The Stepford Wives

CSCL 3461

Final Paper

Yuqi Yan

4433996

Professor: Meredith Gill

Thesis:

The existence of the robot, cyborg is from the desire of human being. We need them to satisfy our need, to make our life easier and better. With the lovely background, the book “ The Stepford Wives” describes the story of the human husbands and robot perfect wives. “Perfect” not always as good as we see on the surface. When we have the ability to use the cyborg or technology to change the world, it is not always bring everyone the happiness in the deep heart.

        There is a book I read it a long time ago called “The stepford wives” written by Ira Levin. This is a really interesting and also pathetic story. It is happened in a town called “Stepford” with many married men who lived with their fawning, submissive, and impossibly beautiful wives. The main character is called Joanna Eberhart, she is a talented photographer who just moved from New York City with her husband and two kids to the “Stepford” town to start a new life. However, the longer she lived in that town, she becomes increasingly disturbed by the thoses “perfect” stepford wives, she even think they are like zombies. Especially when she sees her new friends just become mindless and perfect wife overnight. At the same time, her husband start to spend more and more time in a club, which having meetings with the local men made her become more and more scary about everything happened there.

With the longer time she spent in the town, Joanna is sure that the wives in Stepford are being brainwashed or changed into the perfect wives by the men’s association. She starts to research in the library and search for the information about the background of those wives and husbands. She finds out that some of the women in the town were once feminist activists and very successful professionals, and the leader of the men’s association is a former Disney engineer and others are artists and scientists, who can create lifelike robots. She got a friend in that town called Bobbie, and she helped her to find out the truth of the town. However, one day, Bobbie is also being changed into a docile housewife and she not helping her to do the investigation anymore. At last, Joanna decides to run away from Stepford, but her kids have been taken, and her husband takes her car key. She decides to run away on foot, but the men in the town catch her, she wants to accuse those men’s rascality, those men denies everything. At last, Joanna becomes another Stepford wife shopping in the market, and she gives up her career. A new wife called Ruthanne has come to the town and poised to become the evil men’s next victim to become the robot wife.