The Blackout in Stepford and the Shadow of Southern Horror

Abstract

Abstract: In this essay, I reconsider Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Step-ford Wives and place it in dialogue with its filmic adaptations, to reflect on how much the films based on Levin’s novel foreclose and marginalize black representation and embodiment that had been centered in the novel. I argue that shifts from the novel The Step-ford Wives to the first film, released in 1975 and directed by Bryan Forbes, erase the black female subjectivity that centrally shapes the novel. Similarly, by implication in the 2004 film The Stepford Wives directed by Frank Oz, blackness is associated with a decaying urban landscape and scapegoated as the corrupting force that would prevent the actualization of an ideal or peaceful home in a predominantly white suburban neighborhood, where escape from blackness and the pathologies associated with it, including crime, are idealized. Black people are the community’s hidden and unspoken fear, a fear that looms (ironically even more than the literal horrors carried out in the town among its white citizenry), linked to auras of blackness classically illustrated within gothic writing. Toni Morrison has famously discussed the Africanist presence that inflects early canonical American literature, even when black bodies are absent and black characters do not materialize within gothic narratives.