Rethinking the family melodrama: Thomas Elsaesser, Mildred Pierce and the business of family

conflict indigenous to the family', Nina C. Leibman counters that 'the family melodrama was not a newfound creation of the 1950s, but was in fact a genre that was nearly 200 years old'. 5E. Ann Kaplan discusses the family melodrama as 'a genre geared specifically to women', while Mulvey explicitly contrasts the woman's melodrama with 'the "masculine" or family melodrama'. 6 Ellen Seiter claims that 'family melodramas have always tended to deal with an environment, a set of characters and a narrative dilemma unquestionably identified as middle class', yet not a single one of the films in Claire Perkins's recent list of classic family melodramas -Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956), Giant (George Stevens, 1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958) and Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1960) -is focused on the middle class. 7And while one would at the very least expect that the 'family melodrama' is defined by the fact that it always 'focuses upon the nuclear family', as countless critics have suggested, Schatz's widely cited chapter on the 'family melodrama' in Hollywood Genres surprisingly declares that 'the history of the family melodrama genre' proves that after the 1950s a focus on social issues like racism and feminism 'would shortly displace the nuclear family as the genre's main focus '. 8 At this point, then, we should surely be questioning whether the 'family melodrama' is even a meaningful category for analysis.When Robert Lang declares that 'the family melodrama, as I use the term, is meant to comprehend four generally distinguished types of melodrama of passion: the "woman's film", the romantic melodrama, the family and/or small-town melodrama, and the Gothic melodrama', we might wonder how 'family melodrama' can be a subset of itself, and indeed why Lang even uses 'the family melodrama' as his overarching category here rather than his other term, 'melodrama of passion'. 9And when Leibman argues for redefining 'previously classified "comedies"' of the 1950s like Leave it to Beaver (1957-63) and Father Knows Best (1954-60) 'as seminal examples of a newer postwar type of family melodrama', she is certainly right that these shows qualify as 'family melodramas' if all that the term means is 'a narrative concerned with domestic problems and celebrations, in which social dilemmas are reconfigured into familial ones'. 10Yet one wonders if this focus on 'familial strife and reconciliation' is really specific enough to define a particular genre of melodrama, and if Leave It to Beaver and Written on the Wind are really similar enough for them both to exemplify it. 11 What is it, then, that actually distinguishes the 'family melodrama', and is this genre really as theoretically significant as the critics of the 1970s claimed?Is there any truth to the idea that the genre is, as Lang puts it, 'particularly self-reflexive'; that, more than other forms of melodrama, the family melodrama not only represents but actually reflects on 'what melodrama is really all about'? 12I contend that there is: the family melodrama is a unique and uniquely important form of melodrama, and the key to what defines the genre has been right in front of us all along.For the tendency to read the family melodrama in