by Evelyn Piper
This droll, fundamentally comic conception of Wilson’s degenerate character is an index of how differently the film and novel understand queerness, taken in its more general sense of personal oddity or moral exceptionality. This difference eventually declares itself in what they imagine a dangerously aberrant personality to be, that is, in how they fill the role of malefactor (villain is morally too strong a word, given that the evildoer in each instance is mentally ill, not criminally motivated). Since this is an afterword and not an introduction, I can reveal that Bunny does, in fact, exist but that her disappearance is attributed by book and film to two very different, if similarly deranged, forms of queerness. In the novel, the kidnapper is a disturbed woman, a former director/teacher of the nursery school, herself childless, who is suffering, we are informed on unimpeachable authority, from menopausal hysteria. In the film, Blanche is provided with a brother who translates Piper’s plot out of the dingy and withered region of psychotic child envy into the more lurid, if equally overheated, realm of incest. Where the book explores 1950s anxieties around motherhood and feminity, the film takes up a decidedly 1960s worry, the dangers of free and decidedly unconventional love. The novel’s culpable party, Ada Ford, who is never seen but only referred to, nevertheless survives the translation to film, where she is “upgraded” from menopausal hysteric to queerer drake. Her queerness is not hormonally induced, but a permanent feature of her character and imagination. As played by Martita Hunt, she emerges as a benign eccentric, a white witch, living above the nursery school, diligently at work recording the fantasies, especially the nightmares, with which children populate their world. She helps settle the film into a Dickensian vision of derangement, a vision leavened by a humor that is often black but never desperate, as illustrated in the superb, campy wit of featuring the Zombies in a cameo for the incidental pleasure of hearing them sing the contemporary hit “Just out of Reach.” Zombies lyrics filled with adolescent, gonadal yearning like “Our Love Was Meant to Be” become sly and hilariously sick jokes on brother-sister love. Still, as one wag reviewer lamented, Preminger, for whatever reason, made no use of the Zombies song best suited for the situation, “She’s Not There”!5
With a brother to provide the (sick) love interest, the film can dispense with Newhouse, the psychiatrist, although it retains his name and gives it to the detective assigned to Bunny’s case, a role envisaged and played out with just the right amounts of professional discernment, avuncular solicitude, and sly wit by Laurence Olivier. Olivier’s detective is psychologically astute enough to solve the mystery of Bunny’s disappearance, but also canny enough to understand that his job is not complete until he restores to Blanche her sense of moral security as well as her child. The final words of the film, accordingly, belong to him. They are addressed to Blanche who, with Bunny finally safe and secure in her arms, is on her way home: “Sleep well, both of you, now that you exist.” His is a benediction, however, that winks at rather than solemnifies Blanche’s waking nightmare. Preminger’s film is a black psychological comedy with a happy existentialist ending. Piper’s fiction is something else, more fearful, queerer indeed, something that belongs to the tradition of pulp we might call glandular realism.
The last thing we might think to attach to the fiendishly clever tale Piper spins is the venerable term of realism. Glandular realism in particular may strike some as that linguistic oxymoron—a retrograde neologism. As such it would seem to add insult to impertinence, identifying women writers according to the endocrinal rather than intellectual character of their work. But if we recognize glandular realism as a literary mode rather than as a distinct sexual style, much of the sensation in sensationalist fiction by modern women writers becomes morally as well emotionally intelligible. Understood in this context, glandular realism is the expressive vehicle for modern women writers who wish to execute a sharp, pulpy turn on that literary mode Ellen Moers, in her groundbreaking work Literary Women, christened Female Gothic:
What I mean by Female Gothic is easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic. But what I mean—or anybody else means—by “the Gothic” is not so easily stated except that it has to do with fear. In Gothic writings fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare. Not, that is, to reach down into the depth of the soul and purge it with pity and terror (as we say tragedy does), but to get to the body itself, its glands, muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions of fear. (138)
Modern women writers imaginatively at home within the tradition of Female Gothic live in a time, however, when reality has increasingly come to prevail over fantasy as a source of anxiety; it can even outwit fantasy for images of absurdity. They can find in the glandular realism of pulp fiction the same visceral intimacy with fear enjoyed in classic Female Gothic, from which it descends. It is a fear, however, aroused by the ordinary rather than extraordinary face of the world. In glandular realism, reality predominates over fantasy in keeping with the modern view that the commonplace is more fantastical than the uncommonly strange, the natural more terrifying than the supernatural. Still, the auctorial intent remains the same: to excite the helplessly compliant muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, including and especially the whole respiratory apparatus—the quick breaths, panting, and sighs that signal the onset and discharge of anxious impulses. In the Age of Anxiety, glandular realism and its frissons become an emotionally truthful way of representing and reacting to the world.
