Howard’s
“Lesbians”
The first and one of the most brazen of
Howard’s “lesbians” is Queen Nakari in “The Moon of Skulls” (WT Jun-Jul 1930):
Nakari halted by the
couch, stood looking down upon her captive for a moment, then with an enigmatic
smile, bent and shook her. Marylin opened her eyes, sat up, then slipped from
her couch and knelt before her savage mistress—an act which caused Kane to
curse beneath his breath. The queen laughed and, seating herself upon the
couch, motioned the girl to rise, and then put an arm about her waist and drew
her upon her lap. Kane watched, puzzled, while Nakari caressed the girl in a
lazy, amused manner. This might be affection, but to Kane it seemed more like a
sated leopard teasing its victim. There was an air of mockery and studied
cruelty about the whole affair.
"You
are very soft and pretty, Mara," Nakari murmured lazily, "much
prettier than the other girls who serve me.[“] (SK 129)
Later on in the story, Nakari claims: “[...]
she shall be punished as I have punished her before—hung up by her wrists,
naked, and whipped until she swoons!” (SK
137) Marilyn later confirms: “And in spite of my pleas she took me across
her knees and whipped me until I swooned.” (SK
165) In “The Slithering Shadow” (WT Sep
1933, also published as “Xuthal of the Dust”) the Stygian Thalis who has lived
in the decadent city of Xuthal and is attracted to Conan, dishes out punishment
to her prospective rival Natala:
Seizing her by the hair,
Thalis dragged her down the corridor a short distance, to the edge of the
circle of light. A metal ring showed in the wall, above the level of a man’s
head. From it depended a silken cord. As in a nightmare Natala felt her tunic
being stripped from her, and the next instant Thalis had jerked up her wrists
and bound them to the ring, where she hung, naked as the day she was born, her
feet barely touching the floor. Twisting her head, Natala saw Thalis unhook a
jewel-handled whip from where it hung on the wall, near the ring. The lashes
consisted of seven round silk ords, harder yet more pliant than leather things.
With a hiss of vindictive gratification, Thalis drew back
her arm, and Natala shrieked as the cords curled across her loins. The tortured
girl writhed, twisted and tore agonizedly at the thongs which imprisoned her
wrists. She had forgotten the lurking menace her cries might summon, and so
apparently had Thalis. Every stroke evoked screams of anguish. The whippings
Natala had received in the Shemite slave-markets paled to insignificance before
this. She had never guessed the punishing power of hard-woven silk cords. Their
caress was more exquisitely painful than any birch twigs or leather thongs. (COC 237)
This scene was depicted on the cover by
Brundage, lovingly described by one critic:
[...] a bound woman leans
back away from her captor, the retreating body language serving only to
emphasize her pointed, bare breasts and her naked legs. Her captor, another
woman, wears a kind of skirt, but her torso is almost entirely naked as well.
And she holds a whip, which she clearly intends to use on the other woman.
(Elliot 57)
Margaret Brundage recalled in a 1973
interview:
We had one issue that
sold out! It was the story of a very vicious female, getting a-hold of the
heroine and tying her up and beating her. Well, the public apparently thought
it was flagellation, and the entire issue sold out. They could have used a
couple thousand extra. [...] Having read the story, the thought of flagellation
never entered my head. I don’t think it had theirs, either. But it turned out
that way. (Korshack & Spurlock 29)
It is worth noting that “The Slithering
Shadow” with Brundage’s cover appeared in the September 1933 Weird Tales. One month later would see
the debut of Dime Mystery, the first
of the “weird menace” or “shudder pulps” which would focus largely on torture,
sadism, Grand Guignol-style grue and contes
cruels, where stories of women, nude or near-nude, being threatened would
be much more common. While there are many proto-weird menace stories in the
pulps, “The Slithering Shadow” may have been a marker that there was an
audience for this new pulp genre.
