Published in the 70s, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives is written when the perception of the traditional nuclear family dynamics was quickly losing steam. There’s too much happening at that time: the second-wave feminist movement is in full swing, the Vietnam War is escalating and soon to draw into a close, America is also finding its feet in the tech industry with the creation of semiconductors. The novel is the product of this context where successful career men who were threatened by their free-thinking and intelligent wives planned to replace their wives’ personalities with the ideal image of the American wife: a domestic homemaker, sexual symbols and a practical maid.
The Stepford Wives has been re-adapted a few times to the big screen, with the most recent addition in 2004 starring Nicole Kidman butchering the underlying message of the story. Spoiler alert: It was Glenn Close all along, who led the Welcome Wagon. So it was ultimately still the women who were the culprit! A clever twist maybe, but unkindly skews the original. The novel is a more gritty, less glossy affair, bordering between a Raymond Chandler novel and sci-fi. It is also a feminist book, and the warnings of the dangers of institutionalised masculinity.
The Men’s Association in Stepford is exclusive to the husband’s. Joanna’s husband Walter half promised to join the club to change from within, so that it can be more inclusive to women. Though we never see the events that happens within the association, we can assume that they are directly correlated with the Stepford wives being servile, obedient and sexy, the model wife a la 50s domestic pin-up. Joanna found that not long before, there really was a Women’s Association and that the women had accomplished careers themselves before turning into buxom zombies who would service their husbands at will. There is a pattern, and Joanna and her friend Bobbie do not have much time before they become Stepford Wives themselves.
The Stepford Wives is a short book, but it packs a fair bit of punch. Our point of view is restricted to Joanna’s day to day life. We don’t see the conversion of the wife from a creative, messy though independent woman, we just see the end product of the Stepford wife which baffles Joanna. At the end, we need to fill the gaps ourselves to what happened to these women. The men had particular skills which might help them to create a robot-like wife. Some of these men may be the harbingers of the new engineering wave about to hit America. We can assume perhaps that they have murdered their wives to replace them with robots.
If this is the case, then the implication is terrifying — that men are able to let go of the emotional attachment they have to their wives to replace them with robots who are able to make life convenient for them. In a twisted harakiri, by killing the human woman, man is killing his own humanity. All the husbands in the story it seems, are guilty of the same crime. None of the crime is in isolation, and require that the men work in a group, secretly, covertly, so that they’re able to attain the wives of their dreams.
I’d like to think we’ve come a long way in changing our outlook of what the role of husbands and wives are supposed to be. At least in Western culture, the responsibilities for both are more equitable. Stay at home dads are more common. Wives can earn more than their husbands, though the husbands are still butthurt over this. Yet, The Stepford Wives feel like it’s still relevant somehow: That men still fear intelligent and strong women, that beneath all these improvements that the men are still alike to the Stepford husbands.
