Child abuse,melodrama and the mother–daughter plot in EastEnders

Abstract

This article examines the narrative and discursive strategies that have been mobilised over the past five years in the British community soap EastEnders to construct high-profile child (sex) abuse narratives. It focuses primarily on the long-running retrospective paternal rape and incest storyline that is reconfigured as a maternal melodrama to manage tensions over power, sexuality and the family. The mother–daughter dynamic as a privileged site of trauma and potential resistance to patriarchal control is analysed in both the EastEnders source text and Ronnie and Danielle fan fiction produced by and for female adolescents.

Keywords

Abuse narratives fan fiction melodrama mother–daughter plot paternal incest romance soap

In recent years EastEnders, the BBC’s most-watched television drama, has relied increasingly and consciously on the melodramatic imagination to raise awareness about controversial issues, particularly regarding masculinity, sexuality and the family.

EastEnders’ frequent ‘lapses’ in realism over the past three years have been noted by television critics who invariably diagnose the series’ ‘infusions of melodrama’ (Mayer, 2007) as a symptom of decline in quality television drama, and a crisis in public service broadcasting (Bushell, 2009; Littlejohn, 2007), while scholars from various disciplines anticipated the turn to melodrama by drawing attention to the cultural and ideological role of melodrama in a time of change and uncertainty (Bauman, 2002; Bratton et al., 1994; Brooks, 1995; Geraghty, 2007; Liebes and Livingstone, 1998).

In their study of European soap operas, Tamar Liebes and Sonia Livingstone signal that from the 1990s onwards, the socially conscious community sub-genre (the most distinctively European soap model) seems to be developing in the direction of the dyadic form. The dyadic sub-genre, rooted in American daytime soap operas, draws heavily on melodrama in its playing out of relationships that are in constant conflict, often accompanied by extreme violence within the most intimate circle, as the stable environment of family and community has disappeared. For Liebes and Livingstone, the dyadic form is coming to represent the global form of soap opera that speaks of ‘the postmodern despair of too much freedom and too little trust’ (1998: 145).

Following the film theorist Christine Gledhill (1992) and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2002), who attribute a cultural role to melodrama in mediating sociopolitical change, Christine Geraghty arrives at a similar conclusion in her textual analysis of EastEnders, as she identifies a shift from the realist to the melodramatic mode, which marks a decline in the possibilities of community that traditionally have been the distinctive feature of British soaps. The effect of this turn to melodrama ‘is to present a world which is darker and more precarious than before, to represent indeed a society under siege’ (Geraghty, 2007:10).

In terms of the social responsibility associated with a public broadcasting tradition, the BBC’s flagship soap remains committed to raising awareness about heavily stigmatised social issues such as mental illness and domestic violence. Yet, it is only over the past five years that child (sex) abuse within or around the family has been tackled in several consecutive and/or overlapping high-profile storylines that draw consciously on melodramatic expression.¹

If the recent prominence of child abuse narratives in EastEnders emanates from a tradition of social realism combined with growing pressure to attract viewers with increasingly spectacular storylines in a competitive broadcast industry (Henderson, 1999; Topping, 2007), melodrama imposes itself in these narratives as a privileged mode of narration for the expression of ‘unrepresentable’ violence. It also imposes itself as a site of ideological struggle to manage tensions over power, sexuality and the family, which have become the locus of social anxieties in extensive media coverage of child abuse cases (Critcher, 2003; Davidson, 2008), particularly in relation to paternal rape or incest stories that question the institution of the family and draw attention to the gendered nature of violence (Kitzinger, 2004a). As Christine Gledhill puts it:

Melodrama feeds off the ideological conflicts that accompany social change. Thus realism in pioneering new fields of representation offers melodrama the material for renewed symbolic enactment. In reverse process, melodrama’s capacity to cut short the logical processes of realism to arrive at overdetermined confrontations can make covertly available as melodrama what realism avoids or represses as too threatening. (1992: 118)

Since 2007 EastEnders has exposed viewers to the suffering of young Ben Mitchell being bullied by his future stepmother, teenager Whitney Dean struggling with emotional and sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend, and Ronnie Mitchell trying to come to terms with the long-term effects of paternal rape, while these personal traumas went largely unnoticed by relatives and members of the community. This emphasis on painful secrets and individual suffering is a key feature of melodramatic narratives that maximise audience empathy and identification: it offers the spectator privileged information and access to the viewpoint of the suffering hero-victim, who is mainly unaware of her predicament and/or unable to break free from the abusive relationship due to internalised constraints of familial responsibility or emotional allegiance (Neale, 1986).

In this article I would like to take a closer look at the narrative and discursive strategies that are mobilised in EastEnders to construct child (sexual) abuse narratives. I will be focusing primarily on the long-running paternal rape or incest storyline that puts a strain on the ideological tendency to idealise the nuclear family.

