I’m posting this in GQ instead of the Café because I’m looking for a factual answer rather than opinions of the story or author.
In Harlan Ellison’s short story Soft Monkey a homeless woman clutches a ragged baby doll and believes it to be her dead child. In one paragraph Ellison writes:
So the woman, who at that time had a home, was rocking the corpse of her infant. At some point in her life the body was taken away and she found a baby doll to replace it. What I don’t understand is what Ellison meant by “soft monkey”. Apparently the social worker said something that the reader is supposed to realize, but to the unsophisticated Annie it sounded like “soft monkey”. But I can’t figure out what the social worker was saying. What would a social worker say that sounded like “soft monkey”?
I suspect it’s in reference to the experiment in which baby monkies were seperated from their mother, then given a choice of two artificial pseudo-monkey mothers. One was a bare wire mesh pillar with a nursing bottle of milk, and the other had no milk but was covered in soft fur. The baby monkies chose the soft, but non-food-bearing surrogate. Apparantly Ellison thought it similar how the woman took a soft baby doll to hold in place of her dead infant.
Hm. Could it be that “Alan” never was real? That the woman always had the baby doll and thought it was her child before the social worker came? If that’s the case, then the experiment you mentioned makes sense. I hadn’t thought of that before.
When I read the story I thought there was some procedure or illness that sounds like “soft monkey”. Like an uneducated person might hear “schizophrenic” and think the person said “it’s a picnic”.
Maybe this is too far outside the box. Soft monkey is pretty close to soft money. Perhaps the author is referring to how tough it is for some folks to let go of soft money (in the political sense.)