The Epidemiology of “Regrettable Kinship”: Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain

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Journal of Medical Humanities [jmh] ph130-jomh-375320 June 19, 2002 7:57 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 23, Nos. 3/4, Winter 2002 (C© 2002)

The Epidemiology of “Regrettable Kinship”:Gender, Epidemic, and Community in ToddHaynes’ [Safe] and Richard Powers’ Gain

Lisa Lynch1

In “The Epidemiology of ‘Regrettable Kinship’: Gender, Epidemic, and Commu-nity in Todd Haynes’[Safe]and Richard Powers’Gain,” the author analyzes twocontemporary cultural texts about women and environmentally-linked illnesses torethink commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender, disease,and community formation. By reading these narratives side by side, Lynch is ableto address difficult issues about gendered subjectivity and the fragile constructionof collective political identity. While the female protagonists in the texts Lynch ex-amines relate differently to their illnesses, both portray the ways in which womennegotiate the potential and limitations of “illness communities.”

KEY WORDS: gender; environmental illness; illness community.

A number of scholars have identified what they see as a new type of socialmovement emerging in the wake of HIV/AIDS activism: groups mainly comprisedof disease sufferers and their relatives who assemble to form support networksand to assert their collective rights (Dumit, 1997; Kroll-Smith, 1997; Murphy,2000). Such “illness communities,” highly influenced by the example set by groupsorganized around HIV/AIDS issues, have come together to address the concernsof those who suffer from diseases as diverse as fibromyalgia and DES-relatedcancer. Some of these communities have formal structures, outreach programsand development offices; others are informal and issue-oriented. Many, especiallyin the past few years, have been organized entirely online; the extent of this form ofvirtual community can be quickly deduced by typing the names of various diseasesand syndromes into an Internet search engine.

1Address correspondence to Lisa Lynch, The Program in Media Studies, Catholic University, 105Marist Hall, Washington, DC 20064; e-mail: [email protected].

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1041-3545/02/1200-0203/0C© 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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Given the pervasiveness of illness communities in contemporary culture, itis not surprising that representations of such communities have also begun toappear in films, novels and other cultural texts that grapple with the contemporaryexperience of illness. This article looks at two such representations of the idea ofillness community, a film and novel that narrate the experiences of two womencontemplating whether to use their illnesses as a source of identity and/or as anopportunity for collective identification. In the first example, Todd Haynes’ 1995film [Safe], a Southern California housewife named Carol White is empowered tochallenge her doctor’s claim that her illness is psychosomatic when she decidesher symptoms link her to a community of those who claim to have been madeill by the accretive effects of chemicals in their environment. In the second text,Richard Powers’ 1998 novelGain, a New England realtor named Laura Bodey isslowly convinced by the visible cancer cluster in her small town that her ovariancancer could be the result of toxic residue from a local plant, despite her doctor’sclaim that her cancer has a genetic origin.

Both [Safe] andGainare preoccupied with their protagonist’s attempts—andoccasional refusals—to make sense of their bodies through the experiences ofothers. Carol and Laura are both faced with the choice between believing theirdoctors’ evaluation of their bodies and believing an alternative explanation fortheir illnesses, a grassroots etiology that suggests to each of them that householdchemicals may have poisoned them as well as others in their community. Both textsprovide at least some compelling evidence for this latter speculation, thereby sug-gesting that environmentally-based illnesses are a pervasive problem in the UnitedStates that have been underrecognized by the mainstream medical community.

For the most part, however the link in each narrative between chemical poison-ing and each woman’s illness remains inconclusive. Thus, as Haynes’ and Powers’protagonists investigate the origin of their maladies, the viewer or reader of eachtext must pass their own judgment, weighing the environmental and psychologicalin Carol’s case, and the environmental and genetic in Laura’s. These indeterminateetiologies allow Haynes and Powers to suggest that the cause of each woman’s ill-ness matters less than the interpretive structures that frame their understanding ofthemselves as women who are ill. Each narrative seems primarily concerned withthe assumptions that undergird each woman’s self-diagnosis, and each suggeststhat the etiological decision that these women must make is linked to an underlyingontological choice. For Carol and Laura, the process of choosing between a causalnarrative that focuses on their individual pathologies and one that locates them aspart of an epidemic pattern forces them to simultaneously choose between definingthemselves as alone in their suffering or defining themselves in terms of a sharedidentity.

What is especially compelling in both texts, I will show, is the degree to whicheach cautions against any easy embrace of the ability of a given illness communityto heal—physically or psychically—those who seek membership. While Haynes

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and Powers both gesture towards the possibilities such communities might offertheir protagonists, they also demonstrate the final failure of such communities toeffect any change in the ability of Carol or Laura to understand or manage theirillness. By the end of [Safe], Carol White seems deathly ill, while by the end ofGain, Laura Bodey is dead. Moreover, both women, for very different reasons,ultimately wind up just as alone as they had been before they were made aware ofthe possibility of group identification.

