1998

20.1

Rhoda Zuk
Entertaining Feminism: Roseanne and Roseanne Arnold

Several years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich argued that Roseanne Arnold’s feminist role and aggressive affect in the working-class television series Roseanne flies in the face of the quietism and priggishness of middle-class feminism in America (Ehrenreich 28-31). She also snidely but rather accurately predicted a delayed emergence of "Roseanneology"—once "the women’s studies profession" looked up "from its deconstructions and ‘re-thinkings’" to acknowledge the gritty realities and lively aspirations of working-class women (Ehrenreich 28). In the event, feminist scholars have examined with sympathy Arnold’s articulation of feminist working class identity politics as well as the significance of its varied reception; they have also cautiously ratified Ehrenreich’s praise for the series (Bettie; Dresner; Lee; Rowe). In this view, Roseanne transposes feminist discourse and women’s knowledge into mass entertainment, and so is indeed remarkable—a populist as opposed to merely popular success: an outcropping of thirty years of feminist agitation in America, and an avenging angel of a heretofore unrepresented type, the downtrodden working-class wife and mother. On the other hand, Ehrenreich herself has given grounds for suspicion about the ideological function of "discovering the Other" in America. She argues in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989) that for thirty years the media and academics, prey to the anxiety common to the professional middle class about sustaining the self-discipline necessary to maintain economic stability and status, have participated in the insidious process of uncovering the existence of social groups onto whom the discoverers project the laxity and bad faith they fear in themselves. Each of these classes, including the poor in the early sixties, the working class in the late sixties, professional middle-class progressives in the seventies (the "New Class"), and the nouveau riche ("yuppies") in the mid-eighties is "as much invented as discovered" (Ehrenreich 196), and subjected to the rational interests of the dominant logic of capitalists whose own morality, motives, and power are never addressed. The charged public discourse on social difference, arising from the fear and resentment inherent in a social order defined by unequal distribution of resources, communicates object lessons about adjusting social conduct to preserve the self within the economic hierarchy. Ehrenreich’s own thesis, then, arouses skepticism about the televisual "discovery" of the working-class woman, created—after a gap of thirty years since working-class women returned to the workforce in great numbers and reshaped family structures—when their working and domestic conditions are deteriorating (see, for example, Stacey). Similarly, the success of Roseanne Arnold’s persona as the raucous, plain-speaking feminist who represents them is puzzling in light of the intense hostility to feminism’s public face, as evidenced, for instance, in the political correctness backlash.

The deplorable status of the actual "postindustrial ‘proletariat’" (Stacey 15) and the crisis in confidence that besets contemporary feminism require a resistant reading of "the working-class feminist" as produced by hegemonic corporate interests. Roseanne Arnold’s feminist persona, considered in the context of the broader feminist "star" system, typifies a media-driven discourse that empties the women’s movement of its historical, intellectual, and political meaning to foreground the white middle-class drama of intimacy—(hetero)sexual love and the fraught desire to be a "good" mother. Roseanne naturalizes deprivation and hardship for women by emphasizing the imperative of the maternal. The symbolic economy of the series is therefore congruent with the contemporary discourse that promotes family values while it justifies stripping workers of subsistence and hope. Roseanne Arnold and her namesake Roseanne signal the return of the repressed: American individualism is back—this time, saturated in nostalgia for noisy collective protest. A marginal type—the fat, rude, ungrammatical woman — acts as the idealized vehicle of this revival. The star and her series, mining the affect of grassroots political resistance, function to suppress anxiety about manifestly oppressive social conditions born of class and gender hierarchies.

