Gender and Power in Absolutely Fabulous and Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales, Gender, and the Passive Maiden

The fairy tales we know to be true begin with "once upon a time" and end with "happily ever after." Somewhere in between, the prince rescues the damsel in distress. Of course, this is not always literally the case — many fairy tales omit these exact phrases. But few fairy tales in the Western tradition fail to feature a beautiful, passive maiden rescued by a vibrant man who is usually her superior in either social rank or moral standing. It is precisely this passivity of women in fairy tales that has led so many progressive parents to wonder whether their children should be exposed to them. Can any girl truly believe she can grow up to be a president, CEO, or astronaut after five viewings of Disney's Snow White?

Perhaps, perhaps not. But modern popular culture does contain a number of characters and stories that intentionally play with the ways in which gender has traditionally been used to construct narratives. These works present female characters who disrupt traditional gendered rules of power. We can see this in the British television show Absolutely Fabulous and its two main female characters, Edina and Patsy, who are reprises of a recurrent figure in Western narrative: the "unruly woman."

While such characters have appeared with regularity since at least the moment the Wife of Bath steps onto the literary stage, they are usually only allowed to disrupt the world of the story for a brief period before the normal order of events and power is reestablished. "Absolutely Fabulous," however, presents a world in which misrule is allowed to continue — in which an inverted order of power, one in which women hold a significant degree of authority, is permitted to persist and even be normalized.

The Unruly Woman in Absolutely Fabulous

What makes the female characters in "Absolutely Fabulous" especially compelling is that they are not simple representations of the "unruly" in the way that a character like Roseanne was. These are not characters created simply to violate our ideas about the norms of gendered behavior. Roseanne, an entirely grotesque character, exists as an anti-woman — an exemplar of everything we consider to be the antithesis of femininity. Edina and Patsy, on the other hand, violate some traditional expectations of the feminine while playing in more sophisticated and ambiguous ways with others, as Waddell (1999) suggests.

The four major female characters in the show — representing three different generations — are concerned with both traditional feminine (and not strictly feminist) issues such as friendship, aging, sex, love, and shopping. The major running jokes in the show are each centered on these issues, and on how the various female characters act out — performing the grotesque — by refusing to behave as women are supposed to in relation to them. And yet, even as these female characters disrupt expectations about how they are supposed to act, they remain, in the end, short of revolutionary. They are certainly playing with the rules of gendered behavior, and often breaking them, but the rules remain traditional ones and the game is the same.

We see this interplay with traditional female roles both in characters who embody familiar female comedic types — such as the mother as a spiteful hag with a sharp tongue — and in Edina and Patsy, who represent a rather different sort of disruptive woman. These two characters — often hyper-critical, almost always loud, and very snobbish — shift constantly between the feminist and the feminine. Such shifts are funny, but they are ultimately far more conservative than a casual viewing of the show might suggest.

Neither Edina nor Patsy ultimately offers women a true alternative to the roles that patriarchal culture has written for them. Edina is a grown-up version of the Bond girl: a female defined by the pretty things she buys, even if she is now the one doing the buying.

The essential conservatism of the show — its tendency to play with ideas of the burlesque and the unruly without ever truly inviting us to treat it as a blueprint for even minor revolution — can be seen in the way all of its characters, but especially the female ones, trivialize the important issues of our time, elevating style over substance at every opportunity. Absolutely Fabulous seems more radical than it is because it mocks the style and form of upper-class life. But this must be understood within the context of British rather than American class ideals, and the final message is that while the rich may often provide material for laughter, they are still people that we — and especially if that "we" is female — would much rather be than not.

Consumerism, Money, and Gendered Power

One of the ways in which "Absolutely Fabulous" plays with traditional ideas about appropriate gendered behavior is in its treatment of consumerism. These may be independent women in many ways, deriving their sense of self through modern means — but they also define who they are by the way they shop. In this sense, they are not so different from those essential icons of traditional televised femininity, Lucy and Ethel.

The ways in which gender and the power of money are intertwined in the show illustrate both an inversion of the normal status quo — it is men, not women, who are supposed to wield money in the particular way these female characters do — and a simultaneous reinforcement of that status quo, because it is still money that talks. Even though Edina and Patsy can afford to "buy" just about whatever man strikes their fancy, along with the more traditional trappings of female consumerism such as the best clothes and the best therapist, they must be seen in many ways as pre-feminist creatures, happy to be defined by a consumerist culture that cannot be truly liberating for any woman who defines herself in terms of its values.

It is important to note that it is not only the female characters who are significant in questioning and reasserting traditional ideas about the relationship between power and gender. The male characters — Paolo, Oliver, and Marshall — also call into question how both genders use money to establish dominance through financial power. We see this especially in the episode "Death and Morocco" from the second series (1994) and in the episodes "Happy New Year" and "Sex" (1995).

These episodes, like the series as a whole, place the entire issue of the inversion of gendered power within the context of comedy. Comedy takes as one of its major forms of discourse the inversion of the normal and orderly — this, after all, is what makes comedy funny. Satire, which is the dominant trope of this show, is especially concerned with the ways in which the normal and orderly can be upended.

Conclusion: Conservative Laughter

The happily-ever-after of fairy tales is always a conservative ordering of the world — a state of stasis, an unwillingness to throw out the old rules and begin again. Narratives like "Absolutely Fabulous" make us laugh because they mock the absurdities of our social structures. But the laughter is temporary, the inversions are fleeting, and in the end they are quite illusory.

References

Bacchilega, C. (1997). Postmodern Fairytales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Rohrich, L. (1979). Folktales and Reality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.

Waddell, T. (1999). Revelling in dis-play: The grotesque in Absolutely Fabulous. In A. Mills (Ed.), Seriously Weird: Papers on the Grotesque (pp. 207–223). New York: Peter Lang.