SOURCE: Franceschina, John. Introduction to Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic Melodramas by British Women, 1790-1843, pp. 1-13. New York: Garland, 1997.

In the following essay, Franceschina examines the contributions of female playwrights to the Gothic genre.

Ha! eternal curses! still will I have revenge! 

The Old Oak Chest II.v.

Confusion! foil'd again … 

St. Clair of the Isles I.iv.

Aesthetically, melodrama is the dramatization of a dream world of absolutes “where virtue and vice coexist in pure whiteness and blackness” and where “life is uncomplicated, easy to understand, and immeasurably exciting” (Booth, English Melodrama 14). This world of certainty, in which character, conduct, and situation are extremely simple and clear, is realized in a dramatic form that “presented ‘ordinary’ people in domestic situations, strong plots, violence and broad humor, villainy confounded and happy endings” (Kilgarriff 16). In his Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Michael R. Booth defines the characteristics of...