Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane: Trimmed Eden or Fresh Hell?
p. 187-194
Texte intégral
1The credits of Desperate Housewives could not depict the show’s mythical sources more explicitly: the hugely popular ABC series that started in 2004 to end on an eighth season in 2012 begins on a highly peculiar image of the original biblical garden in clear reference to the Book of Genesis. The brilliant animated sequence opens on a parody of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve1 and ends upon a collage picture showing the four main characters of the series flaunting bright red apples under the same tree. Right from the start, the eponymous housewives definitely make the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil their own as a gigantic apple bearing the series’ title crushes poor Adam, thus adding a new curse to the original man’s fate2. However sophisticated the multi-referential picture may be, it states bluntly how the show is going to be all about Eve’s daughters.
2Studying what stands for “gardens” in the fictional world of Desperate Housewives in reference to the biblical narrative and the evolution of private outdoor spaces in the history of the United States, the article endeavors to answer the question of whether the series’ setting, Wisteria Lane, represents Paradise or Hell by bringing out the contradictions harbored in that apparently perfectly ordered universe. An analysis of the relationship of each of the “housewives” to her “garden” will provide insights into some of the moral and religious issues underlying their fictional universe as one wonders about the nature of the fruit of their garden and of the loss its consumption may cause.
3The pilot of the series, that is to say the “zero” episode made to convince the studio to produce the new show, opens on an aerial shot of the microcosm where the “dramedy3” is to unfold, a lively yet serene suburban street lined with diversely spacious traditional American private houses, complete with manicured lawns and flowered yards. Most episodes begin thus, on a general shot of Wisteria Lane, the landscape and set of the series, reproducing in a studio an ideal northern American middle-class suburban neighborhood in the first decade of the 21st century. In that epitome of suburbia, each housewife and her family enjoy what Pierce Lewis calls, “that most prized of American institutions, a single-family house, privately owned, set on a distinct plot of privately owned land4”.
4Peace and affluence reign and everything seems to fit in place, although a few details rouse the onlooker’s interest, who might for example ask: “Where are all the men?”, before remembering he or she has just seen the credits end on Adam being crushed by the mythical fruit. If this is Paradise, these first shots hardly succeed in making viewers suspend their disbelief as this is clearly a set in which the artificial nature of the place is emphasized. The aerial point of view which stops just high enough for the onlooker not to realize this world does not extend any further creates a distance, as if it were seen and controlled by a puppet master or child playing doll house or miniature railway. One almost feels like shaking this miniature world and make snow flurry around the lovely pastel-color clapboard houses. In other words, Wisteria Lane is clearly to be seen as a model, Utopian world, highly desirable yet hardly believable: where is this “Fairwiew”, this town or city it is supposed to be part of, so fair and never viewed? And from whose fair or unfair overbearing godlike point of view are the people living there and their actions seen and judged?
5Despite these first signs of possible trouble in Paradise, the onlooker is struck by the perfect conformity of the yards to middle class suburban ideals, and soon realizes the great importance of these spaces fronting and backing each family’s house. In the series, the outdoor action generally takes place in the front yards, which is but logical as they are far less private than the back ones. The few occasions when backyards are used as settings generally refer to acts their perpetrators want to keep secret: for example, it is at the deep end of his backyard pool that the infamous Paul Young casts in concrete a most symbolic toy chest containing a young woman’s butchered remains, and when Gabrielle Solis goes through hard times and cannot afford to have the plumbing repaired, she uses her backyard Jacuzzi as a makeshift washing machine. The backyard is definitely the place for dirty linen and shameful secrets, where now and then some knowledge can be gathered about what stands for good and evil in the series’ diagesis, giving an insight into or a view upon acts and facts that are far from fair.
6On the contrary, front yards are essentially visible as an intermediate, transitional space between public and private lives, between the lanes and indoors, as well as a statement of their owners’ social status and credentials as worthy members of the community. In other words, the front yards are there for everybody to see, and they participate in the show as the perfect stages where to enact climaxes and crises. Getting to know as much as possible about your neighbors’ lives (or at least what they are willing to show) is essential to the economy of that series in which most narrative “arcs” (the stories developing throughout the episodes as each of the wives and a number of their neighbors meet with their different fates) are based upon the disclosing of secrets generally through spying on and gossiping about the neighbors’ tragic or trivial mysteries.
