Chapter I- Chapter I- “Was I then a monster”: Deterritorialization, Personhood and Kinship: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
1.1 Introduction
In January 2018, the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and Center for Science and Imagination (Arizona State University) celebrated the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus that was published in 1st January 1818 in order to honor and acknowledge the novel’s relevance in the current culture of biotechnology. Shelley’s Frankenstein dramatizes the life of Victor Frankenstein whose attempt to bioengineer a human being by gathering biomatter from anonymous sources has continued to trigger bioethical debates especially in the field of transplantation surgery and artificial reproductive technology (ART). Stuart F. Youngner interprets Victor Frankenstein’s progeny’s “jigsaw body”1 as an external manifestation of “the dark side”2 of the organ transplantation procedure that defies our normative understanding of the body as an organic whole, thus demonstrating the monstrosity embedded in the narratives of biotechnological practices. Shelley’s Frankenstein may be interpreted as the “founding myth of transplantation surgery and of its ability to defy the laws of nature together with the complex hybridization process that this same ability puts in place”.3Frankenstein fictionally explores and demonstrates the monstrosity embedded in the narratives of biotechnological practices.
In an article entitled “Why Frankenstein Matters” (2018) anesthesiologist Audrey Shafer argues that Shelley’s Frankenstein may be considered as the first major work in the
1Stuart F. Youngner, “Organ Retrieval: Can we Ignore the Dark Side?” Transplantation Proceedings 22.4 (1990): 1014-1015.
2Ibid.
3Sara Damiani, “Unthinkable Hybrid: The Somatic Unconscious of the Transplanted Body,” in Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Raul Calzoni and Greta Perletti (Germany: V& R Unipress, 2015): 260.
science fiction genre that is not merely a tale of scientific hubris, rather “it also presents a framework for narratively examining the morality and ethics of the experimentation and experimenter”.4Shafer says that the novel Frankenstein offers a fictional medium in order to explore bioethical issues related to the domain of “genetic engineering, tissue engineering, transplantation, transfusion, artificial intelligence, robotics, bioelectronics, virtual reality, cryonics, synthetic biology and neural networks”.5In a similar vein, Catherine Belling discusses the novel as the first work of fiction that addresses bioethical issues generated by the creation of lives in the laboratories.6Shelley offers voice to the creature who narrates his tragic life narrative without being over shadowed by the anthropomorphic views of its creator. Susan Lanser’s essay interprets the novel as a complex commentary on the notion of body politics that was evolving as a socio-political phenomenon in eighteenth-century England by dramatizing Victor Frankenstein’s creature’s bioengineered status that triggers questions such as – “who will participate in the civil society, in what ways and with what rights. Who shall have public power and whose interests shall be considered”? 7
Victor Frankenstein’s relationship with his unnamed progeny in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has been interpreted by a range of researchers and scholars through the lenses of postcolonial theory, feminism, lesbian and queer theory and psychoanalytic theory. Drawing on Marilyn Butler’s argument in “Frankenstein and Radical Sciences” (1993) that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is “famously reinterpretable”, one may state that the novel- whose presence in literary criticism and popular culture alike has only grown in time- offers a remarkably rich range of literary and cultural interpretations.8American feminist Ellen Moers argues that Shelley’s Frankenstein is to a large extent informed by the author’s tragic experiences as a young, unwed mother of a baby
4Audrey Shafer, “Why Frankenstein Matters: Frontiers in Science, Technology, & Medicine,” Stanford Medicine (2018), accessed on March 8 2018. http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2018winter/why-issues-raised-in- Frankenstein-still-matter-200-years-later.html.
5Ibid.
6Catherine Belling, “Introduction: From Bioethics and Humanities to Biohumanities?” Literature and Medicine 34.1 (2016): 1-6.
7Susan S. Lanser, “The Novel Body Politics,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 483.
8Marilyn Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science,” in Frankenstein, edited by J. Paul Hunter (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 302.
