In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [95]
The sexual point in my book would seem to be that all totalitarianisms try to control sex and reproduction one way or another. Many have forbidden inter-racial and inter-class unions. Some have tried to limit childbirth, others have tried to enforce it. It was a common practise for slave owners to rape their slaves, for the simple purpose of making more slaves. And so on.
The other point would be that the free choice of a loved one—when denied by a regime or a culture—is going to happen anyway, though under such conditions it will be both brave and dangerous. I give you Romeo and Juliet. Also, when marriage itself has been made into a travesty, talk of sex within the bonds of marriage becomes simply fatuous.
Two last thoughts. First, I put nothing into my book that human beings have not already done. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s our picture, or part of it. Second, if you see a person heading toward a huge hole in the ground, is it not a friendly act to warn him?
Again, I congratulate you, and wish you well. Your thoughtfulness and courage have set an example well worth following.
Sincerely,
Margaret Atwood
Weird Tales Covers
of the 1930s
“ … you could have a pack of nude women who’ve been dead for three thousand years, with lithe, curvaceous figures, ruby-red lips, azure hair in a foam of tumbled curls, and eyes like snake-filled pits … 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.”
These words 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 ’40s, Weird Tales published, well, weird tales: fantasy, horror, and sci-fi of the bug-eyed monster variety. Its covers were in lurid colour, 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 colourful 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 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 clichés. But—looking back at these clichés 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