Ira Levin’s debut novel was so good I eagerly picked up his most famous work, The Stepford Wives. It’s significantly worse! I scanned reviews of afterwards to see if I’d somehow missed something, but reviewers also interpret the novel as an aesthetic wrapper around the idea that men cannot be trusted to value women as people. But the novel fails qua wrapper around that particular idea.
The plot is that all the men in a certain town are in a men's club whose members collectively have the engineering chops to replace their wives with robots. The wives are killed. When Joanna and her husband Walter arrive in Stepford, he also joins the club, and – off-screen – agrees to this plan. In the end, she dies, also replaced by a robot.
The book is from Joanna’s point of view. When the novel starts, they are in a gender-egalitarian marriage that Walter seems happy with. He supports her parallel career as a photographer and doesn’t seem unhappy with the quality of her homemaking. We never get an explanation of why Walter would agree to have his wife killed and replaced. The only thread, in fact, is sex.
There are three scenes where this thread runs clear:
First, when Walter comes back from his first meeting at the men’s club, Joanna wakes up in the middle of the night because he is masturbating. She asks why he didn’t wake her, and initiates sex. It is very good for her, but he doesn’t seem so happy. That’s all Levin tells us. My interpretation is: they showed him the robots in sex mode at the club. When he came back, aroused, he didn’t want to wake his wife – the personal connection was incongruous with the motivating stimulus – but he was highly energetic once they started up.
Second, when some men Walter met at the club come around for dinner, a semi-famous artist among their number sketches Joanna. Various angles. For some reason, the men start blushing. They can’t look at her. The implication is that he’s making studies for the robot that will replace her, and they can’t help but imagine fucking it.
Third, the (single!) comment Walter makes expressing dissatisfaction about his wife comes late in the book. He denies that anything is awry with Joanna’s friends who have suddenly become docile and repetitive:
they realised they’d been lazy and negligent […] It wouldn’t hurt you to look in a mirror once in a while.
The pitch of a Stepford Wife is that she is always cheerful, dedicated to keeping her home clean, will never gain weight, won’t nag you, and will have sex with you on demand. Wikipedia calls this a “feminist horror novel”. The horror is that every man will take this deal over being married to a real woman. But if so, the horror lies in the mind of the man, and this had to be developed for the novel to work. The narrative power lies not in the wife, who is living in a standard thriller novel, but in her husband, who chooses convenience and pleasure over coexistence and respect.
I think this novel fails fundamentally because it chose the wrong focus, the wrong narrator.
Which poses the interesting challenge – of writing the right novel. Of telling Walter’s story – his resentment at trying to split housework evenly in a world where women are more neurotic about cleanliness than men; his lack of respect for photography… his ‘real wages’ are supporting her pursuit of a hobby that earns a little money; his dissatisfaction with sex and her looks; his anger that he is obliged to hide this dissatisfaction and lack of attraction; his belief that she is neglectful of the children compared to less feminist women; his alienation from the more cringe and radical shoots of feminism, which he hides lest he offend his wife; his sense that anything truly difficult still falls to him; his sadness at her faltering libido.
Perhaps such a man could feel all these things as auxiliary challenges in an otherwise good marriage until confronted with the possibility that he could do away with all of them. And then the challenges surge to the fore. He picks fights. He’s a nervous wreck. He doesn’t want to murder her. The men at the club don’t press, but it’s clear the option is always open.
Walter would never betray them to the police. The story is outlandish, and besides, what they have created is magical as well as horrifying. He won’t be the one to desecrate it. The club building is another reality where his difficult skin has been shed and his emotions and sexuality meet with no resistance. He fucks, smokes, talks shop as long as he wants. He spends long minutes staring at the artist’s subtly idealized sketches of his wife, thinking about the robot that could be.
He withdraws from his wife. The more he withdraws, the harder it is to remember and recognize: her.
At some point he realizes there is no retrieving the marriage. He’s been in the club too long, danced with the idea of replacing her too long. He can never be honest with her again in the way a marriage requires. It’s no longer a choice between the marriage and the robot; the marriage is not on the table anymore.
She is not a person anymore to him but a cloud of demands and compounded difficulties. The key problem is that in a “feminist marriage” you can’t be honest with a woman. Her selfishnesses and gendered preferences expand to fill the space while his must contract…
Joanna senses the trouble. She wants therapy, she thinks he’s having an affair, she’s mad, but she’s willing to forgive him, please let’s just fix it. But how could he fix it? He ought to divorce her. But the children… the house!… and what would he even say to the judge? And after the divorce, what? Leave Stepford? Return to the last city? No, she would get all the friends.
He doesn’t trust himself to pick up the pieces if he goes through with divorce. So. No divorce. But this can’t go on. So, yes. Fine. Let’s… upgrade her.
He comes home after his friends from the club take care of it. Heart crowding into his throat. The floors are waxed and the children are in bed. Roast on the spotless tablecloth, with his favorite condiments laid out next to it. And gleaming across the table, his wife, dressed to provoke, slender, hair curled prettily…
The interface of her person is completely smooth now.
He can eat dinner in peace and leave the dishes to her. When she’s done, she comes to bed and seduces him. He picked her flirtation routines long ago.
The awful guilt has lifted. It’s done, there’s no going back. And it’s so easy to think of it as an upgrade – aside from the charging port, she’s completely convincing. And when he (easily) brings her to orgasm and she tumbles off him giggling with post-coital delight and saying, oh, that was wonderful, I love you – and he’s sated with the wonderful dinner and the sex and the sight of the sparkling house with kidslime scrubbed and the toys put away – and tomorrow, hot coffee on an uncluttered table where he could spread out the morning paper –
He thinks, oh. How easy it was. How silly I was for not doing this long ago.