Containment strategies: madwomen and predatory paedophiles

From September 2006 to December 2009, EastEnders progressively introduced three child abuse narratives that largely conform to the master narrative in the media by bringing disruptive outsiders temporarily into the vulnerable (single parent) family, thus allowing for a ‘symbolic expulsion’ (Kitzinger, 2004b: 27) of sexual violence, and a restoration or idealisation of biological family ties.

The perpetrators are marked as distinct from the community in terms of class or regional identity and the characterisation of the female abuser in particular draws self-consciously on horror conventions, with explicit references to iconic Hollywood films such as The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1987) and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1992). Furthermore, these child abuse narratives are contained carefully by extensive media coverage and short-term casting of ‘imported’ actors from the world of television and theatre, whose acting performance’ as ‘panto villain’ functions both as a safety valve and distancing device in disturbing storylines.

Lawyer Stella Crawford is introduced in 2006 as a middle-aged childless woman with a belated desire for romance. Stella, the proverbial spinster, is portrayed initially as an insecure, well-meaning character and unlikely love interest for ‘hard man’ Phil Mitchell, who wants to provide his son Ben with a responsible mother figure. Desperate to win Phil’s approval as a wife and mother, Stella resorts to emotional blackmail and physical abuse of the nine-year-old Ben, who ultimately stands up for himself during the wedding ceremony. The climax sees Stella fleeing to an abandoned factory with a picture of Ben tucked in her white wedding dress, before jumping off the roof in front of Phil’s eyes while exclaiming ‘Watch me, daddy!’ (BBC, 20 July 2007).

Interestingly, the representation of the female perpetrator, informed by a wider cultural repertoire of media images in which ambitious or desiring single women are portrayed as duplicitous and dangerous, is reinforced by a parallel storyline that revolves around another female villain. Introduced in September 2006 as the new local doctor, May Wright unleashes her fury on the community when she discovers that Dawn, a local woman, is pregnant by her estranged husband. Unable to conceive herself despite in-vitro fertilisation treatment, May offers the young woman money to go ahead with the pregnancy. Initially Dawn goes along with the plan, but when she changes her mind and decides to keep the baby, May’s behaviour becomes increasingly abusive. She works her way through increasingly convoluted scenarios that include kidnapping Dawn in order to perform a caesarian, and returning to Albert Square under a false identity to infiltrate the family home, where a final confrontation over baby Summer culminates in May’s violent death in a house explosion.

In the context of EastEnders’ commitment to community spirit (Geraghty, 2000), ambitious middle-class single women such as Stella and May are constructed as the ultimate threat. Their abusive behaviour in the name of romantic or maternal desire is attributed implicitly to a calculated middle-class ethos (that leads to parental neglect, as Stella’s vague background story suggests). In a demonstrative and self-conscious move these melodramatic narratives project anxieties about the vulnerability of the lone parent family onto abject female outsiders (dubbed ‘vixens’, ‘psychos’ or ‘bunny boilers’ by the media), who are killed off in a spectacular way in order to restore trust in the family and community.

If the abuse narratives revolving around female perpetrators obscure the connection between masculinity and violence, EastEnders turns to a variation on the familiar media template of male stranger-danger for its ‘predatory paedophile’ storyline (Henderson, 2007; Kitzinger, 2004a, 2004b) that launched on 12 September 2008, coinciding with the introduction of child sex offender public disclosure pilot schemes which allow concerned parents and carers to apply for information about whether individuals who have regular contact with their children are registered sex offenders (Casciani, 2008).

Relying partly on a retrospective scenario to avoid the problematic representation of child sex abuse, the storyline shows 15-year-old Whitney Dean falling in love with her adoptive mother’s boyfriend, who has been grooming the girl since the age of 12. While the stereotype of the child abuser as visibly distinct from ‘normal’ males in the programme is challenged by representing Tony as a handsome young man, the threat of abuse is carefully contained also by keeping bloodties out of the picture (allowing for an ambiguous erotic reading of scenes between abuser and victim, played by two good-looking actors), and by constructing or othering the abuser as a community outsider in terms of regional identity and dialect (from ‘up north’). Ultimately, Tony is recast as a pathological individual who targets another local girl, and then he is punished and expelled in a neatly tied-up storyline that culminates in his trial and conviction. Furthermore, child sex abuse is marginalised by association with the promiscuous single mother, who is also singled out as a high-risk victim in two out of five ‘sex offender alert’ scenarios suggested to the public by the sex offender disclosure scheme that went nationwide in March 2011 (BBC News, 2010).

Paternal rape and childhood trauma

If external threats to the family and the community can be controlled and contained in order to redress moral boundaries, EastEnders ventures into more challenging territory with incestuous abuse narratives that call into question the very institution of the nuclear family, producing a tension that erupts in mother–daughter relations as a privileged site of trauma and potential resistance to patriarchal control.