Also in 1933, Howard wrote “The Vale of Lost
Women,” although it was never published during Howard’s lifetime. (COC 451) The beginning of the story
includes an unnamed female character whose actions toward the slave Livia are
at best ambiguous:
The young black woman
laughed evilly, with a flash of dark eyes and white teeth, and with a hiss of
spiteful obscenity and a mocking caress that was more gross than her language,
she turned and swaggered out of the hut, expressing more taunting insolence
with the motions of her hips than any civilized woman could with spoken
insults. (COC 304)
While not a product of decadent civilization,
this female character still uses her dominant position to sexually torment an
unwilling captive. Livia manages to escape, thanks to Conan, but flees into the
eponymous vale, and its inhabitants:
The lithe brown women
were all about her. One, lovelier than the rest, came silently up to the
trembling girl, and enfolded her with supple brown arms. Her breath was scented
with the same perfume that stole from the great white blossoms that waved in
the starshine. Her lips pressed Livia’s in a long terrible kiss. The Ophirean
felt coldness running through her veins; her limbs turned brittle; like a white
statue of marble she lay in the arms of her captress, incapable of speech or
movement. (COC 313-314)
The “Lost Women” do not meet all of the
criteria for Howard’s typical “lesbians.” While of a different race, they are
not the product of a decadent civilization. They are not forceful or violent,
and do not seek to inflict pain or humiliation. They may no longer even be
human, despite their outward form. They are exceptional among Howard’s lesbians
in trying to seduce and entrap, rather than dominate, and are somewhat closer
to the eponymous characters of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Flower-Women” (WT May 1935). A more “typical” group of
Howardian lesbians is depicted in “The Thunder-Rider”:
[...] cat-footed brown
women, beautiful with a sinister beauty, and naked but for their golden
ornaments, crowded close to stare at the prisoners, and especially the
warrior-girl of the Pawness. And they laughed at her, sweet, soft, evil
laughter, venomous as poisoned honey.
“Giver her to us,” they begged mockingly, clustering
around Xolotl. “She is a wild young thing—let us tame her! She shall be our
sister! Let us take her into the Chamber of Maidens and play with her!” (WS 407)
The women of “The Thunder-Rider” are
apparently sadistic and bisexual (since they are interested in both male and
female victims), the product of a decadent civilization, fulfilling several of
Howard’s criteria. The witch Salome in “A Witch Shall Be Born” (WT Dec 1934) evinces the same
bisexuality and violence, with the added twist of incestuous overtones. Her
combination of sex & violence is revealed when she asks:
“You never had a
sister?” came the sweet, poisonously mocking voice. “Never a twin sister whose
flesh was as soft as yours to caress or hurt?” (BCC 258)
Later she speaks of “handsome men and soft
women for my paramours and my slaves.” (BCC
260) Although there is no flagellation scene, there is an encounter between
the sisters where it is evident that Salome has indulged in this pastime. She
taunts as her sister shrinks from her touch:
“You do not love my
caresses, sweet sister?” (BCC 277)
Lesbianism is also more implicit than graphic
in the science fantasy novel Almuric,
where the alien queen Yasmeena is described:
Ranged about her couch in
attitudes of humility and servitude were twenty naked girls, white, yellow and
copper-skinned. (ASF 145)
Although Howard goes into no great detail of
Yasmeena’s actions, he emphasizes her cruelty, decadence, base desires, and the
emphasis on the capture of female slaves, and includes flagellation, as when
she declares “Her buttocks shall smart for her insolence.” (ASF 158)
Close
Encounters of the LGBTQ Kind
Flagellation need not always be sadistic:
spanking was sometimes portrayed as just and not necessarily sexual in the
1920s and 1930s. Corporal punishment was still very much the norm in American
schools and homes. In the brief piece “Miss High Hat,” which takes the form of
a letter to the editor, possibly for a confession pulp (although there are some
thematic similarities with “The Sappious Few Menchew,” a parody in one of
Howard’s letters to Tevis Clyde Smith), Howard wrote:
“Miss Sauciness,” said
she grimly, “what you need is a good bottom-warming and here’s where you get
it!”
And she snatched that insolent flapper up, in spite of
her protests and struggles, and turned her across her lap. And right there
before us all, she jerked up the girl’s dress and took off her drawers. How
that flapper screamed and wiggled and kicked! And the matron’s open hand going smack-smack-smack-smack! On her bare
seat. And before she stopped Miss Sauciness was crying and begging for mercy
and her behind was red as a rose. She apologized to the matron and you never
saw such a change in a girl! One of the girls had brought a Kodak along and
while the spanking was going on, she took a picture of the whole scene,
unbeknownst to the matron.
