Melodrama, Existentialism, and Gender

In Albert Camus's introduction to Poésies Posthumes by René Leynaud (reprinted in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death), he describes the late poet in the following terms: "But I have never known a single person who, loving him, failed to love him without reservation. This is because he inspired confidence. Insofar as it is possible for a man, he gave himself completely to everything he did. He never bargained about anything, and this is why he was assassinated. As solid as the short, stocky oaks of his Ardèche, he was both physically and morally strapping. Nothing could make the slightest dent in him when he had once made up his mind what was fair. It took a burst of bullets to subjugate him" (48).

What immediately follows this passage is a page break, and then this: "Up to now, I have spoken of Leynaud dryly and, so to speak, in a general way." The disconnect here between Camus's actual prose and his description of that prose is striking. What he describes as dry is, in fact, both emotional and laced with figurative language: love, infallible morality, assassination, and a man as solid as the oak trees of his homeland, a man who, in the final clause, stares down a "burst of bullets" in the name of what is right. Far from a dry description, Camus's prose here verges on melodrama.

I want to suggest that this dichotomy between claims of plain-spoken realism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward melodrama, on the other, is pervasive in existentialism. The claim to realism (and I am using "realism" here in its political sense, as the opposite of idealism) is most obvious amongst atheist existentialists. For them, the heart of the movement is a rejection of the comforting fiction that there is a God up there who cares about us and that there is a moral order that we need only adhere to in order to live a good life. In Camus' own terminology, we live in an "absurd" universe, one defined by the enormous gulf between what humans ask of it emotionally and what the cold, largely empty universe is capable of providing. This stripping away of religious illusions is at the centre of both postwar French existentialism and existentialism's pop cultural incarnations.

Christian existentialism, though somewhat more sanguine about our ultimate salvation, often shares this appeal to realism in the face of comforting illusions. For Kierkegaard, there may be a Creator out there, but that fact does not lead to any easy answers: we are still faced with the impossible task of figuring out what morality demands and, more difficult yet, when violation of the moral order is required by the higher call of spiritual demands. In Kierkegaard's most famous title, Either/Or, we are denied even the comforting Hegelian illusion that all dichotomies will be subsumed in a higher stage of dialectical development. For Kierkegaard, theist though he was, it is all choice and no grounds.

Thus both theistic and atheistic existentialism pose themselves as realist antidotes to the illusion of traditional moral and religious teaching. In this sense, they stand on the masculinist (more on that later) grounds of facing facts rather catering to our emotional needs.

At the same time, however, existentialism often poses its arguments, and especially its dramatizations, on melodramatic and therefore, at least as traditional genre distinctions would have it, feminized grounds. (I realize there is one very obvious objection to this characterization, but bear with me for a moment.) Take for example, the most canonical of Sartre's short stories: "The Wall." Here the decision without clear knowledge, the unknowability of consequences, and the absurdity of moral choices are staged in the most emotionally heightened of circumstances: the last hours before the protagonist faces the firing squad. (And not just any firing squad--an enemy firing squad eliminating members of the resistance.) Camus's Les Justes stages its themes on similar terrain, tyrants and the scaffold playing prominent roles in another life-and-death drama. In Camus's letters and essays these figures are, if anything, even more prominent; the title Resistance, Rebellion, and Death tells us much about the tendency toward melodrama to be found within its pages. Throughout the existentialist canon, the ticking clock, the noose, and the bravery of the Resistance figure again and again. Even in Viktor Frankl's relatively upbeat Man's Search for Meaning, the central drama is not the quotidian life of its readers, but the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust.

Now let us turn to the obvious objection to what I have written in the previous paragraph: While the subject matter, as enumerated above, may sound overwrought and melodramatic, these texts do not read as melodramatic. And the reason for that is clear: Sartre and Camus are not overplaying their emotional hand; they are dealing with situations that would seem to be objectively charged with high drama and intense emotion. It is impossible to accuse someone of being melodramatic about the Holocaust because the Holocaust, in its objective reality, demands the most violent of words in its representation. And something similar might be said about the French Resistance, anti-Czarist fighters, and the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. In every case, the objective conditions justify a highly charged representation.

Melodrama, then, is not highly emotional writing, but unjustifiably emotional writing. It is defined by a relationship between the content of a work and how that content is represented.

With that formula in place, I want to turn to the issue of gender. If the existentialists are excused from the category of melodramatists, this is because the subject matter with which they work reads as dramatic, dangerous, difficult, and infused with the highest moral questions. The subject matter of most melodrama does not. But are we as readers free from bias in that assessment? If Sartre reads as morally serious because he was a great man of philosophy, engaged in the serious business of war, why does Harriet Beecher Stowe, concerned with the serious business of slavery, read as melodramatic? If we saw the life of a 19th-century working-class woman as as dangerous, as filled with mortal risk from both assault and childbirth as it may well have been, would we see writing about those lives as melodramatic? Or would we grant that kind of writing the free pass we give Camus and Sartre? A detailed reading of both the facts of 19th century life and the texts representing it would be required to answer that question. However, it may be that our notion of melodrama has as much to do with our assumptions about what life was like for certain groups of people as it does for how those people are written about.

Postscript: It is perhaps no coincidence that the one academic article indicting an existentialist for melodrama levels that accusation at Simone de Beauvoir, for all intents and purposes the only female existentialist.