Adapting Jamesian Melodrama

Henry James is renowned for his refined style in depicting human psychology. It seems irrelevant to relate him to melodrama, a19th century theatrical form which presents the struggle between goodness and evil through hyperbolic conflicts, until Professor Peter Brooks, in the book The Melodramatic Imagination:Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess, postulates the idea of Jamesian melodrama. Unlike conventional melodrama that relies on verbal and physical hyperbole, Jamesian melodrama delves into the super-active human consciousness to reveal the hidden conflicts. Ethically, Jamesian is more ambiguous than conventional melodrama as to the categorical difference between goodness and evil. But James still clings to a moral vision that is legible and cogent. As the influence of Brooks’s book overflows into the field of film studies, film melodrama is found to be as capable as novelistic melodrama in rendering moral imperatives, although instead of consciousness film melodrama depends on such cinematic devices as editing, lighting, mise-en-scene and performance. This thesis analyzes The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove and their film adaptations to better understand the art of Jamesian novel writing, and also to affirm the contribution that film adaptations make to our understanding of literary classics. Judged against the common standard of melodrama, the film adaptations need no longer bother about the mantra of fidelity.