Brooklyn Museum: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base: Laura Ruby

The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk

Laura Ruby. The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk, 1992.

Description:
The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk

This series of screenprints refers to the Nancy Drew Mysteries—a series of books depicting the adventures of a young woman detective.

This print engages the viewer in a mystery aboard an ocean liner. The print plays off the title and the subject matter within the Nancy Drew book. The large trunk drawn in an intentionally distorted style, is wedged in a cabin while a Nancy Drew silhouette, a two-dimensional flat depiction, is busy outside the porthole chalking wet footprints in the illusory space of linear perspective where the size of objects gets smaller and recedes, indicating distance. The two-dimensional silhouette in repetition, indicating dedicated pursuit of clues, investigates inside the cabin and inside the trunk. Notice the changes of clothes: these suggest the future on-board detective work to come.

On top of the trunk are two different light sources, a kerosene lantern and a battery-operated flashlight. They are necessary to navigation: red marks the port or left side of a ship and green marks the starboard or right side. Of course their effectiveness is limited, as they are located within the cabin rather than visible to navigating vessels.

The semaphore flags affixed to the trunk signal attention and help. Those viewers able to read the code might wonder at the urgency of the situation and who is appealing to them.

Other travel stickers on the trunk refer the viewers to the end papers and frontispieces in several editions of the Nancy Drew books. Also, the ocean liner is one of a number of Lurlines that plied the waters for many decades between Hawaii and the West Coast.

There is also an allusion to the famous Marx Brothers shipboard scene in Night at the Opera, in which Groucho asks, rather than put the trunk in the stateroom, “Wouldn’t it be simpler if you put the stateroom in the trunk?"