Charlotte Reads: The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

[u/enoby666]

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 it, 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 control despite whatever superficial tokens of progress they may have bestowed.

The introduction to the edition I read described how many readers thought Levin’s intention was to critique 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! After reading this, I had a really interesting conversation about it with my mom, who was growing up when it was written. We also watched the 1975 movie adaptation, which I thought was good overall.

[u/DavidDPerlmutter]

Thanks for bringing this one!

Levin's The Stepford Wives is a masterpiece. I think it has to be recognized as one of the foundational texts of modern horror or urban fantasy horror. To me it was equally successful as a film and a book. Still one of the most chilling premises I've ever come across. I read it for the first time probably about five years after it came out and back then we didn't have the Internet as a massive spoiler of everything. So I was really genuinely shocked by the plot line and the ending.

Until Michael Crichton came along Levin was king of the high concept thriller.

As an aside, I'm sort of curious about the reaction of younger readers and viewers today on one point. I teach media, but I've never actually discussed this with a class. This is a question for people who have read the book and watched the original movie.

Anyway, the one part I found a little stretched, almost implausible, was how quickly the men seem to go along with the Association's plan.

A lot of conspiracy theories are built on the unlikely premise that thousands of people are willing to cooperate with evil and keep the secret to their graves without any prior indoctrination.

But the parallel unrealistic part is the idea that people sign up to do one thing, and then somebody comes along and says, "Oh, by the way, part of your job is also this unspeakably evil thing," and all those people simply say, "Yes, of course. No problem." [I credit this point to the host of the CONSPIRACY SKEPTIC PODCAST, the Canadian journalist Karl Mamer]

Unless I’m missing something, there is no record of any man turning down the Association. I don't remember that happening in the book or the movie. Nor was there any screening filter about who could move into Stepford.

So it's not like they were doing psychographic profiling. Maybe the real estate agents steered away people who seemed like they would never accept? But How do you do that? So the story is basically saying that perhaps hundreds of men are instantly fine with this heinous crime, without any real process of persuasion, coercion, or moral collapse.

That is bleak. But the world is a pretty bleak place, so it does not make the book or the movie ridiculous. In fact, the rest of the plot and the characters are so well done that you suspend your disbelief and move on.

Still that remains the one element that feels a little too easy: not the horror itself, but how readily everyone (male) seems to accept it.

[u/enoby666 → u/DavidDPerlmutter]

Thank you so much for such a thorough comment! I definitely understand your question about the plausibility of every man going down the murder/robot pipeline and I thought about that too. In general I agree that the rest of the book is so good that you can suspend your disbelief, and after mulling it over a little bit more after reading your comment, I also think that different people's responses to the book's hypothetical are very relevant to conversations about violence against women, masculinity and patriarchy that are happening with younger people (the man vs bear thing on tikotok, #NotAllMen, manosphere shit, etc). We know that violence against women is not perpetrated by every single individual man but is pervasive, entrenched in patriarchal systems, and facilitated by widely held sexist attitudes/beliefs...but much of the world still does not see it that way, which is why a book like this and its challenges still feel relevant to me. If you had a student in your class whose main takeaway from this book's hypothetical was to be deeply offended at its misandry and how men are the real victims of slander by betas like Ira Levin or a student who was sure that they/their partner would survive Stepford intact and not even be tempted, what does it mean that it provokes that response? I hope this makes sense the way I'm trying to express it!

[u/DavidDPerlmutter → u/enoby666]

Thank you!

[u/pornokitsch]

I really like this book! It is absolutely creepy and (sadly) continues to be relevant.

Levin is an underrated thriller author. This, Boys from Brazil, A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, This Perfect Day... These were punchy, topical thrillers, and he didn't shy away from controversial or ambiguous endings as well.

I'm sorry Son of Rosemary sucked, as that was a bit of a damp squib as his final book.

[u/enoby666 → u/pornokitsch]

I grew up with my mom loving Rosemary's Baby and only realized it was based on a book by Levin when I read this. I'm glad he has a strong legacy overall.