Super Spreader

Abstract People today live in a world that encourages spread and growth. Even as the globe faces an unprecedented series of climate disasters, people keep expecting the tools of capitalism to somehow free them from the consequences of capitalism itself. Audre Lorde famously critiqued this strategy as hoping the “master’s tools” will “dismantle the master’s house.” This article covers Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Bram Stoker’s The White Worm to reveal how nineteenth century thinkers grappled with these same dilemmas and provided surprisingly useful alternatives to these individualistic and technocratic solutions. Moreover, by focusing on the ways they imagine their characters out of these dilemmas outside of the bounds of growth, development, and progress, the nineteenth century offers us a useful case study to our own collective existential dilemma.