Though, as I will make clear, both Haynes and Powers have multiple agendasin narrating the illnesses of their protagonists, their exploration of illness commu-nities also contributes to an ongoing contemporary debate about the benefits andpitfalls of such communities. Illness communities have been championed by somesocial theorists (Dumit, 1997; Kroll-Smith & Floyd, 1997) for their ability toprovide support to the ill and their families, as well as for their ability to chal-lenge medical authority and thus potentially improve flawed diagnostic criteriaand inadequate treatment. Kroll-Smith in particular has hailed such communitiesas exemplars of what Beck (1992) characterizes as a “risk society,” one that hasbecome both more reflexive and more activist as they seek to reduce possiblehazards. However, other scholars have been far more critical of the idea of ill-ness community, especially those communities formed around contested illnessessuch as environmental illness or chronic fatigue syndrome. Farrell (1998) claimsthat Americans at the turn of the millennia have suffered “a disturbance in theground of collective experience” (p. 3) that has left them with a sense that theymust somehow have been wronged and must seek redress. In some cases, he notes,this sense of affront has led some to conclude that contemporary American lifeis so literally toxic that they have been made ill through the fact of exposure.Perhaps more damningly, Showalter (1998) argues that newly emergent diseaseswith no known cause are the result of a virulent new strain of hysteria spread by“physician enthusiasts and theorists, unhappy vulnerable patients, and supportivecultural environments” (p. 17). Showalter insists that those who believe they sufferfrom contested illnesses—chronic fatigue and Persian Gulf Syndrome included—are victims of this cultural hysteria, robbed of the reality of their own essentialwellness by their credulous acceptance of the idea that they are actually ill.

Showalter’s ideas are rendered somewhat na¨ıve by her persistent faith in theinfallibility of the expert systems that determine the course of technology andbiomedicine, but even those who are skeptical of the omnipotence of biomedi-cal expertise have weighed in with other cautions about the possibility of viablecommunities formed around the notion of illness. In her study of breast canceractivism, Cartwright (1998) argues:

“Community” formation on the basis of health and illness is always highly provisionaland unstable, in part because group formation takes place on the basis of a condition orexperience that is always strongly determined by more conventional identity categories.Illness is not necessarily attached to, but must always be lived through, other categories of

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identity and community—categories that come into play at every level of the construction ofpublics and cultures around disease.. . .This is further complicated by the fact that “illnesscommunities” are comprised of people whose respective identities as ill or disabled shiftthrough the course of disease. (p. 119)

Cartwright’s observations about illness communities resemble the observationsof other scholars looking critically at late twentieth century social movementspredicated on identity politics—like other identities, the identity of the invalid isprovisional, contingent and open to negotiation. And, like other types of identities,illness is overdetermined by a broad spectrum of cultural and individual factorsthat occasionally overwhelm attempts at coalition-building.

In what follows, I map out the ways in which Haynes and Powers considerthe problems of cause, cure and community in [Safe] and inGain. In dramatizingthe decline of their respective heroines, I will argue, these narratives address thequestion of whether it is possible to form a viable community around the experienceof illness. And in addressing this question, both consider how the gender of theinvalids they depict has contributed both to their mistreatment by the medicalestablishment and to their inability, in the end, to find a viable alternative to whatseems to be disabling biomedical assessments of their bodies.2

EPIDEMIC IN THE FORTRESS CITY: ENVIRONMENTAL ILLNESSIN TODD HAYNES’ [ Safe]

The opening shot of [Safe] situates the viewer inside of a car at night. We peerthrough the windshield as the car proceeds slowly through a street-lit, manicuredsuburb that manages to look at once rigidly controlled and ominous. As the film’seerie theme music grows gradually louder, the slowly moving car approaches adriveway, and a high metal fence slides back to receive it. The car comes to restinside a garage whose automated doors shut before the car’s occupants—Bob andCarol White—step into the lit interior space. As the Whites move from the garageinto the house, Carol White sneezes a small, foreshadowing sneeze; her husbandsays emphatically and automatically, “Bless you!”

Haynes’ title sequence is a meditation on the proliferation of enclosures thatsurround the Whites: the car, the driveway gate, the garage, and finally the White’slarge and modern Southern California home. These multiple layers of protection,we learn, seem to have become accretively toxic for Carol White. As the filmprogresses, the affluent, sheltered Carol becomes increasingly ill, and increasinglyconvinced that her environment—an amalgam of freeway fumes, dry cleaningsolvent, hairsprays, deodorants, and treated fabrics—is suffocating her, leavingher wasted, exhausted and literally gasping for air.

2In the case ofGain, Powers extends the question of whether illness community is possible to embracea broader, more fundamental issue: using Laura’s cancer as a vehicle, Powers speculates whether thefracturing of subjectivity in late-capitalist America might thwart any effort at identity formation, letalone the formation of a community around an identity politics.

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Though [Safe] has been called the first “mainstream” film directed by ToddHaynes, it is linked thematically to his earlier, more alternative films—The KarenCarpenter StoryandPoison—which also focus on the abjection of the diseasedbody. A gay filmmaker committed to AIDS activism, Haynes intendedPoisontoserve in part as an allegory of the ostracization of PWAs in the United States. Hayneshimself is ambivalent about specifically labeling [Safe] as an AIDS allegory, butthe film does suggest connections between Carol’s experiences and that of PWAsin the late 80s/early 90s, particularly in its portrayal of Carol’s search to understanda disease syndrome that affects so many3 and no certain cure.4

The illness syndrome that Carol eventually decides she is suffering fromwas controversial at the time that the film is set—1987—and remains contro-versial today. Environmental illness, or multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), canbe broadly defined as a breakdown of the immune system caused by chemicaloverexposure, though this breakdown can manifest itself in any number of symp-toms, both physical and psychological. As Kroll-Smith and Murphy have noted,environmental illness has yet to be recognized as a medical reality by the ma-jority of health professionals. The CDC has not assigned diagnostic criteria forMCS, and most reviewed medical journals have limited their consideration of thedisease to assessing the psychological roots of MCS symptoms and drawing com-parisons between MCS and various moments in the history of women’s hystericaldisorders.

