The Stepford Wives

Product Information

Joanna Eberhart is the mother of two children and is married to Walter Eberhart. She is a woman who enjoys her personal hobbies such as tennis and is a professional photographer. In addition, she is active in “the Women’s Lib movement”. The story beings when she and her family move from New York City to the idyllic Stepford. Walter Eberhart The underlying irony of Levin’s story, of course, is that the only emotion that the Stepford men seem capable of feeling right down to their very bones is fear. They express no desire, willingness or capacity to feel any other emotion and it is the fact that this state as human beings is only replicated by their wives once they have undergone the process of being transformed into the robots that is the real message here. The secret process of turning the women of Stepford into unthinking, unfeeling mindless automatons takes four months. No such timeline is presented for how long it took to do the same thing to the men of Stepford. Update this section!

The Stepford Wives movie review (2004) | Roger Ebert The Stepford Wives movie review (2004) | Roger Ebert

That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.”The way Dale Coba looks at her is “ disparaging” (26, 27, 31). He says “ I like to watch women doing little domestic chores” (30). Levin's first produced play was No Time for Sergeants (adapted from Mac Hyman's novel), a comedy about a hillbilly drafted into the United States Air Force that launched the career of Andy Griffith. The play was turned into a movie in 1958, and co-starred Don Knotts, Griffith's long-time co-star and friend. No Time for Sergeants is generally considered the precursor to Gomer Pyle, USMC. Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives was published in 1972, several years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and founded the grassroots activist group National Organization for Women. The sexual revolution of the late 1960s and the strengthening of the feminist movement at the time forced broader swaths of society to examine the role gender played in their lives, often unequally, and Levin’s work recast those cultural anxieties with a surprising amount of empathy and consideration. The Stepford Wives — which follows protagonist Joanna Eberhart’s move to Stepford, Connecticut, and her quest to uncover why all the women seem like robots (it’s because they are) — is really about women caught between the social necessity of arguing for their rights and a capitalist culture that just wants them to buy stuff.

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin | Waterstones

For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret—a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same. As you can tell this book really hit a nerve with me... true I was born in 1978, so this was a little before my time, but it hasn't changed all that much even though we want to think so. The book is really about men's desires, or Levin's interpretation of them. That they would be willing to sacrifice their wife's very identity, her being, to make her a mindless barbie that did what they pleased. The men in this book are truly horrifying beings... but even more frightening is that this is a doubt shared by all women, across the globe. From a young age we are taught to doubt ourselves, our physical appearance, our mind, our talent, the love of others. I know women with genius IQ's who act like idiots because that is what men want from them. Though there is overnight drug that can do this to a woman... there is the lifelong barrage of the media and society which does a pretty good job in and of itself. Now I have to say that I can think of some men who might go along with scheme like this if it were possible. Can you? While Stepford was met with polarized reactions from those involved intimately with the feminist movement in the 1970s (Friedan hated the movie), it made Columbia Pictures “some dollars” according to Goldman, and led to several made-for-television sequels, starting in 1980 with Revenge of the Stepford Wives. The period of films about working women asserting their place in the world like Working Girl, Baby Boom, and Pretty Woman was followed by a golden era of ’90s romantic comedies, where sex, and the battle between and over it, could be joked about as a form of escapism ( Clueless, You’ve Got Mail, Notting Hill). Pre-programmed, mindless, automatons incapable of feeling or expressing any authentic emotions are running amok in Stepford…and they’re turning their wives into robots. The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin’s 1972 satire on fear of feminism in the suburbs, is technically a story about husbands in a cloistered upper middle community who have taken the same expertise which led to the animatronic Chief Executives on display at Disney World’s Hall of President and perfected it to create utterly realistic high-tech robots that are the dream of every man who ever fantasized about a gorgeous subservient wife who is always ready for sex whenever they are not cleaning the house.The Stepford Wives study guide contains a biography of Ira Levin, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Levin's best known play is Deathtrap, which holds the record as the longest-running comedy-thriller on Broadway and brought Levin his second Edgar Award. In 1982, it was made into a film starring Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine. The Stepford Wives, a story of women who have no means of self-expression, might have been the story of real women in Jordan, Syria or Yemen. Women who are utterly controlled by their husbands but look quite normal, fashionable even as they no longer (have to) wear hijab. But it's the story instead of American women whose husbands would like to control them in the same way and, like Arab men, have no controls on themselves whatsoever. Unable to fulfil this desire in the usual ways of living, they result to Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.” Both versions were filmed in various towns in Fairfield County, Connecticut, including Redding, Westport, Darien, New Canaan, Wilton and Norwalk. The 1975 version had several locations in the Greenfield Hill section of Fairfield, Connecticut, including the Eberharts' house and the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church. Additional scenes from the 2004 movie were filmed in Bedminster, New Jersey, with extras from surrounding communities.

