Water, water, every where
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a sailor, shamed for committing the societally prohibited sin of killing an albatross, experiences a series of deprivations and perhaps divinely-orchestrated punishments, including severe dehydration. The sailor laments his situation because although he is surrounded by water, it is not drinkable water, and therefore the substance is actually something else entirely—in fact a poisonous material—to his thirst-wracked body.
Seabury Quinn’s story “Strange Interval,” first published in Weird Tales in May 1936, has an emotional resonance with Coleridge’s poem: obsessed with shame and social perception of class status, Quinn’s protagonist undergoes a harrowing series of deprivations and punishments while at sea—and although there is a ubiquity of events occurring that appear to be about gender and gender transition, they are actually something else entirely. Rather than poisonous materials, the story contains a couple of fairly common kinks, as we shall see.
If you were looking for a story about gender identity, though, you’re going to go thirsty.
Willoughby, Seabury Quinn’s protagonist of “Strange Interval,” begins the story identifying as a landed gentleman, outright declaring: “I’m a Virginia gentleman.” Willoughby is white, and possesses all the advantages of his race and class in 1686, including owning a boat that he likes to sail on the Potomac. One day while he’s out sailing, he encounters something that should be impossible: pirates on a river that is normally protected by white colonialism:
The notched shoreline of Carolina swarmed with buccaneers, he knew, but there never had been corsairs in Potomac waters.
The pirates destroy Willoughby’s boat, and the captain, Black Rudolph (the color likely refers to his beard and/or his cruelty, but not his race), disregards Willoughby’s claims of entitlement and rights as a gentleman and enslaves him. Not long after that, Black Rudolph encounters a Spanish ship and attacks it, imprisoning a woman named Carmelita who pretends to be mad in order to avoid Black Rudolph’s sexual advances. Willoughby discovers her secret and they fall in love, declaring that they want to marry each other. Black Rudolph finds out about Carmelita’s deception and their desire to marry, so he promptly organizes a wedding to marry them on the spot.
If you were thinking “wow, that was oddly accepting of him,” it’s not, because right after that Black Rudolph violently castrates Willoughby and makes him submit to “the accolade of degradation”: further feminizing him by shaving his beard off, piercing his ears, and forcing him to wear a dress and put his hair up. After that, Willoughby is tied up on a bed and obliged to watch Black Rudolph sexually assault his wife, Carmelita.
This goes on for a bit—they move to an island where Carmelita is regularly sexually abused by Black Rudolph and Willoughby becomes Joaquina—a force-femmed doll who is bullied by other Spanish women imprisoned on the island, but performs fairly light domestic chores (scrubbing floors and serving meals, etc.) that become even lighter after Carmelita intercedes and upgrades Joaquina’s job to her personal maid. Joaquina and Carmelita spend their days eating fruit and kissing and their evenings being traumatized until Black Rudolph leaves to go pirating.
Carmelita and Joaquina take a walk together, and when they see one of Black Rudolph’s employees, a slave overseer, attempt to physically assault an elderly black woman, Carmelita intercedes. The overseer turns on Carmelita and whips her, but Joaquina kills him before he can do further damage. Afraid for their lives, they turn to the black woman who offers them help. She turns out to be Maman Cécilie, “a magic-working obeah woman,” and capable of summoning sharks that can tow boats at incredible speeds. She also reveals to Joaquina that if she wants to become Willoughby again, she just has to put on a pair of pants.
Hot tears came to his eyes and a choking sob rose in his throat as he saw the shining dark hair fall beneath the scissors blades, but a subtle change came over Willoughby as he felt the rasp of coarse wool breeches on his legs. In a moment, like the fading of a specter at the rising of the sun, Joaquina whose sweet form and substance had been his so many months, was dead […]
So Willoughby puts on some pants, and even though that act doesn’t end up magically reversing his castration, he realizes he is a man, and that realization helps him outduel Black Rudolph, forcing the pirate into the sea and a fate of tugboat shark food. Willoughby and Carmelita return to colonial society, Willoughby becoming a gentleman and Carmelita his lady.
Superficially things appear to have settled down, but it turns out that every year, Carmelita takes a strange trip somewhere. Curious, when an opportunity presents itself for him to find out where she’s going, Willoughby takes it, and discovers that she’s been visiting a cemetery where Carmelita has commissioned a little gravestone for Joaquina.
Even if you set aside the magical sharks for a minute, there’s a lot going on here. There is sexual violence in “Strange Interval,” clearly, but is this text a reflection on gender or something else entirely?
Here’s where it gets sticky.
