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

Abstract

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.