In the early sixties, Second Wave feminism was born and women were questioning their roles in life. Women born of the housewife generation were wondering if they too would lose themselves in the mundane chores of cleaning house and tending to one’s husband. The Stepford Wives, a horror movie made in 1975 by Bryan Forbes, addressed these issues with a fearful and unhappy look at the perfect woman. In the film, liberated females who embrace their own sexuality and are more powerful, or at least equal to, their husbands are destroyed and replaced with “perfection.” The new women have perfect figures, they clean house, they are great mothers, and they are ready and willing for sex whenever the man wants it, even in the middle of the day as the film suggests on two separate occasions. With the oppression of women into domesticity and the dominance of men over women in sexuality, is it any wonder that the film depicts violence between the dominated domestic female and the sexually liberated female?
One scene in The Stepford Wives in which the liberated female acts out against domesticity occurs between Bobby and Joanna. The scene entitled “I thought we were friends” starts with a drenched Joanna walking into the newly-domesticated Bobby’s kitchen. Bobby maternally responds to the wet Joanna with “You need a fresh perked cup of coffee” and immediately takes up the chore of making coffee. Joanna is angry and demands her kids while Bobby insists that not even her kids are at home, they are at a friends house so she can catch up on her cleaning. Joanna picks up a knife laying nearby and says, “Look I bleed.” Bobby intersperses this odd conversation with, “Oh that’s right you take it black.” Joanna continues, “When I cut myself I bleed,” Joanna slashes two of her fingers. Bobby does not flinch but says, “Why look at your hand” Joanna stares at her vacant friend then says, “No you look” and stabs the knife into Bobby’s vagina. Bobby looks down at the knife and casually pulls the clean knife out, wipes it off and continues into a fit of repetition similar to that of Carol Van Sant earlier in the film.
The scene described above represents two separate parts of “woman,” the liberated woman and the domesticated
housewife. While the liberated female is still maternal and nurturing, Joanna just wants her kids, the domesticated woman is focused on household chores, Bobby sent her kids away so she could clean house. Bobby’s incessant need to make coffee is another example of her domesticity overriding her natural instincts. When Joanna speaks of blood, Bobby responds with a question on coffee. When the liberated woman is challenged with too much useless domesticity she acts out violently, taking away the domesticated housewife’s sexuality. Joanna stabs Bobby in the vagina, breaking the robot and causing the domesticated housewife’s destruction. The act of violence between the two separate parts of “woman” shows a lack of communication.
The miscommunication stems from the fact that the domesticated woman is the robotic production of the men’s desires. She cannot express feelings of love and concern, but rather common place sentiments. When Joanna cuts her hand, Bobby responds matter-of-factly rather than out of horror or concern. The difference can be traced back to Freud and his infamous Oedipal complex. “Girls emerge from the period with a basis for ’empathy’ built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not” says Carol Gilligan (200). Even though boys and girls must repress emotions during the Oedipal stage, the transition is more difficult for boys and they must repress more. Girls transfer their emotions onto their father, but still hold onto the maternal feelings they learned from their mothers. Boys transfer their feelings onto their mother but repress any maternal emotions and focus instead on “being a man.” Therefore, since men do not have the same sense of empathy, it could not be made into his creation and it explains why the robots do not have relationships nor do they seem to care about what others are truly saying. Bobby and Joanna were best friends until Bobby was defeated by the man’s creation. The creation does not care about any relationships, only about a clean house and a satisfied husband.
Although The Stepford Wives is a gross exaggeration of women and men relationships, Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, speaks of the unexaggerated treatment women faced by the male society. “Women are…made slaves to their persons, and must render them alluring that man may lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright” (58). In Stepford Wives, Diz makes Wollstonecraft’s worst nightmare his truth. He creates women who perform his every whim, who are sexy and charming, yet helpless and without “a mind of their own.” She continues to argue against the robotic state men force their wives into by saying, “Women then must be considered as only the wanton solace of men, when they become so weak in mind and body that they cannot exert themselves unless to pursue some frothy pleasure, or to invent some frivolous fashion”(59). A scene earlier in the film finds Bobby and Joanna forming a consciousness-raising group with their fellow Stepford women’s community. Although Bobby and Joanna try desperately to talk of “real” issues, the wives only want to speak of household cleaners and daily chores. The consciousness-raising session which is supposed to raise the women’s consciousness on liberation instead turns into a consciousness-raising session on cleaning products. Stepford Wives exaggerates and satirizes the life of a woman in the early seventies, but, nonetheless, Wollstonecraft’s warnings ring true.
