The trouble was that I wanted to get married, just not in the traditional sense. I wanted to get married in the sense that I wanted to enter into an ever-deepening, ever-evolving conversation with another; with a person who saw me for everything I was. Romantic love is a mirror in which you can see your whole self pleasantly reflected, if you’re lucky. Or it’s a dark mirror into which you can disappear. Traditionally, the only plot that has been available to the heroine is the “marriage plot.” In stories, it has been her one thrilling, treacherous, booby-trapped obstacle course to transcendent happiness. Because marriage was the only culturally and socially sanctioned (“happy”) outcome for a girl, her story could conclude only one way to be deemed a success. In The Heroine’s Text, her seminal analysis of the marriage plot in eighteenth-century French and English novels, Nancy K. Miller argued that the novel as a form “would have never happened without a certain collective ‘obsessing’ about an idea called ‘woman.’” More than a reflection of social reality, “literary femininity in the eighteenth century,” Miller wrote, is “the inscription of a female destiny, the fictionalization of what is taken to be the feminine at a specific cultural moment.”12 If, traditionally, the hero’s story was the story of a boy’s transformation into himself, then the heroine’s story, or text, was the story of a girl’s transformation into a wife. The transition from her father’s child to her husband’s wife was understood to be her only adventure. Everything, therefore, was riding on this one, early adventure. Its outcome would be, as Miller put it, either euphoric or dysphoric. She would get it “all” (a rich, handsome, sexy, kind, smart husband attuned to her emotional needs) or she would get “nothing,” and then she would probably die. Either way, the story ended. And there wasn’t much she could do to steer it toward its successful conclusion. She could be as fetching as possible, compliant, and charming. She could go the route of virtue, or strategy, or might just get lucky. But she had very little decision-making power, no authority to make things happen. Her word was as ineffective as it was distrusted. The heroine and all who root for her yearned and yearned for a swift conclusion to her intolerable freedom and life of open-ended adventure. A happy ending was impossible without a successful coupling. Without marriage, a heroine was “unfinished.” She had not quite yet become “herself.”
So, what should a movie that wasn’t about two guys and their adventures be about? This was the big question, the age-old question, the ongoing, perpetually trending “woman question.” It was the raging question in 1865, 1890, 1920, 1940, 1963, and 1975. How did a modern girl become herself? What was a girl? Who got to say? What was spookiest about The Stepford Wives was the same thing that had seemed spooky and galvanizing about The Feminine Mystique. Had the husbands in the story been one-dimensional cartoon villains, they would have been easy to mock and dismiss. What was scary about them was that they weren’t that. They were interested in the women’s movement, as Joanna said of her husband to the Realtor. They did the dishes and took the kids to McDonald’s and helped install darkrooms in basements for their photographer wives. Individually, they weren’t bad at all. It was when they got together and let themselves be swayed by a charismatic leader that the trouble began. The husbands’ ambivalence about replacing their wives with sexy wife-bots is apparent throughout the novel and the movie. They don’t have an easy time of it. They need the constant affirmation of the guys at the Men’s Association or they fall to pieces, as Bobbie’s husband does after they swap her out for the new model. The husbands are following orders. They’re not the ones making the rules. The Stepford Wives isn’t really about men and women, or husbands and wives, but about how patriarchy and capitalism use “traditional” marriage—that is, the single-income, “family wage,” upper-middle-class model that became dominant in the nineteenth century—to reinforce the existing global patriarchal power structure. And it’s about how mass media helps perpetuate this power structure by forever spinning fairy tales about marriage that, on closer inspection, are revealed to be horror stories.
This was the idea The Feminine Mystique helped bring into the mainstream.
This was the idea that The Stepford Wives turned into campy gothic horror, that looked familiar and felt like home.
In real life, of course, the girl doesn’t disappear after the story ends—I mean, she kind of does, narratively; her story just stops getting told, but as a person she sticks around. The plot ensures that whatever else she achieves or doesn’t, receives or doesn’t, this “becoming” a wife is what marks her successful passage into adulthood—only it’s not the beginning of a lifelong adventure but the “happy ending.” You could almost call it a plot against women. In an essay called “Stepford U.S.A.: Second-Wave Feminism, Domestic Labor, and the Representation of National Time,” the scholar Jane Elliott observed that The Stepford Wives was notable not just because it was told from the point of view of the heroine but also because it took up where the heroine’s story usually leaves off: from the successful conclusion of her risky, zero-sum journey to marriage, “after which nothing of interest—no meaningful change, in other words—was expected to happen.”13 Despite her youth—and the heroine is never not young—that is, despite how close she still is to the beginning, we cheer her toward this happy ending, this blissful state of suspended animation, this animatronic life—and who doesn’t like to be cheered on?
