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Page 137
down: "It was not clear whether he viewed the prospect with relish or moral distaste. Likely both." Like the masks themselves, which the narrator observes may be "heightening loveliness or hiding ugliness," fear is double valued. The frightened woman is both attractive and offensive. The protagonist's British conservatismhe comes from a society that does not seem much different from England in the mid-twentieth centuryis seen as both morally straight in a world of American perversions and perhaps as foolish, cowardly, and stodgy.
The insecurities behind this ambivalence are made clear in a gratuitous scene midway through the story:
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The street was almost empty, though I was accosted by a couple of beggars with faces tunneled by H-bomb scars, whether real or of makeup putty, I couldn't tell. A fat woman held out a baby with webbed fingers and toes. I told myself it would have been deformed anyway and that she was only capitalizing on our fear of bomb-induced mutations. Still, I gave her a seven-and-a-half cent piece. Her mask made me feel I was paying tribute to an African fetish.
Contradictory responses of sympathy, distrust, contempt, fear, and shame pose an interpretative dilemma here: How are we, the readers, to respond to a narrator who tries to evade the beggar's plea for her deformed child by asserting that "she was only capitalizing on our fear of bomb-induced mutations"? Are we to agree that in a world of extravagant symbolic fantasies, beggars alone are not to "capitalize" on our fears? And what does he mean by "it would have been deformed anyway"? The attitudes here are common enough; the question is are we to accept or to challenge them? Is the British narrator, the representative of the familiar world, to be understood as morally sound or as hypocritical? The whole story is riddled with this sort of dilemma. Is Theda, the enigmatic woman who engages the narrator, victim or "capitalizer"? If the latter, what is her profit? And by befriending her, is the narrator acting as a good samaritan or a conned sucker? And if the latter, is it his fault or hers?
The essential moral displacement that characterizes "Coming Attraction" would seem to allow these questions to remain open. (. . .) "Coming Attraction" (. . .) imagines new sexual relations and emotional values, thereby at least potentially disqualifying conventional judgments and responses. The intrepretative problem posed by the story is whether we are to read the kinky future as an emancipation from our own inhibitions or

 
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