Pearl G. Aldrich

SOURCE: "Daniel Defoe: The Father of the Soap Opera," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. VIII, No. 4, Spring, 1975, pp. 767-74.

[In the following essay, Aldrich identifies similarities of plot, character, theme, and language between the modern television serial drama and the novels of Daniel Defoe.]

Should one mention Defoe and soap opera in the same breath, theoretically he is dealing with two extremes—literature and non-literature written for the mass media—but actually he is not. In his own day, Defoe wrote for the mass media and his five novels, mined from the enormous paper mountain his great productivity piled up, are now called literature because they show, in retrospect, qualities that became identified as artistic during the novel's development into an art form. Whether soap opera, in retrospect, will show qualities of a yet-to-benamed art form is impossible to predict, but we can make some relationships between past and present with existing material. One will be to show that structures underlying popular and elite art are essentially the same. Another, that in the novels he wrote for mass consumption, Daniel Defoe fathered soap opera. Who was the mother? Why, Moll Flanders, of course.

Twentieth-century soap opera and eighteenth-century prose narratives such as Defoe's all come under the standard definition of fiction; i.e., a false story invented by the writer, although in both centuries great effort has been made to convince the public that all the stories were and are true, taken with photographic accuracy from "real life." The great popularity of both the soaps and Defoe's narratives does not need documentation here, but the foundation upon which this popularity was built does. According to John J. Richetti,

[Fiction] depends for its effectiveness as popular entertainment upon its exploitation of what I will choose to call an 'ideology' . . . a body of assumptions and attitudes which commands immediate, emotional and inarticulate assent, as opposed to a set of ideas which requires self-conscious and deliberate intellectual formulation. Fiction, in general, depends upon a community of such belief; the novelist (any storyteller) ruthlessly selects and inescapably shapes events when he presents them to his audience. This process of selection required by the act of narration itself expresses value judgments. . . . The great appeal of fiction at the popular level was its ability to provide an over-simplification of the structure of society and the moral universe which allowed the reader to place himself in a world of intelligible values where right and wrong were clearly and unmistakably labelled. To read these popular narratives was, at least for the moment of belief and participation that even the most inept narrator can induce, to submit to an ideology, a neatly comprehensible , . , pattern of reality.¹

Richetti was writing about the eighteenth century, but this explanation also applies to popular fiction today, particularly soap opera. In Defoe's time, the hidden assumptions that commanded immediate, emotional and inarticulate assent were religious; today, they are psychological. Moll Flanders, therefore, can be called fictional religious biography; the soaps, psychological biography.

The technique employed by writers of both is based upon isolating one motivating factor of life—religious in the eighteenth century, psychological in the twentieth—then magnifying the importance and pervasiveness of this factor to represent all of life. Within this technical structure, the working of each element of the religious and psychological motivation is presented one at a time, as though each operates in isolation from all other elements of life, so that the audience can understand without confusion.

The audience for mass media offerings in both centuries seems to be similar—non-analytical people, mostly women, who accept passivity as a way of life and believe unexamined, generally fragmented, over-simplified, socially accepted, popular mythology. Popular mythology in this context means ideas that are not true, but are believed by large numbers of people. The male counter-part, incidentally, is the spectator sportsman; the watcher of all the football, basketball, and baseball games. Soap opera's audience cannot and does not live by these ideas; real life could never be so simple, but the fictional people who do and, as a result, receive the rewards and punishment such mythology establishes, provide vicarious thrills and deep satisfaction for their audience. Such popular and superficial fiction, by reflecting and enhancing the simplest common denominators of cultural mythology, not only makes all its readers' and viewers' dreams come true, but also reinforces these beliefs.

When Ian Watt wrote that, in the early eighteenth century, emphasis in the whole culture of England had shifted to the "great power and self-confidence of the middle class as a whole," to whom Defoe was able to appeal because he was one of them, expressing their "needs from the inside much more freely than would previously have been possible,"² Watt was ostensibly talking about Defoe as a middle-class tradesman, but Watt's comment can be applied to Defoe's religious beliefs also. They were those of the ultra-conservative, orthodox Puritan, which, according to Maximillian Novak, "was good Calvinistic theology, but it was in distinct opposition to the thought of his time."³ However, it was just this aspect that appealed to Defoe's readers, to what Richetti has called "the deeply reactionary wisdom of the masses."⁴ Richetti further explains the importance of the traditional religious theme to those people at that time:

The reiteration of the key theme that Providence is behind natural and human events points to one source of the ideological tensions of the day; the defence of the traditional religious view of man against the new secularism of the Enlightenment, the encroaching forces of infidelity.

.. . the ideological key of the narratives .. . is fairly limited and definable in its larger outlines . . . this structure tends to take the form of a dramatic confrontation between two opposing attitudes to experience. I will choose to call these two ways of existing in the imaginary worlds the narratives put before their readers 'secular' and 'religious'. . . . In eighteenth-century popular narratives, that is, action itself tends to be depicted as impious aggression against the natural or social order or against innocent and therefore virtuously passive characters.⁵

When Defoe stated in the Preface to Moll Flanders, that

. . . this work is chiefly recommended to those who know how to read it, and how to make good the uses of it which the story all along recommends to them; so it is to be hop'd that such readers will be much more pleas'd with the moral than the fable, with the application than with the relation, and with the end of the writer than with the life of the person written on. . . .

In a word, as the whole relation is carefully garbled of all the levity and looseness that was in it, so it is applied, and with the utmost care, to vertuous and religious uses,⁶

he is very carefully setting the stage to work out the moral equation that sin + suffering = repentance to avoid eternal damnation which evoked the immediate, emotional, and inarticulate assent. He is saying to his readers, in effect, "Beware! This may happen to you," and promotes reader identification with Moll by limiting the motivation for her separate sins to consideration of one at a time—for example, Moll's vanity as the reason for the success of the elder brother's seduction.

"Thus I gave up my self to ruin without the least concern," Moll tells her readers, "and am a fair memento to all young women whose vanity prevails over their virtue," (p. 24) a thought they all shared because, after all, Moll is a member of her own audience.

