"Most important, social change and upheaval
became a primary background for melodramatic action. The earlier melodrama,
however much it may have advocated some kind of social reform such as the
abolition of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, tended to portray society within the story as
static. Individuals rose and fell, but society went on in much the same way" (Cawelti 40).
"The family melodrama, by contrast, though dealing largely with the same Oedipal
themes of emotional and moral identity, more often records the failure of the protagonist
to act in a way that could shape the events and influence the emotional environment let alone change the stifling social milieu. The world is closed. and the characters
are acted upon" (Elsaesser 78-79).
"Characters do not have "lives"; we endow them with "personality" only to the extent that personality is a structure familiar to us in life and art ... . Even fantastic narratives require inference, guesses, and expectations according to one's sense of what 'normal persons are like' - understanding normal in its descriptive and evaluative sense. This is where standard role expectations, stereotypes, prejudices, social biases, and dominant ideologies come in. Believable, sympathetic characters are shaped by prevailing beliefs about how people in those circumstances should behave" (Polletta 293-294).
What are the challenges of providing a story with character types with many expectations, stereotypes, and conventional beliefs but ones who break these conventions and act differently to change the status quo?
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