Shelley, Stoker, Chen, Derrida, The Walking Dead comics, and a book that snarls and bites

I found Chen’s “Toxic Animacies” to be a promising point of entry for teaching Shelley’s Frankenstein. I can see assigning this piece in a course on monsters and monstrosity (a course I can’t wait to design). The theme of invasion, the potential for toxicity to breach boundaries of imagined purity and security, opens the way for a discussion of how such infiltrations are figured in literature and what they might say about our ideas of what constitutes a monstrous threat—and, conversely, what constitutes purity.

Chen posits that “the queerest bioterrorist is the one who is remote, racialized ‘otherwise,’ and hybrid” (271). I would add to this list “fecund.” The danger of reproduction, replication, contagion, or contamination beyond the point of the initial breach seems to be ubiquitous in the representations of such monstrous threats (e.g., the default mode of dietary and other environmental toxins is to "cause cancer" rather than, say, make your heart stop). Certainly some prominent literary and film monsters illustrate this fertile potential: werewolves, vampires, and zombies alike are able to infect others—thus reproducing themselves and perpetuating the bio-not-bio-threat. Interestingly, in Frankenstein one of the most salient examples of a threat to sacred, pure domestic safe zone occurs after Victor refuses to continue his work on the female mate the creature has demanded. The creature vows to visit Victor on his wedding night, at which point he murders Victor’s bride in her bed. Both injury and revenge center upon marital—and potentially reproductive—relations.

The reproductive potential skirted around in this revenge plot suggests an interesting parallel between the Original Threat to correct life-giving (the creation of the monster) and the Ultimate Threat (the monster reproducing). I found this line fascinating and would probably use it as a starting point for a group discussion: “The mediation of [toxins] in and around categories of life [. . .] undoes lead’s deadness by reanimating it” (272). I would be interested in helping the students parse and think through this line. What does Chen mean by “mediating”? What does it mean to offer both “in” and “around” as approaches to “categories of life”? And most importantly, why “reanimating” rather than simply “animating”? This line in particular offers a series of potentially productive stumbling blocks to prevent too quickly accepting an easy, binary conception of life/not-life. It’s in this line where I think Chen’s argument challenges itself.

Not only does Chen's article privilege animacy over life in considering the personified toxic threat, it suggests that its life-status is irrelevant: “Toxins sometimes bear the threat of death to a protected life, but whether or not they ‘are’ alive is not the issue” (272). I’m not so sure. It might not always be at issue, but on the other hand, it’s striking to note how many figures of invasion—especially contagious invasion—involve an unstable, mutable boundary between life and non-life. I am thinking here of zombies, vampires, and of course the animate, intelligent creature Victor Frankenstein fashioned from dead tissues. These threats are absolutely queered; they occupy a third space along the alive/not-alive binary. They are also hybrid in the agent/object sense: they are both victim and perpetrator, both poisoned and poison.

At this point I would produce a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) dramatically from within the folds of my black satin cloak and read to the students the passage about the need for vampires (the unholy undead) to sleep in consecrated earth. And as a fun prank, I would then assign Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”! Right? Perhaps not, but I would certainly consider it as a reading for any grad students who might be taking a cross-listed version of this monstrously exciting class.