Moll's actions throughout most of the narrative are impious aggression, not only because they were dishonest, immoral, and taboo, but also because they were actions, an outspoken lack of submission that thrilled Defoe's religiously submissive readers. Their enjoyment was increased because they knew that Moll would suffer for her sins and repent, finally, to avoid damnation.

Every time Moll stole and, by stealing successfully hardened in sin according to orthodox Puritan doctrine, her readers nonetheless partook of her courage, defiance, and impious aggression; comfortable, though, in the Knowledge that the moral equation would work out. In fact, Defoe, through Moll, keeps reminding the reader that it is going to work out. One episode is typical of the many: As a thief, Moll usually worked alone, then decided to learn to work as part of a team. After several practice sessions for small gain, Moll and her partner pull off a fairly big job, and Moll says,

This was my first adventure in company . . . and thus I was enter'd a compleat thief, harden'd to a pitch above all the reflections of conscience or modesty, and to a degree which I had never thought possible in me.

Thus the devil who began, by the help of an irresistible poverty, to push me into this wickedness, brought me on to a height beyond the common rate. . . . (pp. 175-76)

She reflects upon what could happen to her if she continues with the gang in this criminal life even though she is getting rich, but avarice would not let her stop—and here Defoe is concentrating on the consequences of the sin of avarice. Moll then says that once a "kind spirit" suggested she get out while she was ahead of the game,

This was doubtless the happy minute, when, if I had hearken'd to the blessed hint from whatsoever hand it came, I had still a [chance] for an easie life; but my fate was otherwise determin'd, the busie devil that drew me in had too fast hold of me to let me go back. .. . (p. 176)

And every one of Defoe's readers knew exactly what happens to people held fast by the busy devil. How was she going to get out of it? The next chapter would tell.

If the two opposing attitudes to experience then were secular and religious, the two opposing attitudes now are psychological happiness and unhappiness. If the repeated exhortation in the eighteenth century was "repent and ye'll be saved," today's must be "search for happiness and you'll find it." If, in the eighteenth century, the unifying theme of the mass media for which Defoe wrote was ultra-conservative religious doctrine, the unifying theme of twentieth century soap opera is ultra-conservative Freudian psychology with neither Freud's subtleties nor Jung's, Adler's, Horney's, or anyone else's modifications. Freud's early statement that sex is the central driving force of all man's activities has been accepted in toto by literal, non-analytical minds. Sex, however, in the soaps, is purged of vulgarity and dressed in gentility. It's called "loving" in the same euphemistic way Moll referred to sex as her "correspondence" with a man.

In the soaps, "love" is the all-purpose universal solvent in a one-dimensional world of people either happy or unhappy. If they have "love," they are happy until disaster removes it. Where Moll can be seduced because of the sin of vanity, Lisa, Jane, Lynn, and their ilk can be seduced because they are "searching for Happiness" according to the following orthodox morality in the soaps: Love is the only motivating element in life. One cannot lie about love. Once it is admitted, the admission requires action. Love is beyond control. (It wasn't anything we wanted, Joanne; it just happened.) No woman who is really in love with a man should give him up easily. (I'll stay right here, Father, and fight for him.) Happily married women spend most of their time in the kitchen—a very reactionary idea—and, in one popular soap opera, the kitchen is decorated in Early American furniture. Only bad women who are alone and unhappy decorate their apartments in Swedish modern while searching for happiness. Money can't buy happiness; only loneliness.

The obvious logical step that would resolve a problem is slow to be observed because the people involved are not logical; they are giving the immediate, emotional, and inarticulate assent to the moral equation they all believe in—that is, loving + mating = happiness to avoid loneliness. In soap opera, we have double-barrelled reinforcement of this mythology. The woman who sought happiness successfully and stayed married to one man gets the deep satisfaction of seeing the "impious aggressor" get her just punishment—loss of her man. Yet the divorcee is reinforced, too. She and "the impious aggressor" on the TV screen are still searching for happiness, and that's fine because it's what real life is supposedly all about.

In addition to these similarities of thematic structure, the soaps and Moll Flanders are similar in plot. Each consists of a string of disasters crowding one after another upon the main character.

The soap opera's plot invariably turned on some excruciating crisis in the life of one of its characters. This might be a financial or marital crisis, but on most occasions it was something a good deal more dire. . . . In the small towns which dotted the map of soap opera land, there were, on the average, perhaps 300 per cent more automobile accidents, sudden onslaughts of exotic ailments, and murders for which the wrong person was put on trial than there were in any comparable group of small towns in the real world,⁷

Although this comment is about radio soap opera, television offers the same ingredients to its viewers.

In Moll Flanders, just the statement of the book's full title is sufficient to place it securely within soap opera plot requirements: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Three-score Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother) Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, live'd Honest and died a Penitent.

When the book ended, Moll died rich and penitent, which was happy and successful in eighteenth century Puritan terms. When a serial ends, each character is mated, which is happy and successful in soap opera terms. For example, in the last episode of Secret Storm, the lump on Joanna Morrison's leg proves to be benign, and she and Robert Landers plan a happy future together. Amy is reunited with Kevin, who can now walk again, and the two plan a happy future together. In the last episode of Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Angel Chernak, though dying, plans a happy future with her husband and children of the little time she has left. Betsy and Joe marry and plan a happy future together.

In the early eighteenth century prose narratives that are now considered the first novels, such as Moll Flanders, Pamela and Clarissa, as well as the hundreds that were not of sufficiently high quality to survive, the suffering main character is a woman, as the early titles indicate. So, too, in the soaps. Even though, when transplanted to television, more men entered the plot, the main, superior, and relentless sufferer is a woman.