What if, Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was more than just about housewifely ennui but also about the alienation and unending tedium of all modern work—of a moneymaking need that expands to fill the time available? Why else this constant repetition and reinforcement of a fiction that reality keeps refuting but that fiction keeps reimposing: the fiction of progress, the feeling that we are going somewhere, getting somewhere, that our lives have meaning, that we are not caught in a constant recursion, an infinite loop? Is there progress? What is progress? What if author Ira Levin was not ripping off Betty Friedan but was on her side? What if he was calling back to her, saying, “I feel you, sister! Fuck the patriarchy!” What if, as Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was an allegory for the lives not just of suburban housewives but of global corporate capitalism? of working ceaselessly with nothing to show for it at the end? What if it represented anxieties about lives of pointless repetition with no progress, no end result, and no possibility of transformation? If it wasn’t just the housewives’ problem, or a problem caused by housewives who ceased to perform their housewifely duties, but everyone’s problem? What if “the problem that has no name turns out to be caused by the life that has no more plot?”14 If so, Friedan and Levin weren’t the first to notice.
The Stepford Wives opens in dead silence on a shot of some garish yellow wallpaper. It’s a groovy, bilious, ornate seventies floral print with silhouettes of leopards and lions mixed in, reflected in the mirrored medicine cabinet of Joanna Eberhart’s bathroom in her empty apartment in New York. It’s moving day. The family is off to Stepford. She gazes wistfully at her reflection with the hideous wallpaper in the background. I saw this and thought, You can’t start a movie about a woman who is about to be murdered and replaced with a sexy robot with a shot of yellow wallpaper and not invite comparisons to The Yellow Wallpaper.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short work by the writer, sociologist, and feminist reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Published in 1892, it’s the story of a woman who suffers a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” after the birth of her baby and is taken to a house in the country for a “rest cure” by her husband, a sympathetic but paternalistic doctor named John. The house is lovely but for the room where she and her husband move in. It’s an upstairs nursery with bars on the windows; scarred, bolted-down furniture; and walls covered in the most hideous, crazy-making wallpaper the woman has ever seen—a horrible repeating pattern of snaking, twisted vines in a hideous shade of yellow. The narrator asks to be installed downstairs in a room with a view of the garden, but her husband refuses. Not only does the wallpap
er assault her senses and pitch her further into a nervous (and aesthetic) crisis, but also she is forbidden to write, paint, read, talk to people, or do anything intellectually stimulating for more than two hours a day. She keeps a secret journal in which she records her growing fixation on the wallpaper as she slowly becomes convinced that there is a woman trapped behind it, creeping around. Determined to set the woman free, she starts to peel off the wallpaper in strips. Then she comes to believe the woman in the wallpaper is she herself. Having descended into psychosis, she locks herself up in the room. When her husband makes it inside, he finds her on the floor creeping around on her belly like a lizard or a ghost in a Japanese horror movie. “For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way,” she says. The husband drops in a dead faint at the sight of the monster his angelic wife has become, and she just creeps over him, oblivious.
Gilman was inspired by her own experience following the birth of her only daughter, when she suffered a bout of severe postpartum depression and was taken to the country by her husband on the advice of her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, a neurologist known for treating women for “hysteria” with a “rest cure” that involved isolation from friends and family, bed rest, force-feeding of fatty foods, and no reading, writing, talking, or sewing. The idea was to break the patient’s will and teach her to submit to male authority for the good of her health. Mitchell advised Gilman to “live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time . . . Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” She followed orders, her depression blossomed into psychosis, and she became suicidal. Eventually, she left her husband, moved to California with her daughter, and became an internationally best-selling writer.
We think of women “leaving the house” and “entering the workforce” as being new at around the time The Stepford Wives appeared. But it wasn’t really all that new. The postwar suburbs around which young couples were encouraged to structure their lives were new. The American middle class, such as it was, was fairly new. The notion that in America every man who was willing to work hard was all but guaranteed a house with a wife in it to work all the modern appliances and dust the faux-colonial furniture, and with his-and-her cars side by side in the garage—that was pretty new. And that brand-new world was sold as “traditional,” maybe not the way things “used to be” so much as the way they were “supposed to be,” the way people sometimes wished they’d been, as imagined by some people trying to sell soap from a soundstage in Burbank. It was a blip, though. And by the time The Stepford Wives came out, the postwar economic blip was already over. People sensed it, perhaps, but they just weren’t ready to admit it. I remember getting up extra early so my mom could drive my dad to the train and then waiting in line at the gas station. I remember a weird kid named Teddy following me home from school, sitting down at the kitchen table as my mom served us a snack, and telling her that she shouldn’t smoke because she was killing the birds. “You’re killing the birds,” he’d say, and I’d look at him and think, Why did you follow me here? And my mom would say something like, “Thanks for letting me know, Teddy.” The world was changing, you could tell. A kindergartner you didn’t even like could get holier-than-thou with your mom, and your mom could just train him with a killer stare and keep right on smoking. So, it wasn’t women working that was new. What was (relatively) new was global corporate capitalism as the organizing principle, and what was still unclear was how women would fit in. It was global economies and ideological wars that were new. It was the sense that we were citizens of our corporations more than our countries that was new. As Elliott writes, the image of the trapped, automated housewife symbolized a late-1960s collective anxiety over the stalling out of American progress, a fear of totalizing ideologies, and a paranoia about social control. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, but when I read it, I recognized something true.