After that, whenever the girl would start getting high
hat, someone would bring out that picture and hold it up where she could see
it.
Somehow there is nothing so humiliating and ridiculous as
to be spanked before a crowd of the other girls and when she remembered how she
looked lying across the matron’s lap exposed so immodestly, while her bare
sitting place was being spanked, she realized that she wasn’t so much after
all. (PF 422-423)
The emphasis on humiliation and baring of the
buttocks shows definite overlap with Howard’s pulp flagellation, but the
context is different. This is not depicted as a practice of “decadent”
sexuality (however much it may be enjoyed as such). Miss Sauciness isn’t being
spanked out of sadism, but for the purpose of punishment. The distinction is
not necessarily an important one to the reader of flagellation literature
however: a spanking is a spanking.
Howard dabbled in this kind of work. His poem
“The Harlot” has an irate wife invade a baudy-house and spank a prostitute.
Another tale along the same lines is “A Matter of Age.” A fifteen year old
nearly convinces a 40-year-old man to leave his wife for her, but the wife
arrives at the rendezvous first.
She sat down on the
couch, turned me across her lap, and tucked my dress up above my hips. Smack!
Smack! Smack! Smack! Went her open hand on the seat of my scanty bloomers, and
at every smack I yelled for mercy! Oh dear, what a spanking that was! I was
crying long before Mrs. Perkins stopped [...] (SO 369)
When the bottom-warming is accomplished, Mrs.
Perkins gives her a kiss—although this appears to be more of a motherly show of
affection than lasciviousness. The tale follows the usual sin-and-regret cycle
of confession stories. The unfinished story “The Grove of Lovers” also has a
much-abridged spanking scene as an older woman punishes a younger one:
Señora Yonito was of
better blood than most of the villagers, but in her rage the old dame resorte
to extremely peasant tactics and jerking the frightened Carmencita across her
capacious lap, she spanked her soundly. (SO
403)
Individual elements like nudity and decadence
also may not have been sufficient in and of themselves to count as “lesbianism”
in Howard’s mind. For example, in “Marchers of Valhalla” a female victim is
being sacrificed on an altar by “lesser priests and evil-eyed naked women” (SN 80) but this scene lacks the overt
female-on-female sexual dynamic of “Red Nails” or “The Slithering Shadow.”
It seems likely that it is a personal
synthesis of elements—sadism, nudity, powerful personal emotional connection—between
two women which defined lesbianism to Robert E. Howard. In this regard Howard
appears to have been a bit ahead of his time, as lesbian pulp and exploitation
films would, decades after his death, make explicit what in the 1930s would be
implicit. As Fritz Leiber put it:
The girl-whipping-girl
scenes in several of the Conan stories remind me that Howard must have early
discovered what a potent sexual stimulus this particular image is, along with
the more or less veiled lesbianism that is frequently linked with it. [...]
Howard seems to have known from the start: that mixed whipping is a less potent
stimulus than girl-whipping-girl. There seem to be reasons for this that go
quite deep (for instance, rituals in which women whipped women were part of the
women’s mystery cult in ancient Rome) but I am not prepared to analyze them in
scholarly fashion or any other—beyond the thought that girl-whipping-girl may
appeal to the male voyeur because the scene involves no male actor of whom he
might be jealous[.] (Leiber 6-7)
The flagellation angle is particularly
emphatic in the literary and historical context of the American South. The
whipping of black slaves is part of the history of racial conflict in the
South. When the individuals are stripped naked, the cruel practice can obtain a
sexual aspect, transforming from an inhumane legacy of black slavery to
sadistic activity. An example of this in
Howard’s writing include the horror tale “Pigeons from Hell,” which takes place
on and around an old plantation. One witness in the story “swore he saw Miss
Celia tie this girl up to a tree, stark naked, and whip her with a horsewhip.”
