Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the diagnostic classification system used in the United States, as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy." ^[1]

The narcissist is described as turning inward for gratification rather than depending on others and as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power and prestige.^[2] Narcissistic personality disorder is closely linked to self-centeredness.

Classification

DSM-IV divides personality disorders into three clusters based on symptom similarities.^[1] This clustering categorizes the Narcissistic personality disorder as a cluster B personality disorder, those personality disorders having in common an excessive sense of self importance. Also in that cluster are the Borderline personality disorder, the Histrionic personality disorder and the Antisocial personality disorder.

The ICD-10 (International Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, published by the World Health Organisation in Geneva 1992) regards narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) as "a personality disorder that fits none of the specific rubrics". It relegates it to the category known as "Other specific personality disorders", which also includes the eccentric, "haltlose", immature, passive-aggressive, and psychoneurotic personality disorders.

[edit] DSM Criteria

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:^[1]

1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance
2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
3. believes that he or she is "special" and unique
4. requires excessive admiration
5. has a sense of entitlement
6. is interpersonally exploitative
7. lacks empathy
8. is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her
9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

[edit] ICD-10 Criteria

While the ICD-10 does not specifically define the characteristics of this personality disorder, it is classified in the category "Other Specific Personality Disorders".

ICD-10 states that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is "a personality disorder that fits none of the specific rubrics F60.0-F60.7". That is, this personality disorder does not meet the diagnostic criteria for any of the following:

• F60.0 Paranoid Personality Disorder
• F60.1 Schizoid Personality Disorder
• F60.2 Dissocial Personality Disorder
• F60.3 Emotionally Unstable (Borderline) Personality Disorder
• F60.4 Histrionic Personality Disorder
• F60.5 Anankastic (Obsessive-Compulsive) Personality Disorder
• F60.6 Anxious (Avoidant) Personality Disorder
• F60.7 Dependent Personality Disorder

[edit] Epidemiology

Lifetime prevalence is estimated at 1% in the general population and 2% to 16% in clinical populations. ^[3]

[edit] Hypothetical causes

The etiology of this disorder is unknown according to Groopman and Cooper. However, they list the following factors identified by various researchers as possible factors.^[3]

• An oversensitive temperament at birth
• Overindulgence and overvaluation by parents
• Valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem
• Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback
• Unpredictable or unreliable caregiving from parents
• Severe emotional abuse in childhood
• Being praised for perceived exceptional looks or talents by adults
• "Excessive praise for good behaviors or excessive criticism for poor behaviors in childhood"

Some narcissistic traits are common and a normal developmental phase. When these traits are compounded by a failure of the interpersonal environment and continue into adulthood they may intensify to the point where NPD is diagnosed.^{[citation needed]} It has been suggested^[who?] that NPD may be exacerbated by the onset of aging and the physical, mental, and occupational restrictions it imposes as can most personality traits.^{[4][dubious – discuss]}

Various Clinical Views

Pathological narcissism occurs over a broad spectrum of severity. In its more extreme forms, it is narcissistic personality disorder. NPD is considered to result from a person's belief that he or she is flawed in a way that makes the person fundamentally unacceptable to others ^[5]. This belief is held below the person's conscious awareness; such a person would typically deny thinking such a thing, if questioned. In order to protect themselves against the intolerably painful rejection and isolation that (they imagine) would follow if others recognised their supposedly defective nature, such people make strong attempts to control others’ view of them and behaviour towards them.

Pathological narcissism can develop from an impairment in the quality of the person's relationship with their primary caregivers, usually their parents, in that the parents were unable to form a healthy, empathic attachment to them.^{[citation needed]} This results in the child conceiving of themselves as unimportant and unconnected to others. The child typically comes to believe that he or she has some defect of personality which makes them unvalued and unwanted ^[6].

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is isolating, disenfranchising, painful, and formidable for those diagnosed with it and often those who are in a relationship with them. Distinctions need to be made among those who have NPD because not each and every person with NPD is the same. Even with similar core issues, the way in which one's individual narcissism manifests itself in his or her relationships varies.^{[citation needed]}

To the extent that people are pathologically narcissistic, they can be controlling, blaming, self-absorbed, intolerant of others’ views, unaware of others' needs and of the effects of their behavior on others, and insistent that others see them as they wish to be seen ^[4]. They may also demand certain behavior from their children because they see the children as extensions of themselves, and need the children to represent them in the world in ways that meet the parents’ emotional needs ^[7]. (For example, a narcissistic father who was a lawyer demanded that his son, who had always been treated as the "favorite" in the family, enter the legal profession as well. When the son chose another career, the father rejected and disparaged him.)

These traits will lead overly narcissistic parents to be very intrusive in some ways, and entirely neglectful in others. The children are punished if they do not respond adequately to the parents’ needs. This punishment may take a variety of forms, including physical abuse, angry outbursts, blame, attempts to instill guilt, emotional withdrawal, and criticism. Whatever form it takes, the purpose of the punishment is to enforce compliance with the parents' narcissistic needs^[7].

People who are overly narcissistic commonly feel rejected, humiliated and threatened when criticised. To protect themselves from these dangers, they often react with disdain, rage, and/or defiance to any slight criticism, real or imagined ^[8]. To avoid such situations, some narcissistic people withdraw socially and may feign modesty or humility.

Though individuals with NPD are often ambitious and capable, the inability to tolerate setbacks, disagreements or criticism, along with lack of empathy, make it difficult for such individuals to work cooperatively with others or to maintain long-term professional achievements ^[9]. With narcissistic personality disorder, the person's perceived fantastic grandiosity, often coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically not commensurate with his or her real accomplishments.

The exploitativeness, sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, disregard for others, and constant need for attention inherent in NPD adversely affect interpersonal relationships.

Theories on Narcissistic personality disorder and shame

It has been suggested that Narcissistic personality disorder may be related to defenses against shame. ^[10]

Gabbard suggested NPD could be broken down into two subtypes^[11]. He saw the "oblivious" subtype as being grandiose, arrogant and thick skinned and the "hypervigilant" subtype as easily hurt, oversensitive and ashamed.