Sexual abuse within the family, treated retrospectively and played out in a melodramatic mother–daughter scenario, was already at the centre of a classic EastEnders storyline in 2001 when Zoe, the youngest in the Slater family, discovers that her sister is actually her mother and that she was conceived in an abusive relationship between Kat, then aged 13, and her uncle Harry. Even though incest is displaced onto a distant male relative who is mostly off-screen, the storyline addresses the father’s complicity by highlighting his failure to protect the daughter, and by problematising his reaction to Kat’s ordeal.

The revelation of Kat’s secret and its devastating effect on the family, spread across four episodes, is singled out for analysis by Christine Geraghty who draws attention to the complex melodramatic mise-en-scène that emphasises ‘the desolate isolation of the scattered family’ (2007: 5) and creates a sense of loss as trust in family relations breaks down. The emotional centre of EastEnders’ first child sexual abuse narrative is the relationship between Kat and Zoe, culminating in a dramatic two-hander that shows both women tentatively coming together only to be torn apart a few days later, thus conforming to the patriarchal scenario of mother–daughter conflict and separation as ideological closure (Hirsch, 1989; Kaplan, 1992; Livingstone, 1995).

In 2008 EastEnders turned once again to the mother–daughter plot to deal with the ultimate taboo, paternal rape or incest represented as childhood trauma that comes back to haunt the victim and strikes at the heart of the family and community. The revelation of Ronnie Mitchell’s violent relationship with her father is elaborated in multiple, connected storylines that explore the victim-heroine’s relations with the major players in the family drama. If previous abuse storylines were contained carefully in terms of the perpetrator’s marginality, narrative organisation and ideological closure, the overarching paternal incest story spans several years, encompassing a long build-up to the revelation of Ronnie’s childhood trauma and its aftermath that deals with the effect of sexual abuse on all the Mitchell women.

As a new member of Albert Square’s most prominent family, the Mitchell clan, Ronnie’s character is constructed from the outset in function of the incest narrative. Introduced as the older, wiser and more independent-minded of the glamorous Mitchell sisters, cousins of matriarch Peggy Mitchell, Ronnie is set off from the start against her happy-go-lucky sibling Roxy in a marketing campaign that accentuates difference by contrasting Roxy’s and Ronnie’s personality (comparing them to ‘fire and ice’), while also portraying the two sisters as a self-sufficient couple, modelled on the Kray twins (Daily Mail Online, 2007; Daily Mirror, 2007). Over a period of nearly a year, the audience gets the chance to warm to Roxy, the outgoing party girl, whereas a number of clues (including a mysterious locket that contains a baby picture) point to Ronnie’s secret past and encourages the audience to speculate about the character’s guarded personality and overprotective behaviour towards her sibling.

A turning point in the storyline is the first encounter between Ronnie and the abusive father, Archie Mitchell, who works his way back into the family. This ‘expressive breakthrough’ (Brooks, 1995: 43) reveals the power dynamic between father and daughter for the very first time, allowing the audience to finally see the ‘cold’ Mitchell sister in a different light, as the victim-heroine who stands up to Archie while the other Mitchell women remain blind to the father’s abusive behaviour. The numerous appreciation threads and posts that sprung up in the wake of this episode on Digital Spy (www.digitalspy.co.uk) and Walford Web (www.walfordwebforums.co.uk/prod/) expressing sympathy and admiration for Ronnie Mitchell, reflect the affective response to this melodramatic scene of recognition which transforms a misunderstood character into a long-suffering and courageous heroïne.

Leading up to the confrontation between father and daughter is a female-centred scene that shows Ronnie opening up for the first time to her aunt Peggy during a trip to Weymouth, setting the character apart from conventional femininity as she explains her lack of interest in heterosexual romance and family life:

No husband, one kid. I called her Amy … Never came close to marrying. Every man I meet was another version of my dad … I wished him dead then, nothing has changed. I never wanted anyone dead more. (BBC, 8 July 2008)

The road trip shows Peggy and Ronnie bonding in defiant Thelma and Louise mode, as they join forces in fending off a lecherous driver while prefiguring the introduction of the father as an agent of division in the female family.

In the following off-set episodes shot in Weymouth (‘Mitchell Week’) the audience sees the female bonds torn apart by the controlling patriarch who seduces Peggy and wins the affection of daddy’s girl Roxy, whereas Ronnie continues to challenge the father’s plan to charm his way back into their lives. In a pivotal melodramatic scene, a confrontation between father and daughter is played out for the audience’s eyes only to establish the characters’ moral position. The encounter takes place in Archie’s grand mansion, a labyrinth of hallways and doors that evokes the isolated and claustrophobic atmosphere of the home. In terms of visual orchestration, the scene conveys oppression as Archie is introduced as a predatory figure who appears out of nowhere in Ronnie’s bedroom, following her around the house and trying to convince her into staying the night. Consequently, the spectator becomes a privileged witness to Ronnie’s secret, as we learn that she fell pregnant at the age of 14 and was forced by Archie to give up her daughter for adoption.

