Real Housewives and the violence of the nuclear family

Watching RHONJ is the closest I get to seeing my own family onscreen

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team Melissa, per usual

My friend Frederique texted me the other day about the new season of Real Housewives of New Jersey, which is streaming in real time over here in the UK, thank god. I think it’s my favorite of all the franchises aside from Potomac, which is really saying something.

“You know how Matt Rogers [of Las Culturistas] has a theory that each franchise is about a different overall theme?” Fred asked me. “Previously I’ve thought that Jersey’s theme is patriarchy and I still think thats true. But lately I’ve been ruminating on the fact that of all the franchises, I think it has the strongest immigrant identity.” She mentioned a scene this season devoted to what it means to be a “good” Italian/Jewish/Turkish girl.

Anyone who watches Real Housewives can tell you it’s a phenomenally rich text about the intersections of race, class, gender and power in America. The immigrant throughline as Frederique suggests is indeed huge in RHONJ: its central relationship is between the families of brother and sister Teresa Giudice and Joe Gorga, whose parents were Italian immigrants from Salerno. But if I had to pick a single theme that encompasses RHONJ, I think I’d go with familial violence (which is inseparable, IMO, from patriarchal violence).

Maybe you don’t think you’re a Housewives person, or even a reality tv person. That was me before I binged hundreds of episodes with my roommate Jackie early in the pandemic (miss you JJ). If you’re considering diving in and unsure where to start, might I humbly suggest Jersey, especially if you’re a fan of the Sopranos. RHONJ is about the same culture in the same McMansion Jersey burbs, and it shares the HBO classic’s most potent themes. Academics and critics have long argued that the Sopranos was a show about how Italians became white, and in that respect RHONJ carries on its legacy.

In my BuzzFeed News essay from last fall about how pop culture has fallen out of love with the nuclear family, I touched on the kinds of themes RHONJ shares with the most critically revered texts about Italian-American identity: “the extraordinary pressure of cultural tradition and gender roles, the tension between one’s chosen and biological families, the making and unmaking of the American man.” The wedding scene that opens The Godfather has nothing on the premiere of RHONJ season 3, when an elaborate christening ends with a fist fight between Teresa’s then-husband, Italian-born Joe Giudice, and her brother Joe Gorga, their children standing around in fancy dress clothes weeping. Gorga thought at the time that Giudice was jeopardizing his relationship with his and Teresa’s dad, who when he was alive seemed to defer to Teresa’s version of events. The episode ends with Gorga leaning over his elderly patriarch, wailing in both Italian and English, “You’re my father! You’re my father!!!!” I mean, it’s cinema.

But your mileage may vary. Some Housewives fans don’t care for the family stuff at all. This AV Club recap for the February 14th episode expresses dismay at the resurfacing Teresa/Melissa/Joe drama: “If you’ve watched the show even once in the past 13 seasons, you’ve already seen and heard it.”

Me, though? I truly cannot get enough. One of the many things I love about Housewives is getting to see real families evolve over the course of many years, through divorces and deaths, estrangements and bankruptcies, triumphs and humiliations both (semi)private and public. The little girls who sobbed while their dad and uncle started beating each other up at the celebration of a child’s religious ceremony are now young women, and Teresa’s oldest daughter, Gia, who used to adore her Zio Joe, now wants nothing to do with him or his wife Melissa.

There’s an obvious personal element to my obsession with this show—it parallels many of the vicious fights and petty dramas of my own family. I see a lot of my mother in Teresa, who I fully believe is a narcissist in addition to being a Trump voter and generally hateful person. She’s incapable of taking criticism or apologizing unless she’s been backed into the tiniest of corners.

That doesn’t mean her brother is always in the right. Joe Gorga is hopelessly poisoned by Italian machismo, which was on full display in the latest episode earlier this week. Teresa’s new man, Luis Ruelas (in real time her husband, in show time still her fiancé) is clearly fanning the flames between the siblings, and instead of handling the problem maturely, Joe accuses Luis of not being a “real man” and tells him he’s going to “break his balls” while banging his fists on the table. He’s inherited this machismo, of course. The family is a primary site of establishing and reinforcing gender roles, or “gender-straightjacketing” as theorist and critic Sophie Lewis puts it in her 2019 book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family.

The Giudices and the Gorgas had previously achieved a relative level of peace in recent seasons, largely because Teresa was dealing with being charged and convicted of fraud alongside her then-husband. They served staggered sentences so one parent would be able to care for their four daughters, and in 2019 Joe Giudice was deported to Italy. Humbled by her months in prison, Teresa claimed to have changed from her table-flipping days of yore, but over Season 12 she started getting high on her own supply again after meeting Luis. Narcissists can tolerate you when they feel you’re beneath them in some way, and as long as you never challenge them, on anything, ever.