He suggested that the oblivious subtype presents a large, powerful, grandiose self to be admired, envied and appreciated. This self is the antithesis of the weakened and internalised self that hides in a generic state of shame. This is how the internalized self fends off devaluation, while the hypervigilant subtype neutralises devaluation by seeing others as unjust abusers. This hypervigilent type does not fend off devaluation; he is obsessed with it.

Jeffrey Young, who coined the term "Schema Therapy", a technique originally developed by Aaron T. Beck (1979), also links shame to NPD. He sees the so-called Defectiveness Schema as a core schema of NPD, next to the Emotional Deprivation and Entitlement Schemas. ^[12]. The Defectiveness Schema is compensated with three Schema Modes (coping strategies):

• Surrender: Choose critical partners and significant others; puts him- or herself down.
• Avoidance: Avoids sharing "shameful" thoughts and feelings with partners and significant others due to fear of rejection.
• Overcompensation: Behaves in a critical or superior way toward others; tries to come across as perfect.

Note that an individual with this schema might not employ all three schema modes.

[edit] Treatment and prognosis

Most psychiatrists and psychologists regard NPD as a relatively stable condition when experienced as a primary disorder ^[7]. James F. Masterson outlines a prominent approach to healing NPD, while ^[6] discussing a continuum of severity and the kinds of therapy most effective in different cases. Typically, as narcissism is an ingrained personality trait, rather than a chemical imbalance, medication and therapy are not very effective in treating the disorder. Schema Therapy, a form of therapy developed by Jeffrey E. Young that integrates several therapeutic approaches (psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral etc.), also offers an approach for the treatment of NPD. ^[13] It is unusual for people to seek therapy for NPD. Subconscious fears of exposure or inadequacy are often met with defensive disdain of therapeutic processes.^[14][15] Pharmacotherapy is rarely used. In a review of the literature, one patient responded to Wellbutrin.[1]

[edit] See also

• Narcissism (psychology)
• Narcissistic rage
• Narcissistic supply
• Malignant narcissism
• Hubris
• Victory disease
• Peter Pan syndrome
• Dorian Gray syndrome
• Superiority complex
• Narcissus (mythology)
• Brian Blackwell
• Histrionic Personality Disorder
• Antisocial Personality Disorder

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

Full list in DSM-IV-TR)^[1]

• The Culture of Narcissism, C. Lasch, New York: Norton; Revised edition (May 1991). ISBN 978-0393307382

[edit] External links

• DSM-IV-TR Narcissistic Personality Disorder Diagnostic Criteria
• NPD - How to recognize a narcissist
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) Quiz

(Published in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts [Spring 1989]
as the center for a forum on its accuracy and interdisciplinary, intercultural applications)

 
. . . Nothing is surer than that we [men] will no longer desire them [women], for one does not desire what one possesses.
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-98)

 
Playboy, buck, stud, Don Juan, rake, wolf, rogue, Lothario, Bluebeard, roué, incubus, satyr, hunk, "the Fonz," romeo, babe, lady killer, Casanova -- all are names and terms that have been used to describe the sexually active, multiple-partnered male. Curiously, even though such figures have received specific scholarly attention and social admiration throughout the ages, the single entity they mirror has never been specifically identified or labeled. This is particularly odd since, despite the extensive contemporary feminist preoccupation with the modern destructive male, the figure is actually an ancient, primordial entity and a pervasive archetype.

Sherri S. Tepper in her contemporary horror novel, The Bones, provides an apt and universal label for this archetype, the "femivore" (222). For Tepper's protagonist, Marie, he "' . . . was simply too good-looking by far, improbably good-looking. He broadcast a kind of fatal fascination. Like Count Dracula. The kind of man who eats women for breakfast -- and lunch and dinner'" (221-2).

The femivore's essential nature is that he infatuates and seduces women and leaves them bereft of spiritual and often physical life. He sucks them dry, dooming them to perpetual states of waiting. He has ever been the Dionysian swashbuckler, beguiling and faithless. Most often, in literature and mythology, he escapes consequences and responsibilities and is allowed to remain a memorable and ephemeral treasure whose supernatural prowess defies mere mortals. His characteristic departure is often shrouded in mystery (or the story just ends). Sometimes his real appearance is concealed by simple disguises, such as the masked lover. In more supernatural moments, he is a shapeshifter (metamorph) as is Zeus with Leda and Danaë. In all cases, he is unbearably independent (Jung 25) and does not linger to concern himself with the futures of the ravished females he leaves behind.

Such a creature, of course, makes any sense of love and eros inconsequential. The femivore's concerns are immediate and lustful. He doesn't nurture. Thus, he debilitates any sense of past or future. He makes the most incredible things believable, even Sleeping Beauty's kiss. As such, he violates women's traditional fantasies of security, social and financial acceptance and stability, and marriage to the Father Reborn. He summons to full, passionate life the clay that, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, should be somnolent to insure salvation. Bram Dijkstra, even though he is speaking from the decidedly masculine milieu of the Fin-de-Siècle cle in Idols of Perversity, nonetheless captures the diabolical content here: The phallus, the snake, " . . . with its uncontrollable capacity to spring forward, was indeed the satanic companion to the woman whose presence caused it to uncoil" (305).

Within the more modern, elevated concept of self-actualization, the femivore is the male who dooms the female to a secondary, dormant life in which she exists simply as the waiting explosive for blazes of inconsequential romance, the state Madonna Kolbenschlag identifies so well through her descriptions of the "formula female" and the "other-oriented female" in Kiss Sleeping-Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models. Within the carnal present the femivore creates, his pagan lure is irresistible, and he is a creature of fantasy at its most extreme, both immature and foolish.

