The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

THE STEPFORD WIVES – IRA LEVIN

Well, who'd have thought? Certainly not me. Who'd have thought that The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin would come so loaded? Starting with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir then giving mention to the Women's Liberation movement by the second page? Of course, it's possible to read into the story what you wish just as it's possible to read it as a straightforward thriller without any meaning or depth to it at all but then where's the fun in that? I see Ira Levin was also responsible for Rosemary's Baby and The Boys From Brazil so this in itself should have told me The Stepford Wives was going to be a little bit more than a Mills and Boone wielding a knife.

The plot doesn't really matter and in a way, mention of the Women's Liberation movement is merely a trope on which to hang the main theme of the story upon, that main theme being the issue of 'conformity'. It's been done before, of course – Invasion Of The Body Snatchers springs immediately to mind – but post World War Two it was always about the fear of a communist plot where the Great American Hero would be battling to preserve justice, freedom and mom's apple pie against the Red menace. The Stepford Wives is the complete opposite of this where the Liberated Woman fights against the American (male) Dream and its desire and design for the perfect hausfrau.

A woman's place, according to the good men of the town of Stepford is in the home, apparently. A lady in the parlour, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in bed. A strong woman is a weak woman and any hint of creativity is deemed frivolous. Resistance is futile, the allure and satisfaction gained from serving a husband too important to deny.

When Joanna, the main character in the book, begins to suspect there is something very wrong going on in the town in the way that one-by-one all the women succumb to the will of their husband's vision of the perfect wife, she is gaslit and made to think that actually she's the one who is wrong. Interestingly, Levin in the end leaves it open to interpretation as to whether Joanna was right all along or just being hysterical but either way she still ends up being assimilated.

And so, how might The Stepford Wives be translated so as to be of relevance to the modern-day world? Well, let's think about this for a moment, shall we? 2020 and it's the year of the pandemic virus. Populations groan beneath the weight of mass Right-wing propaganda. News is once-removed from reality and presented as a virtual reality where bodies of drowned child refugees are washed upon the shore but fail to register as flesh and blood but simply as an idea. A symbol of something other. Mono culture is all and if you don't buy into it then you're stranded and at best thought of as being weird. The term 'snowflake' is delivered as mockery but actually meant as a smack in the mouth. Money is the measure of life's worth. Privilege is sacrosanct, religion is an opiate and poverty, along with hunger and disease is a given.

Like lemmings humankind has been swarming towards the precipice, rushing head-on to hurl itself over the cliff and into the gaping jaws of global ecological disaster. It's been almost frenzied in its haste, near delirious in the sheer fun of it all. With not a care in the world or for the world literally. Jammed-up together in a mutual fuck fest of self-idolatry, self-satisfaction and self-flagellation and to hell in a handcart for those who can't keep up. This has been our normality. Our consensus. The great, fat, feverish mindset to which we conform to.

But then out of the blue a coronavirus has popped up. A less than microscopic life-form that unlike most other life-forms on earth doesn't fear us but instead rather actually likes us. We don't, however, like it. So much so that we stopped the world for it.

And suddenly there was silence. A suspended, hanging-in-the-air stillness. Nobody moved. Only our eyes darting from one to the other like in a grand, final duel in a cowboy film, waiting to see who would go for their gun first and ultimately who would be quickest on the draw.

“We need to get back to normality!” shout the spoilsports, the sadists and the overt masochists amongst us. But hang on, weren't we heading for a precipice? “Snowflake!” comes the reply. A smack in the mouth. Along with the most massive, unprecedented gaslighting ever.

As I said, though she realises something is very wrong, Joanna in The Stepford Wives is in the end assimilated. She tries to escape but is gaslit into thinking she's the one who is wrong so she hesitates and eventually conforms to the town of Stepford's normalcy. So can Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives be translated so as to be of relevance to the modern-day world? Unfortunately, the answer is 'yes' and very much so.

John Serpico