(HS 437) The character of Miss Celia
may be inspired by stories Howard heard growing up:
The one to whom I
listened most was the cook, old Aunt Mary Bohannon who was nearly white — about
one sixteenth negro, I should say. Mistreatment of slaves is, and has been
somewhat exaggerated, but old Aunt Mary had had the misfortune, in her youth,
to belong to a man whose wife was a fiend from Hell. The young slave women were
fine young animals, and barbarically handsome; her mistress was frenziedly
jealous. You understand. Aunt Mary told tales of torture and unmistakable
sadism that sickens me to this day when I think of them. (CL2.75-76)
Another example is the short tale “The Block,”
which goes on at greater length and detail:
[“]Instead of tying their
niggers up to a tree or across a barrel, my grandparents had a big wooden block
they whipped them across. Well, the minute this wench saw the block she started
screaming like a lost soul. She fought and howled like a wild woman and it was
all the two big nigger women could do to strip her and get her across this
block on her tummy. But they did at last and one of them held her feet and the
other her hands, while a third laid on a strap under the direction of my
grandmother.
“Well, the minute they got this girl on the block, before
she’d been struck a lick, she quit screaming and started moaning. She lay there
shaking like she had a chill, and moaning; her skin was an ashy color. She’s
gotten about three smacks when she jerked a hand away [...] every time the
strap came down across her sitting place she yelled bloody murder!” (SO 480-481)
Are these examples of lesbianism, by Howard’s
definition? Miss Celia in “Pigeons from Hell” is certainly cruel to the point
of sadism, but the flagellation element toward another woman is limited to this
single line. “The Block” is more explicitly a work of flagellation literature,
but of a different nature—the whipping is directed by the grandmother rather
than administered directly, and as punishment rather than for sadistic
satisfaction.
Beginning in 1935, Robert E. Howard splashed
the Spicy magazines, which were
geared toward an adult audience and promised sex—though due to restrictions,
always fell far short of explicit pornography. Howard’s own offerings were too
spicy for the spicies, being heavily censored when they were published. (SA viii) Female-on-female action was
absent from most of Howard’s spicy stories, probably by editorial fiat—“They
have some definite taboos. No degeneracy, for instance. No sadism or
masochism.” (CL3.418) There was one
notable exception: “Daughters of Feud.” Set in the mountain town of Whiskey
Run, the story features a vicious rivalry between two nineteen-year-old
schoolgirls, Joan Kirby and Ann Prichard:
They came together in the
aisle between the rude, hand-hewed desks, in a whirl of skirts and thrashing
limbs. Garments disarrayed by their violence displayed the generous expanses of
white flesh. Mountain girls fought like wildcats. (SA 139)
Again, many of the criteria are not present.
Neither of the girls is in a position of authority over the other, the
school-house brawl being a fair fight. Ann, the less sympathetic of the pair,
does threaten Joan “I’ll tear off every stitch she’s got on!” (SA 140)—and later suggests gleefully to
castrate a school teacher who spanked her—but this is the limit to her sadism
in the story. The same general principle can probably be extended to the rest
of Howard’s fiction: absent other context or qualifiers, woman-on-woman combat
by itself would not be considered “lesbian.” The catfight in “Vultures of
Whapeton” between Grace and Conchita, for example, results in shredded clothes,
but shows none of the characteristic dominance, sadism, or sensuality of “Red
Nails.”
Warrior
Women & Third Sex
The criteria set for Howard’s “lesbians” as
depicted above leaves out a great deal—including the complex possibilities of
gender and sexual identities. Characters that would be considered transgender
or homosexual today would have been identified as “sexual inverts” in the 1920s
or 30s, and gender identity was largely assumed to follow sexual identity.
Homosexual women would be expected to have masculine mannerisms; homosexual men
would be expected to be effeminate. This was literally thought of at points as
a female mind in a male body (urning,
Uranian) or male mind in a female body (dioning,
Dionian). Howard never directly
mentions these concepts, but he has a few characters which fall outside the
strict norms of male/female gender roles.