From this definition, it would be easy enough to label the femivore as misogynist and wastrel: indifferent to humanity in women, insensitive and irresponsible to all but himself. He might slide smoothly into the concept of intercourse as a punishing tool to which men subject women, as Andrea Dworkin indicates in her novel Fire and Ice and nonfiction work Intercourse. At worst, literary types like the vampire, the demon lover (incubus), and Svengali figure come to mind, destructive in their possessiveness, diabolically and seminally evil. As such, the purposeful femivore is the ugly inversion of the father (Frye's false father [199]) who must discard his daughters and who remains ever out of reach, poisoning all future encounters. This is, of course, the curse of Terisa's father in Stephen R. Donaldson's The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through, Mordant's Need. In Western European culture, the penultimate illustration of this occurs in Eden. It is sadly indicative of masculine-dominated perceptions that, for centuries, no one seems to have cared that Eve is seduced first by a masculine numen, Lucifer/Satan; only then does Adam fall victim to her "feminine wiles." One of history's cruelest stupidities is that the blatant scapegoating of the first step has been ignored. Other examples of the rampaging male echo throughout literature, popular culture, and folklore: the callousness of the seducers in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the destructiveness in The Thousand Nights and One Night and of Bluebeard, and the indifference in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale" and the films Gone with the Wind, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and American Gigolo.

However, unlike his female counterparts, the nixie (Jung 25) and the Maenad, and the obvious male villains (i.e., the vampire), the femivore is rarely presented or perceived as evil, especially by those he victimizes and those who chronicle and relish his conquests. As such, he is deceptive. In fact, he is a prime example of incarnate social fantasy and its duality. Objectively, he is a fleeting parasite who should be anathema to all women. Yet, even among the intelligent and enlightened, he is the shaman of swoons and utter devotion, much like Michael Valentine Smith in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. He is misconceived as mischievous, even non-threateningly boyish. His charm is, in part, like the fauns', those playful demigods who flip skirts and pinch bottoms. Deeply insidious, if not fully disguised by the cloak of socialized fantasy, the femivore is not relevant to the battles between the sexes upon which Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar focus ("Sex Wars . . ." passim; No Man's passim). No, between the ever-adolescent femivore and his welcoming female, there is no struggle, only submission, in their willing bondings. This is no game of Ombre, mock or otherwise. Indeed, the femivore as archetype and social role model has lead numerous adolescent males through the rite of passage of casual sex (sport fucking) -- the "find 'em, feel 'em, fuck 'em, forget 'em" pattern. He is what C. G. Jung calls the "original Man," the one-sided sexual being (Jung 71) who is all animus and no anima.

More expansively, the dreams, behaviors, and rites of passage of misguided and excessively socialized women ("Wendys") and ever-adolescent males ("Peter Pans") are mirrors of the frequently romanticized femivore when he serves as admirable male paragon and vision of transformation (e.g., Cinderella) and she as desirable female companion. This archetypal pattern is obvious in the contemporary bodice rippers known as Harlequin or gothic romances. Amid the mundane, the femivore festers as an accepted and falsely innocuous part of life's furniture and automatically assumed fantasies. He need not be obvious or even deliberate. Like Isaac Asimov's Mule in Foundation and Empire, the femivore and his rapturous female victims only acquire consciences and guilt if they ever become aware of the true nature of their desires and couplings. Social acceptance prevents this from happening, either in the minds of artistic creators or characters. The femivore and victim celebrate an unconscious subjugation to the rite of sexual ruination. He is seduction without fruition. It is his nature to leave -- fidelity is beyond his abilities -- and while the female may empirically know this, she refuses emotionally to acknowledge it, choosing instead to consecrate and consummate herself to oblivion.

The cause of the femivore's vitality is clear. He is bound irrevocably to many materializations of the hero, even when he is the "lovable bastard." Normal people are always helpless before heroes, and women are expected to fawn into sexual surrender before these conquerors as they continually move from feat to trial, leaving broken hearts (and devastated psyches and self-concepts) scattered behind them. Thus, one necessary task in the recognition of the femivore is to reassess definitions of the heroic with an eye on its exploitative nature. In this, the hero may be a subtle, likable, socially enviable, and glamorous rapist, for whom beguilement replaces force.

Bram Dijkstra offers a striking, carnal description of the relationship between the femivore and the pliable woman:

The virgin and the whore, the saint and the vampire -- two designations for a single dualistic opposition: that of woman as man's exclusive and forever pliable private property, on the one hand, and her transformation, upon her denial of man's ownership rights to her, into a polyandrous predator indiscriminately lusting after man's social essence, on the other (334).

Nina Auerbach's justification for the inevitable conquest of the femivore, in Woman and the Devil: The Life of a Victorian Myth, is more psychological and civilized: femivores "are endowed with a magic beyond their own; they possess the secret tradition of the culture," within which "the women they captivate seem not just enfeebled but culturally naked" (16).

As compelling and engaging as Dijkastra's and Auerbach's descriptions are, they fail because they do not plumb the depths that an archetype involves. Both the femivore and his willing victims are, indeed, fonts for the astonishing mythological histories of the virgin birth and the birth of the hero. The "secret tradition" to which Auerbach mysteriously alludes is really not arcane; rather, it is the mythic legacy of humanity's long primordial traditions surrounding human women experiencing supernatural impregnation, being the vehicles for virgin births, and bearing heroes and gods. These events are made of the very essences of magic and functional fantasy. By definition, the amorous visitations of frolicking, anthropomorphic deities are a "psychic genesis"; everything about them must be non-empirical and of the "highest good" (Jung 166). The lusty visitations of these "Invisible Unknowns" (Campbell Hero, 297) and "Expected Ones" (Kolbenschlag 108) embody all the "other-centered" female fantasies of the perfect child, the hero-son, and ultimate fulfillment of fruition. Consider the following wonder children, selected for their chronological and geographic indicativeness, that fill human history and bear testament to the beneficent visitations of benevolent femivores: the Babylonian Sargon I; the Hindu Krishna; the Summerian Tammuz; the Toltec Quetzalcoatl (Campbell, Primitive 457); the Black Feet Little Star; the Roman Romulus and Remus; the Greek Perseus, Hercules, and Telephus; the Aztec Coatliuce; the Tongaese Fatai-going-underneath-sandlewood (Campbell Hero, 312); the Persian Zoroaster; and the Christian Christ. In light of these divine gifts, is it too surprising that women, throughout history, have yearningly awaited the carnal embraces of the Egyptian Ra/Re (Campbell Oriental, 98-100), the Christian Holy Ghost, the Irish Lovetalker (Duffy 47), the Greek Zeus, the German Odin and Loki, the Toltec All-Father, the Eskimo Bird-Phantom who seduces Sédna, the Black Feet Morning Star, and even the pedestrian knight-errant? If these circumstances seem too provincial or archaic to modern audiences, recently, the growing Elvis Presley cult has given rise to reports of virgin births and spiritual intercourse, demonstrating the continuing vitality of this mythology. In addition, the activities and supplicatory oblations of female rock and athletic groupies have often been chronicled. Such celebrity rites of sexual surrender prove only too well that each age worships its own gods.

