SOURCE: "Guiding Blight: The Soap Opera and the Eighteenth-Century Novel," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 73-91.

In the following essay, Rogers views daytime serial dramas within the literary framework originating in such eighteenth-century English novels as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.

Contemporary soap operas (here defined as televised morning or daytime serial drama, as distinct from the prime-time serial and mini-series) contain sentiments so deep-rooted as to have much in common with various literary predecessors. For example, soap opera philosophy could, with some justice, be traced back to the medieval wheel of fortune. And not only does the passive, submissive soap heroine have roots that reach at least as far back in English literature as Chaucer's Griselda, but the aggressive, manipulative, lustful soap villainess can find an ancestor in Chaucer's Wife of Bath if not in Shakespeare's Goneril and Regan. Of course, Grendel's...