The prevailing understanding of the melodramatic mode distinguishes between melodrama as a social sensibility and as an artistic representation. In this traditional model, the melodramatic mode mediates between social experience and artistic representations by inhabiting both of them. This paper argues that these two aspects (social experience and representation) derive from a more fundamental aspect of melodrama, constituted by acts of exchange. I analyze the acts of exchange in two melodramas -The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) and The Story of Adèle H. (François Truffaut, 1975) -explaining how the states of being and representations we associate with melodrama derive from unequal acts of exchange. Melodrama polices the boundary between exchange and the realm that lies beyond exchange, dramatizing the consequences of putting into circulation objects and ideas that should not be assigned an exchange value.

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