142. Today in 1920s Turkey: 6 March 1924 (The Devil’s Horns)
Türkçe:
— Güzel kız, elimden kurtulamazsın, ben şeytanım!
— Başındakilere bakılırsa pek şeytana benzemiyorsun!English:
— Pretty girl, you cannot escape me, I am the devil!
— Judging by what’s on your head, you don’t resemble the devil much!
Comments
This unsigned cartoon depicts the devil approaching a woman before a nondescript, hilly landscape. The woman’s confident and almost disinterested demeanor contrasts with the devil’s mischievous approach, creating an amusing incongruity. The woman represents a typical flapper girl with short hair, smoky raccoon eyes, bare arms, and boundless self-assurance conveyed in her hands-on-hips pose. She can only bother to pay partial attention to her antagonist as her body and half-closed eyes face away from him. To be sure, the devil’s scrawny nude body and bad posture is neither threatening nor attractive. Emphasizing his evil nature, he is rendered with claw-like hands, pointy ears, a pointy nose, and a menacing goatee. Like all (or many?) demons, this one has a pair of horns atop his bald head. Indeed, these horns that are at the crux of today’s joke.
In Turkish popular culture horns (boynuz) are the attributes of someone, usually a man, who is being cheated on (the verb being boynuzlanmak or literally, to be horned). In the same way that a dunce is designated with a conical hat, so is a cheatee visually marked with a pair of embarrassing horns. And the longer the set of horns, the more egregious the offense… In the case of today’s cartoon, the devil’s traditionally fear-inducing, grotesque horns are subverted by the calm and cool woman who views them as in indicator of his vulnerability and impotency. Representing a modern, worldly lady, this woman shrewdly exploits the dual meaning of his horns and ridicules the so-called Prince of Darkness rather than helplessly crumbling before him. With his own weakness exposed, the reader must imagine the devil terminating his creepy advance on the woman.
Not only does this cartoon envision a modern woman sharp enough to ward of the devil himself, but it also brings to fore the rather unsavory reality of romantic relationships: cheating. And indeed, cheating and love triangles are the subject of many cartoons from this period. Similarly, many cartoons from this era show the modern woman as multi-dimensional and with a host of interesting characteristics including resourcefulness, worldliness, cruelty, practicality, confidence, brashness, and selfishness.
Originally published at https://steemit.com on March 7, 2018.
