Charlotte Kersten

So What’s It About?

For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town’s idyllic facade lies a terrible secret—a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.

At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon.

What I Thought

The Stepford Wives creeps up on you. Strange little details add up bit by bit, and you can almost see Levin teasing you as you go along. The oddities start to form a pattern and doom grows nearer; despite this, the book’s style remains casual and full of mundanity. In my opinion, this story wouldn’t have worked any other way.

Before I started The Stepford Wives, I knew that this was the book where men turn their wives into robots. What I didn’t realize was how much I’d get out of its examination of marriage and gender dynamics during the second wave of American feminism. Here is what “these men turn their wives into robots!!!!” means: these are men who cannot stand women’s individuality, messiness, and imperfection. They cannot abide the fact that they have anything in their lives – any hobbies, any sources of meaning – beyond having dutiful, worshipful sex and keeping a spotless house. They are threatened by the thought of women becoming more, having lives beyond their service to men, so they turn them into nothing.

What’s perhaps most interesting to me is how willing the husbands in this book are to simply go with the flow, placate their wives, and pretend to be on board with Those New Feminist Ideas. Joanna’s husband denounces the old-fashioned paternalism of the Men’s Association and vows to change it from the inside out; he nods along like a good ally whenever she talks about gender politics. All the while, he plots her death and replacement with an automaton that will never demand equality or express ideas that he has to pretend to agree with. He can afford to give lip service because he secretly knows that he has the upper hand. In this book, at least, the oppressive institution’s response to threatening change is total annihilation under the guise of allyship, made possible because the oppressive institution still has complete control behind the scenes despite whatever superficial tokens of progress they may have bestowed. Nothing timely about that, I am sure.

The introduction to the edition I read described how many readers thought Levin’s critique was of the robotic mindless wives of the book, not the men who murdered real women to replace them with lifeless copies. I really don’t know what could be more telling than that!!!!!!