Kelly Meaney
Winner
Department of English Undergraduate Awards (3rd Year)
Also Highly Commended in the Global Undergraduate Awards
Abstract
Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives and James Tiptree Jr.’s short story "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" are texts which emerged at the peak of second-wave feminism. My essay explores how these texts were influenced by and, concurrently, satirise the contemporary responses to the Women's Liberation Movement through the representation of robot bodies. The figures of the robot wives of Stepford and the cyborg body of "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" are symbolic of the woman-as-machine ideology which critic Jane Donawerth suggests as a means of dehumanising and relegating the housewife to a mere appliance in the home. This essay explores the numerous depictions of the woman-as-machine trope in these texts with particular focus on the use of the robot/cyborg woman as advertising space and the sexualisation of the mechanical figure. The contrast between the human characters of Joanna and P. Burke and their inhuman counterparts is also explored in relation to the erasure of the "radical feminist" emerging as a result of secondwave feminism. The physical and sexual manipulation and exploitation of the women is also crucial to the investigation of the definitive impact of the real political climate on the creation of these two highly politically charged texts.
Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (“The Girl”) are texts that emerged in time of great social and political change. It is clear in both texts that the real political world of the time had a definitive impact on how both stories portray the woman-as-machine through the robot wives and the cyborg figure. In this essay, I will compare these figures and argue that these characters simultaneously subvert and satirise the contemporary societal fears of second-wave feminism. Firstly, I will position the texts in their historical context and briefly explore how they emerged from contemporary societal anxieties about the Women’s Liberation movement. I will then explore the portrayal of sex and gender as performative in the texts and how this is conveyed through the figures of the “hausfrau” and the “young gods”. A comparison of the relationship between Joanna and the robot wives and that of P. Burke and her cyborg counterpart, Delphi, will be performed in relation to the creation of and dehumanisation of the feminine ‘other’. Thirdly, the physical and sexual exploitation of the women in both texts will be investigated with particular focus on the connection between the dehumanisation of the characters through their role as servant and their relegation to machine. Finally, I will discuss the concept of live products and advertising in both texts and how the robot wives and the cyborg celebrities are expected to perform the roles expected of them by the individual societies of The Stepford Wives and “The Girl”.
In order to accurately explore the presentation of the robot and cyborg women in The Stepford Wives and “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” we must first understand the contemporary societal anxieties which created the space for the existence of such characters. The Stepford Wives and “The Girl” were both published in the early 1970s, a time rife with political and social change. From the post-war generation of nuclear families, stay-at-home mothers, and baby boomers emerged a generation of women who yearned for sexual liberation and gender equality. Feminist theorists such as Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett and Simone de Beauvoir (some of whom are mentioned by name in the aforementioned texts) championed this period of second wave feminism. This new wave of feminism rejected typical gender roles and rebelled against the idea of the woman’s place being in the home which invoked the wrath of conservatives who sought to relegate these “radical feminists” back to their “rightful” place as subservient wife and mother. Thus, it is no surprise that texts such as The Stepford Wives and “The Girl” emerged during this period of great turmoil. Both texts explore second-wave feminism as well as its criticism through the presentation of the normal and robot wives in The Stepford Wives and the cyborg figure of Delphi/ P. Burke in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”.
The societies depicted in The Stepford Wives and “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” exist in dystopian worlds wherein technologies have developed which allow for the creation of the ‘perfect woman’ through varying forms of artificial life. These texts demonstrate that even in dystopian/ alternate worlds women cannot escape the oppressive male tendency to project their patriarchal views and expectations of female bodies and behaviors on the women around them (Uvanovic 123). The society in The Stepford Wives is inherently oppressive to the liberation of female bodies. The women in Stepford are reduced entirely to their function as both sexual and physical servant to the men in their lives. Palahniuk cites the robot wives of Stepford as a direct warning of “some pent-up male reaction to the Women’s Liberation movement” (v). This world wherein the woman is entirely replaceable and killed off without much thought to her personal autonomy is Levin’s personal satire of the male anxieties about second wave feminism. A replacement robot wife who embodies traditional 1950s values of docile, subservient women is, for the men of Stepford like those of the anti-Women’s Liberation movement, preferable to a modern wife – a woman with her own thoughts and opinions, a woman interested in her social and personal autonomy.
