Motherless creations have ancient roots. God creates Adam alone and Eve from Adam’s rib in Genesis, and Zeus gives birth to Athena from his head, for example. Even the Biblical story of Mary suggests “the potency of the male creative force.”¹ The Classical “one-sex model” of reproduction argues that woman provides passive matter from which the male seed generates life. This concept comes from Aristotle, a major influence on medicine in this period.² Part 1 argues that wariness about women’s wombs as suitable places for gestation motivated the master plot of male parthenogenesis or asexual reproduction.

Chapter 1 explores the main rationale for eliminating mothers from creating life: their inability to control their imaginations. Debates concerning maternal imagination or impressions centered on fetal development.³ Texts dispensing advice about family planning, the anecdotes of embryologists, and ostensible case studies of congenital disabilities led physicians, natural philosophers, and fathers to distrust the mother’s role during pregnancy. In tall tales about how life began, mothers played the role of antagonists. Mothers’ wayward imaginations risked bringing malformed, diseased infants into the world, whereas the male seed contained perfectly formed children that resembled motherless creations: homunculi, little men. Women’s ostensibly poor control over their imaginations likely served as a cover for concerns about their apparent emotionality and intellectual deficiencies.

Chapter 2 explores the second justification for eliminating mothers from narratives about creation: man’s apparent mastery over technology, represented by the most prevalent motherless creation of the long eighteenth century (ca. 1650–1800), the automaton. If the body were a machine, as Descartes and the mechanistic philosophers put forward, then men who understood technology could operate it more efficiently than most people. The male midwife’s mechanical tools—so-called birthing machines and forceps—helped advance the field that would be known after 1813 as obstetrics.⁴ These tools distinguished the work of male midwives from female midwives. The inventor Jacques de Vaucanson took his work a step further by advertising his automata as expressions of divine design. Although grounded in inauthentic models of anatomy, mastery over technology seemed to forecast the thrilling ability to control life itself.

A tale such as the story of Pygmalion and the statue from Metamorphoses (8 AD) by the Roman poet Ovid suggests that when fathers create offspring without mothers, they reflect male desire more effectively than ones created with mothers. In Chapter 3, we find two French adaptations of Ovid’s Pygmalion that allegorize men’s ability to harness the creative power of the imagination. The sculptor Pygmalion emerges as a Promethean creator of what we now recognize as ALife. Pygmalion, or the Animated Statue (Pigmalion, ou la statue animée, 1741) by André-François Boureau-Deslandes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lyrical scene, Pygmalion (1770/1771) mediate debates about the nature of creation and its relationship to genius. At stake is identifying the protagonist responsible for creation: the mother, father, artist, or God.

On August 30, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, was born, the product of an unplanned pregnancy. Her father William Godwin had scheduled intimate encounters with her mother Mary Wollstonecraft by following advice in the oft-reprinted family-planning manual, Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece (1684). Godwin described their birth control method as “the chance-medley system:” abstention in the three days following a menstrual cycle and otherwise frequent copulation.² After all, prostitutes seemed to bear relatively few children. Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece taught that women’s bodies functioned like animals in that they conceived during the menstrual cycle, although after 1800, several physicians acknowledged this Classical truth as fiction.³

Much of the reproductive process—called generation in the Classical tradition—remained mysterious to humans in the long eighteenth century. Readers regarded Aristotle as an expert on sexual relations owing to a body of medical-advice and self-help literature. However, Aristotle’s authorship of this text was a fabrication. Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece was based on an anonymous midwifery text and The Secret Miracles of Nature (De miraculis occultis naturae) by the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568).⁴ These texts favored a humoral approach to medicine. Galenic humoral theory regarded imagination—a principal subject of this chapter—as an organ of sorts that could affect the fetus if not properly controlled.

This chapter locates the rationale for eliminating women from narratives about creation in eighteenth-century medical literature, which often blurred the line between fact and fiction. In addition to misleading family-planning advice, texts like Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece blamed maternal imagination for harming otherwise beautiful children, as cited in this chapter’s epigraph: “Women therefore, ought to take great Care that their Imagination be pure and clear, that their Child may be well formed.”⁵ The belief that women’s poorly controlled imaginations resulted in congenital disabilities coincided with debates over who was more responsible for forming life in-utero, the man or the woman. Early embryologists produced imagery encouraging the notion that new life owed more to the father than the mother. A motherless creation, the homunculus, represented the idea that man’s seed contained perfect specimens. While opinions differed, one thing seemed certain: women’s poor control over their imagination resulted in monstrous children. The poem “Callipaedia, Or, The Art of Getting Beautiful Children” (1655) by the French physician Claude Quillet reinforced the culpability of maternal imagination for children’s appearances. I argue that although theories about gestation are framed as factual findings from natural philosophy, they resemble fiction more than science. They cast male physicians and natural philosophers as protagonists and mothers as unwitting antagonists who fall prey to their wandering imaginations, jeopardizing the project of creating life as beautifully as fathers imagine it. These anecdotes helped justify the search to create life without mothers ex-utero. Preoccupation with maternal imagination and the homunculus reflects men’s desire to control the birthing body and perfect future progeny.