space for progress in melodramas : safety valve v. waiting room

The Feuer article makes note of Mulvey's point of view on the "space" opened by melodramas. Mulvey suggests that "melodrama as a form opens up contradictions in bourgeois ideology in the domestic sphere." However, she sees "the purpose of opening ideological contradiction as providing a 'safety valve' rather than as progressive" (7). I believe the safety valve metaphor is almost accurate. It sounds like a zone of quiet forgetting for resistors whose messages are deemed undesirable by the established system. I'd like to offer a different, and maybe more hopeful metaphor: that of the waiting room. A space where the subjects and matters screaming for progress are given a space to measure their concerns against the answers that the family (representative of the contemporaneous era family) is able to offer. If the available answers (representative of the political/ideological status quo) do not provide a real solution to the issue under analysis, the issue blows up into unresolvable drama, but it also becomes an issue that is put out there in our social subconscious, for society to ruminate, until progress occurs. Or rather, it becomes an agent of the desired, yet substantial, if slow, impending progress.