The Elements of a Life: Lauren Redniss’s Graphic Biography of Marie Curie

This article explores how Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout ( 2010 ) uses expressive drawings, lettering, layouts, tableaus, colour, photographs and archival documents to challenge traditional biographical conventions. Drawing on art history, comics studies, feminist science history, and biography theory, it proposes that Radioactive initially invites readers into the pleasures of intimate knowledge of a complex female figure through alluring hand-drawn visual sequences that recreate both Curie’s era and aura. However, this romanticized and even eroticized view of the subject shifts as the graphic biography of Marie Curie transforms into the graphic biography of her primary discovery, the element radium, and the later twentieth century tragedies of atomic warfare and nuclear fallout. The article concludes that Radioactive is an experiment in graphic biography that highlights how the border between the seen and the unseen cuts across atomic science, biographical narrative, and visual storytelling.

ing with archival research, cultural history, and experiments in graphic biography.
In Radioactive, Redniss blends modernist-influenced line drawings, emotionally resonant colours, expressive lettering, and archival documents to draw Curie at the centre of various personal and scientific networks, into which she also folds herself (images and supplemental material associated with Radioactive may be viewed at the archived exhibit page hosted by The New York Public Library: http://exhibitions. nypl.org/radioactive/).
Radioactive pushes the generic rules of biography in a visual narrative that is less concerned with the genre's typical conventions of the authoritative narrator and the autonomous self than with using elements of visual documentation and display to convey a sense of Curie's persona as much as the facts of her person. This intimate approach is particularly evident when Radiocative's portrayal of Curie is contrasted to another recent graphic biography, The Radium Fairy, by Chantal Montellier, which takes a third person and more detached view of Curie's life. While visually dramatic and at times surrealistic, Montellier adheres to biography's conventional linearity and avoids speculating on its subject's interior life. Conversely, Redniss breaks with biographical tradition to produce a graphic example of 'the new biography,' a term life writing scholars use to describe a cluster of practices in prose biography, notably "the relaxing of constraints of evidence, greater use of such storytelling forms as dialogue and setting, and the introduction of uncertainty or speculation" (Smith and Watson 2010: 298).
In what follows, Radioactive serves as the main case study to ask how the visual form of graphic biography, with all of its gaps, tensions, and juxtapositions, might be particularly well suited to the new biography's project to subvert what Pierre Bourdieu terms the "biographical illusion" of a coherent, knowable life story told objectively by an authoritative narrator (Bourdieu 2000). Drawing on art history, comics studies, feminist science history, biography theory, and a brief discussion of how Montellier's The Radium Fairy takes an alternate approach to Curie's graphic biography, I propose that Radioactive initially invites readers into the pleasures of intimate knowledge of a complex female figure through alluring hand-drawn visual sequences that recreate both Curie's era and aura. But, this romanticized and even eroticized view Rifkind: The Elements of a Life Art. 1, page 3 of 19 of the subject shifts as Redniss's graphic biography of Marie Curie transforms into the graphic narrative of her primary discovery, the element radium, and the later twentieth century tragedies of atomic warfare and nuclear fallout. Redniss thereby pivots the visual narrative from the conventional topic of biography -the subject's intriguing life -to the posthumous narrative of the consequences of her lifetime's work in order to construct a relational and self-reflexive graphic biography. In so doing, Redniss draws Curie at the centre of an ever-expanding web of social relations during and after her life, and across time and space.

