tl;dr: TV keeps the housewife down, man!
In her essay "Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy," Patricia Mellencamp analyzes the feminine comedic figures of Gracie Allen and Lucy Ricardo in terms of power relations within the fictional home and how these relate to the power relations on the television screen. To Mellencamp, the figures of Gracie and Lucy and their respective representations, specifically through the sitcom format, present a double-edged sword in the realm of feminism. As she contends: "For me, two issues are central: the importance of early 1950s comedy of idiosyncratically powerful female stars, usually in their late thirties or forties; and the gradual erosion of power that occurred in the representation of women within comedy formats" (81).
To Mellencamp, to place Gracie and Lucy as the centers of the comedy in their shows presupposes that they have a certain power and control over the males onscreen, who must then, somehow, steer the ship of their comedic antics on course in order to restore male (and therefore) domestic power equilibrium. Gracie and Lucy are either pushed to the margins or punished for exerting their forcefulness through comedy. Gracie and Lucy are both the subjects and objects of the joke, using comedy to attain some sort of liberation, but ultimately being "contained" to their domestic worlds because of their comedic styles. For Gracie it is complete nonsensical chatter and actions which justify George's paternal control and figure of stability. For Lucy, her physical antics of literally wanting to "break free" from the confines of being a wife often have her being punished or outsmarted by Ricky in the end, demonstrating that he knows that which is best for her because without him as a provider, Lucy's lack of talent and the convoluted messes her antics result in would leave Lucy helplessly adrift in the world.
I think of Mellencamp's analysis of the comedic housewife and their ultimate exclusion in terms of Lynn Spigel's essay "Installing the Television Set" in which she analyzes the social discourses of the television set, most specifically to housewives. Throughout the essay, the TV is both a window to an unknown world for the housewife stuck at home, a source of visual, vicarious liberation. But it also is painted as a nuisance, something that complicates the life of a wife. It is a gnarly piece of furniture that, despite its aesthetic ugliness, must somehow be incorporated into a carefully crafted domestic space with attention to angles, glare, etc. It is a source of exclusion. A woman stuck at home with the TV all day finds very little marvel to watch it at night, so as the family watches TV together, the wife attends to other duties. As Spigel notes on page 14, many appliance advertisements prioritized the implication that the appliance would place the woman out of the kitchen and in front of the TV set. Moreover, it is the other woman, a source of competition that threatens to make the wife obsolete.
The wife, in both Spigel and Mellencamp's essays, is kept down by the television, whether through its physical technology, or through its representational content. What is privileged is not the wife's relationship to the television, but the relationship of the head male and the other family members to the television. We can further see this in the general denigration of daytime TV, the programs most housewives have to watch, as notated by Tania Modleski. For many TV watchers, soap operas are a joke with outrageous plotlines, lackluster aesthetics, and can be considered sheer visual spectacle. In this regard, we often neglect the very real meaning these shows (even daytime talk shows with recognizable figures) have to housewives attending to their duties and who may very well be excluded from watching primetime programming to cook dinner, do the dishes, etc.
(Just as a brief addendum, I wonder how the representation of the wife in sitcom/TV transforms post 1950s. Take for example, Marge Simpson, Peggy Bundy, or even unconventional wives and mothers such as Jackie Peyton, a mother whose flaw is that she cannot reconcile her domestic break and her desire to be a good wife and mother.)
Thanks for this post! I really like the points you're making here and that TL;DR is pretty much everything about this week — one of the parts that stood out to me along the same lines is the notation that Lipsitz made about how as home appliances became more readily available, the amount of work women were expected to do in the home stayed the same, it's just that the standards were raised. It's not explicitly tied in the article, but I was thinking about how much of that is tied to representations on television. A new product that makes a task easier might not necessarily raise standards by itself, but the presentation of just how clean something can be with that product, whether on a show or in an advertisement, might.
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