In the face of this persistent skepticism, the environmental illness communityhas been extremely effective at organizing on the grassroots level. Murphy notesthat MCS support communities are a good example of how illness communityexemplifies a new type of social formation, one characterized by a “suppleness”in the way it defines both their members and their aims:

The MCS movement is formed of a multitude of cells with nodes where participants cancome together: a newsletter, an internet chat room, a health-food store, a support group ina woman’s center, an understanding church, a specialist lawyer, an environmental illnessclinic . . . this multiplicity also extends to the movement itself [as] there is no single strat-egy or instantiation. Some cells are oriented towards political action through letter-writingcampaigns, exposing the industrial backing of expert witnesses, or pursuing governmentregulation of MCS. . .others are an aggregation of trailers on an empty patch of desert land;some join together in a lawsuit; others might be tested at the same laboratory. (2000, p. 95)

3In the late 1980s, there was general agreement about how AIDS was spread, but debate still continuedover who was actually vulnerable to HIV infection. For example, Treichler (1999) notes that a populararticle in a 1988 issue ofCosmopolitanmagazine actively promoted the idea that women who had“normal” intercourse were not a risk for AIDS because the vagina was “rugged.” Hence, women whowere infected with AIDS in the late 1980s were often undiagnosed, or their infections were attributedto anomalous behaviors or practices.

4Many viewers familiar with Haynes’s work were surprised by [Safe]’s indirect handling of AIDS. Atthe time of [Safe]’s release, Haynes defended his choice by explaining in anArtforum interview thatthe “specificity of AIDS in our lives right now” suggested to him that it was not the right time to makean AIDS film: instead, he explained, [Safe] was a film that took “the metaphor of AIDS away fromthe war zone. . . into the safest, most protected, most sealed-off kind of life.”

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Murphy suggests that the most successful of these MCS “cells,” as she calls them,teach their members how to “build a body in a safe space.” The very title ofHaynes’ film gestures towards Carol’s own search for safety, a search Haynes—like Murphy—at least initially suggests is linked to finding a community that canprovide a workable understanding of Carol’s bodily experiences.5

As I have suggested, Haynes’ depiction of Carol’s illness leaves unresolvedthe question of whether the “safe space” Carol is looking for is a physical orpsychological space. While Haynes’ representation of the mainstream medicalcommunity—embodied here by a white-haired male physician who dismissesCarol’s claims about her body—is sharply critical, Haynes leaves room for hisviewers to conclude that Carol’s abrupt and unsympathetic doctor might be cor-rect in assuming Carol has a psychosomatic illness and should treat her conditionthrough psychotherapy. In a series of vignettes, Haynes demonstrates how Carol’scondition allows her to escape a passionless marriage and utterly banal suburbanlifestyle.6 It also gives the timid, doll-like Carol her first taste of what it might be liketo have a definite identity, even if it is the identity of an environmentally ill woman.

It is this search for identity in and through community that preoccupies Haynesin [Safe] far more that the question of what is “really” happening to Carol’s body. Inrepresenting Carol’s search for the meaning of her illness, Haynes affirms Carol’schoice to seek a definition for her malady that leads her beyond the individualiz-ing explanations of psychotherapy. At the same time, however, Haynes suggestsCarol’s final turn towards community—attempting to embrace the New Age phi-losophy espoused by the guru of a health resort—tragically places her back onceagain inside an individualizing framework in which she must look “inside” for anexplanation for her illness. In other words, the film applauds thepossibilityof anactivist community formed around a shared illness while at the same time findingfault with the sort of community Carol actually encounters.

Carol discovers the environmental illness community, and the possible causeof her illness, when she encounters a printed flyer posted at her health club ad-vertising an informational session for people who think they might be “allergic tothe 20th century.” She decides to attend the meeting, which turns out to be a talk

5The limitations of space do not allow me to do justice to the complexity of Murphy’s argument aboutMCS, which is in part an attempt to refute what she describes as the “abjection” of MCS sufferersby “starting with the assumption that there is no singular, unacculturated body to unearth, but insteadbodies that are always multiply materialized” (Murphy, 2000, p. 92). I should also point out thatMurphy’s discussion of Haynes is limited to noting that the film perpetuates the stereotype of MCSsufferers as wealthy white women, a criticism made by many in the MCS community at the time thatthe film came out.

6Naismith (1998) argues that the dual readings of Carol’s body—as environmentally ill and alsopsychosomatically ill—make sense if one decides that Carol’s body is rebelling againstboth thepsychological toxins and the literal toxins in the environment around her. Naismith’s reading of thefilm is close to my own; but while she seems to suggest that the tragedy of the film is that Carol cannotfind a position to discover and articulate her own identity, I would argue that Haynes is perhaps morecynical in his perception of the possibility of an individual developing an identity that is prior to oroutside of social construction.

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delivered via videotape to a packed room. The videotape begins with a screen blankexcept for the words: “Q: WHO ARE YOU?” and then cuts to a shot of a crowdof people walking on a street. The scene shifts again, as a professorial-lookingman, sitting on the edge of a desk in a paneled office lined with books and medicalcharts, delivers a brief lecture:

You are of all ages and of all walks of life. But you have one thing in common, strange,never-ending ailments.. . .Your family and friends tell you you’re overreacting, it’s all inyour head. But your symptoms worsen. Fatigue and depression turn to migraines, blackouts,and even seizures.. . .You are not alone. What you most likely are is one of a vastly growingnumber of people who suffer from environmental illness. That means for reasons not yetknown to us, certain people’s tolerance for everyday substances is breaking down, usually asa result of chemical overexposure. . . today there are sixty thousand chemicals in everydayuse, but less than ten percent are tested for toxicity. This is a disease that you catch fromyour environment.

