Thesis ID: CBB118579237

The Victorian Posthuman: Monstrous Bodies in Literature and Science (2018)

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“Let me go, ... monster! Ugly wretch! You wish to eat me and tear me to pieces. You are an ogre”. These are the words that William, the younger brother of Victor Frankenstein, cries out moments before his death. The “ogre” to whom William speaks is the creature created by his brother, and the act of murdering a young child seems to confirm the creature’s monstrosity. In fact, the creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein epitomizes the monster: he is a hybrid creature of human and animal, constructed as assemblage out of materials gathered from “the unhallowed damps of the grave” and “the slaughterhouse”; he is an ugly being with “yellow skin scarcely cover[ing] the work of muscles and arteries” with “watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set”; he is a being of immense size, strength and “superhuman” power, able to “bound... over the crevices in the ice” that coat Mount Blanc, run “with the swiftness of lightning,” and scale the perilous cliffs of mountains. The creature’s monstrosity originates not in his violence—that only comes later—but in his physical aberration from the dominant human form. As young William’s exclamation reveals, it is not the creature’s strength that makes him so monstrous, but his “ugly” appearance as an “ogre,” and the thought that something so inhuman is innately a threat to the human: William is terrified that the creature will “eat [him] and tear [him] to pieces.” Notably, it is the eating of human flesh not the violation of that flesh through tearing that is the dominant threat to William. Unlike tearing, eating suggests that the creature will remove William and thus the presence of the human from the scene. The creature is monstrous in his inhuman appearance, his existence as a creature of monstrous bodily inhumanity. Shelley’s creature appears at the start of the nineteenth century and sits at the meeting of two competing worldviews: the sublimity of natural theology and the dawning of a scientific age. The monsters that came after Frankenstein’s creature moved away from this gothic sublimity to embody the dawning fascination with how science, not mythology or magic, could alter the human form. These monsters appeared in the articulated skeletons of primordial monsters unearthed by paleontologists; in the factory machines that disrupted the pastoral quiet of rural England and spewed their smoke across previously verdant landscapes; in the painful labor of working at machines; in the bodies that were warped and distorted by malfunctioning machines; in the bodies of workers and soldiers and citizens alike who had to adopt prosthetics to continue functioning within Victorian culture; in the animalized human newly revealed through Darwin’s theory of evolution; in the flayed and mutilated bodies of vivisected animals; in the bodies desiccated by fictional scientific experiments; in bodies permanently altered by the ravages of disease; and in the invisible bodies of bacteria and pathogens. The Victorian era was an age of monstrous bodies—of bodies that adopted the dictates of science to warp what had previously been thought of as solely animal or solely human. In this dissertation, I explore the way in which Victorian literature, art and popular culture reworked conventional notions of monstrosity within the paradigms of scientific, technological and medical developments. This reworking moved away from monstrosity as aberration to rather view the creatures made monstrous by science as heralds of a new human ontology: the Victorian posthuman. Monsters have long held a place of fascination within the human imagination. They are protean creatures, appearing as hybrid bodies, as primordial creatures animated in the present, as beings who can exist in extreme environments, beings whose genesis defies known biology, as creatures of immense size or strength, as nightmare beasts. In each of their instantiations, monsters challenge a previously accepted method of understanding the known and living world. Indeed, monsters have traditionally been associated with folklore and in this way, they often bear witness to the existence of fantastical worlds beyond the human: these mythologies are populated by creatures such as the centaur, a human-horse hybrid, or the sphinx, a splice of human, horse and bird, or even the unnatural genesis of creatures such as the dragon, born as a serpent from a chicken’s egg incubated in manure. At their core, monsters are hybrid creatures: they bring together known biological entities into a single body and create out of the splice terrifying and terrifyingly destabilizing versions of life. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

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Authors & Contributors
Jylkka, Katja
Evans, Taylor Scott
Anderson, Penelope
Friedman, Lester D.
McGowan, John
Finn, Ed
Concepts
Science and literature
Teratology; monsters
Human body
Frankenstein
Literary analysis
Science fiction
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
Early modern
Renaissance
Medieval
Places
Great Britain
England
Netherlands
Spain
Italy
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