The power struggle between father and daughter builds up to a re-enactment of the original trauma and paternal rape that is disclosed much later in the storyline. During an argument over the welfare of the pregnant Roxy, Archie pins Ronnie down on the sofa and threatens to ‘break her’ if she comes between him and his youngest daughter. The sexual charge of the attack is carried over in the father’s comment, as he turns his back on Ronnie in disgust and exclaims: ‘You still have something of the dirty little adolescent about you. I suppose you always will’ (BBC, 9 July 2008).

If pre-watershed soaps often rely on a retrospective scenario simply to avoid the difficult representation of child sex abuse, melodramatic expression ‘that represents a victory over repression’ (Brooks, 1995: 41), as Peter Brooks puts it, lends itself particularly well to stage a hidden traumatic experience that took place in the past. Hence, the violent confrontation between Ronnie and the abusive father brings to the surface what Brooks calls ‘the primal scene’:

[A] moment of intense, originary trauma that leaves virtue stunned and humiliated. In fact the true primal scene may be in the past … and the breakthrough of evil connects to it, offering a present horror fully explicable only in terms of past horror. (Brooks, 1995: 34–35)

The return of the daughter

Even though Archie, the abusive father, is more marginal than the other central male characters, EastEnders challenges the dominant understanding of sexual violence as a personal or isolated issue by establishing a connection between different forms of male violence in the family. Over a period of months, the spectator is aligned primarily with Ronnie, the critical and rebellious daughter, as a powerless witness to Archie’s manipulative and controlling behaviour which also affects Peggy’s self-esteem and turns Roxy into a dependent daddy’s girl. Particularly poignant is the transformation of matriarch Peggy Mitchell into a vulnerable and lonely housewife who internalises Archie’s disapproving comments on her ‘vulgar’ look and ‘inappropriate’ friends. In portraying Archie as a menacing bridegroom who strips Peggy of her identity by remote control and the sadistic male gaze, the BBC’s wedding trailer (Green, 2009b) draws on The Stepford Wives (dir. Ira Levin, 1975) to critique the hidden operation of male power in the institution of marriage.

Beyond the limits of male control lies the return of the daughter, signalled by a self-conscious shift to the maternal melodrama as the spectator becomes a privileged witness to the desperate attempts of newcomer Danielle Jones to win the love of her birth mother, Ronnie, who believes that the baby she was forced to give up for adoption died. When mother and daughter are finally reunited in mutual recognition, Danielle is run over by a car and dies in her mother’s arms. The infamous reveal episode, aired on 2 April 2009, which sees Danielle finally convincing Ronnie of her true identity, only to be killed off a few minutes later, sparked thousands of complaints from viewers who felt betrayed by and deprived of a long anticipated happy ending, prompting the BBC to launch an official statement to explain the decision to kill off Danielle in the interest of drama (Green, 2009a). The mother–daughter storyline and its pathos-ridden ending generated unprecedented fan activity and protest from angry and traumatised fans, who erected a shrine outside the studio in memory of Danielle and launched a petition to bring their favourite character back to the screen (Daily Mail Online, 2009).

The audience’s indignation can be interpreted as a reaction to the excessive violence inflicted on the mother–daughter couple and, by implication, the female spectator. If viewers grudgingly accept the eventual separation of mother and daughter as another loss Ronnie has to suffer to harness her status as melodramatic heroine, the sudden and brutal severing of the mother-daughter bond is experienced as a gratuitous punishment of the characters by the audience that was consistently presented with Danielle’s viewpoint as a focus for identification, not only in EastEnders’ narrative and visual alignment of the spectator with the desiring daughter, but also in Danielle’s online diary published on the EastEnders homepage (BBC, 2009). Written in the first person, Danielle’s diary provides insight into the character’s thoughts and feelings, which revolve primarily around the girl’s longing for her birth mother.

If Danielle’s death subordinates the mother–daughter bond to patriarchal demands, forcing Ronnie back into a heterosexual economy and paving the way for the father’s redemption (his behaviour is explained away as the effect of a cycle of abuse), the maternal melodrama opens up a space of refuge and resistance for the expression of female desire, a space that is cultivated online by fans long after Danielle’s death in the ongoing production of fan fiction and fan videos inspired by and dedicated to the fictional mother–daughter couple.

If melodrama as genre activates a nostalgic fantasy of childhood with the spectator, ‘endlessly repeating our melancholic sense of the loss of origins – impossibly hoping to return to an earlier state which is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother’ (Williams, 2009: 614), the Ronnie and Danielle story not only articulates the desire to recover the lost mother quite literally, but also raises the spectre of the adult female bond as a trespass on patriarchal law: a threat that is contained by structuring the mother–daughter narrative obsessively around the themes of mistaken identity and missed chances. Throughout the storyline, endless and absurd blockages of communication prevent mother and daughter from forming a unit unto themselves (against the abusive father), and the audience is invited to draw a parallel between the ‘ice queen’ and the abusive father by establishing a cause–effect logic between Ronnie’s absence or failure as a mother, and Danielle’s lack of self-esteem. The mother’s guilt is particularly foregrounded in a contrived plot twist that shows Ronnie colluding in the abortion of her grandchild.

