You're looking swell, Dolly ...
I. Hello, Dolly!
One of my favourite - because one of the most touching - scenes in Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man [a], is in chapter fourteen, when Scott Carey moves into the doll's house and briefly strikes up a relationship with a toy woman even smaller in size than Clarice, the sideshow dwarf with whom he has an equally brief, but arguably more intense and meaningful affair - if we consider the latter in amorously conventional and all too human terms - earlier in the novel.
Readers of this blog - or those familiar with my work beyond the confines of Torpedo the Ark - will know that I have written fairly extensively on the subject of agalmatophilia; i.e., the sexual attraction to statues, dolls, mannequins, or other similar figurative objects (what some aficianados refer to as the Pygmalion syndrome).
As erotic fantasy practices go, this one - with its roots in Classical mythology - seems fairly harmless and rather charming. I can't think of any legitimate grounds upon which one might base a serious objection to the love of an artificial being. Those who protest that a doll, for example, isn't a living, breathing actual woman are not wrong - but they've missed the point. The idea that there is an authentic or more natural form of love - one rooted in
truth and tied exclusively to personhood or human being - is something
that we should always interrogate.
Anyway, let's now take a look at Scott Carey's life in the dollhouse - we can return to this discussion afterwards ...
II. Chapter Fourteen
One day, when Scott has shrunk to under a foot in size, his wife Louise comes home with a large and luxurious doll's house, thinking that he might like to move in - for safety and convenience - away from the cat, who might decide to eat him, and away from Beth, his young daughter, who might accidently step on him.
"He walked over to it and went up on the porch. It gave him an odd feeling to stand there, his hand on the tiny wrought-iron railing; the feeling he'd had the night he'd stood on the steps of Clarice's trailer.
Pushing open the front door, he went into the house and closed the door behind him. He was standing in the large living room. Except for fluffy white curtains, it was unfurnished. There was a fireplace of false bricks, hardwood floors and a window seat, candle brackets. It was an attractive room, except for one thing: One of its walls was missing." [163-64]
Once it's fully furnished, it's a real palace; fit for a king! Well, sort of ... In truth, "doll furniture was not designed for comfort" [164] and life in the doll's house was basically a charade, without plumbing or electric fittings:
"He might have felt inclined to fiddle on the keyboard of the glossy grand piano, but the keys were painted on and the insides were hollow. He might wander into the kitchen and yank at the refrigerator door in search of a snack, but the refrigerator was all in one piece. The knobs on the stove moved, but that was all. It would take eternity to heat a pot of water on it. He could twist the tiny sink faucets until his hands fell off, but not the smallest drop of water would ever appear. He could put clothes in the little washer, but they would remain dirty and dry. He could put wood scraps in the fireplace, but if he lit them, he'd only smoke himself out of the house because there was no chimney." [164-65]
That doesn't sound great, but at least Lou had pushed the house up against the wall "so he could have the privacy as well as the protection of four walls" [164] and one day daughter Beth kindly left him a doll for company:
"She'd put it on his porch and left it there. He'd ignored it all day; but now, on an impulse, he went downstairs and got the doll, which was sitting on the top step in a blue sun suit.
'Cold?' he asked her as he picked her up. She had nothing to say.
He carried her upstairs and put her down on the bed. Her eyes fell shut.
'No, don't go to sleep,' he said. He sat her up by bending her at the joining of her body and her long, hard, inflexible legs. 'There,' he said. She sat looking at him with stark, jewel-like eyes that never blinked.
'That's a nice sun suit,' he said. He reached out and brushed back her flaxen hair. 'Who does your hair?' he asked. She sat there stiffly, legs spread apart, arms half raised, as though she contemplated a possible embrace.
He poked her in her hard little chest. Her halter fell off. 'What do you wear a halter for? he asked, justifiably. She stared at him glassily, withdrawn. 'Your eyelashes are celluloid,' he said tactlessly. 'You have no ears,' he said. She stared. 'You're flat chested,' he told her.
Then he apologized to her for being so rude, and he followed that by telling her the story of his life. She sat patiently in the half-lit bedroom, staring at him with blue, crystalline eyes that did not blink and a little red cupid's bow mouth that stayed perpetually half-puckered, as if anticipating a kiss that never came.
