Home in Hollywood Melodrama

The Home in Hollywood Melodrama considers the home's narrative, thematic, and visual construction within domestic melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, exploring the assumptions of gender, class, and race through which the home is visualized on screen. Informed by approaches from genre studies, architectural and urban studies, feminist film theory, critical race theory, and phenomenology, amongst others, the book traces how routine domestic activities and unremarkable stylistic gestures become charged with meaning via melodrama's emphasis on recurrence and return and its moral elevation of victimhood. Drawing on original archival research and detailed textual analysis, The Home in Hollywood Melodrama offers a series of detailed case studies that explore the onscreen home as a product of both Hollywood production norms and wider cultural conceptions of belonging. Addressing questions of female movement and labor, property relations and class, race, and national identity, the book argues that the generic structures of domestic melodrama are fundamental to understanding how the home within these films takes shape onscreen.