This is a mode Wilson’s wife, Marta, had urged him to adopt, a suggestion he dismisses with contempt until Blanche Lake comes into his life. Blanche brings with her the experience and knowledge of darkness. Wilson initially discredits Blanche’s story as a “Gothic tale” he believes his wife has fabricated to shame him into a new understanding of reality (and into writing fictions with a chance for more popular success). He will eventually come to this understanding and try to represent it to the enamored, still skeptical Newhouse, with whom he joins up to find Blanche, who has despaired of them both: “Marta says what I’m writing isn’t realism. She says, for Christ’s sake, it’s only in my book that nothing happens. She says, read the papers, turn on the radio. She says, by God, she’d make something happen if I didn’t. . . . when [Blanche] comes to me as her only friend and tells me this Gothic tale, it never occurred to me that this wasn’t Marta’s childish notion of . . .” Now, he tells Newhouse, he doesn’t think the notion so childish; he recognizes that his intelligence has prevented him from seeing what was really there to be seen all along: “Maybe Marta doesn’t think I can write, I thought, but she should certainly know I can read. It was an insult to my intelligence to expect me to fall for that story.” If we fall for the story, as we do, if we credit the Gothic tale told by Blanche and implicitly endorsed by Marta—and we should—then we must either accept the insult to our intelligence or admit the need for a different conception of reality.
Piper’s good-humored jab at her own inventiveness in pulp fiction should prompt her readers, women and men, feminist or not, to make this admission and confess that the last thing we desire or expect in pulp fiction, whether written by men or women, is sober, plausible, documentary realism, the realism that presents us with the often shabby truth about the relations between people and about the social, economic, and political forces that condition, sometimes overwhelm, their individual lives—in other words, realism as a genuinely complicated, morally detailed vision of the world. What we seek in pulp fiction is another reality, intensified but also downgraded, a vision of the world that is lowdown, moody, salacious, and often unintentionally funny and as far from careful and sober reflection as we can get. We want, as Wilson’s wife demands, something to happen, the sooner, the more terrible, the better. We crave the hormonal rush of glandular realism because the irresisti
ble sensation of reality is represented in no other mode with such directness, recklessness, or force.
The first three books in the Feminist Press’s Femme Fatales series—Skyscraper, In a Lonely Place, and The Girls in 3-B—illustrate the ways in which different pulp genres channel and deploy this force. Skyscraper (1931), the title of one of Faith Baldwin’s pulp romances and its master image, symbolizes that force and the pulp world that is fashioned out of it. We understand from the novel’s first page that the skyscraper, that “insolence of steel” as she calls it, is not just a building, but a society in miniature. As both structure and world, it represents, to Baldwin’s appraising eye, the ultimate attraction in pulp fiction: “beauty, with menace at its core.” It is a beauty that Baldwin, the author of some eighty published novels, several of them best-sellers, celebrated for its dark and irresistable power. Pulp puts such lurid beauty on display, literally so on its traditionally garish covers. This beauty would soon tire the eye if it didn’t come with a promise of menace beneath the surface and between the covers, a promise of stories which tell of the different forms menace takes in the modern world, stories about what love and money and power and loneliness are and what they makes people do, stories, as Baldwin catalogues them, of “greed and lust, of rescue and rapture.” Yet as Baldwin understands, pulp promises even more. In her opening pages she unleashes an avalanche of verbs to impress us with the fact that life for the characters in pulp is a life of imperatives. When the Seacoast Building opens its doors, she writes, it invites its workers within “to struggle, to attain, to fail, to succeed, to love and to hope, to laugh and to weep, to suffer and rejoice, to envy and wound, to hate and to pity.
“In short, to work for their existence.”
This onslaught of verbs captures the elementary grammar of pulp fiction, which renders life primarily as energy and force, in which emotions come in a rush rather than in quiet meditative arcs. Given how often pulp characters indulge their feelings, it is strange—and strangely exciting—how little real thought and time they give to understanding them. Time isn’t wasted in pulp with long, clarifying descriptions of settings, institutions, things, and the feelings they evoke. For fictions that take the complex hopes and hardships of modern life as their main subject, there is very little sustained account or explanation of modern finance or politics or social organizations. Even if there were, you would skip them as a maddening distraction, impatient for the next turn of events. We don’t want to be detained by the heavy weight of things, so dense with meaning and complication. We want not so much to understand reality as to experience it in a heightened and compelling form. We can dispense with reflection, if only we can have more story, more twists and turns to surprise and startle the mind. We acknowledge this every time we confess that we are in the mood for a mindless entertainment. We know we don’t have to pay dearly in mental energy for the quick and easy gratifications we seek—the cheap thrills of those fulfilling moments of “rescue and rapture,” as Baldwin tickets them.
