Sexual Perversion & the Incredible Shrinking Male Id
Small guys... big problems.
On the surface Richard Matheson’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man” is about an average Joe who shrinks one inch every week – and the horrors and challenges he faces as he gets smaller.
There are encounters with house cats and spiders, confrontations with angry boys, and the difficulties of feeding and clothing yourself when you’re less than two inches tall.
But the “shrinking” is a veneer. The reality is that the 1956 novel is a chilling tale of unleashed male anger and the chronicle of a man’s descent into sexual perversion.
The protagonist, Scott Carey, already an embittered personality before his misfortune, transforms into a raging sexual predator as he gets smaller. The premise is simple: men get their power from their size and without it they are weak and cowardly. This is a radical novel from start to finish.
Matheson’s genius is that he’s able to use the pretense of shrinking to explore issues that would have been taboo in any other format. There are two stories in the book – an adventure story about Carey’s struggles surviving in his basement as he shrinks and the back story of his psychological breakdown as he fails to cope with his situation.
The adventure story has the reader rooting for Carey has he battles a black widow spider with a sewing pin and scales the side of a refrigerator to forage for a few soggy cracker crumbs. Many readers become blinded by Carey’s struggle to live that they don’t realize the magnitude of his selfishness and perverse character.
Carey views his relationship with his wife, Louise, as purely sexual – mourning the not the loss of intimacy with his wife as he shrinks, but the loss of his ability to sexually dominate her. At times “The Incredible Shrinking Man” is shocking in its portrayal of Carey, one of the most finely crafted anti-heroes in science fiction literature.
This passage takes place when Carey is about two-feet tall and hiding in his basement to watch a neighborhood girl:
“He stared at the window. Why’d it have to rain? he thought. Oh, why’d it? Why couldn’t it be sunny so the pretty girl could lie outside in her bathing suit and he could stare a her and lust in secret, sick vicariousness.”
After a mist coats his body during a boat trip and he begins to shrink, Carey doesn’t courageously vow to fight through his condition. He lapses into a vicious state of self-pity – a state he never leaves throughout the entire book (until, perhaps, the last f
ew pages).
By all accounts, Carey’s wife is devoted and loving. During his ordeal he lashes out at Louise on several occasions with barbed insults and prolonged sulking. In fact, there are no tender moments between the couple in the novel. Every word from her becomes an imagined wrong. When Carey shrinks to the size of a child, his wife simply becomes an unattainable sexual conquest. He lusts after her, but projects his own disgust at his height onto her, and therefore can’t be intimate with her. This, of course, makes him even more furious.
When Louise is forced to work in order to support the family, she has to hire a 16-year-old babysitter. Carey refuses to look after his 5-year-old daughter because of his size. He believes that his authority comes from his height so instead he hides in the basement during the day while the babysitter minds his daughter. It says a lot about Carey’s character that he wants to spend his remaining days hiding in a cellar rather than interacting with his own child.
He spies on the babysitter, Catherine, and she becomes his sexual obsession. He becomes flushed and hungry with desire staring at her breasts through the cellar windows and then he becomes angry at his weakness and calls her “bitch” under his breath.
Some of the scenes are quite grotesque as Carey becomes more of a sexual deviant and his obsession becomes savage.
“Almost every afternoon at two o’clock, after having sat in shaking excitement for an hour or more, he would crawl out into the yard and walk secretively around the house, climbing up and peering over the sills of every window, looking for Catherine. If she were partly or completely nude, he counted the day a success. If she was, as was most often the case, dressed and engaged in some dull occupation, he would return angrily to the cellar to sulk out the afternoon and snap at Louise all evening.”
Make no mistakes: Scott Carey is a sick, depraved man. Later in the story, he meets a female sideshow midget at a carnival. He is so overcome with sexual desire that he abandons his loyal wife after begging her to allow him to spend the night with the woman. Louise runs off in tears and Carey has his night of carnal pleasures. Yet, he never returns to the woman midget – abandoning her as well once he has had his conquest.
“The Incredible Shrinking Man” is loaded with sex (its no coincidence that the spider Carey fights is a black widow – a female spider known for eating her sexual partners). Because that’s what the story is really about.
Matheson has hidden his story of sexual deviation in plain sight – and yet few reviewers or readers ever pick up on it. He has expertly masked the real story with the science fiction aspects. Truly brilliant – because the real horror isn’t about a man shrinking to microscopic size, but in his ruthless descent into depravity once he loses his size.
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