Carol’s first encounter with the idea that she is “not alone” in her illnessis striking for its ironic invocation of community where none is in fact present:the audience members who watch the video with Carol sit facing a televisionscreen and do not look at or speak to one another. In the scenes that follow,however, Haynes suggests that Carol is galvanized by her discovery, as it is thefirst suggestion she has received that her illness might be the effect of outside forces.Quite quickly, she rejects the professional opinions of her doctor and psychiatristand begins to embrace the idea that she might be environmentally ill. She visits anallergist sympathetic to the idea of environmental disorders, and then persuadesher skeptical husband to join her in attending a meeting of an EI support group.

After Carol attends the support group, the film moves through a montage thatsuggests her efforts to heal herself according to advice gleaned from the supportmeeting. In one scene, Carol doses herself with vitamins and herbal supplementslined up on her kitchen table while she listens to an informational tape. The tape’ssoothing female voice tells her how to eat, what to wear, how to create a chemical-free zone in her house. But the inadequacy of Carol’s self-cure is made clear byHaynes soon after she begins her routine in one of the more horrifying sequencesof his film. With the instructional tape droning rhythmically in her ears, Carolenters a dry cleaning establishment that is being sprayed with pesticides and shefalls to the floor in a seizure. She rides in an ambulance to the hospital with herface bloodied and her body twisting spasmodically: EMTs brace her mouth opento prevent her from choking on her vomit.

Despite the drama of Carol’s arrival at the hospital, her doctor seems moreexasperated than concerned when he appears at her bedside in the following scene.Carol tries to insist—for the first time in the film—that she has a “chemical impair-ment,” but her doctor cuts her off. Shoving his hands petulantly into his pockets, heargues that “from a medical standpoint, there’s no way to prove this is an immunesystem breakdown, much less one caused by chemicals.” When Carol demurs, hewaves dismissively at her and turns away. “If your psychiatrist can’t provide any

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answers. . .” When her husband asks if she could think of “any reason” for theseizure, Carol replies flatly, “the chemicals.”

This scene is triply harrowing: first, Haynes confronts the viewer with visceral,graphic evidence of Carol’s body gone amok; second, he suggests that it is possiblethat ordinary unnamed “chemicals” have caused her breakdown; and finally, hesuggests that the gap between Carol’s experience of her body and conventionalmedical understanding may have become unbridgeable. In what seems to be anincreasing turn towards self-awareness, Carol seems to understand as well that shehas moved beyond a point where mainstream medicine can help her, and decidesto pursue an alternate means of treatment. Watching television in her hospital bed,she sees a commercial for a New Age health retreat called Wrenwood, a place thata woman in her EI support group has recommended for curing the environmentallyill. For the rest of the film, Carol abandons the Valley and its suburban confinesfor the desert openness of Wrenwood, which has advertised itself to her as a “safehaven for troubled times.”

Haynes depicts Wrenwood as an expensive rustic idyll in the California desert.There are special facilities that address the needs of the environmentally ill, includ-ing reading boxes that protect readers from paper chemicals and open-air sleepingcabins made of natural materials. But unlike Carol’s support group, the focus of theCenter’s healing strategy is spiritual rather than pragmatic. Wrenwood’s director,Peter Dunning, who claims to be suffering from both AIDS and environmentalillness, promotes a New Age healing philosophy that affirms that the illnesses ofhis patients are of their own making.7 As Carol’s stay progresses, it becomes clearthat her continued illness, as well as the continued illness of other Wrenwood resi-dents, is frustrating to Dunning. Though his gentle manner initially conceals this, itbecomes obvious that Dunning sees illness as failure, and thus sees Wrenwood’scommunity as a group of failed individuals. In response to the somatic complaintsof his guests, he repeatedly asserts that they must learn, as he has learned, to createtheir own reality. One night he announces that he has “stopped reading the papers”because “if I believe that life is that destructive, my immune system will believeit too—and I can’t afford to take that risk.”

Like many of the other seriously ill patients at Wrenwood, Carol ultimatelyproves a poor candidate for Dunning’s treatment program. After a few weeks ofsolitary cabin living punctuated by communual meals and group therapy sessions,she becomes so frail that she asks to be moved into a “safe house,” a porcelainbuilding designed to be free of environmental toxins. This structure has a sinistertomb-like feel; in fact, its previous occupant has just died. Haynes shoots thesquat, egg-shaped safehouse from below, so that it looms among the trees despite

7Haynes claimed in interviews that he intended his portrayal of Peter Dunning to serve as an indictmentof the healing philosophies of Louise Hay, a self-help guru who became famous for claiming thatcancer in particular arose from a lack of self-love. Haynes said that Hay’s philosophy had beenembraced—with damaging results—by many of his friends with HIV/AIDS.

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its modest size, and when the structure is on camera the film’s ominous thememusic creeps back into the score.

As the film ends, Haynes chooses neither to identify absolutely the cause ofCarol’s illness nor to resolve whether Carol will survive her time at Wrenwood.The last scenes of the film take place on Carol’s birthday. An impromptu party isgiven for her in the dining hall, and Carol is asked to make a speech. She delivers,haltingly and painfully, her longest monologue of the entire film. Her words are amishmash of Wrenwood’s philosophy and her own:

I really hated myself before I came here so I’m trying to see myself hopefully more as Iam, more positive, like seeing the pluses, like I think it’s slowly opening up now, people’sminds like educating and AIDS and other types of diseases, cause it is a disease, cause it’sout there and we just have to be more aware of it and make people aware of it and evenourselves [sic], like reading labels and going into buildings?

