Bigamy and Sensation
Bigamy and Sensation
Plays about unintentional bigamy were as old as melodrama itself and remained popular throughout the nineteenth century, exercising an important influence on sensation novels such as Ellen Wood's East Lynne and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd. This chapter looks at the tensions between the plays’ decorously moral plots and the more disruptive adulterous desires suggested by the plays in performance. This chapter argues that far from being comparatively moral simple, bigamy plays offered a model for the subversive narratives and moral ambiguities for which sensation novels became notorious. In turn, the success of dramatic adaptations of sensation novels enabled the pre-eminent sensation dramatist Dion Boucicault to push the limits of stage representation still further, scandalizing the critics in 1869 with the first nineteenth-century English courtesan drama, Formosa; or, the Railroad to Ruin.
Keywords: melodrama, sensation, novel, bigamy, courtesan, adultery, performance, plot, fallen woman, theatre
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