The string of disasters that afflict Moll, Claire, Ellen, Lisa, Sandy, Joanne, et al., are contained in self-enclosed, almost independent, episodes. In Moll Flanders, though Defoe conscientiously recorded her age at intervals, many episodes could have changed places in the text. Moll could have married the linen draper after her affair with the gentleman at Bath and the result would have been the same. Moll's courtship and short-lived marriage with Jemmy could have occurred between episodes of thievery, and they could still have been reunited in Newgate. She could have met and lived with the Captain's widow before or after her marriage to the banker and still been in the same difficulty when the Captain's widow remarried. Moll could have had another illegitimate child after her banker husband died, even at the advanced age of eight and forty, and disposed of it through her "governess" to the same woman in Hertford, then faced her next disaster.

In the soaps, the same episodic independence is evident. In "As the World Turns," the episode in which Dr. Dan learns that Ellen is his real mother could have taken place even before the episode in which Ellen accidently kills the housekeeper who threatened to tell Dan the truth. Ellen would not have known that Dan knew the truth and would have hit the housekeeper with that statue under the same stress. The ripple effect would have touched the other characters with the same impact, triggering other catastrophes.

In "Days of Our Lives," it would have mattered very little when Bill's father discovered Kitty's tape recording—before or after her heart attack and death—because of the explosive quality of its content which proved that Laura's husband was not the father of Laura's child. Bill's father would have had to keep it secret as much before Bill's conviction for Kitty's alleged murder as after.

Another Defoe characteristic demonstrated in Moll Flanders that is matched in soap opera is use of language. Literary analysts have called Defoe's style pedestrian, vulgar, repetitious, clumsy, lumbering, yet it was the non-literary everyday language of his audience in the same way the style of soap opera is the contemporary voice of the same audience. Banal comments and trite expressions are uttered slowly, with great significance, as, indeed, they must be to an audience that gives immediate, emotional, and inarticulate assent to the underlying idea that, psychologically, everyday phrases are significant. "You never really know what's going to happen, do you?" is a frequently used philosophical comment. "We all have to do what we think best" and "Everyone is an individual" are psychological truisms based on as total an acceptance of the mythology of individual self-determinism as it was rejected in Defoe's day.

In Moll Flanders, Moll's voice as the narrator looking back over her life and pointing the morals echoes Defoe echoing pulpit oratory. In soap opera, every character is a working psychologist. Twentieth century psychological mythology says that any two or more "individuals" are capable of "helping each other solve their problems;" therefore, the morals are presented in dialogue using question—Is that what you really want? Will marrying Scott make you happy?—and summary—"You're still in love with Scott—not with the Scott that is, but the Scott that could be." While Moll cried out in Puritan agony after that particularly lucrative con job on the mercer, "O! Had I even now had the grace of repentance. .. . I had still leisure to have look'd back upon my follies. . . ." (p. 220)

Another major objection of literary analysts through the years has been to the set, unchanging, one-dimensional characterization of Moll Flanders. However, soap opera viewers would recognize her immediately as one of their own—people in soap opera are clearly, permanently, identified by a set, unchanging, one-dimensional characterization.

In soap opera, the intricacies of family relationships duplicate in quality, if not in quantity, those of eighteenth-century prose narratives. The modern reader who is shocked by Moll's many illegal marriages and other relationships with men, including the incestuous one with her own brother, the number and fate of her ten (or was it twelve?) children should visit among the soaps for a week or two. In one, the illegitimate son adopted and reared by a close friend, grows up, becomes a doctor, and on the day he is to operate on a woman, is told that she is his mother. In another, a man, blinded by flying glass, faces eye surgery on the day his wife runs away from home because she lost custody of her son, Jimmy, born in prison while she was doing time for helping her first husband rob a store. In still another, Dr. Bill is the father of one of his sister-in-law's children because her husband, his brother, is sterile, but the brother doesn't know it.

In the small enclosed world of the soaps, major political and economic events come and go without remark. Neither atomic blasts, hurricanes, nor political scandal slow the relentless search for happiness; neither war, revolution, fire nor plague intruded into Moll's stylized progress to religious stability.

In the same way that Moll's impious aggression thrilled and excited readers who would never be other than religiously submissive, so the continuous search for happiness thrills and excites women who will remain married to the same man for the rest of their lives.

To be sinful and not repent was the worst fate within the eighteenth century conservative Puritan ideology. To be alone and not be unhappy is the worst psychological sin a woman can commit in the twentieth-century soaps.

Defoe used the jargon of popular religion to command the immediate, emotional, and inarticulate assent; contemporary soap opera writers use the jargon of popular psychology. Defoe dramatized the popular religious equation that sin + suffering = repentance to avoid damnation; contemporary soap opera writers dramatize the popular psychological equation of loving + mating = happiness to avoid loneliness. Defoe tried to create religious symbols and gave us memorable people. The soaps try to create memorable people and give us psychological symbols. The relationship between the two, however, points out that, indeed, the underlying structures of popular and elite art are essentially the same.

In the eighteenth century, the religious-passive-virtuous were the mythologically successful, although a casual glance around the population would have exploded that myth. Today, substitute married-passive-happy for the mythologically successful, and the parallel between Defoe's Moll Flanders and twentieth-century soap opera becomes clear. Similarities of theme, structure, plot, characterization, and language firmly establish both that Daniel Defoe was the father of soap opera and that yesterday's popular art is often today's elite art.

NOTES

¹Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 11.

²Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 59.

³Defoe and the Nature of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 10.

⁴Ibid., p. 44.

⁵Ibid., pp. 15-16, 13.

⁶ Introduction and Notes by James Sutherland, Riverside Edition (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1959), p. 4. All subsequent page references noted within the text of this paper are from this edition.

⁷ Thomas Meehan, "The 'Soaps' Fade but Do Not Die," New York Times Magazine, 4 December 1960, p. 27.

Deborah D, Rogers

SOURCE: "Guiding Blight: The Soap Opera and the Eighteenth-Century Novel," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 73-91.

[In the following essay, Rogers views daytime serial dramas within the literary framework originating in such eighteenth-century English novels as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.]