Carol begins with a concession to Dunning’s suggestion that illness mightstem from self-hatred, but then switches to an assertion that directly contradictsDunning’s philosophy. Somewhat incoherently, she echoes the activist philosophylearned in her encounters with the environmental illness support group; ratherthan convincing themselves that the world is safe, she claims, her audience needsto be aware of the dangers which are “out there.” Carol’s speech discomfits theWrenwood residents, who have been urged to believe that disease is in fact, not“out there” at all, but instead is evidence of a failure of will. After she speaks, amoment of uncomfortable silence is followed by a flurry of scattered applause.

Accepting the applause, Carol is characteristically blank and unreadable; wecannot tell whether or not she understands that she has essentially blasphemedDunning’s religion. Her actions once she is back at her safe house suggest other-wise, as Carol reverts to Dunning’s tactics. Staring into a mirror, she repeats thewords “I love you,” a routine Dunning has told Wrenwood residents will transformtheir self-image. In this final shot, Haynes once again lets us look through Carol’seyes; we see her wan, blotchy and ghostly reflection in the mirror. She moves froma stuttering assertion—“I, I. . .”—to the declaration, “I really love you,” but as herlanguage becomes more positive her voice becomes more tentative. For a moment,she seems to gaze inquisitively at her reflection to gauge its response to her dec-laration of affection, but her mirror image is as uncertain as she is, and her facesettles again into blankness, this time the blankness of a face closed protectivelyaround itself.

Searching for her identity as an environmentally ill woman in the Wrenwoodcommunity, Carol thus winds up perhaps fatally isolated. As I have suggested,however, Haynes’ ending should not be read as a general condemnation of hersearch; rather, Haynes intends his portrait of Wrenwood to serve as an indictmentof a certainkind of community. Wrenwood, is not, after all, is a genuine locusof community. Urging his followers to commit to a vision of the world in whichnothing quite matters aside from their own perceptions of it, Dunning actually

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lobbies for the annihilation of community. The end result—as Carol’s encounterin the mirror attests—can only be a final, self-reflexive emptiness. And, Haynessuggests, this self-reflexivity may prove lethal no matter what the cause of Carol’sillness might be: if she is sick because of environmental toxins, Dunning’s philoso-phy cannot cure her, and if she is, in fact, making herself ill, the social and spiritualisolation which engendered her malaise will now only increase in proportion toher symptoms.

CANCER WITHOUT A CAUSE: LAURA, CLARE, AND THEDANCE OF COMMODITIES

[Safe] is finally a story of failed community: Carol attempts to heal herselfby identifying herself as environmentally ill and aligning herself with others inher condition, but she winds up worse than before. For Haynes, this failure seemsless a dismissal of the possibility of community than it is a critique of the kinds ofalliances that present themselves to Carol. In Richard Powers’Gain, however, thesituation is almost the opposite; Powers suggests that his protagonist, Laura Bodey,actively resists what might be a viable interpretive community. In exploring themotivations for this rejection, Powers suggests Laura’s implication in consumercapitalism may in fact make community impossible for her. Specifically, Powersconnects Laura’s resistance to community to her one-sided intimacy with ClarePharmaceuticals, the corporation that manufactures the chemical that may havepoisoned her. Her choice illustrates Powers’ interest in exploring the effects oncontemporary subjectivity of the sort of postmodernity that Jameson (1991) hasdescribed: a penetration of capital into every aspect of modern social and culturalrelations that has disrupted our lives in ways we have only begun to perceive.8

This relationship, he suggests, illustrates the contemporary perils of commodityfetishism; Laura becomes confused in her loyalties, losing her ability to formnecessary social attachments due to her persistent belief in the goodness of Clareand its products.

Gain is structured around two contiguous narratives: first, the death of LauraBodey from ovarian cancer; second, the history of Clare Pharmaceuticals fromits founding in the mid-nineteenth century until the present day. The linear, oftenheroic story of the rise of Clare from an immigrant’s candle factory to a mod-ern conglomerate becomes less linear and less heroic as it weaves through thepresent-day tale of Laura Bodey’s illness. Even as the novel suggests by its very

8Powers has explicitly identified—in discussions ofGain and other novels—his interest in engagingwith, and intervening with, the market structure of late capitalism through his literary output. In aninterview with Neilson (1998), he claimed that literature perhaps could occupy a critical positionjust outside of such a system, a place to launch a critique: “market value may come to drive out allother human values, except perhaps, in the country of invented currency, the completely barter driveneconomy of the imagination” (Neilson, p. 15).

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intertwined structure9 that Clare might be to blame for Laura’s illness, we neverlearn whether she actually is the victim of an environmentally produced cancerepidemic, or whether her cancer is instead the result of a genetic propensity.

Unlike environmental illness/MCS, the disease that eventually kills Laura—ovarian cancer—can hardly be described as “contested.” But though the diseaseitself is granted medical legitimacy, any correlation between ovarian cancer andenvironmental influences has been met with similar medical skepticism. In part, thisskepticism reflects a reluctance, particularly in the United States, to attribute cancerto environment causes. As Steingraber (2000) notes, even though the InternationalAgency for Research on Cancer, a division of the World Health Organization, hasconcluded that at least 80 percent of all cancer is attributable to environmentalinfluences,10 most American medical research has focused on genetic, rather thanenvironmental causes of cancer11 (IARC data quoted in Tomatis, 1991, p. 48).Indeed, even today, in the absence of definitive data about the etiology of ovariancancer, the National Cancer Institute still cites family and personal history as mainrisk factors, though links between hormone-altering substances and ovarian cancerhave been recently investigated (NCI, 2000; Steingraber, 2000).

