The monsters of botany and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Carlos Seligo

pp. 69-84

in: Karen Sayer, John Moore (eds), Science fiction, critical frontiers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstrakt

In Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), Mary Shelley read-dressed a problem of classification which had originally been posed by the discovery of those hybrid species that, in the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin had called "botanical monsters". When he pollinated the first artificial hybrid in 1758, Linnaeus had attempted to tackle the issue of hybridity by claiming that his creation was a belated miracle of Divine Creation. In contrast, Darwin had claimed that hybridity was a natural mechanism of evolutionary progress and that because man also desired progress, he could improve upon nature by imaginatively conceiving ever better combinations of its parts. Desire and imagination would not be a sufficient condition for progress, however, unless technological reproduction was strictly analogous to natural reproduction. Therefore, in order to guarantee the success of his male scientific peers, Darwin had denied that female desire and imagination played a comparable role to the part played by male desire and imagination, not only in technological, but also in natural reproduction. Mary Shelley cast a shadow of doubt over his tortuous guarantee by imagining the monstrous results of an experiment to reproduce without a woman.

Cited authors

Darwin Charles

Shelley Mary