Contemporary soap operas (here defined as televised morning or daytime serial drama, as distinct from the prime-time serial and mini-series) contain sentiments so deep-rooted as to have much in common with various literary predecessors. For example, soap opera philosophy could, with some justice, be traced back to the medieval wheel of fortune. And not only does the passive, submissive soap heroine have roots that reach at least as far back in English literature as Chaucer's Griselda, but the aggressive, manipulative, lustful soap villainess can find an ancestor in Chaucer's Wife of Bath if not in Shakespeare's Goneril and Regan. Of course, Grendel's mother, the first female character in English literature, is a witch. In fact, the resemblances between soap characters and their literary forebears are endless, so fixed are these types in Western civilization.

One recent study compared soap plots and characters to Renaissance tragedies (Morton and Morton). Soaps have also been linked to the prose narratives of Defoe (Aldrich) and, somewhat casually, to the novel of manners of Burney (Modleski 15). Sentimental and heroic drama could be added to the list. Although other eighteenth-century precursors have been mentioned whimsically or in passing, the usual connection is with the nineteenth-century novel (Keeler; Modleski; Cantor and Pingree 20-22; Allen, Speaking 140-51; Stedman 284-91; Weibel; Cantor, "Popular Culture" 193).

While all these links are valid—indeed, they testify to how deeply ingrained soaps are in our culture—the particular fantasies and anxieties of the soap opera relate most directly to the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. Such similarities as the theme of seduction (Clarissa) or the reformed-rake plot (Pamela; Love in Excess) come immediately to mind. (Recently, for example, one soap ex-bad boy announced, ".. . there are a lot of good girls out there who want to find a bad boy they can reform and bring home to Mama.") But the connection is much more profound. Although literary critics may differ about the origins and founders of the novel (Watt; McKeon; Spender; Spencer), one thing is certain: without the development of the extended narrative form of the novel and its serialization, both eighteenth-century phenomena, the soap opera is inconceivable.

The novel shifted the attention of literature to the romances and family lives of ordinary people, who reflected a new middle-class audience of readers. This focus is understandable since the genesis of the novel is itself associated with the Industrial Revolution, which virtually created the middle class, with its new emphases on "affective individualism," romantic love within a marriage, a new female stereotype, and the nuclear family (Stone; Utter and Needham; Watt). Although the exact nature of these changes is much debated among scholars (see below), they are all central to soaps and are expressive of an ideology embodied in what is, I argue, their most direct antecedent, the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, historically a feminine genre. Like the early novel, soap operas, which are directed to women, are governed by conventions of realism and broadcast conservative messages that reinforce the status quo. Given these circumstances, it is important to examine cardinal soap beliefs in a historical context that invites analysis.

It is by now a commonplace that the increased amount of feminine leisure time that came with economic specialization was a major contributing factor to the growth of eighteenth-century literacy. Encouraged by the establishment of the circulating library, women became the primary audience for the sentimental novel (Watt 42-49; Altick ch. 2; Leavis 133ff). This new genre followed Richardson in separating the "two spheres" and addressing what are culturally (though not, perhaps, naturally) considered to be feminine preoccupations. The Richardsonian novel is concerned almost exclusively with what is appropriate to the passive, private sphere, including the (overlapping) concerns of home, family, childbearing and rearing, morals, romantic love, courtship, marriage, emotions, interpersonal relationships, and personal dilemmas. Deemphasized is the public "male" realm of action along with "male topics," which are, according to our cultural orientation, usually thought to include law, business, government, news, and politics. Social problems and concerns of the world at large appear only in terms of the personal, which, of course, as the saying goes, is political. The takeover of the Jabot Company on "The Young and the Restless" is important for its effect on the Abbott family, not for its effect on the Dow. According to Charlotte Brunsdon, the soap opera "colonizes the public masculine sphere," representing it from a personal perspective (78). If gender is translated into these terms, this model of the feminine subverting or co-opting the masculine is complicated: Television and the press, both powerful agents for the dissemination of culture, are part of the public sphere that colonizes—by commercializing—the personal. Soap operas are brought to us through the agency of big business, which sponsors these programs. Similarly, Richardson and other eighteenth-century printers in their enterpreneurial roles helped disseminate "the feminine."

Soaps continue to emphasize feminine preoccupations. Like the sentimental novel, the soap opera has been and continues to be a form of women's fiction. Of the various types of feminine texts such as Gothics, magazine serials, and romances, soaps are unique in that they are the only fiction on television, that most popular of mass cultural media, that is specifically created for women, especially those who are at home during the day, many of whom are homemakers. One has only to examine commercials aired during the soaps—from which, after all, the genre derives its name—to perceive the target audience: women at home who are potential customers for everything from cleaning products to makeup. Missing are the prime-time commercials for "big-ticket" items such as cars or even washers and dryers, which implicitly require some male decisions for purchase.

Although fewer women are full-time homemakers as more join the labor force, women, mostly between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, still constitute over eighty percent of the twenty-five million viewers who tune in to soaps daily (Cantor and Pingree 11, 23). These statistics may, however, be changing with the advent of the VCR. Indeed, recent commercials for products like diapers for incontinent adults may indicate a geriatric audience, if not a (female?) audience that must tend to older parents.

This is not to say that men cannot be soap fans. Indeed, some of the new adventure stories (previously unusual in the soap world, especially insofar as they contain physical violence) seem to speak to a male audience, which may be increasing, due to rises in both unemployment and early retirement. Yet these adventure plots, shot for the most part on location, are still relatively rare. Instead, aimed at a female audience, soaps follow Richardson in his "keyhole" presentation of "to-the-moment" emotions.

