Editors' note: Dyer, Lovell, and McCrindle (1977) take up the matter of women's viewing of--and representation in--the soap opera, a popular form of entertainment. They make the case that genres specially addressed to a female audience--such as the soap opera--should be examined critically. Their paper has inspired many researchers to study the soap opera as well as female genres more generally and the female audience (quoted in Gray and McGuigan, 1993, p. 2).

1. Introduction

Critics do not yet believe that the world of women is as important as the world of men, never mind think that the separation of these two worlds ought to be challenged. Until that time, women will have to produce polemical papers about women (p. 35).

2. Our Study

We focus on the only form of television drama that has been defined as drama for women about women and watched by women. We are interested in how this output especially on television defines the experience that it offers its female audience. From a critical feminist perspective, we ask: What are the limits and the possibilities of this dramatic form? We analyze the ways in which representations of women in soap opera reproduce/reinforce the subordination of women in contemporary society. We explore possible strategies for those women directors and women writers who struggle against the prevailing sexism of the media.

Coronation Street has become Granada's nostalgic look at the 1950s; the programme depicts a working-class world characterized by the values of togetherness, community, i.e., before affluence and consumerism corrupted it. Clearly, middle-class television directors, script writers, and producers find it easier to identify with a supposedly sympathetic working-class than they can find on the contemporary scene. Interestingly, we see this nostalgia for the past in the American series called The Waltons, which tries to recreate a rural extended family before the days of affluence (pp. 35-36).

Each week, programmes like these convey the same message; each week, these utopias exercise their charm--over children and women especially. Our goal is to understand why this happens. Obviously, Coronation Street and The Waltons convey very different representations of women. We notice that the women in Coronation Street are strong, independent characters, i.e., they generate much of the action. Only one has "found" a man. The producer (Bill Podmore) says that, in serials, marriage easily diminishes characters (p. 36).

These women dominate the narrative; they live in non-nuclear families--they rarely have children living with them. The Waltons depends upon a whole era--women with children--for narrative momentum. Coronation Street lacks this dynamic, presumably because employing children actors is problematic. Another aspect of the absence of children is that almost all the women work outside the home: they work in service jobs, etc. Work in these fictional worlds is not large-scale factory production, where the sexual division of labour has condemned women to trivial, monotonous, unskilled jobs. Men and women of Coronation Street are identified in terms of their work, to a degree that the majority of the audience cannot be. The nostalgia here is the nostalgia for those days when the work ethic was more humane and less alienating.

Of course, we see class differences running through Coronation Street, but (generally) these differences are a source of humor. We are still trying to work out the implications these images have for feminists (pp. 36-36).

3. Theoretical Approach and Methodology

We did not begin our study with a strongly partisan position in relation to contemporary debates. Our theoretical position evolved gradually. We believed that Marxism--especially the concept of ideology--had much to offer. However, we could not accept the hostility of this approach to all forms of realism (p. 37).

We set out to study the soap opera because it is popular: it is for and about women, it is not prestigious, and we wanted to discover why it gives pleasure to millions of people and to relate that insight to its ideological aspects. Yet, at the point of production, the soap opera is dominated by men. Soap opera gives us male definitions of women; soap opera tells us how they relate to each other and to men. With regard to the areas of reproduction (family) and production (work), soap opera's representations of women invite a serious challenge. The soap opera validates relationships: it does not celebrate structures, physical strength, etc.

We are conscious of the difficulty of ascertaining how the audience "reads" the ideology that emerges. The multiplicity of female images is much greater in television and in film or in the other visual arts, but the need for women to see themselves mirrored in the society's representations is often much greater than for men due to women's marginality in the social, economic, and political structures. As feminists, we would support attempts to show women coping with their marginality.

We regard the soap opera as a certain kind of social drama on television. While it does not have the tight definition of a genre, as the Western does, we see some similarities that bind the various programmes into a distinctive kind.

We focus on the ideological implications of these representations, bearing in mind that soap operas are set in small-scale interiors--the pub, the rooms of a motel, the corner shop, the farm house, etc.

• Sequences shot out-of-doors are usually regarded as exceptional, like a day in the country (p. 38).
  
• Camera style tends to be simple, not drawing attention to itself, and interaction between characters is stressed rather than inferiority.
  
• Each episode tells a self-contained story or relates a multi-linear narrative with several strands interweaving.
  
• As well, soap operas contain a range of characters of the same importance.

4. key findings

We studied episodes of Coronation Street, Rooms, Emmerdale Farm, General Hospital, Crossroads, and The Waltons. We are concerned with soap opera as entertainment, escapism, etc., and we suggest looking at this form of entertainment under the following categories, i.e., ways these dramas exercise hegemony:

validation

In The Use of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart says that, essentially, working-class art is a "showing" as opposed to an "exploration," that is, a presentation of what is known already. Working-class art starts from the assumption that human life is fascinating in itself. Surely, this is a description of the soap opera. Soap opera validates everyday life--as it is lived--in attending to details, etc. Any way of life is richer for having a language, and one of the major sources of such language in this society is television (p. 38). We would say that:

• while television is largely expressive of bourgeois society, any programme offering a number of images for women and the working-class that doesn't treat them as comic or victims is going to be pleasurable for those groups;
  
• television grants such a language public recognition: it validates it beyond the immediate confines of the home and the local community (p. 39);
  
• the humanistic emphasis of Hoggart's position, for all its current unfashionability, is not easily sneered at.