Just like Haynes in [Safe], Powers does not provide clear answers about thesource of Laura’s illness. Laura has no recognizable risk factors for ovarian cancer(Ashkenazi descent and a high-fat diet); nonetheless, nothing about her diagnosisseems particularly exceptional: many women like Laura develop ovarian cancer.However, Laura’s ex-husband Don and her daughter Ellen conclude soon afterLaura has been diagnosed with cancer that she has indeed been poisoned by Clare;she is, they believe, part of a cluster of cancer victims in her hometown of Lacewoodwho have been affected by toxic runoff from a local plant. Don presses Laura tojoin a class action lawsuit, The People Of Lacewood vs. Clare Pharmaceuticals,which has been organized by cancer victims who are seeking compensation. Untilshe is physically incapable of arguing, Laura remains reluctant to participate inthe lawsuit, deflecting Don’s repeated insistence on the financial gain it will bringto their soon motherless children.

Laura’s resistance to the lawsuit is linked not so much to a refusal to considerthat there really is an epidemic cluster of cancer in Lacewood as is it to her ownconviction that she “has always been on her own” (Powers, 1998, p. 286) in having

9As Harris (1998) notes, Powers has used the structure of contiguous narratives in two previous novels:Three Farmers on the Way to the Dance(1985) andThe Gold Bug Variations(1988). However,Gaindiffers in that it lacks the mediation of a narrator that unifies its twin story lines; without the mediationof such a narrator, the reader is left to actively work out his/her own conclusions about the meaningof Powers’ juxtapositions.

10Steingraber notes that the consideration of “environmental factors” for cancer is complicated bythe conflation of lifestyle choices—including diet—with involuntary exposure to toxins in theenvironment.

11In his history of American neglect of environmental causes of cancer, Proctor (1995) dates the decisiveshift away from investigating the link between cancer and the environment to the Reagan era, whengovernment funding for environmental cancer research simply evaporated.

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cancer. Laura makes it clear that she has no desire to consider herself part of whatshe considers to be a degraded community of cancer victims. Her daily life whileon chemotherapy is marked—at least initially—by exhaustive efforts to appear asif she is not ill, efforts motivated equally by self-disgust and by the need to holdherself separate from other cancer patients around her; in part, this means clingingto her doctor’s assertion that she lacks recognizable environmental risk factors, thecause of her cancer is genetic.

In [Safe], we are led to believe that the moment when Carol begins to admit toherself that she does in fact doubt her doctor is a moment of initially empoweringself-awareness. InGain, however, Laura’s similar realization is portrayed as amoment of dread, if not despair. Shortly after she begins to consider the idea thatthere might be an unusual number of cancer victims in Lacewood, Laura wanderswith her children through Lacewood’s Harvest Fair and finds herself confrontedwith glaring evidence of cancer’s presence in her home town, a presence she hasnever before acknowledged:

They’re all over the harvest fair. A boy two years younger than Tim rests against a stack ofpumpkins, his skin an eerie green. The bared, patchy head of a woman hoisting a papooseand swinging apple cider, clear as a brand. Laura watches as a college-age kid with abackwards ball cap and iodined arms entertains his girlfriend, mocking the towning ritualswhile waiting their turn to bob for apples.. . .She has come late to this affliction. Yet theyrecognize her too, despite the careful makeup that took her an hour to apply. They give herthat silent salute, eyes held too long in regrettable kinship.. . . It’s a best-foot-forward, thisquestioning gaze, this you, too? (Powers, 1998, p. 213)

In this passage, Laura’s vision of Lacewood’s cancer community is practicallyghoulish: the cancer patients and survivors she sees all around her are “eerie” and“branded,” and the stigmata of their illness makes their normal behavior seemgrotesque. What is especially unsettling to her is that the cancer patients aroundher are able to see through her own pretense of wellness; looking at them, Laurarealizes the futility of her own attempts to pass as healthy.

Even when she begins to perceive her “regrettable kinship” with this com-munity, Laura still rejects the idea that she has been poisoned by Clare until Doncomes to her with a trump card. He explains that the “experts” hired by the plain-tiffs’ lawyers have identified the Clare pesticide Laura has been using for yearson her beloved garden—Atra—as carcinogenic. Hearing this, Laura’s skepticismabout Clare’s role in her cancer vanishes. Briefly, she concurs with Don’s need forrevenge: “Sue them, she thinks. Every penny they are worth. Break them up forparts” (Powers, 1998, p. 320). But this flash of anger is only temporary: quickly,it is replaced by what Powers describes as “a weird dream of peace” (p. 320).Though she accepts that what Don has told her might be true, she also decides thatif Clare has made her ill, than perhaps this is all part of some equation she shouldnot tamper with. She concludes, “It makes no difference whether this businessgives her cancer. They have given her everything else. Taken her life and moldedit in every way imaginable” (p. 320).

