Motherless Creations

Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890

Wendy C. Nielsen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000582413
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Letteratura
• Categoría: Critica letteraria nella fantascienza

This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion's statue, Frankenstein's creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers' sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.

Part 1 The Rationale for Creating Life without Mothers, 1650–1800

DOI: 10.4324/9781003276104-2

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.

Notes

1. Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 126.
2. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 69. On the shaping power of the sperm, see for example Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium, in The Works of Aristotle, eds. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, trans. Arthur Platt, 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 729b-731b and Hippocrates, On Generation, trans. Iain M. Lonie, 6–8 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 3–4.
3. Jan Bondeson uses the term maternal impressions in A Cabinet of Curiosities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), although maternal imagination seems more prevalent in Jennifer Buckley, Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Maternal Imagination (New York: Palgrave, 2017).
4. “obstetrics, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press (June 2018), https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/129954?redirectedFrom=obstetrics.

1 Fables about the Birthing Body in the Long Eighteenth Century

DOI: 10.4324/9781003276104-3

Women therefore, ought to take great Care that their Imagination be pure and clear, that their Child may be well formed.

—Aristotle’s Compleat Master Piece (sic, 1684)¹

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.

The Dangers of Maternal Imagination

The mysteries of birth inspired wild speculation about how life formed in-utero. Many people believed that children entered the womb fully formed, where the mother’s body provided a vessel for gestation.⁶ Thus, mothers appeared at fault for complications during pregnancy, casting them in the role of antagonists. Women’s emotions ran so strong, the thinking went, that they could imprint on the fetus, causing various ailments, including epilepsy.⁷ Unable to control their thoughts, women risked giving birth to monsters.⁸ Concern about the effects of maternal imagination on children’s physical characteristics anticipates eugenics. However, the concept of maternal imagination is at least as old as, if not older, than the written word. Jacob increases his portion of his father’s sheep flock in chapter 30 of Genesis by leaving them to breed in front of poplar branches, thus imprinting them with his flock’s signature color.

The subject of maternal imagination took a well-publicized turn in the early eighteenth century with the case of the Englishwoman Mary Toft (1701–1763). In 1726, Toft convinced a local surgeon that she gave birth to a rabbit after seeing one while pregnant. Toft’s alleged pregnancy turned scandalous when court physicians got involved—some of whom claimed that she gave birth to 17 rabbits. The news about Toft fit in with other supposedly true stories about women delivering animals like chickens and rats.⁹ Toft later admitted to perpetrating a hoax and was imprisoned.¹⁰ Among all the satires that appeared after the Toft incident, the most enduring image was William Hogarth’s etching, Cunicularii or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (1726) (see Figure 1.1).¹¹ The title parodies the Adoration of the Magi by alluding to “Wise Men,” and the composition caricatures the scene of royal births.¹² This etching illustrates a female conspiracy between Mary Toft (“F Lady in the straw”) and her sister-in-law, Margaret Toft (“E Rabbit getter”), supported by physicians such as “C The Sooterkin Doctor Astonish’d,” John Maubray.¹³ Maubray seemed a likely character to fall for Toft’s ruse. His book The Female Physician (1724) reiterates the myth of maternal impressions; it credits “a fervent IMAGINATION” for marking “the Infant in her Womb with the Figure or Mark of the Thing long’d for.”¹⁴ Hogarth’s etching seems to suggest, however, that women’s fervent imaginations proved contagious. The print satirizes emotional women, faux mothers, and the physicians who enable them by showing a crowd of people who believe Toft’s story.

Figure 1.1 William Hogarth’s etching of Mary Toft giving birth to rabb...