Melodrama, victimhood, and complicity in Whitney Terrell’s The Good Lieutenant
This article examines how melodramatic political discourse shapes portrayals of victimhood, heroism, and culpability in Whitney Terrell’s The Good Lieutenant. Building on Elisabeth Anker’s account of melodrama—which frames the nation as a virtuous victim whose pain licenses redemptive force—we...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2025
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/26278/1/Gema_Online_25_3_7.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/26278/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1852 |
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| Summary: | This article examines how melodramatic political discourse shapes portrayals of victimhood,
heroism, and culpability in Whitney Terrell’s The Good Lieutenant. Building on Elisabeth Anker’s
account of melodrama—which frames the nation as a virtuous victim whose pain licenses
redemptive force—we show how the novel both draws on and strains this moral grammar.
Methodologically, we translate Anker’s ideas into a practical toolkit for literary analysis, focusing
on temporal design, role grammar, the rhetoric of victimhood, and the affective economy through
which private loss becomes public meaning. Two axes organise the readings: first, the centering
of American soldiers’ suffering as the main source of pathos; second, the conditional and often
short-lived recognition of Iraqi civilian pain. While reverse chronology, scenes of desecration, and
gendered vulnerability lend American figures moral centrality, the book also unsettles
melodramatic binaries by foregrounding complicity, failed rescue, and the limits of redemption.
We conclude that The Good Lieutenant exemplifies the ambivalence of recent war fiction: it
critiques the Iraq War’s legitimating stories even as it remains entangled in the forms that elevate
some victims over others. |
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