In “The Girl”, there is a similar idea of replaceability. Delphi is Tiptree’s version of the Stepford robot wives in that she embodies her society’s beauty standards, which makes her more valuable than the physically deformed P. Burke. The most prominent divergence between the two texts is in relation to the voluntary versus involuntary methods of replaceability. The wives of Stepford are entirely dehumanised by the refusal of their bodily autonomy. They are involuntarily replaced by more worthy and desirable robot wives. However, P. Burke’s disembodiment is not only voluntary, she “welcomes the chance to shed the ignominious flesh and bone that have caused her so much suffering” (Hicks 71). While The Stepford Wives presents the women’s attitudes as the primary factor in the men’s decision to replace them and their bodily improvements as robots as only supplementary in the transformation, in “The Girl” P. Burke’s “pumped-out hulk” (Tiptree Jr. 3) body is the aspect of her being that needs to be replaced. Where P. Burke “loves what comes next” (Tiptree Jr. 5), Joanna argues against the inhumanity of the procedure asking, “What’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?” (Levin 120). These variations in the societal satires in both texts allow the authors to construct a basis for examining the wider societal and literary dehumanisation of the woman as replaceable.
The exploration of sex and gender as performative is most explicit in the internal dichotomies between the texts’ main characters and the “hausfrau” (Levin 10) in The Stepford Wives and the “young gods” (Tiptree Jr. 4) in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”. The “godlings” in
“The Girl” are artificially engineered beings whose beauty has gained them celebrity status among the normal people. Breath, a trio of these cyborg celebrities, are P. Burke’s personal gods and she, in turn, is part of the “loser’s cult” that worships them (Tiptree Jr. 4). These beings are designed with the sole purpose of being sexually appealing and we see that just the sight of their “inhumanly tender lips” is enough to make their crowds moan with adoration (1). These cyborg figure, as well as the figure of the “fifteen and flawless” Delphi (7), are literal embodiments of Judith Butler’s theory of sex and gender performativity. Butler’s theory states that what we believe to be an “internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylisation of the body” (xv). Thus, the highly sexualised, performatively gendered bodies of the “gods” are elevated in contrast with the grotesque body of P. Burke. The narrator devalues and, therefore, de-genders P. Burke’s body through the repetitive, horrifying descriptions of her as a “girl-brute” (Tiptree Jr. 3), a “monster” (20), a “big rancid girl-body” (4), and “guttermeat” (23). She cannot convincingly perform her gender in such a grotesque body which dehumanises her in relation to her cyborg counterpart. In satirising the societal need for a beautiful body in order to perform one’s gender in “The Girl”, Tiptree Jr. highlights the societal scripts that view a woman’s value and her gender identity as reliant on her body through the contrast between P. Burke and the “godlings” of her world. The connection between performing gender and the dehumanisation of those who do not or, in P. Burke’s case, cannot conform is haunting. Not only is P. Burke relegated from her own gender identity through her inability to embody the societal beauty standards, but she is also relegated to a form of sub-human and is ‘othered’ by society as a result.
The contrast between the “hausfrau” domestic goddesses of The Stepford Wives and the pre-transition Joanna similarly explores the idea of performative gender. As previously mentioned, where P. Burke’s physical body is the most prominent problem, it is the attitudes and opinions of Joanna and her fellow wives which the men of Stepford find abhorrent. According to the “scripts she is expected by society to play” (Donawerth 60), Joanna is not correctly performing her gender. She is not “pleased with detergents and floor wax” nor is she “big in the bosom but small in the talent” like the robot wives (Levin 49). Joanna, like P. Burke, is not truly woman she does not conscribe to her society’s ideas of femininity. The robot wives enact the ideal, stereotypical female values and perform what their creators (the Men’s Association) view as their gender. They too are embodiments of Butler’s theory taken to the literal extreme. They have no “internal essence of gender” and are entirely defined by the “gendered stylisation” of their bodies (Butler xv). However, in the eyes of the Stepford husbands this makes them womanlier than their original counterparts who subverted traditional gender performance. In doing so, the robot wives also engender their own objectification and dehumanisation. Their innate need to perform the traditional duties of the 1950’s housewife relegates them to the role of servant. Joanna and the other pre-robot wives are also dehumanised by this societal focus on their being subservient to their husbands. For example, when members of the Men’s Association visit the Eberhart’s house Coba degrades her by saying “I like to watch women doing little domestic chores” (35), while Ike Mazzard draws her in a sexually suggestive manner, scrutinising her body and making her feel “as if she were naked, as if Mazzard were drawing her in obscene poses” (33). Even before they are transformed, the women are inferior, sexualised and treated as servants by the men of Stepford, just as P. Burke is seen as sub-human in her own body and as no more than a sexual tool in Delphi’s body.
