In the novel’s opening scene, when Joanna is asked by a woman from the Stepford Chronicle to list her hobbies and special interests, she replies, “I’m very interested in the Women’s Liberation movement. What’s often forgotten by those who casually invoke the name of Levin’s fictional suburb is that his subject is, quite explicitly, the feminist movement. ( The Stepford Wives is one of the earliest, and canniest satires of the Disneyfication of American culture.) The men of Stepford have conspired to upgrade their spouses, replacing them with more attractive, subservient, and sexually acquiescent replicas.
They are androids-the brainchild of a neighbor who moved to Stepford from Anaheim, where he designed animatronics at Disneyland. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.”Īs Joanna discovers too late, the Stepford Wives are not real at all. These women, Joanna observes, resemble “actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. The main difference is that the homes of Stepford are kept unusually clean by unusually beautiful, and unusually buxom, wives. If you squint you might confuse Stepford with John Updike’s Eastwick, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Hill Estates, or John Cheever’s Shady Hill. They abandon New York-“the filthy, crowded, crime-ridden, but so-alive city”-for two-point-two acres in Stepford, a “postcard pretty” town with white frame colonial shopfronts and indistinguishable streets with names like Harvest Lane and Short Ridge Road. Joanna and Walter Eberhart move with their two children to the suburbs in the hope of a more comfortable life. The Stepford Wives has one of the most enduring premises of 20th-century American fiction. And no Stepford husband would ever tolerate a wife with as consuming a personal passion as dressage. They mean to say that he is bland and conformist, but in the context of Ira Levin’s novel, a Stepford husband is an entirely different creature from a Stepford wife: he is conniving, angry, murderous. Yet those who call Mitt a “ Stepford Husband” do so confusedly.
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