Page 90 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Melodramatic identifications: television fiction and women's fantasy 81
recognition, in their surrender to some power outside the subject, of the fact that one can
never have everything under control all the time, and that consequently identity is not a
question of free and conscious choice but always acquires its shape under circumstances
not of one’s own making. Identification with these feelings is connected with a basic, if
not articulated, awareness of the weighty pressure of social reality on one’s subjectivity,
one’s wishes, one’s desires. On the other hand, identification with a melodramatic
character like Sue Ellen also validates those feelings by offering women some room to
indulge in them, to let go as it were, in a moment of intense, self-centred abandon, a
moment of giving up to the force of circumstances, just like Sue Ellen has done, so that
the work of self-(re)construction is no longer needed. I would argue that such moments,
however fleeting, can be experienced as moments of peace, of truth, of redemption,
moments in which the complexity of the task of being a woman is fully realized and
accepted. In short, whilst indulgence in a melodramatic identity in real life will generally
only signify pathetic weakness and may have paralysing effects, fantasy and fiction
constitute a secure space in which one can be excessively melodramatic without suffering
the consequences. No wonder melodrama is so often accompanied with tears.

FINAL REMARKS

This interpretation of the appeal of melodramatic characters among women must, of
course, be contextualized and refined in several ways. First of all, by trying to explain
what it means for women to identify with a melo-dramatic fictional character, I have by
no means intended to justify or endorse it. I have tried to make it understandable, in the
face of the ridicule and rejection that crying over melodramatic fiction (as if it were
irrational) continues to receive. However, my analysis does not extend to any further
impact upon the subjects concerned. Whether the release of melodramatic feelings
through fantasy or fiction has an empowering or paralysing effect upon the subject is an
open question and can probably not be answered without analysing the context of the
fantasizing.
Second, we should not overlook the fact that not all women are attracted to
melodrama, or not always, and that some men can be moved by melodrama too. If
anything, this fact suggests that femininity and masculinity are not enduring subject
positions inhabited inevitably by biological women and men, but that identity is
transitory, the temporary result of dynamic identifications. Further research and analysis
could give us more insight into the conditions, social, cultural, psychological, under
which a surrender to the melodramatic imagination exerts its greatest appeal to particular
subjects. Melodrama has been consistently popular among women in the modern period,
but this does not have to be explained exclusively in terms of constants. The fundamental
chasm between desire and reality, which forms the deepest ‘truth’ of the melodramatic
imagination, may be an eternal aspect of female experience, but how that chasm is
bridged symbolically and in practice is historically variable. In fact, there is a
fundamentally melodramatic edge to feminism too. After all, are not the suffering and
frustration so eminently materialized in melodramatic heroines the basis for the anger
conveyed in feminism? And does not feminism stand for the overwhelming desire to