Julie Bettie points out that Roseanne accurately reflects the new face of the working class: it is female. The program’s representation of a differently gendered workforce, Bettie argues, is, moreover, compellingly hopeful: unlike Archie Bunker, Arnold’s television character can be "a hero. . . . She represents the working class as blatantly feminist and progressive in a moment of backlash, thumbing her nose at class stereotypes . . ." (Bettie 142). Bettie here insightfully summarizes Roseanne/Arnold’s appeal. However, interrogation of the cultural need for such a hero is necessary. It must be recalled that, historically, business has valued the female labor force as cheap, docile, and expendable. The contemporary market place similarly favors women workers, mostly non-unionized and often weighted with family obligations, over men, because they are still more vulnerable. The mass of working women—the mass of the working class—are exploited, however much they reject stereotypes in their quotidian scramble to survive. The series, in centering on Arnold’s highly publicized persona, formulates a nostalgic recollection of the second wave feminist coming to power—actively rebellious, indifferent to standards of body image and dress, liable to say or do any damn thing. This representation of an heroic assertion of freedom, parasitic of an emancipatory politics, nourishes the compensatory ideology entrenched in the series. The working-class feminist, situated primarily within the context of the nuclear family, insists on the dignity of recognition rather than on social change. Roseanne, in mythifying the working-class woman, mystifies the social relations which deprive her and make struggle necessary.

Arnold’s persona and Roseanne instantiate the process whereby reactionary ideology is constituted through an appeal to democratic impulses. This operation assuages American anxiety about its political onslaught against vulnerable groups and reassures those dispossessed constituencies that they have a voice. Before turning to the details and trajectory of Arnold’s career and the development of the series in which she stars, it is crucial to emphasize that the conceptual and emotional confusion reflected in and engendered by each also characterizes some strands of television content analysis and postmodern cultural criticism. In some cases, these methodologically various critical positions converge ideologically in their theoretical assumptions about the politics of representation. In postulating the articulation of "different voices" as an end in itself and figuring them as moments of self-evidently equal and equalizing representation, such criticism salvages the unequal relation between forces of cultural production and audiences’ power in practices of consumption. However, this theoretical stance fails to acknowledge that oppressed social groups lack the negotiating power—economic means, cultural capital, organization—to gain advantage from freedom of expression. A facile celebration of talking heads actually restricts the possibility of political resistance, cultural transformation, and structural change that would dislodge hegemonic interests. This discourse enlarges the cast of characters in public space while maintaining traditional subject positions and dominant worldviews.

Academics and journalists commonly congratulate the actor Roseanne Arnold and the television industry for depicting Roseanne’s central character as worthy, credible, and valiant (Douglas; Lahr). But the belief that the medium’s acknowledgment of a new constituency entails meaningful acceptance proceeds from the naive assumption that television is a transparent medium. As Mary Ellen Brown observes about the specific genre of feminist content analysis, the method "is only descriptive and fails to critique the discursive construction of women" (Brown 13). Indeed, Gillian Skirrow speculates that "[p]erhaps . . . the working class, because of its otherness in relation to media culture, has itself become the guarantee of authenticity" (168-69). Nor does the claim that television provides "role models" take into account the opacity and complexity of lived experience. Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis (1992) provide a materialist corrective to the sanguine assessment of television’s inclusionary practices in their study of audience reception, finding in cross-class interviews that The Cosby Show was popular even with unrepentant racists, since audiences admired the black man’s class accouterments and identified with his idealized family life. This case illustrates network television’s tendency to reinstate predictable values when representing "difference." Corporate decision-making is notoriously averse to overtly politicized programming.

Roseanne’s unusual demographic focus and feminist themes, nevertheless, diverge from the usual. Unstable market forces account for the decision to first broadcast in 1988. As a rule, according to Ien Ang, "the savoir-faire of program creation is ultimately subordinated [to] the discourse of audience measurement" (21). This privileging of the empirical enables management to argue that existing formulae fulfill the desires and curiosities of consumers. Networks submit to innovation only when forced. Richard Butsch confirms this process when he concludes that working-class representations are concentrated during three transitional periods for network television: "The most recent revival, in the late 1980s . . . has come at a time of intense competition for ratings in an era of declining network hegemony" (389). Within this context, the ABC network hierarchy agreed to a series focusing on a working-class woman and starring a feminist comic.

