Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 43

Male/Scientist in Sw am p Thing

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inexplicable in scientific terms and immune to technological manipulation—in
short, a world too large for the male imagination to confine or delineate according
to objective or mechanistic models. This is emphatically not Alec Holland’s world;
it has transcended that reality.
Yet, for a couple of reasons, Swamp Thing can never actually embrace what
he has become or where he has come to. First, the rhetoric of the book works
against him. More than once he is described as a “moss-encrusted mockery” (4.4),
a “monster” (4.8, 7.3), a “huge, shambling, moss-encrusted monstrosity” (10.1),
as if to focus us emphatically not on what he is but on what he is not: a human
being. Even at the very end of the book, when he must again battle Arcane (who
has himself become something monstrous and inhuman), they refer to each other
repeatedly as “Arcane” and “Holland” (10.12-10.15), as if the scientific paradigms
they once labored under allow them to disregard their senses. What they are is
unthinkable according to any rational model; they are therefore justified in ignoring
it, while clinging to urgent dreams of being human. In this way, Swamp Thing is
imprisoned not so much in his body as in the forward momentum of the gothic
romance myth at the heart of the narrative: Frankenstein/Holland is the monster/
Swamp Thing and the monster/Swamp Thing is Frankenstein/Holland, no matter
how hard they might try to deny it or to sever themselves from each other.
Equally constricting to Swamp Thing are the assumptions about masculinity
embedded in this comic book, as in virtually all superhero comic books and in
American culture at large. According to Mary Rosner and Georgia Rhoades, the
traditional masculine paradigm endorses conflict, a two-category world (male/
female, subject/object, reason/emotion), authority, and competition (82) as
inevitable and even desirable. Cooper Thompson suggests that toughness,
aggressiveness, independence (or alienation, at its extreme), a disinclination to
nurture (586-587), and an inability “to cherish life” (591) also contribute to
definitions of the traditional male. Dark Genesis primarily recounts stories of an
alienated wanderer whose authority derives from the unquestioned rightness of his
actions (good vs. evil) and from his aggression and strength. In every chapter of
the