Eszter Zsuzsanna Csorba
Eötvös Loránd University, Doctoral School of Literary Studies csoresz91@gmail.com
The everyday viewer is not unfamiliar with Italian American characters on television. They have been around ever since The Godfather premiered in 1972 on the big screen, and members of the Italian American community have appeared in some of the most famous television shows of all time. At the beginning of the list is Henry Winkler’s Fonzie (Arthur Fonzarelli), one of the main characters in Happy Days (1974–1984); followed closely by Rhea Perlman’s Carla Tortelli from Cheers (1982–1993), a character that she reprised in a spinoff show about her family, as well as hits like The Simpsons and Frasier; and, last but not least, Tony Danza’s Tony Micelli, a retired baseball player turned housekeeper in Who’s the Boss (1984–1992).
There has been a clear progression of the Italian American “character” since their appearance on the big screen. In fact, cultural changes in the second half of the twentieth century have also been included in movies and TV shows, as Italian American representation has grown.
At first, Italian Americans were side characters, the supporting cast, with stereotypical traits, mostly confined to their own communities. Slowly they evolved into main characters on the big screen, in blockbusters such as The Godfather (1972), Rocky (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Raging Bull (1980), where their sur-rounding community played a vital role in the way the characters were built. In con-trast, being outside of their community often meant being a fish out of water, and their interaction with the world outside of their own was the basis for their behavior.
This is a form of antilocution, as established by Gordon W. Allport’s book The Nature of Prejudice,1 which argues that those in their confined inner group do not take kind-ly towards the outside and stay within their boundaries. However, slowkind-ly leaving the community also means that they become more “Americanized” (not in terms of legal citizenship),2 which in this context means losing the recognizable elements of an Italian American character or anything that confines them to a minority. As a last step, they disappear once again, no longer showcasing any of the stereotypical
1 Allport 94.
2 Speek 237.
elements identifying this character; they only bear a last name that helps the viewer pinpoint their origin. Writer, media theorist, and political critic Walter Lippmann defined stereotypes as “images in our heads”3 and they are also a form of knowledge that remains “in place,” already known and constantly repeated,4 helping viewers and audiences recognize it. If one were to define the image of one specific stereotype, it is much easier to identify when one breaks out of its boundaries. The destruc-tion of the image slowly leads into the disappearance of the stereotype. For Italian Americans, leaving their community helped them assimilate and slowly fade into the mainstream, becoming almost invisible. This paper analyzes Italian American characters that were naturalized or were born in the United States and have an Itali
an heritage. These characters thus include first, second, and even third generation Italian Americans that display stereotypical traits in the audience’s mind.
After a brief description, the study details how three iconic television mothers, from the shows Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005), The Sopranos (2000–2008) and The Golden Girls (1985–1992), have broken out of the frame of the stereotype, its limitations and confinements which they were put in at the beginning of their character arc, whilst comparing them to major female characters from the big screen that remained within their assigned stereotypical boundaries. In addition, despite being prominently used in representation, most immigration studies failed to incor-porate women’s experiences until the 1980s, when this absence was slowly remedied.5 As newer findings on migrant narratives came about, so did the 1980s allow Itali
an American women to emerge and come into the foreground as main characters of sitcoms and drama TV shows, besides blockbusters. Upon the analysis of these characters, the following traits were highlighted: most women adhered to Southern Italian folk culture, as approximately eighty percent of Italian immigrants came from the south of Italy, which meant having a patriarch at the head of the family.6 It was expected of the wife to keep a clean house, the children in order, and always have a hot meal on the table, insisting that everyone eats, almost to a satirical degree.
These gender roles were embedded in the culture that Italian migrants brought with them. But living in big cities like New York, women were surrounded by a “modern metropolis” and it became harder for families to keep up the traditional upbringing of girls in the twentieth century.7
3 Allport 286; Lippmann 3.
4 Bhabha 370.
5 Gabaccia 36.
6 Egelman 188.
7 Egelman 188.
Due to its format, a TV series allows for more profound character development than a movie, at least, that is the case in the examples elaborated in this essay as far as Italian American characters are concerned. On top of that, most background characters do not evolve as much as the main character. For example, in the span of fifty years, from Marty (1955) to My Cousin Vinny (1996), grandmothers and mothers were represented the exact same way on the big screen. But a small revolution was happening on family home television when it came to the stories of Italian American mothers in the 1980s. These characters no longer adhered to the image of the support
ing stereotypical cast but had much more agency when it came to their purpose. The best way to demonstrate the evolution of these characters is to juxtapose those on the big screen with the ones on the small screen.
In Marty (1955), the main character’s mother Teresa Piletti, played by Esther Min-ciotti, is an Italian who emigrated and was naturalized as a United States citizen.8 In the movie, her main aim is to make her son find a wife, as he is too old to be alone.
However, when a potential lady could fill that position, her possessiveness over her son becomes more important. She actively intervenes in her son’s desire to further court the girl and possibly leave his mother behind. A similarly possessive character is Marie Barone, played by Doris Roberts in the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005). She is the mother of Ray, the main character in the title of the show.9 Ray is already married with three kids, and they live next door to his parents, which leaves plenty of opportunities for his mother to form a relationship with her daugh-terinlaw, Debra. The comedy of the show derives from the differences in the inter-actions between Marie and Debra, however, over the span of nine seasons, the two develop a friendly relationship, many times teaming up against the men in the story.