The function of both the robot wives and the cyborg P. Burke/ Delphi as servant is another point which finds its roots in the second-wave feminism debates of the time. The wives of Stepford are reminiscent of the dissatisfied housewives described by Friedan as “the problem that has no name”. The “problem” of the 1950’s and 60’s housewife, says Friedan, was nothing to do with her husband, children, home, or sex: it was a feeling of guilt and shame for not fulfilling the perfect role that had been so engrained in their minds and their cultures. The pre-robot Stepford women embody many of these dissatisfied characteristics. For example, Joanna questions whether some of the robot wives such as Kit Sundersen are happy in Stepford, asking Kit “do you feel like you’re living a full life?” (Levin 49). The robot women represent the idealised 1950’s and 60’s vision of a real housewife, believing that by performing the role of subservient house servant they are “living a full life”, working as a ‘unit’ with their omnipotent husband. However, housework in the novel is also symbolic. Friedan suggests that “the more a woman is deprived of function in society at the level of her own ability, the more her housework, mother-work, wife-work, will expand – and the more she will resist finishing her housework or mother-work, and being without any function at all” (226). This theory is conveyed through the robot wives who always have “so much to do around the house” (Levin 25). The men have designed their robot women to be more than content to serve as the equivalent of a washing machine in their own house. These robot women are not given the opportunity to fall into the trap of the “problem that has no name” that affected so many women during the 1950’s and 60’s and are, thus, able to exist as perfect, idealised versions of real women and wives. Pat Mainardi theorised that even something as “trivial” as housework is “intensely political, because it […] both enables men to do other, more “important” things, and at the same time prevents women, who are busy scrubbing toilets, from doing those same things” (Krugovoy Silver 114). This is, then, why the robots of Stepford when asked if they go out much respond with variations of “No, not much […] I don’t feel much need for relaxation” (Levin 25). The robot wives are designed with the private sphere as their domain and, as such, leave the public sphere to the men which demotes them to the position of unintelligent, uninteresting “hausfrau” (Levin 64).
In “The Girl”, Tiptree Jr. presents a different kind of servantry to the subservient housewives of Stepford. Donawerth provides an interesting argument that suggests that there is even a dichotomy within the sub-genre of texts offering portrayals of the woman as machine. She argues that “the mechanical woman created by women writers will not stay in the servant mold men have designed for them” as they do in texts written by men (Donawerth 60). This can be observed in the two texts being examined in this essay: The Stepford Wives written by a man, Ira Levin, concludes with all of the female characters being confined to their woman as machine role in the form of the robot wife, while “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, written by a woman under a male pseudonym, has a more complex ending for the half-mechanical P. Burke. P. Burke is, in essence, a different approach to Mainardi’s woman who is relegated and confined to the private sphere. Where the robot wives of Stepford are the realisation of this theory, P. Burke is the antithesis of it and is, then, a demonstration of what could come of intellectual women in control of their own autonomy. Hicks states that P. Burke as the “real living woman” (Tiptree Jr. 29) behind the robotic Delphi, is the woman that Paul, “archetypal male idealist and intellectual, recoils from and murders” (74). P. Burke’s function is to play the role of servant - to her company, to Paul, to Delphi’s body – and when she fails to do so she is revealed as inhuman: “the thought of that monster fastened into little Delphi’s brain nauseates [Paul]” (29).
Interestingly, where The Stepford Wives concludes with a new prospective robot wife, Miss Austrian, encountering the now robotic Joanna who has succumbed (involuntarily) to her position as housewife, “The Girl” does not afford P. Burke the same fate. As suggested previously, P. Burke is killed because of her inability to her perform her expected role in society when she is literally exposed as the “gaunt she-golem flab-naked and spouting wires and blood” that lies behind the societally perfect Delphi. However, P. Burke’s death could also be seen as a mercy killing by the author who, in doing so, gives her the luxury of escaping her mechanical prison, the “fantastic cybersystem” which she is trapped in by a permanent contract, through death. In fact, in both stories the primary character is killed by the man she loves which could symbolise the inescapability of the clutches of the patriarchy by any means other than death. Even when these characters rebel they are overpowered and outnumbered by the men in their lives, indicative perhaps of the societal fear of the “radical feminist” of second-wave feminism who mainstream society tried to eradicate to ensure the upkeep of the status quo.
Donawerth’s “woman as machine” trope is exemplified further in both texts through the authors’ examination and use of advertising as symbolic. In both The Stepford Wives and “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” the women are reduced to the role of servant by their mechanical state which becomes their only function in society. However, the robot wives and the cyborg Delphi are further dehumanised by the simultaneous role of product and advertiser which they are expected to conform to. Delphi, like the other “godlings” (Tiptree Jr. 2), is an “investment” (11). Her role as a celebrity is to endorse and sell products for her company to bypass the future world’s strict “NO ADS” (2) policy. However, it could be argued that the entire story is an advertisement (Hicks 75). Where P. Burke is selling products through the body of Delphi, so too is the author selling her technologically advanced future through the story of the cyborg girls. In the narrator’s advertisement of this new technological world, the story of P. Burke/ Delphi is a portrayal of selling a flawed product in the same way Delphi sells products that “gave her a rash and […] made her dizzy” (17). It is no surprise, then, that when P. Burke is killed, Delphi’s body is repurposed and refitted with another “Remote” who will continue to sell the company’s products. P. Burke is entirely dehumanised and replaceable like the Stepford women, as Donawerth’s “woman as machine” (60) suggests. Once she can no longer perform her function as product and advertiser, she can be replaced by another brain that will.
