The Weird art of Seduction
October, 2011
FEMALE PULPARIISI
OF THE 1930s AND 1940s
JUST HOW DANGEROUS THE PINUP COULD BE
WHO'VE BEEN DEAD FOR 3,000 YEARS,
WITH LITHE, CURVACEOUS FIGURES, RUBY-RED LIPS, AZURE HAIR
*ed cunk
I COULD THROW IN SOME SACRIFICIAL VIRGINS AS WELL, WITH METAL BREASTPLATES AND SILVER ANKLE CHAINS
AND DIAPHANOUS VESTMENTS. AND A PACK OF RAVENING WOLVES, EXTRA.... POPULAR ON THE COVERS—
THEY'LL WRITHE ALL OVER A FELLOW, THEY HAVE TO BE BEATEN OFF WITH RIFLE BUTTS."
appear in my 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin. They're spoken by Alex Thomas, who's a writer of pulp magazine fiction in the 1930s. He's not writing at this moment in the novel, however: He's picking up a girl in a park. His initial method is storytelling, always a good thing to know something about, whichever role you're playing. If you're the pickup artist, it's as well to be able to tell a good story or two, and if you're the target, you need to be able to determine if you've heard them before.
The fictional Alex Thomas got his beautiful vamps and their adornments straight off the covers of Weird Tales, definitely the sort of magazine he'd have wanted to publish in. In the 1930s and 1940s, Weird Tales published, well, weird tales: fantasy, horror and sci-fi of the bug-eyed monster variety. Its covers were in lurid color, lovingly drawn in pastels by Margaret Brundage—the only female pulp cover artist of her era—who was fresh from a career as a fashion designer and illustrator.
Brundage specialized in vicious
or threatened young women, sometimes totally nude but otherwise dressed in colorful and revealing outfits involving metal brassieres, translucent veils and ankle chains both decorative and functional, often accessorized with whips and shackles. Large fanged animals are a recurring motif: The Brundage women have equivocal relationships, not only with wolves but also with other charismatic carnivores. Sometimes the women appear frightened by their dangerous friends, but they may also stride forth, alpha females leading the pack.
The Brundage covers run from 1933 through the early 1940s, making them a perfect source for my invention Alex
Thomas, so it's clear where Alex got his cliches. But—looking back at these cliches now—I wonder where I myself got them. I wasn't born when Brundage was creating most of her covers, yet her subject matter seems very familiar to me. When you're a child, you soak up images like a sponge. It doesn't matter to you where they come from. In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven, what is has always been: In that way, children inhabit the realm of myth.
In the 1940s, when I was a comic-generation kid, there were certain things we all knew. We took it as a given that children could make friends with wolf packs and might even be raised by them; these packs would rush to their aid in times of peril. I had my own imaginary pack of this kind and therefore was not alarmed by Al Capp's Wolf Gal of the popular 1940s cartoon strip HI Abner. Wolf Gal must have been the first Brundage-like carnivorous pinup I ever saw. She had white hair and fierce white eyebrows, she most likely ate men, she was scantily dressed, and like all the members of Capp's harem of eccentric glamour gals (stunners such as Stupe-fyin' Jones, Appassionato Von Climax and the mud-covered pig fancier Moonbeam McSwine) she was what was once called "bountifully endowed." "Hubba hubba," men said in those days: a term obscure in origin but most likely a variant of hiibsche, a German word for "beautiful."
Books and characters in books, pictures and elements of pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people. What generated Wolf Gal? Probably Brundage's wolf gals of Weird Tales, which—I'd bet—Capp would have read, and drawn from. Was their grandparent Kipling's Jungle Book, in which the wolf-raised child is a boy? Did these clawed lovelies devolve from the high art of the late 19th century, so fond of depicting
Fanged beasts were a recurring motif in Brundage's Weird Tales work, as shown here on the October 1935 cover.
femmes fatales paired with animals to show how animalistic they were underneath? Or does the line stretch way back, to folklore and tales of lycanthropy, or even further back, to times when animals were thought to assume human form at will?
The enduring popularity of werewolf stories must be based on something, and that something may be dose to a wish. Was Brundage, unknown to herself, drawing early versions of that trope of female freedom, women who run with the wolves? Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was neither the first nor the last to supply seductive women with canine teeth somewhat larger than is generally desirable in a girlfriend. (It's to be noted that Wolf Gal has no Mr. Wolf Gal, and we strongly suspect that Wolf Gal—like some furry Turandot or a female spider—has been the death of all lovelorn aspirants to her hand, or paw.)