If Archie formally occupies the role of villain in separating mother and daughter and keeping them apart, the EastEnders text assigns blame and guilt to Ronnie for lacking maternal instinct, as she fails to recognise her child and remains blind to the needs of a vulnerable young woman.

Fan fiction: hurt and comfort

In spite of, or due to, the narrative containment of mutual female desire through forced blockages of communication and a fatal ending, the utopian potential of the mother–daughter bond finds an outlet in the slippage between a melodramatic and romantic discourse in online written texts such as the Danielle’s Diary spin-off and a vast repertoire of fan fiction.

As feminine genres revolving around a female desire that is always in excess, the romance and melodrama share a tension between the realistic surface and an underlying fantasy realm that finds expression in a narrative trajectory constructed around a series of obstacles that work towards the idealisation of the love object and delay the fulfillment of love (Doane, 1987; Pearce and Stacey, 1995). In her study of the discourse of motherhood in 19th-century literary and film texts, Ann Kaplan notes the ‘similarities between the psychic aspects of romance and of mothering’ (1992: 91) while Janice Radway’s analysis of the romance-reading experience and romantic narratives reveals that ‘the reestablishment of the original, blissful symbiotic union between mother and child … is the goal of all romances despite their apparent preoccupation with heterosexual love and marriage’ (1984: 156).

It is in Danielle’s online diary that the mother–daughter romance is given free reign in the detailed, first-person account of the girl’s mixed feelings of longing and resentment for her beautiful and strong yet unreadable mother who occupies the position of the emotionally reserved lover in romance fiction. A major barrier to the union of the female couple is Ronnie’s ambivalent or cruel behaviour towards Danielle, similar to that of the adversarial hero who has to be transformed ‘into an emotional being with a heart who declares his love for the heroine’ (Pearce and Stacey, 1995: 17).

The emotional focal point in female fan practices is the storyline’s romantic climax, underscored by mutual gazing between mother and daughter as Ronnie finally acknowledges Danielle as her ‘baby’, and confesses her love to the dying girl in her arms in an iconic tableau or pietà. This melodramatic recognition scene triggered an exponential increase in the amount of EastEnders fan fiction (and other fan practices such as fan art and videos) produced and published on various soap fora, blogs and FanFiction.net, the largest multi-fandom archive and home of the majority of EastEnders fan fiction.

The EastEnders fan fiction and Ronnie and Danielle community in particular is a female-centred space, populated by 14–25-year-old British fans who often are ridiculed on mixed or male-dominated forums for their excessive emotional investment in melodramatic storylines and romantic pairings. This hostile reception has fostered an idealistic community spirit among self-identified fan girls who carve out a space of their own (contained in appreciation threads) and persist in cultivating an alternative project through fan-created texts and supportive reviews

Borne out of frustration with the source material, the Ronnie and Danielle fan text explores the psychology of both female characters and the emotional intensity of the mother–daughter relationship that was withheld on screen. If the formats range from one-shots to novel-length texts and work-in-progress, the Ronnie and Danielle fan text is remarkably consistent in terms of generic conventions. The majority of stories belong to the angst and hurt/comfort subgenre ‘in which a character is systematically taken to bits emotionally (and sometimes physically too) before being consoled and sometimes rehabilitated by another character’ (Pugh, 2005: 77).

Hurt/comfort is used by fan fiction writers to engender intimacy by depicting the suffering and vulnerability of characters, allowing a relationship to be transformed from strained to romantic. Angst and hurt/comfort stories aim for emotional intensification by inflicting pain on characters to make them ‘open up’ to each other and the reader. If angst and hurt/comfort scenarios in fan fiction rarely revolve around female protagonists, since women do not struggle with intimacy issues, the personalities of Ronnie and Danielle (and the repressed nature of their relationship in the source text) are particularly prone to hurt/comfort treatment with the openly vulnerable, damaged daughter craving the love of a traumatised woman who is reluctant to show her feelings. Importantly, the element of hurt and suffering is a means to an end, permitting the characters to share intimacies that otherwise would be kept private, and a chance for authors and readers to control painful experiences and ultimately ‘make things better’ for their fictional characters and themselves through a performative or therapeutic experience that allows for multiple identifications as explained by fan fiction author Renae in her column on the pleasures of writing and reading hurt/comfort:

[T]he first step to love is identification. And nothing makes us identify – feel with – another person as immediately as empathy for their pain. It’s instinctive. It’s the root for the highest of human virtues – compassion – and the lowest of human evils – sadism. In H/C [hurt/comfort], one can shade into another and it’s okay because no real people are being hurt during the filming of this fan fiction. When we hurt our favorite hero, we’re hurting ourselves, and yet we’re also coping with that hurt, comforting it, and saving ourselves in the nick of time from worse. We get to play all three sides of the equation – victim, tormentor, and rescuer. (Renae, 2000; emphasis in original)

Mother–daughter ‘romance’

In order to explore female fans’ appropriation of the source text, I will take a closer look at the narrative and textual strategies in the two longest running and most popular Ronnie and Danielle fan fictions on Fanfiction.Net (based on the number of reviews). Broken (Kirsty95, 2009) and Ronnie and Danielle: When the Truth is Out! (Adia Rose, 2009) stand out as lengthy works in progress (written over several years and encompassing more than 70 chapters); a format that appeals to fans in terms of inviting active engagement with an open text and creating a strong sense of community (Busse and Hellekson, 2006). Although they are written in different styles, both simultaneously written fan fiction stories feed off each other’s ideas and incorporate suggestions made by readers.

