"Monster in the Rainbow"

1) Summary of the argument and main points:

Gigante initially sets up a distinction between the "materialist practitioners" (433) of Newtonian science which dominate the first half of the eighteenth century, and the shift towards vitalism, supported by Abernethy, Keats, and Hunter around 1780. Materialists hold that life is an "assemblage of functions or parts" (433), while the vitalists insist that an intangible life-force must exist. This life-force is characterized as "excessive" (434) and pervasive because it transcends physical organization, cannot be aesthetically rendered/imagined, and is capable of acting upon external objects. The materialists firmly deny that this life force exists stating that "an immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting room" (434). This transitions into a discussion of monstrosity, which is an expression of the excessive life-force.

The article is a melting pot of ideas of what makes a monstrosity to be as such, moving from the aesthetic definition of the Enlightenment era as it to be a defect or deformity, to the Romantic notion of monstrosity to be “too much life” (437) The entirety of the article leans towards John Hunter’s (British physiologist) definition of monstrosity, “which held that rather than something gone awry during formation, monstrosity was the result of the formative capacity.” (434) Hunter’s study of monsters is categorized in three separate divisions: mineral, vegetable, and animal matter. This is to provide logic for understanding the swerve from the established notion of a monstrosity to be a defect or deformity to the new Romantic view of monstrosity to be as a troubling overflow of the living principle. “We call everything that deviates from uniformity a ‘monster’ whether [it occur in] crystallization, vegetation, or animalization” (436). Hunter paves the way for Romantic rethinking of monstrosity as an extension of the living principle and rather than it being a deviation from uniformity; monstrosity now came to represent more of –indeed, too much of – the same.

In mineral formation, a crystal turns into a monster by producing more of itself, but the fear is not in that the missing part will reproduce itself but that it will reproduce itself to EXCESS. In vegetable matter, Hunter’s principle of monstrosity asserts itself as the power of regeneration and the animal principle can also be defined as a kind of self-repetition. Monstrosity, as Hunter describes it, in vegetables and animals – in all that contain the living principle – is the result of too much life. It is not a malformation, but instead is an overexuberant living matter.

Relating Hunter’s theory of monstrosity to Lamia is sprinkled throughout the article. Lamia is monstrous as she exceeds the telos of aesthetic form. But as a rainbow imbued with vital power, she is a monstrous object of not Newtonian physics but rather the science of life. Lamia’s transformation into a human being is a scene of creation strangely analogous to the one in Frankenstein. Lamia’s short circuiting colors, her “sharp sparks” (Keats 834) and “scarlet pain,” (Keats 834) all suggests a galvanic experiment gone awry. As in the cinematic Frankenstein’s fait by thunderbolt, the electrochemical experiment described defeats its purpose by giving too much life. Both scenes of creation were intended to produce objects of beauty, and both erupt in monstrosity.

To imagine life as an autonomous power with the capacity to exceed its material dimensions – is to imagine something monstrous. Because Lamia will not be contained by the formal telos of the beautiful – or its teleological expression in the form of organized life – she appears monstrous in her own magnitude. “And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up,/ leaving no drop in the bewildering cup,/ and still the cup was full.” Asserting herself as an unconsumable overabundance, Lamia is more than human – more than material organization alone would allow; she is a monster.

2) A description of the article's rhetorical techniques, blind spots, or assumptions:
            This article has very little in it actually analyzing "Lamia" in relation to all these theories about monstrosity. Mostly, it just discusses in depth these different theories and how they were formed, mentions other works of monstrosity (Frankenstein), but still very little is said about "Lamia" itself. I felt that it didn’t really explain fully how "Lamia" was made up of too much to be contained in her form, but even when it does, that doesn’t come till what seems to be the conclusion of the article. Because this article seems to be using "Lamia" more as an example, than the subject. We were just thrown a bunch of thorough explanation of the different ideas and theories but no explanation of reason. 

The author is repetitive to the point of being exhaustive. She consistently reminds the reader that the living principle is a concept of excess, that the life-force is characteristically self-propagating, and that this lends itself to aesthetic monstrosity. She could have condensed the article quite a bit.
  

3) At least two questions the article or selection raises:

           What is the significance of it all and "Lamia" in particular? Why is this important? And what is the reason to use "Lamia," above others to illustrate it?
        Another question is within the last paragraph of the article. “Yet I submit that the final tragedy of Keat’s unfinished eipc is not the reduction of the human to a mechanistic collection of limbs, a heavy body deprived of its living principle like Newton’s rainbow deprived of its poetry. Rather, it is the possibility that to die into anything more than this is to become too much – to become monstrous in the eyes of a calculating world.” What is this implying? Is it a question vying whether or not we ourselves can become monsters in the process of dying for something more?

Vivian Williams, Shelby Adelsen, and Kaylia Schunemann