A final issue on the destruction of the domesticated product in the scene is a visual attack much like Wollstonecraft’s verbal aggressions. Joanna does not cut Bobby’s hand nor does she test her no-blood theory lightly, instead she stabs a knife into Bobby’s vagina, brutally wounding the place of feminine power. Joanna forces reality onto the fantasy and strives to awaken Bobby from the “wanton solace” that she has been forced into. Another aspect of the scene could focus on the malfunction, proving that even male’s perfect creation is flawed. Men projected their desires onto women, making them into the perfect woman, thereby also producing women who rebelled against patriarchal society and against the perfection that society wanted them to conform to. The violent act of the liberated woman against the domesticated housewife is a final plea, she stabs her vagina to free the domesticated housewife’s sexuality. As long as the housewife is domestic she is under the domination of man and cannot be free like the liberated woman to withhold her sexuality and use it as she pleases instead of how the man desires.
Sexuality and man’s desires plays an important part in another scene in which violence occurs between women. Entitled “Perfection,” the scene starts with Joanna fleeing from Diz. The darkness does not allow the audience to clearly see her actions, but a room with a life-sized female replica is seen briefly. Finally she opens a door and is greeted by an exact replica of her bedroom, including her once thought dead dog, Fred. The camera slowly pans to Joanna’s robotic doppelganger brushing her hair in a three-way mirror. The doppelganger has clear skin, perfectly wavy hair, a fake smile and black robotic eyes. Joanna is shocked and soon the audience sees why, the camera reveals a shot of the robots see-through nightgown and the perfect and significantly larger breast underneath before panning back up to the placid female. Joanna stares in horror and the robot stands up with a pair of pantyhose stretched tightly in her hands, nudity showing underneath her thin nightgown. The camera shows a close-up of a very satisfied Diz, distractingly petting Fred and watching the girl on girl action with genuine voyeuristic pleasure. The scene ends with a close-up of the hose stretched tightly between the robots hands and the see-through lingerie that reveals the perfect abdomen.
The object of desire is a main focal point for the scene between the realistic Joanna and the fantasy created by Diz. Diz’s creation falls into what MacKinnon would say is typical gender division and inequality. “Male power takes the social form of what men as a gender want sexually, which centers on power itself, as socially defined […] “woman” is defined by what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction” (161). Diz created the perfect woman to meet his sexual desires and marketed his product to all the men in Stepford. The women had become too successful, too powerful, but the robots are, to quote Goldilocks, “just right.” The fantasy that Diz creates is not meant to be “woman” but instead “sexuality.” When the robot is shown the focus is not on her mind or anything immediately beautiful, like the eyes or the smile, instead the focus is on her breasts and her stomach and her female form as a sexualized whole. The object of desire is the artificial beauty man created.
Artificial beauty is a theme that is recurrent throughout the Stepford Wives, remaining mostly about dolls or other subjects that relate back to childhood innocence. Earlier in the film the audience learns that Diz got his name because he used to work in Disneyland. Later on, Joanna remarks how the women of Stepford act like “those dolls you see at Disneyland.” A false female figure pops up in a dark room in the mansion before Joanna comes across her own falsified image. At the very beginning of the movie, Joanna is fascinated by the scene of a man carrying a naked mannequin across the streets of New York City. She takes pictures of this spectacle and whenever one of her daughters mentions the scene to her husband he replies, “That’s why we’re moving to Stepford.” Each reference of a fabricated woman contains the issue of liberated females, domestic females and the men that try to control both.
The doll theme becomes eerily apparent in the scene between the liberated Joanna and the domestic Joanna. The domesticated Joanna’s blatant sexuality reveals her submission to the males desire. The camera emphasizes the object of desire multiple times, lingering on the breasts, abdomen and full body. A glance at the full body shows, instead of a woman’s vagina, the body parts of a Barbie doll. Considering there is a scene in the movie where Joanna and Bobby overhear a couple making love the audience can assume a hole is drilled somewhere in the doll’s lower half, but the robot obviously cannot reproduce and more than likely does not have her own orgasm. By taking the feminine act of procreation away, the men have all the power and all the fun. The liberated Joanna owns her sexuality and does not share it with her husband throughout the film. She wears sexy clothes, men’s shirts, pants, slinky dresses but never initiates sexual intercourse nor is she happy to oblige whenever Walter brings it up. Instead Joanna remains liberated, she does not give into the male dominance and finds comfort in other Stepford women who have not been conformed. In the scene between the two Joanna’s, the two parts of “woman,” the liberated female must die in order for the domesticated female to exist. With women’s liberation, domesticated women were a dying breed and women were no longer being submissive to men. In order for man’s perfect creation to exist, the threat of women’s liberation must die.
Ultimately, Second Wave feminism looked at gender issues and the role sexuality played among men and women. Rape was a topic of concern for Second Wave feminism as was any type of sexual act that involved men forcing their dominance onto women. In The Stepford Wives men forced their dominance by creating “new and improved” versions of their wives in the shell of a robot. The robot serves as man’s ultimate fantasy, a beautiful and subservient wife with the perfect figure and a sex drive constantly set to “on.” Joanna forcefully stabs Bobby’s vagina in response to the oppression the men have subjected onto liberated women. The fantasy doll created in Joanna’s image kills her competitor in an act of sexuality. Second Wave feminism saw men and women’s roles as changing and feared that if something was not said or done, that a more realistic Stepford might come into existence.