This willingness to wait for transformation by an external, magic force has plagued women throughout time (Dijkstra 318). It illustrates the religious phenomenon of awe, the state of blind belief in and obedience to appearances and fixed ideas that have been distilled and instilled by religious and social dogma. This continuing, ritual participation is what Joseph Campbell identifies as surrender by general humanity to a system of "historically conditioned sentiments, activities, and beliefs . . ." (Primitive 462). Women are particularly susceptible to such submissions because of the traditional social and spiritual oppression and exploitation that they have suffered for ages and continue to suffer. As Kolbenschlag observes:

If Don Juan is the archetypal male aesthete [from Kierkegarrd in Either/Or as the life characterized by immersion in the immediate; the "accidental person"], his victims are archetypal female aesthetes. "To seduce all girls is the masculine expression of the feminine yearning to let herself be seduced once and with all her heart and soul." Thus, the absence of commitment to the self, the compulsion to "live for another," to be psychically annihilated and controlled by someone beyond the self -- common symptoms of female psychology -- are the characteristics of the minimal level of spiritual existence. This level of existence is marked by illusion, since power over oneself has been given over to someone outside oneself (24).

The femivore's false promises are the expectations of power and the acquisition of magic. Contemporary manifestations of women's frustrated need for power are, of course, the "shopping syndrome" (Kolbenschlag 17-18) and, from the realm of the cinema, the recent films that demonstrate the power of older women over younger, Dionysian men, such as A Night in Heaven, In Praise of Older Women, and In the Mood, the last supposedly the true story of the teen-age Woo Woo Kid, who married older women with the best of intentions. Thus, the silver screen contends that there is now even hope for middle-aged women, who have lived beyond the socially acceptable standard of beauty, to redeem their "barren" lives. Tania Modleski, in Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, provides a model² that yields further and more penetrating insight into this "power" that women seek in their bondings with femivores in her examination of the Harlequin romance and its link to the nineteenth-century traditions of Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), and Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice). Modleski describes the male-female interaction as follows: the male, older protagonist is ". . . mocking, cynical, contemptuous, often hostile, and even somewhat brutal. By the end, however, all misunderstandings are cleared away, and the hero reveals his love for the heroine, who reciprocates" (36). What Modleski's description of an enormously popular female myth shows is that women are not only awaiting transformation but are also seeking the godlike power to transform. This is common enough, and it is the rare individual that has not seen women enter into relationships with debilitating men with clear visions of "fixing" them and "mending their ways" once single males become husbands (a desire that frustration will often transfer to male children). Thus, women do seek the roles of priestess and shaper, not just generatrix.

Yet, historically, women's power to transform and their compulsions to be transformed are rarely realized in their interactions with "significant" males. The femivore, divine child, and virgin birth demonstrate women's secondary priorities to visitations from male deities and to greater wonders and magic. In the literature, art, theology, folklore, and mythology of the femivore, women are rarely more than vessels that gain little except passing interest from their creators and lovers. Women fade away or into the background before the grandeurs of great goodness and omnipotent causes. An obvious illustration of this is Mary, who is but a pale and emasculated version of her historic antecedent, the Earth Mother/Mother Goddess (Kolbenschlag 186).

Why the femivore himself behaves as he does could be easily dismissed with superficial psychology. For example, he suffers from satyriasis, the socially approved form of nymphomania. He is insecure or lonely. He fears imprisonment, the feminine power of engulfment, and the loss of power. Certainly, there is something to all of this (if only from the viewpoint of active and functional rationalizations), and femivorism does lead so many males to spiritually and emotionally destructive and barren existences.

From social and psychological perspectives, however, to leave the causes of the vitality of the femivore to either sex is gravely erroneous. His existence requires a conspiracy and a mutual acquiescence from both sexes. The couplings of femivores and victims repeat archetypal patterns in which they both seek individually and mutually destructive power. Most curiously, there is false pride and hope that derives from participating, that somehow this ageless conspiracy brings the divine into the mortal. Such repetitive sacrifices of the flesh and the psyche throughout all human history and art point to the great danger of ignorance and insensitivity. Those who do not understand can only mirror and repeat. Life happens to them, and femivore and victim both denigrate what it means to be human.

From the more positive perspective of literary criticism, the exploration of the femivore and other archetypes demonstrate how critical the interdisciplinary and international "fantastic sensibility" can be to revisioning art and thought. By deviating sharply from traditional intellectual restrictions of time and field, it uncovers not only the subtle, but the obvious, thereby creating new epistemologies. Indeed, by their very natures, archetypal images are stunningly obvious once articulated. What remains for the femivore and other such "new" discoveries is to view and test them on the broadest possible stage of history and knowledge. If they are legitimate and essential parts of the past and future of the human condition, they should appear over and over again across the full spectrum of both the mundane and the lofty activities of people and artists as they play out their lives.

NOTES

  ¹A shorter version of this paper was originally presented at the Ninth International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. I am indebted to the numerous and generous observations and suggestions that its presentation inspired, especially to those of Kathryn Hume, Carl B. Yoke, and Veronica Hollinger.

²While this male-female mythology may be a potent modern force, its antiquity is unquestioned. Beside all appropriate material surrounding heroic art, Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale" is almost a perfect match for the "modern" Harlequin romance.