The production company, Carsey-Werner, enacted an apparent contradiction when creating Roseanne. On the one hand, it undertook a conscientious striving for authentic working-class representation in dialogue, costuming, and sets; on the other, expedient labor practices also contributed to the program’s competitive edge. This conflict crystallizes the paradox of network television production. Matt Williams, who conceived the concept for a series about the working class—"that’s my background"—undertook research in two Midwestern towns, conducting "conversations with approximately 50" working-class women (Mayerle 72). He says he was interested to "explore all the things [working-class women] confront and how they survive . . . this stoic but fatalistic frame of mind of ‘Well, hell, it can’t get any worse. So what are you going to do but laugh?’" (Mayerle 72). The kitchen in Williams’ grandmother’s house was the model for Roseanne’s set (Mayerle 73), and the living room sofa was ordered from the Sears catalogue. Roseanne Arnold explains in My Lives that, on her part, she wanted "to create a real woman/mother on TV—or political reasons, as an activist" ( 6). To this end, she "lectured [Matt Williams on motherhood and matriarchy for hours and hours . . ." (My Lives 4). Yet Carsey-Werner carried out its careful and nostalgic construction of the brute realities of a woman worker’s life at the expense of actual workers’ conditions and organization. Judith Mayerle explains that Carsey-Werner, being independent, was in a position to hire non-union labor; among other things, this allowed the series a leg up in the initial season when a Writers Guild strike was in progress (84). The company also employed non-unionized technicians, set builders, costume designers, and so on (Mayerle 87, n19). Such activity gives the lie to an apparently well-meaning production designed to communicate the affective life of a large group materially disadvantaged by the overriding of workers’ organization.

The violation of labor rights entailed by the so-called "global assembly line"—whereby American production is transferred to an easily exploitable Third World labor force, consequently rendering American workers also exploitable—is ironically underscored by American television’s international distribution of programming produced with scant regard for workers’ rights. Meanwhile, Roseanne celebrates the deprived working-class "culture" for its worthy resilience. Stanley Aronowitz’s point about the economic significance of American popular culture further clarifies the irony: "As American-made durable goods no longer dominate world markets for these products, the ingression of American culture in world communications markets has grown" (194). The story of Roseanne’s origins demonstrates the way that capitalism mystifies oppressive social relations precisely by replicating signs of reified identity and authenticity:

As Baudrillard remarks, "a panic-stricken production of the real and referential" today overtakes even the drive toward material production. We exhibit an "obsession with signs of reality, tradition, and lived experience as nostalgia engulfs us in an hysterical attempt to find stakes of meaning. . . . The production of such fictions of the real provide the illusion of actuality and bolster our sense of the reality of the stakes" (235). Roseanne, its material production embedded in an intransigently unethical corporate structure and its nostalgic representation constituted within television’s compensatory and overdetermined representational system, would seem to exemplify the Althusserian nightmare. That it is always possible some audiences might recuperate Roseanne as a vehicle for resistance begs the question of the need for new creative forms and modes of production.