That is why, besides its low price and availability, pulp is so cheap. It doesn’t tax the reasoning, responsible mind, but relaxes and sedates it, gives it over to the female fantasy of romance, the male romance of powerful superheroes (Spider-Man and his mighty brotherhood of world savers), the logical preposterousness of science fiction, the brightly hypnotic world of noir. That is why no pulp can be very long. The original flimsiness and disposability of the books’ material form—cheap paper that quickly frays, spines easily fractured—urge and condition us to move through their pages quickly so we can lose ourselves in the fantasy before it falls apart. To read pulp—or rather to read and enjoy it—we need to put ourselves in the frame of mind of Dix Steele, the restless killer of Dorothy Hughes’s mesmerizing noir thriller In a Lonely Place (1947): “He shut out thought, clamping it between his set teeth.”
I find this theme—the deliberate shutting out or shutting down of thought—a recurrent and defining element of pulp fiction written by women. It is a provision that allows the body to tell us what it knows: “Her body knew its treachery before her sleepy mind did,” Piper writes of the betrayed Blanche, “and expressed its loathing primitively.” Glandular realism is a way for canny women writers to exploit their reputation for being instinctive and intuitive rather than disciplined thinkers. It permits them to think the unthinkable—child molestation and perversion in Bunny Lake Is Missing, nurturing lesbian attachments in The Girls in 3-B, insider trading and borderline prostitution in Skyscraper, serial killing in In a Lonely Place. Women who write pulp write about the body’s way of knowing fully aware that their readers would rather be introduced to a new sensation than to a new idea, rather track a killer than a thought. Their fiction supplies us with images of life so pummeled by sensation that the mind itself becomes too bruised to react. This isn’t my extravagant language, but Baldwin’s, who reports at a critical point in her heroine’s story that she felt as if “her mind had been beaten black and blue.” Baldwin’s heroine mounts no effective protest to her mind being battered, as the saying goes, to a pulp. On the contrary, she takes it as a sign that she has experienced something not just brutal, but momentous, in such pulverizing sensation. Her response is paradigmatic. Characters in pulp fiction often feel caught in a nightmare that has spilled over into their waking life. So thinks Blanche, as she follows a policeman to the station where the search for the missing Bunny is being mounted: “What could be more dreamlike than this walk down the street with a tall policeman? And, as in dreams, the faces you passed, all strangers, all strange, turned indifferently toward you and then indifferently away, and the policeman didn’t speak again after he had asked where she lived, and she didn’t speak, either, because what was the point in a dream when salvation only lay in waking up?”
While the dream persists—and it often persists even beyond the last page of the book—pulp heroes and heroines survive primarily on impulse or terrified reflex. Characters must move and decide things quickly, and they do so by instinct, not by the conscious and rational deliberations habitual to a mature moral agent. What might pass for thought in the mind of a crazed mother or demented killer is revealed to be little more than the reflexes of a threatened or twisted creature whose full human character may never be known to us. Annice in Valerie Taylor’s The Girls in 3-B (1959) seems to understand the conventions of the genre she is in when she considers how little she—and by extension the reader of pulp—rationally knows about the characters of the novel. Speaking of a man she has recently met, she reflects (I use this term broadly), “As far as she knew, he might have been created the day they met.” That is as much as any of us can know of characters in pulp. They rarely present themselves as people with scrutable pasts and psychologies to be probed. Giving us a fuller picture of human character is the special province of the modern novel, with its techniques for rendering the slightest vibrations of feeling and thought. Questions that might take Dostoevsky two volumes to explore are dispatched in pulp with amazing coolness. So, you ask yourself while reading In a Lonely Place, what made Dix Steele a serial killer? The woman who knows him the best calls him Princeton, a label that refers to his alma mater and serves as conveniently as any other for the traumatic source of his homicidal hatred (though the admissions officers where I teach may groan to hear me say it). The reality, the pulp reality, as the opening pages alert us, is that he emerged out of the “unknown and strange world of mist and cloud and wind.” In the universe of pulp, evil has no source and seldom suffers exegesis.
There is something elemental, then, something that lends itself readily to dream symbolism about pulp characters suspended in a trance of love or ensnared in a nightmare of loneliness and subjection. In female pulp fiction the dream of love usually takes the form of stupefaction. Heroines usually know they are in love when kisses leave them feeling, as Baldwin reports, “docile and amazed” (55). Baldwin herself, however, is aware that this stupefaction is best captured not through the mind of her innocent heroi
ne, which we recall has been battered black and blue, but rather in the convalescent musings of the career woman, who has survived the dream of love and lived to tell the tale: “She was remembering nothing. You do not remember the things that are in your blood. You put no names to them. They are. They exist, part of you. You question them no longer.” Newhouse, analyzing his own erotic subservience, observes that his feelings are “of course, traditional to the state, always this magnified consciousness of the other.” Blanche sums up this tradition less clinically in a Kafkesque image of that erotic subjection that can leave you feeling docile and amazed. Remembering Newhouse’s kiss, she suddenly has a vision of herself “as the hypnotized guinea pig in the biology lab, when the teacher had stroked its soft belly and it lay tranced on its back with its legs in the air.” So much for the dream—the stupefaction—of love.