who died at an infant state.9Moers interprets the novel as a “birth myth” that is enmeshed with the sense of revulsion that evolves out of Shelley’s inability to procreate a healthy son and heir for P.B. Shelley and her guilt for being the cause of her mother’s death.10 Moers states that the literary piece dramatizes the abnormality and monstrosity hidden in the parent- child relationship. Scholars like Margaret Homan and Barbara Johnson have discussed Shelley’s Frankenstein as a critique of the institution of parenthood.11 Like Moers, Johnson argues that the bioscientist Frankenstein’s abhorrence for his progeny as dramatized in the novel foregrounds the interrelationship between parenting and monstrosity. The novel foregrounds the problematic around the politics of procreation and parenting, juxtaposing the bionormative model with a super-scientific one, while revealing how both are informed by masculinist fantasies of creation, control, and coercion. Johnson while discussing Shelley’s Frankenstein states:
It is the story of two antithetical modes of parenting that give rise to two increasingly parallel lives- the life of Victor Frankenstein, who is the beloved child of two doting parents, and the life of the monster he single-handedly creates, who is immediately spurned and abandoned by his creator. The fact that in the end both the characters reach an equal degree of alienation and self-torture and indeed become indistinguishable as they pursue each other across the frozen polar wastes indicates that the novel is among other things is a story of impossibility of finding an adequate model of what a parent should.12
Drawing on Homan and Johnson’s argument about the critique of patriarchy and family- institution in Mary Shelley’s novel, this chapter would like to extend the same onto an examination of the bioethics of procreation in the context of current cultures of bioengineering. The first part of the chapter seeks to examine the epistemological mutation in the domain of medical science as captured in Shelley’s Frankenstein.13The notion of epistemological mutation is introduced and explained by Nikolas Rose in The Politics of Life Itself (2007) as the transition in the socio-cultural and medico-legal meaning of life. The
9Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” in Literary Women, 90-110 (New York: Doubleday, 1976), accessed on 5November 2017.http://www4.ncsu.edu/~leila/documents/MoersEllen_FemaleGothic_.pdf.
10Ibid., 92.
11See Margaret Homan, “Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal,” in Bearing the World: Language and the Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 100-119. See also Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/ My Self,” Diacritics, 12 (Summer 1992), 2-10.
12Johnson, “My Monster/Myself,” 2.
13Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 41.
essay proposes to study the novel as a literary piece that throws light on the transition in the biomedical practices from healing a diseased body to controlling and engineering the human body into a perfect progeny, an attempt that appears to anticipate modern medical practices in bioengineering. Caroline Mosser argues that “Shelley presents a narrative that explores the possible consequences of a successful actualization of the new biological science’s desire to create and re-create new life”.14Frankenstein’s creation of a human being through technology offers an ontological change in the notion of life structurally similar to the technocratic biomedical practices performed in the era of genetic engineering. The process of artificially creating a bioscientific creature by gathering biomaterial from anonymous sources and Frankenstein’s ability to pre-select the biological features of the being appears to anticipate the baby making procedures practised in the domain of artificial reproductive technology (ART).
The second and third sections of the chapter seek to examine how the novel offers a fictional engagement with the ethical issues that have emerged with the development of ART that has challenged the normative understanding of procreation and kinship. Frankenstein’s monster problematizes the normative understanding of family-making that conceives family as a heterosexual unit with children who are genetically, biologically, socially, and legally related to their parents. Frankenstein’s progeny emerges as a trans-species being who transgresses the normative understanding of being a human and hence is abandoned by his creator as he fails to acknowledge him as a member of his community. The essay will examine how the desired transhumanist perfection of Victor Frankenstein’s bioscientific imaginary becomes a failed project paradoxically due to an extreme embodiment of masculinity and rationality that makes his progeny posthumanist and transgressive, blurring the borderlines between scientific “sublimity and monstrosity” in Mary Shelley’s novel.15The chapter will conclude its argument by throwing light on Frankenstein as a complex literary
14Caroline Mosser, “Artificial Creation of Life and What It Means to be a Human”, 74.
15 Avishek Parui, “Masculinity, Monstrosity, and Sustainability in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” in Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780-1830, edited by Ben P. Robertson, 187-198 (New York:
Lexington Books, 2015) 189. See also, Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota, 2010) for a better explanation of the concepts of posthumanism and transhumanism. In his book, Wolfe explains Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that encourages the practice of biomedical intervention into human body for enhancing intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities with an aim to enhance and perfect the Humanistic and Enlightenment principles of logic and reason that constitutes the notion of the perfect human self underpinned in the Cartesian cogito. It thus aims to expand the human life span and to perfect human attributes embedded in and overdetermined by Eurocentric understandings of life and reason. Posthumanism on the other hand interrogates the Humanist and Enlightenment ideologies that offer a binaristic understanding of the man, animal, and machine. It thus problematizes an anthropocentric understanding of the life-world and rejects any primacy of Cartesian consciousness and reason.
text that enables us to reflect on how not acknowledging the bioengineered being as a member of the moral community by Frankenstein leads to the conversion of the progeny as a monstrous social outcast. The dramatization of socio-cultural and political status of the artificial human being offers scope to speculate on the bioethical issues associated with the use of ART in a society embedded in an anthropomorphic understanding of life and life forms.