The most prominent of such characters Dark
Agnès de Chastillion of “Sword Woman” and “Blades for France” (both unpublished
during his lifetime.) Rejecting her traditional female role (by killing the
groom in her arranged marriage and escaping the wedding), she is disguised in
men’s clothes (“We’ll make a boy of you!” SW
338), which juxtaposition of apparent gender and dress cause much
consternation. It is remarked that her decision is not entirely unprecedented,
as there was the case of Black Margot of Avignon:
You remind me of a woman
I once knew; she marched and fought like a man, and died of a pistol ball in
the field of battle. (SW 349)
Agnès takes inspiration from this example, and
proclaims “I am weary of being a woman.” but she is told “[...] it takes more
than a pair of breeches to make a man.” Upset by the admonition to “Don thy
petticoats and become a proper woman once more.” Agnès declares:
You deny me my place among
men? By God, I’ll live as I please and die as God wills, but if I’m not fit to
be a man’s comrade, at least I’ll be no man’s mistress. (SW 350)
In the sequel “Blades for France” she still
struggles with sexism and prejudice:
Look ye! I wear these garments
but as the garb and tools of my trade, not to catch the attention of men. I
drink, fight and live like a man— (SW 366)
In the unfinished fragment “Mistress of Death”
Agnès adds a point on female equality, also a subject during Howard’s lifetime:
I took naturally to the
life of a man, and can drink, swear, march fight and boast with the best of
them. (SW 508)
There is a great frisson in the character of Agnès, who while never denying her
biological gender or her rejection of traditional gender roles, adopts
masculine clothes and career. Yet she struggles to gain recognition of her new
role. In this sense, Agnès agrees with the 1930s concept of sexual inversion: a
man’s mind in a woman’s body (“I seemed to have been born into a new world, and
yet a world for which I was intended from birth.” SW 355)—however, her characterisation does not fit neatly into any
category. Which may be rather the point and the problem with the character. Weird Tales had seen a few
gender-bending characters, but Agnès’ stories are straight historical
adventures. A transgender swordsman may have been too much for pulp
sensibilities.
 |
| Sword Woman (art by Ken Kelly) |
In terms of contemporaries, Agnès can be
compared to C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry. Both are fiercely independent women
bucking traditional gender roles by following a masculine pursuit (combat), and
were conceived around the same period. The distinction between Jirel and Agnès
is largely one of discovery: Jirel’s character is full-formed in “Black God’s
Kiss” (WT Oct 1934), and does not
change substantially in the handful of sequels. While many of her antagonists
have designs on Jirel because of her gender, her role is never seriously
questioned, and we get no hint of any social repercussions or pressures against
her becoming a warrior, or led her into that career. As Lefanu put it: “women
as protagonists do not necessarily interrogate the social and literary
construction of women as gendered subjects.” (Lefanu 24) Jirel is a warrior and
a woman, but never really reflects on this apparent contrast. She just is. But
in “Sword Woman” Agnès becomes Dark
Agnès. It is her origin story, the discarding of an old identity and the
creation of a new one. With that transition in gender roles comes much
pushback, which Jirel faces only in a very limited fashion. It is the
transition that drives the plot of “Sword Woman.”
In both cases, Moore and Howard both emphasize
that their characters are very definitely women, both physically and mentally
or emotionally—but they are women who do not conform to societal expectations
of docility, weakness, etc. Lefanu points out:
The problem with these
role-reversal stories—as with role-reversal societies—is that they do not
necessarily challenge the gender stereotypes that they have reversed. (Lefanu
35)
Howard’s Agnès does specifically challenge
these preconceptions. She does not simply invert them by declaring that men are
weak, or treat women as men once treated her. Agnès is driven to the change by
her revolt from social norms, and has to continue fighting those preconceptions
in subsequent adventures. Agnès bucks the stereotypes for women, but has to go
on bucking them. Given that it was probably impossible to write an openly
homosexual or transgender female character for the pulps in the early 1930s,
even if Howard had so conceived Agnès as such, the degree to which he was
playing with chauvinistic attitudes towards women, and the gender roles and
sexual behavior expected of women, makes Agnès an interesting contrast to
villainous “lesbians” of Howard’s fiction.
