After the Fact THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION SIXTH EDITION James West Davidson Mark Hamilton Lytle Bard College ~JonnectLearn • Succeed" 360 AFTER THE FACT: THE Ain OF HISTORICAL DETECTION In a typical scene from The Honeymooners,Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) adopts a pompous pose before his skeptical wife, Alice (Audrey Meadows), and her anxious friend Trixie Norton (Joyce Randolph), while his friend Ed Norton (Art Camey) looks on with bug-eyed disbelief. Inevitably, Ralph's confidence shattered in the face of his bungling attempts to get rich quick, leaving Alice to pick up the pieces and put him back together again. even a television or a telephone. To protect his pride, Ralph accuses her of being a spendthrift. Their battles have far more bite than those seen in any other sitcom of that era. In no other show do the characters so regularly lay marriage, ego, or livelihood on the line. Why, then, did the audience like this show? For one thing, it is very funny. Ed Norton's deadpan is a perfect foil to Ralph's manic intensity. It is a delight to watch Norton take forever to shuffle a deck of cards while Ralph does a slow burn. And Alice's alternately tolerant and spirited rejoin­ ders complete the chemistry. In addition, there is a quality to the Kram­ dens' apartment that separates it in time and space from the world in which middle-class viewers live. The mass audience is more willing to confront serious questions if such issues are raised in distant times or places. Death on a western does not have the same implications as a death on Lassie.Divorce for Henry VIII is one thing; even a hint of it for Ozzie and Harriet would be too shocking to contemplate. Thus the depression look of the Kramdens' apartment gives the audience the spatial and temporal distance it needs to separate itself from the sources of conflict that regularly trouble Ralph and From Rosieto Lucy 361 Alice. The audience can look on with a sense of its material and social supe­ riority as Alice and Ralph go at it: RALPH: You want this place to be Disneyland. AL1cE: This place is a regular Disneyland. You see out there, Ralph? The back of the Chinese restaurant, old man Grogan's long underwear on the line, the alley? That's my Fantasyland. You see that sink over there? That's my Adventureland. The stove and the icebox, Ralph, that's Frontierland. The only thing that's missing is the World of Tomorrow. RALPH (doing his slow burn): You want Tomorrowland, Alice? You want Tomorrowland? Well, pack your bags, because you're going to the moon! [Menaces her with his raised fist.]* Underneath its blue-collar veneer, The Honeymoonersis still a middle-class family sitcom. Alice and Trixie don't have children; they have Ralph and Ed. In one episode Trixie says to Alice, "You know those men we're mar­ ried to? You have to treat them like children." Reversal of social class roles makes this arrangement work without threatening the ideal of male author­ ity. Because the middle classes have always equated the behavior of the poor with that of "Baby,you 're the greatest." children-and Ralph and Ed are poor-no one is surprised by their childish antics. Trixie and Alice, both having mar­ ried beneath their social status, maintain middle-class standards. At the end of almost every episode, Alice brings Ralph back into the fold after one of his schemes fails. Surrounding her in an embrace, he rewards her with his puppy dog devotion: "Baby, you're the greatest." One episode in particular reveals the price Alice paid to preserve her man/ child, marriage, and selfhood. A telegram arrives announcing, "I'm coming to visit. Love, Mom." Ralph explodes at the idea of sharing his apartment with his dreaded mother-in-law. Whenever she visits, she showers him with criti­ cisms that wound his brittle pride. After numerous jokes at Ralph's expense, along with some cutting commentary on mothers-in-law, Ralph moves in upstairs with the Nortons. There he provokes a similar fight between Ed and Trixie. But just as this upheaval threatens the domestic order, marriage and family prevail over wounded pride. Kicked out by the Nortons, Ralph returns home, only to discover that "Mom" is Mother Kramden. Alice, of course, has welcomed her with the very warmth Ralph denies Alice's mother. Alice's generosity of spirit once again reduces him to a shamefaced puppy. This victory is so complete that it threatens to destroy Alice's relationship with Ralph. Any pretense of masculine authority has been laid to ruin. As if to soften the blow to Ralph's pride, Alice sits down to deliver her victory speech. She lowers her eyes, drops her shoulders, and speaks in tones of resignation rather than triumph. The episode ends as she reads a letter that * Similarly, a show like M*A*S*H could more easily explore topical issues such as racism because it was set in Korea, not the United States, and in the 1950s, not the present, even though the issues were contemporary. 