POPULAR FEMININE NARRATIVES: A STUDY OF ROMANCES, GOTHICS, AND SOAP OPERAS

This dissertation analyzes three forms of popular narratives for women: romantic novels, Gothic novels, and soap operas. Drawing on current as well as older theories of narrative, it shows how each form corresponds to an important stage in women's lives (courtship, marriage, motherhood) and helps women to resolve the psychological conflicts and social contradictions experienced at such times. Further, by applying to the texts insights gained from the growing body of literature on feminine psychology, the dissertation begins to formulate a theory of the "dynamics of feminine literary response."

Chapter I discusses some of the common assumptions of mass culture criticism to determine which inhibit and which further an understanding of women's popular narratives. The criticism of T. W. Adorno and of other members of the Frankfurt School, whose works have been widely influential, too often merely reiterates what Walter Benjamin called "the ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator." Leo Spitzer's discussion of advertising art, in its generosity towards the mass audience, its close reading of the text, and its emphasis on the utopian nature of mass art, provides a useful approach to popular culture studies.

Chapter II analyzes popular romances for women--specifically, those published by the Harlequin Company. It claims that "romantic suffering" is at once "an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering," as Marx said of religious suffering. Harlequin novels also provide a means by which women can work through the sense of guilt, a central concern of romances since Henry Fielding accused Samuel Richardson's Pamela of being a "sham."

Chapter III discusses the ways Gothic novels enable women to resolve "separation anxieties" and "oedipal conflicts," which, psychoanalysts have observed, the female often re-experiences upon leaving her family. Romances and Gothics each embody a primary anxiety: romances express the "hysterical" personality (the individual who feels morally persecuted) and Gothics, the "paranoid" personality (the individual who feels physically persecuted). Psychoanalytic literature suggests that, far from being abnormal, both the hysterical character and the paranoid character strikingly resemble the "normal idealized feminine personality."

Chapter IV argues that the narrative form of soap operas, while endlessly placing obstacles between desire and fulfillment, nevertheless offers a "pleasure of the text" unlike that provided by most other types of narrative. Hence, an analysis of soap operas helps to define the nature of a possible feminist aesthetics.