Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence (review)

Manicured Surface

Even before it hit the small screen, ABC's Desperate Housewives (2004) courted controversy. The evening soap opera, focusing on the lives of four suburban women after the suicide of their neighbor and friend Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), delves into the lurid secrets lurking just under the neatly manicured surface of the protagonists' lives.

Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass is the latest addition to I.B. Tauris' Contemporary Television Series. McCabe and Akass serve as editors and have overseen other volumes including Reading Sex and the City (2004) and Reading the L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (2006). The essays anthologized in Reading Desperate Housewives include writings from scholars and journalists whose contributions range from a transcript of an imagined recording of George W. Bush's comments on an episode to more traditional academic pieces.

The introduction provides a brief history of the creator, Marc Cherry, and the environment at ABC, summarizing some of the reactions characterized as "a pop culture phenomenon" (1). The book is divided into four sections: "Culture," "Sexual Politics," "Genre, Gender and Cultural Myths," and "Narrative, Confession, and Intimacy." Much of the writing focuses on the feminist or antifeminist, or post-feminist, or post-post-feminist, or post-post-post-feminist politics of the show and its depiction of suburbanites.

In the "Culture" section, David Lavery comments on conservative Americans' reactions to the show through the aforementioned satirical transcript, Rosalind Coward argues the show's popularity stems from its playful representation of emotional reality and its ability to tap into the cultural zeitgeist, Ashley Sayeau weighs in on the series' "flimsy feminism" (42), and Kim Akass posits that the women of Wisteria Lane may be suffering from the same quiet desperation that plagued housewives of Betty Friedan's generation. Among these, Lavery's innovative bit of social political satire stands out.

While the essay may not age well, the nature of the book series is to produce sharp, timely responses to current television programs, and it is certainly that. "Sexual Politics," the second section of Reading Desperate Housewives includes Samuel A. Chambers' essay on the show's subversive sexual politics, Janet McCabe's confession that she is drawn to Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross) despite the character's embodiment of "normalizing images of femininity" (75), Niall Richardson's reading of the show (particularly the character of Bree) as post-feminist camp, Kristian T. Kahn's argument that the willingness of the producers and creator to cater to conservative audiences has controlled and limited representation of homosexual identity, and Brian Singleton's assessment of the hegemonic masculinities invoked by the men of Wisteria Lane. The essays collected in this section provide a tantalizing exploration of potentially subversive elements balanced by more cautionary readings. Taken as a total, they echo the ambivalent responses to the series identified by the editors of the volume.

The pieces in "Genre, Gender and Cultural Myths" include Sharon Sharp's essay tying the disciplining of housewives on reality television shows to the disciplining that occurs on Desperate Housewives and Judith Lancioni's argument that the show should be studied as dramedy, a genre Lancioni sees as particularly post-feminist in nature. Additionally, Sherryl Wilson weighs in on the centrality of romance narratives to the plot and Anna Marie Bautista explores the solutions or lack of solutions available for the characters' domestic desperation.

In the final section, Deborah Jermyn comments on Mary Alice Young's omniscient posthumous narration, Sherianne Shuler, M. Chad McBride and Erika L. Kirby criticize the poor quality of the characters' friendships, Stacy Gillis and Melanie Waters explore the intersections of nostalgia, confession and motherhood in a set of letters published in Ms. Magazine and, Jennifer L. Pozner and Jessica Seigel debate whether the series is feminist or antifeminist in nature. Gillis and Waters' essay is perhaps the most compelling in the book. Looking outside the television show to the broader political landscape, the pair argues...