The Vision & The Stepford Wives

The Vision *SPOILERS AHEAD* features intertexts with various Marvel Comics’ series, but also some deeply important connective tissue with “The Stepford Wives,” a story that notably informs and grounds the arc of Virginia, the series’ emergent tragic protagonist. 1/7

“The Stepford Wives” is a classic SF novel & films (1972, 1975, 2004) about how women could be replaced with androids in order to create wives that are ideal by the (flawed) standards of society. It’s hyperbolic satire in the style of Jonathon Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” 2/7

As the veneer of the ideal suburban family peels away, we learn that Virginia is based on Wanda’s psyche, but was artificially constructed by Vision in a lab with the sole purpose of being his wife, a role that she is thrust into with few alternative options. 3/7

Thus, as with Stepford, the comics series explores the roles and affordances available to women within the ideal American society. Virginia experiences domesticity and maternity, but it’s constructed around her. She isn’t technically forced, but she can’t really consent. 4/7

The series’ effectively lampshades this element in a seduction scene. The couple sleeps on separate beds, thus indicating Vision’s awareness of the importance of sexual consent, but Virginia takes complete control of sexual agency in seducing Vision, despite his confusion. 5/7

Virginia’s ultimate agency, though, can be seen in her violent rejection of domesticity by killing Sparky, Victor, and then herself. Importantly, she has to leave the neighborhood to destroy Victor. She trashes the veneer, takes control & destroys herself, preferring oblivion. 6/7

As Virginia executes her plan, she also comes to the forefront of the narrative, initiating a wave of retroactive reading that foregrounds her place in all of this: a symbol of how women can be victimized by the domestic fantasies of the nuclear family. 7/7