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Devil: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Cleveland and New York: Meridian, 1956.

_____. Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1962.

_____. Primitive Mythology: The Masks of God. Rev. ed. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1969.

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Female Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Duffy, Maureen. The Erotic World of Faery. New York: Avon-Discus, 1980.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Volume One: The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

_____. "Sex Wars: Not the Funkind." New York Times Book Review 27 December 1987: 20-21, 23.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. 9, i. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968.

Kolbenschlag, Madonna. Kiss Sleeping-Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979; rpt. Toronto: Bantam, 1981.

Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasties for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon-Shoe String, 1982.

Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and other Writings. Ed. Philip Freund. New York: Random-Vintage, 1959.

Tepper, Sheri S. The Bones. New York: Tor, 1987.

Vargas' fantasy women captured the American imagination during the Second World War; both naughty and nice, the "Varga Girls" were women that men wanted to worship and women wanted to emulate. Vargas' pin-ups popularly idealized an unusually self-aware female sexuality that had previously been viewed in negative representations of the popular pornographic female or the "high art" femme fatale. However, with the rise of feminist thought since the postwar era, it is difficult for the late twentieth-century viewer to consider such images without cynicism. From Laura Mulvey's psychoanalytical construction of the "masculine gaze" to Andrea Dworkin and Katharine MacKinnon's continuous appeals to broaden the cultural and legal definition of pornography, the wide range of feminist discourse on the ways in which women are manipulated and victimized through various cultural representations has unquestionably affected the way in which individuals tend to interpret the pin-up today.

My interest in investigating the origins and interpretations of the pin-up stem from the fact that many feminist authors from writer Susie Bright to rockers Seven Year Bitch, performance artist Annie Sprinkle to pop icon Madonna have adopted the iconography of the pin-up genre in their image and art. In such recent feminist art and performance, the American pin-up seems to have provided women with a visual and performative source of female power that many feminist interpretations have often denied such imagery. As the Varga Girl has unquestionably cemented the definition of what it means to be a "pin-up" in the realm of female imagery, my investigation led me to question what it was about her specific role, and the boom of popular pin-up imagery that she ushered in during the Second World War, that has helped lead to readings of the pin-up as a model for sexual empowerment and agency for many contemporary feminists. In searching to define the context in which she was created and emulated, I found that the Varga Girl was constructed and received as a modern war goddess, both inspired by and inspirational toward the shifting roles of women in American society during WWII. As such, the Varga Girl can be read as an icon for this powerful if fleeting moment in American history.

The modern pin-up, as Abigail Solomon-Godeau has written, has its origins in the nineteenth century, at the moment when the bourgeois interest in female spectacle and modern reproductive techniques in print and photographic imagery converged. Moving the image of the sexualized female away from both explicit pornographic representation and allegorical academic pretenses, what emerged was what Solomon-Godeau calls: "an image type....predicated on the relative isolation of its feminine motif through the reduction or outright elimination of narrative, literary, or mythological allusion....[and a] decontextualization, reduction or distillation of the image of femininity to a subject in and of itself."(1) The genre which emerged was one which focused on the implicit sexuality of the contemporary female, where a representational distinction was made from privately and guardedly consumed pornography through the conscious elimination or strategic covering of the genital area and artful posing according to the tenets of academic painting allowed such imagery to be widely and openly reproduced, distributed and displayed: qualities which would later lead to the genre's WWII christening as the "pin-up."

While the media and promotional uses of the pin-up through popular prints, cartes de visite, and lithographic advertising afforded the genre a fluctuating visibility to different genders and classes in the years before its rise as a popular culture icon in WWII, its subject remained invariable. As a popular image of contemporary female sexuality, these early pin-ups represented that which was accepted within societal limits of such sexual imagery: working-class women, dancers and actresses. These women's transgressive display of self-aware sexuality was viewed as both part-and-parcel of their class or trade, and distinct from the Victorian construct of the domestic, bourgeois "true woman," whose passionlessness and asexuality were virtues that the pin-up genre was ill suited to idealize.(2) However, with the changes in women's roles in the public sphere that occurred with the events surrounding American involvement in WWII, the pin-up's historical celebration of transgressive female sexuality found parallels in new constructions of virtuous womanhood during wartime, during which the meanings of both the genre and the sexualized female it represented shifted significantly.

It was arguably the founding of Esquire magazine in 1933 that helped elevate not only the status of the pin-up girl, but the context in which she was constructed and understood. In what one feminist historian has argued as "the first thoroughgoing, conscious attempt to organize a consuming male audience," Esquire was inspired by the boom of the men's clothing trade of the 'thirties and was originally intended for distribution primarily through male clothiers, modelling itself after the ladies fashion journals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.(3) However, popular demand for the innovative "men's magazine" was so great that 95,000 copies of the premier issue were recalled from stores and redistributed to newsstands.(4) In addition to the magazine's interest in documenting fashion trends, Esquire also sought to cultivate a reputation as a literary and cultural leader, publishing essays and fiction by such luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, and providing its readership with erudite articles on contemporary art, music, films and American politics. The magazine's most popular features, however, were its "girlie" cartoons, representing not charming Brooklyn girls or burlesque hall queens (popular pin-up subjects since the nineteenth century in tabloids such as the National Police Gazette), but glamorous upper-class women of the American nouveau-riche in various states of undress and humorous situations. Esquire Petty Girl gatefold

Esquire's combination of cultural sophistication and bawdy humor led one critic to define the magazine's style as "a heavy load of excellence with a fine streak of vulgarity." (5) Although illustrators E. Simms Campbell, Alex Raymond, and Howard Baer and photographer George Hurrell helped construct the modern ideal of the Esquire woman, the magazine's most famous pin-up artist was George Petty. His wildly popular "Petty Girls" were primped and sporty cuties, whose cartoons were accompanied by gag caption one-liners, generally quoting the ladies' naïve reactions to the viewers ("Oh, you would, would you?"), or pouting responses to sugar-daddies ("I want to keep the ring for sentimental reasons!") presumably at the other end of the ever-present phone receiver held in her well-manicured hand. Rarely addressing the (always presumed male) viewer with her gaze, and always gleefully grinning for the approval of the viewer in the off- chance that she did, in these early Esquire cartoons and centerfolds the pin-up "outclassed" other pin-ups but had done so at the cost of the economic and sexual self-sufficiency and self-awareness which had characterized the pin-ups of the past.

