Novella November: The Shape of Mrs. Caliban

"You are too frightened. It spoils your enjoyment." / "Larry, you're all I've got"

Let's get this out of the way...

Mrs. Caliban was The Shape of Water before The Shape of Water. And yes, it too is about a woman who gets her freak on with a sea creature.

Oh, and you thought Guillermo Del Toro's Academy Award-winning film (and it's book accompaniment) was wholly original?* Surely you jest...

Now whether Del Toro was inspired by Rachel Ingalls' slim novel from 1982 is up for debate (Del Toro has stated that he was inspired by the romantic undertones in the creature feature classic Creature From The Black Lagoon), but it's not hard to detect that something was cribbed, as both posses strikingly similar threads of DNA whereas a lonely woman, stifled silent by her oppressive environment finds solace and personal freedom through loving an equally misunderstood sea monster. Both too also blur the lines of normal and abnormal (or how we define such...), but Mrs. Caliban, for me, detours into something deeper. Much deeper.


While Shape hunkers down in the smog and Cold War tension of an urban gothic 1960s Baltimore, Mrs. Caliban occupies a distorted domesticity that is bright with California sun, trimmed, lavish lawns, and wide-open beaches burrowed in the big business conservatism that would define the 1980s. Similarities become a bit murkier when we meet Dorothy Caliban, who isn't a mousy minimum-wage working mute like Shape's Elisa Esposito. She's a depressed and lonesome housewife, who is coping with the death of her son, and a recent miscarriage. Her day-to-day consists of plastering on a smile, listening to her only friend Estelle blab about her sexual conquests, and going through the motions of what is expected of her as a 1980s housewife (shopping, exercising, shoulder pads...), this all while her husband Fred is cold, distant, and possesses a wandering eye.

A break from routine comes when Dorothy overhears on the radio that a "monstrous" test subject from a scientific research lab has escaped one day. At the time, she thinks nothing of it...until the creature comes into her home. Surprisingly, Dorothy is neither frightened or combative when the creature makes himself known, she instead immediately welcomes the sea monster (who prefers the name "Larry"), and is intent on protecting and providing for him.

As bizarre as this set-up sounds it's the matter-of-fact tone of this meet cute, and the eventual romance that follows, that are the linchpin of this book's genius.

At first I truly took this book in the literal sense. I embraced the bizarre. This was magic realism, some amusing subversive sci-fi, where a woman and a sea monster play house under the nose of louse of a husband. I could dig it. But as I kept reading, the story leaped out of its predestined box and morphed into something a bit more clever, a bit more real. It began to plant its tongue firm to cheek, probing prejudice, sexual freedom, agency, gender roles, and mental health with a deft craftiness that took me completely off-guard.

None of this would work if Ingalls' prose didn't posses such a superb creeping subtlety. This thing could go completely off the rails or stick to its sci-fi sensibilities, but the prose is so taunt that even as it dives into the outré, Ingalls doesn't linger on the outlandishness of a six-foot-seven amphibian standing there in the kitchen scarfing down avocados, she builds upon the oddity and stirs the curiosity and acceptance of such a situation by allowing Larry's ignorance about human life, life outside of the research lab where he was experimented on and abused, to become allegory for humans lack knowledge towards our own humanity.

Larry is found to be intelligent, gentle, and sincere, none of the descriptors that are voiced in the radio reports about him, but he's also inquisitive, and whenever he questions things, his inquiries are astute observations, observations that give Dorothy a pause before she answers. At times Dorothy, in the midst of explaining, finds herself at a lost for words, and soon she begins questioning the environment around her, finding herself becoming further and further removed from it, finding herself to be just like Larry --- a stranger in her own biosphere.

There are definite undertones where Mrs. Caliban reads as a commentary on racism and immigration, the prejudice against "the other", and how this 'stranger in a strange land' adapts. In a scene where Dorothy and Larry go swimming at the beach we're treated to this exchange where Larry speaks of humans fear of "the other" and how that fear can illicit violence:

She asked him what it had been like in the water. He answered that it was not like his home; he had felt almost as foreign there as above the surface. 

"But down there, I know how to defend myself. Down there no one attacks you for thinking. They attack if you hurt them or invade their home, or if they want to eat you." 

"And if you’re different. They do that here, too." 

"But in the sea, it’s not just because you’re different." 

"I thought everywhere everyone had to fit in, or other people began to feel worried and threatened. And then if there are more of them than of you, they jump on you." 

"That happens here?" 

"More or less. It's true that what happens first is they let you know how they think, and then you’ve got to make them believe you think that."

As their affair progresses, Larry expresses a plan to have Dorothy return him back to his homeland, this in seas around Central and South America. Though there are comical moments where Dorothy attempts to disguise him by dressing him in hats, shades, and wigs, Larry has a fear of adapting too fully to the new environment and life with Dorothy, losing sense of who he is. No doubt this mirrors how a minority and/or immigrant is often forced into or must "adjust" to conform and be accepted into a society that is often defaulted to whiteness.

"If you stayed away for a long time, they might not recognize you?" 

"Or other things could happen. My abilities could leave me. How to swim, how to stay under. I'm eating different things up here. My life is different. My way of using the food is different - what's that word?"  

"Metabolism. Over a long period, maybe it would make a difference. And again she thought, there was the possibility of picking up a human disease. She said nothing, but wondered if he had thought of that himself. 