Stepford Wives by Ira Levin Plot Summary | LitCharts The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin Plot Summary | LitCharts

Another way of reading The Stepford Wives is as a commentary on consumerism, and how non-conformity is a threat to that way of life and doing business.Unsettled by Charmaine’s transformation, Joanna leaves and tells Bobbie about this change in their friend. Bobbie visits Charmaine and confirms that something strange has happened. She forms a theory that there’s something in Stepford that makes women become subservient and domestic. She cites a recent news story about a town in Texas where chemicals made residents easygoing and subdued. There might be something similar in the water in Stepford, she guesses, so she starts drinking bottled water. She also says that she’s going to talk to Dave about moving to a neighboring town, where things are a bit more modern and relaxed. She urges Joanna to do the same. The plot of The Stepford Wives is so famous as to have become a meme, with the phrase “Stepford Wife” serving as the same type of pop cultural shorthand as terms like “Pod People” or “Mean Girls”. The Eberharts—Walter and Joanna and their two children—move from New York to the suburban Connecticut town of Stepford, where all the women are beautiful and obsessed with housework. Joanna watches in horror as her friends, fellow new arrivals Charmaine and Bobbie, give up their hobbies and embrace domesticity and complacent servitude to their husbands. She begins to suspect that the Coba-led Men’s Club is murdering the town’s women and replacing them with robots.

stepford wives : ira levin : Free Download, Borrow, and the stepford wives : ira levin : Free Download, Borrow, and

Between the publishing of Levin’s novel and the release of its 1975 film adaptation, Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal nationwide. The panic over that decision, and over women’s bodily autonomy in general, is marrow-deep within The Stepford Wives, in which the eponymous spouses are killed and turned into fembots who speak in commercial advertisements for cleaning products and shriek with pleasure at their husbands’ undoubtedly mediocre love-making. In a chilling scene, Joanna becomes adamant about moving away from Stepford and Walter uses all the tactics of the manipulative emotional abuser: He pretends to consider her point of view, but at the same time he calls her “ irrational” and “ a little hysterical” (87) He tries to arouse guilt by explaining how hard it would be on the kids. Then he suggests she visit a psychiatrist to see if she’s delusional. In other words, he tries to make her doubt reality. He tries to gaslight her. A much more appropriate title would have been The Stepford Men since what Levin’s story is really about is the very fact that these men don’t really want wives. Wives implies humanity and humanity implies respect and emotional connection that men like those in Stepford not only are incapable of satisfying, but don’t want in the first place. As for titling it The Stepford Husbands…well, that’s just silly. The men of Stepford are not defined by the fact of their marriage...like wives. Written by Katie Silberman and directed by Olivia Wilde, Don’t Worry Darling is transparent about its references to The Stepford Wives, a cult classic that has influenced other contemporary directors of social thrillers such as Jordan Peele. The similarities between the films are plenty: There are housewives, husbands on pedestals, male-only secret societies, mid-century décor, and a woman who questions and challenges the reality that’s presented to her. Both of these works are responses to the politics of their eras and uncertain about the future of feminism in America. But why does Hollywood continue to replicate the aesthetics and tropes introduced in The Stepford Wives? Could that really be an effective measure for just how far gender politics have seemingly evolved? In both the book and the film, Joanna, with her friend Bobbie (the only other normal in town), attempts to revive Stepford’s National Organization for Women chapter, which once hosted Friedan as a keynote speaker. They try to raise some feminist consciousness, but the conversation mudslides into another advertisement. “Talk about anything,” Joanna begins, trying to establish that the group is a space for safe and open discussion. “Sex, money, our marriages, anything at all.” Instead, the women talk about how best to starch a shirt.After one of his Men's Association meetings, Walter comes home late and masturbates furiously in their bed, but acts ashamed when she catches him: His eye-whites looked at her and turned instantly away; all of him turned from her, and the tenting of the blanket at his groin was gone as she saw it, replaced by the shape of his hip (15). They have sex at her insistence, which ends up being "one of their best times ever - for her, at least" and she says, "What did they do...show you dirty movies or something?" (16). This is one of those moments where, in subsequent rereads, the reader wonders: did the members of the Men's Association indoctrinate Walter by showing him what they do to their wives, and did the possibilities of that excite him instead of horrifying him? One of the biggest issues that women continue to face is objectification. You see this a lot when sexist dudes talk about women, reducing them to their parts ("grab some p*ssy," "Tits or GTFO"), or talking about them as if they are trophies to be won for their accomplishments ("I'm such a nice guy, so why don't I have a girlfriend?"). It's gotten better, but not nearly as much as it should have, and one of the more chilling aspects for me is how modern STEPFORD WIVES feels, despite being published in 1972. I don't know about you, but it doesn't speak very highly towards our society that we're still being plagued by the same exact issues almost fifty years later. Especially since the chilling climax of this book is objectification in the ultimate sense: taking living, breathing women and replacing them with actual objects: in this case, robots. Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence. Now the attitude of the males creates a new conflict: it is with a bad grace that the man lets her go.”