7What strikes the viewer, especially if he or she is European, is the apparently seamless transition between public and private spaces and between the neighbors’ yards in the absence of those thick hedges the French seem to favor so much. The only limit between the street and the front yard, when there is one, is the traditional immaculately white picket-fence offering such a vivid contrast with the bright green lawns. It appears to be the perfect means to symbolize the limits of each family’s property in the series, as it does not present much obstacle to the onlooker’s gaze while participating in the mapping-out of the microcosm. The symbolical picket fence departs from the mythical wall defining the original garden as well as the historical walls or “hedges of grace5” the first settlers in the New World would erect to protect themselves first from the native wilderness, then from the open-range cattle. The no-fence laws of the 1830s obliging farmers to fence their cattle in6 gradually allowed private garden owners to take out their now redundant protective hedges and fences. It created the typically northern American open-looking residential areas where house dwellers can both enjoy a view on neighboring properties and offer the visual evidence of their successful lives to the gaze of all, the expression of a world order in which transparency seems to be essential as a proof of virtuous living, at least up to the walls of private houses. The absence of actual wall or privacy-protective hedge or fence could be the reason why theses spaces are not called “gardens”, as “the word ‘garden’, as originally used, referred not to the area enclosed, but to the enclosure itself, the fence7”.
8Going back to Wisteria Lane in the first shots of the series, the onlooker’s gaze is soon made to isolate different denizens of that extremely sophisticated space as the camera zooms on a pretty woman in a pink tracksuit—actually Gabrielle Solis, one of the wives—jogging along the Lane and her neighbors’ front yards, minutes before the introduction of a quartet of women immediately assimilated to the eponymous “desperate housewives”, Lynette Scavo, Gabrielle Solis, Bree Van de Kamp and Susan Mayer, in order of appearance in the narrative. These four daughters of Eve apparently belong to the elect and the blessed as each possesses a house and some land around it. Each of them can be defined through her relationship to her yards, though both Lynette and Susan are never seen gardening and usually favor that other intermediate space of the traditional American house, the porch.
9Despite the fact that one of the first shots devoted to her shows her against the background of a flowery bush like some suburban “Lady with a unicorn”, Lynette Scavo, constantly torn between a brilliant career in advertising and the care of her four and later five children, has little use for her yards except as playgrounds for her three boys who may at times share a foot-or baseball game there with their father. Adam and his male seed still reign in the Scavos’ yards and before their major estrangement of the end of season 7, Tom and Lynette will cling to the traditional large nuclear family, which is probably linked to Tom’s Italian-American roots. Nevertheless, the almost constant scattering of toys in the yards marking the Scavo household as a large family, a rarity in the kind of middle class neighborhood Wisteria Lane represents, is but superficial as the lawn is as manicured as the neighbors’ despite the fact no one is ever seen to be tending it and this slight disorder hardly disrupts the continuity between the different yards. When the endearing gay couple next door adorn their front lawn with a noisy fountain sculpture (4:58), Lynette takes the head of the rebellion against the original ornament considered an eye-and ear-sore disrupting the Lane’s hushed harmony, although she experiences some qualms due to the liberal streak characterizing her. However, it is easily subdued as she submits to middleclass materialistic and statuary values for the greater good of her family, although Lynette as a “desperate” character mostly embodies the contradictions between order and generosity Wisteria Lane is riddled with.
10Susan Mayer is no gardener either, though an interesting episode at the beginning of the series (1:3) casts her as an actual daughter of Eve, recalling the credits’ opening shot as an unfortunate accident leaves her stark naked in her new and very attractive neighbor’s yard and forces her to hide behind some greenery. “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7). Shame is a feeling Susan often experiences as a result of her childlike, immature behavior, her numerous gaffes bringing comic relief into the series but also marking her as a character built upon a constant questioning of innocence, responsibility and guilt. A divorced single mother, the only scene actually showing her in a garden environment depicts her looking for her Adam, a quest that will basically structure Susan’s narrative arcs throughout the series.
