Mel Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections” highlights the queerness -- vis a vis the cultural and the material -- that we absorb by simply going through the world, unaware of our level of contact with other people and the environment, including its inanimate objects. This ongoing exchange is not sanctioned by whoever is invaded by the foreign element or by society: it is an interruption that is radically outside of heteronormative human body exchanges; the perceived queerness of the exchange gives way to an assumption of toxicity. Chen's bodily exchanges with the environment are unwilling and inevitable, yet sociable. Narrating her oblique yet intimate experience of strangers on the street -- dangerous because of their effusions of smoke, fragrance, or very nearness --, Chen writes, “There is a potency and intensity to two animate or inanimate bodies passing one another, bodies that have an exchange — a potentially queer exchange, I suggest — that effectively risks the implantation of injury. The quality of the exchange may ... or may not have violent bodily effects, or the exchange may be visual, where the meeting of eyes unleashes a series of pleasurable or unpleasurable bodily reactions such as chill, pulse rush, adrenaline, heat, fear, tingling skin.” It’s an ambivalent exchange, calling into question the boundaries of the sexual and social, whose desires and effects are mixed.
There are similar encounters throughout The Portrait of a Lady wherein Isabel is confronted by the toxicity of animate and inanimate stuff: Gilbert’s collections and bibelots are a metaphor for his conception of humanity; he collects that which confirms and displays his tastes. Isabel is disgusted. In contact without touching, Isabel, Gilbert and his things are exchanging psychically and physically, perhaps queerly. And, as Isabel is unable to comprehend and re-form to these conditions that run counter to the fulfillment she expected in marriage, they begin to feel toxic: “Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.” Her body cannot function and this attestation to the porousness of human bodies primes Isabel (ironically because thus far toxically) for the sexual exchange that will seal her fate, which has been in thrall to Gilbert.
Like Chen, Isabel is penetrated by her environment in an exchange that occurs at the end of The Portrait of a Lady. Caspar Goodwood confronts Isabel for the last time before her return to Rome. Isabel sees Caspar as a toxic force as he once again declares his love for her, yet, simultaneous with a verbal denial, Isabel responds to him physically, even orgiastically. We read in the scene familiar tropes of orgiastic experience (it is like an ocean, it is like dying) where there is only a kiss: the language of borders being transgressed comes prior to any physical nearness:
Isabel’s physical experience of Caspar, though heterosexual, is yet queer in that the locus of exchange isn’t bodies but the environment. Much like Chen’s unwilling exchange with those whom she passes by, who intoxicate her, we see the same sort of reluctant intoxication on the part of Isabel. The exchange that exists between Isabel and Caspar expresses new possibilities tied to a new danger. The book closes with the open question of whether Isabel will leave Gilbert for Caspar.
Interestingly (but as a bit of a side note), this book is also about transnational borders and state bodies, which we may consider with the same set of concerns as the human body; both are porous and open to unwanted influence. Caspar, a persistent if often unseen force in Isabel’s life is, like her, transnational. They are Americans abroad, subject to multiple influences and, as missives crossing and re-crossing national boundaries, carriers of heterogeneity in their common search for identity. Like the human body, the functional state body thinks itself immune to interpellation (this is inherent in conceiving of itself as having cultural and physical borders) but the passing between states of human bodies, ideas, etc. undermines this idea of immunity and of the body keeping itself alive by keeping foreign bodies out. Thus, Isabel’s and Caspar’s particular form of relatedness is one with international implications.
There are similar encounters throughout The Portrait of a Lady wherein Isabel is confronted by the toxicity of animate and inanimate stuff: Gilbert’s collections and bibelots are a metaphor for his conception of humanity; he collects that which confirms and displays his tastes. Isabel is disgusted. In contact without touching, Isabel, Gilbert and his things are exchanging psychically and physically, perhaps queerly. And, as Isabel is unable to comprehend and re-form to these conditions that run counter to the fulfillment she expected in marriage, they begin to feel toxic: “Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.” Her body cannot function and this attestation to the porousness of human bodies primes Isabel (ironically because thus far toxically) for the sexual exchange that will seal her fate, which has been in thrall to Gilbert.
Like Chen, Isabel is penetrated by her environment in an exchange that occurs at the end of The Portrait of a Lady. Caspar Goodwood confronts Isabel for the last time before her return to Rome. Isabel sees Caspar as a toxic force as he once again declares his love for her, yet, simultaneous with a verbal denial, Isabel responds to him physically, even orgiastically. We read in the scene familiar tropes of orgiastic experience (it is like an ocean, it is like dying) where there is only a kiss: the language of borders being transgressed comes prior to any physical nearness:
“Isabel scented his idea in all her being. ‘But it doesn’t matter!’ he exclaimed, pressing her close, though now without touching a hem of her garment. [...] Isabel gave a long murmur, like a creature in pain; it was as if he were pressing something that hurt her. [...] The world, in truth, had never seemed so large; it seemed to open out all round her, to take the form of a mighty sea, where she floated in fathomless waters. She had wanted help, and here was help; it had come in a rushing torrent. I know not whether she believed everything that he said; but she believed that to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to dying. [...]and the next instant she felt his arms about her, and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free.”
Isabel’s physical experience of Caspar, though heterosexual, is yet queer in that the locus of exchange isn’t bodies but the environment. Much like Chen’s unwilling exchange with those whom she passes by, who intoxicate her, we see the same sort of reluctant intoxication on the part of Isabel. The exchange that exists between Isabel and Caspar expresses new possibilities tied to a new danger. The book closes with the open question of whether Isabel will leave Gilbert for Caspar.
Interestingly (but as a bit of a side note), this book is also about transnational borders and state bodies, which we may consider with the same set of concerns as the human body; both are porous and open to unwanted influence. Caspar, a persistent if often unseen force in Isabel’s life is, like her, transnational. They are Americans abroad, subject to multiple influences and, as missives crossing and re-crossing national boundaries, carriers of heterogeneity in their common search for identity. Like the human body, the functional state body thinks itself immune to interpellation (this is inherent in conceiving of itself as having cultural and physical borders) but the passing between states of human bodies, ideas, etc. undermines this idea of immunity and of the body keeping itself alive by keeping foreign bodies out. Thus, Isabel’s and Caspar’s particular form of relatedness is one with international implications.
Aimee - I appreciated that you highlight Chen's "exchange" to a greater extent than I had when reading the article. For some reason the word "exchange" as you use it here resonates with me, unlike notions of one-sided intoxication (rather than mutuality) that predominated in my thinking about the article. Anyway, the tension I see in your post is similar to what I felt was tense when I wrote about Chen: the issue of the queerness of the "exchange" or "intoxication" in Portrait of a Lady/my primary work. Does Chen argue that if such relationships among toxins, bodies, the environment, and animate objects exist, they are necessarily queer?
ReplyDeleteHi Aimee! I always enjoy reading your posts! And I find your evidence here very convincing. It leads me to wonder if it is only Isabel who displays a queer body (or, more to the point, a porous materiality) in the book, or if we see thIs also with other characters. If it is only Isabel, it seems as though we could read that in one of two ways. It might be that she is simply more aware of her porosity (just looked it up--that IS a word!) than the others; in other words, she could be Chen. It might also be, however, that she is more vulnerable than others in the world of the book. If so, this would alter Portrait's relationship to "Toxic Animacies," would it not? And of course, if the porosity extends to all bodies in the book, then that seems to fit very well with Chen's model, though it works in a different register. I'm really curious to know!
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