Let’s hold off from the forced feminization and start instead with the subject of cuckolding. Why? Because cuckolding is a popular American sexual fantasy, particularly among cis heterosexual men, (in Justin J. Lehmiller’s survey of over 4,000 American adults online—58 percent of men surveyed reported fantasizing about troilism/cuckolding, and over a quarter of them fantasized about it regularly) and troilism’s presence in the narrative is an important clue to understanding this text’s logic.
As you may have noticed, cuckolding fantasies often feature elements of submission and masochism, and this appears to be especially true in heterosexual relationships where the man plays the role of observer.
Lehmiller, Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life (2020) 52
While we like to believe that everything is relatively new, cuckolding is found in many ancient myths and religious texts, including Greek mythology and the Christian Bible. The immaculate conception of Jesus presents the essentials of cuckolding without including any sex. A couple is married (or close enough), the wife has (divine) relations with someone perceived as being more powerful than her spouse, the husband feels shame, but their relationship survives, and they are rewarded with a strengthened bond (and a god for a kid).
It’s likely that cuckolding, and cuckolding fantasies, arose directly in response to the anxieties of marriage itself. Partnership as a landed transaction based on a monogamous contract implies that every perceived loss of a partner is a threat. In this scarcity-bound way of thinking, sex outside of marriage threatens an eventual loss of domestic security. Sexual fantasies about cuckolding arise to address these anxieties, which were obviously extant in the 1930s. The 1933 film Design for Living, based on the 1932 Noël Coward play, is an excellent example of a narrative that plays with cuckolding/troilism anxiety and eroticism. “Strange Interval” is only a few years shy of the cuckolding anxiety-rich narrative that swept American box offices in 1939: Gone With the Wind.
In an ideal cuckolding fantasy, the married couple’s relationship survives the “trials” or psychological stress of the cuckolding, and they are rewarded with a strengthened bond. Carmelita and Willoughby undergo that same strengthening, until they are eventually capable of breaking free from their captor. It is interesting to note that although Carmelita is sexually assaulted, she is not haunted with shame like Willoughby is, or forced to perform domestic tasks. Her class position is never threatened, and while they live on the island she is treated like Black Rudolph’s wife:
She had accepted her position with a fatalistic calm, and lived with Black Rudolph in conditions almost simulating matrimony.
That is because her sexual assault is also part of Quinn’s fantasy. She does not suffer from trauma in a chronic or realistic way throughout the narrative because having her character suffer realistically would not be erotic. For all its violent trappings, this is an erotic adventure story, intended to titillate as much as it shocked its readers.
Forced feminization is a kink, and has very little to do with gender and much to do with arousal and power, specifically the perceived power that performing different gender roles enables or diminishes. The key to unlocking Quinn’s interpretation of this as pure kink, and not a sexual fantasy say, about his own gender identity, is his attention to shame and class. Becoming a woman/maid is “the accolade of degradation,” or a way to degrade his male/gentleman body. The constant thematic fixation on shame indicates a BDSM element at play. Quinn’s protagonist loses his class status, his testicles, and his identity as a man, but it’s crucial to observe that even though he never regains his testicles, Willoughby’s gender identity or “manhood” and class status return to him. Like the end of a rough BDSM play session he leaves with scars, but nothing that could ultimately threaten his gender or class. He is, after all, a Virginia gentleman.
Forced feminization fantasies can arise in response to anxieties about gender or class. While extant in the 1930s, these sexual fantasies would have been regarded as queer, and are therefore more difficult to find in mainstream media. One of the earliest known films about forced feminization is 1906’s Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) – a short about an alternate reality where gender roles are reversed – that was later remade in 1912 as In the Year 2000. 1908 brought us Troubles of a Grass Widower which uses circumstantial forced feminization as comedy. There’s also 1913’s The Little House in Kolomna, a Russian film where a woman feminizes her boyfriend in order to force him to perform domestic chores for her as a maid. At first he’s excited to dress in drag/be in close proximity to his girlfriend, but he appears to visibly dislike performing these chores, and splits as soon as his cross-dressing is discovered by others.
Even if Seabury Quinn was not exposed to these particular films, he was likely aware of drag. Drag has roots in theater and vaudeville, and drag film history starts alongside the silent film era. Frequently most early drag performances were included for comedic effect. When Charlie Chaplin or The Three Stooges dressed in drag, their performances were intended as jokes. What these jokes hid, of course, was anxiety about the flexibility of gender. It’s notable, therefore, that Seabury Quinn’s story articulates this specific erotic fantasy in a mainstream publication.
Seabury Quinn’s sensual preoccupation with texture lingers on almost every page of “Strange Interval.” Black Rudolph is often described as a dichotomy of textures, rough and soft, violent yet perceptive, he is the “strangely sensitive beast” of the story.