With Petty's increased monetary demands from the publishers, in 1940 Esquire sought a replacement for the artist, which they found in Peruvian-born artist Alberto Vargas y Chavez. Schooled in Paris and Zurich, the self-taught artist had been exposed to both the academic work of neo-classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and popular European illustrators Raphael Kirschner and Alphonse Mucha, whose styles he assimilated and juxtaposed in his own work, of which he hoped to base a career upon moving the New York in 1916. Three years later, Vargas began working for Florenz Ziegfeld, painting portraits of the actresses of the Ziegfeld Follies for theatre displays, and magazine and sheet-music covers, and by the 'thirties, Vargas was accepting commissions from Hollywood studios Paramount, Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Brothers. Combining Ingres' fantastical idealization of the feminine figure, the art nouveau ideal of the aggressively sexual "modern woman" borrowed from Kirschner, and Mucha's deification of the theatrical femme fatale, Vargas sought to create an image of a twentieth-century goddess that fit the emergence of the decadent and sophisticated Hollywood female "star image," and would be the signature of his entire career.

After having been blackballed by Hollywood studios for taking part in unionized walkouts, Vargas began working for Esquire in 1940 as the replacement for Petty that the magazine had sought to groom. Vargas' first pin-up appeared as a gatefold in the October, 1940 issue, in which the pressure for the artist to live up to the precedent set by Petty was apparent.

The telephone scenario and an accompanying gold-digger verse of this first "Varga Girl" were perfectly in keeping with Petty's style, but the voluptuous, lingerie-clad trompe l'oeil figure, striking a dramatically sensual pose, was a complete departure from Petty's cheery naïfs. By Vargas' third Esquire pin-up, he had completely shrugged off the baggage of the Petty prototype and returned to the glamour- goddess style of his Ziegfeld and Hollywood portraiture.

Moreover, whereas Petty's pin-ups were characterized by their identical figures and facial features,leggy, well-proportioned and athletic, with heart-shaped faces and prominently full, brightly rouged cheeks Vargas' women varied widely, taking on individual "identities" through their different facial types, figures and senses of style. As influenced by women's fashion magazines as by any fine arts precedents, the Varga Girls revealed less flesh and possessed a greater level of contemporary fashion sense and sexual self-awareness than the giddy, girlish Petty pin-ups.

The most dramatic difference between the pin-ups of Vargas and Petty, however, was Vargas' fantastical approach to the female anatomy. While Petty's women were less rich in their coloring and shading, and shaped more along an hourglass-ideal than Vargas', they still tended toward realistic proportions. Vargas' women, on the other hand, uncannily mirrored the Odalisques of his hero, Ingres.

Like Ingres' career-long disfigurement of the human figure in the name of sensual pleasure (his famous Grande Odalisque prominently featured three extra vertebrae in her seductively-exposed back), Vargas embellished freely upon his renderings of the female body in order to exaggerate their sensuality. The Varga Girls' impossibly long legs ran derriere-lessly into their waists; their ample breasts spread irrationally far across their chests; and even eighteenth-century period drag clung to their bodies like the wet peploi-togas of Hellenistic marble goddesses. Just as Ingres' Odalisques would be unable to stand upright had they been born flesh-and-blood with such grotesquely erotic figural contortions, so Vargas' anatomical exaggerations of the female figure would have been downright monstrous on a real woman.

Adding to the Varga Girls' unsettling perfection was Vargas' airbrush technique. With the controlled paint-sprays of the tool, Vargas held enormous control over the subtleties that the artist chose to heighten their look. With the same instrument used to paint the flawlessly gleaming finishes of American roadsters and coupes, Vargas conjured up lemon meringue blondes with bodies just as steely and dangerous as anything rolling off the assembly lines in Dearborn and Detroit. In contrast, details such as eyes, lips, feet and hands were meticulously rendered by Vargas with extra-fine sable brushes that lifted the subjects' gazes, gestures, and accessories forcefully off the page. Engaging the viewers with their forward, even predatory gazes and beckoning gestures while distancing them with the shimmering solidity of their impossible figures and spectral surroundings, they seemed to entice, but not to invite. Aggressively contemporary and sexual, yet pointedly inaccessible and grotesquely feminine, the Varga Girls became to Esquire readers an icon which embodied the danger and power of an alluringly untouchable, modern female sexuality.

Within the first year of Esquire's Varga Girls, they had begun to find their own identity. The magazine dropped the Petty-esque gag-line jabs at the gatefold girls and replaced them with the adulatory verse of Phil Stack, constructing the Girls as women to be worshiped, not ridiculed. As early as October 1941, one month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Vargas' pin-ups and Stack's paeans served not only to praise the Varga Girls' beauty, but to give them a "voice" as the patriotic ideal of American womanhood. Previously in Esquire, Petty's military women had been represented as charming girls playing harmless "dress-up" in masculine drag. The Varga Girls, on the other hand, posed in (granted, seductively-amended) costumes and accessories of the armed forces, learning drills and semaphore, highly sexualized yet pointedly active women clothed in and usurping male power. As such, from early on Vargas associated the pin-ups with the American war effort.

