Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: The Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media 1604978805, 9781604978803

Much has been written about gender and the monstrous, but sustained engagement with textual manifestations of cultural a

1,850 100 2MB

English Pages 432 Year 2014

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD FILE

Polecaj historie

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: The Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media
 1604978805, 9781604978803

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Our Monstrous Ways • Brandy Schillace and Andrea Wood
Part 1: Theorizing Monstrous Genesis
1: Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs • Alistair Brown
2: The Devil Made Me Do It • Joanna Shearer
3: Constructing the Vampire • Michael Pickering
4: Monsters That Matter • Jesse Stommel
Part 2: Repetition and Replication
5: Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument • Lindsay Ann Reid
6: Death, Disease, and Discontent • Emilie Taylor-Brown
7: Serial Death and the Zombie • Stephanie Boluk
Part 3: Dangerous Maternity and Monstrous Mothers
8: Mothering Monsters • K. A. Woytonik
9: Hypersaurus Rex • Randy Laist
10: Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice • Danielle Lawson
Part 4: Innocence Lost
11: “Children of the Night” • Brandy Schillace
12: Monstrous Births and Monstrous Children in the Late Nineteenth Century • Alison N. Crockford
13: Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics • April D. Miller
14: Failed Futurity • Andrea Wood
Works Cited
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity The Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media

EDITED BY

Andrea Wood and Brandy Schillace

Copyright 2014 Cambria Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press University Corporate Centre, 100 Corporate Parkway, Suite 128 Amherst, New York 14226, U.S.A. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity : the Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media / editors: Andrea Wood, PhD, Assistant Professor, Winona State University ; Brandy Schillace, PhD, Managing Editor, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, SAGES Fellow, Case Western Reserve University. pages cm ISBN 978-1-60497-880-3 (alk. paper) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Monsters in literature. 2. Monsters in motion pictures. 3. Monsters in mass media. I. Wood, Andrea, editor. II. Schillace, Brandy, editor. PN56.M55U56 2014 809'.93375--dc23 2014022413

Table of Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction: Our Monstrous Ways Brandy Schillace and Andrea Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Part 1: Theorizing Monstrous Genesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Chapter 1: Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs Alistair Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Chapter 2: The Devil Made Me Do It Joanna Shearer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Chapter 3: Constructing the Vampire Michael Pickering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Chapter 4: Monsters That Matter Jesse Stommel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Part 2: Repetition and Replication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Chapter 5: Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument Lindsay Ann Reid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Chapter 6: Death, Disease, and Discontent Emilie Taylor-Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Chapter 7: Serial Death and the Zombie Stephanie Boluk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Part 3: Dangerous Maternity and Monstrous Mothers . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Chapter 8: Mothering Monsters K. A. Woytonik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Chapter 9: Hypersaurus Rex Randy Laist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

vi

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Chapter 10: Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice Danielle Lawson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Part 4: Innocence Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Chapter 11: “Children of the Night” Brandy Schillace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Chapter 12: Monstrous Births and Monstrous Children in the Late Nineteenth Century Alison N. Crockford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Chapter 13: Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics April D. Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Chapter 14: Failed Futurity Andrea Wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419

List of Figures

Figure 1: The writing on the wall in Left 4 Dead 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Figure 2: Left 4 Dead movie poster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 Figure 3: “You are dead”: Serial death in Left 4 Dead 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 Figure 4: Jets flying over Highway 10 in New Orleans (Left 4 Dead 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Figure 5: Devastation in Left 4 Dead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Figure 6: The “credits” roll at the end of the game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Figure 7: An infant with congenital syphilis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 Figure 8: Examples of dental malformations associated with congenital syphilis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Introduction

Our Monstrous Ways Brandy Schillace and Andrea Wood

Monstrosity always unites monstrous form with monstrous meaning. —Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror Woman’s birth-giving function has provided the horror film with an important source of many of its most horrific images—its intrauterine iconography, the parthenogenetic mother, evocations of the uncanny and images of alien births. —Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine Monsters continue to fascinate—as well as to plague and haunt imaginations. The psychic landscape is peopled with them; the social fabric is woven of them. This persistent, paradoxical repulsion and fascina-

2

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tion with monsters and the monstrous begins, however, with causation. From early works like those of sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Paré (whose own collection gathered case histories from earlier centuries yet) to modern-day conceptions, people have been concerned above all with monstrous origins. From whence do monsters come? What is their genesis—and more important—their reproductive potential? With the “birth” of the monster comes a particular anxiety about its self-replication, generally through perceived unnatural means. The link between the monstrous and fears of reproduction is present from early modern narratives through nineteenth-century fears of degeneration and into contemporary fascination with apocalyptic zombie films, epidemics, trans-species generation, and colonization. Though the incarnation of the monster manifests through different vehicles across these periods, it is clear that regardless of its form, anxiety is rooted in concerns about the monster’s fecundity—its ability to infect, to absorb, to replicate. Not surprisingly, the female reproductive body and the fertile female mind often become the loci for much of this anxiety. A great deal has been written about gender and the monstrous, but sustained engagement with textual manifestations of cultural and unconscious fears and anxieties about “unnatural” reproduction and monstrous progeny has been limited. Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis remains the most in-depth examination of how horror narratives engage these fears and ultimately render the feminine—particularly the female body and its reproductive capabilities—monstrous and abject. Building upon the work of Creed and others, this collection aims to expand the current discourse on the monstrous reproductive potential of bodies—as well as minds—from a more interdisciplinary and transhistorical framework. Whereas scholarly interest in monsters and the monstrous is certainly not new, studies on monstrous reproduction and birth have tended to be either discipline or period specific, and many are now dated. This book includes essays from a diverse range of perspectives, including film and media studies, literary studies, history, medicine, and women’s and gender studies. Unnatural Reproductions and

Our Monstrous Ways

3

Monstrosity seeks to build upon preexisting work while engaging more directly with reproduction and monstrous birth, as well as with unnatural reproduction(s), which threaten to eclipse the future, cast uncertainty on the present, and reimagine the past. This project owes its conception to a unique collaboration. We, the editors, come from two different fields—or, more correctly, from four: we each teach and research at the intersection of disciplines. Andrea Wood, a film and media studies scholar, also works with queer theory and women’s and gender studies. Brandy Schillace is a medical humanist scholar of the eighteenth century whose work explores both medical history and literary fiction. Though we did not initially expect to have much in common when it came to our research, very early in our acquaintance it became apparent that we were both investigating elements of reproduction broadly conceived—the ways in which cultural and physical replication could inspire both hope and fear. We were both likewise investigating monstrosity—not monsters, merely, but the vestiges and imprints of miscreation, as trope and epithet, as horror narrative and counternarrative. Schillace’s perspective, one that looks backward to Ambroise Paré and as far forward as the fin de siècle, considers the cultural artifacts of these periods to examine specific types of fascination and repulsion surrounding reproduction. Wood examines contemporary cultural media to discern the continued “othering” of women and minorities, exploring monsters not only as a source of fear and confusion but also a means of expressing the inexpressible—and of questioning and upending normativity. The more we worked together, the more links and intersections materialized, and in short order, the idea for this book collection was born. Ultimately, then, the primary contribution of Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity lies not only in its extensive treatment of reproductive monstrosity and unnatural parturition but also in the breadth and intriguing continuity that only a wide lens can provide. With that said, this collection does not attempt to provide a complete historical assess-

4

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

ment or catalog of the enduring cultural fascination with the reproductive origins and potential of monsters. Rather, the essays in this collection come from diverse interdisciplinary and transhistorical perspectives on our subject. Indeed, the theme of unnatural reproduction(s), which is unique to our collection, remains central rather than peripheral to the concept of monstrosity and its evolving narrative incarnations. The current moment is ripe for the kind of interdisciplinary dialogue this collection creates as contributors from a variety of fields analyze how cultural fixation on the genesis and reproductive potential of monsters manifests across time periods, texts, and media. Given increasingly frenzied patriarchal fears about and the desire to control procreation that lie at the heart of the “war on women,” right-wing legislative attacks on women’s reproductive freedom, anxieties about genetic engineering, and the growing number of high profile cases of “monstrous” children who kill, the present moment seems an ideal time to look more closely at how fears about unnatural reproduction and monstrous offspring—and their frequent connections to the feminine—have long been inscribed in and continue to manifest in the texts and media that the modern world consumes. The collection’s four sections provide perspective on hyperbolic and monstrous representations of reproduction and birth that speak to anxieties and fears about gender and sexuality, codified through “unnatural” manifestations and their progeny. By focusing not only on the effect of the monstrous but also on its reproduction in a variety of genres and modes from science to cinema, this collection offers greater insight into enduring questions about the genesis of monsters and their reproductive potential that have long haunted their audiences and continue to shape many fears about the future Part 1, “Theorizing Monstrous Genesis: Past, Present, and Future,” presents more abstract and transhistorical notions about monstrous origins. Alistair Brown’s “Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs: Ambroise Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels and Donna Haraway’s

Our Monstrous Ways

5

‘Cyborg Manifesto’” demonstrates that a trope as hypermodern as the cyborg is linked through sixteenth-century monster birth to understandings of nature and humanity’s place within it. One must think about the human and the cyborg, Brown argues, from two points of view simultaneously: as a creature produced by quantitative science and as an identity considered subjectively as a cultural product of society. This concept returns again and again in this collection, forcing readers to evaluate their own culpability in the production (and reproduction) of monsters and the monstrous. Joanna Shearer’s “The Devil Made Me Do It: Sin, (Inner) Demons, and Monstrous Reproduction in Milton’s Paradise Lost” explains that Paradise Lost seeks to assert ecclesiastical dominion over the reproduction of sin. As with Sin’s unnatural birth from Satan’s forehead in Milton’s text, the mind serves as the gestating womb in these configurations. Pregnant thoughts give birth to sin and— through sympathy or fornication with its originator—to death. Shearer asserts that when it comes to the birth and reproduction of sin, Milton claims the real monster one must be most worried about and actively fight against is one’s own mind. “Constructing the Vampire: Spirit Agency in the Anonymous Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation von denen Vampiren oder Menschen-Saugern (1732)” by Michael Pickering similarly demonstrates the collective power of earlier traditions in the replication of myth, tracing the history of the vampire from within the small corpus of early eighteenth-century material on the purported vampire cases from the periphery of the Habsburg monarchy. Of anonymous authorship, the Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation von denen Vampiren oder Menschen-Saugern (Documentary and Detailed Relation of the Vampires or People Suckers) imbues the vampire body with sentience but also actively constructs the vampire as a spirit predator. The vampire’s ability to replicate is always a chief concern, but this text argues for the vampire’s further ability to bring about widespread death. Like Satan and sin, the vampire is turned into an aggressive, spirit(ual) agent, as well as a cultural artifact indicative of health and sanitation policy in the early Enlightenment. Jesse Stommel’s “Monsters That

6

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Matter: Things That Rise in the Contemporary Zombie Film” continues this trajectory by querying the uncertain boundary between mind and body and the production of monsters. Claiming that George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, like Jacques Derrida’s concept of the monstrous birth, rises up “out of nowhere” yet gives birth to numerous iterations, Stommel explains how the resurgence of zombie media captures not only who people are but who they are in the process of becoming. However, in disagreement with Romero’s own assessment of that (d)evolution, this chapter argues that modern humans, as consumers, are the antithesis of zombies, all brain and no body. Like the “plugged in” gamer, existing as a persona in a virtual world, one is (re)made online, stripped of body. Yet Stommel’s work is also about how the flesh fights back, returning again to the binary that has existed all along, the repulsion and fascination— the simulation and the simulacra—the hope and fear of a future plagued by humanity’s own monstrosities. Part 2, “Repetition and Replication: Unnatural Reproduction(s)” explores the seemingly uncontrollable potential of monsters and the monstrous to replicate, as well as the fascination with telling and retelling such narratives, ensuring an ongoing stream of textual progeny. Lindsay Ann Reid’s “Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument: ‘The Lamenting Lady’ Margaret of Henneberg (and Her 365 Children) in Early Modern England” develops the latter idea by focusing on the seemingly uncontrollable multiplication of early modern ballads retelling a thirteenth-century story of monstrous birth. Also explained (and illustrated) in the work of Ambroise Paré, the tale of Margaret of Henneberg, a cursed thirteenth-century countess who allegedly birthed 365 infants in one day, was widely disseminated through printed ballads by the 1620s. Reid analyzes the ballad entitled “The Lamenting Lady” to argue that it reveals a potent convergence of form and content: the broadside’s firstperson lyrics about Countess Margaret’s hyperfertile reproductive plight simultaneously speak to the conditions under which this and other early modern ballads were historically disseminated and consumed. Jumping forward in time, Emilie Taylor-Brown explores the reproductive power

Our Monstrous Ways

7

of the supervirus in “Death, Disease, and Discontent: The Monstrous Reign of the Supervirus.” Superviruses, from swine and bird flu to mad cow disease and SARS, may be considered science-made monstrosities, created from the universal arms race of inoculation and viral mutation. Starting with a reflection upon the ending of Richard Matheson’s apocalyptic novella I Am Legend, Taylor-Brown explores how real-life viral pandemics and the threat of future pandemics intersect in culturally and contextually specific ways with the media of their moment. Looking at recent films that envision supervirus outbreaks like 28 Days Later and Contagion, as well as novels like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Max Brooks’s World War Z, Taylor-Brown analyzes how fears and fantasies about viral pandemics—viruses that reproduce themselves and engender the potential for the terrifying evolution or extinction of humanity—are reproduced in contemporary literature and film. In these narratives, the supervirus, as both progenitor and progeny, emerges from technological and scientific advances to capture—and disseminate—humankind’s worst nightmares. Looking at production (as well as reproduction), Stephanie Boluk’s “Serial Death and the Zombie: The Networked Necronomics of Left 4 Dead” analyzes the ways in which biometric data are harvested in networked game worlds to create a streamlined system based on consumption, reproduction, and repetition. Boluk argues that an ontological link exists between the zombie’s monstrous (and rhetorical) figure and the video-game medium by examining the relationship between the players (themselves described as “zombies” as they repeat behaviors in front of the game screen as though hypnotized) and the AI algorithms that adapt to the game play. Refiguring the concept of labor in the reproduction of the monstrous, Boluk argues that game-players’ labor is zombified, their activities recycled into the artificial intelligence of the system to produce more of the game’s monstrosities. This truly mindless form of reproduction goes beyond the Frankenstein complex in that it has removed the human creator altogether, substituting a system that feeds on gamers in order to recreate and sustain its own (artificial) life.

8

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

The third section, “Dangerous Maternity and Monstrous Mothers,” examines textual fascinations with monstrous mothers (human and nonhuman) and dangerous female reproductive potential. K.  A. Woytonik’s “Mothering Monsters: Avoidances, Intervention, and Response to Freakery in Progressive America” examines the circumstances and motivations behind public advocacy for the regulation of children employed in freak shows in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a careful analysis of case studies in the decades before and during the Progressive era, Woytonik explores how these debates converged upon the uncomfortable reality of the American freak show’s female and child employees—who were deemed perpetual children in need of governmental “mothering”—revealing that Progressive intervention was really about protecting the American public from outward difference and about protecting business interests rather than so-called freaks’ own self-interest. Randy Laist’s “Hypersaurus Rex: Recombinant Reality in Jurassic Park” reads the 1990s dinosaur film as technological parturition and runaway female fecundity. The genetically altered and supposedly all-female dinosaurs are not supposed to be able to reproduce by themselves—yet they do. The monstrous products of the Jurassic project are not, however, “real” or usual dinosaurs, argues Laist. Rather, they are reconstituted monsters, hypersaurs that both fascinate and terrify. Part entertainment, part experiment, part economic investment scheme, the characterization of Jurassic Park’s toothy inhabitants may remind one of the sideshow freaks Woytonik discusses, striking a precarious balance between fear and wonder. Unlike them, however, these are technological monstrosities, colonizing and proliferating and feeding in a Disney-like setting that splices reality and artifice into hyperreality. Danielle Lawson’s “Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice: Vampiric Pregnancies in Angel and Breaking Dawn” revisits the vampire mythos in its modern manifestations. In the television series Angel and the film adaptation of the Stephenie Meyer novel Breaking Dawn, reproductive and gendered anxieties are reimagined through womb-originated vampire births. This chapter explores

Our Monstrous Ways

9

the ways in which female sexual desire, particularly, is constructed as problematic and even dangerous when embodied in the grotesque and monstrous mother. Lawson uses a communication studies approach, in contrast to the film and media studies approaches of other chapters in this collection, to treat the texts as social interaction rather than mere fictional narratives. Using applied linguistics to perform close examination of how conversational turns are organized in these narratives and of how others respond to them, Lawson argues that Angel and Breaking Dawn read character reactions to the pregnancy and child as attempts to control the “deviant” female body in order to maintain or reestablish the moral order of the group, demonstrating the perilous boundaries between the normative and nonnormative in an uncertain future. The fourth and final section, “Innocence Lost: Monstrous Children,” investigates the figure of the child, typically the symbol of hope and immortal legacy now turned monstrous creature that instead becomes a sign of failed futurity, of degeneration, and of the failures of humankind’s supposedly infinite progression. Brandy Schillace’s “‘Children of the Night’: Dracula, Degeneration, and Syphilitic Births at the Fin de Siècle” examines Stoker’s novel in the context of the Contagious Disease Acts and discourse about congenital syphilis. The acts sought to regulate the spread of syphilis by means of the forced medical examination of prostitutes—ostensibly the nonproductive Victorian women. However, the disease still penetrated the Victorian family center, carried by men and transferred to their children. The repeal of the acts and the campaigns of New Women feminists helped to turn the tables on culpability, making the father the primary factor in disease transmission—a feat accomplished in part by seeing the monstrous syphilitic child (like the monstrous prostitute) as a kind of wounded innocent. Yet whereas the monstrous child figures largely in the medical texts of the day that Schillace examines, they are conspicuously absent from Dracula; instead, in every scene that suggests the transfer of contagion, an adult refigured as a child is substituted. Schillace argues that this creates a fantasy of guiltless paternity (and preserved children) in an attempt

10

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

to recapture lost innocence—and future hope—in an age of epidemics. Alison Crockford’s “Monstrous Births and Monstrous Children in the Late Nineteenth Century” considers the significance of the monstrous child in Dorian Gray and What Maisie Knew; both texts reveal a child who is neither innocent nor angelic but knowing, watchful, and potentially malevolent. Crockford examines the monstrosity of the child as a construction inextricably linked to fears regarding reproduction, particularly the anxieties that underlie teratological reports in medical publications like the British Medical Journal. Through a manipulation of the post-Romantic fascination with childhood’s potentiality, these texts reveal that which has been excluded from ideal constructions of the child figure. April Miller’s “Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics: Transhumanism in Splice and Hanna” investigates the Frankenstein complex— the idea that science will create what it cannot control. Like the DNA dalliances of Jurassic Park, these films seek to reproduce bodies without the woman or the womb. Miller argues that these two films demonstrate the scientific philosophy of transhumanism and the desire to create “perfected” beings while playing upon the reproductive anxieties that such revolutions of the natural order inevitably provoke. At once utopian and dystopian, these narratives reimagine paternity mediated through the sterility of science and focus more intently upon the monstrous potential of the child created from such labors—in this case, the female child. Both Hanna and Splice question the transhumanist vision, as well as the feminist ideal of a genderless utopia; monstrous children turn on their parents/creators, threatening the future of humankind but also that of traditional familial relationships. Andrea Wood’s “Failed Futurity: Reproductive Anxieties, Undead Children, and Queering Survival in Apocalyptic Zombie Films” explores ways that the zombie’s capability of adding to its ranks through a grotesque and abject form of reproduction haunts apocalyptic zombie films and raises questions about whether survivors should also reproduce in order to preserve the futurity of humanity in the face of ever-growing zombie hordes. Wood exam-

Our Monstrous Ways

11

ines how these films infect and decompose the social (and perceived natural) imperative toward biological reproduction and heteronormative concepts of family by instead embracing queer kinship structures and living in the moment as crucial to survival. Wood argues that the anxieties and fears about reproduction and humanity’s survival in apocalyptic zombie films coalesce in the figure of the child, who is almost always already undead—a symbolic harbinger of failed futurity, corrupted innocence, and the end of human existence awaiting the marginal number of living survivors. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, fears and anxieties about monstrous reproduction and parturition have long haunted the cultural imagination, spawning an ever-growing body of literary, artistic, media, and other texts that manifest humanity’s worst fantasies about the genesis and birth of monsters. The diverse transhistorical and interdisciplinary perspectives of the scholars in this collection seek to expand on current discourse while productively complicating the understanding of this widespread and long-running fascination with the origins of monsters and their ability to create more of their kind. Indeed, as this volume reveals, what is so often disturbing about the monster is not so much the thing itself but its ability to infect, replicate, or procreate in ways that threaten the perceived natural order, as well as humanity’s primacy and continuation as a species.

Part 1

Theorizing Monstrous Genesis Past, Present, and Future

Chapter 1

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs Ambroise Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels and Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” Alistair Brown Like many scientists in the early nineteenth century, the pioneer of the modern computer, Charles Babbage, believed that science and technology offered a means to reach closer to God: The advancement of man in the knowledge of the structure of the works of the Creator, might furnish continually increasing proofs of its authenticity; and … thus by the due employment of our faculties, we might not merely redeem revelation from the ravages of time, but give to it a degree of force strengthening with every accession to our knowledge. (Babbage 139) It is ironic that the discipline that Babbage helped to establish would in fact contribute to the post-Darwinian project in which such connections between humanity and the divine are broken. Cybernetics presents

16

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the natural world as working according to a set of codes, but not those that stand as ciphers for a designer. The body is the product of a genetic code that evolved by chance, whereas the brain’s wetware is merely a distributed network that parses algorithms; consciousness itself is just another program. Cybernetic technologies facilitate the manipulation of existing natural systems (such as by splicing genetic codes from different organisms), programming new intelligent systems (as in artificial intelligence), or improving on the model of the human by augmentations such as prosthetic limbs and virtual-reality headsets. In the dreams of cybernetic transcendentalists like Hans Moravec, cybernetics allows human beings to correct nature’s imperfections and in the process to play God (147–159). However, even as one looks toward a stage beyond the human created in God’s image—the posthuman—one also revisits historical ideas, ironically in a more theological context. This chapter seeks to show how responses to cybernetics—specifically, Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto”—may share some affinities with (but also exhibit important differences from) Renaissance definitions of the human and the divine, which are explored via engagement with the monstrous, particularly in Ambroise Paré’s 1573 work On Monsters and Marvels. Both cybernetic and Renaissance writers invoke ideas about monstrosity in an attempt to figure out the limits of their different epistemologies. In the Renaissance, monsters caused problems for theologians and naturalists because their deformities seemed hard to account for if nature is a reflection of God. For example, as Joanna Shearer explores in the next chapter of this collection, sin posed a similar problem for St. Augustine, a theologian Paré followed closely, because if God has allowed sin to exist in the human mind, then humanity seems destined never to be able to live up to God’s ideal image. Monsters were thus explained as being hybrid entities. In part, they were the products of a natural order of things, intended by God. Thus, they can be studied rationally. In part, they were the products of humans’ own overly vivid

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

17

imagination, which can be manipulated by devils and demons. Monsters are also fabricated or projected subjectively, by the human mind. Paré’s work is a useful starting point for this discussion (and collection) because it synthesizes existing knowledge stretching back to the classical period but at the same time stands on the cusp of modern rationalism, when the latter interpretation of monsters as imaginative projections would have to be demolished to make way for a solely rationalistic approach to the natural world. The precondition for a scientific epistemology, as expressed by René Descartes, is that humans deconstruct the possibility of the “deceiving demon” and instead trust the veracity of their own minds and senses (131–199). Yet as many of the later chapters in Birthing the Monster show, monsters continue to reproduce, perhaps becoming still more fecund, even in an era of science and high technology. People continue to produce perceptions of the natural world through their own haunted imaginations rather than simply reading the script of nature in a purely objective way. This was the tension Paré wrestled with on the cusp of the Enlightenment, and this chapter proposes that a similar tension can be felt today, as illustrated by one of the most influential essays of the posthuman period. Donna Haraway wrote her feminist critique, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in part to contest the Enlightenment model of knowledge that suggests human beings can and should live their lives rationally and by standards of pure objectivity (149–181). In the essay, Haraway identified a tension between objects and subjects. Objects are technological products as well as the idealized, theoretical entities studied by science. From the scientific point of view, for example, woman is studied biologically in terms of sex, as an object represented by genetic codes, but not in terms of gender, the consequence of culture. Subjects are the people who in a capitalist system buy and use technologies, and they are also the gendered entities whose individuality science tries to erase. Subjects and objects become fused together in Haraway’s trope of the cyborg:

18

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction … Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. (“Cyborg Manifesto” 149)

In her attempt to get away from the binary thinking that separates object(ive) and subject(ive) ways of interpreting the world, Haraway looked to the dualism of the organic and inorganic that has been destabilized by cybernetics. As Haraway argued, “By the late twentieth century … we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (“Cyborg Manifesto” 149). Science is no longer a theoretical perspective to be adopted temporarily and consciously but should be integrated into one’s biological makeup, thus altering the permanent sense of what it is to be human. Conditioned by technologies such as drugs, contact lenses, and computer interfaces, the cyborg is forced to take direct responsibility for the applications of science in daily life while knowing that truth is a subjective quality that varies depending on the perspective or technological lenses one adopts and sees through at any one time. When a mother sees her baby through an ultrasound scan of her own body, this is a different frame from the baby seen as a genetic code or as a living individual. The cyborg thus acts as a modest witness, a term Haraway developed in her later work, knowing the need to take responsibility for the applications of science because science and technology always already constitute oneself and one’s perspectives on the world (Modest_Witness 22). But just how new are cyborgs in terms of the conceptual problems they raise? Haraway proposed that recent technoscience offers some-

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

19

thing “vastly different from the constitutional arrangements that established the separations of nature and society proper to ‘modernity’ as early modern Europeans and their offspring understood that historical configuration” (Modest_Witness 43). However, as N. Katherine Hayles pointed out, people do not have to be literal cyborgs, with technology intervening upon their bodies, in order to become posthuman, because “new models of subjectivity emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” (Hayles 4). Indeed, in drawing heavily on the tropes of science fiction, Haraway seems to have acknowledged that the cyborg is something that has always been conceptually thinkable, even if it is only now that it has become technically makeable. If, therefore, the cyborg is a partly hypothetical construct, then even in an age without such technologies one might find comparable constructions of human subjectivity. As “a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings,” Haraway’s cyborg is a chimeric entity that is created and understood from both scientific and humanistic points of view (“Cyborg Manifesto” 150). Rather than being a wholly new creature, however, the cyborg also picks up on themes from the Renaissance, when similarly problematic divisions and overlaps existed between rational and personal ways of knowing the world, as epitomized in the double perspective on monsters. Early modern teratology is one rich sphere in which such binaries are challenged, for the monster is seen variously as contrary to nature, as something uncommon that can still be explained by natural laws, and as something that human culture deceptively perceives as “monstrous.” In the theological context, the status of the monster is clearly problematic: If the world is created in the image of its designer, what do monsters say about God? To a supernaturalist or someone in league with the devil, a monster might be taken as showing that God is not entirely benign or omnipotent. To the more theologically educated and ratio-

20

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

nalistic mind, however, things treated pejoratively as monsters could instead be collected, celebrated, and explained as yet more evidence of God’s creativity. The monster provides a body in which converge the sight lines of the subjective interpretation that bleeds into demonic delusion and the rational science that is informed by knowing God’s benign nature. In a similar way, Haraway asserted that “[t]he cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” (“Cyborg Manifesto” 150). Like the monster, the cyborg is variously a product of nature and culture and can be understood objectively and subjectively. From a purely cybernetic point of view, human beings are bodies that happen to run the program of their genetic code. From a more subjective point of view, though, this is not what makes people fully human. Humans are not just genes but are hybrid products of culture—that is to say, they are cyborgs: part children of science and technology and part of society.

Collecting Nature in the Renaissance The Renaissance theory of generation followed Aristotle: all living beings were divinely formed, the female contributing matter to the embryo and the male endowing it with form and vitality (Hagner 175– 217). Aristotle denied the portentous signification of the monster. The monster is simply a thing that goes against the general case while not being against nature entirely. Monsters are caused by the failure of the generative male seed to dominate the material secretion of the female (Aristotle 417). There is, then, a plausible, physicalist etiology that explains them. Aristotle’s etiology was picked up by the Augustinian tradition. Although benign, and therefore not monstrous in the vernacular sense of the abject, their strangeness did embody significance. As Augustine’s influential aesthetic of concordia discors argued, “the beauty of this world [is] enhanced by the opposition of contraries, composed, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things” (472). The problem in the Renaissance was that if nature reflects God, and if monsters are created in accordance with a natural etiology rather than against nature,

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

21

this implies that God has allowed deformity to come about. What then do monsters signify? Or if they signify nothing, why do they exist at all in a divinely ordered nature (Hanafi 27)? If these issues provided opportunity for debate, some reassurance could be found in the practice of collecting and classifying monsters. As Thomas Kaufmann described it, the Kunstkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, provided a symbolic theater of the world in which by systematizing nature for display, the collector used knowledge to assert his or her political status (174–194). Incorporating monstrosities and deformities into the collections of scholars and physicians at least naturalized monsters. Civilized and refined viewers—that is, an aristocratic elite—were aware that monsters were a problematic part of nature rather than the result of any devilish generation from the supernatural sphere, outside of nature and thus beyond the control of God. For example, Peter I of Russia had one of the most extensive collections of the seventeenth century. He argued that “the unlearned hide [monsters] because they believe that such births originate from the devil by witchcraft and sodomy. But this is impossible because the creator of all living things is God and not the devil, who has no power over any individual” (qtd. in Hagner 183). Though different, the monster need not necessarily be monstrous, for it might be simply a deviation within the boundaries of normal expectation; the devil, however, though his evil may highlight the good by way of contrast, also signifies an unnatural magic whose forces work to separate humanity from true knowledge of the creator. By distinguishing weird but explicable monsters from demons or the work of the devil, the rationalistic spectator could make the monster seem, by comparison, more normative and hence better situated within God’s plan. The practice of displaying monsters in books or cases implicitly deconstructed the possibility of occult generation, such that objects in a collection lost their alarming potential and, as Michael Hagner put it, “represented their own subordination” (186). Furthermore, as Zakiya Hanafi explained, the domination of nature through the theatrum naturae exhaustively placed “all things in relation to each other and the whole, with the

22

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

exception of one creature: [the scientist], standing at the centre” (185). The encyclopedic method constitutes a personal science, allowing the scientist to specialize his hierarchical supremacy through bringing the monstrous into proximity with himself, while simultaneously keeping it at a safely objective distance through the glass of the cabinet, specimen jar, or anatomical drawing. By collecting them and contextualizing specimens against others, the Renaissance scientists denied that the monster could be supernaturally generated. At the same time, they were aware that such a structure put them, the scientists themselves, at the center of the natural universe. Thus, the monster was also a lens or sign through which could be read the fact that God beyond nature and time had made humankind so special in the first place, the only one able to collect the monsters that confirm humankind’s place at the top of Aristotle’s scala naturae. Through producing a coherent body of knowledge from the multiple bodies of the monstrous, the naturalist ensured a situated science that located his embodied self in relation to God’s unseen purposes. The Renaissance viewer of monsters thus occupies a position not unlike that of Haraway’s cyborg. The cyborg is heterogeneous, able to occupy different perspectives on nature through applying different augmentations or accessing alternative interfaces. In this sense, as Haraway argued, the individual transcends a personal subjective standpoint to reach a universal truth. Rather than adopting the single authoritative lens of scientific method, one achieves a conception of reality based on multifarious points of view. At the same time, the encyclopedic or cyborg framework reminds one that nature is always mediated and constructed through a particular lens: one’s view of the world from the standpoint of a body (or bodies) affects the perception of nature out there. The cyborg or the Renaissance collector exists within nature, rather than observing it from a position of objective detachment.

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

23

Paré’s Monsters Typifying the collective mode is perhaps the paradigmatic book on monsters in Renaissance science, Ambroise Paré’s 1573 collection On Monsters and Marvels.1 Rather than initiating his own studies of individual cases or exploring a single case in detail, Paré compiled from other sources, thereby producing a synthesis of other treatises on the subject. Following Augustine’s lead, the book presents the rare and unusual forms that prove the creative variety of God’s universe, speaking of his wondrous fecundity. Thus, Paré’s first distinction, echoing Peter I, is between monsters, which “are things that appear outside the course of Nature” and marvels, including demons, which “are things which happen that are completely against Nature” (3). Like that of other collections (such as Peter I’s), the structure of the book demarcates the seemingly grotesque, which can nevertheless be naturalized by containing it within a collative edition, from the demonic, which cannot because the demon works by producing the illusion of the miraculous or supernatural utterly in antagonism to nature. Signifying this, although he did not employ a reductive experimental approach, Paré was intent on accumulating data regarding the causes of monsters, which are discussed through analogies and which are systematically grouped in the book’s chapter structure according to similar categories of origin. For example, a section on how an excess quantity of “seed” leads to superfluous limbs is followed by chapters on multiple births and then hermaphrodites; these androgynes lead Paré naturally into a discussion of transsexual women who “degenerate” into men. Modern scientific writing is selective rather than encyclopedic, marking truth through the paradigmatic experiment whose law extends to all other relevant cases. In contrast, as I have just argued, the Renaissance model of scientific practice saw organization and compilation as essential to validating data; editorial and authorial decisions thereby play a key role in the construction of truth. Thus, though On Monsters is part of a popular period literature on the grotesque and is not a scien-

24

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tific taxonomy in the modern sense of the term, it should certainly be read contextually as a serious development of knowledge rather than as merely a prurient picture book. In the opening to the book, Paré listed thirteen specific reasons for deformity (there are, he has written, other human reasons but none that are “sufficient or probable” to detail). The first is the glory of God. For example, the blind man in the Gospel of St. John was born unsighted not because of the sin of his father or mother but “in order that the works of God might be magnified in him” (4). Monsters and marvelous creatures also result from the wrath of God, “who permits fathers and mothers to produce such abominations from the disorder that they make in copulation,” such as having sexual intercourse during menstruation, which is forbidden in Leviticus 16 (5). Excepting these two examples, the cause of direct divine intervention is relatively absent because of the theological dilemma produced by positing any direct relationship between the etiology of monsters and the beneficent mind of God, who might potentially have created them. Although Paré polemicized at length against counterfeit beggars who feign disease to obtain alms, he tended not to moralize monstrosity against biblical conventions in an allegorical way. For the bulk of the book, nature is treated as autonomous and as acting according to limited physical laws rather than through metaphysical or moral influences. Although these laws are technically incorrect by the standards of modern biology, it is not hard to enter the imagination of the Renaissance scholar. Framed within a different cultural system, some of the reasons seem wholly plausible. This is because etiology here is singularly material: monstrous offspring can be caused by blows to the womb, hereditary illness, rotten or mixed or too great a quantity of seed, the narrowness of the womb, or the irregular posture of the mother. These fall under the Aristotelian category of accidens, circumstantial qualities distinguishing one individual of a species from another, and as George Hoffmann observed, this category of mutilations is the most empirically founded

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

25

one because accidens relies on contingent cause and effect (Hoffman 36– 38). Certainly, there is a beguiling clarity to these causes, which perceive a logical and single sequence of development. For example, according to Hippocrates, upon whose work Paré based his account, from a surplus of seed multiple births or superfluous organs or limbs will result; likewise, the same phenomenon can lead to a fusing of organs or conjoined twins because nature wants to create two children but the seed is constrained and therefore (Paré wrote) must be “coagulated into a globe,” from which conjoined twins will be born. If the menses contain the material form of the adult body, it is intuitive that too much seed should result in a multiplication or compression of the being, or that more seed produces twins. It is equally plausible that a mother with an odd posture will develop offspring who are physically twisted because “it is inevitable that a body which moves in a small place should become mutilated and lacking” (Paré 42). Cause and effect are clearly linked in a way that is more instinctively appealing than the genetic view that a code of four chemical components (adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine) might contain the instructions for building the full complexity of organic life, that a minute error in this code at the moment of fertilization might cause mutation, or that through genetic engineering a cow might be fused with a human embryo to concoct a chimera (Jha).

The Monster and the Gene Evolutionary genetics is a cybernetic episteme in that it assumes nature is essentially abstract information, the physical organism being simply the instantiation of that genetic code upon an organic substrate. Within such a framework, beings are defined not according to any innate, stable reality in their own space and time but with reference to the type of information they encapsulate.2 From the genetic point of view, the fly and the human are both bags of data whose sole purpose is faithfully to reproduce that data, most of which is common across both species. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the human individual looking at a particular

26

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

fly on a window, the fly seems a very different creature. The reduction of all life to a kind of writing of four chemical components seems radical when compared to the straightforward Renaissance alternative, in which there is one hierarchical order of development running throughout a multifarious natural world, an order that places humans at the top and accounts for deviations from the norm as owing to observable, material causes. Indeed, far from challenging humankind’s status, the collection of monsters assures one of human primacy, normality, and the ability to assume an authoritative view of the world—from which perspective monsters no longer seem threatening or especially unusual. In contrast, human responses to genetic science are often illogical. For example, although battery-egg farming is commonplace in spite of the suffering it causes, the public reacts with greater revulsion to the possibility that a chicken might be genetically modified to become a nonsentient egglaying machine that cannot feel pain (Bovenkerk 16–22). According to the first standard, the animal has few ontological rights. Contradictorily, in the second example it is felt that the organism should not be modified precisely because modification violates the animal’s ancestral integrity. The battery chicken is viewed simultaneously as a machine for laying eggs and as an animal with a natural essence that must be preserved in companionship with humankind, which is similarly a normative part of evolved nature. Ethical appreciations rely on a fluid, qualitative notion of the subject that means different things in different contexts. One may reduce the quality of selfhood and autonomy in one situation (as in the economical battery hen) while emphasizing sentience in another (as in the preference for the chicken over the egg machine). A similar type of paradox is seen in Renaissance teratology because, on one hand, monsters emphasize the creative fecundity of God while, on the other, suggesting that his image or capabilities are imperfect. In Paré’s case, however, the linear etiology of monstrosity and the encyclopedic framing of monsters that elides their problematic qualities allow him to resolve and contain this paradox within limits. Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” can be seen as a contemporary attempt to resolve

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

27

a similar contradiction between cybernetic nature and embodied political or ethical culture, in which the genetic value of an organism is only part of the issue surrounding its ontology and rights. Even if the precise technological metaphor of the cyborg may look somewhat different from Renaissance monsters, then—and even if the motivations for constructing it are very different (scientific and feminist ethics, rather than theological paradoxes)—Haraway’s manifesto can be read as an attempt to smooth over problematic concepts about monstrosity, otherness, and the status of the observer of nature in a way similar to that attempted by Renaissance naturalists. From an epistemological point of view, Haraway’s cyborg tries to reconcile the knowledge that human beings are purely informational entities, according to cybernetics, with the tacit feeling that humans are ontologically different, privileged above the rest of nature. The cyborg frames abstract science within embodied culture. Although something like birth is the outcome of a genetic process, it can still also be perceived via an embodied observer, a “modest witness” who views things still through the lens of science and technology but in a way which also recognizes the various subjectivities of the other that can be seen through that point of view. Haraway observed that in the late twentieth century, people were “all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (“Cyborg Manifesto” 150). The cyborg allows humans to mark their difference through evidencing technological prowess, the ability to transcend nature by augmenting and modifying it for their needs, while at the same time the fact that people can merge successfully with technology acknowledges that humans, like computers or other organisms, are essentially similar children of genetic or digital information. As Jesse Stommel points out in her chapter in this volume, “Posthumanism … complicates the notion that the human is an enlightened, feeling, thinking, unified subjectivity distinct from its mere body.” Human beings are both bodies and brains.

28

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Paré’s Demons At the same time as Renaissance naturalism and its methodologies help overcome some of the contradictions in the cybernetic conception of nature, one must also be conscious of the theological problem entailed by the encyclopedic approach. If monsters are taken as examples of God’s creativity, there may always be other examples that should have been included but have been missed. Paré emphasized that God is in principle omnipotent. For example, he condemned astrological explanations for aberration on the basis that “God is not tied nor subject to following the order He has established in Nature, nor in the movement of stars and planets” (73). If God can create anything, might this compendium on monsters inadvertently exclude other cases that simply happen not to be perceived as such by limited humans? More important, how can the naturalist be certain that monsters are caused through the material ways just outlined and not simply through random divine intervention? For Paré, establishing the epistemological grounds on which monsters can be read consistently and rationally while not denying that in principle God could potentially create anything at any whim depends on marking a distinction between reality and simulation. Monsters are products of reality, in which God’s power is theoretically limitless, but in practice, that power is limited and logical; in contrast to monsters, the demon is a being of unreality, of simulation, representing the power of the devil, which is limited but also illogical or deceptive. Although it is tempting to see Paré’s descriptive observations and apparent concern with causality as predicting scientific method, George Hoffmann pointed out that he drew substantially on the Aristotelian distinction between the necessary and the possible (38). Because neither Aristotle nor Paré broke these down further into a distinction between things actually observed (and therefore more likely to be possible) and speculative things (such as angels), then according to Hoffmann, Paré afforded the same ontological status to all the subjects he covered. Arguing that “[n]ature has disported herself in order to cause the

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

29

grandeur of her works to be admired,” Paré saw God’s power as limitless (potentia Dei absoluta) rather than limited by any covenant with humanity (potentia Dei ordinata).3 Hoffmann concluded by observing that Paré might be best understood in terms of literary magical realism, which entertains the sense of the world as that which might be possible, without regard to causal logic or to the actuality of the present (43). However, Hoffmann was wrong to situate Paré as an entirely imaginative fiction maker who saw the world as the virtual and fecund manifestation of a potentia Dei absoluta. In specific cases, such as the belief that there are seven individual cells within a woman’s womb that account for multiple births, Paré’s personal observations and his judicious evaluation of other authorities did cause him to reject certain secondhand accounts as impossible (25–26). Almost every case in On Monsters is given a date and place of observation, tying the examples to realistic historical contexts and implying that Paré was concerned to do more than simply compile in order to subordinate the monstrous by collecting it. Rather, his ambition was to rationalize by organizing. In this vein, although nature’s variety might be analogous to the creative mind of an omnipotent God, Paré made a critical distinction between nature and the supernatural, a discrimination which anticipates that more formally inscribed by the modern “two cultures”: separation of the real (those things legitimately studied by science) from the virtual (magical realism —for example, the domain of literature). He made this discrimination by drawing a boundary line between those monsters or monstrous things that can be accounted for by material causes and those that appear to have been produced by the supernatural work of the devil. Paré brought the demon down to earth, showing that demonically produced monsters are actually illusions without physical cause. In The City of God, Augustine argued that demons are “entirely alien to justice, swollen with pride, livid with envy, and subtle in deceit.” In his scheme, demons vividly exist as fallen angels, and like monsters that highlight the beauty of creation, they provide a revealing coun-

30

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

terpoint to the good. However, unlike monsters that to the skeptic are passive evidence of God’s creative nature, demons may actively “hold sway, as over prisoners and subjects, over the many men who are clearly unworthy to share in the true religion” (Augustine 344–345). Whereas monsters embody unintended but revealing errors, demons result from the deliberate evil of the devil. Importantly, however, demons only appear to operate in a supernatural or miraculous way; in actuality, the same sorts of natural causes that account for monstrosity produce their effects. This is precisely Peter I’s argument, mentioned previously. Recollect, too, that Paré’s very first distinction in On Monsters and Marvels is between monsters, which appear outside nature, and marvels, which are against nature, a distinction necessary in order to tie nature to the moral God who created it and to anticipate the reader of the book as a civilized skeptic rather than an uneducated supernaturalist. Later in the book, Paré maintained this Augustinian tradition: Now these Demons can in many manners and fashions deceive our earthbound heaviness, by reason of the subtlety of their essence and malice of their will; for they obscure the eyes of men with thick clouds that scramble our minds giddily and deceive us by satanic impostures, corrupting our imaginations through their buffooneries and impieties. They are “doctors” in falsehoods—the roots of malice—and in all wickedness to seduce and deceive us and prevaricators of truth; and, to say it in a word, they have incomparable skill in deceits, for they transmute themselves in a thousand ways and heap on the bodies of living persons a thousand strange things. (91) Paré acknowledged the existence of demons and their ability to possess the body and to cause it to expel bizarre objects: knives, hairballs, or nails through the stomach, mouth, or womb. However, unlike the other monstrous etiologies in which cause and effect result from the individual’s development, here the spectacular effects produced by demons originate not in the body of the possessed but in the minds of the observers; they are “done through the cleverness of the devil, who

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

31

deceived the persons present through their faculty of sight” (96). As Joanna Shearer points out in the next chapter in this volume, Augustine’s theology (within the penumbra of which Paré was writing) posits a fallen human being who is almost bound to be swayed by evil, unable consciously to avoid it. Such an approach is, however, acquiescently deterministic in a way that contradicts the desire of individuals to take control of their own destiny. Shearer’s interpretation of Paradise Lost demonstrates that Milton therefore invited the reader to acknowledge that Adam and Eve’s decision to sin is one of free choice from which readers of the epic poem might learn so as to behave differently. Similarly, the implication of Paré’s work is that the refined reader will be able to remain skeptical, refusing to entertain the virtual reality concocted by the devil, while remaining able to accept the reasonable if strange etiology underpinning monsters. This is entirely consistent with theological convention that considered the devil a virtual creature, a simulacrum, in that he both possessed the same powers as God and was simultaneously his antithesis. As Stuart Clark explained, the devil’s power was rationalized as the ability to create deception with the permission of God and to simulate divine powers without possessing their intrinsic basis and hence ambiguously sharing their morality (“Demons” 223–245). Thus, for example, possessions were construed as permitted by God so that the priest performing a successful exorcism might edify and assert the value of his role in exposing evil’s limitations. In effect, the devil is self-deceiving in believing himself to have true power when he possesses only its illusion. So God could in principle control demons because they are but simulations of the power of evil without a true base. Further, marvels work through the mind’s eye of the superstitious witness; they do not therefore have any real physical cause and hence cannot reveal a moral or theological truth in an allegorical way, as monsters might (as in Paré’s reading of Leviticus 16). Because demons can do only what God permits, they are preternatural rather than supernatural, and it is only a human fallacy that perceives their actions to be miraculous (that is, outside

32

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

of nature).4 The aim of natural physics at the time “was to demystify demonic pretensions by subjecting them to careful and essentially negative scrutiny—sorting out, in particular, just where the limits of demonic efficacy via second causes were reached and the realm of fantasy and delusion began” (Clark, Thinking with Demons 153). In the history of science, Paré’s skepticism regarding demons, even as he wrote at length about monsters, anticipated later attempts in the seventeenth century to understand the demonic in rational terms as the result of physical illness and personal fabrication—particularly, as Steven Connor has shown, through exposing the dramatic staging of demonic voices (153–225). The fact that, for all his continual curiosity about strange nature, Paré demoted demons to producing the appearance of monstrous entities rather than actually causing supernatural events to occur suggests that he was entering the “secular attitude” that is fundamental to modern science (Goldstein 43). Indeed, the dismissal of the “deceiving demon” was the first move made by Descartes in his empiricist foundation stone, Meditations. However, though tempting, it would be wrong to present Paré’s work as motivated by the same things Descartes’s philosophy was. Rather than seeking to promote a scientific method, Paré’s emphasis on the veracity of monsters and his downplaying of deceiving demons stemmed from theological conventions. Paré’s demons produced a quasi-scientific epistemology—in the passage quoted earlier, Paré has privileged truth over deception—but they do so from a cultural standpoint (religious belief) rather than from a rational, objective one. Paré attempted to categorize according to formal principles of monstrosity. Thus, incorporating the demon within the same text might destroy any broader moral meaning that emerges both from its celebratory display of God’s creativity (theoretically limitless but practically limited) and from its containment of monsters by contextualizing them on the page as objects of spectacle. The demonic is a virtual force, capable of producing cognitive or visual illusions but not physical actions. Therefore, nature alone remains the

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

33

sole code to the divine mind, with its reliable and linear contingencies in which monsters result from unusual sitting positions, for example. Indeed, that Paré was not objective in the modern sense is clear in his attitude toward women. Further segregating nature and the devil, Paré (again following classical tradition) rejected the idea that human monsters can be produced as the offspring of demons and women (49). Oddly, though, Paré also identified the maternal imagination as one factor in monstrosity. Like many authorities of his time, he drew on Hippocrates’s argument that lengthy contemplation of an object can cause birthmarks with a similar imprint, a belief given added credence by the recent reintroduction of Hermetic ideas into Western thought. For example, Paré cited St. John Damascene’s account of a mother who, having looked too intently at the image of St. John dressed in skins, conceived a girl “furry as a bear … deformed and hideous” (38). But if the demonic deceptions of the imagination are given only a brief space in On Monsters, how then to account for these special cases of mind affecting matter? The Aristotelian tradition treats the mother as simply the passive receptacle for the male seed, which contains the form of the child, so there is a contradiction in a work that otherwise inherits Aristotle while also claiming that because the mother is responsible for the continuation of the species she is accountable for monstrous accidents (Huet 73). Paré was unselfconsciously misogynistic on this point, noting: How dangerous it is to disturb a pregnant woman, to show her or remind her of some food which she cannot enjoy immediately, and indeed to show them animals, or even pictures of them, when they are deformed and monstrous. For which I’m expecting someone to object to me that I therefore shouldn’t have inserted anything like this into my book on reproduction. But I will answer him in a word, that I do not write for women at all. Let us return to our subject. (55) Showing a woman pictures implants a demonic illusion that her body then enacts. Even though monsters cannot be produced through demon-

34

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

human copulation, the maternal imagination is subject to the imprinting of simulacra on the embryos the women carry. The monster stands as a moral rebuke to the excessive psychology of the woman (just as early feminists were musicalized as being “hysterical”). Obviously, not being subject to pregnancy, the male viewer remains protected from such cause and effect. In a self-fulfilling circle, this spectacular picture book of monsters authenticates both the superiority of the male witness and the scientific credentials of the writer who presents it for him without himself becoming deformed through baroque excess. As Hanafi wrote, glossing the very similar views of the early-seventeenth-century scholar Giambattista della Porta, “the woman literally makes of her body a laboratory, turns her procreative capacities into a scientific endeavor whose results make up the data,” in this case confirming the Hermetic hypothesis that the intangible sight of an object can cause it to be produced in actuality (58). As with the Kunstkammer, though, the control contrived through perspective leaves the problem of generation in its wake. Paré’s elision of the precise mechanism that allows the mother’s imagination to affect the physical embryo in accordance with Aristotle suggests that because theology was illogical, it was forced to protect itself by sexual prejudice, excluding one community of readers who might potentially complain about this causal contradiction.

The Demon and the Cyborg Paré’s comment that he was not writing for women again emphasizes the way that the encyclopedic method and the process of editing the compendium to include some cases of monstrosity and exclude others comprise a means of asserting one’s power and rationalism. Writing as an act protects the author from demonic delusion and monstrous superstition. To write for women is to write for those in league with the devil, as indicated by the unrestrained power of the female imagination. In a similar vein, the Renaissance naturalist was cautious that one factor in monstrosity may be a surplus of the imagination, or the

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

35

devils and demons who corrupt it. Paré was aware of the power of writing to contribute toward this extension of the mind beyond the confines of language, to mimic devilish deception through the human creative imagination. Therefore, he refrained from recounting the “great loathsomeness” of additional monsters of a particular type (73). That monsters cannot be themselves generated by demons and that the text on monsters must not spill into diabolic surplus indicate that truth inheres in monsters in their own right, and God’s moral purpose potentially is legible in their nature. In a modern age of epistemological and disciplinary boundaries, as Hoffman’s interpretation of Paré typifies, one is wholly a materialist or wholly a mystic, a scientist, or a humanist: So if one holds a belief in God or monsters, why not also in demons? But in the Renaissance, theocentrism could be maintained along with an imaginative restraint, such that only God can be truly supernatural, whereas the work of the devil is confined to the production of illusion. It may seem illogical to allow one but not the other, but it is also comprehensible. In today’s era, the earlier example of genetic modification shows that some aspects of experience would ideally be understood from a scientific point of view and others from a cultural one, but that in practice people fuse the two together, often illogically but always with understandable motivations from the perspective of the embodied human living in the natural world. Haraway’s cyborg stands as a metaphor in the twentyfirst century for the presence of such a fusion and the importance of being conscious about it. Even though monsters and demons have the same ontological status in modern science (both labeled paranormal, unworthy of scientific study), for Paré the demon actually served by its difference to validate serious study of the monstrous. Similarly, the cyborg as a trope draws together ideology and science while also denoting subtle shades of difference between the two. For Haraway, some versions of the cyborg are constituted of “nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum … Cyborgs are ether, quintessence” (“Cyborg Manifesto” 153). Like Paré’s demons that assume psychological forms, these varieties of cyborg

36

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

are dangerous because they are “as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation” (153). Haraway had in mind the cybernetic transcendentalists here who deny the value of embodiment entirely, thus subverting such foundational notions as gender. Of particular concern to Haraway is the way in which modern science might refuse to succumb to sociological analysis or critique because it deals with pure information, transmitted instantaneously in a multimedia world. It is certainly hard to understand the way in which cybernetic technologies still embody ideologies of sexual difference: Is a male virtual avatar in Second Life to be considered male even if its player is female and even though such an avatar is not biologically embodied but produced through computer code? Alternatively, to revisit my earlier example, even if genetically there is nothing wrong with a modified egglaying machine versus a normal battery hen, one cannot think in such a purely cybernetic way of codes detached from bodies. To put bodies back into the equation, a genetically modified chicken is monstrous, whereas a nonmodified chicken is natural, even if it is exploited and abused. Both demons and cyborgs are epistemological creatures that foreground the ways in which science establishes its bases of knowledge and frames of reference. Just as the exclusion of the demon validates the importance of the science of the monstrous and the authority of the writer who seeks to rationalize the latter, so too cyborgs provoke one to consider the social stakes of scientific and technological advances, even if those sciences are ostensibly studying the immaterial world of information (such as genes or computer programs). Haraway’s cyborg frames scientific knowledge in relation to a world of embodied individuals (“Cyborg Manifesto” 160–161). Epistemological framing of things that might or might not be considered monstrous is the work performed in a similar vein by Paré’s monsters and demons and by Haraway’s cyborg, both of which reside on the boundaries of knowledge, between nature and culture. With this connection, though, one must acknowledge the telling difference between the two periods. Whereas Haraway saw the cyborg as

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

37

capable of raising consciousness of science in society precisely because it seems so provocative, even science fictional, Paré saw the demon as a concept that must be proscribed even if it cannot be erased. Paré’s demons were designed to separate the real from the virtual, to deny the role of the devil in creating monsters by keeping his work a virtual one. In this sense, cybernetics realizes Paré’s fears. Second-wave cybernetics of the 1960s argues that in a sense, the world is only ever knowable from a subjective, virtualized standpoint. Humberto Maturana’s seminal paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” shows that a frog is barely capable of perceiving large, static objects but is welladapted to perceiving small, fast objects, such as flies (Lettvin et al.).5 As N. Katherine Hayles glossed the experiment, “The results implied that the frog’s perceptual system does not so much register reality as construct it” (135). Just as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in physics shows that the act of measurement changes the behavior of the particle under observation, so the biology of a cybernetic agent—whether frog or human—potentially determines perception before the world is raised to consciousness, such that the world one knows is not necessarily the world as it physically is. Poised between the physical and the metaphysical, the deceptive demon intervenes between reality and the mind. Cybernetics, however, incorporates deception within the information receptor that is the brain, so that objective facts about the state of a system are always actively determined rather than passively witnessed by the observer within that same hermeneutic. Such theory seems increasingly validated by later cybernetic technologies: the Internet, virtual avatars, and immersive digital experiences do indeed seem to deceive. It thus confirms the suspicion that sneaks around Paré’s work —the possibility that the mind is not able to perceive the world in an undistorted way. For Haraway, the underlying boundary breakdowns that make the cyborg a possibility both as an analogy and as a real identity are threefold: the collapse of distinctions between human and animal, the leaky distinction between animal and machine, and the imprecise boundary

38

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

between the physical and the nonphysical. Similarly leaky distinctions seem potentially to pervade the science of monsters. Like the monster, the cyborg is a product of—and can only be understood by—the conjunction of subjective, political, and cultural constructions of identity with objective, scientific, and technological ones. However, Paré did his best to restore boundaries by contrasting the virtuality perpetuated by demons and the limited etiology of the physical monster produced in accordance with potentia Dei ordinata. Unlike Haraway in her feminist cyborg, Paré did not reflect on the contradiction that results in relation to gender: he both denied the possibility of demonic deception and blamed the maternal imagination for causing stigmatic birthmarks. Ultimately, although this argument has drawn the concepts of Renaissance monstrosity and postmodern cyborgs closer together, the two are not dyads. Nevertheless, in their style the two concepts do bear similarities. Simultaneously a prurient spectacular of the grotesque and an attempt at serious natural science, Paré’s work is chimerical, poised between the rationalization of the monster and the imaginative fiction of the demon, striving to maintain a materialistic account of development without underplaying the role of an omnipotent but benign deity. Haraway’s work is also a generic hybrid. Her “Cyborg Manifesto” looks to science fiction to posit a new epistemology for science in the (post)human world. Stylistically, the works of both Paré and Haraway reflect times when religious and secular epistemologies undergo flux, when disciplinary boundaries are threatened, and when human beings are unsure what to be more concerned about: the real and tangible world inhabited by natural monsters or the fecund and virtual world made possible by the imagination.

Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs

39

Notes 1. All subsequent parenthetical page references in this chapter refer to Paré, On Monsters and Marvels. The definitive French edition is Paré, Des monstres et prodiges. 2. Typifying this perspective, in which an organism is perceived from the point of view of its genetic information, is Dawkins. 3. According to Renaissance theories, God could perform any act with his potentially infinite creative power (potentia Dei absoluta). However, in practice, God’s contract with humankind (his potentia Dei ordinata) agrees that his power will operate according to fixed and knowable natural laws of causality. Potentia Dei ordinata is thus a solution to the old theological problem of how an omnipotent and omniscient being can nevertheless permit people free will, as most famously expressed by Boethius: “If God foresees all things and cannot be mistaken in any way, what Providence has foreseen as a future event must happen. So that if from eternity Providence foreknows not only men’s actions but also their thoughts and desires, there will be no freedom of will. No action or desire will be able to exist other than that which God’s infallible Providence has foreseen. For if they were changed and made different from how they were foreseen, there will be no sure foreknowledge of the future, only an uncertain opinion; and this I do not think can be believed of God” (119–120). Amos Funkenstein argued that modern science emerged from the secularization of the concept of potentia Dei ordinate (129–150). 4. For a detailed analysis of the way in which demons worked to perform marvelous feats that nevertheless were not miraculous or supernatural see Clark, Thinking with Demons (esp. 161–178). 5. Maturana expanded these ideas about the reliability of observation.

Chapter 2

The Devil Made Me Do It Sin, (Inner) Demons, and Monstrous Reproduction in Milton’s Paradise Lost Joanna Shearer The human world seems obsessed with sin. Indeed, whether or not one subscribes to the Christian connotations of this word, the idea that there are set rules that one must follow to lead a good life translates across myriad cultures and faith systems. In a strictly Christian context, the causes of sin and learning about what leads the human toward sin are the foundational pillars of this faith; for though the Bible and most of its early theologians agree that humanity was not created evil, the fact remains that a sinful act—that is, a moment when pride was stronger than faith —led to humankind’s perpetual banishment from Eden. And really, the majority of the blame for this fallen condition is placed upon Eve’s shoulders. Generations have been told that because of Eve, all of humankind has lost favor in God’s eyes. Because of Eve, human beings have lost their place in paradise. Because of Eve, people die.1 However, should one even call Eve’s—and subsequently, Adam’s—sin, original? After all, that sin is not, strictly speaking, the first one. In reality, sin would not even

42

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

exist save for the seditious thoughts of one pesky angel with delusions of grandeur. Thus, in Paradise Lost, Milton demonstrated through his treatment of all levels of the Christian transcendent realms that readers must not forget that Lucifer is the first to fall, and it is his temptation of Eve in the garden that leads to humankind’s own moment of spiritual failure. So the father of sin is in reality a former angel, and it is his desire for revenge against God that leads to the manifestation of sin in the human world. Indeed, without the angelic war that is precipitated by Lucifer’s fall—by his becoming Satan and the supreme devil that Christianity teaches is waiting in the wings to pounce upon any moment of human spiritual weakness—humankind’s fall, whether it happened or not, could not be blamed on human sin alone. In turn, both the need for Christ to sacrifice himself to forgive human sins and the need for the sacrament of baptism to wash clean the taint of original sin would be mitigated and rendered unnecessary. Accordingly, the very need for Christianity as a moral compass and faith community for its followers owes a huge debt to its greatest monster, Satan. For without Satan, there is no sin, and without sin, there is no fall. And finally, without a fall, there is no need for Christ’s redemption. Using this syllogistic construction, Milton’s assessment of human nature is correct, at least to the extent that humans do indeed need to acknowledge, in myriad ways that may make one uncomfortable, that they are very much like Satan, at least in that the mind gives birth to sin well before the body acts upon it. Like Satan’s, humans’ minds are the primary seat of moral weakness—not their souls. Though the faithful are assured from both Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian perspectives that one’s will is free and that fate is not set in stone, Sin nonetheless lingers in the backmost reaches of the psyche, waiting for the merest inkling of defiance or of damning pride to birth her forth and pave the way for the reproduction of her monstrous offspring, Death. As a result of this likeness to Satan, though the mission of Christ frees the human soul from Sin and her demonic progeny, one cannot escape the knowledge that, like Satan, as well as like Adam and Eve, human beings are

The Devil Made Me Do It

43

merely tempted by Sin. However, to act upon that desire and to reproduce Sin and Death—to move from thought into deed—is a choice only the individual can make of his or her own free will, and the only saving grace for humanity is that, unlike Satan, humans were seduced into committing sin, as is the case in Paradise Lost when the physical act of sinning is reproduced from Satan to Eve and from Eve to Adam. Regardless of the journey taken by the seductive force or entity, the choice to act in each case is up to the individual. So although it is tempting to blame Satan and Eve for their respective sinful actions and temptations of the innocent, one must not forget that Adam makes a conscious choice to follow Eve into sin—to continue its reproduction and thus bear Sin’s progeny, Death, into the human world. Consequently, according to the Christian doctrine of any denomination, the greatest monster a person both gives birth to and fights comprises those inner demons, and therefore, human beings, like Satan before them, have no one to blame for their fall but themselves: a truth that, Milton’s greatest epic shows, human beings will be damned if they forget.

Augustine and the Doctrine of Sin Before I can examine how sin is constructed in Paradise Lost specifically, I must first look at the way in which sin, free will, and the concept of choice are exegetically evaluated by perhaps the most influential mind in all of Christian theology, St. Augustine of Hippo. His doctrines on the Trinity and free will are two of the few—if not the only—that strict Protestants like Milton would allow the Roman Church had correct, but perhaps what is most significant about his writings is that they emerged in the earliest stages of a legal Christian church. That this theology is nascent means not only that much of Augustine’s writing is concerned with defining what Christianity should be as well as with how one should interpret Christian doctrine, but also that he was actively working to transform formerly pagan thinking into obedience to Christ. This transformation is not always easy, for there are the inherent problems in

44

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

fighting certain ingrained cultural mores about what is sinful. His most prominent source of everything was, of course, the Bible, but what further separates Augustine from other early theologians is his intensive discussion of how one should interpret biblical writings based upon signs. He explained this method most thoroughly in book 2 of De doctrina christiana: Some signs are natural, others given. Natural signs are those which without a wish or any urge to signify cause something else besides themselves to be known from them, like smoke, which signifies fire … Given signs are those which living things give to each other, in order to show to the best of their ability, the emotions of their minds, or anything they have felt or learnt. (2.2– 3, 57) Unlike many modern interpreters of the Bible and religious texts, Augustine explicitly argued against a strictly literal interpretation. Furthermore, he prioritized given signs over natural signs, for given signs are not connected by things, such as smoke and fire, but rather their significance is transferred from the mind of an individual and applied to the collective consciousness in order to teach all Christians to connect one sign with a particular meaning or significance. Given signs are no more difficult to construct than natural signs, but they are far trickier to interpret because of the inability of any one person truly to know the thoughts of another or to know that he or she would interpret the given sign in the same way without being told how to assign a specific meaning to a given sign.2 Regardless of the lack of consensus in human thought, Augustine reiterated the need for the use of signs in interpreting Christian doctrine because given signs work as the touchstone that allows myriad minds to grasp the same concept in a similar way; thus, a text is given layers of meaning from person-to-person through the use and transmission of signs. For

The Devil Made Me Do It

45

[t]here is no reason for us to signify something (that is, to give a sign) except to express and transmit to another’s mind what is in the mind of the person who gives the sign. It is this category of signs—to the extent that it applies to humans—that I have decided to examine and discuss, because even the divinely given signs contained in the holy scriptures have been communicated to us by the human beings who wrote them. (2.3.57, 59) In other words, the use of signs renders meaning outside of biblical, historical, and even transcendental contexts. Signs connect humanity and human spirituality through the mind first. Furthermore, how the mind processes a sign determines not only one’s thoughts but also how one will act upon those thoughts, and in this manner, Augustine showed that the mind is primary in terms of defining faith, affirming faith, and processing sin. Consequently, it is impossible to separate the thought of sin from the act of sin itself in the same way that the soul is seen as part of the body but able to separate itself from it when the body dies. The mind carries with it the potential for sin, and sin in a much broader way influences the body to act. For as concerns the living human,3 the body cannot act without an animated mind, even in the case of sleep, wherein the body might be at rest but the mind is still active. After all, as I discuss in the pages that follow, Milton’s Eve is first tempted through her dreams, so it is important to remain vigilant—that is, to correctly interpret the signs—in order to safeguard the mind before it influences the body to turn sinful thoughts into sinful deeds. Take, for example, Augustine’s discussion in book 1 of De civitate Dei of Lucretia’s rape and subsequent suicide, a story that was popular in Roman history, politics, and lore well before Augustine’s birth. For the classical world, Lucretia is a paragon of wifely chastity and virtue, and it is because she commits suicide after her rape that her innocence is unquestioned by all of Roman society. Furthermore, because the king’s son rapes her, Lucretia’s story and physical body are used as powerful signs by the rebellion to reinforce their overthrow of the

46

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

corrupt monarchy and establish the republic. That she is raped is never treated in classical sources as anything but a supreme violation, and because she is seen as such an honorable woman, her suicide is treated as her means of triumphing over her monarchical corruptor. And herein lay the theological challenge for Augustine: How does one damn such a woman under the strict Christian doctrine that unequivocally treats self-murder as always a sin of the gravest order no matter what the circumstances? To do so, one must change a powerful sign of honor and freedom and retranslate its meaning into something sinful. How does one do this while still maintaining the position that Lucretia is not sinful because she was raped—thus singularly damning all rape victims and alienating all the newly converted pagans in the process? Augustine’s answer to this dilemma was to question not what was done to her but, rather, what happened in her mind while the act occurred. He stated: [P]urity is a virtue of the mind and has as its companion a strength of mind that chooses to endure any evils whatever rather than consent to evil, and … no one, however magnanimous and shamefast, has it always in his power to decide what shall be done with his flesh, having power only to decide what he will in his mind accept or refuse. (1.18.79; emphasis added) Further: And so, as long as the mind’s resolve remains constant, whereby the body too made good its claim to be holy, the violence of another’s lust does not deprive even the body of its holiness, which is preserved by the steadfastness of one’s own control. (1.18.81; emphasis added) For Augustine, what happens to the body is immaterial so long as the mind remains steadfast in its holiness. In essence, the sins committed on one’s body, as in the case of rape, are just that: the sins committed by the corrupted mind and body of someone upon the body alone of another. The soul of the victim in such cases remains pure and untainted by the corruption of the outside body committing a sin against the victim.

The Devil Made Me Do It

47

Therefore, if this story were simply about the act of rape, then the sin is Tarquin’s alone; Lucretia would be, for Augustine, completely blameless. But as William S. Babcock stated, “The start of human evil, in Augustine’s view, does not lie in the open and public form of the deed; it lies rather in the hidden and secret chamber of the will…” (42), so one must be cognizant of the fact that the root of Lucretia’s sin for Augustine is not based upon what happens to her body. Rather, it is the sin of her mind— the thought that leads to the deed of self-murder—that must be aggressively questioned. If Lucretia had been only the victim of a heinous rape, then she would not need to die, for she had not sinned up to that point in her tragic tale. Nevertheless, her story does not stop with Tarquin’s sinful act, and her choice to self-murder casts a shadow on both her tale and her soul. This secondary act became a reflection of her sinful thoughts and guilt, and thus it became the linchpin allowing Augustine to condemn her in order to dissuade all Christians from following her example. By St. Augustine’s reasoning, the only reason for Lucretia to compound one sin with another is guilt. He asked: What if—but she herself alone could know—she was seduced by her own lust and, though the youth violently attacked her, consented, and in punishing that act of hers was so remorseful that death seemed to be due to expiation? (1.19.87; emphasis added) One cannot know what “she herself alone could know” at the time of her rape, but by committing suicide, Augustine reiterated, she tacitly admits her culpability. He reaffirmed this idea by stating, She thought that she must present evidence before men’s eyes … because she could not exhibit her conscience to them … This is not what the Christian women who had the same experience and still survive did. They did not avenge a crime not their own upon themselves. (1.19.89)

48

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Thus, according to Christian understanding as articulated by Augustine, Lucretia’s mind and faulty reasoning lead to the misguided belief that committing suicide will prove her innocence when in fact she commits an even graver sin by doing so. By the same understanding, this act is her admission that she has sinned, for if she had in no way consented to the rape, then she would be held blameless and would have no need to compound the violence already perpetrated upon her body. But as Augustine pointed out, one cannot know her thoughts, so one can judge only her actions—and her actions are what damn her in this case.4 Lucretia sins irrevocably, if first in her mind, and her supposedly sinful thoughts reproduce into a sinful deed. For that, Augustine could not hold her blameless and hope that no good Christians would follow her example. He had to actively work to discredit Lucretia and to retranslate her sign from something wholly good into something that is at the very least morally questionable in order to change the way pagan minds should interpret these new Christian signs and not damn their souls in the process. Ultimately, what Augustine taught through Lucretia’s story is that the mind is the first guard against sin; however, it is also the first place in which one can sin. Thus, it is the first place that the devil, or at least devilish impulses, can reproduce in order to corrupt the will and cause humans to choose sin over virtue. This choice is the next crucial point on the path toward the physical act of committing a sin—the thought can result in the deed, but only if the will is complicit in this movement. Nevertheless, Augustine had his most philosophical difficulty with this concept of choice, and many critics agree that the syllogistic means by which he reached his conclusion is deeply flawed, for against much of Christian teaching Augustine argued that no evil could be performed unless the will itself is evil. As Ernesto Bonaiuti and Giorgio La Piana explained: [Augustine] thinks that sin brought an organic modification in the human being and not a helpless perversion of a fleshly organism

The Devil Made Me Do It

49

already in existence … The radical transformation of the human nature from an ethereal to a bodily substance possibly might have left intact in the human compound the capacity of the spirit to work for its rehabilitation. On the contrary, introducing into an organism, already material and fleshly, the incessant trouble of corrupted sensuality, the sin, in the new attitude of the Augustinian thought, effaces at once the very possibility of free will, which became slave of the evil. (162) In other words, before humanity committed its first sin, the will was free, and humanity was in effect a substance or “fleshly organism” completely different from what it became after the fall. After the act itself, the will is irrevocably changed from the state in which God originally created it, and the will is no longer aligned toward the good. Rather, it “became slave of the evil.” Human beings have no choice now but to sin, and they perpetuate this slavery thorough the physical act of reproduction when they have children. Indeed, [o]riginal sin is then described as an infection which propagates itself from father to son through the act of generation, which being an act of organic trouble caused by the sin, is a sin itself and determines the transmission ipso facto of the sin to the new creature. (Bonaiuti and La Piana 163; emphasis added) For this reason, although humans must adhere to God’s law to multiply, biological reproduction creates a fertile ground upon which sin can also be fruitful and propagate.5 In fulfilling one divine mandate, people invariably reproduce in tandem their own sinful natures and “infect” their progeny not only with humanity’s first sin but also with a will that can do nothing but sin, regardless of whether one views one’s thoughts and actions in this way. Thus, people sin not because they choose to but because they have no choice not to. In this way, human wills are bound to evil, for people are now inherently evil and so sin. As many scholars have pointed out, this view represents a radical change from Augustine’s earlier writings,6 and though it is philosophi-

50

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

cally and theologically problematic, it does raise an interesting question: Who is responsible for the existence of sin? Is it human beings, Satan, or God? As previously stated, Adam and Eve are not the first to sin; the first created will to be corrupted is Lucifer’s. He, in turn, is condemned to hell for his rebellion; however, his revenge for his banishment is to corrupt first Eve and then, through Eve, Adam, leading them to sin as well. But this places the emphasis on sin and not upon redemption, for without sin, Christ’s death and resurrection would be unnecessary. If, as Augustine posited, all of humanity were nothing but evil, why would God provide a means for repentance? Satan was not given this gift, so what makes his crime worse than humankind’s own, and in turn, why do some souls go to hell and some go to heaven if all are bound to evil by the same crime? If one were to truly follow Augustine’s reasoning and ascribe to his notion of a will enslaved to evil that reproduces only evil in each generation at birth, then every soul is monstrous and should never find its way to heaven. Thus, Milton’s counterargument in Paradise Lost is that the will is not inherently evil; rather, as demonstrated by the reproduction of Sin from Satan to Eve to Adam, sin always finds the most fertile ground in the mind, not the will, for it is only when the mind is fully committed to sin’s birth that the body has no choice but to follow.

Milton and Paradise Lost From Augustine, I must turn to the way that Milton determined sin was created in the first place. In order to do this, I examine his construction of the anti-Trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death in book 2 of Paradise Lost. Just prior to the war in heaven, Sin is born of Satan’s seditious thoughts, but her role does not end there. Immediately upon her birth, she begins an incestuous relationship with her father, and they beget Death. In effect, Satan is father as well as lover to Sin, and both are the parents of the punishment for sin that will be leveled against humanity. As Minaz Jooma explained:

The Devil Made Me Do It

51

Sin’s tale of her birth, for example, reveals that she is born at the very moment that Satan articulates his rebellion against God … Sin’s role in these two father-son relationships (God and Satan, Satan and Death) points up the unstable position of daughters in the poem: Sin is alternately cast as bringing father and son together and as a divisive force in father-son relationships. The latter role is stressed when Satan simultaneously conceives rebellion and gives birth to become a self-authorizing father on the brink of his ejection from the domain of his own father/creator. (29) In this manner, Sin is an unnaturally birthed entity that immediately inspires lust in her begetter in an incestuous misreflection of the way in which God begets his own son, Christ. Indeed, the lust Satan feels for his daughter, their incestuous relationship, and the resulting pregnancy are juxtaposed with the beginning of the angelic war in Heaven. She is the product of her father’s sinful thoughts of rebellion, and his sexual relationship with her mirrors not only his lust for power but also the physical act of war that Satan will make manifest in Heaven. As Sin narrates: Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing Becam’st enamor’d, and such joy thou took’st With me in secret, that my womb conceiv’d A growing burden. Meanwhile War arose, And fields were fought in Heav’n. (2.764–768) Important to note here is Sin’s assertion regarding what it is about her that made Satan so “enamor’d”: because she is birthed from his mind, it is the fact that Satan sees himself within her image. In essence, the lust that Sin inspires in Satan is aligned with the rebellious thoughts he is already engaged in, and ultimately, his sexual relationship with her is another manifestation of the physical act of war that is happening throughout Heaven. One could say that Sin literally represents a pregnant idea, but the child she births is something that angels and demons alike need not fear: Death. Nor does it affect humanity at this point, for because Adam

52

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

and Eve are in a state of grace in Eden, Death is not a threat to them; this means that Sin and Death initially remain confined as the guardians of the Gates of Hell. It is significant to note that as the child of Sin and Satan, Death is necessarily even more horrific than his parents. He is described as a physically monstrous entity “that shape had none / Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, / Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d” (2.667–669), and to compound the horror of this creature, readers learn that this child of Sin and Satan rapes his mother on a daily basis to produce an army of hellhounds that turn on her and devour her bowls after each birth (2.785–809). Sin herself has also been transformed in Hell to a creature half-woman, half-serpent that Satan does not initially recognize (2.650–659). Here again is the corruption of Satan’s mind in both the monstrous metamorphosis of his daughter/lover and in the dark, nightmarish shape of his son/adversary. But more important, readers see how unaware Satan is of the wrongness of his thinking in the fact that he does not recognize either Sin or Death when he encounters them at the Gates of Hell. In other words, he misses the signs of their corrupted bodies and cannot connect them to their meaning—namely, that they are both products of his own monstrous mind. Sin was born from his mind, but her birth followed his thoughts of rebellion—an idea that he finds so attractive that he copulates with her physical body to create Death. In this manner, Satan establishes his own corrupt Trinity, which he will then release upon the human world when he travels to Eden to tempt Eve toward sin, and from that sin, humanity’s gravest punishment is that each one eventually will die. At the same time, Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib brings about its own problematic ideas, for Eve was created to be Adam’s mate, but she was physically reproduced from Adam’s body. Therefore, she is in some sense his daughter as well as his wife. The parallels between Eve’s birth and that of Satan’s daughter are too similar to easily dismiss, though scholars have often juxtaposed the unnatural sexual relationship between Satan

The Devil Made Me Do It

53

and Sin with the supposedly proper marital relationship between Adam and Eve in order to assert that the Satan-Sin incest is used to further show the rightness of the marriage of the first man and woman prior to their fall. In other words, for many scholars, Satan compounds his evil against humanity by also corrupting Adam and Eve’s proper sexual or marital union.7 Yet one need look no further than Eve’s creation from Adam’s physical body in order to find some flaws in this dichotomy of good and evil, incest versus proper sexuality. One scholar noted, “While she is displaced from Adam by God’s intervention in her fashioning, Eve is nevertheless conceivable only as a figment of Adam’s desire. Echoing Sin’s relation to Satan, Eve owes her being to Adam” (Jooma 35). Furthermore, [i]f the union of Adam and Eve is to be cast in terms of the mutuality or reciprocity of a right marital sexuality, it can only be so in a context in which consent is not a real possibility; and consent is not a real possibility when it is girt about by the relations of indebtedness in which Eve is engendered. In this relation between begetter and begot, it is implausible for the daughter to be seductress or initiator, for each of these presupposes volition. (Jooma 36) Thus, though it is easy to see the similarities between Sin and Eve in terms of their births, one must take into account the theology that this text is based upon; therefore, one cannot view them as wholly the same. Perhaps the difference here between views of Eve and Sin, as well as of their relationships with their begetters, calls back to Augustine’s notion of signs. Milton’s text brings in Augustine’s synthesis of this concept when Sin describes her origin: Out of thy head I sprung: amazement seiz’d All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoil’d afraid At first, and call’d me Sin and for a Sign Portentous held me… (2.758–761)

54

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Whereas the entire “Host of Heav’n” is afraid of Sin and her birth, Satan finds her pleasing and “took’st with [her] in secret” (2.765–766). Her birth horrifies everyone but Satan, for she is a sign of something gone wrong. Furthermore, Sin’s body, which is itself a sign or portent of something unnatural to the other beings in Heaven, only inflames Satan’s sexual desire. It is his acting upon that desire through incest that leads to war in Heaven and to Sin’s giving birth to Death. Her birth is also, then, an early sign of Satan’s fall from grace. But what of Adam and Eve? Is Eve’s birth or creation perhaps a sign of humanity’s eventual fall as well? Granted, Eve is created by God from Adam’s rib, and Sin is the product of Satan’s seditious thoughts; still, one must wonder, is merely the presence of God in the reproductive equation enough to render one nonnatural birth acceptable and the other monstrous? The answer for Milton was yes, and God himself provides the same affirmative response in book 4: Though both Not equal, as their sex not equal seem’d; For contemplation hee and valor form’d, For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace, Hee for God only, shee for God in him. (295–299; emphasis added) Not only were Adam and Eve created for different purposes, and it is stressed here that they are “Not equal,” but perhaps the greatest difference between their creation and Sin’s is the presence of God in the process. Adam was created “for God only,” and Eve was created “for God in him,” whereas Sin is created out of Satan’s thoughts against God. Thus, Sin—not Eve—is a sign of what is wrong both with Satan and with the rebellion itself. Adam and Eve are not created because of any evil thought; rather, they are reflections of God and of God’s presence in another, respectively. Adam and Eve are still created beings, and therefore, like Satan, they can sin. However, they are not the products of an evil mind and corrupted will, as Sin is. She would not exist but for the sinful thoughts of her father, Satan, and his sinful deeds both in copu-

The Devil Made Me Do It

55

lating with her and in rebelling against God lead to Satan’s fall as well as the birth of Death. So although it cannot be ignored that Eve’s birth and union with Adam are problematic because they appear similar to Sin’s beginning and incestuous relationship with Satan, one must also acknowledge that Eve’s origin comes about by God’s design alone. Even though Adam and Eve sin, their sin does not imply the same sign of impending evil that Sin herself does. The sign might be called the same name, but quite literally, it is a different person, and ultimately, Satan’s thoughts are what unnaturally birth Sin in the first place. This means that even though Adam and Eve’s marriage may not be as easily defined as appropriate in comparison to the unequivocal incest of the demonic Trinity of Satan-Sin-Death, it is still a relationship that holds God at its core, something that Satan and his progeny completely reject.

