Death of a matriarch: Soap opera aesthetics, space and memory

The deaths of long-running, elderly characters offer up a chance to consider the ebb and flow and circular nature of soap narratives. This article uses the deaths of three of EastEnders ’s matriarchs to think about the soap opera’s use of aesthetics and space, alongside its layering of memory. Pat Butcher, Peggy Mitchell and Dot Cotton’s deaths – two on screen and one off – saw the programme intensify and disrupt its aesthetic and narrative conventions to signify these deaths as intensely emotional ‘events’. These endings were moments of pause in the ever-onwards flow of soap narrative. Long-running elderly characters embody soap memory, and through these deaths EastEnders revisited deep layers of its past to pay tribute to departing iconic characters by employing ‘practices of self-citations and self-referentiality’ (Holdsworth, 2011: 37). Here, objects and spaces, remembrances and returns are used to enrich the experience of long-time viewers. This article considers the use of Albert Square as a ‘time-rich’ (Lury, 2005:16) space and presents these episodes as examples of how the programme can shift its aesthetic conventions and unsettle its spatial dynamics for affective impact.