“She saw herself as a lone, victimised woman beleaguered by selfish men. Her anger gave her a courage she wouldn’t otherwise have had.”
Helen’s husband Edgar is a class act. He coops himself up in the attic lab of their home claiming to be busy with his experiments. Their sons have left for boarding school and Helen spends much of her time at adult education classes. Her husband does not care what she gets up to as long as she leaves the house to him for a good part of the day. On the days when he feels like playing husband, he brings her roses – never mind that she prefers tulips, geraniums, chrysanthemums. Anything but roses.
Edgar is a smart and accomplished scientist, but a bore of a husband. On top of that, he’s neglectful too. An empty nest and mid-life crisis thrust the couple of Rachel Ingall’s novella In the Act, into a surreal world of robots and menacing scientific experiments.
Man and robot
The novella opens in media res with Helen telling her husband that her adult education classes – “flower arranging,” “oil painting”, transcendental meditation” – have been cancelled due to renovation work at the centre. He demands that she find something else to do and stay out of his hair. The options offered are going for walks, making new friends, and signing up for new classes. Helen reminds him that she has the right to stay home which Edgar immediately responds to with a sexist complaint – she doesn’t properly cut the segments of his grapefruit. Naturally, she loses her cool and Edgar’s continuous insistence makes her suspicious of him.
For instance, what is his experiment even about? Why is the attic lab always locked? Why does he not want her around when they barely even talk? The house is always quiet, his manic demand for silence makes no sense to her.
She gets hold of the key and breaks in. She does not discover bodies of women or kidnapped children, but something equally worse – a lifelike robotic female doll with “lilac-tinted eyelids, dark lashes, cupid’s-bow mouth, and a small pert nose” lying on the sofa. The toenails painted red just like her fingernails. The skin, creamy and warm. Her hair, styled in ringlets and tied with a blue satin bow. The dismembered doll is a jarring sight.
Still, Helen tries to convince herself her husband is conducting research on prosthetics for road accident victims. She gives him a week to come clean, but after hearing no admission from him, she returns to check the progress. This time, the doll has been put together into a whole.
She takes off the doll’s dress and finds a black lace bra and underpants underneath it. She fumbles around and presses some buttons. Out comes “a mixture of baby talk and obscenity, of crude slang and sentimentality.” This is her husband’s grand creation.
Helen finds it difficult to imagine her husband walking into a shop and buying lingerie and nail paint. But shocking as it might be, it was true that Edgar had created this. A virginal doll designed to his taste. His fantasies and dissatisfaction with marriage are the forces behind this “experiment” – one that he is convinced deserves his scholarly and scientific attention.
Much to Helen’s disgust, Edgar has named it Dolly. He claims it is of “therapeutic” value. The doll’s pubic hair and nipples suggest otherwise.
The confrontation leads to a desire for revenge. Charged by anger and disgust, Helen decides to take matters into her own hands. She is furious – as if slaving away for her husband wasn’t bad enough, she now has to worry about her sons following in their father's footsteps.
Helen stuffs Dolly into a suitcase and puts her away in a railway station locker. There is no way she’ll let her live in the same house as her. Only, she doesn’t know a stranger is watching her every move. A petty thief Ron is intrigued by a woman lugging a suitcase and breaks into the locker as soon as Helen leaves. He is delighted by what he finds – a woman waiting to be had by him. He falls madly in love with her: “It was like having a wife, except that not being human, of course, she was nicer.”
When Edgar realises what his wife has done, he cannot believe her audacity and orders her to bring back the doll. But if Edgar can have Dolly, then it’s only natural that Helen has a “companion piece” too. A deal is struck.
However, the second visit to the locker turns out to be a rude shock to both Helen and Edgar. Dolly is gone!
Man and wife
Meanwhile, Ron’s friends are in awe of him. How did he bag such a beautiful woman, and one who was so quiet! Their girlfriends and wives suspect something is amiss. Back home, Edgar and Helen are openly hostile to each other, ready to jump on each other’s neck at the first opportunity.
The institution of marriage becomes a total farce in Ingall’s hands. The infatuation and love of honeymoon days give way to disgust and hatred. Sometimes, there’s an opportunity for revenge.
Ingalls doesn’t spare the men. Both Edgar and Ron, who are so satisfied with their discovery, are in reality, men of limited imagination. The only way out of their depressing realities is a sex doll who cannot answer back, speak frankly, or even make herself up. The total obliteration of women from their lives is the most creative solution to their emotional crisis.
The doll that Edgar built for Helen is no better either. Auto, as he is called, is “about as interesting as a vibrator.” She can’t fault her husband for its dullness, he simply does not know how to be interesting. The conversations with Auto are dud and he is no better at sex either. Despite being married, female desire is alien territory to Edgar. Sexual dissatisfaction aside, Auto’s robotic self does not make for good platonic companionship either. The wires are all connected as they should be but there is no spark. A true human connection perhaps counts for something.
Though the novella was written in 1987, one could argue that Ingalls foresaw the ecosystem of dating apps, sex robots, and computers and algorithms hijacking human relationships. In 2025, being replaced by bots and robots is a very real possibility – one that women are particularly at risk of. It then makes sense to read In the Act as a warning to the eventualities of women centring their lives around men. It is a conscious shift of vision which requires women to see themselves as more than appendages of their male partners.
As for Helen and Edgar, they would rather destroy than preserve whatever they have left. A thing is precious for only as long as no one else can have it.
In the Act, Rachel Ingalls, New Directions Publishing.