I. An Impossible Icon: The Marie Curie Image
There is a long history of Curie biographies in prose, comics, popular culture, and film going back nearly a century. In her lifetime, magazine coverage and the early celebrity industry participated in her biomythologization. The first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win it twice, and the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, Curie's professional achievements are extraordinary. As well, she was lionized in her lifetime for the applications of her work to cancer treatment, and it was widely understood that the purpose of her radioactivity research was medical, not political or military (Hellman 1992: 39-41).
Her biomythology as a great woman scientist intensified with the 1937 biography, Madame Curie: A Biography, written by her daughter, Eve Curie, to manage her mother's image. Picture books and comics about Marie Curie are almost too numerous to count, exist in many languages, and often elicit nostalgic memories of childhood reading and inspiration. The late 1940s Classics Illustrated series, "Pioneers of Science," included Curie in its comics biographies of great scientists from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century (Jones 2011: 137). Even when she was alive, women formed the main audience of Curie's fundraising tours and speaking events, and this gendering of her reception has long positioned her as a role model for girls.
The March-April 1946 issue of Wonder Woman (Vol. 16) features a short comic strip biography, "Wonder Women of History: Marie Curie" (https://wonder-woman. fandom.com/wiki/Wonder_Women_of_History). As Tim Hanley explains, the "Wonder Women of History" series ran throughout the 1940s Golden Age and consisted of four-page strips drawn in a realistic and historically accurate style. Hanley summarizes the narrative pattern each strip followed, whether it was about a famous or lesser known woman: "the subject overcame some kind of adversity, usually related to her gender, and ultimately accomplished something of great importance.
They were heroic stories, and showed how one woman could have a big impact and influence the world" (2014: 76). The message was clear: girls do not need to have superpowers like Wonder Woman to be successful and make a difference. In Britain, the 1959 issue of the British magazine Girl, "seen by comics historians as a watershed," also included a comic strip biography of Marie Curie (Gibson 2015: 49).
Comics scholar Mel Gibson observes that Curie was an ideal subject for a post-war magazine seeking to provide middle-class British girls with activities and role models of appropriate girlhood and womanhood.
But even these instructive comics for young readers prove more complicated than they initially seem. On the one hand, they construct edifying stories to encourage girls into the sciences. On the other hand, even the most didactic examples do not shy away from her private life, especially her romantic and professional relationship with Pierre Curie. As Naomi Pasachoff notes: It would seem that enduring public interest in Curie's life is primarily due to the deeply dramatic narrative arc of her life. Her life, if it were a novel, might seem to suffer from a surfeit of plot lines: the motherless child, the Polish patriot, the self-abnegating daughter and sister, the driven expatriate student, the reluctant bride, and the single mother, with a juicy adultery scandal thrown in for good measure. The public appears to like its science seasoned with lots of spice. (2005: 377-78) For most of the twentieth century, Curie biographies were peppered with gendered clichés that turned her into an icon of an impossible femininity. Julie Des Jardins describes the impact on subsequent female scientists of what she calls the "Marie Curie complex": "the notion that women in science feel pressured to embody sacrifice, motherhood, devotion, altruism, and humanitarianism and simultaneously, to excel at science through objectivity and detachment" (2010: 43-44). In keeping with the superhero comics culture developing in parallel to the educational comics culture of the post-war period, Curie was presented to the American public of the time as "a superwoman, too smart, too dedicated, too focused, and too talented to be emulated by ordinary women" (2010: 44). She was a wonder woman of the laboratory, saving humanity through her superhuman intellect, persistence, and sacrifice.
And, like many superheroes, the "Curie Complex" proposed a divided figure: a serious scientist by day and a doting mother by night.

II. Science and Seduction: Radioactive's Visual Style
A new era of biographical interest and attempts to redraw Curie's private persona began in 1990, when the embargo was lifted on the personal, and often poetic, writing in her workbooks, letters, and diary of the pivotal year after Pierre's accidental death. Radioactive is part of this shift, as it enters and dramatically interrupts the Curie biomythology in its depiction of Marie as a sensual and sexual woman as well as a brilliant scientist. As a result, Radioactive is a hard book to classify. It falls somewhere between comic book, artist's book, and scrapbook. It has also been remediated into an online exhibit at the website of the New York Public Library, and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi announced in 2017 that she is adapting the book into a screenplay (Radioactive 2011; Booth 2017).
As a print graphic biography, Radioactive combines visual technologies of display with the genre of science biography to make visible the hidden energies of radioactivity, as well as the unseen elements of Marie Curie's life. In his study of French graphic biographies about well-known artists, Thierry Groensteen suggests this subgenre is uniquely challenging because the life of the artist is difficult to construct without also reproducing their art, often resulting in tensions between painting and comics (2017). Cartoonists drawing the lives of modern scientists face the opposite conundrum to those drawing artists' biographies. Instead of having to reproduce the subject's own artistic works, they must find ways to communicate their subjects' scientific accomplishments that are often, especially in the case of atomic research, invisible to the human eye. Various imaging techniques, from radiography to ultrasound, might find their way into science graphic biographies, and diagrams are an important visual tool for science educators and cartoonists alike (Rifkind 2015).

