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Genders 28 1998
Feminine
Intensities
By ROBYN R. WARHOL [1] I really like to watch
soap operas. As a self-respecting feminist
academic, I realize I am supposed to be ashamed to
say so, but for reasons I hope this essay will make
clear, I am saying so at once. I am not using "soap
opera," as do many scholars, as a portmanteau to
refer to just any melodramatic serial. I mean
specifically daytime dramas that develop continuous
storylines, rather than being organized
episodically: series that air only once, five days
a week, fifty-two weeks a year, to present a
continuing set of plots and
subplots.
1
I am one of those people who have
avidly followed many daytime and primetime serials
off and on over the years (for example,
Guiding
Light,
Mary Hartman, Mary
Hartman, Anthony
Trollope's Palliser series on "Masterpiece
Theater," Hill Street
Blues,
Soap
, St.
Elsewhere,
Dallas
, L. A.
Law,
thirtysomething
, the second, third, and fourth
Star
Trek series, and
My So-called
Life), but who have
always remained loyal to one particular daytime
story, in my case the CBS-Proctor and Gamble
ancestor of all television soap operas,
As the World
Turns, the only one
of the earliest soaps created for television (as
opposed to radio) that is still being produced, and
hence the longest-running TV serial. [2] In the spring of 1995,
As the World
Turns aired its
ten-thousandth episode. This particular soap came
on the air in 1956, when I was one year old; my
mother, who stayed home full time until I was in my
twenties, watched it continuously--and, I might
add, highly critically, in the negative sense of
that word--until she began working outside the home
in the early 1980s. Some of my earliest childhood
memories of television involve Lisa, Nancy, and Bob
Hughes, characters who are still central to the
narratives that constitute
As the World
Turns
today, and who are still played by the same
actors--Eileen Fulton, Helen Wagner, and Don
Hastings--who created the roles 42 years ago. I
first began watching regularly in junior high,
during the late 1960s, when what used to be called
"forced busing" put my school on so early a
schedule that my girlfriends and I were home in
time to watch our favorite afternoon soaps
together. Throughout high school and college I
followed the story in the summers, when job
schedules would allow it; in graduate school during
the late 1970s, after the episodes of
As the World
Turns had been
extended from 30 to 60 minutes, daily viewing
became one of my favorite modes of procrastination.
There are, to be sure, lacunae in my day-to-day
knowledge of the story line, the biggest gap being
the six years I spent working toward tenure. By the
time I had been promoted in the late '80s, though,
the VCR meant it was no longer necessary to be at
home during the day to keep watching, and I got
back into the pattern of daily viewing through
"time shifting." I find myself now, at 42, the
embodiment of the kind of viewer that Robert Allen
posits in his "Reader-Oriented Poetics of Soap
Opera," a walking repository of 42 years, more or
less, of continuous backstory. [3] Although my analysis of
the structure of affect in daytime soaps begins
with this first-person account of my own soap opera
viewing, I hasten to add that the essay will not
(at least not primarily) be about me. Still, I
don't know how to write about affect in daytime
drama without consulting my own reading experience.
I am not sure how to explain the role that
As the World
Turns's continuous
storyline has played in my consciousness--assuming
I am addressing someone who may not have followed a
narrative produced nearly every weekday over 42
years with no reruns and no syndication--except to
suppose that the characters in some people's
families must provide a similar length and variety
of narrative incident. Some extended families in
the U.S. might still have the experience of daily
contact with a continuously present set of friends
and relatives over four decades, but I certainly do
not share that experience, nor do most of the
people I know. In 42 years I have lived at 29
different addresses that I can remember (there were
more in my infancy), in a total of eight states; I
now live 3000 miles away from my family of origin.
This peripatetic history is not, I think, entirely
unusual among middle-class Americans, particularly
academics. In all those places, only one set of
persons has been constantly present, continually
and reliably "there" no matter where: the
characters who populate Oakdale, Illinois, the
fictive setting of As
the World Turns. I
have sometimes watched the program in my mother's
mode of angry resistance against its
implausibilities; more often I have willingly
suspended my disbelief within the conventions the
genre sets up, and have delighted in this
particular soap's fluency in those conventions.
Whatever viewing position I adopt, though, I have
noticed in recent years that the patterning of
emotional content in the storyline tends to leave
its traces on my own quotidian emotional life. For
that reason--and because I have learned from other
devoted viewers that I am no more unique in this
experience than I am in the other details of
middle-class "feminine" American existence I have
sketched above--I am interested in analyzing what I
am calling the "structure of affect" in this
particular soap opera text. [4] Following the precedent
of much recent scholarship on soap opera (which I
will discuss below), I call the activity of soap
opera viewing "feminine," which is not to say that
only women are doing it. In speaking of
"femininity," I invoke the longstanding feminist
principle of distinguishing between sex--a
relatively fixed and stable category based upon
biological difference--and gender, a culturally
constructed set of assumptions about what is
supposed to be appropriate for women and for men,
respectively. While the soap opera audience
contains men as well as women, the genre "soap
opera" carries heavily feminine connotations in
contemporary culture, as it has been marketed and
addressed to women since its early
twentieth-century radio-broadcast origins.
Scholarship on soap opera viewing generally takes
this for granted, depicting soap viewers as
predominantly female, and interpreting the messages
soap opera plots transmit to women. Such work
either narrows its ramifications by specifying the
kinds of women it describes (in terms of class,
race, sexual orientation, nationality, age, and so
on) or runs the risk of invoking a universalized
"woman" whose affiliation with the codes of
femininity is assumed as a norm. I do not aspire to
generalize about "women" as viewers of soap opera,
except to say that the cultural construction of
femininity inevitably resonates with every woman's
identity, whether she identifies with feminine
codes, rejects them, or--more likely in postmodern
U.S. culture--positions herself somewhere in the
middle of the sliding scale of gender
affiliation. [5] In focusing on gender
(femininity) rather than sex (women) in my analysis
of soap opera viewing, I mean specifically to
include those men who are as dedicated to watching
soaps as their female counterparts, and who are, in
that sense, full participants in this aspect of
feminine culture. I contend that the movement of a
soap's plot structures viewers' affective lives in
much the same way as daily "box scores" do for
sports fans. I am told that any loyal follower of a
team will be cheered, on a difficult day, by a
strong showing in the morning paper and that even
on a pleasant day, the sports enthusiast will feel
at least a little depressed when the favorite team
has floundered. The sports fan, like the soap
viewer, may be male or female, but in North
American culture the enthusiasm for team sports is
coded as masculine, just as soap viewing is coded
feminine. Both activities have an impact on the
emotional experience of those who participate, and
I am interested in the gendered implications of
that impact. Baseball scores are unpredictable
(Isn't that the fun of following them? If, over a
period of 39 years, a team always won or always
lost, following the scores would be so monotonous
as to be pointless). The emotional ups and downs
accompanying this masculine pastime do not follow
any identifiable pattern. Soap opera plots, by
contrast, are highly structured over the long term,
and in that sense, they provide a glimpse at the
emotive implications of what it means to live
"feminine" experience in contemporary U.S. culture.
