Welcome to the Monkey House

Content Warning: The story discusses suicide and contains depictions of rape and group violence against a single person.

The world in Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House” addresses topics including personal freedom, government control, and the purpose of humanity. The author paints a satirically extreme version of a society he was familiar with in the 1960s—with limited rights regarding reproductive autonomy and heavy religious undertones in government and lawmaking. The story’s view on birth control and sexual freedom speak to feminist issues of bodily autonomy, though the overt feminism in Vonnegut’s story is counterbalanced by its depiction of assault and female objectification framed in a controversially positive lens. These complex issues are handled with satire and dark humor and are intentionally provocative, intended to produce a strong emotional response in the reader and inspire more critical thinking about the central issues the story explores.

The issue of quality of life Personal Freedom and Autonomy is addressed throughout the story, primarily through the character of Nancy. At the beginning of the story, during Nancy’s early interactions with the Foxy Grandpa/Billy, her mask slips, and she reveals her irritation with her job and the boredom she feels. She seems outwardly proud of her job, and yet she internally seems to be as discontented as all of the other citizens. Later, she feels disappointed when she thinks Billy will be captured because she wants an excuse to use her martial arts training on someone, hoping for a thrilling alternative to her day-to-day life. When given the truth serum, Nancy admits that being her age and a virgin is “pointless,” suggesting her underlying dissatisfaction with life. The presence of the other former suicide hostesses in Billy’s gang further confirms the general sense of unhappiness beneath the cheery façade they all must exude. Additionally, the poem Nancy reads after Pete and Mary leave the parlor near the story’s beginning demonstrates the loneliness in this society and thematically introduces The Purpose of Humanity. The numbness of the lower extremities acts as a metaphor for any social ailment where people are not acting within their human nature and perhaps numbing through media, drugs and alcohol, sex, and various forms of addiction. The poem indicates that, while people in this dystopian future are packed together like “the pulpy knobs that compose the outside of the raspberry” (30), they die separated, never experiencing sexual intimacy or pleasure.

The society Nancy has lived in for 63 years limits true empowerment and human connection, and yet, until she meets Billy the Poet, she is under the impression that nothingheads are all dissidents who want to destroy the social order. Billy claims he has society’s best interests at heart and wants the best for Nancy, which motivates his actions. Meanwhile, Nancy’s views are supported by people like Pete, who represents the archetype of law and order, and Mary, the archetypal strong woman and virgin who wishes to uphold the perceived moral rightness of society, and these views are reflected in Nancy’s behavior throughout the story. Her arc in the story is a collision of perceived correctness in law and order and the possibility of free will.

Billy’s vigilante mission to give Nancy the sexual freedom he believes she deserves stands in contrast to his treatment of her after her capture. As they walk along the sewers, he suggests that someone with her figure should be doing something better with her life than administering lethal injections, which is reminiscent of suggestions directed at second-wave feminists that beautiful women should be married, rather than working. Nancy also accuses Billy of objectifying her, but he says that the pills have turned her into “an object, rather than a person” (41), which might speak to women who, when this was written, felt unwanted motherhood turned them into objects, rather than people. The necessity of this aspect of his ritual is unclear, except to intimidate Nancy and ensure she cooperates—removing her sexual freedom and bodily autonomy in the process. Billy’s gang is notably an equal mix of men and women, suggesting an equality in Billy’s “new world.” Still, the men manage the labor-intensive tasks of the ritual, such as restraining Nancy, and the women administer the shots, which they are trained for, and handle the bathing, which would allow a hostess more modesty. There is both a sense of equality in this process and a clear divide in the tasks they are assigned.

The participatory women are former suicide hostesses who have been “reformed” by Billy, suggesting that though they may have originally resented Billy for his assault (as he later addresses), they have come to respect his movement and want to take part in doing the same to others. Though the story is satirical, Vonnegut vacillates between feminism and masochism throughout the narrative, in which every perceived good thing that happens for women is also demoralizing or harmful, without the reality of that harm being acknowledged. Billy is not portrayed as an unstable villain; the repeated acts of sexual assault he orchestrates are depicted as an effort to change society for the better. Vonnegut suggests that in the political and social landscape of the story, where sexual pleasure is immoral and unchecked reproduction an existential threat, sexual assault becomes the paradoxical path to sexual liberation. In this framework, Nancy is restrained, drugged, and raped in order to render her unable to participate in the sexually repressive structure of society, and then given the choice to build a new persona that is no longer defined by her virginity. In addition to responding to the cultural tensions of the 1960s sexual revolution, Vonnegut’s argument seems to rebut the Catholic Church’s contemporary policies on birth control; later in 1968, Pope John Paul VI would reiterate the church’s rejection of both the new, more widely available birth control and artificial contraception. This is why the “ethical” birth control in the story does not affect a person’s natural reproductive potential—which is considered sacred by the Catholic Church—but rather their ability to derive pleasure from sexual intimacy, which is potentially immoral in the Catholic Church. Instead of allowing for sexual pleasure without potential reproduction, the government in the story promotes suicide as a solution, which is also considered a sin in the traditions of the Catholic Church. Vonnegut uses this hyperbolic dynamic—where suicide is preferable to sexual pleasure without reproductive potential—to suggest moral hypocrisy and satirize obsessions with sexual purity. Through Billy the Poet, Vonnegut argues that sexual pleasure is a part of a fulfilling human life, even if reproduction is not desirable, and that sexual intercourse has an innate purpose beyond reproduction. This argument was likely sympathetic to the readers of Playboy Magazine, in which the story first appeared. However, Vonnegut explores sexual freedom through the concept of corrective rape, in which a person is sexually assaulted in order to correct a defect as perceived by the assailant. Vonnegut’s failure to reckon with rape as an act of violence and degradation has garnered much criticism for the story since its publication, even and especially among readers who otherwise agree with the idea that sexual intercourse and sexual pleasure can play an integral role in human agency and individual fulfillment independent of a person’s desire to have children.  

Ultimately, Vonnegut leaves the details of Nancy’s rebirth in the hands of the reader, as she must make a choice after the story ends—to join Billy’s cause and take part in the next ritual, or to start taking her ethical birth control pills once more and rejoin a heavily controlled society. Neither option results in true freedom for Nancy, speaking to the complexity of feminism’s place in a prejudiced and patriarchal world.