Passage III

HUMANITIES: The following passage is adapted from an article about soap operas (daytime television dramas) by Ruth Rosen titled “Search for Yesterday" (©1986 by Ruth Rosen).

Every week, an invisible nation of more than fifty million Americans watches soap operas. Stereotypical viewers of the past—the housewife, the infirm, the retired—have now been joined by teenagers, professionals, and college students, both female and male.

There is no doubt that soap operas have moved closer to the center of American popular culture. The source of their popularity, however, has puzzled researchers ever since the days of radio. Herta Herzog, an early investigator of radio soap culture, concluded during World War II that soaps give viewers emotional release, vicarious wish fulfillment, and advice about how to conduct their lives. Others have pointed to the soaps' suspense; one becomes addicted to the characters' unfolding fate. As in life, one never knows how it will all turn out. Some argue that viewers enjoy identifying with the characters' successes or, alternatively, with their suffering.

Undoubtedly, each of these notions does explain part of the soaps' mass appeal. Soaps can ease the loneliness and boredom of life. They do offer advice, sometimes implicitly, often explicitly, on what to wear, how to conduct love affairs, how to save a marriage, how to handle one's children, how to cope with heartache, how to enjoy the intrigue of romance. But soaps do more: they provide a surrogate family and social life, a stable network of friends and neighbors. Soaps offer continuity. People don't just watch soap operas; they live with them. Day after day, “as the world turns,” soap characters bare their struggles without making any real-life demands upon the viewer. With almost no effort at all, the viewer can participate vicariously in love affairs, friendships, and intrigue that seem intimate but are safely remote.

It should not be surprising that all sorts of Americans—not only the bed and house ridden—find solace in the mythically stable communities of soap operas. Some soap communities, after all, have lasted over thirty years. All potential viewers are members of a society that has been in constant transformation through geographic mobility and the loss of extended families. Loneliness, we are repeatedly told, has become pandemic in America, and the longing for community is a palpable need. Whether through religion, clubs, associations, or support groups—or through daily immersion in a favorite soap—many Americans search for some kind of communal life to counter varying degrees of social isolation and alienation.

Nor is this quest new. There is no golden past in America, despite the continuous effort to look back to one. To be an American has meant uprooting oneself from the old country, then struggling to adjust again to new settings, new cultural trends, new jobs, and new technologies. And, for the most part, Americans do it rather well. “Newness” long ago acquired a sacred place in the national iconography, as did “opportunity.” But individual success, when it came, was often at the expense of the continuity of family and community. The tension between the American commitment to individualism and the perennial search for a communal and collective life is at the heart of American social and cultural identity.

Here lies the extraordinary appeal and irony of the daytime soap opera; it is circulated by the very commercial culture which has engendered the need for it in the first place. As the stable small town fades, the soap opera keeps alive its idealized replica, the image of a community in which everyone knows or is related to everyone else, where continuity counts more than transience, where right and wrong are unambiguous, where good triumphs over evil. It is a world dominated by the domestic values of the family. Loyalty to family and community ultimately matter more than the individual's quest for success. Not that personal passion and ambition are missing. On the contrary, most of the drama turns on situations in which individual greed or lust conflicts with a family's best interests. While the monogamous heterosexual family is idealized, love and passion take place largely outside it. Moral failure is tolerated, but never condoned. As long as sinners bow to the community's idea of itself, they can belong and be redeemed. At the end of each strand of plot, all conflict is resolved so that the traditional values of the community and family are reaffirmed.