Meanwhile, Arnold the actor takes on feminist subjects and themes only to flatten them out under the pressure of (temporary) personal conviction. Her feminist persona thrives on destabilizing performance. In fact, she once consolidated, conspicuously—in an op-ed piece to The New York Times—the range of critical type-casting that had accrued by the end of Roseanne’s first season: "I’ve stood for so many things this year I need to sit down a while and catch my breath" ("What Am I, a Zoo?" 115). Feminist criticism that strives to honor as well as analyze her sexual and class politics founders on her contradictions. While Kathleen Rowe argues that Arnold’s obesity and joke-making subvert patriarchal norms, she finds herself having to justify the ways Arnold "has reinvented her persona by altering both the literal contours of her body and the narrative in which it is understood" (214). Rowe refers to the scandal arising from Arnold’s public statements about having recalled incest while in therapy, and to her subsequent cosmetic surgery and dieting. Rowe’s take on the incest issue is that the media’s pathologizing of Arnold fulfills a cultural "desire to see ‘deviant’ women as victims rather than rebels" (214). This is an acute observation; however, Rowe overlooks the reciprocity between the media and celebrity in publicity-making. Arnold’s second autobiography, My Lives (1994), reveals her perspicacious handling of the press. In this instance of self-exposure, she complied with the American predilection for subjecting private life to public judgment. In terms of the popular capital accruing from the confession of abuse and the indictment of her father and mother, she can’t lose. Staging herself as wronged and therefore tragic, she expands her range to include melodrama as well as comedy.

Rowe’s tortuous justification of Arnold’s dieting and cosmetic surgery masks the star’s consumerist power. Dubbing these procedures "shape-shifting," she moves from a celebration of Arnold’s "courage" to be fat to an explanation of the "liminality" of the body, "tethered" as it is to "the grotesque" and therefore still "unruly" (217). Determined to tout Arnold as feminist, Rowe refuses to criticize the plundering of women’s knowledge and organization for a self-promoting script, or to view the female subject as fickle and her actions as irreconcilable with emancipatory consciousness. The slippage, plain as the nose on one’s face or the weight on one’s body, between feminist working-class identity and immensely privileged careerism goes unremarked: individuated diet plans and cosmetic surgery are the prerogative of the rich, just as huge bodies and unrevised facial structures are the lot of the badly nourished poor. Class issues and material realities are here rendered invisible, crowded out by the emphasis on the psychic burden of female memory and physicality.

To ask why some women can seek help and redress for autobiographical injustice and physical infelicities while others cannot entails a critique of systemic inequity. It is easier to dwell on the dramatic and utopian discovery of the self that might obtain in the more universal practice of motherhood. Ultimately, Arnold eschews engagement with sexual politics, and criticism of the unequal distribution of social and economic resources, to promote maternity. Like Camille Paglia, another postmodern believer in biological determinism, Arnold disposes women’s experience of the tensions between personal aspiration to autonomy and gendered roles. Paglia dissolves the culturally and socially constructed conflict between the imperatives of maternal and paid work by gainsaying feminism and ennobling and simplifying sexuality, particularly maternity: "It is woman, as mistress of birth, who has the real power" (32). Significantly, she cites entertainers as oracles on the subject: "Hollywood actresses, used to expressing emotional truths, are always reappearing after a pregnancy to proclaim, ‘I’m not important. My child is important’ . . . It is nature, not patriarchal society, that puts motherhood and career on a collision course" (31). Arnold’s genius lies in reclaiming, in accordance with the zeitgeist, the cliché about woman as the heart of the household. Our period of middle-class family values reinvests by reformulating the ideology of motherhood. Rosalind Coward’s Our Treacherous Hearts: Why Women Let Men Get Their Way (1992) argues that contemporary culture displaces subjection to husbands so as to allow subjection to children, thereby ensuring that the traditional self-sacrifice of women continues. Coward’s book, notable for its methodological shortcomings in concentrating only on middle- and upper-class women and its perspicacity about just that group, in fact describes the mechanics of class reproduction—the fraught relation between maternal performance and children’s achievement. Arnold steers a course in her comic feminist "act" between voicing resentment arising from managing children and articulating pride in surviving them. That she does so in "white trash" language and demeanor distances, makes safe, the expression of maternal frustration and fury.

