Scan barcode
A review by izzyvb023
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
4.0
The scariest part about The Stepford Wives is not what the bad men are able to accomplish; but rather, what the good men aren’t able to.
At the start of the book, both Joanna’s and Bobbie’s husbands are allegedly supporters of the women’s liberation movement. They protest archaic practices with their wives, they support their career ambitions, and they ultimately just treat them as equals. Yet, even they are unable to resist the temptation to see what it’d be like to have a beautiful and submissive robot wife. In other words, they love and support their wives only when it’s convenient for them. As soon as the opportunity arises to actually have one of those idyllic made for tv housewives, they jump on the opportunity.
A lot of people tend to misread The Stepford Wives as a commentary on the banality of a suburban housewife lifestyle; but I think that read really misses the point. The book is not a comedy about silly little housewives. It is a psychological horror story about male desire. In fact, Levin prefaces the novel with an epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex:
“Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence. Now the attitude of the males creates a new conflict: it is with a bad grace that the man lets her go.”
By casting Joanna’s and Bobbie’s husbands as ‘the good guys’ at the beginning of the novel, Levin speaks to the ways in which many men don’t see women’s liberation as a demand for equality, but rather a threat to their superiority. Many men view feminism as a desire to subjugate men to a second class status, not because that’s what the feminist movement actually calls for, but because that’s what they themselves have done to women for millennia. When all you have ever known is power over a group of people, their equality starts to look a lot like oppression.
Its a shame that the 2004 film adaptation really misses the mark on this. Instead of painting the husbands as the villains that they are revealed to be in the novel, the movie decides to change the plot and cast one of the wives as the secret orchestrator of the entire plan. Her reasoning is that she only wanted a perfect idyllic lifestyle and thought others should have it too. While this decision seemingly seeks to add its own commentary on suburbia and what the “perfect lifestyle” should be, it completely ignores the actual point of the book. Not only does the movie redeem the men of the novel by insinuating that they too are victims of the evil misandrist robots, it creates a comedic villain out of a woman who only wanted to be a housewife. The dream of feminism is not that every woman will have a high paying career instead of being relegated to housework; but rather, that she will have the freedom to choose which lifestyle she pursues. The film shows us a woman who actively chooses suburbia as her perfect lifestyle. And, by making her the comedic supervillain, it urges us to mock her for choosing such an archaic life.
All of this is a VERY longwinded way to say that I really enjoyed the book itself. It was a very quick read, but packed with great prose and characters. I only wish people would stop misinterpreting it as a comedy where suburban women are the butt of the joke, and instead read it for the glaring horror novel it is.
At the start of the book, both Joanna’s and Bobbie’s husbands are allegedly supporters of the women’s liberation movement. They protest archaic practices with their wives, they support their career ambitions, and they ultimately just treat them as equals. Yet, even they are unable to resist the temptation to see what it’d be like to have a beautiful and submissive robot wife. In other words, they love and support their wives only when it’s convenient for them. As soon as the opportunity arises to actually have one of those idyllic made for tv housewives, they jump on the opportunity.
A lot of people tend to misread The Stepford Wives as a commentary on the banality of a suburban housewife lifestyle; but I think that read really misses the point. The book is not a comedy about silly little housewives. It is a psychological horror story about male desire. In fact, Levin prefaces the novel with an epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex:
“Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence. Now the attitude of the males creates a new conflict: it is with a bad grace that the man lets her go.”
By casting Joanna’s and Bobbie’s husbands as ‘the good guys’ at the beginning of the novel, Levin speaks to the ways in which many men don’t see women’s liberation as a demand for equality, but rather a threat to their superiority. Many men view feminism as a desire to subjugate men to a second class status, not because that’s what the feminist movement actually calls for, but because that’s what they themselves have done to women for millennia. When all you have ever known is power over a group of people, their equality starts to look a lot like oppression.
Its a shame that the 2004 film adaptation really misses the mark on this. Instead of painting the husbands as the villains that they are revealed to be in the novel, the movie decides to change the plot and cast one of the wives as the secret orchestrator of the entire plan. Her reasoning is that she only wanted a perfect idyllic lifestyle and thought others should have it too. While this decision seemingly seeks to add its own commentary on suburbia and what the “perfect lifestyle” should be, it completely ignores the actual point of the book. Not only does the movie redeem the men of the novel by insinuating that they too are victims of the evil misandrist robots, it creates a comedic villain out of a woman who only wanted to be a housewife. The dream of feminism is not that every woman will have a high paying career instead of being relegated to housework; but rather, that she will have the freedom to choose which lifestyle she pursues. The film shows us a woman who actively chooses suburbia as her perfect lifestyle. And, by making her the comedic supervillain, it urges us to mock her for choosing such an archaic life.
All of this is a VERY longwinded way to say that I really enjoyed the book itself. It was a very quick read, but packed with great prose and characters. I only wish people would stop misinterpreting it as a comedy where suburban women are the butt of the joke, and instead read it for the glaring horror novel it is.