Seduced Maidens and Resourceful Maids
Seduced Maidens and Resourceful Maids
This chapter identifies the common tropes, plots, and character types that run through the popular early nineteenth-century theatrical genre of seduction melodrama. It demonstrates the remarkably close affinity between seduction melodramas and contemporary sociological texts on prostitution, sharing underlying assumptions about female sexual desire. It also reveals more disruptive narratives and implications which run alongside the plays’ primary warnings about women's vulnerability, vanity, and passivity; the resourceful maids who accompany the fallen heroines offer an alternative narrative of resourcefulness and knowledge. This chapter also discusses the relation between nineteenth-century melodrama and narrative art, revealing a more complex relation than previously assumed between familiar Victorian plots and the ambiguities and multiple implications of theatrical tableaux in performance
Keywords: seduction, melodrama, prostitution, tableau, realization, narrative painting, magdalen, theatre, fallen woman, regulation
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