In Roseanne: My Life as a Woman Arnold’s autobiographical account of her early life as a waitress and married mother of three, an avid reader of feminist books, an activist comic and protégé of women’s coffee houses, she recounts at last her desire to be at once a "radical" and a "mainstream" comic (172) The epiphanic moment of achievement occurs in the company of her sister:

We discovered it one day in a restaurant. I remembered my Mom and all the neighbor ladies reading [a book called] Fascinating Womanhood when I was young, and how there was a chapter on manipulating your old man by becoming a "Domestic Goddess" . . . Perfect Wife, Homemaker, etc. I said, "What if I say ‘Domestic Goddess’ as a term of self-definition, rebellion, truth telling?" Sister stood up in the restaurant and screamed: "My God, Rose, it’s Millions, no it’s Billions!" . . . When I started doing that act, suddenly I was just so popular. (My Life as a Woman 172-73)

Roseanne stages the tragicomedy of the heroic mother, still as in the televised fifties central to the home, but truculent rather than silent and subservient in performing routine duties, and wielding tremendously noisy emotional power—a power which doesn’t solve anything, or change the working-class woman’s conditions, and therefore propels the "situation." The series, presenting the novelty of the familiar rather than a radical departure from the usual representation of women on television, has the flavor of old wine in new bottles. Women’s discontent with their domestic roles has surfaced to be laughed at and away since the inception of television (see, for instance, Mellencamp 1986). However, Arnold’s performance of femininity raises the stakes. The television show does not valorize marriage and maternity in an overt or unqualified sense. Maternity and caregiving are not posited as natural per se, but as achievements upon which female identity and authority depend. Interviews, autobiography, and stand-up comedy—her consciousness-raising—bespeak the pain of family life and lend credence to television comedy’s political content. Yet the drive to salvage the family is all the more tenacious. Arnold echoes the angry female voice of the women’s liberation movement in the service of calling closure on the liberatory and open-ended potential of feminism.

Elaborating on her exhilarating shift from marginal to mainstream comic, Arnold provides an example from a stand-up routine of the redefined feminism and left politics—she comes to bury these, not to praise them—that enthralls and pleases the nightclub audience:

[U]s women were being duped, sold a crock of shit, given wooden nickels sister, when we thought for one second that Betty Crocker, Ms. magazine or careers, or abortion or day care was anything important. All they do is keep us busy. . . . Sisterhood’s Dead. Motherhood is where it’s at. Mothers: make your sons lay down their weapons. (My Life as a Woman 174-5)

Another passage in her autobiography sums up, in terms of period cliché and the New Age assurance that the plenitude of history is just around the corner, her political progress from restless questioning to feminist engagement to feminine transcendence: "I didn’t believe that the sixties were over, I believed they had mutated into feminism, and could not go on without it. I now feel that feminism has gone as far as it could go, and that it has mutated into Women’s Spirituality, and cannot go on without that" (My Life as a Woman 178-79). She has seen the future—and it is postfeminist. The retreat into the essentialized, special self and the refuge of a revised maternal mythology comprises Roseanne’s ideological basis.

The television series universalizes Woman by reducing working class women to their maternal role and function and other adjunct affective relationships with husbands, sisters, mothers, friends. Roseanne’s central character, Roseanne, caters to all of these. Verbal exchanges and visual arrangements make clear that, as married mother of three—not widowed, divorced, single, gay—she is the most stable and stabilizing character. The conflation of Roseanne Arnold with her autobiographical television character in some out-takes at the end of each episode signals and underscores in several ways this process of diminishing feminism and class consciousness. In an obfuscation of class difference, Roseanne Arnold gets down and dirty with Loretta Lynn about how to keep real-life husbands; or, Roseanne Arnold and Joan Collins sweep the floor of the set and make coffee for the crew. The wealthy and glamorous woman, maintaining stability against all odds, gossiping, cleaning up, serving working men, appears as a counterpart of the steadfast working-class wife and mother. Such scenes offer reassurance that feminists are ordinary folks making a success, but never being above themselves.

