Abstract
In this chapter I will be considering the link between reality and narrative in terms of the genre (and technology) of soap opera, first reviewing the negative aura that still surrounds what is called ‘women’s television’, and then analysing its features and narrative codes along certain paths: bodies, rooms, claustrophobic spaces, romance and paranoia, couples and pairs. To these paradigms can be added metaphorical and structural dimensions orbiting around questions of opening and closure, space and place. It will be impossible to do this without referring to film aesthetics, and particularly to previous feminist discussions on cinema and women: from one point of view, television melodrama can be considered as the ‘re-memory’ of some filmic genres.
As I was going up the many stairs to my flat, a little girl was frantically ringing a bell on one of the first floor doors. A woman came to open, an aunt or a friend, or mother herself; the girl impatiently pushed her aside and started running while asking at the top of her shrill anxious voice: ‘Has Trisha got married? Has Trisha got married?’.
‘Once I got home, I switched on the soap they were watching (I had never watched it before), just to get that simple reply. And I discovered — obviously not at once — that it was not so simple, that hardly anybody could answer that question (except her wicked fiancé and he never would), and last of all Trisha herself, that she was under drugs and in terrible confusion, and probably had fainted at the crucial moment …
What to my surprise I then realised was that my little neighbour’s voice was not expressing the romantic expectation of a long-dreamt event (marriage is normally that, in romance) but the dread of it happening. That Trisha was in love with somebody else and was being forced into this marriage with the villain by all sorts of circumstances was less important than the total subversion of one of the pillars of romance … And I remembered the time when, as a child, I went to the wedding of a very young aunt of mine, Annamaria, to whom I was very close. To the horror of the guests and o f the extended family, I unaccountably and desperately wept the whole day as one would at a funeral, not a celebration. As things went, Annamarias marriaze …
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Notes and References
J. Stacey, ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’, in L. Gamman and M. Marshment (eds), The Female Gaze — Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (London: Verso, 1988), p. 112.
J. Lesage, ‘Artful Racism, Artful Rape — Griffiths’ Broken Blossoms’, in C. Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is — Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), p. 250.
T. Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 14.
G. Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Paladin, 1971), p. 170.
In K. Davies, J. Dickey and T. Stratford (eds), Out of Focus. Writings on Women and the Media (London: The Women’s Press, 1987), p. 140.
Rosalind Coward, ‘Come back Miss Ellie: on character and narrative in soap operas’, Critical Quarterly, 28, 1–2 (1986), p. 171.
Cf. D. Hobson, Crossroads — The Drama of a Soap Opera (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 36.
See C. Brunsdon, ‘The role of soap opera in the development of feminist television scholarship’, in R. C. Allen (ed.), To Be Continued … Soap Operas around the World (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 52 ff. This essay, an informed analysis of feminist work on women and the media, confronts the problem of why feminists have been so interested in soap opera, and traces the historical and theoretical context of their analyses, from the mid-seventies to the early nineties.
‘Fictions everywhere, all pervasive, with consumption obligatory by virtue of this omnipresence, a veritable requirement of our social existence’: S. Heath, The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 85.
G. Vidal, Duluth (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), p. 280.
C. R. Stimpson, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Transposition of Gender’, in N. K. Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 3.
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 37. This is also the source of the epigraph at the beginning of this section.
The differences lay among American, British or Australian productions; between daytime and prime time; from straight versions of a format to its conscious parody or reversal. A good example of this reversal is given by Lynda La Plante’s Widows, a short British serial that has attracted the attention of feminist critics. See G. Skirrow, ‘Widows’, in M. Alvarado and J. Stewart (eds), Made for Television: Euston Films Limited (London: British Film Institute, 1985) and ‘Women/Acting/Power’, in H. Baher and G. Dyer (eds), Boxed In: Women and Television (London: Pandora, 1987).
The interesting treatment of black people was noted by Christine Geraghty with regard to Eastenders (‘East Enders’, Marxism Today, August 1985); later she writes on blacks in soaps in Women and Soap Opera, pp. 140 and ff. See also Stuart Hall, ‘The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideology and the Media’, in M. Alvarado and J. O. Thompson (eds), The Media Reader (London: British Film Institute, 1990). He enumerates the various stereotypes of black characters in film and television, and observes: ‘Blacks are still the most frightening, cunning and glamorous crooks (and policemen) in NY cop series. They are the fleet-footed, crazy-talking under-men who connect Starsky and Hutch to the drug-saturated ghetto’ (p. 16).
Ien Ang and Jon Stratton, ‘The end of civilization as we knew it: Chances and the postrealist soap opera’, in Allen, To Be Continued, p. 125. Tessa Perkins, commenting on South of the Border and Making Out, maintains that they ‘celebrate aspects of femininity — a celebration of excess. I think Making Out is vulgar and that’s wonderful. They have an immense energy that maybe soaps are now lacking’: R. Brunt, K. Jones, T. Perkins, ‘A Conversation about Contemporary Television’, Women, a cultural review, 2, 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 9–10. In the same conversation, Karen Jones says: ‘Are soaps the subconscious of patriarchy? … That’s why there are no solutions and the characters endlessly go around in circles in discussions’ (p. 7). Further on, she observes that soap and crime series are two arenas where moral questions are debated.
This was the case in two forgotten British series, Juliet Bravo and The Gentle Touch, and the more popular Cagney and Lacey. This series of the eighties, though in many ways a conventional cop series, dealt with female friendship and with issues such as rape, incest, abortion, pornography, violence against women, and breast cancer, attracting much feminist commentary. See B. Alcock and J. Robson, ‘Cagney and Lacey revisited’, Feminist Review, 35 (Summer 1990); L. Gamman, ‘Response: More Cagney and Lacey’, Feminist Review, 37 (Spring 1991), and, above all, Julie D’Acci, Defining Women: The Case of Cagney and Lacey (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1994). Lucy Gamman insists on the importance of homoerotic imagery in the series.
See I. Ang, Watching Dallas (London: Methuen, 1985)
T. Lovall, ‘Ideology and Coronation Street’, in R. Dyer, C. Geraghty, M. Jordan, T. Lovell, R. Paterson. J. Stewart, Coronation Street (London: British Film Institute, 1981).
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© 1998 Lidia Curti
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Curti, L. (1998). The Lure of the Image: Fe/male Serial Narratives. In: Female Stories, Female Bodies. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26207-6_3
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