To further this, when Larry's life is threatened later on, and he reacts to that threat in a deadly way, the media's culpability in stoking fear of "the other" is established and strikes a similar tone that echos in certain corners of today's media, where particular voices crow and give weight to stereotypes and image distortions of minorities and immigrants, and their so-called "violent tendencies". We saw it when protests-turned-riots in Baltimore and Ferguson following the killings of unarmed Freddie Gray and Michael Brown were viewed as war zones and deserving of militarized police retaliation. Saw it when Trayvon Martin's teenage body was threatened and destroyed by the hands and gun of a larger, grown man, but as it played out in court, his murderer was the "victim". Hear it every time a marginalized person calls out violence, racism or prejudice bestowed upon them, and it's these marginalized people, not the attackers themselves, whom are then labeled as "angry", "hostile", "overly sensitive", and acting like "animals".

"I know one thing. If they catch me now, they’ll kill me. These people talking on the news are trying to frighten other people and trying to make them hate me. And they feel disgust. They keep talking about ‘alien intelligence’ and 'animal instincts'."

"It's all too late now, I can feel it. Before I only suspected. Now, I'm certain. People are too afraid now. In a way, I'm glad. If they catch me now, they won't try to tie me up or knock me out to take me back to the Institute. They'll just beat me to a pulp and say I was trying to eat them up. Even if I gave myself up, it's too late. Haven't you noticed - they keep calling me "the killer"?"

As the tale wraps up in an abrupt burst of confusion, the existence of Larry is further put into question, or at least it was for me. Was Larry manifested by Dorothy so she could see her way out of her repressive environment? Or was he all real, and we're left having our perception forever altered like Dorothy's, now ever the more wiser to who we are as humans and humanity at large?

Mrs. Caliban flew under the radar and over people's heads when it was released, and it's a bit easy to see why. Such an outlandish premise mixed with social commentary, dashes of existentialism, and inter-species love doesn't exactly scream "beach read" or will be rushing up bestseller lists. The book did receive a placement the British Book Marketing Council's list for the top 20 post-war American novels at the time of its release, and made rounds through Hollywood as a potential film throughout the 1990s, but more apropos it became a cult favorite among lit heads, receiving praise from such authors as Ursula Le Guin and John Updike, who called it "an impeccable parable, beautifully written from first paragraph to last". The novella has since received a recent resurgence of interest with the success of The Shape of Water, prompting the book's re-issue and re-examination. Due to the current social climate, this book now more than ever is ripe for picking, as its messages echo the fraught fear mongering, media distortion, and gleeful oppression of the "other" that is being stoked by a Trump presidency.

It's why whittling this story to mere aquatic erotica is truly selling this profound tale short. There is more here than scales and skins meeting under the sheets, and a woman's awakening due to such. The strange love that blooms between Dorothy and Larry is about as natural and authentic as anything I've read in terms of romance, add in a dash of ominous instability that carries this story beyond the scope of what is laid out in front of you, and you're left deliciously dangling the middle of reality and fantasy.

A brilliant (and oh so timely) little book.

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from the margins

• Rating: ****
• 128 pages
• Published September 13th 2016 by Open Road Media // Originally published January 15th 1982

• "I've met plenty of Ivy-leaguers I'd call monsters"  is not the most grandiose line within this book, but damn does it embody so much. 

• Copycat-chism*: The Creature from the Black Lagoon (and Mrs. Caliban) may not have been all Del Toro cribbed from, as Shape sounds an awful like a 1969 play from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Paul Zindel called, Let Me Hear You Whisper. The play follows "a lonely, introverted female custodian at a research facility who falls in love with a captured aquatic creature, a dolphin, who talks only to her. When the creature refuses to cooperate with the scientists' plan to be used as a military weapon, they decide they will kill it and dissect it. The custodian attempts to help the creature escape to the sea by means of a laundry cart." Oy. Hollywood Nerd does a superb dissection of both works, and introduced me to the 1969 televised version of this play that starred, Jean Stapleton and Rue McClanahan (Blanche Devereaux!). Yeah, I'm side-eyeing the hell outta Del Toro and co-screenwriter Vanessa Taylor... 

• All In A Name: For you Shakespeare stans, Mrs. Caliban's last name might ring familiar as "Caliban" is an important, complex fixture in The Tempest. He is the half-human, half-monster servant on the island that characters Prospero and his daughter Miranda occupy, and he's depicted either as a "beast" or mix of a fish and human. Since his character is "not honour'd with a human shape" he's oft-cited as a being that desires others to shape his character. Sounds a lot like out "trapped in domestic hell" heroine doesn't it? 

• Further Viewpoints: 1) Emily Temple over at LitHub delves more into the sexy times of sea monster love, as she compares and contrasts Mrs. Caliban and The Shape of Water, looking at things through a gender and sexual darkly 2) Den of Geek examines The Shape of Water, and the old school monster movie tropes it revived to expose the truth about America's incessant white privilege

• For all my slight bashing, I currently have the novel version of The Shape of Water resting in my Kindle. I have seen the movie, and while I did enjoy the film, and enjoy a lot of what Del Toro conveys on screen (Pan's Labyrinth and yes, even the mangled Crimson Peak), I felt something was...missing (yes, even after all that ~plagiarism~...). Mrs. Caliban, in a small way, filled in some of the blanks of the film, but not much as its a prowling entity all on its own. One day I'll get around to reading Shape, but Mrs. Caliban blew me away so much that I need a moment to recover.

• The first rating I had for this was at a 3, but after working on this review and going over the text again, I felt that this novella deserved better, so I went with the full 4. I think what keeps me from giving this a full five is possibly just lags in the writing at times, but other than that, this is possibly one of the most introspective reads I've read all year.