Overview

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.

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9781032231679

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"""This fascinating exploration of the quest for mechanical life in the Western imagination is beautifully written, thought provoking, and riveting. By situating these fantasies of ""motherless creations"" within a cultural context of medicalized misogyny and slavery, Nielsen presents a deeply rich, timely study relevant for understanding today's transhumanist debates."" —Joanna Ebenstein, Founder of Morbid Anatomy"

This fascinating exploration of the quest for mechanical life in the Western imagination is beautifully written, thought provoking, and riveting. By situating these fantasies of motherless creations within a cultural context of medicalized misogyny and slavery, Nielsen presents a deeply rich, timely study relevant for understanding today's transhumanist debates. -Joanna Ebenstein, Founder of Morbid Anatomy

Author Information

Wendy C. Nielsen is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, USA. She has published the book Women Warriors in Romantic Drama and scholarly essays on world literature, Romantic-era automata, theater, the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Corday, and Boadicea.

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