When the Truth is Out! and Broken depart from the same canon scene – the melodramatic reveal or recognition scene – and add a twist to the mother–daughter dynamic by reversing the power relation. A hurt and resentful Danielle is now the one who rejects Ronnie, leaving the mother to do the ‘chasing’ and convince her newfound daughter of her maternal feelings.

Both fan fictions draw on melodramatic conventions borrowed from the source text, but only deploy them in the function of a positive or healing effect on the female protagonists. Contrived scenes of near loss (attempted suicide, coma) force the time-out which both characters need to recognise what each has failed to understand in the other, and bring the extended female family together in cathartic reunion scenes, often set in a hospital which functions as a safe womb-like space for the mother–daughter couple to explore their fragile bond.

In the vast majority of chapters, Ronnie is watching over her weak and helpless daughter who is lying in a hospital bed, allowing for a return to pre-Oedipal symbiosis while legitimising physical contact between adult women, represented as the site of reparation and redemption:

Danielle lifted her uninjured arm outwards to her mother. The grin that spread over Ronnie’s face was one she hadn’t felt herself smile in so long. She leant herself down to embrace Danielle, careful not to put too much pressure on her chest, she was still worried about her breathing. She felt Danielle’s arm wrap around her back. This was it. This was everything Ronnie wanted. This was home. (Adia Rose, chapter 27)

Whereas male characters and father figures in particular still make an appearance as an external obstacle threatening to separate the women once again, fan fiction focuses primarily on the female protagonists’ inner torment as a blockage to mutual understanding in lengthy interior monologues that expose the discrepancy between the characters’ raw emotions and self-censored or inhibited behaviour, exemplified by this passage from Broken:

Ronnie felt helpless, completely overwhelmed by the situation. There was so much that she needed to say and do, and she had no clue as to where to start. She needed to be alone with Danielle, but now she was, she didn’t know what to say. Her love choked her up inside, and she found it hard to express her feelings into words. She cleared her throat ever so slightly, gaining Danielle’s full attention this time. She sucked in a deep breath, getting lost in Danielle’s brown eyes, marveling at their depth and beauty. (Kirsty95, chapter 30)

If EastEnders viewers were widely exposed to Danielle’s unrequited love for her mother, fan fiction revels in turning the tables on Ronnie. Occupying a masculine position in the source text as a tough businesswoman, Ronnie is feminised in fan fiction through a romantic narrative and discourse. In order to earn Danielle’s trust and affection, Ronnie has to court the girl (bringing her flowers and chocolates, watching soppy films together, asking her out on a date, competing for her attention and affection), and the progress in the mother–daughter ‘romance’ finds expression in ‘the mise en scène of female desire that focuses on the lovers’ faces’ (Laplace, 1987: 159) as illustrated in the following passage that emphasises the exchange of longing looks between the two women:

Ronnie’s gaze stared at her with an intensity that she could feel every time she moved. Danielle swallowed consciously, and brought her free hand up to her eyes, brushing her hair away from her face in a self-conscious motion. She nervously edged her head upwards, inch by inch, until she met Ronnie’s loving gaze with her own timid and frightened one. (Kirsty95, chapter 29)

Revisiting the birth and/or separation scene in great detail is used often as a narrative device to draw sympathy for Ronnie who is broken down in the process and forced to reveal her true maternal feelings hidden beneath her ‘masked’ and ‘shielded’ persona. Tears signal a breakdown of language, a cathartic experience that allows mother and daughter to connect for brief and intense moments of mutual surrender. The vulnerable girl-child Danielle also functions as a catalyst to soften and bring out the mother in other female characters such as best friend Stacey and aunt Roxy who are included in the female family romance:

Like Ronnie finally the bolshy mask that Stacey wore was being ground down. Danielle’s actions seemed to be slicing through the defences of everyone around her. Suddenly people were raw and open, like the wounds Danielle had caused to herself, she had opened up Stacey and Ronnie letting their emotions gently flow like blood from their veins. (Adia Rose, chapter 23)

Erasing the mother

In terms of narrative structure, both fan fictions oscillate obsessively between separation and connection, working slowly towards a redemption of the mother and restoration of the female couple. However, this ideal romance comes at a price. While providing the reader with a background story for Ronnie’s angry and defensive behaviour that is missing in EastEnders, fan fiction ultimately colludes with the source text by heightening the daughter’s feelings of rejection and aligning Ronnie with patriarchal oppression:

