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The Stepford Wives

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Since the release of Ira Levine's novel The Stepford Wives in 1972, popular culture has a new term for women who devote themselves entirely to pleasing their partners. Often used in a mocking manner, the origin for the term “Stepford Wive” is actually much darker. In the novel, the devotion of the wives is not given freely and, instead of mocking it, their husbands desire it. Therefore, it can be argued that the world of The Stepford Wives is a dystopian one from the female characters' point of view and a utopian one from the male characters's point of view. While it might be difficult to understand the mind-set of the male characters of Ira Levine's novel from the current social and cultural perspective, it was based on the very real reactions …show more content…

In the novel, instead of trying to understand the female point of view or the complex ways of socialization that teach the need for male superiority, the male characters seek to find a way to gain absolute control over their wives again. For them, this would create an ideal society, a small utopia, in the village of Stepford. As J.C. Davis explains, Thomas Moore first invented the word Utopia for the fictional island in his novel of the same name and it was meant to “allude to imaginary paradisiacal places” (Claeys 4). He created the word by borrowing from the Greek language, using ouk, meaning not, and topos, meaning place. Changing the words slightly and fusing them together, they became utopia, the non-place. (ibid. 4) Making the subject of utopia applicable to Levine's novel, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature gives another possible meaning for the word. In a poem at the end of the novel Utopia, one of the characters gives characteristics of a utopian place. Two of those are that it is isolated from the known world and that “its inhabitants and its rules are so wonderful that it should be called Eutopia (the good place) instead of Utopia.” (ibid. 5) Both the meaning non-place and good place are very fitting to the kind of society the men in The Stepford Wives are trying to create. Stepford is …show more content…

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She goes on to say that she is to busy for these kinds of things, anyway, though the novel gives more than enough examples to show that all the women of Stepford do is housework. Despite his reassurances to his wife early in the novel, Walter soon seems to succumb to the allure of having a perfect, submissive wife. Dissatisfaction with his wife' sexual performance (ibid. 77) and her refusal to dress up or use make up on a daily basis ( ibid. 97) seem to be great motivators in changing him from being supportive of his wife's feminist causes to making him desire what all the other men have in the Men's Association: “[..] a lovely wife, […] pretty, helpful, submissive to her lord and master.” (ibid.

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