In praise of Roseanne.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Cutlure - Roseanne Arnold - Column

The other night, while flipping among three nightly network news broadcasts, I stopped--as I often do--to check out the Roseanne rerun Fox cleverly schedules during that time slot in New York. And, as often happens, I found myself sticking around longer than I intended, watching the Conners wiggle their way through whatever crisis had hit their Kmart window fan that day.

On the three more respectable networks, the Dow Jones averages rise and fall; Congress and the courts hand down weighty decisions in lofty prose; the official weapons of state are deployed, around the globe and in the inner cities, to preserve democracy and the American way. But in the Conner residence, where most things are either in disrepair or not yet paid for, it is possible to glimpse--as it rarely is on the newscasts themselves--how the fallout from such headlines might actually affect those who are relatively low in the pecking order.

On CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN, the problems of the women who make headlines are not likely to sound familiar to most of us. Zoe Baird may be struggling with the servant issue. Hillary may have misplaced her capital-gains records. The Queen of England may be embroiled in royal-family dysfunction. But Roseanne, matriarch of the shabby Conner household, will be coping with less glamorous trauma--unemployment, foreclosure, job stress, marital power struggles, unruly and unmotivated kids--in a less dignified but more realistic style.

I am a big fan of Roseanne--Barr, Arnold, Conner, whatever. So are my female and working-class students, who invariably claim her as their own and hang on to her for dear life as they climb the ladder of class and professional achievement--an effort in which their parents have so hopefully invested everything they own. But it recently occurred to me that I have never--in the many years I've regularly analyzed and commented on American popular culture--written a single word about her. Nor have I read many, outside the trashy tabloids, where her personal life and public persona are regularly recorded and described.

In the last year, I've read dozens of academic and popular articles, and two whole books, about The Cosby Show. Archie Bunker and All in the Family have been praised and analyzed endlessly. Even Murphy Brown and The Mary Tyler Moore Show are taken seriously in ever-broadening academic and journalistic circles. Not to mention the well-structured, post-structural Madonna, long the darling of feminist critics and academics. What is it about these other media icons that makes them somehow more "respectable" subjects of intellectual analysis, more suitable to "serious" discourse?

What is it about Roseanne that makes her so easy to ignore or write off, despite her (to me) obvious talent, originality, political chutzpah, and power? Gender and appearance are surely part of it; but I suspect that class-position as well as attitude--is the major factor. Bill Cosby's Cliff Huxtable, Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards, Candice Bergen's Murphy Brown are all well-turned out, well-educated liberal professionals. And the grungy, working-class Archie Bunker, far from scoring points for his class, is always beaten down by the liberal, professional mentality of everyone else on the show. As for...