Mythology and Reality TV: Storytelling and Feminist Agency in the Ramayana and The Real Housewives

It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women.

— Anaïs Nin in The Diary of Anais Nin (1970 [1967], p. 252)

I have written the Ramayan even before the birth of Ram

I know all about you my daughter, let’s go home.

— from the sixteenth-century Chandrabati’s Ramayan (2020) translated by Nabaneeta Dev Sen

Your blood type is Pinot Grigio.

— Kelly Killoren Bensimon to Ramona Singer in The Real Housewives of New York City (2010)

The Real Housewives follows the lives of wealthy, middle-aged women in different towns in the USA and beyond. The TV show documents the women navigating their overlapping family, professional and over-the-top social lives over long lunches and charity galas. Sita is a character in one of the best-loved stories of all time, the Ramayana, or the story of her husband Rama. In a nutshell, Princess Sita is kidnapped by evil Ravana and after a blockbuster battle is rescued by her husband, Prince Rama, who eventually pronounces her impure and rejects her. The epic poem has been immortalised through countless written, oral and performed versions across South Asia and beyond. ¹

Ostensibly, The Real Housewives centres around pitting rich, territorial women against each other over drinks, and the Ramayana is a very male epic about succession, duty and war, where women are mutilated or kidnapped to keep the plot moving. Nevertheless, it is trendy today to have complex feminist takes on these wildly different projects. In fact, Sita’s and the Housewives’ stories, and the ways in which people engage with them, are uncannily similar.

Fundamentally, the stories carry shared leitmotifs of common female experience. Kamala Subramaniam (2018, p. 11) writes that pain is ‘the predominant emotion in the Ramayana’, and for many women, for long stretches of time, it is in The Real Housewives too. In the latter, viewers often watch the women dealing with highly gendered marital and family crises. While the show depicts several strong marriages, famously countless Housewives end up single. The overall divorce rate for cast members is 43 per cent; for one city’s cast, it is 100 per cent (Bricker and Nilles, 2020). By virtue of being the ultimate scorned woman, Sita gains immediate access to the busy ranks of Housewives with disappearing or departed husbands. Her modus operandi is to endure (Divakurni, 2019)—an abduction and several spousal humiliations—like the many Housewives who during the show suffer through or conceal cheating, a painful divorce or a sour custody battle.

Nevertheless, in both projects the women often shed their victimhood to show how the arc of the female trajectory is long but bends towards freedom—at least most of the time.

Sita begins the Ramayana young and defined by her husband, and ends it in a completely different, emancipated stage of her life. Sita complies with a chastity test that Rama demands after rescuing her. Rama later leaves her while pregnant, and over the years Sita builds a new life for herself and her twins in the forest, until Rama returns and asks her for a second test so they can reunite. This time Sita refuses, before diving underground to be with her Mother Earth. She chooses to leave everything behind, a liberated act made possible because of her previous suffering. Having survived her pain and gained wisdom from it, she realises she has a choice: deciding to endure no longer and instead live for herself.

Similarly, many Housewives join the show defined by their husbands and children, only to leave years later as considerably more independent women (though still living above ground). Some women stay on the show for more than a decade and live through divorces, remarriages, legal battles, health issues and career pivots, all on camera. Admittedly, some divorcées compulsively hunt for new men, but overall they give ‘incredible second acts’ after their marriages end (Cunningham, 2021) and mostly come out stronger on the other side. Life is short, but for the Housewives it seems really long. Stories wind on and on once husbands are out of the picture—in itself a feminist comment. As a result of their experiences, many women, not only those who divorce, become much more autonomous throughout the show, often showing amazing powers of reinvention: divorces lead to haircuts lead to singing careers lead to shop openings lead to exciting property acquisitions. Nothing is forever, life goes on and there is always a next episode.

In other words, Sita and the Housewives suffer and evolve over the course of their narratives and their retellings. Where it gets interesting is in considering how this happens.

Key to the emergence of this phenomenon is that both projects have several audiences—in fact, many complex layers of internal and external spectators, plus a special role reserved for the narrator. Each audience, individually and in concert, not only watches the action unfold but also discusses, challenges and ultimately shapes it. Thanks to the projects’ formats, continuous audience engagement not only explores and endlessly challenges the stories as they are presented but also helps alter them, leading to often positive change for the protagonists. ² The women’s storylines cannot be entirely separated from audience participation.

