Seabury Quinn: A Weird Tales View of Gender and Sexuality

This thesis analyzes conceptions of gender and sexuality during the progressive and interwar periods by examining Seabury Quinn’s Weird Tales stories. It also examines Quinn’s life and various influences on his storytelling. The pulp magazine Weird Tales served as a highly accessible platform from which Quinn both challenged and abided by traditionalist attitudes. This thesis examines Quinn’s depictions of femininity in Weird Tales, and demonstrates that his stories often punished independent female characters as a means to reinforce traditionalist ideas. Quinn’s stories reflected a backlash against many of the freedoms that women had gained during the progressive and interwar periods. American conceptions of masculinity continued to change during the interwar period especially, during the Depression which produced new assumptions about American manhood. Amidst these reformulations of American masculinity, a unique male characterization was born in Seabury Quinn’s protagonist Jules de Grandin. Unlike other interwar characters, Quinn’s Jules de Grandin rejected the figure of American bodybuilder in favor of one that emphasized male effeminacy. The sexuality of these effeminate male characters was often unclear, and it is difficult to discern whether this was a serious attempt by Quinn to circulate literature with homosexual elements in the public sphere or just an attempt to lure readers with mentions of social taboos. Quinn’s challenge to emerging ideas of masculinity and femininity are important to a study of the era of interwar history. Stephanie Brimson's name changed to Stephanie Claudio in January of 2017.