Marie steps out of the role of the feared and despised mother-in-law and lets go of her son. Most of the holiday special episodes, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, never
theless focus on the comical elements of a mother using food as a means to remain relevant in her children’s life, not understanding dietary choices and continuously criticizing the cooking of her daughter-in-law, as it could never be as good as hers, except for one episode, where Marie relied more on her daughter-in-law than on the men in the family. In season 4, episode 10, Marie decides to battle her choles terol and attempts to change the Thanksgiving menu, something the men deem to be sacred.
It is only Debra who helps Marie in discovering alternative options in line with her diet, and they even bond in the kitchen. The end of the episode resolves in Marie
8 Mann.
9 Rosenthal.
herself giving up her diet, but not before she confronts Raymond for not helping her in this process.10 There are various episodes that focus on the dynamic of the “girls vs. boys” theme in the show, but this is exemplary for the way in which Marie con-sciously gives up the role of the family cook, something quite sacred to her.
All the other episodes of this long running show emphasize how she trusts not only her son’s choice of spouse, but her daughterinlaw for who she is. Marie has her husband and another son. She is never alone, thus her motivations might seem to be different from that of Teresa in Marty, but her initial possessiveness appears the same. A recurring theme of American sitcoms is the fear of inlaws, this is true in the case of Ray himself, who has a very distant relationship with Debra’s parents, while with Ray’s parents next door, Debra can never be far enough from them. More comical elements of the sitcom stem from the uncomfortable relationship that Ray has with both his father- and mother-in-law, and over the course of the series, he barely develops a deeper connection to them. Other famous examples of television in-laws include the thirty-year run of The Simpsons, where Homer has a horrible relationship with his wife Marge’s sisters, Patricia and Selma Bouvier,11 who never deem him good enough for their sister. The show Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), despite being a drama series, features as a comical device many mothers not adored by their own children, let alone their inlaws. Marie Barone in the end cannot be kept in the image of a stereotypical mother, possessive of her children and cold to her inlaws, rather she takes agency and breaks out of the expected behavioral pattern to improve her relationship with her son’s family.
The second example of a revolutionary separation from the stereotypical image is that of Carmela Soprano, played by Edie Falco, in the whole six-season run of The Sopranos (1999–2007), where she personifies the wife of Tony Soprano and the mother of their two children. Chiara Francesca Ferrari writes in a book about dubbing stereo-types that The Sopranos “has become, in the United States at least, a real phenomenon of popular culture, and has influenced viewers’ clothing, food, travel destinations, and so on.”12 The show managed to enrage many Italian American associations that felt the urgency to complain about the negative connotations of having this minority be, again, represented as gangsters, as Ferrari writes.13 However, this setting is crucial in understanding why one of its main characters was able to break away from the
10 Sandler and Van Allen.
11 Groening.
12 Ferrari 101.
13 Ferrari 101.
mold. The representation of mobsters of Italian heritage throughout popular culture paints a clear picture of the expectation of both the male and female characters within these stories. As harmful as it is to the community itself, one can easily draw comparisons among the famous women of The Godfather movies and the story of Carmela Soprano.
Carmela, at the beginning of her story, seemed to be just an accessory to Tony, a husband who showed infidelity through most of their relationship, but she did, how-ever, gain agency when she divorced him. Quite unlike any Catholic married woman of the Italian American community, Carmela’s story made her one of the first to di-vorce not only a husband, but a bully and a mobster. In contrast, The Godfather shows the only daughter, Connie (played by actress Talia Shire), beaten and mistreated by her husband. Her family, instead of taking her out of that abusive relationship, in the end has got her husband killed, but only after a series of missteps and other threats.14 Marrying into a crime family, up until Carmela Soprano, meant ‘till death do us part’, for both women and men.
Women have often been simply accessories to male characters, like Adrian in Rocky (1976), also played by actress Talia Shire. She was an additional character to the story of the male lead, someone who added to his overall arc, but showed very little distance from her male counterpart in the original movie. Mostly, she went from being oppressed by her brother Polly to being freed by Rocky, only to remain equally complacent and passive next to the new man in her life.15 Again, on the big screen, the most autonomous female was the character of Loretta in Moonstruck (1987), played by Cher, whose goal was to find true love. It is no coincidence that she was not in a supporting role, but the protagonist. The point of the story was to make her active in finding love and make this aspect the core of her personality. In the span of her story on screen, Loretta stayed true to the image one perceives of Italian American characters within the stereotype, as she pursued “real love” and remained in the confinement of her community and peers.16
In The Sopranos, Carmela’s community confined her within the boundaries of stereotypical expectations: she was expected to be a great mom, a housekeep-er, a devoted Catholic, who stays with her husband. Despite the show rekindling her relationship with Tony and never truly letting them lose sight of each other, their marriage was still unique, as Carmela showcased much more agency than she
14 Coppola.
15 Avildsen.
16 Jewison.