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When Laura claims Clare has “taken her life and molded it in every wayimaginable,” she articulates the extent to which her identity has been constitutedby her encounters with commodity capitalism: her sense of herself is inextricablefrom her immersion in the consumer products she has embraced her entire life. Itis not simply that Laura has come to depend on a vast array of Clare products—thepesticide Atra as well as any number of Clare cleansers and unguents. More thanthis, Laura believes she was “born wanting” these products (p. 303). She has alsointernalized Clare’s advertising campaign; she “hums the [Clare] corporate themesong to herself without realizing it” (p. 7). In the face of evidence that she may ac-tually have been injured by Clare, she persists in her loyalty to a corporation whosemerchandise she has come to depend on. She thus rejects community affiliation—kinship with those similarly afflicted—in favor of commodity affiliation, a directidentification with the products of Clare.

Worn down by her illness and by her family’s insistent attempts to draw con-nections between Clare and cancer, Laura finally does begin to question the effectsof the vast number of the corporation’s products in her house. Returning homefrom the hospital one afternoon after radiation treatments, she walks weakly fromroom to room, enumerating the array of Clare chemicals she has used for cleaning:

Floor by Germ-Guard, windows by Cleer-Thru, table by Colonial-Cote. . . she vows a con-sumer boycott, a full spring cleaning. But the house is full of (Clare chemicals). . . thenewspapers, Don, the lawyers, everyone outraged at the offense. As if cancer just blew inthrough the window. Well if it did, it was an inside job. Some accomplice, opening the latchfor it. She brought them in by choice, toted them in a shopping bag. And she’d do it all overagain, given the choice. Would have to. (Powers, 1998, pp. 303–304)

Laura’s initial impulse is to boycott Clare chemicals, but this sentiment givesway to an acceptance of the inevitability of her own fate. This acceptance, in turn,leads her to detach herself from the retribution demanded by others. While “thenewspapers, Don, everyone” believe that Clare alone is responsible for poisoningher, Laura decides that she herself also must rank as a participant in the act. It is thiselement of Laura’s association with Clare—her belief that she is an “accomplice”in her fate—that is most responsible for causing her to withhold blame from thecorporation for whatever damage it may have done to her.

Laura’s conclusion that she is the victim of an “inside job” resonates with anearlier passage inGainthat likewise demonstrates Laura’s deep connection to Clareand faith in their products. During the earlier phase of her illness, Laura’s faithin Clare is such that she imagines consuming their cleansers to heal her insides.Encouraged by her doctors, Laura flirts with a series of visualization exercises inan effort to cure herself; after working through several affirmations in a cancer-visualization workbook, she turns to visualizing her own home-bred version ofchemotherapy:

[S]he releases a horde of animated rug cleaners, plaque fighters, scrubbing bubbles, thoseenzymes that come on like bug-eyes brushes, chasing the world’s deviant growths down

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the kitchen drain. This crack regimen of mixed specialists goes over and over her cartooninsides, washing, tumbling, coursing through all her organ’s nooks and crannies, until itleaves every internal surface with that see-yourself shine. (Powers, 1998, p. 243)

In this passage, Laura imagines herself unleashing Clare-bred chemicals inher system, chemicals that flush away the stain of cancer and leave her purified andwhole. The irony of this visualization is that she later concludes it iscancerwhichshe has let into her body, not cure; in fact, the very “horde” which she fantasizescould remove the cancer inside her might actually have precipitated it. And whenshe finally does realize this, she feels betrayed, not only by Clare Incorporated,but by her own credulous acceptance of Clare’s vital and positive role in her life.

This final realization comes only at the very end of Laura’s illness, when her“weird dream of peace” gives way to anger and despair at the irreparable damagedone to her body. Powers expresses Laura’s despair in a shattering, recurring dreamof treachery and rape:

Clare comes to take her out for dinner and dancing. A male, in mid-life, handsome, charming,well-built, well-meaning. He comes with an armload of flowers, thoughtful gifts, even apoem. He comes again and again, always finding her at home. But always, the night ofromantic dancing turns by evening’s end into desperate caresses, a brutal attack, date rape.(Powers, 1998, p. 344)

Laura’s dream, like many of her thoughts about Clare, is deeply conflicted.At first, it is a dream of reconciliation; then, it becomes a tale of romance gonedangerously awry. The rape that occurs is a “date rape” because Laura allows theseduction to begin, but it is all the more brutal because of the subterfuge involved,the pretense of sincere courtship.

This dream marks Laura’s final vision of Clare’s penetration of her body.Early in her illness, Laura imagines Clare products coursing though her diseasedsystem, washing her clean; later, she acknowledges the possibility of damage, butalso insists on her own culpability in this damage, her role as an “accomplice.” Herdream, which recurs in the final weeks of her life, seems to likewise suggest Laurais involved in her own destruction, but the narrative it provides is a tale of deceivedinnocence and thwarted promise. Conceiving of Clare as “well meaning” and“thoughtful,” Laura ends up ravaged and abandoned, dying without the attentionsof either real or imagined representatives of Clare.

But Powers suggests that Laura’s feeling that Clare has deceived and aban-doned her is an illusion, just like her feeling that Clare would sustain her—or thatClare would even, for that matter, acknowledge her. As Laura dies, the corpora-tion remains utterly unaware of her existence: even the lawsuit which might havebrought her to the attention of the company’s legal division is settled out of court.Since Don ultimately does convince Laura to join this lawsuit, her children Ellenand Tim receive the settlement money directly, making the loss of their motheralso an unanticipated moment of gain.

