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.However, women have histori-cally used realism to critique gendered structures of power and to lend visibilityand legitimacy to women s perspectives.20 The problem lies less in the episte-mology of realism as a genre than in dominant twentieth-century associationsbetween melodrama/women/kitsch on the one hand and realism/men/art onthe other, associations that have fed discourses on women s cultural productionas trivial and men s cultural production as serious. Raymond Chandler madethese precise divisions when he distinguished realist detective fiction fromthe classic mystery story in his treatise The Simple Art of Murder, to take butone example.Chandler praised Dashiell Hammett as a realist because he tookmurder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.He put [hard-ened] people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think inthe language they customarily used. (530).While Hammett s realist detec-tive stories should be regarded as important writing, on par with Hemingway(he even suggests Hemingway might have borrowed from Hammett), Chandlersuggests that the antithesis of Hammett s quality is both femininity and con-sumer culture.Critics of Hammett, he writes, are flustered old ladies of bothsexes, and the classic mystery story, best embodied by Agatha Christie, can befound any week in the big shiny magazines.paying due deference to virginallove and the right kind of luxury goods. These women s magazines, he adds,contain more clothes by Vogue and décors by House Beautiful, more chic, butnot more truth (526, 531).But if there is nothing innately male about realism that is, in trying toachieve a historical sense, verisimilitude in the representation of everyday life,transparent form, and so on scholars of pop culture genres have also beenquick to note that there is also nothing innately female about melodrama(Cawelti 44, Williams 50).While I would argue that the male-targeted figures Hellman, Graham, and Interpellation of Female Audiences 55of the detective, the gangster, and the boxer at mid-century were all rendered,in part, through adapted traditions of realism, their stories contained no smalldegree of melodrama as well.All three genres centered around ordinary, oftenworking-class men whose dialects and environments were emphasized, and whooften elided the unambiguous label of good or evil essential to melodrama,yet they all relied on intensified effects the gun blast and the knockout tomove the plot along.This fusion of realism and melodrama is just as presentin the soap opera, though in different ways.Listening to the old soaps, one isstruck by how little happens in the course of a ten- to fifteen-minute episode.They often focus on the minutiae of the everyday, but go the additional step ofgiving one the impression of overhearing a completely ordinary conversation(in this sense, they are even reminiscent of the pace of the ultrarealist LumièreBrothers films).In a 1934 episode of The Life of Mary Southern, for instance,husband Max and wife Mary spend the first half of the show playfully argu-ing about a missing tie, with Max suggesting that Mary threw it away simplybecause she didn t like it.Much more extreme in this regard was an episode ofJust Plain Bill, where it took the lead character Bill Davidson an entire week ofepisodes to give a haircut to a single customer.21 Unlike detective or gangsterdramas, the soap opera did not need the sensationalism of the murder scene orthe tommy gun to move the plot along.One soap opera historian has noted afeature of the genre during the 1930s that points to an additional commonal-ity with realism: that environmental forces strongly affected the dialogue andaction of Depression-era soaps (Cox 91).Considering the ordinary nature of thedialogue and slow, lifelike pace of the action, the soap opera should be placedalongside the boxing narrative and the detective story in deriving key formalproperties from realism.Some cultural producers already recognized this in the 1930s, openly chal-lenging the gendered assumptions of genre categorization by claiming women spopular culture as realism.Stung by critics who accused her of producing noth-ing but trite melodrama, Irna Phillips persistently claimed that her soap operaswere in fact realist, not melodramatic, as they handled real issues of significanceto their listeners (Allen 18, 24).Likewise, at the 1939 conference of the League ofAmerican Writers, Hope Hale argued that the tabloid story magazine True Storyrecognized the demand for realistic fiction for the first time.She added thatdespite the anti-union bias of its owner, True Story, for whatever commercialpurpose, did admit that people without food got hungry and sometimes evenill, that babies did not always arrive into a softly bassineted welcome, and thatsometimes crime, cruelty, disease, and even the sacred course of true love mightbe affected by economic problems (Stewart 44).A very influential woman 56 Hellman, Graham, and Interpellation of Female Audienceswould also enter the fray, claiming as realism her popular representations ofwomen s lives.Lillian Hellman and the Politics of VisibilityIn theater criticism of the 1930s and 1940s, melodrama was by and large a labeldenoting poor artistic quality, a death blow for the playwright who wanted to betaken seriously.22 Women playwrights were often assumed guilty of this chargeuntil proven innocent, and many judges were not inclined in their favor.Speak-ing of women dramatists in 1941, George Jean Nathan wrote in The AmericanMercury, Give her an emotion, whether tragic or comic, and she will stretchit not only to its extreme limit, but beyond
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