This essay is part of an Avidly cluster on Vanderpump Rules guest co-edited by Olivia Stowell And Jay Shelat.
The Real Housewives franchise and its spinoffs, including Vanderpump Rules, are in large part garish performances of femininity. Casts endlessly plumb the limits of what it means to be a true friend, a good mother, a loving wife, girlfriend, fuckbuddy, business partner, ex, single lady… trying on and sloughing off archetypes that pique our emotional investment as viewers. Every time someone transgresses some social norm (basically constantly), everyone bickers at length about what happened and what should have happened. As viewers we discuss these transgressions amongst ourselves, dissecting the scenes presented to us with laser precision to determine who is wrong, who is being unreasonable, who deserves better.
As a scholar of Early American literature, the analytical brain I can never turn off instinctively recognized the 18th century sentimental novel in reality television. Like fiction in the late 1700s, reality TV is both wildly popular and often dismissed as trash. Both entertain but also prove instructive for how our society operates and how we, as readers or viewers, might exist within it. Audiences gravitate toward sensationalistic stories, and Bravo offers seemingly endless variations of wealthy and attractive individuals behaving badly in an array of domestic situations. Vanderpump Rules in particular chronicles former Beverly Hills Housewife Lisa Vanderpump’s Los Angeles restaurant SUR (“Sexy Unique Restaurant”) where she employs a lively cast of aspiring models, singers, and influencers trying to get their big break in L.A. Everyone is hot, relatively young, and aspires to fame at any cost, and it’s an ever-unfurling mess as they try to navigate their 20s, 30s, and 40s on camera. Like the melodramatic plots of women’s fiction in the 18th century, it’s hard to look away.
Season 10 of Vanderpump Rules begins by cataloging what each cast member has been up to since the last season concluded. Lala and Randall are embroiled in a custody battle; Katie and Tom Schwartz are getting a divorce; Ariana and Tom Sandoval are still together. Raquel and James ended their engagement and James moved in with his new girlfriend far too quickly, according to some of their friends. Raquel is single and ready to mingle.
Already a number of moral questions are at play: how do you interact with your ex when you still share a friend group? Does a good friend need to cut ties with the man who betrayed your trust? Is it inappropriate for the girls to crash guys’ night? We answer these questions in our own lives, sure, but Vanderpump Rules ramps up the gravity of these scenarios so that we can reflect on these dynamics in a venue comfortably detached from our own experiences.
The 18th century American sentimental novels, from Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson andto The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown to The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster, similarly fixates on the propriety of female conduct. The plots of these stories are virtually identical with only slight variations––a young, marriageable girl trusts an untrustworthy man, he seduces her, she gets pregnant, he abandons her, and her life is utterly destroyed as a consequence of her actions. We’ve heard variations of these stories enough that they feel familiar even today, but without legal rights or reliable birth control, these cautionary tales weren’t always hyperbolic in Early America. For readers, these narratives served the practical function of alerting a predominantly female readership of the hard limits of women’s autonomy.
Reality TV may not seem as didactic as these novels, but its storylines dwell on the social consequences of transgression too, especially sexual transgression. When Raquel (I reiterate, a single lady!) makes out with a waiter in Vegas[1] who is later revealed to be married, her friends condemn her––it is her responsibility to determine the truth regardless of what a man told her about his separation. Is this the core issue, or is Lala just bitter because she expressed interest in Oliver first? Lala and Katie deem Raquel a homewrecker and proclaim that they would never trust her around their men, making clear the fact that Raquel’s violation of this social code carries severe consequences. Later, Raquel retaliates by pointing out that Lala had also slept with a married man, announcing, “You literally, like, give off Mistress Bimbo vibes and I cannot stand it.”
Which homewrecker do you side with? The pleasures of reality TV and the pleasures of early 18th century sentimental fiction are the same: the audience toys with the power to judge the characters at hand while reflecting on the contours of acceptable social behavior. These discussions have a social component, too: gossiping about shared texts allows us to ascertain our friends’ moral convictions through the impressions, sympathies, and the rationales they provide. In nearly all early American sentimental novels, women who transgress gendered expectations of obedience and chastity die as a consequence of their carelessness––in childbirth, of a broken heart, driven to madness, typical girl stuff. While the ramifications are seldom this steep in Vanderpump Rules, the repeated infringement of social or moral norms is reliably what drives the plot forward.
Social regulation exists to maintain order in society, to prevent individuals from harming one another. Nevertheless, the punishment for violating these expectations is meted out unevenly on a number of registers. In the worlds of Early American sentimental fiction and reality television, the consequences of immoral conduct fall disproportionately on women.
Raquel and Tom Sandoval’s months-long affair (termed “Scandoval” by the world wide web) deeply hurt Ariana, who had thought of Raquel as one of her closest friends and been in a seemingly happy partnership with Tom for nearly a decade. Ariana owns a 4,450 square foot house in Valley Village with Tom! What now? Are we angry on Ariana’s behalf, or are we angry that Raquel and Sandoval could be so brazen?
News of the affair broke as Season 10 was drawing to a close. The group shunned Raquel and Sandoval. @bravobybetches tweeted a screenshot of Lisa glaring at Tom and declared, “if Lisa Vanderpump ever looked at me like this I’d enter witness protection immediately and you’d never see me again.” Sandoval threw a series of hissy fits about how everyone was being mean to him, but ultimately the ire of his castmates and the public managed to launch his career as a reality TV personality beyond the Bravoverse.
In the months after Season 10 concluded, friends texted me whenever Sandoval started a new podcast, emerged as The Masked Singer, and was hoisted up a mountain by JoJo Siwa as I shot back again and again that I didn’t care what Tom Sandoval was doing. Raquel, on the other hand, changed her name and disappeared from the public eye, attempting to heal from the disproportionate amount of vitriol she receives online and whenever she is recognized in public. Her attempts to tell her side of the story have thus far only revived this censure.
For the public, reality shows entertain by providing a way to examine the contours of acceptable behavior: viewers love to condemn what is reprehensible and rehash the detailed reasoning that yields their ultimate judgment in any number of petty interpersonal dramas. In the finite social roles available to women now as in the 18th century, only behavior that falls within defined parameters is acceptable, and we can most clearly perceive those lines when they are transgressed in some way. Sentimental novels and reality TV provide spaces through which we can explore social dynamics from a safe distance, articulating our convictions and drawing lessons from messy drama that allow us to reflect on morality in a flagrantly sexist world.
Ashley Rattner is blocked by Lisa Barlow on Twitter.
[1] Oliver, son of Garcelle from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills!