The Oprah Phenomenon

Oprah’s Book Club and the American Dream

191 Oprah’s Book Club and the American Dream Malin Pereira In their essay “America Dreamin’: Discoursing Liberally on The Oprah Winfrey Show” Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg assert that although the show identifies the failures and limitations of the American Dream for women and African Americans and, to a lesser extent, for the lower classes, in the end, it recuperates this classic mythology by affirming that self-actualization is indeed the key to social and economic success.They argue that this belief that the American Dream is accessible to everyone, regardless of the social forces governing their lives, dominates the narrative of the show. Not surprisingly, Epstein and Steinberg are critical of The Oprah Winfrey Show’s promotion of such middle-class liberal values and its related failure to offer meaningful critiques of the ways sexism, racism, classism, and heterocentrism shape the lives of many Americans.1 However, the original Oprah’s Book Club—an aspect of the show they do not discuss—offers an implicit critique of this narrative of accessibility, even if it is a critique the show itself might attempt to repress.The novels of Toni Morrison,She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb, We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates, House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, Cane River by LalitaTademy, and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, all selections for the original book club, do in fact expose the difficulties that many Americans have accessing the middle-class security that constitutes the realization of the American Dream. Further, the episodes in which these books are discussed do not uniformly comply with the recuperation of the American Dream that 1 Malin Pereira Epstein and Steinberg identify as the dominant discourse in The Oprah Winfrey Show. Instead, a nascent awareness that the dream is illusory erupts in book club discussions, an awareness that the show nevertheless attempts to evacuate or suppress.Whether or not the show’s narrative is deliberately framed to assert the primacy of individual agency in achieving the American Dream,the literature—and audience members’ and authors’ discussion of it—plays a subversive role in that discourse, the effects of which are expressed symptomatically.2 Notably, as the books selected for study become more self-consciously literary,the criticisms they pose become more difficult to contain, exemplified by the eruptions of audience members,book club participants,and the authors themselves. The narrative of possessive individualism that sustains the idea of the American Dream as accessible is increasingly challenged. As Cecilia Konchar Farr notes in her book Reading Oprah, the “American Dream comes true again and again on Oprah!” through Winfrey herself and the books she selects. Farr’s endnote discussing Epstein and Steinberg’s article, though acknowledging a concern about the show’s emphasis on individualism and the power of capitalism to maintain inequities, ultimately does not affirm their argument. Instead, Farr claims that the book club’s “talking readers” are the voices of the dispossessed who, through the book club, have punched a hole in the status quo.3 Likewise, Kathleen Rooney points out the “doctrine of mindless American optimism” controlling The Oprah Winfrey Show, as demonstrated by the show’s “master narrative” imposed on the novels through competing narratives.4 Both authors position themselves as primarily in favor of the book club.As Rooney sums it up, her book is “a largely positive appraisal of the club as an important and influential cultural institution, one which . . . has made substantial progress toward effacing and eradicating decrepit, frequently racist and misogynistic cultural hierarchies.”5 Although Rooney’s and Farr’s arguments do not specifically disallow the one I pursue here, neither seems particularly interested, as both espouse a mostly positive understanding of the book club phenomenon. The dismissal and then reclamation of the American Dream is evident in several of the earliest selections for the original book club, such as She’s Come Undone byWally Lamb,announced January 22,1997. She’s Come Undone follows Dolores as she experiences abandonment by her father, the death of her mother, obesity, rape, a destructive rela- Oprah’s Book Club and the American Dream 1 tionship, and, finally, healing and a new relationship.The novel initially critiques the sexism, classism, and racism of American society, demonstrating how social and economic security is predominantly unavailable to women who lack money, beauty, or access to other resources. By the end, though, the plot...