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Victor’s Progeny: Premonition of a Bioengineered Age
- Literature and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 2, Fall 2018
- pp. 337-355
- 10.1353/lm.2018.0017
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This essay examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a piece of literature that captures an epistemic transition in biomedical practices from healing a diseased body to controlling and engineering a human body, anticipating the modern medical practices of our bioengineered era. The process of artificially engineering a bioscientific creature by gathering materials from anonymous sources, and Victor Frankenstein’s ability to pre-select the physical features of the Creature, anticipate the baby-making procedures practiced in the domain of artificial reproductive technology (ART). This essay aims to foreground how the novel offers a fictional engagement with bioethical crises triggered by ART developments that have problematized our bionormative notion of the family as a heterosexual unit.