I am arguing that box scores and soap opera plots
are examples of what Teresa de Lauretis has called
"technologies of gender."
2
By identifying the structure that
drives the movement of soap opera plots, I aim to
uncover part of the machinery that keeps the
construct of femininity in operation. [6] I will be drawing here
on the reported viewing experience of the devoted
viewers I have mentioned, a fan group that meets
regularly to discuss
As the World Turns
on America On-Line, a commercial
analog to the internet. The viewers include several
dozen women and men who have watched the soap for
decades, whose expressed feelings about the soap,
in addition to my own, form the material for my
analysis. By placing special emphasis on the
experience of long-term viewing, I have
found--contrary to what many researchers have
assumed--that audiences' feelings are usually quite
distinct from the fictive feelings being
represented in the soap opera text, but that their
affective experience nevertheless follows a
structure the text establishes. This structure
creates a wave pattern, building to a climax
followed by an undertow of feeling, continuing, as
it were, forever--or at least until a particular
serial gets canceled. I will argue that just as
soap opera carries feminine connotations both
within and outside the academy, the ebb and flow of
the wave pattern (a common enough stereotype for
feminine emotion and for female sexuality) offers
some insight into how femininity is continually
structured, constructed, and reinforced within
contemporary popular culture. The Longtime Soap Viewer
as Academic "Other" [7] One reason I began this
essay with a first-person assertion is that soap
opera scholars have commonly referred to the
viewers of daytime serials as "them." Carol Traynor
Williams points this out in
It's Time for My
Story
(1992),
3
citing Robert Allen among other
influential theorists of soap who admit to
watching--to be sure--for the purposes of their
scholarship, but who would not classify themselves
as bona fide viewers. Williams herself says that
she watched twelve daytime soap operas continuously
for six years while carrying out the research for
her book, and the wealth of detail she cites about
all the daytime plots from the 1980s suggests that
this is no empty boast. Still, while she speaks as
someone who watches, her perspective is not that of
the longtime viewer, who--as she acknowledges--may
have followed a particular storyline literally for
a lifetime. Williams gets an "inside view" of the
production of soap opera narratives from interviews
with prominent writers of daytime serials; in
another recent book, Martha Nochimson's
No End to
Her
(1992),
4
the scholar speaks from the inside
position of someone who has herself been employed
as a soap opera staff writer but who speaks of
female viewers as "them" or "her." [8] The pattern repeats
itself, from Tania Modleski's groundbreaking
Loving with a
Vengeance
(1984)
5
--where the scholar's detailed
knowledge of current soap plots gives rise to a
curious contradiction between her own professional
identity and the one she assigns to soaps' viewers:
housewives and women working at home--to Ellen
Seiter et. al.'s essay, "'Don't Treat Us like We're
so Stupid and Naive': Toward an Ethnography of Soap
Opera Viewers"--where the you/us division between
those who watch soaps and those who watch them
watching becomes the focus of the witty title,
itself a quotation from a viewer.
6
Even Mary Ellen Brown, who
acknowledges that watching soaps "opened the door
for me to a world that has given me immense
pleasure ever since," differentiates herself from
other viewers by assigning them a higher priority
than the serial holds for her: "What became
important to me was not so much the plots of the
various daytime soaps but who else watched
them."
7
For all the insight that such
projects have to offer on the history, conventions,
interpretation and reception of the genre, they
construct the perspective of longtime viewers of
soap operas as "other"--and therefore, academically
speaking, as marginal--in opposition to the
scholarly perspective that centers each
study. [9] Charlotte Brunsdon has
attributed the we/they structure of so much
feminist commentary on television genres to a shift
within feminist media criticism itself, from a
position outside the academy (where the
commentators of the 1960s envisioned a
"transparent" relation between themselves and the
female viewers about whom and for whom they were
writing) to an institutionally entrenched
"hegemonic/recruiting" position typified by such
influential books as Modleski's. As Brunsdon
explains, In scholarship of this kind,
Brunsdon remarks, "The pronouns . . . are 'we' and
'they,' with the shifting referent of the 'we'
being both 'feminists' and 'women,' although the
'they' is always 'women' " (315). Brunsdon
theorizes a third moment in feminist television
criticism--characterized by Christine Geraghty's
1990 book, Women and
Soap Opera
9
--where post-structuralist and
post-modern self-consciousness about identity
positioning lead to a less stable relation between
the theorist and the audience: "Everyone here is an
other--and there are no pronouns beyond the 'I'"
(316). As Brunsdon asserts, the history of feminist
television criticism means "[w] e now have gendered
genres, and we also have gendered audiences" (311).
One might add that we also have gendered scholars.
Since the "gendering" of an audience or a scholar
in a post-structuralist environment is no longer a
question of biological sex (a question of whether
viewers or authors are "women"), but rather of
identity positioning (whether the address of the
text, as well as the activity of viewing or writing
about soaps is itself gendered "feminine"), it may
be appropriate for feminist scholars to begin
"speaking of soap operas" still more frankly in the
first person, using a feminine-gendered
"I".
10
[10] The academic "othering"
of the longtime soap opera viewer--and the
reluctance of scholars to identify themselves
within that category--arises, of course, from the
marginal status of the genre itself. If "we now
have gendered genres" in television studies, soap
must be the most feminine of them all: Modleski
cites statistics showing that 90 percent of soap
viewers in the early 1980s were women, and she and
other feminist theorists have shown how the
multiple climaxes, the lack of closure, the
constantly shifting points of view, the priority of
dialogue over action, and the depictions of female
power so common in daytime soaps mark them as a
specifically feminine alternative to masculine
narrative traditions in both high and low
culture.
