La représentation de la famille dans le mélodrame du début du dix-neuvième siècle: de Pixerécourt à Ducange

Nineteenth-Century French melodrama, a genre often harshly criticized for its "popular" character, is particularly useful for the purpose of studying the modifications that affected the concepts of family and domesticity at the fall of the Empire. A comparison between Pixerécourt and Ducange shows, that while Pixerécourt's "classic" melodrama preaches absolute submissiveness to a father with "divine rights" and thrives on the pathetic situations thus arising, Ducange's melodrama ties up again with the drame bourgeois, by placing a family based on understanding and love at the center of his dramaturgy. By rejecting Pixerécourt's value system and focusing on the family problematic (marriage, role of women) Ducange clearly questions the authoritarian social model inherited from the Empire and also breaks with his predecessor's æsthetic conceptions. (M-PLH)