The robot wives of Stepford are subject to playing the role of advertiser and product in a similar fashion. The Stepford wives are “actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax” (49). They continuously perform to an invisible audience for their husbands who derive pleasure from watching women “doing little domestic chores” (35). Their entire being, then, is an advertisement for new prospective ‘clients’ such as the aforementioned Austrians. The construction of the wives as products of the Men’s Association, however, is an uncomfortable and complex relationship in a different fashion to that of Delphi and her company. The Stepford men, in effect, become “fathers” to their own wives through the process of the creation of their robot body (Krugovoy Silver 120). However, Freudian allegories aside, the robot wives are manufactured and produced by their creators in a way that renders them inhuman. Unlike Delphi who has a human brain, they entirely embody the woman-as-machine, losing all human functions, including reproduction. This is exemplified in the novel when Joanna is manipulated into attending her own murder scene by her belief that seeing Bobbie bleed would prove that she is still “real” (Levin 129). This concept is expressed far more overtly in the 1975 The Stepford Wives film when Joanna stabs the robot Bobbie in the stomach, and she does not bleed. Not only does this show that her transformation has dehumanised her by rendering her entirely mechanical, but it is also symbolic of her inability to menstruate and, thus, to reproduce (Krugovoy Silver 119). The Stepford wives are, then, sexually impotent but still programmed to cater to their husbands every sexual desire without any of their own. Not only are the robot wives dehumanised literally through the removal of their human bodily functions, but they are also rendered even more mechanical by the societally desired role of the sexually available, yet innocent woman that they are now forced to play. Levin addresses some of the fears about the women’s sexual liberation movement of the time in the portrayal of the men as creating sexually desirable and entirely acquiescent robot wives, who have no wish for bodily autonomy of their own. They are relegated to the position of object and are punished by being forced to serve their role as a product of the men.
The roles of the female characters in both The Stepford Wives and “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” are entirely dependent on and constructed around the stereotypical, largely misogynistic views of the patriarchal societies in which they live. The robot wives of Stepford and the cyborg body of P. Burke/ Delphi are very similar figures that suffer because of the societal scripts that define their roles as women and as human beings. Through the examination of their gender as performative, their function as servants to their husbands and company, respectively, and the creation of these figures as products and live advertisements, this essay has explored the connections between Joanna and the Stepford wives and the figures of P. Burke and Delphi. I have also argued for the relationship between second-wave feminism, anxieties around women’s liberation, and the creation of these two texts which subversively and satirically portray the woman-as-machine. The dehumanisation of the female characters in these texts is irrevocably linked with the societal ideologies that saw them as subservient to their male counterparts and believed that their primary function in society was as servant. This essay has dissected the intersectionality of the above topics and themes with the aim of proving that these texts subversively convey Palahniuk’s statement that “a woman’s place was on the picket line, and it’s no wonder men were scared” (vi).
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990. Routledge, 1999.
Donawerth, Jane. Frankenstein’s Daughter: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse University Press, 1997.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. https://elearning.unipd.it/spgi/pluginfile.php/99853/mod_resource/content/1/The_Femini ne_Mystique.pdf . Accessed 15 April 2023.
Hicks, Heather J. “Whatever It Is That She’s Since Become”: Writing Bodies of Text and Bodies of Women in James Tiptree Jr.’s ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and William Gibson’s ‘The Winter Market’”. Contemporary Literature, vol, 37, no. 1, pp. 62-93. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208751. Accessed 14 April 2023.
Krugovoy Silver, Anna. “The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism”. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 109-126. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/445070/pdf. Accessed 15 April 2023.
Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. 1972. Corsair, 2011.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Introduction. The Stepford Wives, by Levin, Ira, 1972. Corsair, 2011.
Tiptree Jr., James. “The Girl Who Was Plugged in”. 1974.
Uvanovic, Zeljko. “Men in Love with Artificial Women: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “the Sandman”, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, and their Film Adaptations.” Primerjalna Knjizevnost, vol. 39, no. 1, 2016, pp.123-140.ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/docview/1825191488?parentSessionId=JP%2F8ABXK0AQR nyspJ6wuAi35hzv5msGI8d0DugEbfqA%3D&pq-origsite=summon&accountid=14504. Accessed 14 April 2023.
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