With regard to sexual identity, Agnès is
depicted playing with some of the stereotypes of sexual inversion, portraying
“masculine” attitudes, garb, and behavior, but is effectively asexual. She
rejects the advances of men and shows no particular attraction to women. An
exception is in “Blades of France,” where she is unexpectedly kissed by a
woman, this appears to be more homosocial than homosexual:
With a sob she rose and
threw both her soft arms about my neck and kissed me on the lips, so I was
further ashamed. It was the first time I remembered anyone ever kissing me. (SW 379)
The voluntary celibacy that markes Agnès is
important because she is:
[...] aware that even to
share a bed with a man, in her society and ours, is to be bridled. Howard
captures the essence of a politic few men dare realize—a concept usually
dismissed by men as the madness of man-hating lesbians, or whoever else can be
blamed for men’s own limited comprehension. (Salmonson 12)
This is also explored with some of Howard’s
other characters. Valeria and Helen Tavrel likewise avoid heterosexual
relationships out of concern for their own position—to be taken seriously as
pirates in their own right, rather than a captain’s mistress. Sexual freedom
for all of these characters is more than the right to choose their partners,
but the ability to say no. This denial of sex does not automatically equate
with a denial of femininity, but for Agnès and her fictional sisters it is
generally better to abstain from sex altogether than to lose the respect and
identity they have fought so long to gain and maintain. Likewise, Agnès shows
no sign of the “decadence” which is a normal prerequisite for his “lesbian”
characters. Sadism is also completely absent, although once in exasperation
Agnès threatens to turn the femme François de Foix across her knee (SW 381), and another time she threatens
a woman to “turn up your petticoats and whip you as no beadle ever did.” (SW 510), she never carried out these
threats.
Howard had other warrior-women in his stories,
but none of them focused to the same degree on issues of gender. The closest to
Agnès was the pirate Valeria in “Red Nails” who was described as: “She was all
woman, in spite of her bearing and her garments.” (CSC 209), and bitterly
swore: “Why won’t men let me live a man’s life?” (CSC 214). The pirate Helen
Tavrel was mistaken for a man from a distance in “The Isle of Pirate’s Doom”
and was said to have “traded petticoats for breeches” (PS 9) and claimed
“though Fate made a woman of me, I have lived a man’s life” (PS 23). The
mercenary Red Sonya of Rogatino in “The Shadow of the Vulture” (The Magic
Carpet Magazine Jan 1934) “Marches and
fights like a man” (SW 405) and was described:
She stood as a man might
stand, booted legs braced wide apart, thumbs hooked into her girdle, but she
was all woman. (SW 402)
The phrase “she was all woman” repeated here
for both Valeria and Sonya bespeaks a need to establish a certainty of
gender—that this is not a feminine-looking man, hermaphrodite, or what today
would be called a transexual, but a woman that identifies as a woman, even if she refuses to conform to expectations of dress
or behavior. Strictly speaking, this term and similar physical descriptions are
examples of sexual objectification; Howard has no unattractive warrior women.
In exploring this theme a little, one critic notes:
[Howard] never conceived
the nation of androgynous beauty, nor seemed to realize “beauty” itself is
cultural. He felt compelled to establish that Agnes was traditionally beautiful
in spite of herself, as if to say, “See—she is a woman despite her choices.” It
adds nothing of character or realism, though it establishes, in the only way
the author knew, that Agnes is not a warrior because she was too ugly or too
stupid or too abnormal to be a wife or mother. (Salmonson 12, cf. Elliot 59)
Making a female pulp character beautiful needs
not have a deeper consideration, from a sales standpoint. But the emphasis on
feminine beauty confirms to the reader that these are women, and at that they are not women that are physically or
mentally deficient, damaged, or flawed in some way. The over-emphasis on the
female physical and mental self is a counterbalance to the social abandonment
of female gender role and the taking-up of aspects of male gender roles and
dress. Elliot would expand on Valeria in particular:
[...] Valeria’s pursuit
of freedom against her society’s wishes marginalizes her, making her other, but
it also forces Howard to go to extravagant lengths to substantiate her
femininity, which he does by including not one, but two female bondage scenes.
(Elliot 66)
The “othering” of such characters might today
be taken as implying a genderqueer or third sex identity; but those are largely
contemporary readings. In the context of the 1930s some might have classed
these female warriors as transvestites. Readers more well-read in sexology or
psychology who saw female characters portrayed in masculine dress and action
might be forgiven for reading “sexual inversion” into the characterization. If
so, the characters’ outward assumption of male gender roles would be matched
with stereotypical male attraction to women. Howard’s phrasing, then, would
possibly forestall readers assuming that these sword-women were lesbians, that
their “masculine” behavior did not necessarily extend to a homosexual
attraction to other women.
