this up with an interpretation which is inimical to a more ambivalent or even cynical response: We worry, like the old man with the smelling salts, about reviving the victim and returning her to consciousness so that her embarrassing and involuntary display of self might be erased in a return to impassive normalcy. The picture forces viewers to adopt a distanced, optical relationship to the physiological response that ought to be suppressed in the theatre but seems to have surprised this overly sensitive woman. The image is both a lesson in bourgeois self-discipline and a warning about what women should be allowed to see.
8
This reading seems to me rather far-fetched. We might just as easily argue that the figure of the woman embodies melodrama, as Anthony Strugnell suggests, and its effect is embodied in those around her.
Marrinan's interpretation uses Richard Sennett's views on nineteenth-century audiences as a basis for rationalising Boilly's contradictory representations of different classes in his theatre paintings. Sennett believes that by the middle of the nineteenth century it was customary to ‘sneer at people who showed their emotions at a play or concert’ since ‘restraint of emotion in the theatre became a way for middle-class audiences to mark the line between themselves and the working class’.
9
Marrinan's use of Sennett complicates and confuses the issue of spectator emotion and class attitudes towards it. While not disputing the importance of Sennett's overall argument in The Fall of Public Man, I find that his assumptions about theatre and spectators in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are at times problematic. Sennett quotes M. Pierre Veron's Paris S’Amuse (1870) comments on the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in support of his views: Right here in the 19th century, there still exist primitive creatures who are pushed to the incontinence of tears by the unhappiness of some stage heroine at the hands of a traitor. Don't go to this theatre just to witness the crying candour of these forthright workers, these honest petit-bourgeois … let them amuse themselves in becoming desolate. They are happy in their despair!
10
On the other hand, according to Sennett, ‘[a] respectable audience by the 1850s was an audience that could control its feelings through silence; the old spontaneity was called “primitive”’. 11 Sennett makes the assumption that between the 1850s and 1870s audiences disciplined themselves and restrained their feelings and desire to talk to each other. Silence becomes an indicator of social status and even of power. It also, for Sennett, becomes indicative of passive spectatorship, a quality also enhanced by the disappearance of the lit auditorium. The more sophisticated spectator no longer knows how to express him or herself publicly: through an act of self-suppression they make themselves passive in order to hide any sign that they are emotionally aroused by a performer (or performance). The mid-nineteenth-century audience worried about ‘embarrassment’ and ‘making fools of themselves’. 12 Now, while there may be an underlying truth here – upper-class and middle-class audiences certainly became more restrained towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century – Sennett's argument is too generalised and insufficiently nuanced to provide a basis either for Marrinan's interpretation of Boilly or for any detailed investigation of spectator response across the variegated social strata of nineteenth-century London and Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Denise Davidson also focusses on emotion and class distinction, suggesting that a change in audience composition occurs within the boulevard theatres between 1800 and 1830: As the neighbourhood and its theatres attracted diverse crowds, women and men from across the social spectrum found themselves in shared spaces which encouraged observation and categorization of different social groups. Over time, however, as social structures became more stable and ‘legible’, the upper classes withdrew from many forms of ‘popular’ culture. Beginning in the 1820s, commentary on Parisian amusements emphasised less and less the interaction and observation of heterogeneous groups as a component of their appeal. By 1830, melodramatic theatres of the Boulevard were drawing more purely ‘popular’ audiences.
13
Nevertheless, Davidson also refers to an 1837 print/illustration by Clément Pruche, Observations théâtrales: les spectateurs pleurant, in which emotional reaction cuts across class divisions, although she suggests the lower-class women ‘appear most visibly distraught’. 14 As with Siegfried, Davidson's assumptions require careful scrutiny.
