In the previous chapter, I discussed Rey Chow's reading of SECRET SUNSHINE. In her essay, Chow shows how Lee Chang-dong's film takes the concept of forgiveness, circumscribed by the humanist metaphysics of Christian morality, to its limit, deposing sovereignty of its right to forgive within this metaphysics. She notes that the “Christian dimension,” meaning its ethics and global aspirations, has not yet “exhausted the possibilities of the future of the human.” The film does not provide a means of depicting Shin-ae's forgiveness beyond this politico-theological dimension – another ethics, as we have seen, was offered in Lee's POETRY. While SECRET SUNSHINE does not delineate a means of forgiving outside the hackneyed modes of representation associated with the ethics of popular melodrama, through its critique the film nevertheless does gesture to the discursive preconditions that make forgiving the other possible. In other words, Shin-ae's suffering marks the limits of the ethics constrained by the melodramatic mode and yet gestures toward that which is not human; or, as Chow puts it, “whatever the human may become.”

As we have seen, the humanist impulse is intrinsic to the melodramatic mode. In her discussion of the melodrama of race in Playing the Race Card, Linda Williams reveals that key to the experience of redemption in narratives such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) and the television series ROOTS (1977) is the recognition of African-Americans as humans victimized by the dehumanizing institution of slavery. The emotional power, for the Antebellum viewer of the Christ-like Uncle Tom (in the novel's theatrical renderings), coalesces around the “historically unprecedented recognition of the humanity of slaves.” Significantly, Williams notes that the transmutation of bodily suffering into virtue, which “is a topos of western culture that goes back to Christian iconography,” carries “special weight” in American melodrama, such as in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. With this recognition comes a host of ideological assumptions about the inherent virtue of the human being, its capacities and limits, and its grievability.