Samuel Johnson long ago warned against reading Richardson for his tediously discriminated plot: " . . . if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment . . ." (Boswell 480). Similarly, soaps are for the most part all talk and no action. In fact, at their inception, televised soap operas were considered to be "radio with pictures" (Cantor and Pingree 48). Although this may have been true of most early television, it continues to be much the case with today's soaps, where with the exception of the rare adventure plot mentioned above, physical movement is minimal. Since talk, whether dialogue or interior monologue, predominates, camera shots are mostly closeups of faces, allowing for intimate views of every nuance of feeling. This emphasis on emotions and words (as well as the repetitive structure and slow pacing—also characteristic of the Richardsonian novel) enables women to do household chores that require some degree of visual attention (such as ironing or sewing) while watching their soaps. It has been suggested that the fact that action on soaps is reported rather than portrayed makes them popular with workers who listen on television-band radios and with the blind (Liss cited in Cantor and Pingree 24). This same feature, which allows for lapses in visual attention, may appeal to homemakers.

In both the Richardsonian novel and the soap, a multitude of details slowly unfolds in a realistic time scheme. As opposed to prime-time, where weeks, months, and even years are compressed into single episodes, soap time is expanded (one day may take a week to unfold) or it approximates real time (Cantor and Pingree 70). When holidays occur on weekdays, unless programs are preempted by parades or sporting events, they are invariably celebrated in a soap world that parallels our own. In this way the soaps seem to go along with or keep up with our lives. Although soap time may be protracted, in another sense soap time is our time. The effect of realism on the soaps is enhanced by daily serialization, as the soaps become a (much-discussed) part of everyday lives. In addition, as Horace Newcomb suggests, the ongoing nature of soap stories allows for characters to grow old and get wrinkled along with the audience (177, 179).

As should by this time be obvious, realism, the defining characteristic of the early novel, the feature that distinguishes it from previous fiction (Watt 9-34; McKeon), is also the governing convention of the soaps. The realism of both the novel and the soap resides in the fiction that they are actual accounts of real experiences in the daily lives of ordinary individuals. (This emphasis depends on a new ethos that may have developed with the Industrial Revolution, the valuing of individualism, as the everyday lives of average people became sufficiently interesting to merit and sustain attention; Watt). Like the Richardsonian novel, most soaps take place in familiar (if interior) territory such as living rooms. As the early novel addresses concerns that may be more real to the middle-class reader than concerns addressed in other literature, the soap deals with problems that come closer to those of the middle-class viewer than do problems on prime time. Just as it is likely that eighteenth-century readers found the problems of family authority in Clarissa much more like their own than Belinda's problems at Hampton Court, so it is likely that the contemporary viewer is more familiar with infidelity or divorce than with the problems inherent in marrying the Prince of Moldavia or in figuring out who shot J.R.

The Richardsonian novel and the soap, then, may approximate experienced reality. Yet realism is still a convention, even if its references, alluding as they do to the everyday world, are easily understood. The soap population hardly reflects today's society: soaps almost entirely ignore the working class. They exaggerate the number of people divorced and the number of people employed in general and employed in professional occupations in particular. Ninety-seven percent of soap characters are Caucasian, less than sixteen percent are over fifty-five, and more than twenty-five percent are fairly rich (Cantor and Pingree 85-90). Although no comparable statistics are available for the eighteenth century, we can be fairly certain that the world depicted in Pamela is no more realistic. For one thing, we know that when many young girls migrated to the city, where they were cut off from traditional systems of support such as family, community, and church, they became prostitutes (Tilly, Scott, Cohen).

To understand how fictional the world of apparently realistic eighteenth-century prose fiction is, one has only to think of the full title of Moll Flanders: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of Continu 'd Variety for Three-score Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, Five Times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother) Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at Last Grew Rich, Liv'd Honest, and Died a Penitent. Consider the following brief outline of the adventures of "One Life to Live's" Victoria Buchanan, which is equally unbelievable: Soon after Viki marries Joe Riley, he is "killed" in a car accident. She then marries Steve Burke, only to find that Joe actually survived the crash although he has that favorite soap illness, amnesia (a rare disease in real life). After divorcing Steve, Viki remarries Joe. When Joe really dies, Viki marries Clint Buchanan and reverts to her alter ego, Nikki Smith. Fearing that, as Nikki, she may have kidnapped her own daughter, Viki finally comes to her senses only to get amnesia and fall in love with Tom Dennison, Joe Riley's previously nonexistent identical twin. Later, she discovers another husband and daughter who had slipped her mind.

Accepting such sensational stories as true seems to depend on a unique viewer or reader response based on an understanding between audience and author that is similar to a "gentleman's agreement". In effect, the audience must "see double". This phenomenon is common in the eighteenth century. Much eighteenth-century satire, especially Swift's, depends upon this mechanism, as does the whole rollercoaster concept of "sublime" feelings, which are evoked in a frightening or, even better, seemingly life-threatening situation, when one knows one is safe. Richardson's audience was accustomed to seeing double, to believing that his accounts were true, while knowing at heart that they were fictitious. In his serially published novels Richardson uses elaborate textual apparatus, including an editorial pose, to insist that his accounts are factual. The audience in turn becomes intensely concerned with the fate of his heroines, as if they were real people, but at the same time writes letters to Richardson asking him to transform the situations of his characters. Perhaps the only other genre to elicit this bifurcated response is the soap opera. Soap characters regularly receive letters of advice and everything from wedding presents to baby booties, as the occasion demands, from an audience that delights in discussing them as if they are actual people. If eighteenth-century villagers attending a reading of Pamela rushed out to ring church bells to celebrate her nuptials, all over America students cut classes to watch "General Hospital" when Luke and Laura tied the knot.

Like the early novel, then, soap fantasies are directed to women and are governed by conventions of realism. As Ian Watt has observed of eighteenth-century novels—and the same could be applied to soap operas—realism makes them "capable of .. . a thorough subversion of psychological and social reality" (206), giving them, in the words of another critic, a "formative influence on the expectations and aspirations of modern consciousness." In this connection, the messages of the early novel are so deep rooted—if not indelible—in our culture that they are still promoted today, especially in the soap opera.

