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Passionate Allegories: Staging Romance in Civil War Melodrama

Abstract The essay traces the changing stages of allegorical melodrama, which heighten the respective Civil War goals of the North and South, from the beginning of the war to the silent film era. At the outset of the war both sides use portrayals of Civil War romance to create ‘passionate allegories’ that praise their own cause and disparage their opponents. Subsequently, spectacular allegorical enactments in postbellum Civil War romance plays serve to commemorate magnanimous, unifying encounters between North and South as well as the North’s victory. Finally, somewhat removed from the war, early silent movies of the new century draw on melodrama’s theater conventions (especially allegorical tableaux) to fire up the audience’s passion for the union of North and South: for instance, Edwin S. Porter’s film Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) shows that Tom’s death was not in vain because it paved the way for the reconciliation of North and South, while D. W. Griffith’s racist Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) ends with a double honeymoon to stress the need of a white union between North and South in the face of the perceived threat of African Americans.