Arnold, playing out an actual pregnancy on the series in 1995, gestures towards re-establishing, for working-class character and celebrity, the utopian possibility of motherhood. The attempt is refracted through a middle-class lens. In an episode in which family members videotape their feelings and reflections for the child soon to be born, Roseanne Conner/Arnold summarizes her children’s characters and emphasizes her two daughters’ troubled lives. Her vow to "do it right this time" reveals the anxiety, the regret and diffident hope, of the "new" motherhood (not to mention the trumpery of other personal growth movements). However, Roseanne Conner’s daughters, seated together in another room for the videotaping, counterpoint their mother’s sentimental declaration of desire with fatalistic disdain for her terrifying control over them. The central character, then, inspires generalized admiration for the maternal role and contempt for the power relations it generates. "Instinct" drives the mother both to nurture and tyrannize her children and her husband—sexually all-man, but domestically irresponsible. Maternal love and the beloved’s disgust are thus established as eternal verities of family life. Naturalized domestic conflict, which displaces the critique of sexual politics, ensures comfortable comedy; to sustain melodramatic interest, the series deals in turn with forces impinging upon the traditional family.

The series resists the representation of feminist argument or even achievement. In an episode featuring Roseanne Conner’s eldest daughter, Becky, subjected to harassment, in the form of an unjustified reprimand, in her job as a supermarket clerk, the issue turns into a gender dispute not between Becky and her male boss, but between her father and boyfriend, who vie for the privilege of punching the supervisor. Becky insists that she can "handle it" without male help. How a female worker can exercise independence in her vulnerable circumstance is an omitted consideration. Presumably, Becky must learn her mother’s art of devastating verbal retort to preserve her dignity; undertaking action which might alter the workplace to enforce fairness and respect is certainly beyond the program’s conceptualization. In keeping with Roseanne’s understanding of working-class female identity, the ability to survive working conditions functions as an index of feminine maturity. The characters take for granted not only the necessity, but also the bad and degrading conditions, of wage-earning work. Indeed, the series undermines any other consciousness of work. Roseanne Conner’s sister, Jackie, longing to be taken seriously, gains employment in nontraditional fields, assuming for a while the roles of police officer and truck driver. These choices signal Jackie’s comically muddled desire and affirm her ambiguous status as a sexually active single woman. On the other hand, the program conveys respect for Roseanne’s ambition to be a writer, a choice later taken up by her daughter who goes to college to further her purpose. The desire for rarefied professional autonomy satisfies middle-class conceptualizations of vague but worthy feminine purpose.

Omitting the dynamics of the workplace to focus on affective individual interaction, the work setting in the restaurant is an extension of Roseanne Conner’s kitchen, not least because her family works, visits, congregates there. This progress at once reflects and deflects the circumstances of many women in the "downsized" economic order. Increasingly, women "work at home," assuming complete responsibility for making a profit, receiving no benefits, and coping with men and children underfoot. Roseanne renders new forms of exploitation and personal insecurity as a happy contrast to traditional modes of work. In the ninth year of Roseanne’s production (1996-7), the central character wins a lottery, allowing the situation to relinquish representation of working-class hardship and to revolve instead around the drama of working-class identity.

Roseanne’s episodes and story lines express dominant values, tinged with New Right ideology, about sexuality, family relations, unpaid and waged labor, and class origins. This is to mock women’s choices. Exhorting women to strive for full agency by therapeutic or self-willed individualized strategies, and promoting the fiction that women are powerful in the private realm, denies the materiality of power relations and the ways that economic security and status shape women’s lives and psychic well-being. While women assuredly maintain domestic surroundings, they do not govern or determine the course of private life. The television series addresses the anxieties ensuing from women’s hardships and powerlessness, but evades interrogation of the institutions responsible for them in its creation of the redemptive persona. Roseanne’s persona and voice—all the feminist personae and individuated voices in America— cannot, by merely asserting blithe versions of Manifest Destiny, bring women any closer to producing social change.

Rhoda Zuk
Mount Saint Vincent University
Departments of English and Women’s Studies
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
B3M 2J6