11We have said their yards have no great importance for Lynette and Susan and the same would be true of Gabrielle Solis but for her special relationship to their young gardener who has become the underage lover of the bored Mexican-American ex-model trophy wife. When Gabrielle engages for the first and last time in a gardening task, i. e. mowing the lawn at night in full party regalia, it is to hide the evidence of her sin: the lawn must be mown so that her husband will not know the gardener tends to another highly forbidden metaphorical garden while hardworking (albeit lax about the source of his riches) Carlos toils at mergers and acquisitions to ensure their affluent middle-class status.
12As that episode illustrates, the perfectly manicured lawns of Wisteria Lane hide sinful secrets and the model community of well-behaved neighbors is deeply flawed. That extremely dark streak is made obvious from the very beginning of the pilot episode, as the first words to be heard happen to be delivered from beyond the grave by a fifth housewife, Mary-Alice Young, whose suicide opens the liminal episode and who will be the off-screen narrator throughout the series. And where should we meet her for the first time but in her front yard, thanks to a flashback scene depicting her supposedly perfect life? However, as we see her immaculately dressed for some improbable gardening task, stepping down from her mausoleum-like porch to go and inhale the perfume of a notoriously scentless agapanthus, we become aware of sinister undertones and realize this Eden comes after the fall: the creation of Wisteria Lane might well be a doomed attempt at recapturing Paradise lost. None of the wives illustrates this better than the character who is introduced as their paragon, Bree Van de Kamp, the best gardener and most zealous (Episcopalian) church-goer of the flock.
13The very image of WASP perfection, Bree will fall the harder and know utter humiliation when, a temporary alcoholic, she “sleeps it off” one night and worse, one morning in full view of the whole lane on the meticulously tended lawn all her neighbors envy. However, Bree still manages to reach some form of perfection in her embodiment of absolute contradiction. She might be prim and proper to a fault, she displays wonderful energy when planting a tree in the third or fourth shot devoted to her as Mary-Alice’s voiceover insists on her doing “her own gardening”, and when asked about her gardening secrets, she obviously relishes mouthing the words “horse manure” in sharp contrast with her extremely distinguished diction. An expert in planting and delving into what Americans interestingly call “dirt” instead of earth or loam, she goes as far as having her first husband’s body dug out then in again when she gets to believe he had attempted to poison her before going back to her former belief in a devoted husband despite his faults.
14The whole series is built upon cycles or seasons of falls and recoveries for each of the wives in turn or simultaneously, but none of them knows such utter debasement or spectacular resilience as Bree, a control freak craving for perfection whose tremendous efforts are regularly crushed in the cruel world of television fiction. In other words, an excellent case to study when interested in what may be good and what may be evil in the beautifully trimmed world of Wisteria Lane and what is the sin at the origins of the housewives’ despair.
15In order to bring together the contradictions that structure the whole series and provide it with its dynamics, looking back on the credits proves useful, especially when focusing on the strange pieces of fruit that can be found there—the “big apple” in the first shot, the banana peel of the spoofed Arnolfinis9, cascading canned vegetables10, a Warhol-like soup can11 and again, a wealth of apples in the last shot—and which make the viewer wonder about their origin and nature: how far are they the fruit of the biblical tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
16The witty use of referential artworks almost hides the dubious aspect of these fruits and vegetables that cannot be produced in the wives’ front yards, these utterly artificial stages set in an eternal spring where wisterias and fruit trees are always in full bloom. Junk, maybe poison12, highly suspect, the fruits stand for Wisteria Lane’s numerous sins, which may point to the series as a satire of the suburban middle-class values and way of life. Could this cornucopia of ambiguous fruits also bear reference to the name, Marc Cherry, of the creator of a series whose ideological position seems to waver between a tribute to conservative Republican values and a satire of US middle class assumptions and way of life? The dubious fruits popping on and off in the credits as well as the hardly edible-looking ones often adorning dining-tables and kitchen counters would then symbolize the incomplete knowledge of good and evil mankind (as represented by the inhabitants of Wisteria Lane) partakes of in spite of Eve’s daughters brazenly picking up the tree’s produce.