Milton and Free Will From Satan’s Sin, Milton turned to human beings’ own, but as in much of his writing, here Milton did not do so in a conventional way. Instead of continuing to journey with Satan as he heads toward the human world, readers are taken to Heaven, where God and his son are watching Satan’s journey—a journey God already knows is going to be successful. Satan will tempt Eve, Adam will choose to sin because Eve has done so, and God already knows this will happen. This theological quandary lies at the core of what led Augustine to eventually reject the notion of free will after original sin, but as previously stated, Milton departed drastically from Augustine on this point. In discussing the angelic fall, which is analogous to that of the human race, God explicitly tells his son: Both what they judge and what they choose; for so I form’d them free, and free they must remain… I else must change Thir nature… (3.123–126)

56

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Further: They themselves ordain’d thir fall. The first sort by thir own suggestion fell, Self-tempted, self-deprav’d… (3.128–130) The emphasis here is explicitly on free choice, the self, and the free will with which the humans were “form’d” by God. In fact, free will is so intrinsic to all of God’s created beings that God states he “must change / Thir nature” if he were to bind the will. What this tells readers of Paradise Lost is twofold: first, Milton did not subscribe to Augustine’s later philosophical ideas on God’s creation of evil and of humanity’s first sin binding the will to nothing but evil thereafter, and second, God could prevent Satan, Adam, or Eve from sinning and still allow them to be “free” in their natures. As John Patrick has written, Nothing occurs in the world of the finite unless God wills it. However, there is a difference between positive sanction of the good, and mere permission—mere toleration of the existence—of the bad … Perhaps this is theological hair-splitting, but a God who is required to act to prevent moral evil within the depths of the busy human anthill would be in a sense “limited.” (19) God does not limit himself with trying to prevent sin, but rather, he already has a solution for the inevitability of sin through his son’s sacrifice. In another example of a created free will, the son asks: Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life… I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee Freely put off, and for him lastly die. (3.236, 238–240) Humanity’s sin is foreseeable, but its future in terms of an afterlife is not set in stone. Indeed, this vow is what saves human souls, even though neither God nor his son can prevent their sin in the first place. God is not required to act, but his son can freely choose to do so. And herein

The Devil Made Me Do It

57

lies Milton’s marked divergence from Augustine because he shows that evil exists and human beings will choose to act upon it, but God did not explicitly call it into being in the same way that Sin was birthed from Satan’s mind. In this manner, Satan’s fall, as well as that of his followers, was “ordain’d” in a way that humankind’s was not. Consequently, people may choose not to fight their own inner demons and to act upon sinful thoughts, but as Milton showed, the means for human salvation has been entreated and accepted before Satan even completes his journey from Hell to Eden. Perhaps, then, Milton’s most drastic departure from Augustine in Paradise Lost does in fact occur regarding the notion of whether God created a free or a bound will, particularly in the way this influences the human intellect regarding the commission of sin. Indeed, Milton followed much of Augustine’s theological and philosophical teachings, and he famously translated as well as commented on Augustine’s writings. However, Paradise Lost shows in no uncertain terms where Milton found Augustine’s teachings to be deeply flawed, for although God created something evil, he did not create an evil will. Rather, he made A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds Perverse… (2.622–625) This new universe is the direct opposite of the fertile blooming that readers see in both Heaven and Eden. This land is where death lives and “breeds / Perverse” and where evil is “only good.” So it is the perfect place for Satan’s progeny to live and to breed. It is a reflection of whom it was created for, not of the creator himself, and this brief passage reflects Milton’s dissatisfaction with Augustine’s reasoning on God’s creation of evil in the will. If the will were truly bound to evil, there would be no choice, and evil would be the only good—or more precisely, the only choice. But according to this passage, God created this universe to reflect the newly corrupted nature of its inhabitants; he did not create the inhab-

58

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

itants evil to begin with. Had Satan not chosen to fall, there would have been no need to banish him to a realm befitting that which his seditious thoughts and actions created—namely, a world wherein “life dies, [and] death lives.” Accordingly, Satan is responsible for his own free actions, which are the result of his rebellious thoughts, and his desire to reproduce those thoughts in God’s other creations will result in the birth of both Sin and Death. Death becomes to the human world both punishment and a flawed legacy to human children. Thus, Milton has revised Augustine to show that it is God’s punishment, not an inherent evilness, that human beings inherit and pass on when they have children. As Milton reiterated in myriad key moments throughout Paradise Lost, even in a sinful state, the human will remains free to choose between good and evil in spite of the fact that it is humanity’s irreversible fate to die. Because of this fate, one also must examine how Satan convinces Adam and Eve to sin, and surprisingly, it is Adam and Eve’s own words that give Satan his formal plan in book 4 when he overhears the couple discussing the Forbidden Tree and how eating of its fruit would cause them to die (4.411–491). In this instant, Satan resolves not to attack Adam and Eve physically; rather, he states, “Hence I will excite their minds / With more desire to know” (4.522–523; emphasis added). Here Satan does not wish to create a desire for sin per se; rather, he wishes to make humanity suffer by having them think like him and birth Sin in their own minds using what amounts to simple curiosity. Indeed, it is Satan’s desire to know or, more precisely, to have the same knowledge as God— to make his mind exactly like God’s—that leads to Sin’s initial creation, and it is the implantation of the same desire to be “Equal with Gods” that Satan is hoping to inspire within humankind so that Sin can be birthed in the human world (4.526). Thus, in creating the desire in humankind to be like God, Satan is in actuality making them more like himself. In this manner, human beings not only share in the rebirth of Satan’s Sin but also have an equal stake in her reproduction once Satan has impregnated Eve’s mind with the possibility of rebellion and then in having that possibility transmitted from Eve to Adam through the action of eating

The Devil Made Me Do It

59

the Forbidden Tree’s fruit. Consequently, for her part in being the first human to fall, many want to blame Eve as the weak link; yet in terms of temptation, Milton’s Eve does not succumb to Satan’s logic as easily as Christian doctrine would have one believe. Satan initially attacks her mind when she is at her most vulnerable—that is, when she is asleep— and in a monstrous perversion of the Annunciation, wherein the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove impregnates Mary after she verbally consents to bear God’s son, Satan is discovered by the angelic guardians of Eden “Squat like a Toad” whispering in Eve’s ear (4.800). The narrator says that this devilish reptile is “inspiring venom” so that he might “thence raise / At least distemper’d, discontented thoughts / Vain hopes, vain aims, and inordinate desires” (4.804, 806–808). In this list, Milton’s narrator makes a direct connection between thought and desire; do not forget that those thoughts are “distemper’d,” “vain,” and “inordinate,” which means that the desires that are born from them will be equally corrupt. However, one must not ignore the notion of consent in this scenario. Free will inherently mandates free choice, and by attacking Eve’s mind in her sleep, Satan is disallowing Eve the conscious consent one needs in instances of desire and will. It is in this manner that he mimics on Eve’s subconscious the rape Death perpetually performs on Sin. Eve is vulnerable while asleep, and he takes advantage of her by attempting to render her will powerless to his own. But for an act of will to be free, the mind and the body must freely consent, as Mary was given the opportunity to do during the Annunciation. One can only imagine what Satan might be whispering in Eve’s ear and, by extension, what seed of doubt he might be using to impregnate her virginal mind. But Milton’s account rescues Eve in this moment. No matter what Satan tries to implant in her mind here, he is thwarted in his ability to do so by Eve’s angelic guards. Thus, whatever Satan intends to tempt Eve to do, Milton has created a scenario in which Satan must first gain her verbal consent to do it. In essence, this moment again shows Milton’s departure from Augustine on the issue of a free will, for Milton, as author, would not condemn Eve for what amounts to her dreams about sinning. But he

60

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

can condemn her for her waking actions, so when Satan next approaches Eve, he does so when she is awake and when she can give her verbal consent. Consequently, in order to get Eve to freely choose to sin, Satan much reorient her conscious thinking toward a rebellion much like his own—namely, the thought that she could be like God or, more precisely, that God might be selfishly keeping some important knowledge from her to hold humanity purposely inferior. In order to accomplish this end, Satan must first take away the punishment mandated by God for eating the fruit from the Forbidden Tree. He states: Queen of this Universe, do not believe Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die: How should ye? by the Fruit? it gives you Life To Knowledge; By the Threat’ner? look on mee, Mee who have touch’d and tasted, yet both live, And life more perfect have attain’d than Fate Meant mee, by vent’ring higher than my Lot. (9.684–691) In the face of such logic, Eve is truly naïve. She is mentally innocent, which means that when the obviously not-dead serpent tells her not to “believe / Those rigid threats of Death,” she believes him, and here is where her will first begins to fall prey to Satan’s corruption and where Sin is born into the human world. Eve believes the serpent’s arguments— her mind is convinced by his logic—and in that moment, through a mental and verbal act of conscious consent, her fall occurs because Eve has freely chosen to reorient her thinking from God to Satan. Once her mind is convinced, her body acts upon the sin, so she “pluck[s]” and eats the fruit (9.781). By this action, she condemns herself to death through the revocation of her immortality. But she does not die alone. She takes the fruit to Adam, as well, and she makes the same case Satan did: that she ate of the fruit and did not die, so God’s threat must be meant to keep them from “vent’ring higher than [their] Lot.” In contrast to deceived Eve, Adam is not persuaded by this argument; he knows Eve’s actions have damned her, but he cannot

The Devil Made Me Do It

61

let Eve be punished alone. He determines that he will sin for love. Indeed, he asks himself: How can I live without thee… …Flesh of Flesh, Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe. (9.908, 914–917) Once he has determined that he will remain “Flesh of Flesh” with Eve, even though he knows she has sinned and will be punished, he then commits the sin of placing love of another over the love one should have for God. In essence, he has sinned in his thoughts by reorienting his thinking from God to Eve, and it is because of this mental sin that he moves to the physical one of eating the fruit as well. So when Eve commands that he “freely taste, / And fear of Death deliver to the Winds” (9.988–989; emphasis added), he makes the choice to sin with her and, thus, also to die. In this manner, Satan has taken his revenge, but he has done so in a way that is more like him than he anticipated; for like him, Adam and Eve first give birth to sin in their minds, and it is those rebellious thoughts that lead to the physical act of sin, and by that physical act, death is born into the human world. But none of it can be blamed upon God; rather, it is the reorientation of the mind away from God and toward the self that creates the right conditions for sin and death to propagate. Ultimately, it is Satan’s continued alienation from all things loved by God that truly sets him apart from humanity and makes him humanity’s greatest monster, but Milton never let his readers forget that, in terms of sin, Satan is a kindred spirit as well.

Early Modern Monstrosity: Satan, Sin, and Death In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstam wrote, “We wear modern monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us. Monstrosity no longer coagulates into a specific body, a single face, a unique feature” (163). And herein lies the most

62

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

significant difference between early modern and contemporary conceptions of monstrosity. Satan, Sin, and Death are truly frightening within the confines of Paradise Lost and beyond not because they are “like skin” but because they are skin. They are the physical manifestations of what the devout Christian should fear most. Satan, Sin, and Death place human failing at the forefront and make readers examine the worst, most monstrous parts of themselves, even as they are warned to always strive toward the good. And so their fall becomes the parental model of one’s own, and the result is the same when humankind’s direct connection to divine grace is severed, once Adam and Eve choose to disobey God. It would be easy, then, to lay all the blame for humanity’s spiritual shortcomings on Satan and his progeny. Yet because of free will, one cannot entirely blame the personified monsters that Milton provided in Paradise Lost. Ultimately, through the temptation of Eve and decision of Adam to follow Eve in her disobedience, Milton showed his readers that nothing is truly as monstrous as the human mind when it comes to sin. A person may use his or her skin to sin; however, it is the mind that first makes the decision to let Sin in, to give her the opportunity to reproduce Death within a person before that person, too, must die. For this reason— perhaps Stanley Fish stated the overarching purpose of Milton’s epic most succinctly—Paradise Lost is “a work about how we got to be fallen, how that flaws our thinking, and [to] whom we should listen to correct it” (x). But one must not forget that this work addresses also the first of God’s creations to fall: Satan. After all, this epic’s opening books are set in Hell, and as is fitting for God’s fallen creatures, the narrative journey moves from the bottom upward. Indeed, readers travel with Satan to Eden before they are allowed to observe God in conversation with his son in Heaven. In this manner, one journeys with Satan and observes his reunion with his progeny and lover, Sin, and with their monstrous child, Death. Theirs is a miserable existence, and the transfer of perspective from Satan’s journey to God’s contemplation of it in Heaven is almost a relief, except for the realization that God knows Satan’s plan

The Devil Made Me Do It

63

will be successful. As a result of this divine foreknowledge, God’s heavenly conversation with Christ is not a discussion of what will be; rather, it is about what will be done to correct it. Thus, humankind’s greatest task is not to lament being fallen but rather to work to rectify that state through penance. Yes, people can sin, but Milton showed his audience that, before human beings even knew that Sin had been born, they were already saved through Christ’s free choice to die for human redemption. Regardless of the seeming optimism of Milton’s theological interpretations in Paradise Lost, Christianity often teaches that the wages of sin is death, and it is by sin that humanity has earned death as a just punishment. Consequently, whom does one blame for this end—Adam and Eve or Satan? For whereas the former are guilty of humanity’s first sin, the latter is responsible for the birth of Sin and Death in the first place. Human beings, in fact, think much as he does, and as Satan asserts: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.254–255). Therefore, each one has the same capacity in the mind to birth Sin and make “a Hell of Heav’n.” As it is for Satan, for people the free choice of will determines whether they will physically act upon the sins that are birthed in their minds. Granted, the action of the sin is what produces the need for penance; still, do not forget that the mere thought of Sin herself is the first step along a very dark path. So one must ask: Does one choose to reproduce Sin in the world that exists outside of the mind? Does one begin to wear her skin or choose to let the impulse toward physical action remain purely a figment of flawed human imagination? As Milton tried to teach in the pages of Paradise Lost, one must remember that God did not create either Satan or humanity evil to begin with, but he does punish evil once it has been done. Thus, Paradise Lost ultimately demonstrates the unbroken thread that should tie together all Christian doctrines: the unwavering knowledge that the greatest monster humanity must face—as Satan did—is not a physical being but, rather, each one’s own mind. Whether to use it for evil is a choice every human being alone can freely make.

64

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Notes 1. The metaphysical birth of Death, for which Eve is blamed in Christianity as a whole, is the loss of immortality. This prelapsarian nostalgia is perhaps what leads to the twenty-first-century fascination with certain monsters, such as vampires, or demonstrates the urge to be genetically or biologically enhanced, as cyborgs are. It is not that one does not recognize them as something alien to the human, in some cases dangerously so, but the lure of being immortal, of forgoing the infinite unknown of human death has seemingly turned humanity’s fear of certain monsters into an attraction to them. Thus, Christian dogma condemns Eve for sentencing humankind to death, but many monsters conversely become appealing through their ability to combat this inevitability with some form of prolonged, sentient life. In this manner, humans seemingly can defy their fate by embracing certain monsters without having to face the punishment meted out to Adam and Eve after their fall. 2. One can also take Augustine’s configuration of natural versus given signs and use it to examine the concept of infection when thinking about how various monsters reproduce. For instance, in narratives such as Resident Evil, 28 Days Later, and even Stephen King’s 2006 novel, Cell, zombies are created through some sort of infection or transmission—a vial of a supervirus that is dropped on the floor, the saliva or other bodily fluid of the zombies themselves, the signal of a cell phone, respectively. In a similar manner, vampire mythology often includes the transfer of vampirism through a bite or blood exchange (or both); however, in all cases, whether zombie or vampire, there is the need for the “clean,” or untainted, humans to look for the signs of infection in others. Those natural signs that connect infection to the monster also translate to given signs that assign the meanings of uncleanness and danger to the monsters when uninfected persons observe them. Thus, the signs have a meaning that must be interpreted correctly by the human mind; otherwise, there is no chance of humanity escaping from infection. 3. I use living human here because, even though many monster origin stories involve a reanimated body, not all of those risen entities are aware or alive in the traditional sense. For example, vampires are almost universally sentient, even if in a number of vampire mythologies the basic nature of the person has been transformed into something evil, reflect-

The Devil Made Me Do It

65

ing their new status as a predatory monster. In addition, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is created from a pastiche of dead parts, but once “born,” he becomes a fully sentient being who is rejected by both his creator and by the human world because of his physical appearance. He looks like a monster, so he is treated as such. Though zombies are also reanimated corpses, there are few narratives that make them more than the equivalent of sharks—dead-eyed beasts with an insatiable hunger that are always moving, always feeding. In contrast to all of these, Milton’s demons are sentient, and most significantly, they must work to influence an animated mind; for to try to influence the human mind to sin when it is not awake undermines the one mandate of Christianity that Milton held to be irrefutable: free will. Thus, although Augustine and Milton distinctly disagreed in terms of whether the will is good or evil, both conceded that the mind—or more precisely, the active mind—is the location in the body that first conceives of sin. Once the mind consents, the body will reproduce the thought of sin into action, and then the human soul is tainted, losing some of its likeness to God. 4. It is important to note that Augustine never figured Lucretia’s rape as part of her punishment for committing the sins of tacit consent (that is, rape retranslated into adultery) and self-murder. Augustine fixated on where the first sin occurred, not on the idea that she might deserve the violation Tarquin performs on her physical body. Indeed, as one can see from my argument here, Augustine has heavily implied if not directly stated that the second sin throws the possibility of the first to the forefront; for had she not sinned in her mind, there would have been no need to commit suicide. Thus, as callous as his treatment of Lucretia and her rape seems, Augustine has used it as a rhetorical device to prove his argument about the way sin is perpetrated first in the mind and then by the body. He has not argued for rape as a viable form of punishment for women’s sins. 5. In this manner, Satan corrupts Eve’s womb without a physical act of copulation, as is the case with Sin. In the latter instance, Sin engages in a sexual relationship with Satan and, in doing so, contaminates her womb as well as the child within it. Therefore, once Death is born, he further corrupts his mother’s womb through repeated rapes resulting in the birth of demons. But in this perverse Trinity, all the acts of copulation are physical, whether they are consensual or not. The conception process for sin and death through Satan is different in the human world, even though the way in which humans physically reproduce is not. Whether

66

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

she has been tempted by Satan or not, the choice to sin taints Eve’s womb such that all human beings thereafter are born with the stain of original sin on their souls. Consequently, in both cases, it is the female womb that is contaminated by Satan such that it can reproduce only monsters (in the case of Sin) or can perpetuate the legacy only of something monstrous (in the case of Eve). 6. Babcock explained, “The first version of Christianity to fire Augustine’s enthusiasm was Manichaeanism, and the Manichees offered an account of sin that exempted the self from moral agency in evil. We sin not because we ourselves, exercising control, determine which action of those open to us will be realized. Rather we sin because we are compelled by the dark power of evil operating upon us from within. Behind this view of sin—and, in late Latin antiquity, the Manichees were the great interpreters of the human experience of evil as a power that simply overwhelms us and drags us, in spite of ourselves, in its wake—lay the notion that the soul, the self, would not otherwise turn away from the good” (30). Augustine was originally influenced by this notion of evil and sin; however, around 396 or 397 CE, after Augustine had engaged in a series of public debates staged by the Christian church against Manichaeans, he began to reject such theological views. Augustine’s later writings explicitly argue against this notion of an outside evil force, but in order to do this, Augustine had to take the position that the will is not good, that it was thoroughly corrupted after humanity’s first sin, and that it has no other way to act but against the good. It is a difficult position to take and one that Augustine never successfully argued, particularly in light of the other cornerstones of Christian beliefs, such as free will, forgiveness, penance, and redemption. 7. The change in how Adam and Eve have sex and experience desire after they sin is seen as a physical manifestation of their pre- and postfall states of being. Whereas the former is a seen by many scholars as innocent, the latter is interpreted as wholly concupiscent, which would mean it mirrors more closely the unnatural sexual desire in the SatanSin union. However, what scholars such as C. S. Lewis, Noam Flinkler, Edward Le Comte, Jean Hagstrum, Janet E. Halley, and Stanley Fish (among myriad others) often gloss over is how similar the birth of Eve is to Sin’s own birth. The need to so completely separate the two into such a strict binary is supported by Christian doctrine, as well, which maintains that all things that derive from God are good and all things that derive from Satan are evil. In light of Milton’s text, this adherence

The Devil Made Me Do It

67

to Christian doctrine is not wrong; however, it bears mentioning that certain aspects of birth and marriage, as well as of sexuality and desire, often resist the strict categories developed in earlier criticism and, really, in much of Christian theology.

Chapter 3

Constructing the Vampire Spirit Agency in the Anonymous Actenmäßige und umständliche Relation von denen Vampiren oder Menschen-Saugern (1732) Michael Pickering The vampire, it seems, is truly “the monster with a thousand faces” (Frost). From the pages of John William Polidori, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker to the almost innumerable films and TV series about vampires, the fanged (or nonfanged) antagonist (or protagonist) has appeared in a wide variety of permutations. Though many of its abilities and attributes have changed from one construction to the next, a generally constant property of the undead bloodsucker is its ability to replicate. Whether this is a literal reproduction involving birth or the more common blood exchange between maker and fledgling, the vampire is most often portrayed as an entity capable of making more creatures like itself. Turning to folklore from central, eastern, and southern Europe, one finds a variety of creatures that are commonly referred to as vampires. Among other things, these may take the form of animals, ambulant corpses, amorphous nonhumanoid

70

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

creatures, or shadows. The first of these descriptors appears across the literature generally (inter alia, Schneeweis 9; Burkhart 218; Vakarelski 239; Filipović 65), although Dagmar Burkhart and Peter Kreuter have maintained that the vampire is categorically an ambulant corpse in the context of southeastern European cultures (Burkhart 217; Kreuter 28). In contrast, vampires in Bulgaria could appear as amorphous sacks of blood, as Bruce McClelland has shown (66), and T.  P. Vukanović has demonstrated that among Muslim Roma communities in the vicinity of Kosovo in the 1930s and 1940s, the vampire could appear as the fire-breathing shadow of a dead person (209). Although the variety of attributes that these vampires possess differs “sometimes from village to village” (Kreuter 19), a salient feature of folklore from southeastern Europe is the notion that vampires can both replicate and, in some cases, reproduce sexually (Vukanović 217–218); however, the latter element is not to be found in the so-called vampire debate of the 1730s. This debate concerned a spate of incidents on the southern periphery of the Habsburg monarchy in Serbia. The Habsburg military administration at Belgrade began reporting accounts to the central administration in Vienna of people returning from the dead and attacking members of the living community starting in 1725. The central administration took an interest in the matter and in so doing, facilitated the transmission of the military reports into the intellectual circles of the wider German-speaking world. The result of this was a flurry of about sixteen printed texts, most of them quite short, that attempted to lay bare the underlying phenomenon of the Serbian incidents. Although several texts posited that the vampires were in fact sentient (although not blooddrinking) corpses, the majority of writers argued that the vampires were the product of the disturbed imaginations of the purported victims. This was, in turn, the result of an epidemic illness, although the writers who argued in such a manner could not agree on precisely what type of disease it was.1 That most of the learned writers argued for a pathogenic interpretation of the purported vampire phenomenon can be, in part, explained by recourse to the discursive ambit in which the debate devel-

Constructing the Vampire

71

oped. The chief concern of the Habsburg authorities in dealing with the Serbian incidents was to ascertain whether the vampire phenomenon in fact represented an outbreak of pestilence on the border. The authors of the printed texts, the majority of them medical doctors, developed their interpretations within this context. The turn to pathogenesis by most of the writers can also be explained by recourse to their perception that the bodies in question were actually dead bodies devoid of divine or diabolic intervention. Alongside the fact that the writers were largely ignorant of the folklore surrounding the vampire’s purported ability to reproduce sexually, reproduction was understood as a token of biological life. The dominant interpretation— that the vampires in Serbia were really just the undecomposed bodies of those who had died of an infectious illness—therefore did not allow for the vampire to reproduce sexually. Further, in those texts that permitted some residual vitality in the vampire bodies, the notion of spiritual replication was philosophically problematic. Of the six texts that construct the vampire as a dead yet still-sentient entity, two attribute the apparent residual vitality of the vampires to diabolic intervention. One author argued, in Aristotelian fashion, that this owed to the further existence of the “third soul,” the vegetative soul; another, the most famous of the whole debate, drew upon an eclectic philosophical framework to interpret the vampire as capable of feeling and communicating sensation by way of sympathetic and antipathetic powers, which in turn provided the channels through which the stillextant imagination of the vampire was capable of sending forth subtle effluvia. The other two texts, in many ways similar in their interpretations, drew upon the conception of the astral spirit in order to explain the activities of the vampire. Though each of these texts interprets the vampire as a spiritual predator, only one of them, the anonymous Actenmäßige und umständliche Relation von denen Vampiren oder MenschenSaugern (Documentary and detailed relation of the vampires or peoplesuckers),2 grants the vampire the capacity to replicate, and that spiritu-

72

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

ally. It is for this reason that the Documentary and Detailed Relation is examined in this analysis. Of fundamental importance for the interpretative system of the anonymously authored text is the existence of a tripartite anthropology comprising body, soul, and spirit. This involves the ability of the human soul to “impress” upon the spirit—thought of in the text as manifesting itself within human blood—ideas and sentiments that it had experienced during life. In such a way, vampire attacks could induce the victim’s soul to impress upon his or her own spirit the conviction that he or she would become a vampire after death. One reason why the vampire was not commonly believed to replicate or reproduce, as mentioned, is that it was interpreted as being a dead (i.e., nonsentient, nonmoving) body. As Johann Daniel Geyer made clear in his essay on vampirism, a core property of a living entity is its ability to reproduce. Another reason concerns the theologically problematic nature of the tripartite model, which has strong links to the spiritualist tradition.3 By the early eighteenth century such ideas about the spirit, the “third part” of the human constitution, had fallen if not into utter disrepute, certainly into a gray area of scholarly inquiry. In 1718 after the siege of Belgrade, the Habsburgs and Ottomans committed to the Treaty of Passarowitz. Under this agreement the Habsburg monarchy would incorporate the Banat, regions of Western Walachia, and areas of Serbia (including Belgrade) into its territories (Kreuter 81; Hochedlinger 195–196). Several years later, in 1725 and then in 1731–1732, two major accounts emerged from Serbia in which certain people had purportedly left their graves and had killed members of the living by throttling them. In both cases, the vampires are depicted as capable of replicating. The first incident occurred in the Serbian village of Kisolova in 1725 (Copia fol. 25, recto). A man by the name of Peter Plagojevitz, dead for ten weeks, was purported by the villagers to have returned from the grave and to have killed nine people by throttling them in their sleep. In so doing, it was reported, he had inflicted upon the

Constructing the Vampire

73

victims a malaise that killed them within twenty-four hours (Copia fol. 25, recto). The narrative of the report mentions that upon opening the grave, witnesses found blood in Plagojevitz’s mouth, and it was stated in the report that this was because he had sucked the blood of his victims (Copia fol. 26, recto). The implication was that this blood sucking had somehow also contributed to the nine deaths. The imperial provisor of the Gradisk district, under pressure from the villagers, who had threatened to leave the village if they were not allowed to dispose of the body, gave permission for the corpse to be pierced with a stake and then burned to ashes (Copia fol. 25, verso). The lead-up to the second incident took place in 1727 in Medvedja, a Serbian village on the West Morava River. The supposed vampire in this instance, one Arnont Paule,4 had died when he broke his neck after falling from a hay wagon. Twenty to thirty days after his death, local complaints claiming that Paule had appeared and killed four people were brought against him, although there was nothing mentioned about the victims’ becoming vampires. Ten days after that, his body was exhumed and found to possess signs of incorruptibility: the body appeared undecomposed, its blood was in a fluid state, and the nails of the hands and feet had fallen away to reveal new nails (Visum et Repertum fol. 1138, recto). This apparent lack of decomposition was evidence enough for the denizens of Medvedja that Paule was indeed a vampire. They destroyed the body in the same manner the villagers in Kisolova had used to dispose of Plagojevitz’s: [T]rue to their habits, they struck a stake through his heart, at which he let out a well audible rasp, and a great amount of blood left him, after which, still on the same day, they burnt the body to ashes and threw them in the grave. (Visum et Repertum fol. 1138, recto–verso) Although the body of Paule had been destroyed in 1727, it came to light in 1731 that a sixty-year-old woman by the name of Miliza had died after eating the meat of some sheep that Paule was said to have

74

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

had attacked. Miliza was stated to have become the first vampire in a fresh outbreak of supposed vampirism in 1731 (Visum et Repertum fol. 1139, recto). It was in this indirect and occult manner that Paule was able to replicate. This new outbreak of vampirism was documented by the Habsburg authorities; incorporated into its narrative was the anecdotal mention of the Paule case from 1727. Sometime in the autumn of 1731, Lieutenant Colonel Schnezzer of the Jagodina district in Serbia was approached by a heiduc5 leader with complaints that an outbreak of vampirism had commenced. Schnezzer’s response was to order a physician named Glaser from nearby Paraćin who specialized in contagious diseases to investigate the problem.6 Glaser, whose aim it had been to inspect the outbreak for any signs of pathogenic origin, found no evidence to suggest that the incident was in any way related to the spread of contagion (HFU rote Nr. 654, fol. 1134, recto). Schnezzer then sent Glaser’s account to Belgrade. Because the governor of Belgrade and regimental colonel (Oberst-Inhaber) of the regiment, Duke Karl Alexander von Württemberg, was not present in the city at the time, his secondin-command, Botta d’Adorno, upon receipt of Glaser’s account, sent a commission of Habsburg military officials to investigate this appearance of supposed vampirism in the village of Medvedja (HFU rote Nr. 654, fol. 1132, recto).7 This is important because it helps to explain the discursive ambit in which the writers taking part in the vampire debate constructed the vampire. The medical officer heading up this commission was the field surgeon Johann Flückinger. The geopolitical situation on the southernmost border of the Habsburg monarchy has been described in detail in the literature concerning vampirism (Schroeder; Kreuter; Nowosadtko); therefore, I focus mainly on its connection to social policy, with an emphasis on sanitation policy. The military border, or Militärgrenze, was an institution based upon the human capital of local populations. As Gunther Rothenberg has indicated, it would have been too expensive for the Habsburg administration to populate the border fully with regular troops (Rothenberg 17). For this reason, the administration effectively militarized the

Constructing the Vampire

75

border zone and brought it under the direct control of the Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat) in Vienna (17). All men over the age of eighteen were required to do external military field service, serve on the Militärgrenze (including in quarantine stations), or engage in economic activity (von Hietzinger 1823, 14). Jutta Nowosadtko has stated that the central administration in Vienna attempted to transform the economy in the newly acquired regions from one based on pastoral agriculture to one centered on export-oriented cereal-based agriculture, but this move met with resistance from the local populations (156).8 It was the head of the Temesvar administration, Claudius Florimund Graf von Mercy d’Argenteau, who was largely responsible for the policy initiative in 1724 of developing an unpaid militia that would staff the Militärgrenze; this came to fruition in 1726 and relied upon Serbians who had migrated from the Ottoman side, such as Arnont Paule (Nowosadtko 157). The Militärgrenze had been established to consolidate and maintain the Habsburg territorial gains made under the Treaty of Passarowitz, but it also provided the institutional basis for the thousand-mile-long Sanitary Cordon stretching from Croatia up into Transylvania (Rothenberg 17–18). Although in 1732 the Sanitary Cordon was still being developed, as of 1710 the border officers of the Militärgrenze had been instructed by the Sanitäts Hofkommission to assist in the detention of suspected plague carriers (Rothenberg 17). A sanitation ordinance from 1731 indicates that this policy was most likely in force: at each quarantine checkpoint there was to be “a physician, or at the very least a well-experienced surgeon” (Contumaz 2). One of the central reasons for developing the sanitary cordon was very likely concern for the social and economic stability of the region. Owing to their location in a buffer zone between two parties that had been at war repeatedly for over two centuries, Serbia and the Banat had become significantly depopulated. Up to onethird of all 1,030 Serbian villages had been abandoned owing to the military conflicts between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans (Ćircović 153). With pestilence perceived by the Habsburg administration to be an everpresent threat from the Ottoman side, and with the growing dependency

76

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

of the Habsburg monarchy on border settlements and communities in Serbia and the Banat, it was imperative both to repopulate these areas and to protect them from epidemic disease (Nowosadtko 156). Parts of this dynamic are reflected in the Kisolova and the Medvedja cases. In the former episode, the inhabitants of the village threatened to emigrate if they were not allowed to destroy the body of Plagojevitz. In Medvedja, Glaser, having found no evidence of a contagious illness, in fact advised the authorities to permit the destruction of the vampire bodies on the grounds that this would appease the villagers and, he implied strongly, help prevent the depopulation of the village through emigration (HFU rote Nr. 654, fol. 1136, recto). More telling is that the first inclination of the regional administration was to send in a contagious-diseases specialist. Indeed, in December of 1731, around the time of the Medvedja incident, pestilence was rife in the Banat (Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv, Ungarisches Kamerale). In 1732 in the village of Trstenik, just southwest across the West Morava River from Medvedja, there was an outbreak of pestilence that killed 19 people (Filipović 66). Such was the political, economic, and social context in which the Medvedja vampire exhumations took place. This situation also represents the discursive ambit in which the vampire was initially constructed as a medical object. The folkloric vampires of the Balkans were utterly different from the medical object that, initially, Glaser and Flückinger constructed in their reports. Though it is exceedingly difficult to gather all the entities referred to in the secondary literature as vampires under a single conceptual umbrella, there is a common attribute that one finds in many vampire narratives, including those from 1725 and 1731–1732: they are capable of making more creatures like themselves. In his pioneering ethnographic work in the Balkans in the 1940s concerning Muslim and Christian Roma beliefs about vampires, T. P. Vukanović encountered the common belief among both religious groups that male vampires could return either to their wives or to single women and impregnate them. As Vukanović stated, “In Stari Ras and Novopazarski Sandzak this child goes by the name of Lampijerović, and in the latter district there is a

Constructing the Vampire

77

whole village of Lampijerović-es, so-called from a vampire of whom they are the direct descendants” (217). The offspring of such a union would be capable of seeing vampires in life, for vampires were often thought to be invisible (Vukanović 220–221). The offspring were also highly prone to becoming vampires after death. This component of the folklore, although not taken up actively in the early-eighteenth-century debate, nevertheless appears briefly in a short account in the Documentary and Detailed Relation. Near the beginning of the essay the anonymous author included not only a transcription of the Medvedja report by Johann Flückinger but also a transcription of a letter purportedly sent from one Captain Kottwitz stationed in Serbia to the director of the learned society, the Academia Naturae Curiosorum. In it, Kottwitz related a case of vampirism concerning two brothers, followed by an account of an anonymous woman who claimed that her husband had returned from the grave and had sex with her. Kottwitz went on to say that after a term of forty weeks she “gave birth to a child, which, although he had the full proportion of a lad, didn’t have extremities, but rather was like a pure piece of flesh, which after three days shriveled up like a sausage” (Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation 17–18). It was a common belief that the children of vampires would themselves become vampires after death, but there was also a conception that being somehow afflicted by a vampire, either directly or indirectly, would cause one to become a vampire postmortem. This is reflected well in the report by contagious-diseases specialist Glaser concerning the Medvedja vampire outbreak. In this incident Schnezzer, the lieutenant colonel of the Jagodina district, received word of a spate of sudden deaths in the village in which a company of militia soldiers was stationed. Schnezzer instructed Glaser from nearby Paraćin to investigate the outbreak. The precise directive that Glaser received is not extant in the archival material, although it is safe to assume, as previously mentioned, that pestilence was a significant concern for the administration. Glaser took it as his objective (or was instructed) to investigate all the houses in Medvedja

78

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

(HFU rote Nr. 654, fol. 1134, recto). Following this, he wrote a report for Schnezzer, a copy of which eventually made its way through the Aulic War Council in Vienna to the treasury department responsible for the Kingdom of Hungary. At the same time, Glaser also wrote to his father, the Viennese physician Johann Friedrich Glaser, explaining what he had found. Glaser Senior in turn wrote a letter to Götz, one of the editors of the Nuremberg-based commercium litterarium outlining the findings that his son had made in Medvedja. It transpired that Glaser junior had “hurriedly” written the letter to his father before he had even penned the report to be sent to the government and the Collegia Sanitatis in Vienna (Hamberger 54–55). In his report, Glaser stated that he had decided to grant the Medvedja inhabitants permission to open ten graves. Two women purported to have been “vampirized” (vervampÿret) during life were suspected of being behind the outbreak; it had been maintained during their lifetimes that they “would become vampires after death.” The first woman was Miliza, a fifty-year-old émigré from the Ottoman side of the border. Glaser narrated that she had emigrated six years earlier and was always “neighborly” in her bearing, although it was never known “whether she had believed or practiced anything diabolic.” According to Glaser’s text, during life she had mentioned to her neighbors that while living on the Ottoman side she had eaten the meat of two sheep killed by vampires, and in so doing was destined to become a vampire herself after death (HFU rote Nr. 654, fol. 1134, verso).9 The other vampire suspect, a twentyyear-old woman named Stanno (in the Flückinger text, Stana) had died in childbirth. She, too, had lived on the other side of the border, and it was there that she had smeared herself with the blood of a vampire in order to protect herself from vampires during her life: The other woman [purported to be a vampire] was named Stanno, and had died during childbirth. The child had been born, but had also died. The woman was twenty years old and had been buried for one month. During her life she had confessed and narrated to her neighbors that, when she was on the Turkish side, where the

Constructing the Vampire

79

vampires also reigned strongly, in order to protect herself from them she had once adorned herself with the blood of a vampire. For this reason she was also destined to become a vampire after her death. (HFU rote Nr. 654, fol. 1135, recto) In addition, those who had been killed by vampires in Medvedja were purported to have become vampires after death. One example of this in Flückinger’s report is that the body of the twenty-year-old Stanjoicka was exhumed and found to be in an uncorrupted condition. According to the report, she had been attacked by the already deceased Milloe (Visum et Repertum fol. 1139, verso). As previously mentioned, the debate in the 1730s did not construct the vampire as a creature capable of reproducing or replicating. The only exception to this is the short, forty-eight-page Documentary and Detailed Relation. This document maintains that the bodies exhumed in Kisolova and Medvedja were not following the normal course of nature; their lack of decomposition was owing to the influence of an astral influence referred to in the text as der allgemeine Welt-Geist, or “universal worldspirit” (Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation, esp. 26–27). This term encompasses the theory of the body, mentioned earlier, that understands the human constitution as divided into three parts: body, soul, and spirit. The astral spirit (Astral-Geist, or Welt-Geist) is in essence the connecting influence between body and soul and is responsible for providing the body with vital energy. The core principle of this model is that the WeltGeist, as the quintessential entity, pervades all things in the universe, operating on and within all objects; it is the means by which bodies can live and move. Georg Heinrich Zinke described the Welt-Geist as “a universal soul of the world, or one such spiritual entity” (Hübner and Zinke 2282), and Georg Wilhelm Wegner stated that the Welt-Geist, comprised of fiery, airy matter, was the basis of all motion in the universe and that the astral spirit (Astral-Geist) was “a particular Modification or Determination” of the Welt-Geist (Wegner 381–382). The Documentary and Detailed Relation draws upon this very well-known principle

80

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

in explaining how dead bodies could remain uncorrupted, could retain fluid blood, and could attack members of the living community. The Documentary and Detailed Relation conceives of the operation of the spirit in the human body as a central component of the workings of nature. It grants the human spirit significant agency. Whereas the soul leaves the body upon death, the spirit can remain with the body until the remains have decomposed. It is not entirely clear in the document precisely what impels the spirit to remain with the body; it is stated only that those who experience particularly strong images in the last moments of their lives can imprint these emotions and motivations onto the spirit, which will undertake to pursue the aims of these drives: The spirit of a person after his or her death can exercise the dangerous intentions and impressions that he or she had in the last moments of life on the spirit of a living person. Because the spirit is a living being it has as an essential component its ideas (Ideen). It is for this reason that after death the spirit will continue to operate in accordance with its ideas until it can do so no more. The vampires during their lifetimes had the strong impression that they were doomed to become people-suckers, or were imprinted with such an impression after having smeared themselves with the blood of other vampires. After death they carried out these impressions, imprinting the same idea upon the spirits of those whom they sucked, in much the same way as an expectant woman can imprint monstrous ideas onto her child. (Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation 34–35) The text states that the means by which such an operation takes place is the Welt-Geist. The spirit draws its nutriment, which is responsible for keeping the body in an uncorrupted state, from the Welt-Geist. Indeed, the Welt-Geist is the sole basis, according to the text, for the red tinge in human blood. This is illustrated with the famous wheat-balm experiment of the seventeenth-century English alchemist Robert Fludd. Through a process of repeated distillations, Fludd, according to the Documentary and Detailed Relation, managed to refine putrefying wheat grains into

Constructing the Vampire

81

a quintessential substance that was “white and bright like a crystal.” Upon holding this substance up to the sunlight, Fludd noticed that it became ruby red within a few hours (Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation 27). This experiment comes from Robert Fludd’s A Philosophicall Key (1619), in which Fludd attempted to demonstrate a link between humans and the heavens, microcosm and macrocosm, a core component of what would later come to be considered the “esoteric tradition” (Neugebauer-Wölk 11). The principle medium through which one could see this connection, according to Fludd, was wheat, whose quintessence was understood to give life to the human body through the consumption of bread: I have seen this volatile saltpetre of this vegetable, being freed from his elementary bands, and being in his unctuous nature in form of liquor, I perceived him so desirous of the beams of life, which lurked in the aire, and were darted from the sun, that in the space of three houres, it became from a white crystalline colour unto a bloody ruby: whereby I was easily taught the reason of formall multiplication, as well in animals as in vegetables … I have observed so worthy an experiment in this vegetative salt in the Wheat, of which the blood of man by eating of bread is full. (Debus 42–43) According to the anonymous author’s understanding of the experiment, the spirit within the wheat balm drew nutriments to itself from the universal Welt-Geist through its “magnetic power” (magnetischen Krafft; Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation 27). Such a power, the author argued, may instead—in the case of the vampires—fix upon members of the living, sucking out their portions of nutriment received from the Welt-Geist. It is “therefore well to believe that such vampires, because their ideas are communicable, can annihilate an entire village” (Actenmäßige und umständliche Relation 34–35). The text just discussed is a particularly interesting remnant of the vampire debate, for it represents a lone argument in favor of considering the vampire a spirit agent. One of the major reasons why the debate

82

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

focused so closely on pathogenesis, as mentioned, concerns the discursive context in which the learned writers were operating. In any case, reproduction was the preserve of living entities, which the vampire was clearly not, according to the writers. Perhaps the most articulate discussion comes from the text of Michael Ranfft, Lutheran deacon at Nebra. In the attachment to the 1734 edition of his text on the masticating dead, Ranfft related the case of the heiduc who was purported to have returned to his wife and had sex with her. He wrote that this narrative is patently false on several grounds: first, it was impossible that the dead man physically returned and copulated with his wife; second, cold semen would in any case be unable to produce offspring, given that it is the warmth of semen that renders it fecund; and finally, a piece of flesh without feet, arms, or a head could hardly be thought of as a child (Ranfft 195). Although it is true that Ranfft never explicitly stated that warm semen can come only from living creatures, this is nevertheless implied strongly by his statement that semen must proceed directly “from the urethra into the uterus” in order for it to retain its potency (Ranfft 197); and per his first point, a dead man cannot physically leave his grave and have sex with his wife. For this reason, semen must come from a living male. A more philosophical rumination on this theme is to be found in Johann Daniel Geyer’s 1735 essay on the vampire cases from Serbia. Geyer, a physician and paleontologist, wrote his essay ostensibly as a contribution to the famous learned society, the Leopoldina, of which he was a member. Among the many fascinating themes that he discussed in his interpretation of the vampire incidents, one in particular pertained to vampires and reproduction. In Geyer’s understanding, every living creature is imbued with a reproductive virtus that he termed Stamen. This potency exists within both males and females and is activated when the male’s semen enters the uterus (Geyer 11). Geyer sidestepped the case of the heiduc returning to his wife. In his understanding, vampire bodies are inanimate, uncorrupted bodies; they do not reproduce, nor do they exhibit any sign to suggest that they can. For Geyer this is a highly important criterion of life, and it is for precisely this reason that

Constructing the Vampire

83

one cannot understand the vampires to be living creatures. (As an aside, it is interesting to note that he did not comment on living humans who are unable to reproduce.) Another reason why the texts focuses so little on spiritual replication is that a spirit model of the body, such as that proposed in the Documentary and Detailed Relation, was philosophically and theologically problematic in the early German Enlightenment. A core facet of the conflict between the mechanist and organicist models of the body in the earlyeighteenth-century German-speaking world was the question of how to interpret the connection between material body and immaterial soul. Recourse to an intermediary entity, spirit, represented a problematic mode of interpretation for mechanical philosophy and new science, and an unnecessary one for organicism. Spirit, in one understanding a highly refined, subtle, quasi-material stuff, stood in one sense incongruous with the mechanical model inasmuch as it presumed to influence, physically, the immaterial soul. If spirit were to influence immaterial substance, then it must itself be immaterial; if it were to influence material substance, then it must itself be material. It could not, according to the mechanist system, be a hybrid substance (Wegner 386–387).10 Spirit, as an intermediary, third substance, stood in opposition to the organicist paradigm in which the soul (understood as a pure spiritual entity) and the body operated as a unity rather than as the mere aggregation and interaction of dual parts. Organicism held that the body directly influenced the soul, and the soul the body.11 In this integrative system there was no necessity for a third, connecting spirit component. In addition to these problems, spirit could be fundamentally threatening for the proponents of orthodox religion in the early eighteenth century. When understood as a component of the triune godhead, spirit did not pose a particular problem for the orthodox Lutheran establishment. When connected to divine inspiration, however, it represented the threat of religious enthusiasm. This connection can be seen in other

84

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

places. Leibniz, for instance, defined the term spirit (Geist) within the context of enthusiasm when he stated, According to their testimony, they [Schwärmer, “enthusiasts”] feel the hand of God, which drives them from within; they feel the activity of the Spirit and they cannot be deceived in their sensation. On account of this they have convinced themselves that reason has nothing to do with what they see and feel within themselves. The things which they experience tangibly are beyond all doubt and require no proof; and what’s more, [consider] the fantastical discourse of these people. They are sure of these things because they themselves are [self]-assured [in their judgment], and their opinions are genuine because they are firmly grounded in their minds. (Finster et al. 123) Further, enthusiasm in the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century German lands possessed a connection to radical Pietism, as Georg Walch stated in his Religions-Streitigkeiten.12 The influence of the Holy Spirit upon and within the body was sometimes perceived to threaten the social and political order, as can be seen in the famous cases of the so-called begeisterte Mägde (ecstatic maids) in the 1690s from Halberstadt, Quedlinburg, and Erfurt. One of these incidents concerned a young woman named Anna Eva Jacobs, called the “blood sweater” (Blutschwitzerin).13 Around Whitsunday in 1692, after having fallen ill, it was purported by the daughter of one Doctor Homberg, into whose house the young widow had been brought during her illness, that Anna had sweated and wept blood three times (Carpzov 111).14 The significance of this reference and the connections that it embodies is that it in fact appears in a short polemic in the vampire debate against the spirit model proposed in the Documentary and Detailed Relation. The text’s author, one Gottlob Heinrich Vogt, physician at Leipzig, argued vehemently against the notion of spirit agency in connection with the vampire bodies. In another respect, spirit represented for the new science a blurring of the imposed boundaries between nature and transcendent power.

Constructing the Vampire

85

The notion that the body could be a site of divine transmission flew in the face of the new science’s system, premised as it was on the importance of natural laws. The attempt to demystify the body on the part of proponents of the new science, as Johanna Geyer-Kordesch has shown, involved the attempt to divest the body of its relationship to hidden, spiritual knowledge by way of anatomization (Geyer-Kordesch, “Court Physicians” 155–181). Though the organicist model was largely associated with Lutheran Pietism under Georg Ernst Stahl and his disciples, such as Michael Alberti and Johann Samuel Carl, it was not the only model that implied a strong connection between the human body, spiritual knowledge, and—by extension, in this context—transcendent power. The spirit model of the body as proposed in the Documentary and Detailed Relation is nowhere near as innocuous, philosophically and theologically, as first impressions might indicate. This model is linked strongly to an array of negative contemporary associations. That it permits the existence of vampires and that it allows these creatures the capacity for replication transgresses the very systems of thought, such as mechanism and (later) eighteenth-century vitalism, which characterized the scholarly environment of the German Enlightenment. Beginning and ending in the 1730s, the vampire debate gave rise to the possibility that the vampire could be a spirit agent capable of replicating; however, this notion was in various ways philosophically problematic. Its conceptual center, premised as it was on a tripartite anthropology connected to the world-spirit, clashed with dominant systems of thought then current in the German lands, such as organicism and mechanism. As has been shown, disease prevention in the southern border regions of the Habsburg territories was a significant concern for the central Habsburg administration. This observation goes some way toward indicating the discursive context in which the vampire debate emerged and which, most likely, informed to a certain extent the outcome of the learned discussions. In one sense, the vampire debate killed off the possibility, for a time, that the vampire could be a real undead creature. This, however,

86

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

would prove to be short lived, for the vampire did in fact return (in literary discourse) as a being capable of making more creatures like itself.

Constructing the Vampire

87

Notes 1. For a general overview of much of this literature, see Klaus Hamberger’s annotated sourcebook. For a very detailed and engaging analysis of the routes of transmission of the vampire reports in the Habsburg monarchy, see Schroeder. 2. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 3. I utilize the terms spiritualism and spiritualist in the sense that Hermann Stockinger mentioned. Of importance in spiritualism is the dualism between internal and external reality and experience: “Buchstabe versus Geist, visibilis versus invisibilis ecclesia, Sakramente versus Glaube/ inneres Licht/Vernunft, geschichtelicher versus himmlischer Christus, Theologie versus Herzensfrömmigkeit.” Knowledge is derived either from divine inspiration or from some other form of higher reason and from unorthodox interpretations of scripture (723). 4. The archival manuscript of the 1732 military report renders his name this way, rather than the usual Arnold Paole seen in the secondary literature. 5. In this instance, the word heiduc, also spelled hajduk or haiduk, refers to an agrarian-based soldier; originally, the term designated a type of mercenary soldier. See Stoianovich 632. 6. Archival records indicate that his forename name may have been either Sren or Sven. Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv, Sanitätsakten. 7. Jutta Nowosadko has made the point that d’Adorno would have been unwilling to make such a decision without further inquiry, owing to the precarious legal context of the situation. Although postmortem staking was permitted under the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, blood-drinking was not actually a punishable offence. Furthermore, the Medvedja case lacked the correct judicial proceedings (160). 8. This stands slightly at odds with von Hietzinger’s assertion that the regions along the Militärgrenze were primarily based on cereal agriculture (von Hietzinger Statistik 1 [1817], 141–143). 9. This is clearly at odds with the Flückinger narrative, in which Miliza had consumed the sheep while living in Medvedja. 10. Justin E. H. Smith has made the important counterpoint that, for all the efforts to reduce spirit to a fine material substance in the wake of Cartesian dualism, it nevertheless retained a great degree of traction as a middle, mediating entity in the late seventeenth century (269–289).

88

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

11. For a contemporary overview of the systema influxus, see Rüdiger 48– 61. For a discussion of this concept in the context of the famous Halle physician Georg Ernst Stahl, see Geyer-Kordesch, Pietismus 159ff. 12. Walch did not agree that this connection is entirely warranted (Walch, Historische 539, 691). 13. Judd Stitziel examined the cultural and social significance of five interrelated cases of ecstasy, including the Jacobs narrative (309–338). 14. The authorship of this text is usually attributed to Carpzov (Stitziel 309).

Chapter 4

Monsters That Matter Things That Rise in the Contemporary Zombie Film Jesse Stommel O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! —William Shakespeare, Hamlet My work is the story of flesh, a sometimes horrifying, sometimes lurid, sometimes mundane account of what culture has made (and continues to make) of bodies. I diverge from most critical accounts of zombies, offering a different sort of apocalypse—one with less menace and more play, less finality and more potential for rebirth. Peter Dendle wrote in The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, “Zombies are people reduced to the lowest common denominator. The zombie is simply the hulk, the rude stuff of generic humanity, the bare canvas; passion, art, and intellect are by implication reduced to mere ornament … The zombie just is” (12). Zombies are charged and relevant, conspicuously embodied and generative. In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro referred to “Romero’s pathetic zombies” (61), but I see nothing pathetic about them. And ulti-

90

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

mately, neither does Shaviro, who focused a chapter in The Cinematic Body on complicating the various ways zombies have been read. In Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, Kim Paffenroth wrote, “The food chain, or the circle of life, seems to end or be short-circuited by their existence. Zombies fulfill the worst potentialities of humans to create a hellish kingdom on earth of endless, sterile repetition and boredom” (13). I would argue, though, that zombies actually fulfill the human’s best potentialities. They shortcircuit the food chain in exactly the right places. In the introduction to this volume, Andrea Wood and Brandy Schillace argue that “regardless of its form, anxiety is rooted in concerns about [the monster’s] fecundity—its ability to infect, to absorb, to replicate.” I would argue that like that of bacteria, germs, and viruses, it is the zombie’s ubiquity that we find most disturbing, but it is this copulative and generative power that also makes the zombie endlessly fascinating, a Rorschach test for what culture has wreaked (and will wreak) upon the human body.

A Note on Form As a figure, the zombie has a good deal of cultural significance, but I am more interested in its philosophical significance. In this chapter, I track my encounters with the zombie in various contemporary texts, a process of discovery, an exercise in critical parataxis not predicated on movement toward a predetermined endgame. The zombie is a postmodern figure, a multiheaded monster, so I read it here via a moblike cross-section, and when my argument wanders, it does so purposefully, because my subject wanders. Like all the best literary figures, the zombie does historical work but is not contextually dead; it speaks in the perpetual present.1 So when I turn abruptly, it is because my subject is a transhistorical one and because my reading of it follows a thematic trajectory that is more endoscopic than ethnographic.

Monsters That Matter

91

POSTMODERN / pōst-mŏd-ərn / adj. Postmodern theorists frequently argue that contemporary society is so fractured that no coherent understanding of it is possible. In “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” Ihab Hassan wrote, “Postmodernism suffers from a certain semantic instability: that is, no clear consensus about its meaning exists among scholars” (276). It becomes, then, somewhat futile for me to parse the word postmodern here. Still, Hassan has mapped a working definition of postmodernism, and I will follow suit. He wrote: Postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, provisional, disjunctive, or indeterminate forms, a discourse of ironies and fragments, a “white ideology” of absences and fractures, a desire of diffractions, and invocation of complex, articulate silences. Postmodernism veers towards all these yet implies a different, if not antithetical, movement toward pervasive procedures, ubiquitous interactions, immanent codes, media, languages. (283) Hassan’s postmodernism is tentative, “veer[ing] toward” a conception of play that is “provisional,” speaking in “articulate silences” that make sense even though they are markedly “complex.” Hassan’s postmodernism is quiet, ordered, unassertive, unassuming, and “optative.” It wants to be loud, rapturous, “indeterminate,” destructive, fragmenting, explosive even, but (ironically) it is instead a language of thesis and antithesis, of either/or dichotomies, a “discourse,” an “ideology,” a bureaucratic “procedure,” dependent upon order and argument for its dissemination. His postmodernism is always already defused by tropes and allusion, deference and derivation, structure and metahypotheses. I argue, in contrast, that the zombie apocalypse offers an unrelenting postmodernism that does not disarm or equivocate. Put simply, zombies do not argue, do not deliberate, do not have bureaucracy; their postmodernism is snarled and thorny, pleasing but never pleasant.

92

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

QUEER / kwîr / v. Both in its form and content, my work aligns itself with poststructuralist accounts of the self, such as those of Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Echoing the theories of Butler and Barthes, Annamarie Jagose wrote in Queer Theory: An Introduction, “Within post-structuralism, the very notion of identity as a coherent and abiding sense of self is perceived as a cultural fantasy rather than a demonstrable fact” (82). The same could be said of the body, that a coherent and abiding sense of it is a cultural fantasy. This is not to say there is no body whatsoever, just that the human body and our experience of it resist (but are not necessarily immune to) attempts to delimit or define it. In a very important way, the zombie queers the body by troubling and deconstructing it.2 I (re)read the zombie body from a materialist perspective while simultaneously calling into question the essentialist character of that body. Bodies have a material existence but one that is inextricably woven into the social codes that help write them into being. A queer reading of the body looks to and celebrates flesh as a way of liberating the body from these social codes. In reading the human from a queer perspective, I deliberately use the first person plural to acknowledge a body that is at once intimate and multiple—a drawing together of reader and writer without eliding our difference. The body I describe here is a postmodern body, a deconstructed body, a queer body, a posthuman body, a body that resists categorization, a body that cannot be written or framed, not an empty body, but one that is a glut of matter. In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Butler wrote, “One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body.” It is all too easy and erroneous to say that the postmodern subject is dead or that the postmodern body is merely a figment. This would imply that the obliteration of quaint identity categories is somehow equivalent to the obliteration of identity altogether. It is not that there is no subject whatsoever in a postmodern world, but rather that the subject and notions of it have become pliant and unknowable.

Monsters That Matter

93

Human identities and bodies have so much cultural baggage that we fail to register—fail to signify—in any singular way. It makes more sense to say that the postmodern subject is decaying, hovering at the threshold between death and rebirth. And in that stuttering instant, when the matter that was transforms into the matter that will be, a moment of play is unleashed, and we become something more, something relentless.

POSTHUMAN / pōst-hyü-mən / n. Judith Halberstam wrote in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, “We wear modern monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us. Monstrosity no longer coagulates into a specific body, a single face, a unique feature” (163). Monsters are cultural creations, reflections of what the human could become and, more important, who we already are. Halberstam wrote that they are “like skin” because humans dress up in them like clothing, using monsters’ features to help define and enhance our own. Like Butler’s notion of gender, our monstrosity, our posthumanness, is performative. It is “on us” like a slow-growth, sometimes-symbiotic fungus. It is “in us” like an infestation, eating from the inside out, pushing, prodding, bending, and bludgeoning. Theories of the posthuman argue that the human is evolving into a new species, a new sort of animal liberated from the ideologic constraints of its body even as it is (re)located, in a visceral way, within the very same body. The posthuman is a figure that demands a consideration of what it is to be human, a figure that disrupts binaries, especially the distinction between human and machine. In the introduction to Posthuman Bodies, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston wrote, “We have rehearsed the claim that the posthuman condition is upon us and that lingering nostalgia for a modernist or humanist philosophy of the self and other, human and alien, normal and queer is merely the echo of a discursive battle that has already taken place” (19). For Halberstam and Livingston,

94

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the posthuman is not a conceptual creature; rather, the transformation from the human to the posthuman is already underway. Posthumanism complicates notions of liberal humanism—complicates the notion that the human is an enlightened, feeling, thinking, unified subjectivity distinct from its mere body. The prefix post in posthuman suggests several things: (1) the posthuman comes after (i.e., later than) the human; (2) the posthuman follows upon the human (i.e., advances the conception of what it is to be human); and (3) the posthuman responds to or rejects the human (i.e., troubles the conception of what it is to be human). The posthuman depends (at least etymologically) upon the human; however, by calling the human so thoroughly into question, the figure of the posthuman implies that the human is, in fact, the more conceptual creature. The zombie does peculiarly posthuman work, beckoning, seizing, and folding human bodies into its monstrous embrace, then biting, tearing, and perforating the culturally controlled binary oppositions that fail to (pre)determine us.

The Zombie’s Semantic Instability The zombie is not, in the main, an allegorical beast. Critics who get caught up in the zombie’s allegorical register are making what I see as a fatal error, turning away in the face of monstrosity, even as it shambles and plods incessantly closer. Steven Shaviro addressed this tendency toward allegorical readings of the zombie in “Contagious Allegories: George Romero,” a chapter from The Cinematic Body, in which he concluded, “The zombies are allegorical and mimetic figures” (86–87). He contended, “The living dead don’t have an origin or referent; they have become unmoored from meaning. They figure a social process that no longer serves rationalized ends, but has taken on a strange and sinister life of its own” (84). The zombie has a strange relationship to language and thus fails to be a static or altogether coherent cultural object.

Monsters That Matter

95

It is not enough to say that the zombie is unreadable; rather, the zombie disrupts the act of reading itself. The zombie defies representation by short-circuiting the very structures that govern meaningmaking. In this regard, the zombie is a quintessentially postmodern text, a quintessentially postmodern body, forcing us to rethink the ways that we (and our bodies) are constructed by language. The zombie is content to eat human flesh, whether it has a word for “flesh” or not. Roland Barthes explored the mimetic relationship between language and flesh in The Pleasure of the Text: Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the phenotext, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the genotext, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art … Writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language. (66–67) For Barthes, words and language have a material quality. And so when one says that zombies do not have language, that they only grunt and groan, this is both right and wrong. It is true, in a certain sense, that they do not speak. They do not make phonological sense. They do not shout messages and ideology. They do not stand on soapboxes or carry signs. They do not chant or rally or march in unison. They do not write novels or epic poems. But they do utter. They do scream. And howl. And dance. And sing. They speak in mantric repetition, wearing their flesh on their words, consonants dripping, vowels oozing. And when they do march, they drag their feet, with a whispered sentence cut short as their feet

96

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

shuffle lurchingly across the ground. The zombie confounds attempts to represent it with language even as it defiantly represents itself.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Its Naughty Simulacra The contemporary zombie is George Romero’s unique creation, having many influences but no direct antecedent in literature or film. In this respect, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is not unlike Jacques Derrida’s monstrous birth, rising up out of nowhere to proclaim itself, and the many subsequent iterations of the zombie narrative are its naughty simulacra. I say naughty because the best zombie films are not mere copies of  Night but rather copies that upset their parent in important ways. Each text I discuss in this chapter riffs on some aspect of Night’s original concept but also diverges from it, evolving (or devolving) the zombie into a different sort of beast. Night of the Living Dead captures the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, just as the recent resurgence of zombie media captures something of who the human is now and who we are becoming. Each new zombie film that gets released also reflects a deeper preoccupation, one Shakespeare explored four hundred years ago in Hamlet, beginning with the words Who’s there?, one Mary Shelley explored two hundred years later in Frankenstein, wondering what makes us human from the first line of the first chapter. Her answer, Shakespeare’s answer, Romero’s answer is that we are not (and cannot be) human (or merely human) any longer. We are (and must be) something else, something new altogether. Shelley’s opening phrase, I am by birth, is overwritten at the end of Frankenstein when her monster flees from the confines of the socalled civilized world and from the confines of the narrative itself to be “borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”3 Here, by birth becomes borne away, and the monster is reborn into a new world, the same world Ophelia turns to in Hamlet, the same world Barbara is taken up by in Night—not just death but “muddy death,” an unintelligible

Monsters That Matter

97

reversion to a self that defies easy categorization, an oozing self, a grossly material self, a plural self, a teeming self. “We are the walking dead,” George A. Romero says in the documentary The American Nightmare (2003) with exactly the right mixture of resignation and apocalyptic glee, and this sentiment is echoed in his films and in the recent resurgence of zombie films like Shaun of the Dead (2004), 28 Days Later (2002), Zombieland (2009), and the remake of Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead (2004). However, I would argue that humans are less and less zombies, as Romero has suggested, but the antithesis of zombies, for zombies are all body, whereas many of us feel increasingly stripped of ours. In the technological age, people are being (re)made online as flesh becomes a husk, a remainder. My work explores the ways in which that flesh fights back.

Dawn of the Dead (2004) At the end of the opening sequence of Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, the protagonist, Ana (Sarah Polley), looks at what remains of her neighborhood: fire, smoke, and debris disturbingly juxtaposed with perfectly manicured, unnaturally green lawns. The suburban horror that this place already was has been layered over by another horror: the zombie turns the impossible order of suburbia on its head. Beyond the chaos of the once idyllic suburban street in the foreground, viewers see in the distance what has become of the rest of the city: a fiery explosion, smoldering skyscrapers, and three circling helicopters. The once picturesque expanse of blue sky is now clouded in black smoke. As she flees the scene, Ana is excited into a flurry of action. She is not the limping final girl of a slasher film. She is an altogether different sort of heroine, resourceful but also unhesitating, callous. As she drives away, a neighbor pounds on her car door begging, “Help—can you help, please?” to which she responds with barely a grimace as she drives on, the woman’s hands making a loud squeal as they slide against the

98

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

passenger window. She is suspicious of her neighbors, not because they might turn into zombies but because she recognizes that they might already be something far worse. She circles almost endlessly, weaving through her neighborhood’s cul-de-sacs, each house a sterile copy of the one before. Cop cars speed past her in the opposite direction. She barely manages to navigate her way out as help barely manages to navigate its way in. This is a closed space, a garden maze, not unlike the one in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Most zombie films, especially Snyder’s, exhibit an extreme cynicism about the living, about what the living have made of their world. The avarice of picture-perfect hedges and suburban cul-de-sacs lends a hand in human demise. Living in the zombie world that rises up from this madness becomes the saner choice.

Dead Set (2008) and Diary of the Dead (2007) In Dead Set, a five-episode UK television miniseries about zombies invading the set of the reality television show Big Brother, a zombie stares longingly into a television monitor, coveting what it sees on screen (one of the fictional Big Brother contestants), as though it wants to climb inside the TV and feast on the image. But in addition to its obvious hunger, there is also a certain melancholy in the zombie’s expression, almost as if it recognizes that in being made an icon, it too is losing its brute physicality. Later, viewers see a zombie looking at itself in a bathroom mirror, pressing its nose toward the glass, grunting, and shifting from side to side, transfixed by its own reflection. Finally, in another scene, one of the survivors barricaded inside the Big Brother set presses her face against a pane of one-way glass while a zombie watches from the other side, tracking her movements, mimicking them with its own. This image suggests that the two, a zombie and a reality-show contestant, are interchangeable—that humans have become de facto zombies. Even more poignantly, it suggests that the dead want to be televised, a theme also taken up by Romero in Diary of the Dead (2007).

Monsters That Matter

99

In that film, as in Dead Set, zombies have become almost a red herring because these films are not about the zombies. Both fit more definitively into what I call the reality porn genre. Hallmarks of the genre include characters that feel compelled to offer their own voice-over narration, rarely profound commentary on the minutiae of what one sees on screen. A character recently bitten by a zombie in Diary of the Dead remarks, “It hurts, the bite. It hurts.” Later, another character offers, “See how many there are. Look how many.” In a world where many of us find ourselves without cohesive identities, we feel compelled to film ourselves and to narrate our own experiences, as though a camera could turn vacant 1s and 0s back into meaty flesh. In fact, the camera does just the opposite in these films, resulting in flesh being devoured by its own image. Whereas Diary of the Dead clumsily pounds this idea into viewers’ heads like the pole a character in the film rams through the skull of one of the zombies, Dead Set treats the theme more subtly, presenting a body that tries to escape the Big Brother set (or the television itself) but finds no signs of life outside its confines.

Land of the Dead (2005) Romero’s Land of the Dead is a far more successful film than his heavyhanded Diary of the Dead. The limits of the body are more thoroughly and grotesquely breached in Land of the Dead than in any other zombie film. A hand is ripped in half, a zombie peels someone’s face off (suggesting that faces have become vestigial), a zombie attacks with its head dangling from its body by a thread of neck flesh, and a woman’s innards are pulled out through her mouth. The gore that spews from these bodies is indeed grotesque but also beautiful. The blood in Romero’s Land of the Dead is a gloriously vivid shade of red, unlike the gothic chocolaty-goo used in Night of the Living Dead or the comically orange gelatin used in Romero’s original version of Dawn of the Dead (1978). In Land of the Dead, Romero suggests that human insides are decidedly livelier than human outsides —that the artificial boundaries policed by skin give way to something

100

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

altogether more horrible and delightful. When flesh is torn asunder, the horrors that rise up from the carnage force many of us to reappraise the faceless automatons we have become. This is depicted succinctly in a single shot from Land of the Dead, one that presents the monstrous birth in all its disturbing and magnificent glory.4 The sequence begins with a close-up of an eerily calm Ohio River (the film is set in Pittsburgh). The zombies led by Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) walk along the riverbed to hunt the humans on the other side. Big Daddy breaks the surface first, the top of his bald head covered in a glistening gel, a substance slightly thicker than the water, almost like amniotic fluid. The sequence of shots is lit unlike any other in the film, a play of surreal light across the water and zombie faces. The sequence is about birth, about the amorphous material of the water transmogrified into solid flesh. The sequence is about the unreal made real, about the image becoming manifest. Big Daddy looks directly into the camera as he rises, acknowledging the camera’s presence and his relationship to it. He is the real protagonist of the film,5 the character viewers are asked to identify with most closely. The shot is frightening but also triumphant. Big Daddy wades through the water with a corpus of monstrous copies behind him; he is the return of flesh, as though Ophelia’s body had risen back up out of the brook, dripping moss and foliage, a new body demanding a new world.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) During the opening credits of Shaun of the Dead, viewers see a series of people engaged in one menial task after another. The first is a man pushing a nested row of empty shopping carts, a nod to the critique of consumerism seen in many zombie films, especially Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and Zombieland.6 The next shot in the sequence shows a checkout girl, “Mary” (or so says her salmon-colored name tag), dumbly watching as her hands pass one item after another across the

Monsters That Matter

101

scanner, the mechanical gesticulations of an automaton. Shaun (Simon Pegg) encounters “Mary” as a zombie in a later scene, and her expression and the quality of her movement remains unchanged. She has no identity per se, hence my keeping her name in quotes; so when Shaun reads the tag aloud to address her by name, it feels false, a hilarious mockery of the sort of grating and anonymous politeness that passes for genuine recognition. A few shots later, the camera pans across a mob of people walking toward the viewer, their heads bopping in unison to the cheeky B-movie soundtrack. Two are in hoodies, one carries a messenger bag, one has a chain wallet and clutches a water bottle, one crosses his arms, another has a thumb in her pocket, and several wear hats or bandanas. They face forward but look down, moving aimlessly in a direction that is no direction at all, their ecstatic dance reduced to a barely perceptible bounce of the head that does not reverberate through the rest of their otherwise stiff bodies. These people stand in for the audience sitting in a darkened theater, not interacting, also facing forward, unmoving, politely stifling laughter and screams. Shaun of the Dead pays homage as much to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers films as it does to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The line between what it is to be human and what it is to be a zombie is nonexistent and irrelevant in Shaun of the Dead. Thus, it becomes very easy for humans to pass as zombies during the course of the film, and vice versa. These scenes play almost identically to similar ones in the Body Snatchers films, in which humans pass as pod people. There is a subtle difference, though, which gets to the heart of my argument about the zombie as a postmodern icon. When Carol (Nicole Kidman) imitates the pod people in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion (2007), she does so by wiping all expression from her face. When Shaun and his crew imitate the zombies in Shaun of the Dead, they do so by becoming more expressive. In characterizing their mannerisms, one character describes the zombies as “limp” and “vacant with a hint of sadness,” but these are not the qualities that

102

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

come out in their performances. Instead, what I notice about the zombies is that their movements and expression are larger, grander. They walk with limbs akimbo and a wobbly, hey-look-I’m-a-zombie stagger. Their expressions are exaggerated, eyes wide and mouths stretched in bizarre directions. And they certainly have more personality than members of the human mob seen bopping their heads in the opening credits. No matter how easy it may be to copy their behavior, if zombies are simulacrum, they are a decidedly perverse sort.

Otto: Or, Up with Dead People (2008) Bruce LaBruce’s Otto: Or, Up with Dead People, a queer film about a “zombie with an identity crisis,” begins with images of mushroom clouds from erupting nuclear bombs. The film, though, is not about a postapocalyptic world so much as it is about the need for a violent restructuring of the present world. The explosions at the opening of the film are wishful thinking, accompanied by wailing orchestration both sinister and triumphant, a cry for the sort of “twisted coming” that Jean Baudrillard described in Simulacra and Simulation, “a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason” (361). Baudrillard described a very postmodern brand of paradox, much like the living dead themselves, both unintelligible and reasonable, perverse and logical, a prophetic coming and a nostalgic reversion. Later, Baudrillard wrote about deterrence and failures to fulfill the potentials of postmodern theory: “It isn’t that the direct menace of atomic destruction paralyzes our lives. It is rather that deterrence leukemizes us” (367). Too many of us are afraid, leukemized, because we have begun to see postmodernism’s residual effects (androids, elective genetic mutation, sexual reassignment surgery, genderfuck in all its variations), and thus fail to detonate the postmodern text. This is exactly where Otto begins, with its index finger on the button, taunting, threatening, (a)rousing viewers to action.

Monsters That Matter

103

Otto is set in a near future in which zombies have become common and unextraordinary. Medea (Katharina Klewinghaus), a director making an avant-garde “political zombie porno,” describes the protagonist, Otto (Jey Crisfar), as “lonely, empty, dead inside … [a] numb, phlegmatic, insensate boy, willing to go to any extreme to feel something, to feel anything. To me, it seemed like the only sane and logical response to a dead and sterile world.” Later, Otto is called a “hollow man” and an “empty signifier.” Zombies in Otto have become lifeless shells, not frenzied or voracious, but rather like the zombies in Shaun of the Dead, sapped and insipid. Even when they eat or have sex, acts that are concomitant in the film, the zombies seem merely to be going through the motions. They are a “gay plague,” as Medea refers to them, but without any of the accompanying menace of the word plague. LaBruce has presented all this with tongue planted firmly in cheek, hyperbolizing his various allegories to the point of parody, prepared for exactly the reading I offer here. Nevertheless, the zombies do rise up at the end of the film, with a vengeance but not to kill. Instead of ending, like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, with an orgy posing as a climactic battle, Otto ends with an actual orgy that goes much further than the coy titillations in Night, showing graphic (and bizarre) homosexual sex with the zombies “fucking [the rest of us] into immortality.” At the end of the film, Otto remarks in voice-over, “I really didn’t know what my destination was, but something told me to head north. The cold doesn’t bother me. In fact, I find it comforting. It preserves my flesh,” and this is the project of the film, to preserve the flesh, dead flesh, rotting flesh, sick flesh, copulative flesh.

MONSTROUS BIRTH / mŏn-strəs bərth / n. Perhaps something is even now occurring in the conception of structure that could be called a transition—a movement, out of the text and into the body, of babies, mothers, and monsters. Here I employ the term tran-

104

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

sition in its colloquial usage to describe the passage from one stage to another but also to allude to the transition phase in childbirth, characterized by the intensification of contractions, opening of the cervix, and general preparation of the body for the exit of the child from the womb. Transition, as it is both literally and metaphorically considered, is most certainly a labor—intensely horrifying and painful though often accompanied by an excitement at the imminent expulsion, a crowning achievement in the shape of the innocent and shameless child, or so it would seem. That this child shall in fact be monstrous—and self-begotten—may only be dealt with as an afterthought, the as yet unrealized product of a society unraveling at the most profound level of language. It is this monstrous birth that Jacques Derrida first postulated in the final paragraph of “Structure, Sign, and Play”: Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing—but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (889) The birth appears as both formless and the “terrifying form of monstrosity,” but also as the “species of the non-species.” Thus, it is both human and not human—animal and not animal—one thing and the other. It is the übergrotesque, Bakhtin’s crudely mischievous mixing of forms, which he described in Rebelais and His World as “giving birth to each other” (32). Julia Kristeva hinted at this concept of the monstrous birth in her description of the abject in Powers of Horror: “Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance” (15). The monstrous birth proclaims its own deformity—gives rise to its own

Monsters That Matter

105

multiplicity. Like Derrida’s idea of the center, the monstrous birth is both within the structure and outside it. It is my claim that the monstrous birth, and so the zombie, represents the possibility of a new center, one which does not resemble the centers of old, one which does not maintain binaries but insists upon collapsing them—insists upon the quintessence of freeplay. This monstrosity is mute not because it exists outside of language but because it undoes language. The monstrous birth is not opposed to the center; it annihilates the center—it is, to use an appropriately trite idiomatic construction, the schmenter.