11
While the audience for daytime soaps
may be less literally "female" today than Modleski
envisioned it as being fifteen years ago, viewers
are engaged in a pursuit that is markedly
feminine--and only obscurely feminist, in the sense
that soap opera texts continue to perpetuate such
myths of the dominant culture as the primacy of the
heterosexual marriage, the irrevocability of
blood-ties between mothers and children, and the
priority of white upper-middle-class Americans'
daily concerns over those of other racial and
socioeconomic groups. The persistence of
patriarchal motifs can help account for the
ambivalence Brunsdon identifies at the heart of so
many feminist projects on the subject, "the paradox
that, on the one hand, there is a perceived
incompatibility between feminism and soap opera,
but, on the other, it is arguably feminist interest
that has transformed soap opera into a very
fashionable field for academic
inquiry."
12
Feminist recuperations of soap opera
have most recently relied upon explications of how
viewers use those texts for feminist ends: to
satisfy unconscious drives toward female power (as
Nochimson hypothesizes), to serve as the focus for
communities of friends or coworkers whose
conversations about the plots can be critical (as
in Dorothy Hobson's work)
13
or carnivalesque (as in Mary Ellen
Brown's), and hence subversive of the plots'
apparent ideologies. What has not been discussed is
one of the subjects most marginalized in all of
academic discourse, including feminism: what does
it
feel
like to follow a soap opera over a period of many
years, and how might those feelings inflect the
experience of longtime viewers? Given that daytime
soap opera's eternal serial structure makes it a
unique television genre, and given that, as
Brunsdon puts it in "The Role of Soap Opera in the
Development of Feminist Television Scholarship,"
"the connotational femininity of the genre remains
overwhelming" (58), an investigation of soaps'
relation to feelings can provide some insight on
contemporary constructions of what femininity
itself "feels like." [11] The question of how
femininity "feels" is a particularly significant
one for feminists who are interested in
recuperating women's experience, or investing with
value those feminine activities that dominant
culture has traditionally dismissed as unimportant
or objectionable. As I have argued at length
elsewhere,
14
British and American mainstream
culture has been especially dismissive of feminine
emotional experience. A plot that qualifies as
"tragic" when it involves a hero in a position of
public power is only "sentimental" when the focal
character is a heroine living in the private
sphere. Tragic stories are supposed to have
"universal" significance; sentimental ones are
trivial, embarrassing, or dumb. I agree with the
long line of feminist canon-busters (dating back to
the early work of Lillian Robinson, Joanna Russ,
and Dale Spender) who have exposed the speciousness
of this demonstrably un-disinterested system for
assigning cultural value. If feminine texts have
begun to receive their scholarly due since the
early 1980s, however, the feelings they inspire in
their readers have not. Sentimentality, for
instance, still carries strong connotations of
pretense and foolishness, as well as of
femininity.
15
I believe this cultural habit--which
denigrates feminine emotional experience in women
and in men--can be traced to a modernist opposition
between "genuine" and "false" emotion. As I will
argue in the next section, that opposition can be
deconstructed through the post-modernist
substitution of "intensities" for emotions,
feelings, or affect. Moving away from the
value-laden vocabulary of emotion--where feminine
sentimentality, for example, is doomed forever to
occupy an abject position--to the concept of
intensities can be one step in reinvesting
femininity with cultural value while detaching it
from oppressive constructs of what is supposed to
be real ("real feelings," "real women," "real
art"). Intensities and the
Structuring of Affect through Television
[12] I have said that this
essay is not, or at least not primarily, about me,
and--in the spirit of Brunsdon's scrutiny of
identity positioning in feminist criticism--I would
like to establish a theoretical framework for
making that claim. The issue of television's
affective properties is certainly not peculiar to
my case. According to Lynne Joyrich, academic
critics of television are always anxious about the
medium's impact upon viewers' emotions, though
scholars argue for two opposite models of what that
impact might be.
16
"On the one hand," Joyrich explains,
"commentators complain of television's evacuation
of emotion" or "emphasize the 'anesthetizing' and
narcotic quality of TV"; "on the other hand, many
people condemn television for its constant menu of
sentimental and sensational drivel, for its arousal
of extreme emotional states" (26). Television
criticism evinces two fears: "that television
deprives us of affect (as it emotes in our place)
or that TV encourages an excessive emotionalism (as
we're drawn into its flow)" (27). In the course of
going on to develop other matters, Joyrich suggests
a reconsideration of television and emotion in
terms of postmodernity, and summarizes
Jameson: Joyrich does not go into any
detail on particular television genres in her
useful critique of TV scholarship, but I want to
direct her point back at the medium itself, to
suggest that serialized television dramas--as a
genre--neither evacuate nor arouse emotion, nor do
they merely exhibit it: I want to argue that serial
form structures the affective response of initiated
viewers, although that response is never identical
to the "feelings" being reproduced by the serial
text. Even though Jameson elaborates the point in
the context of his argument that affect is "waning
in postmodern culture" (12),
17
his concept of "intensities"
(borrowed, he says, from Lyotard) is nevertheless
useful here, as it provides an alternative to
traditional modernist assumptions that some
emotions are "genuine" and some are "false."
Jameson says that intensities, detached from the
concept of a unified self, are "free floating and
impersonal" in postmodern culture (16). They exist
in a culture where the "depth models" of high
modernism no longer operate, among them the
"dialectical one of essence and appearance," the
"Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of
repression," and the "existential model of
authenticity and inauthenticity" (12). If there is,
in postmodern culture, no essential, latent,
authentic unified self, there can be no personal
repository of "real" emotions to be expressed,
drained, or inspired. This notion of the free
floating-ness and impersonality of affect suggests
that intensities, unlike "emotions," exist in a
state of detachment from individual persons or even
texts: it implies that they are forms or structures
operating within culture. My project, then, is not
to provide a confessional account of how I feel
about soaps, but rather to do a narratological
analysis of the structures of affect in the
narrative form of daytime television soap opera in
order to describe how those patterns operate to
structure (not drain, not reproduce) viewers'
intensities. Drawing on the
Backstory [13] I will not dwell here
upon all the scholarly work that has already been
done on how soap operas
represent
feeling (projects like Modleski's
and Nochimson's, for example), nor the
sociologically- and psychologically-based work on
what motivates actual viewers to continue watching
soaps.
18
My interest focuses on the affective
properties of individual episodes within
long-running series. I begin with the assumption
that an uninitiated viewer who tunes in to a single
episode of a soap opera will be distanced from the
emotions being represented on screen (a fact
overlooked by much of the criticism of melodramatic
forms, but emphasized by Allen and Trainor
Williams). I like Allen's terminological
distinction between the "naive" viewer (not, as
criticism of popular culture traditionally had it,
the person who believes the soap characters are
real people, but rather the viewer who tunes into a
soap episode for the first time, having no idea
about the context of the events being represented)
and the "experienced" viewer (who knows the
backstory). As Allen explains, the naive viewer can
only read syntagmatically, from event to event,
whereas the experienced viewer performs a
paradigmatic reading, recognizing the patterning
among events that unfold over the long term
(70).