French Audiences and Emotion
There is plenty of written evidence that French audiences responded emotionally to melodrama whatever their class. Denise Davidson emphasises the socially mixed nature of French melodrama audiences in the early nineteenth century and refers to an 1809 poem by Armande Chalemagne about a French upper-class lady, Hortense, who is attending a melodrama: The signal is given: nobility and populace, Honest people, rascals, everyone is in place
And Hortense appears to enjoy the melodrama just as much as the poorer, less literate members of the audience. Davidson also quotes an 1813 source that states ‘our ladies have developed a strong passion for melodrama: they prefer being frightened to being only weakly moved’. Drawing on further accounts of audiences, particularly of female spectators, she argues that ‘Women were expected to cry, to shriek and even to faint while watching these plays. Failure to behave in such a way indicated a lack of delicacy’. She suggests that this was true across all classes, adding that ‘exaggerated emotional responses on the part of female spectators reinforced the view that women were more “sentimental” than men and permitted such attitudes to spread across class, thus encouraging a uniform sense of “femininity”’.
15
Davidson also cites an 1824 review of a melodrama performance in Lyon, which stated that ‘All the ladies were sobbing … and if the men were not crying, they were no less moved’, suggesting that this ‘highly visible sensitivity functioned as cultural capital, as proof of their class status’.
16
In Husbands, Wives and Lovers: Marriage and its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France Patricia Mainardi references an 1827 production of Ducange's Thirty Years, or the Life of a Gambler at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin, with Frederick Lemaître and Marie Dorval, ninety per cent of whose audiences were said to be women. The press reported that handkerchiefs and smelling salts were everywhere and that women wept and fainted throughout each performance. One journal (La Pandore) stated that ‘Everything that defines the art of melodrama, violent contrasts, hideous vice, loathsome crime is included in the work. There is filial ingratitude, corruption, rape, theft, forgery, murder and arson’.
17
In the late 1830s Hippolyte Auger confirmed the open, demonstrative responses of melodrama audiences, ‘who cannot contain their indignation or their joy, nor withhold their tears ….’, adding that ‘[w]ith a heaving breast, a tightening of the throat, a moistening of the eye and a face contorted by the conflicting emotions of fear and hope, every woman will put herself in the place of the heroine’.
18
Flaubert wrote of a theatre visit in 1856: ‘The beautiful weeping ladies of the boxes … did not omit to weep, and towards the end there was such a display of handkerchiefs that one might have supposed oneself to be in a laundry’.
19
Sensibility could be a demonstrably male trait as well. After attending a French melodrama, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote in 1852: ‘You see fat old men crying like babies; and, like babies, sucking enormous sticks of barley-sugar’.
20
Such references may be fragmentary and occasionally sardonic in tone (Thackeray's comment seems aimed at comic effect rather than an emulation of reality), but none anticipate a growing requirement for emotional restraint in spectator reception. Nevertheless, as Patricia Smyth indicates, there were differences of opinion over the decorum of demonstrative emotional response, which for some indicated a failure of connoisseurship. According to Étienne Pivert de Senancour, while some spectators attended performances to compare different interpretations: There are those happy spectators who have no need of any great verisimilitude, they always believe that they are seeing something real; and however it is acted, it is a necessity for them to weep as soon as sighs or dagger appear.
21
These are, of course, random examples, some of which are facetious and/or critical in tone, but they indicate the ongoing power of melodrama over the emotions of at least some of its audiences.
Daumier and Melodrama
Daumier's representation of theatre audiences in mid-nineteenth-century Paris further develops the interplay of class and emotion in the representation of melodrama spectators. Generally, the subjects of and the audience for Daumier's caricatures were the bourgeoisie, although Marrinan somewhat complicates the issue by arguing that, while Boilly ‘consciously aligns himself and his art with the bourgeoisie of Paris’, Daumier's perspective is more Bohemian, basing his argument on their different approach to what he sees as identical subject matter in La cinquième acte à la Gaîté (1848) (Figure 5) and L’Effet du Mélodrame.
