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
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .