Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Explorations In The Domestic Space: How Hollywood Made A Home In Film Melodrama, Elana Katz

Honors Theses

This thesis utilizes the Hollywood domestic melodramas and sex comedies of the 1950s as a lens to discover the evolution of family and home from Eisenhower’s America to modern day. As a mode of expression with roots in nineteenth-century theater, melodrama serves as a primary genre for tracking historical and social shifts in twentieth-century American society. However, as the narrative form has evolved over time, what satisfies melodrama is difficult to define as its boundaries have been redrawn. Historians and film scholars examine melodrama through three overarching schools of thought: melodrama as a genre, a mode, or both. Film melodrama …