SIMULACRUM / sim-yə-la-krəm / n. Like Derrida’s monstrous birth, the simulacrum also gives birth to itself. According to Plato, a simulacrum is the false copy that overshadows the experience of the essential and ideal forms. Baudrillard took this one step further to say that it is a copy for which there is no original. The simulacrum does not simply overshadow the real; it annihilates it. It is an incessant proliferation, like zombies that beget zombies that beget zombies, ad infinitum. A copy to end all copies. It is Derrida’s monstrous birth, but in spades. For Baudrillard, it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. (343) Baudrillard called the simulacrum perfect, but for him it is perfect in the way that death and gore are perfect: awesome but also abhorrent. Gilles Deleuze, in his essay “Plato and the Simulacrum,” offered a much more optimistic reading of simulacrum. For Deleuze, the simulacrum is cause for rejoicing, not dismay; for excited anticipation, not morbidity and melancholy. He wrote, “copies are secondary possessors.

106

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

They are well-founded pretenders, guaranteed by resemblance; simulacra are like false pretenders, built upon a dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion or a deviation” (256). The perversion here is of the sort that Derrida was also fond of, an extended moment of play or even something akin to Freud’s beloved polymorphous perversion. Deleuze used the word deviation, so the simulacrum is a breaking off, an emancipation—not “a reversion to the logic of reason” (as Baudrillard would say) but rather a perversion of both logic and reason. Deleuze ended his essay with a proclamation quite similar to the one that ends Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: Artifice and simulacrum are opposed at the heart of modernity, at the point where modernity settles all of its accounts, as two modes of destruction: the two nihilisms. For there is a vast difference between destroying in order to conserve and perpetuate the established order of representations, models, and copies, and destroying the models and copies in order to institute the chaos which creates, making the simulacra function and raising a phantasm—the most innocent of all destructions, the destruction of Platonism. (265–266) Deleuze saw monsters too, and (like Derrida’s) his monsters are of the deconstructive, revolutionary sort. They are not monsters that hide in shadows—not the sort tucked away in closets or groaning beneath beds. Rather, they are the monsters we see every day but fail to recognize—the monsters on every street corner, in every house, the monsters groaning in beds (not under them). They are the grotesque, the abject, both not us and exactly us. Deleuze called them innocent. I call them instrumental. Zombies are simulacrum, the monstrous birth, the posthuman, born and born again. My text gathers them in shambling unison, even as the throng circles, snarling at my syntax, pulling at the guts of my grammar. The zombie’s narrative is not one I can control inside the neat and tidy confines of academic analysis.

Monsters That Matter

107

Postscript The zombie apocalypse is an entropic system, and entropy is a relentless seduction. It is a turning in, a turning toward, a movement from an improbable state to a more probable one. Entropy does not, as is commonly thought, measure the pull of a system toward chaos. Rather, entropy describes the tendency in a system for the most likely event to occur. Though I use the metaphor of a seduction, entropy is not wanted, not driven, not desired. It just happens necessarily, like gravity. An orange does not roll down a hill because it wants to. The apple does not want to fall from the tree; it just does. Entropy facilitates (even demands) play; and by play, I mean a state wherein action is feasible, as in the sentence, The gears felt as though they had a good deal of play. The automaton walks, almost begrudgingly, because it can; entropy exerts its pull on a system because it can’t not, like a machine that gets turned on but cannot turn itself off. As an agent of the entropic system, the zombie can’t not walk, can’t not devour, can’t not turn. Entropy’s movement is unidirectional, always toward the most probable outcome. In some systems the outcome could be chaos, whereas in other systems (like the one that drives crystal formation), the outcome might be order or perfection. As a product of entropy, the transformation from human to zombie is also unidirectional (i.e., humans turn into zombies, but zombies cannot turn back into humans). So the system crawls inevitably toward an all-zombie system. It is, perhaps, exactly for this reason that nearly all zombie movies are apocalyptic and do not depict a reformed human civilization when they end. Once the zombies begin their crawl, we all inevitably join the fray.

108

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Notes 1. Many critics read Night of the Living Dead as a film about politics and 1960s America. Much of this critical work uses Romero’s film as a means to an end in making larger sociopolitical arguments about gender, capitalism, war, and so forth. Tony Williams argued in The Cinema of George A. Romero that the film “explicitly presented the image of an America in which the old values were now harmful and obsolete, leading to a chaos very few would survive unless some drastic personal, political and social change would follow” (32). Williams has done important and exceptional work, but his use of the past tense when describing the film nonetheless suggests that it once did—and no longer does—its political work. 2. Queer is more useful as a verb, as I use it here, than as a noun. Nouns describe what is fixed and immutable, whereas verbs imply movement and action. It makes less sense to think about what queer is and more sense to think about what queer does. Sedgwick wrote, “A word so fraught as ‘queer’ is—fraught with so many social and personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement—never can only denote; nor even can it only connote” (9). Queer is a contested word, a word with baggage, a word that resists attempts to fix it with a definition, a word that not only is subjective but also calls into question the very notion of subjectivity. The word causes dissension that obscures anything it might attempt to signify. I employ the word here exactly because the body I am describing is a dissenting body, a body that frustrates attempts to make an easy signifier of it. Rather, like queer theory, the zombie tells a story about the body and the world it inhabits—a story about evolving human physicality (and the erosion of it). Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have written, “It is not useful to consider queer theory a thing, especially one dignified by capital letters … Queer theory is not the theory of anything in particular, and has no precise bibliographic shape” (343–344). It is a not altogether subtle irony, then, that each of the theoretical terms I discuss in this work is written in all capital letters, as though it can be neatly contained by its definition. The form I employ in my account of queer is at odds with the basic tenets of queer theory. 3. “He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance” (302).

Monsters That Matter

109

4. Zombie films engage the subjects of childhood, pregnancy, and birth in unusual ways. Children (that are not zombies or who do not turn into zombies) are scarce in the genre. The film 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, are rare examples of zombie films with children in major roles. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead includes a famous scene in which a little girl eats her father and murders her mother with a trowel. Cronenberg’s Shivers has several controversial taboo-busting shots in which children are depicted as ravenous sexual subjects, one in which a preteen girl molests a man outside an elevator, and another in which two infected kids are seen leashed, on all fours, barking like dogs. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead makes two nods to Romero’s filmic treatment of children and babies. During the opening sequence, Ana and her husband fend off the attack of a neighborhood child, a ferocious little girl zombie that pays homage to the daughter in Romero’s Night. Later in the film, a pregnant zombie gives birth to a zombie baby, whom the main characters quickly euthanize, a nod to the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), which features a pregnant female protagonist in Francine (Gaylen Ross). The treatment of pregnancy and birth in the Dawn of the Dead remake adds a bleak coda to the original film, suggesting that Francine’s baby will be born infected. The film later overwrites the ending of Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) when it turns out that the deserted island the characters escape to is not at all deserted. 5. Paffenroth wrote, “[Land of the Dead is] a movie in which the audience might actually find itself rooting for the zombies, as they bring about the end of the racist, capitalist, exploitative, parasitic human society” (116). 6. Another recent film, Splinter (2008), a spinoff of the zombie genre about the husks of human bodies reanimated by a parasite, takes place almost entirely in a convenience store. The characters barricade themselves inside as though the place will shelter them from the grotesque monsters outside. The barricaded store offers them little protection. Human bodies (in various horrifically contorted states) become just another conveniently packaged product for the beasts (and the viewer) to consume.

Part 2

Repetition and Replication Unnatural Reproduction(s)

Chapter 5

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument “The Lamenting Lady” Margaret of Henneberg (and Her 365 Children) in Early Modern England Lindsay Ann Reid In the fall of 1635, the English clergyman and theologian Thomas Bedford observed evidence of a “strange-birth” that had recently occurred near Plymouth, Devon. His authoritative printed account, A True and Certaine Relation of a Strange-Birth which Was Borne at Stonehouse in the Parish of Plimmouth, would later describe the short-lived progeny of Mr. and Mrs. John Persons thus: Two heads, and neckes, two backes, and sets of ribbes, foure armes and hands, foure thighes and legges: in a word, from head to heele (so farre as the eye could discerne) two compleat and perfect bodies, but concorporate and ioyned together from breast to belly, two in one. (4)

114

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

A mere three days after the conjoined twins’ birth, Bedford officiated at their untimely funeral. Subsequently, his words from “the interring of the sayd Birth” were appended to his eyewitness account. Among the copious annotations that Bedford included in the printed version of his “Notes of a Sermon” appears a lengthy marginal digression devoted to the topic of “Multiplication of severall births.” Though he acknowledged that such cases are exceptional, Bedford reminded his audience that higher-order multiple births are well attested by the likes of “Aristotle, Pliny, and some Moderne Authors.” Of particular interest is that alongside these ancient and contemporary authorities, Bedford also went on to cite “that story of Margaret, Sister to Earle Floris the fourth” as a convincing instance of just such a “miracle, or miraculous accident.” It is this story of Countess Margaret of Henneberg that I take as the subject of this chapter—a medieval tale of multiple birth so familiar to Bedford and his early modern contemporaries that he referred to it as “[n]otorious and in the mouth of every man” (12). A staple character in medieval Dutch chronicle history, Countess Margaret of Henneberg proved to be a figure of fascination also for early modern English audiences. As the reputed mother of hundreds, Countess Margaret was synonymous in the early modern English imagination with uncontrollable fecundity, and the tale of her demise unites those anxieties about the maternal body and its capacity for monstrous reproduction that underlie many of the other contributions to this volume, as well. My own investigation of what this collection’s editors have described as the “textual manifestations of … anxieties about ‘unnatural’ reproduction and monstrous progeny” begins with an overview of various early-seventeenth-century texts in which Countess Margaret’s tale is recounted. I then outline the most significant features of Countess Margaret’s story in these English sources: an uneasiness regarding multiples and multiplication and a strong emphasis on monument as an indicator of credibility. Finally, the concluding section of this chapter offers a sustained reading of how these issues of multiplication and monument inform one particular early modern text, a broadside ballad about

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

115

Countess Margaret entitled “The Lamenting Lady” (ca. 1620). Sharing with Stephanie Boluk’s later chapter in this section a specific interest in how media, too, can be linked with metaphors of unnatural reproduction, I examine the coincidence of monstrous content and form in this ballad, arguing that its first-person lyrics about Countess Margaret’s grotesque hyperfertility simultaneously speak to the conditions under which “The Lamenting Lady” and other early modern ballads were historically spread and consumed.

The Tale of Countess Margaret Though there is no doubt that Countess Margaret was indeed a thirteenth-century historical personage—and perhaps, if speculative modern diagnoses are to be believed, a woman who actually experienced a hydatidiform mole (Rather 509–510)—the trajectory by which she became popularly remembered as the cursed mother of multitudes is less clear. Sensational legends, as farfetched as they were widely believed, about Countess Margaret’s aberrant reproductive capacities seem to have first made their mark on English culture around the turn of the seventeenth century. Probably the first account of Countess Margaret’s story to have appeared in English print was an anecdote included in Edward Grimeston’s 1608 Generall Historie of the Netherlands, itself a translation of Jean François Le Petit’s earlier Grande chronique ancienne et moderne de Hollande. Grimeston’s work recounts: Cont Floris had … one daughter called Mathilde (some say Marguerite) married to Cont Herman of Henneberg…. To describe the monstrous child-birth or deliuerie of this Lady, you must vnderstand, that on a time this Contesse of Henneberg did see a poore widow woman begging her bread for Gods sake, hauing in eyther arme a child both which she had had at one birth: This poore woman crauing her almes, the Contesse reiected her with reprochfull words: whereupon this poore woman, hauing her heart full of discontent, for her bitter speeches, lifted vp her eyes to heauen, and said: O great and mightie God, I beseech thee

116

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity for a testimonie of mine innocencie, that it will please thee to send vnto this Lady as many children as there be daies in the yeare. A while after this Contesse was big with child by her husband; and for her lying in, she went into Holland to see the Earle of Holland her nephew, lodging in the Abbey of religious women of Losdunen [i.e., Loosduinen]: whereas she grew so exceeding great, as the like was neuer seene. Her time being come, the friday before Palme-sunday, in the yeare 1276. she was deliuered of three hundred sixtie and fiue children, halfe sonnes and halfe daughters[,] the odde one being found a Hermaphrodite, all complete and well fashioned with their little members: the which were layed in two basins and baptized by Guidon, Suffragan to the bishop of Vtrecht, who named the sonnes Iohn and the daughters Elizabeth. As soone as they had been baptized, they died all, and their mother with them. (52)

In the following year, Grimeston would again briefly mention this “strange & miraculous deliverie … which is against all the rules of Physick and naturall Philosophy” in another Le Petit translation entitled The Low-Country Common Wealth (127). Shortly thereafter, Thomas Coryat’s Coryats Crudities of 1611 provided audiences with a long account of the same tale, there marked as “the most monstrous and prodigious matter that was in any place of the whole world since the creation thereof” (646); in the 1615 edition of John Stow’s Annales, edited and significantly expanded by Edmond Howes, Countess Margaret and her brood of multiples made yet another appearance, and a rendition was featured in John Molle’s 1621 translation of Philipp Camerarius’s work The Living Librarie. Notably, a common refrain among all of these texts is their repeated insistence on the tale’s demonstrable veracity. “Erasmus, Vives, and others have written of the strange deliverance,” asserts one text, and “of this you may reade more in Guychardine, and manie other Authentique Authors,” assures a second (Molle 157; Stow 217). A third text, vouching that it “is so absolutely and undoubtedly true as nothing in the world more,” claims not only that Countess Margaret’s story may be “read … in a good author” and in “sundry ancient Chronicles of infallible

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

117

certainty, both manuscript and printed,” but also that her tale has been verified by “many worthy travellers … that were the eie witnesses,” individuals who had seen incontestable physical proof of the births (Coryat 647–648). A number of small discrepancies exist between these various earlyseventeenth-century versions of Countess Margaret’s story. Was the countess forty or forty-two years old at the time of this monstrous parturition? Was the fateful year 1276 or 1314? Had Countess Margaret been woefully barren before the incident, and was it 363, 364, or 365 miniature babies that she gave birth to all at once? Nonetheless, despite these minor inconsistencies between versions, two particular elements of Countess Margaret’s story are consistently emphasized across the relevant earlyseventeenth-century texts: the fraught dynamics of multiplication and the role that monument plays in establishing credibility. To begin with the complex issue of how multiplication is represented in various versions of this tale, it is worth noting that Countess Margaret’s story is one of infectious as well as prodigious reproduction. After all, it is as a direct consequence of Countess Margaret’s uncharitable interaction with the beggar woman—herself burdened both physically and financially with multiple babies (most often described as twins, though the Annales claims they were quadruplets)—that Countess Margaret is punished with an even more massive brood of her own. There is something contagious or transmissible about multiples in this story of poetic justice, and Countess Margaret’s punishment is one of twinning in more than one sense. Not only does she become twinned with the beggar woman, duplicating her subjective experience by essentially sharing her plight as the mother of multiples, but Countess Margaret’s own experience of hyperfertility is further intensified by the exponentially more excessive duplication of little Elizabeths and Johns that takes place in her own womb. Most early modern English accounts tended to be more specific about the nature of what Grimeston had obliquely referred to as Countess

118

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Margaret’s “reprochfull words” to the beggar woman, providing audiences with detailed explanations of the ways in which Countess Margaret behaves badly toward her social inferior. Countess Margaret in these texts clearly subscribes to what appears to have been a widespread medieval superstition—seen elsewhere, for example, in Marie de France’s Le fresne—that “more than one childe at a byrth” reveals the mother must have been inseminated by “severall Fathers” (Stow 217). As one account puts it, Countess Margaret haughtily told the other woman “it was a thing against nature (in her opinion) for a woman that is honest to conceave by her husband two children of one birth; and therefore that this her deliverance had bewraied that she had lewdly abandoned herselfe to some others” (Molle 157). Another source has Countess Margaret boldly and maliciously taunting, “[G]oe gette thou hence thou harlotte; thou shalt never make me beleeve. But those thy brattes had foure Fathers, thou insatiate strumpet” (Stow 217). In other words, convinced that the beggar’s children can be the result only of heteropaternal superfecundation, Countess Margaret initially perceives the twin infants as compelling, tangible, and damning proof of another woman’s adultery. Though Countess Margaret is roundly punished for her ill treatment of the beggar woman, nonetheless, the tale as a whole evinces a tangible sense of unease when it comes to issues of multiplication and twinning. Countess Margaret’s initial belief that the beggar woman’s multiples must be the product of licentious sexual behavior is proved to be faulty, but even so, twins, quadruplets, and so on, form an unusual and potentially suspect category of progeny—one that is fraught with semiotic uncertainty. Left unanswered by the tale is this question: If multiples do not confirm adultery, as Countess Margaret originally supposes, what do they mean? Several versions imply that there may be something uncomfortably subhuman about multiple births. To this effect, Countess Margaret’s own brood is described more than once as “the biggenesse of new hatched Chickens” (Stow 217). What is more, although God himself intervenes to clear the beggar woman’s name, the nature of

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

119

Countess Margaret’s divine castigation again reveals a greater ambivalence about multiples at the root of the tale: even if twins are not damning proof of maternal misbehavior, neither are they a blessing to be wished for because hyperfecundity itself figures as an effective, unequivocally disagreeable form of punishment. The second element of Countess Margaret’s story that is prominent in early-seventeenth-century accounts is an emphasis on monument. The sources repeatedly tell readers that “to this day there remaynes a memorable monument of her in Holland” and that “two [baptismal] basins are yet to be seene in the said church of Losdunen, with their Epitaph both in Latine and Dutch” (Stow 217; Grimeston, Generall Historie 52). By the time Bedford wrote his sermon in 1635, legends about this historical woman’s aberrant reproductive capacities had already drawn a host of curious British travelers to Loosduinen, and later in the century, that site would continue to attract the likes of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. Though his account was not printed until 1617, Fynes Morison claimed to have visited the site decades earlier, in 1591: “when [he] staied at the Hage, [he] walked out in halfe an houres space to the village Lausdune, where [he] saw a wonderfull monument” including “two basens of brasse … in which the children … were baptized” (52). In a 1622 publication, James Howell similarly described visiting a Church-Monument, where an Earl and a Lady are engraven with 365 Children about them, which were all delivered at one birth,” and he elaborated that “the Bason hangs in the Church which carried them to be Christned, and the Bishops Name who did it; and the Story of this Miracle, with the year and the day of the month mentioned. (14) Elsewhere, Coryat lamented that he almost made it to the site in the course of his own continental travels, but “a certaine sinister chance” kept him from actually visiting (646). Nonetheless, the author claimed to have “heard many worthy travellers report that were the eie witnesses of the matter,” and these truthful tourists assured him that one could

120

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

find a “monument in the Church of the … Monastery of Laudun, which is to this day shewed … with a most memorable Latine inscription upon it, together with two brasen basons wherein all those infants were baptized” (647). Repeatedly, these various accounts of Countess Margaret’s grotesque demise emphasize that the story could be verified: incontrovertible material evidence existed that affirmed the birth of the 365 minuscule children. This external, physical evidence seemed to substantiate the tragedy, locating it in a particularized temporal frame and geographical place. In a rather ironic twist, however, as Jan Bondeson reported in an extensive discussion of Countess Margaret’s tale, the authenticating basins and inscriptions so widely reported to have been seen by seventeenth-century British travelers were actually counterfeits. Bondeson explained that although from at least the late 1500s there had been a similar monument erected in memory of Countess Margaret, the original had been destroyed and replaced before the wave of seventeenth-century British tourists ever encountered the site: In 1572, there was a civil war in Holland, between Philip II and the insurgent troops of William of Orange. The abbey of Loosduinen was demolished by the Spanish troops…. When the adherents of William of Orange occupied Loosduinen, the old abbey was completely ruined, and the old wooden tablet, as well as the original basin, were among the items destroyed by iconoclasts. Some years later, when Loosduinen Abbey became a Protestant church, one of its first rectors, Reverend Jacobus Meursius, wanted to revive the Legend. He had a new wooden tablet made, with another text … in both Dutch and Latin. Two copper basins, which the rector bought in a shop in Delft, were hung on each side of this inscription. (72) Nonetheless, contemporary accounts relied upon the faulty logic that the existence of these Dutch monuments confirmed the historical truth of the tale.

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

121

“The Lamenting Lady” Having established the narrative outlines and the two most remarkable features of Countess Margaret’s early modern story, at this juncture I return to the 1635 commentary of Bedford with which this chapter began. More particularly, I am interested in Bedford’s assertion that the tale of the medieval countess’s horrifying fecundity was “notorious and in the mouth of every man.” His suggestion that this story was being transmitted orally, or by mouth, is significant: in addition to the numerous printed accounts that I have already discussed, British audiences’ widespread acquaintance with Countess Margaret’s story no doubt also owed much to a relevant printed broadside ballad entitled “The Lamenting Lady.” It is this circa 1620 ballad that is the focus of the remainder of this chapter. Bearing in mind the issues of multiplication and monument that I have discussed in relation to the tale, my approach to “The Lamenting Lady” centers on the various ways in which the ballad’s “notorious” narrative content and the broadside medium in which it circulated as it passed through “the mouth of every man” converge to create new meanings. “The Lamenting Lady” was printed in London by Henry Gosson, who, along with Francis Coules and John Wright, was one of the most prolific printers of ballads during the era. A first-person complaint delivered from the perspective of Countess Margaret herself, the song’s lyrics are prefaced and contextualized by the following prose description: [F]or the wrongs done to … a poore woman, for having two children at one burthen, [Countess Margaret] was by the hand of God most strangely punished, by sending her as many children at one birth, as there are daies in the yeare, in remembrance whereof, there is now a monument builded in the Citty of Lowdon, as many English men now living in Lowdon, can truely testifie the same and hath seene it. The broadside is decorated with two purpose-made woodcuts. The first shows Countess Margaret standing in a doorway, gesticulating toward

122

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

a woman who stands just outside wielding an empty basket and a baby in the crook of each arm. The second shows the countess lying in bed following “Gods wondrous worke,” her hands clasped in a prayerlike position; elsewhere in the room, a basket brimming with tiny, dehumanized babies sits on a table, and a nearby servant throws up her hands in stylized despair. The lyrics of the two-part ballad rehearse the traditional details of the story, recounted in the voice of Countess Margaret. Finding herself infertile and increasingly bitter, the narrator recalls her aggravation that even “people poore” were able to enjoy “those happy joyes” of parenthood that remained elusive to her. Predictably, Countess Margaret tells how she took out these frustrations on “a woman poore / With two sweet children in her armes” who happened to come to her door. Infuriated that “Beggers [can] have what Ladies want,” the Countess recounts, she “most spightfully” hurled “A hundreth … taunting tearmes” at the woman, accusing her: Thou art some Strumpt sure I know, and spend’st thy dayes in shame, And stained sure thy marriage bed with spots of black defame: Else unto these two lovely babes thou canst no mother be, When I that live in greatest grace no such content can see. As usual, the narrator of “The Lamenting Lady” finds herself roundly cursed by the offended woman: “heaven send thee such a number [of children] / At once, as dayes be in the yeare, / to make the world to wonder.” Afterwards, “a heavie hand of heaven, / revengd this womans woes,” and Countess Margaret does indeed give birth to a litter of tiny babies “all like new bred mice.” These “poore creatures,” predictably “short-lived,” are “strangely buried” all together “in one grave” by the end of the countess’s lament.

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

123

Given early-seventeenth-century Britain’s literary inheritances and tastes, it is hardly surprising that the story of Margaret suggested itself as apt ballad material. In terms of content, “The Lamenting Lady” is heavily indebted to a genre that often provided fodder for contemporary broadsides: de casibus–style complaints. Though the prototype for such lamentations was Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century De casibus virorum illustrium, this genre had been widely popularized in Elizabethan England by the derivative Mirror for Magistrates and by the early seventeenth century, the genre’s influence was tangible in a multitude of confessional-style first-person ballads. Such de casibus lamentations work as exempla in malo by featuring repentant first-person narrators who have been dramatically reduced from their former positions of power, influence, or wealth; these extended monologues typically have didactic overtones, the narrators condemning the vices that led to their various falls from grace. While their guilt is clearly established, the regret and sorrow of de casibus subjects mitigate their villainy, often making them into surprisingly sympathetic characters. The moralistic overtones “The Lamenting Lady” are typical of the de casibus genre, for its narrator —now the world-weary and remorseful voice of experience—warns her explicitly female audience to avoid the sin of “pampered pride.” She explicitly instructs her listeners to forgo “the joyes of worldly things.” Moreover, as in the de casibus tradition more generally, “The Lamenting Lady” carefully contrasts portraits of Margaret before and after her fall. Whereas she “once was lovely, faire, and young, / by nature sweet and kinde, / And had those joyes that might content / a gallant Ladies minde,” her vices and crimes against the beggar took a toll on both her “minde” and her formerly beautiful physical body: My cheekes that were so lovely red, of natures choycest dye: Grew blacke and ugly to behould, to every weeping eye. And in my wombe distempered griefes, so vext me day and night:

124

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity I sweld so bid that I appeard, a strange and monstrous wight.

Moreover, “The Lamenting Lady” should be understood in relation to a second genre that was equally prevalent in the broadside ballads of the day: narratives of monstrous births. As Bedford’s description of Mr. and Mrs. John Persons’ conjoined twins at the outset of this chapter would suggest, accounts of unusual, misshapen, or otherwise “monstrous” children were highly vendible during the era, appearing most frequently in pamphlet or ballad form but also in learned tomes authored by physicians, theologians, and natural philosophers. Frequently, as in the case of “The Lamenting Lady,” such broadside tales of monstrous children involved stories about multiple births, as evidenced by titles such as “The True Discription of Two Monsterous Chyldren Borne at Herne in Kent” and “The True Description of Two Monsterous Children, Laufully Begotten betwene George Steuens and Margerie His Wife, and Borne in the Parish of Swanburne in Buckingham Shyre.” Since ancient times, human abnormalities and oddities have been a source of fascination, and travel literature had long evinced the compulsion to interpret the existence of allegedly monstrous human races, such as the dog-headed cynocephali. Nonetheless, there was a sharp and marked increase in monstrous-birth accounts in the early modern era that has been linked to both religious and political circumstances. These accounts no doubt also proliferated and spread owing to advances in technology; as Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes have noted, developments in early modern print culture assisted in the era’s remarkable “dissemination of the monstrous—not merely as text but as printed image” (9). Much has been written about British—and, indeed, other European— audiences’ seemingly insatiable taste for such true or “true” accounts of monstrosity and unusual births in the early modern era, but perhaps a familiar Shakespearean example best illustrates how “The Lamenting Lady” coincides with this genre. Readers will recall the often-invoked peddler Autolycus, who unexpectedly arrives in act 4 of The Winter’s

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

125

Tale “sing[ing] several tunes faster than you’ll tell money” (4.4.184). A duly impressed servant reports that this balladmonger, whose “traffic is sheets” (4.3.23), “hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes. No milliner can so fit his customers with gloves” (4.4.190–4.4.191). Among his various musical wares, Autolycus touts “a very doleful” ballad that is purportedly “true, and but a month old” (4.4.253, 4.4.257). Containing a tale allegedly attested by the attendant midwife, “one Mistress TailPorter, and five or six honest wives that were present” (4.4.259–4.4.260), Autolycus’s song, presented as a typical sample of circulating ballad fare, shares both the monstrous- or multiple-birth theme and the clearly moralistic vice/punishment dynamic later evidenced in “The Lamenting Lady”: the fanciful Shakespearean broadside tells of “how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden” (4.4.253–4.4.254; emphasis added). It is not only its associations with both de casibus–derived and monstrous birth ballads that made Countess Margaret’s story such an apt subject for the broadside ballad, however. Rather, as I go on to argue in the concluding sections of this chapter, the narrative and thematic content of this story intersects in fascinating ways with the historical, material conditions surrounding the production and consumption of broadside ballads in early modern Britain. Therefore, it is worth briefly reflecting on the dissemination and consumption of broadside ballads during this era. Although the ballad as a poetic form predated the advent of print culture in Britain, nonetheless, it was the press that enabled the pervasive material spread of the genre in the form of broadsides—so called because of their format. First appearing in the mid-sixteenth century, these broadside ballads were printed on single, unfolded sheets of paper. Although a number of formats were possible, typically, as in the case of “The Lamenting Lady,” an early modern broadside ballad included a title, one or more woodcut illustrations, a note indicating the familiar tune to which the lyrics were meant to be sung, and the corresponding

126

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

lyrical text, most often rendered in black-letter font. The subjects of early modern ballads were diverse, and recent scholarly estimates of precise numbers printed during the period vary (because many were not properly registered and because broadsides, ephemeral by nature, tend to have a low rate of modern survival). Bruce R. Smith estimated that as many as four thousand ballads had been published by the turn of the seventeenth century, and Tessa Watt argued for a minimum of six hundred thousand circulating ballads in the same time frame (Smith, Acoustic World 168; Watt 11). Regardless of the accuracy of these modern scholarly estimates, numerous early modern accounts attest to the ubiquity of broadside ballads in daily life by the turn of the seventeenth century. Satirist Thomas Nashe, for example, disparagingly complained in his Anatomie of Absurditie of “our babbling Ballets … which every rednose Fidler hath at his fingers end, and every ignorant ale knight will breath foorth over the potte, as soone as his braine waxeth Hote.” Enjoyed by wide variety of audiences—by the literate and illiterate, by “great personages” and “poor husbandmen” alike (Bownde 242)—these omnipresent, relatively cheap, and physically versatile printed sheets fulfilled a number of functions beyond the obvious, serving as everything from wall decorations and convenient wrapping materials for parcels or edibles to toilet paper. In thinking about the intersections between form and content in the case of “The Lamenting Lady,” I return to what I earlier identified as the two characteristic elements of Countess Margaret’s early modern story: that is, multiplication and monument. To begin with the issue of multiplication, I would note that the unruly human reproduction described in the song’s lyrics also serves as an apt (and, in the early modern era, commonly invoked) metaphor for the mechanics of textual reproduction that produced printed broadside versions of “The Lamenting Lady.” It has often been remarked that the language of sexual reproduction and the generative process overlapped significantly with discourses surrounding print technology in early modern Britain. One need only

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

127

think, for example, of the gender-bending imagery of the first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella, where Philip Sidney is “great with child to speak, and helpless in [his] throes” (12); of Shakespeare’s rather self-effacing reference to Venus and Adonis the “first heir of [his] invention” in the poem’s famed dedication; or of Edmund Spenser’s anonymous instructions to his book in The Shepheardes Calender: Goe little booke: thy selfe present, As child whose parent is unkent: And askéd, who thee forth did bring, A shepheards swaine saye did thee sing… (1–2, 8–9) The reversibility of such metaphors was also prevalent, and to this effect, one might consider the innumerable instances in literature of the era in which children are posited as the “print” or “copy” of their parents. This early modern slippage between human and mechanical reproduction was, in some senses, nothing new; the metaphorical connections between the textual and the sexual were long standing. “Since ancient times,” as Margreta de Grazia wrote, “reproductive mechanisms, particularly the signet and the wax, have provided a model for reproductive bodies and minds—for the conception and generation of ideas and children” (52). However, the advent of print culture and the introduction of moveable type further nuanced this extant discourse by introducing technology capable of seemingly unbounded repetition—a wholly new sort of textual hyperfecundity. De Grazia made the relevant point: “A signet or stamp could produce only one insignia; the forme of the press, however, made up of variable letters, could produce a virtually infinite number of impressions” (52). Like twin births (or those of higher-order multiples), the products of the press were simultaneously, almost paradoxically, singular yet double. The multiple textual births facilitated by the mechanics of print and the attendant possibility of excessive or erroneous duplication contributed, in turn, to metaphors that linked textual and sexual reproduction more particularly with the imagery of monstrous birth. In the

128

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

prefatory materials to the posthumously published Arcadia, for instance, Sidney confided to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke: For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you: if you keep it to yourself or to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities…. In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as I would it were (and shall be when God will) having many many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster. (687; emphasis added) What is more, that Countess Margaret’s own story could itself be adopted as an apt metaphor for monstrously indiscriminate textual (re)production is evidenced by Robert Waring’s “To the Memory of His Deceased Friend, Mr William Cartwright,” which prefaced the posthumous 1651 collected edition of Cartwright’s Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems: As the Dutch Lady, who at once did bear, Numbers, not Births, to date each day i’ th’ year, Grew barren by Encrease; and after all, None could Her, Mother, or them Children, call. So whilst All write, None judge, we multiply So many Poems, and no Poetry. To relate these metaphorical concerns more directly to “The Lamenting Lady,” it is of particular relevance that as vehicles of mass communication conducive to both somatic and material transmission, early modern broadside ballads participated equally in what are often conceived as distinct oral and print cultures. Though in their printed forms, broadsides were sold in city shops, such ballads were also disseminated by itinerant chapmen, real-life versions of Shakespeare’s previously mentioned

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

129

Autolycus. As “The Lamenting Lady” indicates, for instance, it was intended “to be sold at [Gosson’s] shop on London Bridge,” conveniently located along the route taken by southbound chapmen and balladmongers exiting the city and bound for more rustic destinations (Watt 76). Though ballads were sold to both urban and rural customers in broadside format, their dissemination was complicated by the fact that a consumer did not necessarily need to purchase access to the ballad’s lyrics. Rather, ballads underwent what Joy Wiltenburg has described as “two distinct, though overlapping, levels of consumption” because their lyrics could be easily memorized and disseminated orally, independent of the printed form in which they also appeared (1). Communicated through private and public performances, early modern ballads could be heard not only “in taverns & alehouses … of base resort” but also “in playes” and “in the streete,” and they were a standard form of entertainment at festive gatherings such as “Christmasse diners and brideales” (Puttenham sig. M1). As objects, ballads were vendible, yet they also enjoyed an immaterial existence; the medium of the human voice, as well as the technology of print, facilitated their reproduction. One might say that broadside ballad circulation is, in and of itself, a sort of out-of-control, almost viral form of textual reproduction—fueled both by the press, with its often-remarked capability of producing infinite physical copies, and also by an oral culture in which lyrics could be learned, shared, sung, and even modified in seemingly irrepressible and disorderly ways. Just as Countess Margaret’s story is a tale of unbridled multiplication, so is the form in which it appeared as “The Lamenting Lady.” The spread of ballad lyrics from individual to individual mirrors the conceptual twinning of the beggar woman and Countess Margaret that occurs at the narrative level as the subjective experience of the former is almost infectiously transferred to and intensified in the latter. It is thus that the form and content of “The Lamenting Lady” worked in tandem to provide meaning as the ballad spread to the point that, as Bedford reported, it was “in the mouth of every man.”

130

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Finally, to return again to the second characteristic feature found in seventeenth-century accounts of Countess Margaret, I focus once more on the issue of monument. At the level of narrative content, “The Lamenting Lady,” like its sources and analogs, cites the existence of the objects in Loosduinen that had become early modern tourist attractions. As the aforementioned prefatory header to the ballad confirms, “many English men … can truely testifie” to having seen the authenticating “monuments,” and within the ballad itself, Countess Margaret reminds her audience that the “poore creatures in one grave / were strangely buried all,” going on to elaborate once more: And on the grave where now [the 365 babies] lye a monument still stands To shew this wondrous hap of mine unto all Christian lands Such concerns with establishing physical evidence to substantiate the historical existence of Countess Margaret’s multitudinous progeny intersect, first of all, with the material production of new textual artifacts in the form of printed broadsides; a printed broadside ballad hung on the wall of an alehouse or a private home could replicate the sense of monumentality invested in the famed inscriptions of Loosduinen. In addition, the ballad’s insistence on the link between monumentality and veracity resonates with the discourse surrounding early modern news ballads more generally. Recall once more Autolycus’s appearance in The Winter’s Tale: there is a well-known and humorous moment when the shepherdess Mopsa—perhaps naïvely, perhaps slyly—declares that she “love[s] a ballad in print … for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.251– 252). Autolycus, too, vouches for the truth of his ballads’ eccentric and unlikely stories. “Why should I carry lies abroad?” the ballad-seller muses, swearing that the outlandish “ballad of a fish, that appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the four-score of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad” was duly authenticated by “Five

Monstrosity, Multiplication, and Monument

131

justices’ hands … and witnesses more than my pack will hold” (4.4.260– 261, 265–267, 272–273). These concerns with establishing physical evidence and witnesses to substantiate the existence of Countess Margaret’s 365 progeny also intersect with the dynamics of embodied performance. As Smith has convincingly argued, one must “consider ballads in relationship to the bodies of the people who sang them and heard them” (“Female Impersonation” 287); thus, in the case of “The Lamenting Lady,” singers relating a firstperson narrative are themselves monumentalized as they begin: Regard my griefe kinde Ladies all, my heart now bleeding dyes, And shewers of silver pearled teares falls from my weeping eyes This emphasis on physical, bodily description with which the ballad begins establishes a direct link between Countess Margaret and each singer voicing her first-person lament. Every time that this ballad is sung, the successive bodies of various singers become, in turn, the authenticating physical conduits through which Countess Margaret’s lamenting words flow. One might say that Countess Margaret is, however momentarily, situated in the bodies and voices of the ballad’s performers who bewail her sins, repent her behavior, and beg the other women in her audience to prudently regard the moral of her story. Listeners and audience members witnessing each performance of Countess Margaret’s words are thereby figured as eyewitnesses, and they are given the further possibility of becoming participants or monuments by taking up the song with their own voices. Simultaneously anticipating the song’s wide circulation and acknowledging Countess Margaret’s notoriety, the ballad’s lyrics prophetically comment: “I in Countries farre and neere / a wonder thus be showne.” It is thus that the story of the thirteenth-century Countess Margaret of Henneberg as recounted in “The Lamenting Lady” represents an evoca-

132

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tive synchronism of medium and message. Not only do the song’s lyrics figurativelyspeak to the duplication and almost infectious proliferation of early modern broadside ballads, but the lyrics’ concern with monumentality also intersects with the materiality of the broadside itself, as well as with the dynamics of embodied musical performance. In summation, with its dual emphases on multiplication and monument, Countess Margaret’s narrative of deviant sexual reproduction metaphorically speaks to the conditions of hyperfecund textual reproduction under which the broadside ballad as a medium was replicated during the early modern period. In so doing, “The Lamenting Lady” continually selfreinforces its own constellation of relationships—explicit and implicit, overt and symbolic—with monstrous and multitudinous generation.

Chapter 6

Death, Disease, and Discontent The Monstrous Reign of the Supervirus Emilie Taylor-Brown [I am] a new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend. —Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

Sign of the Times: Media Influence and the Pandemic Zeitgeist In June 2009 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the H1N1 influenza virus (colloquially known as swine flu) a stage-six infection, raising it to pandemic status (National Health Service [NHS], “Swine Flu”). Although the pandemic proved relatively mild in the UK, it represented the first flu pandemic in forty-one years and claimed in excess of 17,700 lives worldwide (WHO Writing Committee 2012). A combination of media inflammation and popularized anxiety concerning

134

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

influenza viruses in the preceding years led to mass hysteria and to the commercialization of so-called “Swine Flu Prevention Packs,” including hand sanitizer, disinfectant, latex gloves, and respirator face masks. The perhaps disproportionate public reaction was the result of an accumulation of public health concerns including the spread of SARS from the Guangdong region of China to thirty countries in 2003 (WHO, “SARS”), the H5N1 (bird flu) scares of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, and investigations into the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic—which killed approximately forty million people worldwide and originated from a strain of the H1N1 virus (Fraser). Anxiety surrounding the viral world is and has been increasing in recent years owing to mainstream appropriation and dissemination of the virus as a symbol of human destruction. Much like the replicative ability of the virus itself, media coverage of pandemics produces myriad self-propagating progeny in the form of news stories, opinion polls, and blog posts. The comment boxes at the bottom of online articles allow people to partake in the discourses of science with an immediacy afforded only by the Internet revolution, and microblogging sites such as Twitter encourage social commentary and extended dissemination via the “retweet” feature. This is what Alice Bell has called a post-PUS (public understanding of science) landscape, where science is “supposed to talk with, not at, its publics” (511–514). It is this talking with that has raised the virus to monstrous notoriety as a prolific replicator with dangerous recombinant abilities. Controversial articles such as “Armageddon Super-Virus Recipe Finally Revealed” and “After H1N1, Researchers Warn of a Potential New Super-Bug” ensure that the pandemic threat remains a hot topic of social and medical discussion, the word panic fast becoming a watchword for its secondary impact: mass hysteria and social disintegration (Pernick, 2002; Gilman, 2010). The BBC’s 2006 feature-length special Pandemic and countless Internet discussion boards attempt to map out the biological consequences of a new pandemic in the same way that works of fiction like

Death, Disease, and Discontent

135

Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), the British horror film 28 Days Later (2002), and the medical disaster film Contagion (2011) explore the multilayered effects of a viral pandemic on political, commercial, practical, biological, emotional, and psychological aspects of postoutbreak life. The popularity of such fiction (28 Days Later and Contagion were both box office hits grossing $82.7 million and $135.4 million, respectively) undoubtedly reflects a growing preoccupation with the medical disaster genre and the fictional pandemic at large, and the similarities between these films and investigative documentaries endorse the pandemic threat as a very real monster of tomorrow (International Movie Database “28 Days Later”; International Movie Database “Contagion”). In the previous chapter, Lindsay Ann Reid posited a connection between form and content in her exploration of monstrous births and the early modern ballad; I argue for a similar connection, or at least conceptual link, between the replicating virus and developments in technological communication. By this I mean specifically the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, along with the resultant focus on interactive participation in knowledge transmission. This connection might be seen most plainly in the collation of government-authenticated health information in blog posts, flash games, and discussion boards, or the prominence of open-source information pages like Wikipedia.1 The active participation in knowledge acquisition and transmission is perhaps most effectively embodied by the metaphorical phrase go viral to suggest the popularity, or at least the fecundity, of an idea or video clip on the Internet. Significantly, the ability of something to go viral in such a medium relies on its replication and transmission by multiple people who might usefully be termed carriers or hosts; by participating in knowledge transmission, they mirror the role of the infected in the transmission of disease.2 This mode of communication exemplifies the power of global interconnectivity, facilitated by technology—whether virtually (i.e., information transmission via the Internet) or physically (i.e., disease transmission via global infrastructure). The hybridizing effect of interactive communication parallels the recombinant abilities

136

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

of the virus itself and likewise strengthens the perceived threat of the viral world with each new appropriation; the pandemic is always present with this medium, whether it has made it to one’s door or not. Accessibility to information concerning pandemics, both true and false, and the digital visibility of organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the WHO, both of which have their own websites, cultivates an immediacy to the pandemic threat that had previously been absent. Increased public awareness of and participation in the popularization of science and public health communication have had an impact on the types of narratives human beings construct about themselves and the kinds of narratives they want to experience. Priscilla Wald has recognized this as an increasing trend of what she called the “outbreak narrative” (2). These narratives are characterized by experimentation, technological advancement, and global communication. They involve or are underpinned by a scientific or laboratory setting, they affect a global community through technological advancement such as air and road travel, and they use and abuse modern communication systems like the Internet. The emphasis is on transmission—be it of information or of disease—and these narratives address the issues born when communication systems catalyze deadly pathogens or fail to operate effectively. The pairing of viral transmission and social communication facilitates a breakdown in normative social behavior during a viral pandemic; this is a result of two broad occurrences: (1) the disruption of social order owing to the imposed disconnection of communication or rationing of utilities, and (2) the selfish or violent behavior of those attempting to survive the pandemic at all costs. The first involves the isolation of individuals via quarantining, implementing air- and ground-traffic control measures, and in some cases declaring martial law; the second, often spurred by the first, involves the unnecessary killing, injuring, or abusing of the healthy by other healthy individuals resulting from fear of infection. Attempts to stop transmission of disease often involve placing restrictions on techno-

Death, Disease, and Discontent

137

logical communication, and likewise, accepted forms of social communication break down when coupled with disease. The dehumanization of the individual during a viral pandemic provides the foundation for destructive and animalistic behavior and embodies the power that the supervirus has to transform as well as infect.

Fallen Civilizations: The Degenerative Pandemic Representative of the transformative power of the supervirus is an emerging trend in the zombie genre to redefine the origin of the zombie as viral. 28 Days Later (2002) offers this new twist, deviating from the reanimation of the dead to the infection of the living through zombieto-human transmission. Unlike its literary and cinematic forebears, this film employs the traditional bloodthirsty loss of agency but omits the reanimation of dead tissue. This, in combination with a clinical outbreak setting, serves to remove the supernatural element of the plot and to endow the film with a chilling realism and epidemiological relevance. The trend in zombie viral origin, involving the reanimation of dead tissue yet bypassing it, recasts and reanimates the figure of the zombie as both a physical threat and a source of infection, inverting the dehumanizing effects of the virus to present the monstrous behavior of the zombie as itself a communicative disease. This inversion speaks to Jesse Stommel’s chapter on the zombie as a posthuman figure, the zombie manifesting the literal impact of viral infection (i.e., death or human-viral hybridity) in addition to, I argue, embodying metaphorically the dehumanizing and degenerative impact of the pandemic itself.3 The zombie represents a particularly aggressive and manifest mode of viral transmission, embodying both the dehumanized patient (lacking individual identity) and the virus itself (which usually is signified only via symptoms).4 The connection between viral transmission and zombie-ism has become so well established in popular culture that in 2011 the CDC even employed the idea of a zombie pandemic as the basis of an emergency

138

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

preparedness campaign. The campaign, which attempted to communicate the importance of compiling an emergency kit (containing food and water provisions, medical supplies, tools, blankets, personal documents, and a “family disaster plan”), used the zombie as a method of engaging multiple audiences. Dr. Ali Khan justified the move by saying, “If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack.” Part of the campaign involved a comic book strip that follows one couple’s attempt to survive the zombie pandemic. The strip includes television and radio broadcasts, CDC intelligence, and military support. The cause is posited as viral, a highly mutated form of influenza, amusingly—or disturbingly—dubbed Z5N1. Isolation and containment strategies are stressed along with the need to gather provisions, highlighting the importance of infection control and waiting for vaccine development. Here the threat is two-pronged: first there is the infection itself, and then the aggressive behavior of the infected. The suggestion that zombie-ism supersedes a pandemic in terms of threat level (if one is prepared for the former, one is prepared for the latter) styles a zombie pandemic as an extreme form of a regular pandemic. It follows, then, that the aggressive behavior exhibited by the zombie caricatures the destructive abilities of both the virus itself and of those transformed by it through fear (rather than through infection). The double theme of fear and infection present in 2011 film Contagion is embodied in the film’s tagline: “Nothing spreads like fear.” Fear and its consequences are highlighted as the primary focus of the narrative, recognizing that the psychological ramifications of a pandemic are just as destructive as the somatic. The infected individual is quickly redefined as a carrier, and in the absence of a visual manifestation of the monstrous (viruses cannot be seen without an electron microscope), fear is transferred onto the infected. Once sick, these individuals are defined by their symptoms—the signification of viral presence. This signification embodies the infiltration of the pathogen and its reproduction, exploiting host-cell machinery to increase its numbers. This unfettered prolifera-

Death, Disease, and Discontent

139

tion is part of the power of the virus as metaphor. Its seemingly limitless potential for producing unnatural, genetically mutated, and deadly progeny corresponds with a wider trend for representing reproduction as a site of deviant hybridization.5 Max Brooks has used this potential for horror by pairing it with the zombie to produce a monster with a viral base that propagates itself through indiscriminate replication. In his book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a novel virus is responsible for creating zombie-like creatures that are characterized by their extreme violence and lack of mental capability. In an interview with Lance Eaten (2006), Brooks qualified his fear of the zombie by drawing parallels between the creature and viruses themselves: They [zombies] scare me more than any other fictional creature out there because they break all the rules.… Zombies don’t act like a predator; they act like a virus, and that is the core of my terror. A predator is intelligent by nature, and knows not to over-hunt its feeding ground. A virus will just continue to spread, infect and consume, no matter what happens. It’s the mindlessness behind it. (57) In his book Brooks has employed this analogy on multiple levels: not only is the zombie a mindless replicator like the virus, it is also a vehicle for the virus. The mental incapability of the zombie goes some way toward representing the seemingly unchecked destruction executed by the virus. As Brooks noted, an intelligent predator is careful to avoid overhunting its prey; however, the virus does not follow this rule—its raison d’être is to proliferate. Brooks’s description, mindless, is apt; viruses do not have minds, they are not alive or sentient as human beings—or even zombies—are. Being neither alive nor dead in the traditional sense, but straddling the line between the two, viruses are contentiously labeled nonliving by most scientists. They represent a taxonomic enigma, containing genetic material like other organisms but lacking a cell structure—long considered the basic unit of life. They cannot reproduce on their own (without

140

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

exploitation of a host cell) but undeniably exert an influence over other organisms (Villarreal). This liminal existence serves to further deepen the anxiety surrounding the figure of the virus as a cultural symbol. The use of the host cell to reproduce casts the victim as an accomplice and contributes to the branding of the infected individual as abject, a hybrid body—victim and vehicle. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is particularly relevant owing to her definition of an abject being as one that “does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). Abjection, she wrote, is instigated by things that “disturb identity, system, order” (4). The virus encompasses all these things and more, infiltrating and usurping the body from within and compromising its external identity. One example of this disturbed identity lies in the Krippin virus from the film I Am Legend (2007), instigating physiological transformation for those that are not killed by it. Moreover, these transformed beings are problematically hybrid, embodying to some extent the past self in addition to their new identity. This duality is noted in Robert’s obsession with the transformed version of his best friend, tormented and goaded by him and their shared history in the novel: “It was strange to stand there looking out at Ben Cortman; a Ben completely alien to him now” (Matheson 53). The use of the vampire, the zombie, and related archetypes in pandemic narratives acts as a vehicle for discussing the virus’s potential for usurpation—of body, mind, and individual identity; this is evident in its most basic form when a sick person is transformed from an individual with complex needs and interests into a “patient.” This transformation is an ever-present threat, the delicate position of the healthy individual highlighted by his or her proximity to potential infection. In Contagion fear of infection is attached to physical contact and fomites, for this is the closest indication of transmission. Camera shots focus on hands touching surfaces, body parts, buttons, and people, emphasizing the dangers surrounding a healthy individual—dangers which were once benign and have thus now become uncanny. The power

Death, Disease, and Discontent

141

of this monster lies in its ability to transform as well as destroy. It transforms victims into accomplices, patients into carriers, the familiar into the uncanny, and friends into foes. The alternative tagline, “Don’t talk to anyone; don’t touch anyone,” exploits the idea that a once healthy environment has become sick, and those who were once your friends and neighbors have now become vehicles for disease. The national framework for responding to influenza pandemics in the UK recognizes a secondary potential for damage: “as well as their potential to cause serious harm to human health, they [pandemics] threaten wider social and economic damage and destruction” (Department of Public Health). The texts and films I explore in this chapter all include space for these accompanying impacts of infection; as the outbreak develops, plots move away from the initial threat of the virus to incorporate other sources of devastation, including the social, economic, political, and practical. In line with this, the outbreak narrative proffers a vision of two pandemics: one of disease, the other of fear. Fear creates desperation, which in turn encourages selfish and ignoble behavior. Such behavior—committed through fear or opportunism—is placed under the microscope along with its viral progenitor. In both Contagion and World War Z, cures or vaccines are marketed by individuals or companies in the knowledge that they are ineffective. In Contagion these people and groups not only profit from people’s fear, but they exacerbate the spread of infection by suggesting immunity (as in the case of government officials who give a whole village of people a placebo vaccine in a bid to recover a kidnapped WHO epidemiologist) and by encouraging healthy and infected to congregate (as in the case of Internet blogger Alan Krumweide). Equally unethical is the scenario in 28 Days Later in which the military personnel who initially offer sanctuary to Jim, Selena, and Hannah have in fact lied to them about the “answer to infection” and intend to force the girls into sexual slavery in a bid to “rebuild the race.” Their position as military men is used as a power play in an attempt to retain social hegemony. Similarly, in World War Z

142

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

there is a poignant recounting of “rich people” opening fire on “not-sorich” people in an attempt to keep their resources for themselves. The narrator recounts: “It was bedlam, exactly what you thought the end of the world was supposed to look like. Part of the house was burning, blood everywhere, bodies or bits of them spewed all over that expensive stuff” (Brooks 84). Both these instances exemplify the strengthening and subsequent disintegration of social hierarchy that accompanies the degeneration of the human. In Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, the degeneration of the human is a visual manifestation of disease, much like the viral zombie. Those infected are initially reanimated corpses and later humans who degenerate into vampire-like creatures. The story is narrated not from the outbreak of the infection but from a postinfection world in which Robert Neville is the presumed last man alive. Thus, the novel deals with the consequences of infection in a taxonomic sense, rather than with the transmission of it. Some of the infected become a new species, adapting to their changed biology and their environment, but the members of this new species, resembling humanity, are brutal survivors. As he awaits public execution at the hands of this new society, Robert pleads with Ruth, a ranking member, not to let it become “too heartless” (Matheson 158). In the 2007 film adaptation of I Am Legend, Robert notes in his audio journal, “Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent.” As noted, the pervasive nature of the virus, with its inevitable transmission and associated fear, encourages a secondary “pandemic” in the form of human degeneration. The animosity and fear usually directed at the virus are transferred to those around one, exposing human inability to deal with an unpredictable and unpreventable threat. This equally contagious degenerative behavior is present in all my examples, in varying degrees of prominence. Survivors dedicates just the first episode of the series to the outbreak and transmission of the virus, reserving the following eleven for this postoutbreak fallout. Exploring the collapse of

Death, Disease, and Discontent

143

civilization, the series is encapsulated poignantly by the government’s last broadcast before the electricity blackout: “Good luck, and God bless you all.” Survivors have not only the virus to contend with; they also have each other. These dual foes are often conflated through metaphor, as in the case of the zombie. The similarity between virus and human is recognized as a product of their respective reproductive abilities: humanity colonizes the globe, and viruses colonize humanity. This places the virus in direct competition with humans, with a problematically similar goal. The fear of being out-competed is highlighted by this comparison, as Sam Daniels remarks of the virus in Outbreak: “[Y]ou have to admire its simplicity; it’s one-billionth our size, and it’s beating us.” The penchant for aligning the virus with the human also serves to blur taxonomic boundaries. Its similarity to humanity, and humankind’s own monstrous reproduction contributes to anxiety about the replicative ability of the supervirus; as Agent Smith in The Matrix speculates: I tried to classify your species, and I realized that you’re not actually mammals.… You move to an area, and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.

Runaway Reproduction and Transgressive Offspring: The Anxiety of Transmission Fictional disease has a rich popular history; from the plague of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) to the JUVE virus of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), it has played a central role in forming the stories’ underlying and deadly antagonist. Such a fascination with superbugs leads to not only the reimagining of current monsters—as evident in the zombie genre—but also the evolution of the viral antagonist to reflect advancements in science and the public understanding of it. Rather than

144

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

depicting the generalized power of the virus as an unseen killer, contemporary narratives emphasize its unnatural reproductions. These reproductions encompass both hyperfecund replication and mutated progeny. Its power lies in its ability to replicate quickly and disseminate itself within a host population—hyperfecundity—and also in its recombinant and adaptive abilities—monstrous progeny. The opening credits of the first episode of the television show Survivors (2008) depicts a view of Earth from space, followed by a series of fast motion shots emphasizing the mix of people and the size of the population. Shots of replicating viral cells are superimposed over sequences of everyday life, associating the unseen reproduction of disease with its human hosts. This serves to emphasize the fecundity of both species and highlights the infiltrative properties of the virus, which hijacks the host’s cellular machinery in order to produce multiple copies of itself. Given the contemporary focus on reproduction, pandemic narratives must develop—and have developed—increasingly novel ways to signify the invisible replication and transmission of disease. Contagion begins with a black screen and a single sound: a cough. This cough represents the presence of disease as well as its potential spread, being both a symptom and an infection route. Because her symptoms are presented ahead of her visual appearance, Beth Emhoff is demarcated as infected from the offset, this appellation usurping any identity that her character may later develop, becoming synecdochic for the fate of the population at large. The intracellular nature of the virus spawns an obsession with its identity that manifests in attempts to visualize its molecular conformation. This is demonstrated in the use of scanning electron micrograph images and computer simulations, as in Outbreak and Contagion, or indeed in the significant moment in I Am Legend (1954) when Robert Neville is able to see the vampiris bacillus “fluttering about” on a microscope slide.

Death, Disease, and Discontent

145

Although not a virus, the analysis of the bacillus with a microscope still represents a need to observe the pathogenic in the hope of understanding it. In the 2007 film adaptation of I Am Legend, the bacillus is dispensed with in favor of a virus born of scientific research. The Krippin virus, originally engineered as a cure for cancer, mutates to form a particularly virulent new strain of measles with a 90% lethality rate. The virus becomes airborne, killing millions; those that are not killed by it devolve into vampire-like creatures that exhibit behavioral patterns similar to those of the zombies in 28 Days Later. These devolved beings —posited as a new species—are the result of genetic recombination of viral and host genomes. The new hybrid organisms suffer from albinism, alopecia, and intolerance to ultraviolet light, in addition to having overactive adrenal glands (causing heightened awareness, increased strength and stamina, and a faster metabolic rate). These recombinant progeny are also afflicted with psychological symptoms, including blood lust and extreme aggression, characterizing them as monstrous. Thus, the Krippin virus possesses both the initial destructiveness of fecund replication and the ability to produce “unnatural” or monstrous offspring. MEV-1, the star of Contagion, possesses the same properties, albeit manifest in different ways. The virus is itself a monstrous progeny, possessing a chimera genome from viruses with different natural hosts —bat and pig. Its mutated recombinant state endows it with an increased transmission rate, enabling it to produce and disseminate offspring more effectively. The film demonstrates this with the use of fomites (inanimate objects capable of transmitting infectious disease) and an increasing “basic reproduction number” or R0, in line with viral mutation. These techniques realistically focus viewers’ attention on viral fecundity, using epidemiological modeling to deepen anxiety. The R0 for MEV-1 (the fictional virus) is noted as 2, meaning that for every new case of infection, two secondary cases would occur in a completely susceptible population (Barratt and Kirwan). This is in keeping with estimations of the R0 for SARS, novel influenza A (H1N1), and pandemic influenza (Spanish flu), which range from 1.4 to 3 (Colburn et al.; Chowell et al.; Pike). The

146

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

R0 of MEV-1 increases to 4 as the pandemic progresses; this is congruent with viruses like influenza, which are variable and expected to increase in number as each generation adapts to the human population (Pike). Details like this set Contagion apart from other disease films and play out the consequences of a pandemic in much the same way as a theoretical paper would investigate potential transmission rates. Taking a holistic approach to disaster, the film investigates public-health containment measures, including isolating symptomatic individuals and tracing and quarantining infected people’s contacts, keeping virus reproduction a primary concern. It also includes naturally immune and asymptomatic individuals, abandoning possible on-screen dramatic effect in favor of realism. Following several distinct and sometimes intertwining stories, it differs from the conventional development of one or two protagonists to represent a global population. This global spread is emphasized by outbreak reports from likely pandemic hotspots (including Hong Kong and the Guangdong region of China), accompanied by a subtitled population number, suggestive of the potential future death toll. This population awareness also emphasizes notions of transmission via host-to-host contact and the dangers posed by global communication systems. Despite the on-screen time spent developing her story, the death of Dr. Erin Mears from infection an hour into the film poignantly reminds viewers that nature takes no prisoners. Although false hope is offered by her colleague and deputy director of the CDC, Ellis Cheever, who promises that she is going to be “okay,” the audience knows that this is unlikely, evoking Nathan Wolfe’s observation that “everyone recognizes the raw power that pandemics have to sweep through human populations and seemingly kill indiscriminately” (4). This population decimation is bound up with its unchecked proliferation; however, in order to fully realize the devastating potential of the virus, modern narratives include seemingly mundane mediation, such as incubation periods and innate immunity, in addition to an equally underwhelming approach to “saving the day,” which involves finding the correct culture on which to grow the virus for vaccination experiments and time dedicated to

Death, Disease, and Discontent

147

the development and distribution of the resultant vaccine. Though this approach might lack grandiosity, it does provide space for the long-term impact of the pandemic and its transformative powers. In order to effectively facilitate this long-term and multilayered impact, authors and screenwriters must present a well-constructed and believable viral antagonist that cuts beneath the initial somatic threat to reveal a much more complex and relevant foe. This is often achieved by reference to the CDC and the WHO to authenticate—through association—the biology behind the premise. A sense of exhaustive impact is achieved in Contagion by employing what Alissa Quart called a hyperlink narrative, which negotiates the entwining of multiple narratives in a single film, causing temporal as well as spatial reorientations (Booker 12–14). A similar effect is attained in World War Z through its compilation of many personal accounts to form one “historical” narrative, as its subtitle suggests: “An Oral History of the Zombie War.” This technique foregrounds the relevance of this monstrous reproduction to a modern, global audience. To the same end of producing a believable and genuine antagonist, the writers of Contagion employed the epidemiologist and scientific consultant, Ian Lipkin, who is the director of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity in New York, to design the fictional MEV-1 virus. Lipkin based his design on the Nipah virus, an emerging zoonotic pathogen that causes encephalitis and respiratory problems. There have been twelve outbreaks of Nipah since it was first discovered in 1999, all contained in South Asia. Although initially spread from animal to human, the more recent outbreaks from 2001 to 2008 have significantly involved human-to-human transmission (WHO, “Nipah Virus”). Lipkin’s MEV-1 has symptoms closely resembling those of Nipah; seizures and foaming mouths differentiate it from standard influenza and offer a dramatic but ultimately plausible set of identifying symptoms. This allows the reproductive abilities of the virus to take on new significance by designating a somatic “paper trail” of viral identity. The film also

148

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

engages in visual and theoretical explorations of its fecundity through genetic and morphological simulations. Other similarities to the Nipah virus include its natural host, the fruit bat, which is also suggested as an origin for MEV-1. Interestingly, in I Am Legend (1954), Robert Neville claims he has developed immunity to the mysterious disease as a result of being bitten by a vampire bat while stationed in Panama during the war. Rather than developing this justification from an awareness of host reservoirs, however, Matheson’s explanation is based on his pathologizing the vampire. Matheson’s attempt to revitalize this classic monster steers away from the supernatural and attempts to explain the vampire myth using science: “the vampire was real. It was only that his real story had never been told” (77). This “real story” involves a bacterium that Neville dubs vampiris. He implicates the bacterium in historical plagues and population decimations, as well as for being the foundation behind the vampire legend. “It was the germ that was the villain. The germ that hid behind obscuring veils of legend and superstition, spreading its scourge while people cringed before their own fears” (78). These fears are paramount to the outbreak narrative; the virus is posited as an enigma that must be solved within a limited time frame, complicated by its adaptive nature, compounding the fear that “it will figure us out quicker than we can figure it out” (Contagion). The genetic hybridity of the virus, including material from bat, pig, and human, and the failure of the Macao chef to wash his hands in Contagion propagate a fear of the adaptive virulence of the viral world; Contagion thus joins films such as Outbreak (1995) and Carriers (2009), which concentrate on the natural evolution of the viral hybrid. Wolfe has talked about the dangers of this hybridity in relation to future pandemic potential. He highlighted the potential of a recombinant daughter virus if H1N1 (swine flu) and H5N1 (bird flu) were to infect the same individual simultaneously. The resulting virus would have the high transmissibility of H1N1 and the lethality of H5N1—the latter killing 60 percent

Death, Disease, and Discontent

149

of those infected; this is dramatically higher than the 1918 outbreak of Spanish flu, which killed only an estimated 2.5 to 20 percent of those infected. Despite this relatively low lethality rate, the Spanish flu decimated an estimated 3 percent of the world’s population at that time— this is more than all the soldiers who died in battle in all the wars of the twentieth century combined (Wolfe 9)! The fictional MEV-1 appears to have this unique combination of attributes, and its cross-species viral hybridity is emphasized by the line “Somewhere in the world, the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat” (Contagion). These themes compound the anxiety surrounding adaptive viral reproduction, which has the potential to create more virulent and transmissible forms of infection. Pandemic narratives increasingly let this adaptivity speak for itself, using a real virus as inspiration. Grounding I Am Legend’s Krippin virus in a known pathogen (morbillivirus, usually responsible for measles) works in this way to situate the plot line within the realm of possibility and caters to a scientifically literate audience, hungry for a threat with a translatable base for further imaginative exploration.6 Moreover, the initial success of the virus at curing cancer provides a believable incentive for its creation. This is not the secret progeny of fictional “mad” scientists but the product of wellintended medical research. Indeed, the origin of the supervirus is a major source of unease; the involvement of human beings in their own destruction upholds the Promethean anxiety that civilization comes at a price. Recent calls for improved safety measures for experimental research reflect an increasing anxiety about the threat posed by the replicative efficiency of manmade viruses and the biothreat posed by so-called gain of function experiments, which are designed to investigate pandemic potential (Lipsitch). One research team led by Benjamin tenOever at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York has built a genetic safety switch into its H3N2 flu strain to ensure that should it escape the confines of the laboratory, it will not become a human pandemic. This step is representative of a more generalized concern about the genera-

150

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tive powers of modern science, reflected most overtly in fictional representations of superviruses and their respective origins.

Original Sins: Origins of Infection My voice cracked as I asked the villagers how the boy had been infected. No one answered.… I shouted, as much from fear as frustration, that I had to know what happened to this child. (Brooks 6) When the medical doctor Kwang Jingshu meets a twelve-year-old boy tentatively dubbed “patient zero” in Greater Chongqing, China, he is struck by a desperate need to find the source of infection. In much the same way real-time epidemics are managed, World War Z emphasizes the importance of containment and of finding the origin of the outbreak. The plot line of Contagion functions in a similar manner, the driving force being the demystification of the virus, which includes, significantly, the elucidation of its origins.7 In Emerging Viruses Stephen Morse has identified three key sources of emergence: the evolution de novo of a new virus or viral variant, the introduction of an existing virus from another species, and the dissemination of a virus from a smaller to a larger population. Morse coined the term viral traffic to describe the transfers of viral genetics between populations, transfers that might lead to viral evolution through diversification (10–26). A notable characteristic of the virus as a cultural symbol is indeed its genetic fluidity, and by this I mean its ability to evolve into new, more virulent forms, its ability to insert genetic material into the host genome, and its ability to infiltrate plot lines and recombine as the underlying cause of zombie-ism, vampirism, insanity, infertility, and lycanthropy. It is capable of adapting to new niches and of mutating into new hybrid versions of itself; it co-evolves with the host, engaging in an imaginative arms race with the human population. MEV-1 exhibits this hybridity, combining DNA from pig, bat, and human, and represents an influenza variant that has transferred to a new host population. It there-

Death, Disease, and Discontent

151

fore entails both the introduction of an existing virus to a new species and the evolution of a new viral variant (combining multiple genetic codes). Morse hypothesizes that “new” viruses are most likely to arise from existing viruses in other animal species, given that animals act as natural reservoirs for disease. The richness of this zoonotic pool is made use of in Contagion and I Am Legend, both agents having transferred, at least partially, from bats. This notion might also represent an attempt to rebrand a traditional monster—the vampire—as a misdiagnosed viral monstrosity. However, one of the most popularly represented origins in film and text is the evolution of a virus de novo, be it from an unidentified source or from human experimentation. The latter demonstrates a cultural tendency to demonize the laboratory, stemming from a Promethean fear of the dangers of science. The Rage virus in 28 Days Later, for example, is a product of animal experimentation in a pharmaceutical laboratory, and the “European flu” of Survivors is revealed to have mutated from a vaccine experiment. The Solanum virus of World War Z, however (first outlined in Max Brooks’s 2003 publication The Zombie Survival Guide), is an example of a virus with an ambiguous origin. The exact cause of the zombie pandemic is unclear—perhaps designed to authenticate the oralhistory format—however, the narrative starts in China when “patient zero” develops symptoms following a swim with his father in the Three Gorges River. The child is allegedly bitten by something beneath the water, and his father is never seen again. This could implicate a transferal to a new host population (if the child was bitten by a fish or other aquatic creature) or the dissemination from a smaller or isolated population to a larger one (if he were bitten by a human). It could equally have originated from a plant or bacterial agent in the water that was infected with the virus. The fact that readers do not know forms part of its potential for horror. Pandemic narratives are increasingly navigating the fear surrounding reproduction hybridization, which though it traditionally (in the pandemic genre) involves human genetic experimentation, also

152

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

includes “natural” recombination of viral genomes through the infection of multiple hosts. In the context of origins, new viruses are most likely to arise from species transference, as in the Rage virus and MEV-1, or from a viral mutation. Pandemic influenza is taken by many scientists as a classic example of viral evolution at work, and it is no coincidence that variants of influenza or influenza-like viruses form the basis of many plot lines in popular culture. Morse has noted that an influenza pandemic is most likely to arise from “genes from two influenza strains reassort[ing] to produce a new virus that can infect humans” (17). He has also recognized that these kinds of pandemics have always arisen from China, highlighting birds as major reservoirs for the virus and pigs as potential “mixing vessels.” The very same story is narrated in Contagion. The overriding theme of viral origin, be it natural or manmade, seems to be one of recombination, a theme that speaks to a wider fear of unnatural hybridization or indulgent experimentation.8 The 1995 film Outbreak deals with a viral eruption in Zaire that spreads to California via an infected monkey. The virus is named Motaba after the region in which it originates; this creates a semantic association between the two geographical locations, upholding the idea that pandemic threats enter from without, from the demonized elsewhere. As in more recent outbreak films, authenticity is implied by a laboratory setting and the use of the CDC; the film uses biosafety levels to indicate the threat level of the biological agent, and biohazard suits and molecular modeling feature. The Motaba virus, which has a 100 percent lethality rate, mutates to produce a new airborne strain, increasing its transmissibility dramatically. This lethality rate, in conjunction with the very short incubation period, however, would in reality stem the virus’s transmissibility to the point that it would be ultimately self-limiting. In addition, the time scales for compiling a vaccination in the film are unrealistic, as are the characters’ reliance on individual people to save the day. As A.  B. Van Riper pointed out in “What the Public Thinks

Death, Disease, and Discontent

153

It Knows about Science,” fictional doctors and medical researchers in outbreak films are posited as heroes fighting diseases from “African jungles or secret government laboratories” and rarely face more realistic foes (1106). But since that report was written in 2003 and, indeed, since the release of Outbreak, times have changed. The Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever in Outbreak is visually horrifying and said to “spread like the flu”; however, new screenplays dispense with this likeness in favor of actually using influenza as a plot device. Films and books are making use of scientific experts and responding to the technology generation’s increased access to science with newly authentic antagonists. More recent narratives also construct the virus in such a way as to allow space for its secondary, varying impacts—unlike Motaba, with its guaranteed mortality. The origin of the outbreak is often cultivated by people—as in the culture of the Krippin virus, the creation of the Rage virus, and the generation of European flu in Survivors. Likewise, its spread is often exacerbated by technological innovation—directly by global infrastructure, or indirectly through the propagation of erroneous public health information.

Conclusion The supervirus embodies a reproduction-focused mode of living. In real life and in fiction, its central impetus is to produce replicate copies of itself through host infiltration. These replications make up the etiology of disease in an individual person, facilitate transmission of the viral genome within a population, and when accompanied by another viral strain within the same host, might recombine to produce a genetically altered daughter virus. Thus, the supervirus can be associated with pathological, destructive, and hybrid progeny, embodying a reproduction that is both damaging and monstrous. Moreover, the replicating virus in all its forms serves to alter the behavioral patterns of uninfected individuals and to transform the infected into mere vehicles for disease. It is this transformative power that has caught the imagination of contem-

154

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

porary writers, regularly directing their attention to the social consequences of disease transmission. The increase in public knowledge about viruses and viral mutation, owing to technological advancements in science communication and research dissemination, is reflected in its fictional counterpart, which is continuously being updated and redefined. These redefinitions can be seen in the increasingly specific information given out about viruses in film. MEV-1 is an overwhelming example of this phenomenon, but other fictional viruses market themselves just as convincingly. The virus in Survivors, dubbed European flu, causes “cytokine storms,” an overactive and potentially fatal immune response in the host. Many believe this response could have been a factor in the lethality of H5N1 and Spanish flu, and it may be implicated in infectious-disease pathology generally (Tisoncik et al. 2012). The bird-flu scares of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century popularized such terms in the media. Given a populace that is becoming more scientifically aware and capable of learning about such concepts at the touch of a button, screenwriters and authors alike are now forced to create increasingly authentic nemeses. Writers are required to engage in a level of detail suitable for a scientifically literate audience in what is fast becoming a culturally saturated subgenre. Outbreak narratives have embraced the new dimension that the Internet gives to storytelling by including such technology in their plot lines and by creating websites to facilitate further discussion (and sell merchandise!). The website for the film Contagion includes a loading bar that steadily counts up the “number of people infected to date” and an online quiz game “to find out if you are patient x.” In fact, this quiz game bears the description: “Discover how socially active you are and the impact you would have if there were a global pandemic,” overtly compounding the connection between social communication and disease transmission. This connection is the impetus driving the film.

Death, Disease, and Discontent

155

Part of the story is the way in which information spreads along similar pathways to that of a virus: who gets it and how it moves forward, how it’s altered as it moves from one host to another or one organization to the next. (Soderbergh 6) The technology that allows modern communication via the Internet or smart phones, for instance, is a double-edged sword. By collapsing space and enabling immediacy of response without face-to-face contact, such technologies can help stymie a pandemic by facilitating the transfer of vital health information without exposure to sources of infection. However, the very same technologies can exacerbate fear and pass on erroneous advice, facilitating the second, behavioral pandemic discussed in this chapter and explored in films like Contagion and books like World War Z. The information age has changed the way people access information, empowering the individual and encouraging an interactive attitude toward knowledge gathering; the collation of CDC-authenticated health advice, alongside opinion polls, blog posts, open-source documents, and even fictional reimaginings, encourage people to become subjects rather than objects in knowledge transmission, highlighting the power of hybridization as a force at once liberating and destructive.

156

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Notes 1. An example of such a collation might be found on takepart.com/contagion, which includes the titular label “Stay Updated & Prepared on the Latest Worldwide Pandemics.” The site includes pathogen-specific infographics, health advice, an interactive outbreak map, the CDC RSS feed, and interviews with leading pandemic experts, as well as a pandemic simulation game, the trailer for the film Contagion, and a Facebook quiz. The information presented ranges from government-sanctioned health advice and ongoing research to intellectual speculation and cultural commentary, facilitating the interactive creation of knowledge from a wide variety of sources. The infographics themselves are compiled from information derived from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Department of Education, the International Medical Corps, leading newspapers, the Red Cross, National Geographic, and popular-science books. 2. The conflation of knowledge and disease here takes on new significance considering the role that the pursuit of knowledge plays in the creation of superviruses, the births of which are often at least perceived to take place in the laboratory as a result of government-funded or private experimentation. What most people envisage when they think of superviruses are so-called gain of function experiments, whereby experimenters modify an existing virus by, for example, genetically increasing its transmissibility, virulence, or host range in order to investigate its parameters and ultimately to try to develop a vaccine against it. The obvious dangers concern the escape of a modified virus from the laboratory; thus, knowledge creation is intimately bound up with disease enabling. 3. The transformative abilities of the virus are here made apparent, often turning both infected (i.e., zombies) and survivors alike into brutal killers, engaging in (surprisingly similar) repetitive and futile behavior, regardless of actual infection. 4. One might argue that zombie-ism is a symptom of infection; however, given the zombie’s active participation in transmission and ability to create copies, I would align the zombie, at least metaphorically, with the replicating virus as well.

Death, Disease, and Discontent

157

5. Hybridization is presented this way in the varying depictions of the zombie, the hybrid vampire creatures of I Am Legend, and the production of new daughter viruses by recombination. 6. The use of real viruses allows individuals to gather additional information from other sources, explore the parameters of the threat, and themselves create/explore/discuss alternative scenarios—for example, by changing one of the known attributes of the virus. 7. The whole plot might be seen as driving toward this demystification, its origin not being disclosed until the very end of the film. 8. This dangerous indulgence might be read in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) when Victor Frankenstein warns, “[L]earn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow” (23).

Chapter 7

Serial Death and the Zombie The Networked Necronomics of Left 4 Dead Stephanie Boluk The zombie has become an iconic figure of apocalyptic desire, essentially serializing and dismembering the labor of one of the four horsemen to become an infinitely multiplying legion of parading pestilence. There is an ontological link between the zombie as a rhetorical figure and the media through which it circulates. The zombie not only emerges as a response to particular social anxieties, but it also takes on the characteristics of the medium in which it is represented and embodies an undeath drive, a compulsion to repeat and replicate across information networks, or what Jonathan Beller has termed the world-media system. Citing Walter Benjamin, Beller described the world-media system as an “auto-poetic institution of globalization” in which “[w]e consume our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order” (5). This aesthetic spreads from film to other media like videogames. Not only are the video-game company Valve and its digital distribution company, Steam, a kind of microcosmic world media system, but the ludic pleasures afforded by Left 4 Dead literalize these autodestructive social rela-

160

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tions through the figure of the zombie. Zombie capitalism is the corpse that refuses to die. Though zombie-related media, and specifically video games, are hardly exceptional, the video-game series Left 4 Dead (2008–) weaves multiple iterations of the zombie trope within the larger serial structures that govern the production and play of the game. Left 4 Dead is deeply referential, orienting itself within the zombie’s filmic history, channeling the legacy of George Romero’s living dead and the undead voodoo zombies that originate from Haitian culture (this is particularly evident in the second installment of the series, set in the southern United States and released four years after Hurricane Katrina). Left 4 Dead’s zombies take on even greater political potency when one examines the relationship between the representation of zombie in the game and the underlying gameplay mechanics and metagaming practices that surround the game. Though video-game players are often pejoratively described as zombies hypnotized by the screen and compelled to obey the demands of a digital puppet master, I argue that there is a different kind of truth to this statement. In Left 4 Dead—a networked online game—the player’s labor is zombified. Under the control of Valve’s AI Director, an artificial intelligence system designed to produce adaptive and emergent forms of gameplay, the player’s labor is extracted and subsumed into a production cycle: an opportunity afforded by the game’s serial mode of distribution and play within an information economy in which production and consumption are conflated in the same haptic gestures.

