I haven’t gotten around watching The Shape of Water or the King Kong movie. Is the classic woman-meets-monster-they-fall-in-love plot finally done to the death? Maybe it isn’t till there’s a Shah Rukh Khan movie that employs it and fails miserably. Only then will they proclaim is its solemn death. Hey, this is not a potshot at the man, I’ve just been watching too many Chak De India videos and reminded of what he’s capable of. But, I digress.
Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban is a love story at the root. It’s pretty simple. Monsterman on the loose. Dorothy and her husband Fred share a dead bedroom. She’s just going through the motions of life while he’s having affairs. One fine day, Monsterman, who is dubbed as Larry quite adorably if I may say so, lands up at Dorothy’s place while she’s alone. They have an instant connection and she starts to fend for him. As they go about spending time with each other, she realizes that Larry was tortured by the government and conjures a plan to get him home, in the Gulf of Mexico. Amidst the wait for this escape, close ones die, dark secrets are unearthed, unraveling Dorothy’s life by the stitches. No longer a simple love story, eh? Also, as you might have guessed the title derives itself from the Shakespearean character Caliban, who was half monster and half man.
The read: Despite the storytelling being extremely succinct, Mrs. Caliban is extremely layered when it comes to themes. Sexuality is awakened, intense grief is dealt with and mental health is discussed in a constructive manner. There’s a lot of subtexts interspersed amidst the seemingly linear plot which feels mostly predictable before that extremely dark ending flips your mind. It was interesting to get into Dorothy’s mind as she grapples with the frivolous monotony of her enforced domesticity, her suppressed failure of a marriage, lack of motivation, grief about her child’s death, and guilt of shepherding a ‘monster’. I actually feel her relationship with Larry got underplayed a bit in the larger scheme of things and wondered if that was a conscious choice. Mrs. Caliban is a breezy read and to quote the closing lines, feels like water running over sand, one wave covering another. Like the knitting of threads, like the begetting of revenge, betrayals, memories, regrets.
33/365.
Trivia: The story mentions Merce Cunningham, the renowned dancer, in passing as he appears on television. His signature methods included what has been termed as ‘choreography by chance’, with sequences of movements sometimes determined on the night of performances by the tossing of a coin. It was part of his artistic process that he and his dancers would not rehearse to the music in advance, and often the music and the set would be created without the knowledge of the dance itself – the end results just as unknown to his dance company as it would have been to his audience. (Reference)
Documentation:
Book: Mrs. Caliban
Author: Rachel Ingalls
Year of Release: 1982, republished in 2017
Publisher: New Directions