Date of Award
Spring 2025
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
Robert St. Clair
Second Advisor
Rebecca E. Biron
Abstract
Scholars often pose melodrama as a category of critical mediation between genre and form, or as an expressive ‘mode of excess’ uniquely capable of addressing the lifeworld of social institutions and crisis under historical capitalism. Theories of recessive action developed by Lauren Berlant and Anne-Lise François propose an alternate genealogy attending to underperformative or inexpressive styles alongside caricatural expressivities of nineteenth-century bourgeois tragedy’s melodramatic mode. To thread out Berlant and François’ experimental archive of a reticent aesthetics, this presentation considers different instances of excess from Madame Bovary—Flaubert’s 1857 novel and Vincente Minelli’s 1949 film adaptation—in relation to the historical aesthetics of melodrama and minimal realization. Two potential modes of recessive action, mediocrity and the open secret, become melodramatic exemplars for Minelli’s filmic scan of Flaubert’s novel. And in the novel, figural pattern of litotes and hyperbole in scenes of negotiation, as well as musical allegories of articulation, punctation, identification and lyric voice, suspend Bovary’s relations of surface and convention between melodramatic form and content within latent non-identities of affirmative reticence. Gestures of subtractive revelation can show up otherwise: moments of Flaubert’s style indirect libre, positioned in line with reticent or recessive aesthetics of ‘suspended relational clarity,’ develop experimental readings of melodrama as a diffuse formal mode whereby the text calls for re-tuned apprehension of a scene’s viscera.
Recommended Citation
Szepessy, Jackie Béla, "Excess, Melodrama, and Recessive Action in Madame Bovary (1857 & 1949)" (2025). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 195.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/195
