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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2012
In this essay I examine the importance of home within what Peter Brooks has called “the melodramatic imagination.” Arguing that nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama has a long afterlife, I examine the significance of John Howard Payne's song “Home Sweet Home” in two of D. W. Griffith's films, Home Sweet Home (1913) and The Birth of a Nation (1915). I show that home is elevated to a sacred site within melodrama and that, within Griffith's infamous 1915 film, this sacred site is a white southern home which he takes to represent the nation. Melodrama is an ethical drama in which virtue and vice face each other. Home, as a crucial element of melodrama, is often represented as its site of confrontation, indeed is often precisely what is at stake within such confrontations. Given the political potency of home in arguments about nation and identity, the confrontation between virtue and vice over home has powerful potential to articulate issues of belonging and exclusion, desire and longing. The intermingling of representations of home and melodrama, combined with the long afterlife of nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, makes understanding and scrutinizing these formations an important critical act.
1 Here I borrow a word used by Susan Sontag in “Notes on ‘Camp’ ”, in idem, A Susan Sontag Reader, intro. Elizabeth Harwick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 105–19, 110.
2 Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U. S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Critical work on home is growing substantially and rapidly, and works I have found helpful here include Blunt, Alison and Dowling, Robyn, Home (London and New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; George, Rosemary Marangoly, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Crang, Mike and Thrift, Nigel, eds., Thinking Space (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar.
3 I am thinking of the varied debates exemplified within the work of Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, James Chandler, Bruce Burgett, Shirley Samuels, Glenn Hendler and Linda Williams, for instance.
4 Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 29Google Scholar. This remains the foundational study of melodrama.
5 Ibid., 30.
6 Linda Williams makes a similar point in her insightful readings of the permeation of twentieth-century US culture by melodrama and specifically by forms of racial melodrama. Williams, Linda, Playing the Race Card: Melodrama of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 28Google Scholar.
7 See Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 190–91Google Scholar.
8 von Moltke, Johannes, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005), 3Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., 3.
10 Recent critical work has probed the many meanings of home, revealing its conceptual complexities in the modern period across a range of disciplines. See Price, Joshua M., “The Apotheosis of Home and the Maintenance of Spaces of Violence,” Hypatia, 17, 4 (2002), 39–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other significant work on home includes Abdulhadi, Rabab, “Where is Home? Fragmented Lives, Border Crossings, and the Politics of Exile,” Radical History Review, 86 (2003), 89–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v086/86.1abdulhadi.html; Blunt, Alison, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home (Malden, MA., Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Books, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Floyd, Janet, “Domestication, Domesticity and the Work of Butchery: Positioning the Writing of Colonial Housework,” Women's History Review, 11, 3 (2002), 395–415CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zhang, Benzi, “The Politics of Re-homing: Asian Diaspora Poetry in Canada,” College Literature, 31, 1 (2004), 103–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lippard, Lucy R., The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society (New York: The New Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)Google Scholar.
11 Williams, 74–76.
12 See Quinn, Arthur Hobson, A History of American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1923), 163–87Google Scholar; Overmyer, Grace, America's First Hamlet (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1957)Google Scholar.
13 Mike West, “Civil War Soldiers Longed for ‘Home, Sweet Home’,” The Mursfreeboro Post, 28 Dec, 2008, available at www.murfreesboropost.com/news.php?viewStory=14618, accessed 4 Nov. 2010.
14 Payne, John Howard, Clari; or, the Maid of Milan (New York: The Circulating Library and Dramatic Repository, 1823), 13Google Scholar.
15 For further detail see Overmyer, 213–14.
16 Ibid., 217.
17 Speer, Laura, “John Howard Payne's Southern Sweetheart,” New England Magazine, 11, 3 (Nov. 1891), 355–62Google Scholar, 362.
18 Cited in Lott, Love and Theft, 191. Emphasis original.
19 Overmyer, 210. Emphasis original. See also Lott's comments on the “emotional profile” of Stephen Foster.
20 The film's huge popularity was (ironically) largely due to its televised release in 1956 and its subsequent frequent appearances on television schedules. These achieved huge ratings, while attendance at earlier cinematic performances was more disappointing. It was watching The Wizard of Oz within the home, then, which helped to make it into the much-loved text it is today.
21 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 15.
22 See ibid., xii; 12; 14.
23 Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, in Richards, Jeffrey H., ed., Early American Drama (New York; London; Ringwood; Toronto; Auckland, 1997), 492Google Scholar.
24 Anderson, Gillian B., Music for Silent Films, 1894–1929: A Guide (Washington: Library of Congress, 1988), xxxiiGoogle Scholar.
25 See, for instance, Karl Brown's account of being enthralled by it, in ibid., xxxiv–xxxvi.
26 Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner, “The Orchestration of Affect: The Motif of Barbarism in Breil's The Birth of a Nation Score,” in Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 253. See also Marks, Martin Miller, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895–1924 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 127–28Google Scholar and 130–35.
27 Marks, 145.
28 Williams, Playing the Race Card, 101.
29 This might be exemplified by comments made by the president of the University of North Carolina, who wrote in 1901 that the “southern woman with her helpless little children in a solitary farm house no longer sleeps secure … The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust.” Cited in Rogin, Michael, “ ‘The Sword Became a Flaming Vision’: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” Representations, 9 (1985), 177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Marks, Music and the Silent Film, 145.
31 See Marks on the potential ambiguity of using music (“Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home”) associated with minstrelsy. Ibid., 143 and 145. See also Williams, 72–76.
32 Richard Dyer, “Into the Light: The Whiteness of the South in The Birth of a Nation,” in Richard King and Helen Taylor, eds., Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 167. Dyer argues that the film's triumphalist message is fundamentally destabilized by the fact that even within its own terms of representation, racial hierarchies and categories are themselves confused and unstable. A later Griffith film, Hearts of the World (1918), was intended as a patriotic call to arms to persuade Americans of the need for involvement in the 1914–18 war. Griffith's involvement with international politics is suggested by the fact that it was the British prime minister David Lloyd George who persuaded him to make the film. In addition, Griffith gave President Thomas Woodrow Wilson updates as he made it, dedicated the film to him, and even screened it, like its predecessor, in the White House. He had already quoted approvingly from Wilson's academic work within the intertext of The Birth of a Nation. See also Williams, 71.
33 Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flaming Vision,” 152–53.
34 Ibid., 153.
