As the newest neighbor, Joanna Eberhart cannot fathom why these women are only interested in their homes, but she finds friends in Bobbie and Charmaine, who moved into Stepford not long before her. In his novel The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin presents idyllic Stepford, complete with happy husbands, who spend their evenings at the secretive Men’s Association, and submissive wives, who spend their days looking flawless and waxing their floors. Both stories impel us to imagine a world where humans societally commodify other humans, but in the end, we’re left desiring a solution to the madness. In The Stepford Wives, husbands murder and replace their wives with literal robots who cook, clean, and submit mindlessly, while in Severance, the Lumon corporation divides the consciousness of office workers, creating two consciousnesses that exist in the same body yet are controlled by office management.

Similarly, in Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives and in Apple TV’s Severance, the powerful consume the efforts and humanity of the people they’re supposed to protect. In the case of “Harrison Bergeron,” it results in a society where everyone experiences inhumane treatment at the hands of the powerful. Stories like “Harrison Bergeron” take one’s natural inability to love thy neighbor and stretch it to its limits to see what might happen. While The Stepford Wives provides an obvious moral issue with the killing of one’s wife to replace her with a robot, the Apple television series Severance deals more subtly with the morality of creating people in order to consume their efforts.

It identifies the issue, making it larger than life in order to horrify readers, but it fails to find a solution-presumably, this improper balance of power will continue on with Harrison Bergeron’s death. Similar to other dystopias, the powerful consume those without power at great cost, but what makes this short story distinctive is that it ends without a vision to solve the madness. I could tell that one was a doozy.” In the short story “Harrison Bergeron,” Vonnegut explores a future in which the government makes everyone equal, through absurd instruments. After witnessing her son’s murder on national television, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictitious Hazel Bergeron responds absent mindedly, “Gee….

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin