Persephone as Narrative Symptom: Narrative Transactions in Long-Form Viewership

If the narrative of Persephone in post-feminist heroine television is a symptom that substitutes for the deadlocked debates about the body of the woman in culture, how is it staged for the viewer? I continue with Ally McBeal to illustrate how this Persephone symptom can be read as a form of fantasy — a structure that acts out what has been foreclosed — and ask, what is the relationship, in the consumption practices of fans and longform serial texts, between the textual symptom (Persephone) and the producers and consumers of this symptom? For Peter Brooks, ‘the study of human fiction-making and psychic process are convergent activities, and superimposable forms of analysis’ (1994, 35–6), and I propose that the relationship is, on a cultural level, analogous to the dynamic in the psychoanalytic clinic, where the analysand presents his or her symptom to the analyst for examination and interpretation, just as the presentation of the Persephone myth in heroine television is examined and interpreted by the audience through the negotiated decoding practices of individual viewers. The more successful the animation of the symptom, the more audiences identify with and seek out the narrative, effecting a positive transference, what Brooks calls the narrative ‘transaction’ (1985, 216–37).