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.8 Yet if 1970s feminism was never as limited towhite, middle-class women as some accounts assume, it becomes allthe more imperative to consider how and why the vision of feminismoffered by texts like The Stepford Wives came to substitute for this morecomplex history in the popular imagination.9 In particular, I want toargue that the prominence of this strain of popular feminism must beunderstood not only in terms of the often painful failures of feminist poli-tics but also in terms of its ability to figure simultaneously the horrificnature of static time and a potential solution to that experience.Uncanny UnfreedomDespite accusations that it represented a cynical attempt to cash in onfeminism s currency, The Stepford Wives was more faithful to the feministdiscourse of its day than its critics were willing accept to at the time.10Even the seemingly outlandish image of patriarchally brainwashedwomen as automatons finds echoes in Mary Daly s description of such DEAD-END JOB 73nonfeminist women as fembots and puppets of papa. 11 However,these ideas and images are repackaged by both the novel and the filmin a way that affects their meaning.Most crucially, through its mate-rialization of feminist imagery, The Stepford Wives turns on the ideathat the women of Stepford are literally female robots who have beenphysically programmed by patriarchy s avatar, the genericallytermed Men s Association of Stepford.While explicitly invoking what wasby the early 1970s a sophisticated second-wave discourse on genderideology and methods for raising consciousness out of that ideology,The Stepford Wives re-presents this critique through a dark fantasia ofbosomy robot housewives and the rich white men who secretly buildthem.In other words, as Friedan s own reference to it as a rip off suggests, The Stepford Wives operates by simultaneously referencing andreinscribing women s lib discourse in a much more gothic register.Fittingly enough, The Stepford Wives generates its horror-story doubleof women s lib politics primarily through suggestive use of the uncanny.When heroine Joanna moves with her family from New York City tothe suburb of Stepford, a certain eerie sameness suggests to her thatsomething is rotten in the state of Stepford.While a quick glance at anyheterosexual men s magazine would seem to indicate that a patriarchalparadise would be inhabited by a variety of fembot types from fluffyPlayboy bunnies to whip-cracking dominatrices the most strikingfeature of the Stepford women is their unremitting uniformity.Notonly are they all alike in their housework obsession, soft-spoken docilityand voluptuous figures, but they are also self-identical to an extremedegree, unvaryingly recounting their worries about the state of their floorwax and their husbands happiness and comfort.Although Joannadoes find a few women to befriend who at least for a time seem tohave escaped the Stepford dynamic, she is baffled and eventually trulyfrightened by the Stepford women s complete conformity to gendernorms and overwhelming resemblance to one another.When TheStepford Wives deploys such unremitting uniformity to raise our hacklesin this fashion, it assumes its readers and viewers will recognize andreact to the uncanny status of such creepy resemblance; in so doing,the novel works on our implicit understanding that things do andshould differ from each other if left to themselves and that their failureto do so indicates that we have entered a zone where the usual rules ofreality have been broken.The rules that do apply, as Joanna gradually learns, are those of theubiquitous Men s Association, whose machinations have produced thisuncanny uniformity, and Joanna s growing awareness of their conspiracyleads to a sense of paranoia that simultaneously radicalizes her and makes 74 POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORYher doubt her sanity
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