Perhaps nothing is more central to both the eighteenth-century novel and the soap opera than the family. Much scholarly debate surrounds the historical, sociological, and cultural development of this institution. Some contend that for economic reasons, the eighteenth-century nuclear family may have been unstable (Wrigley; Laslett, World and Family). Lawrence Stone argues that the nuclear family was firmly established by the sixteenth century and that "affective individualism," an eighteenth-century phenomenon, was unrelated to the Industrial Revolution. The eighteenth-century family may have developed from an unemotional structure in the Middle Ages to a patriarchal nuclear family with emotional bonds due to several related factors. These include the increase in marriages for affective rather than economic reasons, the lowered infant mortality rate, which allowed for more emotional relationships between parents and children, the increased power of the state, and the decreased importance of the extended family. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, these changes, which must have had different effects on different classes, began to manifest themselves in more affectionate family behavior such as the jettisoning of restrictive swaddling clothes, less severe beating of children, and breastfeeding by mothers instead of by wet-nurses. Parental love came to focus on children, as more marriages were based on affection rather than property (Stone). Others insist that in the eighteenth century the family may have been in a state of transition as the breakdown of cottage industry led to a migration to the city and an increased emphasis on the nuclear family rather than on extended kinship (Watt 139-41). Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the shift in human feelings described by Stone could be unconnected to the growing commercialization of eighteenth-century England. New prosperity may have allowed for time to devote to emotional considerations.

Although we may never know the exact nature of the family in the eighteenth century, this much is clear: domesticity, emotional ties, love, sex, romance, and marriage, all in relation to the nuclear family, received an emphasis unknown in previous literature. This preoccupation with the family may reflect the difficulty of the novel's first audience, eighteenth-century women, in dealing with the hierarchical power structure of this institution. Equating the family's desires with those of the father, our collective myth of family unity, which dates back to the eighteenth century, reinforces male dominance. It is therefore not surprising that much eighteenth-century writing is concerned with the anxiety of working out a new model of family relationships. For example, Eliza Haywood's guides, The Wife (1756) and The Husband, in Answer to the Wife (1756), outline the duties and moral behavior of spouses. Daniel Defoe's didactic works, The Family Instructor (1715-27), Religious Courtship (1722), and Conjugal Lewdness (1727), are conduct books for the middle class. As such, they provide domestic instruction for relationships between and among husbands and wives, parents and children, and couples, taking up issues ranging from premarital sex to love, sex, and marriage to disobedient children. Such concerns are central to much eighteenth-century prose fiction. Albeit in widely different ways, love, sex, marriage, and the family are focal to such diverse eighteenth-century novels as Delariviere Manley's The New Atalantas (c. 1710), Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess (1719) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph (1761), Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Elizabeth Inchbald's Simple Story (1791), and Charlotte Smith's Emmeline (1788), Desmond (1792), and The Old Manor House (1793). In perhaps the best known example, Pamela goes on for almost 150 pages after the marriage to spell out all the facets of a marriage and family based on affective ties. A two-volume continuation chronicles in great detail her widely praised domestic "family management". And in different ways, both Robinson Crusoe and Clarissa challenge the authority of their fathers, only to accept the authority of God, the Father.

As a form of popular culture targeted specifically to women, soap operas similarly provoke considerable anxiety about the family. If soap operas endorse the family, they also undercut in with a subtext that reflects the difficulty women experience living in a male-centered structure that institutionalizes female subordination. At the same time, however, soaps may themselves substitute for the family, allaying anxiety by meeting fundamental psychological needs unsatisfied by their real-life counterpart.

Soap operas often appear to value the family obsessively. Characters yearn for "the kind of security that a family has that has deep roots" and urge that "family means giving and sharing." Indeed one soap, "All My Children," begins every daily episode with a shot of the family album. Defining family as "the big enchilada," soap characters come to eloquent realizations like "Family is important—it's damn important" or "Family is all we've got—and we must never ever lose sight of that, ever." They manage to get through all their trials and tribulations only because they are sustained by their families. In difficult situations, characters repeatedly identify the family as "the one thing that kept me going." Consider, for example, the apotheosis of the family in the following exchange from "The Young and the Restless" between Nellie, a bag lady, and Jack Abbott, scion of the wealthy Abbott clan, concerning his estrangement from his father:

N: Mothers and fathers always forgive their children. . . . Isn't that why most religions call God our Father? Hmm? Because if we're truly sorry, he always forgives us?

J: Yeah, but you're talking about a supreme being, not a human being.

N: I'm talking about parent-child, mother-daughter, father-son. That kind of love lasts forever.

While all this may seem fairly straightforward, it would be a mistake to take these metaphors that have been imposed on the family at face value. The explicit message of the soaps is the glorification of the family, but a different message is implicit in the way the family is actually depicted. Even as the family is deified, it is always in chaos, which insures its centrality. For example, in the present instance, the reason for the antagonism between Jack and his father is that Jack slept with his father's second wife. If the family is enshrined, it is also embroiled in massive and nasty problems such as adultery, divorce, incest, alcoholism, illegitimacy, and babynapping. Not pretty. Although the breakdown of the family is criticized, and deviations from the view of the family as central are punished, as in the early novel, in the soaps considerable tension is inherent in the difference between what is said about the family and what is shown (Rogers, Monitor).

It may be tempting to follow feminists such as Elaine Showalter and Tania Modleski and read this subtext as a competing discourse, submerged subversively beneath the orthodox discourse to express covert feminine anger, hostility, protest against patriarchy, and desire for power. While all this may be true, it may nonetheless escape typical viewers, who probably do not approach television programs as texts. In fact, since the fragmentation of soap operas encourages the suspension of critical processes, viewers probably never analyze (and may be unaware of) the underlying tension. Instead, they may turn around and cling all the more tenaciously to the conservative message, which endorses the patriarchal family, as the only explicit solution that has been offered. The subtext that emphasizes the very instability of the patriarchal nuclear family is probably not coded as protest, which might lead to questioning the institution of the nuclear family, but instead goes unrecognized, generating considerable anxiety, especially since the contradictions may be exactly those that are central to women.