When I told Frederique my own theory about RHONJ and family violence, she pointed out that “there’s a legacy in that franchise in particular of the woman who doesn’t seem to have ‘kin’ being very much treating as an outsider”: Danielle, Marge, and even Melissa, Teresa’s sister-in-law. Melissa is technically a part of Teresa’s family now, and has been for going on 20 years, but Teresa still treats her as the ultimate outsider, someone who wormed her way into the family and poisoned her brother against her. The way this storyline echoes my own family’s, my god!!!!!! That’s my mother’s exact bullshit narrative: that my aunt, her sister, who saved my life as a teenager, has somehow managed to poison her five adult children against her. (I’m sure all the abuse had nothing to do with it.)

This most recent episode of RHONJ, called Boys Will Be Boys, picked up where the last episode left off: in the midst of fighting at new housewife Danielle’s mozzarella-making party. A classic venue. When Teresa mentions doing open seating at her upcoming wedding, Marge makes a quip about the “issues” Teresa had had previously with seating at her engagement party. She’s referring to Melissa and Joe Gorga’s heartbreak that, at that engagement party, Teresa and Luis sat with Luis’s family, while the Gorgas were relegated to another table with “Jennifer and some hairdressers.”

Teresa tells Margaret, in front of everyone in their “make mozz memories” aprons, that actually, Melissa chose to sit at that other table.

This might just seem like more extremely petty housewives bullshit, and it is. But it’s also another illuminating RHONJ fight about what it means to be a family—and whose version of truth, of reality, is ultimately believed.

Biased against Teresa that I am, I have to believe that she’s fully lying to portray herself in the best light. “You said you’d never look me in the eyes and lie,” Melissa says, gasping at Teresa’s gall.

“Why wouldn’t I want my ONLY brother to sit next to me,” Teresa fumes, going into her “family means everything” spiel. As she’s done so many times before, she swears on her mother, father and four daughters that she’s telling the truth. (This always makes Lynette mad; she’s appalled that anyone who claims to be God-fearing would ever swear on their children.) So Melissa backs down, says she doesn’t care about where she was sitting, she doesn’t care about not being in Teresa’s wedding party—she just doesn’t want to be called a liar. Teresa then says if Melissa wants to be a bridesmaid SO BADLY, then sure, she could be one. “It sounds like you’re doing me a favor,” Melissa says, before ultimately declining. “It’s like an ex boyfriend saying I fucked up and I want you back. No, you can’t fucking come back!”

The other cast members watching this train wreck of a mozzarella making party laugh at what they take to be a joke, which helps break the tension, and the sisters-in-law embrace. But Melissa isn’t joking, or at least, she shouldn’t be. If Melissa is telling the truth, and Teresa is yet again insisting on a different version of real events that portray her as Good and Melissa as Bad, then it’s fucked up behavior that should not be tolerated—from either an ex-boyfriend or a sister.

Later, back at home, when Teresa recounts the confrontation to Luis and two of her daughters, she says Melissa brought up the engagement party to complain about it, which isn’t true; Margaret brought it up. “Coming from the liar herself,” Luis harrumphs. He takes the opportunity to make Melissa’s misstep Joe Gorga’s problem: “I don’t think she takes one foot in front of the other without her husband. They’re doing this to hurt you.”

“It’s sad she has to try to make up this lie to make you look bad,” Gia says. I’m verrrrry curious whether all four of Teresa’s daughters will continue to endorse Teresa’s version of reality as they all get older.

There’s plenty of RHONJ to enjoy outside of what is, I believe, the longest-running feud in Housewives history. I’m already loving new bombshell-blonde housewife Danielle, who describes herself as “Jerseylicious,” though she’s technically from Staten Island. In this last episode Danielle revealed that she’s been estranged from her own brother for two years, because, she claims, he made fun of her for trying to promote products like an influencer on her social media, which led her to block him, which led him to disinvite her entire family from his wedding. Melissa sensed there was more to the story to this, and turns out that, in much the same way Teresa was unable to absorb an outsider into her family, Danielle and her new sister-in-law didn’t get along. Danielle says in a confessional that she was so excited to have a new sister, since she didn’t have one by blood, but she was soon accused of making their relationship all about her. Which made her think: “Oh, damn, there’s a new chick in town,” and “I’m never gonna let my family break up.”

It’s the same exact family narrative! Isn’t it amazing? Siblings who grew up extremely close get older, started dating people outside of the family and its strict codes and norms, and all hell broke loose. The codependency makes it extremely difficult for these people to allow their family members to love anybody else.

“It was the worst thing that could ever happen,” Danielle says of her estrangement from her brother. We meet her dad, who is clearly devastated that his children don’t get along. So was Joe and Teresa’s father, whose dying words to his kids, we’re told, were “Love each other.” If my own grandfather had been granted a moment of consciousness and lucidity before he died last year, I’d imagine he’d have imparted something similar. It was all he ever wanted: A peace that never came. •

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xxSK