Day 42: As The World Turns

Well I'm getting near the end of my allotted days of this Lenten time writing project, and I didn't even get a chance to spend time talking about another two sub-groups of delay of recognition stories. Scaramouche is a novel in which characters who interact throughout the story have no clue that in the end they will turn out to be family members. I don't want to spoil the ending, but think of Luke and Darth Vader. There are many favorite stories that I have which include an apocalyptic moment when two main characters find out they are siblings, or parent and child, or twins who were separated at birth, or some other family tie which totally rocks their world at the moment of recognition. But I'm short on entries and have to move on to the final days and tie it all together for Easter.

The other sub-set of stories has to do with a disguise being removed from someone who has been passing as a member of the opposite gender. As You Like It is a Shakespeare play that comes to mind, and many Shakespeare comedies have women who are disguised as men and who help an story that seems certainly to be a tragedy to end up as a comedy. I mention some of my favorites cross-dressing stories in a blog entry from a few years ago so read that if you want more of my thoughts about that sub-group of stories.

A few nights ago I watched a movie from the 1980's starring Barbra Streisand as the title character: Yentl. I just happened to pick this one out at the library without knowing anything about it, and it is amazing to me that it is the perfect story to encounter during this season of reflecting upon stories which include a delay of recognition.

The first scene of the movie opens in the marketplace of an Eastern European Jewish village, and a travelling book-peddler is advertising his wares with these lines, said over and over:
"Storybooks for women, sacred books for men!
Picture books for women, sacred books for men!
Novels for women, sacred books for men!
Novels, very romantic, for women, sacred books for men!"

These lines say everything about the mess that many religious communities have made of the division between the genders and the arbitrary division of cultural objects into "sacred" and "secular." The unfortunate attitude that coined the term "chick-flick" goes way back before Sleepless in Seattle! In many unhealthy religious systems, there are two kinds of writings: sacred and secular. There are two kinds of knowledge: sacred and silly. There are two kinds of literature: sacred and storybooks. There are two kinds of audience: men and women. The men may learn and interpret and teach the lofty sacred writings, while the less intellectually challenging storybooks are for women and children. This town's observant Jewish community considers women who study Talmud to be demons. They put the women in the balcony during worship, and would severely punish any women who broke the following law: "No woman shall wear that which pertaineth to a man." Well as you can guess, Yentl is a woman who is interested in studying Talmud, so interested that she takes the risk of disguising herself as a young man and getting enrolled into a yeshiva for education as a rabbi. And that is only the beginning of her risky and scandalous escapades, since she lives in a place and time when it is impossible to be herself while wearing woman's clothes, because of the way women have been marginalized as domestic servants who need to know little to nothing about the sacred writings and are told to stick to reading what men would not stoop to enjoy: romantic storybooks. It is amazing that no one recognizes her as a woman, not even the other women in the story! How could they all be so blind and miss all the clues about her true identity!

A week or two ago, I heard an On The Media interview on NPR with a man named Darryl Pickney who became a big-time fan of the soap opera As The World Turns. He wrote an article about his experience in the February 2010 issue of Harper's and Bob Garfield, the interviewer, was having a hard time accepting that a male adult with significant intellect was openly talking about such a "weakness." There was a point in the interview when Darryl gently rebuked Bob for assuming universal disdain for the soap opera genre (here's a link set up if you want to hear or read the interview). This interview is worth listening to, because it reminds us how easily we can disdain story genres which depend on outlandish events: surprise pregnancies, characters we thought were dead which come back, hyped up weddings, secret love affairs, sexually-charged romantic encounters which are edited into 30-second clips and dragged out for a whole week to ensure that fans will tune in tomorrow. It is generally assumed that only uneducated housewives could get sucked into such fluff, those women who are oblivious to the fact that a soap opera storyline exists primarily to generate greater advertising revenue from companies who manufacture household cleaning products.

I closely followed a soap for a couple years in junior high: Days of Our Lives. Steve and Kayla, Jack and Jennifer, Bo and Hope and Billy were the couples and triangles that I recall. It was hard to keep up because we didn't have a tv, but I would call my aunt on summertime weekdays and ask her if she had any laundry folding or ironing for me in exchange for an hour's access to Days. An occasional episode, along with reading the soap update in the newspaper, and I could generally keep up with the long drawn out storylines for a few years. By the time I was in college I had lost interest, but several of my dorm friends gathered around the television for the Days hour each day as Roman Brady turned out to be John Black (was it the other way around?), or Marlena was possessed by a demon, or evil Stefano turned out to be kind and other unlikely revelations of plot and character.

How much respect do you have for a soap opera with all of its fantastical plot twists? Is it the furthest thing from sacred writing that one could get? Is it a grown-up form of a child's fairy-tale, worthwhile only for silly women? Your answers to those questions may affect your encounters with the Bible, which is filled with stories of astonishing pregnancy news, supernatural encounters, characters who are killed off then somehow come back alive into the story, ranting and raving of jealous husbands, wedding hype, affairs, betrayals, murders, adulteries, misunderstandings, feuds . . . drama, drama and more drama among lovers, family members and friends.