THE POWER OF ATTRACTION IN THE NARRATIVE OF SOAP OPERAS MARIA BAJNER University of Pécs Abstract: The analysis raises several questions in relation to soap operas. What positions do readers, viewers, or listeners identify with, given that they are already socially conditioned men and women? What positions are avail- able for the female (and male) audience? The answers to these questions are linked to broader gender divisions which soap operas both question and devel- op as a source of pleasure. Soap operas are immensely popular cultural forms, attracting more than 2 million viewers each day in Hungary alone, the majority of whom are female, according to information available on www.mediainfo.hu. While the soap opera audience is both male and female, the soap opera genre carries heavily feminine connotations in contemporary culture, as it has been marketed and addressed to women since its early twentieth-century radio-broadcast origins. The soap opera continued the tradition of women’s domestic fiction of the nineteenth century, which had also endured in the magazine stories of the 1920s and 1930s. It also drew upon the conventions of the “woman’s film” of the 1930s. The primary target audience for soap operas — women working at home — was supposed to integrate the view- ing of these shows into their daily routines. According to Ann Gray (1987: 48), soap operas form an important part of female viewers’ everyday lives and give focus to a female culture which they share. Such an approach either narrows its ramifications by specifying the kinds of women it describes (in terms of class, race, sexual orientation, nationality, age, etc.) or runs the risk of invoking a universalized “woman” whose affiliation with the codes of femininity is assumed as a norm. Watching soaps is as much a proof of femininity, as soap opera aversion is a sign of a Noble prize candi- date. The real issue is not the individual or gendered difference in tastes, but rather the structural and ideological features that explain the genre’s unbro- ken popularity. B.A.S. vol. XIV, 2008 208 Although their consumer value is high, soap operas can boast little appreciation in academic circles. Scholars’ reluctance to soap operas aris- es from the marginal status of the genre itself. If we now have “gendered genres” in television studies, soaps are considered to be the most feminine of them all: Tania Modleski (1984) 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, slow-paced, weak action, the lack of closure, the constantly shifting points of view, the priority of dia- logues over action, and the depictions of female power so common in day- time soaps mark them as a specifically feminine alternative to masculine narrative traditions. Moreover, soap opera texts continue to perpetuate such myths of the dominant culture as the primacy of heterosexual marriage, the irrevocabili- ty of blood-ties between mothers and children, and the priority of white upper middle class citizens’ concerns over those of other racial and ethnic groups. Dallas, the program that sparked the primetime soap boom of the 1980s in the US, not only borrowed the serial from daytime soaps, but also the structuring device of the extended family (the Ewings), complete with patriarch, matriarch, good son, bad son and in-laws, all of whom lived in the same Texas-sized house. The kinship and romance plots that could be gen- erated around these family members were believed to be the basis for attracting female viewers, while Ewing Oil’s boardroom intrigues would draw adult males, accustomed to watching “masculine” genres (western, crime, and legal dramas). Feminist recuperations of soap opera have most recently relied upon explications of how viewers use those texts for feminist ends: to satisfy unconscious drives towards female power, to serve as the focus for com- munities of friends whose conversations about the plots can be critical or carnivalesque, and hence subversive of the plots’ apparent ideologies. ‘Feminine emotional experience’ 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. For some viewers, the intensi- ty of emotions is 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 — the intensities are more present, more vividly part of daily consciousness. To watch every day is to be carried on that wave of intensities, to experience 209 CULTURAL SPECULATIONS the build-ups, the crises, and the undertow of response as one of the struc- turing 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, 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 cele- brating white, middle class, feminine experience. In focusing on gender rather than sex 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. Although soap opera texts are relatively open to different interpreta- tions, they do require certain types of knowledge to draw on in order to make sense of the program. These include familiarity with the genre, with the history or the specific soap opera, and with the wider cultural compe- tence of marriage, family and personal life (Dyer 1987: 14). This is a kind of competence that does not depend on gender. The analysis of the narrative structure of soap operas reveals that they amalgamate elements of genres traditionally attracting male or female audi- ence. Dallas is just about emotions. And as everything in Texas is always said to be larger, bigger and huger than life, so is Texas emotion. The narra- tive is defined by such an emotional wave pattern that gives rise to the story and satisfies the rhythm of both melodrama and whodunit. Before I ana- lyzed and sketched the dominant emotions represented in individual episodes over five weeks (of Season 1), it had been my impression that par- ticular episodes tend to be unified around the representation of certain sets of emotions: there are anxious scenes, angry scenes, jealous scenes, des- perate scenes, etc. My analysis of all the scenes in those episodes indicates that this is generally true, that each episode is dominated by characters pop- ulating various subplots, expressing a particular subset of all the emotions available to soap opera diegeses. A typical example of that is the ‘anxious’ scene where Cliff Barnes (who is a constant loser) is discussing the latest news about his rival, JR, with his mother and where nine different emotions (nine different subplots) back up the leading emotion, his embitterment. The five episodes are similarly dominated by the expression of angst, in the forms of worry, concern, tension, dread, suspense, depression, and unsatisfied sexual desire, except for the last episode that functions as the B.A.S. vol. XIV, 2008 210 crisis point in a particular storyline, where the dominant emotions are revenge, terror, and erotic gratification. The emotional wave pattern cuts across the familiar six-day pattern of a “mini-climax” each week, and a smaller “cliffhanger” every other week, in that it seems to function within a cycle of 23 to 29 episodes. (The first season was a pilot year with only five episodes). After two weeks of tension/worry/suspense/anxiety, one or more of the subplots will culminate in a crisis day of rage/terror/anger. 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. This wave pattern contributes to the rhythm of suspense in the serial form, and results from the form’s radical resistance to closure: no subplot is ever really resolved as the undertow of emotional repercussion after the cri- sis keeps the pattern of affect constantly moving. In this important respect, soap opera is unique among melodramatic forms. Daniel Gerould, summa- rizing the Russian Formalists’ model of melodramatic structures, states that melodramas typically “move in tiers.” In Gerould’s opinion (1991), what is characteristic for melodramatic composition is not a straight rise to the cul- minating point and then a lowering of tension until the conclusion, but rather a movement in tiers by which each new phase of the plot with its new ‘obstacles’ and no ‘resolution’ gives rise to new degrees of dramatic intensity. 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 novelistic counterparts eventually will reach the final moments of the denouement, the soap opera text never does. The intensity continues unabated, each sea- son finishes of with a highly dramatic cliffhanger, where one or several char- acters’ lives are left in the balance, for over 365 episodes throughout 14 years and more, (with the last episodes Conundrum 1 and 2) as the specta- tor’s heightened dramatic perception is never fully dissipated. Another structural feature of soap operas comes into play here.