The Rise of the Dead The zombie metaphor has been exhaustively appropriated to signify the most pressing cultural anxieties. The evolution of the modern incarnation can be roughly regarded as having occurred over three generations: the Haitian voodoo zombie, George Romero’s living dead, and the humans with a rabies-like disease as seen in the films 28 Days Later

Serial Death and the Zombie

161

(2002) and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), and video-game series such as Resident Evil (1996–2009) and Left 4 Dead. The zombie emerged from Caribbean oral culture and voodoo practices, made known to North America through early-twentieth-century English-language reports like William Seabrook’s travelogue of Haiti, The Magic Island (1929). The Haitian zombie is typically under the control of a witch doctor who resurrects the dead in order to put them to work. Though the zombie has an enviable semiotic plasticity, the Haitian zombie speaks to a long history of slavery and colonialism. These depictions began to appear in American popular culture during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) through films such as White Zombie (1932), directed by Victor Halperin. Jennifer Fay argued that “[c]irculation of zombie fantasies in the United States was, in some sense, both an admission and denial that U.S. policy in Haiti resurrected a colonial, even slave economy” (93). The zombie as depicted in American film not only expressed anxieties toward the Haitian occupation but was also an allegory for the subjection of individuals to rapid industrialization.1 George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) removed the witch doctor, turned the ghouls into flesh eaters, and relocated the zombie within a northeastern American geography. Unlike the vampire, another undead ghoul that first moved from oral folk culture to print, the zombie does not belong to a prior literary tradition. The Romero-style zombie is film-born, perhaps explaining why this figure has inherited properties of the medium itself. This new kind of masterless, infectious zombie would become the protagonist of countless spinoffs, remakes, and sequels. The blurring of social categories and the crossing of boundaries that so frequently define the political commentary in zombie films are underwritten by the fact that so many attempts to police both the genre and intellectual property have ended in failure. From the 1936 lawsuit between White Zombie’s finance company and the Halperin brothers in which American Securities attempted to prevent the release of another film with zombie in the title to the inadvertent

162

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

omission of Night of the Living Dead’s copyright notice that placed it within the public domain and to the famous legal battles between John Romero and John A. Russo, the zombie has consistently exceeded attempts to contain its proliferation via legal claims.2 If, as McKenzie Wark quipped in his remix of Stuart Brand’s hacker slogan, “information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains” (“Considerations” 73), the zombie has consistently found a way to escape its bonds and circulate virally. Accelerating this media apocalypse, the most recent iteration of the zombie could be characterized as the “digital zombie,” blending technological and biological concepts of the viral. The terror of the slow, lumbering living dead—who individually were clumsy and weak yet collectively could bring about a worldwide apocalypse—was reimagined along a more explicitly biological model of viral infection. The Romero zombie is very much a reflection of the materiality of the medium through which it first circulated—the undead quality of photographic film. As André Bazin famously wrote, film is “change mummified” (8): the indexical photographic film captures the light on the silver nitrate and enslaves the image within an indefinitely automated loop. The slow decay of the analog zombie body allegorizes the decay of the film reel, for the diegetic content exists in a complementary feedback loop with the ontology of film—the zombie is undead yet not eternal. By contrast, the latest version of the zombie—a zombie 2.0—reflects the ever-quickening conditions of late capitalism in an even more tightly networked global media landscape defined by liveness, instantaneity, and digital abstractions. The video game provides a different media ecology for the zombie, and as a consequence, a species has emerged to allegorize the replications made possible within digital networks. In an essay entitled “Premediation” and a follow-up to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), Richard Grusin argued that the current global information networks operate according to an anticipatory temporality that not only reflects

Serial Death and the Zombie

163

and responds to historical events but also conditions people’s affective response “to generate and maintain a low level of anxiety in order to prevent the possibility of a traumatic future” (29). According to this model, the rise of zombies could be said to premediate the emergence of national and global disasters, as well as that of the 99% and the Occupy movements, which do not behave according to a coherent, rationalist teleology but work through serial operations. The zombie is an expression of human inability to fully understand the large-scale consequences of a globalized, networked culture in which the power of smart mobs, crowdsourcing, and social media are governed by a logic that is no longer built around the romanticized image of an autonomous individual. Juxtaposing his theory of premediation with the more blunt operation of prediction, Grusin further suggested that “premediation works something like the logic of designing a video game; it is not necessarily about getting the future right as much as it is about trying to imagine or map out as many possible futures as could plausibly be imagined” (27). Following this, I argue that the video-game series Left 4 Dead not only addresses itself to the zombie’s historical, mediological, and genealogical past but can also be regarded as an instrument of premediation through the ludic labor relations it employs that imbricate the player within a circuit of data analytics and biofeedback. As Bernard Stiegler wrote in For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010), the posthuman body of the player produces a “proletarianization of the nervous system.” The result is the “harnessing of the attention of consumers and, through that, the harnessing of their libidinal energy” (40). The zombified or proletarianized activity of the Left 4 Dead player-worker is a “cognitive labor power utterly devoid of knowledge” (45) as that individual’s nonconscious operations are captured by the video game—“the cognitive has been reduced to calculability” (46). Valve grammaticizes and discretizes the player’s attention, converting haptic movements into digital data. This movement from analog to digital enacts a kind of violence that McKenzie Wark sees as far more significant than that which exists on the representational stratum of the game and is the frequent target and scape-

164

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

goat of media hysteria: “[t]he real violence of gamespace is its dicing of everything analog into the digital, cutting continuums into bits. That games present the digital in its most pure form [is] reason enough to embrace them, for here violence is at its most extreme—and its most harmless” (Gamer Theory para. 023).

Left 4 Dead: Serial Killers Left 4 Dead combines the serial logic of networked and programmable media with the multiple, interlaced traditions of the zombie while at the same time standing apart from the horde of other zombie video games. The implementation of sophisticated artificial intelligence and cooperative, networked play produces a critical feedback loop between form and content in Valve’s video game. Once installed, the user becomes plugged in to a complex set of gameplay analytics and, as in the case of the Haitian zombie, nonconscious labor is captured and expropriated by an analytics engine and put into the service of the development and expansion of the game. Left 4 Dead was first launched by Valve Corporation in 2008, and a sequel was released the following year. The basic premise is that a team of four survivors battles waves of endless, procedurally generated zombies while traveling from safe house to safe house. The player controls a first-person avatar and with an array of guns, axes, baseball bats, and chainsaws, navigates the three-dimensional geography influenced by the settings of various zombie films: the hospital, the mall, the swamp, the cornfield, and even a post-Katrina New Orleans. Because killing hordes of zombies is necessary for the game to proceed from level to level, the player can participate in brutal fantasies without feeling morally accountable for the ethical ramifications of her violence.3 Playing as a team is also necessary because Left 4 Dead is designed for four-player collaboration in a way that is set apart from other multiplayer video games. Not all multiplayer zombie games are designed so

Serial Death and the Zombie

165

that an individual must think and play collectively, and Left 4 Dead follows a common trope in zombie narratives by creating gameplay conditions in which the inability of groups to function efficiently as a team will result in every player’s death.4 Whereas the game itself has minimal narrative, the human drama that characterizes many zombie films is restaged outside the software through player interaction.5 The ease with which it is possible to be overrun by randomly generated hordes (often accompanied by stereotypical horror-theme music to intensify the action) can produce charged, emotionally strained exchanges among the four players, who have many options for either directly or indirectly communicating with each other.6 Based on this type of group play, Valve has recently begun to explore the potential of biofeedback mechanisms in the form of galvanic skin sensors that measure the arousal of players and adapt the intensity of the game based on their affective responses (Ambinder).7 The first game in the series is set in a fictionalized Pennsylvania, and the second is set in the southern United States. Left 4 Dead opens with an introductory cutscene, but the story subsequently unfolds using narrative techniques established by Valve’s earlier series Half-Life. During a campaign, text bubbles, audio recordings, and cinematic sequences do not interrupt gameplay, as commonly occurs in other AAA video games.8 Instead, the player slowly learns about the events and the relationships between the characters through fragments of information and story discovered while playing and exploring. Walter Benjamin famously described architecture as “the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective” (40). Given that Left 4 Dead is intended to be played repeatedly, this absorption of the narrative through communal play in a state of distraction is appropriate to the form and to the virtual architecture of the gamespace; the player learns by literally reading the writing on the walls, in addition to other in-game objects, such as newspapers and defaced public service announcement posters (fig. 1). There are snippets of audio playing in derelict bars, and players camp out in the abandoned apartment flats and the motor homes

166

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

of possible escapees. The player slowly gleans the narrative in fragments through the exploration of what David Herman termed the storyworld (29) without any dissonance between story and gameplay. The viral zombie, as a category of horror monster without literary precedent, is a primarily visual and uniquely cinematic phenomenon. Because much of the contemporary zombie’s heritage (particularly its origins in African and Caribbean culture) has been obscured, Steven Shaviro argued in The Cinematic Body that “the living dead don’t have an origin or a referent; they have become unmoored from meaning” (84). In this volume, Jesse Stommel similarly claims the Romero zombie emerged “out of nowhere” in a kind of monstrous cinematic virgin birth. It is no coincidence that this model of the undead, dereferentialized, dehistoricized zombie emerged during the Cold War under threat of total nuclear annihilation. Jacques Derrida made an argument similar to Shaviro’s when he wrote in “No Apocalypse Not Now” that the fantasy of total nuclear war “conditions every discourse and all strategies … nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event” (23). Were a nuclear war to take place, it would leave behind no survivors, and it is for this reason that Derrida understood this nuclear condition as one that is purely textual or, as he wrote, “fabulously textual” in that it has only ever existed as a fictional simulation (23). The discursive, proliferating status of the fabulated zombie is similar to nuclear anxiety in the way that it models fantasies of total annihilation. And of course, the labs that developed early computerized simulations of nuclear war were the same spaces from which the first video games emerged.9 Perhaps it is because the zombie has become unmoored from its historical frame of reference that Left 4 Dead is so deeply wedded to the logic of film. It is no coincidence that the game does not attempt to present a naturalistic realism but instead remediates a specifically filmic realism.10 The player is framed as a Hollywood actor, controlling one of the four survivors. The load screen of each campaign, or level, features a poster that displays the usernames of the four players who “star” in the episode.

Serial Death and the Zombie

167

Each campaign is given a B-movie-inspired film poster and a title like “No Mercy,” “Hard Rain,” and “Swamp Fever” to aesthetically reference the game’s grindhouse origins (fig. 2). The game even contains an adjustable “film grain” filter, and the music borrows from classic horror tropes.11 Various leitmotifs, or sound cues, can be heard to warn players when a specific infected approaches (just as Jaws’s or Jason’s presence is signified by specific bars of music), and a screeching bass line can be heard when a ravenous horde of zombies swarms, its volume level adjusted in proportion to the intensity of the attack. Left 4 Dead’s music is not uniform but modulated on the basis of the in-game action and player response. Though the music, posters, and lighting all contribute to a cinematic experience, what Valve self-consciously avoids is the common videogame convention of interrupting the game with cinematic cutscenes as a way of pushing the narrative forward at key points. The game selectively adapts those aspects of film that can be put to the greatest service of a video-game aesthetic. Whereas the Hollywood zombie, as Shaviro argued, may be without origin or referent, the Left 4 Dead series has taken this simulacrum as its point of departure.

Procedural “Undifferentiation” An astute player of the first Left 4 Dead game (or a skeptical one who cannot understand how so much blood, bile, entrails, and vomit could be spilled without the survivors’ ever becoming infected themselves) might surmise that these survivors are immune to the mutagenic effects of what the player eventually learns is Green Flu. Given that the central goal of the game is to move from one safe house to another, the dark implication is that the survivors themselves have been spreading disease everywhere they travel. This scenario seems particularly likely because players learn in a Left 4 Dead comic that transmission of the disease is primarily airborne.12 The airborne nature of the disease explains why

168

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the rescue attempts that close each campaign end in failure. Each unsuccessful attempt by helicopter, boat, plane, and finally military transport facilitates the production of sequels and supplemental downloadable content (DLC). Thus, it is the playable characters themselves, as opposed to some contrived external narrative pulsion, that drive forward the game’s action and story. The playable characters are narratively configured as the engine of their own serial death drive. Their status as carriers makes them dual bringers of death. Because they produce a miasma of disease wherever they travel, they are the cause of the infection as well as the slayers of the already infected—a pharmakon of reciprocal violence. In this respect, Left 4 Dead articulates a set of relations the literary critic René Girard famously described between infection and violence. In an essay published in 1978, Girard argued that plague narratives in both literary and mythic representations are “a transparent metaphor for a certain reciprocal violence that spreads, literally, like the plague” (836). Moreover, Girard contended that plague narratives are “universally presented as a process of undifferentiation, a destruction of specificities” (833). Since the advent of Romero’s films, one of the common didactic messages expressed in the social commentary of zombie films is that there is no difference between humans and zombies. “They’re just us; that’s all,” Peter softly explains in Dawn of the Dead. Although this message is not foregrounded in Left 4 Dead to the extent that it is in other zombie media, at the heart of this serial engine is the lack of distinction, the “process of undifferentiation” that undermines the false binary of survivor and infected, both of whom are programmed in the game with no characteristics but the ruthless capacity for violence.13 Unlike past video-game series, such as Resident Evil, that featured a kill screen announcing in bloody handwriting, “You are dead,” Left 4 Dead translates this disingenuous finality into undead seriality by announcing “You are dead. You will be rescued soon” (fig. 3).14 Breaking the conventions of realism in order to create a more fluid form of play by allowing

Serial Death and the Zombie

169

a player’s character to be revived, the player’s virtual death has itself become zombified. Multiple lives constitute a common convention of many video games, but what sets the avatars of Left 4 Dead apart is that they are simply an alternative species of undead, not much different from those special infected bosses within the game.

Left 4 Dead 2: N. O. Zombies The setting of the first release of Left 4 Dead in Pennsylvania reinforces a connection to film history through an unacknowledged reference to George Romero, longtime native of Pittsburgh, who filmed many of his movies in that area using local actors. The second installment of the game relocates to the southern United States and recalls an earlier generation of zombies—that which the Romero zombie, without “origin or a referent,” had repressed (only to frequently return through the complex racial politics depicted in the Dead film series). In place of a generic landscape that evokes a cinematic rather than regional history, the second game depicts a geographically and culturally specific topography. The survivors of Left 4 Dead 2 do not travel through suburbs but begin in Savannah, Georgia, where they steal a stock car from the mall before navigating the bayou. After traveling through flooded swamps, the survivors end up on a plantation, fighting their way through former slave quarters before taking a stand inside an antebellum mansion. In the campaign “Hard Rain,” a hurricane hits, forcing the survivors to once again wade through water and take shelter in a crumbling sugar mill before the game culminates with “The Parish,” set in New Orleans. As a result of Valve’s decision to set the game in the southern United States and to conclude the campaign in New Orleans, complete with military jets flying over highway 10 (fig. 4), it is impossible to ignore the uncanny and often chilling resonance the game has with the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005. There is the constant presence of warnings, checklists, and procedures from the Civil Emergency and Defense

170

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Agency (CEDA), an organization completely inept at controlling the outbreak. CEDA’s actions sadly echo the incompetence exhibited by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the 2005 disaster, in which thousands of residents, particularly those in the Ninth Ward, were abandoned. Orlando Patterson used the term social death to describe the legal and cultural position of slaves, and sadly, the concept still carries some weight with respect to the official treatment given to many of the once-vibrant communities struck by the hurricane. The status of survivors as “carriers” only further inscribes their rejection from what remains of human society. With graffiti on the wall announcing “death to all carriers,” the Left 4 Dead’s survivors, surrounded by nothing but death, are simultaneously living in a state of social death. At the end of the second game, the survivors arrive in the center of a crumbling New Orleans. Houses are boarded up, zombies walk the streets, and the U.S. military drops bombs as a final solution to clear the city of the infected. The survivors, much like Katrina’s victims, have been left for dead (fig. 5). In the final campaign, the four main characters radio the military in a last-ditch request for evacuation. The game concludes with their being “saved” and flown to a shelter, but it is clear that the military suspects them of being carriers. The players’ victory at the end of the campaign is likely a Pyrrhic one.15 Having survived countless attacks of living dead, it is their rejection by the remaining collective of uninfected humans that will prove to be more dangerous. Hell is other (uninfected) people.

AI Director: The Digital Bela Lugosi The unsettling resonance of the game Left 4 Dead with the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina combines with the class and racial issues evoked by the zombie’s roots in Haitian culture.16 The game’s survivors explore the sugar mill belonging to the Ducatel Sugar Company and walk through tall sugarcane fields in which zombies hide, waiting to attack.

Serial Death and the Zombie

171

The mise-en-scène and the francophone corporation recall the cultural context of Haiti and HASCO (the Haitian American Sugar Company), once believed to have zombified its many indentured laborers in order to put them to work in the fields and factory (as seen in White Zombie, in which the voodoo master Murder Legendre [Bela Lugosi] runs the profitable sugar mill using zombie laborers). Left 4 Dead’s survivors also traverse a plantation colony and fight zombies in former slave quarters and antebellum mansions. The game returns to this older model of the zombie not only via the politicized imagery in the narrative but also through its mechanics and software—specifically, Valve’s vanguard technology, AI Director. AI Director was first used in a limited way in Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but Left 4 Dead was the first game to fully incorporate this feature into its design. Once again making reference to the zombie’s cinematic roots and the players’ role as actors in the game, the director is a complex set of parallel artificial intelligences (AI) that control pacing, dialogue, resources, music, and—most important— zombie swarms, adjusting gameplay in real time based on the in-game performance of players to create a balanced yet dramatic rhythm to the campaign’s progress. The player can never fully anticipate how and when the zombies will attack; a new, unpredictable experience is serially generated with each playthrough. AI Director behaves as a kind of algorithmic Bela Lugosi, the digital puppet master behind the curtain who steers the players’ movement. The better players perform, demonstrating their autonomy and agency within the system, the more “angry” the nonhuman director grows, throwing up greater obstacles to incapacitate them. Given the knowledge that players’ avatars are framed as carriers of infection, this analogy between AI Director and voodoo zombie master becomes more apt. The more time a player spends in the game, the more zombie-like his or her physical body becomes through the development of twitch reflexes and autonomously reactive muscle memory. The libidinal economy that drives play is captured as millions of mouse clicks and nonconscious, microtemporal player actions and

172

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

decisions are aggregated by Valve in this movement from the Haitian factory to the social factory of contemporary informatic ludocapitalism. That Valve and Steam have been named in a way that invokes skeuomorphic metaphors of the industrial factory reimagined through the network logic of cloud computing is hardly a coincidence. Moreover, the survivors that the player controls are themselves embedded zombie agents, spreading the virus as they circulate. Their ability to be continually revived, both through their many in-game resurrections and every time a player loads the game to play, serializes their deaths and generates more infected. At the discretion of a mysterious director, the playeravatar’s actions and responses become as programmatic as those of the horde. After a survivor named Coach guffaws at the uselessness of CEDA’s guidelines, Ellis, a young southern auto mechanic, replies: “Kill all sons of bitches, that’s my official instructions.” The zombified survivors have been reduced to the same mission and reactive singlemindedness as their fellow infected. The algorithmic operations available to the player who controls these survivors are limited to nothing but exchanges of reciprocal violence (with an occasional medical assist). The AI Director serves as a confirmation of Alexander Galloway’s theory of video games as “allegories of control” in the way they offer the fantasy of agency and emergent interactivity as a means to mesmerize players and locate them more completely in a “protocological network of continuous informative control” (106)

Gameplay Analytics As is now common in many online games, Left 4 Dead makes use of a complex set of gameplay analytics. Networked gaming is not a new phenomenon. From its humble beginnings in the multiuser dungeons (MUDs) of the late 1970s to the first-person death matches of Doom (1993) and Quake (1996), networked play has long been an integral part of computer gaming. More recently, this type of network games has also proliferated on video-game consoles through the release of Microsoft’s

Serial Death and the Zombie

173

Xbox Live Arcade (2004), Nintendo’s Virtual Console (2006), and Sony’s PlayStation Store (2006), which feature virtual hubs, public score boards, and community achievements. Prior to this renaissance, home videogame consoles made by companies like Atari, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony kept most players in a state of serialized isolation. But what happens when the “reset” button is removed? When all these actions are recorded and aggregated into sets of gameplay analytics? Networked games like Left 4 Dead, a direct descendant of 1990s PC gaming, critically engage the foundational serial structures that define video games. In the same way that Left 4 Dead forces players to work together as a team, players are further bound through these serial mechanics that make visible previously invisible repetitions. Their ingame actions leave traces and trails in the larger social field of the game as data is tracked, recorded, aggregated, and fed back to players. For example, at the completion of a campaign in Left 4 Dead, a long list of “credits” rolls (in keeping with the film aesthetic), except that instead of listing a cast and crew, the credits are composed of a highly detailed ranking system that exhibits each of the four players’ accomplishments during the game (fig. 6). Players are positioned according to statistics like the numbers of head shots, the total number of infected killed, the amount of damage done by each player to the special infected “bosses,” and the number of health packs used. The credits at the end of the campaign are the first of a series of gameplay analytics made available to the player. Though this is hardly a new phenomenon (scoring systems featured in the earliest games), the unprecedented level of detail made public has consequences for how the game is played. It is not possible for a player to “erase” a bad performance without creating a new online identity. The statistical data leave a permanent trace that recalls Wendy Chun’s concept of the undead of information: “Digital media networks are not based on the regular obsoleteness or disposability of information but rather on the resus-

174

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

citability of the undead of information” (171). Gameplay data can now be harvested, aggregated, and resurrected in unanticipated contexts. To understand the significance of these analytics, it is useful to review the history of scoring in video games. Initially, arcade games scored player performance according to two criteria: time and points. Amassing the highest number of points was the means by which a player could simultaneously record the effects of her in-game actions and create a semipermanent trace of her activity on an arcade game. In addition to encouraging spending, scoring was a means of fostering sociality and competition among gaming communities. With the development of home consoles during the 1980s, scoring was carried over but often in a vestigial way. In Super Mario Bros. (1985), for example, there is a score that tracks the number of points amassed, but to little effect (high scores are never recorded on the cartridge). In 1997, the head shot was born almost simultaneously in GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 and in Team Fortress, a popular Quake mod17 (Totilo).18 The ability to differentiate between body wounds introduced more complex and granular ways of ranking and scoring by monitoring player position, in-game activities, and multiplayer interactions through increasingly precise measurement. No longer was it simply the number of kills that counted or total health but also the accuracy, pacing, and method of execution. As first-person shooters evolved, the means of tabulating scores continued to develop. Following the development of online gaming, gameplay analytics now have an incredibly important role in governing player behavior. For example, generating “heat maps” that graphically depict the activity of players by overlaying server data (like location of deaths) on game environments (usually plan views of levels) is a popular way of analyzing player actions in games like Counterstrike and Halo. From an actual map of the game space overlaid with data collected within the level, players can easily identify dangerous choke points, clever hiding places, and the safest paths to travel given a particular map and a particular player community. With respect to a

Serial Death and the Zombie

175

player’s individual performance, her data is taken and compared not just with that of the other individuals she plays against but with the community of players local to that server. As Lev Manovich declared, “[w]e have moved from the stage of ‘New Media’ to the stage of ‘More Media” (“Cultural Analytics”). He proposed cultural analytics as a solution to managing and analyzing vast quantities of data. Although Manovich’s research is geared toward importing these methods into the humanities, it is useful to recognize game cultures that have adapted to a media environment constructed through these surveillance techniques. The use of gameplay analytics does not simply add a metalayer to the vast amount of information available online, but it directly affects player behavior in terms of how the community members interact and play with one another. The data is not neutral but produces critical and transformative effects in terms of how players play.

Overachievers The recent development of “achievements” underscores this point. Achievements have come to function as a kind of metagame. Once the game is completed, gamers can return to undertake more challenges. For example, Grand Theft Auto offers an achievement for killing one thousand pigeons and walking one thousand miles. In Left 4 Dead, some achievements require painstaking attention to levels of minutiae that only the most dedicated gamer would pursue, whereas others are passively collected through more traditional forms of play (e.g., surviving a campaign without using a health pack). In the process of playing a game, thousands of nonconscious activities that the player engages in are categorized and assessed. A database of information is created from the linear storytelling that the player experiences during the game.19 Because the statistics at the end of the campaign are modeled as film credits, the player is not only further framed as an actor making a movie

176

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

but is also implicitly aligned with the army of workers required to make a Hollywood film. This conflation of play and labor is not too far removed from Valve’s business model. If the story line and gameplay of the video game enforce the notion that the players are being controlled by the witch-doctor-like AI Director, which harnesses their labor to generate even more zombies, this zombie logic allegorizes the way a player’s labor is harvested within the video game’s development cycle. The players become zombie workers in the system’s monstrous reproduction. In an essay on what he termed the e-zombie, Brendan Riley examined the way in which the zombie trope functions in online environments. Beginning with the zombie hard drives that hackers use for denial-ofservice attacks (in which the hacker functions as a witch doctor controlling a zombie army), Riley extended the logic of the Haitian zombie to suggest that “[d]igital zombification refers to the experience of ‘seeing’ one’s digital self, perhaps a handle and avatar cultivated in cyberspace, perhaps an incarnation of one’s real-life identity, acting of its own accord or at the behest of someone else, a digital bocor” (201). Though the most egregious form of losing control of an online identity is identity theft, Riley suggested that such loss of control happens every day through social media networks. Another aspect of the e-zombie is the zombification of labor that defines the Web 2.0 business strategy. In the same way the Haitian zombie expresses anxieties about slave labor, the profit model built around unpaid immaterial labor can be understood as a process of digital zombification. Valve has a long history of relying on its community as a means of producing content. This is accomplished through a variety of business strategies that seek out undervalued forms of labor and monetize them. The first-person shooter Left 4 Dead allegorizes the larger economic ecology that defines Valve’s expropriation of player production and attention. As Tiziana Terranova pointed out, free labor has become the cornerstone of new forms of capitalist production in which the goal is not so much the production of commodities as it is the orga-

Serial Death and the Zombie

177

nization of information and labor flows in an effort to “extract as much value as possible … out of this abundant, and yet slightly intractable, terrain” (46). For Valve, this takes the form of support for modding communities through authoring tools, marketplace improvements, and sales based on player analytics; the monetization of in-game cosmetics that players make and sell (e.g., Team Fortress’s fifty million dollar virtual hat economy); and more recently, investment in a culture of spectatorship and the professionalization of play through the development of competitive electronic sports like Dota 2.20 Valve adheres to the economic model that “the best way to stay visible and thriving,” as Terranova noted, “is to create a space that is not only accessed, but somehow built by its users” (49). The company has become what Matteo Pasquinelli would call a “global rentier” that transforms the “common intellect into network value” (3). Although Left 4 Dead is distributed on multiple hardware platforms (e.g., Xbox 360, Mac), it was originally designed for PCs and circulated via Steam, the most popular and centralized hub for PC gamers.21 Valve’s own games are specifically designed to take advantage of the benefits of its digital distribution service (e.g., producing DLC, collecting data). Apart from the creation of a giant online distribution network, Valve has followed in the tradition of PC gaming by diligently releasing sophisticated sets of authoring tools and developer kits alongside the game itself in order to make the game accessible to modding communities. As Alexander Galloway has observed, “the industry’s magnanimity has worked to its advantage” (113). Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter have also described the process by which game capital rushes to take on “team production, modding, machima artists, MMO populations, digital distributions, and peer-to-peer networks” as exemplary of the process by which empire subsumes immaterial labor into its circuit of production (228). Left 4 Dead aesthetically and materially embodies this economic model of cognitive capitalism as the storyworld mirrors and allegorizes the underlying networks of digital production.

178

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

The zombie, as Steven Shaviro argued, is deeply tied to the function of capitalism: “The life-in-death of the zombie is a nearly perfect allegory for the inner logic of capitalism, whether this be taken in the sense of the exploitation of living labor by dead labor, the deathlike regimentation of factories and other social spaces, or the artificial, externally driven stimulation of consumers” (83). Left 4 Dead locates itself within a post-Fordist society based on, as Stiegler pointed out, “the economic and functional integration of production and consumption.” And to dramatize this conflation, there is no better figure than the zombie, for whom production (and reproduction) is cannibalistic consumption. Within its storyworld, Left 4 Dead offers no viable position outside of zombie logic (there is literally no avatar or nonplayer character that is not a zombie). Technically, the player hears the voices of noninfected humans, but these humans are deliberately excluded from in-game visual representation. The totalizing logic of capital as a world media system is made manifest in this empire of zombies. On account of the miasmic dialectic in which the survivors are locked, the search for an uninfected space is a utopian fantasy that serves only to further spread the disease. In much the same way that the search for a space outside capitalism only extends its invisible hand, these well-meaning zombies are co-opted in the service of spreading infection to previously undiscovered country.22 In this way, Left 4 Dead allegorizes the inescapable logic of networked capitalism in which there is little possibility of locating oneself outside the system. Yet this allegory remains predicated on a disavowal of the larger world media system (i.e., global capital) in which the video game and its players are necessarily implicated. From coltan mining in Africa to the factory conditions in which computer hardware is produced in China and the prodigal return of discarded computer parts to the developing world in the form of e-waste—the labor and material modes of production that structure networked, cloud computing are largely shortcircuited and repressed within the logic and representational schema of Left 4 Dead.

Serial Death and the Zombie

179

Despite this disavowal, the inability to locate oneself outside a network of (capitalist) contagion reflects the same ambivalence Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker described in The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007): “In today’s conventional wisdom, everything can be subsumed under a warm security blanket of interconnectivity.23 But this same wisdom hasn’t yet indicated quite what that means, nor how one might be able to draft a critique of networks” (26). Left 4 Dead does not offer an alternative to this net/work anxiety or to the monstrousness of consumptive production but, rather, rearticulates and enacts these relations. The zombie in Left 4 Dead operates as far more than a rhetorical figure. The underlying economic architecture and cultural interface of the game form a feedback loop that reinforces the game’s necronomic structure. Action and representation unite in Left 4 Dead: the undead labor of the player in the game world is indexed to the larger economic and technological conditions that inform this ludic mode of production.

Figure 1. The writing on the wall in Left 4 Dead 2.

Source: Gameplay screenshot of Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. Taken by author.

180

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Figure 2. Left 4 Dead movie poster.

Source: Gameplay screenshot of Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. Taken by author.

Note: The movie poster doubles as a load screen, displaying the screen handles of the players who “star” in the game.

Figure 3. “You are dead”: Serial death in Left 4 Dead 2.

Source: Gameplay screenshot of Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. Taken by author.

Serial Death and the Zombie Figure 4. Jets flying over Highway 10 in New Orleans (Left 4 Dead 2).

Source: Gameplay screenshot of Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. Taken by author.

Figure 5. Devastation in Left 4 Dead.

Source: Gameplay screenshot of Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. Taken by author.

Note: The game’s devastated residential homes of New Orleans recall the devastation of the lower Ninth Ward by Hurricane Katrina.

181

182

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Figure 6. The “credits” roll at the end of the game.

Source: Gameplay screenshot of Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. Taken by author.

Serial Death and the Zombie

183

Notes 1. Yet as indicated by the title White Zombie, the horror presented is not simply that of zombified labor. The even more chilling disruption to the social order is the exploitation of white (and feminine) zombified labor. The central victim in the film is Madeline Parker (played by Madge Bellamy), and the moral outrage surrounding her conversion into a zombie can be contrasted with the depiction of the Haitian zombies for whom the film naturalizes this condition of involuntary servitude. 2. See Boluk and Lenz for a discussion of the legal battles and genealogies that arose as a result of the inability to contain the proliferation of the zombie. We argue that “[w]hile economic and legal interests have intervened, attempting to quarantine the circulation of the signifier, its very nature seems to have a built-in resistance to such efforts. The serial contagiousness of the zombie, its complex ‘episodemic’ structure of branching sequels and spin-offs and ability to aggressively invade other genres, has perhaps given the figure an immunity against the claims of proprietary ownership” (4–6). 3. Left 4 Dead 2, in particular, produced some controversy prior to its release because its original version had been banned in Australia and Germany for excessive violence and realism. In Australia, there is no game rating for specifically mature (i.e., adult-only) audiences, so Valve redesigned the box art and some of the game’s content so that it could receive a 15+ rating. The debate follows in a long tradition of cyclical media panic over emergent forms of mass communication and recalls some of the old comic-book self-censorship issues that arose through the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) after a 1954 Senate subcommittee hearing condemned EC Comics’ horror fiction as corruptors of the nation’s youth. The CCA did not allow a sliding system that permitted adult content, and this resulted in the ghettoization of comics by permanently tying them to children’s culture. Video games have been similarly subject to scapegoating regarding depictions of violence because this mass medium has been conflated with children’s culture. For further discussion of the arrested conditions of comics after the acceptance of the CCA, see Nyberg. 4. For example, one of the special classes of “boss” infected—that is, the particularly challenging zombies against which players struggle—is named

184

5. 6.

7.

8.

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the Smoker. The Smoker extends a long, serpentine tongue to trap a player. The player cannot free herself once captured but must wait to be rescued by another player. This forces group members to stick close together and be vigilant not only for their own safety but also for that of their teammates if they are to complete the mission. For an evocative first-person description of the moral dilemma of the last man standing and the emotional team dynamics generated by Left 4 Dead, see Bissell. Players can use a series of quick voice commands spoken by their avatar selected from a pop-up radial menu or the chat function that is built into the game (sometimes players also use other Voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP] software). To assist players in communicating with one another, the survivors also provide information (e.g., “Pills here,” “Weapons over here”) without any player input when something occurs that is valuable to the team. In much the same way that human bodies speak even when one does not ask them to, the avatars speak their desires. They demonstrate that the zombified status of avatars (and players) is not yet complete or under the full control of a puppet master. Though these techniques have not yet been officially incorporated into Valve’s games, there are many possibilities in terms of how this affects player behavior. Not only do these biometric inscriptions allow a game’s AI to control “[in]-game encounters determined by estimated arousal level” (Ambinder, n. pag.), but this information can be fed forward to the players themselves and influence their responses. For example, if one player sees that a fellow team member has high arousal levels, this might increase her desire to intervene and protect that player from whatever is causing the distress. At the same time, feeding this precognitive data back to the players might enable them to learn to control and adjust their own arousal levels as a way of influencing the progress of the game. The opening film functions as a noninteractive tutorial that trains the player in the game’s mechanics without an in-game training session. For example, the player observes various “special infected” characters and can learn some strategies for dealing with them. The short cinematic sequence at the start softens this transition, but for the most part the player must adapt and pick up the rules as she plays. The deliberate lack of training furthers the design goal of making the start of a campaign feel as if the player was simply dropped in medias res during a zombie apocalypse, much like the previously comatose Jim in 28 Days Later (2002)— a film known not only for its reimagining of the zombie for the digital

Serial Death and the Zombie

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

185

age but also for being one of the first feature films to itself make use of the constraints and affordances of digital video. See Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, as well as Crogan, for further discussion of the relation between the game of nuclear-war brinkmanship, simulation, and the rise of early video games. In this situation, I understand realism not as defined by a fixed set of aesthetic principles or an indexical relationship to the world but as a contingent and constantly evolving set of conventions established from the relationship between a particular work and its audience. The game itself will adjust the “film grain” at various points in the game, making it appear cracklier during particularly tense or overwhelming situations, but the user can also manually adjust the filter. Dialing down some of the postprocessing effects, such as the film grain, vignetting (an effect often seen in cheap film cameras in which darkness bleeds from the edge of the screen), localized contrast, color correction, gore, and weather (e.g., rain levels can be adjusted) may make for smoother, if less cinematic, gameplay. The Left 4 Dead comic was released shortly after Left 4 Dead 2. It was serially distributed in four sections as a lead-up to the cross-over campaign “The Passing,” which was made available as DLC for both games in the series. The story was written by Valve’s game writers and illustrated by Mike Oeming. Added to this is the fact that in “versus mode,” two groups of four players alternate between playing the survivors and the infected. One group plays as the zombies, controlling the special classes of infected (Smoker, Hunter, Tank, Boomer, Spitter, Charger, and Jockey), which have unique attributes that can more quickly incapacitate the survivors. This particular kill screen is contingent upon a player’s teammates not yet being dead or incapacitated. The campaign ends without a diegetic resurrection if all players are rendered inactive. In a comic that was released before additional DLC was made available for the first and second games, more details on the situation are provided. Readers learn with certainty that immune carriers spread the disease to the uninfected and that the military’s policy on carriers is similar to its policy on dealing with the infected zombies. Another recent zombie video game that produced a huge controversy for its racially charged setting is Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 (2009), set in Africa.

186

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

17. A mod is a videogame that has been modified in order to create different versions, sometimes completely different games, using the original software. 18. Galloway has argued that the first-person perspective of these games is influenced by the first-person subjective camera (in which subject and camera are fused) and point-of-view (POV) shots that roughly align camera with character in cinema (42–69). If this is indeed the case, it is fascinating to note that out of the era of head shots, first-person shooters, and digital culture, George Romero produced Diary of the Dead (2007), a reboot of Night of the Living Dead told entirely from the perspective of a diegetic camera. The use of a diegetic camera follows the revival of this technique in recent horror films (The Zombie Diaries [2006], Paranormal Activity [2007], and Cloverfield [2008]) after the release of The Blair Witch Project (1999) but is rooted in a much longer legacy that, as Galloway has traced, goes far back to films such as Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947). In Diary of the Dead, a group of film students attempts to survive zombie attacks while filming their experience for an uncertain posterity. The film depicts not only the terror of attempting to understand the mysterious events taking place but also the varying degrees of discomfort exhibited by the characters at filming the experience as it unfolds. Viral media and the viral zombie are conflated in Diary of the Dead. Though it is the head shot, the extreme close-up now associated with YouTube’s viral videos, that is most frequently cited in the film, one cannot ignore its connection to the head shot popularized by contemporary gaming culture. The tagline of the film, “Shoot the dead,” conflates the violence of “headshotting” zombies (the head shot being historically more rooted in the advancement of first-person shooters than in actual marksmanship) with the head shot of film and photography. Susan Sontag wrote that the camera can be thought of as an instrument of violence, of what she described as “soft murder” (15). 19. Gameplay analytics serve as a useful case study surrounding the issues debated by Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles on the relationship between database and narrative (echoing the ludology versus narratology conflicts in early game-studies writing). Manovich famously argued that database and narrative are “natural enemies,” whereas Hayles refuted this argument with the inverted claim that they are “natural symbionts.” The acquisition of gameplay statistics versus the completion of a campaign demonstrates both the tension and codependence between these two modes. See chapter 5 of Manovich, Language, as well as Hayles.

Serial Death and the Zombie

187

20. Team Fortress 2 is a game produced in Valve’s Source engine that is based on an original mod of Quake. Though it is currently “free to play,” the video game has generated vast amounts of revenue in the sale of virtual hats that players can buy and trade to adorn their avatars. As of 2011, one analyst estimated the profits from the sale of “unusual hats” at fifty million dollars (Good). 21. Valve is generous about releasing software and player data to users, some key information that it withholds includes its sales figures. Valve is estimated to control 70 percent of the online distribution market (Graft, “Stardock” n. pag.). 22. It is through the same lens that Valve’s modding fan community can be viewed. Like any other large commercial game company, Valve seeks to make a profit. But its policy of setting long-term rather than short-term profit goals has created a fan base willing to donate labor. Occasionally, fan labor is rewarded. Valve has responded to bottom-up innovations by hiring outstanding fan developers, and recently it has started issuing royalties (some modders receiving five-figure payments) for item mods that can be purchased online for Team Fortress 2 (Graft, “Team Fortress 2” n. pag.). These attempts to remunerate fan labor ultimately redirect the energies put into the game back into the flow of capital. 23. In the forthcoming game The Division (based on a Tom Clancy novel), the premise is that a virus can survive on a banknote for up to seventeen days. The pandemic of unbridled consumption during Black Friday leads to a biological pandemic resulting in the total collapse of the world economic system. To paraphrase Laurie Anderson, under a regime of what Franco “Bifo” Berardi termed semio-capitalism, money is a virus.

Part 3

Dangerous Maternity and Monstrous Mothers

Chapter 8

Mothering Monsters Avoidances, Intervention, and Response to Freakery in Progressive America K. A. Woytonik The lives of the “circus freaks” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have to be excavated and reconstructed carefully. Despite obvious physical abnormalities, these people with disabilities did not become so-called freaks of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century “freak show” until they were made so through packaging, creative showmanship, and sometimes, total re-creation of their identities by themselves or savvy managers. Inasmuch as their freak pseudonyms might have preserved the opportunity to escape the sideshow and return to anonymity, freaks have proved challenging for historians to uncover. A real source problem exists because freaks worked in a profession that was dependent on exaggeration, grandiose advertising, and sometimes even falsification and illusion; it ranges from challenging to impossible to verify even simple information like actual given names. More frustrating is that performers often disappeared from the record once they left the sideshow circuit, disallowing analysis of their post-

192

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

circus lives. With information both difficult to authenticate and outright missing, the historian is forced to begin with a rather large disclaimer to the readership. In this piece, the information that freaks offered to the public is treated as a legitimate and invaluable source for analyzing how and why freaks came to be a cultural category in America between 1880 and 1930.1 Even when the freak show was dismantled as a mainstream form of entertainment, Progressive-era attitudes toward the performing disabled shaped American policy and social sensibilities about disabled personhood, motherhood, and reproduction for decades—indeed, sometimes for the entire lifetimes of the former freaks. This chapter stresses that the personas and corresponding materials created by freaks deserve attention in spite of potential inaccuracies because the American public, lawmakers, and reformers reacted to those personas beyond the cultural arena. By the 1910s freakery was increasingly considered inappropriate entertainment that corresponded with the perceived widespread social and moral ill Progressive Americans sought to reform. As a result, freaks amended their personas, as well as their personal and professional goals, and adapted to both extreme pressure and opportunities to live mainstream lives. Freaks were marginalized owing to their physical differences; at the same time, they held the American public captive in performance. There is much to be gleaned by examining their choices in the context of an acted conversation with reformers who waffled throughout the first decades of the twentieth century regarding whether to protect freaks from their public or the public from the freaks. Progressives presented freaks as a problem to the public, and the problem continued beyond the primacy of Progressive reformers’ social authority on morality and the state. Post-Progressive America contended with new economies, technologies, science, politics, and social expectations in the decades after 1920 but did not release the municipal and cultural grip on disabled persons’ lives. A famous image from a “pitch card” features a young girl with backward-bending knees and tells a story of late-nineteenth-century America

Mothering Monsters

193

and of society’s shifting and complicated attitudes toward difference. Ella Harper’s story is both unique to her experience and a model in terms of the limitations people with disabilities faced between 1880 and 1930. She was bound by the pressures of the sideshow industry to fit a niche—to become not only a “camel girl” but also the Camel Girl. Her cabinet card may have read, “I now intend to quit the Show Business and go to school and fit myself for some other occupation,” but Harper’s life beyond the show business is difficult to track and verify. Thirteen years old in 1886 and having already “traveled considerably in the Show Business for the last 4 years,” Harper had made a career of her physical difference, and attempts to downplay deformity to claim an average life were not guaranteed to be successful, as further case studies show (Eisenmann, “Ella Harper”). From Ella Harper’s cabinet card, it is known that she entered the show business as early as nine years of age, ostensibly under the wardship of a parent or guardian who saw opportunity for her to financially benefit from her disability. She found some success in this profession but aspired to something else, an occupation outside the show business or circus sideshow. That one can deduce so little is frustrating, but the extant information is representative of the information available about people working as freaks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: their lives were relatively undocumented outside of show business, but they wanted more and did meaningfully exist outside their circus-act roles. In the first half of the twentieth century, people with observable physical abnormalities tried to espouse a dual identity. Faced with discrimination and limited opportunities, they remade the social category of freak into a profit-making endeavor. At the same time, the freaks made claims to humanity. At the heart of the debate was the following question: Could abnormal people live normal lives? For decades this quandary would puzzle Americans, including proponents of reform movements who objected to both the asylum and the freak show as places to “put”

194

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the physically different while at the same time debating the societal merits and individual value of the disabled. This scrutiny was quickly focused on the relationship between physical difference and the American family. Contending with rapid urbanization, strains of evolutionary theory and eugenics, strong notions of gendered and racial appropriateness, and mounting pressures on existing social welfare programs, reformers struggled to reconcile childhood, womanhood, and mothering with persons advertising themselves as freaks.2 Progressives wanted the state to “mother” child freaks but were deeply nervous about women freaks’ ability and desire to become mothers themselves. As Progressive rhetoric tipped toward considering the disabled perpetual children in need of state or private oversight, freaks fought back by putting their normal lives on display, juxtaposing physical difference with ideological and behavioral similarities.

Becoming “Freaks”: The Child Freak in the Progressive-Era Circus The freak show came into existence as an organized, profit-making endeavor in America in the mid-nineteenth century, transplanted from a long, successful history in parts of Europe. Freaks born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came of professional age in the heyday of the circus, and many lived to experience the effects of a changing modern society. Between 1910 and 1930, the slow decline of the freak show in America had a splintering effect in the industry of freakery. With cultural institutions rejecting freaks as objects to display, the performers found themselves in uncharted waters. Some former freaks used this space to try to gain independence, to challenge social boundaries, or simply to live their lives. Though the 1920s concept of the freak show eventually fell out of favor, the freak show broadly conceived has lived on in American popular culture. Then and now, the relationship between freak shows

Mothering Monsters

195

and the public was always tenuous. The show had to entertain more than horrify, and organizers had to find acts that would have enough widespread appeal to generate a profit. As a result of this careful navigation, circus acts and freak shows became a barometer for public intrigue and often reflected pressing social and cultural questions. This created a cyclical effect, and popular shows and acts were replicated to capitalize on what was often a quickly passing public interest. Still, successful displays indicated major trends in American thought. When in 1836 P. T. Barnum sold tickets to the autopsy of a black woman named Joice Heth, whom he claimed was over 150 years old, he profited from both a growing interest in displayable medical science and a virulent curiosity in African-American and slave bodies (Reiss 8). The case of Heth’s display by Barnum, both while she was alive and after she passed away, exposes another issue in sideshows that would carry into the twentieth century: the degrees of the performers’ unfreedom. Whether or not Heth was legally classified as a slave, she had been effectively bought by Barnum from another sideshow manager. Managers used this method of procuring talent in different ways, but in the industry it was not unusual for operators to pay out for control of performer. This was an investment in a brand; it was often also a purchase of an individual. Managers used a variety of strategies to bind their performers to them. Children were especially vulnerable: their minor status was compounded by the prevailing social notion that disabled people required the constant care of others, often even when they had reached adulthood and when they demonstrated no cognitive or mental issues that would prevent self-care. This made freak children a particularly profitable venture. Daisy and Violet Hilton were conjoined twins born to a British barmaid but purchased soon after birth by Mary Hilton, who put them on the sideshow circuit. Daisy and Violet bore the same surname as their adoptive mother-manager. This relationship strengthened Mary Hilton’s control over the twins such that when Hilton died, the responsibility of

196

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

caring for the then adult Daisy and Violet fell to Hilton’s daughter and son-in-law. This direct transfer of control left little legal or cultural space for Daisy and Violet to proffer an alternative of self-sovereignty. The Hilton twins would not be able to claim independence until a scandal severed the ties with their guardians; their emancipation was situational, never guaranteed or inevitable (Bogdan 166–168). This adoption-management combination gave handlers such strong claims over the livelihoods and actions of circus performers that it was even practiced on adults. The Schneider family performed sideshow acts involving family members both of average size and of short stature in their native Germany. Through careful negotiation and pitch, American talent manager Bert Earles arranged for the immigration of Fritz and Frieda Schneider in 1914. They were later joined by siblings Elly and Hilda, after which the four little people were repackaged as a family unit of their own. The family was so ingratiated with their manager that, like the Hilton twins, they took on the same surname, Earles, which they would keep until his death. After 1930 the family billed themselves as the Dolls or the Doll Family. Their change of name indicates both a level of autonomy not afforded them under the management of Earles and an understanding of how their public viewed them or of what was likely to attract an audience (Cox 107). There was no standard operating procedure by which managers and talent established relationships, but the cases of the Hilton twins and the Earles Family show how managers could gain and maintain the upper hand. In both situations—the Hiltons being minors at the time of their first performance and contract, and the members of the SchneiderEarles-Doll Family being foreigners and seen as childlike owing to their stature—the performers were marginalized both because of their status as freaks and because of a secondary legal status that strengthened their managers’ control. This experience is consistent with the legal framework of Progressive America, in which children were a group selected for state intervention.

Mothering Monsters

197

Physically disabled people employed as freaks experienced a range of personal and professional freedoms, but for those who had been employed since childhood, like Ella Harper and the Hilton twins, the road to gaining total control of their lives was especially challenging. Child freaks were often controlled by managers who had an economic incentive to keep their wards in near-bondage. Circus, sideshow, and singleO (independent single-act shows) advertisements indicate that children were popular attractions and very desirable additions to a lineup. Despite being sought after, children rarely received preferential treatment or pay. Between displaying physical difference and being involved in an industry that traveled, child performers were denied access to school, as Ella Harper’s cabinet card makes clear. This discrimination in the education system incensed reformer Joseph Sullivan to the point of calling it “the most damnable neglect that the United States as a nation has ever perpetrated” (Sullivan 11). Children were at high risk for abuse in an industry that assumed and expected exploitation. If child performers’ families were not directly involved in managing their careers, a handler often stepped in with promises to care for the child while allowing him or her to make money. Building upon a growing interest in general social reform, Progressive organizations as well as churches and local vigilance groups first took aim at sideshow practices by pointing out the misuse of child performers. Urban children’s societies and police departments intervened in cases such as that of Harry Eggert. Eggert, whom one newspaper claimed was under eleven years old while another put his age at fourteen, was nonetheless underage and performing in a freak show in Brooklyn, New York. Newspaper accounts of the seizure of Eggert by Children’s Society agents reflect both sympathy and humor. Harry is described by one publication as “the innocent, helpless boy” who had to be rescued “from the hands of a manager of a freak show”; another, longer article gives a more colorful description of the situation:

198

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity There was a great craning of necks in the Children’s Court in Brooklyn when the name of Harry Eggert was called, and the fattest boy who ever appeared in that or any other tribunal in the borough moved to the bar. All the other boys and girls in the court giggled with delight at the sight of Harry, who is 14 years old, weighs 365 pounds, and declares himself to be the “champion fat boy of the world.” … Speaking of himself, he said he didn’t go to school because he feared that if a fire should occur he could not get out of the building in time. “But,” he said with a smile that spread itself over his expansive countenance, “I can write any word in the English language; that is, I can write it if some one spells it for me. I have never been sick in my life, and I like the cold weather. But you can bet I know what it is to be fat when summer comes around.” (“Too Fat for School” 10)

Progressives would take issue with two matters mentioned in the newspaper report of Eggert’s court appearance: the deviance of his body as “champion fat boy of the world” and the very common problem of children not being enrolled in school. Reformers protesting the treatment of children in sideshow acts often used the physical condition of the circus arenas, performer housing, and the minors themselves as excuses for having children removed from the show or even for having the shows shut down, if only temporarily. That the parents or guardians of the children were often involved in operating the freak shows complicated the issue of removing child performers. In 1911, the Morning Oregonian ran a report about a child “sick, unwashed, and tortured by flies to the point of madness” whom authorities removed from his father’s freak show and “turned over to the Juvenile Court” (“Flies” 9). The child, like Eggert, had ties to the freak show and was alleged to be physically neglected, and over time these factors became linked in Progressive-era thinking about the proper care of minors. These were not isolated incidents: child performers made good poster children for groups opposing child labor or advocating more parental oversight, to be enforced by municipal governments. Progressives were

Mothering Monsters

199

firmly entrenched as advocates of urban housing, health, and parental strategy reform through the settlement-house movement and political agitation for sanitation, labor, and education regulation. When intervening in child freakery employment on a case-by-case basis proved problematic because of familial involvement in the alleged exploitation or because guardian-managers were fighting to protect their “investments,” some reformers instead attacked the entire premise of the freak show as damaging to the American family’s sense of morality. Here, too, they ran into enforcement problems. The circus, for its part, had “self-consciously defined itself as respectable and moral” entertainment (Kline 11). With the exception of a few exhibits marketed to adult men—notably the “cooch shows,” which promoters claimed were dance performances by exotic women from other cultures—circus impresarios told Americans that the big top was fun for every member of the family. Because the circus was advertised as the sum of its parts, single-O or traveling freak shows were included under the umbrella of wholesome entertainment. The freaks were as much a part of Barnum and Bailey’s big top as the elephants and the clowns were, and the freak show’s natural association with the circus provides some explanation as to why freak shows, whether real, faked, or some combination of the two, were popular displays at local fairs, school carnivals, and charity fundraisers. In a common lineup, a fundraiser at the University of Pennsylvania to benefit children at a local settlement house offered “burlesque dancers, comedians, the famous Mask and Wig Jazz Band and an Italian quartette of international repute,” but even so, “[t]he Campus Freak Show proved the principal attraction. The features were a fat man, a wild man, a strong man, a glass eater and a bearded woman” (“Students Hold Carnival” 18). At the same time reformers began to question the morality of displaying live humans as entertainment, circus managers and charity heads alike capitalized on the popularity of freaks. Reformers then were caught in a microcosm of the problem they were attempting to expose: sometimes freak shows might be the downfall of American society and profoundly damaging to

200

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

children (both employees and patrons), but other times they might be acceptable (as a source of funds for benevolent societies and good works). Whereas adult performers—especially those still trapped in a ward system—faced discrimination and poor conditions, reformers were less likely to make arguments against their exploitation, as they had done for child performers. Instead, some voiced general opposition to the freak show as local entertainment by citing its propensity for lawless activity and claiming that it caused social disruption in the community. Two men who “opened a snake and freak show on Public Square” in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, were arrested and fined three dollars after being charged with “disturbing the peace of the community” when “Public Square merchants complained about the noise and language of the ‘barkers’” (“‘Barkers’ Annoyed” 7). Other shows were closed down for violating local laws and ordinances. In 1910, a Portland-area freak show was forced to close when “Constable Wagner … served notice upon the proprietor of the freak show on Sixth Street, near Washington, that he must close, and furthermore he placed under arrest Charles M. Abraham, manager of the show.” Police action occurred because residents argued that the “show cheapened the district” and were empowered to arrest Abraham by “an Oregon statute which forbids the exhibition of freaks” (“Freaks Forbidden” 5). Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, the American public struggled with how, where, and why freaks should be displayed. Circus managers had always employed a revolving door of talent to reflect the public’s changing interest; when freak shows went out of fashion, they simply revamped their acts and their advertising to focus on newer acts. Organizers of fairs and carnivals who chose to remove freak shows from the entertainment lineup often did so loudly and couched their decision in the language of progress. In 1915, Dr. Charles McCarthy told the convention of the American Association of Exposition Managers that “the day of the ‘bearded lady,’ the ‘human skeleton,’ and other such show freaks is passing” and urged their replacement with “industrial and vocational

Mothering Monsters

201

expositions which will tend to educate rather than to amuse” (“Freak Show Passing” 11). This sentiment echoed an organized attempt to cut out freak shows the preceding year. A newspaper article entitled “Fair Association Cuts Out Freaks, Educational Features and Other High Class Attraction Will Be Offered” reported that president of the American Association of Fairs and Expositions, J. C. Simpson, had put a stop to freak displays at state fairs, opting for “educational features and exhibitions of varied character” (11). But one sideshow manager offered an alternative explanation for why he believed freaks would always hold appeal: Don’t never let ’em tell you, son, that freaks of natur’ has lost their hold on the public when they’re handled right. The freak show is based on human natur’ and whatever’s based on human natur’ is bound to be a winner. People been payin’ money to see the unoosal every since the Year 1 and they’re goin’ to keep right on … They was the start of the show game and they can’t put ’em off the lot now. No sir, son, they got to change human natur’ first. (“Pos-i-tive-ly, No” 7)

Becoming “Normal”: The Progressive Effect on Freaks’ Daily Lives Human nature may have been unlikely to change, but sideshow freaks found themselves challenging the very foundation of how society defined human as opportunities for entertainment work steadily dried up. Out of regular or lucrative circus work, the Camel Girl, the Dolls, and the Pretty Grown-Together Twins struggled to determine what kind of lives Ella Harper, part of the Schneider family, and Daisy and Violet Hilton could lead. Still excluded from many of the “normal” American experiences, former freaks were left without their old home in the bigtop sideshow community with no clear route to a new one. Progressive reformers had some success in promoting quilting displays over the disabled in cages. Their platform had never been wholehearted accep-

202

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tance and education about physical disability, so the freak show was reconstituted in American cultural life. It is impossible to generalize about one experience of sideshow work because even a quick survey of performers turns up people essentially forced by circumstance (in some cases, wardship or legal bondage) into the circus, on one hand, and physically disabled individuals who saw the circus as the best opportunity for financial advancement, on the other, along with a variety of stories that fall between the extremes. But because the rise and fall of the freak show—and later other forms of displaying difference—reflected American cultural standards and values, trends do emerge regarding the ways freaks could enter society as “normal” and how they could not. For freaks, especially those who maintained connections to the entertainment industry, balancing the desire to be seen as normal with the need to be viewed as abnormal was a constant challenge For freaks to claim total normality was to close the door to their livelihood: performance and display of their difference. Yet freaks were living their lives alongside their careers in entertainment. Circus performers had to make strategic decisions about when to emphasize difference and when to downplay it. Personal accounts are particularly revealing on this point. First, some circus performers made overt references to participation, actual or desired, in normal American activities, even those precluded by the nature of freakery work. Ella Harper hoped to leave the circus and get an education while she was young; at the tender age of thirteen, she had already decided she needed an occupation beyond being the Camel Girl. Others experienced the opposite trajectory, entering sideshow work after education had been denied them. Born with ichthyosis, a condition that results in scaly and excessive skin and minimal hair growth, Esther Blackmon made her career first as part of a double act with her “twin” (actually, older) brother Allen, who shared her rare disorder, before taking over the show as a single act. Blackmon had aspirations of being a schoolteacher but was forced to drop out of school as a teenager because the principal feared her and Allen’s condition was

Mothering Monsters

203

contagious. Discrimination did not stop Blackmon from pursuing the hallmarks of normal American life, but it did close doors to traditional professions. The relationship between performance and normalcy was more than simply a matter of access, however. Even in situations where sideshow employment was seemingly the only avenue open to freaks, they did not only emphasize the physical difference that resulted in such ostracism. This was especially true after the early 1930s. The decline of the sideshow in the big-top circus left space for freaks still in the performance industry to reconsider their acts and what they wanted to present to the public. Performers who established single-O shows were no longer bound by fitting their act into a lineup or satisfying the demands of show organizers; very basically, they had only to please their audience and themselves. Some performers, like Esther Blackmon, sought to display facets of their everyday life in the show. After facing intolerance early in life, Blackmon utilized the remnants of interest in single-O shows to support herself and, later, her family. In doing so, she became part of a revolution of circus acts. As freaks separated from managers and sought more control over their acts and finances, they used the stage to put their normal lives on display. Esther Blackmon’s was truly a family act. Her husband was her manager, and her children appeared with her on stage in a show advertised as “The World’s Strangest Mother.” The “strangeness” of Esther as a mother was limited to her appearance; in all other ways she physically and emotionally nurtured her children, on stage and off. Nowhere was this clearer than in a pamphlet she released. Half promotional, half educational, the card features two pictures of Esther. In the first, she is posed in a bikini and displaying her unusual skin and baldness. The second is a standard portrait of a family at the beach: Esther, in beachwear and a turban, is flanked by her six children. On the left, her signature appears; the right side is a testimonial entitled “History of Esther Blackmon.” The word normal appears four times on the card and is used

204

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

to persuade readers that despite her physical difference, Blackmon led “a normal and happy life.”3 The card also makes scientific claims about Blackmon’s normalcy. It gives a family history, listing “three normal brothers and one normal sister,” in addition to “one brother like me,” making clear that Blackmon herself produced “six normal children.” The text notes the hereditary and incurable nature of ichthyosis, which appears capitalized. The card speaks to growing scientific interest in abnormalities while reassuring the public that the condition is not contagious (the belief that held Blackmon out of school) and that she could not have done anything to prevent or treat her illness. How could Esther Blackmon make a career of performing normalcy? Her strategy may have been a marked departure from acts of the past, but she was not alone in displaying her abilities rather than her disability. Blackmon and likeminded others profited from a pervasive social question: What is “normal womanhood”? Further, can a woman with scales care for her children? Can a woman who makes a living displaying physical difference also be a good wife? By inviting audiences into their lives, performers like Blackmon and her family further reduced the space between normal and abnormal. It was a calculated risk. Without some distance, this avenue of work would disappear. Performers incorporating degrees of normalcy into their attractions had to keep enough focus on physical difference for intrigue; Esther Blackmon had to release a promotional photo along with the image of her family to fulfill her claim that she was “the world’s strangest mother.” By performing normalcy and attempting to find common ground with other women, female freaks, their managers, and their acts further solidified social expectations of American womanhood. Their need to strike balance between normality and disability mirrored Progressives’ paradoxical need to normalize attitudes toward freaks while categorizing them as different enough from the general public to warrant state intrusion into their lives. “Armless wonder” Ann Leak was often

Mothering Monsters

205

photographed in modified clothing of the popular, conservative style, at once showing off her physical difference and entrenching the standard of appropriate Victorian clothing. Bearded women and half-men, half-women (now nearly all understood to have been female hermaphrodite impersonators) further pushed the limitations of turn-of-the century conceptions of sex and gender (Davis 120). Whereas Esther Blackmon used family life as the basis for her act and subsequent claims to normalcy, Ann Leak opted to profit from interest in her disability in another way. In 1871 she published an autobiography to tell her life story. Her writing focuses on her personal qualities: her perseverance, her talents, and most notably, her religious faith. Far from a promotional work, Leak’s book focuses on her actual, human life instead of on her identity as an armless wonder. A foreword explains the motivation for writing and distributing the text, designed to invoke sympathy instead of offense: Miss Leak, in presenting this, her autobiography, to the public, feels no little delicacy at seeking, to make the deprivation which she suffers in the entire absence of arms at her birth, the occasion of gain to her, by gratifying the eye, oftentimes, of a curious public; though averse to it at first, and till circumstances, changing, necessitated such a course. (Leak 1) Leak, in her autobiography and in her public life, presented herself as a pious Victorian woman. The idea that an ill or disabled person might gain in religiosity through adversity was certainly not a new concept to Americans. That notion did, however, complicate the matters of determining how human freaks were and of defining personhood. If Ann Leak was not as much a person because she lacked arms but was a better model of Victorian womanhood than most, what was her true status? Freaks, especially those whose disabilities were visibly obvious and those who sought to profit from that disability, pushed the limits of social definitions of personhood through identifying with important traditions

206

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

and morals that had appealed to the Progressives and created common ground with their audiences. The social importance of establishing a family in the early twentieth century provided male and female freaks an opportunity for personal, if not public, normalcy. It is likely that far more physically disabled people married and had children than historians can trace. Even when famous sideshow acts did not include the family, performers often released promotional photographs that displayed both their disability and their family. Ann Leak did so in a photograph with her “normal” husband and son. Instead of being staged to hide her lack of arms, the photograph prominently displays Leak; she is even holding an open pair of scissors with her toes. Alternative ability was the other side of Leak’s disability: she was a reserved, resourceful wife and mother. Eli Bowen, born with feet but no legs, joined the circus at age thirteen as the “legless acrobat.” For having chosen to put his disability on display, Eli worked hard to prove that his life was otherwise normal. He was routinely photographed with his able-bodied wife, Mattie, and a number of his four sons. His wife and children are often described as normal on cabinet cards. Having Mattie and his children on display along with his deformity tempered the degree to which people found him disabled; even his performance handle indicates that, though legless, Eli Bowen was a world-class acrobat (Eisenmann, “Eli Bowen”). Between 1880 and the 1930s, the American public maintained an interest in the bodies and lives of freaks without fully accepting them into society as equal members. This was liminal territory. Progressive reformers were willing to intervene and argue on behalf of cruelly treated physically and mentally disabled people but still viewed these people as subjects needing care, protection, and oversight. In a similar vein, people increasingly grew uncomfortable with depositing nickels in jars to enter a tent and stand ten feet away from a tattooed man or a legless wonder, but photography and film provided critical distance between the viewer and the viewed that allowed the entertainment

Mothering Monsters

207

factor of freakery to continue when it might otherwise have been shuttered by arguments of impropriety and inhumanity. As the Progressive movement began to collapse and certain reforms (notably, Prohibition) were dismantled, the question of the relationship between the state, the freak, and the public persisted. Many freaks struggled to make a living for themselves in the changing world of entertainment in the 1920s and 1930s. They also struggled with politics and a public that retained many messages of the moral Progressives and assumed government intervention in certain circumstances. Daisy and Violet Hilton, whose mother-manager had carefully crafted the image of the “pretty” conjoined twins, continued to make a name for themselves on the vaudeville circuit. The twins always appeared in the latest fashions and displayed promotional posters in bathing suits and dresses that flaunted their conjoined deviant bodies and their embrace of controversial revealing styles. If the public had reluctantly accepted that “armless wonder” Ann Leak could be pious, that “camel girl” Ella Harper could go to school with their children, and that “alligator-skinned” Esther Blackmon could be a good mother, they struggled—ultimately unsuccessfully—with Daisy’s and Violet’s overt sexuality. The perpetuation of the “pretty freaks” persona helped the Hiltons early on; they continued to be billed as a higher-class attraction and as legitimate actors and musicians. In their womanhood, the focus on their sexual attractiveness hurt their cause. After their mother-manager’s death left them trapped in the ward system, the wife of their new manager alleged that one or both of the twins had engaged in an affair with her husband. This scandal separated the Hilton twins from their guardians but left them with other challenges, including an inability to obtain a marriage license from the court and deep public misgivings about them. At once fascinated and horrified, the public weighed in on the personal lives of the Hiltons. Daisy and Violet could not separate the stage from the everyday, and their audience had decided that neither aspect of their lives was normal (Bogdan 133). The Hiltons recognized

208

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

this: in 1951 they starred in an exploitation film loosely inspired by these events entitled Chained for Life. The plot involved one twin shooting the other’s lover and the judge in a conundrum about whether to incarcerate both or let the pair go free, a commentary on whether justice could be compatible with conjoined existence. What became of these circus freaks? Sometimes the answer is known, and sometimes it is not. Ella Harper may well have left the show business as she stated she intended to, because she does not appear in the records after 1886. Daisy and Violet Hilton left the business after being abandoned by yet another manager; they settled in North Carolina and worked in a grocery store until their deaths. The Doll family remained in the public eye, eventually amassing sizeable savings and purchasing a house. None married, and all lived together (but apart from the rest of their family in Germany) for the remainder of their lives. Still, many details remain unknown, especially those having to do with these subjects’ perceptions of their world or worlds. Whereas Ann Leak provided an autobiography, and Esther Blackmon’s family retained relics of her show days with loving reminiscences of their mother and grandmother, these insights are few and far between and not without their own interpretive difficulties. Countless more people with physical disabilities may never appear in any existing historical records. Freaks enter the record so often because their images live on in films, photographs, advertisements, and legends and stories. But it is their freak persona that is most easily identified, not their lives as citizens and their sentiments as humans. This was the problem 1920s and 1930s America had to deal with. In reacting to freaks, Progressive America inherently decided that the physically different were worth attention. That attention ranged from extreme paternalism to a conscious avoidance with occasional curiosity extending the natural life of the freak show in various forms. To some extent, it is an issue modern America is still dealing with. There is no clear watershed moment in disability rights. Even the Amer-

Mothering Monsters

209

icans with Disabilities Act is limited in scope and application, and its establishment, though important, does little to indicate when Americans began to believe it necessary to pass such an act. And with the proliferation of both tolerance programs and television shows along the lines of the Discovery Channel’s Incredibly Small: Kenadie’s Story and Half Man Half Tree, Americans are still struggling with when to look and when to look away.4 Freak show performers who continued in the entertainment industry after the decline of the sideshow waged a battle for normalcy in the public arena. They were sometimes hampered and other times helped by the social and intellectual effects of the Progressive movement, which left a cultural legacy that far outlasted its organized reform efforts. The freaks proved unafraid to make claims to normalcy and full humanity by appealing to the hearts of their audiences and by challenging prevailing notions of ability. They were sometimes successful and sometimes not, but their efforts made clear that freaks were not living in an insular world of the big top. They were simply living.

210

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Notes 1. In choosing to use the term freak, I seek to explore its historical significance as a career in the United States between 1880 and 1930. It corresponds to the prevailing method of performance, the so-called freak show, as well as to the title employees used to brand themselves as performers. The term, then and now, has derogatory connotations that are important to note. Here, discussion of the term is limited to its definition as a person engaged in the public performance of physical difference, whether congenital, obtained, or falsified, for profit through entertainment. All of the case studies discussed in this chapter involve people employed in freakery. In my analysis of the case studies, I have opted to use modern language etiquette in describing the bodies and disabilities of these individuals while preserving the language patterns and usage of the past in quotations. 2. The argument that the freak identity was malleable implicitly acknowledges that disability intersects with gender, race, and class, among other categories. More important for the historical perspective, the argument examines how freaks sought to meet the dominant expectations for behavior and describes how those norms were set. This chapter, in focusing on motherhood and mothering, blends gender and disability discourse of the early twentieth century but is influenced by recent discussion of social contingency, historicity, and identity. The essays in Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky’s edited volume, The New Disability History: American Perspectives, provide case studies of people and groups termed disabled engaging the political, legal, and social constraints placed upon them based on their diagnoses. Lauri Umansky has linked race, sexual orientation, and gender expectations in modern United States history (see Umansky). For more on modern social contingency and queer theory, see Green. For the merits of gender studies in historical inquiry, see Scott. 3. This souvenir card has been made available by Esther Blackmon’s family on a number of sideshow websites. 4. The Learning Channel (a Discovery company) has aired a number of specials and series focusing on physical difference, including several on Kenadie Jourdin-Bromley, a young girl with primordial dwarfism, and Dede Koswara, an Indonesian man with a puzzling skin condition result-

Mothering Monsters

211

ing in tree-bark-like growth. These programs (and others like them can be found at www.tlc.com (e.g., The Little Couple, and My Shocking Story).

Chapter 9

Hypersaurus Rex Recombinant Reality in Jurassic Park Randy Laist Donna Haraway compared living in the 1990s to inhabiting “the womb of a pregnant monster,” so it is fitting that one of the highest-grossing movies of that decade, Jurassic Park, addresses the anxiety associated with monstrous generativity. Haraway’s image evokes a correspondence between the manner in which a fetus develops according to the inscrutable dictates of its own genetic code and the manner in which contemporary reality shapes itself out of the prerogatives of its own operational logic. Haraway wrote, “In the belly of the local/global monster in which I am gestating, often called the postmodern world, global technology appears to denature everything, to make everything a malleable matter of strategic decisions and mobile production and reproduction processes” (“Promises” 295). Haraway’s wombscape is a terrain in which every aspect of existence has been preemptively constituted in terms of a monstrous plasticity—an infinite multiplicity of novel forms, each expressing a variation on the same underlying technoscientific imperative. Jean Baudrillard described a similar condition when he

214

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

asserted, “At the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal” (Simulations 146). Both Haraway and Baudrillard have characterized the postmodern subject not as a humanist Adam, created in the immutable image of an eternally fixed God, but as a transhuman fetus, gestating in an amniotic stew of signs, codes, and artifacts and metamorphosing into some unguessable nth-generation variety of monster. As monstrous embodiments of genetic technologies, digital computation, and commercial calculation, the dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park provide a compelling representation of the kind of postmodern monstrosity described by Haraway and Baudrillard. Although the plot of Spielberg’s movie closely follows the story line of the 1990 Michael Crichton novel on which the film is based, the power of the movie’s innovative technical effects, along with Spielberg’s adolescent admiration for the creatures that these effects bring to life, has the effect of marginalizing Crichton’s critique of genetic engineering, exchanging the novelist’s quaint humanist objections to hubristic science in favor of the filmmaker’s celebratory embrace of postmodern monstrosity. The postmodern variety of monstrosity on display in Jurassic Park is distinct from the kind of psychoanalytic monstrosity theorized by Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed. Although the ability of the all-female population of primeval animals in Jurassic Park to bear offspring lends itself to Creed’s description (in a book published the same year in which Spielberg’s film was released) of “[t]he archaic mother” as “the parthenogenic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end” (17), neither Crichton nor Spielberg played up the typical horror-movie effects (bodily fluids, darkness, womb-like spaces, transgressive behavior) that Creed has associated with the monstrous-feminine. Rather than depicting monstrous reproductivity in the horrific mode, Crichton and particularly Spielberg have transplanted this theme into the genre of the adventure story. Spielberg’s

Hypersaurus Rex

215

movie is bloodless, brightly lit, spatially expansive, and good clean family fun. Like several other avatars of monstrosity discussed in this volume —Haraway’s cyborgs as described by Alistair Brown, the algorithmic zombies described by Stephanie Boluk, and the transhuman scientists described by April Miller, for example—the spawn of Jurassic Park represent a postmodern variety of monstrosity in which the stagey paraphernalia of wounds and gore have been superseded by portrayals of monstrosity that disclose the true essence of the monstrous as the runaway self-replication of a code. Such postmodern iterations of monstrosity bypass the particularities of flesh and gender to depict the monstrous as a disembodied ecstasy of renegade self-propagation. Whereas Crichton’s novel dramatizes a conventional warning about the perniciousness of such viral monstrosity, Spielberg’s movie represents an attempt to purge the code of its association with horror and to reformulate it as a metaphor for a humanist kind of technotranscendence. From a distance, the monsters of Jurassic Park look like dinosaurs, but Crichton’s novel makes clear that the animals of Jurassic Park are not exactly “real” dinosaurs. Early in the book, the paleontologist Alan Grant asks Jurassic Park’s chief genetic engineer, Henry Wu, how the park’s scientists can tell whether the dinosaurs they produce are equivalent to the dinosaurs that actually existed 65 million years ago. After all, not only has the park’s dinosaur’s genetic material been patched together from fragmentary strands of significantly deteriorated DNA and supplemented where necessary with DNA sequences from frogs, but their genetic material has also been modified to make the animals patentable and to make them lysine dependent as a mechanism for controlling their behavior. Moreover, the park’s dinosaurs are being hatched in the absence of the sociobehavioral and ecological context that they had evolved to inhabit. The best reply Wu can give to Grant’s query is to concede that “it is a bit of a paradox. Eventually, I hope paleontologists such as yourself will compare our animals with the fossil record to verify the developmental sequence” (114).

