Page 259 - Communication Theory and Research

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244 Communication Theory & Research
between home, office and boat. Mothers stay at home but the dynasty’s daughters
work in the shipping line. The patriarch’s workplace is transformed from the
sleek locus of power manoeuvres to the more recognizable reality of a professional
or business setting.

Gender relations

As in the American model, wives sometimes have a profession or work (e.g.
Virna of Brightness; Brinkman’s women are nurses, even doctors; Edera sells
clothes) but they are not allowed a career or real power (in Die Schwarzwaldklinik
Christa, for example, has to leave Brinkman’s life and the soap when she decides
to specialize, Reider Dahl’en’s granddaughter, who becomes the head of Redereit,
remains totally dependent on her grandfather and adviser). Their access to
power is still measured by their ability to deliver (beauty or baby) to their
husbands (Liebes and Katz, 1993).
In terms of acceptable sexual mores, the asymmetry between the sexes is far
more blatant than, say, in the classic dynastic soap, Dallas. While the broader
circle of characters are distributed rather equally between JR and Sue Ellen, the
entourage of ‘old friends’ around the central couple of Yagos and his (second)
wife Virna consists mostly of a trail of (past and present) women lovers of Yagos.
Moreover, as men are assumed to be polygamous in nature, their illicit affairs are
often not kept clandestine. Yagos is portrayed as a good husband although his
wife Virna knows him to be frequently unfaithful. The rules of sexual behaviour
in Brightness and in Edera also prioritize men far beyond their given biological
advantages. Two patterns of love relationships – in which men initiate, and act,
and women pay the consequences – stand out as different from Dallas, to the
extent to which this latter pattern allows men to exercise violence towards
women without being punished. On the one hand, there is a proliferation of
men’s ‘pure’, unrequited love of a woman and, at the other extreme, the same
men may rape the women they love, or kill their foetus when a baby is undesir-
able. As rape is seen as a masculine privilege it is not punished. 9

The community model

Community soaps open up the closed, self-sufficient structure of an overpower-
ing Dallas-type family to include a whole neighbourhood of ordinary families.
The all-embracing, hierarchical, dynastic dream world is substituted with a com-
munity in which loves, betrayals and reconciliations are part of the struggle
through recognizable daily routines, coloured by more or less pedestrian hard-
ships of sickness, unemployment and teenage drug habits. Britain, as stated
above, has the longest tradition of community soaps celebrating the life of working-
class urban people. Whereas in the 1990s some small beginnings have been
made in Scandinavian countries to produce soaps which portray their own rural
communities (Denmark and Norway with Landsbeyen and I de Beste Familier