Elliot Winter noted in discussing the gender
dynamics of the Hyborian world:
In contrast, Howard’s
world of free warriors, kings, and slaves seem to lack a clear place for the
female characters that resist slavery, sexual or otherwise. Nonetheless, some
of those women mirror Conan’s desire for individual agency and power. Like
Conan, they navigate a line between social conformity and powerful corruption,
but, for them, that line is much more uncertain. (58)
In broad strokes, this applies to much more
than the Conan tales: Dark Agnès, Valeria, and Red Sonya of Rogatino among
others struggle openly with a desire for agency and identity that is not based
on their birth gender. And the struggle for agency among women was never
restricted to the Hyborian Age or medieval France. The 1920s and 30s saw a rise
against traditional perceptions of women as subservient to men, with the
passage of Women’s Suffrage and the rise of flapper culture, and greater
education and economic independence for women. This may be exemplified by his
girlfriend Novalyne Ellis, a fiercely independent woman who sometimes struggled
against the social expectations of a small Texas town. Howard also admired the
fierce independence of her mother and grandmother. (Ellis 86-87)
It is tempting to consider that these women
reflected, at least in part Howard’s thoughts on the “Battle of the Sexes” of
his current day. The politics of the 1920s and 30s recast in a struggle against
the patriarchal and sexist norms of a different age. By a similar token, the
decadent “lesbians” of Howard’s fiction like Nakari, Salome, Thalis of “Xuthal
of the Dust,” and others can be seen as a projection of the darker side of
contemporary psychology (as filtered through Howard’s understanding) and
“decadence” onto his mythic pasts. Howard’s “lesbians” were not exactly the
flappers of the Hyborian Age. To use Winter’s description, these were women who
had pushed individual agency and power-seeking too far, who abandoned social
conformity and sexual norms altogether—and that level of freedom too may have
held an attraction to Howard.
LGBTQ
in Robert E. Howard: The Critical View
Robert E. Howard may never have knowingly met
a lesbian during his lifetime, and gives no real indication of what his
response would be if he had confronted a transwoman or genderqueer individual.
The very ambivalence and quirkiness of his particular expression in fiction
means that interpretation lies heavily on the reader. Critical interpretations
are often colored by the syntax of their own era, and the biases of authors.
For example Uranian Worlds: A Reader’s
Guide to Alternative Sexualy in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1983) freely
listed “Red Nails” and “The Vale of Lost Women” as lesbian stories—and perhaps
did not read very closely, as the synopsis/summary for the latter states:
Rejecting the brutality
of men, she flees to the Valley of Lost Women, an idyllic all-women society.
She finds, to her dismay, that the valley is filled with lesbian natives who
seduce her despite her fears. (Garber & Paleo 65)
 |
| Livia, The Vale of Lost Women Illo by Mark Schultz |
This is a rather bold re-interpretation of
events that seems to miss the central conflicts of the story. But the writers
were looking for “Uranian worlds” and so cast the Vale of Lost Women (where a
group of soulless women entrap victims for a demon of the Outer Dark) as an
idyllic lesbian society. Another example, from 1987:
By degeneracy, Howard
was referring primarily to homosexuality, although “Red Nails” does contain
incidents of bondage and flagellation. He instinctively realized what has been
postulated by others: homosexuality is in some way related to urbanization.
Broaching this subject was a courageous act on Howard’s part and also on the
part of Farnsworth Wright who published the story. Still, rendered the subject
commercially viable by presenting its more agreeable aspect, i.e., Sapphic
relations between beautiful women. (Cerasini & Hoffman 88)
The focus on “urbanization” is telling as a
marker of the period. Urbanization and homosexuality was a crux of research in
the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the emergence of homosexual subcultures in
cities like New York, famous for the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Howard would
probably not have understood it in such specific context: for him, decadence
was largely a product of civilization; a characteristic of civilizations in his
conception was the building of cities such as Xochitl in “Red Nails” and Xuthal
in “The Slithering Shadow.” So cities could be a setting of homosexuality in
Howard’s stories, but not because of the masses of people in close proximity
that allowed subcultures to develop and flourish. Indeed, both Xuthal and
Xochitl are dwindling in population.
