Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 104

100 Popular Culture Review Americans of their senses and their ability to fight back. This notion of seduction is repeated in a scene later in the novel in which another woman who works for the Communists comes to Mike’s apartment. Linda Holbright seduces Mike, and he suspects that she is after information: “If she was going to, she should have asked me then. Any woman should know when a man is nothing but a man and when he’ll promise or tell anything. I knew all those things too and it didn’t do me any good because I was still a man” (80). Initially, then. One L onely N igh t seems to construct the Communist woman as one who uses her sexuality to undermine American vigilance; yet, this isn’t in fact what is actually going on in the novel. Mike assumes that Ethel has betrayed him by revealing his true identity to the Party; he believes Linda has come to his apartment to get information. In both cases he is wrong. Ethel has fallen in love with Mike and has given up her belief in Communism after they have made love. After being shot by a Communist Party hitman, she tells Mike, “After.. .1 met you I saw...the truth” (118). She has gone to the FBI to expose the workings of the Party. Similarly, Linda has come to Mike’s apartment to offer her virginity to him and nothing more. Mike’s assumption that the evils of Communism come in the form of a seductive woman is incorrect and clouds his ability to effectively investigate the case. Thus, despite the charges of misogyny that are frequently leveled at Spillane’s fiction. One L on ely N igh t paints a portrait of the Communist woman as victim rather than as evil seductress.- The image of the woman Communist as misguided found expression as well in sociological studies of Communism written in the Fifties. In a book entitled The A pp ea ls o f C omm unism, Gabriel Almond suggests that the adoption of Communist politics amongst middle-class young people usually resulted from “rebelliousness and emotional instability” rather than from ideological commitment (214)."' Particularly, Almond focuses on case studies of young American women who have joined the Communist Party, concluding that most of these women are misguided. One woman, Frances, has Joined the party in order to becomes promiscuous and thus “show contempt for the ordinary laws of society” (291). Almond states that “the Communist doctrine of sex equality helped her to reject her femininity” (291). One L onely N igh t similarly portrays Ethel and Linda as rebellious girls who, once they have found their femininity through sexual relations with Mike, reject the Party and its doctrines. Thus, the real seducer in the novel is not a woman, but an ideology that corrupts young women. The novel’s rejection of the association of femininity and Communism is further underscored in the character of Velda. Velda is the most fervent anti-Communist in the novel. Mike professes ignorance on the subject of Cold War politics stating, “More about the trials and the cold war. Politics. I felt like an ignorant bastard for