I saw a re-run of The Stepford Wives last night. It was the original version starring Katherine Ross. It’s a chilling classic of a tale, but I always felt its premise was oddly off-base.
I’m not referring to its overall premise – that the people we’ve known, our nearest and dearest, have somehow suddenly be replaced with simulacra. That’s also the theme of another classic movie – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and it’s the underlying theme of all the legends of doppelgangers. These movies and folktales are so frightening just because they play into an all too realistic and justifiable sense many of us get at times, a sense that someone we considered a friend has turned strangely cold toward us.
When carried to an extreme, this conviction that the people closest to us have been replaced by robotic alien life forms, is considered a psychological problem. It has a name – “Capgras’ Syndrome” or “Capgras’ Disease.” Neurologists such as Oliver Saks have written about such cases. Although there are theories about what portions of the brain might be stricken so as to lead to this twisted perception, no one, as far as I know, has pinpointed the source of the problem or been able to advance a cure.
However, in milder form, a perception that someone we’ve loved has changed into something mechanically subversive of us, is all too common and all too accurate a perception. Often the people we invested ourselves in were actually mercenary from the start, just using us - but we were too bubbly in denial to recognize that. Just as often though, people do change into regrettably joyless versions of themselves. In advanced Western societies, it happens notoriously when children hit their teens.
The little girl who was laughingly building sand castles with us one day, suddenly becomes a seething cauldron of rage. The little boy whose greatest joy was once going fishing with his Dad, turns brutally dismissive of anything connected with “the older generation.” An acquaintance of mine sighed over her boy the other day, “Oh, he’s becoming mannish.” She saw her once eager little “handyman” around the house going the inevitable way of guns, gangs, and profligate parenthood.
There often isn’t such a sense of alien substitution in tribal cultures where children remain continuously integrated into the larger society. They aren’t sent off for lengthy periods into the peer group enforcements of schools there. They also aren’t expected to dissociate themselves from parental mores, and to “lead their own lives.” So no sad and inexplicable, but seemingly inevitable, transformation into teen rebellion plagues tribal societies to the extent it does technologically advanced Western cultures.
However , all over there are medical conditions that snatch our loved ones from us. Strokes and Alzheimer’s happen. More subtle, undiagnosable conditions can also alter people’s personalities in indefinably hardening ways. People can become emotionally as well as physically sclerotic as they age.
So that aspect of the premise of The Stepford Wives reflects a lot of real life experience. The Stepford Wives is a stepped-up version of that suspicion we hold regarding some of our relationships. In a larger sense, it’s a representation of the general oncoming coldness of our human universe.
But something else about the movie’s plot didn’t ring true to me at all. The part of the movie’s premise that I did NOT find reflective of any inner reality – was the nature of the replacement women that the men designed for themselves. I don’t think the resultant compulsively house-proud woman is the ideal of many men. The movie script was obviously designed to play off the model woman implied in the word “house-keeper.” It aimed at being a sinister exaggeration of that role into which women were bound for so long. However, I don’t think the average man is very much concerned with how his wife maintains the house.
There are exceptions. Husbands with some tyrannizing version of OCD, like the husband in Sleeping With the Enemy,” might want a wife preoccupied with the relative virtues of different scrubbing products. But I don’t think typical men rate “keeping the house immaculate” very high on their list of qualities they look for in a wife. Some might hope for a good cook, but even that attribute would probably not rank high among the majority of men. What’s more, I don’t think a majority of men in Western societies would particularly want their wives dressed in frilly long skirts and blouses. Quite the reverse, A lot of men I’ve met are pressuring their wives to wear mini-er mini skirts and tighter, flesh-tone tank tops – at least around the house. But even at that, men don’t generally seem to be consistently particular about, or observant of, what their wives are wearing. Their priorities are elsewhere.
There’s a joke circulating on the Internet about what women look for in a future husband. You’ve probably received the joke in your email. It goes:
A store that sells new husbands has just opened in New York City, where a woman may go to shop for a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance to the building is a description of how the store operates. Women entering the premises are advised that they may visit the store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the desirable attributes of the men increase and compound as the shopper ascends the flights. There is, however, a catch. A woman may choose any man from a particular floor, or she may choose to go up a floor. But once having passed a floor, she can’t go back, except to exit the building.
So, a woman enters the Husband Store. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:
Floor 1 - These men have jobs.
The second floor sign reads:
Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.
The third floor sign reads:
Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids, and are extremely good looking.
At this point, the woman is tempted, but keeps going. The fourth floor sign reads:
Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead good looking, and help with the housework.
Still the woman is impelled to keep going. The fifth floor sign reads:
Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead gorgeous, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak.
It gets better and better, Still the woman proceeds to the sixth floor, whose sign reads:
Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.
Quite a few people have added another section to this joke. They have posited a counterpart “Wife Store” across the street from the Husband Store. Same set-up, same rules apply.
A man enters the Wife Store. The first sign he sees says:
Floor 1 – These women like beer and sports.
He proceeds to the next floor. That sign says:
Floor 2 – These women like beer, sports, and sex.
Here the review of the Store Directory ends. When the reader is prompted to ask, “What’s next? What’s on Floors 3 and 4 and so forth?” – the answer is:
No one knows. No man has ever gone beyond Floor 2.
There are a few different versions of this joke addenda about what men want. Sometimes an early floor will include mention of attractiveness – sometimes of wealthy women. But no version mentions a propensity to cook and clean all day.
The Stepford Wives are shown being accommodating to their husbands sexually. But that’s a minor theme. A Stepford Wife is principally characterized by her transfixed affinity for doing housework. And that’s where the book and the movie seem to be so oddly dissonant to me. Based on every know permutation of the Husband Store joke, and based on the predilections of most of the men I’ve been acquainted with – women preoccupied with the relative merits of different oven cleaning products would be scorned rather than married. If anything, many men might appreciate a woman willing to tolerate and even lend herself to the kind of messy casualness that the stereotypical bachelor and husband both tend to favor, as long as things don’t get too far out of control. A man would more likely want to create a partner who would be intelligently available to participate in those beer and sports bashes, and who could be an inventive partner in sex play. In summary, if real men had the power to replace their real, fractious, imperfect wives with simulacra, it’s unlikely that many would create bland scrub women floating around in Victorian modesty.
So there’s a layering of eeriness about The Stepford Wives. There’s the obvious chill factor of its main theme regarding men’s desire to replace real women with some idealization of women. But then there’s the eeriness of what’s shown as being these men’s ideals. That ideal is so contrary to what most men have likely ever really wanted, that it poses its own question. What was going on in our culture in the late 60’s and early 70’s, when Ira Levin’s book was written and when the move was made, that caused this skewed vision of men’s desires to be posited?
That was the era of the Cultural Revolution, of love-in’s, of a push for liberation – particularly women’s liberation. The movie is obviously a reflection of that new consciousness raising. In its terrifying extremity, it highlights the fact that women had for so long been impressed into being, not themselves, but whatever men wanted them to be. However, in the process of advancing such a chilling awareness of women’s subjugation on this score, did the movie inadvertently subject men to an equally stifling falsity? Does the movie advance a very unnatural, prefabricated image of who men are and of what they want?
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