The reception and interpretation of Howard’s
work both critically and popularly is shaped in part by other works that the
readers would have read. Notably, Novalyne Price states in her memoir:
[...] I couldn’t see that
the Conan yarns Bob had brought me to read had any sex in them. Gore, yes. Sex,
no. (Ellis 201)
Charles Hoffman noted that this was because
Novalyne, who shows no awareness of flagellant literature in her writing, did
not recognize sadomasochism as sex. (Hoffman 2009, 50) Just as, possibly,
Lovecraft and many other readers may not have recognized the female
flagellation scenes in “Red Nails” and other stories as “lesbianism,” except
that Howard took the time to point it out. While contemporary readers might
balk at his particular conception and execution of lesbians in his poetry and
fiction, there may be something to H. P. Lovecraft’s observation that the
secret to his stories is that he was in every one of them. Howard’s fiction and
poetry was not just hackwork, but something of his thought, attitude, and
philosophy went into each one.
Howard’s understanding of sex and gender may
have been flawed, but he strove to present an accurate characterization with
regard to that understanding....and in so doing, tapped into the zeitgeist of
the era. The flagellation literature which appealed to many readers as legal
erotica was ripe to make the leap to the pulps. His “lesbians” like Queen
Nekari followed his conception of what women would be like as products of
decadent civilizations. Sometimes the editors and writers responded to that, as
when the issue with “Red Nails” on the cover sold out. Howard’s understanding
of contemporary psychology and culture is what developed the “theme” noted by
Trout. If Howard’s “lesbian” characters today seem stilted or inaccurate
portrayals of LGBTQ characters, that is in part because the basis for
understanding where the Texan was coming from has fundamentally changed.
Abbreviations
ASF Adventures in Science Fantasy
BCC The Bloody Crown of Conan
CL Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (3 vols. + Index & Addenda)
COC The Coming of Conan
CSC The Conquering Sword of Conan
HS The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
PF Pictures in the Fire
PS Pirate Stories
SA Spicy Adventures
SK The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane
SN Swords of the North
SO Sentiment: an Olio of Rarer Works
SW Sword Woman and Other Historical
Adventures
WS Western Stories
Other
Works Cited
Cerasini,
Marc A. & Hoffman, Charles (1987). Robert
E. Howard Starmont Reader’s Guide 35. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
Elliot,
Winter (2013). “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Women: Gender Dynamics in the
Hyborian Age” in Jonas Prida (ed.) Conan
Meets the Academy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & co.
Ellis, Novalyne Price (1998). One Who Walked Alone. Hampton Falls, NH:
Donald M. Grant.
Freud,
Sigmund (1920). Three Contributions to
the Theory of Sex. trans. A. A. Brill. Retrieved from:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14969/14969-h/14969-h.htm
Garber,
Eric & Paleo, Lyn (1983). Uranian
Worlds: A Reader’s Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction and
Fantasy. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & co.
Gertzman,
Jay A. (2002). Bookleggers and
Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Hoffman,
Charles (2005). “Blood Lust: Robert E. Howard’s Spicy Adventures” in Leo Grin
(ed.) The Cimmerian vol. 2, no. 5.
Also available online at:
http://chuckhoffman.blogspot.com/2009/07/blood-lust-robert-e-howards-spicy.html
Hoffman,
Charles (2009). “Elements of Sadomasochism in the Fiction and Poetry of Robert
E. Howard” in Charles Gramlich, Mark Hall, & Jeffrey Kahan (eds.) The Dark Man vol. 4, no. 2. Also
available online at:
http://chuckhoffman.blogspot.com/2010/07/elements-of-sadomasochism-in-fiction.html
Hoffman,
Charles (2010). “Return to Xuthal” in Darrell Schweitzer (ed.) The Robert E. Howard Reader. The Borgo
Press. Also available online at:
http://chuckhoffman.blogspot.com/2015/10/return-to-xuthal.html
Lefanu,
Sarah (1989). Feminism and Science
Fiction. Indiana University Press.
Leiber,
Fritz (1984). “Howard’s Fantasy” in Don Herron (ed.) The Dark Barbarian. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Korshak,
Stephen D. and Spurlock, J. David. (2013). The
Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage. FL: Vanguard Publishing and Shasta-Phoenix
Publishers.
Salmonson,
Jessica Amanda (2006). “Dark Agnes: A Critical Overview of Robert E. Howard’s Sword Woman” in Damon Sasser (ed). Two-Gun Raconteur no. 9.
Trout,
Steven R. (2004). “Heritage of Steel: Howard and the Frontier Myth” in Don Herron
(ed.) The Barbarian Triumph. Wildside
Press.
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