216

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Grant’s question seems to challenge Wu’s naïve faith in the simple mimeticism of his dinosaur project, however, and in the next chapter Wu raises the issue of the dinosaurs’ authenticity to the park’s impresario and chief executive, John Hammond. The dialogue in this scene expresses the unfamiliarity of the new ontological configuration represented by the creatures to which Wu has given birth. Wu begins the conversation by insisting that “[t]he dinosaurs we have now are real … but in certain ways they are unsatisfactory. Unconvincing” (121). Wu proposes rewriting the dinosaurs’ genome to make them conform more readily to audience’s expectations. When Hammond stands by his park’s marketing boast that “[t]he dinosaurs we have now are real,” however, Wu interrupts him to clarify that they are “not exactly” real. “The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past —or at least a version of the past” (122). Hammond emphatically rejects Wu’s suggestion that they reengineer the dinosaurs in the interest of safety and aesthetics: “Then the dinosaurs wouldn’t be real.” Goaded on by Hammond’s obstinacy, Wu is finally driven to articulate the position exactly opposite the one with which he had begun the conversation: “But [the dinosaurs are] not real now … There isn’t any reality here” (122). Wu can be forgiven for his confusion; not only is his understanding of the ontological status of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs evolving in unpredictable ways, but the mode of being characteristic of these creatures is one that is inherently slippery and hybridized, partaking of both nature and culture, both illusion and reality, both invention and discovery. In his struggle to understand the products of his genetic engineering, Wu refers to more primitive technologies of reproduction, such as cinema —“visitors will think the dinosaurs look speeded up, like film running too fast” (121)—and photography—“[t]he DNA of the dinosaurs was like old photographs that had been retouched, basically the same as the original but in some places repaired and clarified and, as a result—” (122). Both analogies position the dinosaurs as mediated entities, figures at one remove from the world human beings think of as real. These creatures are unique among media entities, however, in that they are imaginary

Hypersaurus Rex

217

figures with real fangs and claws, stomping through the real world with their undeniable physical bulkiness and devastating lethality. Wu never finishes his thought regarding the effect that touching up a photograph has on the relationship between the photograph and reality, perhaps because Wu’s own comprehension of the novel implications of mutant ontology is still itself undeveloped. Hammond’s paradoxical insistence that the animals Wu invents for him be “real” reflects Umberto Eco’s observation in Travels in Hyperreality that “the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (8). For Eco, the definitive instance of this phenomenon is the Disney theme park, and Hammond and Wu’s argument about improving the dinosaurs to increase their entertainment value seems deliberately to allude to Eco’s observation that a “real crocodile can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding, but Disneyland tells us that faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands … Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can” (44). In Crichton’s novel, Grant initially assesses Hammond’s affable persona by reflecting that “John Hammond’s about as sinister as Walt Disney” (42), and that John Arnold, the systems engineer in control of Jurassic Park’s computer network, had “helped build Disney World.” The reality-distortion-effect that Eco associated with Disneyland’s animatronic crocodiles is amplified by the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, which are in fact real animals in some sense of the word, even if they are not exactly the real animals they are being marketed as. The question of their reality does not refer to their physical makeup (as animatronic crocs can be easily distinguished from biological ones) but penetrates to the very root of their being. Jurassic Park is therefore a kind of Disneyland raised to the nth power in which the ontological warping perceived by Eco goes viral, permeating the flesh of the natural world itself. In this sense, Jurassic Park takes Eco’s concept of hyperreality in the same direction as Baudrillard, who has interpreted Disneyland not

218

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

as a freakish deformity in the landscape of American reality but as a secret window into the soul of American reality itself. In Baudrillard’s formulation, “Disneyland exists in order to hide the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland … Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (Simulacra and Simulation 12). Crichton’s novel suggests a similar theory about the universalization of the hyperreal condition through John Arnold’s contention that “the entire world was increasingly described by the metaphor of the theme park” (138). It is Jurassic Park’s resident postmodern theorist, Ian Malcolm, however, who is most vocal in describing Jurassic Park in terms reminiscent of Baudrillardian analytics. According to Malcolm, “a zoo is not a model for this park. This park is attempting something far more ambitious than that. Something much more akin to making a space station on earth” (90). Malcolm uses the metaphor of a satellite to express the sense in which the environment being engineered in Jurassic Park is something outside the terrestrial bounds of the various categories—of history, gravity, understandability—that humans associate with terrestrial existence. Baudrillard was fond of applying the same metaphor of an orbital habitat to describe the hyperreal lifeworld, as in his description of “[t]he satellitization of the real, or what I call the ‘hyperrealism of simulation’: the elevation of the domestic universe to a spatial power, to a spatial metaphor, with the satellitization of the two-room-kitchen-and-bath put into orbit with the last lunar module” (“Ecstasy” 129). More fundamentally, Malcolm’s critique of Jurassic Park, like Baudrillard’s critique of postmodernity, focuses on the manner in which its architects have misconstrued the ontological status of their creation. “Jurassic Park is not the real world,” Malcolm insists. “It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world. In that sense, it’s a true park, rather like a Japanese formal garden. Nature manipulated to be more natural than the real thing, if you will” (133). The aspiration that Jurassic Park be more natural

Hypersaurus Rex

219

than nature echoes a common Baudrillardian trope according to which hyperreal entities strive to improve upon what they simulate. In a typical instance, Baudrillard characterized hyperreality as “the truer than true, the more beautiful than beautiful, the realer than real … Imagine the true that has absorbed all the energy of the false: there you have simulation” (Fatal Strategies 27). It seems evident that Crichton is familiar with Baudrillard’s writing and has drawn on his analysis to suggest that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park represent not just an irresponsible use of new technologies but also a fundamental violation in the DNA of reality itself. In fact, Jurassic Park’s narrative juxtaposition of the common Baudrillardian themes of cloning and theme parks would be enough to signify a reference to the clown prince of postmodernism. Although the middlebrow genre of the techno-thriller that is Crichton’s milieu would seem to be far removed from the high theory of French intellectuals, Crichton’s unique gimmick as a writer has always been to provide his audience with not only a story but also an education in a subject that is slightly beyond the layperson’s ken. Jurassic Park’s narrative is interspersed with Malcolm’s lectures on the folly of “four hundred years of modern science,” an ongoing critique of Enlightenment positivity that provides a kind of crash course in poststructuralism, alongside the novel’s other lessons in genetic engineering and computer programming. Malcolm’s variety of pop poststructuralism, moreover, is vindicated when his dire predictions about Jurassic Park come true, a confirmation whose effects are not isolated to the disaster at Isla Nublar but which redounds upon the world inhabited by the consumer of bestselling techno-thrillers. In an introduction to the novel that contextualizes the fictional narrative of Jurassic Park among historical facts about the development of commercial genetic technology enterprises, Crichton quoted an uncited “observer” who authoritatively informs readers that “[b]iotechnology is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, our very bodies. Nothing will ever be the same again. It’s literally going to change the face of the planet” (ix). The intermixing of genetic science and capi-

220

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

talist enterprise “has proceeded so rapidly … that its dimensions and implications are hardly understood at all” (ix). The monsters being bred on Isla Nublar, that is, are destined to escape the narrative space of science fiction and proliferate unpredictably among human beings. The inevitability that the dinosaurs will escape the island—that the mutation in the genome of reality will turn cancerous and metastasize into the ecology of the mainland—reflects the phenomenon Baudrillard described as “the virulence of the code” (Simulacra and Simulation 101). “Soft technologies”—including not only cloning but also marketing, media, and the more subtle mechanisms of capitalist enterprise—escape the laboratory and intermix with the natural world, they escape the spaces of fiction and hybridize reality, and they escape the category of otherness and reconstitute subjectivity itself. Like Baudrillard, Crichton has identified cloning as one of many technologies of virtualization responsible for splicing reality and artifice into a new ontological synthesis, a hyperreality, and Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs are really hypersaurs, entrancing their human prey with a mixture of fascination and terror in the awesome power of the latest technologies of mimesis. Spielberg’s film adaptation of Crichton’s novel dispenses with the introductory warnings about the imminent threat that biotechnology poses to the substance of the living world. It also eliminates the dialogue about the hyperreal status of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, replacing the novel’s insistence on the unnaturalness of the dinosaurs with a fervent conviction of their authenticity. When the paleontologist Grant, observing a flock of galloping dinosaurs, breathlessly pronounces, “They do move in herds,” the movie’s audience receives expert confirmation that these dinos are the real deal, appearing and behaving just as prehistoric dinos did. This explicit contrast to the skepticism expressed by the novel’s Grant is emblematic of a wider tendency in Spielberg’s movie to treat its audience to the same spectacle promised by Hammond’s theme park: Real Live Dinosaurs. Spielberg’s movie promises to do with computer animation what John Hammond’s dinosaur park tries to do with genetic technologies in such a way that, rather than

Hypersaurus Rex

221

adapting Crichton’s novel, Spielberg’s movie acts as a reconstruction of Hammond’s theme park. The only difference is that rather than constructing his monsters from genetic code, Spielberg used computer code, enacting the same conflation of cybernetic technologies that Baudrillard identified when he wrote of “the new operational configuration” that “[d]igitality is its metaphysical principle … and DNA its prophet” (Simulations 103). Whereas Crichton’s novel merely describes the revolutionary potential of genetic technologies to reshape the world, Spielberg’s movie actually enacts the reshaping of the world through its own unleashing of groundbreaking computer-generated imagery. George Lucas expressed his estimation of the significance of Jurassic Park’s accomplishment in terms reminiscent of Ian Malcolm: “A major gap had been crossed, and things were never going to be the same” (qtd. in Shone, 218). In the same way that genetic technologies threaten to implode the coordinates of art and nature, Jonathan Crary has described the manner in which “[t]he formalization and diffusion of computergenerated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual ‘spaces’ radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography, and television” (1). Computer-generated imagery (CGI) manipulates the natural pattern of the reproduction of images in the same way that genetic engineering manipulates the reproduction of chromosomes. In both cases, the mutation, once introduced into the world, spreads virally, so that after the germ has been released one will never know whether the corn one is eating is genetically modified or whether the pictures one sees are CGI. All of which is to say that Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is a breeding ground for hypersauroid entities, one of many grounds zero in the hyperrealization of late-twentieth-century consciousness. The film is not a conventional, literal adaptation but a kind of experiential immersion in the book’s theme of runaway simulation. The plot of the novel is essentially preserved, along with the apocalyptic trajectory, but whereas Crichton’s dinosaurs embody a hubristic folly that should never have been wrought, Spielberg’s dinosaurs are titillating, wondrous, educational, and indul-

222

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

gently spectacular. The critical perspective in the movie is sidelined in favor of a mood of rapt awe, resulting in a filmic experience that actually captures an aspect of the hyperreal experience that cannot be rendered through the media of theory or critique: the sense of ecstatic absorption in the hyperreal lifeworld, the unreflective immediacy of hyperreal vertigo. Whereas Crichton’s novel encourages a skeptical attitude toward hyperreal technologies, Spielberg’s film endorses its audience’s passivity before its onslaught of hyperreal imagery. In this sense, Jurassic Park the film provides a stark example of Baudrillard’s contention that “[f]ilm no longer allows you to question. It questions you, and directly” (Simulations 119). If the conventional, modernist film serves as a window opening out into fictional space, the postmodern blockbuster, a genre Spielberg single-handedly invented in 1975, acts as a rabbit hole into fictional space. Several aspects typical of a Steven Spielberg blockbuster work together to achieve this effect—most notably, the simplified structure of narrative desire, the extradiegetic marketing, and the mobility of Spielberg’s camera. In Jurassic Park, each of these dials is cranked to eleven in a way that makes Jurassic Park like a Spielberg movie squared, like an immersion in an immersion, as if there were something about the monsters at the center of Crichton’s narrative that caused Spielberg to realize that his technique had discovered its perfect subject. It is also well known that producers at Universal Pictures would agree to finance Schindler’s List only under the condition that Spielberg shoot Jurassic Park for them first, hedging their gamble on a black-and-white Holocaust film with the box-office bonanza assured by a Spielberg dinosaur movie. The director seems to have said to himself, “They want a Spielberg movie? I’ll give them one that out-Spielbergs Spielberg!” In one of the first scenes in the film Jurassic Park, the lawyer Gennaro visits an eccentric Latino amber miner. This scene is not in the book and has no relevance to the plot; it is included in the film solely for the purpose of reminding viewers that they are watching a Spielberg

Hypersaurus Rex

223

movie, as if the scene were a trailer for the movie embedded within the movie itself. The ecstatic treasure hunter holds his find up to the light and delivers cryptic dialogue as choral voices swell on the soundtrack with religious signification. In addition to alluding specifically to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films, the scene crystallizes a broader tendency in Spielberg’s blockbuster movies to structure the narrative around a luminescent object of desire and wonder, something viewers want desperately to see. Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Indiana Jones movies, and E.T. are all structured around a sublime, typically glowing MacGuffin of transcendent energies. The most typical Spielberg image is the lingering reaction shot, in which a character gapes in awe at a glowing spectacle, suturing the audience into narrative by setting up expectations for the imminent reverse shot that will reveal the source of the character’s astonishment. In this arrangement, the glowing object of desire is essentially the movie screen itself, and the film director holds the keys to all the viewers’ aspirations in the form of the glittery objects that Spielberg dangles in front of their wide-staring eyes. In Jurassic Park, rather than withholding the sublime object from view until the end of the movie as he famously did in Jaws, Spielberg produced the dinos, to Roger Ebert’s chagrin, “early and often” (“Jurassic Park” n. pag.). This is because in Jurassic Park, numinous entities have run rampant, escaping the confines of narrative economy and proliferating throughout the entire story. The result is that Jurassic Park feels more like a zoo than a movie. Rather than building up to a definitive climax in the typical Spielberg mode, the movie consists of a succession of Spielbergian encounters—terrifying and magical by turns—in a manner redolent of a real trip through Jurassic Park The impression that viewers have actually entered the fictional park is amplified by the fact that the park’s logo—the profile silhouette of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton—is also the logo for the movie. The result is that with the exception of Mel Brooks’s parody of blockbuster cinema, Spaceballs, there has never been a movie that included such extensive product-placement for itself. Jaws had revolutionized the marketing of

224

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

motion pictures by turning the release of a film into a multiplatform cultural event, and in Jurassic Park, this trajectory from the fictional space of film to the cultural space of advertising becomes bidirectional, making the adscape of the film coextensive with the adscape of the filmgoer. When Hammond introduces his grandchildren into the story as “our target audience,” viewers understand that he is referring to the marketing principles of both his zoo and Spielberg’s movie. When he informs the park’s visitors and the movie’s audience, “The voice you’re now hearing is Richard Kiley. We spared no expense,” his boast applies diegetically and extradiegetically; it really is Richard Kiley lending his vocal talents to Spielberg’s movie. When Hammond introduces his park’s fictional and nonfictional visitors to the dinosaurs for the first time, his stately exclamation, “Welcome to Jurassic Park,” is clearly written for the trailers, suggesting that the entire movie is a kind of advertisement for itself. This implosion of movie marketing into the movie conflates advertising and consumption into one giddy swirl of dual participation in both fictional and corporate structures. Spielberg’s numinous dinosaurs come to stand for the reality-warping effect attendant upon the postmodern collusion of the industries of production and the industries of illusion, and viewers are constantly reminded that their immersion in the fictional park rendered vividly real is simultaneously an immersion into a corporate economy rendered vividly fictional. The most immersive aspect of Spielberg’s blockbuster formula, however, is the three-dimensional mobility of the camera, which makes the experience of watching a Spielberg movie feel more akin to being behind the windshield of a flying car (e.g., the vehicle into hyperreality depicted in the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future) than to looking at a moving picture hanging on a wall. Spielberg has demonstrated that the same thing can be said of the American filmgoer that is said of the T. rex: “Its vision is based on movement.” Spielberg pioneered the concept of the movie as a roller coaster by opening up dramatic space to the eye of a restlessly roving camera, and this concept has become literalized in the adaptation of Jurassic Park into theme-park rides such

Hypersaurus Rex

225

as the Jurassic Park River Adventure at Universal Studios in Orlando. Whereas Crichton implied that Jurassic Park was like a Disney theme park, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park actually is a cloned Disney theme park. Turning Spielberg’s movie into a physical roller coaster, however, is redundant, because it already exists in the form of an amusement-park ride. Whenever possible, characters in Jurassic Park occupy moving vehicles or are running from or toward something, and if the character does not move, the camera does. As the helicopter makes its initial approach to the island, the helicopter bounces, the camera bounces, and Hammond emits a boyish “Yoo-hoo”—another trailer moment, inviting viewers to enjoy the physical thrills of submitting themselves bodily to the G-forces of narrative. The 2012 3-D re-release of Jurassic Park is another superfluous attempt to augment the immersive experience that the movie is able to achieve sufficiently on its own merits because Spielberg’s films and this film in particular are already fully three-dimensional and already radically immersive. The movie-as-roller-coaster analogy is represented in the film itself in a scene devised by Spielberg to convey the technical information about genetic engineering. Rather than having the characters talk to one another as they do in Crichton’s novel, Spielberg communicates the ABCs of DNA in the form of a cartoon movie. The animated dinosaurs in the movie-within-a-movie manage to captivate the world-famous scientists in attendance. Its kindergarten-level lesson in genetics silences their quibbles about CpG methylation and viable oocytes with its colorful whimsy, until all three scientists are staring at the cartoon dinos with the same slack-jawed Spielbergian wonder with which they behold the “real” computer-animated dinosaurs. Then suddenly, restraint bars lock into place, and the movie theater is converted into a roller coaster. The educational cartoon had been intercut with footage of the real Jurassic Park laboratories, and when the screening room slides away from the movie screen, it travels to a window behind which can be seen the same laboratory, the real thing this time, for Spielberg’s rollercoaster movie theater has transported the audience from representa-

226

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tion to reality, from mimesis to instantiation. The scientists then pursue the immersive momentum of the sequence of events, standing up and leaving their seats to walk toward the window / movie screen, to pass directly through it and into the movie space on the other side. In crossing this ontological divide, they imitate the journey of Danny Madigan, the child protagonist of The Last Action Hero who magically passes into the world of his favorite movie franchise. The Last Action Hero, a more conventional depiction of the hyperreal encounter, was released a week before Jurassic Park, suggesting the popularity of hyperreal ontology as a subject of popular film during this period. Spielberg’s movie crushed the Schwarzenegger vehicle at the box office, however, arguably because Jurassic Park invites audiences to actually experience the situation that The Last Action Hero merely dramatizes: the immersive plummet into the hyperreal register of being. One of the most significant changes from Crichton’s book to Spielberg’s movie is the representation of Hammond’s character. In both cases, he possesses a gift for affable banter, impatience with technical details, and a childish delight in turning ideas into reality. In the book, as previously mentioned, Grant initially dismisses rumors of Hammond’s malevolence by blithely exclaiming, “John Hammond’s about as sinister as Walt Disney” (42). Crichton’s novel gradually reveals Hammond, however, to be a criminally negligent misanthrope who is prone to saying things like “From a business standpoint … helping mankind [is] a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind” (200). Although he plays the role of loving grandfather, he expresses his true sentiments in an interior monologue toward the end of the book: “Those damned kids! He should never have brought those kids. They had been nothing but trouble from the beginning. Nobody wanted them around. Hammond had only brought them because he thought it would stop Gennaro from destroying the resort” (383). In Crichton’s version, Hammond is nibbled to death by his own procompsognathids, suffering a gruesome but richly deserved fate. In the movie, however, Hammond’s character shows no evidence of being anything

Hypersaurus Rex

227

other than a grandfatherly Walt Disney type whose affection for his grandchildren is perfectly sincere. Richard Attenborough plays the role with a cartoonish Scrooge McDuck accent that seems as though it is self-consciously affected by the character as a marketing gimmick, along with his white suits and his habit of speaking in slogans. But unlike in Crichton’s novel, there is no sinister substratum supporting the Spielberg Hammond’s persona: it is all an illusion, all the way down. This effect is neatly depicted when Hammond introduces the DNA movie in the roller-coaster theater. In his introduction, Hammond presents himself not simply as the corporate figurehead of InGen Technologies but as one of the attractions of Jurassic Park. Once the park opens, Hammond’s full-time job will apparently be to greet visitors at the beginning of the ride and perform a brief dialogue with a screen version of himself. As Hammond ushers his audience into the theater, the screen Hammond walks toward the camera, backgrounded by an enormous Jurassic Park logo. “Here he comes,” Hammond says, but then amends himself—“Here I come”—in a manner that expresses his own confusion regarding his status vis-à-vis a two-dimensional image of himself. But then it is screen-Hammond who is confused “How did I get here?” he asks, meaning, presumably, “How did I become a twodimensional image?” In response, off-screen Hammond requests a drop of on-screen Hammond’s blood, upon which the two Hammonds reach out toward one another and, through the magic of cinema, share genetic information. Immediately, the screen Hammond begins to multiply until the frame is crowded with Hammonds. This short sequence manages to suggest a number of implications regarding the ontological status of Hammond’s character, as well as of the Jurassic Park project as a whole. In terms of his character, the scene identifies Hammond himself as the original clone of Jurassic Park, before the introductory film ever gets around to the subject of dinosaurs. The equivalence between the DNA in the blood of movie Hammond and in the blood of real Hammond twists the two sides of the movie screen into one another, suggesting that reality and fiction both share the same DNA in the new world that

228

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Hammond has invented. Simultaneously, when in response to on-screen Hammond’s question about how he managed to appear in a movie image, off-screen Hammond replies with an explanation about cloning, cinematic and genetic technologies are conflated in a way that indicates the essential similarity between Hammond’s Jurassic Park and Spielberg’s. Clearly, Spielberg’s makeover of Hammond from a villain to a simulated image person is motivated by the sympathy Spielberg felt for Hammond’s project and his identification of himself with this character. Crichton the novelist obviously identified with Malcolm, the hipstergeek who is always right and whose deep understanding of the physics of reality provide the structural frame for the book’s narrative. The chapters of the book are organized around Malcolm’s prophetic axioms, but Spielberg replaced Malcolm’s centrality to the story with the presence of his own narrative markers, punctuating the narrative with “quotations” from his own work as a famous director. Spielberg’s decision to cast a man known primarily for his work as a director in the role of Hammond suggests a self-referential acknowledgment of his own sense of affiliation with the character, and throughout the film, Hammond is shown performing various movie-directorial roles, such as hosting the film screening and watching the video feed from the tour. The basic story line of Jurassic Park goes unchanged—Hammond’s dinosaurs run amok and kill people—but in Spielberg’s version, the architect of the disaster is allowed to remain in a state of innocence, protected by the sheer two-dimensionality of his character. Hammond’s personality is too insubstantial to support any emotion as weighty as guilt, and he is represented simply as an absent-minded dreamer rather than as an amoral capitalist. Instead of being eaten by dinosaurs, Spielberg’s Hammond receives a motherly talking-to from Ellie, the movie’s resident woman. Over comfort food, he explains to her that his only sin is an irrepressible desire to make children happy, from his early days as a flea-circus ringmaster. Like the book’s Hammond, he is never quite repentant, but the movie gives him a chance to defend himself in terms that the audience of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is bound to regard sympathetically.

Hypersaurus Rex

229

“I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit.” Hammond defends the American dreaming of men like Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, and himself who specialize in mounting spectacles that pull illusions into the space of reality. Ellie does not contradict him on this point; she merely entreats him to be mindful of the victims of his experiment with reality, a suggestion that Hammond can easily endorse without rejecting the fundamental merit of his aims. Ellie’s weak, roundabout chastisement of Hammond culminates in an awkward, self-defeating approbation: “Alan and Lex and Tim … John, they’re out there where people are dying. So … [takes a spoonful of ice cream] it’s good.” Ellie’s concern for the deadly consequences of Hammond’s hubris is easily mollified by the creamy goodness of his gourmet ice cream, a sign that Hammond cannot really be that bad after all. The harm caused by the dinosaurs, after all, turns out to be minimal. Ellie is right that people are dying, but of the four deaths in Jurassic Park, the lawyer’s death is played for laughs, Nedry had it coming, the black guy’s death was a foregone conclusion simply according to generic convention, and the hunter dies in his element. Everyone else gets away with superficial injuries and big smiles on their faces, rejuvenated and uplifted by their island adventure. This is in explicit contrast to the ending of Crichton’s book, which is shockingly apocalyptic. In Crichton’s ending, the island is brutally carpet bombed, baby-eating dinosaurs have migrated to the mainland, and when a Costa Rican military officer asks Grant who is in charge, Grant can only reply, “Nobody” (397) and gaze morosely out the helicopter window at the explosions consuming the island and its hyperreal life forms. The final impression is that the mutation Hammond and his scientists have engineered into the genome of reality has self-replicated uncontrollably, infecting the entire world with a new relationship to nature as the artificial dinosaurs disrupt and reconfigure the terrestrial ecology. Spielberg’s film annuls these gloomy denouements. Industrial Light and Magic’s

230

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

majestic CGI dinos are not blown up but preserved in their state of hyperreal nature. The last dinosaur viewers see is T. rex, triumphant in his new cloned form, his towering image comically captioned with the slogan When dinosaurs ruled the earth. Whereas Crichton’s novel The Lost World depicts the mysterious Site B as an InGen dinosaur island that had been simply forgotten, in Spielberg’s adaptation of the sequel, Site B is a location to which Hammond has had the Jurassic Park dinosaurs removed and which he has since kept as a nature preserve. The plot of Spielberg’s version of The Lost World revolves around protecting the “natural habitat” of the genetically engineered dinosaurs, as if they were snow leopards or spotted owls. Rather than perverting nature in a disastrous way, Spielberg’s Hammond has simply created more nature, and The Lost World depicts him as a crusader for the ecological integrity of the artificial nature he has concocted. Spielberg’s dinos stay on the island(s) where they are put rather than proliferating uncontrollably out into the world, indicating that—in explicit contradiction to the spirit of Crichton’s novel—someone is in charge. Spielberg is in charge, timing the suspense and action as precisely as engineers design roller coasters. Simultaneously, T. rex is in charge. The novel’s Grant dispatches the velociraptors with a clever use of poison eggs, but the movie relies on a climactic rescue by the real hero of the movie and the main attraction of the park, T. rex himself, who picks off those nasty raptors in a much more direct and visually engaging manner than the paleontologist ever could. Finally, Spielberg’s work suggests, a strange kind of techno-evolution is in charge. In the last scene of the movie, as the survivors are borne away from Isla Nublar in a helicopter, Grant looks out the window to see a pelican flying over the water. Viewers are reminded of his earlier statement to Tim and Lex about how they will “never look at a bird the same way again” now that they have come to recognize the close evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs. This final lesson is not for Tim and Lex, however, but for members of the audience. It is they who have had their perception reoriented; they now perceive the natural animal as a kind of descendant of Spielberg’s CGI monsters.

Hypersaurus Rex

231

Grant’s lesson in paleontology is Spielberg’s lesson in the neontology of hyperreality—namely, that cinematic images can acquire a perceptual primordiality in relation to the natural world and to lived experience. The world people see outside, Spielberg’s final image implies, is a reflection of the cultural representations of nature that they have internalized. People’s ideas about nature and even their conceptualization of nature as a category of experience set apart from civilization are defined in large part by semantic networks of texts and images. At the same time that the image of the pelican comments on the power of movies to shape one’s perception, it proposes a very specific attitude regarding nature. Whereas the overriding theme in Crichton’s novel is that nature is violent, unpredictable, and inherently inconceivable, Spielberg leaves viewers with the precisely opposite sense: the reassurance that although dinosaurs were scary, nature turned them into picturesque and harmless birds. John Williams’s music swells, reinforcing the inspirational message that nature, left to its own devices, will filter monstrosity out of the biosphere through the civilized refinement of evolution for the benefit of humankind. In this formulation, evolution takes on its distinctly American meaning of anthropocentric progress: animals get better (less threatening) as time goes along in a way that parallels advances in human culture and technology. When the shot changes from the image of the pelican to the image of the helicopter, the parallelism between the two flying entities suggests another evolutionary relationship, one between the natural flight of birds and the technologically accomplished flight of human beings. If the chthonian “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson 66) represented by the dinosaurs is vanquished by the peace and beauty of birds, the birds themselves are superseded by the technological perfection of a helicopter. All things work together toward a telos of human transcendence. The technological transcendence indicated in the final shot of Spielberg’s film by the evolution of pelican into helicopter puts an exclamation mark on the ideological undercurrent of the film as a whole. Baudrillard had famously posed the question “Can we fight

232

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

DNA?” (Symbolic Exchange and Death 4). The question is phrased ambiguously so as to potentially absorb many different meanings, but of foremost importance to Baudrillard was the question whether it is possible for postmodern human beings to resist the digitization of reality in all its forms. Is there any way to put the brakes on hyperreality or to set up an oppositional counterforce capable of standing against the tide of progressive ontological dislocation? In Crichton’s novel, the answer is obviously no. The recombinant hypersaurs, the monstrous embodiment of computational, genetic, and capitalist codes, take on a life of their own and undermine all the efforts of human beings to contain their ramifications. In Spielberg’s movie, however, not only does the happy ending affirm that the after-effects of reality manipulation are manageable, but the shift in emphasis from the DNA technologies in Crichton’s book to the CGI technologies in Spielberg’s movie reorganizes the terms of the relationship between humans and hypersaurs. Hammond was a villain because he engineered physical creatures out of scraps of real DNA. His downfall was his attempt to domesticate chaotic nature, resulting in a violent conflict between his own program and that of the animals. Spielberg, however, can enact the part of Hammond without fear of guilt or disaster because he has taken biology out of the equation altogether. As a result, the story of the failure of Hammond’s Jurassic Park is the story of the success of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Viewers of the film are privy to all the wonder and thrill of a real trip to Jurassic Park without any of the bioethical problems or physical dangers that might have troubled visitors to Hammond’s Costa Rican island. Spielberg redeemed technology by making his Jurassic Park more simulacral than Hammond’s, liberating the code from the chromosome and refashioning it as an ecstasy of electric pulses, a much more pliable stucco than a glitchy and willful filament of nucleotides. Consequently, Spielberg has not placed human beings in an adversarial position vis-à-vis the monsters of hyperreality; although the characters fight to escape the dinosaurs, Spielberg’s movie does not propose that these monsters of runaway hyperreality need to be destroyed, that DNA needs to be fought. Rather, Spielberg has

Hypersaurus Rex

233

nurtured the development of this new alien life form, purging them of blood and death through a fantasy of transcending biology altogether. Thus, Spielberg’s dinosaurs suggest a further stage of hyperreality that Baudrillard considered in his later career, “Virtual Reality, the highest stage of simulation” (Intelligence 44), in which “there is neither distance nor a critical or aesthetic gaze: there is total immersion” (77). Rather than fighting DNA, Spielberg’s film constitutes a tacit collusion with the technologies of recombinant reality. As viewers gasp at the reality of the fictional monsters, they simultaneously intuit the hallucinatory sense that illusory spectacles easily colonize “real” perceptual experience. The space between spectacle and spectator collapses and with it goes the sense of any subjective position outside the virtual hyperscape. As fully immersed participants in Spielberg’s virtual world, the viewers as parkgoers rather than the dinosaurs are the true mutational progeny of Jurassic Park. Spielberg’s film suggests as much in a very subtle detail that the camera sweeps past as it surveys the wreckage of Nedry’s sloppy workstation. Nedry has taped a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer to the frame of his computer and added a cartoon thought bubble containing a drawing of a mushroom cloud and a Post-It note caption that reads, “The Beginning of Baby Boom.” Nedry’s détournement of Oppenheimer’s image conflates the invention of the atom bomb with the explosion of the postwar American population, suggesting that all “boomers” are genetic mutants whose human DNA has been fundamentally scrambled by the Trinity blast. Donna Haraway described a similar phenomenon in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” reflecting, “I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post–Second World War arms race and Cold War as by the women’s movements” (173). Haraway was referring specifically to the post-Sputnik science education initiatives in public schools, but in the context of her argument about cyborg subjectivity, her statement takes on a wider, ontological significance. As inhabitants of the womb of postmodern society, today’s human beings are the inheritors of the monstrous genome. The enormous success of Spielberg’s movie may be partly attributable to the sense in which it

234

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

dispenses with Crichton’s naïve warning against hyperreal monstrosity and performs a much more poignant operation of ferrying his audience into the womb of the virtual. At the same time that Spielberg’s movie gave birth to thousands of future films in which digital effects would increasingly replace photographic images of physical objects, it has taken audiences on a roller-coaster ride through the endless birth canal of their own postnatural becoming.

Chapter 10

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice Vampiric Pregnancies in Angel and Breaking Dawn Danielle Lawson Within the realm of contemporary literature and film (herein including television serials, as well), the vampire remains an enduring source of fascination and fear, a nightmare creature that embodies humankind’s deep-seated desires, shortcomings, and anxieties, particularly those related to sexuality and death. No matter the time period, author, or medium used to tell the tale, there are three constants in most vampire texts—death, desire, and blood.1 If one gives in to the allure of vampiric reproduction, that is, the “forbidden” desire to be something other than what one is—something more powerful, ethereal, sensual, and beautiful—one must die and in doing so be reborn as a monster that lusts for blood. It is this uneasy and often contentious relationship between death, desire, and the resulting blood lust, that thrusts into sharp relief one’s own concerns and anxieties relating to the nature and morality of one’s

236

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

own sexuality. In the end, it forces one to face one’s sense of self while seeking to control the body and forbidden desires. It is hard to see vampiric reproduction as anything but sexual, given the sexual symbolism of the process—the penetration of fangs, the exchange of bodily fluids, and even the intimacy of the postures adopted in the act itself. Yet despite the fact that vampiric reproduction has long been held to be symbolic of the sex act (Nelson; Sceats; Wood), sex itself was largely implied and rarely made explicit. However, in the cases of Angel and Breaking Dawn, sex is not only made “real” but also made problematic in a human sense, that of an unexpected pregnancy. Although much has been written about Angel and Twilight with respect to female agency and patriarchal cultural structures (see Moruzi; Steinhoff and Siebert; Stevens; Torkelson), no one has yet examined the way the vampiric pregnancy is used within both texts to construct the process of becoming a mother as a grotesque undertaking that renders both the mother and the child something monstrous. Although the vampire, vampire lore, and the symbolism found in vampire narratives have been the focus of scholars from a range of fields, as a topic of analysis these have been largely neglected in communication studies fields, except as a popular culture meme. An exploration of why this topic has been neglected within communication and interaction studies is outside the scope of this chapter, but I propose that a communication studies perspective would offer a unique way of exploring vampire texts—namely, treating the texts as social interaction rather than mere fictional narrative. Therefore, I believe that the analysis given in this chapter offers a valuable counterpoint to the literary- and film-studies-driven chapters in this book, for I approach the topic not through an interpretive or critical theory lens but through the use of applied linguistics. The very idea of a “live” vampire birth, that is, one that originates in the womb, flies in the face of much of the existing vampire canon, so it seems almost fitting to adopt a research methodology that is not used in literary and film or media studies

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

237

—conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). Unlike the methods and analytical perspectives typically used to examine literature and film (e.g., critical discourse analysis, queer theory, content analysis, rhetorical theory), which rely upon the researcher’s approaching texts with preconceived ideas about what they will find or about what is important, CA and MCA as applied methods focus on everyday, naturally occurring discourse (Sacks 27). In contrast to the critical interpretative approaches generally seen in literature and film studies, in CA and MCA inferences drawn by the researcher and the resulting discussion emerge through close examination of how conversational turns are organized and, more significant, of how others respond to those turns—that is to say, the “proof” of the researcher’s claims must be in the text itself and is not generated through the arbitrary application of outside theoretical lenses such as queer theory, cultural theory, and the like. Because the conversational interaction examined is fictional and created by the screenwriter according to his or her own understanding of how interaction is constructed, it can be argued that fictional interactions like those seen in films carry the same sorts of underlying power struggles that occur naturally in everyday interaction. Thus, CA and MCA are used in this chapter to show how both the vampiric pregnancy and the child in the live births of Breaking Dawn and Angel are conversationally constructed in ways that attempt to control the “deviant” female body in order to perpetuate the “rightful” social structure. This chapter begins by arguing for the use CA and MCA—methodologies primarily used to examine the inner workings of spontaneous real-world interaction—to examine fictional scripted interaction derived from film and television. From this discussion, I move on to consider the complicated relationship between blood, sex, and death in vampiric reproduction. This is followed by analysis of the selected texts (Angel and Breaking Dawn) using CA and MCA to explore the way characters categorize the pregnancy and child not only as problematic but ultimately

238

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

as grotesque and monstrous. Finally, the chapter concludes with a critical discussion of the live (womb-originated) births as the ultimate sacrifice that resists attempts by other characters to force the gestational grotesque to conform to the existing social and moral orders, which replicate patriarchal norms.

Film Discourse or Fictionalized “Real” Interaction? The Case for CA and MCA in Studying Film Texts At first glance, defining discourse would seem deceptively simple, yet it is not, for it can be defined multiple ways depending upon the field. Given that this chapter is interdisciplinary, I am utilizing a more general definition in which film discourse is considered fictional conversation that is created by a screenwriter based upon his or her understanding of how natural, spontaneous conversation occurs and is structured. Marta Dynel maintained that film discourse is duplicitous in nature, being “fictional/ non-authentic/scripted” conversation between fictitious characters in a fabricated setting (43). She suggested that although such conversational interaction cannot be considered “real speech,” it does share many of the characteristics of everyday discourse. This view contradicts the views of Emmanuel Schegloff, a theorist often considered one of the fathers of CA, who asserted that because film discourse is scripted and therefore not “authentic” discourse—rather, it comprises fabricated interactions— any CA or MCA approach to such texts is antiempirical (92). The dearth in the published literature of interactional communication analyses of film discourse that use CA or MCA as applied methodology seems to suggest that Schegloff’s assertion is correct. Although using applied linguistics methodologies in the study of film discourse is rare, there is a precedent for applying such methods to the study of fictional scripted interactions. For decades, interactional communication researchers have used fictional scripted interactions to demonstrate the way “real language” works, often creating their own

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

239

examples based upon everyday language they have observed (Georgakopoulou; Goffman; Herman; McHoul; Weatherall). Given that in these instances the examples are crafted by the theorists to be representative of conversational phenomena seen within corpus data or observed in ethnographic situations, I must question why using CA or MCA to study film discourse should be seen by those such as Schegloff as less legitimate. Screenwriters create film discourse based upon their understanding of how naturally occurring conversations are enacted and organized; therefore, it can be argued that a film script is a fictionalized account of a potentially real interaction because these scripts should adhere to the linguistic principles and conventions of everyday discourse. The bulk of scholarship in literature and film analysis focuses on social criticism via a number of theoretical lenses (e.g., queer theory, feminist theory, cultural studies) or, in the case of film, on cinematic discourse and cinematographic techniques (Aumont; Creed; Giannetti and Leach; McMahon; Monaco; Senf; Stam). Some applied linguistic theories, such as systemic functional linguistics, have been used successfully to examine literary and film discourse (Nørgaard), yet this type of work is still rare, raising questions about why. Although these questions lie outside the scope of the current chapter, I would argue that given the methodological focus of CA and MCA as a way of examining naturally occurring interactions, and given that film discourse is “fictional/nonauthentic/scripted” conversation (Dynel 43) that is by its very nature based upon the writer’s understanding of how natural, spontaneous conversation occurs and is structured, an applied linguistic methodology like CA or MCA could be a useful tool for examining how film discourse is constructed in ways that not only mimic naturally occurring conversation but also serve the same functions—allowing speakers to perform social identities, categorize actions, negotiate topics, and in some cases, perpetuate the power and authority mores seen in wider society.

240

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Developed by Harvey Sacks, CA was envisaged as a methodology for examining and understanding the underlying rules of conversation that govern human interactions. For instance, when answering a telephone, there are particular expectations about how the interaction should proceed, starting with a greeting of some sort, followed often by an exchange of names if the callers are not known to each other. What sets CA apart from other linguistic theories is that the empirical proof for the interpretation and conclusions drawn by the analyst is found in the interaction itself rather than originating with the analyst attempting to screen the interaction through the lens of critical, social, or cultural theories that may or may not be salient to the interaction at hand. Therefore, analysts using a CA approach focus on the interactional give and take of participants as they respond to what they view as important within the interaction, as well as on the ways they organize their responses. From his initial work with CA, Sacks developed a related methodology, MCA, which allows analysts to explore the role membership categories play within social interaction. As an initial example he offered extensive analysis of a seemingly simple piece of interaction—“The baby cried. The mommy picked it up” (Sacks 236). From these short statements, Sack demonstrated that membership categories (in this case baby and mommy) are used to order an understanding of the world and are demonstrably related to each other through category-bound activities, or those activities that a member of a particular category could reasonably be expected to engage in (249). In this instance, the baby and mommy are shown to be related through the use of category-bound activities—that is to say, babies cry and mommies pick up crying babies. Together, these two categories can be understood as related to each other in a family group, or what Sacks called a membership categorization device (332). Though MCA was originally thought of as an applied linguistic approach for studying naturally originating interaction, David Francis and Christopher Hart demonstrated that MCA is a valid and useful tool for exploring texts that are not “standard” conversation. Their work applied MCA to the study of commercials that have no verbal components at all. This is

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

241

still a rare use for MCA, but I believe it sets a precedent for using these methods to explore a range of texts, including film discourse. Based on the scripted nature of film discourse, research questions seeking to theorize how everyday discourse works through the analysis of film-discourse examples would be problematic (Dynel 45). That said, I believe the key to using applied linguistic methodologies like CA and MCA to examine film discourse is to forgo approaching the data with preconceived hypotheses or ideas about what is important within the text, for these are likely to unnecessarily bias the analysis. Furthermore, approaching data with such preconceived notions regarding what will be found or what is important goes against the underlying tenets of CA, which emphasize letting the interaction lead the researcher rather than allowing researchers to force the text to fit their preconceived notions of what is there. Though CA and MCA differ from other approaches to literary and film studies methodologically because they offer an empirical approach that utilizes a next-turn proof (in which support for the researcher’s claims comes via the actual responses seen in the text), there is one other significant difference between CA and MCA, on one hand, and the critical or interpretive approaches more generally seen in film and literature studies, on the other—the structure of the analysis itself. Whereas other approaches focus on individual words, phrases, and short interactions, offering an interpretation that links to critical and social theories, CA and MCA as analytical methods examine words and phrases but always within the context of the interaction itself. In short, CA and MCA are inherently interested in the construction of conversational turns and in the ways participants respond to them. Thus, this type of analysis is characterized by a detailed line-by-line analysis of the interaction exploring the linguistic functions and strategies that are employed. In particular, reliance upon the next-turn proof in CA and MCA helps to avoid researcher bias in the analysis because no claims can be made about the interaction that are not explicitly oriented as impor-

242

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tant by those involved in the interaction. The danger, then, to using this approach to study film discourse, is that at first glance the analysis may appear (at least superficially) to be a description of plot points. However, upon close reading, it is possible to see how this type of line-by-line, close-grained analysis of film discourse provides a detailed, empirical description of the interaction and when employed in conjunction with critical theories, helps situate the close-analysis within a broader sociocultural context. With these arguments clearly in mind, I suggest that CA and MCA are well suited to a close analysis of the way characters in Breaking Dawn and Angel invoke particular viewpoints related to vampiric pregnancy and the resulting child, because CA and MCA focus the analysis on how the categorization is used within the social context—that is, on what “category work” the characters themselves respond to as important within the interaction. As an analytical tool, CA and MCA allow me to show how the characters (and by extension, the writers) of Angel and Breaking Dawn construct female sexual desire, pregnancy, and the resulting child as grotesque and monstrous, even as they also work to control the reproduction of the deviant female body and uphold the existing social structure.

Blood, Sex, and Death: The Heart of Vampiric Reproduction Across the range of the vampire canon, from the early work of John Williams Polidori and Bram Stoker to more contemporary treatments like True Blood, three things consistently form the heart of vampiric reproduction and life—blood, sex, and death. The term heart is not used lightly here. Not only are sex, blood, and death the key elements of vampiric reproduction, but they also are inherently related to the functioning of the human heart, both physiologically and emotionally. Without blood human beings would die. Without sex people would never

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

243

have been born in the first place. And pregnancy, the potential outcome of sex, results in blood via labor. Even as these three things are inherently linked in the human life cycle, they are also inherently intertwined in vampiric reproduction. Discussing blood and sex separately in relation to vampires and vampiric reproduction is virtually impossible because two things—fear and desire—link them. It has been argued that the archetypal vampire has been able to persist across different times and cultures owing greatly to its ability to adapt, reflecting current fears and desires (Nelson 2). The enduring interest in vampires has been explained by some as related to the way in which vampires speak to anxieties and fears about inappropriate appetites or desires, for they “are made monsters by surrender to impulse and they personify our latent fear that conceding to appetite will compromise our being and endanger other people” (McMahon 202). In recent years, contemporary depictions of vampires in television shows, films, and books have seen the emergence of a new, less-predatory breed of vampire that seeks to resist the primal vampiric drive for blood. Most notable are the “good guy” vampires of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS), Angel, and the Twilight saga. These new vampires loathe their own predatory lusts and seek in many cases to purge themselves of those lusts. Elizabeth Nelson has dubbed this new breed the “tortured gentleman vampire,” noting that such vampires “reflect our profoundly psychological culture” in that they do not want to be monsters (3). She has likened these new vampires to humanity, stating that they are “aware of their monstrous desire [for blood] and tortured by it” (3). This new vampire’s tortured and reluctant nature is represented by shifting attitudes regarding two things: feeding on and forming intimate relationships with humans—blood and sex. The vampires depicted in contemporary film and television, such as The Hunger, BtVS, Angel, True Blood, and Twilight, eschew humans as “happy meals on legs,” so labeled by the vampire protagonist Spike in BtVS (“Becoming”), favoring instead a nonhuman—at least, not “from the

244

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tap”— diet of animal or packaged blood products purchased or in some cases “liberated” from hospitals and blood banks. Within these narratives, the dietary changes represent a shift from predator to protector; instead of feeding on the blood of humans, these tortured gentlemen vampires are depicted as not only protecting humans but also working with them (and sometimes with nonhumans) to more efficiently protect human lives. In striving to overcome or circumvent their natural blood lust, these vampires do not reproduce as other vampires do, for to do so would necessitate drinking blood directly from a human. As with anything, there are exceptions to this development. For instance, in BtVS, Angel does drink Buffy’s blood, nearly to the point of killing her (“Graduation Day: Part 2”). Though it seems that this particular instance would show him to be the same style of bloodthirsty killer associated with the stereotypical vampire, his reaction to what he has done further cements his status as a tortured gentleman vampire. Buffy knows her blood will save him, but he refuses to drink from her. She resorts to violence to trigger his feeding response. When he realizes that he has nearly drained her, his first response is not to go ahead and finish the “turning” process, thus making her a vampire; rather, he is guiltridden and rushes her to the hospital, agonizing over the event for the rest of their relationship and beyond. From this point on in the series, Angel distances himself from potential intimate relationships with humans, a behavior that is something of a growing trend in contemporary vampire film narratives, many representatives of this new breed of vampire refraining entirely from intimate and sexual relationships with humans. This is not to say that tortured vampires strictly eschew close friendships or intimate relationships with humans; rather, when they become involved intimately with a human, they are shown to agonize over the implications of the relationship for the human and his or her continued humanity. One of the more notable examples of this in contemporary television is the initial relationship between Bill and Sookie in True Blood. The relationship forms despite

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

245

Bill’s (and Sookie’s) hesitation, and Bill is depicted demonstrating a continued concern about the effect this relationship will have on Sookie’s safety and her ultimate humanity. Although they may avoid such relationships with humans, the tortured vampires in current narratives are not asexual—in fact, if anything, their underlying sensuality has been moved to center stage, often forming a key part of the narrative as they struggle to control their appetites not only in relation to feeding but also in terms of baser lusts. By denying their blood lust and their desire to feed on humans, not only must these vampires find other ways to feed themselves, but they essentially become impotent, unable—or at the very least, unwilling—to reproduce. The reproductive rituals of vampires are often depicted as the epitome of forbidden desire—a sensual experience that melds both pleasure and pain into an intimate experience that is inherently sexual without the need for intercourse (Sceats 117). At the heart of this intimate act is essentially a kiss that culminates in the penetration of fangs and the exchange of what is arguably the most intimate part of what makes people who they are—blood. This very exchange of blood, the vampire draining the victim and the victim then accepting blood from the vampire (the “sire”) harks back to the sexual nature of the act—an act that for the vampire is not limited to gender or sexual orientation. In human reproduction an exchange of fluids must precede conception, which may then lead to birth. For a vampire, the mutual consumption of blood is the fluid exchange that precedes the rebirth of the human as a vampire. Nelson noted that in vampire lore, “blood becomes a symbol not only of basic biological life, but of psychological and erotic potency,” concluding that vampirism itself is “desire grown monstrous” (2). It is this idea of desire as monstrous that underpins many of the vampire film narratives both past and present, drawing upon core human fears: desire and death. Yet within these narratives death and desire are inherently linked, such that “[s]ensuousness seems suddenly to become

246

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

equated with death, pleasure with evil, erotic … behavior with possession, consumption and destruction” (Wood 59). Considering the inherent link between desire and blood in contemporary vampire films, one cannot escape either the underlying sensuality that vampires continue to represent or the fears about succumbing to that sensual siren call. Much has been written concerning the seductive nature of vampires through consideration of the time period and societal concerns in which those narratives were generated, a number of scholars having argued that Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in particular, demonstrates the prevailing Victorian anxiety of the time concerning changing views of female sexuality (Auerbach; Miller). It is important to note here that there is no consensus among scholars regarding sexuality, society, and social norms in vampire narratives. I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive and definitive overview of the various theories and ideas regarding female sexuality and the seductive predator that is the vampire, but considering the focus of this chapter, I believe it is useful to briefly address some of the ideas related to vampires and sexuality that are seen in vampire film narratives. Given the repressive sexuality of the Victorian period, it has been suggested that the vampirism seen in classic literary texts speaks to the growing concern and anxiety about the potential for unbridled sexuality—in particular, that of women (Nelson 9). Whereas at the start of the Victorian period, women were depicted as pure, virtuous, and innocent compared to men when it came to matters of carnal desire and pleasure, by the end of the nineteenth century this had changed, and women were being portrayed as temptresses who needed to be carefully watched and controlled by men for the good of society (Sceats 117). This control was exercised ostensibly to protect the innocence of women while also serving to protect the men themselves. According to William Acton, the author of the 1875 medical encyclopedia The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, for men to associate with women who gave

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

247

voice to their sexual desires would lead to illness of both mind and body (146). Written during the time period in which Acton’s medical treatise was published, Stoker’s description of the infected Lucy Westenra in Dracula demonstrates this link between unbridled sexuality, illness, and death. She is portrayed as gasping for breath, pale, and listless, demonstrating a remarkable similarity to descriptions of untreatable tuberculosis (consumption) and several venereal diseases that were problematic in the later part of the nineteenth century—both of which were transmitted (primarily) through intimate contact. This link is also seen in Lucy’s appearance as a vampire. Lois Drawmer has noted that “the vision of Lucy’s ‘undead’ appearance as a fully transformed vampire focuses on the conflation of excessive sexuality and the threat of death” (23). In essence, the unbridled sexuality she showed in the throes of her wasting illness was linked directly to her eventual death, something the men in the story sought to control and prevent, only to succeed too late. The concern with controlling female sexuality as a means of protecting women’s innocence and avoiding the illness and death believed to be associated with excessive sexuality is an enduring aspect of vampire narratives, made most visible through the way in which female vampires and female sexuality in general are constructed as grotesque. Women—in particular, female bodies—have long been associated with the grotesque and monstrous. Margrit Shildrick, in Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body, noted that “insofar as their difference is specified, women are the non-subject other, the excluded, the embodied, the monstrous” (1). In and of itself the female body, despite being oriented as unclean and monstrous according to patriarchal norms, is not frightening; rather, it is the body’s potential for subverting the social and moral order that inspires fear and, ultimately, the perceived need to control the female body for the good of society. Thus, the female body is abjected in order to maintain patriarchal norms, though its inherently enticing quality both enthralls and elicits fear (Creed 57).

248

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Carol Senf has observed that female vampires are often shown as “bloodsuckers, rebels or both” and are often “characterized by overt eroticism” (204), representations that oppose the established patriarchal views of female sexuality. This view is shared by Barbara Creed, who noted the link between blood lust and the outlaw nature of female vampires: “driven by her lust for blood, she does not respect the dictates of the laws which set down the rules of proper sexual conduct” (110). Creed’s analysis more specifically refers to the “lesbian threat” as seen in Carmilla, Daughters of Darkness, and The Hunger, in which the female vampire attempts to exert a corruptive influence over “innocent” women, thereby swaying them from more “natural” desires. It is this lack of adherence to the moral order, both criminally and sexually, that sits at the heart of past (and arguably present) anxieties regarding female sexuality as represented in vampire film narratives. These anxieties are made explicit by the ways in which men in the narratives seek to exert control over the female body, an effort that often fails, as seen in the eventual turning of Lucy in Dracula, Sarah in The Hunger, and Valerie in Daughters of Darkness. Though the male protagonists initially attempt to exert this control by protecting the innocent female, because their protective efforts are generally ineffective, they must then attempt to vanquish the monstrous being that the formerly innocent female becomes through submitting to her base desires. One would think that with the introduction of the tortured gentleman vampire the patriarchal overtones of contemporary vampire film narratives would shift away from this focus on controlling the female body as more attention is paid to the control of the male body—yet concern with female sexuality is still seen. In fact, though this new breed of vampire is depicted as somewhat toothless, less a threat and more a romantic ideal than the classic film vampire, this is not to say that they pose no threat at all. Despite their kinder, gentler presentation, the collective anxiety and morbid fascination with the vampiric reproduction process and all that it entails remains because of continued human concern with the problematic expression of sexual desire. The narratives found in Angel

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

249

and Breaking Dawn have taken the existing anxieties related to female sexuality and expanded them, constructing female sexual desire and the potential consequences of acting on that desire as monstrous through the radical reappropriation of the vampiric reproduction process. It is this reimagined reproductive process that stands as one of the biggest deviations from classic vampire film narratives—the womb-originated vampiric offspring.

What Is “It”? Categorization and Vampiric Pregnancy Historically, vampire narratives have been concerned with the potential danger of female sexuality, death through vampirism being depicted time and time again as the negative consequence for giving in to one’s sexual impulses. Although contemporary vampire film narratives may depict a kinder, gentler vampire, their unbridled sexuality still poses a threat to the innocence of the female, sexual corruption remaining an ever-present anxiety. This continued conflict is thrust to the fore in the vampiric pregnancies seen in Angel and Breaking Dawn. The final episode in season 2 of Angel (“Epiphany”) sees Darla, Angel’s former lover and vampiric sire, attempt to seduce him into having sex with her. This attempted seduction is significant for several reasons. Within the canon of the show, should Angel have a moment of “pure happiness,” he will lose his soul—something that happens in the second season of BtVS, when Angel gives in to his desires following pressure from Buffy and has sex with her. Although Buffy and her friends return Angel’s soul to him, the main characters interpret the entire event to mean that a moment of pure happiness equals sexual satisfaction, the clear implication here being that giving in to one’s desires will result in the destruction of the self and of one’s humanity—or in this case, one’s soul. In season 2 of Angel, when Darla attempts to seduce him, she does so knowing that if he were to experience a moment of pure happiness, he would once again revert to the soulless, mass-murdering vampire

250

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

called Angelus. Her attempted seduction of Angel is by no means out of character, for throughout both shows (BtVS and Angel) Darla is depicted as more than willing to use her innate vampire sexuality as a means of getting what she wants, playing on her looks and sensuality to lure her prey into a false sense of security before striking them down and feeding on them. In fact, within the canon of the show, Darla is noted to have been a prostitute before being reborn as a vampire; therefore, trading on her sex is shown in many ways to be an integral part of who she is—in both her original mortal life and in her unlife. By using her sexuality to manipulate the men around her, both mortals and vampires, Darla embodies the continued anxieties surrounding female sexuality— that succumbing to the desires of the female will ultimately lead to one’s downfall and in moral terms, to the loss of one’s soul. Initially, Angel rejects Darla’s seduction attempt but later seeks her out and once again consummates their relationship sexually, fully expecting to lose his soul. Yet it is not Angel who suffers the negative consequences for giving in to their sexual desires; it is Darla, who is shown at the end of the episode to be heavily pregnant. Darla arrives at the hotel where Angel and his colleagues reside, giving them the first glimpse of the consequences of having given in to her (their) desires. The analysis offered in this section focuses on two continual themes seen throughout the interactions: the depiction of the pregnancy as monstrous and unnatural and the struggle among the group’s members to come to terms with precisely “what” two vampires would create—in short whether “it” is a monster or a child. Through a linguistic presentation of these issues, the characters are shown to use membership categories, in particular it, baby, and child, as a means of orienting themselves to just what the offspring is or will be. In the end, the use of these membership categories constructs two competing views of the offspring: as monstrous and unnatural, and as an innocent that needs protecting.

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

251

Analysis Extract 1 1 Angel: “This is impossible.” 2 Darla: “Tell me about it—daddy!” 3 Cordy: “You slept with her?” 4 Angel: “Vampires can’t have children. Wesley?” 5 Wes: “Ah, no, he’s right. It’s not possible.” 6 Cordy: “That’s not what I asked.” 7 Darla: “You know we can’t. I know we can’t. But—we did.” 8 Fred: “I wonder if this might not be that bad thing we were expecting.” 9 Darla: “What did you do to me?” Although their relationship is volatile at best, Angel and Darla are in agreement on one very important point: the pregnancy should be impossible, according to the vampire lore that they (and Wesley, the resident expert on demonology within the series) are familiar with (turns 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7). Because Angel as a “vampire with a soul” is often depicted as playing an important role in the prophecies, that Darla, a vampire, shows up pregnant after having had sex with him would immediately seem to suggest that a prophecy is at work, something that is specifically alluded to in Fred’s comment in turn 8. The group’s acknowledgment of the impossibility of the situation sets the tone for how the group deals with Darla’s pregnancy, immediately constructing the very existence of a vampire fetus as “wrong” and grotesque. It is Darla’s last line in this segment that is significant, for it seeks to point the finger at Angel (“What did you do to me?”; emphasis added). Here it could be argued that seeking to place the blame on Angel is another example of the corruptive nature of female sexuality; however, an alternate reading of this is made possible by Cordelia’s later response to Angel (“Oh! You used her to make you feel better…”), seen in analysis extract 2.

Analysis Extract 2 1 Angel: “Cordy. I’m sorry—I lied. It was just—it was a very dark time.”

252

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity 2 Cordy: “Oh! You used her to make you feel better during your dark time. Well, that makes it all heroic.” 3 Angel: “It wasn’t like that. It just—happened. It wasn’t like I went evil or anything, I just…” 4 Cordy: “You just went male.” (Brushes the hair out of Darla’s face) “Have you been to a doctor?” 5 Darla: (Gives her a look) “No. But I have been to every shaman and seer in the Western Hemisphere.” 6 Wes: “And what did they say?” 7 Darla: “They don’t know what it is. They don’t know what it means. Nothing like this has ever happened.” 8 Angel: “Maybe it’s a hysterical pregnancy.” 9 Darla: “You wanna feel it kick?” 10 Cordy: “Does it kick a lot?” 11 Darla: “Like crazy.”

By supporting Darla’s assertion that Angel is in the wrong and somehow is to blame for what has happened, Cordelia alludes to Angel’s own sexual urges, suggesting that they were selfish and manipulative. Up until this point, the focus of the interaction has been the validity of the pregnancy itself, Angel, Darla, and Cordelia specifically responding to the pregnancy as a negative consequence of Darla’s and Angel’s sexual impulse. The group quickly shifts the focus from pregnancy as a consequence to the question of exactly what two vampires could and would conceive. Darla is the first character to address the issue of the impending offspring, answering a question about whether she has been to a doctor by stating that she has “been to every shaman and seer in the Western Hemisphere … they don’t know what it is. They don’t know what it means. Nothing like this has ever happened” (emphasis added). Describing her own offspring as it, Darla is the first to begin orienting to the pregnancy and resulting offspring as a monstrous thing. This is then picked up by the others, who begin to refer to the child as it; Cordelia breaks ranks and is the first to describe it as a baby. The fact that Cordelia, a human who is in a platonic relationship with Angel, is the first to

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

253

humanize the child can further be read to suggest that it takes a human to see the humanity in another being. Although Cordelia is still describing the child and the pregnancy in general as Angel’s fault and Darla as a victim, her describing the offspring as a baby marks a pivotal moment for the group, as others begin to speak of it as a child, rather than an unknowable it. This shift can be read as recategorizing the offspring as something less monstrous and therefore less threatening. However, it is at this point that the characters begin also to voice their anxieties about what this child may mean, ultimately constructing the child as a potential threat. Lorne, the group’s resident seer, still orients to the offspring as a child but raises the question of what a child created by two vampires might be like (Lorne: “It could be anything. A child born to two vampires”); his concern is answered by Gunn, who suggests, “Maybe it’s some kind of über-vamp?” Their anxieties are further picked up by Angel when he comments, “Great. So, we’re saying that my child is the scourge of mankind?” This is a significant turn within the overall interaction, for it is the first time that Angel acknowledges his role as the father, although he does so in a decidedly negative way by not only alluding to the possible evil nature of his child but also referring to his own past as a member of the vampire family known as the Scourge of Europe. The group continues to speak of the offspring as a child, albeit a child that carries with it a number of unknowable and unforeseeable variables, not the least of which is what kind of child it is and what impact it will have on the world—because in their experience, when unexpected things happen because of arcane prophecies, the outcome is rarely good. In fact, the characters specifically focus on the issue of good versus evil in relation to the child when Lorne says to Angel, “And [it is] mystically unfair. You’ve fought long and hard for good. If your destiny is to spawn something evil…,” to which Angel replies, “I don’t see how anything spawned by Darla and me could be good.” In this couplet, the characters switch from referring to the offspring as a child to recategorizing it as some-

254

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

thing that is spawned. One reading of this is that good creatures are not spawned; only evil creatures are. It is this reference that clearly begins to construct the very presence of the child as something monstrous; the group has already agreed that its very existence is deviant given the known social and moral order. Shortly after this, Darla reverts to her vampiric nature and attempts to feed on Cordelia. When Angel catches up with her, determined to kill her despite her role as the mother of his child, Darla reveals the monstrous effect the child is having on her, claiming, “It pounds! You can’t make it go away! You can’t stop it!” She alludes to the fact that she feeds but is never sated, her monstrous urge to feed growing stronger, along with her desire to feed on those who are most pure—children. This can be seen as an interesting parallel to early vampire narratives, most notably Lucy’s predilection for feeding upon children in Dracula, which can be read alternately as a monstrous mockery of motherhood or as a desire for that which she as a vampire can never have—biological children. Darla’s distress and insistence that “it pounds” is confusing until Angel registers that the child has something that neither vampiric parent has —a heartbeat. He then comes to the conclusion that because the child has a heartbeat, it must be human and therefore have a soul, suggesting that the soul is causing Darla’s emotional distress. Despite the fact that she begs him to stake her and end her suffering, he refuses. This refusal deviates from other vampire narratives in which the male protagonist acts to vanquish the monstrous being. In this instance, Angel is acting to protect what he sees as an innocent (his child), behavior that is reminiscent of abortion-debate arguments regarding protecting the life of the child versus the health and life of the mother. Furthermore, this protection also can be seen as an attempt to uphold the moral order, such that the sanctity of human life must be preserved. In doing so, Angel disempowers Darla, a character who has been depicted in her vampire form as an empowered female who has made her own decisions for centuries

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

255

—yet here is Angel, effectively her child through the sire bond, denying her the death she begs him for, something she is unable to do for herself. Even in this arguably contemporary vampire narrative, the male characters are seen working to uphold the existing moral order that is patriarchal at its core, where the interests of the men are protected over the desires or needs of the women, particularly when the woman in question is constructed within that social and moral order as a gestational grotesque. Though Darla is clearly already a monster, given her preexisting vampire status, the same cannot be said for Bella in Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn. It is only through her vampiric pregnancy that Bella is first represented as monstrous, yet she too is subject to the patriarchal moral order in an attempt to control her deviant female body. Like Darla, Bella instigates the sexual encounter, an offer that is rejected by her vampiric husband, Edward, in what can be read as a traditional patriarchal move to protect not only Bella’s innocence but also her life: within the Twilight saga vampiric sex is violently passionate, so much so that only another vampire would survive the liaison. In a somewhat unique twist, it is the vampire here that is shown to be in control of his sexual impulses, whereas the human is depicted as out of control. Edward controls his desires despite the fact that vampires are more often represented as creatures of excess that readily give in to impulses and appetites that the average mortal cannot. Bella and Edward’s initial reaction to the realization that Bella is pregnant mirrors that of Angel and Darla; Bella claims, “That’s impossible,” then turns and in the next breath seeks confirmation of this belief from Edward: “Can that happen?” Unlike Angel, Edward is silent on the matter, neither denying the possibility nor offering an alternative explanation. His first response to the news is not voiced to Bella at all but occurs over the phone to Carlisle, an older vampire who is effectively the patriarch of the Cullen vampire family. Speaking with Carlisle, Edward asks whether a pregnancy is possible, and Carlisle responds that he does

256

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

not know. Whereas the characters in Angel are sure of their knowledge that a vampiric live pregnancy should not be possible, the vampires in Meyer’s series admit that they do not know, effectively situating themselves as open to the possibility, although not necessarily happy about it, as seen in Carlisle’s next statement: “The sooner Bella’s here, the sooner we can find out what it is” (emphasis added). As in the extracts from Angel, here too, shortly after the announcement of the pregnancy, the offspring is categorized as it, a label that serves to question the very nature of the progeny. In contrast to Darla, Bella does not immediately seek to rid herself of the child; in fact, she has dreamed of a beautiful child and feels protective of it, as seen in the way her hands fall to cradle her abdomen protectively. Rather, it is Edward who first suggests that the child is something to fear: “I’m not gonna let it hurt you. Carlisle will get that thing out” (emphasis added). Although Edward responds to the idea of the child as potentially harmful and thereby a monstrous thing that she should be protected from, Bella clearly does not share his concern, questioning his reference to her child as a thing. Again, the male protagonist is attempting to maintain the moral order by reclaiming control of the deviant female body, a body that is made deviant as a consequence of having given in to her carnal desires. It must be noted that the film script, from which the dialogue here is taken, is incomplete, omitting a key bid for the patriarchal control of the now deviant female body of Bella. In the book, on the phone Edward and Carlisle discuss the need to abort the child—deciding that if they cannot convince Bella to willingly abort the fetus, they will force her to submit to the procedure. In expressing their belief that they must force Bella to comply if she will not do so willingly, Carlisle and Edward effectively construct the pregnancy as something abhorrent that must be eliminated for Bella’s good, as well as for the existing social and moral order of their group.

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

257

Resisting their attempts to coerce her into aborting the child, Bella fights to retain some level of agency and is supported in this by Rosalie, another vampire female of the family group—one who has previously lamented her inability to have a biological child of her own. In fact, it is Rosalie who first identifies the offspring as a baby, chastising another family female for calling it a fetus (Alice: “The fetus isn’t good for Bella.” Rosalie: “Say the word, Alice. Baby. It’s just a little baby.”). As in the descriptive category work that happens in Angel, the child is constructed here as harmful and monstrous by one family member, a description that is then rejected by Rosalie, who attempts to reposition the child as a baby in a bid to render it less monstrous. Rosalie’s attempt at repositioning is rejected by others, most notably Jasper, who responds, “Possibly,” suggesting that there is some doubt as to whether it is either little, given the increased growth patterns already seen, or a baby. While some members are fighting to position the child as monstrous, others are openly appealing to the family patriarch to step in and assert control (Jacob: “Carlisle, you’ve gotta do something”). Jacob’s appeal is shot down immediately by Bella, who in a more overt show of agency (that is strikingly lacking in the earlier novels and films), stands up for herself and her unborn child, claiming, “No. It’s not his decision. It’s not any of yours.” In a final attempt to sway Bella and convince her to allow them to abort the child, Jacob is sent to reason with her, which he attempts to do by appealing to her sense of self-preservation, suggesting that it is killing her. Bella rejects his claim, responding to his anxiety as she works to place things in a positive light: “I know this seems like a scary thing, but it’s not. It’s like this miracle or something. I can feel him.” Not only does she reposition her pregnancy as not harmful but a miracle, referring to the child as him rather than a generic baby, but Bella also positions the child as more real and less a frightful other. Jacob responds to her comment, picking up the category she has introduced (baby) and incorporating it into his interaction: “So, it’s a bouncing baby boy,” yet in a following statement he once again speaks to the

258

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

monstrous nature of the child, saying, “I can see what that thing’s doing to you. It’s a killer, Bella” (emphasis added). Jacob’s concerns are shared by his own family group, who are more overt in positioning the child as monstrous, calling it unnatural, dangerous, a monstrosity, and an abomination before suggesting that they cannot allow it to exist. Here they focus on the fact that the child is an unknown and they fear that it will be an uncontrollable vampire that will feed recklessly, endangering the human population. As in the narrative of Angel, the father discovers that the child has a heartbeat. Within the canon of Twilight, a soul is not the issue so much as whether the child is fully a vampire or not. Through a psychic link to the child, Edward claims to have gained new understanding: “It’s so strange. I thought he was like me, but he’s not. He’s like you. Good and pure.” This is the first time that a character apart from Bella and Rosalie has described the child as anything other than a monstrous threat. Up to this point, Bella herself has not been depicted as grotesque or monstrous; it is not until the rapid growth of the child begins to exert extreme pressure on Bella’s body, bending and breaking it with violent force, that other members begin to orient to Bella as a gestational grotesque. In an attempt to nourish herself and the child, Bella willingly begins drinking blood, which although it feeds her hunger and eases some of her physical pain, sees her transform from merely a gestational grotesque to a monster in her own right—despite the fact that she has yet to become a vampire, she is at this point a bloodthirsty monster.

Death, the Ultimate Sacrifice: Atonement and Empowerment for Monstrous Mothers Although the narratives discussed here deviate significantly from classic vampire narratives in the way that vampiric reproduction is achieved, they do speak to the enduring anxiety concerning female sexuality and the consequences of giving in to carnal appetites. In both cases, the

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

259

consequence of succumbing to one’s carnal desires is transformation into a gestational grotesque, one who exists to carry a monstrous child—a child that is categorized as monstrous purely because there is no precedent for it to even exist, rendering it an unknown other. As such, the child is positioned as a potential threat, or in Bella’s case both a present and a potential threat. Yet seemingly in spite of patriarchal attempts to reestablish the moral order by reexerting control over deviant female bodies, both Darla and Bella ultimately retain control of their own bodies and destiny of motherhood through the death of their physical bodies— Darla finding absolution and a means of atoning for past atrocities and Bella finding empowerment through her death and consequent vampiric transformation. In Darla’s case, her undead body refuses to allow the child to be born (“Quickening”; “Lullaby”), fighting against the labor until she knows that in effect she is killing her child. This knowledge sees Darla admitting for the first time that she can feel the child’s soul, and she is devastated by the idea that when the child is born, she will lose that connection and revert to the soulless, vampiric monster she has been (Darla: “I don’t have a soul. It does. And right now that soul is inside of me, but soon, it won’t be and then … I won’t be able to love it. I won’t even be able to remember that I loved it”). Ultimately, she is afraid that when this happens, she will no longer feel the love she currently feels for her child. Despite these fears, when she is realizes that her child will die unless it is born soon, Darla, a member of the Scourge of Europe who terrorized humans for centuries, is seen to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect her child: she stakes herself. This single act represents one of the key fears regarding vampires’ carnal desires and their consequences—in the end, there is only death. Darla’s sacrifice to bring her child into the world not only serves to reclaim her own agency in the face of repeated attempts by the group to reassert the expected patriarchal moral order, but it can be read as an act of redemption, as well, a truly selfless act committed by a vampiric monster who, by rights and lore, should be unable or unwilling to do such a thing.

260

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Unlike Darla’s birthing process, which in spite of ultimately leading to her death is virtually bloodless, Bella’s birthing process is constructed as a monstrous undertaking involving significant blood and mutilation of the body. A sudden movement from Bella sees the child inside her break not only her hip but also her spine and pelvis, resulting in excruciating pain for Bella and the endangerment of the pregnancy and the child. Although Carlisle, the only medically trained person in the family, is absent, the others realize that if they are to save Bella’s human life, they must attempt to deliver the child by cesarean section. Though they are able to make the initial cut, they are unable to free the child, for the womb is impenetrable to anything but vampire teeth. With his child in danger, Edward moves to assist the child in leaving the womb, using his own teeth to free it from Bella’s body. Though this delivers the child, it results in Bella’s death through bleeding out, although Edward is able to act in the role of patriarchal protector and “rescue” Bella from death by turning her into a vampire—thus changing her from the mother of a monster into a monstrous mother. Bella finds empowerment through giving birth and accepting her eventual vampiric transformation on her own terms. Whereas Edward initially tries to force her to abort her child in order to save her life and humanity, she persists in her desire to carry the child, knowing that it will kill her and that her only choice would then be to become a vampire —a monster. Despite repeated attempts by the men in her life to exert control over her body and pregnancy, in the end they acquiesce to her wishes. Within vampire narratives, the issue of vampiric reproduction generally speaks to anxieties about death and desire only insofar as it is a statement about the consequences of succumbing to those desires— without having intercourse. However, the two contemporary vampire film narratives discussed here not only radically reimagine vampiric reproduction, offering a reproductive process that includes a womb-originated pregnancy; they also speak to fears about intercourse itself and its

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

261

potentially monstrous consequences. Heike Steinhoff and Maria Verena Siebert have noted that “Bella giving birth is a scene in which the implicit threat of the abject female body has become explicit—fears of blurring boundaries, of a fluid, boundless, out of control body where death and birth coincide” (8). Although they refer specifically to Bella’s birthing process in Breaking Dawn, Steinhoff and Siebert’s observations can be applied just as easily to Darla’s birth experience in Angel. Mikhail Bakhtin wrote of three specific life events that exemplify the grotesque body: sexual intercourse, death throes, and the act of birth (353). The narratives discussed here and in the preceding chapters see all three events come to pass, each constructed by characters as resulting in a grotesque or monstrous outcome, the female body often depicted as deviant because it exceeds the boundaries of the body and moral order.

Concluding Remarks Although the examples addressed in this chapter represent a significant departure from classic vampire film narratives vis-à-vis vampiric reproduction by introducing the idea of vampira gravida—that is, live, womb-originated births involving at least one vampiric parent—they do point to a continuing human anxiety about death and desire, in particular female sexual desires. Both examples discussed here see the transformation into a gestational grotesque as the outcome of succumbing to one’s carnal urges, the child in each instance being constructed by characters (including the vampiric fathers) as monstrous because it is unprecedented and therefore an unknowable other. Despite the fact that these narratives represent a departure, in some ways, from classic vampire lore, one thing remains the same—the way in which the male protagonists (in this case, both vampires themselves) work to rein in the deviant female body, the gestational grotesque that is seen as out of control because it is carrying the monstrous child. Surprisingly, although they attempt to regain this control, neither vampiric

262

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

father is successful, and ultimately each comes to accept the child, even going so far as to reconsider the description of the child, repositioning it as less a monstrous or harmful force by claiming it as their own and even humanizing it further by assigning it a gender (male in both cases). In the end, both Darla and Bella ultimately retain control of their bodies and assert their right to motherhood through the death of their physical bodies—Darla finding redemption for her violent vampiric past and Bella finding empowerment through giving birth and accepting her eventual vampiric transformation on her own terms. Furthermore, although the primary purpose of this chapter was to explore the issue of monstrous motherhood and unnatural children in ways that complement and add to the discussion started in other chapters within this work, it also serves a valuable secondary purpose as a methodological springboard for future researchers who seek a suitable intersection between applied linguistics and film studies. Given the constraints of the current volume, it is not possible to fully demonstrate the potential of CA and MCA when applied to film discourse; however, I believe this chapter’s close-grained categorical analysis concerning the unnatural status of vampiric offspring supports the feasibility and usefulness of CA and MCA as legitimate film studies methodologies. In addition, the work shown here demonstrates that a combined approach using an applied linguistics methodology alongside a critical interactional perspective provides a finely detailed yet critical examination of film discourse and the underlying power structures perpetuated in the script.

Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice

263

Notes 1. As an interactional communication researcher, I use texts within this chapter to refer to the media artifacts being studied—in this case, actual scripted dialogue from Angel and Breaking Dawn.

Part 4

Innocence Lost Monstrous Children

Chapter 11

“Children of the Night” Dracula, Degeneration, and Syphilitic Births at the Fin de Siècle Brandy Schillace The haunting specter of the vampire, not the folkloric legend lurking in far-off boneyards but the ever- and omnipresent shadow prowling the dingy streets of an industrial capital, continues to plague the modern imagination. Bram Stoker’s Dracula ushered in a new kind of vampire, energetic, aristocratic, and racially ambiguous—able to move in and between social circles with horrifying ease in a class-bound Victorian England. As a text, Dracula embodies “a seemingly boundless array of Victorian anxieties, nearly all of which revolve around the bourgeois subject’s obsession with the maintaining of clear and distinct boundaries”—not only those of society and state but also of the body proper in an age of virulent epidemics (May 16). Arguably the worst of these was syphilis, a venereal disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Syphilis has four stages: primary (wherein a single sore, or chancre, appears), secondary (characterized by skin rash and lesions of mucous membranes), latent (when symptoms disappear), and late

268

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

(wherein the disease attacks the nervous system and internal organs; see Centers for Disease Control). For everything else that Dracula threatens —hostility toward the New Woman and female sexuality (Roth; Senf), deracination (Arata), “technologies of monstrosity” (Halberstam), and shifts in the concept of masculinity (A. Smith; Yeates and Trowbridge)— contemporary readers would have recognized the mark of pathology in the slow decline of vampiric victims.1 A fluid-borne disease—fluid, too, in its shape shifting from one stage to the next—syphilis turned the virile into the virulent, such that the victim also became the aggressor. Husbands gave it to wives, wives—as mothers—gave it to their children, and the children themselves infected their nurses. Thus, while doctors and theorists hotly debated who was responsible for venereal infection, an equally contentious debate was raging about the effects of disease on reproduction and upon children. Given the present moment, characterized by escalating cases of AIDS and HPV (human papillomavirus), as well as a resurgent interest not only in the vampire but in vampire birth (as seen in Breaking Dawn and Van Helsing), I propose to reevaluate the nexus of disease, culpability, reproduction, and monstrosity that undergirds Stoker’s still compelling narrative. Much has been made of Dracula’s would-be brides, the women he preys upon. Lucy and Mina seem to bifurcate the text, and critical perception most often considers the first a rebellious woman of perverse sexual desire to be punished, the second a maternal figure reestablishing the dominant sexual narrative (Halberstam 335). Andrew Smith’s reading of the gender concerns in the text posits Jonathan Harker as the emasculated, neurasthenic, and enervated man of sexology debates, and Sos Eltis has read Dracula as evidence of gender instability in the wake of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. The sexuality of vampires has become a truism, a platform and stage upon which to determine or decipher competing narratives of sexual identity, practice, and perversion. Far less attention has been given to the consequences of these unions —to the children, the literal fruit of such labors. Gothic narrative so often revolves around the child, the orphan, and his or her search for

“Children of the Night”

269

origins and recognition—is it not surprising that there are no traditional orphan-infants in Dracula? Of the one hundred references to child or children in the novel, fewer than half (forty-three) refer to actual children—the rest concern the spawn of Satan, nighttime creatures, or the adult characters (all of whom, with the exception of Quincey P. Morris, bear that reference at least once). Placed as it is among an incredible number and variety of texts on congenital syphilis, hereditary degeneration, and the national threat of decline through malformed or miscarried births, the child in Dracula is made most conspicuous by its absence. Instances in which children do appear are that much more significant. The suckling devoured by Dracula’s brides opens the novel, and Mina’s son, Quincey Harker, appears at its end—a narrative that, womb-like, gestates for twenty-seven chapters (plus a postscript) in order to give him birth. What happens in between, from professor Abraham Van Helsing’s warning about vampiric contagion to Lucy’s predatory attacks on children, suggests that the signal terror of Stoker’s novel is vampiric (pathological) fecundity in the face of Britain’s reproductive decline— but also that grown men and women may be strangely substituted for children in this world of immortal adulthood. As Elaine Showalter indicated in A Literature of Their Own, fifteen hundred infants died annually until the turn of the century—and these were likely conservative estimates that did not include unregistered births or those children who lived a few years before perishing of complications (qtd. in Senf). But of critical importance to a syphilitic reading of Dracula is the following paradox: though “the little children can be bitten,” they are never infected (Stoker 209). They occupy a position removed from the sexual energy that dominates the narrative; unlike Lucy, they never trade their roles as innocent victims for something darker, the “sweetness … turned to adamantine” that repulses Lucy’s one-time suitors (Stoker 218). The particulars of vampire infection are never fully disclosed in the novel, and though at least one child dies and more are rendered weak and sickly by attack, there is no indication that these babes will become predatory themselves. Moreover, the

270

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

child-adult is substituted for the actual child at critical moments in the text; rather than serving as a vision of New Woman sexuality or of the prostitute, Lucy Westenra is—within the confines of the narrative— primarily referred to as a child. She is the child, in fact, the monstrous child standing in for the congenital sufferer with a wasting disease that replicates hereditary syphilis in the perishing infant. In what follows, I propose a model suggested by Jennifer Wicke in her groundbreaking work “Vampiric Typewriting”—that is, I peer into “the shabby, dusty corners” not only of Dracula but also of the corresponding medical treatises, culling the sexual detritus for two lingering strands: (1) the culpability of women and mothers in the transmission of disease and degeneration, and (2) the fantasy of impermeable innocence and guiltless paternity at the fin de siècle.

