The Stepford Wives

Joanne Eberhart, a young mother and photographer, isn't thrilled with her first impressions of suburban Stepford. The neighborhood wives are all so focused on their housework and their husbands, to the exclusion of everything else, that they seem downright robotic; it's also hard to avoid noticing that they all have Playboy figures and chirpy, vapid personalities, of the sort designed to get under the skin of a committed feminist like Joanne.

Under the circumstances, she's downright thrilled to make the acquaintance of Bobbie and Charmaine, two other recent refugees from the big city who, unlike the vast majority of Stepford women, have personalities of their own and interests beyond flensing their homes of every single mote of dust. But then the prickly Charmaine changes overnight, becoming a sweet hausfrau in the conventional Stepford mode. Joanne and Bobbie realize that something more profound is going on here. Can it be their first theory, contamination by local industrial waste? Or is the local Men's Association--embodied by one of its guiding influences, an openly unpleasant one-time Disney employee named Dale Coba--somehow changing these women into single-minded slaves interested in nothing but keeping house and serving their husbands?

These days, even the rare reader who doesn't know where this story is going will find dead-giveaway clues in Coba's past as an important developer of the animatronic chief executives in Disney's then-novel House of Presidents, in the scene where an artist famous for his Men's Magazine illustrations sketches Joanne with a voluptuous new body and in the sheer preponderance of Stepford men whose professional backgrounds include skill with robots and computer programming.

Whatever the explanation, Bobbie doesn't last long enough to uncover it. Her vibrant personality disappears, replaced by empty-headed subservience. And Joanne finds herself fleeing into the woods, terrified that the fate that awaited the rest of the Stepford women is about to befall her next.

Satirical nightmare turned camp classic

One early edition of The Stepford Wives features the following ad copy, so bold in its promise that it would now read as ludicrous as well as arrogant had time had not proven the words literally true: "It may be one of those rare novels whose very title may well become part of our vocabulary ... there is a certain kind of woman who, from now on, will be known as a Stepford Wife."

Got to hand it to the Random House publicity department. They saw the future. The phrase Stepford Wife did enter our vocabulary, to the extent that the adjective "Stepford" can now be placed in front of any noun describing a subsection of humanity to indicate people of scary, inhuman single-mindedness. On any given day you can spot Stepford Waiters, Stepford Motor Vehicle Department Employees, Stepford Guidance Counselors and even, bringing the discussion back to science fiction, Stepford Fans. You can concoct these phrases at will whenever faced with personalities of a given type, then drop them in conversation, and just about everybody you're talking to will know what you're talking about. Try it yourself.

That phenomenon, a testament to the impact that Ira Levin's novel and the 1975 Bryan Forbes movie adaptation had on popular culture, has paradoxically harmed the story's current effectiveness as fiction. Like the earlier Ira Levin book and movie Rosemary's Baby, it's really a comedy of manners, drawing its horrific and satirical impact from its heroine's gradual realization, several steps behind the audience, that something around her is not quite right; but Rosemary's Baby still works as intended even for new audiences who have already had the ending spoiled, and the effect of The Stepford Wives has been so co-opted that 2004's second filming bypassed the horror completely in favor of knowing, if pathetically clumsy, camp. And its brief discussions of feminism are so self-conscious that they now come off as sadly dated.

That's a shame, because the book's still a well-constructed marvel. Complete at 144 pages, or about one-third the length of the typical modern thriller--short enough, in other words, to avoid the pressing logical questions that the story invites of readers who dwell upon it any longer--it tells its story in short, punchy scenes with descriptions that often accomplish devastating characterizations of its cast in as little as a paragraph or less. Certainly there's no more subtly accomplished revelation than one early scene that establishes, with what may be puckishly called a few economical strokes, that Joanne's husband no longer loves her. Joanne deserves more. And she never should have moved to Stepford.