Needless to say, WWII soldiers took just as strong a liking to the Varga Girls as the Girls had to Allied mobilization. After the American involvement in the war, the military demand for Vargas pin-ups was such that from 1942 to 1946 Esquire printed nine million copies of the magazine "without advertisements and free of charge" and sent them to American troops stationed overseas and in domestic military bases, often with extra, specially-designed Varga Girls prepared specifically for these "Military Editions." Swept up in the context of the "good fight," the Varga Girls were no longer the monthly centerfold that spiced up reading in the pre-war study or breakfast table, but a liaison to the homefront and a metaphor for the American girl. Bob Hope summed up the Varga Girls' overwhelmingly strong connection with American GIs when he proclaimed: "Our American troops are ready to fight at the drop of an Esquire"(6)

Nowhere was the Varga Girls' role in this capacity more prevalent than in their various appropriations by the American military troops. They hung alongside photos of friends, mom, and F.D.R. in both the barracks and the officers' quarters and graced the inside walls of tanks and planes. Significantly, the most common and most recognized appropriation of the Varga Girls was the nose art of WWII bombers. Paralleled to the ship-prow female figures of South Pacific and Viking sailing vessels, these pin-up images on American planes can be viewed similarly as images of cultural identification, and symbolic of cultural views of female sexuality thus represented as powerful and dangerous.(7) In the use of contemporary pin-ups in such a context to serve as a sort of troop "protectress" the genre effectively reversed the traditional roles of male/protector, female/protected. As Elaine Tyler-May notes of the association of the pin-up's aggressive sexuality with these generally male-identified implements of destruction (and liberation), such nose-art imagery also parallels these representations of pointedly contemporary female sexuality with danger and strength, further underscoring the power with which the genre and modern women so represented became invested during wartime.(8)

So associated, it comes as no surprise that the Varga Girls were far and away the most frequently appropriated pin-ups used on bomber noses, considering that their hyper- sexualized proportions and cultural affiliation with the United States made her as easily reviled as alluring. In a specially-designed Varga Girl created for a U.S. bomber squadron, she was a furious, scarlet-clothed war sprite that coaxed allied missiles seeming to spring forth from beneath her skirt toward their targets. Who better to shield those that wielded her image and destroyed her enemies than these icy American Athenas?

On the homefront, where women were strategizing their own day-to-day battles, the Varga Girls were making a significant impression as well. Contrary to the popular belief that pin-ups have historically been reserved for privileged consumption by men, studies such as feminist historian Joanne Meyerowitz's recent research on the genre demonstrate that since their inception pin-ups have frequently emerged in contexts which encouraged their visibility to female viewers; and in the case of the Second World War served as an increasingly acceptable ideal for women's sexual self-representation.(9) In the same issue as the first Varga Girl appeared an Esquire reader-poll article which indicated that nearly three-quarters of the "gentlemen's magazine" subscriptions were read by women, for whom the magazines illustrations were the number one attraction.(10) Although the male appropriation of pin-ups for nose art led to their being viewed then as now as nearly a pre-requisite for bombers, the genre was further removed from the realm of privileged male viewing, because of the proliferation of magazine pictorials and G.I. photos that were distributed on the homefront, and the pin-up impressed into the consciousness and culture of American women. In fact, one quarter of Vargas' fan mail at Esquire was from women asking not just for advice on how they could emulate the Varga Girls' style, but how they could get into a career as pin- up illustrators.(11)

As Meyerowitz notes, the wartime signification of the pin-up as a dangerous feminine force was not lost on the women who analyzed the genre. In fact, Meyerowitz cites the Esquire v. Frank C. Walker, Postmaster General case as exemplary of this fact. In 1943, Esquire's second-class mailing privileges were revoked due to what the Postmaster General decreed was the Varga Girls' legally pornographic ("obscene, lewd, and lascivious character") status.(12) Contesting the Postmaster's decision, both Esquire and the U.S. government called a series of female witnesses to testify as to their perspectives on the pin-ups' "decency." While the women were varied on their perspectives on the propriety and ubiquity of such brazen displays of female sexuality in popular culture, Meyerowitz notes that in the testimonies of all women both in favour of and against the Varga Girl features the genre's subjects were viewed as "active subjects luring men, not as victims of the male gaze."(13) It is with this in mind that I would like to note that, as Vargas' mail-bag suggests, for young women on the homefront, the pin-up eventually became the model for many of these women's self-representations; not coincidentally, during an era in which women were arguably, for the first time in American history encouraged by both political and cultural forces to develop an awareness of their roles as economic, productive and sexual agents.

With the pool of male workers drained from the labour force, government and labour efforts forcefully promoted the notion that it was not only fashionable, but downright necessary for women to enter the work force in the wartime era. During the war, women on the homefront had learned to perform many roles that years, even months, earlier had been deemed beyond their physical and mental capabilities. Similarly, with their wartime introduction to an integrated public sphere, women were faced with a rude awakening as to the power and problems that their sexuality posed in relations with their male counterparts in the previously male-dominated industrial and military forces.(14) The new found confidence instilled in many young women by their socially-sanctioned entrance into the work force, paired with the necessary sexual awareness of women that developed during WWII, allowed women to construct a new female image that reconciled traditional elements of beauty and glamour with new attributes of strength, independence, and bravery.(15)

In the WWII constructions of the pin-up ideal, as epitomized by Esquire's Varga Girl, women were almost invariably depicted with and celebrated for their sexually aggressive and self-aware poses, engaging the viewer with a direct gaze that underscored the subject's confident sexuality. And, as the Varga Girl had long associated herself with not only the war movement but trends in contemporary female issues and identity, the era also saw the Varga Girl shaped by the same new factors which affected the lives of their "real" counterparts in the public sphere: by 1946, through pin-ups, calendars, and propagandistic Allied posters, Varga Girls had joined the WAVES, the WAACs and the War Bond effort. As such, the pin-up genre provided a model through which women could construct themselves as the new image of the contemporary homefront woman: at once both conventionally feminine and transgressively aware of her own power and potential for agency on levels both personal and political. Furthermore, it can be argued that the Varga Girls' icy, controlled presence seemed the perfect stance to emulate for a nation of young women looking to assert this new-found sense of awareness and control over their own sexuality. By literally turning themselves into Varga Girls through self- portraiture, homefront women also found a method for supplanting their images and modern identity overseas in place of these fantasy pin-ups appropriated by American soldiers. In fact, so popular was the genre as a mode for homefront women's self- portraiture, eventually, as Robert Westbrook notes in his essay on the role of women's images in the Second World War, homemade pin-ups circulated overseas as widely as published imagery.(16)

The context of these hometown female appropriations of the Varga Girl seems to provide both a parallel and an inspiration for the recent feminist appropriation of the self-portrait pin-up. Considering the effects of the dramatic change in the homefront climate after the return of soldiers from overseas, and the backlash against the sexually-aggressive and economically self-sufficient women which the war had created, it is no surprise that the Varga Girl,and these same qualities she represented, faded in the postwar era.(17) In her heyday, however, the Varga Girl was established as an untouchable idol of female power and danger for men seeking a protective banner under which to shield themselves form the horrors of war. For women, she embodied the ideal of independence and sexual self-awareness that American women were themselves discovering in their shifting roles and identity on the homefront.

