Soap Opera: Narrative And Gender

With the reforming of Chinese politics, economy and culture, the swift and violent rising of TV serial ("Desire" being its representative) in 1990s, the soap opera, as has been called "worldly myth", became one way of entertainment most loved and widely known by Chinese common people.Being a fictional narrative, "social symbolic behavior," and art of "story-telling," the soap opera plays a unique ideological role in our society as well as a function of " social myth"; it condenses, to some degrees, the collective mutual recognition, symbolizes human Utopian hope, manifests mass daydreams, game spirit, revelry desire and nostalgic emotion, and becomes in our daily life one kind of important ceremony and landscape. It not only has shaped our concept toward ourselves and the Others, but also has restricted our values, emotion and understanding of the world. Simultaneously, it is also a construction of human beings, thus has played a role that cannot be substituted in constructing gender relations, human knowledge and the belief system.The present paper holds that soap opera is one kind of narrative. In narrow sense, narrative refers to "the story", while the general narrative refers to phenomena of sign, behavior, and culture. In narrative, narrator employs sign to obtain, express, and construct significance, which is a cultural behavior. As a sort of culture, the soap opera appeared accompanying human exchange activities; it is the sign and symbolic framework expressing and inheriting systems of value and emotion.Essentially, narrative is a way of cultural expression; narratology is a perspective probe into culture.Taking the soap opera text as the research object, seeing from gender angle of view, employing the research methods of narratology, hermeneutics, typology, and cultural study, and putting soap opera into the macro-contexts of society, history and culture, examining respectively three types of texts of the historical drama, romance play, and family play, the paper discusses the relations between narrative and gender, soap opera and ideology, viewpoint utilization and authority discourse, rhetoric strategy and narrative manipulation, etc., at the meantime, reveals how soap opera, being the quickest and widest spreading mass narrative form, twist and cover real femininity in representation, reflection, portraying of female and story-telling. More importantly, this paper will discuss how soap opera, as a "symbolic practice" and "sign violence", work, and its role in reshaping human values, behavior mode and in construction of gender and identity. The purpose is to "uncover", to reveal the discourse significance, ideology and its interaction with power in and out of the soap opera text.The historical drama enjoys a status of "sublimity " in China TV culture, it is one kind of shared resource in which national behavior, market force and intellectuals participate; each kind of ideology powers, drawing support from " history", enters the political arena, and with the aid of "history" authoritative discourse, proves the inevitability and rationality of realistic order. The first chapter of the present paper takes the quite influential historical drama "Big Dwelling Gate" as a representative text, and embarks from four different angles of "mythological narrative," "race narrative," "history and memory," and the" heroic legend", discusses how the "Big Dwelling Gate" "narrate" the history, remould the myth, rewrite memory and camouflage the feminine historical truth.The romance, relying on fashion, aesthetic orientation, romance and naivety, is carefully weaving the "love myth", but this "myth" is the "emotion commodity" made by the cultural industry especially for mass, whose aim is to offer a vivarious and imaginative satisfaction for human's desire of happy life and happy love. The love myth is mostly starred by the female, a symbolic union of truth, kindness, and beauty, or union of selflessness, devotion, and sacrifice. The Anxin in Haiyan's romance play "the Jade Goddess of Mercy" i...