In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [97]
A closer relative is the Valkyrie, a virgin demi-goddess 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 Brünnhilde, with pink-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 “breast plates,” 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 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 ultra-serious Valkyries to Brundage’s equivocal brass bras, to Maidenform’s faux-naïve 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 L’il Abner 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.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following, who made the Ellmann Lectures so enjoyable for me:
Joseph Skibell, director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature; Barbara Freer Skibell; Sharon Hart-Green, associate professor of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto; Michael P. Kramer, professor of English, Bar-Ilan University; and Esther Schor, professor of English, Princeton University. Members of the Emory administration: James W. Wagner, president of the university; Earl Lewis, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs; Rosemary M. Magee, vice president and secretary of the university; Robin Forman, dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Alicia Franck and Tom Jenkins, Becky Herring, Nicholas Surbey, Levin Arnsperger, and the many members of the Emory University faculty and staff who also contributed.
I would also like to thank my agents, Phoebe Larmore and Vivienne Schuster; my editors, Ellen Seligman of McClelland & Stewart, Canada; Nan Talese of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,