BETTER LIVING THROUGH TV: CONTEMPORARY TV AND MORAL IDENTITY FORMATION. Ed. Steven A. Benko. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. 352 pp. $120.00 hardback/$45.00 eBook.

Abstract

In the foreword to Better Living through TV: Contemporary TV and Moral Identity Formation, Martin Shuster contends that television is a “site for serious moral contemplation” even though the act of watching television will not, in and of itself, “make you more moral” (x). Editor Steven A. Benko concurs with Shuster’s observation. Benko holds that “television is a place where important identity work and moral reflection can occur” (1). For this to happen, viewers must engage in a dialog of sorts with the programs on their screens. Of course, the nature of these conversations has changed drastically in recent decades with the prolifso, she adds, “Mary Poppins ... provides an alternative to domesticated femininity ... [since Mary’s] magical nature ... makes her entirely immune to social regulation” (182). Mary “specifies her [own] wages and schedule” (183), enjoys Bert’s company but (unlike Maria) has no interest in marriage, and flies away with her umbrella when she knows it’s time. (The notion of Mary-Poppins-as-role-model may strike readers as odd, but from a child’s viewpoint it makes perfect sense; as a girl I was more impressed by Mary’s aerial stunts than by anything she did for the Bankses.) More soberingly, Mattis finds recent and contemporary “nanny” narratives in fiction, film, and TV to be, like their predecessors, socially conservative, aimed at pleasing comfortable white audiences. In “Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920– 1965” (102–17), Kristin Celello explores how cultural anxieties about divorced mothers were reflected and addressed in popular media—including novels, magazines, and films—and academic writing from those decades. She notes how the 1927 film version of Children of Divorce exploits the theme of lives wrecked by “scheming and frivolous” (107) mothers and presents the suicide of one such mother, Kitty (Clara Bow) as a heroic way to break the cycle and let a better woman take her place. Celello also analyzes the Mildred Pierce novel and its 1945 film adaptation (starring Joan Crawford), wherein the title character’s pursuit of sexual pleasure is punished by her daughter’s death; and she notes how, as late as 1962, The Lucy Show’s producers avoided making their comedy about two divorced women. Even so, and despite the culture’s lack of attention to working-class and/or ethnic minority women and families, “the growing visibility of divorced mothers ... challenged what Americans thought they knew about motherhood and the family in these decades” (114). Regarding their choice to limit Single Lives’ scope to US and British culture from the “late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries,” the editors cite “parallel demographic spike[s]” and accompanying cultural fears of the nineteenth century fin de siècle with today’s (5–6). Indeed, as early as 1851, one-third of all British women were single (Craig 19), and while some Victorians agonized over this, others, including Charles Dickens, knew and imagined multiple possibilities for female (and male) singles. It might have been feasible—and worthwhile—to include scholarship on screen interpretations of Betsy Trotwood, Miss Pross, and other heroic Dickensian spinsters, as well as analyses of onscreen Jane Eyres, in this collection. Rich in source material—ranging from diaries, letters, and memoirs to short stories and cookbooks—and scholarly perspectives, and promising more to come, Single Lives merits a place in undergraduate and graduate curricula for women’s studies, media studies, and popular culture.