The other night I had one of those nights. I woke about 2:30
my hands on fire from arthritis. I searched the house for some industrial
strength pain killers and settled in front of the TV set sipping a glass of
fruit juice waiting for the pain relief to take hold. Cruising, looking for
something halfway interesting, I discovered an episode of The Honeymooners. I expect that no one under the age of 50 will know
what I am referring to. The Honeymooners
was the 1950’s televised. It starred Jackie Gleason a well-known variety show
host and actor playing a New York City bus driver, Ralph Kramden. He and his
wife, Alice, played by Audrey Meadows, lived in a one-bedroom tenement
apartment. Ralph and Alice’s best friends, Ed and Trixie Norton, played by Art
Carney and Joyce Randolph, lived in the same building. Ed was a New York City
sewer inspector.
The set was almost always the Kramden’s multipurpose
kitchen-living room-dining room. The sink was an open fixture, much like a
laundry tub; they had no refrigerator—they made do with an ice box (as did my
family until I was about 5 years old); the walls were drab; in order to
communicate with the Norton’s they opened the window and shouted (they did not
have a telephone). In other words, the set reflected the life style of working
class city dwellers just following the end of the Second World War. The
Kramden’s did not own a television set, though the Norton’s did. (We got our
first set when I was about 5.) News was often delivered by telegram; neither
woman worked outside the home (ditto for the women in our neighbourhood).
Impressively, as almost all television shows in the 1950’s,
the series was broadcast live in front of an audience. One camera in a fixed
position framed the entire set. The actors entered, said their lines, and
exited. They could not afford a flub, second take, or a pause while they
regained their composure. What they did was what the audience got.
But, what about the stories? Mostly, they were quaint
compared to today’s sophisticated productions. Many of the actors were from
vaudeville where staged pieces were set up in order to deliver a one-line
zinger. Slapstick was a frequent tool.
Loud and brash pretty well covers it. And, Jackie Gleason, as Ralph Kramden,
delivered in full vaudevillian style. His character was loud, given to
exaggerated gestures, filled with maniacal energy. The other characters were
his foils. His long-suffering wife, Alice, was a paragon of patience and
forbearance. She waited out his rants and grandiose get-rich-quick schemes to
deliver a devastating riposte to which he could reply only with threats. “To
the moon, Alice! Bam! Zoom! To the moon!” was a frequent threat, sometimes
complete with a wound-up fist and delivery. Alice never blinked, knowing he
would never actually deliver on the promise.
The episode I watched involved the news that Alice’s mother
was arriving for a visit. Ralph blustered, threatened, and finally stomped off
in a childish tantrum to spend the night with Ed and Trixie. In the end it
turns out to be Ralph’s mother who is visiting and, of course, he completely
turns around, becoming a sweetly loving little boy in vivid contrast to the
spoiled ranting bully when he thought it was his mother-in-law who was on the
way.
The threat of domestic violence was, in the 1950’s, a
comedic device. It was never acted out on The
Honeymooners, but, it was, from time to time, in another popular 1950’s TV
series: I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball
played an immature, manipulative, and scheming girl-woman, Lucy Ricardo, married
to Cuban band leader, Ricky Ricardo, played by Lucille’s real-life husband and
Cuban band leader, Desi Arnez. Ricky could be petulant and demanding, but,
there was no doubt who was the boss in their household. Stories often involved
Lucy trying to get around Ricky’s possessive condescending paternalism,
frequently ending with Lucy being hoist by her own petard. I have a clear
memory of one episode ending with Ricky putting Lucy across his knees and
spanking her, as one would a child in those days, while she kicked and wailed
like a two-year-old. I also recall not being shocked; in my memory that
happened with enough frequency that it was not an isolated incident.
I can think back to when I was a kid when expressions like
“female driver” were a sneering putdown. It was a given that women were weak,
could not handle machinery, could not hunt or fish, or play hockey; nor could
they handle business. My female classmates in elementary school could look
forward to being airline stewardesses, office secretaries, nurses, or school
teachers, but only until they managed to snare a husband. Girls took home
economics; boys took woodworking shop. Our elementary school had separate
entrances for boys and girls and one wouldn’t even dream of entering the
building by the door designated for the opposite sex; the shame would have made
life unlivable.
It is intriguing, looking back at history, to discern where
this idea that women are weak vessels in need of male guidance and protection
developed. Certainly it did not exist in peasant society where often women took
a dominate role in home and village life. Where we find male dominance is in
the upper classes, both secular and religious. In Europe the dominant
philosophical underpinnings of the ruling classes were derived from Rome and
the remnants of its authority. But, even there, in ancient Rome women played a
powerful role, reinforced by the cult of Mithras. I hate to pin things on
Christianity—it’s just too easy and too glib, and generalizations often miss
very important details, contributing factors, and exceptions—but, Christianity sprang
from the same roots as two other very male-centric religions that formed in the
mid-East (Judaism and Islam). The story of the spread of Christianity throughout
Europe often involved the incorporation or subjection of the already existing “pagan”
religions which tended to be female-dominated. Some have characterized the
persecution of witchcraft as a misogynist campaign, but I sometimes suspect
that our image of witches being burned at the stake has been strongly influenced
by Hollywood and is glossing over the fact that many “witches” (“heretics” is probably
a more accurate term) were male and that public burning was only one of many
different ways that enemies of the church were disposed of. At that, the
picture of a bonfire being made around the feet of the victim is misleading.
Often the fire was arranged so that the victim actually suffocated long before any
flames reached them, if at all. And, more so, many victims were strangled
before the fire was lit. All this is an aside, as history is so much more complicated
and interesting than the simple stories that the media have fed us.
To prevent this from becoming the length of a book, or treatise,
I’m going to jump ahead and say that what we were seeing on television in the
1950’s was the final stages of the waning power of the male-dominated church in
Western social mores. It was becoming a bad joke, full of bluster, threats,
childish tantrums, and a barely suppressed violence. Male figures in television
of the 1960’s were often weak and incompetent; the women were the bedrock of
family and social life. Archie Bunker, in the early 70’s, could only mock
and hold parodies of political positions, but had no real power of his own.
Even the so-called liberated son-in-law Mike Stivik, was, when pushed, as chauvinistic
as Archie in his relationship with his wife. The difference is that Mike’s
wife, Gloria, finally freed herself from the marriage and set out on a voyage
of self-discovery. Archie’s wife, Edith, on the other hand, had no such
opportunity, except for brief tentative skirmishes, dying before discovering
that she was more than simply the butt of her husband’s jokes and scorn.
In short, you can learn a lot from watching television at
3:00 am.