19
The experienced viewer attains a
level of literacy in soap-opera convention that
makes it possible to interpret the broad strokes of
an episode of a soap he or she has never seen
before; approaching one of his or her "own" soaps,
the experienced viewer has the competency needed to
fill in the gaps that necessarily occur in the
daily diegesis. Occupying the reading position of
the experienced viewer means being able to
interpret the unspoken aspects of the soap opera
narrative: the long looks and enigmatic remarks
exchanged between characters, the double-takes, the
pauses in dialogue, and the seemingly arbitrary
cutting off of scenes upon certain characters'
entrances. [14] The more a viewer knows
about what has happened before in the series (or
what is happening "outside" the series, as reported
in soap opera magazines or on internet gossip
boards), the more capable that viewer will be of
interpreting and participating in the intensities
being constructed in any given episode. How much
you could sympathize in the fall of 1994, for
instance, with Emily's desperate attempts to
interfere with Samantha's affair with Craig so that
she might become romantically involved with Craig
herself will depend on how long you have watched
As the World
Turns: for six days?
you might read her as merely scheming and
manipulating, supremely self-centered, in obvious
evil opposition to the devoted Samantha; for six
months? you might remember the trauma of her having
lost her fiancé Royce in a crisis over his
multiple personality disorder, and understand this
as the source of her current desperation, while you
may hold some lingering suspicions about the
sincerity of Samantha, Royce's con-artist twin
sister; for six years? you might have followed the
details of Emily's fatal penchant for falling for
inappropriate men who abuse her, therefore reading
her desire for Craig as a positive development, and
you might consider Samantha a mere
arriviste
; for sixteen years? you might
remember that Emily had vied for Craig's love once
before, using many of the same tactics against her
rival, Ellie Snyder, that she is now employing
against Samantha; for twenty-six years? you might
recall Emily's miserable childhood with her
alcoholic mother, Susan (now in recovery) and
understand
that
as the root cause of Emily's notoriously low
self-esteem; for thirty-six years? you might have
no interest in Emily's storyline at all, preferring
to focus instead on the elder members of the Hughes
family, whose story has continued over all 10,000
episodes. The current text sometimes drops
allusions to details of backstory, so that the more
recent initiate can put together the basics of the
long-term plot, but the experienced viewer who has
gone through the "feelings" of all those years of
story will have a different relation to what is
happening on the soap today. The complications
inherent in longtime viewing pose serious problems
for academic commentators on soap-opera plots: the
scholar who watched Emily for only six days, six
weeks, or even six months might draw conclusions
about the two-dimensionality of the "villainess"
figure that would be disputable from the
perspective of someone who knows the
backstory.
20
[15] A naive viewer--scholar
or fan--who wishes to glean the benefits of
experience has several means of access to some of
the basic facts of the backstory. One scholarly
book summarizes the main plot lines of all the
major soaps, tracing the current characters to
their beginnings.
21
For the viewer who might not think
of consulting the library for such information,
Daytime
Digest (Vol. 11 No.
4, December 1993) sold a magazine-format "History
of the Soaps" on newsstands, presenting the
backstory of "every current soap opera from its
beginning." The account of
As the World Turns
in the 1950s and '60s is literate
and useful (one learns of Emily's beginnings, for
example, in phrases such as "After the baby was
born, Susan found another man she was interested
in, and divorced Dan. Dan and Liz were finally able
to marry, and because Susan's new husband didn't
want children, Dan was given custody of their
daughter, Emmy. Then tragedy struck" (36). Later in
the account, the prose style deteriorates ("Craig
returned without Sierra. Ready to pick up with
Ellie, where they left off. Meanwhile, Brock and
Emily had become an item" [46]), as complete
clauses and transitions establishing causal
relationships between events begin to dwindle,
reflecting perhaps the increasing complexity of the
developing plot as well as the evident fatigue of
the copywriter and editors. For instance, a passage
about the late '80s reads: The new viewer of the soap
in search of a more nuanced account of the
relationships that led up to the current storylines
had the opportunity in the summer of 1994 to
consult a witty and detailed history written in
dozens of installments by a woman who calls herself
"O2B Amish" on America On-Line. "Amish," as other
viewers who post messages to America On-Line about
As the World
Turns call her,
began her narrative in July, 1994, when the viewers
of As the World
Turns were, as she
put it, "hostage to O.J." because the Simpson trial
preliminaries were pre-empting daily episodes of
the show. When other viewers remarked on the
extensiveness of her knowledge about the backstory,
Amish wrote, "It's probably a comment on my first
marriage, but I have notes on ATWT from 1956 to
present. I think, if it's OK with you, I'll do a
running history of the show that you all can copy,
if you wish. . . .I remember the show from the late
'50s till now & it makes it ever so much more
fun" (July 13, 1994). Other viewers' responses
indicated that Amish's narrative made a difference
in their appreciation of the subtleties of the
current story; of course, her own feelings about
the characters and events are very much in evidence
in Amish's summaries, and would serve as an
interpretive filter for any viewer depending on
Amish's history as a guide to the story's
background. For example, Amish has little patience
with the young heroine Lily, and always refers
sardonically to Lily's travails, as in this entry
from her September 1994 account of
As the World Turns
in the late 1980s: Amish's narrative, strong on
causality and perceptive in its recognition of the
interactions between the script and such
extratextual matters as the hiring of new
headwriters and the firing of unpopular actors, is
always marked by how she felt--or feels--about the
characters. (In addition to the obvious ironies,
Amish's satire comes through in the parenthetical
and quoted material in the passage above, alluding
to repeated motifs in the plot that viewers had
been ridiculing). This makes her text interesting
reading for the experienced viewer of the soap--who
may or may not agree with her interpretations (I
remember the Lily/Iva/Rod Landry storyline as one
of the most stirring in the soap's long history,
and would not speak of it in terms much more ironic
than I might use in recounting, for instance, the
plot of Absalom,
Absalom!)--but not
precisely a substitute for long-term
viewing. [16] The emotional impact of
long-term viewing depends on matters other than
knowledge of storylines, after all, matters that
cannot be communicated through plot summary. The
return of familiar actors reprising roles they had
created years or even decades ago would be one
example. When Martha Byrne--who had created the
role of Lily as a child and adolescent, then left
the series for several years to pursue musical
comedy while her As
the World Turns
character was re-cast--made a well-publicized
return as a twentysomething Lily, the viewers'
potential anticipation of seeing Lily again (after
one of her many runnings-away-from-home) was
greatly enhanced.
