Will Irish stay-at-home mothers empathise with the TV characters, asks Fionola Meredith
Fêted in the US for ripping away the façade of placid suburban life to expose the quagmire of dysfunction and discontent which seethes beneath, Desperate Housewives has now burst on to television screens in Ireland. But will its particular brand of sun-lit emerald green lawns, home-baked cookies and adultery in the afternoon prove equally attractive to Irish audiences? Will women across the country breathe sighs of empathy and relief as their most inadmissible secrets - feeling hateful towards their darling children; longing to seduce the rough 'n' ready plumber - are playfully acknowledged and even daringly celebrated by the inhabitants of the impossibly idyllic Wisteria Lane?
Or will they grind their teeth in fury at the relentlessly cruel way women are lampooned in the show, all in the name of emotional honesty and sisterly empowerment? Jane Ruffino, an American-born feminist academic at UCD, was appalled at the antics of the desperate housewives. "This show is a good reason to get rid of your TV. I guess it's supposed to be about the women as central characters rather than as supporting actresses, but it still defines them entirely in terms of their men. The women are either insecure and helpless or predatory, manipulative and self-serving. The men are hapless or inhumane. And the old trope of 'woman as amoral temptress' is there right from the start, with the show's logo of Adam, Eve and the apple. Even the title has something of cheap pornography about it. The only appeal is that it has lots of primary colours: green lawns, sunny days, muffins and salads. The whole thing is utterly predictable and embarrassingly simple - it's a two-piece jigsaw. No, no, no . . . just no!"
But Donegal-based freelance broadcaster and mother of two, Kate O'Halloran, disagrees: "It's a sophisticated, polished soap - deliberately way over the top, deliberately tongue-in-cheek. Yes, the women are Barbie dolls, but Irish audiences will see that - they're much more cynical and media-literate than their American counterparts, who are inclined to take things more literally." She thinks that while audiences on both sides of the Atlantic will enjoy the show, "they'll be laughing in different places".
What do real housewives think of Desperate Housewives? Mairead Conley, president of the 80-member Housewives' Club in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, wasn't impressed. "I'm just an ordinary housewife, and I don't recognise these characters in any way. They're very selfish and self-centred. There's no neighbourliness about them."
But Lisa O'Hara of the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service (MRCS) in Dublin believes Desperate Housewives may have a valuable role in pointing out the dangers of the unrealistic fantasies many women bring to domestic life prior to marriage. "It demonstrates how dreams can turn to disappointment and frustration. Here at MRCS we call it 'failure to realise expectations'. It's when women look at their lives and ask: 'is that it?'"
The housewife's sense of "is that it?" was recognised most frankly and fully by American author Betty Friedan in her ground-breaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. The "mystique" was Friedan's term for the "problem with no name" - the psychic distress experienced by women without public careers who were bogged down in domestic concerns. She believed that housewives suffered from "a sense of emptiness, non-existence and nothingness - a slow death of mind and spirit". French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir also bewailed the grinding ennui of domestic life: "Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day." While the monotony of housework is archly referenced in Desperate Housewives, it's difficult to imagine any of its exquisitely-groomed heroines cleaning the loo.
And while the programme seeks to connect with the real-life concerns of women's domestic lives, it's evident that fewer than ever stay-at-home mothers feel comfortable using the term "housewife", with its overtones of kept obedience to the breadwinning husband. Yet ironically, it's also become terribly fashionable to indulge in 1950s "retro-femininity". Whether it's Kylie Minogue in Elle magazine eulogising the pleasures of "a good dust. Or clean. I'll get my Marigolds on and have a fantastic frenzy", or Nigella Lawson promoting the virtues of the "domestic goddess", "trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in her languorous wake", it's never been a cooler time to be a housewife.
But the social recognition of the hours of unpaid labour spent changing nappies, ironing and vacuuming is still glaringly absent. Sioban Harth, a full-time mother of two young children, sees this lack of recognition for the decision to stay at home even in working mothers: "There's a strange dichotomy here in that mums who have to work think that mums who stay home have the easy option. Yet so many working mothers I know say they do it to get a break from their children."
Early signs suggest that, hungry for a show to fill the gap left by Sex and the City, we're ready to gobble up this lushly shot - and apparently addictive - slice of American pie. But while Desperate Housewives is lauded for dealing with the stifling frustration that can lurk behind the closed doors of female domesticity, that's as "real" as it gets. The impossibly skinny, hipster-clad "housewives" with their film-star looks, sexual intrigues and bizarre escapades bear little resemblance to the reality of most stay-at-home mothers' bodies and lives.