The first lecture in the five-part Bonkbusters series, curated by Jo Parsons.
Melodrama: Forerunner of the Bonkbuster?
A common perception of ‘melodrama’ is of an overly dramatic, highly emotional and sensational work, and which is presumed to guarantee a similarly emotional response in audiences and readers. Its origins are usually considered to start in the late eighteenth century theatre, developing into novel forms in the nineteenth century and then, in the twentieth century predominantly found in the films of Hollywood. Melodramas have been criticised for being escapist fantasy combining pathos (so sometimes referred to as ‘weepies’) with action, as innocent and virtuous heroines are terrorised and threatened by dastardly villains, but ultimately saved by manly heroes. In melodramas, the social order is usually restored, and the worthy get their just rewards, although some characters meet a tragic fate that seems to defy any sense of justice.
But what are now called melodramas were, in 1950s America, marketed as ‘Adult films’, indicating the visibility of and appetite for cinematic presentations of contemporary controversial issues such as sexuality, gender, race and class. Despite this being an era that has since been seen nostalgically as reassuringly ‘traditional’, these are also the years that saw the publication of Playboy and the exposé journalism of Confidential. This talk will look at the ways the ground was already being prepared for the sexual liberation and challenges to censorship of the 1960s and 1970s, looking towards the heyday of the ‘bonkbuster’, but also asking whether retrospectively applying the term ‘melodrama’ means that we have perhaps lost sight of how revolutionary and challenging some of these films were.
Speaker bio:
Rebecca Lloyd is an independent researcher, primarily focused on Gothic creatures and landscapes, humour, ghost and crime fictions. Publications include ‘Ghostly knowing laughter: Comic Gothic in the works of W.S. Gilbert’ (Manchester University Press, forthcoming); ‘Ghostly Objects and the Horrors of Ghastly Ancestors in the Ghost Stories of Louisa Baldwin’ in Women’s Writing, Vol. 29 (2), July 2022, co-authored with Ruth Heholt; ‘Dead Pets’ Society: Gothic Animal Bodies in the Films of Tim Burton’ in Hockenhull, S. and Pheasant-Kelly, F. (eds.) Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely (2021); ‘The Human Within and the Animal Without? Rats and Mr Bunnsy in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents’ in Heholt, R. & Edmundson, M. (eds.) Gothic Animals(2020); ‘Gravy Soup: humouring conformity and counterfeiting in A Rogue’s Life in The Wilkie Collins Journal, 2017, Vol.14; ‘Haunting the Grown-ups: The Borderlands of ParaNorman and Coraline’ in Heholt, R. & Downing, N. (eds.) Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment (2016); and co-author with Ruth Heholt on Anne Rice for The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2013).
[Image – Mélodrame, painted by Honoré Daumier between 1855 and 1860]
Your curator and host for this event will be the writer and academic, Dr Joanne Ella Parsons, editor of Doomed Romances (British Library 2024) and 13 Cornish Ghost Stories (Mabecron, 2024).
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
Join us as we enter the glamourous and ruthless world of the Bonkbuster, a phenomenon in mid-late 20th century popular women’s writing, which showed us that sex and excess really does sell, and taught women they could come out on top in both bedroom and boardroom.