Later on, he laid her down on the bed and stretched out beside her. She was asleep instantly. He turned her on her side and her blue eyes clicked open and stared at him. He turned her on her back again and they clicked shut.
'Go to sleep,' he said. He put his arm around her and snuggled close to her cool plaster leg. Her hip stuck into him. He turned her on her other side, so she was looking away from him. Then he pressed close to her and slipped his arm around her body.
In the middle of the night, he woke up with a start and stared dazedly at the smooth, naked back beside him, the yellow hair tied with a red ribbon. His heartbeats thundered.
'Who are you?' he whispered.
Then he touched her hard, cool flesh and remembered.
A sob broke in his chest. 'Why aren't you real?' he asked her, but she wouldn't tell him. He pressed his face into her soft flaxen hair and held her tight, and after a while he went to sleep again." [165-66]
III. Analysis / Commentary
I have to say, the ending of this scene disappoints: Scott's desperate desire for a real woman with ears and large breasts, rather than an earless, flat-chested doll tells us that his major concern is reciprocation; i.e., more than wanting something to love, he wants someone to return his affection and whisper the words I love you into his shell-like.
Although he does eventually snuggle up to her in the bed and press her body close to his, one suspects that Scott, like D. H. Lawrence, finds a doll's nudity uninteresting and cut off from erotic allure [b]. One wonders if his (albeit mild) pediophobia is symptomatic of a much wider philosohical contempt for objects as things that are external to us and to human access.
For me, it would have been interesting if Matheson had developed the relationship with the nameless doll towards a wonderfully perverse object-oriented materialism; allowing Scott to learn to love the doll as a doll and not merely as a substitute woman. Rae Langton and other Kantian-inspired humanists might dismiss such love as sexual solipsism [c] and think it morally problematic, but I don't.
And even if loving a doll is solipsistic, mightn't that be a more fulfilling or, at the very least, happier experience than an authentic relationship with a human being?
Langton would give a categorical No! in reply to this question and insist that human beings deserve to be treated in a manner that is essentially different to how we might treat objects, including life-like sex dolls and intelligent machines. Why? Because, she asserts, people can experience pain and this creates a unique obligation to treat them with a level of care.
This is, I suppose, true at a certain banal level. But as Nietzsche pointed out, pain is not an argument [d] and recognising that others exist and experience pain doesn't necessarily make us love them; it might, indeed, serve as an enticement to sadism. Ultimately, Langton simply can't bring herself to admit that some men - extremely small in number - prefer to love dolls and that there's nothing reactive, immoral, or even solipsistic about this.
But, as we saw, Scott Carey is not one such man; he'd still rather hold a flesh and blood lover in his arms than a plastic doll. Which is fair enough - that's his preference. But I still maintain that an artificial lover (or an animal companion) can allow us to unlock the prison of the self (as Langton puts it) and nourish our virtues, etc. Either that, or perhaps Proust is right to scorn the idea that love - whatever form it takes - magically allows for communication and an escape from the self [e].
Notes
[a] Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man, (Gold Medal Books, 1956). The edition I'm using here was first published by Gollancz, in 2014, in their SF Masterworks series and page numbers refer to this text.
[b] See D. H. Lawrence's essay '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 329-346. According to Lawrence: "In or out of her chemise, however, doesn't make much of a difference to the modern woman. She's a finished-off ego, an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is about as interesting as a doll's." [346]
[c] See Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, (Oxford University Press, 2009).
[d] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book IV, 318.
[e] For
Proust, we are always and forever isolate and courage exists not in
pretending to care and share, but in daring to admit that those who
choose to kiss people instead of dolls are no less alone. Reciprocity is
an illusion and the objects of our affection, whatever their
ontological status, simply allow for the projection of our own ideas,
fantasies and feelings. In
other words, love is an experience that, like all other experiences,
comes from within. It might require some external object, but it hasn’t
the slightest connection with it. Thus, we don't need someone to help us realise ourselves, merely something to provide us with sensation, whatever size we are and however we identify sexually.
To read part one of this post on The Shrinking Man and pictophilia, click here.
To read part two of this post on The Shrinking Man and paedophilia, click here.
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