22
This particular soap opera also uses
musical themes to connect current episodes with
past emotional associations, sometimes depending on
viewers to recognize leitmotifs after months or
even years have elapsed since the last allusion to
a specific song. A recent example is Bonnie Raitt's
"I Can't Make You Love Me," first sung by Lily in
May of 1993 in a nightclub in Malta, where Holden
(beginning to regret having severed their lifelong
love affair when amnesia caused him to forget that
they believe they are "part of each other") has
traced her. Lily is sadly performing the song,
evidently still grieving that she can't make the
amnesiac Holden love her; she has, however,
remarried since last seeing him, and the
complications of their mutual and ambivalent desire
for reunion were to drive a major storyline for
nearly two years. The scene of Lily singing Raitt's
song recurred three or four times in flashbacks
from Holden's point of view in the spring and
summer of 1993, and he once overheard Lily trying
to rehearse it during that period, but the musical
theme dropped out of the diegesis until June of
1994, when a keyboard arrangement of the theme
appeared, briefly and only once, on the soundtrack
during a scene in which Holden is finally coming to
accept that Lily will remain married to her current
husband. With a subtlety that might surprise soaps'
detractors, the theme's reprise effected a shift in
the song's point of view, from Lily's grief to
Holden's, and suggested that Holden's resignation
to their separation now--like Lily's, thirteen
months, or approximately 280 viewing hours
earlier--is permanent, or as permanent as any
emotional situation can be in a form that resists
closure so aggressively as daytime soap opera does.
For the experienced viewer, the affective impact of
the theme's reprise could be substantial; while it
can be explained to the naive viewer, he or she
cannot "feel" it in the same way. Part of the
appeal of following a soap opera over a long period
of time is the accumulation of knowledge of those
emotive details that add layers of affect to each
new episode. Analyzing the Structure
of Viewers' Response [17] Obviously, detailed
formal analysis of the intensities represented in
and inspired by any "text" as massive and ungainly
as 38 years of daily episodes is logistically
impossible; the attempts at plot summary I have
quoted in this essay (not to mention the ones I
have produced) demonstrate the difficulties
involved in assigning causality and conveying
emotional impact in an account of anything so
long-standing and complex as the text of
As the World
Turns, and such
relevant matters as casting and musical themes can
only be accounted for with reference to specific
instances. Indeed, (as, for example, the ironic
tone and hilarious dismissiveness of O2B Amish's
narrative indicates), the melodramatic extremity of
all soap opera storylines makes plot summaries
sound laughable, even to the very viewers who are
moved by the playing out of those plotlines in
individual episodes. I therefore make reference in
what follows only to a narrow slice of that endless
narrative that is As
the World Turns, and
I will resist resorting to plot summaries as I
account for the intensities this text conveys.
Taking a narratological approach, I aim to identify
the patterns that constitute the structure of
affect in the transaction between the experienced
viewer and the soap opera text, rather than to
analyze at length specific instances of emotional
intensity in the text. [18] In trying to locate the
patterns of affect in the series, I have made "mood
sketches" of 26 consecutive episodes from a
six-week segment of the fall of 1994, looking for
the interplay of types of emotion within and among
episodes. I took notes on each of the 26 episodes,
describing the action of each scene and
characterizing the dominant emotion being depicted
in each scene (anger, suspense, grief, sexual
tension, cheerfulness, etc.) Taking each episode as
a whole, I counted the number of scenes dominated
by each of the moods that appeared that day, noting
the emotions that dominated the hour, as well as
the emotions that were secondary or tertiary to the
day's main dramatic actions. I tracked the
intensity of the emotions being depicted through
the buildup of particular plotlines to their crisis
points, and counted the number of days it took for
each of the major and minor plots to reach its
emotive peak. Shifting my analysis from the text to
its audience, I then recorded both the content and
the intensity of viewers' reactions to the details
of the forward-moving plot, to determine whether
the audience's emotional experience was tracking
with the emotions being represented in the
story. [19] In constructing this
analysis, I have consulted--in addition to my own
response--the continuing conversation about
As the World
Turns on the America
On-Line network. The electronic bulletin board
(EBB) devoted to this particular soap brings
together fifty or so businesspeople, homemakers,
students, writers, and teachers who watch the show
regularly (many of them for as long as I have),
women and men who meet on-line to "talk" about it.
This group of viewers--evidently all upper-middle
class people economically comfortable and
technologically sophisticated enough to afford home
computers and use them to enter the
internet--cannot be seen as "typical" of the
daytime audience, because their subscriptions to
America On-Line set them apart as having a certain
degree of privilege in terms of income and
educational level. While I do not wish to
generalize from their remarks to make statements
about the activity of all viewers in general, I am
arguing that the way they (and I) follow the soap
text suggests one possible mode of reception for
soap operas: reading serially, over an extended
period of time, while enjoying simultaneous
critical and affective reactions spurred by the
text. [20] The
As the World Turns
"family" on America On-Line (as its
organizers call the discussion group) produces a
"members' packet" including profiles of thirty-six
of the regular participants. They range in age from
15 to the early 40s, with the majority being in
their 30s; the group includes six men, only one of
whom posts in tandem with his wife. A few profiles
do not mention the longevity of the viewers'
investment in this particular soap opera, but those
who do reflect a long-standing commitment to
watching it: only three members have followed the
soap for five years or less; four have watched from
five to ten years; six have watched from ten to
twenty years; six from 20 to 30; and nine of the
members have watched continually for 30 to 38
years. Not everyone who posts messages to the list
has a profile in the packet, but most of the
members who are profiled make regular postings. The
long-term viewers are always available to answer
new viewers' questions about past connections among
the characters, to remark on the relative
consistency of characters' behavior over the years,
and to praise or to criticize the current storyline
in the context of the show's long history.
[21] The ongoing
conversation among these viewers puts to rest any
lingering scholarly clichés about soap opera
watching as a necessarily passive or naive
activity.
23
They continuously critique actors'
performances (complaining about phony foreign
accents, bad hairstyles, or awkward acting); point
out inconsistencies in the plot (drawing on
details, some of which reach back for decades into
the backstory); complain about the overuse of
certain sets (pointing out that bed-and-breakfast
rooms supposedly set in rural Illinois and in Paris
are identical); denounce manifestations of racism
and homophobia (criticizing the writers for
breaking up an interracial marriage and supplying
the African-American wife with a new black love
interest; organizing a protest when the producers
fired an actor with AIDS); and--of course--they
speculate about the psychology and motivations of
the characters.
