Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies

Steven Dillon is Professor of English at Bates College and the author of Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea and The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film.

"Dillon provides a fascinating analysis of female sexuality in the 1940s as depicted in a truly diverse array of mostly popular culture productions, including popular novels, radio serials, commercial and educational films, and comics … Highly recommended." — CHOICE"This exciting book presents a truly capacious understanding of US culture and offers a spectacular array of analyses of how the decade's cultural discourse struggled to define female desire and how so much male literature and filmmaking sought to constrain it. Dillon's study will teach scholars of modern American literature and culture a great deal more about the 1940s than they already know or think they know. It is a brilliant addition to the field." — Gordon Hutner, author of What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960

• Acknowledgments1. Introduction: Sexual Visibility, or, The Duel in the Sun2. Diana Trilling, Female Desire, and the Study of Popular Culture3. The Waiting Room: Female Desire in Women’s Wartime Fiction4. He-Wolves and She-Wolves: From Tex Avery to Jackson Pollock5. Phantom Ladies: On the Radio and Out of the Closet6. White Female Desire Wearing the Masks of Color7. What Young Women Want: From High School to College8. The Power and the Horror: Male and Female Cultural SpacesConclusion. Two Phantom Women: Ruth Herschberger and Elizabeth HawesNotesSelected BibliographyIndex