The ideological basis of these contradictions may be simultaneous anxiety about the breakdown of the patriarchal nuclear family and deep-rooted female ambivalence about an institution that dates at least as far back as the eighteenth century. Feminists have located the valorization of motherhood as women's chief identity in the Industrial Revolution, when production was transferred out of the home, which ceased functioning as the major manufacturing unit. No longer economically useful at home, women came to accept motherhood as a full-time (selfless) vocation that dominated their lives. The sanctification of this form of motherhood and the gradual dissolution of the extended family were attended by increased sexual division of labor and its consequent inequality for women. Sexual stratification was constituted in the model for the patriarchal nuclear family, the King-subject analogy. With the breakup of cottage industry and of the extended family, as adult relatives as well as nonfamily members (boarders, servants) who could help take care of children left the home, child care became the exclusive domain of the mother.

Ironically, however, many soaps do not primarily reflect the nuclear family (Pingree and Thompson). Often they hark back to the extended family, as adult children marry and have children of their own without moving out of the family home. This nostalgic leapfrogging may indicate dissatisfaction with the nuclear family, which may fail to provide sufficient emotional sustenance for women, whose lives sometimes become circumscribed by economic dependence and child-care demands. On the soaps, where there's a child, there is usually an extended family (or, at the very least, servants) to help with care. Whether aunt, uncle, parent, grandparent, or servant, somebody is always on hand to take care of little Clint.

This is a situation unavailable to most women—or, perhaps available only via the soaps themselves, which can come to function as a replacement for extended kinship. Like the respondents in a recent survey I conducted, many viewers regard soap characters as "family" or "friends". If women must move away from traditional systems of support like family, friends, community, and church or synagogue, they can always "take along" their soaps. Assuming a quasi-familial role, soaps may diffuse a need created by the development of the nuclear family, providing isolated mothers with what may be their only mature "conversation" and "company" throughout the day.

Simultaneously embracing and undercutting the nuclear family, even as they function as a substitute for it, soap operas may both stimulate and contain our anxieties. By providing vicarious relief from the solitude created by patriarchal institutions, soaps may inhibit women from actively transforming their lives, leaving unquestioned the large inequalities and insufficiencies of the maledominated nuclear family.

Since at least on the surface both the soaps and the early novel exalt the family, neither genre can tolerate behavior that threatens this institution. Within this context, it is necessary for women to remain virtuous. In his prefaces Richardson outlines his admittedly didactic purposes. (Indeed, Sylvia Kasey Marks convincingly reads Richardson's novels as conduct books. The soaps could, of course, be read in the same manner.) In Pamela Richardson would

. . . inculcate religion and morality .. . set forth in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial, and the social duties . . . paint VICE in its proper colours .. . set VIRTUE in its own amiable light . . . [and] give practical examples, worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases, by the virgin, the bride, and the wife . . . (31).

To this end, Richardson epitomized an important new feminine stereotype that has persisted in literature until the twentieth century and continues unabated on the soaps. Reflective of the new cultural and economic developments that came with the Industrial Revolution, this highly influential female role model was, above all, virtuous. With the increased importance of property came an increased emphasis on female chastity, so husbands could be sure that their sons were their rightful heirs. For Pamela's parents, death is preferable to the loss of "that jewel" (46). They warn their daughter, " . . . resolve to lose your life rather than your virtue" (52). This equation of sex and death, which Richardson explores more fully in Clarissa, his next novel, foreshadows the treatment of AIDS on the soaps, where a disease primarily of drug abusers and of male homosexuals serves to punish female promiscuity (Rogers, Times).

Like the forever-fainting Pamela, the new female was inexperienced, delicate, passive, and immune to passion until she was married (Watt 157-161; Utter and Needham). Despite immediate appearances to the contrary, this stereotype persists in soap operas, where sexual purity for women is still highly valued. For example, the most important thing about Caroline Spenser of "The Bold and the Beautiful" at the program's inception is that she is saving herself for marriage. She is "a virgin—untouched, unblemished, a challenge." Like the attempts on Pamela and the rape of Clarissa and countless other eighteenth-century virgins, Caroline's rape may subversively demonstrate how provocative this female model is.

Most of the time, however, the persistence of the Richardsonian female stereotype on the soaps, while true, is not this apparent. In fact, soaps are often criticized for condoning immorality. And it is obvious that premarital and extramarital sex is rampant on the soaps (and certainly more prevalent than in the Richardsonian novel). Yet the soaps illustrate on a regular basis that sexual transgressions are invariably punished in the end,¹ often in the form of pregnancy, which, in typical eighteenth-century fashion, is double-edged.

Not only does Western culture enshrine motherhood as women's destiny, if not their greatest "achievement," it also devalues pregnancy as ploy, punishment, illness, and, as it is categorized by some insurance companies, disability. (Anna Quindlen was recently amused when an insurance form asked whether her disability occurred on the job or in a car.) Perhaps nowhere are these contradictions perpetuated more than on the soaps. Characterizing babies as "miracles" and motherhood as "instinctive," soap heroines commonly desire "a little house full of children . . ." Invoked with regularity is the traditional fantasy that procreation is a vehicle for secular (male) immortality, that ".. . any man . . . would just go crazy to have a son that would carry on your name and follow in your footsteps."

At the same time that pregnancy is idealized, it is devalued, presented stereotypically as a female ploy to trap a man. Soap heroes endlessly accuse women of being "too smart to get pregnant. . . unless you wanted to" and voice sentiments like "I've never known a woman yet . . . who got pregnant without an ulterior motive." Using what is regularly referred to as "the oldest trick in the book," female characters with amazing frequency get men drunk in order to seduce them. Since on the soaps sex always has consequences, these women routinely become pregnant by these unconscious (read blameless) men.

Unfortunately, all this may seem unremarkable, but what is perhaps less obvious is that if pregnancy functions as a woman's greatest reward, it also becomes her supreme punishment, all in the service of male domination. The ideological basis of this contradiction is deep-rooted.