Ronnie’s eyes traced every plane of Danielle’s face, fascinated by this person who had come from her. How had she, Ronnie Mitchell, ever managed to produce such a beautiful person? Danielle was everything she could have ever dreamed – thoughtful, well-mannered, kind. She was perfect and yet for so long she had been blind to it. In some ways she feared she had almost been as bad as her father – she had almost stamped out all the goodness in her daughter. (Kirsty95, chapter 71)

Furthermore, Ronnie is stripped of her subjectivity in the process of becoming a self-sacrificing mother. Broken and When The Truth Is Out are heavily invested in makeover scenarios that offer a detailed account of Ronnie’s inner and outer transformation and regression from a tough, glamorous woman to:

a frightened fourteen year old, broken and worn down by time and grief. A woman who was weak and scared, just wanting to impress her child, a woman who just wanted to prove herself worthy of being loved. (Adia Rose, chapter 40)

The power of transformation, a key ingredient in all romantic trajectories, is indeed a one-way process in the Ronnie and Danielle fan text as Ronnie learns to conform to passive femininity for the sake of her daughter. To make herself accessible to Danielle and boost her daughter’s ego, Ronnie has to dress down, remove her make-up, set herself up for failure and repress her feelings of anger, even when provoked by a hostile neighbour in Adia Rose’s When The Truth is Out!:

Ronnie’s nails dug deep crescents into her palms but she knew that these had to be empty threats, if she lashed out she knew that it would get back to Danielle and she couldn’t let that happen. Ronnie had promised Danielle that she would change, that she wouldn’t hurt people. It took all the control she had to then turn and walk away. Fighting for her daughter was all she wanted to do but if she fought, she’d lose. Not fighting was the only way to win and sitting back, waiting, being the quiet one, being the sort of person to back down from such aggression was hard. (Adia Rose, chapter 72)

Ultimately, the angry mother becomes a mere reflection of her polite and gentle daughter, and sexual desire and professional ambition are sacrificed to maternal duty as illustrated in Adia Rose’s musings about motherhood:

‘Mum’. A simple syllable. Just one word. Three little letters. Oh but the power they hold. So much meaning, so much responsibility behind that little word. Once that word is uttered there is an unbreakable contract, both parties sign away their souls and their hearts to one another … One little word and it could change Ronnie’s world. Her world had in reality already changed. But the word cemented it … Be kind to yourself. That’s what Dot had said. And yet by thinking of herself, Ronnie had in one action lost her grandchild and set herself on the road to almost losing her daughter as well. Well this was it. No more games, no more hiding, no more ‘Ronnie Mitchell, heart of glass’. Everything had to be put aside for Danielle, at least for now. Now Ronnie had to truly look at her daughter, know her story and do anything she could to become part of it. To become ‘mum’. (Adia Rose, chapter 39)

Ronnie’s successful transformation meets with approval from readers as a reassuring turning point in the story, if not a natural closure to the mother–daughter ‘romance’. Even though the authors of Broken and When the Truth is Out! have not officially concluded their stories, the lack of recent updates suggests that the mother–daughter narrative has reached a satisfactory ending for Ronnie and Danielle fans in terms of the female characters’ mutual and exclusive commitment to each other.

While still displaying conventions of melodrama, such as the role of fate and concentration on heightened emotional states and suffering, the Ronnie and Danielle fan text is recuperated romantically by the exclusive focus on the developing relationship between mother and daughter. In an attempt to compensate for the frustration caused by the patriarchal sanction against mother–daughter connection in the source text, Ronnie and Danielle fan fiction draws on romance’s intrinsic concern with the pre-Oedipal mother–daughter bond to offer its readers a utopian, wish-fulfilling fantasy that sees Ronnie and Danielle taking one another as their primary object of desire. A key ingredient in the Ronnie and Danielle fan text are intimate scenes of female bonding that offer readers the comfort and pleasure of being ritually mothered as illustrated by user comments that compare the act of (re)-reading to ‘a warm embrace’ (Sparrer, 2009) making fans ‘feel special at a time when not much else is making me smile’ (KAR, 2010)

The serial format of fan fiction, published over a long and undefined period of time, also evokes the romantic experience in the mutual dependency between author and reader, as both are waiting in anxious anticipation for another chapter or appreciative review to satisfy their craving for emotional gratification, a feeling that is poignantly captured by one fan in the following comment:

I know how Ronnie feels. The torturous wait for Danielle to arrive was almost as bad as waiting for this update! Doing everything you can to occupy your thoughts, wondering if it is ever going to happen and then just as you are at your wits end thinking it is never going to happen the doorbell rings [a story alert arrives] and you beam from ear to ear! (mb05, 2009)

