Insect Representations in Postatomic American Fiction and Film By
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Bugs After the Bomb: Insect Representations in Postatomic American Fiction and Film by Catherine S. Cassel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English and Women’s Studies) in The University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Peggy S. McCracken, Co-Chair Professor Patricia S. Yaeger, Deceased, Co-Chair Professor Sara B. Blair Professor Jonathan E. Freedman Assistant Professor Melanie R. Yergeau © Catherine Serena Cassel 2016 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my grandparents, Karin and Jess Cassel. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not be in existence today without the support of many colleagues and friends. I thank Patsy Yaeger for her guidance in the early stages of this dissertation for her unfailing intellectual guidance and enthusiastic embrace of my ideas. Without Patsy, who knows what avenue my pursuits may have taken, but it surely would have been more boring. I thank Peggy McCracken for being a tremendously generous and insightful mentor whose detailed and thoughtful response to my scholarship has exponentially improved it. Her feedback strengthened the quality of this dissertation in unmeasurable ways. I thank my committee members Jonathan Freedman, Sara Blair, and Melanie Yergeau, for their help and support over these past several years. I thank my grandparents, Karin and Jess Cassel, for their unwavering support. Many colleagues at University of Michigan have aided this project through intellectually sustaining conversations. I thank Sarah Linwick, Nicolette Bruner, Gen Creedon, Lauren Benjamin, and Shannon Walton for providing invaluable perspectives on the animal studies aspect of this dissertation, in personal conversations, in a Mellon Workshop on science studies and cultural theory, and through the Rackham Animal Studies Workshop. I thank Jesse Carr, Konstantina Karageorgos, Brian Whitener, and Dashini Jeyathurai in particular—theirs were the first friendships I formed while in the Rackham Merit Fellow Summer Institute, and they have all been crucial to my success in graduate school. I would be remiss if I did not thank Maya for the emotional support she has provided throughout the writing process—she spent many days cradled between my arms while I wrote. Special thanks to Scott Beal for his enduring willingness iii to talk through ideas, provide feedback on chapter drafts, and watch bad movies containing esoteric bug references. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii List of Figures vi Abstract xi Introduction: Postatomic Incompanionates 1 Chapter One: “The Beasts Shall Reign Over the Earth:” Feminized Insect 30 Invasion in the Big Bug Films and Insect-Human Hybrid Films of the 1950s Chapter Two: Control Centipedes: William S. Burroughs’s Entomological 81 Horror Chapter Three: Inconspicuous Life and Empathic Identification in Philip K. 109 Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Chapter Four: Intimate Encounter with Insectoid Aliens in Octavia E. 146 Butler’s “Bloodchild” and Lilith’s Brood Coda 177 Bibliography 201 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 “Misunderstood Spider” meme. Funniest Meme. 23 Figure 1.2 “Misunderstood Spider” meme. Quick Meme. 23 Figure 2.1 Pat cowers as the first monstrous ant makes its appearance in Them! 42 Figure 2.2 Promotional photo for The Deadly Mantis which shows the praying 50 mantis model threatening Marge Blaine as she screams, an event which does not occur in the film. Figure 2.3 Scott Carey discovers that his basement is rife with danger now that 56 he is shrunken down to insect size in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). A spider which just that morning posed no threat to him now appears two to three times his size. Figure 2.4 The tarantula in Tarantula dwarfs the small town which it threatens 56 and the people in it. This shot closes the movie, with the townspeople’s safety restored, and the male and female protagonist holding one another, an ostensible sign that the heterosexual romance plot wins once again. Figure 2.5 Promotional poster for King Kong (1933) which features the African 57 setting where Kong comes from, and prioritizes a nearness between vi Kong and the natives while he clutches Ann Darrow clad in a skimpy red dress. Figure 2.6 Promotional poster for King Kong which features the New York 57 City setting where Kong ultimately dies. While Kong is depicted still clutching a helpless Ann Darrow, the metropolitan atmosphere is accentuated by white Americans adorned in nightlife eleganza. Figure 2.7 Promotional poster for Them! 59 Figure 2.8 Promotional poster for Beginning of the End. 59 Figure 2.9 Promotional poster for Tarantula. 61 Figure 2.10 A woman manicures herself unaware that a giant locust is peeping in 63 on her in The Beginning of the End. Figure 2.11 The mantis’s eyes gleam through the window at an unsuspecting 63 Marjorie Blaine in The Deadly Mantis. Figure 2.12 Stephanie “Steve” Clayton is about to disrobe and go to bed when 63 the tarantula peers in the window at her in Tarantula. Figure 2.13 Promotional poster for The Wasp Woman. 