![]() ![]() Caliban opens with Dorothy, a housewife in a loveless, toxic marriage. According to the novel, marriage for a woman is a repetitive cycle of mundanities, a constant stream of mind-numbing domestic chores, and ultimately, a means of tamping down women’s humanity. Caliban, Ingalls uses the literal imprisonment and physical degradation of a sea creature from the deep to illustrate the dehumanization of women in the confines of the institution of marriage. ![]() Nineteen years after Betty Friedan wrote Feminine Mystique, Rachel Ingalls published Mrs Caliban, a subversive fairy tale that just so happens to serve as a perfect allegory for the “woman problem” as conceptualized by second-wave feminism. ![]() As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-‘Is this all? Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. ![]()
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