ABSTRACT
In her study of gender and agency in American film and television, Kathleen Rowe argues that film “melodrama and comedy are linked by common ideologies that limit the plots available for narrative representations of female desire” (1995, 14). In melodrama, Rowe writes, the female protagonist can gain temporary agency only via suffering and self-sacrifice. In romantic comedy, the heroine exercises greater control over the narrative, but is eventually tamed by the male lead. Both classical Hollywood genres reassert patriarchal status quo. In contrast to these genres, the female-centered situation comedy, such as I Love Lucy, is a postmodern open-ended genre that spoofs “the tropes of masculinity and patriotism” and threatens the sanctity of social institutions (Rowe 1995, 53). Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of François Rabelais and carnival in early modern Europe and Natalie Zemon Davis’s analysis of popular culture and gender in early modern France, 1 Rowe contends that screen formats privileging the female comedian embody the genre memory of the unruly woman tradition and can be traced back to early modern European culture of carnival. Like the unruly woman of street carnival and Renaissance novel, female comedians disrupt ideological and narrative continuity of genres maintaining the patriarchal status quo.
