Collection of Genre Fiction Featuring Illustrations of Apes and Women, 1890-1994.

Collection of Genre Fiction Featuring Illustrations of Apes and Women, 1890-1994. 42 titles, primarily adult/erotica, horror, noir, mystery, and science-fiction; in English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Russian; includes two non-fiction and four graphic novel or serial examples. Many pseudonymous or lacking complete publishing data. Detailed list of contents below. A collection documenting the enduring racialized fantasy of women menaced by apes, responding to colonialism and shifts in scientific understanding and popular culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. European accounts of sexual relationships between apes and women, with abduction and rape themes, date back to at least the 11th-century in St Peter Damian's De Bono religiosi status et variorum animatium tropologia (1061) and his description of a Ligurian count cuckolded by a monkey (as told to him by Pope Alexander II!). John Donne's Metempsychosis (1633) includes an ape who seduces one of Adam's daughters; a later example is the the femicide in Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) by an orangutan. Gorillas were distinguished as a species in the 1840s; adult specimens were displayed for the first time in Paris in 1852; and Darwin's Origin of the Species was published in 1859. Growing popular fascination with the physical and evolutionary kinship of apes and human followed, and the more specific gorilla|woman “tale type” emerged: this collection includes many examples from the 1920s-1940s building on and responding to the narrative structure and popularity of the Tarzan stories (1912 onward) and King Kong (1933). In the one hundred years of publishing represented, endless variations on the theme emerge, but the confusion or failure of moral and species categories continues. Men become apes, apes become men, doomed and violent romances with white women ensue. The protagonists change over time and across genre (travelogues, future noir, LGBTQ, S&M, occult) but the vocabulary of impenetrable jungles, dark Africa, and helplessdruggedsleeping women persist. The visualization of apes and women is based on a number of extremely racist prototypes, notably sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet's Gorilla Abducting a Woman (1887) and his earlier, now destroyed, Gorilla Abducting a Negress (1859). Important early examples in this group include Von einem Gorilla entf ührt (Philadelphia, 1867; 1890) and Tragedja odmłodzonej kobiety (Krakow, 1929).

See Georges Dodds, “Monkey-Spouse Sees Children Murdered, Escapes to Freedom! [...]” E.L.O. 11-12 (2005-2006), pp. 73-96 and Marek Zgórniak, et al. “Fremiet's Gorillas: Why Do They Carry off Women?” Artibus et Historiae, 27:54, (2006), pp. 219–37. 

Contents available on request.