A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

featured female characters who were adventurous and traditional in equal measure, all of whom
pointed to a central lesson—woman’s role at bottom is providing comfort and sustenance to men.
His vision of women was one that positioned the feminine as the necessary and divinely ordained
counterpart to the masculine. As he would later write, in a typically turgid text
Woman gained to her present status of bodily pulchritude, her gentleness, docility, poise,
endurance, tact, and disposition to preserve and nurture and mend and conserve, purely
from the exercise of those talents that had been subtracted “out of the side of Man” and
given an organism for contrasting expression although in constant and continuing
association with those contrasting attributes. She is the “missing half” of Man in his
spiritual totality. 149
Pelley was a critic of “feminized” Christianity yet prone to grossly sentimental professions of
faith. He supported many of the goals of socialism yet called for a firm response to the dangers
of Bolshevism. All of the contradictions inherent in his philosophy placed him squarely in the
context of the debates of his day. More generally, his apparently contradictory positions placed
him in the nexus or circuitry so prevalent in the discourses of the Other we have thus far
discussed. Pelley’s rejection of orthodoxy and his calls for dramatic reform were coupled with a
strong desire to maintain standards of femininity and an abhorrence of Bolshevism. At the same
time that he wanted to challenge the sacred cows of his day, he bowed down before them.
Placing a high value on social decorum and standards of gentility, his rhetoric operated both in
the register of integration and the register of disintegration, enacting both a centripetal and
centrifugal dynamic.
In the midst of a checkered career as small town newspaper owner, novelist, journalist
and screenwriter, Pelley underwent a conversion experience that brought an end to the internal
turmoil wrought by the many contradictions besetting him, placing them in a cosmic context that
149 William Dudley Pelley, Soulcraft Eighth Discourse: The Enigma of Sex and why woman was identified as issuing
from the Side of Man (Noblesville IN: Soulcraft Chapels Press). Undated material recovered from Noblesville,
Indiana Public Library’s vertical file archive on William Dudley Pelley in July of 2005.
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