Indirectly due to how The Real Housewives is taped, watching themselves on screen and responding to a Greek chorus of fan and press reactions (from kind to cruel), the women often grow. Even if the women crash and burn on camera, which they often do, they tend to develop some self-awareness thanks to being under the microscope. By telling their stories, the Housewives are forced to take responsibility for their actions or else suffer the consequences. In some ways, being on the show becomes a crash course in real-life accountability: ‘own it!’ becomes a mantra of Beverly Hills Housewife Lisa Rinna. Personal growth is self-reported: all Housewives consulted for a book said that the show changed them overall for the better, hardening them to speak their mind and take more risks (Moylan, 2021). ‘I think a girl needs three seasons to really find herself’, said one of the show participants (ibid.). Consider being on the show a years-long, real-time public therapy process where there is nowhere to hide, and the effects of which become inextricable from change often seen on screen. While this is hard to measure, another way the show sparks change is not: it facilitates financial independence for many of the women who, by taking part, earn their own income for the first time and/or launch professional ventures (as silly as they sometimes seem). Further, despite the catfights, deep friendships form among many of the castmates. Sometimes they support each other very concretely, accompanying each other to first-ever mammograms or helping build basic financial literacy skills. Note that though the show in some ways promotes agency and independence, as well as solidarity between the women, it remains persistently heteronormative and cast members in several franchises have been accused of homophobia (Cunningham, 2020).

Did Sita’s storytelling set her free? In one way, no. Sita’s middle finger to the patriarchy at the end of her story is not a result of audience encouragement but of her own wisdom, hard-earned after her experiences. In another way, however, storytelling literally liberates Sita, given that she lives on in innumerable retellings. ‘Sitayanas’, which are versions of the Ramayana told from Sita’s point of view, and Sita-centric retellings that reposition her as the main character form a vast genre in and of themselves, and include sixteenth-century Chandrabati’s Bengali version of the Ramayana, ³ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments (2019), Volga’s Liberation of Sita (2016) and Nina Paley’s film Sita Sings the Blues (2008), among many others. In the most widely accepted version of the Ramayana, Sita does not tell her own story. In contrast, in these retellings, Sita’s voice is heard directly and her experiences of the story are expanded upon, sometimes with her making different decisions. These retellings often emphasise female solidarity by detailing Sita’s relations with other women characters, for example her friendship with Trijatha, the demoness who guards her when she is being held in captivity. In Volga’s (2016) version, Sita meets and is inspired by emancipated versions of other women characters (Surpanaka, Urmila and Ahalya); in Divakaruni’s (2019) version, the personal stories of others such as Kaikeyi, Surpanakha and Mandodari are developed. Some of these versions bring to light underrepresented perspectives; for example, some Dalit oral versions draw parallels between the limited choices that Sita and Dalit women face (Ganesh, 2015). Over the centuries of Sita-centric retellings, Sita does not tell her story; rather, her audience permutates her story to give her a voice or change her destiny. This stepping in to correct Sita’s tale in order to give her justice is the ultimate in audience participation.

Both Sityanas and The Real Housewives inspire a sense of community and collective discussion, participation and ownership of the stories. Sita’s and the Housewives’ stories are not the only ones in history to have been thoroughly critiqued and amorphously reappropriated by their audiences; however, what is notable in both is the link between storytelling and evolution in both projects. As The Real Housewives shows real-time lessons in agency and renewal, the many retellings of the Ramayana that centre Sita are of resistance and empowerment. For the Housewives, telling their stories supports their independence, while for Sita, other women telling her story does.

When I told him about this piece, my partner asked if I would argue that the Housewives were deities. While I don’t do this (sorry ladies)—in part because I approach both as secular projects here—I recognise that the Housewives and Sita enjoy a powerful status in fans’ minds.

‘Does someone stop taking food because it has been taken every day? So is the story of Rama and one can write, read and love it as many number of times as possible’, wrote Molla (quoted in Dev Sen, 1997), the sixteenth-century Telugu poet who also wrote a Sita-centric version of the Ramayana. It is important to understand how popular both the Ramayana and The Real Housewives are. Most The Real Housewives season premieres draw in over one million viewers, and the annual BravoCon, a convention held by the TV network, draws in thousands of superfans; in 2019, tickets sold out in less than a minute (Hirsch, 2019). Ramayana fandom cannot be quantified, ⁴ but it would be safe to say that many have engaged with the story year upon year over the centuries. Both projects create not only huge groups of enthusiasts but several (very different) communities. The appeal of endlessly talking about the stories does not diminish; the Ramayana and The Real Housewives continue to spawn active Reddit conversations, ⁵ and major current events commonly result in popular memes comparing the news to moments from both. ⁶ For both the Ramayana and The Real Housewives, there are podcasts and social media groups to dissect the action, spin-offs, satires and a kitsch secondary economy on Etsy. ⁷ The Real Housewives has given birth to its own equivalent of myth-retelling culture, with fans reenacting scenes on dedicated social media accounts and even staging musical versions. People do not tire of these stories; they dip in and out of them as if visiting old friends, rewatching episodes or rereading retellings, knowing it is never a waste of time. It almost seems that the deeper one gets into the stories, the more one gets from them; after a tipping point there are rapid, possibly exponentially increasing marginal returns to engaging. But why do people love these stories so much? What do we get out of them?

‘Stick with it long enough and Real Housewives becomes a longform character study’, writes Kyndall Cunningham (2021). Similarly, the Ramayana storytelling tradition can be seen as an infinite, multi-country, centuries-long character study. And character studies become more interesting when viewers see themselves in them. Here it is important to heavily caveat that The Real Housewives is not an intersectional show; essentially, it shows mainly white wealth. While franchises in Atlanta and Potomac have majority African-American casts, these sometimes perpetuate negative stereotypes, and while other franchises have started diversifying their casts, this often leaves new Housewives of colour carrying heavy burdens of representation. With the show’s growing international presence—expanding via off-shoots in Dubai, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa and other locations—its racial politics have become more complex. For example, the Johannesburg franchise features a majority black cast and a white ‘villain’ Housewife, possibly aiming to ridicule entitled white femininity (Smit, 2022). The show’s relationship to class is hotly debated; does it promote or ridicule the class performativity and extreme conspicuous consumption it displays? In many franchises, the famous ‘Bravo wink’—i.e. highly ironic editing—does the latter; Michael J. Lee and Leigh Moscowitz (2013, p. 65) argue that the New York City franchise of The Real Housewives ‘takes aim at the consumptive lives of its arriviste heroines’. How far the show condones or subverts regressive racial and class politics is a complicated question with a likely ambiguous answer, but the lack of diversity amongst its cast is readily apparent. Yet, it is hard not to identify with the Housewives at some point or other; they may be part of the 0.1 per cent, but they face many contemporary problems that are recognisable to other women. Over many seasons, fans empathise with them during difficulties and rejoice in their successes. Identification is key to enjoyment in watching the show as it is in engaging with literature and other art forms.

A parallel can be made here between The Real Housewives and the Sita-centric retellings, wherein Sita’s many reincarnations embody the Everywoman. Sita exists in folk songs sung across India, each intended for different moments of a woman’s life. Women’s empathy with Sita is often linked to her suffering; songs in Bangladesh sing ‘Women, share Sita’s grief among yourselves’ (Dev Sen, 1997, p. 177). Very often, Sita’s story is told in female spaces by, about and for other women; ‘listen my girlfriends’ is the refrain of Chandrabati’s version (ibid., p. 171).

One reason for these stories’ deep appeal is that they both present and subsequently destroy the concept of the perfect woman. Early The Real Housewives seasons show the Housewives aggressively exhibiting domestic bliss before this unravels or at least becomes more complicated. The show starts by claiming to share the lives of ideal women, knowing well that they do not exist, and goes on to illustrate this with myriad examples of real-life messy womanhood. Similarly, Sita is initially presented in the Ramayana as the ‘Ur-Housewife’: she embodies nari dharm, the ideal feminine code of conduct, showing endless dedication to her husband and society’s expectations. However, by the end of Sita’s story and in many retellings, the notion of the perfect woman and wife is shattered. Rather than present the ideal woman, the Ramayana and The Real Housewives end up revealing multiple non-ideal, real women.

In fact, discussing and re-fashioning Sita and the Housewives’ stories can be a tool to explore and understand one’s own life. This is the ultimate power of storytelling: creating a shared space for self-reflection and learning.

