Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

First published: 1982

Type of work: Modern gothic romance

Time of work: Late twentieth century

Locale: Southern California

Principal Characters:

• Dorothy, the protagonist, a lonely housewife
• Larry, Dorothy’s lover, a six-foot, seven-inch sea creature with a froglike head, slightly webbed hands and feet, and the body of a man
• Fred, Dorothy’s faithless husband
• Estelle, Dorothy’s best friend, a divorced mother of two and Fred’s sometime mistress
• Sandra, Estelle’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who also has an affair with Fred

The Novel

Mrs. Caliban begins with a deft portrait of a failed marriage. Fred and Dorothy lost whatever connection they might have had when their son “died under an ordinary anaesthetic given before a simple appendectomy.... And a few months later, she lost the baby.” Now they are living a pathetic “ritual” of “despair,” of “silence and separateness”—sleeping in single beds and living lives completely unknown to each other. Fred goes off each day to his office and his miserable, unfulfilling affairs; Dorothy cleans the house, exercises, and works in her garden. From this realistic beginning, the story suddenly changes into a charming and convincing fantasy. Dorothy is preparing dinner for Fred and a business associate when the screen door opens and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch froglike creature stands in front of her. “I need help,” he says, and so begins a bizarre and touching love affair between “Aquarius the Monsterman,” known as Larry, a fugitive from the Jefferson Institute for Oceanographic Research who has killed his two sadistic keepers in order to escape, and Dorothy, a lonely and distraught woman imprisoned in a loveless marriage and the crushing emptiness of suburban life. The story of Larry’s intrusion into and transformation of Dorothy’s pathetic and pedestrian life is told with an uncommonly skillful lightness of touch and lack of pretension. Yet, although this monster is not the brutish Caliban of Shakespeare’s vision, neither is Southern California a charmed island, and this tale proves inevitably to be not a romance but a tragedy: a love story of genuine pathos, a haunting account of a brief union of two alien creatures in a world hostile to both.

Dorothy secrets Larry away in the guest bedroom in an unused wing of the house. This curious couple spend their days making love, doing housework together, talking about their former lives, and preparing vegetarian feasts for Larry, who particularly loves avocados. When Dorothy is occupied with Fred or is away from the house, Larry watches television. At night, with Larry in disguise, they go for long drives to gardens and the beach; they swim in the moonlight, make love on the beach, and share their love of the natural world. After a while, Dorothy teaches Larry how to drive, and he goes out alone at night exploring his new world to soothe his restlessness and longing.

Dorothy’s “happiness returned like a glow, as though she had swallowed something warm which was continuing to radiate.” Some of the romantic dreams of Dorothy’s youth seem finally to be coming true; “her hope and youth and adventurousness” are resurrected. Larry is literally her frog-prince: “Now that you’ve come everything’s all right,” she tells him. He is also, however, a prince from another world, to which he longs to return and to which Dorothy, in spite of her dependence on him, resolves to help him to return.

During her weeks with Larry, Dorothy also spends time with her old friend Estelle, a liberated woman who has two lovers who want to marry her and a job at a motion-picture studio. Estelle is a familiar denizen of modern America, the sexy, brassy middle-aged woman who totters between being tough, cynical, and predatory and being a frail and alcoholic victim of a corrupt world. Estelle finally is not human or feminine or honest enough to become a victim. Estelle and Dorothy comment wittily on the “processed” life around them; yet even as Dorothy resists the temptation to tell her friend of Larry’s existence, the reader begins to suspect that Fred, too, is one of Estelle’s lovers. It is soon revealed that not only have Estelle and Fred been having an affair for years but also Estelle’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Sandra, is now having an affair with Fred. Clearly, Dorothy is an innocent compared to Fred and Estelle when it comes to deception and betrayal.

The dreamlike love affair of Larry and Dorothy comes to an abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion in a startling tumult of violent episodes. First, Larry is attacked by five “punks and troublemakers” while taking a walk in a garden, and he kills them all in self-defense; one of them is Estelle’s son Joey. Next, Dorothy and Larry go to investigate a party in one of their favorite haunts, a bamboo grove, and come upon Fred and Sandra copulating. Dorothy and Larry run from the scene and drive away, but Fred and Sandra pursue them. Dorothy races to escape any contact with her husband and to protect Larry from discovery. Fred’s car crashes and burns; he and Sandra are killed. Dorothy and Larry are separated in the confusion following the wreck. They have agreed to meet at the beach in the event of any forced separation, but Larry never appears. Dorothy is more devastatingly alone at the story’s end than she has ever been—stripped of all romantic illusions and false friendships.

The Characters

The human characters in Mrs. Caliban verge on being conventional or predictable figures in a typical American soap opera. Rachel Ingalls,‘however, is a skilled craftsman whose delicate and precise strokes bring even to the minor characters an undeniable authenticity. Fred is a singularly weak and immature man: inarticulate, self-indulgent, irresponsible, insensitive. Having failed to meet the challenges of marriage, Fred is content to ignore Dorothy’s pain and to be mothered by her: She cleans and cooks for him and sees that he has his umbrella or that his tie is straight. Since he cannot respond adequately to the needs of a mature woman, it is altogether fitting that his lover is a sixteen-year-old child, and it is perfectly in character for Fred to disclaim any real responsibility for his affair: “I didn’t even like her, but I was bored. She was the one who started it all.” This despicable little man also predictably reacts to his wife’s renewed vitality and attractiveness by deciding “all in the space of an evening and without consulting her, to put their marriage back where it had been several years ago”—without giving up his tawdry affair with Sandra.