In brief, just as Hoggart took part of the working-class for the whole, so soap opera takes part of women's lives for the whole. Women's lives are changing, in relation to wider structures such as work (and trade unions) or the state, and the danger of the soap opera is that it easily slips back into nostalgia for the old ways.

reassurance

In addition to celebrating the achievements of the way people live now, soap opera reassures, in terms of exploring the problems people face and providing resolutions fictionally (p. 39). Soap opera is founded on this simple narrative structure. The drawbacks are obvious: frequently, problems in life are intractable for a variety of reasons, including psychological. The kind of reassurance offered by soap operas, suggesting that everything will turn out for the best, is false (p. 40).

utopianism

By "utopianism," we mean the representation of ideal feeling. Entertainment makes people experience utopia even if it does not show them how utopia would be organized or how to get there. These feelings include abundance, energy, intensity, transparency, and community. The last three characterize soap opera's utopianism:

• By "intensity," we mean the whole-hearted, unambiguous, all-out experience of feeling, taking one's emotions to their fullest pitch, without holding back, laying oneself on the line emotionally.

• By "transparency," we refer to the way relationships between people in soap opera are free from manipulation (except of a fairly obvious kind) and the way plots often are about the reassuring discovery of falsehood which effectively renders a relationship transparent, ambivalent, light-hearted.

• By "community," we mean a close, warm sense of togetherness, a network of relationships which depend on assumed trust rather than intellectual or other forms of communication.

5. Concluding Remarks

We emphasized the radical possibilities of soap opera, that is, as a vehicle for conveying images of women/the working-class etc., and our theoretical work supports our approach. To begin with, Marxist theory distinguishes the use-value and the exchange-value of commodities. Capitalist commodity production is the production of exchange-value in order to accumulate capital. The accumulation of capital is the dynamic of capitalism, not the production of socially useful objects. Accordingly, the capitalist is indifferent to use-value, in the sense that consumers can use products as they please (pp. 40-41).

Nevertheless, a capitalist system of production has certain requirements for its continued viability. We shall refer to these requirements as the conditions of existence of capitalism. One aspect of the conditions of capitalism is the dominance of bourgeois ideology, an ideology which promotes capitalist social relations. We accept the proposition that popular forms of entertainment are rooted in the dominant ideology. But capitalism has no automatic means of ensuring that the media bring about the desired ideological effects, that is, increased consumption. Ideological production is always hazardous, uncertain, and we cannot know with any certainty what an audience uncovers in any given product of the media. Ideological production always escapes full surveillance (p. 41).

Media women and men do not as such produce ideology. They produce films, television programmes, books, etc., which are the bearers of ideology. Viewers do not watch soap operas to consume bourgeois ideology but to be entertained. The producers of ideology are therefore thus constrained by the need to entertain--to produce a use-value that is wanted by the consumer, as opposed to the use-value (ideology) that is needed by capitalism. These two obligations may--but need not--overlap. They may--and probably will--come to contradict each other. Characteristically, it may be precisely when capital and the accumulation of capital become the dynamic of cultural production that the ideological functions secured by that production escape social control and become problematic. In conclusion, we can expect greater possibilities within commercial television than within state-controlled television: the BBC.

Dyer, Richard, Terry Lovell, and Jean McCrindle. 1977. "Soap Opera and Women. From Edinburgh International Television Festival 1977. Official Programme. Edinburgh: Broadcast.

Gray, Ann, and Jim McGuigan. 1997. Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader. 2nd edn. London: Arnold, pp. 35-41.

1. Dyer et al. (1977) argue that critics do not yet believe that the world of women is as important as the world of men (p. 35).

   (a) What evidence do they give to support this claim?

   (b) What evidence can we cite to support or to challenge this claim?

2. Dyer et al. (1977) say that analyze the ways in which representations of women in soap opera reproduce/reinforce the subordination of women in contemporary society (p. 35).

   (a) Explain briefly why programs like Coronation Street and The Waltons are called "soap operas"?

   (b) Why do the researchers focus on this kind of program?

3. What programs might researchers today consider if they were studying the ways in which representations of women in soap opera reproduce/reinforce the subordination of women in contemporary society?

4. It has been argued that, in serials (especially soap operas) marriage diminishes characters, i.e., characters have less time to reveal the dynamics of their personality.

   (a) What evidence would you cite to support or challenge this claim?

   (b) Is it still the case that, in the soap opera, men and women are "defined" in terms of the work they do (p. 37)? Explain your response.

5. Dyer et al. (1977) regard soap opera as a kind of "social drama." Today, we might think of the soap opera as an instance of the social construction of reality. Elaborate.

6. The researchers argue that the soap opera "validates" everyday life as well as "reassures" viewers in terms of the problems people face and the solutions they employ. Would you say that script writers and directors still build soap operas on this simple structure (p. 38)?

7. It has been argued that commercial--as opposed to state-run--television offers female viewers the greatest "possibilities" in terms of meaningful representations of their lives (pp. 40-41) In your view, has this optimism been justified? Elaborate.

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