I can personally vouch for this, having stumbled across these stories during a protracted breakup. For months I read countless Ramayanas and, once I accepted I was no longer doing so ironically, binged and analysed The Real Housewives as if it were my job. As everyone does during a crisis, I saw my story in all those around me. First, I felt they corroborated my own experiences: masculinity is in a code-red global crisis, from Ayodhya to New Jersey to Berlin. But soon, they also reflected my new reality: life doesn’t end after you split up, there may even be a cabaret career waiting on the other side (still waiting). These are stories of healing and possibility—in reading and discussing others’, we change our own. Volga (2016) writes that when asked ‘Who will save us?’, Sita and her stories give us the strength to answer ‘We ourselves’.

The nature of both projects lends fans’ affinity with the women a special deconstructed richness, as our identification with them is not one-to-one, but one-to-many. Different Sitas and Housewives reflect different parts of us—career-driven, family-centric, fun-loving, peaceful, vengeful, suffering—so we see ourselves in kaleidoscope, with fragments of our psyche externalised. In the stories, we actually get to see parts of ourselves played out to fruition; each woman is not an abstraction but a person navigating the world and making decisions. Women still face mutually exclusive choices in their lives; in some ways, the many Sitas and Housewives show us parallel reimagined versions of our own life that reflect our many inner lives. In turn, fans recognise how these women also contain multitudes (see, for instance, the Instagram account ‘Which Sonja are you?’, ⁸ where we meet Beverly Hills Housewife Erika Girardi and her performer alter ego, Erika Jayne). In the end, we come to wonder: what would it be like if time and space collapsed and all the different Sitas met? Would it be like a Real Housewives reunion episode? And what if the Sitas met the Housewives? What would they talk about? Would it be like a meeting of all parts of ourselves in our brain? Are the Sitas the Housewives, and the Housewives the Sitas, and are they us, and we them, me you and you me? Is watching The Real Housewives the path to karmic consciousness? Basically, yes.

This exposes similarities between mythology and reality TV, and their parallel functions to explore human nature. The Real Housewives—unsurprisingly—does not fulfil various commonly used myth criteria that the Ramayana does. Rather than legends, it shows real people (who, to be fair, often become legends). Myths seem to have no beginning and are never told as if for the first time, while The Real Housewives franchise began in 2006 in Orange County, produced by the TV network Bravo. Myths are about past and sometimes future stories; The Real Housewives unfolds in the present. However, many key resemblances between the Ramayana and The Real Housewives are linked to characteristics of myths. Both projects contain archetypes on which people project personal experiences to find meaning. Carl Jung (1978) argued that myths helps us to understand our own psyches; both projects function in this way as well. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (1995, p. 28) writes that myths are multi-authored and ‘seem to create their own authors’; Sita’s and the Housewives’ stories are collectively owned and continuously recreated.

The popularity of Sita and the Housewives reminds us of an enduring cultural fact: though feminised art forms like reality TV are commonly excluded from ‘high culture’, they often contain female truths not captured elsewhere. Many Sita-centric retellings of the Ramayana are popular books, oral versions or songs, but in both content and form are not considered part of ‘the canon’. In these retellings and The Real Housewives, which depict everyday female lives and dramas, women often take on a shared symbolism. Once a mythological figure, yesterday a soap star, today a reality TV personality.

Some believe in the magical properties of the Ramayana. There is an ancient Thai belief that anyone who can read it over seven days can command three days of rainfall. This has not worked for me after a week-long Real Housewives binge, yet. Still, there are special properties attached to engaging with Sita’s and the Housewives’ stories. Exploring and participating in them enables us to do so better in our own narratives. Anyone—not only women—can use the Ramayana and The Real Housewives in this way.

Both projects have become cacophonous, unwittingly postmodern, many-headed female storytelling monsters. They are open-source documents about the female experience, stories co-opted by and for women, made sprawling and all the more powerful due to the agency we exert over them. Our engagement with Sita’s and the Housewives’ stories creates something rich, textured and greater than the sum of its parts, feeding into a tapestry blending the lives and fictions of those women with ours, and those of real women around, before and after us.

They say that the monkey character Hanuman lives on as long as the Ramayana is told. Bravo host Andy Cohen may also remain alive—or at least employed—only as long as The Real Housewives airs. But this is true of all of us—we hear, read, tell and write stories to understand ourselves, to transform, to live. This much we know.