17Regarding the satire, we have seen how the yards are devoid of effective fences in an invitation for gazes and characters to trespass, and this could be praised as a sign of harmony and perfectly good relationships among the inhabitants of Wisteria Lane if the whole neighborhood was not depicted most of the time as a claustrophobic microcosm harboring a population most often driven by self-interest, pettiness and voyeurism. Despite its exuberant charm and sweet scent, wisteria is, after all, a creeper and the word sounds sinister enough: Eden could well be another name for Hell despite the apparent perfection of the place as illustrated in the lovely yet implausible yards and houses. In fact the whole lane is hardly different from a gated community, the segmentation of the American society providing the neighborhood with invisible yet very effective protection from outsiders.
18A number of narrative arcs tackle the issue of who belongs and who doesn’t, of who can be welcomed and who should be ostracized. For example, when in season 7 the series’ arch-villain and posthumous narrator’s widower Paul Young seeks revenge on the neighborhood via the opening of a rehab center for ex-cons in their midst, Lynette is once more torn between her liberal ideals and her anxiety for her family’s well-being while unsavory vigilantes take up arms against the newcomers. In season 6, the new-comer Angie Bolen attracts some suspicion and animosity and what should be defiled by scattered garbage from her overturned trash-cans but her front yard? Interestingly, both diegesis and casting mark her as an outsider, as actress Drea de Matteo is better known for her part as ill-fated Adriana La Cerva in Sopranos, her character in Desperate Housewives being also linked with the world of crime. If the original sin caused the exclusion of Adam and Eve from Eden, the mythical garden had been created to harbor all living creatures and excluding other human beings from your own private Eden could well be a major sin too. However, the series does not give any clear answer to the questions it raises, such as who belongs or doesn’t or who can be saved or rejected because of their too great evil. The necessity of long-running fiction favors unexpected twists and turns in narrative arcs and characters apparently far more likely to escape control that their almost invisibly gardened front yards.
19Despite the chaos regularly caused by the various crises disrupting the apparent harmony of Wisteria Lane in each season, the housewives’ major sin appears to be their constant quest for perfection, which leads them into excess and fall. Bree’s model home and family shatter after a few episodes and the whole series opens on the inexplicable suicide of a perfectly happy wife, mother, friend and… gardener. The despair qualifying the eponymous characters could well be the series’ biggest produce, and the contradictions it stages and solves but temporarily before building a new set of them for the next cycle and indeed season also reflect the conflicting values founding the American psyche. As true heiresses of the first Puritan settlers, the housewives are doomed to failure in an illustration of Blaise Pascal’s saying, “who wants to act as an angel acts as a beast13” as well as an echo of the theses of cultural analyst Robert Warshow in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”, in which he argues that “mass culture […] seeks to express by whatever means available […] that sense of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create14”.
20 Desperate Housewives would then reflect the deep conflict pertaining the US society constantly endeavoring to solve the contradiction between the acknowledgement of the curse of Adam and Eve and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in its founding texts and sometimes simply conceived as the blissful state induced by the perfect satisfaction of every desire, however trivial. The enormous success of the series may partly result from its reenactment of the tensions of a nation torn between fearing and playing God, as the staging of the series’ main crises on the set of recreated middle-class suburban front-yards where to tackle some of the major American founding myths turns the housewives themselves into variations of a sinful yet ever-resilient Mother Eve.
Bibliographie
Desperate Housewives , Seasons 1 to 8. Created by Marc Cherry. With Marcia Cross, Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman and Eva Longaria. ABC Studios and Cherry Productions, 2004-2012. DVD. Disney, 2012. The official Desperate Housewives page on ABC: [http://abc.go.com/shows/desperate-housewives], consulted September 14, 2012.
Belan Caroline, Le paradoxe puritain, [http://www.yumpu.com/fr/document/view/3984500/le-paradoxe-puritain-bienvenue-sur-le-site-de-caroline-belan-], consulted October 1, 2012.
Genesis, The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville (Va), [http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=RsvGene.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all], consulted April 15, 2013.
Jackson John B., “The Past and Present of the Vernacular Garden”, in Hunt John Dixon and Wolschke-Bulmahn Joachim (ed.), The Vernacular Garden, Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 1993, p. 1-17.
Lewis Peirce, “The Making of Vernacular Taste: The Case of Sunset and Southern Living”, in Hunt John Dixon and Wolschke-Bulmahn Joachim (ed.), The Vernacular Garden, Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 1993, p. 107-136.
Pascal Blaise, Pensées, Paris, Gallimard, 1977.
Phelan Joseph, “Missing the Picture: Desperate Housewives Do Art History”, Artcyclopedia, [http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2005-05.html], consulted October 1, 2012.
Warhow Robert, “The Ganster as Tragic Hero”, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, Cambridge (MA) and London, Harvard University Press, 2001 [1946], p. 97-104.
Notes de bas de page
1“Adam and Eve, by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553). Especially the version at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.” Phelan Joseph, “Missing the Picture: Desperate Housewives Do Art History”, Artcyclopedia, [http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2005-05.html], p. 1, consulted October 1, 2012.
2In Genesis 3:15, it is the snake whose fate is to be crushed under Eve’s and her seed’s heels.
3“Desperate Housewives is an American television dramedy-mystery series created by Marc Cherry and produced by ABC Studios and Cherry Productions.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desperate_Housewives], consulted October 1, 2012.
4Lewis Peirce, “The Making of Vernacular Taste: The Case of Sunset and Southern Living”, in Hunt John Dixon and Wolschke-Bulmahn Joachim (ed.), The Vernacular Garden, Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 1993, p. 107.
5Belan Caroline, Le paradoxe puritain, [http://www.yumpu.com/fr/document/view/3984500/le-paradoxe-puritain-bienvenue-sur-le-site-de-caroline-belan-], p. 3, consulted October 1, 2012.
6Jackson John B., “The Past and Present of the Vernacular Garden”, in Hunt John Dixon and Wolschke-Bulmahn Joachim (ed.), op. cit., p. 16.
7Ibid., p. 12.
8Conventionally, season 4, episode 5.
9The Arnolfini Portrait (The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami), by Jan van Eyck, London, National Gallery.
10World War II “I am Proud” poster, artist unknown. Image from Corbis.
11Campbell’s Soup Can, by Andy Warhol. One can see that the word “Campbell’s” is omitted from the can in the animation; this is a nod to Warhol, but not a reproduction of his actual work. Phelan Joseph, “Missing the Picture: Desperate Housewives Do Art History”, op. cit., p. 1.
12Snow White’s apple is another mythical reference.
13“L’homme n’est ni un ange ni une bête et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête”, Pascal Blaise, Pensées, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, p. 370.
14Warhow Robert, “The Ganster as Tragic Hero”, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, Cambridge (MA) and London, Harvard University Press, 2001 [1946], p. 103-104.
Auteur
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Isabelle Schmitt
Maître de conférences en anglais dans l’UFR de langues et communication de l’université de Bourgogne, membre du laboratoire interlangues Texte/image/langage. Elle partage son enseignement entre la langue anglaise, les cultures anglophones, en particulier le cinéma, et la didactique des langues. Sa recherche porte sur l’oeuvre de réalisateurs comme Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Robert Altman ou Milos Forman et sur les genres filmiques (musicals, westerns) ainsi que sur les séries télévisées anglophones. Secrétaire de la SERCIA (Société d’études et de recherches sur le cinéma anglophone), elle a co-publié Intimacy in Cinema et De l’intime dans le cinéma anglophone avec David Roche ainsi que Bande dessinée et adaptation avec Benoît Mitaine et David Roche.
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