ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the unmanageable passions intrinsic to melodrama, and how they circulate within both literature and psychoanalysis. If compassion is an emotion in operation, so too is hysteria a melodrama of affect on the move, arguably in search of differing responses. The melodrama of Daniel Deronda is one that puts pressure on the real, staging and dramatising Oedipal sexual difference and the bourgeois individual ego, in all of its hysterical opposition and Manichean conflict. Dramatising the gap between the dream experience and its textual meaning, nineteenth century melodrama stages affects that are in excess of the available representational forms. Melodrama, like hysteria "bubbling all the time just below the surface" is what moves the story along; its rhythm is what moves feeling and meaning from one person to the next.
