Redirecting Melodrama: Gish, Henry King, and "Romola"

Victorian domestic melodrama, in its nineteenth-century literary and theatrical forms and in Hollywood films of the 1910s and 1920s, presents the major dramatic conflict of this narrative mode as a challenge to the hierarchically structured family in which women are dominated by men (Brooks 30-35; Gledhill 31 ; Lang 3-13). "Eliot's fiction," Daniel Cottam argues, "is a commentary on an art antithetical to her own" (125).\n In another of Gish's films from the mid-twenties, The Scarlet Letter (1926), the problem of a disruptive gaze threatening the narrative's melodramatic context reappears.8 As Hester Prynne, Gish plays a scene in which Reverend Dimmesdale (Lars Hansen) calls on her to reveal the name of the father of her illegitimate child.