While the Ronnie and Danielle fan text foregrounds female-defined and female-centred experiences that the original text refused to satisfy, the narrative speaks from a daughterly perspective that is caught up in desire for the lost mother object, combined with sadistic urges toward the same object. Fan reviews often reveal a particular intense identification between the reader and the injured or ‘broken’ romantic heroine/daughter figure, rooted in feelings of inadequacy and loss that come with the struggle to achieve a feminine identity

If EastEnders’ melodramatic characterisation of Danielle as a tearful and insecure victim often meets with derision in online fora and press, frequently referring to Danielle as a ‘wet drip’, Ronnie and Danielle fans rescue their heroine (and themselves) by idealising Danielle through the loving gaze of the mother, emphasising the young woman’s innocence and ‘innate goodness’ which finds expression in her pre-pubescent beauty (‘delicate features and angelic blonde hair’) and capacity for empathetic nurturance (love of animals and mothering of cousin Amy) that brings out the best in everyone.

For the hierarchical structure and difference between Ronnie and Danielle to be transcended in this female ‘romance’, the mother is rewritten in function of the daughter’s needs and desire. Hence, Ronnie’s transgressive potential as independent heroine and angry survivor of paternal abuse is contained through patriarchal discourses about motherhood and femininity. Invariably, the character’s defiant behaviour is exposed as a mask or shield that gives way to her true caring and maternal self. This transformation is inscribed sadistically on the mother’s body in makeover scenarios that show Ronnie shedding her immaculate armour in favour of a less intimidating casual or dowdy look, signalling the erasure (or at least suppression) of her mature self as she becomes moulded in the image of the benign girl-child.

Conclusion

EastEnders’ recent preoccupation with child (sexual) abuse offers a response to growing public awareness of a sensitive social problem while the timing of controversial storylines also ties in with a commercial strategy in a time of intensified competition for television drama on British television.

If the melodramatic mode extends to storylines that negotiate ethnic and sexual difference in the white working-class community, the treatment of child abuse in an early evening soap such as EastEnders raises issues of representation and generates ideological tensions that can be managed only by deploying melodramatic conventions in a self-conscious way. Connections between normative constructions of masculinity and violence are suppressed or contained in the majority of child abuse narratives by othering both victim and perpetrator. Lone parent families are the main target of abuse from mentally disturbed or perverse outsiders who are expelled from the community in spectacular and neatly resolved storylines that draw heavily on horror conventions.

Incest stories bring sexual abuse into the heart of the community by turning the series’ most central families into a site of hidden trauma. Even though the perpetrator is still portrayed as a detached character who exists mainly outside the community, these long-running abuse narratives permit a critique of the operation of male power in the family by establishing connections across different forms of violence over women, and by placing emphasis on the aftermath of the abuse in retrospective scenarios that work to reconfigure the sexual abuse story into a maternal melodrama, allowing for identification and empathy with the female victims/survivors.

Focusing on the mother–daughter couple and by extension, female relationships as the privileged site of trauma, allows for the exposure of women’s oppression and suffering within the familial structure. However, at the same time these female plots also pose a threat to heterosexual romance and the institution of the family, which EastEnders struggles to contain by blocking the formation of connections or bonds between victims based on an awareness of the prevalence of gendered abuse. Hence, the series stops short of treating sexual abuse as a wider social issue.

Ronnie and Danielle fan fiction challenges the patriarchal scenario of forced mother–daughter separation by turning to a romantic and utopian discourse that offers a therapeutic site of repair for the female protagonists, and an alternative source of pleasure for female adolescents. While these stories written by and for young women affirm the importance of the connections and continuities of the mother–daughter bond, the voice of the angry mother as incest survivor is sacrificed to the daughter’s desire for an idealised version of maternal love.

If the fan text glosses over Ronnie’s history of sexual abuse and subjects her to the daughter’s needs and demands, the mother continues to cause trouble in another controversial EastEnders storyline that was severely criticised by viewers for its ‘exploitative’ and ‘hurtful’ treatment of sudden infant death syndrome (McCorckell and Johnson, 2011).

The most complained about episode in EastEnders’ history sees a distressed Ronnie exchange her dead son for Kat’s newborn baby on New Year’s Eve 2011. In response to the complaints, the baby swap storyline was cut short and revised in function of a positive ending (Kirkwood, 2011). Singled out for criticism by viewers was the excessive portrayal of a bereaved mother’s ‘unhinged and deranged’ reaction to loss (Plunkett, 2011) generated by a melodramatic narrative that pitted EastEnders’ incest survivors against each other in a battle over ‘their’ newborn son, culminating in Ronnie’s trial and prison sentence. The highly symbolic mise-en-scène in the story’s climax, played out in court, foregrounds what is at stake. Only under the watchful eye of the judge and the community does EastEnders grant the female couple a poignant moment of connection, when Kat and Ronnie reach out to each other and place their hands on the glass partition that mirrors and separates them.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Biographical note

Judith Franco is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts, Media and Technology, Utrecht School of the Arts. She has published in Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Television & New Media, Cinema Journal and in collected works.

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