Tag Archives: Mrs. Caliban

Monstrous Love: Rachel Ingalls’ “Mrs. Caliban”

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Monsters in literature are often sympathetic. In Apuleius’ charming comic novel, The Golden Ass, the hero, Lucius, is transformed into an ass. Hubris was his crime: he spied on a witch and borrowed one of her unguents. Lucius is hilarious, but it’s hard work being an ass. Fortunately, he recovers his human form.

And there is Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, in which mad Dr. Frankenstein creates a sentient monster. Tragically, Frankenstein botched the job, and the sympathetic monster’s appearance terrifies human beings. There’s a Gothic Wuthering Heights feeling to this novel. Heathcliff became a monster after he was rejected by Catherine.

But best of all is Rachel Ingalls’ short novel, Mrs. Caliban, the story of a housewife who falls in love with a sea monster. Lauded by critics and readers, this book has gone in and out of print since its publication in 1984. 

Left to herself, ignored by her husband, Dorothy is one of the saddest housewives ever. Her son Scotty died, her beloved dog was run over by a car, and her husband is having an affair. . Is it any wonder she begins to hear voices on the radio? “Don’t worry, Dorothy, you’ll have another baby all right. You have to relax and stop worrying.”  But the most important radio transmission is a warning that a monster has escaped from a lab after killing two scientists. 

Is Dorothy hallucinating? She is frightened. But when the monster shows up in her kitchen and explains that he was tortured in the lab, she feeds him celery from her hand and learns that His name is Larry. Dorothy and Larry become lovers.

But it is Ingalls’ spare writing, combined with quirkiness, that makes this a classic.  There are other monsters in this book. At the supermarket, Dorothy and her best friend Estelle “were comparing recipes for meat sauce when a figure like a huge doll came trotting down the aisles. It was female, dressed in a sort of drum-majorette’s outfit, and carried a tray with a band that went around the neck. Long curls brushed out from under a species of military hat composed of metallic-painted cardboard, red glitter, and side rosettes.”

This doll-like figure carries a tray of cheese samples and aggressively asks them to try and buy them. Both make excuses. And after she leaves, another doll-like figure with cheese approaches them, and then a rather scary doll-like figure. These doll-like women represent the mechanical forces of female desperation and sexuality. Both Dorothy and Estelle have tried to not to buy into doll-like live

You can interpret the book two ways. Dorothy may have been driven mad by her sadness. That is the sophisticated reading. But my preferred reading is that Dorothy meets the monster.

Then things go drastically awry after a while, and we must ask, Who is the monster?  Perhaps Dorothy is the monster.  She discovers more and more personal betrayals. She can’t take it anymore.

I have read this odd novel several times, and each time I notice different details. One of the most fascinating novels of the 20th century, it is well worth reading.

Falling in Love with Monsters & Other Surreal Tropes: Rachel Ingalls’s “Mrs. Caliban” & “Times Like These”

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 In 1983, John Updike, the novelist and critic, introduced me to one of my favorite novels, Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban.  His review in The New Yorker was strangly inspiring and powerful.  I love reviews, but Updike’s reviews were exceptional, as though he were able to turn each narrative inside-out and explain its essence.


Mad housewives often inhabited the pages of literature in the late 20th century. Perhaps it had something to do with Second Wave feminism.  The heroine of Mrs. Caliban, Dorothy, is an unhappy housewife whose son has died and whose husband is mostly absent. She has begun to hear programs on the radio that couldn’t possibly exist.   In a cake mix commercial, a woman’s voice said, “Don’t worry, Dorothy, you’ll have another baby all right.”

Her husband Fred usually ignores her.  When he leaves after breakfast, he doesn’t say good-bye.

She stood by the door while he went out and down the front walk.  He didn’t look back.  And, of course, he hadn’t kissed her goodbye for years.  This was the same way that affair of his with the publicity girl had started:  staying lat at the office.  Maybe.  Or perhaps it was genuine, but she couldn’t tell anything about him any longer.

Later, while doing housework, she turns on the radio.  An announcer says that a dangerous giant lizard-like creature has escaped from the Jefferson Institute for Oceanographic Research.  She decides this announcement is not a hallucination, because it is not addressing her personally. And, indeed, when the monster shows up in her kitchen, and Dorothy falls in love with him, she knows it must be real.  She is determined to save him from the cruel scientists who have been keeping him prisoner. 

But is the monster real? If so, he is certainly preferable to Fred.  And we are completely on the side of Dorothy and the sea creature.

The woman-and-monster affair was a common trope in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. There were a slew of heroine falling in love with monsters or animals.  In Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets, a woman has sex with a dolphin;  in Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape, the wife of a zookeeper falls in love with Erasmus, an ape whom she has rescued from scientists’ research; and in Jane Gaskell’s feminist fantasy novel, The City, the heroine, Princess Cija, who has been abducted and raped by powerful soldiers, falls in love with an ape-man in the jungle. 
                     

 One can’t read about women and monsters all the time.  This week, I finally got around to reading more Rachel Ingalls:  her brilliant short story collection, Times Like These, which has been on my shelf for a while.  These remarkable stories are strange, unexpected, and sometimes Gothic. 
 

Ingalls is often interested in mad or mildly delusional people (like Dorothy in Mrs. Caliban). In “Last Act: The Madhouse,” William, who is besotted with opera, listens to his opera records after school. There are many madwomen.  He wittily observes,  


In quite a few of these operas, for instance, there was a mad scene. When a coloratura soprano was in the cast, you could be fairly sure that before the last act she’d be crazy, although still able to hit a high E.


William falls in love in high school, and gets his girlfriend Jean pregnant.  He gallantly promises he’ll marry her, but his upper-middle-class parents object.  And after Jean is spirited away by her parents, no one knows what happened to her. He hears later that she had attempted suicide and was put away somewhere.  Years later, he hires a detective to help him look for Jean.  They go from madhouse to madhouse, looking for someone who resembles his photo of Jean.  But one wonders by the end exactly who is mad, as William’s behavior spirals out of control.
                                

Ingalls never steps in the same river twice.  In the surreal story, “Somewhere Else,” a travel agent receives a letter saying he has  won a prize: a vacation.  Just as you might suspect, he and his wife, who also works at the travel agency,  are too busy ever to travel themselves. The  other winners are also travel agents who never have traveled.  The  destination proves to be surreal and spooky.

Unhappy marriages are common in Ingalls’s stories.  In “Correspondence,” Joan is the second wife of Max, a sexy war correspondent.  He is addicted to travel and danger, and carries certain lucky charms which he claims protect him in war scenes.  Women find him very attractive.  When Joan sees him flirting at a party, she remembers that this is how he started an affair with her, while he was married to his first wife.  She is tired of his macho correspondent routine.  She wonders, What would happen if he didn’t have his lucky charms?

Each of these strange short stories is bizarrely well-imagined, and each is different from the others.  Ingalls (1940-2019) was an American from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who moved to London in 1965.   Perhaps this dual-country point-of-view shaped her unique imagination.