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The Unruly Clones: Tatiana Maslany’s Melodramatic Masquerades in Orphan Black

in an opening epigraph to chapter 1 of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Kathleen Rowe cites the Muppets' Miss Piggy and her Guide to Life. In the guide, Miss Piggy recounts a time when an "ill-informed bookseller" tried to convince her to buy a melodramatic romance novel. She rejected this offer, telling the bookseller to "[t]ake back [his] flossy novel about sad people in big houses by a woman with three names" and knocking him to the ground effortlessly (qtd. in Rowe, The Unruly Woman 25). Rowe explains, "Miss Piggy will have nothing to do with melodrama," and though she "distains" "such a feminine genre," she advantageously uses femininity as a masquerade that she can pick up and discard (The Unruly Woman 29). With this example, Rowe places the comedic unruly woman (such as Miss Piggy or Roseanne Barr) and her ability to use her masqueraded femininity in opposition to the melodramatic heroine.Rowe primarily defines the unruly woman as a comedic figure who uses her grotesque body, mouth, and laughter to disrupt social and patriarchal hierarchies. She subverts dominant ideology by mocking femininity and masculinity and making them the butt of her joke. For Rowe, this is not a possibility available to the melodramatic heroine, for the form is "centered on victimization and tears rather than resistance and laughter" (The Unruly Woman 4). Rowe suggests that "melodrama depicts strategies of purity, while comedy, with its exaggerations, hyperbole, and assault on the rational, depicts those of danger" (The Unruly Woman 5). In her second book on the topic, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen, Rowe extends her scope in order to more fully take into account the unruly women of select maternal melodramas. In doing so, she looks to examples that she claims subvert the confines of melodrama through their unruly daughters.I argue that a reading of Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany's performance in the BBC America hit series Orphan Black (2013-) makes visible the unruliness of melodramatic women and problematizes the binarized dichotomy of unruliness and victimhood. In this article, I analyze the way that Maslany's acting style, manifested across the bodies of her clones, reveals the unruliness of both good and bad women. Drawing from Rowe, I define female unruliness in multiple ways, looking at how women control the terms on which they are seen and heard, assert their right to maintain authority over their bodies, and use their voices and bodies to dominate the power structures trying to silence them. Maslany's characters engage with a wide range of unruly traits that are outlined by Rowe, from Cosima's excessive speech and tone to Sarah's occupation and manipulation of liminal borders to Helena's association with the grotesque, all of which I will explore in turn (Rowe, The Unruly Woman 31). By calling attention to the unruliness of Maslany's characters as revealed through her performance, I seek to correct misconceptions about the fragility and passivity of the melodramatic victim-hero, traits that prompt Rowe to place her in opposition to the comedic unruly woman.As it has been theorized by Linda Williams, the melodramatic mode "focuses on victimheroes and on recognizing their virtue. Recognition of virtue orchestrates the moral legibility that is key to melodrama's function"; and melodrama presents "characters who embody primary psychic roles organized in Manichaean conflicts between good and evil" (Playing the Race Card 29, 40). Williams's theory of melodrama pivots around moral legibility as it plays out on the body. According to Williams, the viewer expects melodrama to present a world organized into a dichotomy of extreme good and extreme evil, a binary that is made evident through bodily signs of morality meant to signify the emotional truth of an individual. These bodily signs express what Peter Brooks calls the moral occult, an operative terrain of hidden values that cannot be verbally expressed within the narrative (Brooks 5). …