Never Too Much: The Everyday Implausible in American Daytime Soap Opera Aesthetics, 1930 to Today

Emmett, Ilana Ruby

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3er3-r504

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Never Too Much: The Everyday Implausible in American Daytime Soap Opera Aesthetics, 1930 to Today

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In this dissertation, I assert that a contradictory aesthetic has remained and been reborn in the U.S. daytime soap opera through time and technology; I call this the “everyday implausible.” Using textual analysis and archival research, I follow this genre from its beginnings on radio, through its move to television and its attempts to situate itself in a digital viewing context, focusing my attention on the transitions from one medium to another. The everyday implausible captures the way in which the genre operates in two opposing modes simultaneously, one of which reflects the banality and realism of everyday life and the other of which is implausible and more extreme (larger, louder, closer, etc.). I claim that the contradictory and simultaneous features of the everyday implausible function as both comfortable and unsettling and radical and reactionary. In this way, soap operas reframe the possibilities and potential of women’s everyday lives while simultaneously positioning the viewers back within a normative, patriarchal structure. I explore how identification, negotiation, hesitation, and transformation are all embedded in the everyday implausible and are reflections of the effort it takes for the soap opera’s women audiences to make a place for themselves where they are enough without being too much. The everyday implausible is an escape from the negotiation and hesitation implicit in the everyday lived experiences of women within patriarchy. It is, simultaneously, the aestheticization of that negotiation and hesitation that capitalist patriarchy demands. My analysis focuses on the aesthetics of women’s popular culture in order to both challenge how we determine standards of “good” and “bad” programming and to consider what kind of media transitions are facilitated or stymied in a streaming context. The purpose of this project is to contextualize the aesthetic of the daytime soap opera—one that has become an object of such ill regard to contemporary media audiences—and identify its significance as an aesthetic of marginality.

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