As the World Turns on the Sick and the Restless, So Go the Days of Our Lives: Family and Illness in Daytime Drama.

As the World Turns on the Sick and the Restless, So Go the Days of Our Lives: Family and Illness in Daytime Drama.

Jones Therese

Journal of Medical Humanities

1997

1997

This essay begins with a discussion of the primacy of the nuclear family in American drama. Our best playwrights have been strikingly preoccupied with domestic life, consistently portraying the family as a dream of solidarity and a nightmare of enmeshment. Daytime serial dramas are also stories about American domestic life, privileging a conservatively defined nuclear family and imaging conflicting hopes and fears around it. In serious as well as popular drama, illness is frequently the catalyst for familial destruction and restoration. The middle portion of the essay is devoted to a definition and history of American soap opera, providing readers with a knowledge base for the final portion, a descriptive survey of the representation of medical and social issues on daytime drama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UNITED States; FAMILIES; DISEASES; ℡EVISION programs; ℡EVISION series; ℡EVISION soap operas

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