Used to justify male dominance, this duality was introduced in popular culture almost 250 years ago in Pamela, which cites Biblical authority for these notions. In Pamela pregnancy is valorized, albeit negatively, in terms of "how uneasy many women are, not to be in this circumstance (my good Lady Davers particularly, at times), and Rachel and Hannah in holy writ; and how a childless estate might lessen one in the esteem of one's husband" (Pamela 3:282). Yet even as pregnancy is privileged, the agony of childbirth is interpreted as a special punishment meted out for female sexuality. In Pamela's paraphrase the whole serves as a pretext for female subordination:

.. . the apostle . . . says, That he suffers not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.—And what is the reason he gives? Why a reason that is a natural consequence of the curse on the first disobedience, that she shall be in subjection to her husband.—For, says he, Adam was NOT deceived; but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression. As much as to say, "had it not been for the woman, Adam had kept his integrity, and therefore her punishment shall be, as it is said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow in thy conception: in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children,—and thy husband shall rule over thee (Pamela 3:281).

These cultural pieties, which dictate that a woman's natural role is one of suffering and subordination, bear repeating: the doctrine of Original Sin, which brings sex and death into the world, stipulates that the woman never "usurp authority over the man, but. . . be in silence .. . in subjection to her husband. . . ." It also connects this male dominance to female pain at delivery, defining both causally as punishment for female sexuality: woman's "punishment shall be . . . in sorrow shah thou bring forth children,—and thy husband shall rule over thee."

This long tradition of reading pregnancy as punishment for female sexuality continues tenaciously in the soap opera. For example, on "The Young and the Restless" one unwed mother experiences life-threatening complications in childbirth. For weeks she is in a coma, suspended precariously between life and death. (As previously mentioned, the equation of female sexuality and death is elaborated in the Richardsonian novel.) On the same soap an adulterous affair results in pregnancy, and, in short order, abortion, and institutionalization. (Note that abortion is read literally as insanity.) In general, upholding standards of conventional morality, soaps support the status quo, reinforcing the virtuous female stereotype of the early novel from Melliora (Love in Excess) to Pamela and Clarissa.

Identified with moral failure and sexual pollution, an unmarried pregnant woman becomes in this scheme a text in which sexuality is made visible. Pregnancy is, of course, a particularly appropriate punishment since the "crime" or causality is unambiguous. (It is possible to impose all these metaphoric equivalences on pregnancy because personal aspects of women's lives simply show more than men's and are therefore more open to public scrutiny. Although in the case of pregnancy, this has a biological foundation, it is difficult to see why sexual asymmetry extends in this way to such public tokens of private relationship as engagement rings or the title "Mrs." which have no male equivalent).

The punitive notion of pregnancy, where unmarried pregnant women are standard tropes for sexual transgression, is not confined to "The Young and the Restless," but is pervasive on the soaps. Of a piece with the stories of her eighteenth-century sisters like the evil, aggressive Alovisa, who is killed (Love in Excess), or the sexually passionate Lady Elmwood, who dies after an extramarital affair (Simple Story), is the situation of Pine Valley's resident femme fatale and self-styled feminist, the much-married Erica Kane Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler (soon to be Montgomery). Immediately after she denounces the institution of marriage, declaring her "liberation" from having "fallen into the cultural trap of thinking I needed marriage to be happy," Erica receives a call from her physician, who informs her that she is expecting. Some months later when the cat is out of the bag—although the cookie is still in the oven—Erica is hospitalized, in danger of losing both her baby and her life. At this point she explicitly connects previous moral lapses with her current danger: "My baby—I'm losing my baby. . . . This is my punishment." Convinced that she is now "paying the price," Erica reflects, "God is punishing me. . . . That's why I'm hooked up to all these machines."

Reinforcing the notion that female sexuality is punished by pregnancy, which may be fatal, the soaps help perpetuate the eighteenth-century double bind for women: bearing children and continuing a male line are enshrined as a woman's greatest achievement, even as exercising her sexuality is punished by the pain of pregnancy and domination. (This dichotomy extends to menstruation, which women variously nickname "the curse" or "my friend" and even to the—hormonally induced—happy "glow" of pregnancy, which may nevertheless be attended by morning sickness, heartburn, constipation, and hemorrhoids.)

To "hook" and keep a man, women are supposed to be sexually alluring, but realizing female sexuality, even within a monogamous relationship, may lead to pregnancy and pain. Physiologically vulnerable during gestation and labor, pregnant women are additionally subjected to ideological confusion that enforces female subordination. So tenacious is this double message that, as indicated, it was first articulated in popular culture in the early novel and persists in today's soap operas. In both genres pregnancy is endorsed, even as the subtext reflects women's anxieties and fears about pain and mortality, calling into question the happiness women are supposed to experience in a condition that is surrounded by the rhetoric of punishment and subordination.

Since these notions are so deep-rooted in our culture, it may be worthwhile to re-examine them, especially as they find expression in our current ideas about natural childbirth. Today some obstetricians limit their practices to natural childbirth, allowing women no choice. Other physicians administer anesthesia only at the last stage of delivery, after most of the pain has subsided. But so deeply are our views about parturition inscribed in popular culture that the issue may be one of ideology as much as medical necessity, which may serve as a pretext for enforcing female punishment and subordination.

Like the early novel, the soap opera reconciles women to traditional feminine roles and relationships, reinforcing patriarchal stereotypes and structures. Like the sentimental novel, soap fantasies address themselves to women and are governed by a realism that, as one critic wrote of the early novel, "gives authenticity to the deceptions of romance." For all these reasons, soap beliefs—such as those about the family and pregnancy—are a vehicle for our profoundly ambivalent attitude towards women and female sexuality, which not only causes pain but also justifies the "ideal" Western family structure in which males dominate. The stories we have been telling ourselves on soap operas represent a deeply inscribed, enduring potential danger that can best be understood by tracing them back to past literature. Only then can we fully understand their impact and critique them in a way that frees us from oppression.

NOTE

¹ Moral violations on the soaps (the most frequent of which are deceit, murder, and premarital/extramarital sex) are normally not condoned and the offenders are usually punished (Sutherland and Siniawsky).