24
In this last respect, the viewers
may appear to live out the cliché of soap
opera fans' mistaking characters for real people
(for example, they expressed something like moral
outrage at Holden's neglecting his toddler son to
pursue his obsession with Lily; this thread, like
many others the viewers anticipate in their
discussions, appeared in the discourse of the soap
itself a few weeks after it appeared on-line). The
participants in the discussion are highly aware,
however, of the constructedness of the text: they
share news about hirings and firings of actors and
they speculate about whether the series' writers
are "lurking" on the list, picking up ideas from
their responses. The viewers are even competing
with the writers, constructing texts of their own,
including an enormous America On-Line file
containing an alternative future for the characters
of As the World
Turns, known as
"Oakdale 2," in which Emily--who had been
particularly irritating some members of the list
for many months-- gets murdered, and many
characters whose actors had long ago left the
series come back. The viewers also held an on-line
"costume party" on Halloween, for which they
adopted aliases and engaged in on-line "chat" in
the personas of the soap characters whose
identities they had appropriated. The resulting
parodies of characters' speech and thought patterns
showed a sophisticated readerly awareness of how
the soap itself is put together. [22] By placing the analytic
record I made of six weeks of
As the World Turns
episodes next to the comments the
America On-Line viewers made during the same
period, I have come to two preliminary conclusions
about the structure of affect in this daytime soap:
First, the episodes follow a "wave" pattern of
represented emotion, building to affective peaks
that are followed by an "undertow" of reaction, and
second--though the intensities expressed by the
viewers follow the same wave pattern--the
intensities the viewers express are not at all the
same as the emotions that are being represented in
the soap. To rephrase it in the critical terms that
Joyrich provides: while the continuing text is
clearly not "evacuating" emotion (the viewers'
lively participation on the electronic bulletin
board suggests otherwise), it is not "arousing
excessive emotionality," either, even though it may
be representing emotional excess. While the soap's
patterns are structuring the affective response of
the viewers, the story line is by no means
dictating a particular response. The Ebb and Flow of
Feminine Intensities [23] Before I analyzed and
sketched the dominant emotions being represented in
individual episodes over six weeks, it had been my
impression that particular episodes tend to be
unified around the representation of certain sets
of emotions: there are anxious days, angry days,
erotic days, joyous days. My analysis of all the
scenes in those episodes indicates that this is
generally true, that each episode is dominated by
characters populating various subplots, expressing
a particular subset of all the emotions available
to soap opera diegesis. What I did not anticipate
is that when you flatten out the emotional impact
of drawing on elaborate backstory (I mean, when you
look rapidly at many episodes on a VCR in a
library, over a short period of time, from a
scholarly point of view),
As the World Turns
appears to represent a very limited
range of emotional affect. The 26 episodes are
dominated by the expression of
Angst,
in the forms of worry, concern, tension, anxiety,
dread, suspense, depression, and unsatisfied sexual
desire, except for those episodes that function as
the crisis point in a particular storyline, where
the dominant emotions are anger, terror, and erotic
gratification.
25
The emotional wave pattern cuts
across the familiar five-day pattern of a
"mini-climax" on Wednesday and a "cliffhanger" on
Friday, in that it seems to function within a cycle
of 10 to 15 episodes: After 10 days or two weeks of
tension/worry/suspense/anxiety, one or more of the
subplots will culminate in a crisis day of
rage/terror/eros. Even the most intense of crisis
days will be broken up by some brief scenes from
other subplots reflecting happiness, warmth, or
affection, scenes which are also always present
during the days that build up to and recover from
the crisis.
26
[24] This wave pattern
contributes to the rhythm of suspense in the serial
form, and results from the form's radical
resistance of closure: no subplot is ever really
resolved, as the undertow of emotional repercussion
after the crisis keeps the pattern of affect
constantly moving. In this important respect, soap
opera is unique among melodramatic forms. Daniel
Gerould, summarizing the Russian Formalists' models
of melodramatic structures, states that melodramas
typically "move in tiers." As Gerould puts
it: The "movement in tiers"
resembles the wave pattern, in that there is never
a single climax to a plot, as each new complication
builds more "dramatic intensity." But, whereas the
stage melodrama (or its filmic and novelistic
counterparts) eventually will reach "the final
moments of the denouement," the soap opera
text--like the surf--never does. The intensity
continues unabated, for over ten thousand episodes
throughout 42 years and more, as the spectator's
"heightened dramatic perception" is never fully
dissipated. [25] The America-On Line
record of viewers' responses (and my own viewing
experience) suggests that emotional engagement with
the text follows the wave pattern produced in that
text: during the periods when the plot is in the
undertow of repercussions from crisis, viewers log
on more often and express more vivid reactions to
what is happening in the story. However, the
intensities expressed are never identical to those
being represented on the soap. When characters are
evincing
Angst
,
viewers are typically expressing
irritation, impatience and annoyance. At crisis
points, viewers say they are disappointed with
outcomes or happy about them, they report that they
are moved by certain scenes or left cold, but the
viewers' expressed intensities are neither
unanimous (there is limited agreement, even among
long-term viewers, about which characters are
sympathetic or attractive) nor correlated with the
characters' feelings about those same outcomes. For
example, Rosanna and Evan might both be upset (he
is defensive and furious, she is outraged and
distraught) when she ends their relationship, but
most of the viewers are satisfied or even delighted
to see the manipulative Evan receive his
come-uppance (though some are
disappointed--preferring Evan to Mike, his
working-class rival for Rosanna's affections--yet
resigned to the realization that the conventions of
soap narrative make the young heiress's shift to
the working-class lover inevitable). In short, for
these viewers the soap opera text's representation
of "excessive emotionalism" inspires a response
that parallels the episodes' structures of affect
without mirroring them. [26] What does it feel like
to view As the World
Turns over the long
term? Individual viewers' responses to the feelings
being represented can vary, for any given fictional
event, across the range from sobbing to laughing
aloud, but the underlying motion of the wave
pattern gives a structure to those responses that
resembles the ebb and flow the culture has long
associated with feminine emotion. Even the detached
response of critical irony (so typical of the
America On-Line viewers' attitude toward the plot
and so antithetical to the cultural stereotype of
femininity) follows the pattern of intensities set
by the soap's plotline: even viewers' ironic
outrage ebbs and flows with the climaxes of the
story. "Feminine" emotional experience, in this
view, does not emanate from the female body or even
from any given woman's psychology. It is a process
structured by culturally produced and received
intensities. Any longterm soap opera viewer whose
daily mood tracks with the structure of the series
is submitting, therefore, to a technology of
gender, a process that patterns and reinforces what
the culture assumes feminine emotion ought to be.