362 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART oF H1sToR1CAL DETECTION describes mothers-in-law as having the "hardest job in the world." Ironi­ cally, the letter is one Ralph wrote fifteen years earlier to Alice's mother. The sentiments expressed are so sappy that they virtually undercut the com­ edy. Like Ralph, the producers must have thought it better to eat crow than leave a residue of social criticism. Their material had been so extreme, the humor so sharp, and the mother-in-law jokes so cruel that they threatened middle-American values. Even after its apology, the show ends with a disturbing image. Mother Kramden has gone off to "freshen up." A penitent Ralph admits his defeat, then announces he is going out for some air-in essence, to pull himself back together. But what of Alice? She is left alone in her kitchen, holding nothing more than she had before-dominion over her dreary world. While Ralph can escape, if only briefly, Alice's domestic role requires her to stay with Ralph's mother. For Alice, there is no escape. When the show ends, she is no better off than before the battle began. Her slumped posture suggests that she understands all too well the hollowness of her triumph. We must believe that many women in videoland identified with Alice. The Honeymooners,I Love Lucy, and Our Miss Brooksall suggest that while the male characters in the series maintain their ultimate authority, the "symbolic annihilation" of women that Gaye Tuchman spoke of is, in these comedies at least, not total. A battle between the sexes would not be funny unless the two sides were evenly matched; and setting sitcoms in the domes­ tic sphere placed women in a better position to spar. Further, although men had an advantage through social position, rank, and authority, women like Miss Brooks, Lucy, and Alice vied on equal terms. The authority that men assumed through male hierarchy, these women radiated through the sheer strength of their comedic personalities. The producers, of course, were not closet feminists in permitting this female assertiveness to occur; they simply recognized that the female characters accounted for much of their shows' popularity. And the shows' ratings were high, we would argue, partly because they hinted at the discontent many women felt, whether or not they recognized the strength of their feelings. If that conclusion is correct, it suggests that neither the reflective hypoth­ esis nor the manipulative hypothesis explains how the mass media shape popular culture. At bottom, the extreme forms of each explanation slight one of the constants in historical explanation: change over time. If the mass com­ munications industries simply reflected public taste and never influenced it, they would become nonentities-multibillion-dollar ciphers with no causal agency. All change would be the consequence of other historical factors. On the other hand, if we assign a role to the media that's too manipulative, we find it difficult to explain any change at all. As agencies of cultural hege­ mony, the media could stifle any attempt to change the status quo. How was it, then, that millions of girls who watched themselves being symboli­ cally annihilated during the fifties supplied so many converts to the women's movement of the sixties? From Rosieto Lucy 363 \ \ Perhaps the mass media, although influential in modern society, are not as monolithic in outlook as they sometimes seem. A comparison to the medieval church is apt, so long as we remember that the church, too, was hardly able to impose its will universally. Even where orthodoxy reigned, schismatic movements were always springing up. Today's heretics may be feminists rather than Anabaptists, but they are nonetheless responding to growing pressures within society. From a feminist point of view, we have not automatically achieved utopia merely because television since the 1980s has regularly presented sitcoms and dramas with women as their central characters. We should remember that the same mass culture industry that threatened women with symbolic annihilation also published The Feminine j{ystique. 364 AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION AdditionalReading This chapter draws on material from three different fields-women's his­ tory, social history and popular culture, and the history of television. For overviews of the image of women in our culture, see Lois Banner, American Beauty(New York, 1983); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Cul­ ture (New York, 1977); and Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (New York, 1974).