Vampiric Sexuality: Prostitution and Syphilitic Contagion In the second half of Dracula, Professor Van Helsing warns that the vampire is not a single foe but a potential army: “[T]o fail here,” he tells the Harkers, “is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him”— a quote I will return to presently (Stoker 242). The vampire’s ability not only to absorb but also to transmit life, or rather, to transfer unlife, means that contagion and reproduction are intrinsically linked. Stephen Arata considered this the threat of deracination and reverse colonization, wherein “the ‘civilized’ world is on the point of being colonized by ‘primitive’ forces” (Arata 623). But in the case of venereal disease, the primitive forces are bacteria, spread through sexual contact and through human generation. The link between syphilis and birth had been discovered as early as the sixteenth century (about one hundred years after the initial European outbreak), but social debate and legal action focused for most of the century on the prostitute—the ostensibly nonproductive, sexual woman—as both source and disseminator of the disease. Mary Spongberg, in her comprehensive work on the body of the pros-

“Children of the Night”

271

titute in Victorian England, described a signal shift in the construction of venereal disease (syphilis, in particular). Though syphilis was always thought to be generated and carried principally by women, by the 1890s, British medical authorities suggested that there were specific signifiers and predispositions that not only “inscribed” women’s bodies with the “signs of degeneracy” but also determined that some women were born as prostitutes, congenitally loose in terms of morals and aggressively sexual (Spongberg 1). “Pathologizing the prostitute” allowed people to overlook male responsibility; more specifically, the infection of innocent wives and the birth of syphilitic children could be attributed to the prostitutes, who like Count Dracula, serve as ground zero for the outbreak (11). By repositioning the locus of disease in a woman who was both signally degenerate and, owing to venereal infection, often sterile,2 the rhetoric of the medical establishment made the prostitute the mother of disease in much the same way Milton’s Sin is mother to Death. The problem of congenital syphilis remained, but in the years leading up to England’s problematic Contagious Disease Acts, the child and its parents were rendered largely invisible, hidden by the shadow of the prostitute and her “devouring sexuality” (3). A full understanding of Dracula—and of its complex issues of gender—requires that one examine not only the role of the prostitute (as predator and scapegoat) but also the critical debates about and signal shifts in disease culpability in the years prior to the book’s publication. In the 1860s, the Contagious Disease Acts sanctioned the forced medical examination of women rumored to be prostitutes. The acts and their ramifications, which I return to, were largely punitive—and the measures of treatment were often cruel, harsh, and even deadly. To facilitate such treatment, it was necessary to separate the prostitute from “real women,” upon whom such ghastly treatments could not in good conscience be practiced. The prostitute much be rendered monstrous— she must, in fact, be a monster. As early as the 1830s, medical anthropologists like Alexandre Parent-Duchatalet could claim that prostitutes were different from all other women—that they exhibited (as distilled

272

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

by Spongberg) “deviancy and excess … lesbianism, alcoholism and other forms of addiction” that rendered them both “abnormal” and “less than human” (6). The concept, immortalized in print by William Acton’s provocative but popular Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, portrayed a “fallen” woman as a “sexual vampire,” as a woman with half the woman gone, and that half containing all that elevates her nature, leaving her a mere instrument of impurity; degraded and fallen she extracts from the sin of others the means of living, corrupt and dependent on corruption, and therefore interested directly in the increase of immorality—a social pest, carrying contamination and foulness to every quarter to which she has access. (Qtd. in Spongberg 50) One may easily see the eerie relation Acton’s scurrilous attack bears to the warning of Stoker’s principal hero, Professor Van Helsing, concerning Dracula’s contagion. Consider again Van Helsing’s warning: [T]o fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him—without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best … We go on for all time abhorred by all; a blot on the face of God’s sunshine. (Stoker 242) Though useful in shifting culpability from husbands to prostitutes, this move did nothing to stop the spread of disease to the heart of the family. The specter of the disease within linked the syphilitic offspring of supposedly asexual and pure women and wives back to the prostitute/monster. The horror was not put off by careful rhetoric; after all, if the prostitute herself is degenerate and the child of degenerates, what of the wife and infant she inadvertently infects? Maternity and maternal degeneracy are never far from the debate about prostitutes and contagion, and “[t]he parallelism between the vampire and the prostitute demonstrates the intensification of bourgeois dread almost to the point of an uncanny apotheosis” (May 16). These fears spawn equally

“Children of the Night”

273

monstrous attempts at control, which find their fullest and most horrifying expression in the Contagious Disease Acts themselves. I have detailed here the complex relations between contagion, maternity, and the prostitute in part because, as noted by Leila May and Carol Senf, the prostitute and the vampire are frequently compared. On one hand, May went so far as to suggest that the resemblance is unmistakable, comparing descriptions of the putrescent odor of Dracula’s habitation with descriptions of brothels and the prostitute’s “fouled” body (17). Carol Senf, on the other hand, described the novel as Stoker’s ambivalent response to the New Woman, a figure that—as a champion for women’s rights, socially and sexually—was often also a reformist in debates about venereal disease. Senf claimed that Stoker’s novel corroborates the New Woman concern about the impact of disease on women and children, yet as the medical discourse does, Stoker’s text makes the “fallen” or vampiric woman principally responsible for infecting “innocent men” (44). Similarly, Leila May’s work, though referring to Dracula as the “walking emblem of the nineteenth-century horror of disease and contagion,” reinforces his threat to women, who “like prostitutes, act as ‘reservoirs of infection’ and ‘potential pollutants of men’” (May 18). Aligning Stoker with the rhetoric of the medical treatise and with William Acton’s promotion of the Contagious Disease Acts, such readings show Dracula as reinforcing both the “fine and fragile” line between the angelic and the infernal woman (the wife and the prostitute, respectively), underscoring—for May—the “Victorian male’s dread that his own wife, mother, sister, daughter, might be constitutionally similar to those who had already slipped over the line” (19). Though I am indebted to these explorations and build upon the groundwork they have laid, I would suggest a rather different reading of Stoker’s intent. Reading Dracula’s women and, even more important, its children, through the lens of syphilitic contagion and congenital debate, I argue that the text is much more than ambivalent: it is a fantasy of impermeable innocence

274

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

and guiltless paternity (on behalf of both men and women) in the face of epidemic and disease—a dystopia with strangely utopian aspirations.

Transforming Culpability Judith Halberstam suggested that the vampirized female body is rendered “non-pro-ductive by its sexuality,” and so Dracula alone “reproduces his form” (345). Yet the prostitute—as an equally “foul thing of the night”3—is rendered nonproductive by disease but is hyperproductive of disease. Vampiric sexuality, Halberstam argued, must be eradicated; Lucy Westenra, though an innocent victim, must face the stake. Thus, though syphilis was a disease unto itself, it had become a metaphor for disease by the fin de siècle—a “trope for social and cultural degeneration” (Smith 95). It would also become a battleground regarding sexual violation, women’s rights, and reproductive health. The Contagious Disease Acts of the 1860s operated, not unlike similar laws in France, as a paradox. They made hospitalization compulsory for any prostitute suspected of having venereal disease: she would be detained for three months (Spongberg 63). Given the notoriously bad diagnostic practices of the time, this meant being detained and forcefully treated for any number of nonsyphilitic disorders (resulting, among other things, in poisoning by mercury, the principle medication). And yet the acts also regulated prostitution—and fostered it. As a parallel, it is useful to consider the French system, to which opponents of the acts frequently compared the legislation. In recognition that syphilis could “reach down into the next generation,” France instituted its own réglementation, the registration and regular examination of prostitutes. This procedure was justified as the means of saving “respectable wives” from diseases (Harsin 72). The underlying assumption in England, as in France, was that the regulation of prostitutes (as primary disease carriers) would prevent wives from receiving the disease because it would keep the husbands free of it. What rarely appears in this rhetoric is the husband’s culpability for his actions. Instead, he is the victim who in protecting

“Children of the Night”

275

his (pure, asexual) wife from his own advances, endangers her with the contagion of the prostitute. The acts were not without their opponents, however. In the years before Stoker penned Dracula, New Woman feminists begin to campaign against the Contagious Disease Acts, resulting in perceptual changes that would have far-reaching implications for the prostitute as “sexual vampire.” Activist Josephine Butler successfully led the charge to repeal the legislation in 1886, primarily by representing the prostitute as the victim and the male client as the villain (Smith 97). The monster—the prostitute—thus became the “child,” if not the innocent (and of course, many prostitutes were in fact underage). Butler used quotes from these victims to refigure their role and responsibility: To please a man I did wrong first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayer and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die.” (Butler, “The Garrison of Kent,” Shield 9 May 1870; qtd. in Smith 97) The medical treatment—mercury, usually, and sometimes iodine—was administered in various ways: by mouth, by unction (rubbed on the skin), by fumigation, and by hypodermic syringe (Cooper 321–324). Butler, in recording the complaints of prostitutes, suggested that the medical cure was itself tantamount to a kind of rape, “legitimiz[ing] a cruel and irrational sexual violation, one that inflicted pain and mutilation on women” (Butler, letter to Joseph Edmonson 1872; qtd. in Smith 98). Butler recreated the prostitute in these narratives as a victim of male lust and of perverse male doctors—and significantly, after the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts (and in many ways because of the work of Butler and New Woman novelists), male sexuality was perceived as increasingly responsible for spreading syphilis to innocent women and children. The locus had shifted. More important, the focus was no longer upon

276

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the nonproductive sexual encounters of prostitution but rather upon the reproductive space of the family. The debate had begun, and medical and social treatises fought to cast the shadow of responsibility on one gender or the other. This shift in culpability has been called the pathologizing of the male subject, but texts on congenital syphilis, which represent (often in graphic detail) the mangled bodies of infant sufferers, also participate in a long-standing tradition of pathologizing the mother and the child. Treatises on monster births had constituted a genre from the sixteenth century; the new focus shifted responsibility and origin, but it did not remove the monstrous nature of the diseased infant or the womb it emerged from. Significantly, it was the innocence of the infant juxtaposed with the monstrosity of disease that made children a useful trope to social and medical reformists—and it is also what makes Lucy (as the defenseless and frivolous Victorian lady) more pitiable, though no less punishable. She is a disease carrier and a domestic woman, a potential bride and mother. Unlike the prostitute (who is not considered for her reproductive potential), syphilitic mothers posed a threat to the family center. Their pregnancies often terminated in miscarriage, the infants who came to term alive were often sickly, and those that lived beyond their first few months were marked for life with deformities indicative of the degeneration recognized by theorists from Max Nordau (author of Degeneration) to Cesare Lombroso (The Criminal Man, The Female Offender). However, though Lombroso was famous for suggesting that there were born criminals—that the womb would, in fact, eject the born criminal in miscarriage—this fact has been sublimated in the syphilis debate by a rhetoric of defeated innocence (Bending 207). Victimhood, by the 1890s, had been more thoroughly transferred to the child, and monstrosity more completely to both the mother and the infected father.4 The shift is worth considering, and—I argue—is critical to understanding Dracula’s “children.” In 1863, this contagion was described as syphilitic taint. Gottlieb Heinrich Georg Jahr asked “whether …

“Children of the Night”

277

the disease has been so completely and unmistakably eradicated … that it cannot possibly germinate anew, and produce another syphilitic monster” (366; emphasis added). Two decades later, the syphilitic infant was the pitied, innocent victim of morally suspect progenitors. Charles Diday’s work removed the stigma from the child, who was itself “attacked” but unknowingly transferred “a sanitary problem, the solution of which, weighing fearfully upon the family and the medical man, has not been found” (210). Like the innocent Lucy of Stoker’s novel, the actual infected child is “innocent of the disasters which strike it,” but nonetheless transfers its tainted nature to others (210). Diday himself used the trope of innocence in the opening of his treatise to chastise the medical community for internal schisms when the lives of children are at stake. By the 1890s, even the Spectator announced that “those of us who yield to the ordinary temptations which disfigure our nature, are no less guilty than the monster born. On the contrary, such men are much more guilty” (“Monsters” 426). Accounts about syphilis and its spread differ in their choice of villains—yet there is one significant similarity among them: the assigned, unquestioned innocence of the child. This reimagining of innocence is a crucial shift resulting not only in the repeal of the damaging contagious disease legislation but also in the construction of the father as originator of the “sin.” This revelation, so near the inception of Stoker’s novel, proved a “more ghastly idea” to Victorians than the suggestion of spontaneous generation did (Spongberg 152). Once the grounds for debate had moved to paternity, degenerative syphilis—like Dracula’s vampiric blight—threatened to attack Britain at its very core: future progeny. Mother-guilt had been longstanding; the new specter to haunt the Victorian psyche was that of father-guilt, and it made its appearance in the novels and plays of the period that preceded Stoker’s novel. Spongberg examined Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, a play performed in 1891 about the syphilis of the husband, Captain Alving. The play was violently criticized by Dr. Max Nordau, who felt it was a gross misrepresentation and who, not surprisingly, played down male culpability in his own works. Similar texts, Sarah

278

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Grand’s Heavenly Twins and Emma Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman, also attacked male profligates—Brooke’s with the suggestion that “[v]irtue itself meets some too late, and the best to be hoped for is painless extinction” (Brooke 284).5 It is with this last suggestion that Stoker’s Dracula has principally to deal. There are four female vampires in the novel, but the primary threat—the vampire who, as Halberstam expressed, “reproduces his form”—is male. The female victims, even the inhuman and vicious brides, do not actually infect anyone in the text. They are rendered innocuous in part, I argue, because their prey—children—are immune to their advances and in part because, as the guilty father, Dracula alone bears responsibility for the epidemic. And significantly, it is he who must be eradicated in a (less than) painless extinction.

Reexamining Dracula: Avenging the Little Children This lengthy history provides a complex picture. It is not enough to say that prostitutes were villains or that New Woman feminists were threatening or even that masculinity suffered from crippling anxieties about performance and progeny. The boundaries were much less clear. Medical treatises damned prostitutes and exonerated men, but Butler’s work defended prostitutes as innocent victims of perverse masculinity —and both ideas had currency in the popular culture. It is not, therefore, surprising to see certain competing themes appearing in the novel; Stephen Arata’s “Occidental Tourist” describes Dracula as both a dystopia of declining empire and a fantasy of revenge against those forces threatening to overtake British supremacy. The fear of reverse colonization and the infiltration of borders is also the fear of disease; in fact, the policing of borders in the 1730s across the continent was largely a response to the fear of spreading epidemics. That this converged with the 1732 vampire scare is worth noting; the position and condition of skeletons unearthed in Český Krumlov, a small city in the South Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, suggest that vampire-killing rituals had been performed—and the threat was great enough to gain the

“Children of the Night”

279

attention of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who sent her personal physician, Gerhard van Swieten, to investigate.6 Disease colonizes the host, and in this way, the vanquishing of Dracula is a different kind of revenge fantasy, one that in the text takes control not only (though perhaps primarily) of sexuality7 in the text but also of its deadly consequence: syphilitic contagion. I began by suggesting that Dracula hinges upon a paradox, that though children may be attacked by vampires, they do not become vampires themselves.8 Of equal importance is that adults (or child-adults, in Lucy’s case) are substituted for children. Not yet twenty, Lucy Westenra becomes the object of Dracula’s attention (as well as the attentions of three suitors—Quincey Morris, Dr. Jack Seward, and Arthur Holmwood). After being lured out in the night, Lucy is found by her childhood friend (and the heroine of the text), Mina Harker (née Murray). Mina shepherds her back home again, writing in her diary that Lucy “rose without a word, with the obedience of a child” (111). From the first, then, Lucy’s infection and her status as a child are related—a point reinforced by nearly all the male members of her small circle, particularly Van Helsing. “Now, little miss,” he explains during her first transfusion, “here is your medicine. Drink it off, like a good child” (138). Dr. Seward also refers to her repeatedly as “dear child,” thrice on his entry of September 13 alone, and Quincey refers to her as an “honest hearted girl.” Her symptoms, too, resemble those of a sick, syphilitic infant— for the congenital disease showed a symptomology different from the contracted venereal infection of the adult. In fact, children might be born alive and apparently “healthy and vigorous”—with no chancres (Cooper 275). However, symptoms begin to appear within the first three months: “the skin is loose and wrinkled … the hair dry and scanty”—the child appears to age rapidly and unnaturally (275; see fig. 7). Though there are no sores, no lesions, and no marks, the child appears to suffer “emaciation” (275). The children are also, significantly, born with pegged teeth, or teeth seemingly sharpened and malformed (see fig. 8). They wither before the anxious eyes of their parents who, knowingly or not, have

280

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

passed the deadly poison through the transmission of fluid. In so many ways, the child has become like them (as Van Helsing warns). On the occasion of the first attack, Lucy’s condition is one of a sleepwalker just waking, except that she is “breathing … in long, heavy gasps, as though striving to get her lungs full at every breath” (111). The failure of breath is the most common sign of syphilis in infants, for the disease attacks the mucous membranes of the nose and soft tissues. In the advanced stages of Lucy’s decline, when she is very near death, “her breast heaved softly, and her breath came and went like a tired child’s” (173; emphasis added). Lucy’s other symptoms, from anemia to nervousness and restlessness, culminate in a state of “ghastly, chalk[y] pal[lour]. The red seemed to have gone even from her lips and gums, and the bones of her face stood out prominently. Her breathing was painful to see or hear” (137). Lucy’s looks resemble those of the tainted infant, whose appearance becomes “dull … its rosy color disappears … it is yellow, or like coffee mixed with milk” (Diday 81). The “deep pallour” of the skin is accompanied by emaciation, as well as a waste of the lungs (82). Stoker’s novel to this point has been at some pains to describe Lucy as innocent, virginal, and childlike. In doing so, the author cast greater villainy on her pursuer and, not unlike the rhetoric of Josephine Butler, turned what might have been a critique of a night-wandering woman into a catalog of male failures. Lucy’s somnambulism is problematic (Halberstam connects it with the racial stigma of “wandering Jew,” and many contemporary texts view it as a sign of degeneracy), but her family and closest friends, who know of her sleepwalking, are rendered guilty for their inability to curb it. Van Helsing’s attempts to cure her are thwarted because he has not divulged information to Lucy’s mother— and also because he stays away from Hillingham. A misplaced telegram keeps Dr. Seward from taking Van Helsing’s place, and in dismay, he cries, “Oh, how we are beset! How are all the powers of the devils against us!” (11). But devils alone are not to blame. At critical moments, Lucy is

“Children of the Night”

281

continually abandoned to her all-consuming disease, from the first attack to her last gasp. A “child,” Lucy must not bear the responsibility of her condition. Yet though her condition mimics that of the syphilitic infant both in its symptomology and its progression, she becomes party to the epidemic, a potential contagion bearer. In this manner, it may be (and has been) argued that Lucy becomes sexually virulent, aligned with the “foul” women of the night—with vampires and prostitutes. Her treatment at the hands of Van Helsing, similarly, bears resemblance to the often torturous medical procedures prostitutes endured. The syringe of mercury becomes, in the text, the needle of transfusion and then, ultimately, the stake. Judith Halberstam, Sos Eltis, and others have considered these implements representations of the phallus; it is by the needle that Lucy receives the fluids of men and by the stake that she is physically violated in a “reassertion of masculine dominance and sexual aggression” (Eltis 456). Lucy has devolved into a creature less than human in her sexuality, but she loses her status as innocent victim as soon as she attacks, snarling and wolflike, other innocents. Her staking has been read by many critics as her punishment for sexual deviance and as representative of Stoker’s exploitation of fears about feminists and the New Woman (Halberstam 335; Eltis 463). But as I have discussed, the syphilitic prostitute-as-victim muddies distinctions between sexuality, contagion, and victimization. The prostitute is not virginal and is never portrayed as such. She is, however, rendered innocent of the syphilitic taint, which has been brought on by men. Lucy mirrors this trajectory; she is infected, her blood transformed by the vampire, but she remains virginal. Van Helsing’s distinction between Lucy and the average vampire is strangely clarifying when read through the lens of these competing narratives of culpability. He explains that Lucy is “different from all recorded” vampires; because she was in a trance when she was bitten and when she died, she has been spared the maliciousness of the other she-vampires whose faces “show what they are” (Stoker 209). Even in death, Lucy remains (because of the addition of her physical or sexual, if not vampiric, virginity) caught between the

282

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

identities of child and adult, victim and villain. Her strange middle condition as child-wife but also as innocent-vampire represents the unusual shift in culpability ongoing in works on syphilis and reform—but rather than use the trope of the innocent but afflicted child, Stoker substituted a potential mother. These substitutions continue throughout Dracula. I mentioned before that for all the references to children in the novel, very few of them are true children. In addition to Lucy as the congenital infant, there is Arthur the “dear boy” and the “child,” suffering at the bedside of Lucy, the wife/mother (137). Like a bereft infant, he is himself “sick and weak” and is called a child by Van Helsing, who sees in him a son (171, 173). Dr. Jack Seward, when faced with the memory of Lucy, weeps like a child and is comforted as “my own child” by Mina (227, 236). Mina, like Lucy, is at first called “little girl” by Quincey (237) but the address reverts to “child” once she, too, shows signs of syphilitic infection—particularly after the discussion of her impending death if the hunt for Dracula fails (290). After Mina’s suffering begins, Harker—who, by rights, begins the novel as a rather enervated creature and ends it more traditionally masculine—is also called a child (302). Finally, though Van Helsing is not directly called a child himself, he is referred to as a woman and a hysteric by Dr. Seward in a scene where Van Helsing himself approximates the mother/father (185). There are two other instances wherein the child reference is made: Renfield is christened a child by Dr. Seward (273), and Dracula by Van Helsing (300ff.). However, these last instances more appropriately follow the degenerative and evolutionary theories of Lombroso (on the degenerate criminal) and of Francis Warner, who linked degenerate development to defective brains, animalistic tendencies, and interestingly, biting (Bending 207). For the child-adult protagonists, however, the references always come either at times of infection— when the women replace the infected children—or at times of bereavement, thus rendering the grieving spouse a child (in the case of Arthur Holmwood and Jonathan Harker) or a grieving mother (as in the case of Van Helsing).

“Children of the Night”

283

Two corollaries arose in the medical and popular press of the time. First, a number of women did in fact commit suicide (as Mina threatens to do) once they contracted the disease. A famous case concerns a wet nurse who killed herself after contracting syphilis from the infant of diseased bourgeois parents and giving it to her own child, who consequently perished (Harsin 8). The second corollary concerns the mothers of sufferers. Although women were often kept in the dark as to the details of their syphilitic infection—in fact, in France, dermatologist Jean Alfred Fournier told his students that it was their “moral duty to deceive her in this matter”—their mothers, through age and experience, often understood very well (qtd. in Harsin 85); Fournier himself was accosted by a furious mother who discovered that her daughter had been prescribed mercury. But in the end, these women could but rail fruitlessly at an establishment that expected them to accept their infection with either ignorance or grace—ideally with both (Harsin 89).9 That such women would be considered hysterical, that their sense of injustice would appear as “bizarre caprise,”10 aligns Van Helsing, particularly, with the injured mother—a very different mother/father from Dracula, the originator of the disease and thus the representation of sinful, profligate man. In every scene that suggests the transfer of contagion, the congenital child itself is absent—not, as the “bloofer lady” makes apparent, because children cannot be victimized but because unlike the syphilitic infant, they are preserved in Stoker’s text from becoming infectious themselves. I return to the first true child mentioned in the novel: the infant devoured by Dracula’s brides. Harker describes these women as animalistic, without humanity—not real women at all, but “devils of the Pit” (Stoker 75). Halberstam argued that “[v]ampire sexuality blends power and femininity within the same body and then marks that body as distinctly alien” (344); May contended that the vampire/prostitute perverts “the nuptial and maternal roles” and turns the Victorian female “into a child-eating, man-devouring monster” (19). Yet by virtue of this very devouring, the cycle ends. There is no transfer—another paradox, as the vampiric (syphilitic) curse lies with its fecund nature; Van Helsing

284

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

warns that the undead, cursed but unable to die, go on “adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world … And so the circle goes on ever widening, like the ripples from a stone thrown in water” (Stoker 222). But the vampire brides, like the prostitute, are contagious only if they reproduce their kind (other vampires, or the congenitally ill infants the prostitutes indirectly birth through the wives of their customers). In this scene, the women long to feast on Jonathan Harker, and their seductive embrace is described in titillating detail by the coy Harker, who pretends to be asleep: I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart. (62) Not unlike the (equally titillating) accounts of Dr. William Acton, Harker’s description depicts these women as hypersexual. The “wicked lightnings” of their eyes do, in fact, “stir the pulse” for Jonathan “with devil’s leaps”—a near approximation of Acton’s concluding remarks (which were themselves borrowed from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King; Acton qtd. in Spongberg 50). If, however, these women are aligned with the prostitutes and fallen women Acton so maligned, why do they not spread their foul contagion? The only active figure in this scene is Dracula, who sweeps in “quick as lightning,” and thrusts the women away with an “imperious gesture” (63). It is also the count who brings fresh bounty—its presence registered only with “a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child” (63). Readers can infer from the eagerness of the brides and the additional presents Dracula brings them while later impersonating Harker that this is a regular occurrence. Yet the castle is not peopled with child-vampires or creeping undead infants. The devouring sexuality of these, the worst of female offenders, ends in the

“Children of the Night”

285

deed itself. One might see in them another substitution—they are, after all, aligned with the monstrous “children of the night.” They may also be aligned with murdering mothers, practicing infanticide as did Mary Ann Brough, who slit the throats of her six children before attempting suicide in 1854 (Mangham 20). Though a horrific crime and one that haunted the Victorian imagination throughout the century (particularly after the sensationalized Brough trial), the act does not reproduce degeneracy. It is, in fact, reproduction’s inverse. There is no explanation given as to why the children, who may be bitten, do not bite in turn. The seeming contradiction is also apparent in the second half of the novel, when a vampirized Lucy attacks small children as the “bloofer lady.”11 These accounts are presented, first, as clippings from the Westminster Gazette. Such papers often carried sensationalized stories—the Mary Ann Brough case, for instance, appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. These fictionalized accounts appear as “The Hampstead Mystery” and “The Hampstead Horror.” In these tales, the “grubbyfaced little children” and “tiny tots” are led away by a mysterious woman. Each returns to its home with small puncture wounds in the skin, such as “a rat or a small dog” might make (188). In the hospital, the children rally, though they long to return to the cause of their suffering. Van Helsing warns the doctor to keep the children indoors, lest wandering prove “fatal”—but there is no mention here of the possible contagion of the child itself or of its danger to others (204–205). Later, when the vampire Lucy is discovered with a child, clutching it to her bosom with “lips … crimson with fresh blood,” much of the focus remains on the transformed and unnatural “mother” (218). Productive analysis of Lucy’s “adamant” looks, the heartless way she flings the child to the ground and “snarls” over it, her voluptuousness and wantonness and overt sexuality has been performed by others—in most respects she mirrors the vampire brides, and in so doing, also mirrors the prostitute. But if one examines the scene for the impact on the child, one sees that here, too, no infection has been transmitted. The child’s

286

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

cries are likened to a dreaming creature curled up “before the fire” (218). When Lucy tosses the child to the ground, the cry is repeated, and the child lies “moaning” (219). The violence of the scene is attributed only to Lucy’s actions, which Stoker’s text describes as “adamantine,” “heartless,” “cruel,” “strenuous,” “blazing,” “callous,” “livid,” “raging” (218– 219). By comparison, the sleeping child is portrayed as cozy—and is, despite all that commotion, left “in safety” (220). Stranger still is the juxtaposition of Van Helsing’s description, mentioned earlier, of the ever-widening circle of the undead. He tells Arthur of his narrow escape: “if you had met that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die, or again, last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu” and would himself have made “more of those Un-Deads that so have filled us with horror” (222). But immediately following this, he likewise claims that the “children whose blood she sucked are not as yet so much the worse” (222). Should Lucy continue as undead, “more and more they lose their blood and by her power over them they come to her, and so she draw their blood with that so wicked mouth,” but this is not followed with the same deadly consequence that Arthur, it seems, would have faced after only a single “kiss.” Readers can be further assured of the children’s relative immunity by Van Helsing’s comment that the essential reason for vanquishing vampire Lucy is to free the soul of the real Lucy, not to protect the world from vampire children. The female vampire feeds on them; she may cause them to appear weak, even emaciated. But in the end, they are free from any curse or contagion. Similarly, the end of Stoker’s novel washes over the hard facts of the vampiric contagion. Dracula is tracked down, staked, and beheaded in a rapid series of events (a short six chapters from Dracula’s attack on Mina to the novel’s end). Mina is freed from the curse—at the expense of Quincey’s life—and the whole is summed up in a postscript, written (readers are told) seven years later. It is in this note that Harker calls the tale, even his own part of it, impossible to believe. The documents that he and the others collected, though carefully preserved, are likewise

“Children of the Night”

287

discredited: “there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing … We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story” (369). Van Helsing brushes aside these concerns, refocusing attention on the corporeal product of their union against the count: Mina’s son, Quincey, who “links” the “little band of men” together (368). He is bounced on Van Helsing’s knee in this scene, but like the infant that opens the text, his health and wholeness exist only by inference. They are not, in fact, described at all. Quincey Harker exists as an empty signifier, joining in his innocence the paternity of all the hale and hearty nonvampiric males in the novel—but he is also the son of Mina, who has suckled at the vampire breast. Halberstam’s point is a sound one: little Quincey is as much the son of Dracula as he is the son of Jonathan (349). The relation among infected blood, semen, and breast milk described by the syphilis treatise is nowhere more apparent than in Dracula’s attack on Mina12—but the pathology of the child Quincey’s possibly infected blood is passed over with parting comments about the future man he will become. Vampirism is left behind; the focus is on the family and on the “sweetness” and “brave[ry]” of the mother, the mistress of hearth and home (369). Who or what is monstrous—and what is the source of monstrosity, after all? Even as Cooper’s syphilis treatise sought to preserve the “moral right of marrying,” (309) Stoker’s novel mitigates the destructive force of vampirism by reemphasizing the power of the (middleclass) family. However, in Dracula, the children never become themselves carriers of disease. The children should be monstrous in a tale like this one—but instead, the monsters are referred to as children. Rather than congenital babies born as “little old men,” the “miniature picture of decrepitude” (Diday 81), or appearing as malformed “syphilitic monsters,” Stoker’s novel presents the backward-aging vampire’s rapid dissolution: “almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust” (367). Social reformists and New Woman novelists used the innocence of infected babes as a powerful trope in their arguments for male culpability; here, however, innocence itself staves off disease in a

288

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

fantasy that redeems both the vampirized woman (Mina, now a mother) and the emasculated man (Jonathan, at last a father). Even Dracula, the source of the contagion, is purified by the end of the narrative, exhibiting “a look of peace” before his features utterly waste away (367). Though the vampire brides and Lucy pay with their unlives (read critically as misogynist and brutally similar to the punishments inflicted on prostitutes by the Contagious Disease Acts), there is a sense in which no one is ultimately faulted for the vampiric epidemic. The men of the novel are purified by their dramatic encounter with the vampire; the “innocent” women of the novel exonerated even in death as other than the usual vampires, special cases that are neither wholly victimized nor wholly villainized. A rereading of the syphilitic monstrosity of an age, Dracula provides a strange—if not quiet believable—middle ground in which the innocence of children (and by inference, that of reproductive integrity and family values) redeems humankind from the ever-widening circle of decay. As Alison Crockford discusses in the next chapter, Victorians particularly were exploring the shadowlands between innocence and villainy, morality and monstrosity. I began by suggesting that Dracula reimagines the culpability of women and mothers in the transmission of disease and degeneration, primarily to offer a fantasy of guiltless paternity. This reading aligns Stoker, in many ways, with rather than against the New Woman social reformers (if not with the sexual activists). However, in the fictional world of the novel, all fathers save one—Dracula—are likewise exonerated. The source of contagion has been found and rooted out in ways that syphilitic contagion could never be, a fantasy of health and clemency that would have been singularly important to a man like Stoker, who died of tertiary syphilis in 1912 (Senf 38). Given the rate of infection and incubation, it is likely that he contracted the disease circa 1897, in keeping with the writing and publication of Dracula— thus, the horror of diagnosis would be still fresh, the hope for cure still lingering. More important, perhaps, is how Stoker contracted the illness and his behavior afterwards. Letters by Stoker’s granddaughter suggest

“Children of the Night”

289

that he had been living in celibacy with his wife Florence Balcombe for eighteen years, for she refused sexual relations after the birth of their first and only child, Irving Noel Thornley Stoker, in 1879 (Senf 38). His syphilis was contracted abroad, therefore, perhaps from a prostitute or paramour—which might explain the violence with which the vampiric women meet their end. Yet Stoker did not take the disease home to his wife or his child. His only progeny (like Quincey Harker) was free from contagion, the bearer of his father’s hopes into a future he would not see. As a sufferer and as a father and husband, Stoker wrote a dystopia with a utopian ending: the children of the night are replaced by children of the day—even if, like the debates that glossed male culpability, such a tale is merely a wild story, neither authentic nor believable.

290

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Figure 7. An infant with congenital syphilis.

Source: Wellcome Library, London, UK.

“Children of the Night”

291

Figure 8. Examples of dental malformations associated with congenital syphilis.

Source: Wellcome Library, London, UK.

292

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Notes 1. This point has also been made by Senf. 2. Syphilis and other forms of venereal infection led to miscarriage and birth defects, though in the rhetoric of physicians like William Acton, sterility was the proper “wages of sin” (qtd. in Spongberg 51). 3. This is the argument of Leila May. 4. I make a distinction here between the rhetoric of congenital syphilis texts, which primarily consider the progeny of middle-class bourgeois sufferers, and the rhetoric surrounding child prostitutes from the working class. As noted by Spongberg, the child prostitute is never considered innocent; neither are the victims of child rape. A pervading sense of the inherited lewdness of the working-class mother infected a discourse more interested in preserving the dignity of the man than in exonerating the woman or girl. The trope of innocence that begins to emerge in the texts primarily concerns infants and much younger children and can be considered part of the arsenal of early feminists and social reformists who, in the advent of the Royal Commission into Venereal Disease Acts, focused on the sins of the father. For more, see Spongberg. 5. Also quoted by Spongberg, who has treated the novel more extensively than I have done here in her chapter “The Syphilitic as Moral Degenerate.” 6. In 1755, he reported that “vampires only appear where ignorance still reigns” (Steindl and Sulzer). 7. “Writing, or at least who writes, must be controlled since it represents the deployment of knowledge and power; similarly, reading must be authorized and censored. When Mina falls under the vampire’s influence and he begins to read her mind, she is barred from reading the English group’s plans. Similarly, the English men eliminate Dracula’s contaminated opinions from the narrative; he has no voice but is read and written by all the other characters in the novel” (Halberstam 336). 8. This is a trend that would, of course, be reversed in more modern narratives—as Danielle Lawson’s article in this collection makes plain. 9. One of Fournier’s most admired patients reportedly claimed, “So far as my husband is concerned, I shall always remain ignorant, for my dignity obliges me to ignore that which I could not pardon” (qtd. in Harsin 89– 90).

“Children of the Night”

293

10. Harsin 89. This was Fournier’s response to one female sufferer who claimed, after many syphilitic miscarriages, that she would bear “no more children to a man who had already killed four.” 11. Generally understood to mean “beautiful.” Charles Dickens’s Bleak House similarly refers to a “boofer lady.” 12. After all, breast milk was once thought to be a transformation of menses: the vampire breast oozes like a strange kind of womb, and Mina’s forcefeeding resembles rape by fellatio.

Chapter 12

Monstrous Births and Monstrous Children in the Late Nineteenth Century Alison N. Crockford

The active, contributive, close-circling wonder, as I have called it, in which the child’s identity is guarded and preserved, and which makes her case remarkable exactly by the weight of the tax on it, provides distinction for her, provides vitality and variety, through the operation of the tax—which would have done comparatively little for us hadn’t it been monstrous. —Henry James, What Maisie Knew The lines with which Henry James closed his New York–edition preface to What Maisie Knew (1897) raise the seductive notion that it is the

296

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

child herself who is monstrous, at least as much as if not more than her corrupt domestic situation. This allusion to a monstrous child raises fascinating questions regarding the literary representation of children toward the end of the nineteenth century. What constitutes a monstrous child? In a century in which literature’s fixation on children is so often defined by the legacy of the Romantic child, where does monstrosity fit in? What Maisie Knew was published only two years after the release of Walter Pater’s posthumous collection, Miscellaneous Studies (1895), which included, among other works, “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), both of which carefully construct images of an eternal childhood. The year 1895 also saw the publication of George MacDonald’s fantastic novel Lilith, which centers in part on the adult protagonist’s interaction with the Lovers, a troupe ensconced in neverending childhood, and culminates in the Lovers’ welcome entrance into Mount Paradiso, a heavenly vision of immortal life after death. Such images of child immortality, Judith Plotz suggested, “dominate nineteenth-century treatments of childhood death from about 1840 to 1910” (8). Building from a Romantic legacy of prelapsarian childhood innocence, the child figure is exalted to the point of transcending death itself in many literary texts of the late nineteenth century. Perhaps reacting to this prominent tradition, texts like What Maisie Knew and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) pervert the literary idealization of children and childhood and instead construct child characters that deliberately dissolve traditional adult definitions of childhood as a paradisiacal state of purity and infinite potential. Both What Maisie Knew and The Picture of Dorian Gray depict child figures that are rendered monstrous in the most etymological sense of their ability to show,1 to reveal that which has been excluded from ideal constructions of the child figure. Although Dorian Gray is an adult on the cusp of coming into his inheritance, both the character and the novel itself are haunted by his childhood. As a child figure, Dorian’s eternal youth stands as a perversion of a post-Romantic tradition of childhood that not only extolled its limitless potentiality but also, in literature

The Late Nineteenth Century

297

especially, fantasized about its immortality. Dorian’s devotion to experience is constructed as a too-literal embodiment of the child’s potential, revealing the uncanny reality that is the monstrous potentiality of the child figure. The supernatural curse also leaves his body unblemished by age or sin, a reminder of the child figure’s essential impermeability: not only is childhood an essentially unknowable state; it is also the embodiment of an as yet unknown future. Like Dorian’s physical perfection, it betrays no indication of what is to come. Maisie’s monstrosity likewise stems from the unknowability of the child’s mind: Maisie is selfaware, demonstrating at an early age a canny understanding of how she is perceived or ignored by the adults around her and of her central yet peripheral position as a child within their games. She exists both within and outside the adult world, and What Maisie Knew capitalizes on this liminality to construct a monstrous child figure, not only a figure whose consciousness remains wholly unfathomable but one that readers are content to leave lurking in the shadows. Maisie’s discomforting performance of childishness treads upon a comfortably established definition of prelapsarian childhood and threatens to reveal its fragility; her monstrosity is as much a warning as it is a revelation about adult definitions of childhood. The Picture of Dorian Gray and What Maisie Knew are also alike in their manipulation of narrative form in order to emphasize a sense of perverted childhood. Each novel relies on a confusion of movement and stasis to imbue the figure of the child with a monstrousness that is unsettling rather than outright horrifying: an echo of normality almost imperceptibly marred. When speaking of a “monstrous child” in the context of the late nineteenth century, it is perhaps natural and surely beneficial to turn to the Victorian medical community’s growing fascination with teratology, the study of congenital anomalies, which led to an influx of case studies describing so-called monstrous births. Because the focus of these reports is what is now deemed physical disability, the connection between the monstrous child of the medical journals and that in the pages of a novel may not seem initially clear: the physical disfigurement that stains

298

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Basil Hallward’s titular portrait is ultimately not what makes Dorian monstrous—at least, not in this context—and What Maisie Knew does not offer even such a superficial comparison. Analyzing the language and tone that characterize the medical case studies, however, excavates the anxieties underpinning their insistent use of the word monster. These fears are born of the uncertainty that characterizes reproduction: the limitless potential of a child’s development, whether physical or psychological, means that it can follow arbitrary and uncontrollable paths. The teratological reports offer insight into the significance of Wilde’s and James’s construction of conceptual monstrosity by revealing the anxieties that lurked in the shadows of a Victorian fascination with the child’s infinite potentiality. The apprehensions that surround the child figure in both literary and medical spheres reveal the significance of the monstrous child to the creation of children in the fictive as well as in the material world.

Teratology and the Anxiety of Indication Many of the most influential medical journals of the nineteenth century, including the still-dominant British Medical Journal and the Lancet, were haunted by the specter of monstrous children. Their presence was invoked by the teratological reports that grew exponentially in number throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and by related obstetric articles that detailed the best means of responding to the difficulties posed by monstrous births. Not only do such reports reveal the violence—both real and conceptual—that these infants were subjected to, but they also suggest the nature of the anxiety in which such violence was rooted. In a response to an anonymous article published in the British Medical Journal in 1891 calling for the publication of an Englishlanguage “atlas” of teratology, J. W. Ballantyne, one of the largest presences in the discipline of teratology, lodged the following complaint: Many of the cases of monstrosity reported in our medical journals and in the transactions of our obstetrical societies are sadly

The Late Nineteenth Century

299

deficient in details; some contain a good account of the mother’s labour, with the additional remark that the “monster shown” was the result, and others contain a full dissection of the monster, and a reference to its place in a teratological classification, but neglect to inform us of the nature of the labour, the character of the placenta, the history of the pregnancy, etc. Much material of a most valuable kind is thus lost annually to the scientific teratologist. (Ballantyne, “Monsters and Teratology” 493) Ballantyne’s insistence on the inclusion of details regarding “the nature of the labour” and “the history of the pregnancy” is particularly significant. His own background in midwifery and obstetrics offers a comfortable explanation for Ballantyne’s interest, but several teratological case studies that do make mention of the labor and pregnancy history deliver observations that urge a closer consideration of their inception. These reports construct a narrative of childbirth in which the appearance of the deformed infant becomes a traumatic event based largely on the context of its arrival. The obtrusion of the monstrous child is made more terrible by the deception of the birth itself. In one such report, published in the British Medical Journal in 1889, the author described being called to a woman in labor; on his arrival he “found the os well dilated and the head descending in the first cranial position” and even asserted that “as this was the woman’s fourth confinement I did not expect to be long detained,” before discovering that he was facing “a case of double monstrosity” (Shapter Robinson 1331–1332). In an 1895 British Medical Journal article, despite noting that “the pains were feeble, and the patient was nervous and anxious,” the anonymous author remarked that “up to this time everything pointed to the swift and safe delivery of a living child at full term” (“Two-Headed Monster” 1569). Yet the labor became more difficult as it progressed, and “the woman became collapsed and expired undelivered, the legs of the foetus dangling between the thighs of the mother” (1569). The author went on to note, after describing the dissection of the fetus, that “large monsters often cause great anxiety to the medical attendant, especially when the

300

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

labor proceeds easily at first. In arrested head after a footling presentation, the odds that a second head causes the difficulty are so small that the possibility of the existence of monstrosity is very naturally overlooked” (1569). In both cases, the occasion of a monstrous birth is particularly marked by the lack of any indication as to its monstrosity. Those teratological case studies which report that the patient had previously or subsequently given birth to “healthy” children are too numerous to mention individually. The “anxiety to the medical attendant” described by the anonymous author of the 1895 article “A Two-Headed Monster (Pleuropagus)” is, in part, the anxiety caused by any anomalous birth: it is an unpredictable, unknowable event. Such accounts are also notable in that their accounts of the pregnancy, labor, and delivery are typically precursory at best, emphasizing the normality of the experience as a clear contrast with the child born. By comparison, obstetric articles that offer advice on the delivery of monstrous infants offer a much more detailed and practical, if often gruesome, account of the labor and birth; Ballantyne’s own piece on delivering conjoined twins (as he referred to them, double monsters), gives a sense of what he meant when he encouraged his colleagues to include particulars about the parturition. The difference between Ballantyne’s more scientific account and the 1889 and 1895 articles in the British Medical Journal highlights the extent to which the latter are fascinated by the discrepancies in the labor and its issue. The persistent belief in theories of maternal impression is likewise indicative of the desire to place monstrous births within a narrative of causality. Long after maternal impression had been generally discredited—even up to the early twentieth century—reports offer accounts of frights or trauma experienced by the mother during pregnancy that might explain the child’s deformity. Yet problematically, this narrative can only ever be imposed retrospectively. Even more unnerving is the often disavowed realization that bodily difference is an inherent part of reproduction. The monstrous child is an embodiment of the child’s

The Late Nineteenth Century

301

unlimited potentiality. These children are, therefore, a visual reminder of what is traditionally excluded from considerations of that potential. In her examination of nineteenth-century studies of the child mind, Sally Shuttleworth noted the significance that potential plays in “the fascination and intensity of interest focused on the figure of the child” (267): With its potentiality waiting to be unfurled, the child becomes … an embodiment both of all past history and an expression of all future possibility. The highly Romanticized conception emphasizes the role of play and childhood imagination, while the “brutish” elements which the child is also deemed to express are rhetorically glossed over and allied with the divine in this teleological vision of an evolutionary sweep towards perfection. In the yearning nostalgia of the image, the child becomes the key to selfunderstanding, to a return of a lost past, and also the guarantee of a more positive future. (Shuttleworth 267) Shuttleworth’s description calls to mind in particular George MacDonald’s assertion that “the childlike is the divine” (3), the philosophy that provides a significant framework for his construction of literary child figures in his fantastic literature. It also evokes many other literary child figures from the late nineteenth century, perhaps most notably those composed by Marie Corelli, Walter Pater, Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, and Charles Kingsley.2 The desire evident in these literary representations and, as Shuttleworth has made clear, in many scientific theories of childhood to gloss over the “brutish” elements of childish potential reveals the impact that monstrous births had on nineteenth-century conceptions of children and childhood. Inasmuch as childhood is the promise of limitless possibility, the word potential inherently carries with it darker implications of that which remains hidden, lurking dormant beneath the surface yet always ready to erupt unexpectedly. As the inevitable reminder of the unnerving truth behind the child figure’s defining characteristic, its unlimited potentiality, the monstrous child unexpectedly and violently disrupts the “vision of an evolutionary sweep towards perfection” (Shuttleworth 267).

302

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Any doubt as to the weight of this impact and the anxiety it inspires dissipates in light of the medical community’s reaction to monstrous births, in particular to the infant itself (already denied its identity as child by its designation as a monstrosity). Ballantyne contributed a chapter on “double monsters” to J. M. Monro Kerr’s Operative Midwifery, published in 1908, in which he admitted that “it is safe to say that in the past cases of difficult labour, in which the cause of the difficulty was the presence of united twins in the uterus, have generally been dealt with without any consideration for the life of the double monster” (121). Although Ballantyne did make a case for increased consideration regarding the child’s life, the chapter continues by detailing a number of techniques for approaching the birth of conjoined twins that seem primarily to involve the violent dismemberment of the child: If, for instance, the connecting band between the foetuses can be reached, and if it be not of too solid a nature, the obstetrician will divide it, and then deliver the foetuses separately. If one head be at the vulva and the other be jammed in the pelvis, decapitation of the first head may make it possible to complete the delivery. In almost any of the impacted cases the performance of cleidotomy [division of one or both clavicles] will facilitate other obstetric manoeuvres, if it does not of itself make labour possible. Craniotomy of one or both heads may be necessary. (Ballantyne, “Double Monsters” 126) Ballantyne concluded his chapter with a few passages on “lambdoid double monsters,” which he identified as cases “in which the foetuses are fused in the region of the heads and upper part of the trunks” (128); after outlining similar methods of facilitating delivery, he remarked that “since … these lambdoid double monsters have usually a very repulsive appearance, and little chance of surviving, there need be little hesitation in pursuing the line of treatment indicated above” (130).3 If Ballantyne’s brusque approach can be rationalized as medical distance, it should be noted as difficult as his matter-of-fact description of infantile dismemberment may be to read, it is practically kind when compared to the

The Late Nineteenth Century

303

observations of some of his colleagues. An earlier article by James Clapperton, “Maternal Impressions” (1875), notes that it is fortunate that [monsters] do not [survive], as it renders it quite unnecessary to consider … the propriety or necessity of inducing their destruction by acts either of commission or omission. Still, it is somewhat suggestive that babies so altered, anencephalous or other monsters, always seem conscious of the impropriety of survival in their case, and atone for their shortcomings and indiscretions by early demise. (170) The conviction that monstrous infants “atone for their shortcomings and indiscretions” by dying during or shortly after childbirth is a vivid encapsulation of the anxiety provoked by monstrous births; not only are these infants excluded from an identification as children because of their anomalous physical form, but they are expected to die in order to atone for their very existence. Further, Clapperton’s use of the word indiscretion warrants closer attention. The repeated references to an inability to identify monstrous births during labor and a similar failure to place the responsibility with the mother—the interest in previous and subsequent pregnancies—suggest that this indiscretion has been the lack of any indication of monstrosity. The monstrous child is indiscreet in its unexpected and unexpectable arrival. Perhaps the violence of Ballantyne’s techniques in Operative Midwifery can be excused by necessity; however, when coupled with convictions akin to (though not as vehement as) Clapperton’s, they too point toward a desire to preclude such infants from a conceptual definition of child. These children become monstrous through the inevitable failure of such an exclusion: however decided the efforts are to identify them as different from a “normal” or “healthy” child, not only do they remain children, but they force recognition of the reality of the child’s infinite potential. The significance of such an embodiment of childhood’s potentiality is reinforced by the theories that emerged through the study of teratology to explain the causes of birth defects; maternal impression is perhaps

304

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the most culturally prevalent of such theories, but more important to the founding principles of teratology was the concept of arrested development. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, renowned as the grandfather of teratology, was also an epigenesist who believed that monstrosity was caused by shock or damage incurred in the womb during gestation that stopped or altered the process of development; these ideas were subsequently fundamental to the taxonomies of teratology laid out by his son, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Gill 227–228). Although by the later nineteenth century the term arrested development was being applied increasingly to mental development in a manner that might be more recognizable in the twenty-first century, a substantial number of teratological reports still offer evidence that the theory was central to the study and understanding of monstrous births. Miranda Gill noted that “the theory of arrested development,” as outlined by Johann Friedrich Meckel and expanded upon by the Saint-Hilaires, “suggested that all ‘normal’ human beings have passed through a stage of monstrosity” (227–228), and Alice Domurat Dreger contended that the term was more broadly used “to refer to the supposed failure of an organism to develop to its full potential” (137). Yet the phrase also bears connotations of an arrested state of potential itself: the monstrous body is the body that bears witness to the limitless potential of the human form. Arrested development, in the context of monstrous births, is the child’s pure potential, and all that it suggests, frozen in time. At the same time, it is a warning of the uncanny reality underlying visions of childhood that sought to immortalize and idealize the child figure. This monstrous potentiality of the child and the anxiety of indication on which it relies also emerge in the construction of literary children and are particularly evident in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and James’s What Maisie Knew. In these texts, however, the child’s monstrosity is conceptual rather than physical.

The Late Nineteenth Century

305

Dorian Gray’s Monstrous Potentiality Kevin Ohi described Dorian Gray’s “undetailed boyhood” as “haunt[ing] the novel like Lord Henry’s ‘line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece that you had ceased to play’” (118), yet this ghost of childhood bleeds relentlessly into the characterization of Dorian himself, who has barely stepped into adulthood. In addition to Basil’s initial description of Dorian as a “lad,—for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty” (Wilde 12), the text repeatedly and actively refers to him using the terms lad and boy, especially throughout the first ten chapters. Claudia Nelson further suggested, “[Dorian’s] sexual ambivalence—is he a seducer of childwomen, a homosexual, or both?—is one with the generational ambivalence that enables the text to assert simultaneously that he is a boy and that he has left boyhood far behind” (68–69). This confusion of eternal youth with aging bears with it auspices of monstrosity in and of itself; Karen Chase described Dorian’s agelessness as both vampire-like and cannibalistic and suggested that “his youth is composed of the youth that belongs to others, to history” (213). In this comparison, Chase used the language of monstrous consumption; however, Dorian’s construction as a monstrous child, when considered alongside anxieties revealed by the teratological reports discussed earlier, is less the result of an endless consumption than it is of his (concealed) capitalization on the child’s world of potential. The Picture of Dorian Gray appears, on the surface, to be a tale of corruption by means of material and sensual excess; upon seeing a completed portrait of himself, the eponymous Dorian recognizes for the first time his own physical perfection and its inherent transience. His subsequent wish that he might trade places with the picture and displace the disfiguring effects of age onto the painted form is, through an unknown supernatural force, granted. Dorian’s eternal youth encourages a growing addition to sensation and experience, mirrored by a fascination with the corruption of his soul that is manifested in the horrific

306

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

degeneration of the portrait. Yet the events as they take place throughout the narrative appear largely unmotivated by any particular incentive, and the text deliberately denies any explicit morality by simultaneously advocating that which it appears to condemn. Thus, despite the prevalent themes of sin and corruption, the monstrosity that the text constructs is not simply of a moral character. Nor is it exclusively the domain of the text’s engagement with themes of homoeroticism and homosexuality.4 Although Judith Halberstam described Dorian’s homosexuality as “a particular form of monstrosity that depends upon the closet structure of homoerotic desire,” her assertions that “only a psychoanalytic model of interpretation insists upon the essential link between psychosexual pathology and monstrosity” and that “the Gothic narrative itself sees monstrosity as infinitely more complex and dense” point to the “multilayered body” of monstrosity in the novel, one that extends beyond either morality or homoeroticism (111).5 It is no coincidence that Dorian’s introduction is marked in part by Lord Henry’s elucidation on the transience of youth, nor that this particular edict carries with it echoes of the child’s limitless potential and dwells particularly on the values of capitalizing on every possibility. “I believe that if one man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,” Lord Henry dictates, “that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal” (Wilde 18–19). This exhilarating announcement is followed closely by his solemn observation that we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish … We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth! (23)

The Late Nineteenth Century

307

The latter statement informs the first: the opportunity to live one’s life “fully and completely” is thus realizable only in the “rose-red youth” and “rose-white boyhood” (19) that is characterized by potential, by the passions, thoughts, and dreams that have not had a chance to be repressed or denied. It is under the influence of these sentiments that Dorian expresses his Faustian wish: “If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything!” (25). Just as Lord Henry’s reflections on youth and temptation foreground the untempered fulfillment of potentialities that is to form the basis for Dorian’s monstrosity, they also hint at that very monstrosity. Despite his apparent conviction that “a fresh impulse of joy” is bound to result from the experience of “giv[ing] form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,” Lord Henry refers only to those “passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame” (19). The monstrosity revealed by these lines, which have such power over Dorian that they inspire in him a kind of revolution, is not that of the unlawful passions that form the subject of so many studies of sexuality in Dorian Gray, nor is it the surface monstrosity of sins to come, sins that will mar the face of the portrait. Such interpretations rely on the use of monstrosity as inherently correlative to sin or homosexual desire, on that “essential link between psychosexual pathology and monstrosity” to which Halberstam referred (111). The monstrosity in this passage is that infinitely more complex, multilayered construction that Halberstam described in place of a model that designates things themselves as essentially monstrous. Lord Henry’s emphasis on the “passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror” (Wilde 19) indicates Dorian’s eventual monstrosity by alluding to the possibility that the child’s potential, as yet the stuff of daydreams and sleeping dreams, may, once realized, be revealed as terrible and terrifying and shameful. Like the teratological reports that deny the glossy post-Romantic vision of the child’s

308

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

unlimited potential, Lord Henry lays bare the fallacies behind concepts of children that saw them as the guarantee of a more positive future. This is the monstrosity to which Lord Henry unknowingly alludes: that Dorian’s own vacant innocence at the start of the novel offers no indication of the worm-eaten visage of sin that he is to possess at its close. Aside from the character himself, Dorian’s boyhood most visibly haunts the text in the form of the disused schoolroom that becomes the resting place for the portrait and the site of the text’s most violent scenes. Like Dorian himself, the room remains “little changed” (104), and entering it in order to conceal the shame of the “monstrous soullife” (187) that the painting becomes, he reflects on “the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seem[s] horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him!” (104). Like the “great anxiety” referred to in teratological reports when the absence of any indication during labor caused “the existence of monstrosity” to be “very naturally overlooked” (“Two-Headed Monster” 1569), the source of Dorian’s own monstrosity similarly owes in part to an anxiety of indication. His “curious secret” is twofold: it offers him the immortality of eternal youth, but it also assures him of its unblemished form. His beauty is such that “even those who had heard the most evil things against him … could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He always had the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world” (108). Dorian’s body offers no clue to the sins he has committed, just as the stainless purity of his boyhood fails to reveal the horrors in his future. It is the nature of childhood to be always defined by an unknowable future, and not only its own; the child figure, especially at the fin de siècle, “becomes the beacon of all future hope” (Shuttleworth 267). Yet the child’s ability to personify the future of humanity lies in its own inherent unfathomability. Dorian remarks on the childhood space that “there was no other place … so secure from prying eyes as this” (Wilde 104). Reflecting on the purity of his boyhood, Dorian evokes

The Late Nineteenth Century

309

his own inscrutable beauty—both markers of a disturbing alternative to the child’s potentiality. The hedonism and corruption responsible for the portrait’s unsightly transformation are charted largely throughout the eleventh chapter of the novel, which details Dorian’s obsessive tendency to trace “with minute care and often with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age … He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs” (109). Jan Gordon suggested that “like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Heathcliff, and even Dorothea Brooke, the beautiful Dorian Gray must assume a role in a bildungsroman, that nineteenth-century pilgrimage through adversity and into vocation. Yet, the outcome of Dorian’s journey is decidedly different, for this pale Apollo loses rather than gains identity” (277). However, if chapter 11 charts this inverted bildungsroman through its exhaustive lists, it does not reveal either a loss or gain. In fact, the chapter that appears to depict the passage of time, condensing it, denies the prospect of any progression that would indicate such a journey.6 Although his lack of movement or progression calls to mind the teratological theory of arrested development, the inertia that Dorian experiences is less centered on the state of stalled development than Maisie’s is, as I demonstrate later. Instead, Dorian’s paralysis is characterized by the sensations and experiences that are its cause. Chase identified the “various and successive preoccupations” detailed in this chapter as an addiction and suggested that “the movement from sensation to sensation … underlies the novelty of each moment. He chooses the very means to undercut his enterprise when he selects repetition as a method for securing novelty” (210). The passage of time is thus laid out in a succession of preoccupations whose repetition in “consistency of form” (210) denies either novelty or progression. Dorian’s description of this suspended existence is telling: “There was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to

310

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

recreate life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival … its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be” (Wilde 114). Dorian’s obsession with experience itself, his endless pursuit of new sensations, is the desire to capitalize on the potential open to him. The births described in the teratological case studies stand as proof of the unlimited and unexpected potential of the human form. They deny definitions of “normal” humanity through their assertion of an endless prospect of variability. Dorian likewise is a reminder of such potential: he is granted “eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins—he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all” (92–93). The centrality of potential to the child is predicated on the child’s lack of experience—experience becomes in this dynamic the realization, and with it the death, of a possibility. The child of truly limitless potentiality is the child that does not age, yet Robert Pattison pointed out that “to try to remain a child is to fail to meet one’s human potential” (33). Dorian Gray reveals the uncanny truth behind the worship of childhood’s potentiality that characterized post-Romantic concepts of children and childhood. The novel constructs in Dorian a monstrous child figure that does not age and that relentlessly pursues the infinite number of possibilities open to him in a perpetually suspended cycle of experience that conflates movement and stasis. Like the body of the monstrous child in teratological reports that offered a physical encapsulation of an arrested development, Dorian’s monstrous embodiment of static motion is mirrored in the form of the novel itself. Ohi described Dorian Gray as “a generic crossing or hybridization, the ‘Japanese effect’ of coalesced movement and stasis for which the prose often strives” (76). Ohi went on to suggest that the effect transforms the novel into both “a painting that could unfold temporally like narrative and a narrative prose that could be frozen, apprehended at once, like painting. Such a crossing is one effect of the novel’s remarkable prose style … [it] describes and enacts a motion-in-stasis and a stasis-in-motion” (76).

The Late Nineteenth Century

311

This mirroring is nowhere clearer than in the tortured night that Dorian passes after the murder of Basil Hallward. As he waits for Alan Campbell to arrive and dispose of the corpse, the “thing” locked in the schoolroom along with the portrait, both witness to the hideousness of Dorian’s infinite potentiality: Time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some black cleft or precipice … Then, suddenly, Time stopped for him. Yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, Time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him stone. (Wilde 140–141) In the wake of the death of Time, Dorian’s thoughts race “nimbly on in front” to drag before him “a hideous future from its grave.” The text allows for the assumption that this hideous future is Dorian’s fate should the murder be discovered, but at the same it time hints at a more significant premonition. The future that is laid before him is dragged from the grave; it is a dead future, not necessarily a vision of death to come but a future that can come to life only in a space of nimble movement, yet where time is dead. Locating this future in the conflation of stasis and motion that is intrinsic not only to the dynamic between Dorian and his portrait but also to the form of the prose itself suggests that it shares the reality of Dorian’s eternal youth. The hideous undead future that is shown to Dorian only in the interminable present of a timeless night is the failure of human potential—that is, his own monstrosity. Like the mirroring of the central trope in The Picture of Dorian Gray, in the union of stasis-in-motion and motion-in-stasis that characterizes its prose, What Maisie Knew also relies on form in its construction of a monstrous child figure. In Maisie, however, form plays an even more crucial role, creating the illusion of development that serves to both conceal and emphasize Maisie’s static performance of a monstrous, selfaware childhood. Though the anxiety from which Wilde’s child figure

312

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

draws its monstrosity is, in part, based on the absence of any indication, for James this lack of indication was the product of a refusal to look. In What Maisie Knew, James increased the discomfort posed by the monstrous child not only through his construction of a child who is defined by an arrest of development but by focusing on the potential for the child’s self-aware manipulation of adult constructions of childhood as prelapsarian, innocent, and therefore inherently passive.

Pantomimic Childhood: Maisie as Automaton Dorian’s monstrosity is founded in anxieties regarding children that directly echo those revealed in the teratological reports of the time; James’s monstrous child complicates such anxieties, focusing on the active complicity on the part of the adults constructing definitions of children rather than on the abstract constructions themselves. Maisie’s monstrosity is located within a confusion of motion and stasis just like Dorian’s, but rather than undermining the desire for an eternal child of limitless potentiality, Maisie constructs a self-aware performance that reveals the fallacy implicit in adult constructions of prelapsarian childhood, dissolving the definition of child in much the same way the monstrous children featured in the teratological reports do. What Maisie Knew, like Dorian Gray, is superficially presented as a bildungsroman that charts Maisie’s growth and development; in fact, nearly every major critical response to the text feels compelled to comment on this “central theme … [of Maisie’s] transition from ‘ignorance to knowledge’” (Honeyman 42). Summaries and analyses alike are peppered with phrases that describe this story of growth: “Maisie’s maturation,” “she gradually becomes” (Craig 205) “her developing awareness,” “her growing awareness” (Shine 110, 119) “Maisie’s fast developing consciousness” (Lowe 190) “Maisie has, by the end of the novel, greatly changed” (Wasiolek 167)

The Late Nineteenth Century “[Maisie’s] … growing perceptual powers” (Wolk 203) “[Maisie] outgrows her childhood” (Kaston 38) “her developing individuality, her realization ‘self’” (McCloskey 506) “Maisie’s ascent to knowledge” (Cross 84)

313

of

her

Yet this collection of statements vehemently asserting the importance of Maisie’s development carries within it an air of protesting too much. A closer inspection of both the preface and the novel suggests that the text creates in Maisie a static and troubling figure. Having achieved an epiphany of self-awareness early in the novel, she engages as an active participant in the goings-on of her various guardians, making use of her role as a child figure to manipulate her parents, stepparents, and governess. The narrative of growth and knowledge that defines the text derives not from Maisie’s development but from the gradually changing perceptions that the adults around her—including the narrator—have of the child. Through this layering of motion and stasis in the novel’s form, Maisie’s monstrosity is akin to that of Dorian Gray and that of the monstrous children featured in teratological reports; like theirs, Maisie’s arrested development long remains concealed, in her case through the appearance of growth or progression. This deception eventually forces recognition on the part of readers, as well as her parents and stepparents, of the discomforting reality not only of eternal childhood but of the very understanding of childhood as a world of potential. The novel outlines the interweaving and morally questionable relations among five adults as perceived and understood by the young girl at their center, although the events are related by an unidentified third-person narrator who claims insight into Maisie’s infantile consciousness. Opening on the finalization of Beale and Ida Farange’s acrimonious divorce, the text follows the struggle that develops between parents, stepparents, and governess regarding who will take guardianship of Maisie Farange, who finds herself taking on the role of both weapon and unwanted baggage. The situation is further complicated by Maisie’s encroaching adolescence and concerns about her own devel-

314

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

oping morality or lack thereof. The question what exactly Maisie knows or understands about the immorality in which her parents and stepparents are embroiled is, of course, never answered, and as previously mentioned, James’s preface deliberately adds to the mystification. Despite the suggestive lines with which the preface concludes, the novel’s opening chapters do their very best to construct in Maisie an utterly innocent child figure, just the kind of empty receptacle her parents take her to be. Her mind at this stage is described as a “dim closet” (James 20) into which the evil wishes of her father for her mother, and vice versa, can be tucked away until such time as they are called for, at which point they pass “in her clear shrill voice, straight to her little innocent lips” (21), seemingly without Maisie herself discerning the sentiment of the messages she delivers. Yet although Maisie may begin as an innocent child, the development she experiences takes place not over the text as a whole but in the opening chapters; by the fifth chapter, Maisie has come to realize that “everything had something behind it: life was like a long long corridor with rows of closed doors. She had learned that at these doors it was wise not to knock” (36). In fact, Maisie undergoes a moment of crisis as early as the second chapter, one that establishes her character’s selfawareness and echoes throughout the text: The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents, corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was literally a moral revolution and accomplished in the depths of her nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment. (James 22–23) What has taken place is Maisie’s discovery of the “strange office she fill[s].” In this moment, Maisie has realized precisely how her parents—

The Late Nineteenth Century

315

and later, by extension, her stepparents and Mrs. Wix—perceive her and what role she plays in their interactions. Much like her guardians, Maisie criticism tends to deny the child any measure of self-awareness;7 David Foster, for example, was able to concede only that she has an aptitude for “discovering the order, responses, and consequences that structure interactions between people” (211). In a description that evokes the image of an automaton, Maisie is here granted the powers of deduction and mimicry but denied the self-reflective powers that enable her to understand her own place within her situation. That is an experience evidently confined to the territory of adulthood. Shuttleworth did allow Maisie “an awareness of self,” but she suggested that “Maisie is ‘doomed,’ in James’s phrase, to passivity” (332). However, there is an element of Maisie’s awareness that denies such passivity; as Joseph Hynes crucially pointed out, “[Maisie] is aware of how often she herself is not seen, even when her presence would appear to be important” (548). It is precisely this knowledge of her own invisibility that forms the basis for Maisie’s construction of herself as a child in a world of battling adults. Just as Dorian capitalizes on the liminality and unknowability of the childhood space when concealing his portrait, so Maisie capitalizes on her invisible position as a child when concealing her monstrosity. Maisie’s “moral revolution” is marked by that curious and disturbing description of “the stiff dolls on the dusky shelves [that] began to move their arms and legs” (James 23). This reference to living dolls is interesting in the context of Maisie’s own awakening; the unexpected movement of the inanimate toys is uncanny, the discovery of life within the lifeless forms evoking the unnerving possibility that their glassy eyes have been watching, comprehending all along. In their relationships with Maisie, the adults of the novel unconsciously make the automatic and certainly unquestioned decision to disregard the staring eyes of a doll —for such is Maisie in their perception. This correlation between the dawning of Maisie’s awareness and the image of the living dolls calls to

316

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

mind another element of the child’s monstrosity; in her transition from inanimate doll to living doll, Maisie once again evokes comparison to automatons. The horror of the automaton, or “what makes an automaton monstrous,” as Zakiya Hanafi suggested, is “the fact that matter formed by artificial means and moving of its own volition would seem to be endowed with spirit” (54). Hanafi went on to make a connection between the fear of physical deformities and the fear of automatons, identifying a shift from the former to the latter during the scientific Enlightenment in Italy. The nature of the relationship Hanafi described is especially interesting in a consideration of Maisie’s monstrosity: “the horror and fear provoked by appearances in nature of monstrous births moved over into the horror and fear provoked by our own artificial creations” (54). By constructing Maisie’s self-aware performance of childhood as akin to the automaton, the novel invokes the same anxiety that is central to the teratological case studies; in both the deformed infant and the automaton, the source of the anxiety is the same, tied to the act of creation and its offspring. The fear of the natural monster and the fear of the mechanical monster are both, in their essence, the fear of the monstrous child. The appearance of the animated dolls during Maisie’s crisis of self-awareness is a significant allusion to this fear, a visual indicator of the unnerving possibility that creations are not what one makes them or what one thinks they are. This scene, furthermore, represents the final stage of Maisie’s development, after which point she remains fixed, an anomaly in the temporality of the novel, somewhat like Dorian himself. Her temporal disruption, however, is not simply that of the monstrous eternal child—the failure of human potential—as Dorian’s is. Whereas Dorian’s inertia is the product of an endless repetition of sensation and experience that stalled any form of progression by means of their cyclicality, Maisie’s is a truly arrested development. Her monstrosity therefore betrays the vulnerability of definitions of childhood that are fixated on the child as a figure of development and thus of unlimited potential. In addition, like the monstrous births in the teratological reports, in which the arrested

The Late Nineteenth Century

317

development of the child is usually hidden throughout gestation, Maisie also commits the indiscretion of concealing her monstrosity behind a veil of normal progression. The novel may follow her physical growth, an undeniable literal journey from childhood to adolescence, but Maisie herself does not gain in knowledge or understanding; this is an illusion advanced primarily by the mediation of events through the voice of a detached adult narrator. The preface makes the concession that [m]y first view of this neat possibility was as the attaching problem of the picture restricted (while yet achieving, as I say, completeness and coherency) to what the child might be conceived to have understood—to have been able to interpret and appreciate … The infant mind would at the best leave great gaps and voids; so that with a systematic surface possibly beyond reproach we should nevertheless fail of clearness of sense. (7) The solution James proposed to this supposed problem was to mediate Maisie’s experience and understanding through a translating voice: “Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them … but our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies” (8). Describing the narrator’s mediation as a translation and amplification of Maisie’s own perception creates the illusion that the result will be accurate, based on the narrator’s direct representation, as of an existing text that he or she can access. Shuttleworth noted that the novel’s narrative mediation leads “to the position where James can end his text with a return to the problem of how we interpret what Maisie ‘knew’” (327). I would argue instead that the question posed by the nature of the relationship between Maisie and the narrator is less how one interprets what Maisie knows and more how one knows Maisie. The preface’s emphasis on the gaps and voids in Maisie’s comprehension of the world around her overlooks any potential for the same kind of gaps in the narrator’s understanding of Maisie herself. By ignoring the possibility that the narrator’s ability to understand and represent Maisie may itself be flawed and in citing the child’s limited comprehension and

318

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

vocabulary, the preface raises the prospect that adult mediation may face the same problems, undermining the need for an intermediary. Rather than clarifying and amplifying Maisie’s understanding, the narrator only adds further confusion, exacerbating Maisie’s isolation from the reader. Such mediation creates a veil of adult interpretations of children through which the reader’s experience of Maisie is filtered. The narrator’s bias— based on his view of Maisie as a developing child—provides the reader with a skewed perception of the child’s supposed journey to adolescence. Descriptions of her comprehension are prefaced with statements that this knowledge is tied to her age or developmental progress, as she comes to such realizations “in time” or becomes “old enough” to know or to understand. The form of the novel in the narrator’s mediation of Maisie echoes that of Dorian Gray in one crucial respect: like Wilde’s use of a form that simulated narrative and painting, What Maisie Knew also relies on a structure that confuses motion and stasis, and like Wilde’s novel, Maisie also utilizes this confusion to construct a monstrous child figure. For the adults around her, and crucially, for the adults through whom she is presented to readers, Maisie’s knowledge, her awareness, relies on whether she is—in their eyes—old enough to understand any given fact or circumstance. With this in mind, perhaps two of the most relevant passages in Maisie are those that outline her final encounters with first her father, then her mother. Each reveals the failure of Maisie’s performance and alludes to the monstrosity ingrained in her construction of herself as a child figure. During her confrontation with Beale, Maisie realizes that she has “grown for him, since the last time he had, as it were, noticed her, and by increase of years and of inches if by nothing else, [she was] much more of a little person to be reckoned with” (143). Not only is Maisie aware of how she has physically matured, but she is aware that her father’s perception that she has grown “[by] years and [by] inches if … nothing else”—the phrase nothing else is a crucial one here—has affected Beale’s perception of and treatment of his daughter. Despite Maisie’s attempts to “appear more as he would like her” by agreeing to “do anything in the

The Late Nineteenth Century

319

world you ask me, papa,” Beale immediately responds with the recognition that “that’s a way, my dear, of saying ‘No, thank you!’ You know you don’t want to go the least little mite. You can’t humbug me!” (147). The statement that Maisie cannot humbug Beale is not only the first instance of awareness that Maisie might be trying to manipulate but also the first instance in which such an effort fails. Whereas Beale once stood floundering with a “fidgety look” (146), Maisie now becomes “momentarily bewildered” (148). The confrontation between the two concludes with Beale’s evident disgust at Maisie’s continued attempt to retain her role as innocent child and culminates in his emphatic statement that “you’re a monster … they’ve made one of you” (150). Although Maisie’s monstrosity is a result, in Beale’s eyes, of her corruption by her adulterous stepparents, the emphasis that “they’ve made one of you” carries elements of the anxiety that surrounds teratological reports. Paralleling the determined persistence of maternal impression as an explanation for monstrous births, Beale attempts to identify some clear cause for Maisie’s monstrosity. Yet with Maisie, as with the infants who are the focus of teratological reports, who is responsible for the making of the child’s monstrosity is unknown and unknowable; she is thus as much a reminder of the limitations of adult control over a child’s development as the monstrous child is a reminder of humanity’s lack of control over reproductive development. Furthermore, Beale’s vehement reaction upon discovering Maisie’s performance echoes that of Clapperton and other teratologists when confronted with monstrous births: it is likewise born of the fear inspired by the deceptive reality of the “ideal” child figure. This anxiety of indication is similarly revealed in Maisie’s confrontation with her mother. Mrs. Farange initiates the exchange with a view of her daughter as an inconsequential child, although the narrator admits that “it suited [Ida] to convey that Maisie had been kept, so far as she was concerned or could imagine, in a holy ignorance and that she must take for

320

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

granted a supreme simplicity” (170–117). Ida’s assumption that Maisie has remained innocent is itself a convenient performance, and she later admits to the child, “I dare say you know things that, if I did (I mean if I knew them), would make me—well, no matter! You’re old enough at any rate to know that there are a lot of things I don’t say that I easily might” (172–173). Ida reveals that, like Beale, she has also come to recognize Maisie’s awareness of the circumstances surrounding her, and furthermore she has identified Maisie’s age as sufficient to excuse a greater confidence in the child. Maisie has, for Ida, finally become old enough. As with Beale, Maisie misjudges her position and forgets “that she had never been safe unless she had also been stupid. She in short forgot her habitual caution in her impulse to adopt her ladyship’s practical interests and show her ladyship how perfectly she understood them” (173–174). As Maisie “falters supremely,” her mother is described as towering over her, “and in the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge” (175). In response, however, Maisie fixes her mother with a glare that “could by this time pretty well match [Ida’s], and she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as anyone could look down” (175). Rattled by her sudden removal from the well-charted waters of peripheral childhood, Maisie falters in her performance and, as a result, finds herself meeting Ida with Ida’s own eyes. Most important, what follows is the admission that Maisie has had intimations and understandings, even hopes, regarding her mother’s affairs; for Ida it is the equivalent of looking into the eyes of a doll and finding for the first time that they are looking back. It is this discovery that causes Ida to call her daughter a “little horror” and a “dreadful, dismal, deplorable little thing” (176). Ida is confronted with the realization not only that the child as she had made her—the construction of Maisie-as-child on which she had relied—was inaccurate, but that Maisie has been actively manipulating her mother’s perceptions. Like the monstrous children of the teratological reports, Maisie is guilty of “indiscretion”; she has given no indi-

The Late Nineteenth Century

321

cation of her true form. Maisie’s monstrosity is compounded, however, by the fact that her concealment has been deliberate. According to Shuttleworth, James “suggests that childhood itself becomes, for his heroine, a form of performance” (325), and Randall Craig noted that “in order to overcome ‘the doom of a peculiar passivity’ … [Maisie becomes] something of a pantomimist herself” (211). It is interesting that Craig chose to describe Maisie’s performance specifically as a pantomime, for in the nineteenth century, as Martin Meisel pointed out, “transformation, and especially the animation of the inanimate, were essential to the pantomime genre” (99). This pantomimic animation of the inanimate carries with it specific connotations in relation to Maisie’s own pantomime performance of childhood. Once more, the animation of the inanimate, that defining characteristic of the automaton and the living doll, is incorporated into the nature of the child as Maisie performs it. Maisie’s performance of childhood becomes monstrous in its revelation that children may not necessarily exist as adults create them; if monstrous births as described in the teratological reports are evidence of humanity’s limited control over the act of creation, Maisie likewise demonstrates the fruitlessness of cultural constructions of childhood.

Conclusion Maisie’s monstrosity is a concept that has traditionally been skirted in critical discourse; in fact, Joseph Hynes specifically dismissed the idea, stating that one reason for our possibly being tempted to think (wrongly) of Maisie as monstrous is that she deliberately feigns stupidity[, which] could be thought of as cloaking the unnatural … only if Maisie did in fact “know” what she is learning; only if Maisie knew what the reader knows of the behavior and motives circulating around her. As things are, Maisie simply does not know. (547)

322

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

This dismissal is perhaps a bit too hasty, however, and the condescension with which Hynes denied the possibility that Maisie herself might be monstrous indicates a misreading of the nature of her monstrosity or of the idea of monstrosity itself. The association that Hynes drew between monstrosity and unnatural qualities makes this clear.8 Similar misreadings of monstrosity characterize reductions of Dorian’s monstrosity to a one-dimensional facet of the character—or indeed, of the novel—one that can be simply attributed to “unnatural” moral or sexual transgressions. What the teratological accounts peppering nineteenth-century medical journals make clear is that the monstrous is not that which is unnatural; it is that which is so uncomfortably a natural part of the self that one feels compelled to reject it as entirely other. If Dorian Gray becomes monstrous by embodying the abject truth behind fantasies of an unfettered and idealized immortal childhood, Maisie’s monstrosity is born as it forces the integration a self-aware child figure—which Hynes seems to designate as unnatural—back into the definition of childhood. In this reintegration, What Maisie Knew echoes the multitude of anxieties that surrounded teratological studies of so-called monstrous births. Maisie’s arrested development, concealed as it is by a performed childhood, recalls the anxiety of indication that forms the foundation of so many teratological reports; this is compounded by her deliberate manipulation of traditional definitions of childhood and the invisibility of the child, which reveals the fragility of such definitions themselves. Both Maisie’s and Dorian’s monstrosities are created not in the ways in which they are contrary to the “normal,” “natural” child but in the ways they embody the unnerving potential of all children. Maisie embodies the most unnerving prospect raised by the teratological theory of arrested development: that monstrosity may be a state through which each fetus passes, that it is therefore an inherent part of humanity. The Picture of Dorian Gray likewise forces recognition of the inherent perversity of the child’s limitless potential. In fact, Dorian comes to represent the necessary failure of the child’s potentiality: the idea that childhood is a world of opportunity to be desired and exulted too often overlooks the

The Late Nineteenth Century

323

reality of such a state of potential—namely, that it can be as horrific as it is miraculous. The depravity and materiality of Dorian’s endless pursuit of sensation directly undermines the spiritual innocence in which postRomantic constructions of childhood were so deeply embedded. Worse yet, Dorian’s monstrosity demands the realization that children can never fully capitalize on the world of possibilities open to them; to do so would precipitate the ultimate failure of their human potential. Both Maisie and Dorian embody child selves that elicit discomfort and anxiety, an anxiety that can be fully understood only in the context of the physical monstrosity that formed the core of nineteenth-century teratology. Rage regarding a lack of indication, the inevitable failure of any narrative of causality, and the unavoidable realization that the monstrous is a part of the human seeps through teratological reports and the theories in which the discipline was grounded. The monstrous child of the medical world, as well as its literary counterpart, is the product of these anxieties even as it serves to exacerbate them. Ever a reminder of a fundamental inability to fully understand or control not only reproduction itself but also who and what children become, the monstrous child of the nineteenth century denied the illusory ideal of childhood as a symbolic utopia and brought the child back into the realm of the uncanny and, with it, the human. What these texts, both literary and medical, indicate is a more nuanced and pervasive construction of monstrosity in latenineteenth-century culture than that of the later Gothic tradition that was its most visible envoy. Seeping far beyond the boundaries of discipline or genre, beyond even corporeality, the multidimensional specter of the monstrous haunted even the iconic Victorian fascination with the child.

