Melodrama, parody, and the transformations of an American genre (Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Aiken, William W. Pratt, W. H. Smith)

In this dissertation, I discuss various intersections between parody and melodrama on the American stage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most popular genre of the nineteenth century, melodrama still serves as the spine of many artistic productions today. But while most genres of significance are given parodic treatments, melodrama is the rare form that exists in the popular imagination as a parody of itself. This dissertation thus tracks the varying integrations of the two forms in American performance.; The first chapter situates the dissertation in the vast critical literature about parody and melodrama, comparing their initial disparagements at the hands of critics, as well as their recent scholarly reclamations. The two chapters that follow focus on the parodies of some of America's most significant dramatic works. The second chapter examines the parodies of the most performed play in American history, the Stowe/Aiken version of Uncle Tom's Cabin , while the third centers on two notable temperance dramas: The Drunkard by William W. Pratt, and Ten Nights in a Barroom by W. H. Smith. In these chapters I argue that the numerous parodic emergences, varying from early minstrel travesty and burlesque to postmodernist reinventions and nostalgic simulations, reveal important responses to dominant political discourses. While the melodramas articulate a vision of America, the parodies answer this enunciation, some with scorn, some with kindness, but always with critique. Grouped together, the parodies disclose the different ways that the parodic impulse can manifest itself.; The fourth chapter takes up a discussion of present-day melodrama performance in the always-nostalgic form of "old-fashioned melodrama"---the hybrid of the continual cross-pollination between parody and melodrama---in contemporary productions of amateur and tourist theatres of the American West and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Like their parodic forebears, these performances also reveal widely differing perspectives regarding the meaning of the melodramatic narrative and certainty of the myth of America.; Parodic subversion and transformation reveal and destabilize the artifice of constructs, allowing for narratological growth and development. Persistent parodic re-workings of melodrama may be seen as attempts to offer contributions to the articulation of "America."...