Tales of housewifely desperation are still just as endlessly produced, endlessly popular, and contemptuously dismissed today. Jell-O delights have given way to gluten-free cupcakes, but the basic structure of the system that sustains us and keeps the economy going hasn’t changed. We’re just made to pretend it has, and we’re punished for pointing out the ways in which it hasn’t. We don’t like to acknowledge this. We prefer that women blame each other or themselves. Mommy squabbles, feminist infighting, and generational antagonism are always encouraged. The media never stops concern-trolling us with essentialist ideologies couched in existential questions. Can women, as God and nature made us, really “have it all”? Or must we still choose between parts of ourselves, to preserve a Victorian idea of masculine wholeness?
It wasn’t just the look of The Stepford Wives, the Vera scarves and the wood-paneled station wagons, that reminded me of my mom and her friends in those days. It was the sense of dissonance that arose from the disconnect between Joanna and Bobbie’s understanding of the world they lived in and the actual world they lived in that was deeply familiar. I’d lived in that disconnect my whole life, though I couldn’t have named it—not even after Betty Friedan did. I didn’t know it, but the “woman question” was back with a vengeance—not that it had ever really gone away. As a girl, I was gathering that being a girl was a problem in the process of being solved, and that my generation—lucky me!—would be the first to benefit from the solution. The solution, I knew, would be related to fairness somehow, but I wouldn’t have to worry about it very much. Joanna and Bobbie were so familiar. They were seventies housewives who were interested in women’s lib and proud of their messy kitchens. They probably read Erma Bombeck and would soon graduate to Erica Jong. (Fear of Flying was published between The Stepford Wives book and the movie, but whatever.) They probably subscribed to Ms. magazine, or pretended they did, and hated Phyllis Schlafly. When they got together at each other’s messy houses, they doubtless laughed at Barbie’s parabolic boobs and Ken’s smooth crotch-dome. They were cool, hip, post–Feminine Mystique housewives. They were in on the joke, which only made it harder to see that the joke was on them. The problem with the ironic postmodern stance, when you look back on it from our current, metamodern age, is that not everyone who indulged could really afford it—they paid for it on credit.
This is why the husbands in The Stepford Wives are so interesting and so conflicted. Diz, the former Disney Imagineer and founder of the Men’s Association, is the bad guy. The others are torn between two sides: either they believe in the existing social and economic order, or they believe in women’s equality. They can’t have it both ways. They pretend to, for a while. But ultimately, they have to choose.
In A Strange Stirring: “The Feminine Mystique” and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz writes, “Friedan captured a paradox that many women struggle with today. The elimination of the most blatant denials of one’s rights can be very disorienting if you don’t have the ability to exercise one right without giving up another.”15 “Disorienting” is putting it mildly. Blatant denials of their rights, of the kind the second-wavers had to deal with, had the curious upside of at least making it clear what women were fighting for. It’s hard to fight a foe that pretends to be your friend. It’s like Joanna in The Stepford Wives novel, not knowing whether to trust robot Bobbie or run for her life. The problem with traditional marriages and workplaces, says Coontz, is that “at their core they continue to gently guide women toward a choice that’s not really a choice, to choose half of what they really want, and to blame themselves if that half fails to satisfy their needs.”16 This is gaslighting. It makes you wonder if you’re crazy by denying your perceptions and encouraging you to think the problem is you. It makes you doubt yourself in the face of overwhelming evidence, even as the buxom robot that’s supplanted your best friend comes at you with a knife,
smiling, telling you to relax, calm down, and let your life be taken away from you.
A few years after publishing The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a treatise called Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, in which she argued that it made no sense to think of wife- and motherhood in the same terms as work. For Gilman, women’s lack of power in society was not inherent but the result “of certain arbitrary conditions of our own adoption.” Her problem was with women’s de facto economic dependence on men at the time; with “the commonly received opinion” that whereas “men make and distribute the wealth of the world . . . women earn their share of it as wives.” This assumption made no sense to her, though. If it were really true that women were participating in the economy as wives, then a wife would be an employee or a partner in her husband’s business, and entitled to share his income or profits. “But a manufacturer who marries, or a doctor, or a lawyer, does not take a partner in his business, when he takes a partner in parenthood, unless his wife is also a manufacturer, a doctor, or a lawyer.” In reality, Gilman argued, a wife’s work was regarded not as employment but as duty. The more money a husband made, the less hard a wife would be expected to “work.”
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