22
However, while Boilly's and Daumier's representations may be almost twenty years apart and the medium is different, both allow for open interpretations of their subject matter. Daumier's portrayal of an audience watching the fifth act of a play at the Théâtre de la Gaîté, a popular venue for melodrama, depicts an emotionally responsive audience, two of whom are wiping away their tears with handkerchiefs. Daumier's intention may be satirical, but (whether the scene is observed or imagined), it could be just as easily non-judgmental
Honoré Daumier, La cinquième acte à la Gaîté, 1848, lithograph. © Theatre Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
Daumier's painting Le Drame (c. 1860) (Figure 6), which was later reproduced as a lithograph in 1864, shows how rapt and engaged an audience can be, capturing the tension in their bodies and their absorption in the drama unfolding before them. He could almost be illustrating a comment by Eugène de Mirecourt, who wrote in 1843:
The lower classes give themselves up body and soul to the fascination of the drama: they follow the plots anxiously as they unfold. You see them with their necks outstretched and mouths gaping: not a word do they miss, not a syllable; they shudder at every turn of events and weep at the conclusion. They take everything for real with a frightening naivety. 23
Honoré Daumier, Le Drame, c. 1860, oil on canvas, 97.5 × 90.4. Neu Pinakothek. © Bridgeman Images UK.
In Le Drame, as Martin Meisel points out, the figures on stage are ‘faceless and ideal’, for it is the pictorial nature of the situation that has ‘its audience in thrall’: It is the audience, one notes, that is marked with individual passions, set into physiognomic masks and—where the reflected light of the stage reveals it – vivid in diversity and character. The aesthetic problem for the age was to incorporate such individuation, for which it had an enormous appetite and which it perceived as the real, with the glamor and readable moral and intellectual coherence of the faceless ideal.
24
Meisel considers that Daumier's painting resolves the tension between the ideal and the real very effectively in the painting and this, for him, is far more significant than whether the representation of spectators is judgmental. He also suggests that the painting shows how ‘individuality and collective identity can in the realm of feeling co-exist’. 25 In some ways the acknowledgement that there is both an individual and collective element to spectatorship and emotional response is more helpful than an emphasis on class differentiation.
Despite the differences apparent in Daumier's and Boilly's treatment of spectators, both demonstrate a balance between judgment and non-judgment. Although Boilly's representations of spectators have been used by some critics to suggest that his vision is clearly inflected by class and that emotion is something to be sneered at, such readings require a more careful analysis. Equally, Daumier's satirical representations of audiences cut across class distinctions and, however mocking, allow for divergent responses. While emotional distress during melodramatic performances may be treated satirically (or assumed to be so treated), this is not necessarily an early indication of a growing tendency towards emotionally repressed responses in the theatres of this period.
Audience Reaction to Sensation Melodrama in 1860s Britain
In this section of the article, the focus on emotional response to melodrama moves from pictorial representations in France to other types of evidential and theoretical representations of audience reactions to 1860s sensation melodramas in Britain, placing an emphasis on the conjunction of learned and potentially involuntary responses during this period. While nineteenth-century French audiences were often treated quite seriously in contemporary prints and paintings, the pictorial tradition of caricaturing English spectators from Hogarth onwards means that spectatorship in nineteenth-century England has been treated more comically. Audience members may have wept, cried or fainted, but there is often a sense that such reactions are either not genuine or due to emotional gullibility.
Thus, an early twentieth-century cartoon in Punch entitled Melodrama in the Suburbs implies rather snobbishly that suburban audiences for melodrama are easily taken in by theatrical illusion, as the caption implies. ‘ELDER SISTER; Do give up Nellie! They’re only acting. NELLIE: (tearfully). You leave me alone. I’m enjoying it’ (Figure 7). Yet, even from the mid-nineteenth century into the early-twentieth century English spectators were arguably seeking experiences that drove them to tears or laughter, that thrilled and shocked them, that triggered physical sensations, as Tiffany Watt Smith suggests in her study On Flinching. Writing about spectator response to sensation dramas such as those by Boucicault which became popular in the 1860s, she defines the sensation scene as ‘one climactic scene of thrilling technological effects’, designed (according to the Era) to ‘hold the spectator breathless, to harrow up his soul, to excite him … and make the flesh creep’. 26 However, she also detects a doubleness in this response as a moment when spectators ‘simultaneously experienced emotions and monitored them too’ 27 , as they consciously reacted not only to the theatrical illusion itself, but also to their own emotional and visceral responses. Watt Smith extends this argument with reference to an 1872 production of Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn that went wrong. She quotes a reviewer who states that ‘The great sensation scene of the water cave exercised its old spell on the house’, but that when a technical fault required the premature lowering of the curtain, ‘the highly wrought audience … strongly objected’ to the blunder. Watt Smith adds:
This audience, in turns spellbound and aware of the terms of the contract they had entered into on purchasing a ticket, had gone to the theatre to consume their own emotions, paying to watch actors present symbolic near-death experiences so that they might enjoy the pleasure of their own flinches, and, in turn, the vicarious relief of crises averted. Theirs was not a naive encounter with, or a complete enslavement to, the fictional world on the stage. Rather, these audiences consumed their own vivid feelings, in the knowledge that mere simulations of terror had produced them. 28
Frederick Henry Townsend, Melodrama in the Suburbs, Punch, 1909. Source: Author’s Collection.
