Welcome to the Monkey House (short story)

"Welcome to the Monkey House" is a short story first published in Playboy in January 1968 and reprinted in the collection of the same name that same year, the second volume of Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2011, and Complete Stories in 2017. It was also included in the 1969 science fiction anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr. It was Vonnegut's first new published short story in nearly five years.

Plot Summary

Sheriff Pete Crocker of Barnstable County warns two Hostesses at the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis that "nothinghead" Billy the Poet, known for raping Hostesses, was reportedly headed toward the Cape. A "nothinghead" is a person who refuses to take the mandatory three daily ethical birth control pills which make people numb from the waist down but don't actually prevent reproduction, which would be unnatural and immoral. This and ethical suicide were instituted by the World Government to reduce the current Earth population of 17 billion, especially since most people were unemployed due to automation. Hostesses Nancy McLuhan and Mary Kraft—who, like all Hostesses, wear recognizable purple uniforms, stand over six feet tall, hold advanced degrees in psychology and nursing, and are trained in self-defense—are unconcerned and blame the attacked Hostesses for failing to stand up to Billy effectively. Just as the sheriff reminds them that Billy often prefaces his attacks with an obscene letter or phone call, a letter arrives addressed to Nancy with a dirty poem.

Nancy enters a suicide booth to check on an old man who has been dawdling for hours, telling stories of the past and deciding on a last meal, which is not at all uncommon. His age shows that he must have already been fairly old before the twice-yearly anti-aging shots were instituted. The old man claims to have known J. Edgar Nation and tells the familiar story of how he first developed ethical birth control as means to prevent monkeys in zoos from sexual acts in front of visitors, especially children. A phone call arrives for Nancy on behalf of "a mutual friend" and the man on the other end tells her a sexual couplet just as the police, who have been tracing the call, burst in to arrest him. An elated Sheriff Crocker leaves to attend to the arrest and a curious Mary tags along. Nancy returns to the old man who muses about how the United Nations decided to use Nation's ethical birth control once scientists determined that people had to stop reproducing and moralists insisted society would collapse is sex were only for pleasure. Expressing how futile his single death would be in an over-populated world, the old man spins around and pulls out a revolver, removes his disguise, and reveals himself as Billy the Poet.

Although ten inches taller and forty pounds heavier than he is, Nancy is kidnapped at gun point. Billy forces her through the sewers of Hyannis, saying he refuses to talk with her until the ethical birth control pills wear off in eight hours, since "[a] woman's not a woman till the pills wear off". The two emerge at the ancient Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, now a museum encased in a plastic geodesic dome and only open during the summer. Planning to attack Billy once out of the sewer, Nancy finds a waiting gang of four men and four women who from their physique are clearly former Ethical Suicide Hostesses. Concluding that merely being "nothingheads" couldn't explain this behavior, Nancy determines that the former Hostesses must be drugged by a substance that would make "even a person numb from the waist down... copulate repeatedly and enthusiastically after just one glass": gin. The gang takes Nancy inside the compound where a former Hostesses gives her a truth serum that causes her to admit that being a 63 year old virgin feels "pointless" and then black out.

Awakening, Nancy realizes her feeling has returned from the waist down. The former Hostesses bathe and dress her in a white nightgown, then lead her to the Marlin, a yacht formerly owned by Joseph P. Kennedy. She finds Billy in the cabin with a bottle of illegal champagne. He claims that the night is all about her happiness, but she tells him that the only way he'll get what he wants is with his eight accomplices holding her down and he holding a gun to her head. So he does, clinically. Both are depressed afterward and while Nancy lays in the bed she insists she hated the experience. Billy says all the former Hostesses did but are now "grateful" with the passage of time. He explains that this experience, without the accomplices since they weren't necessary, was the wedding night of many, perhaps most, women a century earlier and that what angers her is that Billy is "such a bad lover, and a funny-looking shrimp besides". Nancy objects that sex used to make the world so horrible, but Billy says it's reproduction that has caused the problems and he does not understand how society became so hostile to sexual pleasure. Leaving, he gives her a book with Sonnets from the Portuguese, Number 43 ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...") and a bottle with birth control pills that prevent reproduction without affecting sexual pleasure, labeled "Welcome to the Monkey House".

Critical Analysis

Author Kathleen Founds argues that the core of the story is founded on corrective rape and stands in opposition to much of Vonnegut's work as a figure of compassion. She points out that the word "rape" is never used in the story and that Billy is largely cast as the "good guy" and concludes that often times "[m]en—even moral geniuses—struggle to recognize rape culture".

Adaptation

"Welcome to the Monkey House" was adapted as a full-length play in 1970 by Christopher Sergel.

See Also

• "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", another story dealing with overpopulation and anti-aging medications
• "2BR02B", another story featuring overpopulation, anti-aging medications, and purple-clad suicide hostesses