The Stepford Wives, Or: The Horrors of Domesticity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper provides a new interpretation of Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives (1972). It seeks to refute that the novel “misses the deeper concerns over the wage relations making the antagonism between Joanna and her husband inevitable” (Brady 2021, 9) and that its ambivalent ending is “part of a canny strategy” (Neill 2018, 265) to win as large a readership as possible. I will show that female economic dependence is in fact the key issue of The Stepford Wives. Moreover, I draw on the novel’s roots in the Gothic genre to demonstrate that its ambivalence entails an insightful commentary on the pervasiveness of patriarchy. Levin’s novel illustrates that the fight for women’s rights is challenged on multiple levels, neither solely nor exclusively by men, but rather by a whole (patriarchal) culture. Gender equality hence requires that both men and women critically reflect on their own role in sustaining patriarchy. The Stepford Wives therefore paints a more complex picture of the “war between the sexes” than its conventional reading allows.