In effect, there is perhaps a doubleness in the visceral, emotional, and cognitive response of audiences to sensation scenes in melodrama.
Watt Smith provides a contemporary account of an audience's reaction to substantiate her argument. She also acknowledges Lynn Voskuil's discussion of spectators at sensation scenes, in which the latter argues for a similar doubleness, and also a sophistication, in spectator response. In Voskuil's view sensation drama was perceived to produce ‘sensation’ in its spectators – ‘minute, bodily responses that distinguished its effects from those of other kinds of drama, including earlier melodrama’. 29 She sees sensation melodrama's dual emphasis on authenticity and verisimilitude on the one hand and heightened spectacle on the other as key to its appeal to consumer culture and alleges that the visceral and vicarious experience of watching sensation melodrama worked because the spectators ‘practised a wilful ignorance that allowed them to perceive burning ships and speeding trains as real and thus capable of producing sensations they could experience as authentic’. 30 Voskuil claims that playgoers were ‘amazed’ and ‘astonished’ by such scenes, but that, while they ‘experienced the hair-raising thrills as spontaneous, somatic events, they courted such thrills knowingly’. What mattered most was the fact these feelings were shared with other theatregoers. Indeed,
the theatricalization process renders stage spectacle apparently real for spectators who watch it in order to participate vicariously in its action and experience the spine-tingling chills that signal authenticity. As part of this process, they both confirm and lose their individuality: they confirm it by means of the minute bodily sensations that they experience idiosyncratically; they lose it by seeing that their friends and neighbors are experiencing it too. 31
Through the commodification of the ‘real’, theatrical artifice and emotional response, the ‘public sphere’ ‘becomes the cultivation of collective sensational experience, a process whose authenticity paradoxically rests on a radical suspension of disbelief’. 32 In exploring these issues further, it may also be important to distinguish between ‘emotion’ as a socially constructed, cognitive, individual response and ‘affect’ as more of an involuntary, somatic communal reaction of tears, cries and gasps, sometimes enhanced by melodrama's use of music.
Insofar as both Watt Smith and Voskuil argue for emotional and visceral responses as aspects of active spectatorship, I am inclined to agree with them. Erin Hurley states in her monograph theatre & feeling that melodrama is a kind of ‘feeling machine, formally engineered to elicit emotional response’. In a sensation scene, such as that of the fire in The Poor of New York, according to Hurley, ‘its super-stimuli … arouses the intense affective response of the autonomous nervous system’ and fans the flames of feeling to produce ‘a sense of wonder’. Melodrama of the nineteenth-century English stage, she adds, ‘possessed an entire arsenal of feeling technologies intended to whip up enthusiasm’. 33 In considering the emotional response to melodrama and its capacity to stimulate feeling, it would certainly be desirable to believe with Lisa Feldman Barrett that ‘emotions are not reactions to the world’ and that we are not ‘passive receivers of sensory input’ but active constructors of our emotions, constructing meaning cognitively not only out of sensory input but also past experience. 34 This may also predispose us to the assumption that active spectatorship is just as much a uniquely individual act à la Rancière as a collective response, reminding us of Meisel's comment, quoted above, that ‘individuality and collective identity can in the realm of feeling co-exist’. 35 However, despite the cognitive turn in audience research posited by scholars such as Bruce McConachie, there may still be a case for seeking a wider evidential basis from contemporary sources for confirmation of the emotional impact of melodrama on its spectators. 36
Among key sources for exploring contemporary reactions to sensation melodramas are newspaper and periodical reviews. A sample of reviews for the first performance of Boucicault's After Dark, for instance, staged at the Princess's Theatre on the 12 August 1868, and famed for its sensation scene in which a character is rescued in the nick of time from a railway track as a train approaches, yields a range of reactions. The Morning Post informs us that the audience was in ‘an agony of alarm’ and that the rescue was hailed with acclamation
37
, while The Times describes how the train ‘sweeps across the stage, raising the audience to a perfect fever of excitement’.