324

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Notes 1. The term monster derives from the Latin monstrum, “a warning or potent,” which is related to the verb monstrare, “to show, point out, or reveal,” both words themselves derived from monero, “to warn or advise” (“Monster,” OED Online). 2. Naomi Wood likewise recognized this privileging of childlike innocence over adult experience, suggesting that “inheritors of a Wordsworthian Romantic tradition … fin-de-siècle authors produced a newly sensual Romantic child through books directed towards children and about them. Eschewing the didactic texts which taught children the values and ideals that would enable them to become rational, pious, and thrifty adults … these writers adjured children to be ‘childlike’—to repudiate adult values in favor of fantasy, play, and joyous anarchy” (159). Though she did not refer directly to potential, Wood’s description of the postRomantic fin de siècle child figure also carries with it connotations of the privileged potentiality that Shuttleworth described. 3. Ballantyne was, in fact, instrumental in turning teratology from simply another means of collection and exhibition into an informative and beneficial discipline with ties to embryology and obstetrics. Salim AlGailani pointed out that “while obstetricians had long dissected fetal anomalies, preserved them for anatomical museums and reported them in journals, Ballantyne insisted that the systematic collection of case histories by obstetricians would make teratology clinically relevant” (3); “framing clinical histories as a crucial component of the investigation of fetal anomalies” played a crucial role in the development of a new discipline, “antenatal pathology and hygiene” (3). 4. Nils Clausson discussed the correlation between homosexuality, monstrosity, and degeneration; see also Dyer. However, most readings of homoeroticism and homosexuality in Dorian Gray do not focus on a relationship between monstrosity and homosexuality; see also Dellamora; Nunokawa. 5. Dreger suggested a connection between the idea of arrested development and homosexuality in the nineteenth century, noting that “where ‘sexual inversion was a terrifying nexus of medical, social and moral deviations,’ the ‘variation’ of the invert ranked among inferior forms that needed explaining and treatment. Throughout the nineteenth century,

The Late Nineteenth Century

325

French teratological theorists often used the notion of arrested development to explain a whole host of variations” (137). However, the representation of Dorian’s homosexuality and homoeroticism in general in Dorian Gray does not indicate that such a comparison is warranted. 6. For a more extensive consideration of Dorian Gray’s relationship to European bildungsroman, see Mao, who suggested that “if the Dorian in the picture has neither consciousness nor agency, it (or he) is capable only of registering the marks of the other Dorian’s sins, not of learning from them—which is to say that in this case experience manages to be formative without being instructive. Dorian Gray may thus stand … as a repudiation of the idea of moral growth on which the bildungsroman depends” (94). 7. See Barbara Eckstein, who suggested that “Maisie judges contextually only after her attempts to act according to the symmetrical codes of ‘justice’ provided by the guardians fail. She imitates what she has seen and heard as long as she can” (183). See also Rivkin, who asserted that Maisie’s ability to thwart her parents’ attempt to use her as a messenger develops “not because Maisie has begun to read the messages themselves but because she has learned to read their effects” (140). 8. A similar misinterpretation of monstrosity is also evident in some readings of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as in Clausson’s parenthetical remark that “not insignificantly, the word monstrous occurs over twenty times in the novel” (358), meant to justify his reading of Dorian’s atavistic degeneration to a bestial state.

Chapter 13

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics Transhumanism in Splice and Hanna April D. Miller From Frankenstein to The Fly, Hollywood has birthed countless monsters that serve as harsh warnings against scientific hubris. Portraying both the imprudent “gods” bent on exceeding the limits of the human form and the awesome “monsters” produced by their endeavors, such narratives often argue both for and against the adrenalized, scientifically fueled view of human evolution that has come to define transhumanism. Creating bodies that possess improbable intellectual and physical capacities, they testify to the inexorable drive to achieve human “perfection” while also mining the anxieties of what Isaac Asimov dubbed the Frankenstein complex: the fear that science will create something it cannot control, a monstrous being capable of supplanting its creators (409). When the desire to perfect the human form and intellect moves into the terrain of reproduction, it also enters the topical terrain of genetically manipulated designer babies, thus questioning the ethics behind

328

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

the natural but dangerous human drive to give one’s child every advantage. Science fictions, particularly those focused on the manipulation of human reproduction, present fertile ground for examining the controversial aims of transhumanism, a movement that in its simplest form, is governed by the belief that technology can and should be used to increase human intelligence and strength and to reduce human susceptibility to disease. In scrutinizing the monstrous potential of such endeavors, I examine two recent films that expose the double-edged sword of scientifically enhanced reproduction, Splice (Natali 2009), an independent Canadian production ultimately distributed by Warner Brothers’ genre label, Dark Castle, and Hanna (Wright 2011), a relatively low-budget Hollywood action film. Focusing on government and commercial scientists who engage in manipulations of conception and gestation in perverse quests to create perfect superhumans, these films, like many horror films, challenge the sanctity and innocence of childhood and muddy longstanding binary distinctions, ultimately questioning and redefining what it means to be human and transhuman and what it means to be the creator—the parent—of such a being. More specifically, in both Splice and Hanna, the superhuman female monsters, created largely by female scientists, expose the gendered problems of the transhumanist desire to exceed the biological limitations of the human form. Though both the eponymous Hanna and Dren, Splice’s “monster,” suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms by which bodies are culturally defined—human and animal, male and female, to name but two—the films’ subtexts offer a far more troubling vision of transhumanist creation by presenting the mother’s body as either unnecessary or disposable and the child as highly corruptible. Elsa Kast and Marissa Wiegler, responsible for the creation of Dren and Hanna, respectively, eschew their own bodies’ reproductive potential in favor of advancing their scientific careers. In exploring the complicated relationship between motherhood and employment, specifically in the sciences, both women run afoul of the inherent tensions between radical feminist ideology, transhumanist philosophy, and their own ensnarement in

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

329

the social construction of gender. Both films present a world where the goals of transhumanism are at the forefront of scientific methodology, ultimately exposing the dangers of such quests to move beyond the human body’s limits—particularly when co-opted for feminist purposes. Speaking to an issue frequently addressed in today’s popular press, both Splice and Hanna ultimately function as warnings against their female scientists’ rejection of a traditional procreative process that often impedes women’s careers and their desire to “have it all”: a career and motherhood on their terms. By exploring the specific gendered implications of the science and scientists used to represent the transhumanist quest for human perfection, Splice and Hanna depict both the fantasies and the nightmares of such a pursuit. Given that many transhumanists would rather bypass entirely the clumsy biological systems of the body, to claim that the very humanoid creations at the center of Hanna and Splice are examples of transhumanist achievements is to oversimplify the complex and highly controversial philosophy. Given the disparate voices that claim to speak on behalf of transhumanist ideas, attempting to define the movement is a daunting task, and fully mapping out its supporting and dissenting voices is an impossibility. Though providing a definitive unpacking of the philosophy’s many threads and the critical discourse that surrounds them is beyond the scope of this project, I present a brief sketch of transhumanism’s principal goals and beliefs. Seeing biotechnology as an essential tool for speeding up humanity’s natural evolutionary process, transhumanism endorses the use of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other as yet undiscovered tools to enable a disembodied, fluid, and flexible human consciousness that transcends human biological limits and will help realize a more equitable social order. This essay considers a limited kind of critical transhumanism in Splice and Hanna and explores transhumanism’s goal of achieving human perfection as a parallel to parents’ goals of offering the best opportunities to their children. My argument reveals some of the gendered tensions at the heart of such popular-culture representations of transhumanism’s biotechnolog-

330

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

ical vision of the future, ultimately investigating the feminist possibilities, both captivating and horrific, of scientific interventions into gestation, procreation, and parenting. Splice and Hanna can be read as representations of a transhumanist approach to science; both films clearly embody the controversial goals that are distinctly linked to the transhumanist project: in the latter, making a specimen that has outstanding physical and intellectual prowess and, in the former, birthing a creature that embodies the animal characteristics that humans most often pine for, such as wings and amphibious lungs. On the surface, there seems to be nothing controversial or inflammatory about these goals. After all, who would want to limit technology’s ability to improve humankind’s lived experience and to enhance “human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities”?1 Who would not want to expand future generations’ physical and intellectual abilities? Yet like the many critics whom Hanna discovers that brand the genetic engineering behind her creation “dirty science,” countless detractors of transhumanism decry both its godlike manipulation of evolution and its long-term hope of gestating beings that are “no longer unambiguously human by our current standards” (“Transhumanist”). Such criticism of popular transhumanism often latches on to its more radical elements, including the writings of Max More, founder of the extropian movement, who “advocates using science to accelerate our move from human to a transhuman or posthuman condition” in the hopes of achieving a disembodied consciousness that ultimately leads to a dissolution of the biological body and its inherent physical and intellectual limitations (More n. pag.). The apocalyptic outcome of such endeavors, some critics believe, is allowing technoscientific practice to produce “monsters” that will threaten human individualism and serve the immoral needs of a corporate, global capitalism. Summarizing the many arguments against cloning, often seen as a central component of the transhumanist project and certainly one that is central to the two films examined here, Ronald Bailey claimed that “[m]ost of the arguments against cloning amount to little more than a reformulation of the old Luddites everywhere: ‘If God

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

331

had meant for man to fly, he would have given us wings” (108). Hinting at these tensions and seemingly in response to the kinds of criticism mentioned by Bailey, Splice’s visionary geneticist, Elsa, counters, “If God didn’t want us to explore his domain, why did he give us the map?” Furthermore, transhumanism’s contentious relation with identity politics and critical theory makes constructing feminist claims for transhumanism an even more formidable undertaking. After all, how can a movement that eschews the body and favors an ahistorical description of human development account for the specificity of women’s experiences and the long history of gendered oppression that marks even the most liberated of female subjectivities? Proponents of transhumanism like James Hughes have themselves decried the movement’s “ideologically narrow, apolitical, sectarian ahistoricality,” along with what he called its “elitist anarcho-capitalist roots” (Hughes). In contrast, a quick survey of the literature surrounding transhumanism and other attempts to theorize the posthuman make clear that the discourse offers considerable potential for feminist theorizing. For example, despite transhumanism’s conservative roots, theorists like Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles clearly recognized the radical feminist potential of the posthuman but have also acknowledged the movement’s deriding history and its problematic origins in a predominantly white, upperclass, male milieu. As Hayles pointed out, “the posthuman should not be depicted as an apocalyptic break with the past … We do not leave our history behind but rather, like snails, carry it around with us in the sedimented and enculturated instantiations of our past we call our bodies” (137). The posthuman has been celebrated as a fragmented form of subjectivity capable of challenging the coherent, bodily, and essentialist construction of the humanist subject. Therefore, critical theorizing of the posthuman proposed by the likes of Haraway and Hayles celebrates its ability to challenge the oppressive boundaries created within phallogocentric systems of meaning and the patriarchal capitalism they support. In these conceptions of the philosophy, transhumanism becomes a system “wherein the human is but one of a number

332

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

of equally valid and substitutable sites for consciousness, where nature is not superior to artifice, where human dominance is not an inherent or essential attribute, but a negotiated position within a system” (Bartlett 39). Thus, my argument relies heavily on a critical transhumanism like that offered by Catherine Waldby: “a general critical space in which the techno-cultural forces which both produce and undermine the stability of the categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ can be investigated” (43). In Splice and Hanna can be seen just such critical spaces whereby the films’ scientists and the creatures they birth become tools, albeit ones that pose considerable dangers to their creators, for questioning social binaries. Hanna and Splice revolve around organic, at least partially biological human subjects who seem at odds with the machine-driven consciousness one might expect from a transhumanist representation of the future. Yet both protagonists are examples of the kinds of monstrous “boundary creatures” that Haraway sees as transhumanism’s most fruitful territory; they destabilize “the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives” (Simians 2). Seeing the monster, like the cyborg, as an empowered and empowering subject, Haraway argued that people should find pleasure in the confusion of boundaries created by such figures but should also hold themselves responsible for their construction. In fact, she ultimately contended that hybrid beings—a category that includes cyborgs, monsters, and women—are essential to the utopian tradition of imagining a world where gender “might not be a global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth” (180). Elaine Graham identified a similar power in the monster’s blurring of boundaries and “dissolution of the ‘ontological hygiene’ by which for the past three hundred years Western culture has drawn the fault-lines that separate humans, nature, and machines” (11). Showcasing a genetic “freak” defined by her superhuman strength and intelligence, on one hand, and a human-animal hybrid, on the other, Hanna and Splice offer such highly contested modes of monstrous subjectivity, exposing the shifting boundaries between the genders, between human and animal,

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

333

between humans and the technology that affects and, in these cases, creates them. Like many science fiction films before it, Splice presents a particularly bleak vision of profit-driven scientific experimentation, telling the tale of a geneticist power couple, Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), employed by a pharmaceutical company that has commissioned them to create synthetic proteins for use in treating livestock. Frustrated by the company’s focus on the bottom line and its desire to reign in any experimentation on humans in order to maintain its public image, the couple goes rogue, using their techniques for splicing DNA to create a human-animal hybrid. The resulting “monster,” Dren, begins life as an amorphous ball of tissue—one that inspires her parents’ revulsion and that bears little resemblance to anything human. However, their offspring quickly goes through a series of transformations that seem to extol the exciting potential of Clive and Elsa’s experiment—a childhood that showcases her incredible intelligence and artistic talents and an adolescence that reveals her amphibious lungs, wings, stark physical beauty, and love of music. Yet the final incarnation renders “her” unquestionably monstrous as she is transformed into a male “specimen” that commits a final act of Oedipal horror: raping and impregnating his mother and killing his father with his venomous tail before Elsa bashes Dren’s skull in with a rock. Given its frequent mimicking of the Frankenstein narrative, the film’s final outcome should come as no surprise. As Clive explains, “We fucked up. We chained her up, we locked her away from the world, we maimed her”; this mistreatment or misunderstanding of Dren’s position between the boundaries of the human and animal— treated as part child, part pet, and part experiment—incites the disaster that, Clive admits, everyone warned about: “A new species set loose in the world.” The hybrid subject seen in Splice may, at first glance, seem like a pitch-perfect example of the transhuman in that Dren surpasses the strength and intelligence of “normal” humans, and her sequential

334

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

hermaphroditism defies the categories of sex and gender that transhumanism will, in theory, enable human beings to relinquish. However, the narrative quickly reveals that its scientists, its monster-makers— including the hipster scientists who bring Dren into being—are still far too reliant on what Donna Haraway called “the mundane fiction of Man and Woman” (Simians 180). Even as Splice seems to celebrate the posthuman’s hybridity and the feminist potential of the posthuman subject, it also exposes the anxieties caused by such a breakdown of long-standing binaries, perhaps most notably when Elsa and Clive first discuss the prospect of starting a family. In one of the many scenes that take place in the couple’s small, dark walk-up apartment, which seems like an unlikely residence for two successful geneticists, Elsa and Clive reveal vastly different visions of their domestic future. Opening with a close-up of vinyl figures representative of the couple’s expansive Japanese anime collection before moving to a medium close-up of Clive tapping loudly along to Led Zeppelin and Elsa expressing her annoyance over the distracting noise, the scene depicts the couple discussing the prospect of moving to a more spacious apartment. Clive, whose taste in music perhaps suggests an unwillingness to get with the times, so to speak, resists Elsa’s request that he look at a listing for an ultramodern loft. He justifies his hesitancy by explaining that the apartment “just doesn’t seem big enough” for “down the road.” Realizing that this is Clive’s way of saying he is anticipating children, Elsa explains that this is an unreasonable expectation “because [she’s] the one who has to have it,” a protest that aligns the female scientist with a radical second-wave feminism like that espoused by Shulamith Firestone, who decried the tyranny of the biological family and called for women to seize control of reproduction. After declaring her unwillingness to bear children, Elsa proclaims, “I don’t wanna bend my life to suit some third party that doesn’t even exist yet” and concedes that she will revisit the idea of children “after we crack male pregnancy.” Clive jokes, “And ruin this perfect figure,” which prompts Elsa to both call him a hypocrite and shower him with kisses. Notably, this moment of intimacy is immedi-

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

335

ately interrupted by an emergency call that BETI, the Biomechanical Extrautero Thermal Incubator being used to cultivate Dren, is malfunctioning, thus suggesting the fragile possibility of meeting Elsa’s demand for biologically independent reproduction. 2 By discussing the complicated reproductive choices that an ambitious career woman like Elsa must make, Splice raises the specter of posthumanism’s and radical feminism’s common cybernetic vision of genderless reproduction, only to ultimately suggest that such attempts to supersede women’s reproductive role are not only unsound but likely to pose a monstrous threat to the female subject. In its final image, the film presents an even harsher warning against women’s roles in this imagined postpatriarchy. The creature’s threat to patriarchal capitalism is ultimately contained both by its physical destruction and by its integration into the system of big business; Elsa signs an agreement that frees Newstead Pharma to experiment on her unborn child, conceived after Dren changes sex and rapes her. Immediately after an aerial shot that displays Elsa dressed in a telling red coat lying next to the dead Clive and Dren, the film moves to the Newstead boardroom, where a close-up reveals CEO Joan Chorot against a stark white backdrop. Dressed in a head-to-toe dark pantsuit, Chorot paces around a seated Elsa, moving in and out of the frame. Chorot begins to describe Dren in terms that hint at monstrosity while also highlighting Elsa’s remarkable scientific achievement: “Your Dren turned out to be a cauldron of unimaginable chemical mysteries.” Despite using the telling word cauldron, aligning Elsa’s work with witchcraft, Chorot’s admiration for Dren is palpable; she seems oblivious to the tripartite tragedy that surrounds Dren’s creation: Clive’s and Dren’s deaths and Elsa’s rape. Chorot is also quick to point out the economic payoff of this “failed” experiment, explaining that Dren “was filled with a variety of completely unique compounds. We’ll be filing patents for years.” The economic repercussions of this experiment in biotechnological reproduction do not stop with Newstead Pharma, however; Elsa also

336

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

stands to reap tremendous benefits from Dren’s life and death, a fact highlighted by Chorot’s sliding a file folder across the table toward Elsa, proclaiming that “the figure we have come up with is very generous.” Elsa, completely expressionless, pulls the document toward her and silently signs it with considerable force as Chorot warns, “You can never speak of this to anyone. Ever.” At this point, Elsa rises awkwardly to her feet and is shown in a silhouetted profile that showcases her heavily pregnant body. The camera tilts downward until only her lower abdomen is visible in the frame before switching to a long shot that shows the two women, now both in silhouette, at the immense glass boardroom table. Despite the economically focused exchange, Chorot does reveal a softer side after the deal has been signed, giving Elsa an out: “Nobody would blame you if you didn’t do this. You could just put an end to this and walk away.” Without evincing any change in expression, Elsa responds, “What’s the worst that could happen?” suggesting she has learned very little from the violent outcome of her earlier rogue experiments. Though Elsa refuses to consider terminating the pregnancy, this exchange between the two ambitious career women suddenly takes on new feminist weight, framing Elsa’s decision in terms of reproductive choice. The film cements their unified stance in a final long shot of the two women, again shown in silhouette, standing side by side, Chorot firmly gripping Elsa’s shoulders. Framed by the large floor-to-ceiling windows, the two women appear under dark clouds that hang ominously over the expansive cityscape and a microscope showcased in a bell jar just to the right of their bodies, a small reminder of their common scientific interests. This closing shot suggests that such reproductive experimentation— or more specifically, women’s desire to circumvent the natural procreative process—cannot be tolerated, a warning reinforced by the image of Elsa’s pregnant body. The woman who frequently expressed her unwillingness to bear children is ultimately punished by her own transhuman child with pregnancy and childbirth. Both the monster and her female creators become tools for inspiring fear of the hybrid human-animal

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

337

subject while also exposing a fear of gender equality or neutrality— women’s desire to break down both professional and domestic boundaries. Thus, the film’s final image of the two women signing up for such unethical, commerce-driven manipulations of reproduction becomes just as abhorrent as the ill-defined contours of Dren’s infant body. Elsa and Chorot become monsters themselves, yet another example of the horror film’s monstrous-feminine (Creed). Like Dren, Hanna too is set loose on an action-packed rampage that leads to the death of both her father and mother. Yet unlike Dren, there is nothing monstrous about this transhuman subject—at least not at first glance. In the film’s opening shots, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) appears as a striking sixteen-year-old girl gliding through the frozen landscape of Finland, a bow strapped to her shoulder and wearing animal skins and fur boots as she brings down a reindeer nosing the snow in search of food. Nowhere could seem farther removed from the world of science and technology than the one in which Hanna was raised and educated, just south of the Arctic Circle. But like Dren, this natural wild child is a finely tuned technological being who can speak ten languages and kill any opponent with her bare hands. She is the last of a genetically engineered “litter” of superassassins created by Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) to have “high intelligence, muscle mass, and no pity.” Whereas Dren’s creators deliberately attempted to remove any violent animal characteristics from their “child’s” genetic makeup, Hanna was always intended to be a ruthless, violent creature—just what one would expect from a monstrous experiment gone wrong. Yet the film presents her as a hopeful, albeit disquieting, example of the transhuman: she uses her prodigious strength only when threatened and seems largely free from malice or cruelty. Trained by her father and relying on her superhuman instincts and abilities, Hanna allows herself to be captured by the CIA early in the film in order to get closer to Marissa, about whom she seems to know little apart from her father’s instructions that she must be killed in order for Hanna and Erik, her guardian, to survive and live freely in the world.3

338

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Hanna’s body count is noticeably and significantly higher than that of Splice, but the former frames Hanna’s efficient and violent martial prowess as heroic and awe inspiring. Although both her gender and her age distinguish her from most of the genre’s protagonists, Hanna approximates the mythic hero that has become a Hollywood action-film staple, offering up a hope of salvation from the violence, depravity, and perverse misuse of science exhibited by many of the film’s “normal” humans. In fact, Hanna’s strength, speed, and dexterity, as well as her growth as a fighter, lend her posthuman traits a distinct appeal, and she becomes more sympathetic as she grapples with and ultimately comes to terms with her (in)humanity. Notably, Sophie, a British teenager on holiday with her family whom Hanna stumbles upon in the Moroccan desert shortly after escaping the CIA facility, sums up Hanna’s appeal as a monster in a very succinct way when the two girls make a concrete commitment to their friendship. In a scene composed of extreme closeups of the girls’ faces, hands, and feet as they lie under an impromptu blanket fort, Sophie gives Hanna a friendship bracelet just before Hanna admits that she is “abnormal” according to the DNA analysis performed on her while she was held by government officials in Morocco. Sophie reveals the tensions created by the monstrous subject, saying, “I mean you’re a freak and everything, but I like you.” This word choice also haunts Hanna, however, who is forced to recognize her nonnormative status in terms of both the scientific charting of her genetic difference and Sophie’s statement. Later, she throws the word back at Erik when the two fight over his claim to fatherhood; Hanna yells, “I’m not your flesh and blood. I’m abnormal.” In proclaiming her own abnormality, Hanna reveals transhumanism’s quest for human perfection as a paranoid fantasy, showing that the hybrid subject is capable of destroying one of its creators—the heartless Marissa Wiegler—and threatening the life of its sympathetic cocreator, surrogate father Erik Heller. Just as the film’s opening deerhunting scene and the mock battle with her father that follows function as coming-of-age tests for Hanna, killing the film’s “big bad wolf,”

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

339

Marissa, also functions as a rite of passage, a sign that the adolescent Hanna is able to separate herself from her (in this case nonbiological) father and mother. Not coincidentally, given that fairy tales often function as coming-of-age lessons, Hanna first learns of her own biotechnological origin story and that Erik is not her biological father while hiding out at an amusement-park version of Wilhelm Grimm’s house. Later, when she confronts her father with this knowledge, the film exposes its own latent anxieties about such genetically engineered families, presenting science as a considerable threat to family stability and human subjectivity. In the house where her biological grandmother was recently killed by Wiegler, Hanna asks Erik, with notable anguish in her voice, “Are you my father?”—repeating the question several times when he refuses to immediately answer. He finally explains, “Of course I’m your father. I raised you … I’m your father. I’ve been with you your whole life. Treated you like my own flesh and blood.” Though many would argue, as Erik does, that family is defined by behavior, not biology, Hanna’s retort that she is not his flesh and blood suggests the tensions inherent in scientifically enhanced reproduction using donors’ genetic materials. When Erik asserts, “I tried to prepare you for what your life would be,” Hanna retorts, “You didn’t prepare me for this.” I read this statement as her lack of preparation not for the violent threats she would face, for which Hanna seems more than adequately prepared, but for the realization that she is other than human, bound to live in a world where her difference is not accepted and where her superiority marks her as monstrous. She even challenges the motivations for her father’s love when he says, “I love you, Hanna”; she responds, “Because I’m a freak.” Even though Sophie’s earlier statement is voiced with tremendous affection, Hanna’s echoing of that descriptor acknowledges a central dilemma faced by the monstrous subject: when not living off the grid with her father in a remote cabin in northern Finland, Hanna will necessarily be other when forced to live in the nonfantastical world where one’s parentage and binary oppositions matter.

340

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

A similar debate emerges in Splice when Elsa and Clive briefly discuss the genetic source of the ovum used to produce Dren. As Elsa prepares the donor specimen, Clive asks, “What’s the profile?” To this Elsa responds, “Jane Doe. Anonymous female donor. Clean medical and heredity. The usual.” This clinical description inspires Clive to respond, his mouth full of pizza, “A dime a dozen.” Notably, paralleling the exclusion of Hanna’s biological father from that narrative, the two scientists in Splice never discuss the origins of the sperm used to generate their offspring. Yet Clive’s later confrontation with Elsa about this supposed Jane Doe reveals that using his DNA was out of the question. After a disturbingly intimate dance with Dren, Clive claims to recognize something of Elsa in Dren’s appearance and behavior, which prompts him to challenge Elsa’s scientific motives and integrity: “It’s your DNA in Dren. I can tell. You put yourself into the experiment. How could you? Was this ever about science?” Hanna’s questions about Erik’s claims to fatherhood focus largely on how it affects her sense of self-worth, and Dren’s biological makeup provides the impetus for questioning Elsa’s scientific integrity. She has essentially fulfilled the radical feminist goals outlined by Firestone, seizing control of the means of reproduction and human fertility; however, at least in Clive’s view, doing so has caused Elsa to compromise her objectivity, a concession that calls into question her experiment’s legitimacy and her own legitimacy as a scientist. A return to critical posthumanism reveals that because they are illegitimate both in terms of parental lineage and genetic makeup, both Hanna and Dren inhabit powerful outsider positions. To wit, while defining the cyborg as the illegitimate fusion of animal and machine, Haraway also expanded cyborg identities to include subjectivity “synthesized from fusions of outsider identities” (Simians 174). In questioning Erik’s claims to paternity, Hanna displays the way in which “stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins” (Haraway, Simians 176); As Haraway explained, within the debates surrounding the use of biotechnology can be heard “the tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed,” an “anxiety over the pollution of lineages” that can also be

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

341

linked to “gender and sexual anxiety” (“Mice” 218, 217). And given that Hanna is the illegitimate offspring of biotechnology and a militaristic patriarchal capitalism, the discussion of her paternity brings these anxieties to the surface. Revolving around science fictions where no character is simply human, both Hanna and Splice render human status highly problematic, thus offering promising but dangerous monsters that engage in the types of boundary transgressions that Haraway sees as essential to a feminist cyborg politics. As gestures toward the transhuman, these scientifically created hybrids break the linear reproductive binary model, and though such births are ultimately condemned in Splice and are a source of profound tension in Hanna, they nevertheless allow difference, particularly as it relates to essentialist notions of gender, to proliferate. Relying heavily on the imagery associated with countless Hollywood representations of childbirth, Splice’s two birthing scenes reflect a posthuman suspicion of biological reproductive processes and their concomitant birthing practices. The film opens with a credit sequence that includes what one might assume are point-of-view shots from the perspective of Elsa and Clive’s first successful animal-animal hybrid, Fred, as he journeys down the birth canal, amniotic fluid bubbling up around the names of actors branded into the biological tissue of the fabricated mother’s body. After this eerie but not entirely unpleasant sequence, the narrative progresses to what looks like a typical hospital surgery room as Fred is expelled into the eager arms of his “father,” Clive, who cuts the umbilical cord and, after a few tense moments, proclaims his progeny perfect. Notably, this first birthing scene positions Fred’s “mother,” Elsa, firmly at the margins of the entire process as she follows Clive’s lead and reads off Fred’s stats like a highly skilled nurse. The moments following Fred’s birth also mimic more typical birthing scenes, Clive acting like the proverbial proud papa as he removes the sluglike creature from its incubator, Elsa videotaping the whole process before saying with obvious pride, “He’s so cute,” a statement that is surely intended to contrast starkly with viewers’ assessments of the creature.4

342

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Perhaps as a correction to Elsa’s refusal to give birth by traditional means, which she worries would force her to give up control, the film’s second such scene places this “mother” in dire peril, suggesting that even biotechnologically mediated birthing practices present a danger to the female subject. Taking place this time in a basement facility that allows Elsa and Clive to keep their activities secret from Newstead’s bureaucrats, the birthing is highly traumatic for both parents, though most dangerous for Elsa, as the two realize that the bionic womb they have created is simply not large enough to allow the hybrid to be born by mechanical means. Elsa declares, “We’re going to have to do this manually” as she dons rubber gloves and inserts her entire arm into a slippery, vagina-like opening. However, Elsa’s calm but determined voice quickly gives way to incoherent screams of pain as her arm is sucked into the canal; she shouts “It’s stinging,” at which point Clive resorts to a kind of brutal cesarean section, slicing open the artificial uterus and thus freeing both mother and child. But the horror does not stop with the seemingly successful birth, for Elsa collapses in a fit of seizures that require an adrenaline shot to the upper thigh before the two scientists finally get to examine their latest offspring, which Clive immediately declares a “mistake.” This scene and Clive’s assessment call these scientific processes into question, implying that they will not save humanity from either the difficulty of natural reproductive processes or the possibility of producing imperfect progeny. A further questioning of Splice’s scientific vision occurs even before Dren’s birth, during Clive and Elsa’s first clandestine attempt to splice human and animal DNA. In a montage sequence that looks like something out of a crime procedural, images of DNA strands and computations float across the screen as the frustrated scientists struggle to pull off an incredible feat that they know could make them famous— if only they could reveal their work to a skeptical public. Though the film’s depictions of genetic experimentation may not stand up to serious scientific scrutiny, this scene emphasizes that theirs is a hard-fought battle to pull off the scientific feat of the century, one that, if Elsa and

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

343

Clive are to be believed, will allow them to address numerous genetically influenced diseases. Fast-motion photography, their steady diet of pizza and Chinese take-out, and Elsa’s obsessive consumption of energy pastilles5 suggest that the pair’s quest has been an arduous one full of sleepless nights and contentious disagreements. Yet these struggles pale in comparison to the ones they will face as new parents. Whereas Splice situates itself within the world of hard science and explicitly critiques biotechnological attempts to control birthing and child rearing by making it the kind of terrifying process one has come to expect from horror and science fiction films, Hanna has no pretentions toward scientific accuracy and locates the details of Hanna’s birth firmly outside the film’s narrative world. Even the director, Joe Wright, has admitted that the scientific narrative that Erik offers Hanna as an explanation of her superhuman abilities is nothing more than a red herring, a plot device that explains how she came into being but that fails to hold up to scientific scrutiny: “you were born in a research facility in rural Poland, Galinka … They took fertilized embryos and made small changes to them to improve them, to reduce the capacity for fear, for pity, to increase muscle strength, heighten senses, anything to make a better soldier, the perfect soldier. I recruited your mother at an abortion clinic; I recruited twenty women the same way.” In this brusque outline, Erik glosses over several important factors about the process by which Hanna came into the world. First, as in the discussion of Dren’s genetic makeup, Erik makes no mention of Hanna’s biological father, perhaps reflecting his anxiety about how such a discussion might challenge his own claims to parenthood. Second, he downplays the significance of his recruiting process, by which vulnerable women like Johanna who are contemplating the termination of their pregnancies are enticed by unknown means to assist in a scientific “program to make babies stronger.” Though the film presumes that Erik and Johanna eventually become lovers and long to raise Hanna together, this mapping of the scientific

344

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

program is ultimately designed to define its female participants by their power to reproduce. Under Erik and Marissa’s program, women like Johanna are destined to become caught in a kind of handmaid’s tale that reduces the female human subject to nothing more than a reproductive tool. Erik also outlines the harsh outcome from which he hoped his parenting would save her, explaining that when Hanna was two, “Marissa Wiegler closed the whole program, and all of this research —it was disposed of.” Hanna positions the cyborg as savior, the body that is remarkably superior to unenhanced humans in both her intellect and her physical prowess, while still hanging on to an ethics that is more humane, more human. It is the creators, not the cyborg itself, who threaten the human race with their cruelty and abuse of scientific endeavor and political power. In contrast to the self-serving scientific model developed by Erik and Marissa, Clive and Elsa initially appear to be high-minded idealists. Hoping to build upon the success of their first animal hybrids, Fred and Ginger, Clive and Elsa present their next scientific vision, rather naïvely assuming that their employers will leap at the chance to be at the frontlines of DNA research designed to improve the human condition. When making their original argument for using human DNA in their splicing experiments to the heads of Newstead Pharma, Clive explains the need to begin using human subjects: “By incorporating human DNA into the hybrid template, we can begin to address any number of genetically influenced diseases.” Elsa finishes his sentence, listing the diseases that could be controlled by their research: “Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, even some forms of cancer.” CEO Joan Chorot begins this scene shrouded in darkness, before leaning forward in her chair and into the light to deliver the bad news to the idealistic young scientists: the company is not interested in what Elsa describes as “the medical breakthrough of the century” but instead wants to focus on what Chorot calls the “product stage” of development, which will allow them to attract investors and deflect the social and political outrage that would come with using human DNA. Chorot makes clear that profits come first,

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

345

offering up a capitalist conception of biotechnological research projects that substantiates the worst fears of transhumanism’s skeptics: “We’d love to go there. Shoot for incredible medical breakthroughs. Of course we would. You put a viable livestock product on the shelves, then we will talk about a twenty-year plan to save the world.” Elsa responds with outrage that, though it is certainly fueled by her belief that Newstead is stymieing science that would help better humanity, is also evidence of her own scientific hubris. She is too proud to “spend the next five years digging through pig shit for enteric proteins.” Despite Chorot’s call to focus on the bottom line and to stop creating “monsters,” the couple refuses to relinquish the plan to pursue human DNA splicing, instead beginning a project they claim they never intended to “take to term,” the gestation and birthing of Dren, the world’s first human-animal hybrid. After Clive and Elsa begin their clandestine nurturing of Dren, and foreshadowing her eventual violent transformation, the pair’s original specimens, Fred and Ginger—which are somewhat amorphous blobs, in contrast with Dren’s sleek humanoid appearance—brutally attack and kill each other, splattering Newstead Pharma’s conspicuously wealthy potential investors with gallons of blood.6 Afterward, Elsa and Clive must explain this unexpected violent turn of events to Chorot. They first rationalize the shocking outcome by saying that the female specimen, Ginger, precipitated the attack after undergoing certain hormonal changes, perhaps echoing a cultural commonplace that uses women’s reproductive cycles to explain female “irrationality.” When pressed, the couple admits that Ginger had changed sex without their knowledge, a fact that shocks Chorot, who exclaims in disbelief, “Your first living hybrid changes sex, and you didn’t notice? How is that possible?” It seems that Clive and Elsa’s biggest offense is their disregard of gender difference, their refusal to acknowledge that gender does not matter in a world where all one needs to generate new life is a crack scientific team and an expensive array of technological equipment.

346

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Despite the disastrous outcome of their first successful attempt at hybridization, Elsa sees no reason to put the brakes on the couple’s experiments, saying with confidence, “We can recreate them. There’s no reason not to start over,” to which Chorot responds, “No more monsters. We don’t have time for that”—a statement that conveys the desire to reign in the subversive power of the monster and the need to confine such experimentation to serving the company’s capitalist goals. In fact, here, the monster becomes nothing more than an instrument in a patriarchal capitalist’s toolbox, one that will eradicate what Chorot calls “la passion” of young, idealistic scientists bent on making “the medical breakthrough of the century.” And if the CEO’s harsh financial reality check is not enough to bring them down to earth, their monstrous progeny, Dren, surely will be. In one particularly striking scene in Splice that exemplifies the dangers of such passion for biotechnology, as well as the film’s reliance on subjectivities built around strident gender divisions, Elsa tries to disarm her creation by removing Dren’s spear-like tail and her zootoxin glands, an explicit act of castration designed both to render the monster powerless and to reinforce the boundaries between the human and the animal. As Elsa explains, “Physically, H-50 has evolved well. However, recent violent behavior suggests a dangerous psychological development. Erratic behavior might be caused by disproportionate species identification. Cosmetically human affection should be eliminated wherever possible.” Before subjecting her progeny to this brutal act of violence, Elsa tries to reaffirm the boundaries between the human and the animal, cutting off Dren’s dress and roughly scrubbing the makeup from her face with the torn cloth. In a series of shots that noticeably mirror those in James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein, Dren lies naked, strapped to a wooden table, light streaming in from the barn’s skylight. Canted framing reveals Elsa from Dren’s perspective, wearing a brown butcher apron and with all signs of maternal feeling washed from her harsh face.

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

347

Like Frankenstein before it, Splice suggests that a society produces monsters less by systematic oppression than by inept parenting. Splice interrogates reproductive politics in a mythic, indeterminate scientific future arena that continues to be structured by early-twentieth-century notions of gender. Most parents want to improve the lot of their children, turning to conventional means of enhancing the health and opportunities of their offspring: providing a safe environment, a healthful diet, a good education, and exposure to diverse experiences. Increasingly, parents or would-be parents are being offered genetic means of enhancing their children’s lives. Splice plays with the stereotypical narrative of the new parent, showing Elsa and Clive struggling to sooth their new baby, to feed it, to comfort it in illness, to provide for its needs around the clock while struggling, even in their sleep-deprived state, to function professionally. Once Dren arrives, the film showcases Elsa and Clive’s struggle to care for their creation via episodes filmed with a handheld camera that contributes to the atmosphere of confusion and instability. For example, viewers see Clive struggling to feed Dren her specialized diet, a green pabulum made of “chlorophyll, roughage, bean curd, and rich starch,” as he becomes increasingly frustrated by her refusal, forcefully proclaiming, “You’re going to eat this.” He quickly switches to softer tactics, pleading, “Just a little bit. Please.” But when that too fails, he curses and holds his hands to his ears to drown out Dren’s cries, announcing, “I just can’t take it anymore.” When even force-feeding results only in Dren’s spitting the food into Clive’s face, he announces their attempts at child rearing a failure and describes Dren in terms that could apply to any newborn baby: “She makes too much noise, people are going to notice, and she stinks.” Much to Clive’s disappointment, the couple soon realizes that their child prefers an unhealthy diet of candy, or as Elsa calls it, “high-fructose food stuffs.” Despite Dren’s status as an experiment, Clive and Elsa’s early treatment of her mimics typical parental behavior in many ways, including

348

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

their reliance on the kind of gender divisions prevalent in the marketing of everything from toys to children’s clothing. Immediately after she sheds her podlike first skin and reveals herself to be female, they clothe Dren in baby-doll dresses, a trend that continues throughout her development. Viewers see the influence of gender or its lack of relevance to both films’ “monsters” in their clothing choices, as well as in other accoutrements of childhood and adolescence. Dren’s clothes consist entirely of dresses, and her playthings are traditionally feminine ones: stuffed toys and baby carriages that one might imagine are designed to inspire tender, maternal instincts. At a moment that could be described as Dren’s coming of age, Elsa teaches her how to apply makeup, explaining, “My mother never let me wear makeup. She said that it debased women. But who doesn’t want to be debased every once in a while?” After she and Dren both admire Elsa’s handiwork, Elsa declares, “Look. See how pretty you’ve become. Now you have to learn how to be a grown-up.” This statement causes Elsa to pause and remember how she “felt at your age” before breaking off, lost in some sort of painful memory of her own adolescence before declaring, “We could use some more eyeliner. Let’s try some more eyeliner.” In Elsa’s eyes, being pretty and wearing makeup are part of the maturation process for the female, and she tries to foist this set of cultural expectations onto the human-animal hybrid. This falls in stark contrast to the right of passage set up for Hanna—a life-or-death struggle, one where physical and intellectual strength, not physical attractiveness, are of utmost importance. Hanna’s clothing is altogether practical and eschews gendered expectations. She begins the film in the kind of rugged fur and leather pants and jacket one might expect from a survivalist living less than a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. Even later, when she is imprisoned in the government facility in Morocco, she appears in a loose orange jumpsuit and plain white-canvas sneakers. Mimicking the uniforms worn by Guantanamo inmates who are labeled “noncompliant,” this uniform serves to mark Hanna’s renegade, deadly status while also masking her bodily identity.7 In a trend that continues throughout the film, Hanna’s

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

349

costuming reflects an unwillingness to objectify her in the way that has become standard even for adolescent depictions of the female action hero. After escaping the government facility, she abandons the conspicuous orange jumpsuit in favor of a Moroccan djellaba that she steals from some women washing clothes by the river. Like the uniform before it, this shapeless unisex garment is designed to cover the whole body and ensure the wearer’s modesty. Viewers eventually see Hanna clothed in an outfit more typical of a twenty-first-century teenager—a gray hoodie, jeans, and sneakers—but even this attire is unusually modest for female action heroes, whose appearance often suggests that their power both within the narrative and at the box office relies on bodily displays. Whereas many action and science fiction films present a world in which masculinity becomes intrinsically aligned with both the dreams and nightmares of such human perfection, both Hanna and Splice offer differently gendered visions of the futuristic human subject. Foregrounding monsters and scientific creators who are female, these films struggle, to varying degrees, to imagine a world where a body is just a body and gender is no longer a relevant category. Yet Hanna, at least, approaches the kind of genderless vision of transhumanism imagined by Haraway in her critical transhumanist cyborg politics. Perhaps even more significantly, Hanna’s imagining does not come at the expense of feminist history, a frequent theoretical criticism lobbed against the popular transhumanist vision. As Hanna’s coming of age process causes her to encounter women literally for the first time, she observes an array of female subjects who present visions of the feminine and female experience that starkly contrast with her own early life, which has been spent living in total isolation with only her father and a pack of wild dogs for company. Similarly, given the film’s title and the protagonist’s obviously female-gendered name, viewers will enter into the narrative with a conscious awareness of Hanna’s gendered position, particularly given the relative novelty of female adolescents in the action genre. Although Hanna’s gender remains unremarkable, and her father clearly does not see her female form as an inhibitor to her physical or intellectual achieve-

350

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

ments, the film acknowledges the profound historical significance of such gender divisions via a diverse array of central female characters: Sophie, Karen (Sophie’s mother), and Marissa. Constantly wearing largely monochromatic 1980s power suits with women’s “ties” and highend designer pumps, Marissa symbolizes women’s ongoing struggle to break the professional glass ceiling in the world of science and upperlevel government. Her conservative clothing and her biting attitude toward her male colleagues suggest she has had to play the stereotypical “ball buster” in order to advance through the ranks of the historically paternalistic CIA. In her conversation with Johanna’s mother (Hanna’s biological grandmother), Marissa reveals that even her personal life is marked by the kinds of difficult decisions that many women are forced to make if they hope to succeed professionally. When Johanna’s mother asks Marissa whether she “ever had children of her own,” Marissa responds with the definitive statement, “I made certain choices,” ultimately echoing Elsa’s belief that childbearing and child rearing are activities that demand women, in particular, forfeit too much personal freedom. Presenting a world view that would most certainly seem alien to Hanna, a hybrid subject who suggests that gender presents no restrictions, Marissa’s sturdy pumps, power suits, and personal philosophy acknowledge the lived reality of countless professional women. Yet it is those sturdy and expensive Prada pumps that eventually bring about Marissa’s downfall, suggesting that her particular brand of feminism is not only outdated but downright dangerous as she catches her heel in the train tracks and plummets to the bottom of a slope, thus giving Hanna the final upper hand. Sophie’s mother, Karen, though of the same generation as Marissa, presents a different take on female emancipation, albeit one that becomes a source more of cheap humor than signs of feminist empowerment. After going on about how designer handbags represent an investment that will never depreciate, Sophie denigrates her mother’s brand of feminism, explaining, “Mom is against plastic surgery. She doesn’t even wear makeup.” In a moment that can be read as a caricature of a radical femi-

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

351

nist critique of makeup and that refers to the same philosophy Elsa attributes to her mother, Karen explains this decision by saying she thinks that wearing makeup is dishonest. She then goes into a detailed description of how lipstick acts as a tool for making a woman’s lips more closely resemble her labia, to which her skeptical and embarrassed daughter responds, “Vomitorium.” Sophie, for her part, represents another kind of feminism, a parody of the third wave’s vision for women’s empowerment that exhausts her mother, who likely thinks her daughter is squandering the gains wrought by her generation. Sophie believes in maintaining control over sexual relationships but still derives pleasure from wearing makeup and thinks there’s nothing wrong with plastic surgery and pink clothing. Yet it is difficult to see Sophie, obsessed as she is with Gucci handbags and boys, as a symbol of contemporary feminist empowerment. In fact, the film places her boy-crazy, pink-accented, lipstick “feminism” in stark contrast to the powerful image projected by Hanna, who is defined by her physical strength, intelligence, lack of interest in boys, and inability to successfully sport Sophie’s “princess” clothing. Hanna conveys its feminist message by presenting and interrogating women’s varied modes of gender expression, and Splice embeds a feminist message in its presentation of a career scientist, Elsa, who refuses to have children by traditional means because it will cause her to lose control; instead, she uses her own genetic material without her partner’s knowledge to create the world’s first animal-human hybrid. However, Elsa eventually falls back on stereotypical gender binaries, as does Clive, whose ineffective policing of the nature/artifice boundary that biotechnology calls into question his brother blames specifically on Elsa’s castrating power. The film also implies that Clive’s boss, William Barlow, is similarly castrated by his boss, CEO Joan Chorot, for he is repeatedly mocked by Elsa and Clive and struggles to maintain control of his rogue scientists and largely lets Chorot run the show. Splice evinces a seeming obsession with gender binaries that contrasts sharply with Hanna. Whereas Dren’s ability to transform from female to male is seen as remarkable (as it is in her ancestor, Ginger), Hanna represents such

352

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

fluidity as rather mundane. When Marissa enters a nightclub where one of her henchmen, Isaac, works to present him with the mission of finding Hanna, he is supervising the rehearsal of a club performer, someone who, he says, “has both male and female genitalia.” Marissa barely bats an eye at this revelation, and the film suggests that the challenge to such binaries represented by the performer’s body is not terribly remarkable. Until her capture by the CIA operatives, Hanna has lived in a world where gender is largely irrelevant. Trained to be the perfect superhuman specimen with no sense that her female body or mind is a kind of social or physical detriment that she must surmount, she has lived a posthuman dream. But Hanna is able to temporarily avoid such questions of gender only because she has been raised in a world of fantasy, a secluded forest fairy-tale world that is physically harsh but protects her from the kind of objectification and professional struggles that women face in the everyday world. Fairy tales are obviously rife with gender binaries, and the film’s borrowing of imagery from classics by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen makes gender divisions necessarily part of its mythology. However, Erik has constructed for his daughter a world where those limitations simply do not exist, but notably this only works in that transitional realm of adolescence. Granted a kind of freedom exclusive to the “preproductive” female body, Hanna is not yet an acceptable object of desire, at least not as presented by director Joe Wright, who vocally condemned the emerging trend toward sexualizing young female protagonists in films like Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch (2011).8 Notably, Hanna refuses to play the damsel in distress, and the film’s camera refuses to subject her to the kinds of objectification that have become standard fare in the Hollywood action film. Even in a moment ripe for such stereotypical bodily displays, Hanna does not veer from its refusal to objectify its superhuman protagonist. When Sophie convinces her new friend to go on a double date with two Spanish boys she has met at the campground, she deems Hanna’s djellaba likely to mark her as a “crazy German” and lends Hanna some of her

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

353

clothes, which results in Hanna’s appearing in a strange outfit that seems to mock the hyperfeminine pink clothing Sophie always dons: a pair of jeans, a sequined Harlequin eye mask, a white denim jacket over a white dress adorned with sequins, and a tulle skirt. Perhaps more significant is Hanna’s reaction when she rides on the back of the boy’s motorcycle, an act that he expects to inspire fear in his female passenger. Instead, Hanna asks, “Afraid of what?” before disengaging her arms from his waist and letting them and her hair fly loose in the air. This is not the girl that either he or the makers of many action and horror films imagine, not one who is afraid of violence or danger—the formulas that many marketers still believe should leave both female characters and female spectators clinging to their male dates.9 Though both films present some hope for a transhumanist and feminist future, Splice and Hanna also expose the dangers and ethical compromises that come from the transhumanist quest for human perfection, suggesting that such endeavors are particularly threatening to female subjectivity and long-held cultural stereotypes of childhood innocence. Unlike Hanna, an “abnormal” DNA-manipulated subject who emerges as the film’s heroic slayer of far more horrific human monsters, the progeny created by Clive and Elsa turns into a Frankensteinian horror show as Dren quickly transforms from a naïve girl into a violent gendershifting creature that brutally attacks, kills, and sexually assaults the very humans who brought it into the world. In their respective fantasies and nightmares of biotechnology’s impact on gestation, parenthood, and maturation, Hanna and Splice question both the transhumanist vision of human perfection and the feminist ideal of a genderless utopia in which women are freed from the unequal burden of reproduction. In fact, they suggest that such utopian visions, admirable in many ways, also pose a considerable threat to humankind, transhumanist scientists, and the “perfect” subjects they are bent on bringing into the world. One might like to read the films’ female researchers as figures who bravely rupture the scientific world’s glass ceiling, but both Splice and Hanna suggest that any attempt to eliminate the woman’s reproductive burden will likely be

354

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

met with disaster. As Hanna’s Chemical Brothers soundtrack and Isaac, the hired hand Marissa commissions to kill Hanna, both explain, “The devil is in the details.”

Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics

355

Notes 1. This definition comes from the Humanity+ website, which is a joint effort of the Extropy Institute, the World Transhumanist Association, and other transhumanist organizations (“Transhumanist FAQ”). 2. It is also worth noting that the cryochamber used to incubate Dren is given a name that alludes to the famous pinup girl Bettie Page. To reinforce this connection, the chamber is adorned with a small sticker of Page. 3. Erik, who once worked with Marissa on the CIA-sponsored genetic engineering project that produced Hanna, one among a band of other perfect soldier children, eventually begins to question the ethics of the program. When Hanna’s mother is killed, Erik informally adopts the young girl and spends the rest of his life trying to help Hanna learn the skills necessary to escape Marissa’s attempts to eradicate the last of her genetic “mutations.” 4. Clive’s obvious pleasure at Fred’s arrival contrasts sharply with his response to Dren’s birth later in the film. Like the unwilling father “trapped” by a pregnancy, and perhaps responding to his lack of control in the generative process in that Elsa proceeds with the experiment in spite of Clive’s protests, he immediately declares Dren a mistake. 5. In the original script, they are described as the Willy Wonka brand of candy, Nerds, an obvious reference to the acronym used to identify their research program: Nucleic Exchange Research and Development. In the film’s final incarnation, the candies are nondescript ones in a Tic Tac– like container marked with a lightning bolt. 6. It is also worth noting that the Fred and Ginger experiment is not the first one to be named after a famous couple. At an early stage in the film, just after a close-up of dividing cells that viewers are to assume represent the developing embryo that will become Dren, a reverse zoom showcases Clive and Elsa’s experimental history: a metal shelving unit that contains a series of jars filled with formaldehyde and specimens, alongside corresponding bottles of alcohol with the dates of the experiments. The first bears the names Adam and Eve and the ambiguous date 00/00/00. The other couples, in the order of their creation, are Brad and Angelina, Donny and Marie, Bogie and Bacall, Bonnie and Clyde, and Sid and Nancy. The Bogie and Bacall experiment is the only one marked by a

356

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

bottle of vodka, rather than champagne, likely a reference to Humphrey Bogart’s highly publicized drinking problem. 7. Inmates who are labeled “compliant” are issued white uniforms. 8. Though Wright has discussed this issue in many interviews since Hanna’s release, see John Lopez’s 5 April 2011 interview for Vanity Fair. 9. See Oliver and Sanders.

Chapter 14

Failed Futurity Reproductive Anxieties, Undead Children, and Queering Survival in Apocalyptic Zombie Films Andrea Wood Popular critics and academic scholars alike have often dismissed the zombie as loathsome and far less interesting than other monsters in the horror-cinema pantheon. On the surface, the zombie may seem rather one dimensional or redundant in its single-minded drive to consume human flesh. Yet the zombie has been, and remains, a versatile monster that speaks to cross-cultural fears about humanity’s demise. In this respect, it is perhaps no surprise that apocalyptic zombie films consistently manifest fears and anxieties about reproduction and the perpetuation of the human race. In the face of the zombie’s ability to exponentially add to its ranks through a grotesque and abject form of reproduction, survivors are often confronted with the failure of “natural” reproduction to preserve the futurity of humankind in the face of rapidly expanding zombie hordes. Consequently, I am interested in how apocalyptic zombie films infect and decompose the social (and perceived natural) imperative toward biological reproduction and heteronormative concepts of family.

358

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

In contrast, these films embrace alternative kinship structures and living in the moment as crucial to survival in what I call, drawing from Judith Halberstam’s work, a queer time and place. This chapter interrogates the ways queerness plays a critical role in imagining the apocalypse, as well as in conceptualizing survival in zombie films when neither a utopian future nor a nostalgic return to the past is viable. Survival itself becomes a fleeting concept of the moment—producing what Halberstam referred to as queer temporality, which “disrupts the normative narratives of time that form the base of nearly every definition of the human in almost all of our modes of understanding” (152). In the face of undead hegemony, those who survive (or at the very least, live longer) are often those who refuse to be held captive by heteronormative modes of living that privilege longevity and transition into what Halberstam characterized as “adult responsibility through reproduction” (153). In contrast, those characters who do not survive tend to be individuals who remain ideologically captive to a former time and place that proves impossible to regain or recreate. I argue that the anxieties and fears about reproduction and humanity’s survival in apocalyptic zombie films coalesce in the figure of the child, who is almost always already undead. The typical hopes associated with the symbolic futurity of the child are perverted in these narratives, in which the child turns instead into a harbinger of failed futurity and corrupted innocence whose entrance into the narrative often becomes the catalyst that forces survivors to imagine and enact new ways of living in the present moment.

A Queer New World Order in Apocalyptic Zombie Films In zombie films, apocalypse frequently serves as the catalyst for the annihilation of the normative social order that produces a chaotic and often anarchic time and place in which survivors become the marginal other to the zombies that are constantly adding to their ranks, unnaturally reproducing with an almost mechanistic rapidity. Whereas many critics

Failed Futurity

359

have viewed the apocalyptic framework of zombie films from Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives, I employ a queer theoretical lens to analyze what is ideologically at stake in these visions of zombie apocalypse. First and foremost, the traditional family structure, linchpin to the heteronormative system, has been destroyed: the bonds of blood-related kinship are severed when relatives and loved ones die and return as the walking dead, ready to eat and infect their kin. In most narratives a small band of survivors—all of whom have lost, for the most part, their families and friends—are thrown together by chaotic circumstances and forced to work collectively in order to survive against the perpetual zombie threat. In the process, these characters all form, to varying degrees, communal alliances based on alternative kinship structures that, to use Judith Butler’s words, “depart from normative, dyadic heterosexually based family forms” (104). This plays out somewhat differently in each of the films I discuss here as characters experience varying degrees of denial and ambivalence about abandoning former heteronormative ways of life in order to survive. In the new zombie-infested world, former orders and systems of knowledge collapse and crumble overnight as survivors are left in a time and place where the familiar has become irreconcilably unfamiliar. The collapse of the dominant social order often occurs in tandem with the collapse of systems of knowledge. Julia Kristeva’s influential study on The Powers of Horror explores the concept of the abject as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). The corpse, for Kristeva, is one of the most abject of objects, not simply because of the loathsome signs of decay it evinces but more fundamentally because it upsets the one who confronts it by revealing the fragility of the border between life and death, being and not being. The corpse makes human beings witnesses of death’s materiality and of their own inevitable fate. The zombie takes abjection to an even more horrifying extreme as it forces people to imagine the possibility of borders dissolving and bleeding into one another, creating a state that is neither

360

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

life nor death yet is both at the same time. Consequently, scientific and medical experts are often confounded and sometimes rendered mad in zombie films because the zombie defies the logical epistemologies through which human beings have structured an understanding of existence and the natural order of things. Zombies are constantly reproducing with an almost mechanistic rapidity, for each death of a living individual is followed by a horrifying rebirth that ultimately effaces the former person’s subjectivity and subsumes him or her into the collective as merely one more copy. George Romero’s zombies possess a disturbingly uniform and homogeneous appearance with several key visual characteristics—namely, grayish skin color, vacant expressions, and clumsily slow motor functions. The only real markers of difference among the zombies in films like Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985) are reflected in their clothing, which ultimately proves to be nothing more than a superficial marker of lost individuality. In more recent films like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2001), the physiognomy of the zombies also shares a notable uniformity, although in this case it is the red eyes, animalistic facial expressions, and predatory speed with which they move that act as telltale markers of their condition. I would note here, however, that the “infected” (as they are referred to in the film) are not identified as zombies in the diegesis— although this is metaphorically implied by the loss of their former sense of self and individual consciousness. Unlike the zombies in Romero’s films, those in 28 Days Later do not seem to be driven to eat their prey but rather to pass along the Rage virus with which they are infected. They do this by forcefully sharing contaminated fluids with their victims, which action usually manifests in the projectile vomiting of blood into the victim’s mouth or eyes. What occurs thereafter is something more of a violent metamorphosis of the body, contorted by uncontrollable paroxysms and spasms, into the rabidly animalistic state of an infected. Although characterized quite differently, both Romero’s zombies and Boyle’s infected are depicted as subjectless automatons with an insa-

Failed Futurity

361

tiable drive to consume and subsume the living into their homogenous and increasingly hegemonic ranks. Although all zombies eventually become indistinct as they are subsumed into the rapidly expanding ranks of the mindless walking dead, there is often a moment in which a living survivor is able to distinguish and identify a zombie he or she once knew as a human. However, this uncanny moment of recognition when characters are confronted with the gruesome spectacle of a loved-one-turned-zombie often causes a hesitation that is fatal. In Night of the Living Dead this occurs near the end of the film for Barbara when amid the teeming zombie horde she and the other survivors are trying to keep from entering the house, Barbara recognizes the visage of her brother, Johnny. Rendered temporarily immobile, Barbara can do nothing as Johnny approaches her, arms outstretched, in a perverse mimicry of an affectionate embrace. She is quickly pulled into the zombie collective and disappears from sight. Hesitating is typically fatal; survival requires split-second decision-making skills and the ability to let go of the former bonds of love and kinship —already an unconscious but critical step characters must make toward abandoning the past and the old status quo. It is not surprising that many characters in these films have a hard time letting go of their understanding of and investment in the former dominant order. At the same time, however, the apocalyptic scenario, as film scholar Robin Wood explained, reflects a “nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere” (72). In discussing George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), Wood went so far as to suggest that “the premise of [the film] in fact is that the social order can’t be restored,” adding that the characters are “at the outset absolved” from their responsibility to the value structure of the past—“they are potentially free people, with new responsibilities of choice and self-determination” (105). Romero took this to a further extreme in his 1985 film Day of the Dead, in which the female protagonist, Sarah, ultimately abandons the idea of saving the old order

362

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

(Wood 292). In the new world order, patriarchal heterosexist institutions of authority have lost their power, and the capitalist infrastructure has become meaningless. Romero’s films, which laid the foundation for future zombie cinema, make clear that characters who do not survive often remain ideological captives of that former time and place—a time and place not only impossible to preserve but also not worth trying to regain or recreate.

Rejected Reproduction, Failed Futurity, Zombie Children In the face of encroaching zombie hordes, conventional notions of futurity are necessarily called into question in zombie films. Traditional heteronormative understandings of futurity generally revolve around the institutions of marriage, family, and the reproductive imperative. Thus, as Lee Edelman suggested in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the child is consistently figured “as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value” (4). Zombie films, however, tend to challenge this paradigm by eliminating the child’s symbolic potential for hope and for futurity. Indeed, children frequently appear at critical moments in zombie films, negating their traditional promise of futurity because they are usually already undead. Few can forget the provocative appearance of the zombified child Karen eating her father and murdering her mother in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). A peripheral and virtually mute presence throughout most of the film, Karen—bitten by a zombie before the film begins—lies ill in the basement of the farmhouse the small group of survivors has taken refuge in. At a climactic moment near the end of the film, Karen finally succumbs to her bite and rises as the walking dead to kill and consume both of her parents—definitively announcing the demise of the nuclear family unit. Romero’s use of Dutch angle shots and distorted sound in this sequence reinforces the notion that the natural order has been turned on its head, leaving the world off kilter. Karen’s mother, when confronted by the uncanny sight of her

Failed Futurity

363

daughter as a ravenous, undead monster, cannot accept the truth that stands before her. Yet her seeming paralysis at this moment and her weak denial as she backs away from her child-turned-zombie also seem to suggest a hopeless resignation. Her one hope and reason for survival —her daughter—is now gone, and she does not seem to have the will to live anymore. In Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero’s follow up to Night, Peter (one of the survivors) is unexpectedly attacked by two young children when the group stops to refuel the helicopter they have stolen while fleeing Philadelphia. This scene is worth discussing for several reasons. First, Peter, a tough member of a SWAT team and typically the most stoic character and the coolest under pressure in the narrative up to this point, is momentarily unable to act. The scene begins with Peter relaxing in the flight hangar office drinking a cup of coffee. He thinks he is alone until he hears a strange noise coming from behind a closed door, followed by louder scratching and animalistic grunting. On guard, Peter fires his gun several times at the closed door at eye level, presumably expecting an adult zombie lurking behind it. Romero uses cross-cutting to compelling effect in this sequence as viewers move outside just in time to witness a zombie unintentionally walking into a rotating helicopter blade in front of Roger—partially decapitating itself. This shot is very explicit and gory in its special effects, showing the viewer exactly what has happened. When the film cuts back to Peter, two zombie children come hurtling out from behind the door. Like Karen’s mother in Night of the Living Dead, Peter is temporarily paralyzed and unable to act. The camera quickly focuses on Peter’s face from a low angle, mimicking the height and point of view of the two zombie children, as he watches them in disbelief and denial. In sheer terror, Peter flings them onto a nearby couch, his gun hanging limp and useless in his hand. When he finally regains his capacity for action, he shoots the zombie children—but their deaths are noticeably censored by rapid cutting that obscures the details. In contrast to the explicitly gory representations of other zombie deaths shown in the film up to this point (exploding heads, evisceration, decapitation,

364

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

etc.), this moment is rendered even more powerful by the fact that it is largely hidden from view—almost too horrible to visualize. This brief filmic moment may seem random or innocuous at first; however, upon closer examination it becomes clear that these zombie children serve a portentous function. Indeed, the zombie children that Peter kills so early in the film haunt the narrative as the horrifying and perverse possibility awaiting the only female (and pregnant) survivor in the group, Fran, and her own unborn child. Anxiety about futurity manifests from the very beginning of Dawn of the Dead, when Stephen explains to Fran why they are fleeing Philadelphia and leaving behind their responsibilities at the news station. He tells her, “We’ve got to survive. Somebody’s got to survive!” However, undergirding his concept of survival is a dependency on, to borrow Edelman’s term, a reproductive futurism that the film finds problematic and ultimately seems to reject. The social dynamic within the group (Fran, Stephen, Roger, and Peter) becomes critical to the film’s problematization of reproductive futurism. It is initially complicated by the racial tension that is introduced by Peter’s presence as the lone black man and the other among three white survivors. However, I would argue that as the narrative progresses, Peter’s racial difference receives less focus as more attention is centered on the gender and sexual dynamics of the group. As Robin Wood noted, “Dawn explores (and explodes) the two dominant couple relationships of our culture and its cinema: the heterosexual couple (moving inevitably toward marriage and its traditional male/female roles) [embodied in Fran and Stephen] and the male ‘buddy’ relationship [seen in Roger and Peter] with its evasive denial of sexuality” (Wood 106). I begin with Wood’s allusion to the homoerotic subtext between Roger and Peter and consider the ways this queer dynamic evolves into a more complicated and triangular configuration in the film when one considers Stephen’s function in the story. Although he is initially presented as Fran’s heterosexual partner and the father of her unborn child, their relationship steadily disintegrates as Stephen becomes fixated on proving himself to the other two men.

Failed Futurity

365

Stephen, almost from the very beginning of the film, wants to gain entrée into Roger and Peter’s masculine “buddy” relationship. The first indication of this occurs when the group has to land and refuel at an abandoned flight hangar in the countryside. When the survivors spy several lumbering zombies wandering through the fields, Roger begins sharp-shooting them from a distance, displaying expert marksmanship. Stephen, clearly excited by witnessing this display, picks up a gun and tries to emulate Roger. In contrast, however, he is clearly unfamiliar with how to use the symbolically phallic weapon and continually misses his target. In a comical rebuke, Roger steps in and knocks away Stephen’s ineffectual gun with his own and dispatches the zombie in one clean shot —clearly showing his masculine superiority. As the narrative progresses, Stephen spends much of his time trying to impress the other two men with comically ineffectual attempts to demonstrate his masculine capability and prowess. Once the survivors set up camp in the shopping mall, Stephen continues efforts to impress Roger and Peter—desperately trying to be just like them. What proves particularly interesting here is that, as Robin Wood noted, neither Roger nor Peter “shows any sexual interest in the woman, yet both are blocked by their conditioning from admitting to any in each other” (107). Even Stephen’s sexual interest in Fran erodes over the course of the film and is finally highlighted most poignantly after a failed romantic dinner, an attempt to recapture the former normality of their relationship. In this scene, the pregnant Fran rejects Stephen’s marriage proposal, a meaningless and hollow gesture toward the old dominant order and its emphasis on paternal legitimation. Although Stephen is the father of Fran’s unborn child, she rejects the establishment of a traditional family unit through the institution of marriage. Fran tells him that “it wouldn’t be real”—foreclosing the possibility of reestablishing a traditional heteronormative family. To further highlight the deromanticization of this sequence, Romero then cuts to a shot of Stephen lying in bed staring vacantly into nothingness. As the camera slowly zooms out, audiences also see that Fran is sitting up in bed next

366

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

to him, cast in shadow and silently staring in the other direction. The mise-en-scène reveals that they are in the bedroom they have created to approximate a domestic shelter. However, this simulacrum of a home is cold and empty. The somber nondiegetic soundtrack in this scene, as well as the clear physical and emotional distance between the characters, adds to the emptiness of the setting and the relationship. Indeed, there is no postcoital glow to the couple; rather, the evident discomfort of the scene suggests obvious sexual and emotional dysfunction. Even heterosexual sex has been rendered lifeless and deadening. In contrast, the queer bonds between the men take on a deeper level of affective significance. This becomes most poignantly evident when Roger dies after succumbing to a zombie bite. It is clear that Peter feels real emotional loss after Roger—his buddy and the one member in the group he felt a true connection with—dies. Indeed, Peter’s behavior afterward speaks of deep melancholia and grief. That he makes a grave for Roger, something never done for any of the other zombies in the film, who are either left to rot outside or stacked like meat in the mall’s freezer, is telling. In a time and place in which traditional modes of mourning that allow one to process grief and accept the loss of loved ones have become impossible, Peter resolutely attempts to mimic these former rituals. When Fran and Stephen are having their romantic dinner, Peter leaves them and goes to drink at Roger’s grave—a juxtaposition that connotes a level of love and connection between Peter and Roger that is deeper than friendship. However, the playground utopia the men created in the mall—where they could shoot zombies, play games in the arcade, and endlessly consume goods—has been destroyed for Peter now that Roger is gone. The only one who still wants to maintain this fantasy is Stephen, who views this as his opportunity to take Roger’s place as Peter’s buddy. However, Stephen’s attempts to adopt a surrogate-Roger role ultimately fail when it matters most. He does not have the same level of synchronized behavior, understanding, and action that Roger shared with Peter.

Failed Futurity

367

This becomes most evident when the mall is attacked by a roaming biker gang and Stephen deviates from the plan; he does not listen to his buddy, who cautions him to wait it out, and tries to take back what he believes is theirs in a failed exhibition of masculine bravado. Rather than going down in a blaze of glory, Stephen ends up clumsily bringing about his own demise and subsequent zombification. Fran, the voice of reason throughout the film, is ready to cut her losses when Stephen does not return—assuming the worst and preparing to leave the mall in the helicopter. It is Peter, however, who refuses to leave and wants to stay in case Stephen returns. When he does return, now a member of the walking dead, Peter shoots him and encourages Fran to leave without him. Now that both his buddies are dead, Peter has no desire to leave the mall, which has become a tomb that houses the memories and bodies of his dearest friends. It is only at the very last minute that Peter seems to find the will to live and makes a suitably heroic escape from a horde of ravenous zombies. In the end, the film suggests that it is Fran’s ability to leave behind the mall—the falsely reconstructive domesticated space, with its lingering attachment to past heteronormative modes of being—that allows her to survive. And although she escapes with Peter, who has more difficulty letting go of the mall as home, the film denies any romantic connection between these two characters, thwarting a typical heterosexual resolution to the narrative and instead supporting an alliance based on a shared desire to survive the moment. Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later (2001) engages many of the same concerns about reproduction and futurity established in Dawn of the Dead. After leaving London for Manchester in the hopes of finding a functional military base, four survivors (Jim, Selena, Frank, and Hannah) are forced to stop their car and refuel along an empty highway in the countryside. After arriving at an abandoned gas station in a sequence that is an obvious homage to Dawn of the Dead, Jim wanders away from the group to investigate the inside of the station’s shop. The once idyllic

368

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

scenery Boyle creates with the mock-family drive through the countryside is shattered when Jim enters the shop and discovers a number of putrefying corpses, including the body of a woman clutching a dead infant in her arms. While Jim is distracted by this grotesque tableau, the camera suddenly pans away to an indistinct figure moving toward him quickly from behind. Jim turns just as a small boy attacks, thrashing and groaning with all the telltale markers of infection—red eyes, animalistic expression, and uncontainable rage. Jim is able to restrain the infected child before beating him to death with a baseball bat—rather perversely ironic, given Western culture’s frequent association of baseball bats with childhood sports. This scene is heavily censored: the audience sees only the bat descending before the film cuts to a new shot of Jim leaving the shop, wiping the blood from his improvised weapon. When Selena asks him whether he found anything in the shop, he does not relate the incident, seeming to want to forget what happened. But as in Dawn of the Dead, the specter of the child lingers—in perhaps a more horrifying manner—when reproduction is introduced as the proposed answer to survival. The band of survivors in 28 Days Later has been lured in by a recorded broadcast sent over the airwaves by a band of military officers stationed in Manchester. Their message offers the tantalizing promise of a cure to infection. However, when Jim and his companions arrive at the compound, they soon discover that this “cure” is in fact a horrific plan to rape and impregnate female survivors. Major Henry West, leader of the all-male militia, tries to explain his reasoning to Jim, saying, “I promised them women. Because women mean a future.” The military officers are willing to go so far as to imprison and rape both Selena and Hannah, the latter still a young teenager who occupies a liminal space as not quite a child but not yet an adult woman, in order to impregnate them in an effort to return things to “normal.” Robin Wood has noted that zombie films frequently capture “the hysteria of contemporary masculinity, the very excesses of which testify to an anxiety, a terror” (290). In 28 Days Later much of this anxiety revolves around the prospect of, in the char-

Failed Futurity

369

acters’ minds, no future without any children to indefinitely extend one’s existence by proxy. Indeed, many of the military men have been on the brink of suicide—and only Major West’s promise and the idea that they can return things to normal have kept them alive. Ultimately, however, the film rejects the militia’s efforts to promote futurity by force, and the entire group of men has been killed by the end of the narrative, whereas Jim, Selena, and Hannah—who reject the proposed “cure” to infection— manage to escape and survive. In Romero’s Day of the Dead (1986), this rejection of heteronormative modes of being and reproductive futurity is taken to an even more extreme and, I would argue, queerer end. In this film, a group of scientists and military men is holed up in an underground military complex in Florida conducting research on the zombies and attempting to discover a cure that will reverse or stop the process of zombification. Among these survivors is one woman, Sarah, who is the film’s protagonist. As the sole female in a group of men, Sarah frequently asserts her independence and agency, demonstrating that she is not afraid and not willing to acknowledge the officers as in any way superior. Her defiant attitude and capable behavior (often shown in direct contrast to less capable men in the group) generates a great deal of antagonism, from the captain in particular, because she threatens his power and sense of control over the situation. Thus, much of the film revolves around moments in which the men attempt to demonstrate their believed superiority via phallic posturing (with guns, knives, general crotch-grabbing) and sexual innuendo. In contrast to that in 28 Days Later, the sexual motive of these military men is not to procreate and reproduce but rather to fuck in order to assert power and supremacy. Sarah, however, thwarts these efforts at every turn and effectively ridicules what the film demonstrates to be the dissolving patriarchal phallic power of the military officers—something that is accentuated metaphorically at the end when their guns prove ineffective weapons against the zombies that break into the complex (they jam, run out of ammunition, or are lost in desperate efforts to flee).

370

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Two men, however, stand apart from this patriarchal military collective. Repeatedly treated and visually positioned as outsiders, the West Indian helicopter pilot John and the Irish radio operator Bill live together in a trailer at the borders of the compound that they have turned into a home. Although not directly acknowledged as more than platonic friends and generally ignored by the military men, John and Bill are at least subtextually positioned as a queer couple in the film. Symbolically, they represent nonnormative difference on several levels: as an interracial couple, as outsiders who deliberately separate themselves from the other men (by eating together at a separate table during meals, by living on the edge of the compound itself), and most notably, as men without a sexual agenda vis-à-vis Sarah. Not surprisingly, at the end of the film, they are the only two men to escape with her—making it to an island where, as John suggests earlier in the film, they can get “juiced up and spend what time [they] got left soakin’ up some sunshine!” This conclusion, while optimistic in the sense that these survivors have escaped the zombie hordes, also seems to reject the futurity of survival and instead embraces the value of the moment. As Robin Wood noted, Sarah “effectively learns, in fact, to abandon any attempt to save American civilization, which the film characterizes as a waste of time” (292). I would take this notion a bit farther than Wood did and argue that the film’s conclusion reaffirms this idea more radically by eliminating any prospect of reproduction, for Sarah has escaped the oppressive patriarchal advances of the heterosexual men in the film, finding safety and survival instead by creating an alternative kinship structure with her two queer companions. In the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, directed by Zack Snyder, it is apparent from beginning to end that there is no future for humanity. Starting with the opening sequence, it is very clear that children will provide no kind of solace or certainty for humanity when the apocalypse comes. In the first few minutes of the film, viewers see Ana returning home from work. A nurse at a local hospital, Ana misses early signs of a problem at the start of the narrative when some strange cases arrive

Failed Futurity

371

at the hospital just before she leaves. Near her house, Ana has a short discussion with a local child named Vivian, who embodies the ideal Hollywood image of an innocent blue-eyed blonde girl. At home, Ana then misses an important television broadcast while she and her husband make love in the shower. The next morning, however, Vivian becomes the catalyst for Ana’s all too late realization that the world she once knew has begun to fall apart. In this rapid-paced sequence, the little-girlturned-flesh-eating-zombie appears in Ana’s house and attacks Ana’s husband. She rips out his throat, and he bleeds to death moments later; terrified and perhaps unable to confront the child zombie, Ana flees her home, emerging into her once idyllic neighborhood, now a death zone. Heteronormative suburbia has become an apocalyptic nightmare. Right from the start, the film shows that the child is a false hope and that futurity is impossible. If the point was not clear enough from this opening scene, it is reiterated in the ways that this remake of Romero’s 1978 film reenvisions the original pregnancy narrative. After fleeing her home, Ana meets up with a group of survivors, and they all seek temporary shelter in the aptly named Crossroads Mall. One member of the group is a young woman named Luda, who is visibly pregnant. As the story progresses, it becomes clear to the audience that Luda has been bitten by a zombie, but her husband conceals this from the rest of the group and does not tell her what this means. Eventually, Luda dies and is reanimated as a zombie he keeps chained to a bed until, in a grotesque and disturbing sequence, she gives birth to her baby. Visual emphasis is placed on movement in Luda’s swollen stomach and on the dark, viscous fluid she expels from her vagina—the child is not immediately shown on screen when it is born. Zack Synder, the director of this film, plays with the viewers’ expectations, withholding the big reveal until a climactic moment when the other survivors arrive on the scene just in time to see the blanket pulled away, revealing the horrifying sight of the infant zombie.

372

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Ana, who has become something of a leader figure in the group, is forced to confront the zombie child once again. In contrast to her earlier encounter, from which she ultimately fled in terror, this time Ana tacitly accepts failed futurity by agreeing to handle the situation. Like the other films, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead censors the death of the zombie child. Audiences see Ana holding a gun, and then the film cuts to an image of the Crossroads Mall sign just as a gunshot is heard. At this pivotal moment, Ana is forced to destroy the undead child—reflecting her symbolic decision to reject futurity and accept the temporality of living in the moment. The film also denies any romantic resolution for Ana that might suggest the possibility of renewed reproductive futurism. Ana’s husband is killed at the start of the film, and although she develops a connection with one of the other survivors, Michael, he ends up being bitten toward the end and shoots himself in the head to avoid becoming a zombie. Ana escapes with the few remaining survivors on a boat, heading toward an island off the coast of California in the hopes that it may be untouched by the zombie plague. However, the digital camera footage that plays over the film’s end credits suggests that the group in fact finds no such solace or safety once they arrive at the island but are attacked and presumably all killed. Certainly, not every zombie movie assigns the same degree of anxiety and hopelessness to children, but this is by far the most pervasive representation. Consistently, zombie films challenge reproductive futurism, displaying what Lee Edelman referred to as queer negativity: “For by figuring a refusal of the coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity, while refusing as well any backdoor hope for dialectical access to meaning, the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the social—and by extension of the social subject; a faith that politics, whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms” (6). Zombie films figure a similar kind of queer refusal in their rejection of reproductive futurism. The apocalypse does not usher in a hopeful new beginning but rather an end, a permanent break with the social and symbolic order. Apocalypse itself in these films

Failed Futurity

373

inherently problematizes “futurism’s unquestioned good” (Edelman 7). Those who survive, at least longer than others, if not indefinitely, are those characters that accept a queer temporality that does not, as Judith Halberstam put it, “create longevity as the most desirable future” (152). Gregory Waller suggested that in the context of a zombie apocalypse, survivors must ultimately decide “whether normality is worth saving or resuming” (19). I would take this a step further and argue that most of these films have already decided that “normality” is not worth saving or resuming from the very beginning—and only those characters who realize, accept, and adapt to this queer time and place have a chance at survival and of escaping assimilation into the undead zombie hordes. Even children are not spared in the zombie apocalypse, and these films ultimately shatter the saccharine fantasy of the child that “seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s rainbow, serving like the rainbow as a pledge of a covenant that shields us against the persistent threat of apocalypse now—or later” (Edelman 18). The child offers no shield against apocalypse now that it is undead but instead becomes a queer embodiment of the definitive demise of reproductive futurism.

Works Cited

Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation von denen Vampiren oder Menschen-Saugern. Leipzig: August Martini, 1732. Print. Acton, William. The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs. London: Churchill, 1875. Print. ———.Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large garrison towns, with proposals for the control and prevention of its attendant evils. London: J. Churchill, 1857. Al-Gailani, Salim. “Teratology and the Clinic: John William Ballantyne and the Making of Antenatal Life.” Wellcome History 42 (2009): 2–4. Web. 29 Apr. 2012. Ambinder, Mike. “Biofeedback in Gameplay: How Valve Measures Physiology to Enhance Gaming Experience.” GDC Conference Presentation. 3 Mar. 2011. Web. 15 Oct. 2011. Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33.4 (Summer 1990): 621– 645. Print. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Trans. A. L. Peck. London: Heinemann, 1943. Print. Asimov, Isaac. Robot Visions. 1954. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Print. Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans. Ed. and trans. R.  W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. ———. De civitate Dei. Trans. Marcus Dodds. 1950. New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1999. Print.

376

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

———. De doctrina christiana. Trans. R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Aumont, Jacques, ed. Aesthetics of Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Print. Babbage, Charles. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1838. Print. Babcock, William S. “Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency.” Journal of Religious Ethics 16.1 (Spring 1988): 28–55. Print. Bailey, Ronald. “What’s Wrong with Cloning People?” Ed. Glen McGee. The Human Cloning Debate. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hill Books, 2000. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Print. ———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Print. Ballantyne, John William. “Double Monsters.” Operative Midwifery. Ed. John Martin and Monro Kerr. New York: William Wood & Co., 1908. 121–130. Print. ———. “Monsters and Teratology.” British Medical Journal 2.1600 (29 Aug. 1891): 493. JSTOR. Web. 29 Apr. 2012. “‘Barkers’ Annoyed Square Merchants.” Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader 4 Mar. 1911: 7. Print. Barratt, Helen, and Maria Kirwan. “Epidemic Theory (Effective and Basic Reproduction Numbers, Epidemic Thresholds) and Techniques for Infectious Disease Data (Construction and Use of Epidemic Curves, Generation Numbers, Exceptional Reporting and Identification of Significant Clusters).” Healthknowledge.org.uk. Health Knowledge, 2009. Web. May 2012. Barrow, Mark V. “A Brief History of Teratology to the Twentieth Century.” Teratology 4.2 (1971): 119–129. Print. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972. Print. ———. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill & Wang, 1975. Print.

Works Cited

377

Bartlett, Laura. “Back to the Future: The Humanist Matrix.” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 28–46. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. New York: New Press, 2002. 126–134. Print. ———. Fatal Strategies. Trans. Philippe Beitchman and W. J. G. Niesluchowski. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Print. ———. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Print. ———. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print. ———. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Print. ———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London, UK: Sage, 1993. Print. Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly 13.4 (Summer 1960): 4–9. Print. “Becoming: Part 2.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writ. and dir. Joss Whedon. WB, 19 May 1998. Television. Bedford, Thomas. A True and Certaine Relation of a Strange-Birth which was Borne at Stonehouse in the Parish of Plimmouth. STC 1791.3: London, 1635. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Bell, Alice. “Doing It by the Book: Introductory Guides for Twenty-First Century Science Communication.” Science as Culture 18 (2009): 4. Print. Beller, Jonathan. Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World Media System. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006. Print. Bending, Lucy. “From Stunted Child to ‘New Woman’: The Significance of Physical Growth in Late-Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Fic-

378

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tion.” Children in Literature. Spec. issue of Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2002): 205–216. Print. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Print. Berardi, Franco. Precarious Rhapsody. Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation. London, UK: Autonomedia, 2009. Print. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” PMLA 110 (1995): 343–349. Print. Bissell, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Random House, 2011. Print. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. and introd. Victor Watts. Revised ed. London: Penguin, 1999. Print. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. 2000. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Print. Boluk, Stephanie, and Wylie Lenz. “Generation Z: The Age of Apocalypse.” Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Print. Bonaiuti, Ernesto, and Giorgio La Piana. “The Genesis of St. Augustine’s Ideas of Original Sin.” Harvard Theological Review 10.2 (Apr. 1917): 159–175. Print. Bondeson, Jan. The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Print. Booker, M. Keith. “Breaking Up Is Hard to Avoid: Fragmentation in Postmodern Film.” Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. 12–14. Print. Bovenkerk, Bernice. “Brave New Birds: The Use of ‘Animal Integrity’ in Animal Ethics.” Hastings Center Report 32 (2002): 16–22. Print.

Works Cited

379

Bowers, Fredson. “Adam, Eve, and the Fall in ‘Paradise Lost.’” PMLA 84.2 (Mar. 1969): 264–273. Print. Bownde, Nicholas. The Doctrine of the Sabbath. STC 3436: London, 1595. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Boyle, Danny, dir. 28 Days Later. DNA Films, 2002. Film. Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006. Kindle edition. Brothers, Abram. Infantile Mortality during Child-Birth and Its Prevention. Rpt. Philadelphia, PA: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1896. Print. Burkhart, Dagmar. “Vampirglaube und Vampirsage auf dem Balkan.” Beiträge zur Südosteuropa-Forschung (1966): 211–252. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 1514–1525. Print. ———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory & Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Print. ———. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Carpzov, Johann Benedict. Ausführliche Beschreibung des Unfugs, Welchen die Pietisten zu Halberstadt im Monat Decembri 1692. ümb die heilige Weyhnachts-Zeit gestifftet. 1693. Print. Carrick, John Donald. The Laird of Logan; or, Wit of the West: Being a Collection of Anecdotes, Jests and Comic Tales. [First-second series.] Vol. 1. London, 1835. Google eBooks. Web. 6 Dec. 2012. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Syphilis—CDC Fact Sheet.” 16 Sept. 2010. Web. 10 June 2012. . Chase, Karen. The Victorians and Old Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

380

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Cheng, Maria. “WHO Handbook for Journalists: Influenza Pandemic.” WHO Outbreak Communication. World Health Organization, 2005. Web. Sept. 2012 Chowell, Gerardo, Hiroshi Nishiura, and Luís M. A. Bettencourt. “Comparative Estimation of the Reproduction Number for Pandemic Influenza from Daily Case Notification Data.” Journal for the Royal Society Interface 4.12 (2007): 155–166. Web. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 148–171. Print. Ćirković, Sima. The Serbs. Trans. Vuk Tosić. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Print. Clapp, Elizabeth J. Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Print. Clapperton, James. “Maternal Impressions.” British Medical Journal 1.736 (6 Feb. 1875): 169–170. JSTOR. Web. 29 Apr. 2012. Clark, Stuart. “Demons, Natural Magic, and the Virtually Real: Visual Paradox in Early Modern Europe.” Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe Jr. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002. 223–245. Print. ———. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Clausson, Nils. “‘Culture and Corruption’: Paterian Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Papers on Language and Literature 39.4 (2003): 339–365. Project Muse. Web. 4 May 2012. Colburn Brian J., Wagner, Bradley G., and Blower, Sally. “Modeling Influenza Epidemics and Pandemics: Insights into the Future of Swine Flu (H1N1).” BMC Medicine 7.30 (2009): 1–8. Web. May. 2012. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

Works Cited

381

Contumaz, und respective Reinigungs-Ordnung, wie solche, sowohl mit denen Personen, als in die Contumaz ankommenden Waaren, wie auch Briefschaften gehalten werden solle; und der Zeit auf denen diesseitig-Kaiserl. Gräntzen in Hungarn, Siebenbürgen, der Wallachey, Servien, Sclavonien, Croatien, und übrigen In. Oe. Ländern, und MeerPorten gegen das Türkische Gebiet, und Venetianische, Dalmatien gehalten wird. Wien, gedrukt bey Johann Peter v. Ghelen, Ihrer Röm. Kais. und Königlich-Catholischen Mejestat Hof-Buchdruckern, 1731. Und in Herrmann-Stadt 1740 auff Neue gleich germig gedruckt worden. Kriegsarchiv Vienna, Sanitätshofkommission, Akten (1738–1762). Print. Cooper, Alfred. Syphilis and Pseudo-Syphilis. London: J.  A. Churchill, 1884. Rpt. Tempe: Arizona State University, Society for French Historical Studies, 1989. Print. Copia des vom Hern Frombald kayl. Cameral Provisore zu Gradiska im König Reich Servien erlassenen Briefes anno 1725. Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv Vienna, Türkei I, 191. Manuscript. Coryat, Thomas. Coryats Crudities. STC 5808: London, 1611. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Cox, Stephen. The Munchkins of Oz. New York: Cumberland House, 2002. Print. Craig, Randall. “‘Read[ing] the Unspoken into the Spoken’: Interpreting What Maisie Knew.” Henry James Review 2.3 (1981): 204–212. Project Muse. Web. 2 Aug. 2011. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Print. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. New York: Ballantine, 1990. Print. Crogan, Patrick. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

382

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Cross, Mary. “The Syntax of Seeing: Henry James and Paul Cezanne.” French-American Review 7 (1983): 34–44. Project Muse. Web. 2 Aug. 2011. Davis, Janet. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Print. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 1973. 30th anniversary edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print. de Grazia Margreta. “Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes.” Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England. Ed. Douglas A. Brooks. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. 29–58. Print. Dead Set. E4, 2008. Television. Debus, Allen G. Robert Fludd and His Philosophicall Key. New York: Science History Publications, 1979. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 253–265. Print. Dellamora, Richard. “Representation and Homophobia in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Victorian Newsletter 73 (1988): 28–31. Print. Dendle, Peter. The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. Print. Department of Health. “Pandemic Flu: A National Framework for Responding to an Influenza Pandemic.” UK Department of Health, 2007. Web. Oct. 2012. Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse Not Now.” Diacritics. Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984): 20–31. Print. ———. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 61–119. Print. ———. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Print.

Works Cited

383

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.  R.  T. Ross. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931. Print. Diday, Charles Joseph Paul Edouard. A Treatise on Syphilis in New-Born Children and Infants at the Breast. Trans. G. Whitley. London, 1859. Rpt. New York, 1883. Print. Drawmer, Lois. “Sex, Death and Ecstasy: The Art of Transgression.” Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Peter Day. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 39–56. Print. Dreger, Alice Domurat. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Print. ———. One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print. Dyer, Richard. “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism.” Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and Popular Fiction. Ed. Susannah Radstone. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988. 61–67. Print. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print. Dynel, Marta. “Stranger than Fiction? A Few Methodological Notes on Linguistic Research in Film Discourse.” Brno Studies in English 37.1 (2011): 41–61. Print. Eaton, Lance. “PW Talks with Max Brooks: Zombies Spreading Like a Virus.” Publishers Weekly 253.39 (2006): 57. Ebert, Roger. “Jurassic Park.” Chicago Sun-Times. 11 June 1993. Web. 5 July 2012. Eckstein, Barbara. “Unsquaring the Squared Route of What Maisie Knew.” Henry James Review 9.3 (1988): 177–187. Print. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986. Print. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Print.

384

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Eisenmann, Charles. “Eli Bowen, Wife and Children.” N.d. Photograph. Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY. ———. “Ella Harper—The Camel Girl.” 1886. Photograph. Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY. Eltis, Sos. “Corruption of the Blood and Degeneration of the Race: Dracula and Policing the Borders of Gender.” Dracula. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2002. 450–465. Print. “Fair Association Cuts Out Freaks. Educational Features and Other High Class Attractions Will Be Offered.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram 4 Dec. 1914: 11. Print. Fay, Jennifer. “Dead Subjectivity: White Zombie, Black Baghdad.” CR: The New Centennial Review 8.1 (2008): 81–101. Print. Filipović, Milenko. “Die Leichenverbrennung bei den Südslaven.” Wiener Völkerkundliche Mitteilungen 10 (1962): 61–71. Print. Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv Vienna. Hoffinanz Ungarn (HFU), rote Nr. 654. Manuscript. ———. Sanitätsakten, rote Nr. 1, dated 19 Apr. 1732. Manuscript. ———. Ungarisches Kamerale, Ältere Banater Akten, Karton 6, fol. 1032ff. Manuscript. Finster, Reinhard et al., eds. Leibniz Lexicon: A Dual Concordance to Leibniz’s “Philosophische Schriften.” Hildesheim, Germany: OlmsWeidmann, 1988. Print. Firestone, Shulamith. Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. Print. Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin. 1967. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print. Fleischer, Ruben, dir. Zombieland. Sony Pictures Releasing, 2009. Film. “Flies Agonize Tiny Boy, Tot Sick and Unwashed Is Object of Police Attention.” Morning Oregonian 19 July 1911: n. pag. Print. Flinker, Noam. “Father-Daughter Incest in Paradise Lost.” Milton Quarterly 14 (1980): 116–122. Print.

Works Cited

385

Forsyth, Neil. “‘Paradise Lost’ and the Origin of ‘Evil’: Classical or JudeoChristian?” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 6.4 (Spring 2000): 516–548. Print. Foster, Dennis. “Maisie Supposed to Know: Amo(u)ral Analysis.” Henry James Review 5.3 (1984): 207–216. Project Muse. Web. 2 Aug. 2011. Francis, David, and Christopher Hart. “Narrative Intelligibility and Membership Categorisation in a Television Commercial.” Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorisation Analysis. Ed. S. Hester and P. Eglin. Lanham, MD: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis & University Press of America. 1997. 123– 152. Print. Franke, Noralee, and Nancy S. Dye, eds. Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Print. Fraser, Lorraine. “Experts Set to Exhume Victims of the 1918 Pandemic.” Telegraph 11 Feb. 2001. Web. Aug. 2012. “The Freak Show Passing: Public Refuses to be Humbugged, Doctor Tells American Showmen.” Weekly Kansas City Star 3 Dec. 1915: 11. Print. “Freaks Forbidden, Display on Sixth Street Suddenly Terminated by Constable.” Morning Oregonian 15 May 1910: 5. Print. Frost, Brian. The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Print. Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Print. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Print. Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. “On the Sociolinguistics of Popular Films: Funny Characters, Funny Voices.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18.1 (2000): 119–133. Print.

386

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Geyer, Johann Daniel. “Von denen Todten Menschen-Saugern, An die hochpreißlichen Praesidem und Collegas S.R.I. Academiae Naturae Curiosorum.” Müßiger Reise-Stunden Gute Geadncken, Aber utnerschiedliche aufgestoßene Begebenheiten, Zu Abtrag seiner Versäumniß der Hochpreislichen Academie derer Käyserlichen Curiosen in Teutschland 9. Dresden: Hilscher, 1735. Print. Geyer-Kordesch, Johanna. “Court Physicians and State Regulation in Eighteenth-Century Prussia: The Emergence of Medical Science and the Demystification of the Body.” Medicine at the Courts of Europe, 1500–1837. Ed. Vivian Nutton. London: Routledge, 1990. 155–181. Print. ———. Pietismus, Medizin und Aufklärung in Preußen im 18. Jahrhundert: Das Leben und Werk Georg Ernst Stahls. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. Print. Giannetti, Louis D., and Jim Leach. Understanding Movies. Vol. 1, no. 1. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999. Print. Gill, Miranda. Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print. Gilman, Ernest P. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print. Gilman, Sander L. “Moral Panic and Pandemics.” Lancet 375.9729 (2010): 1866–1867. Print Girard, René. “The Plague in Literature and Myth.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15.5 (1974): 833–850. Print. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Print. Goldstein, Thomas. Dawn of Modern Science. Boston: Houghton, 1980. Print. Good, Owen. “Analyst Pegs Team Fortress 2 Hat Economy at $50 Million.” Kotaku 12 Dec. 2011. Web. Oct. 2013. Gordon, Jan B. “‘The Wilde Child’: Structure and Origin in the Fin-deSiècle Short Story.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 15.4 (1972): 277–290. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2012.

Works Cited

387

“Graduation Day: Part 2.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writ. and dir. Joss Whedon. WB, 13 July 1999. Television. Graft, Kris. “Stardock Reveals Impulse, Steam Market Share Estimates.” Gamasutra.com. 19 Nov. 2009. Web. 11 Jan. 2011. ———. “Team Fortress 2 Community Contributors’ Five-Figure Payouts.” Gamasutra.com. 21 Oct. 2010. Web. 11 Jan. 2011. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Print. Green, Adam Isaiah. “Gay But Not Queer: Toward a Post-Queer Study of Sexuality.” Theory and Society 31.4 (2002): 521–545. Print. Grimeston, Edward. Generall Historie of the Netherlands. STC 12374: London, 1608. Early English Books Online. Web. ———. The Low-Country Common Wealth. STC 15485: London, 1609. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Grusin, Richard. “Premediation.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 46.1 (Winter 2004): 17–39. Print. Hagner, Michael. “Enlightened Monsters.” The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 175–217. Print. Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Print. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print. ———. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. London: Duke University Press, 1995. Print. ———. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Studies 36.3, Victorian Sexualities (Spring 1993): 333–352. Print. Hamberger, Klaus. Mortuus non Mordet: Kommentierte Dokumentation zum Vampirismus 1689–1791. Wien: Turia & Kant Verlag, 1992. Print.

388

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Hanafi, Zakiya. The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Print. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. ———. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149–181. Rpt. of “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108. Print. ———. “Mice into Wormholes: A Comment on the Nature of No Nature.” Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. Ed. Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1997. 209– 243. Print. ———. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse TM: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. ———. “The Promises of Monsters.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 295–337. Print. ———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Harsin, Jill. “Syphilis, Wives, and Physicians: Medical Ethics and the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” French Historical Studies 16.1 (Spring 1989): 72–95. Print. Hassan, Ihab. “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.” A Postmodern Reader. Eds. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 274–284. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Afterword: The Human in the Posthuman.” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 134–137. Print.

Works Cited

389

———. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print. ———. “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts.” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1603–1608. Print. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Print. Herman, Vimala. Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Hietzinger, Carl von. Statistik der Militärgränze des österreichischen Kaiserthums 1. Vienna, 1817. Print. ———. Statistik der Militärgränze des österreichischen Kaiserthums 3. Vienna, 1823. Print. Vukanović, T. P. “The Vampire.” Vampires of the Slavs. Ed. Jan Perkowski. Cambridge, MA: Slavica Publishers, 1976. Print. Hirschbiegel, Oliver, dir. The Invasion. Warner Bros., 2007. Film. Hochedlinger, Michael. Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 1683–1797. London: Pearson Education, 2003. Print. Hoffmann, George. “Monsters and Modal Logic among French Naturalists of the Renaissance.” South Central Review 10.2 (1993): 32–48. Print. Honeyman, Susan. Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Print. Hopkins, Jasper. “Augustine on Foreknowledge and Free Will.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8.2 (1977): 111–126. Print. Howell, James. Epistolae Ho-elianae: Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren. London, 1650. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Hübner, Johann, and Georg Heinrich Zinke. Curieuses und Reales Natur- Kunst- Berg- Gewerck- und Handlungs-Lexicon. Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Gleditschens Handlung, 1762. Print. Huet, Marie-Helene. “Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation.” Representations 4 (1983): 73–87. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2008.

390

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Hughes, James. “The Politics of Transhumanism.” Version 2.0. Mar. 2002. Web. . Hynes, Joseph A. “The Middle Way of Miss Farange: A Study of James’s Maisie.” ELH 32 (1965): 528–553. JSTOR. Web. 8 Aug. 2011. “Innocence.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writ. and dir. Joss Whedon. WB, 20 Jan. 1998. Television. International Movie Database. “28 Days Later.” Box Office Mojo. Web. Aug. 2012. ———. “Contagion.” Box Office Mojo. Web. Aug. 2012. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Print. James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print. Jha, Alok. “First British Human-Animal Hybrid Embryos Created by Scientists.” Guardian 2 Apr. 2008. Web. 21 Sept. 2012. Jooma, Minaz. “The Alimentary Structures of Incest in Paradise Lost.” ELH 63.1 (1996): 25–43. Print. Kaston, Carren Osna. “Houses of Fiction in What Maisie Knew.” Criticism 18 (1976): 27–42. ProQuest. Web. 8 Aug. 2011. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. “From Mastery of the World to Mastery of Nature: The Kunstkammer, Politics, and Science.” The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 174–194. Print. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print. Khan, Ali. “Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response: Zombie Preparedness.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012. Web. Oct. 2012. Kline, Tiny. Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Print.

Works Cited

391

Knoppers, Laura Lunger, and Joan B. Landes, eds. Monstrous Bodies / Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Print. Kreuter, Peter. Der Vampirglaube in Südosteuropa: Studien zur Genese, Bedeutung und Funktion; Rumänien und der Balkanraum. Berlin: Weidler, 2001. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print. LaBruce, Bruce, dir. Otto: Or, Up with Dead People. Jurgen Bruning Filmproduktion, 2008. Film. “The Lamenting Lady.” STC 15120: London, 1620. English Broadside Ballad Archive. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Lawrence, Francis, dir. I am Legend. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2007. Film. Leak, Ann E. Introduction. Autobiography of Miss Ann E. Leak, Born without Arms: Containing an Interesting Account of Her Early Life and Subsequent Travels in the United States. By Leak. Philadelphia, PA: Barclay & Co., 1871. 1. Print. Lettvin, J. Y., H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts. “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” Proceedings of the Institute for Radio Engineers 47.11 (1959): 1940–1951. Print. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. 1942. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Print. Lim, Dennis. “Finding an Original Heroine.” New York Times 1 Apr. 2011. Web. . Lipsitch, Marc. “Exceptional Risks, Exceptional Precautions.” European 10 Apr. 2013. Web. Sept. 2013. Longmore, Paul, and Lauri Umansky, eds. The New Disability History: American Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Lopez, John. “Q&A: Director Joe Wright on Hanna, Sucker Punch, and Keira Knightley.” Vanity Fair 5 Apr. 2011. Web. .

392

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Lowe, John. “Color in What Maisie Knew: An Expression of Authorial Presence.” Henry James Review 9.3 (1988): 188–198. Project Muse. Web. 2 Aug. 2011. “Lullaby.” Angel. Writ. and dir. Tim Minear. 19 Nov. 2001. Television. MacDonald, George. “The Child in the Midst.” Unspoken Sermons. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867. 1–26. Print. Mangham, Andrew. “‘Murdered at the Breast’: Maternal Violence and the Self-Made Man in Popular Victorian Culture.” Critical Survey 16.1 (2004): 20–34. Print. Manovich, Lev. “Cultural Analytics: Analysis and Visualization of Large Cultural Data Sets.” Manovich.net. 30 Sept. 2007. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. ———. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Print. Mao, Douglas. Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Print. Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. 1954. SF Masterworks. Kindle edition. Maturana, Humberto R. “Reality: The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument.” Irish Journal of Psychology 9.1 (1988): 25–82. Print. May, Leila S. “‘Foul Things of the Night’: Dread in the Victorian Body” Modern Language Review 93.1 (Jan. 1998): 16–22. Print. McClelland, Bruce. Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Print. McCloskey, John C. “What Maisie Knows: A Study of Childhood and Adolescence.” American Literature 36.4 (1965): 485–513. JSTOR. Web. 8 Aug. 2011. McHoul, Alec W. “An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Fictional Conversation for Doing Conversation Analysis.” Semiotica 67.1–2 (1987): 83–104. Print.

Works Cited

393

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Print. McMahon, Jennifer L. “Twilight of an Idol: Our Fatal Attraction to Vampires.” Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality. Ed. William Irwin, Rebecca Honsel, and J. Jeremy Wisnewski. New York: Wiley, 2009. 193–208. Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Print. Meyer, Stephenie. Breaking Dawn. Boston: Little, 2011. Print. Miller, Elizabeth. “Getting to Know the Un-Dead.” Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Peter Day. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 3–19. Print. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Print. Molle, John. The Living Librarie. STC 4529: London, 1621. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Monaco, James. “How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language.” History and Theory of Film and Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Print. “Monster.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2002. OED Online. Web. 26 Mar. 2012. “Monsters.” Spectator 68 (26 Mar. 1892): 426–427. Google eBooks. Web. 6 Dec. 2012. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Print. More, Max. “Extropian Principles 3.0: A Transhumanist Declaration.” Maxmore.com. Web. Morse, Stephen S. “Examining the Origins of Emerging Viruses.” Emerging Viruses. Ed. Morse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 10–26. Print. Moruzi, Kristine. “Postfeminist Fantasies: Sexuality and Femininity in Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ Series.” Genre, Reception, and Adapta-

394

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

tion in the Twilight Series. Ed. Anne Morey. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012. 47–64. Print. Moryson, Fynes. An Itinerary. STC 18205: London, 1617. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Nashe, Thomas. The Anatomie of Absurditie. STC 20583: London, 1589. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Natali, Vincenzo, dir. Splice. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2009. Film. National Health Service. “Swine Flu (H1N1).” NHS Choices. National Health Service (UK), n.d. Web. May 2012. Nelson, Claudia. Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Print. Nelson, Elizabeth. “Monstrous Desire: Love, Death, and Vampire Marriage.” Inter-disciplinary.net: A Global Network for Dynamic Research and Publications. 2009. Web. 4 July 2012. Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika. “Esoterik im 18. Jahrhundert—Aufklärung und Esoterik. Eine Einleitung.” Aufklärung und Esoterik. Ed. Monika Neugebauer-Wölk and Holger Zaunstöck. Hamburg: Meiner, 1999. 1–37. Print. Nørgaard, Nina. Systemic Functional Linguistics and Literary Analysis: A Hallidayan Approach to Joyce—A Joycean Approach to Halliday. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen Center, 2003. Print. Nowosadko, Jutta. “Der ‘Vampyrus Serviensis’ und sein Habitat: Impressionen von der österreichischen Militärgrenze.” Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit 8.2 (2004): 151–167. Print. Nunokawa, Jeff. “Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” American Imago 49 (1992): 311–321. Print. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Print. O’Brien, George Dennis. Finding the Voice of the Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Print.

Works Cited

395

“Offspring.” Angel. Writ. Dave Greenwalt. Dir. Turi Meyer. 5 Nov. 2001. Television. Ohi, Kevin. Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Oliver, Mary Beth, and Meghan Sanders. “The Appeal of Horror and Suspense.” The Horror Film. Ed. Stephen Prince. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 242–260. Print. Paffenroth, Kim. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. New York: Random House, 1988. Print. Paré, Ambroise. Des monstres et prodiges. Ed. Jean Céard. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1971. ———. On Monsters and Marvels. Trans. and introd. Janis L. Pallister. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Print. Pasquinelli, Matteo. “Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect.” Matteopasquinelli.com. 13 Nov. 2009. Web. Oct. 2013. Patrick, John M. “Milton’s Conception of Sin as Developed in Paradise Lost.” Utah State University Monograph Series 7.5. (June 1960): 5–62. Print. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Print. Pattison, Robert. The Child Figure in English Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. Print. Pernick, Martin S. “Contagion and Culture.” American Literary History 14.4 (2002): 858–865. Print. Peterson, Wolfgang, dir. Outbreak. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1995. Film. Pike, John. “Flu Transmissibility/Reproductive Number.” Homeland Security. Globalsecurity.org, 2012. Web. May 2012.

396

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Pinkerton, John. A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in all Parts of the World. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1809. Google eBooks. Web. 6 Oct. 2012. Plotz, Judith. “Literary Ways of Killing a Child: The 19th Century Practice.” Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature. Ed. Maria Nikolojeva. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 1–21. Print. Polidori, John William. The Vampire. London: Nielsen Press, 2010. Print. “Pos-i-tive-ly, No, Says Texas Cooper, Denying Side Shows Are Doomed.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram 19 Dec. 1915: 7. Print. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. STC 20519: London, 1589. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. “Quickening.” Angel. Writ. Jeffery Bell. Dir. Skip Schoolnik. 12 Nov. 2001. Television. Ranfft, Michael. Von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern. Leipzig: Teubners Buchhandlung, 1734. Print. Rather, L. J. “Ambroise Paré, the Countess Margaret, Multiple Births, and Hydatidiform Mole.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 47.5 (1971): 508–515. National Center for Biotechnology Information. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Reiss, Benjamin. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Print. Revard, Stella P. “Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost.” PMLA 88.1 (1973): 68–78. Print. Riley, Brendan. “The E-Dead: Zombies in the Digital Age.” Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture. Ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Print. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Print. Romero, George A., dir. Dawn of the Dead. United Film Distribution Company, 1978. Film. ———. Day of the Dead. United Film Distribution Company, 1985. Film.

Works Cited

397

———. Diary of the Dead. The Weinstein Company, 2007. Film. ———. Land of the Dead. Universal Pictures, 2005. Film. ———. Night of the Living Dead. Walter Reade Organization, 1968. Film. Roth, Phyllis A. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Literature and Psychology 27 (1977): 113–121. Rothenberg, Gunther. “The Austrian Sanitary Cordon and the Control of the Bubonic Plague, 1710–1871.” Journal of the History of Medicine 28.1 (1973): 15–23. Print. Rowe, William L. “Augustine on Foreknowledge and Free Will.” Review of Metaphysics 18.2 (1964): 356–363. Print. Rüdiger, Andreas. Herrn Christian Wolffens, Hochfuerstl. Hessischen HoffRaths und Prof. Philos. & Mathem. Primarii &c. Meinung von dem Wesen der Seele und eines Geistes ueberhaupt; und D. Andreas Ruediger Hochfuerstl. Saechsischen wircklichen Raths und Leib-Medici in Forst, Gegen-Meinung. Leipzig: Johann Samuel Heinsii Buch-Laden in der Grimmischen Gasse, 1727. Print. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Intro. by Emanuel A. Schegloff. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 3–11. Print. Sample, Ian. “‘Armageddon’ Super Virus Recipe Finally Revealed.” Sydney Morning Herald 4 Apr. 2012. Web. Aug. 2012. Sceats, Sarah. “Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 20.3 (2001): 107–121. Print. Schegloff, Emanuel A. “Goffman and the Analysis of Conversation.” Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. 89–135. Print. Schneeweis, E. Serbokroatische Volkskunde: Volkglaube und Volksbrauch, Erster Teil. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1961. Print. Schroeder, Aribert. Vampirismus: Seine Entwicklung vom Thema zum Motiv. Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1973. Print. Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91.5 (Dec. 1986): 1053–1075. Print.

398

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Seabrook, William Buehler. The Magic Island. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “What’s Queer?” Tendencies (1993): 5–9. Print. Senf, Carol A. “Daughters of Lilith: Women Vampires in Popular Literature.” The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Ed. Mary Pharr and Leonard G. Heldreth. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. 199–216. Print. ———. “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman.” Victorian Studies 26.1 (Autumn 1982): 33–49. Print. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkens. London, UK: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1997. The Arden Shakespeare. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2 vols. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Shapter Robinson, H. “Case of Double Monstrosity.” British Medical Journal 2.1511 (14 Dec. 1889): 1331–1332. JSTOR. Web. 29 Apr. 2012. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Print. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London, 1818. eBook. ———. Frankenstein. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Print. Shildrick, Margrit. “Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body.” Body and Society 2.1 (1996): 1–15. Print. Shine, Muriel G. The Fictional Children of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Print. Shone, Tom. Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Print. Shuttleworth, Sally. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print. Sidney, Philip. Astrophil and Stella. Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 153–211. Print.

Works Cited

399

———. “To My Dear Lady and Sister, the Countess of Pembroke.” The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans. New York: Penguin, 1987. 57–58. Print. Simon, Adam, dir. The American Nightmare. IFC, 2003. Film. Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004. Print. Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print. ———. “Female Impersonation in Early Modern Ballads.” Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Eds. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Smith, Justin E. H. “Spirit as Intermediary in Post-Cartesian Natural Philosophy.” Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture. Ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber. Leiden: Brill, 2008. 269–289. Print. Snyder, Zack, dir. Dawn of the Dead. Universal Pictures, 2004. Film. Soderbergh, Steven, dir. Contagion. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2011. Film. Soderbergh, Steven. “Production Information.” Contagion Biohazard. Warner Bros, 2011. Web. 5 June 2014. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. Print. Spenser, Edmund. “To His Booke.” Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. Ed. Hugh Maclean. New York: Norton, 1968. 407. Print. Spielberg, Stephen, dir. Jurassic Park. Universal Pictures, 1993. Film. Spongberg, Mary. Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997. Print. Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Print.

400

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Stark, Laura. The Magical Self: Body, Society, and the Supernatural in Early Modern Rural Finland. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2006. Print. Steindl, Klaus T., Andreas Sulzer, dirs. The Vampire Princess. Smithsonian Networks and Österreichischer Rundfunk, 2008. Film. Steinhoff, Heike, and Maria Verena Siebert. “The Female Body Revamped: Beauty, Monstrosity and Body Transformation in the Twilight Saga.” Kultur & Geschlect 8 (2011). 9 July 2012. Print. Stevens, Kirsten. “Meet the Cullens: Family, Romance, and Female Agency in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight.” Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 8 (2010): 1. 1–25. Web. Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010. Print. Stitziel, Judd. “God, the Devil, Medicine, and the Word: A Controversy over Ecstatic Women in Protestant Middle Germany, 1691–1693.” Central European History 29.3 (1996): 309–338. Print. Stockinger, Hermann E. Die hermetisch-esoterische Tradition: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Einflüsse auf das Denken Johann Christian Edelmanns, 1689–1767. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 2004. Print. Stoianovich, Traian. “Factors in the Decline of Ottoman Society in the Balkans.” Slavic Review 21.4 (1962): 623–632. Print. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Print. ———. Dracula. New York: Dover Books, 2000. Print. Stow, John. The Annales of England. Ed. Edmond Howes. STC 23338: London, 1615. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. “Students Hold Carnival, Proceeds of Outdoor Jubilee Will Go to University Settlement House.” Philadelphia Inquirer 13 May 1919: 18. Print. Sullivan, Joseph. The Unheard Cry. Nashville: Smith & Lunar, 1914. Print. Summers, Joseph H. “The Two Great Sexes in Paradise Lost.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 2.1 (Winter 1962): 1–26. Print.

Works Cited

401

Survivors. Created by Adrian Hodges. BBC, 2008. Television. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. The Works of Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam. London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875. Print. Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33–58. Print. Tisoncik, Jennifer R., Marcus J. Korth, Cameron P. Simmons, Jeremy Farrar, Thomas R. Martin, and Michael G. Katze. “Into the Eye of the Cytokine Storm.” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Review 76.1 (2012): 16–32. Print. “Too Fat for School.” New York Times. Rpt. in Dallas Morning News 9 June 1909. Print. Torkelson, Anne. “Violence, Agency, and the Women of Twilight.” Theorizing Twilight: Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 209–223. Print. Totilo, Stephen. “The History of Headshots, Gaming’s Favourite Act of Unreal Violence.” Kotaku 31 Aug. 2010. Web. Oct. 2012. “Transhumanist FAQ.” Humanityplus.org. Humanity+. Web. 23 June 2012. “A Two-Headed Monster (Pleuropagus).” British Medical Journal 2.1895 (21 Dec. 1895): 1568–1569. JSTOR. Web. 29 Apr. 2012. Umansky, Lauri. “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Print. Vakarelski, Christo. Bulgarische Volkskunde. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969. Print. Van Gent, Jacqueline. Magic, Body, and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Print. Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. “What the Public Thinks It Knows about Science.” EMBO Reports 4.12 (2003): 1104–1107. Print. Villarreal, Luis P. “Are Viruses Alive?” Scientific American 291.6 (2004): 100–105. Web. Oct. 2012. Visum et Repertum. Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv Vienna, Hoffinanz Ungarn (HFU), rote Nr. 654. Print.

402

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Wachowski, Andy and Lana Wachowski, dirs. The Matrix. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. Film. Waggoner, Erin, ed. Sexual Rhetoric in the Works of Joss Whedon: New Essays. London: McFarland, 2010. Print. Walch, Johann Georg. Historische und Theologische Einleitung in die Religions-Streitigkeiten der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirchen, von der Reformation an bis auf jetzige Zeiten ausgeführet und herausgegeben. Jena, Germany: Johann Meyers Wittwe, 1733. Print. ———. Philosophisches Lexicon, Darinnen die in allen Theilen der Philosophie, als Logic, Metaphysic, Physic, Pneumatic, Ethic, natürlichen Theologie und Rechts-Gelehrsamkeit, wie auch Politic fürkommenden Materien und Kunst-Wörter erkläret und aus der Historie erläutert; die Streitigkeiten der ältern und neuern Philosophen erzehlet, die dahin gehörigen Bücher und Schrifften angeführet, und alles nach Alphabetischer Ordnung vorgestellet werden. Leipzig: Verlegts Joh. Friedrich Gleditschens seel. Sohn, 1726. Print. Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. London: Warbug Institute, 1958. Print. Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Print. Waring, Robert. “To the Memory of His Deceased Friend, Mr William Cartwright.” Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems. By William Cartwright. London, 1651. Early English Books Online. Web. 1 Sept. 2012. Wark, McKenzie. “Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto.” Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Ed. Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge, 2013. 69–75. Print. ———. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Print.

Works Cited

403

Wasiolek, Edward. “Maisie: Pure or Corrupt.” College English 22 (1960): 167–172. JSTOR. Web. 8 Aug. 2011. Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print. Weatherall, Ann. “Language about Women and Men: An Example from Popular Culture.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 15.1 (1996): 59–75. Print. Wegner, Georg Wilhelm. Schau-Platz Vieler Ungereimten Meynungen und Erzehlungen: Worauf die unter dem Titul Der Magiae Naturalis So hoch gepriesene Wissenschafften und Künste … Vorgestellet, geprüfet und entdecket werden. Berlin: Haude, 1735–1736. Print. White, Robert B., Jr. “Milton’s Allegory of Sin and Death: A Comment on Backgrounds.” Modern Philology 70.4 (1973): 337–341. Print. Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media” ELH 59.2 (Summer 1992): 467–493. Print. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. Williams, Tony. The Cinema of George A. Romero. New York: Wallflower Press, 2003. Print. Williamson, Milly. The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. Print. Wiltenburg, Joy. Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Print. Wolfe, Nathan. The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age. New York: Times Books, 2011. Wolk, Merla. “Narration and Nurture in What Maisie Knew.” Henry James Review 4.3 (1983): 196–206. Project Muse. Web. 2 Aug. 2011. Wood, Martin J. “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature.” The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Ed. Mary Pharr and Leonard G. Heldreth. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. 59–78. Print.

404

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Wood, Naomi. “Creating the Sensual Child: Paterian Aesthetics, Pederasty, and Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales.” Marvels and Tales 16.2 (2002): 156–170. Project Muse. Web. 29 Apr. 2012. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Print. World Health Organization. “Nipah Virus.” World Health Organization, 2009. Web. Oct. 2012. ———. “SARS Outbreak Contained Worldwide.” World Health Organization, 5 July 2003. Web. May 2012. ———. “Summary of WHO Technical Consultation: H1N1pdm Mortality Estimates.” World Health Organization, 2011. Web. May 2012. Wright, Joe, dir. Hanna. Focus Features, 2011. Film. Writing Committee of the World Health Organization. “Clinical Aspects of Pandemic 2009 Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infection.” New England Journal of Medicine 362 (2010): 1708–1719. Web. May 2012. Yeates, Amelia, and Serena Trowbridge, eds. Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature. Basingstoke, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Zedler, Johann Heinrich. Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste. Leipzig: 1732–1754. Print.

Index

abnormality, 124, 191, 193, 202, 204, 272, 338, 353 abortion, 254, 256–257, 260, 343 Acten-mäßige und umständliche Relation, 5, 69, 71, 77, 79–81 Acton, William, 246–247, 272–273, 284, 292 Adam and Eve, 31, 41–43, 50–56, 58, 60–64, 66, 355 adolescence, 214, 313, 317–318, 333, 339, 348–349, 352 adscape, 224 adultery, 65, 118 afterlife, 56 aging, 287, 305 coming of age, 296–297, 338–339, 348–349 See also eternal youth “armless wonder,” 204, 207 AI Director, 160, 170–172, 176 Alberti, Michael, 85 American Association of Exposition Managers, 200 American Association of Fairs and Expositions, 201 American Nightmare, The, 97 Americans with Disabilities Act, 208–209 amniotic fluid, 100, 341 amusement park, 225, 339 analog, 162–164 androgynes, 23 Angel, 8–9, 235–237, 242–243, 248–250, 256–258, 261, 263 Annunciation, 59

anthropocentric progress, 231 anxiety, 2, 4, 8, 10–11, 90, 114, 133–134, 140, 143, 145, 149, 159–161, 163, 166, 176, 179, 213, 235, 243, 246, 248–250, 253, 257–258, 260–261, 267, 278, 298–300, 302–305, 308, 311–312, 316, 319, 322–323, 327, 334, 339–341, 343, 357–358, 364, 368, 372 apocalypse, 2, 7, 10–11, 89, 91, 97, 107, 138, 159, 162, 166, 184, 221, 229, 330–331, 357–359, 361, 370–373 Arctic Circle, 337, 348 Aristotle, 20, 22, 24, 28, 33–34, 71, 114 arrested development, 304, 309–310, 313, 316, 322, 324–325 arrested development, 304, 309–310, 313, 316, 322, 324–325 artificial intelligence, 7, 16, 160, 164, 329 Attenborough, Richard, 227 Augustine, 16, 20, 23, 29–31, 43–50, 53, 55–59, 64–66 Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat), 75, 78 Autolycus, 124–125, 129–130 automaton, 100–101, 107, 312, 315–316, 321, 360 Babbage, Charles, 15 baby. See infant Balkans, 76

406

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

ballad, 6, 114–115, 121–126, 128–132, 135 Ballantyne, J.W., 298–300, 302–303, 324 Banat, 72, 75–76 baptism, 42, 116, 119–120 Barnum, P. T., 195, 199 Barthes, Roland, 92, 95 Baudrillard, Jean, 102, 105–106, 213–214, 217–222, 231–233 Bedford, Thomas, 113–114, 119, 121, 124, 129 beggar, 24, 117–118, 123, 129 Bible, 41, 44, 275 biblical, 24, 44–45 biotechnology, 214, 220–221, 228, 329, 335, 339–341, 343, 345–346, 351, 353 Big Brother, 98–99 big top, 100, 199, 201, 203, 209 binaries, 6, 18–19, 66, 93–94, 105, 168, 328, 332, 334, 339, 341, 351–352 biothreat, 149 birth, 1, 3–4, 8–11, 17, 23, 27, 29, 42–43, 45, 50–55, 61, 63, 65–67, 77–78, 103, 113, 115, 117–119, 121–122, 127, 135, 156, 205, 216, 237–238, 262, 267, 295, 297–298, 301, 304, 310, 319, 321–322, 330, 332, 336, 343, 345, 355 and syphilis, 268–271, 283–284, 288–289, 292 ballads, 125 canal, 234, 341–342 defects, 16, 21, 24–25, 33–34, 104, 114, 124, 128, 193, 195, 206–207, 218, 269, 276, 292, 299–300, 302–303, 316 of multiples, 114, 120, 125 rebirth, 58, 89, 93, 96, 235, 245,

birth rebirth (continued), 250, 360 vampire, 5, 64, 69, 236, 245–246, 260–261, 268, 270, 284 virgin, 166 zombie, 2, 6–7, 96, 99–100, 105–106, 109, 166, 371 Blair Witch Project, The, 186 Blanchett, Cate, 337 blood, 81, 99, 142, 167, 227, 233, 338–339, 359–360, 368 blood drunking, 70, 87, 244, 258 blood lust, 145, 235, 244–245, 248 blood sucking, 69, 73, 248 “blood sweater” (Blutschwitzerin), 84 bloodless, 215, 260 and sex, 237, 242–243, 345 and syphilis, 281–282, 287 and vampires, 64, 69–70, 72–73, 78–80, 84, 145, 235, 237, 242–246, 248, 258, 260, 281, 285–287 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 123 Bowen, Eli, 206 Breaking Dawn, 8–9, 235–237, 242, 249, 255, 261, 263, 268 breast, 113, 280 breast milk, 287, 293 bride, 129, 268–269, 276, 278, 283–285, 288 British Medical Journal, 10, 298–300 Brody, Adrien, 333 Brooks, Mel, 223 Butler, Josephine, 275, 280 Camel Girl, 193, 201–202, 207 cannibalism, 178, 305

Index capitalism, 108, 160, 162, 177–178, 187, 330–331, 335, 341 Carl, Johann Samuel, 85 Carriers, 148 Catholic, 42 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 136–138, 146–147, 152, 155–156 cervix, 104 cesarean section, 260, 342 Český Krumlov, 278 child figure, 10, 296–298, 301, 304, 308, 310–311, 313–314, 318–319, 322, 324 child zombie, 371 child-adult, 270, 282 childhood, 10, 109, 194, 197, 279, 296–297, 301, 303–305, 308, 310–313, 315–317, 320–323, 328, 333, 348, 353, 368 China, 134, 146, 150–152, 178 Christ, 42–43, 50–51, 63 Christianity, 41–44, 46–48, 59, 62–67, 76, 130, 352 circus, 191, 193–203, 206, 208, 228 Civil Emergency and Defense Agency (CEDA), 169–170, 172 Clark, Eugene, 31–32, 39, 100 cloning, 219–220, 227–228, 330 Cloverfield, 186 Contagion, 7, 135, 138, 140–141, 144–152, 154–156 Contagious Disease Acts, 9, 271, 273–275, 288 Coryats Crudities, 116 Counternarrative, 3 Creed, Barbara, 1–2, 214, 239, 247–248, 337 Crichton, Michael, 214–215, 217–222, 225–232, 234

407 Criminal Man, The, 276 Crisfar, Jey, 103 Croatia, 75 crowdsourcing, 163 cutscene, 165 cybernetics, 15–16, 18, 20, 25, 27–28, 36–37, 221, 335 cyborg, 4–5, 15–20, 22, 26–27, 34–38, 64, 215, 233, 332, 340–341, 344, 349 cynocephali, 124 cytokine storms, 154 Czech Republic, 278 Dawn of the Dead, 97–100, 109, 168, 360–361, 363–364, 367–368, 370, 372 Day of the Dead, 109, 360–361, 369 de casibus, 123, 125 De casibus virorum illustrium, 123 De civitate Dei, 45 De doctrina christiana, 44 Dead Set, 98–99 death, 5, 7, 18, 42–43, 47, 50, 54–55, 57–61, 63–64, 72–73, 93, 96, 104–105, 133, 137, 146, 159, 165, 168–170, 172, 178, 180, 196, 207, 226, 232–233, 235, 242, 245–247, 249, 258, 262, 270, 272, 311, 336, 359–360 children, 51–52, 62, 65, 76–80, 229, 237, 255, 259–261, 269, 271, 280–282, 287–288, 296, 310, 337, 348, 362, 368, 371–372 deformity, 21, 24, 33–34, 104, 193, 206, 218, 269, 279, 287, 299–300, 316 degeneracy, 23, 137, 142, 271–272, 277, 280, 282, 285, 292, 306

408

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Degeneration, 276 della Porta, Giambattista, 34 demon, 4–5, 15, 17, 20–21, 23, 28–39, 41–43, 51, 55, 57, 65 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 96, 104–106, 166 Descartes, René, 17, 32 devil, 5, 19, 21, 28–31, 33–35, 37, 41–42, 48, 284 Diary of the Dead, 98–99, 186 Diday, Charles, 277, 280, 287 diegetically, 224 dinosaurs, 214–217, 219, 221–222, 224–225, 227–231, 233 hypersaur, 8, 220, 232 disability, 191–195, 197, 201–202, 204–206, 208–210, 297 disease, 7, 24, 70, 74, 76–77, 85, 133, 135–137, 141–146, 148, 151, 153–154, 156, 160, 167–168, 178, 185, 272, 275, 277–278, 280–281, 288–289, 328, 343–344 congenital, 9, 268–271, 273, 276, 279, 283, 287, 292 venereal, 247, 267–268, 270–271, 273–274, 279, 292 Disney, Walt, 8, 217–218, 225–227, 229 djellaba, 349, 352 doctor, 30, 71, 84, 150, 153, 161, 176, 252, 268, 275, 285 See also physician and surgeon Documentary and Detailed Relation, 5, 72, 77, 79–80, 83–85 Dracula, 9, 246–248, 254, 267–271, 273, 275–276, 278–279, 282, 287–288 dream, 16, 45, 59, 217, 228–229, 286, 306–307, 349, 352 dwarfism, 210

Earth, 29, 90, 144, 218, 230, 346 Ebola, 153 Eden, 41, 52, 57, 59, 62 Eggert, Harry, 197–198 Emerging Viruses, 150 Empress Maria Theresa, 279 Enlightenment, 5, 17, 83, 85, 219, 316 entropy, 107 Erfurt, 84 eroticism, 95, 245–246, 248, 306, 324–325, 364 eternal youth, 296, 305, 308, 310–311 eugenics, 194, 327, 343 Europe, 69–70, 124, 151, 153–154, 194, 253, 259, 270, 325 Evelyn, John, 119 evil, 21, 30–31, 41, 46–50, 53–58, 63–66, 161, 168, 185, 246, 252–254, 308, 314 exempla in malo, 123 experimentation, 8, 23, 37, 152, 229, 337 animal, 151, 333, 336, 342 economics of, 333, 335 gain of function, 149, 156 human, 136, 151, 333, 336, 342 resulting in hybrid, 10, 327–335, 338, 340–347, 349, 351, 353, 355 Robert Fludd, 80–81 vaccine, 146, 151 extradiegetic, 222 extradiegetically, 224 extropian, 330 extropy, 355 e-zombie, 176 fairy tale, 352

Index fallout, 142 fantasy, 7, 9, 11, 32, 92, 161, 164, 166, 172, 178, 233, 270, 273, 278–279, 288, 297, 322, 324, 329, 338, 352–353, 366, 373 father, 24, 42, 49–51, 54, 78, 109, 118, 128, 151, 198, 238, 253, 258, 261–262, 276, 282–283, 287, 289, 292, 314, 318, 333, 337–341, 343, 349, 355, 362, 364–365 guilt, 9, 270, 274, 277–278, 288 fear, 1–4, 6–8, 10–11, 37, 51, 61–62, 64, 136, 138–143, 148, 150–152, 155, 232, 235, 243, 245–247, 256, 258–261, 272, 278, 281, 298, 316, 319, 327, 336–337, 340, 343, 345, 353, 357–358 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 170 female body, 2, 9, 237, 242, 247–248, 255–256, 259, 261, 274, 352 Female Offender, The, 276 femininity, 1–2, 4, 183, 214, 283, 337, 348–349, 353 See also monstrous-feminine feminism, 2, 9–10, 17, 27, 34, 38, 239, 275, 278, 281, 292, 328–331, 334–336, 340–341, 349–351, 353 fertility, 2, 49–50, 57, 328, 340 See also hyperfertility fetus, 213–214, 251, 256–257, 299, 302, 322 fin de siècle, 3, 9, 267, 270, 274, 324 Finland, 337, 339 Firestone, Shulamith, 334, 340 Fish, Stanley, 62, 66 Flinkler, Noam, 66 flu (H3N2), 145, 149, 151, 153, 167 bird/avian flu (H5N1), 7, 134, 148, 154

409 flu (H3N2) (continued) swine flu (H1N1), 133–134, 148 Fludd, Robert, 80–81 fluids, 64, 73, 80, 100, 168, 214, 236, 245, 261, 268, 280–281, 329, 341, 360, 371 folklore, 69–71, 76–77, 161, 267 France, 39, 118, 219, 274, 283, 325 Frankenstein, 65, 96, 157, 327, 333, 346–347 freaks, 218, 332, 338–339 Blackmon, Esther (“World’s Strangest Mother”), 202–205, 207–208, 210 Bowen, Eli (legless acrobat), 206 Chained for Life, 208 Earles Family (“little people”), 196 Eggert, Harry (“champion fat boy”), 197–198 freak show, 8, 191–195, 197–203, 208–210 Harper, Ella (“Camel Girl”), 193, 197, 201–202, 207–208 Heth, Joice (“150-year-old corpse”), 195 Hilton twins (conjoined twins), 195–197, 201, 207–208 Leak, Ann (“armless wonder”), 204–208 Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, The, 246 future, 3–4, 6–7, 9–10, 13, 39, 56, 103, 146, 148, 163, 224, 234, 262, 277, 287, 289, 297, 301, 308, 311, 330, 332, 334, 347, 353, 358, 362, 368–370, 373 gameplay, 160, 164–166, 171–176, 179–182, 185–186

410

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

gender changing, 333, 335, 345 gendered, 8, 17, 194, 328–329, 331, 348–349 genderless, 10, 335, 349, 353 genitalia, 351–352 irrelevance, 345, 348 Generall Historie of the Netherlands, 115 genetics, 16–18, 20, 27, 35, 39, 64, 102, 139, 145, 148–149, 152, 156, 213, 229, 331–332, 334, 343, 347, 351 DNA, 10, 150, 215–216, 219, 221, 225, 227, 232–233, 333, 338, 340, 342, 344–345, 353 genetic engineering, 4, 8, 10, 25–26, 36, 151, 153, 214, 216, 219–221, 225, 228, 230, 327, 329–330, 337, 339, 342, 355 Germany, 183, 196, 208 Ghosts, 277 globalization, 135–136, 146–147, 153–154, 159, 162–163, 177–178, 213, 330, 332 God, 15–16, 19–24, 26, 28–32, 35, 39, 41–42, 49–51, 53–63, 65–66, 84, 115, 118, 121, 128, 143, 214, 272, 330–331 godhead, 83 Grand Theft Auto, 175 Grande chronique ancienne et moderne de Hollande, 115 grandmother, 208, 339, 350 gray, 10, 72, 296–297, 304–305, 307, 309–313, 318, 322, 324–325, 349 Greater Chongqing, 150 Grimeston, Edward, 115–117, 119 Grindhouse, 167 Grusin, Richard, 162–163

Guangdong, 134, 146 Habsburg, 5, 70–72, 74–76, 85, 87 Hagstrum, 66 Haiti, 160–161, 164, 170–172, 176, 183 Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO), 171 Halberstadt, 84 Halberstam, Judith, 1, 61, 93, 268, 274, 278, 280–281, 283, 287, 292, 306–307, 358, 373 Halley, Janet E., 66 Hamlet, 89, 96 Hamlet, 89, 96 Hanna, 10, 327–330, 332, 338, 341, 343–344, 349, 351–354, 356 Haraway, Donna, 4, 15–20, 22, 26–27, 35–38, 213–215, 233, 331–332, 334, 340–341, 349 Harper, Ella, 193, 197, 201–202, 207–208 heaven, 50–51, 54–55, 57, 62, 122 Heavenly Twins, 278 heiduc, 74, 82, 87 hell, 50, 52, 57, 62–63, 90, 170 hellhounds, 52 hermaphrodites, 23, 116, 205 Hermetic, 33–34 Hippocrates, 25, 33 Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 101 Hofkriegsrat, 75 Holland, 116, 119–120 Hollywood, 166–167, 176, 327–328, 338, 341, 352, 371 Holy Spirit, 59, 84 homosexuality. See under sexuality Hong Kong, 146 Hurricane Katrina, 160, 169–170, 181

Index hybrid, 16, 18, 20, 27, 38, 83, 137, 139–140, 145, 148–153, 155, 157, 216, 220, 310, 334, 338, 341–342, 344, 346, 350–351 human-animal, 332–333, 336, 345, 348 hydatidiform mole, 115 hyperfecundity, 119, 121, 127, 132, 144 hyperfertility, 115, 117 hyperreality, 8, 214, 217–220, 222, 224, 226, 229–234 I Am Legend, 7, 133, 140, 142, 144–145, 148–149, 151, 157 Ibsen, Henrik, 277 ichthyosis, 202, 204 in medias res, 184 incest, 50–51, 53–55 infant, 6, 18, 103–104, 109, 117–118, 120, 122, 130, 229, 233, 240, 250, 252–253, 257, 269–270, 272, 276–277, 279–284, 287, 290, 292, 298–300, 302–303, 316–317, 319, 327, 337, 343, 347–348, 368, 371 infected, 49, 64, 71, 109, 117, 132–133, 135–138, 140–142, 144–147, 149–156, 161–162, 167–173, 178, 183–185, 247, 268–269, 271, 273, 276–277, 279, 281–283, 285, 287–288, 292, 360, 368–369 influenza, 133–134, 138, 141, 145–147, 150, 152–153 informatic, 172 information age, 155 iodine, 275 innocence, 9–11, 45, 48, 228, 246–247, 249, 255, 265, 270, 273, 276–277, 287–288, 292, 296, 308, 323–324, 328, 353, 358

411 innocence (continued) See also purity insemination, 59, 76, 118, 368 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 101 Invasion, The, 101 Jacobs, Anna Eva, 84, 88 Jahr, Gottlieb Heinrich Georg, 276 James, Henry, 295 Jaws, 223 Jourdin-Bromley, Kenadie, 210 Jurassic Park, 8, 10, 213–214, 217, 219–226, 228–229, 232 Kaufmann, Thomas, 21 Kidman, Nicole, 101 Kiley, Richard, 224 killing, 4, 72–73, 76, 78–79, 85, 103, 134, 136, 140, 145–146, 148–149, 164, 168, 172–175, 185, 228, 244, 254, 257, 259–260, 278, 283, 293, 333, 337–339, 345, 353–355, 362, 364, 369, 372 Kisolova, 72–73, 76, 79 Klewinghaus, Katharina, 103 Kosovo, 70 Koswara, Dede, 210 Krippin virus, 140, 145, 149, 153 Kristeva, Julia, 1, 104, 140, 214, 359 Kubrick, Stanley, 98 Kunstkammer, 21, 34 labia, 351 LaBruce, Bruce, 102–103 Lady in the Lake, 186 “Lamenting Lady, The,” 6, 113, 115, 121–126, 128–132 Lancet, 298 Land of the Dead, 99–100, 109 Last Action Hero, The, 226

412

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Le Comte, Edward, 66 Le fresne, 118 Leak, Ann, 204–208 Left 4 Dead, 7, 159–161, 163–173, 175–185 Leipzig, 84 lesbianism, 248, 272 See also sexuality Leviticus, 24, 31 lifeworld, 218, 222 linchpin, 47, 359 lipstick, 351 Lombroso, Cesare, 276, 282 Loosduinen, 116, 119–120, 130 Lost World, The, 230 Lucifer, 42, 50 Lucretia, 45–48, 65 ludocapitalism, 172 ludology, 186 Lugosi, Bela, 170–171 Lutheran Pietism, 85 Macao, 148 MacGuffin, 223 Magic Island, The, 161 Manichaeism, 66 Margaret of Henneberg, 6, 113–122, 125–126, 128–132 masculinity, 268, 278, 281–282, 349, 365, 367–368 Matrix, The, 143 McCarthy, Charles, 200 meaning-making, 95 Meckel, Johann Friedrich, 304 medical, 76, 134, 138, 156, 172, 195, 219, 275–276, 281, 283, 324, 340 authorities, 3, 71, 74, 150, 271, 277, 297–300, 302, 323, 360 breakthroughs, 344–346 disaster, 135

medical (continued) research, 149, 153 texts, 9–10, 246, 297–300, 322 treatises, 247, 270, 273, 278 Medvedja, 73–74, 76–79, 87 menstruation, 24 mercury, 274–275, 281, 283 metagaming, 160 MEV-1 (fictional virus), 145–150, 152, 154 Meyer, Stephenie, 8, 255–256 Microtemporal, 171 midwifery, 125, 299, 302–303 Militärgrenze, 74–75, 87 Mirror for Magistrates, 123 miscarriage, 269, 276, 292–293 mise-en-scène, 171, 366 misogyny, 33, 288 mob-like, 90 monstrous-feminine, 1–2, 214, 337 morality, 24, 30–32, 34–35, 48, 56, 66, 131, 164, 184, 199, 207, 235, 238, 250, 283, 287–288, 292, 306, 315, 325, 361 immorality, 42, 183, 192, 228, 271–272, 277, 313–314, 322, 324, 330 moral order, 9, 247–248, 254–256, 259, 261 Moravec, Hans, 16 morbillivirus (measles), 149 More, Max, 330 Morison, Fynes, 119 Morocco, 338, 348 Morse, Stephen, 150–152 Motaba, 152–153 Motaba virus, 152 mother affecting embryo, 34 and freaks, 194 archaic, 1, 214

Index mother (continued) as passive receptacle, 33 empowerment, 260 grotesque, 236 image of St. John, 33 infection, 9, 267–271, 274–277, 280, 282–283, 287–292 insemination, 118 maternal misbehavior, 119 monstrous, 8–9, 24, 33, 52, 65–66, 103–104, 114–116, 189, 214, 235–236, 254, 258, 260, 270, 276, 285, 287–288, 300, 303, 318–320, 333, 337, 339 mother-guilt, 277 mother-manager, 195, 207 of many, 114–115, 117 of monster, 260 parthenogenetic, 1 rape, 65 strangest, 203–204 with odd posture, 25 See also prostitute and syphilis mutation, 7, 25, 102, 138–139, 144–145, 150–152, 154, 220–221, 229, 233, 355 mutilation, 24–25, 260, 275 neontology, 231 New Orleans, 164, 169–170, 181 New Woman, 268, 270, 273, 275, 278, 281, 287–288 Night of the Living Dead, 6, 96, 99, 101, 103, 108–109, 161–162, 186, 361–363 Nipah virus, 147–148 nonconscious, 163–164, 171, 175 nonnormative, 9, 338, 370 Nordau, Max, 276–277

413 obstetrics, 298–300, 302, 324 Occupy movements, 22, 163, 225, 269 Oedipal horror, 333 Ohi, Kevin, 305, 310 On Monsters and Marvels, 4, 15–16, 23, 29–30, 33, 39 ontology, 7, 20, 26–28, 35, 159, 162, 216–218, 220, 226–227, 232–233, 332 Operative Midwifery, 302–303 Ophelia, 96, 100 oppression, 18, 331, 347, 361, 370 orgy, 103 orphan, 268–269 Oryx and Crake, 7, 143 Otto: Or, Up with Dead People, 102–103 Ottoman Empire, 72, 75, 78 Outbreak, 143–144, 148, 152–153 Page, Bettie, 355 paleontology, 82, 215, 220, 230–231 pandemic, 7, 133–138, 140–142, 144–149, 151–152, 154–156, 187 Paraćin, 74, 77 Paré, Ambroise, 2–4, 6, 15–17, 23–26, 28–39 Paradise Lost, 5, 31, 41–43, 50, 56–58, 62–63 Paranormal Activity, 186 Paré, Ambroise, 2–4, 6, 15–17, 23–26, 28–39 Parent-Duchatalet, Alexandre, 271 pathogenesis, 70–71, 74, 82, 136, 138, 145, 147, 149, 156 patriarchy, 4, 236, 238, 247–248, 255–256, 259–260, 331, 335, 341, 346, 362, 369–370

414

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Pegg, Simon, 101 Pennsylvania, 165, 169, 199–200 Pepys, Samuel, 119 Persons, John, 113, 124 Peter I of Russia, 21 phallus, 281, 331, 365, 369 physician, 21, 74–75, 78, 82, 84–85, 88, 124, 279, 292 See also doctor and surgeon Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 10, 296–298, 304–313, 315–316, 318, 322–325 Pietism, 84–85 pinup, 355 plague narratives, 168 playthrough, 171 plot line, 149–150 podlike, 348 Polley, Sarah, 97, 333 Portland, 200 post-Fordist, 178 posthumanism, 4, 15–17, 19, 27, 92–94, 106, 137, 163, 247, 330–331, 334–335, 338, 340–341, 352 postmodernism, 38, 90–93, 95, 101–102, 213–215, 218–219, 222, 224, 232–233 post-Romantic, 10, 296, 307, 310, 323–324 poststructuralism, 219 postwar, 233 potentia Dei absoluta, 29, 39 potentia Dei ordinata, 29, 38–39 Powers of Horror, 1, 104, 359 prayerlike, 122 preexisting, 3, 255 pregnancy, 5, 8–9, 33–34, 51, 109, 213, 235–237, 242–243, 249–253, 255–257, 260, 276, 299–300, 303,

pregnancy (continued), 334, 336, 343, 355, 364–365, 371 procreation, 4, 11, 34, 329–330, 336, 369 Progressive era, 8, 191–192, 194, 196–198, 201, 204, 206–209, 232 Promethean, 149, 151 public understanding of science (PUS), 134 prostitute, 9, 278 and vampire, 249–250, 269–275, 281, 283–285, 289 mother, 270–271, 273, 276, 281–282, 288–289, 292 Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body, 247 Protestant, 42–43, 120 Psychopathia Sexualis, 268 punishment, 50, 52, 58, 60–61, 63–65, 117–119, 121, 125, 268, 281, 336 purity, 17, 36, 46, 77, 83, 164, 246, 249, 254, 258, 272, 275, 296, 304, 308 quadruplets, 117–118 quasi-scientific, 32 Quedlinburg, 84 queer, 3, 11, 92–93, 102, 108, 210, 237, 239, 358–359, 362, 364, 366, 370, 373 queer negativity, 372 racial, 169–170, 185, 194, 267, 280, 364, 370 rape, 45–48, 52, 59, 65, 275, 292–293, 335, 368 realism, 29, 137, 146, 166, 168, 183, 185, 218 reality porn, 99

Index Rebelais and His World, 104 reimagine, 3, 10, 260 Renaissance, 4, 15–16, 19–20, 22–24, 26–28, 34–35, 38–39, 173 repression, 169, 178, 246, 307 reproductivity, 2–4, 6, 8, 10, 54, 82, 115, 119, 127, 143, 147, 214, 245–246, 249, 260, 269, 274, 276, 288, 319, 328, 335–336, 341–342, 344–345, 347, 353, 357, 362, 364, 369, 372–373 Resident Evil, 64, 161, 168, 185 Resident Evil 5, 185 Roma, 70, 76 Romero, George, 6, 90, 94, 96, 109, 160–161, 169, 186, 360–362 Romero, John, 162 Ronan, Saoirse, 337 Russo, John A., 162 safe house, 164, 167 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy, 304 sanitation, 5, 74, 199, 272, 277 Sanitary Cordon, 75 Sanitäts Hofkommission, 75 SARS, 7, 134, 145 Satan, 5, 42–43, 50–63, 65–66, 269 satanic, 30 Savannah, 169 scala naturae, 22 scientist, 15, 22, 35, 139, 149, 152, 215, 225–226, 229, 332, 342, 344, 346, 369 female, 328–329, 334, 340, 345 hipster, 334 rogue, 351 transhumanist, 353 scientific, 23, 28, 34, 38, 136, 145, 147, 149, 153–154, 204, 299–300, 316, 333, 336, 338, 345, 347, 353,

415 scientific (continued), 360 advances, 7, 36, 328, 335, 339 ethics, 10, 27, 327, 340, 344 experimentation, 341–343 point of view, 10, 17, 19, 22, 27, 32, 35, 301, 327–330, 349–350 technoscientific, 213, 330 science fiction, 18–19, 38, 220, 328, 333, 341, 343, 349 semen, 82, 287 Serbia, 70–77, 82 sexuality, 4, 53, 67, 207, 235–236, 258, 270, 274, 279 asexuality, 245, 272, 275 heterosexuality, 364, 366–367, 370 homosexuality, 103, 248, 272, 305–307, 324–325, 364 hypersexuality, 109, 247, 284 proper sexual conduct, 248 psychosexuality, 306–307 sexual assault, 353 sexual desire, 9, 54, 66, 242, 247–250, 261, 268 sexual deviance, 118, 281 sexual intercourse, 24, 66, 77, 82, 103, 249, 251, 261, 289 sexual inversion, 324 sexual reassignment, 102 sexual relationship, 51–52, 65, 244, 351 sexual reproduction, 70–71, 126–127, 132 sexual slavery, 141 unbridled sexuality, 246–247, 249 vampire. See under vampire Victorian period, 246, 267–268, 271, 283–285 Shakespeare, William, 89, 96, 124–125, 127–128

416

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Shaun of the Dead, 97, 100–103 Shaviro, Steven, 89–90, 94, 166–167, 178 Shelley, Mary, 65, 96, 143, 157 Shining, The, 98 short-circuit, 90 Shuttleworth, Sally, 301, 308, 315, 317, 321, 324 Simpson, J. C., 201 simulacra, 6, 31, 34, 96, 102, 105–106, 167, 218, 220, 366 Simulacra and Simulation, 102, 218, 220 sin, 5, 16, 24, 31, 41–43, 45–63, 65–66, 123, 131, 150, 228, 271–272, 277, 292, 297, 306–310, 325 Skin Shows, 1, 61, 93 sleepwalking, 280 society, 5, 20, 37, 45, 77, 82, 91, 104, 109, 142, 170, 178, 199, 201–202, 206, 233, 239, 267, 347 social expectations, 192, 204, 237, 242, 246 social order, 9–11, 19, 84, 136, 159, 163, 183, 237, 240, 247, 254–256, 329, 358–359, 361, 364, 372 social reform, 192–194, 197, 200, 209, 276, 287–288, 292 sociobehavioral, 215 sociocultural, 242 sociopolitical, 108 Spaceballs, 223 Spenser, Edmund, 127 Spielberg, Steven, 214–215, 220–234 Splice, 10, 327–335, 338, 340–343, 346–347, 349, 351, 353 Stahl, Georg Ernst, 85, 88

stepparents, 313–315, 319 Stoker, Bram, 69, 242, 246, 267 story line, 176, 214, 228 storytelling, 154, 175 storyworld, 166, 177–178 Sucker Punch, 352 Suicide, 45–48, 65, 283, 285, 369 Superfluous Woman, A, 278 superhuman, 328, 332, 337, 343, 352 supernatural, 21, 23, 29–32, 35, 39, 137, 148, 297, 305 superstition, 31, 34, 118, 133, 148 supervirus, 7, 64, 133, 137, 143, 149, 153 Survivors, 142, 144, 151, 153–154 Survivors, 142, 144, 151, 153–154 surgeon, 2, 74–75 See also doctor and surgeon syphilis, 267, 291 and children, 9, 268–273, 275–284, 287–290, 292–293 and mothers, 268–271, 273, 276–277, 280–283, 287–288, 292 and prostitutes, 9, 269–276, 278–279, 281–284, 287–289, 292 T. rex, 224, 230 tenOever, Benjamin, 149 teratology, 10, 19, 26, 297–300, 303–305, 307–310, 312–313, 316, 319–325 terror, 7–8, 104, 133, 138–139, 162, 186, 220, 223, 259, 269, 307, 324, 343, 363, 368, 372 theatrum naturae, 21 theme park, 217–218, 220–221, 224–225 Three Gorges River, 151

Index time frame, 126, 148 transcendence, 22, 42, 84–85, 223, 231, 233, 296, 329 transhistorical, 2, 4, 11, 90 transhumanism, 10, 214–215, 327–334, 336–338, 341, 345, 349, 353, 355 transition, 103–104, 184, 312, 316, 358 transsexual, 23 trans-species, 2 Transylvania, 75 Treaty of Passarowitz, 72, 75 Treponema pallidum (syphilis bacterium), 267 Trinity, 43, 50, 52, 55, 65, 233 Trstenik, 76 28 Days Later, 7, 64, 97, 100, 109, 135, 137, 141, 145, 151, 160, 184, 360, 367–369 Twilight, 236, 243, 255–262 twins, 117–119, 127, 129, 196–197, 201–202, 278 conjoined, 25, 114, 124, 195, 207–208, 299–300, 302, 308 übergrotesque, 104 undead, 10–11, 69, 85, 160–162, 166, 168–169, 173–174, 179, 247, 259, 284, 286, 311, 357–358, 362–363, 372–373 utopia, 10, 178, 274, 289, 323, 332, 353, 358, 366 vagina, 342, 371 Valve Corporation, 159–160, 163–165, 167, 169, 171–172, 176–177, 179–185, 187 vampira gravida, 261 vampire, 64–65, 69–71, 74, 81,

417 vampire (continued), 83–87, 140, 142, 148, 150–151, 157, 161, 244–245, 274, 276, 292–293 sexuality, 82, 235–237, 242–243, 246–251, 255, 258, 267–271, 278–279, 281, 283–285 stake, 72–73, 254, 259, 281 pregnancies, 5, 8–9, 235–237, 242–243, 249–253, 255–256, 260 offspring, 8, 76–80, 82, 145, 236–237, 242, 249–262, 268–273, 275, 277–279, 281–289, 305 See also prostitute van Swieten, Gerhard, 279 vaudeville, 207 victimhood, 46–47, 70, 72–73, 140–141, 170, 183, 229, 245, 253, 268–269, 274–278, 281–282, 284, 292, 360 victimization, 281, 283, 288, 353 Victorian period, 9, 205, 246, 267, 271, 273, 276–277, 283, 285, 297–298, 323 video game, 7, 159–165, 167–169, 172–174, 176, 178, 183–185, 187 Vienna, 70, 75, 78 Vignetting, 185 violence, 46, 48, 102, 108, 136, 139, 163–164, 168, 172, 183, 186, 231–232, 244, 258, 262, 286, 289, 298, 302–303, 308, 336–339, 345–346, 353, 360 viral traffic, 150 virginal, 59, 166, 280–281 virtual, 6, 16, 29, 31–32, 36–38, 127, 135, 165, 169, 173, 177, 187, 233–234, 243, 260, 362 virtual reality, 16, 31, 37, 233 virus, 7, 90, 133–139, 141–144,

418

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

virus (continued), 155–157, 172, 187 Krippin virus, 140, 145, 149, 153 MEV-1, 145–150, 152, 154 Motaba virus, 152 Rage virus, 151–153, 360 Solanum virus, 151 Vogt, Gottlob Heinrich, 84 voice-over, 99, 103 von Mercy d’Argenteau, Claudius Florimund Graf, 75 voodoo, 160–161, 171 Vukanović, T. P., 70, 76–77 Watchword, 134 Welt-Geist, 79–81 West Morava River, 73, 76 Western, 33, 72–73, 76, 252, 332, 368–370 wet nurse, 283 What Maisie Knew, 10, 295–298, 304, 309, 311–323, 325 White Zombie, 161, 171, 183 Wilde, Oscar, 296, 298, 304–308, 310–311, 318 Wilkes-Barre, 200 Winter’s Tale, The, 130 womb, 5, 8, 10, 24, 29–30, 51, 65–66, 104, 117, 213–214, 233–234, 236–238, 249, 260–261, 269, 276, 293, 304, 342 wombscape, 213

woodcut, 121, 125 working class, 292 World Health Organization (WHO), 133–134, 136, 141, 147, 156 world media system, 159, 178 World War Z, 7, 135, 139, 141, 147, 150–151, 155 Xbox, 173, 177 Zaire, 152 zeitgeist, 96, 133 zombie, 2, 7, 10–11, 64–65, 91–92, 95, 102, 105–108, 137–140, 143, 145, 147, 150–151, 156–157, 159, 163–165, 167, 171–172, 176–179, 183–185, 215, 357–361, 364–370, 372–373 digital zombie, 162 “gay plague,” 103 heritage, 166, 170 Romero zombie, 6, 89–90, 94, 96–101, 109, 160–162, 166, 168–169, 186, 362–363, 371 viral zombie, 142, 166, 186 Zombie Diaries, The, 186 Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, The, 89 Zombieland, 97, 100 zoonotic, 147, 151

About the Contributors

Stephanie Boluk is assistant professor in the Humanities and Media Studies Program at Pratt Institute. Working at intersections of cultural studies, media archeology, and digital humanities, Boluk coedited with Wylie Lenz Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture and has published in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Alistair Brown is an associate lecturer at the Open University, and a postdoctoral teaching assistant at Durham University. He is currently writing a textbook “Topics in Modernism” for the Singapore Institute of Management University and preparing a monograph “Reading Games: Computer Games and the Limits of Literature.” Ally Crockford is the Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research focused on Victorian literary representations of the child figure, and her article “Spectacular Medical Freakery: British ‘Translations’ of Nineteenth-Century European Teratology” will be featured in Exploring the Cultural History of Continental Freak Shows. Randy Laist is assistant professor of English at Goodwin College. He is the author of Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels and the editor of Looking for Lost: Critical Approaches to the Enigmatic Series, and he has published numerous articles on American literature, popular culture, film studies, new media, and pedagogy Danielle Lawson is assistant professor of communication and media studies at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of "Blurring the Boundaries: Ethical Considerations for Online Research Using Synchronous CMC Forums" in E. Buchanan’s Readings in Virtual

420

Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity

Research Ethics: Issues and Controversies. Dr. Lawson's is also a regular contributor to several pop-culture blogs. April Miller is associate professor and director of film studies at the University of Northern Colorado. Her research focuses on intersections between literature, film and socio-scientific concerns like criminality and mental illness. She is working on a book manuscript “Offending Women: Modernism, Crime, and Creative Production,” which investigates the female criminal and her often-overlapping sites of representation in literature, journalism, and silent film. Michael Pickering is a doctoral candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia. Current research concerns utilization of human body parts and excretions in early modern German pharmaceutical literature. Currently an Ernst Mach Scholar (ÖAD), Michael is undertaking research on his new project through the Institut für Geschichte, University of Vienna, Austria. Lindsay Ann Reid is a lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her interests include late medieval and early modern English literature and culture. Dr. Reid is working on a monograph “Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book” and also conducting research on medieval vernacular literature informed early modern readings of classical poetry. Brandy Schillace, a medical humanities scholar, is research associate and guest curator at the Dittrick Museum of Medical History and managing editor of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Dr. Schillace has published in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Feminist Formations, and writes for Huffington Post, H-net, and the Centre for Medical Humanities Blog. Joanna Shearer is an assistant professor and medieval feminist scholar at Nevada State College. She is working on a book project, entitled “Naughty by Nature: Chaucer and the (Re)vision of Female Victimhood in Late Medieval Literature,” which seeks to examine questionable sexual

About the Contributors

421

scenarios in Chaucer’s to interrogate why rape remains the primary threat of and means to control female behavior in human culture. Jesse Stommel is assistant professor of digital humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on lifelong learning and the public digital humanities and runs the gamut from Shakespeare to postmodernism to horror film. He is also founder, designer, and coeditor of Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Teaching & Technology. Emilie Taylor-Brown is a PhD candidate at University of Warwick. Her research explores the foundation and evolution of the field of parasitology as a branch of tropical medicine in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Based on work involving the figure of the parasite as cultural symbol informed by biology and religion, her research investigates relationships between parasitic disease and British Imperialism. Andrea Wood is assistant professor of media studies in the English Department at Winona State University. Dr. Wood has published articles in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Dr. Wood is coediting a special issue of Journal of Popular Romance Studies on “Queering Romance.” K. A. Woytonik is a doctoral candidate in the department of History at the University of New Hampshire. She received her Masters degree from The College of William and Mary while editorial apprentice at Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Her forthcoming dissertation studies the cultural and economic impact of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital on lay practitioners and home care in the early republic.