The Angel and the Freak: The Value of Childhood and Disability in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love

In Katherine Dunn's 1989 Geek Love, a novel full of evocative allusions to other texts, Chick Binewski seems strangely out of place.¹ Geek Love's extended critique of the myth of the perfect American family is telegraphed through the characters' names, each heavy with the weight of powerful stories in Western culture. The Binewski story takes on mythic proportions from the very beginning with a family patriarch who, godlike, designs his own children. He and his wife, down on their luck running a travelling carnival, set out to create a freak show peopled with their own offspring, nourished throughout pregnancy on a cocktail of "illicit and prescription drugs, insecticides, and eventually radioisotopes."² The results are, to say the least, remarkable. Two of those children are conjoined twins called Electra and Iphigenia, two names resonant with the vengeful sacrifices of Greek tragedy.³ The narrator Olympia (Oly for short) is a bald albino dwarf whose position as storyteller provides a narrative vantage point not unlike the ancient Greek gods watching earthly dramas unfold from Mount Olympus. The youngest son, however, has no such spectacular physical attributes; he's so disappointingly "normal" that his parents view him as a liability and nearly abandon him altogether. His eventual claim to freakery, which is the ability to move objects with his mind, remains largely invisible to outsiders. It's unlikely to be a coincidence, then, that this novel's anomalous character, the one who doesn't belong, is given the diminutive nickname Chick. Oly is notably mysterious about the origin of his name; she simply says that while his real name is Fortunato, "for one reason and another, we always called him Chick" (9).

Chick's sweet dissonance within this mythically dysfunctional family provides an entry point into the larger cultural dissonance the novel seeks to explore. Placing the freak show's brazen exhibitionism within a home that might otherwise earn traditionalist Phyllis Schlafly's seal of approval is a particularly skillful magic trick. Dunn keeps our eye on the shiny, attractive object—Chick, the innocent and beautiful child—to reveal that the vision of American life he represents is a particularly pernicious illusion. As a lovely nineteenth-century cherub stranded in a cutthroat twentieth-century domicile, Chick evokes a past fetishized throughout the 1980s by Christian conservatives—a world in which the child occupies the pinnacle of the private and functions as the affective center of a home ruled solely by love, walled off from the harsh bargains demanded by the outside world.⁴

Chick references a figure not from Greek myth, but from American film. A nod to the feathered figure that opens Tod Browning's classic 1933 film Freaks, Chick is the exception that illuminates the rule. The points of intersection between Browning's Freaks and Dunn's novel have been well noted by critics.⁵ On the most fundamental level, both film and novel are an insider's look into the freak show; as such they are meditations on a site in American culture where the bounds of the liberal individual are both subverted and reinforced, and in which bodies are commodified as subjects of fear and desire. Freaks made waves for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the use of actual freak show performers as actors. The film opens with a barker spinning a tale about a particularly shocking freak, a half bird, half-human figure. "And now folks," the barker calls, "if you'll just step this way, you are about to witness the most amazing, the most astounding living monstrosity of all time!"⁶ The camera teases us, focusing on the viewer's reaction rather than showing us the freak behind the curtain. Her true monstrosity is not revealed until the final scenes of the film. We look down into a nest, to find a giant bird, with a woman's face.

Incapable of speech, the creature merely squawks unhappily at the viewers. According to the barker, Venus's transformation from a beautiful woman to the...