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This essay examines the representations of the urban environment as a challenge by

hegemonic American discourses, providing the example of the narrative of the Batman villain
Poison Ivy, personified by Beatrice Rappaccini. The discussion first focuses the anti-urban
bias in U.S. American culture, which can be identified in both in metaphysical and secular
ways of perception. With the biblical conception of urbanity as a dichotomy of Celestial City
versus Sodom and Gomorrah causing people to search for otherness outside the center of
civilization, the collapse of the frontier as an imaginary boundary between order and
wilderness resulted in the emergence of the city as contested space. It is argued that the
otherness and deviancy portrayed by the fictional Batman character Poison Ivy can be
perceived as an embodiment of the frontier, representing disorder and the cultural other,
reappearing in the American city.