Black Rudolph put the girl from him, not roughly, but with a kind of slow, deliberate tenderness, and the startlingly red lips beneath his black mustache were parted in a smile that showed a hard, white line of teeth as merciless as those of any wolf.
He is the aggressive antithesis to Willoughby’s meek submission, the cuckolding large ship that physically demolishes Willoughby’s small buckeye.
Because this is a sensual world, intended for erotic consumption, there is a preoccupation with sensualism. Fabrics are soft or coarse or expensive or cheap, but they’re always well-described. Black Rudolph wears felt and diamonds, cambric and lace and velvet and Spanish leather. Willoughby is, by contrast, described as being “uniformed” when he is reunited with society and regains his status as a gentleman. Willoughby, although respectable, is less texturally interesting as a gentleman than the pirate Black Rudolph who indulges in his sexual impulses. It’s only when Willoughby becomes Joaquina and starts to delight in the dresses that she wears that her fabrics come to life. “Stiff brocade” and “clinging gowns of rustling silk” are worthy of Seabury Quinn’s descriptive attention, in addition to a pair of red heels and a corset.
Wool is the fabric that restores Willoughby’s masculinity to him—a less flashy and far more functional fabric than what Joaquina prefers to wear. Willoughby’s wool is “coarse” and “rasps”; it is the antithesis of the softness or smoothness of silk. This arbitrary binary is enough to break the spell of Black Rudolph’s hell/paradise and end Quinn’s sexual fantasy, only to briefly take us on a shark-filled high-speed boating adventure on the open sea.
I’d like to think that this was America’s first “jumping the shark” moment. It definitely predates that Happy Days episode.
For a long time he remained kneeling, and when he rose there was a look upon his face such as one might wear if he had seen the wraith of one whom he had loved and lost long since […]
In any case, what does the narrative “sting” of Willoughby discovering Joaquina’s grave lend to this discussion? It certainly implies that Carmelita is mourning Joaquina’s absence, while giving the story a nice “look at your own grave” moment that pulp magazines frequently enjoyed employing as a trope at the time. The grave could also be interpreted as a part or version of Willoughby that he buried when he left his kinky lifestyle behind on the island, but it feels like a stretch to associate this with a buried or lost gender identity. Joaquina is:
[…] a piteous, forgotten little ghost, without so much as a dead body to call hers.
But Willoughby does not mourn her loss. If this story is about Willoughby’s lost identity, why didn’t he commission the gravestone and take trips to grieve? The gravestone is outside of Willoughby’s purview; purchasing the plot and having the stone carved were tasks only Carmelita undertook. The gravestone is about her grief and Willoughby’s shock at encountering it. Gender isn’t buried in that plot. But perhaps there is something about gender to be gleaned here.
Even though he doesn’t articulate it explicitly within his text, on some level Seabury Quinn obviously understood that gender is contained within the human mind, and not our genitals. As he wrote out this sexual fantasy he instinctively knew that gender could be as easy as feeling connected to one’s own gender presentation—that a pair of pants was more than enough to prove Willoughby’s manhood to himself—but failed to distinguish any differences between kink and identity.
Quinn would likely have had a great deal of difficulty understanding the concept of a person identifying as trans and asexual, for example, because he appears to perceive transness as an innately sexual (and temporary) identity. While people may have gender-bending sexual fantasies, being trans is not a kink. Being trans is about living as the gender you identify as. Forced feminization is a kink, a temporary fantasy; but being trans is about gender identity, and living in the real world. Being trans is being trans all of the time, because it’s who a trans person is. It’s being trans and waiting in line at the DMV; it’s being trans and running out to buy toilet paper because you forgot to get it earlier that day; it’s being trans at the hospital and receiving a difficult medical diagnosis; it’s being trans and being a little sad because you broke your favorite coffee mug.
Transness is not inherently sexy, it’s just a part of a person, like a blood vessel or a fingernail. Anything else is erotic projection.
So one drop. No more.
“Strange Interval” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.
M. Lopes da Silva (he/they/she) is a white Latinx and non-binary trans masc author and artist from Los Angeles. He has previously been employed as a sex worker, an art critic, and an educator. In 2020 Unnerving Magazine published his novella Hooker: a pro-queer, pro-sex work, feminist retrowave pulp thriller about a bisexual sex worker hunting a serial killer in 1980s Los Angeles using hooks as her weapons of choice. Dread Stone Press just published his first novelette What Ate the Angels – a queer vore sludgefest that travels beneath the streets of Los Angeles starring a non-binary ASMR artist and their vore-loving girlfriend – in Volume Two of the Split Scream series. On Twitter he’s @_MLopesdaSilva – on Instagram he’s @authormlopesdasilva.
Copyright 2023 Mitch Lopes da Silva.
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