For some viewers, the intensities are a form of
background noise in a life otherwise detached from
the concerns of the soap opera plot; for
others--particularly those who are moved enough by
the storyline to want to write about it on-line
(or, in my case, in this essay)--the intensities
are more present, more vividly a part of daily
consciousness. To watch every day is to be carried
on that wave of intensities, to experience the
build-up, the crisis, and the undertow of response
as one of the structuring principles of daily life.
To watch every day--to have your emotional life
structured, however subtly, by that wave
pattern--is to be continually re-gendered as
feminine, whether you are male or female, whether
you experience the feelings as "genuine emotions"
or "intensities," whether you view this process as
part of the oppression of women or as an
opportunity for celebrating twentieth-century,
middle-class, North American feminine
experience. [27] When I consider the
venue in which the America On-Line viewers'
conversation is being held, I find it appropriate
to think about the feelings I am discussing in
terms of "intensities." Not only are these
feelings, as Joyrich suggests, artificially
induced, they are being expressed in a metaphorical
space (for "cyberspace" is not literally a place)
by entities bearing ambiguously gendered aliases
rather than personal names. Sometimes a viewer will
sign his or her real name; sometimes one will
report that he has been ill or she is currently
grieving over a divorce or the loss of a family
member. When they do, a wash of intensities comes
over the line: "I'm so sorry for you"; "Let us know
if there's anything we can do." Do these utterances
sound insincere, inauthentic, absurd? Not to me: I
would say they express feelings that are structured
by the conventions of internet communication among
persons who have never met, but who share certain
feminine expectations about appropriate social
interaction.
28
Like the intensities inspired by the
patterns of storyline in soap opera, these feelings
may not be "authentic" or "genuine" in the
modernist sense, but they form the basis for a
virtual community that exists in the absence of
long-time residence in a single geographical place.
As cyberspace stands in for place--as the America
On-Line "family" stands in for bodily present
persons--so do intensities for "feelings." The
existence of the VCR and the electronic bulletin
board make possible an extension of the family
group, the college dorm crowd, or the community of
coworkers who might meet "as women" to discuss soap
opera. The virtual community includes men, too, in
an expanded version of the gendered audience; the
"intensities" being expressed in that virtual space
are a feature of post-modern, ambivalent
femininity, as potentially experienced by both
sexes. These feelings are not special, unique, or
original; they are, in a sense, as formulaic as the
plots that inspire them. And yet we who feel them
experience them as nonetheless intense. 1.
See Jane Feuer, "Narrative Form in
American Network Television," in
High Theory/ Low Culture: Analysing
Popular Television and Film,
ed.
Colin MacCabe (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986), 101-114. As Feuer has demonstrated,
primetime episodic television adopted many of the
conventions of serial form during the 1980s,
including "a more developmental model" allowing
basic situations of episodic shows to evolve (111).
Feuer sees serial and episodic form as "two
different responses to television's dual
ideological compulsions: the need to repeat and the
need to contain" (114). Given the enormity and
complexity of the story lines that develop over
time, I would say that soap operas do indeed enact
the compulsion to repeat, and are probably the
least "contained" of all television forms.
2.
See Teresa de Lauretis,
Technologies of
Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and
Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987). As de Lauretis argues, gender is "the
product of various social technologies, such as
cinema, and of institutionalized discourses,
epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as
practices of daily life" (2), and not "a property
of bodies of something originally existent in human
beings" (3).
3. Carol
Traynor Williams, It's Time for My Story: Soap Opera
Sources, Structure, and Response
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992).
4.
Martha Nochimson, No
End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female
Subject (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
5. Tania
Modleski, Loving With
a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for
Women (New York:
Methuen, 1984).
6. Ellen
Seiter, E. Borchers, G. Kreutzner, and E. Warth.
"'Don't treat us like we're so stupid and naive':
Towards an Ethnography of Soap Opera Viewers," in
Remote Control:
Television, Audiences and Cultural
Power, eds. Seiter,
et. al. (London: Routledge, 1989), 223-47.
7. See
her Soap Opera and
Women's Talk: The Pleasure of
Resistance (Thousand
Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 1994) as well as
"Motley Moments: Soap Operas, Carnival, Gossip and
the Power of the Utterance," in
Television and Women's Culture:
The
Politics of the
Popular, ed. Mary
Ellen Brown (London: Sage, 1990), x.
8.
Charlotte Brundson, "Identity in
Feminist Television Criticism"
Media, Culture and
Society 15 (1993):
309-320, 313.
9.
Christine Geraghty, Women and Soap
Opera (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990).
10.
Robert Allen has remarked that "by conflating
audience and gender address we might be obscuring
important differences among audiences for types of
programs as well as differences in the
relationships between audience groups and the
spectator positions inscribed within texts." See
"Bursting Bubbles: 'Soap Opera,' Audiences, and the
Limits of Genre," in Remote Control: Television,
Audiences, and Cultural Power,eds. Ellen
Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and
Eva-Maria Warth (London & New York: Routledge,
1989), 44-55, p. 52.
11.
See, for a more detailed analysis of
soap opera's formal revision of dominant cinematic
narrative models, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis's "All's
Well That Doesn't End: Soap Operas and the Marriage
Motif," Camera
Obscura 16 (January
1988): 119-127, which argues that the resolution of
the marriage-plot in daytime soaps functions not as
a device for closure, but rather as a "knot" that
introduces further complications in the story.
Though Flitterman-Lewis makes no claims for the
"femininity" of this formal difference, the
gendered implications are striking.
12.
"The Role of Soap Opera in the Development of
Feminist Television Scholarship," in
To Be Continued. . .
Soap Operas Around the World, ed. Robert Allen (London and New
York: Routledge, 1995), 49-65.
13.
See, for instance, "Soap Operas at Work" in
Remote Control:
Television,Audiences, and Cultural
Power, eds. Ellen Seiter,
et al. (London & New York: Routledge), 1989.
14. See
my essay, "As You Stand, So You Feel and Are" in
Tattoo, Torture,
Mutilation, and Adornment: The De-Naturalization of
the Body in Culture and Text,eds.
