Melodrama may be most generally defined as a sequence of events for which ‘normality’ (or verisimilitude, if it is represented or described) is claimed, but which is too spectacularly dramatic, too extravagant to be taken as ‘normal’ or realistic. It is, of course, a culturally and historically relative concept: what is melodramatic for a reader of The New Yorker is not so for a reader of True Stories; a novel by Smollett or Balzac is, for us today, inherently more melodramatic than one by Sinclair Lewis or Roger Martin du Gard.

There is the melodrama of events and the melodrama of presentation; the two often overlap, but not necessarily. On the one hand, a straightforward description of the plight of the nineteeth-century immigrants to the United States, of the trenches in Flanders in 1916, or of a Soviet labour camp may strike us as melodramatic by the sheer force of facts related. On the other hand, it is possible to describe hidden psychological developments in a manner which has to be called melodramatic; Henry James would sometimes do that, as has been pointed out by several critics.

In its developed literary and dramatic forms, melodrama rests on the principle of unabashed emotionalism. It strives to call forth unambiguous and strong feelings, plays on polarities of moods, selects plots abounding in emotionally loaded situations, uses starkly contrasted characters and impassioned speech; there is hardly any withholding of anticipated emotional gratification and the denouement is psychologically unequivocal.