Brunsdon_1

7/28/2019 Brunsdon_1

1/14

Introduction to Part II

M y ow n book, Reading th Romance, was only on eintervention in this complex and ongoing struggleto redefine fm inine subjectivity and sexuality. M yobjective was to place th romance with respect notonly to th discourses o f patriarchy but also to those offeminism. Although I tried very hard not to dismiss thactivities of th Smithton wom e n and made an effortto unders t and th act of romance reading as a positiveresponse to th conditions of everyday life, my accountunw ittingly repeated th sexist assum ption that haswarranted a large portion of th commentary onth romance. It was still motivated, that is, by th assumption that someone ought towo rry responsiblyabout th effect of fantasy on wom en readers .(Janice Radway 1994:214)T H i s section offers detailed textual analyses of three diffrentmodes of engagement with th soap opra and th housewife.One is clearly scholarly, th second ambivalently so , while ththird takes as its primary material a tlvision soa p opra and asso-ciated pu blicity ma terial. In contra st with th opening chapter which

t raced a history across a range of writing and imagery, thse threechapters are organized as closely read case studies of diffrent kinds ofmaterial, distinguished historically, a nd through country of origin,genre, and mdium. I suggest that a nalyses of thse diffrent kinds ottext allow us to identify rcurrent figures and tropes in both soapopra and th analysis of th genre. In addition to th housewife, w hois represented both in and as a viewer o/radio and tlvision sriais,th most signifkant of thse is th personherse l fthat J a n i c eRadway describes in th epigraph to this introduction, th ' someone'w ho 'ought to worry responsibly about th effect of fantasy onwom en readers '. By juxtaposing detailed analyses of this very d i f f r e n tmaterial , I show both how soap opraas text and scholarshipisdominated by this someone w ho worries responsibly and how t h i sfigure is differently constituted at dif frent historical mom ents .

The f i rs t chapte r of this pa rt , Chapter 2, examines th research intoth audiences fo r radio soap opra f rom th ea r ly 1940s conducled in


2/14


3/14


4/14


5/14


6/14


7/14


8/14


9/14


10/14


11/14


12/14


13/14


14/14

Brunsdon_1

Documents