67 vii Figure 2.14 Janice Starlin from The Wasp Woman transforms into a murderous 68 wasp woman at night. Figure 2.15 Tarantella begins her seductive dance with her fingers posed 73 bizarrely in front of her face as though they were mandibles in Mesa of Lost Women. Figure 2.16 A promotional photograph for Mesa of Lost Women shows 73 Tarantella stretched out on the ground while the spider puppet looms behind her, suggesting the dark fusion between the two. Figure 2.17 Andre’s insect-human hybridity is finally revealed in The Fly. 75 Figure 2.18 Helene’s screaming reaction is multiplied by the compound vision of 75 Andre’s fly vision in The Fly. Figure 2.19 Full page advertisement placed in the New York Times by the 78 Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy which ominously predicted that the cockroach would be the only winner of World War III. Figure 3.1. A line drawing of a stele from the Chichen Itza Temple of Warriors 98 depicting human sacrifice and centipedal imagery in Slyvanus Morley’s The Ancient Maya. This image undoubtedly inspired viii Burroughs’s elaborate control cosmology predicated on centipedes and Mayan priests. Figure 4.1 Sculpture of Oankali individual by Gisèle Reneault (1992). Butler, 160 Octavia E. Photograph: color: 15x10 cm. Folder 7191. Box 265. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Figure 4.2 Page from Butler’s idea notebook for Dawn, 1985, OEB 2981, Box 161 150, The Octavia E. Butler Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Figure 5.1 Barbara Norfleet’s “Am I Pretty?” displays menagerie of beetles vie 194 for a gold star in a beauty pageant. Copyright Barbara Norfleet. Figure 5.2 Catherine Chalmers’s “Hanging,” which features a multitude of 195 cockroaches hanging in a fashion reminiscent of Southern lynching practices. Figure 5.3 Catherine Chalmers’s “Gas Chamber,” which offers an unsettling 195 emphasis on a multitude of cockroach legs to recall the horrific genocide of the Holocaust. ix Figure 5.4 Wangechi Mutu, Moth Girls, 2010. Detail. Musée d’art 197 contemporain de Montréal Collection. Copyright: Gladstone Gallery, New York. Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Figure 5.5 Figure 5.5. Wangechi Mutu, Moth Girls, 2010. Detail. Musée d’art 197 contemporain de Montréal Collection. Copyright: Gladstone Gallery, New York. Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Figure 5.6 Figure 5.5. Photo from Jennifer Angus’s artist website of her exhibit 198 installation at Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C. Copyright Jennifer Angus. x ABSTRACT This dissertation engages with critical animal studies, materialist feminism, and American culture to examine how insects and other bug-like creatures embodied cultural anxieties about postatomic life in 20th century North American literature, film, and culture. I argue that insects became a powerful register for expressing fear for the future of an environmentally damaged and increasingly systematized society in the form of insects taking over the planet. I analyze texts by William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, as well as “big bug” films of the 1950s, and show how these authors and films metaphorize postatomic configurations of “life.” I chart the omnipresent but little analyzed links between narrative form and the insect cosmos using a materialist and posthumanist feminist lens, and argue that explicitly articulated anxieties about insects convey larger concerns about ecological awareness, and language, dehumanization, and xenophobia. My claim is that insectoid figuration can reveal much about how the construction of the category of the human relies upon the abjection of animality through triumphalist exceptionalist views of our own affective capacities. xi Introduction Postatomic Incompanionates Scientific and social revolutions from the past century and a half, including Darwinism, cognitive ethology, cybernetics, and genetic engineering, have compelled humans to doubt the centrality of their place in the universe and in nature, and encouraged skepticism about absolute truth. The precarious position of the human became an urgent concern with the realization that humans could destroy themselves. In the 1950s, the threat of nuclear war loomed as an ominous possibility, and the apparent degradation of the environment through human practices like increased pesticide use and trash production, intensified apocalyptic images of the world’s end. The use and testing of nuclear weapons, and the devastating effects of radioactivity on the environment stirred human fantasies of insects taking over the world in the wake of our auto- genocide. Depictions of intelligent insects proliferated in postwar American narrative, expressing the dwarfed individual agency people felt in the face of these “large governmental, corporate, or social systems” which “appear uncannily to control individual behavior and in which characters seem paranoid,” according to Timothy Melley.1 Agency panic emerges from a fear of compromised free will and autonomy and expresses anxiety about the extent to which an individual is able to control his or her behavior.