However, the significance of The Stepford Wives<\/em> resides not just within a contemporaneous interest in Gothic narratives, but also in how the film directly interrogates the socio-political context of the US in the 1970s using the Gothic mode. In 1963 Betty Friedan has published her influential The Feminine Mystique<\/em> which explored the unhappiness of suburban housewives in the 1950s and 60s who struggled to find satisfaction from a life of domesticity and maternal duties. This is a central theme of The Stepford Wives<\/em>: upon arrival Joanna is faced with beautiful women neighbours who are solely concerned with cleaning and cooking, whilst their husbands congregate for meetings of the \u2018Stepford Men\u2019s Association\u2019. Joanna is unsettled by these occurrences and initially finds a kindred spirit in Bobbie who celebrates the sight of a messy kitchen. In this way, the rise of radical feminism in the 1960s and 70s in challenging gender stereotypes and traditional roles, and demanding legal and social change, should not just contextualise the viewer\u2019s reading of the film, but clearly these progressive politics influenced the making of the film too. The politics of housework is explicitly mentioned in dialogue in the film, as is references to feminist movements, such as the women\u2019s liberation movement in New York.<\/p>\n Anna Krugovoy Silver argues that it is precisely this political context which informs the film and its interaction with the Gothic tradition. Interestingly, Silver notes that Friedan did not like the film because it seemed to demonize all men in the active oppression of women (Silver, 2002). However Silver argues that The Stepford Wives<\/em> does not simply parody feminist discourse, like Friedan\u2019s, but rather the film seeks to interrogate the ideas being discussed by feminists at the time and force a spotlight on aspects which continued to be contentious issues for many women, such as marriage and housework. In this way, The Stepford Wives<\/em> becomes an important \u2018sociocultural document\u2019 for 1970s America. Silver continues: \u2018[The<\/em>] Stepford Wives<\/em> arose out of these feminist critiques of marriage, but rather than simply exploiting the feminist critique, as Friedan implies, the message of Forbes’s suburban gothic is consistent with that of many second wave feminists. His conclusions about the family are indebted to, and consequently reinforced, the popularization of feminist rhetoric and theory\u2019 (2002).<\/p>\n The Gothic helps to illuminate the interactions between the film and its political messaging. For example, the threat from the male protagonist \u2013 which is often translated into the suspicious activities of the secretive husband in the 1940s Hollywood Gothics \u2013 now becomes the oppression of the murderous male community in The Stepford Wives<\/em>. The role of the Gothic heroine in revealing secrets of the narratives as an active investigator becomes Joanna\u2019s role in exposing male privilege and its Elyce Rae Helford also writes how The Stepford Wives<\/em> engages with the political context of its making and highlights how the film is a contemporary of Laura Mulvey\u2019s famous essay on \u2018Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema\u2019(Helford, 2006). The Stepford Wives<\/em> helps to show how Mulvey\u2019s work thus becomes another important historical document in the interaction between feminist movements and the creation of artworks, and in particular film. Helford\u2019s comparison is interesting on another level too: The Stepford Wives<\/em> appears to interrogate the idea of a male gaze, as the women in the film are \u2013 quite literally \u2013 formed in the shape deemed desirable to their husbands. This stands in tension with Joanna\u2019s resistance against the Men\u2019s Association and \u2013 on a metaphoric level \u2013 her role as a photographer and thus her control of the lens. This element of the film is of particular interest to the Melodrama Group\u2019s wider discussion of representations of the Gothic heroine and the agency she has (or does not have) within the Gothic narrative. The Stepford Wives<\/em> contributes to this conversation as the film presents the themes of looking, being watched and the female body as interwoven within the confines of a Gothic story which simultaneously speaks to the larger narrative of women\u2019s rights and feminist movements of the 1970s.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>References<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n Helford, Elyce Rae. 2006. \u2018The Stepford Wives and The Gaze.\u2019 Feminist Media Studies<\/em>, 6 (2), 145-156.<\/p>\n Silver, Anna Krugovoy. 2002. \u2018The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism.\u2019 Women’s Studies Quarterly<\/em>. 3 (1\/2): 60-77. Online at:\u00a0 http:\/\/lion.chadwyck.co.uk.chain.kent.ac.uk\/searchFulltext.do?id=R04239649&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft <\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thanks Frances! And please note that due to the length of the film we will be starting promptly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" All are very welcome to join us for the\u00a0third\u00a0 of this term\u2019s Screening and Discussion sessions, which will take place on\u00a0Monday the\u00a022nd of February, 5-7pm, in Jarman 7. We will be showing\u00a0Frances’ choice The Stepford Wives\u00a0(1975,\u00a0Bryan Forbes, 115 mins). Frances … Continue reading ![\"The](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/melodramaresearchgroup\/files\/2016\/02\/The-Stepford-Wives.jpg\")
<\/a>Bryan Forbes\u2019s 1975 screen adaptation of The Stepford Wives<\/em> may seem, at first, a long way away from the eerie shots of Manderley which open Rebecca<\/em> (1940) or the exuberant period costume of Uncle Silas <\/em>(1947), viewed during the last session. Indeed, The Stepford Wives<\/em> opens in a modern New York apartment where our protagonist \u2013 Joanna \u2013 sits alone. Soon afterwards, Joanna and her family will be seen outside in the busy city and a man carrying a mannequin across the street captures Joanna\u2019s eye as a keen photographer. The film\u2019s beginning \u2013 with its emphasis on the bright, noisy and <\/a>modern city, and Joanna\u2019s role as a wife and mother as well as an inspiring professional photographer \u2013 appears to radically contrast the Gothic films discussed in previous weeks. Yet The Stepford Wives<\/em> soon reveals how the tropes of the Gothic infuse this tale of horror set in a seemingly perfect suburban community. The film conveys the same Gothic anxieties of the menacing dark house, the suspicious husband and the investigative heroine whose well-being is very much jeopardized. The historical context into which The Stepford Wives<\/em> was made and originally released supports these assertions: the film appears at the same time that Gothic fiction enjoyed a renewed interest, with Gothic novels \u2013 published in cheap paperback editions \u2013 were enormously popular, as beginning with Phyllis Whitney\u2019s Thunder Heights<\/em> in 1960.<\/p>\n<\/a>subjugation of women. And the presence of the old, dark house becomes a symbol for where such inequality emerges and is resisted by 1970s feminists and Joanna alike. As Silver observes, the film emphasises how \u2018the patriarchy begins in the home\u2019 (Silver, 2002).<\/p>\n