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Ironically, after Laura’s death Ellen and Tim find themselves linked to thelawsuits’ fellow petitioners by both shared loss and shared gains, members of acommunity that their mother had consistently refused. And Tim, at least, comes tothe realization that his mother was in fact not as alone as she imagined herself to be.At her funeral, he is astonished by the crowd of people in the church; afterwards, atthe reception at his father’s house, he notes that “everyone had cancer or knew threepeople who did” (Powers, 1998, p. 353). For both Ellen and Tim, the unswervingloyalty to Clare that had separated their mother from this community is hardly anoption.

In giving a brief account of the adult lives of Laura’s children, Powers endsGain with a surprising twist. Tim, we learn, becomes a medical researcher work-ing on computational formulas that might reveal sequencing codes for amino acidsand thus fight cancer at the cellular level. His research group manages to create aprogram revealing sequencing codes for proteins; as Powers explains, “the teamfound itself staring at a universal chemical assembly plant of the human cell”(p. 355). Euphoric, they decide to go into business officially, creating a start-upwith the ambitious aim of discovering a cure for cancer. Tim announces that hehas the necessary capital: “The settlement money had been compounding forever,waiting for a chance to revenge its earning. The sum was now huge, a consid-erable bankroll.. . .Softly, Tim suggested that it might be time to incorporate”(p. 355).

Tim’s discovery seems, on one hand, a sweeping gesture of narrative closure.Laura may have lost her life to cancer, but her son may now find the cure forall cancer—and he will finance it with her blood money, the settlement from thelawsuit. However, Tim’s suggestion “that it might be time to incorporate” evokesthe moment of Clare’s incorporation. There is a hint, in other words, of a pro-cess that the novel has revealed as deeply troubling beginning all over again. Likeso much ofGain, this ending is ultimately ambivalent, a closing image meantboth to comfort and unsettle the reader. We could, as readers, put this hint aside:there are vast differences between Tim’s intended corporation and Clare. But givenGain’s indictment of the commodity relations engendered by corporate capitalism,we can only cautiously, at best, celebrate the biotechnology firm that is born asthe novel ends. I would suggest that Powers is quite deliberate about instillingthis caution. After warning us of the dangers of pious faith in scientific inno-vation and corporate beneficence, he wants to remind us that there is no safeposition outside of science and capital from which to stage a resistance. We are all,Powers suggests, incorporated into the world we now inhabit; our task is not torefuse this world, but to recognize it for what it is. The tragedy of Laura’s mis-recognition of the relationship between people, corporations and commodities isas tragic as her death at a young age: both her cancer and her particular formof blindness, Powers tells us, are epidemics to be fought by the generations tofollow her.

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CONCLUSION

In [Safe] andGain, Carol and Laura gradually become aware of the existenceof an established illness community made up of individuals who share their symp-toms and have come to a particular understanding of how they have been made ill.This awareness, in turn, leads them to a different understanding of their illnessesthan that proffered by mainstream biomedicine, an understanding that does not sit-uate blame in Carol’s flawed mind or Laura’s flawed genes, but rather in an outsideagent: chemical contamination. In the end, however, this new understanding—andthe communities that provoke such reinterpretation of their somatic experiences—can supply neither cure nor solace for these two women. Carol White journeys in[Safe] from passive acceptance of her body’s place in that environment to activerevolt against what ails her, but the interpretive community she invests in furtherundermines her health. InGain, Powers’ protagonist resists membership in a com-munity of townspeople that would identify themselves as victims of environmentalcancer, thus depriving herself of an understanding of her disease which extendsbeyond her sense of her own body’s mortality.

What is the meaning, in these texts, of this failure of community? I wouldsuggest that we can “read” this failure on two levels. First, it seems that bothHaynes and Powers want to caution us that communities formed around the notionof illness are of necessity fraught, complicated not only by the fragility of theirindividual members, but by the difficulty such communities have in achieving aconsensus about the etiology and cure for disease. In this regard, they are in tunewith Lisa Cartwright, whose work on communities of breast cancer survivors hasserved in part to temper utopian speculations about communities based on diseaseof any kind. The communities that Carol and Laura encounter reveal the types offissures Cartwright documents in breast cancer communities. In [Safe], the NewAge rhetoric embraced by Peter Dunning ultimately overdetermines his responseto Carol’s illness, and thus what Carol embraces as her illness identity has less to dowith environmental illness, in the end, than with a disabling fable of self-making.And Cartwright’s point about the shifting self-identification of those who are illis evoked most powerfully inGain, where Laura’s need to cling to the world ofthe “healthy” keeps her distant from those who most resemble her: Lacewood’scancer community.

It would be an injustice to both [Safe] and Gain, however, to suggest thattheir representation of the complexities of illness community are intended solely orprimarily as cautionary tales for potential activists. Beyond this, both texts engagethe question of community on a more philosophical level, suggesting that thereare powerful social forces in late capitalist America that fracture the subjectivityof even the healthiest of us, forces that make conventional forms of communityperhaps inadequate to the demands of contemporary subjects. What might beneeded to heal the Carol Whites and Laura Bodeys among us is a reconsideration

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of the problem of subjectivity itself. Ultimately, Haynes and Powers want us torealize that whether or not it is the case that Carol and Laura have been made illby forces emanating from within rather than without, there is assuredly somethingin their makeup that has rendered them less than whole. This is not because theirsomatic conditions are reducible to mirrors of their psychic states, but because thedamage to both women may be deeper, and more constitutive, than the physicalmanifestations of their illnesses.

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Wesley.Triechler, P. (1999).How to have theory in an epidemic.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Tomatis, L. (1991).Cancer: Causes, occurrence and control.New York: Oxford University Press.

Documents

The Epidemiology of “Regrettable Kinship”: Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain