The American author and artist Henry Darger, Jr. (1892–1973) lived in almost total seclusion for most of his adult life, earning subsistence income as a hospital custodian. His real life’s work, discovered posthumously, is the 15,145 page, single-spaced, illustrated manuscript for The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger’s epic and its accompanying graphics depict a fantasy universe in which the heroic Vivian Girls, young hermaphroditic sisters endowed with magical powers, venture to protect their world from attack by invading soldiers who ravage and dismember the enslaved little children inhabiting “the Realms.” The troublesomeness of Darger’s plots and highly descriptive scenes of violence in combination with his astonishing hypergraphia have elevated In the Realms to cult status, and have made Darger’s work synonymous with “outsider art.”

The preceding synopsis gives one enough of an idea about Darger’s disturbing subject matter to imagine the pathologizing interpretations that have been attributed to him. Standard accounts of Darger have treated his bizarre work as the evidence of mental illness, perhaps even as the sublimation of a repressed tendency toward pedophilia or serial murder. In Darger’s Resources, Michael Moon instead advances a contextual history of this unconventional artwork. “Rather than seeing his work as providing us a window into a deeply disturbed psyche,” Moon writes, “we can take it as a series of views of many of the successes and pleasures of twentieth-century mass culture, as well as of the massive and recurrent racial, ethnic, and sexual violence perpetrated during the same period” (20). Moon’s interpretation stresses Darger’s appropriation of themes and characters from the vernacular culture of the early twentieth century. By offering these material alternatives—Catholic kitsch, violent juvenilia, comic strips, pulp fiction—Moon portrays an artist who was eccentric but not necessarily criminal or insane. Accordingly, Darger’s Resources reads primarily as a work of cultural studies, its theoretical foundation clearly set upon Foucaultian analysis of the social construction of delinquency.

Moon’s short book contains four chapters, each of which deploys key parallels between Darger’s work and other mass or marginal practices and literary figures. The ultimate goal is to reframe Darger as a sensitive arbiter of cultural forms. The first chapter lays out the methodological pattern of the book. Here, Moon illuminates the surprising commonality of the violent martyred-virgin narrative in midcentury, vernacular Roman Catholic devotional culture, one in which Darger was immersed (he attended Mass several times daily) and most likely influenced his writing. With this new perspective, Moon tells the reader that these stories about saintly young girls’ ability to protect holy relics while being raped and eviscerated by demons may seem shocking, but are less an effect of the author’s own will to torture. Moon’s careful observation of names and places within Darger’s text unleashes insightful linguistic associations that interleave eloquently into his historical analyses. He posits that Darger’s own first name sounds like the names of his child heroines that often in turn resonate with that of religious figures with potent devotional followings: “The major characters of In the Realms betoken a close identification on ‘Henry’s’ part . . . with the various Annies and Jennies who undergo martyrdom in his text, as well as with the virgin martyrs [Saint] Agnes and Joan [of Arc], whose names Darger’s heroines cite and revise” (38). By working in between cultural history and microscopic linguistic slippages, Moon makes Darger’s authorial voice coherent. In the Realms emerges as deeply and painfully autobiographical.

This brings me to what Darger’s Resources does best. Moon’s nuanced, insightful, and compassionate interpretations of gender expression are exemplary. Why, for example, does Darger identify with the female heroes drawn from Catholic devotional tracts and catechistic plays? Moon speculates that Darger, as a bookish and almost certainly misunderstood young person, probably endured bouts of teasing by his male peers for being a “sissy” (a word that also appears as a subject of debate in a subplot of In the Realms). Thus his valorization of girl heroes is a projection: “If little girls can not only show valor on the battlefield but can also, at least sometimes, outwit and even outmaneuver gangs of male bullies, maybe sissy boys have a chance in the battle of life, too” (39). Even if the reader rejects this psychoanalytic argument, Moon’s address of male effeminacy in a way that does not necessarily rely on sexuality (and especially a straight/gay binary) is commendably modern. In the third chapter, Moon narrates the fascinating history of Darger’s friendship with William Schloeder, a childhood friend, with whom Darger attempted to become adoptive parents of a daughter. Moon writes: “We may anachronistically assume that the rejection of Darger and Schloeder’s bid to adopt was in some sense fueled by what we would call homophobia.” In fact, it was not, but rather that “genuine maternity [was] the indispensable characteristic couples needed to qualify as adoptive parents . . . at the time” (82; emphasis in original). Moments like this reprove pat conceptions of homosexuality, homosociality, and the history of the family. I second literary critic Christopher Nealon’s back-cover praise of Darger’s Resources in that it will “expand the vocabulary of queer theory in an urgently needed way”—a way that recasts light on queerness as a stance oppositional to entrenched norms.

The book’s preface makes it clear that Moon wants his book to find its way into the hands of art historians. He ceremoniously cites the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s citation of Darger in Ninfe (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007), in which Agamben addresses Aby Warburg’s analysis of the publicly and privately resonant meanings of certain biblical and apocryphal figures in Italian Renaissance art (x). Moon’s nested citations are tough to manage, but his larger point is that an exploration of the margins of visual studies permits us to see afresh what is and what has always been freakish and upsetting about art history’s canonical works. This important project loses momentum when Moon discusses Darger in the context of mass culture at the expense of other creative contexts. For instance, the third chapter suggests a tentative link between the idea of adoption and appropriation in collage, which I think is full of promise. But what larger revision might the study of Darger’s appropriation of newspaper clippings contribute to the discourse of Dada? Or Surrealism—a movement in which adherents simulated hypergraphia as a method of automatism? Granted these movements were anemic in the United States in comparison to Europe, but that begs the question: what is it about visualizing madness that both seduces and alienates American viewership? Similarly, given Moon’s celebration of Darger as an artist of the working class, a reference to the contemporaneous Ashcan School of illustrators and painters would be at least as appropriate as the stated references to Agamben and Warburg.

Precisely because of the capaciousness of Moon’s deconstructive imagination, I was disappointed not to read more about Darger’s locality in Chicago as a “text” in his analysis. I wondered about Darger’s everyday, street-level experience as “resources”: his job at Children’s Memorial Hospital and what his custodial labor entailed; his home at 851 West Webster Street, and its architecture inside and out; the places where he bought, borrowed, or bartered for the newspapers that he clipped and made into illustrations for his novel; and what he might have thought about the German- and Polish-identified neighborhood that his section of Lincoln Park had been before World War II, and its many demographic and economic transitions he no doubt saw over the course of his lifetime. Darger’s footfalls are too much alluded to and not heard enough in Moon’s scholarly work.

Ultimately, we can all admire Moon’s imperative to redeem Darger from the pathologizing interpretations of the past. That said, there is another identity for the artist that one might not ascertain from reading Moon’s book: Darger the hero. When In the Realms was discovered, it was the subject of genuine admiration by Chicago artists in the seventies and eighties. Darger was lauded for having developed a type of Surrealism indigenous to the Midwest. His studio was deemed important enough to preserve on permanent display at Chicago’s Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. His home, now under different ownership in a drastically transformed neighborhood, still remains the object of hipster pilgrimage. Naturally there will be some that ward Darger away as warped and dangerous, and just as naturally there will be others who identify with his struggles—those who are willing to adopt him.