38
The Pall Mall Gazette, which declared the play yet another example of the degenerative tone of contemporary theatre, found the sensation scene ‘sufficiently horrible to satisfy the grossest and most morbid of tastes’
39
. The Standard felt it provoked more laughter than applause: ‘The idea of tearing down an immense piece of a two foot wall in less than ten seconds [so the rescuer could get to the victim in time] was a little too absurd to be effectively portrayed’.
40
The Examiner considered the play favoured the presumption that, ‘when the upper portion of the community have betaken themselves to country quarters [during August], those whose lot it is to abide everlastingly in town, are neither worthy of, nor anxious for anything beyond a well-managed leap from Elfin tower or bridge balustrade, or steamboat pier – just as a kind of nervous reinvigoration’.
41
Other newspapers and journals referred to the ‘thrilling and exciting nature’ and to the ‘terrible reality’ of the sensation scene, while all commented on the verisimilitude with which locations in contemporary London were recreated on stage. John Bull stated that Boucicault had ‘strung together so many sensational scenes that the feelings of the audience are wound up to the highest imaginable pitch’.
42
Nicholas Daly places the railway scene against the backdrop of ‘the problems generated by the collision of modernization with the (resistant but presumably expandable) limits of the human sensorium’: What we see at the Princess's Theatre and elsewhere, is an audience seeking escape from the wear and tear of industrial culture with its demands for attentiveness, alertness, and concentration, only to find that attentiveness is also the price to be paid for the pleasures of the popular theatre. The members of the popular audience are drawn to the edges of their seats, and their attention is focused on an industrial scenario, but now this is meant to be fun; they are meant to be thrilled rather than traumatised.
43
This is, of course, a surmise and not based on evidence, but it certainly echoes Ben Singer's belief that such scenes enabled spectators to come to terms with an otherwise threatening modernity. 44 It also implies that, by the 1860s, audiences are familiar enough with the genre to take pleasure rather than alarm in the anticipated effects, although one review cited above does draw attention to the audience's ‘agony of alarm’.
The Streets of London (a reincarnation of The Poor of New York and of The Poor of Liverpool), premiered four years earlier at the Princess's Theatre in August 1864, had provoked similar reactions. The Era stated that the production was ‘unrivalled for the completeness of pictorial illusion in some of its most striking tableaux’, adding: Such a vivid representation of reality the Stage has, probably, never furnished as that of which Mr G Vining and his scenic artist have contrived to bring before a startled public in the House on Fire, which forms the most striking pictorial feature of the piece … The bill wisely prepares the audience for the nature of the scene, but if the programme had been less communicative the surprise of the spectators might have been exceeded by their terror. It is this stupendous ‘effect’ which will become the talk of the town.
45
Of the reviews of this production sampled, this is the only one even to hint at spectator response. Elsewhere the emphasis is often on verisimilitude and ‘effect’ rather than ‘affect’. Thus, the Examiner merely states that ‘The House on fire, which occupies the whole breadth of the stage, is one of the most wonderful scenic illusions we have ever seen’,
46
while The Times praises in general the reproduction of ‘reality’ on stage, including the ‘more appalling reality’ of ‘the fire in Bedfordbury, where we see the best burnt house ever destroyed upon any stage’.
47
However, much more attention was paid by just about every reviewer to the dioramic representation of what was generally known as the Charing Cross scene, ‘perhaps the most real ever witnessed on the stage in London’.
48
The verisimilitude of this scene was perhaps an even greater sensation than the house on fire. Dickens attended a performance of the play, of which he had a low opinion. He touches on audience response in a letter to John Forster: It is the most depressing instance, without exception, of an utterly degrading and debasing theatrical taste that has ever come under my writhing notice. For not only do the audiences – of all classes – go, but they are unquestionably delighted.
