Gender Role Reversal in Gilman’s “Herland” and Oz’s “The Stepford Wives”
The short story Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the movie The Stepford Wives directed by Frank Oz (from the book by Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby) utilize gender reversal to explore sex roles in society. Never mind the improbable pretexts of each piece, a race of self-breeding Aryan women and a town full of android bimbos who are miraculously restored to flesh and blood in the end, we are posed the simple question, “Is what’s good for the goose good for the gander?” and left to ponder the related questions and their answers.
In Herland three men are held captive by an isolated all-female nation and attempt to understand what women could have been if not for the influences of man and his idea of domestic bliss. Gilman uses the device of role reversal to make explore the irony of the situation. The men are overpowered and detained by the women and we’re given the idea these women are far from the weaker sex. The women wear short hair, and the men’s hair grows long while in captivity. The women are the leaders and the decision makers, while the men are forced to follow. The men seem to be the emotional creatures in the story, while the women are more rational. Through these devices, Gilman attempts to show sex roles are learned and imposed by society; sex roles are not seen as something inherent or biological.
In Oz’s The Stepford Wives, the role reversal has largely taken place before the opening credits. A collection of high-power women executives overpower their spineless “it must have been cold there in my shadow” husbands (I wonder if the Bette Midler “Wind Beneath My Wings/Beaches” connection was intentional). The men respond in the only way their neurotic-macho sensibilities allow, they divide and conquer the potentially superior race, reducing them to a society of AOL-slow blond bimbos. Not only were these wives the bread winners, but several of them had the audacity to be taller than their husbands! However, it might be said that the women in this story never did relinquish control to the men; even though they appeared nothing more than a battalion of domestic-goddess slaves, the men were still controlled by the lust hold these women had on them. The control didn’t happen to be helpful to the women, but they had it nevertheless. In the end, of course, the ultimate role reversal is revealed when a woman is revealed as the evil genius behind the entire plot; and I thought only men could be evil geniuses!
While gender role reversal did go a long way to highlight our expected norms and cause us to question their validity, unfortunately both pieces suffer from two-dimensional characterizations which discredit the potential strength of the exploration. The three male characters in Herland conveniently represent three stereotypes of manhood, the philosopher, the romantic, and the man’s man, and none of them are given much opportunity to contemplate any other point of view. The women in Herland suffer a similar fate and at times seem more a race of clones than an advanced matriarchal society; they are too wise, too noble and too even tempered to be human, and might not engage us enough to ponder what makes them seem traditionally male or female. While the wind-up-toy women of The Stepford Wives are understandably a little less than human, their husbands are also portrayed as caricatures of men; each of the husbands were so universal in their desires, any of them (except the gay man) could have swapped places an nobody would notice.
In reality, people, both men and women, are more complicated than either of these stories would allow. An Utopia for one sex does not have to be a dystopia for the other. While the swapping of gender roles did go a long way toward showing tendencies in both sexes which we commonly assign to one or the other (and I did enjoy watching the bozo husbands’ shop-till-you-drop punishment in The Stepford Wives), real life is seldom so cut and dry. The effects of both estrogen and testosterone were denied when Herland explored society’s contributions to sex roles. What would happen if a man enjoyed cooking and didn’t know how to fix a car, could his Stepford wife be that flexible? What if the he-man had a tender side and what if there was variety of temperament within the Herland race? While things must by necessity be simplified for the constraints of a story, the subject of gender and its shallow characterization in these works left important issues unexplored.