Fran Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1992), 100-125, as well as Chapter 8,
"Direct Address and the Critics: What's the Matter
with You?" in my Gendered Interventions: Narrative
Discourse in the Victorian Novel (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
15. See
"As You Stand" for a detailed demonstration of this
usage in the popular press and in literary
criticism. The essays in The Culture of Sentiment : Race,
Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-century
America, ed. Shirley
Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
represent a recent move toward more serious
attention to the sentimental tradition in
19th-century American literature, though strong
traces of distaste for the mode linger in many
scholarly projects.
16. See
Lynne Joyrich, "Going through the E/Motions:
Gender, Postmodernism, and Affect in Television
Studies," Discourse 14.1(Winter 1991-92).
17.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
18.
See, for examples, the work done in the mid- to
late 1980s in such projects as Alison Alexander,
"Adolescents' Soap Opera Viewing and Relational
Perceptions, "Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic
Media 29.3 (Summer 1985): 295-308; Ronald J. Compesi, "Gratifications
of Daytime Serial Viewers," Journalism Quarterly
57 (1989): 155-158; Alfred P.
Kielwasser and Michelle A. Wolf, "The Appeal of
Soap Opera: An Analysis of Process and Duality in
Dramatic Serial Gratifications,"
Journal of Popular
Culture, 23.2 (Fall
1989):111-124; and Alan Rubin and Elizabeth M.
Perse, "Audience Activity and Soap Opera
Involvement: A Uses and Effects Investigation,"
Human Communication
Research 14.2
(Winter 1987): 246-268; as well as Hobson, Brown,
and Seiter in Seiter, et al. cited above.
19.
Robert Allen,
Speaking of Soap
Operas (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
20.
This problem for scholars occurs in the opposite
direction, too, in that pronouncements about a
particular soap's plot--or the ideologies it tends
to uphold--may be undermined by future developments
in the story. For example, see Gilah Rittenhouse,
"The Nuclear Family is Alive and Well:
As The World Turns" in
Staying Tuned: Contemporary Soap Opera Criticism, ed. Suzanne Frentz (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press,
1992), 48-53, whose generalizations about the
nuclear family on As the World Turns do
not hold up in the light of events on the soap
since 1992.
21.
Marilyn Matelski's book contains these summaries in
addition to a history of the production of soaps
since radio days. See
The Soap Opera Evolution: America's
Enduring Romance with Daytime Drama
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988).
22. For
an interesting analysis of the semiotics of
re-casting in soap opera with special reference to
Meg Ryan in As the
World Turns, see
Jeremy G. Butler, "'I'm Not a Doctor, But I Play
One on TV': Characters, Actors, and Acting in
Television Soap Opera," in
To Be Continued. . . Soap Operas
Around the World,
ed. Robert Allen (London and New York: Routledge,
1995), 145-163.
23.
Indeed, Dorothy Hobson's interviews with regular
soap viewers have already established that "the
process of watching soap operas is in no way a
passive operation and it continues after the
viewing time and is extended into other areas of
everyday life" (Seiter et. al.,
150);
Louise Spence, too, argues that "feelings for a
character are certainly other than simply feeling
at one with that character; they involve both
psychological processes and critical ones." See
"'They Killed Off Marlena, But She's on Another
Show Now': Fantasy, Reality, and Pleasure in
Watching Daytime Soap Operas" in
To Be Continued. . . Soap
Operas
Around the
World, ed. Robert
Allen (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
182-198, p. 189. Recent work on the electronic
bulletin-board (EBB) discussion of television
serials has begun to characterize the activity of
viewers who participate in such discussions. See
Nancy K. Baym, "The Emergence of Community in
Computer-Mediated Communication" in
Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated
Communication and Community, ed.
Steven G. Jones
(Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995), 138-163.
Baym says such EBBs "provide information about what
has happened and what will happen on the shows, to
interpret the shows, to negotiate private issues in
a public space, and to sustain relationships" (147)
among daytime soap opera viewers; Denise Bielby and
C. Lee Harrington observe similar phenomena among
viewers who post to EBBs devoted to primetime
serials; see their "Reach Out and Touch Someone:
Viewers, Agency, and Audiences in the Televisual
Experience" in
Viewing, Reading, Listening:
Audiences and Cultural Reception
. eds. Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 81-100.
24.
Hobson's subjects "discuss the events on television
in relation to the fiction, the accuracy of the
fictional representation, and also in relation to
criteria within the 'real world'" (167). The
America On-Line group's preoccupation with the
production and political implications of the soap
adds extra dimensions to what Hobson observed.
25. A
long-time viewer of
All My Children
tells me that this particular
configuration of dominant emotions, especially the
emphasis on worry and anxiety, is peculiar to
As the World Turns, and that he
believes other soaps have different dominant
emotions. To test the wave pattern against another
daytime soap, a critic would need to have access to
the affective response generated by decades of
backstory, as well as the reports of other viewers
in a forum such as America On-Line; I would be very
interested in the results of such an inquiry.
26. In
the 1994-95 season, the wave pattern has been
continually interrupted by the O. J. Simpson murder
trial's preemptions of episodes, which has varied
by region. CBS's spokesperson assured me "you won't
miss anything" when I called in January of 1995 to
ask about the network's preemption policy; they had
resolved to postpone entire episodes but not to
interrupt episodes in progress. Local networks had
policies of their own. This has meant that the
usual pattern built around Friday
"cliffhangers"--not to mention the emotional impact
of following a daily diegesis--has frequently been
disrupted, making the collection of a
longer-running study sample impractical for this
year. The televising of the Simpson trial is also
responsible, of course, for putting to rest forever
the notion that events unfold more slowly on soap
operas than they do in "real life."
27.
Daniel Gerould, "Russian Formalist Theories of
Melodrama," The Journal of American Culture
1.1 (1978): 152-68. Reprinted in
Imitations of Life: a Reader on Film & Television
Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1991), 125.
28.
Baym (in Jones, Cybersociety) has demonstrated that soap opera
EBBs observe less aggressive, more polite, more
stereotypically feminine standards of etiquette and
interaction than typical cyberspace discussion
groups do (159-160).
ROBYN R. WARHOL is a professor of English and the director of Women's Studies at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Gendered Interventions (1989) and co-editor with Diane Price Herndl of Feminisms (1991, second edition 1997). Her articles on gender and narrative have appeared in journals including Novel, Style, PMLA, Studies in English Literature, Essays in Literature and Psychohistory Review . She is currently working on a book on feelings and popular culture forms. Copyright ©1998
Ann Kibbey. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. |
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