49
The notion of ‘delight’, a term also used by the Era in describing audience reaction to the railway scene in After Dark 50 , raises further questions around emotional responses to sensation melodrama and the pleasure to be experienced through replications of the ‘real’.
Peter Brooks designated melodrama ‘the mode of excess’, a reductive term for which film scholar Linda Williams has rightly taken him to task.
51
Insofar as melodrama often included not only sensational effects but also moments of heightened emotional interaction, it is hardly surprising that it generated moments of heightened emotional engagement among its audiences. Such moments, of course, were not actually excessive in terms of the narrative contexts in which they occurred, while audience reactions were an arguably authentic (if knowing) response to the seeming authenticity or implicit realism of the circumstances presented. E. Deidre Pribram considers that ‘melodrama's supposed lack of restraint – its emotions often appearing as a surplus beyond rational, ideological, or articulable explanation – may well be regarded as excessive’.
52
However, she argues that responses to melodrama can be interrogated through an ‘aesthetics of emotion’, which she carefully distinguishes from ‘affect’: An audience's felt moments of recognition are actions of emotion stimulated by the aesthetic practices of melodrama and other popular cultural forms, arising out of shared, lived experience and knowledge. Such acts of emotion, when recognized, allow us to accept, appreciate, admit, or deny that which we suddenly apprehend as familiar. In these senses, melodrama can justifiably be viewed as grounded in an aesthetics of emotion.
53
Pribram's argument is plausible, firmly positioning emotion as central to the genre.
Conclusion
Whether melodrama delights its audiences, assuages their anxieties, as Daly and Singer suggest, or gives rise to a genre of what McConachie calls ‘panic plays’
54
, there is certainly a case for further investigation of emotional spectator response as a form of active spectatorship. There is also a need to free such discussions from the notion that emotional reaction is invariably a signifier of social class. Tiffany Watt Smith contends that she wishes to interrogate: the equation between theatrical audiences and passivity by arguing that embodied and affective audience performances may be understood as a form of interactivity and participation in the live event…[T]he theatre auditorium was a space around which questions about looking – and particularly about the collective, affective, and visceral aspects of spectatorship – were raised and contested.
55
Visual and written evidence as to the nature, behaviours, emotional reactions of melodrama spectators can often be unreliable, whether we consider the representations of Boilly, Daumier and Punch on the one hand or written descriptions on the other. As we know, any visual representation of a theatre audience historically is problematic for many reasons – an approximation at best, a fabrication at worst. Such images are, totally or partially, works of the imagination, something that inevitably undermines their value as historical evidence. Martin Meisel addresses this conundrum well, in relation to nineteenth-century audience iconography and perhaps points a way forward: I don't think it is fruitful to try to sever an art that believed in representation from representation, or indeed the works of imagination from history, or images from texts. Still, if these images are to be read as evidence, I am most secure in reading them as evidence of how some denizens of a particular place and time conceived, interpreted, abused, assimilated, in short imagined the theatre and its frequenters in art; and did so for another audience than that found in the theatre, though one knowledgeable enough of the theatre to recognise what the artist was up to.
56
Meisel's focus on contemporaneity, context and imagination provides a useful key to reading visual representations of nineteenth-century audiences, including those attending melodramas.
Equally, while we can theorise the emotional responses of melodrama audiences, it is easy to fall into the trap of over-generalising spectator reactions, especially when reliant on a random or limited evidential basis. Nineteenth-century written descriptions of melodrama audiences are themselves likely to be constructed to some extent, however much they appear to be based on observation: they may contain something recognisable, but they may also be bolstered by the writer's imagination or undermined by imperfect recollection. This in turn may also impact on more recent attempts to theorise these audiences. Nevertheless, it is important that we take up Tiffany Watt Smith's challenge about how questions of looking and about how the collective, affective and visceral aspects of spectatorship, particularly with reference to melodrama, were raised and contested within the theatre auditorium. In doing so we may also come closer to an understanding of Matthew Buckley's notion of melodrama as ‘an affective meme, a self-replicating pattern of sensation and feeling that moves successively from the surface of culture to the subtending structures of social and individual life, and from there to the behavioral patterns of the body and mind’. 57