Estelle is a liberated woman: liberated from the repressive strictures of a patriarchal society but unable to replace the conventional values she has rejected with any values of substance. Rather, she has opted for promiscuity and self-indulgence. She is a “natural speeder” who is finally overbearing and insensitive. Estelle confuses a frivolous compulsion to own an elaborate white costume gown with romance and the “nature of desire.” The reader’s compassion for her grief at the loss of her two children and her lover is tempered by the perception that Estelle’s judgment of Dorothy (and Fred) is brutally wrong: “We could have been happy if it hadn’t been for you. But you destroy everything around you.... Even my children. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it.”

Dorothy herself is a sympathetic character, a gentle woman who has been so victimized by the conventions and illusions of her male-dominated society and by her own tragic history that she lives a life of quiet desperation, of mindless routines which keep utter despair at bay: “When she started to get really upset about everything, she just went out into her garden and planted something or pulled up weeds. Otherwise there was no end to it.” Simple and good-hearted, she seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown when the novel begins; she hears voices over the radio speaking directly to her. She is refreshingly open and nonjudgmental, and her relationship with Larry is charmingly uncomplex. Through it, she is reborn, once more feeling fulfilled and taking genuine pleasure in the beauty of the natural world. Although her renewed happiness seems to be totally dependent on Larry, she sympathizes with his sense of isolation and alienation and resolves unselfishly to help him to return to his own world. Dorothy is finally a sad character, humble in her demands, so basic and unsophisticated that she, too, is an alien in the corrupted currents of this world where “one betrayal covered another.”

Larry is a very credible and decent sea monster; he is extremely strong, curious, observant, and thoughtful, but he is not a particularly profound or astute critic of human society. He is perplexed by the complexity of human relationships and by the inability of humans to enjoy the beauty of their world. His own oneness with the sea, with his world, is foreign to human experience; in his world, the creatures are not tormented by unfulfilled dreams or desires. Furthermore, he assures Dorothy that in his world all the creatures are just alike. Larry’s moral sense is primitive by human standards; he feels no remorse for having killed his keepers or the five youths who attacked him, and he even offers to kill Fred and Sandra: “I can kill them for you, and it will be all right.” Larry is clearly an alien creature who cannot solve Dorothy’s problems for her or provide her with any profound insight into her particular situation or the human condition in general.

Critical Context

Mrs. Caliban is at the center of one of the most improbable literary success stories of the 1980’s. First published in Great Britain, it was issued in the United States by a small press in 1983. Receiving little notice (a notable exception was a favorable review by John Updike), the book and its author remained virtually unknown until 1986, when the British Book Marketing Council, in a heavily advertised promotional campaign, selected a list of twenty “great American post-war novels.” Mrs. Caliban, the most surprising choice on the controversial list, was reissued in 1986 to great acclaim, and as a result of the attendant publicity, other books by Ingalls are being made available to American readers.

American-born, Rachel Ingalls moved to England in 1964 and has continued to reside there. It is not only the individual angle of her vision that has, until now, kept her work in obscurity: There is also the problem that most of her fictions could loosely be classified as novellas—“a very odd unsalable length,” as she has said. Among her collections of such short fictions are Theft and the Man Who Was Left Behind (1970), Mediterranean Cruise (1973), I See a Long Journey (published in Great Britain as Three of a Kind, 1985), and The Pearlkillers (1986). All of them feature the unsettling images and the subversive intelligence that have made Mrs. Caliban a contemporary classic.

Bibliography

Beatty, Jack. “Discovery of the Month.” Atlantic 257 (April, 1986): 16-18. An enthusiastic review essay that traces the novel’s publishing history and its belated discovery by American readers.

Cowart, David. “Fantasy and Reality in Mrs. Caliban.” Critique 30, no. 2 (Winter, 1989): 77-83. This uneven but useful essay draws connections between Mrs. Caliban and movies, soap operas, and a host of other texts, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1929), John Fowles’s The Collector (1963), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Cowart also argues persuasively that Larry is not real but is instead a psychological projection that reveals the extent of Dorothy’s desperation.

McCall, William W. “A Note on Mrs. Caliban.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 18, no. 3 (May, 1988): 4-6. In this brief but cogent note, McCall argues that imagining Larry is Dorothy’s initial misguided response to her fraudulent society; after Larry’s disappearance, however, she develops an inner strength.

Upton, Lee. “Mourning Monsters: Deception and Transformation in Rachel Ingalls’s Fiction.” Critique 33, no. 1 (Fall, 1991): 53-61. Upton’s essay compares Mrs. Caliban to Ingalls’ subsequent novel, Binstead’s Safari (1983). Upton argues that these novels—both about women who become obsessed with male fantasy figures—illustrate the dangers of isolation, secrecy, and deception. According to Upton’s reading of Mrs. Caliban, then, Dorothy becomes a moral monster at the novel’s end.