Toxic Virgins, Queer Relations

The following is an outline for a teaching discussion about John Lyly's Gallathea using Mel Y. Chen's "Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections" as a lens.

Consider the following passages from the Chen: 

A toxin threatens, but it also beckons. It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death. A toxin requires an object against which its threat operates; this threatened object is an animate object — hence potentially also a kind of subject — whose “natural defenses” will be put to the test, in detection, in “fighting off,” and finally in submission and absorption. (265)

Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion[. . .] (266)

1. Considering Chen's definition of "toxin," what are the toxins in John Lyly's Gallathea? Maybe a more appropriate question would be who are the toxins? 

What are the roles of the citizens, the Danes, and the gods in creating a society that fears toxins? How do the Danes enact toxicity? Can the Danes be considered a racialized, toxic other?

2. Are Gallathea and Phillida toxins? Remember that the sacrifice to the Agar must be "the fairest and chasest virgin in all the country," which appears to fall under the requirements of Chen's "new kind of purity" (266), since outward beauty and sexual absistence can be see as manifestations of purity and innocence.

View the following clip:

3. How does toxicity function according to temporality? Once intoxicated, is a subject or object always toxic? This is, at least, the running joke in Monsters, Inc., in which the character "George Sanderson" is constantly subjected to new detoxifying regiments. If Gallathea and Phillida are toxic, when did they become toxic? Does their impending gender/sex transformation at the end of the play detoxify them? Consider the following passage from Chen: "Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives" (281-82).

4. The Rafe/Robin/Dick subplot is often ignored among critics and scholars, for various reasons. Even though the subplot appears to be a low-brow, simple farce that makes fun of dimwitted servants, some of the brothers health is endangered as they work for different masters, which can be seen as an early modern echo (if we can echo back in time) of the Chinese workers who are exposed to lead paint. Chen says of the Western concern (or lack thereof) for these workers: "the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial/state/racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around the workers themselves" (269). Can these servant brothers be compared to the Chinese workers? Does the play encourage us to pity or sympathize with the servant brothers, or are the just visible enough for "blame," but not enough for "the ring of sympathetic concern"?

The Train-Licking Boy

As I was reading the Chen article, I was continuously trying to figure out how to tie the Chen to Edelman’s queer theories and somehow then to Maisie and teaching. I was therefore not surprised when Chen did in fact mention Edelman; not surprised because really she had to at least acknowledge his theories in her argument. Chen writes of Edelman, “Signal to queer theory’s interest in queer relationality, Lee Edelman takes up a psychoanalytic analysis of queerness’s figural deathly assignment in relation to a relentless reproductive futurity” (278). It didn’t seem to me that she really elaborated on how “queerness’s figural deathly assignment” plays into her argument beyond being a point in queer history’s treatment of life and death and consequently its relationship to toxicity (please correct me if any of you would disagree with this assessment). This is the moment when she brings toxicity more explicitly into parsing the boundaries of the body:

Toxicity straddles boundaries of “life” and “nonlife,” as well as the literal bounds of bodies, in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects. While never undergoing sustained theorization in queer theory, toxicity has nevertheless retained a certain resonance there and a certain citational pull. (279)

I personally felt it would’ve been more helpful for her argument to discuss Edelman’s treatment of children in relation to the train-licking boy “that must not be allowed to become toxic: he must not be mentally deficient, delayed, or lethargic. His intellectual capabilities must be assured to consolidate a futurity of heteronormative (white) masculinity, which is also to say that he must not be queer” (271). That, however, might’ve shifted the focus of the article. Nonetheless, if I were teaching this article, I would focus specifically on Chen’s discussion of toxicity related to (non)reproductive futures. I would have my students specifically explore the following aspect of Edelman’s theory, and come up with a question in their respective texts (for the purposes of this post, I suppose we would be reading What Maisie Knew, though I think there are other late Victorian texts that might better serve this purpose) that links the two:

Edelman investigates the ramifications of treating the child as a symbol for the future rather than an individual. Edelman writes, “Historically constructed…to serve the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 11). Using Lacan’s lectures, Edelman crafts a theory of sinthomosexuality with which he challenges the assumption that non-procreative sex is destructive because it threatens a heteronormative ‘love-based’ society by refusing to buy into the future as represented by children.

Perhaps a question a student or I might generate would be: How does Chen’s train-licking and consequently mentally deficient child queer the future represented by children that society holds, in Edelman’s opinion, “in perpetual trust” as a symbol of the reproductive and therefore non-queer future?

To better contextualize the importance of the child as the site of society’s future, and therefore the metaphorical death of the individual child that makes the real child become a specter, we would read all or part of Katherine Bond Stockton’s book The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, who considers the ramifications of forgetting the individual child in favor of managing that child’s fictitious innocence on which society depends for the reproduction of the heteronormative future: “This kind of growth is made palpable, as I plan to show, by (the fiction of) the ghostly gay child – the publicly impossible child whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child” (Stockton 11, her italics). I would explain that rather than looking at the child as a site of the future or the fantasy possibility of retroactive adult discovery like Edelman does (which is very Freudian), Stockton proposes that instead of growing up, children today are subjected to managed delay, “the notion that children should approach all things adult with caution and in ways that guarantee their distance from adulthood” (Stockton 91), and so ‘grow sideways.’

To link the novel to Chen, Edelman, and Stockton, and the above aspects of their respective theories/ideas/opinions that I would hone in on, I would posit that Maisie’s body acts as an impenetrable tomb into which information, often toxic information, enters and from which it never again emerges after she initially decides to seal herself off from her parents. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post linking Maisie and Moretti, James writes that Maisie “was the little feathered shuttlecock that they fiercely kept flying between them. The evil [her parents] had the gift of thinking…of each other, they poured into her little gravely gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle” (James 12). Maisie, however, zips her lips and eventually refuses to recite this information; she breathes in the toxins, and in an attempt to control her situation, she lets them recirculate in her body rather than expelling them, and in this self-poisoning she takes great pleasure: 

"She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been the centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so. Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would...repeat nothing, and when, as an tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure altogether new" (James 13).

The question throughout the novel therefore becomes, what does Maisie know? Even the reader cannot quite make her body of knowledge his or her own, cannot co-opt or appropriate the personal narrative tucked into her brain. We can only hope to understand by the end of the novel whether or not she has managed to maintain some semblance of a sense of self and agency (arguably, she has not, but that’s my attempt to interpret what it is that Maisie knows). Maisie therefore becomes illegible, an almost-specter in the text, the “ghostly gay child” whose “identity is a deferral” because it is only while she is a child that her parents can continue to use her for their purposes; they delay her adulthood and therefore delay the reproductive future, unwittingly creating a version of Edelman’s sinthomosexual, the figure that rejects the future-based social order; Maisie becomes the train-licking boy. But as Chen and the novel suggest, “We need not assign the train-licking boy so surely to the nihilistic underside of futurity or to his own termination, figurative or otherwise” (281). I'll leave you with that titillating thought.