The Stepford Wives, trajectories of dystopia into gender, genre, class and race – from novel to film

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60056/CCL.2024..155-168

Keywords:

genre, dystopia, thriller, horror movie, class, race, gender, patriarchy, gaze, spectacle, feminism, mass culture

Abstract

The Stepford Wives, a novel by Ira Levin published in 1972, describes a micro-dystopian society, which imposes a strict ‘traditional’ order, by transforming women into compliant wives programmed to serve their husbands. The book has been adapted to screen several times. The present paper will focus on a comparison between the original literary work and the first adaptation of 1975 by British director Bryan Forbes, seen through the notions of genre, gender, class and race.

Author Biography

  • Ioana Pankova, New Bulgarian University

    Ioana Pankova is a visiting lecturer at New Bulgarian University, author of the courses: Screen Language, Writing for Screen and Visual Analysis. Currently, she is a PhD student (unsupervised on an individual plan). She has professional experience in film production, and in festival selection and management through Meetings of Young European Cinema, Sofia and Days of the Bulgarian Cinema, Paris. She has a Master’s degree in History and Theory of Culture from Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohrdiski’ and a Bachelor’s degree in Screen Studies, awarded at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

    Academic interests: film language, classical film genres, American cinema, scriptwriting, gender studies, psychoanalysis. Languages: Bulgarian, English, French.

References

Bonitzer, P. (1982). Partial vision: Film and the labyrinth. Wide Angle, (4).

Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of happiness: The Hollywood comedy of remarriage. Harvard University Press.

Chocano, C. (2017). You play the girl: On Playboy bunnies, Stepford wives, trainwrecks & other man-made women. Virago.

De Beauvoir, S. (1956). The second sex. Jonathan Cape.

Elliot, J. (2008). Stepford U.S.A.: Second-wave feminism, domestic labour, and the representation of national time. Cultural Critique, (70), 32–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475486

Gilman, C. P. (1973). The yellow wallpaper. Feminist Press.

Levin, I. (1998). The Stepford wives. Bloomsbury.

Mulvey, L. (1992). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In G. Mast, M. Cohen, & L. Braudy (Eds.), Film theory and criticism. Oxford University Press.

Rubin, M. (1999). Thrillers. Cambridge University Press.

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Published

2025-11-06

Issue

Vol. 10 (2024)

Section

I. Dystopia Traditions, Genre Dynamics, Directions of Transformation

License

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How to Cite

The Stepford Wives, trajectories of dystopia into gender, genre, class and race – from novel to film. (2025). Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum, 10, 155-168. https://doi.org/10.60056/CCL.2024..155-168