However, in this role as a war goddess, the Varga Girl's impact on American culture happily appears to have outlasted the women's war effort and its subsequent backlash. Appropriating not only the style but a popular distributive medium of Esquire's Varga Girl series, Annie Sprinkle and Katharine Gates' Post-Modern Pin-Ups playing card deck borrows both the sexually-aggressive poses and comfortable conflation of femininity and power of the WWII-era pin-ups they emulate. Moreover, in Sprinkle and Gates' appropriation of the pin-up, their choice of subjects whose careers (ranging from professors to Elvis Im-puss-inators) and activism blatantly underscore the feminist potential of the genre as defined by Vargas' work.

In an even more direct reference to the pin-ups, Ann Magnuson's Revenge of the Vargas Pin-Up Girl finds the artist transformed into a Varga Girl, but turns the airbrush gun the medium through which Vargas created his fantastical women back onto the world. Magnuson's implication that the tools of the pin-up's male author, in the hands of his dangerous creation, are so easily turned against any "objectifying" motives is a virtual metaphor for many feminist readings and appropriations of pin-up imagery.

Constructing the transgressive, yet controlled, image of the pin-up as everywoman, capable of extraordinary confidence, patriotism and sexual power, the Varga Girl transformed the genre away from its former representation of the morally corrupt and socially marginal female. As such, the Varga Girl, as well as the modern understanding of the pin-up which she has helped define, can be interpreted as an image of womanhood which embodies both the normally denied plurality and contradictions of female sexuality, and an era in American history in which such an unstable identity was accepted and celebrated. As such, the simultaneous glorification of conventional femininity and the unruly potential of subversively self-aware female sexuality that the Varga Girl established within the pin-up genre can be read as a substantial inspiration to feminists utilizing the genre to explore the shades of female identity between the boundaries of tradition and transgression.

Notes

I would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance in this project: Steve Goddard, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the University of Kansas' Spencer Museum of Art, for both allowing me access to the Spencer's collection of Esquire original pin-ups and for his continuous encouragement of my attempts to defend a positive feminist history of the pin-up; Professors Marilyn Stokstad and Charles Eldredge, chairs of the Murphy History of Art Travel fund, for facilitating my participation in the conferences at which this paper and its earlier versions were presented; My panel-mates at the SUNY- New Paltz Subject to Desire conference, Nicole Demerin and Mary Duffy, for their support, friendship and suggestions. Thanks also to John Pultz, Joanna Frueh, Marie Aquilino, Barry Shank, David Cateforis, Mark Olsen, Tracy Floreani, Cynthia Lee Henthorn and Angel Kwolek-Folland for providing me with direction, resources and enthusiastic support.

Samael

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] In Judaism

In Jewish lore, Samael is said to be the Angel of Death, the chief ruler of the Fifth Heaven and one of the seven regents of the world served by two million angels; he resides in the Seventh Heaven. Yalkut I, 110 of the Talmud speaks of Samael as Esau's guardian angel. In Sotah 10b, Samael is Edom's guardian angel, and in the Sayings of Rabbi Eliezer, he is charged with being the one who tempted Eve, then seduced and impregnated her with Cain. Though some sources identify Gadreel as the angel that seduced Eve, other Hebrew scholars say that it was Samael who tempted Eve in the guise of the Serpent. Samael is also sometimes identified as being the angelic antagonist who wrestled with Jacob, and also the angel who held back the arm of Abraham as he was about to sacrifice his son.

In The Holy Kabbalah (p. 255), Samael is described as the "severity of God," and is listed as fifth of the archangels of the world of Briah. Samael is said to have taken Lilith as his bride after she left Adam. According to Zoharistic cabala, Samael was also mated with Eisheth Zenunium, Naamah, and Agrat Bat Mahlat - all angels of prostitution.

Samael is sometimes confused in some books with Camael, an archangel of God, whose name means "He who sees God."

[edit] In Gnosticism

In the Apocryphon of John, found in the Nag Hammadi library, Samael is the third name of the evil demiurge, whose other names are Yaldabaoth and Saklas. In this context, Samael means "the blind god", the theme of blindness running throughout gnostic works. He is born out of the error of Sophia, who desires to create offspring of her own without the Spirit. His appearance is that of a lion-faced serpent. In On the Origin of the World in the Nag Hammadi library texts, he is also referred to as Ariael.

[edit] References

• Bunson, Matthew, (1996). Angels A to Z : A Who's Who of the Heavenly Host. Three Rivers Press. ISBN 0-517-88537-9.
• Davidson, Gustav. A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels. Free Press. ISBN 0-02-907052-X

[edit] Further reading

• Bamberger, Bernard Jacob, (March 15, 2006). Fallen Angels: Soldiers of Satan's Realm. Jewish Publication Society of America. ISBN 0-8276-0797-0
• Cruz, Joan C. (1999). Angels and Devils. Tan Books & Publishers. ISBN 0-89555-638-3.
• Jung, Leo (1925). "Fallen Angels in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan Literature. A Study in Comparative Folk-Lore", published in four parts in The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Ser.
  • Vol. 15, No. 4 (Apr., 1925), pp. 467-502, doi:10.2307/1451739
  • Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jul., 1925), pp. 45-88, doi:10.2307/1451748
  • Vol. 16, No. 2 (Oct., 1925), pp. 171-205, doi:10.2307/1451789
  • Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jan., 1926), pp. 287-336, doi:10.2307/1451485