This unique visual challenge of making visible the invisible is explicit in
Radioactive from the very beginning. The Prologue is a hand-lettered reproduction of the pioneering American modern dancer Loïe Fuller's "Lecture on Radium" (January 20, 1911). Fuller is famous for her luminescent costumes and experiments with chemical compounds for stage lighting that brought late Victorian scientific developments onto the avant-garde stage. Redniss explains later that, like "a moth to the Curies' flame, Loïe Fuller came to dance in their home" (2010: 64).
Her Prologue lecture describes radium as a one of "nature's magics"; the element is magical because it was, at the time, a mystery to human understanding (Fuller qtd. in Redniss 2010: 7). Fuller then turns from magic and mysteries to evidence and belief: "If Radium can bring to our vision those things which we cannot see (as it does the atom), its influence cannot be measured on materialists who say, 'I'll believe when I see' […] We may not believe, but we do not know that we should not believe!" (2010: 7). In one sense, this Prologue summarizes Curie's life project to reveal radium's properties through laboratory-intensive experiments and evidencebased scientific method. In another sense, Redniss sets up her own artistic project to make visible the invisible sensations of life experience as well as the threads that connect individuals to each other through time and across space. Redniss thus reconstructs the life and legacy of Marie Curie in a graphic biography that crosses aesthetic and genre boundaries to represent its primary subject as a figure at once spectral and luminous, present and absent.
Radioactive draws Curie as a ghostly figure who haunts the atomic age she helped to launch, while she is also a complex example of the female scientist caught Depicting Curie in relation to her male professional and romantic partners clearly genders the story of her scientific life; it is a narrative strategy the many prose and graphic biographies of Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman, and other male scientists resist. Despite its contemporary view of Marie's sexuality, in many ways Radioactive reproduces the history of Curie biographies that oscillate between admiring hagiography of a strong woman and empathetic victimology of a wasting woman who was, ironically, destroyed by the substance she discovered.
While I agree with many reviewers that Redniss romanticizes Curie on several levels -she becomes both an erotic figure and an idealized one -I also believe that Radioactive is at once visually seductive and ideologically complex, and that it highlights how the border between the seen and the unseen cuts across atomic science, biographical narrative, and visual storytelling. It's about radioactivity, these things that we can't see, and so to make a visual book about that was an intriguing challenge for me" ("The Twilight Softness" 2011).

III. From Dream to Nightmare: Chantal Montellier's The Radium Fairy
Predictably, Redniss's mystification of Curie's work has irritated some historians of science. Physicist Sharon Stephenson points out that Redniss ignores the fact that

Rifkind: The Elements of a Life
Art. 1, page 9 of 19 radioactivity can be seen with the right technology, just not by the human eye, and that perhaps scientists like her, who "understand Marie Curie's world, a world of data, of graphs, of precision and accuracy, are the only ones who should hold her dear" (2016: 36). This is a classic tug-of-war over biographical authority and authentic representation, between scientific history and cultural history, and Stephenson's comment also betrays her irritation with Redniss's feminized and mystifying rendering of Curie's relationship to her science. That these two graphic biographies employ very different styles to tell the same story supports the respective artists' narrative investments as well as their visual auteurism. Montellier draws Pierre as a political radical and humanitarian inspired by  scientific imagery; instead, Redniss uses earth and blood tones that recall the vibrant reds of the erotic scenes, thereby reminding us that Marie is a physical woman in a vulnerable body. Her luminosity is replaced by her spectrality; her near invisibility is rendered visible in a pastiche of the very x-ray technology she helped to develop.

IV. After-Effects: Radioactive as a Relational Graphic Biography
The as private commemoration (labor of love)" (2011: 634). Both of these sub-genres of science biography risk too much attachment between author and subject, such that reverence can produce hagiography rather than critical inspection. Although he is referring to prose biographers of living scientists, Söderqvist's comments about emotional attachment are productive for thinking about how graphic biography can use drawing, layouts, colour, pastiche, and lettering to transgress the conventional boundaries between biographer and subject, commemoration and critique.
He writes: One can hardly set out to write a biography without being in some way emotionally involved with the central figure. But one has to work hard on establishing a more distant yet attentive stance in the process of writing.
The final result should emerge as a happy divorce: the book should be a certification that the writer has freed herself or himself from the central As much as Radioactive is both a eulogy and a labour of love, it also breaks many of the rules of prose science biographies to question what it means for the writer/ artist to "free herself" from the subject. Drawing herself into the page formallyfrom the medium of cyanotypes to the invention of a typeface -allows Redniss to perform the role of in/visible biographer. She enters herself self-reflexively into the scenes of biography, drawing her attachment to Marie Curie in the verbal and visual signs, traces, and shadows of her subject's life on the page. At the same time, Radioactive is as much the life story of radium as it is of Marie Curie.
In her depictions of how radioactivity shapes our current world, Redniss implies that it is impossible for any of us to free ourselves from her central figure, that a "neutral detachment" towards Marie Curie would demand detachment from twentieth century atomic history, nuclear medicine, and even comic books (Söderqvist 2011: 643).
Ultimately, the pleasures of Radioactive's pages, its seductive pulls on the reader into its intimate imagery, quirky anecdotes, and affecting stories, masks some of its more insurgent strategies to reanimate the image of one of the world's most famous women as both luminous icon and spectral shadow. Radioactive -like both Curie and radium -is not always what it seems: Redniss produces a visually virtuosic study of a woman to whom she is both deeply attached and whose life narrative comes with the hindsight of the horrors of atomic weaponry and nuclear fallout.