Then there are the women in the twin tinnies—those two shiny cups, attached to the torso with fine chain link—that abound in Brundage's oeuvre. Richard Wolinsky co-authored and edited a manuscript called The Girl in the Brass Brassiere: An Oral History of Science Fiction 1920-1950, a title that acknowledges die ubiquity of the trope in early 20th century sci-fi and fantasy, but like everything else pictorial, diis item of dodiing had its visual predecessors.
The message borne by the hard-but-soft frontage is mixed. One part of it derives from orientalism. Before moving to Weird Tales, Brundage drew covers for another pulp, Oriental Stories. In the exotic maidens she portrays, Brundage was lifting from a rich vein of 19th century Victorian orientalist painting, some of it purporting to depict such things as harems and slave-girl markets but some of it purely imaginative, inspired by the hugely influential A Thousand and One Nights. This iteration
of the metal bra—nonfunctional, skimpy and bejeweled—invokes bondage and/or other depravities. Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame—a frequent contributor to Weird Tales—was quite keen on both slave girls and depravities, and used the Brundage dress code. In The Blind Assassin I based Alex Thomas's writhing women with eyes like snake-filled pits on simple-hearted Conan's encounters with the uncanny seductresses of the corrupt, decaying cities through which he marauds.
Brassiere advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s hint at the second part of the twin-tinnie lineage: impermeability. Maidenform was just one of the brands featuring blindingly white bras with concentric circles of stitching that suggested armor. Their ads that coupled a state of undress with public activities—"I dreamed I was a private eye in my Maidenform bra"; "I dreamed I was a lady editor in my Maidenform bra"—presented the bra less as an aid to seduction than as a guarantee of security and, combined with the name, of chastity. Athena, the maiden goddess, with her shield and spear and her helmet, is perhaps a distant relative.
A closer relative is the Valkyrie, a virgin demigoddess from Norse mythology whose job was to gather up dead warrior-heroes and cart them off to Odin's banquet hall. Richard Wagner brought the Valkyries to the opera stage in his Ring Cycle, but to a 1940s and 1950s audience they were more familiar as the parody conception of what a Wagnerian soprano should look like: large metal brassiere or corset, long braids, helmet complete
with Viking-fantasy wings. Sure enough, there's Bugs Bunny in the 1957 cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?," cross-dressing as the Valkyrie Briinhilde, with orange-winged helmet and two tiny brass cups stuck on his chest.
Wonder Woman, the comic-book heroine who first appeared in 1941, doesn't have the full metal jacket, but she does have enough shiny stuff on her front to indicate her lineage. She too is related to the virgin goddesses—the chaste moon goddess Artemis, in her case. Supergirls of all kinds, good and bad, are generally unmarried: Wonder Soccer Mom, amazing though she may be in real life, somehow doesn't quite fit the image.
The metal bra was capable of carrying two simultaneous undermeanings: vulnerability, especially when it was flimsily attached to a girl with big scared eyes; or strength and staunch resistance, when the "breastplates," as they were called in the pulps, were more substantial and their wearer looked determined. Brundage sometimes tried for both at once: a girl in a brass brassiere and little else, with big scared eyes, tiptoeing forward with fear but determination, anklets quivering, to unlock some handsome fellow from a cage.
The "low art" of one age often cribs from the "high art" of the preceding one, and "high art" just as frequently borrows from the most vulgar elements of its own times. The Lady Chatterley porno-trial wars were fought over whether or not several words you could see scribbled on a washroom wall every day had the right to be written inside something that purported to be "literature." The Weird Tales covers of the 1930s are just one example of the way cultural memes transmit themselves, taking their meaning in part from their context, and from our own knowledge of it. Thus, from Wagner's ultraserious Valkyries to Brundage's equivocal brass bras to Maidenform's faux-naive undergarments to Bugs Bunny's skimpy travesties and finally to Madonna's witty pop-show quotation of the entire tradition. And from the wolf women of myth and folklore to Brundage's wolf girls to Al Capp's gloss on them in his WlAbner Wolf Gal to me as child reader and finally to my invention, Alex Thomas.
Alex is using Weird Tales pulp schlock as foreplay. He knows it's schlock, and the girl he's seducing knows it as well, but that's part of the attraction, for her as well as for him. "I don't think I could fob those off on you," he says of the depraved women and the maidens in sexual peril he's conjuring up for her. "Lurid isn't your style."
"You never know," the girl replies. "I might like them."
And so she does.
Brundage could exploit and subvert images of female vulnerability, sometimes doing both on one cover, as this September 1935 issue shows.
"Oh, yes—do come in!"
"Gee, Harriet, you are the kinkiest!"
Harvey! You come down here this instant!!"
"/ couldn't say—I'm a stranger here myself."
Special thanks to the Toronto Public Library for assistance with the images.
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