Unsophisticated Lady: The Vicissitudes of the Maternal Melodrama in Hollywood

During the transition to sound in Hollywood, several articles in the film industry trade press suggested that audiences were no longer interested in “sophisticated” fare and that the new technology had occasioned the resurrection of “10–20–30 style melodrama” or “old tear-jerking hits.”1 Most of the films to which the journalists referred were adaptations of well-known stage plays—Madame X, East Lynne, Common Clay—that fell under the generic rubric of what present-day critics have called the maternal melodrama. This essay investigates the reception of such films across the course of the 1920s and early 1930s in order to shed light upon what was considered “old fashioned melodrama” in the period, and to explain shifts in critical attitudes toward the genre. The maternal melodrama derives from several late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century theatrical prototypes. Although there are many narrative variants, the basic plot concerns a mother who is suspected of adultery and expelled from her home, thereby becoming separated from her children. She suffers degradation, sometimes becoming a drug addict or a prostitute. After a long period of separation, she again encounters her children who do not recognize her. In East Lynne, a perennially popular stage melodrama based upon Ellen Price Wood’s best-selling novel of 1861, the mother returns to her former home in disguise and takes a position under her husband’s new wife, acting as nursemaid to her own children. She nurses her son during an illness and dies of grief after his death (in the 1925 film version, by Fox, the boy lives as a result of her care and only the mother dies; in the 1931 film version, also by Fox, the boy is modernism / modernity